Category: Christian Living

Second Sunday of Advent – Faith

~ Joy O'Toole ~ Leave a comment

On the second Sunday of Advent, we focus on faith. Last week, we thought about the hope and expectation that the promised Savior would come. God had told Adam and Eve about Him back in Genesis 3. Abraham and the patriarchs looked for His coming. Moses talked about Him in Deuteronomy. The prophets and psalmists foretold His coming.

But hope requires faith. What is faith? The writer of Hebrews gives us one definition:

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Hebrews 11:1

If we don’t have faith, then we won’t have the assurance that those hopes and unseen promises will actually come true. But in Matthew 1 and 2, and in Luke 1 and 2, we see God’s people obeying His commands because they believed His promises He made in the Old Testament.

By faith, Mary and Joseph believed that the child she was carrying was the Son of God. By faith, the shepherds hurried to see the baby, whom the angels had announced. By faith, the wise men journeyed many days, weeks, months to see the child and worship Him. By faith, Simeon and Anna saw the infant Jesus in the temple and recognized Him as God’s promised Messiah.

We, too, can believe in God’s promises of salvation, life, and freedom from sin in the Lord Jesus. By faith we come and worship Him at Christmas, and day by day, we trust that all He has said will come true for us just as it did for Mary, Joseph, Simeon, Anna, the shepherds, the wise men, the disciples, and all who witnessed Christ’s life and death.

Do you have faith to believe that Jesus Christ came to earth at Christmas to save you, to give you life, to free you from the tyranny of evil? If you believe, then you can sing with the Christians who, all over the world and for many centuries, have caroled their faith:

O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant!
O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem;
Come and behold him
Born the King of Angels:
O come, let us adore Him, (3×)
Christ the Lord.

God of God, light of light,
Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb;
Very God, begotten, not created:
O come, let us adore Him, (3×)
Christ the Lord.

Sing, choirs of angels, sing in exultation,
Sing, all ye citizens of Heaven above!
Glory to God, glory in the highest:
O come, let us adore Him, (3×)
Christ the Lord.

Yea, Lord, we greet thee, born this happy morning;
Jesus, to thee be glory given!
Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing!
O come, let us adore Him, (3×)
Christ the Lord.

translated by Frederick Oakeley, 1841

Come, let us adore Him, the Promised Savior of the world.

First Sunday of Advent 2022

~ Joy O'Toole ~ Leave a comment 
O Come O Come Emmanuel

O come, O come, Emmanuel, 
And ransom captive Israel, 
That mourns in lonely exile here 
Until the Son of God appear. 
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Wisdom from on high, 
Who orderest all things mightily; 
To us the path of knowledge show, 
And teach us in her ways to go. 
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free 
Thine own from Satan's tyranny; 
From depths of hell Thy people save, 
And give them vict'ry ov'r the grave. 
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Dayspring, come and cheer 
Our spirits by Thine advent here; 
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night, 
And death's dark shadows put to flight. 
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Key of David, come, 
And open wide our heav'nly home; 
Make safe the way that leads on high, 
And close the path to misery. 
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
Words: various, combined by unknown author approx 12th Century, Translated by John Mason Neale, 1851.

This haunting advent hymn is the first one that springs to my mind as we start the Advent season today. Over the next few weeks, as we meditate and prepare for the great celebration of our Savior's birth at Christmas, we must first stop and think about the world's darkness and our need of that salvation. In our sin, we are captive and exiled from the Lord. We need wisdom and understanding to know where to go in our lives. We need to be rescued from Satan and sin's tyranny over us. We need light to disperse the gloomy clouds of night and death's dark shadows. We need a path away from misery and towards God. 

Amid that darkness, misery, gloom, confusion, and captivity, Jesus came, and He has brought us light, gladness, joy, wisdom, and freedom. Do you need to be freed from the miseries of this world, from the darkness of sin, from eternal death? Come to Jesus this Advent season. He came so that you may have life and have it more abundantly (John 10:10).

God’s Heart Toward Us

~ Joy O'Toole ~ 2 Comments

One of the things I most love about slowing down to read and think and ponder is how it gives me the bandwidth to notice common themes that pop up again and again. A recent theme has been the love of God for us in Christ.

I saw this several places: in a song by Twila Paris, We All Bow Down

Worship Jesus

For He is love

Unfailing love

He is the Love of God

I saw it again in D.A. Carson’s meditation on Psalm 103:8, The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love,

On the first signs of genuine repentance, he turns from wrath, for the Lord is “slow to anger, abounding in love.” Strict justice would be immediate–an easy thing for Omniscience! The truth is that God “does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities (103:10)

p. 6585, For the Love of God, Volume 2

I saw it multiple times in both the Old and New Testaments,

Sing, O heavens!

Be joyful, O earth!

And break out in singing, O mountains!

For the Lord has comforted His people,

And will have mercy on His afflicted.

God Will Remember Zion

But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me,

And my Lord has forgotten me.”

“Can a woman forget her nursing child,

And not have compassion on the son of her womb?

Surely they may forget,

Yet I will not forget you.

See, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands;

Isaiah 49:13-16a

Now the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth,

Exodus 34:5-6

Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.

Matthew 11:28-30

Then as I was listening to the Knowing Faith podcast a couple of weeks ago, Dr. Michael Kruger said,

…God that is presenting Christ as a propitiation…God is basically offering His own Son to be the sacrifice that He Himself demands and so there’s this sense in which no one could say that God is this wrathful deity who’s angry all the time and you’ve got to placate Him with blood. No, this is a God who loves you and is going to give His own Son for you and He’s the One who offers Him. (Episode 121, you can start at where he is talking about propitiation at 27 minutes in but the whole episode is worth listening to)

Most of all, I have seen it in a book I’ve been slowly, slowly reading over the past several months, Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund. While I knew the theology behind what the author was saying in his book, I have found it too easy to forget that, in Christ, God the Father’s heart toward me is one of compassion and mercy, not judgment. This book has turned my heart and mind to the truth of God’s mercy and love for His children.

Filled with quotes from the Puritan writers, Gentle and Lowly returns again and again to who God truly is. Ortlund makes the point that the God of the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament are the same God, the One who loves us with an everlasting love, the One who has engraved us onto His hands, the One who redeems and clothes, sustains and provides for His people.

How easy it is to fall into the trap of thinking that God is angry, especially when we think of the Old Testament. Ortlund writes,

The Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumption about who God is, over many decades, fall away, being slowly replaced with God’s own insistence on who he is. This is hard work. It takes a lot of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger.” The fall in Genesis 3 not only sent us into condemnation and exile. The fall also entrenched in our minds dark thoughts of God, thoughts that are only dug out over multiple exposures to the gospel over many years. Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.

P. 128, Gentle and Lowly

In fact, before we were born, before God even created Adam, from all eternity the Godhead had already agreed to what theologians call the Covenant of Redemption, which was God’s Plan A all along. R.C. Sproul explains it more fully in this article, but the gist of it is that God the Father sent God the Son into the world to save sinners and that God the Son willingly did so. It wasn’t some last-ditch effort because Adam and Eve messed up. No, God the Father loved us before He created us and had planned to save us from the beginning.

In one of the end chapters, Ortlund talks about our tendency toward “law-ish hearts” being so natural to our sinful selves that we struggle to see God’s lavish heart toward us, just as the Galatians did in Paul’s time. Ortlund writes,

And the Christian life is simply the process of bringing my sense of self, my Identity with a capital “I,” the ego, my swirling internal world of fretful panicky-ness arising out of that gospel deficit, into alignment with the more fundamental truth. The gospel is the invitation to let the heart of Christ calm us into joy, for we’ve already been discovered, included, brought in. We can bring our up-and-down moral performance into subjection to the settled fixedness of what Jesus feels about us.

p. 160, Gentle and Lowly

His heart toward us is one of love and grace, not harsh condemnation because of Jesus. What good news is this!?

I highly recommend this book to all Christians. It’s one that I will go back and re-read often as it reminds me of the thing that I most often forget: God’s magnificent, all-encompassing love for His people. Our beliefs drive our actions so the more this truth sinks into my soul, the more I will be able to live it out in my daily life. And then extend that love and grace to those around me.

Do you believe the Father’s heart is one of compassion and mercy towards you? How could believing that truth change your thoughts and words and actions today?

Journaling – My Need and Neglect

~ Joy O'Toole ~ Leave a comment

Over the years, I’ve discovered an intense need for keeping a journal. It started in high school and has only grown over the years. When I was fifteen, a journal gave me a place to write down my thoughts, wishes, dreams, and desires that I did not dare share with anyone else. It provided a secret place for bad poetry, prayers, and plans for my future. Crushes on boys at school or church sat next to sincere desires to serve God with all of my heart.

As I grew older, I used my journal to not only keep track of what came out of my heart but also to record my interactions with God. What I read in Scripture, what I heard from sermons and speakers, what I discovered about Him in the books I read, and all of my responses to these things were crammed onto the pages as I learned about who He was and who He created me to be.

Plans for my daily life, goals for upcoming months, multiple lists, commonplace quotes, and things I wanted to remember were jotted down for future reference. My journal was my go-to most days to help me think and plan and dream. It became such an integral part of my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life that I couldn’t imagine abandoning it.

However, as much of a need as I have for journaling regularly, I’ve noticed that I’ve been neglecting it more and more in the last few years. While I still try to read a good bit each week, I rarely copy down quotes from the books (commonplace). Also, I do a lot less thinking about what I’m reading, comparing it to what I already know, pondering its meaning, and writing about what I think.

Last year, I worked through Life Path: Personal and Spiritual Growth through Journal Writing by poet Luci Shaw with a group of Christian women who also wanted to start or restart journaling. For a time during that study and a bit afterward, I once again filled page after page in my journal, but as COVID retreated somewhat and life began returning to its former busyness, I wrote less and less.

Part of that is just a lack of time for pondering. With a home and family, a full-time job, and a commute, large blocks of time for reading and writing have turned into snatches of time here and there. Writing often falls by the wayside as a result. To be honest, the difficulty in finding time is also due to the great amount of knowledge at our fingertips, the glut of which often keeps me taking in too much and not thinking about it enough.

However, this summer I have been deliberately setting up systems for tracking my time and activities and for carving out a deeper life, in which I can lose myself once again in the written words I used to revel in. My hope is that my neglect of journaling will cease, that I will pick up my pen regularly to mull over life and ideas, and that my musings will lead to a fuller, richer life.

Do you make time for journaling? How do you make it a priority? Please share any tips you have below!

Signposts of God’s Faithfulness

~ Joy O'Toole ~ Leave a comment
My rogue daffodils

Have I ever mentioned my rogue daffodils? They are God’s reminder to me each spring that

no matter the trials in my life,
in whatever circumstances I’m living,
wherever He is calling me to live by faith and not by sight,
I can grow and thrive and bloom because I abide in Christ and bear fruit in Him.

Years ago, daffodils grew along the path from our driveway to our front porch. Most of them had been covered over with so much soil that the only thing that grew were the green leaves. So my husband decided to dig them up and get rid of them. He threw them in a large heap of dirt and debris leftover from some construction work in our backyard. Later that summer, we had the mound of trash hauled away, forgetting about those daffodils.

The next March I looked out of the back window in my bookroom and to my delight, a stand of daffodils were popping up in the grass where that hill of dirt had been. They apparently had worked their way down into the soil and waited for their time to shine.

Every day, I peered out the window to enjoy the sight of these glorious daffodils in the middle of our lawn. Eventually, the flowers withered and my husband declared that they couldn’t stay there in the middle of the lawn. So he dug them up again and threw them in the back corner of our yard. An easement runs there and because we can’t do much with that spot, it has turned into a catch-all for gardening stuff, old Christmas trees, and piles of wood and sticks. Again, we forgot about the daffodils in a back corner we rarely entered.

Lo and behold, the next year those daffodils popped up again in the middle of debris and weeds and sticks!. This time I told my husband that they obviously belonged in our yard if they were that determined to bloom no matter how many times he threw them away. They stayed, and each year, when they bloom, I am reminded that God takes our circumstances—the garbage, the piles of sticks, the cracked wheelbarrows, the weeds—and He strengths and nourishes us so that we bloom right in that spot. Rogue means something or someone that doesn’t behave in an expected way, which describes the little flowers that were determined to grow no matter how many times they were discarded.

These daffodils are a witness, a signpost to God’s faithfulness and lovingkindness that I look forward to every year. It seems appropriate that they bloom every year right around Good Friday, when He took the darkest day in the history of the world and turned it into a glorious victory over sin and death. Even so, He will take our sins, our trials, our sufferings, and our pains and turn them into golden daffodils for His glory.

What signposts of God’s faithfulness do you have in your life today?

January Reading and Listening

~ Joy O'Toole ~ 2 Comments

According to the weather report, we may be getting our first snow since Christmas Day. I love watching the snow fall and feeling cozy with a cup of tea. I always feel a bit more relaxed and ready to take time for reading and reflection.

Here are some interesting things I read and listened to this month:

Reading

3 Contemporary Temptations Old Books Will Help You Face – Alan Jacob’s new book was already on my to-read list this year so I appreciated this article.

Why We Should Pray Like the Puritans (Even if We Don’t Sound Like Them) – ...they took God at his Word, and they valued the truth of Scripture. They counted the cost, and they prayed about everything in their lives with a fiery passion.

8 Tips for Reading Poetry – Working with local poets at the library has inspired me to read more poetry. This article has good ideas on how to do it.

Join Us to Read for 21 Minutes Every Day in 2021 – Gretchen Rubin has been a favorite author of mine since I first read The Happiness Project. She’s got some great ideas on adding more reading time to your life.

Reformation Women: Giulia Gonzaga – I had never heard of Giulia before reading this article. I love reading about how women in history loved and served God well.

Knowing God’s Word from the Inside and Out
We know that God’s Word has saturated our lives when it has overflown into our actions.

Why Is It So Hard to Think?
The reason deep thinking requires time and space is because deep thinking is work. It takes energy to sift through thoughts and put them in some kind of order, spring cleaning the attic at the top of my body, forcing my way through cobwebs and unexpected memorabilia to stay on task.

Spiritual Disciplines for Dark Days – Five things we can do when we face difficulties, large and small.

How to Go Deep Into Bible Study without Getting Lost – Helpful article on studying Scripture without losing the thread of the main story of His grace.

Cancelling Chaucer – Apparently he’s no longer relevant for today’s students although this poet disagrees. Let’s hope that wiser heads will prevail and old books will be added back into the learning of our young people.

Winter Trees – I have a fondness for trees in the winter time, stark against the sky, and my favorite movement of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is Winter, but there’s no doubt that winter can be hard. Here’s a bit of help to make it through until spring.

Listening

Literary Life podcast – Why Read Old Books? – Can you tell this is a favorite theme of mine?

The Stories Between Us podcast – This new-to-me podcast is delightful. A husband and wife, both writers, talk together on the writing life with wisdom and compassion and fun. I’m currently working through the back episodes and have enjoyed every one.

The Well Read Poem podcast – This new podcast is perfect for those of us wanting to add more poetry to our lives. Thomas Banks not only loves poetry, he understands it and can explain the mystery behind the words. Also, he reads beautifully! I highly recommend this one.

Great Hacks, Tips, Tools, and Suggestions About How to #Read21in21 – The podcast to accompany the article above. There’s a list of bookish podcasts to listen to, including two of my favorites: The Literary Life and What Should I Read Next?

Although his podcasts are LONG, I still listen to Cal Newport’s The Deep Life regularly. Recently, he has started doing a deep dive on a specific topic at the beginning of each episode. His first topic, The Deep Reset, was very helpful for those of us wanting to add in more depth to our work and life. At some point, I believe he will string these all together into a single video. In the meantime, if you listen to the first several minutes of each of these podcast episodes, you can hear the whole thing: Episodes 49, 51, 53, 55, and 57.

Last year, my husband and I consolidated our music app subscriptions to one: Apple Music. However, I wasn’t thrilled at how hard it was to find good classical music with full pieces all together, not jumbled up in classical-lite playlists. Enter Concertino, a free app that I now have on my phone and my computer. I logged in with my Apple account and can choose any composer, genre, or time period. I can listen to a specific piece of music or set up a radio station. I am loving it and now I’m loving Apple music, too.

I hope you find these articles, podcasts, and app useful. If one of them is especially helpful to you right now, please share in the comments.

Reflecting on a Word

~ Joy O'Toole ~ Leave a comment

In 2019, I purchased a goal planner, which included a process of setting goals and choosing a single word to focus on during the year. I was intrigued and chose the word, reflect. I placed it on a card on my desk and over the year, I did think about what that meant in my life and how it was working itself out.

Last year, I decided to try the word of the year again. I chose a word, wrote it down, and then, at some point, lost the card with the word. It made so little impression on me that I can’t even remember the word I chose.

With such an abysmal failure with the word of the year, I had decided to skip it in 2021. I have plenty of intentions for my year and don’t really need that single focus. Or, at least, I didn’t think I did until the last week in December. A friend posted a discussion topic on a forum I’m part of and asked if we could discuss choosing a word of the year. I confessed what had happened in 2020 with my now lost word and that I didn’t think I would choose a word this year.

But I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. In my desire to improve my prayer life and draw closer to the Lord, one thing I am learning to do is to stop and listen, to notice when I see or hear patterns or trends in my reading, thinking, sermons, friends’ counsel, etc. Over that last week in December, I started noticing the theme of rest coming up over and over. That noticing caused me to stop and think about what rest might mean for me.

Anyone who has known me for any length of time probably has picked up that I am a planner. I like to have my ducks in a row, to know what is happening throughout a day, a week, a month. I track progress I make in several areas of my life. In order to best use my time, I have built structures into my life to help me stay on track with intentions and goals.

However, as I have been pursuing a deeper relationship with the Lord this past year, I had added regular Bible reading and study, regular prayer times, and other means of grace, but I knew something was blocking me going further. As I pondered the idea of “rest”, I began to realize that in the good and godly pursuit of knowing Christ more and drawing closer to Him, I was striving in my own strength to do it. Instead of resting in my union with Him and allowing His life and power to pour through me, I was trying to make myself fruitful. To use an analogy from Rankin Wilbourne’s book Union with Christ, I was frantically try to blow the wind on my own sail to live the Christian life.

I saw the idea of rest in the study of Matthew I’m doing with friends at church. I saw the idea of rest in this book I’m reading on union with Christ. We sang the hymn Jesus I am Resting, Resting in church the last Sunday of December. Rest was everywhere I looked when I started paying attention.

Listening is not my strong suit but even I couldn’t miss the fact that the Lord was telling me something. I didn’t need to strive and do a bunch of things to draw close to Him. In fact, all of that doing was possibly getting in the way. Instead, He desires me to rest in Christ, to know the truth of the gospel—that Christ became the wisdom from God, the righteousness, sanctification, and redemption for us. As we rest in Him, His life flows through us and we are fruitful as a result of that life, not as a result of our own work.

I have been a Christian for many years and I know these truths in my head, but I keep having to go back and work them out in my life. I have been saved by grace and I walk by grace but again and again, I need to learn what that looks like. Every time I want to go deeper with God, I have to see what that grace looks like in my day to day life in a new way.

After all this thinking, I ended up choosing a word for 2021: REST. I have written it down in my journal, on that forum with friends, and placed it in several places so I can’t forget it. This year, I will once again learn what it means to rest in Christ.

Do you choose a word to focus on each year? What have you chosen for 2021? Please share in the comments so we can encourage each other in our growth this year.

January is For Reflection

~ Joy O'Toole ~ 4 Comments

You will see the theme of reflection throughout my January posts. Last week, I mused about my reading life in 2020. Today I want to focus on using these first weeks of the new year to think and set my intentions and priorities.

I started using the first few weeks of January for reflection after reading an article in the old Victoria magazine back in the 1990s. Each January, the magazine would print a “winter journal”, focusing on different topics about the season. One year, there was an article which talked about using the quiet winter months for reflection and thought. This resonated with me, and I have viewed January as a time for thinking about the new year ever since.

Years ago, I chose September as my calendar start since it coincides with the start of school and many activities after summer vacations are done. This crisp season seems right for jumping into a new calendar.

January, on the other hand, is the time that I stop and think about priorities, values important to me, and intentions. It’s a quiet month. The holidays and their busyness are over. Often, the weather is more conducive to staying inside with a hot cup of tea than for gardening or taking walks. Even the trees are quiet with their leaves long gone and their branches stark against the sky. Birds and animals are asleep or slow this month. Even my garden is asleep, sometimes under a coverlet of snow.

So I take my direction from the rest of nature and become still inside. What is going to be important to me this year? What do I want my life to look like? How will I focus my reading? My writing? My use of time and energy?

As I ask myself these questions, slowly ideas form in my mind as to where I want to focus. I write down these big ideas, from which I will derive the quarterly, monthly, weekly, and even daily intentions that land in my planner.

Laura Vanderkam, a time management expert that I particularly admire, often talks about the importance of being intentional in using your time. There are millions of things we can choose, but we have a limited amount of time. How we want our life to look, things we want to accomplish, priorities in our spiritual, physical, emotional, and intellectual lives that we want to set–all of these are the things we use to choose how to spend our time.

I will spend the next few weeks, curled up in a comfy chair in my bookroom with pen and paper in hand, reflecting on my progress over the last year and creating or sustaining the intentions for this upcoming year. This will help me to know if I used the time I have been given wisely the next time January rolls around again.

Do you have a specific time to set your goals or intentions? Are you intentional in your use of time? I’d love to hear about your choices in the comments below.

Reading and Listening – November 2020

~ Joy O'Toole ~ 2 Comments

October was a busy month. My son got married in another state, which required planning, travelling, and quarantining afterward. Then, a few days ago, I was in charge of a virtual conference that has taken a lot of time and work this past month to plan and coordinate all the moving parts.

Added to those two big things, a third big event was the reopening of library access to the public, which requires a lot more time in the library branches. I’m so happy to see and help our community again in person, albeit masked and socially distanced.

However, I have still carved out to read and listen to various articles and podcasts. Here are some of my favorites:

Reading:

Feed the Better Hunger – I used to tell my boys that taking in too much “junk food of the mind” is as bad for your brain as eating too much junk food is for your body. Glenna Marshall writes about what we should be hungering for in this article. We need to intentionally learn to love what is good for us and this article points us in the right direction.

6 Tips to Help You Tackle the Classic Novel – Anne Bogel gives six great ideas on how to read that classic from high school that you skipped. I 100% agree about trying it on audio. I finally managed to read Moby Dick several years ago by listening to the audio, and Heart of Darkness was much more manageable when read by Kenneth Branagh.

Your Devotional is Not Your Bible – As usual, Jen Wilkin encourages the reading and study of God’s Word over everything else: “Devotional writing, when done with excellence, may supplement our time in the Scriptures, but it must not subordinate or supplant it.”

The Hidden Discipline of John Stott – This is an inspiring, convicting article. If I was half as disciplined in my reading and writing as John Stott was, I’d be a first class scholar. Definitely something to aspire to!

Fact Checking Is the Core of Nonfiction Writing. Why Do So Many Publishers Refuse to Do It? – A longish article on the need for fact checking nonfiction books and the lack of industry standards. This was interesting to me as I’m currently working on a nonfiction book and anyone who is also writing nonfiction might want to give it a read. Fact checking and copy editing are not the same thing, and I had been thinking about how to make sure my facts were correct (important when you work in research for a living!) when I saw this article.

As I mentioned in my last post, I had hoped to finish Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell by the end of October and I did. I think this was my favorite fiction book in 2020. The combination of historical detail, rich characterization, an inventive plot, magical realism, and deep, deep emotions left me with a huge book hangover and food for thought for weeks. If you like Shakespeare or you like historical fiction, you will like this book.

Listening:

A podcast on the three stages of creative work: friction, flow, and finalization – At the beginning of episode 37, Cal Newport talks about how all creative work has these three stages, what each stage entails, and how to push through to complete your project. I’ve often said that writing is 25% thought, 25% drafting, and 50% editing/polishing. Even if my percentages are a bit off, it was nice to know that I’m not the only one who has noticed that the majority of the project is not the fun drafting part.

The last Help Me Teach the Bible podcast – After years of talking to Bible teachers all over the world, Nancy Guthrie is (mostly) wrapping up this podcast. She does reserve the right to do an occasional new one if she’s able to do a great interview in the future. Here’s a list of episodes by Scripture: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/help-me-teach-the-bible-episodes-by-scripture/

Now that I’m back to commuting on a regular basis, I should have more listening suggestions next month. What are you reading or listening to right now? Please share in the comments.

The Darkness of the Dungeon

~ Joy O'Toole ~ 5 Comments
Image by Evgeni Tcherkasski from Pixabay

Last week I was reading a blog post by a friend, in which she said that she was feeling that rock bottom has a basement. The definition of rock bottom is the “lowest of the low.” Yet my friend felt that life had managed to go even lower than the lowest possible place.

In Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, Christian and his friend Hopeful are caught by Giant Despair and put in his dark dungeon. There they lay for three days, terrified and without hope. They were also in the basement of rock bottom.

In Psalm 88, the Psalmist is also in that place beyond the lowest low:

You have put me in the depths of the pit,

in the regions dark and deep.

Your wrath lies heavy upon me,

and you overwhelm me with all your waves. vv. 6-7

In fact, unlike the other Psalms that start in despair and end up on a positive note, Psalm 88 ends:

You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me;

my companions have become darkness. v. 18

The alternative meaning in Hebrew is darkness has become my only companion. The Psalmist has no hope left. There is nothing for him. He is in the black dungeon of Giant Despair. He’s with my friend in the basement of rock bottom.

If we left him (and Christian and my friend and us) there in that dungeon, then what would be the reason to go on? Where is there hope for the Psalmist or for any of us?

This man feels that God is against him, that there is nothing in life that’s good, that his soul is full of trouble, that he has no strength, that he has been forgotten by God, that his friends have all abandoned him and view him as a horror, that the only companion, the only friend he has is darkness, and that the only place lower is death.

However (praise the Lord, there is a however), despite all of these feelings and circumstances of darkness and feeling forgotten by God, the Psalmist still cries out to God, he still has the small kernel of faith that looks to God in the darkness and believes that He hears and that He cares.

Jesus says, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you. (Matthew 17:20)

In our dark places, the tiny seed of faith that the Lord has given us strengthens us to turn to Him, the Light of the World, and cry out, pleading with Him for light, for hope, for salvation. When we are in the dark, we need only to remember to look for the light.

Despite the seeming hopelessness in this Psalm and in our lives, there are glimmers of light if we look closely enough. The glimmers of God’s promises:

  • He will never leave us nor forsake us (Hebrews 13:5)
  • Even if a mother could forget her nursing child, God will never forget us (Isaiah 49:15)
  • We are inscribed on the palms of His hands (Isaiah 49:16)
  • He will with us in the waters and walk with us in the fire (Isaiah 43: 2)
  • He has loved us with an everlasting love (Jeremiah 31:3)
  • He rejoices over us with singing. (Zephaniah 3:17)

As we focus on these promises, even if the circumstances are still hard and our road seems endlessly black, we begin to see the glory of our Father’s face shine out in the gloom, the fingers of sun gleaming through the cracks of the dungeon walls, and to believe again in His love poured out for us in Christ. We start to grasp that if God is for us, which He is in Christ, who could be against us. We take shelter in His love and in His protection. And we take hold of the glorious truth that Christ is sufficient and will always be sufficient for all our needs, no matter what is occurring in this world. If we have Christ, then we have eternity and glory and unfailing love from our God.

Charitie Lees Bancroft wrote:

When Satan tempts me to despair

and tells me of the guilt within,

upward I look and see him there,

who made an end to all my sin.

Because the sinless Savior died,

my sinful soul is counted free;

for God, the just, is satisfied

to look on him and pardon me,

to look on him and pardon me.

Christ has become wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption for us. (I Corinthians 1:30) If He has done all this, how will He not also give us all things. (Romans 8:31)

As Christian lay in the dungeon, he prayed and the Lord reminded him of the promises of God, and these promises were the key that allowed Christian and Hopeful to escape into the sunshine. My friend, too, acknowledged that God’s light still shines even when it is clouded over by life’s circumstances and she can’t see it at that moment.

What about you, friend? Are you in the darkness of the basement of rock bottom? Do you feel abandoned, forgotten, and alone in your hard times? Can you see no hope and no light and no escape?

Go to Jesus. He loved you enough to die for you, He stands at the throne of God and pleads your case, He will give you all that you need to walk with Him in this life, and He will come and take you home to be with Him, basking in the sunshine of His love for eternity.