TBT #3 - Duped by Design

Dad and Me

I thought of this post last week as we went through the loss of my father.  All the sentiments I had on behalf of friends who'd lost loved ones, I suddenly felt strongly for myself.  We knew Dad wasn't long for this world, but it hasn't made his death any easier.  Strangely, the separation of death reminds me how greatly God loves me.  I hope you find His love in your loss as well.  

Duped by Design

August, 2011

I've had my fill of funerals lately. Ready or not, impending or immediate, death is not a kind caller. It always asks too much, takes too much, leaves too much sorrow and takes too long to recover. Death has no desire to bargain or befriend - he is an unruly rapist of our equilibrium.

In the past month I lost an uncle to cancer and a young friend to a sudden heart attack. One was ready, one was not. One was imminent, one was unexpected. Neither death was fair. Both goodbyes were hopeful, but no less painful.

I'm not always one to question God - I love the book of Job too much to think He needs to offer me any answers. I'm ok with Him being God and even ok with knowing He doesn't have to explain Himself to me. But I need purpose. There needs to be a bigger picture, a loftier goal, a greater glory. My mind needs to know the usefulness of the pains and joys of my life regardless of whether or not they are useful to me or to God. I just don't want it to be wasted, so I struggle with the unexplainable turns of life.

To be honest, I felt somewhat duped in this scenario. On one hand, God expects us to love one another, so we do... and we lose them. We love strongly and it doesn't keep us from still having to say goodbye. We lay our lives down for the good of someone else in humble devotion in the name of God, and then they're gone. And this gaping hole in our hearts bleeds and our spirits scream. We did what we ought to do - we loved... and we still lost. We did everything right, and we got emotionally clobbered. We did what we were told and the inevitable happened - the one we loved left.

Maybe it's just me, but doesn't it seem like a set up? Like a huge "nanny nanny boo boo" from God? Like we're ants and God is a bully with a magnifying glass burning off our feelers (if I may loosely quote Bruce Almighty)? Maybe I shouldn't confess such gaping holes in my theology. I love God with my whole heart, but the more I know Him, it seems the less I understand Him. I hope the honesty of this post doesn't leave you with the impression that I'm angry with God. I am simply a Jacob at Peniel, wrestling what I do not know. And this has been a struggle - a wretching, heaving struggle, and for other people it's been even harder. I know - I see you cry and usually cry with you.

In all of that wrestling of thought I was reminded that the prophecy of Messiah in Isaiah 53 described Him as "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief". In the NIV it reads, "a man of suffering familiar with pain". In the middle of sorrow and grief that was so important to me. I felt understood, especially as it goes on to say "He took up our grief and bore our suffering". He carried it all. I didn't have to go through it alone. Jesus so willingly reached over to me and took my grief and carried it for me when it was far too heavy for me alone.

Grief, however, was not the only angel at the riverbank. There was the set up. Why lead us to love if loving only magnified the inevitable pain and loss? "Here, love this, depend on it, be selfless toward it... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand now that you're attached, I'm taking it back."

Most of the time, I would simply confess, "I just don't get it" and graciously He came back to me this way -

"You do this - go through this - feel this pain and despise the separation, mourn the loss and really grieve. Now what would you do to have them back? What would you go through to know that tomorrow morning their voice would be on the other end of a phone call? What price would you pay to know it would buy back their companionship for just one more minute? How far would you go to just hear their voice again? What would you do to be reunited with someone dead and gone?"

"You know what I would do?" said God.

"I would kill my Son in the most brutal way imaginable and I would turn my back on Him in the middle of His greatest torture. I would sacrifice His life to raise YOU from the dead and win you back... without ever looking back or second-guessing one moment of the process. That's how much I love you."

Here's what Ephesians tells us in chapter 2 verse 1-5,

"As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved."

You see without Christ we are dead. There is no spirit alive within us, until God makes it alive through Jesus. We are dead, and doing exactly what the rest of the world does - living for the moment, the fun of sin. But because God loved us so much, He offered us grace. He was not willing to remain separated from you for eternity. He would do whatever it took to win you back and bring you back to life.

Death and grief are never easy, but I pray they always whisper to me the simple question, "what would you give to bring them back to life?" And regardless of my answer let that voice always come back with "I gave more." I pray every death becomes a humbling reminder of how much I am loved by my Creator. He was unwilling to endure one more moment of the separation of death, so He graciously brought me back to life by the death of His Son.

He remains unwilling to let you be separated from Him by death. He graciously extends His love toward us this way - while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. I'm so grateful He did. So undeserving of His love. So thankful to be alive.

Dam Dam Dam Dam Dam (Part 3)

Five Ways We Hinder the Flow of God's Work in Our Lives
Mark 6

In our last post, we talked about the first two ways we hinder God's work in our lives - trying too hard to understand and settling for a religion of goodness rather than of power.  

Photo by Justin Camp

Today, we'll talk about the final three and they all have to do with our expectation.  When it comes to seeing God do amazing things in our lives, what is your expectation?  Do you anticipate that He'll do something miraculous?  If you don't, it could be because one of these three reasons - all of which will keep us from experiencing the power of God flowing in your life.  

Dam 3) Isn't this the Carpenter?

Do you think this is the first century equivalent of "don't quit your day job?"  Or like us, did they have a hard time imagining Jesus could do anything other than what He'd always done.  "He's just a carpenter.  I've only ever seen Him do carpentry."  And we too have the same low expectations of Him.  "I've never seen Him work that way before." Or worse, "He won't do that, because I've never seen Him do that."  

Following this, Jesus proceeded to do miracles and signs and wonders around Israel, and in what could be an affront to their argument that He'd never done that before, He rarely performed the same miracle with the exact same method again.  It was as if He took great pleasure in finding new ways to do old things.

Are you looking at your needs and expecting God to do only what He's always done?  Are you open to whatever way God wants to break through and do what only He can do?  Or have you built a dam of limited expectations based on only what you've seen Him do before?  

Dam 4) Isn't this the son of Mary and brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon?

There are times we do not experience the miraculous work of God because we associate that kind of work only with certain people - usually us.  Other people, denominations, have a less pure understanding of who God is and what He can do than we do.  We have Him all figured out, we know everything about Him, we know His family, He's our people - so surely He couldn't be working over there, working in ways we're not accustomed to.  

I hate that I spent a lot of my life looking at other denominations claiming "God doesn't work like that".  I knew Him too well to think He would move outside of my comfort zone.  I was wrong.  And every day I believed that, I dammed the work of God in my own life.  There was so much He wanted to do that He could not do because of my stereotypes of other believers and their experiences with God.

Scripture calls believers "stewards of the mysteries of God".  Some things will always remain a mystery, and we are poor stewards if we denounce some mysteries be explaining them away.  God works in ways we don't understand among people we do not know in ways we've probably not experienced.

Dam 5) Aren't His sisters here with us?

Even a rudimentary understanding of the role of women in the 1st century will tell you they weren't much more than commodities.  As much as Jesus elevated women through His ministry and gave them value and dignity, here on the front end of his ministry things in the old hometown were likely status quo.  

I'll be honest... I really struggled with understanding why this statement is in this account. Really why would it matter where His sisters were?  Why would having His sisters among them keep them from believing He could do miraculous things?  

Here's what I think - and I'm happy to be corrected or at least engage in conversation about this - I think this statement boils down to an expectation of enough, maybe even less than enough.  Could it be that it signifies an attitude of being ok with less than God's best for us - the pendulum swing from a prosperity gospel to a poverty gospel neither of which can be completely supported scripturally.  We don't need Him to do miraculous things for us. We have this meager, less-than-God's-best amount and we'll just get by.  

I am by no means all about prosperity and neither am I about poverty, but I believe God wants far more for us that we have the guts to ask for.  And our willingness to accept what could be viewed as just His leftovers will dam up the work of God in our life and keep us from experiencing His miraculous provision and blessing on our life.  

So when it comes to God's work in your life - in you or through you - what are you expectations?  How have you been hindering Him from working miraculously in your life?  Trying too hard to make sense of things?  Settling for a religion of good works instead of God's power?  Expecting Him to only do what you've seen Him do, in only the manner you've experienced?  Assuming His best is for other people while you just make do?  Whatever the dam, I pray God helps us remove it so that His glory can be vividly revealed in our lives.