Mountains from Molehills

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Margaret

Emerald has been a by-the-book baby. At 2½ months, she has smiled through all manner of schedules and a wide variety of loud commotion. Always even-tempered, she’s amazed us with her calm demeanor through restaurant meals, shopping trips, and doctor’s appointments. And she’s been endlessly patient with lots of cousin-cuddles, kisses, and head-pats.

Tonight, however, her sunny disposition disappeared, and nothing satisfied her. Birgitta and I took turns trying to quiet her in what seemed like an interminable effort to get her to sleep, though in reality it lasted only 2 hours.

Birgitta had gone through Emerald’s regular bath and bedtime routine, after which she’d fallen asleep and been put into her bassinet as usual. This child has slept beautifully through-the-night 3 times in the past week alone, once for a 10½ stretch.

So it surprised us when she began fidgeting in her bed immediately, eventually bringing herself up to a full roar. Birgitta picked her up and tried each of the usual soothers: pacing, bouncing on the exercise ball, rocking, patting, and shush-shush-shushing. Nothing worked.

I tried too, but Emerald refused to be calmed, stiffening her legs and flailing her arms while continuing with earsplitting screams. My theory was that whatever had first bothered her (a burp, an intestinal bubble, a sudden noise) was long gone, and she kept hollering just because she had started and couldn’t stop.

Although adults don’t usually open their mouths and yell full-power like babies do, we sometimes wish we could. We object to something undesirable as loud as we dare, and when the facts don’t quickly change, we get carried away with our responses.

But just like Emerald no longer remembered why she was crying, we can work ourselves into the same kind of frenzy for no good reason too, making a mountain out of a molehill.

It isn’t that God doesn’t want us to cry. I can think of 3 good reasons when he does:

when we’re mourning over our own sin
when we’re sharing in another person’s sorrow
when we’re calling out to him from a place of deep deficiency

In these instances our sobbing has positive purposes, which causes the Lord to rush in and minister to the need at hand.

Tonight Birgitta and I came to Emerald’s aid, despite believing she had no good reason to scream. But she’s just a baby, so we gave her the benefit of the doubt. Eventually she wore herself out and fell asleep by default.

We’re still puzzled over why she cried so hard for so long, but thankfully God is never puzzled over our crying, always knowing which good reason is behind it.

And in his great love for us, he’s often willing to comfort us even when we’re crying hard for no good reason at all.

“Let all who seek God’s help be encouraged.For the Lord hears the cries of the needy.” (Psalm 69:32-33)

Infinite Eternity

Posted on January 6, 2013 by Margaret

Although math has never been my forte’, one “number” that’s always caught my fancy was the symbol for infinity: ∞

Maybe that’s because infinity isn’t like other numbers. It has an interesting story behind it because it isn’t anything specific but refers to an amount without limit. If something is “infinite,” one more can always be added, making the amount greater but the number, by definition, still infinity.

If one part is removed from infinity, the result is still infinity. I love that. Such crazy reasoning actually holds up in the precise world of mathematics, and there’s something captivating about that.

But does infinity have anything to do with eternity?

Eternity is something that exists outside of time and space, forever. As Christians, we’re looking forward to our eternity with God in heaven, a place that will exist out of time and space as we know them, though it will probably have its own new-fangled time and space.

As for God, he will exist there, too, but he also has existed throughout eternity past. And this is where eternity and infinity cross paths.

God existed as far back as history goes, whether that’s thousands of years or billions. Think big, and then add one more eon of time. He was alive an infinity before that. For him, the categories of past, present, and future are irrelevant. For us, it’s different.

Our past and present, though brief by the measurements of eternity, are monumentally important to us. The future, always uncertain, is cause for concern, because we wonder how it’s going to go. What will happen to us? How long will we live? What quality of life will we have? How will we die? And though Scripture describes our afterlife as worry-free, that doesn’t stop us from being concerned about our lack of knowledge about it.

Because our understanding is so limited, God offers to come close to help us. He says something like, “Although I exist outside of time and space, I also exist inside them. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to relate to you personally as I do, and that’s important to me. I always was and always will be, but I’m also in your here-and-now.”

Because of that, we can know God as our Father and Jesus as our brother, one-on-one, today, tomorrow, and every day after that. And as I’ve been thinking about how we can always add an infinite number of days to our relationship with him, such a wonder is now, and always will be, infinitely and eternally awesome.

“Before the mountains were born, before You gave birth to the earth and the world, from eternity to eternity, You are God.” (Psalm 90:2)

Caught

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Margaret

A whole crowd of people in this world believe that disobeying the law is ok, unless you’re stupid enough to get caught. Then you deserve what you get.

Today stupid-me got caught. Birgitta, baby Emerald, and I were running errands when I passed a police car parked inconspicuously next to an auto body shop.

As I drove by, I reviewed a mental list of possible driving errors and was innocent on all counts. Proceeding with confidence, it surprised me when my rear view mirror lit up with police lights.

“Maybe it’s just a routine check for insurance and registration,” I thought. But when the police woman arrived at my window, she said, “You didn’t make a complete stop at that last stop sign.”

“I didn’t?” I said. “But I almost did, didn’t I?” She was not amused.

As she walked away with my license, registration, and insurance, I thought about how stupid I’d been to slide through a stop sign in front of a police car. But as Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does,” and I’d done something pretty stupid.

Bemoaning the mark on my driving record and the hike in my insurance that was sure to come, I thought about how failing to come to a complete stop hadn’t bothered me one bit… until I got caught. And truth be told, I’ve sloppy-stopped my way through scores of stop signs without getting caught, dismissing those “crimes” as ok. Now, mental repentance flowed.

Or did it? Maybe I was just wishing I hadn’t been caught. Sadly, that was it.

Scripture describes the human heart as “desperately wicked,” which is a whopping indictment against us all. The trouble is, we don’t really believe it. Haven’t we done some good things, too?

But more important than calculating our good-to-bad balance is another accusation Scripture makes alongside the words “desperately wicked.” Jeremiah 17:9 says the human heart is “sick, without a cure.”

So what’s to be done?

We’re to ask God for a favor: “Heal me, Lord, and I will be healed. Save me, and I will be saved, for You are my praise.” (v. 14) In other words, we’ll never heal our own desperate wickedness, but God can and will, if we ask.

Today as Birgitta and I waited for the bad news and guesstimated my fine, the police woman returned. “I’m giving you a warning,” she said, “but next time, make a complete stop.” It was an undeserved gift, an example of grace. Whether it came from her or from God I wasn’t sure, but I gratefully accepted it.