Author: Jane Foard Thompson

Jane Foard Thompson is an inspirational speaker and award winning author and poet. A former Montessori teacher in Texas and Utah, for eight years Jane and her husband were missionaries in Honduras, Central America. After working for the American Red Cross in Idaho, they now live in Florida, where she writes, leads music and women's Bible studies at their church, and enjoys nine grandchildren and her Golden Retriever, Lily.

In the face of loss, will I listen to the song?

I had a dream a few nights ago that shook me with one of the blackest events I could imagine. I startled awake, struggling to breathe, heart pounding like helicopter blades. Unlike other something more dreams, I couldn’t pray. I waited for guidance. Nothing. Only my anguish. It felt so real. I could almost hear my heart tearing in two. For fifteen or twenty minutes I had was must have been a full on panic attack. When I’d gulped enough air, I cried, “No! Please, God! No!” And after a while, “Take me instead.”

I felt like Mary must have when Jesus was laid in the tomb and the cross stood empty. Barren. Dead.
carved egg with tree

How deep the darkness that weighed on her.
orchid tips
dead porcupine fish in Galapagos Islands
dead sea fan
Even after my husband woke up and prayed for me, I couldn’t go back to sleep. I struggled through the morning. Several conversations with two of my daughters helped to ease the ache, but the reality of it stayed in front of me for days — and nights.

A weekend filed with good family time helped to move the pain off center stage, but, like a San Francisco fog which seems to clear, then covers and chills everything, I couldn’t completely shake it.

Until Sunday morning when I went to church with YD and her family.

As so often happens, it was song that spoke to my heart. “God Is Able”

The question for my heart was:

Will you listen to the song from the Lord when you are looking in the face of great loss, hopelessness or grief?

Or will you chose to stay between the cross and the grave, and dwell in loss or fear?

Will you believe he really is a good God who desires good for you, or will you continue to prepare for the great “test” always waiting around the corner to pull the rug out from under you?

Had I generalized God’s order to Abraham about Isaac, believing that he means to take anything I love too much? Was it childhood trauma? Was I like Thomas, believing the worst until proven otherwise? I worked through the logical and psychological reasons for the dream, and the fear, but I couldn’t dodge the bottom line.

Will I trust God, even with this?

Especially with this.

The enemy hisses.

And sometimes Jesus seems silent, with nail-pierced hands extended, waiting for me to reach out for him.

To trust him to pull me out of the darkness.

A resurrection life means we don’t have to listen to the enemy of our souls, to the lies that wound, bind or cripple us.

But it is a choice.

We each face the question: Will I dwell in the valley of the shadow of death, or reach for Jesus?

Easter flowersEaster eggsorchid in bloom
Praise

Beyond the darkness

God doesn’t mind our brooding, aching questions. This week as I continued to ponder the darkness, I felt as if I were taken by the hand, behind the curtain, into the depths of the darkness. I comprehended in a deeper way why Jesus had to become a human being, why God become a baby, went through all we must to walk and talk and learn, and suffer. Why he had to spend so much time talking with his father. He wasn’t simply God in a transformer body-disguise. He really was a man. A man with choices.

YD talks a lot with her children about making good choices. Not much of right and wrong, obedience and disobedience. Not so much the rules and no-nos. “Did you make good choices?” she will ask to elicit a heart response from the child who obviously didn’t.

Jesus grew up with choices just like we do. Since he was also God, I think he had the God-awareness that made it possible for him to grab on to his father when the choices were hard.

When his cousin John lost his head.

When he saw in the eyes of Judas his betrayal was in place. And knew all his friends would leave him.

When he cried in the garden for a way out.

It really was his choice, a man deciding, every moment, to say ‘no’ to himself and ‘yes’ to his father.

I think the biggest difference between our choices and his was that he knew what was really at stake. Chalice by Jack H Thompson

When he broke apart the bread at their Passover Seder, his last meal with his close friends, he knew the depth of our brokenness, and what that tearing would cost him.

As he offered the cup it was no polished chalice he had in mind.

It was his own blood, drop by drop, poured out on our dry and thirsty world.

The last night in the garden, he looked into the darkness. In his agony of soul, he knew he must walk there.

Dwell there.

Release his father’s hand and go alone into the pit of evil.

He chose well, but it cost him.

Oh, how it cost him.

Cut off, by his “good choice” he gave up the light of the world.

Jesus hung on the cross and the world went dark for three hours.

For the first time since he was conscious of his own life as a human being, he felt totally alone.

“My God! My God! Why have you abandoned me?”

He walked into the darkness of the sin of the world. Of the vilest and worst.

He didn’t just see it. He felt it. He “bore it upon himself.”

During those dark hours on the cross

He became sin.

The bullies at the bus stop, or in the home
The little ones abused by their father or another trusted friend or relative
The runaways trafficked for profit, purposely hooked on drugs so they have no exit
The parents losing their temper, again, this time throwing their baby across the room
All those babies, never knowing love or protection, experiencing only violence, and if they survive, becoming violence.
Alcoholics, drug addicts, food addicts, porn addicts, video game addicts, control addicts, religion addicts . . . all those who life focus is skewed and drained and draining, committing slow death and stealing life from those around them
The diseases destroying bodies or brains, and the hearts of those who love them
The slums of the world, teaming with hopelessness, one miserable wretch preying on another

All the sickness, hurt, pain, injury, violence, torment, greed, envy, jealousy, selfishness, pride, arrogance . . . and death.

Can you even imagine the weight of it?

When he cried, “It is finished!” he proclaimed the end of the power of darkness to destroy us.

Because he went into the darkness, and came out of the tomb, not one of us ever has to walk alone.

There is no place on this earth, no life too far from the presence of the risen Jesus.

He was looked down on and passed over,
a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand.
One look at him and people turned away.
We looked down on him, thought he was scum.
But the fact is, it was our pains he carried—
our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us.
We thought he brought it on himself,
that God was punishing him for his own failures.
But it was our sins that did that to him,
that ripped and tore and crushed him—our sins!
He took the punishment, and that made us whole.
Through his bruises we get healed.
We’re all like sheep who’ve wandered off and gotten lost.
We’ve all done our own thing, gone our own way.
And God has piled all our sins, everything we’ve done wrong,
on him, on him.
Isaiah 53:3-6, The Message

When it is hard to see the light

The announcer reported the crash of the German plane in the French Alps last week, and chilled my soul. My son-in-law frequently flies over Europe. One of my daughters lives in Switzerland, and we’ve visited the French Alps together. Though strangers died and lost loved ones, the personal connection brought it into my heart. As the story emerged of the co-pilot’s suicide, selfishly taking many with him, including sixteen teens and their adult chaperons from a village in Germany, I couldn’t shake the heaviness.

It’s too dark.

All around, the darkness seems to be growing.

Isis is teaching children to behead people.

Arab countries call for Israel’s destruction, along with the Great Satan – the United States. Iran moves closer and closer to the threat of nuclear weapons. Many think the trouble brewing in the Middle East may initiate World War III.

From across the U.S., I read daily notices, no longer front page, of young people on shooting sprees, mothers on trial for their children’s deaths and, tucked even deeper in the paper, day after day, arrests for child molestation.

And I wonder how many are never reported.

How many silent screams fill our land.

This was the filter with which I stood in church and listened to the dramatic reading of Jesus entering Jerusalem on a young donkey – a symbol of peace.

The crowd cheers him. Too soon, we move to the last meal. Jesus washes their feet with his love, and Judas rushes out to betray him. With a kiss. And the crowd now mocks and shouts, “Crucify him!”

But before that final ordeal begins, Jesus goes to the garden and talks with his Father. Agonizes.

Some believe he dreads the beatings, mocking, shame and the pain of the cruelest death, on a cross.

I think he looks into the darkness, that horrible presence in our world that continues to rip open hearts and lives, and perhaps he dreads entering.

Perhaps his greatest agony is knowing that, even after it is all accomplished, after he does through the darkness and wins the victory, after he rises from death to regain Paradise for God’s creation, there are some who will still choose darkness.

Some will still ignore the warmth of the fire and walk out into the heart-chilling cold.

What I can’t understand is how they are able to carry others with them.

The little children killed or terribly abused or neglected by their parents, the orphans no one claims, all the wounds in childhood that lead to an angry, hurting adult who hurts others.

At times, this is the darkness that makes it hard to see the light.

I know I cannot dwell there.

I must choose to remember the sun is still shinning above the thick clouds.

His love has been poured out.

God has won.

The end is secure.

And when the darkness threatens to overwhelm us, there is hope. There is light. There is a new identity, a new life for all who chose to seek it.