Goodnight Maya...

I think maybe it’s important to sit a while with death. Get to know him. See what he has to say. Even if all he says is nothing.

I put our dog to sleep today. Maya was a good dog and we loved her very much. We woke up this morning to find her bleeding all over the floor from a tumor the size of a softball that’s been growing in her leg for the last couple of years. So I killed her.

I guess that’s what it boils down to. I tried to explain it to my 5 year old son as “putting her down,” “putting her to sleep,” “letting her go to be with Jesus.” I just couldn’t bring myself to say it, “I’m going to kill our dog… for her own good.”

I brought my kids in for a few minutes after the doctor gave her the initial sedative, to say goodbye. I don’t want them to be afraid of death, like I am. When it looked like she was about to have a seizure, I sent them out. She did have a seizure. I had to tuck her tongue back in her mouth. It’s not supposed to happen like that, but it did. Nice, easy, slow, peaceful… that’s how it’s supposed to go. Complications. Life is full of them. I don’t suppose death should be any different.

After a few minutes they shaved her leg, inserted the needle and stopped her heart. I scratched her ear and rubbed her head for a few moments, that’s what she always liked. She didn’t feel it. She was dead. The experts say it’s important to say that word. Dead. It’s such a simple, blunt word for such a damned ugly, frightening thing. She was always scared of the vet. I let her die in a room that terrified her. The experts are bastards.

She doesn’t have to suffer anymore. I think that’s what I’m supposed to say. She’s going to a better place. It’s just a dog. Life goes on. God is in control. Try explaining that to crying children. Is that really the best we can come up with to say to death?

I wonder if that’s what they’ll say about me. He doesn’t have to suffer anymore. Life goes on. He’s just one guy. God is in control. Will they let me die in a hospital room, terrified? Will they sedate me to death? Will my family gather around my bed for a while and cry, then head out for dinner and thank God that I’m no longer bleeding all over the place?

Will my life be reduced to memories that cut out my teeth and blunt my edges? I like my edges. Will they say how sad it was that I didn’t do all those things I wanted to do? Will they wish they had just one more moment to say, “I’m sorry,” “I love you,” “I always hated that about you.” Will they just forget and move on? Life goes on.

Death has lost its sting, but kept his teeth. He runs down the weak, the sickly, the slow and sometimes in moments of sheer ferocity strikes down the strong and fast. Jesus has given us victory over death, but sometimes we still feel like prey. But I will not run from him. I will sit quietly, look him in the eye and trust that Life is stronger than death.

Being Somebody...

"...Nevertheless, the firm foundation of God stands, having this seal, "The Lord knows those who are His,"

- 2 Timothy 2:19 NAU

I’m officially old enough to be president. It’s really kind of surreal. I still remember sitting on the floor of my kindergarten classroom talking with my friends Jason and Steven about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I had on those stupid looking white socks with the multi-colored stripes at the top. Yeah, I don’t think they were cool then either. But it didn’t matter, our moms told us what to wear back then.

We wanted to be presidents, and astronauts and rock stars… and Superman. We wanted to be famous. We wanted to be rich. We wanted to be successful. We wanted to be on television. We wanted to be somebody. Isn’t that what everybody wants? To be somebody? Even at age five, we just want people to know our name.

I wanted to be Captain Kirk from Star Trek. William Shatner looked like my Dad, and back then my Dad was about the coolest guy I knew. Except on nights when he drank too much, then he was just a jerk. But he was still my Dad, and I loved him. He doesn’t drink anymore. But he can still be a jerk. And I still love him.

The reason I thought Captain Kirk was so great was because he always got the girl. Even in Kindergarten I was fixated on girls. I gave a girl a ring for the first time when I was five. I got the ring from one of those quarter gumball-type machines filled with prizes in little plastic bubbles that refused to open unless you smacked them up against something or stomped on them. Her name was Amy and when I gave her the ring I thought we were married. I served her with divorce papers the next day when she left me for a boy in first grade. She kept the ring.

These days Shatner has a new television show, $#*! My Dad Says. He doesn’t look nearly as cool anymore. He’s old. 80 years old this year, in fact. And unless he finds a way to cheat death like Kirk did with that Kobayashi Maru test, time is going to stroll right past his grave without blinking. He will be archived on the internet. His autobiography will experience a brief spike in sales. And when he is laid to rest, it will probably be under the shadow of a tombstone that reads in a variation of, “Here lies somebody.”

He won’t know about it, though. He’ll be dead. Even somebodies die.

My dad, who is about the same age as Shatner, will die too. And I will miss him and wish that I had a just a few more chances to tell him, “I love you.” Amy will die, and probably never return that ring. Jason and Steve will die, and I’ll probably never even remember Steven’s last name.

And I will die as well. I will never be president. I will never be an astronaut. And though I keep holding out hope, I’ll probably never be a rock star. I won’t be able to choose my own clothes when I’m dead either, and I’ll probably be buried in a pair of those horrible striped socks. But it’s okay, because somewhere along the way my dreams changed. At some point I realized that people don’t change the world because they are the president or an astronaut or a rock star or even Superman. People change the world because they love other people well. They love their families well. They love their enemies well. They love God well. And along the way a few people realize that love can make all the difference. And all that will matter is that Somebody knows my name.

Scabs

For he wounds, but he also binds up; he injures, but his hands also heal.
- Job 5:18








Funerals are curious events. In the best of situations, they are celebrations of a beautiful life well lived, now concluded. In the worst, they are full of mourning for a life of regret with no further opportunity for redemption. In most cases, they are some combination of the two. I have never known a life lived without regret. And I have never known a life that was completely void of beauty. But the one thing all concluded lives have in common is that they inhabit the past.

The past is a monstrous thing. It has its own gravity. And it is ridiculously difficult to escape. I say "ridiculously" difficult because it seems that the past is by definition something that should fall behind us as we move through life. The human race however, has the disturbingly beautiful gift of memory. We are keepers of moments adrift on a sea of time, capable of somehow capturing time and carrying it with us as we move through it.

I can only believe this is part of what God created us to be. Over and over we are called to remember in the scriptures. Do this in remembrance of me," says Jesus at the Passover meal before his crucifixion. God says to his people, "Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you from there." Sadly, even this seems damaged by the Fall. Our memories last only until death comes to take them from us. Then we ourselves return to dust, held in the memory of Christ who knows all and forgets none who are his, one day to be fully reborn in the world unbroken.

In the meantime, I carry a broken past with me. It is full of snakes and dead things. There is much beauty too, but never without evidence of the rot and ruin folded into this world. And that brings me back to funerals... and scabs.

I shook the hand of a former friend who hurt me deeply at the funeral of a friend. The memories of the wounds he inflicted boiled to the front of my mind, but I tried to ignore them. In spite of my best efforts, it was only a short time before all those memories were screaming for me to pull them out and play with them.

Memories are like scabs in that way. They're fine as long as you forget about them. As soon as they come to mind, you are beset with the irresistible urge to pick at them. So I did. We delighted together for a while; they for the attention, and I for the self-gratification. Then they began to bleed. By the time I left them alone it was too late. They were swollen and painful and I was left to clean up the mess. I should have ignored them.

It's hard to remember that scabs and memories are intended to help the healing process. They harden and protect the soft layer of skin regenerating below. Picking at them only makes things worse. It lengthens the healing process and makes the scars uglier. They will soften and fall away in their own time if left to God's timing. Scabs. Memories. Even this life itself. And some day the healing will be complete.

Sign of Jonah

But he answered them, "An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Mat 12:39-40 ESV

“If you were to die tonight, do you know for certain that you would go to heaven?”

Silence rumbled like the shock waves of a sucker punch up and down the twin rows of mahogany ribs dividing the church sanctuary. Neatly starched and suited men sat politely next to their primly decorated women and stared awkwardly at the floor as matching children squirmed in dress shoes examining the corners of the ceiling. All the while, the eyes of the preacher canvassed the room from behind his oaken bulwark with expectation and a hint of something like predatory hunger.

“If you’re not sure tonight, please raise your hand”

And there sat I again, hand raised alone amidst “the saved, the sure and the serving,” wondering whether it was faith, apathy or ignorance that gave everyone but me such confidence

“If you want to be sure, pray this prayer with me tonight…”

One more prayer, followed by the pastoral reassurance that I could now magically “know for certain” that I was going to heaven. Why? Because I was “obedient to God” in doing what the man waving the heavy leather textbook told me to do. But what about the man-in-black down the street with the crisp white collar? He had some slightly different ideas of what it meant to be obedient to God. How about the kind young gentlemen with white shirts and bicycles? Or the bearded man across town in the building topped with soft-serve? Or the man with the graphing calculator and the cosmic chip on his shoulder? Everyone seemed to have an opinion about this whole heaven thing.

Heavens abound, with vast catalogs of images to translate their Elysian beauty and indescribable splendor into the all-too-describable banalities of this world. And while opinions vary, the general consensus is that all other roads lead to Hell, or Rome depending on how you slice your eschatological pie.

Every religious system has its own apologetics, evidences and experiences to validate its individual beliefs. According to my own investigation Christianity, properly and humbly understood, is easily the most satisfying intellectually and spiritually. However, while some belief systems perform better than others, all require the engine of faith. Without that engine, even Christianity goes nowhere. In the absence of faith, we are left with only the rigid skeletal remains of religion. Religion is dead, and dead stuff stinks.

And the grand smelly truth is that the atheists have a point. It is impossible to know anything about subjects like God and heaven “for sure” according to the modern concept of knowing. Knowledge requires fact, fact requires demonstrable proof and the only thing demonstrable about heaven is that people are just dying to get in.

Faith is the anima of Christianity. And faith, simply put, is trust. Practicing faith is practicing trust in the God who created the universe, called himself our Father, came to live among us and subjected himself to the curse of death which we brought upon ourselves, so that we could be free from its fear and power. It is not a summation of facts. It is a call to trust in the character of a God who reveals himself in Christ to be the essence of selfless love.

To those who proclaim or insist on some indisputable fact or irrefutable sign, God offers only the sign of Jonah. This sign also must be accepted on faith and stands only on the evidence of the gospels and the truth inherent in the words and actions of Christ. It is a truth that can only be “known” by faith, by the willingness to believe in something so ridiculously crazy that it could only be true: that God loves us so much, he would suffer and die for the freedom of those who murdered him. That because of such scandalous love, he can be trusted.

Love and Glory

No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.

John 1:18 NAS

God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high…

Heb 1:1-3 NAS

I hear much about God’s glory. Worship music revolves around it. We “give” it to God in public prayer. Pulpits abound with preachers zealously proclaiming it, defending it, demanding it and lamenting the loss of it. Still, in spite of all the noise, I think some people have little idea what they’re talking about. From the way certain people speak about God, it is understandable that others leave the church with an impression of God as petty, self-centered, egomaniacal, an attention-seeking infant with self-esteem issues.

I cringe every time I hear the phrase, “God’s primary concern is His own glory.” I hear it a lot. I hear it from people I know and love, people who love Jesus very much. They want to lift God’s name high and defend it all costs. They don’t seem to understand that God doesn’t need to be defended. I think they fail to realize they are lifting Him out of the reach of the very people He came to deliver. In the words of Rich Mullins from the Lufkin, Texas concert before his death, “They’re not bad, they’re just wrong.”

A being primarily concerned with his own glory would never descend to this rat-hole of a world. And he certainly wouldn’t die for the rats. Honestly, he would probably torch the whole damned thing. He might possibly be convinced, out of a narcissistic desire for praise - and all that nagging - to leave cracked the door to the heavenly servants’ quarters. Even then, however, I think he would station Saint Peter nearby with instructions to weed out the riff-raff. And the bad singers.

The book of Hebrews says that Jesus is the exact representation of God’s nature. In other words, if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. He came to be a servant (Mat 20:28). He was homeless (Mat 8:20). He was spit upon, beaten and mocked (Mar 14:65). He was crucified for our sin (Gal 3:13, Isa 53:5). He never acted for his own glory. Everything he did and said was for the deliverance and redemption of humanity; and of course, for the glory of the Father (Joh 7:18). Such a deliverance could do nothing less than bring glory to the Father because it displays the greatest love imaginable (Joh 15:13).

Genuine selfless love, fully understood and accepted, always results in praise from the beloved. But assuming praise and glory to be God’s primary goal misses the focus of Jesus’ every word and action, denies the very selflessness in which he was glorified. You see, it is His love that makes Him glorious. The pursuit of glory could never make him love.

Cicadian Rhythm

The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.

Zephaniah 3:17 ESV

Once a year, in the hazy humidity of late summer, the cicadas begin their singing. Endless rising and falling rhythmically in pitch from morning until evening, their song is a constant presence in the months of July and August.

Cicadas aren't like crickets. They don't rub legs or wings together to make their music. What they do is not entirely unlike singing. Rapidly constricting muscles in their abdomen, cicadas rattle a set of stiffened membranes, called tymbals, at speeds up to 50 times per second. The clicking of the tymbal membrane is then amplified by the cicada’s largely hollow abdomen which functions as a resonance chamber. They move their abdomens toward and away from the tree to create the characteristic modulation (wheeee-whaaaa) in their song.

An interesting observation about humans however, is that we often "tune out" the cicada’s music. The sound is so constant that our brains learn to filter out their familiar drone as we focus on the sounds of everyday life.

One of the more beautiful things scripture says is that God sings over us. His presence is always with us. That's an amazing and wonderful thought. However, I think we often lose touch with God's voice in the same way we tune out the cicada. We get used to the fact that God is always there. The other, less constant things in our lives catch our attention and distract us. The “noise” of those many things can drown out God's song in our hearts making him seem far away, if there at all.

But he is there. Always there. Always singing. Always holding our noisy lives in his hand and singing his love song softly into our hearts. The question is... Are we really listening?

Orbit

God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also. God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:16-18 NASB

The night sky is an amazing illustration of God's creative nature. Millions of stars scattered across the darkness as if God had stood in the dust of the earth and flung them by handfuls into the void. Look at them through a telescope and you will discover that what you thought were millions, are really billions upon billions of stars, swirling in galaxies, birthing in nebulae and sometimes dying in great explosions of glorious light. Each one the center of its own solar system, perhaps similar to ours.

The planets of our own solar system dance a magnificent waltz with the sun. Like suitors twirling and spinning around the radiant mistress of the ball, they move to the glorious rhythm of time, orchestrated by the Grand Musician of the universe and bound together by the unwavering pull gravity.

Love is like gravity. It is the love of God that holds all of us in his grip, drawing us ever closer to himself. Our often chaotic lives revolve around that love. Some in vast wobbling, whirling arcs far from the constant, pulsing heart of Christ. Others following orbits that pass so close to his consuming fire it is almost unbearable, destroying even as it gives life. And that is our final rest, swallowed in the fierce love of God that must offer death before offering resurrection.