The Flame of Joy

Pride slays thanksgiving...A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves. Henry Ward Beecher

Summer Light by Lee Boynton

An Excerpt from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You are:

Can we really expect joy all the time?

I know it well after a day smattered with rowdiness and worn ragged with bickering, that I may feel disappointed and the despair may flood high, but to give thanks is an action and rejoice is a verb and these are not mere pulsing emotions. While I may not always feel joy, God asks me to give thanks in all things, because He knows that the feeling of joy begins in the action of thanksgiving.

True saints know that the place where all the joy comes from is far deeper than that of feelings; joy comes from the place of the very presence of God. Joy is God and God is joy and joy doesn't negate all other emotions -- joy  transcends all other emotions...

Joy is a flame that glimmers only in the palm of the open and humble hand. In an open and humble palm, released and surrendered to receive, light dances, flickers happy. The moment the hand is clenched tight, fingers all pointing toward self and rights and demands, joy is snuffed out. Anger is the lid that suffocates joy until she lies limp and lifeless. And for me, it's a cosmic-numbing notion that far eclipses the domestic moment. It speaks to the whole of my life and the vision brands me: The demanding of my own will is the singular force that smothers out joy -- nothing else.

"Pride slays thanksgiving... A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves." Dare I ask what I think I deserve? A life of material comfort? A life free of all trials, all hardship, all suffering? A life with no discomfort, no inconveniences? Are there times that a sense of entitlement is what inflates self, detonates anger, offends God, extinguishes joy?

What do I really deserve? Thankfully, God never gives what is deserved, but instead, God graciously, passionately offers gifts, our bodies, our time, our very lives. God does not give rights but imparts responsibilities --- response-abilities -- inviting us to respond to His love-gifts.

...The secret of joy's flame: Humbly let go. Let go of trying to do, let go of trying to control...let go of my own way, let go of my own fears. Let God blow His wind, His trials, oxygen for joy's fire. Leave the hand open and be. Be at peace. Bend the knees and be small and let God give what God chooses to give because He only gives love, and whisper thanks. This is the fuel for joy's flame. Fullness of joy is discovered only in the emptying of will. And I can empty. I can empty because counting His graces has awakened me to how He cherishes me, holds me, passionately values me. I can empty because I am full of His love. I can trust.

I can let go.

Only self can kill joy.

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Unfailing Love

The Lord is my Best Friend and Shepherd...Psalm 23:1 

The Good Shepherd, oil painting by Lee Boynton

Psalm 23 -- The anointed words of this familiar, much beloved psalm, were penned by David, a shepherd boy tending his sheep on the back side of the desert. They are as alive today as when they first burned and pounded in David's heart, begging to be released. Think of the thousands upon thousands of anxious, grieving hearts this psalm have soothed and comforted over the generations.

Jesus is the Good Shepherd. We are His well-tended sheep. He leaves the 99 to find the one that is lost.

The Story Behind the Painting:

Nick Boucher, the young man who posed for this painting, had been raised under challenging circumstances. His mother, a single parent, was a drug addict. Nick fell into this same dark pit when he was in his early teens. But the Good Shepherd found him.  The word mouth is "bouche" in French. Nick's Savior and Lord -- the Lover of His Soul --holds and kisses him with His perfect, intimate love every day -- with the kisses of His mouth, that is with His Word!

Psalm23  The Passion Translation

The Lord is my Best Friend and my Shepherd.

I always have more than enough.

He offers a resting place for me in his luxurious love.

His tracks take me to an oasis of peace, the quiet brook of bliss.

That's where he restores and revives my life.

   He opens before me pathways to God's pleasure,

   and leads me along in his footsteps of righteousness

   so that I can honor his name.

Lord, even when your path takes me through

   the valley of deepest darkness,

   fear will never conquer me, for you already have!

  You remain close to me and lead me through it all the way.

   Your authority is my strength and my peace.

   The comfort of your love takes away my fear.

   I'll never be lonely, for you are near.

You become my delicious feast

   even when my enemies dare to fight.

   You anoint me with the fragrance of your Holy Spirit;

   you give me all I can drink of you until my heart overflows.

So why would I fear the future?

   For I'm being pursued only by your goodness and unfailing love.

   Then afterwards -- when my life is through,

   I'll return to your glorious presence to be forever with you!

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Thanks Builds Trust

Trauma's storm can mask the Christ and feelings can lie. Ann Voskamp

Be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10)

An excerpt from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are:

How do you count on life when the hopes don't add up?

A morning in late November, joy shimmers.

The hopes don't have to add up. The blessings do. Count blessings and discover Who can be counted on.

Isn't that what had been happening, quite unexpectedly? This living a lifestyle of intentional gratitude became an unintentional test in the trustworthiness of God -- and in counting blessings I stumbled upon the way out of fear. Can God be counted on? Count blessings and find out how many of His bridges have already held. Had I not trusted all these years because I had not counted?

I glanced back in the mirror to the concrete bridge, the one I had boldly driven straight across without a second thought, and I see truth reflected back at me: Every time fear freezes and worry writhes, every time I surrender to stress, aren't I advertising the unreliability of God? That I really don't believe? But if I'm grateful to the Bridge Builder for the crossing of a million strong bridges, thankful for a million faithful moments, my life speaks my belief and I trust Him again.

I fearlessly cross the next bridge.

I shake my head at the blinding wonder of it: Trust is the bridge from yesterday to tomorrow, built with planks of thanks. Remembering frames up gratitude. Gratitude lays out the planks of trust. I can walk the planks -- from known to unknown -- and know: He holds.

I could walk unafraid.

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A Light Has Dawned

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.  Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Light Has Dawned

Except from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are:

Stress is a joy stealer. It stands in direct opposition to what Jesus directly, tenderly commands: "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me." (John 14:1) I know an untroubled heart relaxes, trusts, leans assured into His ever-dependable arms. Trust, it's the antithesis of stress. "Oh the joys of those who trust the Lord" (Psalm 40:4). But how to learn to trust like that? Can trust be conjured up simply by sheer will, on command? I've got to get this thing, what it means to trust, to gut-believe in the good touch of God toward me, because it's true: I can't fill with joy until I learn how to trust: "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow (Romans 15:13). The full life, the one spilling joy and peace, happens only as I come to trust the caress of the Lover, Lover who never burdens His children with shame or self-condemnation but keeps stroking the fears with gentle grace.

How can I trust when a troubled, joy-shriveled heart has pumped fear through the stiff veins of all my years?

If I believe, then I must let go and trust. Why do I stress? Belief in God has to be more than mental assent, more than a cliched exercise in cognition. Even the demons believe (James 2:19). What is saving belief if it isn't the radical dare to wholly trust? I read in one of the thick commentaries, that the word pisteuo is used two hundred twenty two (222) time is the New Testament, most often translated as "belief." But it changes everything when I read that pisteuo ultimately means "to put one's faith in; to trust." Belief is a verb, something that you do. Then the truth is that authentic, saving belief must be also? The very real, every day action of trusting.

Then a true saving faith is a faith that gives thanks, a faith that sees God, a faith that deeply trusts?

I read in the Amplified Bible on an afternoon while young hands work scales up and down the piano keys, "Jesus replied, 'This is the work (service) that God asks of you: that you believe in the One Whom He has sent [that you cleave to, trust, rely on, and have faith in His Messenger] (John 6:26). That's my daily work, the work God asks of me? To Trust. The work I shirk. To trust in the Son, to trust in the wisdom of this moment, to trust in now. And trust is that: work. The work of trusting love. Intentional and focused. Sometimes, too often, I don't want to muster the energy. Stress and anxiety seem easier. Easier to let a mind run wild with the worry than to exercise discipline, to reign her in, slip the blinders on and train her to walk steady in certain assurance, not spooked by the spectors looming ahead. Are stress and worry evidences of a soul too lazy, too undisciplined, to keep gaze fixed on God? To stay in love? I don't like to ask these questions, sweep out these corners where eyes glare from shadows. But this I must ask and I do, out loud, to the C-scale being played with certainty: Isn't joy worth the effort to trust?

Because I kid no one: stress brings no joy.

Isaiah 9:2

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light;

On those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.

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Beauty in the Woods

Woods on the Isle of Arron, Scotland. Photo by our friend Neil May

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. John 1:1-2

Except from One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are:

The woods spell out words. I need a lens to read them. Every dark woods has words. And every moment is a message from The Word-God who can't stop writing His heart.

...What do all the words written in the world really spell out? I had read it in Job, what makes reading God's message in every moment a form of art, fullest life: God speaks to us not in one language but two: "For God does speak -- now one way, now another" (Job 33:14 NIV) One way, His finger writing words in stars (Psalm 19:1-3), His eternal power written naked in all creation (Romans 1:20); and now another way, the sharp Holy Writ on the page that makes a careful incision into a life, blade words kindly cut the tissue back to where soul and spirit join, tenderly laying bare the intents of the heart (Hebrews 4:12)...

To read His message in moments, I'll need to read His passion on the page; wear the lens of the Word, to read His writing in the world. Only the Word is the answer to rightly reading the world, because The Word has nail-scarred hands that cup our face close, wipe away the tears running down, has eyes to look deep into our brimming ache, and whisper, "I know. I know." The passion on the page is a Person, and the lens I wear of the Word is not abstract idea but the eyes of the God-Man who came and knows the pain...

That which seems evil, is it a cloud to bring rain, to bring a greater good to the whole of the world? Who would ever know the greater graces of comfort and perseverance, mercy and forgiveness, patience and courage, if no shadow fell over a life?

Without God's Word as a lens, the world warps.

Beauty Calls

Beauty is the voice endlessly calling and so we see, so we reach...Someone is behind it, in it. Beauty Himself completes.  Ann Voskamp

Lily pads in my garden

Touch beauty! Write a poem. Draw or paint a picture. Be united with the beauty you see, pass into it, receive it!

From The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis:

What more do we want? Ah, but we want so much more -- something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words -- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

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Beauty Sparks the Romance

Beauty is all that is glory and God is beauty embodied, glory manifested. Ann Voskamp

A new day

Excerpt from One Thousand Gifts: the Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are:

#362 Suds...all color in sun

A soap bubble, skin of light and water and space suspended in sphere. Who has time for that?

Hadn't I? Only because I was looking. Because that list of one thousand gifts has me always on the hunt for one more...one more -- to behold one more moment pregnant with wonder.

Time is a relentless river. It rages on, respecter of no one. And this, this is the only way to slow time: When I fully enter time's swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here. I can slow the torrent by being all here. I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment. And when I'm always looking for the next glimpse of glory, I slow and enter. And time slows. Weigh down this moment in time with attention full, and the whole of time's river slows, slows, slows...

This. Is this eucharisteo the way to that elusive fullest life, the one that lives in the moment? What my sister urges when I get angry and knotted about tomorrow, when I sorrow for what is gone, her words always tugging me to stay right here -- "Wherever you are, be all there." I have lived the runner, panting ahead in worry, pounding back in regret, terrified to live in the present, because here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.

Light on soap film, its energy traveling, reflection, refraction on a wall a few millionth of an inch thick. Light waves permeate and collide, crest to crest and crest to trough. Yellow marbleizes into indigo dark. I do see this. I hold it. 

This is where God is... God Himself framed in moment.

When I'm present, I meet I AM, the very presence of a present God. In His embrace, time loses all sense of speed and stress and space and stands so still and ... holy. Here is the only place I can love Him. I have time for God...

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My Pace Setter

Divine strength is not given to us until we are fully aware of our own weakness and know that the strength we receive is indeed His Gift and not the reward of our own excellence.            Thomas Merton          

The quintessential rose

Psalm 23, Thomas Merton translation

The Lord is my pace-setter, I shall not rush;

He makes me stop and rest for quiet intervals;

He provides me with images of stillness, which restore my serenity.

He leads me in ways of efficiency through calmness of mind,

And His guidance is peace.

Even though I have many things to accomplish each day,

I will not fret for His presence is here.

His timelessness, His all importance will keep me in balance.

He prepares refreshment and renewal in the midst of activity

By anointing my head with His oil of tranquility;

My cup of joyous energy overflows.

Surely, harmony and effectiveness shall be the fruit of my hours.

For I shall walk in the pace of my Lord,

And dwell in His house forever.

[Glory to the Father]

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Grace, Thanksgiving, Joy

We only enter into the full life if our faith gives thanks. Ann Voskamp

Resurrection power...

An except from Ann Voskamp's book One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are:

Isn't it here? The wonder? Why do I spend so much of my living hours struggling to see it? Do we truly stumble so blind that we must be affronted with blinding magnificence for our blurry soul-sight to recognize grandeur? The very same surging magnificence that cascades over every day here. Who has time or eyes to notice?

All my eyes can seem to fixate on are the splatters of disappointment across here and me.

I open the bathroom linen closet. Pick up a brush to swish toilets. I don't need more time to breathe so that I may experience more locales, possess more, accomplish more. Because wonder really could be here -- for the seeing eyes.

So -- more time for more what?

The face of Jesus flashes. Jesus, the God-man with his own termination date. Jesus, the God-man who came to save me from prisons of fear and guilt and depression and sadness. With an expiration of less than twelve hours, what does Jesus count as all most important?

"And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them..." (Luke 22:19)

This. I live in this place, make porridge, scrub toilets, do laundry, and for days, weeks, I am brave and I do get out of bed and I think on this. I study this, the full life, the being fully ready for the end. I start to think that maybe there is a way out of nightmares to dreams? Maybe?

I run my finger across the page. I read it slowly. In the original language, "he gave thanks" reads "eucharisteo." I underline it. Can it lay a foundation under a life? Offer the fullest life?

The root word of eucharisteo is charis, meaning "grace." Jesus took bread and saw it as grace, charis. But it also holds its derivative, the Greek chara, meaning "joy." Joy. Ah... yes. I might be needing me some of that. That might be what the quest for more is all about -- that what Augustine claimed, "Without exception...all try their hardest to reach the same goal, that is, joy."

I breathe deep, like a sojourner finally coming home. That has always been the goal of the fullest life-- joy. And my life knew exactly how elusive that slippery three-letter word, joy, can be. I think of it again, the night of nightmares, the flailing, frantic, moon-eyed lunge for more. More what? And this is it; I could tell my whole being responded to that one word. I longed for more life, for more holy joy.

That's what I was struggling out of nightmares to reach, to seize. Joy. But where can I seize this holy grail of joy? I look back down to the page. Was this the clue to the quest of all most important? Deep chara joy is found only at the table of the euCHARisteo -- the table of thanksgiving. I sit there long ... wondering... is it that simple? Is the height of my chara joy dependent on the depth of my eucharisteo thanks?

So then as long as thanks is possible ... I think this through. As long as thanks is possible, then joy is always possible. Joy is always possible. Whenever, meaning -- now; wherever, meaning -- here. The holy grail of joy is not in some exotic location or some emotional mountain peak experience. The joy wonder could be here! Here, in the messy, piercing ache of now, joy might be possible! The only place we need see before we die is this place of seeing God, here and now.

I whisper it out loud, let the tongue feel these sounds, the ear hear their truth.

Charis. Grace.

Eucharisteo. Thanksgiving.

Chara. Joy.

A triplet of stars, a constellation in the black. A threefold cord that might hold a life? Offer a way up into the fullest life? Grace, thanksgiving, joy. Eucharisteo. A Greek word... that might make meaning of everything?

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My Treasure Trove

Taped into one of my 2013 journals. This little card got us, Lee and me, through many a hard, pressured time.

I love to journal. I record all of the delightful, surprising, and often very challenging ways God shows up for me each day. I also copy verses of Scripture, inspiring quotes, and excerpts from books I am reading. As I copy life-giving words in my journal I am also writing them on my heart. This is my way of meditating on them, and my journals become for me a treasure trove.

 David, in the Bible, and his soldiers went off on a recognizance mission one day. When they returned to Ziklag, their camp, they found the Amalekites had attacked. The Amalekites, a particularly blood thirsty people, had taken captive the women and all who were there, small and great, and burned the place to the ground. David and his men were greatly distressed, and grieving to the point of exhaustion. His men were so upset they were ready to stone David. They had lost everything. David had nowhere else to turn except to God. 1 Samuel 30:6 says David "strengthened himself in the Lord his God." Do you see that?! He strengthened HIMSELF in the Lord his God.

When the going gets tough, I strengthen myself in the Lord my God by opening my treasure trove. I love to sink my hands into the gems up to my elbows -- feel the hard edges of the diamonds and sapphires and those smooth round pearls of great value on my skin, running through my fingers. Ink is cheap medicine.

Tomorrow I'll be posting an except from                                                                                        One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.

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