deep down things

Ravi Zacharias on Faith

2011-10-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

Faith in the biblical sense is substantive, based on the knowledge that the One in whom that faith is placed has proven that He is worthy of that trust. In its essence, faith is a confidence in the person of Jesus Christ and in His power, so that even when His power does not serve my end, my confidence in Him remains because of who He is.

(Ravi Zacharias)

Forgiven. Free.

2011-08-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

Now, most people would not be willing to die for a person who is morally upright; though someone might perhaps be willing to die for a person who is kind and good. But God offers proof of his great love for us in this: that when we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And since we have been made right in God's sight by the blood of Christ, he will certainly keep us from being condemned. (Romans 5:7-9)

When Will Jesus Return? (Bible Verses Harold Camping Didn't Read, and Why the World Isn't Ending Anytime Soon)

2011-06-03T19:33:00.000-07:00

Dear Harold Camping,

I hear you have a new prediction for when Jesus is due to return to earth. Just so you know, there appear to be some important verses missing from your Bible...pretty much all the verses that talk about when, exactly, Jesus is coming again. Here they are. Feel free to cut and paste them in when you have time.

But of that day and hour knows no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. (Matthew 24:36)

Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. (Matthew 24:42)

Therefore be you also ready: for in such an hour as you think not the Son of man comes. (Matthew 24:44)

Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man comes. (Matthew 25:13)

And as he sat on the mount of Olives over against the temple, Peter and James and John and Andrew asked him privately, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign when all these things shall be fulfilled? And Jesus answering them began to say, Take heed lest any man deceive you: For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. And when you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars, be you not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.

But take heed to yourselves: for they shall deliver you up to councils; and in the synagogues you shall be beaten: and you shall be brought before rulers and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them. And the gospel must first be published among all nations. (Mark 13:3-10)

But of that day and that hour knows no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. (Mark 13:32)

And he said to them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father has put in his own power. (Acts 1:7)

The Bible does say that Jesus is coming again. Twice, in fact. First, he's coming to the air to call home every soul that belongs to him. The world will be left on its own for a little while. Not one real Christian left (I don't think I need to explain that - you've probably encountered real ones and fake ones and you can figure out the difference). (Also, you might think a world without Christians sounds alright, but if you have a Christian friend, s/he probably carries your name in prayer to God daily. What's that worth?)

Then, in a time of unprecedented war and destruction, Jesus is coming to the earth to reign in peace for one thousand years. (Won't it be interesting to see how that's done!) So things might get messy (war and destruction and all) but the world can't end for at least another thousand years or so.

There's so much wack religion out there to distract us from reality. If you, like me, are hungry for something with a little less flake, Bible.cc is an online Bible in a list of translations that you can search by word or topic, and use to draw your own conclusions.

Something Borrowed: Does God Love You Just the Way You Are?

2011-06-03T19:27:00.001-07:00

Note: I borrowed this. The link to the original is at the bottom of this post.

Post Author: Bill Pratt (toughquestionsanswered.org)

In one sense God loves you just the way you are, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Let’s unpack this statement.

God loves each of his children unconditionally, wherever we are, whoever we are. Even if we are sinning, living a dissolute life, He still loves us. But what does love mean? The classic definition of love is to desire the good of another. God most definitely desires the good for all his children regardless of who they are. As human parents, we strive to love our children in the same way. Even though they are behaving badly, we still desire their good – we still love them.

The implication of the person who says that God loves them just as they are is often that they do not need to change anything about themselves; God will be perfectly content for them to be the same forever. Here is where they are making a serious error.

Continue reading here.

Looking for Signs: Revival in Our Times

2011-04-05T07:38:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of talk in the "Christian" world these days about revival. Someone is always muttering excitedly about this "movement" and that one, an end-times spiritual revival. So many people are just waiting for the big one, like a bunch of spiritual surfers just waiting to catch a big wave - one that will sweep gloriously across people and nations and carry us euphorically along on its crest. Churches, when they are filled with anything, are filled with cries to God to "send down fire" or "rain on us".

This, my friends, is rank foolishness. The Bible promises us no universal end-times revival, no outpouring. In fact, you want to know what it says about the "end-times"?

Now the Holy Spirit tells us clearly that in the last times some will turn away from the true faith; they will follow deceptive spirits and teachings that come from demons. (I Timothy 4:1)

But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. (II Timothy 3:1)

Now as to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, and our meeting with him, it is our desire, my brothers, That you may not be moved in mind or troubled by a spirit, or by a word, or by a letter as from us, with the suggestion that the day of the Lord is even now come; Give no belief to false words: because there will first be a falling away from the faith, and the revelation of the man of sin, the son of destruction, Who puts himself against all authority, lifting himself up over all which is named God or is given worship; so that he takes his seat in the Temple of God, putting himself forward as God. (II Thessalonians 2:1-4)

That all sounds pretty hopeless, but it's not. Remember Elijah, who went all doom-and-gloom when he felt that he was the only Israelite left following God?

...have you no knowledge of what is said about Elijah in the holy Writings? how he says words to God against Israel, Lord, they have put your prophets to death, and made waste your altars, and now I am the last, and they are searching for me to take away my life. But what answer does God make to him? I have still seven thousand men whose knees have not been bent to Baal. ( Romans 11:2-4)

There is yet hope for a revival. It won't be the one we have dreamed of, sweeping across nations and making magicians of priests and pastors. The holy God will not be conjured or summoned with repetitions or spells.

If we lack the kind of power we ought to have, the trouble is not that he needs to be pleaded with. The problem is not God; it is us. We've been looking for great signs of our God's power, and displays of his wealth, but we seek them for our own vindication and our pride; these things defeat His purpose. He designs to demonstrate not his power, but his love, his worth, his purity.

When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. (James 4:3)

We won't find revival by seeking it for governments or cultures or nations; we will find it when we seek it for our own hearts and lives. We won't receive it when we look for signs and special powers; we will receive it when we bend ourselves and allow the sword of truth to cut through our own flesh and our selfish wants. Revival won't come to us as a sweet, warm rush; it will humble us and shake us and tear us free from the tyranny of our comfort.

If we truly belong to Christ, and if we truly long for a renewal of our stone-cold, fattened, lazy hearts, we need to do more than squeeze out tears and chant prayers. They insult a great and giving God. Why should we seem to beg before a throne that has ever been the source of grace?

...He who did not withhold even His own Son, but gave Him up for all of us, will He not also with Him freely give us all things? (Romans 8:32)

So then, how ought the children of the Living God seek strength and renewal and fresh perspective from him? Real revival will begin, as it always has, with repentance: an awareness of our awful selfishness, and a willingness to learn rather than our bullish desire to teach.

"Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, so that there may come times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord... (Acts 3: 19)

Turn away my eyes from looking at vanity, And revive me in Your ways. (Psalm 119:37)

We can learn much from the experiences of Israel. I remember sitting in Sunday School as a child, hearing stories of the Israelites and rolling my eyes at their fickleness - but we, the followers of Christ, who have so much more, are just as foolish and just as easily turned aside. When Israel was brought back to the worship of the Living God, it was almost always through the reading of God's book - their books of the Law, and our Old Testament. We will find ourselves unable to repent, and unable to find renewed perspective, unless we act on a Spirit-given desire to learn the ways of our God, and submit ourselves to the discipline of reading from His book and laying ourselves open before him in prayer.

The desire for real revival is good and God-given. But let us not be deceived into seeking signs and supernatural wonders. Let us not look for God to change many people miraculously. Let us look for him to transform our perspectives, and soften our hearts with his love. Let us bend ourselves low, and allow God to change us, one by one, the hard way. Then we will have revival.

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints... (Ephesians 1: 18)

Why I Love Jesus, Part II

2011-02-20T22:30:00.000-08:00

Who else but God Eternal has the right to forgive me - not just for being a flawed human being, but for not doing or becoming the good that is within my grasp - ?
Who else but Love Himself dares forgive me?
Who else, real or invented, offers to help me realize the good I can imagine, when I have failed again and again to achieve it?
Who else loves me, without needing a thing from me?
Who else has given up his own rights, comfort, position - for me?
Who else can lift my load of guilt and not exchange it for denial or self-righteousness?
Who else knows me, really?
Who else, but Jesus?

...but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.
(John 8:1-11)

God of Eternity, Jesus of History

2011-01-19T23:54:00.000-08:00

A local website that focuses on multiculturalism has been doing a focus on diverse religions and their origins. I choked a little when I read that Christianity is a religion that was invented by a man named Paul. I'm awfully tired of the great press got by Jesus the Magic Nice-Guy.

The scandal of it, after all, is not that Jesus Christ, the man, was also the Eternal God - but that Almighty God was and is a man, existing in time and space. Yeshua ha Maschiah, promised by the prophets, was a mother's son. The modern world seems to have forgotten that Jesus of Nazareth is not just a religious figure, but a historical one.

It was with relish, then, that I read Skeptic Mantra #14: Jesus Never Existed, over at No Apologies Allowed. Hope you enjoy.

Something Borrowed: Is the New Testament Text Reliable?

2011-01-15T00:06:00.000-08:00

This post is not mine. I've "borrowed" it from a site called "Stand To Reason". A link to the full article is at the bottom. I hope you, like me, find it too good to pass up.

Is the New Testament Text Reliable?

By Gregory Koukl

The phrase, "The Bible's been translated and recopied so many times..." introduces one of the most frequent canards tossed at Christians quoting the Bible. Can we know for certain that the New Testament has been handed down accurately? Yes, we can.

In the spring of 1989 syndicated talk show host Larry King interviewed Shirley MacLaine on the New Age. When a Christian caller contested her view with an appeal to the New Testament, MacLaine brushed him off with the objection that the Bible has been changed and translated so many times over the last 2000 years that it's impossible to have any confidence in its accuracy. King was quick to endorse her "facts." "Everyone knows that," he grunted.

This appeal to common knowledge is enough to satisfy the ordinary, man-on-the-street critic of the New Testament. An appeal to the game "telephone" to demonstrate how reasonable this objection is. Whisper a message to one person and transfer it from person to person, ear to ear, in a circle. Then compare the message's final form with the original. The radical transformation of the original phrase in so short a period of time is always good for a few laughs. This comparison is enough to convince the casual skeptic that the New Testament documents are equally unreliable.

The argument against the reliability of the New Testament texts can be stated very simply. How can we know that the documents we have in our possession accurately reflect originals destroyed almost two millennia ago? Communication is never perfect; people make mistakes. Errors are compounded with each successive generation, just like the message in the telephone game. By the time 2000 years pass, it's anyone's guess what the original said.

It's easy to state the problem, and some may think merely raising the objection makes the argument itself compelling. Yet offering evidence on its behalf is a bit more difficult.

Usually the complaint is raised by people who have little understanding of the real issues. In cases like this, an appeal to common knowledge is more often than not an appeal to common ignorance. Like many questions about Christianity, this objection is voiced by people who haven't been given reliable information.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

The question of authenticity is not really a religious concern at all; it's an academic one. It can be answered in an academic way totally unrelated to spiritual convictions by a simple appeal to facts, an apologetic technique I call "Just the Facts, Ma'am."

The objection at first glance is compelling. When we try to conceptualize how to reconstruct an original after 2000 years of copying, translating, and copying some more, the task appears impossible. The skepticism, though, is based on two misconceptions about the transmission of ancient documents like the New Testament.

The first assumption is that the transmission is more or less linear, as in the telephone example--one person communicating to a second who communicates with a third, etc. In a linear paradigm people are left with one message and many generations between it and the original. Second, the telephone game example depends on oral transmission which is more easily distorted and misconstrued than something written.

Neither assumption applies to the written text of the New Testament. First, the transmission was not linear but geometric--e.g., one letter birthed five copies which became 25 which became 200 and so on. Secondly, the transmission in question was done in writing, and written manuscripts can be tested in a way that oral communications cannot be…

(Click the link below to continue reading...)

Stand to Reason: Is the New Testament Text Reliable?

The Amazing (Human) Race

2011-01-09T22:58:00.000-08:00

Nature attains perfection, but man never does. There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished. He is both an unfinished animal and an unfinished man. It is this incurable unfinishedness which sets man apart from other living things. For, in the attempt to finish himself, man becomes a creator. Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning and growing… (Eric Hoffer)

Thinking today about what it is that makes people so much more fascinating than almost anything else. Perhaps it is our unique ability to become. Not just change or grow, which is also fascinating and lovely when you see it in an animal or a plant. No, people have the possibility to do something more. By the choices we make, we actually become more or less than we began. It's mind-boggling, if you think of it. What power, not in doing, but in willing - !

And then, to consider that someday we will be what we have created; what we have willed. Is that the frightening part of death - to have our choices ended, our state-of-becoming completed? To be finally formed, finished?

I read an article the other day about artist Brian Eno, who has been challenging the idea that art needs to be controlled by the artist. His installation 77 Million Paintings is currently on display at Calgary's Glenbow Museum. It consists of a digital kaleidescope of paintings that shift and change at random; what emerges is something Eno did not choose. Eno says he believes that surrender ought to be thought of as an active verb. To be frank, I don't really like Eno's work, but the philosophy behind it intrigued me. In fact, it reminded me of the work of another Creator. The first one. He too created something and let go.

His creation, like Eno's, is not entirely what he would have it. God made an earth that is held together by a vast number of physical laws. He made animals of every sort. It is interesting to consider that when Noah built the ark, and God called every kind of animal in twos and sevens to enter it, they went. There was no complaining, no arguing. And then I think of Jesus in the boat, speaking to the wind and waves, saying, "Peace, be still". No hesitation. Entirely within his control. Humanity, though, is a wholly different kind of creation. Remember what Jesus said about us? O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you that kill the prophets, and stone them which are sent to you, how often would I have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and you would not! (Matthew 23:37)

But while 77 Million Paintings operates on randomness, humanity does not. For each of us, there are choices, and a choice. We ultimately become, not what we were made, but the result of what we will. We can change; become something different. Jericho's Rahab and Mary Magdalene both began as something many despise - prostitutes - and became women of great honour. Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, became a laughingstock.

What our mortality means is that we do not know the day when our choices will end; when we will be frozen forever into what we are; the ultimate result of what we have willed.

Religion and Relevance

2011-01-01T01:07:00.000-08:00

Religion and relevance. Two words that don't seem to go together. Can you be religious and relevant? And if your religion isn't relevant, what's it worth?

What we have let people believe is that Jesus and his followers have no relation to the matters at hand; that Christianity has nothing to do with the human, the everyday. How is it that we have allowed such a contradiction to gain ground?

The great Bible translator, William Tyndale, was jailed for translating the Bible into everyday English, but he just kept at it anyway, hoping there would one day be a Bible accessible to the English ploughboy. And there is, thousands of times over. But who today sees the Bible as something really to be read - by ploughboys or anyone else?

Make no mistake - we are the ones who have failed. We have shut ourselves away. We have withdrawn and turned our backs on a world for whom Christ died. We have become irrelevant.

This world deserves to see lives full of the mercy and the truth of Jesus Christ - relevant. Rubbing elbows with those he loves - sinners of every class, and not just the down-and-outs. What's that, you say? They don't want to rub elbows with us? Don't we have anything they want?

We are so in need of another Tyndale to translate our message of freedom and peace into the language of the today's ploughboy.

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound. (Isaiah 61:1)

The One we profess to follow spent a lot of time praying and a little time preaching, but he didn't just talk. He touched lepers. He paid taxes. He went to a wedding, and provided wine. He spent an afternoon, tired and thristy, chatting with a Samarian woman by a well. He went to dinner parties, at least once with a notorious traitor and a cheat. (Remember Zaccheus?) He had a job - in construction. He played with kids. He didn't just ring the bell of the Synagogue and sigh that no one was interested - he went out and related to people, where they were. His religion was relevant. Is yours?

Happy Holidays to You!

2010-12-15T23:13:00.000-08:00

How it warms my weary heart in this jumble of a season to hear, in the oddest of places, carols of praise and thanks to our Great God. I don't have a "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" banner on my balcony and I don't have any problem with saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" if that pleases people, but oh - what joy to hear "O come, Emmanuel" and "fall on your knees!" coming out of public stereo systems. In a world gone mad for Rudolph and beribboned angels, it is an uncommon luxury to be reminded of the unsentimental truth for which I am most grateful - that Jesus came and is coming again, and that when he does, every knee in the universe will bow in reverence before Him. With one voice and one heart, the earth will proclaim Him King. No war, no oppression, no violence. Love recognized and reigning...

O holy night! The stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of our dear Saviour's birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
'Til He appear'd and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Fall on your knees! O hear the angels' voices!
O night divine, O night when Christ was born;
O night divine, O night, O night Divine.

Led by the light of Faith serenely beaming,
With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand.
So led by light of a star sweetly gleaming,
Here come the wise men from Orient land.
The King of Kings lay thus in lowly manger;
In all our trials born to be our friend.

He knows our need, to our weakness is no stranger,
Behold your King! Before Him lowly bend!
Behold your King, Before Him lowly bend!

Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother;
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy name.

Christ is the Lord! O praise His Name forever,
His power and glory evermore proclaim.
His power and glory evermore proclaim.

Why Did Jesus Have to Die?

2010-11-24T00:05:00.000-08:00

Have you ever considered that dying was a weird thing for a God to do-? Have you ever asked yourself why Jesus had to die? You don't really think he was just a good guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, do you?

When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.
He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.

(IPeter2:23,24)

...we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

(Isaiah 53:4-6)

Come and see, look on this mystery
The Lord of the Universe, nailed to a tree
Christ our God, spilling His Holy blood
Bowing in anguish, His sacred head
Sing to Jesus, Lord of our shame
Lord of our sinful hearts.
He is our great Redeemer.
Sing to Jesus, Honor His name.
Sing of His faithfulness, pouring His life out unto death
Come you weary and He will give you rest

(Fernando Ortega, Sing to Jesus)

Jesus, the Creator and the Man

2010-11-04T00:11:00.000-07:00

I have thought much on the splendour of God, our Creator. He is worthy of my worship not merely because He is the Highest One, but because his unfailing kindness and multi-faceted wisdom and warm mother-care and unparalleled brilliance and deep goodness are observable both in all that He has made and in all His dealings with us. Who could help but reverence the One who spoke worlds into existence, before whom the highest angels cover their faces and cry "Holy, Holy, Holy"?

“Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.” (Revelation 4:11)

But what about Jesus, the man? What is He to me? How shall I worship Him?

And they sang a new song, saying, “Worthy are you... for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation..." (Revelation 5:9)

Jesus, God-with-us. He didn't pour grace from heaven; He packed up His position and His power, and He came here himself - not as a king, but as a homeless man. He wasn't too socially aloof to eat dinner with sinners or reach his hands out to lepers. He healed the blind and the sick, but he wasn't too morally uppity to provide wine for a wedding that had run out. He is the God who came down, and raises me up.

When I meet Jesus face to face, my eyes won't be on the blaze of His glory or the shining of his beauty. I won't look for the magnificence of the Eternal One, or the radiance of Him who is the Source of all Light. I will scan the crowds of heaven not for perfection, but for One who is forever marred. His hands and His feet, marked by man-made nails, will I seek among the incorruptible bodies of heaven's citizens.

No less the High and Holy, He is my Friend, the love of my heart. Though He sits now on the highest throne, he is none other than the God who became one of us, the God who knows as none other what it is like to be hungry and thirsty and tired; what it is like to cry and sweat and bleed.

Not with songs and low bows will I worship Jesus, the wounded One. When I see him, I will fling my arms around his neck. I will kiss his lovely feet.

THE cloudless day is nearing
When Thou, O Lord, wilt come,
Thy radiant beauty wearing,
To take Thy people home!
Bright hosts on hosts around Thee
Shall catch Thy living rays,
And all who once have found Thee
Breathe out new songs of praise.

But how shall I then know Thee
Amid those hosts above?
What tokens true will show me
The object of my love?
Thy glories, all excelling,
In pure effulgence shine;
But GLORY in Thee dwelling
Will ne'er proclaim Thee mine.

Thy wounds, Thy wounds, Lord Jesus,
Those deep, deep wounds will tell
The sacrifice that frees us
From self, and death, and hell!
These link Thee once for ever
With all who own Thy grace;
No hand these bonds can sever,
No hand these scars efface.

Ordinary Holiness

2010-10-29T01:45:00.000-07:00

"There are religions in which holiness involves unusual conditions and special diet. Some forms of mysticism seem to be incompatible with married life. But the type of holiness which Jesus teaches can be achieved with an ordinary diet and a wife and five children."
(from The Jesus of History, by T.R. Glover)

Refuge

2010-10-19T06:57:00.000-07:00

The Eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the Everlasting Arms. (Deuteronomy 33:27)

My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness. (1 Corinthians 2:12)

Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. (Isaiah 40:30)

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28)

Where else can we find a God for the weary? Every religion the world has been able to craft has a god or a creed that advises us to be strong; to do something; to be something. Some give detailed instructions about what we must do, and how we must do it. Nowhere except the Bible can we find a God who calls out to the weak. He alone has something to give, rather than merely a set of requirements. He alone offers rest and strength to the broken. He alone calls the empty and worn to his side without mocking, without reproach.

Oh, so thankful today for the Eternal God, who gives his strength when I've reached the end of my own, who bids me hold out my empty hands to receive before he asks me to give. He is a God worth worshipping. I may lay my whole heart in his arms.

Accounting Principles

2010-10-06T00:15:00.000-07:00

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.
For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it.
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
(Matthew 16:24-26)

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
(Matthew 11:28)

[Words of Jesus]

Without Excuse

2010-10-05T00:03:00.000-07:00

To know what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage.
(Confucius)

Your God is Too Small

2010-06-05T16:30:00.000-07:00

From J.B. Phillips' Your God is Too Small:

The trouble with many people today is that they have not found a God big enough for modern needs. While their experience of life has grown in a score of directions, and their mental horizons have been expanded to the point of bewilderment by world events and by scientific discoveries, their ideas of God have remained largely static. It is obviously impossible for an adult to worship the conception of God that exists in the mind of a child of Sunday-school age, unless he is prepared to deny his own experience of life. If, by a great effort of will, he does do this he will always be secretly afraid lest some new truth may expose the juvenility of his faith. And it will always be by such an effort that he either worships or serves a God who is really too small to command his adult loyalty and co-operation.

It often appears to those outside the Churches that this is precisely the attitude of Christian people. If they are not strenuously defending an outgrown conception of God, then they are cherishing a hothouse God who could only exist between the pages of the Bible or inside the four walls of a Church. Therefore to join in with the worship of a Church would be to become a party to a piece of mass-hypocrisy and to buy a sense of security at the price of the sense of truth, and many men of goodwill will not consent to such a transaction.

It cannot be denied that there is a little truth in this criticism. There are undoubtedly professing Christians with childish conceptions of God which could not stand up to the winds of real life for five minutes. But Christians are by no means always unintelligent, naive, or immature. Many of them hold a faith in God that has been both purged and developed by the strains and perplexities of modern times, as well as by a small but by no means negligible direct experience of God Himself. They have seen enough to know that God is immeasurably "bigger" than our forefathers imagined, and modern scientific discovery only confirms their belief that man has only just begun to comprehend the incredibly complex Being who is behind what we call "life."

Many men and women today are living, often with inner dissatisfaction, without any faith in God at all. This is not because they are particularly wicked or selfish or, as the old-fashioned would say, "godless," but because they have not found with their adult minds a God big enough to "account for" life, big enough to "fit in with" the new scientific age, big enough to command their highest admiration and respect, and consequently their willing co-operation...

If it is true that there is Someone in charge of the whole mystery of life and death, we can hardly expect to escape a sense of futility and frustration until we begin to see what He is like and what His purposes are.

I can't recommend this book too highly. It says, with pith and measured reason, so much of what I long to say. You can read the rest of it (for free!) in pdf here.

Browning on the Precious and Eternal Soul

2010-05-15T22:49:00.000-07:00

Ay, note that Potter's wheel,
That metaphor! and feel
Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,--
Thou, to whom fools propound,
When the wine makes its round,
"Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!"

Fool! All that is, at all,
Lasts ever, past recall;
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be:
Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.

He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.

(from Rabbi Ben Ezra, by Robert Browning)

What a cruel joke it would be if we, able to imagine and hunger for eternal things great and deep, were no more than mosquitos or mushrooms. Don't you, with Browning, cry out in your heart at the outrage of such an idea, that we - knowing and longing for more - are here, by chance, for our short day with no greater meaning than we can manufacture ourselves? Doesn't your intellect swell with indignance at being forced to accept an idea so ill-matched to all that can be known and sensed about the self? There must be no mistake about this. We, into whom God has breathed the breath of his own life, are a thing wonderful and mysterious in our souls. We are eternal.

And, what is more, we are loved.

Does God Really Need Your Money?

2010-05-07T22:16:00.000-07:00

Six days before the Passover, Jesus arrived at Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Here a dinner was given in Jesus’ honor. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. Then Mary took about a pinta of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.
"Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. “[It was intended] that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”
(John 12:1-7)

To our way of thinking, Jesus comes across as a little callous here, doesn't he? Perfume worth a year's wages has just been poured on his feet, and Judas the self-righteous hypocrite is sure this is the Teacher's cue to deliver a sermon about how much good that amount of money could do for the poor. But amazingly, Jesus - the same Jesus who has been adopted as the posterboy for bleeding hearts everywhere - doesn't seem to care how much the poor people get at all. He's not urging his followers to end poverty - he's telling them that the poor are always going to be around. And this is not a typo or a mistranslation. The same story is told by no less than three of the Bible's writers.

Yet readers of the Bible are always being taught to give.

If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. (Proverbs 25:21)

Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." (Luke 6:38)

Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. (Luke 12:33)

Jesus looked at him and loved him. "One thing you lack," he said. "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." (Mark 10:21)

If their giving is not primarily to satisfy a need, then what is the purpose?

King David knew that what God wanted from him was not his money, but his heart. He knew that the gift was not important; the cost to the giver was. Do we even grasp such a concept?

...Gad went to David and said to him, “Go up and build an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.” So David went up, as the Lord had commanded through Gad. When Araunah looked and saw the king and his men coming toward him, he went out and bowed down before the king with his face to the ground.
Araunah said, “Why has my lord the king come to his servant?”
“To buy your threshing floor,” David answered, “so I can build an altar to the Lord, that the plague on the people may be stopped.”
Araunah said to David, “Let my lord the king take whatever pleases him and offer it up. Here are oxen for the burnt offering, and here are threshing sledges and ox yokes for the wood. O king, Araunah gives all this to the king.” Araunah also said to him, “May the Lord your God accept you."
But the king replied to Araunah, “No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.”
(2Samuel 24:18-24)

Your gift, in God's eyes, is nothing compared to the love that prompts it. Without the love, there is no gift.

If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. (1Corinthians 13:3)

Did you hear that? Your money is nothing. It accomplishes nothing. It doesn't change a thing. It's a pebble on a road full of pebbles. Why mess around with such trivialities at all? Why give?

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:21)

Isn't it rather funny, after all, to think that we can do the Creator a favour; that he could do more with our petty contribution? He, who spoke the worlds into existence, waiting for a handout from you and I?

The Mighty One, God, the Lord,
speaks and summons the earth
from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets.
From Zion, perfect in beauty,
God shines forth.
Our God comes and will not be silent;
a fire devours before him,
and around him a tempest rages.
He summons the heavens above,
and the earth, that he may judge his people:
“Gather to me my consecrated ones,
who made a covenant with me by sacrifice.”
And the heavens proclaim his righteousness,
for God himself is judge. Selah
“Hear, O my people, and I will speak,
O Israel, and I will testify against you:
I am God, your God.
I do not rebuke you for your sacrifices
or your burnt offerings, which are ever before me.
I have no need of a bull from your stall
or of goats from your pens,
for every animal of the forest is mine,
and the cattle on a thousand hills.
I know every bird in the mountains,
and the creatures of the field are mine.
If I were hungry I would not tell you,
for the world is mine, and all that is in it.
Do I eat the flesh of bulls
or drink the blood of goats?
Sacrifice thank offerings to God,
fulfill your vows to the Most High,
and call upon me in the day of trouble;
I will deliver you, and you will honor me.”
(Psalm 50:1-15)

Let us remember that the God who asked his followers to give never mentioned the need of the one who receives from us; again and again he pointed out that the real, crying need of humanity can only be satisfied in receiving from Him. It is not the poor we bless with our alms, nor does God have any lack that we may satisfy: the lack is in us, and we are the ones who are liberated by heartful giving.

God doesn't need your money. Not for missions. Not for churches. Not for the poor. Dare you mock him with your carefully-counted twenties, hundreds, thousands...? He would have you set free in the giving of your heart.

Loved

2010-04-29T22:55:00.000-07:00

My friend Amy, without any reason, hates her name - so I googled it for her last night to see what it means. "Amy" comes from the old French "aimee" - "loved".

Loved. Warm; precious; held.

I wonder how differently we'd treat ourselves, and each other, if we knew ourselves loved. What kind of respect would we offer to the people we rub shoulders with every day, if we could see what makes them so precious to God that he would hurt for them? What if we could see the kind of beauty God sees when he looks at us? Do you ever wonder? Do you know yourself loved?

God and the Politics of Circumcision

2010-04-25T00:13:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder what God was thinking with the circumcision-thing? It doesn't quite match up with our God-as-prim-Victorian-grandfather concept, and I get the sense most Christians are happy to stuff the whole embarrassing issue deep into the dusty nether-regions of a cabinet marked "Old Testament Jewish Stuff"- which is full of things we don't use and don't really like but are too scared to throw out completely. (Kind of like that ugly green sweater your grandmother gave you for your birthday. You know you're never going to wear it, but you have to keep it in the back of the closet just in case she asks about it when she comes to visit.) "Oh yes, Grandfather-God, we do have your teaching on circumcision here...um, it's right here somewhere...but it's all about the circumcision of the heart now, right? You changed your mind in the New Testament, remember?"

But secretly, don't you ever wonder why in the world God came up with something as weird as circumcision in the first place?

In Abraham's time, as throughout the ages, there were many gods worshipped. The difficulty a god always faced was in maintaining his followers' loyalty. Worshippers would stick to their guns only as long as they were either getting what they wanted or too scared of the consequences to go shopping for a new god. A good way to get people on board for the long haul was to require an enormous investment. So things like child-sacrifice were a common way to get people in so deep that it would be hard for them to walk away. Once you'd killed your youngest daughter and offered her to your god, you weren't as likely to say you were wrong and switch religions. Psychology calls this "investment theory". The Bible calls it an "abomination", a word that basically means "repugnant" or "disgusting".

For more or less obvious reasons, it was important for people to make a clear choice about which "god" they were going to follow. In the case of YHWH/Jehovah/the Living God, this was particularly important. He had told Abraham that through Abraham's descendants, he was going to bless the whole world. His concern was always that people should know who he was. If he was going to reveal himself, his followers were going to have to make a clear choice - otherwise, who would know what came from God and what came from any one of the variety of other deities worshipped throughout the ancient world? There clearly needed to be something that first, set his followers apart and made them distinguishable, and something that encouraged a loyalty that went deeper than a child's connection to the source of his supply of lollipops.

The ancient world wasn't squeamish about sex. It was an important part of life, and for most cultures, everything hinged on the ability to procreate. If you wanted to make someone really happy, you didn't tell them that they were going to win the lottery; you told them that their descendants were going to be many and powerful. The numerous wives weren't just harem-girls selected to keep their husband happy; they were primarily chosen to be mothers of children - insurance against the harsh realities of life in a time when disease, war, or famine could wipe out an entire people-group.

The root of our English words "testament" and "testify" is "testis" - a word that is interestingly close to "testes". Indeed, folks in patriarchal times didn't swear by laying their hands on their hearts, but by laying their hands on their fathers' testes - so say many historians. Abraham asks Eleazer to do this as proof that he will bring a wife for Isaac from Abraham's own people. (Genesis 24:2-4) They were recognizing the source of life swearing by their family's bloodline - the most precious thing a person or family had. A common and fearsome curse in Bible times was the cutting off of a bloodline. The person without descendants was a poor man indeed.

So circumcision was a rather ingenious linking of an Israelite family's commitment to God with the most precious thing they had: the ability to procreate and maintain their bloodline. It acted as a daily reminder of what their loyalty was, and it included the idea that a commitment to God was not something to be tossed out on a whim, but was to continue even beyond a person's lifetime and passed on to descendants. It set a people and their bloodline apart from others. It also meant that Jewish men were identifiable, and couldn't intermarry with other people-groups without their wives knowing that they and their families had been set apart to God. There would be no mistaking which God was working in and for and through the Jews.

Did God change his mind in the New Testament, then? "For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love." (Galatians 5:6)

"In Christ Jesus" are the key words here. Remember the plagues of Egypt, which started off general and then got specific, eventually requiring people to make individual choices rather than it just being enough that they were part of the right community or people-group? God is always moving from the communal, the visible, to the personal. In Jesus, people have at last become fully free because they are offered a choice that is made with the mature intellect. We may be socially pressured, even coerced, into some action - but the will is above coercion. Let's be very clear on this: it is an act of the will rather than any religious action or societal connection that makes someone a Christian.

Circumcision is neither here nor there for the Christian, just as bloodline is irrelevant. The "circumcision of the heart" takes place when a person exercises her will and chooses to separate herself to God, worshipping only him. This kind of circumcision is visible only in its results: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness.

So God hasn't changed his mind at all. He has only brought us from the concrete to the concept that underlies it; from the action to the intent; from the communal to the individual. The onlooking world could see that the Jew's hope and chief joy was linked to belonging to God, but the message is taken from the picture to the word in Christianity: our hope and chief joy IS God. We belong to him, body and soul and spirit - not because he has power over us, but because he loves us to his own hurt, and we have chosen him.

The God of the Bible is not prim or proper. He doesn't lift his robe and tiptoe around the messy awkwardness of human cultures. He allows himself to be revealed piece-meal to our imperfect understanding. Dear, wise God!

Without the Shedding of Blood, No Forgiveness: Love's Imperative

2010-04-04T21:45:00.000-07:00

Alone, in a garden damp and dim, see there beneath the olive trees a bent and wearied Jesus. He has not come away from the city shuffle for restoration, for rest. His knees press the dark earth; his head is bowed. He falls on his face - Why? Just a day ago, they hailed him king and strewed palm leaves in his path.

Only a Father's ear is bent to listen to his bewildering grief. Hear the gentle voice of the One who once said "Let there be..." and there was - world, light, and life. His words now are pleading. "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will." (Matthew 26:39)

Why is he there - Son of the Living God - weak and heavy-hearted and alone?

With what strange purpose has he come?

But a word, a look, an outstretched arm, and every enemy of God is annihilated. As God, must not his power be absolute? Then why this bending, this pleading, this humiliation?

"Then the men stepped forward, seized Jesus and arrested him. With that, one of Jesus’ companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear.
'Put your sword back in its place,' Jesus said to him, '...Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?'" (Matthew 26:50-53)

We all know how the story ends. (Or is it the end?) Some of us have celebrated today the triumph of an empty tomb, a risen Saviour. It is enough for us to know that He is alive now, that we are free. We face indignantly those who will ask their questions and examine skeptically such a gift.

But what does it all mean, really? Almighty God with his face in the dust; the King of Kings beaten and bleeding-? And now...God communicated with no miracles, no thunderings, but a book?

We speak of a God whose power knows no limits, and we are quick to remind skeptics that in the past, some have had demonstration of the vast might of our God. Where is it all now? Why doesn't He rise up and destroy His many enemies?

Ah, friends, here is Love. Here is a God of mercy, whose Lordship over you and me is not maintained by power, but by the undeniable claims of inexorable Love. Those who question him are not struck down, punished, destroyed. Instead, he speaks gently, simply. He uses not the language of the heavens, incomprehensible to the human ear, but communicates his vast mind through the imperfections and approximations of words and sentences. He will convince by Truth rather than power. "Come now, let us reason together," says the Lord..." (Isaiah 1:18)

This is not the Almighty we have imagined, but God reasonable and knowable. "No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you." (John 15:15)

There is much chatter these days about Jesus the Teacher, who came to tell us a better way to live. This is not what the Bible says. "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners". (1 Timothy 1:15)

Why did Jesus have to die? He begged his father for "another way" - why was there none found?

"...without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins." (Hebrews 9:22)

But again, why?

"Sin, when it is finished, brings forth death..." (James 1:15)

"For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life." (Leviticus 17:11)

Sin is, by its very nature, destructive. That is what makes it sin. When destruction is chosen, it has power. By the choice of our first parents, our world has for a long time been under the destructive power of sin. In vain we have devised programs and plans to deal with power it has over us. Time and again, we have found ourselves defeated, on every level. Do you, like me, ever wonder why?

It was the strength of that first choice that made sin so powerful. Unlike the rest of God's wonderful creation, we humans were not spoken into existence. The Creator formed us with his own hands, and breathed into us the breath of his own life. We are something more special than we imagine. We are made like God. Like Him, we are creators. To us has been entrusted an awe-ful choice: Love or Self. Without such a choice, we could not share God's ability to love. But our choice is dangerous and powerful because it has been entrusted to us by an omnipotent God. A choice for self allows destruction a rightful place in our world - a place sanctioned by God when he offered us the power and the freedom. Our decision to satisfy self gives evil a moral right over us - we've chosen it, havent' we?

But Adam and Eve didn't make an informed choice. Isn't this what you wanted to say? They were innocents, tricked by the enemy of God; an enemy who deceived even angels with his beauty and power. The Bible warns us about his devices, but it refuses to leave the blame fully with him. "Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire." James 1:14 Temptation comes, not from without, but from within; from what we desire. I am not talking about the manifestation of desire, like wanting chocolate, but the deep choices we make that decide whether or not we will give in to a "want".

The only way for God to not snatch back the choice he had already given was for him to accept the destruction himself in order to offer them a new choice - an informed choice.

Jesus was not murdered. He was not overcome. He came to die. His death was a choice. Even the cross did not kill him - he yielded up his own spirit. "Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, 'Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!' And having said this he breathed his last." (Luke 23:46)

The God of the Universe has been affronted by an enemy who gathers support with the lie that divinity is rooted in power. God's inherent right to rule has been called into question, and a mutiny begun in the heart of his precious project - a world of people who are able to choose between Love and self. He hurls no lightning-bolts in responding to the assault, and to the underlying question: Is he only God because his power is Supreme? Could another be God if the position were wrangled from his grasp? Patiently, painstakingly, he answers by folding his great power, and hiding his vast beauty. His right to be God is founded firmly on the inherent, inarguable supremacy Love.

So Jesus takes on humanity and subjects himself to the humiliation of death. So God reasons with men and reveals himself to sin-impaired intellect in a book. He is worthy to be worshipped not because his power is unassailable (though it is), nor because his beauty is captivating (though it is) - but because the goodness of Love is undeniable. Whether with the right of monarchy or with strength of dictatorship or with common understanding of democracy, the Living God is Ruler by every right because He is Love.

Isn't the beauty of Love fully displayed in the death of Jesus Christ? Isn't its immutable strength made known in his rising again? Who can fail to be convinced that Love is better, greater, more worthy to rule than anything that relies on mere power?

He reigns!

"'Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord Almighty." (Zechariah 4:6)

Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. (Psalm 85:10)

A Prayer

2010-04-03T23:51:00.000-07:00

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought
and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

(Rabindranath Tagore)

Understanding God

2010-02-08T23:49:00.001-08:00

The scientist trying to understand God is like a mechanic trying to figure out the computer. Both end up baffled because they start with the assumption that the vital parts can be seen and controlled.

Grace

2010-01-21T23:12:00.000-08:00

"'Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friend,' has nothing to do with Christianity; an atheist will do this, or a blackguard, or a Christian; there is nothing divine about it, it is the great stuff that human nature is made of. The love of God is manifested in that He laid down His life for His enemies, something no man can do."

Oswald Chambers, The Shadow of An Agony

On Being a Christian

2010-01-04T01:25:00.000-08:00

"Going to church no more makes you a Christian than going to a garage makes you an automobile." (Corrie ten Boom)

On Our Need for Redemption

2010-01-01T03:52:00.000-08:00

"If you have had no tension in your life, never been screwed up by problems, your morality well within your own grasp, and someone tells you God so loved you that he gave his Son to die for you, nothing but good manners will keep you from being amused."

(Oswald Chambers, The Shadow of An Agony)

The Indubitable Value of Doubt

2009-12-21T22:44:00.000-08:00

The mark of a fool is his unwillingness to change his mind, so they say. The willingly ignorant exchange what is the birthright of humanity - the ability to reason - for a sham security. It is a sham because it is built on arrogance and buttressed by fear and a disregard for truth.

Many of us have, like the fool, found ourselves at one time or another bound in a set of mind less-than-convincing, and mortally afraid of the questions that would shake our paradigms. We have built fortresses against the assaults of doubt, and locked ourselves inside. Doubt is a fearsome thing to the one who is more concerned with security than truth. We'd rather become our own prisoners than expose ourselves to the possibility that we might be wrong. But questions, once asked, are insidious things. They find the unevenness along the walls of our thought-fortresses, and once wedges have been inserted into the cracks, it is only a matter of time until the walls crumble. This is a frightening experience indeed, but some of us have so been unloosed from our self-imposed prisons.

Doubt, then, is a liberator.

So often, recently, I have read and heard people extolling the virtue of doubt and scoffing at the human desire for surety, truth, knowledge; and there is a part of me that agrees. But very many of the treatises I have come across have lauded doubt while denying the very thing that makes it so valuable. What is the use of doubt if it tears down the knock-kneed walls of our beliefs and then leaves us there, dizzied and exposed? Did we fare worse trapped in false belief than we do as wanderers unable to move beyond the doubt, and cut off from the hope of knowing reality?

Doubt is useful because it exposes falsity - but it is a poor replacement for truth. We are wrong to hide from questions, but we are not wrong to seek and rest in the knowledge that isn't shaken out by questions, however incomplete it may be. The problem is not contentment, but complacency. When arrogance and fearful ignorance and imposter faith have been put to doubt's test and their inherent weaknesses revealed, they must be replaced by knowledge, not the placebo-philosophy that doubt is all we are capable of.

Let us embrace doubt, even if it shakes what we hold most dear. But we are doubly fools if we allow our delusions to be destroyed,and then dupe ourselves with an empty chant about there being no truth.

Why God Loves You

2009-11-03T22:26:00.000-08:00

My most recent definition of love called it "desiring the good of another at my expense". While this is both vital and true, it's actually not the whole truth. Another essential part of love is the appreciation of beauty and value in its object.

We try to wiggle out of this. Recently I've noticed people using the phrase "loving on" someone. It just doesn't work. You can sit on, or vomit on, or spill on, or hit on someone - but you can't "love on" someone. You can't just project love outward and let it fall on whoever happens to be around. Yet this is what we tell people God does. Yep, we're so thoroughly worthless - nothing lovable at all, but God just loves us anyway...isn't that the message?

Oh, have we ever missed it! The Bible tells us that to God, we are very precious, each one. In spite of the warping and gnawing of sin, God sees us yet with the beauty he put in when he created us. The Bible makes clear that even before we are redeemed by the blood of the Lord Jesus and transformed by his Spirit, God places infinite value upon us as individuals. Jesus uses three allegories in Luke chapter 15 to describe just what we as humans are to God. The shepherd of a hundred sheep goes looking for one that hasn't made its way home. A woman with ten pieces of silver (and no income of her own) searches carefully for one lost piece. A father with two sons waits patiently and throws a party when the rebellious one returns.

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, "This man receives sinners and eats with them."

So he told them this parable: "What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.' Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

"Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it? And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.' Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents."

And he said, "There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, 'Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.' And he divided his property between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living. And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything.

"But when he came to himself, he said, 'How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants."' And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.'But the father said to his servants, 'Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.' And they began to celebrate.

What does God see in us? Why does he love us - each one - even the worst of us? He's not "loving on" us. Rather, he sees in each of us what he - the Creator - has put there. In each of us is a unique, carefully crafted reflection of God himself, creative and personal like our Creator, bearing his image, imagined and designed by Love himself. Our capacity for creating and acting in love and beauty has been witnessed throughout the ages and over the world. Our uniqueness as people, with our vast array of personalities and cultures, is wonderful.

The destructive force of sin is to be feared because there is something of infinite value to be destroyed - something created; something dear to God himself... you and me. What a lie it is that we are worthless or expendable.

Like the shepherd calling, like the woman searching, like the father waiting - God loves us. His love is not general, but personal. Its object is you and me - because he, as no one else, knows the value of what we each are, and what each of us was made to be.

Truth in Advertising

2009-10-27T23:59:00.000-07:00

All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because
“God opposes the proud
but gives grace to the humble.”
Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.
Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings.
And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. To him be the power for ever and ever. Amen.

Oh, I love the straightforward simplicity of the Bible. It has no sweeping promises, no persuasive techniques, no hucksterism. No flash; no spin.

"...after you have suffered a little while..." If we were writing that, we'd have done away with the suffering altogether. It would be "zap", "bam" or "kapow" and no more difficulty. But God is no wizard, conjuring cures. His is the careful work of the Creator and the guiding hand of the Father. In my suffering, too, there is measurement and meaning.

Is it possible that some should mistake the slick, marketed thing that passes off as Christianity these days for the gracious, practical, reasonable-ness presented with neither pomp nor apology in the Bible? The first is a caricature so grossly distorted as to seem incapable of drawing away any thinking person from the beauty of the second.

Dear, wise, and holy God who weighs out my pain - he is so un-magic.

Helas

2009-10-19T23:46:00.000-07:00

To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God.
Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?

-Oscar Wilde

From the Inside Out: A Call to Peace

2009-10-07T23:08:00.000-07:00

Who among you can say that he is wise and has been given knowledge of spiritual things? Let him prove it, then, by showing in his everyday life the good he does, and the humility that comes from wisdom. But if you have envy, bitterness, or a desire to fight in your heart, don't pretend that you are spiritual, for you are making yourself worse by becoming a liar and setting yourself against Truth.
The kind of cunning that makes a person appear spiritual when his heart harbours wrong doesn't come from God, but from corrupted human nature, the world, and the devil. For wherever there is envy and fighting, there is chaos and evil.
But the wisdom that God gives is first of all un-mixed with self-interest, and also peaceable and gentle; it makes a person approachable and easy to reason with, merciful and full of goodness, fair, and sincere. Furthermore, the person who is right with God multiplies goodness, because its seed is planted by him in the hearts of those he comes in contact with. He does this peacefully (He doesn't try to change people by fighting and arguing). Instead, it is a by-product of his work making peace with others.

(This is my own paraphrase of James 3:13-18)

The Thinking Christian and Other Fairytales

2009-09-17T21:35:00.000-07:00

Quick, run over to this site right now, and you might see it - a creature you thought lived only in imagination and fantasy. Nope, not a unicorn...a thinking Christian. Turns out they're real, folks.

And at last, a site with something to chew. Enjoy.

My Extreme Makeover

2009-08-04T00:03:00.000-07:00

Beloved, now we are children of God, and it is not yet revealed what we will be. But we know that, when he is revealed, we will be like him; for we will see him just as he is. (1 John 3:2)

Every so often, I catch a glimpse of the great gulf that separates who I am from who I long to be, and I can hardly describe the feeling it inspires. More bitter than the appallment is the heartbreaking disappointment that strikes as I admit that I miss my own mark by miles. There is nowhere to run; I am trapped within myself. There is nowhere to hide: experience lays bare all it touches.

I content with what God has given me. I have more and better than I have dreamed, and I can truly say that his gifts are good, as he is Good. But I look with deep longing for the day when I will become more than I am; when I will be free and beautiful as the Lord Jesus. I am so very tired of my weak, shallow, sickly soul.

With what relief I remember that I am not only hidden in Jesus Christ, but that I will be changed by him - set free to be what he already is. I wait for the day...

What is Sure

2009-07-18T21:17:00.000-07:00

“Come, let us return to the Lord;
for he has torn us, that he may heal us;
he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.

Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord;
his going out is sure as the dawn;
he will come to us as the showers,
as the spring rains that water the earth.”

(Hosea 6:1,3)

God's Trademark

2009-07-09T22:55:00.001-07:00

A year or so ago, I received as a gift a beautiful wallet - one that I would never have bought for myself. It was designed by one Louis Vuitton, and is probably worth more than any money I'll ever have in it at one time. People are often interested by this wallet, and the first question I am often asked is "Is it real?" Well, it came in a pretty fancy-looking box, with a tag inside that said "Made in France for Louis Vuitton, #801" (actually, I'm not sure if the number is really 801 and I'm too lazy to go and dig it out right now, but you get the picture...) One girl told me that there is a way to tell for sure if an item has truly been made by Louis Vuitton, and that is to check the pattern stamped onto the leather. Since each genuine article is stamped witht he LV symbol after being cut, the symbol should never extend past the edge of the wallet. That's how you know you have the real deal.

My recent reading in Daniel has reminded me that God, too, places a mark on those who belong to him. His trademark is humility, and it has been indelibly stamped onto the lives of those who have come to know him.

Take Daniel, for instance. This is a young man who has been dragged out of his own country and carted off, a captive, to Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar in the beginning of the book of Daniel is about ready to do in the whole lot of his advisors and magicians, because none of them could tell him what his strange dream means. (Apparently, what these crafty gentlemen had been doing was getting together and agreeing on what they would tell the king, so that it would appear that their stories matched - but Nebuchadnezzar was no slouch, and had found a way to test the validity of their 'interpretations'.) When he hears why he is to be killed, Daniel offers quietly to tell the King is dream. To make a long story short, he is able to tell the dream and its meaning and is made very rich and powerful in short order. Human nature says that it's time to make the most of such a promotion, but here's what Daniel says:
"No wise man, enchanter, magician or diviner can explain to the king the mystery he has asked about, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries...But as for me, this secret is not revealed to me for any wisdom that I have more than any living, but to the intent that the interpretation may be made known to the king, and that you may know the thoughts of your heart."
Can you believe this guy? Everyone thinks he's a superstar, but he wants them to know he has no special powers. He doesn't hold a big Judaism rally with long robes and mood music. There are no big promises, no fantastic claims. There's no capitalising on King Nebuchadnezzar's change of heart. This is clearly a man with God's mark.

Anyone who has ever come face-to-face with the God of Eternity has first had to have a good look at the destruction in their own heart. And it's not easy to be the "big man on campus" when it's not just your accountability partner you are accountable to, but a Holy God.

In this age of mass-mediated everything, including Christianity, there are so many confusing messages. Everyone claims to speak for God. The Bible gives a good picture of the genuine article, so we don't get fooled by all the big claims.

There are some good fakes out there. Keep an eye out for God's mark.

Faith Like a Mustard Seed - Or a Lab Rat

2009-07-06T21:14:00.000-07:00

I spent Saturday with my grandmother, participating in a Hallmark channel movie marathon from the comfort of her couch. One of the movies' heroines had dealt with the loss of her husband by renouncing her faith in God and was being counseled by a wise old missionary who advised her earnestly that "God's ways can't be understood."

I was immediately struck with the dichotomy the movie offered. It's the same one we are offered everywhere. On one hand is the person who seeks to understand, portrayed alternately as the truth-loving scientist and the hard-headed empiricist; on the other hand is the person who accepts without understanding, depicted either as a noble idealist or as a pie-in-the-sky dream-chaser. The options are only two. Either we can utterly relinquish all claim to that which cannot be held in the hands and counted like peas, or we are forced to shut ourselves into the walled gardens of our fantasies and reach for our ideals by wishing upon stars. Perhaps it is this divide that has left 'faith' romanticized almost beyond repair. It has come to mean a idealistic clinging to what I want to believe at the expense of all that I know. By contrast, to insist upon reason is to reject out of hand all that is not see-able and smell-able.

Hallmark's gentle missionary was presented more as a noble idealist than a brainless fool... but her words made me feel tired. Is this all we really have to tell people? You don't need to understand - just accept it? Must faith be a blind leap into the dark?

But no! God's ways CAN be understood - more and more, as I come to know him. He doesn't ask for blind belief, but action that is based on what I DO know.

It is true that God asks me to trust him when I don't like or understand what he is doing - but he doesn't leave me there. He does let me see some of his plan. I do eventually come to understand the 'why's, as I come to know God himself.

He doesn't explain it all up-front. I do have to trust him - for a little while. The difference is this: I know who I am trusting. He asked for a little trust in the beginning, when I knew him a little; now that I know him better, he asks for more. But it's only a little while that I have to wait without understanding. God is not the enemy of the intellect - he created it. He does ask that we subject our understanding to him, but only for a while, and only to the degree that we know him.

God is not fully encompassed by reason, but he is never unreasonable. Every life winds through dim wastes, and when I find myself in its dark corners, I am driven to reach for his hand. But when I emerge into the sunlight again, understanding casts its rays backward onto the way that I have come and illuminates the reason why. And then, too, with every experience I know more surely the One who has chosen it, and that I can trust the hand that has led me. As I come to know God, his choices for me seem less and less incomprehensible, and more and more I can appreciate the Good he offers, though its wrappings frustrate and sadden me.

My confidence is not based upon the fact that God will give me what is comfortable. It is based upon the fact that God will give me what is Good. How do I know that? Trial and error. I understand how, contrary to appearances, the things that he has already given me have been Good. The things I have chosen for myself have not always been, but His choices have - every time.

A lab rat can exercise that much faith.

Heard in Passing

2009-04-13T00:35:00.000-07:00

"Love can be measured only by what it gives." (M. Radcliffe)

For God so loved the world that He gave...
His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him will never perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

What Love Is

2009-03-22T23:19:00.000-07:00

Love: (Verb) to will the good of another at my own expense.

View From a Small Window on a Weary Day

2009-02-24T22:28:00.000-08:00

Eternal God, unchanging
Mysterious and unknown
Your boundless love,unfailing
In grace and mercy shown

Bright seraphim in endless flight
Around your glorious throne
They raise their voices day and night
In praise to you alone

Chorus:
Hallelujah
Glory be to Our great God
Hallelujah
Glory be to Our great God

Let every creature in the sea and every flying bird
Let every mountain, every field and valley of the earth
Let all the moons and all the stars in all the universe
Sing praises to the living God who rules them by his word
(Fernando Ortega and Mac Powell)

And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands;
Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.
And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.
(Revelation 4:11-13)

I have struggled for several days to bow myself before the only worthy One. At last, I can can confess that His right is over all - even the pride that sends its roots deeply and quietly into my heart, and tears me all apart when it must be uprooted. How I long for the day when all within me will bow willingly, without raging and tears! I will take my place in a universe resounding with one song, and I will cry with an undivided heart that the God who is Love is greater than all.

Sunset, Seen On My Way Home

2009-02-04T21:32:00.000-08:00

Great, heavy drapes of sky were flung wide tonight,
Laying bare a broad canvas, swept
With tangerine fire
And a thousand half-attempts at flame-soaked cloud
In strokes that swirled and dabbed and scratched and bubbled and scudded.
Smoke-blue mountains
With snowy caps
Rose pale and clear in the light,
Suddenly visible;
A stretch of urban grey
Became a blazing panorama beyond the windows of the Skytrain,
In whose vinyl seats
Slumped hundreds of dull-eyed commuters in home-bound stupor,
Oblivious -
Too weary to wonder;
Used to the grey.

A Rare Perspective on God and Africa

2009-01-26T22:04:00.000-08:00

This is for my little sister, who lives and breathes Africa and its beautiful, amazing people:
As an Atheist, I Truly Believe Africa Needs God
Matthew Parris - Times Online

Putting Off Childish Things: On Reason and Responsibility

2009-01-19T21:50:00.000-08:00

Is it enough to have an epiphany, an experience, a vision? Are we then excused from the heavy work of thinking, comparing, reasoning?

A thousand times, no.

The human mind is a flighty, deceptive thing. It lights on one line of thought, then another, as it pleases. Given rein, it is prone to all sorts of dreams, hallucinations, illusions, and delusions. It is easily overcome by stress, strain, shock,fear, great emotion. It wavers, projecting ideas backward onto memory, and at other times blocking out entire chunks of memory.

For each of us there are two sentinels posted just outside the shadowy, billowing curtains of the mind, and we esteem them lightly at our peril: they are conscience and reason. Both are fallible, and know little of what is, but they are quick to identify what is not. Conscience raises a ruckus over all that is not right; Reason is quick to point out all that is not true. Both may be silenced, but in their silence we are forced to submit to the tyranny of whim and whimsy.

Every adult with an adult's mind bears responsibility to her own conscience and her own ability to reason. The mind that knows light and chooses darkness pronounces its own judgement and damns itself.

Epiphany
an appearance or manifestation, esp. of a deity.
a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.

If an epiphany be no more than an appearance or manifestation, then what can it give, more than a kind of comfort? What good is the appearance of a deity that has no relevance to the real, that makes no sense, after he has again disappeared into his pale and hazy realm? Only if we mean, by "epiphany", something that rearranges the thinking; that offers some insight into reality, can it bear any weight. Even then, that insight must be guarded by reason until its trustworthiness has been firmly established.

When I say that I am coming to know the Living God, himself the very source of all Truth, what does that mean unless I submit it to the thrashing of reason? Shall I tell that I know God, who made me a rational creature, and lie to say that he bids me discard reason to know him?

An epiphany can never be the climax of knowing, but the introduction. If my thinking is changed to take a whole new direction, then I must not discard reason, but cling the more tightly to it. If it stands under reason's measured blows, and can be reconciled, too, with conscience, only then can I begin to trust it with the weight of my own thinking.

Reason is a weak guide, but we have no better gatekeeper. It never produces its own material, and works instead on the material of conscience and the senses. It compares, analyses, reconstructs; but it never introduces new things - only new combinations of things. That is why it can never, on its own, lead us into what stands outside of us: Truth. But let reason not be undervalued, for it protects us from any number of apparitions pretending to be Truth; they fall under its flashing blade. And once Truth, however dimly, has been perceived, reason will go all about it, marking its foundations, and broadening its reach. Reason allowed to do its work will not rest until Truth has been fully stripped of paint and facade and revealed in all its rich lustre.

Be sure that the comfortable, harmless Gods of epiphanies allowed entrance without reason will all turn tyrant. The only God worth knowing is that One who is called Truth; who fully reconciles and perfects the knowledge and the work of body, mind, and spirit: he is the One who makes meaning out of the gathered questions and answers of sense, reason, and being. If I may not know Him, then call me atheist. Any other God is a lie.

Do Not Go Gentle: Searching For Truth

2009-01-18T12:47:00.000-08:00

Exrelayman, this post is for you. It is the story of my journey towards truth and knowing. I have not completed the journey, but I have found the source of all that I am looking for.

For I am confident that given a choice between a warm and comfortable delusion and a cold and harsh reality, we want reality...

There is a bliss in ignorance - but that ignorance walks with innocence, and it belongs to children. A willful ignorance knows no such bliss. To those of us who speak of knowing, and who have tasted the rich delight there is in understanding, there comes a longing only Truth itself can satisfy. All other bliss is wrecked on reason's encircling rocks.

So truth is the principal thing. Furthermore, we can each see in the human experience evidence that, while truth is not without beauty, it is rarely comfortable - at least to begin with. Thus the seeker of comfort rarely finds truth.

My education is average, and my knowledge of all things scientific, philosophical, historical, and theological, must be called a "smattering"; and while I don't know what is my IQ, I know that I am no genius. I have no great apologetic that will convince the atheist that God does, in fact, exist. That said, I will attempt to tell how I, an unremarkable person (except perhaps in laziness!), am coming to know One who is called Truth.

People speak of faith, and by that they often mean the belief that God exists. Why there should be particular merit in believing that a God exists is incomprehensible to me, especially since the ideas of most of the "faithful" about who that God is are so widely varied as to be hardly the same thing at all, save for two qualities: of those who believe in a God, most agree that he is all-powerful, and that he is invisible. The invisible part is understandable, since if God were visible, then their faith would hardly be warranted. The all-powerful part becomes problematic when other qualities, such as goodness, are added to the mix: all sorts of troublesome questions arise, like "Why does a God who is both all-powerful and good allow the evil we can clearly see around us?" It is at this point that such "faith" again becomes necessary. The real question is, can this be called faith, or is it simply a very human cowardice and a willful gullibility?

I was taught from before I could speak about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He wasn't the warm, cuddly God in circulation today, but he was both all-powerful and invisible. I was taught to fear not his power, but his holiness - clear and blinding and unassailable and impossibly pure. My mother read me stories from the Bible, and I knew that its stories about people encountering angels didn't have them shivering in warm delight, but falling on their faces and shaking with fear. And so behind my sense of God was a fear of his holiness - but it was his holiness that could be trusted, too. He wouldn't lose his temper, or change his mind, or fail to keep his promises, as my parents, being human, sometimes did. I also knew that to my grandfather, (who spent long hours reading while we played, but always had time to tell a story or teach my sisters and me to fly paper airplanes; whose beliefs about God were rarely spoken but often evident) God was both father and ever-present friend. Later, when my grandfather's mind was ravaged by Alzheimer's disease and he couldn't recognize my grandmother or remember how many children he had, his sense of God remained unblurred. On the subject of God alone he was lucid and sure; unchildish; reasonable. Near the end, he had a series of heart attacks, and I spent long hours with him in the hospital. He was often confused, but there was no confusion when he prayed aloud or spoke of the Bible.

So as I child, with my child's thinking, I didn't question God's existence, or my need for God to rescue me, even though I hardly knew what from. I accepted easily the truth that I was a sinner - not that sin made me something to be loathed, but that I, made to be more, was trapped by some evil that separated me from the good I could imagine but failed to do and become. I hardly understood what sin was, but I didn't have any trouble understanding that I wasn't exactly heaven-material. From age five until about age nine, I tried to "have faith" in a God whose existence I had never questioned. At the last, I was running out of hope and patience. I pleaded with God, asking him to tell me how to "have faith"; how to do what he wanted me to do. I can't quite explain how the answer came - whether I heard something in my mind, or if it was an comprehension as sudden as if someone had spoken, but in my mind was this understanding, at once clear and relevant: "You don't have to do anything. It's all been done."

That settled my restless searching and pleading for some years. I had asked, and had received. I was content that Jesus' death and resurrection meant that nothing more was required to make me acceptable before a holy God. Though I had struggled and failed, he had satisfied his own terms on my behalf.

But then came university, and my introduction to philosophy. I felt a new urge and a responsibility to examine my knowledge, to understand as well as know. I was shaken by Descartes' questioning of the basis for knowledge, and oddly, both comforted and disturbed by Anselm's seemingly circular answers. Looking back, it wasn't really God's existence that seemed so shadowy, but my own ability to know an invisible, un-prove-able God. In any case, a great cavern of questions unasked opened up in my mind.

I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. My grandfather was dead. I appealed to my parents. They had encouraged my siblings and me to think and to ask questions as we grew older, so I felt that I could trust them - but they didn't offer me the answers I wanted. They advised me to read the Bible and ask God whatever questions I had. I am thankful they didn't ask me to stop reading philosophy, because it was from Plato that I came to understand that empirical knowledge is not the only, or necessarily the best, kind of knowledge. From then on, I began, half-subconsciously, to put my knowledge of God to the test. I wasn't looking for miracles or empirical proofs - instead I wanted anwers to all the 'why's. I asked and waited for him to answer. One by one, the answers came. Sometimes the 'why' became clear with a new piece of knowledge or a fresh perspective; other times I realized that the question had been based on a flawed understanding in the first place. I gained confidence in God. The realization at nine years old that my relationship with him wasn't based on my own ability to have "faith" but on his own provision, made me less afraid to ask questions, and bit by bit, I was coming to understand that there were answers. Even the ones that were beyond my intellectual grasp were not unreasonable. (For example, I spent a long time trying to wrap my head around infinity and mostly failed, but I had no trouble accepting infinity as a rational concept.)

It was not until after university that my world came crashing down. It wasn't one thing, but many things that converged at a single junction in my life. I had moved far away from my family and friends. I took on a job that was too big for me and that stripped my confidence in myself and in humanity. I stepped out with big dreams of making the world a better place, and was shocked to find myself full of selfishness and other flaws, and with nothing worthwhile to oontribute - certainly nothing that would offset what I found myself greedily wanting to take. I was hit hard by depression and the seemingly impossible struggles of everyday life. I had no friends, and neither energy nor motivation to maintain relationships or build new ones. I felt that there was no one who could understand. Desperate, I went running to God, but he, too, had withdrawn.

It is hard for me to explain the terror and extreme loneliness I felt. It lasted for over a year, and ebbed but didn't entirely lift for almost three years after that. During that time, almost every relationship I had was strained to breaking. I was a deadweight. Most days, I was struggling just to get through the day. I felt unloved and unloving and unloveable and abandoned. My thinking became negative. I gained weight. I was out of control. These things sent me spiralling into self-loathing and a deep hopelessness.

Worst of all was the absence of God. I read my Bible, but its words went flapping and cawing like flock of crows through my head. I prayed, and I could almost hear the clang as my pleas bounced off the ceiling and fell clattering back down to mock me. I had no reassurance that anyone was speaking to me; no sense that a living God could hear my calls or take pity on my hurt and bewilderment. I longed for a way to die without hurting my family. In my darkest night, God was nowhere to be found.

I couldn't understand what had happened; why he had disappeared. I had trusted him and tried to please him. I had asked him for answers - wherever they had come from, they were meaningless to me in the bleak dim fog that had wrapped itself coldly about me. Had I been naive, believing I knew God? After all, wasn't it kind of arrogant to think that I, among so few, could know and be known by God? Suddenly, I could see myself and my motives clearly. I had hoped to help people, thinking that was love - but really, I was seeking approval and appreciation. I was terribly disappointed in myself and in other people. Was it possible that we had been wrong about God, too?

Deep down, I wanted to know the truth. If there was nothing more. Since I felt myself powerless to do what I wanted - either simply cease to exist or find a way to make my life enjoyable - I wanted to know what was so that I could begin to deal with it. How quickly the things that had comforted the young me became empty platitudes that highlighted my emptiness. In my mind, I heard the reproaches of Job's friends: 'If you had tried harder to please God, this wouldn't have happened.' 'You must have done something wrong, and this is your punishment.' But despite my fear and self-hatred and the newly-discovered selfishness within me, I knew that I had sought God and followed him. I had tried my best to please him. It seemed that he simply wasn't there.

I began re-thinking what was there. I considered the possibilities. Christianity as it is generally presented in our world seemed not implausible so much as irrelevant, empty. It sounded nice, but faded away to nothing in the face of the vast, howling wilderness that gaped at me. I was falling. I could throw it all away, but one thing remained: the God my grandfather knew. He was the One I both feared and longed for. I had seen him in my grandfather's eyes, suddenly sure in the midst of his confusion. I knew simply and surely that if there was anything worth having in life, it was what my grandfather had found. It had given him peace when his own mind became an enemy. He had had joy when his life was stripped of all its meaning. He had known love when every human relationship had been forgotten. Whether it was God or something else, that was what I wanted more than anything. I determined to find it, or to die searching. If I failed, my life wasn't worth much to me anyway.

After more than a year of jarring loneliness and bewilderment, I picked up my Bible again to read and something - or Someone - spoke softly from a small verse in the book of Psalms:

You will make known to me the path of life; In Your presence is fullness of joy... (Psalm 16:11)

That was what I needed: a purpose and a path for my life, a kind of joy that wasn't related to my situation, and a living truth that was more than a maxim - something I could trust no matter how I felt. I didn't want any empty religious rags, or the equally irrelevant measurements of things I found in reason without God. I needed a truth that could reach to the very bottom of life and remain meaningful.

I sought that truth in the Bible because that was where my grandfather had found it. I couldn't pray as I had before, but I went outside and looked up into grey skies and spoke to the One I longed to know. I begged him to speak to me. I no longer knew who he was; sometimes I was simply speaking to that great energy evident in living things, the Goodness I could vaguely sense in trees and sky and sea. I asked him to reach through my expectations and my preconceptions and let me know him. (I use the masculine article here not because I looked for something masculine - but I was looking for something personal, so "it" doesn't suffice.) It wasn't God I was looking for. I wanted to know what was Real - I only called him God because my grandfather had called him that.

How can I describe that way he came to me? Shall I tell you my feelings, my thoughts? Shall I tell you what sorts of things I was doing when I knew him present? It all seems trivial and immaterial. The real difference was that my concept of God had been blasted out of the little corner I called my "spiritual" self. He cared about me, but my comfort was a small thing to him compared to my knowing, growing, being. He was concerned with the dusty details I would never have expected him to bother about, but he was far bigger than I had imagined, and his priorities rolled right over mine like a train over a penny placed on the track. He wasn't contained to Sundays and hymns and my evening prayers. He was secular. He was warm earth and wild wind and deep, restless sea. He was Love and Light and Life and Truth. The majesty of trees, the austerity of mountains, the bleakness and the purity and the silence of snow were all his. He had revealed himself to human intellect in the measured meter of words and history, but he could never be comprehended by those things. The Living God is not a comfortable truth, nor easily understood - but comfort was paltry and my understanding meagre when I placed them next to truth.

To my surprise, it isn't answers, smooth and pat and carefully arranged, that come with knowing God. There are answers, to be sure, but it was the questions that came springing that shocked me. If God is really-real, not what we think of as spirit-real, then things have to make sense. And if things have to make sense, then the Bible is a book full of questions to be understood rather than divine incomprehensibilities.

I had asked to know God, but I hadn't understood the foolishness of wanting to know Love or Truth with my intellect alone. I had opened my mind and asked him to come in, but I had left him room only in a box marked "religious". Why had he deserted me? To show me that the God I had allowed him to be was too small, too unreasonable, too inadequate; that what I needed wasn't a spiritual mascot, but Truth; Love; a Father; a Mother; a Friend. It was when I came to understand my own need that he came rushing in to fill that void.

And the disciples came and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” Jesus answered them, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted. “For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him. “Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. “In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says,
‘YOU WILL KEEP ON HEARING, BUT WILL NOT UNDERSTAND;
YOU WILL KEEP ON SEEING, BUT WILL NOT PERCEIVE;
FOR THE HEART OF THIS PEOPLE HAS BECOME DULL,
WITH THEIR EARS THEY SCARCELY HEAR,
AND THEY HAVE CLOSED THEIR EYES,
OTHERWISE THEY WOULD SEE WITH THEIR EYES,
HEAR WITH THEIR EARS,
AND UNDERSTAND WITH THEIR HEART AND RETURN,
AND I WOULD HEAL THEM.’
(Matthew 13:10-15)

Like the Jewish people, I had decided what the truth was, what it had to be. I gave more credence to the things I "figured out" than to the knowledge that imposed itself on me without being courted by my intellect. Let me give you an example of the difference. I knew, as we all know, that careful study leads to learning. Somehow, though, when I entered university, I thought I was smart enough to beat the system. I thought I could get by on my ability to understand rather than on gathered knowledge. I put my trust in my intellectual ability rather than in my knowledge of the way things are. For a while, I did beat the system, but eventually my poor study habits caught up with me. I was in a strict program: I failed a course, and was dismissed from the program. That shook my thinking and humbled me, but it didn't completely change me.

My concept of truth had a lot to do with my concept of myself. Without knowing it, I was full of arrogance. God had to show me that truth before I could ever see him. He didn't want me to keep trusting him just because he answered the questions my intellect asked. He wanted me to learn who he was, and he stopped answering so that I could understand what I really needed.

Does truth require faith? Knowing it does not. It stands on its own. Finding it does, but not faith of the sort that ignores questions, trampling on reason and denying the observable. It is not the kind of faith that decides what the end ought to be and then sets about making it so. Rather, the sort of faith that is required is a refusal to deny what we know, no matter how uncomfortable it is. It is this sort of faith that spurs people to throw off their "hope-so, maybe-so, think-so" beliefs. It sometimes leaves us without something to call "God", but it is the way to knowing Truth.

I wouldn't dare tell someone else why they have searched but haven't found God, but I know why I didn't find him right away. First of all, I was searching for my idea of God, which didn't exist. Such a search, though it be for something called "God", ends nowhere, because it is usually a search for something else entirely - intellectual satisfaction, comfort, tradition. I wanted the truth, but in the beginning I was unwilling to accept the truth that made me uncomfortable. When I was desperate enough to search for Truth, whatever it was, rather than my too-small conception of God, I found Truth - and it was God.

Do I have bullet-proof evidence to lay before the skeptic and show him where he is wrong? No. Neither truth nor God is a precept to be pounded in. Moreover, my own understanding of those things that offer evidence even of material truths is far too lacking to offer anything to the educated person.

What can I offer, then? Only hope for the one who seeks truth, refusing to deny that truth is worth all that must be sacrificed of comfort or pride. I can only tell that I have found what satisfies not merely my senses, or my intellect, or my spirit - but my whole being. I don't ask that you believe that it is God, but that you believe it is what you need, too.

Ancient Wisdom (Part II)

2009-01-14T23:02:00.000-08:00

Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.
- Lao-Tzu

On Prayer and Magic: Our Universe as a Demonstration Garden

2009-01-06T23:03:00.000-08:00

My friend is in the hospital tonight with her small baby. The baby has been having seizures, and my friend, not a Christian, has been praying. The only problem is, she says, if she notices an improvement in the baby, she can't tell if it's the medicine or the praying that's making things better.

Why does our praying seem so impotent? Why are the things we ask for so sporadically granted? Why do we need to pray to a God who is supposed to know already what we mean to ask for?

What does it mean to pray, anyway? Shall I beg God to do things my way? Will he wait, like a dog trainer, while I shake a paw, before he drops down a little blessing-biscuit from heaven? Can I believe that he, forgetful, need be reminded of my desires? Is it possible that He who is also called Love must be pleaded with to give good things?

If this is true, how can he be God? If my own flesh-and-blood father, whose love is imperfect, takes pleasure in giving me good things even to his own hurt, can I expect less from the God who created fathers?

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. (James 1:17)

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him? (Matthew 7:7-11)

But we do know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to purpose. (Romans 8:28)

I used to live near a demonstration garden. It was planted and maintained by those who wanted to show what could be grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers, and how earth-friendly habits like composting could be used to grow food and flowers. More than simply beautiful, the garden was practical on a number of levels. It grew healthy food. It also took its premises out of the realm of philosophy and into real life. It offered proof of what was possible, and ultimately, what was preferable. It taught people how earth-friendly principles could be made to work with their own lifestyles and used in their own gardens. The gardeners could have, with much less work, bought chemical fertilizer. They could have omitted the walkways and signs and instead, planted more seeds. But they weren't in the business of simply growing large numbers of things. Their goal was to demonstrate the best way of growing things sustainably.

Earth is a demonstration garden in our universe. Long ago, some, making the mistake of thinking that it is God's power that makes him God, questioned his right to absolute rule. They did this by a challenge to his power. Had God met that challenge with a display of his infinite might, he would have won - but in winning, he would actually have lost, because he would have proved that power was indeed the basis of his infinite right to rule. Instead, He who is Love lay down power and held Love up to meet the challenge.

God is in the process of showing that Love is not only the most powerful force, it is also the dearest and the best and the most beautiful, the most profound, the most pure, the most precious thing in the universe; infinitely worthy of all that may be sacrificed to it and for it. Like the earth-friendly gardeners who grow things without chemical help (not because they don't have access to it, but because they want to show that it is not as important as we think), God has subordinated his power (not because he lacks power, but because he is showing that it is not his power that makes him worthy). As Love, he is inherently worthy to reign. His right to rule is not only rooted in his power, but in his essence. He is not content to settle challenges with force.

Instead, he sets up what is really a bit of a panorama-box - what you and I call the Milky Way galaxy. In it is a little planet called Earth, populated by creatures called humans. Humans have all of the attributes of God which are not related to either power or love. The most important of these attributes are personality and the power to choose. On earth, all that is not God is allowed freedom to present itself - to lay out its claims, to show its power, and demonstrate its superiority to God; to Love. God's power, and all other power, is unleashed as it is chosen by humans.

It is interesting to note that the Bible does not say "all things work together for good to those that God loves", because that would leave both the love and the power in God's hands. Instead, it says that all things work together for the good of those who love God. The great forces of the universe, which belong to Love, work together for good to those that choose Love.

When I pray, I am not begging God to have pity on me, and use his power to help me. I am simply offering the choice I have as a channel for Love. When I pray for another person, I identify myself with them. I link their good and my good. To the extent that I allow God to work for my good, he is then able to work for their ultimate good.

Does this mean that if I choose God, I will get everything I want? No. It means that if I choose God, who is Love, then Love is what I want - and I will get that. To the extent that I choose it, I will receive Love. The struggle in prayer, is never with God - it is with my own will and my desire for power. Through prayer, I offer my desires to God. He is then free to revise them and allow me to take on his desires. If I choose, I can want what Love wants.

In choosing Love, I say that Love is the greatest good. It is greater than all my wants. It is greater than power - my power to reject it and serve myself. I demonstrate that even if it makes me powerless, love is worth it. And then all of Love's might is set loose to work for my good. Not for my pleasure, which is power; but for my good, which is Love.

Our problem with prayer is that we want to treat it like magic. Magic is power. It must be coaxed; conjured. It must be used and manipulated. The magician is tricked into thinking he is greater than his magic, but he is natural and it is supernatural: he is the one who is used in the end. Prayer is just the opposite. When I have struggled with my self, and subordinated my own will to my choices, then I need only lie down become a road for Love's trucks to roll through on. They are waiting at the portal. In praying, I wield no power, no control. I need not coax or beg. I am neither beggar nor magician, but a child receiving good gifts - gifts chosen with such love that they might be carrots when I ask for candy.

When I pray, bending my spirit before Love and subordinating my power to Love, I thus give Love a right to be in this world; a place in which to do the work of loving. When I pray, I open up the doors of my life and my heart to God. In telling him my desires, I give them to him. I allow him to fulfill them or, if they are less than Good, to sacrifice them. When I pray, I give my choice back to God, and allow him to give the good he longs to give.

The God Who Cried

2009-01-04T00:51:00.000-08:00

If you stop and take a look around at the world for a few minutes, it's enough to break your heart. From war-ravaged Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Rwanda and the Congo, to the orphanages of Turkey and Romania, to the Untouchables of India, to the illegal immigrants hiding out in USA and China, to the First Nations children of Canada and the Maori in New Zealand, there winds around this beautiful earth a great line of sorrow and suffering and awful-ness. We who can do our best to forget it, but the cries of our fellow humans sound just beyond the great walls we have erected to keep the sadness out. A great darkness deepens and widens, even as we protest that things are getting better. And though we find ways to distribute food and build shelters and cure diseases, a great wail yet rises. It is not enough.

For if we could find a way to feed and clothe and house them all, and keep them all safe, there remains a gaping need that cannot be filled by us. It sucks life from those who live in abundance and purpose from those who would. People are dying and living dead for want of not food, nor clothing, nor shelter - but love, and you don't have enough to give them, nor do I.

Sometimes it overwhelms me, and I look to the only One who ever could help. Why is he so long in coming? Does he see?

Then I remember that he cried. Not once does the Bible say that Jesus laughed, but it tells us that he cried.

I love him, my weeping God. What a thing for a God to do! Is there another such God in all of our imaginations? A God who cries?
Therefore, when Mary came where Jesus was, she saw Him, and fell at His feet, saying to Him, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and was troubled, and said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to Him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. So the Jews were saying, “See how He loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man also from dying?” (John 11:32-37)

His longings are unanswered, too.
When He approached Jerusalem, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, “If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace!” (Luke 19:41)
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling." (Matthew 23:37)

When I stand, heavy and helpless, before the terrible things that take place in our world, to whom can I turn, but to the Man of Sorrows?

He has no stately form or majesty
That we should look upon Him,
Nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him.
He was despised and forsaken of men,
A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
And like one from whom men hide their face
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
Surely our griefs He Himself bore,
And our sorrows He carried;
Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten of God, and afflicted.
But He was pierced through for our transgressions,
He was crushed for our iniquities;
The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him,
And by His scourging we are healed.
All of us like sheep have gone astray,
Each of us has turned to his own way;
But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all
To fall on Him.
He was oppressed and He was afflicted,
Yet He did not open His mouth;
Like a lamb that is led to slaughter,
And like a sheep that is silent before its shearers,
So He did not open His mouth.
By oppression and judgment He was taken away;
And as for His generation, who considered
That He was cut off out of the land of the living
For the transgression of my people, to whom the stroke was due?
His grave was assigned with wicked men,
Yet He was with a rich man in His death,
Because He had done no violence,
Nor was there any deceit in His mouth.
But the LORD was pleased
To crush Him, putting Him to grief;
If He would render Himself as a guilt offering,
He will see His offspring,
He will prolong His days,
And the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in His hand.
As a result of the anguish of His soul,
He will see it and be satisfied;
By His knowledge the Righteous One,
My Servant, will justify the many,
As He will bear their iniquities. (Isaiah 53:2-11)

Isn't this what humanity needs? A God who can be touched? A God who weeps?

Blessing

2009-01-03T09:35:00.000-08:00

The Bible's description of Isaac, the Jewish patriarch, is an interesting one. On the surface, it doesn't seem to go anywhere, and wouldn't make a very good drama. To put it bluntly, Isaac comes out looking like a bit of a patsy. His father offers him as a sacrifice; his servant finds him a wife; he gets kicked around by King Abimelech; and finally, when he is an old, blind man, his wife and son together dupe him into giving a blessing to the youngest son rather than the oldest. Poor old Isaac. He kind of stands in the way of the popular belief that God helps those who help themselves.

So who does God help, and how exactly does he help them?

Genesis 26 - Isaac's encounter with Abimelech:
Now there was a famine in the land--besides the earlier famine of Abraham's time--and Isaac went to Abimelech king of the Philistines in Gerar. 2The LORD appeared to Isaac and said, "Do not go down to Egypt; live in the land where I tell you to live. 3Stay in this land for a while, and I will be with you and will bless you. For to you and your descendants I will give all these lands and will confirm the oath I swore to your father Abraham. 4I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, 5because Abraham obeyed Me and kept My requirements, My commands, My decrees and My laws. 6So Isaac stayed in Gerar." ...

12Isaac planted crops in that land and the same year reaped a hundredfold, because the LORD blessed him. 13The man became rich, and his wealth continued to grow until he became very wealthy. 14He had so many flocks and herds and servants that the Philistines envied him.15So all the wells that his father's servants had dug in the time of his father Abraham, the Philistines stopped up, filling them with earth.

16Then Abimelech said to Isaac, "Move away from us; you have become too powerful for us."

17So Isaac moved away from there and encamped in the Valley of Gerar and settled there. 18Isaac reopened the wells that had been dug in the time of his father Abraham, which the Phlistines had stopped up after Abraham died, and he gave them the same names his father had given them.

19Isaac's servants dug in the valley and discovered a well of fresh water there. 20But the herdsmen of Gerar quarreled with Isaac's herdsmen and said, "The water is ours!" So he named the well Esek, because they disputed with him. 21Then they dug another well, but they quarreled over that one also; so he named it Sitnah. 22He moved on from there and dug another well, and no one quarreled over it. He named it Rehoboth, saying, "Now the LORD has given us room and we will flourish in the land."

23From there he went up to Beersheba. 24That night the LORD appeared to him and said, "I am the God of your father Abraham. Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I will bless you and will increase the number of your descendants for the sake of My servant Abraham."

25Isaac built an altar there and called on the name of the LORD. There he pitched his tent, and there his servants dug a well.

26Meanwhile, Abimelech had come to him from Gerar, with Ahuzzath his personal adviser and Phicol the commander of his forces. 27Isaac asked them, "Why have you come to me, since you were hostile to me and sent me away?"

28They answered, "We saw clearly that the LORD was with you; so we said, 'There ought to be a sworn agreement between us'--between us and you. Let us make a treaty with you 29that you will do us no harm, just as we did not molest you but always treated you well and sent you away in peace. And now you are blessed by the LORD."

30Isaac then made a feast for them, and they ate and drank. 31Early the next morning the men swore an oath to each other. Then Isaac sent them on their way, and they left him in peace.

32That day Isaac's servants came and told him about the well they had dug. They said, "We've found water!" 33He called it Shibah, and to this day the name of the town has been Beersheba.

How many times can you say, "Now the LORD has given us room and we will flourish in the land", before it starts ringing a little hollow? Sure, Isaac had a huge household and herds and flocks. But none of that was going to last long if he couldn't give them water. And while it must have been great to be wealthy, it can't have been terribly fun to have to lug all that wealth through the desert every time Abimelech's servants got cranky and wanted a fight.

If I had been Isaac, it wouldn't have taken me too long to give them the fight they were so obviously picking. I'd also be complaining to God. After all, he gave Isaac all this wealth, and then left him at the mercy of a few servants with a grudge for the one resource he needed to maintain his riches: water. From a PR standpoint, it wasn't a move likely to garner a whole lot of believers. Even Isaac went up to Beersheba to have a little talk with God about the whole thing. What did he get? No apologies, no big promises, no miracles - just a gentle reminder: Don't be afraid, Isaac. I haven't forgotten my promise to your father. You'll get your blessing.

So what was the blessing, if it wasn't protection from Abimelech's hoods, or water to maintain the herds - not to mention Isaac's own family?

Genesis 12:2-3 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless you, and curse him that curses you: and in you shall all families of the earth be blessed.

The wealth, it turned out, wasn't Isaac's 'real' blessing at all. The blessing wasn't something he was going to get; it was something he was going to be.

So often, our disappointment with God causes us to take things into our own hands. We think we need to fight with those who cause us trouble, and wonder why God isn't striking them down. But look what happens to Isaac. He hasn't done a thing to protect himself. His father, Abraham was a great leader who, with his servants, fought off multiple marauding armies, but Isaac has gone running like a girl at the first hint of conflict.

Abimelech and his men come knocking. Isaac must have groaned and thought, "Not again! Why has God set me up to look like a fool?" Amazingly, Abimelech isn't there to fight. Instead, he's scared. He wants to make a peace treaty with Isaac - with Isaac, who has appeared incapable of hurting a flea; who has hit the trail every time Abimelech's servants raised a ruckus. Abimelech is afraid of him? There's not the faintest smell of greatness on Isaac, but Abimelech says that he and his people know God is with Isaac, and is blessing him.

What? They do?

And so God has done it again, revealing himself to others in his chosen one's weakness rather than his strength. We are always waiting for God to sweep in with miracles and wonders and signs that will prove to everyone we aren't gullible fools after all. When he refuses to fill our order for blessings, we are disappointed and figure he's not there after all. The problem is that we have failed to understand what is important. Our own comfort is of paramount importance to us, and we assume that God shares our values.

The High and Holy God of Eternity is not to be conjured. He refuses to be made a pet "genie", kept on hand to grant our wishes. He's no magic fountain, spilling out holy water with which we can heal all of our ailments. He's not a waiter, ready to fill our orders. He'll make the order - we can decide whether or not we want it. It might not come out looking like a blessing.

To those who love God, he will give what is good - but that might hurt us, embarrass us, make fools of us, as it did Isaac. But through Isaac, Abimelech and his people came to know God, the city of Beersheba was born and blessed with a water source, and of course, the Jewish nation was built. Ultimately, it was through this nation that the whole earth was set free by Jesus, the Christ. Isaac got his blessing, and he got to be the blessing.

How many blessings have I turned down, because I was looking for the wrong thing? How many times has my hope turned to distrust because I expected God to think like me, and value what I value?

Who is God?

2008-12-30T23:34:00.000-08:00

"What is your beloved more than another beloved?" - (asked by the daughters of Jerusalem in Song of Solomon)

How God is obscured in the dim glare of our everyday. We have thrown him into a great heap of religious relics and gold-plate, useless artifacts thick with the dust of age, but none of the deep patina'd sheen of the ages. We've covered the Living God with stale incense and dull chalices full of murky potions, the magnificence of cumbersome robes and gothic arches, and the choking must of books unread and out-of-date. We have exchanged the shining splendour of One who wraps himself in light like a garment for the smoke-and-mirrors flash of long-robed pastors (or pirates?) on healing tours.

Where is the God who dwells in cloud and rides on the wind? Where is El Shaddai, the many-breasted God? Who has seen that One who also calls himself Love? Have you heard him, seen him, sensed him - the deep One of the Ages? There is nothing of western sophistication about him. He is wild and ancient and vibrant and warm. He is wide and pure and great and humble and free.

I saw God this week, in a son of Punjab who stooped to touch his father's feet; in a field of snowy whiteness and a gold-flushed sky; in a dog full of eagerness and trust and single-hearted patience; in a bundled baby, warm and round. He was there, in the bright flutter of a scarf; in the spin of a bicycle wheel; in the bent back of an old man shovelling snow. I heard him in the voice of a friend; in the howl of a wind that bent trees; in the beat of an eastern drum.

God is all about, everytime and everywhere, and he is almost nothing that they say he is. He is Great and Good. He is Love and Life and Light and Truth. I long for the day when every energy in the universe will bend itself toward him, loving and singing and spending itself in and for the heart-breaking beauty and the deep fullness of the One who is Love.

God and the Politics of Christmas

2008-12-17T22:53:00.000-08:00

I hear a lot of grumbling this time of year about "the reason for the season" and "Merry Christmas" being the new un-PC greeting. Come, come. Christians have never had sole claim to Christmas - why do we figure we need it now? The "reasons for the season" are about as various as the people celebrating it. Do you suppose Jesus was born on December 25 under a Christmas tree? Do you suppose God is bothered by people who say "Happy Holidays"?

The trouble with all of this wrangling over what Christmas means and who is allowed to celebrate it and how, is that it completely obscures the real issues. It gives us a sense of control because monitoring people's words is something we can manage. It's measurable, and in our world, value must be measured. But it shines a light on us and sticks God in a dim corner. It causes us to forget who it is that we are asking people to celebrate when we stubbornly call out "Merry Christmas" to the grocery store clerk. We are glad to tell people of a God who became a human, who knows our weakness, who was a baby before he was our Saviour - but we present him as a small-minded disciplinarian, more focused on the shape of the words than their actual meaning.

This Christmas, what if we ignored the encroaching darkness around us, and took up arms against the darkness within us? What if we gave up selling Bethlehem as a tourist destination and instead, bowed like awestruck shepherds inside our own hearts before God-become-human? What if we quit looking around at who else was there with us, and got a good peek instead at the babe called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace?

What would that say about the season?

Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
and expect your voice to be heard on high.

Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for a man to humble himself?
Is it only for bowing one's head like a reed
and for lying on sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD ?

"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?

Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe him,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Happy Holidays to you all!

God: My Father and My Friend

2008-11-25T23:04:00.000-08:00

There are so many people out there who want to tell you about how pure and high God is, and still more who want to tell you about how loving God is. You know, the thing I really appreciate about God is not that he is holy, nor that he is dear - but that he is holy AND dear. He is high and pure and all that a God should be, yet he's never too stuffy to come near and hold out a warm hand when I'm fed up or lonely.

What would I do in this howling wilderness of a world without such a Friend?

I don't care whether it can be explained or not. He is every bit of the beauty that I know. He is all the richness, all the deep, mysterious wonder, all the warm, thrumming energy, all the loveliness that I know. Only in him my weary, bone-tired, self-seeking, self-berating soul finds rest from its endless trying to be; only in him I find fluttering warmth and spreading peace.

His name - God - has been mustied and muffled and garishly painted over: but He remains. What are the theses I have been offered in that Dear One's place? Beside Him, the vast sweep of philosophy and the measured step of science and the unfurled banners of ancient history and the colored skein of modernity are but mutterings and platitudes, after all. All their promised textures; treasures; sapience, drawn out, are paper and shadows. In all that I have sought and seen, there is nothing that compares with Him.

You may have the visions and the miracles, the blessings and the wonders and the signs. Keep the great cathedrals and the stirring hymns and the flowing robes. Take the inspirational poems and the well-expounded sermons and the bullet-proof apologetics. Call me naive and deluded. Call me a reactionary and a romantic. Call me a fool, a fanatic, a Jesus-freak.

How I love him - my Father and My Friend.

Better Gifts

2008-10-06T21:19:00.000-07:00

I've been working a lot lately. A lot. Long hours, at three jobs. Just thinking about it would have been enough to make me tired a few years ago. But since then I've spent some time unemployed, and now I look at work very differently. You could even say I enjoy it. Work not only makes me feel productive and useful, it also saves me from my lazy, time-wasting self. It sets parameters in my day. I lie down at night with a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.

I often remember what my grandfather used to say from his big Lazyboy chair: "You know, the trouble with doing nothing is that you can never stop and take a rest."

So I've been thinking a lot lately about work, and where it came from. I've also been re-reading the Old Testament during my lengthy Skytrain commutes. One day I was making my merry way through Genesis as the Skytrain went skree-ing in and out of stations, when a single paragraph leapt right off the page and punched me in the eye:

"...cursed is the ground for your sake, in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you…in the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground..." (Genesis 3: 17-19)

One thing that always puzzled me is why God would curse the earth for Adam's sake. It seemed a petty, thing to do; more like the action of a child smashing his Lego castle because someone had bumped one of the towers and knocked it off than like a God full of redeeming grace. I imagined him pouting beneath his snowy beard, or worse - scowling vindictively: "You've really gone and done it now, Adam. I am going to make sure nothing is easy for you from here on out. I'm going to mess up nature so that you'll have to work like a slave just to get food in your belly. How d'ya like them apples, huh? That'll learn you two ingrates!"

I wondered why a God who is Love would punish innocent animals for human disobedience, and afflict the pure world of nature with poisons and pestilence - all to prove a point. It just didn't seem fair, or good, or any of the things that God is. Try as I would, I couldn't get around the conflict in my imagination.

But there in my Skytrain seat, I understood something at last: the earth was cursed not to punish Adam, but for his sake; for his blessing. Perhaps I have learned something from being unemployed. Humans don't become better when we have it easier. We become worse. Fast.

Indeed, the whole Western world stands as a testimony of the destruction too much leisure can bring. Set free from the scourge of leprosy and plague, we die by the thousands of diseases that are the direct result of our selfish lifestyles. The most common ailments among us are not the result of parasites or virus, but depression. We lack not food, nor clean water, but purpose; meaningful work to usurp the tyranny of Self.

I have learned a lot through work with the elderly in different provinces and countries. It has given me a unique glimpse of the other end of life. I have seen the results of lives lived comfortably, full of the best that life can offer. I have seen, too, the results of lives lived scrabbling, full of the search to satisfy Self. But the life which remains beautiful, even at the end, is a life full of work that has been difficult enough and meaningful enough to produce perspective and humility.

God wasn't throwing a temper tantrum; he was being a merciful and careful father when he cursed the earth. I was a fool to judge God's motives by my own. Pride had done in me what it always does, and made me narrow-minded. God destroyed his precious creation in order to protect humanity from its own selfishness. In fact, everything that He did was a means to contain sin; to keep its destructive power from gaining ground too widely or too quickly.

Get leave to work
In this world — 'tis the best you get at all;
For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts
Than men benediction . . .
Get work, get work;
Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get.
- from Aurora Leigh (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

The (Real) Secret

2008-09-20T22:41:00.000-07:00

"He'll meet the soul that comes in love
And deal it joy on joy
As once he dealt out star and star
To garrison the sky;
To stand there over rains and snows,
And deck the dark of night -
So God will deal the soul, like stars
Delight upon delight."

(author unknown)

Something Borrowed

2008-09-03T23:47:00.000-07:00

Stumbled across this in my travels. It's from Rachel Tulloch at RZIM's Slice of Infinity:

"God’s love is terrible, in a way. Think of all it includes.”

I have often been asked, “Could not God have forgiven people without going through the pain and the violence of the cross?” As nice as that sounds, reality forces me to ask: When is forgiveness not painful? True forgiveness cannot occur unless the hurt is acknowledged and called for what it is. When you look a wrong full in the face but choose to accept the hurt instead of returning it on the one who did it, that is always painful.

Jesus illustrates forgiveness by telling the story of a servant who owes his master more money than he could possibly repay (See Matthew 18:21-35). The master originally threatens to sell the servant’s family and possessions to get some return for the debt, but when the servant begs for mercy, the master is gracious and forgives the debt. Yet the same servant not only refuses to forgive the debt of his fellow servant, but also has him thrown in prison as punishment.

Sometimes we treat forgiveness and justice as though they are mutually exclusive. If we choose the way of justice, we think the options are reparations or retribution--either the guilty person makes up for a wrong or is punished for it. These are the only options the servant offered his debtor. Since the second servant could not repay, he was then punished. However, the master chose the way of mercy when he forgave the debt, neither requiring reparation nor inflicting retribution. If God has really forgiven us like the master forgave the servant, we ask, then why all the pain and death of the Cross? Does the Cross undermine God’s mercy? Is it merely an underhanded way for God to force repayment from humanity or exact punishment on us?

In asking these questions, we betray a misunderstanding of both justice and forgiveness. Justice can never be achieved by reparation or retribution alone, because like the servants’ debts, true wrongs can never be repaid. The hurt and pain caused are not reversible. Punishing the guilty person does not undo the hurt either, even if it brings brief satisfaction to the victim, just as the first servant did not get his money back simply because the other man was in jail. Justice must be about much more than balancing out the wrongs of the world. It must be about making things right, about the kind of restoration that does not reverse the pain, but moves beyond it toward something new.

And just as wrongs cannot be erased by punishment or repayment, they cannot really be erased by simple forgiveness either. When the master forgives the servant’s debt, the debt does not simply disappear. The master takes the loss! He accepts the full brunt of the debt himself. Similarly, when a person forgives, he or she accepts the full brunt of the hurt or injustice rather than returning it on the one who caused it. Although it is painful, this is the way that healing and restoration begin. This is why there is no way to avoid the bloody Cross. And this is why God’s love is terrible. Think of what it includes: us, with our best and our worst, with our failed attempts and outright cruelty, with our wrong motives for right actions and our right motives for wrong actions... us, with the mess we have made of the world, with our brokenness and despair, with our rebellions and inadequacies. We are the ones included in and redeemed by the deep and wide love of God. Paul is astonished by this reality when he emphasizes that Christ died for us while we were still sinners! (Romans 5:8).

Instead of demanding that we pay what we cannot, instead of punishing us for not paying what we cannot, the God we see in Jesus Christ accepts the loss himself and opens his arms even to those who would murder him. The Cross does not represent God’s mercy being tamed by his anger; rather, it demonstrates that God’s mercy is much bigger than we think. The Cross is a graphic picture of God’s terrible love. Think of all it includes.

On Praying and Prayers, and Why Some of Them Don't Get Answered

2008-08-18T21:34:00.000-07:00

Why do we need to tell an omniscient God what our needs and secret desires are? Shouldn't he know already? Why does he make us wait? Does he take pleasure in our grovelling? Why doesn't God just give us what we want?

Why have we fasted and You do not see? Why have we humbled ourselves and You do not notice?' Behold, on the day of your fast you find your desire, And drive hard all your workers.
Behold, you fast for contention and strife and to strike with a wicked fist. You do not fast like you do today to make your voice heard on high.
Is it a fast like this which I choose, a day for a man to humble himself? Is it for bowing one's head like a reed And for spreading out sackcloth and ashes as a bed? Will you call this a fast, even an acceptable day to the LORD?
Is this not the fast which I choose, To loosen the bonds of wickedness, To undo the bands of the yoke, And to let the oppressed go free And break every yoke?
Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry And bring the homeless poor into the house; When you see the naked, to cover him; And not to hide yourself from your own flesh?
Then your light will break out like the dawn, And your recovery will speedily spring forth; And your righteousness will go before you; The glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; You will cry, and He will say, 'Here I am.' If you remove the yoke from your midst, The pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness,
And if you give yourself to the hungry And satisfy the desire of the afflicted, Then your light will rise in darkness And your gloom will become like midday.
And the LORD will continually guide you, And satisfy your desire in scorched places, And give strength to your bones; And you will be like a watered garden, And like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. (Isaiah 58:3-11)

You ask for something but do not get it because you ask for it for the wrong reason-for your own pleasure. (James 4:3)

We squeeze our eyes shut and rhyme off a Christmas list, address it to God instead of Santa, and sit back with the idea that God is somehow bound to deliver. This is not the prayer the Bible describes, nor does it give us a handle on the Living God.

What is the purpose of prayer, if it is neither the exercise of reciting our wishlists nor the wrestling into submission of a reluctant deity?

Prayer is first of all my recognition of who I am, and who God is. It is my opportunity to relinquish my responsibility for the lack - to lay the burden of my need and my longing before the One who can take responsibility for it. Prayer draws me into the very heart of God and allows me to share his thoughts and his great longing heart.

As I come near to the God who is Love and lay my burdens down, I am drawn into a circle of shared understanding. I begin to see, not through my own priorities of fear-driven pain-avoidance, but as Love sees. As I name my hurts, my worries, my wants, he puts them in with his own, and I am allowed, as much as I will, to see things as they truly are. Most amazing of all, I am allowed to join Love in his great aching and longing over his own broken creation. I participate in the hurt of his loving, and I know the comfort of his love toward me in my brokenness.

In prayer, I am reminded that Good is far greater than the petty ideas of comfort and self-satisfaction that we humans seek so doggedly. As I pray, my self-centred wants are deepened and transformed until I begin to long after those things that God himself longs after: the redemption of the broken, and the filling of the whole universe with Love and Light and Truth - beginning with your heart and mine.

When my requests remain un-granted, I am sure of this: the God who hears is ignoring my worded request for good things because instead he is satisfying the cry of my heart after the Good I cannot name. There are two reasons I am sure of this: the Bible promises it: And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28), and I have tried it. Never has God refused my request for a good thing and not given me instead the Good I couldn't have imagined. Every bitter, painful thing I have surrendered to him in prayer has been sweetened and time after time I have seen the very thing I begged to be set free from become the means by which I have received my deep heart's desire.

The God who hears my prayers has proven himself faithful to his word again and again and again. He doesn't always save me from hurt or hunger or embarrassment. He doesn't make me immune to the difficulties or the indignities of ordinary life. But God is changing my selfish thinking, bit by bit. I have been surprised to find him less like Santa Claus, and more like my Mother. He is filling every corner of my life with a Good that is more like carrots than candy, and with every passing experience, I learn that His love doesn't always mean giving me what I think I want.

He hears all my prayers, but sometimes he doesn't obey me. Thank God.

Shopping for God

2008-07-31T22:14:00.000-07:00

God is not easily seen in our lacquered, branded, and packaged world. He hides himself even from those who say they are looking for him. Some have looked long and hard - up and down the theological mall, and even in through Sunday sermon-markets. They've read treatises, attended churches and conferences and camps, tried their best to have faith in healings, participated in book studies and prayer groups. Others have searched online, asked questions of their leaders, studied apologetics. Why does God hide his face?

Oh, there's a plethora of God-shaped toys and God-labelled substitute deities - all cheap knock-offs that are sure to let you down when you most need them. There are God-rituals to participate in and God-songs to sing and play and God-movies to watch and any number of God-clubs to join. There are books about the most efficient ways to follow God, and scientific discoveries that pinpoint which brain cells are used when thinking about God, and university courses on the history of world-wide philosophies about God. There are God-stickers for your car, and God-approved political parties to vote for, and theological God-alternatives.

But where, oh where, is God? What else can we assume, except that what so many are looking for doesn't exist?

Thank God, it doesn't.

The kind of God you can go shopping for and pick out the same way you pick out a pair of shoes is blatantly and hopelessly non-existent. Our lives have become so padded with comfort, so bloated by excess, that we have little concept of what it means to need. We are more burdened by the results of too much food, too much leisure, too much choice, than we are by any sort of lack.

‘Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,” and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked... (Revelation 3:17)

Our society is looking for a commodity - an accessory; a divine talisman that can be toted about with even less trouble than those cute little be-ribboned dogs poking their heads out of purses. We want a magic genie who will make our troubles go away and rewind-and-erase our little slip-ups, and so save us from our guilt. We want a friendly grandfather who will scratch his chin and forget just how things really are, and who will just step in with gentle words and smooth over things in our relationships when we need the help. We want a pretty little God-pet that will do back-flips in his cage to impress un-believers. Oh, we'd be happy with any of the above, actually, so long as God, when he shows up, is well-documented in scientific journals. Or at least approved by the scientists they interview on the nightly news. The thing is, we'd like this God to be real - we aren't going to be hoodwinked like generations before us. We want a well-pedigreed Dog, er, God - one with papers.

And the search goes on, because there is no such thing.

You might shop 'til you drop, but none of us ever finds the God who is Love until we see our desperate, awful need of him. When we find ourselves, dizzy and sick, at the precipice overlooking the dark caverns of selfishness in our own souls; when we awake to the fact that the poison eating away at everything of ours that is pure and good comes bubbling up from the inky depths within us; when we have grown bone-weary of the struggle to fix the broken-ness that increases its destructive force as we take arms against it... When we cry out in utter helplessness for the Love and the Light and the Truth we so terribly need - then is revealed the God who Is.

He's not waiting for us to manipulate our skepticism into blind belief. He doesn't expect us to join the 'right' religion, or pretend we don't think evolutionary theories are likely. But God is neither philosophy nor meat. He is not consumed at your whim or mine. He cannot be sought as one seeks a new rug. It is our understanding of our need that defines what it is for which we search.

The Living God is freely known, but never cheaply. He comes warm and swift as a rushing wind into the awful vacuum created by the admitted need for what He alone is - Love. Light. Truth.

And you shall seek me, and find me, when you shall search for me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:13)

Expectation and Experience and India, and God

2008-07-17T22:00:00.000-07:00

I didn't really want to go to India. I had never actually been there, of course, but I'd read books and seen bits in movies and heard stories. I knew about as much about it as I cared to, and it just didn't seem all that interesting. For one thing, everyone said it was dirty. And crowded. The music sounded whiny, and wasn't there a rather inhumane caste system still to be dealt with? What else was there to know?

But I was going. I had been roped in with a group and India was the chosen destination. So I went.

And oh, how I long to return to India. The colors and the casual grandeur were breathtaking. The rich, deep, age-old culture that lay, multi-faceted and palpable, draped over and under and interwoven with everything, and the people - warm and smiling and open-hearted, and the life-energy running through and around it all, humming and vibrant... I fell in love with India and all that she is. The dirt and the crowds were there, but they didn't seem tedious and annoying as I had imagined. Even the fine dust that blew through the air and ruined my clothes and wouldn't be scrubbed from my skin bespoke a simplicity, and seemed a subtle reminder of the humble origins of humanity and our vital connection with the earth. The vaulting of the sky seemed much higher and grander than I remembered it being in Canada. The jostling commotion of the crowds wasn't all pleasantness, but it made me feel a part of something great and vital. The very air thrummed with life and living and a kind of drumbeat, felt rather than heard. Color and sound and rhythm streamed like long banners overhead. India wasn't comfortable - it was hot and old and dusty and dirty and noisy and even unkempt - but somehow, comfort didn't seem to be all that I had felt it was back home in Canada.

This is a little how it is when one really comes to know God for the first time. Oh, you may have seen 'The Jesus Movie', or maybe you've been brought up in the church and listened to a million sermon-stories. Maybe you've even read the guidebook. But God is nothing like you've imagined. Like India, he is deep and rich and warm and dear and living, and filled with a wide freedom and a captivating sweetness. Like India, he is not comfortable - but he shows comfort for the meagre, pitiful thing it is. Like India, God can be ignored and shoved onto the shelf in your mind marked "religion", and you might go your whole life with your assumptions, never really knowing what you're missing...

'til Love Returns

2008-06-15T21:53:00.000-07:00

"'That there is brokenness,' he says quietly. 'That this world is brokenness. But within brokenness is the Unbreakable Name. How the whole earth groans 'til Love returns.'" (Joy Kogawa, Obasan, 1981)

Looking for Love

2008-06-11T22:18:00.000-07:00

Evangelical Christians commonly offer Christ to mankind as a nostrum to cure their ills, a way out of their troubles, a quick and easy means to the achievement of personal ends... What we do is precisely what a good salesman does when he presents the excellence of his product as compared with that of his closest competitor. The customer chooses the better of the two, as who would not? But the weakness of the whole salesmanship technique is apparent: the idea of selfish gain is present in the whole transaction. (A.W. Tozer)

The sales technique works - there are many who follow the Christ in hope of some 'blessing'. They will find in the end that they have purchased an empty package. Unless what we seek is a freedom from that driving selfishness; unless we first find that ugliness destroying all that is beautiful and true in us, we may spend a lifetime steeped in Christian culture and church work, but we will neither seek nor find the only One who can and will set us free.

Once the head of the house gets up and shuts the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock on the door, saying, ‘Lord, open up to us!’ then He will answer and say to you, ‘I do not know where you are from.’ “Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in Your presence, and You taught in our streets’; and He will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you are from; depart from me, all you evildoers.’ Luke 13:25-27

But to the sad truth that some are wrong about their acceptability to God, the Bible adds a promise that those accepted are not, as some assume, limited to the western world:

...And they will come from east and west and from north and south, and will recline at the table in the kingdom of God. (Luke 13:29)

We are not acceptable to God on the basis of our piety, but on the basis of our reaching for his mercy:

[Jesus] also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: "Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.' But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted. (Luke 18:9-14)

On Arrogance and Awe and Dr. Suess

2008-05-29T21:43:00.000-07:00

Dr. Suess's Yertle the Turtle is an ingeniously prophetic work. It is the tale of the modern Western man. Yertle is a turtle who has a yen for leadership. He wants to rule. As king of the pond of Sala-ma-Sond, he soon grows dissatisfied with the rock that serves as his throne. So he piles up all of the other turtles and steps on them, one by one, until he reaches the top. He styles himself king of all he sees:

I'm the king of a house! And a bush! And a cat!
But that isn't all. I'll do better than that!...

But, while he was shouting, he saw with surprise
That the moon of the evening was starting to rise
Up over his head in the darkening skies.

In the end, though, all it takes is a burp from one little turtle and Yertle finds himself king of the mud.

Aren't we Yertle? We've stepped on everything that can be put under us - nature, philosophy, history, humanity - exploited it and discarded it and climbed up on it until we really think we are the kings of all that we survey. We fancy ourselves infinitely more wise than any people groups who have failed to come, fawning, to buy and sell in our marketplace, and whose cultures have not yet been laid humbly before our own mass-mediated philosophies. Cultures throughout our world and throughout history have been aware of a world higher than the natural world - but WE alone are un-primitive and un-ignorant, so we can pity the poor sods who just didn't have our understanding of things. We can scoff at global warming and the energy crisis and the dearth of nutrients in our soils - because we are the greatest, and we frankly can't imagine a crisis that the omnipotent mix of our scientific forces and technological advances wouldn't be able to put to rights.

Like Yertle, one of the things we have lost is a sense of awe. Because science has allowed us to arm-wrestle nature into a kind of submission - at least for the time being - we think we can rule it. Because we can name scientific laws - some of them - we think we can control them. We toss around the bits we have learned about particle physics and black holes and we think we are the rulers of it all - because however little we actually understand, we can talk about it - a little. Just like Yertle, outraged at the moon, which dared ascend higher than him on his turtle-pile.

One little burp is all it's going to take for this pitiful little 100-year, several-country flash-in-the-pan to go Plunk! in the pond.

If only we had some inkling of the powers that are over us, and around us. We could see them, if only we could first admit our own weakness.

In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the LORD sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.
Above it stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.
And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.
And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.
Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.
(Isaiah 6:1-5)

We have seen the enemy...

2008-05-14T00:27:00.000-07:00

In the collective consciousness of at least Western society is a half-fantasy, half-fear of alien invasion. In our daydreams, the aliens are coming to destroy us. Their dark powers will spread throughout the universe unless they are put to death by charmingly innocent and grandly idealistic us. Sometimes they are robots; sometimes borgs; sometimes mind-forces. At all costs, they must be stopped before they destroy the whole universe.

We would like to believe that the darkness; the destruction, is something out there that may be met on the portals and finished off by the essential goodness of humanity. We need to face that fact that we are the the dark aliens. We are not the idealistic children we always let ourselves be in the sci-fi movies - we are the mutants, the devouring borgs who are systematically destroying every square inch we have the technology to reach. We have almost sucked this amazing planet dry. We are doing a thorough job of robbing it of its rich biodiversity and intricately balanced eco-systems. We have reached, as far as our technology allows us, into space.We pride ourselves on our scientific and technological achievements and our social sophistications. We forget the hideous and spreading corruption we have authored. We ignore the violence and oppression that run rampant despite our complicated societal codes.

The dark aliens aren't coming - they are here. They are us. And who is going to keep us from destroying the whole universe?

Oh, I am so disappointed in us. In people. In me.

We are so lovely, but for our wretched selfishness. That wicked, sucking heart of darkness reveals itself time after time, and we make excuse after excuse, but we know, if sometimes dimly, the truth.

There is only One who is lovely, trustworthy, pure. His name is Love and Jesus Christ. He doesn't hate us, the destroyers in a universe of beauty; he pities us. He comes without ray gun or flashing light sabre, but holds out his hand.

This is my body, which is broken for you... Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do...

When I am tired of the weakness, the lies, the unreliability of my own heart, I take refuge in One who is Truth. I am content to rest, then, at his dear feet. Somehow, though, he bids me come closer. If I will, he can set me free - free from that dark, clawing within that isolates me and eats away at all that is pure, making me something alien, to be feared and loathed.

He is not the God I have imagined, bending magnanimously to bless the humble penitent with his fingertips. Here is a Father and a Friend.

He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble... Psalm 91:15

I have sought in vain such a friend among humanity's hordes, but in Him alone my heart finds rest. He has given me pain, but never out of selfishness. He has let me cry and rage, but he has never deserted me.

Isn't this the One we need?

Wise Men on Wisdom

2008-05-06T21:56:00.000-07:00

"There is no happiness where there is no wisdom;
No wisdom but in submission to the gods.
Big words are always punished,
And proud men in old age learn to be wise."
- Sophocles, Antigone

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding."
- Proverbs 9:10 (KJV)

Earth, Idealism, and God

2008-04-29T00:20:00.000-07:00

I think I might be a bit of an idealist. I don't like that. I mostly like to think of myself as realistic, but from time to time, I sense the idealist shoe fitting pretty snugly about my little foot. This might be one of the reasons that I so often find myself disappointed. I don't realize, most of the time, that my expectations are anything more than modest. That is, until I come smack up against reality. -Pop- goes my shiny bubble, and I'm left wiping soap scum off the computer screen.

The boys in the reading club I teach are in the middle of a book about an alien who comes to earth. He writes back home about his experiences, and one of his observations is this: "Earth is a tough neighbourhood." I liked this statement. He's right. We humans are always trying to build trust, and always letting each other down. We talk about brotherhood and peace, but deep down, we only want those things if we can have them and all the other things we want, too. At our very best, we are broken.

There is only one thing in my life that has been better than I expected, not less; that hasn't left me feeling flat or disappointed: only God. Only He has been more warm, more kind, more lovely, more rich, and more trustworthy than I dreamed he would be. Only He has kept every promise. Only He satisfies, surprises, and delights the idealist in me with her high-flown expectations. What a sweet relief after I have got a look at the disappointing weakness of the human heart, and the failure that dogs the most noble of us.

And this is the message which we have heard from him, and declare to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (I John 1:5)

Oh, here I can rest my weary heart...

Jesus still calls...

2008-04-20T23:42:00.000-07:00

“Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matt 11:28-30

Waiting to Be Free

2008-04-05T23:32:00.000-07:00

This is what the Lord says-- Israel's King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty: I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God. Isaiah 44:6

Perhaps the hardest thing a human being can do is bow herself before the God of Eternity, to recognize his awful authority and right. There is something deep and dark and long-clawed within us, that lays hold on the heart and will not let us go without blood.

I am waiting for the day when I will be free of that squealing, squirming self that reaches always for supremacy and rages in bitter disappointment against the God who refuses to give up his place.

Words and wishing, and God

2008-03-29T01:26:00.000-07:00

The trouble with talking about God is that we all use the same words, but they mean such different things. When many people talk about "God", they refer vaguely to a magical being who decides how everything is, and yet - despite the horror and confusion we see around us - is also somehow good. People talk about love and mean warm, fuzzy feelings that make you want to talk all night and buy flowers for no reason.

The "God" I want to tell of is not God because he or someone else decided that he could be, nor because he won a shootout with the other powers in the universe. He is God because he is Love, and Love is the most powerful force there is. The "love" I speak of is not the thing they make movies about. You know you've encountered it because it sits like lead in your chest. It forces you out of bed in the morning, and half- sets you free and half- kicks your butt until you find yourself choosing to do things you hate doing. It stomps with heavy boots on your pride, and hurts more than anything else has the power to hurt. It's wearying and difficult and sore and will make you grow up if you can just stand it.

So, a God who is Love is not all gumdrops and roses. He is difficult. If we would reach out to him, or attempt to join him in loving, we will ache and weep in bewilderment. But let me say again that, in the end, he alone is enough.

Oh, if I could only draw back the curtain and let you see his vast beauty and his intricate order and his deep warmth... But you've seen snows and sunsets; ocean and sky; stars and dogs - and the eloquence of words must be laid aside when such speak.

Why This Waste?

2008-03-10T22:43:00.000-07:00

I'm tired. Tired of waiting. Tired of hurting. Tired of leaving myself bare, tired of feeling foolish, tired of pushing down my wounded, squirming pride, tired of hurting for what seems like no reason, tired of waiting for God to replace my withered love with His strong one. I try to remember - well, half-remember, half-imagine - what it's like to love and hurt and still not need.

I sit outside a tightly closed door and wait. The door was once open to me, and I went in and out of it at will. I begin to forget, just now, precisely why I wait, but Love, that charming child, is somewhere about me, and for what seems like a long time, his presence has been enough.

Pride comes stalking about from time to time, making indignant thrusts and reminding me of the privilege from which I have fallen, and drawing my eyes to a plentitude of other doors open to me which I might more independently go in at. But Love rises up and silences his angry talk with a bold look.

Then Loneliness has a turn at me. He comes smoothly and coldly, laying with chill hands a thin blanket of melancholy about my shoulders as I wait. His pleading suggestion is a whine in the wind, but it matches the rising complaint in my cold heart: If you can't bear it, no need to stay. There are other doors open wide and warm. But again, Love arises in my defence and quells him with a word or two.

Last comes Reason, unsanctified. I hear the ordered measure of his footfall as he comes and it seems reassuring to my ear. He is neither angry nor pleading, but all matter-of-fact, and he seems not even to see me, but addresses Love directly: "Think carefully, my friend. Long have you sat outside this door, to what end? Are you not simply a bother to those inside? When they think of you at all, doesn't your stubborn waiting seem a burden rather than a gift? What can you give if the door is shut?" His unimpassioned charge is swift and strong, and even Love seems to stagger, his childlike trust suddenly made foolish.

Then softly, through the damp and gloom, comes One whose brow is wrapped in thorns, whose hands and feet are pierced and bleeding. He neither looks nor speaks harshly, but before him, Reason knows his place and becomes the humble penitent. Love runs to him as to a father and looks boldly out from amongst the soft, warm robes of the Man of Sorrows.

I, too, am compelled to take my place at his feet, and I remember why and for Whom I sit waiting. It is not for the ones on the other side of the door, but for Him who also waits with broken heart.

Like those frugal-minded souls who watched with only their eyes the glory of One for whom an alabaster box was broken and its ointment poured forth, I have questioned in my heart, "Why this waste?"

And then - a glimpse of Him before whom all is at once broken and made whole; Him before whom there is no waste, though I pour out the whole treasure of my deep heart on his dear feet; Him whose broken heart precedes every other breaking, and whose precious ointment lavished on me is the full of my own heart's store.

I am ashamed that I have forgotten for whom I wait and watch; that I have been deceived by that rogue trio into counting again the cost of the alabaster, into making measure of my precious ointment. Surely there can be no waste for the One whose own blood poured forth is of matchless worth.

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. (Ecclesiastes 6:8)

Why We Need A Jesus (Part 1): Great Humanity's Tragic Flaw

2008-02-24T20:05:00.000-08:00

Why do people so often disappoint us? Why are we so deeply hurt when they fail to match up to our expectations? What keeps us hoping for a purity, a greatness of character that rarely fails to elude us, in ourselves and in others?

Isn't it that, despite the glaring flaws in the very best of us, there is something deeply a part of humanity that is inexplicably lovely - something so wonderful that it teaches us to hope, again and again?

We like to talk about "good people" and "bad people". A friend of mine stays with a man who hits her because "he's not a bad person". She sees something in him, despite his violence, that is pure and beautiful. Knowing what goodness lies within, she can't bring herself to toss him out, even though the very same man may someday, in a rage, kill her.

The truth we don't like to face is that there aren't any "good people" or "bad people". In each of us lives, side by side, a nature that is loyal, loving, kind, and true - and a nature that is selfish, hateful, spiteful, and proud. Whether because of personality or experience, some of us are better or less able to control which side shows itself, but both exist in us all.

Occasionally we meet people whose characters are so shot through with beauty that we begin to hope - perhaps they will be the ones to satisfy that stubborn longing within us that, seemingly without any basis, seeks purity, nobility, and an unfailing heart of love. And reality comes to bite us on the bum time after time. Oh, we still love them in spite of their failure to meet our expectations. We don't have any business doing it any other way, since we know ourselves to be so flawed. But the point is, we are disappointed.

What teaches us to hope? What is it about the human imperfection we can discuss intellectually, that doesn't translate to the subconscious us - the part that hopes, in the face of knowledge and experience, for someone (a friend, a lover, a mother or father) that won't let us down? How is it that such rich, dear, loveliness can exist alongside violence, stubbornness, arrogance, selfishness?

What else, but that we are made in the image of very God - so that our deep essence is no cheap thing, but a thing made with his own beauty and greatness and love? What else, but that sin eats away at that precious thing, destroying its usefulness but unable to nullify its rich value?

Our world is built upon a great tragedy - one that, to understand, we need not study science or history or theology. We have only to look with honesty at that thing we know both least and best - our own heart.

Outside of Jesus Christ, we have neither explanation for the tragic reality we know in every fibre of our lives, nor have we any cure.

On Beggars and Choosers

2008-02-20T07:28:00.000-08:00

Modern capitalism is based on the manipulation of desire. We find ourselves a consumer society; one that has gone softly into a long good night in which guilt and fear prevail, and longing is dulled and re-directed. Our need to choose has been substituted with the much more glamorous privilege of choosing from.

Willingly, we have accepted the outrageous lie that individuality and personality may be satisfied by making consumer decisions. Our need for freedom is sublimated in the exercise of consumer privileges. That I may select from twenty varieties of toothpaste, or twelve movies, or four electoral candidates, appears as freedom. We have become convinced that choice need involve nothing creative: it is enough for us to merely select from an array of options.

Ideas, too, have been added to shelves of the grand marketplace in which we all live. Having succeeded in throwing off our need to seek and think and feel and consider, we have succumbed and contented ourselves with selecting entire blocks of thinking, based on processed and packaged philosophies, theologies, and belief-systems.

Consumerism creates the illusion of luxury, which is tied to the act of selecting. Since beggars can't be choosers, we must all be first convinced that we have no needs, only desires. We are all choosers with no real needs, but only the luxurious privilege of selecting the goods and the packets of theory that best match our personalities.

In allowing ourselves to be transformed from thinkers to consumers, we have been elevated from scrabbling in the dust of reality and experienced truth. Instead, we discuss theories that we have chosen to ascribe to, but hardly even understand. From trusting and experiencing a God that we can't see, we have gone to trusting what amounts to little more than popular opinion. Science has been unjustly discounted in the Christian world; but much of what is passed off as scientific truth in the secular world is only that portion of science which agrees with other socially and economically convenient truths. We toss around scientific arguments and other "facts" as though we aren't simply trusting those who purvey them; as though they have been researched by us; as though we deeply understand why they must be true.

We look for ideas that have been well-packaged, endorsed by appropriate authorities or celebrities, and carefully branded. I select and carry about my preferred brand of truth as I might a new handbag. It's a fashion statement; something that sets me apart and tells the world what type of person I am. Even we who call ourselves Christians want to think it's enough to believe that Jesus exists; that on that basis we will be acceptable to God. The demons themselves know that he exists!

Because you say, "I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing," and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked... (Revelation 3:17)

Truth is not something to be consumed. If I am to know it, I must first know my need of it. We are not, after all, choosers, but beggars, if we only knew it. The question is not, "Does God exist?" or "Who was Jesus?", but one that I may have a full answer to: "Who am I? What do I need?" If we can see the problem within that is utterly destroying us; which makes a mockery of all that is beautiful and true in us, then we know that, whether or not he exists, we need Jesus. That he is the only solution that matches our one great need. And if he does not exist, then there is no hope for us anyway.

The man who knows himself carried swiftly along a river that ends in a waterfall asks no questions about the rope thrown to him. He grasps it, because, though he knows not whether it may be trusted, he knows his problem. There is no shortage of solutions being bandied about by the philosophical and religious people of our world, and what can we know of their viability? If we know our problem, we will take part in no elevated selection of an appropriate solution, but a desperate grasping of what will meet our deep need.

Jesus Christ the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

My Scary, Surprising God

2008-02-07T07:53:00.000-08:00

How can we be sure that our God is not a product of our own minds? How can we know that the God we believe in is not a projection of ourselves and our wishes and hopes?

This post is in answer to a challenge presented by DagoodS: "How does your god Frighten you? How does your God surprise you? How does your God change your thinking?"

Power can be exciting and comforting at the same time. What child doesn't like to imagine superheroes with great powers? In the same way, our imaginations of God make him an all-powerful genie, and Jesus the ultimate Superman. We can love this kind of a God because his unlimited powers are, in a way, at our disposal. He is on our side. We just have to pray diligently enough, sprinkle a little faith-dust, and *poof* - our wishes are granted.

The God of the Bible bears no resemblance to such a magician. His purposes are vastly different from ours. He does not grant wishes to his favorites. The privileges I am offered if I follow him are himself, and the privilege of knowing him - though my choice allows God to use his power for my benefit, he doesn't use it for my comfort; nor is his power given into my control. Similarly, we experience this in nature. As we take our rightful place in the natural world, the benefits of nature come to us - but never is nature under our control. The universe laughs at a person or people who think they can through study or industry bend the natural forces.

I love the ocean whose salt waves cool my body in summer; whose unseen depths and ceaseless tides at the same time calm and intrigue me. But though I splash and play in the waves, they are no playthings. The ocean is relentless. It is set upon principles that will not be denied, though I cry and beg. It is a thing wholly outside of my control, and is therefore a thing to be feared as well as loved.

So is God. His principles go far deeper and higher than my wanting. He is not controlled by my pleading. He is not devoted to my comfort. He let Joseph be falsely accused and languish in prison for ten years. He let the Hebrews be made slaves to the Egyptians. He allowed John the Baptist to rot in Herod's dungeon until John questioned all that he had lived for - then he let them cut off his head. Who would imagine such a God?

But wait - there's more. The same God who seemingly ignored the pleas and tears of those who followed him the most closely all through history showed that he is merciful, not by granting them favours (as you and I would imagine) but by becoming a man. He became one of us, with all of the human weakness that we despise in ourselves (except sin). He was tired, hungry, dirty, lonely, weak. He had, like us, to seek even his spiritual strength and comfort from heaven. The power that allowed him to give to others offered him no pillow, no home, no dainty food, no freedom from pain or weariness.

Even if it were possible for me to conjure such a God in my own thoughts, if he is an illusion only, then he is a God for contemplation; for philosophizing. When I am cold, I want a blanket. When I am hungry, I want bread. When I am tired, I want a place to lay my head. When I am lonely, I want a friend. The mere thought of a God as the Bible describes him is awe-inspiring when I sit comfortably on my couch and meditate - but such thoughts are easily quenched by the realities of life: loneliness, disappointment, tiredness, hunger, pain. Only the experienced reality of a God who sees and knows - though he denies my request - is enough then.

This sort of a God is frightening. He's too complicated. He's too big, not in the good, "my-Dad-can-beat-up-your-Dad" way, but in the "do-you-even-know-I'm-here?" way. He can give me pain. He can leave me lonely. He can let me be confused. On top of it all, he expects far more from me than I want to give. He's disconcerting.

Then, too, he surprises me. He doesn't do what I expect him to do. He reveals himself as a person I didn't expect him to be.

God surprises me by not being the person I expect; by being subject to reality in a way that he is not in my imagination. In my mind, no one characteristic of God has to have a bearing on any other characteristic, because he doesn't have to make sense except in the way I think of him. In real life, he has to be what makes sense even before I've gone over the parameters and the consequences of his characteristics; even before it makes sense to me. I have to know what he is before I understand why it's necessary for him to be that way.

I used to think that God was completely unlimited; that he could do anything - just anything. Of course, that left me with a million problems that began in my own life and ended in places like Darfur and Indonesia. The God I imagined didn't have to make sense - he could be good AND unlimited AND thus have both the ability and the will to relieve the plight of millions of suffering people down through history... but in reality my little daydream broke down. The God I came face to face with in reality looked astonishingly different because he was limited in the way EVERYTHING is limited in reality. He can't be what he isn't. He can't serve opposing purposes. He can't make a rock so big that he can't lift it. There are reasons for what he does. And yet, the Bible tells me what he is like without my being able to understand how that fits with what I see. It corrects both my imagination and my reasoned deductions. I can see what he does BEFORE I understand why; and I can know (from the Bible) who he is BEFORE I can reconcile that with the evidence. Both of those things are baffling to the imagination. But the fact that I can know who God is before I can understand why it is necessary for him to be that way offers me evidence that my knowledge of God comes from outside my own thoughts.

I thought I could please God by being kind, by helping others, by doing my best to conform myself to the teachings of the Bible. I also thought that by pleasing God, I could expect some favours in return. Oh, not so simply as that. I wasn't thinking that God would ply me with sports cars and overseas flights because I traded in my time and money and tried to be kind to hurting people. But I did expect that there would be some kind of return on my investments. I thought there was some sort of perk to be had for those who follow Jesus. Not so, as it turns out. Well, not like I expected, anyway. No extra comforts, no signs that the King of Kings is my own father.

Just Him. He is the perk. There is deep peace in knowing him. There is joy and purpose, even in the midst of struggle, confusion, and depression.

The more I get to know him, the more he surprises me. He wakes me up early, just to talk. (Ask my mother how likely it is that I'd wake up early on my own!) He shows me the selfishness at the core of the sacrifices I make, and the pride that surrounds my most selfless acts. He bursts all my balloons, and replaces them with himself. Oh, he is lovely, but make no mistake - God is a party pooper. Just when I'm feeling great, patting myself on the back for a particularly selfless act, he sticks his foot out and I'm flat on my face. That's not just surprising, it's frustrating.

And just when I've got him in a nice, neat little box - the kind you can hand to someone like a present - I come smack up against a whole new side of him I've never seen before.

He tells me I'm wrong. In fact, sometimes he shows me that my whole perspective is wrong. I used to think that it was my job to point out sin - from my schoolfriend who lived a gay lifestyle to my sister who hurt my feelings with her carelessness. One day God showed me that judging is his job, not mine, and that being right is far from enough in his eyes. In fact, in trying to take his place, I am worse than those I judge! Do I like that? Nope. When somebody does what I know is wrong, I love the rush of knowing that I'm right and they are wrong, and I want them to understand exactly what the situation is. (There, now you know just what a little prig I am, though I usually try my best to hide it!)

Then, when I thought I was doing a pretty good job of showing what God's love is, He showed me that I don't know a thing about love. He pointed out how much of my "love" is emotionalism, neediness, and pride. He let me see how fast my brand of love turns to hatred and resentment when it is met with rejection, weakness, or apathy. But he didn't leave me there - this is the wonder and the loveliness of the God I worship! - he let me have a little of his love. I had to receive it myself before I could give it, and even then, it wasn't anything like I expected. As it turns out, God's love isn't a warm, smooshy feeling, but a heaviness. It isn't what makes me smile and hand out sandwiches to homeless people - it's what lets me come back for more when I've been kicked in the teeth; it's what lets me sincerely want good for someone who has rejected me; it's what makes me see the beauty of God himself in the kind of person whose sinfulness is all too evident to me; it's what allows me to want another's good at my cost. Don't get me wrong, I've experienced real love in trace amounts - but even the minutest grain of such a thing was enough to turn my whole thinking on its head.

Oh, I am smart enough to figure out what my weaknesses are - but God shows me the deep darkness and the flapping foolishness that entwine themselves about my strengths. The better I know him, the less I trust myself.

No, the God I worship is far more frightening, more complex, more deep, vast, and breath-takingly beautiful than I could ever dream up. I know myself more free as I am changed by him, but I am not released from the chains of selfishness with smooth sighs - it is a bitter struggle with one who is stronger than I. His purpose cuts across mine. He offers me pains that I could not and would not choose for myself. Many in our world have pain, but the pain God gives is different in this - it results in love, joy, and peace. It sets free those who choose Him.

The idea that I could imagine a God so wise, so pure, so full of the kind of love that doesn't even make sense to a human being, is not only laughable but indeed, if it were possible, it would make me - the dreamer of such a dream - myself worthy of worship. That I am patently unworthy is a fact beyond dispute.

Testing the Hypothesis

2008-01-28T11:21:00.000-08:00

Research has always interested me, while the logistics of carrying out solid research have always repelled me. However, it is clear to those of us who study the unquantifiable that, despite the paucity of answers available through even the most painstaking and principled of research, without it there are no answers that may be communicated. I may hold any beliefs I choose about "the way things are", but without an appeal to primary research, I have no basis on which to offer my beliefs to others.

My life's thesis, that God is Love, must too be tested and subjected to experiment under varying conditions if it is to be communicated. It seems that Paul had the same idea about the responsibility of the apostles:

"For it seems to me that God has put us the Apostles last of all, as men whose fate is death: for we are put on view to the world, and to angels, and to men." I Corinthians 4:9

He saw the apostles' lives as a spectacle, a display - living, breathing experiments of their great hypothesis, Jesus Christ the Savior of the world.

If I live true to my own hypothesis, it will be tested. My life will become an experiment in which the reality of God may be tried and the results displayed to anyone interested enough to watch.

One of the great medieval biology experiments on the effects of rest and exercise on digestion was one ordered by a cruel emperor. He had two of his servants fed well for a month. After each meal, one was forced to rest; the other was forced to exercise. At the end of the month, the servants were brought before the king and disembowelled to determine which lifestyle was better suited to healthy digestion. Obviously, the knowledge gained in this case hardly warranted the brutality it involved. But the results were clearly more to be trusted than reams of arguments on the matter.

Whatever it cost me, may I subject to the necessary tests my life's hypothesis. Let me prove amid the rigours of life's inevitable weariness and bewildering unfairness and absorbing variety and strange, surprising happiness, who is that One who is more dear than solace and more beautiful than joy. Let me not speak with smooth, swollen words of such deep, darling, powerful, and pure things as God and love. Rather, let me eat them. Let the bowels of my self be ripped apart, that the precious results may be displayed to those who wonder.

Aha! Moments...

2008-01-07T21:11:00.000-08:00

Why didn't anybody ever explain to me the vast difference between the things in life that make me feel good and the things that make me happy?

Or maybe they did, but it didn't feel good, so I didn't listen...

God is Kind

2007-12-13T00:24:00.000-08:00

It's been a hard few months. I lost my job in September, and I've lost a good friend. I'm tired of instability, I'm suddenly lonely, and I'm ashamed and afraid of the future. My pride is tattered, and I am thrust, at odd times, to the edge of a precipice overlooking a vast and vacant wilderness. Depression, fear, and loneliness send their howls and shrieks from its depths to chill and oppress me, and I am heartsore and weary with it all. I like to put on a good face and pretend (to myself as much as anyone else) that I am mature enough, that my coping skills are advanced enough, to manage my churning emotions, but the truth is, I'm just tired and scared and cold and I want this to be over. Now.

But lest my words ring hollow when I sit again at friendship's fire, warmed by laughter and encircled in security, let me tell out of this darkness who my God is when I am weak and childish and shivering. Look on my humiliation and see Him - who has chosen it for me - full of love strong enough to allow pain, and merciful. He is kind. I will say it now because it costs me admit it now. I don't always feel it to be true. I don't always feel that it even matters. But I always, always know it it true. I hear it as a steady drumbeat above the din of my clamouring emotion - His mercy endures forever. I will tell out of my weakness that God is wider than my wide wilderness, and deeper than its nether reaches. Even when I refuse to be comforted by that, I know it to be true. Beneath, above, around my bewilderment, I know with surety that God is kind. I cannot deny it, even when I would. I ask him, "Why?", and he holds out bleeding hands. He has been where I am. He has begged our Father to make another way for him.

Some day I will kiss his lovely feet. But today, I will tell who he is.

WDJD - What DID Jesus Do?

2007-11-29T15:09:00.000-08:00

The WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) movement sprang up about ten years ago. It was loosely based on a book that asked people to consider their actions in light of what Jesus would do in their position. The acronym WWJD suddenly appeared everywhere - on keychains, rings, wristbands and bracelets, bookmarks, stickers, Bible covers, even backpacks and purses. It was a nice sentiment - a bit cheesy, but more or less harmless and not really offensive even to members of secular society, most of whom could respect the humanitarian teachings of the historical Jesus.

In reality, WWJD is a signpost that ought to warn us just how far into wish-land Christianity has slipped. Instead of concerning ourselves with facts and realities, those of us who call ourselves Christians have collectively become more and more interested in what might be and what we hope, think, wish to be rather than what is. We dabble in shadows. We are convinced by dubious accounts of the "miraculous", stories that play on our emotions, and meta-philosophies that do little more than confirm what we are already sure of - our own superiority. We ignore most of what ought to uniquely concern human beings, what is natural and reasonable - our responsibility to manage and nurture the earth, our relationship with other human beings, all that belongs to the realm of reason and human experience. Instead, we want to play about with the supernatural. We take our delight not in the wonders of oceans and trees and stars, nor the mysteries of love and life. We have lost sight of what IS, and have become fascinated, rather, with unverifiable tales, and ideas that lead us out of our natural sphere and into a land of half-lights where we are singled out for special revelations. In that land, our imaginations are given free reign, and we are elevated to gods and demi-gods by virtue of our individualised experiences of a "God" who not vast and unchanging, but as various and as fickle as we are.

We owe a great debt of gratitude to Secular Humanism, which has at last stood up and said, "Enough is enough". Though its adherents deny God, they at times demonstrate who He is and who we are with more clarity than much of what masquerades as "Christianity".

We who call ourselves Christians need to stop believing the lie that calls "mysterious" what might be better labelled murky and dubious. I don't deny the existence of a spiritual reality. The supernatural is just as real as the natural. But it is not the native sphere of the human. And we ought not to confuse the spiritual with the merely supernatural. Neither one is a thing to be toyed with.

What is spiritual is not fully comprehended in reason, but that offers us no excuse to lazily toss reason aside and settle for wishy-washy definitions, or to fully depend on personal experience. The spiritual realities described by the Bible are NEVER unreasonable. Even while they are not fully comprehended in reason, they never deny reason's bases, nor its value.

The question then is not, "What WOULD Jesus Do?", but "What DID Jesus Do?". And indeed, why should it matter?

At the center of Christianity is the issue of who Jesus is. The linguistic root of "Christianity" is "Christ" - the Greek word the Hebrew "maschiah" or "messiah" - the "sent" one. Jesus is "sent" from God in fulfillment of God's promise to the world through the Jewish people. "Jesus" comes from "Yeshua", meaning "saviour". His full title is tranlated into English as "the Lord Jesus Christ". "Lord" is a term used in place of the Hebrew "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" - the Almighty God. Jesus is the Almighty God, Sent as a Saviour.

Jesus is God come to us in human flesh. He is the Creator of all things. He is God demonstrating his love in willingness to experience what we experience as humans. He is God willing, for Love's sake, to humble himself, to take on the pains and indignities of human life. He is a Holy God beyond the scope of our universes and countless universes unimagined by us, the Source of Light and Life and Love. He is in his essence, not merely his position, Worthy and pure. He is Light and lives in Light. He is personal. The Eternal One showed his pity for a beautiful but flawed and floundering humanity not by reaching down - but by becoming what we are; by sharing our experience. Jesus is the High and Holy God willing to leave behind all that belongs to him - glory, peace, worship, light, and the full fellowship of Love - in order to demonstrate Love in human terms. He doesn't hold out a tingly experience, shiny angel-sightings, or sweeping emotion. He comes himself - Love eating and drinking with fishermen and prostitutes, Love attending weddings and telling stories; Love paying taxes and cooking breakfast; Love tired and hungry, with a beard and dirty feet; Love sweating and breathing and crying and bleeding.

The Lord Jesus Christ laid aside all that is his - the worship of a realm we cannot imagine, the incomprehensible glory belonging to the Prince of heaven, the deep beauty of God, the undisturbed joy of Love's daily fellowship with Love. He became part of the secular, human world that he had created. He ate and drank, worked and wept. He shared the simple joys and the wracking suffering that belongs to humanity. He demonstrated Love in a tired, hungry world reaching for the divine but devastated by selfishness.

But that isn't all he did. He didn't just hold out the love that we so long for. He stood between us and God. He accepted the consequences of his own character. He took on the results of our flaws and our selfishness before God. He allowed God to lay our guilt on him. Jesus died to demonstrate his full indentification with a broken, dying humanity, and he accepted God's judgement of our selfishness. Through him, we can approach a pure and holy God. Because he sacrificed his own comfort and his own pleasure for Love, he broke the hold selfishness has over us as humans. In choosing him, we can be free from the flaw that eats away at our best gifts. He offers us his own Spirit, not to give us supernatural powers that will allow us to cure our friends of cancer or deal masterfully with demons, but to give us a spiritual power that demonstrates itself by setting us free from the selfishness that destroys us.

Jesus comes not, as we have presented him, in white-robed splendour with coast-to-coast tours and glowing billboard testimonials, promising freedom from poverty and sickness. He comes to us in the dust of the everyday. He reconciles Jews with Palestinian Arabs, North Americans with Iranians, Britons with First Nations peoples, Koreans with Japanese. He says that Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and Mormans and Wiccans are not enemies, but fellow humans to the Christian. To the one who chooses him he gives a power that overcomes the seeping poison of self-interest that hides beneath mother-love, humanitarian compassion, and the fidelity of friends.

He who is Love, demonstrated Love to his own hurt, and offers us the power to love truly. That's what Jesus did.

Ancient Wisdom in Modern Language

2007-11-23T23:21:00.000-08:00

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve, and bad things are very easy to get. (Confucius)

Faith: How Much is Enough?

2007-11-07T16:47:00.000-08:00

ex·pe·ri·ence (ĭk-spîr'ē-əns)
n.
The apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind: a child's first experience of snow.
Active participation in events or activities, leading to the accumulation of knowledge or skill: a lesson taught by experience; a carpenter with experience in roof repair.
The knowledge or skill so derived.
An event or a series of events participated in or lived through.
The totality of such events in the past of an individual or group.
tr.v., -enced, -enc·ing, -enc·es.
To participate in personally; undergo: experience a great adventure; experienced loneliness.
[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin experientia, from experiēns, experient-, present participle of experīrī, to try.]

'For which reason, because we have righteousness through faith, let us be at peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; Through whom, in the same way, we have been able by faith to come to this grace in which we now are; and let us have joy in hope of the glory of God. And not only so, but let us have joy in our troubles: in the knowledge that trouble gives us the power of waiting; And waiting gives experience; and experience, hope: And hope does not put to shame; because our hearts are full of the love of God through the Holy Spirit which is given to us.' (Romans 5:1-5, Bible in Basic English)

'I think you ought to know, dear brothers, about the hard time that we went through in Asia. We were really crushed and overwhelmed, and feared we would never live through it. We felt we were doomed to die and saw how powerless we were to help ourselves; but that was good, for then we put everything into the hands of God, who alone could save us, for he can even raise the dead. And he did help us, and he saved us from a terrible death; yes, and we expect him to do it again and again.' (2 Cor 1:8-10 Living Bible)

'A big wind storm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so much that the boat was already filled. He himself was in the stern, asleep on the cushion, and they woke him up, and told him, "Teacher, don't you care that we are dying?" '(Mark 4:37-38 World English Bible)

Sometimes I can really relate to those disciples in the boat, crying, "God, don't you CARE? Don't you SEE?" It's always amazing to me that God is not weakened by his love for me. His pity doesn't soften his resolve to give me the experiences I need. I've been in the boat with him before. I am beginning to realize that he never planned to keep the storms from touching me. I'm beginning to learn that with a little patience, I'll have an experience that will allow me to trust him further.

I can sympathise with those who find themselves unable to span the chasm that lies between their present knowledge and a knowledge of God with a great leap of faith. We who ask others to do such a thing ought to first ask ourselves if this is what we have done. I have not.

On reflection and careful consideration, however, it has taken a little faith. Enough to make me begin, and to keep me searching for what I had only sensed, and that rather dully. There was no single leap, for me, from doubt to faith. I carried both all along the way. I took little steps with the hope that there would be Something There, and my "faith" was replaced by experience.

Just as there is no way to quickly know or trust a person, or even a methodology, so knowledge of God is rarely sudden and undeniable. Rather, it is a cumulation of experiences that, looked at individually, may amount to little, but as a whole offers a body of knowledge that satisfies the questions we ask.

How much faith does it take to know God? A little. Enough to give me a little patience so that I can see the end of a thing. Enough to take a single step forward in the search for what God is - not a super genie offering wishes; not a white-robed grandfather-in-the-sky, but Light, Love, Truth. We need not take a second step until our faith be replaced with knowledge.

To all of you who have tried to make the leap and failed, many have done as you have done. But God does not require a leap into the dark. I hope that I can shine enough light on the trail to convince you only to take a tiny step toward whatever you may sense of Him who is Light. You don't have to take off your "atheist" sticker. You don't have to change your religion. You don't have to begin attending church. Just take a little step. Put yourself in a place where you could experience a God who who is Light, Love, Truth; the kind of God who makes stars and suns and trees and oceans and lions and puppies and people; the kind of God who is what he is no matter how much it hurts you OR him.

Faith doesn't mean deciding what God should do and believing sincerely that he will do it. It means knowing God well enough to be sure that what God does do is good, no matter how rotten it feels. There is a huge difference. Faith requires experience.

In Light Inaccessible

2007-10-31T12:54:00.000-07:00

I've been in a thick fog lately - struggling to think clearly but sinking further down with every flailing attempt to re-surface. I hate my weak self; I hate to admit what, deep down, I know myself to be; I hate to be shown the dark spots of selfishness that eat away at everything I do; above all, I hate to have my weakness and bewilderment exposed. Yet the God I love is dedicated to shedding his light on the very things I long to bury and forget. When he begins his work in me, I reach for him in desperation. Blinded by my refusal of the light that exposes me, I grope in the darkness for my God, and he hides himself in a thick cloud.

Slowly, I am coming to realize that there is a pattern to God's withdrawing from me. He hides himself when I refuse to admit some aspect of his character. "God, come and comfort me, but don't shine your light on my weakness. Don't let me be ashamed - " this was my prayer, were I to admit it. Even as I began to see and confess it, I rationalized my thinking - aren't there multiple verses in the Bible that tell us if we trust in God we won't be ashamed? (“…and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” Romans 9:33) But, ah, I read my own hopes into those words. It is in trusting in him that I'm to be kept from shame - not in trusting myself! Indeed, the more I trust in my own ways when I know them to be different from God's, the more shame I have.

I'm still a bit lost. I hardly know where to begin dealing with the flotsam that has surfaced in my turmoil of soul. I don't know how to stop being the person I sense that I am in the carefully hidden recesses of my self. Again, I realize that whether or not he does help me, I need God to help me. He is the One who can make me whole and my life complete. Lest anyone say that I worship him because he speaks kindly and softly to me, helps my favorite basketball team win, saves me the best parking spaces at the mall - let me tell out of my misery who is that high and Holy one who withdraws when I reach out for him in desperation...

He is Light. He is Love. He is Truth.

As I become willing to accept the consequences of knowing Love and Light and Truth, my blindness is departing, and I begin to see - not the kindly father/comforting teddybear/soft-hearted auntie-God-all-in-one I was reaching for, but the Living God, the Most High, in whom mercy and truth are met together. I cried for comfort, but he is too good to give me a thing so small. Instead he offers healing through pain. I'm too weak to reach for it, but I choose it, and he will give it.

He Is Not Far...

2007-10-24T14:07:00.000-07:00

The following piece keeps popping up everywhere I go lately, so I thought I'd share:

Acts 17:21-33

All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas. Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.
"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.

God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'
"Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man's design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead." When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject." At that, Paul left the Council. A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.

A Strange and Costly Beauty

2007-10-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

This video offers one of the best demonstrations I've witnessed of the strange beauty that is sometimes born of ugly, terrorizing pain; that rises in sweet triumph over the destructive power that has brought it to light. Too easily we are convinced, from the vantage point of our safe and comfortable but airless and visionless lives, that happiness is the highest good and pain the greatest evil in the universe. Not so, says this video. Eliot and his parents have experienced a thing of goodness that you and I, with our all-important comfort, may never experience. They have drunk deeply of Love, and having lost all, are neither empty nor bereft.

We ought to be careful how we judge things. Most of us have tasted so little of the goodness that is sometime revealed amid the destructive forces clearly at work in our world. It flames out now and again with a deep beauty that shines its light upon our narrowminded assumptions and quells our childishly arrogant sums of things.

What I Could Not Say - Oswald Chambers on "Sin"

2007-10-18T12:21:00.001-07:00

We Christians love to think of ourselves as brave "soldiers of the cross" - until we mess up big-time. It's then that we realize that God hasn't called us soldiers - he's called us sheep. Stubborn and easily distracted, but sought after and loved by the Good Shepherd, we are asked not to fight, not to defend - but to follow. I've been discouraged lately, in discussing a number of things (including sin and its heredity), by my inability to explain what I know and understand in a way that is not completely incomprehensible to another. Why am I so unable to bridge the gap of thought when I do understand both perspectives? Why must I play so handily into the "narrow-minded Christian" stereotype?

Then that darling of a sister of mine, who sees things so differently from me, came out of the blue with an explanation by Oswald Chambers that is everything I wanted to say, only with pith and restraint. It satisfies my longing to bridge perspective with rational communication. I've included it below. It no longer matters whether or not anyone else sees what I see, because Chambers, at least, understands and has explained, and has done it well. Oh, I know that God will not be sorted and explained by mere words, because he is not known by the intellect alone. But how lovely to have my intellect satisfied, too - and in far less wordy an attempt than mine!

When I am filled with my own inadequacy, God reminds me that I am not all that important, after all, and I am comforted. What does it matter how I appear? In my very best talents and abilities, the flaws begin to show themselves, and I go running again with sweet, rushing relief, to the Christ - who alone is flawless.

The Nature of Degeneration (from "My Utmost for His Highest", by Oswald Chambers)

" Just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned . . ."
—Romans 5:12

The Bible does not say that God punished the human race for one man’s sin, but that the nature of sin, namely, my claim to my right to myself, entered into the human race through one man. But it also says that another Man took upon Himself the sin of the human race and put it away— an infinitely more profound revelation (see Hebrews 9:26 ). The nature of sin is not immorality and wrongdoing, but the nature of self-realization which leads us to say, "I am my own god." This nature may exhibit itself in proper morality or in improper immorality, but it always has a common basis— my claim to my right to myself. When our Lord faced either people with all the forces of evil in them, or people who were clean-living, moral, and upright, He paid no attention to the moral degradation of one, nor any attention to the moral attainment of the other. He looked at something we do not see, namely, the nature of man (see John 2:25 ).

Sin is something I am born with and cannot touch— only God touches sin through redemption. It is through the Cross of Christ that God redeemed the entire human race from the possibility of damnation through the heredity of sin. God nowhere holds a person responsible for having the heredity of sin, and does not condemn anyone because of it. Condemnation comes when I realize that Jesus Christ came to deliver me from this heredity of sin, and yet I refuse to let Him do so. From that moment I begin to get the seal of damnation. "This is the condemnation [and the critical moment], that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light . . . " ( John 3:19 ).

Guest Post: How Far Will We Go?

2007-10-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

*Editor's note: Today's post is the story of my fellow blogger, Karen K, whose knowledge of God has cost her more than most of us could imagine paying - yet she testifies (with more depth and reality than most of us can) that He is worth any price. Check out her blog, aptly named Pursue God.

How Far Will We Go?

The defining moments of life lie in our response to God when the unexpected comes. Sooner than later we face a rude awakening: Christians are not exempt from pain. Life will treat us unfairly—and God will allow it. How we grapple with our faith at these pivotal turns sets the direction of our lives. Do we persist in pursuing God? Or, in our disillusionment, do we abandon him? These questions pressed hard on my own mind for many years. It began in 1992. That’s when I looked into life’s mirror and was startled to see the unexpected. That’s the year I knew I was gay.

My same-sex attractions barreled into consciousness during Bible college, stripping away years of denial and wrenching my presuppositions of God from their secure sockets. The Church never told me a good Christian girl who sang in church choir, went on mission trips, and served in youth leadership could be gay. Weren’t homosexuals outside the Church—a subgroup of activists with an “evil agenda”? Didn’t Romans 1 teach homosexuality is caused by hatred toward God? How could I be gay?

The unexpected challenged everything I believed about God and Christianity. For ten years I wrestled with, What does this mean for me? Was I born this way? Is homosexuality truly wrong, or was it my fundamentalist upbringing that convinced me it is? I studied Scripture. I got involved in lesbian relationships. I went to ex-gay support groups. I read pro-gay theology. These were difficult years marked with crying, pleading, trying, exhaustion, failure, painful losses and suicidal thoughts. My healing never came.

American Christian culture teaches us God will fix all our problems. We just have to pray hard enough, seek him earnestly, and surrender more readily. After all, Christianity is about the “abundant life.” All God wants is for us to be happy, right? The truth is God can be unnervingly patient in the midst of our storms. He let me sweat it out. Just as he may let you wrestle with your pain. Our response to such treatment is often anger—at least for me. I thought God was callous, a cruel jokester playing a cosmic game. I didn’t understand; his silence was moving me past superficial comforts to find deeper wells.

Ultimately, I came to a deep spiritual peace in choosing not to be in homosexual relationships. Not because of my fundamentalist upbringing. Not because of family or peer pressure. Not because I was afraid God would hit me over the head or send me to hell, but because the Spirit testifies in me that homosexuality is not what he wants for human relationships. This life is short; my destiny is not about finding a lover or a life partner, as good as those things are. It’s not your life purpose either. Our destiny in life as followers of Jesus is to proclaim and live out, on a daily basis, the Kingdom of God until He comes.

Scripture says the Kingdom of God is where righteousness dwells. Righteousness is a word that is often misunderstood. We tend to associate it with legalism, perfectionism and trying to measure up. But, the Bible associates righteousness with joy, life, beauty, healing and all that is good and pleasing in the eyes of God. It is especially related to shalom—which means holistic well-being. Psalm 85:10 says, “Righteousness and shalom have kissed each other.” The ways of God and well-being are intimately conjoined. To value righteousness is to value our own well-being and the well-being of others.

I still have same-sex attractions. I might have to live a life of single celibacy. All my problems haven’t gone away and all of your problems, whatever they may be, might not go away either. Jesus said in this world we will have trouble. The question is: Will we follow him anyway? How far will we go in our pursuit of God? Will we give up when pain and loss slap us across the face? Will we falter when loneliness taunts us? Will we throw aside faith when God shatters our presuppositions of him? Or, will we cling to him even when he is silent?

Let me tell you something; Jesus is the priceless pearl worth losing everything for. Don’t throw away your destiny for that which fades in a matter of days or years. Don’t hold onto bitterness and anger because life didn’t turn out the way you expected. The picture is grander than what meets the eye. God can be trusted. When the unexpected knocks you flat, get back up and keep walking. I am walking with you.

Is God Better Than Sex?

2007-10-01T20:57:00.000-07:00

Slapdash raised this question with her "Sex Entry". Don't think I am being facetious. It's a question for my generation. We have been led to believe by all that surrounds us that sex is the greatest rush of all. Is it?

As a single 32-year-old who knows and is known by the God of the universe, this is a question I have had to look at seriously. This goes past philosophy and moralizing. It's a question I answer daily, not with my words, but with my choices, with my life.

Let me say it in every language I know, with every breath, with every ounce of my being: God is enough. He is the loveliest and deepest and dearest that I know. He is better than sex.

"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." (C.S. Lewis)

**Check out this blog of a Christian with same-sex attractions for a much more eloquent look at this issue.

Give Me Jesus

2007-09-13T00:22:00.000-07:00

In the morning, when I rise
In the morning, when I rise
In the morning, when I rise, give me Jesus

Give me Jesus,
Give me Jesus,
You can have all this world,
But give me Jesus

When I am alone
When I am alone
When I am alone, give me Jesus

Give me Jesus,
Give me Jesus,
You can have all this world,
But give me Jesus

When I come to die
When I come to die
When I come to die, give me Jesus

Give me Jesus,
Give me Jesus,
You can have all this world,
You can have all this world,
You can have all this world,
But give me Jesus

(song by Fernando Ortega)

Some months ago HeIsSailing described his own feeling of queasiness at the love for Jesus that is so ubiquitously present in Christian circles. Since then, I often considered the way in which I have come to love the Lord Jesus. This is my response to his question, "why do you love Jesus?"

I didn't always love Jesus. Even after I came to be thankful to him for what he did for me, I didn't feel that I loved him. It was easier for me to think of loving a spirit-God than a human-God. I felt a kind of awe at the holiness of God, and I could imagine him loving me as a Father would - but Jesus? - He was too close for comfort in some ways, and in other ways I felt that I could never know him as I might his Father.

I too felt ill at all the gush-y-ness that seemed to flow out of other Christians at the mention of his name. I just couldn’t feel it. I felt grateful to the Christ who came from heaven and shared the human experience. I could respect Jesus, the historical person who dealt with people so compassionately. Maybe my deepest feeling was reverence for the God the Son, who became the Messiah. But there was no emotion welling up in my heart, no love as we commonly know it for the man Christ Jesus. I couldn’t understand where other people were coming from. It all seemed so fake and so nauseating to me.

Suddenly, I came to a crisis in my life. I guess, thinking back, it wasn’t all that sudden, but I was thrown on almost every level with a force that took my breath away. I spent a whole year searching for the God I had sensed and trusted as a child and poured my heart out to as a teenager. I didn’t care what his name was – God or Jesus or something else – I was desperate for someone to answer me. I felt utterly abandoned and alone. I prayed, but the words rose slowly and woodenly from my heart, only to hit the ceiling and come tumbling back again. I read the Bible, but it was just words. I walked outside almost every day and looked up at the sky. I had only one prayer – “If you can hear me, I can’t hear you; please talk to me, touch me, let me feel that you are there.” I knew there was a God; I just wasn’t sure how much it was possible to know him or how much I mattered in his great scheme. I feared him, but I didn’t love him. I didn’t even feel I knew him. I ached for more than a great and vast Creator; I needed something personal, something warm and deep and near. I wanted to be touched by the kind of God who would create a tree, a dog, a soul. At the same time, I was aware of a vast cavern within myself that made me want to hide from God – a deep ugly blot that made all the good I tried to do flimsy and fake. I knew that if there was a God, then my sins were forgiven, but I was filled with self-loathing and I felt utterly alone.

After a year of groping about in the dimness of my weary self, I was reading my Bible – rather hopelessly – when I heard the “still, small voice” once again. Suddenly the words on the page were no longer just words, clanging senselessly against the metal wall in my head. They had meaning. They were spoken to me. I was reading in Psalms 16:11 – “Thou wilt show me the path of life: in thy presence is fullness of joy.”

There were no flashes of light, no angels singing; but from that moment, I had hope that the God of the universe knew me, and that it was possible to know him, really. I don’t know how or when exactly I came to the realization that he was Jesus. All along, I had known the great Ruler of heaven. I had reverenced his holiness, I had even felt his fatherly kindness from afar. But he had shut himself off from me so that I could realize what I was missing – the personal God.

Jesus is (still is!) a human, in addition to being God. He knows what it’s like in my life. He is touched by my weaknesses. He has been here. I can love him as I love another human being, because that’s who he is. But you can’t love someone you don’t know. When I came to a place of longing for Jesus (even though I didn’t know it was him I longed for!) that was when I came to know him. He crept in softly, and lit a flame, and sat beside me. By the time I was aware that he was there, I knew he was the one I had needed all along.

When I am overwhelmed by the loneliness of humankind; when I feel the howl of a vast wilderness waste in my soul, Jesus comes near. He lights a fire and I am warmed from the inside. He listens, and he understands. He is a sweet relief from the cold, grasping darkness that grips me suddenly, inside and out, because he is light, “and in him is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5) He is love, personified. While the presence of the almighty God fills me with awe and wonder, and a strange longing for something deep and old, Jesus gives the warm comfort of a dear friend. I know God in the ocean, the stars, and pour out my soul and bow before him; but Jesus is here with me.

More recently, I have come to appreciate the Jesus presented in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series as Aslan. He has a wildness, an animal-ness that is very like the Jesus I know.

I still don’t like the gushiness that is poured out on the weak-mouthed, white-skinned, blue-eyed Jesus of mass-mediated Christianity, forever holding out his hands to be touched. But I love the God who knows what it is like to be hungry and lonely and catch a cold and have dirty feet. I love the God-man who is utterly free –and offers me his freedom! - from the dark selfishness that rises up and threatens to choke me. I love Jesus, at last.

When the bottom drops out of my world, give me Jesus. He is enough. Only he is enough.

Warning: This Post is Based on My Subjective Experience and May Be Rambling and Boring!

2007-08-24T22:01:00.000-07:00

This post is in response to another question asked by that relentless question-asker, Slapdash. I'll warn you before you go skipping blithely onward, that it's rambling and more vague than I like to be. Moreover, it concerns my own experience of things, which may in this case be quite beside-the-point for most of you. Nevertheless, I must attempt, though my powers of self-analysis be strained to the breaking-point. Please keep in mind that my purpose here is not to convince but to explain.

Slapdash's question:

**Can you define what you mean by “know” and describe what you think the door [to knowing God] is? (Slapdash)

I'm not sure that I can communicate this, but I will die in the attempt. By knowing, I mean being sure with sense, mind and spirit.

Of course, we may not truly know a person through the senses, but the evidence our senses are able to gather about a person must either match the other knowledge we have of that person, or the mind must be able to postulate a reason why the sensory evidence does not match.

In order for the mind to know, reason (in as much as we possess it) must be satisfied. I don't say that reason must understand fully, but certainly it must not be ignored; its questions must not be brushed away. If I know my sister, I don't necessarily understand all that she is, nor do I necessarily have a good grasp of the biochemical processes that function in her body and brain. Rather, my understanding of who she is and that she is, is accounted for by reason and does not oppose my logical powers.

The testimony of my senses attests to her existence as an individual. Though I have had greater sensory evidence of her existence than I have had of yours, Slapdash, reason allows for both of you.

But knowing that someone exists and understanding what kind of a person exists is not knowing a person. Knowing a person involves shared experience; feedback; an exchange of views and perspectives; ultimately, a changed understanding because my understanding has been acted upon by the force of another's. When my understanding alters on its own, the alteration is clean and complete. We like to illustrate this in our culture as a light turning on. While this kind of realization may, in a more complex way, happen in conversation with another person, it is usually through a rather more complicated process that I am "convinced" or brought to an understanding and/or espousal of another person's point of view.

I am rationally convinced that I know God based on two theoretical evidences which are convincing to me as an individual. The first is that he offers arguments and opens my understanding to other things that neither appeal to me nor appear in any way to be an extension or progression of my own views. The second is that I am coming to understand who he is and why. The fact that I know WHAT before I know WHY signifies non-progression and offers me evidence that this sort of knowledge is not my own imagination or wishful thinking.

These evidences have been reflected in experience for me by God's fulfillment of the promises he has made to me. There have been times when I haven't understood what he was doing. There have been times when I've believed he wasn't fulfilling his promises. In the end, he has fulfilled every one. In doing so, he has brought me to understand on a rational level the reasons he had for allowing me to misunderstand him or for appearing to fail me. He has also, in different ways and different times, given me satisfying answers to every question I have asked him, with the exception of one. (The exception is a question I asked him recently, and it has been partially answered but not completely.)

As I put into practice the things that God teaches me, I am coming to trust him as well as my knowledge of him. I see evidence that the things he has asked me to do which seemed ridiculous to me have results that are not ridiculous at all.

Finally, I may compare my understanding of God with all of my other hopes or imaginations. While all else that I dream up on my own claims that I am brilliant and under-appreciated, God alone reveals my foolishness, even to me, and attests to the destructiveness of my pride.

I cannot say much on a rational level about the knowledge I have on a spiritual level, but I will try to describe the results. When I am overwhelmed and weakened, there is a strength and a comfort within me that I am aware is not of me. This grows as I share experience with, and come to know God. I am also aware of a growing freedom from myself - from my own wants and wishes and feelings. My self does not dull nor grow less, but my freedom grows greater, and I have a heightened ability to will what I do not want or feel. I have increased joy in things despite the hurt or difficulty they bring me, as I come to know God.

What is the door through which we may know God? The Bible says that door is Jesus Christ. He is the beginning of knowing God as a person because he puts us in a position to approach God and to allow God's Spirit to enter us.

"I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved..." (John 10:9)

Then how is Jesus to be known?

Through exercise of the will. He calls himself the Truth. Thus all who honestly will to know the Truth will to know him.

You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:13)

Please don't assume that my meandering attempt here is the real answer to this question. The truth is, I am trying to share what is really a very individual experience. My sister, who shares my knowledge of God despite our vastly different personalities, priorities, and approaches to knowledge, would describe it differently. And yet the God we know is the very same person.

God in a Bottle

2007-08-08T22:58:00.000-07:00

We 21st century urbanites harbour grave doubts about tap water, fruit picked from the roadside, and animals that come complete with toenails. We like our beverages in plastic bottles; apples with little stickers specifying their variety and lot number; and animals that have been appropriately groomed, leashed, and otherwise rendered harmless. We like things that have been well measured and counted and regulated; treated and stamped and packaged; filed and trimmed and sanitized. What lies beyond our control, or the control of the vast network of machines we have created to expand and maintain the reaches of our great domain, is plainly not to be trusted.

On top of all that, we want convenience. We no longer have to knead bread dough, or wait for it to rise. We just pop by the corner store on the way home. We figure we can pick up an understanding of world events with just as little effort from half an hour spent watching the 5 o'clock news.

And this is one of our main issues with God.

We'd be happy with a lap dog, one who'd sit when we said sit, and wag his tail nicely at passers-by. If only he'd do things as we want them done, we'd happily drop our tithes into the box on Sundays, and offer to bring potato salad to church functions. If only he'd offer digitally recorded, downloadable seminars in 15-minute segments covering the major aspects of his character, we'd see that our friends were well-informed. We'd even donate to help send the VHS versions to Africa and Indonesia. At the very least, he ought to be quite evident to someone who sits through an hour-long sermon every Sunday.

After all, how can we be expected to trust a God who won't perform miracles when we ask for them, refuses to submit himself to any sort of inspection, fails to mount a marketing campaign, and is liable to up and let us die of some painful disease in the end of it all, in spite of all our belief in him?

I've often heard, from someone admiring the exuberance and freedom of a child, the beauty of a sunset, or the joy of a couple deeply in love - "if only I could bottle that..."

We'd love to have God in a bottle - a personal genie who could prove us right and amaze our friends, heal our relatives, keep the neighbour's cat from digging in our garden; a well-behaved God who would always do what we think best; a friendly grandfather-type who'd be grateful for our forgiveness of his eccentricities and who'd do his best to keep difficulty from our door. We could give him an updated look when he lost brand appeal, and label him "new and improved"...

Some things can't be bottled.

Search for the Invisible God

2007-07-16T22:48:00.000-07:00

"...how faint the whisper we hear of him! Who then can understand the thunder of his power?" (Job 26:14)

If God really wanted to be found, why didn't he draw a better map? Why does he hide in clouds and parables? Why does he speak to us in his "still, small voice" when Isaiah and Job assure us he can "thunder", while Ezekiel and John describe the sound of his voice as "rushing waters"? Why doesn't he just lay it out all plainly? Do we have a hope of hearing his gentle whisper amid the cacaphony of an Information Society?

It is unfortunate htat our "fast food culture" extends its reach to ideas. Never has such an array of information been available to us. On the other hand, never has there been so much to sort through, to analyse before we come to a reasoned decision. A veritable buffet of data, complete with various perspectives and opinions, is open to us at any hour of the day. What can the postmodern citizen do except throw up her hands in despair and resort to the random or to personal whims? Even those of us who call ourselves "seekers" like our ideas pre-chewed and presented to us with bullets, via Powerpoint if possible. The possibilities are simply too overwhelming. In fact, one who says he "knows" anything must be considered a near fool, since it would be impossible to draw conclusions from more data than could ever be analysed.

We have an invisible God who refuses to conform to the parameters of any measurable data set, and on top of it all, speaks in a bare whisper. Are we to be blamed if we don't believe in him?

How does one recognize God? The Jewish people of Jesus' day puzzled over this question. They were waiting anxiously for a messiah who would deliver them from their oppressors. Instead, along came a carpenter from Nazareth (of all places!) who spent time with the wrong people; forgave a woman plainly caught breaking God's law; and spoke of God as his father.

'Then they asked him, "Where is your father?" "You do not know me or my Father," Jesus replied. "If you knew me, you would know my Father also." (John 8:19)

Those who looked for the messiah, basing what they looked for on what they knew of God, recognized his Son. Those who looked for the messiah as they hoped he would be were blinded by their expectations.

The disciples, too, were confused at Jesus' approach. "Why do you speak to the people in parables?" they asked.

Jesus explained that God's secrets are not heard by the ear nor known in the intellect alone.

For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.' (Matthew 13:15)

The problem wasn't their ears or their eyes or their I.Q., it was their HEART. They were looking for the wrong things. They had become hard. They didn't long for what God was, therefore they couldn't appreciate it though Yahweh himself came and lived among them. Is this our problem?

Oh, I'm not advocating letting go of ears or intellect. God gave them both to be used. But be careful of what your heart longs for. It blinded the scribes, despite their education. It blinded the priests, despite their religious experience.

If you long to know God, you can't begin with a leap into what you don't know (even if you like to call it "faith").
Don't search for a supernatural being (for there are many such beings).
Search for what YOU know of Light, Love, Truth, wherever and however you have gained knowledge of those three. Surely those who looked for such things in Jesus' day recognized him when they saw him, while the scribes and studied theologians argued among themselves about whether or not it was lawful for Jesus to be healing on the Sabbath!

Please don't think I'm saying everyone who doesn't know God this second has a "heart problem" (we all have sin!). Sometimes God hides himself from us when we become too satisfied with too little of him. Sometimes he empties out our little store of "God moments", scattering them in the dust of doubt, in order to give us a deep and abiding experience of him.

Oh, give up on the "God" you have constructed in your mind! Call yourself an atheist or an agnostic if you must. But seek Love with your last blink, your last synapse, your last breath!

On God, Love, and Darfur

2007-07-05T20:16:00.000-07:00

Can a thinking person truly believe God to be both good and omnipotent without ignoring the existence of the kinds of atrocities now taking place in Darfur? Can we face that fact that a God powerful enough to speak worlds into existence is not doing anything to relieve the intense suffering so many humans are experiencing? Can we tell people with a straight face that such a God cares?

I once participated in a program called BaFa BaFa. BaFa BaFa is an exercise whose goal is to promote cross-cultural awareness and understanding. The participants are divided into two groups. In separate rooms, each group is given a goal and a list of rules. Both groups have pieces of coloured paper with numbers on them. Group A's goal is to get "sets" of the numbered papers. They may signify the numbers they want by calling out that number of syllables, using the first letters of their first and last names paired with any vowel. In this way, they are able to trade with other participants. The Group A member with the most sets of numbered papers wins. Group B is told that their goal is to protect one of their members, who has been selected and placed inside a circle. I forget the details (I was in Group A), but I think that men are not allowed to approach women in Group B - to do so is a sign of disrespect. Or something like that. Group B's members are protectors. They may interact with others, but they must act together to forcibly remove those who break the rules.

Of course, when the groups were brought together, confusion ensued. Group A quickly learned how easily Group B's members were parted with their numbered papers. Group B members enjoyed interacting with Group A but were constantly on guard. Group A members seemed either ignorant or uncaring in relation to the rules. Group A members who inadvertantly stepped inside the sacred circle became belligerent when they were suddenly removed and prevented from trading coloured papers. Even Group A members who tried to learn from their team member's mistakes and avoid the circle found themselves removed for inappropriately approaching their counterparts in Group B. It was surprising how quickly the situation escalated.

BaFa BaFa was a great illustration of what happens when we fail to understand priorities that are different from our own. One of the biggest problems in dealing with God is understanding that his economy doesn't work on the same basis as ours. It did once, but sin has altered what we see as important.

The value of a life, or anything else, in God's economy, is completely centred in Love. A successful life is not marked by happiness, but by love.

Humans do value love, but we generally see it as secondary - a support - to happiness. That is why the horrors of Darfur cannot be reconciled, in our minds, with a loving and all-powerful God. Love is valuable to us because of the happiness it brings, but happiness itself is everything. We may trade one kind of happiness for another kind (ie the happiness of wealth for the happiness of health or family love), but we almost cannot imagine anything being worth the sacrifice of happiness.

God can. And so he chose to let go of his control over our happiness so that we might have the ability to choose and give love. He doesn't sit back in the La-z-boy when Darfur makes the news and say "gee, that's too bad" - he chose suffering himself in order to offer us the choice that allows us to love. When people choose selfishness or hatred, we end up with situations like the one in BaFa BaFa, and in more extreme cases, like the one in Darfur. Since we don't operate in a bubble, we have the power to take away the happiness of others by our choices.
But no one can take away our choice to love. Not even the God who gave it to us. We may choose by our "wants", but he may never take or offer the lesser at the cost of the greater. And the greatest of all is Love.

One of my favorite films is Roberto Benigni's 1997 film Vita e Bella (Life is Beautiful). Benigni plays Guido, a gregarious Jewish Italian charmer who loves to laugh and enjoys his life to the full, until he is interned with his young son in a Nazi concentration camp. His main goal becomes protecting his son from the horrors of the camp, which he does by pretending that it is an elaborate game whose prize the boy longs for: an army tank. Guido's love for his son forces him to smile and laugh even after days of back-breaking labour. He seems amazingly able to set aside his own feelings for the sake of his son.

Such love is truly what makes life beautiful, and the film reveals that Guido's life, destroyed among the hatred and the horrors of the holocaust, is more lovely and more valuable than mine, wasted amid the freedoms and comforts of 21st century North America. Having given all, he is something far better than I am. Vita e Bella says that I needn't pity Guido or others like him who have chosen love and to love. Rather, I am to be pitied for the selfishness that robs my life of its beauty.

God stands by. He allows people to suffer because he protects the choice of each one - to love. We may refuse. But those who choose love will find themselves at the feet of a God who is Love. They may suffer. They may lose their lives. But such lives are not wasted, as we may someday find ours to be. They are beautiful. They are valuable.

Once chosen, God is not standing by any longer. He is able to choose for those who allow him.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

Wow! says the Christian, eager for blessing. He begins counting what God will give him. Of course, he'll tithe, and God will be appropriately grateful - grateful enough to bless him even more...

Sorry. What we call "good" and what God calls "good" are different things - remember? To us, "good" is happiness. We like to skip the difficult, boring parts and get right to the juicy bits; the reward. That's why our society sees love as a side dish and sexual gratification as the main entree. God serves it the other way around. To God, happiness is a byproduct of Love, but never a goal in itself. Sometimes it is only through suffering that we may receive what is good from God's hand - but when we allow God to choose for us, our suffering is never the result of another person's choice. It has been weighed, measured, and chosen by the One who chose suffering for himself.

God loves the people of Darfur and the Sudan and Rwanda. He longs to give them what he longs to give us - something far, far lovelier than happiness. He longs to give them himself. Love. And they may be hungrier for the main course, since, unlike us, they've been denied the opportunity to gorge themselves on side dishes.

The soul who chooses love may be beaten, tortured, and tormented. She may be violated and imprisoned. She may be robbed even of life itself. But she will have, in spite of her pains, what only one who has experienced both may tell us is far better. No sword may separate her from that Father and Mother and Friend who alone knows the deep things of the human heart. No lock may bar her from that unfettered freedom that love alone imparts to the sou. l No violation may rend from her the sacred self that belongs to God alone. She is at no one's mercy, for God himself counts the drops of blood that may be spilled from her body. She may bleed, but it will be as God bled. She will love as God loves. She will fly free.

Cry for the people of Darfur. What is in your power to offer as relief for their suffering, hold not back. But cry for yourself, if you don't know Love.

Why Hell Instead of House Arrest?

2007-06-27T22:42:00.000-07:00

My favorite question - WHY? - was asked by fellow blogger Slapdash, who uses it to challenge my previous post:
Why does evil deserve eternal punishment? How on earth does it square with Jesus' commands for us to forgive others 70x7 times, and to turn the other cheek? Why does God insist that we forgive others for their sin/evil, but he doesn't actually have to forgive us for our sin/evil, and in fact will infinitely punish those who committed finite crimes here on earth?

Answering these questions is a bit tricky, not because there are no answers, but because I need to make sure I don't come across as though I have a right to do any more than recount them. I also don't want to give the impression that hell and eternal punishment is something I can talk about glibly. The reality of hell and the lake of fire is something that would shut every mouth, were we to grasp even an edge of it.
Nonetheless, I am going to foray into this minefield of a topic because the questions Slapdash asks are vital ones, and the answers even more so.
I think there are three aspects to what we are calling "punishment". One is just that - punishment, or moral retribution; a fair return for an evil act. When we talk about justice, we are talking about morality - not values, but rather those deep "rightnesses" that underlay our knowledge and on which the universe is hinged. Another aspect is destruction. The third is separation. (For ease' sake, I'll refer to the final dealing with evil, or "punishment", as simply "hell", although those of you familiar with the Biblical use of the word will know that I am not technically correct in doing that. Notwithstanding, I press on...)
Hell does involve a punishment - the just reward for evil. It is a punishment that all who choose evil will share, but it was not created for human beings. It was created for the Devil (Satan) and his angels. (Matthew 25:41) Humans were tricked into choosing self over God and allowing Satan to have a moral power over them, even though they were warned that doing so meant death. Hell is not our punishment, it is Satan's, but we will share it with him if we allow him to choose for us. Satan is more powerful than we are. We cannot resist him, except with God's help, who is stronger. The death of Jesus means that the torments of the lake of fire are not the just desserts of one who has stumbled and fallen, but rather the ultimate destination of one who has ultimately chosen the road of selfish pleasure (sin) over the Source of all goodness. If we choose self, we have no power against such an enemy as Satan, and he will overtake and choose for us. It is he who longs for us to be in hell.
God, knowing that we are born into a world that is already under Satan's power, demonstrated his nature- Love- when he took responsibility for our sin and took on himself the sentence of death that Evil, with the inarguable sanction of humanity's choice of self over God, had every moral right to impose. This is what both logic and our moral sense of things tells us a God who is good should do, but not one of us has the faintest inkling what it cost him, who is Light and Life and Love; who is all powerful, all knowing, and whose presence reaches throughout the expanses of all the universes - to subject himself to life as a created being and bow in submission to death, that great bastion of Evil. In any case, he took on death in recognition of two things: the moral rights of Evil over the human race, who had chosen it over him; and his own moral responsibility to them whom he had created in love. Evil no longer has the right to hang a death sentence over humanity, because God came in flesh as Jesus Christ and satisfied its claim to our lives with his own.
Thus God becomes both the enforcer of the moral laws and the one bent beneath them. He doesn't lighten the blow as he accepts sin's consequences. He forgives freely, but he hasn't forgiven us cheaply or easily. He allowed himself, for a period of about thirty years, to be mocked and ignored and thought a fool. He placed himself in a world ruled by Satan, and made himself subject to the indignities that Evil had wrought amongst his magnificent creation - hunger and thirst and tiredness and fear and pain. Then he, creator of heaven and earth, bowed himself and accepted death.
He who is God accepted such humiliation because there was no other way to satisfy the claims of sin. As Jesus comes face to face with his choice, alone in the garden at Gethsemane, he pleads with his Father, "If there is any other way..."
But there is no other way for God to be God.
A God who is unchanging AND good AND all-powerful cannot, even for a second, being good, become amoral; nor can he, being all-powerful, refuse to exert his power for good. Evil is what sets itself against good. It is not that God chooses to destroy evil, but rather that, being both good and all-powerful, it is his nature and his responsibility to destroy evil. Hell is the place where evil is kept continually in the state of destruction.
The third aspect of hell is, as I have mentioned, separation. The lake of fire takes its nature from the absence of God. God will have turned his back on such as fill its depths.
When the grandfatherly God of popular imagination is rejected, no such horrors as those of an eternal state of dying are necessitated. But when the God who is Love, Light, Truth, be rejected, what comfort can exist where he is not? I am no scientist, but I have a rudimentary understanding of what is necessitated by a vacuum. When God withdraws, there is only evil and its torments left to go rushing into the void.

What then of Jesus' commands to forgive? How is it that we may let evil go its way, when he cannot?
God's command to those who have been freed by Jesus' death is to recognize that they have not liberated themselves. Just as we who have been forgiven were in need of God's goodness and mercy, so we are to offer goodness and mercy to those who will accept it from us. Just as we did not deserve what God gave, so we are commanded not to put constraints on whom we offer goodness and forgiveness. It is the same moral law that both allows us to be forgiven and makes it necessary for us to forgive. If we refuse to recognize our responsibility to forgive others, we at the same time reject God's forgiveness by denying his responsibility to forgive US.
We must forgive because he has died to offer us forgiveness. He cannot overlook evil, but, having dealt with evil on a moral level, he can set us free from its grasp. He must judge and may only forgive at his own cost.
As God, it is not only his right, but his responsibility to judge. We cannot judge each other for numerous reasons. We are fallible; God is perfect. We cannot see hearts and motives; God reads the meanings behind our thoughts. It can never be the right of one sinner to judge another sinner. What can we do, morally, except forgive?
And yet, how much it has cost God to forgive? He has paid the price with his own blood, and he longs to forgive! It is not sin that will stop him, nor evil, but only the choice to reject him, which is the natural and inalienable right of an eternal soul.

God is Not a Big Meanie

2007-06-20T22:52:00.000-07:00

Had an interesting conversation with one of my most broadminded friends tonight. I love getting her perspective. We talked about evil, the world, and us. I've been thinking aboout how these things relate to God.
Let's face it, God gets a bad rap in our culture for being so tough on sin. We're only human, after all, and is sin really SO bad?
There are a couple of questions on which God's reputation really hangs here. First of all, what is sin? Second, how big is it, really?
Broadly, sin is selfishness. It is the opposite of, or the absence of, love. It is the lifebreath of a greater thing - evil.
The problem with sin is this: it is much, much bigger and more powerful than we imagine.
I've been watching the Lord of the Rings for the first time. The thing that grips me is the movie's understanding of evil. Sometimes evil looks good. Sometimes it smiles and speaks softly. Sometimes it comforts the good guy when he's tired. But once chosen, it ends up with a power over the very one who chose, and a vastly greater power to destroy.
This is just myth, our society tells us. These things aren't real. Even children know the difference between reality and the movies.
Really?
This is not myth: I throw a bottle in the garbage. (Can't be bothered lugging it all the way out to the recycling bin. It's no big deal - only a single bottle.) Unless everyone in your city and my city and cities all over the world does the same thing. That's millions and billions of bottles filling up landfill sites and polluting lakes and rivers and ultimately, destroying the whole universe. We've gotten used to the idea of living in a polluted earth, whose soil lacks the nutrients to grow the plants we need to be healthy; whose air and water are full of toxins and destructive pollutants. The idea of a depleting ozone and the threat of global warming have got to be commonplace. No big deal, we suppose. Someone in the future will invent a way to fix what we've done.
We haven't yet.
Instead, even with our recycling programs and eco-awareness, we've only barely managed to slow a process that has left us on a dying planet, rampant with cancers and diseases that all our medicines hardly leave a dent in.
When we choose sin, we see ourselves as entirely in control. Just this - that's all I want. Along with our little self-indulgences, evil comes slithering smoothly through the door we've opened just a crack. That evil is destructive. It's bigger than you or me. And we give it a power and a freedom in our lives and in our world that is destroying far more than just us. Take a look at the earth we were supposed to care for. We've forgotten what it's like to breathe pure air, to drink water that hasn't been chemically treated, to eat food that doesn't have to be supplemented with synthetic vitamins. Our selfishness has opened the door to a level of destruction that is bigger than our lives, bigger than our cities. It's destroying our whole universe.
The God of all was willing to suffer and to submit himself to death in order to defeat sin. When he judges sin, he's not being tough - he's dealing the only way possible with his enemy and ours. There is no such thing as a little sin - when it comes in, it brings destruction with it. There's no overlooking it. There's no brushing it under the table. There's no excusing it with the "we're only human" mantra.
Sin and evil will either be destroyed without mercy or they will destroy without mercy.

Through a Glass, Darkly

2007-05-28T22:15:00.000-07:00

"For in and out, above, about, below
'Tis Nothing but a Magic Shadow Show
Play'd in a Box whose Lantern is the Sun;
'Round which we Phantom Figures come and go."

- from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

- I Corinthians 13:12

It is hard for the human to imagine that what is tangible - what has texture and form and and smell - may be simply the shadow of what is REAL. And yet, don't we have a sense, in spite of what our bodies tell us, of a world more deep, more rich than the one we sense so concretely? And are there not, even in our merely dual world, evidences that there is something greater of which we may witness only a reflection?

For instance, take love. If you have ever been lucky enough to carry in your heart such a paradox of weight and lightness, then you must know the strain of communicating the thing materially. The evidences we are able to produce and witness (kind words, gentle touches, beautiful gifts) seem a pale smoke beside the richness of love as we know it to be. Even our own experience of such a thing must make us aware that there is more than just emotion in the grand landscape of love - something so deep and pure and real as to make us, in comparison, mere specks. And yet, after all, are we not elevated in our experience of love so as to be more than simple humans; more than beautifully orchestrated, fascinatingly scientific bodies; more than minds full of intelligence and philosophy and the amazing ability to learn? Have we not all, at times, woken to the awareness that what may be produced, spoken, even thought, is nothing more than the shade of what IS?

It will not be denied. Just as a Valentine's Day rose or a Mother's Day card is a paltry symbol speaking of a greater, less tangible thing, what may be sensed is little more than the reflection of what is REAL.

What is REAL?

God.

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM.

- Exodus 3:14

On Knowing Truth

2007-05-19T01:34:00.000-07:00

MarcoPolo asks, "What is the path to truth?"

(Thanks, MarcoPolo! It's so easy to get caught up with "what isn't" and forget all about the main issue: "what IS".)

If the ultimate source of truth be, as the Bible tells us it is, God revealed in Jesus Christ ('I am the Way and the Truth and the Life...' John 14:6), then The Truth must be revealed by him. Knowledge of the truth, as with all other truths, may be begun through reason. But pure reason is not enough in two aspects: the first is that we, being human, may only apply reason to our own realm. Our ability to reason is limited by our limited experience (the senses). The second is that our ability to reason is limited by our finite minds. We cannot comprehend even what may sense and must admit exists: infinity.

With reason as a beginning, but inadequate, how then may we progress to knowledge of The Truth?

'You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.' (Jeremiah 29:13)

What this describes is not a mental sifting through information, but a heart-search. It is the heart that opens heavy gate of the mind to let the light shine in. Reason and the senses are the dual sentinels that stand at that gate, able to both testify to the truth and to identify the imposter.

An act of the will allows The Truth to reveal himself. This is the only way The Truth may be known.

We ought to take note that the searching is not for knowledge, nor is it even for God in the religious sense; rather, it is a search for what God is, in essence.

What is God?
'God is light.' (1 John 1:5)
'God is love.' (1 John 4:8)

If those things be sought, then truth must be found.

Jesus explained to his disciples why he didn't reveal himself clearly, but spoke in parables to the people:

'For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn, and I would heal them.' (Matthew 13:15)

Notice the references to choice: 'they have closed their eyes' (a deliberate choice); 'and turn' (a deliberate choice).

I have spoken of a "path" to truth, but this is not quite accurate. There is a path we must take to make ourselves able to accept truth; but after all, truth must come where we are, because where it dwells we cannot go.

Must the Bible Be 100% True?

2007-05-15T19:22:00.000-07:00

Everything else is debated. History and science and geography and even language, are re-written daily. What can be considered "true" in our world is only what is socially accepted today. Why not the Bible, too? After all, there are a lot of people who consider its claims laughable. Why sacrifice credibility for the details?

If the Bible be only partly true, then we are left trying to decide which parts are trustworthy, and the Bible is rendered lame and disjointed, having no authority. It becomes a compilation of thoughts and experiences rather than the revelation by God, through history and culture and experience, of himself.

Then, is it necessary for God to be known through the Bible? What about our own personal experience of the Eternal?

I do understand the draw to focus simply on the individual experience of God. It is wearying to me to deal constantly with what must be dealt with if a perfect, holy God be communicated through the imperfections and complications of language and history. In addition, we are living in a period of history that is witnessing an unprecedented mistrust of the printed word. In a world thick with lies, it is indeed much easier to let go of the Bible as a revelation of God. It is so hard to obtain real, trustworthy knowledge about anything in 2007! Even doctorate-level study leaves so many questions that the experts argue bitterly about what may be known - so my measly B.A. offers me no intellectual authority. The temptation is almost overwhelming to give up and cease to strive for knowledge. Yet in so doing, humans become fools, denying our nature. We are not mere animals; the intellect, though imperfect, will not be denied.

And then, how much is lost if we lose the authority of the Bible! Through my experience, I can know with certainty that there exists a being full of love and worthy of worship. But without the Bible, there are no answers, no attempt by such a being at communication with my intellect, no reasons why the world about me and my heart within are so rich in loveliness and intricacy and yet so devastated by ugliness and selfishness. I can be certain of no savior, no one who is both able and willing to lift me out of the filth that I see all around and within. God I may know in my heart, but Jesus - he stepped into time, into space, into history. If there is no trustworthy record of the Christ, then I have no sure hope - just a blind, desperate cry to the one I have sensed. The Christian God becomes like every other God - a being who says "Come up to me"; not the one who shared the human experience - even death - in order to lift me up, to let me do what I could not.

While it is true that I have experienced God outside of the Bible, my sense of him comes and goes. It is trustworthy because it matches what I can know through cold, hard reasoned thought based on what may be read by me and verified by others in the Bible. I went through a long year of searching for God, during which he was silent to me and seemed infinitely far away. Without the promise and the appeal to reasoned knowledge I found in the Bible, I could not and would not have continued to search for him. Nor would I have known who such a person was when he did reveal himself warmly to my heart: I recognized him because of what I had read about him. The Bible continues to rearrange my assumptions about God, which can just as easily come from what I want to be as from my experience of him. My knowledge has to be continually pared and re-shaped so that I may know God as he is. Reason is not THE path to truth, else love and truth be forever separated, but it forms the fence that keeps wandering feet on the path. It tells us what truth is NOT.

If I can know God only in my deep heart, and not with my intellect, then why have I been created with the ability and the need to reason? How can I be sure that my experience of God is "real"; not merely a sense, an illusion? How can I be sure of my own sanity? Why should my God be the one who is, when others have believed in other Gods? Why should God be so subjective, when the world he created is not? If I may know such a God in a way that cannot be communicated nor made openly available to others for logical analysis, am I not arrogant to speak of him?

No, I cannot accept a God who speaks only to my soul. I am also body and intellect. I need a God who communicates with my senses, with my intellect, and with my deep self - all three, else even trusting him, I dare not trust my experience of him.

If we could see...

2007-05-09T01:06:00.000-07:00

If we could see God, really see him - not with our eyes, because the eyes tell us nothing about a Spirit - but with our souls - what would happen?

We would fall on our faces before such a one. Our hearts would shatter, and all would flow out...
We would be humbled to the very ground. Not one of us would dare to criticize another, for we would be naked in our hearts before the Eternal one.
We would be fully willing, not only to die, but to live for the sole privilege of honoring his name.
No more would we get huffy and offended at obnoxiousness. No more would we seek our own justification.

We would seek Jesus, with every remaining breath.

I have seen him too little - fleeting glimpses that have taken my breath away and rearranged my thinking. But I have seen him, and he is enough. Only he is enough.

When I feel the howl of a vast wilderness in my soul, he is my comfort and my Friend.
I know and am known.

O, taste and see that the Lord is good! (Psalm 34:8)

Ladies and Gentlemen, Presenting the Presidential Candidate for the Democratic Republic of Your Heart

2007-05-05T15:02:00.000-07:00

Brothers and sisters of humanity, we have been the victims of a Great Lie. We have been led to believe that our salvation will come in the form of a mighty Leader, one who will arrive amid the unfurling of banners and the blare of trumpets, and tell us how to live. When we know how to live, then we will be free.
We are all too content to gloss over and ignore the lesson we ought to have learned from history - that the perfect rules don't add up to a free society.
If there ever was a beautiful and perfect political system, it is socialism/communism. Now don't you right-wingers jump all over me just yet. Democracy may be the best of the worst, but it is neither so pure in its ideals nor so faithful to the inherent value of humanity as is a socialist philosophy. Democracy says that there is no right or wrong, but only different needs, ideas, experiences. The one of these shared by the greatest number of people should rule. Socialism says that there is right and wrong, that equality is right and that oppression, even of one person, is wrong. It says that people are valuable based on their being human, and that the value of all humans is more important than the wants of any number of individuals.
But flying directly in the face of such ideals, we have the testimony of history. Have socialist and communist systems set humanity free?
Rather, they have been abused and used to oppress vast populations. 'Why?', the idealist cries. 'Why? What flaw appeared in the implementation of those ideologies?'
The flaw is in us, friends. The ideas are pure and lovely still, and they mock us from the bookshelves.
This is the reason that Jesus came. This is the reason that he refused to stand up and reject the oppression of the Romans over the Jewish nation. This is the reason he didn't deliver a new "Ten Commandments" for Christians. This is the reason he didn't lead a revolution to liberate the downtrodden. He wasn't trying to perfect the world, or your country, or anyone else's country. He knew that the problem wasn't in the world, or your country, or anyone else's country. He knew that the problem was in your heart and mine.
And that's why Jesus didn't ask you to elect him, or his followers, for government. He didn't ask you to stop people from having abortions, or from marrying gay people, or from shopping on Sundays. He didn't ask you to make people pray in schools, in government offices, or at football games.
He's not the Presidential Candidate for the United Nations of Earth, or for your country, or for anyone else's country. He's the Presidential Candidate for the Democratic Republic of your heart.

The Story of the Universe

2007-04-30T22:48:00.000-07:00

I will attempt to tell this story as I know it.
In the beginning, there was God.
This word - God - has been bandied about for centuries; millennia, if you want to talk cross-linguistically. Therefore, I shall be a good essayist and defiine my terms. By God I mean the highest and first that was and is. The Eternal One. The Most High. The absolute Source of all Good - Love, Light, Truth. He who fills all, and is in all.
I don't know what was the situation that made the time (a term utterly unknown in eternity, but I'll use it here for ease of understanding) ripe for love to be multiplied and reflected. Perhaps it was the challenging of God's authority by one of the highest beings in his service - an angel of light. That angel sought personal glory and power rather than Love. Maybe God decided military might, power, and authority were not the means by which he would ensure the reign of love and goodness in the universe. It could be that he decided to teach his remaining angels by an object lesson instead of a display of raw power.
In any case, he embarked on a very dangerous plan - dangerous because it did not immediately crush evil, but instead allowed Love's antagonist unprecedented power as a means of demonstrating its inherent inferiority to good; to love.
God created suns and stars that demonstrate, by contrast, the difference between moral light and darkness. He created a plethora of green, growing things that testified to the power of life. He created animals, through whom his warm compassion and wildness were displayed. But then, God created something quite unlike all that had been created before. He created humanity.
Humans were different from all the rest of creation in this: while all the rest of creation by its very nature glorified God, the Source of Love, humans God created like himself - personal, able to participate in that greatest of all things: Love. This was God's most glorious and dangerous invention. It was dangerous, because humanity was given the ability to choose. They could choose evil - selfishness - instead of love. Humans were vastly different from angels - they were nearly gods themselves. Such was the power and the glory God created in them that even he would not be able to take it back. If they chose evil, it would gain great power in the universe. But they could choose to love as no other creature could.
If humanity chose evil, it would have power in them. If they chose God, they would rule by and be ruled by love. Love would be reflected in myriad lives and thoughts and personalities, each a little different; each mirroring Light from a different angle.
Alas! Self, or the personal-ness like his own that God had given humanity, was used to trap the first man and woman into choosing evil rather than God. Evil gained the right to live among humans. Its power grew in the universe and destructive forces were allowed power from God throughout the earth. It seemed as though Love's rule was on the wane. Had God miscalculated?
God had a plan that was going to answer the challenge of selfishness. It was a plan that would cost him in the deepest way possible - causing him to take on pain. What is the most devastating pain for Love?
Being the one to give pain.
God himself, in Jesus, stepped out of eternity and into time. He limited himself as he had never done before. He took on a human body and submitted himself to all the indignities of living in a world under the rule of evil. For the first time, he knew weakness - hunger and thirst and tiredness. Finally, he submitted himself fully to that last triumph of selfishness - death.
All of eternity stood breathless at the sight. God had been challenged, and now mocked.
But just as a choice had sold God's creation out of his hand, a choice had been made by one of humanity's own - Jesus - to redeem it back to God. Each one would, by a choice, decide his master. God could not force humanity to choose love. But he had demonstrated its beauty and power over selfishness at the greatest price he could pay.
The angels looking on, were learning about Love - its cost, its value. They were also learning the emptiness of selfishness' golden promise. The challenge had been met, fully. Oh, there were battle scars (there always are!). Jesus would bear the marks of his sacrifice forever. Never again would he be Spirit alone.
The days and the weeks measure the passage of time, and many moons have waxed and waned, and still we humans go stepping, stepping through time's portals, tricked into pleasing self instead of Love and blinded by the evil that grows more powerful as we choose it. Still the angels watch and wonder at their God.
But time has an end, and one day God will decide that the power of love has been fully demonstrated. Choice will be no longer a tender shoot, pushing its way up. At the last, it will die or blossom, and the reign of love throughout the universe will be once again triumphantly complete, and richer than ever before, multiplied and glorified and reflected from millions of human souls who have chosen not only Love, but to love.

Not what we expect

2007-04-25T00:02:00.000-07:00

Why is God so often not what we expect? He is so elusive, so unwilling to be neatly wrapped and tied into our smug understanding.
Take Simon's experience for instance. Simon was, I expect, a curious fellow. He had heard about Jesus, who was healing people and performing miracles. Not entirely respectable, mind you - rumor had it this Jesus was spending time with tax collectors and other, ahem, sinners. He was travelling about doing - well, other than the miracles, who knew what? Was he a prophet? A fake? A magician? An attention-seeker? Anyway, it would be good to be on the safe side - he might be a prophet after all. Weren't all of Israel's prophets a little eccentric?
Simon was no dimbulb. He was going to find out about Jesus. He was going to solve the riddle. First, he'd invite Jesus to dinner.
Jesus came to Simon's house. Simon was determined not to give him any honor until he had proven himself worthy. Simon was, after all, respected in his town, and a Pharisee. He didn't welcome his guest with any undue warmth. He didn't even have Jesus' feet washed, a customary gesture showing welcome and willing service.
But a woman in that place heard where Jesus was, and she came to Simon's house. She brought an alabaster box full of precious ointment. She didn't hesitate to welcome him. She wept, washing his feet with her tears and wiping them with her hair. Then she broke the alabaster and poured the ointment over Jesus' feet.
Simon thought he had caught a fraud. He was almost embarrassed for Jesus.
Surely if Jesus were a prophet, he would know that this woman was an unsavoury character - she had a reputation throughout the town. Surely, if he knew her sin, he would never let her touch his feet!
"Simon, I have something to tell you," Jesus said. He had seen his host's heart as well as the woman's. "Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?"
Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled."
"You have judged correctly," Jesus said. Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven--for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little."
Simon had been trying to judge Jesus by his own sense of right and wrong. But his sense was too dull; too narrow.
So it is with us. We think, "if God is who is says he is, then he will..." We should examine our intelligence, our understanding of such things. If we want to judge God, then we must be sure that the criteria we have established are valid.
God is apt to surprise us, just when we think we've got him figured out.

Who Do You Say That I Am?

2007-04-22T22:01:00.000-07:00

How is God to be known amid the babble of modern Christianity's myriad voices? Everyone's got a different opinion, and they're all on a mission to make that opinion orthodoxy. How ever does God expect us to know which one to listen to? Should we record them all and go through them systematically, run statistical tests and calculate probability? Should we deliver them all to the great philosophers, scientists, historians of our age, and trust that they will give us the right answer? Should we throw up our hands and "just have faith" in whatever we costs us the least, pleases us the best, or is easiest to explain? Would it have been easier if we could have met Jesus while he was on earth? Did Jesus really expect that the average Jew in his day would be reading the old scriptures and from them have a full understanding of the prophecies contained in the Tanakh? How did the disciples know that Jesus was their Messiah?
What does God expect?
Peter was a fisherman. Now, I don't want to presume - he might have been shipped off to university in Rome or Athens by his parents and rebelled by buying a fishing boat. He might have studied under the famous teacher Gamaliel, as Paul was supposed to have, but it's likely he was just a fisherman. Little knowledge of theology, history, or prophecy. And yet, when Jesus came along and said, "Follow me," Peter put down the nets and went. What made him do it? Was he just naive? Easily led?
Matthew tells us.
"When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, 'Who do people say the Son of Man is?'
They replied, 'Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.'
'But what about you?' he asked, 'Who do you say that 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.'"
(Matthew 16:13 - 17)
Doesn't mean nobody told Peter. Doesn't mean he couldn't have learned something from the stars, as the wise men did, or from an angel, as the shepherds did, or from the Tanakh, as Paul did. But he didn't know for himself, for sure, from those things. God had to reveal himself.

Thoughts from "Toward Jerusalem"

2007-04-21T02:02:00.000-07:00

O Thou who art my quietness, my deep repose,
My rest from strife of tongues, my holy hill -
Fair is Thy pavilion, where I hold me still...

- Amy Carmichael

I love Amy Carmichael. However different we may be in temperament and experience, she is a woman who knows my God.

God Himself

2007-04-16T00:15:00.000-07:00

"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God." Revelation 21: 1-3

How I love that word - himself! It's so personal. The God of the Revelation is great, high, and above all - holy. But John records that God - himself - will come and be with men and women. He is not going to be their superhero, not their sugardaddy, not their good-luck piece, not their grandfather. He is going to live with them and be their God. Who can imagine living with God? Who can imagine being pure enough to want to live with God?
Something deep down in my soul is homesick for that God. I miss him. I was meant to be with him.