His Love is Better than Whine

I know, I know…I can hear many of you saying to yourselves, “That’s “w-i-n-e, not whine”.  Well, perhaps it’s both.  But I’d like to speak to the first spelling. 

By a show of hands, (you’re not really raising your hands now, are you?) how many of you have something to complain about?  Come on, you over there at your desk, why aren’t you raising your hand?  You know that lower back pain you’ve had for a few years now?  Go ahead, whine.  How ‘bout you over there with your car in desperate need of some over needed work?  Whine away.  And what about you?  (You know who you are!)  You have been losing your temper more and more these days, and, well, everybody’s acting so stupid around you, you have every right to…go ahead…whine away.  (How many of you fit all three examples?)

Here’s some non-news.  The little things will always change.  Car troubles, mounting bills, age related back pain, weight related back pain.  (Double ouch!), intellectually challenged people all around…always will be in a state of flux.  But here’s more non-news…The Big things will never change.  God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s grace.  Rocket science?  Hardly.  Just a friendly reminder.

I feel that I have a lot to complain about.  Even my hair hurts.  The past 5 years,  I’ve been in and out of doctor’s offices and hospitals with 3 heart operations.  I have 2 wonderful children still at home; the youngest is a chronic care child.  He’s perpetual energy and movement.  He requires constant observation, and is SOOOOOO strong, that I, more times than not, find myself sitting on the floor, having lost in the collision that was him and me!  A lady once told me her definition of parenthood.  She said it could be summed up in four words.  “You’re always wiping something”.  Well with Dylan, that is even more so.  I travel ALL the time.  Each year the print gets smaller.   Did I mention that my hair hurts?  All my trousers are shrinking!  Shirts too.  Have I mentioned my hair?

About 15 years ago I heard then 700 Club co-host Ben Kinchlow speak in Toronto, Canada.  He talked about perspective, and our problem with problems.  He took a dime out of his pocket.  He told us to close one eye.  Then he said to hold the dime at arms length up to the sky.  He said that the dime represented our troubles, the things that we complain about.  The size of the dime in comparison to the vastness of the sky is really the way our problems should look to us who believe in the scandalous grace of Jesus.  However, he said that most of us pull the dime right up against our one open eye.  As we do, it becomes the only thing we can see.  I now ALWAYS carry a dime around with me.

What’s your “dime”?  Is it finances?  Cancer?  Heart problems?  Job?  Spouse? Hurting hair?  Hold it at arms length against the vastness of who God is. 

Many years ago Stuart Hamblen wrote a gospel song called “How Big is God”.  The chorus said this:

How big is God, how big and wide His vast domain

To try to tell these lips can only start

He's big enough to rule His mighty universe

Yet small enough to live within my heart.

Believe me, His love is better than whine!  Ten cents says I can prove it!

God Lives in the T.V. Room

I envy Dylan. My son Dylan thinks God lives in the T.V. room.  Or so it seems as I watched him play and laugh with the “invisible” friend in the T.V. room.

I giggled softly and tiptoed off to my own room.  Dylan's unique perspectives are often a source of amusement.  But that night something else lingered long after the humor.  I realized yet again the very different world Dylan lives in.

He was born 20 years ago, mentally disabled as a result of a duplicate gene in Chromosome #1.  Apart from his size, there are few ways in which he is a young adult.

He reasons and communicates with the capabilities of a 1-year-old, and he always will. He will probably always believe that God lives in the T.V. room;

that Santa Claus is the one who fills the space under our tree every Christmas and that airplanes stay up in the sky because angels carry them.

I often wonder if Dylan realizes he is different.

Is he ever dissatisfied with his monotonous life?

Up before dawn each day, off to school, home to eat snacks, dinner, and the hectic activity of his family, and later to bed.

He never seems dissatisfied.

He lopes out to the SUV every morning at 7:35, eager for a day of simple schoolwork.

He wrings his hands excitedly while the water boils on the stove before dinner…it may be “the same ol’ thing”, but pasta’s just as enchanting for Dylan as if it were the first time.

And so goes his world of daily rituals.

He doesn't know what it means to be discontent.

He doesn’t cry.

His life is simple.

He will never know the entanglements of wealth or power, and he does not care what brand of clothing he wears or what kind of food he eats.  His needs have always been met, and he never worries that one day they may not be.  He’s never learned how to doubt!  That’s right…doubt is a learned behavior.  Probably based on expectation.  But all Dylan knows is that if he’s hungry, his father feeds him…if he’s cold…his father clothes him…if he needs anything at all, His father is right there to make sure his needs are attended to.

His hands are diligent.  Dylan is never as happy as when he is working.  When he drops marbles into a bucket, or plays with a skipping rope, his heart is completely in it.

He does not shrink from a job when it is begun, and he does not leave a job until it is finished.  But when his tasks are done, Dylan knows how to relax.

He is not obsessed with his work or the work of others.  His heart is pure.  I imagine he believes everyone tells the truth, promises must be kept, and when you are wrong, you apologize instead of argue.  I believe he’s never sinned.

Free from pride and unconcerned with appearances, Dylan is not afraid to cry when he is hurt, angry or sorry.  He is always transparent, always sincere.  And I believe he trusts God.

Not confined by intellectual reasoning, when he comes to God, he comes as a child.  Dylan seems to know God – to really be friends with Him in a way that is difficult for an "educated" person to grasp.

God seems like He’s Dylan’s closest companion.

In my moments of doubt and frustrations with my faith, I envy the security Dylan has in his simple faith.

It is then that I am most willing to admit that he has some divine knowledge that rises above my mortal questions.

It is then I realize that perhaps he is not the one with the handicap.  I am.  My obligations, my fears, my pride, and my circumstances - they all become disabilities when I do not trust.

Who knows if Dylan comprehends things I can never learn?  After all, he has spent his whole life in that kind of innocence, maybe praying in the dark and soaking up the goodness and love of God.  And one day when the mysteries of heaven are opened and we are all amazed at how close God really is, I will realize that God heard the simple communication of a boy who believed that God lived in the T.V. room.  But Dylan won't be surprised at all!!!!

He hasn’t a voice…at least not with words.  But I have become his voice.  His impact on this world has been profound, if only served by the fact that I’m his father, and he’s my son. 

Let me use this example that struck me after I heard the news of Dylan’s diagnosis:  It’s like we had airline tickets to Paris….you know…the trip of a lifetime….returning to the city we loved so much…familiar…and the great anticipation of “doing Paris” one more time.  But when we’re landing, the pilot comes over the speakers, and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, in about 15 minutes we’ll be landing in Amsterdam”.  I become agitated and indignant, and say out loud, “What? Amsterdam?  We didn’t buy tickets to Amsterdam!  We are going to Paris.  This is totally unacceptable!  I didn’t pay for a trip to Amsterdam, I paid for a trip to Paris”!  We land, and disembark, and I’m livid…and heartbroken….we had planned for months for this trip.  As we leave the airport, ALL I can think about is Paris, and my unbridled anger that we are NOT there.  Then, as we travel away from the airport, and begin to drive through the lush and beautiful countryside of Holland, I see the fields of tulips…the rosy cheeked children playing….the awe striking beauty of this unexpected destination.  I am resolved.  This place is beautiful.  It’s not what I paid for….not what I planned for….not what I wanted!  But it, too, was beautiful. Paris was NOT going to happen on this trip….we were blessed to be in Holland, and the beauty here was to be learned and appreciated.

It's Time to Post this Again.....

It's one of my faves.....so I'm posting it once again, and aiming to live it out even more:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous”? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Marianne Williamson

Have Faith

Have Faith, Pursue truth!

In the coming days, week’s, months, as you encounter ideas and situations that seem a challenge to your faith or a challenge to Christianity itself, how do you think you’ll respond?  Will you continue in your faith?  If so…how will you do that?

There are two paths that I hope you don’t take…One is to give up…to easily be defeated.  (Sometimes people abandon their faith)

The other is to retreat.  Sometimes we run; we decide to just stick with what we know and with people who think the same as we do. We ignore the challenge, or dismiss it easily.  At least we keep our faith, but I think the result is a weak and less effective faith.

In the face of challenging ideas, to give up or to retreat, while both are very real temptations, to choose them is to choose NOT to do the hard work of faith.  And it’s hard work – it’s hard to honestly and seriously wrestle with an idea or challenge.

To do the hard work of faith, to be a genuine person of faith in this world, I think that amongst other things, this involves two key qualities:  humility and courage. (And perhaps in a different way than you might think) Humility, to realize we may need to change a belief that needs to change; and courage, to look our questions and doubts in the eye, and not to look away.

In thinking about how to encourage you in your faith, two people come to mind: Galileo and Thomas.

I think about Galileo a lot.  He lived at a time when most everyone around him believed something that he figured out was wrong, and he was persecuted for it.  You probably know that he, along with Copernicus, discovered that the sun is stationary and the earth moves around it.  The church leaders and most Christians at that time were convinced that the earth was the centre of things, and that the sun revolved around it.  People had believed this for centuries, and they firmly believed this in large part because of what the Bible said.

And Galileo, he had it right, but he was labelled a heretic, his works banned and confiscated, and he was ordered to abandon his ideas.  At his condemnation, the Holy tribunal stated that his ideas were “absurd and false”, because they were “expressly contrary to the Holy Scriptures”.

There are plenty of other examples of Christians sincerely getting it wrong.  The gravestone of a seventeenth century American Puritan reads, “Sacred to the memory of Lynn S. Love, who, during his lifetime, killed 98 Indians that had been delivered into his hands by the Lord.  He had hoped to make it 100 before the year ended when he fell asleep in the arms of Jesus in his home in New York state”.

It’s easy for us centuries later, to be smug, and from a distance think, “How incredible; how could they have gotten it so wrong?”  But living then, that’s what made sense to them; it was hard for them to see another way.

We are not at the end of history.  We, like they, are just at a point along the way, and if we are sincerely interested in truth, we need to remain open to where we may need to see things differently, and to the fact that where Christians see themselves today, at times, may in fact be wrong.

It’s a kind of integrity of the mind.  We are called to love God with all of our heart, soul, strength, and MIND.  When we are challenged, our first reaction needs to be an honest desire for the truth, whatever that might be.  And that can be hard, but sometimes it’s the heretics who have it right.

Continue in your faith; a faith that is strong because it loves the truth. You can rest in the knowledge that “All truth is God’s truth”.  That His truth will endure, and that a genuine pursuit of truth, ultimately brings us closer to a deeper knowledge of God. We hold onto God, not necessarily to all of our ideas about God.  Remember Galileo.

Living with that kind of openness means also being open to our own doubts and questions.  And that brings me to Thomas.

A Calvin College professor, in a recent article, describes Thomas’ so-called doubt as “a kind of brutally honest faith.”  He reminds us that Jesus didn’t actually die in his sleep.  Thomas’ questions were real and Jesus doesn’t reject him.  What does He say?  He says, “Peace be with you.”  Then He invites him to wrestle with his questions as Jesus invites Thomas to put his hand into His broken body – to enter the brokenness.

When I was in high school, even though I was a leader of a Christian rock band, I certainly had questions about my faith, and still do.  In particular…then it was the Holocaust and God’s apparent absence.  I heard all of the explanations about God and evil, but none of it made much of an impression.

Someone then pointed me to the writer Rilke.  In his “Letters to A Young Poet” he writes, “I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books, written in a very foreign language.”  He goes on to say not only to love the questions, but LIVE the questions.

It’s easier to live feeling like we have everything all figured out; it’s usually harder but more real to live with our questions.  Every question is not neatly linked to an answer, and when we doubt and struggle, we can do it in the spirit of the psalmist and the prophets, and our questions and shouts become a prayer.

Elie Wiesel was fifteen when he was taken from his home to the Auschwitz concentration camp and then to Buchenwald, where his parents and young sister died. He saw other children die there too.  He didn’t write of his experience until 10 years after his liberation, but when he did, one of the things he said was simply this: “I don’t have the answers but I have a lot of very good questions”.

Christianity and the Bible itself asks a lot of good questions, and the Christian life is not so much about having all the answers, but about living deeply within those questions that really matter.

Last year, the journals of Mother Teresa were made public, and they revealed serious questions she had about her faith and her work. This great woman of faith lived with serious doubts.  This, of course, should not surprise us.  She along with so many others, from Abraham to St. John of the Cross, lived a genuine life of faith.  It has been said that spiritual development is founded on two crucial things; the first is great faith; the second is great doubt.  We seek truth, but we see “through a glass darkly.”  At the heart of it all remains a mystery.

Remember Galileo – be unafraid of new ideas.  Remember Thomas – be unafraid of your own questions.  And with Galileo on one side, and Thomas on the other…trust God, have faith.  Choose to hold onto God, and trust that He holds onto you in the messy-ness of this life of faith.

We are going to need that style of faith.  It’s not exactly a cheery time to be on this planet.  The planet, the world is in crisis, and we have before us a tremendous challenge and opportunity – it’s a huge responsibility to be alive at this point in time…to shape the changes we so desperately need.

May our faith guide us.  May it be a healthy, vibrant, full, deep faith…a faith that can stand the light of day, and endure the dark of the night.  May it give you hope and vision…courage and strength.

DC

I'm A Champion!

I am telling you I am a world class champion at proving my own humanity.

It is so hard to be an awesome bubble of kindness and love when you have a mondo backache and you are super hungry times five. It’s hard to keep hope when the world's cup runneth over with hopelessness. How am I supposed to fit in a round hole when I am an incredibly deformed peg? 

I want to be the kind of person who loves on people when I feel like a drawer full of socks. I want to be joyful and hopeful in the midst of the most down trodden situations. I want to always say and do the right things and always keep my word. I want to always win the war with my flesh. I want to learn from my monumental mishaps and never let them haunt and taunt me, but the truth is I am made of flesh and blood. 

I have scars on my arms and forehead to prove the fact that my skin is easily penetrated. I cry when my heart hurts. I use my tongue like a weapon when I am angry, and I hate every bit of that. But the only hope I find in all of this mess that I create daily is that The Guy who made heaven and lady bugs and the heart that beats in my chest (most of the time!) loves me just as I am and has my back. He never promised me a life of perfection, but he did promise me a life of forgiveness and hope in the midst of my human state.

I'm afraid this is about FEAR!

Fear is one of life's most tragic emotions.  It cripples....it disables...it robs us of desire, and generally....it's irrational.

I've never used to like flying.  I mean...I have had some pretty awful flights.  During my hey-day of traveling, I sometimes did close to 200,000 air miles a year...more than most pilots!  I've thankfully worked through this irrational fear, and now really enjoy flight.  But during the years of fear, I would lament my "plight of flight".

I've watched fear strip the powerful of the very attributes that made them effective.  I've seen fear destroy.

The turning point for me was watching the movie, The Wizard of Oz as an adult.  The cinematic epiphany for me was the hidden (yet obvious, that time around) message entwined in the story of the Cowardly lion.

I have always been struck by the story of the Cowardly Lion.  In the Wizard of Oz, the Cowardly Lion always possessed the courage he longed for.  He ALWAYS had that courage.  But it took a charlatan medicine man, posing as a wizard, to realize that all the lion needed was some affirmation.  The Wizard knew that if he merely put a medal on the lion, it would release what was already in him. 

The lion was a kitty cat...afraid of his own tail. The Wizard (medicine man, for all intents and purposes) knew of a device to release the very thing that he KNEW the lion possessed.  For deep within the lion's DNA was a genetic predisposition of great courage.  Never mind that the lion didn't recognize this, the Wizard did.

As I age, I am becoming less and less fearful. In fact, I LOVE the adventure of the unknown.  So much more to experience…..so much more to achieve. Courage….like the story of the Cowardly Lion, has always been a part of my nature.  I now “roar” at life!

So...with great pomp, the Wizard placed a medal on the Lion.  In this one act, the Lion felt validated and empowered.  He was no longer fearful....all this from a charlatan.