Like a Lonely Bird on a Housetop: Concrete Obedience

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Concrete Obedience

I hit it again, I knock it down, I roll it on it's back.
And it's up again.

This continual struggle over and over and over. I yield my will, and within minutes I take it back. Within minutes I'm wrestling, wrestling, wrestling it back down to the floor.

Will this ever stop? Why won't my body relax, surrender to a calming touch that I know is good? Stop wriggling, stop resisting that Hand that only tries to soothe me, rock me, calm me.

I want what I want--and I want what He wants. Oh wretched man!

What is this spite within me that refuses to believe, to accept, that grasping for what I want has yet to prove successful? I am a great dreamer of ideas, but I have no follow through. When it comes to carrying on, my resolve crumbles and vanishes right before my eyes. It changes shape and exits--like a breeze out the door.

I long with everything that is within me to come to a place where my wishes to do right, can translate into action.

Concrete Obedience.

Remembering, knowing, what has happened all the other times.

And knowing what and who has always brought me true success.

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Hear my prayer, O LORD!
And let my cry for help come to You.
Do not hide Your face from me in
the day of my distress;
Incline Your ear to me;
In the day when I call answer me quickly.

For my days have been consumed in smoke,
And my bones have been scorched like a hearth.
My heart has been smitten like grass and
has withered away,
Indeed, I forget to eat my bread.
Because of the loudness of my groaning

My bones cling to my flesh.
I resemble a pelican of the wilderness;
I have become like an owl of the waste places.
I lie awake,
I have become like a lonely bird on a housetop

--Psalm 102:1 – 7

I don’t remember when it was, or where I was, when I first read these words. But I remember how it felt when I realized there was someone else who had once stood where I had. Someone who had been there. And understood.

I thought I was the only one who felt my days consumed in smoke. The only one whose bones had been scorched and whose heart had withered away. Maybe, the only one who had ever begged God not to turn His face away from me at the exact moment when I needed Him the most.

I have never forgotten the picture of being a lonely bird on a housetop. For many years now, that verse has come to symbolize to me a life that is a mysterious jumble of joy and pain. Of knowing God intimately, and yet dealing day by day with a heavy heart because of a chronic situation.

I have a good friend who once told me that anyone can live with a difficult situation for a while, but it’s the chronicity that pulls us under. No wants to live with chronicity, whether it’s pain in the body or pain in the heart. And no one wants to live around someone one that finds himself in a chronic situation. We want to get over things, to get well, to get a job, to have our children turn away from the lifestyles that hurt them. We want to meet God, fall in love with him and live happily ever after.

But, sometimes that’s just not the way it works. Not everyone finds God, marries Prince (or Princess) Charming and goes to live in the castle in the air. A lot of us find God, fall in love with him and begin a walk down a very long road that was not what we signed up for.

We can love God and still struggle. Struggle a lot. And sometimes we try to tell others about our struggles, and they don’t like it. And sometimes, when we just won’t be fixed, they grow tired and they leave us. And when friends and family start to disappear, then we know what it is like to be alone with God.

And we know what it is like to be a Lonely Bird on the Housetop.