Confessions over an Anchor

Here you go again, God, using an image thread to speak to me and call me to a strange pairing of conviction and promise. Conviction is the anchor, circumcision is the promise. The circumcision came mysteriously in advance, and required days of expectancy. The anchor came of its own volition, or by grace my eyes were too blind to anticipate until it arrived. Yet, it too came for a purpose. Help me understand both and live them well.



Lately, I've been broken down to "a shell of my former self." Mono and all the other things whispering in the wings that could be mono's associates have weakened me to a level I'd never conceived possible. I've felt pained before, troubled, battered on every side, but I realize now that I've never before felt really truly "weak." Never "weak" like you were, my Lord, when someone else had to come alongside and carry your cross. But I have a new level of perception now. And it comes not with fear, but with amazement. I tried to go to work Friday just for a half day and realized that I had no confidence that my arms would remain on the steering wheel of the car, they were that weak. Stunned by such a state of weakness, I returned home while I could still drive. What was this strange new state of being? It was utterly unfamiliar to me.

I had previously determined that the next day--Saturday--I would go to music contest and simply sit at a table to be available for my students if a problem arose. Always before determining something in my will was sufficient to make me able to drive myself to overcome any obstacle, particularly those related to my own physical abilities and capacities. And, if such an event of "pressing on" should nearly break me, then I would still find some way to "make good" for the sake of those depending on me, then I'd establish a recovery spell where only those nearest me would see me crawl off and complain and grumble at myself for being so weak as those oblivious ones went on their merry way. But my slinking off to recover became harder and harder to do, and more bitter and more pathetic. Finally, as I lay on the couch Friday, I came to the realization that I'd turned a corner in all this, entering an the era when my own determination simply might not be sufficient at all. I prayed for the grace (rather than praying for the strength) to go to contest for my students sake. I did receive that grace, but with a stark reminder that my "value" was again not locked up in these false perceptions I want to carry about my reason for being there. I knew this "message" came for me because the one "problem" that arose, I was not able to fix. It was beyond my enfeebled state to figure out what was wrong with one young man's saxophone, and because the contest offered no emergency repair station--something I'd always presumed would exist at Indiana contest sites even as it had at Illinois ones from my past contest experiences--the boy could not play. His ensemble could only play at 2/3's capacity for the judge's evaluation (You would have had a gold medal with all parts there, she said) but no medal of honor was available to them, only the assurance that it "would have been" if things were different. And it was I that should have made "things different" but I couldn't find the problem with his horn. I had no idea what was making it inoperative today, especially as the day before it had played fine. Probably today it plays fine. Or, tomorrow my sub will see whatever it was I missed yesterday, but both come too late. Cruel, it seemed. Was I wrong to even be there, I asked myself? It surely happened for a reason, said the young man, refusing to have a despairing attitude. He was more concerned at how much he might have disappointed the others in his ensemble than he was concerned for himself. I had no answers to give him. What's more, these two weeks (or is it three now?) that I've been gone took a toll on the most ambitious of my young students. I let them down when they were in the very trenches of preparing themselves for this great battle waged for the proving that personal endeavor leads to personal achievement. Ironic point of abandonment I inflicted on them there, but still rises the question: Why? I went yesterday knowing in some measure I was only there to serve as a stint for the very disappointment I also in part caused. It is a heaviness.

Oswald Chambers in one of the devotionals I read recently poses the question: "Am I prepared to let my obedience to God cost other people something?" That is the crux of it really. I'm fine with my obedience to You costing me almost anything, but I don't want to bring others into the matter. That is where the anchor comes in. Yesterday I was reading Lucado's In the Grip of Grace as I sat waiting while my students came and went for their playing times. Max uses the analogy of a sailor coming into a storm and deciding to set the anchor, but this inept sailor sets the anchor first at the bow, then at the stern. Even a near-clueless passenger knows enough to take the anchor away from the sailor and throw it over the side, exclaiming, "you can't just anchor to yourself!"

Is this what I'm doing, God? Max says "When the storm blows, the legalist anchors on his own works. He will save himself." But the thing forgotten in this moment in the storm that could destroy is this: salvation is God's business.

What's more, just this morning, the anchor returned to visit again through another of Your ministers, God. I was too tired to go to church today, so I watched Charles Stanley on tv, and he too spoke of an anchor. He held a Bible in one hand, laid the other hand across its open pages and said, "This is your anchor." Heavy heart indeed. Am I throwing Your word all over myself and my works, and forgetting to anchor them back on You instead of on me? Am I making myself the measure of their benefits? Am I becoming too self-important, too personally significant? Set me free from such a shame as that, God! Help me fling the anchor of Your Word back into You. The boat is indeed attached to the anchor, (I have that at least going for me)but this boat that I am can not contain that Word when it, as anchor, must do the very work it is designed to do. Help me let You go in that respect, but keep me attached by that strong cord!

And what is the promise that brings me through such moments of feeling set back at square one in my spiritual development (you think you're wise? you're only wise in the ways you're supposed to be, and that by My grace, You remind me.) What gives me the hope to believe good things will be borne even of my being forced to prove myself such a disappointment to many, even though they graciously do not point the finger? It is the circumcision.

Some days ago, months actually, I found that whispering voice in my heart came and spoke to me again. It told me once before that I was to be baptized into my calling. Strange, wonderful, mysterious, spiritual, confusing baptism that it was, but in the end clear and wonderfully wrought with all Your purpose such that I did receive it much like a mother endures the process of birthing a child for the joy of parenthood--even as Paul spoke of his relationship with churches in the epistles--such was my experience of the ultimate joy of knowing that baptism and coming to learn who You said I would be as a result of the message You locked in that event for me.

Here later, I heard the same voice that promised the baptism come to me with promise of a circumcision. I have walked further into this strange country with You now, O Lord, and I understood more what to expect. I knew enough both to see fear and confidence in Thee as heavier weights on the scales. So I read about circumcision with that circumspect heart You tell Your people to carry through the days of Sabbath, the time of worship and waiting. But it is come now, isn't it? Being incapacitated as I am, and then cutting the huge gash in my finger, feeling the full pain of the stitches as the numbing agent refused to do its work, looking at my hand lying there on the doctor's table in a congealing pool of blood. I received my slash in a different place: the index finger of my left hand, but I received it while cutting bread. You gave me a dream once about slicing bread...a deep dream. I sliced bread and You said as I sliced, "This is My Body, broken for you," and when I had fully sliced that bread, power shot up my arm so strong it woke me and left my arm tingling. And I am called to remember as I slice bread in the physical world now and break my own body in the doing.

Yesterday as I sat there "present" for my students, what would seem a virtually pointless activity, I read another passage in the Lucado book, and it addressed the meaning of this idea of circumcision, from God's perspective in the days before man took it and turned it into a self-appointed badge of God's favoritism. When it was God's call on Abraham, it was not so mean a thing:
"Circumcision symbolized the nearness God desires with his people. God put the knife to our self-sufficiency." (If that is the definition of circumcision, then I am certainly enduring it now.) "He wants to be a part of our identity, our intimacy and even our potency." (My new understanding of weakness comes back to mind as I read that quote.) "Circumcision proclaimed that there is no part of our life too private or too personal for God." Lucado says Jews in St. Paul's day were supposed to see circumcision as a sign of submission, but they had transformed it to a sign of superiority. A person circumcised in the heart by God's Spirit rather than according to some written law "gets praise from God rather than from people." (Romans 2:28-29) Though they do not have good cause to praise me, people are nevertheless helping me, offering to bring me food, clean my house, do my laundry. What a wonder You work in the hearts of people, God! Help me keep the purity of this circumcision as a submission and not a superiority ever before me; it is what Your Spirit deserves as that Spirit shows the heart of Your Sone sealed in the people You send to help me.

And lastly, Lucado says circumcision is a reassurance that all was already made right between Himself and the one circumcised. "Abraham was circumcised to show that he was right with God through faith before he was circumcised. Its purpose was to show what God had already done."

Thank You, that You have taught me to see the hope and the promise even though it is woven in with the things that still need to change within me. Help me to learn to let go of this wretched tendency to measure my value by my good works; rather may I receive a call to good works because I receive the word of how You value me before they are yet done.