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

Life, the Three Stooges and Everything

I wonder sometimes if God is watching from on high, a little bored or something, and we make for some good entertainment.

We watch the Three Stooges. God watches us.

I’ve heard people (mostly women, but my daughters as well) say things about the Stooges over the years, things like: Why are they doing that? They’re not making any sense. That was kind of random and pointless, don’t you think? Why do they keep hitting and hurting each other? You don’t really think that’s funny do you?

These criticisms are fair. But it’s funny anyway. And in many ways, the Three Stooges are a perfect metaphor for the human race.

They are we.

I’m not talking serious theology here. Not really. It’s more about trying to get into the heart of God, which seems kind of inscrutable to me at times. But I imagine God watches us, and he gets tired of crying about it all the time. Wouldn’t you? There’s a lot to cry about, you know? The human race is very good at stupid. So, just from a love standpoint, it must get emotionally draining, all the heart break and sorrow. Even if it doesn’t make God “tired,” he probably still wants a rest from it all. Kind of like he rested on the Sabbath.

So I imagine God, turning the sound down on the earth, putting on a pot of whatever spiritual thing passes for coffee, and watching the chaos while humming the tune of Three Blind Mice.

He stops weeping, for a little while, and he laughs.


Psalm 2:4
Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2011

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

Kite

It was the month of March, and the principal of Edison Elementary announced that we would be having a kite flying contest the next day at recess. This caused immediate excitement among us kids. This was a big deal.

So I went home and told my mom, but there was a problem: My dad was at work and, the thing is, my dad was almost always at work. My dad worked all the time. He was hardly at home at that point in our lives. And mom didn’t drive. So I had no way to get a kite. What’s a boy to do?

Fortunately, I have a great mom.

We found some sticks, mom and me, and we made a kite. A very special kite. It was made out of my moms nylons, pulled over the sticks into a kite shape. And it was amazing. I tried it in the front yard and the thing was like a bird. It wanted to soar. It was extremely light weight and it caught the wind like a miracle . . . and I knew, I KNEW, I was going to win that competition the next day. Who needs one of those dumb store bought kites anyway?

The next morning I got ready for school and I literally had a smile in my heart. I’m not kidding, there’s no better way to describe it. All was right with the world as I got ready and took my kite out the door, headed for the bus stop. When I got there, the other kids weren’t sure what to make of my kite, but when they started to think about it, they realized it could work. I could be the king of the playground. It actually caused a little buzz on the bus as we drove to school.

When we arrived at school, everyone got up to get off the bus. Suddenly, the kids behind me started to push. They were just messing around. They weren’t thinking. It was normal kid stuff, but they pushed so hard that I couldn’t stop it and I fell forward into the kid in front of me, crushing my kite, breaking it into several pieces. It was completely destroyed.

My teacher tried to help me put it back together but it was useless. Nothing was going to fix it. It sat next to my desk, pathetic and hopeless.

I can remember, during recess, looking up in the sky at the other kites, floating above our heads all around the playground. All the colors. The wind moving gently through a perfect blue sky. It was beautiful. Everyone was having a great time.

Well. Almost everyone.

It’s a hard thing to feel joy and happiness passing you by, like a bus going to paradise, and there’s nothing you can do to make it stop and not leave you behind. It is a bitter thing to lose opportunity and hope, then have to stand watching others taste the joy you wished for but cannot have.

Sometimes I don’t know how we survive childhood without losing our minds. Seriously.

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

A good friend of mine has been grieving because his best friend committed suicide. My friend has been handling this in what I consider a heroic manner. But grieving can be hard because it’s so unpredictable. Grief does not always behave like you expect it to. It can do weird things to us.

Years ago, when I was 19 and still living at home, my parents were in the kitchen, making dinner or something, when the phone rang. My mom picked up the phone. I didn’t pay much attention until I heard her say...

“No.”

She said it quietly. It was disturbing. I dropped what I was doing in the next room and walked toward the kitchen. I saw her hand the phone to my dad. While he listened, his face started to change right in front of my eyes. In a moment it went from the face of a grown man to the face of a broken and hurt child. He said, “Alright.” But it wasn’t. He hung up the phone and collapsed into my mom’s arms, weeping. I have never before and never since seen my dad weep like this. Sobbing. Uncontrollable. It scared me.

Two of my dad’s sisters, living in Tennessee, had been driving to work. At some spot on the road, near a school, there had been some ice on the road. They collided with a semi truck and were killed instantly.

A good friend decided to drive me down to Tennessee for the funeral. We drove until we were passing out, then we stopped on the side of the road somewhere and slept in the car. We drove some more. We talked. We observed. We philosophized about life and death. Jack Kerouac would have been proud.

I was nervous about getting there.

When we arrived in Tennessee, I didn’t know how to feel. I think seeing my dad like that had messed me up. Knowing how my aunts had died, so violently, left me not knowing how to respond. Everything about how I felt seemed inappropriate and out of place. I laughed at things I shouldn’t have. I was unintentionally rude. I said things that were outright goofy, which I’m pretty good at regardless. But, more than usual, I was nervous and unsure about what to say to people. I didn’t know how to act. I just felt numb. And I didn’t shed a single tear. It was weird.

We got through it, then the friend took me and we detoured over to the Smoky Mountains for a day. Had a nice time. Headed on home.

Life went on. Time happened. Over a year went by.

I’m sitting in the car with my newish girlfriend. She would later become the wife. We’re talking about different things. Somehow the subject of my aunts and how they died comes up. I start to talk about the trip. I try to explain what I experienced. And, suddenly, I realize that I am broken and I fall apart. Sobbing. Uncontrollable. I wept for my dad and the family. I wept for my aunts. I wept from the center of my strange, inscrutable heart.

For some reason, finally, after all that time, I mourned.

I’ve learned over the years that the process of mourning can heal if we don't let it take possession of us. It can be like a demon, or it can be like a guide. You can let it control you or you can let it take you through the loss to a place of peace. Without mourning we would be emotionally destroyed by our broken world. But we can't belong to the sorrow because we belong to the Creator.

Like love, mourning works to heal us. So we need to grieve over whatever we've given away or whatever has been taken from us, we need to mourn, to confess our loss and, through that expression, begin to move on. It’s okay to weep, to grieve, to mourn. For a time. But it’s also okay to move on. It really is.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. Do you see it?




John 11:35; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14
Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2010