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

This In-Between Month, (Later On) Day 25: Heals As It Cuts

I got up earlier than I wanted to go to the DMV as my driver's license will expire while I am in Haiti. The line was wrapped around the back of the building when I arrived and I braced myself for a long morning of waiting. Waiting without coffee. But the entire process is now automated. It took me 3 minutes. I got back to my rental car before my coffee cooled. Winning!

But yet, for whatever reason, I was one of two people to use the automated machine. The waiting room was to overflowing capacity with disgruntled drivers, faces contorted in disgust. One man ranted how all this technology was some conspiracy of paper conservation at taxpayer expense. He said this, holding ticket number one million forty-five out of about a billion and was still mumbling under his breath as I danced joyfully out the door. Well, I felt like dancing.

Now at a coffee shoppe I am lost in the words of Flannery O'Connor. If I have never mentioned her to you before I am sorry. I would quote her here but everything she said or wrote should be quoted. Get thee to a bookstore, a computer, or the library and read her. The Habit of Being is a collection of her letters. That's a good place to start. And Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose is great too. Her fiction is the best of American Southern gothic. Full of freaks and Jesus and deep mystery and eternal truth. She has the kind of razor wit and effortless grace that heals as it cuts. I seriously want to just quote her for an hour. I cannot find one phrase that rises above the rest when they all fly so high. For every writer out there, please, please read what she has to say about writing. She is a master and her wisdom is invaluable to your craft. To the Christian and the truth seeker she speaks with a clarity and a poetry that seers into the soul. To the reader and lover of fiction she captures in both narrative and dialogue that which is elementally human having been twisted by misery, wrung through the ringer of life and having resisted all their days Grace. She shows us the grotesque we will become without Christ. Wow. 

My driver's license will be mailed to my parents in 14 days. I will have been in Haiti for a week and a half by then. Some of the people in line with me this morning may still be sitting in the purgatory of the DMV waiting room. God help them.

Anyway, I finally found some quotes by the irrepressible Miss O'Connor that I'd like to share. Quotes about writing. Enjoy!

“The serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature for his starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable character. Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not. Then, too, any character in a serious novel is supposed to carry a burden of meaning larger than himself. The novelist doesn't write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, the total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama. ” 

― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored."  

― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

This In-Between Month, Day 25: Our Own Shadows

Sometimes I can be my own worst enemy. I am certainly my hardest, most unrelenting critic. If I took the tone with you that my inner voice takes with me, well you would not be my friend. Blame personality type or order of birth but I hold myself to an impossible standard. And when I fail, as I always do, as I always will in light of unattainable perfection, I have a hard time forgiving myself. 

Don't get me wrong, there are many things I fail at that are your garden variety failures. Ones so common and ordinary as to be too pathetically boring to admit here, but even those things, maybe especially those things, raise my inner voice's ire and I take a good tongue lashing.

And what I have found, wherever I go, is that most of us, in one way or another, are the same way. And what is worse is that we put our critical voice into God's mouth. And many times in my experience, people don't even realize it.

As I lay in bed last night, sleepless, restless, melancholy to the point of morose, a little bird of thought flew headlong into the little window of my soul. "When we face the sunlight we cannot see our own shadows." And in the darkness of that room, with darker thoughts, that little flash of light fluttering, that little thud and shudder and chirp of a truth reminded me this:

I must stare into the face of Jesus whose beautiful radiance will devour my shadows. And the more I am consumed by His loveliness and His light the less I will think of me, my darkness, my ugliness. And the more I bathe in the glow of His perfection the more I realize I need not even try to be something I am not and cannot ever be. What I can be, is a vessel, or maybe a cup, or probably more likely a shot glass to carry His light and His love and His utter perfection to the world. Anything else will leave me mired in self-loathing and failure. So I give up (again) on being perfect. And though I may be found muttering "shut up" to myself, or even screaming it now and then, well, I refuse to listen to that voice of condemnation any longer, for in Christ there is no more of that nastiness. I choose to believe what scripture says about me, namely that I am unconditionally loved and that His grace is made perfect in my weakness, not in my mock perfection.

Yup. Amen.

Grace and a Sheet of Glass.

The paper, folded, sweat bleached and poorly printed read:

Funerailles de Mr. Andre Eliphate

Ne le mai 1961

Decede le 22 Septembre 2012 a l'age de 51 ans

At least that's what it appeared to read, the legacy of a man already fading for want of ink. And then underneath there was a picture, in decorated uniform, blurred beyond recognition, and an epitaph:

"Tout vit, tout naitre, tout perisse"

"Everything lives, everything born, all perish." But what have we learned. Only what we already know. The order of service on the back does not tell us how to live life, or better yet avoid death, to be unborn. It proffers the names of choral groups and the arrangements they will sing. Pays honor to the speakers, speaking to honor the deceased, who will themselves die one day. The snake with its tail in its mouth. Oh, this pitiful little piece of ephemera, maybe it will survive, longer than the man. Pressed between pages in an album celebrating his life only to be shelved and shrouded in dust.  

But this is not the man, this paper. Anymore than the script on it's back is the funeral. He lived and loved and raised 7 children. He protected his community from violence until gang members shot him for stopping their thieving in broad daylight of a woman selling mangoes in the market. He was the father of my friend Alfedo, who speaks 7 languages and works tirelessly without complaining at every task put before him. He will be missed like all good men by his family and friends. Such is the nature of these things. 

But my God the funeral. 

A thousand mourners packed and then overflowing out of a flesh coloured concrete church with one small humble cement cross at its peak. I stood at the door, straining to see Alfedo, straining to comprehend the Creole songs and eulogy. But nothing said or sung was of any importance. Grief was the only language spoken today, and of a sort I have never heard nor seen. As I stood there concussed by the screams all my words for what I was hearing failed me. A banshee's wail, an ambulance siren. I would welcome either in the casket black night over what I heard today. Tortured anguish, hopeless desperation, convulsive sorrow....words cannot touch what I saw. Women in white dresses flailing, flung down to the dirt floor by grief. Rolled and shook and throttled by grief. Seizurred and spun and batted about by so great a grief that those who tried to restrain them could barely do so. Woman after woman carried out of the little church, white dresses ripped and stained and faces soaked with sweat and tears, their screams unabated their arms and legs lurching in every direction, bent at impossible angles.

The bible talks about groanings words cannot utter. I have heard these things today. And even the occasional comprehendable "Why! Why!" was so strangled by grief as to be beyond language. Nothing ever spoken could touch the despair and gravity of those groanings. I wanted to cover the ears of the children, to cover the ears of those women. No one should ever make these noises, have to hear these noises. 

I stood outside in the Haitian sun. Reeling, trying to make sense of such sorrow. The women who had been carried out now whimpered in the courtyard of the church. They sat sprawled on the ground, shivering with exhaustion. Across the street a bar was opening. Patrons laughing, drinking beer and rum not 50 feet from the mourners. One group drinking away their own grief and the other having drunk to the dregs of sorrow's sourest cup. Next door to the bar a little shop called "Le Sange de Jezi Cosmetiques". The Blood of Jesus Cosmetics. Only in Haiti. The irony as the recession of the corpse commences. A white casket cradled in uniformed arms. Inside a Father, a friend, a brother and son, a fellow officer- the mortician's art, the embalming perfume, the make-up. And the blood of Jesus, the covering of the Christian, a soul snow white forever. Le Sange de Jezi Cosmetiques.

Alfedo approaches. Vacant-eyed and asleep on his feet. I embrace him, pray for him as tears soak our shirts. And then he too recedes. Into the throng of mourners. I catch my reflection in a glass surface; hair sun bleached and wind-whipped, face gaunt with sadness, eyes red and weary and wasted looking. And I realize I am seeing my reflection in the window of the hearse. Grace and a sheet of glass....

The national radio programs called for manifestations around Port-au-Prince today. Nothing new. This time it's Aristide holdovers protesting President Martelly. These things rarely go well. Lots of stuff gets set on fire and people get busted up real bad. There was no sign of any of it though, just a few spray can scrawls on crumbling walls that proclaimed Aristide president for life. They would have seemed silly today, small and insignificant against the backdrop of such intense suffering and pain. We drove back to Titenyan in silence. Everyone of us, alone with our thoughts, thinking of loved ones lost and those we would be crushed to lose. I hope everyone of the guys went home and hugged their kids, their wives. Called up their closest friends. I am thinking of my son and also of my beautiful muse. They both seem a million miles away. Oh what I would give for their hugs right now.