Growing up, I was always uncomfortable with seeing people who wore “crucifixes”, the pendant form of a cross WITH Christ hanging on it. Or quite often, the crucifix was boldly up front and centre on the main wall of the auditorium of many churches (usually Catholic churches). I felt offended, to be honest, by the fact that Jesus was up there hanging on the cross. I would say to myself (and to others who were around at the time), “I hate when I see the cross with Jesus hanging lifelessly on it. Don’t people get it? Jesus is not dead. He’s alive!” and I carried this attitude that it was disgusting, depressing, and morbid to see people wearing these crucifixes or seeing them hanging on a wall in a church.

I no longer feel this way.

What changed?

Well, I met Christ intimately ON the cross, as He lay dying upon it, and I found myself being crucified there upon that very cross WITH HIM. I met the dying Christ, and my heart has never been the same since.

I now see Christ on a cross and I weep with affection for this Man. I see this bloody tree as the place of meeting. It has become the altar of intimacy for me, in which I finally came to love the Christ, the Messiah. I died with Him there. This is where I came to love Him, at last.

Yes, Jesus Christ is no longer on the Cross. He is surely alive and seated at the right hand of the Father, on the Throne. But who can ever forget the place where you first gave your heart to the one you love? You can never forget it, and your heart will always long for this place, this meeting place. It will always hold a special place in you heart.

In another sense, He is on the cross every day of our lives. The thing with the cross is that we never leave it, this side of Heaven. We continually return, daily, to our cross, to His cross. We never leave this continual death, as we are called to continual resurrected life which is born out of death, every time.

Are we called to daily resurrection?

Well, this can only come with daily death.

With every day, there comes night. Then the morning arrives with the sun rising again upon us. Every day, without stop. The cycle of death and new life.

In reality, Christ hung on the cross once, and sin was paid for once, but in our lives, essentially, it happens every day. We die daily. So we can be borne anew, each and every day into new life, the life of Christ.

This is a bit of insight into why I now love to see Christ on the Cross, and the Crucifix is an offence that I now embrace with a whole heart.

Selah. Think upon that.

I am going through some of my past journals and I came across this revelation that the Lord spoke to me back in 2010, now almost 2 years ago (My how time flies! I remember this season as if it were yesterday!) I felt it was crucial to share this revelation today. By the power of the Spirit, may your heart be open wide right now, to the truth of this word:

Attention, all singles!

Here’s the question:

Ever wonder why you’re still single??

Here’s the answer:

You’re single because God’s not ready to share you just yet.

Settle the question in your heart with THAT answer. It’s the truth. And it’s the ONLY answer.

You’re not single because you’re unwanted. You’re single because you are SO WANTED.

God is not ready to share me just yet. While at the altar the other night, I received EYE-OPENING revelation to the past 10 years of singleness (well, truly, my entire life so far). The revelation was that God has shut the doors to marriage and relationships with the opposite sex because He has valiantly and relentlessly pursued me and is jealous for me and He didn’t want any swine to steal my attention, my heart! He didn’t want me to throw my pearls to swine. (Note: not all men are swine, but in truth, some are!) In God’s pleasure, He has sought me out, so I would be wholly devoted to Him – and He doesn’t want to share me. Who’s to know if this is permanent or just an extended season? Who’s to know if He will one day share me with an earthly husband? But it’s about time I stopped taking my love life in my hands, and begin to truly, truly, truly TRUST the heart and intentions and timing and choices of my Heavenly Father, who truly knows best. It’s not because God hates me, that I’m single. It’s because He LOVES me so much, that I’m single.

It’s about time we flip the tables on our skewed PERSPECTIVE on how we view our singleness. We have often just thought that we are single because we are unwanted by a man. But the truth is that we are single because we are SO WANTED BY GOD. He is keeping us from marriage in this season because He wants us so much. He wants our whole heart. All our attention.

So, rather than see your singleness as a proof of your being unlovable, unwanted and worthy of rejection, see your singleness as proof that you are…

…SO LOVED

…SO WANTED

…SO WORTHY OF BEING CHOSEN BY THE GOD OF THE UNIVERSE!

He has set His seal of Love upon your heart, and He has sealed off the door to other men in this season. He has thwarted the purposes of swine who have tried to come and take His pearl of great price away from Him.

You ain’t single because you are unwanted. You are single because you are SO WANTED.

You are single because God isn’t ready to share you just yet.

Think upon that. Chew on that. Digest this revelation and let it FILL YOU and seep into every corner of your hungry, hungry heart. Let this truth FILL YOU with dignity and honour, knowing that, because you are chosen, you have been set apart in this season for God.

He loves you so much.

Truly, you are so loved.

“Celibacy is a vacancy for God. To be a celibate means to be empty for God, to be free and open for God’s presence, to be available for God’s service.” (Henri Nouwen, Thomas Aquinas)

If you are single, you are called as a celibate. To be celibate is to leave a vacancy for God. To be empty for God, open for His presence to fill you.

If I am a single believer in Christ, I am consecrated (set apart) as a celibate for my First Love, for God alone, unless the Lord leads otherwise in a new season.

Jesus was single. Jesus was a celibate. Jesus had a vacancy (an emptiness) within Him reserved for God alone. Even with this vacancy, this emptiness, Jesus was a fully-realized man. He wasn’t a half-realized man. He wasn’t a half-fulfilled man. He was fully fulfilled as a human, and as a man.

And so it is with us, also.

Contemplate this for a moment. Take some time and go for a walk, or think about it wherever you are right now.

If you are single, you are a fully-realized, fully-fulfilled human being, AND woman or man. We are not above our Master, our Beloved, who also walked out His entire life on earth AS A SINGLE MAN who died at a young age, IN HIS PRIME.

Yet, Jesus fulfilled everything He was called to do. He was not jipped. He was not a disgruntled, ripped-off, discontented man who complained to the Father that he was not being given what He was entitled to in order to fully live the life He was meant to live. Jesus did not feel that He had to postpone His “real life” until His “partner” or “spouse” came. He went forward, in joy and serene acceptance, and did not see His singleness as an obstacle to be removed, but saw it as the path in which the Lord’s will would be fulfilled on earth.

And He did fulfill God’s will, without a spouse. Without children. Yet His life is the most fruitful one in all the universe.

To be single, to be celibate, to be a man or woman who never partakes in sexual union, does not make you less of a woman or a man. If it were so, we would have reason to say that Jesus was only half a man…

…but He was the most alive Man this world has ever seen. And we will never see another as real, as fruitful, as fulfilled as this Man, whom we adore and willingly lay down all of our agendas for, to pick up this high calling, this privileged position as a single, as a celibate for our Beloved.

Selah. Ponder that.

~Alison

Well, I left wintery Canada a couple days ago and arrived back into New Zealand after 2 months of travel around Turkey and Canada. I was overjoyed as New Zealand’s mild summer weather and fresh air breeze greeted me as I stepped out of the airport in Auckland, and headed down to Tauranga. Ah, I love this land. I will miss it when my time to leave comes… I will be writing a more detailed update in the near future (most likely in February/March) which will share what is around the corner, on the horizon. So stay tuned for that. Until then, here’s some information about some address changes for donations you send to me.

New Mailing Address for Financial Donations:

For those of you who are a part of my Financial Partnership team (or for those of you who would like to become a partner), please take note of the changed postal mailing address for the Project Funding office for YWAM that processes tax-deductible donations for me. This really only impacts you if you decide to mail in donations (ie: cheques, money orders). You can email the funding office (email below) if you want to ask about other options for payments or visit my website Support page to see step-by-step instructions.

Project Funding Office
PO Box 57100 RPO East Hastings
Vancouver, BC
V5K 5G6
Canada

Phone: 604.436.4433
Fax: 604.436.4466
E-mail: admin@projectfunding.ca

If you need to email the Project Funding office that processes all my ministry financial support, here is their new email address: admin@projectfunding.ca

Feel free to email me at hopejoyfaith@gmail.com if you would like to personally ask me any further questions. I’ll be more than happy to help answer your questions.

God bless you and hope 2012 is treating you well so far!

Alison

O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, Hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed,
Deliver me, Jesus.

From the desire of being loved…
From the desire of being extolled …
From the desire of being honored …
From the desire of being praised …
From the desire of being preferred to others…
From the desire of being consulted …
From the desire of being approved …
From the fear of being humiliated …
From the fear of being despised…
From the fear of suffering rebukes …
From the fear of being calumniated …
From the fear of being forgotten …
From the fear of being ridiculed …
From the fear of being wronged …
From the fear of being suspected …

That others may be loved more than I,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

That others may be esteemed more than I …
That, in the opinion of the world,
others may increase and I may decrease …
That others may be chosen and I set aside …
That others may be praised and I unnoticed …
That others may be preferred to me in everything…
That others may become holier than I,
provided that I may become as holy as I should…

by G. D. Watson

If God has called you to be really like Christ in all your spirit, He will draw you into a life of crucifixion and humility and put on you such demands of obedience, that He will not allow you to follow other Christians, and in many ways He will seem to let other good people do things which He will not let you do.

Others can brag on themselves, and their work, on their success, on their writings, but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing, and if you begin it, He will lead you into some deep mortification that will make you despise yourself and all your good works.

The Lord will let others be honored and put forward, and keep you hid away in obscurity because He wants to produce some choice fragrant fruit for His glory, which can be produced only in the shade.

Others will be allowed to succeed in making money, but it is likely God will keep you poor because he wants you to have something far better than gold and that is a helpless dependence on Him; that He may have the privilege of supplying your needs day by day – out of an unseen treasury.

God will let others be great, but He will keep you small. He will let others do a great work for Him and get credit for it, but He will make you work and toil on without knowing how much you are doing; and then to make your work still more precious, He will let others get the credit for the work you have done, and this will make your reward ten times greater when He comes.

The Holy Spirit will put strict watch over you, with a jealous love, and will rebuke you for little words and feelings, or for wasting your time, which other Christians never seem distressed over.

So make up your mind that God is an infinite Sovereign, and has a right to do what He pleases with His own, and He will not explain to you a thousand things which may puzzle your reason in His dealing with you. He will wrap you up in a jealous love, and let other people say and do many things that you cannot do or say.

Settle it forever, that you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit, and that He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue, or chaining your hand, or closing your eyes, in ways that others are not dealt with.

Now, when you are so possessed with the Living God that you are, in your secret heart, pleased and delighted over this particular personal, private, jealous guardianship and management of the Holy Spirit over your life, you will have found the vestibule of heaven.

Read these astounding words from the Apostle Paul…

7But whatever things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. 8But no, rather, I also count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them to be dung, so that I may win Christ 9and be found in Him… that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death; 11if by any means I might attain to the resurrection of the dead. (Phil 3:7-11 MKJV)

And then read this slightly different translation of Paul’s words…

7 I once thought these things were valuable, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. 8 Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ 9 and become one with him… 10 I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, 11 so that one way or another, I will experience the resurrection from the dead! (Phil 3:7-11 NLT)

Paul truly was an alien. A strange man in this world! He was a man who wore “dung goggles”. He looked at life through these lenses. Everything was dung compared to the desire and longing to know Christ and to be one with Him. But we read his written words above and we just can’t seem to connect. We are quite in love with this world; we are enamored with this life. The thought of dying and losing our lives and our lifestyle and our possessions seems more like a tragedy than a genuine upgrade! We certainly don’t consider our lives on earth as “dung” (garbage, rubbish, worthless stuff…). We’d much rather wear some trendy shades than to put on dung goggles.

I love what Mrs. Charles Cowman wrote in her famous devotional book ‘Streams in the Desert’:

St. Paul won the race; he gained the prize, and he has not only the admiration of earth today, but the admiration of Heaven. Why do we not act as if it paid to lose all to win Christ? Why are we not loyal to truth as he was? Ah, we haven’t his arithmetic. He counted differently from us; we count the things gain that he counted loss. We must have his faith, and keep it if we would wear the same crown. (Mrs. Cowman)

I could write a book about what God has been doing in my heart in recent months… but some things feel too precious to post on here, but what I will say is that God is weaning me of my dependencies on earthly things. All this “STUFF” I have called gain, and been unwilling to lose, I have clung to and grasped onto as though they were my most valuable possession. But I’m in this place now in life, where I am just so weary of holding on to these “cling-on addictions” — God’s got me cornered and I am too tired to resist Him any longer. I just want to follow the Lord into this time of deep relinquishment, even if the pain level threatens to take me out. I just want to let go now….

You see, I have seen the letting go of these ‘loves’ as the losing of myself, the losing of what makes me “ME”, the losing of all things precious. God is weaning me of these dependencies – those things I have lived and moved and breathed and had my being in.

To wean means to “accustom someone to managing without something on which they have become dependent or of which they have become excessively fond”

I truly am being weaned, like a baby, by its Parent. I am crying and flailing my arms in protest, I am having my hissy fits, my moments of panic as I fear I cannot survive without these security blankets, this milk, this soother, this “STUFF” that comforts me. God is re-aligning me so that I can begin to manage without this “STUFF” on which I have become exceedingly dependent, and of which I have become exceedingly fond. I have given this “STUFF” my heart, my love, my energy, my focus, my leaning. I have leaned and leaned and leaned upon this “STUFF”. I have fallen in love with this dung, this rubbish pile, this garbage – and called it treasure, precious to me.

In replacement? I am being given a new food, with a taste that is foreign to my tongue and slightly frightening in flavour. It seems quite bitter to the taste as I begin to partake, but I sense a strange sweetness is on its way… Something deep within me knows there will be some gain in this, some nourishment, some unknown nutrient that will bring the longed-for fulfillment to my stomach, oxygen to my lungs and blood to my heart. But I don’t think I am yet experiencing the reality of this treasure that is being cultivated in my inner world.

I still think this new way adds up to zero, or possibly in the negatives. I have not fully grasped that it could really be a number uncountable, of gain upon gain, of rich abundance spilling over into more abundance…

Lord, you are weaning me off the dung. You are making me accustomed to a new food, the only real treasure, and teaching me a new arithmetic:

To lose is gain.

“God’s great men have not been men who have originated great plans for God, but rather men, who, like Christ, the great model, have laid aside their own wills, however wise and good, and submitted themselves to follow so these mighty and renowned workers for God have felt the pressure of God’s hand. They were flexible to its slightest touch, listening to His softest whispers, and obedient to His every call.

“This submission to God’s will is an active virtue; it works, as well as suffers, under the sweet supremacy of God’s direction. It bears the rod, but works under the rule of the same divine will when the rod is not seen, feared, or felt. The consecrated life adores the fact that God is sovereign. It is His business and wisdom to plan and arrange His own work, settle His methods, and choose His agents to carry out His purposes. The efficiency and success of these agents does not depend on the maturity of their plans, or on their skill, but on their submission to God’s will, and their faithfulness in executing God’s plans.

“To surrender our life purpose to God’s will; to put forth all our energy in doing that will, and walking in God’s ways, this and this alone is consecration. In this, the servant will not be above his Lord. Active submission to, and working out God’s will is consecration.”

(E.M. Bounds)

Do you want to know why I sing? This quote says it quite clearly:

“Christianity is about the crucified Christ and the dancing Christ. We exist to wash the feet of men as Christ washed the feet of the apostles. But inside of our hearts joy should sing, for if our faith does not sing it is a kind of dead faith. For love is a song, the echo of God’s voice, and we must make this echo available.” (Catherine Wild)

This comes from the wonderful book by Father Robert Wild on the life of Catherine Doherty, called “Journey to the Heart of Christ”. I can’t shake this picture of the crucified AND dancing Christ. Truly, as Christians, is it not both the juxtaposition of mourning and joy together, that makes our faith so rich, deep, and somewhat surprising and unexpected?

We die daily, but in this death, we find joy everlasting! In our dying, we pick up life eternal.

Let the sound of singing come from a heart that is alive in faith. And if there is no singing, let faith arise once again! And let the song arise again within us, lest in our silence, the rocks would cry out!

This echo must be heard on this earth…

ARTICLE: A Bridegroom’s Reflections on his Wedding Day
By Sub-deacon Adam Deville

There comes a moment in life at which one’s perspective begins to shift from the unending gaze of youthfulness to the finite view of adulthood. There comes a point when the significant milestones of early life have all been crossed and one enters a new phase, acquiring a new outlook. There comes a time when one begins to think of death.

Such thoughts do not typically occur on one’s wedding day! For marriage, to be sure, begins in joy but – as Fr. Paul Evdokimov reminds us – “…the hour has not yet come.” That “hour”—as the word is invariably used in John’s gospel –pertains to the hour of Christ’s death. When one is baptized into Christ, one dies with Him; when one is married in Christ, one dies to self. In all things, one seeks that transposition of self which can only come about through death, so that, with Saint Paul, one may say “It is no longer I who live but Christ Who lives in me.”

The life and death of Christ is powerfully illustrated in the icon of Christ the Bridegroom. About an hour before I was married at St. Elias, I took my bestman – himself engaged to be married in the spring of 2004 – into the church to show him this icon. He and I had been having ad hoc discussions about what Christian marriage, properly so called, requires and entails, but I knew that all my disquisitions would be powerfully supplemented – if not supplanted – by that one sacred image which conveys everything I could hope to say in an hour or more. It is an exceedingly simple, and therefore exceedingly powerful, image.
For those of you unfamiliar with this icon, its most salient feature is a downcast Christ crowned with thorns and pierced through with many arrows. It makes that point that Saint Paul articulated so powerfully in his letter to the Ephesians:

Christ loved His Bride, the Church, so much that He was willing to suffer and die for her.

That text from Ephesians is part of the epistle reading for many Christian weddings, and for all weddings that take place in churches of the Byzantine tradition. These are the lines that are of special focus to us here:

“Wives, be submissive to your husbands as if to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of his body the Church, as well as its Saviour. As the Church submits to Christ, so wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church. He gave Himself up for her, to make her holy, purifying her in the bath of water by the power of the word, to present to Himself a glorious Church, holy and immaculate, without stain or wrinkle or anything of that sort.” (Ephesians 5:22-27)

This text is, in our day, one of the more (as is said) “controversial” readings, controversial not because of what it says so much as how people hear it. That hearing typically trips up at the phrase “wives, be submissive to your husbands …in everything.” In an age when even the slightest hindrance to one’s self-determining liberty is said to be an intolerable injury to one’s self-esteem, such an admonition is thought to be part of what ideologues call, pejoratively, the “patriarchy” of Western culture.

Read fully and understood properly, however, it should present no stumbling block for two reasons at least. First, it is a model of equanimity in making strenuous requirements of both men and women. Second and more serious, as my bestman realized – and, in turn, had to stress to his betrothed, who had not heard the text properly – the requirement made of wives is but a minor spot of difficulty compared to what husbands must do: they must be prepared to die for their wives! Husbands must pattern their love after Christ, who “loved the Church” and “gave Himself up for her.” From a husbandly perspective, it may be said that the wifely submission is a slight bit of self-denial compared to the supreme sacrifice of self-immolation seen in the Cross!

Such comparisons, however, are out of place: in marriage, there is no room for a bean-counting mentality, no need to measure – like a Pharisaical accountant – each other’s number of sacrifices and amount of self-giving. When it comes to dying to self, there is no limit, and in such contests one must not look for commendation but only say “we are worthless slaves: we have done no more than what was our duty to do” (Luke 17:10).

One’s duty in marriage, we may say, is an undying love of death without which there will be an inevitable death of love. Without a ceaseless dying to self, the marriage that sustains a couple’s love will not be able to sustain the tyrannical pull of the individual ego. One must die in marriage; marriage must kill one’s selfishness. Otherwise, selfishness will murder the marriage.

Such language is not meant to be macabre (disturbing) for a marriage is not a funeral. And yet there are certain parallels, reminders, and connections threaded throughout the rite of crowning itself. As Fr. Evdokimov explains:

“The wedding rite symbolically summarizes the entire married life. The betrothed have already exchanged rings; they have already been crowned and they partake of the one cup of life. It is only in the evening of life that this cup, symbolic of fullness, will be taken, when the shadow of the crowns will fall upon it… [and] the spaces of the heart that do not exist as of yet… are created by suffering. In order to be loved by the other, one must renounce oneself completely. It is a deep and unceasing ascetic practice. The crowns of the betrothed refer to martyrdom.”

In addition to these liturgical reminders, there are further symbolic ones at St. Elias: the very “crown” (the chandelier) under which the couple, also crowned, stands on their most joyous of days is the same one under which they will weep and mourn as they are separated when the one buries the other. One spouse will see the body of the other spouse lie in its coffin awaiting burial – a burial that may well take place in the parish cemetery a few feet up the hill from where guests once stood to congratulate the new husband and wife. It is here, in this church – where one first died to oneself in the “funeral” of baptism and later died to oneself in the “funeral” of marriage – where one will, when dead in body, be sent on one’s way with a real funeral to (one prays hopefully!) what Scripture tell us will be precisely a wedding feast of the Lamb in heaven, where there is no more death or sorrow but only life everlasting (cf. Revelation 21).

Meditating on this thought of our eventual separation is a spiritually salutary practice. In the first instance, it keeps our focus off the often-petty details and disagreements that occur in any marriage: we remain focused on higher things. It encourages a deepening of love here, now, today so that later, in the future, down the road, we may be sustained by that love when difficulties, disease and ultimately death claim us. At that moment, we will have few causes for regret if our love will have been pure. It is far better to die to oneself now and be purified in one’s love than to endure the fiery ordeal of posthumous regret and recrimination for all the things left unsaid, all the wounding words which were said but cannot be taken back, and all the affection whose manifestation one postponed for another day.

Meditating on the fact that one’s spouse will one day be taken from us reminds us, moreover, that this person is not one’s own possession, not an extension of oneself, but a separate person, fashioned in the mind of God and given to us precisely as gift. One does not own one’s spouse; one receives him or her from God, to whom one will be accountable on that great and terrible Day of Judgment when the Lord will ask how one treated this inestimable treasure.

In realizing that one’s spouse is a gift from God, we are given to ask the natural question: how would God treat him or her and, by extension, how does He want us to treat this person? The answer to that is very simple: we are asked to love this person as God loves him or her, with an undying love that knows no end, that does not count the cost, but pours itself out entirely, withholding nothing. In so doing, we love with that love of Christ then, which nothing greater can be conceived.

For perfect love is love crucified.

—

Author: Adam A.J. DeVille and Anne-marie Sandstrom were crowned in marriage at St. Elias on 30 August 2003 and are awaiting the birth of their first child in June 2004. Adam, a sub-deacon in Eparchy of Toronto and Eastern Canada, is a Ph.D. student at the Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky Institute for Eastern Christian Studies at St. Paul University, Ottawa, Canada, where he is writing a thesis on the Roman papacy and Orthodoxy in response to Ut Unum Sint. He is also the text editor for the Institute’s scholarly revue, Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.

Article Link: http://www.saintelias.com/ca/mysteries/reflection.php