The song blows me away…”If I can change I hope I never know.” How many live with these feelings?
I’m still baffled by the short film. It’s powerful but in a way that words can’t explain. And this is why I believe that those who follow Jesus must wrestle with art expressions such as this video. Yes, we’ve often done a great job of engaging our intellect as we attempt to discover the human condition. But what about engaging our soul? Our emotions? Have we thrown in fully, (emotionally, spiritually, soulfully) to find solidarity with the society in which we find ourselves?
What people in our neighborhoods, schools and jobs face often defies articulation. Can we meet the mess of life without words? Yes, but.
Doing so means that we must open the emotions of our life to the vulnerability of being torn deeply by things to painful for words. Will we wear the scars of a neighbor’s wounds?
Recently I teamed up with John Dobbs in writing. His blog Out Here Hope Remains has had a profound impact on people. He writes with honesty and from a place of deep faith. He has experienced excruciating pain and yet, still, hopes in the resurrected Messiah. He is an inspiration to many. I’m glad to be a part of what God is up to through his blog ministry. So go on over and check it out.
I’ll remain posting here but only on some short thoughts and perhaps a bit of commentary on pop culture here and there. I’ll go a little deeper every other Friday at his site. Have fun and stay tuned. And thanks John!
The more I read Paul the more I see beyond his remarkable theology and into his heart. Following Jesus wasn’t simply a stimulative mind exercise for him. He philosophized in Athens but the emotional tug of Jesus’ heart pulled him beyond sitting around convincing others of his point. Paul loved people and he never disconnected that from his technical teachings. He always left the classroom and the courtroom to seek solidarity with the poor and the prisoner.
And so if we’re to read him correctly we cannot extrapolate his intense desire for his neighbor’s good from his intricate detailing of God’s work through Jesus. Reflected in the glint of the wet ink of Paul’s pen were hopeless faces peering back at him through the blur of their tears. Though laboring to articulate the impossible, he stared back into their eyes, writing with unmatched technical precision but with greater empathy. This empathetic momentum shaped his writing more than his intellectual prowess or his religious education.
In this way Paul wrote through a vision displayed by Jesus on the cross. He saw the orphan, the widow, the temple prostitute, the misguided Pharisee and the confused Greek through the lens of the greatest love ever. As if he had mixed the dry elements of ink with his tears, the core of Paul’s emotions seeps into the parchment of his letters. His writings weren’t dry treatises just written for peer review, they were movements of love shaped by Jesus and his cross and the Spirit of God.
No matter what we conclude about Paul’s theology we miss it all if we ignore his raw honesty and love for people. “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people.” “But the greatest of these is love.” “Therefore, if food makes my brother or sister stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother or sister stumble.”
The cold scholar? The heartless debater? Hardly.
His words live. In them his heart still beats for the “least of these.” For Christ’s sake, the world’s sake…for our sake, let’s not rip it out.
Hope has refreshed my world like needed rain. It’s not that hope doesn’t always exist, it’s that we can become distracted by the lies of its death and lose sight of it. In many ways I’d lost sight of it…until a meeting yesterday. A new friend showed me a passage in Romans that never really stuck until he read it to me through his years of experiencing it in ministry.
“He [Abraham] is our father in the sight of God–the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not” (Romans 4:17). Our God brings dead things to life. He brings to reality the impossible. It’s the reality that launched the story of Israel. It’s the reality that gave energy to Abraham’s first step away from home. And it still moves God’s co-workers to embrace the risky and nonsensical trust that God is going to take over and bring to life the lifeless.
My friend encouraged me to pray for things I couldn’t dream of happening. Not as a challenge to God but as an invitation to him. He pushed me to believe that if I ask God to show up I’d soon be watching things unfold that can’t really happen. He’s lived it. He’s seen it. And he’s got pictures and t-shirts to prove it. It blew me away.
As we were coordinating the meeting, Terry asked me to call him the night before we were supposed to meet and make sure that he hadn’t caught the flu. Thankfully, he didn’t have the flu and we got together. But he did have a case of something else, an incurable and contagious belief that God can make dead things alive and through his power orchestrate the impossible into reality. It consumed his entire being and seemed to jump off and onto whoever went near.
I didn’t get away unscathed. God exposed me to a carrier. And I now have a case of believing the impossible. I can’t wait to watch what happens.
