Author: danefowlkes

Tasting Death

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Tasting Death
Scripture Reading:
Galatians 2

Meditation:
(The following is an excerpt from my soon-to-be published book, Ordinary Glory: Finding Grace in the Commonplace)

Thirty six years ago, my best friend and I embarked on an epic journey. Fresh out of high school and sporting my own set of wheels, I somehow convinced my friend’s naïve parents to trust him into my care for a road trip from Port Arthur to Mississippi and back. My ace in the hole was that our destination was a church camp and that the purpose of this extended soirée was spiritual growth. They consented and we departed. Oh, the feeling of youthful independence, conquering asphalt in a rust red tank officially identified as a ’65 Ford Galaxy, heating pork and beans for dinner at roadside parks, and singing off key at the top of our lungs to music blasting from state-of-the-art 8-track.

Dark-thirty in some obscure-to-me portion of Mississippi with radio blaring to stay awake behind the wheel, we navigated a blind curve without noticing an unlighted Rail Road crossing warning. Neither of us saw the sign in the dark because we were too busy talking to pay attention, so we emerged from the bend just as a train approached the intersection from the west. The train’s horn roared, I stomped the accelerator, and somehow we crossed the tracks just ahead of the train, feeling its draft as we plunged past. Stunned into silence, I pulled the car to a stop on the side of the road to allow time to collect what remained of our nerves and talk about what just almost happened. As we debriefed, we were convinced that God had rescued us from ourselves and decided that it was as good a time as any to prepare to die. We hastily scribbled a note to the effect that if anyone found us dead, they were to rest assured that we knew the Lord and that we wished the same for them. To cap it all off, we laid awake long enough that night to commit to memory what has become my life verse–Galatians 2:20. For the first time in my life, I had a glimpse of the truth that no one is ready to live unless they’ve tasted death in themselves. 

“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” 
(Galatians 2:20, KJV)

Cleaning Carports

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Scripture Reading:
Hebrews 10
Meditation:

My wife and I returned from our spring break vacation resolute to change our diet and conditioning. A mainstay of the plan is to alternate strong walking with strength training.  Our first day back included a brisk three mile walk on the dam, so the next was time to break out the Bowflex and deadweights. That’s when the plan hit a snag. I’ve needed to clean the carport all winter because leaves tend to accumulate there as if hibernating or laying low and hiding from who knows what–leaves on top of leaves, with a great many of them blanketing our exercise equipment. Before we could flex and lift, I had to bend and rake. I worked on clearing the Bowflex so my wife could begin, and continued sweeping and raking and shoveling to see the floor again. Who knew you could do yard work under a carport? Long after my wife completed her workout I continued my battle with winter clutter. An hour or so later I called it quits; it was too late and I was too spent to lift anything else, so I retreated to my easy chair and a cup of coffee with blueberry fig newtons for comfort.

Leaves aren’t the only things I allow to accumulate. Unsightly emotions have done some hibernating of their own forming clutter that stifles effort toward spiritual strength training and diminishes intensity and focus on what matters most. Discipleship contradicts clutter and demands stringent attention to whatever threatens the heart. Only when the garbage is removed am I able to see what needs to be done.

Buechner on Grace

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Scripture Reading: Ephesians 2

Meditation:

Frederick Buechner is unique in the way he expresses himself. I read Buechner and say to myself, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Here are his thoughts on grace, originally published in Wishful Thinking and reprinted in Beyond Words:

After centuries of handling and mishandling, most religious words have become so shopworn nobody’s much interested any more. Not so with grace, for some reason. Mysteriously, even derivatives like gracious and graceful still have some of the bloom left.

Grace is something you can never get but only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.

A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love somebody?

A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to do.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.

There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it.

Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.

Forgiveness

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Scripture Reading: Isaiah 43

Meditation:

“Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, and what is soiled is made clean again. The dream explains why we need to be forgiven, and why we must forgive. In the presence of God, nothing stands between him and us – we are forgiven. But we cannot feel his presence if anything is allowed to stand between ourselves and others.”

~Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

Words

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Scripture Reading:
Psalm 51

Meditation:

“It speaks in a way they cannot avoid hearing for themselves, which is the awesome power of words because, although there are times when they shield us from reality, at other times they assail us with it.” 

~ Frederick Buechner

Language speaks. At first glance, no statement could be more ridiculously obvious. Everybody knows that words are our means of communicating with one another; however, on second thought they contain more potential than that. Words build and destroy empires; language launches movements and topples them. Words determine destinies. The most powerful ones are what we say to ourselves if they are honest words. Transparent confession results in transformation if the word we speak afterward is forgiveness; in fact, this is the most powerful word in any language–forgiven. One may argue that love has more weight, but love that carries a grudge evaporates leaving no lasting impression. Forgiveness restores.

Convenient Memory

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Scripture Reading:
Philippians 3
Meditation:

The Apostle Paul did not have in mind spiritual amnesia, nor was he advocating self-deception. His declaration is more akin to moving on than to pretending the past was something that it clearly wasn’t. We’ve probably all taken a stab at those mental maneuvers. At times I hide behind what may be termed convenient memory, hints of reality that I manipulate in order to ignore the more pressing truth of what I was or failed to be. In these mind games, the memory justifies the end.  What good is there in manufactured reminiscence? I am convinced that I never benefit from my past apart from brutal honesty. Wishing that things had been different does not make them so and actually distances me from any real growth and progress beyond the hurt or error or misguided choice. Truth is the only clear way to the Father and it is the only trustworthy way to myself. 

Hunger for Most

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Scripture Reading: 
Matthew 6:16-21
Meditation:
“Some have exalted religious fasting beyond all Scripture and reason; and others have utterly disregarded it.”
~John Wesley

Lent and fasting go together naturally. Lent harkens back to Jesus Christ’s wilderness experience in preparation for his public ministry, in which Jesus intensified his focus on prayer by fasting from food for 40 days. It also may be associated with Moses’ 40 days on Mount Sinai with God, and the 40 year journey of the Israelites wandering in the desert. Lent for contemporary believers is a period of somber self-examination designed to promote intense hunger for God, and nothing reveals what eats at me as clearly as when my appetites are exposed in light of a renewed hunger for God.

“In a culture where the landscape is dotted with shrines to the Golden Arches and an assortment of Pizza Temples, fasting seems out of place, out of step with the times.  In fact, fasting has been in general disrepute both in and outside the Church for many years” (Richard Foster). Fasting is never intended to be punitive. True Christian fasting doesn’t seek suffering or self-denial as an end, but as a way to love something less so that God might be loved more. Actually, fasting does not always deal with abstinence from food; it is the denial of any normal function of life in order to become more absorbed in seeking God. Herein lies the rub: What masters us has become our god; and Paul warns us about those “whose god is their appetite” (Phil 3:18). What we hunger for most, we worship.

Chambers on Surrender

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Scripture Reading: 

Philippians 1; Romans 1:16-17

Meditation:

Consider these thoughts on surrender from Oswald Chambers in My Utmost for His Highest:

We will all feel very much ashamed if we do not yield to Jesus the areas of our lives He has asked us to yield to Him. It’s as if Paul were saying, “My determined purpose is to be my utmost for His highest—my best for His glory.” To reach that level of determination is a matter of the will, not of debate or of reasoning. It is absolute and irrevocable surrender of the will at that point. An undue amount of thought and consideration for ourselves is what keeps us from making that decision, although we cover it up with the pretense that it is others we are considering. When we think seriously about what it will cost others if we obey the call of Jesus, we tell God He doesn’t know what our obedience will mean. Keep to the point—He does know. Shut out every other thought and keep yourself before God in this one thing only—my utmost for His highest. I am determined to be absolutely and entirely for Him and Him alone.

Paul was determined that nothing would stop him from doing exactly what God wanted. But before we choose to follow God’s will, a crisis must develop in our lives. This happens because we tend to be unresponsive to God’s gentler nudges. He brings us to the place where He asks us to be our utmost for Him and we begin to debate. He then providentially produces a crisis where we have to decide—for or against. That moment becomes a great crossroads in our lives. If a crisis has come to you on any front, surrender your will to Jesus absolutely and irrevocably.

Kindred Spirit

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Scripture Reading: Psalm 147
Meditation:

“A pearl is a beautiful thing that is produced by an injured life. It is the tear that results from the injury of the oyster. The treasure of our being in this world is also produced by an injured life. If we had not been wounded, if we had not been injured, then we will not produce the pearl.” 

~ Stephan Hoeller
The bad news is that we are all walking wounded. The good news is that we will never identify with Christ without a wound. Nail-scarred hands and gaping side demand intimate acquaintance with sacrifice. Faith that costs us little may be worth about the same. It has been said that “We turn to God when the foundations of our lives are shaking only to find out that it has been God who was shaking them.” Such thinking runs counter to the present day obsession with slick and polish, ease and comfort. I’m increasingly leery of churches and religious leaders that make Christ-following “hip.” The next time your heart is injured or your spirit crushed, look to the cross–you will find a kindred spirit there.

Slaying Demons

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Scripture Reading: Romans 5

Meditation:
“We profess to be strangers and pilgrims, seeking after a country of our own, yet we settle down in the most un-stranger-like fashion, exactly as if we were quite at home and meant to stay as long as we could. I don’t wonder apostolic miracles have died. Apostolic living certainly has.”
~ Amy Carmichael (Side by Side)

We all have our demons, don’t we? Some have names and faces attached to them, while others are inanimate but no less real or formidable. I’m beginning to believe that the disciple’s life is not about eradicating these but learning to allow God’s love to loosen their hold and God’s grace to erase the damning effect when their fiery breath scorches me once again. For some, that will sound defeatist. For the most honest, it will ring true and strike an autobiographical chord. I want to think they arise from some outer region– “the devil made me do it”, but I fear their origin greatly resembles what is deepest inside of me. 

I’m told there is no plot without conflict, and the same must be true for my own narrative. Growth is not possible apart from honest struggle and heart rending hardship, but the difference made by the cradle and the cross is that Christ enters the foray with us. He doesn’t fight the battles for us while we look on from a distance, but instead faces the enemy side by side with us to the extent that he sways the outcome in our favor. We are more than conquerors because he is in us and that always adds up to superior force. I will never slay my demons on my own; fortunately, I don’t have to.