Ducks

When I taught seventh grade, we had two ducks for class pets, Leonardo and Archimedes. They weren't real ducks, of course. Real animals and large numbers of thirteen-year-olds do not mix well. The ducks were made of polyester fluff and stuffed with beans, easy to care for, and small enough to sit on desks or on shoulders or to hang from the ceiling fan.

They provided low-key amusement for the students, but the ducks persistently mocked me. Education is serious business, after all. I wanted to rock students' world with wonders: the beauty of poetry, rhythm of mathematics, the nobility of history. In naming the ducks, the kids had reduced the nobility of art and numbers to balls of fuzz. I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all.

I thought school to be made of nobler stuff--of reaching beyond their grasp, of dreaming big and then making those dreams happen. That part was all right, but I also thought that I could make it all happen, that I had chosen this career and could bring it to life by the force of my own vision.
But I was wrong.

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit--fruit that will last.-John 15:16

My job is not to enact my own vision, but Yours. I wanted to bring Truth and Beauty into the lives of youngsters, but that is not within my purview. Truth and Beauty belong to You and You deliver them to men. The fruit You want me to bear have arms and legs, flesh and blood. Truth and beauty are easy. They hover above this poor earth like beacons You gave to light the way. My job, whether a teacher or a plumber or a mother, is to deal with the messy parts, the people.

Now, Archimedes and Leonardo, they just sit there, wearing noble names and doing nothing, exactly the opposite of what You want for me. Any noble name I ever have, You will give. In the meantime, I must remember the beautiful, but work in the immediate. You have chosen it and it will last.

Family Business

I've often marveled at how God puts us together in families with people we would never have chosen for friends. After all, we tend to choose friends like ourselves in temperament, in belief, and in interest. When siblings don't fall into those categories, however, our relations with them become more like exercises in patience and forgiveness rather than true friendship. We sometimes love them because we have to. We will, after all, be related to them forever.

God has a family, too. When He adopted us as His children, He gave us brothers and sisters according to His choosing, not ours. Some of them we like, and others we may not, but we are related to them all forever. We are joined with each other through the Lord we all love, for better or worse.

He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with His pleasure and will to the praise of His glorious grace which He has freely given us in the one He loves.--Ephesians 1:4-6

We are all adopted children in God's family, equal before Him by virtue of our faith. The blood that joins us, the shed blood of Christ, is at least as strong a tie as shared DNA. We cannot reject one another when we have differences, but must take advantage of every opportunity to face our rough spots with honesty and overcome them.

I don't always understand my fellow siblings in God's family, but by God's grace, I love them. They, like my physically related sister and brothers, teach me to deal with dissension and criticism as well as how to enjoy agreement and affection, but they do it under the eternally binding influence of faith. I may not have to spend hereafter with everyone in my physical family, but am blessed, or stuck, with God's family forever. Thank you, Father, for the challenge of family business.

Thought for today: How do you think God's family differs from a physical family?

You Can't Go to Church, Part Two

Like many of you, I can say that I went to church yesterday. I pulled in, parked my car, and walked through a door. The building had walls and a roof and a cross up front. It had pews in which I stood, and sat, and knelt side by side with other believers. However, had the building been empty of any other person, had I been alone, I could not have gone to church. The building would have been there, but the church would have been absent.

God did not build His church with wood or stone. He built it upon the belief of man.

"But what do you say,?" He asked. "Who do you say I am?"
Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God,"
Jesus replied,"Blessed are you Simon, son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church."

The word 'Peter' means rock. Jesus, in giving Simon Peter this new name, invested him with a special place in His early church, but He did it at the specific moment that Peter declared the one essential truth that binds the church even today, the declaration that Jesus was the Christ. Everyone who believes this is the church. Jesus built His church not only on Peter, but upon the power of faith.

Together, the people of the church live and breathe the Word of God. We bear the gospel with every step. When we are together, we gather the power of the Holy Spirit into one vibrant place. There is no doubt that God wants us to gather, but He doesn't much care where we do it. In fact, the more we concentrate on our buildings, the less attention we have to concentrate on Him.

So, on Sunday morning, I search out the people of God and pray shoulder to shoulder with them because of what Jesus said to Peter so long ago. I know there is power in our communion with each other and with Him.

But tonight, when we have dinner with believing friends to mark their daughter's departure for college, well, that's church, too. Christ reigns over both places and we glorify Him through both activities. Our church exists because of Him and because of each other and we delight in being together.

You Can't Go to Church, Part One

Here's the picture--it's Sunday morning. Mom and Dad are getting dressed for church, she in a sweet chintz dress and he in a blue striped tie. The children line up for approval. Mom straightens the last cowlick and wipes a smudge off a patent leather shoe and they march first into the station wagon, then through the church door. There, they sit quiet and attentive in the pew: standing to sing, and sitting to listen, and kneeling to pray, satisfying and squeaky clean. They have gone to church. They are ready for another week.

OK, so that's a dated picture. Today, the family is more likely to show up in jeans or shorts, often to join in electronically enhanced worship, but the concept remains the same. When it's Sunday, we go to church. How did we get this idea? God sees things differently:

How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty! My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh cry out for the living God.--Psalm 84:1-2

Where are the pews? Where is the stained glass? Where is the choir? Instead, the psalmist paints a picture of longing, panting, yearning, not of pews standing in regimented order full of proper people who pray and sing and go home. God's church is a living thing, pulsing and full of vigor. His church is not a place, it is an entity, a phenomenon. It has blood and bone, soul and spirit.

From God's view, it is impossible to go to church. We cannot go to church any more than we can go to life. Wherever believers gather, we are in church. Whatever we do together is worship. Our Holy God does not live in a building made of human hands. His house does not have a door.

If you want to go to church, look in a mirror. If you want to find the house of God, look at the believing friends standing together with you in your photo album or on Facebook. God breathes through you every moment and His Spirit works with more power when an assembly gathers. You do not go to the church. The church, when God lives in you, goes with you.

Thought for today: What purposes do church buildings serve?

Inpouring and Overflowing

I work at a winery. Whenever I walk through the front door, particularly in this season, when the harvest is beginning to come in, the ripe smells of plenty surround me. In the back of the store, bright fermenting vats stand in regiments and, in the front, bottles of deep flavors fill bins and shelves. When a customer comes in, I set a glass before him and pour a taste of wine, sparkling and clear. This place is full and rich; it overflows with tastes and smells.

You want this richness. You incorporate it into Your picture of life, Your hope of heaven.

...my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.--Psalm 23:5-6

In fact, cups overflow in heaven, too, but they do not contain any liquid.

...the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.--Revelation 5:7-8

The house of the Lord, the halls of heaven, serve up more than mere wine. We men, Your children, fill up Your cup with prayers that sparkle and satisfy, that provide conduit to Your power, that glorify You and flood heaven with Your praise. Like wine, prayers smell sweet and satisfy, then spill over into the golden lap of heaven.

Rather than vats and bottles, angels and saints stand rank on rank before You. Rather than wine, Your glory fills every space. The aroma of prayer drifts up from this poor earth to fill Your cup and then, You fill my soul.

Thought for today: This world is God's reflection. Where do you see His truth in it?

Riding the Wave

I wake up in this world every day. I share my existence with a man, a cat, a tree. I listen to birds and the noise of distant traffic. I smell vivid lilies or a heady skunk. I am in deep. Life surrounds and covers me. But I am a human being. I live in a world that is like me--vibrant, temporary, and flawed.

God, however, is something else, and has shown enough of Himself for me to define Him. This is the definition of God: He who has the power to give life to that which has none, to call out that which is not as though it were, to promise with unfailing power and confidence, and to fulfill every promise made in His perfect will.

He (Abraham) is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed--the God who gives life to the dead and calls out things that are not as though they were...he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what He had promised.--Romans 4:17, 20

Ah, sovereign Lord, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you.--Jeremiah 32:17

Like I have lived every day of my life in this world, God lives in an infinite creation of His own making. I am surrounded by what is like me, but God surrounds Himself with Himself, perfectly sufficient and powerful. And, because I am His reflection, I share in the glory of His infinity. I am taken up in it as I raise my eyes to Him in faith. God is both the irresistible force and the immovable object.

God is like the vast ocean--unrelenting, consuming, overpowering, but at the same time beautiful and refreshing. Even as I am drawn down into Him, He bears me up.

Thought for today: God makes Himself known to everyone. How has He made Himself known to you today?

God: Father or Host?

We like to entertain and our guest rooms are often full. Most of the time, guests are not family members, but anyone from sweet friends, to occasional hangers-on, to near, needy strangers. Whoever they are, we believe God brings them and we try to make them comfortable accordingly. Recently, though, as we welcomed our granddaughter for a couple of weeks, I realized something important about guests.

Through Him (Jesus), we have access to the Father by the Spirit. Consequently, you are no longer foreigners or aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household.--Ephesians 2:18-19

A chasm of difference yawns between the way I welcome a young unrelated guest and the way I welcome a granddaughter. For a casual guest, I fluff pillows in the same way, and make sure she has toiletries and clean towels in the same way, but do not concern myself so much about whether she brushes her teeth every morning or eats properly or what poet she may prefer so I can plan for her next birthday gift. And I certainly do not giggle at infant resemblances in family pictures or discuss which pieces of my jewelry she may prefer to inherit. Nor does a casual guest ask for advice regarding college choices with an expectation that I will be there later to help. An unrelated guest does not have privileges like these. On the surface, relatives act respectfully and with consideration for one another just as we would to anyone, but underlying expectation and responsibility apply from both sides that we cannot ignore.

So exists my relationship with God. I am his daughter. He has adopted me. Without Him, I would still live in His lovely world, would still see the sun every morning and the stars every night. I would eat the food He has provided and smell the flowers He made and hear a bird call. I could not, however, lay any claim to it. I would be a guest in His world, able to use what He provided, but only for the short time I stay.

As a daughter, and only as a daughter, I have rights and privileges. God makes His guests comfortable, but He loves His children as His own. I know I have an inheritance and bear His resemblance. As a daughter, I have responsibility to Him and He teaches me. As a daughter, I learn the family secrets, the truths, and am invested for the long haul. As a daughter, I do not only enjoy the guest room of earth, I know that the inheritance of heaven is already prepared.

Thought for today: How do you understand your daughterhood or sonship?