The Freedom in Futility

The end of James 4 says this:

 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.

Have you ever considered what it would be like to be an ant? A pretty short life span, mostly have no direction other than what you immediately see and smell... not appetizing. But the other hand, have you ever seen an aluminum casting of an ant hill? No? Check this out. It's amazing.

By no means am I saying that God looks at us like we look at ants. We are his supreme image bearers that he has paid a high price to redeem and we have been made children and heirs. On the other hand, our lives are a vapor that is here and then is gone. Our plans are not unlike the ant's: we must live based off information in front of our faces because we cannot see the big picture.

In case it is unclear, we are not God. God is God. He is the one that knows what has been and what will be. He is the one that has authority over time and death and everything else. Frankly, to live as if we have even the slightest bit of control is suicidal lunacy.

Yesterday, I stood chest-deep in the ocean. There is no firm footing on the ocean floor; if a few waves had converged, I might have been carried out too far to swim in. Helpless, but in utter bliss. To be transparent, I am unsure about camp. I am unsure about grad school. My heart is fickle, but somehow has the loudest voice in my head. Who knows what is real or what will be? I feel personally the least in control of my life that I ever have, but I have also never known freedom so well.

True freedom means knowing not that you can do whatever you want, but instead that He that can do whatever He wants wants you. Our God desires for us to know Him. He wants us to follow Him and to give us guidance about how to live these brief lives. He is the only stability, the only one that knows what is to come, and the only one that will be able to give us what we desire. Our lives, at best a breeze in a windstorm, change. Our God does not. 

Overwhelmed.

This is me pondering just how good God is. As always, please forgive any incoherence and rambling.

Psalm 19 says this:

The heavens are telling of the glory of God, and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.

Glory, transliterated as kabowd in Hebrew, means heaviness or worth or honor or majesty. Basically, this verse means that what we can see in the heavens tells us about the weight that God carries, of His majesty and splendor.

A cool thing I have been learning about God is that His goodness is overwhelming. The glory of His goodness and graciousness is genuinely more than I am able to process. 

The other day, riding down to the beach with a friend, it occurred to me that this moment in my life is extraordinarily brief. It is also occurred to me that this season was something the younger version of me would have killed for. 

How many day will be the ones where I can leave town to the east one day and leave to the west the next? How long will I be able to go to the beach just to hang out with friends, to celebrate years of friendship with brothers and laugh until late in the evening, and to develop meaningful friendships with new friends?

In a couple weeks, I will be immersed in the hectic, beautiful, difficult, rewarding season of camp (my last summer! For real this time!). I'll be able to see some of my closest brothers, guys that have been some of my best friends for years. I'll be able to invest heavily in teenagers and hang out with tons of little kids. There will be shenanigans and games and jokes and genuine community... it's a time and place like none other. How soon will August 13 come and what will it bring with it?

My brother and sister-in-law live a couple miles from my house, so I can see them and get advice or hang out any time. My little sis and older sis (and brother-in-law) still live near my parents, so I can easily see them. All 4 of the kids in my family love the crap out of each other and my family has always loved and supported each other. How long will we live so close and being able see each other so easily?

The goodness of God's gifts is overwhelming to me. I honestly can't articulate exactly how good they are. All I am confident about in this season of life is this: God's goodness is more than the goodness of His gifts (He must be greater than His gifts in order to give them); God's goodness is better than I can comprehend during this season and it still will be during the next season; it would be incredibly silly to respond with anything other than broken, humbled gratitude.

Oh, God would you teach me the brevity of these day and let me soak in the beauty of the gifts you are giving me? 

Oh God, would you let me remember your goodness when the stars are evident and when they are hidden?

Oh God, would you take my brokenness and desperate need for you and accept it as all I can give to you?

Here We Go Again

I'll start this by admitting that I am eating lots and lots of crow. When I wrote the post saying my time as a summer staffer was over, I genuinely thought I was saying goodbye. When I left camp in August last year, I was sure I would come back. I was sure I would be coming back to visit old staffers and meet new staffers and hang out with friends that are incredibly important to me. I was sure that whatever I would be doing May 11, 2014 was going to be, it would be something other than introducing my family, watching them leave, finding out who my AP is and jumping off into the craziness that is summer.

Basically, the only part I had right about it was buying a truckload of fruit snacks to drop off at the Nest. Now I just get to take part in the eating of said fruit snacks.

So, here it is: I am going back to camp. It's fantastic. It's terrifying. It raises all sorts of questions about my sanity. It isn't going to make me any reasonable amount of money and it won't help me get a head start on grad school. I could give you every reason that I should have forgone my 4th summer, but, honestly, I feel like it is something God has asked me to do, then, when I told Him I couldn't, He opened up my summer. I would try to explain everything going on in my life right now, but maybe we should just talk in person.

So, here I go again.

I have written to ask for help and prayer in previous summers, including this post. I still stand behind those things. I need help to do camp well this summer. I always have; now I just need different and more help because while I know many things about being a summer staffer, I have no clue how to be a 22 year old college graduate that is the grandpa of a group of young and gifted staffers.

There will be new staffers to invest in, new campers to teach and serve, new memories to be made, a new AP (My 4th! Wow.) and there will most assuredly be challenges, heartache, sacrifice, and difficulty. Stories will be told about staffers from long ago, stories that they don't even remember they were a part of. There will be off-day adventures. There will be nights spent on the porch trying to figure out what in the world God is pushing us to do with the lives He has given us. This summer will be a glorious, joyful season full of hard work, full of lots of laughs, and, above all, a time where everyone we cross paths with at camp will be presented with the lordship, kingly authority, and immeasurable grace of Jesus.

What I have asked before I will ask again: please pray for us. Put simply, we can't do camp without our God sustaining us. I have nothing to pour out for guests that He hasn't filled me up with. Pray for the guys, mostly that we don't do something stupid or prideful, but also that we would remember who we are as God's sons. Pray for the girls, asking God to make clear to them that they are forever His daughters and, because their identity is secure, they can be the life-givers that they were created to be. Pray we would lead well and follow well. Pray that we would have the mindset of Jesus, who, although He was God, did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped but subjected Himself to humility and servitude to the point of death, even death on a cross (sorry for the paraphrase).

Guys, I'm going back to camp. I'm excited. See you when you come down the hill!

Distracted

I can't point at a verse in the Bible that says this, but I think this statement is almost always true: "the older you get, the busier you get." Or, I could say it this way: "living longer means a longer list of responsibilities."

That's right, the cliche show is in town and I'll be here all night... and every other night.

Here is a list of things that demand something like immediate attention in my life:

- I have to pass my classes to graduate. It'll be a lot of work, but I'll make it.

- I have to make sure there are enough people to live n my house next year.

- Grad school will start immediately after camp and I need to start on research grants.

- I have obligations and commitments to maintain relationship with my family and friends. 

- I have to mentally and spiritually start preparing myself for camp.

- Some issues with close friends have reached critical mass and I need to process how those relationships will be manifested down the line.

- I need to continue seeking to be close to God in prayer and knowing scripture.

Yes, that is the order that those things came to mind. Wow.

My heart has been, is, and will be an incredibly distracted one. After typing all of those things out on a separate list before writing this, I looked at what I had written and my response was first despair at the seemingly overwhelming nature of my life right now, followed almost immediately by a disgust at how deeply I desire comfort and ease, and then, after realizing that I am entirely missing the boat on the whole matter, brokenness and a deep desire for repentance.

What I learned from the list above is not that I need to get on the ball with work, not that my life is more or less difficult than anyone else's, and not even that I am doing the wrong or right thing by prioritizing the first few items; what I learned was that I am viewing a lot of ultimately superfluous things as things to be done before I checked in with my God, my Father, my teacher, my owner, my master, and my redeemer. To me, Jesus has at times become an afterthought. Those words hurt to hear.

Truthfully, I don't have any clever points to make. After thinking about it long and hard, here's all I can come up with: Jesus is the point. Getting a degree and having friendships and doing what I am supposed to do is a good and a right thing, but it is ultimately not the point. The point of life and everything is to know God and be known by God. Everything else is subordinate to that end. Unless I am seeking to know, serve, and love God, anything I do is intrinsically worthless. 

If we take Him at his word (hint: we should), it is disingenuous to say that Jesus died and resurrected so that His righteousness can be put on us to save us from the just wrath of God and go on about our day. I think I am not making a stretch to say that the good news of Jesus and the Kingdom is not just a matter of salvation; basically everything He taught was about living in God's Kingdom and basically everything Paul wrote was about being 'in' or living 'united' to Christ. 

The gospel is not safe and it will not leave your life unchanged. I know God is not going to abandon me because I sometimes wander in my thoughts and ambitions; Jesus has been abandoned and punished and risen so that I may live in liberty and true freedom. My biggest fear no longer has to be wondering who God is and what He thinks about me. He let His son get murdered unjustly so that I could have life. My biggest fear is that I would have that life (hint: John 10:10) and not be transformed, or said another way, that I would be able to live in freedom and communion with God and instead keep twiddling my thumbs focusing on things that aren't even on the same level of reality. 

Don't be distracted. Don't stop looking at Jesus. While we live these lives, a mere speck of dust in view of the true story that reality tells, our enemy will try to convince us that we and our lives are central. This, of course, is false. Jesus is central. Jesus is the point. Jesus is that whether we are willing to repent (metanoeō, or change our minds) and again remember that we were not created to do a series of ultimately meaningless tasks, but instead to live lives that point at Jesus and say "look at Him. He is what it is all about." God loves us and is willing to keep teaching, guiding, and disciplining us. He isn't going to hate us when we get distracted; He has just made something far better and more meaningful available.

Impossible

Before reading this post, you should first read John 5, specifically the interaction between Jesus and the guy that couldn't walk.

To a 22 year old guy that has grown up reading the Bible and having it taught to me, the story of Jesus healing someone that couldn't walk is not surprising, for better or for worse. Jesus, who is God and did all sorts of miracles when he was on earth, healed a guy. Yep. Sounds right.

When I read this passage a few weeks back, something did surprise me about it. Jesus asked the man if he wanted to be healed. The obvious answer would seem to be 'duh,' but it apparently isn't quite that obvious. When Jesus asked the question, the man responded not by saying 'yes, Jesus,' but by saying "well, I can't put myself in the pool and no one will help me." The man's answer was not really an answer for the question asked. Basically, the man was saying "I have been trying to heal myself for 38 years, of course I want to to be healed because I have been trying myself. Why won't you help me do what I think is best?"

Fortunately, Jesus is not above helping people that are hostile toward being helped. In my mind, I think I have strategies worked out to rid myself of sin. I think I can fix myself and fix everything around me, when I am in fact devastatingly crippled by my weaknesses and have literally no way to help myself.

This of course makes it all the more confusing when, after the man is examined by the religious officials, Jesus secretly meets him and tells him to not sin anymore, "so that nothing worse may happen to you." Wait, don't sin anymore? Isn't that impossible? But really, when you think about it, Jesus says the same thing twice: 'you are lame, but I am telling you to get up and walk because I say you can' and 'you are helplessly broken by and addicted to sin, but you must stop because I say you can.'

I'm sure Jesus did not really expect the man to never sin again. 1 John 1 (written by one of Jesus' disciples) says that any mere man that claims to be without sin is a liar. The man definitely sinned again. What Jesus was communicating to the man was that what man cannot do, Jesus can. Jesus calls us to the impossible not by telling us to go and do something and walking away, but by saying, "I know the Father. Follow me and know the Father. I am holy. Follow me and be holy."

To be obedient to God's commands is impossible. Jesus did the impossible. Maybe we should follow Jesus.

What Does Scripture Actually Say: Church

Let's talk about church. What is it? What does the Bible say about it? What do we mean when we say it?

If I may be so bold, I would argue that most of the time when we say church, we are referring to a building or a meeting or something like that. Sometimes, I talk about church this way. I'm not sure I've ever met a person that didn't refer to the church this way at some point. In my estimation, there are negative and positive aspects of this idea.

First, the negative: I don't think the scriptures talk about a church being a building or a meeting. The word that is written in Greek (ekklesia) means a group of people called out or separated. In fact, here's a useful link to help you see what the word means. Basically, if you went up to Paul (the writer of a lot of the New Testament) and told him you were going to 'go to church,' he would have no idea what you are talking about. It would be like us saying I'm going to go to baseball team.

The positive: if someone did happen to tell you they were 'going to baseball team,' you would probably understand that they were going to practice baseball with their club or go do something with their club or even go do something to benefit their club. Likewise, when people say they are 'going to church,' they probably mean they are going to meet with the church or do something with their church or do something to benefit the church. It's just a term we use.

The verdict: I don't think people are going to stop referring to church gatherings or buildings where they meet as a church. On the other hand, it is important to be important with our words. So, be careful about what you say and about what you mean. Don't be overbearing. Speak truth in love. Serve Jesus and His church.

Walter Mitty, Freedom, and John 10:10

One thing I have seen and therefore think is true is that ‘drugs’ stop working. Obviously, you can keep drugging up or keep drinking or keep having sex, but eventually it all goes away. All these things are often abused for escape, but the question is what from we are trying to escape. It seems like every person is looking for more. We are naturally given a drive to go and to do and to experience and, ultimately, find something that has deep, eternal meaning. Meaning that doesn't go away, to have true freedom that is completely ‘else’ from our lives as we know them. In fact, every religion in the world is centered on one main idea: somehow, we got here and now something is wrong and it needs to be fixed.

I watched “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” with my family yesterday, and all I could think about was how Walter’s life is so much like everyone’s life: our actions are built around being content with what we have and trying to be safe, but everything in us is built to crave more. We live trying to pad our lives so the inevitable storm or fall doesn't hurt as much (escapism, drugs, and comfort are commonly used padding elements [read: idols]) while we yearn to break free of the silly, useless things holding us down and live fully in freedom.

John 10:10 says this: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” (NASB) Jesus came to do a lot of things and one was to bring life full of freedom and fulfillment. Basically, Jesus is what we are looking for. Obviously, Jesus is Messiah. He is the fulfillment of all prophecies. He is the righteous King and Lord of everything that was created by and through Him. However, He is not only those things, but indeed the one entity that will give us water that will never make us thirst again. He will give us the satisfaction that does not wear off and does not quit. Jesus doesn't just offer salvation from hell when we die, but also a daily salvation from the kingdom of hell that we are slaves in.

There is a reason Jesus came to earth and took on flesh and lived 33 years. God could have done salvation another way, but chose Jesus’ life for a reason. Jesus came to bring life and life to the full, not just being fully saved after we die. The Gospel works in power to set us free from the bondage of sin and fear and slavery. Jesus, who is literally God forever, took on human flesh and died and resurrected so that He could be glorified and we could live. If this is true and we depend on it, there is literally nothing that can encumber our freedom because we are in full communion with the God we were created by and for.

Go and live with this call from the author of Hebrews (12:1-3):

“Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, ² fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. ³ For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”