faith

Psalm 119:81 My souls long for your salvation, I hope in your word. My eyes long for your promise.

I wish that were all true for me. The truth is, my soul longs for things not good for it, I often hope in the tangible things of this world that I can see. My eyes are too often fixed on the next thing I think I need.  My desires are all wrong.  I want the wrong things and those things—recognition, money, status, greed—never satisfy.  They only create in my heart more of the wrong longing.  My love and desire is corrupted.  I need retraining.

James K.A. Smith says, “In worship we don’t just come to show God our devotion and give him our praise; we are called to worship because in this encounter God (re)makes and molds us top-down. Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.”

I don’t go to the gym BECAUSE I’m strong, I go there to train my body to be stronger.  My daughter doesn’t dance six hours a day because she’s already a great athlete and dancer, she trains her body to do things it doesn’t naturally desire to do.  And then somewhere after practicing the habit over and over, her body wants to become better and better and is willing to do the work it takes.

And so with our faith life.  We don’t worship because we have the right desires and are spiritually strong.  Just the opposite.  We are weak and our desires are often jaded.  So in humility, we place ourselves in training, to hear the word and receive God’s gifts.   He so graciously remakes our hearts and re-forms our desires so that we finally begin to want what is truly good for us, what will make us happy and at peace.  Our habits, then, are the training ground for our desires, so that we learn to love what is good and right and pure.

 

Isaiah 29: 19 The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the Lord.

I knew she about to cry.

And I heard all the things she couldn’t say.

She looked at me with eyes that are learning about the hardness of the world.  She needs my truth and my  story because her battles will be impossible sometimes.  She’s learning loss and betrayal and I hate it so bad for her. And I know that this is only the beginning.  She will walk through fire and hard rain.  She will know heights of joy she never thought possible but there will also be the depths of sorrow unspeakable.

This is what it means to be a woman—covered in roses and babies and secrets and pain.

So, I sit awhile and listen.  I can’t fix it, but I try to nurture and love and serve—to show kindness and mercy in a world hell bent on hurt and hate.

I stay.  I tidy up the room.  I stroke her hair and pat her back.

And in a strange way, these moments make room for real joy.  The joy that comes from forgetting about ourselves for awhile and bearing the hurt of others. The joy that comes from feeling empty and so spent  that God can finally fill us with His comfort, His truth about who we are and WHOSE we are.  The joy that comes in the morning, though the night has been sown in tears.

Frederick Buechner says, “Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes….”

May you see the joy of Advent, even through the tears.  Christ has come.  All is well.

Jude 21 “But you beloved, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of Lord Jesus Christ, that leads to eternal life.”

I was 13 and I wanted to know God so bad. I wanted an inside track. I wanted to be sure that he could love someone like me.  He walked into my life wearing the skin of my basketball coach.  He gave me rides and fed me and taught me how to shoot jump shots.  He made me laugh and challenged me like a father would. And I learned something so precious about the mercy of God.

It comes to you disguised as your neighbor.  The one who steps in and takes care of you, the kindness of strangers, the hands of the one who gives you communion, the feet of the lady bringing your dinner. God’s mercy is infinite and never more present than right now in the beautiful ways He is meeting your every need.  And YOU, too, are that mercy, those hands, that kindness to others today. God is near. He hides himself in your husband and children and when you serve them, you become His love and mercy incarnate.  Advent teaches us the wonder of all wonders.  God is here and He is for us and all heaven is behind us, begging us to see the everyday miracle of God’s love and mercy in the flesh, standing right in front of us. The question is, has He come to us so plain and lowly that we fail to recognize him?

Bonhoeffer says, “And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly….God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as His instruments and performs wonders where one would least expect them.  God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak, and the broken.”

 

 

Isaiah 35: Here is your God, he comes with vindication; With divine recompense he comes to save you. Then will the eyes of the blind be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared.

Thomas is 5 and is a passionate fan of trucks with trailers.

He notices EVERY SINGLE ONE, no matter how many happen to be on the road at any given time in East Tennessee.  (that would be a LOT)

And he gets just as excited about each one as if it were the first one (and not the hundredth) he’s seen today.  And since we drive an hour to church one way, it can be a little, shall we say, redundant.  But he doesn’t care.  We can drive past ten trucks with trailers and there is a 100% chance that when we drive past one 2 minutes from now, it will be as if we are driving past it for the first time.  Repeat that process ten, twenty, a thousand  times and the enthusiasm for driving past the trucks with trailers does not wane.

It’s been SO good for my teenage girls to see because when he delights in something with SO MUCH FERVOR, it’s hard not to enjoy it with them.  And it begins to eat away at the cynicism with which we as adults see the world.

It’s so easy to be so stressed or so distracted that we don’t see anything anymore.  Snarkiness and apathy creep in.  It takes so much to impress us or wow us or cause us to feel delight.

GK Chesterton says, “The capacity for wonder and delight can be recovered by admitting we’ve been wrong. We’ve taken the world for granted. We’ve forgotten to be inspired by the apple.  We’ve forgotten to be amazed that the sun rises every morning. We’ve lost the will to see the miracles that surround us every day.”

Lord, open our cynical and tired eyes to the delight and mystery all around us.  Forgive us for losing our childlike wonder.  Give us eyes to see the wonder this Advent season.

Isaiah 26: 3 You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you.

Mama gave birth to me in the January cold and bundled me up on a  Friday night for my first homecoming.

Daddy was no where to be found.

That is, until he brought the honky tonk band home from the bar to finish out their set in the kitchen at 3am.  Because surely homecomings need beer and old school country music.

The first time mama ever told me that story, I laughed until I cried and then begged her to tell me every hilarious detail.  It’s almost too good to be true.  Or too outrageous to believe, depending on how you look at it.  It’s still my favorite thing to tell people about my Daddy.

In the incarnation, God does something even more scandalous.  He comes to the world in diapers, in the helpless form of a baby nursing at his mother’s breast. He comes weak and lowly and plain, just like every other human.  He empties Himself of strength and power in order to serve and this lowliness teaches us something profound about how we find what we are looking for in this world.

C.S. Lewis says it best,

“Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life.

Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

We find what we are looking for when we finally stop looking to find it in this world.  Peace & joy come from outside us—from the babe in the manger, the Prince of Peace, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  Our father gives us a homecoming beyond our wildest dreams—a home in His tender care, and a lifelong feast of forgiveness, love, joy, and peace.

I John 1: 7 Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling.

I stood among in a room full of mostly strangers ready to impart some wisdom on how to have deep, sacrificial, meaningful relationships.  I had my power point ready and was wearing my favorite cowboy boots.  I was ready and feeling confident with just a little side of nerves.  It was a good hair day.

Someone caught me on the way to the restroom and to tell me she had just finished my book.

It felt like a gut punch, for some reason.  Still after more than a year of releasing my memoir, my  long confession, I still sometimes wish I could go back to the time before people really knew my story.

We cried together over similar childhood experiences, we hugged, but now I felt so exposed.  I felt like I didn’t have anything wise to say, only more confession of how God is using relationships to humble me and sanctify me and show me my sin.  I barely got through the talk.  I went off script and it was raw and vulnerable and humbling.  But I’m learning that to love people is to stop hiding from them, to let them hear your confession, to hear theirs and to forgive them, to bring to light what has laid in darkness for so long.  Bonhoeffer says in Life Together:

“Confession in the presence of a brother is the profoundest kind of humiliation. It hurts, it cuts a man down, it is a dreadful blow to pride…In the deep mental and physical pain of humiliation before a brother – which means, before God – we experience the Cross of Jesus as our rescue and salvation. The old man dies, but it is God who has conquered him. Now we share in the resurrection of Christ and eternal life.”

This Advent, we beg our Lord to teach us what it means to walk in true light, to love our brother, to hear his confession, to forgive him, to be forgiven, to die to our pride and live in His glorious Light.