Scared

"Don't let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me.” John 14:1

Beyond worry there is scared. I have only seen my father scared a few times in my life. He has been scared before major surgeries that my mom has gone through; scared when he was bitten on the hand by a brown recluse spider, and scared when he almost lost his vision. I don’t remember all of the detail of his vision episode. It was pretty complicated with microscopic veins not carrying blood to and away from the eye and the vitreous (the watery stuff) in his eye not doing what its function was.  The main thing I remember were the flashes of light and floaters in his peripheral vision.  That’s how he knew something was wrong.  My mother also has macular degeneration and so did my Grandma Patterson, which was first diagnosed when they began to see flashes and floaters in their peripheral vision.  Can you imagine the fear associated with losing your eyesight?  The idea that something could be happening to the two things you use most in your life is frightening. The eyes are central to everything you do.

I could only imagine that fear until today. Today, when I got to work I opened my computer to start working and bam, flashes and floaters.  At first I thought that it was a problem with my computer because the screen seemed wobbly, so I turned off the fluorescent lights to cut down glare and went back to work…even worse.  So I closed my laptop and the flashes and wobbliness were still there. Cue serious worry.  I read online that these are common and tend to dissipate with no problem, or they can be indicators of the early stages of a retinal detachment…not cool.

Eventually the symptoms dissipated and I was able to go about my normal day, but it made me think about fear.  A worrier by nature, it is sometimes a challenge not to let fear and worry stand in the way of all that God has to offer each day.  I wonder how Jesus, knowing that each step brought him closer to death, could continue on the road to Jerusalem.  Jesus begged his father to let the cup of death pass from him, but when he knew it wasn’t the Father’s will, he faced the cross with courage.  How did he do it?

Perhaps he could face the cross with courage because he was seeking God’s will and not his own. He completely trusted God. The knowledge that you are fully trusting God and walking in His will brings with it a peace and clarity that defies our anxiety.  The kind of peace that made Jesus stand firm and not run when he saw the torches of the mob who were coming to arrest him in the distance. The kind of peace that when the time comes, will allow us to stand firm as well. But this peace only comes with trust. Trust is the imperative prerequisite to peace.

In her book “Jesus Calling”, Sarah Young says “If you mouth the words ‘I trust you’ while anxiously trying to get things to go your way, your words ring hollow (to God).”

So today, do you really trust God or are your simply giving going through the motions when you hand your burdens to Him? Who do you trust more, yourself or your creator?  One can give you peace and one makes you God of your own life. I don’t know about you, but keeping my house clean and my child fed is more than enough responsibility for me. I’d make a lousy God.

Prayer: Holy God, help me put my trust in you and walk in your peace. Amen.

Tempted

Lenten Devotion Day 2

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

Matthew 4:8–10

Tempted.  We’ve all been tempted. To do, to take, to eat, or worse yet, to speak our minds without filter.  In the scene in this passage Jesus is tempted.  As a child, I always thought that Jesus’ temptation wasn’t too bad being that the world and all that is in it belong to God, thus to Jesus, being that he was fully God and fully human.  In my eyes the devil wasn’t offering anything Jesus didn’t already own. 

But through adult eyes I see that Jesus’ greatest temptation was to step outside his fully human self to serve his own needs.  Here he was after 40 days of fasting in the wilderness.  His body was weak.  He was hungry.  He was tired. What Satan was really tempting him with was the opportunity to check his humanity at the door, and embrace his Godhood. Embrace his omniscience. Embrace his omnipotence. To think of himself for a change.  To worship the kind of selfishness that Satan embodied.

But Jesus, having been totally enveloped in prayer, meditation and scripture for the past 40 days knew that to worship God and serve him only, was to live for others.  It meant putting the needs of a woefully lost world before his own immediate needs.  Jesus showed us what “I am second” looked like before it became a Christian catchphrase. 

Today, the message that we are bombarded with in society is “me first”.  First let me satisfy my immediate needs and then let me work on long-term needs and goals, then my wants, and finally, so often only then do we look around to see the “least of these”.  Our greatest temptation in today’s society is a sense of entitlement. The sense that we “deserve” anything beyond salvation.  No, what we deserve is death. What He gave us was grace. We have been saved by it and for it.  Saved for the work of sharing grace to a world that is lost and dying in sin everyday.  No one was more entitled to all the world has to offer than Jesus, and yet he saw beyond his needs to ours. 

Prayer: Jesus, you were fully God and fully human and yet you did not allow Satan to tempt you to something greater in the world’s eyes and less in the eyes of your Heavenly Father.  Help me today to follow your example.  Amen

Broken Halellujah

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

-Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen is one of my favorite songwriters.  When I first heard the song "Hallelujah" on the Album "Songs of the 49th Parallel", I had to know who wrote it.  When I actually heard him sing the song, I was surprised by his deep and gravely voice, so different from K.D. Lang or Jeff Buckley who covered this song, but when you hear the words 

"Love is not some victory march

It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah”

in the voice of the songwriter, you hear the song with new ears.  It's not pretty.  It's dark and it's broken. It is not a hymn, it's a struggle and a lament...kind of like Lent.

"The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; A broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise." Psalms 51:17

The story of the last days in the life of Christ are not pretty.  As you journey with Jesus to the cross, the road that leads there is broken, and a struggle. The prayer of Jesus at Gethsemane is a lament, a plea.

The Lenten journey is a "cold and broken Hallelujah".  It is a journey into darkness; a journey of hard truths and introspection.  It is a call to recognize that within us which Jesus was called to die for. It is a call to awaken to the lonely sacrifice of Christ as he hung on the cross with the sins of the ages weighing heavily upon him, stealing his strength and his last breaths.

But it is not a journey unlit.  Although we see the cracks in our humanity at Lent, it is through our brokenness that the light of Easter and Christ's victory can shine forth to light our way through the darkness of sin and death that lie on the path before us.  

The road to the cross may be cold and broken, but it is not empty, not a ritual that we mindlessly observe. It is a journey to deepen our faith and we do not walk it alone or without direction. We travel with our fellow companions in Christ and we follow in the footsteps of Jesus. On the other side of the journey is our "Hallelujah" but to truly experience it, we must face the darkness of our sin. 

This is the Lent. Let's get going.