The fire was pressing closer.  The woods were teeming with animal life in a frantic attempt to escape the flames and suffocating smoke.  Ground squirrels, mice, chipmunks scurried across the floor,  and deer crashed through the underbrush.  Wolf could run beside fawn in this race, because only one thing mattered:  flee.  Everyone obeyed their self-preservation instinct. 

Except one.

It was a mother grouse with her small brood of chicks.  They were still quite young, and she knew they could not get away fast enough.  She desperately looked for some kind of shelter and found a hollow log to hide in.  She gathered all the chicks under her and waited.  She had no way of knowing whether the fire would destroy them utterly or pass by and leave them alive.  But she would not flee without them.

Sometime later, after the firefighters had beaten back the flames, they discovered her hiding place.  She was dead.  She had not been burned up, but apparently the heat and smoke killed her.  But they became curious about why she had stayed, and when they lifted her body, found all her chicks underneath. 

They were alive. 

There is a verse in Psalms that is familiar to most of us:  “He will cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you will find refuge.”  It is from a chapter that is a bastion of strength to us in the midst of our trials and tribulations on earth.  For most of my life that verse connected with me in a sort of cozy way.  God covers me with His wings.  I am safe, I am warm, I can snuggle up and be close to Him.  It wasn’t until recently, when God connected the verse with the story above that I grasped a deeper, more serious tone to the picture. 

When a bird covers their fledgling with their wings, and tuck them under their body, they are essentially placing their life between the danger and the fledgling.  Yes, there is a comforting feel to the arrangement, but in all seriousness, the parent is prepared to die to avert the danger.  They are putting all their resources, all the fight they have within them, all the strength they can muster between the predator and the baby.  What would it have been like for that mother hen as the heat and smoke got worse and worse?  Was she ever tempted to flee and leave the chicks to die?  Or was she so determined to protect that the thought never crossed her mind?

We know that nothing can destroy God.  It is not a matter of who will win – Him or the predator.  But think about what it means that God is putting Himself between you and the thing that’s after you.  Like the bird, the picture shows God pitting His strength against the teeth and claws of the enemy.  And even though He has infinite resources at His disposal, we know through the story of Jesus Christ, that in essence God was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for our redemption. 

I understand there are times when God takes us under His wings and times when He purposely exposes us to the elements so we can heal and grow.  But next time you feel Him speaking to you about His protection, the next time you read this verse, think about what it really means He is doing.

I have never been able to touch my toes, well, or even come close.  Maybe I could when I was a gumby baby like most are in the early months of life.  But after that … not a chance.

My hip flexers and hamstrings are REAAAAALY tight.  They have been for as long as I can remember, and I have had to deal with sleepless nights, and pain, and trying to make stretching a habitual part of life.  You know, the habits always get better when the pain level gets higher.

Recently, the pain level got high enough that I decided to do physical therapy.  I had gone to the doctor years ago about it, but now I needed something current.  I can only imagine what my therapist was thinking when she did the evaluation.  Probably two things:  “wow, this girl is TIGHT and could anyone really be THAT weak in their core?”  Being the kind-hearted soul that she is, she didn’t say a word to that effect, but I sure wonder what was going on in her head.

So, I have been going for three months or so.  I arrive and do a bunch of stretches and muscle strengthening exercises, she pommels me for a while and then I go relax on their ice block.  During one of the sessions, I decided to ask her what the logic was behind the strengthening exercises.  I understood the stretches.  Of course.  My muscles are tight, they need to be stretched.  But why did it matter if I strengthened my core, or my hip muscles, or anything else?  I had no problem with the strengthening as a good idea for general health, but I was missing the connection.

As she began to share the logic, it made a lot of sense.  The stretching gets the muscles loosened up and re-aligned to a healthier balance.  But because they have been in a particular position for such a long time, it will take STRENGTH to keep them in the new position.  If I do all the stretches, but don’t build the strength to hold them where I want them to be, they will simply go back to all the old patterns.  Does this sound familiar to anyone?

She was describing an important principle that plays out in the physical AND spiritual realms.  You can do all the fixing you want, but if you don’t put some new practices, character, or “muscles” in place, you are going to go right back into the place you were trying to get out of.

I see this a lot in the kind of work I do.  People want deliverance, but they don’t want to change their lifestyle.  They want the renunciations, but they don’t want to learn the material.  Or they want the anointing without all the hard hours and pain of earned authority.  It just doesn’t work that way.  You can’t sustain the change unless you have built some strength to hold it – whether that is growth, maturity, spiritual authority or character.

My therapist may be dealing with physical muscles, and I may be dealing with emotional and spiritual muscles, but we are talking about the exact same thing.

So, I want to encourage you to examine your perspective regarding this principle.  Are there areas of your life where you need to focus a little less intently on the initial deliverance or breakthrough and find out how you need to be building the muscles to sustain the change when it comes?  Or perhaps instead of asking God for a certain kind of anointing or authority, what if you were to ask Him how He wants you to earn it?

Do an inventory.  See how strong your muscles are, and whether or not you can maintain the things you are asking for.  God is looking for people with strength as well as freedom and power!

I discovered a new jogging path the other day in the “woods” of Fullerton.  What this really means is that if you squint your eyes, don’t look to the right or the left, and play nature sounds on your iPod you can almost imagine you have left suburbia.  Even so, it beats running on the sidewalk, since there is real dirt under your feet and real trees that grew there on their own, instead of being transplanted like most of southern California.

While enjoying this vague resemblance to nature I came across a tiny paddock with a stable and two horses inside.  This is not an unusual occurrence in California.  I was shocked the first time I saw what is a permissible allotment of space for farm animals.  Where I grew up you had to have at least 2 acres for a horse, and these poor animals are regularly kept in the California interpretation of that standard, which is something closer to the size of your patio.

Well, I stopped to say hello to these fine beasts and took a moment to observe their attitudes about life.  One of them was gettin’ on in years and the quarters seemed to fit him fairly well.  The other horse was an entirely different story.  He so didn’t belong there.

But what made me sad was that he wasn’t pacing or cribbing or throwing his head in a spirited appeal to get out of his prison.  He just stood there.  When I looked at him I could feel the echo of thousands of years of wild freedom coursing through his veins, like a faint voice calling from the past.  But he had long ago tuned out that voice and surrendered himself to the monotony of life in southern California.  My spirit ached to breathe life into the smoldering fire of beauty, grace, and passion that could flow from those hooves.

That horse was made for something so much bigger than what he was living.  I grieved over the extreme disparity of the two.

It grieves me even more to know that this is where a lot of people live every day.  God made you to be big, to be free, to be immense in spirit and soul, but the reality of your life is like the tiny California pasture.  I wish I could walk the world over and unlatch the gate of every paddock that confines a big person to a little world.

I will, however, offer this encouragement to you, from the depths of my experience.  God was there first, and His fingerprints do not disappear.  Whether you are in your current reality because of trauma, neglect, poor choices, or some destructive combination of all three, His fingerprint on you still remains.  No amount of toxicity or defilement can remove it, no number of locked gates or tiny pastures can make them die a permanent death.  They will endure any of the hardships this world can inflict.

Don’t lose hope.  Don’t give up on God.  Even if you must endure a season of confinement, don’t let it eat away your confidence in His design.  If you must wait, wait.  Use the time to develop something.  Work on character, spiritual authority, skill sets or relationships.  Do NOT let the fire fade from your eyes.  If you resign yourself to the disappearance of all hope of fulfillment, you will miss God when His time comes.  It’s entirely possible, if given the chance, that horse could not reconnect with the Fingerprint of his design.  Maybe he drowned out the voice one too many times and would plod right on past his chance to be free.  That would be a tragedy more grievous than his original imprisonment.  I know that allowing the voice of your design to sound in the midst of your captivity can be a pain too great to bear.  But instead of shutting it down, I encourage you to take it to Christ, who simply by existence on earth confined His immensity to a paddock so relatively small as to be microscopic.  Let His wisdom, grace, and longsuffering instruct you in walking out this tension without destruction.

May you rise, with intensity, dignity and anticipation for your time, when it comes, knowing that in the season of confinement you prepared for the moment of His glorious redemption of you.

Letter from Mary’s neighbor to her sister
Have I got news!!  You know my neighbor Mary, the one you met at my dinner party last spring?  Well, she got engaged to Joseph a few months back and they are due to be married soon.  But that’s not the news.  Can you believe she’s pregnant? Yes!  What do you think of that?  Remember how sweet and friendly she was?  Seemed like such a nice girl.  Just goes to show you never can tell!

Letter from Mary’s aunt to her cousin
Did I hear that Mary is pregnant?  PREGNANT??  What in the world?  And how?  Her mother is going to KILL her, after all these years she stayed out of trouble, and now?  What was that girl thinking?  I hear rumor that Joseph had been out of town, so we don’t even know if he was the father! 

Letter from Elizabeth’s servant to Mary’s cousin
You heard about Mary, right?  Well, I overheard my mistress and her talking and Mary said an angel came to her and told her she would be with child … but not by a man!  Is this bizarre or what?  Is she sick?  Has she had a nervous breakdown or something?  I am worried and wanted you to know.  Maybe she is so afraid of what will happen if the truth is found out that she is making up stories to cover it up.   

Can you imagine being in Mary’s shoes? 

We all know the story of the Virgin birth, so it is not a strange new concept to us.  But it sure would have been to anyone who knew about it in that day.  Even Joseph wasn’t too sure what to think, until an angel appeared to him and assured him that it was ok, and he was to put his reputation on the line by staying engaged to this woman who suddenly had the whole community wondering what was going on.

The rumor mill was working overtime.

Then to top it all off, the city of Bethlehem was plump full of returning natives, and a VERY pregnant Mary was forced to have her rumor shrouded child in a stable with the cows and horses for nursemaids. 

I really began to wonder what it would be like in real life for the scene that Mary and Joseph found themselves playing in.  There weren’t smart phones and text messages in those days, but word could still get around.  Then it dawned on me that the question of legitimacy could have hung over Jesus’ head his entire life.

In Hebrews it says that we have a high priest in Jesus who is able to sympathize with us because he was also subject to temptation, though he did not sin.  As I looked at this picture, I saw for the first time that Jesus could relate to the social stigma of illegitimacy.  His knowing the truth wouldn’t prevent others from fabricating stories.  People were no different then they are now.  There are many kinds of temptations and wrong reactions to pain that can stem from so foundational an issue.  And though Jesus did not sin, He still could have felt the human reaction to the brokenness of community.

He didn’t have to be born in that context.  He could have been born in the context of marriage so there would never be any question.  God knew what people would think, and how they would respond.  But His purpose was perfect, and I wonder if part of that purpose was so that our High Priest could walk with those who have experienced the stigma that surrounds an illegitimate birth.

Welcome to the Beyond the Horizon blog! 

Some of you may have been here before, back when the last blog entry was in July … well, I have decided it’s time to change that.  I’d like to use this as a way to share some ideas and tools, and discuss some fun new topics as well. 

I’ve added some new pages at the top, so please take a look.  I will also be posting in the general category periodically with random articles. 

Enjoy!