Rachel Starr Thomson

What we must never be encouraged to do, although all of us are guilty of it over and over, is to force Scripture to fit our experience. Our experience is too small; it’s like trying to put the ocean into a thimble. What we want is to fit into the world revealed by Scripture, to swim in this vast ocean.

- Eugene Peterson, “Eat This Book”

written after an airplane ride, summer 2010 …

I gazed out the airplane window at the storm gathering over the Arizona desert. Night was falling, and beneath the clouds, city lights shone out of the darkness. Above, the clouds were shining with amber sunlight. Lightning arced through the clouds, forking out over the city; it flashed across the upper formations, out of sight of the earth’s surface.

“I give rain out of my love,” God seemed to say. “And more. The beauty of this is out of my love too.”

But no one sees this, I thought. And most people aren’t thankful for rain.

“Does that matter? That is how I love. I give life, I give sunlight and energy, I give rain, I give food, I give laughter and opportunity whether people look or not; whether they’re grateful or not.”

I swallowed. God’s love, I know, is still more—more than rain, beauty, provision. God’s love is Jesus, coming to earth, walking, healing, and dying for people. And so many never thank Him for that either. So many never even acknowledge the gift.

“There’s more.” Of course there is. God’s love extends beyond life on earth, beyond forgiveness for sin to eternal life in His presence.

I pressed my face to the window and drank in the beauty of the storm. I heard the words “There’s more.” More love, more power, so much we can’t even see—yet.

I whispered, “I love you.” I want to love Him, now, forever—and more.

Posting something a bit different today :). I’m not sure if this qualifies as poetry, but here you go:

The Closet
Rachel Starr Thomson
Written at the Magnificat Retreat in Guelph, February 12, 2011

Here I sit
In my deep dark closet
Where the plaster peels
And reveals
Wallpaper that was ugly when they put it up
And is even worse now.
Here I sit
Wishing
For wind in my sails (I dream of sails)
I’d leave
But I’m hung up on all the nails.

Jesus, help me renovate
You pick the paint, I’ll spread it
We’ll pull off the paper!
Down with plaster!
Give me a hammer
We’ll pull all the nails.

Silly child . . .
Come out.

But Jesus, we’ve not fixed it yet!
And it’s not so terribly bad.
The walls will look great in yellow
There are ways to clean up mold
We’ll pull out the nails or pound ’em in
New plaster, no rust—

Child, get out of the closet!
Get out of the whole rotting house.
You can’t fix death.
Get out.

But Lord—oh fine, I’m coming.
But I still think—
Oh.
What is that?

That, my child, is sky,
Stretched over a green world,
Alight with a million stars,
Windows to heavens beyond,
Pulsing with song and with breath.

It’s . . . so much.

Yes.
When I said you would live,
When I said “All things new,”
When I said you would be free,
I didn’t mean the closet.
I meant this.

Ephesians is a companion letter to Colossians, and here we find the bracing instruction, taken perhaps from an early Christian poem or hymn: “Awake, sleeper, rise from the dead, and the Messiah will give you light!” (5:14).

In other words, it’s time to wake up! Living at the level of the nonheavenly world around you is like being asleep; worse, it’s like that for which sleep is a metaphor–being dead. Lying, stealing, sexual immorality, bad temper, and so on (Paul lists them all in a devastating short passage) are forms of death, both for the person who commits them and for all whose lives are touched by their actions. They are ways of sleeping a deadly sleep. It’s time to wake up, he says. Come alive to the real world, the world where Jesus is Lord, the world into which your baptism brings you, the world you claim to belong to when you say inthe creed that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead.

What we all need from time to time is for someone (a friend, a spiritual director, a stranger, a sermon, a verse of scripture, or simply the inner prompting of the Spirit) to say, “It’s time to wake up! You’ve been asleep long enough! The sun is shining and there’s a wonderful day out there! Wake up and get a life!”

- N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Besides overseeing the schedule and volunteers, my big job at SDG Ballet and Arts Camp earlier this month was teaching Bible class for older and younger kids. For the older class, we started each day by looking at principles of study.

For me, one of the most important principles of study is obedience. A quote from Eugene Peterson summed it up pretty well, so I included it in our class time:

Obedience is the thing, living in active response to the living God. The more important question we ask of this text is not, “What does this mean?” but “What can I obey?” A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances.

Not that the study is not important. A Jewish rabbi I once studied with would often say, “For us Jews studying the Bible is more important than obeying it, because if you don’t understand it rightly you will obey it wrongly and your obedience will be disobedience.”

This also is true.

- Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book

Paul wrote:

For he himself is our peace, who has made us both [Jews and Gentiles] one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two . . . For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father (Ephesians 2:14–15, 18).

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many (1 Corinthians 12:12–14).

The fact is plain: Christians are one.

Our oneness does not come from our efforts. It is a spiritual reality, one that is enacted when we become members of Christ upon trusting in Him for salvation. Our oneness is in a Person, and it is a miracle.

It’s probably too much to ask that whole denominations and congregations will suddenly get serious about the biblical call to unity — acknowledging each other as brothers and sisters and committing to walk together in love, despite our differences, for Christ’s sake. But that’s OK, because like most things, unity starts with individual hearts.

Hearts like mine.

Practical unity, a real relationship with other Christians even if they are outside of “our” circle, starts with what I believe about you and what I do with that belief — it starts with what you believe about me and how you live that out.

Some might cry foul at this point: “We can’t,” they would say, “throw out truth and conviction in the name of love and solidarity.” And they would be right. Doctrine is important. So is practicing righteousness. But our unity is not based on these things. Statements of faith are not the Spirit of God who makes us one. No one denomination has cornered the market on truth. Our standards are not always God’s. And personality conflicts are no excuse to disown your own family.

If you are trusting in Jesus Christ alone for your salvation, no matter where else our beliefs may diverge, we are family. We are “one new man,” we are “baptized into one body”; we all “drink of one Spirit.” And God asks us to live as though this is true.

Read the rest of the article here.

Yes, I know, this post is REALLY late. I am pulling a late night in the office because I have so much to do today: besides “normal” work, I’m preparing to run a week-long arts camp next week as part of the outreach of Soli Deo Gloria Ballet. I am scheduling, arranging travel for, and confirming various workshop teachers, volunteers, and students.

The job requires perseverance. But I’m not actually going to draw today’s post from it :).

As I was reading the Bible this morning, a phrase jumped out at me. When God delivered his people from Egypt by the hand of Moses and gave them the law, he commanded them not to “depart from it,” but to keep it in their mouths, their hearts, and their lives always. If you know Old Testament history, you know how well that went! The people departed from God’s ways within two generations of entering the Promised Land. And ever after, God sent judges, prophets, and the occasional righteous king to bring them back.

In 1 Kings, the people of God were split into the nations of Israel and Judah after Solomon died, with David’s grandson Rehoboam ruling Judah and a military leader named Jeroboam taking over the kingship in Israel. Jeroboam was actually called and anointed by God to head this rebellion–it was a judgment on Solomon’s idolatry (and, one can’t help but feel, Rehoboam’s nitwittyness). But God called him to walk after God’s ways, to “not depart” from the law.

Well, Jeroboam looked at circumstances and got scared. He figured that the people would continue to go to Jerusalem to sacrifice at the temple as God had commanded they do, and that, since Jerusalem was the capital of Judah and the Davidic kings were ruling there, this would eventually cause him to lose his kingdom. So he set up two golden calves (hints of the exodus, no?) in Bethel, anointed a lot of non-Levites as priests, and declared “There are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of Egypt.”

Ouch.

Well, Jeroboam lost his throne via another rebellion. And while the Davidic line continued steadily on, Israel went through generation after generation of coups, rebellions, and new dynasties, all until the day they were completely conquered and sent into exile by the Assyrians.

And here is why the Bible says Israel was judged so harshly: because in all of that time, in all of that upheaval, and with the witness of some of the mightiest prophets ever to live, Israel “did not depart” from the sin of Jeroboam in worshiping the false gods in Bethel.

Think about that! For generation . . . after generation . . . after generation . . . after generation . . . the people did not depart from idolatry and sin. But God’s law? That, they departed from almost as soon as Moses and Joshua died.

What do I learn from this? A couple of things: first, that sin is not something to mess around with. It’s addictive and enslaving. God will let us exercise free will and walk away; sin will not–not without the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

And two, perseverance only counts if you’re persevering in the right things.

With that, good night. I’m back to work.

Inconvenient or not, we are stuck with the necessity of exegesis. We have a written word to read and attend to. It is God’s word, or so we believe, and we had better get it right. Exegesis is foundational to Christian spirituality. Foundations disappear from view as a building is constructed, but if the builders don’t build a solid foundation, their building doesn’t last long . . .

. . . Which is to say, the more “spiritual” we are, the more care we must give to exegesis. The more mature we become in the Christian faith, the more exegetically rigorous we must become. This is not a task from which we graduate. These words given to us in our Scriptures are constantly getting overlaid with personal preferences, cultural assumptions, sin distortions, and ignorant guesses that pollute the text. The pollutants are always in the air, gathering dust on our Bibles, corroding our use of the language, especially the language of faith. Exegesis is a dust cloth, a scrub brush, or even a Q-tip for keeping the words clean.

- Eugene Peterson, from Eat This Book

Today I had hot chocolate with a missionary friend, and I shared an area in which God is dealing with me: I’m scared of “big” things, especially if they have anything to do with serving God. It’s kind of a twisted hang-up, and I won’t go into all of its roots and branches here, but I thought I’d share the prayer that has recently been born out of it.

I also sometimes struggle with its opposite: the tendency to feel that the day-in, day-out, earthly necessities in which I spend so much of my time are not worth anything eternally. This is not true.

Anyway, the prayer. I’ve been praying, on a nearly daily basis:

God, help not to shy away from big things,

Nor to despise small things,

But to see and to serve you in all things.

Courage and faithfulness, that’s what I need.

When I was in my late teens, I was really really passionate about seeking the Lord. So passionate, in fact, that after reading a few books on revival and the “godly habits of godly people,” I pretty much burned myself out in prayer. And ever since, I’ve been a bit gun shy when it comes to my prayer life.

Recently God has been calling me to live with far more emphasis on prayer and daily seeking him, so I have to get over my qualms. I’ve been reading Prayer by Richard J. Foster, and yesterday this paragraph, advice given to a young man who was desperately trying to hear from God through a passage of Scripture, spoke to me:

“You’re trying too hard . . . You’re trying to control God. Go back to this passage and this time be open to receive whatever God has for you. Don’t manipulate God; just receive. Communion with him isn’t something you institute. It’s like sleep. You can’t make yourself sleep, but you can create the conditions that allow sleep to happen. All I want you to do is to create the conditions: open your Bible, read it slowly, listen to it, and reflect on it.”

It seems to me this advice holds true for all of spiritual life, not just lectio divina or specific types of prayer. In Luke 11 Jesus tells us to ask (not demand), seek (not create), and knock (not grab a crowbar and force the door). Any approach to God means coming empty handed and waiting humbly for him to give, reveal, and open the door.

If he decides to remain silent, that’s fine. We can still come, being faithful to create conditions. It’s sort of like being a servant and setting the table every morning, laying out a beautiful breakfast and fine china, even though it’s possible the master will decide to show up late or eat somewhere else. Laying out the table, with love and reverence, is still an act of service and love. It’s up to the master to decide how to accept that act.

I think prayer is a little like this as well. Creating the conditions can be, in itself, an act of worship. We do not decide how God will respond to that worship. But we know that he will respond–ask, seek, knock; receive, find, come through the door.