Written September 21^st

 

On coming to Chandler my friend Christi graciously extended herself in many ways; one of those ways was to invite us weekly to their church in Scottsdale.  I am mentioning this because over the last several weeks things have been brought to my mind some new things some old, but all of which have been particularly pestering to me.  You know those times when your mind is like a skipping record?  None of it was especially profound or even very thought provoking, but I felt like maybe I should tell them to the pastor.  Of course I did, I impose my thoughts on people all of the time.  Last Sunday after the church service I walked up to him and asked if we could meet at some point.  He had me call his secretary on Monday to see if we could set a time.  Then Wednesday the 18^th late in the afternoon when I had all but forgotten about it the secretary called me back.  I then tried to remember why I had wanted to talk to him in the first place.  That night my thoughts drifted to the points that I wanted to make to the pastor and they were this.

 I was going to start with something like busy.  I have found that people like to stay busy.  Church people especially like to stay busy.  (I told you it wasn’t profound.  I am simply, or at least was, a Physical Therapy tech by trade and a mother of two in life.  The waters here don’t run very deep.)

   I am a people watcher; I have been my whole life.  I like to see how people take in information.  How they process it; how they reach conclusions based mostly on their own personal life experiences requiring very little factual information.  Yet look how firmly they (we) all stand on those conclusions.  Just try to shake a person standing on their new found conclusion, you can’t.  I have done this forever, people watching I mean, and am now quite good at reading people.  I use to know how each person in my family walked and I could tell instantly by listening to just a couple steps what mood they were in.  It didn’t take long to expand this talent to friends and their families and then eventually to school and work.  By watching people and learning how to predict their next move I could keep myself safe.  So it started, that I never was going to let people or circumstances determine my outcome. What I couldn’t predict by reading people I could prepare for with all of my contingency plans.  I then would eventually always end up on top and would never really need anyone at all. 

About Four years ago Greg and I met with a couple for counseling.  I am so happy to say that we now call them great friends and mentors.  Four years ago I was exhausted and angry. (Yes I realize this is a reoccurring theme with me.)  I was tired of pulling rabbits out of my hat.  Having to plan and make plans for all of the possible bumps and curves in our lives.  I felt very alone in this.  Greg wasn’t helping me keep us afloat.  This mentor of mine asked me why I had to plan and figure things out so much.  And I said because these things might happen, in fact they most likely WILL happen and happen soon.  Again she questioned me about why I spent so much time in my head.  I don’t remember the whole conversation, but I remember what I came away with.  I fear the next paragraph will probably lose half of you, but try to hear me out. 

This is what I remember of what was a very lengthy multi-day, maybe even weeklong conversation from four years ago.  Satan does not have a very big bag of tricks, in fact I am tempted to say that he really only has one, but it manifests itself in several different ways.  We church-going people know God to be the creator.  Satan is a mere creation.  Just in that over simplified explanation we can see that Satan has limits that God the creator of all things doesn’t have. Yes I believe that there is a devil just as I believe that there is a God.  Humm…, let me tweak that last statement to make it a little bit more honest. I would actually say that at that time (and maybe even a bit true now) I have felt more impact from the reality of, shall we say, the dark side, then the reality I felt from any particular protection or guidance from God. 

Now let me get into Satan’s bag of tricks, at least the ones I know of:  Shame, Fear, Guilt, Pride, Isolation, Withdrawal into self, and Busyness.  What it really comes down to is distractions; distracting is really his main game.  He doesn’t have to make you particularly bad; in fact I believe he likes it much better when we look mostly good.   Remember “for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light,” he is the king of partial truths.  All he has to do is keep us distracted; distracted people are much too busy to simply sit at the feet of Jesus. 

 I will try to abbreviate this the best I can.  God promises to be with you.  Some of you have heard the saying he gives you strength for the moment. God is omniscience (God is all-knowing), he is omnipresence (God is all-present/all-seeing); he is omnipotence (God is all-powerful).  But here is the headline, we aren’t!!  He has not promised you tomorrow; he has promised to be with you moment by moment. Why? Simply because he is God and we are not.  He can handle it, but guess what, we can’t.  This is why I get so exhausted and feel so overwhelmed when I look at the future.  It is because our human minds, bodies and hearts were not made to handle these things.  So when we get distracted and get pulled away from the present moment guess what; it gets terrible.  Why?  Because we have wondered away from the protection of God’s side.

  God has promised us grace for this moment; His grace is sufficient for “the now”.  When I get distracted and live in a realm other than the present, I choose to walk in a realm where His grace has not been promised.  So why do I not choose to walk in “the now”?  Because it requires faith to trust God, to believe that He knows and cares for me, that all His intentions for me are good.  In the absence of that confidence, I’d rather trust in my own ability to “work things out”, my own planning, setting up contingency plans (in case God really isn’t there), and to establish my own security so that I won’t have to depend upon a God who may or may not actually be there for me.  Yet this does not prevent me from expressing my bitterness towards Him when it seems like things are spinning out of control and this promise of His, that His grace is sufficient for me, is a lie; never mind the fact that I never walked within the realm where He had said His grace would be provided.  The latest experience becomes the latest example of why I can’t trust Him; once again, I struggle and struggle (doing my part) and He once again lets me fall.  It never occurs to us (to me) that He NEVER promised grace for “carrying tomorrow” today or for carrying all the “what if’s I can imagine); He promised that His grace would be sufficient for “the NOW”.  Yet nevertheless I feel justified in my bitterness toward God because once again His grace has not been sufficient and I’m exhausted and spent. 

Matthew 11: 28-30.  [Jesus said] Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.  

Hebrews 4:16.  [Because Jesus is our High Priest]  Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. 

II Corinthians 12:9.  “But he [Jesus] said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. 

My little Amara is quite the character; actually both of my kids are, but for now I am going to talk about our little princess Amara.  I feel like God gave me this thought last week. Again I thought that it was because I was to share it with the Scottsdale pastor; who would have thought that it was actually me who needed to hear it?  We live in a great apartment complex we all really like it.  It is quiet, safe and very well maintained.  There are lots of interwoven walkways leading to the playground, pool, mailboxes, bike trails and the office.  So many times Amara and I head out and have to hit up several of those locations.  Amara is very independent and ever so slightly stubborn.  She does not like to hold my hand and likes very much to be in the lead.  We have a little talk every time we go out; I tell her that she has to stay with me and that it isn’t safe for her to go too far ahead.  She usually says something like “I knowww, you say it all the time, Why are you so exasperating?!”  (I don’t know where she picked up that word, but she now says it all of the time.) So this is how our walk starts.  She starts by being verily obedient, she won’t hold my hand, but she stays by my side.  I don’t know if it is her confidence or excitement about what she THINKS the destination is, but all of a sudden she starts picking up speed.   I used to get quite upset with her the moment I saw her speed up.  She would in turn get mad at me because to her she was hardly ahead of me at all. (In truth she would still be quite close, but I knew where she was headed and I wanted to stop her before she got too far.)  Now when I see her pick up speed I stop and see how long it takes her to realize that I am not there.  That little twerp almost never stops; I usually panic and yell at her and say, “Where are you going!”  She usually is surprised to see the distance that stands between us.  She usually gets scared or immediately sad because she knows that there will be consequences for her disobedience.

I told that story because I find it is so easy to stray from God.  We start out so often in “basic compliance.”  She wouldn’t hold my hand which she really should have, but she was at least by my side. And then what happened?  I don’t know, but I see it now in me.  I think we start with the assumption that the path we are on is the general direction in which our life is taking us.  We of course have the capacity to have plans a, b and c, however we still lack the ability to see the future. This usually results in us being hopelessly lost.  Here is the really scary thing.  While my mind was mulling this over the other night I realized that we can be quite lost and be completely unaware of it just as Amara found herself the other day. There are necessary pit stops and via points; I am also finding that there are completely unpredictable twists and turns in our life that only God knows.  There are times we need to step out and then I think there are times when we are called to just sit and wait.  A “be still and know that I am God” moment.  Can you imagine how much easier it would be if Amara would just hold my hand until we got to our destination.  But instead, this is what happens: I have to either go to her, which by the time the distance is crossed we now have to “recalculate” and find an alternate route or Amara has to walk back to me with her tiny little legs and we still have to continue on to our final destination.  The moral of the story is, of course, to stay with the guy who has the map since it is much less exasperating.

Going back to my thoughts on the busyness of the church.  I have found in my observations that church people very much like the “busy things” such as committees, small groups, mops and of course building projects just to name a few.   When people get together what do they like to talk about?  Many times it is describing how busy we are.  Just how busy we are, is how we justify ourselves and our lives in general.  I found that we never really outgrow what I call the club house mentality.  Kids need, not just want, but need to belong to something.  Something bigger than themselves, something that matters not just to them, but to the world.  It sounds dramatic I know, but watch and listen to kids talk and play.  Their games have big problems. They fight for the good. It needs to matter.  They can’t just have friends; they, as a group, must have a mission a purpose.  I watch it every day when I take my son to school.  Their made-up games are important, there are rules, consequences, goals, good and bad.  They become consumed with their made up mission.  We as adults behave in much the same way.   And I think that it is good to have these desires and feelings (my son’s name means to have a strong high longing; this is my wish and desire for his life).  We were made this way.  Our creator made us to desire a purpose.  Unfortunately our desire to have a purpose can have such a terrible aim that we at times satisfy this need with just staying busy. 

The next thing I thought about is how church people can be very funny with spiritual things.  The goal of every church (or at least it should be the goal of every church) is to draw you closer to God.  So I always feel very conflicted when I walk into a church and see a bunch of pageantry.  Why are there smoke machines?  Why do we play soft spiritual elevator music while we pray?  Why the phone voices and the church stance, and then the head tilt (you know what I’m talking about).  The staggered stance when things turn serious.  If it is really serious or spiritual, they couple the stance with a head tilt and to really drive a point home, they will only talk out of one side of their mouth)?  Also, why is everything so perfectly orchestrated?  (Real life is messy, I mean really messy.) Lights usually get dim as the subject turns serious.  There are light shows and gobos in the spot lights for dramatic effect, but why?  Now this one, more than anything else, just annoys me to death, fill in the blanks.  Why are we still filling in the damn blanks!! Pardon my French, but my mom said I could say anything that was in the King James Version of the bible and damn is in there a lot.   I of course could go on and on; I have a life time of this stuff built up.   But at the end I guess I just get annoyed when I see a bunch of BUSY STUFF.  

(Why the rant you ask?  Well to start with right now I find myself in a particularly feisty mood.  It is also in part because from a very early age I could never get comfortable with the obvious nakedness of the emperor. (You know the story about the Emperor’s New Clothes.)  Things had to make sense.  There had to be a reason.  I needed to know why.  I wanted to see the root.  And when the answer so clearly contradicted the action, then I was compelled to say it.  My dad is a scientist and just loves to ask questions I think that is where I get it from.  Sorry Dad)

 I think the church does this because they feel, by creating an atmosphere close to that which surrounded Christ, we will understand or feel closer to him.   If it isn’t that exactly it is something close to that I believe.  You see we are sensual beings; we physically and emotionally need to feel and connect with what we believe.  We long to know and to be known.  If we do not feel the “stillness or peace” without the “soft music” and “soothing voice”, what does that mean?  If a clear answer or direction doesn’t come, then what.  If the goose bumps that accompany the music and the dimming lights aren’t there in the stillness, are we alone?  I believe that imbedded in that deep desire to be known, a fear grows that we might never feel God the way we are “supposed” to feel him.  We might not hear him or sense his presence the way we think we should.  So we (I think not consciously) create for ourselves a replica.  A contingency plan that mimics what we are sure it must feel like.  I think this is why the modern western church has so much pageantry.  God filled the temple with smoke so in turn we will turn on our smoke machines so we can all feel closer to God.   What was important, the smoke or that it was God that had done it? You see God is not a one hit wonder.  He is not the guy who takes all of his dates to the same restaurants then to the movie and so on.  No, he treats us like the individual creations that we are.  He doesn’t have to reuse anything, not a single emotion, sign or experience.  Why?  Because he loves us uniquely, different from everyone and everything that ever has been and ever will be.  It is his great pleasure to shower us with his affection in a personal way, a way in which we uniquely can receive it and enjoy it. 

Have you ever noticed that everyone can identify with the bad things in your life?  When we describe the terror we felt in the night as kids it is universally understood.  The description of the sick feelings in my stomach matches yours identically.  I could come up with several different analogies but what it comes down to is that bad things are universally relatable.  I think this is why our legal system can verily accurately profile criminals and sociopaths.  They all have the same finger print.  “Could it be Satan?”  All silliness aside, Satan has no choice but to reuse those feelings, emotions and crippling fears.  Remember he himself is only a creation.

In contrast, has something amazing ever happened to you; a thought, a dream, a feeling, has a line in a song, a scene in a picture or a movie: has a verse or a line in a book witnessed by you a million times before, has it ever in an instance come to mean so much more?  Do you remember when concepts that you have been so painstakingly laboring over out of nowhere connect in way that now finally “YES I get it!!” Have you ever felt moved to the soul, taken, even if just for a moment, clear out of your orbit?  Let me guess, when it comes to those moments, no matter what, you can’t recreate it with either word or picture.   No matter how hard you try to describe it, the other person says “oh, you mean like xyz…” and you say to yourself, “no no” it wasn’t like that at all.  You know what?  You just experienced God.   He didn’t give it to the masses; he gave it just for you.  Satan does his best to steal those moments.  Don’t let him.   Please be careful to guard those moments there will come a time that you will need them. Don’t doubt it just because people don’t see it the way it was shown to you.  (I would however tell you to test your experience and run it through the filter of Gods truth.)

I think this is why I hate fill in the blanks in church bulletins and study guides. I feel like it is setting the stage for God not being adequate.  The pastor has to make sure that his congregation understands the scripture in a way that he feels it is true.  Of course we must make our God experiences relatable.  We must then set up contingency plans and perimeters to make sure we aren’t deceived and that we all understand it the same.

Now the dilemma:  we desire, no we really need, those moments of reassurance, and we feel lost and abandoned when those moments don’t come or when they are few and far between?   Have you ever heard how C. S. Lewis came to know the Lord?  You see he was an atheist at first; a practical man of reason bent on disproving the existence of God.  Simplifying it perhaps a little too much, he was unable to.  He was then left with the possibility that there may be a God (I think at that time, it may have been more than that to him, I think he may have believed there WAS a God).  However it didn’t reside in him yet; the physical and the logical conflicted with the spiritual.  I think we can all identify with that. Then one day while out for a ride, it happened.  What you ask?    He understood something that he never had understood before.  God!  He came to know God.   Without thinking about it or reasoning through it or even willing it to happen. God revealed himself to him.

If you are like me, I long for those moments when you so clearly know something that you could not, for the life of yourself, get to adhere before.  So what then do we do when in longing we are still left to wait?  “When the intervals of darkness come, as come they must- when the sun is hid and the stars withdraw their shining- we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is.”  I love this passage from Emerson’s The American Scholar.

 

 

 

 

This is the role I believe the church is to play.  We are not to create the “impression” or the “general atmosphere” of the sun or stars, in case we forget what the sun is or what it really feels like.  We are instead to introduce what we do have access to, the lamps which were kindled by the Sun (the authentic, not simply the appearance).  I fear at times we are entering a dark age, like in C. S. Lewis’s book The Silver Chair.  We, like Prince Rilian, have been persuaded that the witch’s dim lamp is the true sun.  We at times need a Puddleglum to wake us up, simple in nature but honest to a fault.

Now I am now going to attempt to tie up all of these loose ends. This is how all of this relates to our present circumstances. 

I feel like I, being frail in my faith, believe in God but I don’t really believe that he will be adequate for me.  I have concluded this is why I plan and stay so much in my head.  I think that this is the same reason we turn down the lights, talk softly and play soothing music.  This is why we manufacture an atmosphere that makes us feel like we belong to the same God that the greats of biblical time experienced.  This is why we must pass the offering tray.  What if people don’t feel or what if they don’t obey God’s prompting to give.  Or still worse what if God doesn’t prompt.   The church has made contingency plans (just as I have and everyone else has) in case God doesn’t come through, or he doesn’t come through in a way in which we think we need him to. 

So I believe God began this work in me four years ago, and quite possibly much earlier than that; and then he brought it to mind again over the last few weeks. It was, I believe, “for such a time as this”.  I am finding myself in an interval of darkness the likes of which I have never experienced before.  I know now that Satan preys on these moments; he knows my desire to have a clear answer, a solution.   “Fix this Damn it!” my ears ring with the sound of my heart’s cry.  Yet here I am.  I have really only two options; one that I know Satan desires.  Distractions, he desperately hopes, I know he does, that I busy myself.  His desires are for me to turn to the artificial sun.  To find contingency plans and busy work.   His hope is that I soldier on ahead of God and then I will eventually find myself on a walk to nowhere. (I meant that last bit for my niece.  I love you Adeline, ask your mom about it.)   To what or to whom will I turn to when answers don’t seem to come?   My prayer now and please let it be yours for me to, that I instead turn to the lamps which were kindled by the sun’s rays.  And that I will find myself eventually in the East where the dawn is.   I believe these lamps right now to be manifested in prayer and by the constant, moment by moment reminders of His truths and His promises that He has clearly laid out in His word, and by the memories of the moments spent with God directly.