Ragamuffin Gospel

My Big Hike

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

Normally, my friend and I meet at Radnor Lake State Park and choose one of the trails to hike while discussing all sorts of random topics (and of course throwing in bad puns wherever appropriate).

Today, I went solo for the day. I challenged myself that I could hike both the Granier Ridge Trail and the South Cove Trail (the two difficult hiking trails at Radnor).

Halfway through Granier, I thought I’d made a serious mistake. I was wheezing like a 90-year old and it was all I could do to keep putting one sandaled foot in front of the other.

Still, I persevered. An persisted. And I didn’t give up.

At some point, my strength revived. I got that proverbial second wind. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as hikers’ high (similar to runners’ high), but I think I might have experienced that at some point.

The key to it all was that I never quit. I did take a short break on the second trail.

At the end of the day, I tallied over 22,000 steps, according to the app on my Apple Watch. That’s a lot of steps.

The old adage remains true. Every journey of 10,000 (or 22,000) steps begins with a single step. And each and every step counts, no matter how hesitant or small or feeble.

Every journey of change also starts with the smallest of steps. All God needs is the most hesitant of agreements and He can still bring about the most amazing transformations. All He’s looking for from you and I is the “I believe. Help my unbelief,”  as a good place to start.

Jesus looks at you right now right where you are and asks, “Do you really want to be healed? Do you really want the brand new world of uncertainty that comes with change and transformation?”

Oh, and yes, my feet hurt. I suppose that’s a given.

 

A Song of Hope for Those Who Wait with Heartache

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment
“Walking around these walls
I thought by now they’d fall
But You have never failed me yet
Waiting for change to come
Knowing the battle’s won
For You have never failed me yet

Your promise still stands
Great is Your faithfulness, faithfulness
I’m still in Your hands
This is my confidence, You’ve never failed me yet

I know the night won’t last
Your Word will come to pass
My heart will sing Your praise again
Jesus You’re still enough
Keep me within Your love
My heart will sing Your praise again

Your promise still stands
Great is Your faithfulness, faithfulness
I’m still in Your hands
This is my confidence, You never failed

Your promise still stands
Great is Your faithfulness, faithfulness
I’m still in Your hands
This is my confidence, You never failed me yet

I’ve seen You move, You move the mountains
And I believe, I’ll see You do it again
You made a way, where there was no way
And I believe, I’ll see You do it again

[x3]
I’ll see You do it again

Your promise still stands
Great is Your faithfulness, faithfulness
I’m still in Your hands
This is my confidence, You never failed

Your promise still stands
Great is Your faithfulness, faithfulness
I’m still in Your hands
This is my confidence, You never failed me yet

And You never failed me yet
I never will forget
You never failed me yet
I never will forget” (Do It Again, Elevation Worship).

Very rarely does a worship song bowl me over anymore, but this one just about did. I’ve never resonated with a praise song’s lyrics like I did this one.
Granted, I’m not there now, but there have been times in the past when I would have seriously questioned whether the writer of this song had been reading my private journal. And I don’t even have one.
My prayer is that the words to this song wash over you and that God speaks though this song as powerfully to you as He did to me earlier today.

The Trinitarian Prayer

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me forget myself entirely so to establish myself in you, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity. May nothing be able to trouble my peace or make me leave you, O my unchanging God, but may each minute bring me more deeply into your mystery! Grant my soul peace. Make it your heaven, your beloved dwelling and the place of your rest. May I never abandon you there, but may I be there, whole and entire, completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given over to your creative action” (The Trinitarian Prayer of Elizabeth of the Trinity).

Right now, I feel as though I could sleep for 36 hours straight. That might be a wee bit difficult with a tiny 12- week old kitten who will probably want me to play with her and feed her at some point. She’s literally pouncing all over the bed as I write these words.

My prayer echoes the prayer of most of you. I want rest– not sleep but rest. I don’t necessarily want to be lazy and do nothing. I want to have a rested and peaceful mind, as opposed to the rushed and frenetic mind that most of us have that won’t settle down for a moment.

The world is saying, “More! More!” and “Faster! Faster!” It never wants for a second for you to slow down and wonder why you’re racing yourself to death to accumulate more trinkets and plaques. God says, “Slow down and savor and live this one life to the fullest.”

May we be so absorbed by the mastery of the Trinity of God that we forget ourselves and cease to obsess over how miserably we failed last week or how many flaws we seem to carry lately.

May the glory of God be so blinding to us that we can see nothing else and live for nothing else. May every thought, every word, every action, every deed be born out of a deep contemplation of the love of the Trinitarian God for us. May our lives be an expression of that love and may we be the love of Christ manifest and made visible to every person we meet.

Amen.

 

Still Waiting on God

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

“I believe that a trusting attitude and a patient attitude go hand in hand. You see, when you let go and learn to trust God, it releases joy in your life. And when you trust God, you’re able to be more patient. Patience is not just about waiting for something… it’s about how you wait, or your attitude while waiting” (Joyce Meyer).

Today, Pastor Aaron preached from Psalm 130 on how to wait on God. Waiting is one of the hardest disciplines of the faith but well worth it in the end.

I supposed I should say waiting well is hard. Waiting by itself takes no effort. You don’t need any special skills to sit with hands folded in your lap, or in front of the TV binge-watching the latest Netflix craze.

Waiting well is different. Waiting well means that you learn to tune your heartbeat to God’s. You learn to discern God’s voice out of the myriad of other voices that are constantly calling to you all the time.

Waiting well means that you let God have His way in you so that you are ready whenever God chooses to end the wait and give you whatever it is you’ve been waiting for.

I’ve come to learn to be thankful that God didn’t give me many of the things I asked for when I asked for them. I probably would have ruined it and ruined myself in the process, especially where relationships are concerned.

Waiting involves open-ended hope. You go from waiting with expectations for a certain outcome to waiting with the sole expectation that God will do what God sees fit, which is always for His highest glory and your best possible outcome.

Lord, help all of us to learn to wait well and not focus on the outcome but who we are becoming in the process. Help us to remember that ultimately who we are as defined by You is far more important than what we have, what we do, or where we are.

 

Open-Ended Hope: A Guest Blog Post by Henri Nouwen

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“We lived in a world where people don’t know much about hope. We know about wishes. The whole Christmas period is full of wishes. I wish this, or I want that. It’s very concrete: I want a toy or a car or a new job. These are all very specific requests. But hope is precisely to say, ‘I don’t know how God is going to fulfil His promises, but I know that He will, and therefore I can live in the presence with the knowledge that He is with me.’ I can then know and trust that the deepest desires of my being will be fulfilled. This way keeps the future very open.

Hope has nothing to do with optimism. Many people think that hope is optimism, looking at the positive side of life. But Jesus doesn’t speak like that at all. When Jesus talks about the future or the end of the world, He describes wars, people in anguish, nation rising against nation, and earthquakes. There’s no place where Jesus says, ‘One day it will all be wonderful.’ He talks about enormous agony, but He says, ‘You, you (my beloved ones) pray unceasingly that you will keep your heart focused on Me. Stand with your head erect in the presence of the Son of Man. Don’t get distracted by it all. Remain focused.’ Don’t think that things will clean up, and finally there won’t be any more pain. Jesus is saying that the world is dark, and will remain dark.

     If you live with hope, you can live very much in the present because you can nurture the footprints of God in your heart and life. You already have a sense of what is to come. And the whole of the spiritual life is saying that God is right with us, right now, so that we can wait for His coming, and this waiting is a waiting in hope. But because we wait with hope we know that what we are waiting for is already here. We have to nurture that. Here and now matters because God is a God of the present. And God is God of the present because He is God of Eternity.

     Hope is to open yourself up to let God do His work in you in ways that transcend your imagination. As Jesus said, ‘When you are young you put your own belt on and went where you wanted to go. But when you grow spiritually old, then your stretch out your hands and let others and God lead you where you rather wouldn’t go.’ That’s hope, to let yourself be led to new places” (Henri Nouwen).

Keep hoping, not because everything will work out exactly like you want it to, but because God is working it all out for His ultimate glory and your good.

No Fears

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“…new day & *no fears* because fears are just the bad stories we tell ourselves. *And your Father is far bigger than your fears.*
This is why ‘I have set the Lord always before me. Because He is at my right hand I will not be shaken’ Psalm 16:8. He pulls you right close & whispers it, ‘Do Not Be Afraid.’ He knows how hard things are. And He knows how *faithful He will be.*
That’s why He repeats it again & again, 365 times, so we don’t have need to fear any day of the year: Do Not Be Afraid. He holds every minute of this week & His grace & timing are *perfect.*
So we’re just going to go all out & Trust & be brave this week: It takes courage to listen with our whole heart to the tick of God’s timing, rather than march to the loud beat of our fears” (Ann Voskamp) #PreachingGospeltoMyself

Again, I remind you that fear is just False Evidence Appearing Real. Fear always looks to the future but fails to figure God into the equation. Fear always forgets what God has done in the past, but faith as the antidote to fear reminds us that God remains faithful in every circumstance.

Sometimes, fear comes over a specific circumstance, like a loved one being far away from home or the uncertainty of an undiagnosed illness.

Sometimes, fear is generalized and hard to pinpoint. You have anxiety but aren’t exactly sure why.

In either case, the cure to fear is still the perfect love of God. It’s believing that God’s perfect love can overcome whatever it is that you’re fearing.

Fear says that God is not enough. Faith says God is more than enough.

Once again, I say the words, “I believe,” even when my feelings tell me otherwise. I proclaim it until every part of me receives it and until I fully believe it.

God is enough.

Blog Post #2,540

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough” (Garrison Keillor).

It doesn’t seem real that I’ve written over 2,500 blog posts in nearly 7 years. That averages out to just about one per day.

It’s been a good discipline to attempt to write something every day. Granted, some days are easier than others, and some days I don’t got nothing.

I can look back over seven years and realize just how much has transpired since that very first blog post back in 2010. I lost my job and went through a lengthy job transition before finding my current position. I had to say a final goodbye (I like to think of it more as a goodbye for now) to my beloved cat Lucy and welcomed little Peanut into my world.

I’m still driving a Jeep Cherokee, though not the same one that I had back in 2010. This one is two years newer and has power windows and locks (which you probably take for granted until you don’t have them then they become very much appreciated).

I feel like I’ve grown in grace quite a bit in these seven years. I know that I am certainly more thankful than I was then. It’s not that I necessarily have more than I did, but I’m much more grateful for what I have and a lot less apt to take things and people for granted than I was.

I can’t wait to see what the next seven years bring. I know God will be just as faithful and true to His promises as He’s been up until now. God willing, I will be able to keep you updated on all my latest shenanigans and wisdom.

“Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known” (Garrison Keillor).

I Want to Go There, Too

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

I believe there’s an actual place that exists that meets all of these descriptions. I believe that it’s a place where God will wipe away every tear and where there will be no more night or darkness.

I believe there are hints of that place here and now. We catch glimpses of it here and there and it gives us longings that nothing earthly can satisfy.

Still I long for that kind of place.

An Inconvenient Life

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

“It’s never too late to live a remarkable, inconvenient life given to the interruptions of now.
Love is the willingness to be interrupted.
Love is the willingness to be broken into.
There are never interruptions in a day—only manifestations of Christ.
And the truth is? Your theology is best expressed in your availability and your interruptability—and ability to be broken into.
This is the broken way.
This is all love.
Loving people without expecting anything in return always turns out to have the greatest returns.
Let’s do this today? Continuously make the ever-present Christ present. The hands of every clock never stop signing this: the best use of your hands is always *love*. The best way to say you love is always *time*. The best time to love is always *now*” (Ann Voskamp, The Broken Way).

My prayer that we will see interruptions not as diversions from our work, but as our actual work and labor of love that God has placed in front of us in the moment.

We’re always choosing whom we will serve, whether it be the never-ending to-do list that keeps getting interrupted or those interruptions that are God breaking into our sphere of influence and wrecking our world.

I confess that I’m not a fan of people barging in when I’m in the middle of trying to accomplish something, even if it’s reading a book or binge-watching Netflix. It gets on my nerves sometimes.

Yet that may be the chance I get to serve Christ in disguise. That may be the chance I get to pay forward a blessing that will come back to me a thousand times multiplied.

I want to be broken into in such a way that both I and the people who I come in contact with are never the same again.

 

Velveteen Love

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / 1 Comment

“’Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.’” (Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit).

I’ll just let this speak for itself. May each of us know Love like this that takes us where we are and makes us real and whole.