Hope

We’re Gonna Make It After All

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But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.
—Phil 3:13b-16

You're freeAs the year comes to a close, I want to end on hope.

I’ve been doing my Bible study plan through Philippians, and the above passage stands out time and again. Not the more recognized beginning half, but how it concludes.

You and I aren’t finished yet. And that’s okay. If you lack wisdom now, you won’t always. If you don’t know the answer now, you will eventually. God’s not going to let us twist in the wind. He’ll reveal what we need to know when we need to know it. That timing will be perfect, too, for He makes all things beautiful in His time, not ours.

So it’s okay if you’re not where you think you’re supposed to be along that spiritual timeline you planned for yourself. Rest in Him and trust Him for completion. If we make ourselves available to Him in the place He dwells, that should be simple.

God asks that we live up to where He’s brought us. Let’s not live down, but live up. We’ve all attained some measure of maturity. Living up to what we already know is what we need to do. That’s all God asks of us.

His yoke is easy and His burden light. For 2008, may He help us all live up to that easy yoke and light burden.

Blogging Angry

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Last week probably wasn’t this blog’s bright, shining moment.

Oh yeah?! Well, you can just...I did something last week that I’ve never done before: blog angry. I’m not an angry person, not in the slightest. I grew up with an angry dad, so anger is not something I like dealing with. As far as I’m concerned, we in this country get too cheesed off too easily over things that don’t matter in the long run.

I don’t visit angry blogs anymore. They drain too much emotional energy, especially since they never seem to have practical solutions to the issues that make them angry.

Anger without focus is about as unhealthy as it gets.

Unfortunately, the state of our country today is such that most of our anger is directed against nebulous sources. That not only fuels further anger, but leads to frustration and despair. When what is causing the anger cannot be located or reasonably addressed…well, it’s destructive.

I’ve spent most of the last two weeks angry, not a normal state of being for me.

I don’t have much, but what I do have I’d like to preserve. Not in an idolatrous way, but because they are good things worth conserving so that generations to come will be grateful for me fighting the battle.

I’m now fighting the biggest company in the world. Needless to say, that’s not an easy battle. It’s asking more of me than I have, but I also can’t lay down and give up on what’s important in life, especially at a time when more and more people are coming around to the values I hold dear. To be a champion of those ideals for others, only to lose in my own backyard is galling.

As someone who makes a living with words, to see our local library levy go down to crushing defeat was more disabling to me than I would have guessed. Then again, I had no reason to believe the levy would fail. At any time my family has about 30-50 books checked out of our library. I’ve got a hotline to the staff. New books on the shelves are like candy to my family. The power of story blesses people in the brightest and toughest times. Why would anyone vote against that? To see that threatened brings out the father bear in me, I guess. ROAR!

At the beginning of last week, the Lord gave me a discouraging word I didn’t want to hear right now. And sure enough, I had to drink that bitter cup down to the dregs. On Friday, we got the bad news, leaving us still drowning in the wake of the tsunami I discussed a few months ago. I’ve now run out of all options and I don’t know what to do. So I’m going into the Christmas season about as low as I can go, hoping and praying for an elusive miracle.

People who study human behavior say that a person under extreme duress reacts with his “shadow personality.” In my case, the normally exuberant, extroverted Dan becomes sullen and withdrawn. Not angry becomes angry. Content becomes frustrated. Spiritually-oriented becomes secularly-oriented.

So my apologies if the tone here recently seemed indignant. I don’t want Cerulean Sanctum to become an angry blog. If anything, it’s supposed to be the antithesis of that pattern.

Tomorrow, I’ve got a post on community that I think will rock. It won’t be angry, just hopeful.

Stay tuned.

Thanks for being a reader.

You Love the Lord, But…

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…do you trust Him?

At first glance, such a question appears ludicrous. How can one love God and not trust Him?

Well, you love your kids, but would you trust them with a gun? Uh, probably not. I taught riflery at camp once. Emphasis on the once. Having a spacy teen girl carelessly point a loaded .22 at your head (despite fifteen minutes of admonition not to do so) tends to bleach your complexion, if you know what I mean. Didn’t make me love her any less, though.

Each of us may have good reason to love but not trust. How about a dad you love, but who’s in the habit of making life miserable for you and your family because he drinks—and he’s not a fun drunk. Or a single mom who brings home “Uncle” after “Uncle,” a relentless series of men who drift in and out of your life. Or your brooding teen nephew with the death metal and the Hustlers stashed under his mattress—your own son wants to man shotgun in the young nihilist’s new Lancer Evo.

You love your mom, but she’s not acting like an adult should. Dad, either. The nephew? Barely tolerable, but you love him ’cause he’s your beloved sister’s kid. Plus, you sat by the young punk’s bedside when he got pneumonia at eighteen months and you prayed your guts out that he’d live.

I think plenty of people who tear up in church during worship, the ones with their hands held highest, may very well love God with a fervor that outdoes everyone else in the pews, but all the while they’re scared to death to trust Him with their lives. They’re scared because they’ve been burned by a father who was an ugly drunk, or a mother who couldn’t keep a decent man in her life, or {fill in the trust issue here}.

No greater area of struggle affects me like this one. I love God very much and have served Him for many years, but I don’t always trust Him. Yes, I’m fine when I’m trusting the Lord for other people’s faith needs, but when it comes to my own I don’t do so well. I’m sure my Dad’s problems didn’t help me in trusting, but I don’t remember being leery of God’s direction and leading in my life until I started getting dropped.

Dropped?

Have you ever taken that leap of faith, the one so certain that it could not fail because “God was all over it”? Wile E. Coyote splatEnded up as a squish spot at the bottom of some canyon just like Wile E. Coyote, didn’t you? Hurt, right?

It wasn’t just the pain of meeting the ground at a terminal velocity as much as the fact that the angels didn’t bear you up. That God—the one who orchestrated that leap of faith—seemed to vanish in a puff of smoke just when you needed Him the most. Years later, you’re still nursing the wounds, still asking why.

And still not getting any answers.

For me, no verse in the Bible stares me in the face and dares me to blink more than this one:

Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him…
—Job 13:15a KJV

For some of us, though, dying would be fine. But what of living, yet bearing a brutal wound? Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him may actually be easy. It’s the Though I’m left paralyzed in the bottom of a crater, yet will I trust in Him that needs our attention. I know a pastor who, on his way to a church meeting, accidentally backed the car over his toddler son and killed him. I can’t imagine. I simply can’t. I get choked up even thinking about something like that.

…yet will I trust in Him…

I’m not sure we do trust Him, at least to the extent we say we do. Though we all want to trust God to be more coherent and reliable than a drunken father, irresponsible mother, or suspect punk nephew, I suspect we all have our limits where trust begins to corrode. For some, that level’s pretty low. I believe that more than a few of us in America would blanch in the face of finding our favorite TV show canceled, our usual breakfast cereal discontinued, or the NFL home team packing up to move to LA.

Even if most of us can get past those mundane “disasters,” other more serious ones loom. We don’t want to deal with diminishing physical prowess. We don’t want to see the new kid promoted over us because it means we’ve maxed out our career and it’s all downhill from here on. We don’t want to go on weeping over adult children who have abandoned the Faith. We don’t want to consider what happens when the dream dies.

Even Christian books dance around this issue. I’m two-thirds of the way through Dan Allender’s Leading with a Limp. As an illustration of the power of honesty, he tells the story of a high-powered lawyer who confronted her company with a mirror and showed them how ugly they’d become. The company realized their errors and turned things around. The lady lawyer came off as a hero for her boldness.

But what if she hadn’t? What if they gutted and filleted her, then tossed her still-warm professional corpse on the dust heap, taking extra special care to ensure she never worked in a law firm within the borders of the good ol’ U.S. of A. again?

Doesn’t that happen? Doesn’t the leap of faith sometimes result in a big splat? Also, don’t we all know people who never recover? I do.

Last December, I wrote a blog post called “We Need a Gospel That Speaks to Failure.”I think we also need a means to help people crawl up out of the crater left behind when all the faith in the world didn’t work—for whatever reason. That’s where Christianity should shine, in moments like those.

Because I think that life is not going to be easy for most of us. At some point we’re going that face the reality of the ground rushing up to meet us and no net coming out of the sky. We have to be able to make sense of the crater we leave behind if we’re to trust God in the future.

We talk about God never leaving us and make up little poems (“Footprints in the Sand,” anyone?), but then the Bible also says this:

But, in regard to the ambassadors of the rulers of Babylon who sent to [Hezekiah] to ask about the wonder that was done in the land, God left him in order to try him, to know all that was in his heart.
—2 Chronicles 32:31

What is God going to find in our hearts when we’re in the crater after the leap of faith? What is it going to take from His Church to help those in the crater summon up the trust He is looking for?