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. 

credit: www.miraclefruitusa.com

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. 

credit:holdinholden.com

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

All the Saints

From: galleryhip.com

Today is All Saints Day, one of the sweetest festivals of the church. It is when we remember our place among all those of faith who have come before and those destined to come after. The line is long, the crowd very dense and they are all so, well, so great. They have done so much, suffered so much. Many still do. How can we measure up to that? What kind of place in heaven can we find compared to them?

Mechthild of Magdeburg (1208-1282) expressed it well:

To the extent we desire that God be praised, recognize that we have been given, and properly carry out God's will, we are like the prophets and the holy fathers who through great virtue overcame themselves in God.

To the extent that we learn wisdom and through it change other people and stand true to God in all trials we resemble the holy apostles who went out of themselves even unto death.

To the extent that we are patient in all distress and in the measure that we hold fast to our Christian faith, even in the face of death, we resemble the holy martyrs, who have marked out for us through the shedding of their blood the true path to heaven.

To the extent that we bear resolutely the difficulties of Holy Christianity, both those of the living and those of the dead, we are like the holy confessors, who remained watchful in great toil and heard confessions with sympathy.

To the extent that we remain unconquered in battle and preserve our maidenly honor we are like the holy virgins, who have not lost true victory.

To the extent that we have deep sorrow and to the extent that we perform many kinds of holy penance we are like those holy widows who, after sinning, attained such great honor.

To the extent that we have all the virtues about us we are like God and all His saints, who have followed God with complete devotion.*

We are not asked to be saintly in the context of someone else's life. We are asked to become saints within the life God has given to us. The opportunity for martyrdom that put another man or woman in a den of lions or in front of an assault rifle may never come to us. We may never encounter the victims of a earthquake or a deadly virus or desperate hunger. We may never meet a people unreached by the gospel.

But we can be saints within the circumstances God has marked out for us to the extent that we yearn for righteousness with the same fervor as those who have done these things. We can love with the same compassion. We can work with the same zeal. We can rejoice with them in the same holy God.

All Saints Day. My day. Your day.

*From The Flowing Light of the Godhead

The Creation Test

credit: cosminpana.com

OK--Here's another test. (If you missed the first one, click here)
This is the creation test, and again consists of only one simple question:
What was the first thing God created?

Are they running through your mind? The plants, the animals, the cosmos?
Maybe you are thinking this:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.--Genesis 1:1
How can anyone argue about that?

Well, not so fast.
Have you ever seen this?
The LORD brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old.--Proverbs 8:22

Oh really? And what was this that God made before he made the rest? Go back a few verses:
I, Wisdom, live together with good judgment--Proverbs 8:12

It's Wisdom. God made Wisdom before anything else.
Wisdom. God begat His own Consciousness and Word. He gave them His sound and utterance.*
His own Consciousness. God's awareness of everything.
How great a gift is this? Well, you answer that.
By Wisdom we hear God's voice.
By Wisdom we can know right and wrong.
By Wisdom we have the capacity to discover.
By Wisdom we recognize justice and freedom.

Without Wisdom, God could have made the whole world and we would be completely clueless about it. We would know no inspiration, no curiosity, no wonder. Without Wisdom, we would never come to realization about the greater meaning of anything.
Look at your pet. That is creation without Wisdom. Sweet, loveable, and clueless.

Wisdom had to come first because, through it, God made a way to know Him.
And how did we figure this out?
By using God's gift of Wisdom.
Thank you, Lord.

*Tertullian, (c. 200), Adversus Praxean, 6

Taking off the Mask: Wearing Truth

photo: reachinghurtingwomen.blogspot.com

I'm a hypocrite.
I admit it. So are you.

This is why:
Every time I sin, I have lied about what I believe. I have lied to whoever has witnessed my sin but, worse, I have lied to myself.

Here's how it works: I say I want to do the right thing, that I don't want to sin. And then I do. How does that work? Is someone twisting my arm to take a third piece of cake? To snark at my husband? To spend time at work on the phone with friends? Really?
Even the writer of Hebrews knows:
In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of death.--Hebrews 12:4

This is the truth--
I always do exactly what I want to do. 
Every time.
The devil never makes me do it. He can't. I have to cooperate. I have to agree. We all do.

Think about it. Imagine someone who is a compulsive thief. He says he loves God and wants to obey Him, but just can't seem to stop himself. We call this behavior an addiction and it probably is. Addiction is a real thing, but even an addict lies to himself and we often let him. Even given the physical pull of addiction, at some level the addict likes his behavior. He enjoys the thrill of cheating, the belonging of gossip, the comfort of the drug. They not only feel like they can't, but deep down do not want to give it up.

We choose our sin.

Here's a more honest approach. Just say it.
Adultery is exciting.
Gossip makes us feel important.
Food makes us happy.
Anger vindicates us.

Our faults and habitual sins are not mitigated in the least when we go to church on Sunday or read our Bible but don't change. Unaltered sinful behaviors do not characterize a Christian. They indicate a Pharisee.

There is a a relief, a kind of grace, in admitting who we really are. Try it sometime.
Substitute "I struggle with nagging, but can't seem to stop" with "I don't dare stop nagging him. Nothing will ever get done." Admit that we care less that nagging is wrong than about getting the garbage taken out.

God knows this is hard, but He wants us to examine our real motives:
I desire truth in the inner parts--Psalm 51:6

Before we can turn our true face to the world, we have to turn a true face toward God and toward ourselves.
What are we really afraid of? The Christian mask we are wearing will have to come off sooner or later. We might as well take it off now. The Christian truth lies underneath.

Linking up this week with http://christianmommyblogger.com/fellowship-fridays-22-link-parties-worth/

It Wants to Go Straight

Thank you, God, for bringing us a teenager who we can teach how to drive.

photo:noexcuses-easyorganising.blogspot.com

Really. I mean it.
Learning how to drive bears so much resemblance to learning how to live.
The techniques are, in the end, very much the same.
Look where you are going.
Watch out for the other guys.
Anticipate your next move.
Slow down for turns.

And then, after she turns a corner and overcorrects--

Just let the wheel come back on its own.
The car wants to go straight.

The car wants to go straight.
It does, you know. Just let go of the wheel and it will return to center.
Just let go and you will go the right way.
So it works for the car, but do I do that with my life? Do I know how to find the straight way by just letting go?

I will instruct you in the way you should go.--Psalm 32:8

You tell me, of course. Over and over. I know where to go because of You.
You show me the straight path and I want to walk it because You give me the desire.

Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind me saying, This is the way: walk in it.--Isaiah 30:21

You make me want to go straight.

photo:www.lonelyplanet.com

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

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.

Why the Apple was Delicious

Eve picked the apple because it was beautiful and juicy.  I suspect it tasted sweet and made a satisfying crunch when she bit into it.  God could have made it ugly or poisonous, but He didn't.

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good and pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some, and ate it.--Genesis 3:6

It made sense to her.  The tree, after all, held the knowledge of good and evil.  Knowledge is good, right?  The fruit was supposed to bring wisdom.  God wants us to be wise, doesn't He?

It made sense.  Simple, common sense.  So what was the problem?

The problem wasn't with the apple.  The apple itself was fine, exactly what it was made to be.  The problem was Eve.  And what she thought of God.

Eve thought of the apple first, not God.  According to Eve's reasoning and common sense, the apple should have brought wisdom, but it brought death for only one reason: God said it would.  

God's command supersedes appearances and simple deduction and common sense. If common sense ruled, knowledge of good and evil would have brought Eve the advantages of wisdom and we would all have profited by it.  But it didn't because God knew that, in the end, it would destroy us, and it did.

It is not the worth of a thing itself that matters most.  It is whether God, in His infinite wisdom, affirms or denies our access to it. Temptation ties itself not to the thing, but to our willingness to trust and obey. 

Jesus saw this immediately when Satan came to visit Him:
Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.--Matthew 4:4

Plain obedience satisfied Christ.  Should it not satisfy us as well?