“Still on the Design Board”
“As you look back over your life, it is not too difficult to believe that what you went through was for a purpose, to prepare you for some valuable work in life. Everything in your life may well have been planned by God to make you of some use in the world. Each person’s life is like the pattern of a mosaic. Each thing that happened to you is like one tiny stone in the mosaic, and each tiny stone fits into the perfected pattern of the mosaic of your life, which has been designed by God.
Prayer for the Day
I pray that I may not need to see the whole design of my life. I pray that I may trust the Designer.” (From Twenty-Four Hours a Day © 1975 by Hazelden Foundation.)
Even though I am sixty-nine-and-a-half, I am still on the drawing board. The Great Designer continues to work on me. He is very creative and very patient.
The problem is that his work on me feels like radical surgery without the benefit of an anesthetic. I am not usually aware of his desires for the final product, but I am keenly aware of the pain.
But of course the pain hasn’t killed me yet. Maybe it won’t.
Sometimes, I get really discouraged when I think of how many years and days I’ve had on this planet and how few years (?) or days (?) I may have left. But then I remember that the Designer who is working on me is eternal himself, and that what he designs is also eternal.
“For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees,
and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.” (Hebrews 12:11-13, English Standard Version)
So, I say a very reluctant “Get on with it, LORD! Don’t mind the whining and screaming. You know what you’re doing, even when I don’t.”
“Living Lightly with God”
I am not good at living lightly. No matter what the situation, my philosophy is often summed up by the following proverb: “Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.” While this proverb—like most proverbs—serves me well occasionally, it often creates more problems than it solves. I tend to pack too many things for vacations and keep too many throw-away bottles because “we might them, and I want to keep them out of landfills.” I also keep broken equipment, thinking that I will eventually get around to fixing said equipment. Of course, I rarely do. I don’t think I’m a hoarder, but I am for sure on the cusp of becoming one.
God is continually reminding me that my life needs to be simpler. The reason he needs to remind me so often is that I am continually forgetting God’s call to simplicity. But, am I forgetting or willfully ignoring? I think I know the answer, and I don’t like it.
Sometimes, it is helpful for me to think in terms of the big picture. I didn’t have anything or any freedom when I entered this life. I didn’t even come with a diaper. And when I die, I won’t have anything, including one more breath or heartbeat. Meanwhile, everything that I “have” is on loan.
“You are sojourners with me.” (Leviticus 25:23.) God is speaking to Israel just before they entered the Promised Land. Israel didn’t own the land. God did. And they were living there as resident aliens.
There’s a song by 38 Special called “Hold on loosely.” The chorus is pretty simple, but also very powerful: “Hold on loosely, but don’t let go. If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna lose control.”
May I, may we all, hold on loosely today.
“The Glory of Overlooking Things”
“Prov. 19:11 Good sense makes one slow to anger,
and it is his glory to overlook an offense.” (English Standard Version)
I wasn’t very glorious the other day. In fact, I almost caused a very serious accident. The details don’t matter. What does matter is that I did not handle a highway offence in a glorious manner. Quite the contrary: I allowed a jerk to turn me into a jerk myself.
Of course, if the jerkiness had not been in me, it couldn’t have come out of me. Andy Stanley warns his listeners not to make the following statement, “I don’t know where that came from” when they’ve messed up. Andy says, “I know where it came from. It came from you!” Right! (One of the things I really like about Andy Stanley is that I don’t like a lot of what he says. But, of course, he’s right.)
It is easy to rationalize this proverb, if we simply look at most of the translations. We might think that the word translated “offence” (English Standard Version) suggests a minor offense. Nope! The Hebrew word pāšaʿ suggests a serious violation of trust. This Hebrew word is often translated as “rebellion” or “transgression”. It applies to both rebellion against God and human beings. So, it is not legitimate to say, “Oh, I do in fact overlook minor things, but when it comes to big things, I don’t overlook. I don’t even just get mad. I get even!” And it is always a big deal when someone transgresses against or offends us, isn’t it?
Choosing to overlook an offense doesn’t mean denying it or minimizing it. Rather, creative overlooking means acknowledging wrong-doing, at least to ourselves, and then thinking of the best response. My problem is that I don’t always think about the best response. I simply react. And reactors—nuclear and human reactors—are always in danger of meltdowns. Unless someone is about to pull the trigger on a gun, I almost always have time to think about my response.
And of course, there is prayer. It may need to be short. (“Help God!” comes to mind as being about the proper length of such prayers.)
God, help us to slow down today. Help us to think about our responses. Help us to make glorious choices about how to respond to wrong-doings today. Deliver us from becoming the same kinds of jerks that offend us.
Yes indeed!
“The Lame Blame Game”
“Blame must be assigned, and it wasn’t me.” (A 12-step friend about how his family handled wrong-doing.)
“The woman, whom you gave to be with me, she gave it to me! (And I ate it.)” (Genesis 3:12: Adam, the first man, when God confronted him about his disobedience.)
Blaming others is our national sport right now. Perhaps it always was. We see it (and do it) daily. It is practiced by small children and old people, by men and women, by religious people and by irreligious.
But in reality, blame is really lame. By using the word “lame,” I mean this: Just like a person who can’t use his legs, blame can’t go anywhere.
Don’t get me wrong. Acknowledging the role of others and ourselves in creating problems can be helpful. Confronting others and ourselves when they/we’ve done wrong can be healthy. Cleaning house is not done by merely throwing things in the closet or shoving them under the bed.
However, blame doesn’t simply acknowledge or confront wrong. Blame contents itself with continuing to talk about the wrong of others or of self. Yet, at the same time, blame refuses to do anything to change what’s wrong.
Of course, it’s easy to see the stupidity and uselessness of other people blaming other people (or circumstances or God) for why things aren’t the way we think they ought to be. Seeing that we ourselves are playing the blame game is not so easy. No! Of course, we aren’t blaming. We’re telling the truth about why things are as they are.
Really?
Even blaming ourselves isn’t wise or helpful. That is a truth that I struggle with every day. When I’ve done something wrong—or not done something that I should have done—I tend to go on and on about my failures. But here is the deal: I’ve discovered that continually blaming myself is so much easier than doing something positive to make my own life and the life of others better. But blame is still lame.
In twelve-step programs, steps 10 and 11 seem to me to flow rather naturally.
Step 10: “Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”
Step 11: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with a power greater than ourselves, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.”
The antidote to the lame blame game is to acknowledge our wrongdoing, and then turn to God and seek to discern God’s will for us. And then, we do God’s will. It’s as simple as that. It is also as difficult as that.
“Reflecting my Heavenly Father on a Down Day”
“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” (Matthew 5:14, English Standard Version)
“Today, as God helps me, I am a living reflection of my Heavenly Father.” (My twelve-step affirmation this morning)
But I don’t feel much like the light of the world or a living reflection of God this morning. There are reasons.
- My wife left and will be gone for a day-and-a-half.
- It is cool and rainy.
- The daylight hours are short.
- My favorite brother-in-law has covid-19.
- My hands hurt it (arthritis?) so badly that I can hardly type or hold my coffee cup.
- I am worried about the upcoming election and its aftermath.
- Today is the first anniversary of the closing of CCU, where I taught for eleven years.
- I am trying to change my relationship with food. (That is a very positive thing, but difficult, nonetheless.)
But I refuse to do anything to make a difficult day worse. I refuse to think harmful thoughts toward myself or anyone else. I refuse to eat a bunch of junk food. That would make me feel a little better for a little while, but it would also cause me to feel a lot worse in a little while.
Instead, I do positive things, no matter how I feel.
- I take and make 12-step calls and text friends.
- I make myself a cup of vanilla caramel tea and drink it out of a butterfly meadow cup.
- I read some good Scriptures (no Ecclesiastes today, thank you very much!) and other good readings as well.
- I take good care of our little dog, who is a wonderful companion.
- I send a text to my wife about what I’m feeling. (She texts right back with the most encouraging text I’ve ever received from anyone.)
- I listen to a TobyMac c.d.
- I turn on virtually every light we have on the lower level of our Cape Cod.
- I write this blog post and publish it.
I will reflect God’s love and grace no matter how I feel on this or any other day.
“The Lust to Get Back to Normal”
“To be human is to exist, not in stasis or equilibrium: only fossils do that.”[1]
“‘Normal’ is just the name of a town in Illinois.” (Source unknown)
We all want—or even long—to get back to normal. Yes, I do too. However, let me ask you, as well as myself, several questions.
- What is normal?
- Why do we want to go back to it?
- Is our normal “normal” (or perhaps better, our usual normal) a private reality/construct, or a societal reality/construct? If reality is a societal or relational reality, which society or relationships are we talking about?
- If we are Christians, is normal even a possibility for us? As believers, we are called to be counter-cultural. Have we forgotten this?
Cornelius Plantinga wrote a book titled Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin.[2] I’ve only dipped into the book, but I love the title. Those of us who try to take the Bible seriously recognize that our world has not been “normal” since Genesis 3:6.
And one more question: Was our normal, whether it was individual, familial, or societal, really ever all that normal? I suspect that, for many of us, good memories are primarily a result of bad memory.
As a believer, indeed as a human, it seems to me that there is something better than “getting back to normal.” It is making the day, this day, better. And we can do that, no matter how abnormal our days are or seem to be. Making this day better appears to me to be infinitely better than lusting after a normal which probably was pretty messed up anyway.
[1] Anthony J. Griffiths, Courage and Conviction: Unpretentious Christianity (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2018), 180.
[2] Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).
“My Eating Addiction: Playing the Short Game”
“The one who keeps the law is a son with understanding, but a companion of gluttons shames his father.” (Proverbs 28:7, English Standard Version)
“Help my friend to savor his food, because savoring is the opposite of gluttony.” (A friend who prayed with and for me over the phone.)
I was blindsided by the second half of the verse. What!?! You mean to tell me that the opposite of keeping God’s Law, God’s Instruction, is gluttony?! That can’t possibly be right!
So, I checked it out in Hebrew. Yep! That does seem to be what it says. How dismaying.
I see now, as I have seen before, that my eating addiction is, in many ways, even more serious than my other addictions—even more serious than my “major” addiction. Food (particularly sweets) was likely my original gateway drug. For sure now, overeating tends to lead my mind in directions that I know it should not go. So, I have to stop thinking that this is not a serious matter. It is.
I can’t change my eating attitudes and behaviors for the rest of my life, or even, for the rest of this day. What I can do is to change my attitudes and behaviors for the next little while. Being a serialist writer of good, short stories about my life is my best shot at making a big difference in my life. And these short stories are not written with a pen or a keyboard, but with consistent attitudes and actions.
What story will you write today, dear reader?
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