As Christ said, "They shall know you by how you love one another" A blessing from a sister in Christ....

I've heard this song in relation to Olympic athletes - perhaps the 1996 Olympics, of which I was a particular fan). I think of you as that athlete. You are running one of the most challenging marathons I have heard of. You are trying to do your best, in obedience to God's leading, to keep your head above water, only to find yourself sinking with every effort you make. Do not be discouraged, beloved brother. God is not done with you yet!

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go
To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star

This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far

To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause

And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest

And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star

Here is what Paul wrote, about YOU:
I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. (Philippians 1:3-6)

Take heart, dear brother! God will lift up your head. Your eyes are focussed on the prize - achieving the impossible dream, reaching the unreachable star - with a heart overflowing with love for the lost and wounded in this world, so that they will be blessed in heaven eternally. Do not be discouraged by circumstances. They seem so definitive, though, don't they? But look at Sarah. She conceived in old age. And Elizabeth had been barren. And Mary yet a virgin! God seems to be blind to earthly circumstances, not of discompassion, but to the obstacles.

Tranquility….is not a sea on the moon

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" Jeremiah 17:9 (NIV)

There are those, in the interests of healing and training those who follow, that will remove the heartfelt responses of this journey from the discussion of their story for this very reason…the heart, the human corrupted heart, is deceitful above all else and its reasoning for being so is well beyond the understanding of man. Dealing, they decide, with the emotional and beating pain of the heart is beyond where God would have us go, far beyond what we could understand and therefore something to be cut out and removed from our Christian walk. Love becomes a hardened, lifeless shell in the context of our humanity, for love is the very thing we cannot abide in….it is simply too painful.
 

And we develop a mechanism to prevent the heart from feeling, a switch as one friend put it today, where we think with the logic of our minds rather than the feeling within our heart. And it is that switch that throws us into alienation from God; the God of love, the God of grace, the God of mercy and the God of our creation. And, in that disconnection, we find that logic will not survive and the benefit of tranquility becomes the thing we most fear.
 

I speak from experience, but I speak it in faith because my heartfelt cry isn't, "Lord, Lord come….." but "Dear Father, help my unbelief….in what I believe."
 

I came away from the meeting today with my brothers, those men who refuse to let go of this heart and refuse to accept the logic of my argument that I cannot be worthy of what God entices me to be because I am disrupted, and far from the realization of what logically a life surrendered to Christ would or should be. They called out to that heart today….and its sorrow lay heavy upon the ground between us, its pain disturbing the peaceful tranquility of the gathering. When I tried to switch from the emotional disruption of my heart, they called me back……
 

And, in the midst of the disturbance of that movement, they glimpsed the beating wounded heart and sang of its worthiness to feel, to live and to experience the tranquility of God's peace in the disorder of chaos that logic brings. God doesn't call us to a 'measure of a man' that lies within the logic of society's demandiness….a wealth of possessions, finances and relationships devoid of feeling and disturbed eddies of our living in the broken world of this place…..but of a nourishing, illogical movement of love within a heart reborn…..a replacement heart, born in love and moved by compassion, unselfish movement and a power that is not orderly in its use but alive in justifiable use through unselfish living 'to bless.'
 

The world operates upon the value of logic; if we don't buy things, then others cannot buy things with the money that comes from our 'consumer confidence'. If we do not allow the government to support the needs of the uninsured, we are being calloused and uncaring. If we trust in God, we will not vote according to our beliefs and values, but put those aside under the title of "God will what God wills." Tolerance is not living our faith, but refusing its voice in the lives around us.
 

The church, in its missional duty to reach out to the world, has been corrupted by that very logic: if you are saved, instant and definable change takes place. If you continue to feel pain, it is because you do not love logically as Christ loved, loves or will love. There is a formula for corporate worship, a logic in counting the numbers to define the worthiness and effectiveness of a ministry. If, logically, you are not attracting the numbers, you are doing something wrong. There is a way to heal anyone, no matter the wound and there is a step by step process by which true growth within the family of God can be discerned. It doesn't require relationship, only training, and in that logic lies the death of the church that Christ entrusted to His disciples and them to those who followed on down through the ages to you and I today. Instead of a God who is both logical and illogical, emotional and unemotional; loving and unloving……we have constructed a god definable by the self-serving logic of our humanity. And doomed the sheep to which we are all called on a personal level to shepherd into being shepherds themselves.
 

Our belief becomes a coat of many colors and as interchangeable as the clothes we don in the morning.
 

We become a logical people who live in the chaos of a fallen, broken world dysfunctional…..and fearful of the tranquility that exists in a one on one relationship with God as lived in the relational state with other believers.
 

I don't speak of a logical assumption based on my experience, but to that heart that beats within me….changed by God….that I have been silently starving in the logical justification of my experience and judgmental attitude towards myself. I'm scared of tranquility because I don't know how to live with it when my experience tells me that I will only know the chaos of being unworldly in this life. If I do not let the beloved son bleed, I cannot feel and I can rationalize my unbelief away in the shadow of my belief. Logically I can assume that there is no growth, and therefore no real conversion, because of the lack of worldly stability in my life. And, as one friend said in a previous blog, I challenge the will of God in the face of my own unwillingness to be peaceful in the storm. I try and fix that which I've destroyed by the logic of my unbelief and am challenged by my faith and experience to believe in a God who is unbelievably emotional in His enticement.
 

I can speak with the dismayed logic of Peter in the face of Christ's emotional statement of the flock scattering, "Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will." And even when Christ specifically pointed out Peter's logical betrayal, Peter still replied with the logic of his masculinity and pride, "Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you." But, in the silence of this world's movement against its Savior Peter was faced with his self-protecting logic and fulfilled the prophesy of Christ….denying Him three times. And in the failure of his logic, he realized the painful wound it had created in his heart, withdrawing to weep bitterly in the face of its realization.
 

When Jesus appears to His disciples after the Resurrection, upon the shores of Galilee where Peter had retreated with the logical conclusion that he was unworthy to be the 'rock upon which I will build My church', again Christ used His heart to speak against the logic of Peter's choice…."Simon, son of John, do you truly love me?" Three times, the exact number of times Peter's logical denial scourged the heart of Christ, Christ asked him to show that love by feeding His sheep…..and Peter had nothing to say except the logical response of "You know I love you" until the wall was breached and the emotional longing of his heart was exposed……to which he cried out with heartbreaking feeling, "Lord, you know above all things; you know that I love you."
 

Maybe I'm not making sense today as I try and write about what I learned today, in the silence that I attributed to God's abandonment in this season ending portion of my life, where everything that I had built slowly implodes into the unknown. I have less than a week to pack and be moved, again into a place that is so much less than logically I should provide as a man…..disrupted and battered about by the storms of my life, created and not created by my own hand or the hands of others……..rowing against the tide of my own destruction because illogically that slim hope remains that God is real, that God is worthy and that God stands at the helm of this battered vessel and guides me into the fury of the storm.
 

In the fury of my logic, God steers me to the storm of its creation to face the illogical emotion of my heart…..to fight the logic that this time, this final time, He will not come to my aid for I have proven myself logically not worth saving with the emotional cry of my heart to be loved, to be valued and to be rescued from the chaos of my making.

In the logic of my crisis of belief where I am broken by the realization that I cannot expect more than the chaos that my life is, God sits…..
 

Answering my emotional and wounded cry of a heart born to feel the depth and grace of His illogical love with the thing I most logically fear……
 

Tranquility in the arms of the Father who created me, who calls me and who has plans for me that I was born to do…..
 

Being the Image Bearer of a complete God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob…….

Who weeps for His people and desires our hearts, hearts reborn through the blood of Christ.

"Worship the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest Commandment. And the second is like it; Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." Matthew 22:37-40 (NIV)

An illogic, complete love born outside the logic of our own realization, realized in the illogical service of emotional relationship with others against the logic of our minds.
 

Slopping for the pigs......

"But when he came to himself, he said, 'How many of my father's hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants."' And he arose and came to his father." (Luke 15:17-20a ESV)

There is no time frame given in which the prodigal son is slopping the pigs, wishing for food that is only fit for them and their substance. This story is often used to help understand the process of salvation; we realized that we have sinned and are absent from the relationship with our Father, The repenting sinner turns with firmness and resolution from the bondage of Satan and his worldly lusts and returns to God through prayer...."notwithstanding fears and discouragements," Matthew Henry says. He returns to take the servant's role, to the Father's rejoicement and restoration to his place in the home.

But, as I have travelled this journey, slopping for the pigs who are placed so much more highly than myself in this world (who are of the world) I wonder if God didn't intend for the message contained there to stop with the repentant sinner and the joyful celebration of his return home. There is so much more contained within the story of his conversion. Pastor Jim Combs, of the River of Faith, brought another context a few Sundays ago, about the elder son and the prodigal and how that should be reflected between mature and newborn Christians (I'd recommend listening to it www.hissalt.net). But, even there I think lies a true message, but not the only one......

The world will, as the lesson clearly teaches, fool you into its embrace and promise wealth, glory, and relationship....until what you have to sustain the illusions is gone and then it will cast you upon the rocks of despair, leaving you valued less than the pigs, who are quite content to wallow around in fith and muck. Even those who have 'backsliden' from what they know is true.

What kind of home did he leave? Apparently a wealthy and prosperous one where he had experience with independence and authority, for he demanded his inheritance and was not stopped from leaving. Maybe there was a disagreement he had with his elder brother, the mother, or even the father...whatever the reason, he rejected the 'nature' of his home and went into voluntary exile. Steeped in selfish gratification, he held to a 'bondage and gloom' image of what home was like instead of its truest picture until even the illusion of such denial came to break under the Truth of reality; the world didn't want him unless he had wealth to give and in the 'empty, desolate, withered, perishing' (Jamieson, Faussett and Brown) situation he found himself in, the Truth found him once again and reminded him that even the lowest in the household were treated better than what the world offered him when nothing else was left that he had to give.

He came to 'himself', not as if he had gone mad but back to the person, I think, he was when he lived in his father's house. A house filled with peace, wealth, freedom, authority and dignity even for the servants of the family. A warm and living reality that breaks the bonds of his disillusionment and gives him the resolve to journey home.....he envisions the initial meeting and what he would say....and goes home, expecting only enough grace to become a servant under that remembered roof.

So heartening is even that lowly status, to serve those he once called family, is enough to make him journey non-stop back to the country of his birth, back to the home he had rejected. Hungry growled within his stomach, his feet were sore and dirty from the walking, and his heart was tired of the deceptions with which he had lived with for so long.

He was broken, yet he journeyed to become nothing more than a servant in his father's house.

Even when life doesn't work, our efforts are nothing more than dirt thrown into the fierceness of the wind to come back and cover us once more and the remembered grace of our Father's house becomes the only sustaining hope that we have left to push us back to our feet, back to our senses, and back home to be nothing more than servants placed in our own home to be the laborers for those who enjoy what we once did...even then, that hope remains.

There is no flipping back and forth for the prodigal; no question in his mind that his father will accept his request, either through pity or compassion. There is that assurance that, even with what he had done, squandering his inheritance, rejecting his home, and now coming back to his father smelling of filth and stained with the dust of his journey. He expects nothing more than his rightful due; to be a servant, nothing more.

As I got home last night from work, being touched once more by the grace of God and His love....oh my God....His love for even the lowest in His house....being broken again and lifting my hands high even in that humbling, that pain, and realizing how far I have come....servanthood is a dream to what I have come from....I came back to that "Amazing Grace" lyric...."I once was dead but now I live....now my life, to You I give.", I looked at the mail; the packet from Reverend Doctor John Gotberg arrived. As I read the commission that appointed and annointed me as an Ordained Community Chaplain, I felt that assurance that even in my Father's house....servants are fed and well-treated. In my Father's house.

In my Father's house, even the suffering is preferable to the illusionary happiness of the world. In my Father's house, even the hired servants are cared for and treated well. In my Father's house, once I had rejected and walked away from, there is an assurance I will be given an opportunity to be there...in whatever capacity...but I will be in my Father's house!
Even if I spend my life toiling away, indentured not as a son to a Father but as a servant to the family, I will be better off in my Father's house than what the world, absent from that home, would allow me to do.

In the group I've never felt I belonged to, unworthy and unqualified for the task and the scope of the mission God has complied these mighty giants to do in and for the Kingdom, it is far far better to be the lowly servant than to be absent from their presense. If I can do nothing more than perform the mudane task of a servant, in my Father's house, I will be far better treated than what the world could give me.

I don't know if I'll ever reach home; I'm faminished, tired, bruised and filthy with the illusionary stain that seems to never wash off ...........like a rape victim, I can't shower enough or be clean enough to seem to remove the stain, the filth of what the world has done to me.....but even if I don't make it home, the vision of what it will be like shall sustain me till that point I cannot go on.

And when I lie collasped in the sand, I'll try once again to get back up and continue...so that I can be a servant in my Father's house...........for they are treated better than the world offers, this lies within my heart to move me to move, get up when I want to stay down, and sustains me in my hunger...such small hope, such a small faith......

Even faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains.....

And I think I can see my father's house just over where the valley floor ends.....

A few more steps, and I'll be home.

A handy guide for helpers of the hurting

When I was faced with the daunting task of preparing both my dearest sister in Christ, her family and the congregation for the ending of her earthly journey, it was my first experience as a chaplain and I was woefully unprepared.

There is a wealth of denominational handbooks that speak doctrinal traditions, but there have been no concise, structured handbooks available that make this journey as a layperson, a chaplain, or even a pastor somewhat less daunting….

Barbara Roberts has put the wealth of her experience, tested and tried upon the field of ministry, into such a handbook. Less of a personal story of lessons learned, it is rather a precise and no-nonsense reference guide that anyone facing the call of ministering to those facing life's challenges can quickly read, understand, and then apply the support of the Holy Spirit to so that the expression of God's love can be realized in the midst of the heartaches of this world.

This is a 'must-have' for anyone called to go into the mess of life with the heart of the Savior so that the needs of the ministered can be met with Christ-like love and compassion. Lay-counselors, Chaplains and even Pastoral staff will find this a vital and welcomed help.