Hungry

Have you ever experienced that time when you just have nothing to say? It could be due to any number of reasons…lack of imagination, dearth of input, or simply laziness. It’s been all of these lately, but I’m starting to pick up again. Now, I know I promised that I’d get into stewardship and masculinity this time, but, as happens so very often, my thoughts got sidetracked…likely a mild form of attention deficit. Now, I might have something to say on this at another time, but tonight…tonight’s all about three questions. ‘What is your heart?’, ‘what is your mind?’, and ‘what is your strength?’. The first and greatest commandment, upon which “all the Law and the Prophets depend” is also a really good indicator of where you stand with God, what sort of steps He’s got in mind for you, and where you’ve been failing in your walk. These are questions that I’ve grown desperate to find answers for, and I want nothing more than to have time to ask them to my Father in heaven. It seems that the moment you seek to make that time…in my case a retreat day later in the week…things start coming in to fill that time up. The challenge is prioritizing.

The other thing that bears thinking about is a verse in Isaiah 49. Vs. 16: “Behold, I have engraved you on the palm of my hands; your walls are continually before me”. This seems to say two things. First, that we are not forgotten, nor are we even second place in God’s eyes. We are engraved on His palms. He’s going to see us whenever he does something. He’s going to see us when he raises His hands to work miracles. He’s going to have each and every name of His children before him always. Second, and perhaps less obvious, is the result of reading the second part of that verse knowing that we are written on His palms, but also that we are sinful creatures. There’s an almost inexpressible tenderness in His statement that our walls are continually before Him. The things we do to shut Him out are always there despite our place in Him, and He wants us to realize this. Tender love indeed.

That’s it for now, but you never know. I’m going to make this a discipline, as I have with being off chocolate for Lent.

Landfill Theology

I was in retreat today, and thinking about some of the topics that arose on Sunday in Bible study, as well as some of the matters for prayer that came up but didn’t get prayed into then. I came up with two things today that bear sharing. One is that when exegeting ecological meaning out of passages in Scripture, we must consider it as practically as possible…we must become aware of the immutable link between man and the land. The second is the responsibility of Christians to confess bad stewardship as a primary root of sinful behaviour. I’ll get more into this in a bit.

I worked at a landfill for a summer and a bit when I was younger. Not the most glamorous of work, nor something that most would consider as implicitly theological, but on reflection, it provides some serious food for thought. I’ll begin with a quote from that time that I recorded in my idea book.

“It is here, on a chair above the world, that a man can see how small he is, and how vast and beautiful the reality around him is. Here, the clouds perform their constant dance, and wind whips the skin of a gnat.”

Seems rather poetic, looking back on the experience it records. I was working outside and had found an old chair on the top of one of the backfill piles. I was doing paper picking at this time, employed to walk up and down the road of the landfill and bag up the loose garbage that had flown off the trucks. It was break time, and I decided to go up and sit down and simply reflect. The experience still haunts me because of the solitude in the place. I’m a fan of solitude, taking long stretches of time to be alone during the summer, simply enjoying God’s days. Anyway, I was thinking back on those experiences today – the talk on Sunday about Biblical stewardship is still rolling around in my head – and I realized two things. One, that I miss such simplicity, despite the surroundings. Two, that landfills are merely concentrations of the visible presence of man’s sin. I was reading through the first few chapters of Joel during the study, and an ecological perspective about that book throws so much more of a meaning into the words recorded there. It’s astounding how the book changes given that perspective. Or maybe I simply hadn’t read it before. There are some amazing treasures in the Word, folks. Amazing treasures. But the point I want to get to here is that when you think of landfills, as I was this morning, you tend to think of filth, decay and destruction, waste, and ridicule. But I want to open your eyes to the fact that that’s one of the things we need to realize that God sees on earth as sin. He sees wasted lives, wrappers balled up and thrown away, the goodness gone from them. He sees the bags of baby diapers and broken needles, and he sees , too, the rejection of filth and garbage in people’s lives. I wrote this down as a result of that meditation:

“We have made the land over in our own image – we have given ourselves sin to display openly and call it modern life. Father, we are sinful, and so we make ourselves images of sin that we might feel superior.”

We have corrupted the land with modernity, and we have covered over creation with refuse. We’re each of us walking landfills but for Christ, leachate and rags spilling out left and right. The implications of this revelation to me this morning are astounding, and I’m sharing only initial reactions to them here. It’s something that I’m not going to let alone for a time, for sure.

I mentioned before the significance of the confession of bad stewardship as a primary root of sinful behaviour, and I’ll speak a little bit more about that now. We need to do as Nehemiah does, and confess that we are part of the problem. Coldplay in ‘Clocks’ asks “Am I a part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?”, and this is a very valid question. We are part of the problem, guys. We are also part of the solution, because we’ve got the opportunity and I would even say the responsibility to confess the sins of the nations to God, interceding for forgiveness and healing. Not the least of those sins is the plethora of decisions that indicate bad stewardship, and about which I should become more informed. See, I’ve not really kept up to date on the condition of the nations, nor have I considered them a real prayer burden, but the recent upswing in environmental consciousness has made them such, at least in that aspect. I was really moved to this type of confession on Sunday, which was a good sign, as it means the intercessory heart is coming back, thank God. But that’s a slight sidetrack. Here’s the dirt:

Bad stewardship is one of the primary roots of sinful behaviour because:
a) We waste the resources that God has given for support and provision on selfish and instantaneous gratification.
b) We have lost touch with what it means to be Adam, ‘of dust’, and what it means to let the land provide.
c) We forget the grace of God in allowing seasons, crops, provision, and bounty.
d) We do not know what it means to be tied to the land. Look, for example, at skyscrapers.

Next post, I’ll get into a lot more detail on the connections between masculinity and stewardship, and how they’re being formed for me. Until then;

Chris

Walking With The Father II

There’s a scene in the Chronicles of Narnia, both the movie and the book where Edmund is walking with Aslan and speaking of many things. I’ll include the quote here, just for fun:

“As soon as they had breakfasted they all went out, and there they saw Aslan and Edmund walking together in the dewy grass, apart from the rest of the court. There is no need to tell you (and no one ever heard) what Aslan was saying, but it was a conversation which Edmund never forgot. As the others drew nearer Aslan turned to meet them, bringing Edmund with him. ‘Here is your brother,’ he said, ‘and – there is no need to talk to him about what is past.’” (p. 174, Harper Collins Omnibus edition)

I wanted to mention it because of the resonance of walking with the Lion of Judah as a son walks with his father, and which Daddy invites us to do always. Such a truly magnificent gift, and I’ll get back to it near the end, but right now I want to wrap up the topic of the bride and her Bridegroom. Thank God that He showed up tonight in Bible study. It’s really amazing to look at what the marriage of Christ and the church really means for us as it appears through the Bible. I count it a great privilege to see the birth of two marriages from our Bible study, and to see the way God has knit the group together from such diverse backgrounds to look so deeply into His heart for each of us. Anyway, to get on topic;

Reading Proverbs 31:10-31, otherwise known as the Wife of Noble Character while thinking of the church can be both an encouraging and disciplining experience, because the church does not always live up to its expected character as seen in this passage. On the other hand, it gives us a picture of the true cultural force that the church can become, and is in many ways, as well.

Looking at the Song of Solomon – something I haven’t seen much of in the churches I’ve attended, we get an idea of the jealous and consuming love that the Bridegroom holds for his beloved, and the beloved for her lover. The insights that came out of that passage were really something else, especially when augmented with Matthew 25:1-13 and Ephesians 5:22-33. The urging that we must not delay when greeting our lover is an extremely pertinent one, a call to a real relationship of love and desire that we need to saturate ourselves with. This is the outgrowth of the passage in Ezekiel that’s been such a pressingly important passage to me of late.

Finally, we need to remember that even from the very beginning, we were created to be captivated, but also to be loved deeply and zealously by our Father, our Lord and our great Bridegroom. One other point I ought to mention is courtesy of Becky, who had a flash of insight regarding the ‘one flesh’ lines from Genesis that are also echoed in Ephesians, and the knowledge of Adam’s ‘flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones’, his helpmate Eve that also carries through to the church. It does strike so much resonance, if you think about it. Pray about it, and you get some serious heart knowledge as to the state of the church.

I told you I’d get back to walking with the Father. It really is a magnificent gift, if you can get into stride with Him, and likewise if a man and his wife can get in stride with each other, walking together in the Lord. It seems I’ve got a struggle to do that, although here on earth my father and I walk in precisely the same style, which is encouraging. I can even outstrip him in pace most of the time, but I’ll never be able to outstrip God. I just have to come to terms with that. That image is the one that I want you to carry this week, folks. We can never outstrip God, but we must make every exertion to get into step with Him. And we must do it without striving, because there is rest in the Lord. Talk to you again soon.

Chris