Missing The Goal

Posted on July 11, 2014 by Elizabeth

My older two girls have been a little crazy lately. Their emotions have been all over the map and they bounce from playing beautifully together to screaming and crying and hitting in less than a nanosecond. I’m not sure why it has been so extreme lately, but one thing I’m learning as a parent is that often the thing behind the wildly veering emotions is their goal for the moment.

A child’s main goal, as well as a major goal for the rest of us if we are honest enough to admit it, is to please themselves. They haven’t yet learned the paradoxical truth that when playing with others, if you want to keep the pleasure of the play, the goal must be pleasing the other person. If a child continues to aim toward their goal of pleasing themselves, they instead begin aiming crazily at different targets every few minutes, and end up not hitting any of their goals but hitting their sister instead.

It seems as though staying focused on your main goal in life should be easy. Yet as often as we adults act like children, we quickly discover that it most definitely is not easy. Instead of continually aiming at the goal of pleasing God, we aim instead too often at the pleasing of ourselves and begin careening from thing to thing, from emotion to emotion, and we end up hitting those we love best.

I love how one of our Church Fathers, Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–298 – 2 May 373), describes this as a charioteer who forgets where he is supposed to be driving his horse and instead simply drives as fast and as hard as he can. He says that such a charioteer would “often drive against those he met, and often down steep places…thinking that thus running he has not missed the goal – for he regards the running only, and does not see that he has passed wide of the goal.”

Athanasius says that this is the source of all evil: the changing of our goal. We turn away from God and drive ourselves toward other things, often not even seeing that we have missed the way.

When I am careening from one activity to another, seeking after success for my children; when I am veering from one emotion to the other, leaving my family as casualties in my wake; when I am uncertain of what I should do next, then I have changed my goal and am not even aware that I have done so.

Stealing the Toys

I am more like my children than I like to admit. I have trouble keeping to my goal, to my purpose in life, but often I can see the signs and often those signs help me to raise up my head, look for how far away from my goal I have strayed, and ask God to carry me back into the race again.

Hopefully I can teach my girls how to do likewise.

I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead. I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. ~ Philippians 3.12-14

When It Is Hard to Believe

Posted on June 20, 2014 by Elizabeth

I am wrestling with the difficulty of believing God.

I suppose it would be more accurate and honest to admit that really I am wrestling with why I don’t believe God much of the time.

This struggle to believe manifests itself in different ways at various times and seasons in my life, but currently I am noticing it in two particular ways.

One struggle I have is in believing that God truly loves my children.

I know.

When I say it like that, it seems ludicrous. We are talking, after all, about the same God who gave up His only Son so that my children could be with Him forever.

Yet I worry about my babies. I worry about their safety, about whether they will survive to adulthood (although sometimes I think that it might be me who causes them not to survive), about whether they will suffer some horrible trauma along the way. I worry about whether they will learn to love God most of all and whether they will love people. I worry about my children…which means that I am not believing God.

God has promised that He loves my children even more than I do. He has promised that He will do what is best for them and that He will give them what they need. But I still worry. Why?

Part of the trouble is that I don’t trust in what God’s best is. I know that sometimes His best is painful and even when I can trust in that for myself, I often want to protect them. It is truly ridiculous that I would want to protect my children from God, but there it is. Deep down inside, I sometimes believe that I know better than God, that my goals for my children are more important than God’s goals for them.

I don’t know why I wrestle with this. When I state it so plainly, even I can see the foolishness of it. It should be easy to believe. Yet it is not.

The other struggle I currently have is in believing that God’s Spirit will truly guide me through life. I have trouble believing that God is interested in all areas of life. Can I really trust the Holy Spirit to guide me in my parenting? Can I really trust the Holy Spirit to show me the best way to train, disciple, even educate my children? Does God’s Spirit care about a business, a household, a career?

I don’t believe it and so I want to rely on books, on methods, on other people to tell me how to raise and teach my babies. Yet if Jesus is before all things, if all things hold together in Him, and if Jesus sent His Holy Spirit to us to guide us and teach us Jesus’ truth, then He truly is interested in showing me how best to live my life. All aspects of it.

Why is that so difficult to believe, so hard to rely on? It seems like it should be simple. God has never broken a promise; He has proved over and over that His way and His love is best, that His Spirit is faithful to show us truth. I am foolish to doubt the faithfulness of such a God.

Yet I do. I am like the Israelites who refused to believe that God would provide enough manna on the sixth day to provide for the seventh or that He would provide enough harvest bounty in the sixth year to provide for the seventh year of Jubilee. I doubt and I worry. Yet even through the doubt and worry I still keep plodding forward, step by painful step, begging for God to help me trust Him, desperate for more of His Spirit.

I trust that He will. “I believe; help my unbelief!”

Art Credit: The Golden Calf by Esteban March

Hope Changes

Posted on June 13, 2014 by Elizabeth

Hope.

It changes nothing. It changes everything.

How do you endure? When everything around you is falling apart, when all that you love on this earth fails you, how do you keep going?

It happens to all of us. At some point in our lives, whether early in life or late, we sit in stunned silence while our world crumbles.

What do we do? What do we do when we or one we love is living in the middle of unimaginable pain? What is it that keeps us going, that lets us perservere?

Hope.

It changes nothing. It changes everything.

Hope doesn’t heal the sick or take away the pain. It doesn’t fill the stomach or bring your loved one back.

It changes nothing.

Hope gives you a glory-full vision of the end of your story. It gives you a glimpse of the beauty, the joy, the perfection that is promised.

It changes everything.

When you know the end of the story, when you know that Christ wins and that we will be with Him forever, it gives us the power to bear anything. Anything. When you can see the end of fear, the end of despair, the end of pain, when you can see the adventure, the rest, the wholeness that waits for you, you are sustained in the now because you know that this, too, shall pass.

So hope. Hope in what is promised. Hope in what God has promised through the power of the resurrected Christ.

For you who have just received that 3 a.m. phone call, you who walk dazed from your doctor’s office, you who saw your child drift away, you who wish desperately for a child, you who sit weeping in a corner, who think that you will always be alone and unloved, for all of you who live in darkness and doubt…

there is hope. Beautiful, glorious, resurrection hope. So breathe deep of this hope. Let it fill you up with peace and joy so that you are able to endure all things. For He who is our hope is coming.

It is promised. It shall be so.

Art credit: last photograph by R.K. Sewell Photography (photographybysewell.webs.com)

When You Feel Unlovable

Posted on June 6, 2014 by Elizabeth

I have felt particularly unlovable lately.

My heart is full of impatience with my children and criticism toward my husband.

My body is lazy at the idea of housework and my mind is discontent with where I am.

I am frustrated with myself, with my inability to love, and full of guilt over my thoughts and actions.

What is it that worms itself deep inside of me and makes it so hard to love fully?

What is it that worms itself deep down and makes me feel shame?

It is this human piece of me, of all of us, that is quick to give in and give up, this fallen part of us that is so quick to turn away from what we know is right and good and lovely – it is this portion of us that longs to be healed, to be made whole, to be made holy.

It is the days on which we feel the ugliest, on which we feel most unlovable, on which we cry out for God to take away the war that rages right within our own selves, that it is most difficult to believe that Christ could love such as us.

It is hard to believe because we don’t see this very often in our world. We see love in response to beauty, not love no matter what, and it is hard, it is so very hard to believe in that which we do not see.

Yet we do catch glimpses. Every once in a while we catch a glimpse of the glorious love that is God in us. We catch glimpses of light and peace and see a glimmer of who we were created to be, of who we will be someday if we just cling to Christ and hold tight with all of our strength.

We catch a glimpse of who we are becoming because of the way Christ loves us, regardless of how unlovable we may be right now.

So to you who snubs the coworker that everyone wants to avoid, to you who yells at those you love best, to you who lies in bed thinking that you just cannot get up and do it all over again, to you who takes yet another drink, looks at yet another picture, forgets to even think about God for yet another day, to you and to me, look at Christ.

Look at Him standing in front of you, the light of a bridegroom in His eyes. Look at Him look at you with a love that sweeps away all of the dirt and filth and imperfection and the failing and falling over and over again. Look at the way He gazes steadfastly, not turning away in disgust or disappointment.

Look at that love-light shining in His eyes and know that He cannot wait for the day when you will be perfectly united with Him in the power of His resurrection.

You are loved.

God In the Personal

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Elizabeth

Cancer.

Such an ugly word. A word that is filled with fear and pain, hopelessness and loss. A word in which the treatment is as bad as the disease, a word that contains no promise of a cure.

We’ve lived through cancer twice now in my close family. Once in one who had lived a long and good life and who chose not to fight. Once in one who had just begun her life as wife and mother and who fought with every bit of strength she had. Both times, our cancer word contained death and loss.

Perhaps this is why when someone I know learns firsthand of the horrors of this word, it stirs up something inside of me. We all have causes and issues that make our hearts feel more weighty, that bring us to tears. Causes alone, though, don’t have the power to stir us up the way an individual can. I give money to causes, but a cause will not change me in the way that a person can. God works through the personal to deepen our hearts in a way that a faceless cause never can.

Perhaps if I see pictures on the news or in the papers of victims of earthquake, flood, drought, I will write a small check for the cause of world hunger, and I may even refrain from meat on Wednesdays; but as long as I am responding to a cause it will not affect my entire life, my very breathing. It is only when I see discrimination and injustice in all its horrendous particularity as I walk along Broadway, that my very life can be changed. If it was necessary for God to come to us as one of us, then it is only in such particularity that I can understand incarnation…But a response to a cause will never change my life, nor open my heart to the promptings of the Spirit. ~ Madeleine L’Engle in The Irrational Season

The differences in the pieces of life we each have lived allows different causes to stir each one of us to action. Cancer, especially when this word contains a parent with children living at home, has become one of those for me. One reason is that this word doesn’t have to end in death, you see. Sometimes there is hope. That hope, however, can be expensive.

May I introduce you to my friend, Mark?

Mark and I worship together and I know him best from making music together in the arts ministry at our church. He is a musician by trade, performing and teaching in order to support his family.

Mark is a husband to Jana and a father of five beautiful children, three of whom still live at home. His wife, Jana, is a self-employed speech pathologist who contracts with several different school systems.

A musician and a self-employed speech pathologist don’t get very good health insurance.

Mark was diagnosed with cancer in 2007; his cancer word will not have within it a cure without also containing a bone marrow transplant. He has not yet found a suitable donor. Mark participated in a clinical trial that held the cancer at bay for several years.

Until this past December. The cancer returned. Mark still does not have a bone marrow donor.

He found another clinical trial, but this one requires that he live in Houston while receiving the treatments from MD Anderson.

A musician and a self-employed speech pathologist also don’t make crazy amounts of money.

He moved from hotel to hotel for awhile, living wherever they could find the cheapest price each week on Priceline. He was finally able to find an apartment, but it is in a crime-ridden area of town. He has been hassled several times when returning from his cancer treatments, and he can’t leave his windows open at night. In Houston. In the summertime. He is trying to find work, but it is difficult to find teaching gigs in a new place when you are in the middle of cancer treatments.

So here they are. Mark, living in a dangerous part of Houston all alone without his family to support him as he gambles for his life. Jana, caring for their kids on her own while traveling hours everyday to and from work. Both of them living 900 miles apart and trying to hold the fraying pieces of their lives together while living with the fear that their time together is slipping through their grasping fingers.

We can’t do much. We can’t take away the cancer. We can’t take away the fear. We can’t take away the loneliness or the desperation of being a single parent or a distant parent.

We can do a little, though. We can take away the one piece of their pain that has to do with their finances. They are not big spenders. They are frugal and they know how to stretch their paychecks. And they will need a bit more while Mark is living in Houston.

I have never done this before on this blog. I may never do it again. But I know these people. I have served with them. And God is working through these individual people to change hearts and lives. Will you join me in helping them? You can give online at GiveForward. (If the link does not work, copy and paste this address: https://www.giveforward.com/fundraiser/4th4/mark-cornell-benefit-fund)

I know that we can’t do it all, that we can’t eliminate all hunger, thirst, suffering, pain. This often frustrates me, but I am struck by the thought that Jesus didn’t do it all either. He didn’t heal all of the blind while here on earth. He didn’t heal all of the lepers or all of the lame, he didn’t feed all of the hungry.

I don’t know why He didn’t make all of the sad things come untrue immediately, but knowing this helps me to be content with not being able to help everyone but to, as Jesus did, help one beautiful person at a time.

To Interpret with Love

Posted on May 23, 2014 by Elizabeth

I have written recently about the difficulty of agreeing on Biblical interpretation. It is easy to draw lines in the sand and difficult to discern between what is cultural and what is truth that transcends place and time. It is easy to vilify those with whom we disagree and difficult to extend the grace of believing that they, too, are doing their best to follow Christ.

The ease of which I find myself speaking in terms of “us” and “them” while speaking of how we interpret the Bible forces me to search more deeply into how I see the Bible.

Do I view the Bible as a way to live my own life or do I look into its pages to search out ways of making me right and them wrong? Of even more eternal import, do I place the Bible as an idol above God? Do I view the Bible or Jesus as the Word of God?

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is myth (but of course myth specially chosen by God from among countless myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read with attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons. ~ C.S. Lewis in a letter to a lady

When it does become necessary to know how to interpret a certain passage (only, as Lewis said, for my own spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity), to know whether it was only written to one particular culture or whether it should be obeyed in all times and places, I am learning that love should be my standard. It seems obvious when you think about what Jesus mandated as the most important of all the commands, but it is a standard for interpretation that I had never thought about before. Love is to be the standard for deciding which passages are cultural and which are universal.

Paul says in Romans that whatever commandment there may be, it can be summed up in the rule “love your neighbor as yourself”. He is, of course, writing of the Greek word agape when speaking of love. Agape is a selfless, sacrificial, unconditional sort of love. It is the kind of love that seeks out the best for others before it seeks for the good of itself. I think what Paul means, what Jesus means by “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” is that if we are truly living out God’s kind of love for others, we will always be led to do the right thing.

Even Jesus seems to apply the same principle to the Jewish Scriptures when He heals on the Sabbath or picks and eats grain on the Sabbath. Rather than defending Himself by saying that He is not technically breaking the Sabbath, in each case He argues that sometimes violating the letter of the law is necessary in order to act in love and fulfill the spirit of the law instead.

I have a lot more praying and studying to do about this, but this idea feels incredibly freeing. Rather than having to be a Bible scholar and know the ancient languages by heart, I can apply this standard of agape love and let God’s Spirit lead me to the best answer of whether a passage is cultural or for always. Paul speaks of slaves obeying their masters, but agape love demands their freedom. Paul’s rules about hair length and head coverings were good in his time and place, but they have no current relation to loving God or our neighbors.

We have been set free from the Law. We no longer live under the supervision of the Law but under grace. “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” Paul speaks to this many times, saying that we are not to use our freedom to indulge our own selfish impulses but that we are to use our freedom to serve each other in love. Love, agape love, is to be our standard, our way of deciding what is right and what is wrong, both in our deeds and in God’s Word.

After all, as we see in the story of the judgement in Matthew 25, Christ knows us by our actions as we serve the outcasts, the hungry, the sick, the poor, and the imprisoned.

But Jesus provides no list of beliefs at all. People are judged not on what they believe but on how they have loved. ~ Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

Cheat Your Master

Posted on May 9, 2014 by Elizabeth

Once upon a time.

This is how a parable begins.

We hear once upon a time and when it comes from Jesus, we listen for morals and look for lessons of what we should do.

Once upon a time there was a steward. A steward who was accused and then fired. A steward who then set out to cheat his master in order to protect himself.

This steward brought in all of his master’s debtors and reduced each one’s debt, thus stealing from his master but incurring debts of gratitude for himself.

Once upon a time there was a steward who was then praised by his master for having the prudence to care for himself.

It is bothersome and uncomfortable, this steward who is commended for being unjust. It is not what we expect from Jesus. It is not the moral lesson of selfless service we presume that Jesus will teach.

The moral seems to be, instead, that we should cheat our master.

This looks so out of character that we try to explain it some other way. We search for ways around it and try to find sermons to explain it away.

Yet what if the moral is as it appears? What if the moral truly is cheat your master? How could this possibly be a directive from Jesus?

What changes it all, what turns everything on its head (which Jesus is prone to do) is the discovery of who the master is.

It all turns around when you understand that the master is the world. It is the world whom we are to cheat. The firing is our notice that our lives here will soon end, and before that day comes we are to cheat this master with all of his own tools.

If he gives us riches or beauty, power or abilities, we are to use them for our own purposes rather than for his. We are to use them for intentions that align with the goals of God’s kingdom.

For if we won’t do that even with the world’s kind of property, Who will trust us at all with the true kind of treasure?

If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? ~ Jesus

So cheat your master. Cheat him with all of his own temporary tools so that you can store up your own, lasting sort of treasure with God.

Art Credits: Photo of Neuschwanstein Castle by Alfred Borchard; Etching in the Bowyer Bible by Jan Luyken; painting of Parable of the Unjust Steward by Andrey Mironov; photo of Earth from NASA images

Temptation

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Elizabeth

Temptation.

It swirls around me like a hurricane

sending my intentions spinning into the blackened sky.

I hear the voice of God

I hear Him tell me what is good

Why can I not obey?

My consistency is that I fail to listen

My constant is that I continue to fall.

The ugly truth?

I don’t believe God.

I don’t believe Him when He tells me what is best.

If I believed, I would obey.

If I trusted in God’s goodness, His love, I would always do what He asks.

I would choose love instead of anger.

I would choose compassion rather than bitterness.

I would forgive instead of clinging to my grudge.

I would assume the best rather than enjoying my irritation.

I would think of others and forget about myself.

How can I obey,

how can I root out this ugliness that is deep inside my heart?

I cannot listen when I will not trust.

And yet I remember.

God is mercy and God is grace.

He changes hearts and He captures our gaze.

He is faithful if we ask;

His wisdom He delights to give.

Christ stayed in the wilderness

He faced down our sin

He trusted in God

Trusted God’s love and goodness

Christ conquered to make me a conqueror.

Grace.

It captures my heart and teaches me to trust

changing my nature so that I am now able to believe what God says

And obey.

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I Cannot

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Elizabeth

I hate admitting that I cannot do something. I have experienced quite a few tragedies that occurred because I was unable to swallow that thing inside of me that rises up and prevents me from asking for help.

The one notable exception is raising children. I am all about seeking out advice when it comes to my children (which is its own problem because too much advice leads to indecision which invariably leads to paralysis). This is not by any particular virtue of my own, rather it is because I am completely terrified of irreversibly messing up another human being.

Messing up my own life, however, is fine, because whatever the thing is, I can do it.

Even if I cannot.

This causes a definite problem, however, when it comes to my faith. I want to be able to be good enough, to make myself righteous enough, to climb up the ladder and reach God all on my own.

I would have done well in Babel.

I want to do it myself so that I can then take credit. I want to be proud of my own accomplishments. I want, in short, to seek and worship myself.

God, however, is quite clear. We can never rise up to Him, so He, in His infinite mercy, came down to us.

This is folly and this is scandal. It cannot be understood by our own reason and intelligence. This is offensive. It offends our pride to know that there is nothing for us to do.

God is too high and holy and our sin is too deep and depraved for us to be able to reach God.

Our souls become crippled and cramped by trying to rise to the highest height. The end is despair, or a self-righteousness that leaves room neither for love of God nor for love of others. ~ Emil Brunner

It hurts as a crucifixion always does, but I must crucify myself and admit that I cannot reach God. I cannot be good enough and I cannot make myself righteous.

So God descends to us at Christmas and finishes His descent on Good Friday. What is His goal and where does He end His descent? He ends where we belong. In Hell. Our rightful place is separation from God, which is hell, and God descends down to hell.

Jesus experiences our separation from God and despairs of loneliness from God so that we can be free of it. He descends all the way down so that He can lift us out and reconcile us to God. It is the only way.

If the only way to receive God’s Spirit and nevermore to be separate from Him is to admit that I cannot do it, I will crucify my pride every single day and bow my head to the ground in worship and thanksgiving.

I will confess: I cannot.

Art Credits: Construction of the Tower of Babel painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger; The Three Crosses by Rembrandt

Keep Fighting

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Elizabeth

To live life well is hard.

It is difficult to live deliberately, to continue to work for the good of yourself and those you love. It is easier to coast, to react, to let things slide.

For myself, it is easier to let the clutter pile up than to keep our house feeling like a home. It is easier to read mind-candy sorts of novels than to ponder the nature of our God and this universe. It is easier to let my children learn on their own or through their schools, to allow my girls get away with small acts of unkindness and to be passive in the way they discover God than to fight for their hearts and their minds. It is easier to let my relationship with my husband drift, to sit in our separate corners in the evenings than to work to know him and enjoy him.

Often I do not want to fight. I do not want to fight for what is good. I do not want to fight for what is God-honoring and God-pleasing.

Yet I fight anyway. I fight because I love and, in this world anyway, loving requires you to fight.

I don’t fight perfectly, though. I fight in fear of the needs that others have. I fight in fear of my own inability to give anything good. I fight in fear of doing the wrong thing and causing irreparable harm.

But still I fight, imperfect as it may be. I fight in obedience to One who fought for me.

Just like you. You go and you fight. You go to the bedside of the sick or even the dying and you fight. You go to the home of someone who is lonely and you fight. You go to a meeting of a church group in need of volunteers and you fight. You go to the food pantry, the orphanage, the shelter, and you fight. You go to funeral, the party, the study, and you fight.

We go because it is where His way leads us; and again and again we are blessed by our going in ways we can never anticipate, and our going becomes a blessing to the ones we go to because when we follow His way, we never go entirely along, and it is always something more than just ourselves and our own emptiness that we bring. ~ Frederick Buechner

So keep going. Keep fighting. And be blessed because when you go and when you fight, you are never fighting alone.

Art credit: photo of Christ carrying the cross by Asta Rastauskiene

Athanasius says that this is the source of all evil: the changing of our goal. We turn away from God and drive ourselves toward other things, often not even seeing that we have missed the way.

When I am careening from one activity to another, seeking after success for my children; when I am veering from one emotion to the other, leaving my family as casualties in my wake; when I am uncertain of what I should do next, then I have changed my goal and am not even aware that I have done so.

I am more like my children than I like to admit. I have trouble keeping to my goal, to my purpose in life, but often I can see the signs and often those signs help me to raise up my head, look for how far away from my goal I have strayed, and ask God to carry me back into the race again.

Hopefully I can teach my girls how to do likewise.

I am wrestling with the difficulty of believing God.

I suppose it would be more accurate and honest to admit that really I am wrestling with why I don’t believe God much of the time.

This struggle to believe manifests itself in different ways at various times and seasons in my life, but currently I am noticing it in two particular ways.

One struggle I have is in believing that God truly loves my children.

I know.

When I say it like that, it seems ludicrous. We are talking, after all, about the same God who gave up His only Son so that my children could be with Him forever.

God has promised that He loves my children even more than I do. He has promised that He will do what is best for them and that He will give them what they need. But I still worry. Why?

I don’t know why I wrestle with this. When I state it so plainly, even I can see the foolishness of it. It should be easy to believe. Yet it is not.

Why is that so difficult to believe, so hard to rely on? It seems like it should be simple. God has never broken a promise; He has proved over and over that His way and His love is best, that His Spirit is faithful to show us truth. I am foolish to doubt the faithfulness of such a God.

I trust that He will. “I believe; help my unbelief!”

Hope.

It changes nothing. It changes everything.

How do you endure? When everything around you is falling apart, when all that you love on this earth fails you, how do you keep going?

It happens to all of us. At some point in our lives, whether early in life or late, we sit in stunned silence while our world crumbles.

What do we do? What do we do when we or one we love is living in the middle of unimaginable pain? What is it that keeps us going, that lets us perservere?

Hope.

It changes nothing. It changes everything.

Hope doesn’t heal the sick or take away the pain. It doesn’t fill the stomach or bring your loved one back.

It changes nothing.

Hope gives you a glory-full vision of the end of your story. It gives you a glimpse of the beauty, the joy, the perfection that is promised.

It changes everything.

So hope. Hope in what is promised. Hope in what God has promised through the power of the resurrected Christ.

there is hope. Beautiful, glorious, resurrection hope. So breathe deep of this hope. Let it fill you up with peace and joy so that you are able to endure all things. For He who is our hope is coming.

It is promised. It shall be so.

I have felt particularly unlovable lately.

My heart is full of impatience with my children and criticism toward my husband.

My body is lazy at the idea of housework and my mind is discontent with where I am.

I am frustrated with myself, with my inability to love, and full of guilt over my thoughts and actions.

What is it that worms itself deep inside of me and makes it so hard to love fully?

What is it that worms itself deep down and makes me feel shame?

It is this human piece of me, of all of us, that is quick to give in and give up, this fallen part of us that is so quick to turn away from what we know is right and good and lovely – it is this portion of us that longs to be healed, to be made whole, to be made holy.

It is the days on which we feel the ugliest, on which we feel most unlovable, on which we cry out for God to take away the war that rages right within our own selves, that it is most difficult to believe that Christ could love such as us.

It is hard to believe because we don’t see this very often in our world. We see love in response to beauty, not love no matter what, and it is hard, it is so very hard to believe in that which we do not see.

Yet we do catch glimpses. Every once in a while we catch a glimpse of the glorious love that is God in us. We catch glimpses of light and peace and see a glimmer of who we were created to be, of who we will be someday if we just cling to Christ and hold tight with all of our strength.

We catch a glimpse of who we are becoming because of the way Christ loves us, regardless of how unlovable we may be right now.

Look at that love-light shining in His eyes and know that He cannot wait for the day when you will be perfectly united with Him in the power of His resurrection.

You are loved.

Cancer.

Such an ugly word. A word that is filled with fear and pain, hopelessness and loss. A word in which the treatment is as bad as the disease, a word that contains no promise of a cure.

We’ve lived through cancer twice now in my close family. Once in one who had lived a long and good life and who chose not to fight. Once in one who had just begun her life as wife and mother and who fought with every bit of strength she had. Both times, our cancer word contained death and loss.

May I introduce you to my friend, Mark?

Mark and I worship together and I know him best from making music together in the arts ministry at our church. He is a musician by trade, performing and teaching in order to support his family.

Mark is a husband to Jana and a father of five beautiful children, three of whom still live at home. His wife, Jana, is a self-employed speech pathologist who contracts with several different school systems.

A musician and a self-employed speech pathologist don’t get very good health insurance.

Mark was diagnosed with cancer in 2007; his cancer word will not have within it a cure without also containing a bone marrow transplant. He has not yet found a suitable donor. Mark participated in a clinical trial that held the cancer at bay for several years.

Until this past December. The cancer returned. Mark still does not have a bone marrow donor.

He found another clinical trial, but this one requires that he live in Houston while receiving the treatments from MD Anderson.

A musician and a self-employed speech pathologist also don’t make crazy amounts of money.

We can’t do much. We can’t take away the cancer. We can’t take away the fear. We can’t take away the loneliness or the desperation of being a single parent or a distant parent.

We can do a little, though. We can take away the one piece of their pain that has to do with their finances. They are not big spenders. They are frugal and they know how to stretch their paychecks. And they will need a bit more while Mark is living in Houston.

I don’t know why He didn’t make all of the sad things come untrue immediately, but knowing this helps me to be content with not being able to help everyone but to, as Jesus did, help one beautiful person at a time.

The ease of which I find myself speaking in terms of “us” and “them” while speaking of how we interpret the Bible forces me to search more deeply into how I see the Bible.

Do I view the Bible as a way to live my own life or do I look into its pages to search out ways of making me right and them wrong? Of even more eternal import, do I place the Bible as an idol above God? Do I view the Bible or Jesus as the Word of God?

After all, as we see in the story of the judgement in Matthew 25, Christ knows us by our actions as we serve the outcasts, the hungry, the sick, the poor, and the imprisoned.

But Jesus provides no list of beliefs at all. People are judged not on what they believe but on how they have loved. ~ Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

Once upon a time.

This is how a parable begins.

We hear once upon a time and when it comes from Jesus, we listen for morals and look for lessons of what we should do.

Once upon a time there was a steward. A steward who was accused and then fired. A steward who then set out to cheat his master in order to protect himself.

This steward brought in all of his master’s debtors and reduced each one’s debt, thus stealing from his master but incurring debts of gratitude for himself.

Once upon a time there was a steward who was then praised by his master for having the prudence to care for himself.

It is bothersome and uncomfortable, this steward who is commended for being unjust. It is not what we expect from Jesus. It is not the moral lesson of selfless service we presume that Jesus will teach.

The moral seems to be, instead, that we should cheat our master.

This looks so out of character that we try to explain it some other way. We search for ways around it and try to find sermons to explain it away.

Yet what if the moral is as it appears? What if the moral truly is cheat your master? How could this possibly be a directive from Jesus?

What changes it all, what turns everything on its head (which Jesus is prone to do) is the discovery of who the master is.

It all turns around when you understand that the master is the world. It is the world whom we are to cheat. The firing is our notice that our lives here will soon end, and before that day comes we are to cheat this master with all of his own tools.

If he gives us riches or beauty, power or abilities, we are to use them for our own purposes rather than for his. We are to use them for intentions that align with the goals of God’s kingdom.

For if we won’t do that even with the world’s kind of property, Who will trust us at all with the true kind of treasure?

If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? ~ Jesus

So cheat your master. Cheat him with all of his own temporary tools so that you can store up your own, lasting sort of treasure with God.

Temptation.

It swirls around me like a hurricane