But once I get things sorted out, the photos from the trip will be up.)Tags: No Tags
The type of cancer I had is reasonably likely to recur, and also reasonably likely to spread (metastasize). Both are most likely to happen within the first two years–about four out of five times, in fact. So if you get to the two year mark NED (no evidence of disease), statistically you’re doing quite well.
My two-year mark was May 1. Or mid-April, depending on when you start counting. But it wasn’t until last week that I had a CT scan to verify the "no evidence" part, and it wasn’t until this morning that we got the results: clear!
So big praise. I’ve been waiting two years for today to get here, and while it doesn’t feel as relieving as it might, I think it’s mainly because I don’t think about it as often as I once did! At any rate, on the one hand, today is just a day from yesterday; on the other, today was pretty significant on the cancer front–as far as human medical knowledge can go. Of course, God’s in control from day one.
Tags: No Tags
I have to say, when I started Ineffable Grace, it certainly wasn’t my intention to go whole months without posting. Yet, at the moment, that’s exactly what’s happening, and it’s unlikely to change for at least a couple more months.
As most of you probably know, we’re praying to be welcoming a new little girl into the world just over a month from now. I’ve been sick–hyperemesis gravidarum and, more recently, fairly severe anemia–but honestly, I think the biggest “problem” is that pregnancy seems to have done something to my brain! My mind seems to be suddenly happier to dwell on concrete things and downright stubborn about dealing with abstracts. In other words: for the first time in my life, housework is coming easier than thinking. ;) I suppose this is a good thing, maybe even a God-given instinct to help mothers prepare for children! But it is wrecking my blogging abilities, and for that I apologize.
So it looks likely that I won’t be posting until whatever chemicals have gone berserk in my head go back to normal. In the meantime, though, two very non-deep thoughts that have manged to run through my head between vacuuming and painting:
Tags: children motherhood
On about the third day after we first met, Seth and I were on our way to a little Italian restaurant in Memphis when he asked me, out of the blue: “So, Julie, if we got married, and God called me to live in a mud hut, would that be okay with you?”
For a few frenzied seconds, my poor teenage-girl brain was very confused. Seth had been very clear that he didn’t feel called to a foreign mission field, and so part of me was trying to figure out why God would call him to live in a mud hut in North America, and another part was thinking mud hut? Does he feel called to live in a mud hut? Why a mud hut? What would we do for a bathroom? I think I missed something here. But then I realized what he was really asking: are you the type of person who wants to live a good moral life, live in a house, have a family, try to live a righteous life, and be actively involved in a local church–or are you the kind of person who is happy to drop everything and lose everything for no reason beyond the fact that it’s the way God is leading us? And also: are you the type of person who would willfully give up the usefulness of a kitchen, a bathroom, and a floor, simply because your husband asks you?
So I answered. And I realized that his question was no less insightful into his character than my answer was to mine.
In the past six months or so, I’ve realized that a very large number of the people I knew in high school and college are starting to get married. Still lots of singles in the group, but a growing number of people who are “together,” engaged, or married. And–having been married for going on four years–I’m really terrified for the souls of many of these old friends of mine. Some of their prospective spouses’ salvation is in serious question, others are marrying into heretical denominations, and countless more seem to be spending their lives in pursuit of the American dream, Christian-style, which says let’s get married, have two kids, volunteer in VBS, go to the local MOPS, and tithe; we won’t cheat on our taxes and we’ll give to charity.
I hear phrases like “I’m so excited–I know God just made us for each other, we have so many interests in common and we just understand each other so much!” Because, you know, God’s main concern is that you can find a board game you both like to play. Or “he’s such a great guy; he has a really great job and our careers work together so perfectly, and he’s so sweet and sensitive–he makes great cappuccinos!” Personality equals greatness. And, my favorite of all: “we even want the same number of kids!” Since the whole kid thing is governed by wishes and not by, I don’t know, the multitude of Bible verses on the subject. Just once, I want one of my friends to pull me aside and tell me that they’re deliriously in love with their boyfriend/fiancé/husband because he makes it clear everyday that his top adoration is Christ, and constantly points her toward the truth of the Gospel, enough that it makes her uncomfortable, embarrassed, and aware of her own insufficiency.
One thing I’ve learned in the past four years is that it’s very easy for a husband and a wife to become alike spiritually. We can drag each other down, we can build each other up, and the effect is effortless. We have a huge impact on each other, even when we don’t want to. It’s hard for one of us to be in close fellowship with God when the other is spiritually depressed, and conversely easy for us to be lifted out of spiritual dimness when the other is passionate and fiery. Solomon is a prime example of this; 1 Kings 11:4 says that ” when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God” (ESV). Even with all his wisdom–and verbal communication with the Most High–Solomon still succumbed to his wives’ spiritual state.
Even more than our relationship with each other impacting our relationship with God, though, our relationship with God impacts our relationship with each other. Nothing brings us together like the feeling of catching Seth’s hand in mine in silent support during an intense theological discussion that’s going on, and nothing is quite as satisfying as curling up to each other to sleep after a spiritually harrowing night. Sometimes there’s no words, just togetherness: nothing can give one-ness on the same scale as pursing the Gospel together. There’s no comparison. Scripture doesn’t give us very many examples of couples where both are clearly strong believers, but it’s worth noticing that the couples who seem to have the most secure marriages–Abraham and Sarah, Boaz and Ruth, Joseph and Mary, Zechariah and Elizabeth–are the same couples where we can read both parties praising and praying to God. And I’d wager that Priscilla and Aquila were among the happiest people in the whole New Testament; they certainly seem to have been inseparable!
Nothing can make a marriage a success the way that a shared commitment to Christ will. Our love for each other–our capacity to love each other–increases as we draw nearer to God. Nonbelievers can never experience the most ultimate pleasure of marriage, and weaker believers cannot experience it as fully. There’s no earthly delight more agreeable than a godly spouse–and, I suspect, no earthly torment more horrible than a wayward or apathetic one. And on the other side of the coin, apart from the Gospel itself, I don’t think there’s anything that can change us, for better or for worse, than the person we live with day in and day out.
2 Corinthians 6:14-15 are the famous verses used to point out how wrong it is to marry a nonbeliever, but I think it’s useful to note the reasons Paul gives: “what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?” [ESV] No matter how many common interests two people may have, if one is righteous and one is lawless, they have nothing in common. No partnership, no fellowship, no accord; no shared portion.
And so, common interests, pleasant personalities, good jobs, even going to the same church or writing identical doctrinal statements: these things are not what we should be looking for. You can marry a seminary graduate with all the right words and excellent references, and still find out that he falls apart when his world falls down around him. Or you can marry somebody who obsesses over the proper method of courtship and reads every book Douglas Wilson, James Dobson, and Gary Smalley ever published, and learn what happens when he’s more concerned with his relationship with you than your relationship to God. It takes a lot more character to confront someone with their sin than to be a sensitive shoulder to cry on. It takes far greater maturity to look you in the eye and say, “if God takes you away from me then I will praise Him; He is all I need,” than to say, “darling, you’re my world and I couldn’t survive without you.”
That’s where the mud hut questions come in: Would you really abandon everything? Can you really smile when humanly everything is sorrow? Do you put your relationship with God above all, and regard your relationship with your wife/husband as only a tangent to that all-encompassing passion for Christ? Is your house going to stand strong when the rain starts to fall and all the sand washes away?
I pray that the marrying people of my generation would have greater vision, and that we all would be bold in confronting the horror of unequally yoked.
Tags: marriage married happiness singleness spouse criteria women
One thing that I have become very strongly convicted about over the past few months is the reality of the universal church.
If I tried to write an entry about what the Bible has to say about specific little congregations, it would be very short indeed. Yet that’s where it seems like our attention is focused. Oh, sure, we go on youth retreats with some other area churches (particularly those that are far enough removed geographically to not represent competition), and maybe we do Good Friday services or “church swaps” with one or two like-minded churches–but do we regard those other churches as equally important to our own?
For the vast majority of our married life, Seth and I have not been members of a local church. The first church we attended in Louisville required agreement with their doctrinal statement, which we could not confer; the second church had required membership classes at a time we could not attend (and we didn’t go there too long before we came to Delaware, anyway). We joined Bethel once we got here, which was easy and a no-brainer; since we left, we’ve been membershipless once more.
By some theologies, this should be bothersome. Don’t we have a responsibility to formally put ourselves under the authority of a local elder board? Shouldn’t we commit our time and resources officially to a single church? Indeed, there was a time when I was disconcerted myself by our unaffiliated state–but I grow less so with every passing year.
John Piper’s church had a very thought-provoking controversy a little while back: should infant-baptized believers be allowed to join their credo-baptist church? Piper’s position was yes; the elder board’s position was no. Piper’s explanation was one that struck me deeply, and with a wider range of implication than his current situation: the “door” for joining the local church should be precisely the same size as the “door” to heaven. In other words, woe to the church that excludes genuine believers from their fellowship. I can’t see how you can argue with that logic. Where in Scripture does it grant a church the authority to exclude anyone who genuinely professes Christ? Yes, we’re to excommunicate people for unrepentant sin, but how did we take that guideline and extrapolate that we should set ourselves (or our elder boards) up as judges to decide who is and who is not worthy, “Christian” enough, of sufficient doctrinal purity, or adequately “committed” to the church at 123 Church Lane?
Scripture talks about removing people from fellowship; it never once talks about refusing people from fellowship. The very idea is contrary to everything the church represents: Christ went out and visited tax collectors and prostitutes; He invited them into His midst. He didn’t make sure to weed out all the undesirables before He spoke, and He clearly rebuked those who made sinners feel excluded or demeaned. Yet we alternately preclude people from participating in evangelism, singing in our choirs, or–heaven forbid!–organizing an event until they’ve passed a rigorous set of “tests” to enter the inner circle of specialness called “membership.” I’ve been membershipless-but-regularly-attending at five different churches now, including some excellent churches, and I can tell you firsthand: even as a believer in that setting, I still feel excluded. Sometimes it’s very faint; sometimes it’s downright annoying: I find it despicable, frankly, that the leadership at a church can know me and believe that I’m a Christian, but still make us jump through the hoops of formal membership before, say, letting me help out in VBS.
So, to return to the idea of the universal Church: I’m increasingly non-concerned about any given local church. I love fellowshipping in one, and I love being a part of a consistent group of people, but, in the end, it’s just an abstract construct that we tend to mistake for being something real and finite. It’s common for us to point out with regard to our U.S. citizenship that “our citizenship is not of this world,” but we should take that concept to the local church and say, “my membership is not of this church.” If our church burns to the ground, if our congregation scatters, if our pastor runs off with another woman, if the worst thing we can imagine comes to pass–our membership is not of this church. God hasn’t changed, the real Church hasn’t faltered, the divinely-appointed shepherds still lead the flock, the Gospel is the same, and we have every occasion to rejoice because God is always faithful and Christ always refines and purifies His bride.
This works in reverse, as well. Christ didn’t say to come alongside and rebuke erring believers [who belong to the same church you do]; Paul didn’t write for us to break fellowship with unrepentant wolves [who formerly belonged to the same church we do]. There are no parenthetical qualifications. Those cast out by one church should not be readily received in another, and when we sin, any believer has the responsibility and honor of helping us see more clearly. Yes, the local church clearly should play a role in both of these processes, but if we’re limiting it to the local body, we’re hurting the true Body. If we send an adulterer or a heretic out of our midst and contently sit by in silence when the church down the street welcomes them in ignorance with open arms–do we really think that’s building up the Church? If a pastor at a neighboring church is leading his church astray into some serious doctrinal error, do we sit by and say that it’s none of our business instead of pleading with the shepherd and his flock to return to the truth?
I’m very concerned that we don’t have more concern for “our” local body than we do for sister churches. The idea of putting our local body above the needs of the universal body–or another local body–is wholly unscriptural. Indeed, verses like 2 Corinthians 8:1-3, 1 Corinthians 16:1-3, and 2 Corinthians 11:8-9, among other passages, clearly show local churches giving to other local churches, even when they have virtually nothing to give. 3 John 1:5-8 makes it equally clear that individuals in one church do well to support those who are ministering elsewhere. And the pervasive pattern of prayer we see throughout the New Testament shows that inter-church support was not limited to merely finances. If we have enough pew Bibles, and the poorer Bible-believing church down the street doesn’t have any, are we willing to share our own, even though it may mean that we too have ten people huddled around a single Bible? Do we help our brothers and sisters only out of our abundance, or out of everything we have? Are regular attendees encouraged to tithe their 10% to our reasonably well-off church before giving to overseas missions or poorer churches that need the funds more desperately?
I’ve often been in churches and gotten the impression that it’s our responsibility to give first and foremost to the local body. And I understand and agree that basic necessities such as a building and a pastor must be provided. But I don’t understand and don’t agree that we should devote our resources to an inefficient bureaucratic institution with an inflated VBS budget that would cover a whole year of building and pastoral care for a church in Africa. And yes, outreach in the States is undoubtedly more expensive than outreach in third-world countries. But how can we hear a missionary come and tell us of a church that has no pastor, a congregation that meets in sub-zero weather with no heat, or a rural “seminary” that can’t afford Bibles for its students–how can we hear of these things happening within the universal Church and not immediately stop and say, hmm, our VBS budget, our choir budget, or our new-every-year Sunday School materials budget would take the Gospel a lot farther if we shared it with that church. Are our new flannelgraph figures really that vital? I wonder what would happen if we stopped basing our budgets off of what we need to meet our yearly “program” expenses, and instead tried to figure out how we could best use our resources to advance the cause of Christ everywhere. Could we still justify $30,000 for a high school missions trip to pour concrete in the Bahamas, or would we send thirty local Bible-believing pastors in thirty different towns across the island a complete library with commentaries and other resources, instead?
The secular world is catching onto this idea. Websites like thehungersite.com, kiva.org, and freerice.com exist because certain people realized that the wealth in the Western world is so great that we can make gigantic impacts in third-world countries without changing our own lifestyles at all–we can feed the hungry simply by viewing advertisements! Christians are called to a much higher standard: we’re called to sacrifice, to put our brothers and sisters above ourselves, whether they’re in the pew next to us or huddled in a dark meeting room on the other side of the world.
Our present lack of membership is an anomaly in some ways. We’re not rebels. I’m sure we’ll join another church someday, perhaps sooner rather than later. But in the meantime, membershiplessness has been thought-provoking, and useful. Loyalties to a local body can be so easily distracting from our joyful duties and fellowship with the rest of the world church. It’s been good, in a sense, to be forced to see with broader vision for a time. No matter where our church journey eventually takes us, I hope we never lose the consuming passion for the Church where our membership truly lies, and never settle for being members of just one “church.”
Tags: evangelism fellowship the church
Being that I am neither Presbyterian, believing that our child is automatically covenant and promised for salvation, nor Arminian, believing that our child will be saved if only we manage to be convincing enough–being neither of those things, I believe this little baby is in spiritual darkness.
I’ve been dwelling on this a great deal. This little one that I’m so eager to meet, the tiny frame that’s being knit together inside of me, is a tangled mess of sin and rebellion. Even as he or she is learning to think, to hear, to feel, his or her little thoughts are selfish and unredeemed. That little mind holds no appreciation for its own insignificance, no desire to serve the One who is forming every bone and synapse. Our child is fallen.
Parents don’t often seem to treat their children like lost people. It’s frightening to think of; I can feel even now the peculiar blend of terror that comes from flinging all your love and devotion into a little being that may never grow to desire God, from building such an incredibly close relationship with a person who may one day break your heart with their waywardness, or whose funeral you might attend and know that they’ve gone into eternal torment instead of eternal joy.
I don’t think it’s idle worry to be so starkly dramatic. We don’t know God’s plans, and how could we presume? We hope and we plead on our knees, but if it brings God more glory that this little child should reject Him, then our hearts may break but still flow with praise.
I don’t want to lose sight of this. I’m sure it will be easy to do: even as Seth and I plan and giggle about all the ways we’re going to love this child to death, it’s so easy to distance ourselves from the reality of his or her spiritual condition. And we haven’t even met yet! Once we’re captured by smiles and coos and all the miniature wonder of new life, I can’t imagine how much more difficult it will be. But how vital it is that every action we take as parents, every decision, be underpinned by solemn determination to show this child the beauty of Jesus Christ and His Gospel! We’re embarking on a tiny mission field, bringing it in through our front door.
It goes well beyond “scary.” And yet it’s also amazing, because even we as saved parents can only throw ourselves on the mercy of God–and so throwing our child on His mercy is not very much different. And it’s awesome, because how many things bring as much joy to believers as sharing the Gospel? And here we will, Lord willing, have the opportunity to do exactly that, day in and day out. So it’s exciting, too, because God is gracious in all things.
Tags: children sin nature
