Author Archives: Tamar

Today’s Reading: Exodus 38:21-40:38

2 AM

LORD,

Thank You for the opened eyes through fear. For understanding that no matter what Satan does to harm, no matter what we foolishly do, we are playing directly into Your Almighty hands. LORD, I thank You for Your plans, that they are not plans for harm and that Your ways, Your methods of achieving Your Almighty plans simply are not our simple ways. Papa, Your perfect love is what casts out fear, so will You please shine Your love on this tortured world so filled with fear? Oh Lord, we need You down here! We need open eyes to Your grace and closed eyes to this fear-filled place.

How long Lord? How long has it been since I’ve written directly to You? I’m sorry it’s been so long – I’m sure You’ve missed me. And I apologize that it took terror in the night to achieve a letter like this.

And Oh the terror, the demonic sounding dog roaming the deserted streets in late night air and filling it with its tortured snarls and indiscernible barks. To a sleepless mother with heightened senses something within her shakes, something breaks. Tortured souls surround us all – yet we remain unbroken, unshaken, eyes closed. Always closed. Closed eyes, closed ears, closed minds, closed hearts, closed fists, wide open mouths. Who is wrong, pointing fingers – pain. Everywhere pain.

Lord, for months now I’ve prayed this Morning Prayer You gave me to pray, every morning. I’ve lived with myself laid wide open and bare for all to see, for You to fill. And You HAVE! Oh how You have opened my eyes to see Your marvelous light, Your abundant life through that lighted tunnel, and I took that tunnel, I dug that tunnel, scratched my way bit by bit to the surface from underground darkness. I was on that mountaintop with You, above the clouds of light, above the fear of night, above the darkness and death and all the closed. Lord, I wanted to build a shelter there to dwell there with You in Your glory-filled light, why can’t we live on the mountain top Papa? Why can’t we stay there basked in Your transfiguration? Why do we have to come back down into the closed, into the death into the torture? If you led me to scratch my way to this mountaintop surface can’t You lead them out on their own too? I left a bread crumb trail of how I got here, can’t they just follow that? Why do I have to go back? I don’t want to go back…

I know, I know that I sound like a persistent child asking why? But isn’t that what I am? Your child. And I know that they say real faith doesn’t ask why it simply trusts, or at least that’s what I’ve heard. But isn’t it possible to trust AND still ask why? Inquisitive minds want to know. Why Lord?

Why does someone always have to be right? Superior to others, pushing them down in the process of proving their right-ness… their good-ness and the other person’s evil-ness, their sin. Why do we all seem to be on a constant sin hunt rather than a goodness hunt? We have our eyes wide open to sin but shut tight to Grace, to Love, to Light, to Goodness. We relish in focusing on the one negative and lose sight of all the positives.

Why?

Why do I bemoan the sleepless night when I could rejoice in the golden opportunity of sweet solitude of uninterrupted conversation with You? Why do I fear the terror of the valley of darkness when I should be fearing no evil? Yet how can I not be afraid with ears now wide open? Ears that have heard and know her shepherd’s voice, they can discern… they weep.

Lord, living wide open hurts. To see You is glorious – don’t get me wrong – but to know You, and Your true light has placed into stark contrast the darkness of the false light I once lived in. The room I made my home and called the house of light was never the light I thought it was. It was the pit, it was captivity, and it was sin. That place I have tunneled from, it was all I knew it was all I had; my eyes were closed to the stone coldness of my heart in my sin -hunt to prove my own right-ness, my own righteousness. I was hell-bent on being right and never being proven, or even thought to be wrong. Yet the harder I tried to be right, to think right, to live right and do right the more I was doing wrong.

Lord, that’s the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil isn’t it; right-ness and wrong-ness and constantly feeling like we have to prove ourselves. Prove ourselves right or prove ourselves wrong and come hell or high water we will do it too! We will go to any lengths in order to prove that we are good and others are evil. But we are ALL made in Your good image aren’t we? Don’t we all have Your sweet breath filling our lungs, Your able hands knitting us together in our mother’s wombs? Yet all we seek to find in one another is the darkness. What about the goodness?

Lord, I am that tortured soul wandering through the town crying out in the darkness! Papa my soul cries out “Why can’t we all just be nice? My soul pleads “Lord why?!?! Why darkness? Why pain? Why death? Why? Why? Why?” And the only answer I get is simply “Because.” Like a Father tired of listening to complaints all day, “Because I said so.”

Lord, I will take the good with the evil. I will take the pleasure with the pain. I will take the sweet with the bitter and I will say “Thank You” for it all. I don’t have to understand it all, other than to understand that I can’t understand it at all. But I will choose to trust in You, I will trust in Your grand scheme of things and I will roll with these punches, I will feed on them and allow them to strengthen me. I will trust that they are not harming me but rather helping me. That they are not hindering me but propelling me to the necessary place I need to be.

Lord, I choose to rejoice in this pit of darkness where I dwell once again. Not because it is dark, but because You are my light; because although I may sit in darkness the LORD will be my Light. Lord, I will choose the goodness hunt; I will hunt and collect Your moments of grace. All of them. Not just the pleasant ones, but the bitter ones as well. I will count the scars with the blessings and I will choose to remember Your deliverance. Just like the Israelites experienced the first of the plagues before You delivered them from their plague of slavery I will rejoice in Your deliverance during the plagues. Lord, I will rejoice in a home-sick heart that longs to be in its heavenly home because I know that the homesickness will make the homecoming just that much sweeter. Papa, I miss You. Like a camper who wants to come home saying send food, send money, I miss You.

Sincerely,

Your Beloved

(There, now perhaps my tortured soul can rest!)

Today’s Reading: Exodus 32:21-35:19

Today’s Reading: Exodus 29:26-32:20

Today’s Reading: Exodus 26:26-29:25

Today’s Reading: Exodus 23:10-26:25

Today’s Reading: Exodus 20:1-23:9

Today’s Reading: Exodus 13:1-16:8

I was awakened this morning by the rolling thunder of a storm passing over our house; as the thought of the jug of orange juice in our fridge passed through my mind. Yup, orange juice. This is how God starts the conversation this morning, a booming ORANGE JUICE! And then says to me “there’s always enough to go around, it’s the blood of Christ in communion.” Yes, in this house communion isn’t always your standard grape juice. Sometimes the good old orange juice gets broken out and passed around because it’s the juice we have in the house. Have you ever made orange juice before? The first thing that you do is you roll the orange on the counter pressing it firmly with the palm of your hand in order to break the membranes inside so that you will be able to get more juice out of it in the end. Then you take a nice sharp knife and you pierce the orange cutting it in half. Then you take a torture device called a juicer and jam it down through the center of the orange half squeezing the orange half round and round the juicer until there is nothing left but an empty shell of skin.

The next thing that God showed me this morning with the next rumble of thunder was a vision of Jesus standing on the top of a beautifully round green mound of earth with a round loaf of bread in His hands holding it skyward and giving thanks to the Father for it. He then looked upon that single loaf of bread expected to feed the ravenous multitudes seated before Him and He broke it in half, handed one half to a waiting (and also hungry) disciple. Then He looked once more at the whole loaf in His hands, broke it in two once more and handed another half to another hungrily awaiting disciple. This continued over and over again, each time Jesus broke the round loaf in half, handed the right half to a waiting disciple to disperse to the crowd and then looked down upon the loaf once more again made whole until finally the entire multitude was satisfied and fed with hands on full rounded bellies, crumbs falling from their drowsy lips and pieces of bread round lying all over the green grass. More than enough.

With the next thunderous roar from the Lion of Judah He showed me the half-eaten pan of salted caramel fudge sitting in my fridge, aluminum foil still stuck to its gooey caramel dripping out around the edges. I saw myself prying the delectable prize from the pan, a small piece of foil refusing to let go of the sticky sweetness in my hand. And I put it all in my mouth, foil and all, in order to suck the sea salted caramel off the shiny surface not wanting to waste even the tiniest bit of the addictive substance.

Each of these things, made to be in the mouth, on the tongue, in the belly, not in the containers or wrappers. Like communion bread and juice, Jesus’ body and blood – His life, they were made to always be on our lips, always on our minds, always in our bellies like rivers of living waters but that couldn’t happen until they were removed from the container. This happened on the cross when He cried out His last “It is finished” and gave up His Spirit. The Spirit of Jesus, like the juice from a fruit, was removed from its container; like a loaf of bread His body was broken over and over and over again in order to make us whole. Like sea salted caramel fudge the communion, or Eucharist, of Jesus begs to be taken out of the fridge, off the pan and placed into our mouths, rolled around our tongues where His gooey sweetness can drip down our throats and fill our bellies. When we have tasted we will see His goodness and mercy pursuing us all the days of our lives.

Lastly, as the final touch in the conversation that caused me to throw back the covers and race to find my computer in the dark stillness of the very early morning He showed me the centerpiece of the Garden of Eden the Tree of Life. When Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit, believed the lie of the Enemy, God decided that it was far too dangerous for them to eat from the Tree of Life and live forever in their broken state. So He devised a plan that would save us all from the food poisoning of that fruit.

The cross.

The entire Bible is all about the cross, every word of the Old Testament points forward to it, and every word of the New Testament and our lives points back to it. As The Tree of Life, the cross is the tree that brings us life. It stands in the middle of history, the centerpiece of the garden of Life and Love. When we have eaten the fruit from it, believe the truth of the Living God, we become far too dangerous for the Enemy to stand against in his now broken state. When we taste and swallow and eat the truth that Jesus died to set us free because He loves us, we become immortal, in that very moment. Not after we die physically, immediately. In the Garden of Eden when they ate the fruit of the Enemy they surely died, they died spiritually immediately. Today, because of the cross, the Tree of Life, when we eat His fruit of truth we surely LIVE!!!!! Immediately!!!!! And every time that we give thanks for that fruit, every time that we live lives filled with thankfulness we are eating and drinking Jesus’ sacrifice all over again, we are continually digesting the fruit of the Tree of Life. Gratitude is the fruit of Life!

We have so much to be thankful for, yet so often we allow those opportunities to pass as we speed by at 55 miles an hour on our way to the next event in our life. We miss the opportunity to witness the multiplication miracle of time. It’s the only thing we have on this planet that we can’t buy and will never get more of… unless we are thankful. Somehow, pressing the pause button on the speed of our life to take a moment to be thankful manages to multiply time in a way that there seems to become more of it to go around. Like taking a day off every week to relax and recharge our systems seems to multiply our energy and our minds, taking a moment here and there does the very same thing. Thankfulness is a miniature Sabbath day wrapped up in a beautiful container that begs to be opened and savored, to be passed over the lips sweetly and then digested down in order to spring back forth over our lips as words of thankfulness once again as springs of Living water from our innermost being.