by Christie Purifoy | Feb 2, 2012 | allergies, Family, Jesus, poverty
It’s another dinner conversation with the little people, and you never know where it will take you. This night the middle child suddenly recalls the Christmas boxes we filled months ago.
Who opened those boxes, he wants to know. Who’s playing with those toys? I don’t know, I tell him, but I’m sure it’s a child far away who might not have opened anything else on Christmas Day.
He absorbs my answer and says, “I’m glad we’re not poor.”
Oh, honey. I’m glad too. I can’t imagine facing dinnertime with an empty cupboard. Every time I dole out another of the boy’s pink asthma pills ($100 for the bottle with good health insurance!), I wonder how some parents do it. I imagine them holding out for the really bad wheezing, hording those pills like gold.
Oh, honey, I’m glad we’re not poor.
But there’s something I don’t like about his comment. Something that doesn’t feel right. Am I sensing a bit of “us vs. them”? As in, we are the ones who fill the Christmas boxes (thank you, Jesus), and they are the ones who open them? Yet I know that when it comes to Jesus’s kingdom, we’re all in it together. No “us vs. them.”
What did Jesus say to the rich young ruler? Give it all away, then come follow me. But, he couldn’t do it. Can I? Will my kids?
I’m not asking my kids to give it all away. I’ll keep on giving them gifts as long as there’s still money in the bank. But, there are a lot of ways to be poor, and maybe it’s time to teach a few of those?
To be poor is to know that you don’t have what it takes.
To be poor is to know that you’ve got nothing worth standing on.
The poor in spirit give it all away because they know it was never really theirs. The poor in spirit willingly let go of everything in order to stand on the Rock. They know that money, good looks, good health, good behavior, none of it is as strong and steady as that Rock.
Oh, my little boy, I’m afraid you’re wrong. We are poor. Maybe not in our bank account (though who knows what tomorrow holds), but we are poor. We aren’t good enough. Or strong enough. We’ll never have it all together. But, there’s One who was and is and always will be.
He is our treasure. Our pearl of great price.
by Christie Purifoy | Jan 26, 2012 | allergies, Florida, God's promises, healing, Seasons
This is the kind of landscape I’m dreaming of. Cold. Bleak. Beautiful. Beautiful because there is not a drop of tree pollen for miles.
It seems that the trees here in northern Florida are trying to kill me. Maybe they have no such intention, and it’s only that my lungs have misunderstood. They think the thick yellow dust swirling through the air is reason enough to close up shop. I try to convince them otherwise with pills and inhalers.
It’s been a long month, and pollen.com tells me I still have a ways to go.
I’ve never experienced anything quite like this. It’s left me feeling nostalgic for Chicago’s concrete jungle. Living there I did do some sneezing in springtime, but this? I’ve never known anything like this. I’ve always said that I’m a winter person. That I need that season of cold, sleepy hibernation. It seems my body agrees. There’s always something blooming in Florida, and, apparently, my lungs have had enough.
For now, I’m sticking close by my bedroom air purifier. I have time to be inspired. Time to write. Somehow, though, I’ve found the life of the bedridden to be less than inspiring.
Still, whenever I open my Bible I find promise after promise of healing. Who knew God had so much to say about healing? Now I know, though the promise of it belies my reality. So, I’m holding tight to the promise and waiting.
Waiting.
Breathing.
Waiting.
“Blessed is the one whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he also binds up; he injures, but his hands also heal.”
Job 5:17-18
by Christie Purifoy | Jan 19, 2012 | Faith, Jesus
Wisdom is a treasure, a precious cargo worth seeking, but it can also feel like a heavy weight threatening to sink our ship.
Through wisdom we know that our days on this earth are brief. Like a whisper of mist. Like a flower that blooms and fades. We are little more than grass and flowers, and we know that “grass withers and the flowers fall” (Isaiah 40:8).
Through wisdom, we do indeed learn “to number our days” (Psalm 90:12).
How, then, do we hold on to wisdom’s treasure without sinking under its weight? How do we keep our spirits from tipping over into despair? “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief” (Ecclesiastes 1:18).
The voice of pragmatism and reason would likely advise balance. Seek wisdom but not too much. In other words, don’t overdo it!
Yet, there is nothing balanced or reasonable about following Jesus. He is a lion and a lamb, not some creature halfway between the two.
The best way may be the utterly reckless way. Pursue wisdom with everything you have. Hold tight to it and weep. Feel the grief of that knowledge. For here is another paradox: there is laughter in these tears. Lady Wisdom “can laugh at the days to come” (Proverbs 31:25).
This is the laughter of children, the laughter of innocence.
To be like Jesus is to be utterly wise and thoroughly innocent, a serpent and a dove.
To be wise and innocent is to feel grief and joy that haven’t been dulled by fear. It is the wide-awake life he promised us.
“Awake, my soul!”
Psalm 57:8
by Christie Purifoy | Jan 17, 2012 | allergies, healing, prayer
I have prayed for healing.
I have prayed for symptoms to disappear because that is what healing meant to me, but deep within I have suspected that my prayers were somehow too narrow. Too limited. How, then, should I pray? Is true healing more than the absence of some symptom?
I prayed that my boy would be healed. I prayed that food would no longer squeeze the breath from his lungs. God heard my prayer. When his throat began to swell, and I had forgotten the epi-pen, a stranger’s hand reached out with the medicine he needed.
What does it feel like to be healed? It feels like being held.
I have felt the breath squeezed from my own lungs. For one long, hard month I have despaired of ever again feeling strong. And I have prayed for healing.
I prayed for breath when what I needed was hope.
This is not a less-than prayer. I do not redefine healing in order to make it seem more possible. Lungs are made strong, allergies do disappear, the cords of cancer and disease are broken every day, but God can do so much more than that.
His healing is not limited to our bodies. His healing is not given only to those whom doctors will pronounce well.
To be healed by God is to know that death is a lie. That there is nothing to fear.
“He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters.” Psalm 18:16
To be held in arms of love. That is what it feels like to be healed.
by Christie Purifoy | Jan 13, 2012 | book of quotations, Books, healing
I’ve been sick. For a month. I’m worn out with it.
Worn out enough to have spent the last few days in bed. Worn out enough to have finally called the doctor. Having filled the prescription he gave, I can breathe again. Though I am still tired. And each breath has that ache-y, medicinal twinge suggesting that my body knows it isn’t yet breathing under its own strength.
To be confined to a sickbed feels like the ultimate waste. Productivity ceases. To-do lists are left undone. One can no longer give anything. Confined to bed, receiving is the name of the game.
In other words, it isn’t only the pain of illness that makes it so uncomfortable.
When sick, it is no longer possible to do; the challenge is simply to be. I focus on each breath in and out. At first, this brings fear. Later, comfort. To labor at something which is usually instinctive is to recognize that it has always been, will always be … a gift. Breath. The presence of God. Beyond us and within us.
When we are sick, the world shrinks. I have a book. The view from my bedroom window. A slowly ticking clock. This is life condensed. Which means there is more to notice, more to observe, more to think about in one minute of this life than in an hour of my usual busyness.
And that is a good thing.
Still, I hate the phrase “look on the bright side.” It suggests a yin-yang view of life that I simply can’t accept. I think you know what I mean: every cloud with its silver lining, every light with its shadow. No thank you.
Shadows only make me dream of a world without shadow. Of light without darkness. Of a day when “the moon will shine like the sun, and the sunlight will be seven times brighter … when the Lord binds up the bruises of his people and heals the wounds he inflicted” (Isaiah 30:26).
But, in the meantime, I do marvel that anything good can emerge from sickness. From brokenness. From darkness. This isn’t to say that “it’s all worthwhile” or “it happened for a reason.” Those are platitudes that do little justice to the utter wrongness of sickness. And brokenness. And darkness.
No, when I acknowledge the good gift I am marveling at the fact that darkness is never all. There is always something more. Something beyond.
For me, now, it is only a few words read in a book in the middle of the afternoon while I lie in bed and listen to the children scream their far-off screams. They are not, in this moment, my responsibility.
And so, released from every responsibility that says do, I lie still and read a description of wolves crying under a full moon in Yellowstone Park. I’ve never heard a wolf’s cry, I don’t know if I ever will, but now, having read these words, I can carry that cry with me for the rest of my life:
At the same time other wolves joined the first two, and we heard … the full-throated quiver of the pack. It haunted everything it touched, sanctified it. It rolled down the mountains and onto the plains and the bison heard it, the ground squirrels heard it, the crows nesting in the trees heard it. Mary began to tear.
“We are alive,” the wolves said. “And the world is beautiful.”
(from Eternal on the Water by Joseph Monninger)
