September 17, 2003 Morning

Confession time. I didn’t do evening prayer last night, not even the readings. Cheryl and I went to visit Joanna, who decided this week she didn't want to go into the pool. So, we sat around drinking herbal tea in her kitchen, with her mother-in-law, and had a lovely visit. Joanna, despite her two bouts of emergency brain surgery a year ago and her long, arduous recovery, has such a radiant faith in God's goodness, it's an inspiration to be with her. I was feeling awfully sore from my weight training on Monday, even though I took time to stretch yesterday and went for an hour’s brisk walk to try to keep the oxygen flowing. By the time I got home from Joanna's last night, I had a dull headache from tense muscles in my back and neck.

The physical discomfort kept me away from prayers, but it didn’t keep from eating a bag of rosemary and olive oil potato chips. Not a huge bag but not a single serving bag either, and this morning I feel as if I have an undigested mass of starch in my stomach and still the vestiges of that dull headache.

Nor did the physical discomfort last night keep me from playing a couple of games of Spider Solitaire on the computer. I think I shall have to declare a fast from Spider for the rest of the week, because it is embarrassing to report. And I don't even enjoy it that much. Isn't that the way of the world? It tempts you to do stuff and you ask yourself.....why am I doing this? I don't even like this!

I’ve suffered from frequent headaches from childhood and I think sometimes I know what causes them. I can look at physical causes, stress, heredity and so on. I watch what I eat, avoid sugar and white flour, in fact all wheat products these days. But, then I wonder if in being preoccupied with what I’m putting into the body that I’m not honouring a false belief of some kind. I don’t want to fall into a trap of thinking even subconsciously that what I eat, or how I exercise or stretch “saves me” somehow. I don’t want to confuse “feeling better” with the fruits of the Spirit, even though experiencing love, joy, peace, patience, self-control, are the best “feel-good” program I know of.

I want to be a good steward of my body, but I don’t want to get so fussy and pre-occupied with what it’s doing and what I’m doing to it that I forget about the way that Christ in me permeates every molecule of my body.

In the Prayer of Humble Access during Communion, we pray:

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, Trusting in our own righteousness, But in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy So much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou are the same Lord, Whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, So to eat the Flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, And to drink his Blood, That our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, And our soul’s washed through his most precious Blood, And that we may evermore dwell in him, And he in us. Amen.

This prayer is tough stuff for our modern sensibilities. It makes me remember how when Jesus mentioned eating and drinking his flesh to his disciples that a number of them fell away.

“He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.” John 6:56

“Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?
When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples murmured at it, he said unto them, Doth this offend you?
What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?
It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.
But there are some of you that believe not. For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray him.
And he said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father.
From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.
Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away?
Then Simon Peter answered, Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.
And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God.” ( (John 6:60-69)

These words of eternal life, this spiritual sustenance, this heavenly food, this other-wordly grace, is far more important to my physical well-being than whether I eat this or that, or exercise this or that.

Once I remember going to my Baptist church for a meeting. I arrived with a dull headache and asked at the office if anyone had anything I could take for it.

“No,” Marge, one of the elders said, “But, how would you like to try prayer?”

We went into the small closet that would have housed a mimeograph machine in the old days but then served as her office and she sat me on a stool. Then she stood behind me and kneaded my shoulders for a few seconds, praying softly. Then she lifted her hands to my head, and I felt as if liquid, warm, golden grace was pouring from her fingertips and surrounding me. The headache began to abate. It wasn’t entirely gone by the time she stopped praying, but the effects of that grace continued to work, until, about fifteen minutes later it was entirely gone.

There was another instance, where, my friend Jeni had a terrible headache while trying to run a small women’s meeting. I was newly on fire in the arena of intercessory prayer and having the kind of miraculous success that often follows new conversions to Christ, or new “discoveries” of God’s supernatural power. Jeni rubbed her forehead and her eyes reflected the pain. I'd call it "beginner's luck", but we Christians are not supposed to believe in luck.

I suggested we stop for a moment and pray for Jeni. We did. Then, she resumed the meeting, still in obvious pain, and I had a strong impression come over me. “I see your headache leaving,” I said.

“Well, I don’t. It’s still here,” Jeni said. She continued the meeting, brow wrinkled in pain.

Then, about five minutes later, she interrupted the business at hand to say to me, “It’s gone! It’s completely gone!”
She was amazed.

I had during that time several instances of knowing in advance of healings, or knowing that prayer would change things. Then, I had a couple of instances where I experienced that inner certainty, but what I’d prayed for didn’t come to pass. That made me wonder about my ability to discern what was a genuine word of knowledge from self-deception. Hmmmmm. As the church lady on Saturday Night Live might say, “Could it be……satan?” I began to doubt whether I’d ever had a genuine word in the first place. I stopped the kind of fervent intercessory prayer I used to do in those days after that happened. I wonder if that counterfeit “certainty” was a ploy to get me to stop.

I believe in an all powerful, all good, supernatural God who created the entire universe out of nothing. I believe that I am His adopted child, a joint-heir with Christ.

So, why do I continually seek physical remedies and diet-related solutions and other means to maintain my health? Why don’t I seek God first in the physical things. Most of us seek Him last, after all physical means have failed.

Oswald Chambers this morning: “There is no temptation taken you but such as is common to man.” (! Cor. 10:13)

Okay!

It’s a profound reading today, one that I’m going to have to meditate on before I can clearly see what it means for me right now.

One of the temptations facing me this morning, before I started blogging was self-doubt. Should I bother? Probably days go by and no one reads this. Not even my friends!

That’s similar to the self-doubt that sometimes assails me in my fiction writing. Other times, I swing in the opposite direction, to the grandiose and imagine that my novels are going to be huge sellers and everyone who has rejected me is going to be slapping their foreheads wondering how they could have missed the next big publishing phenomenon. At least the grandiose fantasies sometimes help motivate me to write. But, I also recognize that rejection is a comfort zone for me. If a big dream started to come true, that would be truly scary. Maybe that's why I get headaches! My dream, though, whether the novels ever get publishes, is that somehow God would speak to others through me and that they would know it was God.

I pray that the joy and the life knowing Jesus has brought me can be shared. That you might know His healing power and love, no matter what your circumstances. He is real. He is who He says He is.

Now, to morning prayer, and last night’s readings that I skipped.

Already, I feel joy moving in my bloodstream, the joy of the Lord. I am so thankful that I can be with Him this morning, and share this time with you, whoever you might be, my one solitary reader.

“Where two or three are gathered together in my Name, there am I in the midst of them.”

My prayer is that whoever is joining me now in cyber time and space, will feel His Presence because He is here in the midst of us.

Now, where did I put the Ordo? I spend a lot of my time running around looking for things, like my glasses, or my keys. If you scroll down, you’ll find hyperlinks to today’s readings in an earlier post.

I’ve done the readings. I hope you do too. I’m going to sign off now.

See below the readings for this morning and tonight.