The lower shelf

I’m in the process of going through a “forgiveness journey,” venturing through the book Forgiving What You Can’t Forget by Lysa Terkheurst; it’s been an interesting trek as it has unveiled aspects of my life that have really caused me to limp in areas where I should stride.

The week I am in currently is looking into events or lessons that impacted my life in profound ways (for better or for worse). I find myself considering some things I picked up along the way and how they have affected my gate.

Over the last several years I have been gathering words to help me heal from the warped view I received of my femininity and worth; I was not certain I had dignity and struggled to maintain my humanity in the face of the objectification that stripped me of personhood. I grew up believing I was a second class human, destined for the cast offs of life, always just out of reach of what I truly wanted. And I adapted—human beings are incredible in their ability to adapt—I trained myself that though I was free to dream without limits, I was to stretch no higher than the lower shelf and to be content with what I found there.

This translates in some interesting ways as an adult in the Body of Christ. Do you want to know how I answered the question, “How have these events or perceptions affected what you believe about God?”? I wrote, “His best love and blessing are for others, and I am just grateful for the crumbs of grace. My hand doesn’t reach high enough.” I find that over the years I have battled these words, “It can cause me to stop seeking the desires laid on my heart because surely I’ve received all He’s willing to give someone like me.”

I walk out my faith in this tension: I KNOW the Lord’s generous, lavish love—it has landed upon me with such gentleness and such force that it was shaped me forever—and yet I never stop marveling at it. I am a book filled with innumerable testimonies that witness of God’s outlandish heart for me…and the reason I probably remember each of these markings so vividly is because they still surprise me every time.

I wrote this down in my journal as I process that, imagery to my place:

I see myself as a little girl
looking longingly at the festivities
of a party…
while clutching my invitation
in my grateful hand.
Longing to belong.
I’ve entered through the gate,
eager to celebrate,
but unable to shake
the outside from within.
Courage and faith
moved my feet to come,
but it is only the certainty of love
that will embolden me
to enter in.

I know there are no second tier citizens in the kingdom of God; He doesn’t set aside a group of people who He withholds His greatest blessings from; He doesn’t mark some of us as acceptable, but not accepted; He doesn’t plant the longing for all into the hearts of those intended only for some.

Ephesians 1:3–10 says “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with EVERY spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as HE CHOSE US in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. IN LOVE He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, with which He has blessed us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, ACCORDING TO THE RICHES of His grace, which He LAVISHED upon us, in ALL wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of His will, according to His purpose, which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth.”

In Christ, I get EVERY blessing because IN LOVE He chose to LAVISH the RICHES of His grace on me. This is the truth. It’s the truth the overshadows the lies to which I have adapted. It’s the truth that speaks the better word than the voices that set me up to settle for the dust. It’s the truth that lifts my eyes to the heights and gives me the courage to stretch out my hand. I may have approached Jesus’ feet to wrap my desperate fingers around the crumbs of grace that fell from His table, but He didn’t leave me there; His hand reached down to pull me up and He gave me a chair so that I could partake of the fullness of His feast.

So today I look upon my mud-smattered image and praise the Lord that no matter how much dirt has gathered and hidden my perception of place in this life, I hold within my hand the blood-bought, Spirit-sealed invitation to enter in and partake with all believers of the greatness of His lavish love and glorious grace.

Reproach

REPROACH: An expression of rebuke or disapproval; a cause or occasion of blame, discredit or disgrace; one subjected to censure [judgment involving condemnation; the act of blaming or condemning sternly] or scorn.

 

I can feel the pain of my soul—the entirety of my person—as I read this word and its meanings. Clearly this word remains stamped upon me; it covers beauty never realized like the defacing of graffiti, and mars like the careless application of a stamp slammed down with force. Reproach. The cause of shame…The subject of disgrace…An object to be scorned…A person to be despised…The one to be blamed…I want to accept these reproaches, to rationalize why they belong to me, to justify the hands that stamped them there (even my own). I want to examine each mark to determine its validity to see if the merit behind it should allow—no, demand—that I keep it to wear as a badge of dishonor, a warning to my future ambitions. 

But You look down at me from Your hanging place, where your blood stains both the wood and the ground beneath it. You’ve already determined the merit of my markings. You’ve already sorted what has been cast upon me, what has rested upon me, what ways I am to be despised.

“I am the Lamb without blemish; My blood makes the marked ones clean; My love covers a multitude of sins and leaves the ones who receive it free. I’ll take it all— every marking, every declaration, every judgment, every disgrace, every ounce of blame…the sum of all your reproach.”

"You know my reproach,
    and my shame and my dishonor;
    my foes are all known to You.

Reproaches have broken my heart,
    so that I am in despair.
I looked for pity, but there was none,
    and for comforters, but I found none.

They gave me poison for food,
    and for My thirst they gave Me sour wine to drink."

Psalm 69:19–21

May I walk by faith, not by sight.

Shallow love

“Our problem is not our difference of opinions. It’s the shallowness of our love.” Francis Chan

I read those words today (and listened to the corresponding interview), and I have to say, my heart is weightily moved. Francis wasn’t looking around at culture and making an observation on the overarching secular scene; he was referring to the Church—evangelical Christians, people claiming the name of Christ and walking in ways that oppose His name. It makes me want to cry. Sincerely, I fight back tears as I write this.

How is it that we who claim to know what it is to be loved by the One True Living God—the God Who poured Himself out to redeem us even as we rebelled and turned our backs—how is it that our love lacks such depth? How is it that lives that claim to be touched and transformed by perfect love struggle and fail to show even the smallest portion of love to even our spiritual family? Shallow love. How can lives that have been touched by the deepest wells of love come up so utterly dry?

It’s Good Friday, nearing the end of this Holy Week; and I think the reason that this quote bowled my heart over in the way it did is because I find myself looking at a situation that is not only contradictory to reason, but troubling in its repercussions.

This day we look in our minds eye at our Savior hanging upon a cross: Innocent blood pours out of His rent body, flowing out of gaping wounds and around piercing nails; His holy, royal head hangs down upon his heavy, human chest; pressed into his smattered hair sits a crude crown of thorns—a far cry from the diadems of beauty that were made to adorn Him; His arms splay as His throat produces one last raspy sigh, “It is finished.”

Jesus was not murdered. Jesus laid down His life.

For Love’s sake.

“While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” He didn’t do it because we were worthy, well-deserving, lovely and lovable. He didn’t even do it because we asked. He did it because He is love and because He set His heart upon humanity—ugly, broken, sinful, wicked, wandering, rebellious, lost human beings.

We must not overlook this loving God. We must not forget this act of love we claim to have received, nor the heart of the One who acted on our behalf because a life lived in the wonder of this love will not remain shallow. It will not remain shallow because it has been saturated with love from the deepest of wells in the purest of ways; a love so real and so lovely that life springs up from the smallest drop and beauty emerges at the slightest touch.

So this good Friday, in this painful lament, I exhort you, brothers and sisters in Christ: Look upon the One whom we have pierced. Let His sacrifice rend your heart; if it has not ripped you open in sorrowful repentance then you have not lingered at the foot of the cross long enough to consider the deity of this Son of Man. Let our love for one another—the agape that is suppose to reveal Jesus to a longing world—begin in the utter humility of beholding God Himself die in our stead. Humility will not leave us in the shallowness of love; it is humility that leads us into the depths and propels us into the heights.

What a Savior. May we be a people whose love reflects His.

A Margin Meditation on Psalm 106

[Margin Meditations are things I wrote in the margins of my bible as I journeyed through it from cover-to-cover intentioning to glean something from every page.]

 "Intercession of a faithful few can turn away the wrath of God for the faithless many."

Followers of Jesus, do you believe this is true? There are examples of it ALL over the Bible.

Prayer is not necessarily intercession. It is not difficult to pray for someone or something; prayer is as simple as communing with God.

Intercession is a different sort of thing. We see in Psalm 106 that Moses “stood in the breach before [God] to turn away His wrath from destroying [Israel]” A breach is defined as “a break in a wall made by battering.” To stand in the breach would be to face great danger that the wall protected from, and it would require great courage.

We also see in verse 30 that Phinehas “stood up and intervened” to end a plague that Israel was experiencing because of their idolatry. To intervene means “to come between so as to prevent or alter a result or course of events.” Phinehas placed himself between righteous, angry God and his dying people and changed the course of the plague.

Who were these men to stand between God and the people who had continually and repetitively sinned and rebelled against Him? I will tell you my thoughts…They were men who knew the character and nature of God, who believed that His default is love, not anger. God’s wrath is a responsive attribute, it is provoked and poured out in precise measure to the sin and evil that caused it to arise. But does He take pleasure in administering it? No! However, He does take great pleasure in our turning back to Him. And intercession can stop His wrath as it appeals to the great mercy of His loving nature.

As you watch the year unfold, I want you to remember this meditation. Instead of wrath this year—because of intercession—we get severe mercy; what is going to happen is for the purpose of turning hearts back to the Lord.

And here is one other little gem I found in Revelation relating to this meditation: Unlike His love, grace, power or so many of His other attributes, the Lord’s wrath will end (Rev 15:1), because one day sin will end.

But until that day, may our lives reflect that we truly believe that “the effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.” (James 5:16b)

The Saints on the Battlefield

I wanted to share with you a vision the Lord gave me several months ago, I wasn't sure what to do with it at the time, but feel like it is time to share. 

I was reading in Psalm 102 where the Psalmist speaks of Zion (the dwelling place of God), just going through my reading in the usual way, when I read a verse and suddenly found myself bawling—tears streaming out of my eyes. I was startled, and reread what I had just passed: Verse 14 says “For Your servants hold her stones dear and have pity on her dust.”

Suddenly I found myself standing on a huge battlefield, it stretched endlessly for as far as the eye could see in every direction. It was covered in rolling hills (similar to the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), and sprinkled across these hills were saints (anyone washed by the blood of the Lamb). Every single one of them was holding in their arms a gigantic boulder; a rock so heavy it required all their strength and left no room in their hands for any other weapons. They were standing, looking out across the battlefield, which was covered with piles of rubble, and they were weeping. Not just “crying,” but weeping with the desperation and sorrow of ones who had just watched their loved ones be completely destroyed.

The battlefield was the Church. And the saints who remained standing at the end of the war were the ones who had not set down the boulders in their arms; the stones of Truth revealed to us in the Word of God. The piles of rubble were the fallen saints who had compromised and disregarded the Truth of the Bible.

Followers of Jesus, to survive the battle that is coming, you will only remain standing if you are rooted deeply in the Truth of the Word of God. You must consider the foundational truths found in the Bible of Who God is, what He is like, what He says is right and wrong to be dear…so dear that you are unwilling to lay them down for any reason to appease any person, including, for the ease of your own life, yourself. You must also remember who your enemies truly are (not each other or other people) and fight this spiritual battle not with physical weapons, but with prayer.

"The spring of him who called"

This song was inspired by a story found in Judges 15. Samson had just been given a miraculous, though strenuous, victory and he was very thirsty. And he called out to God, and the Lord opened up for him a spring--a well--of water for him to drink. There he drank and was revived and satisfied, and the name of this well was En-hakkore: The spring of him who called. 

I love that. I love that we have an abundant, lavish God who waits with compassion and eagerness to pour out His overflow at the sound of our voice. May your voice lift up to our Jehovah, and may He open for you wells from which to draw that meet the deepest needs of your deepest depths.

A Spring for the One who Calls
©1-12-21 Hannah McLean

Near quiet waters
You walk with me
though raging rivers
I see
Your gentle hand
keeps my heart at rest
though mighty
the testing may be

Your ears
they hear my cry to You
Your eyes
they see my plight
There are fountains for valleys
and wells for the one
who cries out
to the Lord of Life

There’s peace when the heart
has been shattered and torn
Hope when the
desolate longs
There’s joy for the soul
who can see no light
For the outcast
a place to belong

For His ears
they hear our cry to Him
His eyes
they see our plight
He has fountains for valleys
and wells for the ones
who cry out
to the Lord of Life

The bended knee
will be lifted up
The burdened back
be made straight
Innocence lost know
the years restored
Justice for the one who
must wait

For His ears
have heard our cry to Him
His eyes
have seen our plight
He has fountains for valleys
and wells for the ones
who cry out
to the Lord of Life

burn away the dross

 a purified cry
©12-14-2020 hannah mclean

oh to lock eyes
with Your eyes of fire
let them burn away the dross
You see into my
heart and soul
i will not suffer loss
for the fire of
Your faithful flames
makes pure
and right and true
and all that must
be burned away
leaves me nearer, Lord, to You

my heart
it burns within me
my soul
for You it longs
my life
it reaches heavenward
my spirit
pours out song

this i know,
Faithful and True,
i will endure the ashes
for the beauty
that is drawn by You
i kneel upon the altar
as a living sacrifice
burn away the dross
that when i rise
there stands
an overflowing fountain of new life

Your diadem befits You
as my cry begins to ring
“behold the Lamb”
behind me
before me
“behold the King”

-----
Revelation 19:11–13 “Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The One sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on His head are many diadems, and He has a name written that no one knows but Himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which He is called is The Word of God.”