PATHS

In every part and time of our lives, we are meant to be on a path. What that means is there are choices we make that either place us solidly on the path that God has already forged or on another one...or many, of our own choosing. Where we are allowing our feet to trod will determine the effectiveness of our Christian witness and our relationship with the ONE who leads. Don't we always think that we know which turn to take, which road to step out on?? Doesn't the world laud an independent spirit that bushwacks through the dense foliage with a courageous heart?

Proverbs 16:9 is a verse that I always return to when I think that I know which way is best. "In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps."

I have chosen many paths over the years. Most were through thick and humid jungles of confusion. There was always a lot of noise and echo in the deep of those jungles. The noise effectively eclipsed the sound of my Savior's voice whispering for me to turn back. And many of the noises that I couldn't actually identify seemed like sounds that signalled danger. I, of course, ignored the warnings and found myself deeply enmeshed in foliage that wrapped it's green tendrils around my already suffocating heart.

Whenever we disobey God's command to, "do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and shun evil," (Prov. 3:7), we step onto a path not meant for us. Unfortunately, that path is fraught with terrors. Caniverous predators stalk our steps, causing us to live a shudderingly fearful life. In that way, they control our steps.

We are watched from the limbs above by monstrous yellow-eyed reptiles, waiting to accordion our bones and flesh. The snake's desire is to "kill, steal and destroy" all that is not of his world. In that way, he controls the steps we take. Our fear, our emotions then, control our direction on the path, our life.

It is really so much easier to step on the right path in the first place. It may seem overgrown at the beginning but becomes more defined as we walk along it. There is always a light illuminating from above, even when the darkest, moonless night comes. There is sustenance and the sparkling river of life along the way. Our eyes are ever opened by insights and clear-thinking because this path has been carefully and lovingly carved through a maze of tangled webs, webs created by an enemy wishing to waylay us.

Step carefully, friends, where God would have you.

TARGETS

Thursday, October 21, 2010




TARGETS~

1. Failing~

Even as I sit here now, now, with you being dead more years than it went on, the strings are still attached. I wrangle with them, struggle against the way they close off my air and sometimes win (only because of God, ONLY because of Him do I ever come out on top). More often than not, I fail miserably. There is the descent into inauthentic living and blindness that removes us from the place God created little girls or boys to live. That failing is where I sometimes find myself wicked-witch melting into the invisible that I am.

2. Divorcing~

I have tried for years to divorce, not you, but your actions from my life. Many have advised me to allow the hatred to remain, as you deserve it. But God spoke to the little girl years ago, telling her to love and forgive. So I have done that. I hold onto the sweet smell of white pine needles on a hot summer day, the warmth of your hand in mine as we hiked over them, and the special I was to you. Now, those actions, those actions that stole little me from big me, seem like the yellowed fragment of a tattered reel-to-reel movie. The little girl runs and dances and laughs and sings but she is a shell, an image only.

3. Seeing~

I have often wondered what it was that made you choose me. My eyes? My laughter? My curiosity? My differentness? I have since learned that you groomed me to be what you wanted. What you saw was potential. The damage was in that; in that preening and petting and attention. It was how you decided for me who I was. I remember, even then, thinking (while I counted and spelled, counted and spelled), that God must have known that I was stronger than most. He was with me all that time. You were unable to isolate me from everyone-He was always there.

4. Speaking~

Telling this, putting words to this loss and pain, makes it not my story but anyone’s. Anyone who was changed…was irrevocably CHANGED…anyone who watched as their little hearts poured out God’s pure and innocent love onto the cement-hard floor of your needs, will be able now to speak this aloud. He was watching, mind you. God was always watching as His precious children were being driven from their own bodies into worlds their minds were unprepared to comprehend.

5. Stealing~

This is the crux of the matter. This is a raw and secretive thing. It is a put-it-in-your-emotional-pocket action that rolls like thunder in little girl or boy hearts. I have allowed God to peel layer after layer back to reveal the pit where each stolen gem once resided. He replaces and restores what you thought you could take with you. Now I know that you tried to steal what you were empty of. I pity the desperation and need that caused you to steal from sweet-faced and trusting little girls.

6. Sorting~

As you enacted your sin...God was at work. I knew it even then. He wraps His healing hands around hearts so betrayed and aching that it feels like they are bleeding. He offered more to me in that time than I could begin to understand. But now I do. I do. He has sorted the wheat from the chaff and I am the wheat, full and golden, waiting for His hand to gather me up.

7. Invisibility~

Now a word about what we become: how our eyes seem to forever look through windows that separate us. We are trying to find where the wind has taken us. We are just simply, invisible-which can be a comfort in many ways, or at least, a familiarity. That is who you make us when you steal us away-unseeable. We spend years in a daze of feeling beaten up inside and left-out outside. We make choices based on who sees what we allow them to. God answers our confusion with this: He most certainly sees us, intimately, and we are Loved.

8. Scattering~

Wind blows autumn leaves in spirals of burnt orange and bright yellows, sometimes reds and browns, even pinks. Those little furies, I used to call them, swirl in the hearts of stolen children. Little furies are simultaneously beautiful and dangerous. There is the brilliant color and beauty of being wanted and special and set-apart-that heart-beating connectedness that we all desire. Then there is the belly-flopping dip in the downward spiraling and wayward scattering that occurs when realization hits us. The fraudulence and untruth of it all becomes the eye of the storm. All of this NOT-God scatters little hearts, tearing apart that which God knitted together.

9. Rebuilding~

Ha! This is where all that has been stolen is replaced by what God intended. Here is the place where God takes mud and filth and creates a masterpiece. Frost-bitten hearts are melted by the warmth of His Love. Feelings of anger and betrayal become forgiveness. All that you tried to take away is transformed into all that HE intends to stay. You see, He had a plan all along. You may have imprinted your big boots into the soft sand of a little girl’s or boy’s heart, but God has impressed His Truth on top of your footprints.

10. Birthing~

It is the newness that surprises. There is a cleanliness and freshness that simultaneously frightens and entices. I can remember the shame washing away, down a drain littered with “Why me’s,” and “Poor me’s.” This is it then, the place we envision all our lives. The air is rare and clear—we can breathe. This is what we were looking through the glass for. This is the hallowed ground where we are whole and not-targets. “Victim” is no longer emblazoned upon us but “REDEEMED.” We are redeemed (“bought back, freed from distress or harm, freed from captivity by payment of ransom,” according to Webster’s), by a Daddy who has carried us safely inside and will never leave us. This is a true new birth and cannot be stolen away.


c10/20/2010 M. LaPointe

His Feet

Saturday, October 23, 2010




HIS FEET

We spend our lives doing things our own way. All our own way. We suffer hurts. We take wrong turns. We run into walls. Pain rakes its nails across our souls leaving gashes that bleed mercilessly.



We spend our lives looking for love; a person to fill the needs, fill in the holes, smooth our rough edges. It leaves a criss-cross of scars. Our hearts bear a crazy quilt of zippered mistakes.



So, we stumble on, thinking we know who we are.



In prayer this morning God brought the woman who washed the feet of Jesus to mind. All we know is that she was a sinner. No name. No rank. No serial number. Just a sinner---someone who had spent her life, up until that point, doing things her own way.



"Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisees's house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, and as she stood behind Him at His feet weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them" (Luke 7:36-38).



Now, do you suppose she had her day planned out that way? Wake up, go for water, wash and style hair, parade through town with her pretty jar, turn heads while her luxurious hair rippled down her back, wash the dirty, smelly feet of a man she had never met before? I don't think so.



It seems that that is exactly how we walk through life (when we don't have the feet of Jesus in our face). This woman was more than humbled by the washing. She truly saw. She was no more or less than we. She was just willing and able, needful and willing to admit to it, hurting and hurt. She gave her most precious items to Jesus that day: her tears of repentance, her extremely valuable jar of perfume, and her hair---the very hair that was her crowning glory. The lesson, well, that was unplanned but very, very necessary.



It was about seeing who she really was in the light of who HE really is. Her tears flowed from that place. They fell freely when the person she thought she was came into contact with who she was without Him.



And that's it. The crux. What we all need to learn in our hearts. That. we. are. nothing. without. His. feet.



c 10/23/2010 M. LaPointe

Tuesday, May 05, 2009
WHO I FOUND
First finding that perfect oval of silver, a shape worth mentioning, I bent wondering, then touching, smoothing around the gentle arc. For it seemed to beat as a heart and pump as a heart, but shine like an iced and fallen star in the palm of my sanded hand.
It was no larger or smaller, than a silver dollar, yet when my eye caught its beckon hidden in the fine grains beneath my feet, I knew that its insistence meant something.
More than just a coin of nothing, it sang some sort of song. The whooshing and vibrating into my feet, legs and then my hand rushed in on whitecapped crests. Was I imagining?
The song was of desire primal and needful. The song sung in rivers, earth and trees. The gulping air of mountain peaks. One that gulls need not learn. A simple song of praise and purpose. The song of You, dear One. You alone.
I could no more dispose of one so special than pass it by.
Quickly it had become a blood singing in me, standing on the hot sand blown by fishy breezes.
So I closed around its graininess a soft flesh, and that was my prayer.
That grasping. That flesh to You. The surrender of it all as waves tickled the shoreline, as gulls screeched, was me. Me to You with no edges or borders, nothing but the rising on the high air currents into the blinding sky.
It answered only with a sun-drenched warmth. And did I hear a yes so softly that my heart barely registered it?
Yes.
Here it is now, in my pocket, riding with me, singing with my voice, whispering with Yours. I carry it a bit duller for the wear, as I travel sanded, rocky, stone turned, or snow-diamond glittered roads, listening to the Voice, remembering the gift, Knowing Who.
c 05/05/2009 M. LaPointe

THIRSTY???? (Who's foot is in your puddle?)

I am dumbstruck by the words God spoke through Jeremiah to the Israelites in Jeremiah 2:13.

"My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken Me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water."

Ah, yes. The perfect picture of our rebellion. God offers us living, refreshing, renewing water for our very souls and we pugnaciously decide to dig a filthy, dirty pit to collect our own water. As if our water could quench the eternal thirst of our souls!!!!

The Israelites were doing their thing again...worshipping idols. That, in itself, was an empty and barren endeavor. They thought that building temples of beauty and strict rules to guide their lives brought them closer to the truth. Really, those hull-like containers they thought were filled with the truth, were worthless...because they collected only worldly water and not the true water of life.

John 4: 13-14 describes Jesus' interaction with the woman at the well.

"Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water [from the well], will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

When we step away from the well, when we take it upon ourselves to drink of other waters (such as; idolatry or even self-righteousness), we risk, not simply losing our focus on and relationship with the Lord, but a full scale attack from the enemy.

Alone, without the water of life prophylactically coursing through our veins, satan, that old horned and warty toad, hops into our self-made puddles (cisterns). Once his foot is in, mud is immediately produced.
Our thinking suddenly becomes cloudy. Our hearts begin to develop barnacles. We begin to notice the humanness of humanity without God-produced love in our hearts. Suddenly each freckle and dimple is cause for offense. Suddenly people are dissatisfying and rude. Suddenly the faces of those we once loved are ugly.

We are so easily fooled by the lure of becoming god-like ourselves, aren't we? Adam and Eve certainly started this trend. And, make no mistake, whenever we choose to drink of our own water, we are in rebellion. Rebellion really is just another word for making ourselves gods. Leaky gods, but gods nonetheless.

If you have a thirst for TRUTH and LOVE, consider the water flowing from God's pure heart. If you desire God's best for you, His love, His mercy and His protection, drink from His proffered cup. If you desire freedom from the horned toad making mudpies in your heart, take a refreshing shower in the pure spring of LIFE---Jesus Christ!

c 2009 M. LaPointe