One evening my sister took me to one of the most enjoyable
and interesting events I have ever attended:
“Knit Night.” You are all
probably thinking about now…”Really? Knit as in two needles and yarn?” Yes, indeed.
And let me just say right up front:
Knit Night is VERY well attended.
We had to park down the street a bit.
My sister has gone to Knit Night for a few years now, and I always smile
when she tells me she is on her way because I know Joni doesn’t knit…AT
ALL! So it wasn’t really a surprise when
as the night progressed I saw exactly ONE person do anything with
yarn. And that would be Christy; a woman
I had the joy and privilege of meeting that night.
What is especially astounding about Christy doing anything
crafty is this truth: she has a painful disease called scleroderma,
an autoimmune disease characterized by the hardening of the skin.
There she sat on the sofa crocheting away with
hands obviously affected by this disease.
As I talked with her, I found she not only crochets and sews replicas of
old, antique quilts, but to support herself, she creates beautiful jewelry as
well.
She talked of her family, a
daughter who had married the son of a dear friend, also in attendance at “knit
night.”
We chatted about the Bible
studies we had done and the goodness of God.
She talked little to none about herself and almost entirely drew the
conversation around others and God.
She
did not tell me about her disease, or that her husband had left her, or that
her last home had burned to the ground.
Others told me these things.
She
talked of family and friends, of their kindness and generosity, of God’s
provision and goodness.
Have you ever thought about what your life magnifies for the
entire world to see? What is up for
display? Maybe your
accomplishments? Or troubles? Your family?
Your service? Your
addictions? Your difficulties? Your job?
Your afflictions? Definitely my new friend could have magnified
her scleroderma and nobody would have blamed her. She could have talked about how this disease
had changed her, limited her, caused loss, pain, frustration…but she
didn’t. In fact she did something quite
different. She magnified the Lord. What he had done in her life…was doing and
all the graces and gifts she had been given by His great hand. I was humbled by her complete trust in the
goodness of the God she served.
I’ll be honest…sometimes I magnify my poor self.
And it is about as healthy for me as this ant. I get
caught up in it unaware.
Usually
something happens that zeroes my focus with pinpoint accuracy…like a laser
right at myself.
It’s all I can think
about…all I can talk about.
It becomes a channel…the thoughts have run the
course so many times, my mind is at the mercy of the torrent…the channel is
deep, the sides steep so it flows on and on.
I flew over a barren landscape on my way to my sister’s one
afternoon. I was stunned as I looked
down at the land below. It was obvious
that water…lots of it…had coursed through at sometime because the landscape was
scarred with the marks of the cutting…land, rock and whole mountainsides
relentlessly worn deep by the power of the never ceasing water. Until it did.
Something had changed the pattern.
A small creek flowed next to what once had been a raging river. Carving its own history now, this new rivulet
of water created an entirely new course.
Pastor Jonathan Rue said in a recent teaching at my church that our
brain loves habit.
(For a video of this wonderful teaching click---> http://subsplash.com/desertvineyard/v/8eef0b1.) In fact our brain
loves habit so much it will create a “super highway” of habit so we don’t have
to think much about what we are doing.
This completely answers the question of how in the world I can make it
all the way home and not remember stopping at one light or stop sign along the
way!
The bad news is that all of our bad
habits have super highways in our brains as well.
The good news is just like that little creek
I saw from the air, we can create different paths…better habits…God
honoring….God magnifying habits!
Thanksgiving…declaring gratitude…writing it down stops the
flow of self-focus and begins to carve a new channel in our hearts and
minds.
As we begin to take notice of the
everyday graces and good gifts God showers on us and put voice to these things,
we magnify the Lord.
David says it
simply and beautifully in one of his own songs:
“I will praise God’s name with song and magnify Him with
thanksgiving.”
Psalm 69:30.
We are, every one of us, holding a magnifying glass to
something in our lives or maybe even a lot of somethings. Ann Voskamp asks these questions: “What will a life magnify? The world’s stress cracks, the grubbiness of
the day, all that is wholly wrong and terribly busted? Or God?”
Please don’t hear from this post that you cannot be honest
about what is going on in your life.
When the day is miserable from beginning to end. When your toddler has painted herself and her
room with her poo, when your teenager took your car….when the doctor gives the
diagnosis you feared…when you are exhausted from all the demands…when all you
want to do is sit with your head in your hands and sob, for crying out loud,
don’t paste a fake smile on your face and pretend.
Here is the key:
Magnifying the Lord is done best when we make
ourselves smaller.
It surely does not
mean pretending your difficulties aren’t real.
We magnify the Lord when in the midst of trouble we still number His
daily gifts…we still see His magnificence…His goodness…His grace.
We still see that HE IS.
Christy magnifies the Lord by counting and recounting
all the good in her life that comes from His hands while her own hands struggle
through each stitch, each glass bead strung on a silver thread.
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