Living in Debt

photo: www.nerdwallet.com

Bills. I don't like them. You probably don't either. And I have too many.
House. Car. Heat. Lights. Food. Clothes. School. And on and on.
I owe so much, and those are just the practical debts--the ones I can pay with money.
I have others, too.

I also have debts I can't pay. These are the hardest ones to live with.
I owe my parents, who gave without expectation for my nurture and training.
I owe soldiers, who gave their lives for my freedom.
I owe teachers, who gave more than anyone asked for my education.
I owe my family, who suffered my sins and returned forgiveness.

I can never pay them back, any of them.
Worse yet, I take them for granted.
I've lived so long in the luxury of what they gave that I no longer notice it's even there.

'Thank you' is not enough. Ever.
But what else is there?

And then there's God.
What does God want for all He gives?
For life. A world to live it in. Salvation and the promise of heaven.
How can I pay Him back?

I can't.
Not God. Not my parents, my family, not anyone who sacrificed for me.
I will owe them forever.

So if I can't pay them back, what, then, do I do?
What do those I to whom I owe so much want from me if it is not recompense?
I know what God wants because He says so:
And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.--Micah 6:8

That's what God wants. Just action. Merciful love. A humble walk toward Him.
In one word, God wants appreciation.
And I imagine they all do.
They don't want repayment. They want love.

I will always be in debt.
Now, if I can only love...

The Reluctant Unknown

Jesus lived 90% of His life in complete obscurity. 
The Bible says almost nothing about Him until He began His ministry at 30, and He died at 33.
How could the Son of God, the coming Savior, go unnoticed for so long?

I think I know why:
He made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.--Philippians 2:7
He did exactly the opposite of what we normally do. He knew what He had to do, melted into His appointed place, and did it. Without fanfare. Content to go without credit.
When He turned water into wine at Cana, He didn't want any notice:
Dear woman, why do you involve me? My time has not yet come.--John 2:4
When He healed the leper, He told him:
Don't tell anyone but go, show yourself to the priest...Luke 5:14
When He was tempted, He did it alone.
When He suffered at Gethsamane, He did it alone.

Jesus did not need an audience.
Why do I?

I want to matter. I want notice, credit for what I do. I want to be recognized, known.
I am vain.
I count the hits on my blog. I wait with anticipation for comments.
"Oh, they like me..." I think.
Significance. The unquenchable thirst.

Like drunkenness and gluttony, vanity drugs me into overindulgence, and I disappear beneath its insistent desire:
All man's efforts are for his mouth, yet his appetite is never satisfied.--Ecclesiastes 6:7

There is only one solution. I must remember who I am. God does.
...He know how we are formed. He remembers that we are dust.--Psalm 103:14

Dust. I am dust before God. He made me and any vanity I have before Him makes me ridiculous.
I must expect no notice, crave no attention.
Instead, I must bathe in the attention of God alone, trust Him for all satisfaction, thank Him for every comfort, and honor Him for His glory.
And, as a result, I will probably be alone a lot, too.

Litter Box Lesson

Photo credit:www.indoorcatshq.com

My husband has twelve cats.
And, amazingly, it works out pretty well.
He restricts their movements so they don't take over the house, he feeds them, he cleans up after them.
He even makes sure the house smells OK.

Until he gets pneumonia.
Then I have to do it.
And I don't like it.
Not one little bit.
Every day, I grab up the litter bucket, sift through every one of the five litter boxes, and walk the disgusting, heavy mess outside.
It makes me crabby.

These are his cats, not mine. They don't even like me much.
They are dirty, and arrogant, and tempermental.
Of all the nerve....

And then I remember what I asked God for....
I've been asking Him to teach me humility.

And I think of Jesus...
taking up the basin of water, tying the towel around Himself, and washing the disciples' feet...
their dirty, smelly feet.

And I remember what He said then--

Photo credit: s260.photobucket.com

You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.--John 13:7

OK, I get it.
Feet are little different from litter boxes, and I can't do this with your willing attitude, Jesus.
At least not yet. But thanks for trusting me with the opportunity.
Thank you, Jesus-- for the feet, for the cats, and for the lesson.

Go Ahead and Look

Photo credit: www.visualphotos.com

Discovering my own sin is tricky business.

Problem is, I can't repent if I don't know what I have done wrong.
And, because I am so wonderful, and loveable, and, well, saved, I don't always see the problem.
So I pray...
God, please show me my sin...

And He does.
But my sin is not always something I've done wrong.
Let me repeat that in another way:
Sin is not only lying or cheating or getting angry or any other violations of God's laws.
Some of the most insidious sin is congratulating myself for something I have done right.

When I am tempted to do that, God has a few succinct words for me:
..all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.--Isaiah 64:6

I can't do anything right enough to be considered righteous before God.
Therefore, I have only one hope--
to man up and remember who I am, then remember who God is.

Who I am:
He knows how we are formed, He remembers that we are but dust--Psalm 103:14
Who God is:
I am the Lord Almighty.--Genesis 17:1
I will never leave you nor forsake you.--Joshua 1:5

I am dust. He is God.
And He loves me anyway.

The Fool Who Follows Him...

Take a close look. I thought this was clever at first. The Last Supper, but rather than Christ and His disciples, well-known scientists-- Galileo Galilei, Marie Curie, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Thomas Edison, Aristotle, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin.

Harmless.  Even funny. But then I saw.

Not the heresy of it, although there is that component.  
It's the danger of it. Not because it's a joke, but because it isn't.

My former amusement dies to a choke, a strangle. I can't laugh at this because I live with it every day, as does every single smart person God made.
Suddenly, I get scared. Really scared.

This is the problem:
Smart people get used to being right.
They do. 
They get used to it because they often are, or sound like it. They know the right arguments, the pertinent facts, the scientific proofs. Most of them don't mean to lie or to deceive. Smart people are sincerely trying to help others understand. They are teachers, doctors, researchers, philosophers, scientists....and pastors. They are the best of us, aren't they? We go to them when we want to learn, want to improve, want to get well. 

But they have a problem. Us.
Because we believe smart people so completely, we have given them permission to believe themselves. 
We have given them license to ignore their own capacity for self-deception.
We ignore, and let thus let them ignore, their own humanity.

Oh sure, we all say no one is perfect, that we're all only human, and screw up, but then don't universally apply what we acknowledge to be universal frailty.
We permit some people to be more perfect than others.
We permit some people to be like God.

And that is what this picture is really about. 

Look again. 
Each of these men and women used their intelligence to figure out something important, and I am grateful for that. 
But some one of them also believed, and seemed to have convinced some of us, that their ability to figure stuff out makes them so special as to discount their own vast capacity for being wrong.
And this makes the smartest of us also the most dangerous. 
Listen to them, but don't trust them.

It is easy to deceive a really smart person when the deception involves their own perfection. 
They will believe in their own rightness almost every time.
After all, they're smart, aren't they?

The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, but the folly of fools is deception.--Proverbs 14:8

Don't You Dare Kiss Me

The Bible tells us to be gentle.  It tells is to be patient, too, and to forbear with one another.
"I can do that," I think.
When someone cuts in line at the grocery, I can keep my mouth shut.
When I'm picking up socks for the fifth day in a row, I can almost smile.
When I get passed up for a promotion, I can try harder next time.
I'm doing pretty good.
Ha.

How about if the person in the grocery cuts off my arm instead of cutting in line?
What if I must pick up a sword rather than socks?
Or if I get chosen for the gas chamber rather than passed up for promotion?
It gets a little harder, doesn't it?
But Jesus did it, and He did it for Judas, who He knew would sell Him out.

Just before Judas walked out of the upper room to collect his thirty pieces of silver, what did Jesus do?
He prayed for him, he took off his robe, knelt before him to wash his dirty, smelly, betraying feet, and then Jesus fed Judas' conniving body with His own body and blood, the bread of life and the cup of salvation.
He forbore with Judas' outright evil  not only without complaint, but without apparently even noticing. 
And me?
I bristle with annoyance at the hint of a perceived wrong.
I know offense at the smallest slight.

A person who needs a bath needs only wash his feet; his whole body is clean.  And you are not clean, though not every one of you.  You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.--John 13:10, 7

Later you will understand.  Later--like now.
Thank you, Jesus, for training me with socks and checkout lines.
And please, please forgive my sad selfishness.

It's All About the Feet

NFL players are lacing up pink shoes for their games these days.  They are not doing it to make a fashion statement, but, after the game, to auction them for charity. And buyers pay big money for them.
Why?  Aren't they just shoes?

Yes, they are only shoes, but, oh, the feet that wore them! That's what folks pay for.
Like the guitar John Lennon played, or a pen that signed the Declaration of Independence, an object can be elevated beyond its intrinsic value by its user.

Ok, you get that.
Now, pinch yourself.
You are made of flesh and blood.  We each occupy our own body and most of us are nothing special, pretty much like one another in composition and appearance.

But what if God put on identical flesh and blood, pulled on our own skin, and age, and pain? What if He laced up a human body as His version of a pink football shoe?  How would that flesh change?

Well, He did it, of course.
God did take on flawed flesh and wore it in His own game.
He wore it every moment...all the way into the end zone.
And when He did that, He changed the flesh, the game, everything.

Aaron Rodgers' pink shoes are still just pink shoes, though, just like before he put them on.
When God took on our humanity, our sickness and death became something else.
He not only made us part of Him, but He put part of Himself in us.
And the one body, the one He wore, He eventually put aside, perpetually undefiled, because it was His.

When Jesus put on flesh, He declared that He wants us to be like Him--not in exaltation, but in sacrifice and humility.
"Be holy," He says, not as men made to be Gods, but like God made man. 

Who, being in very nature God...made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness..." --Philippians 2:6-7
The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.  We have seen His glory, the glory of the One and Only...--John 1:14

Now Where Was I?

My husband does not want me to use herbicides.
But I want a perfect, weedless garden.
For 30 years, we have wrangled about this.
It needs to stop.

But how?  Nobody wants to give in.  We both think we are right and, from our own perspectives, we are.  After all, no biblical principle hinges on whether I spray Roundup on the creeping charlie.
Or does it?

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.--Matthew 5:3,5
A man's pride brings him low, but a man of lowly spirit gains honor.--Proverbs 29:23
I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and revive the heart of the contrite.--Isaiah 57:15

Think about it.
What makes us really humble?
Is it bowing and shuffling when someone tells me that I have done something well?  No.  That makes me secretly proud.
Am I humbled when I experience defeat after striving to do or learn something?  No.  As often as not, that simply spurs me on to try harder next time.

But obedience, now that breeds humility.
Doing what someone else wants, not what I want, when I know my idea or plan is just as valid as theirs.  Setting aside my own will in situations where all I sacrifice is me.
That's humility.

Of course, I should never set aside my holiness, my love and devotion to God, but all else can be well lost.

And it feels nasty.
Is not my opinion or desire of value?
Of course it is.  That's why setting it aside takes so much effort.
I am humbled by giving up my will not because it has no validity, but because it does.

Some positions are not important enough to fight over.
But they make great tools by which to learn holiness.

Obedience in these issues is how I push aside the extraneous parts of me, how I enter into the holy of holies, where my humanity takes a back seat to God's supremacy.

Humility was never about my position before other men.  
It was always about my position before God.
And, as it turns out, pulling weeds.
I am always with you.  You hold me by my right hand.--Psalms 73:23