Having a Reserve of Grace...

Vulken7 told me to do this, and I do whatever Vulken7 says.... Not really, but it was a good idea, Vulken7, so I did it. :) Here's some thoughts based on something I read earlier.

[God] desires us to have a rich deposit of grace... Being spiritually wealthy means to have a reserve of grace before God and not to rely on special grace. Poverty is banished by the surplus of grace within.

God is not treating us wrongly when He gives us more trials and difficulties; He is actually treating us very well. He has selected us and has granted us favor by providing us this big opportunity.... The amount of our spiritual wealth is based on the amount of experiences we have passed through.... our hope is not only that we would spend sufficient time before the Lord and pass through enough experiences, but also that we would become vessels unto glory after we pass through these experiences.

I was impressed that our life is about coming to know the Lord in a deeper way and having a wealth of His grace or experience within our vessel. It's not so much about our physical situation: where we live, how we feel, or whatever. As Christians, we should be persons building up a surplus of grace. It struck me that the Lord has me where I am because He loves me, and He wants me to know Him in a particular way. That's really a blessing.

Quotes from "Special & Reserve Grace" by Watchman Nee, a booklet excepted from The Collected Works of Watchman Nee, Volume 5, Chapter 5.

Depth of Influence...

Experience, not perception, of events and circumstances build reactions and philosophies. Until something actually affects our inner being and our private life, it cannot fundamentally changes our values and beliefs.

In his book, Haffner writes of the Nazi "takeover" of Germany:

All this was still something one only read about in the press. You did not see or hear anything that was any different from what had gone on before. There were brown SA uniforms on the streets, demonstrations, shouts of "Heil," but otherwise it was "business as usual." In the Kammergericht, the highest court in Prussia, where I worked as Referendar as the time, the process of the law was not changed at all by the fact that the interior minister enacted ridiculous edicts. The newspapers might report that the constitution was in ruins. Here every paragraph of the Civil Code was still valid and was mulled over and analyzed as carefully as ever. Which was the true reality?...

I must admit that I was inclined to view the undisturbed functioning of the law, and indeed the continued normal course of daily life, as a triumph over the Nazis. They could behave as raucously and wildly as they wished. They could still only stir up the political surface. The depths of the ocean of life remained entirely unaffected.(109-110)

Confusion and difficulty to perceive events breed inaction, as Haffner writes:

Daily life also made it difficult to see the situation clearly. Life went on as before, though it had now definitely become ghostly and unreal, and was daily mocked by the events that served as its background. ... now it was no longer possible to deny that daily life itself had become hollow or mechanical. Every minute merely confirmed the victory of the enemy forces flooding in from all sides.

Strangely enough, it was just this automatic continuation of ordinary life that hindered any lively, forceful reaction against the horror....

It was hindered by the mechanical continuation of normal daily life.... It is the cause of his reluctance to do anything that could "derail" his life -- something audacious or out of the ordinary. It is this lack of self-reliance that opens the possibility of immense catastrophes of civilization such as the rule of the Nazis in Germany.

...In this way, unsure of myself, temporizing, I performed my routine daily duties. At home, I gave way to fruitless and ridiculous outbursts at the dinner table. Excluded from events and passive like millions of others, I let events come at me.

And they did. (137-9)

How poignant his words, but how true to our experience! It seems even with the momentous days that we live in, my inner being and my reason for living have remained the same because my inner life has been unaffected. Part of it is youth and ignorance, and part of it is simply absence or distance from the happenings. I don't live in Washington or New York City, so how does it really affect me? True, prices have increased and the administration is about to change, but that remains far from my private life because it does not touch my inmost being.

How scary this was for Haffner who looked back and realized that a generation of Germans had allowed their country to be taken over by the Nazis all because it did not affect them. How could it? He says, "I was inclined not to take them very seriously -- a common attitude among their inexperience opponents, which helped them a lot, and still helped them." (104)

It's food for thought at least.

Living Life...

As a young person, one doesn't always reflect on what life is about and whether or not one is living it to the fullest. Bust, recently, that thought has crept up in my mind. Not just whether or not I live in a way that glorifies the Lord and prepares me for His coming, but whether I'm enjoying life in a full and human way.

A couple things I read today make these thoughts all the more concrete.

The first comes from Anne of the Island by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Anne has just finished talking to Ruby Gillis in what turns out to be their last conversation together on earth.

Heaven could not be what Ruby had been used to. There had been nothing in her gay, frivolous life, her shallow ideals and aspirations, to fit her for that great change, or make the life to come seem to her anything but alien and unreal and undesirable.... She had laid up her treasures on earth only; she had lived solely for the little things of life—the things that pass—forgetting the great things that go onward into eternity, bridging the gulf between the two lives and making of death a mere passing from one dwelling to the other—from twilight to unclouded day. God would take care of her there—Anne believed—she would learn—but now it was no wonder her soul clung, in blind helplessness, to the only things she knew and loved....

Anne walked home very slowly in the moonlight. The evening had changed something for her. Life held a different meaning, a deeper purpose. On the surface it would go on just the same; but the deeps had been stirred. It must not be with her as with poor butterfly Ruby. When she came to the end of one life it must not be to face the next with the shrinking terror of something wholly different — something for which accustomed thought and ideal and aspiration had unfitted her. The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must be begun here on earth. (Chapter 14)

The second comes from Haffner's Defying Hitler:

A generation of young Germans... had never learned to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful, and worthwhile, how to enjoy it and make it interesting.

...There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live. They began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities. It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis. (68-9)

Without a doubt, private life needs to be valued as it is lived and as something to be studied. It is the ordinary things in which we ought to find pleasure and meaning.

There is much on the earth that is fleeting and very much earthly. Ruby spent her life, enjoying boys and worrying about her looks. There's so much more to life that is meaningful and worthwhile! We ought to put our heart into something lasting -- something many Germans, Haffner says, never learned to do. Like Anne, we ought to have a deeper purpose while taking time to find the good in life.