Broken

Before God could bring me to this place 

He has broken me a thousand times.

- Smith Wigglesworth

We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We receive his poured-out life, and being allowed the high privilege of suffering with Him, may then pour ourselves out for others.

Elisabeth Elliot

               When you sit quietly and listen to the world, you hear the grief of breaking hearts being borne in utter silence as a fake façade puts up a front and says,

                “No, I’m okay.”

                They lie. But they are so longing to be vulnerable, and so longing to know truth. 

                And yet they do not speak……until they want to. And when they speak, it rains. And when it rains, it pours. But sometimes rain is good because it causes me to stop cold in my own self-serving path and listen to a person tell me how painful was their break.

                Breaks are never clean. The heart is like a window-pane that shatters in a thousand tiny spider-webs when life hits it with a force.

                I think I have it hard sometimes with my own heart, you know. I sob a lot over Poor Old Me who thinks she’s just stepped across the line to the point of no return. And "poor old me" commiserates with "poor old me" a lot, not remembering that "poor old me" was purchased on the cross.

                I’m hit with utter mourning, realizing just how blind I often am. How blind and deaf do I have to be – how blind and deaf have I been – to fail to see or hear the corpse-like, crying, living dead the world around me is?

                They’re looking for an answer. They’re begging me to hear.

And where am I? Am I involved? In tune? Alert? Or am I with my own agendas, selfish purposes, and fears that keep me far away from hearing all the breaking hearts around me that are longing to finally speak. Finally cry. Finally bare their broken soul to someone – anyone – who is willing just to nod and hug and shout in quiet urgency:                                             

                “There is hope, God is alive, and healing happens even here!”

                When I sit quietly and listen, I hear my own heart beating, and I so long to hear the hearts of every person I hold arms-length, far, or dear, beating through the healing grace Christ has showered down on me.

                So many want to talk. Want to know. What to hear what is the answer for all the hope and all the seeds we try to sow. How much then do I hate them to know the answer and to hide?

                Hide away where I am safe, where I am happy, where the troubles of this world don’t touch or pull upon my heart.

                For how much, how utterly much, do we have to hate the world to know there is eternal life and not to tell the wandering soul?

                There is a way to heal all the spider-veiny breaks.

                So don’t lost heart, and don’t resign to the hiding of your faith. 

“Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” 1 Peter 3:15

You Can Find it Anywhere

            The world is up in arms. Facebook has become the ultimate hub for prophetic quotes and end-of-the-world status updates and second amendment war cries. Facebook, go home. You talk too much and solve too little.
            This week we were shocked with the bombings in Boston and the explosion in Texas, making social media and world news spring to action. We mourn the deaths of free, innocent Americans. I mourn. My heart goes out to the parents and the brothers and the aunts and the coworkers and friends who lost, perhaps, the most influential person in their lives, or are now watching by their hospital bed.

            The events were, and are, very horrific. Do not suppose that I make light of these tragedies. They took human lives, and these lives were dearly valuable.

            But I found this last week interesting. Does it really take two bombs and an explosion to see the brokenness of the world? 

            The woman announcing on the radio today sent her heartfelt sympathies to Texas, which was comforting to hear. 
            But when was the last time the radio sent their heartfelt sympathies to the girls sitting outside planned parenthood? 15 people were killed yesterday and it made national news, as it should have. But 4,400 babies were aborted yesterday, and no one said anything. And Facebook didn't erupt. And the Mayor didn't come out to calm his worried townsmen. 

            Thousands of people in our nation volunteered their help, time, and money to the victims in Boston.
            But when was the last time a child died and a twitter page was immediately set up to alert the public of the 16,000 other children who would die of hunger before midnight? Or we rushed to the grocery store and cleared the shelves and set up food lines until all who needed to be fed were filled? The help flooding towards Boston and Texas will not cease until it's deemed that all who need help have been helped.

            Right now the news is saying that 75 houses were leveled in Texas, therefore leaving 75 families homeless.
            They will join the 635,000 other Americans who are homeless. Those invisible people aren't a daily blip on our middle-class radar. We don't wake up and hope that the people who slept under bridges last night are okay. We don't interview them or post pictures of them on CNN. Or what about the 123,000 orphans in America? When you're surrounded by affluence, you tend to only see affluence - unless something like a bomb forces you out. 

http://www.showhope.org/home.aspx

            The president issued a public address following Boston, promising that he would find the perpetrator and bring him to justice. 
            What about those who are trafficking the 14,500 – 17,500 people into the United States every year? Are they being brought to justice? There were a lot of TV shows on last night, but I don't seem to remember a surging amount of popular media bent on ending sex trafficking. Most people would agree that this is an injustice.
            But what's anyone doing about it?  Why isn't social media erupting every single second? According to statistics, around 75% of Americans identify themselves as Christians. That's about 235 million people. 
            235 million people who say they believe the words in James 2:16-17: 
            "And one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead."

            Or Matthew 25:35-40 
           “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

 

            I have come to the conclusion that we are apathetic. We don't like doing in secret. We don't like getting our hands dirty if no one is going to see all the dirt.
           These tragedies are captivating. They captivate our emotions and our energies - not joyously - but as if we cannot pull our eyes away, no matter how horrific the scene. The world likes to be shocked, but there's nothing shocking about a statistic. We forget that those statistics represent very real people. 
            And we should be shocked. We should be shocked by babies being ripped from their mother's wombs. We should be shocked by malnourished children dieing in gutters. We should be shocked by the depravity of humans and the injustices forced upon trafficked victims. We should be shocked with the amount of orphans who are never adopted. 

             Don't let Boston and Texas raise up your emotions for a few weeks, and then in a month of two, let it slip from your mind. May this brokenness stay before us and awaken us to the hurt that was happening before this week, and will continue on even after Boston is swept up and Texas is put back together.

             Let these tragedies actually change who you are and what you are doing with your life. Let them change me. Because we can't just wait for a bomb to go off to spring to action. We have to be working anyway.

           

            If you have not gold or silver ever ready to command, 
            If you cannot toward the needy reach an ever open hand,
            You can visit the afflicted, O'er the erring you can weep;
            You can be a true disciple, sitting at the Savior's feet.

 

            Do not then stand idly waiting for some greater work to do;
            Fortune is a lazy goddess, she will never come to you.
           Go and toil in any vineyard, do not fear to do or dare;
           if you want a field of labor, you can find it anywhere.
          -  Ellen M. H. Gates

            You are forever my judge, and I'm forever your witness, 

           And I pray that I'm always found on a mission about my Father's business.

            - Janette Ikz

            Therefore to him that knows to do good and does it not, to him it is sin. James 4:17

(I am deeply affected over the events of this week, and I do not discount their magnitude or importance. If you know, or were close to, anyone who was injured or affected by these tragedies, my sympathies are wholeheartedly sent to you. I am praying for all of you. 

I do not mean to make light or offend. I mean to beg myself - and all who need an excuse to begin serving - to find that excuse right now. It's right in front of our eyes.)
 

Unchangeable

     Change.

     I don't like it. I rebel against it. I exert myself in trying to hinder the ultimate inevitable of life. There is nothing I can do, though, to stand against the oncoming rage that this river holds.

     And it's a river called change. And change makes me weep.

     That sounds dramatic, even for me. It sounds desperate. But it is, because I often am desperate. Because I lose sight of what change truly is. Of what change truly means. And all I can see is how change is affecting my plans and how those plans are going to come crashing around my head like an erupting Mt. St. Helen. But I so often fail to see change for what it truly is.

     They tell me change is normal. The media. The scientists. The brains of society. They say that my body is in a constant state of change. (I wonder, then, why I am not in a constant state of weep?) In order for our physical bodies to remain healthy and functioning, they must constantly be turning themselves over and creating newness.

     Donald Miller discusses this concept in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, as he quotes a friend:

     “People get stuck, thinking they are one kind of person, but they aren't. The human body essentially recreated itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were in February.”

     My body is adept at change, and yet still my mind doesn't like it. Or perhaps that isn't even possible, because my mind is just as adept. Every word I say, every person I meet, every book I read, changes my mind. I am as a machine that only gets smarter if you show me something new.

     We all are.

     And yet, even as my mind grows as I write this, I still claim to hate change. And I am tempted to say that hate comes from my heart. But how can my heart hate that which it knows strongest through Christ: change?

     I was changed by a God who I could not resist. I could not stand against His change in my life. Then why do I buck so fiercely against all other changes? What is within me that hates it, that despises it, that accepts it reluctantly if I come to accept it at all? 

     Something was very strongly impressed upon me this summer that I had thought little about before I mean, I'd thought about it some, but not much. Not really. And that altering truth was this:

     God is unchangeable.

     And not just that He doesn't want to. It's not just that people haven't tried.

     God cannot change. It is not in His nature. It is utterly impossible for God to change in any way whatsoever.

     I watch a movie. I see a new actor I had previously not seen. I change because something new has entered my mind that had not entered it before. I listen to a new song. I meet a new person. I breath a new breath.

     And yet God knows all. There is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9) He is the same yesterday, today and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)

     I am the same NEVER. Nothing about me is ever the same as it was before. And yet I serve a God who knows no change. A God who is unchangeable. And that bring immeasurable hope, because my hope is founded in One who cannot possible change the reason that I hope in Him. Heartbreak, rejection, betrayal, fear, divorce, murder, dishonesty, sin. They are all a result of change.

     Of people changing. Of decisions changing. Of plans changing. Of hearts changing.

     But God exists outside of change. Change is not a part of Him.

     The author Sheldon Vanauken says this in his book, A Severe Mercy, in regards to another aspect of the earthly condition:

     C.S. Lewis, in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there. 'Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures?' Then, if we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest?

     It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed at it – how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren't adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home.

     He is questioning why he hates time. Why he does not feel at home in it. Why it bothers him so. And he realizes it is because He serves and strives to be like a God who is outside of time. He realizes he was created for a timeless place to be a timeless person. And so he longs to be outside of time like his Father. 

     He longs to be timeless as God is timeless.

     And Vanauken's claims made me wonder if that is the very same reason I cannot grow accustomed to change. The same reason I hate it. Because I long to be like and be with an unchangeable God. Christ has changed me, yet still my heart long to be where I will never have to change again. Where it will not creep up on me like a foreboding shadow. Where what I love won't have to be traded away for something else.

     Where I will be perfect.

     In an eternity that does exist, and is most definitely our home.

    

Talk

I am guilty.
Guilty of talking too much when I should be still.
Guilty of worrying and discussing and gossiping.
When there's a problem in my life – be it large or not – I talk through it. On and on and on through it until I've talked myself in circles and still don't know my mind. And I am not the only one.

My type likes to talk things through. There is a type of people, so I hear,  who can somehow exist while not sharing their hearts hourly with those close to them. They just think through their problems. Just think! I couldn't do it. I have to talk. It's my reliever, my relaxer, my way of getting through the day.
There comes a time, though, when my words start spinning on themselves and I'm sick of talking. At the end of the day when I know I've said too much. At the end of the night when I realized I was too tired to be sharing my heart because my heart started bleeding out on the ground and no one in the room really wanted to see it.

At the end of the day, really, when I was too focused on me,
when I was too engulfed in talking through my life,
and I forgot to stop and listen to someone else's.

But more than that, I didn't do anything with all the words I threw out there in the atmosphere. They came up somewhere in my heart, and ran a little race to my brain, and came out, sometimes neatly and sometimes not so neatly, from my mouth: and then there they were. Out in the air, falling on someone's ears who can't do a thing to change my problems, or the problems of the person I'm talking about, or the problems of the world in general, and I'm guilty.

Guilty of talking too much.

I always liked the old words in the hymn. You know, Joseph M. Scriven was a very wise fellow when he said, “Take it to the Lord in prayer.” He didn't just mean those heart-stopping incidents when you fall on your knees in desperation and beg for someone's life. He didn't just mean the one night out of the school year when you're so overwhelmed that being in a coma sounds very relaxing. He meant all the time.
Any time.
And so did God.

Philippians 4:6-7 Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

I can talk until I'm blue in the face and nothing will change in my life or in anyone else's. I can talk to God until I'm blue in the face, though, and He can move mountains. My words aren't falling on deaf ears then. He wants to see me daily take my heart out and let it bleed out on Him.

I spend a lot of time talking. A lot of time trying to figure out verbally what is going on. And there is nothing wrong with talking; all things in moderation. God gives every one a unique way to travel through life, and some of us just have to be really verbal about the whole thing. There is a beauty and freedom in being who we were created to be! Just imagine if the whole world was a bunch of non-talkative introverts.
Life would be boring.
But I was reminded of something this summer, after a friend and I had talked and talked and talked through a situation with no results. She reminded me that talking won't solve anything. It can clear our heads a bit and organize our thoughts into a concise order, but it won't change anything.

So we took it to the Lord in the prayer. And it relaxed our worries and released us from thinking that we had to figure it all out on our own.

And maybe, when you know you've spilled out as much as can be physically spilled, and you still can't make head or tail of your life, maybe take comfort in the fact that you won't figure it out all the way and you won't solve it all. And that talking might be your way of coping, but it's all about who you're talking to.

I'm all for talking, don't misunderstand me. Ask my sister and she will tell you of the many nights I've kept her awake. But, sometimes, I just know that it's not going to get me anywhere,
and I've just talked too much.

. ...For your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. (Matthew 6:8)

The Blood of Sinners

     We are saved from the propensity. The propensity to do what they did. We were not only saved from the sins that were committed in our past and the sins to be committed in our future. We are saved from becoming what we could become if our sin carried itself to the conclusion. 

We are saved from being who we would be if we were left to ourselves.

A friend asked me this summer if I had ever thought of who I would be if I hadn't ever been saved. I had never thought about that before, and so, knowing my tendencies and my temptations and my disposition, I mentally carried my sins to their ultimate end. And the image of who I would be without God's grace was horrifying.
It reminded me that I am no better than the serial-killer or drunkard around the corner. Because I could have been like them but for the mercy of Jesus Christ on the cross. And yet before the world was created, God looked down on my sinful nature and chose me as His. “You are mine. And I will save you not only from what you will do, but I will save you from what you could do.

You are my Child, and on the cross a perfect sacrifice will be killed so that the sins which would kill you need not take hold of your life.”

From the beginning of time, God was carefully orchestrating who would be blood relatives with His son so that that we could be relatives through that blood. He saw a man named Abraham whose wife, and mother of Issac, disbelieved His promises.
Then Rachab, the outcast of society. The harlot. He chose a downright prostitute to carry on the human vein of blood that would mix with the blood of the only perfect man. And David was in that line. David, the murderer and adulterer and coward who took Uriah's life and then dispatched Uriah himself. Judah's in there, too. And Solomon. All in the line to Christ.
God chose the ones who lived out their sin to its conclusion and saw the devastation and endured God's punishment but then were renewed through his mercy. David lost his child, but David was forgiven his sin by the creator of the universe. Rahab was redeemed. Abraham was allowed to prove his trust as he offered his son on an altar.
These broken, erring people weren't perfect. They weren't amazing beings who loved God at every single moment or followed his words every day of their lives. They were sinners. They knew sin as you and I know sin. And yet out of everyone on the earth, God knew these people would fail, and God allowed them to carry on the line to his perfect Son anyway.
I stand in awe of that fact. The people God used to work up to the greatest moment in history were the same as you and me. They had the same propensities. They had the exact same sin nature. They failed. And yet God forgave them.
The humans sharing blood and genes and physical traits with Jesus Christ were just that. Humans.

How humbling. That God would allow us to be so close to the one who would save us. 

        Jesus shed human, tangible blood as he poured out himself on the cross for our every sin. Mary, a sinner, carried him in her womb, sharing her body with the body of the son of God. Jesus had everything to do with sinners.

His life was created in the body of a sinner by the breath of an infinite God.
And as he died, and the veil was torn, and his spirit left him, we became co-heirs with him through that redeeming blood. We joined together with Abraham and Rahab and David as children of the promise. We became one. And in that moment, we were saved from everything we would ever do and everything we could ever do.
We were saved from ourselves as we became nothing and He became the only breath bringing us to life.
O, grave, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? (1 Corinthians 15:55) 

Who I could be is not who I am, and I have no other boast but knowing that the one who made this possible is the one who gave his life for me. The only one who could give his life for me. The only one who would never sin, and yet who chose to share his blood with sinners.

And Hallelujah. All I have is Christ. 

But as I ran my hell-bound race

Indifferent to the cost

You looked upon my helpless state

And led me to the cross.

And I beheld God’s love displayed

You suffered in my place

You bore the wrath reserved for me

Now all I know is grace.

                         

No One Told Me

               

                When you think you've hit the bottom, and the bottom gives way,

                And you fall into a darkness no words can explain.     

                You don't know how you'll make it out alive.

                Jesus will meet you there.

                When the doctor says I'm sorry, we don't know what else to do.

                And you're looking at your family, wondering how you'll make it through.

                Whatever road this life takes you down,

                Jesus will meet you there.

                - “Jesus Will Meet you There” by Steven Curtis Chapman

                Chapman penned those words after his youngest child, a precious girl, died at the age of 5. When grief doesn't creep as a rising tide but floods as a tidal wave. When every emotion possible rushes through with no rhyme, no reason, no method. Grief has no order.

               "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." said C.S. Lewis. Well, no one ever told me that, either. He is a friend I have not learned to love and a guest I have not learned to welcome. He is a participant in my life who was not invited and yet will never leave. Because, honestly, if we could plan our lives – if we had been allowed in on the decision-making process of the human race – we would have left out the things that hurt us. We would have left out grief.

                Saturday afternoon, shortly before 1:00, we were sitting in our church, listening to the strains of a wedding prelude and rising to see the angelic bride float down the isle on the arm of her father. We got the call, shortly through the ceremony, that the 16 month old grandson of some dear  friends was taken away.  At a time like this. Right in the middle of uniting two into a new life, a tiny life was taken away.

                And if we were the ones looking down from heaven and jotting down life stories, we would have kindly omitted death, allowed the treatments to work, the heart to keep beating, and the happy family would have headed home at the end of the day. Deep in the heart of each of us is the voice that promises that we will do everything in our power to not let grief into our lives or other's.

                But we are foolish.

                We forget that it is not through the good times that we are refined. Calm water does not refine gold, but fire. And we are golden beings, on our way to a golden city.

                If we try to remove grief from the human race then we are trying to remove the hand of God, just as if we tried to remove joy. But, heaven forbid. No one would try to remove joy! How ludicrous. But God works through joy just as much as he words through grief. Can't you see that? They are both his creations.

                God created life. And God created death. He works through both so that his purposes may be fulfilled. But he doesn't abandon us there, when we are crying as if we will never cry again. When our hearts feel like they are being ripped from our chest. He doesn't just deposit us on our doorstep and say, “Well, buster, I created a life and I decided to take it away and you're on your own now. Deal with it. I do what I want.”

              No.  That is not the Savior we serve. That is not the Lord who drew us from darkness into marvelous light.

                Jesus meets us. In the midst of our grief, he is there. In the refining flames, he is there. In the moments when we are sure that we will never live again, that this life is too hard – he is there.  He whispers to us that we still have a purpose. That every life has a purpose. That every life is precious.

                That if he sees every sparrow which falls to the ground, then he is not remiss in seeing us, the beings created in his own image, and he hears our cries.

               

                There is a gravity in grief because it teaches us that life is short. As I wrote in my journal this past week after finding out that a friend of my brother's has leukemia - “Why is it that we suddenly realize the mortality of life when immortality becomes impossible? We always know that we're mortal,  - we always do, somewhere deep inside, know that we're not actors in a movie who can face anything and come out in the end. It's just when immortality is medically proven impossible in someone's life that we begin to believe that it really is impossible."         

           

            Be in prayer for this dear family if it comes to your mind. Grief may be an overwhelming flood, but we are children of the creator of the waves, and He will not let us drown. There is a purpose in our sorrow, and someday we will clearly see what it is.