So I’m sitting here in the Coffee Cottage waiting for God to show up and provide me a way to get to Charlotte, NC where I think I’m supposed to meet somebody.
So far...no ticket.
30 April 2008
05 April 2008
You're a Word from Heaven
As a birthday gift, Rebekah brought me up to Seattle to see an artist I am really digging these days named Jason Upton (http://www.jasonupton.net/). Jason is part of what some people are calling prophetic worship, which I guess is as good a name as any. But if you haven’t heard him before...DO. His style is to linger on a few phrases, but ruminate on these words over and over again as if in meditation – it can be very, very powerful even on a CD and we’ve been listening to his stuff in our morning prayer time at work for something like the last nine months or so.
But live...that’s a different experience entirely.
I was totally blown away by the power of the Spirit, the engagement of he audience, and the humility of the singer. The dude is way down to earth and very centered. But he’s also aware of the gift he has, and the power and authority he wields. 3 – I thought about you a lot there. You would have loved it. The man’s talent, his passion and his heart are so akin to the things you’ve spoken about, to you own deep heart. I deeply wish you had been there or get to see him somewhere somewhere else.
Anyway, on the point of this post. The most powerful song in the set for me was a song called Sons and Daughters. The words go something like this:
Do you know you’re a Word from Heaven?
Do you know you’re a Child of God?
Do you really know?
Every word sent down from Heaven
Cannot go back up until it’s succeeded
In what it’s meant to do.
Sons and Daughters of the Living God
Sons and Daughters of the Living God
Sons and Daughters of the Living God
You
It’s a beautiful song (check it out) and singing it there with all these people was working deep magic on my heart. Deep, deep magic.
I‘ve certainly heard this idea before, the idea of how we’re princes and princesses, so I don’t mean to say that this concert suddenly made it click for me, it’s not really like that. No, the idea is one that is both too large to get all at once, and also too Old World for the mind of this modern American. And yet, as the sprouts of that seed slowly rise from the soil of my heart, beginning to show fresh new buds, I think it may be one of the most profound and powerful concepts I’ve ever come to wrestle with.
This concept is at the deepest foundation of many things that I’ve been working through in the last couple of years. From one angle it’s a profound and almost ungraspable statement of God’s love and His commitment to us. We’re not his subjects, or his pets, nor even his friends, we’re His family. And by extension family to one another. Again – of course I’ve heard that before and even said it to others, but the deep strength of that reality is hard for me to really get my hands around. From another angle though it speaks of our own strength and glory, our own royalty as it were and that cryptic passage in Hebrews about all creation groaning for the moment we come to realize who we are...that passage whispers of realities that I am simply unable to understand.
What does it really mean to say that I am an emissary of God? A son of the king on a mission to broker Heaven to this shattered and sick world? As an American, we can sometimes get a tiny glimpse of this when we travel to certain places overseas. Depending where you go, Americans are loved or hated, but we are always noticed. In most places around the world, we represent something that we are generally unable to perceive ourselves. In Kenya for instance, there was a basic assumption that I was wealthy and almost everybody there sort of politely hoped/suggested that I might share some of that wealth with them. At the time, I often resented the situation. I was in fact NOT wealthy, I was a barely-getting-by college student and some people were quite obviously sucking up in order to get something; something I didn’t have. But in hindsight, I’ve realized something – it was all very relative. My just-enough-to-survive budget of about $800/mo was like two or three YEARS of wages to most of them. While I didn’t FEEL wealthy, the objective truth was that I was way, way better off than almost anybody I met. What would I have done differently if I had that in my mind? I don’t know to be honest. But there is something there that I’m trying to understand. Something about being a representative of a higher reality and the authority that goes with that. I’m wondering to what degree I can (or should) write checks that draw on Heaven’s bank, my father’s expense account as it were. Yes, I’d hate for such a check to bounce, but how much more I fear the possibility that I have this unending resource gathering dust on my unexplored desk in the embassy. Not just a resource that I’m authorized to use, but one I’ve been commissioned to use.
A Word from Heaven?
A child of God?
Do I know?
Do I really know?
But live...that’s a different experience entirely.
I was totally blown away by the power of the Spirit, the engagement of he audience, and the humility of the singer. The dude is way down to earth and very centered. But he’s also aware of the gift he has, and the power and authority he wields. 3 – I thought about you a lot there. You would have loved it. The man’s talent, his passion and his heart are so akin to the things you’ve spoken about, to you own deep heart. I deeply wish you had been there or get to see him somewhere somewhere else.
Anyway, on the point of this post. The most powerful song in the set for me was a song called Sons and Daughters. The words go something like this:
Do you know you’re a Word from Heaven?
Do you know you’re a Child of God?
Do you really know?
Every word sent down from Heaven
Cannot go back up until it’s succeeded
In what it’s meant to do.
Sons and Daughters of the Living God
Sons and Daughters of the Living God
Sons and Daughters of the Living God
You
It’s a beautiful song (check it out) and singing it there with all these people was working deep magic on my heart. Deep, deep magic.
I‘ve certainly heard this idea before, the idea of how we’re princes and princesses, so I don’t mean to say that this concert suddenly made it click for me, it’s not really like that. No, the idea is one that is both too large to get all at once, and also too Old World for the mind of this modern American. And yet, as the sprouts of that seed slowly rise from the soil of my heart, beginning to show fresh new buds, I think it may be one of the most profound and powerful concepts I’ve ever come to wrestle with.
This concept is at the deepest foundation of many things that I’ve been working through in the last couple of years. From one angle it’s a profound and almost ungraspable statement of God’s love and His commitment to us. We’re not his subjects, or his pets, nor even his friends, we’re His family. And by extension family to one another. Again – of course I’ve heard that before and even said it to others, but the deep strength of that reality is hard for me to really get my hands around. From another angle though it speaks of our own strength and glory, our own royalty as it were and that cryptic passage in Hebrews about all creation groaning for the moment we come to realize who we are...that passage whispers of realities that I am simply unable to understand.
What does it really mean to say that I am an emissary of God? A son of the king on a mission to broker Heaven to this shattered and sick world? As an American, we can sometimes get a tiny glimpse of this when we travel to certain places overseas. Depending where you go, Americans are loved or hated, but we are always noticed. In most places around the world, we represent something that we are generally unable to perceive ourselves. In Kenya for instance, there was a basic assumption that I was wealthy and almost everybody there sort of politely hoped/suggested that I might share some of that wealth with them. At the time, I often resented the situation. I was in fact NOT wealthy, I was a barely-getting-by college student and some people were quite obviously sucking up in order to get something; something I didn’t have. But in hindsight, I’ve realized something – it was all very relative. My just-enough-to-survive budget of about $800/mo was like two or three YEARS of wages to most of them. While I didn’t FEEL wealthy, the objective truth was that I was way, way better off than almost anybody I met. What would I have done differently if I had that in my mind? I don’t know to be honest. But there is something there that I’m trying to understand. Something about being a representative of a higher reality and the authority that goes with that. I’m wondering to what degree I can (or should) write checks that draw on Heaven’s bank, my father’s expense account as it were. Yes, I’d hate for such a check to bounce, but how much more I fear the possibility that I have this unending resource gathering dust on my unexplored desk in the embassy. Not just a resource that I’m authorized to use, but one I’ve been commissioned to use.
A Word from Heaven?
A child of God?
Do I know?
Do I really know?
01 April 2008
'Show me side-to-side...'
I think I had a genuine epiphany today.
I’ve mentioned here that a little over a year ago I had God amend my ‘name.’ Prior to our 2007 Advanced camp God had been talking to me a lot about my nature as a warrior, the symbol of which (no mystery) was a sword. But as we drove home form that camp he gave me a new picture: a sword with a snake wrapped around it. The image was specifically reminiscent of the cadducus(sp?) - you know, the symbol you see on the sides of ambulances and stuff. (Not the two snakes with wings which is the symbol for Hermes, the God of magic, but the single snake on the staff...like Moses lifted up in the desert) Anyway, the name was amended to include the aspect of being a healer and I had the sense that he was speaking specifically of physical healing as opposed to mental or spiritual healing, and specifically miraculous healing as opposed to learning to be an MD.
That journey, of pursuing that gift, learning about it, experimenting with it, has been many things: sometimes exhilarating, often frustrating, scary, disappointing...really just about every emotion possible including totally incongruous emotions like ennui and anger. But today’s epiphany wasn’t about any particular emotion but rather a sudden realization about the range of emotions. Specifically it was a sudden awareness of how powerful a topic it is, how disruptive it can be even in conversation to say nothing for practice. Miraculous healing can be incredibly polarizing as it forces a number of issues that can otherwise lay dormant in people’s lives. For example many folks are happy to pray that the doctor who is about to gut them has steady hands, but to pray that God would simply remove their gallstones freaks them out. At another level, some folks are willing to believe that a man in China had his blind-from-birth vision restored, but can’t bring themselves to seek prayer for their own near-sightedness.
Healing seems unique in that it demands attention and response in a way that not even prophecy does. For the healer, healing also carries a power and mystery with it that no other manifestation seems to. Aimee Semple Macpherson (sp?) apparently wanted to be a preacher, but when her healing ministry broke out it became almost impossible. People didn’t want to hear her speak about Jesus or salvation, they wanted to walk.
Anyway, I’m drifting...
Parallel to the healing quest, was a far calmer, and in that way less dramatic, lesson about rest. God has been speaking and teaching and showing me how to rest in Him, how to abide in Him. And I got to tell you, it is not something that comes naturally to me. I tend to be pretty gogogo and I really have to fight to make rest happen (how ironic is that). And yet I’ve come to the deep seated conclusion that it is something I MUST have. I can no longer tolerate long seasons without a DAWG day. And opposite the often confusing walk toward healing, the walk toward rest has been...well...restful. I’ve gained so much peace at times I really needed it, confidence in God’s love, and a dramatic new confidence in my ability to hear God speak to me...which is almost impossible to overstate in importance.
And that was part two of the epiphany. Seeing this other track, this parallel lesson that has been unfolding in my life over roughly the same season and how different the two experiences have been.
But the real punch in the moment was in seeing how they fit together.
As Mr. Miagi points out, the first lesson in most every martial art is how to keep your balance. In short, all the activity of blocking and striking will quickly throw you way off balance and make you profoundly vulnerable, if you fail to keep your feet under you. What he Quakers call ‘centering’ is the spiritual equivalent to ‘first learn stay dry.’ Learning how to quiet my spirit, how to retreat to what Jesus and David call the Secret Place is like learning how to take a deep earth stance...where I become the immovable rock that you will break yourself upon. Learning to snap to that secret place as a matter of habit, and to sense when balance is being lost or threatened, that’s like basic footwork.
Without that deep, deep lesson of peace and abiding, healing will be too much for me to bear emotionally or spiritually. It will do more harm than good by putting me in a position I’m not ready to handle.
I need to learn silence first.
Now that’s not to say, in any way, that I’m giving up or even slowing in my quest for that particular gift – I know what God told me and I don’t doubt that call in the slightest (not to mention, I said the experience has been often frustrating, not always frustrating. I’ve seen some pretty incredible things this last year...) But I can see right now that like most things, this is a process and I have confidence in my teacher. Ninja Phil had a few things under his black belt that he hinted at from time to time. Secret ninja techniques that he said we simply weren’t ready for. The thing is, I totally get it in that context. Even in the brief time I studied there I learned things that I would not share with just anybody and as we talk about the supernatural, how much more true might that be? I’m not leaning toward the occult/gnostic sense of God where secret knowledge becomes the goal, but I am aware that jut reading about healing has revealed pats of me that I was surprised to find; a part that lusted simply for the power of it all, a part that sought the recognition or validation, a part that was willing to judge who deserved what healing and when...nasty, petty, awful parts of me that might never have been brought to light in any other context, or at least not shown in such sharp relief.
But the thing is that now I’m OK to let it all play out in God’s time party because I suddenly see what He’s been doing.
I had that moment where I turn from the sensei in frustration, “I’m going home!” and he’s like “Chris-san! Show me ‘paint the fence’” and all of a sudden I see that He’s been teaching me all along.
I’ve mentioned here that a little over a year ago I had God amend my ‘name.’ Prior to our 2007 Advanced camp God had been talking to me a lot about my nature as a warrior, the symbol of which (no mystery) was a sword. But as we drove home form that camp he gave me a new picture: a sword with a snake wrapped around it. The image was specifically reminiscent of the cadducus(sp?) - you know, the symbol you see on the sides of ambulances and stuff. (Not the two snakes with wings which is the symbol for Hermes, the God of magic, but the single snake on the staff...like Moses lifted up in the desert) Anyway, the name was amended to include the aspect of being a healer and I had the sense that he was speaking specifically of physical healing as opposed to mental or spiritual healing, and specifically miraculous healing as opposed to learning to be an MD.
That journey, of pursuing that gift, learning about it, experimenting with it, has been many things: sometimes exhilarating, often frustrating, scary, disappointing...really just about every emotion possible including totally incongruous emotions like ennui and anger. But today’s epiphany wasn’t about any particular emotion but rather a sudden realization about the range of emotions. Specifically it was a sudden awareness of how powerful a topic it is, how disruptive it can be even in conversation to say nothing for practice. Miraculous healing can be incredibly polarizing as it forces a number of issues that can otherwise lay dormant in people’s lives. For example many folks are happy to pray that the doctor who is about to gut them has steady hands, but to pray that God would simply remove their gallstones freaks them out. At another level, some folks are willing to believe that a man in China had his blind-from-birth vision restored, but can’t bring themselves to seek prayer for their own near-sightedness.
Healing seems unique in that it demands attention and response in a way that not even prophecy does. For the healer, healing also carries a power and mystery with it that no other manifestation seems to. Aimee Semple Macpherson (sp?) apparently wanted to be a preacher, but when her healing ministry broke out it became almost impossible. People didn’t want to hear her speak about Jesus or salvation, they wanted to walk.
Anyway, I’m drifting...
Parallel to the healing quest, was a far calmer, and in that way less dramatic, lesson about rest. God has been speaking and teaching and showing me how to rest in Him, how to abide in Him. And I got to tell you, it is not something that comes naturally to me. I tend to be pretty gogogo and I really have to fight to make rest happen (how ironic is that). And yet I’ve come to the deep seated conclusion that it is something I MUST have. I can no longer tolerate long seasons without a DAWG day. And opposite the often confusing walk toward healing, the walk toward rest has been...well...restful. I’ve gained so much peace at times I really needed it, confidence in God’s love, and a dramatic new confidence in my ability to hear God speak to me...which is almost impossible to overstate in importance.
And that was part two of the epiphany. Seeing this other track, this parallel lesson that has been unfolding in my life over roughly the same season and how different the two experiences have been.
But the real punch in the moment was in seeing how they fit together.
As Mr. Miagi points out, the first lesson in most every martial art is how to keep your balance. In short, all the activity of blocking and striking will quickly throw you way off balance and make you profoundly vulnerable, if you fail to keep your feet under you. What he Quakers call ‘centering’ is the spiritual equivalent to ‘first learn stay dry.’ Learning how to quiet my spirit, how to retreat to what Jesus and David call the Secret Place is like learning how to take a deep earth stance...where I become the immovable rock that you will break yourself upon. Learning to snap to that secret place as a matter of habit, and to sense when balance is being lost or threatened, that’s like basic footwork.
Without that deep, deep lesson of peace and abiding, healing will be too much for me to bear emotionally or spiritually. It will do more harm than good by putting me in a position I’m not ready to handle.
I need to learn silence first.
Now that’s not to say, in any way, that I’m giving up or even slowing in my quest for that particular gift – I know what God told me and I don’t doubt that call in the slightest (not to mention, I said the experience has been often frustrating, not always frustrating. I’ve seen some pretty incredible things this last year...) But I can see right now that like most things, this is a process and I have confidence in my teacher. Ninja Phil had a few things under his black belt that he hinted at from time to time. Secret ninja techniques that he said we simply weren’t ready for. The thing is, I totally get it in that context. Even in the brief time I studied there I learned things that I would not share with just anybody and as we talk about the supernatural, how much more true might that be? I’m not leaning toward the occult/gnostic sense of God where secret knowledge becomes the goal, but I am aware that jut reading about healing has revealed pats of me that I was surprised to find; a part that lusted simply for the power of it all, a part that sought the recognition or validation, a part that was willing to judge who deserved what healing and when...nasty, petty, awful parts of me that might never have been brought to light in any other context, or at least not shown in such sharp relief.
But the thing is that now I’m OK to let it all play out in God’s time party because I suddenly see what He’s been doing.
I had that moment where I turn from the sensei in frustration, “I’m going home!” and he’s like “Chris-san! Show me ‘paint the fence’” and all of a sudden I see that He’s been teaching me all along.
16 March 2008
Seven Pillars of Society
I just heard this from Kris Voltron.
There are seven pillars of society:
Holy Cow.
There are seven pillars of society:
- Justice
- The law is a facilitator of justice.
- The law only has purpose in bringing about and sustaining justice.
- When a society looses its grip on justice, the law begins to serve itself and taking on a life of its own.
- This creates a culture where peace officers become law enforcement officers and justice courts become magistrates of the law.
- Judges and juries are now charged with determining if someone broke the law, rather than if someone performed an injustice.
- Peace
- Peace is the foundation of government.
- The purpose of all government is to facilitate peace.
- When peace is removed from government, the government begins to serve itself.
- The goal of its officials becomes staying in power rather than extending the borders of peace.
- The goal of its officials becomes staying in power rather than extending the borders of peace.
- Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of wholeness.
- Love
- Love is the purpose of fatherhood.
- Fathers are facilitators of love.
- When fathers loose love, fathers become bosses and families become his subjects.
- Caring and compassion are replaced with sexual perversion and abandonment.
- Happiness is no longer the fruit of loving relationships, but instead becomes the purpose of them.
- ‘I’m not happy’ becomes the purpose of my actions.
- ‘I’m not happy’ becomes the purpose of my actions.
- Honor
- Honor is the element in society that allows people to be empowered rather than controlled.
- Honor is the responsibility of sons. They exemplify respect that results in order.
- When honor is served instead of serving, it causes leaders to demand honor even when it is incongruent with their character.
- This results in a culture of control that is manifest through fear.
- This results in a culture of control that is manifest through fear.
- Truth
- Truth is more than honesty. It is the embodiment of reality.
- The fruit of truth is life and the word of god is the facilitator of truth.
- Teachers are the stewards of truth.
- When truth is absent from a culture, the bible begins to served instead of serving.
- This consequently leads to people learning but never coming to the knowledge of the truth.
- Resulting in rules of religion being exchanged for the realities of relationship.
- Resulting in rules of religion being exchanged for the realities of relationship.
- This consequently leads to people learning but never coming to the knowledge of the truth.
- Righteousness
- Righteousness is more than an accumulation of good character choices.
- Righteousness is the visible expression of the habitation of an invisible yet holy god.
- Righteousness is the personification of the very nature of God being manifest in His creatures resulting in his likeness emanating through his people.
- When divinity is absent from a culture, Godliness is reduced to goodness which is attained through discipline instead of a pure heart.
- Wisdom
- Wisdom is the ability to rightly apply knowledge in a way that builds for the future that which is envisioned by the creator so that the divine ecosystem of heaven yields life.
- Rulers are the stewards of wisdom.
- They are to lead in a way that creates an environment that draws out and facilitator the destiny of people both individually and corporately.
- They are to lead in a way that creates an environment that draws out and facilitator the destiny of people both individually and corporately.
- When the definition of wisdom is reduced to the gathering and recalling of information it results in futility.
Holy Cow.
Fleeting Thought
There’s been this thing rolling around in my head recently. It’s a thought that has yet to really resolve but I really want to jot down what I have so far because I think it’s important...and God asked me to put it here instead of my journal.
In the story (in John I’m pretty sure) where Jesus is talking about how the sheep hear his voice and they follow him, he also says something to the effect that we (Christians) will ‘go in and come out and find pasture.’
It’s the in and out thing that has snagged on my gray matter. In and out of what? Well the sheepfold of course, but what does that represent and what the hell is a sheepfold anyway. Webster says it’ a shelter or pen for...wait for it...sheep. So it seems like he’s talking about our coming in and out of His shelter? Doesn’t the word talk about God’s peace being like a shelter? You know, the secret place and all of that.
The last few weeks have felt like I had stepped out of his peace in many ways, not like I was bad or anything, but there was stuff going on here and there that ruffled feathers or made me anxious or whatever. Anxiety always has a way of also making me feel more distant from God. Worship is more work, prayer seems hollow – you know what I’m talking about. And that has always made me sad. I don’t want to leave God’s presence – I like it there. I’m increasingly hungry for his spirit and his input and it bugs me when like takes me away from all of that.
But...
Maybe that’s pretty normal. Maybe ‘going out’ is either necessary to keep us from getting flabby, or just part of the almost-but-not-quite life we lead until he returns...maybe both. The Final Quest tells the story of he Christian warrior who climbs a mountain to eventually find himself in a kind of new Eden. The tree of life is there, Jesus is there, the demons can’t get in...it’s paradise. And yet Jesus tells him after a while that he can’t stay there. As important as it was for him to reach this place, it’s at least as important that he return to the front – the battle rages on and he’s needed.
I’ve noticed something over the last few years as spiritual warfare becomes more and more normal in my life. Attacks that used to take me out for weeks at a time now roll off in days or even hours. It’s like when the enemy gets a goo shot in, my recovery time has become shorter and shorter. If the kind of frustration or depression that happens in such a case is like ‘going out’, I find that I’m far better equipped these days to get back in. If chasing hard after a man’s heart is the current mission, and all the risk and warfare that it entails is another kind of ‘going out,’ I find myself more able to get back in when I need to.
It’s like this sheepfold, now that I’ve found it (and come in by the door), is never more than a twinkling of my heart away. And so it seems to me today as if I’ve been going and coming fairly regularly in the last few years but always feeling pretty crummy about the going, like I’d failed somehow to find myself outside of that garden that always renews my spirit. But I think I see it differently now – like Jesus has removed one more of those guilt arrows from my back just by reminding me that going and coming should be part of the experience...and he will always be there to show me the pasture.
Baaaa
In the story (in John I’m pretty sure) where Jesus is talking about how the sheep hear his voice and they follow him, he also says something to the effect that we (Christians) will ‘go in and come out and find pasture.’
It’s the in and out thing that has snagged on my gray matter. In and out of what? Well the sheepfold of course, but what does that represent and what the hell is a sheepfold anyway. Webster says it’ a shelter or pen for...wait for it...sheep. So it seems like he’s talking about our coming in and out of His shelter? Doesn’t the word talk about God’s peace being like a shelter? You know, the secret place and all of that.
The last few weeks have felt like I had stepped out of his peace in many ways, not like I was bad or anything, but there was stuff going on here and there that ruffled feathers or made me anxious or whatever. Anxiety always has a way of also making me feel more distant from God. Worship is more work, prayer seems hollow – you know what I’m talking about. And that has always made me sad. I don’t want to leave God’s presence – I like it there. I’m increasingly hungry for his spirit and his input and it bugs me when like takes me away from all of that.
But...
Maybe that’s pretty normal. Maybe ‘going out’ is either necessary to keep us from getting flabby, or just part of the almost-but-not-quite life we lead until he returns...maybe both. The Final Quest tells the story of he Christian warrior who climbs a mountain to eventually find himself in a kind of new Eden. The tree of life is there, Jesus is there, the demons can’t get in...it’s paradise. And yet Jesus tells him after a while that he can’t stay there. As important as it was for him to reach this place, it’s at least as important that he return to the front – the battle rages on and he’s needed.
I’ve noticed something over the last few years as spiritual warfare becomes more and more normal in my life. Attacks that used to take me out for weeks at a time now roll off in days or even hours. It’s like when the enemy gets a goo shot in, my recovery time has become shorter and shorter. If the kind of frustration or depression that happens in such a case is like ‘going out’, I find that I’m far better equipped these days to get back in. If chasing hard after a man’s heart is the current mission, and all the risk and warfare that it entails is another kind of ‘going out,’ I find myself more able to get back in when I need to.
It’s like this sheepfold, now that I’ve found it (and come in by the door), is never more than a twinkling of my heart away. And so it seems to me today as if I’ve been going and coming fairly regularly in the last few years but always feeling pretty crummy about the going, like I’d failed somehow to find myself outside of that garden that always renews my spirit. But I think I see it differently now – like Jesus has removed one more of those guilt arrows from my back just by reminding me that going and coming should be part of the experience...and he will always be there to show me the pasture.
Baaaa
14 March 2008
08 March 2008
Aurora
The following story is totally true, at least as much as I remember it. However, it’s lingered around in my drafts folder for these years because I really don’t know what to think of it...
In my life, there have been a few...um...let’s call hem mega-goals. Not mega as in particularly huge really, but mega in that I really see now real way in which they might happen. Maybe long-shot goals is a better phrase. Anyway, as I was leaving high school I got the mega-goal of going to Kenya someday and shortly after I arrived at GFU, like ten years later, I found myself thinking, “Wow. I’m really at college. Cool.” Going to college in the Pacific Northwest was another kind of goal, something genuinely challenging but achievable you know. “What would be a good goal to replace it now that I’m here.”
Before I go on, let me say that I’m not your typical goal oriented guy. I tend to have loosey-goosey goals...sometimes...but I’m not at all driven by them. So I don’t want you to picture me flipping in my day planner to October 12, 2019 and making an entry, I was just looking forward with a comfortable sense of “cool. I made it.” Anyway, as I thought about what might be next God distinctly said, “You always wanted to got to Kenya.” and I smiled. “Yeah.” I thought sort of whimsically. “Kenya would be cool.” The next day in the student paper was an offer to go to Kenya for a semester, already paid for by my tuition, which was already paid for by the Navy. I was the only person who applied.
Fast forward about 18 months and I’m again thinking about mega-goals and He says, “You’ve never seen the Aurora Borealis.” - and that’s how I get to today’s story.
I’m not certain of the date, but I’m pretty sure it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, 2003...give or take a year. I’m up at my mother-in-law’s house and somebody at Alice’s church realizes that the pastor wont be around on Sunday and instead of doing a potluck or something they think, “Hey, Becky’s husband seems like a nice guy. Maybe he will preach.” How this idea came to them I can only speculate, but I blame God.
At that time I don’t think I’d ever done anything even remotely like preaching and the last time I’d been on a stage was playing a wizard in a college play...not exactly preacher-man stuff. But you know, when the offer came across my bow I guess I figured what the heck. And while I was pretty nervous I think it went pretty well all things considered. And they even gave me $100 for the trouble which is interesting since I’ve never made a dime at that since then even though that was the smallest group I’ve ever ‘preached’ to...
Anyway, later that night Re and Alice and I were walking home in the dark when I noticed a faint shimmer in the sky. I stared for a moment thinking it was light from the dam reflecting off low clouds but another little shimmer told me otherwise. No these shimmers were barely visible – just dim, soft whispers of light, but I reckon I realized what I was seeing because it really couldn’t be anything else. I was seeing the far southern vestiges of the Aurora Borealis. I told Alice and Rebekah, who’d both seen the aurora before, that I’d be along later and I laid down in the sage to watch the slow, lazy waves of sun fed electrons.
The sky got darker and darker as it got later. The aurora got marginally brighter as my eyes adjusted to the dark and there was less of the failing sunlight to compete with and I began to see, more or less, what I expected to see. Long, sinuous filaments of pale yellow light undulating in the sky like some kind of slow motion sail in the wind. You almost never get the colors below the arctic circle so I knew this vanilla pudding yellow was the ‘right’ color. I probably laid out there for an hour and a half watching the slow dance and smiling from ear to ear. I was well aware of my five year old mega-goal and how it was being fulfilled not in some exotic locale but in my mother-in-law’s back yard and I felt deeply loved by God. I felt as if somehow this light show were a kind of ‘well done’ or ‘thanks’ for having thumped my Bible that morning and it was wonderful.
Not thrilling, but wonderful. The thrilling part comes next.
In time, I became aware of an increase in the tempo of the aurora, if I can use that word. Instead of the slowly waving sails of light, I starting seeing what looked more like thin clouds that would start near the horizon and move up toward the ‘center’ of the sky where they would dissipate. In the space of about 15 minutes, this new presentation had completely replaced the previous one and I thought, “That’s odd...maybe really odd.” I’ve seen many video clips of the aurora from Alaska websites and astronomy websites and even Art Bell’s website, but nothing I’d seen there looked like this. It was still, without question, the Aurora Borealis in its essence but it’s behavior had turned to something I’d never heard of nor seen. Still, I’m obviously the new guy so I thought it might be something that Alice had seen and anyway, I was getting cold. So it seemed like a good time to go inside, grab a coat, and grab my family.
A few minutes later the three of us are out on Alice’s deck and the sky is dancing. Now that I’m not in a dark little hollow I can see that these ‘aurora bolts’ are manifesting across the whole horizon. Every compass point is sprouting these increasingly fast moving blobs that silently cross ninety degrees of sky in a rush and it’s as if they are all racing toward a single point in the sky...directly over us. I want you to remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis open the ark and all the ghosts start floating around the scene. Not the ones that coalesce into recognizable shapes, but the more vague white spirit blobs. That’s what we were seeing, but magnified thousands of times since each sheet must have been hundreds of miles long.
We watched this frenzied show for a few minutes when Alice says, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.” with notes of both awe and anxiety. Like maybe this was cool, but also a little scary. Me, I was just having a great time. Sure, I knew this was atypical, but it was my first and to date only experience so I was just enjoying it. But Alice’s tone made me wonder...what are we seeing here? I thought about that earlier sense that somehow God was showing me this as a kind of reward or something – like a little Scooby snack for Skaggs – and now I started wondering what else might be going on here. Not scared or anything but starting to sense that might be witnessing something bigger than a light show.
As we stood there in the cold, and the spirit shapes were coming so fast there was no longer any break between them, the point at which they were all meeting was now becoming a kind of empty hole above our heads. A ring that was only perceived as a gestalt of the space never violated, the invisible line that was never crossed, and I’m not kidding you, it was almost directly over Alice’s house. Now if it were directly over our heads I would be more inclined to think it was an an optical illusion, like how fireworks always look like they are ‘facing’ the observer. But this hole, this empty zone, was ‘placed’ just slightly to the north and east, maybe directly over Mansfield which is the next town. We started commenting on this hole – this space where the otherwise ubiquitous aurora bolts, which had also increased dramatically in brightness and intensity (still no color), never went.
Then there started a kind of final movement of the sky symphony. Where the last 30 min or so were characterized by these shapes rising from random points along he horizon and racing to the hole where they broke upon its border, it all suddenly changed to where we would see multiple shapes emerge at once along the perimeter of the sky and race up in lock step to hit the border in unison. In this way the beautiful accident of swarming shapes quite suddenly changed to something regular and just outside of predictable. It was now as if the sky were pulsing or breathing, like we were somehow seeing the beat of a heart and the blood that beta pushed heavenward. It was breathtaking.
Then comes the part that suggests peyote. As we stood watching this celestial breathing we started to see light inside the ‘free zone’ and we each wondered if we were alone in seeing it. With each ‘breath’ the racing shapes would tear from the horizon to the top of the sky in about 1 and a half seconds. As something like a dozen bolts would meet at the ‘ring’ I saw other...distinct...shapes flash to life in the center of the ring. This interior shape would stay lit or just a moment, like a face lit up by a camera flash. It was just long enough for your brain to think, “Was that what I think it was?” but not long enough to be sure. But in the four or five minutes that followed, maybe it was much shorter than that, I saw a a series of explicitly Christian images: a crown, a dove, and yes a cross.
Now I’d be more than happy to conclude that the events of the day put my mind in a certain way and I saw what I was prepared to see. That would be fine with me and still be a cool story since the experience remains interesting and fun without the crown. I’d be equally willing to say that God had given me some kind of vision, albeit mysterious, for his own purpose. Again – it makes a good story and has a neat kind of Jesus spooky to it. But when the dove appeared in that hole I had a moment to say out loud, “Did anybody else just see a dove?”...and they both had. They had also both seen what I am calling a crown, a moment before but there was not a consensus on what he shape had actually been. In another moment, all of us saw the cross – as plain as day – and basically unmistakable for anything else. So with the confirming testimony of my wife and my second mother (third?) I’m forced to conclude that it really happened and probably in the physical world as opposed to some kind of group vision (other people in the following days remarked on the very unusual aurora that night, but nobody mentioned the images...including us).
And then it ended.
The whole thing mostly petered out over the next ten minutes. When I went back inside there were still lights in the sky, but they looked a lot like what I’d seen in video clips – cool, but not really comparable to what we had just seen.
Four or so years later it remains a truly wonderful experience, but it also remains profoundly enigmatic. The circumstances make my brain want to find meaning in it all but the whole thing seems to inscrutable, at least to me, and at least to date. Does something like that properly get the label of miracle or mystery?
Like I said, apart from telling a story that’s pretty neat, I’ve had basically no ability to reflect on it or draw any meaning out of it. I think I’m fine with that though. It doesn’t HAVE to have meaning. I’m OK with it just having been a really memorable event that I got to witness. And yet...there’s a part of me that can’t help but think there is something deeper there, maybe something that won’t make any sense until heaven – but still the meaning of it is in there even if imperceptible in this world. It makes me wonder about the star he magi followed. Surely other people around the word saw that star, but almost nobody recognized what they were seeing. Wise astrologers of the day probably drew all sorts of meaning from the new star...but what percentage were thinking things 180 degrees from what was really happening.
It’s such a strange story, one that seems obviously laden with...something...
In my life, there have been a few...um...let’s call hem mega-goals. Not mega as in particularly huge really, but mega in that I really see now real way in which they might happen. Maybe long-shot goals is a better phrase. Anyway, as I was leaving high school I got the mega-goal of going to Kenya someday and shortly after I arrived at GFU, like ten years later, I found myself thinking, “Wow. I’m really at college. Cool.” Going to college in the Pacific Northwest was another kind of goal, something genuinely challenging but achievable you know. “What would be a good goal to replace it now that I’m here.”
Before I go on, let me say that I’m not your typical goal oriented guy. I tend to have loosey-goosey goals...sometimes...but I’m not at all driven by them. So I don’t want you to picture me flipping in my day planner to October 12, 2019 and making an entry, I was just looking forward with a comfortable sense of “cool. I made it.” Anyway, as I thought about what might be next God distinctly said, “You always wanted to got to Kenya.” and I smiled. “Yeah.” I thought sort of whimsically. “Kenya would be cool.” The next day in the student paper was an offer to go to Kenya for a semester, already paid for by my tuition, which was already paid for by the Navy. I was the only person who applied.
Fast forward about 18 months and I’m again thinking about mega-goals and He says, “You’ve never seen the Aurora Borealis.” - and that’s how I get to today’s story.
I’m not certain of the date, but I’m pretty sure it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, 2003...give or take a year. I’m up at my mother-in-law’s house and somebody at Alice’s church realizes that the pastor wont be around on Sunday and instead of doing a potluck or something they think, “Hey, Becky’s husband seems like a nice guy. Maybe he will preach.” How this idea came to them I can only speculate, but I blame God.
At that time I don’t think I’d ever done anything even remotely like preaching and the last time I’d been on a stage was playing a wizard in a college play...not exactly preacher-man stuff. But you know, when the offer came across my bow I guess I figured what the heck. And while I was pretty nervous I think it went pretty well all things considered. And they even gave me $100 for the trouble which is interesting since I’ve never made a dime at that since then even though that was the smallest group I’ve ever ‘preached’ to...
Anyway, later that night Re and Alice and I were walking home in the dark when I noticed a faint shimmer in the sky. I stared for a moment thinking it was light from the dam reflecting off low clouds but another little shimmer told me otherwise. No these shimmers were barely visible – just dim, soft whispers of light, but I reckon I realized what I was seeing because it really couldn’t be anything else. I was seeing the far southern vestiges of the Aurora Borealis. I told Alice and Rebekah, who’d both seen the aurora before, that I’d be along later and I laid down in the sage to watch the slow, lazy waves of sun fed electrons.
The sky got darker and darker as it got later. The aurora got marginally brighter as my eyes adjusted to the dark and there was less of the failing sunlight to compete with and I began to see, more or less, what I expected to see. Long, sinuous filaments of pale yellow light undulating in the sky like some kind of slow motion sail in the wind. You almost never get the colors below the arctic circle so I knew this vanilla pudding yellow was the ‘right’ color. I probably laid out there for an hour and a half watching the slow dance and smiling from ear to ear. I was well aware of my five year old mega-goal and how it was being fulfilled not in some exotic locale but in my mother-in-law’s back yard and I felt deeply loved by God. I felt as if somehow this light show were a kind of ‘well done’ or ‘thanks’ for having thumped my Bible that morning and it was wonderful.
Not thrilling, but wonderful. The thrilling part comes next.
In time, I became aware of an increase in the tempo of the aurora, if I can use that word. Instead of the slowly waving sails of light, I starting seeing what looked more like thin clouds that would start near the horizon and move up toward the ‘center’ of the sky where they would dissipate. In the space of about 15 minutes, this new presentation had completely replaced the previous one and I thought, “That’s odd...maybe really odd.” I’ve seen many video clips of the aurora from Alaska websites and astronomy websites and even Art Bell’s website, but nothing I’d seen there looked like this. It was still, without question, the Aurora Borealis in its essence but it’s behavior had turned to something I’d never heard of nor seen. Still, I’m obviously the new guy so I thought it might be something that Alice had seen and anyway, I was getting cold. So it seemed like a good time to go inside, grab a coat, and grab my family.
A few minutes later the three of us are out on Alice’s deck and the sky is dancing. Now that I’m not in a dark little hollow I can see that these ‘aurora bolts’ are manifesting across the whole horizon. Every compass point is sprouting these increasingly fast moving blobs that silently cross ninety degrees of sky in a rush and it’s as if they are all racing toward a single point in the sky...directly over us. I want you to remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis open the ark and all the ghosts start floating around the scene. Not the ones that coalesce into recognizable shapes, but the more vague white spirit blobs. That’s what we were seeing, but magnified thousands of times since each sheet must have been hundreds of miles long.
We watched this frenzied show for a few minutes when Alice says, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.” with notes of both awe and anxiety. Like maybe this was cool, but also a little scary. Me, I was just having a great time. Sure, I knew this was atypical, but it was my first and to date only experience so I was just enjoying it. But Alice’s tone made me wonder...what are we seeing here? I thought about that earlier sense that somehow God was showing me this as a kind of reward or something – like a little Scooby snack for Skaggs – and now I started wondering what else might be going on here. Not scared or anything but starting to sense that might be witnessing something bigger than a light show.
As we stood there in the cold, and the spirit shapes were coming so fast there was no longer any break between them, the point at which they were all meeting was now becoming a kind of empty hole above our heads. A ring that was only perceived as a gestalt of the space never violated, the invisible line that was never crossed, and I’m not kidding you, it was almost directly over Alice’s house. Now if it were directly over our heads I would be more inclined to think it was an an optical illusion, like how fireworks always look like they are ‘facing’ the observer. But this hole, this empty zone, was ‘placed’ just slightly to the north and east, maybe directly over Mansfield which is the next town. We started commenting on this hole – this space where the otherwise ubiquitous aurora bolts, which had also increased dramatically in brightness and intensity (still no color), never went.
Then there started a kind of final movement of the sky symphony. Where the last 30 min or so were characterized by these shapes rising from random points along he horizon and racing to the hole where they broke upon its border, it all suddenly changed to where we would see multiple shapes emerge at once along the perimeter of the sky and race up in lock step to hit the border in unison. In this way the beautiful accident of swarming shapes quite suddenly changed to something regular and just outside of predictable. It was now as if the sky were pulsing or breathing, like we were somehow seeing the beat of a heart and the blood that beta pushed heavenward. It was breathtaking.
Then comes the part that suggests peyote. As we stood watching this celestial breathing we started to see light inside the ‘free zone’ and we each wondered if we were alone in seeing it. With each ‘breath’ the racing shapes would tear from the horizon to the top of the sky in about 1 and a half seconds. As something like a dozen bolts would meet at the ‘ring’ I saw other...distinct...shapes flash to life in the center of the ring. This interior shape would stay lit or just a moment, like a face lit up by a camera flash. It was just long enough for your brain to think, “Was that what I think it was?” but not long enough to be sure. But in the four or five minutes that followed, maybe it was much shorter than that, I saw a a series of explicitly Christian images: a crown, a dove, and yes a cross.
Now I’d be more than happy to conclude that the events of the day put my mind in a certain way and I saw what I was prepared to see. That would be fine with me and still be a cool story since the experience remains interesting and fun without the crown. I’d be equally willing to say that God had given me some kind of vision, albeit mysterious, for his own purpose. Again – it makes a good story and has a neat kind of Jesus spooky to it. But when the dove appeared in that hole I had a moment to say out loud, “Did anybody else just see a dove?”...and they both had. They had also both seen what I am calling a crown, a moment before but there was not a consensus on what he shape had actually been. In another moment, all of us saw the cross – as plain as day – and basically unmistakable for anything else. So with the confirming testimony of my wife and my second mother (third?) I’m forced to conclude that it really happened and probably in the physical world as opposed to some kind of group vision (other people in the following days remarked on the very unusual aurora that night, but nobody mentioned the images...including us).
And then it ended.
The whole thing mostly petered out over the next ten minutes. When I went back inside there were still lights in the sky, but they looked a lot like what I’d seen in video clips – cool, but not really comparable to what we had just seen.
Four or so years later it remains a truly wonderful experience, but it also remains profoundly enigmatic. The circumstances make my brain want to find meaning in it all but the whole thing seems to inscrutable, at least to me, and at least to date. Does something like that properly get the label of miracle or mystery?
Like I said, apart from telling a story that’s pretty neat, I’ve had basically no ability to reflect on it or draw any meaning out of it. I think I’m fine with that though. It doesn’t HAVE to have meaning. I’m OK with it just having been a really memorable event that I got to witness. And yet...there’s a part of me that can’t help but think there is something deeper there, maybe something that won’t make any sense until heaven – but still the meaning of it is in there even if imperceptible in this world. It makes me wonder about the star he magi followed. Surely other people around the word saw that star, but almost nobody recognized what they were seeing. Wise astrologers of the day probably drew all sorts of meaning from the new star...but what percentage were thinking things 180 degrees from what was really happening.
It’s such a strange story, one that seems obviously laden with...something...
02 March 2008
Disappointment
Several nights ago now Odin had the distinct pleasure of eating sausage for dinner - one of his favorite things. And by the time it was over he was crying in great heaving sobs.
Allow me to ‘splain.
I had made the mistake of cutting up roughly half a sausage into bite size bits and placing the small pile of meat on the high chair in front of him. In what is a relatively new behavior, he started playing a pork filled version of chubby bunny - stuffing bits of sausage into his gob as fast as he could without bothering to chew or swallow. Seeing the approaching problem I put my hand between his and the additional meat, effectively stopping him from choking, but also breaking his heart.
The incident would be sort of laughable except for the very real pain Odin suffered through the misunderstanding. In his mind I had put a good thing before him (what's better than sausage?) and then arbitrarily kept him from enjoying it. In his mind I had taunted and betrayed him in that moment. He didn't understand that I was protecting him. He didn't know his zeal was leading him rapidly toward the Heimlich maneuver. He just saw the sausage that he wanted and me stopping him from eating it.
I quickly recognized what had happened and tried to tell him 'slow down' as I lifted my blocking hand, but that only caused him to dive into the pile with renewed vigor as if it might all disappear entirely in a moment - which caused me to intervene again - which lead him to burst into bitter tears...and start to choke on the first raft of meat he still hadn't bothered to chew. Now he's sobbing, and choking and Rebekah is there looking at me like 'what's going on here?' and I'm both trying to keep him from still more sausage as I try to comfort his clearly wounded heart and none of it is working. I barked at Rebekah, glared at Odin, and dropped things all over the floor. It was horrible.
Eventually he calmed down and in an ill advised effort to salvage the moment I set his food back before him. But now he looked at it and me with a kind of suspicion that I've never seen on his face. It was like for the first time in his life, my son didn't trust me. He'd asked for bread bread and I'd given him a scorpion so to speak...at least that's the way he saw it. He reached tentatively toward the sausages again as I nodded in encouragement, but once he got one in his mouth his hell bent mission to get every stinking piece in his mouth simultaneously resumed at double speed. Needles to say, I had to intervene again and dinner ended with Odin wailing in emotional misery, deeply wounded by my efforts to save his life from himself.
Between this incident and a discussion with #5 I've been thinking about disappointment and God. Yes, there is an obvious object lesson here in how we can sometimes find ourselves deeply resenting the hand that acts to save us from ourselves, totally missing the help and only seeing that something we want desperately has been striped from us, but that's not really what I wanted to talk about here. Yeah, Odin misunderstood what was happening - but he's 18 months old, that's to be expected and it happens every day. What really got me churning was the distrust that rose up later - the fear if I can use that word - fear of being hurt again by his daddy.
A while back I was musing on how I had started to glimpse how powerful fear is but at the time I was thinking in he context of how fear can stop us from stepping out when God’s invites us forward. What if He doesn’t catch me? What if something goes wrong? What if I didn’t really hear His voice? It’s that ‘what if’ fear that paralyzes us and turns faith to inaction. This incident with Odin was in many ways the converse of that. It reminded me of how fear can also drive us to rash action. In Odin’s case you can see that urge we get when things look dire and feel compelled to grasp at something for fear of losing out. This would be like Satan’s first temptation for Christ in the wilderness. “You’re starving to death. Provide for yourself. Take what you can because clearly God is holding out on you.” Poor Odin got scared that I would take his precious sausage away again when in fact I wanted nothing more than for him to eat it, but his fear and mistrust literally put his life at risk and in the end he was unable to have what he most wanted because of that fear.
Needless to say, the other place we se this is when fear drives us to ‘get to safety’ as quickly as possible. It’s the fear of abandonment when we find ourselves in unknown and threatening territory. “God has forsaken me. I’m on my own. I must find whatever safety I can...anywhere but here.” It’s the brand of fear that makes us quit school or a job, the kind that makes us turn from relationships that cause us pain...come to think of it, maybe it’s best understood as the fear that makes pain intolerable, unendurable. We can endure great bolshie buckets of pain, physical and emotional, so long as we believe there’s a point to it. But when this kind of fear creeps in it whispers that MacBeth was right – life is just a tale full of sound and fury...signifying nothing. And from that precipice, devoid of any larger purpose, we feel like getting away from pain is indeed the highest and most natural calling.
I recently heard a pastor say that the largest barrier stopping folks from experiencing a deep and powerful walk with God lay in unresolved disappointment. The thought punched me in the gut as I started to ponder the implications. In essence, we all experience things in our life that feel as if God has let us down – a prayer for healing that never happens, a personal tragedy, or just the daily erosion of minor disappointments from tension in our marriage to the promotion that never comes. Of course we deal with things in several ways but if I’m honest with myself I have to admit that at least some of those linger long after. I may be unwilling to openly accuse God of failing, but my mind returns over and over to wondering why Odin’s throat wasn’t healed when I prayed my hardest prayer. I think that unless we make a very deliberate effort to settle those kinds of things in our deep hearts, that disappointment can’t help but morph into a kind of subtle fear.
It’s not to suggest that God abandons us when we fear, by no means! I certainly won’t abandon or chide my son the first time he backs away from a diving board...or the second time. But it’s when our trust in God is undermined by those disappointments, especially by long patterns of disappointment, we can turn away in fear from the very best things God has for us – and we learn over time to be satisfied with far less than He wants to give us. We decline the offer or glory He gives because we fear it can’t be true, or that He can’t be trusted, or that we just can’t abide the cost. And so we cling to the crumbs under the table and wonder why our lives seem decidedly less than we had hoped they would be.
It reminds me of a thought about adventure. I’ve been encouraging men to seek and accept the adventures God has for them because, you know, adventure is cool! It’s fun! Who doesn’t love adventure? And yet in that Hurrah moment we generally fail to remember that Sam and Frodo suffered great sorrow, endless days of hunger, insurmountable risks, all on their journey to Mordor. It’s like Sluss II says, people don’t actually want to have an adventure, they want to have HAD an adventure. Something under glass to put on the mantle and wax nostalgic about. We want the memory, but not really the experience. And I’m not saying that’s wrong in any way – to seek after pain is creepy in a whole different way. But the unavoidable truth is this: to walk with God is to expect heartache. Bonheoffer says the offer of Christ is “to believe and to die.” (or something like that...)
OK, I’m hopelessly rambling now. The point was just this: I’ve seen a lot of examples recently where fear lead folks to do things they didn’t need to, and in many cases really shouldn't have. I’ve always thought of fear as a kind of secondary sin but I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t more foundational to the way we screw our lives up. And I’m increasingly aware of the ways in which I’ve stuffed disappointment with God into deep holes where it festers and turns putrid instead of approaching the throne of the father who I KNOW loves me to say, “I know that you are good, but right now it looks from here as if you let me down when I really needed you and it hurts so very, very much I feel like I’m going to die. Please help me understand this so there isn’t any weirdness between us.”
...and then patiently...
...stubbornly...
...faithfully...
Wait for Him to speak and heal.
Allow me to ‘splain.
I had made the mistake of cutting up roughly half a sausage into bite size bits and placing the small pile of meat on the high chair in front of him. In what is a relatively new behavior, he started playing a pork filled version of chubby bunny - stuffing bits of sausage into his gob as fast as he could without bothering to chew or swallow. Seeing the approaching problem I put my hand between his and the additional meat, effectively stopping him from choking, but also breaking his heart.
The incident would be sort of laughable except for the very real pain Odin suffered through the misunderstanding. In his mind I had put a good thing before him (what's better than sausage?) and then arbitrarily kept him from enjoying it. In his mind I had taunted and betrayed him in that moment. He didn't understand that I was protecting him. He didn't know his zeal was leading him rapidly toward the Heimlich maneuver. He just saw the sausage that he wanted and me stopping him from eating it.
I quickly recognized what had happened and tried to tell him 'slow down' as I lifted my blocking hand, but that only caused him to dive into the pile with renewed vigor as if it might all disappear entirely in a moment - which caused me to intervene again - which lead him to burst into bitter tears...and start to choke on the first raft of meat he still hadn't bothered to chew. Now he's sobbing, and choking and Rebekah is there looking at me like 'what's going on here?' and I'm both trying to keep him from still more sausage as I try to comfort his clearly wounded heart and none of it is working. I barked at Rebekah, glared at Odin, and dropped things all over the floor. It was horrible.
Eventually he calmed down and in an ill advised effort to salvage the moment I set his food back before him. But now he looked at it and me with a kind of suspicion that I've never seen on his face. It was like for the first time in his life, my son didn't trust me. He'd asked for bread bread and I'd given him a scorpion so to speak...at least that's the way he saw it. He reached tentatively toward the sausages again as I nodded in encouragement, but once he got one in his mouth his hell bent mission to get every stinking piece in his mouth simultaneously resumed at double speed. Needles to say, I had to intervene again and dinner ended with Odin wailing in emotional misery, deeply wounded by my efforts to save his life from himself.
Between this incident and a discussion with #5 I've been thinking about disappointment and God. Yes, there is an obvious object lesson here in how we can sometimes find ourselves deeply resenting the hand that acts to save us from ourselves, totally missing the help and only seeing that something we want desperately has been striped from us, but that's not really what I wanted to talk about here. Yeah, Odin misunderstood what was happening - but he's 18 months old, that's to be expected and it happens every day. What really got me churning was the distrust that rose up later - the fear if I can use that word - fear of being hurt again by his daddy.
A while back I was musing on how I had started to glimpse how powerful fear is but at the time I was thinking in he context of how fear can stop us from stepping out when God’s invites us forward. What if He doesn’t catch me? What if something goes wrong? What if I didn’t really hear His voice? It’s that ‘what if’ fear that paralyzes us and turns faith to inaction. This incident with Odin was in many ways the converse of that. It reminded me of how fear can also drive us to rash action. In Odin’s case you can see that urge we get when things look dire and feel compelled to grasp at something for fear of losing out. This would be like Satan’s first temptation for Christ in the wilderness. “You’re starving to death. Provide for yourself. Take what you can because clearly God is holding out on you.” Poor Odin got scared that I would take his precious sausage away again when in fact I wanted nothing more than for him to eat it, but his fear and mistrust literally put his life at risk and in the end he was unable to have what he most wanted because of that fear.
Needless to say, the other place we se this is when fear drives us to ‘get to safety’ as quickly as possible. It’s the fear of abandonment when we find ourselves in unknown and threatening territory. “God has forsaken me. I’m on my own. I must find whatever safety I can...anywhere but here.” It’s the brand of fear that makes us quit school or a job, the kind that makes us turn from relationships that cause us pain...come to think of it, maybe it’s best understood as the fear that makes pain intolerable, unendurable. We can endure great bolshie buckets of pain, physical and emotional, so long as we believe there’s a point to it. But when this kind of fear creeps in it whispers that MacBeth was right – life is just a tale full of sound and fury...signifying nothing. And from that precipice, devoid of any larger purpose, we feel like getting away from pain is indeed the highest and most natural calling.
I recently heard a pastor say that the largest barrier stopping folks from experiencing a deep and powerful walk with God lay in unresolved disappointment. The thought punched me in the gut as I started to ponder the implications. In essence, we all experience things in our life that feel as if God has let us down – a prayer for healing that never happens, a personal tragedy, or just the daily erosion of minor disappointments from tension in our marriage to the promotion that never comes. Of course we deal with things in several ways but if I’m honest with myself I have to admit that at least some of those linger long after. I may be unwilling to openly accuse God of failing, but my mind returns over and over to wondering why Odin’s throat wasn’t healed when I prayed my hardest prayer. I think that unless we make a very deliberate effort to settle those kinds of things in our deep hearts, that disappointment can’t help but morph into a kind of subtle fear.
It’s not to suggest that God abandons us when we fear, by no means! I certainly won’t abandon or chide my son the first time he backs away from a diving board...or the second time. But it’s when our trust in God is undermined by those disappointments, especially by long patterns of disappointment, we can turn away in fear from the very best things God has for us – and we learn over time to be satisfied with far less than He wants to give us. We decline the offer or glory He gives because we fear it can’t be true, or that He can’t be trusted, or that we just can’t abide the cost. And so we cling to the crumbs under the table and wonder why our lives seem decidedly less than we had hoped they would be.
It reminds me of a thought about adventure. I’ve been encouraging men to seek and accept the adventures God has for them because, you know, adventure is cool! It’s fun! Who doesn’t love adventure? And yet in that Hurrah moment we generally fail to remember that Sam and Frodo suffered great sorrow, endless days of hunger, insurmountable risks, all on their journey to Mordor. It’s like Sluss II says, people don’t actually want to have an adventure, they want to have HAD an adventure. Something under glass to put on the mantle and wax nostalgic about. We want the memory, but not really the experience. And I’m not saying that’s wrong in any way – to seek after pain is creepy in a whole different way. But the unavoidable truth is this: to walk with God is to expect heartache. Bonheoffer says the offer of Christ is “to believe and to die.” (or something like that...)
OK, I’m hopelessly rambling now. The point was just this: I’ve seen a lot of examples recently where fear lead folks to do things they didn’t need to, and in many cases really shouldn't have. I’ve always thought of fear as a kind of secondary sin but I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t more foundational to the way we screw our lives up. And I’m increasingly aware of the ways in which I’ve stuffed disappointment with God into deep holes where it festers and turns putrid instead of approaching the throne of the father who I KNOW loves me to say, “I know that you are good, but right now it looks from here as if you let me down when I really needed you and it hurts so very, very much I feel like I’m going to die. Please help me understand this so there isn’t any weirdness between us.”
...and then patiently...
...stubbornly...
...faithfully...
Wait for Him to speak and heal.
Please welcome...
It is my distinct pleasure to announce the late but always fashionable arrival of my love, my life, my wife.
Rebekah: http://travellingmouse.blogspot.com/
Rebekah: http://travellingmouse.blogspot.com/
20 February 2008
Breakthrough
Back in December, I wrote an entry that included this cryptic comment about coming very close to loosing my business...I reckon I ought to explain what that was about and also include some of the developments and hindsight that's come from that.
As far as the facts go, when Dec 1 rolled around it was payday at Code-Monkeys and there was no money in the till - which meant nobody got a paycheck. Needless to say that was stressful all around. Now the next important thing to note is this: from a fully earthly perspective, there really was no logical reason for such a state to have happened. We had been busy and productive the weeks and months prior, there was a bunch of money in the A/R queue and we had a totally full schedule for the upcoming weeks. In summary, the buckets were all full but no water was coming through. Long standing, reliable clients simply forgot to pay their bills - so sorry. Projects that were birds in the hand, suddenly decided to take a week break to reevaluate. So as a result we had this mysterious break with no money, AND no work. It was like tumbleweeds and crickets. Let me be as clear as I can be and hope that you'll be willing to take my word for it: nothing at all, in any way was wrong with the business. As a matter of fact when December was done, not only had we totally made up for that entire week of doing nothing, we had also had another full week of vacation between Christmas and New Years, and December STILL wound up being a record smashing month, the biggest December we've ever had by a factor of two and the second largest month we've ever had, ever.
But I don't want to get ahead of myself here, I want to focus on the immediate situation and how we all felt without the benefit of hindsight. When that day came and there was no money to pay anybody, I think it's fair to say that everybody in the shop got more than a little weirded out, including me. Since there was really no work to do, even the busy work had been taken care of, we had a lot of time to sit in our circle and pray..and we did...a lot. Of course we prayed for the immediate needs we all had: rent, bills, medicine, all the normal stuff, but we also had a lot of space to really dig into this situation as wave after alternating wave of emotion rolled over us. We were alternately wrestling with a kind of panic, and doubt as well as rising to great heights of joy and faith and confidence. One day turned into two, which rolled into three...a whole week went by when there was no bread in the cupboard and we were still wondering what the hell could be going on.
I should point out that this situation brought all of us face to face with several financial issues in our lives that were purely practical. Obvious stuff like not counting chickens, not having savings, not writing checks on money we didn't have yet. And while many of those lessons were costly and painful, they were also the kinds of things we couldn't blame on anybody but ourselves once all the frustration and anger burned off. We all had a very vivid lesson that asked if a single day of a delayed paycheck could throw most of us off so bad, then we were clearly managing our money improperly. We were living way too close to the edge. That said, the purely practical, fiscal lessons weren't at the center of the experience. That office was held by another phantom.
The primary struggle we all dealt with in that season was fear. Panic even. In hindsight I can say with confidence that some fear was probably normal enough, but this was wave after wave of highly enhanced fear - a powerful and sustained attack by the prince of this world that had all these trailing attendants of distrust and blame and division. We each fought our own battles about how this could possibly be happening when we dedicated so much of our work to God. Basically, the 'how could a good god allow' lie but with a green leotard on. We struggled with how we could break this awful news to our wives and whether they would see us as failures and on and on. We all struggled, a lot, with whether or not all of this was worth this kind of pain and disappointment and every one of us, including myself, thought about throwing in the towel.
You have to understand that in the last 2 years, Code-Monkeys has transmogrified into something that is not easily characterized or explained. We are growing into a kind of highly integrated, very close knit group of Christians who see this company as a kind of starting point on a very long-term and exciting trip toward who knows where...but the next step seems to be this Christian video game company called Soma. So when I say 'is all this worth it' I'm not talking about a job, I'm not even talking about a company I've poured every dime I have into. I'm talking about something far, far larger that is just starting to bud - and all the guys at CM sense what I'm talking about. They all know to a greater or lesser degree that they've been invited into something special. Something fragile and tenuous, but with gigantic potential, and totally committed to God. So you have to understand that this struggle in our minds wasn't about whether or not it was time to look for another job - but whether or not we believed that this thing was actually special like we'd said, and to what degree we were willing to fight for it, and what degree of hardship we were willing to endure to keep at it.
I don't want to underplay how tense that week was or how close each of us came to folding. In the end, each man had to fight that fight that is essentially an internal battle about what we really believe and what we're really willing to pay to have Jesus and the life He promises. Now I'm incredibly proud to say that everybody hung in there. Everybody toughed it out and I'm proud of all my men, as well as deeply humbled by the experience.
There have been tight moments before at Code-Monkeys and in those moments I'll often pray that God provides and He almost always does. I say 'almost always' not because of His provision, but because I know I've screwed those moments up form time to time in my own panic and His provision gets mismanaged. That's part of my own learning process. But as I prayed the day before payday He told me 'My grace is sufficient'...which meant He wasn't going to provide a sudden rush of money. And He also made it very clear that I was in way to interfere with the test that each of these men had to go through. I knew I just had to let them all walk through it, which was incredibly hard. In the past, I've borrowed money to cover those bills, or foregone a paycheck for myself to pay somebody else, but I was totally disallowed to do that in this case, and totally unable anyway - like I said, there was no money - period.
As we prayed that week, baring our souls and pouring out our fears, we seemed to come to a general consensus that what we were experiencing was an honest to goodness test - a trial that was not (at it's root) a matter of spiritual warfare or mismanagement of funds, or a downturning economy, but a kind of 'put your money where your mouth is' trial. In the previous two months or so, a very common theme that we continued to pray on was this notion that God was our true provision. Not this job, not ANY job, but God. And we prayed a lot about an attitude toward money that was in synch with Jesus and not beholden to the world. Well here we were being asked, 'So, who is your provision again?'
I know each of the guys had to work that question out for themselves. For me, I had my question about who my provision was, but I had the additional question of who THEIR provision was. It was one thing to trust God to feed my family. It was quite another thing to trust God to look after the families that I feel deeply responsible to, the men He's brought to me for employees and friends. I was a mess! But this sense that we were in the middle of something with a larger point helped a lot. I am convinced that one of the central aspects of the test was to prove (either to God or ourselves) that we couldn't be bought - that it really wasn't about the money. And in that regard, I think we all learned that there was a lot more spiritual reserve in each of us than we thought.
When we'd gone a week without any pay and we were sitting around praying again (still). It seemed to me that all of sudden something broke and I had this sense that it was over. Whatever that was all about, it had just ended and within two hours we had two separate people call us, totally out of the blue, and give us new work that we had never bid one, never solicited, and they both wanted to pay the entire balance up front, that day. People, in seven years, that has never happened, NEVER. It's just one more point of indication to me that in the final analysis, God had the whole thing in His hand all along, but we all needed to learn a certain lesson that can't be taught in the classroom...and we passed.
******************
Moving forward a bit, we (BCNW) recently got back from our second Advanced camp - four days on the Oregon coast in one of the most peaceful places I've seen and certainly the most spiritually protected place we've held any event. It was awesome. (Thanks for coming Sluss and #1) I think we still need some work on how we organize the advanced camp, we can be a little scattered, but it was a big improvement from last year's advanced and I think far, far closer to what we really want that event to be about. But enough about that - it wouldn't be a boot camp if God didn't kick me in the head.
One of the things we talk about at some length is what we call the stages of manhood. It's a broad look at the phases a man typically goes through in his life and what the point and challenge of the various phases are. For the sake of context they go in this order (if you're interested, read Way of the Wild Heart):
• Beloved Son
• Cowboy / Ranger
• Warrior
• Lover
• King
• Sage
Keeping in mind the fact that these stages are not discreet, and stages typically overlap, I find myself in a blend of the Warrior, Lover and King stages - which is pretty typical for my age by the way, minus the king part...and that's what God was talking to me about. No doubt there are places in my life where authority and leadership has come to me from outside sources - being asked to be an elder for example. But other places have grown out of my own ambition - Code-Monkeys to be precise. Before, I go much farther, I want to make clear that God wasn't eating my lunch in this conversation. He wasn't giving me grief or convicting me about out-of-balance ambition. He was pointing out the seeds of error - elements in my heart that left unchecked, could lead me into some dark places and all riding on great intentions.
One of the speakers tells a pretty compelling story about how he became a king way too early in his life, running a multi-million dollar company when he was barely 33. Of course, in most contexts that's a story of great achievement and something to be proud of, but David tells how the simple fact was that he was in no way ready for that kind of responsibility and as a result - he was a bad king. Now David would never have seen it that way at the time, it's only something that he has come to understand in hindsight, now that he's sold the company and has had some time to reflect. In some ways, but of course at a lower level, I see a little of what drove David in myself and when I hear his story I can really see what he's talking about. What's unfortunate is that until God pointed it out, I had been harboring this secret attitude that went something like this, 'Wow. David's experience has cost him dearly and I see a lot of parallels...of course I would never do that.'
David's message is one of the rare, sober accounts of a man saying 'Don't make the mistakes I made.' A little like Jacob Marley to be honest. But in my heart I've been hearing the wrong message. Instead of hearing what he has said very explicitly - that he became a king too young and it was bad for him, his family, and his employees - I've heard only a message to do it differently. In essence, I still wanted to be a young king, the ruler of a growing business empire, and I sort of figured I could handle it where he didn't, even though I never really thought about it in those terms.
It reminds of the fact that Jesus reserves some of his harshest words for the rich, mentioning wealth as perhaps the one place where we might actually loose our souls, and yet we are all quite eager to take that risk and we seek wealth with reckless abandon. Another aspect of this is that I'm a pretty independent guy and while I've told many men that life is better when it's not done alone, I've been sort of unconsciously disregarding my own advice, stubbornly insisting on cutting my own path - insisting that men who are clearly wiser and more experienced than myself, treat me as a peer...when I'm clearly not their peer.
Let me add one more log to this fire. For as often as I've told the story of Soma Games, I've always said that the whole thing has been God's idea from the get go. That I couldn't take any credit at all for the concepts or even the game designs. It all basically came to me as a download and I've been carrying it. But still in the three years since the download, I've grown sort of possessive of the whole thing. Acting as if I were the guardian of a sacred trust or something. I've had this attitude that other people could help - by donating $1M say - but they would have to play by my rules, because only I heard the vision from on high. You get the picture. Now of course I never would have said it that way, not even to myself, and I'm aware of the things that spooked me early on and made me somewhat cautious of unscrupulous investors, but it had grown out of balance, and God was kind enough to point the error out before I strangled to the thing like Lennie.
I really can only think of one other place in my life where I had a sort of sudden moment of clarity where I was able to make a sharp 90° turn but not need a more vivid crisis to kick me into gear. The realization of these things was like that though. I was able to very clearly see how I'd started down a bad path with my possessive attitude toward Soma and also to clearly recognize my need to seek and submit to some people who really have a lot to teach me. More to the point, I don't want to be a king right now, at least I don't want to grasp at that role - I'm not SUPPOSED to be a king right now. I think this time in my life is more about being the warrior (read the book if that doesn't make any sense) and the price I've seen paid by men who've become kings when they weren't ready is a price I'm unwilling to pay.
In short, I need to let some things go, take a deep breath - Ahhhhh.
****************
Now the really exciting part and the cause for this post's title. And I should point out that yes - I do se a very direct connection between what I've been talking about and this new development.
Soma has taken a very important step forward this week. Three separate men, men who have already succeeded in business and really know what they're doing, have all made commitments to see Soma move forward. They all get it. They all like the business plan. And they all want to see this thing be for real. Now any one of these guys could write us a check and fund our first round out of their pocket books but that's really not the coolest part. The cool part is the commitment of time, energy and expertise when none of those things are lightly given by any of them. One, for sure, has agreed to sit on the advisory board and the other two have had very positive responses and asked for a little time to pray just to be sure about what role they feel lead to play.
This is huge.
This is the day where Soma went from a cool idea to where it is now basically a matter of time before we start writing Arc. If these guys decide to invest themselves, great. If not, they have all the contacts in the world and will make it their business to find us a match for an investor or two.
And yet, as great as that is, I'm in a totally different place than I was four weeks ago. And as cool as it is that funding now seems to be over the next hill, I'm far more excited about working with a group of solid Christian men, men who are genuine and appropriate kings, and learning how to be a good king myself.
That...is breakthrough.
17 February 2008
We call it warfare
I heard a voice that cried
Balder the beautiful
is dead, is dead
The Word makes it clear that there is a time to rejoice, and a time to mourn. It also says that those who mourn are blessed - because they will be comforted. The last month and more has been a time of great mourning for me for a good and precious man, a kind of Balder in his own right, has taken a well-aimed bullet from the hater of our souls. In some ways there is so much to say, too much to say for all the hurt, all the sadness, all the pain. And in another way there is nothing at all to say - nothing really seems meet to the moment.
Without taking a single ounce from the tragedy of the fall, I am powerfully reminded of the words I've spoken many times to many men - this is a broken world and we are at war. If there were no casualties, it would put the lie to my own passionate assertion. Brave warriors can be struck down one step from the gate, a single arrow can unmake even the mightiest soldier. Odin's lesser known son, Balder, was beloved among the Aesir and Vanir. He and his wife, Nanna, inspired all who knew them with their grace and kindness and this special pair was held up and celebrated by heroes of much more renown. Thor, Sif, Tyr, Hermod, all of them brought gifts to Balder; they sought, and gained, oaths from everything upon and beneath the earth that nothing should harm their beloved Balder. But Loki the Hater was able to orchestrate the death of Balder with a sprig of mistletoe - a normally harmless plant with no root or strength. At his death, all of Asgard mourned bitterly that all their work to protect and lift up their beloved Balder had been undone by what no-one had deemed a threat. Over his body they sang bitter songs, "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead."
Still, for all the sorrow, all the mourning, I know that we serve a God of resurrection and restoration. We live under the bright and constant star of a risen Jesus and I pray that I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living - the 'against all odds' rebirth of this man and his family. Of course some things change permanently - Our Lord's risen body still bears the scars of our sins - but no man, no situation, is ever beyond the power of God to redeem and make whole, even if that whole is a different shape than the original design.
With that in mind, I know that I must guard my own heart against growing hard, against taking pain-driven words too personally, against feeling any safety beyond a sober "there but for the grace of God go I."
Dear Lord, guide my friend back to you door and do not let the work of the enemy stand.
Amen.
13 December 2007
Reflection
I find myself in an interesting frame of mind.
It’s part exhausted, part exhilarated. I’m partially overwhelmed, and somehow anxious for more. I’m living in a moment that is powerfully spiritual but almost cloyingly material.
There is so much to say about the last few months. Simply telling the stories would take several pages and yet even these few words seem premature in some way.
Perhaps that’s wisdom – maybe writing everything now is just to soon. It all needs time to germinate.
But for the simple purpose of relaying a few facts:
...presumably more to come.
It’s part exhausted, part exhilarated. I’m partially overwhelmed, and somehow anxious for more. I’m living in a moment that is powerfully spiritual but almost cloyingly material.
There is so much to say about the last few months. Simply telling the stories would take several pages and yet even these few words seem premature in some way.
Perhaps that’s wisdom – maybe writing everything now is just to soon. It all needs time to germinate.
But for the simple purpose of relaying a few facts:
- The Bontrager family moved into my house at the beginning of September
- Instead of three days (you know, like fish) they stayed three months
- They moved out last weekend into their own place and we deeply miss them – the house seems empty.
- We had the best month ever in my business in September
- I was within a hairsbreadth of loosing my business last week
- God is still God
- God is always good
...presumably more to come.
03 December 2007
Another New Sermon
Yeah so I actually got the opportunity to finish the thoughts I had started in the last sermon on authority, obedience and submission. So this sermon (see Strange Fire part 2 in sidebar) and the last should be seen as a single...very...very...long thought.
02 November 2007
24 September 2007
Quick Link
Some folks have asked for these, so here’s a link to the stuff I’ve been saying when they give me the mic:
http://www.code-monkeys.com/clients/home/mp3s.cfm
http://www.code-monkeys.com/clients/home/mp3s.cfm
Sober Smiles
You know, I was just about ready to not mention this to any broader audience, but now that Botrager has sent out an announcement to several people, I see that I'd get busted if I failed to at least mention this here.
I've been given the true honor of being selected as an elder in my church. The elders occupy a somewhat ambiguous position in a four square church as they have no voting role, and in fact don't even need to exist. The group is conveened by, and serves at the pastors convenience. We act as a sort of non-binding advisory group for the pastor...at least that's what the bylaws say. Functionally, elders have the role of acting as role models in the body, serving as spiritual thermometers for the pastor and other leaders, and we act with the explicit written Biblical authority to pray for the sick. Pretty heady stuff really. From the biblical perspective, they are one of the few 'offices' that get any ink in the Kingdom and Paul makes the establishment of elders a priority when he set up churches.
While I'm pretty excited by the whole thing, I'm also quite humbled. It's a serious responsibility in my mind and I really don't want to take the whole thing lightly. So please pray for me that I don't bollocks this up or serve poorly. The fact that teachers are judged by a different standard is a sobbering thought and as different folks shake my habd and say various things about what they think of this appointment I'm really made aware of the fact that God is no respecter of persons...
23 August 2007
Wonderful News
Just a quick post to share some wonderful news.
Odin was in the hospital the other day where he took a swallow test to check the interior diameter of his throat. For anyone not in the know, he’s been going to the hospital about every three weeks since he was born to stretch that point in his throat where they had to sew everything back together. The procedure itself isn’t terribly tricky, it’s an outpatient thing for an adult, but every three weeks for a year has been incredibly taxing – particularly on Rebekah who is the person with him most of the time.
Anyway, that now appears to be behind us. Almost a year to the day and we have no more dilations scheduled and the doctors expect he’ll be just fine from here on out. There is still a minor chance that his throat will start to constrict again, and we’ll forever want to take extra caution about taking too big a bite of food, but aside from that – it’s over.
I can’t tell you how happy that makes me and how it feels like the sun finally breaking through the clouds. What a crazy, brilliant, tortuous twelve months we’ve lived through...and I have this beautiful, wonderful son to show for it. Without question it’s all been worth it.
Odin was in the hospital the other day where he took a swallow test to check the interior diameter of his throat. For anyone not in the know, he’s been going to the hospital about every three weeks since he was born to stretch that point in his throat where they had to sew everything back together. The procedure itself isn’t terribly tricky, it’s an outpatient thing for an adult, but every three weeks for a year has been incredibly taxing – particularly on Rebekah who is the person with him most of the time.
Anyway, that now appears to be behind us. Almost a year to the day and we have no more dilations scheduled and the doctors expect he’ll be just fine from here on out. There is still a minor chance that his throat will start to constrict again, and we’ll forever want to take extra caution about taking too big a bite of food, but aside from that – it’s over.
I can’t tell you how happy that makes me and how it feels like the sun finally breaking through the clouds. What a crazy, brilliant, tortuous twelve months we’ve lived through...and I have this beautiful, wonderful son to show for it. Without question it’s all been worth it.
05 August 2007
Oh my gosh...it's all real!
See: http://the-m-blog.blogspot.com/2007/07/denial.html
There’s an elderly woman at my church, let’s call her Tina.
Tina has a granddaughter who we will call Suzy.
Suzy is pregnant.
Two weeks ago, Suzy was told by her doctor that her 20 week old baby was dead in her womb.
Suzy scheduled an appointment for Thursday the 2nd to have the corpse removed.
One week ago today, Tina asked the TFC prayer warriors to pray for her understandably depressed granddaughter.
One such warrior had the audacity to ask not for God to comfort Suzy, but rather to resurrect the child.
Three days ago, at her scheduled appointment, Suzy was told that her baby was – unexplainably – alive and apparently in excellent health.
Today we (TFC) hear the news and celebrate.
God is good – all the time.
Now in the spirit of full disclosure, let me say plainly that I am not the prayer warrior mentioned in the story. Nor am I Tina or Suzy in case that wasn’t clear. In fact, I wasn’t part of this prayer and only heard the story today. However, I am part of the growing group of folks at TFC who have been pressing in to God in the last few months specifically asking for miraculous healing to be a functional part of the TFC ministry and for that I feel like I can at least share the news as a victory with some back story, and the result of sustained prayer – as opposed to one of those random things that happens without precedent or follow-up, and always ‘elsewhere.’ As a matter of fact, while the ‘Denial’ post mentioned above might suggest that the idea was new to me as of a month ago, that’s not really accurate. I think the bell really rang for the first time back in February at BCNW’s advanced camp where I received an addendum to my name – healer. But none of that is really the point.
Regardless of me or any of the other prayer monkeys at church, beside Suzy, or Tina, or even the second life of this tiny baby, the point and the person to notice is Jesus...hence the title. Not like I needed more evidence, but this is the kind of thing that makes all my doubt and reservation seem so patently ridiculous.
And for you who think to yourself, “That isn’t what happened. The doctors simply got it wrong the first time. The real miracle is that modern science was able to catch the oversight before something horrible was done.” For you I have pity. Jesus mentioned you when he said ‘For [some] not even a man raised from the dead will convince them.’ Your incredulity is no inoculation against superstition, it’s instead a prison that keeps from any truth larger than your own parochial experience. But for the simply, and understandably, skeptical, let me remind you that we’re not talking about the kind of thing a doctor would be at all careless about for the risk of a gigantic lawsuit. Suzy had the death or her child checked, double-checked, and triple checked by various methods. All of the medical documentation is there to see – two weeks ago that child was dead beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And today...
Do you have space in your mind, or in your theology, for an American baby in 2007 to be resurrected in her mother’s womb for all the medical establishment to see? Does the thought of that kind of reality excite hope or fear in your heart? Do you find yourself longing to believe or longing to rationalize? If 99 identical cases end with a routine D&C but this one ends in a miracle do you conclude that God heals, that even now He has and uses the power of life and death in His hand...or that He doesn’t?
Listen closely dear reader, do not think for one moment that I seek the healing more than the healer. Healing of anybody’s body is only a temporary thing. This miracle child, just like Lazarus, will one die die again (if the Lord tarries). So this is not an eternal work. In fact the scripture makes it clear that healing and working miracles is a lesser gift than teaching. But I am also painfully aware of how the Western church has so completely forsaken the power of the Holy Spirit that almost none of us can relate a truly unambiguous story of Heaven elbowing its rude way into the earthly. We don’t even look for such things.
We’ve been praying for the kind of healing that silences all doubt – this is that moment. We’ve seen several other healings and miracles that are great, and we believe in their reality, but they were also of the sort that any scoffer could easily brush away. A prayer for a woman’s barren womb to be opened – was it prayer or just good luck that brought that woman’s daughter to church last week? A long broken family suddenly and unexplainably restored within 48 hours of starting a special (and secret) fast for that purpose...coincidence? Paralysis from a stroke, 90% lifelong deafness, debilitating addiction to pornography – all of these things healed in direct juxtaposition with authoritative and focused prayer to say nothing for dozens of smaller cases. And yet, all of them also open to debate as to what really happened and what the effective agent was. The people who prayed saw with spiritual eyes and knew what had happened, but the world could easily brush these things away. Not this time. This indeed is a touchstone and worth making a big deal over.
Let’s be honest, we’re all human and subject to doubt and despair. We NEED these kids of events to shore up our faith and get us to call on God for more of what he is already doing – in this case, raising the frakking dead! Maranatha baby! I want to remind you of Paul’s exceptionally eloquent defense of the gospel at Mars Hill in Athens (Acts 17:16-34) where the story concludes with ‘Now when they heard of the resurrection from the dead, some began to sneer...’ and Paul’s brilliant words were only able to reap a meager crop. But next he goes to Corinth. Imagine Paul disappointed in his own success in Athens, coming to Corinth to plant a new church and he says to them, ‘...when I came to you, brethren, I did not come to you with superiority of speech...my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.’ (1 Cor 2:1-5). I know that most of the folks who read this blog are the types who read more than we believe. We think about faith instead of acting on it. But my gut tells me that he time is rapidly passing for that mode of life, at least for myself.
In my heart of hearts I know that I will see the glory of God in the land of the living for one reason – because He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.
I implore you – seek and seek big, big things. Ask for the keys to your Father’s car, His house, His very Kingdom...and keep on asking. May this report of a documentable miracle, no doubt the first among many, break every chain of apathy and doubt and I pray it gnaws your gut as profound hunger for more in your own life, your own church, your own family.
There’s an elderly woman at my church, let’s call her Tina.
Tina has a granddaughter who we will call Suzy.
Suzy is pregnant.
Two weeks ago, Suzy was told by her doctor that her 20 week old baby was dead in her womb.
Suzy scheduled an appointment for Thursday the 2nd to have the corpse removed.
One week ago today, Tina asked the TFC prayer warriors to pray for her understandably depressed granddaughter.
One such warrior had the audacity to ask not for God to comfort Suzy, but rather to resurrect the child.
Three days ago, at her scheduled appointment, Suzy was told that her baby was – unexplainably – alive and apparently in excellent health.
Today we (TFC) hear the news and celebrate.
God is good – all the time.
Now in the spirit of full disclosure, let me say plainly that I am not the prayer warrior mentioned in the story. Nor am I Tina or Suzy in case that wasn’t clear. In fact, I wasn’t part of this prayer and only heard the story today. However, I am part of the growing group of folks at TFC who have been pressing in to God in the last few months specifically asking for miraculous healing to be a functional part of the TFC ministry and for that I feel like I can at least share the news as a victory with some back story, and the result of sustained prayer – as opposed to one of those random things that happens without precedent or follow-up, and always ‘elsewhere.’ As a matter of fact, while the ‘Denial’ post mentioned above might suggest that the idea was new to me as of a month ago, that’s not really accurate. I think the bell really rang for the first time back in February at BCNW’s advanced camp where I received an addendum to my name – healer. But none of that is really the point.
Regardless of me or any of the other prayer monkeys at church, beside Suzy, or Tina, or even the second life of this tiny baby, the point and the person to notice is Jesus...hence the title. Not like I needed more evidence, but this is the kind of thing that makes all my doubt and reservation seem so patently ridiculous.
And for you who think to yourself, “That isn’t what happened. The doctors simply got it wrong the first time. The real miracle is that modern science was able to catch the oversight before something horrible was done.” For you I have pity. Jesus mentioned you when he said ‘For [some] not even a man raised from the dead will convince them.’ Your incredulity is no inoculation against superstition, it’s instead a prison that keeps from any truth larger than your own parochial experience. But for the simply, and understandably, skeptical, let me remind you that we’re not talking about the kind of thing a doctor would be at all careless about for the risk of a gigantic lawsuit. Suzy had the death or her child checked, double-checked, and triple checked by various methods. All of the medical documentation is there to see – two weeks ago that child was dead beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And today...
Do you have space in your mind, or in your theology, for an American baby in 2007 to be resurrected in her mother’s womb for all the medical establishment to see? Does the thought of that kind of reality excite hope or fear in your heart? Do you find yourself longing to believe or longing to rationalize? If 99 identical cases end with a routine D&C but this one ends in a miracle do you conclude that God heals, that even now He has and uses the power of life and death in His hand...or that He doesn’t?
Listen closely dear reader, do not think for one moment that I seek the healing more than the healer. Healing of anybody’s body is only a temporary thing. This miracle child, just like Lazarus, will one die die again (if the Lord tarries). So this is not an eternal work. In fact the scripture makes it clear that healing and working miracles is a lesser gift than teaching. But I am also painfully aware of how the Western church has so completely forsaken the power of the Holy Spirit that almost none of us can relate a truly unambiguous story of Heaven elbowing its rude way into the earthly. We don’t even look for such things.
We’ve been praying for the kind of healing that silences all doubt – this is that moment. We’ve seen several other healings and miracles that are great, and we believe in their reality, but they were also of the sort that any scoffer could easily brush away. A prayer for a woman’s barren womb to be opened – was it prayer or just good luck that brought that woman’s daughter to church last week? A long broken family suddenly and unexplainably restored within 48 hours of starting a special (and secret) fast for that purpose...coincidence? Paralysis from a stroke, 90% lifelong deafness, debilitating addiction to pornography – all of these things healed in direct juxtaposition with authoritative and focused prayer to say nothing for dozens of smaller cases. And yet, all of them also open to debate as to what really happened and what the effective agent was. The people who prayed saw with spiritual eyes and knew what had happened, but the world could easily brush these things away. Not this time. This indeed is a touchstone and worth making a big deal over.
Let’s be honest, we’re all human and subject to doubt and despair. We NEED these kids of events to shore up our faith and get us to call on God for more of what he is already doing – in this case, raising the frakking dead! Maranatha baby! I want to remind you of Paul’s exceptionally eloquent defense of the gospel at Mars Hill in Athens (Acts 17:16-34) where the story concludes with ‘Now when they heard of the resurrection from the dead, some began to sneer...’ and Paul’s brilliant words were only able to reap a meager crop. But next he goes to Corinth. Imagine Paul disappointed in his own success in Athens, coming to Corinth to plant a new church and he says to them, ‘...when I came to you, brethren, I did not come to you with superiority of speech...my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.’ (1 Cor 2:1-5). I know that most of the folks who read this blog are the types who read more than we believe. We think about faith instead of acting on it. But my gut tells me that he time is rapidly passing for that mode of life, at least for myself.
In my heart of hearts I know that I will see the glory of God in the land of the living for one reason – because He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.
I implore you – seek and seek big, big things. Ask for the keys to your Father’s car, His house, His very Kingdom...and keep on asking. May this report of a documentable miracle, no doubt the first among many, break every chain of apathy and doubt and I pray it gnaws your gut as profound hunger for more in your own life, your own church, your own family.
26 July 2007
Getting It
I only have a moment here, but allow me to direct your attention to a dear friend of mine:
http://luckysevencatranch.blogspot.com/2007/07/forty-years-to-getting-it-part-three_26.html
Fish is...well...effusive in this post but if you don’t have the time to read it her point is so fresh, and so ancient and so incredibly important I just had to pick it up for a moment.
God loves me.
I’m amazed at how much time and energy we (as regular ol’ people) spend avoiding, fighting, doubting, dismissing and disregarding this wonderful fact. Please understand, I’m not trying to criticize anybody who wrestles with this. Lord knows it’s my daily bread as often as not. But in the good days I see that my best, most profound epiphanies all settle down into one of two things.
A: God is good.
B: God loves me.
Reading Fish talk about the overwhelming sense of being loved by her friends and family, and by immediate extension – loved by her Creator...man that is no small thing. And there is a part of me that almost snipes at her with a kind of ‘well duh’ expression. But another (and I think more holy) part of me says to that first part ‘Shut the hell up!’
If I could get to that point where I no longer had any doubt about God’s love I’d be half way to paradise. If I could really call my Lord Papa without feeling like I was somehow presuming upon his patience, or pray without the myriad of affectations I employ to try and move his hand...if I could only accept that he isn’t disappointed in me somehow...
Perhaps the thing we most need from Jesus’ example, and perhaps the thing we almost entirely miss, is the way he lets others love Him, particularly his dad. I think more and more about how easily Jesus received love totally without pretense, or shame, or desire to earn it.
God loves me.
God loves me.
God loves me.
http://luckysevencatranch.blogspot.com/2007/07/forty-years-to-getting-it-part-three_26.html
Fish is...well...effusive in this post but if you don’t have the time to read it her point is so fresh, and so ancient and so incredibly important I just had to pick it up for a moment.
God loves me.
I’m amazed at how much time and energy we (as regular ol’ people) spend avoiding, fighting, doubting, dismissing and disregarding this wonderful fact. Please understand, I’m not trying to criticize anybody who wrestles with this. Lord knows it’s my daily bread as often as not. But in the good days I see that my best, most profound epiphanies all settle down into one of two things.
A: God is good.
B: God loves me.
Reading Fish talk about the overwhelming sense of being loved by her friends and family, and by immediate extension – loved by her Creator...man that is no small thing. And there is a part of me that almost snipes at her with a kind of ‘well duh’ expression. But another (and I think more holy) part of me says to that first part ‘Shut the hell up!’
If I could get to that point where I no longer had any doubt about God’s love I’d be half way to paradise. If I could really call my Lord Papa without feeling like I was somehow presuming upon his patience, or pray without the myriad of affectations I employ to try and move his hand...if I could only accept that he isn’t disappointed in me somehow...
Perhaps the thing we most need from Jesus’ example, and perhaps the thing we almost entirely miss, is the way he lets others love Him, particularly his dad. I think more and more about how easily Jesus received love totally without pretense, or shame, or desire to earn it.
God loves me.
God loves me.
God loves me.
11 July 2007
Denial
I heard something on the radio the other day and it got me thinking.
How much is my life with Christ hindered by fear of living in denial?
How much is it hindered by my fear of other people thinking I’m living in denial?
I remember an entry a while back that I wrote that fear had suddenly appeared to me as the mother of all Christian hang-ups. In Dune they say ‘fear is the mind killer’ but even more, fear is the faith killer.
What if I’m wrong? What if it isn’t God talking to me at all? I mean we are talking about ‘hearing voices’ aren’t we...what if I’m going absolutely mad and I can’t tell the difference between straight-jacket grade crackerdom and a spiritual nudge...if indeed there is a difference.
Ever since I read all those Lovecraft stories in high school with Jeremy O’Kelly I’ve felt like insanity would be perhaps the most frightening thing I could imagine. And yet, my last several years with God have been characterized by an increasing sensitivity (and conforming) to invisible things. Without equivocation, I am moving farther and farther away from the rational, materialistic worldview that is supposed to be my birthright as a child of the Enlightenment and approaching...no, not just approaching – racing, longing, reaching for a worldview that could easily be assailed as superstitous at best, or flat out bonkers at worst. Demons? C’mon now Really. Angels? Miracles? God TOLD you to do that? You know they have pills for that sort of thing now (since electro-therapy is out of style).
But that said, I still am dragging a very heavy ball and chain called denial. It’s this little, unobtrusive word that sort of haunts me whenever I ponder another leap of faith. There is a ‘nontrivial’ fear in me still that I’ve bought some bill of goods with all this God stuff. I fear the possibility that reality is one way, and I am imagining it to be another...in other words, that I’m living in denial.
Even more scary is the thought of sharing my crazy processes with others. It’s one thing to wonder in my own little brain if I’m losing it. It’s quite another to have that fact pointed out by somebody else. And as painful as it might be for Slusser to say to me, “Dude...are you holding it together?” it would particularly distressing for some random passerby to speak up. As if the dreadful and obvious nature of my psychosis was so compelling that the milk of human kindness insisted they offer assistance to whatever shred of sanity remain in my noxiously rotting melon.
...and I realize that it is also at exactly that moment that I recognize the ploy for what it is.
When I lay it all out like that I can see how exactly backwards it is. What could possibly motivate me to care for the opinion of a stranger more than for the heartfelt and contextualized feedback of a friend? A friend knows my story and sees my current step as only one step in a longer journey. A friend knows my past and is far more likely to know what deeper motivations (crazy or sane) lay under my actions. In short, to care more what ‘they’ think than what you think is simply inaccurate thinking. Even more so, and no offense to my friends, but nobody knows every nook and cranny of my psyche like I do and if Shakespeare's best advice is “Know thyself” and “To thine own self be true” then I am compelled to be true to my own heart, regardless of what even best friend's concerns might be. (Which is not to discount good counsel...I’m making a point here).
So suddenly, ‘Denial’ shows itself to be a kind of shadow monster, cast on the wall by hands trying to manipulate me. As Lewis puts it in Peralandra – it’s the empirical boogey. This unfocused anxiety about facts and numbers and the implied pressure to conform in thought and deed to what the Bible calls the World.
Going forward: I declare here today that I don’t give one flying fig what the world has to say about my life. They can all go to hell.
Second: I will not let fear of men, especially not the men and women I hold precious, to check my willingness to share my life with them.
Third: I would much prefer the uncomfortable uncertainty of a mystery than to force a ‘rational’ filter onto a transcendent lifestyle.
So with that, I’m reminded of something Jesus says: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out demons – full stop.” Mat 10:8
I’ve spent some significant energy in the last couple of years in learning to drive out demons. I’m working on healing the sick next.
How much is my life with Christ hindered by fear of living in denial?
How much is it hindered by my fear of other people thinking I’m living in denial?
I remember an entry a while back that I wrote that fear had suddenly appeared to me as the mother of all Christian hang-ups. In Dune they say ‘fear is the mind killer’ but even more, fear is the faith killer.
What if I’m wrong? What if it isn’t God talking to me at all? I mean we are talking about ‘hearing voices’ aren’t we...what if I’m going absolutely mad and I can’t tell the difference between straight-jacket grade crackerdom and a spiritual nudge...if indeed there is a difference.
Ever since I read all those Lovecraft stories in high school with Jeremy O’Kelly I’ve felt like insanity would be perhaps the most frightening thing I could imagine. And yet, my last several years with God have been characterized by an increasing sensitivity (and conforming) to invisible things. Without equivocation, I am moving farther and farther away from the rational, materialistic worldview that is supposed to be my birthright as a child of the Enlightenment and approaching...no, not just approaching – racing, longing, reaching for a worldview that could easily be assailed as superstitous at best, or flat out bonkers at worst. Demons? C’mon now Really. Angels? Miracles? God TOLD you to do that? You know they have pills for that sort of thing now (since electro-therapy is out of style).
But that said, I still am dragging a very heavy ball and chain called denial. It’s this little, unobtrusive word that sort of haunts me whenever I ponder another leap of faith. There is a ‘nontrivial’ fear in me still that I’ve bought some bill of goods with all this God stuff. I fear the possibility that reality is one way, and I am imagining it to be another...in other words, that I’m living in denial.
Even more scary is the thought of sharing my crazy processes with others. It’s one thing to wonder in my own little brain if I’m losing it. It’s quite another to have that fact pointed out by somebody else. And as painful as it might be for Slusser to say to me, “Dude...are you holding it together?” it would particularly distressing for some random passerby to speak up. As if the dreadful and obvious nature of my psychosis was so compelling that the milk of human kindness insisted they offer assistance to whatever shred of sanity remain in my noxiously rotting melon.
...and I realize that it is also at exactly that moment that I recognize the ploy for what it is.
When I lay it all out like that I can see how exactly backwards it is. What could possibly motivate me to care for the opinion of a stranger more than for the heartfelt and contextualized feedback of a friend? A friend knows my story and sees my current step as only one step in a longer journey. A friend knows my past and is far more likely to know what deeper motivations (crazy or sane) lay under my actions. In short, to care more what ‘they’ think than what you think is simply inaccurate thinking. Even more so, and no offense to my friends, but nobody knows every nook and cranny of my psyche like I do and if Shakespeare's best advice is “Know thyself” and “To thine own self be true” then I am compelled to be true to my own heart, regardless of what even best friend's concerns might be. (Which is not to discount good counsel...I’m making a point here).
So suddenly, ‘Denial’ shows itself to be a kind of shadow monster, cast on the wall by hands trying to manipulate me. As Lewis puts it in Peralandra – it’s the empirical boogey. This unfocused anxiety about facts and numbers and the implied pressure to conform in thought and deed to what the Bible calls the World.
Going forward: I declare here today that I don’t give one flying fig what the world has to say about my life. They can all go to hell.
Second: I will not let fear of men, especially not the men and women I hold precious, to check my willingness to share my life with them.
Third: I would much prefer the uncomfortable uncertainty of a mystery than to force a ‘rational’ filter onto a transcendent lifestyle.
So with that, I’m reminded of something Jesus says: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out demons – full stop.” Mat 10:8
I’ve spent some significant energy in the last couple of years in learning to drive out demons. I’m working on healing the sick next.
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