“Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children;” Ephesians 5:1

We all have known that one annoying person who hijacks the conversation by inserting him or herself in the center.  They haven’t progressed beyond the toddler stage, thinking the world revolves around them.  For example, if someone is talking about their recent European vacation, “that person” jumps in by telling about the vacation they took to not-so-glamorous Gary, Indiana.  Or if one person shares with the group a devastating cancer diagnosis they just received, “that person” jumps in about their latest splinter.  I think you get the picture.  Often, “that person” is not as rude and self-involved as they come off because this need to be the center of the conversation probably stems from insecurity and lack of confidence.  But they are still challenging to be around.

Recently, as I have been reading some books and listening to various podcasts, I discovered a transformative idea that has changed how I view the Bible.  The metanarrative, a fancy word for the overarching theme of the whole Bible, or the big picture, has nothing to do with me.  Instead, it has everything to do with the story of God in relation to creation, the fall, redemption, and restoration.  This revelation of the metanarrative made me realize that I am “that person”!  I have spent most of my Christian life reading the Bible from the perspective of trying to understand how it relates to me.  What principles do I need to learn, and how should I apply it to my life?   In every psalm, prophecy, and parable, I have searched for God’s message to me, desperately trying to become the ideal Christian.  All the while, God has been trying to get my attention, desiring me to know Him!

My daughter, Maggie, was the one who decided the timing and circumstances when she was going to reach a milestone in her life, including walking, reading, and riding a bike.  As parents, we couldn’t bribe, cajole, push or motivate her in any way to accomplish our desired outcome.  Some may call this a stubborn streak; I call it determination and grit.  Despite this trait, once Maggie made up her mind to accomplish something, nothing stopped her from achieving her goal.  For example, she loved riding her first bike, as long as her training wheels were still attached.  What Maggie failed to realize was that the training wheels were so worn and badly bent that they no longer touched the ground.  Terry knew that they were no longer needed, so, as any good father would do, he removed them.  She was livid with her doting daddy and told him that she was no longer going to ride her bike and walked away sulking!  Despite Terry’s encouragements and faith in her ability, she refused to try again.  But the next day, he came home to see his little blonde, pig-tailed daughter flying down the sidewalk on her bike!

Maggie’s determination and grit runs in her bloodline, as I share those same qualities, although I would label myself as stubborn!  I have served God for more than thirty years, and I know that ministers might have presented this concept of the metanarrative to me in sermons.  I am sure that many of my Bible scholar friends have discussed this principle with me before.  But, like Maggie, I was content with trying to balance my life on a broken concept, making it all about me when reading scripture.  You see, I was using God’s Word to fix me.  Jen Wilkin, in her book, “Women of the Word”, points out the flaw in this way of thinking by this quote: “We ask it (the Bible) to tell us about ourselves, and all the while it is telling us about “I AM”.  We think that if it would just tell us who we are and what we should do, that our insecurities, fears and doubts would vanish.  But our insecurities, fears and doubts can never be banished by the knowledge of who we are.  They can only be vanished by the knowledge of “I AM”.  We must read and study the Bible with our ears trained on hearing God’s declaration of himself.”

I remember when I first fell in love with Terry, I wanted to know everything about him: his favorite dessert, the places he wanted to travel and what goals he wanted to accomplish in ministry.  In learning these details, I also began to discover that he was a quiet, contemplative man who liked order and clear direction.  Learning about Terry’s need for order and clear direction shed light on how disorderly and chaotic I was.  By getting to know Terry, his nature shed light on my nature and the areas where I needed to find more balance.

When I first fell in love with God, I learned a lot of Biblical facts.  I understood doctrinal truths and the scope and history of Biblical stories.  I learned about His character, but because of my past, I had some distorted ways of thinking about God.  For example, I knew God was good, but I did not honestly believe that He would be good to me.  Instead, I thought I would have to earn my way by being a “good Christian”.  For years, I lived trying to earn God’s affection by staying in His good graces.  This revelation of the metanarrative has exposed me to God’s true nature.  He says that he is our Father, and as any good father, I don’t have to do anything to earn His love.  He loves me unconditionally, no matter what state I am in, including my sinful attitudes and actions.

At the time this blog was written, I was still waiting for news of the birth of my first grandchild.  Since the day I knew of his impending arrival, this little boy has had to do nothing to earn my love and devotion.  Just the fact of his existence has sparked an overwhelming flow of love from my heart.  I can’t wait to hold him and get to know him.  I know that, within a few short years, he will be occasionally disobedient like any child.  I am sure that as he grows, I will see flaws in his character, areas where he needs guidance from the Lord.  But none of his flaws or moments of disobedience will change my love for him.  Nor will they affect my desire to bless his life with goodness.

The Bible gives me a glimpse into the character of God in the words of Jesus when he says in Luke 11:11-12, “If a son shall ask bread of any of you, that is his father, will he give him a stone?  or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish, give him a serpent?  Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?”  Jesus goes on to say that if we, who are sinful, want to give good gifts to our children, how much more shall God give us.  I am not talking about God showering us with possessions, like new iPads or Nespresso coffee machines.  I am talking about filling our lives with relationships, community, and creation itself to bless us.  God wants to bless us!  His desire to give sheds light on areas where I remain selfish and want to withhold.  It leads me to repentance and then, with a desire to be more like Him, I can sanctify my life.

Since the revelation of the metanarrative, I have read the Bible with a new perspective.  I look at every book, chapter and verse to see what it reveals about the nature of God.  Jen Wilkin makes this statement, “The heart cannot love what the mind does not know!”  I want to know God more, know what He likes and what He hates.  This knowledge will help me to love God more and grow in my faith.  I want to see His character in the anointed word that He has provided for us, to understand that His story is all about restoration.  With this knowledge, I can, as Paul says in Ephesians 5:1, “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children.”  The word “follower”, translated from the Greek “mimetes”, is defined as an imitator.  My calling is not to see myself in the Bible, but to learn to imitate God, and this perspective changes everything!

“Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” Hebrews 4:16

Pennsylvania summers delight me!  Warm sunshine floods the sky, colorful flowers bloom in pots on my patio, birds, bunnies, and squirrels scurry around my yard, and my personal favorite, an abundance of produce fills the farmer’s markets.  It starts at the end of May when peas, rhubarb, asparagus, and strawberries hit their peak.  Soon, blueberries, apricots, cherries, and zucchini appear in bins.  Then, raspberries, peaches, and nectarines, along with peppers, corn, melons, and tomatoes dominate the baskets at some of my favorite local stands.  Finally, squashes and apples make their debut towards the end of the summer.  This abundance of produce reminds me of how good God is, creating this colorful assortment of foods to thrill our taste buds with flavors, along with the bonus of nourishing our bodies with essential vitamins and minerals.

This year, I picked strawberries in a local patch.  After devouring a few of the perfect berries, the ones that are deep red right through to their centers, I had a moment of pure bliss!  I couldn’t believe how sweet the flavor was in the handpicked strawberries.  I immediately contrasted them to the ones I had been buying in stores for weeks.  Those strawberries, often white in their core, lacked flavor, just teasing the taste buds with a hint of strawberry essence.  I immediately understood my son’s resolution on strawberries.  For years, Ethan has refused to eat any strawberries unless they were handpicked from a local farm, referring to the ones in the stores as imposters!  I understood his resolve on some level, but strawberries are one of my favorite fruits.  And although I had a moment of absolute bliss, strawberry season and my memory are short.  Within a couple of weeks, I went back to buying the imposter strawberries, content with the lackluster flavor.

Terry and I will soon be celebrating twenty-four years of marriage, and I would say that, overall, we have had a good marriage.  Like most marriages, we had our honeymoon stage where we marked every first moment with romantic sighs, thinking that life could not get any better.  Within in a few years, we had two toddlers, and we had partnered together to raise our kids in a loving home.  We had some incredible moments creating memories and marking milestones in our lives.  We loved and encouraged each other, having the occasional date or weekend getaway.  If marriage was a strawberry, we had a good strawberry!

But then life happened: job changes, moving to a different state, children becoming adults, illnesses, and the death of my beloved mother-in-law.  With all these changes, we spent less time investing in our marriage and more time going through the motions.  Soon, we were satisfied with the tasteless strawberry, no longer craving the best.  We relied on years of producing good fruit to sustain our marriage.  But we all know that good fruit does not last long untended.  You leave a fresh-picked strawberry in the fridge for more than a few days, it will soon develop mold.  This mold will spread to all the fruit around it.  Because we were no longer investing in our marriage, our tempers were short, our words were sharp, and our selfishness grew.  Quickly, even this tasteless strawberry started to rot.

Fortunately, we both know a God who is faithful and merciful.  He used some “tough”, maybe even “rotten”, situations to help us redirect our diverging paths back towards one another.  We started investing more in each other, learning to listen in love, not out of self-interest.  We shared life together again, developing new mutual interests and rekindling connection.  We found new and healthier ways to deal with conflict.  We reaffirmed God as the center of our marriage and made each other our priority.

The hard work cultivated a “perfect” strawberry again.  I have learned some valuable lessons from that time that I don’t want to ever forget!

1. If you want the perfect strawberry marriage, you must work for it.  I spent two hours in the hot sun looking for the perfect strawberries.  I didn’t pick the strawberries out of drudgery, instead, I enjoyed my time in the patch, knowing that I would benefit from the results.  If I want a great marriage, I need to be working at it.  This work shouldn’t be done out of obligation, but out of love with a servant’s heart.
2. Strawberry season might be short but preserving the strawberries will help the season last!  I picked about ten quarts of strawberries and there was no way we could eat all of them in the few short days they were perfect.  So, I found different ways to preserve the strawberries: making freezer jam, strawberry honey butter and tray freezing some to use for pies and smoothies in the dead of winter.  It is amazing to open a bag of strawberries in the middle of a blizzard and smell the sweetness of summer permeate my kitchen!  Marriage is not always the high moments where you feel like you are living out the best romantic movie scenes.  Sometimes, life is hard, and these tough times can take a toll on your marriage.  Yet, if I take the time to invest in creating good communication skills and positive conflict resolution techniques, when the tough times hit, these skills will help preserve a good marriage.
3. A perfect strawberry is only sweeter when covered with chocolate.  This year, we saved some of the best strawberries and dipped them in chocolate.  These were a decadent treat!  When rotten situations hit our marriage, God’s mercy and grace covered our lives as we worked towards restoration.  Even though we spent time doing some hard work, it was not enough to fix some of the wounds we both felt.  This was the perfect place for God to step in and fix those broken places with His unconditional love and gentleness.  As we moved towards the “perfect strawberry”, His “chocolate” grace covered places that might otherwise have resulted in bitterness.  I am forever humbled that the God who created all, cares enough about Terry and me to show us a better path.

I do not want to leave you with the impression that our marriage is perfect; we still have our moments of sharp words and tempers.  However, even though we are still human, we are in such a better place than we were three years ago.  After sharing our story with Ethan, he responded with something like this, “I have never seen you and Dad happier.  Genuinely happy, not only with each other, but with God”.  His description brought me to tears.  You see, the rotten fruit that was developing could very well have destroyed our marriage.  It took courage to stop the rot and invest in producing good fruit again.  During that time, I stood on this scripture found in Hebrews 4:16, “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.”  This anniversary, while I am choosing to celebrate us, more importantly, I am celebrating God’s grace!

If you are interested in making the strawberry honey butter, please follow the link to the recipe: https://www.growforagecookferment.com/strawberry-honey-butter/