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.
When your wallet's fat and full, when the light, the weather, the very timbre and tenor of the day defies description. When laughter is your constant companion, and gravity has no claim on you as you float from place to place....it's on those days when you say things like...I think I'll go to my favorite restaurant, order my most favorite meal, and then of course the decadence of some dark chocolate dessert chased by darker espresso!
But there are other days. Empty pocket days, dead channel days, static on the airwaves kinda gray days when you'll eat anything anyone offers, as long as it's free....just to quiet the rumbling and the nausea...just to be done with it already.
And so it with other things...the days when love is worth the wait, worth any price. When your list of non-negotiables is long and sacred and without a shadow of compromise. When your heart is happy to be held in His hands and your eyes are fixed on things above. Heady days, days of looking at yourself straight on in the mirror, days of self respect and contentment. Days when she might be about to turn the corner, but even if she's not, days of peace and patience and the lingering of longing and the promise of love.
Ah, but there are other days....the dead letter days, free-bleed nights, when a hand to hold is more preferable than oxygen, when a hug could save your life...it's on those days when it would be so easy to make some concessions...so easy to tell yourself that you've deluded yourself with romantic notions, adolescent and pathetic. It's on those days when the temptation to give your heart away is greatest that you have to rage against that urge the fiercest....for if you are His than your heart is His and only His to give....
And He who made you...well he knows where you fit...He knows who is your other half...the last piece to the puzzle of you...the picture finally coming into focus....
Thanks to J- for opening a window this morning and letting hope back in...hope you find that perfect seashell...or that someone perfect finds it for you...
And to everyone one else....if anyone's out there....if You can trust Father with your soul for all eternity....well than trusting Him with your heart for just one lifetime is nothing too hard.
And if I might be so bold....might be allowed one moment of gratuitous self-promotion....if you're out there....I'm waiting....empty pockets and notebooks full of poems....a little more lost in Him....on a day like today...
We live in the fear of being found out. Of being unmasked, of having our secrets spilled, our truth held to the light and exposed for the thin, counterfeit it is. It could be the things we do in secret, the things we hate, but feel compelled to do. It might be the shame of failures that haunt us, that visit us at the most inopportune times and steal our joy. It might be the self-loathing that is borne of years of insecurity or the gray fog of depression that never lifts (and the sunny smile we wear to hide it)......it might be all of these and more.....
And if this were our lot in life.....to struggle alone against the onslaught of so much sorrow....well then I'd of pulled the trigger a long time ago....I'd of run my Jeep into a concrete embankment.....
But as Isaiah prophesied "He was lifted up even though many who were appalled at him. His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and His form marred beyond human likeness.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Men hid their faces from Him, He was despised.
But yet still He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows. He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and yet His Father laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth; He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth."
Sorrow, shame, self-hate, addiction, depression, disappointment, and despair were nailed into the cross....through the tender wrists of Jesus. And because of that I adore Him.
And because He never said a word, because though He was innocent he did not speak up and cast the blame where it was due...on me.....He is my hero.
And because He ripped the mask off of hell and death and the grave. Because he exposed the philosophies of men for the counterfeits they were. Because He allowed Himself to be stripped bare.....I am a little braver. I can face the day.
This past April my friend Sam and I traveled to D.C. for an IJM conference. We spent time in and around the capitol, stood where MLK gave his "I have a dream" speech, walked the solemn, heart rending halls of the Holocaust Memorial, and criss-crossed the city on subways and shuttle buses. On the walls of the public transit vehicles were PSAs and other messages on every subject from littering to child abuse. One campaign had quotes from school children and one particular quote from a fifth grader named Carolyn Keshap broke my heart as well as blowing my mind. She said:
"I stare at the fire. It is dimming. Now it is nothing. I light it again. I wish it were that easy for me to restart my life. Considering how many people I have hurt."
Wow......
I do not know what "hurt" this little girl thinks she has perpetrated on others, only that the perfect poetry and the emotional immensity of her words left me breathless.
Today as I sat far from D.C, far removed from the fifth grade, and on the other side of the gender divide, I conjured Miss Keshap's words, tried to wrap my clumsy mind around the colossal significance of them. And I was reminded that children often blame themselves for the crimes of others. That abused children will many times assume that they are being repaid for their own disobedience or failures or even that they should expect the abuse because of their lack of worth. I know these syndromes have been documented in enough books to fill a small library, but those words, on a bus, written by a fifth grader, said more in that small space, then a thousand libraries full of textbooks written by PhDs. And not just that, but her words articulated the cry of so many devastated hearts of people of every age, the need for approval, acceptance and love.Not sure what to say but that I hope Carolyn has somebody to tell her she's beautiful and full of worth and wonder. And I hope she has gotten over her self-loathing and will believe them when they tell her. But more than anything I hope she does get to start again, born anew, into the family of God by the sacrifice of the Son, adopted by the Spirit and sealed for all time.
Faith is a much maligned concept. For the Marxist it's the delivery system of the opiate of the masses. For the Scientist it is that bothersome admittance "we don't know" or at very best the ongoing challenge to prove everything. For the Theist it is in some form or another, that way in which a soul touches god. Many a Christian sermon (and certainly many non-christian ones) have been preached on the subject, for better or worse, trying to capture that element of knowing that transcends belief, for without faith the scripture tells us, it is impossible to please God.
We live in a modern world, full of miracles of medicine and marvels of technology. It has caused a certain level of "sophistication" that makes modern man much less susceptible to un-skeptical belief. Think of a prophet four thousand years ago seeing his predecessor taken up into the air in a chariot of fire and then put that in the modern context of the many types of aircraft that actually to do just that. With a little imagination most of the miracles of the bible can, at least on the surface be somewhat explained away by rational if not modern conventions. And on the converse, many of the mechanizations of modern society would seem like miracles to even the great fathers of our faith.
India has been so much in my thoughts this month. Last night as I was driving home from work a little before midnight, I thought about a young boy I met one night at a believer's meeting. After the service many of the youth came forward for prayer, most wanting some measure of supernatural ability to pass their exams or for divine favor with instructors or school administrators. (One cannot overstate the borderline obsession in Indian society with excelling in school. It is the one road out of poverty, that one chance to escape the wheel of fate. And as I so painfully learned, the suicide rate among teenagers is spiraling upward as those pressures increase in light of emergent Indian middle class.) But other prayer requests were for healing, some for themselves or for a family member. After the long line dwindled to a few stragglers a woman approached me with her son. They had not been at the meeting but had been told someone was praying for the sick.
The young boy, barely a teen, had a look of pain mingled with apprehension on his feverish face. He was holding a bandaged hand upward in his other hand. He grimaced with every step. The "bandage" looked more like he was holding a fistful of trash in his little hand. The dirty, yellowed tatters taped together in a most distressing fashion. I carefully removed the bandage exposing a festering cut on his thumb. The original gash probably a quarter of an inch had blossomed into a infected gouge almost four times that size. The boy was worried sick and hot all over. I went to my room and grabbed an anti-bacterial wipe, a bandage and some triple anti-biotic cream. I gently wiped his hand clean and then put the cream on with a clean bandage and told them to come back the next day. I said a prayer for the boy as I returned the items to my room.
The next night the boy was back and we repeated the careful process of unwrapping his damaged thumb. There, after 24 hours, was a tiny cut, mostly healed. The boys fever was gone and the look of wild wonder and incredulous awe on his face was only eclipsed by his relief and thankfulness. I reapplied more cream and a fresh bandage and never saw him again. Until last night that is, when his little face popped into my tired brain and the Holy Spirit showed me what I had missed from the whole incident.
Jesus said unless you become like a child you won't enter the Kingdom, that the Kingdom belongs to such as these. In our modern "sophistication" we lack the ability to be amazed by God. We lack that wonder and awe that transposes the mundane into the sacred. I have long since ceased to be impressed by the internal combustion engine, I take for granted the impossibility of space travel, I can call or email anyone in the world instantaneously and I don't give it a second thought. But that young Indian boy, who was suffering needlessly, experienced a tiny bit of modern nicety and was blown straight away.
I have heard many a Christian lament the lack of miracles in the modern church, heard them blame the "ye of little faiths" that populate the pews in the 21st century. And I share their frustration. But it may just be that our faith has become so "sophisticated", so grown up, that we can't see the many miracles all around us. The perpetual miracles of sunrises and sunsets, the incredible and infinitely practical force of gravity, the all surpassing miracle of salvation. I believe we are so bored by our ease and excess, so inoculated by advancement, we can't see the wonderment of the infinite in our midst. And when we are not thankful for the little miracles, when we hold a sense of entitlement to them, it hardens our hearts, steals our awe.
We must become like little children again if we ever hope to see both the miraculous we long for and the very face of God. For it is the innocent of heart that see God. The scripture tells us that it is the Holy Spirit in side of believers that cries out Abba, literally, Daddy. It is the indwelling Spirit then, in this sense, that allows us to see everything through the filter of this impossibly intimate paternal relationship. Everything, from sunsets to space travel becomes a function of that intimacy, the lens of our perpetual understanding is focused by it. We are given back our awe, restored of our innocence by the Spirit of adoption, literally, born again.
