Losing my religion.

"I have lost my faith in humanity." is a phrase I've heard numerous times over the proceeding months, right after someone has relayed a recent news story.  Sometimes it's in a half joke, sometimes it's conveyed with a deep sorrow.  But here's the truth: Faith in humanity is an illusion.  In good times or in bad, the only hope for humanity remains in Jesus.  Waiting for some prophet or politician to come along and set things right is an almost ridiculous proposition.  To have faith in FDR or Reagan or Obama has proven to be extremely short-lived.  Germany was full of hope at the rising of Hitler, he restored the prominence of that nation and gave hope.  We are a world that can't help but Hope!  It is a feature written in our DNA, put there by the creator himself.  Ah, but while we may acknowledge and respond to this desire, we frequently fall short of putting our Hope in the only being that deserves it.  Like the fools that we are, we tend to stop short and put our Hope in everything except the one that can actually deliver.  It is not our Hope itself that matters, but the object of our Hope.  Our Hope in Jesus resides on the eternal, just and loving nature of our savior, The Savior.  Hope springs eternal...your damn right it does!

So whether it's Ferguson, Ebola, ISIS or our abusive neighbor, our Hope remains the same.  Do I want peace in Ferguson and Shaw for my own convenience, or because I want Jesus to live in the hearts of those around me?  We must not stop short!  Why do I want the Middle East to have peace?  Because extremism will always be the best option when Hope has died.  Why do I want to help my neighbor?  Because the condition of my own soul is at stake...Did I do everything I could to give to others the Hope I have in Jesus?  Not for my own comfort (relationships in fact are all kinds of discomfort), but because he Loves me.

Rage! Against the Dying of the Light OR This Little Light of Mine

I've always been a little dark.  For all my goofiness and for all my manic episodes, quite predictably there have been many dark days.  And that has been the arc of my story: the fight against the dark.  My identity has been one tainted by sadness.  As a boy, and I was a happy boy, I always felt haunted by a feeling of ache or emptiness.  I think it was partially guilt, both legitimate and also religiously induced.  But there was something more.  I was and am sensitive to the world.  I have a high capacity for empathy and what my heart has always whispered to me is that things just aren't how they are supposed to be.  

Without guidance, an emotional boy gets easily confused.  The world becomes too much, too much hurt, too much disappointment so you do what you can to make it go away.  To everyone else, you're a fun guy, but in the quiet moments alone when there is no escape from your own thoughts, the ache creeps in.  It's an emptiness that sits in the pit of your being and bids you to jump in.  This is The Fall.  This is the corruption of the Earth.  This is Sin, that compassion for others can wander down a dark road to self destruction.  The Love for my neighbor that God built into me got reprogrammed to a search to meet my own needs and to make a giving boy into a selfish man.  

So in my journey back to Jesus, there has been a lot of deprogramming the years of reprogramming.  In most cases the wires and the hardware and back up drives have all been ripped out, leaving things very basic and very sensitive.  I have become a raw tangle of emotion at times.  When Jesus comes for you, he doesn't come to make you comfortable.  He comes to make you his own.  To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, you had ideas for a few general improvements, maybe a fix here and there, but Jesus is coming in to you and wrecking the place to make a suitable residence for he himself to live.  I get easily overwhelmed by my emotions now and I have to be okay with that.  I have to trust the work he is doing.  I have to let myself be his.  It has led to a lot of Joy, even in the very midst of Pain.  

In church on Sunday, a thought eased into my heart and passed over my whole being, leaving me in a state of wonder.  I can't remember the sequence of thoughts that led me to the revelation but this may very well be a turning point in my understanding of who I am in Christ.  You see, my path back to Jesus has been one plagued by the fight against the darkness in me.  All though I have tried to surrender my complete identity in Jesus, I have still had the notion that I was by nature, Dark.  And while philosophically this can remain true as I am indeed a sinner, that mustn't and needn't remain my default.  I've thought myself a dark soul struggling and searching to be healed by the light.  But I have now realized that I am actually Light by nature struggling to be revealed, to be shone.  I am a Child of Light, I am a Child of God.  It is a fruitless battle to try to beat back the dark down in to the pit of your soul.  But in the Power of Jesus, he ignites a fire from within, a light that drives the dark out completely.  

1 John 4

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. 17 This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. 18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear

My Grandma Hodges used to look at me and talk to me in a way that suggested that I was a "Good Boy."  Scotty Angel she called me.  It made me sick.  It made me feel guilty.  It made me feel like she didn't know the real me.  This feeling was indicative of every relationship I would have throughout my adult life.  I always felt like, "If this person knew what I was like on the inside, they would be horrified."  But maybe she saw that little light inside me and she was doing her best to coax it out.  It is a great Joy of my life that I got to express to her how much I had come to love Jesus and nothing could have made her happier.

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.” C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity

Thoughts...

Out of nowhere, or out of anywhere it seems unavoidable: sin pops into my head.  It might be lust or greed or envy.  No matter what the subject matter, once that appealing counterfeit enters my brain, the wrestling match begins.  There are all sorts of methods of discipline that can help a sincere Christian cultivate a pure mind and pure heart.  Eventually though, we all fall short.  The more practiced the Believer is, the more cunning our enemy and the more subtle the sin.  The point is that there is never a moment when we can coast and there is never a day when we don't have to give it all to God.  The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ remains the only power for prevention and more importantly, the only power for redemption.  

Matthew 5

21 “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder,[a] and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’

27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’[e] 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

So, once the creep of sin enters your mind, what can you do?  No doubt that a burst of excitement from lust can make you feel like it's already too late.  The ache of Greed or Anger may send you down a road that seems impossible to come back from.  I've gotten texts from friends saying, "Pray for me brother, I'm feeling weak."  I do pray for them, but what I feel in that moment is "It's too late."  

Once these prompts toward sin enter our minds, these temptations, we begin maneuvering for either a defensive stand or an offensive assault.  We see the destruction down the road and then we beg, plead, command God, Satan and the World to act to prevent this act from happening.  From experience, I tell you there is no place that feels more desperate and more isolated than this limbo land.  We don't feel God's power, all we feel is the tearing of flesh and the building blocks of justification beginning to form.  In a bold move we take steps to eliminate all temptations or sources of gratification.  But our sinful desires remain and in fact seem to become inflamed.  We curse God for making us this way or for not helping to take away this ache that we truly do not want anymore.   We fail.  Well, unfortunately that happens.  We fail and then we repent and turn back to God and pick up the pieces, humble and broken and ask for his forgiveness to begin again.  He does.  He does not fail.

But what if we could change our perspective in this scenario?    
In the verses above, it is clear that Jesus is saying that the Sin comes before the Act.  However in our behavior we often repent of the Act and not the Sin.  What if we began the repentance process one step earlier?  What if we treated our crooked thoughts like the Sin that they are?  What if we didn't treat our depravity, perfectionism, and pride like they were some cute affectation?  What if we could train ourselves to be convicted in our own thoughts and not just by where these thoughts may lead?  What if we were bold enough to ask forgiveness for the failing of our minds and hearts instead of praising our own will power.  Because the truth is that even if you can save yourself from the Act, you have still committed the Sin.  If you can't see this, then you cannot access the overwhelming power of Christ and will be left to navigate this treacherous territory on your own.  This will leave you bitter and rigid instead of triumphant and at peace in his victory.

The outside world can view the offerings of Christ as either too restrictive to be practical or that Grace is too much freedom to be real.  In a way they are both on the right trail.  The freedom from Sin leads to a binding with Christ, a union that overtakes your whole life.  And the restrictions imposed on your soul by this new found freedom cut you to the quick.  In this new love you find that the surface infractions that you used to feel bad for are nothing in comparison to what Jesus is exposing in your heart.  So what is the selling point, this sounds awful?  The selling point is the gentle erasing of your very self.  All along you have known that there is a seemingly unreachable purity within you.  All along you have known that there is a fleshy selfishness that blocks the way.  Only in Christianity and in the person of Christ himself do we have a path that leads us to the best version of ourselves that he has been working towards since before the world was made.  Once in Christ, you will realize that you were made for a different world.

2 Corinthians 10

3 For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. 4 The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. 6 And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, once your obedience is complete.

Sandy Hook

Most of my twitter feed is pretty left leaning, lots of comedians and otherwise funny people.  It's made up of people that make me laugh and people I think are like me.  When something terrible happens, the posts get weird.  The Batman theatre shooting, hurricane Sandy and now the school shooting in Connecticut.  Otherwise jovial smart-asses get serious and try to deal with their hurt and fear and sense of injustice over the twitter waves.  A lot of it is good.  Most frequently it is about gun control and as the right leaning folks respond to the left leaning folks, that is all it becomes about and pretty soon good minded people are taking political positions over the dead bodies of children.  Better gun control seems reasonable to me as a reaction.  However, to pretend that is a solution seems pretty naive. 

What is not dealt with is a fundamental broken-ness in all of us.  As many good minded people deal with the insane hurt they feel, does anyone stop to wonder where this fierce sense of justice comes from?  Why is the slaughter of the innocent such and overwhelming blow?  We seem to talk about these issues while only dealing with the pure emotions and the surface reasoning.  In a world without God, these random acts fit into the "order" of things, trucking right along with the random "order" of Natural Selection and Evolution.  Time+Matter+Chance.  Is Justice then just a protective reaction that has developed over the course of evolution.  That is plausible, I can't deny that.  What I can't shake, as I consider my God in the world of the Godless is that I am even able to consider it at all.  If we accept that there is no God, then we are left to make sense of this on our own.  We are smart and we will come up with increasingly clever reasons for the way we feel.  The problem is that we are perpetually a part of the experiment.  To deny God as a possibility in the name of Science is to corrupt the scientific process, because we will never be able to remove ourselves far enough to see what is really there.  We will ALWAYS demand a solution, and our efforts to search for those solutions will be tainted by our beliefs and emotions.  Only in God do we find a pure starting point for our emotions.  There is Truth, and if we start there we are free to roam in sensible directions looking for answers instead of scattering ourselves across the great breadth of knowledge looking for patterns in Time+Matter+Chance.  That leaves us hollow.  These great tradgedies will continue to occur and we are left with only ourselves and our wit to try and explain why and how to our children.

So if God is real and a real part of the equation, what then?  This tradgedy is no less awful.  In fact, for some it becomes even more awful.  How could God let this happen?  What kind of twisted God are we dealing with?  The answer lies in our own broken-ness.  This world contains glimpses of Heaven and glimpses of Hell and we all live right there in the tension.  It seem that we can't quite shake the feeling of God and we can't escape Hell on Earth.  The mercy of God is explained in the fact that we are allowed to exist at all: you , me and the mass murderers.  We are all allowed to live in this world.  The weeds grow and thrive right along with the beauty of the field, but there will be a harvest and the beauty will remain forever and the scourge with be burned forever.  If the world were only filled with beauty, then we would already be in Heaven.  We all know that that is not the case.  So in times like this, God is the only thing that makes sense.  Our fierce sense of Justice burns.  It burns because we are made in his image and he is Love and Justice and Mercy.  We want justice now, but because of our less Godly attributes, our fleshy human sense of right and wrong we have no way of administering or sustaining Justice.  We know this in history, we will mess it up.  We mess it up because we can't shake our own flaws and broken jealousies and lustful vengence.  The shooter is dead and no one feels better about it.  If he were alive and tortured, that still wouldn't do the trick.  The only Hope that remains is that God will make all things right, that the wicked will get what they deserve and that the wounds of the believers will be healed and the tears of the innocent will be wiped away.  Here and now we live in that Hope, and we try to restore our world in the little ways that we can, because we are like him.  Even as our world hurdles through this entropic path of pain, we will continue to hope and love because we are like him.  And in the end the Love you recieve will not be equal to the Love you gave.  In the ultimate sacrificial display, God gives all. We get to call on his name and be saved.  That may not seem like Justice, but that is because it is a Justice we cannot comprehend.  It's a Love that overwhelms all.  We just surrender to the name of God: Jesus and we will receive his Love forever.  It is a love a million times greater than we even catch a glimpse if here.  God is Love, and this pain doesn't make sense without him.

Marriage 1.

Under the direction of the Divine, in marriage you are more and more attracted to what your spouse is becoming and less attracted to who they are or were. Your role as a spouse is to help your husband/wife become more like Christ.

The Call

I cried out to Him, "Lord, there are many brighter, more righteous, kinder, more learned, stronger, and less sinful men than me!"
He said to me, "Yes, I know.  However, your location is promising.  And all I really need is your obedience."