When I was a child, I was very sensitive and emotional; which kind of sounds funny since I don’t suppose that I’ve ever stopped being those things. But somewhere along the way I figured out that wearing my heart on my sleeve and allowing everything to penetrate my soul, was not the most expedient way to live. The first step was suppressing the urge to express every thought that came into my head and eventually I began to develop my mind as a way of heading off those powerful emotions. I learned to anticipate situations and to think my way through them as a defense against getting overwhelmed by circumstances.
It is interesting how dramatically that changed the face of who I was. As a child I was driven by the winds of my feelings, while as an adult I have largely been driven by pragmatism and my own sense of what is “reasonable”. Though I doubt many men would express it this way, I would guess that most have gone through some sort of similar process. If you’re ever around little boys, you’ll find that most start out as emotional, expressive and affectionate; while grown men generally exhibit limited evidence that this was ever the case.
At the point I became serious about living for the Lord, I immediately found Him pushing me back towards this sensitivity. I felt as though He said that this was part of how He designed me; that my gifts were wrapped up in that sensitivity and that a childlike heart was the only way I’d experience His kingdom. While I understand that He doesn’t want me to be driven by my emotions, I have found that He is equally dissatisfied with idea that I would be guided by my rational thoughts.
God and His kingdom far exceed the bounds of my natural mind’s ability to understand them and to rely on my thoughts as a guide greatly diminishes the influence He means to have in my life. To that end, He has graciously given us His Holy Spirit, that we might have the mind of Christ and the heart of the Father.
As I ponder all of this, I am reminded of some things my mother taught us as children. At a very early age she began to play card games with us. She used this as a way to help us with our number recognition, counting and learning simple arithmetic. It was very effective. She started with simple games like “War”, in which we learned that an eight was greater than a seven and that a king beat a jack. We went on to “Go Fish”, where we learned how to match pairs together. As she taught us more complex games, we eventually came to the place where we needed to learn the concept of “trump”. Many card games include the use of a trump suit, which is when one suit usurps the power of all the others (e.g. Spades).
At first it seemed a strange concept; after all, we’d just come to understand that a king was greater than a ten, and now we had to grasp that if that ten was a trump card, it nullified the king’s power. I believe that as we mature as Believers there is a similar adjustment that God means to make in our thinking.
As the simple games of our childhood taught us the patterns of counting and arithmetic, so our life experiences give us a sense of the world and how it works. Unconsciously, we’ve learned these patterns and they’ve formed boundaries within our thought processes as to what is sane, rational, reasonable or even possible. Maybe we’ve consciously studied things like science, psychology or philosophy, to come to some greater understanding of what the boundaries for man and mankind are, but I’d submit that whatever we might have learned has given us only a small view of a picture that is greater than we can comprehend.
As we come into relationship with God, we find that despite all the patterns that life has taught us, He has given us some trump cards, which have the ability to usurp the power of whatever hand we’ve been dealt. As I prayed I sensed that the three trump cards He’s given us are faith, hope and love, and that the application of any one of these into our situation has the potential to overcome what our mind has concluded to be the natural order of things.
As we study the scriptures, we find the power of faith, hope and love, both implicitly and explicitly expressed. Repeatedly God reminds us of the limitations of our natural mind and exhorts us towards faith as the pathway to cross these borders. He tells us not to lean on our own understanding; that His thoughts and ways are higher than ours; and that He is able to do exceedingly, abundantly more than we could ever imagine or hope for.
He warns us that knowledge puffs a man up; and He offers both a peace that surpasses understanding and a love that surpasses knowledge. He tells us that the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. Yet, despite these exhortations, it seems that much of Western Christianity is often more rooted in psychology than in the word of God. Psychology can only study the pattern of human behavior as it has been, but it cannot hope to reach the possibilities of what we were created to be. Only the Creator can show us that.
Much of the well-intentioned, self-help mentality within the church keeps us bound to finite worldly thinking and at the mercy of the world’s system. Paul warned us against this when he said, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world, rather than on Christ”. Jesus told us that if we had the faith of a mustard seed, that we’d be able to overcome the things that we consider to be the “laws of nature”.
Peter further states that love has the power to overcome a multitude of sins and Paul adds that we can possess every spiritual gift, but that if we have not love, we have and are “nothing”. We must understand that the love they’re speaking of is God’s love and not the self-seeking human strain, which is of little value to the kingdom. God’s love “always protects, always trusts, always hopes and always perseveres”.
As we look at the apostles, we see how these forces came to bear in their lives. When Herod imprisoned Peter, he was guarded by four squads of four soldiers; with a soldier constantly chained to each side of him. Our natural minds would say that there was no hope for Peter, but the scripture tells us “the church was earnestly praying to God for him”. This seems a marked contrast to how the modern western church might handle such a scenario. We’d likely call a lawyer from the Center for Law and Justice, to defend Peter in court; circulate petitions via the internet, demanding Peter’s release; and maybe even set up a picket at Herod’s palace.
We seem to have forgotten that our battle is not against flesh and blood, and that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal in nature. The early church asserted their faith and appealed to the power that was higher than any natural law and as Peter slept, an angel came, woke him up and walked Him out of the prison. Our natural minds cannot comprehend this, but the nature of a miracle is that it cannot be explained and is beyond what we believe to be reasonable.
We must understand that God’s reality is much higher than ours. As the church prayed, they invited God and all His resources into the situation; which changed everything. How often have we failed to invite God into our situation because we felt bound to the world system, and that the outcome was somehow inevitable? The Lord said that we have not because we ask not.
We see examples of this intervention in Paul’s life as well; like the time he and Silas were praising the Lord in prison. In so doing, they asserted their hope and faith into the situation and the Lord literally shook the earth to free them. He is no respecter of persons, so it holds true that He will do the same for us.
I am certainly not advocating an empty headed walk with the Lord, but we must realize that there is a huge chasm between worldly knowledge and the knowledge of God. Inherent in the knowledge of God is relationship with Him. The Pharisees had devoted their life to the study of scripture, but were still unable to recognize the manifestation of truth when it stood before them. They knew about Him, but they didn’t know Him.
God did not leave us to our own resources in this; He gave us His Holy Spirit to be the “Counselor”, the “Comforter” and to “teach us all things”. He placed at our disposal all the resources of heaven, but in the church today those resources remain largely untapped. When our natural minds come against a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, they tend to default to fear and discouragement; but God wants the hearts of His children to default to faith, hope and love.
When we don’t have the answers for people, He wants us to default to loving them where they’re at. When situations look negative and hopeless, He wants us to default to placing our hope in Him and to assert our faith in prayer, by inviting Him into the situation. He is a God who delights in making a way where there seems to be no way.
Paul said, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your minds in Christ Jesus”. He also said that one day “fire will test the quality of each man’s work” and I believe when that test is done, all that will remain are those things done out of faith, hope and love.
While those without Christ are left only to play “War” with the world, hoping that the cards will fall their way; every child of God possesses these trump cards, which are able to overpower any cards that the world may deal.
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Bjcorbin's Blog 
Finding God’s Favor
Posted in Commentaries, Tributes, tagged aggressiveness, beloved, childlike, children, compassion, cynicism, faith, frolicking, grandchildren, Heart, innocence, intellect, intelligence, nurture, nurturing, partner, sensitivity, sibling, smart, transformation, vulnerabilities, wife, wisdom on May 26, 2025| 1 Comment »
Like most kids who grew up in the 1960’s and 70’s, my parents had home movies they’d occasionally pull out and show on a big projector screen. One that particularly sticks out in my mind is of my brothers and I playing on the street in front of my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn. It was a cold, dreary looking day, and we were all in our winter coats, but we were running around with the sort of abandon that only young children seem to possess.
I believe that I was about 5 yrs old in the film, which would make my brothers 6 yrs and 7 yrs old. In particular it was my brother Tom (the oldest sibling) who stood out. His big eyes and childlike manner in these movies were such a sharp contrast to the serious and pragmatic fellow he would eventually become. These old reels were some of the only evidence that he’d not really started out that way.
Life has a way of pushing back against innocence and cultivating cynicism. And for little boys, wide eyed compassion and sensitivity aren’t generally a sustainable course. Very quickly it becomes clear that having such emotions or at least allowing folks to know that you have them, is a precarious path to take. Early on, it becomes a matter of survival to learn how to hide your vulnerabilities and to always come from a position of strength. For many young men that manifests in a form of aggressiveness that is generally accepted for young males. For my brother Tom, it manifested in the form of intellect.
My brother had a brilliant mind and was usually one of the smartest guys in the room. He also had the ability to express himself, which made his intelligence harder to ignore. Because my father was in the Air Force, we changed schools constantly, but wherever we’d go my brother would quickly be viewed as the smartest kid in the class. As the sensitive nurturing elements of his personality receded into dormancy, the power of his mind emerged. He wasn’t just smart, he was a born leader, and soon that was all you could see.
As a younger brother, who had no desire to be led by someone I thought of as a peer, I just viewed him as overbearing and bossy. By the time we got to high school, his identity as the smart kid was already set in stone, and he further solidified it by dating the smartest girl in school. In those days, if you had asked anyone who knew my brother to describe him with three adjectives, his intelligence would have been referenced with the first word.
Forty-five years later, as I sat through the various memorial services celebrating my brother’s (too short) life, I suddenly recalled those scenes of us frolicking on the street as kids, and I realized that not one person had made a singular reference to his intelligence. Indeed, there was barely any mention of the impressive work he had done at Ball Aerospace (e.g., the Hubble Telescope, the Mars Rover), or any of his other accomplishments.
As the montage of pictures scrolled across the screen, they were mostly scenes of Tom with his grandchildren, or his god children, or dear friends, or with his beloved wife. In many of them he was dressed funny and clearly goofing around with that same sort of abandon that we’d had as children.
When people eulogized him, it was his warmth, compassion, faith, and wisdom they spoke of. And I found myself wondering how this transformation had occurred. What was it that allowed my brother’s true heart to re-emerge over all these years.
The short and simple answer is that the God who gave Him that heart, also worked throughout his life to preserve it. But at the center of God’s plan was Tom’s beloved wife Fawn.
By the time they’d met in high school, Tom had developed a pretty sharp edge to his personality, yet around her, he was like Jello. He was crazy about her from day one, and she was not the type of person to use that as leverage against him. If there were ever two people who seemed destined for each other, it was these two, and absolutely no one was surprised that they married and spent a lifetime together.
Looking back, I realize that because Fawn loved my brother for who he was, she made it safe for the nurturing, loving, playful part of his heart to re-emerge. Because she routinely engaged that part of his being, it regained strength and eventually became the hallmark of his legacy. Though it sounds cliche, she brought out the best in him. And to his credit, I believe that he did that for her as well.
As I pondered all this, I couldn’t help but think that this is exactly what God had in mind for marriage. That these unions were meant to amount to more than just the sum of the parts. That both partners would help each other become the people they were created to be.
If Tom had chosen to spend his life with someone who only related to him on an intellectual level, he may well have become a stoic recluse. Thankfully, he found a loving soul, who was full of spirit, and every bit his intellectual equal. She loved his heart and nurtured it throughout their years together.
In my brother’s final days, the room was filled with people who loved him and whose lives had been touched by his. And right by his side was his beloved partner Fawn. Though we could wish for more days, it would be hard to imagine a better way to finish the race.
He who finds a wife of worth, receives the favor of the Lord (Prov.18:22)
A wife of noble character is worth far more than rubies (Prov.31:10)
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