New Things

I was talking with a friend tonight, and it stirred up two emotions that prompted me to check this blog. She's studying abroad in South America and was talking about blogging to capture it all. It reminded me so much of my experiences at Summit Semester, which resembles a semester abroad more and more when I think about it. She also talked about how exciting my life is right now, with the changes that have happened recently. A lot of days, I'm just living, and it's easy to forget how exciting these changes actually are. But seriously:

In the past two months, I've returned from an awesome mission trip to Romania, finished college, visited S2 friends, toured a seminary, read the Harry Potter books, watched friends/mentors transition to new stages of life, started working part-time at the church, purchased potential play-off tickets for the Rangers, and begun investing in a small group.

Obviously, some of those things are more significant than others, but they all make me very happy.

I came back from Romania excited for the future, but it was founded out of trusting God and being encouraged by what He was doing in other people. But since then, He has thrown open doors, almost before I could ask, and definitely beyond what I could ask or imagine. While I still find myself having to fight getting ahead of God, it has been very encouraging. In the midst of all this, I have to remind myself to trust and wait. I have to remind myself that God is good. And I think that's the main reason I write blogs like this, to look back at standing stones and remember.

Zakar - remember and live, because God is faithful.

"Take Heart"

Take heart
His love leads us through the night
Hold on to hope
Take courage again

All our troubles
All our tears
God our hope
He has overcome

All our failures
All our fear
God our love
He has overcome

All our heartache
All our pain
God our healer
He has overcome

All our burdens
All our shame
God our freedom
He has overcome

All our troubles and
All our tears
God our hope
He has overcome

All our failures and
All our fear
God our love
He has overcome

God our justice
God our grace
God our freedom
He has overcome

God our refuge
God our strength
God is with us
He has overcome

"Take Heart" from Hillsong United's Aftermath. It's been on repeat today.

Happiness v. Holiness

It's not about my happiness. It never has been! It's about holiness - mine becoming like His - so that He may be glorified.

If only I could remember the simple things like this...

A Small Enough Worldview

I am grateful that the Christian worldview is big enough for the world. It’s big enough to sustain questions of eternal destinies, and it’s big enough when disasters seem to question God’s sovereignty and His goodness.

But tonight, I am particularly grateful that the Christian worldview is small enough for the mundane things of life. “God is so great that all things bring Him glory if we mean they should” – even chemistry problems that have to be re-taught three times and vocab words that are never quite pronounced right. So often I forget that there’s more to it than trying to help kids not fail a class or getting them caught up to the right reading level. It’s about bringing God glory in everything – especially in the seemingly trivial stuff, where I’m so tempted to think it doesn’t matter.

Life isn’t lived on the mountaintops, but that isn’t to say I spend my time walking through the valley of the shadow of death either. Most of life seems to be just walking, one foot in front of the other. From what I understand of parenting, for all its joys, there is also a whole lot of exhaustion from sleepless nights and endless dirty diapers. From what I know of being a student, the joy of acing a final and moving on comes only after memorizing endless lists of proximate causes for meaningless wars that never should have been fought, much less remembered for posterity. But we change the diapers and learn the facts because it’s not just about the here and now. There’s something much bigger at stake.

There’s this Kingdom of the Now and the Not Yet, and it gives me great hope. For even a cup of water offered in the name of the King is worth rewarding. The smallest and the least of these are not cast off; it is not only the important and the daring acts that are remembered. A King is coming, redeeming every part of life and work and society, and someday, in His Kingdom, He will make all things new.

Until then, there’s a tension we’ll never escape. And because of this tension, my head might always wonder that the supplementary angles and the perpendicular lines I taught today really aren’t as important as what the next guy is doing for the Kingdom. But it turns out that faithfulness and obedience are more important than racking up cool and impressive points. It turns out that even the littlest things that bring God’s rule and reign to life – a smile, an intentional moment of encouragement, a perseverance in doing the right thing – are important, because there is nothing that escapes the Lordship of Christ. He is King of chemistry just as He is King of Cambodia.

This isn’t to shy away from the big things He calls us to, but to realize we are to be faithful with little, or what may seem little, until He entrusts us with more. God doesn’t waste time or circumstances. He’s never late, though He may miss many opportunities to be early. Looking at things practically, it seems Israel would have been better off if Moses had shown up with the Exodus 40 years earlier or if David didn’t waste half his life waiting to replace Saul. It seems Jesus could have done a lot more important stuff if He wasn’t fixing chairs and hauling around rocks until He was thirty. But there’s something about waiting, something about just living, day to day, in and out, that God must value. There must be something about living out His Kingdom in math tutoring and in the grocery checkout line and in paper pushing and cleaning up after kids. There’s something reassuring about realizing faithfulness isn’t how many mountains I can throw into the sea, but how I live in the daily life of the Now and the Not Yet – studying, working, eating, shopping, playing, resting – glorifying God.

It’s not to say I’ve mastered this; on the contrary, I’ve just been convicted. If there’s anything I habitually fail at, it’s the command to remember – zakar in Hebrew. It carries an understanding of not just a recollection of fact, but of an understanding that impacts how one lives. Remember the Lord your God who brought you up out of Egypt. Remember your Creator in the days of your youth. Remember God and His goodness. Remember and trust Him. Remember and live.

A Reflection on Faithfulness

New Year's Eve brings out the introvert in me more than any other day, I think. I'm not a huge party person to begin with, but New Year's Eve is the last day of the year I would want to party on. For me, it's a time of solemn reflection, thankfulness, and preparation.

On the whole, 2010 was rather uneventful for me. It was definitely an inbetween year. Nothing stands out as a huge landmark experience, at least compared to previous years. There was a whole lot of just normal life. School, work, family, church. In some ways, it's been a really hard year. It was much harder than I expected transitioning home from Semester. But it has also been a good year. It hasn't been exciting, but it has been good. Though it's hard to see along the way, I know I've grown a lot this year. My heart is in a much better place than it was last December. And I thank God for that! It is only by His grace.

If I had to pick a word to describe this year, it would be faithfulness. Again and again, I have seen the faithfulness of God. He has blessed me abundantly, and I am so grateful. I think this year was also about me learning what it is to be faithful. The vast majority of life is not about the beauty of the mountaintops, but being faithful in the valleys. Though the valleys are not always the most pleasant places to be, they make the mountains what they are. And for that I am grateful.

I've been thinking a lot the past month about what Stonestreet talked about in his last lectures at Semester. A lot of his material about going home well applies again to me as I look at beginning a new year well. I need to ponder on my loves, loyalties, longings, labors, and liturgies. I need to create space and schedule time for the things that really matter.

So here's to a new year. I have no idea what I'll be doing this time next year, but one thing remains sure: the faithfulness of God. He is good. And that's all that matters.

Remembering

It's so easy to forget. We like to think we won't. We promise we won't. But we do. Whether it's simply human nature or part of our fallen nature, we forget.

God is well aware of this. In Deuteronomy, which is basically one big speech by Moses summing up the past forty years before they enter the promise land, God commands them to remember 14 times. Remember what it was like in Egypt, and remember what I have done. Remember. Remember and obey. Remember and live.

Every now and then, we do remember. A certain anniversary or date forces us to take note and pay attention, but often not for long. For most of us, life as normal resumes as soon as the formalities are over. Church attendance rose dramatically after 9/11...for all of three weeks. And then most of the country went back to life as normal.

We're given certain opportunities in life to remember. Some come in joyous occasions. Perhaps though we more often remember when we don't want to remember. As Lewis said, "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world" (The Problem of Pain, 1940).

Yes, we must remember and honor those who have gone before us, those whose lives were taken and those who gave their lives to defend others.

But ultimately, we must remember Christ and what He did upon the cross and at the resurrection to redeem the world. We must remember this and live because of it - because of His name, because of His glory.

wRestling, Rights, and Remembering

Day 51, Summit Semester

Disclaimer: this is really long, but it’s really important. It’s what I’ve been wrestling with all Semester, and I’m now kind of maybe starting to get it…

(read the referenced blog first...for some reason, I don't think it posted last week, sorry)

So the “personal blog” I wrote last week was written Saturday night (10-17), and it was kind of coming from some of the frustration (and resignation) I’d been wrestling with for the past couple of weeks. Various things, those outside my control and those inspired by some of the Semester experience, have left me feeling less secure about my future plans than I was before coming here. (Perhaps, as Bauman asserts, I’ve been confused all along, and it just takes the right questions to make me realize it.) Seriously though, I felt to some degree that the rug had been pulled out from under me again, as far as my plans for the future.

And I really struggled with this. I struggled with not knowing. I struggled because I felt like I wasn’t trusting God like I should. I struggled because I felt I had, in some way, walked this path before (post-Implosion and college decision) and yet I was struggling with trusting God just as much now as then, though I have already seen Him work things out better than I could have planned or dreamed in a million years. It was frustrating because it felt like I had made no progress, that I was currently in an unstable spiritual state of not trusting God fully, and that I still really wanted to know what’s coming and I still have no idea.

I talked with Naomi, my mentor and small group leader, and she had some really helpful stuff to say. In a sense, she’s been in a place of not knowing any long term plans for the past six years, so she definitely understood what I was wrestling with. She said that sometimes the Christian life doesn’t seem so much like hills and valleys as it does this spiraling motion – often it seems we keep coming back to the same issue/problem/question time and time again, each time coming with a little more knowledge than we had before, which can inspire both hope (God got me through this once, we can do it again) and frustration (God why can’ t I learn this and move on?). There are times it just seems like I haven’t grown at all since the last time God tried to teach me this, and yet I know I have. Talking with her really gave me a better perspective, and I definitely had more peace after that, but it was still simmering at the back of my conscious for another week or two. Which led to Saturday’s blog of frustration.

And then came (last) Sunday morning, when God gave me exactly what I needed in church. It was amazing. The pastor is preaching through Philippians, and he was at the last part of Philippians 2, which is about Timothy and Epaphroditus…not exactly a passage obviously conducive to application. He talked about their example, how they didn’t look out for their own interests, but those of Jesus Christ, and how they were willing to and almost died for the Gospel. He talked about how far this is from our understanding of the Christian life today. We understand that if you join the Marines, you give up all rights – they own you and you do exactly what they tell you, even if you don’t like or understand it or consider it abusive. You signed up, and they own you. Yet we don’t carry this understanding over to our understanding of the God of the Universe, who created us and owns us more than the United States ever could.

He talked about how there’s no middle ground – we have “full devotion” or “no devotion.” There’s a straight narrow path, and an easy wide path – we’re not given the option of middle ground. We’re called to live holistically, and following Jesus costs me everything. We can’t have everything on our “middle road” and have Jesus. It just doesn’t work that way.

Going back to a theme of Bauman’s, I have no biblical rights, only responsibilities. I have no rights, only the obligation to remember and the responsibility to obey.

I have no rights. I have no right to assume college or the pursuit of Master’s degree or a missions career or marriage. I have no right to know God’s plan or where I’ll be next year or five years down the road. I have no right to my next breath. Jesus is EVERYTHING, and nothing can be better than Him. To paraphrase CS Lewis, he who has _________ + God has nothing more than he who has God alone.

I forget so quickly. And God knows this.

In the Pentateuch, God commands us to “remember” 18 times. In the same space, God “remembers” 6 times. Based on the rest of Scripture and my personal experience, we don’t remember well often at all. That’s why it’s commanded so frequently.

This idea of remembrance isn’t new to me. Pastor Syvelle talked about it when I was 10 at the Garden Tomb. It came up again when I was 16, in India. Later that year I wrote a paper about the connection between those – see here. That year in chapel, Mr. Gregory went with the theme of the Hebrew word “zakar” – meaning to remember and therefore live - for chapel as we worked through the 10 Commandments. I then put that term on a leather bracelet I made that summer and have worn since. I’ve been journaling consistently for the past four or five years. It’s something I’m aware of, but that I fail to practice.

And when I forget what God has done, and how glorious He is, how perfect and faithful, I get in trouble really fast.

God commands us to remember, because we’re stupid humans and we forget the important things really, really fast.

So when I forget what God has done, and live in light of my forgetfulness – walking in worry or doubt or fear – I am sinning. I’m pretty good at this.

There’s a quote I stumbled across on a blog one time, and I love it, because I think it sums up what I’ve been wrestling with really well.

“I find I fall the hardest when I try the hardest to do in myself what God wants to do in me.”

I’m called to live. To die. To surrender. To jump. To trust. To love. To work out my salvation with fear and trembling, because it is God who works in me to will in to act according to His good purpose.

His purpose is good. It is good, because He is good. It is safe to trust God.

I’m called to remember – remember what God has done in history and in my life, and to remember those who have gone before me, those who have given everything to follow Jesus. How can I not do the same, for Him who is always faithful even as I forget time and time again?

The LORD will fulfill His purpose for me; Your love, O LORD, endures forever – do not abandon the works of Your hands!