worship and forgiveness

There is something so healing and cathartic about praise and worship, but it has to be true worship, true praise.  It cannot come while we are focused on the right notes or harmony, it cannot come while we are focused on ourselves.  it only comes when all we can see is our sinfulness and the sinlessness of the Son and his Father.  Only when we enter totally into their presence, accompanied by the Holy Spirit, do we experience forgiveness and the healing and peace that comes as a result.  It is not something that can be manufactured or achieved by following a prescribed formula.  It is only when we see the depth of our need and the height of God's majesty that we can sense his provision, his forgiveness, his acceptance.

I Just Want to Sing in the Choir

Tonight will be the last practice before the Community Chorus Christmas concert next Sunday.  All morning long I have been singing the refrain from The Holly and the Ivy, one of the songs we will be singing.
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'Sweet singing in the choir', the chorus repeats, and I repeat those words in my head over and over and over again.  Sweet singing, sweet singing, sweet singing in the choir.  It takes me back to a day years ago at our little church in Jockey Hollow, New Jersey, where the worship was so sweet that at times you wanted it to go on forever.  It was one of those Sunday mornings, and as I sang along with the congregation I was struck by the thought that singing God's praises was what I was created to do. 

I have an adequate voice.  Not the best, but I can read music and can tell if something is off pitch.  I also love to make a joyful noise, so I have been blessed to sing in a few choirs during my life.  Choral music, is in fact my favorite genre next to opera.  I love the emotion that a choir can invoke with both beauty and power.  I love listening to John Rutter. I love the harmonies. I love singing in the choir. I love the blending of voices.  I love trying to make my voice indistinct from the next.  I love being part of something that is greater than the individual parts.

So, on that Sunday morning as I sang along with everyone else, blending my voice in a hymn of praise, I realized there was nothing more my heart longed for than to sing in the heavenly choir.  I don't care where I am in heaven I thought, I don't care if I am the last in line to make it in the door.  I don't care if I have earned any crowns.  We're just going to cast them down anyway.   When I get there, I want to see Jesus, then I want to join in the singing.  Can you imagine what that will be like, joining with hundreds of thousands of voices singing God's praises.  We will probably sing every hymn, chorus, psalm, that has ever been written in every language that has ever existed.  We will sing all of the psalms of David and the other writers in the Old testament.  We might even sing Christian rock songs, although some of them could not be called praise or worship songs.  We will sing.  A lot of people will probably be milling around, some will be looking for their loved ones, some will be looking for the house that was prepared for them, some will be looking for the saints and martyrs of the faith.  We've got eternity to explore, we've got eternity to reflect in the light of God's love.  But, as I've told my husband, if you want to find me, go looking for the choir.  I may be in the very back, my voice may be outshined by all the others, but I'll be singing in the choir.

A Cat Named Grace

 

 

We have a cat named Gracie.  She is a shy thing, all black with a slinky, sensual stride.  We saw her at the vet one day.  She had been brought in by a good Samaritan who found her alongside the road where she had presumably been hit by a car.  Her pelvis was shattered and her leg broken so badly the bones were sticking out.  To top it off, she was pregnant with kittens that were stillborn a few weeks after we first saw her.  After an emergency C-section for the ones that could not be birthed because of her shattered pelvis, we brought her home.  We have since decided that she must have been a feral cat prior to her run in with the car.  It was only due to the kindness of strangers that she survived, but that didn't make her more sympathetic to people, only curious.

Despite her early disability, Gracie has conquered the tallest obstacles in our house.  She slinks through our lives, and although she is ever present in the background, we can seldom grasp her.  She will sidle up to my chair and let me reach down to pet her, but she will not let me look her straight in the eye or pet her head.  If I call her name, she will come within inches, but not so close that I can pick her up. Yet we know she likes us because wherever we are, she will always be lurking on the periphery.  Sometimes I think she likes us more than our other two cats do because she is always in our vicinity.

That's so much like grace.  Grace is something that few of us grasp, yet it is ever present.  It pussyfoots through our lives, stealthily, but ever watchful.  Most of the time it can't be defined. It can't be captured, it just is.   It surrounds us like air, and is just as elusive, as impossible to capture.

I actually named her for the missionary Gracia Burnham who was held prisoner for a year with her husband, Martin, in the Philippines.  While Martin was killed, Gracia survived that captivity and has been working tirelessly ever since through her foundation and as a guest speaker at conferences and churches.  For me, Gracia Burnham has come to exemplify what grace is all about. There are many definitions of grace, but for of us who are Christians it can be defined as 'God's unmerited favor':
God's love given freely without anything required in return, sanctification as a result of nothing more than God's favor, being granted the power to live the Christian life through no effort of our own.

Gracie, Gracia and Grace have something in common.  They are survivors.  They have been tested and tried and come our even stronger.  It's almost too much to contemplate, this grace.  Yet it is something freely given, it surrounds us even when we can't sense it and even when we don't deserve it, it is there.

As Far As Darkness Is From Dawn

Praise God my sins are gone.

Chorus
They're underneath the blood on the cross of Calvary,
As far removed as darkness is from dawn;
In the sea of God's forgetfulness, that's good enough for me,
Praise God, my sins are gone! -  Lyrics by N. Vandall:
I have been singing this old time hymn all morning and remembering how far I have come. I was a sinner. Not just the 'told a little white lie' type of sinner, but a real sinner. Except for the one about Thou Shalt not Murder, I think I committed every other sins prohibited in the Ten Commandments. Did that make me feel good about myself? Was I happy? No, an emphatic no! At a certain point, I looked into the future and saw a sad ending to my life. That was my future without God, but, as the song says, Praise God, my sins are gone. God's blood blotted them out and I must strain to remember how awful I was and how awful I felt.

I'm afraid that we as Christians have forgotten how it feels to be a sinner if we ever knew. If we could remember, it would change our attitude towards those who are currently caught up in the maelstrom of sin. By our actions, it appears that most Christians think that non-Christians are having all of the fun, that they are living lives that we envy with none of the consequences. In truth,  everyone caught in a life of degradation feels hopeless, utterly, miserably, hopeless.

I serve as a CASA volunteer and as such, I am exposed to people caught up in an unsavory lifestyle that they can't get away from. Some of them started out with lives of promise, but the exciting party life turned into desperate addiction. Their hunger for possessions turned into hoarding. Their promiscuity produced unwanted, abandoned children.

Those of us freed by Christ have the answer, we could be point the way for a world caught in the throes of sin if we were not so busy pointing a finger. We don't have to tell them they are sinning. They know that. We should be telling them that there is an answer to their emptiness that is better than any solution the world can offer, that there is a place where their sins are as far removed as darkness is from dawn.  Sometimes, we need some old-fashioned singing to remind us of just how forgiven we are.

                         n.

Bubble Wrap

In the midst of a series of trials, tribulations, and losses, I came upon a couple of sheets of bubble wrap, protection around a present from my husband lovingly meant to cheer me up.

 I stood in the kitchen that fall morning squeezing the bubbles between my fingers, as I love to do, until they popped.  This time the explosion of the small balloons did nothing to better my mood which continued to dwell on all the losses, complications, and regrets in my life.  Then finally, finally I saw my heavenly Father in all that was going on around me, in the sorrow, the fear, in the noise of the bursting bubbles.  I saw how he longs to be our protection, our provider and how he must sit back and watch as we build our own protection around ourselves.

We've wrapped ourselves up in bubble wrap.  We've gathered all of our security around us in the form of our jobs, our homes, our health, our families.  We pile it on as deep as we can.  Even our positions in the church become symbols of security to us.  The more we do, the safer we will be.  Our protective layer just gets to a comfortable stage, then...God begins to burst all of our bubbles.  The trials and losses come.  They explode all around us and yet we try to hang on.  We've invested so much in this wrapping around us that we continue to look to bubbles of air for protection. Fortunately, God will continue to burst those bubbles until we see them for what they are, just hollow air, and begin to trust Him for our protection.

I've thought a lot about when David transferred the Ark of the Covenant from Kirjath-jearim to Jerusalem.  Why did the Lord kill Uzza when he put his hand out and touched the ark while Obed-Edom was blessed when they left the ark at his house for three months?  Had the Israelites made a god out of the ark, had they begun trusting in it for their security instead of in the true God of Israel?  Had Uzza put a hand out waiting for the ark to catch and support him?  Did Obed-Edom recognize that the ark was not a god but merely the symbol for the true God?  Did he fear the Lord and not the ark during those months that the ark sat in his yard?  And did the Lord let the ark stay there until the children of Israel remembered again who the true God was?

When the ark was finally brought to Jerusalem, David sang danced and worshipped not the ark, but the Lord.  Included in his song in 1 Chronicles 16, were these words: 

"For great is the Lord and greatly to be praised.  He is also to be feared above all gods.  For all the gods of the people are idols:  But the Lord made the heavens.  Glory and honor are in His presence:  Strength and gladness are in His place."

Lord, help us to let go of all the security we wrap around ourselves.  Even when it is good, it is merely bubble wrap.  Give us hearts that trust solely in you for our security.