Yesterday I texted Kimberly, “almost a perfect hike. 45 minutes of good cardio in the sun, a stroll along a beautiful mountain view, adventure on a new trail, and then overcast to be a perfect ambience for meditation.” Then I texted her this picture.
We get gorgeous views when it’s not cloudy, a rarity in the Pacific Northwest winters. And when the sunshine falls on my day off, even for a couple of hours, I consider myself lucky. I said it was an “almost” perfect hike because instead of being simply overcast, it rained the last 30 minutes down the mountain, which made me hurry to finish rather than calmly meditate. I finished texting Kimberly, “Near the end I laughed, thinking, Yeah God always has to add that little dose of ‘reality.’ Life never seems to come neatly gift-wrapped with a bow, but always manages to throw us off-kilter as though it fears we will settle down too easily into comfortable stagnation. There’s always something that doesn’t quite fit in the box, that leaves a sense of dis-ease challenging our neat organization of the world. Sometimes we flounder desperately trying to make sense of it all. Living genuinely is scary and confusing and painful, but it leaves us open to new directions we may never have considered. It’s a very messy affair wobbling courageously down a trail with no clear markings. Faith is given not so much to make us stalwart in our certainty, but to make us stalwart through our uncertainty.
Kimberly has been struggling for months with her job at an Asheville animal shelter. The physical labor is too strenuous for her, and the lack of structural support forces her to constantly fight for resources that should simply be allotted to her–and that is directly contrary to her nature. She has been looking for a new job and saw an ad for an admin assistant at a Presbyterian church. Wanting a better look, we went to visit this last Sunday. We both liked it a lot, and she applied for the job on Monday. She would be great at it. Unfortunately, 50 people have already applied for that opening through only one job website, which was posted just 5 days ago.
What should we hope for, plan for, invest in? Which is the best path to take through this jungle of life? Sometimes discernment feels more like reading tea leaves than weighing pros and cons and finding a clear way ahead. The confluence of situations at times seems to suggest the way forward, but that has often led me into deadends–jobs I had to quit for my own sanity, relationships that ended up worse instead of better, decisions that lost time and money with no benefit. When two people’s dreams and fears, gifts and weaknesses must be accounted for, it makes that process so much more difficult. So we pray and leap… and sometimes end up in the ditch. At that point we can either decide that God wanted us in the ditch (we made the right choice) or that he’s teaching us a lesson about making better decisions (we made the wrong choice). Which is it? Hindsight is rarely 20/20. Sometimes it’s straight-up blind.
Our approach to guidance feels very haphazard to me, and I haven’t found a solution for that. Looking back on past choices and their results gives me very little confidence in my ability to find the best way through this tangle called life. If we eventually stumble out of the jungle near the right spot, I will be as surprised as anyone. In the meantime, if we go in circles because we can’t read a map, let me at least be a good travel companion. A good friend in the swamp is better than a bad friend in the penthouse suite.
I started this blog to share about my own personal journey. Recently I have taken to writing reflections on Scripture, and it threatened to take over this blog, so I moved it to its own page, but making the page longer and longer became cumbersome (pages are not designed to have multiple entries, archives, etc. like blogs), so I have started another blog for just my Scripture reflections. You can find it at scripturegrace.wordpress.com I hope you can draw a blessing from those readings as I find a blessing in thinking and writing them. (you can also sign up for email updates if you wish). Sorry for the administrative confusion!
I continue to write my reflections on Genesis because it is a personal blessing to me to keep mulling over these thoughts, and I’m happy to share them if it blesses others, but I realized it was filling up my blog with these daily posts, which was rather intended to be about my own experiences, so I have transferred them to a separate page (as you can see above). Let me know if you find them beneficial.
Today between the rows of stoves in Home Depot’s appliance department, I asked a couple if I could help them. They told me they had just moved from out of town, were buying a new house, and needed appliances. I soon discovered he had jumped mid-life from the business world into repairing musical instruments, which is his first love. They had moved here two weeks ago, and he had a fully functioning business up and running. I was astonished—how did he build up a clientele so quickly?
“Oh,” he replied, “a local man was retiring, and I saw his ad—a full shop of tools and a full client list of customers. That’s why we moved here. I didn’t even have to pay for the business. The man was retiring and just handed it over to me!”
He had been looking all over the country, but this shop just happened to be in the town where his wife grew up, so the couple was staying with her father until they could buy a house. I asked if it was hard to get a loan for the house since he was self-employed in a new business in a new location, which might seem risky to a bank.
“No,” he said, “my wife has been working an internet job for 15 years (which she can do from anywhere) so the bank gave her the loan.”
Having recently moved here myself, our contrast was sharp. I have a part-time job for which I have no love, which doesn’t pay enough, and which can’t possibly support a bank loan for a house. Everything fell into place magically for this couple while Kimberly and I struggle to make ends meet in jobs neither of us want, making do with an over-priced, under-sized rental in a bad neighborhood, and without friends or family with whom to connect. Where’s our magic?
Such sharp contrasts do not make me angry or bitter, but they often make me hopeless and depressed. I don’t know how to make life work for us. But this time I knew God was punking me. He’d set me up for this by giving me just the insight I needed this morning to trust him in what he was dragging me through. I knew that our tough road was creating a unique work of God in my soul. His magic wand was out, not pointed at my circumstances but at me. I was the magic he was making, and sometimes a magic brew calls for frog toenails and lizard poop.
I grew up with a father who believed in systems, in order and method. It’s an effective approach to face this world as the modern industrial movement has proven. This pragmatic and efficient outlook found a perfect petri dish in American society, leading to a remarkable level of productivity. My dad’s books all reflect this approach: a system for Bible study, a system for ethics, even a system for living the Christian life.
Dad was drawn to this approach because of his personality. He felt most comfortable and safe here, and his sense of value was deeply rewarded as a choleric: someone who thrives on activity, goal setting, and accomplishments. He transfused this outlook into me, and it helps me organize and plan, to feel some sense of security by means of order and control. But since I am not a choleric–the personality that fits so well with this approach–his emphasis led me to a great deal of internal conflict and turmoil. Order and action works well for minds already tame, but they could not corral the forceful questions that galloped through my heart and mind. I tried repeatedly to make his solutions fit, and felt myself a failure when they didn’t “take,” only to slowly realize that his sums were not for the problems in my book.
As an example, a key to his view of the spiritual life was to separate sins into intentional and unintentional so that he could clearly delineate between “defeated” and “victorious” Christians. If a fellow knew something was wrong and chose to do it anyway; he was sinning intentionally, while the unintentional sins were those he did not “choose” such as a reflexive emotional reaction, a lack of insight, dispositional sins like pride and so on. Of course, such a neat distinction can only be made by those who are outward rather than inward focused. For instance, when pride is recognized, it becomes an intentional sin, but cholerics may not notice themselves bragging or posing or pontificating unless it is quite blatant. We who are sharply and constantly aware of our own pride are, based on dad’s system, defeated Christians living in sin. I beat myself with his sin chart for 20 painful years before trading it for a spiritual path that worked better for me.
Hidden inside each of our strengths are our hidden weaknesses, blindspots, and distortions. Our default is to offer everyone the solutions that have worked for us. Dad offered everyone alike his well thought out action steps just as I tried to solve everyone’s issues with introspection and analysis. But Sue may not need his strategy or my interpretation. Perhaps she just needs a hug or a sounding board or a push. We must constantly work to embrace the perspective of those who differ from us–to understand who they are, where they come from, and what works for them–or we will cause more pain and harm by the very help we give. Even if the goal is the right one, we may take very different paths to reach it. In this give-and-take, we may well discover their views challenging and correcting ours, a painful truth I have often realized.
“The beauty of holiness” is a delightful and profound biblical thought. We long for the clarity, simplicity, and certainty that comes from a paint-by-numbers spirituality, to know exactly where the lines are drawn and what colors we should use to fill them, and yet the Bible continually confounds our efforts to make all its truth fit in our neat boxes. We think there is an ideal body weight, a best-practices study plan, one way to be a good Christian employee or manager, and we constantly measure ourselves against these perfect models, the WWJD approach to Christian living.
But from that mindset, “What Would Jesus Do?” is a trick question, making us think that Jesus would always do the same thing in the same situation, and that following him is just about identifying and imitating that action. What if he wished instead for us to absorb his worldview and then shine that out in our own unique way with our own personalities and contexts, spins and quirks, under the individual guidance of the Spirit.
Holiness is not a flow-chart of right choices with everyone responding in the same way to the same situation. From my perspective this would actually undermine God’s design for us as unique parts of the Body of Christ. Some are good at encouragement, others at pointing out problems. Some are gifted in counsel and others in comfort. In this building of God, some are studs, outlets, or flooring, and each has a unique part to play. Walking in the Spirit is organic and dynamic, often surprising and confounding, a constant learning and discovering process where even our faults and missteps contribute.
There is no simple and easy answer to predetermine my response to a neighbor that mows over my petunias or a kid who is afraid of my dog. Love is always the answer, but love has a thousand ways of expressing itself, and if it is truly love, it will be beautiful in each of these expressions–a flowering cactus is just as thrilling as a prize-winning rose. So let us become artists in our own unique way, painting our world with the love only we can give in our inimitable way.
Historical time frames in the Bible move so slowly that if we lived through those daily events, we’d notice no real progress except in rare moments of change. Abram is promised a large family. He must imagine spending his life watching the birth and growth of each child, raising them into men and women, and playing with his grandchildren. Instead he spends his whole life waiting, childless, and at the very end, when he is an old man, he gets one son. Israel is promised a new land, but that whole generation slowly drops dead one by one as they drag their tents through the desert over decades of splintered dreams. Only their children see the promise fulfilled. “All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.” (Heb. 11:13)
For hundreds of years Israelis waited for the Messiah, passing their sometimes-wavering expectation on to their offspring. They waited, grew old waiting, died waiting, as did their children after them. The Old Testament is one long book of waiting. And then he comes… only to leave his people once more with a promise. Christmas, like communion, is a memorial of remembrance until he comes again.
It seems that faith is given to us less as a means to gain a promise and more as the strength to wait for the promise. Daily grace is more about sustenance in the famine than the bounty that will one day come. Our faith is not measured by how much blessing we enjoy, but by how much faithful endurance we keep without receiving the promised blessing. It is drought, not abundance, that drives roots deep into the earth where they tap into the true, undying water source and build an unshakeable foundation. Grace refuses to settle for the short-lived, easy gains that we so often wish for and rather calls us to the hard road of long-term transformation, the kind of change that radically reshapes who we are.
So our patience is not passive and acquiescent, like a doctor’s waiting room, but active and willful. “Prepare the way of the Lord.” Those hills and valleys that need to be straightened are not the landscape of the world, but the topography of our own hearts. He has not come (or we have not gone) because we are not yet ready for him. When a bush pilot flies into the jungle to deliver supplies only to find no landing strip, his coming brings no benefit. So let us be active participants in his grace, yielding our hearts for the Spirit to clear the brush and fill the holes, preparing for our coming King. Waiting is one of the greatest acts of faith, determination, and diligence.
Each year we wait like Israel of old, reenacting the anticipation and longing, the hope and heartache of an oppressed people looking for the Messiah. That night long ago changed everything… and changed nothing to the common eye. The day after Jesus’ birth, the Israelites awoke to the same oppressive government, the same self-righteous religious leaders, the same troubles with which they lay down the night before. Looking around them, nothing had changed.
We have our own heartache and hope, and we await our deliverance. But unlike that night long ago, December 25 changes nothing. We awake the morning after with an emotional hangover and face all the same sorrows we set aside for the holidays… except for a lot of extra trash, extra bills, and a long, cold, dark winter ahead. When we call Christmas “advent,” which is to say “coming,” what exactly is coming…in our day, in 2016? What are we expecting?
One day redemption will come, but like that first night, our world is still fractured. As the shepherds trudged back to their sheep that night, nothing had changed around them… but everything had changed in them. They still stubbed their toes in the dark, but aching feet could not detract from that history-smashing story of salvation into which they had tumbled, a story that recast their whole world. Whether they held onto that vision so that their whole lives after were shaped by it or whether that vision slowly dimmed and became just an old tale told by their campfires is the same question that hangs over each of our journeys.
Our God is the same in our celebration and mourning, in our feasting and hungering, in our brokenness and healing: a loving, true, faithful, mighty, gracious God. And he knows that both the shadow and light are essential to our continuing salvation. As we are able, we embrace all that our hearts feel and know, believing that there is hope, that light will spring up for us, even if it delays until the final day. Until then, we walk in the light of that first Christmas, a candle even on our darkest days. He has come and our lives will never be the same.
Janathan Grace Reflections 