Category: meditations

One time I tried to teach children to speak English. Their native tongue made it very hard for them, and they constantly struggled.

I would explain instructions slowly, in simple words.

They didn’t understand.

I would ask them to repeat the instructions.

They didn’t understand.

I would tell them again, in simpler, slower words. I felt sure they’d get it. I felt sure my point was made.
They didn’t understand.

No matter what I tried, there was still that barrier,
an absolute mountain that stood in the way
of passing what I knew onto them.

I was so frustrated. I was at a loss. All I wanted to do was to take these kids, to tell them that I loved them, and to teach them everything I knew.

And then it hit me.

In life I sit in a class, and at the blackboard stands God,
the All-Mighty God of the universe,
who is speaking to me in a wonderful and complex language of Love.

And I don’t understand.

And I hope that when I finally get something, that when a light finally turns on up in my head,

God smiles,

and feels a joy beyond compare.

I think that everyone should be forced to teach English as a second language. The lessons learned from watching people struggle with something you natively understand and not being able to communicate with them I think provides an interesting perspective on how God must see us at times.

The two summers I spent in that classroom were eye-opening in so many ways. As a teacher, I desire to pass knowledge on to my students – ultimately for my understanding of the subject to be given to them. Somehow, no matter how hard I tried, there were those who simply couldn’t get it.

But I think one of the funniest things was that it wasn’t the success of the students who never had a problem that gave me the most joy. It was when one of the slow ones – the ones who never got anything – when it clicked for one of those students, every minute of frustration was worth it.

I still wonder what God thinks as he looks at my life. I don’t know where I fit in the scheme of “fast” or “slow” learners – from my perspective it’s “slow” far too often. But I have a feeling that God feels somewhat like I did. I have a feeling that when we get something, when the light finally clicks for us, God smiles.

What is it that saves you?

Is it some checklist?
Some recipe in an eternal cookbook, that if followed to the letter, exactly to the letter,
guarantees salvation to anyone?

Does your biblical knowledge,
your theoretical understanding of God gleaned from years of research, listening and reading,
hold the key to heaven’s gates?

Can you rest your eternal security
completely and totally on your faith in the grace of God that you can say nothing else matters,
nothing at all?

For I know many people who can follow instructions
to the letter
who make lousy cooks.

And I have brilliant friends who know more than I ever will
and understand so much
who don’t know the first thing about applying their knowledge.

And I have seen many who believe strongly
and do nothing
and in the end that’s exactly what they have.

So what is it that saves you?

Paul says
“I now consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus. . . I want to know Christ . . . to become like Him in His death.”

To Paul
nothing
absolutely nothing
was more important than knowing Jesus and seeking a deep relationship with him.

I think that Paul would say
I am saved because
“I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus,
took hold of me.”

Another early foray into a more post-modern way of thinking. As I sat and pondered, I came to the conclusion that there had to be something more to it than everyone was telling me. Is salvation baptism? Is it the sinner’s prayer? Is it how much I know, or how well I follow the instructions?

Ultimately all of these answers felt hollow and empty to me. They didn’t fully answer the question that was being asked – “How do I make myself right with God?”

What Paul says here was later put to me in an extremely cogent fashion by my mentor – “Relationships are more important than rules.” All too often we get caught up in the rules about what it means to be a person of faith and what we have to follow. Ultimately we have to follow Christ, and the relationship we have with him is more important than the rules.

Far more important.

“Relationships are more important than rules.” – Good words to live by.

“Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.”

What is purity?

Is it something that
requires stiff and rigid living?

Is it something that
only a few,
very special people obtain?

Is it something that
we strive for, and seek after,
but always seem to end up short?

I believe our hearts are like a glass,
and we look through that glass to see God.

We have a choice
to fill our hearts
with the water of Christ,
or the dirt of the world.

And when we place dirt in our hearts,
even if only a bit,
our vision of God becomes
that much more blurry,
that much less defined,
that much less complete.

Could it be
that being pure in heart
simply means choosing Jesus?

Filling our lives
so totally and completely full of Him
that there is no room for anything else?

“Create in me a pure heart, O God.”

For quite some time there was (and still is, to a certain extent) a “purity movement” in afC… a movement that basically said that purity was about what you didn’t do. Before going further, I must say that I love dearly the people who feel this way, and I respect their committment to God and to a righteous and holy lifestyle. They are good people who love God tremendously, and I respect them completely.

In re-reading this, I think it can be interpreted to the benefit of either side of the debate, but my intent was certainly not to say that we should employ a strict moral code in the service of sectarianism. Rather, the idea that purity *does not* require strict and rigid living was the theme.

In the reflection of subsequent years, it strikes me that we often talk about purity in the wrong way. Often, we talk about religious purity in terms of a righteous lifestyle. Purity, on the other hand, in a worldly sense is used in terms of consistency. Pure gold is 24 karat – it is *just* gold – there is nothing else inside of it. Something can, of course, be pure lead, or pure dirt, or pure manure. Similarly, our lives could be purely evil and be “pure”.

I think we confuse the term “purity” with the term “holiness”. Most certainly we want to be pure – we are called to have a heart that is consistently seeking God. Holiness is the term that refers to the the character and the “rightness” of our actions, where as purity is the term that, in my mind, refers to the consistency. Certainly we are called to be both holy and pure.

None the less, we cannot and should not use either of these terms in the pursuit of rampant sectarianism, seeking to disengage ourselves from anything that might make us “worse people”. To engage evil is not to embrace evil. We are called to be “in the world, but not of the world” – a challenge to be sure, and one that requires us to make difficult moral choices every day, but ultimately the only way we will be able to fulfill the mission and ministry of Jesus.

This Christian thing,
this thing that we bill as the answer,
So many times we call it easy.
We call salvation as simple as ABC.

But I can’t read more than a few pages of my bible
without being squarely hit with this fact:
The Christian life is not easy.

We are called to a higher standard.
We are called to a life of sacrifice.
We are called to place our trust in a God who is unseen.

It is a perfect life,
a fulfilling life,
one without remorse,
without regret.

But it is not an easy life.

“This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”

We were in Africa, and one of the people with us had a guide to salvation – easy as ABC. I have more problems with that now than I had back then, but even stilli remember feeling rather annoyed at the assertion that this Christian life was an easy thing.

I suppose in some ways it’s a matter of definition. The way many people today live their Christian lives – a health and wealth Gospel that says something to the effect that we’re all on the gravy train to heaven – is certainly an easy proposition to accept and live. The problem, I think, is that it’s not how life works. Over and over again that theology is proved untrue.

More than that, it’s not easy to maintain a solid commitment to Christ. If it were easy, we wouldn’t have a high divorce rate; we wouldn’t have churches angrily splintered across the nation. We wouldn’t live in a culture that feels, primarily, that Christians are anti-homosexual, judgmental, and hypocritical, and more than that we wouldn’t be those things. (To insert a note of clarification here, I am not suggesting that we support a homosexual lifestyle. However, when viewed as an issue of human rights, we should not be anti-homosexual – as in the people. We can and should treat homosexuality as a sin. We also, however, should treat things like greed, pride, and lust as sin, which places many of us in the same boat with homosexuals – the boat of sinners.)

If the Christian walk were the easy walk, we wouldn’t have to sell it. We wouldn’t have to convince people that it was easy – everyone would find it out for themselves. The reality is that a Christian walk is hard. It doesn’t involve saying a little prayer or jumping into water and then checking out for the rest of your life until you get to heaven. It requires a constant, daily struggle with the nature of who we are. Salvation is not an event, but a process. A long, slow, hard process.

One without remorse,
without regret.

how rare
a soul in open anguish
unafraid to break
under the burden
of constant sorrow

how uncomfortable
we sit in silence
as the sobs of despair
echo in the hollow room
while we twitch in our seats

how powerless
spiraling out of control
terrified to admit
our disinterest in each other
our weakness embodied.

how tragic
a place fashoined
for such sorrow
should offer no solace
save to those with no need.

Struggle
is an ugly word.

I wonder why we avoid it so much.

We seek the easy path.
We pray for God to remove obstacles
We see every hindrance as something what annoys us, a true inconvenience on our path to heaven.

Could it be

that all of those annoyances and frustrations
are the only way we step closer to God?

That the easy path,
the one that looks to be fair and lovely,
actually hurts more in the end.

In struggle we must rely on God,
depend on Him as if He was our very Life.

And He is our very life.
And He must remain our very life.

Something interesting to me is that we try to avoid struggle at all cost – this in spite of the fact that the struggles we have in life often define us. God’s plan has always been to lead his people through the wilderness – a time where they are forced to rely on him and cast off the assumptions of their previous lives in order to enter the promised land.

When we, as people, refuse to enter the desert, we don’t take those steps toward God that are so needed. I feel that in many ways, I am on a constant journey from one wilderness to the next.

My prayer is that we each would seek the wilderness in our lives, and that when we do, we would view it as a time of refinement, a time of questioning, and a time of growing closer to God.

Who was Jesus?

This King of kings,
Lord of lords.

This man-God who
had power beyond measure.

With all his power,
all His glory,
all the honor He deserved,

He came into the world as a servant,

and refused to be known as anything else.

And as I come to God in my power,
with my wisdom,
I become a little less in tune with
my King, who called the greatest least,
and humbled Himself to be glorified.

This was the first of what I wrote that first year in Africa. Charles mentioned Jesus – this man who came to be known as a servant and refused to be known as anything else. I began to question how the choices I made regarding my general attitude bring me closer to God, or push me away from Him. I think that often we make small, subtle choices that make it that much more difficult to relate to Christ – that much more difficult to understand his perspective on things.

More than anything, we forget that the nature of Christ was that of a humble and meek servant – one who had all the power in the world, but refused to use it.

“I’m right,” said the believer.

“It’s all about being right.
Doing the right things,
Having the right order.”

“If you get something wrong,
then it’s worse than not doing it at all.”

“Now it is evident,” said Paul
“That no one is justified before God
by the law.”

“The righteous,” God said,
“shall live by faith.”

followed immediately by…

“I’m right,” said the preacher.

“I know the right things,
pray the right prayers,
give the right sermons.”

“In my church, people are saved
the right way,
and we worship God right,
the way we’re supposed to.”

“God I thank you that we aren’t
like others, that our Church is right before you.”

But the tax collector stood at a distance.

He would not even look up to heaven.

“God,” he said,

“Have mercy on me,
a sinner.”

And Jesus,
the God of Righteousness,
said,

“I tell you

that this man,
rather than the other,

went home justified before God.”

“The righteous

By faith

Shall Live.”

This was, I think, one of my first attacks on the idea of doctrinal correctness. Growing up in a restoration movement church, it’s easy to spend so much of our time focused on doctrinal distinctiveness – that which sets us apart from others, and the things that make us “right”. In some way, I suppose this was one of my first forays into a post-modern view of right and wrong.

It just seemed to me that there had to be something bigger than what we term “being right”. In so many ways, we focus on the minutia of what sets us apart rather than what brings us together, and in so many ways what sets us apart isn’t core or central to the message of Christ – though we certainly make it that way.

And somehow in all of that, Christ all too often gets lost in the discussion about the right way to practice Christianity.

At the end of the day, we must realize that we are declared righteous by decree of a loving God as a result of our faith in his promise. If we’re depending on our own righteousness or doctrinal correctness, then we’re in very deep trouble.

“Be Still”

Could it be the reason that command –
and that is what it is –
is so hard for us

is that we don’t understand
how deep
and wide
the love of God is for us?

Could it be that in our busy-ness
we think God will finally
acknowledge us,
approve of us,
and say

“Now that you’ve done this…

now…

now I love you.”

Could it be that we don’t understand.

God loves us.

He always has.

He always will.

Sometimes I feel like God has this standard that’s out there – some set of expectations that I’m never going to live up to, and unless I do, he won’t really approve of me as a son.

My father told a story recently of a mother he visited with whose son is my age, still living at home, and working in a token job in order to appease his parents. Even though in the eyes of most of the world, the kid is fairly worthless, his mother’s view was strikingly different: “He’s a good kid.”

Regardless of my status in the world’s eyes,
Regardless of the thousands of times I fall short,
My father in heaven loves me
And thinks I’m a good kid.

Teach me, O Lord
not to be shallow.

When distractions come
keep me focused.

When trials come
keep me faithful.

When things are well
keep me near.

When things are hopeless
be my hope.

When I am helpless
be my strength.

When the storm is all around
When the sky is black
When night overtakes me

Make me deeper, O God.

Make me deeper.

i still remember where i was, but i have no clue what i was annoyed about. i remember that i wasn’t at all focused, and that for some reason the words that were being spoken were completely lost on me.

but in that moment, i believe I opened my soul on paper for the first time. of all those first ninety-nine writings, this is probably one of the most personal. it’s written without an agenda or challenge – simply a desire of my heart.

and it is still my prayer.

make me deeper, O God.
make me deeper.

edit: These are actually queued up for several days, and it’s sometimes interesting to see how certain days fall. The truth and practicality of these words is possibly more relevant to me today than it has been at any time, even when it was written. And who knows – perhaps it was written for a time such as this.