Tag Archives: God

That’s God

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Last evening my sister, my husband, and I attended a screening of the documentary Since I Been Down, which follows the lives of young men and boys from the Hilltop neighborhood in Tacoma, Washington, to prison. For more info, visit https://www.sinceibeendown.com. There’s also an excellent synopsis of the storyline here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14519366/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1. What follows is my musing after seeing the film.

When someone who has a 777-year prison sentence lives with purpose and hope, that’s God.

When a mother, whose innocent son was shot and killed, forgives—that’s God.

When tattooed men in a prison classroom understand justice as listening to the person next to them, that’s God.

When men who are quarantined from society, for life, choose to give of themselves to the people around them, that’s God.

When men of different races, from opposing gangs, covered with tattoos that censure each other, sit at the same table and joke together, that’s God.

When an older gang member slips $5 to a middle school gang member because he knows that kids’ parents aren’t putting food on the table, that’s God.

When a man who has been shown that he is worth nothing, finds that he is worth something, that’s God.

When fear and self-protection give way to curiosity, and then to the intimacy of shared humanity, that’s God.

When a grandmother forgives the mom who beat her three-year-old granddaughter to death, that’s God.

When a woman stands with the oppressed, and she voices that we are all perpetrators and we are all victims, that’s God.

When a lifer feels free for the brief moments he stands in front of his peers in a prison classroom, that’s God.

God was the Life in this film, though His name was never mentioned.

For where there is courage, compassion, and creativity, that’s God.

Where there is forgiveness, faithfulness, and friendship, that’s God.

Where there is hope, humility, and humor, that’s God.

In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey visits the richest man in town—Mr. Potter—and begs for help when he is at the end of his rope. After grilling George about his assets, and finding the only monetary asset he has is a $500 life insurance policy, Mr. Potter tells him, “You’re worth more dead than alive.” George Bailey stumbles from Mr. Potter’s office and finds his way to a bridge, where he would have ended his life, were it not for a tattered angel who showed him his worth without reference to money.

Many men and women have been told by those of us with money that they are worth more dead than alive.

When beauty and passion arise in a place where men are left for dead, that’s God.

God, who was tried, tortured, and killed, emerged from a guarded tomb, alive. And He stands with those who are tried, sentenced, locked away, and guarded, and—through them—shows us what it looks like to be alive.

Is It Really Safe?, Part 2

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As I described in Is It Really Safe?, Part 1, I have been in a funk. It’s a tropical storm of emotions, fueled by the lie that my value is based on my performance. It’s not the first time this lie has pounced on me in my weakness, and I am certain it will not be the last. I find some comfort knowing that God sees me and loves me. He invites me to be as I am, to be known by Him, to take a deep breath with the knowing: it’s ok to not be ok. As I continue to battle the monster and alternately fight and give up as each day goes by, God keeps inviting me into His goodness.

Invited To Be Sought

Unsurprisingly, my funk takes a toll on my marriage. It’s exhausting to live with a depressed person, and it’s exhausting to be depressed. With my husband I feel compelled to take the path of least resistance. I don’t have much energy for intimacy (emotional, physical, or otherwise), but neither do I have the energy for a big breach or fight and then repairing. So I’m walking on eggshells, somewhere in between (if that’s even possible). As I write about this in my prayer journal, God says, “I’ll help you walk on eggshells.”

Uh… Wait, what did You just say? I am stunned into silence. This is not what I expected. When I find my voice I say God can’t possibly mean that. Doesn’t He have a solution? Isn’t there something I ought to be doing differently? Slowly I internalize that He does, in fact, mean what He said. He affirms my struggle and joins me in it. Perhaps this isn’t as bizarre as it seemed to me at first. After all, didn’t He save us humans by becoming one of us? This is central to the way He operates. He seeks me, He finds me, and He stays with me. Oh God, Your companionship would mean the world to me.

Two weeks after the “God, what did You just say?” conversation, bedtime with the kids crashed and burned. It was late. Nothing went well. It ended with my five year old crying herself to sleep in the guest room and me in time out downstairs. As I sat in the recliner crying and staring out at the trees, I was again reassured of God’s companionship. No advice, no fixing. Instead, a quiet spirit.

The lessons of love are freeing: I am invited to be. This invitation stands even when I am seen – no masks, no filters, no protection. God wants to be my companion, exactly where I am. Even when where I am is unhealthy and un-beautiful and unpleasant. Even when it is lonely and sad and frustrating. He will be here. With me. Emmanuel: God with us.

I am invited to be sought, and to be found. And when God finds me, hiding under a blanket of shame, red-handed from my latest sin, deeply mired in my mistakes, He stays there with me. Oh precious gift! My failings do not sentence me to solitary confinement. This God-Man Jesus knows what it is like to be human, and He stands with me, sits with me, struggles with me. I always thought God didn’t really get it. Yes, he was tempted, but He didn’t sin (Hebrews 4:15). So how could He possibly understand what it feels like to fail: to find myself again and again on the other side of a choice I wish I’d made differently; to treat the people I love the most with aggression, disdain, selfishness. He doesn’t know what it feels like to suck at life.

But I think I was wrong. Paul says, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21a). Sin separates. Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). The only reason He could have felt forsaken is if He became sin for us and experienced the feelings of separation and despair that plague every human. He does indeed know how heavy it is. How lonely it is. How desperate. And this is what He does: He seeks me. He finds me. He shares with me this ugly knowing of sin and separation, and He doesn’t run. He stays.

Invited To Enjoy

In his book Come to the Cradle Michael Card observes that children are occupied with playful imitation of what they see adults doing. He asks, “Could my work become playful imitation of what I see my Father doing?” I mull this over. It is so different from how I think about life, it is a foreign thought. Card goes on to say, “The point of work is to finish. The point of play is to not finish…” Again I pause, unsure what to do with this observation.

Finished is safe. Unfinished is negligent. Given my point of view I suppose it’s not surprising that I excel at finishing. I am so determined to finish that I even try to finish my children. Do the tasks, learn the skill, become mature.

I am realizing that often the way I think about my life is unhealthy and counterproductive. So I approach God one morning with a question, and we have this conversation:
How do You think about my life? How do You want me to think about it?
“Life is to be held loosely. Even people who are deeply sad or troubled can enjoy life. You have more capacity for enjoyment than you think. Keep slowing down. The answer is not more.”
Are you sure? Because I feel like I’m hardly doing anything.
“Think about the gift analogy. I have called you to play, not work. There is so much to enjoy in your life, but we must take this slow, because you will be tempted to turn enjoyment into work.”
I sigh. You know me so well.
Why do I always think of martyrs and people in concentration camps when I think about goodness/happiness/enjoyment?
“You are still living in fear. That’s ok. You won’t always.”
Ok. Will You help me enjoy something today?
“Of course I will. I love to help you! This will be fun!”
Ok. (Pause) Do You really feel that way?
“Yes, I do.”
You’re trying to speak life over me, aren’t You? I’m sorry I make it so hard.
“It’s not hard, because I love you with my whole big self. I don’t think you know how much patience I have.”
No, I suppose I don’t. Ok Lord, go head and make me alive. (Pause). Are you sure it’s not hard? Because I feel like a tough case / lost cause / disaster.
*Laughter* (is anything too hard for God?)

I find it very odd that God wants me to enjoy life. It’s not a new concept, but in all honesty, I always hear it through the lens of “doing the right thing” and it sounds like work: there are so many wonderful things in life we ought always to be joyful. Ugh. I guess there’s something wrong with me.

God enters into my misconceptions and fears and invites me to enjoy, to hold life loosely. I am so accustomed to holding life with an iron grip that I’m not even sure where to start. I have the “scarcity mindset” Brené Brown describes in her book, The Gifts of Imperfection: “We’re afraid to lose what we love the most, and we hate that there are no guarantees. We think not being grateful and not feeling joy will make it hurt less. We think if we can beat vulnerability to the punch by imaging loss, we’ll suffer less.” This is a lie I have believed. I protect myself behind the safety of pessimism/realism, hard work, and control. Enjoying is scary because it’s vulnerable. Brown continues, “If we’re not practicing gratitude and allowing ourselves to know joy, we are missing out on the two things that will actually sustain us during the inevitable hard times.” Hmm.

Why is it that I don’t want to enjoy what I have now, because I don’t know what I’ll have tomorrow? I don’t want to drink in abundance when I can imagine a future without abundance. It’s like I want a guarantee of a long and happy life, or I won’t engage. I want to know that if I do things right everything will turn out well, or that if I trust Jesus I will experience safety in all things: relationships, finances, health, my faith community, and the list goes on. Not knowing sets me on edge. Being set on edge is the opposite of enjoyment. So here I am trying to perform an impossible balancing act while holding onto – well – nothing, with an iron grip.

And here God is, inviting me to loosen my grip and to enjoy. To play. To have fun. To be grateful. To slow down. I feel like God is laying out a lavish banquet before me, but I have not yet partaken. I’m still looking at it. When I fill up a plate and start eating, perhaps I’ll write another blog post about enjoyment.

For now, I am grateful that I need not hold tighter or try harder. I can be still and know that God is seeing me, seeking me, celebrating me, and being the companion my soul longs for most deeply.

Obedience, Part 5 – Disobedience

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This is the last post of six on obedience. Below are links to the previous posts.

Obedience, Part 1 – Turning

Obedience, Part 2 – Agreeing or Trusting?

Obedience, Part 3 – What Precedes Obedience

Obedience, Part Unknown

Obedience, Part 4 – What Follows Obedience

Lest we be tempted to think this post is about those destined for eternal fire, let’s remember that disobedience is a universal experience. Everyone has disobeyed (and will continue disobeying) God. “If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth… we are calling God a liar and showing that his word has no place in our hearts.” (1 John 1:8,10b NLT)

It’s like any relationship – sometimes we make loving and healthy choices, and sometimes we make defensive and hurtful choices. We are never going to grow out of this while we’re on sinful earth. We will always make mistakes, and we will always need to ask for forgiveness. We will inevitably turn toward God sometimes and away from Him other times.

At the risk of being black and white, let’s assume there are two senses in which we can talk about disobedience. The first sense is what I described above – the individual choices we make as we relate to God on a daily basis. The second sense would be that in which disobedience describes the sum of those choices, the consummation of what path we choose in life (acknowledging that our final state is not the result of adding up our deeds, but rather whether we entered into relationship with God).

God knows how all this works, and in the end He will make it known who is in relationship with Him, and who is not. I cannot pretend to truly understand, but I have some clues as to what disobedience might look like, which are best illustrated by sharing insights from writers who have insightfully described various aspects of relationship with God. By looking at relationship, we can understand also what it looks like to not be in relationship.

Challenged or Comfortable?

One clue suggesting disobedience is feeling comfortable: “free from vexation or doubt” (merriam-webster.com); feeling like you’re great, the world is great, and you can just relax and not think about difficult things. In her book Searching for Sunday, Rachel Held Evans says, “Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable.” The presence of God is safe, but also awe-inspiring, humbling, and challenging. If you are feeling comfortable, or if everything is going your way, it may be a clue that you are not in His presence.

In his book The Reason for God, Timothy Keller talks about why he believes it’s important to allow the Bible to challenge us. I believe what he describes is true not only for the Bible, but for all the ways God reveals Himself to us and interacts with us: prayer, nature, the teaching of others, and so on. This is what he says:

In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you. For example, if a wife is not allowed to contradict her husband, they won’t have an intimate relationship. Remember the (two!) movies The Stepford Wives? The husbands of Stepford, Connecticut, decide to have their wives turned into robots who never cross the wills of their husbands. A Stepford wife was wonderfully compliant and beautiful, but no one would describe such a marriage as intimate or personal.

Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won’t! You’ll have a Stepford God! A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination.

If God seems to always agree with us, or we always agree with Him – if we are feeling comfortable, in control, like we have things figured out – this is a clue that we are not in relationship and therefore not in obedience to God.

Submission or Performance?

Another clue that suggests disobedience is a focus is on behavior rather than submission. Behavior is a distraction from submission. Valuing God’s will above our own is the hardest continuous thing we will ever do, and in comparison it may be easy to put our efforts into being generous, patient, committed, or kind. But if our focus is on our performance and we are not daily coming up against God’s will and learning to let it be above our own, we are not walking in obedience.

In his book Mere Christianity – in the chapter titled “Nice People or New Men” – C.S. Lewis considers whether becoming nice is the main point of being a Christian. He sets forth a Christian character – Miss Bates – who is not nice, and a non-Christian character – Dick Firkin – who is nice. He then explores what they look like in terms of God’s kingdom.

The niceness, in fact, is God’s gift to Dick, not Dick’s gift to God. In the same way, God has allowed natural causes, working in a world spoiled by centuries of sin, to produce in Miss Bates the narrow mind and jangled nerves which account for most of her nastiness. He intends, in His own good time, to set that part of her right. But that is not, for God, the critical part of the business. It presents no difficulties. It is not what He is anxious about. What He is watching and waiting and working for is something that is not easy even for God, because, from the nature of the case, even He cannot produce it by a mere act of power. He is waiting and watching for it both in Miss Bates and in Dick Firkin. It is something they can freely give Him or freely refuse to Him. Will they, or will they not, turn to Him and thus fulfil the only purpose for which they were created?… The question whether the natures they offer or withhold are, at that moment, nice or nasty ones, is of secondary importance. God can see to that part of the problem.

Do not misunderstand me. Of course God regards a nasty nature as a bad and deplorable thing. And, of course, He regards a nice nature as a good thing – good like bread, or sunshine, or water. But these are the good things which He gives and we receive. He created Dick’s sound nerves and good digestion, and there is plenty more where they came from. It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.

When we get distracted by performance, we’re not engaging in relationship with God. We are speaking in a language He doesn’t understand; coming to His banquet table with no appetite for what He has prepared.

Let’s imagine I am planning to purchase a car, and the advertisement says “CASH ONLY.” I arrive to purchase the vehicle with only a credit card in my wallet, and the seller has no way to process my card. We are unable to make the transaction. Similarly, when I show up hoping to interact with God and I present my performance, no transaction can occur. I must show up with my will; and when I hold my will out to God, a transaction occurs. Our relationship becomes real.

Conclusion

Pursuing comfort and performance lure me into disobedience. These clues are personal to me: comfort and productivity were the first two idols I identified in my life. Your clues may be different. Our enemy the devil is relentless in distracting us from our Creator and Savior, and in our weakness we are so easily confused. If you’re feeling brave, ask the Spirit to show you what your clues are.

Whatever our clues, they are a reminder that perhaps we have missed the Person who loves us and wants to engulf us in His presence. We are thinking of ourselves – distracted by what we have and what we want. It is in thinking of God that we finally come alive.

We usually begin the journey toward God thinking, “What do I have to do to get this or that from him?” but eventually we have to begin thinking, “What do I have to do to get him?” If you don’t make that transition, you will never actually meet the real God, but will only end up believing in some caricature version of him. – Timothy Keller, The Reason for God

I don’t want to waste my life serving a caricature of God. I want to know the real God. This occurs at great cost to self. But may I never forget that God wants to know the real me, and His cost to enter this relationship is infinitely greater.