Tag: thinking life

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!

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.

A Room of My Own

~ Joy O'Toole ~ 1 Comment

For many years, my bedroom was the room where I did much of my study, reading, writing, and thinking. Morning is when I read, meditate, pray, reflect, and work on my current study project. With children in the house and a busy schedule, there was no other time and place to work on my own studies and cultivate my devotional life.

Now that my children are grown and mostly gone, I am working every day outside the home so I still don’t have a lot of time. However I still write and read in the morning, and I now have a place for my studies. When we moved into our house, my husband decided that since I was the only woman in a house full of men, it would be a good thing for me to have a room I could call my own. He had our contractor take the back porch and turn it into a room off the back of the house.

It’s a jewel of a room. The pale green walls reflect the sunlight that pours in like liquid gold throughout the day. The dark wood floor is covered with an oriental carpet with rich, deep colors, which my father gave me. Family heirlooms dot the room and the wingback chairs are both elegant and comfortable. And, of course, there is a full wall of bookshelves, covered in books of all kinds, so that I have novels to sink into and bits of information right at my fingertips.

Virginia Woolf wrote in her famous essay, A Room of One’s Own, that for a woman to write fiction, [she] must have money and a room of her own…. She did not just mean a physical place, but also that one must have leisure as well as mental and emotional space in order to pour out her thoughts onto a page.

While I believe that anyone can write in the middle of a busy, crowded room, if necessary, as journalists and other professional writers have learned to do, I also can see what Woolf was implying. In order to write, you must create a mental space to take in information through reading, watching, observing, and then meditate on those things long enough to turn them into your own thoughts. Once those thoughts are formed, they must then be written down in some way. All of this takes time and space and energy, much of which is lacking in busy family life, especially when the children are small.

Of course, a mother must make time for her children. Interruptions must be allowed. Attention must be turned from her work to her child’s needs. Reeve Lindbergh discussed this in her memoir, Under a Wing:

…if I knocked at my mother’s door, she always answered, and if I entered the room, she never seemed to mind. She would put down her pen immediately, and smile gently, and ask what I wanted.

However, since my children have grown and moved out into the world to embrace their lives as adults, it has been easier for me to go deeper and further in my thinking and writing. The empty nest has allowed me to acquire the mental and physical space I need work. Having a room with doors that can be closed signals to others that I am in working mode: please do not disturb. I can now fall into what I call the “black hole of research” without being concerned for hungry tummies and skinned knees.

It doesn’t mean that the men in my house always pay attention to that closed door (which is why I still get up before everyone else in the mornings), but it does help me to feel less conflicted and less likely to be interrupted, which allows me to more freely pour out what I want to communicate. Long stretches of time are still scant, but with careful planning, I can often find corners of time and sometimes even a few hours to gaze out the window, read beautiful prose, chase down my myriad of thoughts, and write what’s in my heart.

A room of one’s own—what a luxury and a comfort to have this place of beauty in which to work and think and ponder the important things of life. This room, this jewel, is in the top ten of things for which I am thankful every day.