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A Bowl Of Cereal
Thursday, July 24th, 2008 / Karifern

For breakfast, I poured myself a bowl of frosted mini-wheats.  Well, no, actually I PICKED myself a bowl, meaning I juggled and sorted through the box to pick out the frostiest ones available.  Why?  Because I wanted the sweetness to cover the dry, nutritional part of the cereal.  This morning, however, there weren’t very many well-frosted pieces readily available, so I dug deeper, hoping to find some on the bottom (the frostier pieces weigh more, you know).

At that moment with my hand deep in the box, I suffered an attack of the conscience.  What was I doing?!?  After all, wasn’t I eating this cereal for its nutritional value (rather than, say, Frosted Flakes or Captain Crunch)??  And yet, here I was selfishly searching for the ”good stuff!”  Oh, the shame.  (I know you’ve never done anything like that before, but for those of us who have, it is humbling moment when we succumb to such low behavior.)

Okay, okay.  So maybe it wasn’t quite like that, but a random thought did cross my mind: How often do I dig for the frostier pieces in life?  And how do I respond when I don’t find them?  Am I disappointed?  Mad?  Do I frantically dig deeper in the box?

I’m old enough now to realize the need for a nutritional, well-balanced diet, just like I’m far enough along in my Christian walk to recognize that life cannot be perfect in a sin-cursed world.  Even so, that doesn’t keep me from wanting a sugar-coating to help me swallow other harsher realities of life.  And when I can’t find or don’t get well-frosted pieces, I accuse God of being unfair.

I’ve been listening to a message series “Responding Right When You Feel Like Reacting Wrong” (preached MANY years ago) by John Sauser.  He often repeats the phrase, ‘God does not promise to make all the crooked ways straight!”  In other words, God doesn’t promise an abundance of frosting with each box of mini-wheats; in fact, He doesn’t promise any frosting at all!  But He does promise the grace to help me eat them, and most importantly, He promises to use them to help me grow through the nourishment they provide.”

It may surprise you, but I was not the easiest child to raise.  No, I required much discipline, which my father readily and amply supplied.  There were times I accepted Dad’s discipline and then…well, there were other times.  (Guess which occurred more often?)  Inevitably, when I resisted Dad’s discipline, I received more!  Was this because my dad didn’t love me?  Of course not.  It was because of his great love for me that he persisted!  (And praise God that he did!)  If he had not cared, he wouldn’t have bothered; it wouldn’t have been worth the effort!

Likewise, my Heavenly Father corrects me (and I need plenty of it!).  God knows my sinful tendencies, but He strives in love to change and transform me into His likeness for my good; and He does this through His discipline.  That’s why God sent Christ, who not only acts as my Savior, but through His earthly example, serves as my encouragement!

“Consider [Jesus Christ] who endured from sinners such hostility against Himself,
so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.  In your struggle against sin
you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.
And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?

“‘My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
nor be weary when reproved by him.
For the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
and chastises every son whom he receives.’

“It is for discipline that you have to endure.  God is treating you as sons.
For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?
If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated,
then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this,
we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them.
Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live?
For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them,
but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness.
For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant,
but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness
to those who have been trained by it.” Hebrews 12:3-11

While on this earth, Christ, too, suffered at the hands of sinners; He endured wrong treatment by others, and He did so without sin.  Why?  Because God forgot about Him?  Because God failed to protect and take care of Him?  No.  God allowed it for my good because when I follow the example of Christ and allow myself to be trained by life’s difficulties — that is when I am patient and look to see what God wants to teach me through them rather than reacting and fighting against them — then I am transformed into His image and share in God’s holiness.  And there is nothing greater!

I say all of this for my benefit.  Monday and Fred’s interview at the consulate are quickly approaching, and I know I will be served a bowl of cereal.  Regardless of how much frosting covers my mini-wheats that day, may I praise and thank God for His perfectly measured portion and His sufficient grace faithfully supplied along with it.

“In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be,
you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuiness of your faith,
being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire
may be found to [result in] praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”
1 Peter 1:6,7

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“A Fish or a Scorpion”
Tuesday, June 03rd, 2008 / Karifern

(From Elisabeth Elliot’s These Strage Ashes: Is God Still in Charge? , p.124-7)

The events of the preceding day stayed vividly in my mind for a long time. It had been, I wrote to my parents, “the most nightmarish day of my life.” As we walked home in the rain from the graveyard, it seemed to me that everything was over. Although I could, by no stretch of the imagination, hold myself responsible for Macario’s murder, the enormity of it weighed me down almost as heavily as if I were guilty. It was another failure, somehow, a judgment on us and our work.

I went over and over in my mind how it had come to be that I was here at all, that Macario had been my colleague. The work we did together was the work to which each had been clearly called, had we not? I went back to the night in New Jersey when I had knelt in my room, asking for assurance that the call was God’s voice and not a figment of my own mind. It had seemed that He answered me through a Bible verse, “I the Lord have called thee and will hold thine hand.” I thought of those who had prayed for me and encouraged me in so many ways, I thought of all the sermons I had cringed under about the coldness of the churches and their disobedience to Christ’s commission, “Go ye.” I thought of all the times I had sung “Where He Leads Me, I Will Follow,” earnestly examining my soul for signs of insincerity or impurity of motive. I could not deny the reality of that call or the faithfulness of those who had supported me.

What of the work of the Colorado translation? Could I possibly doubt that this was God’s work? Was He, in fact, interested in the salvation of this jungle tribe, or was it only we three foreign women who were interested? Had I come here, leaving so much behind, on a fool’s errand? If this was how the Lord of Hosts looked after His servants and His glory, if this was a sample of how He answered prayers for His work and His workers, it certainly fit none of my categories. How was I to reconcile His permitting such a thing with my own understanding of the missionary task?

… As I look back on that time, I think it was Lesson One for me in the school of faith. That is, it was my first experience of having to bow down before that which I could not possibly explain. Usually we need not bow. We can simply ignore the unexplainable because we have other things to occupy our minds. We sweep it under the rug. We evade the questions.

Faith’s most severe tests come not when we see nothing, but when we see a stunning array of evidence that seems to prove our faith vain. If God were God, if He were omnipotent, if He had cared, would this have happened? Is this that I face now the ratification of my calling, the reward of obedience? One turns into the abyss. But in the abyss there is only blackness, no glimmer of light, no answering echo.

When I was sixteen years old, I copied in the back of my Bible a prayer of Betty Scott Stam’s, whose visit to our home when I was very small had made such a deep impression on me. Her prayer: ”Lord, I give up all my own plans and purposes, all my own desires and hopes, and accept thy will for my life. I give myself, my life, my all, utterly to thee to be thine forever. Fill me and seal me with thy Holy Spirit, use me as thou wilt, send me where thou wilt, work out thy whole will in my life at any cost, now and forever.”

The cost, for her, was quite literally her life only a few years after she had prayed that prayer. I had never forgotten the picture on the font page of our newspaper of the Stams’ baby daughter being carried in a rice basket by a Chinese woman who had found her after her parents’ execution.

I went back to things like that prayer as I searched for meaning to Marcario’s death. Only God knew Marcario’s heart, and whether he was a martyr. For me there were other implications. I had promised to obey God, and I had known that that promise might lead to “tribulation.” I had prayed also for holiness, but this – this kind of “answer” – was startling and repugnant to me. I had desired God Himself and He had not only not given me what I asked for, He had snatched away what I had. I came to nothing, to emptiness.

… I felt like a son who had asked for a fish and been given a scorpion I had honestly (surely it was honestly?) desired God. I wanted to do His will.

… It was a long time before I came to the realization that it is in our acceptance of what is given that God gives Himself. Even the Son of God had to learn obedience by the things that He suffered. He had come for only one purpose: “Lo, I come, in the volume of this book it is written of me, to do thy will, O God.”

Amy Carmichael wrote: “But these strange ashes, Lord, this nothingness / This baffling sense of loss / Son, was the anguish of my stripping less / Upon the torturing cross?”

Each separate experience of individual stripping we may learn to accept as a fragment of the suffering Christ bore when He took it all. “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” This grief, this sorrow, this total loss that empties my hands and breaks my heart, I may, if I will, accept, and by accepting it, I find in my hands something to offer. And so I give it back to Him, who in mysterious exchange gives Himself to me.

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