“UNMISTAKABLE DAWN: GRADUALLY, IT DAWNS ON YOU . . .”
“The path of the righteous is like the morning sun, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.” (Proverbs 4:18.New International Version.)
“By surrendering our lives to God as we understand Him, we are changed. The nature of this change is evident in recovered alcoholics. This personality change is not necessarily in the nature of a sudden and spectacular upheaval. We do not need to acquire an immediate and overwhelming God consciousness, followed at once by a vast change in feeling and outlook. In most cases, the change is gradual. Do I see a gradual and continuing change in myself?” (From the book, Twenty-Four Hours a Day.)
The dawn never really comes suddenly, although at times we notice it suddenly. At first, it may seem a little less dark than before. Eventually, it seems that there is a little more light, though you may still think that you are engaging in wishful thinking. But eventually, the dawn has arrived unmistakably.
There is a song that says, “I know this light won’t last forever.” But there certainly are seemingly forever-nights. However, it is not so. If we stick around, the dawn will come.
Perhaps this entire mortal life we are living is one long night. It probably seems so for all of us at times. And for some people, night is all they know all of their lives.
However, the Bible talks about Heaven as a place of light. Occasionally, I think I see a glimmer of it on the horizon, but night has a way of reasserting itself. And on dreary cloudy days, it is difficult to believe that there is a sun.
As I write this, the sun appears to be attempting to make an appearance. I suspect that it will only be a cameo appearance, if it shows up at all. However, I believe that this entire life is a rehearsal for the real performance. We can all be stars in that performance, if we choose to be.
And the lighting will be perfect!
“A BEAUTIFUL MIND”
I had not seen the movie “A Beautiful Mind” before last night. My twelve-step friends had mentioned it several times, so I finally decided to watch it. I’m going to yell at my friends after the next meeting. I ended up with a terrible sinus headache from crying so much. Thanks a lot, guys!
SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t seen the movie, I’m going to spoil it for you, so stop reading right now!
. . .
Okay, you’ve been warned!
So, the movie is loosely based on a true story about a man, John Nash, who is a brilliant mathematician. He is recruited by the U.S. government to work decoding Russian instructions to sleeper cells in America. The sleeper cells are planning to detonate nuclear devices.
It starts out at Princeton University, but fairly quickly it turns into a spy thriller. You realize that this brilliant mathematician is in way over his head.
But eventually, his wife realizes, and we the viewers realize that he is really in over his head in a very different way: Nash has constructed an alternative reality. He isn’t working for the government. The people he interacts with aren’t real. He is, in fact, schizophrenic.
His imaginary people never entirely disappear, but he learns to ignore them. His wife, against all strict logic, stays with him. Eventually, he becomes a well-beloved professor, and wins the Nobel Prize.
The real story, like all real stories, is much messier than the Hollywood version, but it is a good movie in my opinion. And while I’ve never been diagnosed as schizophrenic, I did identify with Nash. Here’s why.
For years, I have struggled with various addictions. While there are many useful ways to look at addictions, but perhaps they all boil down to a few simple non-realisms: the desire to be in control and the illusion that I was in control, the desire for pleasure without the pain of commitment, and an extremely skewed image of myself, God, and everyone and everything else.
And, of course, I still hear the voices calling to me. The difference is that these days, I ignore the voices. In a sense, we all hear voices. We need to decide which ones we’ll listen to.
“Balancing What I Need to Do and What I Enjoy Doing”
Have you ever said or written something, and then wondered what you meant by that? I had that experience just now. I was writing my daily e mail report and affirmation to send them to my sponsor. Here is my affirmation for today:
“Today, by God’s grace, I am balancing doing what I enjoy doing and what I need to do. When I do this by God’s grace, I am discovering that what I enjoy doing and what I need to do are the same thing.”
There are things I need to do—lots of them. They range from cleaning the bathroom, to taking care of the dog, to preparing for a class I’m teaching tomorrow at the university, to helping my wife lead our community group this evening.
And there are things I would enjoy doing. They range from taking a ride on the Little Miami Bike Trail to taking a nap this afternoon. (I will try not to do both of these things at the same time.)
In this context, it was the second sentence of my affirmation that struck me, and that I am trying to understand. Can those two things—what I need to do and what I enjoy doing—really be one?
I think that the short answer is, Yes! However, as with most short answers, this “Yes!” needs to be unpacked.
Can necessity and enjoyment be one? Yes, but the word “can” is crucial here. The unity of “need-to” and “enjoyment of” is possible, but not inevitable. We all know people (and some of us have been those people) who never enjoy anything—even things they enjoy! If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, it is. But we’ve probably all experienced that, either with other people or with our own selves.
In his book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis has one of his characters (who is in hell) say, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.” I do believe that there is hell. I don’t know if people are that honest and aware in hell. But sometimes, I do suspect that some of us occasionally visit the suburbs of hell. Any time when we don’t do what we need to do or what we enjoy doing, we are probably flirting with hell. And rest assured that hell will always flirt back.
And perhaps, on the other side of the equation, one aspect of Heaven is that those who are there have discovered a way to make necessity and enjoyment one. Perhaps the last stanza of Robert Frost’s poem, “Two Tamps in Mud Time” strikes the right balance, which is Unity. Frost pictures a man (himself?) splitting wood when two unemployed lumberjacks walk by. One of them stands to watch, and the man splitting wood knows only too well that the lumberjack is silently asking for work to make some money. And the necessity of one man trumps the enjoyment of another man.
But Frost ends with the following observation:
“But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.”
So, today, by God’s grace—and only by God’s grace can I do this—I will balance and unify what I need to do and what I enjoy doing. Writing this blog post is a first step.
“AM I ALREADY THERE AND JUST DON’T KNOW IT?”
A friend of mine told me a hilarious story that has left me pondering a serious matter.
My friend and I were talking about the danger of becoming old, crotchety guys. I said, “Man, I don’t ever want to become demanding and hard to please.”
He replied, “I once said something like that to my family, and I added, ‘If I ever become like that, just take me in the back yard and shoot me!’” Immediately, his teen-age daughter grabbed him by the wrist, and began dragging him toward the back door.
Now, of course, if he had really been that bad, his daughter would have probably been too afraid to do what she did.
However, this funny story causes me to wonder: Am I already becoming what I don’t want to be? It’s an easy question to ask, but no easy to answer. In fact, I’m not altogether sure that I even want to answer it. Still, I’m learning to sit with hard questions, without trying to squirm out of them prematurely.
And here is the deal: Crotchetiness is like body odor; it creeps up on you, and you never smell it yourself. Other people certainly are aware of it, but we are not. Like all qualities, good or bad, becoming demanding and hard to live with take possession of us slowly.
So, every now and then, I check in with my wife and friends. Fortunately, I have people who love me with the truth. What a blessing!
Still, I need to be careful. It is always possible for character to deteriorate. Good character development is never a default position.
And, of course, God often uses funny stories to get inside my head. They rattle around and unsettle me in ways that I need to be unsettled.
You too?
“UNSWERVING LOVE”
“ ‘Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. 17 Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.’ 18 And when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more.” (Ruth 1:16-18)
These words frequently used to be spoken in weddings—and rightly so! They represent the best mindset for beginning and continuing a good, loving, committed relationship. The fact that such solemn words often prove to be a hollow promise does not indicate their hollowness, but our own hollowness.
Of course, the words were not originally written for a wedding. They were spoken by a daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law. And they were spoken by the daughter-in-law after her husband was dead!
This makes the words even more striking. After her husband is dead, and when Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi, is on her way back to her homeland, her foreign, Moabite daughter-in-law, Ruth, utters these words of unswerving love.
Now, Ruth was a Moabitess, a fact that the narrator of this story hammers into our ears and brains. In the four short chapters of this book, we are told again and again that Ruth was a Moabitess.
How’s come?
If you do even a brief study of the relationship between Moab and Israel/Judah in the Old Testament, you will quickly discover that, as a general rule, these two neighboring countries did not get along with one another. That is an understatement. They hated one another would be closer to the truth.
And yet, there is Ruth, and her unswerving love. As it turns out, she is a great grandmother of King David.
The words of Ruth are a wonderful expression of her unswerving love for Naomi. Ruth’s words were backed up by a wonderfully unswerving life. These words are a wonderful challenge and example for us all.
And yet, I heard something this morning in this ancient story, something that was not explicitly said. I heard God speaking, not only about one human’s unswerving love for another human being, but also about God’s unswerving love for us all.
You can read the long and haunting poem by Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven” to know one man’s struggle to evade the unswerving love of God. Or you can read the Old Testament, concerning God’s unswerving love for the people of Israel.
Or you can read the New Testament concerning God’s unswerving love for all mankind. Apparently, even death by crucifixion cannot cause God’s love to swerve.
“THE NEED TO WEED”
“Prov. 24:30 One day I walked by the field of an old lazybones,
and then passed the vineyard of a lout;
31 They were overgrown with weeds,
thick with thistles, all the fences broken down.
32 I took a long look and pondered what I saw;
the fields preached me a sermon and I listened:
33 “A nap here, a nap there, a day off here, a day off there,
sit back, take it easy—do you know what comes next?
34 Just this: You can look forward to a dirt-poor life,
with poverty as your permanent houseguest!” (The Message)
I weeded the vegetable garden and the flower beds about two weeks ago. I did a very fine job, if I do say so myself! I even mulched the flower beds.
However, I have noticed quite a few weeds are already invading. There is an old saying that “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” The saying works at many levels, and not just at the national or military level. The price of freedom from weeds is also eternal vigilance.
But here’s the thing: I am irritated that I worked so hard to finish the weeding work, and my work didn’t stay finished. Irrational irritation? Of course! But there it is anyway.
According to Genesis 3:18, once the man and woman had disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, they were doomed to struggle with thorns and thistles. Whether you believe the Bible or not, the thorns and thistles part makes sense.
Jesus warned that weeds come in various forms. There are internal weeds, as well as external ones. He said that the “seed” of the Kingdom of Heaven could be choked out in our lives by weeds. And when it came to defining the weeds, Jesus named names!
“Luke 8:14 “And the seed that fell in the weeds—well, these are the ones who hear, but then the seed is crowded out and nothing comes of it as they go about their lives worrying about tomorrow, making money, and having fun.” (The Message)
Worrying about tomorrow, making money, and having fun—sounds like the story of my life. However, be careful! It is not tomorrow, or money, or fun that is the problem. It is worry about those things that threatens to choke out everything in my life that is good.
The Greek verbs in the latter part of this verse are in the present tense, which suggests an ongoing struggle with the weeds. There is no reprieve from the hard work of weeding out things in our life.
Are you sufficiently depressed yet? Lift up your hearts! I have good news!
But first, a story.
When I was young, we had a huge garden. The rows seemed to go on forever. When I was old enough to help in the garden, my mom would send me out to hoe and weed the garden, while she finished up the breakfast dishes. I hated hoeing.
But, in a little while, I would hear a sound behind me, my mom with her own hoe catching up with her intentionally slow son. Soon, we would be talking and laughing, and we were at the end of our respective rows. Then, we would turn around and work our way back. Row after row, until we were done.
I now cherish those memories. There was more going on than weeding the garden.
God never calls us to the garden alone. He is with us. His companionship makes the difficult work, if not easy, at least doable. And, at the end of our lives, we might just find a clean and productive garden, with produce not just fit for a king, but produce fit for The King.
(One of the best things I read on line while preparing this blog may be found at https://bobbieschae.com. It’s a good piece of writing on weeding!)
“THE HEART OF THE MATTER: THE MATTER OF THE HEART”
I was listening to an Andy Stanley Your Move video early this morning. He was talking about how good we are in selling ourselves on bad decisions. Stanley said that the problem is our hearts. He referred to Jeremiah 17:9, so I had a look at it. Here is my own rather wooden translation of the verse:
“Treacherous is the heart above all things,
And incurably sick;
Who can know it?”
Now, I know that it is fashionable these days to give and receive such advice as “Follow your heart!” Since we think of the heart as the source of feelings, we may simply mean “If it feels right, it probably is right.”
Sometimes, that may actually work, but as a principle, I have two huge problems with it. One is related to the meaning of the word lëb in Hebrew, and the other problem is with the underlying assumption that the human heart is reliable.
From the standpoint of the Hebrew word itself, the problem, at least as I see it, is this: The Hebrew word lëb rarely has anything to do with feelings. It has more to do with thinking. Our modern distinction between the heart and the head may make some sense to us, but it probably wouldn’t probably make any sense to Jeremiah or other ancient Hebrew.
So, if I am correct in this, what Jeremiah is actually saying is that our thinking process is treacherous and incurably sick.
Well, of course, my thinking is not treacherous and terminally ill. Yours, on the other hand, I do sometimes wonder about.
No, I wonder about my own as well. I can talk myself out of doing good things, and into doing bad things incredibly easily. My heart (a.k.a., my mind) has a great capacity to fool itself.
In on other words, the heart of the matter, no matter what the matter is, is the matter of the heart. And the problem is that the heart of the matter of the matter of the heart is that something is terribly the matter with the heart.
Christians call this “sin.” Sin is not simply, or even primarily, what we do. Sin undergirds all that we do, because everything what we do flows out of the flawed heart/mind. This is one of the reasons why merely changing our behavior rarely solves very many problems.
But the Bible also speaks of a God who can change our hearts. Both the Old Testament and New Testament speak of this change of heart. While we certainly need to cooperate in this change of heart (Proverbs 4:23; Romans 10:10), it is primarily something that God does in and for us (Ezekiel 11:19; 36:25-27; Romans 2:29; Psalm 51:10).
A heart/mind transplant is tricky, but God knows what God is doing. God can get to the heart of the matter, and can deal with what’s the matter with the heart.
“THE CHOICE BETWEEN HAPPINESS AND JEALOUSY”
I just discovered that two of my favorite musicians have a close connection. I had no idea before today.
I have loved Al Stewart for decades. I was listening to a cd of his song “Time Passages,” when the name Peter White came up. I supposed (correctly) that Peter White was the writer or co-writer of “Time Passages.”
And then it hit me: Was this the same Peter White whose smooth jazz guitar I have come to love through AccuRadio? “Peter White” is a fairly common name, but . . .
And, sure enough, it was the same Peter White! Cool! In fact, Peter White not only helped write that song, but many others that Stewart performed. They collaborated on music for some twenty years. White also played in Stewart’s band, and is behind many of the great guitar licks on “Time Passages” and other Stewart songs.
Have you ever had a similar experience with two people that you know personally and like a lot? You suddenly discover that, not only do they know one another; they are also good friends with one another, as well as with you.
And what do you experience in that moment? Happiness? Or jealousy? Or some mixture of the two?
I may be a uniquely selfish, possessive person, but I rather doubt it. Mixed feelings are probably normal feelings.
And yet . . . And yet!
The music, in all its glory and beauty, is in the collaboration, isn’t it? Stewart without White is simply good, but not as good.
And what do I bring to the party? Appreciation! Gratitude! Happiness!
I have a couple of good friends. We’ll call them “Steve” and “Will.” Due to distance, we don’t get together physically very often, but we frequently call. We pray for one another, hold one another accountable, give advice when asked (and sometimes, when not asked), and mostly encourage one another. No jealousy!
Where the choice between happiness and jealousy becomes more important and much murkier is with husbands and wives. I do not believe in “open marriages.” Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I think that I am just plain right on this one. Marriage should be a committed and exclusive relationship.
On the other hand, maybe it shouldn’t.
Now, before both my friends and my wife think that I’ve lost my mind, let me explain. My wife is, right now, taking care of her mom. Mom is probably at a “transitional point” in life. The expression “transitional point” is a euphemism for no longer being able to live in her own home. For the past couple of years, my “retired” (??) wife has been helping care for her mom. This, of course, means that I have had to “share” my wife with her mom.
Have I always been happy about this? No. Have I sometimes been jealous? Yes.
But, whenever I begin to feel the “Green Monster” of jealousy stir in my heart and mind, I remind myself of one very important fact: Real love for one is ultimately real love for all. Love is one of those things—like joy itself—that grows the more it is shared.
So, I try to remember that loving collaboration is where the music is, that the more my sweetheart loves her mom and others, the more love she has for me as well. Al Stewart is good on his own. So is Peter White. Put then together, and they’re dynamite.
I choose happiness!
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