The Paradox Paper #45
Theology and Cleaning Help
Well hey! A reader reached out two days ago to ask if there was another edition of the Paper coming out soon, and we’re all glad she did, because if she hadn’t, I’d have clean forgot.
Me and the kids are back to school, and it has been the smoothest back to school transition we’ve had yet. The baby is annoyed about still not being big enough to go with his brothers, but what can ya do. Next year at this time we’ll be dropping them all off in one place. I love school for the routine and the learning and the community spirit it can foster, but it sure does make time fly by.
Speaking of time flying! You may remember this email I sent out back in March, regarding an upcoming trip to Nigeria I’m taking with my church. Poof! Just like that, here we are staring down the barrel of Fall Travel Plans.
Our church has partnered with A Place of Hope since it began in 2011, and a group of adults used to visit every year. Like everything else, that pattern suffered a major interruption with the onset of the pandemic in 2020. This October will be the first trip back since then. It’ll be my first time ever getting to meet the precious kiddos I’ve seen photos of and heard so much about over the past four years, and I am so excited! With the help of generous donors (and some timely FB Marketplace sales!) we’ve slowly chipped away at the trip cost of $3700, but still have $1170 left to pay by October 1st.
If you would like to help offset the cost of the trip you can do so at this link. Enter the amount you would like to give and choose “Mission APOHA 2024” from the drop down menu.
After you give online, send our lovely church administrator an email with something like:
“Hi Monica! I just gave $_____ in the online portal for Stephanie Cochrane’s Nigeria trip. Thanks!
-Jane Doe”If you prefer to give by check, make payable to Temple Baptist Church with “Stephanie Cochrane Nigeria” in the memo line.
Some of you donated when I first shared about the trip almost five months ago. I have not forgotten, nor stopped thanking God! I will write proper thank you notes and updates when we get home, so that I can accurately communicate the impact your dollars and prayers have made.
And now, off we go!
Welcome to The Paradox Paper, a monthly newsletter that honors the paradox in a life with Jesus. If a friend forwarded you this email, click here to subscribe:
In this edition:
An app that once was dumb and now is great
A kids book about church that I want to read to every church-going adult
A few thoughts on the ways God reveals Himself
A prayer Jesus prayed
Tody Cleaning App
I am what’s called a natural slob. Very demure. Very mindful. I have to find tools to fight that tendency, or spend actual days digging us out of our own mess. Those tools have to be easy to use or I will not use them. Because of the inborn slobbishness. My biggest struggle with cleaning in this season is that it feels like I never have time to do the whole room, so it feels like I can’t do anything. Enter, Tody. It breaks down every room in your house and allows you to assign a time cycle for every task. For instance, under Primary Bedroom, I could enter “Change bedclothes every week.” So now when it’s ten minutes till pick up and I want to make the house look better, instead of wasting the whole ten minutes trying to decide what to do, I just open the app and do as many tasks as I can in that time frame. My house looks better and I’m less stressed about it. Amen.
This Is The Church, Sarah Raymond Cunningham
Over the summer our pastor did a sermon series on the various metaphors the New Testament uses to describe the church. It was so helpful and clarifying for us grownups, I was thrilled to discover this picture book to use with my kids. It plays off the old rhyme “Here is the church, here is the steeple…” to show how church isn’t a building or a program, but a people. I loved it and so did they!
Earlier this week my Theology prof asked me in her thick Aussie accent, “I wonder where you find yourself on the 'Barth-Aquinas-Calvin' spectrum of how much true knowledge of God we can ascertain apart from Scripture?”
To which I said, with only a tiny bit more formality, “I ‘on know, Prof. I ain’t never read them fellers bafoher.”
The gist—I think—is that some folks believe it’s impossible to know anything true about God apart from Scripture. Others think if we want to know God, we can’t get anything from Scripture that we couldn’t get from a walk in the woods or a glass of good wine. Still others maintain that walks in the woods, along with the best parts of reason, tradition, and experience are all ways God reveals Himself to us, but that we need Scripture to know Him intimately and specifically. Scripture lends clarity and authority to all the other means of knowing God.
I don’t know exactly how I line up with the believers who came before me, but I’m humbly convinced of two things:
Scripture matters most
God is gonna use any and all means to reveal Himself to humans—even those without access to Scripture—because that’s who He’s always been.
Perhaps my favorite detail in the Genesis creation account is that God spoke. He certainly didn’t have to. It might not have even been the most natural first option. He could’ve osmosed or Jedied or by some other means outside my ability to describe, God-ed the heavens and the earth into existence. But He didn’t. He spoke.
I’m convinced He chose this method because, from before the beginning, and knowing what a bothersome lot we would turn out to be, God was bent on helping us know Him. He spoke, so that one day while reading a grand and fantastical story that feels in many ways far removed from my own life, I would have that tiny word to grab onto and say, “Oh! I know what that is! I speak too.” Even before the beginning, God was revealing Himself through words.
“The Lord merely spoke, and the heavens were created,” (Psalm. 33:6a NLT) and it is the echo of those first words that still rings in all creation, calling for the attention and allegiance of human hearts. Since “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights,” (James 1:17a NKJV) then any goodness in humanity or nature—art, science, reason, friendship, or beauty—finds its true origin in God. So all these “secular” things are made channels of grace, tiny peepholes through which we recognize some true part of God.
I say "recognize" because, while these common graces may cause us to notice something in them that is higher than humanity, they cannot grant me the kind of knowing God that my soul craves. Like my mother’s soft southern drawl that signals to Yankee locals that she’s “not from around here,” these common graces smell and sound enough like God for our souls to jump to attention and cry, “That’s not from around here!” But to know God intimately, we need the Special Revelation of Scripture.
Any effort we put toward this endeavor cannot be in vain, because Our God is bent on being known. God’s words—the ones that ring through creation and the ones preserved in Scripture that reveal Jesus as the perfect Word—never return to Him empty.
I am not great at praying “big” prayers. I don’t struggle believing that God is ready to hear the little details of my life—He cares that my son is sick (again), that my keys are lost, that my assignment is due, that I’m annoyed at my husband. I can and do pray about that stuff all day.
It’s also not hard for me to pray about “holy” things. Of course God wants me to be more patient, so I’ll as for that. Of course He wants the students in our church to love Scripture and have healthy friendships, so I ask for that.
But when it comes to the Big Unknown Stuff, I stutter. How do I pray for my friend’s cancer to go away, for revival in my city, for the adoption to go through, for justice to come, when I don’t know what God’s up to? How do I ask for the Big Stuff I want when I can’t be sure what He wants?
I haven’t figured out where this hesitation comes from, and maybe I never will. For now I’m copying Jesus’ prayer recorded in Mark 14:36:
“Abba, Father,” he cried out, “everything is possible for You. Please take this cup of suffering away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.”
Jesus couldn’t have asked for anything bigger, anything more inconvenient (or contrary!) to the plan. But He still asked. So whenever I have a Big Thing and get the stutters, I start with remember that my Father can do anything. Then I say the Big Thing. Then I remember that my Father can only do good, so whatever He wants is always better than what I want. This model is helping with my spiritual stutter. Maybe it’ll help you too.
It is a true joy to write for you each month, and I always love to hear about anything you tried and loved or anything that stirred your heart. Simply reply to this email or leave a comment to let me know.
Until next time, hold the paradox, don’t panic. Love you.
-Steph
If you enjoy The Paradox Paper, please share it with a friend! You can forward this email or screenshot your favorite part for easy sharing on social media. (Remember to tag me on Instagram @stephaniehcochrane so that I can say thanks!)
I have trouble praying for the Big Things, too. Your take on it is helping me get over my prayer stutter!