Not too weak (or whiny) for God

Last week, my devotional presented an odd passage from Judges 6. I say odd only because I don't venture off to read Judges much. Zepheniah might be less read, but only just.

But I have been totally captivated by this little interchange.

The set up is this: Moses walked the people of the Israel around the wilderness for 40 years; Joshua leads them in victory to the promised land flowing with milk and honey. But after Joshua dies, generations pass, and no one remembers what God has done and they start doing their own thing. So during this time of the judges, the people of God run amok; God sends them a judge to deliver them; they run amok; God sends them a judge to deliver them. Rinse and repeat OVER and OVER. Here we're reading the calling of the next judge, Gideon.

12 When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.”
13 “Pardon me, my lord,” Gideon replied, “but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about when they said, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.”
14 The Lord turned to him and said, “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?”
15 “Pardon me, my lord,” Gideon replied, “but how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.”
16 The Lord answered, “I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites, leaving none alive.” ~Judges 6

I love that in 13, after the angel calls him a "mighty warrior", Gideon starts off with a "pardon me". I don't know if this is what the translators intended, but I'm picturing a 17 year old, sunk-chested nerd.  In other words, not a mighty warrior.

But what I could hug him for is the next line, "...but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?" It's stuff like this that makes the Bible stand out as literature over the millennia. I had an old teacher who liked to quote Ezra Pound saying, "Great literature is news that stays news." Through the ages, who hasn't felt this way in times of trouble?

Gideon, if you read the opening of the chapter, is threshing wheat. But instead of doing it in the open, he's hiding in a wine press. The bad guys, the Midianites, have taken over the land to the extent that crops are being destroyed and people of God are living in caves. Gideon can be forgiven for his incredulity. Everything in his experience points to being abandoned by God. Wherever God is, He's not with them.

And the response is equally awesome. We find out a few verses later that Gideon's own dad has set up altars for several other (non)gods. The one, true God could have played His own abandonment card. It's not like His people were being faithful to him. Instead, Gideon is commissioned and affirmed in 14.

But nerd boy won't have any of it. God says, "Go in the strength you have...," and Gideon answers, "What strength?" Gideon has a very clear picture of his circumstances--he is personally weak, his family is weak, his nation is weak. There is no defeating Midian; it's not happening.

The reality of Gideon's circumstance does not, however, phase God. The God equation in 16 is "I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites, leaving none alive." It's as if it would take a thousand pounds to crush Midian, and Gideon's got a toy hammer. But God does not care because He's going to bring a monster truck to the party.  All Gideon has to do is get in the cab and put the hammer in the glove box.

I love this story of what I imagine to be a pimply, weakling having a very unheroic discussion with God. We live in a culture at-large and a church culture of strength and success. But weakness is common, and here we see that it isn't off-putting to God.

Weakness as gift

My mom is visiting her mom after having spent 5 weeks with us as we welcomed baby DW into our lives. So this week is the first time we've been left truly alone with our kiddos. One thing I've enjoyed is all the cuddle time with both my children. L, who has always been very independent, has wanted and enjoyed hugs and kisses more in this time of transition. And DW just patently prefers being held to pretty much anything else at this point. And I'm happy to accommodate.

But I was thinking back to my early 20s when I did a fair amount of living overseas for months at a time. This was pre-skype, pre-convenient email. And I suffered from intense bouts of loneliness. It did not help that I traveled to countries with little sunlight and lots of foul weather. During one of those trips, I read the book Five Love Languages. This book proposes that different people have different love languages and if you try to "speak" a language that another doesn't understand, they won't see your actions as love. The "languages" were quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, physical touch and receiving gifts. Quality time and physical touch resonated with me as languages I understood.

But there I was, on some distant continent, far from people I cared about and I wanted to throw a bat through a window. It seemed extremely unfair to have physical touch be a love language when I was extremely single. At the time, I had never dated anyone and would not have known how even if the opportunity presented itself to me. And then there was the whole deal about how God designed sex for marriage and man, if dating felt far off for me, marriage really felt far off. Basically, I felt cursed to have an empty love tank. Ultimately, living a healthy life in my body would be a struggle the rest of my singleness. It was something I managed by God's grace--I took up more athletic endeavors in my mid-20s--with alternating bouts of peace and torment.

Now, I'm writing this as my newborn sleeps in my lap. Those days seem very far off. As the mother of young ones, I'm constantly touching and being touched. Books sometimes warn parents that moms can be worn out from constant touching and want alone time away from her husband. Maybe it will come to that someday, but that day certainly hasn't come yet for me. I love the sweetness of our current phase. My daughter will sit in my lap and rest her head on me while describing the most mundane realities of life. "Daddy blue eyes,""Baby DW sleeping,""Red bowl,""Blue shirt,""Stacky blocks all-fall-down." My son loves being held and petted. I could do without the wailing parts, but really the rest is great.

What once seemed like a curse has now become a gift. I have hugs for my kids all day and when my husband gets home I've got plenty more snuggles left for him too.

YAY Grace; What? Suffering?

Noticed this juxtaposition in yesterday's lectionary reading:

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

As I look forward to celebrating Easter, this sounds AWESOME!! But the very next line is:

More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

I get rejoicing in "the hope of the glory of God", but I'm honestly not yet at the point of rejoicing in my sufferings. The place where I might connect to this idea is in the following line:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

While I might not rejoice in suffering, I am aware that I am weak and ungodly and that Christ has been and will continue to work in me something I cannot do for myself. And if I can ever get to a place where I can rejoice in sufferings, I think it might start there.

~Passage from Paul's letter to Roman believers, chapter 5