The Calling

"Real spiritual and relational change requires a commitment to move far beyond the certainty of false intimacy toward unsettling and sometimes shattering levels of disappointment that we reach when we really love others. Only then will trusting God become more than a sermonic platitude. Only then will it become the rock on which we stand."

"As God begins working in your life, you can begin to love others as God created you to do. Move toward others courageously. Don't deny the pain of disappointments in relationships. Face them squarely. Allow yourself to hunger for deeper relationships, and as you draw closer to God be assured that He will draw closer to you. He will give you hope." - Harry Schaumburg

Offering and Wages Payable

Something from the book of Kings caught my interest last night: under Joash and Jehoiada, the priests assigned to collect money to meet the expenses of repairing the temple "did not require an accounting from those to whom they gave the money to pay the workers, because they acted with complete honesty" (2 Ki 12:15). I have no good reason why I like this verse other than its reference to our meticulous accountant friends. They get their very own line! I've frequently pondered the very real temptation to use church funding for private purposes, and how those lawyers and accountants who are often responsible for our church finances deal with it. There is also a convergence, or collision of sorts, of covenant theology, political economy, and taxation of public goods taking place on all sides in the Old Testament. More on OT administration of government another time.

Though the Sentence is Hasty, Feeble, and Inexpressive

A young writer, confident that he can muster his experiences with his pen and bend its undercurrents to serve the senses, will often quickly realize that his story is both relentless and unbreakable; all he can do then is tighten his grip and let it take him where it will. Over the past twelve months, I have frequently felt as if I were that man, fighting to remain afloat atop a tirelessly expanding mountain of pages.

I look at my final undergraduate year from a distance now and breathe a little more deeply, as if I were rowing away from the groaning pull of a ship disappearing beneath the waves. But at the time, nearly everyday I felt too empty for any creative industry, too tired for others, and too beleaguered to throw a contemplative look over my shoulder. I have never found a period in my life to be more impossibly difficult to translate into words. Some things from that year revisit me now: boarding myself up in the imperturbable silence of dusty old libraries, the smell of rich coffee constantly on my clothes, and staggering around on days leading up to tests, permanently dazed from hours of solitary study. I either genuinely can't tell, or just don't like to admit as much, but I have found that when the pimples come out--always in the same place between my eyebrows--there is no surer way of telling that I'm stressed. I remember hearing nothing but deafening silence from employers, and resigning myself to keep on going to the next application, and the one after that. Some things I cannot forget, like the way my roommate half-jokingly likened our relationship to "preparation for marriage," and all the things that my professors did for me. I remember staking out and pouncing on empty tables at coffee shops, late night walks back from the library, the howl of the train that runs through campus, and the company of a friend. And yet, try as I might, I still cannot grasp the fullness of all the joys and trials that the Lord has put me through.

Why is it that every couple of weeks, when I take my life out and contemplate it--asking where I have just come from and where I am going--I'm shattered all over again, robbed of all speech and sensibility? Perhaps the writer is weak, or perhaps the strength of the story is, in the end, a testament to its true author, and what you actually put down on paper is merely a pittance. When nearly everything I know is just an unfinished footnote within soteriology, the most beautiful story ever written, it quickly becomes clear that there isn't a sound mind, sentence, or anecdote out there that could contain it. After all, what other story ends with so certain a promise while fraught with equal mystery on the path to get there? You and I are part of a deeply redemptive narrative drawn up before time with the same hands that crowned the stars and raised the firmament. I can only reckon that it's alright to be completely lost for words.

The Lost and the Song

Realizing that you've lost something can happen in one of two ways: in a single, terrible instant, or with slow, dawning comprehension. Last week, it was the latter. As I left Tuesday night prayer, I grasped my right pocket. And then the left. And then I seized all of my pockets. Empty. My keys and my Navy lanyard were gone. For my friends, the remainder of the trip was much like conversing with an agitated mother. No conversation swayed me from anxiously clucking about where my keys were, whether they were safe, and who would listen now when I tell them that I used to be a Navy vet. But that wasn't what unsettled me most.

All that time, my keys had been sitting expectantly on the gym floor, right where I left them. As I galloped home, unleashing the "hallelujah" chorus into the night sky, I was struck sidelong by how small the joy of my salvation seemed in comparison to this unfeigned, boundless euphoria. Job once lamented his overwhelming awareness of God's unbearable gaze: What is man that You magnify him and that You are concerned about him, that You examine him every morning and try him every moment? Will You never turn Your gaze from me...? I felt afflicted with the opposite. I thought about how every morning I awoke feeling lost and frustrated, wondering where God and all the fanfare that used to accompany Him had gone. Somewhere along the way, I had become so dully attuned to His grace that I had lost much more than my keys.

But within a span of a hundred yards, my heart had turned again. By the time I triumphantly sprinted up the stairs and fit my key in the lock, my roommate jumping up from the sofa in anticipation, I was convinced that more than one thing had been found that night. God rescue not only my keys, but also my soul from despair. What better a way to assure me that He was near, and had never left, than to choose the most unassuming of ways to declare His adamant presence in all of my affairs? Could an event of such laughable simplicity really have such cosmic consequences? How foolish and silly it all seemed! Many things, such as our relationships, ailments, and careers we offer up in desperate prayer, but others we either deem manageable, or have difficulty seeing any room for God's involvement. As a result, we live tunelessly for entire intervals in which He seems both absent and irrelevant.

We will never cease to be fixated by the infinite ascent and descent of questions and answers that run along the very foundations of creation. One moment, He might move mightily like a rushing squall, altering history and shifting whole landscapes, and in the next, work with the careful precision of a watchmaker, multiplying the tiniest of moments into praise and wonderment. He makes our paths straight, and yet ambushes us with side-journeys to remind us that He loves us, and that we should trust Him daily. To those who might try to walk life in a straight line, beware of an unpredictable God who works all things great and small for the good of our salvation. A trip, a stumble off the path, a lost set of keys, and you may unexpectedly find yourself face to face with the same sovereign and majestic God that Moses did while tending to Jethro's flock in the parched and unpredictable wild.