James 4:2 (New International Version)
2You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God.
Link to BibleGateway.com – Passage Lookup: James 4:2;
I realized today I have run myself ragged. I have driven myself to distraction. In my anger and frustration toward God, I have avoided quietness and peace — the things that bring perspective to life. This passage talks about being frenzied with greed and need and looking in all the wrong places. I have been frenzied with frustration and anger, and have looked for relief in all the wrong places. I kind of knew I was doing it, but I didn’t care.
Deciding to try running toward God instead of away from him, I finally sat down to pray and read the Bible for a while this afternoon. But I dozed off after just a few verses. I kept waking up and trying to read or pray, but could get nowhere because sleep kept barging in. And I was reminded that being well-rested is a spiritual discipline. We cannot function effectively if we are drained. The holiest, most spiritual thing I could do right now is take a nap.
My soul is a mess. It has been starved. Starved of prayer. Of quietness. Of focus and reading and rest. Of coffee and other little things in life that bring me joy. No wonder God commanded his people in the Old Testament both to fast and feast. There are proper rhythms for things, and they are given to us — “wired in,” so to speak. We cannot create our rhythms, we can only choose whether to play by them.
So I will return to more frequent prayer. But first I will sleep. And play with my children. And enjoy a rich cup of coffee. If all of life is prayer (which I believe), I have been lousy at praying in more ways than one lately.
Anyway…I do want to declare, shout it from the mountains that God is good, he is faithful and trustworthy and he sustains us daily. Healing takes time, God is not a I want it now kind of God. We are waiting on the Lord anticipating what He will do in the coming days and weeks and months. This morning as we sang songs for the worship service I was struck by the imagery of my feet. The bible talks about how all of our steps are ordered by God, and we sang about our feet being set on a firm foundation, and I thought of the armor of God and how our feet are are supposed to be ready for the gospel of peace, I’m not sure why the thought of feet came to mind but the whole idea of my feet being planted firmly on God right now is powerful. Just as Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever so my life can be solid no matter what may come. I often pray that He will walk before us, beside us and behind us, hemming us in all around and I believe that He literally is. He hides us in the shadow of His wing and holds us in the palm of His hand. The sense of protection is amazing and brings security in a world that “moves like mad”. Hope you sensed His presence today in your church or wherever you were today.
–Ruth Jackson
Source: The Jackson Family Online
Ruth’s husband Mark is receiving hospice care for lung cancer he was diagnosed with a few months ago. This post can be read in two ways, depending on whether one is a cynic, or a person of faith. One is “Tsch – how cliched can you get. What a desperate leap she has taken in an attempt to hang onto some kind of hope.” The second is to say, “Is hope not what this woman and this family need right now? Even more than a miracle, more than healing, they need hope. And somehow, in a way I believe is supernatural, Ruth has found the hope she needs. All through prayer and the exercise of her faith in a situation that appears to offer little hope.
This blog from Ruth is really only set in context by the others that ask or at least hint at the question ”Why,” and talk about how the family is down, burned-out, depressed, etc. So this can be seen not as a cliched “Ho hum, whatever happens we’ll trust God,” but as another step on the journey they have taken that has brought them through fear, anger, depression, anxiety, doubt, and all kinds of stuff. And what it shows is that a person can encounter anything – absolutely anything – and continue to not only hope in God, but believe God cares for them, and trust in his goodness. I have never been as sick as Mark, but I can say that when my MS has been at its worst (and it sucked bad), I have experienced those broken times as moments of grace from God, where I have sensed his peace and presence in ways I never have before.
The greatest challenge for me in the last flare-up I had was a profound fear that this was not in fact MS, but perhaps cancer or, even worse, Lou Gerhig’s disease. Many of the symptoms were the same and ALS really is just a fatal version of MS in terms of how it works in the brain. I had terrible anxiety about it. For days I feared and worried. And then finally something occurred to me. I thought, “Dave, many people would be horrified to experience what you are experiencing now, and yet you have found God in this place. Do you think that if it’s ALS you have instead of MS, God will not be in that place too?” And the most profound comfort came from that. I was able to get through the rest of that flareup not with confidence in myself, but with genuine confidence that as long as God was with me, I could walk through any valley. And not with some expectation of physical healing. God’s presence would be enough. How true it is that this presence is the most healing thing we can ever experience – it heals the soul of the things that really ail it. Bitterness, depression, resentment, frustration, anger, anxiety – with the experience of God’s presence, and the corresponding knowledge that we are never really alone – there is soul healing. When that comes, body healing appears as a convenience rather than a necessity — even though it may be a deeply-desired convenience.
All of this is what I have lost sight of in the last few weeks as bad things have happened in my life and in the lives of others and in our country. That is what has allowed my anger to flare and my doubts to overtake me at times, and put up a wall between God and me. I intend to tear down that wall this week.
I finally finished the plumbing job in my kitchen yesterday. If you read my previous post, I’m In Hell, you know it was one of the worst things I have ever done. However, I am surprised to realize that I already carry a large amount of pride in the work I did. It’s something I thought I could never do. While I was doing it I thought I’d never get it finished and would have to give up and call a plumber. During the project I kept thinking, “Do I really have to keep doing this and redoing it over and over? Why can’t I just be done?” But it turns out the repetition helped me get better at doing the job. I became familiar with what gets done in what order, what I need at the hardware store, and what kinds of things to look out for.
What I learned in hell is that sometimes the very thing that makes hell hellacious will make victory sweet when it comes. If it ever does. And that’s what’s so hard about it. When you’re in hell, you never know whether victory is coming. It just might not. You might have to call a plumber and give up in defeat. You might not reach your goal. You could fail. That tension is what makes the experience agonizing. If I knew three days ago what I knew now — that I would complete this project, that I would succeed and move on to do other easier projects in my kitchen — this whole thing would have been very different. Then it would have been just a matter of putting in the time until victory day.
But in the middle of the battle, you don’t know whether victory will ever come. You realize that with every step you take, you might just be investing more time in what will turn out to be a fruitless effort. You second-guess yourself a lot. It’s hard to put in the time when there’s a chance that you won’t reach your goal no matter how hard or long you work.
“Maybe I should just call the plumber right now.”
“Maybe I should give up. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m going to ruin something.”
“What am I doing? This is a waste of time. I’m never going to finish this.”
But you slog on. Things are terrible. Two hours later things are so much worse that you long for the good old days of two hours ago. After a day or so, and your second or third complete redo and third or fourth trip to Home Depot (remember, this is my first time ever doing plumbing), a dark cloud descends. A cloud of anger, frustration, and feelings of incompetence, and then you sink into depression. (That depression, for me, was at its peak on Tuesday. It was so bad I did something I never do — I went and bought something on impulse, just to make me feel better. It didn’t.)
What I learned is that if you stick it out, if you don’t give up, you are learning something with every mistake, every disassemble and reassemble, every do-over. Even though you keep feeling stupider and less competent each time, you are actually getting better as you go. The reality is the exact opposite of how it appears.
I hope that is true in the rest of my life as well. I hope that as I sit here typing this blog, aware of other things I could be doing, my life is other than it appears. I hope I am learning something – piecing together lessons that I will carry with me into future ventures into unfamiliar territories.
As I struggled the past few days, I kept worrying that I was going to make a mistake that would force me to buy a new countertop or a new sink — that I would ruin something valuable that I already had. Isn’t this what we always face in trying new things? We’re always afraid of losing whatever we already have – position, power, income, status, image, reputation, etc. We can hold onto those things so tightly that our iron grip keeps us from ever embracing anything new. And when we stop embracing new things, we stop feeling the sense of pride in our accomplishments that I am feeling now. I want more of those kinds of experiences. One of my favorite movies is Braveheart. In that film William Wallace says, “Every man dies. Not every man truly lives.” I got to live a little this week.
Pleasure and pain, baby. No guts, no glory. Crucifixion and resurrection. There are more metaphors and cliches about the celebration that comes after struggle than I can count. This sentiment is expressed no more beautifully than in the Bible. Here is one of my favorites:
Psalms 30:5 (NIV)
5 …weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.
I often feel lost in an infinite universe of choices. There are so many belief systems; so many political positions; so many large organizations that seem to control so many aspects of our lives — how do we hang onto a sense of who we are? I guess I could be like so many and just never really think about it. In fact I have tried that too – witness months at a time of zero entries in this blog and you’ll understand that.
And yet I can say that on Sundays, week after week, I stand in front of my congregation and say the things I really believe most deeply. My beliefs are a point of reference for everything else. It’s not that I pretend to be certain on Sundays and then live in uncertainty Monday through Saturday — it’s that on Sundays I have a chance to get “back to basics” every week. The older I get the less certain I am about most things, but the more certain I am about the few things I believe most deeply.
This gets strange when it comes to pastoring and leading in the church. People need a safe place to ask questions, even if their questions are different from mine. At the same time, people have a strong drive to find answers, to move past questioning into resolution. The more open Wildwind is to questions, the more uncomfortable it becomes for those who just want to focus on answers. The more we celebrate answers, the more we alienate those who are questioning. How do we live with the tension between asking questions and needing answers?
This week someone from my church wrote to me and said, “When you serve communion to us and say, ‘The body and blood of Christ,’ what are we supposed to say back to you?” It had never occurred to me that my people should say anything in particular. But apparently she knew a few people who were kind of confused about this and was thinking perhaps I’d have some direction for them. Off the top of my head, I suppose something between “Thanks Dave, you rock, don’t ever change,” and “I hereby attest that at the appointed time God will work his glorious will upon the earth” would probably be fine. Perhaps something like “Thank you,” or “Bless you,” or even a reverent silence would do the trick.
I’m not poking fun of those who are uncertain. (That would be the pot calling the kettle black.) I struggle constantly with uncertainty. The drive to “know the rules,” to have boundaries clearly defined, is a strong one. So also is the drive to resist rules, to run from direction. Highly liturgical, formal churches are what happens when a religious institution attempts to make clear for everyone exactly what to do at every point: say this at communion, say this prayer when someone dies, pray this way when someone is in need of healing, recite this at a wedding, sprinkle this at a funeral. Again here I’m not denigrating churches that have decided to define this stuff for their people. Some can live within these guidelines and discover that their sense of connection to God is enhanced through them, because they are free to focus on the experience of God and not have to think about what to say or do in certain situations. This is the appeal of liturgy, and there’s part of me that would love to do more of that. I see great value in it.
On the other hand there are always those who would say, “All that formal stuff just brings me down.” They want everything free-form — nothing defined, everything off-the-cuff. But the fact is our spiritual lives can’t develop that way. We cannot separate spiritual life from the experiences of everyday living, as if somehow most of “regular” life can be routine and scheduled, but this one area should always be wild and spontaneous. What really happens when we refuse to apply any discipline at all to our spiritual lives? They fail to develop into anything substantive, just like the couple who thinks they should never have to schedule sex might have to deal with really long periods of time without it. Other people prefer actually having sex and so they figure out a way to get it. In other words, for some people their idea (i.e., in-the-box, preconceived, Hollywood movie, fantasy notion) of what sex should be actually keeps them from having sex. For some people, the idea of what worship should be keeps them from actually worshipping.
In the final analysis, there is a danger inherent both in churches that don’t try to define everything and in those that do. The ones that don’t can mistake spontaneity for authenticity, as if someone cannot sincerely pray a prayer written hundreds of years ago (Christ’s prayer on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” was directly out of the Psalms). In the ones that do, people can mistake structure for relationship, thinking that all of these little traditions actually tell them who God is rather than giving them a way to seek Him. I sympathize with the struggles of some in my church to know what to say during communion (or whether to stand or sit during singing, etc.). My best answer to this difficulty is to say that Wildwind has chosen to be a church that does not define everything. This allows uncertainty, but ultimately to relate to God at all is to be uncertain. We might as well learn to live with some of that tension.
