Today’s post begins a miniseries within our Lenten series. Each piece in this five-day set has been inspired by one song from the album Worship and Believe by Steven Curtis Chapman.
The song accompanying today’s piece is shared below. And the following four days of posting will not contain any commentary — only art and a song link.
Be blessed and delight.
PS — When the day comes, will someone please play this song at my funeral?
Mind-numbing: to consider our glorious complexity and dare to think no Creator wove us.
Heart-shattering and hope-smothering: to consider our fundamental need for unconditional love and yet refuse to see the Creator who sings over us in delight.
Close your eyes and hear His song in your beating heart.
One of my favorite promises in Scripture comes from the Psalms where we learn that God sees the lonely and He delights to set them in families.
Sometimes that comes in a traditional form. And sometimes God’s provision in various seasons of life is surprisingly unique…and delightful.
I have no biological children, though such children have long existed in my dreams. But 11 years ago, God gave me a little boy to care for from a distance through Compassion International. And a few years later, he gained a “sister” from the same impoverished country. And then, a couple of years after that, a little girl from another continent captured my heart and joined my sponsorship “family.” And, finally, a couple of years ago, a sweet and vivacious Spanish-speaking teenager appeared to round out my crew.
They live in their home communities, my four children, dependent upon the safety they find in their Compassion Projects and the monthly support I send to help them thrive. And I pray they will grow strong to be good, godly leaders of those local communities, to affect lasting change in this world because of the harvest of Christ’s Spirit in their hearts.
We write letters to each other, and the kids often draw pictures as enclosures. But Gloria, my most recent addition, often uses her extra letter space to illustrate the words of God’s Word. (I know she has a dear mother of her own, but I do value this extra connection with Gloria, sharing her creative spirit.)
A couple days ago, Gloria’s most recent letter arrived in my mailbox. And when I opened it, there was one of her most beautiful offerings yet.
My heart was filled with delight.
I have never studied Spanish, but even before I looked at the translator’s note, I knew what it said.
So today, I wanted to share my quiet happiness and honor my four beautiful children by following the pattern of Gloria’s design in my own translated version.
Thank you, God, for the strength we find in You, especially in seasons of loneliness.
Where will we find the most true and only pure delight? Where we dwell with God and experience the joy found in His presence.
And where is that presence found? In the desert tabernacle? Or the local cathedral? Or the span of the whole earth? Or the heart of His redeemed child? Or the Heaven awaiting us?
Yes.
Aren’t God – and His Word – awesome? The promises are seamlessly fulfilled: from beginning to end, old to new, age to age, Father to Son to Spirit.
“Come we that love the Lord, and let our joys be known…” Isaac Watts, 1707
Only (An Acrostic)
Open wide my soul and bring
Now to light what only You,
Love, have always known — and
Yet, You have embraced me still. I dance.
Yesterday, I highlighted an old, classic song. Today, I would like to highlight a new song that I just heard for the first time yesterday.
This wonderful song by Andrew Peterson was released about a year ago. The combination of lyrics rich with the truth of many different Bible passages and reverent music stirs the spirit. Because it magnifies the truly Awesome One.
As I listened to the song several times in a row, I started this piece by drawing the heart. John struggled to find earthly words to describe images of Heaven when he wrote of his visionary experience. And I certainly do not have the drawing skills to capture exactly what my mind sees when I think about the overwhelming, woven loveliness of Jesus’ heart. What would it be like if we could see it?
One day, when I meet Him face to face and have my first closer look, I am guessing I will weep simply because it is so beautiful.
And to think of that day now brings me so much hope, so much delight.
While talking with a loved one this past week, the theme of contentment rounded off our conversation.
Contentment. What a delightful — and yet difficult — state for human hearts to maintain.
Psalm 131 speaks to the delight, of the content soul being like a tiny child drifting off to sweet sleep in his mother’s warm arms. (This is something I also tried to capture in my simple, abstract design today: the crown of the child’s fuzzy hair from above where his head rests against her shoulder.)
Philippians 4:11-13 speaks to the difficulty, of the soul that must learn and choose contentment. As the song says, the ability to embrace humility and find peace in the swirling circumstances of life: that ability is also a gift.
Whether it comes easily for you today or it ends up being a struggle to make the choice, may you find delight and contentment in God’s embrace.
Does today’s design mess with your head? I wanted to visually express some of my favorite lines from this pair of verses. So I used vertical lettering to represent the most endearing factor that sets Him apart: how He is the only one among all the gods who has come down to us.
And His motivation for doing so as well as our ability to trust Him are both set on the solid foundation of His mercy.
Thanks be to God.
For you, Dad.
Our Heavenly Father, the only source of true and lasting hope, delights to watch us continually grow in every season.
Comparatively speaking, I haven’t heard too many sermons from the Song of Solomon in my lifetime. And of those few, I can’t ever remember hearing one about chapter 5, verse 7: the violent assault of a woman who is simply looking for the man she loves…
It’s something we (in the church) don’t usually talk about, something we rarely know how to understand or name or deal with. But it is one of the deepest cancers of the Fall, one of the hardest wounds to heal.
In fact, I would argue that there is no greater pain, loss, or shame for a woman than some sort of grief or trauma to her womb or her womanhood. And I would argue that level of suffering cannot be fully understood by another woman unless she has somehow known it herself.
(I am not ignoring the men who have also suffered deeply in similar traumas, nor the good men who have valiantly loved, or tried to love, women who carried such loads of grief and hidden scars. For the sake of today’s meditation I am simply focusing on two women in the Scriptures.)
…And yet, just a few verses later, the woman knows where that man she loves is, and as she runs to him, she declares her delight in the firm knowledge of her true identity – she belongs to her beloved and he belongs to her.
(Why did I never notice until yesterday that the only difference between the affectionate title beloved and the verb phrase be loved is space?)
Going ahead about 900 years, we find a sweet young girl held in her mother’s arms while that mother sings these words of the ancient song in a soulful, earthy tone. And the girl drifts off to peaceful sleep, dreaming that one day she will be loved the way her father loves her mother.
We move forward again, perhaps thirty years, to the next chapter, later captured in Luke’s gospel. We don’t know what has transpired in between, but now we see the girl-turned-woman who has been bleeding continually – and by extension continually swimming in shame – for 12 years.
She is exhausted physically from lack of iron, exhausted financially from no lack of dead-end-medical fees, and exhausted emotionally from trying to hold on to the dream that the suffering can end and she can somehow be renewed.
That’s when she sees the Man she loves. And though contact with the very edge of His garment striking the final remnants of her faith is all it takes to immediately stop the bleeding – and begin the untwisting of her broken identity – He does not stop there. He has to identify her, call her forward in the huge crowd, and publically declare who she is to Him.
He does not call her “person.”
He does not call her “woman.”
He calls her “daughter.”
And He tells her to go in peace.
Any act of God is said to be a miracle. And in our human thinking, some miracles seem bigger or more impressive than others.
What is the bigger miracle in these two stories…and perhaps the biggest miracle, apart from basic salvation, that can come upon a woman bruised from within?
It is the reopening of her soul to really know as deep as her scars run – and even deeper still – that she is loved. And when she knows it, that she can delight in it.