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| On September 11th, 2001 two planes crashed into maybe the two most high powered financial buildings in the world, causing their collapse and the death of 2,752 people.
This changed the world.
On October 8th, 2005 73,000 people died in an earthquake in Pakistan and India.
nothing happened. we won't remember this day with even a brief moment of thought or reflection. no names will be carved into stone, or read to the tune of bells.
Death, travesty, disease, famine.. these things seem to be reative in their impact on our lives.
Be not surprised that so many perished in a moment, but be surprised that this house does not come down on you. It is us and them who deserve death, we are simply fortunate enough to not yet get what we have comming to us. Not yet.
Pray for my forgiveness, pray for being lost and pray that I never let luxury flood my thoughts and my feelings like they have so effectively in the past. | | |
| I want to look out my window and be inspired.
I don't want to be manipulated by advertisements and what other people think or do or say.
I don't want to get caught in the cycle of life. I think it might be a miracle every time a single person, out of billions, does something with their life that isn't for themselves in any fashion- not even for the feeling of doing something for others.
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| When I Don't Desire God
How to Fight for Joy
When we first are young in our
faith (be it a young understanding that has been with us for years, or
simply the recent development of faith) we are excited. This excitement
is because we finally get it. We see a God of a love so pure and a hope
so great. Then... then we discover that we are made to know and enjoy
God, freed to persue the knowledge of salvation and joy with all of our
hearts... and we discover very nearly the same time that being
free to run doesnt pick up our feet.
The emotions of love, the affections of God are truly free for our
taking... for our enjoyment... prove to be beyond our
reach. Our devistation is that christian life is impossible, completely
imossible... that is to say, it is completely supernatural.
And so, we are left with but one hope, the sovereign grace of God. God
must transform our hearts in a way that a heart cannot transform
itself. Only God can make a heart desire God... much like only the
memory of a sweet taste can make you wish for dessert.
The desciples once found a man who desired more than anything money.
They wondered about his salvation. Jesus said to them in Mark 10:27
that "with man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are
possible with God."
Jesus was telling them and us that while we desire what is not God,
with God, we can desire Him and find what we should to be looking for.
Pursuing what we want is possible. It is easy. It is a pleasant kind of
freedom. But the only freedom that lasts is pursuing what we want when
we want what we ought.
And it's devastating to discover we don't and we can't.
Augustine said it better than any,
"I was astonished that although I now loved you... I did not persist in
enjoyment of my God. Your beauty drew me to you, but soon I was dragged
away from you by my own weight and in dismay I plunged again into the
things of this world.. as though I had sensed the frangrence of the
fare but was not yet able to eat it."
The
first things people get wrong is that we must not try to desire God.
Christianity is not some job. I will try not to get too quote heavy,
but it is essential to understand this concept, and I cannot put
it better than CS Lewis...
"Provided the thing is in itself right, the more one likes it and the
less one has to "try to be good" the better. A perfect man would never
act from sense of duty; he'd always want the right thing more than the
wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the
crutch at times; but of course it's idiotic to use the crutch when our
own legs ( our own loves, tastes, habits, etc.) can do the journey on
their own!"
Lewis is reminding us that if we are trying hard to be good people,
trying hard to really truly desire God, then we are trying in the wrong
way. We shouldn't be trying at all. This, above all, makes the journey
towards Joy very hard.
Love is an experience of the heart, not the movement of the body or a
thought in the brain. Christ must be cherished, not chosen.
How is it that one does this? Many will say that giving up is the way,
because if you don't love someone to begin with, and love is an
experience of the heart, then all is lost. This is true, but how
many loved their wives or their husbands before they met them? What
twelve year old girl would say she was never getting married because
she didn't yet know who her husband would be? Yes, maybe an idea of
someone to love... but it's hard to love an idea.. a thing we conjur up
and hope someone fits into. This is sadly how many of us love 'god'. We
kind of have an idea of who he should be, and when we can't find
ourselves longing to spend every minute with Him we can't understand.
To end this paragraph is to say that to fight for joy, is to get to
know God.
To
get to know God, is to sacrifice. Job is my favorite book of the bible,
and any who have read it will know that Job lives the good life, and
loves God. Then all is taken away, and he is left nearly cursing a God
who could do this. You see, Job did not know God when he was so
comfortable... This is evident by the conversations and the final
ending of the book with Job coming to see God for who and how He is. We
must fight for joy like Job, we must stop letting the pain that the
world gives us form an idea of God. We must sacrifice, spiritually, in
order to find Him. We must really search for Him, as though we
were looking not for a lost puppy, but as if we are the lost puppy. We
have to be humble. We have to get to know God.
As I
aluded to earlier, the impossibility of grasping God's love makes it
supernatural, and to get over this we must pray, and pray not like a
pastor or a priest, or a nun or a missionary. We must pray like you did
when you were a little kid talking to God as if you would talk to your
mother. You must sacrifice your doubt that he hears you completely, and
you then have to just ask. Ask for your heart to be turned, as that the
impossible be made possible. As that you could know Him and ask
everything your heart then flows out.
The
aim is that our words would be the overflow of Joy in Christ.
Fighting for joy
in this fallen world of pain and suffering, we live and minister "as
sorrowful, yet always rejoicing" (2. Cor. 6:10)
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| Oh God, in this place of uncertainty how can it be surprising that I am so unsure? How can it be that my life circumstances seem so out of place? Why oh why did you put me here?
I want nothing but you, oh Lord. I would lie if I said I can handle it all on my own. | | |
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