Today I’ve been listening to Shawn McDonald’s new album Roots on NewReleaseTuesday.com.  One of the tracks is called Clarity.  Ahh, yes, I could use some clarity today.  The interviews I’ve been conducting haven’t been going all that great.  The list of the home-improvement projects that need to be done before things completely fall apart is endless (but the bank account and available time to complete them with are not).  Decisions need to be made in how to handle my various new responsibilities with my new job.  And then there is the issue of child rearing.  I’ve been reading a couple of books the last couple of evenings.  One refers to this process as training and the other as shepherding.  Both (along with some recent behaviors at home) make me seriously wonder if we’ve let some issues carry on too long to resolve them now.  It sure would be nice to have some clarity and directions in all these areas.  But as Indeed magazine reminded me this morning, it’s not as-if I’m in control anyway. 

I wonder if there is an actual medical “purpose” for scar tissue? I may have to ask my cousin’s (doctor) husband that some time. The Bible tells us that there is a purpose for the (emotional/spiritual) scar tissue of life’s wounds, so I suspect there is in physical scar tissue, as well.
All praise to the God and Father of our Master, Jesus the Messiah! Father of all mercy! God of all healing counsel! He comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us. (2 Corinthians 1:3-4 MSG)
I found this passage back in 2005 when I was grieving the loss of my wife and trying to make some sense of it all. There was a blessed young man who had lost his wife a few years prior who came alongside me during that time that helped me keep my head above water. I can’t imagine what I would have done without his shoulder to lean on. This week the passage came to mind again as I spoke to him again for the first time in a while and we both began to lend comfort to another young man who has found himself walking this dark road. It isn’t a short road. The wounds still hurt four years later, even after re-marrying. But the “Father of all mercy”, the “God of all healing counsel” has been faithful these four years. I pray that somehow He can use these scars for His glory.

On a recent business trip, a friend and co-worker loaned me a copy of Don Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz: Non-Religious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. I’m soon going to be getting myself a copy so that I can take a second read-through. That’s actually saying a lot about the book, because I have/take so little time to read anymore that for me to want to read your book twice is quite the accomplishment. After a second read, I think I’ll pass the book on to a dear friend of mine who I would love to see come to know the Lord. Try as I may, I’ve never been able to adequately convey to him my thoughts and beliefs, especially on weighty issues like Hell. So I was quite surprised by reading the description of Hell in Blue Like Jazz and found it to be as close to my own ideas on the subject as any I’ve ever seen.

The book starts out with this passage (which really hooked me):

“I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Baghdad Theatre one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes and he never opened his eyes.
After that I liked jazz music.
Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.
I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.”

The book isn’t about Jazz, but there are a few references to it like this memorable passage:

“I was watching BET one night, and they were interviewing a man about jazz music. He said jazz music was invented by the first generation out of slavery. I thought that was beautiful because, while it is music, it is very hard to put on paper; it is so much more a language of the soul … The first generation out of slavery invented jazz music. It is a music birthed out of freedom. And that is the closest thing I know to Christian spirituality. A music birthed out of freedom. Everybody sings their song the way they feel it, everybody closes their eyes and lifts up their hands.”
Instead the book is about how Christian spirituality fits into the “real world”. It’s about how to resolve in your own mind all those messy topics like denomination doctrinal differences, hypocrisy, and eternal damnation.

Speaking of which… I know some of my friends may be shocked/repulsed by the fact that I don’t believe Jesus spoke “King James” English or that every word in the KJV is a literal fact. Fact of the matter is that I happen to know that the KJV is a translation of the original which attempted to transpose all the original quotes of Christ (et. al) to synonymous words in a different language. In the same way, I believe that Jesus tried to translate spiritual/heavenly terms and concepts into terms and concepts that the people of his day could understand. That’s one of the reasons he was always telling stories and parables. One of the most awful places that the people of His day could imagine was the garbage dump (Gehenna) outside the gates of the city and beneath the hillside where the Romans crucified people (and where they often discarded their bodies). Here there were perpetual fires that never went out, worms, and pain/mourning/gnashing of teeth. I believe that Jesus was trying to convey to the people of His day that heaven was a literal place that they would go to after death if they were members of the Kingdom where they would enjoy the unending presence of God and all things good (a.k.a., the most wonderful place they could imagine, streets of gold and all that) and that hell was a literal place they would go to after death if they were not members of the Kingdom where they would suffer the unending absence/separation from God and all things good (a.k.a. Gehenna). Blue Like Jazz offers one such interpretation, and one of the best I’ve seen in modern language. It talks about an astronaut cast off from a space station explosion into orbit around the earth in a space suit that keeps him alive perpetually but no one comes to save him, no one talks to him, and even the beautiful sights of the earth and sun and stars are slowly and completely shut out by his hair growing throughout the decades and filling up his helmet until he his floating in complete darkness and isolation.

There are some days that I have to try really hard to remember why it is that I get out of bed in the morning; why I put one foot in front of the other. Usually days like that come when I’m exhausted. Since I spent well over half the night lying awake in bed deep in thought and back pain, this morning was just such a day. On days like this, I remind myself that God is still God and He is still sitting on His throne. After that, there isn’t much left to do but sing. Today, my daughter and I listened to “Hallelujahs” by Chris Rice over and over on the way to school and work:

A purple sky to close the day
I wade the surf where dolphins play
The taste of salt, the dance of waves
And my soul wells up with hallelujahs

Oh praise Him all His mighty works
There is no language where you can’t be heard
Your song goes out to all the earth
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah!
O hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah!

Today was full of reminders of the on-going work God has been working in me lately. It started with a devotional article by Chip Ingram in Indeed magazine entitled Always on the Altar: The Meaning of Ongoing Sacrifice in which Chip says “I’ve found that Christians today are fairly certain of what Jesus saves us from, but pretty vague on what Jesus saves us for. That discrepancy explains, at least in part, why we have a lot of Christianity in our country but relatively little Christian living–evidenced by the statistical similarities, morally and ethically, between the church and society in general. If we don’t understand what we are saved for, we’re likely to fall short of it every time.” Chip later continues: “A moment of expressing our intent to be a living sacrifice isn’t the same as being one. That’s why it’s so important to pray daily, to read God’s Word daily, to be accountable to others daily, and to encourage, exhort, and fellowshoip with one another daily–and to envision Jesus standing before you daily, listening to your very important question: ‘Lord, what do You want from me?’”

After exploring this topic in my Adult Bible Fellowship, along with the topic of being ready to follow God’s wisdom (in contrast to the world’s), I was deeply challenged by another reminder from a visiting preacher in the morning worship service. Prayer isn’t exactly my strongest of skills/gifts. In fact, it is one I struggle with a lot. I’m overwhelmed when I hear stories of specific and dramatic answers to other people’s prayers, but disheartened that so many of my most heart-felt and important prayers have not seen similar responses from God. For example, last week our church’s prayer chain was circulating requests for prayer for a woman in our church who was going through the same tests, treatments, and setbacks as my wife had gone through before her death. I feel silly to admit it, but I honestly wondered a time or two if she wasn’t worse off having me praying for her no better off than my prayers were answered (in my limited view) the last time I was praying for that condition. And so when Russ Shinpoch from Branson took the pulpit today to share with us Simple Steps to Changed Lives in a lesson about prayer, I was reminded that God really does want to hear from me — even in this area which I feel so weak in.

Being in the Lord’s presence today was an excellent way to start the week. It’s going to be a busy week at the office that is going to require a dramatic change of my normal workday routine, which in turn is going to make it difficult to work out at the gym or spend my usual time in devotions. Which makes me all the more thankful for these early-in-the-week reminders of what the Lord wants from me each day.