Monthly Archives: April 2018
“LIGHT OUT OF DARKNESS, ORDER FROM CHAOS: DO IT AGAIN, LORD!”
“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.” (Genesis 1:1–2, The New American Bible)
“For God, who said, ‘Let there be light in the darkness,’ has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2 Corinthians 4:6, New Living Translation)
In my 3-minute retreat today, I read the following:
“Each of us knows the chaos of searching, wondering, and waiting for direction. In the Genesis story it is the Word of God that brings order, balance, and beauty to creation. We experience God’s presence in the created world. When we consider the beauty of the world and understand that “God saw how good it was” after each act of creation, we become increasingly aware that our special place in creation gives us unique dignity and value. In turn, we have both a responsibility to care for creation and give God praise and thanks.”
I immediately thought of that verse in 2 Corinthians that plays off of this same idea—at least the part about light. Paul takes these wonderful statements from Genesis—statements that relate to God’s creation of the universe—and compresses them into the human heart.
The human heart is, I believe, a very dark and chaotic place. At least, my own heart is. You also likely know the dark places in your own heart, the places that are too scary even for you to look into.
However, according to Paul, this is precisely the dark place that the light of Christ wants to shine. And, of course, it is in the darkness that light is needed. It is in the chaos that order is needed.
“SAVED OFF OF A KILL TRUCK”
I sometimes listen to “Fresh Air” on National Public Radio. Recently (on my birthday, April 10), Fresh Air had an interview with Brady Jandreau, a severely injured bronco rider and wild horse trainer, featured in the movie “The Rider.” The director of the film, Chole Zhao, was also interviewed.
Terry Gross, the host of “Fresh Air,” gently compels me to be interested in things and people I’m not interested in. She has wonderful, interesting guests who are made even more interesting by means of Terry’s good questions, and her even better silences.
For example, when Terry asked her horse trainer the following question, I was moved to wonder and to tears. “I see what humans get from a relationship with the horse, but what does the horse get?” Terry asked.
Brady responded, “Many horses we save off of kill trucks. There’s no legal slaughter of horses in the United States now, but there’s still legal slaughter of horses in Canada. So if there’s a horse that’s never been trained and he’s much too wild or much too old for your average trainer to have a go at him, they’ll typically sell him and nobody can ride the horse so he typically becomes glue or dog food or whatever, sent to France. And the horse Apollo in the movie is actually one of the horses I saved off of a kill truck.”
I feel as if I myself have saved off the kill truck. I was too old and too wild to tame. It wasn’t just that I was going to hell someday. No. I was already there.
Addictions make you do destructive things to others, especially to those you love. Addictions make you do destructive things to yourself. You may choose your way into an addiction, but you can’t choose your way out. I know. I tried for decades.
So, I had pretty much given up. I was loaded on the kill truck, along with many others. And then, Someone opened the gate and let me out. I tried to stomp Him, kick Him, bite Him, escape Him, but He kept trying to get close to me. Eventually, I gave Him a little sniff. What harm in that, I said to myself. Well, He didn’t smell particularly threatening. And eventually, I let Him touch me . . . just a little. Well, that didn’t hurt so much!
Little by little, I let Him work his way back along my body. The shoulders! That’s far enough! He walked back to my muzzle, and gently stroked it. “Let’s start over again,” He said softly.
This time, He got to my flanks before I shied away. Back to the muzzle. “Let’s start over again,” He laughed gently.
And finally, little by little, He tamed me. I was not simply freed from the kill truck. I was free!
Or, at the very least, my Trainer and I are working on freedom.
“OF ROYALTY AND BAD BEHAVIOR: THE LAW OF BLUE TASSELS”
37 Then the LORD said to Moses,
38 “Give the following instructions to the people of Israel: Throughout the generations to come you must make tassels for the hems of your clothing and attach them with a blue cord.
39 When you see the tassels, you will remember and obey all the commands of the LORD instead of following your own desires and defiling yourselves, as you are prone to do.
40 The tassels will help you remember that you must obey all my commands and be holy to your God.
41 I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt that I might be your God. I am the LORD your God!”” (Numbers 15: 37-41, New Living Translation)
This is one of those boring passages in the Old Testament that is tempting to skip. I decided that I would dig a bit deeper. I’m glad that I didn’t skip, but dug deeper. The brief dig was more than worth it. Two sentences from an Old Testament scholar shed a great deal of light on this. Pekka Pitkänen writes,
“As Milgrom suggests, the purple colour in the tassels is likely to tie in with the Israelites being a kingdom of priests (Milgrom 1990: 414; Ex 19:6). This said, the law at the same time ties in with the fact that human nature can be susceptible to bad behaviour (v. 39).”[1]
So, the tassels remind Israelites (and us) of two things: We are royalty, and we are, at times, behaving royally badly. Those are two things that we all need to remember.
Twelve-steppers confess two things at meetings: We are recovering and we are addicts (or, as one of my friends likes to say, “We have an addiction”).
Being recovering addicts makes us royalty. But we are still “susceptible to bad behaviour.” Indeed, as an addict, I am prone to very bad behavior!
I believe that these are two very important things for all humans to remember. If we don’t affirm our royalty, we are ignoring our own worth. If we only affirm our royalty, we ignore our innate tendency to do the wrong, destructive thing to ourselves and others—our tendency to screw up royally.
But what do we do to remind ourselves of these two seemingly contradictory facts? What are our blue tassels?
I can’t speak for you, but my 12-step meetings, readings, and phone calls are my blue tassels. The program and my friends in it remind me of what a good person I am, how blessed I am, how I reflect the glory of God in some dim but important ways.
But they also know all my stuff. They have heard my unvarnished, unedited, x-rated story. They know only too well that I am “still susceptible to bad behaviour.”
I would encourage everyone to find and wear some blue tassels. Put them on every day. Look at them often.
[1] Pekka Pitkänen, A Commentary on Numbers: Narrative, Ritual and Colonialism, Routledge Studies in the Biblical World (London: Routledge, 2018), 125.
“LIVING WITH THE PREPOSITIONS IN THE RIGHT ORDER”
“Today, LORD, I want to live in and through and for you. Help me to live with the prepositions in the right order.”
I tend to think (and even feel) grammatically. That doesn’t mean that my grammar is always good or appropriate.
Take prepositions, for example.
Prepositions are the workhorses of every language I know anything about. Along with conjunctions, they connect and divide. They prioritize. They are, I would argue, the most important parts of speech and thinking—more important than nouns, or even verbs. Prepositions are the unsung heroes of language.
“She gave her love to me,” versus “She took her love from me”—that sort of thing. “I ran toward the dog,” is a very different statement from “I ran from the dog.”
So, this morning, I wrote in my journal the words that begin this post: “Today, LORD, I want to live in and through and for you. Help me to live with the prepositions in the right order.”
The prepositions are crucial in this desperately longing short prayer.
First, I need to live in God. Indeed, I believe that there is nowhere else to live.
The Apostle Paul, speaking to some of the intellectuals of first-century Athens, said, “For in him (that is, God) we live and move have our being” (Acts 17:28).
We live in God! Does that seem a bit “new-age-ish” to you? Well, it’s in the Bible!
Of course, if we live in God, that means it is going to be terrible difficult to recognize God’s presence, or even God’s existence. If God is the medium in which we live, we will probably take God for granted. Expecting us to be aware of God would be like expecting a fish to be aware of water. Water is all that the fish knows. Therefore, awareness of water is, I suspect, not easy for fish.
And yet, though living in God makes it very challenging even to be aware of God, it is a wonderful prepositional truth. (No, I did not mean “propositional truth.” I meant “prepositional truth!”) There is a sense in which I need to “seek” God. There is another sense in which I simply need to pay attention. God is, in fact, all around me, inescapably present. This non-negotiable presence of God might invite me not to take myself quite so seriously. It might help me to relax.
But even when something or Someone is inescapably present, I do need to pay attention to that fact. Unfortunately, paying attention is not one of my strong suits.
Then, there is the preposition “through.” “Through” means that I don’t try to do life apart from God. Living through God means that I recognize my intense need for God’s help in order to live well. Otherwise, I will mess things up. A friend of mine said years ago, “The Christian life is hard to live without God.” In his usual ironic way, Marlon nailed it. What he was really saying was that it is impossible to live the Christian life apart from God.
And then, there is the preposition “for.” To live for God means that I seek to trust and obey, to glorify God, to make God look even a fraction of how good God really is. To live for God requires my very best intentions, will, plans and actions.
So prepositions matter, in my opinion. The order matters as well. If I start with living for or through God, I’ve already messed up. I need start with the in—God’s everywhere presence. Then, I need to continue with through—God’s every-when empowerment. Finally, I need to live for God—recognizing that I am not the center of my universe; God is. It is in, through and for God that I need to live! Only in that order does my life find its proper order.
IMPORTANT UPDATE!
I just got an e mail from a friend who had read today’s blog. He had some excellent suggestions for making it even better.
“. . . [Y]ou forgot WITH, which is my favorite preposition. God uses WITH more than any other preposition when describing himself and us, n’est ce pas? On another note, I think of prepositions as VERBS. Gives them more CLOUT, if you will.”
Both points are well taken, and will be the subject of future blogs, I hope!
DTEB, “YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO FOREVER RIGHT NOW!”
I was whining around to my sweetheart about the fact that I haven’t read all the scholarly articles and books that I should have read. Of course, the question that might be asked is this: Who has read all the scholarly books and articles? However, this is cold comfort. “The heart knows its own bitterness.” (Proverbs 14:10a)
Then, whether as a dodge or as a wise word, I added, “Well, there is eternity, I suppose.”
And the love of my life said, “And you don’t have to do forever right now!”
Now that was a wise saying!
I am not sure what Ecclesiastes 3:11 means when it says, “God . . . has planted eternity in the human heart . . . .” But I do know that verse 11 comes after verses 1-10. (See! I really am pretty sharp!) And verses 1-10 talk about how there is an appropriate time for all things. God may have planted eternity in our hearts, but God has planted us in time.
A time for everything? Well, not exactly. Not even the Preacher of Ecclesiastes (who was the skeptics skeptic) said that there was a time for regrets about the past or worries about the future.
And I suspect that the author of Ecclesiastes would agree with my wife that “you don’t have to do forever right now.”
“WRESTLING WITH A PROJECT . . . AND MYSELF”
Monday, April 2, 2018
I am not so much trying to write a decent scholarly paper on Ruth and Mary, as I am trying to write a decent version of Daryl.
But I have writer’s block. And the block is also named Daryl. I never believe that I’ve read enough, that I’ve thought enough, that I know enough (that I am enough) to write something worthwhile. This was true for the first paper I ever wrote in high school. It was true for all my college papers. It was true for my Ph.D. dissertation. It is still true.
Am I really struggling to write and be something “worthwhile?” Or do I mean “perfect?”
So, as I listen to a song on You Tube, I wrestle with my own self-expectations. (I love Terry Wollman’s song “Survive”!)
Of course if you wrestle with yourself, you are bound to lose. Perhaps surviving this wrestling match is the name of the game. Or, better, perhaps the name of the game is surrender to God?
DOWN TO EARTH BELIEVER
- DTEB, “Getting Christ and Ourselves Back in Focus” November 11, 2024“Col. 3:1 ¶ If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Col. 3:2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. Col. 3:3 For you have died, and your life is hidden […]
- “Search Me!” October 27, 2024“Psa. 139:23 Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! 24 And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” (Psalm 139:23-24, English Standard Version) I am participating in a Bible study, and this is a prayer […]
- “Christian Speech” October 26, 2024“Eph. 4:29 Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.” Foulkes, in his excellent commentary on the Book of Ephesians, writes the following, which I quote at some length: “29. Now the […]
- “God is in the Details” October 11, 2024“The devil is in the details.” (A general saying, often quoted by lawyers, reporters, and negotiators.) “God is in the details.” (Me, almost certainly not original.) “Luke 12:7 Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.” (Jesus) God does not micromanage, but God […]
- “Grandma’s Pump” October 8, 2024When I was a little critter, I would stay at my grandma’s house for a night or two sometimes. I liked this for a lot for many reasons. One thing I liked about staying with her was that Grandma’s house was much more technologically advanced than ours was. For one thing, she had indoor water—sort […]
- “Wearing the #14 Wrong-Side-Out” October 5, 2024Pete Rose, #14, is dead. Many of the old guys with whom I play softball watched him play and appreciated him greatly. I do as well. He was one of the greatest players who ever played the game. Yes, he admitted (eventually) to betting on baseball. But many of us still regard him as one […]
- “Passing Along the Love (and a Link)” October 4, 2024Several years ago, a friend of mine put me onto a daily meditation by Richard Rohr and friends. I don’t read them all the time, but I probably should. They are good! I thought that today’s writing was especially good, and I also figured that this would be a good way to post something. I […]
- “Witnessing Versus Being Witnesses” September 19, 2024“Acts 1:1 In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, Acts 1:2 until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. Acts 1:3 He presented himself alive to them after […]
- “A Bathroom Prayer for Hurting Hands” September 11, 2024A week ago Sunday, my hands were hurting so badly at church that I went to the bathroom to run hot water over my hands. Arthritis perhaps, or carpal tunnel, or general orneriness—I don’t know why my hands hurt, but they do. They have for years. So, while I was running hot water over my […]
- “Waiting and Seeking” September 10, 2024“Lam. 3:19 ¶ Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall! Lam. 3:20 My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. Lam. 3:21 But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: Lam. 3:22 ¶ The steadfast love of the LORD […]
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