God is not like you

I have a stack of unfinished blog post drafts in my queue. Writing comes harder these days, probably because I don’t have the two- or three-hour uninterrupted stretches of time it usually takes to get my thoughts down coherently on any topic, and also because I’ve been battling a weird sense of the pointlessness of it. It used to feel more like a calling to write out what God had put on my heart. Now I so often feel too small and insignificant to have a voice, when there are hundreds and thousands of other voices speaking at the same time, about the same things. Why not leave it to them?

But I know from many hours spent in the pages of God’s Word that His calling doesn’t have to make sense. It only has to be obeyed.

So even though there’s probably only ten minutes left of this naptime, and even though this might not be written as carefully as usual because of it, and even though someone else is probably out there preaching exactly the same thing at this moment, here’s what has been weighing heavily on me in the last several months:

God is not like you.

I’m hearing Christians justify their voting choices based on “who Jesus would vote for.” I’m noticing that Christians substitute the causes of social justice for the truth of Biblical justice. I’m watching Christians wait on the government to love their neighbor for them, because we’ve forgotten how to do it ourselves.

And the basis of it all seems to be this strange assumption that God has the same priorities that we do, that Jesus would be part of the same political party that we are. Is it becoming more and more shocking each day to consider that God might not actually agree with us on all the opinions we so strongly hold? How dare He?! As my Bible teacher used to say, “God made man in His image, but for generation upon generation, we’ve been trying to make God in ours.”

Did Jesus come as a political activist or as Savior of the world? Does God uphold peace at any cost or truth at any cost? Is love the avoidance of discomfort or the willingness to absorb whatever discomfort it takes to rescue someone else? Should the radical grace of Jesus for the lost inspire pride in one’s lostness or grief over one’s sin?

The answers to these questions seem obvious at a glance, but the words and actions of so many Christians prove just how confused we are about what ought to be basic.

Jesus is nobody’s mascot. He isn’t in your party and He didn’t vote for the person you voted for. He doesn’t celebrate your pride or fear your discomfort. He isn’t too holy to stoop down and save you right where you are in your moment of desperation and He’s not waiting for the government to do His job.

He is not like you. He is not like me. He is not waiting for our counsel or our approval or our opinion. He’s already King, already Creator, already Rescuer.

It’s nothing but grace that He has invited us in.

1 The Mighty One, God, the Lord, has spoken,
And summoned the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting.
2 Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty,
God has shone forth.
3 May our God come and not keep silence;
Fire devours before Him,
And it is very tempestuous around Him.
4 He summons the heavens above,
And the earth, to judge His people:
5 “Gather My godly ones to Me,
Those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice.”
6 And the heavens declare His righteousness,
For God Himself is judge. Selah.

7 “Hear, O My people, and I will speak;
O Israel, I will testify against you;
I am God, your God.
8 “I do not reprove you for your sacrifices,
And your burnt offerings are continually before Me.
9 “I shall take no young bull out of your house
Nor male goats out of your folds.
10 “For every beast of the forest is Mine,
The cattle on a thousand hills.
11 “I know every bird of the mountains,
And everything that moves in the field is Mine.
12 “If I were hungry I would not tell you,
For the world is Mine, and all it contains.
13 “Shall I eat the flesh of bulls
Or drink the blood of male goats?
14 “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving
And pay your vows to the Most High;
15 Call upon Me in the day of trouble;
I shall rescue you, and you will honor Me.”

16 But to the wicked God says,
“What right have you to tell of My statutes
And to take My covenant in your mouth?
17 “For you hate discipline,
And you cast My words behind you.
18 “When you see a thief, you are pleased with him,
And you associate with adulterers.
19 “You let your mouth loose in evil
And your tongue frames deceit.
20 “You sit and speak against your brother;
You slander your own mother’s son.
21 “These things you have done and I kept silence;
You thought that I was just like you;
I will reprove you and state the case in order before your eyes.

22 “Now consider this, you who forget God,
Or I will tear you in pieces, and there will be none to deliver.
23 “He who offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving honors Me;
And to him who orders his way aright
I shall show the salvation of God.”

Psalm 50

I have loved

I have been wanting to post this for months, but have been too afraid - afraid of the pain I knew it would bring up, for myself and for others who have gone through it with me. But for me, writing is part of healing, and so I must write. Even when it hurts.

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It was raining that night. How cliche, I thought at the time, that the same night the world would stop turning, the sky should be weeping.

I had spent that day sprawled awkwardly across some terribly uncomfortable padded chairs in a surgery waiting room while the seconds seemed to pass with horrific hesitation, as if they wanted at all costs to avoid advancing all the way to that dark, rainy moment in which everything would change. I was frustrated by them at the time. Now I wish they had tried harder.

I remember the ringtone, startling me out of my sleepiness while I was trying to listen to the Book of Job on audio. The mile marker glared green in the headlights - 54. Then the voice, in which I failed to read the shock - the stress - the pain.

So when he said it, I was not ready.

"Grandma B passed away."

What?!

I said it out loud into the phone, just like that, with a note of hysteria - I was not ready. Could never be ready.

With Grandma B on our wedding day, four years ago.

We still had almost an hour to drive in the pouring rain and the dark, and I remember I cried the whole way, though it seems odd to think of it now. Why did I cry, since I did not believe what I had heard? Why, for nights on end after that, did my whole body seem to heave with sobs when I knew it couldn't be true? Grandma B was simply home at her apartment in Goldendale, and I would see her the next time I visited.

But eventually, something shifted, and belief set in - and with belief came something worse than tears, worse than sadness.

It was anger - and fear.

I was so angry, not at her for leaving us, not even at God for taking her, but at the fact that someone who had only ever wanted to bring joy into the room had been forced to cause such pain. She wouldn't have wanted to do that. She would hate that we were all broken because of her.

And I was so afraid, for though I finally believed she had gone, I did not - I do not - believe she is dead. I know that the brilliant spirit of my Grandma B could not be quenched by something so feeble as death, but I feared, deep down in my clenched gut, that wherever she was, she wasn't okay. Was she in pain? Was she lonely? Was she afraid?

I just wanted to be able to call her on the phone and ask her if she was okay.

The denial and the sadness were hard, but the fear was excruciating. I had expected God to seem near when I walked through the Valley of the Shadow, but instead He seemed unreachable, just like Grandma B.

But He did not leave me alone.

There were nights when I asked Him to stand right beside me and hold my hand while I tried so hard to fall asleep, and He did. He touched my dreams with a beautiful vision of Grandma B's smiling face, a thousand times happier than even the happiest I'd ever seen her on earth, and I knew that she is okay. And one Sunday morning in church, some ten days after her funeral, while we sang the words "worthy is the Lamb who was slain," He showed me the heavenly throngs joining with us around the Throne - and she was there. In that moment, at last, I knew peace.

The days after that rainy night sank deeper into the darkness than I have ever been, for more reasons than one. Now that we've reached midsummer, I find myself spending hours of every day outside under the sun, as if to force myself to believe that life is growing lighter again, and that perhaps the world did not stop turning after all.

I am learning that grief is no five-step process - it's just a tangle of unpredictable emotions that ebb and flow. I am learning that my God can be trusted to hold my world in His hands, and to work in deep and invisible ways - even in the ways I least expect Him to. I am learning not to let myself keep up the pretense of being "fine" for too long, even though it's easier - because sometimes the healthier thing is to sit down and write; to open up the wound again for a cleaning, even though it requires me to relive the pain.

We will gather together for our family vacation this week. It will be the first one we spend without her, and it will be hard for us all.

Grief is the price of love, it has been said. And I think, in the end, it's a small price to pay for how I have loved - and been loved by - that extraordinary lady, my Grandma B.

do not be overcome

Some days I am overcome by the sheer quantity of sin and evil in the world. It's as if Satan took a broad brush dipped in black paint and made a few heavy strokes across the surface of the earth, sucking away all the color and light and life from God's beautiful Creation and replacing it with death.

And it's not just a generalized darkness - maybe that's why it hurts so much. Some of it is so terribly personal. So terribly close. The oozing black paint seems to find its way into every crevice, even the most sacred spaces of our lives.

It makes me cry for the children - the innocent ones who enter into a world that immediately stains them and batters them and breaks them. Before they are even old enough to fight back, they've already been made slaves to sin and the ever-willing flesh. Some of them never escape.

And some of them - some of us - are set free, only to keep going back again and again to that addictive black bondage.

I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?

Romans 7:21-24

Wretched men and women that we are - stained from birth with the long-reaching after effects of Satan's paintbrush, wanting to walk in the freedom that comes from God and His Spirit, and yet still ravaged by the war of our two natures within us. We have been freed from guilt and judgment, but who will free us from the evil that still resides in our bodies of death? Who will scrub away all that wicked black ink?

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin. Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

Romans 7:25-8:4

A flicker of light

This might be one of the most incredible passages in the New Testament, and I think it's too easy to miss with the chapter break in the middle of it, so I like to read it straight through: "Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin. Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

What honesty, from a man we all probably consider a super-Christian. Paul the Apostle admits that evil still lives inside of him, and that his fleshly desires do not align with his spiritual ones; that he is wretched and helpless, but for the gift of God. The two opposing natures are still at war for as long as he awaits glory, but safe in the freedom of Christ's sacrifice, there is no condemnation.

We come into the world already stained by evil and we grow into adulthood already broken by it. The world is, indeed, black. And yet what is this we see in Paul? A flicker of light!

Later in Romans, there's a short little verse that caught my eye: "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good" (Romans 12:21).

The blackness seems suffocating. It would be easy to be overcome. Even God could have chosen to let Satan snuff His Creation out - could have decided it was easier than mustering up His mighty attributes of love, grace, and mercy to save an evil humanity from the dark.

But He was not overcome by evil. He overcame the evil with good.

He sent Jesus - His Son - to die as the only sin offering powerful enough to set us free from condemnation and slowly-but-surely, over lifetimes and beyond, scrub all that black out of each one of our hearts.

And as He scrubs Paul, and Paul candidly testifies of God's ongoing work, that little flicker of light grows and multiplies.

walk as children of light

It would be easy to be overcome by the evil we all see around us (and in us) every day - especially the stuff that hits us close to home, or stabs like a poisoned knife straight into our hearts. But with a little more effort and a lot more sacrifice, we have the option to overcome evil instead - not with our own might or determination or fearlessness, but simply with good. Not a spineless "good" that says anything goes, but the fierce kind of good that makes up the merciful and unconditional love which both "exposes" the deeds of darkness (Ephesians 5:10) and "covers a multitude of sins" (1 Peter 4:8).

This kind of good is hard, even excruciating work. Sometimes it means that we join with God in the sanctification-scrubbing of the saints (John 13). Sometimes it means confrontation or confession to bring light into the dark places. Sometimes it means forgiving a betrayal that seems impossible.

Always, it will require participation in a Christ-oriented body and a refusal to follow the comfortable call of isolation and complacency. Paul didn't have to confess to the hidden evil inside himself, but if he hadn't, where would we find that flicker of light to cling to when we feel that the darkness might choke us to death, both from within and without?

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One final thought: if you read the account of Creation in Genesis 1, you will find that there is only one thing that God did not have to create: the darkness. Darkness is default. But therein lies its weakness, for it is vulnerable to be driven away the very moment that God speaks and the Light is revealed.

For you were formerly darkness, but now you are Light in the Lord; walk as children of Light (for the fruit of the Light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth), trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord. Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them; for it is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret.  But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light.

Ephesians 5:8-13