The Fuel That Drives Me

I have been learning a great deal lately about the fuel for the Road Home.  It's a huge deal! But first let me ask you a question, dear reader. 

When you have encountered a need in your life, say a wound from your spouse or a son or daughter who refuses to listen and you come to the end of your rope, where do you turn? Whose counsel do you automatically seek? Friends? Pastors or church counselors? A professional counselor? A ministry offering help? All of these are good options I've used myself depending on the question and the circumstances. Yet, when we're done, when we have our answer, or our solution to walk out, don't you feel a certain emptiness about your soul? Don't you feel a pulling of the spirit toward those who gave you the help, desiring a further closeness and connection? 

Some people feel that desire for connection and it becomes a snare to them. They act on it and begin to cross lines, wanting to be friends or closer than that with those who professionally offer help but can't afford to connect in a personal way with every person they help. They are not merely unwilling but they are completely unable to affect a friendship with those who need that connection. If they were to try, they would not have any sort of a life, nor would they be able to continue helping others. 

There is a friend with whom we can connect in just such a way. This way, this need is a very human, understandable and intimate need. It cannot be met by any human. So who is left? Why the One Who created the need. We need a relationship with the Trinity, connecting with God the Father, whose omnipotence and omnipresence allows us to tap an inexhaustible supply of love and grace and peace to sustain us when we are lugubrious, overwrought, devoid and bereft of comfort and hope. We connect to that fantastic source through the person of Jesus Christ Whose death reconciled us to Him and Whose resurrection established His ultimate power over death and the grave. We interface with Jesus by the very real and living Holy Spirit, Whose power to connect and guide and direct and support drives all the wonderful things God does within us. The power of the Holy Spirit in our lives to speak to and through us is marvelous and makes my heart laugh and take joy at how He works. 

Is this real? Am I just babbling on about God? Maybe a little, but it is because I've connected with the very living God of the Angel Armies, the all-powerful One. I connect with Him and when I do, I fuel up! I get enough to go forward. But I don't go far without Him. I can't. Not in these times. The world either kills you or it drives you back to connect with God. The truth is, we all need Him, every bleeding day.☧

Getting Out of the Judging Contest

Judging from a limited perspective is something we humans do with alarming regularity. It starts innocently enough. Parents teaching their children to be clean and orderly tell them to not be messy like so-and-so's kids. The children learn comparisons. You don't want to be like him or her. You want to be well thought of. You want your parents' approval. Most of all, you want their love, and so you learn to make those comparisons. And comparisons are so very tricky, because comparisons invite judgment. 

The problem with judgment is that no matter how informed a person may be, their human perspective is limited and therefore incomplete. Uninformed judgment, no matter who it comes from, no matter the intention, will always wound the subject. We know this to be true because we have all experienced it. The casual remark of a friend, the gossip that manages to find its way back, the angry, heated words of a frustrated adversary or, worse, a frustrated lover, all of these words are usually based on a judgment that is inevitably flawed, carving a wound through our soul as if we were jello. 

It's not that the words are untrue. If they were, there would be no power in them. It's that only enough of the facts fit to yield a fun-house mirror of our reality, just enough truth to make us look ridiculously incompetent or fabulously uninformed or classically unhinged. Sometimes, were it someone else, we'd be tempted to laugh or cry or dismiss it out of hand. But it's not. It's us. It's personal. And the distorted illusion trumps reality yet again in the quest for the final verdict.

But it's not final. It's not even real, if reality is something that we can truly perceive in these baggy, lumpy, fleshy suits that we call the human body at large. No, and the judgment is not yet rendered by the Judge that counts. That happens when we "shuffle off this mortal coil." We will all find that we are to be judged in a review of our time here. Hebrews says, "It is appointed for man once to die and then the judgment."

How long this review lasts is not clear nor is it a "The state versus John Doe" kind of trial. There are no motions to vacate or objections or depositions. It is a recounting of your life with the God of the Universe and whatever you thought, did, or said is on display. There is no wounding here and there is no comparison. It just is what it says on the box, a judgment. 

I don't have my eschatology in final form, nor do I pretend to know what God thinks or what He plans for the end of the age. I do know that this is not the "Valley of decision" judgment where he separates the sheep from the goats of the world--and trust me, you do not want to be reckoned the goat at this award ceremony! Instead, I believe that the end of everyone's life is a natural conclusion for any human and a way for God to personally address all the "what abouts" and "whys" of our lives. I know I will have more than a few whys piled up to review with Him, things that likely are not possible to reckon until the end, when we can see, as Paul writes, "clearly, face to face"

Until then, I have to resist==constantly resist--the temptation to judge others. Because the judgment of others is not something I desire or need. Instead, I need God's help and guidance every day, hour, minute and second. And most of all, I need the grace afforded to me by Jesus and his death on the Cross. The same grace is available to you. You only need lift a finger to take it.☧

Crossing A Finish Line

My baby just turned 21. That's a finish line for me. But it's not the finish line.

You don't ever stop being a dad, even after you die. You become a father at one point and that doesn't stop. You continue in the relationship, showing how to grow old and be who God created you to be and engaging God in a living, loving relationship that we are called to by Jesus. 

It's all about Him, anyway, and His kingdom is made of the same loving relationships that only He can make perfect. As we get older, we don't have to fix our kids. They don't have to fix us. We let the Master we both know work on us. Even if they run away from Him, all we need to do is be loving and let them ask us for what they need, not shoving what we think they need on them. 

Pray for them. Let God go after them. If you want to go all the way, pray God goes after you! ☧

Why Have You Abandoned Me?

It is not widely known, even among Christians, that when Jesus was hanging from the rough, splintered cross, dangling between the heavens and the earth, between God and humanity, bleeding and struggling for air, his anguished cry, "God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" was not just an anxious plea of separation, but a way of quoting the entirety of the psalm begun by these same words. What began with profound loss that no one but Jesus himself can truly and fully know ends ...like this:

Psalm 22 NIV‬‬

[24] For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.

[25] From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly; before those who fear you I will fulfill my vows.

[26] The poor will eat and be satisfied; those who seek the Lord will praise him— may your hearts live forever! [27] All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him, [28] for dominion belongs to the Lord and he rules over the nations. [29] All the rich of the earth will feast and worship; all who go down to the dust will kneel before him— those who cannot keep themselves alive. [30] Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. [31] They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!

https://psalm.bible/psalm-22

From the world's most tortured pulpit, an abused, mangled, scourged lump of flesh wheezes out praise for the I AM. Every bone in his body is intact only so that every nerve can fire messages of utter pain and alarm to his brain. Joint after joint dislocated, heart striving to keep each cell with enough oxygen so that the agony and misery can continue, not able to stop its mad pace even as it too struggles, the body of Jesus must continue until it is utterly spent to the last moment, and in the middle of these moments, he praises God.

No one but Jesus could do that. Utterly worthy is the Lamb who was slain and yet lives forever more!

None of us are unacquainted with pain. We know it, some of us more intimately than others. Physical and emotional pains put tears in our eyes, tears God has promised to wipe from our eyes. This wouldn't be possible without the reckoning Jesus established there outside Jerusalem on Skull Hill. 

He lives now, today. Not even death can keep Jesus down. It helps to remember this on days when I can't get up. All of us live with a disability. Even this psalm points it out to us: "...those who cannot keep themselves alive..." Or as Morrison said, "No one gets out alive." Only Jesus lives. He is still physically alive. No kidding! If it weren't true, why would the psalm point out the difference? Jesus can and does. He laid down his life willingly and then took it back up again. The picture God gives us of baptism, and of Israel passing through the Red Sea. When you pass through the waters (of death), I will be with you, He promises. Only He will never abandon you.