What Will You Do?

from Waking The Dead

So, let me ask again: How would you live differently, if you believed your heart was the treasure of the kingdom?

What does your heart need? In some sense it’s a personal question, unique to our make-up, and what brings us life. For some its music, for others its reading, for others they must garden. Our friend Lori loves the city; I can’t wait to get out of one. Bart reads articles on flying; Cherie loves a good novel. Bethann loves horses and Gary needs time working in the woodshop. You know what makes your heart refreshed, the things that make you come alive. I don’t get the thing with women and baths, but I know that Stasi loves them and finds a little retreat in a fifteen minute tub. “He leads me to soak in still, bubbly waters.” For me and the boys its the dirtier, the happier.

Yet there are some things all hearts need in common. We need beauty; that’s clear enough from the fact that God has filled the world with it, as he has given us sun and rain,

Wine that gladdens the heart of man,
Oil to make his face shine,
And bread that sustains his heart. (Psalm 104:15)

We need to drink in beauty wherever we can get it – in music, in nature, in art, in a great meal shared. These are all gifts to us from God’s generous heart. Friends, those things are not decorations to a life; they are what brings us life.

The skies of blue
The fields of green
Are all for you

The silver moon
The shining sea
All for you

For you, the wind blows
For you, the river flows

And everything you dream about
Even the love you dream of, too,
Is all for you. (John Smith & Lisa Aschman, “All for You”)

I don’t think I could have finished this book if it weren’t for the walks I take each day in the woods. My soul is tired, bone tired. The battle has been long and hard. Last night it began to snow. It is still snowing now. It, too, is a gift to my heart.

(from Waking The Dead, 214, 215 )

 

Coming To a Close

One month left.  Three long, exciting, difficult, intense years in a graduate counseling/marriage and family therapy program has come down to one month.  Hard to believe.

I find it ironic somehow that I’m sitting in the same seat as I was four years ago.  Not much external has changed over the past three years.  My job, certainly.  The work I do during the day.  But the shift, the movement, has been largely an inward one.  As I thought of that, I got the picture of William Wallace coming back home to the place of his youth early in the Braveheart film.  Same homestead.  Same people around him.  He was the same person… sort of.  But a different man, a different kind of man than he had been a boy.  Had he stayed, the trajectory of his life would have led him to a different spot.  He’d been disciplined.  Trained.  Honed.  He had been primed as a warrior.  His desire was still for peace, a reflection that his heart had not become hard or wicked; rather, he had developed skill and cunning for battle.

And battle it is, each day where I work.  My office is Stirling, and every counseling session is a taking of the field.  A movement either more toward freedom from tyranny — if only a single step — or a retreat toward it.  I don’t battle alone; I can’t.  I don’t mean only that the Lord God goes before more, for surely He does, and I don’t mean in this case that, like Wallace, I am a part of a band that knows their place in the story, for certainly I am.  What I mean here is that the war we’re fighting is for “the sons and daughters of Scotland,” for the freedom and life of all these precious ones sitting on my couch.  They must advance.  I spend much of my time preparing the advance, or instilling hope and courage into their hearts to pursue the vision of victory in the dreaded battle they find themselves facing, as much as I “go to pick a fight.”

But, unlike for Wallace’s  men, this is where the battle lines are drawn — is it not? — right through the hearts of us all.  It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn who said that “the universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between countries, not between nations, not between parties, not between classes, not even between good and bad men: the dividing line cuts… [through] the heart of every man.”  This is where the Enemy has set up camp.  And this is where we are called to fight, if we are to fight at all.  And fight we must.  This is where we experience either the joy of ground retaken, or the bondage of captivity and allegiance to the false king in our midst, to the wicked prince of a foreign territory.

I have come to see that my life, though not only about battle, must be about the battle for truth and life.  If only we had those given to us on silver platters.  We don’t.  Instead, we are in a war where it is just as often our own heads that find their way onto silver platters.  But we are given the strength and resources to fight that these things advance within us and among us.  And we have a kind and quality of life guaranteed us if we are willing to give our lives up to have it.

My own training is far from over; in some ways, I’ve only just begun to recognize the meaning and need of it.  And Jesus always seems to be about growing us more into His image as men and women pursuing hard after His kind of life, and willing to fight through hell and back for others to enjoy it with us.  (What else could God have meant by telling husbands to “love your wives, just as Christ loved the church” [Eph. 5:25]  How does He love the church?  By “giving Himself up for her” on the field of battle.)  But I’m nearing the end of one phase of my journey, entering more fully into the next.  I long for peace for these friends whom I meet — in their homes, in their marriages, in their work.  But, in the words again of Wallace, “it’s all for nothing if you don’t have freedom.”  And freedom is hard-won.  Maybe that’s the only way we come to appreciate it for what it is.

 

Moses’ Training

The following article comes from a recent report from Training Ground.  It is so good, it needs no introduction.  I wanted to post it in its entirety…,

Leadership Through the Story of Moses

For Moses, 1/3 of his life is a great picture of where young men find themselves today. Till 40, Moses was “educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action.” (Acts 7:22) He emerges already as a leader. Strong. Persuasive. Wise. (Many of the young men coming through Training Ground) But, he had been given everything. The golden boy. A life of wealth, privilege, and entitlement in the Egyptian courts. He was far from his people (the Israelites) life of slavery and hard labor. It says in Acts, “when Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his fellow Israelites.”

Can you imagine the disconnect? The two different worlds colliding. This “prince” in beautiful Egyptian covered clothes, shiny clean, and trim, walking around, visiting “his people” covered in dirt and sweat. I can’t imagine what the Israelite men thought of this guy strolling around.

Moses wants to be the hero for the Israelites. He is beginning to feel the injustice of his people and even experiences his call to lead them. He is in a position of power and influence. But even his actions show how self-righteous he was. Right before he murders the Egyptian (his way of vengeance) it says, “Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them.” (Acts 7:25)

Gosh, how I can relate. The narcissism. Believing that in me is that power to change the world. All those graduation speeches telling us to seize the day. All those promises of what our life could be about.

And like so many guys, Moses is relying on his own life and the power of what is around him. But, he is really untested. There is not a deep settled confidence. He has been given a life void of real experiences of pain, suffering, and hardship to know God, and how Gods works through them. The real roots of faith. He has only come into these through a fate outside his own control (leaving him ungrateful). He has little to no understanding of the people he wants to lead, and their own struggles.

We see this happening all the time, today. Isn’t that how presidential candidates are spun as being unrelatable and disconnected to the people? “They can’t relate to the working class. They are out of touch. Have never been through financial hardship. Never suffered through real life.”

But God, using Moses choice of violence and flight, leads him into the place he needs to experience. Loneliness. Blue collar work. Desert. Wilderness. Pain. Abandonment. Frustration. Loss. Even confusion. We know this as the scriptures say that Moses named his son, Gershom, “I have become an alien in a foreign land.” (Exodus 2:22) This wasn’t a process welcomed or even understood by Moses. Proving, even at the time, Moses didn’t appreciate or understand what he was needing to go through. He had given up. Believing he was removed, and far from God’s place to lead the Israelite people.

It’s the irony of God’s training for leadership. By the time God taps him as the leader of the people, he doesn’t believe God. Instead of seeing himself as ready and prepared, he sights every reason why he would be horrible at it. Oh, the irony! It’s the perfect place for God to restore Moses, and finally be his God, and his Father.

He spent 40 years being educated, and entitled. 40 years in the wilderness and in hardship, and then 40 years being God’s voice, and leader of the Israelites who are taken into desert and wilderness.

It is a beautiful picture of how education is important, suffering and testing is essential, and restoration and leadership is birthed somewhere between the two.

 

On Assignment

One of the coolest things I’ve learned recently came from a group of friends who take seriously the call to follow Jesus in this world and into the heart of the arenas they work in, live in, and move about in. Whatever their profession, wherever they are living right now, whatever their family looks like, they see it all as an “assignment” from the Lord. This is where they are for now. Because they walk with Jesus, they know that this, whatever this is to them, is where they are called to be. Not always. Not forever. But for right now. Which gives them an immense amount of freedom to move about in their worlds with courage and hope. They know the time in their assignment will not last, and so difficult circumstances become easier and beautiful moments are treasured more deeply. And when their time is up with one assignment, they walk with Jesus into the next, keeping before them the constant undercurrent of reality, which is the Kingdom of God and our Father’s desire to see people come into it, walk in it, and live.

I’m on assignment right now doing something I thought I would never do, and something I’m not quite sure I was really prepared to enter into, and that is working with high school students. My job duties on any given day vary, but largely I consider myself a mentor to these teens, though sometimes my role is a disciplinarian, sometimes a teacher, sometimes a counselor… but really all of that I roll up into the title of “mentor.”

As a mentor, and especially through the summer months when I work daily with the students, I encounter situations that are brand new to me. I find myself needing to deal with one issue or another — whether it is a serious disturbance at home, relational struggles, or the typical difficulties that come as a by-product of their stage in life — that I am completely unprepared to handle. And when I say “unprepared” I do not mean that things are not handled well. In fact, that is one of the joys of working where I do and in the capacity I do, which is that my coworkers are incredibly competent and adept and dealing with these kinds of situations. What I mean in saying “unprepared” is just that I have never had explicit training or experience in handling this particular kind of issue, whatever this may be.

And this is where it gets really cool. This is where the Kingdom (“the reign of the King”) comes into play. I once worked (on a different kind of assignment) with a missionary in Colombia, South America. He had been kidnapped some years ago by a rebel faction at gunpoint. His current assignment, to continue to borrow that term, is to bring the gospel to the paramilitary groups in Colombia. It’s an incredibly dangerous mission, one in which is “unprepared” to do, in the traditional meaning of that word. (How could you possibly prepare for that?) I sat one evening at a hotel in Bogotá while he regaled us with stories of his near-death experiences of bringing books and Bibles into remote jungle, rebel-controlled regions of the country and of the way Christ would lead him in very specific ways to do very specific things and the countless times when he would have a half-dozen AK-47′s pointed at his head with weary and suspicious fingers shaking on the triggers. “At times like those,” he told us, “You do not have time to consult your Bible or call your church elders to pray for you or call a time-out so that you can go to your prayer closet for a few days, come back, and decide what to do or say in the situation. Whatever you have in your heart, that’s what you got to go on in those next split-second decisions.” Meaning, it was the Spirit of Christ that would lead him in words and sometimes action, sometimes inaction, to bring peace to a very tense situation. Always, every time, guns would drop, fingers would relax from the triggers, and God would soften hearts to hear the gospel.

And he has been on this assignment for something close to 25 years now.

Something about what he said that night stuck with me. I realized that often we are in similar circumstances, times and places when what flows out of our hearts right then at that moment determines an entire series of outcomes. It may be a word properly –or improperly– spoken. A gesture. A seemingly small decision. Or an enormous one, like in the missionary’s case. Certainly in my job now, I have to earn the trust of my students (earn is the only word here, and it is not done easily for a generation suspicious and wounded) while simultaneously treating the issue at hand with wisdom, discernment, and timeliness. It all can be a difficult balance, with a lot hanging in the balance, including issues of faith, hope, and love centered in relationships that need the healing ministry of Christ. Including the relationship with Christ.

Which is the similarity in the two assignments. My mission here is not so different from my friend’s mission in Colombia. Each of us, in our own way, are bringing the gospel, bringing in the Kingdom, by the fierce intention of first and foremost remaining intimately connected with Jesus. That’s the source. All else — every on-the-spot decision — is fruit of that relationship.

My friends that I spoke of earlier, my wife, the beloved of God all over the world — all of us are “on assignment,” “in the world but not of it.” It is an astounding and freeing thing to remember that the relative successes of those missions depend not on our own wisdom or charm, mood or even awareness, but rather by our connection to Jesus. Our intention to love Him, to follow Him, to be obedient. And to listen, which is a tough thing to do in our culture. But it pays off. It is intimacy for intimacy’s sake, but it also results in a transformation of character that enables to live from the new nature that the world needs to see and needs to have.

And so, what better preparation can there be? I could not possibly know everything I need to know about every situation that arises. They are all different, every time, as different from one to another as people are one to another. But I have at my access a resource to draw from — God Himself! — who knows everything there is to know about the deepest heart, the most complex problem. We need the intimate acquaintance of Jesus in each circumstance (2 Peter 1:3). And then we have all (1 Corinthians 3:21).

I can’t say for sure what my next mission will look like, but I can say that it will involve a deepening intimacy with the Lord God and a growth more into His likeness. That is the one commonality among us all, no matter what assignment we’re on.

 

Blood and Water

I preached a funeral once. Just once. It was for my uncle’s wife. I say it that way instead of saying “aunt” because I didn’t really know her, and she had been the second or third wife he’d taken. But she was his bride, and he loved her. She had died tragically and suddenly in her sleep. He awoke to her cold, stiff body laying beside her.

It was a small funeral, the services held in the mortuary chapel. Flowers lined the wall on either side of the casket. The walls were washed in a sad dirty blue paint. The lighting was turned down low. The pews were packed with mourners.

I remember feeling quite overwhelmed at what to offer. What do you say at something like that? It had to be unique, modeled around the brief life my uncle and aunt enjoyed together, highlighting this lady’s character of which I knew very little about. Her family was there. I didn’t even know their names. But my uncle had asked me to speak, and I was honored by the request. My words were a mix of longing, of poetry, of the gospel as best as I could offer it, and of grief.

I grieved for my uncle, for his loss, for the losses that kept coming at him in his life relentless as the seasons. The death seemed to shed some light on his heart, and I saw the pebble that remained after disappointments and pain had eroded the rock that he had meant to become. He seemed shriveled inside.

I grieved for the faces I saw in the crowd that day. Not because they were openly sorrowful, but because they were not. These were people I had grown up with and hung around in various roles all of my life. They were parents and grandparents and cousins and siblings. Some were distant relatives I hardly knew. But all of them seemed to share this one feature in common: they were emotionally crippled, as if they did not know how to express themselves, or feel, or join with my uncle in the years upon years of eroding pain that had dictated his script in life.

There is a lot of heart disease in my family. Disappointments and fear and stunted dreams have layered its plaque along the arterial walls of almost everyone I saw in some degree or another, clotting the blood flow of soul nutrients to their spirits. The condition of my uncle’s soul felt indicative of the family he belonged to.

And I grieved that I, too, had been stunted, that the life of God in my bones had been blocked. I am not a preacher. Not by election, or by prescription, or by calling, or by conquest.* What was needed was gentle but strong nudging to loosen and weaken the embolism in all who could hear that day, allowing the grief to settle in as a kind of heparin to thin out the blood and let it flow again.

I remember feeling like what I offered was pretty ineffective. I wanted to model open grieving and hoping. I tried that day to infuse blood into the vessels that were already bloated and distended. Later I thought of how when Jesus’ side was pierced, blood and water flowed. What was needed was not transfusion; it was a deluge. We needed the water of His Spirit to wash and cleanse, so that His blood could then flow into the furthest reaches of the heart and homes I saw represented there in the pews.

This is why, I think, Paul goes to great lengths to explain that we are all different members of the Body of Christ, each with unique callings and gifts and roles to play (see Romans 12; 1 Corinthians 12; Ephesians 4; Colossians 3). He says that we need to embrace our unique calling and to recognize that we are not able to do it all. We need others with other gifts and callings to be with us. To recognize that is a deep humility.

I learned a lot that day. I was given insight into the particular assault against my family line (Exodus 34:7). I recognized the pain, often unexpressed, that years upon years of wounds can invoke. I recognized that we have a great need for the deep and inner presence of the Spirit to stir the blood again that we might experience life as it was meant to be. And I learned that I want to pursue my calling, to walk with Jesus in my desire to bring life to the inner places in the hearts of others, even as His blood infuses through my own. I recognized that it requires training (Luke 6:40) and discipline, which in turn requires that I recognize that Jesus is my Teacher, my Rabbi, in the art of living and loving well. I’m learning that His coming was not about being nice, or making us comfortable, or settling all questions and doubts about this life we find ourselves in. His coming was to ravish us, and often that means a combination of battering our hearts to “divorce, untie, and break” us from our the enemy we have betrothed ourselves to, in the words of John Donne, as well as steadily growing us into the image we were made to bear — that of His bride.

*These descriptions of owning or appropriating our place in the Kingdom are taken from C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian. At one point in the story, Peter sends a messenger off with a letter written for Miraz, once Lord-Protector of Narnia who had styled himself king and was now bearing his army down against Peter and his companions. Peter’s letter was a challenge to a man-to-man combat. He began it with the greeting, “High King Peter of Narnia, by calling, by prescription, by election, and by conquest…” I think each of those terms profoundly identify different aspects of our actively taking our place next to our Commander and King in the adventure of living in the Kingdom.

 

Restless Heart Syndrome

I’ve spent the last several nights restless, up at the early morning hours. I wrote this in my journal:

It’s early in the morning, too early to be hammering away at the keyboard, but I haven’t been able to sleep yet. I am restless and aching with longing and desire. I just finished watching an episode of Man Versus Wild on the Discovery Channel. Bear Grylls taught me how to survive my time in the Moab Desert if ever I find myself there with only a knife, a flint, and a canteen. It was intriguing, and the contrast between battling on the edge of survival and all it means — eating raw raven’s eggs, swimming underneath a debris field in deep cavernous water, fighting against Pygmy rattlers for sleeping shelter — felt piercing when compared to my surroundings laden with empty boxes of carry-out pizza, a heating blanket with its controls sitting on my nightstand next to my cell phone (oh, who’s call did I miss?), and a fluffy, cozy bed. I’m drawn into the exploration and adventure coming through the TV screen.

Keeping as quiet as possible so as not to wake my wife, I tiptoed to the office and turned on a small reading lamp and pulled one of my journals from the shelf and flipped randomly to an entry from a little over a year ago. I wrote it days before journeying to Colorado to attend a retreat geared toward helping a group of men discover the deep calling and passion placed within our hearts by the Father (Psalm 139). Here are highlights from that entry:

“…I keep wanting to act on the world instead of having the world act on me. I want something real and relevant and holy to come from within me like a spring gushing up instead of standing out waiting for the promise of rain by elusive and swift-moving storms. I want to pour out to the degree in which I am filled up… …I answered a email questionnaire that asked ‘’What did you want to be when you grew up?’ My response is pointed, ‘A pioneer of some sort, leading the world into some new way of living.’ Everything I ever wanted to be or do comes from that, from an astronaut to a musician to a speaker to an actor to a scientist. Exploration. Discovery.
Expression…

“…This is what I would love for Jesus to do for me this week in Colorado, to say to me something of my true heart and calling, to commission me, to speak into me as One who knows, and knows deeply. To say to me something in the same way He spoke into Peter on the shores of the Sea of Galilee that fateful and bright morn, ‘Then (because you do love me), feed my sheep.’ And this is my desire still on this morning a year distant, a year further along on the journey Homeward. Frederick Beuchener said that in whatever other “official” way God may speak to us through the church and Scripture and such, surely He is also speaking through  what happens to us, through the events of our lives. I feel this to be an important moment, full of holy ache and mystery, my heart itself becoming in some sense a wild bit of bush burning without being consumed.

 

For the First Time

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspiried and success achieved.

-Helen Keller

How telling it is that Helen Keller would speak of strength and vision. It’s reminds of Ginny Owens, the blind Christian singer/songwriter, whose favorite song is Be Thou My Vision. Helen grew up as a girl both blind and deaf.

I was really moved after watching a video of her life and the dramatic way in which she came to see all that she had been taught by her tutor as her way of trying to reach her, to communicate to her. According to the film, Helen Keller’s tutor had taught her to speak using the tactical sensation of someone’s hand shapes in her palm. Speech would not work, since she was deaf, and sign language would not work, since she was blind. This technique was like sign language for the blind – done in a way in which she could “feel” the words. But for so long, she didn’t get it. She learned and went through the motions, but it never reached her. She spent her days isolated, cut off from others, unable to communicate in the most basic way.

One afternoon, she was fetching water from a well and felt the water running through her hands. She dropped the bucket and stood up sharp, a kind of contorted unbelief crossing her face. She felt the water again, then ran for her tutor. She made the sign for “water” in her tutor’s hand, so hurried and excited she had to repeat it. The tutor, who had finally given up on Helen after so long not connecting, almost couldn’t believe it. She started making the sign for “dirt” and “bucket”, for “dress” and “hair”. She got it. It all came rushing to her like an avalanche, a waterfall of understanding. The entire world suddenly opened up to Helen.

I wrote some words to a song I called “Helen Keller” at a time when that for me was a picture of my entering into Grace. Deaf to His calling, blind to His wooing, He came to speak a language I would grasp. He came to write it in the sand and in my palm. For so long I had missed it. Like Helen, I remember feeling the Water rushing through my fingers, dodging my grasp, and my heart skipping a beat in the moment it all came.

I run my hands through the water of life,
amazed to be alive.
In one flash, in one instant moment of grace,
I catch a glimpse of Your face,
my heart’s home, where I strive to be
but could never reach –
And so your waters rush over me.

And like a waterfall of love
rises the sun
Like the roar of an ocean
is your ceaseless devotion
for your precious ones
for me, your son
And for the first time
my eyes perceive beauty,
though they’ve never seen before
And my ears hear an invitation
from this, my Lover Lord

The breeze it blows to take me back
Into your secret place again