After an exceptionally busy week (by the way, I am sorry for not posting here sooner, but I honestly haven't had the time), John and I settled down last night in front of the TV to watch a romantic comedy, The Holiday. I sucked up every second of the sappiness and predicitably that we all find so comforting in this particular genre of film. Of course, as usual, the ending left me with questions about it's realism and concerns about what happens next. But Hollywood would rather leave those issues unaddressed since they would only serve to complicate the story line and the simplicity of a good romantic comedy is what makes it so appealing.
Another thought that struck me after we turned the movie off is how mainstream Hollywood makes billions of dollars on addressing the beginning and ending stages of relationships, but they've done very little to address the middle part. Perhaps it's because the middle part of a relationship is too complex to adequately address in a 2-hour story. Unlike the excitement of the beginning and sorrow of the ending, the middle part of a relationship is emotionally multi-faceted and usually less definable and intense, which probably intimidates most movie makers who seem stuck on the tried and true ways to make a buck. Hollywood sells to us that the only interesting parts of a relationshp are the start and the finish.
While I certainly can't argue the the middle can become laden with routine and that some of the romance seeps out after you regularly find yourself waking up to someone who looks just as terrible as you do in the morning, I still find the middle part exciting in it's own right. In addition to security, the middle part is characterized by a sacred intimacy that the beginning has yet to discover and the ending has lost along the way. While Hollywood may find the idea of two people trying to create a life together boring, I find this to be one of the best parts of being married. John and I are witnesses to each other's life while at the same time forming something new out of the space in the middle of us. A new life that neither of us would have without the other and that could not be replicated exactly with anyone else. Yet while our routine is what we have created out of the two of us, it is not what sustains us as a couple. Our deepening love and continuously evolving discovery of ourselves and each other is what nourishes us during the years that Hollywood filmmakers ignore. Complex and different, but certainly not unexciting. Part of the beauty of this part of a relationship comes not from knowing what will happen next but from knowing that no matter what happens next, we will face it together. In the beginning of The Holiday, Kate Winslet's character shares a quote attributed to Shakespeare, "Journeys end in lovers meeting." But in many ways, when lovers meet the journey is just beginning.
A tragedy like what happened yesterday on the campus of Virginia Tech University inevitably calls people to question where God is in the midst of senseless pain and suffering. It's small comfort to many to know that God is grieving with us. People want to know why He didn't stop the tragedy from occuring. The answer is not that God doesn't care. He cares about each of us very deeply and intimately and His heart is more grieved that we can know. What happened yesterday happened because of sin which entered the world because God chose to give us free will. Sometimes people use their free to will to sin and hurt other people, whether on a smaller scale such as theft, adultery, rape or individual murder or on a larger scale such as the mass murder that happened yesterday. The innocent are hurt because of the actions of the guilty. This is the nature of life. God did not create robots. He gave us free will because He wanted us to have a genuine love relationship with Him, but with free will comes the option to reject God, and, in cases like what happened yesterday or what has been happening around the world with genocide and wars, that rejection of God leads to heartache for many. Much of the pain in our world is caused by somebody's sin. We complain when we are hurt by the sin of others because it doesn't seem fair, but do not think that we are alone in our tears. God is hurt by our pain and by the sin that claims the lives of the innocent and the innocence of the alive. This is not how He wanted the world to be and it's not how it would be if we chose Him.
Events like this always bring me back to the importance of living in today. Tomorrow is not a guarantee for any of us, and that fact is so easy to forget when we move comfortably through our routine lives. I know that God has used the most heart breaking events in my life to bring me back to Him and take me away from the false security of my self-focused existence. On a large scale, He uses these experiences to bring us together as a people to pour out love and prayers over each other whereas during most of our days we are negligent and lazy in truly and actively loving one another. I am not a wise theologian, and I certainly don't pretend to know the mind of God. I do know from personal experience that the only way to get through tragedy is to focus on the good, because if you only look at the bad, you will lose heart and the enemy will have victory. We serve a God who is capable of bringing good out of everything (Romans 8:28), even the effects of our sin. He is working in this Virginia Tech tragedy already, and we just need to keep praying and watching Him move. In many ways, this is a helpless feeling for human beings who want to be able to fix everything. I watched the news last night and heard all the finger pointing that the media was attempting to do, and I turned to John and asked him what they were trying to accomplish by casting blame. We want things to make sense and we want to sleep peacefully at night knowing that someone was to blame when something goes wrong. Life isn't that simple. Situations like this show an even larger societal failure that goes beyond university leadership and that would probably be too complex to address in a 30 minute news segment--a societal failure that cannot be fixed without reexamining our values, our lifestyle, and our relationship with our Creator, whether we acknowledge Him or not. The media does not want to tackle this so they cast individual blame, but I challenge the followers of Christ to check to see how much of your life aligns with God's word versus how much aligns with society's noise. Ask yourself what you can do to help further the cause of God today rather than the world's cause. And make sure that you are not sleep-walking through your daily routine when you should be living every day like your last because you never know when your last day will be. Sorry to be morbid, but it's true, and if no other good comes from this situation for you, I pray that you would gain an awareness of the preciousness of every breath that you take and that you would treasure the miracle of being alive even in times of pain.
Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. --Philippians 3:13-14
I love this verse because of the clear and concise way in which Paul describes how our walks with Christ should and should not look. We should be walking with a sharp focus on our goal; we should not be walking with our heads turned around looking back at the past. If I am looking back at my past with longing, I am missing chances to grow and receive God's blessing in my life today. Change is difficult for human beings, but our race can only be run forward. We are trapped by time and cannot move backwards. If we aren't moving ahead towards our goal, we are stagnating. Stagnating Christians are benefiting neither God nor themselves and certainly not the non-believers who are looking on.
In a similar way, I am not beneifiting anyone if I'm constantly lamenting my past. I think that most of us have some event or events in our past that we would like to redo a little differently. I have talked to some women who describe a time period in their past as their "rebellious phase." I certainly had a phase like this as well, but I look back at that phase in my life as a glitch in my past--a time period where I was acting in a way that was out of character for me and inconsistent with how I've lived the rest of my life. This glitch does not define me or who I am in Christ. If I spend my time looking back and regretting my my past, I am missing out on all that God has in store for me today and tomorrow. The past is done, and God forgets all about it as soon as I repent, so I need to forget about it, too. Or, if I can't forget about it, then I need to learn from it and move forward from it rather than setting up camp right in the middle of yesterday.
You would think that at some point along my walk as a Christian, I would learn to look past my circumstances and remember that no matter what I see in front of and beside me, God is still God. In the book I am studying with the women's group at my church, Max Lucado's He Still Moves Stones, Max writes in chapter 18 about how imagines what Joseph might have been feeling the night that Jesus was born. He imagines Joseph praying and wondering at how different the birth of the Messiah was from what Joseph had envisioned--a barn on a haystack instead of a nice room on a comfortable bed, alone instead of surrounded by friends and family. A manger was no way for a king to enter the world, and Max ponders that this scene in his life was unfolding much more differently than what Joseph would have envisioned.
This chapter struck a chord with me because of the way so much of my life has unfolded lately, or, actually, if I'm going to be completely honest, how my life has unfolded pretty much since I left the womb. God often moves in my life in ways that I never would have anticipated just as He did in Joseph's life on the night that Jesus was born. And like Joseph, I often find myself looking around dumbfounded with only the question of "huh?" on my lips. Satan likes to take that "huh?" response to the circumstances around us and use it to drive us away from God. Satan wants us to believe in the reality of our own thoughts rather than the sovereignty of God. In response to our "huh?" Satan says, "Let's look at this logically. The facts of the situation show that God either doesn't care about you at all or he is completely insane. Wouldn't you be better off on your own?" Satan wants us to run away from the God we should be serving.
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." --Isaiah 55:8-9
The huge call of faith in our daily lives is to trust that God knows better than us. His thoughts and His ways may not make sense to us, but that is because His thoughts and His ways are far larger than what our minds can comprehend and far better than that for which our sinful hearts could hope. The challenge of being a Christian is perservering on our walks even when the road we're on seems completely illogical. If we had it our way, the path would be straight and free of thorns that might hurt us on the way. Faith calls us to trust in the goodness of God's ways regardless of our present circumstances. God does not put twists or thorns in our path without purpose and we can trust that every one of those twists and every sharp thron is placed there so that we can grow and glorify Him. And much to our chagrin, the biggest glory for God and the most profound growth for us rarely comes from the easiest path.
Last night at dinner, my friends and I somehow got on the subject of a person from my past who wronged me. As soon as the topic came up, my mood went from happy-go-lucky to fuming mad. It has been several years and so much has changed in my life since then, but somewhere in my heart I have been harboring bitterness and it came to the surface in a very ugly way last night at simply the mention of a name. I know that the Christian thing to do is forgive and forget. I serve a God who has removed my sins from me as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). I have no right to fill my heart with unforgiveness when I have been forgiven so much.
Nevertheless, knowing this in my head and transferring it to my heart is a more difficult task than it may seem like on paper (or on the computer screen as the case may be). Even with the understanding that I am called to forgive just as I have been forgiven, I find myself feeling an awful lot like Jean Valjean from Les Miserables, craving revenge on those who have harmed me. See, the tricky thing about forgiveness is that I have to really let go and let God handle the situation, trusting in His sovereignty even if it means that He opts to forgive the person who hurt me and that person never has to suffer for the wrong done to me. Part of the beauty of God's grace is that He extends it to everyone equally, but part of the challenge as a human is getting over the desire for human justice to be served.
A key for me in the letting go process has been reminding myself (usually over and over again) that forgiveness does not mean that I am saying what happened was OK. Wrong was still done and I can still call it wrong, but forgivness means that I no longer hold the wrong against the person in my heart, where, quite frankly, it is hurting me much more than it's hurting the person against whom I hold the grudge. My unforgiveness and the resulting bitterness has driven a tangible wedge between God and me which has severely stunted my spiritual growth over the last few years. I have been praying to get back to the place where I was before I let this person too far into my life, and I couldn't understand why God wasn't magically changing my heart until last night when all the hurt and anger came pouring out of me over tortilla chips and a bowl of queso.
I cannot be right with God until I am right with my brothers and sisters (Matthew 5:22-23). When I am allowing anger and bitterness to fester in my heart, this rot subjects me to the same judgment that I am casting on others. The important point here is that I am the one allowing anger and bitterness into my life. God is greater than these things, and I can choose to cast the anger and bitterness out in the name of Jesus instead of silently letting them grow. I have been struggling for years to pray for my enemies as Jesus instructed (Matthew 5:44). I struggle because I find the task of praying blessings into the lives of people at whom I am still angry an impossible mandate. Forgiveness must come first.
On the car ride home from dinner last night, I poured my heart out to God in prayer. I prayed for Him to help me to truly forgive and let go of the hurt and pain that I have been holding onto for far too long. I confessed to Him that I am not strong enough in my humanity to forgive without His help. I praised Him for His grace in granting me free will, as well as for His grace in allowing all of us to know the beauty of the human experience, including our capacity for pain and for healing. In situations where we have been deeply wounded, our prayers to help us forgive may need to be a daily occurance, or even a moment-by-moment occurance. I am committed to giving my wounds up to God as often as necessary until I stop taking them back again and truly let them go. I am committed to this task because I trust God's will, and I am indebted to Him more deeply than I could ever pay for all that He has forgiven me.
In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps. --Proverbs 16:9
Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails. --Proverbs 19:21
Someone once told me that they admire the fact that when I see something I want, I go after it. This is a blessing and a curse. See, because I have a tendency to think my plans are brilliant, I have to check myself when I pray to make sure that I am seeking God's plans rather than asking God to bless my plans. It's been a hard lesson for my self-seeking mind to learn, but my life is not about me, it's about God. And thank goodness for that! If my life was all about me and my plans, I would have much smaller, less exciting existence. My vision is limited and seeking only to please myself with my limited understanding would land me in situation after situation that I don't want to be in. Of course, because of my severe lack of foresight, I wouldn't know I was walking into disaster until I found disaster and began to retrospectively reflect upon my choices. We are very blessed we have a God who has allowed us free will to pursue our own plans and fail until we finally learn that our own plans aren't worth any fraction of the time and energy that we put into making them. I praise God for all the times that I have had to face the consequences for my actions so that I could learn how poor my own planning is and how desperately I need to consult God for His plan.
Ultimately, God has a purpose and plan for each of us that is far greater than what we ourselves could imagine. When I pray, I pray for His plans to come into fruition so that He will be glorified. I wear my emotions very close to the surface, so I tend to get excited (or very depressed) about things before consulting God for His will. It is still sometimes challenging for me to remember when I get hit an emotional extreme over something that God knows more than me and that I may be excited over something that isn't really in my best interest or depressed about the very thing that is best for me. The premature excitement about someone was a common theme in my dating life before I met my husband! This same type of them is also woven into to most major decisions I have faced including professional decisions and the recent move my husband and I made. I want God to direct my steps and define my purpose, and I have to squelch my emotions so that I don't wander off course and miss the higher calling on my life by settling for something lessor when the lessor is all I can see.
I took a break from writing over my spring break, but I am happy to be back in action today. Mostly I used my break from work to relax and avoid the computer since I normally sit in front of one for 8 hours a day. I did take some opportunity for self-reflection over the break, and one of the more interesting of these opportunities arose during a phone conversation with a friend. My friend told me that every time he passes a homeless person on the streets of DC, he not only stops to give the person a few dollars, but he asks the person to share his/her story with him. My friend put it as him trying to get his money's worth, but I see it as him offering dignity to the overlooked and outcast members of society.
The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.' --Matthew 25:40
When I was in college, I spent one of my spring breaks on a short-term missions trip to DC with the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship on my campus. We were told when we arrived not to give money to the homeless but that we could buy food for them and talk to them. In fact, one of our assignments was to talk to one homeless person and get his/her story, just like my friend told me that he does on his own. This was a huge step out of my comfort zone since I have always been one to avoid eye contact entirely with those asking for my money on the street. Still, to this day, I remember very clearly the face of the man that me and a couple of my friends talked to--even more clearly than I can remember the faces of some of those friends who were by my side when we talked to him.
At our cores, I think all of us want our stories to be heard. We want to be listened to without agenda or judgment. The least among us deserve the same dignity and respect as the grandest. As much as I would like to say that I changed my ways after my experience with that homeless man in college, I still look the other way. I'm scared to give money because I don't know what it will be used for and I'm too rushed to buy food on the spot. I have no problem collecting money or food with my church and giving at a distance, but my friend's story reminded me that sometimes I need to step out of my comfort zone and be with the least of our society the same way I would choose to be with those in my own socioeconomic sphere. Jesus did this all the time, and He has instructed us to be hands-on Christians just as He was.