"If you are hard and vindictive, insistent on having your own way, and always certain that the other person is more likely to be wrong than you are, then there are whole areas of your nature that have never been transformed by His gaze" -- Oswald.
I can be arrogant. I can be hard and vindictive. I can be a misanthrope, and I am certain that there are huge parts of my nature that have not been transformed by his gaze. Come, Lord Jesus.
"He did not need man's testimony about man, for he knew what was in a man," John 2:25.
He knows what is in me -- my thoughts, my fears, my desires, my longing, my strengths, my weaknesses, my secrets. He knows. He knows.
I have only experienced this sort of reconciliation once. I was on the receiving end. My pastor came to my husband and me at the tail end of Sunday school. We had been teaching the three year olds of whom we had two and he had one.
A bit of background: A year before we had been the best of friends -- the pastor, his wife, my husband, me and our four young children. We got together on the spur of the moment -- combining pot-luck style what our frugal budgets could afford, caring for each other's children, sharing plants from each other's gardens, meeting over coffee and dreaming about the future. Then we -- my husband and I -- had gone into business with my pastor's in-laws, and while the business was a stunning success, the partnership was a disaster. My husband and I had suffered what seemed like a death, and now, an ocean of pain lay between our pastor and us.
That particular morning, he was going to be serving communion, and as he said it, he wanted to do as Scripture taught and be reconciled -- if he had done something to offend us. If. If. Hm-m-m. What a powerful little word. We were pretty young at the time, and I've never been good on the spur of the point, but I wish I had had the presence of mind to protest. To say this mess -- for indeed it was one huge mess of mistakes (big and small on both sides), hurt feelings, misunderstanding, and betrayal -- could not be resolved in the five minutes before he needed to be upstairs for worship. But I didn't. My husband didn't. We were taken by surprise. We had no idea how to begin to put the damage into a conversation, let alone a five-minute, neat-and-tidy reconciliation. No, the script for this conversation had been pre-written, and we played our part, said our lines.
Months later, before we left town and moved halfway across the country to start a new life, I sought out a mediator and invited this pastor and his wife to what I imagined might be a real reconciliation -- not neat and tidy at all but by its very messiness imbued with genuine meaning. They declined.
And to this day, honestly, I wonder how it's really supposed to work.
"The true expression of Christian character is not in good-doing, but in God-likeness. If the Spirit of God has transformed you within, you will exhibit divine characteristics in your life, not just good human characteristics. God's life in us expresses itself as God's life, not as human life trying to be godly" -- Oswald.
I found these sentences to be simultaneously comforting and perplexing. Comforting because I have always felt defeated by the words, "Be perfect." How can God command that? He can demand it because he is the Perfect One living in me. Perplexing because what in the world does that mean? How can he live in me? Where? I know we teach three-year-olds to say Jesus lives in their hearts, but really, there is nothing but blood pumping through tissue in that particular section of my chest. Where is he really? In my mind?
Don't be so literal, Barb. OK, I get that. If you spread my chest or crack open my skull, you will not find God there. He is a Spirit, but what does that mean?
Partly, it means this: Mystery beyond my understanding. He is a Person whom I cannot see, hear or touch, and yet, I know he exists. When I try to deny him, make sense of the world without him, I cannot.
So here's where the comfort comes in again: All my do-gooding will not make me like him. If he is to live in me, it will be his doing, not mine.
You want perfection, God? Bring it.
The thing that struck me in today's Scripture passage is how clearly Christ knows our weakness -- the certainty that we will fail him -- and yet he calls us friends. Oswald jumps off from verse 28: "You are those who have stood by me in my trials." The irony, however, is that these words are said at the Last Supper -- just before the Garden of Gethsemane where his best friends fall asleep when he asks them to pray and then desert him when he is arrested. Peter denies even knowing Christ -- not just once but three times. And Jesus knows all of this -- predicts Peter's betrayal -- when he says the words Oswald uses in today's devotional: "You are those who have stood by me."
Make no mistake, Barb. You are weak. You know it. God knows it. And yet, he calls you his friend. He sees you. He knows you. He remembers you. He loves you. Just as you are.
"God's training ground, where the missionary weapons are found, is the hidden, personal, worshiping life of the saint" -- Oswald.
I am discovering that Oswald has several themes to which he returns time and again. The relationship between the private and public life of the saint is one of these themes. Oswald emphasizes that the private life must be solid for the public life to be of any value. And each time he returns to the subject, I am reminded of how easily I get it reversed -- focusing on my public life at the expense of my private relationship with God. The thing is, public service will flow naturally from personal worship, but it doesn't work in reverse. Not for me anyway. Public service, when it becomes the focus of my effort and attention, drains rather than revives me.
I am currently the elder in charge of worship at my church. I have helped to orchestrate several services where, while people told me they were blessed, I walked away discouraged and exhausted, blue even -- a sure sign, I think, that I was focusing on public service without the training ground of a hidden, personal worship of my God.
First things first, Barb. First things first.
My husband and I had an interesting discussion today about the merit of doing things out of duty vs. doing things out of love. I said that doing things out of duty was way better than not doing things at all, and he said he thought I was discounting the cost/the fallout of doing things out of duty -- resentment primarily -- both on the part of the person doing his duty and the person receiving a gift given solely out of duty.
After reading Oswald's entry for today, I'm wondering if part of taking every thought/project captive is taking the time to move from a knee-jerk dutiful response to a love-motivated one.
Oswald: " . . . a person is not only committed to Jesus Christ for salvation, but is also committed, responsible and accountable to Jesus Christ's view of God."
We must transform our minds, and that includes trading resentment-inducing duty for love-motivated action. Perhaps it will take more time. Perhaps we will get less done. But what gets done will be worth doing -- on every level.
Oswald makes two really interesting distinctions today: 1) sin vs. human nature; and 2) innocence vs. holy character. He seems to be saying that while Jesus has done the work of defeating sin in our lives, washing us white as snow, our daily choices move us from what is natural to what is spiritual.
Consider this excerpt:
"The conflict is along the line of turning our natural life into a spiritual life, and this is never done easily, nor does God intend it to be done easily. It is done only by a series of moral choices. God does not make us holy in the sense of character; He makes us holy in the sense of innocence; and we have to turn that innocence into holy character by a series of moral choices. These choices are continually in antagonism to the entrenchments of our natural life, the things which erect themselves as ramparts against the knowledge of God" -- Oswald.
Turning a natural life into a spiritual one. Turning innocence into holy character. Making choices that frustrate my natural inclinations.
What in my life exalts itself against the knowledge of God? What keeps me from wanting to seek him, study him, follow him? Those are the things that need to be destroyed -- even if they don't seem like sin.
Shortly after we moved to the Portland-Vancouver area in 1995, we discovered the Salmon Street fountain along the Willamette River boardwalk. I had never seen anything like it. A wide circle of powerful water jets shot into the center of an only slightly dipped surface. There was no pool, no off-limits. This was a fountain meant to be played in. Children ran through it screaming. Teenagers stood in the very center, seeing how long they could withstand its power. But it was also a "guessing" fountain. It changed from the outside jets shooting inward to the center jets shooting outward. My husband and I let our 5-year-old boys peel off their Sunday clothes and run through the fountain in their Superman underwear. We took turns running through it ourselves with our 18-month-old daughter in our arms. We squealed, laughed and got soaked. Then we got great big ice cream cones, sat on the benches and dried out a bit before heading home for naptime.
The Salmon Street fountain is the one that came to mind as I read Oswald's entry today. "You are to focus on the Source so that out of you 'will flow rivers of living water' -- irrepressible life." Not just a fountain to be admired as beautiful from a safe distance but a fountain full of giggling, squealing, surprising, powerful life.
What amazing comfort I find in these words this morning. Focus on the Source. Forget the obstacles. Wow! How terribly simple and how amazingly sweet. Because, you see, I just can't figure out the obstacles. I stare and stare at my depression, my finances, my apparent inability to experience God's joy and peace. My stuck-ness. And I cannot fix any of it. The obstacles, and my meditation on them, produce in me a nearly irresistible desire to retreat.
Focus on the Source. Look at God. The Father, the Son, the Spirit. See the wisdom. The bounty of his goodness flowing over. Trust him with me. Trust him that his waters will flow around or over or through the obstacles.
Words for me to live by today: Eyes off the obstacles. Eyes on God.
"In the Garden of Gethsemane they slept as a result of their own sorrow, and at the end of three years of the closest and most intimate relationship of their lives they 'all . . . forsook him and fled' (Matthew 26:56)" -- Oswald.
I understand the desire to sleep, to escape. Reality seemed to be crumbling around them. Had the last three years all been an illusion? Were they kidding themselves? The present certainly seemed to discredit their belief that Jesus was ushering in a new order. He was predicting a betrayal, his own death. This was not what they had expected when they left their livelihoods to follow him.
For three years, they had what I say I want -- the closest and most intimate relationship of their lives -- and yet they forsook him and fled. Then, in their dejectedness, he came to them and gave them the one gift that allowed them to believe, stay awake and stand firm -- the Holy Spirit.
My relationship with God -- such as it is -- has defined my life. Will I forsake it now because it has not played out as I envisioned? Will I judge the basis of my life an illusion because I don't like the results?
My temptation when faced with what appears to be a crumbling reality -- but is actually a shattering of illusions -- is to sleep. Only the Holy Spirit can give me what is required to stay awake, face my disappointment and stand firm.
"The spirit that comes in is not that of doing anything for Jesus, but of being a delight to Him" -- Oswald.
Someone sent me a note recently: "Just wanted you to know how much I appreciate your person. What you do is icing on the cake." I love the idea, but my sense of myself is so tied up with what I do that I'm not sure I get it. What does someone mean when he says he appreciates my person, and how can I be a delight to God apart from obedience, i.e. performance? keeping the law?
I have been struggling with a whirlwind of emotions over the last few days. When I finally sought out counsel, I ended up spewing a confused mixture of tears and anger and disappointed idealism and jealousy and fear and legitimate points in a hundred different directions. My wise counsel suggested that I attempt to narrow the onslaught into one overarching emotion. Here's what I came up with: "less than." I feel less than.
I continually compare myself not only to the young, beautiful and talented around me but to my own sense of what I should be, and I fall short. This process is so ingrained in me that I do it without conscious thought. I walk into a room, and boom! I intuitively know that I do not measure up. Sometimes it happens before I even enter the room, and I dread going because I know I will not be enough or I will be too much. I will just be wrong. My flight defense kicks in before I've even faced the danger, and all I want to do is go home where it's safe.
I end up being jealous of other people's successes because their successes are my failures. I should have lost the weight. I should have run the half-marathon. I should have written that or suggested that or had that brilliantly creative idea.
I can see the sickness in this, how it is the opposite of what God wants. I think I could even spell out the right way to think, the right way to judge my worth. Only I cannot seem to get there. A friend described her own journey recently as trying to ride a stationary bike cross country. I think that comes close to what I'm experiencing -- lots of work, goal in sight, no progress.
I confess that I'm writing this blog out of order. I wrote the blog for September 4 before this one. Hence, it might seem like the light bulb of understanding is brightening in reverse order.
"Our Lord's teaching is always anti-self-realization . . . It is not that God makes us beautifully rounded grapes, but that He squeezes the sweetness out of us. Spiritually, we cannot measure our life by success, but only by what God pours through us, and we cannot measure that at all . . . It is time now to break the life, to cease craving for satisfaction, and to spill the thing out" -- Oswald.
Anti-self-realization. Cease craving for satisfaction. An immeasurable life. Breaking. Squeezing.
God isn't asking me to be the perfect specimen. Just the opposite. He's asking me to quit trying. Offer up the perfect specimen as a sacrifice. Let it be broken and spilled.
The One Thing That Matters . . .
Oswald: "The one thing that matters is whether a man will accept the God Who will make him holy. At all costs a man must be rightly related to God."
I am going to a conference for work today entitled, "This One Thing . . ." Only I wonder if it will be about the One Thing. I have a feeling it will be about our mission statement and how everything we do should be about serving the poor -- "serving more and serving better" is the phrase I have heard batted about. Good stuff. "Right, good, noble affinities" in Oswald's words.
But the thing is I consistently let the good stuff crowd out the One Thing.
The One Thing: my right relationship with God.
