SHOUT!

A friend of ours has an 8-year-old son who is in the hospital right now with awful sores on the outside and inside of his body. I don't think the doctors have yet determined exactly what they think the illness is, but the boy is in tremendous pain. Yesterday I emailed the friend to tell him he is in our prayers and I can only imagine what he would feel like... I have a 7-year-old son and I'm afraid I would be on the edge of being a basket case if it were me. I also told him something I learned from experience: if you put your trust in Jesus in these kinds of circumstances, He will give you peace. I reminded him of just this promise in Isaiah 26:3. And I mentioned that I knew this from experience...

This past year my wife's mother left this world and went on to be with Jesus before her time. She was 62 years old and healthy; it was a needless, senseless thing that happened to her, and the family was devastated. It was probably the most emotionally difficult week or two that I have ever experienced in my entire life. Five or six months before that, my wife lost a much-loved aunt to cancer. My wife's first name is her mother's, and her second name is this aunt's name. Needless to say, it was an incredibly tough year. But in those times when we thought we were going to be physically ripped apart by emotion, the peace of God was with us. It was unbelievable that there could be a sense of peace in those places in those circumstances, but there was.

When Jesus was on the Earth, he wept with the family when a friend died (John 11:32-35). He had compassion on the sick and hurting (Matthew 14:14). He fed the hungry (Matthew 15:32-37). Jesus felt. He was fully man, and He understood sadness and loss (many commentators speculate that Jesus may have lost His Earthly father Joseph as a child, since Joseph does not appear in accounts of Jesus as an adult although his mother Mary does.) I was thinking this morning about how much I wish I could eradicate suffering just from my one friend's life, not to mention from the entire world. Jesus feels that. I believe that Jesus is waiting with great anticipation for the day when He is told by God, Now is the time, Son. Go bring your bride to me!

The word translated "shout" in the KJV of 1 Thessalonians 4:16 actually means a shout of command more than a shout of, say, joy or excitement. More of a "giddyap!" kind of shout than a "hooray!" type of shout. But I think there is an element of excitement in that shout as well. I think Jesus is so ready to eliminate evil once and for all that He won't be able to keep His voice down. I think God loves us that much!

The Sun

I was wondering today if The Sun exists. I've heard about it all my life, and I do believe in it I guess, and from time to time I've even felt its presence warming me. But I've started to wonder about this whole flaming-ball-of-gas thing. I mean, the ancient Greeks believed that the sun was really a chariot flying across the sky driven by a Titan in a crown. Ancient Egyptians believed that The Sun was the Eye of Ra. Who am I to go against what they believed? Maybe they were right and I was wrong. It's kind of tough to figure out, though, because even people who believe in The Sun don't agree... the Greeks and Egyptians believed The Sun was male, but I hear the Vikings believed The Sun was a woman.

Besides, what about people who live in caves all their lives? For them The Sun doesn't even exist. I mean, I've always been "taught" that life on planet Earth wouldn't be able to exist at all without The Sun, but those cave people live without The Sun their whole lives and they seem to be doing OK. It seems like people who believe in The Sun without reservation are kind of dogmatic and closed-minded.

What I'm really wondering, though, is whether it really matters whether I believe in The Sun or not. If it exists, it exists whether I believe in it or not. If I believe The Sun is a shiny huge grapefruit, and it's actually a shiny huge pool cue ball, I don't automatically change it into a grapefruit. I guess it would be pretty arrogant of me to think I could make The Sun be whatever I wanted, assuming that it does exist up there somewhere. And I'm not even sure that it's possible to prove that The Sun exists. I mean, if The Sun is a king in a chariot, maybe he would hit me with his scepter if I tried to find him. If it's a flaming ball of gas, I would probably catch on fire if I tried to get too close. I guess all I can do is keep trying to find out things about The Sun and maybe I can figure out what the real truth is. What I "think" doesn't really matter if what I think is not fact. The Sun can't possibly be a grapefruit and an eyeball. I'm going to keep searching for clues until I figure out which one it is.

If You Think It

Why is it that "intellectuals" seem to feel such a need to attack Christianity?

This morning I was listening to a CD of a lighthearted sci-fi story that was produced for radio. Every once in a while in the story, there is a little break where two female androids talk about stuff. Often it is silly stuff, like the time they talked about what sheep dream (an homage to the title of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, the short story that the movie Blade Runner was based on). The music bed behind them is some trancelike techno music, with the ultimate effect being that the clips almost have the feel of subliminal advertising or what some might look at as some kind of mild hypnosis. Generally it's fun stuff, but this morning I was surprised to hear the androids say (I'm paraphrasing; I don't have the CD with me):

If you believe it, it is true. For you. If you believe that Jesus is your savior, He is!

The obvious implication being that Jesus as savior exists only to those who are dumb enough to swallow the whole thing. It's all in your mind. The next break with the androids in it talked about "barking up the wrong intellectual tree," accompanied by the sound of dogs barking. (To be fair, the android breaks seldom seem to have any connection with each other, but I wanted to illustrate the cynical humor present in the breaks.)

My question is this: why was Jesus targeted? Why not Mohammed or Shiva or Zeus or Krishna? Why not The Flying Spaghetti Monster, for goodness sakes? My hope is that it's because Christianity is so prevalent in Western civilization. The humor might be less obvious if the joke was about, say, Quetzalcoatl or Ra. But it does make me wonder if the attacks are because Christianity is a big target, or because of the germ of truth that nags in the back of the mind of those who struggle intellectually against God.

By definition God cannot be understood; He is the creator and we are the creation, thus the reality we live in is within and smaller than the reality He lives in, so His reality is difficult or maybe impossible to figure out unless He reveals it to us. Intellectuals like to figure things out (I ought to know, I'm one of them). Maybe smart folks "attack" God because they want to understand but can't, and it makes them afraid.

parent gifting

I've many times heard ministers talking about how when their son or daughter approaches them with a heart of gratitude and love and asks them for something, the child can get whatever he or she wants. This is used to illustrate how God provides us what we need when we ask Him in faith. The whole metaphor seems sort of flawed to me, though... if I had unlimited funds, would I give my son anything he asked me for? If I did, he would wind up spoiled and with no appreciation for any of it! And then again... does God give me anything at all that I ask for? Of course not. If I ask to be president of the moon, it's not likely to happen, at least not until someone LIVES on the moon. If I ask to be the owner of Microsoft... well, someone already owns Microsoft. And then there are the times when we feel we have made perfectly reasonable requests of God, and yet He does not seem to come through. What about those?

So what's my point? I don't exactly know. The Word specifically tells us that God will supply all of our needs... but I don't know that it says He will supply everything we want. I would never withhold food or clothing or shelter or love from my child, but I might withhold candy or a toy in certain situations. Maybe God, as our loving Father, works things out in a similar way. Maybe there's some sort of God-logic to when He answers "want" prayers. But I guess it doesn't hurt to ask, right? "You have not because you ask not" it says!

(I don't really want to be president of the moon, though.)

Spirituality

I've been thinking about what people call "spirituality" for a while now. Particularly this comes up in the arts... musicians, actors, those types. People who have no real understanding of God or religious beliefs. "I'm not religious, but I'm a very spiritual person." This bothers me, because unless you are in a relationship with God, the Bible says that you are dead spiritually. Which means that this "spirituality" has no basis in the real spirit world... it's all human emotion, empathy with other human beings or being in touch with nature, that sort of thing. In the long run, it's not spirituality... it's being human. That's not the same thing.

This becomes dangerous when just the kind of attitude I quoted before comes about: "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." When humanity starts being called spirituality, it leads people to intellectually believe that they are in touch with whatever "spirit" is, and so they are off the hook to figure it out: I don't need your Christianity, they might think, because I'm already very spiritual.

Spirituality is not being in touch with our feelings. It's not being in touch with The Human Race At Large. It is not feeling sympathy for things in nature. It is not a feeling of wonder at a sunrise. Spirituality is being in relationship with God. Those other things might take you somewhere into the neighborhood of spirituality, but they are the means, not the end. Spirituality is, in a nutshell, meeting God and joining His family.

People

Today I was walking down some stairs with a handrail, and a series of thoughts hit me in rapid succession:

1. I wonder who else has had his or her hand on this handrail?
2. Maybe nasty stinky persons... ew.
3. Maybe someone I wouldn't mind being friends with.
4. I wonder if I'd want to hold hands with those persons? I hold hands with lots of different people during prayer time at church.
5. Why would it seem repulsive to touch something someone has touched?
6. Why would it seem repulsive to touch someONE?
7. God is not repulsed by us... by ANY of us. Even the nasty stinky persons.
8. Why is that?
9. Because God doesn't look at the state of our bodies as the final indicator of our worth... He sees the worth he constructed within each of us.

All that before I reached the end of the stairway! Maybe I'm deep or maybe I'm trite, but that's my deep thought for the morning...

White Stag

I was just listening to the Roar of Love album from 2nd Chapter of Acts. The album is based on The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and the last song, "White Stag," is about the hunt for the stag at the end of the book. Interesting how the children, now grown into adults, begin to see landmarks of their previous journey (the lamppost is the main example) but have forgotten what the landmarks are. They follow the signs anyway, and they wind up children in "our" world again. Since the white stag is clearly a symbol for Aslan/Christ (or maybe for the Holy Spirit, since Aslan generally appears in the books as a lion?), the picture that presented itself to me was this: when we grow "old" and have lost sense of the true landmarks of our spiritual journey, sometimes God will lead us into a place where we can become children again.

Food for thought.