fragrantdevotion

I don’t know how it is for you, but I find that God speaks to me through just about everything in my life.  Of course, I have to be paying attention and I have to be able to recognize His voice from other things that try to masquerade as Him, like my own thoughts, the world or the Enemy.  But the more time I spend in relationship with Him, reading His word, praying, listening, and obeying, my ability to discern His voice from the background noise becomes easier and more natural.

And so it was as I was watching Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  Since the story of Narnia is sort of a metaphor for Jesus it only stands to reason that there would be wonderful, Biblical messages in it.  But for me, within the story there was a very personal and very clear message; “You are not fooling yourself, I have changed you.”

It came toward the end of the film when Edmund, Lucy, Eustace (their very ill-natured cousin), and Caspian were rowing toward Aslan’s country.  Eustace had recently been turned back into a boy by Aslan after becoming a dragon from putting on an enchanted arm bracelet (in the book he turns into a dragon from his ”greedy, dragonish thoughts” ).  Sitting in their small boat Edmund asks Eustace what it was like when Aslan turned him back, and Eustace replies:

“No matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t do it myself. Then He came towards me…it sort of hurt, but it was a good pain. You know, like pulling a thorn from your foot.”¹

The description in the book is a little different, and more detailed.  In the book Aslan comes to Eustace in a dream and tells him to “undress” himself.  Eustace scratches at his dragon skin and peels until he can just step out of it.  But then he notices that he has another smaller skin underneath. So again he scratches, sheds, and steps out of the dragon skin, only to find yet another beneath it.

Then Aslan says, “You will have to let me undress you.”²

Eustace goes on to describe how painful Aslan “undressing” him was.  He says, “…it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.”  Eustace continues, “Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off-just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt — and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly looking than the others had been.”²

Oh how I can relate.  My whole life there were so many things I wanted to change about myself.  But no matter how I hard I tried (and I did try very, very hard), no matter what method I used, no matter how many desperate attempts I made, I could not affect any real or lasting change, particularly in my temperament.   I kept peeling off layer after layer just to find another beneath that was even more hideous to me than the one before it. 

(Which points out a significant difference between Eustace and me.   It wasn’t until he became a dragon that he realized what a disagreeable boy he had been.  I, on the other hand, have always been acutely and painfully aware of how unpleasant I can be.)

For some reason I kept on trying to be someone else even though nothing helped.  But what I didn’t realize through it all is that what I was trying were those things that were the least threatening to my personality. I’m not saying some of it didn’t go deep enough to hurt, I’m saying I chose things to do that fit my temperament.  So they weren’t painful in the way that true change is painful, they were painful in the way that staying the same is painful.  My persona is highly critical, negative and self-deprecating, so the methods I chose to “fix” myself put my faults under the microscope for me to scrutinize, or up on the big screen for others to judge, and just made things worse. 

Eventually I found myself drowning in a quagmire of my own creation.  And it was then that I finally became desperate enough to do the one thing that I had until then been unable to do: I relinquished the aversion to Jesus that I had adopted in response to some early childhood religious experiences, and submitted myself to the authority of Christ. And since that time changes have been occurring in me that I know could only have come from God, because of all those years and ways I’d tried to change myself with no success.  And pretty much every day I pause in awe and wonder because God is transforming me from the dragon that life, circumstance and my polluted way of thinking had turned me into, to someone that is of use to Him and that I can stand to be.

Meanwhile, back in Narnia (the book), it is said, “It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.’  To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses.  There were still many days when he could be very tiresome.  But most of those I shall not notice.  The cure had begun.”

And so it is with me.  I too have relapses, and in those moments my critical viewpoint doubts and disputes that anything really has changed about me. And there are certainly those who might say I haven’t changed at all.  Which is why the loving reassurance I “heard” as I watched the movie meant so much.  It was an affirmation that the cure has begun.  And it is with a grateful and unpretentious heart that I relate to you one of my very personal and intimate experiences of what our powerful, gracious and loving Savior can and will do for us if we will just let Him.

¹The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader 2010

² The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

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I can’t believe I’m doing it – I’m joining the frenzy and blogging about what everyone is talking about this week.  No, not that one; I mean Mother’s Day!  It’s so…conformist of me and for some reason I typically avoid conforming in this kind of way.  I much prefer to leave my conforming to things like being on time, not causing a scene in public, and volunteering for the socially-acceptable amount of things at church and my daughter’s school.

Daughter…that brings me back to Mother’s Day.  I actually have two daughters; well, one and a half.  First there’s our beautiful, brilliant, very creative and extremely willful Emily, who will turn 11 in July.  We met Emily in a very God-like way (which is a story for another time) not quite 5 years ago.  Her adoption of us was final December 19, 2008.  She’s the one.

My other daughter is Emily’s almost 3 year old half sister who is still our foster child.  We nicknamed her Izzy and we don’t yet know if we get to keep her.  We have loved Izzy since the moment we received the call saying she was born, we met her for the first time about 10 weeks later, and she has lived with us since she was 7 months old.  I call her my “half” daughter not because I only love her a little, but because despite the fact that in my heart and hers we are mother and daughter she is not legally mine.

The story of me finally becoming a mother at 45 is complicated and full of so many God-incidences that it needs to be told at another time.  What is on my heart to share now is what I have been thinking about this week as I approach my 5th Mother’s Day since Emily came to live with us.

Every time I try to write about this it gets too complicated and it ends up sounding like I’m just venting about my mom and dad’s weaknesses and failures as parents.  But some of the “negative” is important to tell because it provides a perspective on what I really want to talk about, so I will state here loud and clear: I love both my parents very much.  They gave me the best of what they had to give, and I forgive them for not being able to provide many things that are critical for a child to grow up well-adjusted, healthy and equipped for this broken world.  I understand that many of their shortcomings are because their parents fell short in providing for them as well.  In other words, it’s generational.  Probably back to Adam and Eve…

So to keep it simple, I arrived at adulthood fully equipped as follows:

Of course, my parents also gave me some extremely useful tools for my bag: loyalty, perseverance, fairness, passionate conviction, a strong work ethic; all of which saved me from a life even more painful than the one that I ended up creating.

Fast forward, if you will, through a lot of missteps, bumps, bruises, broken bones and almost destroying my marriage, as well as past our deciding that since we could not have children of our own and because private adoption is so expensive, we’d just live our lives loving on other people’s kids.

Then God said, and I quote, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”  Actually, what he said was, “Alana, stop being so selfish, I have something for you to do.”  And so it was, about a year after dropping out of foster parent orientation because I couldn’t handle the thought of falling in love with a child only to see them returned home (no matter what the circumstances), God made me a mom in a way so miraculous that it would even give an atheist reason to pause.

What is even more astonishing and wonderful to me is how God took a very broken little girl (me), and answered her lifelong prayer to be part of something really, truly important, by bringing into her life three other very broken little girls (Emily, Izzy and bio-mom).  And that important thing, much to my surprise (I’d imagined some combination of Mother Teresa and Celine Dion), was the most precious of all things on earth; a family.

And as if that were not enough, God has shown me that His vision of my future is one far beyond what I would dream or hope for.  It includes healing for me, for my girls, for bio-mom, for my parents, and for many others that I may never even know about.  And all it will cost me is my agenda and a lot of obedience.  A swell deal, don’t you agree?

So now I want to get down to what this is really all about.  It is about is me acknowledging and praising God for the work He is doing in and through me.  It is about gratitude for the Holy Spirit living inside me, calling, nudging and urging me forward every day of my life.  And it is about me accepting and confessing that God has made me something I never believed I could be: whole.  Not perfect (fortunately God is not done with me yet), whole.

As an illustration I’ll share a little story.  It was last summer and I was sitting around a table with some other moms.  Our daughters were all in art camp together and the last day we decided to take the afternoon off before picking up the girls and have lunch together.  I sat there listening and watching and felt totally out of place.  You see, I had nothing from my childhood to relate it to.  There had been no play dates, no after school activities, no mommy groups, no sleepovers.  Everything I knew about family and a “typical” middle-class childhood was from outside observation.

And as I sat there, listening to these genuinely nice and friendly women chit chat and laugh I thought, “They don’t understand that I don’t belong here.”  And they didn’t, because, you see, I did belong there.  I’ve earned my mommy badge, I’ve “paid my dues”, I’m not just a waste of space.  Not because of anything that I have done, but just because I am God’s precious and deeply loved child.

It’s like the day when I was sitting in a training class listening to other foster parents talk about all the kids that had passed through their home or that they had adopted.  I was thinking I wasn’t good enough, that what I was doing was unimportant because at that time we were only fostering Emily.  Then “that” voice inside me said, in a way that even I could not argue with, “Emily would think what you’re doing is important.”

“I thank you Lord for your faithfulness throughout my life even when I did not know or recognize you, even when I turned away from you.  My whole life you placed in my heart desires that were right and good, and though I often looked for love in all the wrong places you never gave up on me.

I am amazed and humbled by the changes I see in myself, changes that can only be your hand.  I know this because of how many years I tried to fix myself, to make myself the loving, nurturing, caring and generous person my heart ached to be. 

You and I both know the results of my efforts.  I love how you do not wave my failures in my face, but rather you beckon me to come closer, because your ways are the ways of life and peace and unspeakable joy.  And I love that you are doing all of this for your purposes, your glory, and because you love me.

And I thank you for being a God who invites us all to join you in the work you are doing all around, and for asking us to sacrifice everything for your glory just as you sacrificed everything for us.  Your love is truly amazing.” 

Okay, now to comment on the other subject everyone is talking about.

• Human solution: Kill the wretch and gloat.
• God’s solution:  Redeem the wretch, celebrate his return and invite everyone, then send him back out to do Kingdom work.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go looking for one of those parties.

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