Category: biography

Someday Soon, We Will Wear White [Heaven]

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by Robert Murray McCheyne

As long as you live in your mortal body, you will be faulty in yourself. It is a soul-ruining error to believe anything else. Oh, if ye would be wise, be often looking beneath the robe of the Redeemer’s righteousness to see your own deformity. It will make you keep faster hold of his robe, and keep you washing in the fountain.

Now, when Christ brings you before the throne of God, he will clothe you with his own fine linen, and present you faultless. O it is sweet to me to think how soon you shall be the righteousness of God in him. What a glorious righteousness that can stand the light, of God’s face! Sometimes a garment appears white in dim light: when you bring it into the sunshine you see the spots. O prize, then the Divine righteousness, which is your covering.

My heart sometimes sickens when I think upon the defects of believers; when I think of one Christian being fond of company, another vain, another given to evil speaking. O aim to be holy Christians, bright, shining Christians. The heaven is more adorned by the large bright constellations than by many insignificant stars; so God may be more glorified by fine bright Christian than by many indifferent ones. Aim at being that one.

We shall be faultless. He that begun will perform it. We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. When you lay down this body, you may say, Farewell lust for ever, farewell my hateful pride, farewell hateful selfishness, farewell strife and envying, farewell being ashamed of Christ. O this makes death sweet indeed. Let’s long to depart and to be with Christ.

 

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For more from this preacher, you may want to start with these links:

http://www.wholesomewords.org/biography/bmcheyne3.html

http://dowboy.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/robert-murray-mccheyne/

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Anxiety Stole My Personality – for a Season

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by Melanie Valdivieso

Christ has set my soul free – Hallelujah! This truth shall forevermore stand. But on this earth and in this body, I have a mental illness: anxiety, plus a dash of depression. An invisible enemy, stigmatized as either lunacy or mental weakness – it has stolen my personality and threatens me with doubt. I fret over the future and plan for crises that never happen. My chest grows heavy, my vision blurs, and my head spins. My time is consumed with regulating breathing and my heartbeat. All I want is to get out from under the blanket that suppresses who I really am

Ironically, I held a very stressful job that I LOVED; I was a high school English teacher. Indeed, I was going to teach for the rest of my life – with the help of meds of course.  Oh, that glorious moment during my second year of teaching when I realized that I was free to be myself because I had found the right medication. Then the rollercoaster ride of bodily changes started: my brain would grow accustomed to the medication and quit responding to it, or my body would grow  a brand new human being or two. Every few years I needed to readjust or change my prescription, the challenges and rewards of teaching captivated me again, and on I persevered.

Then the 2015 school year started, and I experienced my worst episode of anxiety. Logic takes a flying leap when you can’t breathe, focus your eyesight, or stand in a crowd of people, so it didn’t occur to me that I needed to see the doctor about changing my prescription. By the time logic did manage to squeak through the cracks of my troubled mind, it was too late. My love of teaching had deserted me, and the best I could muster was babysitting the students. After nine years of teaching, I was so tired of having to fight my body and my mind to do my job, so I quit at the end of October.

As you can well imagine, the lies of the enemy nagged at me everyday during this season of transition, and I allowed them a seat in my heart. Specifically, the master lie that took the throne was that I had failed. My husband’s denial of my mental illness heaped upon the guilt and shame of quitting a career to which I devoted myself left me floundering for purpose. I had failed miserably to pick myself up through strength of will and support my family financially.

However, the Lord of the Universe says that I am not a failure. He states it over and over again in Scripture.

Truth #1

2 Corinthians 6:18 – “I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”

I am a daughter of the King. Anxiety and depression are physical problems, albeit they manifest as emotional symptoms, but that doesn’t change me being a princess. I had lots of fun teaching as God’s daughter, and now He is humbling me for other services.

Truth #2

Romans 8:1 – “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,”

First and foremost, since Jesus doesn’t condemn me, I shouldn’t presume to condemn myself. Secondly, mental illness is NOT a sin. Finally, the choice to quit was a healthy choice, and God definitely supports health!

Truth #3

Isaiah 54:5 – “For your Maker is your husband—the Lord Almighty is his name—the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth.”

How to react to my husband when in moments of anger he says deprecating things to me? Now I know; my Maker is my eternal Husband. I will listen to what He has to say about these trying times by respecting His commands to be Christlike.

Truth #4

Romans 8:28 – “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

Psalm 115:3 – “Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him.”

This is God’s sovereignty! I have faith that either God allowed this ordeal to occur so that I can focus on a new ministry, or He is just so powerful that He turned something horrible into something that glorifies Him.  Either way, I give my injury to Him and He transforms it into beauty.

After coming through as a whole person, I praise God for His mercies, which don’t depend upon my feelings.  God’s Word is the truth that stands forevermore, and through each episode of anxiety in my life, the truth is internalized more and more.

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About Melanie Valdivieso

I taught high school English for close to 10 years before quitting due to anxiety. I was so confused about this drastic change in my temperament. Shouldn’t I be set as who I am for the rest of my life now that I’m 34? Apparently not, and you now what? I like the author God is creating in me, and I couldn’t be my true self without first having taught English for so many years.

 

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There is a Crack in Everything

“Ring the bells that still can ring/Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”

Leonard Cohen,  Anthem

A crack in everything. As someone who has experienced brokenness in my life,  I appreciate the wisdom of these simple words. You see, I am intensely aware of being different then others.

I had a night job working my way through school frying donuts.  I remember clearly an incident were I overheard my boss telling someone that, “Bryan is one of the most eccentric people I have ever met.” Now I honestly was not trying to be odd, or eccentric.

To put this in perspective, I just happened to be taking N.T. Greek at the time and knew that the word for eccentric was a contraction, (of ek, meaning “off, or off to one side, and “centros”, meaning, “center”).  He was saying that I was “off centered”. That really troubled me because I always felt like I was intensely stable, and very much a well-balanced person. (But I was just 22.  I guess that fact alone explains much.)

Cohen’s poem tells us certain things. First, he describes bells that can’t be used, they don’t work anymore. Second, he tells us of our need to get real and to understand that “a perfect offering” is beyond our capability. Maybe 30 years ago, ‘naive idealism’ might have carried the day for us. But now I’m in my mid-50s  and I have tried to figure out a thing or two.   By then we start to see the cracks in everything, nothing has gone by untouched. We live in a fallen and broken world.

But the poet delivers a paradoxical truth, he states, “that’s how the light gets in.”

To learn this deeply, is to turbocharge your recovery. You’re a broken person. But that is actually a good thing. It summons up a discernment of how we grow spiritually.

I find it quite astonishing that the broken, weak, and the burned-out are closer to the Kingdom then the strong, the sure, and the gifted. This is a rich and an incredible truth, we are to see our brokenness and ruination in a whole different perspective.  We must see that that is how the light gets in.

“Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God.”

Matthew 5:3

“God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.”

Vance Havner

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Two O’ Clock in the Morning Poetry, #5

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~Victor Hugo – Les Miserables 

“Deep hearts, wise minds, take life as God has made it. It is a long trial; An unintelligible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for man at the first step in the interior of the tomb.”

“There he begins to discern the definite. The definite, think of this word! The living see the infinite; the definite reveals itself only to the dead. Meantime, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. “

“Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved forms, bodies, appearances only. Death will take all from him. Try to love souls, you shall find them again.”

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Victor Marie Hugo (French pronunciation: ​[viktɔʁ maʁi yɡo]; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best known French writers. In France, Hugo’s literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achieveme’
nts. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862, and Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831 (known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame).
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