Here's a recent excerpt from an email from one of my friends, Kristen Rinnovatore..
The Lord is good. Our Lord Jesus Christ is good. I can't stop crying about his goodness. Maybe that will be my reaction in Heaven. The angels sing out "Holy!", the elders fall down and throw their crowns and I lay by His feet and cling to His ankles, crying in gratitude, while my hair grows forever and ever around me. He says he wipes every tear from our eyes, but does He dry up our tear ducts? Because I think I will be crying out of gratitude for eternity.
Isn’t that beautiful? The beautiful thing isn’t just that Jesus inspires this reaction in heaven, but that He inspires it here and now, while we’re on this earth.
The Lord is so faithful. Always. He's so good. Always. Even in the darkest of times on the Race, when I couldn't see Him or feel Him, He was still at work in my life, through your prayers – those in raleigh, my family, others from my hometown, from my squad, etc. Those are the times He taught me about perspective and endurance and thanksgiving. Now, this phrase, 'hard joy', continually comes to mind. And it's not even that He's stopped teaching me about perspective and endurance and thanksgiving; they’re all in the background as 'hard joy' takes forefront. 'Hard' is a very general term and I like it because I mean it in most of its definitions. A few of those definitions are:
- not soft; solid and firm to the touch; unyielding to pressure and impenetrable or almost impenetrable
- firmly formed; tight
- difficult to do or accomplish; fatiguing; troublesome
- involving a great deal of effort, energy, or persistence
- vigorous or violent in force, severe
- difficult to explain away
- lacking delicacy or softness; not blurred or diffused; clear and distinct; sharp; harsh
- incorrigible; disreputable; tough
In the concepts of endurance or being farsighted, I discover that I want the whole of the idea, in this case 'joy'. I want a difficult joy, a persistent joy, a vigorous joy, an incorrigible joy, an impenetrable joy, a difficult to explain away joy. I want the hard joy because I know on the other side it's a refined joy. I was so scared prior to the race and even the first couple of months or so on the field that I’d find my faith to be shiny and neat but lacking substance. To some truth it was and to some degree it still is but these last 9 months have given it some strength and some weight. And I want that with my joy, with my peace, with my.. whatever. I’m almost craving the hard parts because of the result after the hard parts. Of course I say craving now when things aren't hard. But I think about the end of January to the end of February and I would say that was the darkest part of my race. I wasn't even just sad or troubled or.. well I was apathetic but more than that I was so angry that I made such a decision to come on the Race to be in that position of darkness. Yet I could attest to the Lord's goodness, maybe not in my life at the moment but whether or not the Lord is good wasn't a debate, whether or not He is loving wasn't a debate. His truths were reality even if I couldn't see them personally in my life those few weeks. My anger wasn't necessarily towards the Lord, just towards the circumstance because there was something in me that couldn't deny His faithfulness, His goodness, His grace, His love in my life the previous 23 years, no matter the depth of darkness of my circumstances or the cynicalness of my apathy.
I can't really come up with a good analogy for it except being in light and being in darkness. To make things easier to understand, let's just say life could be broken down into this cycle of living in the light for a period and living in the darkness for a period, peaks and valleys. Right, so as we do life with Jesus, we learn to follow Him more nearly, love Him more dearly, see Him more clearly, the light in our lives becomes more brilliant. Then we cycle into darkness for whatever reason – circumstantially, by our own way, hurts by others, whatever. But it's not like those movies where people have been gone for so long that they forget about everything. In the darkness, our perception of light is still in our minds, still illuminating in our hearts. When we come out of the darkness, the light is just like we imagined, just like we remembered and in fact, even brighter, sharper, clearer, more brilliant. And that intensity grows as we walk more in the light. Then darkness comes again, except it's a greater depth of darkness because the degree we were in before can't overcome the light that's been growing in us. Yet the light we remember is more potent and powerful than when we first remembered it. Even in darkness the contrast and sharpness and radiance is to a greater degree. It almost seems to grow exponentially in the darkness because of such a contrast.
I want the hard dark places because the polarity of light is so amplified in my heart.
The Lord is just so good right now. And it's exciting to me to think that the Race isn't the end all, that life is so open and full to the miracles and wonders He has planned. That marriage and a job and tears and a family and kids and heartaches and traveling and community and vacations and losses and the many more situations, good and bad, are all avenues to see and understand more of Him. A.W. Tozer talks about how there are attributes of the Lord that we'll never ever know because we'll never be in a place of needing to know. For example, if we never sinned and were like the angels we would never ever understand His grace. Does that mean that He ceases to be a gracious God because we have no avenue to experience His grace? By all means no! It would just be a characteristic that we'd never be exposed to. To think that the sum total of our understanding of God is because of what we experienced of Him. Maybe there are thousands more attributes we'll never understand because we’ll never be in situations or circumstances that predicate those characteristics.
So when I think about what's in life – hurts, joys, travels, routines, etc – they’re all avenues for Him to reveal Himself to me in that particular instance that no other instance could teach me otherwise. Isn’t that crazy?? To think we escape the heartaches and the pains and the uncomfortableness for the sake of ease, we are limiting our interaction of intimacy with knowing Him more and more.
Just a thought.
Ministry/Physical/Country update: We’re in Latvia, the land literally flowing with milk and honey. There are more dairy and honey products than all of the other countries we’ve been to combined. The temperature in Latvia hasn’t risen above high 30’s (it’s averaging about high 20’s to low 30’s) and it’s only not snowed 2 days in the past 10 days we’ve been here. I’ve purchased a few winter items and have been quite cozy.. well as cozy as I can be. I hear NC temperature is 80’s this week? As far as ministry goes, we’re working with a church that is ministering to the rougher areas of Riga. I’ll update you all more later!
