no, you didn’t miss service

Christmas day.

I was missing Kansas City, and my iPod was completely out of juice. So I started scouring my parents’ house for some music that I might find decent, only to come up with The Best Of DooWop which was hidden behind Neil Diamond’s Christmas Hits. I finally came across Isaac’s talk on Wonder which I had burned to CD and mailed to my mom a couple months ago. Let me recreate the mood:

A child kicks its legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough...It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again," to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again," to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. —G. K. Chesterton in "Orthodoxy" [1909]

As I listened to Isaac’s words again, I was reminded of a story from last July. I was visiting my best friend’s crazy family with her in southern Missouri, and we were in the middle of supper. Not just any supper, but Sally’s birthday supper. We were at Sweetwater Farm, sitting around multiple tables in a farmhouse with no windows—only screens. As we sang Happy Birthday to Sally and chowed down on leftovers from the Fourth Of July Cookout we’d had the day before, a thunderstorm raged outside, spitting water on us intermittently as we enjoyed the light show and the thunder. Cue Caroline’s story.

Caroline was a woman I’d met just the day before, a vibrant and loud tiny little thing with a husband and four children with French names. She lived near New Orleans (this was when New Orleans still existed in all its magic) in a house with a backyard that she frequently confined her four vibrant and loud children to. Her story was of one evening when the kids were particularly making her wish that she’d chosen a life of celibacy. The day had been ridiculous, culminating with a supper at which no one would eat what was put in front of them, complete with screaming and poking and all sorts of usual sibling fighting. Her husband promptly walked off the set to his office after eating, leaving her with a frustration level about to boil over. She told her kids, “Look. I’m going to do the dishes, and I want to do them in complete peace and quiet. Go outside, and I don’t want ANY of you to talk to me until I’m done.”

They all ran outside and as she started to relieve her stresses in a sinkful of dishwater, she decided that she’d just take extra long to finish the dishes that particular evening. Just as she was starting to return to a level of normalcy, her middle son—the next to youngest—entered the kitchen determined. “Mom, I know you said you didn’t want to be bothered, but you HAVE to come see this RIGHT NOW.”

She took a deep breath and said, “I told you I didn’t want to be talked to.”

“I know,” he said, still determined, “but this is REALLY IMPORTANT.”

She dried her hands and let out an audible sigh of frustration. She followed her son out the door and into the backyard where she saw her only daughter dangling from a Y in the tree branches from her foot. Caroline started down the steps quickly yelling, “Honey, it’s okay! I’m coming to get you!” Her son grabbed her by the back of her t-shirt and stopped her. Pointing beyond his sister he said, “Not HER, Mom, the sunset.”

Wonder. May we never overlook a sunset ever again. If God says, “Do it again,” every evening, we’d do well to take notice.

i love lamp?

"My thoughts are completely different from yours," says the LORD. "And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9

Not long ago I was reading Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew, and related to his description of what most of us raised in the mainline American church system have been taught to believe that Jesus is: The Flannelgraph Jesus. The one that we learned about in Sunday School—our teachers using felt cutouts to show us Jesus with a lamb over his shoulders, Jesus engaged in a group hug with five children, Jesus and his glowing halo with his hands folded smiling at a lame person on a mat. This Jesus was fair-skinned, blond, blue-eyed, and wore Birkenstocks and a white bathrobe. What an absolutely ridiculous picture of projection.

I was eating breakfast at 1:00 am with a few friends at Denny’s a couple days ago, and one of them said something about his mother reading one of the gospels and saying, “That Jesus guy really wasn’t very nice.” Another friend, who is actually quite a new Christian, said, “Jesus didn’t come here to be nice. He came to save us.” Her picture is way more accurate than my other friend’s mom’s picture, one in which she wanted Jesus to carry a lamb on his shoulders and play hopscotch with children. I think that seems to be a pretty common picture of projection.

Last week another friend was lamenting the slow and slippery journey of his friend who is searching for something more. He was telling me that his friend kept saying things like, “Well, my God wouldn’t allow suffering in this world.” “My God wouldn’t expect me to give up this or that.” He kept starting sentences with, “My God...” He was projecting, too.

And the bible has a word for that: Idolatry.

When we make God in our own image, we aren’t actually worshipping God, we’re worshipping a false image of God. And in this age, as Isaac pointed out tonight, we are no longer left to projecting. We have Jesus—who is the image of God, who is fully God.

But leave it to us to have a very accurate picture of who God is right there in the bible, and continue to project. To pick and choose which things we like about Jesus, and discount the rest as if we’re glossing over the fact that Uncle Eugene chews with his mouth open at family gatherings.

God has always been very honest with us about who he is. Let’s ask that he give us the conviction to always seek him as he is, to dive faithfully into scripture and prayer to see God as he’s revealed himself to us—not in the movies, not in tradition, not in popular theology...but in Jesus.

fixing the tongue

Gentle words bring life and health; a deceitful tongue crushes the spirit. Proverbs 15:4 seems to be the “moral of the story” that Jarrod told about what it’s like to realize in a moment that you’ve been crushing someone else’s spirit by simply using words. It brought to my mind what Tom Brawner said once, almost offhandedly, during the middle of a prayer. He said, “And God? Help us to remember that the person to our left and the person to our right is an intentional creation.”

An intentional creation. That has stuck with me through some of my most impatient moments. And thank God, because if I were to judge myself by the same measuring stick that I sometimes use to judge others, I would fall painfully short. It’s a good thing that I have no business judging. I know for a fact that I can be (and usually am) annoying, impatient, inconsiderate, and inappropriate. I have plenty to work on in and of myself rather than using my energy to unfold and analyze other people’s shortcomings.

We’re all snobs about something. I get very sideways and cringe visibly when people mix up the use of “your” and “you’re.” I correct people when they misquote a movie. But I also realize that most often my clothes don’t match and if you mention anything about politics in my presence my eyes will glaze over. We’re also all sorely incompetent at something about which someone else is a snob.

So what do we do? How do we have real community if we’re all such snobs? Jarrod said it, we love. It’s a loaded word. And when we don’t feel love, then we do love. If the noun isn’t there, then we verb. Let me clarify: if I’m having a very hard time feeling all gushy and gooey inside for (insert name here), then instead of “biting and devouring” said person, I need to love him or her. Perform an act of kindness for him. Talk nicely behind her back. Build the person up in the presence of our peers. Focus on something that I admire about that person’s character. Our focus changes our perspective very quickly. All of a sudden, we want to apologize. All of a sudden, we feel love.

God is very gracious in this sense. He knows us all too well. He knows that even though he created us with a beautiful diversity, that we will get quickly annoyed with our differences. In my experience, if I make an effort—if I walk one mile, God will walk ninety-nine and meet me. He’s put love in my heart for people I never thought I’d be able to be in the same room with. Real love. Like, want-to-hang-out-with-them love.

So, is there someone in your life that you have dripping from your deceitful tongue? I’ve named mine. And I’m going to make intentional efforts to love this intentional creation. God never said community would be easy, but he did say it would be worth it.