None Live For Themselves

I think more than anything we fear being found out.

We are scared; scared that people will find out who we really are, warts and all.

We find ourselves often wondering what others see in us and what they think of us.

Our myopic and self centered views on life have paralyzed us.

Why?

Because discovering ourselves over and over, whether in counseling sessions or too much time in isolation or even in self-centered prayer, has led to a deep and magnified view of our failures, flaws, and wounds.

I often find myself in constant preoccupation with these nagging thoughts.

True freedom lies in lending ourselves to others instead of to some sort of introspective paranoia.

My dear friend Sam Choi once told me that humility comes not in thinking less of ourselves, but in not thinking of ourselves at all.

We are reminded by the Apostle to "in humility, consider others better than ourselves", we are told to look "not only to our own interests, but also to the interests of others."

Verily we are told by Christ, that in the end, the man who strives to save his life will lose it, and the man who gives his life will find it.

O Beauty!

As Christians, we have called God by many names, not Buddha or Allah of course, but we have called him Father or Friend or Savior or King.

These, our own particular brand of God, are usually chosen based on some mixture of our own personal spiritual needs, and whatever we were taught about God in our formative years.

In recent musings I have wondered what would be different if we were to come to know God as the author of Beauty.

David, in wonder, cries aloud from the place of prayer, "From zion, perfect in beauty, God shines forth."

In seemingly ecstatic utterance Augustine writes in his confessions, "O Beauty, ever ancient, ever new!"

Dear friends, what would it be like to know the one who is "perfect in beauty"?

I wonder if our creations would be more brilliant; I wonder if we would realize the true beauty that lies within us, the Imago Dei. Perhaps most importantly for me, I have wondered what presuppositions I have about God will be shattered in the wake of my newfound revelation of who God is.

But come what may, this is all that I have come to desire, "to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord."

A Father's Pride

I realized something today.

I realized the thing my daughter has to do to make me proud...

She has to wake up in the morning.

That's about it, and my heart is filled with the wonder that can only be known as a father's delight.

I am beginning to discover something about God's love through this.

En Inspiro

The first work of the author, as I understand it, is not his first draft or his outline; his true beginning is inspiration.

This moment is the inventor’s fuel, it is the theologian’s revelation, and the philosopher calls it his epiphany.

Without this inspiration, our works lack the brilliance, creativity, and pathos that characterize all meaningful endeavors.

We are “created in Christ to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us.”

I fear that we spend our lives completing tasks, instead of a mission, and the “good works”, which could have been ours, are left undone. Our schedules are full, but our lives are not.

Our world is full of works that are mundane and colorless and uninspired, and it is not begging us to produce one more that is devoid of any true virtue or significance.

If we filter our creations through what is born of inspiration I think we will discover a need to retool some our lives, and abandon some projects all together.

I would run my own life through these painful criteria, but I fear that I lack the moral courage to act upon what I find.

In Search Of The True Wilderness

I often find within myself an ache to go to the wilderness.

And I'm not talking about some cool meta-physical wilderness that is somehow an analogy to where I'm at spiritually either.

I'm talking about trees and mountains and creatures with four legs; it all feels like home to me.

Intuitively I am given the impression that this longing is greater than myself. I am speaking of that particular brand of desire which transcends an individual, or even a time. The belief of an afterlife, or the desire to find a soul mate I would categorize as such.

In short, these cravings do not belong to you or to me, but to all of humanity. 

Man was born into the unfinished wilderness; he awoke to a world where he was alone with God.

It is this genesis with God that I long for; the desire to be alone with God is inherently etched on the tablet of my heart.

We are unsure how long man was in this state with God, scholars presume it could have taken him years just to name the animals.

Woman was born into community; Adam, and a more finished creation awaited her crowning arrival. As such she craves this covering, this protection, this love and togetherness. 

Perhaps this is why she doesn't even like to go to the bathroom alone...or perhaps for us men, such mysteries are better off unexplored. 

I am not saying that she doesn't long for intimacy with God, any more than I am saying that a man doesn't desire to be with others. As a quick aside, many of you know that I have always maintained that the qualities belonging to the masculine or feminine are extremely subjective and change drastically with cultures and time; I believe the intrinsic, God given, attributions to be a much shorter list. So I will not make any conclusive statements here; but I welcome the conversation.

Jesus told his disciples: "You will leave me all alone; yet I am not alone, for my father is with me."  These moments in the proverbial wilderness when we are "lonely, but not alone", are calling to me even as I write this. 

For me the mountains provide me with this singular pursuit, but life affords us many such opportunities. Singleness is such a wilderness; an uncommon situation or struggle is such a desert.

In these moments I am hedged in; like the harlot wife of Hosea, my solitude separates me from all other interior interests and pursuits. 

My ear is tuned only to his voice; my heart has feelings only for him...And in these moments I am reborn and I open my eyes, awaking to a wilderness all my own with God.

A Great Salvation

Today I am reminded of the words of the Reformation's great theologian,

"All that is necessary for salvation is the knowledge that I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great Savior"  ~John Calvin

It is alarming to know that that great human quandary which has eclipsed the ages, lurks quietly within our own members. Like some kind of unknown cancer, we begin to see it's symptoms without fully knowing it's severity.

Our problem is no small thing, but as Calvin says, we are better to know it, Blaise Pascal once said, "It is good to be tired and wearied by the futile search after the true good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Redeemer."

The problem of the human race is serious...and it is eternal; But sin's greatness is rivaled only by it's remedy.

Christ, the paschal lamb, was, and the Jews knew nothing of this, not a great man as they had always supposed, He was God's only Son. 

The existence of the Messiah was known, but his nature was veiled; concealed within the words of the  ancient prophecies. Perhaps it was known only in the heart of God, perhaps this was part of the Ephesians 3 "mystery which was not made known to men in other generations which has now been revealed by the Spirit."

Yet this was his glorious plan all along, the "Lamb slain before the creation of the world". Or even that he would "dwell among us", should be enough to elude our greatest cerebral capacities. As Lewis writes in the Last battle, 'Yes,' said Queen Lucy. 'In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.'

 Such a divine plot could only be the contrivance of beings no less magnificent than the Godhead themselves. We are partakers of no small emancipation; but the heirs of what Hebrews calls "such a great salvation", and this wrought by no less of a propitiate, Christus Victor, Christ the Victor!

Death Of My Lover

A crucifixion story from the perspective of John the Apostle

An ancient tree I now behold

Blood of God runs now cold

Crimson red the branches stain

Ageless deity is now slain

What victory is won by this?

Death has stolen God’s great gift

A violent end to peace’s prince

No justice here before or since

Then he wakes and I am new

To empty graves as one we flew

The he walks and I find peace

My heart with God, a debt appeased 

On The Power Of Children

I have always maintained that it is hard to be a spiritual writer because we are, in a sense, reducing things magnificent and eternal to something as paltry as human language. It is hard indeed, to not be the butcher of all things divine, when we are working with such incredible limitations and today's topic is no exception.

I have not written in some time partially because I am falling in love right now, and as you well know, this commands almost all of a man's resources and time, and also because I have wished to do such a great idea, some measure of justice.

About seven months ago, I had an encounter with the Lord, where I saw a vision of my daughter, almost exactly as she looks today. When I saw her, I was filled with so much joy it was overwhelming. I felt like God told me that the depression that I have struggled with on and off over the years, would be taken from me through the birth of my daughter.

The next day Lizeth came to me not knowing about what I had seen and told me that we should name the baby Abigail if it was a girl...and that it meant, "father's joy".

Dostoevsky once said that "the soul is healed by being with children." The other night while I was holding her, I could feel it, I could really feel the healing happening. I could actually sense her little frame healing my wounded heart. It was as if the love and the warmth God was filling my heart with was searching out the recesses of my heart and taking from it all those remaining pains and disappointments which have held so tightly on over the years.

It is humbling, I think, for a grown man to be so weakened by a creature so small and unassuming; but it is healing me. It is taking from me the ego that demands to be validated, and the pain that demands to be masked. In their stead it is giving me one of those few substances that will remain for all of eternity: love (I Cor 13:13).

I am looking forward to thanking my daughter in the years to come for the ministry she has done to me. Jesus said, that we could not enter the kingdom except a man become like her, so I am learning from her. I am learning those rudimentary qualities necessary to "enter the Kingdom." I am learning from her how to be gentle and open; she is teaching me to trust without reservation, and perhaps most importantly, she is teaching me about my utter dependency on God for my most basic of needs.

I am experiencing what theologians have called a "great exchange", that is, that Isaiah 61 experience, exchanging our ashes for a crown of beauty, our mourning for his joy, a spirit of despair for a garment of praise. This exchange is most certainly from God, but it has come to me through this tiny vessel, truly, "God has chosen the weak things of this world".

It is almost as if he gave these things to her while she was being "woven together in the depths of the earth," and said, "here...give these to your dad."

Life, Death, & The Renewal Of All Things

I find that words are often woefully inadequate to capture our deepest emotions; In these moments I've found music or art to be much better mediums of the mystery that is within us.

Above my dining room table hangs a painting. It's cheap art, and it looks tired, but as I sat at my table yesterday I felt like it expressed my musings as of late, far better than language could.

It's a picture of a home, surrounded by a garden. It looks far too idyllic to be real; the landscape is flawless, the home, a stucco-tuscan design seems untouched yet...welcoming; and the lot of it is more like a house you would see at the end of a movie than one you would pass on the way to work.

It's like the house I've always wanted to come home to, not at the end of a long day; but rather at the end of a long life.

It's perfection spoke to me about a better age, an age to come; it reminded me of the "better country" that the Patriarchs who were "not at home in this life" were longing for (Heb.11).

So many things that I have been going through as of late, like that painting, have been reminding me of that age. The death of my grandmother, and the death of my friend Michelle, the impending birth of my daughter, the aching exhaustion from working long hours; these have all served to remind me of a better world.

A world where death itself is defeated and no more, a time when the One "through whom all things were made", will "make all things new". A time when the eternal longings which He has "set in the hearts of men" will be fulfilled.

Oh how my deepest longings will come to fruition in that age! What a joy it will be to see my little sister, and my father, and my grandmothers; and what an honor it will be to say like John the Beloved, that we have "seen his glory, the glory of the only begotten Son"!

And finally, after my long day of toil in this life...whether by eastern sky, or by grave should He tarry...I will go home.