Sunday, March 27, 2016

"Crown Him with Many Crowns"


Crown Him with many crowns, the Lamb upon His throne.
Hark! How the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own.
Awake, my soul, and sing of Him who died for thee,
And hail Him as thy matchless King through all eternity.

Crown Him the virgin’s Son, the God incarnate born,
Whose arm those crimson trophies won which now His brow adorn;
Fruit of the mystic rose, as of that rose the stem;
The root whence mercy ever flows, the Babe of Bethlehem.

Crown Him the Son of God, before the worlds began,
And ye who tread where He hath trod, crown Him the Son of Man;
Who every grief hath known that wrings the human breast,
And takes and bears them for His own, that all in Him may rest.

Crown Him the Lord of life, who triumphed over the grave,
And rose victorious in the strife for those He came to save.
His glories now we sing, who died, and rose on high,
Who died eternal life to bring, and lives that death may die.

Crown Him the Lord of peace, whose power a scepter sways
From pole to pole, that wars may cease, and all be prayer and praise.
His reign shall know no end, and round His piercèd feet
Fair flowers of paradise extend their fragrance ever sweet.

Crown Him the Lord of love, behold His hands and side,
Those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.
No angel in the sky can fully bear that sight,
But downward bends his burning eye at mysteries so bright.

Crown Him the Lord of Heaven, enthroned in worlds above,
Crown Him the King to Whom is given the wondrous name of Love.
Crown Him with many crowns, as thrones before Him fall;
Crown Him, ye kings, with many crowns, for He is King of all.

Crown Him the Lord of lords, who over all doth reign,
Who once on earth, the incarnate Word, for ransomed sinners slain,
Now lives in realms of light, where saints with angels sing
Their songs before Him day and night, their God, Redeemer, King.

Crown Him the Lord of years, the Potentate of time,
Creator of the rolling spheres, ineffably sublime.
All hail, Redeemer, hail! For Thou has died for me;
Thy praise and glory shall not fail throughout eternity.

(all text Matthew Bridges except vv. 2 and 3, which are the contribution of Godfrey Thring)


Friday, March 25, 2016

The Great Exchange

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin,
so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:21, ESV



"My Saviour wept that all tears might be wiped from my eyes,
groaned that I might have endless song,
endured all pain that I might have unfading health,
bore a thorned crown that I might have a glory-diadem,
bowed his head that I might uplift mine,
experienced reproach that I might receive welcome,
closed his eyes in death that I might gaze on unclouded brightness,
expired that I might for ever live.
O Father, who spared not thine only Son that thou mightest spare me,
All this transfer thy love designed and accomplished;
Help me to adore thee by lips and life.
O that my every breath might be ecstatic praise,
my every step buoyant with delight, as I see
my enemies crushed,
Satan baffled, defeated, destroyed,
sin buried in the ocean of reconciling blood,
hell's gates closed, heaven's portal open.
Go forth, O conquering God, and show me the cross,
mighty to subdue, comfort and save."

Valley of Vision, 42-43


Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Sailaway {Lone Star to Last Frontier, 2015}


Our home for the next week, the Star Princess



We enjoyed watching several helicopters come and go from this helipad as we waited for sailaway:





The yellow piles on the left are sulfur, the primary mineral resource of Vancouver





Canada Place from the water

Passing under the Lion's Gate Bridge

Lion's Gate Bridge and Prospect Point




{If you are accessing this by e-mail and cannot see the photos, here is the link to the Web version of the blog post "Sailaway".}

Monday, March 21, 2016

Vancouver {Lone Star to Last Frontier, 2015}

For the backstory, please see the post "Courage, Dear Heart!"
{If you are viewing this in an e-mail and cannot see the photos, you may wish to visit the Web version of this blog post.}

My family spent the evening of our arrival in Vancouver strategizing how we would spend our one full day there before embarking on our cruise. My dad discovered the Hop On and Off Trolley, which proved the ideal way to maximize the amount of the city we saw within our party's walking limits.


Our journey took us past several public art installations:




To our delight, we also drove past the stadium where the US Women's National Soccer Team had won the World Cup (2015) earlier in the summer:


We left the trolley long enough to tour the Classical Chinese Garden, a peaceful and remarkable quiet refuge in the middle of the urban bustle. Although a number of Japanese gardens exist in North America (with one near us in Fort Worth), this one, according to our guide, is the only Chinese one.


bonsai crape myrtle



Silk double-sided embroidery, free of knots and loose ends on both sides

Limestone sculpted by the sea
Each of the numerous doors and windows framed a different picture as we moved through the gardens.







We reboarded the next trolley which passed the gardens and arrived at Canada Place to eat lunch and change to the Stanley Park trolley line. This was our first glimpse of the port from which we would sail the next day.



On the way to the park, we passed the Olympic torch:

Olympic torch from Vancouver's winter games

We disembarked the trolley again for the Stanley Park Rose Gardens:



Photo credit: my dad (Amore was inside the tree trunk.)




A musician played a traditional Chinese instrument along the path from the garden to the Vancouver Aquarium, our next stop:



Sea Lions

Beluga whale


Moon Jellyfish



The trolley picked us up next to the harbor to take us to Prospect Point and the Tea Room at Stanley Park, where we ate supper and enjoyed the view, grateful for the mild and sunny day God gave us in Vancouver.



Friday, March 18, 2016

"Courage, Dear Heart!" {Adventure-Bound}


At the gate, waiting for our plane to board

When 2014 was new, my parents told Amore and me that they wanted to take each of their daughters on a special trip. Terza’s family had chosen Walt Disney World, since Rocky and the Thunder Twins were just old enough to appreciate it, so we needed to consider where we’d like to go.

Amore was excited, but then I suspect he secretly keeps a packed carry-on and passport in the back of his office closet “just in case.” (You can take the boy out of the mission field, but you can’t take the mission field out of the boy.) I, on the other hand, was mostly panicked. Those who have followed my travel attempts since 2010 can understand why, in my rheumatologist’s words, I might “seem to have a little travel-related post-traumatic stress going on here.”

But this was important to the three other people involved, which made it important to me, and my rational self knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Amore immediately started researching the most exotic, rugged wilderness locations in North America. After burying my head in the sand a while, I asked a well-traveled friend for suggestions we could all 4 enjoy. Based on an extended family vacation of her own, she recommended an Alaskan cruise. With a balcony room, beautiful scenery would be accessible from our own cabin for anyone who needed to stay and rest, but the wide range of excursion options would accommodate more active inclinations too.

We booked passage for the May 2015, made airline reservations, renewed passports, and began thinking through what we had and what we lacked for the trip. My doctors all approved, but as the journey approached and tasks began to be checked off our list, my anxiety only increased. When unforeseen circumstances postponed our journey until September, the delay only worsened the worry cycle.



Three times in 2 months we planned to visit Amore’s family a couple of hundred miles away; my health or pain level postponed the visit twice, and the third time he went without me. How would I manage a couple of thousand miles away, and outside the lower 48 states, no less? Yet I was ashamed and lonely in my anxiety, chastising myself for ingratitude.

In addition, several ongoing situations left me worried about being out of touch with the home front for 2 weeks. Besides that, we’d never left the Ebony Dog or Wits’ End for that long; the last time we were away from home for 15 days was for a mission trip to Southeast Asia in 2000, before those trials had arisen, when all we had was a 1 bedroom apartment of borrowed furniture, and my dog Steinway was already in the care of my parents, in preparation for our imminent overseas move. At that time I was running 4 to 6 miles a day and only had one chronic illness, which we knew how to manage and did not pose a difficulty with travel.

The final months before the cruise included emergencies in every single area of concern, and some I hadn’t thought to worry about. None of them caused lasting or life-changing harm, but they only fueled my fears. My good ankle swelled up without any inciting trauma, resulting in the same diagnosis the other ankle has had for 3 years. Both my sisters and a brother-in-law moved and changed jobs. My mother and I both suffered painful falls. A nephew had a swimming accident that was 20 underwater seconds away from tragedy. (He’s fine, and it was astonishingly, graciously minor in hindsight, after the initial, fraught 48 hours.) Even though being home didn’t prevent any of them, it felt more right to be with hurting family members in person and by phone, to take Ebony to the vet myself for his first-ever back problem and work out the needed behavior modifications, and to be able to check the back garden morning and evening after the watering timer broke and turned the lawn into a swamp. I feared being out of touch for 2 weeks and returning to find those I love had been suffering without me even knowing how to pray. Sometimes a vivid imagination can be a blessing, but where worry is concerned, it’s definitely a liability.

This is not a how-to-beat-anxiety post, in the event you’re still reading and hadn’t figured that out yet. If anything, it’s a how-I-was-anxious-and-the-Lord-rescued-me-in-spite-of-myself post. God-sized challenges, some much bigger than a cruise, have not stopped since our return, and I need to remember how He got me through this one as a means of grace to (please, Lord) get from fear to faith sooner next time.



  • Recollect. The Lord graciously used a sermon clip to remind me of Lloyd-Jones's words on the merits of talking to oneself, and I realized they exactly described what I’d been doing: listening to myself instead of talking to myself. As I began reminding myself of the Scriptures I knew and the Bible stories of impossible victories in times past, the words, “Courage, dear heart!” bubbled up again and again in my soul. My concordance didn’t reveal anywhere in the Bible for that precise phrase, so I asked Google, which pointed me to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. (Lewis. Of course it would be Lewis.) My body and hands were too full of duties to read it all in search of that one phrase, so I listened as I worked, and in listening discovered the passage and the treasure in that phrase.
  • Recognize and repent. One lesson the Lord has been teaching me in the last few years is that an immediate impulse to fear in response to an actual threat may be a biological process I can’t control and an emotion I cannot extinguish, but what I do from there is my choice and responsibility.

    If I take the fear and threat straight to God and lay hold of His grace to exercise the will His Spirit rules to fill my mind with truth that will eventually replace the fear with peace, all is well. If, however, I take the fear to my imagination, if I coddle and indulge it so that it spirals into catastrophizing, I sin. If I allow the fear, especially fear of a threat which only yet exists in my imagination, to persuade me not to obey God’s will, I sin. If I let fear restrain me from loving my neighbor, I sin.

    Once the Lord illumined the fact that I was sinning in my indulgence of an anxiety that could only bring selfishness and retreat from God’s path, I saw how ugly it was and turned from the fear to the Lord. Or perhaps I should say “began turning,” for it was at least a daily need to turn my heart toward Him and away from fear’s bullying taunts.
  • Remember. Remembrance is one gracious means of abiding in an attitude of repentance and faith. The Scriptures both model this and provide content for remembrance. Starting there primed the pump for my personal remembrance of the “memorial stones” God has raised in my life, and there have been plenty of God-sized challenges in which He has shown Himself strong on my behalf. To help with this I ordered a pendant from Etsy with the simple words, “Courage, dear heart.” The weight of it on my chest reminded me of God’s invitation to trust Him.
  • Request. I admitted my powerlessness and anxiety and asked for help, from God first and from a few trusted friends second. “Show up and show off, Lord. I can’t do this unless you do.”

  • Respond with resolve. Taking a deep breath and stepping forward into the actions God had assigned to me, saturating every step with prayer, helped prepare the way for whatever “adventure Aslan would send” and also helped calm my anxiety. Planning was able to mitigate some of my concerns and make arrangements in advance for my known medical problems in case my joints behaved badly or medications had to be replaced onboard ship despite every safeguard.

    Every time fear reared its ugly head, God’s grace enabled me toward fresh resolve to trust Him and open my hands to His will. If that meant this voyage would be more painful than pleasant, repentance and remembrance enabled me to pray, “Thy will be done,” and to recognize that His presence would drive out fear in the deep waters, fiery trials, and dark valleys, just as much as in clear skies and blue waters. Unbelief is worse than pain, if He is with me in the pain.
  • Rallying cry. Finally, over and over again, when fear threatened or my body wasn’t up to the day’s demands, I placed my hand on my chest or took the pendant in my fingers and whispered, “Courage, dear heart. Courage.” (Actually, this has outlasted the cruise.) And to the Lord, “Show up and show off, Lord. Your will be done.”

There’s my Ebenezer, Crumbles, my "Thus far the Lord has helped me." If you who are reading this feel anxious today, I pray God meets you through these words, if only to let you know that you aren’t alone in your fear and that He is big enough for your need.

May He give you grace and strength to recollect the need of talking to yourself, repent of giving fear its head, remember His ways and works, request help in prayer, respond with resolve and obedient trust, and rally your soul with the cry, "Courage, dear heart!"

In the next several posts, I look forward to sharing with you what God did on this journey last September and what I would have missed if He had not pulled me out of the paralysis of anxiety into obedience, whatever the outcome.