Sometimes as a Mum I literally feel like a pack horse. Life after the pushchair has frequently found me loaded up with coats, bags, cuddly toys and whatever else needs to be carried. Not to mention being the go to receptacle for any snotty tissues and sweety wrappers that happen to be around.

However, it is the emotional burdens, the responsibilities, the weight of the world (or worse – the To Do list) on my shoulders sort of burdens that I find myself really struggling under. Add to that the general rubbish of the day that I often end up absorbing and you’ve got a problem. Or rather I have!

Last week I let my burdens crush me, or maybe my burdens just got so great that they did it all on their own! Anyway the end result was that I felt crushed and took to my bed – literally. To mix my metaphors it was as if I had been keeping up my flood defenses for as long as possible, dealing with the occasional breach, and generally coping,and then all of a sudden the waves were just too much for them. The waters rushed into my control centre and wreaked havoc. All my strategies for managing my depression, and the pressures of parenting and ministry (not to mention everyday life!) were rendered ineffective and I just had to wait for everything to dry out.     

To a certain extent, now that I am ‘better’ it is a case of brush myself off and get on with it. Chemicals in my brain, and/or certain life factors happened and knocked me off my feet and now I am back up again.

BUT, as the flood waters recede I find some thoughts swirling around in a corner and I feel the need to explore them and pull them together rather than just letting them drain away. It may be that rather than just repair the damage, and build everything back up to the same spec I need to pause and look a bit deeper at what’s going on. I want to look back to my life raft from Serving without sinking (see June 2015 post and Comments from my Bookshelves); consider my practical pointers from What’s best next? (by Matt Perman) and explore further the teaching from Time for Everything? (by Matt Fuller, and our current VWs book).

How burdened should our lives be as those who have answered Jesus’ call:

“Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11: 28-30

What truths can we draw on, and what tools can we use to help us day by day to be lightly and rightly burdened?

To be continued…. 

Avoiding the words ALWAYS and NEVER  has been key advice for us in our marriage. Which started 15 years ago today!

It is something we now use in our parenting as well.

The principle is that when we use these words in our conversations they are rarely ever true (note the use of rarely as opposed to NEVER!) and they are normally accusatory. Sentences starting “You always…” or “I never get to…” wakes up the inner defence lawyer (a Paul Tripp phrase that I find so helpful, see his book on marriage: What did you Expect?) in the other person who immediately feels the need to defend themselves and point out occasions that disprove the accusation, excuse themselves and/or come up with a return shot in the same vein. “Well, you NEVER… or “Yes, but I ALWAYS…”

To steal from The Marriage Book (Nicky and Sila Lee) this time – the issue/problem is firmly placed between you, being batted back and forth in a combative manner instead of out in front of you where you can look at it together.

On a practical note the very act of taking back a “You ALWAYS… statement generally resulted in laughter and tension melting in our case. It was normally me – “You ALWAYS ….., well usually, ok sometimes, well that one time…”

Often the sorts of issues that produce these kind of statements are actually great chances to express things that we need to say and that the other person needs to hear, but we go about it the wrong way. Try starting with “I find it hard when…” or “I miss you when….” “I used to really enjoy it when we….” These emotions are usually what we are really trying to express. This sort of vulnerable opening up builds intimacy rather than setting up a net between us that only encourages point scoring.

So why am I bringing it up now? Well we were chatting about it with another married couple so it has been on my mind and as I was reflecting on our conversation it dawned on me that there could be a link to our grumbling vs lamenting thoughts. Are we taking God to court over things with our lawyer in tow or are we coming to our Father and telling him that it hurts? The end of the book of Job would, I think, warn us from the former as it reveals the otherness, the perfection and the might of God, while encouraging the latter because it also reveals a generous, merciful, listening, communicating God.

So ALWAYS keep on praying and do not give up. Luke 18:1

I have recently read A loving Life by Paul Miller. I will review it shortly, but before leaving the subject of laments (- I am going to unburden myself on burdens next) I want to share with you something that really struck me as Paul Miller looked at the life of Ruth and Naomi.

Quotations taken from page 48, 49 of my 2014 edition published by IVP. 

“A broken heart that doesn’t lament can breed unbelief.” The writer urges us to lament, to let our heart be broken over something rather than get overwhelmed by it.

I get anxious about lament. Naomi troubles me. Is she a goody or a baddy? Paul Miller writes: “That doesn’t mean Naomi’s judgement of God is correct. God is good and just. He will answer her frustration with more goodness. Naomi was interpreting God through the lens of her experience. She has stopped in the middle of the story and measured God.  A deeper faith waits until the end of the story and interprets experience through the lens of God’s faithfulness. Is this something we tell Naomi? No. It is what we tell ourselves. Good theology lets us endure quietly with someone else’s pain when all the pieces aren’t together…..A lament fits God’s heart perfectly. God loves an open, honest heart, no matter how broken by life, even if theologically incorrect.

I struggle with this – I want to correct, I want to point them to the end of the story – mainly because I so want to help them see how good God is. What wisdom we need.

I want to try and embrace the idea of lamenting rather than being overwhelmed. Overwhelm is a regular feeling with me. Overwhelm says I can’t cope, feels like it can’t cope, fails to cope and yet generally in my experience goes on trying to cope, or in extreme cases drops everything and runs away.

If only I went to my loving Father and lamented. Poor in spirit I would throw myself on him, not groan under the weight. “A lament puts us in an openly dependent position, where our brokenness reflects the brokenness of the world… A lament functions like a mirror of the world. What is broken or out of balance is not the lament but the world. Motivated by clear seeing, a lament reacts to the mismatch between hope and reality, between heaven and earth.”

How often do we go through the day effectively telling ourselves that we can do it, with some better time management, by applying the things we learnt at that conference, (or from that book!) after a good night’s sleep….. By God’s grace we can do so much, he gives us great works to do, but we can’t sort it all out.

There is great pain in my church family at the moment, there are situations that crush the air out of my lungs when I think about them. I know the situation is enormous, but at the same time I think if I just word an email correctly, or bake a cake or prepare faithfully for a bible study it will all be OK.  It may well be that God will use my email, it is certainly right to be careful in how I word it, or that my cake will demonstrate love and help bring healing, and of course my bible study should be faithfully prepared, but the weight of the situation is not for me to carry, but to lament. To voice to God the wrongness of the situation, while resting in the rightness of his perfect will. To step back from my To Do list and my list of failings and recognise the world we inhabit for what it is and the impotency of human actions to build anything with our own labours. To give up trying to do what is not mine to do and patiently bear the yoke that is easy and light under his loving guidance.

Lord, help me to lament, help me to love and help me to have an ever deeper faith that interprets everything through the lens of your faithfulness. In the name of the one who calls the heavily burdened to himself, Amen.

Lamenting longing,
not grumbling entitlement.
Aching, I shelter.

Our wants are just so muddled. I want my children to be obedient. This is a godly ‘want’, it is in line with God’s preceptive will.  BUT it is also a selfish want, because what I really want is peace, or to impress my friends, or to have an uninterrupted conversation, or more sleep….and so as I ask I need to humbly accept and trust God’s decreted will – because he sees their hearts and he sees mine and he sees every day of our lives and he knows how to work to his glory and our highest joy.

One of the first dates my husband and I had was at an ASK! pizza restaurant. They always had gerberas on the table – still one of my favourite flowers! It’s an interesting name for a restaurant – one that led to great confusion the first time I heard about it. I asked my boss if he could recommend somewhere for us to eat and he said, “well ASK! is always good”, but we were in a big crowd of people and I only heard the words ‘always’, ‘good’ and ‘ask’ and thought – yes – that’s what I am doing! Anyway we got there eventually.

Asking is good.

Ask yourself…
“What will please the Lord today?”
Ask him for it. What is
Needed for God’s glory and your highest joy today will be given to you.
Those who fear God need not fear want.

Weep and wait and worship
Ask all that is on your heart, while also asking:
Not my will, but yours be done.
Take heart for the Lord is near.

I’ve been trying to think of where we are directly commanded to ASK!

I’ve come up with…

• Matthew 9:38: workers for the harvest field.
• Matthew 7:7, 8: Ask and you will receive, linked with the asking of good gifts and for the Holy Spirit.
• Matthew 6: 9-13: Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, the gift of daily bread, keep us from temptation, deliverance from evil.
• John 14:12-14
  • ¹² Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. ¹³ And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. ¹⁴ You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.
  • I think the emphasis here is the disciples dismay at being left to do the work on their own without Jesus. But they will do great things because they have only to ask!
• James 4:1-3
  • What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? ² You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. ³ When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
  • Sometimes we just don’t ask. And when we do… so much of our asking comes out of our friendship with the world – see following verses.

Do let me what others you can think of… 

And finally – not a command, but a wonderfully reassuring and realigning prayer:

²⁰ Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, ²¹ to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.  

Ephesians 3:20, 21

AMEN!

I finished my last post by asking the following:

Is there a place for desires and dreams in the life of a child of God? Can we say “the Lord is my shepherd” and yet want so much more? Is there a difference between grumbling complaints, and gut wrenchingly painful laments? When are we being demanding customers and when are we pouring out our hearts to our loving Lord? How should we say “I want..” to God and will we ever get it?

Well let’s start off with what we do know. Asking things of our heavenly Father is not only good, but obedient. Where we know God’s will it seems that in one sense we should demand it happen. I hesitate to use the word demand – but I’m thinking of the prayer the Lord used to teach his disciples how to pray: Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, give us this day, forgive us, don’t lead us into temptation, deliver us…

Of course this isn’t the sort of demanding  of a master to a servant or a customer who is always right, but the longing pleas of a hungry child. “Only you can do this God, you have promised it, this is not something I can do, we need you to work your will in this world and in our lives….”

Oh how little we pray and when we do how small are our prayers! As we pray our mouths should be wide open – like baby birds that seem to become all beak as they cheep to be fed. See Spurgeon – Chequebook of the Bank of Faith September 30th commenting on Psalm 81:10. He writes: Let us take in grace at every door… Let our needs make us open our mouths, let our faintness cause us to open our mouths and pant; yea, let our alarm make us open our mouths with a child’s cry. The opened mouth shall be filled by the Lord himself.   

But

(I hate to use the word BUT – not only because you shouldn’t use it at the start of a sentence, but because it suggests that there is a caveat, a catch – which there isn’t. In that sense it is more of an AND…)

But/and..one of the things we need God to fill us with is wisdom, and discernment. May we want our hearts’ desires to be ever more in line with his will and not just as a tag on, but because it is our greatest love and joy, satisfaction and safety.

Like Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane let us frame our prayers in a desire for God’s glory and his will to be done that supersedes and colours all other requests.

In Cumbria they have a brilliant word – twining (pronunciation: rhymes with lining..). It means irritable, low level, but on going whining. Children are excellent twiners: constantly letting you know that life at the moment is not the what they had hoped for and that it is basically your fault. We need to let God’s word rebuke us when we are twining at God. The Israelites were great at it – I am too. Paul writes: Do everything without complaining and arguing (Phil 2:14). There is a lack of humility and obedience and other-centredness (compare with preceding verses in Philippians!). “In humility count others as more significant than yourselves” (Phil 2: 3) is a far cry from the ‘the customer is always right’ style of life we tend to expect and demand.

We need to see the arrogance and/or the lack of trust that is tied up in grumbling. As the writer of Ecclesiastes writes: you do not know the work of God who makes everything. We know ourselves that very often we are grumbled against not because we are doing something wrong, or harmful but because it doesn’t fit with the picture that the plaintiff has of the situation. Never mind that our picture of the situation is  more accurate, far reaching and for the grumbler’s great delight and good. “If only”, I say to myself, “they would remember that I know them, that I love them and that I love to do them good.” by God’s grace we know him, we have seen to what extent he loves us, all be it through a glass darkly – how dazzled we will be when we see it fully!) we know that he is wise and all seeing and that his will is good. And yet we grumble rather than submit and trust and open our mouths wide to enjoy his good will.

Grumbling is different from lamenting. Grumbling treats God like someone behind a customer service desk. Lamenting – like our loving Lord. It rests in his everlasting arms and weeps. I love the description of Aslan C.S. Lewis gives in The Magician’s Nephew when Digory tearfully utters his request for his mother to be healed. The little boy does not receive an answer, but he does receive a deeper knowledge of Aslan as he realises that he is weeping too, as he realises that Aslan must love his mother even more than he does. While God’s word can rebuke us as complainers, it can reassure us as those who lament. “You do not know the work of God who makes everything” (Eccl 11:5) – keep trusting, keep clinging, you are safe in God’s good will.

So – does “I want” ever get? Well let’s humbly ask God and see! BUT – let’s ask within the graceful relationship we have with him in Jesus. Let’s want him to change our longings and to show us that we want for nothing. We must ask, not worry or be anxious and let him fill us with good things. If we need it today we will have it today.

The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.

I want to be more godly, I want to long more for God’s will – or rather I would like it and will ask it boldly with a wide open mouth. But in Jesus I don’t even need this! Praise God that in him I have everything I need until Christ’s return. And that is something I do want and that I will get! Amen, Come Lord Jesus.

I want never gets. It’s probably been said to you, and you may well have passed it on! But is it true?

Well I guess it is up to the person who is being told the desires of the ‘want-er’. If the house rule is that wording a request for something as “I want….” means you don’t get it then yes in one sense – I want would never get. But I’m not sure it works that way. Surely if the ‘want-er’ wants an apple – presumably, once the expressed desire for an apple had been turned into a polite request for an apple then in many cases the apple would then be given. So I want did get. There was a desire, and the desire was met. Even more so imagine a child who had hurt itself expressing the desire for a cuddle – “I want a cuddle” – who would not want to fulfill that desire and make sure that “I want” got?

In some ways we are getting into the realms of linguistics and possibly pedantry. So while it is more accurate to say “Please may I have…?” rather than “Can I have…?” the sense behind both phrases is generally an expression of a desire for something. “I would like..” is considered more polite than “I want..” (something you learn pretty early on in French lessons!) but do they mean the same thing?

Perhaps the problem with “I want” is that it is seen to be expressing a demand for what we desire? Whereas “I would like..” is giving the other party the chance to give you your desire? Does “I want..” basically mean “Give me..”?

Perhaps the expression of the desire is not the problem – in fact surely we should (generally!) encourage the sharing of needs and wishes and dreams and desires – but the expectation of the fulfillment of that desire, the feeling of the right to have it met.

This attitude is a far cry from David in his famous Psalm:
The Lord is my shepherd, nothing shall I want.. Psalm 23v1.

Here want = need. As in “I want for nothing”, nothing is wanting.

To want something is to suggest a need for it and in that sense it is a demand. A demand springing either from dissatisfaction or desperation.

An asthmatic gasping for breath wants their inhaler. They are desperate for it, they need it in order to survive.

A child who has had their quota of screen time wants more screen time. They are dissatisfied, they ‘need’ more time in order to feel satisfied.

The problem is that our use of language muddles it all up. Parents are just as bad – we say “I want never gets”, and then we ask: “Do you want apple juice or orange juice?” Perhaps an accurate (although cheeky) answer might be: “I want for neither Mummy, as water would be quite adequate to hydrate me, but I would like, I would enjoy and prefer apple juice thank you.”

So let’s get away from the pedantry and oddities of the English language and examine the heart of the matter. What is the place of desires and dreams in the life of a child of God? Can we say “the Lord is my shepherd” and yet want so much more? Is there a difference between grumbling complaints, and gut wrenchingly painful laments? When are we being demanding customers and when are we pouring out our hearts to our loving Lord? How should we say “I want..” to God and will we ever get it?

To be continued ….

Please be reassured – this not the start of a joke! “Why don’t mummies sit on the step?”  “I don’t know – why don’t Mummies sit on the step?”

Although laughter is always welcome so if you have any comical suggestions please do share!

It is a question that my disgruntled son (the Court Jester) asked me this morning. So why don’t we? Is there a grown-up equivalent of sitting on ‘the step’ (our version of the naughty step)?

Interested? Please go to the Peculiar Parenting page to read on. 

This is clearly a good prayer to pray. God’s will is good. God is good all the time and all the time God is good. BUT it is not a tame prayer to pray because God is not ‘a tame lion’ and much of what he wills is beyond our knowledge and understanding and grasp.

I have learnt recently about two aspects of God’s will and have found the distinction really helpful.

Firstly there is God’s DECREETED will. God is sovereignly in control of his universe and nothing happens unless God decrees it. Therefore in any given situation, big or small, we can be confident that God is doing what he wants, what pleases him. It is God’s DECREETED will. Being sure that God’s will is being done, however, is not the same as knowing what God’s will is.

So if we are praying for God’s will to be done in the midst of a global conflict, an election, a friend’s illness or infertility there is an element of blindness in our prayer. We don’t know exactly what we are asking for, because we’re not God!

What we do know is who we are asking. His word is full of his purposes and plans, his loves and desires, and his promises to his people. In other words we do know his PRECEPTIVE WILL. There is much of God’s will that is plainly revealed to us – here we can pray with full sight.

I was listening to a sermon online today in which the preacher pointed out that so often our prayers are focused around situations in which we don’t know God’s will. We either try and guess God’s will or even worse tell God what he should be doing. While it is totally right to bring all our cares and anxieties to the Lord the preacher argued that the majority of our prayer lives should be spent in the realm of God’s revealed, PRECEPTIVE will. So often we spend more time stumbling around in the dark in our prayer lives rather than praying with open bibles reflecting God’s promises back to him. The preacher looked at the prayer life of George Muller. Muller would not pray anything unless he could clearly reflect God’s revealed will in his prayers. If he felt prompted to pray for something he would first diligently search his bible in order to faithfully pray God’s will.

I love the way that Paul Miller looks at Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane in his book ‘A Praying Life’.  Jesus pours out his heart to his loving Father. “If you are willing take this cup from me; yet not my will, but your be done.” Luke 22:42.
Jesus neither pretends he is without care –

(care is too weak a word, oh the staggering suffering he faced for us – thank you Lord Jesus)

– nor demands that his care be placed above his Father’s will. Jesus both loves his Father’s will, trusts that it is good and perfect, desires above all that it is done AND he honestly cries out that it is hard. He encircles his deeply felt troubles with his desire for his Father’s will to be done, rather than covering them over and hiding them underneath it.

I think we are more likely to pray ‘your will be done’ with our lips than with our hearts. Do we ever pray “Your will be done”, but really mean “I give up, don’t mind me God, have it your own way” which basically translates as “How dare you not mind me, you’ve got it wrong”?

I’ve recently read ‘A loving Life’ by Paul Miller and was struck by his comments on lament. We are so much better at grumbling like Israel in the desert than lamenting with open, submissive, trusting hearts.

So let’s know God better. He is good. Let’s study his PRECEPTIVE WILL so that our prayers can act as mirrors, reflecting his will back to him; still pools of God’s promises that we can immerse ourselves in as we pray. And let’s thank God that we can splash and lament within the safety of those promises and the goodness of his will.

God’s will is that his people would love and trust his will. That we would love and trust it and eagerly ask for it whether it is in plain sight (his PRECEPTIVE will) or undisclosed (his DECREETED will). So let’s pray that his will be done!