Determination.

Determination.
With God, all things are possible. So buckle up, show up, and NEVER give up.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

The Newness and the Maker

New Year's Eve can bring some of the most mixed emotions. I don't know what yours are this year, as 2014 ebbs out and prepares to give way to the new tide of 2015, but mine are certainly a mixed bag. There's nostalgia in reliving a few fond memories, remorse over some of the mistakes made or time I can call wasted - the missed opportunities, and there's expectation that comes from wondering how this blank slate before me will be written on. Will it hold many of the things I anticipate, or only a few? Will it be a year I'll look back on in 12 months and call a "good" or "bad" year? Part of my spirit really deeply longs for it to be a good year. 

For some, there's no emotions about New Year's. Some are plain old numb about it. Maybe it's been a moot thing for you for as long as you can remember, and you just want the hullabaloo to pass so normal life can get back into swing. Or maybe you've just recently become disenfranchised with all the fuss made about such things as nostalgia, commiseration, catharsis, and resolutions. 

Or maybe the pain of something that's hovering over your life like the deep darkness of these winter nights, that comes too early and lingers too late, is what's got you numb towards New Year's Eve this year. You just can't shed the dragging heft of this ugly weight in your life, and a calendar flip can't change squat about that. So what's the point? It's another day. So what? Working in retail as I do currently sure brings to light how many people might be, or admittedly are, living that way, as they have no issue spending all their time in a furniture store on a holiday, whether as a customer or employee, or have no special plans to do anything at home with family or friends. 

My friend, I can't account for all that you may be feeling as we sit at the doorstep of another year. I can't be sure exactly what might be cheapening the potential value of another New Year. 

But as I found myself thinking about this concept of "newness," I realized that it's all about the making.

Nothing can be new unless it's made new.

One of the most powerfully moving scenes in the 2004 film "The Passion of the Christ" was when Jesus, played by Jim Caviezel, took another of his nasty spills while struggling to carry his cross out of the city of Jerusalem and up to the crucifixion site on Golgotha. At this particular moment of the movie, the anxiety of Christ's path with the burden of the cross upon him, mixed with surging sorrowful music that mimicked the anguish of those around him who loved and followed him, mounted with Jesus' mother, Mary, running to his side after trying to work through the crowds to reach him.
There, joining him for a heart-wrenching moment on her knees, as her son, the Son of God, panted for his labored breath and peered over to her with blood running all over his face, she tried to console him, and her motherly heart broke for him in his pain. 

Jesus, though, despite his suffering and fatigue, still had his mind set on the purpose of all of it, and showed that he still believed in what he was about to accomplish. He took her face in a bloody hand, gently pointed it towards his so she was close enough to hear his chortled words, and uttered,

"Behold, mother, I make all things new..."


Tonight my point is very simply this:

Jesus Christ is the one who makes this year new, and makes you new too. 

"But I'm broken. I haven't felt whole inside in so long," you say.

Doesn't matter. Christ makes you new. 

"But this relationship is strained to the point of breaking, and I have no fight left in me to work on fixing it."

Doesn't matter. Christ makes you and your relationships new.

"But this addiction I've battled for years just won't let me go. It's got a grip so tight on me that I can't imagine being free."

Doesn't matter. Christ makes you and your behavior new. 

"But I'm so lonesome and feel like I have no one to love me."
"But I'm broke and sick of feeling like a failure."
"But I'm afraid of what my illness, my cancer, my condition, my chronic pain will bring in the days to come."
"But I just doubt that anything good is ever going to truly happen to me."
"But I am numb, and done with trying."

Doesn't matter. 

Christ has made all things new. 

It didn't look very promising in that dire moment when Christ was on his knees, bleeding, aching, sore from beatings, dirty and spit upon, and mentally taxed from all the hateful mocking of his opponents. He knew that death awaited him. But he rose from the ground and got back to his feet, shrugged the cross back onto the peak of his shoulder, and carried forward to that crucifixion site. There, even though his death sentence was carried out, the bitterness and ugliness of an apparent defeat was the victory mankind needed. 

It was a victory YOU and I needed. It made us new. It made everything new and changed everything forever. 

Your newness is not a cape to throw on whenever you feel triumphant enough to play the superhero in life. It's not a badge to wear proudly emblazoned on your chest when you have a day of proud accomplishment. It's not something you can take off and put back on - it's a part of you. 

Even in whatever feels ugly, disappointing, heartbreaking, maddening, or despicable in your life or in your very self, there is a newness that was MADE...made by Jesus on that day he died for you. That newness was assigned to you by his mercy, and whatever things that are weighing on you now as you contemplate another new year cannot erase that from within you. 

I wish for hope for you, my friend. Don't see the darkness. It's a disguise, no matter how real or convincing. The darkness of the world, and our lives that are affected daily by sin, is a shroud that only just barely hides the light beneath. That's temporary. Christ has promised to come back again one day, and take all those who belong to him home to enjoy Paradise, and leave this shroud of darkness and numbness behind. 

Wait on that day, and let that hope and expectation color over the gloom and numbness that sits in your heart. 

You are new. You may not feel it in this moment, but I pray you will realize it again and grab onto its sturdy truth like a bold hiking staff that will help you climb life's mountains. 

2015 may not look like much as it approaches. But remember, the night is always deepest and darkest before the dawn. The light is coming. It's a light of hope, and it cannot be contained. 

It's the light of newness, and it springs from your soul. It was made by someone, to live inside you, and that someone is the Lord, Jesus Christ. 

May your New Year be truly joyful, because of salvation and a home waiting in Heaven, regardless of how happy you are tonight. 

It's a New Year.....and a new you.

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Weak is the New Strong



Are you strong? Are you powerful, a conquering warrior who has never lost a fight? Are you the kind of man or woman who strolls with swag into any room and people notice, and everything just goes your way? Are you the owner of a spotless rap sheet, the doer of all noble deeds, with no scars or emotional wounds to speak of? Do you pretty much have life by the tail, and the world is going to be missing out something fierce if it doesn't know about you?

Then stop reading this, and move along. 

But are you weak? Are you always plagued by that thing - you know what it is for you - that sticks in your craw, that keeps you up at night, that rears its ugly, annoying little head whenever you're poised for a personal victory? Are you more on the downtrodden, delicate, self-deprecating side of self-esteem? Do you hate feeling weak, being weak, coming up lame, never coming through in the clutch, and it's all because of that doggone weakness inside? 

Then I'm talking to you....and I know exactly how you feel. 

AND...I have fantastic news for you.

You see, it's ok to be weak. It's ok that you are weak sometimes, and that you have this weakness that taunts you and trips you up in critical times. In fact, it's more than ok. It's a reason to throw a party, for crying out loud!

As your party music of choice starts thumping and the balloons are inflating and the sparkly hats and champagne are being passed around, let me tell you why it's ok that the banner hanging from the ceiling at your personal party says "Congratulations, Weakling!"

.........It's because weak is the new strong.



Let's talk about St. Paul. No one, and I mean no one, had more to boast about than he did. He had the ministry all ministry-minded people would die for, and technically, he almost did die for it a number of times (see: Laundry List of Run-In's, Near Death Experiences, and Hardships of Paul...you'll have to read most of the New Testament after the book of Acts to get that list, but it'll be worth it), and ultimately his faith cost him his life. But the guy was pretty much the main catalyst to the growth of the Christian church around the known world in the Roman Empire in the first century A.D. He was a missionary extraordinaire, and when he talked, or wrote an epistle, people paid attention. From a human standpoint, Paul did work, son. 

But if you know his story of his life as Saul, you'll also know that no one had more reason to be ashamed, and he called himself the Chief of Sinners in his writings. He was a prime persecutor of the church of Christ at first, and about the closest thing to a member of ISIS in his day. Yet he spent his later years in life leading and growing that very body of followers of Jesus after a dramatic conversion. 

Paul spends the first few verses of chapter 12 of his second letter to the church he planted in Corinth talking about boasting. He references a story of amazing church lore where a man was called to heaven and heard [and saw] "inexpressible things." That would be a guy worth bragging about. What a rock star HE must have been. But, Paul says, "Me? Nothing to write home about, unless of course you want to talk about my weaknesses." In verse 5 he says 

"I will boast about a man like that, but I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses."

Not exactly something you'd hear many men say, is it? 

It's not like this was a cultural thing. Men in those times in that part of the world - or any part, for that matter - always wanted to be macho. They rarely wanted to show or admit any weakness, and that's no different from men today. In our culture today there's an obsession about power. I can't say for sure that it's only a male thing, but it sure weighs heavier on men to be powerful, and not talk about what's weak in us. 

Nobody likes to talk about their weaknesses, much less admit they have any to begin with.

I've seen it. You've seen it. Most men - and many women too - will run from their weaknesses. If the weaknesses are uncovered by others, the next thing they'll run from is therapy, or any healthy solution.

Power is everything today. It's attractive, engaging, commanding, and sexy. It conveys status, dominance, mastery of something, dependability, value. Power and strength also offer a protective shield for our pride. The rich, famous, and powerful never have to let the world in, or have their weaknesses on display, unless they choose to. Even the average Joe wants to stay carefully protected behind whatever power he can project into his world. Weakness, on the other hand, is a time-waster. It's inconvenient. It bogs down the company, the family, the team, the church ministry...Who wants to deal with that? Just ask Jesse "The Body" Ventura. He ain't got time to bleed. Who of us has time for weakness? 

God does. For the Maker of the Universe, who loves his people immensely and beyond our comprehension, weakness is opportunity for him. Not opportunity to exploit, but to come to the rescue, to shine, and to advertise to the world, that weakness is ok because HE is strong - at all times, in all things, and for everyone. 

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:7 that he had a "thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me." 

We all have thorns, don't we? Paul goes on to redefine this thorn as merely a "weakness." Something in him that he preferred not to have or deal with, that slowed him down, embarrassed him, and made him feel inadequate or vulnerable, and Satan routinely used it against him. 

What's your thorn? We all have them. We all have a personal area of weakness that feels to the psychological side like a little, obnoxious thorn lodged in the skin, that can't be pulled out with a tweezers. We've worked to eradicate these thorny weaknesses, and we've covered them up a thousand times, but they just....won't....go...away.

So we turn to God eventually, after all of man's grand efforts fail miserably to renew himself and develop personally into some self-made giant within. We come to that breaking point in life when we just HAVE TO be rid of the thorn or it'll do us in, and cause despair. 

"How many times have you heard me cry out,
'God, please take this'?
How many times have you given me strength to
just keep breathing?
Oh, I need you...
God, I need you now."

These lyrics from a song by the Christian musician Plumb come ringing into my head when I think of my thorn, my weakness (YouTube the song after reading this, it's an awesome, powerful song - seeing her perform it live brought me to tears). 

Did you know Paul cried out to God for his thorn to be taken away three times? Seeing how Paul describes his ordeal with this "thorn in the flesh," and knowing how my own life has gone, I'm guessing this wasn't three times all on Thursday one week, back in Shevat of 57 (that's like saying "January of 2014"). I'm guessing it was at three separate passages of time, in seasons of his life and ministry, when he had good, knock-down-drag-out prayer sessions with the Lord that culminated quieter periods of ongoing inner turmoil, and he pleaded with God to eradicate this weakness from his existence. We all know what it's like to feel like we just can't go on unless the weakness is taken away. The thorn may be a tiny little thing in our emotional skin, but its weight is tremendous.

But just as God didn't choose to remove the cancer of sin from mankind's fabric with a wave of a magic wand, neither did he choose to take Paul's thorn away. Nor does he just make ours go away either - not all the time. Rather, he redeems the thorns. He redeemed us, through Jesus Christ, thus giving us a new standing with God that overcomes the relevance of the thorns.

This is how Paul described it: 

"But [the Lord] said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' " (verse 9a)

I've had a real weakness in me revealed in recent weeks that sort of defies what I've always thought of myself, and shakes my confidence in an area where I always felt I was strong. It's definitely going to be a thorn going forward. When this kind of thorn shows up - and some days I think of have several others, too - it leaves a man feeling suddenly more vulnerable about the things he wants to take on in his future. The trust in oneself to win life's battles can be eroded so thoroughly when you find yourself staring face to face with a glaring weakness. Is it time to panic? Is it time to crumple up the plans or dreams I've drawn up and throw them aside? It is time to curl up and get overrun with depression?

Not even close. 

It's party time, people. It's cause for celebration! 

"...I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties..." (verse 10)

Why, Paul? How does that make any sense?

"For when I am weak, then I am strong." (end of verse 10)

During all the years of human history, and in all those microcosmic individual moments in fallen people's lives, leading up to the day Christ hung on the cross, mankind was very weak. Sin itself, and the eternal spiritual death sentence it brought along, was the elephant in the room, and the thorn in the flesh. 

What were we going to do?? How were we going to overcome it?? How could it ever be right again?? Why would God our Father in heaven ever want anything to do with impure, weak people like us??

But on that beautifully black Friday afternoon, as Jesus gave up his last breath, uttering "Tetelestai" ("It is finished"), he made it all right. He overcame it. He tore down the heavy veil that hung between us and our holy God, and brought wayward sons and daughters back together again with their daddy. He redeemed us. His unbelievable, sacrificial display of love that we couldn't possibly deserve - better known as "GRACE" - stepped into human history as he died, and it made us -

FORGIVEN. 

It made us strong, though we were weak on our own. 

God used Paul, his rockstar of a missionary, whose name has graced many a chapel or cathedral around the world since his time, as a striking example of a man being kept humble through weakness. If such a man would only brag on himself with respect to the stuff the rest of us would laugh or sneer at, then I think the rest of us can take a page out of his journal. 

So let the party go on. Take a selfie of that weakness. Don't be ashamed of it. Continue to work on yourself, sure, and seek to glorify your Lord through personal growth and a constant maturation of your faith and spiritual life. But NEVER, EVER let your weakness become reason to despair. Let it put a smile on your face. Even though that smile would be an impossible thing for the face of someone who doesn't yet know that Jesus' love is for them too, YOU can smile it up big time. You can throw that party and boast in the weakness that God allows you to live with, because it means something powerful...

It means God is on display. 

If we were strong all the time, in every way, the world would look at us. We don't want that. We want them to look at Jesus. Weak is the new strong. 

When you're weak, God gets to be strong. He gets to do all over again, through you and your thorn, what he once did in the most glorious way as he bought us back from sin and death. He's using you and your weakness as the stage to show how awesome a God he is and how awesomely he can come through for fallen people. 

For people like me, who are so fallen and weak, that's some pretty fantastic news! 

Next time that thorn shows up....Let that initial reaction pass, then go look in the mirror, and say to yourself, "That's right! Now God can show up!"





Sunday, December 7, 2014

The Perfect Impossibility


Want to talk about something that's really an impossible mission? How about figuring out what God is up to.

We've all been there. Whether it be the little, almost meaningless things that still get under my skin, like how my dutiful and studious efforts to select the optimal fantasy football roster still blow up in my face...or the big things, like why a loved one would get cancer, why poor children around the world are going hungry, why a certain politician is allowed to remain in office, or why my wheels of purpose in life seem to spin in the mud...So many issues find me staring up at the sky, asking God: 

"What are you up to??" 

A passage of Scripture I bumped into the other day really made me sit back and think about this tendency to strive for figuring God out. It was Ecclesiastes 11:5. Check it out:

"As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things."

I don't think this crazed desire to have God and his "work" all figured out is anything new. Many of the oldest philosophical works delve deeply into the heart of logic, trying to apply paradigms onto the divine that mankind has established which allow us to make sense of the world around us. There seems to be certain categories of things that science can explain, or other patterns that math or reasoning can rationalize or justify. 

But God is in a category all his own, isn't he? He really is. Sometimes we explain things going differently than we'd expect with light-hearted sayings like "God must have a sense of humor." Sometimes we get downright miffed about things. Other times a person may find him or herself at the winter of their lifetime, looking back across decades of being upset at God all over a single event that shook their trust in him simply because it couldn't be understood. 

The writer of this passage in Ecclesiastes was told by God himself to write these exact words so there'd be no uncertainty. There are just some things we're not meant to understand. By God's grace it's been made perfectly clear what we can understand about his plan to save us by orchestrating human history to create a time when it would be right for his son to come to Earth as Jesus Christ, become our substitute, and die in our place and rise to defeat sin and death. Aside from that, how he operates is really quite a mystery. 

Well, that's not entirely true. There are other principles about God and how he works that we find ourselves being educated on by Sunday morning sermons in church. And those lessons are to be taken seriously. But still, sometimes we just can't know why God did this, or allowed that to happen, or did this thing over here when normally one would assume he'd do that over there instead. 

Why do we try so hard to make sense of every last little thing? There's really nothing we human beings don't want to have figured out, is there? It's even worse with how we view God. We demand answers and explanations. We claim to have him or his behavior defined completely, and then when he breaks our mold, or goes beyond what we can fathom, it perturbs us. Why?

I personally think it's a couple traits in action, possibly simultaneously in some cases. 

First of all, there's PRIDE. We are some seriously egotistical people. Especially nowadays in the 21st century, when so much of the prevailing philosophy of the times indoctrinates us with ubiquitous materialism, antsy instant gratification, and entitlement. 

We want it all, we want it now, and it's because WE DESERVE IT, doggone it!

The discussion of what's wrong with this hubris, as it's long been called, is deep enough for another time. The fact is, simply put, that it's flat out wrong. It's very near-sighted and narrow-minded. It's full of self and no one else, and definitely devoid of God, our heavenly father who has in mind the temporal wellbeing and eternal destiny of each of the 7.13 billion people (give or take) currently living on the planet. When you put it into perspective that way, the relevance of a single event, even as severe as contracting a terminal illness, for the life of just one person, is miniscule in relation to the grander scale of Earth's population. As for something like my fantasy football week not going my way? Well, we won't even go there....

Then there's another factor, FEAR. We simply lack the composure to let some things go on unexplained. We are terrified of not being able to account for all the ramifications of an event, an issue, a change, a loss, an occurrence, a lingering question that seems to be bound for finding no resolution. We can't handle the thought of not knowing why God operates as he does sometimes. 

But trust, as in faith, in our amazing God, is two things:
It's necessary, and it's beautiful. 

It's necessary because, well, as that Scripture passage's author points out, "...you CANNOT understand the work of God, the Maker of all things." It just ain't happening. Just as impossible as it is for us to truly explain, much less comprehend, the miracle of conception of life in the womb, and just as impossible to predict perfectly how the wind and weather will behave - c'mon, meterologists, you know what I'm talking about - so is it with having God pegged. 

And really, why should we? We are, after all, the creation. Not the creator. How could the minds of the beings who were fashioned from the boundless creative genius of an all powerful, divine craftsman POSSIBLY exist on the same par with that Creator's mind and consciousness? That really wouldn't make sense, actually. 

As I said, it's also a beautiful thing to trust God too. Trust without the explanation is something God craves for us to have, as part of the loving relationship he drew up for us and him. He wants us to see him as an infinitely more perfect father than the Earthly ones we all have had, whom many of us have been able to trust fairly blindly because we knew their love, and we loved them in return. The vibrant examples of followers and believers in God who simply fall back and expect God to catch them because of that loving trust, and assured affection, lend themselves as beautiful models for those of us who long for a peace of mind that only those trusting ones understand. 

It's the effortless, fluid, artful image of a dancing partner knowing the other understands the moves to be made, and knowing that the footsteps will fall where they ought, and trusting that when it's time to be twirled in the air, they will be caught and spun on into the next delightful dance move. 

The biggest challenge of faith, that can engender this trust without explanations, might just be a letting go. It's a not-needing-to-know. It's recognition that he's told us, in passages like Ecclesiastes 11:5, "My son, my daughter, you just aren't going to be able to know. You won't be able to understand it. You're not meant to. You're meant to have faith in me, and watch me work."

This is a humbling idea, and an often times abrasive one for very natural parts of our human fabric. But faith is meant to transcend the frailties and shortcomings of what human nature has been ever since the Fall into sin. It's an opportunity to lay down pride, and to push past fear. It's meant to be a confidence that no matter how crazy, or scary, the dance moves, we WILL be caught, and the beautiful dance will go on perfectly. 

This isn't an impossible mission to trust God. With faith, it's all very possible....because with God, all things ARE possible.