Lorrie Spinney

Blog

  • The smallness of me

    “Everyone assembled here will know that the LORD rescues His people, but NOT with sword and spear.” I Sam. 17:47

    No, he uses a shepherd with a sling and a stone.

    Here stands young David, neck bent back to look up at the soldiers, way up at Saul. He wears no armour, carries no sword, no spear. His skin looks like it could snag and tear on a branch. He’s got a few smooth stones and a sling and he’s going to bring down the giant whose mocking laughter scatters warriors.

    And he does.

    And Jonathan and his armour bearer take down a Philistine troop. And Gideon and a few men with clay jars chase off an entire army.

    And Joshua walks around a wall a bunch of times, then shouts. The wall turns to dust and the city is his.

    You do rescue your people, but not with sword and spear. You like to do it unconventionally. You especially like to use small things, weak things, things that shouldn’t work.

    You positively delight in weakness.

    Like you used the broken Israelites, wrecked by abusive slavery, to overthrow the entire Egyptian Empire – just walked them out one night leaving it shattered and wailing.

    Like you used a bloodied, exhausted Jesus … a dead Jesus! … to save the whole entire world: people, animals, and earth itself.

    So, my weakness?  The smallness of me?

    It’s no hindrance to you.

    It’s an opportunity.

  • Christmas in ordinary life

    He started out as a baby

    without self-awareness –

    the great I AM –

    and needing to put the pieces together

    as he grew; to figure out his purpose

    and learn about his father.

    He needed to learn a skill and trade

    among his family – brothers, dad.

    He began each day with no awareness

    of what that day would bring, or where

    it would take him.

    He needed to learn how to surrender

    his human will to the will of God,

    and then

    how to keep doing it day after day

    in the context of an ordinary life –

    a tradesman in a nowhere town

    during tense political times.

    He needed to learn

    to see God

    with human eyes

    and live for God, with God

    in a human life.

    The Jesus we saw at the end –

    His few short years of publicity

    and long hours of pain on a cross –

    was the final result. He learned

    how to live God’s life

    as a human.

    Which is what we need to learn;

    and at Christmas, when we try to remember

    a long ago event in a faraway place,

    and to somehow piece it together

    with our ordinary lives, so that it means

    what we know it should mean,

    we can remind ourselves

    that he did learn,

    that he knows how to learn,

    and how to teach us.

    And that although for us

    it is long ago and far away,

    it is not for him.

    To God, whose thoughts are never dimmed by time,

    the experience of being human

    is fresh, and utterly now.

    He is still learning,

    as a master learns,

    for and with each one of us,

    how to live his life

    in ours.

  • This Isaac?

    Thousands of years ago a man was told to kill his son.

    And this matters to you and me.

    The man was Abraham and it was God – our God, the same one – who told him to kill his son. That’s why it matters.

    The son was Isaac, and most of us know the story. We know that Isaac was a miracle child. God had promised him to Abraham and Sarah and then waited over twenty years – twenty years! – to deliver on the promise.

    And Sarah was already old when the twenty years started.

    By the time Isaac was born she was long past fertile. She was long done. As the bible so succinctly puts it, “her womb was dead.”

    But that’s no problem for God. In another bible story, He started with a walking stick: Aaron’s staff. It was long gone from the tree yet God grew buds, then flowers, then almonds from that dead stick.

    In the same way He grew Isaac from Sarah’s dead womb.

    And there was more. Isaac was not only promised, but he was a promise. God had promised Abraham that through Isaac, Abraham would be given a multitude of descendants.

    The story almost loses me here because I don’t get what is so great about a multitude of descendants.

    But I think it’s a bit like if God said to us, “Your life matters. It is so important to what I am doing in the world that generations upon generations of people will know you and know that through you they are blessed.”

    Anyway, that’s what Isaac meant to Abraham and – so Abraham thought – to God.

    Then God told him to kill Isaac.

    Can you imagine?

    Honestly, it would seem as though God had come unhinged.

    “This Isaac? God, you want me to kill this Isaac? The one you grew from death? The one you promised so much about?”

    And, in a smaller voice, “The one I love so much?”

    But Abraham does it.

    He does it!

    How?

    By faith.

    Faith? In God? The God who has completely reneged on everything He said? The God who has become so strangely, unrecognizably, horrible?

    But you see that’s what faith is.

    It’s not just believing that God exists. It’s believing that He’s good.

    I’m going to say that again: faith doesn’t just believe that God exists. It believes that He’s good.

    Sometimes, He really doesn’t seem so. It’s almost as though He tries to be difficult.

    I think He does.

    It’s like muscle-building for our faith.

    So, when God seems not good to us, even … horrible, then let’s turn our faces toward Him and walk. Let’s obey though it cost our dearest treasure. Let’s believe, against all the evidence and against all reason, that He is good.

    Let’s muscle up our faith.

    Oh, did I forget to mention?

    In the end, God didn’t let Abraham kill Isaac.

    He’s not actually like that.