by Patty Morwood

One day I came across a psalm that instantly “talked.” Every line was rich with meaning for me.  And oh, how I needed to be reminded of God’s economy of things.
Apparently I had long ago written in the margin of Psalm 73, “God’s sanctuary: the godly woman’s lens for life.” No other beckoning was needed. I put on my magnifiers and settled in with my pen and a cup of tea.  This was going to be a slow meditation in search of a fresh, clean reset of perspective.
In the first verses I saw a common predicament that many Christian women live in: themselves saved by the redeeming work of the Lord Jesus Christ, but living and working among unbelievers - being worn down and sawed off raw. 
For the psalmist, the salve for his oppressed state-of-mind came when he walked into the sanctuary, presumably packed wall-to-wall with thirsty and needy worshipers just like himself.
It’s true for us, too, the company of righteous believers is where we can rest, finally distanced from gangs of the wicked. For five or six days of any given week the lives of the ungodly live large before our eyes; talk of evil, always punctuated with laughter and jokes, floats through the classroom, the office, and sometimes even the hallways of home.
Do you feel like this psalmist, whose feet nearly slip because he is surrounded by prosperous ungodly people and it eats away at him? 
Do you smart because the wicked wear pride as an adornment, a badge of power? 
Weep because your colleagues or husband or students actually believe God will not know their sin? 
Feel trapped in cords of ugly when they mock God’s wisdom and even His existence?
If you are worn down spend time with Psalm 73. Its author is finally healed of his great burden when he walks into the sanctuary where he is surrounded by the redeemed, where words of life and the beauty of worship dance with joy to the highest heaven.
Finally he understands: God has really set the wicked in slippery places, though the psalmist felt that he himself was sliding down at an accelerating rate. The wicked – those who persistently deny God and disparage His universal rule – will one day, in a moment, meet destruction! 
What is the healing truth in this contrasting description of two people-types, the redeemed and the degenerate?  It is the shout of victory in verse 25, the literary climax of the song: a believer’s desire for none else but God, Himself. This is the clear lens that reshapes perspective and renews one’s ability to do more than cope.
Let me paraphrase that verse: there is none in heaven but God Almighty and none else upon earth that I desire!
You and I may feel our hearts cast down, our physical bodies barely surviving, but in reality God Himself holds our souls and God Himself strengthens our bones.
It is good for us to draw near to the Lord, GOD in the sanctuary of believers … and also privately in the Word, specifically in this case, by praying through Psalm 73. Experiencing the Lord’s Presence teaches us to breathe the good stuff: His love and power toward us and our Christian sisters the world over.
How can we help but declare His works into the pathways of the wicked? How can we resist the call to stand in the sanctuary with other downcast women? This is our life mission. This is our vocation … and this can be our sheer delight.

A few days ago I hiked through a forest with friends, bending down often to collect the fiery red and orange leaves strewn on paths and boulders.  I remarked to myself, again, that leaves don’t really matter in this annual recollection; it’s the Tree itself that grips me. 
It always does at this time of year when they begin to go dormant and release their deadening leaves into the cooling wind.
Just few years ago during this very same season, my husband and I rode an antique train up a mountain in West Virginia.  A swath just a few feet wide had been cut through a vast sea of trees to allow the old tracks to still hold that old train as it made its eight-hour trek to the top, where miners who had worked deep in the mountain in the 1800s had built a town for their families. 
Periodically a family member would take the long ride down to civilization for necessaries or to find a doctor.  The ride down, the ride back up.  Two days surrounded by trees.
To this day it’s the only sight to see through the windows.  No structures, no light, no sky even.  Trees stretched upward so high one doubts their top branches really exist.  Trees packed together, marching in lock-step to the summit of their mountain.  An endless experience for any passenger rocking to and fro with hours more to go.
But I was riveted.  “Patty, what are you thinking?” he queried.  “About the Tree,” I answered as thousands of them sped by my window, a silent witness.
The Cross is our reminder today of a saving love so startling that hymnists and poets over centuries have penned the most glorious language to portray it.  But the Cross was a terrifying sight, an anathema to even speak of for those on the ground who witnessed its use in ancient times. 
The Gospels barely mention it; we know His feet were nailed to the pillar and His arms to the crossbeam.  
Instead they wrote of the week leading up to it: palm branches, poignant gatherings at Lazarus’ house, the Last Supper and Gethsemane, the trial and the screaming “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” of the midnight rabble, the brutal trek of a nearly unrecognizable Man through the streets of Jerusalem. 
And they wrote of its victory-day afterward: women laden with spices suddenly face-to-face with the Resurrected One, followers on the road out of Jerusalem walking and talking with their Lord unknowingly, the lying collaboration between natural enemies: soldiers, government and religious leaders.
In those days everyone knew the inhumanity and the agonies of the Roman cross.  Everyone had seen it.  Why go into it when expensive scrolls were needed to explain the new fresh Gospel circulating where Paul and Peter and Barnabas and Luke had traveled with their life-changing story of love? 
But you and I must take a long hard look at the Cross.  We don’t see this sort of thing ringing our cities that teem with shops and theaters and walking paths and parks. 
But the Romans would leave the pillar entrenched in the ground just outside the towns or even at a crossroads, standing mute as a warning to occupied peoples of what would be the fate for the next rebel against their rule.  Afterward they’d throw the body into a shallow pit nearby for the carrion to feast on until they reached the stripped-clean skeletons layered underneath.
Their bodies were nailed as one would nail a marker or a sign.  Huge nails; powerful blows hammered by soldiers deadened to the cries for mercy.
But that one particular Tree, that monstrous obscene Cross, was stained with a deep red drained from a God-man willing to be there.  The most beautiful of men died impaled because of you and me.  Because our sin so long ago had incurred the wrath of God and the greatest mercy of God … so long ago. 
For us, for you and for me.  For the joy of our salvation.
Why would I write this now?  Why not save this essay for Easter Week?
Because fall is the season marked by millions of trees undergoing a remarkable change right before our eyes; many families plan excursions into areas of spectacular fall foliage.  Because we decorate our dining tables with vibrant leaves collected from trees shutting down for winter.  Because rustling is a sound that awakens and reminds.
Because I can’t any more look at trees in this season with a simple enjoyment. 
Never again will I be able to hike a forest, wrap my fingers around bark for balance, bend down with the impulse to collect, without experiencing the deep mournful regret for sin and an ever-deepening awe and gratitude for our Lord’s bloody rescue. 
 
 

foreword by Patty Morwood

   I don’t remember exactly when I met Jean Berkmeyer, but it was shortly after she and her family returned from living in Switzerland.  The whole church was ecstatic to have them in their midst once again; the excitement was palpable. 
   We did eventually come to know each other though we were never really involved in the same things.  But I kept seeing her and hearing her voice floating down the halls, inevitably accompanied by laughter; and I couldn’t help but laugh myself though I hadn’t been in on the conversation.  Jean affects people like that because she is genuinely a funny gal.  In fact, she told me she believes laughter is the best medicine and that’s why she’s rarely serious for long.  I’ve also found her to be spontaneous, caring, energetic, and always real.
   Jean is a middle child, the daughter of a Southern mother and FBI agent father.  Poor girl, she was almost kicked out of children’s choir because she was supposedly ‘tone deaf’ and yet she became a music major in college!  God blessed her marriage with the man of her dreams who houses a stubbornness just as strong as her own; together they are raising three “beautiful and wildly different” children to the glory of God.
   As editor of the church newsletter’s women’s pages, I was fortunate to learn that she can write so I asked her to contribute an article. Of course her answer was spontaneously in the positive!  Over time she wrote several articles, all of which may eventually find their way into this blog at some point.
Her essay below is a personal take on Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny.  I wonder if, when you read this story to your children, you see yourself there: your willfulness, how you confidently push against the bonds of love, and your secret delight in hearing always, no matter your blind self-orientation, a divine love-affirming response. 
   Jean has captured the essence of the story beautifully: God loves and God pursues; we are self-focused, ever-pursuing our own thing.  For most of us though there is finally an acceptance of the ineffable … God’s saving redeeming love in every aspect of our lives.