CN | Bread for Resistance: Place of Refuge, Garden of Grief

" ... As we walk the path praying, from the start with Jesus and then sent out again to our neighbors, tears become sighs, sighs become silence. Silence becomes peace, and peace becomes hope. ... " + Donna Barber, Bread for the Resistance

In the midst of everything related to justice that has been stirred up and reached seemingly new heights in 2020 in the U.S. (ex. see A Call to Prayer + A Cry of Hymns & Songs for Justice & Healing, George Floyd Lament, Liturgy, and Message | Receive the Gift of the Holy Spirit, "I Can't Breathe | We Need the 2nd Wind"), this is the 3rd and final post featuring Donna Barber's powerful wisdom and experiences. Here are the links to the first two posts:

+ Blindness, Big Shoes & Avoiding Burnout  

+ Wells and Waterpots, The Emmaus Road

Let's continue to be led by this sister of color who knows what it's like to walk with Jesus and others in view of His justice and mercy for the long haul. We, the poor in spirit, need to seek first His Kingdom of justice and righteousness alongside each other, praying together it will come on earth as it is in heaven. 

I trust Donna will serve you today as she has already greatly served me. And if these few below bless you, go ahead and purchase all 40 devotions included in her book, Bread for the Resistance. I think they will nourish your soul all the more.

"Place of Refuge, Garden of Grief & Epilogue" excerpts adapted from Donna Barber's Bread for the Resistance: 40 Devotions for Justice People

Part 6: The Reality: Suffering, Reflection 39: Place of Refuge

Your way, O God, is in the sanctuary; Who is so great a God as our God? + Psalm 77:13

We find sanctuary any time when, in the Spirit, we enter the presence of the living God. Sanctuary is the place where we empty our hearts before the Lord, pouring out our pain, anger, and sorrow like water. But it is also a place of remembrance and restoration where we can find and enter that space through worship. Worship is not a form of entertainment for a crowd of religious spectators. It is the way we remind our souls of who God is and what He has done.

The sanctuary is a sacred and holy place where instinctively our heads, knees, and hearts bow in reverence around the altar. The altar provides a table for both communion and sacrifice. There, we remember and consume the broken body and spilled blood of Jesus. There, we offer up our own for healing and divine use. There, we surrender our fears, cares, and worries. There, we recall that we have been given new life. In times like these, we need both physical and figurative altars and sanctuaries within our homes, ourselves, and our communities: places we can pause to worship, pray, and cry before the living God; places of stillness and quiet; places of beauty and holiness.

Once, my husband and a friend created a prayer labyrinth in the parking lot of a church building in an urban Portland neighborhood. The friend, an engineer, laid out the design with stones, and we framed it out with cinder blocks, wooden rails, potted plants, and flowers. Seats and posts were placed in the four corners, encouraging visitors to sit and pray. We prayed for the children of our community, for the police and political leaders of our city, and for the poor and the oppressed throughout the land. 

As we walked the path praying, from the start to the center and out again, tears became sighs, sighs became silence. Silence became peace, and peace became hope. In the sanctuary, we can re-member God. The image and reality of the King of Glory can be reconstructed from the severed pieces. The dismemberment of His identity in our minds and hearts by the trials and circumstances of our lives can be undone, and our faith rebuilt. The sanctuary reminds us of who He is and what He has done, and this reconstructs our hope. So while I cry out at the hardness of the world and perhaps this life, I will return to the sanctuary again and again to remind myself that the Word of God is still true. Jesus is still risen. Our God is yet so great a god. Therefore, will I hope.

+ Recommended Song: "Purge Me" by Urban Doxology

Part 6: The Reality: Suffering, Reflection 40: Garden of Grief

The Spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. + Matthew 26:41

"You have not yet struggled to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin" (Hebrews 12:4). In the garden the night He was betrayed, Jesus was facing a devastating assignment. And His response was to gather His posse and head to a quiet place to talk to God. Once there, Jesus, weighed down with grief and despair so much so that He felt like He might die, began to talk to the Father. "This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope" (Lamentations 3:21).

At the thought of Jesus kneeling in the garden, I'm reminded of a time when I was bowed down in grief, facing a God-assignment that felt like too much to bear. The image of me, down on my knees, head in my hands in the pre-dawn hours of the morning is still clear to my mind. I was sobbing into the cushion of a chair in the corner of my Atlanta living room. We had left everything and everyone familiar to start an urban school in the city. It was hard work: twelve-hour days with no pay and little support; a small, resistant faculty; and inadequate resources. I felt disrespected, misunderstood, and insecure. Worst of all, we were far away from the people we loved and the people who loved us. I was trying to be faithful to the call, but I felt I had nothing left to give. At the end of myself, I cried out to God for help. I was asking for direction. I was longing for a friend. I was looking for financial relief and a change in the people around me. What He gave me instead was what I needed most: an anchor in the midst of my storm. Most often we are praying for relief, looking for deliverance or a way of escape. However, sometimes God would have us yield the way Jesus yielded to the cross: Until the person is dead to sin but the spirit is alive to God. Until we realize our need. Until we choose to trust in God and His goodness. The Lord is good to those who wait: Good to the one who seeks Him. Good to the one that still hopes and waits without complaint. Good to the one who bears the yoke of suffering, even if rendered speechless by it.

A short time after that dark morning, I traveled to a conference with our staff. I was so weighed down with my pain that I could barely stand. I got down on the floor in the back of the conference ballroom and prayed. It was a three-day conference, so I told God I would give Him my food for the next three days in exchange for a word from Him. From that point forward, in every session or workshop I attended at that conference, God gave me a word of encouragement, manna from on high. Every speaker either read a Scripture passage, told a story, or shared a truth that fed me. Despite my lack of physical food, by the middle of the second day I felt revived and renewed — body, soul, and spirit — and ready to return home to complete the work that had been assigned to me.

In the heat of the suffering, it's hard to see clearly. And for some of us it feels as if we are always going through something. In frustration, feeling mistreated or abandoned, we cry out, "Why, God? Why now? Why me? Or why this? Look at all I've done. Look at all I've sacrificed. Where is my blessing? What am I supposed to get from all of this?" But when we are still and quiet our hearts before Him, we discover an amazing truth. The Lord is our portion. He is what we get. He is our inheritance. He has given us Himself, and that is enough to cause our hearts to say, "Nevertheless, Your will be done." 

+ Recommended Song: "Purge Me" by Urban Doxology

Epilogue: Bread for the Resistance

All things were made and came into existence through Him; and without Him not even one thing was made that has come into being. In Him was life (and the power to bestow life), and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines on in the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it or overpower it or appropriate it or absorb it (and is unreceptive to it). + John 1:3-5

Over the years and the course of my life, I've heard many justice people, both young and old, talk about experiencing burnout. And well-meaning friends and family members suggest that maybe it's time for you to do something else because this (the neighborhood or the work or the issue) is just too much, and after all, you have kids to consider, and what about your health, and God expects us to use wisdom, and ... and ... and ... 

The problem is not that there is more darkness. The problem is that there is less light. Darkness is a constant, ever present and relentless. However light, like fire, can change, grow, and spread only as long as it is fueled. What causes light to burn out? Is it because it gets too dark? No, lights were created to function in darkness. We burn out because we forget that we are not light itself but rather light bulbs, conduits through which light passes or shines. Solar-powered lights do not stop working because the darkness increases or the sun becomes deficient. Rather, they stop functioning because either the mechanism for absorbing the energy and generating electricity or the battery that stores and discharges it in the bulbs has stopped working properly. The spiritual disciplines of prayer, meditation, Scripture reading, and solitude are our solar panels, the means through which we draw life and light from the Son.

It is easy, in the midst of the demands of this world, to allow them to be overshadowed or crowded out. We can press forward on the rush of adrenaline for a time, but eventually we will begin to feel the effects of this neglect. ... We are not capable of producing our light or charging our own batteries. Again and again Jesus, the Lord of the universe, slipped away — in the morning or the evening, in a garden or to the mountains — to pray or to mourn, to cry and to rest. And then He returned to the multitudes to minister and heal them. So, too, we His disciples must make time and find place to meet with the living God, to bask in the warmth of His Sonlight, and to find bread. And then we must return to the meat of service. For we were created to make Jesus known and to glorify God.

Resistance is not only the refusal to comply with something but also the ability not to be adversely affected by it. We are light bearers, sent to shine in the darkness and, if properly fueled, we will not be overpowered by it. "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed — always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body" (2 Corinthians 4:7-10). "Then Jesus said to them (and us), ... 'My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.' Then they said to Him, 'Lord, give us this bread always' (John 6:32-34).

+ Recommended Album: Bread for the Journey by Urban Doxology

Next post: CN | Dispatches: The Gospel in the Former Soviet Republics

Here are links to previous City Notes books: A Meal with Jesus; The Art of Neighboring; A Praying Life; Encounters with Jesus; The Rest of God; Letters to a Birmingham Jail; Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith; The Pursuing God; Yawning at Tigers; Moving Towards Emmaus; Evangelical, Sacramental, and Pentecostal; Faith Without Illusions; The Eternal Current; Learning to Speak God; Tattoos on the Heart; Drop the Stones; He Speaks in the Silence; The Dusty Ones; A Beautiful Disaster; Glorious Weakness; Discovering the Freedom of Limitations; Bread for the Resistance Part 1; Bread for the Resistance Part 2

Soli Jesu gloria.

Christ is all,

Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan

Email Pastor Mike | Website | Visit Us | Support Us | Facebook Us