Blessed to be Included

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Margaret

This family photo (taken at my niece Julia’s wedding) was the last one of our “Nyman 9.” Shortly after that our children began marrying, and before we knew it, grandchildren were making their debuts. Today we are 15 and counting, but isn’t that the way families grow?

Often I think of God as my heavenly Father. According to Scripture, Israel was his bride, and his Son Jesus opens the way for the rest of us to gain sibling status when we believe he is who he says he is. That makes God the Father of millions, if not billions of children, and his family continues to grow.

Bill Gaither wrote a song about the delight of being included in God’s growing crowd of relatives. One of the verses goes like this:

From the door of an orphanage to the house of the King,
No longer an outcast, a new song I sing;
From rags unto riches, from the weak to the strong,
I’m not worthy to be here, but praise God I belong!

The wonder of those words is that God gives us a way to belong. He certainly never had a need for us, and our thanks for being given life was to cause him unbounded trouble, disappointing him repeatedly through thousands of years that include even today. Yet the limitless love he has for us, a complete mystery, motivated him to go all out. The only born-one to God, Jesus Christ, surrendered his life, and God the Father agreed to this mind-boggling idea.

The Message puts it beautifully in Ephesians 1:2-4:

“How blessed is God! And what a blessing he is! He’s the Father of our Master, Jesus Christ, and takes us to the high places of blessing in him. Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love. Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ. (What pleasure he took in planning this!) He wanted us to enter into the celebration of his lavish gift-giving by the hand of his beloved Son.”

I couldn’t have said it any better. And I can’t wait to be in the family photograph.

What to wear?

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Margaret

As a young mother, I worked hard to make sure my children were presentable when they went to school, church or anywhere else. The toddlers got their high white shoes polished every Saturday night, and I ironed all the little girl dresses and little boy shirts.

Outfits on school picture-taking days were especially important, and I tried to coordinate clothing colors with the eventual wall display of 8 x 10’s in mind.

Unfortunately I frequently forgot to look at the school calendar. One year picture day slipped past me completely, and the kids wore a haphazard array of shabby clothes. Klaus, then in his shark phase, had been given a white souvenir t-shirt from Florida with a picture of Jaws on the front and a splattering of fake blood on it. The shirt was a grungy white with a stretched neck, and completely unacceptable for picture day. But I didn’t catch it, and that’s what he wore.

I don’t think Klaus did it for any specific reason other than that he loved his shark shirt. When the picture proofs came back, I took one look and was disappointed, but Klaus saw only his great-looking hair. How could I then say, “I can’t believe you wore that awful shirt!”

This kind of thing is what drives moms crazy. But looking now at Klaus in his blood stained picture, I have to laugh. From today’s perspective, it’s no big deal. Actually, it’s a colorful story.

Buried in there somewhere is an encouraging word for today’s young mommies, not just on school picture day but any day. We mothers can get so caught up in our efforts to make our families look good that we’re swept into a parenting panic when they don’t.

The Bible reminds us that only one thing will matter in 100 years, and it’ll have nothing to do with our clothes. The important issue will be where we are, not how we’re dressed. Will we be spending the umpteen years of eternity with or without the Lord?

In the mean time, we shouldn’t let ourselves get stressed over things that eventually won’t matter. But if we’re into fashion and enjoy thinking about what our children will be “putting on” each day, rather than concentrating on them looking good, we can focus on their character. They put that “on” each day, too. Are they kind, patient, giving?

In the end, after all the polished shoes, ironed dresses and even the shark shirts are no more, character-clothes will still look good.

“Put on then… compassionate hearts, kindness,humility, meekness, and patience.” (Colossians 3:12)

Thinking it through.

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Margaret

My nephew-in-law has worked hard renovating my old cottage for 8 weeks, running into his share of negative surprises. He’s ripped up a floor, built a new one, covered it with slate, laid hardwood in the kitchen, corrected a structural problem, made a hole for a decorative window, sanded and refinished wood floors and built a wall of bookshelves.

But by far his greatest challenge was the back stairway, 12 steps with two turns and two landings. It would have been simple if each step had had the same measurements, but no two were exactly alike in height or depth.

Every so often I’d come around the corner and find Drew just looking at the steps. “How’s it going?” I’d say.

“I’m thinking it through.”

When everything is “off” just a little, pondering the project is critical to its success. And Scripture says we’re to count the cost before every commitment, not just the ones that don’t look right to begin with. Drew’s “thinking it through” was exactly that.

Our remodeling has been like those 3” puzzles we used to play with as kids, 8 tiny, sliding square pieces and one space. As we slid the flat pieces up, down and sideways, the surface picture began to come together. It wouldn’t make sense till every piece was in the right spot.

Sometimes it was necessary to push a piece 2 spaces left, 1 down and 3 up before it found its proper place. And moving the last square into position necessitated sliding most of the others around to make a path for it. Drew tackled my house the same way, doing things in order but always preceded by careful planning.

Sadly, I lean toward slap-dash, the opposite of counting the cost. If I’d have built our stairway, the finished product would have looked like something out of Dr. Seuss. Good intentions minus thinking-it-through equal costly destruction later.

I wonder if God watches people like me putting incomplete ideas into place too soon and thinks, “You’d better stop and think first. How about measuring again? Oops, you forgot to count the cost.”

Most of the messes we get ourselves into are the result of not pondering, measuring, counting. For example, we end up with addictions because we don’t consider the end before we begin. A teen finds herself pregnant, because she didn’t reflect on that possibility. A business goes bankrupt because of over-borrowing.

Jesus was the one who cautioned us about counting the cost. When he said it, he was referencing the price of becoming his follower, which doesn’t come cheaply. It was extremely expensive to him to allow us to join him, and it can be costly to us as we do. He was urging us to think about that before we committed.

But just like Drew’s careful thinking about my complicated stairway, if we ponder our commitment to Christ and measure the cost, in the end our lives will square off well.

Jesus said, “Which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost?” (Luke14:28a)