Called, part I

“….There’s a war inside of me

between who I want to be

and who I am…”              –Todd Agnew

That’s just the chorus from the song, because it was the part that resonates with me the most.  I was thinking about it last night after I got done talking to Jenny.  Sometimes she really just gets me thinking about things (which is good.  I have been known to think from time to time).  And she humbles me with her faithfulness.

What I was thinking about last night is that I have this really detailed picture of who I want to be in my head.  In the picture, I am so very strong in my faith, and discipleship, and my prayer life is regular, and powerful.  I am a great steward of my finances, and I tithe diligently and faithfully.  I get through my list of prayers daily.  I am a good worker, and will be a good husband, and father.

But that is not always who I am.

The reality is that I am not a tidy package of faith like the person above.  I want to be all those things.

I want to be.

But that is not always who I am.

I am messy, not tidy.  Sometimes my discipleship is weak.  Sometimes–maybe even most times–I am not a good steward of my money, and I do not tithe as I should.  Sometimes I do not pray all the prayers I should, or at all, really.

Sometimes I feel like my faith is not strong enough.

Sometimes I feel like I am not in a state of Grace at all, and I don’t know what to do about it when those feelings come.   

And that is the battle.

How do I become the person I want to be?

Good question.  As far as my discipleship goes, I need to throw myself into the Word, and into God.  I need to chase after Him with all my might

                        “like a deer pants for water…”

I need to truly seek Him, and that’s when I will find Him.  I need to just BE a better steward, and stop talking about it.  I need to give first, and trust God to take care of everything else. I can’t afford to?  I can’t afford NOT to….

I need to set aside more time for prayer.  I need to pray before I do anything else–before I get out of bed, and before I sleep.  If that means I get up at 430 instead of 5, then that is what I will have to do.  I need to trust all of my heart to the Lord, and trust that He will take care of both me and my family.  I need to fight for Him, and fight for them, and the way I do that is to pray.

Pray.

Pray….

That has to come first.  It’s the best way to fight.

And the truth is, Jesus did not call tidy packages of faith to Him.  He called messy people, who were sometimes timid in their faith.  He called fisherman, and tax collectors, and whores.

He called regular people whereever he went, not Pharisees, to walk at his side.

Regular people.

And He’s calling me.  Whether or not I fall into step with Him is entirely up to me.

I am not a tidy package of faithfulness, and I never will be.  I will not always make the best decisions.  I will not always be the best person I can be.  And there will always be struggles.

But still God calls, even with all that.

He calls to me in my messiness, in my inconsistent discipleship, and weak devotional life.

He calls….

Rebuilt

Sometimes I get pretty frustrated with the progress I’m making–or perhaps more accurately, with the slowness of it.  I want to be happy, edified, and healed.  I want to have a good job, a home, and a family. 

I want to be rebuilt.

It’s just taking so darn long.  But I suppose I should not be surprised.  It took a lifetime to make me the person I am today, and while God certainly could change me instantaneously into the person he made me to be, then I would miss a lot.

I would miss the journey.  I would miss learning, and impatient as I am, that is something I very much need to do.  But when I think about where I was, vs where I am today, I can see that God truly has wrought a miracle in my life.

where I was:

20 years, relatively speaking, is not that long of a time.  But 20 years ago, while I was young, I was not strong.  I think that was actually when I really began my downward spiral in earnest.  I would hole up in my small apartment, and I would literally stare at the freaking walls sometimes.  It got to the point where I didn’t want to look at just the navajo white paint anymore, so I covered them with movie posters.  Not for your everyday movies, mind you, but for what I liked to call “splatter” movies.  The gorier the better.

I had posters for zombie movies, slasher movies, vampire movies.  Some were campy looking, but many  featured a strong, supernatural element, and some were downright scary.

It was better than looking at paint.

I hardly ever left my apartment, except to go to work.  I had this one friend at the pizza place where I worked, and he would come over sometimes and we would listen to music, and talk about how much the world sucked.  I think it was Travis that first introduced me to death metal.  Bands like Cannibal Corpse, Obituary, Sepultura, and Napalm Death.

I liked listening to that stuff–it was so ridiculously graphic.  It was like watching one of the movies whose posters covered my walls.

Travis did not do drugs, and neither did I.  Never got into them, never even tried them, actually.  Instead, we would listen to metal, and with some of the CDs, would really get into the stories they depicted.  Sometimes, we would be kicking back listening, maybe having some junk food, and the next thing I knew, hours would go by.

I think that was the closest I ever came to feeling totally lost.

But God reached out to me in that place.  It would be years before I would reach out to Him in return, but he sent people to me that would lift me up, with prayer, and friendship, and love.  One or two people at a time.  Some I got to know very well, and some hardly at all.  But I began to realize I did not have to sit in darkness. 

I began to realize there was light, and people like

Annmarie (the first person to really love me as I was, though just as friend)

Holly (the first person who told me she loved me that I believed)

Teresa (literally dragged me out of my apartment on many occasions)

Johnny (would not take my “no” for an answer. I hope he’s well)

Sherry (talked to me for hours when I was at my worst.  My first real adult friend)

and Mike made me realize over time that there was hope.  It wasn’t all dark, or it didn’t have to be.  It was up to me how much light I let in. 

 Mike in particular made a big impact, and he was really just an acquaintance and coworker more than anything else.  One time he said “thank God” about something.  I remarked that God had not done a hell of a lot for me.

“He’s done more than you realize,” Mike said.  I thought about that for weeks afterward, and while it seemed like a load of crap then, I would still think about his words from time to time after we stopped working together.

More than I realize?  What did he know about anything?  I realized what God had NOT done, certainly.

What didn’t I realize?  You know the funny thing about Mike? 

He was right. 

I wonder what he’s doing now? 

And the first thing that happened was that I got rid of all the posters.  Not because they were affecting me (at least I didn’t think so), but because of how they made me think.  I did not realize how old thinking dark, violent thoughts had gotten.

And the second thing to go was the death metal.  It was not healthy–and even before I had Christ in my life, I was able to realize this.  It was maybe even worse than staring at gory posters all the time.  I had to use my imagination, and I had a lot of imagination.

Light began to creep into my life, little by little, person by person.  It took a long time after that before I found Jesus, but it’s hard to reconcile that person with all the gross posters on his walls, and all the darkness in his heart with the way I feel today.  I really had no idea what a bleak place I was in back then, right out of high school, and into my twenties.  I had no idea how depressed I really was.  I did not realize that what I was really doing was just waiting for the next thing to happen.

Waiting to die.  It was just the next thing.

But Jesus reached down into the dark well of my life and pulled me out of it.  He did it by his might, but also through the Grace and love of people on earth, that were able to show me his love in a practical and real way.  He did it by introducing people into my life that had been where I was.  People I could relate to.

People who could feel my pain.

And that made all the difference.  I hope to do that for someone, someday.

The main thing that’s different now from then is that I have hope running through me, and it seems as if a new blessing is introduced into my life nearly every day.  It’s so strange to have hope when all you grew up with was despair. 

Hope.  4 letters. H-O-P-E.

A small word, but so huge with resonance and meaning.  Because I have God in my life, and Jesus in my heart, I no longer am subject to that despair that once owned me.  I don’t need to withdraw into a dark place when I feel the world weighing on me.  And actually, for the most part, it doesn’t anymore. 

The world, after all, is not what is important.  Like the song says, the things of earth grow strangely dim.

I am being rebuilt, and it is a process.  A lifelong process, from what I’m told, and what I’ve been made to know by God.  And that’s OK.

I have time.

Many things have happened in my life since God entered it–since I asked him to.  I have found wonderful friends, and a great church.  A good job, and a healthy family.  And I have found love, or perhaps more accurately, it found me.

But hope was first. 

I needed to know it was out there.  I needed to know that God was out there, and had plans to prosper me, and not to harm me.  Plans to give me hope, and a future….

2 Corinthians 5:17

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!

I got stuck on this verse.  Well, maybe not stuck, but I could not stop thinking about it. Most days, I don’t feel like a new creation.  Most days I feel all crudded up by life.  By sin.

For me, part of becoming a Christian, maybe even the largest part, was being made aware of my sin.  Prior to that awareness–that awakening, I thought I was golden because I was a pretty good guy.  I was nice to old people and animals.  I didn’t do any drugs, I didn’t fool around.  I hadn’t had the same kind of big, dramatic experiences I heard people talk about over the years, no twelve step programs, no prison, never been to war.  I should be good, shouldn’t I?  Nothing to worry about?

I went for years thinking along those lines….years.

But when I had that experience at the river, when I became aware that I had in fact been (and remained) a sinner, when I asked Jesus to take that burden from me, I was still aware of the person I had been afterward, even though I wasn’t entirely him anymore.

So even though I knew in my head that I was made new, I did not necessarily feel that way.  I still don’t.

But here’s the thing I’ve been trying to think about, and remember.

6You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  Romans 5: 6-8

So even before I knew him, even while I was still wallowing in my filth, even while I consoled myself with huge quantities of food, or alcohol, or empty relationships, God loved me just as much in that state of disgrace as he does now in a state of grace.

Before I existed, He died for me.  And whether I like it or not, whether I accept it or not, I am a new creation.

The old has gone, the new has come.

I was listening to this Brennan Manning sermon the other day, and he had a really good point.  He said that until we can accept acceptance, we aren’t really a believer.  I think part of my problem is that very thing: it’s hard for me to be accepted.  I would convince myself that either my friends did not really accept me as I was, or if they did, once they found out the real me, they would bail like everyone else did.

It was much the same with God.  I have always had difficulty accepting His acceptance, and His love.  No, I don’t deserve it. 

The wages of sin is death.

But I have it anyway–I have his acceptance.  And even if I had not ever seen Him as he desires to be seen, and accepted Him as abba, I would still have his love.

8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

He died for us.

He died for us.

He died for me.

I am not worthy of Him, nor would anything I could do on earth make me worthier.

Yet I am loved, and because of Jesus, have a place in his kingdom.

Imagine that.

Anyway, I plan to work on being a new creation….and trying to see myself the way God sees me.

I think of a pearl, lying in a freshly opened oyster, or whatever mollusk pearls come from.  All crudded up with sediment, and filth, and layers of built up….junk.

Jesus removes the impure jewel from its shell, resplendent in its rough beauty, dripping with water, tendrils of slime leading back to the shell. He holds it in his hand, ignoring the slime, and layer by layer, peels away the filth, grime, and sediment, until the thing in his hand is no longer rough, but shining. 

A pearl of great price.

Why me?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately (I know, I know.  Evidence points to the contrary).  I’ve just been feeling so blessed.  Blessed with a healthy relationship, with a good job, with great friends, an affordable place to live.

Blessed with so much.

And then I was talking with Jenny the other night and the thought popped into my head

                    –what had I done to deserve this?

Why me?

Why should I be blessed, when so many other people–some of whom I even know–are beset on all sides by tragedy, and trials?

I think the answer is that I shouldn’t be blessed.  Probably none of us should.  Because

           “no one is worthy, no not one….”

So why me?

I think I can answer that in a single word:

Compassion.  God has compassion for me.

I used to hear that word and I would think of Sally Struthers, trying to raise money for hungry African children.  I would think of missionaries.  I would think of Mother Theresa, and others like her.  I would think of kindness.  I would think of people in Soup Kitchens and other missions across the country and the world.  I would think of nice people, doing nice things, for good motives.

But I would never really think about what the word meant, really meant.  I never even looked it up, because I thought I knew.  And then I was listening to this Brennan Manning sermon.  And one of the things he brought up was the Greek word for compassion,

                                               Splagchnizomai

It’s not such a kind and gentle translation. 

“It is usually translated “to have compassion or pity”, but these are only approximate translations. Splagchnizomai literally means a movement in the bowels (in the sense of the innermost parts). Karl Barth comments, “The term obviously defies adequate translation. What it means is that the suffering and sin and abandonment and peril of these men not merely went to the heart of Jesus but right into His heart, into Himself, so that their whole plight was now His own, and as such He saw and suffered it far more keenly than they did. esplagcnisyh means that

He took their misery upon Himself, taking it away from them and making it His own.(emphasis added)”

Jesus did not just sympathetically identify with the pain of others, he actually, empathetically, experienced their pain and sickness as His own. Their pain became his pain. Jesus did not heal them with an act of almighty power. He healed them by taking their sickness from them and into Himself.”

That, my friends, is compassion. 

And then I think of John 3:16.  “For God so loved the world.”

And then I think of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, and over us.

And then I think of a exhausted, horribly injured, bleeding, thirsty, and dying man walking up a hill with a large beam of wood across his shoulders because of love.

And then I know why me?

Love.

Love is why me.

Love is why I’m blessed, and why I do my best to be faithful.

                   

Tired of rhetoric

So I watched only a part of the Presidential debate last night, but it was enough to get me a little ticked off.  I didn’t see enough to form an opinion as to who may have won, but did see enough to realize I am good and tired of rhetoric.

I know there is a financial

                           housing

                           mortgage

                           gasoline

                           healthcare

                           welfare

                           employment                crisis.

What is to be done?

it was said someone would raise taxes.

                          Which ones?  How much? For whom?

it was said someone would lower taxes.

                           Which ones? How much? For whom?

It was said McCain spent wantonly.

                             On what?

It was said Obama did, too.

                            Same thing.

It was said CHANGE was needed (which was agreed on by both candidates).

                            Both promised to deliver, but Obama did not (to my knowledge) specify the nature of the change he promised to deliver, or how he would deliver it.

I’m no political scientist, but isn’t that a little bit like telling a bill collector the check is in the mail?  I’ll pay you, I will.  You should have it any day now.

How much is the check you sent?

–It will take care of my debt.

Then what?  What will ensure the same debt will not happen again?

I heard Obama said we should not have sent troops to a country that had nothing to do with what happened on 9/11.  Does that make what was happening in that country any less wrong?  And those people any less worthy of life without oppression, without being gassed, shot, and otherwise murdered by their own leader?

Apparently not.  Let them die, I guess.  Saddam Hussein did not fly a plane into the twin towers, nor tell anyone to.

I think that ticked me off more than anything.

Of course, I am not naive enough to believe that either of the candidates had (or have) all the answers.  Neither one of them answered with what seemed to be complete specificity.  Neither one of them is perfect.

But I have to say I do not support Obama.

A very good friend (as I mentioned before) described him as hollow.  I believe that to be true.  And after further reflection, how can I, as an American, support socialized medicine?  How can that be the answer to the healthcare crisis?

How can simply repeating the matra “CHANGE” and making vague promises about how to facilitate it solve ANYTHING?

the answer is it can’t….

and it makes my decision all that much easier.

Calico Dragon

I saw this cartoon when I was a kid, and it stuck in my head, for some reason. Every now and again, a picture from it will just sort of float up in my mind, like that little envelope that comes up on my office Outlook when I get an email.

I don’t remember if it was a Looney Tunes cartoon, or something else. I don’t remember if it was one of the musical variety, or the more traditional slapstick kind. I just remember this one character–it was a stuffed looking dragon made from many different colored fabrics, and rather haphazardly stitched together (that’s the way I remember it, anyway). In the cartoon, I think it was called a “calico dragon.”

I was thinking about that last night for some reason. I remember the tongue on the thing flicking out, and thinking the dragon was not frightening, or really even funny–just ridiculous looking. And it occurred to me that I sometimes feel like that stupid stitched together collection of fabric pieces, or at least see myself that way. The dragon in the cartoon did not really seem to fit together the way it was supposed to.

And that’s how I’ve felt in the past, up until fairly recently.

Like I was not stitched together the way I was supposed to be. Like the stitches I did have holding me together were not strong, and I never really felt like I could trust the thread.

Like the pieces of my fabric were too many and too varied to really even make sense together.

Like they could never really fit, not matter how I stitched them.

And I was right.

And that was the problem.

I had always done the stitching. I had always tried to sew up the tears and rents in my fabric. I had taken the thread from wherever I could find it.

But the truth was that I could never fix myself, no matter how much I tried. I could never stitch up the rents and tears in my fabric. I could never connect the pieces of my fabric together in a way that made sense to anyone, least of all myself.

I could not do it myself.

I don’t know if that dragon in the cartoon tried to patch himself together, but when I recall it in my mind, that’s how I see it.

And that’s how I saw myself. Many tattered pieces held together with fine, gossamer thread.

Weak thread.

I needed a thread that was stronger. I NEED a thread that is stronger. And the best part of it, the One doing the sewing will accept me whether or not my pieces are tightly knitted together. Yet He wants desperately to stitch me back up. And Once I accept him as Tailor, once I allow him to hold the pieces of my life separately, work them through his hands, and bind them together with the thread of life, then piece by piece, my mending will begin. That was, and sometimes remains, very hard for me to see, or remember.

And last night, when I heard the men in my group talking about parents, and some of the wounds they’d received from them (and the healing of those wounds for some), I thought of that calico dragon from my childhood. I could see him very clearly.

And remembered he was me. But slightly different. While some of the patches were still ragged, and barely held together, others were bound tightly, with bright shining thread. And while the colors still did not match, the way those pieces fit together made sense. And I was able to perceive with a little more clarity that my mending had indeed begun–had in fact been underway for some time, based on the amount of stitches.

none of this probably makes sense to anyone but me, but I suppose me is who I’m writing this for, anyway.

And God.

And to gather what remains of my thoughts….

Backyard blessings

I was out in the backyard this morning with Sumo while he was doing his business, and I was thinking about love.  Not just romantic love (though that at last has become part of my life again), but love.  I used to think about it solely in romantic terms, but now that I have that in my life, it’s like it freed me to consider love in the way it was actually created.

I thought about how Jesus was actually the greatest manifestation of love that has ever existed–or ever will.

Consider John 3:16.  “For God so loved the world…”

God loved us enough to do that.  And not just for the people that loved Him, but for those that did not as well.

Especially for them.

He sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for them.

I thought about Abraham, and his unwavering obedience.  Walking up that hill to sacrifice his son, not wanting to, but willing to, able to.

                                     Sacrificing his son.

His son was spared, but God’s was not.  He, too, went willingly up a hill.  You see paintings or images of Jesus all the time, walking the via dolorosa.  You sometimes see stations of the cross (if you’re a Catholic, mostly).  You see Jesus with a wooden beam balanced across his shoulders as  He walks.  Sometimes, even a whole cross.  But the Jesus usually represented in these images, is whole, and hale, and were it not for the crown of thorns you would probably not even be able to recognize Him for who he was. 

 But by the time Jesus climbed the hill to Golgotha, he was battered, and scarred, and bloody, and in pain.  He was near His end in more ways than one.

It was not pretty, nor should it ever be represented that way.

I read somewhere that when the Romans were going to flog someone to death, the punishment was 40 lashes (someone had deemed that enough to kill).  Jesus was to be flogged nearly to death, but…not….quite.

                                             39 lashes, supposedly.

No way to prove this, of course, but the word does mention how badly Jesus was beaten.

                                                          39 lashes.

In “Blood on my hands,” Todd Agnew sings

                                       “each crack of that whip was for my mistakes…”

Mine, too.  But Jesus loved me (and loves me) enough to choose to be beaten, and whipped.  To have thorns twisted onto his head.  To have nails driven into his limbs, on my behalf.  He loved me then, two thousand years before I even existed.

                                                     He loves me still.

I was thinking about that when I was in the backyard this morning with my dog.  I was thinking about what it felt like to be loved.  It feels pretty good.  I have someone in my life now that has only been there for a short while, but she loves me.

And there is someone else that has always been in my life, and loved me even before I knew it was possible to know him intimately, passionately, and with all my heart.

I am loved.

Loved.

It feels amazing.

All things to all people

This is a blog by Todd Agnew. He’s an awesome blues/rock/gospel/worship/praise artist, in case some of you didn’t know:

 

“For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.” 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 (ESV)

Seeing as how the same thought has come up twice this week in completely unrelated circumstances, I think it may be of some value to share it with you. One instance was being in the van driving back from our shows listening to a sermon from my church. But that’s where you expect to hear from God and learn what He desires from you. The second instance was listening to a concert by a band that as far as I know doesn’t know God at all. They may, and that’s not really the point. The point is that it was a very different environment to be hearing from the Lord.

Now I’ve noticed that in our churches most of the time we want people to be like us. We may say we want to be welcoming to all races, but what we really mean is we’re going to do church like white people but anyone else is welcome to attend. Or we’re going to do church like black people, but you’re welcome to come. Or we’re going to do church like Hispanic people but you’re welcome. We have an upper middle class service but people from a lower income bracket are invited, should anyone happen to run into one. Now while I’m sure that is a step in the right direction, considering the stories I’ve heard of segregation in generations before, I don’t think it was what Paul was talking about in 1 Corinthians 9.

I think I first noticed it in worship music. Obviously that is my field of strength so I pay attention to it. I noticed among many churches I was working with that they were starting to say they wanted to reach people of all ethnic backgrounds. And yet their services didn’t change at all. They may have invited people from other cultures, but hadn’t done anything to actually make them feel welcome once they arrived. Once again, the music stood out to me. A church I knew said they wanted to start reaching the African-American community surrounding the church, but musically they stuck with an entire roster of Passion songs. Now don’t get me wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with those songs. But they have definitely defined a generation. All I’m saying is in the middle of their set, why don’t they work in a gospel number? Or even a soul or hip-hop track? These visitors’ opinions on music are just as valid as ours. And Paul says he became like the people he was trying to reach. Not after he knew them, but in order to know them. So it seems to me that if we wanted to reach other ethnic groups that we should value their culture, their music, their heritage, and include them in our own.

So here is the example I wrote about. This weekend I attended the Austin City Limits Festival, which I will blog about in the days to come. On Sunday, we went to church and then hurried over to the festival grounds to make sure we got our spot for Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet. Abigail is a singer and a banjo player. The rest of the group included a violin (fiddle, if you will), cello, and another banjo. Of course, the OTHER banjo player was Bela Fleck, which only means something to music fans, but he’s amazing. So anyway, these guys (and girl) were incredible. Their instrumentations and arrangements were so creative. The songs were beautiful. And the musicianship was exquisite. I’m sorry, I know it’s a weird word, but it’s really the only one that fits. So anyway, they told a story about touring China and having such success that they were invited to be the first American group to play in Tibet. And in their set, they played two Chinese folk songs. They said when they played one of them at a high school in Tibet, they had 3,000 high school kids singing along. And they didn’t just learn Chinese songs to tour China. They truly appreciated the art and the music of this place. They had a love and a passion for it. So they had worked up amazing arrangements of these songs, using the banjo, a very American instrument. God really spoke to my heart about these people and their story. They had prepared to reach a very different people group. But they hadn’t just done it to be a hit over there, they truly valued this other culture and its music.

So I began to wonder what it would be like if we, the church, approached reaching people in this way? What if we built churches that didn’t demand that people fit into our mold, but accepted them and not only accepted them, but valued them as they are? What if, in trying to reach different people, we became different ourselves? What if we included their musical styles? What if we altered preaching styles, sometimes? What if a protestant church was willing to include some liturgy? (Now you Episcopals back off, I’m obviously not talking to you! …now that’s a joke. I’m just kidding. But I also refuse to use LOL or smiley faces to define my humor.) What if we were willing to become like the people we were trying to reach? Now obviously this is not a question of holiness, or of the church becoming like the world. I don’t mean that at all. I don’t mean we should start using offensive music in our churches because that may be what lost people listen to. I just mean that maybe we should put our preferences aside and be willing to include other cultures in our values, not just in our verbage.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Todd