Over the break I figured I should read a book or two from my bookshelf which I haven’t read yet. Redemption Accomplished and Applied, by John Murray is first up. I’ve just started digging into this small but weighty work. I’ll report in on it periodically.
[I was really hoping to get more written on this before I posted it. But I figured I'd post what I've got for this week, even though it's a few-hundred words shorter than I was hoping to post.]
Anna would be home by about 4:00, and Jacob wished it were closer. He needed rest, not sleep, but rest – from the shaking and re-shaking of everything, from his world rocking on what now seemed an awfully feeble foundation. Not that it should have been feeble. The Rock is not feeble, Jacob knew that, but, perhaps, the shaking revealed that Jacob’s world had been all-too-much founded on something shakeable. Not, again, that shaking demonstrated a feeble foundation, because the King does not forbid shaking for his children’s towers (especially if they are towers built on sand). His voice shakes the heavens, in fact. Jacob knew.
It was swirling, all of it.
And, so, again, all that was left was silence and waiting – waiting in the silence of fear and trust placed so firmly yet weakly.
Jacob muttered:
“For God alone my soul waits in silence,
from him comes my salvation.
He only is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall not be greatly
shaken.”
He knew the verses well, and it struck him – the profound and unexpected weight that they carried now – now that the world was shaking. All of his fortresses were crumbling into the sand, all of the towers erected in worship of the baals rocked back and forth, gaining momentum and toppling. The gravity of such mercy overwhelmed Jacob, even such gut-punching and painful mercy.
And there would be much more to see in the coming days, but I’ll get to that when we get there.
Jacob drove home, calling Mark on the way. Mark didn’t answer.
“Hey, Mark, this is Jacob. Just calling and seeing how you’re doing bro. Call me back when you get this.”
At home Jacob wanted only to find something to pass time as quickly as he could until Anna would get home. Something in him still pricked at his mind, that he should try to be productive with his seventy-five or so minutes. Possibly productivity would pass time more quickly, as busyness can tend to do, and, so, Jacob found something he could do. Jacob could think himself into madness, and he knew it, knowing therefore that whatever he would do had to be more than cerebral, something he could do, physically, and move or build with his own hands.
Re-stringing and tuning his acoustic guitar took about 15 minutes.
So Jacob sat, leaned back into the family room couch, holding his guitar, plucking out a melody that he had been working on recently. He played and he played, without stopping, plucking or strumming until it was a song, because the words had been written thousands of years before Jacob. Those words from his memory, the perfect speech that they spoke from heaven to his soul – those words were collided together with the transience of his melody.
He sang and played that song with the furor of hope and the loudness of trust. Over and over and over until Anna got home. She walked in, but he was singing and playing, his eyes squinted tightly and moist with seeping tears. Standing, she watched and she prayed for her husband, the man singing his prayer – “For God alone…my soul waits…he only….”
Maybe the shadows changed over Jacob’s eyes when Anna crossed through the light which was scattered into the house through the windows; or maybe he sensed the warmth of her presence. Either way, he knew she had gotten home, so he stopped playing, setting the guitar down on the floor leaned against the couch to his side.
She rushed down onto the couch next to him, putting her arms around him and squeezing tightly.
“I love you so much,” she whispered, nuzzled into his shoulder; and Jacob could tell that she was crying.
He hugged her back.
“I love you too.”
It was again one of those moments that lasted longer than it lasted. Probably, it was only fifteen or twenty seconds of empirical time, but it was longer — the length of comfort and trust and the love expressed between them.
“Well,” Jacob finally said, pulling back a little so he could see Anna’s mascara-streaked face. “I’m not forty grand in debt and I’m not dead, so let’s look on the bright side.”
Anna smiled, then nuzzled her face back into Jacob’s shoulder.
A few weeks ago, I got this comment:
I hope you don’t mind me asking but I am wondering how you will know if your blog is successful or not – what you will base your success on – high stats? – lots of feedback? – just telling from the search engines that you helped somebody in pain? – all of the above?
This was in response (I presume) to the statement in the “About: The Blog” section. On that page, when I first started this blog, I wrote about my previous lack of “success” at blogging. I don’t know what I meant by that precisely. Two things, though, are probably in the ballpark. First, I had never blogged consistently. Second, I don’t think many people read my rarely updated blog(s). Part of what I knew I had to do, if I were to start blogging, was to be consistent. I had not, however, thought it through very specifically — about how I would measure “success.” The question above got me thinking about how I define success with this blog (or, really, with anything).
Honestly, stats have often been how I have measured success. If I get 22 hits in a day (the November low) I tend to feel like my blog is less successful than a day when I get 113 (the November high). Of course, either way, these numbers are low compared to thousands of other blogs, including those I read regularly. Since starting on July 27, I’ve averaged about 70 hits a day, which is better than I would have expected when I wrote that first post. If I had known on July 27 that the Almanac would have gotten 8300+ hits in the first four months, I would have been thrilled. But sitting here, even while I type this, I can’t help but feel disappointed — because I know that many other blogs get 100 or 1000 times that much traffic.
The point is this: numbers are fleeting, elusive, and never satisfying. Someone will always have more; and I know that if my daily traffic was more like 700 a day, it would not satisfy me.
Also, I’ve actually (believe it or not) gotten to where my blog traffic matters a lot less than it used to. Some stuff from this past month, part of which I’ve blogged about, and some of which I can’t blog about, has put stuff like blog numbers into a better perspective. Basically, I’ve been entrenched in worry (see my Running Scared posts) — and the worry is always attached to what I most care about, like my wife, my health, my ministry (or whatever else I most treasure at a particular moment). This whole worry thing has made me see the feebleness of my faith. When stuff like that is going on, 75 hits don’t matter much more or less than 25 or 25000.
Still, though, this blog is important to me, and I have thought a lot recently about how I should define its success. I think the answer is similar to the answer for anything (and ministry in particular): faithfulness.
My desire with Almanac of Captivity is to be faithful to what I have committed to, and to what I think God wants from me. That means being better at following through when I say I’m going to write about something, being consistent and thoughtful, and basically writing — because this blog gives me an ability to use whatever gifts God has blessed me with, and to practice what I say I want to do.
This whole “faithfulness” thing is, I think, a profound lesson for all things. What measures my success on this blog must be what measure my success as a preacher or even a barista — am I being faithful and honoring to my Lord in heaven? Still, I’m a jacked up, sin-indwelt man, and, so, having the goal of being faithful to my Master as my measuring rod will not always sit in the primary spot in my mind. But that’s my goal — to be and to remain faithful, and to know that God gets his glory when I am faithful to whatever he has called me to do.
This is a very timely and profound post at Of First Importance.
Look more at justification than sanctification. In the highest commands consider Christ, not as an exacter to require, but as a debtor, an undertaker, to work in you and for you. If you have looked at your resolutions, endeavors, workings, duties, qualifications, etc., more than at the merits of Christ, it will cost you dear.
You probably have, but, if not, you should subscribe to OFI.
