Hey everyone,
Five days from now is my first fund raising deadline. I need $3,500 and I am currently at $2,718. If you have not given yet or are still considering whether to give at all let me encourage you to invest not only in what is certainly going to be one of the greatest adventures of my life, but what is an opportunity for me to really learn about myself and what God wants me to do with my life. Already so many of you have blessed and encouraged me beyond anything I’ve expected. I trust that God will use many more of you to outshine my greatest expectations.
And it’s almost October! I bring it up because Autumn is, without a doubt, the best time of year in Minnesota. Grandeur hovers in the cool air and invites you outside where the sky is all kinds of blue and orange. Warm tea and comfy sweatshirts return along with a more civilized schedule and a subtle but definite increased enjoyment of reading. Finally a guy can get some contemplation done in peace.
To be honest, going on a mission trip like this kind of feels like throwing yourself into a rushing river – arms, legs, bags and all. I may lose everything, but it’ll be one heck-of-a-story. Certainly it’ll contain everything that makes a story great.
I love a great story. Some of the best I know include Peace Like a River (I’m reading it this fall again, for the umpteenth time), The Once and Future King, and The Hobbit (and The Lord of the Rings). Each story flows forward and carries you along with it to beautiful and dark places. They are poetic, funny, heavy at times, strong in underlying themes and at the end I feel illuminate. To me, a good story or painting should weave multiple ideas or themes together in a way that evokes truth. It communicates something much deeper than the words or lines that compose it.
How does your life compare to the great stories?
My own life feels like a puzzle. The pieces lay scattered before me and I have to fit them together. But how can I? I don’t have the box to depict how my puzzle should look when it’s complete. What am I to do? Can I join the shards together according to my own imagination? Or shall I leave them scattered?
Do you see my problem?
Life is a product, a picture, a book, an image that will reflect something. It’s not a random conglomerate of minutia, but a story meant for print. It is meant to relay a deeper truth. That is what I hope for in my life. I desire truth and harmony. But I look at the pieces and they don’t fit my vision. They include colors I don’t like and patterns more fitting a Jackson Pollock. I see discord, not harmony, and I lose hope. Maybe I’m just a broken mess, not a puzzle, not a story, not a melody.
Understanding truth begins with realizing how broken we are.
Maybe some of you can relate with me. Perhaps we wouldn’t feel this way if myths and stories didn’t say that life should be different. We have a sense that along with fracture and discord exists something called harmony and resolution. And we want to get at it. C. S. Lewis describe this feeling in Weight of Glory, “We do not want merely to see beauty…We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
How can we attain this beauty? Maybe you’ve tried to let beauty pass into you, and learned that what Lewis above describes is impossible. A glorious sunrise cannot be absorbed. It’s almost like beauty exists in an alternate dimension. We know of it, but cannot grab hold or fit it to our purposes. Life is the same way I think. It doesn’t matter how hard we try, all roads lead to Rome, or, in this case, Babylon. Fracture and disharmony is inescapable. Gravity knows us too well. It only has to wait. Soon, by curiosity or necessity, we look over the ledge and stumble, introducing our porcelain heart to the indurate floor of reality, whereupon the little surety or pride holding us together in the first place shatters.
Right?
And just like that our brimful vainglory spills out and the vessel of our heart becomes broken beyond repair. We’ve all experienced this, have we not? But little does the devil know, this is where light breaks in and showers us with healing truth that will change our life forever. For, walking in the darkness – reaching out to pick us up – is the LORD.
The reason he can make you whole is that he went through it all. He passed through all the processes that would normally break us, but he did it without succumbing. This man was perfect in every way, inside and out, but he was not just a man. His words and actions and heaven itself attest that he was divine. He was Jesus, one with the Father, and for a time he assumed the form of man.
He is the great healer.
His one purpose being to reconcile us to God, he chose to be shattered, as we are shattered. He became as one who had sinned, though he had not sinned, and paid the price of a sinner. He remained faithful to his friends, even when they betrayed him to die. He drank the bitter cup of sin meant for you and I.
Shards are beautiful to Jesus Christ. He has a knack for taking all the least expected pieces, the most ugly and malformed, and he slips them together wonderfully, making forms I’d never imagined possible. The end product is beautiful. With Him you are transformed. What you thought impossible is made possible.
Maybe you’ve accepted his sacrifice but haven’t really learned to trust in Him, maybe you once thought you loved Him but life’s cares and worries have swept you away, or maybe today is the first time you’ve realized your need for Christ. He can bring wholeness into your life and change your story. No longer will you be subject to the inevitable sadness that is the sign of humanity.
And you were dead in the trespasses and sin in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience – among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. For by Grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. – Ephesians 2:1-7
True story.
