Between the Two Ponds
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
Until Something Burns
Allure is not a word we use much, and when we do we usually mean something a little dishonest. A lure is what you put on a hook.
"Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her." (Hosea 2:14)
Allure is a suspicious word to us. We think of a lure, the thing you hide a hook inside. This is the opposite. The alluring here is not a trick but a persuasion, an offer held out to a wandering heart. Would you be willing to consider another way. Would you be willing to see my goodness as greater than the thing you have loved more than me. And notice how God does it, because it is the strangest part of the verse. He does not corner her. He does not expose her in the street. He draws her out into the wilderness and speaks tenderly. Faithful love never forces itself on anyone.
Think of the two walking to Emmaus, away from Jerusalem, away from everyone, and doing it after the reports had already come back that the tomb was empty. They had heard the witnesses and walked away anyway. And Jesus comes alongside, keeps their eyes from knowing him, and simply walks. He had just defeated death. He had every reason to correct them on the spot. Instead he asks questions, he listens, he opens the Scriptures and shows how the whole story had been pointing to him the entire way, and he lets them not yet know that it is him. He walks in the direction they are already going.
He may do that further than we think, walking the ones who are turning away as far as they will go, still speaking tenderly, still holding out the other road, right up to the gate. Their hearts burned first. The recognition came second. So he will not seize you and he will not shame you. He will walk beside you until something in you begins to burn.
The Problem Is the Pronoun
Say it out loud a few times and you will hear the whole problem, because the problem is not in the nouns. The problem is in the pronoun. Every single one of those things was given to her. She did not spin the wool. She did not press the oil.
"She said, I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink." (Hosea 2:5)
Listen to how Gomer talks. My wool. My oil. My bread. Say it a few times and you will hear the whole problem, and the problem is not in the nouns. It is in the pronoun. She did not spin the wool or press the oil. Every one of those things was given to her. She has stood in the middle of another's provision, called it hers, and walked out the door to find people who might give her more of what she already had.
That is not a story about a woman in the eighth century before Christ. That is most of us, on an ordinary Tuesday. We forget who is really providing, and we run after the next thing, the next relationship, the next signal of status, while the faithful love that stocked the shelves stands quietly in the house we are leaving.
The forgetting is rarely dramatic. No one wakes up and decides to be ungrateful. It happens the way a house gets cluttered, one thing at a time, none of them decisive, until one day you look around at a life that was entirely handed to you and find that every item in it has your name on it. My health. My family. My gifts. My work. My church.
This is the quiet blasphemy of the settled heart, to hold a gift and call it a possession. So take the inventory honestly. Go down the list of what you call mine, and over each one name who actually gave it. A gift received keeps you near the Giver. A gift renamed sends you out the door to look for him in all the wrong houses.