good friday

“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, wehave peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And weboast in the hope of the glory of God.  Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!  Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”  Romans 5:1-11

God’s love is absolutely unfathomable.

We are terrible.  Fallen.  Rebellious and turned away from God, refusing him and choosing our own sin.  We think we can live without him, we blame him for things, we fall.

And yet.

God loves us.

We’re absolutely awful, and He still loves us enough to take the punishment that we deserved.  I talked to someone yesterday about this, why we need faith at all, or why God can’t just forgive people.  And I didn’t have a fantastic answer to that, because it’s a very tough question.

But I thought through it a little bit.  God must be both just and loving.  If God wasn’t a God of justice who punished wrongdoing, then He wouldn’t be a good God.  And we wouldn’t want to follow a God that’s not good.  That’s just… crazy.  A just God must rule the universe, and so we must be punished.  We deserve to be punished.

But God is also loving.  He wants to share that perfect love with us, and bring us to Him forever.

The sin, however, still stands.  The damage has been done (by us), and somebody must pay for it.  Somebody has to take the blame.  Forgiveness always comes at a cost… and He took that on Himself.  He absorbed our blame when He died on the cross and took the weight of sin upon himself on our behalf.  And as He took that sin upon himself, God turned away from Him in that moment.  Can you imagine? It’s like being ripped apart from yourself.  And he did this all freely– John says that He gave up his spirit.  It was a conscious choice, for you and me.

It’s the most beautiful story I’ve ever heard.  I think this is part of the reason that stories of sacrificial love resonate so strongly with us– because it’s an eternal truth, one that we find beautiful. A Tale of Two Cities is still one of my favorite books because of the profound sacrifice of Sydney Carton (sorry if I spoiled it…).  Sacrifice is beautiful because it’s true and it’s happened for us.

The story gets even more beautiful with the resurrection from the dead, the craziest, awesomest, and most pivotal event in history.  It gives us eternal life and reconciliation.

Death for life.

Happy Good Friday, and, (if I don’t come back soon), Happy Easter!

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the poet

The Diviner

Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick
That he held tight by the arms of the V:
Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck
Of water, nervous, but professionally

Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting.
The rod jerked with precise convulsions.
Spring water suddenly broadcasting
Through a green hazel its secret stations.

The bystanders would ask to have a try.
He handed them the rod without a word.
It lay dead in their grasp till, nonchalantly,
He gripped expectant wrists. The hazel stirred.

~Seamus Heaney

Excuse me while I try to form my feelings and hazy ideas into something that makes sense.

So the week before Spring Break (two weeks ago, I suppose), we were talking about Seamus Heaney in my Irish class.  I adore Heaney, and his poetry is beautiful and meaningful and very much a living thing.  Among all of the things that he has to say about life and Ireland and all the rest, something that struck me the most was his talk of the role of the poet.

Now by poet, I don’t mean strictly someone who writes poetry.  That sounds funny.  Let me explain.  I mean “the poet” in a broader, more ancient sense, one that encompasses more than rhyming or what you may normally associate with poetry.  I mean the poet as a sort of epic hero, who brings truth to his people, sometimes painfully.  This is the traditional Irish view of the poet, or senchaí: someone with great power that speaks the truth, even to the king, and that some fear.  He has the power of sight, and can use his words in satires against his enemies.

Or like the Oracles of Ancient Greece: someone who is chosen to be a mouthpiece of the divine, someone who is spoken through. Which brings me to the most important parallel to the poet, the true calling of such a person: the prophet, someone who carries the truth from God to the people.  Although this brings to mind the prophets of the Old Testament who spoke with God (how amazing!), you can still be a prophet today.  Anyone that God uses to speak through is a prophet, and God most certainly still speaks to people.

And around this time in my class, as we’re talking about poetry being made up of partly scop, or craft (being a good writer), and partly vates, or prophesy or vision, speaking the truth, I start freaking out.  Really freaking out, and zoning out of some of the discussion or being way too much into other parts of it.  I can feel myself getting excited all over again as I type this.  I’m looking at my paper right now, and I have little notes scrawled all over it, like:

my heartbeat shakes my whole body in trembling rhythm with the hand of God,

Or this overly-excited realization of the poet’s job:

poet as a go-between!
a translator of truth!
a diviner!
a mouthpiece!
a prophet! an oracle!
a tool in the hands
of He who holds all Truth
a liminal, ferried between
two worlds,
granted another sight by the
Everlasting

poet as messenger
of the eternal, birthright
of an oracle
why am I almost twitching?

a mortal body and an
eternal soul,
like all the amphibians of humankind.

and I am suddenly restless,
yearning, churning, swelling
with a feeling I don’t know
and a desire for something past
this mortal coil.
My heart is beating with desperate purpose.

So, I was freaking out.  And still am.  Because I couldn’t, and honestly can’t, imagine a greater purpose than being spoken through.  The lump in my throat tells me that I desperately want that, to have a purpose, to have this purpose, but I don’t know.  I honestly don’t know.

We read another poem that day called “St. Kevin and the Blackbird” (click), where a bird makes a nest in St. Kevin’s hand and he is responsible for their lives and can’t move until they leave.  I talked to my professor about the role of the poet and such things after class on my way to study for my calc exam (that was easy to focus on after all of this).

I wrote down all that I could remember of what he said.  He looked at me and told me that the calling of the poet is not an easy one to accept.  He asked me to remember St. Kevin.  What did he do?  He went out to the wilderness and hid away from everyone else.  But God found him anyway.

You were made with a purpose, and you’re here for a reason.  I watched the movie Hugo a few days ago (which I heartily recommend), and was nearly moved to tears by certain parts of it.  There’s one part in there where Hugo and Isabelle are talking about purpose.  Hugo looks at people like machines and wonders if they too become “broken” when they lose their purpose.  It’s beautiful.  And then he says this:

“I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason too.”

You are not an extra part.  I really identify with Isabelle.  I wonder what my purpose is, too.  But I know that I have one, because God has given me one.  We were each made for something.  And I trust that He will help me find that something.

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See this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdEXHIuTxw  Seriously, watch this movie.

sick.

My brother does this thing.

There are so many things that he could say instead, as most people do.  I’m sorry.  Feel better.  A soft, murmured, poor thing.  A pat on the back, a sympathetic groan, a thoughtful do you need anything?  They’re all things we say to people that are sick and really hurting, and they’re all perfectly wonderful things to say.  They truly make me feel a little bit better.

But my little brother looks up at you with a soft smile and offers up a quiet, songlike “I love you”.  Sure, he says the other things, too.  But somewhere in there that simple phrase softly emerges, putting emphasis on the love every time – “I love you” – as if those three words could go farther than a healing of the soul to a physical healing of my body.  And that seems ridiuclous at first.  Why would he say that?  Great, but how’s that going to make me better?  The thing is, I have never once thought that when I hear the words leave his mouth.  It never makes me bitter, because it’s hard to look at pure love and feel upset.

And I think my little brother has the right idea.  I think (as much as I want to separate the two) that the soul and the body are more closely linked than we imagine or want to believe.  Love is so much stronger than we even realize, and we don’t see that.  We look for complex solutions, pragmatic findings, things that can be tested and proven.  And of course this matters.  But sometimes – most of the time – we need to know that we are loved as much as we need medicine or the right diet.  It might not heal our bodies by itself (although I have no doubt that it helps), but it reaches in and heals our hearts.

When we’re the most vulnerable, all we want to know is that we are valued, loved, and cherished.  That’s why those other things mean so much, too.  The sympathy, hugs, acts of service.  They’re all ways of sharing an immense love, and it’s a beautiful things in the midst of feeling absolutely awful.

Love heals.  Jesus cares about our bodies as well as our souls – why else would he have healed all the people that he did?  It was a way to show his love and his power to them and also meet their needs.  Not only that, but he healed us completely, in all our being.  Jesus’ death on the cross for our sins was the ultimate sacrifice of his very life that brought the ultimate and eternal healing of our souls.  We’ll get new bodies, too, in a resurrection to mirror His.  We will beraisedwith Him to live in eternity, forever made new and forever healed.

I’ve had the flu since Sunday, when I woke up with a fever.  I’m not going to pretend that I’m enjoying this, or that this is how I really wanted to spend my Spring Break (truthfully, it’s pretty terrible).  It’s really, really difficult to find the bright side in spending my only week at home on the couch in the study, surrounded by meds, toast, blankets, a thermometer, and Netflix (okay, that sounds kind of nice, now add the flu).

But I am loved, and I know that.  I am loved so much more than I deserve.  And a hug, just being held by someone who knows full well that I’m contagious, is one of the most beautiful things in the world.

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Read this: “We love because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19

Also, I read Blue Like Jazz (<click) a few days ago, and it was brilliant and amazing.  Go buy it now, or check it out from the library, or borrow it from a friend.  It’s beautiful, and fantastic, and honest, and I loved it.  I don’t really know how to explain it.  So read it, and maybe I’ll write a post on it soon.

See this: I’ve watched a heck of a lot of TV these past few days.  I wouldn’t recommend that telenovela or the end of the Mummy #3 (I think…?) where Brendan Fraser and his attractive British son use great teamwork to stab a Chinese mummy (uh)…  But the 1950’s version of The Importance of Being Earnest was pretty fantastic.  My family’s also forced me to watch a heck of a lot of Burn Notice, and I’ve watched some Phineas and Ferb (NO REGRETS).  Oh, and expect something soon about Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

a week with nothing to say?

Well.  That’s certainly new.  I’m getting a little concerned, though.  You see, for the past two-ish weeks, I’ve been doing work pretty much non-stop.  It hasn’t been the most fantastic, but it hasn’t been bad.  What concerns me, however, is the nature of writing.  Is it an acquired skill?  Is thinking deeply an acquired skill?  If you get into the habit of not thinking, of living down here in the physical world in perpetuity, of not writing or considering eternity and the bigger questions, does it get easier to not do these things?

I don’t have that burning desire to write something right now.  I don’t have time.  Not really.  Do I make time?  Instead of making me want to write more, does the time gone without writing anyway slowly dull my mind and lull me into a sleepy sort of obscurity, taking away that desire all together?

I don’t really know.  I do know that habits are easy to form, however, good or bad, and that’s something I need to be careful of.  I, like most of humanity(?), am a creature of habit and addiction, willing to cling to comfort before giving it up for something harder.

So, this was quick (for me).  I’ll continue to find lees of time to hide from the winds of busyness in, and maybe I’ll shore some fragments there.

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nothing else matters.

“At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.  When human souls have beome as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.” Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis

Last night, I went to a worship event in another state.  It was sort of a spur of the moment decision, but it was one of the best ones I’ve made in a while.  Clearly, it was a lot of fun, and I got to bond with people, have milkshakes, and be silly afterwards.  But the actual worship was fantastic.

I worry about the same things a lot.  My thoughts cycle through future job woes, how I’m dreadfully undecided, the amount of homework I have, etc.  But, here’s the thing.

It doesn’t matter.

Jobs, your future, work, what you’re going to wear, problems in your social life.  I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do our best in these things (because of course we should).  But in the long run, they don’t matter at all.  When it comes right down to it, this world will pass, and you and I will pass, and we can’t take anything with us when we are translated over except our souls.

Nothing matters but Jesus, and what he’s done, and who he is, and what he’s sacrificed for us.  He loves us astoundingly, amazingly, in such a way that we can’t even comprehend the volume of his love.  He came to us, even though we don’t deserve it, and gave his very life in order to share it with us.

It’s absolutely mind-blowing.

I can’t remember much of the particulars of the worship night.  I don’t remember exactly which songs we sang, or if the band was good, or what the content was exactly of my desperate, fervent, muttered prayers.

But I remember the peace of the God of the universe filling me up until I thought I would overflow or burst or laugh or cry, and I remember God grabbing my heart and refusing to let go.  I remember knowing that he was there, with us, ready to take us in and change us entirely and turn our lives upside down in order to put them back together in a better way that centers completely on Him.

He’s still here with me, now.  And I know that he’s not going to leave.

It doesn’t matter what I end up doing, as long as I’m doing it for Him.  I pray that he’d take away my pride and fallen-ness and fill me up so much with the Holy Spirit that his love would flow out of me and reach those that need him desperately.

I hope I won’t lose sight of what’s important.  And I know I will, at least a little bit.  I still live in this world, and that will distract me.  I have to be refreshed every day and refocus on what truly matters.  But one day, we’ll get there.  One day we will truly understand the weight of God’s glory.

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Read this: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12

Romans 8 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+8&version=NIV )

Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis: http://www.verber.com/mark/xian/weight-of-glory.pdf  .  I really struggled with finding a quote to start this post off with because every word of this is absolutely amazing.  READ IT!!!

the internet (and other drugs)

I’m just going to admit that I have a problem, here.  I realize the irony of this in that I’m posting it on the internet itself, but WordPress isn’t really the culprit as much as Tumblr or Facebook or any of the other mindless sites where you scroll and scroll and scroll until you realize that several hours of your time have suddenly disappeared.

But when my first thought is of a technological escapism and I beeline right to my computer, that’s bad.  That borders dangerously close to an obsession and smacks of the beginnings of an addict.  The more time I spend on these things, the less creative and thoughtful I become.  And that’s certainly an issue.

I realized yesterday that the Internet, when not used for checking important emails, researching information, looking up assignments, or thinking about things (mostly, WordPress falls here), is much like the soma of Brave New World, or like any other drug.

Soma makes you vacuously happy.

Soma makes you think of nothing.

Soma takes hours of your time and leaves you with nothing in return but lethargy and a deadened mind.

Soma prevents real thought.

Soma prevents you from becoming the sort of person who changes the world.

The Internet is soma.

So I can’t follow TV shows obsessivly or continue polluting my spirit with hours of the Internet that begin to weigh me down.  Because you can’t see life through a TV screen.  You can’t change the world or understand the eternal while constantly shackled to Tumblr or Facebook.  I shouldn’t waste what little life I have on nothing that really matters.  It’s draining me.  It’s taking my soul, little by little.  And I hadn’t done anything to stop it, because I’ve been too busy taking the freaking soma.

The Internet is the drug that steals your time, your individuality, your mind, and the things that matter.  I have to stop being a Delta and live.  And I’m going to need the help of my sin-and-death destroying Savior to do that.  I can’t do it on my own – I desperately need Him for everything in my life.  But I’m up for less Internet.

Tell me your thoughts!

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Read this: Any book.  Any classic that touches your soul.  And think.  And have an adventure.  Because I need to do all of the above.