Week 35 Sunday
Week 35 Sunday
Music in the Making
Mark 6:30-32; Acts 1:3, 4; Galatians 1:15-17
We have been discussing positive pain and suffering, but other troubles that include no positive pain and suffering arise from being laid aside, rendered inactive, shelved. Some of these come from temporary indispositions, some through unemployment, and some through approaching old age. In all of these, our tasks are suspended and we have to face inactive life. This is sometimes harder to meet than positive suffering.
Someone has said that in music “pauses are music in the making.” There is a momentary suspense only to produce music more lovely than before. The pause prepares those who produce and those who listen for the finer music.
Is it possible that these pauses in our lives—these suspensions from activity—may become music in the making? I grant that continued unemployment of healthy, active persons may and does cause deterioration. The only remedy for them is employment, and society must provide it, or it isn’t worthy the name of society. But apart from this extreme case, cannot the temporary periods of being laid aside, or of being blocked from our real life work, be made into periods that become in literal fact, music in the making?
It was so in the life of Jesus. The call to give his message must have burned in his soul like fire during those silent years at Nazareth. Making yokes, when he was commissioned to strike off the yoke of sin and misery from the neck of the world! But he did not chafe. He could wait—yes, for thirty long years. We are glad he waited; the music is sweeter for the waiting. Those silent years are a pause that became music in the making. Thirty years of silence, three years of song. But what a song! It is richer because of the undertones of patient silences in it.
Thus it may be in your life and mine, silences that enrich the ultimate music.
O Christ, make me patient under restriction, that I may be richer under release. And help me not to chafe, but trust. Amen.
Week 35 Monday
Some Pauses
Matthew 14:13-14; Mark 6:33-34; Revelation 1:9-10
Youth often chafes under years of disciplined schooling. Many throw away the opportunity for study, and it never returns, and they wear a lifelong regret within the heart. They refuse the pause, so there is no music in the making. Many a missionary, eager to get to work, chafes under the drudgery of months of digging at language roots; they pass it by, or slur it over, and all through their missionary lives they sing very broken music in very broken language. Then they live to regret that their message is ineffective.
Perhaps one of the most distressing of pauses we have to meet is the fact of interruptions during the day. We plan our work, and then people upset those plans, and us. We say our work is spoiled. But it may be that those very interruptions are our work.
Jesus made them so. Trace through his life and you will find that almost everything glorious came out of an interruption. Some of Christ’s finest teaching and finest deeds, the revelation of his finest spirit, came out of some person or circumstance upsetting his plans. These interruptions did not upset his plans, they only sent his grace off at new angles. He looked upon them as God thrusting human need across his path. Those interruptions were opportunities. Once, when he was so pressed that he and his disciples hadn’t even leisure to eat, he withdrew them to a desert place apart. But the multitudes, perceiving it, followed him; and he welcomed them (“had compassion on them,” Matt. 14:14), and spoke to them of the kingdom of God, and healed those that had need of healing. And then he fed the multitude. Jesus taught, healed, and fed the breakers of his plans and interrupters of his quiet!
Those three words—he welcomed them—are worth to us more than multitudes of books on patience and love. They throw open a window into the heart of goodness. That pause was music in the making. And what music!
O Christ, this day I shall meet with many interruptions, sometimes by very trying people. Help me to make those very interruptions a revelation of your Spirit within me. Amen.
Week 35 Tuesday
The Most Solemn Pause of All: Death
Job 19:29; Philippians 1:21-25; 2 Timothy 4:6-8
None of these pauses we have mentioned can be compared with the awful solemn pause of death. Our work is stopped, our plans are broken off, our ties with others are snapped, the pitcher is broken at the well—at the well, just when it was going to draw water for someone. This is the most devastating pause of all. But is it? It may be the pause that will turn out to be only life’s sweetest, gladdest music in the making.
It was so with Alice Means, one of the rarest missionaries we have ever had in India. What an amazing life she was living: building, teaching, making leaders! And then cancer struck her. She thought she might get to America before she died, but was stopped in Bombay by the doctors, knowing she would never reach America. She wrote me from the Bombay hospital, after knowing she would be denied even the privilege of going to her homeland to die:
Use me as an illustration in your book, “Sure—but what?” I haven’t suffered much yet, and when I do, I may not be able to tell you how it goes. How thankful I am for all these years of perfect, abounding health! What a happy life I have had! Let me tell you of the experience of these last two months. With a host of others I am working along in a great field, digging, sowing, weeding, watering, never noticing I had reached the edge, until I heard, “Alice, that’s enough, come over here and sit down a bit.” I looked up and there stood Jesus smiling at me. I went over and sat down on the grass by him, and he said—“You have been busy working and have not had time for all those intimacies that go with a great friendship, such as I want with you. Come along and let us walk together here.” He put his arm through mine and we walked along an avenue all covered with grass and flowers, and the birds were singing. Oh, it is beautiful! As I look down toward the river it is a little misty. But I know He will see me through that. Even now I am forever with my Lord. His peace within me is wonderful. Nothing can separate us now. It is heaven. That’s all. The doctors and the nurses cannot understand how I can calmly discuss my condition and outlook.
Who can say that this pause of death to her was not music in the making? And vaster.
O Christ, we know that even death is but vaster music in the making. Help us to welcome it with joy. Amen.
Week 35 Wednesday
Life’s Most Fruitful Pause
Psalm 55:16-17; Matthew 6:6; 14:22-23; Luke 18:1
Perhaps the most fruitful pause of all is the pause of prayer. It has more music in its making than anything I know, and yet how few really use it! “Prayer is the most talked about and the least used force in the world.”
I do not mean by using prayer the gaining of the benefit from the reflex influence that comes to us from quiet thought and meditation. I mean something more. I mean that my lesser spirit can come into intimate, personal contact with the Spirit called God, that I can come to an understanding with God, can adjust my will to God’s will, and through the contact can find my personality heightened, enlightened, reinforced, used. Only a reflex influence? Humbly I say, I know better! Those who think of prayer as only a reflex influence soon give up prayer. For “it is not possible to project one’s spirit continuously to that which is not responsive.”
Evangelist and faith healer F. F. Bosworth says, “We could explain any reply to prayer provided we believe that it is possible for God to put a thought into the heart of man.” Can God put a thought into our hearts? A thought? Why, God’s very Life! God can reinforce the very foundations of our being by imparting of the divine Life. Life flows into life, Will into will, Love into love—that is what prayer means. It all comes when we are attuned, and prayer attunes us to the Eternal God.
Ethel Romig Fuller* writes in her poem “Why Wonder”:
If radio’s slim fingers can pluck a melody
From night, and toss it over a continent or sea;
If the petaled white notes of a violin
Are blown across the mountains or the city din;
If songs, like crimsoned roses, are culled from the thin blue air
Why should mortals wonder if God hears and answers prayer?
I do not wonder. For I have gone to my knees broken, all in, defeated, and have arisen reinforced, new, and victorious. Everything within me said I had met God. And I had.
O Christ, this pause of prayer—what music in the making there is in it! Help me to use it this day as a working way to live. Amen.
* Oregon Poet Laureate, 1957–65.
Week 35 Thursday
We Pause to Consider Prayer
Psalm 37:4-5; Proverbs 3:6; Matthew 18:19-20; John 15:7, 16
Let us get rid of certain notions about prayer. Prayer is not a lightning rod to save us from the bolts of God’s wrath. Many think it is; if they don’t pray, something will happen to them. “We don’t have prayer or grace in our house, and nothing has happened yet,” said a little girl in awed tones. No, dear, nothing has happened yet, nothing except deterioration. And perhaps nothing ever will. But that’s enough. However, deterioration is such a slow process that we scarcely see it taking place, and so we are not alarmed. Prayerlessness means slow rot, not sudden calamity.
Again, prayer is not bending God to our wills; it is the bringing of our wills to God’s. When we throw out a boat hook and catch hold of the shore, do we pull the shore to ourselves? Rather we pull ourselves to the shore. Prayer does not pull God to us, it pulls us to God. It aligns our wills with God’s will, so that God can do things through us that could not otherwise be done.
An almighty Will works through our weak wills, and we can do things all out of proportion to our ability. Prayer is, therefore, not overcoming God’s reluctance; it is laying hold of God’s highest willingness. Those who pray link up with that willingness. If God has left certain things open in the universe to the contingency of man’s will—things that will not be done unless we act—is it strange that God has left certain things open, contingent upon prayer, things that will never be done unless we do them through prayer?
In real prayer, our will coincides with God’s. That is what we mean when we pray “in Jesus’ name.” That is, we pray the kind of prayer Jesus would pray. But when we pray “out of God’s will,” we are forging Jesus’ name to a prayer.
O God, help me this day to make my will coincide with your will, that your power may coincide with mine. Amen.
Week 35 Friday
We Further Consider Prayer
2 Samuel 3:25; Psalm 109:4; Luke 21:36; Romans 12:12
In prayer, I seldom ask for things; more and more I ask God for God, for the assurance that my will and God’s are not at cross-purposes, that we are agreed on all major and minor matters. I know, then, if this is so, I shall get all the things I need. If I seek first the kingdom of God, then all these things will be added unto me. God is interested in things. But I do not want the reality of prayer to depend on whether I get this thing or that thing. If I get God in loving communion, then the prayer is answered and is effective. Things are a side issue. But with many Christians they are central, like the little boy who said to me: “I love my daddy. He gives me pennies every day.” Penny-praying, like penny-loving, belongs to immature childhood.
A Sufi woman saint was seen running with a pail of water in one hand and a torch in the other. When asked what she was doing, she replied, “I want to burn up heaven with the torch and put out the fires of hell with the water, so people will not love God for fear of punishment or for hope of reward, but just for God.’’ Many Christians might do well to learn from that Sufi saint.
Prayer is the power to get through difficulties, to be at your best, to become effective. A raja ruthlessly took away a bridge across a river in Bengal. A Muslim saint sat upon his prayer mat and sailed across the unbridged river. One can cross uncrossable rivers, scale impassable mountains, and do impossible things through prayer. For God, the Eternal God, works with us and in us. Prayer, then, is the kind of a burden sails are to a ship and wings to a bird. Then pray, my brothers and sisters, pray, if you want to live victoriously.
O Christ, we thank you for what prayer did for you and through you: “power has gone forth” (Luke 8:46). Help me this day to pray that power may go forth. Amen.
Week 35 Saturday
Making the Prayer Hour Effective
Psalms 4:4; 24:3-5; Isaiah 64:4; 1 Timothy 4:15
First of all, have the prayer hour. Sacredly keep it. Build the habits of your life around that prayer hour. Make things fit into it, not it into things. People who, neglecting the fixed hour of prayer, say they can pray all the time, will probably end in praying none of the time. But if you keep the fixed hour, it will probably project its spirit through the whole day.
In the beginning of the prayer hour, be silent. Let your mind relax and let it roam across your life to see whether it stops at anything wrong. If so, tell God you will right it. Let the first moment be a sincere moral search. If nothing is shown to be wrong, then, “Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God” (1 John 3:21). We are ready for bold praying.
Then bathe your thought in God’s Word. It will wash the dust from your eyes. Then you will see, have insight. You will get right attitudes through the Word, so you will pray right prayers. You are pulling your thought up alongside of God’s thought, your purposes up to God’s purposes.
Take a pen or pencil with you and write down what comes to you as you pore over the Word. That pen is the sign of your faith that something will come. And it will. Don’t hurry through that Word. Every word is precious. Pause, assimilate. When you hurry through a wood, you see few birds or animals. They hide. But if you sit down and wait, then they come out. It will be so with your prayer. Prayer is a time exposure of the soul to God. Expose your inmost being to God’s Word.
Take obedience with you into that hour, for you will know as much of God, and only as much of God, as you are willing to put into practice! For God will answer many of your prayers—through you.
O Christ, I come to you to help me make this hour of prayer effective, that I may make through this hour the whole of today effective. Amen.