posture

how we hold our charge

I have more words here than I need. The number at the bottom of the screen says 3748 and counting as I type this. Don’t panic, most of them won’t end up in this post.

But all the words have to go in the document so I can see what I’m dealing with, and to decide what to give you. Floating up in my head is the worst place for all the words because they just buzz around and stress me out until they’re pinned to the page or screen, safely confined, ready for examination.

That’s when I can see what all the noise has been about, and when patterns start to emerge.

Ohh, this theme. And that one keeps cropping up, too. I think I see what You’re doing.

For the last few weeks, one of the main themes has been posture: how we are positioned to hold what we are charged to carry. Are we ready to receive, or to give? Are we attending, is our eye on the ball (hint: the ball is Jesus), or are we perpetually blindsided, looking the wrong way, focusing on the wrong things?

Or, also – and this is just as important – are we hearing the accusations of the enemy tell us we’re in the wrong place, at the wrong time, looking at the wrong things, when we’re actually right on target but he’s trying to distract and dissuade us before the moment arrives? Maybe we are holding our charge, but confusion comes in to waylay us.

Or maybe, more literally, we are to hold our charge – as in, don’t move yet, play it cool, keep watch rather than rushing ahead.

We can get this wrong any number of ways, and the enemy doesn’t care which ruse we fall for.

Sooo, we abide.

As I type this, we’re cleaning up after a four-day windstorm across the Valley. Not the kind where you move all your lawn furniture to a safe location, but the kind where the wind finds that safe location and then moves everything for you all over again as an extra service, generally leaving pieces upside down, or across the yard, and takes one of the table legs with it.

We knew the storm was coming, so we prepared: Stored fresh water, protected the coops, moved the lawn furniture (but I already told you how that went). We prepped some easy cold meals in case the power went out. And we kept the teapot and the crock pot filled and running.

What was supposed to be two days of wind extended to four, and I noticed some things. These observations were greatly made possible by the fact that we, unlike most of the Valley, never lost power, so I was at leisure to notice what I’m going to tell you, rather than dealing with the house getting cold or my phone battery draining or the toilets desperately needing flushed or how certain kids desperately needed to bathe.

Anyway, here: A windstorm at night is different from a windstorm during the day. And this, too, has to do with our posture and attention, and how we hold our charge.

In daylight, you can see the whipping of trees in response to the roaring gusts of wind, and you can look out the window when you hear a crash to see what fell.

You know what you’re dealing with, and what you’ll have to fix. And you know if that repair needs to be immediate, or if it can wait until the storm passes.

So that’s about six hours of the day for us in Southcentral Alaska.

During the other eighteen hours, the gusts come blindly. All is just noise amid the constant background of undulating wind. The volume rises and falls but you don’t see movement; you only hear it.

Relative calm settles briefly as the wind races to other neighborhoods, and then without warning it returns with frenzy, feeling its way across the angles of rooftops and through the fingers of tree limbs. Kitchen vents clap suddenly. Stove and vent pipes whistle across multiple notes in panicked harmony. Wood frames creak moodily, sometimes in timid hesitation and others in angry protest.

Unknown objects scud heavily across the ground. Probably, hopefully, they’re just large branches. More than once, something crashes. You vaguely guess the direction, and wonder what you’ll find in the morning.

I’m not only talking about windstorms, of course.

Some of us have been learning to posture ourselves in darkness so we can handle the noise we cannot see.

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I don’t know if you’d call it the “mystic rites of our ancestral houses,” but each family has its own culture and traditions, some more ancient or life-giving than others.

In our house, it means Looney Tunes on birthday mornings, books and pajamas on Saturdays, and speed cleaning whenever there’s the slightest threat of a power outage, because a ) a little motivation goes a long way, and b) we want clean dishes and laundry for as long as possible, and also C) no one wants to go the ER during a windstorm because they slipped on a small Nerf gun that was left in a dark hallway.

Saturdays, though, are the one day of the week we don’t go anywhere, even when we don’t have hurricane force winds.

“You’re not allowed to have fun on Saturdays?” a younger extroverted friend asked me (she reads here, too – love you, darling). I explained that as an introvert with eight kids, two churches, and a dozen projects simultaneously, not going anywhere is fun. The bestest fun, the mostest fun. I’d do it all week and twice on Sundays if I could.

But we can’t, so we stick with Saturdays.

During the week we’re all over the place, and Saturdays are the lull for gathering ourselves back together. I often feel scattered and spread thin, investing in several directions and wondering if seeds are growing or if fruit will ever come. In some places, I can hear the noise but not see movement. Sometimes I wonder if I’m lacking vision and focus, and other times I wonder if my vision is just too big (Or, deep and wide, she thought) and needs time to flesh out.

For sure though, a big part of it is persisting in long, patient obedience even as the enemy hisses that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. But we know his schemes.

And also, there’s that pothos, bursting with more leaves every week.

We position our family with firm boundaries around Saturdays, and birthdays, and bedtimes, nurturing an atmosphere of peace so we can withstand the storm.

So I think we’re really talking about endurance in the midst of the overwhelm. We have to be postured to carry the charge if we are to endure.

...we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

– Romans 5:3b-5

It is just time, and patience, and obedience. It is like prayer, or like writing: We keep coming back again and again, hitting that same topic over and over, asking for words, seeking wisdom and perspective. If we give ourselves to it long enough, we see something happen. Eventually we make huge strides when we’re postured to do so for long enough.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.

Consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners, so that you may not grow weary in your souls or lose heart.

– Hebrews 12:1-4

It is the steady work of untangling knots, mending what’s broken and torn, doing the hard repair instead of the costly replacement. Yes, it takes so much time. But if we don’t use that time to fix this, we’re going to spend other time – and often, a lot more of it – on bigger, more expensive repairs later on.

So we choose our hard, and our vision directs that choice. Do we see worth, or waste? What do we carry, and what do we shrug off as extraneous?

This has been our work for years in our own family and marriage. And at the desk, it is still the work, only the knots look more like paragraphs that don’t flow perfectly together or thoughts that don’t fit on the same string. The untangling here looks more like rearranging, rewriting, deleting, and sitting and staring in prayer, asking for revelation. It looks like phone calls and meetings and deep conversations, asking questions and reframing statements, connecting dots and finding patterns, listening and waiting.

We do not have answers for all these knots. Sometimes the yarn has to be cut. But more often, with enough gentle persistence, you can work a knot blindly and still manage to get it untangled. Because it’s not always about seeing the answers, but persisting in giving the thread it’s proper space after it’s been pulled too tight.

None of us like being pulled too tight. Yesterday afternoon I was already running late, already feeling stressed, already lost an hour of time in other tasks and hadn’t even opened the document to write yet. The phone started dinging notifications and this was the moment Bingley chose to jump on the desk and knock a book to the floor and start his loud meow that sounds less like it comes from a domestic cat and more like it comes from something that lives in the jungle with paws the size of small frisbees.

Hold on, I have a meme for this.

This is the noise, the tangling, the wind gusting that threatens to bowl me over.

But God’s been speaking to me about posture, so I’m learning to brace myself to withstand the things out of my control.

Like this little document, now ballooning to 4935 words – far too many, but don’t fret, less than half will stay in this post.

It has taken forever to pull together and I wanted to publish it two weeks ago. This Monday came and I was determined to finish it. Tuesday came and I thought it was finally almost done. Wednesday came and I realized it still needed work because there was still so much more to say, but I had already spent so much time on it that the words were swimming everywhere, so familiar I couldn’t even really see them anymore.

We clocked out early to get to class, and at the red light I wondered if I could tap out some sentences on my phone to make up a little time. Because this is me, and maybe you: I like to check off boxes, finish the projects, do all the things, and if I get a green light, I want to put the pedal to the floor. Not sit at red lights in the passenger seat, feeling late to everything.

In that moment, I heard the Lord. Let it sit, He said. Sleep on it, Love. Work smarter, not harder. Give it time to cure, and temper, and you – you hold your charge, rather than draining your battery.

In class, before starting discussion or anything else, instrumental worship music played and we just sat, soaking, for...I don’t know how long. Thoughts tried to crowd in: How is Reagan handling her class? Is she testing like she did last week? I hope the boys are calm. I hoped this and that and a million things I can’t type here.

But the music kept playing, and the Lord is teaching us to hold our charge. There was no awkward silence to break, nothing to do but to be with Him.

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We (and by “we” I mostly mean me, but I’m trying to include you here) tend to resist stillness and default to restlessness. But restlessness is not a posture; it’s noisy filler.

For years, I took a notebook with me to church partly because of this. Every week, at the top of the page, I wrote the date, the name of whoever was speaking, the sermon notes, verse references, and my thoughts. I did it religiously, in all senses of the word.

Then I got tired of religion and restlessness, and I also got jaded with church, and with writing down the glib soundbites of entertaining presentations instead hearing revelation from solid teaching and preaching. Long after we made a better switch, I still left my notebook at home. I mostly stopped taking notes, and if I really wanted to get something down, I’d tap it into my phone.

And if you know me, you know there’s something off about that. I’m a writer. Also, I don’t use my phone for birthdays, calendaring, planning, finances, reminders, or anything else...I use paper. This is why my office looks like a tornado ripped through a library, and why I probably forgot your birthday, too.

But then we started a new class a few months ago and I thought it would be a good idea to bring my old notebook, especially since I was not going to drop an extra $15 to purchase the class workbook. I’d just take notes, instead. Hello, old friend.

It is remarkable what happens when we position ourselves differently, to hear and respond more acutely. The first Sunday I took my notebook to church, the Lord said, Put the pen in your hand so you’re ready to write the revelation down. And then, notes and notes and notes.

The words have to be put on the paper. The pen has to be held, ready. We have to posture to receive, and steward, and bear the calling we’re charged with.

It reminded me of other wisdom I’ve read many times:

Your fingers would remember their old strength better, if they grasped a sword-hilt.

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

Friend, what is your sword hilt? What do you need to be picking up again, holding onto, and letting go of?

Because our fruit is born from faithfulness. It is not born from having all the answers or getting all the experience (though this is how those come, too) and it is definitely not about finishing everything according to our own timelines.

Fruit comes from abiding, living, persisting, and maintaining a stance of holy stubbornness that expects a good outcome.

Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.

– John 5:4, 8

If we can soak in stillness, we can handle the overwhelm, the noise, and the dark chaos that we can’t see out there.

The post is almost done. The word count says 5244 but only 2750 or so are in this piece; still, so many more than I intended.

Once finished – we’re so close now – most of the paragraphs will still be unused. They’ll get pushed to the bottom of the document, ready to start the whole process all over again.

That’s for next week, though.

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P.S. We have a ministry update for you here. Got questions, want more info and details? Let us know what you want to hear about.

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RELATED: If you need more on this, you might also like this post. (audio version here)