I AM PERSUADED

Like fools we prayed, “Your Kingdom come” knowing not for what we asked.

Because when your Kingdom came, it landed like a meteorite, a bright light bursting our shadows.

Shell-schocked we scrambled but there’s no place to hide.

What did we ask for?

Not: loving our enemies or confessing our sins,

not showing grace or letting love win.

Not bearing burdens that never were our own,

not pulling up roots where bitterness had grown.

We asked for polite poetry that waits for our permission to speak, a beautiful legend, a private faith.

But You’ve brought us troubling prose, full of order and authority, full of command not compromise, no negotiation, just assimilation.

No legends here -

your Kingdom comes in real tears

falling down real faces

and there are no

private places.

Break your heart life will, and Kingdom lets the blood spill

in white rooms filled with strangers: this is public testimony, your pride will burn.

Your Kingdom of grace is a threat to our illusions -

step up she says and admit where you’ve fooled us -

saying you’re something you’re not.

Give me your masks that make your souls rot.

Our faces drop at the sight of our sins,

we’d shut you out, but you’re far too in.

Hurting and fuming, we curse our prayers -

we prayed Kingdom come,

but now take your Kingdom back.

This is the pain of souls pierced by light, souls set right.

After a while, you bring us to morning, to the meteor burnt marks in our front lawns.

Never mind our kicking and screaming, our hurting and bleeding, gone are the old days -

your Kingdom is here to stay.

I remember what your face looked like when you told me about your childhood. I remember how the lines fell taut and stretched as you remembered the pain and helplessness. I remember the anger when you asked how God could have let that happen.

I know your story too, how the odds always seemed to be stacked against you. How everytime you thought you finally had a start, the odds came crashing, laughing, slamming down on you. I remember how you tell me through the tears how it’s not fair.

I remember how we cried together and I told you it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that it had happened to you, it wasn’t fair that this was your burden to carry, your wound, your scar. I remember wishing death on that person, wishing somehow I could take it back again.

These are our wounds of injustice. This is the harvest of terrible  seeds sown long ago in a beautiful garden, full of beautiful things, and a wonderful God. It seems so unfair, that we would have to pay for their sin.

It seems cruel that God lets it happen.

Over

and over

and over again.

They say God is a God of justice. That He wants to put things right again. But all around us there are only reminders of how man failed and how we suffer. They say God knew it would happen, and He gave us choice anyway. It was His story, you know. His plot. His idea. And we chose wrongly. When will He fix it?

People say we should believe in a dying God-man on an  accursed cross. As though it was my fault I had sin that someone had to come die for. And now you want me to come begging for mercy, for repentance, for salvation? What does that do for these broken pieces, these deep, bloody wounds?

True this is His story. This was all His idea. He knew it would happen. And yes, He’s concerned with justice.

It’s for justice that He’s come and died and offered to make it right. He’s taken the blame for the story that went wrong. But the, your story isn’t over. It doesn’t end with the pain, the injustice.  This is how we make sense of the God-man dying on an accursed tree. This is where we bring our thousand broken pieces, our deep, hidden wounds, our bitterness and worry. We bring them to His open, scarred hands and let Him write justice over them.

Life is like an array of threads that come spilling from the spool of experience. Sometimes they end up all knotted together in fuzzy chaos. Most of us spend a good portion of our lives trying to unravel the mess we’ve made. It isn’t fair, we say, these things that have happened to us. These hard, terrible things.

We’ve all been given circumstances, events, and experiences with which we are forced to reckon. It’s like up until a certain point, we are recipients of these realities…and then we come to this place where we really do have to make sense of what we’ve been given.

I’m not saying that I think God creates situations just to make us a sort of person. That’s stepping onto the holy ground of His sovereignty that is rightly beyond me. I have discovered, though, that despite the frustrating wake of knotted strands, that there is comfort in a certain reality: that my story, your story, her story, his story are all meaningful against the backdrop of the Gospel. This means that everything that happens to me are no longer futile events caused by the circulation of the universe.

The events of our lives are threads, and all the threads come together to make a thoughtful, beautiful tapestry: my life against the backdrop of grace and eternity. It’s a strange source of comfort. I think most people want to think that God would deliver and shelter us from suffering and hard things, but maybe He needs those strands to make a deep tapestry?

Thin fabric never kept anyone warm, and it’s a cold world. Maybe right now, He’s working out the knots, adding depth and dimension. Maybe Christianity is really about difficulty and doing hard things.

Maybe it’s about having hard lives so we can minister in a hard world. Hardship without the Gospel is just hardship. Hardship with the Gospel is a glorious platform for redemption -the experience of life bursting forth from death.

Bring Jesus the hard things in your life and watch Him. He’ll carry them gently, mend them carefully, and then  breathe into them the life of redemption.

What if Love was a natural law?

What if was like oxygen-can’t breath without it. Or like gravity. Everything falls apart without it?

What if we don’t take loving people seriously, and instead love has become a matter of convenience? What if we treat people like accesories-only letting them into our lives and circles when they make us look good?

Many a songwriter and poet and artist have awakened us to the reality that without love things really do fall apart. But maybe this is a trade-off we can afford. Because love is hard. It’s painful. It’s frustrating to put up with people who don’t understand you. It feels stupid to keep holding out and holding on when people let you down. And I don’t know what that even looks like. I don’t know what it looks like to love people. Really love them.

But what if we stopped living as though we had an alternative? What if we lived as though without love, our lives really would be a scattered mess? What if we stopped living as though people were just means to our dreams and ambitions, and rather, the purpose of our dreams and ambitions? What if we stopped counting dollars and started counting the lives we influence, the hearts we touch, and the souls God uses us to save? What if we started measuring success by the people we extended affirmation and grace to instead of the ones who we collected into our fan club and customer database? What is a good life if we run over people along the way?

Love like gravity. It was love that compelled divinity Himself to stoop down into our dusty frame and minister to our world. It was love that compelled the sacred intervention into human history. Without love, humanity would be damned.

Start living your life as though love were a natural law. Hang on and hope for the brighter times, even when life and people let you down. You might not be able to fix it, but love hopes all things. You might be facing a stream of accusations from someone you love. Love rejoices in the Truth. Love is the gateway to hope. Love is the gateway to freedom. Withhold love and you bind yourself into shackles of bitterness and unforgiveness.

My feet are firmly rooted to the ground today because gravity is here. Beautiful weightless pressure that brings order. Our hearts may be heavy and our pillows may be wet. There is chaos even with gravity, and there is heartache even with love. But love grounds us.

Like gravity.

People blew cars up last night because their favorite team won the Basketball game.

Across the room, where I’m sitting as I listen to this aimless news blurb, my brow furrows. There are pictures of angry people with smug faces. Some form of twisted happiness comes out of this junk, I guess.

I think: where are the days when people were angry about something actually meaningful?

Everywhere I turn, there are signs of the times. Crying babies in faraway nations, threats of crippling taxes and a dying economy, people with frazzled hair warning of the earth’s overbearing population. The sun isn’t shining today. Maybe it got tired of being blamed for everything. People I meet are scared. Snow-capped people who have seen more of the times than the rest of us speak slowly, their eyes wander and yearn for hope, for past times when things were different. When things were better. They talk to me as if I can change something, but I just wait and listen. Maybe it’s more therapy for them because after a while they smile softly, thank me for listening, and walk away. I wish I could say something, but what can I promise?

We’re living in a fray. A tangled, knotted, electric, choking mess is what we’ve made of the world. Our best attempts at order and harmony have frizzled and popped and spewed out at us. Celebrities fail to deliver the ultra-human vision of perfection for which we idolize them. Political leaders bleed. A shocker for those of us who thought them immortal. War is a reality that we can no longer deny. Oh the fray. What humanity. Is this the best expression that we can make? Suffering, warfare, poverty, superficiality? Our culture making is frantic and chaotic, void of real meaning, bursting with desperation.

I feel overwhelmed with the reality of our times. What am I to make of the world? I will create. Others are creating artifacts of hope and redemption, but how do I keep untangled from the fray? It’s everywhere I turn, threatening to pull me down into it’s life-robbing vibe. I’m running, frantic, desperate to breath. Everywhere I turn, culture is infused with falsetto hope and I’m watching my generation sing along out of tune, holding on because it’s all they have.

At the end of the day, even a sunless day, there are sunsets. And they remind me. I stop running and catch my breath. The fray can’t catch me now. Sunset sits above the earth like holiness above the fray. Your presence. Now I’m running. I know where I should be. With You, I’m above the Fray and it’s here in this place that I find light and Truth and hope. And then…I run back. Back into the fray. I run to meet it, trusting that all the things too big for me in this world, You’re making sense of. Trusting that You are the Divine Orchestrator of human events.

There is the fray. Then there is that place above the fray, where I find light. And it compels me back into this chocking, tangled mess that we’ve made. This is the imitation of Christ to which you’ve called us. Compassion for a desperate world. We live in and above.

The Fray.