The One Place to Lay My Head

Throughout my life, I've felt this restlessness. Like there was nowhere for me to be still and lay the full weight of my being that I might experience full acceptance, comfort and relief.

Jesus felt the same way when He walked upon the earth. He was far from heaven where He dwelt in perfect unity with the Father. 

If you look at the four gospels (Matthew 26:36, Mark 1:35, Luke 9:18, and John 17:1), you'll see that Jesus spent a plenitude of time in prayer. Like He was getting some face-to-face time with His heavenly Father to remind Him who He was, why He was here and where He was going.

Who He Was:

Jesus knew He was the Son of God. As the Son, He has always existed in perfect unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. 

He has no beginning and no end (Revelation 1:8). From the breath of His mouth the universe was made (Psalm 33:6). 
Even though He knew this about Himself, He didn't strut around demanding that all people bow at His feet and pay Him homage. No, He was completely humble. That is what makes Him so approachable. He fully accepts those who come to Him. 

He says to each one of us:

"Come to Me all you who labor and are heavy laden 

and I will give you rest..."

Matthew 11:28-30

Why He was here:

Jesus once commented to His disciples that He had "no place to lay His head (Luke 9:58)."

This of course was figurative. Meaning that He could never settle here. Not that He was restless, but He chose to come to this world for a reason. This crazy, messy, beautifully-broken place that was not His home. 

The King of the universe, who dwelt in inapproachable light in heaven came to this often dark world to complete a mission.

That mission was for us.

To save us.

It may not seem apparent at times, but we are drowning in sin. We only get to live one life and then the judgement (Hebrews 9:27). 

Do we really think we deserve to go to heaven, to be with God forever? To the place where His glory dwells? Where there is no sin?

Unless we are living in denial, none of us can claim to be without sin. And that means none of us deserves to be in the holy presence of God forever. Ultimately, that place will not be heaven. When Christ returns, He will renew the earth and make it His home. This is eternal life.

There is only one way for us to have eternal life.

And that is in the person of Jesus Christ (1 John 5:12).

He lived a perfect, sinless life, enduring poverty and suffering. Many became His followers, but by the ruling religious leaders, He was rejected and ultimately this lead to His death on the cross.

He died. God. Died. For us. Can you let that sink in. It is a profound life-changing truth.

But, death could not hold Him...

Where He was going:

Three days later, the stone was rolled away. And in the full glory of resurrection, He appeared to His disciples and to over 500 people (1 Cor. 15:6) before returning to heaven. His home. Where He is waiting for us.

For now, in prayer, He is the place where we can truly rest our head. 

He is for us and not against us (Rom. 8: 31-32) and accepts us with all our flaws. He comforts us in our afflictions and gives us relief from trying to live in this crazy world on our own. 

Because He lives, by faith, His Holy Spirit lives in us and gives us power, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead (Rom. 8:11) to overcome sin and become more and more like Him. 

And wherever He is, that is where I belong.

"But He was pierced for our sins, crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on Him, and by His wounds we are healed."
Isaiah 53:5

Sitting on my Duff: The Lost Art of Being

It all started when I was awoken in the middle of the night.  Not sure what woke me, but I looked up to find a spider dangling right above my head!

Needless to say, I rolled right out of bed and switched on the light.  To my dismay, the spider had vanished. Thinking my eyes were playing tricks on me, I hopped right back into bed and went to sleep.

The next day, I went about my usual business of busyness cleaning the house, taking care of the children, and checking e-mail. When I finally sat down for the day and that's when I noticed a bruise in the middle of my knee cap. At least that's what I thought it was.

The next day, the bruise had grown and had a white puffy center.  I was beginning to wonder if it wasn't a bruise. 

When I showed Billy, he had an appalled look on his face.  "How did you manage to get that?"

"I don't know.  I don't remember hitting it on anything."

"It looks bad. You need to go to the doctor right away."

Billy seemed to think it looked pretty strange, so I went to a walk-in clinic.

"Looks like a spider bite," said Dr. D.

My eyes grew wide.  The dangling spider...I wasn't seeing things...It bit me!

Then, I shuddered. And, it was still somewhere in my room.

"Draw an outline around it with a marker, take these antibiotics, and try to rest. It could be a brown recluse or even a black widow. Both are highly poisonous. Go straight to the ER if it spreads."

That kind of freaked me out. I drove home in sort of a daze.

As soon as I got home, Billy helped check the bed, but we couldn't find the spider. I tried to put my feet up and take it easy. But, boy was that hard!

There's so many things that needed to be done around the house, but everyone else has a different definition of clean and in general, the children just add to the mess rather than helping to clean it up.

The next morning, the redness had spread across the line of demarcation and a patch of dark purplish blood vessels appeared around the white puffy center.  It didn't look good.

So, I was off to the ER.

A nurse practitioner (not even a doctor) gave me an even higher dose of antibiotics and a big fat bill. Lovely. More antibiotics. My intestines were going to hate me for it. 

After giving Bright Girl a crash course in housekeeping, I was finally able to prop my leg up and relax.

And, this time, I did. I was able to catch up on some really good reading: The Giver by Lois Lowry and Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis.

I could just be still and allow the Lord to "search me and know my heart" (Psalm 139:24).  It was a good time of refreshment for me.

Funny, it takes a spider bite to get me on my duff.

The bite was still looking bad, so Billy decided to do a little research on spider bites:

According to Google and Wikipedia, there is no real good remedy for the bite of a brown recluse. They are usually not aggressive little spiders, the size of a penny, but if you sit on one, or lay down on one, it will bite. And, they are very poisonous. Sometimes the poison can even cause necrosis, or death of the affected tissues, and if it gets infected, gangrene, which means amputation.

Eek! I needed the antibiotic to work or some other treatment. I had been praying the whole time about the bite, but now I was begging, supplicating for healing or wisdom in treating the wound. 

Then, it dawned on me, it's the poison that is causing the problem. What if there was some way to neutralize the poison or draw it out.  I checked some natural websites and double checked with WebMD and sure enough, there was one home remedy that works that I've already been using for ant and mosquito bites: good old baking soda mixed with a little water.

The baking soda absorbs moisture and so it draws out the poison.  

Pretty simple.

And, it worked! I'm still taking the first doctor's treatment of antibiotics, just in case. And, that little time of respite has been good for my soul.

Something stood out to me that C.S. Lewis wrote why he preferred walking to places rather than quickening his pace with modern inventions such as the automobile in his autobiography Surprised by Joy,

"I possessed 'infinite riches' in what would have been to motorists 'a little room.' The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it 'annihilates space.' It does.  
It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given...Why not creep into his coffin at once? There's little enough space there."

In this fast-paced, tech-addicted, information age, I think we've lost the art of just being. It's considered wasteful and frivolous to take a break from work, turn off the phone, the computer and go for a walk and enjoy nature or just rest.

In cases of the under-responsible that may be true, but I have plenty of responsibility and probably more than I can handle.

Sometimes I need to just rest. 

So, when I find myself in a cleaning flurry, it's okay to slow down and sit down.

To take a break every now and then to get my bearings. 

And, when I rise, I will be present and strengthened and able to enjoy the life that the Lord has blessed me with--instead of just rushing through it!

"Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him, for he shields him all day long, and the one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders." (Deuteronomy 33:12)