When I look in the mirror, whose image do I see? Is it who I really am or has it found its form in another's mold? My parents? The image my friends and social circle have of me? Is it the reflection of the events of my life that have gouged my landscape and planted markers in my soul. Is it the image my spouse wants me to have...or my children? Is it God's?
When I look at friends and loved ones, what image do they bear? Is it the image of who they really are, or of who I want them to be? Are there chisel marks left on their form by my sculpting hand? "Train up a child in the way that he is," the truest translation of Proverbs 22:6 instructs, "and when he is old he will not depart from it." The wisdom here is that we all come uniquely wired, and that wiring...that uniqueness...is to be honored and nurtured in how we parent. It is to be embraced with our loved ones and co-workers.
Acceptance is one of the great gifts the human heart can receive. It carries with it the assurance of belonging, of specialness, of affirmation and freedom. When we feel another's acceptance it is life-giving. When we offer the gift of acceptance to others it is life-giving...and sometimes life-saving. Acceptance of another as they are does not imply condoning inappropraite behavior. It implies love...loving the person without loving the behavior. Acceptance is the wing that carries the grace of Christ to a limping soul and makes it real.
Our efforts to fashion people over into our image are life-draining at best and life-taking at worst. They hobble the spirit of who they were born to be. They alter the terrain of their soul in ways that are contrary to who they are, and it becomes a life and death struggle for them...and we become their God. Either their spirit is broken, eventually, or there is war.
We are not programmed to be god. We are designed of human cloth. We are not wired to fit another's mold...we come with our own. And our loved ones - our children and spouses -come with their own. They will not fit in our mold; their image cannot be fashioned after ours. Acceptance celebrates who they are, and it is a holy wind that carries the scent of heaven on it wings. It is a gift of freedom, and freedom is a sacred perfume.
God's grace allows us to accept ourselves as we are. Not that we are satisfied with the glitches in our behavior and attitudes, but that we accept ourselves as the frail and flawed humans that we are...made whole, not by our own efforts or performance, but by the acceptance and grace of Christ and the Holy Spirit's working in our lives. As we accept ourselves, we may better accept others. As we accept ourselves, blemishes and all, it frees God's Spirit to rennovate our soul, to heal and re-shape us into who we were born to be. Taking the gouges of life in a surrendered soul, God can bring forth the butterfly hidden in the worm. The butterfly is who we were born to be, but if we reject the caterpiller we will never discover the wings hiding inside.
- II -
The Meaning of a Life
When she broke the alabaster box and a sweet fragrance filled the room, those present were stunned. A woman of soiled character had slipped into the house and in a gesture of extravagant waste, poured expensive perfume over the head and feet of Christ. Indignant, condemning remarks assailed her soul...a landscape withered from the choices she had made and from the scorching way the world looked at her. "If this man were a prophet, he would have known what manner of person it is that touches Him." Yet in her pouring, Christ saw not an act of extravagant indiscretion and waste but of extravagant love and humble service. He saw what the others did not; He saw the message of the moment and spoke of the meaning of her life. Defending her, He affirmed and praised her.
We are asked to carry such vision in our soul; to see, as David Steindl-Rast says, "through our eyes" rather than with our eyes...to see into the meaning of a moment...or of a life. What is the message this moment holds for you? Is it one of thanksgiving and worship for the fragrant love that fills our days with sunshine and dew, with smiling eyes of a child, the antics of a squirrel, the darting acrobatics of the hummingbird? Is it a moment of destiny when a wounded soul is set on course through the confession of a repentant heart. Is it a moment of liberation when an imprisoned soul is set free through forgiveness? Or is it a tender, threshhold moment of good-bye to a child leaving for college for the first time...or to kindergarten: good-bye to an era...to child-hood...to innocence....to a full nest? Is the message of the moment one of a change-point that will never bring us back this way again? And what are we to take with us from that message? That life is fleeting and moments precious and oh how we must live them well?
And what is the meaning of the life that walks beside you as a friend or stranger? What angelic fragrance might they pour upon our world? What of Christ may we see in them? The ministering, healing Christ who seeks to salve our aching places with His balm? Or the hungry or lonely Christ who needs to taste our food and feel our touch? What of His ways and wisdom might He be speaking to us from the stranger on the plane?
Let the moment invite you into its richness; let it speak to you of life lived brim-full and running over. Let it sing to you of heaven's ways...stepping moment by moment in the Spirit, listening for meaning beyond the sounds; looking for God in common cloth.
It may be the blessing of grace that marks us most of all. We are called to be grace-ers.
When one is worthy of being judged, we are asked to give grace. We may judge an act, but not a person. We may not brand another's soul with a curse. Judging a person is not in the code of conduct of this new order of man whom Christ has summonsed. Christ did not come to judge, and He did not come to commission judges. He commissioned servants; He commissioned followers. He commissioned givers of grace.
When someone has really dropped the ball, we are asked to forgive. Where there is guilt, we are asked to pardon. Where they is a debt, we are asked to let it go. If we see ourselves as grace-ers we may better find it as a ready reserve from which to cast blessing broadside with a generous hand. And the curse will be broken...for a moment...where you are. And the world will have been blessed because you are here.
I'm convinced that one of the great hindrances of our Laodicean legacy is busy-ness. Not that Laodiceans were busy...they may not have been. But the relics of wealth and comfort were there, and as with most artifacts, patina has collected over the centuries to give it a slightly different look. Busy-ness is our culture's patina layer that gives us value and significance. If we are busy we must have interesting lives....we must be important. And so we spin the treadmill and we miss a deeper life of the spirit...a deeper communion with the invisible God. We miss His still, small voice; we miss an inner validation by the one who made us.
If you and I would serve the Lord, we must seek that inner quietness where His voice can be heard. If we would serve Him, we must step out of the rat-race. The problem is, most of us who attend church and call ourselves Christians won't do that. We won't make the break to even test the waters of Spirit-living. My sense is most of us really don't won't to serve Him...unless it's on our terms and can be penciled into our dayplanner.
This week, test yourself. Simplify your schedule. Cross out some optionals...not a token or two, but make some real cuts; free up some real time for God. Infuse your week with wiggle room for the Spirt to steer you a different course. Try it for just one week.......if you can. Give us feedback about how that was for you. Did you attempt it at all? Did you alter your schedule? Did God find more room in your day? What difference did it make?
It was not the agony of death...or of the kind of death that awaited Him...but it was the agony of the absolute separation from His Father that caused Christ's body to break down...that caused His sweat to bleed. It was the bearing of the darkness of sin...of all sin for all time...that weighted Him into the turf of Gethsemane. It was becoming sin...not just bearing it...that compelled His foresakenness from God. It was becoming sin's curse that carried the weight of hell itself for Christ. Carried the shame of the billions...the guilt, real or imagined, of us all...the nothingness of our worst state...for all who have ever born those soulish scars; He became that in the mystical darkness of Calvary. Not that He had not known before - and carried it in the shadow of His soul - it's just that here the veil that had anesthesized Him to its starkness parted. Here, with the full brunt of the cost in His face, Christ was asked, once more, to choose the cross. It was here in the struggle of Gethsemane that Christ was crucified....It was only acted out at Calvary.
He tells us to come to Him as a little child. Trusting, wide-eyed, vulnerable...embracing. Life is brim-full, for the undamaged child, and running over. Sure, there is growing and maturing to do, but, above all, they are malleable. They are moldable. Christ is asking us to be moldable to His image...to be malleable to the Potter's hand. He asks us to come to Him trusting and wide-eyed, embracing His purpose and plan for us, eager to run through the days with Him, joying in the moment, alive to the day....fully awake in the spirit to the stirrings of His wind.
He asks us to come to Him as a little child...to love Him freely. He asks us to live as a child...running through our days...in love with life. He asks us to be as a child...tender and caring; wanting to be with those we love and climbing into His lap and letting Him hold us there.
"Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you."
"These things" are clothing and shelter and food. Christ's promise to those fearful of their daily sustenance was that they would be provided...as we sought above all else...God's kingdom and His righteousness. It is His ways we are to focus on, not the difficulties of our circumstance. God knows what we have need of. Our role in the equation of provision is not to focus on our need -- God does that -- but to focus on Him and His will in our lives...His righteous, unfathonable ways. As we do what seems foolish to man - including to us - God takes care of our needs.
He does not promise us a banquet table, but He does promise us a table in the wilderness that will be set by His manna. We may not receive from His hand what we would want, but we will receive what we need. Can we bear that? Only if our own notions of what we need are set aside. Only if our hunger for God and His ways is the primary motivation. The leeks and garlic of Egypt kept the children of Israel from embracing God's manna. So God gave them quail, but it met only their desire for something more than manna. It did not meet their need.
As we determine that we know better than God what we need, we may find ourselves sickened by the very thing we have demanded. Hardly ever do our notions turn out to be as we had thought they would. In signing a pact with Hitler, Chamberlain thought he had brought peace to Britain. In selling Joseph into Egyptian slavery, his brothers thought they had rid themselves forever of their youngest sibling. In taking performance enhancing drugs Marion Jones rose to the Olympic pennacle but lost her self and her Olympic gold in the process. In fearing the giants of Canaan a generation of Israelites lost the promise of God. In insisting on a king, the Jews missed their Messiah....In crucifying Christ, Satan thought he had won.
His ways are not our ways, neither His thoughts our thoughts. Faith, alone, takes us out of our small world into a larger place where God moves. We see "through a glass darkly" and what we see here is never the whole picture and is never pure. Faith, alone, tells us that. Our senses, our logic and reason, will always argue with the Divine about things of this world. Don't look at the giants in your land and despair. Don't look back to the predictability of a lesser time and lament for its security. Faith never carries with it the security of Egypt but the unpredictable winds of a free God breathing His Spirit into His people.
In uncertain and fearful times, grab hold by faith to the hem of a holy garment and hold on with unrelenting commitment. Dare to believe He will provide and rest at peace with what His hand offers. Canaan lies just beyond the horizon for those who know that what they see is not necessarily what they get...or what they need.