I think there are not many things that loom as large to feed our fear than uncertainty. It seems to come at us from every direction. It can be as simple as accepting an invitation to get together with some potential new friends or it can be as risk-filled as considering a job or career change or dealing with unending medical tests with no clear diagnosis.

Without even trying I can easily think of major times of uncertainty in my own life. One was when my husband was serving in the military half a world away when I was expecting our first child. Another came when I sensed the Lord nudging me to leave my safe teaching career where I had tenure to go to graduate school in the area of counseling (specifically marriage and family therapy) followed by entering into a private Christian practice without health insurance or any clear expectation of income.

There was uncertainty about when to retire and what would be next when I am not one to golf all day or spend my time sitting on a porch leafing through magazines. There is nothing wrong with either of those, but they are not me.

When unexpected things happen, it exposes where our trust lies. Perhaps it lies with our paycheck or savings account. Perhaps it lies within a specific church or ministry. Perhaps it lies with family or one or several very close friends we rely on. Perhaps it lies with an institution like the government.

I am not suggesting not trusting anyone or anything. What I do know is that if my trust in the Lord gets stretched like a muscle that is being worked out regularly, my world will not fall apart when those people or those things I am trusting in change or disappear. My trust and faith will get healthier and stronger even though I won’t enjoy the process any more than I enjoy a workout at the gym. Both are good for me!

“Faith doesn’t reduce uncertainty. Faith embraces uncertainty. We’ll never have all the answers. And some people never come to terms with this truth. They feel there is something wrong with them because they can’t wrap their minds around God. But maybe faith has less to do with gaining knowledge and more to do with causing wonder. Maybe a relationship with God doesn’t simplify our lives. Maybe it complicates our lives in ways that they should be complicated.”

Mark Batterson

It reminds me again of the children of in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe asking the beavers about whether or not Aslan is safe since he is after all a lion. The answer may not have comforted them because the beavers respond that he isn’t safe, but he is good!

Sometimes I think we want the Lord to be safe and miss that He is not safe in the sense we are hoping He will be, but His goodness is plentiful. I love how C.S. Lewis depicts the Lord as Aslan. It serves notice to us all that He is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah even as He is the tender Savior urging children to come to Him.

Our challenge is to allow ourselves to grow in our Christian life and maturity until we experience the paradox of being childlike in our faith, trust, and wonder. In Him we can have spiritual certainty in the midst of circumstances and daily life filled with uncertainty.

“Faith is embracing the uncertainties of life. It is chasing the lions that cross our paths. It is recognizing a divine appointment when you see one.

Embrace relational uncertainty. It’s called romance. Embrace spiritual uncertainty. It’s called mystery. Embrace occupational uncertainty. It’s called destiny. Embrace emotional uncertainty. It’s called joy. Embrace intellectual uncertainty. It’s called revelation.”

Mark Batterson

In Pat Springle’s wonderful book, Trusting: The Issue At The Heart of Every Relationship, he cuts to the chase with these words:

“Only God remains 100% trustworthy, as well as totally outside of our control.”

Pat Springle

Doesn’t it come down to this: If I am trusting Him for salvation and life with Him everlastingly, can I not trust Him for the circumstances in this life no matter what they may be?

It was Lucy, the youngest, in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, that was the lion chaser, who sensed and looked always for Aslan and trusted Him. She chased after and trusted Aslan with childlike trust and faith. I think we need to grow up to become more childlike like Lucy.

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From the beginning of childhood we are in the process of learning nearly everything we need for living life. That means practice and most of us are challenged with that requirement. We just don’t like it whether that is about tying our shoes and making our bed, a spelling list, basic math facts, a musical instrument, or any other thing you can name. It requires repetition and discipline to cultivate the steps to form the habit we need to become skilled. Couldn’t you just show us and then be able to do it right away?

That might be nice but it doesn’t really work that way and never has.

Many skills and habits are no longer in style and are getting dusty setting on a shelf somewhere but there is one that we may not even recognize we need to practice despite how vital it is.  Discernment. 

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Moment by moment each day we are faced with making choices. How do we decide? To know which is really the best choice requires discernment and never before have we been so bombarded with competing voices trying to persuade us one way or another. If I don’t clear out my email inbox daily I can quickly accumulate thousands of emails making it harder than ever to discern which ones are worth my time and attention and which ones I toss right away.  What is the truth of the one trying to persuade me?

“Discernment in its fullness takes a practiced heart fine-tuned to hear the word of God and the single mindedness to follow that word in love. It is truly a gift from God, not one dropped from the skies fully formed. It is a gift cultivated by a prayerful life and the search for self-knowledge.” 

Ernest Larkin

Discernment is a habit that begins with learning to wait and listen before we act on something. Even in prayer, how often do you wait after praying to hear what the Lord might speak to your heart? Do you know Him from the Bible well enough to recognize his voice above any other clamoring for your attention?

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It’s not always easy even when two options before us are equally good. Even so, who better than God to show us which is best for us in the long run?  Our understanding of that develops over time with experience and the habits of waiting and listening.

“The capacity to recognize and respond to the presence of God in all of life is a spiritual habit and practice that keeps us connected with God’s larger purposes for us and for our world rather than being consumed by self-interest. As we become more practiced at recognizing the presence and activity of God, we are able to align ourselves more completely with what God is doing in any given moment, which is when life begins to get really exciting!” 

Ruth Haley Barton

If these are the necessary components and goals to result in growing in discernment, what are the ingredients that help us get there?

Ruth Haley Barton describes three beliefs that move us there in her book, Sacred Rhythms. The first is “belief in the goodness of God.”  That isn’t as easy to hold onto as it may sound. It’s a belief tested when crises and challenges make life hard or bumpy and our prayers seem to bounce off heaven’s walls in silence or we get a different answer than what we think we want or believe we must have. It means we must trust God when our own choices do not get the outcome we want.

Barton lists “love” as “the primary calling” as the second step. It’s important to notice these two steps do not bring us to decisions based on intellectual reasoning or listing the pros and cons. Instead we ask ourselves “What does love call for in this situation? What would love do?” Such questions can pierce our hearts and reveal how much self-interest goes into choices we make (not what Christ modeled at all).

The third step in Barton’s list is “God does communicate with us through the Holy Spirit.”  How do we get to that as a solid belief?

“The practice of discernment assumes a deep-seated theological belief in God’s presence and action through the Holy Spirit in the midst of daily experience. It assumes that God’s will is continuing to be revealed as it is needed and as I am able to hear it and respond to it.” 

Ruth Haley Barton

As the darkness of the world creates more shadows over every area of our life, discernment has never been needed by any of us more. There are many voices seeking our attention. Some are loud (almost screeching). Some are sweet and seductive in their persuasion. Some whisper so we are not quite sure what is being said. Some are speaking truth. Some use half-truth and others are lies. Distinguishing the difference is not always easy, but there is only one voice that is true and Christ has said in scripture that those who are his know and recognize his voice.

How does that happen?

A good shepherd spends all his time with the sheep (day and night) and his voice becomes so well-known they will not fall prey to another trying to appear as a shepherd. No shepherd can compare with Christ who came to earth to give us life and show us God.

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If we knew how to avoid a snare of any kind, we would do so. Any snare is meant to trap us and hold us so we cannot be free. 

Life exposes us to many kinds of snares. Those connected to innate needs or desires can be most difficult because they hold us in a struggle that not only creates guilt but also binds us with shame and fear of exposure. 

Her Freedom Journey by Dr. Juli Slattery and Dr. Joy Skarka is not just a book but offers an 8-week guide divided into four days each week of teaching along with reflection questions and challenges for women caught in the snare of pornography, those who can’t seem to shake the temptation of the shame of sexual sin.

You hear of these challenges facing men more often but in the small print you discover that one out of three visitors to adult websites are women. Many of these women are first exposed to pornography at a very young age. The average age of the struggle begins at 12 but that is the average so some see what they cannot unsee even earlier.

One of the authors, Joy, shares her first exposure to pornography came in the fifth grade when a friend from summer camp pulled up images on her laptop on her desk in the bedroom. Then on her first day of college Joy was date raped. Both of these were snares holding her in a trap that offered a way out of pain and shame, tempting her to return to them again and again in ways she would never have imagined she would choose. 

“Not every woman struggles with pornography but every woman has had the beautiful gift of sexuality tainted in some way by lust, assault, legalism, betrayal, or exposure to sexual experiences and images their brains and hearts could not process.” 

Dr. Juli Slattery

Often women go to sites such as those meant to ensnare as a form of education about sex they were not told about or were afraid or embarrassed to ask. Little did they know that curiosity has a bite that pulls the viewer in deeper as the endorphins released in viewing gives them a  powerful rush. Neurological wiring connects those experiences to the pleasure centers of the brain and over time can become reconstructed in ways we don’t discover until we are farther into the rabbit hole than we wanted, planned or could imagine. 

How any woman gets into this insidious snare varies. Sometimes it is exposure at an early age such as it happened with Joy when there is no truth or knowledge to know what is being unleashed. It can also happen from childhood trauma that plays out and seeks expression in sexual temptation. It can happen when we indulge ourselves in romance novels that releases dopamine and hijacks the pleasure center of the brain. The girl or woman wasn’t looking for sex but for the intimacy we were designed to know and enjoy within a marital relationship.

“Most women don’t look at porn for porn’s sake. We use pornography because it promises to dull the pain of the past and to make us feel wanted and loved, even for a moment.” 

Her Freedom Journey

We are inundated with images on every device and in nearly any venue unlike any time before when those images were only found in magazines tucked into closets or under mattresses. Ads to sell almost anything are full of seductive poses and actions to get us to buy food, cars, beverages, and a long list of items.

Add to that…”social media encourages us to present only the best version of ourselves, making us feel like no one could really love us exactly as we are. Feeling isolated and unlovable, we fall for what we can feel like is a valid substitution.”

Her Freedom Journey helps identify and address the problems beneath sexual sins, those we keep hidden out of fear and shame. The book is structured into eight chapters: The Problem of Pain, Can God’s Love Really Be Enough?, A New Vision for Sexual Wholeness, Pursuing Sexual Integrity, Ditching Lies and Embracing Truth, Stop Trying So Hard!, Getting Unstuck from Shame, and When Your Story Becomes Your Weapon. It is crafted to be used in group settings where you can gain support for the battle but can be helpful for an individual to start on the path. 

You may be thinking this all sounds hard to fathom among those who have spiritual moorings and worship with us regularly but as a retired Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor for nearly 25 years, I know these are not as unusual as you may think. The authors in their ministry, Authentic Intimacy, have been leading women to hope and freedom for more than a few years and offer online studies, workshops, and conferences. They can also give guidance for those who have progressed to addiction and need professional help beyond what this book offers.

If you are identifying with what I have written or know of someone who is, this book offers a pathway out of hopelessness and will be released on July 2.  I was honored by the authors to be invited to be on the launch team. Take the first step to freedom with Juli and Joy alongside you on your own journey to freedom.

Communication seems to be more complicated than it has ever been despite the vast array of ways available to most of us to accomplish it. Mankind started out with language and face-to-face communication that expanded to written words that developed into reading the language being spoken and we have been adding to that ever since. But there are those of us who are older who recall the days when communication was still largely face-to-face, print media, landline telephones, radios, and movies without surround sound.

The past 50 years have brought an explosion of high-tech devices that allow for instant communication so it might seem that we should be clearer and better informed, but misunderstanding abounds despite all these options. Emojis each have a meaning and there are shorthand text memes that convey things that leave many uncertain of what has been communicated. Add to that the new words and the changes in meanings of so many words we thought we knew the definition of as well as the greater variety of languages we might hear spoken more routinely and you have the possibility of needing translation far more often than you would have expected at one point in time.

I recall so well when I was pregnant with our first child and my husband was on military duty thousands of miles away. Our communication was limited to “snail mail” and then one day he sent me a little reel-to-reel tape recorder that we could use to send tapes to and from one another. (Hard for many of you to imagine since even cassette tape recorders are now ancient history.) Then when our son was born my husband used a network of ham radio operators (amateur radio operators) that leaped from one country and continent to another and across the ocean till a ham radio operator in the United States received the message and picked up a landline telephone and called me on a landline in the hospital. Sounds amazing, right? It was quite a surprise! But even then, I needed to learn the correct protocol using words like “over” and “out” to be sure all of this was passed along the network.

The baby boy my husband had called to hear about now picks up his cell phone to FaceTime or Zoom call me without a need for a network of radio operators or a specific protocol for the conversation. How times have changed!

But it is likely that many of us have discovered that a lot can get lost or missed in these new ways of communicating whether it is texting, video chat, email, or something else. We can miss the other aspects of communication such as body language or tone of voice that help us know more about what the person is saying beyond only their words.

We seem to be perpetually looking down at screens and can lose the depth of communication we can still experience face-to-face with cellphones and other devices set aside. Maybe that is what draws more people to meet at their favorite coffee shops today to have that “in-person” connection we have lost in the maze of all the devices we have at our disposal and regularly use. It’s only then we are more often able to ask a follow-up question to clarify what the other person has said and be sure we understood what they said and meant. We can even ask for clarity on how they define a word that might be less clear in current lingo.

More and more persons are also becoming fluent in multiple languages and the days of the high school classes in Latin have faded from most scenes. Maybe it really is now a “dead” language despite so many of its root words still influencing scientific terms and words.

But there are actually two words that require no translation and mean the same thing in every language in the world. And that was a great discovery for me recently. Eugene Peterson writes about these two words in his most recent book, This Hallelujah Banquet.

“The first word is hallelujah.“

“Hallelujah is a Hebrew word meaning literally, “praise God.” But it has crossed the language barriers and ethnic boundaries and kept its own sound through it all: hallelujah.“

Eugene Peterson in This Hallelujah Banquet

“If you want to swear, you have to learn a new word in every language: Hebrew, Greek, Sanskrit, Egyptian, French, Spanish, German, Icelandic, and Russian. If you want to say, “Praise God,” one word will do all over the world: hallelujah.”

Eugene Peterson in The Hallelujah Banquet

Little wonder this word appears in Peterson’s book in the chapter entitled “The Supper of the Lamb: A Benediction.” It’s the word heard at that last grand banquet where persons from every tribe and nation will be assembled around Christ.

“Hallelujah was injected into the vocabulary of the peoples of the world by persons who were threatened daily with torture and death. The songs of Revelation were sung by Christians who lived under the sadism of the Roman police state. The church that sang the hallelujah songs in Revelation was almost exclusively made up of the poor and the exploited, the imprisoned and the martyred.”

“Language, if it is going to be useful, has to reflect the reality of life. God is the reality of life. Hallelujah is a good word to describe our knowledge and response to that reality.”

Eugene Peterson in This Hallelujah Banquet

But I said there were two words that needed no translation…

“The second word is amen. It is an untranslated Hebrew word. And it means “yes.” Like hallelujah, it has infiltrated the vocabularies of the peoples of the world. None of you know what the word for “no” is in Hebrew, but you know what “yes” is. You have been saying it all your life, in church, and out of it. Amen-yes-is God’s favorite word.”

Eugene Peterson in This Hallelujah Banquet

What causes Peterson to say that amen is God’s favorite word?

“What I am saying is that the basic overwhelming, eternally fixed word of God to you is yes. Yes, I love you. Yes, I accept you. Yes, I want you. And that our best word back to God is yes, Amen.”

Eugene Peterson in The Hallelujah Banquet

It can happen so easily to any one of us. It lays in wait and catches up with us. We let the feelings and hurts, and misperceptions stay stuffed inside. Then we fall prey to the enemy’s devices. He wants to disconnect us from one another, ourselves, and God and the enemy is cunning and waits for just the right moment.

C.S. Lewis gives us a perfect example in his powerful story set in Narnia, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Life was hard in London during WW II and there was special concern for the children. So, hundreds of them were sent into the English countryside away from the relentless bombing for protection. Can you imagine being put on a train to travel to an unknown place to live with strangers without any idea of what would happen and if you would ever see your family at home again? It was fertile ground for so many taunts of the enemy.

Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy had already been dealing with the absence of their father and by now the oldest siblings had taken on a somewhat parental role. Little wonder that Edmund might chafe when Peter and Susan started giving him direction. Not unusual for that to happen among siblings under the best of circumstances.

Lucy seemed to be unruffled by that, but Edmund was trying to find his place and absent one, he was prone to behavior that showed his anger. The feelings he didn’t actually express festered in the darkness inside of him and as they did, the enemy saw his longing. Edmund had no idea who Aslan had called him to be or what lay ahead if he did not yield to the darkness growing in his heart.

When Edmund stumbles into the winter of Narnia and discovers Lucy has not lied about this country beyond the wardrobe of the professor’s house, he is easy prey to the white witch. It might seem he is just fond of Turkish delight, but he is really looking for something more than that to satisfy the hunger inside of him to feel important, valued, and capable. If somehow that nagging emptiness had not been there, there would not have been room for the anger, bitterness, jealousy, and rebellion to grow. Perhaps then he would not have been foolish as to accept the false promises of the white witch masquerading as the Queen of Narnia offering him candy and rulership of her kingdom one day, if only he would comply with her request to bring his brother and sisters to Narnia to meet her.

The trap was perfectly suited to Edmund, and it would lead him to betray those he loved.

This wondrous tale written as only C.S. Lewis could write can quickly cause us to not feel much affection for Edmund. Perhaps we need to look closer to what moved him to take those steps and consider whether we also could be duped. Evil seduces us by appearing to be good and offer us something yummy and appealing without telling us the cost.

The seduction was easier because the children didn’t know the prophecy, had never heard of Aslan, or what the call on their lives was to be.

It’s vital for us to know the Bible and the truth that fills the pages from Genesis to Revelation and it is even more important than we may realize to teach these things to our children from the time we hold them in our arms and rock them to sleep. For it is God’s story and the most important story they will ever hear or learn. It can show them the right path, help them make the best choice, and save them from the evil conspiring to seduce them. If this story isn’t woven into the fabric of each of our stories, each of their stories, we and they can be duped not unlike Edmund.

Holding onto the hurts, misunderstandings, comparisons, judgments, unmet longings, and more can tempt us to look in all the wrong places for something to make us feel better. If we don’t know the story, God’s story, we will never know that He is the only One who can satisfy those longings, meet us in our hurts and emptiness, and do for us what only He can accomplish.

The enemy’s lies that we will never be accepted by Him if we tell Him the truth of what hides within us are meant to isolate us and deceive us from recognizing He already knows and is just waiting for us to come to Him so He can clean it all out and make us whole. Only if we have a steady diet of the words He left for us can we overcome the hunger that can be stirred in the confusing daily lives we live. He wants us to not initiate with evil and the imprisonment it brings, not to be deceived by the angel appearing as light.

What are you really hungry for?

Only One can fill the emptiness you feel.