Jonah. A Prophet's Pride and the Relentless Grace of God.

After almost two years of reading, studying, wrestling, and writing, my book on Jonah is finally finished! What a labor of love it has been. With so many of my friends along the way letting me flesh out these thoughts in conversation, in bible studies, and in less than literate first drafts. I wanted to take a moment here to thank them all again, and also to give a little insight into why I wrote this book, why I felt it is a story that urgently needs to be read.

Nearly 22 months ago I stepped off of a plane into Northern Iraq in the middle of the night. After a long day of security training and a longer night of restless sleep I traveled with new and returning team members to a field hospital 8 miles from Mosul. Coalition forces were in the final phases of liberating East Mosul from ISIS and here I was on the plains of Nineveh about to enter a heavily guarded and fortified compound and face death like I'd never before. Bombs shook anything that wasn't made of concrete and our on-site orientation included a tour of the compound's many bunkers. I was a long way from Mississippi, surrounded by real enemies, about to be changed forever. And while the story of my time in Iraq is referenced in this book, the majority of that experience will have to wait to be told. The pain is still too fresh, the memories yet to be completely processed.

During the lead up to my deployment I read as much as I could on the region. Its geopolitical history and current state. And of course the rapid rise and spread of the scourge that was ISIS. The terror ISIS was inflicting on the innocents of Northern Iraq cannot be described more accurately than to say it was demonic. 

I also read the biblical narrative of Jonah. In fact I was drawn to it over and over. As I write in the book:

Perhaps it was the intensity, the urgency, the utter insanity of a war zone and grasping to make sense of my surroundings, but I was drawn over and over again to Jonah and the story of Nineveh. And as they had many other times in my life, the words of the book seemed simple and unrelated to my spiritual journey. Jonah remained a mythology of my youth, a fantasy of Sunday school. That story that so quickly captures the imagination of a child and insults the intelligence of an adult. The story of a big fish and a wayward prophet sulking in its stomach. And yet, continuously I was drawn back to it, until the Spirit began to unravel Jonah to me, piece by piece, line by line.

I read the book of Jonah maybe 25 times before it started to make sense. As I began to dig into the geopolitical narrative of Jonah's day I began to see modern America. And as I began to get insight into Jonah's heart and motives, I began to see myself, and my brothers and sisters in Christ. Jonah's day was rife with nationalism and his heart was too. He hated Nineveh, they were ethically inferior in his mind. He wanted their destruction, in fact he tried to sabotage God's mercy to achieve just that. 

Today I see an American church clamoring toward isolation, conflating patriotism with nationalism, and resisting the call of mercy toward its neighbors. I see a deep riff forming between "us" and "them". And it breaks my heart. At its root I believe the issue is pride. It is the false belief God is on our side and against those we despise. And we couldn't be more wrong. And the results of our pride and lack of mercy are disastrous.

As I write in the book:

God is not the god of America, He is the God of the universe. Like Jonah, if we forget that God is sovereign over all nations, we make God small, we remake Him into our image. He starts to speak like us, starts to look like us, and starts to hate all the same people we hate.

Throughout the story of Jonah, from his call, to his rebellion, and all the way to his ultimate decision to sit outside of Nineveh and hope for her destruction, we also have God relentlessly pursuing Jonah with grace. My book is about that grace. It's about the true nature of God and how we should and can image that. I hope you will read what I wrote, ingest it line by line, and be fed on the richness of God's word. There is so much truth in the 48 verses of Jonah. And yet most urgently is the cautionary tale of a nation and its prophet choosing nationalism over God's desire for inclusion. Jonah was and is a prophet with an important message. One the modern American church cannot afford to miss.

I'll leave you with this short passage from the book:

The Church of Jesus is so much bigger than the Church in America. And the gospel is not best told in English, nor best represented by our idioms and American personality. The gospel is fuller, richer, more vibrant when spoken in diverse languages and expressed through many cultures. This great flavorful feast, this common meal, with so many savory spices. The worldwide Church has so many beautiful reflections of God’s glory. Like an infinitely sided diamond each of us reflects the light of God’s image in a beautifully unique way. You and I will understand God more fully when we meet Him again through the testimonies of believers from all over the world. That’s a promise. There is absolutely nothing nationalistic about grace. The Gospel gloriously transcends all governments, all nations. It speaks clearly and precisely about the day when we will pass from this world to the next. In heaven any deference or exclusion due to national identity will be locked in the prison of the past.

“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7:9,10)
 

You can read a sample of my book and purchase the electronic version here.

xoxo

Behind Those Blast Walls

My first day at the emergency field hospital just east of Mosul, Iraq was very much like my last day. Mortar strikes on civilians, children bloody and broken, black bags to hold the dead. The slow, solemn walk, cradling a ten year old in my arms, counting the steps to the morgue. Laying someone's son down on cold gravel, reading his name one last time on the death certificate taped to the body bag.

Time of death 18:17.

Patient #855.

I'll never forget the sounds of his dying. The rattling and the gurgling. I'll never forget the songs we sung over him, the prayers strangled by grief and sorrow. The tear stained cheeks and our righteous anger. I'll never forget the faraway look on his precious face. I'll never forget his face. What was left of it.

Many of us were strangers a week before, two days before. Strangers taking care of other strangers. One set from the west, a land of peace and prosperity, one set from northern Iraq, a region ravaged by terrorism and war. And now here we all were, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, translators, construction workers, administrators, and HR reps.  One and all hearts turned inside out and taking care of the dying while other new friends fight for the living in mobile operating theaters a few hundred feet away.

That last night may have been the worst. The toddler with ribs exposed from mortar wounds. 9 children in one day. But there were other days, other nights when I thought my heart might die. The toddlers with their feet shot off. The whole families targeted by drone strikes. The burnt and blackened restaurant patrons, victims of a suicide bomber. One night in particular I carried five children to the morgue. It leaves you breathless, concussed. The mortar of sorrow, a direct shot to the soul.

I'm processing, I'm free bleeding my heart and thoughts here so I don't explode and because I don't have the luxury of denial. I cannot separate my belief in a good and sovereign God and the suffering of innocence. If there is no reconciling the two than I am lost. We all are. Especially Christians, fools to be pitied of all men.

But what we found there, behind those blast walls, with the ceaseless drums of artillery fire, the strangled song of the whine and wail of one ambulance after another, was that hope is not a thing you wish for, it is the only thing afloat in a raging sea of chaos. It is what you hold on to, what holds on to you so you do not go under the relentless waves of grief. And we found that you hold on to each other. And you pray like gasping for your last breath. And you plead with heaven, even when heaven is silent. And you raise your broken hearts together in a pitiful little petition, more whimpers than words, and you beg, unified in grief, "Jesus please....."

The Bible says that suffering produces hope. A comical, sadist thought when the belly is full and the sun of our futures never sets, always shines on our glorious destinies. But when the night never ends, when the morgue is full, when evil seems to be laughing in every shadow, on those nights you somehow see it. Suffering produces hope in this way: when terrorism and hate and the cancer of evil spreads over all that is good with a blight of darkness, the light still does not go out. There is a flame in the hearts of those who have known the love of God. There is a song of praise that is not stalled on their lips, is not silenced. There is a light in the inner places of those who have heard the Word of Life and believed. This is the flower of hope that grows in the garden of souls by heaven's Holy seed. This is the hope that springs eternal, because it has always existed, always will exist apart from the human stain, in the Holy heart of God.

Suffering produces hope in the same way bomb blasts produce the broken bodies of children. It is the inevitability, the cause and the effect of universal laws. But only one will remain. Hope will swallow grief one day because Love will conquer all. But Hope is inevitable in us only when we trust, against our own instincts, in the goodness of God and allow ourselves to be taken deep into our own human frailty, far past vulnerability to the point of despair. And in that wasteland of our utter uselessness, in that wilderness of our unraveling, God is there, He is faithful, He alone, as He has always been, is holding the universe together and simultaneously holds us in the palm of His hand.

That is the only hope: that God holds His own in the palm of His hands while they yet suffer. And that the insatiable hunger of the mouth of Hell cannot devour the ragtag, broken band of believers called the church.

In the picture above I hold in my hand a 50 caliber bullet taken from the body of a pre-teen boy. An ISIS sniper shot him because their's is an ideology of fear. They target the weak, not just because the weak are a low-hanging fruit, but because most of us are weak. Most of us are trying to live our simple lives in peace. ISIS needs capitulation. They need submission. A sniper bullet in the side of a child reminds us the world is not at peace and things are not simple. It reminds us that suffering isn't a concept, that no abstraction paralyzed this young man. It reminds us that we are fragile and vulnerable. It reminds us that to walk the way of love our hearts will be obliterated by suffering.

And so against all hope we hope, that Love will one day conquer all. But not human love. Only God's selfless love, for with it carries His perfect all-powerful justice and the promise and ability to make all things new. Godspeed that day. Especially for the precious children of Mosul.

Jesus. In His Own Words.

The internet is teeming with memes such as this:

And this:

And those images are shared ad nauseum across all social media platforms, especially during political seasons.

I'm guilty. I found this particular image Instagram worthy because it fit in nicely with my take on the words of Jesus.

When we quote someone, be that MLK, the President, or Jesus, the responsible thing to do is make sure the context of that quote is represented accurately. We must also make sure it isn't half of the meaning intended. We all know this, as evidenced by how angry we get when someone twists our words or puts words in our mouths. 

Now, if I am going to quote Jesus because of His authority on an issue, then I am recognizing His authority. Likewise, if I am quoting Jesus to expose the hypocrisy of someone across the political or religious aisle from me, I must remember, while they may yet be hypocrites, the judgement I give will be equal to that which I receive. Jesus did say that, in so many words...

So this man we quote, this moral teacher, this poet and prophet. This hippy, this iconoclast. This itinerant Jewish rabbi. This social justice warrior who didn't suffer the rich or the self-righteous gladly. This egalitarian, this raging temple cleanser. This radical revolutionary. This non-violent, non-white, homeless, healer of the sick, raiser of the dead. This refugee, this middle-eastern man. This Jesus, who is all of those things and more. 

He claimed to be the forgiver of sins. Luke 7:48-49 "Then Jesus said to her, 'Your sins are forgiven'." And Luke 5:20-21, Mark 2:10. And by forgiving sins he reiterated to the masses the need for forgiveness, reiterated that sin separated them from God.

He claimed to pre-exist with God. John 17:5 "And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began." 

He claimed He would return again. Matthew 24:27-30 "So as the lightening comes from the east and flashes to the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man... At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory." And Matthew 25:31-32, Mark 14:61-62.

He claimed to be the only way to eternal life. He didn't just tell people how they could find everlasting life, or deepen their own life experience. He actually claimed to give eternal life himself. John 11:25 "Jesus said to her, 'I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die...'" And also: John 6:40, John 6:47, John 10:28-30

He claimed to be Savior, John 3:14-16. And the Messiah, John 4:26.

He claimed to be the Son of God, Matt 26:63-63. One with the Father, John 10:30. He even claimed to be God himself, John 8:58.

In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote, "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg--or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us."

We will never all agree on every nuances of all the teachings of Jesus. But if we are to quote Him, if we are to claim the authority of His words, we must re-examine all He said, and who he claimed to be and then decide what the weight of those words reveal, what action we might be required to take. 

Jesus loves us but He is not a puppet whose lips we flap subject to our whims and will. He is not a child to be silenced and sent to the corner, a dog to be muzzled and chained. He came to be servant of all but He is still King (Luke 23:1-3, John 18:36-37) and Lord (Luke 2:11). He is not a mouthpiece for our religious or political platform. Jesus stands alone as the Truth, the only truth. He, himself, claimed that, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." He goes on to say in that same audacious, and if true, universe-shaking statement, "No one comes to the Father except through me." John 14:16. 

Jesus is the social justice revolutionary we all want, and He is the door to heaven, the way home, the redeemer and saver of our souls we so desperately need. If we would only believe.

Jesus. In His own words. 

The Night Hides A World, But Reveals A Universe.

I love to read the proverbs of other cultures. I love how it reminds us we are all so much alike. To me there is something very compelling, very salt of the earth about the oral tradition of a phrase that has stood the test of so many generations, that has survived the revisionists and the post modernists and the younger generations chaffing under the disciplines of their elders, throwing off the shackles of tradition. It speaks of course to a proverb's practical wisdom that so many lips for so long have uttered the phrases and felt completely justified if not obligated to do so. Today I have been reading Iranian proverbs and poetry.

The main text of poster is an Iranian proverb means: "Our cow doesn't milk, but pisses plenty", that describing a person who tends to make mess of things, rather than making them right.

These Iranian proverbs range from the practical:

Habits are first cobwebs, then cables.

You can’t push on a rope.

The joy of finding something is often worth more than what is found.

The larger a man's roof the more snow it collects. 

Standard fare really, similar sentiments found in every language, every culture under the sun. A testament to their universal truth. Then the slightly more abstracted, at least if nothing else by the translations:

A drowning man is not troubled by rain.

Every man is the king of his own beard.

He who has been bitten by a snake fears a piece of string.

The lion (and the lioness fellas) is most handsome when looking for food.

But there are also the romantic ones. I like these best:

The loveliest of faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy. 

Only a heart can find the way to another heart.

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous. 

A woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea. 

Then there are those that bridge the gap between proverb and poetry, where the best of Persian culture begins to bleed through:

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky... Finally, to take a step without feet.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you..

But it is the Persian poets that I believe really capture the essence of the heart of the Iranian people. Such passion and such reckless abandon to it. Hafiz has always been my favorite. He was a master of love poetry:

...Your love 

Should never be offered to the mouth of a 

Stranger, 

Only to someone 

Who has the valor and daring 

To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife 

Then weave them into a blanket 

To protect you...

and...

...One regret, dear, 

That I am determined not to have 

When I am lying on my deathbed 

Is that 

I did not kiss you enough.... 

and the sensuous and heady..

Lean your sweet neck and mouth 

Out of that dark nest where you hide, 

I will pour effulgence into your mind. 

Artist's rendering of the most famous Persian poet Hafiz.

Hafiz also wrote about our relationship to God with such unapologetic romance and passion. The way that relationship should be. Intoxicated by the Spirit:


I am a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through.....listen to this music.

I am happy even before I have reason. I am full of light even before the sky can greet the sun or moon. Dear companions, we have been in love with God for so very, very long; what can we now do but forever dance?

This place where you are right now

God circled on a map for you

Wherever your eyes and arms and heart can move 

Against the earth and sky,

The Beloved has bowed there – 

Our Beloved has bowed there knowing 

You were coming

But my all time favorite has always been this one. To me it speaks about the surpassing joy that comes from knowing God, of resting in the finished work of Grace, of letting go and surrendering to the mysterious wonder of His sacrificial, unconditional, never ending love.

What is the difference between your experience of existence and that of a saint? The saint knows that the spiritual path is a sublime chess game with God and that the Beloved has just made such a fantastic move that the saint is now continually tripping over joy and bursting out in laughter and saying, I surrender! Whereas, my dear, I am afraid you still think you have a thousand serious moves.


I do not agree with some of Hafiz's philosophy, and he has certainly been mistranslated as have all poets. But he consistently touched this truth. That the heart of man and the heart of God have a gravity, a convergent trajectory. That we are made for this collision, and that we should stop resisting the pull. As Hafiz would say..

Just sit there 

Just sit there right now

Don't do a thing

Just rest

For your separation from God 

Is the hardest work in this world

For NKA...

Invisible Keepsakes.

***Warning***

This is the blog where I geek out about:

But before I bore you, there is a particular phenomena occurring in those giant retail bookstores that I find most depressing. It is the encroachment into and onto the sovereign shelf space known unilaterally as: Poetry Section.

Really?

To the left it's the African-American Literature section compromised mostly of Harlequinesque paperbacks and on the right the Western section, both whose ranks are apparently bulging with readership as they strangle poor poetry out of its pitiful existence.

"Nobody writes bigger than Frank Roderus." Apparently Mr. Roderus gets paid by the page.

But the enemies from without are much less insidious, much less subtle than the enemy within. For within the very ranks of poetry books themselves come other cumbersome beasts. The bloated poetry anthology, the poetry writing and reading guides (for dummies), the little faux-gilded gift books of poetry, and of course the banal and bland critical essays.

I don't mean to be callous, but is Poetry on the top of the average "dummy's" to-do list?

And if that is not enough, the Classics section, which has apparently been relegated nameless, sulks alongside the few remaining slender volumes of poetry, banished from the school reading lists, into oblivion; The Iliad, Ulysses, most of Shakespeare's plays, gathering dust a few feet from Bukowski and Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson, her poems unpublished until her death, live on, for now...

Of course among the other poetry survivors are the recent Poet Laureates, hanging on by the skin of their Chardonnay stained teeth, and any famous actor with a rhyming dictionary and a penchant for catharsis, and any singer or musician with a surplus of lyrics. There will always be the annotated Poe's Raven in a cool teen goth friendly font collectors edition and the obligatory Beat poets with their calculated decadence, bankable rebellion.

"Beat Poets" is not an invitation to cause bodily harm to a bard. Above, one of the aforementioned little faux-gilded gift books of poetry.

Thomas, Cummings, Hughes; they soldier bravely on. But fallen is Miss Brooks and noble Hopkins, even the every man's friend Frost has gotten the cold shoulder, living out his life in ignominy on the bargain table between last year's calender of crazy (with a backward z) cats and a hip-hopped up cookbook called "Grillin' and Chillin'."

Party's over, Mr. Frost.

Of course near the registers there are still the packs of refrigerator magnets that offer the midnight snacker the convenience of pouring out their unrequited longings on the fridge front, that is as long as the heart's vocabulary is less than 500 words + punctuation.

It's as if, like Ogden Nash said, "Poets aren't very useful. Because they aren't consumeful or very produceful." But great poets are very produceful! Wallace Stevens defends the poet, calls him the "Priest of the invisible." Dylan Thomas said the poet reveals that "your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own."

Dylan Thomas in the "Poet's Pose". Ever lingering, ever pensive, ever pale.

Matthew Arnold described great poetry as "the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things." Of it Keats proclaimed "Poetry should surprise—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance." Shelly echoes this in A Defence of Poetry (1840). "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

Perennial lingerer? Pensive? Pale? Yep. Percy Blythe Shelley passes the poet test.

Carl Sandburg in Poetry Considered waxes poetic about, well, poetry. "Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance."

No disrespect to the venerable Mr. Sandburg, but this may in fact be where rainbows come from.

On writing poetry Emily Dickinson said "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." And "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting," is how Robert Frost defines it. He says "A poem begins with a lump in the throat." And I suppose, if it's a good poem, ends with a lump in ours.

Savagechickens.com is so awesome I just can't stand it.

Certainly poetry can be priggish, ostentatious, condescending and esoteric. But great poems are written in the universal language in which Christopher Fry says "man explores his own amazement." T.S Eliot wrote, "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." And though great poems need not be simple, they need not be complex for their own sake. They need only be the "best words saying the very best things" as Coleridge pleaded.

Poetry then, in the simplest definition is, as Thomas Gray said, "the thoughts that breathe, and words that burn." "It is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words," according to the poet of the path less traveled. Gwendolyn Brooks condensed it to this: "Poetry is life distilled."

Ms. Brooks caught in the very act! And failing gloriously the poet's test! Her poem "The Bean Eaters" is one of my favorites, one I wish I'd written.

Perhaps though the English poet Robert Browning best puts his finger on the eternal nature of the poem, poetry writing and the spiritual kinship it engenders, as we, made in our Creator's image, imitate God, "the perfect poet, Who in His person acts His own creations."