"Journeying Realities": A Letter To A Friend

This blog entry is adapted from a letter to a friend from August 2012. He was going through some difficult road in several aspects of his life and I felt prompted to write him. I came across it today and thought I would change the names and pretty it up a little so that I could post it.

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Friend,

 

Thanks for sharing your “journeying realities” (the hard stuff) with me.

 

God has been seriously hitting me from all angles with this theme through two or three separate books and various preachers I have listened to in the past couple of weeks. I don’t know if any of this will help you or encourage you, but I have learned not to resist if I feel a prompting to write something. Just pass it off as, “Brian being a dork”, if what I am going to tell you doesn't find a home in your situation. Just take some time and process what I am saying and listen to it with your heart. Maybe this stuff is just new to me, and you have fully assimilated this already, or maybe this will be a good reminder.

 

My own situation is that I am becoming more and more calm about my own "journeying realities" as I realize that God is less concerned with making my life work, and much more concerned that my heart is inclined towards Him. This has not come easy to me by any means.

 

Here is the thing about marriage and all close relationships! Let’s use you as an example. Even as a child, your background of pain, in your spiritually dead state, made your sinful flesh ball up a tight little fist against God in some way and say, “I will not be hurt this way again!” This is when sin AGAINST you, was converted to sin IN you. The problem is that when we take that stance, whatever the specifics, it warps us and makes us vulnerable to more sin. Later, we bring that into a relationship with another flawed human with a balled up fist, and this is a recipe for perfection. By perfection I mean that God uses our relationships to perfect us through great suffering. He uses not only our romantic relationships, but also our children, our bosses, our parking attendant, and every other human being that we have the opportunity to have a personal conflict with.

 

I heard a definition of sanctification recently that I loved. It went something like this, “Sanctification is The painful process by which God extracts us from priorities and pleasures that we have placed above Him.” 

Primarily, we come face to face with our sins, failures, terrifying “journeying realities” and have a personal “Alamo moment”, which can last much longer than a moment. We come to the end of our ability to prop up the religious idea that “if I do good stuff that God likes, God will GIVE me good stuff back.” WE know this isn’t good theology, and we would never admit that we believe it…but our actions say we do. God knows just the right places to apply pressure to bring that terrible theology crashing down. 

When we really hit that point and get frustrated enough to jump off the lofty cliffs of our expectations of a good life, we find that the scarlet cord of “Knowing God” is more than strong enough to keep us from crashing into the rocks below. The ugly stuff we go through is designed to get us to finally jump and realize that He is all we need. We can quickly learn that we have been serving our selfish need to have “blessing” in our lives rather than serving the God who is allowing life to process us through sufferings, which probably won’t look anything like our ideal picture of blessing. 

This brings us crosswise to God’s purpose and puts us in the unenviable position of idolatry. It is hard to see sometimes, but in the wrong context, tending the things in our lives that could make our lives seem better can actually be a subtle but still heinous form of idolatry. Imagine Joseph devising an escape plan out of the prison, or creating an uprising among the prisoners against the warden. “Well,” he would say, “it seemed like the way out of an unfair situation!” But, sometimes the way out, isn’t God’s way. And God’s way is ALWAYS the better way, even if we don’t see the immediate results.

 

I am not talking negatively about bettering yourself, or looking for a different job, working on communication skills with your wife, or being a more caring and encouraging parent to your child. But, I am talking about any one of those things when they become “first things” instead of “second things”. If you humbly pray for things you need from God, but when he seems to be saying, “not now”, it ticks you off and you get offended, then you may ask yourself, “Is God highlighting a place inside me that needs to find rest in him and his over-arching plan for me? Am I just ticked off because I thought he was my ticket to the “cookie jar” of blessing?”

 

This is a stinging truth, and a difficult reality. But it is also the most lovely place of peace that can be found: when we can derive more pleasure from our relationship with God than we do with the stuff He blesses us with, we will find that when everything is stripped away, if everyone leaves us- if we have lost love, health, and cable T.V. - even in that dark place… something inside us isn’t destroyed. The light inside of us isn’t snuffed out. There is a pleasure in God that continues through it all. The truth is that, in Christ, something about us truly IS indestructible! A 747 could fall on your head, but if God didn't say it was time to come home, you would be just fine.

 

He has more blessings for us than we are prepared to ask for, but He will not put our souls in danger by giving us that which will destroy us. That is part of His goodness, and that is evidence of His great mercy. It is also a marvelous sign that you are His kid, and that He is a wonderful dad! 

Brian

Settling For Scraps?

One of the others in this alley found my stash, a carefully hidden plastic sandwich bag with pictures and notes from loved ones, which was carefully taped to the backside of a small electrical box. 

Anxiety... so many thoughts: upheaval, abandonment, fear, loss, betrayal. I felt the tide of anger coming in increasing waves. Did I have a choice but to lash out? I thought to myself, "What does my certain knowledge of some kind of beautiful future life do for me when that which is most cherished on this earth is taken away?" 

I froze...and then I slowly repeated aloud, "when that which is MOST cherished? Is taken away?" Had I really allowed the meager items that filled that bag to become cherished and relied upon more than the king who had saved me with His own blood? 

Words like thunder pealed across my sky, "Stop looking among those scraps! I have relieved you of them so that you will LOOK TO ME!"

Something like a warm whisper began to tease at my heart's periphery. It was like the warmth I felt as a young child eating my grandmas chicken gravy on a Sunday afternoon, the hearty laughter of my best friend sharing an exquisite moment of humor, loves sweetest and most solemn vow, the strong, and steadying embrace of my father, long-since passed. 

I have learned that for me, a sense of anxiety waves the red flag that there is most assuredly idolatry in my heart. Some woefully inadequate god is being asked to fulfill my deepest needs. My wounded soul hurts and tries to patch the holes. Even after all of this time, it is still my knee-jerk response to pain. I think I need a better version of me, or a somebody else. I search for some THING, or I strap my hopes to concentrated and wholly misguided religious effort.

Lord Jesus, please help me daily to remember that "It is finished!" None of my feeble efforts are required because the strong arms of my Savior have accomplished all that I never could.

(2 Corinthians 1:3-5)

A Question at the Core

Behold, the confidence and surety with which a child lifts his eyes and proclaims the answer to some mystery that befits the human mind at such a tender age. Where do frogs come from? Why does the truck make such a loud noise? Why do bees sting?

What right does the child have to think he holds the answers to such things? In this post-modern world where "reason" dominates, shouldn't some adult guide chastise him for imagining that he holds the answers to such things that are so far beyond him? Shouldn't someone sweep in with the "Origin of Species", charts of the modern diesel engine, or a naturalist guide to the defense mechanisms of plants and animals. 

Further, how dare he believe that there is enough coherence in the natural world to imagine that there would be a logical reason for anything?

How dare he grow to graduate through the stages of life, glory in the beauty and grace of his wife, and search through the night sky to find an answer to a question that is too deep to ask, sensing that there must be an answer. 

Why does the natural man have to be taught, using such ordered and well labeled arguments, that there are no coherent answers? Why must hope be expertly pulled from his grasping hands?

Without God, there is no coherence, no argument, no invention, no answers, no hope. There is no peg board with which to hang speech, thought or even the passage of time. 

Those that argue for the randomness of existence use borrowed language, borrowed reason and borrowed time.

We love that child for his searching heart, because it speaks of that unfathomable, greater mystery which beckons all of our searching hearts, and cannot honestly be denied. 

Ask yourself this:

Why is there a question at our core?

And if a question defines the human condition, might there be an answer? Could it be that we were designed to ask it?