The Quintessential Rearview Mirror

Friday, September 30, 2022

The thought of my suffering and homelessness is bitter beyond words.  I will never forget this awful time, as I grieve over my loss.  Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this:  The faithful love of the Lord never ends!  His mercies never cease.  Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning.  I say to myself, “The Lord is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!”  The Lord is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him.  So it is good to wait quietly for salvation from the Lord.  Lamentations 3:19-26

When you’ve either been through, or going through a rough patch (COVID, War, Divorce, Prison, or a thousand other nightmares), the tendency is usually to stare into one of two places – the road ahead, or the rearview mirror.  To be glued to the rearview mirror is to hold on to the anguish and pain of the past, embracing the rough patch as the future.  To dwell on the past means you are driving blindly into the future, and we know where failing to keep your eyes on the road will lead.  (Laws against texting while driving were placed on the books for a reason!).

However painful the rearview mirror can be, at times we must shoot a quick look there, to be sure of two things:

1.    We are aware of what we left behind.

2.    We are still progressing away from the road that led to the rough patch.

If knowledge is power, running on a low battery is a dumb thing.  It is foolish to not remember what got you into the rough patch, or the dangers that might lead you back there.  Real wisdom is the common sense that puts knowledge (good or evil) to good use.  As the wise person once said:  if we fail to remember the mistakes of the past, we are doomed to repeat them in the future.

Even an ostrich in a hurricane has enough sense to look above the storm to chart his course.

For You Today

So, to be (at least) as wise as a bird-brain, use the rearview mirror to poke your head out of the hole in the ground so you can get above the harsh conditions, and get a bead on where you need to go.  In short, look above, you’ll find plenty of answers as the Lord leads you out of the rough patch, even if the road seems rocky.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

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There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

Has God Forgotten to Be Gracious? and Hard Times & Growing Churches   

[1] Images:  via Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

UnBroken

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Thursday, October 3, 2019

The thought of my suffering and homelessness is bitter beyond words.  I will never forget this awful time, as I grieve over my loss.  Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this:  The faithful love of the Lord never ends!  His mercies never cease.  Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning.  I say to myself, “The Lord is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!”  The Lord is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him.  So it is good to wait quietly for salvation from the Lord.  Lamentations 3:19-26[2]

Jeremiah, fierce, sword-wielding prophet, is the author of Lamentations.  He is the one we find wallowing in his suffering and homelessness, grieving over his loss.  Jeremiah’s homelessness is not what we’d picture in our time, sleeping on park benches, begging on street corners, tents in the woods or nights huddled in an old abandoned car.  Jeremiah was in prison; his home and the entire nation was occupied by the enemy.  His was a broken nation.  His conclusion, that it is good to wait quietly for salvation from the Lord was not a spiritual high ground…Jeremiah had no choice. 

Suffering, and what you do with it, have filled libraries of books for generations.  Ever since Job’s loss of his family, wealth, friends, and place in the community, coupled with the boils that covered his body in torment, humankind has searched for the why of suffering, and the what of how to deal with it.

My friend, Bert Cavaletto learned to deal with Jeremiah and Job’s suffering.  Bert was a pilot in World War 2 who spent a long time in a prison camp.  Among a myriad of coping skills developed to ward off despair, Bert constructed a model ship which he completed while hiding it from his captors.  I saw the ship just before Bert died in 2014.  There was such painstaking detail; each plank of the deck, turnbuckle, stanchion and battens were either carved or fashioned with tools that would have been seen as weapons by the guards.  While it was a diversion from the reality of being a prisoner, this ship was also Bert’s sanity project, and the expression of genuine hope in salvation.  Like Jeremiah, who purchased a piece of property while in prison against the day when he might be released to a freed homeland – something which he never got to see, however – Bert’s ship represented the freedom one experiences on open seas.  It was his statement of hope!  It was his unbroken spirit claiming the promise of God that he was not forgotten.

I have come to understand that unforgotten and unbroken go together.  They belong and hold to one another like night frames day, and young meets old.  They are as integral to understanding God’s love as breathing is to staying alive in a prison camp, whether it be a military prison, or the prison of our thoughts and unrequited dreams.

From the mouth of Jesus (by way of John the Revelator) we hear the words of our Creator’s promise that suffering faithfully leads to the strength that only brokenness brings, a crown of life to wear long after a dying world passes away:

Don’t be afraid of what you are about to suffer.  The devil will throw some of you into prison to test you.  You will suffer for ten days.  But if you remain faithful even when facing death, I will give you the crown of life.  “Anyone with ears to hear must listen to the Spirit and understand what he is saying to the churches.  Whoever is victorious will not be harmed by the second death.  Revelation 2:10-11

For You Today

How else can you genuinely face and overcome the brokenness, emptiness, hurt and crushing blows of lost hope, except to trust that God has not lied?  This was the experience of the apostle Paul and my friend, Bert:

We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed.  We are perplexed, but not driven to despair.  We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God.  We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed.  Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.  2 Corinthians 4:8-10

This is what it means to be battered, and yet unbroken!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

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[1] Title Image:  Russell Brownworth photographs     Unless noted, Scripture used from The New Living Translation©

[2] For another post on this text and the topic of grieving see:  Hard Thoughts

 

Hard Thoughts

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Thursday, September 29, 2016

The thought of my suffering and homelessness is bitter beyond words.  I will never forget this awful time, as I grieve over my loss.  Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this:  The faithful love of the Lord never ends!  His mercies never cease.  Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning. I say to myself, “The Lord is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!”  The Lord is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him.  So it is good to wait quietly for salvation from the Lord.  Lamentations 3:19-26^(NLT)

Perhaps the hardest of thoughts is to have hope in the midst of grief. 

Battling grief is a common experience; if you live long enough grief will be more than once your uninvited companion on this journey through life.  Often a first touch with grief is as a child when grandparents die.  That was my lot as a pre-teen.  It was then I learned Jeremiah was right; you never forget the time of loss.  In seminary a wise professor shared with us would-be preachers that one of the last, arguably best gifts people give to their grandchildren is their own death; it is a valuable and needed preparation for learning to grieve while parents are still around to comfort and guide.

It has been a little more than a year since my Dad became part of the church triumphant in heaven.  From our family’s perspective he was the last of his generation.  With him passed away any first-hand memories of our family history.  And with our family’s sketchy knowledge of our ancestry, there is a haze of unknowing rather than links to the past.  For my remaining brother and cousins, we don’t know where we come from, and that speaks much about the emptiness and finality of loss.

So what about hope in the middle of loss and grief?

Jeremiah said he dared to hope because his track record with the LORD is that there is mercy forthcoming every morning, like the dew on the ground.  And hope, itself, is much like faith; it is (as the writer of Hebrews proclaimed) the evidence of things we long to see.

There is no standard, one-size-fits-all way to move through grief.  There is certainly no way to escape it altogether, at least not in a healthy way.  It must be embraced as necessary to the process of accepting God’s new mercies in a rotten time.  It must be endured as the inescapable price of loving. 

The question isn’t will I grieve; the question is always, how shall I grieve; how do I start?

Let me borrow some military advice from Jean-Luc Picard.  He is the fictional captain of the Starship Enterprise. 

Patrick Stewart played the captain for the 1980’s TV series, and every time the Enterprise was about to begin a new adventure traversing the next galaxy, or getting ready to do battle with the evil enemies of The Federation, Captain Picard would look wistfully out the front windows from the command center and issue the order to the helmsman, Warp speed….ENGAGE!

This is how we begin – without fear, without hesitation, but not without God.

For You Today

If your pathway is remembering with hard thoughts today, engage…God is faithfully in the middle of it with you with all the new mercies you need.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road…have a blessed day!

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NOTES

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[i] Title Image: By Jiri Hodan [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons