Sometimes things come in a flood.

Pandemics

Identity politics

Woke culture ideology

And now you can pre-plan your own exit.

I think I’m on the next ship outta here.

Joking aside, we’re in trouble.

But I guess that depends on how you look at it.

Civilizations ago, there was another flood, you remember the story?

As the narrative goes, things in humanity had become so bad that God himself couldn’t condone any longer the things that were going on. Historians have touted theories about sexuality gone crazy, orgies, the things described in Romans 2 and even the devastating sexualization of children. And that was just one front. Violence. Selfishness on a level unheard of, and most concerning to God as evidenced over and over in his Word, the marginalization of the poor and afflicted.

There was another time in history, on a local level, when God said a people group had become so depraved that there was no going back. Redemption was no longer possible. So he told his King on the ground (Saul) to wipe them (the Amalakites) out. This story has been the source of much debate and derision to the satisfaction of detractors of the faith as they accuse the King of the universe of genocide.

Yet… was there another side to the story? Again, theologians and historians in many cases believe that this people group was so tainted by evil that there was no redemption possible and the only option was annihilation or they would continue to infiltrate and attack Israel’s (God’s missive to bring the Saviour) spiritual, social and security structures repeatedly. And when I say tainted by evil I mean the most heinous things you can imagine (or don’t please).

So… fast forward to Jesus, the Saviour, God’s Child, His real presence amongst us in the form of a man. God on foot. He said “As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man.” He goes on to describe people eating and drinking and marrying, essentially going about their daily lives, yet I think we must pay attention to the description, “As it was in the days of Noah…”.

What was it like in those days? I’m wondering, that it should be touted as the same conditions for when Jesus Christ will return to earth to take His people home.

Genesis 6:5 tell us this about that time; “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually,” and this, “Now the earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.” (Genesis 6:11)

And 2 Timothy 3:1-4 describes this… “But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God…”

Sound familiar?

This could describe a lot of times and ideologies. Yet once again we’re at a place in time where ‘the earth’ is becoming corrupt, not a localized place, but just about the whole globe.

Do you see it?

Matthew 16:2-3 says of Jesus, “He answered and said to them, ‘When it is evening you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red’; in the morning, ‘It will be foul weather today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ Hypocrites! You know how to discern the face of the sky, but you cannot discern the signs of the times.”

I think many people are aware that something’s amiss today. There’s a homing device inside us that yearns for the kingdom of God. Yet there’s a cosmic battle waging, realer than we know and the enemy is lulling people to sleep with an evil lullaby that says everything’s okay.

But it’s not okay and I can’t imagine anyone thinking deep within themselves that it is. The evidence is there in the skyrocketing mental health crises, suicide rates and confusion as the woke world bludgeons our children with messages to titillate themselves in every imaginable way. Those children are pretty special to Jesus as even He said, “But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea.” (Mark 9:42). Them’s fightin’ words!

And the prophet Isaiah cried this long ago, “Woe unto them who call evil good, and good evil.” (Isaiah 5:20) We’d do well to heed the warning.

“Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.” (Matthew 24:42-43)

I consider the walls I live within, the space I inhabit.

We patched and painted last year, a neutral creamy beige with the slightest hint of green. I love green. The swatch was called ‘Garden Mist.’ Made me happy.

Aren’t I blessed to be made happy by a paint swatch from Home Hardware here in our small town.

We replaced our worn sectional with a new leather sofa and love seat from Leons on the pay in two years plan. They’re paid off. I love kicking back those recliners, especially on a cold night when the wood stove is stoked and the room’s filled with friends.

How did I warrant this? Did I do something to deserve it or did the chips just fall this way?

Am I good, like Maria Von Trapp in the Sound of Music. She breathlessly sings in the garden as Georg kisses her, “I must have done something good….”.

No. Not good. My heart, God knows is prone to resentfulness, rebellion and self seeking. Not good.

I was blessed with this, all this life. Not perfect, even some injuries along the way. But I’m not just surviving. I live in a different mode than those awaiting safety or one meal or shelter from the elements.

Yet I search for something. I ache for a wider space, a borderless place with high hills and views to the east where the sun slips up the earth, painting another morning orange-bright.

Why should I have that?

Why should I have anything at all when others are just wondering if that same birthing day will bring any food or death.

The earth is hellish. Fear smashing at our doors and I want to move. But where? Is there a place where soulish and real world worries aren’t present? Maybe the move isn’t to wider fields but to a different heart space. A space of lie me down yieldedness to the One who actually knows what the day will bring. It could be death or a meal or a field or even paint, but God forbid those things come because I clamoured for them. Let each gift be a mercy, a grace to cup gratefully, not a grasping.

I’ve heard that Sodom and Gomorrah didn’t start with the place it finished. It began with greed and selfishness. People wanting more and having much and thinking it was their right. And forgetting the poor. The ones who matter specially to God. The ones that God said Pay Attention to, because if you have much it’s not to build your bigger barn, it’s actually to share that much with the one who has little and it all evens out in the end. Not Communism, but Community. God’s way. But they didn’t. They turned inward and hoarded and got bored and tried new things and bought more and titillated themselves and found new ways to fill their cups of debauchery. And eventually God said okay. And turned them over to it.

I’m afraid we’re here, again. Even those of us who call ourselves Believers. Do we even know what we would need to repent of when we quote those 2 Chronicles 7:13-14 verses? I don’t but I’m getting a feeling as I look around. The attachments to my present life are pretty strong.

But there’s this whisper of freedom as I imagine not being owned by what I own.

What ties you to this earth? What distracts you from a fundamental connection with your Creator, the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us? From the just living connected, trusting and obedient?

Are you willing to loosen your grip? To count the cost and take the hand held out to you?

I want to try. I imagine walking away and knowing this unfettered lightness.

“Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ…” Philippians 3:8 NKJV (biblegateway.com)

Today, though I asked You to fill me

so I could pour you out to others,

You became glue, compound, to stop up the holes in me,

so You could pour in and keep me full.

“It’s not from your continued emptiness

that I flow,” You said.

“but from your top, your fulness that I spill

over.

There is no glory in you leaking,

your holes running you dry,

but only in my fulness making you whole.

Then I fill you brimful and your cup runs over.

There is beauty and life,” You said, with your

unexpected, compassionate smile.

I don’t think God is a gentleman.

They said at church

He stands at the door and knocks,

would never force his way in.

I only agree in part.

He doesn’t seem to hammer through

the front door,

but he might break your walls down.

I don’t think a gentleman

lets the devil have at you

bringing sores, sickness, fire and death

of all your progeny,

leaving you with just the cracked mind

of a grief shattered wife for company

and the questioning of ‘friends’ to be your solace.

I don’t think that when you rage at his unfairness

in your attempts at understanding

a gentleman would say

“Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge.

Now prepare yourself like a man;

I will question you, and you shall answer Me.”

and then literates the extensive details

of His creative force producing

the raging beauty of earth.

What is a gentleman anyway?

A privileged land-owning gentry

or a chivalrous, courteous one,

or both?

Top hat in place, gloved hand held out in deference

to you going first, manners indicative of his noble birth.

Does he sip tea with the ladies

proper and right after a gentle knock at the door and a gracious welcome?

I can’t accept this image as the depth of his gentle-man-ness

Mr. Lewis got it right when Beaver said

“Of course he isn’t safe, but he’s good. He’s the king I tell you.”

His gentleness

suffers long

as the lamb is slaughtered,

compacting the unsafe, fierceness of the lion into meek, red stained fleece,

the bleat silenced as the One who spoke the stars into being

constrains His strength

and dies, a gentle man.

Quotes:

Job 38:2-3 NKJV Holy Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe C.S. Lewis

“You just need a little more self care,” she said.

The grey of everything pushes colourless across life. Grey hair, grey lockdown zone where I live, grey atmosphere drizzling down and my fifty something face feeling grey.

Okay, so maybe some red on my lips, brown on my locks and heaven help us some revitalizing cream to help with these tired lines.

I look her in the eye and say “Let’s do it!” We dash out the door and hit the store just in time, grabbing a fairly random box of dark brown, 2 minutes before they closed.

Well you know… plans can go awry, colors can look one way in a photo and when applied to salt and pepper hair it can turn out a whole other blend, especially when it’s rubbed in thoroughly and left for extra time. We gasp a bit at the outcome, me a whole bunch. A dark, almost black-with-auburn tinged head looks back at me from the mirror. Oh dear. We laugh and take pics and I’m wondering how long it will take to wash this out.

Covid hair. Covid care. I look into these surprised eyes in the mirror. Tired eyes. Care worn and not enough sleep eyes. Not how I’m hoping to look in these mid fifty days. Thinking there’s someone in there who needs more attention than the external tending will accomplish. It’s a tenuous balance. We mind our outsides, catering to the endless badgering of the fountain of youth advocates. Wrinkle reducing creams, dyes, ever changing hair styles and stylish wear to make us remember that 50 is the new 40. Mercy! What happened to ‘act your age’? No, it’s all about not growing up, never maturing, always alluring and captivating.

Captive is what’s happening to yet another generation of gorgeous girls of all ages, sizes, cultures and colours. Buying the enticing lie that the shell we inhabit is the sum of our sumptuous being. We paint, perk and pant after the unreachable, airbrushed, baby faced images, taunting us into the unending race to immortality. But it’s all found in a bottle, a tube, a tub, and when the last dab has been scraped out, we’re still gazing into the mirror at our own face. Happy or sad. Old or youthful, we are in our fading, aging, ground bound bodies. It’s inevitable.

Self care? Absolutely! If I stop tending this tent and slouch around grimy and gritty I have to believe some depression has crept in and maybe has to do with caring for only part of my self. The lack of care to the soulish me leaves a wasteland and no amount of attention to the outside will cure the hunger in me.

There’s a yearning, just for someone to look in my eyes and say “I want you just the way you are.” Someone should write a song. Haha. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBZnGk1nAjw. Don’t we all want that? There’s a craving in us to be wildly, unconditionally accepted and loved. Is it possible that there is Someone who knows us this deeply and wants us this badly? Is it possible we also need to accept ourselves and this is part of soul care?

If my soul is part of my-self then it must need tending as much as my physical being does. And if my physical being is a housing for the spirit part of me then doesn’t that need attention as well? How are we convinced then that the physical is worthy of such a disproportionate amount of attention. Is it possible that in the developed world, we have become dull to the spirit needs as our physical cups are filled to the brim with every possible titillation. Our suffering is minimal due to the plethora of medicines, various doctors and comforts to assuage our ails. Yet the starvation of our souls and spirits, those ethereal inner parts of us withering from lack of connection and sustenance, gradually pushes through into the physical, until our bodies show the effects of the wounded, unattended inner sanctum.

We’re challenged in a world that presses us to fill each moment with frantic activity and distraction. Yet during this time of pause, can we find ways to retreat to the interior and nurture the neglected parts of us? i.e. https://www.24-7prayer.com/ancientprayerrhythms. Daniel prayed three times a day. Jesus got up while it was still dark and spent time with his Father. How do we imagine that we will get by on less? We are starving and the state of our lives and the world that’s made up of the bricks of us shows it.

My daughter who is a university student shared her thoughts with me as she compared the detailed organization of the human cell to structures of the body, earth and human society. I love the parallels she drew about this microcosm. I do my best to explain it here but it blessed like poetry when it fell from her lips:

The cell’s organelles are encased in liquid cytoplasm while the mitochondria and golgi apparatus function within the machine to produce energy and export proteins. Similarly, our bodies have rivers of blood to transport oxygen and a digestive system fuelled by food translating to energy, a heart to pump the life giving river and a brain to dispatch signals to every single part of our body through nerve cells. The earth is an organism made up of life bringing rivers, trees doing the work of lungs and a delicate ecosystem of creatures and plants that all work together within the biosphere to sustain life. Our human systems of family, friendships, church, education, work and government all function due to the unique, individual giftings each of us bring to the whole.

It expands outward and inward. If there’s a drought, the earth is parched, the human body is deprived of water, the cells themselves malfunction and life cannot be sustained. I see a parallel in the soulish world. If the human soul/spirit is deprived of living water, it also cannot survive.

Considering all of this on the grand scale of earthly ecosystems and the minutia of the cell in all its microscopic magnificence, let us examine the human in the trinity of its parts: body, soul, spirit. Each part a necessary, functioning segment of a greater whole, needing the unique sustenance its survival requires. If my body is denied the basic needs required to sustain life: air, food, water, sleep; it will die. If my soul is denied love; it will die. If my spirit is denied connection with and food from the Spirit it came from; it will die.

Maslow summed these up in his detailed “hierarchy of needs.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs#/media/File:Maslow’s_Hierarchy_of_Needs2.svg“. May I suggest that wrapping the spiritual element around his triangle as a membrane in which all the other functions are met and maximized, would bring true potential through the life giving river surrounding and feeding into all the other components.

Within this model, self care takes on a new dimension. We become complete, lacking nothing “holding fast to the Head, from Whom all the body, nourished and knit together by joints and ligaments, grows with the increase that is from God.” Colossians 2:19*

Disclaimer: This is in no way meant to criticize anyone who enjoys caring for themselves through the use of make up or hair colour. We’re all different and that makes it all the more fun. These are just some thoughts on the idea of self care and the depths of it.

*Poetic licence taken with this verse as it’s actually written about people who do not do what is described, but the meaning in reverse is still the same.