New Year's resolution. I've never made one. Kinda smacked of a superstition of sorts. That is not to say, in moments of insipid bravado, at arbitrary points during some year, that I haven't made some sort of fallow promise to the air, for posterity sake or whatever....the best intentions of mice and men....that sort of thing. But this New Year's resolution ritual, well it always seemed like the membership to the gym, the copy of War and Peace on the mantle, or the learn French in 4 weeks course on cd rotting in the glove box: good intentions gone flat.
The Wall Street Journal just posted their 2011 celebrity artist "creative" resolutions story. What struck me instantly was the self-centeredness of the resolutions. Now I realize that it was the way the question was presented and the framing of the article...but c'mon? So many bright, talented, presumably rich people and not one act of good old fashioned altruism? So I muddled on. She Knows Entertainment, strike one. Ology (with the exception of Ashley Simpson giving a nod to her son) strike two. Theater Mania....strike three. Geez....
I think my favorite was Justin Bieber's resolution to win a grammy. Can a New Year's resolution be something like that? I mean can you resolve to win a Grammy? the Super Bowl? the lottery? Well count me in. Resolved. Resolved. And resolved! This year I resolve to be #1. I will win everything. Be better than everyone. All others will be less than but not equal to, the great, 2011, ME!
What gives people? (apparently nothing...) Where's the token "I want to strive for world peace"? Have we grown that callous? Or is it cynicism? With the exception of two of our celebrities adopting a pet-shelter dog, where are the open hearts and homes to the cast-off children of the world? I mean c'mon already, if you're gonna take the time to make one, make it good. Just lie to us. Just say you're gonna donate a tenth of your 20 million dollar salary to victims of poverty. Say it, even if you don't mean it. Inspire us to emulation. Do I have to beg?
Rant # 2
Have you ever been to one of those retail giant book stores? Christian or otherwise? There is a section called Christian fiction. Presumably the sterilized versions of romance "novels" and spy thrillers, all impregnated with Judeo-Christian ethic and evangelical underpinnings. Well I take exception to bad art in any form no matter the doctrine, and to be fair I've never read these books, they may be compelling and soul-stirring. I'm even willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But as a Christian, one who believes it is what's in a person that makes them beautiful, I wonder why every cover of every book has a beautiful person on it. Not one ugly, or fatty, or pimply faced wallflower....hmmmm. Now I realize this just sounds like sour lemons from a confirmed "unattractive", and I may very well be, but what message does this send to people about the God of the universe? That He created the beautiful in His image and the uglies are spawns of Satan?
Rant #3
And while we're on the subject of celebrity and beauty....why how come pray tell do they cast some gorgeous girl in a role and then spend the first half of the movie trying to prove just how down to earth, Chuck Taylors and Levis, everyday girl next door she is so that we can relate to her? Why not just hire the girl next door and get to the meat of the film...if there is any.
Rant # 4
Yes. There's more. Jersey Shore. Never seen a single episode but somehow this quantifies for me everything that is wrong with everything, everywhere, all the time. I mean my heart breaks for these kids and yet....
Rant #5
Gratuitously rich world...so much abject poverty.....Argh. I hope 2011 brings a sense of global responsibility, a sense of compassionate connection and kinship...please?
Every 5 seconds a child dies from starvation. Every 5 seconds Americans waste 2 1/2 tons of food. Every 4 seconds a child dies of a water related illness. Every 4 seconds Americans waste 730,000 gallons of water. And that's just Americans.... Argh.
Harriet Tubman spoke out against a system that bought and sold people, her people, even her own family. And her fearlessness gave force to her words. She didn't desire her own freedom so much as to leave others behind. They put a bounty on her head to scare her into silence and submission. But no one ever got to collect.
Rosa Parks sat in the wrong section of the bus. The white section. She was told to get up. She didn't. She was tired from working all day, tired of being a second class citizen. Her actions were louder than words. She went to jail. For sitting on a public bus. In America.But America heard her loud and clear. They tried to marginalize her and they failed. Her civil disobedience led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott that made her an international symbol of resistance.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr had a dream. And he let the whole world know from whom it came and who would make it come true. And they shot him 'cause he wouldn't back down.Because he kept showing up places and talking about equality and justice.
John the Baptist took on the world. When the world slept in houses. He slept in caves. When they were clothed in soft linens, he wore camel skin. When the most respected religious men of the day came out to the Jordan, he called them a brood of vipers. He also told a king to repent. They had to cut off his head to silence his tongue.
And then there's my Savior. Whom even death could not silence. Nor the hordes of hell.
Let's me and you be these kind of people. The kind that don't shut up. Let's “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.” Proverbs 31:7-8
Because Thanksgiving has been chewed up and shat out by the X-mas machine I thought I just might take a minute to tell you what I am thankful for.
Espresso.
The smell of wood-smoke on winter wind.
Black beans, butternut squash, potatoes and curry.
Sunsets and sunrises and shooting stars and the moon, the lovely, lonely moon.
Friends who fight for justice.
Parents whose shadow I've never had to live in, whose words have never torn me down. Two brothers and a sister who would do anything in this world for me and have. A kid sister, who I miss and can't wait to see in heaven.
In my Itunes library the most played song is "To Be Alone With You" by Sufjan Stevens. 216 times. I was thinking what that says about a person....the lyrics....
I'd swim across Lake Michigan I'd sell my shoes I'd give my body to be back again In the rest of the room To be alone with you To be alone with you To be alone with you To be alone with you
You gave your body to the lonely They took your clothes You gave up a wife and a family You gave your ghost To be alone with me To be alone with me To be alone with me You went up on a tree
To be alone with me You went up on a tree
I've never known a man who loved me
I guess it's because what we long for in love is that beautiful isolation of being alone with someone. Someone who prefers you over everyone else, someone you prefer the same. Someone who you would give up everything for, someone for whom all the things of this world are meaningless when compared to you. Someone who knows your deepest darkest and doesn't turn away. Someone you would rather die than be without, someone who would die for you.
And in this way I know we are created in God's image because this is exactly what He wants....
My friend Adam took a job in Florida so I'm dog-sitting his pit bull Buster for a few weeks. Don't let the sunglasses fool you, Buster can see into the soul. And the soul is made of meat.
Buster barks at the wind, at invisible boogies that trouble him so. He growls when he's angry, happy, anxious, etc... It's easy to know the difference. Except in the dark, when he's standing over you in the bed, teeth shining in the strange half-light.
He has been a little down, missing Adam and all, and so he doesn't eat his food. But then when I add the special favorite gravy morsel goodness in a can to his dry food he scarfs it down. Come to think of it, Buster may be less melancholy and more a master of the human psyche.
To watch Buster belly up in the soft autumn sun, scratching his back on the grass, writhing like some strange beached sea creature, is to envy him. I suppose if I weren't so self-conscious I might join him. And I may yet still.
Things about me that spook Buster: My cell phone vibrating, my alarm clock announcing the waking hour, my sneeze, and especially me running into a wall or door in the dark, which I do, half asleep in a strange house.
Buster has one trick. He shakes. Whenever he isn't being paid his due attention he will remind you of that particular skill by placing his paw squarely into your personal space. He has a knack for finding your most personal space.
I used to have a number four on my keyboard. 123four567890. How many times do I really use the dollar sign anyway? I shouldn't have been typing during playtime.
Buster has a rope. It's a foot or so long with a frayed knot on each end, maybe 2 inches in diameter. He loves to grip it in his teeth and have someone pull the other end. It reminds me of the game when I was a kid and one of the older guys would let you get a free punch in on their shoulder. Just so you would know what it was like to punch a solid wall. Buster is just letting me know that with very little effort he could rip my arm out of it's socket and sling it around the room like a sock puppet.
Me and Buster, we'll do just fine. Besides, I'm skinny. I'm prolly pretty tough and stringy. But come to think of it that describes Buster's favorite chew toy.
On a church sign near where I work it reads " Like Coca Cola, God is the real thing."
Last night my friend Whitney stopped by. We stood staring at the black curtain of the new October sky and the thousands if not tens of thousands of stars that were visible in our little corridor of space. We stood in silent awe, amateur astronomers, drinking in the majesty of creation.
Whitney spoke first. She asked if I'd seen the man and the woman walking down Hattiesburg's main drag carrying the large wooden crosses. I said I had. She asked in a somewhat leading tone what I thought. As is my particular idiosyncrasy, I asked If she really wanted the truth. Which my friends know means I have a strong opinion on a subject. She smiled. I smiled. And then she answered her own question, insightfully so. She said it kinda makes the cross and the sacrifice of Jesus small.
Yeah. Real small. Soft drink slogan kinda small.
Another friend, Laurel, has a quote from an As Cities Burn song on her Facebook page. "I think our God isn't God if He fits inside our heads" it says.
I tend to agree.
We live in a world desperate for something real. Something more than a slogan, more than a soft drink. Something, or someone that can save us from ourselves, from this path of destruction we're blindly ambling down. The church has that something, knows that someone, and yet we reduce it and Him, to sloganeering, second rate plagiarism, and a bland, watered down hipsterism that the world sees right through it. What if instead of wooden crosses we carried our cross like scripture dictates of Christ's disciples, by dying to our old nature and living the new life by the Spirit? What if instead of the symbols of things we lived those things? Isn't this why we have been warned against idols? Because the symbol of a thing becomes that thing, at least in as much as it becomes small, so easy to fit inside our heads.
What if instead of offering the world a Coke-sized God (and a smile) we offered them the One who created the universe, holds it in His hands, who knows every star by name. What if instead of a soft drink slogan we gave them the Living Water from which no one ever thirsts again.
So for Whitney who said, "I don't even like Coke." Let's buy us a bucketful of those letters and do some vigilante church sign editing....
And for Laurel who is the only person I've ever met who loves the sky as much as me, and for anyone else out there, may God grow larger to you every day and yet ever closer still.
Not sure if you're anything like me. I grew up in faith. That is my mom says my first word was Jesus and my childhood was surrounded, saturated by church and Christians and God. As I grew my faith grew and then I became a teenager with a rebellious streak a mile wide and to use the Christianese vernacular...I backslid. And as I did, as the shimmer of this world seduced me, it also, as it always seems to, caused me to wonder if God was angry at me, disappointed or even disillusioned by my moral lapses. I would return to Him, a little (or a lot) worse for the wear. Try hard to win His favor back. Only to repeat the whole sad cycle again later.
And so it was, much later, after one of my longest lows that God tenderly loved me back to Him by the Spirit. Without judgment, or anger, and certainly no disappointment. And from then on it's been a whole lot easier for me to come to Him with my struggles, to trust him with my failures. I know He loves me. His tenderness saved my life.
But to be honest, it's Jesus I've always had a little trouble with. Not the cross, or the dichotomy of His nature, or any of His miracles. Jesus just came across to me as a little terse, harsh even, and in my broken-heartedness I have always been a little fearful that He might become exasperated with me, or at the very least, that I wouldn't have been one of the guys He would've wanted to hang out with.
I go to a small believer's meeting called Ekklesia here in south Mississippi. The "pastor" Michael Dixon goes to great lengths to explain the person of Jesus in the equation of: Jesus is God and God is love and therefore everything Jesus did, said, and was can and should be understood in that context, viewed through that lens of love.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been confronted anew in Isaiah and 1st Peter by the humble, silent suffering of Jesus. How He did not blame me in my guilt, but for the joy before Him endured it. I have been falling in love with Jesus these past few days in a special way.
This morning, top off the jeep, fall in the air, sunshine like a tidal wave I was kinda blindsided by reality. The dead dark moon of impossibility eclipsed the beautiful blazing sun (Son) of His promise. My faith wasn't going to cast that mountain into any sea....I was probably gonna just crash and burn into the shear face of it. But then....
The Holy Spirit showed me Peter, trying as he might on stormy seas, to reach out in faith to a Jesus that he sometimes couldn't understand. Peter sinking in an impossible situation and immediatly Jesus....reached out....right where Peter was...to lift him...to rescue him.
But then Jesus said to Peter one of those phrases that always put a wall between me a Jesus, made me think He wasn't very tender, "You of little faith, why did you fear?"....As if God the Son didn't know.
It was for Peter he asked, not to castigate Him, but to reinforce to Peter, that rescue was never in doubt, there was never any need for him to fear, for me to fear. Impossibility isn't a bad thing, it's that place where only a miracle will suffice, where only God will get the credit, and where our faith will grow.
And so I fell in love with Jesus again this morning. He is my hero.
