Talipes Equinovarus

       I don't like being needy.  But we need to be needed.  It is the way we learn to care for one another.  And, it is what keeps us humble.  Neediness is what allows us to step out to serve and to be served. 

     When I am vulnerable, others have to do things for me that I cannot do on my own.  It causes me to go to someone else, ask for help, wait for them, and allow them to do things the way they would do them.  
     There is good in vulnerability for me.  While others have to do for me, I have to wait and relinquish control.  In this letting go, I am able to heal.

      You see, I have had pain far too long. Pain that I have pushed through when all along I really needed help from other people.  In putting off this slowing down of my life, I have put off the restoration I need. I have needed to come off of the front lines, to go back to base for a shower and a hot meal and for some clean clothes while someone else takes my place.  

     I was born with a foot that needed correcting.  If my congenital deformity, talipes equinovarus, more commonly known as a clubbed foot, had not been corrected, I would not be walking very well. I remember seeing a young man walking along a side walk one day with a limp, going slowly, walking with difficulty, almost on his ankle.  That would have been me.

      Thankfully, medicine has come a long way and this condition can be easily corrected through serial casting, minor surgeries, and braces.  I had very little of these interventions.  Prayer is what really healed me as a child.  My son, who was born with the same thing, had the works.  His was more severe.  He is doing well now.   

     Pain in my foot has demanded my attention.  I could not go further without other’s help.  I had become too weak to walk on my own.  C.S. Lewis has said, “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” 

     I have been made more vulnerable so that I could be made stronger in the end.  I will be like Bill the bird for a little while.

     The kids found a Robin fledgling a week ago and named him Bill.  We warned them that he would need constant care and probably wouldn't live long. But, they were insistent.  The kids fed him, carried him around, made a comfortable box for him, and generally doted on the little bird.  One thing that amazed us was how other birds reacted to him.  When Bill was outside on our porch in his box, a       Flycatcher who was nesting nearby would come and feed it as well.  Our resident Bluebird came and checked Bill out too.  Everyone slowed down to care for the little bird. 
     We have all slowed down a little more because of my foot.  And that is ok, because in my weakness I am made stronger.  How can this be?  It is another great paradox of life.

      When I am weak in an area of my life I must rely on someone else; thereby necessitating that my life must get bigger because my circle has widened. I have to let someone else in and they have to let me in.  I have to increase my strength in places where I am weak and so I must learn from someone stronger than me.  It takes humility and quieting myself to listen and watch and learn.  It means that I must trust someone else.  Becoming vulnerable means taking a risk.  It goes against my desire to do all I can on my own in order to avoid any possibility of pain. But pain is really an indicator that we need help beyond ourselves.

     There is a story in the Bible about a man who waited by a pool for help.  He had tried to do what he could to help himself, but to no avail.  He needed a savior. 

“Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.” John 5:2-9

        The man at the pool of Bethesda had to wait.  He could not even get to the place of healing on his own, he needed another, he needed the Healer.  But if he had been able to procure his own healing, he never would have met the Savior, he never would have received complete healing.  It was worth the wait, it was worth the vulnerability.  Thank God for his vulnerability, his need, for in his need he came into a healing like none other he had ever known.  One that would go beyond the restoration of his body, one that would bring his soul rest.
        When the wearing of the walking cast, and taking steroids, and the making of my new orthotic shoes is over with, I will be able to tackle those things I was doing in pain with strength.  And I am thankful for the pain. My pain has brought me into a deeper awareness of my own finiteness.  It has caused me to notice people who walk with more difficulty than most.  It has made me see how I take much of the grace and many of the blessings in my life for granted.  I have learned that I must walk with more wisdom.  Every step counts and has more meaning.  And so I am learning to “keep in step with the Spirit”.  I have even contemplated running.  But even if I never run a 5k or even one mile, I want to run my life without fear of what may come.  I want to run without the things that weigh me down and hold me back.  And for that, there is only one place to run.  Like David, “I will not merely walk, but run the way of Your commandments, when You give me a heart that is willing. Teach me, O Lord, the way of Your statutes, and I will keep it to the end steadfastly. Give me understanding, that I may keep Your law; yes, I will observe it with my whole heart. Make me go in the path of Your commandments, for in them do I delight.” Amp. Psalm 119:32-35.   

~Your Fellow Sojourner

I have to end with this scene.

  

Does Jesus Love Me?

     One of the children’s most devious cut downs in our home is the phrase, “You’re not a Christian.”  This comment is used as a derogatory phrase when someone’s behavior is not Christ like.  The irony in all of this is that telling someone they are not a Christian in a mean and spiteful way is also not Christ like.  So, it is a mess all the way around. 

      Chris and I have to point out the lack of love the other child is also displaying.  We have to expose the disease that infects all of us, sin.  Like Mr. Legality in Pilgrim’s Progress, the offended child is looking for the keeping of the law. Show me your righteous deeds and I shall pronounce you Christian!  Like the older son in the parable of the prodigal son, they desire to show their own righteousness to earn favor and grace.  They do not want to see the prodigal restored, they want to see him turned out.

     We cannot escape it.  It pervades all of our souls.  Sin, our utter inability to do anything righteous on our own.  One of my daughter’s first memory verses was “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.”  She pulls it out with pride whenever anyone wants to know what James 2:10 says.  It states the problem we all have.  And it makes us think of the accounting that is inevitable.

      The end game is what changes our life now.  What do we think will happen to us at the end of our life?  The end is coming for us all – with fear or with hope. 

      My son loves Bible prophecy.  All of the “gloom and doom” passages in Scripture are his favorite.  And yes, Revelation is at the top of his list.  When he was about 6 or 7, he would regularly predict that Earth had five years left before her destruction.  Forget 2012 Mayan predictions and numerology, five years that was it.  The predictions became as common as, “pass the potatoes please”.  We just came to ignore it.  But that little boy was in earnest.  He saw the sin of the world around him and even as a child, he knew what the Bible said about sinners. He just put the two together and said, “Five good years guys, that’s it!”

     We have now survived those five years, and we have not stoned our son for his wrong prediction.  He has softened in his end of the world prophecies.  He sees that he is just like everyone else.  He trusts in the mercy of God.

      All of my children must come to a reckoning in our home at some point because we speak so often of God as Creator, of Jesus as Savior, and of man as a sinner.  They know they need to get something right, but what and how?  And so, Chris and I apply the healing anecdote of the gospel whenever questions about salvation, judgment, and eternity come. These moments can be big or little.  They can even come while singing a lullaby.

     “Sing me a song Mommy, I am afraid of the dark,” he said with tears streaming down his face.  After three attempts at finding the right good night song he said, “sing me Jesus, Mommy, sing my Jesus”.  And so, I sang him “Jesus Loves Me”, and his tears stopped. He calmed down and looked at my eyes while I sang that old children’s hymn, like a prayer.  May he know that Jesus loves him, enough to die for him.  May he know this, not because of a feeling, or because he is in a Christian home and attends church, but because the Bible tells him so.  May the fear of the dark cause him to be drawn to the light.                                   

     I need to know that Jesus loves me too.  And when I ask, Do you love me Jesus?, He takes me to where He died.  The place of my unbelief, my love of sin and this world, is the same place where He said, I must die for you or you will never come.  I too grew up in a Christian home, and attended church as a child.  But, He knew I would need to understand His love for me apart from me “doing the right thing”.   

     When I wonder if His love for me is real, I see myself standing before the cross, covered in my own filth, “all my righteousness deeds are like a polluted garment”. His blood runs down the wooden beams, the perfect man, gasping and heaving over and over even while my name is on His lips.  And I want to leave, I want to hide.  But like Peter, I hear my spirit say, “Lord, to whom shall we go?” I know that it was my sin that held Him there. And then the words come, “It is finished.”   The great exchange has taken place.  “My life is hidden with Christ in God.” He fulfilled every law of God that I could not.  He atoned for every sin that I could not.  He made me come to Him when I could not.  He drew me with cords of love and tightly bound me to him.  His life is entwined with mine.   There is no love like this on earth.  I know that Jesus loves me.

      I identify with my children’s struggle of knowing whether or not Jesus loves them.  I need to breathe the prayer, “O love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee” to “shake off my guilty fears”.  O what a rest sublime for the weary soul that comes to Him!  May you find a place of rest for your burdened soul in Him today.

 ~ Your Fellow Sojourner

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

1. O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

2. O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

3. O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

4. O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.

Words by George Matheson

Starving Jackson

       I would like to think that I feed my family well.  Judging by the hours I spend in the kitchen, I don’t think I do too badly.  I admit, it can become monotonous to cook, clean, and serve, just to do it all over again.  So, I am grateful for my family’s cooking endeavors.

       My older children are beginning to get into the kitchen more.  Bella has acquired some basic cooking skills and is always looking for an excuse to cook for us.  Most of her results are pretty good.  Jackson however…  Well, this story is about him.  And it is also about me.  This is a story about feeding Jackson.

      One Saturday morning I had the rare pleasure of sleeping in.  The rest of my family had been in the kitchen for a good while before I came downstairs. I entered the kitchen wrapped in my fleece robe, looking for some coffee.  As my sleepy eyes glanced up, they beheld a scene of carnage.  My son was holding a plate filled with a pancake like substance, and he had the look of one who intended to eat it.  I gasped.  I opened my mouth, but nothing would come out.  It was a pancake massacre.  I turned and walked out of the room. 

      When I found the courage to enter the kitchen again, I walked passed my son, who was attempting to stomach his “pancakes”, and looked at the griddle – ground zero for the pancakes.  I put my hand over my mouth and realized something.  This was much bigger than poorly made pancakes.  This was near starvation.

  

      A scene of my son, maybe two or three years down the road, repeating this pancake incident over and over again came into my mind.  This was not in someone else’s kitchen, this was in my own.  It was real.  He knew how to “cook” two things that I knew of, “pancakes” and “kettle corn”.  This was serious.  I had to do something.  My son could starve. 

      My son was in danger.  The possibility of starvation was there.  Grabbing for what he could find was his first thought.  He needed help.   He needed to learn how to feed himself.  He could not rely on others to feed him.  One day, Momma would not be there anymore.  It was time to learn to cook. 

      We have often heard the phrase, you are what you eat.  What goes in will eventually bear fruit of some kind.  And we all know that we can tell a tree by its fruit.  No mother wants to raise a son who bears the fruit of bitterness, anger, selfishness, or unbelief.   The loving mother will do what she can to help tend that young sapling.  To help it bear the sweetest fruit she can. She will tend to the feeding and care of his soul.

      I know in the back of my mind that I could and should be doing more to help my son with his desire for more of God and His Word.  I would console myself with the sight of his Bible off of the shelf or when he would tell me that he read his Bible today.  Ok, well at least he is getting some Bible reading in.  But, how can I help him to want to read Scripture, to love the Word, to know his God?

      My father in law is a chef.  He makes, no creates, wonderful food.  He is very particular in how he cooks and for whom he cooks.  To get an invitation to his table is a real treat.  He has one standard that he judges most food by, was it made with love? He says that if you love the person you are cooking for, you will put your heart into it. 

      And so, because I love my son, I put love into what he eats.  But his soul needs to be fed just as his body needs to be fed.  His soul, as well as mine, can only be satisfied with one thing, God and His Word.  As the Psalmist tells us, “he would feed you with the finest of the wheat, and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.”  And if words were food, then my son would be a glutton.

      My son loves to read.  I mean loves to read.  He gets into ketchup bottle labels.  I mean, who does that?!  When I talk about a book I am reading or an author that I like, he wants to know about it himself.  One evening, we had a young man in our home who was talking about John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress.  The very next morning, my son was sitting on the couch with a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress that he had found on our shelf.  The fly was drawn to the honey.

      How sweet are the Scriptures to me?  Do I savor them and speak of their sweetness?  Am I offering my son a taste of the Words that are sweeter than honey and the honeycomb? 

      I need to draw Jackson into my own story, into my own interaction with the Word.  I need to tell Him about my own sweet encounters with the Bible.  I need to tell him that even though we have no money, we can come and buy food and drink.  I need to tell him that we can come to Jesus poor and naked and have nothing to give, and yet be filled with all the fullness of God.  I need to tell him that the Bible is not just a vitamin that we take once a day to ward off sickness.  God’s Word is meant to be savored and enjoyed, like a good pancake. 

      So, I think tomorrow morning I will make blueberry pancakes, and I will have an assistant.    I think I know what we will be talking about while we flip those beautiful blueberry pancakes.  It will be sweeter than honey and more satisfying than any feast.    It will fill our souls and we will be fed.

                      ~Your Fellow Sojourner

“Your words were found, and I ate them,

and your words became to me a joy

and the delight of my heart,” Jeremiah 15:16