Lama Sabachthani?

Do you have problems and challenges and personal issues that make you crawl?

I know I do.

I have some pretty good days. I have some not so good days. And the bad days can be really bad. Only God and my wife know exactly how bad. But even on the worst days, when I feel abandoned and alone, I know I’m not.

Jesus said this thing on the cross that is often quoted but not really thought through. He quoted King David from Psalm 22:1. He was claiming the words for his own life. He said, “"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

In a very real way, Jesus was experiencing the tortures of Hell in that moment. If Hell is anything, it is a place that is God forsaken. And the point of the cross was for Jesus to take things on himself so we wouldn’t have to have those things put on us. Things like the wrath and punishment of God. But, also, I think, is this thing about being forsaken.

We have every reason to feel forsaken sometimes. We do things wrong. We cling to sins. We make huge mistakes. We hurt the people we love. We do things and we can’t even figure out why we’re doing them half the time. And I think we realize that these things rob us of our innocence.

Or other people rob us of our innocence.

And we feel forsaken because that’s the feeling that goes with these things. Sin should cause God to turn his face away...

But...

If sin is taken care of – if what is broken is made whole – then there’s no reason for God to turn his face away. This is one of the reasons I trust Christ. Jesus has taken care of things. He took God’s wrath so I wouldn’t have to. He was forsaken by God so I wouldn’t have to be. He said he could do this and I believe him. I can accept that some people don’t want to believe him, but I do. And, because of this, no matter how I feel, I can know that I am not alone. I am not abandoned. I am not forgotten.

Ever.


Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2011

Sticks and Stones

Some of the people who have hurt me the most over the years are completely oblivious to it – people who treated me like I was more of an idea or a thing than a person. And there were times when what was the most painful about it was their ambivalence and ignorance. They were so wrapped up in themselves and what they wanted that they had no idea what they were doing to me. Or they didn’t care.

I’m not saying I’m any better. I know it must be true of me as well. I know I’ve done this to others, especially when I was younger. It’s a trait of the immature and the self centered. And you’d think people would grow out of it, but some don’t. It’s so easy to objectify people in the pursuit of our own desires. We care about causes. We care about ourselves. We care about injustice and religion and politics. But all of those things become sticks and stones for hurting others if we don’t genuinely care about people like we should.

I’m saddened by the fact that, in my weaknesses and my inability, I fail to care for some of these people like I should. Like I want to. People I care about. People who might not even want to, but they will hurt me with their thrashing through life.

So you learn. You learn that sometimes it doesn’t much matter what you say and do, certain people are not going to listen to you. They aren’t going to take any lessons from you. You learn sometimes that you are not the person who is going to be an agent of change in their life. And, despite what you may have been told, meaningful relationships are about how we change one another. If your friendships, your relationships, don’t involve good, healthy change in your life and in the lives of the people you are connected with, then those aren’t relationships. They’re acquaintances. If you aren’t growing in kindness and compassion and peace through your relationships, then something is wrong.

The reality is, like it or not, there are some people you could love perfectly, if that were possible, and it still wouldn’t be enough because they’re too busy loving themselves or hating themselves or taking care of themselves or making sure they have what they want, or what they think they need. There’s no room left for you in their life. You can come or go, they don't really care. You're of no use to them except, maybe, as a punching bag. And they will hurt you over and over again if you let them.

Sometimes it isn’t a question of forgiveness. It’s a question of survival.


Luke 23:34
Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2011

Believe It Or Not

This past summer we took our kids to the Smoky Mountains, and one of the things we did was go through the Ripley’s “Believe It Or Not” museum in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. It was totally cool, including my favorite: a three dimensional holographic projection of Mr. Ripley himself, talking to you from inside a small room. Very amazing.

I don’t know about you, but I feel a certain kinship with the oddities of the Ripley Museum. Maybe you’re completely normal and everything, with no idea what I mean by this, but I have my own list of Ripley’s type things in my own personal life. Do you? Unusual things that are true, believe it or not? Here are some of mine:

1. BOY RUN OVER BY BUS, LIVES TO TELL THE TALE...

I have been run over by a bus. Seriously. I wrote about this under the post: “The Boy & the Bus.” (Go read it if you dare. It’s archived under March 2010.) Thing is, about 10 years later, I was just barely kept from being run over by a bus a second time by a friend who pulled me out of the way at the last second. I was not paying attention. You’d think I would have been a little more careful after my previous experiences.

2. BOY ACTUALLY ALLERGIC TO SUN...

When I was a kid I had a fairly rare problem with “photosensitivity.” I would have an allergic reaction (severe, painful itching) after getting sunburned. The first time I had a reaction was after a day at the beach. I had a very mild sunburn that any normal person wouldn’t have paid any attention to. But a few days later, I was sitting in church and I thought someone was poking me in the back with needles while I wasn’t looking. Thing was, no one was sitting behind me. It freaked me out, and it didn’t stop. It began to spread, and the intensity of the pain kept increasing until I ended up running into the church basement where I was found a little later writhing incoherently on the floor with pain and madness. (I would have rather died than interrupt the church service, ya know.) I think my parents thought I had lost my mind, or maybe I was possessed, which would have been very embarrassing, considering we were at church. But, being raised Baptist instead of Pentecostal, they didn’t try to exorcise me. Instead, they rushed me to the hospital where I was diagnosed and covered with cloths that were coated with the miracles of modern medicine. They informed me that I am allergic to the sun, which put me off a life of being a beach bum. (And just kidding about the Pentecostal thing. Sort of.)

3. THE EERIE SYNCHRONICITY OF TWO DAVES...

One of my best friends is named Dave. My name is Dave. When we first met, long after High school, we discovered that Dave and I both graduated from the same High School about 5 or 6 years apart. We also discovered that we both have wives named “Sue,” and both of our wives were occupational therapists. On top of these startling coincidences, we both had dogs named “Buddy,” who are since then both dead, and we were both involved over the years in church work. (I know, it’s like that whole Lincoln/Kennedy thing.) And it’s also true that my buddy Dave is thin, healthy, energetic and smart. Which is, unfortunately, where the similarities end.

All of these things are 100% true, I’m pretty sure. Almost and completely entirely.

Believe it or not.


Ecclesiastes 1:9
Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2010

Laugh

My six year old daughter was getting dressed to go play at her grandmother’s house. Normal summer clothes and such. When she finished, she put on this clear, thin, shower cap thing. I have no idea where she got it from, but she was determined to get all of her hair up into it, so I helped her. Finally, I thought to ask...

Me: Why do you want to wear that thing?

Her (very seriously): I want to be the lunch lady.

Slight pause. Then we both laughed hysterically. Which I find myself doing a lot with her. She says things, she seems serious, but then we lock eyes and we realize it’s funny and we laugh. I don’t even know why it was funny. It just was.

Maybe you had to be there.

I don’t laugh as much as I used to, and I miss it. I’ve been made a more serious person by the responsibilities I’ve embraced and the experiences I’ve endured. I’ve seen hard things, witnessed moments of death and the heart breaking struggle of disillusionment and powerlessness in people’s lives. I’ve been victimized by people who dehumanize me for their own selfish reasons while they wallow in self righteousness. I’ve shared in the deep mourning of those who have suffered great loss, and I’ve suffered great loss myself.

Such is life.

But because of all these things, laughter is a greater treasure to me now than it’s ever been before. I really value it. But it’s hard to figure what will bring it on. You never know when it’s going to sneak up on you, and it’s quick to go hide again.

I don’t live for it, but I do hope to make people laugh. On a regular basis. They can laugh with me or even at me (sometimes). Maybe I can help them to laugh at themselves when it’s needed. But I want to laugh with the freedom of a six year old. I want to laugh with others at the nuttiness of life as we try to cope in a broken world. I think that as long as we laugh without arrogance or cruelty, it can be a healing thing.



Psalm 126:2; Ecclesiastes 3:4
Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2010

A Father's Torture

One of my daughters cut her finger the other day. She was using the apple cutter without permission and she took a little chunk out of one of her thumbs. It’s a little chunk, but she has a very little thumb. So it was hurting pretty bad. As she cried there was a look of helplessness on her face. She covered her mouth with her hand, crying, “It hurts! It hurrrrts!” And so we stayed calm in order to calm her. We took care of her and helped her get through it. We compressed it and finally got it to stop bleeding. It wasn’t stitch worthy, but it was close.

Even with something this small, it absolutely breaks my heart. I HATE seeing my children in pain. Of course I do. Any good parent does. It upsets me physically and emotionally to see them hurting. But you keep yourself calm and do everything you can to help them through it when it happens.

One of my other kids, a few years ago, ended up with a big cut on her forehead. It happened at an activity she was at. And it was WAY stitch worthy. It hurt you to look at it. So we drove her up to the after hours clinic to get it taken care of. And it still makes me cringe to think about it. It was so painful for her. (I was just trying to describe what they had to do and it’s making me upset, so I deleted it. You can just imagine for yourself.) But there wasn’t much we could do. I held her hand. I struggled with the anger I felt simply because my child was hurt. But we had to try and keep her calm while the doctor did his thing.

Sometimes, when this kind of thing is going on, my kids start saying, “Please Daddy! Please Daddy!” And what they are asking, with those two words, is for me to make the pain stop. Make it go away. Make things back how they were before the hurt started. And I would if I could, but I can’t.

And it’s like torture...

Which makes me think about God the Father looking at God the Son as the Son hung on the cross. I can’t help thinking about this. Watching my children in pain always takes me to this. And in that situation, if the Father stopped the pain, it would have stopped the forgiveness and redemption. The Father did not offer comfort because the pain and suffering was needed for our sakes. So they endured it. And, I think, it was a torture.

Not just for the Son, but for the Father.






Hebrews 12:2-3
Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2010

I Could Run Like The Wind

I recently watched the movie, Forest Gump, and I had forgotten just how good this film is. Not only is it beautiful from a visual standpoint, it is profound in so many ways. I could do a blog just on this movie, but I won’t.

It’s amazing how skillfully this movie explores the distinctions between intelligence and wisdom and asks questions about predestination and free will. But I think the basic movement of the film comes from this idea: Forest may not be the most intelligent person, but he is an exceedingly wise person, at least most of the time. When he isn’t wise it’s because he’s too much like a child. It might be better to say that he’s a very wise child.

I was watching the part where Jenny comes home the first time, then sneaks away in the morning, leaving Forest without any explanation. There is an extended group of shots where the soundtrack goes dead silent. Forest is shown sitting in different parts of the house, trying to make sense of what she’s done, but it’s something he can’t make sense of. All he knows is that he’s hurting. Truly, he has been used in a painful way. Finally, the camera shows Forest sitting on his porch, thinking. Then the music begins to swell as Forest says something like, “All of a sudden, for no particular reason, I felt like running.”

And for the next umpteen minutes of the movie we get shots of Forest running across the country and back again, and I remember not really getting this part of the movie when it first came out. It seemed out of place. Even the humor in this section is much broader than the rest of the film. But if you think back to the beginning of the movie where some local punks throw rocks at Forest it makes sense. He’s hit with these rocks and Jenny yells at him, “Run, Forest, run!” So he does. He runs so hard that his braces fall off his legs and he gets away from the boys. He runs from them all through his childhood until it lands him a football scholarship. Later, Jenny tells him that when he gets to Vietnam he needs to run if people try to hurt him.

Jenny teaches him to get away from pain by running.

The reason he runs so long and hard after Jenny abandons him is that the pain of his life has finally caught up to him. The pain of his childhood. The pain of his war wounds and the death of his friend Bubba. The pain of mistreatment. The pain of his mother’s death. And finally, Jenny has given him the greatest pain of his life by using him and abandoning him without an explanation.

All of this pain, festering under the surface, pushes Forest to run for over three years, even though he doesn’t totally understand why he’s doing it. His pain is a silent motivator and running is the only thing he knows to do. But, finally, he says, “Momma always said you got to put the past behind you before you can move on. I think that’s what my running was all about.” So he stops running. He says, “I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll go home now.”

All that running would wear anybody out, don’t you think?






Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2010

Marathon

Last October, at the Detroit Free Press marathon, three different guys died within a fifteen to twenty minute period of time. This is not a typical thing. And they weren’t all old either. People did what they could to save them, but it didn’t work. Tragic.

When I read about this, all I could think was, “It could have been me.” I actually ran this marathon once. Well, “ran” is a bit extravagant.

Let me explain.

A friend of mine was a runner. He took it seriously and he was good at it. He ran all the time. He lost all kinds of weight and seemed more relaxed. And I observed with admiration. I was impressed with his dedication. I wanted to be that dedicated too.

Alas.

Then, one day, he told me he was going to run in the Detroit marathon. He was working hard for it. And I thought, hey, maybe I could do it too. I could start running and get ready. There was still time to prepare. And I meant to. I really did. I thought about it a lot. I even bought some new running shoes.

I went out running a few times. To be honest, it was more a kind of jogging with an intent look on my face. Around the block. And as the date kept getting closer, I thought, “It’s just a few miles. Old people are doing this run. I’m in pretty good shape. I’m not in it to win. How hard could it be?”

Did I mention that this marathon was over twenty miles long?

The day arrived. I went out there with my buddy and we ran. Well, he ran. He did great. Placed pretty high on the list of survivors. As for me, I ran for a bit, trying to keep up with the people around me, but that soon faded into a sort of half-hearted jogging motion, which progressively degraded into a painful lope.

Many, many people passed me by. The trained runners flew past in a blur. Others moved past more respectfully, but it still pained me. Then those old people passed me by. I think some guy on crutches passed me by, and then some infants, crawling, snickering as they went past. Squirrels made jokes at my expense from the sidewalks and trees. At one point it felt like someone was jabbing a knife into my side. But I kept going. I walked. I jogged. I tried to run. I walked. I loped. As fast as I could, I forged ahead.

It seemed like the run would never end. It went on and on and on. Hours and hours, I plodded forward. The whole way I was trying to figure out why I was doing it. I was in some serious pain. At times I was just barely walking. Then I’d get my whatever back and keep going. I almost quit several times, but I didn’t. I’m just not much for quitting. So I finished the race.

People have said, “Hey. That’s still pretty good. You finished the race!” But that is not a race I should have been in. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t do the work. You kind hearted people need to stop encouraging my foolishness.

I went home. At the time, in that moment, I was kind of proud of myself. After all, I had finished the race. I told my family about it, then went to lie down for a while. I was tired. I had every reason to be tired.

A few hours later, I woke up. Suddenly, I understood the meaning of the word “excruciating.” We get that word from the word “crucifixion.” Pain so bad that it feels like you’re being tortured. And that’s what it was like. My legs had seized up in paroxysms of pain. I didn’t just have a charley-horse, I was riding that horse. Throbbing, unbearable pain.

I screamed! I tried to get out of bed to find help from someone, anyone. Pathetically, I fell to the floor. My poor abused legs had gone on strike. They couldn’t support me. And why should they after what I had done to them? If they had any sense, they would just leave and never come back.

Thinking that someone must be murdering me, the family came running. Thank God. Literally. Someone started rubbing my legs. Someone gave me pills. I don’t know what they were. I would have swallowed a toad dipped in used chewing tobacco if someone had told me it would help. Anything to make the pain go away. A spinal tap would have been good.

Finally. Finally. The pain started to let up. It didn’t go away fast. It took a while. My legs hurt for days. I still have flashbacks. I get the sweats when I walk past athletic shoe stores.

It was so stupid. But I learned. Running a race, any kind of race, takes preparation. Sometimes you can finish without it, but there’s a price to pay.




1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2010