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.

Tough times

This past month's hiatus was intentional. We have been navigating a painful family crisis, and internet space wasn't where I planned to process anything. We're out of the acute, immediate, fighting for each day phase, but unwinding all this will take a while.

So here are some general reflections on the past month:

1. Choosing to not hide allowed us to experience a lot of love and grace from many directions.
2. I did not always know what I needed, but I was needy.
3. The crisis was big enough to be clearly not fixable, and this was freeing.
4. When the abiding presence of a loving God was all I could hold on to, it was enough.

Resting, Secured, Shielded

Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him,
for he shields him all day long,
and the one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders.
Deuteronomy 33:12*

I've been savoring this verse this week. Over the weekend, we hosted some friends while they packed out their house for a big move. They did the literal heavy lifting (and cleaning, and sorting, and details), all we had to do was watch 5 kids under 5 (with help) and provide 3 square meals a day. I know why they were exhausted, but somehow we were too.

And then this verse.

Like lemonade on a hot summer day.

I think about all the uncertainty of a move and am comforted that in God our friends are secure and shielded. And then I think about how tired we all were by the end of the weekend and that image of resting between his shoulders is so powerful. There are many cultures that tie their babies on their backs up between the shoulders. How safe, how close, how restful.

I also notice that the beloved in this verse does nothing but rest. The Lord provides the security, the Lord does the shielding, the Lord does the loving. I think we fail to take that seriously to our detriment. We're afraid that if we rest in our loving God, something important isn't going to get done. We're not going to be secure or shielded if we don't do something. But this verse says differently.

While you're thinking about that, enjoy this trailer about beauty from unlikely places.

*Moses' blessing to the tribe of Benjamin, read the whole chapter for neat blessings given to the 12 tribes of Israel.

Special enough to be ordinary

In a past life, I taught English as a second language. One summer in LA, I had an Italian student who marveled that LA Lamborghini drivers would get out wearing t-shirts and flip flops. He said in Italy they always wore nice suits. My first thought was if they owned a Lamborghini, who cares what they wore?! It was a Lamborghini!

Likewise, I think about the apostle Paul, who said he'd learned the secret to being content whether well-fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want (Philippians 4:11-12). Or how after listing his exalted resume, he said it was garbage (Philippians 3:4-9). There was no need to dress up because of who Jesus was to him. T-shirts or suits, PB & J or filet mignon, Motel 6 or the Ritz Carlton, whatever! because he was in Christ.

That, however, is not the world we live in. Every message we receive is about the exceptional. Part of it is that our very nervous systems give more attention to the extraordinary and new. So we're more aware of and seek those sorts of things.

But then we add a layer to the exceptional--we try to tie our worth and value to experiencing or owning the exceptional. The logic might be something like this: "If I am noticeable, then I am valuable." And conversely, "If no one notices me, I'm not valuable."

And off we go to buy the right stuff, date the right person, earn the right degree, get the right job, so that we'll be noticed and valuable. Or we can buy the wrong stuff, date the wrong people, have the wrong degree, work the wrong job, and poof! We're nothing.

But the story of the Bible is one of intimate noticing. God talks to Adam and Eve in the garden and notices when they try to hide. He notices Hagar when she runs away from Abraham and Sarah's abuse. The people of Israel, not powerful or mighty, are the object of his noticing, pursuit, protection, and judgment throughout the stories of the Old Testament.

When we join with Paul in grasping our "In Christ" status, that we are the objects of God's loving care and noticing, I think we can become t-shirt and flip-flop wearing Lamborghini drivers. We can be graciously ordinary. We've got nothing to prove. We can have nothing worth posting to facebook, nothing worth writing a news story about, no star stickers or merit badges, no 26.2s on our cars, no designer clothing, no alumni rings. Instead, we can wear our raggedy t-shirts, and not-so-skinny jeans, make non-organic mac & cheese for our kids, take a modest car camping vacation on a muddy, used-to-be-a-lake, and sing off key on Sundays in our not-that-hip church.

In fact, I think that ordinary, not-crazy, everyday love is what Paul encourages the believers in Thessalonica toward. This he says is how to live out loving our neighbors as ourselves.

 Now about your love for one another we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. And in fact, you do love all of God’s family throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more, and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody. ~I Thessalonians 4:9-12

As children of the King, we're already special. There's no need to be more special, in fact, we can't make ourselves substantially more special. Sure we can gain notoriety, but only temporarily. So we're free to just live and love the people around us in the most everyday, unnoticeable, not-facebook-worthy ways.

Photo: PacificCoastNews.com

The mysterious ascension of Jesus

If you're an orderly-minded person, you should just go find something else to read.

This Thursday is for many Christians the Feast of Ascension which commemorates the Jesus' return to heaven after his resurrection and is celebrated 40 days after Easter. I have never celebrated the Ascension; I've never heard a sermon on it that I remember (although I did have a pastor who loved Acts, so he may have covered it at one point); I basically have never thought about it.

But this year, I noticed, and I'm trying to rectify the issue.

First off, in proportion to the space given to Jesus' sermons and actions, the description of his return to heaven takes up very little space. In fact, if you will indulge me, I'll provide all the scripture describing the event*:

When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. And they stayed continually at the temple, praising God. ~Luke 24:50-53

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”~Acts 1:9-11

So this week, I read NT Wright's chapter in Surprised by Hope on the Ascension and Dallas Willard's chapter in The Spirit of the Disciplines, "Salvation is a Life". Both of these guys talked about stuff I had never contemplated, but I'll just present one theme that came through in both author's writing: Jesus had a human body after resurrection that was taken to heaven.

The body had wound marks from the nails. It could eat food. (Luke 24:40-43) This enfleshed being, not some dissolved spirit, was taken to heaven which isn't literally up but is actually elsewhere and near at the same time. Or so they say. It seems wonderful and totally sci-fi at the same time.

So where does that leave us? Well, for one thing, however, heaven and earth are organized and related, if I thought I understood it, I certainly don't now. Jesus, as a physical human, is somewhere in heaven, a nonphysical reality. Do his lungs still need oxygenl? Go to the bathroom?

For another thing, Jesus is not with us, but he did send the Holy Spirit. And that was for our good (John 16:7). And Jesus promises to come back (John 14:3, 18, 28). So in the Holy Spirit, God is with us, but God the Son is not, but he will come back. Clear as mud? I don't know what to do with this, but at the least, this points to the idea that my life and history are not complete. There will be a time of deeper union and intimacy between Jesus and individuals, his bride the church, and earth itself.

Finally, and perhaps most tangibly, the resurrected and ascended body of Christ shows us that the whole life of Jesus could not be stopped by death and so in Christ, our whole, embodied lives are saved. On the other side of death, Jesus had the body that he had lived in to walk and talk, eat and sleep, laugh and cry. It's from there that we get the encouragement that "...whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. (I Corinthians 10:31)"  Our very bodies and all that we do in them, hugging, hitting, holding, hiding, these things Jesus died to save. So that our hugging, hitting, holding, and hiding would become actions embued with and transformed by our loving God.

---
*This is not to say that there aren't suggestions in the Old Testament of something of this sort. Nor is it to say that Jesus wasn't talking about this in John 14-17 (although the disciples certainly didn't get it). Nor is it to say that the rest of the New Testament doesn't touch on the implications of this, but as far as the Gospels go, there's not a lot.

Truths for the Suffering Believer

Paul wrote, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come."

What does this mean when we are hurting? If the world without Jesus hurts and the body of Christ hurts too, what's new? What is the old that has gone?

For starters, I don't actually know. But here are some ideas from the Bible that we can hold on to.

First, as I concluded in the last post, God is not indifferent to our pain and weeps with us. This doesn't make chemo any more comfortable or solve the grief of a lost loved one, but it is nevertheless light in dark times.

Consider this testimony:
"Two weeks after my daughter's [fatal] accident, I was lamenting in prayer over how damaged Paula's body was. She had been an attractive young woman at the apex of her beauty, but in the accident she was thrown from the car and crashed against a concrete barrier. When I first saw her body in the casket, I thought we had walked into the wrong chapel. As I relived the horror of her shattered body with God, His quiet voice spoke inaudibly, "I felt that way, too." I was shocked into silence as I remembered that He, too, was a bereaved parent. (Reynoso, "Formed Through Suffereing" in The Kingdom Life)"

At the same time God empathizes with this woman who has tragically lost her daughter, God's heart is for each of us in our own experiences however we think it compares to anyone else's experiences. Pain is pain; God sees and grieves with all of us.

Secondly, we have the Holy Spirit as our comforter. In John 14, Jesus is preparing his friends for what's coming up. He tells them he's leaving soon, but that he's not going to abandon them as orphans (vs 18). With them will be the Holy Spirit described as the parakletos which gets translated as advocate, counselor, helper, comforter. Common ideas within these translations is that the Parakletos comes to the aid of one in need. And Jesus gives the promise that the Parakletos will never leave (vs 16) and will teach and remind (vs 26).

When we are in pain, pretty much we just want it to end or at least lessen. As we understand it, any supernatural power a god could have should be applied to that end. However, we frequently don't get that and certainly not when we want it. But just because we don't get what we want doesn't mean that as believers the Parakletos is not with us, that we do not have supernatural aid in our need. We may not notice until we're at the end of our rope, but God our Parakletos has been with us all the while actively helping us in our need.

Thirdly, as we follow in the way of Jesus, we come to know that death is not the end. Whether our suffering is spiritual, emotional, physical, relational, whatever it is, we have the hope of heaven. This is not a pansy, precious moments angels heaven. This is a stiff, bracing new reality filled with beauty, health, and rightness.

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,”for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” ~ Revelation 21

We look around at the pain in our lives and the pain in the lives of others and the pain across the globe, across history and we can ask, "Is this as good as it gets?" And the resounding answer is No. All the good that we hope for will be fulfilled perfectly in eternity.

Where is God in suffering?

We envision God as the source of life, light, and goodness as is claimed in the Bible, and when we encounter death, darkness, and despair, our logical conclusion is that God has turned his back on us. This only adds to our misery.

Yet when we go back to scripture, we see time after time God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit moved and bowed in the face of suffering. I do not understand how this works, but this is a pattern in scripture.

God the Father
Nobody reads Ezekiel; it's a weird book tucked in an obscure part of the Old Testament, but it gives the most amazing description of the heart of God.

In chapter 16, God explains his relationship to his special people, the Israelites, with a story about an abandoned newborn he found in a field and saves. She grows up but is still fragile and in need of care and he cleans her, marries her, takes care of her, lavishing her with jewelry, clothes, and fine dining. She becomes famous across the world for her beauty.

But she begins to trust in this beauty, and the love story begins to unravel. She starts sleeping around eventually not taking money for it, but giving money for it. She takes the riches she had been given and uses them to make idols. Then, she sacrifices her children to them. What wickedness, ugliness, and profanity!

Far from abandoning her in her sin, God takes it in the chin like a rejected father and cuckold husband. Then he allows her to reap what she has sown. And there is verse after verse of his howling pain and anger, descriptions of the results of sin. Israel suffers the consequences of her betrayal, and God the Father suffers right there with her.

God the Son
In Jesus, the infinite God squeezed himself into human flesh and lived among us. That's what we celebrate at Christmas.

God physically enters our world and experiences it from first to last breath--experiences sunburns and mosquito bites, making new friends, losing old friends, family members dying, new births, weddings, physical exhaustion, hunger, and longing. Jesus lived in a minority group in a mighty empire, was born as a refugee on the run from a tyrant, was a brilliant adolescent apprenticed to become a blue collar carpenter. But more remarkably, this Friday we remember his ultimate suffering on the cross, a cruel, publically humiliating way to die slowly.

In the life of Jesus, we can be sure that not only does the great God the Father feel the fallout of sin in mysterious, supernatural ways, but God the Son fully understands our human sufferings.

Isaiah prophesied this about Jesus' sufferings (chapter 53):
...He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain
    and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.

In life, Jesus experienced what we humans experience. In death, out of love, he took on the compounded, sin-upon-sin of all people and it "pierced" him, it "crushed" him. Far from abandoning us to the suffering caused by sin, Jesus in his crucifixion faced the ultimate suffering, the collective wages of sin.

God the Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit, promised to us our comforter and guide also knows pain and grief.

In this next passage, we see the love of Jesus in action, our sin, and a grieved Holy Spirit:

...In all their troubles,
    he was troubled, too.
He didn’t send someone else to help them.
    He did it himself, in person.
Out of his own love and pity
    he redeemed them.
He rescued them and carried them along
    for a long, long time.
But they turned on him;
    they grieved his Holy Spirit.
Isaiah 63 (The Message)

While the Holy Spirit may be generally grieved by sin, we are told he is personally grieved as he accompanies us in our suffering:
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.
Romans 8:26

This interceding is a emotional pleading that the Spirit does with us as we pray in our weakness, in our need, in our desperation.

So what?
We expect God to be far from suffering in general, from our suffering in particular. But scripture does not read that way. Instead, we have a God intimately acquainted with suffering in all ways. Whatever we may feel in our pain, God is not indifferent to our suffering, and we are not alone. His back is not turned, his face is upon us and he weeps with us.

The gear and the goods

So recently our church changed the translation of its pew Bibles which reminded us that we needed to figure out what Bible to get our children which reminded me of what the point is.

When I was learning about photography, I stumbled across this phenomenon where some people love photographic gear more than they love making beautiful pictures. They get huge thrills out of the engineering of the thing that makes pictures, that's their interest. And that's great and it takes up a lot of pages on the internet, but it's not photography. It's gear.

I did my senior thesis in college on Bible translation, and I'll say that for 99% of people any Bible translation done by a committee is fine. The issue, particularly for the big English Bible translations, isn't which translation? The issue is do you read the Bible? For 99% of people who are thinking about picking one translation over another the only question that needs to be answered is, "Will I read this?" The 1% are people who study the Bible. And honestly, for people who study the Bible, they need many translations including the Greek and the Hebrew.

So if you love the King James Version because Grandma always read to you in the KJV, if that's what'll keep you reading the Bible, read the KJV. If you are a nerd who likes awkward phrasing that reminds you that you're reading a translation from Greek and Hebrew, knock yourself out on the New American Standard (NASB) or English Standard Version (ESV). I'm a nerd, I like those versions too. If you gravitate to a version that's more like what you encounter in everyday language there's the New International Version (NIV) and the New Living Translation (NLT). Biblegateway.com and The Bible app are great places to review the same passage in many translations. Pick the one that you're ready to read a lot of.

Currently, I'm doing my daily Bible reading from a devotional called Seeking God's Face (my review of the book). I didn't even know what version I was reading until I looked it up today. Wouldn't have been my first choice (TNIV), but it's still be a great resource for daily Bible reading.

A second consideration is what are your friends reading. If you're in a situation where you're reading the Bible with other people, depending on the circumstances you might want to have the same version they do. Alternatively, you might be in a group where it is beneficial to have a few different translations on hand.

From there, onto children. For our kids, I'm looking for a sturdy Bible with large print that is easy on young eyes. That would be my primary criteria except that these are my kids. So it would be also nice for my kids to use the version that we're most familiar with and the version that I did most of my scripture memory in.

This is where things become tricky. I have done almost all Bible memorization from an out-of-print version of the NIV. It went out of print two years ago, before my kids started reading, before I knew to care about this. So now I'm stuck between learning verses with my kids in a new version or hunting up old versions of the NIV on ebay. What a pain.

If you're not in my boat, I would probably recommend the latest NIV version because it's a nice compromise between oddly contemporary and oddly archaic. (And it's in print.) If you want to see some kids' Bible verses in different versions, here's a pdf of Awanas verses for 3-4 year olds.

Book Review: Seeking God's Face

When I was a kid, I was introduced to two kinds of personal interactions with God, aka "daily devotion" or "quiet time". The first was a short lesson based on a short verse. You read it and move on. The second was Search the Scriptures which involved reading a longer passage and then answering questions about it, in other words, the Bible as homework.

To this day to my mind, the "gold" standard for personal time with God is a study about a book or topic that goes deep into the Bible. But what I find I want and am able to sustain is regular touches with God of scripture and the thoughts of other believers.

Last Christmas, N got me this book, Seeking God's Face, and it fit really well into my life this past year. There's been a lot to like about the book. In no particular order:

• The book feels good in the hand with a soft/fake leather cover and nice pages with a book mark ribbon.
• It's organized around the church calendar noting Advent, Lent, Easter, Ordinary time and so forth. It hits that at the right amount of detail for me; the major time divisions without every feast day.
• Each day is 2 pages of text. Just about right for a moment with my cup of coffee after the kids have finished breakfast and before we get going for the day. 
• Through a week, the opening verse and the closing blessing with be the same. This has allowed me to "hum" along with a theme for the week.
• There are several reminders to slow down, be quiet, and reflect on the passages just read.
• Each day there's a new bit from Psalms and one from somewhere else in the Bible. Some times the "somewhere else" bit will follow a story for a few days in a row. 
• Because of the church calendar thing, each entry is specifically dated for the years 2011-2026? So if I miss a few days, I know exactly how many days it's been since my bookmark moved.
• At the end, there are a few bullet points for prayer items. The ones I've been struck by this year is praying for different geographical areas, leaders in different spheres of influence like government and business, and care for the environment. I tend to bristle if I feel like people have an "agenda" about how I should feel about things as a believer. These prayer items have reminded me that no matter how I think things should be, I should submit them to God's care first. 
• I've really been challenged by the short written prayer at the end of each reading. The prayers are based on a classic creed or confession but they are so fresh and pertinent to how my heart can be now.  

All this to say that this book has kept me at the "spring of living water" this year. It's less intense than a deep dive into the Bible, but very tangible and consistent. Or maybe a way to say it is that it's helped me get back into the habit of hearing God through the Bible. 

As advent approaches in a few short days, I'm not sure what to do. Like the church year, Advent is the beginning of this book, so I'm in the last few pages of it at the moment. I have liked the Nouwen book I have for Advent readings, so I may head back there for the season. We'll see. Anyways, outside of Advent and Lent for which I have other materials, Seeking God's Face is an excellent way to spend a bit of time with God daily. 

Unfailing

I came across this saying in Proverbs as if for the first time:

What a person desires is unfailing love (Proverbs, chpt 19)

As our neighborhood shepherds one of our own through spousal abandonment, this notion of unfailing love has clanged around in my heart and head for the past several weeks.

I think about the life-shattering pain of having a friend and partner of 25+ years walk out, and I think about the contrast with unfailing love. I think about my relationship with my parents and my kids. While my parents have loved me well, I'm coming to terms with the fact that they are in the last leg of their race, nearing their finish line. Death with bring their love to an end (in many ways, but not all perhaps.) When I look at my kids, I wonder if they know that I want to love them despite what they do because Jesus loves me despite what I do? I'm not very good at it, mine is a very much failing love.

Upon reflection, so many things in life remind me of this thirst for unfailing love, an insatiable thirst. Except in Jesus. Now that I've been meditating on unfailing love, I'm finding that the Bible refers to the unfailing love of God all the time. The Jesus Storybook Bible calls it something like God's "never failing, never giving up, always and forever love".

Anyways, I'll keep writing on this periodically, I think. It's been a very fruitful couple weeks thinking about this.

Outliers, part 2: Basic principles

As we watch our daughter develop, we wonder if she too will be an outlier and what does that mean for her and us? Here I mean that she seems to be doing somethings ahead of schedule, and I'm not excluding this possibility for our son, but he's not so startlingly precocious at the moment.

Because of my childhood experiences, I have gone through a period of mourning over this possibility concerned that being different from her agemates would bring her inevitable grief. But as I have processed my own stuff, I have also thought about foundational principles that I would like my child or any child to understand.

I think one such principle is that God created us individually for his pleasure and glory (see Isaiah chapter 43 for one expression of this). This was translated for me in a 6th grade chapel as "God does not make mistakes." What a life-giving message to hear as a preteen, one that I went back to many, many time as a teenager. I wish that every outlier who feels alone and "not right" or "not normal" would be gripped with the reality of a loving God delighting to imbue him or her with just such qualities.

And just as the Creator God gave individual attention to each person, a second principle I want for our children is that the Redeemer Christ died for all. Translated, this means every individual is of the same, glorious worth, bought back with the shed blood of Jesus. So for all the pain of being an outlier,  if you're out there in a socially approved way, smarter, faster, richer, more beautiful, etc. it's easy to believe that you're more special. And that, of course, is bupkis.

If we can communicate these two principles to our kids, I think their hearts will be well-prepared to handle life.

UPDATE: links to Part 1 & Part 3

Harshin' my mellow

One thing I've been pondering lately is why I don't always obey God, aka "Do the right thing."

And when it comes down to it, in that moment, I believe my way is better or my way is the only way I know how to do.

The big thing right now is not yelling at my kids. I think there's a ton of insight in the Bible on why I should not yell at my kids. We'll start with the verse I work with my daughter on "Be kind, one to another, tenderhearted forgiving one another even as Christ has forgiven you." (Ephesians 4:32)

So I know that verse and many others, but I still regularly lose my temper with my kids. What's wrong with me?

In my devotional time this morning I read,

The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever.The ordinances of the Lord are sure and altogether righteous.They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold;they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb.By them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward. 

~Psalm 19:9-11

When I first read this, I wanted to jump up and point it out to my daughter:
See! We're not harshin' your mellow. Obeying your parents as God has instructed you to do, that's gold, that's honey, that's reward. 

(Seriously, she bawls like we killed her fictional, pet kitten and served it to her for dinner. It's ridiculous)

But then, I realized this is ME. I think that God is harshin' MY mellow, that giving up my right to anger at my kids or at whomever will hurt me in someway. No, I've got to explode. I deserve to explode. Can't you see how bad he/she was to me?

But that's not true. And it's not a little bit untrue, it's completely untrue. Angry outbursts never solve my problem and any satisfaction I get from them are so fleeting and never worth the cost.

Keeping the laws of God: gold, honey, reward. Value, sweetness, true recompense.

God, help me to see how flimsy my "mellow" is, like dust in the mouth. Let me see your guidance as gold, honey, & reward.

Super Mom breaks a leg

At 4:45PM last Monday, I had homemade granola about to burn in the oven, a roast on the grill, a house that needed tidying for guests, a sticky almost-3 year old, and a fussy baby.

In a fit of SheerGenius(tm) while I had my son on the changing table I thought, "He's half undressed anyways, I should bathe the kids." And then in a moment of UtterStupidity(tm), I left him on the table to turn on the hot water.

In the interim, my daughter wet her underwear, and my son fell on the changing table and started screaming his head off.

Two days, many miles on the road, many interviews with nurses, doctors, social workers, a blood draw, urine sample and several dozen xrays later, my son's broken leg was in a cast and we were done with the "suspected non-accidental tauma" protocol.

I had a lot of time to review how we got to the fall. At the end of the day, I'd say it was 2 parts pride and 1 part selfishness.

I like having guests and I really like playing with meats on a grill. And then there's MyAgenda which includes baths for the kids on Mondays, making more granola when I run out like I had that morning--even though I certainly could have had something else for breakfast and could have made more another day, and having a basically presentable house by 6:30 on Mondays when friends come over for dinner or church small group.

I knew when I decided to do bath time right then, that I was trying to be Super Mom. For that matter, I knew when I started doing the granola that I was being a little crazier than I needed to be. But I wanted to be super. To have a list that I could show my husband, "See I do cool stuff with my day too!"

It's pretty devastating to realize that pride can literally come before a fall. Especially when the faller is your cute little boy who has no business bearing the brunt of your inner ugliness.

What is amazing, however, is that I don't have to live in mom guilt. My pastor likes to use the phrase "standing under the waterfall of grace". It's a pretty phrase, but it should be offensive too. The apostle Paul wrote, "there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

That means that even though I screwed up, and I really did screw up, Jesus is not holding a stick over me and I'm not either. I am receiving a forgiveness I don't deserve; it's both-and. I don't deserve it and I am receiving it. I hope that kind of ticks you off.

We're about half way through Lent, charging our way to Easter where Jesus dies for the wretchedly ungodly and buys freedom for prisoners who deserve their sentences.

Hallelujah!

That's ugly

Somehow in the awesomeness of Christmas, the part where Herod kills all the baby boys in Bethlehem has never really hit home with me,

¹⁶ When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. ¹⁷Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

¹⁸ “A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”

~The good news according to Matthew, chapter 2

My son is in the two-and-under age range and I know many families with young sons. I cannot fathom how devastating it would be for all of us to lose our sons on the basis of such a decree. Just the thought of it brings a deep ache.

When I first read this yesterday, I felt how can the loving gift of baby Jesus sit in the context of so much senseless death and weeping?

Our church community is in the midst of a venue change as we handle the needs of a numerical growth. At the same time, we have suffered the early passing of several members from disease.

It is very hard for me to accept goodness in the midst of death and suffering. I want good to be good and darkness to be absent. I want answers and I want justice.

And I don't get what I want.

So today, as I continue to process goodness and, let's call it what it is, evil, the only thing I can say is that sin is ugly. Evil is really evil. Herod was wrong. Disease is something God is going to banish when his ultimate victory and reign in the world come to be. Let that day come soon!

In the meantime, I realize that I tend to want to let sin slide. Or at least, the sin in my life. It's not that bad. But it is. It is a gross, disgusting affront to God when I am not kind and gentle with my children, when I don't watch what I say and what my tone is. And that's true no matter how tired I might be or how honestly annoying they are. Thank God, that he is bigger than my tongue and with his strength I can do differently.

When you feel you don't fit in

Dear Children,

While it is on my mind, I thought I would address something I hope you will not have to encounter for another decade. I think most people at some point in their life feel they do not fit in. By virtue of your family history, you will actually not fit in. While there are more and more families with parents of different ethnicities, most of your classmates will not be in this situation. Certainly, we as your parents were not. But we both did grow up in a home culture that was different from the surrounding culture. And it is from that experience that I want to offer two truths that can be lifelines as you navigate these tricky waters for yourself.

1) God did not make a mistake when he made you.
2) You have an invitation to belong to God's household.

God did not make a mistake when he made you
As a young person, I often felt like a cosmic oops, that God had been distracted when he made me and that's how I ended up being a girl born to Chinese parents in the American South. Like wouldn't it have been easier if I had been born Chinese in China or White in America? Growing up, in the US I was never American enough, and in Chinese countries, I was never Chinese enough. You may feel similarly.

But something that helped me a lot was a chapel when I was in 6th grade where the speaker said, "God does not make mistakes." I don't remember the verse she was speaking on, but here is one to offer you food for thought:

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
~Psalm 139

The image here is one of God taking great care in crafting a life. God picked out your eye color, hair, nose, and mouth. And he built them on the genetic differences between Asians and Caucasians. Likewise, he knew you would have a particular cultural environment and has plans for that. Your ethnic background is not a cosmic mistake.

You have an invitation to belong to God's household
In your everyday life, you may feel like you don't fit in, you may be told you don't fit in, and you may actually not fit in. That's an awful feeling, I know. But this verse was huge for me when I was processing all of this. Listen to this:

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household,
~Paul's letter to the Ephesians

When you accept that Jesus's death and resurrection was for your sin too, you get a new citizenship and a new family. The spiritual reality is that God sweeps you into his family and loves you perfectly just as he made you. You have a place to belong. And this is true even if there are people actively telling you that you don't belong. And this is true even if the people telling you you don't belong are people who say they are Christ followers.

Now, I hope that you have a few friends who are also hapa. That y'all laugh about the weird, awkward things that come with it. And I hope you have Uncle Jonny and Uncle Kevin around to show you the ropes. But iffn you don't, I think these truths can carry you a long way.

I love you,
Mom

Why doing less grates

If you'll remember, I was initially dismissive of my husband's call to do less. But I think I realized why I felt the idea stank when I first heard it.

First of all, I have typically been rewarded for doing more. It brings me glory and recognition. As I mentioned previously, in high school, I "did more" and I won big time. I was an academic rock star, and I was lonely and miserable and I had heard that Jesus offered living water but there was none for me. At college, I said, "Screw doing more. Where's the living water?" God, in his grace, brought a group of people around me that loved me despite being a basket case, apart from the lauds and laurels the university had for me.

However, in terms of kingdom living, I've been taught since I was a child that there is kingdom work to do:

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
~Jesus' words to his disciples, the good news according to Matthew, chpt 9

I've always understood this to mean, "Hey, stop lazing around and DO stuff! Can't you see there's more work than we could ever possibly finish? Hop to it!" But this week, a passage that the Sunday sermon focused on talked about what God does and where real glory belongs:

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
~Paul's letter to believers in Ephesus, chpt 3

But that's kind of the point, there is more work than I could ever do, but God is able to do immeasurably more than I could even ask or imagine and it brings him glory to do it.

The idea of doing less grates for me because it takes the focus off of what I can accomplish and requires me to trust that God is going to pull through. Doing less requires me to ask God, "Well, what do you want me to do?" and to listen and obey even if I don't know how that's going to get me/the kingdom/my family/my career all the way from point A to point B. To me, doing less feels like doing half way. More is better. If I'm not exhausted and miserable, I must not be doing enough. But again, that's the point, I can never "do enough"; God is the primary doer and he does more than enough. Doing less acknowledges this.

Why do you believe in God?

Her father had committed suicide over a decade ago, when she was a teenager. Shortly after that, her grandmother had a stroke and was placed in a nursing home. That was the last time the young woman had seen her. Today that changed. After more than ten years, she had driven several hours to visit and finally face all the emotions, now rising up and choking her like fine dust from the place she had tamped them down for so long.

She asked me a little more about myself, and my ministry. Then, these words: “I don’t mean to offend you, but may I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” I said.

Looking me directly in the eyes, she asked the most basic question, “Why do you believe in God?”

~From Chaplain Mike on The Internet Monk

I read this today and I did a gut check, asking myself how I would answer this question if I was standing eyeball to eyeball with this woman. And my answer would be, "Because I have faced death and God has given me life."

Whew. That took my breath away and took me by surprise. It's a little dramatic. But it's actually true. There was a time in my early twenties when I was suicidal. I was depressed and thought about ways to kill myself. It's hard to remember that time not because it's painful to remember it but because it is so far from my current reality. At that time, I could never have imagined the fullness of life that I have now. In grade school, I learned a verse that says,

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I [Jesus] have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

~The Good News According to John, chpt 10

When you boil it down, I guess I believe in God because I see the truth of Jesus in my life. I have seen how the thief (Satan) comes to steal and kill and destroy. But I am currently experiencing the full life that Jesus promised. And this is true even though I struggle in my new role as a mom.

My daughter took her first steps yesterday. I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest; I was so stinkin' proud of her. She's on her way to exploring the world in a whole new way. (Watch out, World!)

The road out of depression was long and hard. I won't deny it. But I wonder if God felt similarly as I took those first shaky steps toward a new and different life.

If you believe in God, why do you believe in God?