My dad can beat up your dad

So often, as Christians, we seem to want to 'prove' God to those outside the church.  Sometimes this is done on the platform of academia / theology.  Other times, it's simply through sharing our experiences and showing how God has come through for us.  This is akin to playground antics.  "My dad can beat up your dad."  We're all proud of being God's children.  This is a good thing.  He created the entire universe and he loves US.  Pretty amazing.  We should feel special.  We want to show off how good He is to us and prove that he's the best dad around, trying to convince others to become adoptees.  This makes a good sales pitch when we have a shiny new toy to bring to school.  "My dad loves me so much he bought me this aweseome new thing!"  Or, we're proud of how rough and tough he is.  He gets us out of the messes we tangle ourselves in.  He's our rescuer.  We're proud of Him and want to show him off.  We have an easy time doing this when we feel special about what He's doing for us.

However, no kid is bragging to his friends how great his dad is because he's grounded, and he realizes that it's in his best interest, and so this makes his dad phenomenal.  Or, how wise his dad is for letting him learn from his mistakes the hard way, so he won't make them again.  We tend to complain about these instances, or we keep quiet about them, not wanting to show this side of Him to others...they might decide they don't want that kind of dad.
The point is that we aren't God.  We don't always understand what He has in mind for us.  The dangerous thing to do is to try to formulate how He's working or to attempt to understand how it will all work out.  God is sovereign and He does love us.  He knows what He's doing.  We oftentimes don't know what He's doing (or what we're doing).
I find that I get into the most trouble when I try to figure out how God is working on somebody else...or I get so focused on somebody else being in relation with God, that I forget about my position as God's son.
God wants us.  I don't personally believe that he regularly makes things happen or not happen.  He does, however, use life, as it happens, to teach us and bring us closer to Him.  I think that if we believe this and keep this mindset, we will do well to grow closer to Him as his children.  We should spend less time worrying about how God comes across to other people and more time focusing on what He wants to do with / teach us.  It's all His to begin with anyway.
"The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it"  -Psalm 24:1

Burning Van

So this is a bit out of the ordinary for this blog, but it's pretty amazing, so I will share it anyway.

I was driving home in the minivan with the boys and noticed the A/C wasn't working very well.  Next, I noticed a funny overheating type of smell.  Shortly after that (seconds later) I noticed the hood was smoking.  I became frustrated, thinking of how I'd have to take the van in to get a new radiator.  As I merged lanes to pull off into a parking lot, I noticed an electrical burning smell...similar to the kind I smelled in my days working as an electrician when doing repairs from electrical fires.  When the smoke got thicker I realized it was time to get out of the van.  I put the car in park, took the keys out and got out of the van to go around and get the boys (Elliott and Bo) out.  By the time I was out of the van, I saw that the passenger part of the hood was on fire.  I flung the sliding door open and woke Elliott up, telling him it was important that he get out of the van right then.  I took Bo out, still strapped into his car seat and got the boys on the lawn underneath a tree in the shade far away from the van.  I turned around to look at the van and saw my mom driving by.  Weird.  She pulled over and the boys loaded up with her while the van went up in flames.  All of this happened over the course of about five minutes.

I'm not sure that I've processed all of this yet.  I mean, the minivan is completely gone, and the boys and I are completely fine.  All of this could have been so much worse.  I told Elliott at least 10 times today how proud of him I was that he obeyed so well and didn't ask why when I told him to get out of the van.  He was in the middle of a nap at the time, btw.  I'm so thankful for experiences like this, because it's through these bigger things that we can really deeply learn important lessons.  Just a week ago I was trying to explain to Elliott why it's so important that he listens and obeys without asking why.  I told him that, sometimes, there's no time for explanations...action just needs to be taken.  He got to watch the van burn too.  I'm thankful for that.  I mean, how cool is it to watch things burn in the first place, let alone a big car, let alone your own.  But I'm thankful for the lesson.  After telling him how proud I was of him, he asked what would have happened if he stayed in the van.  I told him it could have been really bad...bad for him, Bo, me.

I know that God oftentimes tells me to do things...and it's not necessarily that I don't understand why, and no, it's not a clear audible voice...but it's knowing what I should do...but not feeling like it, or wanting to.  I think that God gives us instances like these in our life to look back in retrospect and see what may have happened if we didn't listen.


Tonight when I put Elliott to bed, he prayed and asked that God would help the van feel better.

Broken, Needing Gentle Healing

The past few days (or weeks) have been notably difficult for me.  I’ve been waiting to write since the few times I have, I’ve noticed that nothing good has come out.  By good I mean true, uplifting, encouraging.  I’ve done a good share of venting, writing out my frustrations but these have been in no way helpful aside from allowing me to be honest before God.  I seem to inevitably write anytime a few common threads seem to weave their ways though various avenues of my life.  And having been in a very segmented mode for the past while, these dominant themes tend to grab my attention.  Recently, these themes are pain, brokenness, and restoration (not necessarily in that order, nor a finite, non-repeating series).  C. S. Lewis’ “The Problem of Pain” has been a personal favorite of mine over the past year.  There is so much truth in this book and I encourage anyone who has found themselves up against a wall (of pain) in life, to read this.  I believe it makes as much sense as is possible out of why we must go through pain in this life.

Zena is a woman at my church with a great blog called My life is good (and so is yours).  As a side note, her husband is an amazing teacher and shared at our church for two weeks.  If you want to listen to something encouraging and insightful, that offers hope, you can download his two sermons from our church’s website:  ROVC Sermons (May 9th and May 16th).

I just read Zena’s latest blog on brokenness.  It was refreshing to be reminded that we are all broken and that we can’t fix ourselves.  That’s the way it is.  There’s hope that one day we’ll be put back together, but it will not be by our own works.

I also just re-read a manuscript written by a theology professor of mine named Dr. Cross that never made it to book form…it was too long.  The book is about the Church and he has a chapter that addresses spiritual authority vs. spiritual abuse and how it applies to the process of restoration in the church.  Restoration from brokenness.  I’ve been reflecting on these themes, how they relate and apply to my life.

Brokenness hurts.  But healing from this brokenness is necessary for our growth.  Amazingly, God designed our bodies and environment in an amazing way so that they are self-healing much of the time.  The problem is that the healing process often hurts far more than the breaking and we’re afforded the opportunity to ignore the symptoms and avoid the healing.  Breaking can be quick and sometimes completely out of our control.  The initial shock sometimes even numbs us…this can be to our advantage for the time being.  The pain could otherwise be intolerable.  Our natural response is to make the pain stop…however it must be done. 

Sometimes, the long-term fix requires further, yet temporary pain.  In our advanced medical age, with the advent of anesthesia, we tend to forget this.  Thankfully for us, the use of drugs can almost eliminate the pain.
However, I’m not aware of any (healthy) emotional/spiritual anesthesia.  Maybe counseling, therapy, good friends?  I think of counseling/therapy as more of the (painful) healing aspect whereas friends  may be more representative of the towel to bite when the pain becomes intolerable (or maybe the process of biting the towel…biting your friends is generally frowned upon).  Nothing really eliminates the pain.  I mean, Jesus doesn’t even promise this.

So God does this fixing of our brokenness.  His primary objective is to restore us….to make us whole again.  His purpose isn’t to make us comfortable and happy in the short-term.  If this was his purpose, he could hook us up to a spiritual morphine drip for the rest of our days, or magically take the pain away.  But this isn’t how He works.  He wants real people.  He wants whole people.  He is our healer.  But thankfully, he is gentle.  He adds no pain to the equation.  I say this because healing still hurts…but there’s too often pain added to healing that is unnecessary.  The pain of judgment, malice, condemnation.  And this is precisely where everything gets a bit more complicated.  God isn’t just a big spirit in the sky that only works with us on a one-on-one basis…he uses His body…which is comprised of a bunch of imperfect, not-so-gentle people.

I tend to think of healing as the process of recovering from terrible things that have happened to me…being deeply emotionally wounded by another person…having a piece of metal shot in my eye…etc.  I don’t tend to think of those broken parts of me that are due to my neglect.  I tend to think of the wounds I’ve caused others even less.  The following applies to the damage we do to ourselves that we need healing (restoration) from.

Dr. Cross, the theology professor, talks about the process of “gently restoring” a brother or sister who has fallen into sin, found in Galatians 6:1.  The Greek for “restore” is katartizete.  This is actually the same Greek medical term used to refer to setting a broken bone.  As a church body, we’re responsible for restoring one another….GENTLY.  Unfortunately, gentle is a very subjective term.  Cross offers these two scenarios for thought:  A 40-year-old man who’s experienced his share of physical trauma and pain over life would probably respond mildly to an experienced physician setting a broken humerus.  A five-year-old who has never been to the hospital before would probably not respond well at all to the same doctor, or any doctor at that.  His or her perception would be that the doctor was not gentle at all.

I think it’s important for us to examine ourselves in both of these positions (as doctor and as patient).  How gentle are we with those who need help?  Do we perhaps set those bones a bit more firmly to remind the patient not to be so careless next time while riding their bike blindfolded?  Do we decide that a healed arm is more important than a pleasant experience and therefore abandon any attempts to be gentle?  I’ve unfortunately heard (and experienced) this argument from people in the church.  While there is a very basic fragment of truth in this, it nevertheless disregards the exhortation to be gentle.

Contrarily, are we focusing on and protesting the perceived un-deserved pain of healing (that is ultimately the work of God)?  Do we insist that we are being wronged by those trying to help us?  Do we insist that this process of healing (aka, life) should only reach a certain threshold of pain, if any at all?

Who can objectively look at this and say who is being too big of a baby and who is being too rough?  I think that God could, but He doesn’t, because we’re probably all off by varying degrees and at different times.
The spooky thing is that over the course of a lifetime I believe that we all end up experiencing both sides of this scenario.  The danger is to pity ourselves for our circumstances or to rub the noses of our adversaries in the all-too-familiar situation that we once experienced.  This is where empathy (and forgiveness) comes into play.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest meanings of pain that we’ll ever comprehend.  Simply the opportunity to relate to and help others (and be related to and be helped!).  I think it’s important for us to grasp this…because God works and acts through his people.  Pain, healing, brokenness, restoration…so much of this occurs through the same broken vessels.

The present danger is to overlook our own errors in these interactions…either as the careless doctor, or the wimpy patient.  Yet even more dangerous is, as a patient needing healing, to ascribe this unnecessary pain to God and interpret it as his anger and vengeance against us.  The LORD is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. (Psalm 145:8)

Can Anybody Help?

I have an interesting job.  I've been at it for a little over two years now and I have my ups and downs...good days and bad days, but overall I enjoy what I do and I believe that in the grand scheme of things, I help people.  To summarize my profession, I monitor peoples' brains, nerves, and spinal cords while they undergo surgeries that could be potentially harmful to these structures.  One of the difficulties in doing this is that the field is still fairly new and (like most of science, and life in general) there is much more to learn.  Occasionally, during a surgery, we'll notice something in our data / signals that looks wrong or different, without much of an explanation.  After much troubleshooting and communication with everyone else who could be adding to the problem, there is sometimes to resolution.  This can be very frustrating and lead to questions of confidence.  "Am I doing this right?  Did I place something incorrectly?  Did I not realize that this patient has some weird disease that is making all this stuff not work?"  From time to time this happens and their seems to be no explanation for these events.

Every year, the society that credentials for my field has an annual meeting where all the brilliant minds present their latest findings and talk about things they've seen over the past year.  These guys will present case studies where they saw something different from the norm and were able to understand what this difference meant and explain it to the surgeon, ultimately improving the patient's outcome.  This past year I was comforted when one of these big shot guys talked about a case that was very similar to one I had monitored.  I listened intently, taking notes, waiting to hear the answer to my problem.  The conclusion, however, was that he didn't have the answer.

To a degree, this was encouraging.  I mean, hey, this guy is pretty smart and he can't make sense of this stuff either.  It makes me fell a bit better until the reality sinks in.  The problem still isn't solved.  I'm almost worse off now, because I don't even have hope that somebody can help me fix this.  This means that it's up to me to figure it out.  Thankfully (for me and everyone else involved), since I'm not a doctor, life-altering (for he patient) decisions like this aren't handed to me to make in the OR.  But I see this happen all the time through other avenues of my life.

I look for one guy in his fifties or so that seems to have done life well...by this I mean he's still married, loves his wife, she loves him, his kids aren't currently in jail, nor do they resent him.  He's done well at his job without becoming a slave to it.  He's healthy, has a good group of male companions, and has gone through a lot of crap in life and has deal with it well.  He has all the answers.

While there are a lot of good men and good people out there, this guy obviously doesn't exist.  Comforting, in the fact that as I see my life's path diverge and head somewhere I never would have expected I realize that everyone's path in life seems to make these abrupt jogs.  However, this doesn't solve the problem of where I'm at, where I'm heading, and how to make it work how I'd like it to.


So what is the solution?  Or, rather, what is the point of this?  What are we to learn?  I think that is the key...what I'm supposed to learn.  That's truly the only "good" way to deal with the non-ideal scenarios we end up in through life.  Because true growth comes through learning, and I find that meaningful growth usually only comes through the hard types of learning...."learning the hard way".  These frustrations can be an incredible mercy...a miracle if we dare to call it such.  Having no answer for why things don't work gives me more motivation to figure out an answer than anything else.