Coming Up For Air

After this I awoke and looked around, and my sleep was sweet to me. Jeremiah 31:26, New King James Version My Grandma was a warrior woman for God in the true Hebrew meaning of the word virtue in Proverbs 31. She once dove into a well to rescue her toddler, and she was no less all in in prayer. In the latter stages of her glory-to-glory walk on Earth, someone brought her use of the death of one of her grandchildren. She took it to heart, wondering aloud why her precious Jesus would allow this tragedy while He saw fit that she should linger and battle cancer. I'll pray about it, she said, and she did, on the spot. On the same spot, she emerged from prayer as tranquil and as radiant in Him as ever. She knew the One in whom Jeremiah believed and was persuaded that He is able to keep that which she committed unto Him until that day when she saw Him face-to-face. She knew the taste from the well of that prophet's peace as announced in Jeremiah 31:26. As with Grandma, Jeremiah has a s...

24 And there shall dwell in Judah itself, and in all its cities together, farmers and those going out with flocks. 25 For I have satiated the weary soul, and I have replenished every sorrowful soul.” Jeremiah 31:24-25, New King James Version For one of our wedding anniversaries, my wife and I went to Mayberry. We found common consolation in the idyllic TV town, or the recreation of it in nearby Mount Airy, North Carolina. Supplementing the feel of the place was a vintage theater advertising Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 classic The Birds on the marquee. Being an incurable history major, I sifted the irony. Even then, even in the civilized conformity of fedora-tipping politeness I would idealize and maybe idolize, tensions were present and unreconciled. People feared attack. People feared the familiar would suddenly become the fearsome. The space race, that aspect of the Cold War, is mentioned even on The Andy Griffith Show . Barney's concerns that Opie might turn out to be a hoodlum...

23 Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: “They shall again use this speech in the land of Judah and in its cities, when I bring back their captivity: ‘The Lord bless you, O home of justice, and mountain of holiness!’ 24 And there shall dwell in Judah itself, and in all its cities together, farmers and those going out with flocks. Jeremiah 31:23-24, New King James Version There have been times when my class came out of my mouth, and not necessarily when I showed my fondness for compound sentences and relished resplendent vocabulary. As I taught students in the poorest counties in three states, they would make assumptions at which I would bristle. Referring to the government benefits that were the lifeblood of many of these communities, they would ask, "You get a check, don't you?" Teacher that I was, I would consider this a Teachable Moment, but really am sure what it conveyed was my pride that, as a man in a wheelchair, I was working. I was Producer rather than ...

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: “They shall again use this speech in the land of Judah and in its cities, when I bring back their captivity: ‘The Lord bless you, O home of justice, and mountain of holiness! Jeremiah 31:23, New King James Version I used to enjoy going to summer camp. For nine days, I was seen apart from from my relationships at home. I was related to not as son of a particular father and mother, or as a particular person's brother, or as having reached this status in school. Uprooting and replanting, even temporarily, prompted a different kind of flourishing. I also, for this nine-day stretch, was planted separate from many of the comforts of home. For that time, I didn't have regular access to television, carpet on the floor, or complete privacy in the shower. The cabins were even rustic enough not to include a bathroom. Every year, upon returning, home looked different. The same sights and amenities which had been routine a fortnight before wer...

22 How long will you gad about, O you backsliding daughter? For the Lord has created a new thing in the earth— A woman shall encompass a man.” Jeremiah 31:22, New King James Version My weeks in my first semester of my freshman year of college had a certain enforcement to them. They built up tension toward midmorning on Friday. Though the weekend was in sight from that vantage point, more prominent and problematic was my weekly test in Biology. I dreaded it all week, allowing it to color my life experience to such an extent that I calculated out loud Fall Break's marking that I was one sixteenth of the way through my college career. This looming testing cast its shadow in spite of the fact that the results were generally satisfactory. The expectations I imposed on myself based on the comfort and enthusiasm I felt in the humanities just didn't readily translate to the exactitudes of science. My identity settled and succumbed to the point of its lowest and latest reflection on my ...

21 “Set up signposts, Make landmarks; Set your heart toward the highway, The way in which you went. Turn back, O virgin of Israel, Turn back to these your cities. 22 How long will you gad about, O you backsliding daughter? Jeremiah 31:21-22a, New King James Version In his novel The Rookie , Jerry Jenkins tells the story of a major-league project through the eyes of the prodigy's mother. Her shepherding, scrimping foresight toward the future she sees for him is contrasted with the family of his father, who has departed from the picture. His father also had major-league talent, she notes, and the accompanying windfall of a signing bonus that could have changed the trajectory of his father's family of origin. Instead, she looks back mystified on the poor family's decision to blow that money is a rare consolation before returning to hardscrabble life. I wonder if God discerned something similar in the hearts of the children of Ephraim as Jeremiah 31:22 began. He foretells a nat...

21 “Set up signposts, Make landmarks; Set your heart toward the highway, The way in which you went. Turn back, O virgin of Israel, Turn back to these your cities. Jeremiah 31:21, New King James Version "We are quite ignorant of the real power of our habits," writes CS Lewis in a 1942 letter to Mrs. Percival Wiseman, " until we try to give them up." Picture it. Here is a great mind acknowledged by the world as an Oxford don and by the Church fed by his insights many decades after his death. He and Mrs. Wiseman sit in a world set afire, the futility of man's assumptions exposed to their ashen foundations. Still, Lewis confesses the nearly intractable power of habit. Something similar, humbling, hopeless but for the grace of God, is going on in Jeremiah 31:21. In this case, on the scale opposite of depravity's power of habit are episodes of giddy goodness. God has traced them like so much ad copy up to now in Jeremiah 31. His faithfulness to bring His people ba...

Is Ephraim My dear son? Is he a pleasant child? For though I spoke against him, I earnestly remember him still; Therefore My heart yearns for him; I will surely have mercy on him, says the Lord. Jeremiah 31:20, New King James Version I was in awe of my little brother early. I knew he had a fluidity of intellect I did not possess. More daunting, he seemed free of concern over comparisons. Whatever I learned by what I felt was rigor and focus, I needed to show someone, or show up someone, in order for the prize to be complete. Brent, though, was always secure being himself. Now, when he was nine and I was 12, he was putting those gifts into particularly adult action. Slight and blond, he was nevertheless atop a massive tractor. He was making things get. Ever the indoorsmen, I watched from afar, both in terms of physical distance and perspective. Lamenting and admiring at once, I spoke aloud that he was going to accomplish great things. My dad, somehow trusting Brent to operate the tracto...

Surely, after my turning, I repented; And after I was instructed, I struck myself on the thigh; I was ashamed, yes, even humiliated, Because I bore the reproach of my youth.’ Jeremiah 31:19, New King James Version On the sitcom The King of Queens , Doug Heffernan is accommodating himself to unemployment. He visits his sister who is a gym teacher at his old high school, looking for sympathy. She tells him he ought not be too hard on himself for this interlude. He's been working hard since… She pauses. The story is a little less sympathetic since his work history, the definition of adult responsibility in her narrative, only goes back to Doug's mid-20s. It's a fairly flexible definition of youth. Her generous recasting has nothing on the grace to which God sees Ephraim's story in Jeremiah 31:19. Having been brought through Jeremiah 31:18's full-fledged confession of intense sorrow over sin, of seeing himself corrected and trained by God as a result of it and more pers...

“I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself: ‘You have chastised me, and I was chastised, Like an untrained bull; Restore me, and I will return, For You are the Lord my God. Jeremiah 31:18, New King James Version "Even our tears of repentance," admits Jerry Bridges in Pursuit of Holiness , "need to be washed in the blood of the Lamb." If those blood-washed tears could speak, their purified confession would sound a lot like Jeremiah 31:18. This is what God hears. God's characterization of the words that Ephraim is "bemoaning himself," is not, perhaps, a promising beginning. That description could be a prelude to endless what Pursuit of Holiness also downgrades as "morbid introspection." Indeed, once we begin to look at our sin, to apprise the gulf between ourselves and God's glory, there is an intoxicating quality to the exercise in extremism. Bemoaning ourselves can become, perversely, an indulgence in self-righteousness. I'm more...

For your work shall be rewarded, says the Lord, And they shall come back from the land of the enemy. 17 There is hope in your future, says the Lord, That your children shall come back to their own border. Jeremiah 31:16b-17, New King James Version John Piper dropped the idea of grace-driven effort into my combustible mind that fires on phrases, but I remember when seeing what it looks like worked the sentiment into my affections and began to change me. Casting a glance to a now quiet corner of my living room, I remember where I was sitting, uncharacteristically all in in intention. It is now something like holy ground. My wife and I were foster parents to a beautiful, sinewy conflagration of enthusiasm I will refer to as Little One out of respect for social services policy asking that I not name her on social media. As with her foster father, Little One's fascination was focused. She was learning to crawl, and I was learning the comprehensive meaning of faith. On the relatively sli...

16 Thus says the Lord: “Refrain your voice from weeping, And your eyes from tears." Jeremiah 34:16a, New King James Version I tend to latch on to doomed shows. I've settled into the fact that I like what not everyone does and that I retain a fondness for what others choose to forget. An example is the one-season run of Matthew Perry's Go On . He plays sports talk radio host who rounds out being quick with the quip with the reality that he is healing from his wife's untimely death. In the process, he finds himself eating incessantly. He complains to one of the people in a grief support group that he hadn't been able to exercise the discipline he would've expected, perhaps trying to summon from himself that which he calls for from the athletes he covers. An older, wiser sufferer sees beyond the will and the moment. "Maybe you aren't ready to stop yet." I seized that patient perspective because there is a lot of truth in it. Grief and healing, by the...

15 Thus says the Lord: “A voice was heard in Ramah, Lamentation and bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for her children, Refusing to be comforted for her children, Because they are no more.” Jeremiah 31:15, New King James Version Toula Portokalos is finding her way in the world. Or, rather, as CS Lewis in Screwtape Letters describes the pervasive phenomenon, it is finding its place in her. The central character in Big Fat Greek Wedding is being assigned a useful spinsterhood as she has reached A Certain Age without a family. She can, then, the well-meaning extended family members reason, serve out her usefulness and find some validation within the family's interconnected web of businesses. She chafes glumly, unwilling to accommodate to the assumptions around her, to settle into a part in a process for the remainder of her days. The family patriarch is mystified. Isn't she grateful for everything her forbearers have built, for a chance to fit into what already is? Her mother, who l...

13 “Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance, And the young men and the old, together; For I will turn their mourning to joy, Will comfort them, And make them rejoice rather than sorrow. 14 I will satiate the soul of the priests with abundance, And My people shall be satisfied with My goodness, says the Lord.” Jeremiah 31:13-14, New King James Version Bill brought a former history teacher's fascinated thoroughness to the teaching of God's Word. His sense of the background of Nineveh's which Jonah faced and his adeptness at connecting the sailors' questions to the prophet to the same pigeonholing of identity we attempt today still stick with me 30 years later. Thus prepared to invite the youth Sunday school class in front of him into life's deeper things, he wasn't quite prepared for my persistent prayer request. I wanted the Braves to win. That was the channel in my heart I wanted God to overflow at about the age of 12. They were terrible, and I was convinced ...

“Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance, And the young men and the old, together; For I will turn their mourning to joy, Will comfort them, And make them rejoice rather than sorrow. Jeremiah 31:13, New King James Version She was her usual, effervescent self. Our foster child neared her first birthday as fascinated with life as ever. I remember writing in my constant chronicle on social media that she rejoiced because it was Tuesday. That was her last day with us. She didn't know, but we did, with the awful gift of foreknowledge. Social services had other plans to which she was oblivious. Her joy continued, constant, the very essence of child -like faith. I consider that as I think over Jeremiah 31:13. Our little one, whom I still don't name in print out of respect for social services policy, was completely engulfed in life's dance. God said His grace was such that the young would be, that they would be able to completely enjoy what they were doing without a sense of for...

11 For the Lord has redeemed Jacob, And ransomed him from the hand of one stronger than he. 12 Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, Streaming to the goodness of the Lord— For wheat and new wine and oil, For the young of the flock and the herd; Their souls shall be like a well-watered garden, And they shall sorrow no more at all. Jeremiah 31:11-12, New King James Version I haven't tuned in to Wheel of Fortune in a while, but I remember the old voiceover that drew the viewer in. "Look at this studio, filled with fabulous prizes…" That's the tone I sense from the Lord in Jeremiah 30:12, and it staggers me. You are the Prize, Lord, I want to insist. I want to know, and I want Him to know, that I want Him more than what He can do for me. It's Nevertheless, the description, HIS description in Jeremiah 30:12 is positively alluring. He speaks stuff. He admires His work. He is the Father on Christmas morning, relishing ahead of time the image of His c...

  For the Lord has redeemed Jacob, And ransomed him from the hand of one stronger than he. Jeremiah 31:11, New King James Version In John Grisham's novel The Testament , billionaire Troy Phelan is reconsidering his choices. His children squander and squabble over his wealth. His oldest made such a mess of his business that he ruminates over having to devote his best people's time to straightening it out. Phelan decides to write off his previous familial investments, in a manner of speaking. He will pay off their debts incurred up to the moment he dies, and be done with them. His money will go elsewhere, to an illegitimate child engaged in foreign Gospel missions. Although this makes an interesting premise among men, the opposite emotion from God in Jeremiah 31:11 is more intriguing. Whatever the cost of this tycoon's previous hopes for an investment in his children, God's was infinitely greater. Yet, God does not seek to distance Himself from this active effort. He brin...

10 “Hear the word of the Lord, O nations, And declare it in the isles afar off, and say, ‘He who scattered Israel will gather him, And keep him as a shepherd does his flock.’ Jeremiah 31:10, New King James Version "There are two ways of acquiring knowledge," divides Peter Milward in Wisdom and the Well-Rounded Life . "One way is to pick up bits and pieces of information, which may be called indiscriminate or random knowledge, such as is acquired by perusing an encyclopedia. The other way is to relate such bits and pieces to each other so that they throw light on each other and on the world as a whole. This becomes what may be called 'ordered knowledge.' When the different parts are studied together and seen to support each other, they are less likely to be forgotten." We see this principle played out to the glory and by the grace of God in Jeremiah 31:10. By His persevering work among the people most closely identified with Him, the nations take notice. Ther...

9 They shall come with weeping, And with supplications I will lead them. I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters, In a straight way in which they shall not stumble; For I am a Father to Israel, And Ephraim is My firstborn. Jeremiah 31:9, New King James Version I've been thinking of the episode from Star Trek 's original run, "Who Mourns for Adonis?" In it, Apollo sheds much of the awe of deity as he deals with the Enterprise crewmembers he encounters. He says status as a god is relative, that humans worship what is more powerful and longer lasting than ourselves. He even describes the death of his fellow inhabitants of Olympus, leaving him the last of the race. Diana was first, he remembers, as she just faded away. Apollo reveals another limitation. He has grown used to worship, and he demands it from Capt. Kirk and his friends, but he isn't much interested in THEIR needs. When Kirk reminds him, he can't really be bothered with such picayune concerns...

8 Behold, I will bring them from the north country, And gather them from the ends of the earth, Among them the blind and the lame, The woman with child And the one who labors with child, together; A great throng shall return there. Jeremiah 31:8, New King James Version I just started watching the Amazon series Away hypothesizing about a human mission to Mars. Expecting an ordeal of years to get there and back, the process of winnowing out is rigorous. Key to the plot, it separates man and wife. Both are aspiring astronauts with sterling credentials and sharpened skills, but only one can represent humanity in braving this frontier. With so much at stake, any possible weakness, including a latent, almost hypothetical disability, simply cannot be tolerated. How different is the Lord's watchcare, and something like bravado, in Jeremiah 31:8? Behold, He trumpets. World, make sure you are watching, because, again, MY ways are different. My calling is counterintuitive. Fittingly, the Mast...

7 For thus says the Lord: “Sing with gladness for Jacob, And shout among the chief of the nations; Proclaim, give praise, and say, ‘O Lord, save Your people, The remnant of Israel!’ Jeremiah 31:7, New King James Version I've always been touched with Reepicheep's outsized valor and outspoken gallantry in CS Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia series. When I admitted on social media to such a soft spot undermining my flinty façade, I was surprised by one reaction in particular. My friend Sharon, who knew me most closely decades ago in awkward, post-adolescent formation, said I had always reminded her of Reepicheep. I saw, and still see, a short body the efficacy of which even in routine matters is addled with cerebral palsy. I know my heart, and there is a lot in it that isn't brave and isn't others centered. Yet, the Lord positioned her to see and to sing, what isn't necessarily evident in life's baser moments. My friend Nick knows me much closer up. He knows my...

For there shall be a day When the watchmen will cry on Mount Ephraim, ‘Arise, and let us go up to Zion, To the Lord our God.’ ”Jeremiah 31:6, New King James Version My father once asked me why I write. He challenged me as to whether the rhetorical flourishes in which I engage, the variegated vocabulary which he played no small part in instilling in me, whether I might be employing these as offputting as often as engaging. He asked me with his usual directness whether I cared about the people who might come across my writing on social media, the burdens they carried there, and the expectations they had for the words they encountered there. I think about this mindset as I consider Jeremiah 31:6. I've never been a little watchman, soldier, or policeman. With a physical disability, I especially depend on these for the protection I cannot provide for myself or those I care about. My flesh, then, has directed itself to compensate for such a deficiency. If I can't run a physical param...

You shall yet plant vines on the mountains of Samaria; The planters shall plant and eat them as ordinary food. Jeremiah 31:5, New King James Version A veteran coach watched a pitching prospect getting in his work between games in a slipshod fashion. Michael Lewis in Moneyball records, he was too young to realize he was becoming what he pretended to be. Jeremiah 31:5 presents the same sort of warning even in a call to celebration. The verse opens our eyes, as with Jeremiah's original audience, to the sweeping scope of God's remaking. He rebuilds what has been torn down as part of His people's deserved chastening. There's more. He remakes hearts, that those who once mourned, either at being caught or offending God's glory, they will celebrate publicly with tambourines and dance. But, however exuberant the worship, the pragmatic among us will reserve something of our levity with the knowledge that people must work. Conscious of how ready we are to reckon with the Genes...