Comparing Ourselves: What About Him?

Comparison.  We all do it.

In grade school I remember being mad that some girl beat me out of the valedictorian spot. 

Going to Cedar Point was also interesting as I would look at others in the line and try to act cooler than them.

As a teen, I wanted so much to dress like the burn out crowd, but still with some class because I also wanted to hang with my honors English friends. 

I learned to push my glasses up right (like cool people do with their sunglasses, not in the middle like a 'nerd').

Comparison goes much deeper, though.  When we consider God's call on our lives, it's easy to think: What about him?  or her?  I'm not as bad as that guy.  I can't be as good as that girl. 

After Jesus kicks the grave, he visits Peter and John (John 21) and they have a little picnic on the shore.  Jesus keeps giving Peter this mission for his life: Feed my lambs, He says.  He even tells him that he will get in trouble and will get taken advantage of. 

While this resurrected Son of God is foretelling Peter's mission and challenges, Peter has an interesting thought on his mind: He looks at John and asks Jesus, "What about him?"

Comparison. 

But here's a cool response from Jesus.  "What is that to you?  You follow me." 

In essence, he's saying, "Peter, I'm talking about you here.  I've got a plan for you.  It's not the same as John's over there.  What I've got in mind for him is between me and John.  Don't worry about what   You focus on my heart for you and follow me."
he's doing.

Jesus is not asking you to be like someone else or be someone else.  He's not pressuring you to follow some robotic process of turning into someone that you're not. 

He has a meaningful life for y o u.  And He wants y o u to follow Him, in the way He is calling.  So what is He calling y o u to do and be?  You may not know.

Begin asking Him, and learn to listen to the Spirit.   

My Lighthouse

I love these guys.  They sound like Mumford & Sons or the Lumineers, but it's worship music.  Great instrumentation for the other folkies out there!

Good? Friday

A Hand reached from the other side,
into the void that is our life.
No more will you be a boat
tossed about by angry waves
determined to crush
this already splintering piece of bark.
Waves once cowered at this Voice.
And they shall once more,
for the voice is no longer just a voice,
but a presence, true presence
that has come into life, our life
and known it all, the intimacy of suffering,
the ache of loss, the anxiety of death,
the lash of betrayal,

Your feet are now coupled,
wedded to an ever present groom.

painful joy
happy sadness
sweet tears
healing blood
searing pleasure
Good Friday.



-Kurt Maechner

Darkness is my closest friend

Check this out.  This is a Psalm in the Bible.  Psalm are songs to God.  This is Psalm 88 (I cut out parts to shorten it).  Be prepared for some surprising lyrics:

Lord, you are the God who saves me;
    day and night I cry out to you.
² May my prayer come before you;
    turn your ear to my cry.

³ I am overwhelmed with troubles    and my life draws near to death.
⁴ I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
    I am like one without strength.
⁹     my eyes are dim with grief.

I call to you, Lord, every day;
    I spread out my hands to you.

¹³ But I cry to you for help, Lord;
    in the morning my prayer comes before you.
¹⁴ Why, Lord, do you reject me
    and hide your face from me?

¹⁵ From my youth I have suffered and been close to death;
    I have borne your terrors and am in despair.
¹⁶ Your wrath has swept over me;
    your terrors have destroyed me.
¹⁷ All day long they surround me like a flood;
    they have completely engulfed me.
¹⁸ You have taken from me friend and neighbor—
    darkness is my closest friend.

I love this because this shows again that the Bible is not a book about a fantasy life.  It's not a book about perfection.  It's a book about reality, real life, with real people who have doubts and pain. 

I need my God to know real life.  I need to know that He gets it, that He isn't surprised by my sometimes raging emotions.  The fact that this Psalm is in His book proves to me that He does.

I don't think we have to believe that the writer of this Psalm is right either.  There are numerous things in here that are wrong (I don't believe God terrorizes us, for example).  This isn't intended as a teaching.  It's intended to be art, and art expresses our interior world.  Sometimes that world is scary and irrational. 

Regardless, we have a God, who says, don't run from me when you are scared, angry, or sad.  Run TO me.  Give me your true self.  That's a God worthy of love.

 

 

 

 

What to do with guilt

Morning after morning in my teen years I would wake up with the same feeling.  It was as if someone had wrapped a belt around my gut and was tightening it.  Nervousness like an electrical charge set to 'constant on' mode permeated my system.  This was a punishment, I was sure, because all together my bodily sensations told me I was feeling guilty.

Guilty for what?  I wasn't sure, but I sure knew it must be something.  Why else would I feel this way?  I worked to find things that I must have done wrong and asked God to forgive me.  The slightest wrong feeling or thought could have been the culprit.  Yet, surely there were things I couldn't remember that may have been the cause.  I begged forgiveness for those too.

When there is sin, it has to be paid for, so to make up for them I tried to prove my desire for forgiveness by denying some happiness.  Maybe it was not allowing myself to enjoy something or, at other times, just being 'down' to prove to my Judge that I was serious.

Have you fought this battle with guilt?  Maybe it was for actual wrong doing or maybe it was, like me, a general feeling of unworthiness.  Father knows about this and is a much better God than the sacrifice-demanding one I thought He was.

The letter in the New Testament written to the Hebrews speaks directly to this.  When I heard a series of talks about this in college it changed everything for me.

Let me simply summarize chapters 9 and 10.  The old covenant God made with people (as explained in the Old Testament) sets up a system whereby people can deal with their sense of guilt by making blood sacrifices of animals at a temple to God who focuses his presence in a quarantined room, sealed with a heavy curtain, called the Holy of Holies.  Within this system, "people under the law offer the same sacrifices every year."

In a way, that's what I was doing with my guilt: offering sacrifices of happiness, groveling, and self-hatred.  Over and over again, I would make my payment.  But, the letter to the Hebrews continues like this:

"but these sacrifices can never make perfect those who come near to worship God.  If the law could make them perfect, the sacrifices would have stopped.  The worshippers would have been made clean, and they would no longer have a sense of sin."

In other words, that old system didn't ultimately work, and nor will ours.  Instead, God sends his Son to deal with our sense of unworthiness, our sense of needing to pay for things over and over again.  Instead, "we are made holy through the sacrifice Christ made in his body, once and for all time." 

What does this all mean?  I'll let the text speak for itself:

"So, brothers and sisters, we are completely free to enter the Most Holy Place without fear because of

the blood of Jesus' death.  We can enter through a new and living way that Jesus opened for us.  It leads through the curtain--Christ's body.  And since we have a great priest over God's house let us come near to God with a sincere heart and sure faith, because we have been made free from a guilty conscience, and our bodies have been washed with pure water" (10:19-23).

Live in confidence with your God, like I have learned to do.  Trust that He has fought and beat your guilt.  You may need to continually remind your guilt that it already lost the fight. 

As I have learned to live in this reality, I've discovered that people who live freely in Father's love, will freely love others.  That, indeed, is a very new, new convenant.

Allegiant: when relationships get tough

Tris and Tobias.  I like them so much more than Katniss, Peta, and Gale.  They have a great chemistry

 and, for the most part, they really seem to care about each other.

Then comes Allegiant.  Things get much dice-ier for them in this book.  That’s pretty realistic actually.  All long-term relationships eventually go through an arc.  At the beginning, things often are great.  Excitement, mystery, newness, all these things make us feel alive to life in a way we weren’t before. 

The myth is that this goes on forever.  The truth, however, is not that love is doomed to failure or boredom.  That too is a myth, although one that can, and often does, come sadly true for those who don’t realize the first myth. 

Tris and Tobias are no exception.  Like in real life relationships, the challenges of life hit them individually, like a barrage of baseballs, and it takes a toll first on them individually and then on their relationship. 

So far, I see a trend that continues to harm their connection when it could be an opportunity to draw them together:

They are very understanding of their own pain, but don’t sympathize with the other’s. 

Two examples.  Both Tobias and Tris go through genetic testing and discover that something is supposedly “wrong” with Tobias’ genes, but not Tris’.

Tris quickly comments, “It’s not that big a deal.”

Now I actually think she has a valid point here and that she’s trying to love and validate that “This doesn’t change anything.”

But here’s the problem, she doesn’t give Tobias a chance to simply struggle to his conclusion with her.  Tris dismisses the hurt he feels.  He then walks out to struggle on his own (and get lured to Nita).

Another example.  Tobias finds out that his father, for whom he has contempt, was not sentenced to execution, but to being banished.  Again Tris dismisses the effect this has on her boyfriend.  She outright says, “You can be upset about whatever you want….But…it doesn’t seem like there’s much to be upset about.”

And, like any good story, their chance to follow up the conversation is interrupted.

Relationships, friendship, family, or romantic, are blessings from Father.  Blessings must be held gently.  Heavy-handedness usually harms, not heals.  The beauty of Jesus was God coming into our world and fully experiencing the joy, pain, grief, fun, laughter, hurt, and death that we feel.  Hebrews 4 says, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.”

Tris is a great character, but we can learn from her mistakes.  Healthy relationships involve sympathizing with someone else’s weaknesses and feelings, even if they seem ridiculous from our perspective.  If you want to feel close to someone and, also if you want to see them move on from something, the first step is to ask, listen, and bear the feelings of the other person.

Allegiant: Is Christianity a fix-it religion?

[Spoiler alert]
Everybody is living inside an experiment. 

Creepy, eh? 

That's what Tris finds out in Allegiant, the third book of the Divergent series.  All of her life up to this point has been lived inside an experiment at gene manipulation.  A long time ago people decided to alter the genetics of a select group of people so that negative qualities would be erased.

However, "when the genetic manipulation began to take effect, the alterations had disastrous consequences....Take away someone's fear, or low intelligence, or dishonesty...and you take away their compassion.  Take away someone's aggression and you take away their motivation, or their ability to assert themselves. Take away their selfishness and you take away their sense of self-preservation."

So they ultimately damaged people's genes and, as a result, had to set up false, monitored societies, like the faction-led world of Tris and Tobias, to slowly fix people.

Have you ever heard someone say of Christianity, "it's not a religion, it's a relationship"?  It's become something of a cliche, but there is truth in it. 

Christianity, when lived as a religion, is a lot like the world of the Divergent series.  We want people to be better so we manipulate them by using lots of rules and fear.  We read about rules, preach about rules, and quote the rules.  We try to take human nature and fix it by external means. 

Here is the common problem with this method.  Like the situations mentioned in Allegiant, enforcement of standards leads to a whole host of internal damage.  We create a culture where certain feelings are unacceptable, so people hide their true struggles and stuff them, instead of sharing with others.  Be a good role model and be happy, yet we are cutting in our bedroom at night.

We tell each other what to do and not to do and subsequently create hidden cultures where people act out these forbidden behaviors in secret. 

Religion gets to play a fix-it role again when we go to church on Sunday and confess our sins in the service.  We feel some relief and turn around and do all the same things again the following week.

At the worst, religiosity can make us cocky and lead to lots of bickering, much like the Purity wars mentioned in Allegiant.

Scripture gives us a different picture.  "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me."  Galatians 2:20

"When someone is joined to Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has gone and the new has come."  2 Corinthians 5:17

I was a good kid, according to the rules, when I was in junior high.  My teachers saw me as a responsible, well-behaved young man.  Still, I was just doing what was expected of me.  I was a manipulated gene, manipulated by the approval I received.    Really, there was a very different me going on inside that I kept hidden from others.  I began to truly change, to become a "new creation," though, when I surrendered my life to Father. 

My heart began to change naturally as the Holy Spirit showed me my issues.  I found myself growing compassion for people I had once hated, developing patience for people that bothered me, finding out the joy of opening up about my honest feelings, and growing in desire to learn and know Jesus.

Lasting change, I'm finding, comes not from monitoring or manipulation, but from meaningful relationship with Father.