FRUIT

Fruit has been on my mind all morning. Perhaps it was spurred by the news story I heard about the cold temperatures in Florida freezing the oranges. I tend to think though, as I meander through this slow-moving day, that God wants me to closely examine, squeeze and even sniff the fragrance of my own. He wants me to really push forth sweet and tender little buds and then fully birth a product of excellence---something fresh and tempting to others. Tasty and sweet with His perfect goodness.

God reminded me today that every interaction I have is to be one of excellent fruit. Through this, He will become that thing others seek to fill the empty, high-hanging limbs of their bare-naked spiritual lives.

"No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks" (Luke 6:43-45).

God just knows how to speak directly into our hearts, doesn't He? The only way that evil would be leaking out of us would be if we were not in right standing with Him. Because He is perfect and good, nothing could ever be produced but that which is perfect and good. 

Sometimes the worm that burrows into our hearts is the most subtle and damaging. Bitterness comes to mind. It is easy to take an anthill offense and build a mountain of it. Many moats are dug and tightly-bricked prisons designed from a simple incorrect word, an overlooking or tone of voice. We humans have made taking an offense an easily accessible artform---quite user-friendly. Unfortunately, when we allow these offenses to creepy-crawl into the heart of our fruit, the result is a bitter tasting, unattractive product that no one wants. 

My desire for myself, and for others, is to bear fruit that, when squeezed, brings forth a sweet and tantalizing fragrance. One that God could fully utilize to draw more pickers to His grove!

c 01/05/2010 M. LaPointe 

BEING "EMO"

Risking sounding morbid and depressing, I again write with feeling and emotion choking my heart. I am careful though, to tiptoe carefully over the fragile eggs of not allowing emotions to rule me. The kids at school call all of this emotional outletting, "being emo." I get that term but cannot accept its implications. They are too shallow.

What they possibly don't see is that there is great value in examining the direction we have been going. Have our feet been kicking up dust on the twisty, downward trail leading away from our Daddy? There is only one way and, "Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it" (Mat.7:13). It's a straight and narrow path---there are no confusing side trails webbed with tangling vines and pitfalls. 

There is enormous wisdom in backtracking and staring straight on at what very well might have been a bad choice. Adrian Rogers said, "Wisdom is not getting all wet around the lashes and warm around the heart. It is having a mind that is stayed on God, full of the Word of God, and led by the Spirit of God." Yep!

And then, the most important thing, is allowing God to speak into prepared, softened and repentant hearts. God will open hearts (and eyes), further to all that needs repair and redirection when we kneel beneath His outstretched arms. It's all in the asking...ask Him and He will respond. Repent and receive a cleansing waterfall of forgiveness.

I have been awake since the wee hours of this morning...unable to sleep, praying, asking, pleading, begging Daddy for that which I have no power to change. That realization has been my constant companion for a little over a year now.

So many think that their prayers will give them exactly what they want wrapped up with a pretty bow. I knew, though, as I knelt in front of the chair on the winter-cold floor, that what I asked for might bring more pain at first. I knew that trust was necessary.

I knew, as I wept, that when the Word came to me from Luke 18:1, "Then He spoke a parable to them, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart," that God was shining a beam directly on my sore spot. Isn't it interesting that praying is joined closely with keeping the heart full of hope??? Again, the hope. Again and again.

So, no "emo" raging against the night stuff for me. I am going straight to the heart of this matter. How can I turn my pain into HIS gain? How can this be reshaped into the beauty peeking out from beneath? How can I allow God to work this out for HIS good?How can I get out of the way?

c 01/04/2010 M. LaPointe

Coloring In The Lines

There is a moment when one realizes that they are different. For me it was as if I had suddenly discovered that I had grown gigantic and remarkable antlers. It was Christmas Eve and I was perhaps 10 years old. My father was putting together a life-sized styrofoam dinosaur for my youngest brother and I had many questions. They seemed important and logical, but my father was not thrilled with my verbal processing...of everything. 

Suddenly, I began to understand that the different hues, the unique shaping of things, the playfulness of words I experienced did not coincide with the rest of the world's.

As a very young child, I was excited by the flutter of moths on the window screens in the early evening, the thunder and squeal of trains, or a deep pine-scented summer forest, the sound of a screen door smacking the frame or creaking on rusted hinges, the rustle of a pre-storm breeze picking up through the treetops, the glitter and shape of river rocks and the fish smell of the seaweedy ocean. First snows or below zero temperatures sent me into a frenzy of joy! I was intrigued by the shape of cat's eyes and their silent, calm stares, spoke into the hearts of horses and dogs, watched the green heads of crocuses busting through the soil like brave soldiers or the buds on my grandfather's lilacs as if they were newborn children. I rescued and patched and put together odd collections of things in my heart that made sense only to me.

Like the sifting down of finely grained snow, still wet and cold, it hit me that December night. I AM DIFFERENT! Perhaps it would have been an exceptional and wonderful realization if it had fit within some sort of family norm: if it had not frightened my father, annoyed my mother, if my endless questions and energy had not tired others, if the writing and writing and writing and endless reading, was not against the parochial upbringing. No, I didn't color within the lines.

My first reading of Psalm 139 was transformational. Why? Because the certainty that I was not an accident, a family fluke, a "weirdo," as an uncle once called me, became clear. God don't make no junk, a wise person once said.

Psalm 139 opens with the verse that shows real Abba Daddy love, "O, Lord, You have searched me and know me." Isn't it amazing that anyone would even try to know or understand us in such a deep way? Knowing precludes lack of interest. To God, no matter what we feel, we are not invisible.

The Psalm continues, "You know my sitting down and my rising up; You understand my thought afar off ." Whew! What a relief! Someone understands. The self-imposed requirement to figure out and explain everything is lifted. We are understood by the Creator of the Universe! Pretty heady stuff..

"You comprehend my path, and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord,You know it altogether." He knows everything about us, even our strangest idiosyncrasies and foibles. He saw where we were headed and where we are now headed. Yet...He still loves us.

"You have hedged me behind and before, and laid Your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it." The picture this conjures is one of ultimate protection and guidance. We are hedged in with His love. He's got our backs. Even though our understanding is limited, this is TRUTH.

Further on in this Psalm, " For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise You for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest part of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them." We are created beings, created with a purpose and a plan. Our very substance--that which we ARE--was seen and known by the Creator. Each characteristic He chose to DNA into us, was purposefully placed there to bear fruit.

Next time you see antlers spring from your head remember that God placed those unique antlers there for a reason. And...He loves you with a perfection that is simply not found in the world.

c 01/03/2010 M. LaPointe

NO NEXT THING

You know what I did last week? I discarded my hope file. Yes. It was actually labeled HOPES and DREAMS. It originally began when I was young and followed me through every college, city, and move. It was precious to me. It represented mountain cedar scented droplets of hope---not just for things, but for a vital, exciting life waterfalling into a big, stainless steel bucket. It was chock full of clippings, photos, and interesting tidbits of decorating or living information.

But, I threw it away. I dragged the HUGE, clear trash bag downstairs knowing that that particular file was in it. I hauled it (with some difficulty, I might add), to the side of the road. I wanted to get it as far away from me as possible. None of those dreams had ever panned out. No next thing sparkled with dewy newness on the far distant hill for me.

I remember someone once telling me, after the death of my beloved grandmother (Bobbie), that she was a very disappointed woman all of her life. One would never have known that about her. I often wondered after hearing that, if she suffered watching her dreams swirl away like mini tornados into one sunset after another. I felt saddened at the thought that she lived with no next thing. Nothing to look forward to. The death of all that glitters and shines in one's heart. That made me sad then---then, when I still hugged and cuddled with my dreams every night. And yet...well, I threw mine away.

This act, this seeming betrayal, this throwing my 54 year old hands up in the air in surrender and discarding a piece of my history, is resoundingly about how there just doesn't seem to be any next thing. There is no point in saving yellowed, curling magazine pages and dried and pasted cut outs. Although leaving that bag at the roadside brought a rush of memories and tears, I was pricklingly aware that the Word says, "For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope" (Jer.29:11).

There it is. God is the One Who provides our hope. When I thought on those words as I was walking back toward the house, I realized that pieces of me must be whittled away to make room for God's newer plans. I might have forgotten but God has not forgotten the desires of my heart or His original plans for my life. He even says next, "Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you" (Jer. 29:12). He knows AND He listens.

My Daddy is aware that I am unable to grasp the perfect jewels He is offering right now. So He offers what I CAN handle. And I pray that each hauled out trash bag full of my old dreams is replaced by God's big handful of perfect and new next things!

c 01/03/10 M. LaPointe

ENTER 2010

Ok. It is almost midnight and, even as my eyes droop, my fingers fly over this keyboard in response to my racing thoughts. I am struck with how upended I have been throughout most of 2009. I was, at first, embarrassed by the depth of my feelings of pain and loss. But, I have learned to live with unbidden tears. I have learned to accept that others find this grief trivial and unimportant. I now understand that my grip was not the sound binding that could hold him.

My up-endedness was not intentional, of course, but situational and quite unexpected. It disarmed me spiritually, ripping away my protective garment of praise. My joy. I hurt in ways that I was unaware that a human being could.

I have been living outside of my own skin most of this time, wondering how I would cover myself. Unable to draw the necessary deep, cleansing breath that leads to connection with my Father, I have been adrift in a cold, cold ocean, devoid of discernment or compassion.

In a quiet, desperate and singular way, my heart, that keeping receptacle of all that I am, has been shattered, causing teeny tiny shards to puncture my confidence of who I am in Christ. After all, why would He want a relationship with someone who allowed this to happen in her own home??!!

I have learned things though (things I would have preferred not to have had to learn). But because God is always, always good, always listens to my cries, is patient, full of love, FORGIVING, and systematically using the pain to teach and guide me, I am beginning to arise from my crazy.

The lessons that have been found on the island of me, like a gemmed and jeweled buried treasure, have become fortification. It's a comfort to know that this is built into God's plan. There had been no sound here on the island of me but the lapping of a hungry sea on a well-salted shoreline...but then I began to hear things...God things. 

I have been reminded of this; "He found him in a desert land and in the wasteland, a howling wilderness; He encircled him, He instructed him, He kept him as the apple of His eye. As an eagle stirs up its nest, hovers over its young, spreading out its wings, taking them up, carrying them on its wings, so the Lord alone led him and there was no foreign god with him"(Deut.32:10-12).

Adrian Rogers speaks about this, "Now if you are experiencing trouble, realize the Lord Himself may be bringing your life the discipline of DIVINE DISTURBANCE. All of us who are Christians like it easy. We don't want any conflict or difficulty. We may resist change. We like it in the nest, don't we? But God has a purpose for disturbing our comfort and security. He wants us to discover the wings of faith that are going to bring us to a fuller life. He wants us to know the joys of flying." 

I am aware that I am not yet ready to leave this island, that God still has some things to do. I will be comforted by this as I sit in isolation; "The Lord builds up Jerusalem; He gathers together the outcasts of Israel. He heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds" (Psalm 147:2-3).

c 01/01/2010 M. LaPointe