Lorrie Spinney

Category: Uncategorized

  • Shortcut

    I know that one day I will look back on my life and see how everything that happened “worked together for good.” I will stand with God and honestly say, “Thank you for how you did it. Even that part I hated. I see now all the good you created because of it. I’m so glad you did it that way.”

    Of course, that’s one day.

    Today it sucks.

    But what if there was a way to get past the suck into some of that ‘one day’ perspective?

    I think there is.

    I’m learning to say “thank you” now.

    Thank you for the things I don’t like. Thank you for the bad things, the awful things, the terrible things that you have allowed into my life. Thank you for the pain I feel, for the mysteries I can’t solve, for the suffering I hate. Thank you for my job ending, my marriage dying, my children hurting, my dinner burning.

    At first, I wrestled with the theology of thanking God for bad things, but then I realised it was just a shortcut past accepting that He ‘lets’ it happen. It goes straight into, “I know you’re doing something good, even in this.”

    When I say thank you, something lets go in me. I stop resisting.

    Thanking God for the bad stuff automatically shifts my perspective. I can see God’s hand in the thing that, moments before, was only awful. Now it is part of something bigger, something good that I can’t see yet.

    Before ‘thank you’, I stand alone facing an ogre: an evil, violent thing that wants to hurt me.

    When I say thank you, the focus widens and I see that the ogre and I are both part of a Story that God is writing: a story with a happy ending.

    Sometimes when I say thank you I am still mad at God. I don’t like the way he is writing the story.

    I have found that it works anyway. Angry surrender is still surrender. The act of thanking is itself a form of repentance. I spit it out and it reaches back to change me. As the word echoes in the air around me, or I see it there on the page where I wrote it, it begins its magic transformation of my understanding, and I am softened.

    It’s not a magic spell, though. I can’t just say the words. I need to be deliberate about it. I need to think about what I am doing when I thank him. Often, I have a mental image of my hand clenched and then opening to reveal my heart there, exposed to whatever it is I am thanking him for. Ready for him to do what he wants.

    Saying thank you is an exercise of trust, and it’s what he is waiting for.

    From here, He can make miracles.

  • Problem and Perspective

    My roommates moved away.

    It was the first time I had ever lived alone and I didn’t like it. Weekdays were okay because I worked, but the weekends loomed.

    I was bored – how much cleaning can an apartment stand?

    I was lonely – why was nobody calling?

    Worst were the existential issues: if I die here now, will anyone notice or care?

    Saturdays began to be a big problem; this huge tract of time without structure or purpose, full of dark pockets of self-pity and gloom.

    Around this time I quit writing poetry because my poems were becoming uniformly bleak.

    Then one night I began a conversation with myself:

    “Okay, Lorrie, what is your problem?”

    “I don’t like weekends. They’re too hard.”

    “What’s too hard about them?”

    “I’m afraid of them. I don’t know how to manage them. I don’t know how to handle being so alone, and having nothing to do.”

    “What exactly are you afraid of?”

    “I don’t know, maybe that this is all just too much for me. I’m not ready to handle life on my own. Maybe I’m not really capable, or significant. Maybe this will destroy me.”

    “Really?”

    “Okay, I see how stupid that is. How can weekends destroy anyone? Besides, as soon as I said that, I remembered that God is here, He won’t let me be destroyed.”

    “Yes. What do you think God is doing in all this?”

    “Let’s see: God loves me. What if I looked at all this as something He has brought me to because He loves me?

    He loves me, so He has brought me here.

    If I loved someone, why would I bring them to the exact thing they fear? The only reason I can think of is to show them that they don’t need to fear. It’s like shining a light under the bed for a child who’s afraid of monsters – “See? Nothing there.”

    “God wants me to not be afraid of long, lonely weekends!”

    It’s funny how a moment gets frozen. I remember the wooden surface of the desk because as I stared at it, lost in this conversation, I was suddenly flooded with joy so intense that it lit the space like a camera flash and forever locked it in my memory.

    I still had to face the problem of what to do but now, instead of crippling fear and uncertainty, I had this joyful confidence that God was going to help. He really cared about me, even about how I spent my Saturdays!

    I’ve used the same method since. First I define the problem and then I put in front of it the fact that God loves me and so He has brought me here. I let that certainty steep for a while, until it saturates my perspective.

    Love brought me here.

    I can trust Love.

  • Why joy matters

    It’s okay if you’re not joyful. There are lots of good reasons to be unhappy; in fact, sadness is a reasonable response to life in this world. How else can a thinking person feel when faced with the madness?

    And sometimes, sadness is the result of chemistry gone wrong in our brains.

    But sad is not God’s ultimate plan for you and me.

    Joy is a theme that pulses through the whole bible, especially the New Testament. Jesus wants his disciples to be as joyful as he is, and his joy was strong enough to triumph over the cross. We are even commanded to ‘be joyful’ – as though it is a choice we can make.

    God wants us glad.

    Joy is both a reasonable response to God and a powerful force for Him in this world. I look to God and am filled with joy, then – when I turn that joy outward – others can see God.

    It is not a by-product of the right circumstances.

    Years ago I was worried about my daughter and at the same time reading Mike Mason’s book, “Champagne for the Soul”, where he chronicles his 90 day experiment in joy. I remember a particular moment where I felt that God was inviting me to open up and receive His joy.

    I didn’t want to.

    You see, I wanted Him to do something for my daughter and unless and until He did, I didn’t really want to be happy. I felt that to be happy while she struggled would be wrong. Worse, it would show God that I was okay with the way He was handling the situation, which I wasn’t. To accept His joy while being mad at Him felt like a kind of capitulation, like giving Him permission.

    My sadness was a form of protest and I wasn’t ready to surrender.

    Joy is a by-product of surrender.

    Joy comes when I see God for what He is: all good, all strong, all smart, and forever and ever on our side – no matter how much evidence there may seem to be to the contrary. It comes when I plant myself in God’s word and say, “This is truer than everything I see, everything I feel, and everything I have experienced so far.” And when joy comes, it opens my heart and floods it with His love.

    When I look at a situation I don’t like and say, “God has this. Thank you, God, for what you are doing here and how much I’m going to love it, one day.” – joy comes.

    Joy matters because it is both the proof of God’s activity in my life, and the power of it.

    So, it’s okay to be sad, because that is honest and reasonable.

    But get ready to be glad.