The Black and White Floor: It’s not Always Black and White…

April 7, 2023June 5, 2023 / Apple Hill Cottage

I don’t usually write about Jesus in this space. I’ve gotten in trouble for it before… But I’ve recently given up my other blog where I did write about faith, and it is Good Friday of Easter week. I’ve just written and rewritten this chapter–in fact, I’ve been writing this chapter for ten years and I’ve only now felt drawn to put it out there where others can read it…For more like this, I invite you to visit Faith Is the Hammer, Grace Is the Nail: Lessons Learned from an Old House.

March, 2013

I have had black and white on my brain lately.

Everywhere I look, I see black and white together. Dark and light. Absorbing and reflecting. Hot and cold. Opposites. Contrasts.

Black and white together–it is bold. Courageous. Balanced. Stunning. It takes a stand.

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And it’s our newly laid kitchen floor..

I generally believe in hardwood floors or muted rugs because I don’t think it’s a floor’s job to be noticeable.

But this is bold.

The contrast of black and white tiles laid next to each other makes this floor shout out: Look. At. Me. One of my friends shook her head when I told her what we’d be doing with the floor. “If one color doesn’t look dirty,” she said, “the other will.”

Yes, it’s a worry–I’d better be able to keep it clean…

March, 2023

Ten years later, I can say contrasts, opposites, paradoxes–these have been on my mind lately too. Tensions of faith fill the Bible, and sometimes it’s hard for me to get my head around them. I just read today in Joshua 1:7–

There are many other verses that tell us to keep straight on, not veering to the right or the left. (Deuteronomy 5:32; Deuteronomy 28:14; Joshua 23:6; 2 Kings 22:2; Proverbs 4:27; Isaiah 30:21 are just a few…) This is troubling to me, because I don’t always like to stay on the main road…I like taking little detours, or long detours; I think they can add stillness and depth and beauty to a journey. Perhaps I am overthinking it though, because our Christian faith journey is already filled with the enigmas of contrasts, opposites, and tension:

Jesus’ kingdom is already, but not yet. The present may look bleak, but God’s promises for the future are true and the basis for our hope;
We are sinful, but forgiven in God’s eyes;
Grace means we are free from “works righteousness”, but we are still responsible for working for the good;
Christ was a human, yet Christ is God;
God will judge us all with his righteous judgment, yet he is also a God of mercy;
God is a God of personal intimacy, yet God is a God of the universe;
Sorrowful, yet rejoicing. God allows both unimaginable joy and unimaginable suffering;
Poor, yet rich;
In the world, but not of the world;
God is sovereign, yet humans are responsible for their own actions;

…and I am certain that I’ve only thought of a few.

How do we, as people of faith, deal with all this tension? We can get stuck on one side or the other, veering off to the right or to the left and lose focus on what is straight ahead. In truth, the world is always calling us to veer off to the right or to the left. Even those words right and left are loaded with the world’s values, aren’t they? (And some of those “right and left” issues are fracturing the American church and Christian testimony right now.) Look at some of those contrasts in the list above and think about which ones trouble you the most. Mike Cosper writes about the balance that Christians must struggle with:

“Does it sound confusing yet? Does it sound absurd? Rest comes with struggle? Blessing comes with wounds? Grace comes from the death of an innocent man?… Life with God is an invitation into a world where most of what makes sense to you crumbles. It’s far richer than you imagined, far less orderly and sensible, and far more mysterious…”
Mike Cosper, Recapturing the Wonder, p. 163

The mysteries are many…

so why must we argue about them and substitute human-made rules? We must remember and take to heart that Christ’s Church is called to be a diverse lot of believers from every tribe and nation. God calls us to be different, to be a peculiar people. He called the Hebrews in the Old Testament to be His chosen people and they failed spectacularly. Yet regardless of their failures, God did not change his plan. He kept on using sinful, prideful people to do his work of building his kingdom. Jesus came and opened the kingdom to all who repent and believe–and yes, the church is STILL made up of prideful sinners, for even though we have the Spirit, even though we are forgiven, and even though Jesus is our cornerstone, God’s blessed Kingdom has not yet come. We are still tempted and tried by the world and its curse of sin. And so often we fail…

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And yet, God is sovereign. He holds the spinning planets and stars of the universe loosely in his hands–allowing for our own free will–desiring for none of us to perish. Because we are the people whom he created to be like him (see Genesis 1:26-27) we have that thirst for knowledge, that curiosity, that need to know; and we sometimes (most of the time!) can’t accept the mysteries.

And yet, there are things we don’t know, can’t know, and need not know. We study and study and argue and argue and split churches over doctrine and point fingers at other believers and say You’re wrong about that. (Jesus’ Church has become contentious Pharisees.) I admit I’m no better than anyone else. I saw those Jesus signs held by demonstrators who later took over and tried to destroy the Capitol building, and I cringed. I hate that there are so-called Christians who are trying to make our nation into a theocracy and ruining the witness of Christ. And yet, if I criticize them, I am no better than they are with their loud and ugly signs and words. And yet, God is in control. All of us–you, me, them–we will be judged by a just, but merciful God.

The mysteries are many…

and if you are anything like me, you like to have order and reason in your life. Confusion, uproar, and tension leave me shaky and wishing for peace. Perhaps this is why Jesus talks so often about the peace He gives us. He tells us straight off that it is not like the world’s peace; it’s a different kind of peace. (John 14:27) He knows that humans won’t understand what he is telling them, what he is bringing them. The disciples sometimes have no clue–“Who is this?” they asked each other in Mark 4. “Even the wind and the waves obey him.” (Mark 4:41) The disciples lived with the man Jesus. They saw his miracles daily. They heard his words over and over. And yet still, they didn’t understand until later. That should be comforting to us here in the 21st century who are still living in the not yet and still struggling to understand.

How is the peace that Jesus gives us different from the world’s peace? We all know that worldly peace can be shattered by one event, one phone call. I’m no expert; I still struggle, but I believe the peace of Christ comes through knowing, trusting, and believing his great promises. There are many great promises, but here are a few:

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28)

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. (Luke 19:10)

I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. (John 8:12)

For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. (Matthew 7:8)

I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (John 14:6)

Very truly I tell you, the one who believes in me has everlasting life. (John 6:47)

And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (Matthew 28:20)

The mystery here is that Jesus took on our guilt and sins, and after three years of teaching his followers, he took our place as the sacrificial lamb. And now, in God’s eyes, we are seen as sinless and clean as Jesus. So mysterious as to be unbelievable to the rationalists among us….

The mysteries are many…

I can say very truthfully to you that until recently, I raged against those mysteries. I tried my best to understand them. I read and studied diligently; of course, I knew that I was limited by my little brain, but the rationalist in me said I can figure this out if I just study harder and read more! It’s only been lately that I’ve been able to let those mysteries be. Perhaps it’s my old age? Perhaps it’s the hard lessons I’ve learned? But I’ve been encouraged by reading and listening to N.T. Wright. You can listen to his podcast with this link; the two books that have most helped me are Surprised by Hope and The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential. He wrote in his book on the Psalms that Jesus is the point where space, time, and matter converge. It’s fascinating to think about that way, and it encourages me to accept the mysteries; love the mysteries; and make peace with the mysteries.

In my quest for order and understanding, I think perhaps I divided scripture and concepts too much. Instead of thinking about opposites or trying to make contrasting concepts black and white, I should have been concentrating on the whole. God wants our whole mind, heart, body, and soul (Deuteronomy 6:5 and Mark 12:30). Rather than dualistically examining faith and works, or mercy vs. justice, or sorrowful yet rejoicing, we should be encompassing the whole of scripture and seeing it as God’s One Big Story for the World. It is the Wholeness that counts. The story consists of concentric circles, overlapping and growing ever larger, that include the whole of time, space, and matter. It is God’s universe, Jesus’ kingdom; and as we live and work and worship as part of that world, the bold and courageous and good things we do for the kingdom will somehow be transformed into that new world that is coming down from heaven. The earthly tensions will be transformed, and we will realize then that they were nothing but mist that obscured the clarity of Jesus’ light.

Favorite quotes from C.S. Lewis (Nov. 29, 1898-Nov. 22, 1963)

November 20, 2022March 6, 2023 / Apple Hill Cottage / 10 Comments

C.S. Lewis died on the same day that President John F. Kennedy was shot, so the news of his death was overshadowed, at least in the U.S.

Yet I owe my faith to this prolific faith-filled author. Years after Lewis’ Mere Christianity was published, I can credit that book with allowing me to step out of smug intellectual agnosticism and stoop into the humble love of Jesus. Literally.

I was seeing a counselor. She had given me several books to read, and being a good patient (and a librarian) I had read them all and we had had many good discussions on them. Then she told me I should read Mere Christianity. Uhm…Maybe, I said, uninterested. I’d been on the opposite side of Christians trying to convert me for most of my forty-eight years, and I didn’t want to be part of their group.

Then one morning I was the first one at the public library where I worked. I flipped on the lights and stepped into the office and there on the floor was a copy of Mere Christianity. It had fallen from the desk of the employee who was responsible for readying books for the shelves. Her desk was always piled with books; I would never have noticed it if it hadn’t been on the floor right in front of my foot.

Have you noticed how God so often sends us books at just the right time? from *Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis*

Reluctantly I bent down and picked it up. I was still standing there looking at it when Jean walked through the door. It was her desk; I held up the book. “I’m supposed to read this book,” I said, “and it fell off your desk right in front of me.” She grinned. “Well just let me paste the pocket in it, and you can be the first one to check it out,” she said. True to her word, she handed it to me that day before she left.

In the next week, as I read through Lewis’ apologetic masterpiece, I was stunned by his way with words, his thought processes, his genius. By the time I had finished it, he had gently rid me of all my prejudices, my fears, my hesitations about Jesus. Two weeks later, I purchased my first Bible to read it and see for myself. In the following years, I read avidly other books by Lewis–everything from his fiction to his collected letters to his philosophically dense tomes.

So, yes, I have quite a few quotes. Allow me to share some. And please, if you have a favorite that isn’t here, share it with me in your comments.

Quotes from Mere Christianity:

You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Nobody can always have devout feelings; and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about.

If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

…this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…

An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons–marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying that those things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.

Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive…

The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred…

I am afraid the only $afe rule is to give more than we can $pare. If our giving habits do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too $mall.

Quotes from The Screwtape Letters:

When He talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.

Quotes from The Chronicles of Narnia:

But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. The Magician’s Nephew

A dozen different things that he might say flashed through Digory’s mind, but he had the sense to say nothing except the exact truth. The Magician’s Nephew

“You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” said Aslan. “And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.” Prince Caspian

He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one. The Horse and His Boy

Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country, but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Quotes from The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis:

I have been feeling that very much lately: that cheerful insecurity is what Our Lord asks of us. Thus one comes, late and surprised, to the simplest and earliest Christian lessons!

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life–the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination.

Quotes from The Weight of Glory:

For it is not so much of our time and so much of our attention that God demands; it is not even all our time and all our attention; it is ourselves.

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words–to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

…all of our natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest, and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not.

Quotes from Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis:

As to wishing it had not happened, one can’t help momentary wishes: guilt begins only when one embraces them. You can’t help their knocking at the door, but one mustn’t ask them into lunch.

Don’t worry if your heart won’t respond; do the best you can. You are certainly under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, or you wouldn’t have come to where you now are: and the love that matters is His for you–yours for Him may at present exist only in the form of obedience. He will see to the rest.

Quotes from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer:

Don’t bother much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them; when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behavior.

But the very last thing I want to do is to unsettle in the mind of any Christian, whatever his denomination, the concepts — for him traditional — by which he finds it profitable to represent to himself what is happening when he receives the bread and wine. I could wish that no definitions had ever been felt to be necessary; and, still more, that none had been allowed to make divisions between churches.

We say that we believe God to be omniscient; yet a great deal of prayer seems to consist of giving Him information.

Quotes from Surprised by Joy:

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

So today, I am saying thank you to a saint who went before. Thank you Mr. Lewis, for your words, your faith, your intellect, your humor, your letters, your humility. I think you have brought many thousands to a new faith, to a deeper faith, to Jesus. And we all are thankful.

Changing the Season of Darkness into the Season of Light…

November 29, 2020March 5, 2023 / Apple Hill Cottage / 11 Comments

When we lived in the city we had a strategy for homeless people or those on the sidewalks with signs. We carried gift cards for Subway and gave them out one or two at a time. It seemed mostly satisfactory, until one day a guy asked how much was it worth. Later that same week I discovered a “cash-in your gift cards here” machine in the local grocery store.

We have since moved to a small town/rural area, and the people with signs aren’t so frequent. I don’t carry gift cards any more, and I rarely have cash with me, so I mostly just feel bad when I see someone with a Need Help sign.

I was thinking this morning of something that happened last fall before 2020 happened: I had made an uncharacteristic stop at Walmart to get Burt’s Bees chapstick. While there, I bought a rotisserie chicken for dinner. As I was leaving the parking lot, there was an older man standing at the curb. I could barely read his sign; all I got was “Need Help, Lost Job…”

I drove by.

I had a twenty dollar bill in my purse and a chicken for dinner. Playing on the car audio system was “More Like You” by Scott Wesley Brown. If you don’t know that song, the chorus goes like this:

More like you, Jesus, More like you, Touch my lips with holy fire, and make me more like you.

At the bottom of the hill, I turned around and drove back to where he was standing. I gave him the twenty dollar bill and prayed that he would use it wisely. I don’t know. I’m not writing this for any praise from you because it wasn’t my first thought to be generous. It wasn’t even my second thought. And for all I know, he went out and bought drugs or whiskey with it. But the story that keeps coming to mind is from C.S. Lewis: he was walking with a friend and he gave a generous amount of money to a street person. The friend gently chided him, saying the standard remark, “You know, he’ll probably just drink it up.” To which Lewis replied, “Well, so would I.” (This is from a biography of Lewis by Owen Barfield — who actually was that friend…)

But there’s another quote that’s not so well known in Letters to an American Lady. Lewis writes, “It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been “had for a sucker” by any number of impostors; but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need.”

I’m not suggesting we give money to every homeless person; we all have to figure out how to live generously and thankfully, and what that means is different for everyone. But the events of this year — from pandemics to hurricanes and wildfires to racial unrest to large scale economic upheaval — have left so many of us feeling overwhelmed by the need. And feeling overwhelmed, I am trying to figure out what I can do.

sunrise Today is the first Sunday in Advent. As we await the light coming in this dark year of dark years, I suggest we choose something to do about it. It could be giving anonymously to someone in need. It could be making a meal for someone who is alone. Maybe every Thursday in Advent, you call someone you’ve been thinking about. Yesterday I read a suggestion–that instead of buying Christmas presents this year, we all donate to food pantries or agencies that are struggling to help people in need. We’re considering this: I’m thinking about making cards to send to family members explaining our strategy. Now, more than ever, is a good time to reconsider our spending habits and instead of spending our money on Cyber Monday, let’s spend it on Giving Tuesday instead…