Category: Suffering

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On the Back Burner

Sometimes life makes you feel like you’ve been placed on the backburner of the stove in God’s kitchen. Forgotten, whatever is being sauteed in your life is now burning. Smoke rises and sets off the fire alarm, while God does nothing to intervene. At least that is how it feels. You’ve been there. So have I. So has a New York city grandmother.

On a cold winter’s night in 1935, in a New York City courtroom, a tattered old woman stood before the judge, charged with stealing a loaf of bread. The storekeeper was pressing charges. The woman pleaded her case, “My daughter’s husband has deserted her. She is sick and her children are starving.” The shopkeeper refused to back down and drop the charges, saying, “It’s a bad neighborhood, your honor, and she’s got to be punished to teach other people a lesson.”

The judge sighed. He turned to the old woman and said, “I’ve got to punish you; the law makes no exceptions. Ten dollars or ten days in jail.”

And that is life on the back burner. No one listens, not even God. No one cares as hope evaporates like forgotten boiling water on the back burner of a stove.

Would it surprise you if I told you that Paul carried similar feelings?

By 2 Corinthians 2 Paul is in the midst of defending his decision not to visit this church, and his decision did not sit well with certain members who were influenced by outsiders. Instead, Paul dispatched a letter and began the long wait. Here is Paul’s description.

Now when I went to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ and found that the Lord had opened a door for me, I still had no peace of mind because I did not find my brother Titus there. So I said good-bye to them and went on to Macedonia (2 Cor. 2:13-14).

The situation in Corinth had grown toxic. The church attacked him like a rapid dog, and he was still licking his wounds. Having written a letter, which caused him great distress (2 Cor. 2:4), he outlined expected behavior. Without a reliable mail system, he dispatched Titus with the letter in hand to Corinth. He would meet with the church, read the letter to them, and gather a response to report back to Paul. All of that took time and introduced a waiting game. No email. No texting. No phones. Paul wrote a letter. Gave it to Titus who travels to Corinth. Titus reads the letter and allows the church to absorb the message before assessing their response. Then Titus makes the journey to find Paul.

That is a long time to wait. What happens in the meantime? In the void of unknown information, we tend to fill in the gap. No matter how hard we try, we insert information to complete the void, and it’s usually the worst-case scenario. Someone appears to ignore you; you assume they are angry with you. Your child is late coming home, you presume that there has been an accident. The boss calls you into his office and you start thinking, “What have I done wrong this time?” God won’t answer your prayer and you wonder, “What sin is in my life?” You’re arrested for stealing bread in the wake of the Great Depression and the judge with the law stands against you. So now you find yourself on the backburner of life and everything feels likes it’s about to go up in smoke.

Lloyd C. Douglas might have stumbled upon a solution. You might remember him as a minister and writer whose works included The Robe and Magnificent Obsession. As a university student, Douglas

lived in a boarding house. On the first floor was an elderly, retired music teacher, who was now an invalid and unable to leave the apartment.

Douglas said that every morning they had a ritual they would go through together. He would come down the steps, open the old man’s door and ask, “Well, what’s the good news?” The old man would pick up his tuning fork, tap it on the side of his wheelchair, and say, “That’s Middle C! It was Middle C yesterday; it will be Middle C tomorrow; it will be Middle C a thousand years from now. The tenor upstairs sings flat, the piano across the hall is out of tune, but my friend, that is Middle C!”

The old man discovered one thing that he could depend, one constant reality in life. He could have felt like he was on the back burner of life, I know I might have felt like that like. Instead of filling in the gaps with anxiety, lies, or fake truth, he chose something that wouldn’t change. He remembered Middle C. That is what he attached to his life too.*

Troas was the meeting place (2:12). Paul ventured to the city and waited for Titus to arrive with news. Titus never arrived. In the meantime, Paul preached in Troas, to which he claims, “the Lord had opened a door for (him).” Good things were happening in Troas. People were receptive to the gospel. Unlike the Corinthians, those in Troas trusted Paul and made course corrections to their lives. God was working. God was saving. But Paul found no resolution. No Titus. No news. No peace.

We’ve experienced the silence. A text is unanswered. A phone call is not returned. In its spot, anxiety.

With a plan in place, the backup was for Paul and Titus to meet in Macedonia, likely Philippi (2:13). With no clear directions from God, Paul was filled with apprehensive. His pot was simmering on the cusp of boiling over. Uneasiness. Worriedness. Anxious. He left a booming and productive ministry in search for answers he may or may not find. In truth, answers he may or may not want to know. And for now, we’re at a cliff-hanger and don’t know how this situation will get resolved. For Paul, he headed for Macedonia to wait for Titus on news of Corinth.

We live in a world where the forgotten backburner is so prevalent. We walk into people’s lives who feel discarded by society and abandoned by God. They live with broken promises to be there to the end. We bring a smile. We confidently step into their lives offering hope in a moment when they feel hopeless. They have filled in the gap with negative messaging, and we have the chance to redirect their thinking to believe again. To hope again. To love again. So, we sit and talk to our patients. We hold their hands. We listen to their stories, or complaints. We act for their good. We walk with them on a path that is difficult to navigate. And soon the pot that looked to be on the verge of boiling starts to simmer. Peace reclaims its place while hope is restored.

Still, sometimes life makes you feel like you’ve been placed on the backburner of the stove in God’s kitchen. Forgotten, whatever is being sauteed in your life is now burning. Smoke rises setting off the fire alarm, while God does nothing to intervene. At least that is how it feels. You’ve been there. So have I. So has a New York city grandmother.

On a cold winter’s night in 1935, in a New York City courtroom, a tattered old woman stood before the judge, charged with stealing a loaf of bread. The storekeeper was pressing charges. The woman pleaded her case, “My daughter’s husband has deserted her. She is sick and her children are starving.” The shopkeeper refused to back down and drop the charges, saying, “It’s a bad neighborhood, your honor, and she’s got to be punished to teach other people a lesson.”

The judge sighed. He turned to the old woman and said, “I’ve got to punish you; the law makes no exceptions. Ten dollars or ten days in jail.”

And that is life on the back burner. No one listens, not even God. No one cares as hope evaporates like forgotten boiling water on the back burner.

However, the judge that evening was no ordinary judge, but the sitting mayor. Having dismissed the judge earlier in the evening, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia – yea, that LaGuardia who has an airport named for him – was the sit-in judge. And while he was pronouncing sentence, LaGuardia reached into his wallet, took out a ten-dollar bill, and threw it into his hat with these words, “Here’s the ten-dollar fine, which I now remit, and furthermore, I’m going to fine everyone in the courthouse fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat. Mr. Bailiff, collect the fines and give them to the defendant.”

The following day, a New York newspaper reported, “Forty-seven dollars and fifty cents were turned over to the bewildered old grandmother who had stolen a loaf of bread to feed her starving grandchildren. Making forced donations were seventy petty criminals, a few New York policemen, and a red-faced store-keeper.”

It’s a reminder to us that no matter how we feel at the time, to God, we are never a forgotten pot on the back burner.

Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e., only God is glorified!)

* A story by Max Lucado.

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Beyond Retribution

The 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption was like filling a diet Coke bottle with Mentos. The combustion was massive, explosive, and destructive. The blast radius destroyed everything within ten miles and its damage reached some 230 miles away. The North Fork Toutle River, flooded by the melted ice and mudslides, wiped out everything in its path, and I mean everything. Trees were stripped bare and logs that filled the Toutle River looked like toothpicks on the TV screen. While fifty-seven people died, the death toll could have been worse. A lot worse. I remember a respected adult commenting on the event, believing God used the eruption to punish America for its moral sins.

Who could forget the images of the people stranded inside the Superdome in 2005 as residents sheltered to wait-out the Katrina Hurricane. Stories, emerging from their sheltering, were sickening and too gruesome to recount here. The massive hurricane made landfall as a category 5 and caused over 100 billion dollars’ worth of damage, leaving some to believe that New Orleans might never recover. Eighteen hundred people, who were unable to evacuate the city, died in the storm. Religious pundits pounced on the news with some saying that the storm was retribution by God for the city’s sinful behavior, while others believed it was punishment for the United States’ preemptive strike against Iraq.

On the precipice of COVID anxiety levels were rising. No one knew what might happen or how deadly the virus was going to be. We knew China was under lockdown and were building hospitals. What we didn’t know was what America was going to do with the crisis. The answer came soon enough as loose lockdown requirements were coming into play. If businesses were not deemed necessary, they closed. Schools educated students via Zoom. Churches were asked to find alternatives to meeting in person. Some offered services outdoors while other went online. While the death toll is debated – whatever that number was or is – what is true is that far too many people died by COVID. In the early days of the virus, finger pointing emerged as to its cause, including America’s permissive abortion laws, persistent ungodly behavior, and sports along with entertainment being far more important to people than God was. Many, at least by those sharing posts on social media, claimed that the virus was God’s means of punishing America.

The official term for God enlisting punishment on people for their sins is called Retribution Theology. Simply, you sin and God punishes you, and that theme recapitulates throughout Scripture. Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, and are expelled from the Garden of Eden. The earth is corrupted, so God hits the reboot button through a flood. Sodom and Gomorrah were wicked cities that God destroys with fire. Nadab and Abihu offer strange fire while Uzzah touches the untouchable Ark of the Covenant; all three are struck down. David commits adultery, and then uses murder to cover up his deed, so the baby’s life is forfeited. Israel is exiled to Babylon for breaking, no obliterating, the Covenant with God. So a clear line exists with Retribution Theology: if you sin, God punishes you.

One of the problems with Retribution Theology, which still has its claws in our perception of God even today, is that it limits God to a box of anger and revenge. We have a “he’s out to get us” mentality, as if we are in the hands of an angry God. 

We’re not. God is far more gracious than given credit, and his use of retribution is far more nuanced than we’re willing to admit. A man is born blind, and the disciples ask Jesus who committed the sin that the man be born blind, he or his parents (Jn. 9:1-2). The disciples were working out of a Retribution Theology. “Neither,” was Jesus’ response, as he was not working from such a perspective. The man was born blind so that God may show his grace to him.

Job and his three friends all operated out of Retribution Theology, though from different angles. Job’s friends believed Job had sinned and was being punished by God for his sin. They used guilt to shame him into confession and repentance. Job, on the other hand, argued that he had not sinned and did not deserve this punishment or suffering. While all four’s assessment was wrong, Job’s friends were forced to beg Job’s forgiveness because they felt free to condemn and point their fingers at Job. Job’s suffering had nothing to do with sin, any sin.

Job’s friends demonstrate the biggest flaw in the way Retribution Theology is deployed. Everyone else is blamed for the disaster, disease, or distress but not ourselves. In the end they get what they deserve, and somehow we are more righteous than they. The fifty-seven deserved to die from Mt. St. Helens, but somehow I didn’t deserve to die? The some 1800 casualties deserved to die from Katrina, but I was worthy to escape even the storm itself? The million or more deaths from COVID came to people who deserved such fate, but apparently I was deemed worthy to only have a mild case after the vaccine was in play?

This really is not what we believe, is it? If not, what is another way to understand such a painful crisis?

The prophet Agabus stood before the church in Antioch and foretold that the entire region would suffer a severe famine (Act. 11:27-30). Palestine, like most of the world, was an agricultural based society, and much of their economy was drawn from the crops. A famine could be as economically devastating as our Stock Market crashing today. I can hear the gasps from the crowd as Agabus shared his disturbing and sober vision.

Luke does not tell us why the region faced the drought. Making absolutely no connection between God’s will and the famine, Luke remains silent on the reason. Unlike the days of Elijah, Scripture explicitly says God brought famine to the land as he was going one-on-one with the fertility god, Baal. But in Acts 11 Luke says nothing. Luke is quiet on the reason for the famine. This famine was headed their way, and the reason, if there was one, was almost irrelevant.

What happens next is nothing short of beautiful. Agabus refused to point fingers or lay blame. The church pundits refused to get up before the church and start listing the varied sins that had been committed, either by the church or by the Jews who rejected Jesus. Instead, harkening back to Acts 2:42, “The disciples (in Antioch), each according to his ability, decided to provide help for the brothers living in Judea” (Act. 11:29). They acted by offering help to those who were going to need help. Instead of finger pointing, they raised their hands to volunteer. And do you know who was among them? Better call Saul, as we know him as the Apostle Paul (11:30).

When Paul went through Asia-Minor and spoke with the churches he had planted, he initiated a relief aid for the saints in Jerusalem and Judea. That region was going to be hit hard and he was hoping that those who could, would step up to aid their brothers and sisters. Paul organized no concert venue or showcased top preachers, charging people an admission to the event. Instead, he challenged the Gentile churches to collect funds out of their own generosity to send to the Jewish churches. Paul trusted their generosity. Paul believed his churches would come through for him.

At least two results emerge from the gift collected for the saints. First, they will help alleviate people’s suffering. As Paul tells the Corinthians, “This service you are providing is . . . supplying the needs to God’s people . . .” (2 Cor. 9:12). Their gift will help bring healing to the hurting, herbage to the hungry, and hope for their homes. They get to have a hand in redeeming something horrific. Maybe one of the most God-like quality we can embrace is to be generous in helping others who are suffering, especially if we forgo any finger pointing. Such thinking harkens the reader back to 1 Corinthians 1:3-4 where God comforts people so that they can share that comfort with others.

Secondly, and one might say, more importantly, God will get praised through their generosity. Paul references God’s glory four times in verses 12-15. While people are hurting, the church comes in to serve, help, and minister to the people, and all the time those same people praise God for the graciousness of others.  We help alleviate pain and suffering while God gets praised. Not a bad combination if you ask me.

When we engage our patients, do we resort to Retribution Theology in ministering either as nurses, aids, social workers, volunteers, or spiritual care coordinators? Of course not. Such perspective is cold, callused, uncaring, and is devoid of compassion. Instead we act to bring healing, and a Gilead-like balm for their wounded-ness, not more pain and suffering. Remember that Job’s three friends approach did not fare well at the end of Job’s story.

In the movie Apollo 13 the three astronauts aboard the doomed capsule tried getting their heads wrapped around the failed mission to the moon. Between the moment the system failed and their reentry, no one knew why the spaceship was failing. Fingers were quick to point. Jim Lovell, portrayed by Tom Hanks, put a stop to the blame game saying, “Look, we’re not doing this, gentlemen. We are not gonna do this. We’re not gonna go bouncing off the walls for ten minutes because we’ll just end up right back here with the same problems!” Well said, as Retribution Theology spends too much time finger pointing and laying blame instead of working the problem. Luke never told us why the famine hit, but he told us what the church did. They contributed to the needs of others.

Finally, I’ll leave you with the quote from Fred Rogers who addressed the news’ constant preoccupation with traumatizing stories. Mr. Rogers said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” Good advice. Look for the helpers, or better yet, be one of the helpers and leave the blaming to someone who has a better handle and perspective on the situation. That person is God.

Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e., only God is glorified!)

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Too Close (Not) to Comfort

My love for Snoopy and the Peanuts Gang began on Christmas Eve 1968 when I received my plush Snoopy doll from my parents for Christmas. Since I was three years old at the time, no memory exists of the moment. I do have a picture taken by my dad of me of holding Snoopy with my mom looking on. I wasn’t a Snoopy fan before that moment, but since then Snoopy and I have had a nearly unbreakable bond. He’s brought plenty of comfort to the boy who has grown to be a man. Two of those moments come to mind.

Sometime around my eighth birthday I decided that I was too old for the plush doll to share my bed. A better place for him was on top of the wardrobe where he could watch over me and keep me safe. I felt like a big boy until the night I had a nightmare. Immediately, I got out of bed to climb up on a chair to retrieve my Snoopy so that he could comfort my fears through the rest of the night.

Then, when I was nine years old, I was admitted to the hospital with a prelude to a bleeding ulcer. I was very sick and spent three days at the children’s ward of Portland Adventist Hospital. Mom asked me what I wanted brought from home to make my stay easier. I told her I wanted my Snoopy, because I knew he would comfort me through the strange environment and separation anxiety. Unfortunately, I loved my Snoopy so much mom was embarrassed to bring the well-worn, formally white fat, soft, plush doll to the hospital. She bought me a knock-off Snoopy. I appreciated the effort, but he wasn’t Snoopy and I wasn’t nearly as comforted as I wanted.

Children are known for seeking comfort through a thumb, pacifier, a doll, or a blanket. They grow out of the need for the crutch, but usually find some replacement like foods, shopping, hobbies, or relationships. We never grow out of the need to be comforted.

As Paul opens his second letter to the Corinthians he bursts into worship saying, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 3). God is truly worthy of our praise, but the fireworks are only a small portion of Paul’s opening statement. God is praised, but like bacon wrapped around a hamburger, Paul wraps his praise with comfort. Nine times in five verses Paul drops the word comfort. Praising God, Paul acknowledges the role comfort plays in our lives. Such an unexpected pivot helps set the stage for what Paul will unpack throughout his letter to the Corinthians.

For the moment Paul makes two powerful statements about the role comfort plays, and that it’s rooted in God’s character.

First, God is praised because he comforts us. Paul says he is the “God of all comfort who comforts us in our troubles” (v. 3b-4). Suffering is a part of living. Troubles come with the world we live in and no one is immune to it. We are all the walking wounded, as grief torments every fiber of our lives; physically, spiritually, emotionally. We hurt. We cry. We ache. We do not need a God who inflicts pain on us, we are in need of a God who will comfort us.

In the midst of our suffering, we’re not alone. We’ve not been abandoned. We do not have a God who withdraws from our pain, but we have a compassionate God who steps into the very midst of our pain and suffering to offer comfort. According to Paul, God is not the source of suffering, but the source of our comfort. He brings healing, not sickness. He restores hope, not despair. He sits on the Mercy Seat, not the Vindictiveness Seat. He breathes life, not death. He’s looking to save, not to condemn. He acts out of compassion, not oppression. He creates comfort, not torture.

The popular Footprints poem has the speaker addressing God as they walk along the beach. Much of the walk the speaker notices the two sets of footprints, side by side, but also noted times of only one set. Those, he noticed, usually occurred when he was at very low points in his life. Inquiring of God, he sought insight and answers as to why God abandoned him, especially when he needed him the most. God’s answer reassured the man’s faith. No, God never left him nor forsook him. Only one footprint can be seen because that is when God carried the man.

God does not create the suffering, for the world has created enough pain and misery on its own. God brings comfort, as he sits with us in our suffering.

I once asked a Bible class a rhetorical question, “Who does God comfort?” No one gave me a wrong answer, they just failed to offer the best answer. Being in a church setting, they came up with answers like “fellow Christians,” or the “Church.” Their answers weren’t wrong, but they miss the point Paul is making in this passage. God does not discriminate when it comes to comforting, nor does he play favorites. He comforts people who need comforting. Anyone. Anywhere. Anyplace. If someone is suffering, God is comforting because that is who God is. We are wounded by the suffering and are in need of comfort. Thus, that is why God is praised.

Marla Hanson says we all have scars, it’s just that some can be seen and others are deeper than the skin’s surface. Experience speaks volumes and with clarity. In the mid-eighties Marla, a model and TV personality, was assaulted by two men who used razors to slice up her face. She needed a hundred stitches to mend her scars. Five months later, she was back to work with reports saying she was radiant and smiling. “Everyone has scars,” she said. “Mine show. Most people carry theirs inside themselves.”*

Scars left behind from betrayal, broken promises, death, terminal diagnoses, a bad job, false accusation tend to stock pile, and never quite heal. We carry the hurt with us until God brings his comfort. While God is not the source of suffering, he is the source for the comfort offered to us.

That is when Paul pivots saying that after God has comforted us, he does “. . . so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (v. 4). We are partners with God as we step into the ministry of comforting others. Like the children’s song says, “Love is something if we give it away,” and the kind of love we give away, in this context, is comfort. When we comfort others, that comfort acts like bread on the water and comes right back at us. God comforts us so that we can comfort others, which in turn is comforting to us.

In 1987 Lisa Najavits was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She decided to spend the summer in New York. Her dream summer quickly turned into a nightmare, when, on an early Tuesday morning in June a man with an abuse record had a fight with his wife. Frustrated and angry, fueled by a few beers, he went looking for trouble. He found Lisa and assaulted her, slashing her face with a razor to require a hundred stitches.  

God had nothing to do with this attack. It was not God’s will or some morbid plan of his to inflict such harm on this woman. There was no reason beyond that evil does weed itself through this world. No, God was not the source nor the motivation behind the pain or the attack. But God may have been behind the healing.

The next morning Marla Hanson, who was pursuing a film degree from New York University at the time, visited Lisa in the hospital. Doctors could repair the wounds, but only someone like Marla could help the healing process as she draws comfort out of her own wounded-ness.* While God did not cause the pain, for neither Marla nor Lisa, God used Marla’s experience to comfort someone who had endured great suffering.

We cannot escape suffering. In a fallen world suffering feels like its woven into its very tapestry. And maybe it is. But we can counter suffering through our comforting compassion. Whether we are nurses, aids, social workers, spiritual care, volunteer coordinators, or TC’s who answer phone calls. Our compassionate engagement and sympathetic understanding allows God to work through us to bring comfort. Not self-soothing comfort like a child gets from a Snoopy, or a blanket, or a pacifier, or a thumb, but this comfort comes from God. Once we experience his comfort, we can do nothing but give him praise.

Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e., only God is glorified!)

* See Rubel Shelley, Bound for the Promised Land: Walking in the Faith Footsteps of Father Abraham. Nashville: 20th Century Christian, 1988.

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Christ, Christians & COVID-19: Where Do We Go from here?

Unlike Pearl Harbor, President Kennedy’s assassination, the Challenger explosion, or 9-11, the COVID-19 pandemic did not have a defining “Where were you when” moment. In December of 2019 we started hearing reports of a new virus in China, but like other news stories, it was emotionally discarded and soon believed to be long forgotten in the news cycle. But it wasn’t. More stories and reporting was highlighting the disease.

Three weeks into January 2020, the city of Wuhan went into lockdown. This was no rural town, but a metropolitan epi center boasting of modern technology and eleven million in population. I remember seeing workers in protective suits spraying the city streets down with disinfectant chemicals while citizens were in isolation/quarantine. By February the government, with amazing speed, built two new hospitals in Wuhan to treat the overflowing number of people suffering from this disease. By all accounts they were taking the virus seriously.

This was the defining moment for me. I began contemplating, “What if the virus comes to America?” “Will we go into lockdown” and “What will be the plan if we do?” Even more so, “How will the church adapt and respond?”

On March 15 Taylor and Lilly were riding home with me from worship services. Rumors were swirling that American cities were going into their own lockdown. Basketball tournaments had already been shelved with baseball’s season on the brink. I didn’t know what kind of travel bands might be activated. With Taylor’s husband deployed, I suggested she decide on one spot to live with us or her in-laws. She chose to live with us and did so for the next four months. And as it turned out March 15th was the last in-person worship service Sunshine experienced till June.

I wish the story ended in June, but it didn’t. As we came into fall, the number of COVID cases surged. Hospitals were overrun and the medical personnel on the front lines were physically and emotionally depleted if not traumatized by the death toll reaching a half a million people – and just in America alone. The constant isolation and general fear was wearing society out. On my own Homefront Cile was recovering from her own COVID infection; we canceled our yearly trip to Tennessee for Thanksgiving and Christmas. But with the New Year, the vaccine now in play and places of worship meeting for in-person services, hope is on the rise.

While God is the only one who holds tomorrow in his hands, we move forward with every step taken. Yes, we take him by the hand, but sometimes we’re stumbling around to find our way. Where we go from here is cautious, but filled with renewed faith.

First, we begin recognizing how vulnerable and fragile we really are, as Rich Mullins sings, “We are not as strong as we think we are.” COVID didn’t create dilemmas as much as it exasperated and exposed problems already present. For instance mental health issues were present before 2020, but the isolation and shutting down of needed social relationships created more room for anxiety to take hold. Marriages that ended this past year didn’t just happen to go bad. They were well on the divorce road before COVID hit. The anxiety and stress of a pandemic was the final straw. Peter looked really brave and strong as he stepped out of the boat, but all that was stripped from him when the waves took his focus off Jesus (Mt. 14:29-30).

Secondly, we have a deep desire to break the social distancing by re-engaging with each other. We miss the interaction of the in-person community. Still, getting together continues to feel like porcupines snuggling. Renewing relationships look good on paper, but acting it out still feels like a pipe dream. The political and ideological divide is widening as distrust on both sides of the isle escalates. Finger pointing and name calling is eroding the very foundation for which relationships are established and maintained. Paul warned the Galatians of “biting and devouring each other” and predicted destruction unless they began allowing the Spirit to control their lives (Gal.5:13-15, 22-26).

Finally, we’re called to display a sacrificial love for each other even though we’re very selfish at heart (1 Jn. 3:16-17). Jesus demonstrated his love for us by sacrificing himself for mankind. He gave up his rights, his positon and his power to die for us, calling on us to do the same (see 1 Pet. 2:21-23). Like preschooler children lining up for a drink at the drinking fountain, we demand to be first. We have to have it our way. Following 9-11 an elder commented to me that America was not in a position to sacrifice again like it did for the War Effort. He may have been right. We’re so consumed with our own personal rights, we fail to consider how our personal decisions are damaging and destroying those around us.

Where do we go from here? We take hold of Jesus and keep our eyes fastened on him, even with the waves crashing around us. As we’re nurturing our relationships, we allow Jesus to be the unifying factor, not our personal ideology. Then we follow him, emptying ourselves for each other. Such steps are far from easy, but when we arrive at our destination, it will be worth it.

Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e., only God is glorified!)

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A Very COVID Christmas

Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year, and with apologies to Andy Williams, it may be the most wonderful time of the year. From Thanksgiving to New Years the focus on family, forgiveness and future hopes are packaged and wrapped neatly under the Christmas tree.

Since March COVID-19 has disrupted our entire lives and the story of its disruption has been told like an endlessly bad joke. We know about the social distancing protocols. We’ve seen the business sector take a huge hit. Questions about mental health are raised as children and parents struggle to educate at home. Who knew that the term “in person,” as a legitimate way to describe our church services, would be coined? Sickness, death and dread hover like a black cloud waiting to burst. Right now, it’s hard to be merry when COVID is everywhere. And so far this Christmas hasn’t been near as “wonderful” as prior Christmases.

As we’re stepping into Christmas, a few thoughts have been running through my mind worth sharing. First, history is replete with Christmas’s that have been far from wonderful. Just four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Germany (declaring war on Japan was a quicker process). By Christmas, America was committed to war with families sending their young men (and some young women) overseas. Nearly 300,000 never returned. Historians tell us that WWI left even a larger hole in people’s lives, taking years to heal (a reason why Europe was so slow to stop Germany’s aggression). The closest marker we have to understand COVID is the Spanish Flu which lasted two years, 1918-1920, and claimed nearly 700,000 lives. Maybe the deadliest disease was the Black Plague hitting Europe in 1347, lasting four years and claiming an estimated 25 million lives. These events are not included to minimize COVID and its impact on our lives, but to remind us that while the path we tread is new to us, it’s well worn by those who have gone on before us. Jesus walked with them through their Christmas seasons, and he’ll walk with us (Heb. 12:2; 13:8).

Secondly, Christmas this year has exposed what the marginalized have experienced: beneath the joy and laughter is pain and suffering. Significant pain and suffering. Social isolating has opened our eyes to the need of community and gathering. We miss our friends and family. We’re battling loneliness with mental health issues rising. But what all of us are struggling with is what many people deal with on a regular basis. People are estranged and longing for reconnection, even if they don’t understand how to reconnect (see Act. 2:42-47).

Thirdly, a better question than asking, “Why?” is “How long?” (Ps. 13:1-2). The “Why” question is usually unanswerable. Sometimes a direct line between cause and effect can be drawn. Sometimes. Most of the time a correlation does not exist. Sure, if you smoke a pack of cigarettes for thirty years you may end up with lung cancer or COPD. Or maybe you won’t. That’s part of the cause and effect weirdness. But more so, asking the “Why” question puts God in a defensive posture of blame. Directly or indirectly God is at fault for causing or allowing the bad to happen (when Jesus quotes the why question of Ps. 22:1, it’s relational and he’s not seeking an explanation). Even if we knew the “why,” it doesn’t change our situation, we still have to endure or give up. But the “How long” question steps far more into faith by enlisting God’s presence without further explanation. Since facts won’t change our situation, we need God’s assurance that our situation will come to an end.

Finally, instead of looking for the silver lining, be the silver lining for someone’s life. Make that extra phone call of encouragment. Provide a meal to a neighbor or family suffering through COVID. Send a Christmas card to someone who won’t receive cards. Be generous with the homeless. Purchase a meal for frontline workers. Maybe through our compassionate generosity we can make this a very merry Christmas anyway.

Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e., only God is glorified!)

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Problem Solving Life

The art of movie making is a disaster in the mix. With so many variables in play, we shouldn’t be surprised how movies bomb in the theater. Actually, with so many variables I am amazed at how many movies succeed. From studios to actors to producers to directors to set builders to script writers and rewrites, the possibility for something going wrong seems inevitable. That anything comes together perfect like a puzzle is amazing in and of itself.

David Sandberg, who directed the hit movie, Shazaam!, says movie making is really about problem solving. Just getting Zachary Levi’s character to fly through a shopping mall is one problem. So you shoot three stunt guys dressed in blue pushing an oversized “tuning fork” with Levi attached to it running through the mall. Then you painstakingly erase all the blue pixels from the scene only to realize too late that crew members were seen in the scene. So in come the CGI guys who add gift bags and mops to the crew members and suddenly they’re shoppers and custodians. Problem solved.

One of the most powerful moments in all of Star Trek became more powerful by accident. Admiral Kirk witnesses his son being murdered by the Klingons. The scene called for him to step back and stumble into his command chair, uttering his line, “You Klingon (explicative)! You murdered my son!” Instead, Shatner tripped on the stage platform and fell backward. Staying in character, he uttered his line making his appeal even more emotional than he would have otherwise. The scene went to print. Problem solved.

Getting through life is often a disaster in the mix. Anything and everything that could go wrong usually does. A couple step into retirement to spend the rest of their lives together, only to discover life cut short from cancer. A professional’s career is secure until the market turns and he’s left without a job. A friendship parts way, maybe over unmet expectations or maybe over politics, and both mourn the loss. Or maybe a pandemic breaks out and people either fall ill or divide even more so because no one trusts anyone or the government. Unsolved problems.

5000 people followed Jesus and when they were hungry he fed them. A blind man sat on the road and he cried out to Jesus and he healed him. The disciples were fearing for their lives in a boat on the lake when Jesus calmed the storm. A multitude of people listened, wanting answers to living and Jesus delivered the Word of God. The world needed redeemed so the Lamb of God took away their sins. Problems solved.

Sandberg admits that “every scene has its own problems to solve no matter the scene.” The job of the director is to solve the problems as they materialize. No melt downs and instead, a non-anxious presence. Sometimes the problems end up creating the best solutions for the movie that the writers never imagined.

Not long ago Andy Stanley was attributed to a post on FaceBook. In it he recalls talking to an 87-year-old who lived through polio, diphtheria, Vietnam protests and is still enchanted with life. In the midst of this COVID-19 Pandemic, one might expect him to feel the anxiety and pressure brought on by this disease. He said, “I learned a long time ago to not see the world through printed headlines. I see the world through the people that surround me. I see the world with the realization that we love big. Therefore, I choose (to direct my own scenes): ‘Husband loves wife today;’ “Family drops everything to come to Grandma’s bedside.’” He pats (Andy’s) hand, “Old man makes new friend.” Problem solved.

So life is not about solving problems, it’s about framing your life. But most encounters we experience bring on problems. And we have a choice. We can easily become exasperated and discouraged, throwing our hands up in the air in despair. Or we can make do and reframe the scene to capture a better moment. And who knows, maybe the problems we face create the best solutions for our life that we never imagined.

Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e., only God is glorified!)

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“Where Are You, God?” Faith in the Midst of Suffering

Questioning God’s presence or his sovereign rule during the midst of tragic suffering is common among believers. One might say it’s the norm. For if everything is under God’s reign, then what happens under his watch is on him. The buck has to stop somewhere. “Where are you, God?” ends up being a good question.

While Jesus was hanging on the cross, he cried out in a loud voice, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt. 27:46; Mk. 34). Most people believe Jesus was facing a form of “separation anxiety.” At the very moment God turned his back on his Son, Jesus felt alone, vulnerable and abandoned. Like a child who cannot find his parents in the store, Jesus appears to be unable to find God. 

When Job was enduring his assault from Satan he questioned God’s ability to rule. With a belief rooted in retribution, he announced his innocence having done nothing to deserve such punishment (Job 6:24-30). Job’s friends believed otherwise (Job 5:17) and assumed their friend was holding out on them. So disturbed, Job was willing to take God to court, even though he was convinced justice was beyond his reach (Job 9:3, 17-18).  

How do we step into the vacuum of the unanswerable question, “Where are you, God?”

Deadly tornados swept through Middle Tennessee leaving in its wake about a 200 (?) mile mass of destruction and death. At this time 24 people have died, most of whom are children and in Putnam County. While all have been accounted for, some 150 were hospitalized. One site claimed that 75 buildings were destroyed in Nashville alone. The number that hurts the most is the 18 children who died, particularly the four year-old girl of the Collegeside Church of Christ youth minister.

So in the midst of our pain as we endure the suffering around us, we ask, “Where are you, God?”

Job was granted his wish. He was offered the chance to present his case before God, but the Almighty asked the first series of questions. He grilled Job on the details of the universe and complications and difficulties of comprehending how the world even works. Job never received an answer for his suffering, even though we were told from the opening lines of the drama what was unfolding behind the scenes. Job realized that his finite mind cannot comprehend the infinite (Job 42:1-6). Sometimes that’s where we sit. We stop reading into the cause or looking for an explanation. Certainly, we refrain from indicting God. We simply trust that God is bigger than our biggest moment of tragic suffering.

Astute readers of Scripture will note that Jesus quoted Psalm 22:1 while on the cross. Some assume he was framing his suffering in the faith of the Psalmist because it reads like a prophecy to the cross. It also ends with hope, and the very next Psalm proclaim the faith of following the Good Shepherd (Ps. 23). But something else is at work too. As Jesus utters these words from the cross, it’s the only time in the New Testament where he refers to his Father as God. Even more so, Jesus personalizes his relationship with God by crying out, “My God, My God” (emphasis mine). The closeness and intimacy Jesus had with his Father is evident even in the most difficult, tragic and unjust moment in humanity’s history. Instead of focusing on “forsaken,” we should focus on his intimate relationship with God. He’s not just anybody’s God, he’s “my God.”

So we ask the question, “Where are you, God?” and in his silence we beg for an answer.

But God is far from silent. In the midst of a tornado, sickness, fear, forsakenness and death, God speaks. He provides an answer. He offers the answer. As we gaze upon the Golgotha hill, we watch Jesus suffering from the cross. For in the midst of his faithful suffering we find our answer. The God of the universe, who reigns above all, is suffering with us.

Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e. only God is glorified!)

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Finding Mercy in the Wake of Justice

When Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980, my dad believed it was punishment from God for the sins of America. He never quite told me what sins America had committed that would unleash the fury of God, though looking back on it I can imagine the sins. Twenty-five years later, when Katrina hit the gulf coast, I heard the same statements coming from multiple sources, only louder. This time, though, the storm came on the heels of 9-11, and numerous people connected the dots to the conclusion: God was punishing America for their sins. Recently, with the fires in the Northwest and hurricanes in Texas and Florida, the voice of doom has been heard again, “God is punishing America for her sins!”

Retributive Theology is the belief that when something bad happens, it’s because of sin and the result is God’s punishment. It’s the kind of thinking being drawn from when people, like my father, associate the natural disasters with God’s punishment. The belief is rooted in stories like the flood (Gen. 6), where God destroys the entire world because of the people’s sin. Or when God uses Israel as punishment to evict the Canaanites from their homes because of their grave sins (Gen. 15:16). 

The story of Job is a story rooted in Retributive Theology, and all the players were driven by the belief that God was punishing Job for the sins he committed. The difference between Job and his three friends (Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar) was that Job kept trying to defend his righteousness while his friends condemned him for his unrighteousness. Job might say, “I’ve done nothing to deserve this punishment from God” (see 6:24-29; 9:17-18; 13:15). His friends might counter with, “God only punishes the wicked, thus you’ve done something wrong” (see 4:7-10; 5:17; 8:2-6; 11:5-6, 10-11). The problem, of course, is that we know from the opening pages of Job’s story that he’s not being punished for wrongdoing, and that in the ending pages of Job he’s not only exonerated, but his friends must beg his forgiveness for speaking out of turn, an important fact often ignored.    

Beyond the fact that we live in a fallen world where bad things naturally happen, two points are worth highlighting. First, God’s answer to pain, suffering, sin, and rebellion is not fires and floods, but the cross.  God’s purpose for the cross was to redeem and save mankind, not to condemn us (Jn. 3:16). One could argue that if God is punishing people by way of flooding and fires, then God is devaluing the reason for sending his Son in the first place. I wouldn’t want to take the attention off the cross, but we might want to try and figure-out how to keep the cross front and center to his message. With the cross central to our faith, we might find ourselves more compassionate with the victims of the disaster instead of more condemning. 

Secondly, if God is punishing the people with fires and floods, then what is the appropriate response? When Jesus told the parable of the talents (Mt. 25:14-30), the man with the one talent held a conviction about his master (he reaped what he did not sow).  The man’s response did not line up with his conviction about his master. The master confronted him, “If you held those convictions, then instead of burying my money you should have invested it in the bank.” He then called the servant lazy, and threw him out of his presence. If these disasters are punishment from God, then the response from the people is to repent. Those making the “punishment” claim should be the ones leading the charge in repentance by tearing their clothes, putting on sackcloth’s and ashes, or in our society, by coming forward on Sunday to confess their roles in the sins of our nation. Unfortunately, what I’m seeing is a whole lot of self-righteous finger pointing, and very little repentance. 

When the disciples saw a man born blind, they created a theological debate over the reason for man’s blindness (Jn. 9:1-3). Jesus refused to enter the blame game, and instead looked for mercy and compassion, while seeking a means for God to bring healing. Maybe we ought to start doing the same. 

Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e. Only God Is Glorified!)