generational – BONNIE J. McKERNAN

Your Labor is not in Vain

April 7, 2021 No Comments

If there’s anything these six Virginian acres have taught me, it’s that nature is not tamed overnight. The work of attempting to order the disordered so often feels like a battle I’m ever fighting and ever losing.

The growth and life that spring awakens is both exciting and exhausting. We live in a culture (myself included) that values results, production, and finished products, but rarely pauses to consider the mere act of tending and keeping and maintaining as work that is not only essential, but good and worthy.

I want a garden, flower beds, chicken coops, and patios, yet here I am still pulling endless weeds, chipping away at acres of brambles, and attempting to subdue this overgrown and unruly land into something that can support growth and use and beauty.

Staked tomatoes, arbored blooms, and manicured hedges are rightly glorified, but I’m working on seeing the glory in the slow and simple work of sometimes just holding back disorder. Continually fighting my yardful of invasive flora, stabilizing eroding hills and banks, adding things to my soil that leave it healthier than how I found it, and caring about those downstream of our creek that meanders well beyond my own land.

And here’s the thing, I need to see the value of this work even if we sold this place tomorrow. Even if it takes generations beyond my own before someone finally gets to lounge on a patio out back. Even if I never get my garden and taste the fruits of my labor.

This past season of Lent was a good reminder that pulling weeds makes room for flourishing and fruit. It’s simultaneously fighting against disorder and paving the way for order. With the knowledge that the exercise of dominion has always been meant as a vehicle of salvation, wholeness, and healing. Dominion exercised for other purposes is a travesty and a perversion of itself. It will not produce fruit that lasts or nourishes.

All things will be made new. Until then, we’re called to faithfully and tirelessly labor alongside the One who will carry it to completion, knowing that when we do, we are offered sustenance, beauty, and rest along the way

[On Faith], [On Family]

A Remnant of Peace and Reason

January 7, 2021 No Comments

The world has been abnormal for so long that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.”
Madeleine L’Engle

This is my grandfather working on a restoration of the U.S. Capitol. He was a builder in more ways than one. Regardless of political views, race, status, religion— whether you were a Senator, homeless person, an employee, or his grandchild— he treated you with kindness and respect. He’d stand up for the wronged and do right by those in need, even if it cost him his business.

But while he not only saw the humanness of those who needed help, he never stopped seeing the ones he disagreed with as humans too. The ones who were wrong. And that’s really hard.

He passed this on to my own dad. Growing up, I watched him address every checkout clerk or service worker by name, always be employing or bringing home someone who needed to get back on their feet, then turn around and show forgiveness and decency to someone who had greatly wronged him or had literally stolen from him. He’s never been a pushover, never wavered in his beliefs, yet he’s never stopped being willing to look someone in the face he utterly disagrees with and see them as a person.

Because once we lose the ability to see the humanness of one, we will eventually lose it for all. Whether quickly or slowly, individuals will become lost in a sea of “others” (defined merely by their affiliation with things we don’t agree with). We will have become what we were fighting against.

We can fight for rightness, yet forgive. We can be heartbroken, yet humble. We can defend, yet love. We can speak truth, yet listen and ask questions. Pursuing peace can be the strongest, most effective thing we do.

This isn’t any sort of veiled political support or rejection of anything. Thankfully, I don’t think I know anyone who saw the events of this week as anything other than egregious and disgraceful (clearly, not everyone also had a Sicilian Grandmother, and let me tell you, it shows😉).

This is simply a call and personal resolve to pursue peace and reason. Consistently, and at all costs, because of what it’ll cost us if we don’t. To build up, not tear down. Thankful today for those who have modeled that for me…

[On Faith]

Strong Emotions and Weak Prayers

January 7, 2017 1 Comment

Originally published HERE at www.desiringgod.com

Prayer is hard. It’s always been the spiritual discipline I struggle with the most. I blame it on all sorts of things — my busy life, my easily distracted mind, my loud children, my personality, how I’m better at communicating through writing rather than verbally — the list goes on. “It’s not my gift,” I say. Some people are just gifted prayer warriors while I really love reading and studying God’s word, so God must have just wired us to serve different purposes and that’s okay, right?

No.

A thousand times, no. I thought like that for a long time and believing that lie was a tragedy. It’s ignoring one of the greatest gifts ever given to us.

Prayer is the recognition of and participation with God in our life. Our deficiencies in prayer cannot simply be compensated by increased Bible reading, ministry, community, or listening to sermons. Nothing can take the unique place of prayer in the Christian life.

I can say from experience that a prayerless soul is a dead soul.

Blessed Aren’t the Poor in Prayer

Realizing my struggles with prayer, I set out to study it. I talked to people about it and read sermons and commentaries on prayer from other generations, trying to figure it out. In doing so I came to the realization not only of my own poverty in prayer, but the depth of those deficiencies in much of the church — and in particular, my generation.

While it might not be fair to generalize an entire generation, virtually everything about our western culture and way of life is at odds with prayer in ways not at the forefront in generations past. Our schedules are filled to the brim. Smartphones and technology keep us connected to everyone but God. We pour out our lives and emotions on any number of social media platforms, leaving us little to set before God in prayer.

As I poured over commentaries and sermons about prayer from over a hundred years ago, I was struck, not only by how seriously they took prayer, but how much they discussed the care that should go into our prayers in order that they not be careless and ineffectual. They really got into the specifics of how to pray and how not to pray. *not* to pray.

This can be hard for us. We live in a culture of ‘anything goes.’ We often think that prayer should be anything we want it to be in any way we want to do it. It becomes primarily about us and our preferred methods of communicating and our preferred style. We don’t like being told how to do things that feel so personal. The result, however, is that our prayers can be weak and ineffective when they are meant to be a mighty weapon against darkness and accomplish great purposes.

Does God Get Your Leftovers?

For our own sakes, and the sake of our families, churches, and nation, we must not settle for a “something is better than nothing” approach. As Charles Spurgeon said:

There is a vulgar notion that prayer is a very easy thing, a kind of common business that may be done anyhow, without care or effort. . . . We should plow carefully and pray carefully. The better the work the more attention it deserves. To be anxious in the shop and thoughtless in the closet is little less than blasphemy, for it is an insinuation that anything will do for God, but the world must have our best.

Does prayer require so little of us that we’re content to give God our careless leftovers, when there’s nothing particularly pressing at work or interesting on Facebook? If we want to revive our families, and our church, and our nation, then we must revive prayer — and it must begin with us.

A good place for me to start was to understand what prayer is and what it isn’t.

What Prayer Is Not

Prayer is not a rote and empty ritual. How often do our lips move, yet our hearts are still? We “say our prayers” so very often, and yet how often do we really truly pray? If all we are offering is words, we may as well offer them to an idol of stone. May our prayers never be less fervent than our strongest opinions and emotions and social media posts.

Prayer is not simply “chatting” with God. “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) doesn’t mean we just incessantly chatter to God about anything and everything while neglecting the act of intentionally coming before the throne of God for focused and fervent heart-searching, soul-seeking, honest-to-goodness prayer. It’d be like a marriage that consisted solely on texting. I love when my thoughts wander to God as I offer up little praises and prayers all throughout the day. That should happen, but that can’t be it — we must go deeper.

The free access which Christ purchased for us is not a liberty for flippancy before God — it is an invitation to approach the throne of almighty God. The freedom to come boldly before God’s throne of grace does not change who God is (Hebrews 4:16). It was our status that changed, never that of the unchanging King.

Prayer is not about us; it’s about God. It’s the thing that draws our eyes away from ourselves and fixes them on our good and powerful God. The recipe for weak and barren prayers is self — self-sufficiency by thinking we don’t really need prayer in the first place; self-conceit by thinking much of our goodness and little of our sin; and selfishness by thinking primarily of our own needs and wants in prayer. Adore God for who he is, not for what he can give to us. God must be the object, Christ must be the medium, and the Spirit must help us.

What Prayer Is

Prayer is the turning of our soul towards God. It is communication with our heavenly Father, and the powerful force that links child and Father, earth and heaven, man’s impotence and God’s omnipotence. This direct contact is only made possible through Christ Jesus, whose righteousness covered us and provided us unlimited access to confidently approach a perfect God. It is accomplished by the Spirit’s groaning within us and supplicating on our behalf (Romans 8:26–27).

Prayer is the unified work of the triune God to connect with us himself — the Holy Spirit within us communicating through Christ the Son, to God the Father. When God feels distant, more often than not it’s because we are neglecting the very thing that spans the distance between Creator and creature. It is we who are distant, refusing the vital breath of our souls, without which our spiritual life cannot survive.

Lord, Teach Us to Pray

May our prayers not be careless or weak but powerful instruments of change through which the Spirit moves and breathes and eternity is impacted. Our Father is holy and good and worthy of excellent prayers, and he loves giving good things to his children:

Lord, teach us to pray! Against all odds, may we become mighty prayer warriors who in turn teach the next generation, because we have no hope of change apart from you — in the name of your Son, for the sake of your church, and for the display of your glory. Amen

[Read part two that covers practical ways to do this HERE!]