Who Are We, Anyway?

Someone sent me a mask for Christmas. It came from Italy, almost halfway around the world, and I keep looking at it. It wasn't until this morning that I started to understand why.

It started out on New Years Eve, and a talk about the lives we'd built for ourselves over these 50 or 60 years, and not our dissatisfaction with them, but our downright confusion. We've become, in great parts, what we've set out to be--capable, thoughtful, faithful in measures more than we'd ever expected--but now, well, now it all seems a bit silly and out of place.

Oh, we still mess up (and I did, spectacularly, later that same night) but that's not the problem.
We recognize our instances of falling short with ease. It's the instances of success that make us pause. Our successes haven't taken us where we know we have to go. In fact, they seem to take us farther from it.

That's where the mask comes in.
The mask reminds me that we are still trying to figure out who we were meant to be.
 You'd think that, by now, we'd have gotten farther in this basic truth, but well, we haven't. And this is why--

After spending our whole lives learning and building, it seems like our business now is to dismantle it--to take apart the entire construct we've worked so hard on, looking for that essence, that kernel of what's really important.

The mask doesn't represent something that's fake--it's the layers of our life. 

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It's the good things we've made day by day that, suddenly, we don't need any more. In fact, they've become hindrances. It's the taking charge, the steadfast patterns, the suddenly useless knowledge that's beginning to weigh us down rather than propel us through our days.

It's God saying, 'I've shown you what I can make of you, but I'm not done yet. Now I'm going to show you what I've put in you.'

He warned us about this, you know.
I will put my Spirit in you...--Ezekiel 36:27 

Somebody asked me on New Years Eve for one wise saying to share to take us into 2016 and I, clumsy and self-conscious, said that God wants to show us that He is in us. What I should have done is gotten out the mask, because that's the whole point.

God has made us wonderful, but what we've had to do to build our lives has covered it up. 

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Now, it's time to strip all that away. Now, He wants to help us uncover the kernel He's deposited, that Spirit He's incomprehensively given and nurtured. He's asking us to take off the outer shell we no longer need, to pare down to the simple, unguarded core.

It's taken Him all our lives to teach us to trust Him. 
Now, He wants to show us who we really are in Him.

So they asked him, "What are you? Are you Elijah?" And he said, "No, I am not." "Are you the prophet?" He answered, "No." So they said to him, "Who are you so that we can give an answer to those who sent us? What do you have to say for yourself?"  He said, "I am the voice of one crying out in the desert, 'Make straight the way of the Lord.'"--John 1

For His Eyes Only

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I've come to accept that there are some things about God that I just won't get in this life. I won't get to understand the Trinity. I won't comprehend the real nature of love. I won't even get to know whether God really cares whether we dunk or sprinkle. But it never occurred to me until recently just how much Christ invested in His relationship with His Father, a relationship from which we are pretty much excluded. 

Oh He tells us about it, all right.
I and the Father are One.--John 10:30
...just as you are in me, Father, and I in you...John 17:21
In fact, He uses it as an example of the closeness He wants to share with us. But He also makes it clear that we're not there yet. What He has with His Father is something very special, very different, and we are, by its very nature, left out of some stuff.  After all, they are both GOD, and we're not.

Nowhere did this seem so obvious as when I realized during this Easter season (head slap) that Jesus rose from the dead in the presence of God His Father alone. Nobody else was around--not His best friends, not the women who loved and served Him, not the Pharisees, not Pilate and his government officials, not even a passing shepherd or centurion. Nobody.

What gives with that, I wondered? Where was everybody? I mean, this was the single most important thing Jesus did. Lots of people die, but HE ROSE! Only Him!

And then I started to get it.

Jesus became a man, and the most of what we can grasp about Him is connected with Him as man, not with Him as God. We understand love as human beings, the same way we understand obedience, charity, worship, prayer, and everything else. We don't know the first thing about being God. Jesus shared the God-part of Himself with His Father alone. It had to be that way. 

Why do you think He was always going off alone to pray? When He was alone with His Father, He could be Himself--fully God and fully man.  Only once did He share that with anyone human:
Jesus took with Him Peter, James and John...and let them up to a high mountain by themselves.  There He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light.--Matthew 17:1-2

THAT's who Jesus really was. And it freaked them out. They right away wanted to start a building project, right there on the top of the mountain. They didn't get that Jesus. And if they, who knew the man Jesus better than anyone, failed so miserably to assimilate that little display, think what they would have done if Jesus had arranged they be there when He walked out of His grave, looking for all this sad world like His true self.
"C'mon, guys. Meet at the gravesite just after midnight. I've got a surprise for you..."
Not hardly.
After Friday, they'd already had as much as they could take. They were long gone.

No, this moment, like some of the most important moments in our own lives, was too intimate to share. After all, we do the same thing in our own lives. The consummation of marriage, often the birth of a child, and often, too, our first real glimpse of God--they all occur away from prying eyes. We treasure them for this. No one knows, and they don't need to. We might share the fruit of those moments, or some of the less private parts, but when hushed privacy cloaks a special moment, it becomes a sacred touchstone and in that context, Jesus reserving the holy moment of rising for His Father alone makes perfect sense.

We get to share the result, though, and to that end, Jesus' arms are wide open, filled with the fruit of His dying and rising. We don't need to see it. We get to know it. And He did not withhold any part of that experience. He lets us touch the holes in His hands and feet. He lets us eat with Him. He walks with us on our own Emmaus road.

Lord of heaven and earth, Jesus Christ lives, and we are beckoned to join Him.
I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.--Psalm 27:13

I AM: The Ultimate Selfie

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Selfies.
Everybody's taking them.
They can be kind of fun, like when we get to see our daughter's pregnant belly shot, or when we get to put heads together with that friend we've long missed. Selfies can also help us see ourselves the way others see us, and for that, they may have value. Most days, I wouldn't be caught dead in a selfie. They show what I really look like...yikes.

But, whether I want to show myself off to someone else or not, I'd better know who I am. I need to know where to find my own borders--the boundary lines that mark off who I am from who I am not. I may not make beautiful material for a selfie, but I am. Just that. I am. I exist. I have been given a real, palpable life and corporeal flesh.

Most of us don't know where to begin to think properly about ourselves. We can turn around our little camera phones and snap them, but of what have we taken a picture? Of whom? What am I? Wife? Mother? Writer? Lover of God? Teacher? Citizen of the United States?  Yes, all of these, but they aren't really who I am. These are what I do or where I live. I am more than these.

I am that unique signature that doesn't change regardless of how old I get, or where I live, or what I do. I am someone separate and particular before the Lord. I soar and invent and love and fail and sin in a way peculiar to myself alone. I am the whispers of my heart, the flight of my soul. No one is completely like me. I am known to God by my own unique name. I am created in the image of my own Creator.

Jesus knows me this way. He knows me according to who He made and recognizes me by what He did to me and gave to me. In return, He wants me to recognize Him the same way, but He has a much clearer understanding of who He is than I do. And He didn't hesitate to say so:

I AM the Bread of Life--John 6:35
I AM the Light of the World--John 8:12
I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life--John 14:6
I AM the Door--John 10:9.
I AM the Good Shepherd--John 10:11
I AM the Resurrection and the Life--John 11:25
I AM the Vine--John 15:1

I AM
I AM
I AM...
Strong statements. So strong they got Him killed.

This is the bold Jesus I can't help but follow. He gives us a picture of value and strength and confidence and, to the extent we can follow Him, the original from which we can stand in reflection. We can look like Christ, all parts of Him.  We will not BE God, but we can LOOK LIKE God.

When Christ talked about Himself, he never flinched or hesitated. He behaved outrageously and to be sure, to say that we can be like Him is an outrageous statement. But I can say it anyway. I can say it because I have God's permission and example to say it.

Christ said,
Before Abraham was, I AM.--John 8:58

I say:
Because You are, I AM.

You Can't Change Anything From Inside the Limo

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Things change.
They do. Always. I can't do anything about that.
I don't always like it, though. Like when kids grow up and move away. Like when parents or friends or spouses die. Heck, I don't even like it when a favorite restaurant changes their menu or skirt lengths go short again.
But sometimes...sometimes I just know things HAVE to change. And, even worse, that I'm the one who's supposed to help change them.

I can't even imagine how Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela felt. Yikes. They changed BIG things. My convicted changes aren't that big--not even close. But they're big to me. And, like those famous men, I have to figure out how to implement them. Whether it's school reform, or property taxes, or how my church runs their Sunday school, change sometimes calls me to work, and I am going to need a plan.

My first big experience with this came in business. I worked for a company top-heavy in wealth and privilege. The men and women who worked in our factory worked hard--really hard--and got none of the perks I saw handed out liberally to managers and executives--bonuses, both cash and non-cash. It wasn't right, I thought from my entry level office desk. If I ever got the chance to change that...well, I would.

Eventually, I got the chance.

When I got promoted to Vice President, I had big plans. I would shine a new light into the executive offices. I would make the changes I'd always seen needed making. But then, on my next business trip, the company paid for a limo to pick me up at 5AM and take me to the airport. Instead of sending it away and driving myself, I settled deep into the leather seats and napped. And a few months later, when I realized that the bonus I got that year would pay for my younger son's college education, I didn't cash the check and distribute it to those hard working men and women on the shop floor like I'd planned to do. Instead, I deposited into our savings account.

Were these things evil? Not really. But they serve to demonstrate something I learned the hard way then and in the long years that followed. Even after I'd stopped joining the excess and started fighting it, the big boys didn't care that I didn't want to play with them. It didn't matter to them at all, as long as I didn't interfere with their fun. And I didn't interfere, but not because I didn't want to. I didn't stop them from their greed because I didn't have the clout to do it. They couldn't care less what I thought or did. To them, my example was not eye opening--it was, maybe, faintly amusing. Finally, I did the only thing I could decently do. I gave up and got out.

This is what I learned: real change does not generally come from the inside.  Not unless the changer is also in charge. Kings can exert change. Sometimes very disciplined presidents and CEO's can. But not the rest of us. If we want to change something, we have to step out of it first. I saw this in business, but I also saw it in the school where I later taught and in the church we attended. There, too, we tried to enact change from the inside and found that it couldn't be done.

God knows this, too.
Example: Right after Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem to waving palm branches and cries of 'Hosanna', what did He do? He marched right over to the temple and chased out the money changers for the second time.
It is written--My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves!--Matthew 21:13
And what happened?
The scribes and the chief priests heard it and sought out how they might destroy him.--Mark 11:18

Jesus didn't become a temple honcho first. He came in almost incognito--a young guy from a small town, but with wisdom and a mission He thoroughly understood. He could see clearly from the outside, whether from heaven or from Nazareth or from the back of a donkey, the kind of corruption so rarely visible from inside.

Obviously, I am prejudiced by my own experience. The hierarchy surrounding my own situations chewed me up and spit me out. Just like Jesus. Well, almost.

And that's my takeaway from all this. The people Christ criticized destroyed Him, or tried to. When they were finished with him, He was certainly very dead. But the same as He did, I rose up from each of my experiences remade, better than I'd begun. And amazingly, in the process, some of the things that needed changing did change. Not directly from what I did, but they did change, and some are still changing.

Just like Jesus, I left each of these situations an outcast, but not untouched, unchanged. And I learned to trust that God will use my actions in His own way. I also now know not to trust reformers with a stake in the status quo, but only those who have nothing to lose by changing it.
They have the vision. They follow the right example.

Where did they put Him?

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Sometimes, I can't find Jesus. 
Oh, He's out there all right. He might even be in here, in my heart.
But I can't feel Him. I can't see Him, and I can't hear Him..
Where did He go?
Like Mary Magdalene, I wonder where they put my Lord.
They have taken my Lord away and I don't know where they have put Him.--John 20:13

Go and find Him, my friends tell me.
He's right here. All the time.
Pray.  He'll come.
Ask and you shall receive.
Seek and you shall find.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not working.

Still, I remember. He was here just the other day.. I can still smell Him. We put Him in this tomb with our own hands.
I left Him in this place. I know I did. And He's gone. Just plain gone.
I am beyond sad. It's like every light in the world has gone out.
Tenacity does not bring Him. Trying harder does not bring Him.
 
I must be looking in the wrong place. 
Maybe I need to open my vision, to look in another place.
What was it that He said? Don't look for my dead body.
Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?--John 20:15-16
He is not here; He is risen, just as He said.--Matthew 28:6 

I'm alive! He tells me.
No, you're not. I saw You. You were dead. Dead. And I felt like I was, too.
I still do.
Desolate. Alone. Back to the same place all my former sins consigned me. The same lonely darkness I started in.
Everything was wonderful while You were here, but now...what happened to the sweet, bright hope You brought us? When I can't find You, I can't find the hope anymore, either.

Then, there it was...that smell. Nard. Can it be?
I look up and see an stranger. No. Not You. A gardener.
"Where have they laid Him?" I want to take hold and shake the man.
But he can't help.
I might as well go home. You're not here. You've gone. Forever.

"Mary..."--John 20:16

What? Where are You?
Do not touch me now...John 20:17

It's You. It is You. You've never gone, never.
It was me. I let you go. How could I ever have done that?
Never stop calling my name. I never want to lose you again. I don't need to touch You. I just need to trust You.
You're alive...forever.
I will never leave you nor forsake you.--Deuteronomy 31:6
Of course.

Fixing My Ouchies

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I have an infection.
How do I know? Because it hurts.
It's red and icky and swollen. Just looking, anyone can tell that something is definitely wrong.
I've tried to clean it out and de-infect it, but nothing's worked so today, I'm going to the doctor. I'm sure the doc will know what to do and afterwards, it will stop hurting.
Simple.

Nobody likes hurt.
Nobody likes it, but nobody escapes it. We all get hurt.
And some of our biggest wounds are the ones that don't show.
It's harder to show a doctor an infected heart than an infected finger. But it hurts just as much, maybe more. And just as when I don't get my infected finger cleaned out and healed, my emotional infection left untended will spread and get worse. Much worse.

We all know what physical infections look like when they're not tended. Nasty. But what do emotional hurts look like when neglected? They have repercussions, too. Like anger, and bitterness, and isolation.
OK--so when we go to a doctor, they ask us for symptoms of our physical malady. How about our other hurts? How about those symptoms? 
Who or what makes me consistently mad?
Or, what inexplicable outburst took me and everyone around me by surprise?
Who just always irritates me?
What kind of book or movie or remark always puts me in a bad mood?
Why do I pick on a particular person or behavior or habit?
When did I stop going to church?
Or hanging out with friends?
What makes me just want to hole up at home and avoid everyone?
What place or person or subject do I want to avoid no matter what?

I know that, if I don't get my finger healed up, the affected area will get bigger and eventually, I'll either get blood poisoning and die, or I'll catch it in time and it'll heal, but will leave a scar. Well, I have non-physical scars, too. And they are not without consequences.

Ironically, a physical scar won't hurt like the wound did. It might twinge a little once in awhile, but the constant, throbbing pain is gone. Someone can touch it, and I don't jump anymore. I know that a doc can probably help me with my physical hurt. But I have to get help with my other hurts, too. And just like my physical ones, I have to admit I hurt in the first place.

There's no shame in hurting. Jesus did, too.
During the days of Jesus' life on earth, He offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save Him from death...--Hebrews 5:7a

Loud cries and tears. Jesus was not shy about telling God about His hurts. And what did God do?
...and He was heard because of His reverent submission.--Hebrews :7b

Jesus humbled Himself to admit there was something wrong and then accepted God's healing when He did. I have to do the same thing.
God wants to do for me exactly what I want the doc to do for my infected finger:
He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.--Psalm 147:3

But I have to admit that I need it. I have to look at the warning signs--the pain, the tenderness, the inability to engage in normal activities, and realize that I need to let God bind my wounds. I need to let the scar form if it must, and wear it as a sign that I've come through safe, after all.
We're pretty good at saying that God is the Great Physician. Now we have to act like it.

What is the Gospel?

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Our faith tells us that we are taught to preach the Gospel, but I have often wondered exactly what that Gospel is. Its direct translation from Greek put simply means the Good News. OK, but what good news?

From a personal standpoint, I know well the good news Christ brought to my own life--the renewal, the hope, the transformation, and the strength. But how did He do this? Well, through His suffering, death, resurrection, you say. That's right. He has done all this through His Holy Redemption.

But that's not quite it. I think there's more.

I know what Christ did--born of a virgin; lived and taught the New Covenant principles of love, humility, and sacrifice; performed miracles; died an undeserved and public death, then rose first from it and then from the earth itself. But the key to all this isn't His activity, it's Him.  

Everything Christ did only mattered because He did it. Other people performed miracles. Other people have died, then come alive again. Other people have died sacrificially for someone else. Other people live exemplary lives. But they do not carry the same weight.  Christ does not call us to preach what He did, but the One who did it--the Son of God, Son of Man, Creator-Redeemer, Jesus Christ. The Gospel, the Good News, is not what Christ did because, had anyone else done it, it would be no news at all.

Christ didn't enact the Gospel. He is the Gospel.

So, this is how I preach--deferring attention from the act to Him, lifting Him up. I know we all love to tell our stories of redemption, and we should. Believe me, I do too, but my story doesn't begin to come close to explaining the miracle and wonder of God. Nobody's does. My story, I think, is mostly for me--to remind me who God is--how intimate and mighty and, well, involved.  It helps me stay on the road toward Him.

So how do I preach? Well, if the Gospel is not what He did, then it's not what I do either. If the Gospel is who He is, then as I am called to follow Him and resemble Him, the Gospel is me. Myself. My very person. If you are saying, 'Whoa, there--we are not like God,' well then, I say that if we are not like God, if people can't see God in us, we are not equipped to preach. If people cannot see God in us, then we have no real knowledge of the Gospel at all. 

My very presence should say, 'Here He is, friend--Jesus Christ--Savior, Redeemer, Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God. He's in me and in you, too.' My life should make people long for God. I have to live the new life Christ has put in me, living primarily before the Lord, but all the while in the company of everyone He has put in my path. I can live so that when people see me, they see Christ. I can do this because God says I can.

Is this hard? Of course it is. At least until it becomes very, very easy. In the end, I don't have the responsibility for anyone else's salvation. I just have to look out for Christ as He shows the way. And that is very Good News, indeed.

For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you but Jesus Christ and Him crucified--1Corinthians 2:2
To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, Christ in you, the hope of glory.--Colossians 1:27

Looking for the Holy Church

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For the past few years, we've been trying to find the church. Not a church, but the church. 

It's easy to find a church--a community of believers who gather once a week to worship God, connect with one another, and work together to further His kingdom. There are lots of buildings that house communities like this and every Sunday, we are in one of them. But often, I come away unsatisfied, like I have missed something important. We have sung, we have prayed, we have listened to a good lesson, we have hugged and shook hands with friends, but something is missing and now I think I'm beginning to understand what it is.

I expect something else from God's church, something important. I expect the church, more than anything else, to be holy. Holy--as in completely dedicated to God. I expect the people who gather in that building to cling unreservedly to Him. To worship Him, to kneel humbly before Him because we know corporately as well as singly who He is. He is God and we are not.

The church I yearn for does not put on a pretty face. The church I yearn for falls down in thanksgiving, not just raises its hands in praise. The church I yearn for does not just look for one another in their accustomed places. It looks for God. God first, second, and third--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Everything--everything--else comes after.
A feeling of togetherness comes after.
Personal development comes after.
Good sermons come after.
Jobs and committees come after.
Witnessing comes after.
Activities come after.
Ministries come after.
Good works come after.

I want holiness. I want from my church complete dedication to God's very person, all the parts of Him--incarnated Man and supernatural Spirit.

I am entirely convinced that the church is not primarily the place to work with and learn from and celebrate with one another, but to learn together to be like God. He has commanded us to perfection in Him and given us the church as the place where we strive to attain that together. Our church, like the tabernacle of Israel, needs to be a Holy of Holies, a place we must approach on our knees in reverent fear, not a place where we only sing for joy, clap, and wave our hands. The church I yearn for concentrates not primarily on our friendship with God, but on what still separates us--not on what we have, or on what God as done, but on what He has asked us to be.

I want a church that holds up God's seemingly-impossible standard of holiness and urges me forward toward it, reminding me to have courage and strain for what is still beyond my grasp. Don't tell me about your wonderful pastor or friendly congregation or uplifting programs or helpful ministries. Tell me that, together, you unswervingly desire and work to be more like God.

Be ye holy as I am holy.--Leviticus 20:7, 1Peter 1:16

Please, please give me a church who looks at her bridegroom with the same singlemindedness as a bride on her wedding day, all but blind to everything and everyone else, but promising the fruit of that devotion in everything else she does.

...prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.--Revelation 21:2

Putting It Together

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Once a year, I work a jigsaw puzzle. My son buys it for me as a Christmas gift, and we spread it out on the dining room table and lay in one piece at a time until it's done. I like laying the pieces in, watching the picture form slowly. It always seemed like a fitting activity for the dark of winter at the end of one year and the beginning of another, and now I know why.

A jigsaw puzzle is a metaphor for life.

Think about it.
A thousand pieces or more that make up a design someone else conceived. Each piece a day that I can only add one at a time. 

The edges first--a framework for everything else.  God, the law, my conscience, the place and time ordained for me above all others. I have to start there.

Then I look for big patterns--the side of a barn, a bunch of flowers, a face, a doorway--and I gather the pieces up, again one at a time, to see whether they fit. Some do. They are a job, marriage, children--the things around which all else must fit. And the easily recognizable parts begin to take shape.

These usually go together fairly quickly. Yes, I look at them one by one, but not always too closely. They come almost automatically. But then I have to join them. I have to piece together a sidewalk, a brick wall, a lake, a bookcase. This is when it gets harder and slows down. The pieces all look so much alike. Raising kids. Going to work day after day. Learning my spouse does not exist to make me happy. These are the days we learn to live with mistakes. I get frustrated when this phase starts, not liking the forced slowdown. I have to individually examine every one of these pieces for size and shape and color, in order to figure out where it fits. I find a place in the puzzle for some. Some I put aside for later. Some I try to force--surely it goes in this spot. But it doesn't. This is when I am most likely to lose or bend a piece.

But all the while, the picture builds. I see more of it every day, become familiar with each region of it. The brown pieces go in the upper right. The green ones go near the door. The ones that look like mottled eggshells are a sandy beach and go next to the water.
I dream about every detail, excited to see where the next piece will go.

And always, always, I see the end approaching. The pile of loose pieces shrinks, but I feel no panic. The empty places in between begin to disappear and I stand back occasionally to see what all those small pieces have wrought.

It is then I see what I am making. One by one, day after day, piece by piece, the overall design, made long ago by my Father in heaven, finally comes together and I can see it, and remember. This is when I did this or this is what happened on that day. This is not a painting, beautiful only for the finished product. It is gradual assimilation of detail, forever made of small things bound together into the finished whole it was always meant to be.

The puzzle only goes together one way and, eventually, I hold only one piece in my hand. The box is empty, all other places filled in. I am finished.

My last day.
And I lay my final piece into place and stand back to look. So that is what I am. That is what You planned for me all along. 
Thank you. It is beautiful.

Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom--Psalm 90:12

Not Drowning in the Meaningless

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Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!--Ecclesiastes 1:1

Poor Solomon.
I always felt kind of sorry for him, but not so much anymore.
Actually, I've come to understand that he was right, but not in a bad way.
Everything IS meaningless, and that knowledge drives us to find a reason for living. This is a good thing. Understanding that most of what we do and accomplish doesn't last drives us to search for meaning, for a reason to take the next breath.
And that's where Solomon got into trouble.

His dad, David, also thought life was meaningless. He did.
David, like Solomon, knew he was a sinner. He was drowning in his sins, in fact. Like Solomon, he knew that after he'd messed up big time, his good intentions had failed. He'd done very little right. He'd tried, but was not a worthy king, a good friend, or a successful husband and father. Like Solomon, he'd messed it all up.
But unlike Solomon, he didn't sink into melancholy over it.
Unlike Solomon, he didn't lose his reason for living.

Why? In spite of all the wrong turns, God was not enough for Solomon.
But God was more than enough for David.

How can we tell? Look at the symptoms.
Frustration = lost reason
Fear = lost reason
Depression = lost reason
Loneliness = lost reason

Solomon had them all. David did not.
David had repentance and after repentance, David had God.
I must find God, too, if I am to find the source of a balance mind and heart and the source of all health. I must always know the only solid reason for my life. 

I will never leave you nor forsake you.--Deuteronomy 31:8

God will take me beyond this life into eternity. He endures.
It's OK if everything is meaningless. I have God.

Putting Pain in its Place

Sam and Anne

I like to listen to first-time moms when they talk about the pain of childbirth. Really. There is a kind of community in this, something we all share and, as for every intense life experience, we all learn something from it. Some women bear their pain patiently, some resentfully, but like me, most of us try to forget it as soon as possible and, in the wake of the joy that usually follows, we can.

Not my friend Sam, though.

Now, Sam loves her daughter as much as any other new mother. She bubbles with the joy of her. She hasn't however, sidelined the memory of pain in getting there. Instead, Sam continues to stare her pain in the face, to call it by its nasty name, and commands it to its appropriate place in her life. Sam refuses to let her pain pretend to be anything other than what it is--hard, unpleasant, and temporary. 

Sure, she remembers that her labor hurt a lot, but also, defiantly, that it did not hurt forever. The pain never mastered her because she knew it had a purpose and when its purpose was fulfilled, it would end. In doing this, she got to keep the memory of the pain and the lasting gift it left her. Today, she can look at her daughter and say, 'You cost me a great deal, but you were worth it.'

In doing this, I think, she has discovered pain's purpose. What, after all, does pain bring? If we apply it correctly, it brings more than discomfort. Pain, if we let it, can bring sure knowledge that we can endure it and understanding that some things bring a hard cost. It can also bring vision of and hope for a future of health and wholeness.

Christ knew this, too--hence, the cross. He endured pain because He had a job to do that overshadowed it. His pain took a back seat to His purpose. He knew that the effects of His purpose would long outlast His pain. It happens the same for us. When God allows us pain, we can, if we choose it, come to know both the cost and the value of its greater purpose. By this knowledge, both the pain and the gift of it, we can join with Christ.

For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.--Hebrews 12:2

Frank and Abe, Doing it Their Way

I would not have thought that Frank Sinatra and the biblical patriarch Abraham had much in common, but I would have been wrong:
And Abraham said unto God, 'Oh that Ishmael might live before thee!'--Genesis 17:18

Just when God was promising Abe everything--all he had ever wanted and more, children too many to number and a kingdom by God for God--what does he say?
No, don't do that.
Do it my way.
Don't make everything new. Do it with this stuff, this child I already know, people I already love.
Don't give me a new people, a whole new place.
I'm old, said Abe. I'm tired of new.
Can't you do it my way for once?
And God said no.
And He didn't.

Abe and Frank, who would have thunk it?
But I want my way, too. And I suffer from the same shortsightedness they did.
If he'd gotten his way, Abraham would have missed so much just because he had no imagination for it.
Please, God, let me want your way.

Who Are You Looking At?

Do you ever wonder how God wants us to pray? I do.
I am not satisfied with most prayer. 
It seems self-serving, not God-serving.
It sometimes sounds whiny, like "This is what I want, God. Would you help me out and give it to me, please?"
Prayer can also sound like the person praying has too little faith to even know what, or more importantly, who to ask. Like "I am so overwhelmed, God. Please help me. Please bail me out. Don't let me suffer like this."

I know that God tells us to ask for things.
And I also know that He understands when we get in so deep we can't see the way out.
But when these prayers of rescue or favor-granting become our standard fare, when our daily prayers consist of fearful flailing and endless lists of I-wants, I am sure we are not in the place God wants us.

To confirm that, I look at John 17:
After Jesus said this, He looked toward heaven and prayed...--John 17:1
He looked toward heaven, not toward His concerns on earth.

Glorify your Son so that your Son may glorify You.--John 17:2
He asked only for what would benefit His Father, not Himself.

I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me.--John 17:9
Jesus confined His prayers to what His Father had already indicated as concerning Him.

May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.--John 17:21
He prayed for the success of the plan His Father put in motion through Him.

Jesus does not once here pray for His own concerns--His coming suffering, His earthly friends and family, or His own strength. He trusts God for all of these.

If I pray for a thing, then my goal is clearly the thing, not God.
If I pray for a relationship, I am more interested in the relationship than in God.

I cannot even pray for new motivations, or emotions, or will. Those are my part.  God will not control me. I must control myself and dealing with my own will and emotion and motivation is how I do it. My obedience in emotional self-control is what I bring to the party.

And we wonder why our prayer is not answered.
God does not give His favors to relative strangers looking for a new toy.
Proper prayer, however, God always answers, and we find it in those rare moments when our will intersects with His own.

Prayer is answered from a place of union with God only.

The Real Zombie Walk

Everybody's talking about a coming zombie apocalypse.
I used to think they were joking.

After all, what is a zombie?
The dictionary says it is "the body of a dead person given the semblance of life, but mute and will-less, by a supernatural force, usually for some evil purpose."
Colloquial observation  tells me that a zombie is a mindless, soulless, automaton. Neither reason nor sentiment affects it.  Kill one if you can, because nothing else will stop it.

Don't think you've run up against a zombie lately? 
You have. 
Every time we see someone intentionally follow a course they know is wrong or destructive.
Every time someone refuses responsibility they know is rightfully theirs.
Every time someone denies obvious truth or reason.
Every time someone does wrong because someone else has. 

Take a close look at their blank stare. You've seen it before, and often. 
 And what's worse, we've been warned:
They refused to pay attention; stubbornly they turned their backs and stopped up their ears.--Zechariah 7:11
They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.--2Timothy 4:4
Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes.--Isaiah 6:10
To whom can I speak and give warning? Who will listen to me? Their ears and closed so they cannot hear.--Jeremiah 6:10

People who function without thought, without reflection, without reason--they are the zombies. They probably won't groan or wear that telltale blood on their shirt, but they are zombies nonetheless. 
And, in their own way, they are just as dangerous.

Jew for a Day

I am trying to imagine myself a Jew today.
Or a Buddhist, or a Mohammedan, or a Muslim.
I know that God exists.  
He made me. His power drives the world.
Somewhere, from up high and far away, He influences my life.

I try to serve Him. I try to obey Him. I reach out to love Him, to draw near to Him, but He is too terrible, too far.
He speaks to men sometimes, but they don't benefit much from the conversation.  They are too flawed themselves.
Such men have stood so near God as to hear His voice in thunder and whisper, to feel the heat of His fire, to witness His blinding brightness, but even then, they fail.
They smash His personally engraved tablets in a fit of anger.
They fear their king so deeply that they tell him their wife is their sister.
They sleep with their captain's wife, then kill him to cover it up.
No, these men, though they have spoken with God, do not help much at all.

And, because I am a Jew, there is no Jesus.
God shows no gentleness, little mercy, no offered fellowship, no shared humanity.
I long for God, but know that He will not share His heaven with the likes of me.
I can never know my God.

Then I remember Simeon:
Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared for the face of all people; a light to  lighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of your people Israel.--Luke 2:29-32

He saw Jesus on the day of His presentation in the Temple.
One look.  That's all it took to change an impossible contradiction into hope and a future.
One look.
Not a God far away, but God in my own skin.
Simeon, a faithful Jew, but as sad and impatient as the rest, had waited for the promise.
And it came.
It came to him in the same way that it comes to everyone--in one moment.

I look up and He is there.
My Savior lives.

Being Beethoven

"How do I know God's will?" she asked me.
"How can I be sure I am doing what He wants me to do?"
Good question.

Anything we do, God Himself can do better, so what, after all, does God want from us?
And what does the Lord require of you?  To act justly and love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.--Micah 6:8

Yes, yes, I know that. But what to DO?
God gives us stuff to do not because He needs us to get it done for Him, but because He wants us to seek Him in it.

Seek Him first, last, and always...then do what seems right until we can't do it any more.

Don't concentrate on the result. 
As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.--Isaiah 55:9

Do what God gives us to do because He gave it.  
He manages the result.
I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow.--1Corinthians 3:61
We cultivate devotion to God.  He brings in the harvest.

Beethoven was nearly deaf when he composed his ninth symphony.  He never heard it, but he wrote it, and conducted it, with such genius and fervor that almost everyone recognizes its Ode to Joy:

God asks us, too, to play the notes even when we can't hear the music.
My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast.  I will sing and make music.  Awake, my soul.  Awake, harp and lyre.  I will awaken the dawn.--Psalm 57:71
Play on, and our love for God becomes our true song.

Forget the Pool

Thinking today about the lame man sitting beside the pool at Bethesda, waiting 38 years to be healed.  Jesus, knowing everything about him, asks the man,
Do you want to be healed?--John 5:6

Obviously, waiting at the pool was not getting the job done.
Jesus wanted the man to reconsider his position.
Jesus did not just want to heal him.  He wanted to show him something wonderful.
He not only wanted the man to walk, He wanted him to see.

When Jesus told the man to pick up his mat and walk, restoring his mobility was not the point.
Jesus did not want to give him only legs that worked.
He wanted the man not to walk, but by walking to see real power.

The man had waited vainly for so long because he looked for the wrong thing in the wrong place.  He looked to get well, not to find God.

Where do I look? 
Do I look for relief?  Do I look for a spot of water to bring it?  Do I look to someplace else on the planet or to something of flesh and blood?  Do I think these can enact rescue, provide comfort?

Or do I look always into the eyes of my Savior?  Do I see His extended hand, offering more than the world, more than legs that work, more, more, more?

Forget the pool.  I want the power.

Who Really Rises

The sun does not rise.
Just saying.
That big yellow ball on the eastern horizon every morning is not the one moving.
We are.  The earth.  The blue marble.

Now, intellectually, we already know this.  The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth, but when I look out of the the window at 6AM, I think, "The sun is coming up."
But it isn't.  Instead, I am on the earth, and the part of the earth I occupy is turning to face the sun.  Every day, my patch of earth slowly rotates relative to our stationary sun, then turns during the night away from it.  Our dawn is simply my face turning into the light.

Now, when you think about it, this makes perfect sense.
God made the world to reflect Himself.
He is the sun...constant, glorious and full of light.  We are the earth...vacillating, moving now toward Him, now away. 

You remain the same, and Your years will never end.--Psalm 102:27
I, the Lord, do not change.--Malachi 3:6

God finds delight in us as we seek Him, as we turn from dark to light.
He does not move.
Luckily, that makes Him easy to find.

Who Is My Enemy?

It's hard to think about having enemies. 
I have family connected by blood, friends connected by heartstrings, and acquaintances connected by circumstance, but enemies?
Nobody is shooting at me, cursing me, or actively blocking my progress, are they?  No, not really.

But God thinks they are.
He keeps telling me that He will defend me from enemies as though He assumes I have them.
What am I missing?

I think it is this:  My enemy is not a person.
My enemy is blindness.
My enemies are the people and things I bring close enough to block my vision, to distract me from God.

The Lord said to Moses, "When you cross the Jordan, drive out all the inhabitants before you.  Destroy their images and idols and demolish their high places.  Take possession of the land, for I have given it to you."--Numbers 33: 50-53

The territory I have to conquer is not only physical, it is the ground I have given to an enemy in heart or action.  
What habits do I maintain that come from former times? They are my enemies.
What thought patterns placate or distract me?  They are my enemies.
What plans and desires derail God in my life?  They are my enemies.

Just as I can't know salvation until I know I am a miserable sinner, God cannot destroy my enemy until I acknowledge its identity. And the enemy often comes from within.

God reminds me that I more often embrace my enemy than engage him. 
But when I do choose to stand my ground against an enemy, the fight is God's and I am guaranteed victory.
In all these things, we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.--Romans 8:37

Be Careful What You Ask For

Poor Solomon.
God asked him what he wanted and Solomon asked for wisdom.  A good thing.  Very good, everyone seemed to think.  And God gave him piles of it, along with piles of everything else--power, wealth, wives.

It started out all right, like the dead baby incident, when wisdom came in pretty handy for figuring stuff out.

With time, however, wisdom brought Solomon a kind of clarity he didn't particularly like, and he wrote about it in Ecclesiastes.

Meaningless! Meaningless!  Everything is meaningless!--Ecclesiastes 1:2

So this is where wisdom leads?  Apparently, it is.

God's gift of wisdom gave Solomon a clear view of man, much clearer than he liked.  And this is what he saw:

Work achieves nothing lasting  (Ecc 2:11)

Men continually mess up  (Ecc 7:20 and 8:14)

Riches and wisdom make little difference in the end (Ecc 10:6)

God showed Solomon that, even though he was a great man, he was still a man.
This only have I found:  God made man upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes.--Ecc 7:29
God showed him that, for all Solomon's wisdom, he was still a sinner.
There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins.--Ecc 7:20

Solomon thought his wisdom would help make him a better man.  Instead, it only helped him see mankind's failings more clearly.  In the end, wisdom differed very little from any other possession he'd accumulated.  

God graciously put Solomon in his place, and Solomon left a bit deflated, but finally seeing with a wisdom greater than his own.

In the end, Solomon concluded this:

Live your life, remembering that you sin.

Be happy as you can with what you are given, remembering that it will not last.

Love God.  Obey Him, remembering that only He sees righteousness clearly, and only His perfect wisdom lasts forever.  (Ecc 7:13, 12:13)

Not what Solomon expected, but not so bad after all.