What is the voice of God?

When I think about life, my purpose for getting up in the morning, the everyday things I do, the comings and goings of my day...my soul does a skip when I think this radical thought:

God has great things for me to do in this life.

God has great things for me to do in this life.

God has great things for me to do in this life.

God has great things for me to do in this life.

"The most secret, sacred wish that lies deep down at the bottom of your heart, the wonderful thing that you hardly dare to look at, or to think about...that is just the very thing that God is wishing you to do or to be for Him.  And the birth of that marvelous wish in your soul--the dawning of that secret dream--was the Voice of God Himself telling you to arise and come up higher because He had need of you."

-Emmet Fox (1886-1951)

Why I Like Sad Movies

I like funny movies the same as the next guy.  But I've got a thing for watching "heavy" movies.  I leave movies like Talladega Nights with a lighter heart and tired cheeks, but I leave movies like Les Miserables, Sunshine Cleaning, or Invictus somehow different.

I used to be a guy that was so big about the rules.  Now, don't get me wrong.  It wasn't all about being nice or being a teacher's pet.  Instead, when I really began following Christ with all my heart, I saw the wisdom in God's ways, as I perceived them, and was proud to live and promote them.  But, they eventually just became more about living rules instead of understanding God's heart.

Then I'd see movies where love had to break rules.  I'm not just talking about romantic love, but love for those who suffer.  Like Les Mis where a girl who is pregnant out of wedlock is desperate for help or in Sunshine Cleaning where the main character is convinced that the best she can do to not be lonely is to carry on an affair with a married man who has no commitment to her.  Then there's Henry Poole Is Here where a man argues vehemently against belief in God, but we find out later that he has a terminal illness that has crushed his hope.

These are all people who did wrong, "unrighteous" things.  Christians are supposed to fight these, argue against these, and vote to stop these...aren't they?  It's no wonder the religious world couldn't appreciate Jesus.  All kinds of sexual deviants, swindlers, and uneducated dopes seemed to pull toward him like old magnets on a fridge.

Somehow, he must have been able to see their souls, their stories, their sufferings.  We mostly sin to
fill a void, an emptiness, and Jesus could see it.  Lives were changed, but not by rules, by love.  Love has a way of calling out the true, noble "us" that is often buried beneath our coping mechanisms.

That perspective, Jesus', is the one that sad movies sometimes give me.  

Elizabeth O'Connor, an author, said that, "We each carry within us the image of God the Creator; we each have the task of making the earth into a fairer, kinder place.  The first step is imagining a better world, and that is most apt to happen when we suffer or look on suffering."

Suffering through Christmas

It's nice when someone asks how you're really doing.

It's nice when someone says they'll pray for you.
It's nice when someone thinks you're amazing because of all you've gone through.

But it puts divine medicine on a chapped soul when someone shares your suffering with you.  They enter into it as much as they can with listening, empathizing, asking, helping, comforting, even sometimes feeling the same things.

That's Christmas.

God doesn't just say, "Wow.  Life is hard for you guys."
or
"I'll send some angels to help sometimes."
or
"Good job facing the trials of life!"

No, He comes INTO it, WITH US.  Emmanuel, is this name that the ancient Jews were told the Messiah would be called.  It means "God with us."

That baby in Bethlehem becomes a man and showed us another time that He would be with us.  Here's a quote from Nadia Bolz-Weber's book Pastrix that captures it:

Every time I go looking for God amidst sorrow, I always find Jesus at the cross.  In death and resurrection.

This is our God.  Not a distant judge nor a sadist, but a God who weeps.  A God who suffers, not only for us, but with us.  Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross.  Therefore what can I do but confess that this is not a God who causes suffering.  This is a God who bears suffering.  I need to believe that God does not initiate suffering.  God transforms it.

Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother's sister, and Mary Magdalene.  When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, "Woman, here is your son."  Then he said to the disciple, "Here is your mother."  After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said, "I am thirsty."

"I am thirsty," he says.  "I am not watching this from a distant heaven.  I too am thirsty."

Thanks giving

John 10:17-18 "No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord."

"That Jesus would endure such hostility against himself with the full freedom to end it at any weak moment makes me appreciate the cross that much more.  As free choice got us into this bondage of sin, so Jesus' free choice would walk us out of it.  His example also reminds us that we are not victims either.  Even though disgusting things might be done to us by others, we still have the freedom to overcome evil by putting our trust in him.  He still redeems the darkest moments of life with the wonder of his grace."
-Wayne Jacobsen, He Loves Me

Happy Thanksgiving!

Dating OUTWARD

Love is not just the domain of chick flicks and cheesy pop songs.  Love is also the domain of the greatest literature and art in the history of mankind.  Even God, when trying to explain the intensity of the passion between the Messiah and His people, compared them to the passion between a bride and a groom.

This is because one of the most dangerous, exciting, and satisfying journeys of life is the adventure of finding and learning to love one person, and love them well.

One contemporary author who writes a great deal about love is Debra K. Fileta.  She is a regular relationship columnist for Relevant Magazine.  Read her article: Here's How to Find True Love



I'd like to get some dialogue running about Fileta's three concepts of dating inward, outward, and upward.

After reading about dating outward in her article, here are some questions I think that are worth exploring:

Why is this so scary?
When is a good time to start?
How will dating outward look differently if you're a follower of Jesus?  What do you think Fileta means by saying, "It is a give-and-take that must never desperately give too much or fearfully give too little"?

Heaven is fairy tale?

Hazel Grace, the sweet, terminally ill girl that has found love from The Fault in Our Stars. I want so much to like her. I want so much to find her inspiring. But she angers me. I should feel bad about that. I mean she's dying. But she claims she doesn't want pity. Here is just one example of many that frustrate me: Hazel loves this one book. Her dad read it and says, "It was a bit hopeless," he said. "A bit defeatist." "If by defeatist you mean honest, then I agree." "I don't think defeatism is honest," Dad answered. "I refuse to accept that." "So everything happens for a reason and we'll all go live in the clouds and play harps and live in mansions?"   I come across this thinking so frequently: if you really want something to be true, it must not be. Because you really wish there was a God, because you really long for there to be an afterlife, it must not be. Some atheists pride themselves on being so honest, so in touch with the facts and reality. Theirs is just another wishful-thinking mode too, though they don't admit it.   Some very much hope there is no God or no afterlife. Alas, that may require them to recognize some responsibility towards that God or that how they live their life now may have some effect on the next life. The "honesty" argument falls in so many places. I love my wife. But one could say, "Hey let's be honest. We are all competing organisms. My survival is my main goal. I am an evolutionary product with no inherent meaning. I am a blob of stellar material that has come to life and all I can do is maintain my miserable existence. So, I will choose to protect myself and serve myself at whatever cost it takes." And I can say, "I'm just being honest." But, here's my problem: I believe in love. Yes, I really, really want there to be a thing called love. I want it to be true that giving of myself not only blesses my wife, but also blesses my God. I want it to be true that all the love and relationships that I have built with her and my four little girls will have meaning both in this life and the next. Yes, I believe in love. Call me dishonest, if you must. I give Hazel's dad credit that he tries to hold onto some semblance of belief, though the best he can come up with is, "I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed." He seems to be trying so hard to avoid saying there is a Being who actually cares. Maybe he's afraid of being 'honest.' God (truly), I hope Hazel gets honest by the end of this book. But maybe because I really want that to happen, because I actually care enough about this fictional character to hope she finds real meaning, that must mean I believe that everything happens for a reason and we'll all go live in the clouds and play harps and live in mansions*" Honestly, I suppose I do...minus the harps, of course. *To be exact, no I don't believe everything happens for a reason, though I do believe that God can bring meaning and life out of even the greatest tragedies.  The clouds, harps, and mansions are simply a cartoon cutout of a real belief in a life that will happen after this one that will certainly be much more meaningful than comic strip versions of heaven.

 

Do I mean anything?

I'm reading two different books right now.  One is called The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, a fiction story about two teens with cancer who fall in love.  The other is Pastrix by Nadia Bolz-Weber, a former addict turned tattooed, f-bomb dropping Lutheran pastor. The differences between these two books is like oil and water.  In Fault, the main character Hazel has to carry around an oxygen tank because her lungs won't work otherwise.  She has terminal cancer.  A young cancer survivor named Gus comes to a support group meeting.  When asked his biggest fear, he responds, "Oblivion," meaning to cease to exist after death. 


Hazel tells him the following:
"There will come a time...when all of us are dead.  All of us.  There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything....Everything we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught....if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it."

Wow.  Makes you feel small and insignificant, doesn't it.  But then...I read a chapter in Pastrix called "Beer and Hymns."  Nadia tells the story of how her church meets in a bar to sing hymns to God each week.  However, one particular week stood out because a few days before that one guy shot and killed some 12 people in a movie theater during a midnight showing of Batman. 

Nadia considered cancelling the meeting, but instead, they did it anyway.  Here are some of her remembrances of that night.

"It took a few minutes for me to pinpoint the uniqueness of how these hymns were being sung [that night].  But then I knew.  It was defiance.

"Mary Magdalene was the very first to proclaim, in the midst of loss and sorrow, that death had been defeated.

"Of course, Mary Magdalene would have very little tolerance for the Christian platitudes and vapid optimism that seem to swirl around these kinds of tragic events.  Those platitudes are tempting, but they're nothing but luxuries for people who've never had demons (or at least have never admitted to them).  But equally, she would reject nihilism, or the idea that there is no real meaning in life or death--ideas present in so much of postmodernity.  Those ideas, too, are luxuries, but they are for those who have never been freed from demons.

"When we sang hymns to God at the bar, it sounded like a people who simply would not believe that violence wins, a people who know that the sound of the risen Christ speaking our names drowns out all other voices.  It drowns out the sound of the political posturing, the sound of cries for vengeance, the sound of our own fears and anxieties, and the deafening uncertainty--because all of it is no match for the shimmering sound of the resurrected Christ calling our name.

"This is the resurrected God to whom we sing.  A God who didn't say we would never be afraid but that we would never be alone.

"Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples.  Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we can stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new.  On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid.  To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles...that death is not the final word.  To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it.  And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, still we make our song alleluia.  Alleluia.  Alleluia."

I'm not done with The Fault in Our Stars yet, but I'm hoping Hazel finds more hope than that sad "reality" that she gave to Gus.

I hate myself

I don't really hate myself, but there have been times when I have.  It still sometimes hits me, but I've learned how to fight that impulse.  I think we all can get pretty good at hating on ourselves.  In fact, in some Christian circles, hating on yourself is seen as a sign of spiritual maturity or something. 

So, I'm reading this book called Pastrix by an ELCA Lutheran pastor who also happens to drop f-bombs and has tons of tattoos named Nadia Bolz-Weber; oh, and she's a woman.  That alone would throw many for a loop.  There are a lot of things in the book that many would be uncomfortable with.  In fact, there are things I'm uncomfortable with in it too.  Still, I love this woman's heart for Jesus and people.  As I read I'm going to post some parts of the book that jump out at me.  Here's one where she talks about identity.

(BTW, she's going to be the speaker at an upcoming Ohio ELCA youth conference)


And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased."  Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.  The tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread."

And the Word that had most recently came from the mouth of God was, "This is my beloved in whom I am well pleased."  Identity.  It's always God's first move.  Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God's own.  But almost immediately, other things try to tell us who we are and to whom we belong; capitalism, the weight-loss industrial complex, our parents, kids at school-they all have a go at telling us who we are.  But only God can do that.  Everything else is temptation.  Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are.  And maybe, just moments after Jesus' baptism, when the devil says to him, "If you are the Son of God..." he does so because he knows that Jesus is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that he is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God.

So if God's first move is to give us our identity, then the devil's first move is to throw that identity into question.  Identity is like the tip of a spool of thread, which when pulled, can unwind the whole thing...Our identity has nothing to do with how we are perceived by others.  But it's still tempting to believe.  I mean, if Jesus was vulnerable to temptation, the rest of us certainly are, whether it be temptation to self-loathing or self-aggrandizement, depression or pride, self-destruction or self-indulgence.  We are tempted to doubt our innate value precisely to the degree that we are insecure about our identity from, and our relationship to God.

Happy Birthday

Here's a quote that I find to hold incredible meaning especially as I have another birthday:

"If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say  both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.  In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments and life itself is grace."
Frederick Buechner (Writer, novelist, and minister)

I Knew It Not

I have a quote calendar on my desk and I read one every morning.  A recent quote really struck me.  It's by an author who wrote a lot in the 50s and 60s named A.W. Tozer.

"Jacob saw a vision of God and cried in wonder, 'Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.'  Jacob had never been for one small division of a moment outside the circle of that all-pervading Presence.  Be he knew it not.  That was his trouble, and it is ours.  Men do not know that God is here.  What a difference it would make if they knew."
 

Wow. It's a cool challenge to try to remember that God is with me all the time, not in a generic sense, but in a real, personal way. Consider that throughout your whole day God is with you, listening to you, talking to you, guiding you when you eat breakfast, when you interact with your family, in your classes, at lunch, when you're walking with your friends between classes. Amazing stuff.

studying God

"We devote years to studying a trade or profession.  Ought we show less perseverance in acquiring the experience of God?" 
Paul Tournier (1898-1986)