Adjusting the sails

We cannot always direct the tenor and severity of the wind of life that blows at us, we but can certainly adjust the sails.

We can adjust the sails and even as we do so the day comes when you gather the strength of spirit so high that you not only adjust the sails, but you also threaten the sacred cow that seeks to intimidate you.

Confronting our difficulties is sometimes as necessary as praying them away.

Dousing self importance
This week has been a week filled with God’s abundant grace; and I have had to stoop and choose humility and compassion in a situation where I really might have chosen fury. I believe that in choosing meekness instead of fury, I threatened the sacred cow that sought to intimidate and imprison me in the stronghold of pride and self-importance. Note, self-importance – not self-assurance which I spoke/wrote about some days ago, for these are two totally opposing dispositions.

We can adjust the sails and choose faith, hope and love as the principles that will bind and govern our behaviours and responses. For in doing that you not only demonstrate self-mastery but you also exhibit faith, hope and love.

Faith, hope and love
But even as I think self-mastery is a crucial and critical tool for this C21st living, I am convinced that faith, hope and love are ancient tools of the art of living. I haven’t mastered these myself but I certainly must. For with faith, we exhibit an acceptance that we are creators of The Creator; with hope we demonstrate our reliance on The Creator; and with love we express the gladness of faith and hope’s profit and dividend.

The ancient Holy Scriptures speak to the importance and significance of love. And as we approach St Valentine’s day it is heart warning to speak of love!

But we really should speak of love not as the verb but as a noun. We should speak of the Love that is governed by faith, hope and love. For the verb to love today has become synonymous with falsities. The falsities of sending red roses to your sweetheart on St Valentine’s day when you know that you haven’t really respected nor loved him/her. The roses sit on her/his table rather as a trophy of falsities as opposed to a testimony of your endearment.

The falsities of ‘treating’ your partner to a weekend at that exquisite resort for St.Valentine only for you to sneak away at moments during the weekend to make that call, send that text or that BB IM to your ‘bit on the side’. These are the falsities that keep us worshiping the sacred cow of pride and self-importance, even as we nurture and feed the cycle of vulnerability.

The greatest of these is Love
But let us talk about the noun Love. Love, founded on faith and hope. Love, which really ought to govern all things. For if Love governed all things we might really all know a happier existence. Love has chosen though, in tenderness and affection, to allow us the liberty of mind and the freedom to choose Him, Love, or to choose love. I am convinced that Love’s premise in doing that is to permit us the independence of mind to realise that love fails but Love abides.

But when we persist in love, the doings and undoings of love, catastrophe strikes. The catastrophes of denial and despair. The catastrophe of love may strike once, it may strike twice or it may even strive five hundred times. I have surely experienced love’s catastrophe a number of times – as a giver of catastrophe and a recipient of catastrophe. Either way, love always deceived and injured both the do-er and do-ee.

Love, rather, is the way to go.

Wheels within wheels
Incredibly as I was writing this piece, I was led to read the book of Ezekiel. As I read Eugene Peterson’s introduction of the book of Ezekiel, I understood why I had been led to the piece. Mr Peterson. He writes:

Catastrophe strikes and a person’s world falls apart. People respond variously, but two of the more common responses are denial and despair. Denial refuses to acknowledge the catastrophe. It shuts its eyes tight, it takes refuge in distractions and lies and fantasies. Despair is paralysed by the catastrophe and accepts it as the end of the world. It is unwilling to do anything, concluding that life for all intents and purposes is over. Despair listlessly closes its eyes to a world in which all the colour has drained out, a world gone dead...... But Ezekiel saw. He saw what the people with whom he lived either couldn’t see or wouldn’t see...God was at work in a catastrophic era. The denial people refused to see that the catastrophe was in fact catastrophic. How could it be? God wouldn’t let anything that bad happened to them. Ezekiel showed them. He showed them that, yes, there was catastrophe, but God was at work in the catastrophe, sovereignly using the catastrophe. He showed them so that they would be able to embrae God in the worst of times

Might we this Love week, forget those things which are behind? Might we forget the love ways of the past? Might we chose to reach forth to those things which are before us? Might we press, towards the mark, of the higher calling, that’s laid up for us in Love?

Happy Love Week!