Where Did That Come From?

 

Where Did That Come From?

God is The Creator and he created man in his own image. Therefore, man is creative. This is the line of thinking that spurred me to become a writer. When I was young, I used to think my creativity was expressed on the basketball court. Perhaps it was true, but to be honest, it was a low target (and likely a copout) so when I couldn’t play, what then? I searched and now I write. Here I go…

While condensing my parent’s lives from a house and woodcrafter’s shop on ten acres with storage in every nook and cranny to a target of a family history and distributed memories, I have over the past 18 months drifted in and out of grief and written of it from time to time. Today I was at the storage facility where we keep boxes of stuff (tools, papers, photos, memories), high-end golf equipment, a piece of furniture, and an old workbench. My target for the day was to dismantle the workbench.

My objective was troubling to me and I went about the work with a haze of melancholy draped over my shoulders. It was easy for me to understand. The bench was older than me. My grandfather built it for his workshop in Gardena. My dad brought it to La Crescenta and put it in his little workshop that he had excavated underneath our deck in the backyard in La Crescenta and he then moved it to Merlin, Oregon and created amazing works of intarsia on it.

I moved it to the storage facility with the thought we would move it to Ashley and Matt’s new place in Santa Barbara once they were organized in their garage and they would create on it. However, the bench needed a lot of work to be stable and it was on its last legs. I discussed this at length with Ashley and we decided to move it to an alternate place which would have been in our backyard as a potting bench. It still needed a lot of work and we don’t pot much so we passed and there was no one in the family who could use it.

When I put screwdriver, claw hammer, and prybar to the bench I was saddened. I could not figure out how to get another generation out of this thing. I removed the three-sixteenth-inch steel top and decided to put it on the worktable I’d built in my own garage. As I stacked the 2x12s and 2x4s on my dolly I sunk a little deeper into glummyland but when I got down to the 1x stuff, a tongue-and-grove backing and some support strips, I remembered the Christmas trees I’d made of the old roofing materials from our front porch project and now I think there will be a Christmas tree or two to pass along. Then I remembered the bird houses and other decorative things I made from the old cedar fencing from our replacement project and I think there will be birds finding new nesting places.

The wood from a two-generation old workbench will find new life with three more generations; mine, my kids, and their kids.

Thinking about how creativity sprung from a feeling of melancholy lead me to wondering what it was that inspired God to create. Was He melancholy and then turned his creativity to making everything we see and feel? Was She lonely? These are not questions I will try to answer – they are way beyond my paygrade. It likely has something to do with the fact that God is love and needs entities to express that love toward.

While pondering this and wondering where sparks of creativity come from and what motivates someone to create, I came across one of my favorite Bible verses:

Psalm 121: 1 – “I lift up my eyes to the hills-- where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.”

No mater the source or who your muse is, once the spark is set to the idea, put your heart and hands to the task and see what good comes from it.

In His grip,

jerry

 

Author’s note: Melancholy may not be the proper word for me to use in describing my feelings of the day as an online definition reads, “a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause”. I know the cause but I like the term and my friend Webster’s definitions give me some latitude so I’m keeping melancholy. After all, it’s my story.

The Fast That He Has Chosen

 

Isaiah 58:6 “Is not this the fast that I have chosen: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the bands of the yoke, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?” American Standard Version

I had a hankering, a yearning, and I longed to take up a spiritual discipline I had sitting dusty on the shelf of underappreciated disciplines. I used to fast on occasion when I was hitched to particularly difficult tasks. It has been several years since I last undertook a fast to clear the way for the Holy Spirit but I’m in a place where I find that I am again in need of the discipline.

I turned to a couple of old friends, if you don’t mind me being so familiar with them. Dallas Willard and Richard J. Foster both wrote about the discipline of fasting. Dallas in his The Spirit of the Disciplines, Understanding How God Changes Lives and Richard J. in Celebration of Discipline, The Path to Spiritual Growth.

It is interesting to me that these men eschew the use of Dr. on their book covers and instead simply use their names. I have seen them both in person and their humility is worn about them like an old familiar sweater.

Dallas Willard is known for his writing on Christian spiritual formation and having had a focus on ‘phenomenology’, a study of the structures of experience and the consciousness. He says of fasting, “Fasting confirms our utter dependence upon God by finding in him a source of sustenance beyond food. Through it, we learn by experience that God’s word to us is a life substance, that it is not food (“bread”) alone that gives life, but also the words that proceed from the mouth of God (Matt. 4:4)”

Again, from Willard: “We learn that we too have meat to eat that the world does not know about (John 4:32, 34). Fasting unto our Lord is therefore feasting – feasting on him and on doing his will.”

And again, “Actually, fasting is one of the more important ways of practicing that self-denial required of everyone who would follow Christ (Matt. 16:24)"

In his Celebration of Discipline, Richard J. Foster quotes John Wesley: “Some have exalted religious fasting beyond all Scripture and reason; and others have utterly disregarded it.”

Foster says, “Scripture has so much to say about fasting that we would do well to look once again at this ancient Discipline. The list of biblical personages who fasted reads like a “Who’s Who” of Scripture: Moses the lawgiver, David the king, Elijah the prophet, Esther the queen, Daniel the seer, Anna the prophetess, Paul the apostle, Jesus Christ the incarnate Son.”

There are a range of fasts: full fasts where we abstain from all food, solid or liquid, but not from water, partial fasts whereby we restrict the diet without total abstention (Daniel 10:3), and an absolute fast where nothing is taken in. For reference, these are people who fasted in the Bible: Esther in Esther 4:16 for 3 days, Paul in Acts 9:9 after his visitation, and Moses in Deut. 9:9 and Elijah in 1 Kings 19:8 for supernatural absolute fasts of 40 days.

For the most part, fasts are of an individual and personal nature. There are times when groups are called to fast such as the Day of Atonement for the Hebrews or when in 1756 the king of Britain called for a day of solemn prayer and fasting because of threatened invasion from France. Of this fast John Wesley writes, “The fast day was a glorious day, such as London has scarce seen since the Restoration. Every church in the city was more than full, and a solemn seriousness sat on every face. Surely God heareth prayer, and there will yet be a lengthening of our tranquility.” France did not invade.

In any case, group or individual, partial fast or complete or even absolute, we must remember one central tenet as Foster put it, “Fasting must forever center on God. It must be God-initiated and God-ordained.”

I have leaned on Foster for what I am thinking of as the process for fasting:

1.       Define your fast objectives. Outline whatever you hope to breakthrough on during your fast and define it but remain open the Holy Spirit to redefine it.

2.       Jesus said in Matthew 6: 16-18, “¹⁶And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. ¹⁷But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, ¹⁸so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

3.       Define your fast parameters. What are you giving up and living on? How long will you fast? The following are a list of progressions to take for fasting. Figure out where you fit on the spectrum from beginner to ‘old-hand’:

a.       Begin with a partial fast of 24-hours.
  i.      Use fruit juice and water, plenty of water
  ii.      Repeat weekly for several weeks
  iii.      Monitor the attitude of your heart – prayer, meditation, singing, and worship

b.   Graduate to a full fast of 24-hours with water only and lots of it. Use the normal time spent on eating for prayer and/or meditation.

c.     Step up to a 36-hour full fast, or three meals.

d.    Consider a multi-day fast of three to seven days and then after, even longer if you feel up to it. Things to consider on the long fast:
i.      The first three days are tough as the body rids itself of toxins.
ii.     Headaches are mild withdrawal systems for caffeine, consider weaning yourself prior to a long fast.
iii.  Around the fourth day your hunger pains should begin to subside but there may be feelings of weakness and occasional dizziness, these should be temporary.
iv.   You should feel stronger and more alert around the six- or seven-day mark of your fast.
v.     Your longer fasts should be broken with fruit or vegetable juice and small amounts of those until your system gets back to normal. I learned the hard way on this one. As a 20-year-old zealot of sorts I broke my 4-day fast with a big greasy burrito. It was not elegant.

Foster writes of fasts extended from seven to 40 days. I won’t go into these here. If you are moved to do anything longer than I have covered in this short post I recommend a deeper study of fasting on both the spiritual and physical levels.

CAUTION: If you have, or suspect you have, underlying medical issues consult your doctor. It is best to go into the discipline of fasting with your eyes wide open.

We must remember that the major work of scriptural fasting is in our spirit. What goes on in our hearts and souls are more important than what is occurring in our bodies. A spiritually critical period is when we break our fast and relax. Fasting can bring us breakthroughs in the spiritual realm that we can’t find any other way. I have seen it work in my own life and am looking forward to it doing so again.

We should remember Paul’s warning to the Colossians in chapter 2, verse 23, “Many things have an appearance of wisdom in promoting rigor of devotion and self-abasement and severity to the body, but they are of no value in checking the indulgence of the flesh.”

Finally, let’s remember that it is His fast and the purpose is to break chains of bondage.

In His grip and under His Grace,

Jerry

Authors note: In reaction to a sermon that I alluded to in this post I swore off purchasing and eating meat. This was not a lifestyle change but a fast of protest, surely not a spiritual fast in any shape or form. I discovered that in writing this post that I no longer held my grudge and have taken up eating meat again but I have determined not to do so in the presence of my vegetarian wife, daughter, or grandson. I have perceived it as an affront to them the numerous times vegetarians have been denigrated from the pulpit.