Changing...in the Car

Dear friends,

Here’s a quote from an article I read today in Prodigal Magazine.  To read the whole story, click on the link: http://www.prodigalmagazine.com/living-is-the-hard-part/

“Living isn’t all suffering by any means, but a life lived fully unto Christ ultimately leads to the kind of suffering that Christ experienced. It only makes sense. We follow a man who was beaten and disowned.”

I cried in the car today.  In fact, my beautiful van, a 2010 Grand Caravan – the newest, most splendid car I have ever owned- has housed a great many tears since it arrived on our driveway last fall.  I am grateful for car crying.  I find it private, purging and sweet with the presence of Jesus.  Unfortunately, I never remember to keep tissues in the car.  So my upholstered seats get kind of wet from wiping my tear dripped hands on the only source of dry. 

I cried for sadness and grief and heartache, but I also cried for joy of the unexpected.  How it is that I never knew before this testing how near the Savior sits right there in the passenger seat, He himself “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”  Trouble has become my teacher…of those things I could not, or would not know otherwise.  To see all my life in its true light…a life meant to be lived with the Gethsemane Man who showed the way through His great sufferings, through my “light and momentary trials….

I don’t want to have to have my hands pried open.  Driving past the refracted light dancing on the Hudson, I want to take my hands off the steering wheel and open them to say “This is your world; I am yours, save me from my fearful, tottering, wavering, ignorant self!”  Somewhere along this pilgrim road I have begun to see.  Just begun, and I think I will still be saying that on the day I die.  I hear the persistent pound of anxiety, and my long time companion discontent, and a world of other unfocussed defaults, banging for entry in my moving tabernacle, and I choose to turn my back.  For today.  Today is all I can do, I make no promises for tomorrow, I only believe on the One who owns tomorrow and owns me.  I acknowledge the pain and my ferocious self will which dies so hard. O, but the blessedness of that death.  Who surrendered more than He who said “Not my will, but thine be done”.  He opened his hands and side and all His God/Man to my grief and sin and all yours and the world’s a billion, billion times over.  For the joy set before Him!  Joy!

The beaten and disowned one is beside us in the car, at the sink, with keys under our fingers and grease under our nails and trays in our hands, from the stars in the sky, to the depths of the ocean floor. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH1cGsH74Js

To suffer our tiny drops of sorrow here, to gain from them, to find with Him the joy set before us…the very longing is more precious than all the world’s mere dollar store trinkets.

Your friend on the pilgrim road,

Loriann