Sweet Defeat

“What is that?” he asked, pointing to the white casserole and its murky brown contents.

“Apple Crisp,” I told my guest, trying to sound confident. “It’s our dessert.”

Actually, it was an experiment. I just didn’t know at the time that’s what I’d made. It should have been delicious. It was full of homegrown apples, Irish butter, unprocessed sugar, sea salt, the best cinnamon you can buy online, and flour. I’ll bet that’s what the problem was. The flour. It wasn’t organic.

I couldn’t blame him for his fearful question. I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat it either, let alone serve the weird-looking concoction. But I knew the ingredients were stellar. And since I thought my normal tried-and-true recipe for apple crisp was too simple and old-fashioned, I figured I’d google something better, my friends would be wowed, and the evening would be a complete success. So, I went online to find someone else’s superior recipe to finish off the comfort meal I’d made for my neighbors. And that’s when it happened.

The internet lied. (Well, it couldn’t have been operator failure.)

“This is the best recipe I’ve ever found!” the author gushed in her too-long post in between all the flashy ads that broke up every paragraph. “I tweaked it and made it better. You’re gonna love it!”

I’d have had her arrested for fabricating evidence, but I threw the proof in the trash and blocked her on my computer.

I blame myself. I don’t even know who that blogger was. Why did I trust someone I’ve never heard of before? Why did I believe her when she’s never once cooked a meal for me? Even more important, why do I keep practicing new recipes and serving them to my neighbors?

To add insult to injury, she raved about her homemade browned butter salted caramel sauce. That ridiculous enticement cost me a precious hour in the kitchen, one of my favorite Pampered Chef spatulas, the first batch of ruined caramel sauce, and a second with a very distinct hint of scorch.

It was supposed to be the finale to a fine dinner. The piece de resistance following a satisfying meal. But more than all of that, it was supposed to bring my friend and me victory if the cards weren’t going right. That was the plan—it’s always the plan. If Lady Luck is flirting with the boys, giving them all the breaks, we retaliate with sugar and inject our opponents with enough carbs to put sucrose in a coma. That’s how we win.  First, the four of us eat dinner, then the men cheat at cards, we break for dessert, and finally we show ‘em who’s boss.

Apparently, that only works if the dessert is delicious. We lost six out of seven rounds and half of us went home with a headache.

So, thanks a lot, internet, for failing to taste test all those recipes you let just anybody put up in public. I used to think you had all the answers, but now I know you’re just in it for the pop-up ads. From now on I’m going old school. Back to my worn-out recipe box. Next time I need a tasty treat, I’ll look up the right way to make it in one of the hundreds of recipe books gathering dust on my shelves. And if that fails, it’s back to vanilla ice cream and store-bought chocolate syrup.

Winning at cards is too important to risk gambling on homemade salted caramel sauce.

Selah

Selah.

I love this word, which is weird because definitions are important to me and nobody knows what "selah" really means. It shows up 71 times in the Bible and once on my foot. Where I had it tattooed. The word with no meaning. It makes people ask questions. People like my eight-year-old granddaughter, Tully.

“That’s pretty, YaYa,” she said a few weeks ago. “What does it say?”

“Selah.”

“What does that mean?”

Well, that’s the question of the ages, isn’t it? Since it’s found almost entirely in the book of Psalms which was the hymnbook of its day, most people think it’s a musical direction. It’s a place where musicians pause to take a breath and let the instruments take over for a while. A pause or a rest. That’s the reason I bit my lip for ten minutes while a talented tattoo artist needled it into my skin last year. Because I need a reminder, in a place I often see, to rest.

I have another tattoo, my first one, that actually is a musical quarter rest. “Is that a bat?” a friend asked me when I showed the healed version to her. In the months since I got that one, only two people have ever recognized that it’s a quarter rest—that zigzageddy shape which, when you view it sideways, resembles . . . a bat.

So, I have this hangup with the word, “rest.” I love it. I need it. I crave it. Not the kind of rest like when your bones are weary or your brain is bored and you plop into a chair to watch Gilligan’s Island reruns for a while. I need the kind of rest that refreshes my soul. The problem is you can’t be a worry wart and rest at the same time. Oil and water, that one.

Six years ago, I found out I had cancer. It was terrifying. I didn’t know for a while if this was my final curtain call or if I’d be around for a few more performances. Six years ago. It was not my curtain call. But after my surgery, it took a while to heal. I often sat and read in my favorite chair, my feet crossed and propped on an ottoman, where I had a view of a plaque across the room, a promise inscribed on it.  A promise which carried me through that entire experience. “The Lord will fight for you,” it reads, “you need only to be still.”

It was my literal lifeline for months. Years. Actually, it’s still my lifeline. Just to know that the God of the universe thinks enough of me to literally fight my battles for me, to fight for me, is overwhelming. I sat in my chair with one foot crossed over the other, looking at that promise on the plaque on the wall, and I decided I would someday tattoo that verse on my propped-up foot—a picture of the physical rest forced upon me, symbolic of the spiritual rest I craved.

I thought about it for five years. I wrote it with a pen on my foot. Which tickled. And I made an important decision. Thirty-eight letters is too many to tattoo on any part of my body. Especially when it’s your first tattoo. Which is why it took five years to get that little quarter rest on my left forearm. I couldn’t figure out how to condense all those letters into one.

Until the rest. The one that resembles a bat when you look at it sideways.

Somehow, it wasn’t enough. My sister, who is the instigator of the whole tattoo idea though she’d never had one either, decided to get one of her own once I took the plunge, and wanted me to come along. I spent a few weeks looking at the blank spot on my resting foot where I really wanted that tattoo in the first place. I'd chickened out because everybody said it’s so painful to get one there. Now I made up my mind. Five letters was better than thirty-eight. We made an appointment together, Lynette got her first tat, and I my second.

It’s beautiful. It’s right where I wanted it. It, as well as my bat tattoo, both remind me to rest because God thinks I’m worth fighting for.

“YaYa?” Tully said, breaking into my thoughts. “What does it mean?”

“It’s from the Psalms,” I began. “It means to, like . . .”

I had to figure out how to explain it in language an eight-year-old could understand without all the drama of cancer and surgery and weeping in a chair for weeks while I wondered if I would live or die. Condense it, Eula. Just like you condensed that verse in Exodus to five letters in a tattoo.

“It means to pause, to take a breath. Stop and think about how good God is.”

She nodded like she understood and didn’t know why I’d had such a hard time explaining it to her. “So, it means to just calm down,” she said, in all of her eight-year-old wisdom. Now I was speechless.

I paused.

I took a breath.

I thought about how smart eight-year-olds can be.

And I didn’t have anything better to add to her definition of the beautiful tattoo on my right foot which reminds me to kick fear and terror to the curb while God fights for me.

“Yup,” I said. “It means to just calm down.” Finally I know what all those Bible translators have never figured out. But one word is still better than three when it comes to biting your lip in a tattoo parlor.

Selah.

Frayed Edges

Guilt.
Shame.
Condemnation.
Jesus took it all away.

But it still gets my attention. Somehow, it’s easier to tune in on the droning, repetitive voice of the accuser instead of the voice of my soul’s Lover. Why is my selective hearing selecting that?

You will not need to fight in this battle. Take your positions, stand still, and see the deliverance of the Lord Who is with you.

I know He is. But still I fight. Still I fall. Still I fail. Still.

Then be still.

Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud.

Yeah. That’s what it feels like. Compressed by the pressure of a low-lying black cloud. Pretty sure that’s not the abundant life.

A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

But what about moral standards? My expectations? His expectations! What about those? And judgment from other people. What about that? What if I mess this whole thing up and people point and say, “I knew she was a faker.”

It’s a dead end to obsess over self. If you want to find the way out into the open and a spacious, free life, turn your attention to God.

So, I’m pretty self-focused here in this game of moral living—that’s what you’re saying? That’s why I keep listening to the wrong voice and agreeing with it?

For you who welcome Him, in whom He dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you experience life on God’s terms. When God lives and breathes in you (and He does, as surely as He did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life.

It feels dead when I cave in to condemnation. “Life on God’s terms.” Interesting. I’ve been living on my terms thinking that was what pleased God. You know, keep a log of sin, apologize a lot, grovel if necessary, crawl around believing I’m a worm He let in to His kingdom against His better judgment.

Okay, well, that’s messed up. Don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent? There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!

I get really tired of hearing the accuser’s voice. He’s pretty good at pointing out my inabilities and disfunction.

I’ll bet.

I keep trying to protect myself by always doing the right thing. You know, keep the law with the help of God’s Spirit.

How’s that working for you?

Pretty wormy.

Listen, God went for the jugular when He sent His own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In His Son, Jesus, He personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.

But what about the greatest Commandment and the second greatest—and the other eight?

The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.

“Simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.” I don’t know what to say. That’s the best news I’ve ever heard, even in church.

Sad. Now I don’t know what to say.

So, I don’t need to search my heart to see if there’s any wicked way in me?

You’re out of your league if you do that. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God!

Then it really is finished. He doesn’t expect any self-improvement efforts from me?

How can you improve on a plan that cost God the life of His Son?

You’re right. I don’t have what it takes. I can will it, but I can’t do it. I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope.

The perfect place to be. Maybe it’s time to let go.

It’s been a pretty lousy rope, now that you mention it.

This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike, “What’s next, Papa?” Like I said, a new power is in operation. God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know Who He is, and we know who we are: Father and children.

When I look inside at me, I forget who I really am. That’s where the downhill slide begins.

God knew what He was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love Him along the same lines as the life of His Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity He restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in Him.

So, when I focus on Him, then I’ll see the real me?

The real you.

Even on my worst days?

Even then.

I’ll still be His?is

Still.

So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing Himself to the worst by sending His own Son, is there anything else He wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us?

No, I guess not.

And who would dare tangle with God by messing with someone who belongs to Him? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—Who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us.

That’s not exactly what I’ve heard from the pulpit, either.

Maybe you’ve been facing the wrong pulpits. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us?

Well, now that you ask . . .

There’s no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not threats, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture. None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us.

I guess I didn’t look at it like that.

I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.

Not even if I get in His way?

Seriously?

Right. I guess that covers it.

It covers it, heals, renews it, settles it, transforms, empowers, secures, and holds it.

Nothing can get between me and God’s love for me—not even me.

Not even you.

So, the best thing to do when the accusations start . . .

And they will . . .

Is just be still?

Every single time.






A conversation with Paul in Romans 8 (via The Message Bible) and the bold promise of 2 Chronicles 20:17.

Thanks to Al Levine for the use of his photo of this frayed rope. The original photo can be viewed at https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/26240804093/in/photolist-6VFVAJ-LvDypq-pEDbEm-3adyAF-oZhG4u-64oSDk-Tn93Sb-cePW8S-FYNYQM-aSKssM-71NkLC-2pSgZz-9xMavz-5rQ313-aURRp4-mqJhv-PH8Tg-2ehya2z-EagMd-7LzVG9-y8bkpY-KW2GdR-3Qzy2-4xPcae-3ky4Y-o5L1Wg-6NWd32-cJJtr1-nd6CTz-23vh7E-7DVbfs-3ePfSp-aRpG1i-8ie4tL-8rurbu-7wJwuR-88xVkL-4E5tXw-n6UY9z-5hN2Fa-BtFzgD-7ckqvQ-aEyX2H-27YR3V-QpZLmg-QzR4i7-J5Jsxp-bYFtQ-ot51xR-dNpXFG