The Cattle on a Thousand Hills

"There is not one square inch in the whole realm of human existence over which Christ who is sovereign over all does not say, 'Mine! It is mine!'"

~ Abraham Kuyper

Sincerely

Maria Sue Chapman,

2003-2008

I am always astounded by the amount of hurt we as humanity are able to bare. So many times we face down the hurts of countless generations and the hurts never cease. Nor the hope for that matter. Yet when hope is painfully quiet and hurt screams in our ears, we forget the truths that we hold dear. How can anyone get back up after they've fallen? How does someone pick themselves up, not just when they trip, but when they seem to have fallen from a ten story building? That hurt is hard to get back up from. But we do. We rise out of the ashes of anguish and we teach ourselves to remember hope. We teach ourselves to breath again. We teach ourselves to listen for truth and to hush the lies that tried to creep in when we were down. But while still down, it is scary. It hurts. The sadness shakes us. Sorrow brings a sort of cold grief to the core of your stomach and you shiver. You feel the wash of weariness break you down. And you reel from terror to terror of questions and aches. In A Grief Observed, Lewis explains:
"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me."
What seems most scary is that once facing some deep hurt we realize that the potential for greater pains is not out of reach. And we shudder at the notion of more hurt, more anger, more failure, more devastation. Our weakness is immense. Our frailty is vast. Then we grasp our capacity for suffering and hurting and our fears are both lessened and strengthened. God tells us that He will never give us more than we are able to handle. And He knows better than we what we can handle. But our heart would like to say, "no. No God, I cannot handle this." Our eyes are dazzled by the fears and pains around us. Jesus asked Peter to step out onto the crashing waves of angry waters and Peter follows. He follows in faith and trust. He follows with the desire to discover that, yes, he can in fact handle the challenge God puts before him. Jesus gives him the challenge knowing fully what Peter can bare. Then Peter sees the crashing waves. He sees the overwhelming environment he has walked into and his heart breaks under the heavy weight of fear and doubt. The sight of the ordeal overtakes him and he falls through the water. Yet he is pulled back up by his Master.
In life, we walk into the ordeals placed before us in the hope that, yes, we can handle. We can deal. Then when the battle becomes great and the fears and hurts of life overtake us, we fall. We slip, and the waves crash over us. This is life. Cycles of either waiting in the boat to be called, stepping out in bright faith, falling into the depths as we reach the failure of our faith, and being rescued to continue on again. This pattern will not change. And it does not need to because we find that after having stretched our capacity for faith, we can go farther in the next venture. That reality is a huge responsibility for Christians because this means that we desire to achieve our maximum potential and therefore must prepare to face trials of increasingly greater pressure. All the while, we must never forget that the Great Designer has a plan and a purpose. He sees what we may become. So when we are hurting and all we can see are the crashing waves, we must know that God, as well as we can and better, sees those crashing waves. He also sees perfectly who we will be after we pass through them.
All this, just words. All this, just talk. All this, just the repeated phrases and cliches of countless humans who faced down trial after trial just to discover that their friend living a generation before them said the same things and came to the same conclusions. So why repeat these discussions and seemingly trivialize the greatest and most overpowering hurts of our lives? Why should we allow this discussion of hope and whatnot into the heart? Why do we care? Or do we even? Why should we care?
Because. Words are things. Talk is not cheap. Cliches are cliches for a reason. And the lessons that thousands of people have had to learn before us must never be forgotten lest we forget to pass these lessons down to the thousands of people coming after us. Truth is truth is truth no matter how immune we have grown to it. And if we can grasp the fullness of truth in the notion of hope twixt hurt, then the effects would resound throughout all time and space. This is no lightweight matter. This is nothing to be taken for-granted. This is the beauty and grace of life. And if we could live by these things we call truths, what a different place and people we might be.
May the falls you take, although deep and dark, be rich with hope. May your pains be washed in the balm of grace. May your hurts and fears be forerunners of peace and fortitude. May your greatest tears be the onset of your greatest outcomes.

http://chapmanchannel.typepad.com/inmemoryofmaria/

"The Heroic Life" The Deadliest Monster, JF Baldwin

"Being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the world." ~Basil Grant a character invented by G.K. Chesterton

"Karl Barth defines wisdom as 'the knowledge by which we may actually and practically live.' [...] 

And so we arrive at last at the biggest paradox: Christians, the very people who claim that man can do nothing to save himself, expect more goodness of themselves than any other adherent of any other worldview. 'Christianity is strange,' writes Blaise Pascal. 'It bids man to recognize that he is vile, and even abominable, and bids him to want to be like God.' [...] 

The irony is profound: men who deny their sinfulness and posture as gods-in-the-making stay 'mere men,' while men who acknowledge their sinfulness become, by Christ's power, sons of God! 'For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it' (Luke 9:24). Broken vessels can only be used when they recognize that they can accomplish nothing on their own--then suddenly these broken vessels find that they are expected not only to live well, but to be holy. 'Man,' as Chesterton says, 'is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution'--a being called from death to life, from blindness to sight, and from sin to heroism. 

Please understand: this is not hyperbole. Heroism is a big word, I know, and it conjures images of firemen rushing into burning buildings and mothers quietly going hungry so that their children can eat. We think of heroes as people in stories or on television, not real people in our neighborhood--and certainly not us! But [...] 

Make no mistake, the Christian is called to lead a heroic life [...] 

The world cannot account for heroism. Properly understood, heroism is synonymous with selflessness--and the world calls only for selfishness [...] 

Every other worldview says we should help others because in the long run it will help us. Only Christ provides salvation first, and then demands that we die to ourselves every day [...]

When you think of the body of Christ, the tendency is to picture Charles Colson as the eyes and James Dobson as the mouth and yourself as the big toe or the armpit. We think that better men may achieve great things by the grace of God, but that we are just lucky to get by. Such an attitude is unbiblical. There are no better men, only men who have made themselves more available to be used by God [...]

That's all heroism is: getting out of the way and letting God lead.

George Roche says it best: '[W]e are all asked to be heroes, each in his own circumstances. We are mislead by our perspective. In seeing the heroic as too large for ourselves, we have been deceived and cheated by man-made philosophies that see human purpose as far too small.' Our purpose is none other than to glorify God, and every Christian has been set free to do exactly that.

Naturally we don't like to think that God expects us to be heroic, because it means a lot more work; it means dying to ourselves and letting God be in control; it means being uncomfortable and sometimes even persecuted. 'Every man,' writes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 'always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.' And each of those excuses comes from the flesh. When we listen instead to God, we will find that He is calling us to sacrifice everything."