Grief And Surrender

What do we do with grief? Despite the fact that we are always moving toward physical death, we Christians believe Christ’s sacrifice produced a miracle in which death was defeated. Yet, we still suffer terrible loss. Tragedy. Surprise endings.  I need to understand what Jesus means when he says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”—Matthew 5:4.

I picked up a book called “Traveling Mercies” by Anne Lamott, and I discovered that her story is really about Grace and loss. This is the Grace:

“But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more, so that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”—Romans 5:20-21.

Lamott’s story is gritty, and uncomfortable, and illustrates how God works best in lives where nothing is working. God even seems to come through better when nothing else is working. But even when he does, loss must be handled. Christians don’t get a pass. And loss isn’t easy. This is Lamott’s decription:

Within hours of reading these words, I’m informed that a friend’s mother has died. My own mother also got sick that weekend, and I was struck again at how precariously we are attached to this life by the time we are in our seventies.  I know, cognitively, that my mother will die but I have no concept of what I will be when she is gone.

To imagine my own mother’s death is to imagine a world without air. This is where grief hits us. This constellation of revolving family members and friends is (slowly or suddenly) slammed with a planet-sized meteor called death—and everything changes. Alliances are lost…and remade.  Battles break out in unlikely places. People reconnect, or stop speaking forever. Everything changes.

Loss is a mixed bag. We are not in control. There’s no right way to die, and there’s no right way to grieve death. Lots of people want to tell us how to grieve properly. Advisors who think they’re helping say, “You’ll find someone else.” As if replacing a partner is like replacing an old dog, or your favorite shoes.  Or they say, “She is in a better place,” as if that should make it any better for me…still here in this place—without her.  We should be altruistic and stoic about it, they tell us.

Jesus promises comfort. Where does it come from? From honoring the life a person has led; from storing memories through storytelling; from agreeing that this life is not the whole story. Our gut tells us how to grieve, if we don’t suppress it. It tells us that this person I loved (and even sometimes hated) is uniquely created and never to be repeated. My dad was a one-of-a-kind original. My mother, brothers, sisters—all broken like me—yet also beautifully crafted like shattered glass transformed into vibrant stained-glass images of refracted light.

With loss we are comforted with a clarified vision of a life lived. Jesus knows we will find comfort in our loss because he goes ahead of us, modeling a life lived for others and given for all. He makes us more than random cells brought together into a skin sack of various systems and chemical processes that begin one day, and end another. He makes us eternally Real. That is the comfort.

We’ve Fallen and We Can’t Get Up!

 Was The Fall of Adam and Eve fair?

I was watching my grandchildren one day.  The baby was just beginning to pull up and balance against tables and couches for moments before wobbling back to solid ground. The older child—a competent five-year-old with perfect control over his balance—discovered unending delight in lightly shoving his sister off balance and watching her fall.  All the work she had done to get to her precarious balance was undone in a flash and she’d be on her back flailing like an upended turtle.

Any adult in the room could quickly place the baby on her feet, or hold her hands to help her walk. She could get from fallen to upright in one quick intervention without her own effort. When I think of The Fall of Adam and Eve I cannot get this image out of my mind. Our first reaction upon seeing any person fall is to help.  How can this be our human gut reaction, and not God’s?

But what if the fall of Adam and Eve was a first wobbly step toward learning to live in a universe with free will, in just the same way a child steps out of his parents’ arms to test the internal gyroscope needed to live with gravity on a spinning planet? Wouldn’t it make sense that a fair and just God would want to bring his own children back into balance?

If there were no possibility of rebalancing then free will would not be fair, but is that the case? Was man left to his own devices entirely by some impersonal God to bring himself back into balance? Can man be responsible for his own evolution? Is a baby expected to learn walking without aid; to become socialized without models? What we understand about God is that free will is part of the plan, meaning we can fall and that God’s will is the whole plan, meaning we must also be re-balanced.

God makes The Fall fair by Christ, who rebalances the course of mankind. There are those who want to throw out the Old Testament and keep the New Testament, but the first makes sense of the second. There are those who accept an Old Testament punishing and impersonal God—without Christ. But our God is a God of mercy, who reconciles the whole world by Christ, and planned to do so at the very beginning when he also made fall possible by his own law of free will. We need both old and new testimonies of mankind’s personal relationship with God to make sense of the broken world that surrounds us, and the promise that this is a temporary state of imbalance.

 “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are —yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”—Hebrews 4:15-16.

Jesus gives various names to his followers–friends, brothers, and children of the king–in different parables and lessons. He is family! He sweeps us up and sets us on our feet. We are learning to walk by the blood of Christ. Walking, after all, is just a series of truncated falls tempered by balance. Jesus is our balance. Our gyroscope. Our intervention. He is Risen so we may rise up from our fall. Surrender to the arms of Christ. He gets you on your feet for his kingdom work. You don’t have to do it alone.

Following The Way Of Grace

In the recent movie, Tree Of Life, the existential questions of Biblical Job are posed with graphic beauty. This movie voices clearly our childish internal questions toward a complicated God. Near the beginning, one of the characters narrates her catechism teaching:

The way of nature described in the above quote can be seen everywhere in our culture. Nature seeks only to survive at any cost. When our culture demands that we see ourselves only as natural we are encouraged to serve our “nature” in all things, notwithstanding the harm. But while we share physiological systems with the animals, only one animal in all of created nature participates regularly in chosen self-annihilation. This alone sets humans apart from all others.

The truth of us is both simple and complicated. We are stuck with the responsibility of “knowing” good and evil, which constitutes our free will. God created a universe that is good, but in which all humans can choose to love their Creator (and themselves, and each other). All other choices are “not love” which leads directly to the perversion of every good.

The way of grace requires us to engage a higher nature.  We may be like animals in our physiology, but we are made triune, like our maker. We have mind, which knows itself. We also have soul: that part of our nature designed to communicate with God.

So, why are we in this fallen state in the first place? Is it due to an unjust God? Is the game rigged from the start? Can we be intended imperfect by a perfect God?

Many Christians are tickled into half-believing the idea that self-salvation makes it possible to be righteous without God; and that sin is an antiquated word for people just being people. There are two sides to this coin: one side claims we can be perfect without God, flip it over and there is no standard of imperfection whatever!

A popular esoteric faith claims: “Unintended evil entered the cosmos when God created man.” To be created mistakenly by a flawed God makes perfection a hopeless venture for a few reasons. First, there would be no perfect image to fashion ourselves after; and second, there can be no knowledge of “perfect” without a perfect standard from which to measure. Logically, we wouldn’t know we were imperfect, or have any desire to attain perfection without a perfect Creator in place.  Funny, though, how the less people believe in God’s grace to perfect the more they scramble for self-perfection.

Another premise of this belief system is that when all people become good they will be able to repair God’s mistake of allowing unintended evil to enter the world. This faith also claims that God is neither personal nor perfect. If you find yourself agreeing to any of these ideas, you are not alone.

In fact, these ideas are almost as old as Man. Self-righteousness is nothing but crediting our own will to our moral choices.  If I think I can fulfill God’s laws through my own will—perhaps I can for a season. But I am not justified, redeemed, or under grace when I do so. The burden of sin is ever upon me even as I “perfectly” meet the law, according to Paul. I am among those “…being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and wishing to establish their own righteousness, who have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God.”—Romans 10:3.

There is no true righteousness apart from God, who through Christ frees us from both the debt and the wages of sin, by grace alone.  This is why Jesus can claim that his burden is light. It carries neither debt nor cost. Surrender your will over your own righteousness to the One who purposes you to His perfect will.

The Strangling Vine of Envy

Probably the first sin I ever committed in my life was envy. I was born one year and ten months after a pair of twin girls.  I cannot remember a time in early childhood when I did not wish I were a twin. I pursued friendships to find that same connection my sisters seemed to share, and was consistently dissatisfied with the results.

Worse yet, by the time I began to crave a twin, it was already too late!! I could never go back and FIX the problem! The object of my need was unattainable. I believed I needed something that belonged to my sisters–THAT I COULD NEVER HAVE!!

Envy asks God to let us be God for just long enough to go back and change an unchangeable event. Because we are not God, we cannot change the past so we get stuck—like Lot’s wife—in a permanent state of looking back.

A secular philosopher points out how envy has become endemic in modern cultures, and offers some ideas about why. Alain de Botton, says this:

“It’s a real taboo to mention envy, but if there’s one dominant emotion in modern society it’s envy, and its linked to the spirit of equality. The closer two people are in age, in background in process of identification, the more there’s a danger of envy. The problem with modern society is that there is a spirit of equality combined with deep inequalities.”

But there is also an insidious purpose in industrial capitalism keeping people dissatisfied through envy. According to an essay entitled “Advertising at the End of the Apocalypse” by Sut Jhally, the strategy of advertising by the 1920s was to get people to buy things based on “the relation of objects to the social life of people,” rather than on the qualities of the object itself. The reason this changed was because surveys showed that people were most influenced by their social connections.  Jhally explains the result:

Jhally’s premise about the purpose of advertising is simply this: people made to feel dissatisfied with their social happiness will buy objects that promise satisfying relationships.

Herein lies the garden of envy in all its strange and variegated expressions. It makes us hungry; it makes us class-oriented; it makes us feel a constant underlying anxiety that we need to have something we are missing to be acceptable. This is one way in which we as Christians are sticky with our culture. We breathe these thoughts and feelings unaware of their origin.

So let’s talk about the sin of envy and why its one of the Big Ten. In envy our healthy desire for God is diverted into an unhealthy desire to be satisfied by something that is not God, is not real, and is not attainable–because it IS NOT OURS.  The big problem of envy is that everything in your life could be great, but you’re not paying attention.

When Paul warns of fleshly behaviors to the Galatians, seven descriptions on the list derive from envy:

“The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.”—Galatians 5:19-21.

There is an antidote to this modern disease of envy: It’s called gratefulness. It’s not a feeling, it’s a decision to change our focus. If Lot’s wife had been grateful, she would have been looking toward the hills of safety. When we focus on what we  have we un-stick ourselves from the pervasive dissatisfaction of the world’s vision about what we’re missing. What do I have to be grateful for? Here. Now. When dissatisfaction creeps in, step back and assess its origin. Surrender your envy and jealousy today!

Living Life “Flat Out”

This is a story of two funerals.

Helpless Platitudes

At the first funeral I am too young to say the right things or even think them. I see the world through 20-year-old lenses, pink with hope and faith that all things happen poetically (including death). God is in His heaven and all is right with the world.

At this first funeral I say something stupid from the tension of silence. Silence is golden at a funeral, for future reference.  Don’t open your mouth unless you ask God first, and you really get a definitive answer. I spoke some ridiculous platitude that even now makes me cringe in memory.  I was quickly chastised by the elderly daughter of the deceased, and rightly so. I went away from this funeral with budding existential questions. What does a life well-lived mean, or matter? Why are we here? Why do we suffer?

The second funeral heralds my full immersion into Egypt. My desert of loss, and understanding. Now I am about thirty-five years old, and you’d think I’d learned some things, but I am still floating along in the shallows feeling pretty lucky about God, and offering up largely unchanged platitudes in helpless response to suffering.

Going Deeper

This funeral holds all the elements of true Southern fiction. A beloved middle-school teacher has died on school grounds in a freak accident on the weekend. That she was at school on the weekend testified to her passion: bringing science to life for her students, my daughter being one of them.

This amazing woman left behind a legacy of joyful connection with more than 2,000 people in a small community that barely topped 10,000 in population. As I watched the biggest church in a small southern town fill to capacity, I was humbled. I had only moved to this town the year before, and I realized that if I were to die the next day, I would be able to count on my fingers the likely attendees to my funeral. Although I had been attending a large church at the other end of town, I was not plugged in. It was an awakening!

As speaker after speaker testified to this woman’s life, I realized that she devoted every living, breathing moment to engaging with others. She kept nothing back for herself. She lived her life “flat out” as southerners put it.

That funeral marked an end to my  Christian infancy. It began a deepening relationship with God that has produced great joy, although the seeds were sown through suffering.  Here in the desert I would be required to move beyond “Jesus Loves Me!” to the meat and potatoes of relationship with a complicated God who allows incomprehensible suffering, and yet loves deeply and personally.

Can’t Get There From Here

Years later, I was driving around an unfamiliar town in New England when I stopped to ask for directions from a homeowner. “You can’t get there from here,” he stated bluntly, turning back to his garden. I was perplexed. Was I in a black hole? Had I entered a separate dimension? Can’t you get anywhere from…well… anywhere?

Egypt is like that. As you trek deeper into the heart of God it feels like you can’t get there from here. At least not without passing through murky swamps of doubt brought through impossible suffering.

I was born wearing rose-colored glasses. Being an eternal optimist, I stuck to the comfortable shallows of positive thinking where I could make optimistic sense of God. I had to pass through the dry wasteland of rejection to get to the wide-flung arms of a surrendered Christ, only to find he’d already been to the desert before me. “I thirst,” were his words before they were mine.

Why?

And what was the necessity of that lonely and difficult trek? Here’s why: Because I am not called to witness a gospel to soothe the fitful dreams of the wealthy righteous, who fortify their faith with life insurance policies. I was called by Christ to love the poorest of the poor in flesh and spirit, who are mourning, rejected, and lost. To offer hope to the hopeless requires firsthand experience of hopelessness, despair, and mercy. I can walk alongside the lone pilgrim during her desert trek, and encourage her that she can get there from here; and that living waters await.

Today I don’t worry whether my funeral could draw a large crowd, but I try to live my faith like that science teacher taught me; like Paul illustrates:

“Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.”—1 Corinthians 9:19, 22.

 

Surrender To Obedience

I once knew a doctor who identified what was wrong in my body by touching me where the pain was, and then putting pressure with his other hand to my stiffly outstretched arm. As he moved his hand from organ to organ he asked me to resist his pressure on my arm. Acting as a conduit of the energy in my body, he was able to discern the organ with the problem because my arm would falter weakly whenever he touched the “sick” organ.

I think one of the most common aspects of being a Christ follower in a secularist society is that we find ourselves weak and powerless, up against certain arguments. The Holy Spirit is the power source of all believers, but it passes through our resistant flesh and our sin nature, losing some (or all) of its juice along the way.

Obedience is the antidote for weakness, because when we surrender our resistance to God’s grace, he heals the sin in our lives clearing a path for the Spirit to move freely. Why is obedience so difficult? Jesus knew we would be reluctant to follow even if he promised following was the easiest path. This is what he says about that reluctance:

 “Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock. But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall.”—Matthew 7:24-27.

Jesus is ministering to the reluctant follower, who hears (maybe even preaches) but does not obey. This temptation to believe in our hearts that Jesus is the Christ, but to avoid following brings that dis-integrated weakness we feel when pressed on all sides by our secular world. By secular, I mean those pressures that seduce us into believing that certain parts of our lives are irrelevant to God, or that God is irrelevant to all or part of our daily existence. Jesus illustrates that our faith is built on sand if we do not do what he has told us. Obedience builds discipline; discipline builds strength.

Here’s an example: A friend was pressured by another believer to accept the possibility that the Bible stories cannot be true because they are too surprising. For instance: the talking donkey. This friend felt powerless to respond. The questions deeply touched his own doubts, and he had not fortified himself with study and discipline. Discipline is obedience in action.

There is certainly a fine argument that the Bible stories must be true—because they are so surprising! Bible stories never seem to follow the pattern of made-up stories. In the Bible many astounding things happen because of (and in spite of) the freedom each character is given by the master storyteller. Even the donkey—who is allowed to speak—is given his own voice. He is not placed within the limits of a story of talking animals, he is placed right smack in front of an angel in a story where God is acting personally.

Redemption is the alchemist’s magic in Bible stories that turns sin into good, like copper to gold. Tamar, Rahab, Naomi, Noah, Abraham, Peter, Jacob, Cain…always there is sin, yet also sin is the impetus leading to redemption. Over and over these surprising stories lay a foundation for who is coming once for all time, to redeem us for our disobedience.

How to obey? Look at it this way: If you go to a home repair store and take a class on how to make a fire pit you have taken a path, but you cannot call yourself a bricklayer. Only when you have laid a thousand bricks, then seen a flaw, pulled it all down and started again that you can begin to call yourself a bricklayer. Obedience is deciding to lay bricks; discipline is learning to lay bricks from a master.

When I was younger I used to say that there was nothing there to obey. It was just a bunch of unrealistic platitudes. But the first time I opened the book and looked at the red letters I found this:

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”—Matthew 7:3, 5.

This is a clear and solid lesson. I could lay every brick of my life on this one teaching. Pick up one brick. Take one thing Jesus said, and obey this day. He is the rock foundation of your new house.  The hot wind of secularism will never even budge it.

Surrender To The Passion Today

Today is the most important day. Good Friday exists eternally as a hard day to gaze upon comfortably. On this day God enters into history and redeems us of our rebellion. This blood sacrifice drops into the timeline like a pebble into a still pond sending ripples all the way back to Cain and all the way forward to you.

This one thing makes everything new. Here. Now. Were you there? I am there. I am each minor character in this story of all stories:

I am Peter, afraid to stand up for my Lord, though I speak proud words of belonging to him safe beneath the pleasant roof of my worship clubhouse where I gather with other believers who do not have to be converted or convinced. I believe when it is timely, or useful or easy, but then in boasting take my eyes off Him and sink into the murky waters of doubt and fear. I am also Peter when I throw myself weeping into the arms of mercy, trusting in his understanding and forgiveness of my mistakes.

I am the disciples, confused and scattered through the dark night peering fearfully down what looks like a dead-end road and wondering how I will get there from here. Those weak fellows camp out in my bones when I can barely see the shrouded shadow of Jesus in the distance and I would like very much to get his five-year plan, please, before I decide if I can afford to follow. I’m there with them, also, when I cannot hear his voice clearly over the roaring storm of my uncertainties; when I don’t know if fight or flight, or returning to my fishing boat is the right choice. And my no choices from my past remain, because Jesus holds still another plan for me beginning at the foot of his cross. I have been written into a new story.

I am so like those Jewish leaders: unable to fit my idea of Messiah into all the prior plans and politics I’ve invented to protect myself from the strong, warm wind of revelation. I forbid his presence with my tight schedules and prevent His creative force from sweeping out the dusty corners of my life and dragging me from my pointless traditions into the refreshing world of Kingdom work that he made for me.

I am Judas! Yes, I was there as Judas.  When I try to manipulate Jesus into fighting my personal battles in boardrooms and church committee meetings, instead of trusting him to be in charge of his own business. I am Judas, also, when I refuse to accept the unconditional grace of forgiveness, because in my wicked pride I imagine my own sin somehow too unacceptable to be stricken from the record by Christ’s blood.  I, too, throw myself into the empty arms of despair to avoid yielding to this tremendous, alarming salvation offered by Grace.

I stand in the shoes of Pontius Pilate, between a bad choice and a terrible one; when the only satisfactory answer is to wash my hands of Jesus and turn my back on the affliction of my brother. Try not to think about it. Suffer my fitful dreams reminding me that I do not belong to myself anymore.

I am Simon, the Cyrene, who first saw himself as an innocent man carrying the cross of a condemned man. The bit of cross I’ve borne for Christ, just a sliver of it once or twice in my over-stuffed life, soon taught me the depth of my unworthiness. My pride. My condemnation. His innocence. His power to heal. Myself condemned, but for that cross.

I am a Roman soldier. Brutal. Murderous. Indifferent to suffering inflicted both by the world and my own hand. I was unmoved for so many years by the stripes he took for my apathy, my fears, and my spiritual detours. Before I knew him, he interceded for me and waited for me to turn around, surrender, and let him make a new path straight to his heart.

I am every woman who followed Jesus. I am the nameless adulteress, and the unknown woman at the well. Addicted to corruptible things which cannot save, miserable, lost, used, and discounted. Worthy of stoning, perhaps, but instead accepted unconditionally; made Holy by the most intimate yet trustworthy relationship I’ve ever known; strengthened by his stout blood to experience, witness, name, and defy the world’s brutality and oppression.

Last of all the women, I am a mother; steward of two creation miracles of birth. Like Mary, I’m only human. I can’t go where my children will go, although in secret moments I might glimpse their course. Sometimes I’m only capable of knocking lightly at the crowded door of their lives and whispering, “I’m here…your mother is outside. Do not be afraid.”

I am powerless to deliver them from the suffering they face as they take up their own splinter of cross and follow him down their own particular paths. Sometimes I turn away when my heart breaks for the burdens I know I helped to bestow; this legacy of sin I passed along. But God has no grandchildren. He is sufficient to bear their burdens and light their paths with his lamp of salvation.

Yes, I am all of them, and I am there. You are there, too. Today is the most important day. Don’t pass it by on your way to the resurrection celebration.