Pay Attention!

Did you ever hold  wild bird in your hand?
So light, so small, so fleeting...bound to fly away at the slightest flinch.
Its quick, small weight is a rare gift and too soon gone.
I have to pay attention every minute lest it vanishes.

That bird is like God, whose nearness is also a fragile thing.

God--fierce, constant, powerful God--always hovers close by.  He occupies the very air. His love, ethereal and palpable, bears rare,  precious weight.

But it can fly away in an instant of inattention.
Although God, for His part, always loves, always protects, my own wavering drives Him off, just out of reach.

That is why I nurture my closeness to God like a sweet rare bird in the palm of my hand, knowing that, though He never changes, when I succumb to random motion, He will flutter off to a nearby branch and wait there until I am still again.

Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,--Isaiah 54:10

Works for Me...

Forty years.
Why did God make Moses and his Jews wander around in the desert for forty years?  Why not twenty? Why not fifty?

What happens in forty years. anyway?
People die, that's what.  Two generations die.
In forty years, God knew that virtually none of the people who He rescued from Egypt would still be alive.  None of the ones who worshiped the golden calf.  None of the ones who complained about not having onions.  None of them, not even the babies.

 Your sons shall be shepherds for forty years in the wilderness, and they will suffer for your unfaithfulness, until your corpses lie in the wilderness.--Numbers 14:33

After forty years, none of those Jews still living would have remembered anything about their life in Egypt.  They all would have grown up in the desert.  They would know nothing of lush harvests or emerald rivers.  They would know only sand and sun and manna and God.  And they would be grateful for the promised land.

God thinks in terms of generations. Men do not.
Even Hezekiah, who came to know God and to teach his whole kingdom about Him, didn't get that God does not just care about individuals.  He cares about legacies.

 Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the Lord Almighty: The time will surely come when everything in your palace, and all that your fathers have stored up until this day, will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord. And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood who will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.”

“The word of the Lord you have spoken is good,” Hezekiah replied. For he thought, “There will be peace and security in my lifetime.”--Isaiah 39:5-8 

In other words, Hezehiah thought, "It may suck to be you, but it works for me..."

God doesn't agree.

What damage does generational faithlessness produce?

Examine your own heritage. 

What did your grandparents do or know that has been lost?

Did a grandparent build or sing or sew or cook something that has disappeared forever?

Did they know how to survive without car or grocery store or telephone?

Does they have a heritage of faith that has dwindled from misuse?

Two generations and it is lost.  Gone, and irretrievable.

Forfeiting what was good from prior generations steals from our children.

We keep the faith of our fathers today not just because it benefits ourselves, but so that we can build an unbroken chain of those who know and love God for the future.

And you shall teach them your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house,
and when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.--Deuteronomy 11:19

The Look of Real Horror

Aliens vs Godzilla
The Tomato that Ate Cleveland
Halloween 25
It's that time of year again, when horror becomes the pastime du jour.

But most of what passes for horror is only silliness.
Want to see real horror?
Try repentance.

Don't bother looking into the ridiculously manufactured faces of Jason or Frankenstein.
Try looking into the face of our holy God, knowing that you have offended Him and that He does not have to do more than think about your death to make it happen, and that His face turned away will be eternity in howling darkness.
Think about sin, your sin.

You will know when you get it, when the reality of it dawns on you.
You will know.

Why have these people turned away?..They cling to deceit;..no one repents of his wickedness, saying, "What have I done?--Jeremiah 8:5-6

"What have I done?"
The sadness, the devastating reality, the...repentance.
That is horror. Real horror.
Not the movies, not any fright fest, no trick or treating.

We have to go there, you know. And often.
Repentance is not a Sunday thing, not a just-before-church thing, not even a daily thing.
The best repentance comes right away, moment by moment, the same way we sin.

"What have I done?"
And when we know, and repent, Christ will show us again what He has done.

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.

We, the Needy

OK, so you aren't rich.
Most of us aren't.
Or are we?  I mean, rich compared to who?
We might not be rich compared to Bill Gates, but how about compared to someone living in the Middle Ages, who feared plague or walked in cow dung every day? Or in Renaissance Europe, when courtiers carried perfumed hankies because people and places stank so badly? Or modern Ethiopia, where starvation kills thousands of people every day?
We are, in fact, richer than we ordinarily think.

Admit it.
We live in a place and time of comfort and privilege.  No one dies of starvation here.  We do not wake to the sound of gunfire. Our lives are luxuriant beyond that of ancient kings.

But are very poor in one way.  We can no longer see God.
We are the ones Jesus spoke of when He said,
Blessed are they who have not seen, yet believe.--John 20:29

We have not seen.
Moses, Abraham, and Noah have long ago died. The burning bush is extinguished.  The voice on Sinai is silent. Jesus does not walk among us.  We cannot, by word of mouth, learn of something He did just yesterday in the next town.

We need one thing those poorer people did not.
If we are to know God, we must have faith.
No earthly privilege will bring it.
No wealth can buy it.
We will not stumble upon it hanging on a cross in the town square.

Still, God made us for this time.
Faith is part of our intended destiny and, indeed, it is our privilege.
Because we cannot see, we must believe.

My Lord and my God!--John 20:28
The Lord is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth.--Psalm 145:18

Waaaaa!

What do you cry about?
Be honest.
Sadness, loneliness, loss, physical pain, emotional hurt?
More often then not, this is the audio to that:  "Me. Me. Me."
Even empathy for someone else transfers from our own remembered pain.
Our tears are almost always all about us.
I do it, too.

We begin at birth with a cry of outrage when life smacks us with cold and discomfort, and we wail at its first assaults.
And they keep coming.
And, when they seem too much, we cry.

Did Jesus cry at birth?
He felt the pain and cold, too, but did He cry?
He wept later, but in very specific circumstances--over the sins of His people, and again at Lazarus' grave.  He wept for the death of people he loved. In no recorded instance did He cry over personal loneliness, insult, betrayal, or desertion.
Not like we do.
Jesus' flesh felt every body blow as deeply as our does, but He did not cry over them.
Why not?

Think about Him at His weakest moment--in the garden, sweating blood in an agony of anticipated suffering.
"Let this cup pass", He begged, but it would not.
He had come to the end of His human resources, but He did not cry.
I cry because I do not master my flesh.
Jesus, Master of all things, did.

He felt every pain, every hurt, as deeply as I do, but He did not give in to them.
Why not?  What was the difference?
He knew Himself.
He knew His Father.
He had already won.
I am supposed to know this, too, and in this knowledge, self-pity has no place.

Can I hold His kind of mastery over myself all the time?  No.
But in this, like in all things, Christ says,
"Follow Me."
"Be holy."
"My yoke is easy."

From the very first ones, all of my tears have been selfish.
Yes, tears sometimes come as a release, too, and I will still shed these, but I have no real reason to cry. Not ever.  Not really.
My Savior lives. He loves and cares for me.
What could I possibly cry about in the face of that?

So Far Away...

Warning: You might not like this post.

Something has been bothering me for a long time.
Something about mission trips, and public ministry, and faith extravaganzas.
We plan them, we talk them up, we go to them.
And they look good.  They bring God into public view and seem to honor Him.  Some say that they change the lives of those who witness them, and maybe they do.

But is it possible that we are also hiding behind them?
Are we hiding our own inadequacies, our own distance from God?
For whom do we travel to a distant place, dance, or sing, or preach or perform streetcorner dramas?  For unbelievers?  Really?

Maybe.
And maybe we do it to drag our own sorry behinds back to God.

I know this:
We stay close to the ones we love, if not bodily, then in spirit.
If we want to connect with someone we care about, we do not have far to go--they will hear a sigh, a whisper.  We will not need to shout.   If we want to touch them, we need only lean in their direction.   They are already near.

It is the same with Christ.  We need to stay near Him, too.
My lover is mine and I am His.--Song of Solomon 2:16

If we care about our Savior, we will not need any spectacular display.  We draw near to Him with little prayers and exclamations, with everyday favors and tender moment-by-moment murmurs because He is already close by.

And He is there because He is our dearest love, and the place we find the beauty of holiness.