I Need.

There are two ways to be your  own Savior and Lord.  One is by breaking all the moral laws and setting your own course, and one is by keeping all the moral laws and being very, very good... Jesus's message, which is the "true gospel," is a completely different spirituality.  The gospel of Jesus is not religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, moralism or relativism, conservatism or liberalism.  Nor is it something halfway along a spectrum between two poles-- it is something else altogether.  The gospel is distinct from the other two approaches: In its view, everyone is wrong, everyone is loved, and everyone is called to recognize this and change... Jesus says: "The humble are in and the proud are out" (see Luke 18:14).  The people who confess they aren't particularly good or open-minded are moving toward God, because the prerequisite for receiving the grace of God is to know you need it... When a newspaper posed the question, "What's Wrong with the World?" the Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton reputedly wrote a brief letter in response: "Dear Sirs: I am.  Sincerely Yours, G. K. Chesterton." That is the attitude of someone who has grasped the message of Jesus.   

The above selection from Keller's Prodigal God touches my heart in the same place seared by the words of Hart's hymn in the post below.

"Let not conscience make you linger, nor of fitness fondly dream.  All the fitness He requires is to feel your need of Him." 

Feel my need.  Need.  Need.  Need.  I keep thinking about all the ways I try to make need go away.  I am uncomfortable owing, and I don't like to admit need for anything from money to driving directions and from the time of others to the grace of God.  Needing translates to weakness.  To debt.  To the stress of trying to keep up, trying to stay on even terms with everyone.  I don't want to need more than I am needed.  I want to give more than others can give to me.  I don't need anything...

I like to think my John Mayer-esque philosophy of uncertainty "Am I living it right?" is a testament to my  constant quest for the right answers and the right way to live, but maybe it's really an attempt to get out of needing-- to get out of needing God's right answers and His grace when I can't live up to them.    What I tend to ignore in my search for "rightness" is the fact that I'm never going to "live it right" because I'll always have to straddle the two thoughts of right living that Keller identifies.  I'll always struggle with conventional rightness and morality, always question how any one set of conventions can be right when so many cultures and perspectives have their own definitions of right and when the notions of right from any one view are always changing.  Yet I'll never be satisfied completely by any course of rightness that I set for myself.  I have an arrogant amount of faith in my own opinion, I'll admit, but not enough confidence to be sure I can accurately determine what's right or actually live that right out if I can even identify it.  So it all comes down to need.  Not just need, a need for divinity.  Need for God, need for a Savior.

I have to admit-- amidst all my soul-searching, all my reading, all my discussing, all my pondering-- that I just flat out can't do it.  I can't figure it out.  I can't find someone else who has figured it out.  I can't study enough to put together pieces of rightness into one picture of what life should be, and I can't live that perfection either.  I can't.  I need.

My idolatry lies in looking for answers from humans, from my brain, from my heart.  I want something to prove itself so right that I can do it and never fear that I have it wrong.  I want to be completely confident that I'm living a life that is pleasing to God and that is right and just.  All of my searching and all of my attempts to be the right kind of Christian are what the hymn articulates; all I'm doing is fondly dreaming of fitness, looking for a way to be satisfied in my own soul that I am living life the right way.

What I should be doing is something entirely different.  What I should be doing is learning to feel my need more acutely, acknowledging my need, embracing my need, loving the one who fulfills those needs, living in gratitude.

I am what's wrong with the world.  God, You are what is right.  Make me love Your rightness in worship of You and in service to others.  Help my soul to feel and know its need and to delight in You in its fulfillment from only You.  

I Will Arise and Go To Jesus!

Come, Ye Sinners (adapted from the words of Joseph Hart, 1759)

I will arise and go to Jesus,

He will embrace me in His arms;

In the arms of my dear Savior,

Oh, there are ten thousand charms.

Come, ye sinners, poor and wretched,
Weak and wounded, sick and sore;
Jesus, ready, stands to save you,
Full of pity, joined with power.
He is able, He is able;
He is willing; doubt no more.

Come ye needy, come, and welcome,
God's free bounty glorify;
True belief and true repentance,
Every grace that brings you nigh.
Without money, without money
Come to Jesus Christ and buy.

Come, ye weary, heavy laden,
Bruised and broken by the fall;
If you tarry 'til you're better,
You will never come at all.
Not the righteous, not the righteous;
Sinners Jesus came to call.

Let not conscience make you linger,
Nor of fitness fondly dream;
All the fitness He requires
Is to feel your need of Him.
This He gives you, this He gives you,
'Tis the Spirit's rising beam.

Lo! The Incarnate God, ascended;
Pleads the merit of His blood.
Venture on Him; venture wholly,
Let no other trust intrude.
None but Jesus, none but Jesus
Can do helpless sinners good.

Would Jesus Start the Kind of Church We Attend?

The following is the most well written paragraph I think I've read concerning the thought it expresses.  In the first chapter of his book Prodigal God, which I am currently reading for a Bible study group at church (shocker!)*, Timothy Keller beautifully and succinctly communicates the fearful truth that our church must be missing the point.

Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people.  The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren't appealing to younger brothers [as in the wayward son in the parable popularly known as "The Prodigal Son"] they must be more full of elder brothers [as in the brother from the parable who resents his father's forgiveness of his less righteous brother] than we'd like to think. 

* The shocker! comment is not ironic; I've steered clear of church Sunday school classes, Bible study, and the like for a while now.  I still fear that many/most exist for good Christians to regurgitate the "right answers" and congratulate each other for knowing the faith so well, but I want to quit being so closed.  I do believe that people grow and learn from community with others, and my condemnation of the communities around me does nothing for anyone and is bitter sin on my part.  It is time for me to quit judging and loathing what I suspect to be wrong and start learning and living what truly is right. 

Time Keeps on Slippin', Slippin', Slippin' into the Future...

I cannot believe it is nearly July!  I would say that I don't know where summer has gone, but I am thankful that I can say that I do.  I can mark where the time has gone.  It has gone to time with friends and family, to professional growth, to reading, to cleaning, to so many things that I have needed to do and wanted to do.  June has not been wasted, but it has been spent, and I am a little on edge about the rest of my summer because there is so much more I want to do and I just hope that I can get to it all.  I have only managed to read a few books, and my "recently read" list on this blog is pitifully only four books long, and 75% of the list consists of children's books!  I need to get reading, and I need to continue even after August arrives.  This little post exists for nothing more than to remind myself that time is moving quickly, and I need to stay driven!

Hello World

Traffic crawls, cell phone calls
Talk radio screams at me.
Through my tinted window I see
A little girl, rust red minivan.
She's got chocolate on her face
Got little hands, and she waves at me.

Yeah, she smiles at me.

Hello, world.

How've you been?

Good to see you, my old friend.

Sometimes I feel cold as steel.

Broken like I'm never gonna heal.

I see a light, a little hope.

In a little girl.

Hello, world.
Every day I drive by

A little white church.
It's got these little white crosses
Like angels in the yard.
Maybe I should stop on in,
Say a prayer,
Maybe talk to God

Like He is there.

Oh, I know He's there.

Yeah, I know He's there.

Hello, world.

How've you been?

Good to see you, my old friend.

Sometimes I feel as cold as steel.

And broken like I'm never going to heal.

I see a light,

A little grace, a little faith unfurled.

Hello, world.

Sometimes I forget what living's for

And I heave my life through my front door.

And I'll be there.

Oh, I'm home again.

I see my wife, little boy, little girl

Hello, world.

Hello, world.

All the empty disappears.

I remember why I'm here.

Just surrender and believe.

I fall down on my knees.

Oh, hello world.

Hello, world.

Hello, world.

--"Hello World" performed by Lady Antebellum

The words of this song are beautiful, and the music that accompanies them tells the story even better than the lyrics do.  The entire song sounds like worship... I don't really know how to define that, but it does.  Listening to the album today, the song caught my attention simply with its sound.  The strokes of the piano keys, the soft building base notes swelling underneath, a high and haunting piano melody breaking through just like the hope breaking through in the lyrics, drums building, strings joining and orchestration soaring, piano breaking freer and freer like the heart emerging, steel softening...

One of the things that makes me believe in God... (I've been trying to work out and articulate my reasons, and, while I'd like to have more than "feelings" to support my rationale, I'll go with only my emotion and my smattering of academic dabbling for now.)  ...One of the things that makes me believe in God is the ability of humans to reach each other with words, with music, with art, with dance.  What is it inside us that needs to create, that is moved by the creations of others?  Can this be a bit of God?  A glimpse of a Creator who glories in creation?  Is it blasphemy to say that my recent encounter with this song by a secular country music group that also sings about one night stands and heartbreak felt to me like an encounter with God?  Or are instances when we are moved by interactions with other humans-- like the moment with the little girl in the song-- truly glimpses of the divine in the form of connection between one creation and another.  Could such moments sear as they do because they are a communion of creations of the same artist?   Much has been written and sung about the oneness of humanity, about the common bonds that transcend cultural differences, and about a brotherhood that should exist. I love these ideals in the earthly realm, and I realize I hold to them from a spiritual standpoint as well.  What connects us if there is nothing greater than man?  What is a laugh or a tear?  What can explain the feelings they express that all nations can understand if there is not something greater than the individual and the groups and governments he creates?  There must be something more, and I call it God.

Listening to this song, opening my eyes a little wider to see the world and say "hello" to it in a way that I haven't in a while, I feel the meaning of the words reverberating through me-- I know He's there.  I know He's there.

As the building rejoicing of the music pulses through me, I wonder what this can be besides worship.  Why does humanity have the impulse to create beauty if not created by something beautiful, why if not for worship?  


Perhaps even our most irreligious productions come from the same place that produces praise.  Maybe even our darkest desires originate from the same core that yearns for God.  It seems to me now that it could not be possible for us to have art or appreciation for it in any way if not for a little bit of divinity, a little breath of God that must exist inside of all of us.

Note: You can and should go listen to the song on Lady Antebellum's website.  Just click the link and then the play button beside the song "Hello World."

Semantics

At some point in my life, soon after I realized being a famous writer wasn't exactly a career for which I could just fill out an application and accept the position, there was a brief flicker of desire in me to be a linguist.  I don't now remember how long that desire lasted, but I know that it was on my mind for enough of my freshman year of high school that I wrote a research paper about linguists and the study of language. Something extinguished the dream fairly quickly; the absolute ineptitude I brought to beginning Spanish class probably had a lot to do with the quelling of that aspiration.

While I can barely manage “hello” and numbers in Spanish, I realize today that I am still a linguist at heart. Words matter to me.  Deeply.  The term "semantics" and the quest of language quibblers to find exactly the right words to express ideas and concepts perfectly fascinates me.  Even the term "semantics" has a spectrum of meanings and uses.  As I use it here, I know that it denotes other meanings than the one I mean, and while that fact frustrates me, it also exhilarates me. 

I suddenly realized a moment ago that one of the biggest barriers I face when it comes to matters of faith is a huge wall of words.  I stumble over vocabulary, and I quibble over expressions.  (Ironically since I can appreciate cliches,) I choke on trite phrases that I've heard and read repeated too many times.  When it comes to faith, I question any sentence that is easy to say, anything memorized, anything "learned by heart."  I sit in judgment in my pew over terms that don't sit well with me, cry in fits of rage over words people say that I believe have lost their meaning, and scour my Bible, books, and the Internet in a never-ending search for information that might somehow satisfy my impossible desire to know for sure that the words I read in Scripture really do mean what I think they mean.  I distrust the interpretations of others, and my instinct is to reject completely any interpretation that is commonly accepted because I fear all meaning has been skewed too much to be believed.  

Suddenly now I wonder if my problem with my faith is not disbelief in its actual core but dissatisfaction with the way it is commonly expressed.  Am I really just arguing over semantics?  Is it really God and Christianity that causes my incredulity or am I really just a cynic when it comes to the words?  I want meaning.  I have to find the genuine meaning, the intended meaning, the God-inspired meaning if there is one.  I don't want my meaning or someone else's.  It's not just that I want someone to write and speak more eloquently, not that this is just a petty protest over words.  It's a deep-down desire for meaning perfectly expressed so that it can be understood and lived out.  I don't want to be confused.  I don't want to find out that I misunderstood, that I memorized and spat out the right words my whole life but didn't truly grasp the meaning.  

Funny, here's how I'll end this in total irony--

No wonder I am this way.  From my learning of Luther’s Small Catechism, I have taken as my own without realizing it, not the answers but the repeated question of the catechism, which is, after all--  "What does this mean?"

Just a Journal... in the Haze of Half a Rainbow

I fully know that I am prone to trafficking in cliches, but I cherish the possibly deluded opinion of myself that, while many of the things I find most inspirational are terribly hackneyed, they inspire me in ways that are different, new, unique to me.  One of those cliches is the rainbow.  How much more tired can a poor symbol be than the rainbow?  There's the whole Biblical story, there's proverb after quotation after witticism (my favorite by my beloved Dolly Parton) about waiting through the rain for the rainbow, and there's every piece of Lisa Frank stationery from my childhood and every childish notebook and picture book ever published with a cheerful looking rainbow somewhere on it.  There's Lucky Charms cereal, and there's Dorothy's warbled song.  There is nothing unique or new to find as far as inspiration goes anywhere in a rainbow.

But I like rainbows anyway.  And I do like their symbolism.

Today, for example, there is a little half of rainbow arc... actually less, more like a quarter, peeking out from behind the hazy purply pink clouds that followed a recent storm.  It's dusk, and the rainbow is fading, but it is there, marking the end of the rain as evening falls.

And as I see it, as this first school year draws to a close and as the summer comes with the potential of more time for planning, for personal reflection, for rest, for reading, I see that little quarter of a rainbow poking through the clouds of discontent and anxiety that have been condensing on my heart, rumbling low thunder in my head for the past several months.  Maybe all the inner strife and turmoil is as much a product of lack of time to examine it, wrestle with it, untangle it as it is an actual problem.  Maybe all the fears and questions that I've been harboring need only to be written down.  Maybe they just need time with poetry and literature, time with Scripture, time with prayer, time with sleep, time with typing and scrawling across pages to form and to gain clarity.

If the little rainbow peeking through is a sign-- rather, if I make the little rainbow a sign of my own-- today is the start of the clearing of the storm.  It's the start-- not necessarily of all sunny days and birds chirping (Who wants that anyway?) but the start of days unclouded, uncluttered, the start of days to-- wow this is gonna be corny, but I admit I like my cliches-- the start of days to search for the rest of that little rainbow.