| | “Wake up. Who are you, and what do you want?” For over a year. No mercy. No reprieve. I could go to bed each night knowing that in the morning, I would hear this voice, these words, in my head, again. Not from a child, or a spouse, or a guest … no, there was no physical being I could convince or coerce to stop asking these two questions. It was a lonely time; I felt seperated, emotionally and spiritually, from everyone. I felt that no one I knew was going through what I was. Yet to the voice, to this reliable companion in my head, my response was always the same: “I don’t know, I don’t care, and neither do you. Nobody does, really. It’s just a game. I’m not playing. Go away. Leave me alone.” - - - I remembered hearing God when I was younger. Being with him. I remembered the day I was in this beautiful place, part of this huge crowd of people singing songs to him: songs about how he was so great, so loving. I remembered adding on my favorite “and,” as I always would, in my head as I sung these songs to him, “… and I am such a scumbag. So undeserving. So evil. Do you remember where you found me, Jesus? What I had done? What I liked doing? How people hated me? What a desperate loser I was? All the disgusting things I did that make you cry?” It was my celebration. This was how I celebrated God’s goodness. Re-living, re-feeling, re-hashing, re-bashing who I was when God found me and rescued me. And one day, with no warning, he answered with a shocking vision. In my vision there was a flower pot, maybe with a dead flower in it. I barely grasped what it was when it flew past me and crashed against the wall, breaking into a hundred pieces and making this huge mess. Definitely not salvageable … not without some serious stupidity, anyway. I had just about decided I had lost my mind, was halucinating and needed water, when suddenly understanding fell on me like the instant relief you feel when you can’t remember a word you need to finish a sentence, and someone else reminds you of the word. First, I knew the flower pot was me. Wot??? Then, I knew it was the old me. The one I kept dragging out to celebrate that God had saved me from it. I don’t remember if it was an audible voice, even in my head, but the understanding, in whatever form it came, was definitely God’s voice, and he said: “Stop bringing the same old things to me over and over again. Those things are gone. They are no longer yours. They are no longer you. I don’t want them. We have new things to do.” And so he cut me loose from the shame of my past. He knew things would get ugly now, and he knew he was big enough to handle it, too. Freed from the religious chains that had kept me bringing my old pond scum to Jesus over and over, I felt enlightened, I felt certified … and unfortunately for me, I felt free to live in selfish arrogance. I became, in my own eyes, the righteous man. The one whose example others should follow, the one who looked really good. You know, the one who never missed church unless he was deathly ill, the one who stood strong and confident and didn’t need the help of others. I was on staff at a church, I was above reproach, and I made sure I stayed above reproach. So when things started to go wrong in my relationship with my wife, of course, I didn’t seek any help from anyone. Instead, I turned up the heat at home. Full of arrogance and pride, and completely dead to the concept of grace, my response to my wife’s troubles and weaknesses started to sound like “Why can’t you be more like this? Why can’t you be more like [that person] who does [this or that] perfectly? Why can’t you be more like me? Snap out of it and get with the program!” And one day, predictably, reality came crashing in. My wife had had enough. I was faced with a choice. My marriage was about to disolve. If it did, all my posturing would be revealed for what it was, and I would lose someone who I could vaguely remember was once very precious to me … and something from deep inside told me that underneath all the layers of arrogance and pride, she still was very precious to me. And to keep her in my life, I was going to have to drop most of the things in my life that made me look good to the people whose opinion I cared about, and extend grace and unconditional love to her, for a very long time. It was so confusing, really, thinking I was “all that,” and seeing now I was going to have to eat all that for breakfast, lunch, dinner, desert, and midnight snack. My defences were up so high that I didn’t feel like I could hear from God at all. But I asked him what I should do, and I wasn’t sure I heard anything, but I did come away from that prayer with a strong realization: if I was really anything like Jesus, I would trade ministry, reputation, respect, and sometimes the right to claim being right, to restore relationship with the one(s) I loved. So that was my decision. I gritted my teeth and moved forward with a repetitive prayer: God help me. Over the next few years, and a lot of pain as I cut off all these pieces of “how great I am,” even though I hated it, and more and more I hated that question that wouldn’t go away, I finally discovered what I’d been looking for. How to change the world. How to set things right. How to get people to stop hurting each other. How to free people from mediocrity. How to experience closer intimacy. How to experience heart pounding, totally overwhelming joy and fullfillment. It had nothing to do with maintaining a stellar reputation, nothing to do with impressing anyone with how great I was. It had everything to do with loving like God loves at any time, whether it impressed anyone or not. Through all this, I learned the answer to that question that hounded me for so long. One day I answered that question, and it went away and never came back: I am a creation of the living God, created to enjoy relationship with him and reveal his image by walking with him in a life of loving togetherness with others. Hand in hand with him, I reveal the life changing power of his radically unique love by extending it to others. I am unique and irreplaceable, a powerful, effective one-of-a-kind combination including a specific personality and specific gifts, placed into life at this specific time to give and receive the blessings of relationship and truth with all those I share this short time with. And that, my friend, is the real you, too. This means that a lot of the time we are not who we think we are supposed to make ourselves out to be. And much of the time we are not the people others have made us out to be, either. We are, in fact, who the creator God has made us out to be: his ambassadors, his representatives, his workers, and his children. He has chosen to accomplish his work in this world, in this period in time, through us. --- Maybe your life isn’t looking anything like that now. Maybe you don’t even see any compelling reason to want your life to look anything like that. Maybe you feel like it’s all you can do to make ends meet and keep yourself from getting shafted every day. Maybe you feel, like I did, that the world hasn’t really given you what you deserve yet – the good or the bad. In that case, you have a very important place here in this community of people whose hearts have been captured by that radically unique love, this place called the church: we want to help make your world a better place. We want to be the friend who is there for you no matter what. Try us, and if you find we’re being posers, like I was, call us on it, because (as I discovered) we really don’t want to stay there. We want to be the ones who lend a helping hand when we have nothing to gain from it except maybe, if you decide you like it, a relationship where you start doing that and sharing some of that one-of-a-kind you with us and others. And yeah, we’re hoping you’ll be totally hooked. As we walk through life with him, we actually stumble onto clues to our purpose in unexpected places … places like a very ironically enlightened bumper sticker that appeared a few years back: GOD BLESS THE WHOLE WORLD. NO EXCEPTIONS. When we read something like that, we hear an answer inside. It says “OK!! Let’s go.” |
