Sauntered into the woods behind our house this afternoon looking for a quiet place. The drone of a neighbors mower filled the air and birds provided joyful punctuation to the song of summer. The quiet I was looking for wasn't really silence, anyway. I looked with pleasure on sunlight dappling the alder trunks beneath a luxuriant green canopy--and I talked in spurts with God who made all things. All things. I was impressed by the advance of an army of blackberries, thorny arms reaching out across tenuous paths to attack anyone passing by. But just as impressive was a stunning contrast: The aggressive vines were adorned with crepe-paper flowers of softest pink. In the center of each a myriad of stamens—like silken threads—rose with the grace of a crown fit for a fairy princess. Common things. They're all over the woods, these floral diadems. It's as though the King of Glory had such an abundance of it that He spilled it out and it pooled in lowly, ordinary places. It even snagged and collected on a thousand rampant blackberry vines in the forest behind the barn. #ordinaryglory #himalayanblackberries © Copyright July 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
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When they start putting one candle on your cake for every decade, you know that you've racked up a few years. I blew out five candles on June 23. Here are some of the lessons I'm still learning as I start into my sixth decade. 1. I don't know as much as I thought I did.One of the things I've most enjoyed over the past several years is working with young men God has brought into my life. I've observed something very interesting about these guys: They may be fervent and earnest and committed and smart-as-a-whip--but they don't know what they don't know. I've started telling them (my own sons included): "Young men need gray hair." I well remember working with young people when I was just a young guy myself and having a dad tell me that he thought a traveling group I was sending out needed a chaperone. Like we weren't good enough. Like a twenty-something year old man wasn't really a full-on man. Exactly what part of adult was I NOT?! And now I know, because now I'm that dad. It's not that young men and women don't know a lot about life: Frankly there are plenty of areas in which they know more than I do or ever will. It's that they don't know what they don't know: They haven't felt their limitations or discovered their weaknesses or come to a place where they realized they are in over their heads. One thing is more dangerous than not knowing, and that's not knowing that you don't know. I'm learning that there are a whole lot of areas of life where I don't know. I'm not espousing an agnostic form of living--asserting that we can't know what we must know--but an honest humility that knows it's limits, a grace, born of experience, whose certainty is in God alone. 2. There are a lot of things I'm not good at.We define experience as learning what to do the next time we encounter a problem. But experience is equally the knowledge that the next time I encounter certain problems, I will still be inadequate to the task. To say it another way, experience teaches us both to get better at what we do on the basis of what we've already done AND to know our limits, the areas where we'll never be genius even if we encounter the same problem a thousand times. That doesn't mean that we can skip the parts of life we're no good at. Endurance is the capacity to walk in weakness, not expecting unaccountable success, but embracing unheralded humility and the joy of grace it brings. 3. Life is lived in little steps taken one at a time.Growth in life is a lot like early light on a summer morning: It steals into the room so softly that you don't even notice it at first. Then, in a moment, you become aware of blinding rays flooding the room with light, penetrating your heavy eyelids--A new day has dawned! But the day didn't begin just then with your conscious awareness of it. In fact, it's a little hard to say just when it started. The first gray twilight crept into the eastern sky hours ago, and little by little, the shadows emerged and the birds began to sing. The insignificant decisions--how to spend a pocket of free time, what to say when we're upset, whether to reach out and shake the hand of a stranger--these little things are the gray dawn of change, the first fingers of light in a new day. The change doesn't happen all at once; it's often imperceptible, as though nothing happened at all. But moment-by-moment the sun is rising and then, in a flash we awake to the reality that we are no longer the people we once were. New habits are formed; new character is developed; new loves are kindled. In western culture, we focus a great deal of attention on "decisions,"--and decisions are important--but it's fleshing out of those decisions out that really makes the difference. That animation doesn't take happen around a campfire when a fairy waves her wand and turns us from frogs to princes and princesses. In other words, it is good to determine, "I'm going to live for Christ from here forward!"--that's a good decision. But the process of change is likely to look petty: When we invest five minutes we could have squandered, when we bite our tongues instead of speaking our minds, when we reach out to people we don't know and don't know if we even want to know. 4. It's easier to talk about loving than to love.A long time ago Melissa and I wrote up the story of how God brought us together and titled it, "Learning to Love." It was true then, and it's true now. As we approach our twenty-third anniversary on this July 4th, we're still learning. It's easy to fall in love with love--to romance the rose-tinted ideals of caring and giving, of knowing and being known. It's another thing altogether to LOVE, because love is always associated with an object. We don't love in isolation. We love people--people with irritating habits and frustrating sins, people who don't always reciprocate the love we profess to have for them. We might say, "I'm not so good at loving people, but I sure love God!" The apostle John counters, "...he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen" (I John 4:20). Saying that we love God without having that love spill over onto the people He brings into our lives is evidence that we just love the idea of love. We think we love God because we have a warm, fuzzy feeling about a theory--but God is loving us through difficult people and challenging circumstances, pressing us to love in deed and in truth. When I was a young man, a good friend told me, "I'm just praying that you'll learn to love people." I hope he's still praying, because I'm still learning. © Copyright July 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
I've always remembered the sensational tabloid headline I saw when I was a boy: "Woman gives birth to 17 baby rabbits!" Absurd. Untrue. But when a rabbit gives birth to baby rabbits, the effect is both sensational and TRUE. Hairless pink bodies arrived in Theodora's nest box this morning--we weren't even sure she was pregnant. Right now we aren't supposed to touch the tiny creatures, but I can only think of velvety skin, a thin membrane keeping the outside out and the insides in . . . of the pulse of a tiny heart beating just beneath the surface . . . of warm life quivering beneath my giant fingers. I don't know how many rabbits there are, but God knows--and He made each fragile, persistent life for a purpose. © Copyright June 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
Peering through the leaves at the evening sun. The framework--call it perspective--we have, makes all the difference. When we look at an impossible situation do we see the insurmountable obstacle or one more mountain for God to cast into the sea? When we follow our path toward obscure and painful valleys do we see the darkness or the Shepherd who is leading us through? When we love people who profess to care but who hurt us anyway do we see our injury or something of what we've been to God--do we catch a glimpse of what it meant for him to love us when we despised Him? The impossibility, the darkness, and the injury are real--it's denial to say less--but if our focus is on God, everything changes. © Copyright June 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
8:30 p.m. in Ferndale and the sun is far from going down. We could work outside in the twilight at 10 and we could start again at 4 in the morning. If we had the strength, we'd have the light. But it's far from the longest day. In Alaska, I'm told, the sun never sets. People find themselves working all hours without even thinking about it because it doesn't dawn on them that they need to go to bed. But even the unending days in Alaska are nothing compared to the longest day. To tell us about that day, we have to use measurements greater than ordinary twenty-four hour periods: One day is like a thousand years to God. And a thousand years? They're like a single day to Him, we're told. I suppose that only makes sense since God Himself is the Light. There's no darkness in His kingdom; there's no night there. It's one eon of sunless brilliance following another, timelessness joined to the strength to live every moment of every unending day to the fullest. I'm longing for that day. © Copyright June 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
Ella planned a father's day flight to the islands, but with clouds at 300' we took a raincheck. Instead we ferried the airplane back its base in Arlington... ...through the mist... ...surrounded by nothing by white... ...no direction, no landmark, no guidance... ...except for a voice on the radio speaking in code and a complicated set of dashboard instruments. "This is the button you press if we have an emergency," Ella told me, pointing to a small black button on my side of the dash. Finally flew above the lower clouds into a slot of blue, Mt. Rainier rising like an island from a misty sea, gleaming in the sun. It's a faith-flight, being a dad--listening for guidance, keeping straight on the course when there is no evidence that you're going in the right direction, when you're not even sure what direction is right...except for the Voice saying, "This is the way walk in it." © Copyright June 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
We in the Pacific Northwest have a love-hate relationship with rain: We love what it does, but we love to complain about what it IS. It makes everything grow in green splendor. But it IS wet. It's a proverb for life. We like knowing but not the hard work of learning, the benefits but not the process. We love grace but hate the humility required to receive it. We appreciate blessing but not the empty hands required to hold it. Can we believe that both the process and the product are from the hand of God? © Copyright June 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
The old picnic table we inherited when we moved in more than fifteen years ago served us again tonight--one last time--as the starter fuel for a fine bonfire. It had fulfilled its purpose. Andrew and I heaped debris on the fire, and with the table crackling and blazing beneath, we watched flames consume what was no longer of use: old rose canes and branches and half-burned logs, fruit tree trimmings and scraps of firewood too small for efficient use in our wood stove. We gathered around the fire again a few minutes ago, good intentions for roasting marshmallows in hand--only the marshmallows, fresh bought from the store, were somehow a homogenous gluey mass. Melissa harvested one glob and roasted it anyway, probably just to say we did. Amid the bright coals and dull ashes was a little piece of history--the residue of a rustic table and the memories of a job well done. The value of a thing is not in building monuments; it's not in preserving in dusty relics. Real value is very often simply the fulfillment of the purpose for which something is made. © Copyright May 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
The unison of a hundred voices joined in a single anthem may have greater power than a famous soloist, alone. That's the advantage of unity in a marriage, in a family, in a church. It's often less about one spectacular servant and more about the combined dynamism of many servants using their talents, however small, for the common good. It's often in this way, through many small means, that the Kingdom is furthest advanced and that the King receives the greatest honor. © Copyright May 2017 by Robert G. Robbins
Tonight a southwest wind is rushing off the Salish Sea and across the flats we call home. The ropes tying up a giant rose bush groan and the power flickers. It's still warm, but there's a marine feeling to the air and ten thousand newborn leaves murmur and the hammock tosses between trees.
I went on a short run tonight and crossed paths with another runner, an older man in a sweaty tank-top, going in the opposite direction. "It's easier going that way," he puffed as he thudded by. I was a bit put off. I had just come UP a hill; he was preparing to go DOWN it. Then I thought about the wind at my back as I pressed east on Thornton Road--and the wind that was in his face as he plowed west. I had further reason to think about the wind after I turned around and started pushing my own way westward. Yes, it was downhill, but somehow I didn't experience the same exhilaration of expanded stride that I might have known. I was tired: Yes. It was the first time I had run in some time: True. But it was that breeze that took the final wind out of my sails. This was no gale, just a pulsing pressure that made every step a little harder. Leaves and needles littered the ground, too tender and too new to hold on in their first significant test. I turned the corner and headed north on North Star Road, the last lap toward home. My legs were still heavy, but the pressure was gone--I was running with the south wind, aided by what had been my foe moments before. Nothing had changed--nothing but my direction. In a nutshell, that's repentance: turning from my way to God's so that the Wind that once was against me now presses me home. As much as I incline to my own self-serving--as much as I enjoy pursuing my own--I'd rather go with God. © Copyright May 2017 by Robert G. Robbins |
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