Everett and Jackson

The other night our Christmas Eve "crowd" included a couple of families with little guys.  In one family, Dad was holding Jackson (who's maybe about 3 years old) on one knee and a lit candle on the other while Jackson was sobbing because he wasn't being allowed to hold the candle - until he sobbed just hard enough to blow out the candle, which startled him into stunned silence!  Mom and Dad relit the candle, and all was fine.

Then there was Everett, just a year old, who knows how to say "OH-oh!" and was saying it at the end of every hymn and carol.  Well, he doesn't know "Amen" yet, but "out of the mouths of babes will come praise" and I think he just wanted us to know he didn't want us to stop!  In the meantime, he was saying "Oh-oh" loud enough for everyone to hear, and everyone took it in stride with grins and chuckles all throughout.  

I love it when even the littlest ones are paying attention in worship!  That's life in the family of God at it's most fun.

Our "Grief-Illiterate Culture"

In an interview on the Today Show this morning, Maria Shriver made a comment about our "grief-illiterate culture" that gave us pause.  My wife and I thought that was an interesting and pretty accurate observation.  While there are still some pockets in our society that seem to know what to do about grief and mourning, most of our 21st century American culture seems to be a vast wasteland when it comes to dealing with grief and loss.

We don't know how to deal with the emotions that come with grief.  We're taught to buck up, to shake it off, that big girls don't cry and that boys certainly don't.  When we see a person at a time of intense grief who is not crying, we say "he's holding up well"; when they cry we say "she broke down."

We think reason fixes everything.  So we come with lame explanations,  pitiful comments, measly excuses for comfort that do no good.  In truth, nothing can fix the loss or cure the grief.  It will likely always be there for the person whose loss it is, but over time they will discover their own ways to look at it, to come to terms with it, and perhaps even to embrace it.

It's not our grief, so we move on quickly.  Like driving past a man standing on the roadside with a cardboard sign "Homeless Vet," we may feel a twinge of pity for him for a moment but our own plans and commitments quickly put him in our rearview mirror.  We attend the wake or the funeral and quickly move on, expecting the grieving person to do the same and are surprised when they don't.

I think we respond to grief this way because we don't understand that grief is a holy place, a sacred space.  It is a place where people meet God, or they don't meet Him.  It is a place where they are angry with Him, or they are comforted by Him.  It is a place where they hate Him, or they know His love for them.  It is a place where they wrestle with Him, or they nestle into Him.  Grief is the Jabbok River to which each of us comes eventually (Genesis 32), and some fear crossing it more than they do crossing the Jordan.

But whether in our anger, our hate, our wrestling; our being comforted, our being loved, our being nestled; our meeting God or our not meeting God, grief is still a prime place where all this happens.  Certainly we can encounter God in other places and at other times; but when our defenses are down, our props are washed away, our self-structure is shattered, our composure has decomposed - these are the places where God comes to meet us.  These are the most sacred spaces of life for those who are in them.

The Great Lie

My Message from our Prayer Vigil this evening

In days like these, following terrible and unfathomable tragedies like this shooting in Connecticut, one of the things we try to do is to understand a bit of what has happened.  Hundreds of news clips, sound bites, interviews, articles, and special reports break in at all hours and on all media to bring us the latest in somebody’s effort to make sense out of the senseless.  Eventually, Christian and non-Christian alike are confronted by the question (often asked in anger, without any real desire for clarity), How could God let something so terrible happen?

There are certain background assumptions behind this question, assumed by both Christians and non-Christians (although Christians take them to be true, while non-Christians take them to be false and just assume them to be true for the sake of argument).  These assumptions are:

1.       The world is basically a decent place.

2.       People are basically good.

3.       God is basically good.

4.       God is Sovereign (which means, He rules the whole world).

Now, when any evil thing happens (like the shootings this weekend), there are a number of possibilities.  Let’s consider them by number:

1a.     The world is basically a rotten place.  We should not be surprised when bad things happen, but rather when good things happen.

2a.     People are basically evil.  I’ve often said you have to teach kids how to be good, but they know how to be bad all by themselves. 

However, in general people don’t want to buy into either of these statements.  They prefer them in their original form, because life is a lot less scary and a lot more comfortable that way.  They also like 3 and 4, but modified a bit in these ways:

3a.     God is basically a good God; He just has trouble keeping track of things (particularly the evil ones).

4a.     God is basically a Sovereign God; therefore, “everything happens for a reason” that He hasn’t told us yet.

Here’s where all of these fall down – none of them account for the fact that there are more players on this field than you and God!  Yet when something bad happens, we try to figure it all out based on our own ideas while ignoring some basic Biblical thoughts, like these:

5.       Satan is a major player in this game, too.

6.       In the Garden of Eden, Satan’s promise to Adam and Eve was that if they ate the fruit of the tree they would “be like gods, knowing good and evil.”

7.       Since that time, all humanity has been infected by sin in general and this one in particular – that we like to think we are like God in this one respect, that we now “know good and evil.”

8.       To put it more specifically, when a tragedy happens, we want to claim this promise that because we are now like God we should get to know, to understand, where the good and the evil are in it.

9.       What we consistently fail to realize is that the promise to “be like God” and to “know good and evil” is the promise of Satan, not God!  We also know from the Bible that Satan is the father of lies, and therefore cannot be trusted to keep his promises the way we expect they should be kept.  And so, the result is that

10.     When a tragedy happens and we want to understand, we have fallen right into Satan’s trap of lies!

The better option is this:  get out while you can!  Forget understanding!  Hang on to grief, even to anger if you need to – but hang on to Christ even more closely.  Hang onto His cross, where He bore our pain and sorrow, our wounds and stripes.  Hang onto His nail-pierced hands and feet, no matter what happens!  Forget understanding – “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, but Blessed be the Name of the Lord” – and just cling to Him in worship.  Thy Kingdom come!