The Gate

 The Gate is finished!!!!

I have had the picture of this gate in my head for…ev...er!!! Today I finally got to work on it. Must say, it was easier that I thought it would be! Just knocked off a few slats from an old pallet and sandwiched a piece of tin roof between. The little blue bird was on a bird feeder that my sister gave me years ago, and I like it here now. The gate swings on a couple of brand new hinges that I found at Habitat today for $2…for the pair!!! It swings shut nicely and doesn’t even have to be latched. The idea was to have a way to visually enclose the labyrinth without really walling things off too much. 

Mission accomplished!

Now that I think about it, that makes more sense than I thought! We’re supposed to be like that, too….set apart, separated with Christ, but still living and active in this world. We aren’t supposed to wallow in things that would not honor Christ, but we shouldn’t be so walled off we can’t see to go where He may want to send us to serve.

There are a lot of things that wall us off, too! I’ve just started a book study with a group of friends. The book is called The Good and Beautiful Life by James Bryan Smith. He opens this book talking about something that he calls our narratives. Those are what I call our filters, those things that we sift the rest of the world thru. He makes some wonderful points throughout the book about how to examine our narratives and make sure they are the narratives of Christ. We are human, after all, and it is soooo easy to erect walls and shut gates that were never meant to be there…and sadly, be perfectly ok with it.  

 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?

Matthew 7:3

OK, so that verse has nothing to do with a gate, but it sure shows us how we can miss the gate altogether! We have all had it happen to us…so easy to see a problem, or habit, or something in a friend’s life, but totally miss the MAJOR obstacle in our own lives. It all goes back to perspective, tho’. That personal plank of ours juts out from us ~ Just picture it for a second…every time we make a move in life it is jutting out there ready to throttle the world. 

We can’t “notice” our own plank without help, without our allowance of another’s voice. So, today I’m asking my Carpenter to get the crow bar out and start pulling planks…

Swing wide the city gates—the righteous gates!
    I’ll walk right through and thank God!
This Temple Gate belongs to God,
    so the victors can enter and praise.

Thank you for responding to me;
    you’ve truly become my salvation!

Psalm 118:19-21 ~ The Message Version

Isaiah 55

 “Come…”

This morning God blessed my inbox with a special gift. A friend of mine shared her morning devotional time via an audio file. It wasn’t something pre-printed that she read, it was 22 minutes of absolute joy, listening as she shared her soul’s thoughts on lent. First, thank you Lord for putting such wonderful gifts of friendship in my life…my cup overflows!

One of the Scriptures that she read was Isaiah 55. I can’t really pinpoint the why or wherefore, but the book of Isaiah has always spoken to my soul in a very special way….that’s one for God to answer at another time. Oh, but today! One of the things you’re taught when learning to learn about Scripture is to meditate on a certain passage. My way of explaining that process is to just sit and soak. This isn’t about responding with a dissertation, it is about allowing His Word to flow past our responses and over our objections and thru our perceptions, in order to get all the way down to our soul’s ear. That place that we hear from when God whispers and we feel like a tornado just went by…that’s mediating.

So, today Isaiah 55: 1 starts…Come…and I couldn’t read further. It struck me, is there really anything more than that? You know, just Come. That’s all there is….He does the rest. He holds us, leads us, heals us, loves us! We just have to come. At times, that part may seem unreachable to us, but not really. Thinking on all this, a kind of picture came to mind. We only need to lift that one foot to take a step, we don’t even have to complete the stepping, HE spans the chasm we envision and lifts us to Himself. It is His reach that rescues us from the things of this world that seek after our soul…

He reached down from on high and took hold of me;
    he drew me out of deep waters.
He rescued me from my powerful enemy…

Psalm 18:16 & 17a

As for Isaiah 55? (when you do read on) I just love that it begins with an invitation…

“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters;
and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread,
    and your labor on what does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,
    and you will delight in the richest of fare.

Isaiah 55:1 &2

Before God does anything here, He invites us all to Himself. It doesn’t say to bring anything, or get something done first, or anything…just come, period. Verse two is an invitation to us also, don’t ya think? God invites us to peer into our own soul with Him, to look at our motivations, our life’s prompts and ask  “why”. It really is only by His revealing that we can see the truth about ourselves. It says so right there… Listen, listen to me…  Not me listen to me, but me listen to Him! It is in the listening that we receive the Grace that moves our steps. Discernment, vision, Truth ~ they are all gifts of our God when we just come.