Symphony

I am Your instrument.

The touch of Your hand,

the breath You breathe into me,

these are Your Love language.

But lately I've been playing myself.

My hand, my breath, my composition.

My sorrow, my death, my destruction.

A screeching lie I cry out to You.

The tinder is running low.

The flames approach my branches alone.

My life begins to approach the bone.

I squirm and squeal and hide.

But You reveal what's inside.

You found me in the gallows of self-abuse

strangling on my poorly tied noose.

As You cut the rope, i fall to the ground.

Then You breathe Life into me, a shiftless mound.

And once again, we are making music.

Poetry Jam

We join together in praise song

We join the trees

We join with their leaves

In singing,

screaming,

shouting

The praise of our one LORD.

His name is every breath we breathe

and wind blowing through the leaves.

His Mercy is the tears on our cheeks

and the way the branches creak.

His Justice is the blood in our veins

and their sap that stains.

His Love

endures

forever.

Questions [or Answers (or God is God)]

Why do we stop at caring?

Why do we forget our calling?

Why do we ignore our calling?

What makes my comfort and convenience more important than the advancement of the Kingdom?

What happens when we live like The King is on the throne?

Here's some news for us all, there would be no throne if The King were not residing on it. Think of the implications of that. If God is not God, then there is no God. Most of us are familiar with the idea of "making gods" out of the things around us. But the truth is that we cannot make God. We cannot put something on the throne. Because no matter how much we idolize something, it cannot be God. It can't provide for our needs. It can't help us live outside ourselves. It can't be the source of Truth for our lives because there is not Truth in it.

There are some inequalities that I should highlight.

"truth" does not equal "Truth."

"god" does not equal "God."

"a throne" is not "the throne."

There is a fundamental shift in mentality that we must make to understand the difference between God's Godness and a romantic relationship's godness. God's Godness obsoletes the godness of self-focus. His Truth exists on a level beyond that of your News Feed. His is the throne of justice and love, of power and mercy, of glory and grace. We cannot make this throne nor can we or any of our idols occupy it.

So back to the questions. Why do we stop at caring? Why is it that, with all our good intentions and after so much good teaching, we consistently fail to do good? Simultaneously, this question has no answer and many answers. It has no answer because nothing can occupy God's throne (see above) and in light of that fact, there is no reason for us to not live accordingly (see below). But it also has many answers because, with our broken (but naggingly persistent) human perspective, we find all sorts of other thrones to set our sights on.

Again, these are not the throne of the Most High, and they cannot provide the way He can. I reemphasize this because it is this crucial fact that we so often forget or ignore. THE THINGS OF THIS WORLD CANNOT BE GOD. Or, to put it in a nicer way that may... resonate more with some of you, "Creation cannot sustain what a Creator was meant to provide." It's when we forget this that we begin to make things more fundamental to our happiness or identity than God. Just the other... okay, it was this morning. Just this morning I found myself telling myself (and God) that if I just got this one thing, then I could serve Him better. If He would just gift me in this one certain area, then I would be able to obey, but if not, then I would just be stuck in sin.

I was blatantly crafting idols in the presence of God. There He was on His throne and there I was bowed down before it, telling Him how awesome He is and how blessed I am by Him. As I was talking, I sat up, pulled out a pocket knife and a small chunk of my heart. I started carving and telling Him that if I could just have this one hole filled, if He would just make this one part work a little differently, then I would start living like I was praising. Fortunately, on this particular morning, I realized the eminent consequences of my actions and allowed Him to fix the parts I had tactfully destroyed by filling them with Himself and His Truth.

One bit of this Truth was that I would never be satisfied, equipped, or fulfilled by anything but Him. The temporary things of this world will always betray us and will never provide what we truly need. So it's senseless to turn to those things in attempt to solve our problems. It's time we started living like we know this.

To return to the questions, what does this life look like? What does it look like when we realize (as in, "make into reality through action") that God is God and [insert "god" here] is not? To put it concisely, it looks like Jesus. But the idea of Jesus is an awfully large package. To unravel that a little, it looks like going into the world showing how much He loves us. A little more unpackaging and we start to see things like seeking after justice and having real, honest humility. We look a little deeper and the packing-peanuts of love (noun), joy, peace, patience et al. start to appear. After sifting around in these for a while we find some of the Bible's most explicit directions: love (verb), heal, preach, pray, give, serve.

So the question is not "Who?" nor "When?" nor "Why?" nor "What?" nor "How?" That leaves us with just one option. "Where?" And if we are looking and listening, He is faithful to provide an answer to this question as well. Then it's our turn to start living the answers.

Childlike Faith

I'm sitting at Starbucks, sipping on my free pumpkin spice latte sample and nibbling on the apple fritter sample that came with it. A dad walks in with his two young boys. I can feel the play in their eyes. After they order, the barista treats the older of the boys to one of their coffee themed stickers (the younger boy didn't want one). He gleefully peels back the wax-paper backing and plants the sticker on to his jacket. Under Dad's prompting, he heads to trashcan by the door to dispose of the wax-paper backing. I watch as he playfully tosses the paper in. But then he approaches the can and peers into the depths of its belly. For several seconds he is lost inside this unexplored wonderland.

When was the last time you lost yourself in a trashcan?

For this boy, the world was a giant playland full of adventure and excitement. Do you think God might want more of us to see His creation this way? Think back to your childhood. Think of the games of House or School or fighting imaginary bad guys in your backyard with the big stick you found during yard work that morning (or is that just me?). When did that stop?

Perhaps a better approach: why did that stop? Was it because those things no longer amused you? Was it because your imagination had run out of ideas? Or was it because the world told you it was time to "move on"? Did you ever try to go back and play those games after you had stopped? It was difficult to imagine a new reality after this one had been so well defined, wasn't it? But a true faith requires this sort of imagination. We "can only imagine" a realm of perfection that is only realized after death. We have to imagine the kind of world that God wants us to be creating. We are called to imagine the life that He would have us lead and then to chase after that. We must imagine an infinite and perfectly steadfast, loving and kind God because anything else would be us trying to put bounds and limits on Him and His love. In his book Velvet Elvis Rob Bell says this about our minds and God:

"The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. And if we made him up, then we are in control. And so in passage after passage, we find God reminding people that he is beyond and bigger and more."

The truth is that we don't know infinite and boundless in our daily lives. We have nothing else to help us understand that idea. We live in a world with edges and compartments and limits. I'm not saying that God is imaginary, nor that our imaginations can understand Him. What I'm saying is that when we lose the ability to imagine a reality that is beyond our own we lose the ability to understand that God is ununderstandable, that He is beyond what we can know. When we lose track of this fact, we start to worry that science might disprove God. We start to worry about tomorrow. We start to doubt that God can provide. We start to trust ourselves because that is what our reality tells us to do. But how can we remedy this?

We need to return to a childlike faith. We accept our identity as children of God. We need to embrace the idea that our reality is not all there is. We need to be sure of the fact that we are unsure. Like Jon Acuff said in his Stuff Christians Like blog (there's a link in the title), we need to "put aside [our] pursuit of perfection and just color." And maybe with this change of perspective we will be more willing to try new things. Things like talk to that one person you always see at that one place but just keep ignoring. Things like encouraging that girl who has given up on herself. Things like selling everything you own and moving your family of 8 to Uganda to find out what God wants you to do there. Things like listening when you pray. Things like obeying God.

Let's make God's world our praiseground and see what a childlike faith can do in a grown-up's world.

"Unless you accept God's kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you'll never get in."

Mark 10:15 (Msg.)

Through the Looking Glass

Here I am.

Bloody and filthy and ragged

And smelly and sobbing and dejected

And bruised and battered and broken

And beautiful.

A Picture

How can I tell you?

Can I scream it like the leaves in the wind?

Can I ring it out from atop the clock tower?

Can I echo it softly through the wind-chime pipes?

How can I show you?

Can I soar majestically then land in your hands?

Can I paint it on a sky-canvas like the setting sun?

Can I roll it out over hills and fields like golden grain?

What could I possibly do to capture the complete, beautiful essence?

To make it more than the layman who would say

"I love you."

9.7.10

My soul knows its directive.

You have spoken life.

I long for action.

I have been steel, sharpened.

My breath longs for combat.

Lord I am ready to march

And You have given the order.

Bring Peace to my soul

So that it will be prepared

For War.

Capacity

I'm in a room.

The sign near the door says "capacity 150."

I am surrounded by at least 300 people walking in a mob of a circle.

They are all shouting at me.

Telling me how to live.

How to achieve happiness.

Their voices alone exceed the capacity limit.

I recognize some of them.

I see important historical figures and famous faces from several religions.

I see school teachers and classmates.

I see police and businessmen.

And I see regular people.

The walls of the room are plastered with different media devices, all contributing to the noise either vocally or visually.

The ground beneath me lifts me up and the crowd continues to circle and shout beneath me.

I elevate into another room that has a single incandescent light shining down from above me.

The capacity sign I made is hanging by the door.

1.

But the silence is no reprieve.

This room is as maddening as the first.

I wander about the room, building the world for myself.

Nothing is required, no sense must be made.

But progress is seldom and small.

I lay down under the tree I made.

Nothing was required, but I made a tree.

Then the room-world falls to pieces around me.

As the pieces fall, some gather on the sign and now it reads 2.

I close my eyes in fear and when I open them again I am lying in a new room.

There is no source to the light that fills the room.

There is no sign by the door.

There is no door.

There is but one voice and I am drawn to it.

It never sounds distant, but it has direction.

I walk through the pure white with silent footsteps.

I sit on the solid white ground and look out over the solid white pond.

A solid white bird flies silently and swiftly just inches over the solid white water.

It zooms towards me and then zooms back over the water.

As I watch the solid white poetry in flight, the solid white voice asks

"Who made the tree?"

Shift

Glaring upon the faceless visage of time

I find my gaze more penetrating than before.

Within its eyes Perspective dances nimbly a frolicking step full of insight.

The dancer's gift no longer eludes me.

In the once-empty space between the steps

I now find The Old Man breathing softly in his lounge chair

He tells me tales of times gone by

And sharpens my Spade for times to come.

And on the step, a Seed is planted

Each one casting a shadow of Truth

Guiding me to its roots with its growth.

Strength wanes and as I fall out of step

The shadow becomes one with the Darkness

And my eyes turn to more familiar places.

Runaway

I turn away every chance I get.

I signal right, veer left and drive the wedge in deep.

I'm blowing past the stop signs we used to make

And pretending that all the lights are green.

I see your lights flashing in my mirror

But it's starting to pick up speed.

A crash,

A bump,

And a moment alone.

And now it is more than a seed.

And in that moment I see what I've done

As I approach the look at the end of my leap.

But there ain't no rest for the wicked

And I'm worried because I can't sleep.