God is Love

I have lived quite a life. Sometimes, I'll be telling a story from something I have experienced, and it will roll into another story, which will roll into another one, and I'll look up to see someone gape-mouthed in front of me, one eyebrow sort of cocked up, and I'll laugh and say, "Didn't you know? God loves me special much." 

I haven't thought about these experiences in quite so positive a light while I've been living most of them, but as the acute phases wear off and things start to settle into a bigger perspective, I look at my life, and I see the fingerprints of divine love all over it. 

Truth be told, the experiences I've had, the strength I now stand in, the character of my spirit, all the things that make me who I am, not a one of them is possible unless God loves me. 

The same is true for you. 

Nothing in your life is possible unless it is God who is loving you. Through the hard times and the easy ones, the good and the bad, the trials and the triumphs, all of it, God has been busy loving you. 

And Psalms confirms that I am right - He loves us (me, you) very much. Special much. (Psalm 117:2)

Sometimes, it's hard to see that in the moment. It's hard to look past the circumstances and see what's going on. It's all we can do to keep our eyes open to see the trees, let alone look for the forest. It's hard, in the dust and the ashes, to remember that God is loving us. 

But He is. 

I wish we could see it from His end, so we could always know, but the only option we have is to see it from our side. From our already-but-not-yet, waiting-and-hoping-and-trusting, longing side where the love isn't always obvious, but if we can slow down, quiet our souls a little, get away from the noise and the mess, we can feel it. Undeniably. We know it in the pits of our souls. 

God loves us special much. 

He always has. He always will. 

He always is. 

God of Miracles

Quick: name a miracle of God. 

Now, name another. 

Got a third?

If you're like most Christians, you've got a whole database of the miracles of God somewhere in your head, or maybe in your heart. Parting of the Red Sea, healing of the blind, resurrection. The Bible is literally full of stories of the miracles of God, and we have read them, heard them, sang them, play-acted them, and flannel-graphed them enough that we know them by heart. 

Now, name a miracle of God from your own life. 

Harder?

Oh, sure, we have stories of the goodness of God. The time He's been better to us than we deserve. The times when He's worked things out for us that we didn't think were possible. The times when we've been healed, restored, redeemed. 

But we wouldn't call those miracles. At least, we usually don't. Those are just stories of God being God, of Him being good, of us living by faith and reaping the benefits of what we've sowed. 

Friend, tell me - why is it a miracle for God to give sight to the blind but not a miracle for Him to give health to your body? Why is it a miracle for Him to part the Red Sea, but not a miracle for Him to make a way for you? Why is it a miracle for God to resurrect Lazarus, but not for Him to fill you with new life? 

Those stories about God, the ones we so easily remember from our own lives, those are miracles. Those are acts of God that break the natural order of things. Those are moments when God has stepped in and found us on the side of the road, the edge of the sea, the grave and done for us exactly what He did in the stories that we're so quick to call miracles...are still miracles. 

Know how I know? 

They're unforgettable. (Psalm 111:4) 

That's why they're so easy for us to recall. If we read them in someone else's story, we'd call them miracles. If we heard someone else recall them so readily, we'd call them miracles. It's just hard, I guess, because we struggle to believe we're worthy of miracles. But..we are worthy and they are miracles. 

And we'll keep telling the story of them over and over and over again. 

Delbert

Others often call me stubborn. Usually because I am just pushing through, or pushing off, something that would give them more pause in their own life. 

Like in last week's story, when Mindy broke my finger with a crowbar, and I just duct taped it together and go back to work. Where does that come from? 

The answer, at least in part, is Delbert. 

Delbert was my elementary school principal, but he was more than that. He was also a friend of the family, having grown up with my grandma's generation. So we were deeply connected before we even met. And even though we had a unique relationship, and I still count him among my friends, there is one moment that has always stood out to me. 

I doubt that Delbert knows how ridiculously often I have thought of this moment, of all the moments that we have shared. 

I was a young teenager, and they were working on relocating an old one-room schoolhouse to the grounds of my elementary school. Delbert, Herb (the head custodian), my dad, and I were primary volunteers on the project. It's where I learned to lay concrete block, at the tender age of 13. Delbert taught me. 

One morning, we were out working on the foundation for the building before we could get the actual structure moved. I was mixing concrete and laying block, and Delbert had moved on to building trusses. All of a sudden, he set his hammer down, walked over to where I was working (dad and Herb were moving materials or something, if I remember right), and told me he needed to go into the elementary building for a minute and he'd be right back. 

I acknowledged his statement and looked up in just enough time to see a blood-soaked rag wrapped around his thumb as he walked away. 

I never heard a whimper. I never heard a curse word. He had set his hammer down calmly and was walking just as calmly. But Delbert had hit his thumb with that hammer and busted it completely open. To my 13-year-old mind, it was a lot of blood. (A couple of decades later, I would bust my own thumb open with a hammer while laying some new flooring, and I can guess based on that that it was a lot of blood.) And he had just walked into the building, wrapped it in some bandages and gauze from the nurses' office just outside his own. 

Then, he came back outside, gave me a thumbs up, and without another word, went back to building trusses. 

That moment has stuck with me. It has inspired me to react to things the way that I do - as truly small things, so often, in the grand scheme of things. 

It may look like there's a lot of blood. It may be throbbing with pain. But it's not a reason to change your character, to get angry, to quit, to stop. It's a reason simply to take a breath, take care of business, and get back to it. 

I talk a lot about the things that are broken in me. They seem important to others, who can't understand why I'm so stubborn and not giving them the due that they deserve. Truth is, so many of the things that seem like a lot of blood to you are truly small things to me. Little hiccups in the grand scheme of things. I probably wouldn't talk about them at all if it were up to me. But I feel a certain sense of pressure from those who don't understand this moment in my story. This moment that has shaped the way that I respond to so very many things. I'm not being stubborn; it really is just such a small thing to me. The kind of thing you just walk in, put a bandage on, and get back to work with. 

It's one of the moments that makes me such a good chaplain, a non-anxious presence, the person you want by your side when things start to get hard. 

That moment that Delbert hit his thumb with a hammer.

God Saves

I am a person who is so thankful for second chances. But you know what I'm even more thankful for? 

Third chances. 

And fourth chances. 

And fifth chances.... 

You get the point. 

I am a person who just seems to keep messing things up, often in the same ways. I swear to myself, and even to God, that if I had an opportunity to do it all over again, I'd do things differently, but somehow, I keep ending up on a path that leads me to the same broken places. Like a bad horror movie (as depicted in a not-too-old commercial), I keep hiding behind the chainsaws when there's a running car right there to take me away. 

I'm silly that way, and I'm betting that you are, too. 

But it's more than that. Sometimes, my life gets into these seasons when there just doesn't seem to be a safe place to escape. Where there's a lion down one path and a bear down the other and if I turn around, I can see the lightning and wind coming from behind me and it seems like if I could somehow even jump high enough into the air to get around it all, there would be a swarm of bees up there, waiting.

This is the reality of living in a broken, fallen world like ours. 

I can come back from one failure, set my feet on solid ground, and find even that ground starting to move. It can be frustrating. 

What do you do in a time like this? Where do you turn? What do you put your hope in? 

In the God who saves His people. In the God who, Psalm 106 says, saves His people many times. 

That God is our God. That God is our Father who sent His Son, who sent His Spirit, so that when we face situations like these in our lives, we can know that help is not only coming; it is here. God tames the lion and slays the bear and calms the storm and dispels the bees and heals the broken places and makes new paths and offers new opportunities and saves me from this broken world and saves me from...myself. And He does so many times. Many times upon many times upon many times over. 

And He does the same for you. 

So whatever you're facing today, know that there is hope. There is grace. There is confident assurance. Because our God is a God who saves. 

Again and again and again. 

God is Wise

In the beginning, everything was formless and void, then God spoke and all things as we know them came into being. We sometimes call this an act of divine imagination - and it certainly is - but even more than that, it was an act of divine wisdom. 

One of the pastors I have enjoyed listening to for many years, a man I met while I was young in my faith, also has a keen interest in science, and it is the kind of wisdom that is present in creation that he uses frequently to discount the "scientific" (pseudo-scientific) theories of evolution and so forth. 

There is no way I will do justice to the eloquent and humorous way that he puts it when he gives these talks, so I won't even try. But the point is that the very intricate interdependencies of various species of plants and animals on earth requires that they all come about maturely at roughly the same time in history. There's no time for evolution, for the very slow processes of change, because if one doesn't fuel the other, they both die out. 

This is wisdom. It is the wisdom that runs through literally everything in God's entire creation. All of these tiny little complex things that we might not have ever really noticed but now, we cannot unsee, and there's just no way to account for them except divine wisdom. 

Accident would never have gotten us here. 

So often when we talk about the wisdom of God, this is where we point it out - in creation. Psalms even says it, "God made everything with His wisdom." (104:24)

It's easy, then, for us to get lost in birds and butterflies, storm clouds and waterfalls, the capybara and the platypus. 

But did you know that when the Bible says God made everything with His wisdom, that everything includes...you? 

It includes all the things you love about yourself and all the things you don't. It includes the way you see things that no one else does, and the things that you are blind to. It includes the little whispers that you hear that keep you on the right track, and the way your ears can somehow tune out the massive alarms going off that would keep you from danger. 

It includes the things you're trying to change about yourself this new year, and it includes that inspiration that you have to change them. Think about that for a second. God, in His wisdom, made you the kind of person who would do things you don't particularly love, but He also made you the kind of person who would be willing to do the hard work to change them. 

This is important. It means that simply accepting that we are created in the wisdom of God doesn't give us a cop-out. It doesn't let us just accept the things we don't particularly like about ourselves. It only gives us a new frame for them - so that we don't have to hate them, but we don't have to settle for them, either. Because we know that God's wisdom also makes us a person capable of change. 

And if you don't change? Okay. There's wisdom even in the way that you're broken. Did you know that? 

God made everything with His wisdom. And that includes you. And all your broken pieces.