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Prince of Peace

Tracey Dyck 16 Comments
For a child is born to us,
a son is given to us.
The government will rest on his shoulders.
And he will be called:
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Isaiah 9:6
Prince of Peace. What a beautiful name. It is a sound of hope when calamity strikes us or busyness unravels us or hardship grinds us down.
Wonderful Counselor. Mighty God. Everlasting Father. Prince of Peace. To me, these names paint a picture of the enormity of Christmas.
One whose perfect plans and infinitely wise counsel are met with awe. A champion God, glorious in His strength. A loving Father so ancient He has no beginning, and so eternal He has no end. A Prince of complete and utter peace.
All of this was wrapped up in a squalling infant boy thrust into a cold and broken world. All of this majesty, all of this strength, all of this infinity . . . confined within human flesh, a vulnerable baby completely dependent on his teenaged mother. Mighty God. Everlasting Father.
Every time I pause and let the weight of it sink in, I can hardly fathom why He would do such a thing. It’s then I sense His heartbeat, and it’s there I find His answer.

For me. For us.

It was for us He came. For these glorious, incredible, imageo Deo–made in the image of God–creatures. For these broken, lost, fallen human beings. He entered our world because of love, to accomplish one purpose: to bring us peace.
The original Hebrew word is shalom, and it’s used 239 times throughout the Bible. The English word, peace, doesn’t even begin to convey the depth of its meaning. This shalom speaks of wholeness, soundness, and well-being. Completeness in number, safety and soundness in body, health, prosperity, quiet, tranquility, contentment. Peace in relationships. Peace from war. Peace with God.
We were cut off from this shalom, struggling to recreate it or achieve it or be worthy of it. Locked into a covenant of law that promised us shalom only if we could live up to its impossible standards. Then Jesus came to fulfill the law and restore us to this all-consuming peace, this rightness with Himself.
Shalom dawned on the first Christmas day, and it was brought to full light on the day this crucified Savior returned to life.
My Prince of Peace came to fill me with shalom. Completeness, soundness, absolute rightness. A quiet strength inside that knows that no matter the storm, I am anchored in Him. A contentment welling from within, unthreatened by outside circumstances. A haven found in the shadow of His wings, in the shelter of His love.
In Him, shattered hearts are made whole. Dead soil springs up with new life. Old coals kindle with fresh flames. Peace reigns.

This Christmas, may the Prince of Peace fill you to the brim with shalom. Merry Christmas, my friends!

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Yesterday’s Bread

Tracey Dyck 29 Comments

Life can be dry sometimes, admit it. Sometimes we let our passion die down to embers. All that’s left is dust and ashes and maybe a barely-surviving coal or two, and so we trudge onwards in the dark, wishing for brighter times.

Sometimes that doesn’t just describe our life, but our relationship with God.

I’ve been there more times than I care to admit. I’ve heard all the trite phrases about being sold out, on fire, all in. Those are nice when you’re feeling sold out, on fire, and all in. Not so much when the emotions wave goodbye, and you feel neutral or depressed or angry or tired or scared.

Maybe you’ve heard this one too: passion isn’t an emotion, it’s a choice. It’s an oft-used phrase, at least in my circles, and though it may be clichéd, it’s absolutely true. You can have passionate emotions (there’s nothing wrong with that–I love feeling passionate about something) but if that’s as deep as the passion runs, it doesn’t take much to send it crashing down.

Passion is a choice.

And sometimes you’ll have to fight against every ounce of your current feelings to make that choice. Sometimes you don’t feel terribly enthusiastic about someone or something, but you choose to value them anyway. You choose to put energy into building that relationship or pursuing that project. The awesome thing about making that choice, is that if you keep making it and keep making it and keep making it . . . the feelings of passion will often follow.
Revelation 3:16 in The Message version says, “You’re not cold, you’re not hot–far better to be cold or hot! You’re stale. You’re stagnant. You make me want to vomit.”
When I’m stale and stagnant, I usually want to vomit, too. Being stagnant sucks. No growth, no movement, no passion–it makes me feel gross. I find in those times, I look back longingly at seasons in my life when I was passionate. I wish I could extract the feeling of blazing enthusiasm out of the past and inject it into my present. I wish I could return to those times.
Perhaps you’ve been there too, or maybe you’re there right now, longing for that old spark.
Guess what? It doesn’t work that way.
And that’s okay.
You probably know the story of Exodus–in one of the most epic exits in all of history, Moses leads his people out of slavery in Egypt and heads for the Promised Land. But in chapter 16, we find the Israelites struggling through the wilderness with nothing to eat. It is then that God provides manna, bread from heaven that covered the ground of their encampment each morning. But He instructs them to gather only what they need for today, to keep nothing for the next day.
If I were in their situation, in the middle of a desert where food is scarce, and I saw the ground blanketed in bread, I would probably want to save a few extra snacks for the road. Who knows when food will be available again, right? Obviously some of the Israelites thought the same, because a few of them kept extra manna. And overnight, it became wormy, smelly, rancid. Completely inedible.
I find that’s a striking picture of what happens with us. You might have had a mountaintop experience, a spiritual high, a time when you felt deeply connected to God. I’ve experienced that, and if you have as well, that’s amazing. But when life gets hard or boring, and those feelings aren’t there anymore, you wish you could somehow go back to that. Yet you can’t.

You can’t feed on yesterday’s bread.

[source]
You can’t expect to be nourished by the time you had with God last year, last week, or even yesterday. That food, so to speak, was for that day. It’s like if I eat a five course meal on Monday and think that I won’t need to eat for another week. I’m going to be hungry on Tuesday, no matter how much I ate on Monday. The same is true for our spiritual lives.
I used to think that was depressing, until I realized I don’t even need yesterday’s bread. There’s a feast spread before me today. Day after day after day, it’s like God scatters fresh manna across the ground, there for the taking.
Every day I can choose to gather fresh inspiration and nourishment for my heart. Every day I can choose passion. I can choose to dig in, to be enthusiastic, and to make another connection with my Father.
Do I make that choice every day? Nope. Some days I huddle in my tent, nibbling on rotten bread. Some days I see the manna covering the ground like snow, and I don’t lift a finger to fill my jar. But those choices, too, belong to yesterday.
Today really is a new day. I challenge myself, and I challenge you: gather fresh bread.
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Is Our Writing Needed? (a response post)

Tracey Dyck 23 Comments

I’ve never written a response post before, so today will be a first. The lovely, spitfire authoress Jenny Freitag (who penned Plenilune, a book I want to read one day) over at The Penslayer wrote a post the other day called Why NOT Being a Prolific Writer is a Godsend. Now, I agree with/am inspired by a number of Jenny’s posts, but something she said in this one burrowed under my skin and stuck there. So I’m pondering it in the form of a blog post.

The Lord doesn’t need you + you don’t know what you’re talking about. If you possibly think you know enough to “write” for the Lord, you know nothing of the smallness of man nor the immensity of God. Do as Job did, and put your hand over your mouth. Be humble. God has left his written witness. My fiction – your fiction – none of it is necessary.

I confess, I blinked at my screen and did a double take at that first phrase: the Lord doesn’t need you. I won’t presume to know all the thoughts and intentions behind Jenny’s statement, but I’m bothered enough to want to unpackage and sift this for myself. Cool?

God is infinite. Infinitely complete, infinitely self-sufficient. So of course He doesn’t need me. Need is felt only by finite beings. He has and is everything. The creation of the world and of mankind was not done out of a vacancy of God’s. It was not because He was somehow lacking. No, He spoke creation into being because He wanted to. It was what He desired, and it brought Him pleasure.

But the Lord I’m spending my life getting to know does want me. After all, He brought me into existence. And every page of the Bible is evidence that He wants to love me, wants me to love Him back, and basically wants to have every piece of myself. And He shows me the way to live a life that builds His Kingdom. One way I can do that is through my writing.

If you possibly think you know enough to “write” for the Lord, you know nothing of the smallness of man nor the immensity of God.

Maybe this is just arguing semantics, but by “writing for the Lord” do you mean “writing in service of the Lord” or “writing because He can’t speak loud enough on His own?”

“For the Lord” in the sense of a lesser being serving a higher one–or in the sense of fulfilling someone’s lack? I can bake muffins for you because I like you and want to give you something that will bring you pleasure, or I can bake muffins for you because you can’t/are too busy/don’t know how/don’t want to.

All it takes is for me to look up at the stars on a dark night to recognize the smallness of man and the immensity of God–only a scrap of it, you understand, because my finite mind cannot truly comprehend the infinite. But if I say that I write for the Lord, I don’t say so under any delusion that He somehow needs me to. As if His plan would fall apart if I didn’t.

And yet! And yet . . . one of the greatest mysteries of all is how a God so indescribably powerful would choose to give such a measure of authority to earthen vessels, human beings. How He would choose to do His work not with a bang and a flash of lightning and an instantaneous solution, but through the slow, painful process of moving in and through mankind. Through flawed, limited people. Yes, through me.

Does He need me? Isn’t He capable of accomplishing whatever He wants no matter what I do? Yes. And also no.

This mystery confounds me. It’s like prayer. He doesn’t need us to tell Him what we’re thinking and what we need, because He already knows. But for the purpose of relationship and the maturing of our faith, He wants us to pray. There’s a big difference between needing and wanting. I don’t think we realize the full extent of our prayers’ impact. Prayer is needed.

None of it is necessary.

 I see where you’re coming from–you’re speaking to those of us whose heads have gotten too big, those of us who pressure ourselves to write, write, write, because there are SOULS TO SAVE. Those of us who stagger under the unrealistic pressure we’ve heaped upon our own shoulders. I get that.

But every mile of road has two miles of ditch. The opposite swing of the pendulum is one which causes us to throw up our hands and weigh our writing too lightly. If my writing is not necessary, then why do it? It’s too much work and pain and bloodshed to press on if it doesn’t matter anyway. (But there’s the rub–maybe it really is unnecessary, and yet it still matters. Maybe it’s something I don’t have to do, but when I do it, it makes a difference. Or maybe it is necessary. I’m not 100% sure.)

This post is all over the place . . . But that’s the shape of my pondering, so I won’t apologize.

I think this has become more of a spinoff than a response post, because Jenny’s aim was one thing and my thoughts have veered off on another that’s rather tangential. She was speaking to relieve the pressure we place on ourselves to produce copious amounts of story, and here I am talking about the necessity-or-not of writing and whether God needs it or wants it of us. (Sorry, Jenny.)

For me, writing falls under the umbrella of living well, of making use of everything God has given me. For me, writing is one means of discovering Him and in the process, sharing His light with those who may read my words. Do I feel worthy of such a task? Not at all. But God seems to have a penchant for using the unworthy. If I can be an instrument in His hands, that’s incredibly humbling and brings me such joy. If He can shine through the chinks in my stories, then I will keep penning those tales.

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A Monument of Praise

Tracey Dyck 23 Comments

Times of high emotion imprint us with our strongest memories, good or bad. I don’t know about you, but the hard times of life leave a lingering aftertaste. Perhaps it’s an unfortunate human tendency to gravitate toward the negative, and so we have to work at focusing on the positive.

Remember Old Testament stories of how God came through for His people? Whenever He delivered them, they would build an altar to commemorate that place and time.

So Joshua called together the twelve men he had chosen–one from each of the tribes of Israel. He told them, “Go into the middle of the Jordan, in front of the Ark of the Lord your God. Each of you must pick up one stone and carry it out on your shoulder–twelve stones in all, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. We will use these stones to build a memorial. In the future your children will ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ Then you can tell them, ‘They remind us that the Jordan River stopped flowing when the Ark of the Lord’s Covenant went across.’ These stones will stand as a memorial among the people of Israel forever.” (Joshua 4:4-7, NLT)

This is just one of many examples of God’s people doing something to celebrate, honor, and remember miracles He had done.

What do I do when He comes through for me?

When light bursts into my dark valley, do I merely gasp in relief and proceed to move on with life, or do I pause to thank my Father?

I know He has answered prayers. I know He has pulled me through storms. But if someone were to ask me what God has done for me, I would have to stop and think.

What if I were to consciously celebrate those times? What if I were to play them over in my mind as my soul sang its gratitude? What if I did that daily?

It’s so important to encourage ourselves in the Lord, as David did. Life presents us with many difficult times. There’s no way to sugarcoat that. But in those rocky places, we can proclaim our Father’s faithfulness by remembering how He has delivered us in times before. We can build altars, not with stones but with thoughts. Not in religious recitation, not out of bondage. It’s taking the time to pull out those memories and smile at them again the way we smile at the knickknack on the dresser that reminds us of that wonderful vacation or the letter that reminds us of a dear friend. The edges are frayed from handling; it is a frequent gesture.

What if I made this a habit? A habit of praise–how beautiful would that be? How much peace would that bring? It would build faith and confidence like nothing else. “I know I’m facing something hard right now, but look what God did for me last time and all the times before. I was never abandoned, I never went hungry, He was always on time.”

Every time we ponder His faithfulness, it’s like adding another stone to the altar. The more we rejoice, the higher it builds, and the more naturally our thoughts will turn to this goodness again. This way of life is one of overflowing peace. I want that.

What we habitually think about affects our entire perception, which in turn determines how we experience life. I know that when I start a day mulling over the problems and negative things going on, my day will follow suit. But how wonderful would it be to enlarge our experience of God’s greatness and love? To focus on that instead, and begin to recognize it at every turn?

Let’s begin today. Let’s begin right here. If you feel comfortable doing so, please share something God has done in your life. There’s nothing so encouraging as realizing that what He did for someone else, He can do for me. For you. For any one of His beloved children. I’ll be adding a few comments of my own.

And let’s not stop here. Let’s begin to form a habit of thankfulness and praise. Let’s build altars and return to them again and again.

Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together. (Psalm 34:3, NKJV)

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