Another major curve in the road.

2009 is definitely the worst of our lives in the 35+ years we've been married and frankly it has been the worst year of my own life. It has been a year of loss and sorrow, a year of grief and letting go. Ironically, no one we love has physically died, but sometimes there are "deaths" that are more bitter and heartbreaking than a physical one.

And yet....I have come to believe that in this year, our marriage has become stronger than it has ever been and that is a great blessing. My faith in my Lord Jesus has never been as real and tangible as it is today and that is the pearl of great price. These are good things, sweet evidences of God's grace in our lives, which we will need in even greater abundance in the coming weeks and months as we face a life that we had never contemplated in our wildest dreams.

We just purchased our new home, a used 34 foot Seahawk 5th wheel RV. We are still both unemployed in spite of the job postings we've been answering for the past several months. Unemployment has been just paying the bills, but at the end of the year our lease is up and my benefits run out and we will be left with just Ace's benefits. Not enough to cover our rent and utilities, much less food, medicine and some kind of health insurance when our subsidized COBRA runs out.....also at the end of the year. The Lord does provide, but it is usually not the way in which we want Him to provide it or on our timing.

A few months ago I discovered that I had a very small retirement account from a previous employer, the old-fashioned kind that was company provided apart from a 401K. The monthly benefits would be less than $100 if I waited until retirement age to draw it. But I could take a lump sum rollover and then have access to the money. It wouldn't be much, especially after paying taxes and early withdrawal penalty, but it would be enough. It would be enough to buy us a place to live in that didn't have a lease or a mortgage. We weren't sure how it would work out, but we knew that it was a better option than moving in with my 74 year old mother-in-law or with our son and his wife. Our younger daughter and her fiance were okay with us living on their property with them, but not in a mobile home. So the decision was made to look into purchasing a used RV.

Some might wonder how did God provide the money for this purchase? After all it had been there for over five years, it wasn't like it was money from heaven. But I didn't know it was there and I didn't learn about it's existence until the right time, until God was ready for me to know about it. If I had learned about it a year or so ago, it would have been combined with another small rollover into an annuity account which is essentially locked for ten years. If I had learned about it just 5 or 6 months ago, we would have liquidated the account and given the money to the wrong person for the wrong reasons. Instead, I learned about the money approximately two weeks after learning a few other truths, such as living with my mother-in-law would be impossible and that we had to stop enabling our older daughter.

God is both efficient and economical in His providence. We learned these truths within a few days of each other as the indirect results of a trip to visit Ace's family in Oklahoma. Who knows, maybe they were the reason for the trip in the first place. I have been urging Ace for several weeks that we needed to make the trip, which he did not want to do. I told him that I felt the Lord had placed a burden in my heart that we were supposed to make the trip, but I didn't know why. Another "indirect" result of the trip was a increased willingness to let go of staying here and move to wherever a job might be. God was preparing us for the next part of His plan for us.

I did mention that it was just enough money to be able to buy the RV and take care of the remaining expenses for the transition?

I invite you, gentle readers, to come with me as we make this curve in the road. So much is now just unfolding and we have no idea what our future will look like in 2010 and beyond. There will be some occasions of looking back down the road already traveled, but mostly this is to be record of what lies ahead. This may be our journey, but it is our journey with our Lord Jesus and it is His itinerary, schedule and plan. As I said, His providence is economical and He reveals to us only what we need to know and only when we need to know it.

The one thing we did learn this week is that for His reasons, the Lord wants us to have the ability to be mobile, although I haven't a clue as to why. In a 5th wheel it's quite easy to "bug out". Taking a page from popular culture we decided to name our unit, where the M stands for mobile. We are the M*A*P*Z* unit, the Mobile Anglican Prayer Zone. I'm taking suggestions as to what we could name the 5th wheel...and no, she's much too nice to be called "The Swamp".

66 days and counting....

Our National Arrested Development

"The main things are the plain things and the plain things are the main things." This was a truism I first heard when I started listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. Gentle readers, if you haven't heard this amazing Scotsman preach, please check him out. He can be heard on Christian radio stations all over. If you can't find him that way go to the website truthforlife.org and listen online. He has made that statement many times when advising his listeners on the most reliable way to interprate Holy Scripture. Having left the Episopal Church ("ECUSA") a few years ago, I have witnessed first hand what happens when any church or denomination drifts from the plain Word of God.

That truism of interpretation is also my approach to the U.S. Constitution as well, which is ironic when you consider that many of its framers were Episcopalians. I do not equate the Constitution with Holy Writ, but I do believe that in the manner it was set forth, it was inspired by God. I believe that our Maker's hand was involved in its construction and like scripture it lives for all ages. That notion is not the same as the notion that it needs to be "evolving" to reflect the times, or else it can easily become a mirror to a lot of ugliness. The methodologies to interpret both scripture and the constitution are similar, and likeness have similar outcomes. I am both a constitutional and biblical fundamentalist, the plain way it has been written is the way it should be read. Today, the enlightened approach suggests otherwise and their approach is to re-write the plain word to fit their own desires. I see that interpretation has having lead to the same types of errors and problems because it is the same type of persons doing the interpretation.

For me the main distinction between Holy Scripture and the Constitution is that the Bible must trump the Constitution because the basic tenets of the Constitution flow out of the framers understanding of the Bible. This is approach in my life, but as a lover of the liberties that this country once believed, neither do I believe my understanding should be mandated by law. To do so is also a violation of God's own principle of free will, in which our faith and trust and love of Him comes freely from the heart and not by mandate. However, when the Supreme Court of the United States started making its interpretations out of a stance that is essentially anti-biblical, we became cut off from the root out of which our country grew and prospered. In so many of its rulings over the past 40+ years, they have codified the process of telling this country that we are to base our national life on the exclusion of God.

We have now become a society which enshrines the notion that we are to have freedom from religion, which is plainly not what the Constitution says or means. What we are really claiming in freedom from God, which is as old as Adam and Eve and the fall in the Garden of Eden. It actually predates them in the rebellion of Satan. It is the ugly perversion of free will, the ultimate and yet disasterous expression of the self. It says that I, the creature, demand such absolute freedom from my Creator that I expect to be endowed with all of His attributes, His power and His glory. Once I have taken them to myself that which is His by His nature, then I will kill Him. The problem in this scenario is that no creature can kill its Creator unless the Creator lets him. The other problem is that this type of creature confuses God's absence for His death.

And that, is what we have been doing systematically in this country for decades, we have been trying to claim God's power as our own and to eradicate Him from our national will and conscience. We have also had a problem learning lessons from history and are deaf and blind to the parallels to other civilizations that have risen and fallen to our own. We live in the times of perpetual adolescence, in which we arrogantly and foolishly believe that we're going to be the ones that finally beat the odds. So it is not surprising that at this time in history we most strongly manifest an arrested development. As an aging Baby Boomer, I see it far too much in my contemporaries, that unwillingness for people in their 50's and 60's to grow up and take responsibility. Too many cling to the notions born in the 1960's and which have been proven wrong countless times. They are still protesting the war in Vietnam, even if it's just on a metaphorical level. They are emotionally and often intellectually stuck in the late teens or early 20's, which is consistently the time in one's life that we are most foolish and foolhardy.

It not so much that the inmates are running the asylum, but rather the teenagers have been left with run of the house. They have the keys to the liquor cabinet and the family car, and access to all of the credit cards. While Obama is not in the strict sense a Baby Boomer, he is surrounded and influenced by them. For the majority of those in public life, it's all about decrying the wisdom of the past, the true wisdom of our parents and grandparents. We never really grew up; we got stuck in the place of "ah ha!" realization that our parents were flawed and imperfect and made mistakes. We were too busy pointing to and laughing at the nakedness of a drunken Noah, we missed our obligation as sons and daughters to cover him.

We have lived our entire lives gleefully breaking the 4th commandment; we have not honored our fathers and our mothers. We have peopled this country with now a third generation, as many Boomers are grandparents, with those who are fundamentally immature and who will strive to stay that way. We have not reached the point of another old truism: "When I was 17 I knew I was so much smarter than my father, but when I was 25 I was surprised how much the old man had learned." We refuse to look beyond the folly of those who have gone before and to incorporate into our lives their wisdom and their understanding of the basic and fundamental truths.

Faith in the worst of times

Gentle readers, please forgive me for starting off on such a down note. I suspect that I am not alone, so let me tell you about this section of the road.

2009. It has been a very difficult year from the beginning, and in these dog days of summer not very hopeful. We have both been unemployed for several months and that's not the worst of it. We will probably survive, but day by day it becomes a greater uncertainty. All of our present circumstances just reinforce the fact that our earthly lives are uncertain and capricious, even for the Christian.

I am fond of telling others that God is sovereign, but I am actually telling myself. I have heard many sermons that have told me in one way or another, God is never surprised. One of my favorite passages in Romans tell us that all things work together for good for those love God and are called according to His purposes. I can still say and believe that God loves me, even at times like these when it is so easy to cry--"Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?"--our Lord's cry from the cross. I draw comfort from the fact that my beloved Savior knows in Himself, in the very Godhead, the very human feeling of being abandoned by God. Romans 8 may be the most sublime chapter in the entire Bible. Yes, I do cry "Abba, Father!", and I will trust that this cry is the Holy Spirit bearing witness with me that I am a child of God.

I haven't always been able to speak this way, which is scary. The deeper my faith becomes, the more and more I view the world in a very black or white perspective. Either all that Holy Scripture teaches us is utterly true or the strict secularists are right and we are utterly alone. If the latter is the case, then everything about us is just some random accident and our lives, no matter how good or bad, have no meaning. There are only two honest alternatives: Christianity or nihilism--all other philosophies or belief systems are man-made and delusional.

I cannot, not believe. Even when my doubts are strongest and part of me longs to surrender to the Nothing, I still believe, I still pray. It's easy to wonder, to honestly question whether our Faith, all faith isn't just the human psyche screaming at the Long Night. If compassion and charity are human constructs, and this is the age of deconstructionism, then they are subject to discard the very moment they get in the way of living one's life in the most self-serving and hedonistic manner. I don't understand why a true atheist would live a moral or ethical life. If I truly believed there was absolutely no God, then I would live whatever life I could in order to achieve the maximum amount of pleasure and endure the minimal amount of pain. When I had enough, I would check out at the time of my own choosing and on my own terms. Whether it's 17 years or 70, in the end you're still dead. Show me an atheist who is genuinely compassionate and charitable and I'll show you someone who is very superficial and shallow with themselves. They are a conundrum of self-delusion.

So, here I am, in the midst of the worst time of my entire life, looking at the only two cosmic world views that an honest, thinking human being can assent to, and again I say: I cannot, not believe. Even doing my best to factor in the sound notion that we human beings have invented God to make sense out of a senseless, meaningless universe, I still cannot, not believe.....and believe me I have tried. I spent the first 15 years of my adult life in connecting the dots from an agnostic point of view to the notion of some type of "higher power". Once you get to the point that there is a creator, One Creator, whose attribute is to disclose his/her/itself to his/her/its creation, then the dots start lining up and pointing in one direction. The fact that millions, billions of human being have believed and believe other faith systems or other philosophies is in the end irrelevant to me.

I have sought Truth all my life, I have always been a Truthseeker. I have always capitalized "Truth"; I believe in the very core of my being, my essence that there is an Absolute Truth that rules our lives and the cosmos. And that is why I cannot, not believe. I have come to a place where I know and believe that Truth has a name, that He is a person. I have put my faith, my hope and my trust in Jesus and His word that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. As St. Peter once said, there is no one else to whom we can go. For it is in Jesus' words that we find the words of eternal life.

So here I sit, at this juncture in my life, confused and doubting. Yet, I believe in God and I believe that God loves me and all things in scripture teach us what it means when we are loved by God. My emotional state is bordering on hopelessness and depression. I feel overwhelmed with all that is happening to me, to my husband, to my family and to a beloved child in mind, body and estate. I do cry--Eli, Eli....which is the same as crying "Abba, Father!" Almighty Father, protect your servants from the evil of this day. O Lord, make speed to save us, O God make haste to help us. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be, world without end. Amen.