–JI Packer, Knowing God
Most of us would change some significant details of our life story if we had our druthers. Had God asked us ahead of time, we might have suggested any number of changes: different parents, different socio-economic situation, different ethnicity, different geographical location, different allergies. But God didn’t ask and here we are stuck with an inherited hand of cards.
What to do now? It seems to me that we have several options: complain, fold, or play the hand.
Complain? Those who complain about their hand of cards have more than an attitude problem, they have a God problem. Nursing a grudge against the author is useless and quickly turns a character into the villain of his story.
Fold? Those who fold are more than just quitters, they rob themselves of redemptive opportunities and a chance to live a glorious story. They also have a God problem. They lack the imagination to see possibility and, therefore, hope and that leaves them without the desire or the ability to make a move.
Play Out The Hand? The only desirable action left for those with a bad hand is to play. We can play well or we can play poorly, of course, but the goal of life is to play it well. Robert Louis Stevenson said as much:
Sometimes it helps those holding poor cards to see others who have played a bad hand well. We need inspiration and we need tips. One such inspiration for me is Booker. T. Washington.
Booker was born into slavery in 1856. Despite inheriting some rather daunting cards in life, Booker T. Washington knew that “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.” So he took care of the little things, working hard even at menial jobs to obtain the respect of those who knew him. Before he died in 1915, he had become a prominent African-American teacher, orator, and presidential advisor.
“Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.”
“There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.”
“Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.”
“Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things; to the every day things nearest to us rather than to the things that are remote and uncommon.”
Booker did not have a God problem. He had a deep faith in God and had the imagination to see possibilities and hopes where others could see only defeat. Booker T. Washington did not become an inspiration overnight. He made small choices that lead him incrementally towards glory. His life was the accumulation of small glories and now he serves as an inspiration for us all. Likewise, we may not become an inspiration overnight, but we can make small choices that lead incrementally towards glory.
Holding poor cards? Take each moment one at a time and play your hand well. Who knows how it will all play out in the end? God does.
benpalpant.com – life re-imagined
In the 1956 World Series, Don Larsen laid an egg. His Yankees were leading the Brooklyn Dodgers by a score of 6-0 when he was called in to close out the game. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. But he lasted only two innings, walked four batters, and allowed four runs. Not exactly Hall of Fame stuff and the Yankees lost the game 13-8.
When Don Larsen arrived for Game Five, manager Casey Stengel gave him the ball as starting pitcher. You can imagine that Larsen was as surprised as the rest of the baseball world. And if it weren’t for Casey Stengel’s courage to offer Don Larson a chance at redemption, we would still have no post-season perfect games. But on October 8th, 1956, Don Larson faced 27 batters and kept every last one of them off of first base. His perfect game remains one of only 20 perfect games in baseball history and the only one in post-season.
And that’s one more reason to call October, “National Redemption Month.”
We are surrounded by people who imagine the world is a place in which failure is the last word. They have grown so accustomed to failure that they expect it, even anticipate it. They wake up each morning hoping to avoid failure, but nagged by a heavy sense of dread. Failure takes many forms. Relationships fail. Businesses fail. We fail tests and quizzes. We fail to fight temptation. Failure. Failure. Failure.
Ephesians 2:1-9 serves as a proof text: “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked…and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy…made us alive together with Christ-by grace you have been saved…For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
We fail.
But God!
Our lives would certainly be richer if we imagined our lives the way God does, as stories in which failure is not the final word. God is in the business of redeeming “the years the locusts have eaten” (Joel 2:25). He is redeeming every corner of life and so his mercies are new every morning. And that’s just another way of saying, “Yesterday’s failures are not the end of the story.”
In many respects, my life story is a test case for this motto of grace. God has faithfully followed each of my failures, small or massive, with redemptive moments. It takes a small but important imaginative shift to recognize this fact of our existence: “Failure is not the final word.”
Remember Don Larsen. And never forget Casey Stengel, the manager who remembered that failure is not the final word and who made a perfect game possible.
Our failures are myriad. Our perfect games are rare. Praise God for second chances and God bless those who gave us those chances.
benpalpant.com – life re-imagined
On August 2, 2013 Vinnie Catricala struck out on one pitch. That’s right. One pitch.
In a minor league battle between Midland Rock Hounds and Corpus Christi Hooks, Nick Tropeano got the easiest strikeout of his life and Vinnie Catricala wrote himself into baseball lore. After the first pitch was called a strike, Vinnie disputed the call and decided to take his time getting back into the batter’s box. The umpire decided he was in violation of Rule 6.02 (c) which requires an umpire to call a strike if a batter refuses to get back into the batter’s box. Did Vinnie take his place in the batter’s box? No. He stayed out of the box and drew a third strike call.
This isn’t how he dreamed it would be when he was a kid in the back yard. Little Vinnie dreamed of loaded bases, two outs, and a 3-2 pitch in Game 7 of the World Series. Big Vinnie, however, struck out on one pitch in a forgettable minor league game. All his years of training, diet, sacrifice, and dedication had no impact in his claim to victory.
Vinnie provides us a few key life lessons applicable to just about everything:
No one really knows what pitch God will throw next. It might be a high heater or curve ball. It might be in on the hands and jamb us a bit or it might be the dreaded spit ball. Whatever it is, we’ll have no shot at it if we don’t stand in there and take it.
Many of us moan and groan about the last pitch and miss the opportunity to hit the next one. You can’t stand outside the batter’s box and whine about your circumstances, the bad calls, the prevailing winds, or the sun in your eyes. Get in the box and swing. Complaining once makes it easier to complain the next time and before we know it, we’ve got ourselves a nice little rut–a habit not easily kicked. Vinnie struck out because he complained.
We dream of making it big as a writer, actor, business man, husband, father, pastor, etc, and we even train for the big moment. But for many of us that big moment will never come because we never stayed in the batter’s box. You can’t hit a grand slam in Game 7 of the World Series unless you stay in the batter’s box during T-ball, Little League, High School, College, and even during those forgettable minor league games. We can’t expect the big moments to come if we’re not putting our training to use and faithfully dealing with each pitch thrown at us.
Vinnie made National news, but not in the way he’d always hoped. Don’t be a Vinnie. Stay in the box. Keep swinging.
benpalpant.com – life re-imagined
God has used various means to show me my need for him, but it was health collapse that most forcefully pushed me to confront my destitute state. It was a long year at the bottom of an ocean of suffering. My resurrection was no over-night affair. Two years of halting efforts finally resulted in an embrace of this destitute reality. If I were totally honest, I still haven’t come to full grips with it.
But there is no doubt that my year of suffering was one of the best things that ever happened to me. And I’m still convinced that suffering might be the best thing that ever happens to you, but only if you embrace destitution and your deep need. We need this recognition to revise our vision.
Metaphorically speaking, this revised vision makes us smaller. The rest of the world seems bent on bloating their egos and bulking up in every way possible like a toad. In the end, however, it is the small who win. Their lives are not weighed down and they are able to fly farther and faster in life. A toad is still a toad, hopping from lily pad to lily pad, but neediness makes us like birds, able to cover the world.
One of the smallest, most over-looked birds in the world is the Bobolink. What a great name? It’s plumage is nothing special and neither is its song. But that bird can fly farther and longer than any other bird, even farther than the B52s with the massive wingspan.
All exercises that make us smaller, especially prayer, serve us in the long run. Our spiritual flight is more exhilarating and our progress more substantial than those of the pruning peacocks or lumpy toads we used to be.
Paul was destitute and would have it no other way: “If I must boast, let it be in the things that show my weakness.” In this he was imitating Christ, our older brother, and knew the benefits of doing so: “For though he [Christ] was crucified through weakness, yet he lives by the power of God. For we also are weak in him, but we shall live with him by the power that works within us.”
Let us boast in our weakness and reclaim the power of God that works mightily within us. Let us live and, therefore, fly like Bobolinks.
benpalpant.com – life re-imagined
The only thing I really remember about Popeye, besides his cans of spinach and bulging muscles, was his motto: “I yam what I yam.”
The Apostle Paul said it a little more clearly: “By the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain” (I Cor. 15:10). My life story is marked by a running conflict between the me forged over time by my imagination–tall, dark, and handsome…and strong–and the real me. The imagined me is Autonomous Me (sounds like a good band name). The real me, the one whom God sees, is desperately in need of him.
It seems to me that God uses various means to help us recognize our desperate need for him: loss, illness, financial distress, loneliness. Whatever his means, the aim is to reconstruct a person’s imaginative grooves. At the end of our rope, we realize that our very identity is being recast. What we worked so hard to forge over a lifetime has melted and we’re left wondering who we are. The word “Me”, being the final one in the prayer for the destitute (“God help me”) is the proper close of all prayers. You and I are, after all, the end purpose of prayer. Prayer is not so much for God’s benefit as it is for ours and this prayer forms us in a very special way.
This simple prayer for the destitute shapes our identity, particularly as we repeat it. It declares who God is, acknowledges what he will do for us, and establishes our relationship to him. Given time, a person who habitually prays in this fashion will embrace the reality of who she is: destitute.
I Corinthians 1:26-29 reminds us that this identity is not only true to reality, but a good thing. God chooses the foolish things of the world, the destitute: “For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.”
How willingly we forget what God does not. He “knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalms 103:14) and he has pity on us as a result. You and I are dependent nobodies. It’s who we are. As Jim Eliot put it, “We are a bunch of nobodies trying to please somebody.” Anthony Esolen riffed on the same theme in his wonderful book, *Ironies of Faith*: “What can return foolish man to his senses? Little, if he is blessed by nature with the small gifts that veil his yawning insufficiencies. Some people, ‘vain in their imaginations,’ ‘professing themselves to be wise’ (Romans 2:21,22), lapse into comfort and self-satisfaction, as a fish swims easily and stupidly into a trap. Such ones are so full of all-important ephemera that they miss the miracle before them.”
Esolen’s words kick against our human sensibilities, but they’re true nonetheless. Being highly aware of our yawning insufficiencies opens our eyes to our dire need and to the daily miracle of God’s help on our behalf. A Christian’s daily habits should include a conscious confession of personal helplessness: I am what I am.
Our fathers and mothers of the faith have echoed that fact ever since Christ. “I am what I am” marks our identity and serves as a plumb line against which all other human claims are measured. “By the grace of God I am what I am.” Any statement out of alignment with that is a false one and will prove hollow over time.
benpalpant.com – life re-imagined
Breton Fisherman's Prayer
benpalpant.com – life re-imagined
A person who desperately needs God’s help doesn’t mess around with formalities. His prayers are simple and aggressive, variations on the same three word prayer, “God help me!” It is a richly theological prayer and worthy of more insights than I can give it here. We briefly considered the first word, “God” in last week’s post, now let’s consider the second word.
The second word, and the essential core of a destitute’s prayer is “Help”. It is, after all, what we really need. Nothing superficial here. A truly needy person doesn’t have time to tiptoe. “Help!”
A man once accosted me outside the public library and made a strange request: “My kids are hungry and we’ve run out. Do you have a loaf of bread?”
I’ve been asked for cash countless times. If he’d asked for cash to buy bread, then he very well might have wanted the money for something else. But a man who asks for bread wants bread. He needs.
It reminds me of Christ’s words in Matthew 7:9-10. “Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?” The answer? Well, no decent dad would ever do that. Correct. “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”
God knows the extent of our need. Does that mean that God gives his children candy all the time? No. Does his answer to this destitute’s prayer always look like the salvation we hoped for? No. But when we ask for fish, he will not give us a snake. In my case, God brought a night into my soul to dispel the darkness that was suffocating me.
To someone observing from the outside, it may have looked like God was giving me a snake instead of fish. I felt that way at first, but now I know that the night in my soul was the cure for my darkness. Does he answer that way for every cry? No. Just as suffering seems especially tailored for each of us, so his help is fitted particularly for each of us.
In any case, God’s rescue and whatever form it takes, is in line with his final vision for us. He is about the daily task of forming us and he will bring us to completion.
That’s no lounge chair doctrine. If I am a pot (and I am), and if God is a potter spinning me on his wheel right now (and he is), then I should expect trouble. Those who have done any pottery know that the process is a violent one. Early on, the clay must be literally pounded. Spinning the pot is no gentle task either.
C.S. Lewis famously noted that an artist making a sketch for his three year old nephew takes little pains about it, content to whip something up. “But over the great picture of his life–the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child–he will take endless trouble–and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient.”
God is an artist. You are his masterpiece. God causes trouble, varying degrees of dis-ease, not only to shape and cure you of various ills, but also to bring you to himself. The dis-ease, the suffering, is an opportunity for you to depend completely upon the one whom you need anyways.
<a href=”https://plus.google.com/u/0/101682939517488858639?rel=author”>benpalpant.com</a> – life re-imagined