Woman On A Mission Ministry

In times of peace I drift away from You.  Like float­ing on a quiet river in cool temps, I effort­lessly slide away.  Nap­ping, I wake to find I’m removed; You, dis­tant.  Peace­ful waters hide dan­gers worth remem­ber­ing. There is where I long to be—in the shadow of the Almighty, no mat­ter how delight­ful the nap.  Surely by now our rela­tion­ship is deep enough that storms are not nec­es­sary.  The trip back to inti­macy feels like a neck-high trudge upstream.  I reach for You, strain­ing against the cur­rent.  Like Angelo’s fresco, arms out­stretched but not touch­ing.  Stuck in space.  How did I wind up here?  How do I avoid a sim­i­lar trip?

Yes, I’m grate­ful for the calm and quiet but not at the expense of inti­macy.  Ah!  Could that be my help, tucked into the shad­ows of my thoughts?  When the lazy river wants to draw me down­stream, may sweet, deep grat­i­tude bridge the dis­tance before it even appears.

As you there­fore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him,
hav­ing been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and estab­lished in your faith,
just as you were instructed, and over­flow­ing with grat­i­tude.
Colos­sians 2:6–7

Luke 8:22 – 25

Now on one of those days Jesus and His dis­ci­ples got into a boat, and he said to hem, “Let us go over to the other side of the lake.” So they launched out. But as they were sail­ing along, He fell asleep; and a fierce gale of wind descended on the lake, and they began to be swamped and to be in dan­ger. They came to Jesus and woke Him up say­ing, “ Mas­ter, Mas­ter, we are per­ish­ing!” and He got up and rebuked the wind and the surg­ing waves, and they stopped and it became calm. And He said to them, “Where is your faith?”

Jesus’ ques­tion to His dis­ci­ples implies that their faith had fal­tered even though He was right there with them, in the flesh. For most of us, just the oppo­site is true: in the midst of storms, our faith rises to the occa­sion. And when the seas of life are calm, that is when our faith is slug­gish. We don’t need Jesus to do any­thing for us, and so, we ignore Him. But do we EVER pray for storms so that our faith may flour­ish? No way. Our prayers are pep­pered with requests for ease, com­fort, and good health. Yet, when those prayers are granted, life can be down right dull and our faith wimpy. There’s noth­ing to prompt us to des­per­ately cling to God.

The dis­ci­ples in the boat came to know Jesus as their Refuge and Deliv­erer. They expe­ri­enced His power — and a mir­a­cle —first­hand! While we might still find it hard to pray for storms, maybe now we can relax a bit when they do come, know­ing that with­out them we might never know aspects of Jesus that are only dis­cov­ered amid fierce winds and crash­ing waves.

Eph­esians 2:10: For we are God’s work­man­ship, cre­ated in Christ Jesus for good works which God pre­pared before­hand so that we would walk in them.

Abun­dant life: a promise to be believed or is Jesus just kid­ding? That’s what I began to won­der as I stum­bled yet again upon the irri­tat­ing verse:

I have come that they might have life and have it abun­dantly. ~ Jesus, John 10:10b

Irri­tat­ing because I had long ago decided that I believed Jesus and the Bible, yet life abun­dant eluded me. And kept on elud­ing me for years. A Christ-follower for more than twenty years, sold-out and secure in my rela­tion­ship with Him, I was doing all I knew to do and being all I knew to be as a Chris­t­ian. Yet I could not lay claim to “abun­dant life.” Para­dox­i­cally, I was a happy per­son; life was good. With a won­der­ful fam­ily and a close-knit com­mu­nity of believ­ers around me, I had lit­tle to com­plain about. But I was rest­less, frus­trated and confused—clearly not expe­ri­enc­ing abun­dant life. Some­thing was miss­ing. “Fail­ure to thrive” was a dis­ease I’d con­tracted along the way. If Jesus was telling the truth–that abun­dant life was avail­able to me, where was the cure for my dis-ease?

My Work Worth Doing

Over time God showed me the miss­ing piece: We were cre­ated to know Him per­son­ally and to part­ner with Him in His pur­poses. When we dis­cover and embrace both, the rela­tion­ship worth hav­ing— with Jesus— and work worth doing, the good works pre­pared for us in advance, we will then expe­ri­ence life worth liv­ing—the abun­dant life He came to give me. It’s what John Piper calls The Best Life —

They get help. We get joy. God gets glory.

What glo­ri­fies the Father, thrills the soul! God-ordained work is not dri­ven by “ought-to’s,” oblig­a­tion, and duty. It comes from deep, sin­cere “want to’s,” pas­sion, and delight. And it’s avail­able to all. No, Jesus is not just kidding.