onlyontuesday
  • Blog
  • About
  • Quotes
  • Nature
  • Destinations
  • Subscribe

Can you trust me

3/27/2018

1 Comment

 
Picture
That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death. Philippians 3:10
 
No life depicts the power of this verse to me more graphically than that of Helen Rosevere. Many of you know her story. Like so many people who grew up knowing about God, at university Helen came to see him as irrelevant and dropped him out of her story. But the one thing she couldn’t escape was the difference she saw in some of the girls she met on campus. “They were so consistently kind, loving, helpful and thoughtful”, she said.  
 
One Christmas they asked her to join them at a Christian conference and not wanting to be alone, she agreed. For the first time she heard sound bible teaching and she quite literally fell in love with Jesus. The next day the leader of the conference gave her a bible inscribed with Philippians 3:10. He told her that she had begun the journey to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and maybe some day she might be privileged to share in the fellowship of his sufferings. She said, “I’d been a Christian for 24 hours and he was suggesting suffering for Christ!”
 
And of course that’s just what she did as a missionary doctor to what was then the Belgian Congo, Ziare.  From 1953 she helped make mud bricks to build a hospital, delivered babies, helped lepers, founded a training school for nurses, trained women to serve as nurse-evangelists and ran the hospital with minimal supplies as the only doctor in the area.
 
Then in the early 1960s, the Congo gained independence, but without any preparation or training of the national people to run the country. Chaos broke out. Most Europeans fled the country and four years of anarchy followed.
Picture
Its amazing the beauty that grows in the harshest of environments.
Picture
Picture
In September 1964, without warning, war erupted. Twenty missionaries were murdered, 200 nuns and countless priests lost their lives. Ten weeks later the rebel soldiers ransacked Helen’s home, held her at gunpoint and over the ensuing months she was severely beaten, her face smashed, glasses broken, teeth knocked out by a rebel boot, she endured imprisonment and on a number of occasions was brutally raped.
 
At one point as they marched her down the hall and she knew what lay ahead of her, she asked God where he was, why he had abandoned her. She was unprepared for his reply, “Are you willing to thank me for trusting you with this experience, even if I never tell you why?” She said she was unable to say anything else but “Yes” and in that moment she knew overwhelming peace and the inexplicable presence of God. “It didn’t stop the pain, the humiliation or the cruelty, that was very real, but it was all for Jesus.”
 
It would be many years in the future before she was given a glimpse into the way her story of suffering had the power to bring help and healing to many thousands of women around the world.
 
Suffering is beyond our understanding except by faith.
Picture
Such beauty growing on sheer rock and nothing else - barren beauty
Picture
Picture
The Cross is the beginning of the story. It is the means of our Salvation and eternal hope.  It is the inconceivable price paid for the person I was to become the person God is shaping me to be.
 
My deepest gratitude will always lie at the foot of the cross. But can we linger too long at the Cross I wonder? If Helen’s life tells me anything it tells me that she came to know him and the power of his resurrection as she lived out her faith in the mainstream of life, making bricks, learning language, healing wounds, enduring conflict and navigating cultures.
 
Her autobiography makes no secret of her struggles with pride, anger, jealousy and despondency; yes she was human. But life was the refining fire that enabled an intimacy with God that many people long for, an intimacy that allowed her to trust her Lord through suffering few of us could imagine enduring.
 
When I saw her interviewed at 85, her faith was tangible. I saw it in her eyes, heard it in her voice and felt the vibrancy of her love for her Lord radiate in a way that moved me to tears — tears that flowed from a longing to know that level of faith and love.
 
I can't imagine I could have survived what she suffered, but that’s the power of the resurrection, the indwelling God, with us in the midst of suffering. Helen's life is a living testimony to that truth.

So often I try to side-step suffering and eliminate pain but its a package deal, I will come to know him and the power of the resurrection when I can "thank him for trusting me with the suffering, even if he never tells me why".
1 Comment

I can only imagine

3/20/2018

4 Comments

 
Picture
In his son’s words, he was a monster. An angry, bitter, abusive man whose words hit deeper than his powerful fist; the bruises heal but the words can retain their power for a lifetime.
 
Bart was a gentle, music-loving child and like most children, prone to dream and imagine, but in his father’s eyes he was a failure.  His father had been a Southern Methodist University all-American football player and Bart said, "I tried to get good at the only thing my dad cared about", but Bart wasn’t so gifted. When he broke both ankles in a sporting accident and it was evident that he would never play sport again, his father walked away in disgust.
 
But those broken ankles opened the door for Bart to find his true self. When he got back to school the only elective still available was choir. Despite his fierce protestations, his teacher’s ultimatum left him little choice, “You have a gift Bart and in my class you will use it or fail”.  Bart discovered his outstanding voice.
 
The rest of the story is painful and raw, his father’s words casting long shadows across his path many times, but it's a story of redemption and hard won triumph. Bart had encountered Jesus at a summer camp when he was a child and the seed had been sown. He went on to become lead singer in a band called Mercy Me.  
Picture
His father developed cancer and a door was nudged ajar for the restoration of a relationship. How does one forgive that level of abuse? Only by grace, but Bart found that grace and the all too short father son relationship he’d always wanted. His father became a Christian and following his death Bart wrote a song in tribute to his father called, I can only imagine.
 
I can only imagine what it will be like
When I walk by Your side
I can only imagine what my eyes will see
When Your face is before me, I can only imagine

Surrounded by Your glory
What will my heart feel?
Will I dance for you Jesus?
Or in awe of You be still?

Will I stand in Your presence?
Or to my knees will I fall?
Will I sing Hallelujah?
Will I be able to speak at all? I can only imagine
 
It reached double Platinum, being the only Christian single to sell 2 million copies. Bart’s story has been made into a movie of the same name and opened in cinemas last week. I found it hard to watch but I’m so glad I did.
Picture
I love that it's an unsanitized true story. It has so much to say about life.
 
No one is beyond redemption, no one, that’s the power of grace. Bart believed that if God could change his father from a monster to a saint, He could do anything  — even heal the wounds that had so deeply scared his life — “I saw God take him from the man I hated to the man I wanted to become.”
 
In forgiving his father, Bart could begin to live beyond the prison of his father’s cruel words, words that had crippled and defined him. Proverbs 18:21 reminds me that “The tongue has the power of life and death.” For Bart that was a living death, but it doesn’t take a cruel, abusive person to damage another human being, we are all capable of that.  And we've all experienced the life-giving energy of words of encouragement and appreciation. Every day we have that power within us — that choice to make. As parents, the way we speak to children becomes their inner voice.


"Music gave me hope when I felt hopeless. Love when I felt unloved. A reason to embrace life when I was dying inside. If a song moved me, then I felt I was alive for a reason. Later I came to the truth of knowing these blessings were all gifts from the Lord. Music was simply the conduit for them to reach my heart.” Bart Millard.

Bart had always loved music but had no idea of the enormous gif that lay within him. It lay dormant and could have stayed that way if it hadn't been for a teacher who discovered his talent quite by accident. Through her encouragement - read demandingness - she forced him to use the gift and the highlight of the movie for me was the realisation that dawned on him as he faced a standing ovation - I am valued, I do have something to offer.

How many people die with the gift within them, unrecognised or unshared? I don't want to die with untapped potential or not having used the gifts I've been given for the purpose they were intended. 

"The best music can come from the worst experiences" Christian Toto.

Postcript:  Dennis Quade played
Bart's father, Arthur Wesley Millard. Dennis had given his life to Christ as a boy but he had lost his faith somewhere amidst the the glamour and darkness of Hollywood. Playing Arthur revived his faith and enabled him to finish a song he'd begun writing for his mother 20 years before, a song about grace. His mother was a woman of faith and he gave it to her on her 91st birthday.
4 Comments

Beauty of the human spirit

3/13/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
I hate the ugliness of life. I watch my friend dying, week-by-week, inch-by- inch until she's no more than skin and bone and a mind struggling to hold on to some semblance of reality and recognition. She’s been dying for what feels like forever - a long slow fading into nothingness – this woman who has spent a lifetime caring for others, lays helpless in a bed, incapable of doing anything for herself.
 
I wipe her tears. What she fears most is losing her mind, and she knows it’s happening, although she doesn’t realise the extent. She longs to die, she prays that the Lord will take her, but it doesn’t happen and the living hell continues.

​My heart breaks.
Picture
Last week I visited another friend, caring for her husband with advanced Parkinson’s disease. “He wants to stay at home’, she tells me, and her tears make me realise the load she's carrying to make that happen. She never complains, but the exhaustion shows. “In sickness and in health” – they’ve enjoyed the health and now they endure the sickness and its endlessness. I ache for him, he must feel a burden at times and that’s the last thing he would want to be – the last thing any of us want to be.
 
And then there’s my friend caring for her husband with Alzheimer’s disease. He lives with constant frustration and confusion, and anxiety that keeps him constantly under her elbow, like a frightened child holding tight to his mother's skirt. She’s his security and she's being crushed under the weight of the constancy of it all – the never-ending-ness of the questions and the fear. She can’t leave him, so she has no respite, no time to recharge and draw breathe before starting again. It’s taking its toll of her and I wonder how much longer she can keep going.
 
It all seems so cruel, so ugly. Is there any sense to it all?
Picture
As I knelt beside my friend’s bed yesterday, there was at first a look of consternation and then the relief of recognition and she spoke my name. I read some scripture to her and her face lit up. Then in a small whispering voice she sang to me — Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so …  I am weak but he is strong … Yes, Jesus loves me, yes, Jesus loves me, yes, Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so.
 
In what felt like a moment of holiness, I saw the beauty. The beauty of her faith — unfaded, unlike her body — faith grown over a lifetime of living for her Saviour, sustaining her to the end. And then she smiled, her beautiful radiant smile that hasn’t faded either. In that rare moment I felt I met her very soul — beyond the crippled hands and twisted body, I experiencing the beauty of her inner being.
 
In the midst of the ravages of age and the hideousness of suffering is the last place I expected to find beauty … but its there.
 
I see beauty in the enormous courage of my friends as they care for their husbands with all the sacrifice that requires. The beauty of their devotion and perseverance and the commitment to get up every morning and do it all again and again and again … until death us do part.

It's easy to limit beauty to something 
that pleases the aesthetic senses,  something that gives delight and joy, something warm that makes my heart want to sing. 

But maybe we need to redefine it, to set it free from the limitations we put on it —  to develop eyes to see it in the broader context of life — life stripped bare from self sufficiency. Maybe, just maybe the deepest, richest beauty of all is the beauty of the human spirit.
0 Comments

The intruder

3/6/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
Like most people, one of my greatest strengths is also one of my greatest weaknesses. I’m goal-orientated. Once I start a job I’m totally focused and don’t want to stop until the job is complete. In other words, I’m not easily distracted, which is a good thing. But I don’t like interruptions, which is a bad thing.
 
However, I’ve come to realise that being focused on the job isn’t the problem; it goes much deeper than that. It's the underlying issue of priorities.
 
This morning I was grappling with the story in Luke 9 about the disciples returning from their time away, travelling from village to village, teaching and healing. I guess they had a lot to tell Jesus and he decided they’d go away to a quiet place. Maybe to regroup, debrief, I’m sure they had lots of stories to share, or maybe he knew they all needed a good rest, including him. Whatever the reason, they headed for Bethsaida.
 
The problem was that the crowd discovered their plan and rather than a quiet time together, they found themselves besieged with over 5000 people. At the very least I’d have felt frustrated, if not angry … surely I was allowed some quiet, quality time alone with friends without intrusion. I need time to be refreshed and so do my disciples.
 
But Jesus had a very different heart. He welcomed them. He went right on teaching and healing the sick until evening. Maybe he saw the people’s ‘hunger’ for truth, maybe he wanted to make the most of whatever opportunities were given him to teach them about his Father. One thing I know for sure, he looked on them with compassion and poured himself out in love.
Picture
The story raises big questions for me:

How wiling am I to be interrupted?
Where do I see people as an intrusion rather than an opportunity to share God’s love?
Can I genuinely and lovingly welcome the intrusion and give 100% of myself?
 
So often my priorities are more about my time than Gods, my plans than his.  
 
Picture
I once heard a wedding speech, in which someone said that we all have the same 24 hours in the day, plenty of time to do what God has asked us to do. So I wonder why we frequently feel we can’t fit in all we need to do. Perhaps we’re living our own agenda.  
 
I think the secret is becoming consciously available to God throughout the everydayness of life with a mindset that whatever comes into my life, is from his hand ... an opportunity, a lesson, an invitation ... or as a friend of mine says, a divine appointment, not an intrusion.
Picture
Photos: taken in the Royal Botanic Gardens
0 Comments

    Author

    Glenyss Barnham
    ​I'm a mother and grandmother who loves  discovering beauty in unexpected places.

    Archives

    December 2022
    August 2022
    June 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly