Scratching the Surface

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Maybe you recognize these as the fruit of the Spirit found in Galatians 5:22-23. Or perhaps you recognize these things in God's character. Do you recognize them in yours? Not to brag or anything --no, I really mean, not to brag (at least not on me)-- I can see them in mine. You see, over the years, the Holy Spirit has been at work, changing me and bringing me into conformity with the character of God. It's sort of like those "scratch art" things. Maybe you did them as a kid: you apply the base coat to your paper with all sorts of brilliantly colored crayons, you paint over it with acrylic paint (usually black); once the paint dries, you scratch off your design and watch the colors pop through wherever you've removed the paint. That's how I imagine the work of the Holy Spirit to be.

I encourage you to give Genesis 1 a read some time. In a nutshell, God created all this stuff. He said it was good. Lastly, He created a man and a woman. He looked at everything He had made, the man, the woman, and the perfect environment in which they could live and have a relationship with Him, and God said it was very good. Mankind was made exactly as God designed: strong, beautiful, in His image. Two short chapters later, in Genesis 3, God through Moses tells of the sad day when sin entered the world, and everything became corrupt by its presence. (Sort of like the black paint that obscures the beauty of the original design on a scratch art.) What would it take for God's design to be restored to its perfect beginning? All of this was part of God's plan. He would use Adam and Eve's rebellion as a means to show human beings His goodness and their need for a good God. Again and again, He demonstrated grace toward those who dishonored Him; He forgave and restored; He loved His people and cared for them the way a good father longs for his rebellious son to return home; He proved His character: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, and then, when the time was right, He offered up His Son to be cursed and condemned in the place of every man that they might be righteous in His Son. He would not restore mankind to its perfect beginning; God would reveal the fullness of His plan: a new life, a more perfect design! 

To those who choose to follow after God through His Son, He gives the gift of His Holy Spirit to dwell with them and in them, changing them --while still on this earth!-- to be more like Jesus. This is His word-of-mouth advertising. He transforms lives to reflect His character so that those He has transformed will love others and by loving others will entice others to follow after Him as well. Living, breathing, walking, talking billboards of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control!

But we're human. And we're not robots. we're not always going to get it right. We're not always going to obey perfectly. When we do, however, more of our old nature (more of that black acrylic paint) gets scratched off. And one day, when we get to heaven, we'll be able to see the beauty of God's perfect design. Not just the original swirls of colored crayons, or the obscurity of the acrylic paint, but the perfect masterpiece, just as He designed it from before the foundation of the world. 

Until then, take the time to reflect. Acknowledge and give thanks for the transformation that's taking place as the Holy Spirit scrapes away more and more of your old nature. Don't be ashamed to say you are better than you used to be. After all, it's not you who is doing the work anyway.

Such a Gift (Frederick Buechner)

War is hell, but sometimes in the midst of the Hell men do things that Heaven itself must be proud of. A hand grenade is hurled into a group of men. One of the men throws himself on top of it, making his body a living shield. In the burst of wild fire he dies, and the others live. Heroism is only a word, often a phony one. This is an action for which there is no good word because we can hardly imagine it, let alone give it its proper name. Very literally, one man takes death into his bowels, takes fire unto his own sweet flesh, so that the other men can take life, some of them men he hardly knows. 

"Who knows why a man does such a thing or what thoughts pass through his mind just before he does it. Maybe no thoughts at all. Maybe if he stopped to think, he would never do it. Maybe he just acts spontaneously out of his passion the way, when you are a child and somebody attacks your brother, you attack the attacker with no fear for yourself but just because it is your brother and somebody is attacking him. Or if you are a cynic, you might say that a man must be temporarily insane to do such a thing because no man in his right mind would ever willingly give his life away, hardly even for somebody he loved, let alone for people he barely knows. Or that he must have acted out of a crazy thirst for glory, believing that not even death was too high a price to pay for a hero's honors. Or if you are an idealist, you might insist that although the human spirit is full of darkness, every once in a while it is capable of the Godlike act. Maybe in some complex way, something of all these is involved. It is impossible for us to imagine the motive. 

"But I think that it is not so hard to imagine how the men whose lives are saved might react to one who died to save them--not so hard, I suppose, for the obvious reason that most of us are more experienced at receiving sacrifices than at making them. In their minds' eyes, those saved men must always see the dead one where he lay in the ruins of his own mortality, and I suspect that at least in part of what they feel must be a revulsion so strong that they come to believe that if they could somehow have stopped him from doing what he did, they would have stopped him. We say 'life at any price,' but I have the feeling that to have somebody else pay such a price for us would be almost more than we would choose to bear. I have the feeling that given the choice, we would not have let him do it, not for his sake but for our own sakes.

"Because we have our pride, after all. We make our own way in the world, we fight our own battles, we are not looking for any handouts, we do not want something for nothing. It threatens our self-esteem, our self-reliance. And because to accept such a gift from another would be to bind us closer to him than we like to be bound to anybody. And maybe most of all because if another man dies so that I can live, it imposes a terrible burden on my life. From that point on, I cannot live any longer just for myself. I have got to live also somehow for him, as though in some sense he lives through me now as, in another sense, I live through him. If what he would have done with his life is going to be done, then I have got to do it. My debt to him is so great that the only way I can approach paying it is by living a life as brave and beautiful as his death. So maybe I would have prevented his dying if I could, but since it is too late for that, I can only live my life for what it truly is: not a life that is mine by natural right, to live any way I choose, but a life that is mine only because he gave it to me, and I have got to live it in a way that he also would have chosen."

Such a Gift by Frederick Buechner (from his book, The Hungering Dark and reprinted in his daily meditations: Listening to Your Life)