Brick by Brick

One of my favorite nursery stories was The Three Little Pigs. I have read kinder, gentler versions, but the one I recall from childhood begins with a mother pig too poor to take care of all her piglets. She sent the oldest three out to build lives for themselves. As the story goes, the first pig was too impulsive and lazy --the Party Pig --to take the time and effort to build something that would last: he built out of straw. The second was a little less reckless but also unwilling to build with eternity in mind. The third, of course, was the oldest child --He must have been! --he was detail oriented, probably controlling, and a little neurotic: he built out of brick to keep the wolf at bay. To his credit, however, when the abodes of his siblings failed miserably against the gale force winds of the Big Bad Wolf's heave, he took them in and sheltered them against their mutual enemy, despite what might have been a very valuable life (or death) lesson.

For a long time, I saw myself in the third pig. Wise, responsible, dutiful, industrious. (I didn't side with him in his decision to show mercy to his lazy siblings, but all-in-all, I thought he was the better of the three. Not like I was full of myself or anything, in those days.) The other day, I realized I was more like him than I thought, but this time, in a different way. You see, he and his siblings built their homes uniquely because, whether you believe it had anything to do with character or not, they were individuals. Maybe Pig #1 was happy with just enough. I'll build my house of straw --enough to keep me warm and dry without investing too much money or taking time from my relationships. Maybe Pig #2 was simply that middle-of-the-road guy, the guy that buys a reasonably comfortable, reliable car but has no need to spend extra on luxury.  And maybe the third pig, the pig like me, was such an over-achiever, was so impersonal with regard to his relationships, was so terrified of danger or threat of danger, he built to ensure nothing would get in or out.

I was a stronghold builder. I built according to the lessons taught me in childhood. What was not my fault --injury sustained --became clearly my fault when I began building monuments to it. Another brick here, another brick there. So high you can't get over it; so low you can't get under it; so wide you can't get around it! The problem with strongholds is they keep everything out --the evil and the love of God, the lie and the Truth. I relied on my own understanding to determine who could and could not gain access to my refuge. I allowed squealing, desperate pigs into my stronghold. The problem was there was nothing desperate in those squeals, only deceit, the deceit of the Adversary. The Big Bad Wolf played cruel tricks on me, and because my strongholds were built well enough to keep out the wisdom and discernment granted by the Holy Spirit, I was ignorant. The walls I built for protection were my greatest undoing.

But as with our fairytale, my story doesn't end there. My story begins and ends with the iron-willed, mountain-moving grace of God. Praise God, for He is merciful! He is my loving Creator and sovereign over all things! He knew the way in. In His kindness and His savage grace, He protected me until such a time, made His way in, brick by brick, moving with expert precision, only as quickly as my condition would allow, and He dismantled those strongholds (He is dismantling still), so that I might bring Him glory, serve Him more effectively, and know the joy of fellowship with others. 

I'd like to just leave you with a few verses today. If you are living behind, on top of, or under a stronghold today, I pray God in His grace will escort these truths in as He begins to dismantle anger, jealousy, grief, despair, pride, fear, or any other thing raised against the knowledge of Him, brick by brick. 

Unless the Lord builds the house,

They labor in vain who build it;

Unless the Lord guards the city,

The watchman stays awake in vain. 

(Psalm 127:1)

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,

And lean not on your own understanding;

In all your ways acknowledge Him,

And He shall direct your paths.

(Proverbs 3:5,6)

For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ,

(2 Corinthians 10:4, 5)

How Do You Live?

As a society, we are pathetically soft. Even the "most durable" of us are pretty pampered. We have our can't-do-without shampoo and our climate-controlled office buildings. We lose our minds when a detour forces us to add minutes to a commute. We want to know every detail and ensure they are written in stone before we embark on vacation. We have calendars and alarms to keep our days comfortably aligned, and we hide the dirty little secret of our overflow in storage units conveniently located in every town. 

In Mark 6:7-11a, Jesus sends His disciples out with very limited instructions and few customary resources. 

And He called the twelve to Himself, and began to send them out two by two, and gave them power over unclean spirits. He commanded them to take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bag, no bread, no copper in their money belts— but to wear sandals, and not to put on two tunics. Also He said to them, “In whatever place you enter a house, stay there till you depart from that place. And whoever will not receive you nor hear you, when you depart from there, shake off the dust under your feet as a testimony against them."

We're not told if Jesus told them how far to go or how long to stay. It appears He did not. And we are not told how far or how long they actually did go. The fact they were told to take a walking stick, seems to indicate it wasn't a quick trip to the next town over and there could very likely be a predator or two they'd have to knock over the head. No GPS, no debit card, no transit pass, not even a hotel reservation. Mark simply tells us, one day Jesus whistled or waved for His disciples to come to Him and then sent them out. Maybe they came to Him thinking it was time for group prayer and some lunch. Nevertheless, they complied with Jesus' commission and based on Mark's description of their return (verse 30), they had great success. 

I started to wonder if I would be willing to take that trip. How many of us wouldn't ask if there would be WIFI or if we could postpone the trip until our children are back in school? Would friends gather for some sort of intervention to keep us from doing something so impulsive, so reckless? Then I imagined coming face to face with John the Baptist, who set up his ministry in the wilderness with nothing more than one simple camel skin suit and a diet of honey and grasshoppers. Who, in his final days, sat alone in a prison wondering if he'd gotten it wrong, and was eventually beheaded for speaking truth. Or Jeremiah, the "weeping prophet," an empath who was refused the comfort and companionship of a wife, suffered rejection, humiliation, physical pain, and imprisonment, and saw his beloved Jerusalem decimated by heartless Babylonians. 

How did you die? someone might ask them.

Martyred. How did you die? they might ask in return, looking at me.

Crossing against the light while scrolling Instagram.

We are pathetically soft. If we want to go to our death with the full confidence we have carried our cross daily, been poured out, used up, done all we could for the Kingdom of God, the question we need to ask ourselves now is, How do I live? Do I live sacrificially, against the status quo, for God alone. Am I living in imitation of Jesus and those others who laid down their lives for the brethren in His name? Or do I merely exist from paycheck to paycheck, on a quiet cul-de-sac, with neighbors who insist on overhanging my driveway, weary with purposelessness and seeking all I can for myself? Can you imagine explaining the asperity of that sort of suffering to The Apostle Paul?

Photo courtesy LuAnn Martin

Midweek: At the Hands of a Craftsman (2014)

The right tool for the job! Wasn't that the slogan for a tool distributor? Something like that. Bottom line, you don't want to use a chainsaw when a pocketknife will do. Our Heavenly Father is pretty adept at both. Ask me how I know! We don't always enjoy His methods, but we can rejoice in the truth that He knows us better than we know ourselves; Scripture assures us His work is for our good and His glory; and because of His character, we can trust the job will be done perfectly and to completion. Even when the work causes us to wonder, it never causes us to doubt (we do that all on our own accord), because His designs are greater than anything we see from the cheap seats.  

And I don't say that lightly. The person I am today is not the same person who wrote this original article eleven years ago. More often than not, I couldn't see the end from the beginning. More often than not, I wasn't in love with the changes or the means to change God expertly wielded. But I am living proof that trusting oneself to the Master's hands is to experience His best and walk in peace with Him. And I have so much further to go. So, be encouraged today: it will all be worth it. Know that to surrender your life to God is to see it remade at the hand of a True Craftsman!

~~~~~~~~~~

What do you like to do? When considering the perfect occupation or weekend retreat, what would you do?

My uncle was a carpenter. His basement was full of enormous power tools -- lathes, saws and all manner of woodworking amenities. The smell of scorched wood, and crackling curls of maple littering the floor --it was captivating. His tools; my foray into craftsmanship.

My nana taught me needlework as soon as I was able to balance a hoop and needle. I loved sitting at her feet, her bag open in front of me. I'd root through embroidery hanks and thimbles --so much potential. Her tools; my toys.

Then there's the unfaithful husband. The drug-addicted daughter. The death of a parent. The bankruptcy. The cancer. No, you haven't turned a page. These are tools also. Not all of them my experience, but close enough. These are the tools God has used to change my life, or the lives of my friends.

Christians catch a lot of flak for worshipping a God who would hurt to heal or tear down to rebuild. And right now, trust me, we are knee-deep in teardown. But I have learned that something good will come of it. Oh, I can't say that I'm gushing about the process, but truth tells me this is for a season.

The Bible contains account after account of folks who, throughout history have experienced the same phenomena as this --God's (sometimes) sharp tools applied to their lives --but this poem says it pretty well and encourages us all:

The Master Weaver's Plan

 

My life is but a weaving
Between the Lord and me;
I may not choose the colors–
He knows what they should be.

 

For He can view the pattern
Upon the upper side
While I can see it only
On this, the under side.

 

Sometimes He weaves in sorrow,
Which seems so strange to me;
But I will trust His judgment
And work on faithfully.

 

‘Tis He who fills the shuttle,
And He knows what is best;
So I shall weave in earnest,
And leave to Him the rest.

 

Not ’til the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly
Shall God unroll the canvas
And explain the reason why.

 

The dark threads are as needed
In the Weaver’s skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned.

-Author Unknown

Made New

Recently, a sister in Christ invited a group of us to enjoy a time of fun and refreshing at her home near the beach. As I was going over logistics with my husband, he began looking up directions and mapping out where I would be. No, no, no, I said. That's not where I'll be. I know exactly where I'm going. The house was located minutes away from a place I stayed while I was in my early twenties. The day I was supposed to leave, I set my GPS, and pulled out of the drive, listening to a podcast I'd been eager to hear. About eighty minutes later, the navigator's voice interrupted and directed me to a shortcut, a series of back roads to get me just where I needed to go. A couple of rights and lefts later, I recognized names and landmarks I'd not thought about for thirty years. Memories --some pretty horrible --flooded my mind, and the weight of my emotions caused me to struggle to breathe. This is who I used to be. Let me first say, the things you see and read about when it comes to heavy drug use, they're all true. People who spend their days and nights getting high, who are fully dependent on illegal substances live like hell. Their houses are filthy and falling down around them --or they don't have a place to live at all, in which case they crash at someone else's filthy, falling down house because no one with a shred of sanity and a mortgage is able to sustain the madness drug dependence brings to one's life. Generally speaking, addicts' lives are a mess, their finances are a mess, their clothes are a mess, and their relationships are a mess. And it was my life with an addict, being an addict, and hanging out with addicts that had come back to me as I drove.

A single house, filthy and falling down, of course, was where I found myself one day. Nowhere to sleep or sit but dirty mattresses and a torn sofa. Evidence of drug use lie all around, and the floor was littered with food and wrappers. Little children, barefooted and clothed only in diapers toddled about. Children just a fraction of life older, faces smeared with dirt and whatever they'd fixed themselves for lunch, were keeping watch as "parents" used and argued. Their drug was not my drug of choice, so I was not partaking that day. I was just an observer, quiet and tense, trying not to look uptight, trying not to get called out and coerced into being one of them. But it was the first time I'd ever seen freebasing, and I remember knowing the police had been watching the house. Neighbors had been demanding for months that something be done about the drug use and all the chaos that came with it. What if they come and I'm here? What will I do if I get arrested? Who will come get me? But I didn't leave. In fact, not only did I not leave, did I not do drugs that day, I didn't do anything. I didn't do anything the next time I was there either. Or the next. Or the next. Or the next. I never did anything. Not drugs. Not leave. Not help those children. Not help those adults. Not cry and grieve for their pain and the futile ways they chose to deal with it. I did nothing. But that is not the most egregious realization that arrived with all of those memories: the most egregious thing is that I convinced myself they were all okay. Time after time, as I stayed entire afternoons at that filthy, falling down house, the initial shock of all that was taking place faded. No longer did I notice the smeared faces and littered floors. No longer did I care that people were so destitute of reason they lived this way. No longer did I think they needed to change course --at least for the sake of these sweet little babies. It was okay. They were okay. I was okay. And I was desperately wrong.

This is who I used to be. And I say that not to remain in that place or to punish myself in any way. I say that not to beat my chest and emphasize how far I have come. I say that to bring glory to the God who was with me even in those days, who looked on --How that must have hurt Him! --and kept me safe; not because I was His, but because I would one day be. I say that to bring glory to the One who forgives me for all of that; for my selfishness and my self-medication and my failure to obey Him in those days. I say that to bring glory to the Waymaker and Healer, my Redeemer and Transformer, who pulled me from that life and is every day making me a new creation. I say that to point to the only One who can use a filthy and falling down mess to bring glory to His name --the only name worthy of it --and give me a heart that now aches for people in trouble, a heart that is today praying for all of those I knew back when that was who I used to be.