The Light in the Woods

#13 – THE LIGHT IN THE WOODS – AUGUST 2006

© Aubri Dennison 2006

8/2/06 Reflections          I think when we’re handed trials and react to them properly, they are opportunities to receive grace and favors – opportunities that we would never have if God didn’t love us enough to allow the trials to run their course. Trials are tribulations only if we react to them badly. We have a choice; if we choose to accept God’s will we’ll find peace even in adversity. Trials offer us spiritual growth – we ask God’s help to do the right thing and He always develops our characters because of it. But some trials are evil and it’s hard to blame people for doubting God’s goodness in the face of them. If God is the author of creation, both good and bad, He must be equally capable of harming us as well as blessing us. So why does He harm innocent children? Well, the answer is that taking innocent children to heaven isn’t harming them. We aren’t hard-wired to see that life on Earth is a small mote of dust within the cosmic matter. Even if we believe, we can’t see beyond our human faculties. Human minds don’t have the capability to absorb full understanding of the creator, so we tend to give what we do understand more meaning than it deserves. The death of a child seems cruel only because we can’t see the glory of its birth into eternal life. If we had understanding of God, all death, disease, pain and infirmity would be reconcilable. But since we don’t have understanding in this world, we must substitute it with trust.

8/6/06 Insights from Study         As I read the Bible over once again, trying to do what, as I was taught, God wants me to do, I find all the negativity I’ve come to detest. I can’t even skip over the specifics, as I could before, to get the flavor of what was meant to be conveyed. Before, I could relax in the face of my inability to understand the Bible, feeling that with an open mind I can hit the high spots and by this gain what I need to gain. Now, I feel like I’m gaining nothing, just plodding on to get it over with, even though I truly want to get into it. Now I have to decide: Am I just lazy and inattentive to God’s word? Am I too dedicated to defining a set of beliefs to learn anything from the Bible? Is the Bible’s usefulness compromised by the passing of time? Is God trying to tell me in this way to pay more attention to how He personally works in my life instead of how He works with creation in general? Am I going to go against all I’ve been taught and give up on the Bible completely? I will if that’s what God wants for me, and if I’m wrong about what God wants I’ll have sold my soul pretty cheaply. But there is one part of the Bible that does speak to me clearly, because it speaks to me in a way I’m used to hearing – it fits in completely with what has already been imprinted on my heart. With the coming of Jesus, did God mean to wipe that slate clean to the point of abandoning the Old Testament ways as well as the Old Testament? It feels that way to me because in the Old Testament so much of God’s actions and men’s actions of which He approves seem unChristlike. The point isn’t that I don’t understand the Bible – I don’t understand God either but I’m not going to abandon Him. It’s that with the coming of Christ God means to deal with us differently, and to cling to the Old Testament come hell or high water seems like ignoring God’s wishes and putting our own needs first. This is heresy, so I need to proceed carefully and put all my trust in God that He will show me what to do. For now, I’m moved to do another in-depth study of the Gospels, which are the part of the Bible that speak to me so loudly, and go from there. God won’t let me dishonor Him unknowingly.

8/13/06 Inspirations            This last Sabbath was so disappointing and unfruitful for me, I was near depression. This time is wasn’t just interruptions and inattentiveness. This time the words made no sense, the devotions fell flat and the journaling and praying might as well have been done by someone I didn’t know, and incidentally, wouldn’t have liked very easily if I had known. Towards evening I gave up and went to check my email. There was a note I had been waiting for and had pretty much given up on. Not only was the email there, but it contained good news, which by now I had come not to expect. To add to the favor, the email announced that I had finally been assigned a prison inmate as a student for whom I would review lessons and write encouragement. This was just what I had wanted and prayed for – a way to serve others despite the limitations of my remote lifestyle, and in a manner I might even be good at and enjoy. This fit in to my Sabbath so perfectly that it was obviously not coincidence, but God’s working in me and rewarding my patience. This is exactly what I would have wished for myself, and not only did I get my wish, it was brought home to me that my wish pleased God. What a gift – to want to please God and actually find out He has been pleased by you! And just when I was at my lowest. How can you not recognize God’s hand in something like this?

8/13/06 Reflections            How is it that God never seems to lose patience with His people? Will He show us mercy forever even though we never seem to learn to overcome our human nature? Of course He will; He created us and our human nature; He has no need for patience as He already knows how it will all turn out. But to us, who can’t see beyond what we know, it feels like God should’ve given up on us long ago, because no matter how educated we get, we keep making the same old mistakes with th same old sin. If only we could understand how God looks at the world, it would help us so much with our own outlook. That’s why the mystics are so right to abandon their wills; to become only what God desires — for in this way we have at last the opportunity to see things through God’s eyes. This can only be wonderful, because we were created to spend eternity with Him and this eternity must be a beautiful thing.

8/14/06 Insights from Prayer            I’ve been given so much to be thankful for, and one of my favorite gifts is having the desire and the means to help others. For this I’m so grateful, especially because it’s something I ask for almost every day.

8/16/06 Reflections            I have never suffered from allergies or stuffiness for any reason before. Suddenly this summer, I started to notice that my scented candles didn’t do anything for me, and that I could place myself right in front of a stick of burning incense and smell very little of it. Is this some kind of message, or am I just plugged up? The reason I thought it might be some kind of message is that I enjoy candles and incense so much that maybe I was putting too much emphasis on my own pleasure. But somehow I don’t think so. Their purpose is to help me concentrate during study and reflection, and the enjoyment is secondary to that.

8/16/06 Reflections               When writing letters to prisoners I’m dealing with good Christians who have asked for pen pals especially in order to discuss faith and fellowship with someone who has the same interest. Both I and the inmates in this program freely speak of religion and faith. Then I have to contrast this with the way I have to do things for the education program, where my job is to encourage prisoners with the lessons they’re taking. This organization is rather secular and even warned me against basing my work on religious matters. They have an anti-establishment bias anyway for me to work around. So it’s been interesting trying to scale back what I really want to say, especially since my student, in his first lesson, cited prayer as one way he gets through the day. How hard it is to hold back, and how daunting it is to think that maybe God is testing my sincerity. It says in the Bible we should be God’s servant and not be ashamed of Him. Maybe I’m not a very good evangelist when the chips are down. I will work religion in with this student, but I have to be careful because if they get mad I won’t be able to keep on helping him or any others they might assign me. But here’s what I keep thinking – this organization wants so badly to help these black prisoners get along in the real world when they get out, and they’re actively eliminating the most important thing they can do to assure the person a better start. Too bad they can’t, or won’t, realize that knowledge of God is the sharpest tool we have against recidivism, and really do some good for the inmates and the communities they will be going back to. Too bad secularism beats down the real solution. It fosters self-thought as the answer, when self-abandonment is the thing that will really work. The contrast between methods striving for the same goal is startling, but in itself is a wonderful enlightenment for me that reinforces my commitment.

8/17/06 Reflections          There was a time when I would have railed against fate for bringing rain when I wanted sunshine. But now I accept everything as coming from God’s hand. God only does whats best for His plan. It may be comfort one time and chastisement the next, but it’s always what’s best for us. How dare we put down what God has deemed in our best interest?

8/22/06 Presentations           I was watching a fish duck out my window, going along the shore dipping here and there to look for dinner. When the duck encountered lily pads it couldn’t progress through, it didn’t rage against fate that they were in its way. God in His wisdom has given him the instinct to know that there is nothing he can do about it other than accept it. The lily pads just were, and that’s the way of it. They weren’t there to aggravate the fish duck – they were there because they were serving God’s good purpose unrelated to the comings and goings of the fish duck. And so the duck accommodated the lily pads into his routine as something totally logical, swam around them, and left the plants and his peace of mind intact. As humans we would have hacked away angrily at the lily pads to get them out of our way, never thinking of their purpose in being there. We are encumbered by our free wills, unlike the fish duck, but this serves to illustrate that using our free wills to abandon our good for the good of God’s plan will result in things being the way they should be.

8/27/06 Insights from Prayer         My faith is lately in darkness, and I pray to God that it’s only short and temporary. But there’s value in dryness in that I learn the proper role of faith in my life through it. My faith is not for my own enjoyment any more than it is to be paraded in front of people so they can see how holy I am. It isn’t for public consumption (although the good effects of it are) or for private satisfaction that approaches human pride. I shouldn’t want to take my faith out of its protective wrapping, hold it up to the light, and turn it around and around in my hands so I can exclaim over it’s beauty. It should instead be a thing inside me; a part of me and the whole of God, hidden from my pridefullness but on exhibition to all as a gift from God himself – to be shaped and shared so that others can accept the gift of faith from God within themselves. When I stray from using my faith at all or from using it but ineffectively, it’s like getting sidetracked from the right path and getting stuck in the ditch. It’s dark and lonely there but if I try to find my way out it’ll only make it worse. Then is the time I need to wait and trust; eventually God will pick me up and carry me up and out, placing me back on the center of the right path, and turn me around so I’m facing the right way. Seeing how He helps me in times of trouble, I’m confident enough to take that first step on my own that starts me forward at last once again. This is the purpose of spiritual aridity.

8/27/06 Insights from Study            Old Testament law was proving insufficient to return man to the right relationship with God that God desired. The Messiah’s job was to bridge that gap by being a symbol of the God/Man relationship in that, as Jesus was both God and man, so God resides in each of us yet, and the blending of His will and ours is possible. His passion, death and resurrection was Jesus’ playing out of the ritual sacrifice of the Old Testament to its apogee – God’s son was to be the sacrifice to end all sacrifices; the victory over death proving that the sacrifice had done the job; that God was now reconciled with man. Like any sincere sacrificial event, the absolution from the sins of man the sacrifice took upon itself was approved by God and the purity of our souls once again established. The resurrection was God’s sign of final approval. From then on, the slate was wiped clean, and all any man had to do to keep the slate clean was accept the sacrifice from this end. In doing so we agree to take on the mantle of Jesus, who by His example, showed that obedience to God was the right way.

8/31/06 Reflections               The wonder isn’t that God would allow horrible disasters to occur. The wonder is that the hell on earth that we deserved to inherit through sin has been tempered by a loving, merciful God; that not only has our exile been made tolerable, but God has even provided us pleasure in His creation and glimpses of heaven here on Earth. We should use disasters to bring us closer to God, not to drive Him from us. For it’s by the trials of life that we remember our frailty and inability to overcome without the help of our creator, who wants us to join him in paradise and to this end has come among us as Christ to deliver us from the wages of sin. Having been assured salvation, the least we can do is come through the atonement with our faith intact.