57. Of Ships and Sheep

In my later twenties, I worked with Youth for Christ as a Youth Guidance counsellor. That meant I worked with troubled teens and juvenile delinquents. One summer we had an opportunity to take a 10-day trip on the Robertson II (photo), a 110-foot gaff-rigged schooner, which was identical to the famous Blue Nose pictured on the Canadian dime. I and a couple of my unruly charges embarked with 20 or 30 other more “normal” teens and various YFC staff and volunteers on an exhilarating adventure with the full-time crew of the vessel.

The massive wooden mainmast of the boat was anchored to the structure of the deck with steel cables. These cables were called stays. When we were under sail, the mighty mast would creak and groan, especially in rougher weather, but it was secure in its upright position because it was “stayed” to the main structure of the vessel.

It is this meaning of the word stayed that comes to mind when I think of Isaiah 26:3: “Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee.” I am thinking of that verse this morning as I quietly ponder the first part of the first verse of Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd….”

If He is my shepherd, then I am His sheep. Sheep are not known for their intelligence. Their shepherd is a whole lot smarter than they are. As we read in 1 Corinthians 1:25, the foolishness of God is wiser than the smartest person in the world. Moving that thought into the sheep metaphor, we can safely say, “The foolishness of the shepherd is wiser than the smartest sheep”—much wiser!

This encourages me to cast all my worries and cares upon Him.¹ Why would a sheep waste her energy worrying about all the things that concern her life and the lives of the precious sheep around her that she loves so much? The Shepherd knows what He’s doing, and He wants to carry my burdens and dissolve my fears. He has the best interests of all the sheep foremost in His mind, and He is all-wise, all-powerful, and all-loving. “We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.”²

When I turn my anxieties over to Him in a posture of trust and gratitude, He gives me, according to His promise, His peace in return³. Peace. Peace. The most foundational part of my inheritance in Christ. When I am troubled, I take the time to identify the issues that are tying up my thoughts, my emotions, and my guts. I choose to untie myself, disentangle myself, from those issues and instead tie myself to Him. I stay my mind on Him the way the mainmast of that sailing vessel was stayed to the deck.

The mainmast is my life. God Himself is the solid wooden structure of that ship. Those cables are my faith. No matter how rough the storm, no matter how much the buffeting of the wind causes my frame to shudder and groan, I can stay upright and secure, because I am anchored to a deeper reality that cannot be shaken.⁴ He keeps me “in perfect peace.” Or rather, His offer is there on the table. I have to take it up, and some days, labouring under the weight of family concerns, I have to struggle to lay hold of that peace.

Just yesterday, my dear husband was texting someone with an exhortation, dictating into his phone. He quoted the Psalmist: “’Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’”⁵ Then he commented, “That’s a choice.”

I overheard, and his statement arrested me. I pondered it. Jesus has made every provision for me to live in peace, but I must choose, with my will, to lay hold of it by faith; trust that what He says is true. Then I will discover that indeed it is, because He then pours His grace into the vacuum of my fear.

Easier said than done, I think as I write this. Then I suddenly remember a text that I sent to someone, not even a week ago. I look it up, and I find my own words speaking back to me:

I want to encourage you … to take your fears to God. He is the only one who can unburden you. Remember, when you are anxious, to take all your concerns to Him and spell them out one by one, with thanksgiving, and wait on Him until He gives you His peace in place of the anxiety.⁶ Do not ask or worry about tomorrow; today has enough concerns of its own.⁷  Give your whole family over to God, over and over, until you are able to truly release the burden to Him.… You are carrying such an impossible weight for … your family. You are so weary and heavy laden, and He wants to give you rest,⁸ a rest that you have not yet fully known.

This article is a lesson, to this point, in laying hold of the things—like unshakable peace—that God has prepared for those who love him,⁹ things intended to be had in the here and now. It’s not an easy lesson to assimilate, and it’s not for milk-fattened babies¹⁰; it is hearty, life-giving—but sometimes tough—meat for those who have grown a solid set of spiritual molars. If you can chew it and digest it, it will strengthen you mightily.¹¹ 

But memories of the Robertson II also bring to mind my “salvation,” when I became a sheep of His flock; when He left the 99 others, came after the one that was lost, and carried her back to the flock. He answered the deep cry of my heart, a cry I didn’t really know was there until He answered it. The experience opened up a whole new world to me, filling me with an ever-deepening longing for more, and making life an adventure at a deep level never before touched.

Likewise, the thrill of being out at sea on that huge sailing vessel awakened something in me of such magnitude that it became an analogy for the deep joy of “discovering” God.  These thoughts stirred me so deeply, back in the day, that I wrote them out in a song shortly after coming back to civilization.

The Call of the Sea

I was not a young girl

In the eyes of the world

When I first felt the call of the sea

But no matter the age

It burned inside me like a rage

And it seemed it’d always been there calling me

 

How do you describe the call of the sea

To one who’s satisfied where he lives?

How can I describe to you the ache inside of me

For the thrill the wide ocean gives?

 

As you set out to sea

You’ll feel you’ve been set free

Though you never realized you were bound

And as you crest each new wave

It’s like another step out of the grave

Your spirit will rejoice in what you’ve found

 

—Musical Interlude—

 

I was not a young girl

And I’d seen too much of the world

When I first felt the call of the Lord

I awoke with a start

As He spoke right to my heart

With a voice I’d have been a fool to have ignored

 

How do you describe the call of the Lord

To one who’s never heard it inside?

How can I describe to you the one that I adore

When your vision’s so distorted with pride?

 

To describe the call of God

Might seem a trifle odd

Like to describe the longing call of the sea

But I’m such a happy girl

Since I walked out of the world

And answered the call inside of me

 

—Nancy Fowler, August 1982

 

If we have heard the call of the Lord, and if we keep listening, we will find that He never stops calling. Whether we are lost lambs or mature sheep, He is always beckoning us onward and upward, toward a fuller life in Him.

_________________

 

1. 1 Peter 5:7

2.   Psalm 100:3c

3. Philippians 4:6-7 

4. Hebrews 12:26-28

5. Psalm 23:4

6. Philippians 4:6-7 

7. Matthew 6:34

8. Matthew 11:28 

9. 1 Corinthians 2:9ff

10. Hebrews 5:12-13

11. Hebrews 5:14

 

 

56. Reptiles in the Basement

Recently I was reading a Life Lessons article from the six-months series I began in 2001. It was very intriguing as I had no recollection of this piece, and even though it was written a couple of decades ago, it is so applicable to life today—in a much broader perspective than family.

 

*  *  *

 

And God spake unto Israel in the visions of the night (Genesis 46:2a).

*  *  *

Saturday morning. I should have been able to sleep in, but Rachel’s alarm had been left on and it went off at 6:30 a.m. I jumped out of bed to get it, but she switched it off before I could get to my door. I crawled back into bed, bugged that a good sleep had been cut short. Then I reminded myself that God always has His reasons.

What was that dream I had just been having? Oooo . . . creepy.

We had moved into a different house. Financial difficulty had finally made it easier to move into a smaller, run-down house, rather than to stay in our nice house and fight the pressure. The main floor didn’t look too bad; it’d just had a fresh coat of paint, so cosmetically there was a good face on it.

In the dream, it was the day of the high school’s Big Band Dinner Dance, just as it was in real life. My awareness of the time-frame was God’s way of saying to me, “This is your life, right now.” I was amazed to find us already moved into this new place: I didn’t even remember making the move. Obviously it had happened fast and easily—so fast, in fact, that I hadn’t even seen the basement yet. I decided to go down and have a look.

The basement presented a much different picture from the main floor. There had been no effort made here to cover up the true state of the house. It was dirty, and the concrete floor was cracked and uneven. I saw an old cellar door, stuck slightly ajar. Just outside the door was a poor little cat. It was tied with a heavy cord, one end attached to the wall and the other end tied tightly around its middle, tight enough that the cat could not squirm out of it. (Knowing cats, that’s pretty tight!) However, the cat did not seem to be in much distress; it was used to the discomfort by now. It had plainly been kept there a long time.

I shoved open the creaky door, the bottom scraping across the floor as I pushed. Inside I found another cat, tied the same way as the first. Then I saw something that made my skin crawl. It was a bucket full of strange little reptiles, like salamanders and newts. Most of them were natural, dark colours, but the occasional one was bright yellow, screaming scarlet, or lime green. They had crept in through cracks in the foundation and were now proliferating in this rusty old bucket, one or two of them slipping over the edge now and then as the bucket became too full.

Now I saw why the cats had been kept captive there: they killed and ate the overflow. The cat inside the door got most of them, but now and then a creature would slip out the ill-fitting door, and then the other cat would catch it.

Lord, what does this mean? Is this a spiritual dream, or just random ramblings of my mind? Are You trying to speak to me? The thoughts began to come:

Reptiles, to me, always represent the powers of darkness. Jesus spoke all in one breath of “serpents and scorpions and . . . all the power of the enemy” (Luke 10:19). This was clearly a picture of spiritual oppression. Evil spirits. There were evidently some cracks in our foundation where these repulsive beings were getting in; now they were proliferating right inside our home.

This brought to mind the heaviness that Greg and I experience over some of the choices we have found our teenage children making. How many times have I said that I had a “knot in my gut” as I have tried to pray against the things I see happening! Just like those poor little cats, both tied with a knot around the belly, we are trying to destroy (through prayer) the manifestations that are spilling out of that bucket. The bucket, perhaps, represents the lives of our children. Greg would be the cat outside the door; he’s away from home a lot, but he deals with the things that get away on me, the things I can’t handle on my own.

The worst part of this scenario is that these two cats are spending all their efforts in cleaning up the over-flow, dealing with the final symptoms, their guts in a knot, and no freedom or perspective to deal with the real source of the problem. The breach in the foundation needs to be repaired.

This ugly house is not the place that God chose for us to live; we find ourselves living in this situation because of pressures we could no longer resist. Similarly, in real life, spiritually, we find that we have moved from where God intended us to live. We have succumbed to worldly pressures that have slowly invaded, as our children have persistently tuned to certain radio stations and brought certain magazines and videos into the home. They are very typical kids, and the media they gravitate to reflect worldly values. These media portray attitudes that run to the irreverent, reckless, and rebellious, or that are preoccupied with superficial beauty and ungodly attitudes toward relationships and sex.

Our foundation has been breached as we’ve slowly given in to the insidious and continual pressure of these things. Now there are some strongholds of certain attitudes in our children, spiritually unhealthy kinds of thinking that are reproducing and multiplying right in this house.

The house in my dream has freshly painted walls on the main floor—a good enough front to present to the rest of the world. You’d never guess that underneath, down in the basement, there are some potentially serious issues that need to be addressed.

As I think about all of this, it seems like a weight settles on me, stifling me. I find myself resisting the interpretation of the dream as it comes, hoping that this isn’t really what God is telling me, because it’s too hard to deal with—the thought of trying to change things now. If over the years we have found ourselves gradually less able to uphold as high a standard of godliness as we would have liked—as our children have grown older and been more and more exposed to the ways of the world—how impossible to turn the tide now! How unreasonable to suddenly try to clamp down on our kids and forcibly prevent them from hearing and seeing and doing certain things! They are at an age where they rightfully are making more and more of their own decisions about their lives, just as God intended. They are finding out who they are, who God created them to be, and their journey may take them, at times, in a rather roundabout way. If we were to try to drastically increase control now, we would probably incite full-fledged rebellion. “Provoke not your children to wrath,” is a solemn caution to parents.¹

Even as I feel this heaviness, though, this dread of trying to deal with the problems, I sense God reassuring me: His way of addressing these issues is not the way of coercion and bondage. Not between Him and us; not between us and our children. He will not put on us a weight too grievous to be borne.² All the ways of the Lord are mercy and truth.³ “Come now, and let us reason together,” He says.⁴

Just as He wants to sit and talk with us, He wants to teach us how to sit and discourse and truly communicate with our children. We can continue to nurture and admonish them in the Lord,⁵ gently correcting and teaching, every day. Trying to restrict our children’s choices at this point would be like trying to remove all of the reptiles. It’s a short-sighted plan. We need, rather, to repair the foundation.

The truth of God is our sure foundation. Where the truth has been breached, He will show us how to apply more truth as needed, carrying it with us like a bucket of mortar in one hand and a trowel in the other: here a little, there a little.

Even as God promises to extend mercy and truth to us, He will show us how to extend mercy and truth to our children: guidance based not on fear but on faith—faith in God’s ability to save them to the uttermost.⁶

Let them repair the breaches of the house, wheresoever any breach shall be found (II Kings 12:5b).

_____________________

1) Ephesians 6:4a; 

2) cf. Luke 11:46; 

3) Psalm 25:10; 

4) Isaiah 1:18; 

5) Ephesians 6:4b; 

6) Hebrews 7:25