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The Godward Life

Another Reason For Boundless Joy: God Delights In The Details

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I was smacked by the miraculous last Saturday. The Aspen trees were gilded in gold along the mountains in Buena Vista, CO as I drove to my grandfather’s memorial service. He was a tree farmer and I had the distinct feeling that all those trees had dressed in their finest to celebrate his life. I had the distinct privilege of saying a few words as the eldest grandchild and so I shared a portion of what I posted last week in the blog; namely, that while I haven’t developed a love for planting trees, my eleven-year-old son has. Mystery of mysteries.

Although they hardly knew each other, my son has some of his great-grandfather’s loves coursing through his veins. As you may have read in last week’s blog post, my grandfather sent a package of seeds that he had collected many decades ago and my son planted those seeds on the day my grandfather died. So this is a direct quote from what I said to all those people at the memorial service: “Who knows if they’ll take? But I know that if they don’t, it won’t be my son’s fault. He goes out most mornings in the dark, before school, and waters them from a spray bottle he stole from his mother’s stuff.”

Oh ye of little faith.

Twenty minutes after the service, we were all enjoying a luncheon hosted by my grandfather’s church. I was in the middle of a sandwich when I received this text from my ecstatic son: “Dad, we have four Japanese and one Australian growing. Yea!”

That’s right! On the day of my grandfather’s memorial service, those seedling broke through the ground as a grand gesture of new life and reminder to those of us with fragile faith of God’s sovereignty.

Some might call it “dumb luck” or “chance.”

Seriously? I call it a God who delights in the details. He lavishly flings forth such remarkable, unmistakeable, glimpses into his soveriegnty. If he pulled back the curtain and showed us all he has done and continues to do, down to the most minute detail, we would be unmade on the spot.

So I thank God for my grandfather, yes, but I give greater thanks for a God who decided it would be pretty cool to have my grandfather’s seeds break ground on the day of his memorial service.

God delights in the details! Mystery of mysteries.

Faith, Like a Seed: In Memoriam

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I worked on his tree farm for one summer when I was in junior high. He woke me early to work the property, to get sap on my clothes and to harden my hands for manhood. He tried so hard to nurture in me an affection for seeds and saplings and to care for them. My proclivity to day-dreams, to laziness, to playing when I should be working, was admittedly frustrating to him. After a day of work, we used to roll into the house at around 9:00 pm to the smell of warm food and the chastisement of my grandmother.

“He’s a growing boy, Ed! You can’t keep him out this late. He needs rest and a good meal!”

He’d mumble something about every boy needing to learn how to work and there was a particular inflection in his voice that made it obvious how he felt about this boy in particular. I never doubted his love, but I also never doubted his opinion of my manhood: he was perfectly clear on what he thought of my work-ethic and, as everyone knows, manhood and work ethic were inseparable in his mind. They were, of course, both right.

I remember one particular night when my grandparents had guests over and there was really no place to duck and cover except up in my grandfather’s loft which was his bedroom. So I clambered up the stairs and brooded around, looking for something to do. I found a framed stitch-work hanging on the wall of Proverbs 22:29: “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will work before kings. He will not work for unknown men.”

There was something enchanting about that little promise, something enticing in all the right ways. Something inside me awoke that night to the possible rewards of hard work. I realized that the rewards for hard work were not the grades or the financial windfall, but the possibility of doing great things with great people. In that moment, I realized why, to some degree, my PopPop worked so hard and why he asked me to work hard too. He wanted to do great things for great people and he wanted the same opportunity for his grandson.

I didn’t do the mental math at the time to recognize that my grandfather was already working before a king he knew and loved; namely, The Lord, Jesus Christ. However imperfect his love for Jesus Christ and for people, my PopPop had faith, like a seed, and he knew in no uncertain terms that it was the most important seed in all the world. He was faithful to nurture that seed in himself and in others and I’m the beneficiary of his efforts.

Now, I can say with the Psalmist that “the lines have fallen to me in pleasant places; Indeed, my heritage is beautiful to me” (Psalm 16:6) and “you have given me the heritage of those who fear your name” (Psalm 61:5).

I haven’t really developed an interest in planting and nurturing trees…but you’ll find this interesting: my son has. They hardly knew each other and yet there is something in my son that loves the seed and sapling. One month ago, he started a mango tree from seed and it’s still growing in my living room. Of his own accord, my son started a maple tree from seed last summer. He’s almost irritating in his attention to detail around those trees. I never told him to plant them or pluck the lower leaves or weed around their base or water them, but he does it all nonetheless. On the day we heard that PopPop died, we prepared four flats with soil and planted some seeds that PopPop collected decades ago. It was our small way to honor his life. Who knows if they’ll take? But I know that if they don’t, it won’t be my son’s fault. He goes out most mornings in the dark, before school, and waters them from a spray bottle he stole from his mother’s stuff.

Robert Louis Stevenson asked that these words be carved on his tombstone: “Here he lies where he long’d to be.” So it will be for my grandfather when his remains are buried in Michigan. His body will be a part of the loam of the earth, the loam that he loved, but he will be enjoying the new resurrection. In both cases it will be true: He lies where he long’d to be and his faith, like a seed, grows in his great grandchildren’s lives. Already, the mountains of this needy world are being peopled by the saplings he planted.

Today, I will join my grandmother, my uncles and aunts, my cousins, and my siblings in honoring my grandfather’s life. I can tell you with all certainty that I will thank my God for this rare heritage of faith. I will remember that stitched proverb. “Do you see a man skilled in his work?” Yes. Yes, I do. And, happily, he’s at work for the King of kings and Lord of lords right now in a place where there are no beetles, aphids, or diseases to threaten his work. There is no pain nor Alzheimer’s disease.

Now that you’re gone, PopPop, we’ll remember that “the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children’s children; To such as keep his covenant, and to those that remember his commandments to do them” (Psalms 103:17-18). While you have had to live in this broken world with a breaking body and mind, God brings you now to the other side of the smudged window where you see “face to face.”

PopPop, you’ve run the race and now you’ve heard what we so badly long to hear ourselves: “Well done, good and faithful servant.” I love you, PopPop. I’ll see you on the other side.

The Secret Ingredient For Gladness

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I asked my students to close their eyes and imagine a room full of people who loved God with deep affection. Then I asked them to imagine that those same people also loved others with deep affection.

Go ahead, you can do the same thing and I’ll ask you what I asked my students.

Now, with your eyes still closed, tell me what you hear. Got it?

Now, while you mill around the room, tell me what you feel.

In other words, what does a room filled with people who love God and love their neighbor (the two greatest commandments) sound like? And how does it make you feel?

Most of my students said that the room was filled with happy and sincere chatter. They said it was like a singing conversation that made them feel glad, contented, joyful. One student said that it made her feel at home. Another said that it made him feel wanted.

I find that answer, “wanted,” fascinating. It really cuts through all the other descriptors, down to one of our most fundamental desires. We desire to be wanted and when we know we are wanted, then we feel content, joy-filled, glad, at home, and motivated. Isn’t that what our closest friends give us? They make us feel wanted.

It doesn’t take much thought exploration to realize that being wanted holds great power across life’s spectrum.

What would our marriages feel like if we practiced wanting each other? Or how strong and radiant would our children be if they knew, deep down in their bones, that they are wanted? Would our employees work better and more effectively? Good grief, even our pets perk up and live longer when they know they’re wanted.

Think of it this way: we might convince ourselves that we love someone (a child, a student, a spouse) without actually liking that person. We can keep saying, “I love you” until we’re blue in the face, but it will just be an exercise in self-deception unless we like the person too.

[Tweet “”You can like someone without loving them, but you can’t truly love someone without liking them.””]

We want to be loved, yes, but we really want to be liked, wanted, treasured.

If we all want to be wanted in our earthly relationships, how much more so in our relationship with God? We long to be wanted by the divine. We want that assurance at such a deep level that some verses bring tears to the eyes because they remind us that we are, indeed, wanted.

Consider Zephaniah 3:17, which says, “The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.”

Or 1 John 3:1, which asks us to open our eyes and “see what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.”

We know how unworthy we are; in fact, sometimes we’re guilty of fixating on just how unworthy we are to be wanted by friends, or a spouse, and especially by God. But the Gospel assures us that we are wanted by him and that message is powerful to move us. When we truly believe that God wants us, that he has great affection for us, then our affection for him grows and we are motivated to serve him wherever we can.

So here’s one quick takeaway for life:

  1. If you want to marshal people to action, then you must demonstrate that you want them.

[Tweet “”People will move mountains for those who demonstrate affection.””]

And here’s one last thing: God wants you.

 

He MAKES Me Lie Down.

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My friend lost power to her attached garage the other day. The house had electricity, but everything powered through the garage was dead. The garage door wouldn’t open. The sprinklers didn’t work. I traced the problem backwards and spent a good thirty minutes sleuthing the cause, but to no avail. I was on the verge of giving up when I discovered the tiny (and I really mean “tiny”) source of this mini blackout.

Everything in her garage was plugged into one outlet and that outlet featured a small circuit-breaker inside. It’s commonly called a GFCI outlet. Most of the time, this outlet acts like any other outlet and we forget it’s there. But when the difference in electrical current changes, the GFCI shuts off the electrical flow in .025 seconds. Electricity is useful, but dangerous and a GFCI helps save lives. In this case, it also prevents one from opening the garage and running the sprinklers.

What was my tip? I noticed a small yellow light on the outlet that indicated it had been tripped. I pushed the button, which reset the outlet, and everything worked again. How remarkable that something so small, so overlooked, so easily taken for granted, could so dramatically shut everything down.

I don’t know what caused the circuit to break, but something did. And while the sprinklers and garage door not working are an inconvenience, who knows what trouble was avoided. The garage could have burned down. Who knows? Whatever the case, that small circuit-breaker forced everything to stop.

What are the small circuit-breakers in your life? A sprained ankle? A cold? A migraine headache? What if God is using those small (Okay, none of those feel small. I know.) inconveniences to force your hand. What if these are his reminders to stop and rest?

We all want to get on the other side of suffering, but what if some of our suffering is God’s way of forcing us to lie down? Remember Psalm 23? “He MAKES me lie down in green pastures.” A good shepherd may not coax his sheep to lie down. He might have to make the sheep lie down. I know that God has had to force me to lie down. I don’t lie down easily. There’s too much to do.

The next time you get hit with a headache, remind yourself to be thankful for the opportunity to slow down. These griefs are sobering reminders of our limitations. They press us into our Maker’s arms.

Lean in.

Stay.

What I Wish I Knew Before I Hit Rock Bottom

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“Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.”

So wrote John Donne.

I suppose he should have known. After sending five of his children and his wife into eternity and suffering under the wrack of stomach cancer, he preached his own funeral and posed in a death shroud for his final painting. I imagine him as the legend describes, wrapped in a sheet while the painter pretended the poet was dead and waited for him to stop itching.

Affliction is a treasure, he claimed. He should know. But still. No child in the history of mankind, when asked what he would like to do when he grows up, has ever responded, “I want to suffer.”

I, for one, did not. In fact, for most of my life I’ve tried to evade suffering with any number of poor tactics:

1. I tend to minimize suffering: Instead of facing the dark reality of our pain and recognizing my own brokenness, I simply try to “suck it up.” The “Pull-Yourself-Up-By-The-Bootstraps” approach to suffering is not a godly one.

2. I tend to moralize suffering: Instead of aknowledging the complexity of suffering, I assume that bad things happen only to those who did something wrong. The story of Job is a hard argument for those of us who lean this way.

3. I try to fix suffering: I often assume that suffering is a roadblock to my happiness and, therefore, an evil to be avoided instead of an opportunity to meet God. Generally speaking, I want pain-free living and not God-full living.

4. I tend to compare my suffering: Instead of facing my pain, claiming my pain, and entering into it, I dismiss it by comparing myself to someone who has a more difficult trial than my own. I say stuff like, “It could be worse.”

5. Finally, I sometimes buy into the self-improvement approach to suffering: I often assume that the whole point of my suffering is to make me a better person. It’s no comfort to someone in suffering to tell them that it will all work out in the end or that they will be a better person as a result. It’s not even necessarily true. It might all work out in the end, but we’re still never the same. And we might be a better person afterward, but we might not be. So much depends upon our response to suffering and there are no pat answers.

These are all terrible ways to respond to suffering, but they’re always easiest because they are a flight response away from suffering.

I experienced a health collapse In 2009 that crippled many of my faculties nearly overnight. Suddenly, walking, reading, and feeding myself were incredibly difficult. It dragged on long enough to pull me into a wilderness of despair where I hit rock bottom. That kind of experience forces us to ask hard questions and it also exposes our view of suffering. Is suffering unmanly? Is grieving an un-Christian thing to do? Will I claim and face my pain? So here’s what I wished I knew before I hit rock bottom: There are right responses and wrong responses to suffering.

Let’s respond rightly by leaning into suffering. It’s much harder to lean into suffering. It’s much harder to grieve and, thereby, reshape the way we imagine the world and ourselves.

But a study of Scripture reveals that the Bible always takes the hard path. It never minimizes suffering. Examples abound, but one will suffice: When Jesus wept in the garden of Gethsemane, he was suffering and he was leaning into suffering. He was the God-Man, sinless and joy-filled, but he sweat blood in his anguish and he grieved. He was NOT unmanly. He did not try to evade suffering. Christ was certainly NOT a Stoic and those who call themselves his disciples should not be Stoics either.

Maybe it’s time to imitate Christ by living more whole-heartedly, more authentically, more deeply. Maybe it’s time to do the hard thing and lean into suffering.

Suffering is unpredictable, unknowable, and very real. How we live through suffering really matters.

My upcoming book, A Small Cup of Light, helps sufferers lean into their grief. If you want to live more whole-heartedly, more authentically, and more deeply, then you’ll want to get your hands on this book. It’s hope for the hopeless and you can get your copy at Amazon on August 30th…

Okay, the truth is you can actually get your copy right now. I’ll start the official ten day book launch on August 20th with a big surprise you don’t want to miss on August 30th. If you want to experience the book launch with me…and don’t want to miss out on the surprise… just scroll up to the top of my homepage and subscribe to my blog.

The Big Question Nobody’s Asking: What Will You Do With Your Suffering?

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November 22nd is, perhaps, my favorite day of the year to die. Weird? Maybe. But consider this: Aldous Huxley, Jack London, William Bradford, John F. Kennedy, and C.S. Lewis died on that day. Even Robin Hood and Blackbeard, the pirate, reportedly died on November 22nd. But four influential little girls, largely forgotten from history, also died on that day and their deaths have changed my life forever.

The Spaffords decided to spend their vacation in England, but a last minute obligation in his law practice forced Horatio to stay home. His wife and daughters were at sea several days when another ship collided with theirs. All four daughters drowned that day. When their mother reached England, she sent him a heart-breaking telegram: “Saved Alone.”

Horatio’s only son had died only two years earlier at the age of four, and here, overnight, he was bereft of all the rest. Those deaths thrust him into the basement of his soul where he wrestled with unparalleled grief. He climbed aboard a ship with that anguish and began the journey to join his wife Anne, solitary and sorrowing. When his ship sailed over the very spot where his daughters had drowned, Horatio chose to do something that has changed the way I see suffering and the way I respond to suffering. In his grief and anguish, he did something utterly courageous. He wrote a song.

His decision to write a song in the midst of his suffering forces us to ask the big question that nobody’s asking: “What will I do with my suffering?”

Life’s pain often arrives suddenly, abruptly changing everything. C.S. Lewis put it this way: “We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Pain, to some degree or another, is a guarantee in life. The encounter with suffering forces us to decide what we will do with it-whether we will remain deaf or whether we will listen to God-but the decision would be easier if we established principles ahead of time, before the anguish sets in. Most of us try to forget or ignore our suffering. We certainly don’t memorialize it, like Horatio Spafford did. Some of us have subconsciously bought the lie that pleasure is the aim of life and any suffering is a roadblock to our life’s aim.

How easily we forget that God is the aim of our lives.

What would happen if we changed our aim in life from self-fulfillment to God-fulfillment? Would we view pain differently? Horatio Spafford saw his suffering as an opportunity to worship and draw closer to God. He saw it as an opportunity to write a song, one that has ministered to generations of Christians ever since: “It Is Well With My Soul”.

“When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll;

Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,

It is well, it is well with my soul.”

Horatio Spafford’s response to tragedy was born from an uncommon imagination. Maybe it’s time to imagine our story, including suffering, more like he did. Maybe it’s time to see suffering as an opportunity to know God more urgently, more intimately.

We all want fulfillment. We all want a richer life. I think suffering is an important means to both, but only if we respond to it well. Here are four principles for turning suffering into an opportunity for a richer walk with God:

  1. Claim Your Pain: Stop comparing your suffering to someone else’s. God has included it as part of your story. Whether the suffering is big or small, it is God’s megaphone in your life. Listen.
  2. Lean Into Suffering: Don’t drown it out with distractions, ignore it, forget it or run away from it. Lean into the anguish and lean on the Holy Spirit.
  3. Trust the Author, You have no other choice. The facts are clear. God is the author (Psalm 119:9-91). He’s good (Mark 10:18). He’s reliable (II Cor. 1:20). He’s in charge of the events in your life (Dan. 4:35). Embrace the story by embracing the story-teller.
  4. Look for the Stars in the Dark Canvas of Your Sky: Even in the midst of darkness, God gives us small tastes of hope, glimpses of goodness for which we can be thankful.

Those four principles will enrich life. If you’d like to further explore these four principles, you can do so in my new book.

I’m excited to announce the upcoming release of A Small Cup of Light, available from Amazon.com on August 30th.

If you’d like a deeper walk with God through suffering, I wrote this book for you. I can’t wait to share it with you. Spread the word. Spread the light.

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Why Multi-Tasking Is Not A Virtue

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Maggie Jackson, in her book Distraction wrote, “Amid the glittering promise of our new technologies and the wondrous potential of our scientific gains, we are nurturing a culture of social diffusion, intellectual fragmentation, sensory detachment. In this new world, something is amiss. And that something is attention.”

While some cognitive neuroscientists believe that attention is an organ system, like our respiratory system, we at least know that attention is the basic organizational power of our lives. Attention is, continues Jackson, “key not only to higher forms of thinking but to our morality and even our very happiness…in a world of information overload, we need brevity and distillation…We are adapting to a new world, but in doing so are we redefining ‘smart’ to mostly mean twitch speed, multitasking, and bullet points?…How do we keep from getting lost in these mercurial and diffuse realms, where time for reflection and focus is increasingly lost as a valued part of life?”

I write this as one who has discovered rather late in life that I am the victim of my own distracted habits. Having suffered migraine headaches for many years due to various stresses, I blamed them on chemistry or biology forgetting that the mind, body, and emotions are all inextricably connected. These migraine headaches increased in frequency and intensity until they culminated in the great migraine attack of my life in January of 2008. The attack left me intellectually scrambled, disoriented, and physically immobile for some time.

My father’s counsel, coinciding with those of my dear friends and the great C.S. Lewis, was that God had used pain in my body as a megaphone and encouragement to slow down in life. Since I did not listen to those warnings, God had, in some respects, forced this rest upon me. During those weeks of immobility, I came to see my life and mind as analogous to fields for planting. Like an incompetent farmer, I had over planted the field and left it undernourished. Rather than rotating my crops and giving regions of my mind and life opportunity to rest, I developed those overly-busy habits of life so common amongst evangelical Christians. O, sure, I pretended that those few minutes driving hither and yon with music playing were sufficient moments of reflection, but they were nothing more than a continuation of that stream of distraction that had come to define my life.

Attention acts as a plow to loosen the soil of the mind and prepare it to receive the seed that is planted there. Split-attention and hyper-productivity, my dominant habits of life, would be akin to a farmer who skips his plow along the surface of the soil and then throws his seed as quickly as possible: not an effective farming method and certainly not effective for developing a reflective lifestyle. Effective intellectual farming is a more patient process requiring attention so that when the seed is planted, whatever that seed might be, then contemplation can water and nourish the seed.

I believe that the development of a contemplative life is a Christian obligation and I suspect that it will take the rest of my life to unwind the cords of busyness and distraction that so entangle me. The body tremors, sudden onset of fatigue, and idiopathic Narcolepsy that developed in the year following that migraine attack might very well have biological causes, but I am certain of one thing: a split-attention lifestyle combined with hyper-productivity have undermined my intellectual, physical, and spiritual clarity. I am not alone in this, I am sure.

Maggie Jackson’s questions are poignantly relevant and her comment that “we are becoming a nation of the untethered” is spot on. Like water spiders, we skim on the surface of life, unable to taste deeply, incapable of substantial self-reflection, and absolutely satisfied with surface observations. We have either forgotten or ignored the fact that wisdom does not sink her roots into the soil of distraction.

If we want wisdom, which is the first goal of every Christian reader, then we must be people of attention. The Latin mother of our word “attention” is the word attendere: literally to stretch toward. Being so well trained for a lifestyle of distraction, we have difficulty stretching our minds toward anything for any significant length of time and this inability has social, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual consequences.

The current intellectual skill set amongst many of the next generation is more akin to skimming, to data selection, than to anything like rumination. One can hardly blame them for this tendency since we have built the world that has raised them and gave them suck, but it seems altogether strange that so few are willing to question the rudimentary shape of modern society itself. The social, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual consequences should come as no surprise.

We are so wired for sound, so primed to pursue the latest novelty, that we gutted our modern lives of any opportunity to ruminate quietly, to practice attentiveness. Not only have we removed such possibility, but we have actively filled the spaces that were left from the removal with objects or activities that force either multi-tasking or abandoned intellectual myopia. The explosion of technological capabilities that have aided in this elimination of rumination have perhaps intoxicated our humanistic longings so much so that while we know that we can, nobody is asking whether we should.

We have all assumed that more data at our fingertips is a good thing without counting the cost of such an unending stream of information. The written word today is far less “fraught with meaning and deeply embedded in our psyches, than the transparent carryall of burgeoning info-bits” (ibid). These info-bits and lightning access to any given piece of data has given us the illusion of knowledge, but this is not actual knowledge.

Actual knowledge is acquired only by intellectual chewing, rumination or contemplation, by stretching one’s mind toward a given thing. Contemplation is especially necessary for the act of reading because it allows for the reader to ingest the text rather than skim along its surface.
Practiced contemplation, therefore, bridges the gap between the higher things found in reading and our own inadequacy and fickleness. Attention and contemplation are necessary tools for the Christian who desires to remain a cognizant and reflective observer of all God is teaching whether in nature or in literature.