Foxes and Birds

Luke 9:57-58

⁵⁷ As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” ⁵⁸ And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” 

If you have never had the chance to listen to Rich Mullins last album before his tragic death in 1997, I encourage you to listen to “The Jesus Record”.  There is an album within an album on this CD. “The Jesus Demo” is the original recording of this album that Rich Mullins made on a tape recorder that sat near an out of tune piano in an old abandoned church where he wrote the music.  He finished his demo nine days before he died. You can actually hear the tape recorder click on and off as he starts and stops each song.  Every song on this album is about Jesus, about the life of Christ and how he lived, walked, loved and sometimes how Rich struggled to love him back.  After his death, some of the day’s top Christian artists went to the studio and recorded these songs professionally and that album is “The Jesus Record”. 

Amy Grant has a beautiful voice, but to me, her professional recordings of Rich's songs don’t touch my soul nearly as much as hearing those taped church sessions and hearing the sincerity and imperfection in his voice. My favorite song on the album is “You Did Not Have a Home” based on Luke 9:57-58. The lyrics are as follows:

“Birds have nests, foxes have dens
But the hope of the whole world rests
On the shoulders of a homeless man
You had the shoulders of a homeless man

And the world can't stand what it can't own
And it can't own You 'cause You did not have a home”

       When I first heard this song, I had never thought about the sacrifice that Jesus made to be an itinerant teacher, prophet and Messiah.  I had always been grateful that he gave up his life for me, but I had never really considered that he gave up what we would consider “a life” to fully live into his calling. He made his home wherever he was welcomed.  He gave up childhood friendships, family, the chance for a wife or a child, and chose homelessness so as not to be tempted to put his or his family’s comfort above ministry and his sacrificial call. He couldn’t be owned or tempted by anything the world afforded.  Through his life of poverty and minimalism, Jesus freed himself to die.

       The scripture the song is based on calls me to evaluate if my earthy comforts free me to serve my God or if they serve as my God.  Do I work towards His calling to come and follow in His footsteps or towards feeling free to put my feet up?  What owns me? How am I being called to put service ahead of comfort?

I supposed that is the question for all of us. What owns you, calling or comfort?

Prayer:  Holy God, thank you for your sacrifice of earthy comforts so that you could be about your heavenly calling.  Help me to choose the same each moment and day. -Amen

Power Outage

Mark 10:17-22

New American Standard Bible (NASB)

The Rich Young Ruler

¹⁷ As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to Him and knelt before Him, and asked Him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”...Looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him and said to him, “One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” ²² But at these words ^[a]he was saddened, and he went away grieving, for he was one who owned much property....

Load shedding.  “What in the world is load shedding?” I asked my South African husband after reading the term on a mutual friend’s facebook page.  As it turns out, load shedding is scheduled blackouts to prevent an overload on the power grid and total blackouts for the whole country.  According to most sources, it’s supposed to be a last resort.  South Africa has been using its “last resort” since 2008.  It appears that South Africa has only one main utility provider called “Eskom”.  Eskom at any given point will either say “there is no problem”, “wet coal is the problem”, “people using too much electricity are the problem” or “we cannot afford to fix the problem.”

Now, I’m not one to knock on the woes of a third world country, but it would appear to me, that if your country has the means and technology to host the “World Cup” of soccer, then someone there has to have the means to build more power stations.  But that’s when we get into the, the chicken or the egg discussion.  The power company says “we need money to build more power stations” and the government says “even if we did build more stations the power situation is so bad that we’d probably still need blackouts until we can be sure the electricity is distributed properly, so no. No more money for power.”  But, maybe I’m oversimplifying a complex system of underfunding, corruption and people basically not knowing how to do their jobs.

It sounds a lot like the discussion of poverty in America.  People cry out that poverty is a problem, a crime even, and other people shout out it’s a systemic problem and we have to fix the system before we can really help people in poverty.  “People are starving” some cry, only to get the response “We’ve got to teach them to fish so they can feed themselves.” All the while children in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, go to bed hungry. 

Is poverty a problem? Yes. Is it a systemic problem? Yes.  Should we feed some people for free, while others have to work hard for the food on their table? Yes.  Should we expect people to work hard and learn a trade so they don’t need the government’s assistance? Yes.  Apparently, third world mentalities hit home in the U.S.A. as well.  A problem that would seem to have any number of solutions, can’t be fixed because every solution has it’s own problem.

It’s kind of like sin. You can stop people from sinning in certain ways with laws and guilt, but there aren’t enough rules and laws in the world to stop all sin.  You can change people’s public actions as best as you can, but you can’t change their hearts.  You can love people from here to eternity, but you can’t make them recognize that a life of love and a Godly lifestyle are the best for them. We will always serve other gods, always embrace culture, always build idols.  It’s our nature.  Every solution to sin has it’s own problem whether it be too many rules, a hindrance to free will, or a decline in standards so that our sin doesn’t seem quite so…sinful.

But that is why Jesus actions leading all the way to the cross are so miraculous.  He showed us that, yes, you are sinners. Yes, your hearts have conformed to the ways of the world.  Yes, you will always make your own idols and make God’s of yourselves.  Yes, I love you. Yes you are worth saving. No, you cannot do this on your own. Yes, I will be the final solution to your sin.

The Son of God dying on the cross was the only answer to sin.  His sacrifice is our redemption.  His loss, our life. It is the only answer that doesn’t refute itself.  His death is the  only thing that can change our hearts and our lives. 

The only problem now is… who will share the solution? Yes, the world is lost and dying in sin…and if they reject Jesus, like the rich young ruler, they only have themselves to blame.  But, if they haven’t heard the answer, if they don’t know the solution, the "power outage" is our fault. 

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