Month: October 2013

F Is For Fearsome Faith

Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace. ~Martin Luther

On any hair-raising adventure of faith, fear is the backseat driver.

Abraham was a fearful, anxious man, an unlikely role model. Read Genesis 12-23. You’ll wince as the father of our faith makes the self-protective choice at almost every turn.

Twice, he throws his wife Sarah under the bus to save his own skin. When Sarah returns the cruel favor with Hagar as her target, Abraham hides behind his newspaper, and barely blinks when his first-born son is driven to the wilderness to die.

Abraham doesn’t strike me as wicked, just sadly normal. In his myopic view, other people are shadows, their needs less important than his own survival.

If Facebook had existed then, Abraham would have posted mostly pictures of himself.

Fear Is The Old Norm

I know what it’s like to walk through my day with my head down, muffled in a fog of anxiety and worry, forgetting I’m not the only one who matters. And so do you.

Fear is the normal, logical response to a world where no one is in charge, where there is no one to protect you. And your inadequacy as your own god becomes more alarming by the moment.

Faith is something else. Beautiful, demanding, an everyday slog, a breath-taking thrill. Illogical, insane, unless there really is Someone in charge.

But ever since Genesis 3, insecurity is the voice our inner GPS can hear best. So God’s solution is not to seek out the fearless few. Instead he chooses one of us–flawed but willing–and goes to work.

Faith Must Be Tested

Abraham’s biography is both pitiful and powerful, climaxing in the most unbearable test of all. God asks the long-promised son be given back, with no explanation. Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love…and offer him there as a burnt offering…” More ink, and more angst, has been spilled about this story than any other in the Old Testament, so terrible and unique is God’s command. But Abraham’s example offers bracing comfort for all who walk by faith:

God knows us well, the places where we cower, our deepest, unspoken fears.
His aim is not our comfort, but a complete and glorious cure.
The only way we can know God provides is to be emptied of all provision.
When we are willing to give everything to God, his plan is set in motion to bless the world through us.

God could make life easy. He could cater to our insecurity and pamper us with a well-paved life. But we’d never learn, as Abraham did, with God we have nothing to fear. Jehovah Jireh, God will provide.

Genesis 22 Hebrews 11:17-19

How is God leading you from fear to faith?

In our series, An Alphabet Adagio, we are savoring the story of the Bible, our story, alphabetically. You can subscribe to e-mail above so you won’t miss a letter. Next: G is for Grit and Glory.

Tags faith

E Is For Embrace

When we cease from the battle of trying to think well of ourselves and turn to God in complete nakedness, we will find nothing but acceptance. ~James Bryan Smith

The Enigma of Embrace.

At the tender, if volatile, age of three, one of my sons acquired super powers.

In the late afternoon when my wits were already fading, he’d abandon his mild-mannered cheer, don a defiant-boy cape, and demolish every parental line in the sand.

The sweet compliance every tired mommy longs for crumbled under classic preschooler tantrums in response to my every NO. Time-outs and threats accomplished little, he was clever enough to argue his way past my jaw-clenched frustration.

One day, a strange idea penetrated my fogged-in brain.

Sitting on the floor beside my son’s screaming outrage, I pulled him into my lap. Stiff, unbending he struggled to be free, but I firmly held him close, rocking. Within minutes I could feel his little body relax as he snuggled into my embrace, his tears dry, his sunny smile restored.

I sat for a while, cuddling his soft warmth and marveled at this perplexing truth:

Sometimes the last thing I want to give is the only thing the other person really needs.

God knows this better than I do. You think preschoolers pull tantrums? Read through the sickening slide show of Genesis 4-11. Murder, petty revenge–paranoid humanity boasting of evil, mocking goodness, wildly rejecting everything they’ve been given. God is horrified. Even with a restart through Noah, chapter 11 ends with a fallen tower of human hubris, our ancient relatives exposed, exiled, entangled in ego-centrism.

They were looking for love, for divine acceptance, in all the wrong places. They found alienation instead.

The Grand Embrace

Only a dozen chapters into the story, God has the choice to give up on the human project, but he does something peculiar instead. Through Abraham, God will reveal his breath-taking intention to sit on the floor and pull humanity into his embrace.

His eyes wide open to the very worst we have done, God won’t wait for us to be good. His lap is big enough for every bit of our baggage. There’s room for every cranky child.

Rest in that truth for a moment. You are not rejected, but embraced. The voice of this age claims you are not worth it–you’re dispensable, disposable, and unlovable as you are. The Bible claims the opposite. As the story unfolds, God won’t give us what we deserve. At great cost to himself, he will give us the only thing we ever really needed.

Have you accepted God’s perplexing embrace?

In our series, An Alphabet Adagio, we are savoring the story of the Bible, our story, alphabetically. You can subscribe to e-mail above so you won’t miss a letter. Next: F is for Faith.

Photography by Melanie Hunt

Tags acceptance, embrace

Faith Life

D Is For Deceived

Ah, why should all mankind for one man’s fault, be condemned, if guiltless? ~John Milton, Paradise Lost

Deceived, we choose door number two, and watch it slowly open. The promise of more, of better, of life without limits–we rush on the stage, to find

nothing.

Except a tuneless music box, alone on a barren floor, unwinding its last sour note.

And the picture of an apple, a serpent and the terrifying brink where we once teetered.

That one brief moment, all of heaven held its breath, and waited. And winced. What was ours, what was very good, we threw away.

But how did we fail, if we were not there? Why still the curse, when we have done nothing?

Let’s review.

Genesis 1 ends with Sabbath–all creation in harmony, with itself and with its Creator.

Genesis 2 ends with the joyous intimacy of human community, patterned after God’s own delight.

Genesis 3 ends with shattered glass and now with splinters we are born. Sabbath, replaced by sabotage–we shake our fists at God, exploit the creation we’ve been given, daily draw our battle lines between us.

Deceived, we all pick the same door, so enticing is its promise:

Open Here For Knowledge Of A Higher Kind.

The desire stirs in every human heart to experience what we’re not wired to know on our own. We want to profit from nearness to God, without dealing with God himself. We want to acquire the blessings of life while ignoring the hand of the blesser.

Would a child cry for a mother’s milk and demand she leave the room? Would mountaineers hire the most reliable guide and leave him behind at the base? We laugh at the deranged behavior of others, and then sign up for the same.

Because the serpent knows where to poke:

I am not enough, just as God made me.
What I have is not enough, as much as God has given me.
Someone has it better, so God must be withholding.
Someone else is better than me, so I will become as god.

In reaching for more, we got nothing. In over-running our boundaries, like petulant tsunamis, we brought chaos and death on ourselves. What was unthinkable in Genesis 2 has now become our norm. From self-worship to self-destruction–humanity itself in identity crisis.

Not Deceived

Later, in the wilderness, confronted by the same insinuating whispers, Jesus will resist, and stay within Father-made bounds. A way home will be made for us all. The night before he is betrayed, he will invite his disciples to “take and eat” the knowledge we’ve always desired. By his death on a tree, he will free us, for:

Evil is not a thing of its own, but an un-thing, offering un-life and un-love.
Knowledge doesn’t exist as an independent prize, but is wrapped in the person of God, who is good.

In Christ, in door number one, “lie hidden all the treasure of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:3).

Do you hear the un-deceived invitation in those words?

In our series, An Alphabet Adagio, we are savoring the story of the Bible, our story, alphabetically. You can subscribe to e-mail above so you won’t miss a letter. Next: E is for Embraced.

Tags Deceived

Culture Faith Life

C Is For Companion, Not Compliance Or Complaint

Post author By Janet Hanson
Post date October 10, 2013
10 Comments on C Is For Companion, Not Compliance Or Complaint

Love will not be constrained by mastery.~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Companion: From the old French, One who breaks bread with another.

Warmed by mugs of fresh-brewed coffee, they nibble home-made pumpkin bread and admire the first red leaf of autumn resting between them on the worn oak table. Their eyes are kind, their posture comfortable, reflecting other-centered hearts. How have you been? How can I help? What would you advise? I’m grateful to find someone who will listen.

Control: From the old French “to keep accounts.” To exercise dominating influence over.

Stiff arms crossed, they glare at each other across the room, one calculating the best answer to the wailing rant of the other. Crafty maneuvers, evasions and defensive lobs deaden them to the unspoken cries of their own hearts. The air is tense with accusation. What were you thinking? Why do you never? How dare you defy my rights and desires? When will you become the ideal I have in mind?

Companionship or Control, which word best describes the relationships in your life?

God welcomes the human to his new home–a lush garden more beautiful than words can capture. Adam, not yet a proper name, but Hebrew for “earth-made,” is given a task to name the animals. In the midst of the barking, baa-ing, twittering, growling crowd, he hopes to find a companion.

One by one, Milo and Otis, Simba and Barbar approach and lick his out-stretched fingers, adoring. Cute, cuddly, and uncomplicated, a pet just may be the answer.

For the first time, the Creator has noticed something not good. People were not made for solitary life. But an unequal, superior/inferior pairing will not teach us how to love. A helper, an ezer kenegdo, a “sustainer-beside-him” must be found.

A True Companion

The English word “helper” in Genesis 2:18 derails us–a helper implies less-than. Gender, class and race divisions reflect the wretched human tendency to form a pecking order, to dominate each other in any group of more than one. What was the relationship between Adam and Eve? How do they model God’s design for all relationships? Before you decide, consider these other Old Testament verses where the word ezer is found:

Exodus 18:4 Moses names one of his sons Eli-ezer, for “The God of my father was my help, and delivered me from the sword of Pharaoh.”

Deuteronomy 33:7 “O LORD give heed to Judah…strengthen his hands for him, and be a help against his adversaries.”

Psalm 27:7-9 “Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud….Do not turn your servant away in anger, you who have been my help.”

Of the 29 places outside of Genesis 2 the word ezer is used, all but one refer to God. The implication? The first human needed someone to be like God for him, God with skin on, as they say. In marriage, in friendship, in work and church relationships–yes, even in the halls of Congress, God’s intention is for companionship, not control.

Ever since Genesis 3, we’ve resisted the call to companion.

We know how to dominate,
we know how to cower,
we know how to detach.

But we have forgotten how to be the kind of companion/helper God has been to us.

So, later on in our story, God will become human to show us how its done.

How is God calling you to be a companion rather than control freak to others in your life?

Welcome to our series, An Alphabet Adagio. We are savoring the story of the Bible, our story, alphabetically. You can subscribe to e-mail above so you won’t miss a letter. Next: D is for Deceived.

Photograph by Melanie Hunt

Tags companion, marriage, relationships

Faith Life

B Is For Beloved

I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection. ~Henri Nouwen

Beloved. Have you embraced your name?

Or maybe other designations come to mind. Bruised, Bitter, Blemished. Branded by the past, befuddled by the present, barely worth a future.

The choir piece was new to me. I was tired and discouraged, not sure I wanted to be perched on this hard metal chair, fighting to stay in tune with a wobbly voice singing a half pitch flat in my ear. I was sick of the daily battle to do it right–this life, this high bar to hurdle. Faith hidden in a haze of self-condemnation.

I looked down at my score, as the accompanist pounded out the melody.

And the Father will dance over you in joy!
He will take delight in whom He loves.
Is that a choir I hear singing the praises of God?
No, the Lord God Himself is exulting over you in song!*

I found the lyrics impossible to believe.

Many of us careen through life, bouncing from egomania (why isn’t everyone like me?) to self-loathing (why do I have to be me?) to numbed disconnection (is there any ice cream left?). Look at our bowed shoulders, our shifty, mis-trusting glance–it’s obvious. We’ve forgotten our name. Beloved.

In the words of Henri Nouwen, “Becoming the Beloved is the great spiritual journey we have to make.” Becoming what we are, versus attaining what we wish we had.

In the beginning, God created. And the pinnacle, the climax, the glorious, dazzling finish was not a snow-capped mountain range, a lush tropical island, dolphins cavorting by the shore, or cute puppies in a furry pile. When did creation move from good to very good?

“Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image…” From its opening pages the Bible unfolds a story about the irreplaceable value of you.

Beloved

I have called you by name, from the very beginning. You are mine and I am yours. You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.

I have molded you in the depths of the earth and knitted you together in your mother’s womb.

I have carved you in the palms of my hands and hidden you in the shadow of my embrace.

I look at you with infinite tenderness and care for you with a care more intimate than that of a mother for her child.

Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved

Read Psalm 139 and remember your name. B is for Beloved.

What are you like when you feel loved?

Welcome to our series, An Alphabet Adagio. We are savoring the story of the Bible, the story where we are found, alphabetically. You can subscribe to e-mail so you won’t miss a letter. Next time: C is for Companion.

*Mark Hayes, And the Father Will Dance Zephaniah 3:14, 17 Psalm 34

Photograph by Melanie Hunt, Drawing by Randi Reed, 16.

Tags beloved