not so fast

Hey Church. We’ve got something so wrong, and I don’t think the Spirit is gonna let me sleep until I share some truth with yall. I pray that our eyes can be opened to what the Bible proclaims instead of blurred by what the church-going masses over the centuries have accepted as custom.

Ash Wednesday is tomorrow, and I’m struck with a question. Do we really GET Lent?? A lot of us assume that it’s a time right before Easter that is meant to make us suffer like Jesus did. But guess what? Jesus wore thorns on his head, got spit in the face, and died slowly with nails through His hands and feet. Oh, you’re giving up chocolate? Nice. Our Savior never sinned, but He paid for every sin. Here we are complaining about paying a little extra for gas these days…I don’t think we’re really ready to take on the concept of paying for the sins of the entire human race. Much less, paying for it with our own blood. The beautiful thing is that we don’t have to because He did it for us. And an even MORE beautiful thing is that we can never possibly match His sacrifice!

I believe that when we “give up” distractions that pull us away from the Cross, God can meet us in our wimpy “sacrifices” and teach us powerful lessons through the process of fasting from cravings of the flesh. But God doesn’t rejoice when my head is throbbing from a caffeine headache due to fasting coffee…He desires for my heart to take one look at Jesus and for my knees to hit the floor and for my entire LIFE to be lived in “obedience that comes from faith” (Romans 1:5). Not just 40 days right before Easter, but every day of my life, of your life, of our lives together, should be a time of fasting.

Does that mean you have to give up dessert forever?? Thank the Lord, NO. It’s not a physical fast, but one of the heart. Listen to what God says in Isaiah 58: “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice, and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter — when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?”

Did you know this piece of truth was there??! I didn’t. I’ve been in the Church for eighteen years and I’ve always believed I had to give up chocolate cake to “get closer to God” before I could really understand or appreciate Easter. Truth changes everything. According to God in Isaiah, the fasting He commands spells it out clearly that I must break chains, cook meals, share shelter, give away clothes, and love the family He has placed around me. So pretty much, I can start obeying Him by giving away every ounce of myself to others for God’s glory. It still doesn’t compare, but God’s kind of fasting is getting a teensy bit closer to Jesus’ sacrifice, don’t you think?

My world is officially turned upside-down. Yet there’s ANOTHER beautiful thing that should not be overlooked before we buckle up and move on into the Lent season. Get this: the Isaiah passage doesn’t end in commands. As it continues, God actually promises that if you fast in these ways out of obedience from faith, “then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer, you will cry for help, and He will say: Here am I.” You know what that sounds like to me? It sounds like we will be resurrected from our broken, self-serving, disobedient lives in order to point to God’s glory…maybe reflecting how JESUS was resurrected from death in order to point to God’s glory.

I hope this new perspective on fasting blows your mind to a gazillion pieces! Mine most definitely is. If you’re still debating right now whether to give up facebook or your iPod for Lent, go read Isaiah 58 for yourself and let it change you. Let’s see where the Spirit takes us in this. Maybe we’ll still be led to give up physical possessions and comforts, but maybe our hearts will finally learn to LOVE through this Lent, this sacrifice, this obedience, this faith.

Hallelujah?? Yes. Hallelujah.

why i like the empty ones

They say you can tell a lot about a man by whether he sees “the jar” as half-empty or half-full. People ponder over this concept, trying to squeeze out a bit of depth from everyday life by determining how they personally perceive this abstract jar and its contents. But I hate thinking about a half-full, half-empty imaginary jar. I hate looking at life like that. “The jar” is just an analogy, right? So that means I, as a human being capable of original thought, have the prerogative to recreate the idea for myself if I so choose. Guess what? I so choose.

First of all, what is this jar’s symbolism? Is it time? Is it success? Is it life? I’ve decided that for me, it is my soul. It holds all the experiences, dreams, and desires that God has made mine. I can see my jar, but I cannot directly control how much it contains. My God is the chief force that changes how empty or how full my jar is, because He designed the jar in the first place, and is the sole proprietor. It may not seem fair that I cannot fill it as I please, since it is my jar. Even so, I have been given the responsibility to set my jar in good places where it can catch the splashes of godly overflow, and glean the dripping joy and wisdom off of people placed in my path. Sometimes I look around seeking this overflow, yet cannot find it on my own. It is then I remember that I can always run to the Constant Fountain to top me off with “streams of living water.” All I have to do is tell Him I am thirsty and hand over my jar. Not that I have to give Him permission! He just wants to see me surrender to Him what is already His.

Now that we have established and understood the foundations of our new soul-jar analogy, let’s take a peek back at the old, sad one. If “the jar” the world talks about is only filled up halfway, someone’s soul is missing out. To me, the halfway watermark in an unbeliever’s jar gives off a vibe of mediocrity, unfulfilled potential, and settling for the average. It could also mean the jar is leaking, letting life slowly drip away. Maybe the jar was carelessly knocked over and spilled due to ignorance of the treasure inside. I pity the people who blindly accept the half-full/half-empty jar. Do they know that they are destined for more than simply gawking at it, debating whether it’s half-empty or half-full? STOP just staring at the jar!! You can’t fill it up, but there is One who can.

The heartbreaking fact is that some of these people don’t even know they are thirsty. Some of them even want their jar to remain at the halfway point, because living an “okay” life is safer than one that is dry and dreary or too good to be true. Others see that they are not near as full as they could be, but they actually believe they can find water on their own. “Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights who does not change like shifting shadows.” (James 1:16-17).

Now that I’ve driven this whole concept way out of proportion, you very well know that I don’t like the mental image of half-empty/half-full jars. But I’m going to let you in on a secret about myself: I don’t like full jars either. According to our new analogy of the jar symbolizing a soul, it should be comforting and contenting to picture a jar full of life and living water, right?! As we all can testify, however, I’m a little kooky.

Even though I believe that jars simply brimming with life, love, and the pursuit of happiness signify a time of abundant blessing from God, full jars make my doubting heart fear what’s next. I trust that God’s plan is the only plan to trust, but that does not mean I trust His plan to be smooth sailing forever. If my jar is overflowing, it’s “as good as it’s gonna get” here on this earth. It can only get worse from there, and I know what “worse” feels like. And that’s why full jars scare me. I know it won’t be my turn to overflow for long, because God will soon have more to teach me by draining me back down to the lower levels. I may enjoy the euphoria of being full, but I won’t find hope there.

So where do I find hope?? The empty jars. When they are completely empty, the only thing left over is the hope of what is to come, of what is to fill them up. They are so bone-dry that no memory of joy or grief can survive. They can never be more empty; they can never be lower than this. They can only hope for God’s grace to drench them once again. To an empty jar, even one single, long-awaited drop of fresh life is a reawakening, a beautiful reason to rejoice. “O God, You are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” (Psalm 63:1). I love to witness how my own emptiness points to God’s glory as I celebrate that only Christ Jesus can ever fill me up.

Yeah. I definitely like the empty jars best.

digging

I dug up the past today. I don’t know why. It was hiding in my filing drawer – that overflowing, allegedly organized black hole of papers holding everything from traffic tickets to bank statements. It’s that drawer I crack open every time some leaf of paper makes it into my hands so I can cram stuff in and be done with it. Once something makes it to the filing drawer, it rarely sees sunshine again. But… I got a paper organizer thingy for Christmas, and of course I needed papers to put inside!

Thumbing through my crumpled airplane boarding passes to Jamaica, I tried my best to avoid that file marked “spiritual stuff.” I wasn’t dreading what was inside that folder…prayer lists, scribbled snippets of favorite Scripture, church notes…but I was most certainly dreading the reality that I knew would slap me in the face when I looked back over the past couple years: that God and Time and Life have changed me, right under my very nose. I’ve been picking up on little hints that I’m a new creation, but I hadn’t seen the whole past chapter of my story all spelled out in black and white. And I didn’t really want to. Looking back might prove God’s plan to be an immaculate mountain and mine to be a crummy crumb. Self-righteous control freaks can’t deal with that. However, the organizer in me trumped the freak. I got out my shovel, and went digging.

Why on earth have I saved so many church bulletins over the years? One might say they’re all the same: pretty cover displaying the sermon series, with the inside delineating the call to worship, Apostle’s Creed, and sermon outline. They’re not all the same though. As I was sorting them by date, I thought about how each individual one (habitually creased in half and tossed in the drawer on Sunday afternoon) marks a time where I had sat and soaked in the grace of the gospel. The older ones are filled with silly notes written back and forth between me and my brother or between me and my friends, but the ones from this past year or so make it look like I was listening, really hanging on every word. I was. And still am, increasingly more so. But there are some patterns I accidentally dug up when I lay out these countless bulletins all in order. Patterns that made me remember; patterns that made me cry.

The bulletins from last winter show my true interest and enthusiasm for what was going on during the church service. I was taking thorough notes on the sermons, jotting down inspiring song lyrics I heard. But then in early spring of 2010, it looks like I got bored. Sure, maybe I forgot to bring a pen, but regardless, for about five weeks in a row the bulletins are almost bare, with just a couple shallow notes trickling down the margins. Sitting on my bedroom floor this afternoon and rereading the various sermon outlines, I scolded myself for not making an effort to connect with God’s truth during those months. You may say it’s not that big of a deal, that everyone goes through spiritual dry places, but it rips me up inside to realize that Truth was being spoken straight at me in a time I would need it most, yet I let it slip right through one ear and straight out the other.

In late April, the bulletins reach a gap. My friend Skylar flew away to Jesus on April 27^th, and I took a short sabbatical from corporate worship while my grief process festered. I had my faith group supporting me on Wednesday nights at church (and all the time, really), so I remained steady in the Word during those worst weeks of my life, but sitting through the Sunday service felt way too routine after my world had just been dumped upside-down. The gap stretches till June, when the broken pieces of my heart found their way back to my family’s favorite pew, back to note-taking on the trusty bulletins, and back to falling in love with God’s love revealed at Christ Community Church as I rebuilt my life on the joy of the Lord amidst tragedy. I can’t help but wonder, now that I see the full picture, why God allowed me to daydream the service away in the month before Skylar fell, instead of thumping me on the head and preparing my heart for the sorrow and suffering. I’ll never totally understand His reasoning, but He likes it that way.

Well, a pattern really isn’t a pattern unless it repeats itself. There’s a shorter gap in late September, when the saltiest salt from the Dead Sea was poured into my wounds of grief. I had another funeral to attend, another friend to say good-bye to, in that very same funeral home, in that very same cemetery. This bulletin gap was not near as long as the first, because suicide was no new tragedy to my soul. I didn’t spend weeks in grief for Chris. I was back in my Sunday seat after a week or two, still hanging on the pastor’s words like before. I couldn’t sing the worship songs for a while, but my heart and soul were fully present in my worship of God. My flesh simply refused to express it. My lips wouldn’t budge when the band played “How Great is Our God.” I firmly believed that simple and humbling truth, but I couldn’t shout it at the top of my lungs. I stood with my church family and swayed back and forth with the peace God gave me as a dance partner through this new episode of Loss.

I think it’s safe to say that I’m relieved to turn the page on that chapter of my life. Not so I can forget the shadow of death, but so that I can gather up my new strength, my new peace, my new self that has come so far and seek new direction for the new places God, Time, and Life will take me next. It’s so good to have that filing drawer organized, but most importantly, to have dug up the “spiritual stuff” instead of letting myself take the easy way out by burying it all deeper. I pray to never see another repetition of that painful pattern, or another gap in paying my full attention to God’s wisdom in church. It’s out of my hands, though, isn’t it? I’ll rest in the fact that it’s all in my Lord’s hands, and that His hands have already paved the next road I’ll take.

Speaking of hands, it’s time for me to go wash the dirt off of mine. It’s been a lot of digging tonight.

baby-blue

Hooking up the ancient handy-cam to the TV and scanning through the monotonous Christmas pageants and birthday parties, I sit cross-legged on the floor and soak up the memories and color and life flying by on the screen. And then…there it is. A scene I’ve been subconsciously searching for. I didn’t think I was looking for anything in particular, but my finger hits the “play” button and a gentle smile sneaks across my lips. It’s a close-up of me in the frame – a much younger me – with stringy, blonde hair and a bright, timid gaze. The scene shows my eyes dripping with innocence and laughter. That’s what I want to see. That’s what I want to go back to. Maybe if I shrink two-and-a-half feet, lose 83 pounds, and rewind my mind back to when I was five, things can all be better.

Back then, words were just becoming real to me as I taught myself to read. Back then, faith was just becoming real to me as I stood on the pew in my shiny, black church shoes and hummed along to the hymns. Back then, sorrow was just becoming real to me as I watched cancer steal my uncle and Texas steal my “most bestest” friend. Back then, life was just becoming real to me as the azaleas, Bradford pears, maples, and tulips showed me the seasons. All these things were real before, but my brazen baby-blues were just barely beginning to open.

My eyes still have the blue, but I’m afraid the baby part
is lost. They’re now wide open to lessons of words, faith, sorrow, and life. The bittersweet aspect of having eyes wide open is that light is more blinding and dark is more lonely that way. I see the world around me and feel unspeakable joy, and I see the world around me and feel unspeakable grief. These eyes have been emptied out, calloused, shattered, and built back strong. Strong and wide open. Strong, wide open, and alive. But if you look real closely, past the abyss, the fire…you might catch a glimpse of something that has faded, but that will never completely wash away. You might catch a glimpse of baby-blue.