An update, a little Hebrew poetry & a call to mercy in Jesus
“Concerning this I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might leave ok ok me; but He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you [My lovingkindness and My mercy are more than enough—always available—regardless of the situation]; for [My] power is being perfected [and is completed and shows itself most effectively] in [your] weakness.” Therefore, I will all the more gladly boast in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ [may completely enfold me and] may dwell in me."
2 Corinthians 12:8-9, Amplified Bible
I have fifteen tabs open on my computer right now and forty more on my phone.
Open tabs range from normal things like Bible commentaries, homeschooling blogs, recipes, and home improvement ideas, to more apropos topics like researching what in the crazy is actually going on in the world right now and how do we navigate through it.
I’m in the middle of listening to 7 books on my audible app, and reading 8 in-my-hand, taking-up-space-in-my-house, paperbacks - including my Dad’s new novel Significant, which is wonderful. I finished two books this past weekend and felt a solid wave of accomplishment rush over me like it was me standing on that Olympic podium.
I'm baking sourdough bread again. Reviving our love for fresh spongy bread, crispy edges and melting butter. Sourdough bread is low glycemic, low gluten, helps your body absorb beneficial vitamins and minerals from the grains, stays fresh longer and is easier to digest than commercial yeast breads. Given Aaron’s recent Lyme diagnosis and Solomon’s frequent stomach aches, I’m doing all the things I can to keep inflammation down and optimal health a priority.
Sourdough baking also means I’m either feeding my culture, making leaven, proofing or baking bread or a combination of those things every day. They’re not monumental tasks, just more living organisms I’m tasked with keeping alive every day.
It’s mid August right now and my garden is buzzing with bumblebees, honey bees, wasps, and butterflies. After the cool thunderstorms we’ve had this week, everything is green and growing and needing something to be done. Weeding, harvesting, jamming, canning, chopping, blanching, freezing, eating, cooking. It is such rewarding work, but it's also hard, tedious work.
I'm a little over 21,000 words into the book I’m writing. I had hoped to write it all this summer but there are only two and a half weeks left of August, and I’m still only finishing chapter 3. I guess I have a lot more to say than I thought, but who’s really surprised about that?
September is looming closer with every humid day that passes, and with it the sweet beginning of those days centered around teaching, training and equipping our three school age children in God’s Kingdom and reading, writing, history, math, science, typing, cooking, cleaning, music and art. Phew!
Then there’s our sweet baby girl in her first year to nurture and keep healthy. I am learning to treasure those breaks in the day when she’s crying and needs me. I actually sit! and cuddle her while she nurses and grows fat-fat on Mama’s good milk and Mama’s good lovin. Holding her sweet little dimpled hand in mine, prayer comes pouring out of me involuntarily. “Thank you.”
I will be assistant directing children’s theater again this fall, and it’s Charlie & the Chocolate Factory for us! We are all quite excited by the thrill of another stage performance to prepare for. The boys have officially “caught the bug.”
Updates are nice and all, but why this written litany of some of the things that occupy me these days?
Because I have a sneaking suspicion that your life looks different but eerily similar to mine in that there are things that occupy all the hours of your days as much as mine. There are tasks to be done and tensions to pray over, goals to hit and milestones to record, responsibilities that can’t be shirked, bills to pay, food to buy and cook and stock, health needs to research and tend to, opportunities to pursue, obligations that build character, preparation for the days ahead … endless pulling here and there.
Not to mention the elephant in the plastic plated, sterilized room. Mask or no mask? Vaccine or no vaccine. Red or Blue. Black or white. This is what it’s like to be alive in twenty-one.
Madness. A world torn apart.
We have more propaganda flying at us from every device, billboard, television, shop window, bumper sticker, and sign we pass than any generation in the history of the world.
We all have a lot of tabs open.
We are losing jobs, and friends, facing mandates that don’t respect “my body, my choice,” making hard decisions for our children, and families, and businesses, advocating for them, willing to look a fool for what we believe, more divided than ever but aching hard for the other. When do we get to heal?
We are finding that even in this climate of tension and stress, diapers still need changing and dinners still need making and cheeks still need kissing and dishes still need washing.
Life goes on. But how can it?
In my house, the laundry is endless. The world could be on fire outside but I still need clean dishes to eat on. The work in the kitchen, endless.
...but something is happening in my soul and despite the endless pull here and there, my nerves endlessly buzz with one word that summarizes everything and all the chasms in between. It seizes me head to toe, immediate with the Presence of God. “Jesus….”
In the midst of all this, the busyness and insanity of too many tabs open in my one brain, the mess and the trying everyday to do better, be better, love better, the responsibilities and expectations - I tell you there is a grace that hangs about me like Heaven’s perfume. Daily I draw from it strength, courage, identity, patience, kindness, long suffering, humility, love. It's not a perfect operation over here, I'm still growing - we all are. But the fragrance of His mercy lifts the striving and serving and stumbling of my efforts, and translates them back to me a thousand times over in grace.
If God did not supply this grace I could not do what I do or be who I be.
I know what a graceless wretch I am without Him and what a graceless day is like.
I have lived many many of them.
Enough to know better than to go it alone in my own strength and be robbed of the joy that’s found when weakness is exchanged for His strength. Enough to know that leaning harder into the invisible God, and lingering longer in the Word that reveals Him is the way to tap the resources of His endless grace.
Every day I invoke His presence and every morning I partake of His mercy.
Remembering Him broken and given, and receiving Him fresh, and new, and full every morning.
I am sustained in this place. Shockingly so.
For as long as I can remember I’ve had this little game I play with God. My birthday is 3/21 and whenever I see those numbers I know He’s reminding me that He’s thinking good thoughts about me, loving me fiercely, and always, always enough for me. I see these numbers all the time. I even saw them yesterday, while writing this piece. And yes, I cried!
When I was at rock bottom, as they say in stories, it was then God chose to reveal a “321” that changed everything. When you hit rock bottom, or get fairly close, and you look in the mirror and see the filth of what your sin has wrought through you; the ugly, festering wound of self - stiffnecked and bent on destruction, you realize just how good God must be to love you anyway.
His mercy changed me that day, it changes me still. At my lowest, most hideous place, alone and despondent, afraid to hope, God took me to Lamentations 3 - a beautiful Hebrew acrostic poem written by Jeremiah, the weeping prophet.
19 Remember my affliction and wandering, the wormwood and the gall.
20 Surely my soul remembered
and is humbled within me.
21 Yet I call this to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
22 Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed,
for His mercies never fail.
23 They are new every morning;
great is Your faithfulness!
24 “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in Him.”
Lamentations 3:19-24
Each line in a Hebrew acrostic poem begins with a succeeding letter of the alphabet. My numbers “321” are right in the middle of the seventh and eighth letters. Yet I will call this to mind...I will remember, and so I will have hope. Because of the loving devotion of my Lord-Adonai, my Creator and Abba, the God of my father Israel, because of His steadfast love for me, I was not and am not consumed by my failures or circumstance or burdens or checklists of endless things needing to be done, for great is His faithfulness.
His mercies are unending. Like the work in my kitchen and the needs of my family; un-ending.
Unending mercy and unending grace are ours, new like dew every morning. To refresh and realign and re-inspire and reinvigorate. To hold you up and sustain you. This is what I know and this is my story - God is faithful. He is my portion. He is all that I need. Therefore I will hope in Him.
Maverick City Music has two songs that have quickly become worship favorites. “Jireh” - one of the many Hebrew names of God, meaning Provider. And “Wait on You” - written from that gripping prophetic utterance that is Isaiah 40.
Listen to them! Add them to your playlists, meditate on them, and get the truth of them into your soul. When God is your portion you have more than you need. You’re free and the world can’t offer you anything you don’t already have. You have God.
When you have God you can do things you never knew you could do. You have strength in places you’ve never had strength before, and grace to do all the things that feel impossible in your one day and your one life.
Invoke God into your days, my friends. He is waiting to be invited in. You can do this job and this season and this waiting and this persecution and this life - in Him. In His strength. Nehemiah said “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” (Nehemiah 8:10)
Is it?
In Lamentations 3, verses 19-21 begin with the seventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet, zayin, and verses 22-24 begin with the eighth letter, chet. One of the incredible things about the Hebrew language and therefore every book of the Bible written in Hebrew, is that each letter has a meaning or multiple meanings. This adds fascinating, spirit-enriching, searchable depth to literally every single word.
I want us to read these verses again, only this time through the lens of what the seventh and eighth letters represent.
Zayin: seventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet
Numerical value: 7
Sound: "Z"
Meaning: 1. crown 2. weapon 3. sustain
19 Remember my affliction and wandering, the wormwood and the gall.
20 Surely my soul remembered
and is humbled within me.
21 Yet I call this to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
There is a sort of weapon in remembering.
When we look back we see it all with shining clarity, the thousands of times God fought for us, pulling us through. When we look back like Jeremiah, we remember our affliction and wandering, the bitterness of our own way, and our remembrance causes worship to come bubbling up out of us, so that if we remained silent even the rocks would cry out and the trees clap their hands.
From His own arm He brought salvation. (Isaiah 59:16)
When we remember how good God is, how trustworthy, how true, the weapon of our praises rises within us like a double edged sword in our mouth - a weapon for taking down the kingdom of darkness.
There is a sustaining power released in our lives through the cycle of the number seven. The number represents the perfection and completion of God's creation. There are seven days in the week, the seventh being God’s Sabbath day of rest; a cycle established at the end of the first week of time and creation itself. The seventh day was specifically blessed by Yahweh and set apart as holy unto him. (Genesis 2:2-3) All who honor His Sabbath day draw sustaining power from the prophetic act of rest, declaring through our inactivity who our portion comes from.
God is enough. He’s more than enough.
The last lens through which the Hebrews view the number seven is a crown. Crowns are worn by royalty and traditionally represent power, legitimacy, victory, triumph, honor, and glory. They are a physical sign of an inward reality.
I think, when we remember who God is and how He’s brought us through, when we honor his cycle of rest, and tap into the sustaining power of waiting on Him, we wear outwardly the crown that resonates the inward reality. We are His. His Bride. His crowning achievement. His royal priesthood.
The eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is chet, and provides a new lense through which to read verses 22-24.
Chet (also spelled Ches and Het): the eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet
Numerical value: 8
Sound: "KH"
Meaning: Life
22 Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed,
for His mercies never fail.
23 They are new every morning;
great is Your faithfulness!
24 “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in Him.”
Lamentations 3:19-24
Chet means life. Isn’t that beautiful? His enduring devotion is life. His fresh new mercy is life. His faithfulness is life. The Lord-Adonai as our portion is life. This is the testimony of Jesus; it’s why He came - to give us life and life abundantly.
Eight is also the number that signifies new beginnings, because it is the first day of a new cycle of seven.
With unending work to be done, and unending mercy to draw from, it’s time we lay aside the weights and burdens and checklists and fears that so easily entangle us in the rat race of this world, that we may run with endurance the race set before us. (Hebrews 12:1)
He is Jireh, our provider, our portion; He’s enough. He has equipped you with worship and remembrance and His Word as a weapon and crowned you as a child of His love. He is faithful to sustain you as you align yourself with His cycle of rest. His mercy restores your soul.
My prayer for you today is that you would come to the living waters and draw strength for your weary soul - to be able to do all the things you need to do, and be all the you He made you to be - not from your own striving or resources, but from His supernatural and unending source of mercy and love.
You don’t have to pretend you're not weary. It’s a human condition. We’re all weary. But don’t pretend you’re strong enough to do this one life with all of it’s open tabs and endless busyness on your own and in your own strength. God is standing at the door of your heart, knocking. Let the Strong Man in.
God’s shalom-peace to you today, I love you!
Natalie
As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul longs after You, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, the living God.
Psalm 42:1-2
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
Psalm 73:26
I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.
Philippians 4:13
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