Gaining Humility in the Confidence that is Christ

In the course of Christian maturity, I have come to understand that those who transform into sincere, accepting, joy-nuanced and calm humility—

humility not threatened by or jealous of how others live; 

that doesn’t attempt to cover up feelings of weakness with bravado or intelligence; 

humility that actually prefers to mind its own business and not meddle (whether that meddling be through overt unsolicited advice, internal irritation or passive, critical gossip)

—that those who become this are true, gentle and beautiful.

These then spread truth, gentleness and beauty wherever they happen to be at any given moment. 

Oodles of books have been written about how to live the Christian life, along with the steps to becoming humble. 

In reality, the answer is in the live-streaming, if you will, of Christ the Person: embarking upon the journey of Him, relaxing into His Spirit, taking in His nourishment to wholeness in His Person. 

Thinking upon Him always, contemplating His Words, our heart-mind strengthens as His confidence proceeds while our own recedes and eventually peters out. 

Then it is that the humble surety of Christ reveals: His constant presence, His love not just for us but for all—nothing marred by the grandstanding, interfering self. 

Copyright Barb Harwood

The Approach

A poem, by Carl Sandburg:



                                CHOOSE

     The single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.
                                Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.


Carl Sandburg

To the Morning

There’s a song, called To the Morning by Dan Fogelberg, which I became acquainted with during my 16th summer while working and living at a Wisconsin Youth Conservation Camp. 

Each morning, as we campers snoozed in cozy bunks in rustic lumberjack-era cabins shrouded in pre-dawn mist, we would perceive, from the corners of dreams or out-cold REM, the ever so slight inklings of piano music emanating from the camp loudspeaker. 

The song, played on vinyl in the camp office, tiptoed at first into our heavy-lidded slow-to-come-to-life consciousness, and the singer, Dan Fogelberg, began:

“Watching the sun

 Watching it come

Watching it come up over the rooftops”

Then, in slow but sure crescendo, it spread out across the camp, eliciting the first no-going-back-to-sleep-now stirrings among the slumbering workers.

“And maybe there are seasons

And maybe they change

And maybe to love is not so strange”

Every morning, in rumbling thunder or windy restlessness, that song woke us to the day that lay before us.

Not a morning person at that time in my life (show me a teenager who is), I loved waking to that song. It modeled for me how to rise and meet the day in the possibility of romance with life itself.

I used to occasionally play this song to rouse my boys before school, and have returned to listening to it in the last year.

It reminds me of that summer—of that soft dawn light carried on a breeze of fresh pine through screened cabin windows—of when the song did justice to a time of day I had previously loathed. That summer, I learned what morning is—the very best time of day.

Back then, it was physical hard work that would dim this fleeting moment of ante meridiem joy: 

The bright harsh afternoon sun which reduced the landscape to a flat, one-dimensional plane;

The sore neck from looking up to trim branches on Department of Natural Resources Land;

The aroma of bleach and pit toilets that sticks in the nostrils after a week of State Park Campground duty;

And the sentimental-tinged realities swirling in my adolescent head as each day wore on: missing my best friend back home, and yet dreading the ever-approaching end of summer when I must leave this brief, but thoroughly established and adapted-to camp/work existence, never to return to it again.

But when I play To the Morning now, after these many years, this time, of course, on Spotify (which certainly can never quite measure up to a rusty loud speaker as conduit for a tune spinning on a record player in a northern conservation camp office), it all comes back and I remember--that when I meet the day in this way, and watch the eggy orb show it’s cherub face, be it above a stark frozen landscape in January or one teeming with the early June croaks and bleeps of frogs and trillings of Red Wing Blackbirds in the marsh outside my door, that morning is when we establish how it will go—this day. 

And so I toast the morning in determined commitment, in a non-negotiable and oddly confident way, that, in the words of the song, “Yes! it is going to be a day where there really is nothing left to say but ‘come on morning.’”

Copyright Barb Harwood

To the Morning by Dan Fogelberg

Watching the sun

Watching it come

Watching it come up over the rooftops

Cloudy and warm

Maybe a storm

You can never quite tell 

From the morning

And it’s going to be a day

There is really no way to say no 

To the morning

Yes it’s going to be a day

There is really nothing left to

Say but

Come on morning

Waiting for mail

Maybe a tail

From an old friend

Or even a lover

Sometimes there’s none

But we have fun

Thinking of all who might

Have written.

And maybe there are seasons

And maybe they change

And maybe to love is not so strange

The sounds of the day

They hurry away

Now they are gone until tomorrow

When day will break

And you will wake

And you will rake your hands

Across your eyes

And realize

That it’s going to be a day

There is really no way to say no

To the morning

Yes it’s going to be a day

There is really nothing left to say but

Come on morning

Written and sung by Dan Fogelberg

Another Thought on Re-Thinking the Status Quo Corporate Church of Today

"But do not be called Rabbi; for One is your Teacher, and you are all brothers. Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven. Do not be called leaders; for One is your Leader, that is, Christ." Matthew 23:8-10

R. T. France, in the Tyndale New Testament Commentary on the Book of Matthew, writes, regarding the above passage:

"...to recognize that Matthew records Jesus' creation of a new community does not entail reading into his Gospel all the institutional paraphernalia which the word 'church' tends to suggest to us. Indeed, when this Gospel is compared with the letters of Paul, mostly written before even the earliest date suggested for Matthew, it is remarkable how lacking it is in 'church' terminology. No church officers are mentioned..."

For This Day

from The Briar and the Rose by Tom Waits

“I picked the rose one early morn

I pricked my finger on a thorn

They’d grown so high

Its winding wove the briar around the rose

I tried to tear them both apart

I felt a bullet in my heart

And all dressed up in springs new clothes

The briar and the rose

And when I’m buried and in my grave

Tell me so I will know

Your tears will fall

To make love grow

The briar and the rose

Aftermath

Aftermath

A poem by Barb Harwood

Thunder—anger voiced.

Lightning—shards of overwhelming life, unleashed.

Wind—the patterned and impulsive on their course.

Pent up maelstrom all;

perfect storm.

Snapped twigs,

sodden boughs asunder,

triad leaves, downed and trampled; 

Brokenness across the lawn—

in the street

upon the rooftops.

Will depleted, trails off as

slight breath of breeze meets steam upon the pavement.

Fireflies marshal quiet.

Nervous, 
stars emerge.

A tired sun awakes

and with her God to man bespeaks 

not of the whirlwind or the squall;

the frenzied pitch and pellets of the rain—

But of the pleading

ardent

and expectant aftermath--

beyond the raking of the scene
that puts to superficial rights all which had lain askew-

to ask and put to answer what will be gained
what will be gained
be gained 
be gained...

in the aftermath. 

Copyright Barb Harwood

One Salvation, One Blessing

World Wars, pandemics, floods, hurricanes, cancer... although some people do survive them, would certainly not be considered “blessings.”

Does good come out of them? Well, considering that to survive a tragedy can only be a good thing, then yes. 

But the question begged is this: 

What about those who did not and do not survive, regardless of whether or not they were and are people of faith? What about the inconsolable grief of moms and dads, sisters and brothers, when their loved ones never come back—from the Front; the house washed away by the river; the hospital; the burned down apartment building. 

The discomfort I have experienced with the saying “I’m so blessed” in any number of circumstances is that the same circumstance that blesses me curses someone else.

If I’m “so blessed” in a particularly trying situation that numerous other people are also going through but not doing well in, what does that make them? Punished?

When I first joined the ranks of church-going Christians, I, too, would say how blessed I was in various material situations. 

I’ll never forget when I drove into a parking lot years ago, as a new Christian, and snagged a very convenient parking spot. I said, 

“God is so good in blessing us with this spot!”

My husband, rightly so, immediately responded, 

“Do you really think God cares about you getting this parking spot?”

To his credit, that was the beginning of my taking stock of this “I’m so blessed” sentiment, which I believe is, for some people, an innocently-naive statement. For me, however, I came to understand it as a blind adoption of what my church was modeling, along with a desperate need to be affirmed—especially in my own mind—that I was a bona fide spiritual person.

In the years between my sudden questioning of “I’m so blessed” and my husband having a stroke almost two years ago, I put trying to figure blessings out on the back burner. I didn’t know what to think, so I just didn’t think about it. 

But the close-up-and-personal of going through the stroke with my husband, and together having numerous conversations on this concept of “being so blessed,” along with a close study of the book of Luke (which entails much about the topic of blessing), I have come to much greater clarity. 

Did some good come out of my husband’s stroke? Absolutely. The medical outcome could have been much worse. His mind is as sharp as ever, and he isn’t immobile like he was in the months following. All his vitals have stabilized and he is living a new normal with just a few setbacks.

But would good things have come out of his not having a stroke? Absolutely. And we’d be singing the praises of those “blessings” as well: freedom to walk miles and miles as we explored new cities, golfing with good friends, downhill skiing with our sons, cooking with both hands. 

Those are no longer options, due to the stroke. But had the stroke not happened? The activities of life in that realm would also have been considered “blessings,” just as people label his recovery from the stroke a “blessing.”

In my investigation into this concept and use of the statement “I am blessed” in the daily material occurrences of life, I found an excellent article that I credit for opening my eyes to the truth of the matter: and that is, to be blessed is singular. It happens right along with salvation and comes in the form of the Holy Spirit. 

Here’s the link to this excellent perspective:

https://blog.biblesforamerica.org/what-does-it-mean-to-be-blessed-by-god/

Salvation and receipt of the Spirit are, in my now convinced mind, the one and only blessing. Everything else that happens in life is exactly that: life simply happening.  But it happens within the overarching blessing—the coming of the Messiah’s Spirit to us.

So if I recover from cancer, great. But I personally, now, don’t see that as being any more blessed than the next person who does not recover. Because they too had the Spirit, just like me, and that is how we are both blessed.

I’ve shared this before in previous posts:

A man in his late 50’s, of exceedingly humble and quiet faith, was diagnosed with stage four melanoma. He fought it for a couple of years. He said something that transformed, for me, the meaning and application of the word “miracle,” the same way the word “blessing” is being transformed for me now.

He said, 

“The Lord is going to do a miracle. He’ll either cure me, or take me home.”

God took him home. A miracle.

That is how I now understand blessing. If I come down with cancer, or die in a pandemic, or lose my house to unforeseen circumstances—if I can’t find a parking spot and miss the concert—(even the Christian concert), I am still and always blessed.

Copyright Barb Harwood