The Guy in the Back

He sat quietly in the back, not really singing during the time for worshiping God in song, not coming forward to put anything in the basket during offering, but when it was time for prayer? when the opportunity to share prayer requests was given? This gaunt, heavily tattooed, well-spoken young man stood from his place at the back and introduced himself:  

I am X, and this is my life...

Though his introduction was brief, his request bore the depth and weight of all he'd endured and the endless expanse of all he wished to do. Within the week, X was dead. What we knew of this humble man we knew: there would be nothing more to learn.

I've mentioned before, sometimes our church services, during those less formal moments, can track more like an AA meeting. My name is ___, and I am a drug addict; or, My name is ___, and I was recently released from prison. It's one of the things I love most about our fellowship. This small gathering is a safe place where secrets are revealed --not exposed --in the hopes of finding healing. I hope X found his healing.

Isaiah 53:5 tells us the scourging Jesus received prior to His crucifixion is for us, the means of our healing. Physical healing? Perhaps, but I think to wish for that is selling short all Jesus accomplished. The things this life --this physical, temporal life --has to offer are wonderful. When God created this place, He deemed it good. Would a perfect God have created anything less? It was man's choice for something less than, the choice for something immediate and tangible and "pleasant to the eyes" that brought a curse, that brought death and destruction to mankind and this place in which we live. Is the healing I want physical? Is the reward or restoration I seek something that can be touched or tasted? Isn't that settling? X didn't ask for something so small. X had a vision for something much better for himself. And X had no clue, I'm sure, his days in this physical world would be so few.

Jesus has something more for you, something greater than mere physical health. And that's not to say, He will not cure you of cancer or regulate your a-fib or stop your seizures. But there is a healing that surpasses anything this world has to offer, a restoration, a reconciliation of relationship with our Creator, the One True and Living God. Jesus' death and resurrection guarantee a clean slate, the forgiveness of all our sins; it guarantees the repair of a once broken relationship with the God of the universe; it guarantees our adoption as sons and daughters of the Most High; it guarantees His Holy Spirit, the Comforter and Helper, living and working in us to transform us into the best humans we can be in Christ; and it guarantees our inheritance, the presence of God with us and us in His presence eternally!

What needs to happen for you to find your healing? for you to choose to seek Him and know Him and obey Him? What needs to happen for you to do what he's called you to do? to find a place where people will surround you in love and pray for you? to stand up where you are, introduce yourself, and speak the desires of your heart to the God who listens to the broken? I hope you find your healing.

Midweek: Do You Love It Enough?

In thinking of the condition of our country and its citizens, in considering the upcoming election, I am reminded of G.K. Chesterton's words in his work, Orthodoxy. There are things for which I hope in the natural, but more than that, most of all, it is my prayer that God receive glory. In saying this, I share Chesterton's words with you today:

We say there must be a primal loyalty to life: the only question is, shall it be a natural or a supernatural loyalty? If you like to put it so, shall it be a reasonable or an unreasonable loyalty? Now, the extraordinary thing is that the bad optimism (the whitewashing, the weak defence of everything) comes in with the reasonable optimism. Rational optimism leads to stagnation: it is irrational optimism that leads to reform. Let me explain by using once more the parallel of patriotism. The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly the man who loves it with a reason. The man who will improve the place is the man who loves it without a reason. ...I do not deny that reform may be excessive; I only say that it is the mystic patriot who reforms. ...The more transcendental is your patriotism, the more practical are your politics.

Perhaps the most everyday instance of this point is in the case of women; and their strange and strong loyalty. Some stupid people started the idea that because women obviously back up their own people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head. A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else. ...The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

...Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.

~ G. K. Chesterton

Orthodoxy

Forgiven and Full of Grace

Good morning. Your mother messed up. The reunion is at...

That was the text I sent out just hours before a family reunion. No big deal, right? We all mess up. Really nothing to forgive. But there are those times... You know the ones. We say something we can't take back or do something that will remain part of the annals of history forever. Sort of like Simon Peter. Have you ever noticed Peter's failures and foibles pepper the pages of the New Testament. Even after the sting of Jesus' rebuke had become a lesson learned, even after the serene and beautiful tableau of restoration in John's Gospel, Peter still can't catch a break. Peter's offenses become headline news again when, in his letter to Galatia, Paul says Peter "played the hypocrite" and Paul called him on it. (Galatians 2:11-20) We don't read anything of Peter's response, but he wrote extensively of grace in his letters. 

Grace and forgiveness are gifts I believe we radically undervalue and underestimate. I have just seriously begun plumbing the depths of both of these, but here are just a couple things I've discovered so far:

-- To allow oneself to be forgiven is to surrender to the power of the one who has been offended; it is to make oneself vulnerable, to ask for mercy or at least, to admit one is in need of it. It bears the responsibility of never committing the offense again, not necessarily because there will be punishment and not necessarily because of consequences, though those are persuasive elements; but because the one offended is even lovelier and more precious to the offender than before because of their mercy and forgiveness. There is an aspect of this person's character not necessarily seen or experienced before, and it is alluring and humbling to those who truly seek reconciliation. The alternative is to go off in anger and bitterness, dissolve the relationship, and discard anything of previous worth or potential worth. To not submit to forgiveness is the death of a dream.

-- Grace is not some sweet, gentle gift extended by a milquetoast God sitting in Heaven hoping someone will pay some attention to Him. Grace was diligently sought for by prophets of old, educated men who took seriously the promises of God. Why would they seek something of little significance or power? The grace that is to come is strong enough to do the heavy lifting of all my hopes, and yours, and the person sitting next to you, and your great-great grandchildren and their children who don't exist yet! Grace is limited only by the God who created the poodle moth and the goblin shark (look them up); as creative as our God, His grace is as multi-faceted. He will never run out of ways to show you His grace!

And whether your offenses are kept to something as commonplace as bad directions in a closed text or are spread across the internet like six-week old Tik-Toks, in Christ forgiveness and grace are yours. They are weapons of hope and healing and power. They give strength to relationships and deepen our connections. They achieve the impossible. They transformed the impulsive, sometimes brash Simon Peter into the apostle and saint who was fundamental in the establishment of the Church and zealous even in death. They can transform us as well.