There is a Seven Eleven near the office that I go to quite frequently.  A couple of mornings ago there was a homeless man in a wheelchair sitting outside of the store.  It is not unusual to see homeless people about, so I was not surprised.  He did not look at me, nor did he ask for any money.

He was there again a second day, and I decided that if he was there next time, I would ask if I could buy him a cup of coffee.  So, when I saw him again, I went up and said “Good Morning” and asked if he would like a hot drink.  He looked at me and said he was cold and so hungry he was shaking.  That I could plainly see.  He didn’t want the coffee.  I was a bit taken aback, but managed to switch gears fast enough and decided that I would offer him some money, since food was clearly the priority.  I had $5 in my wallet, so I offered that to him and said he could probably get something from the little restaurant next to the Seven Eleven.  He looked at the window where their special meals were listed and said that what I gave him wouldn’t be enough, and started to hand the money back to me.

Now I was more than taken aback.  I told him that I was sure he could find something and walked into the store.

As I paid the cashier, my mind was churning over the whole exchange.  I don’t claim to be the epitome of generosity.  And I did approach him, so maybe he didn’t want to be bothered.  Maybe I unintentionally offended him.  Maybe there was a mental dynamic I did not know about.  But all of that aside, what struck me the most was the lack of resourcefulness.  It was true that the $5 wasn’t enough to buy one of the special meals.  But what about a single item?  Or what about something from the Seven Eleven?  Or perhaps there was somewhere else he could go that he knew about?  Five bucks could still have gotten some food in his stomach.  All he could see was barriers and no opportunities.

It grieved and sobered me.  There seemed to be no capacity or willingness to think of how resources could be combined differently, or broken up to achieve the same goal.  The situation appeared so void of opportunity to him that he was going to give the money back to me.  I wonder how much he could change his situation if he had a different perspective in this regard.

But what really hit me hard was when God shifted my perspective to think about our relationships with Him.  How often do we do the exact same thing?  He is, of course, infinitely more generous than I could ever be, and He knows what we need.  But when we are presented with a gift from Him, how often do we refuse it because we all we can see are the barriers?  How capable are we of seeing the opportunities, even if they are not what we originally wanted?  How often does He turn away in frustration because we can’t see how we could use what He just gave us?

God knows far more about our lives and what we need than we ever could, and He has infinite resources at His disposal.  But we don’t always understand why He didn’t give us exactly what we expected, or we may even think He is not giving us enough.  Many times God gives us gifts of raw resources, and it is a son who can see the opportunities they bring.

The picture of a homeless, shivering, hungry old man trying to give me back my gift will long be a reminder of how we may sometimes appear to God.  May He shine His light and show us how to grow!

#4 in the Mysterious God Series

How do you deal with tension in your life?  What is your reaction when some part of your world goes off the track?  Does it pull the rest of the train off with it?

For many years of my life I could tolerate little to no tension, especially in relationships.  If something started to go haywire, my whole life skidded to a halt until I could get the recalcitrant piece back in place again.  Considerable amounts of my time and emotional energy were expended to keep my fragile house of cards from collapsing.  When things in my life were bright, I could make forward progress.  But as soon as the sun darkened in any portion of it, I became nearly obsessed with restoring the light again.

God, in His mercy, began to show me that I could not go on living this way.  He had given me a desire to grow, and the sheer messiness of growth was at direct odds with my need to keep everything in a good place all the time.  So, He set me out on a healing journey.

Slowly, over a course of years I began to develop the capacity to stay on track when things were not going well.  I could be hurting in one area of my life and still push forward in another.  I could be completely blocked in an important relationship and still find joy and fulfillment in the rest of my life.  This was huge progress, but I didn’t realize at first just how significant it was.

God took me next to the issue of love.  As a young Christian, my love was sincere but very naive, as was my perspective of the Love that is God.  It was simple, sweet, and revolved around good feelings and good deeds.  In the process of my healing journey I came across some pockets of pain that I had long hidden.  I had to deal with anger at God, anger at people, and all kinds of emotions related to those events.  Then I had a very close relationship blow apart with grisly results and I was left feeling pretty raw.  Suddenly God wasn’t so one-dimensional and neither was life.

What was this about love?  God loves me while He allows my heart to be ripped open?  God loved me all those years ago when bad things were happening?  What happened to the good feelings?  What was this razor edge?

I still believed and knew to be true the things we naturally and joyfully experience with love.  But now, here, I was faced with an entirely different view of it.  It was love that caused God to send His Son to die a horrible death, it is love that causes every parent to punish their child.  Love can be the most painful thing we experience.

I pondered and wrestled a long time with God about love.  Was I willing to accept all of it, knowing that in the name of love God could cause me great difficulty and pain?  I knew I would have to accept something I couldn’t possibly fully understand.

In the midst of my pondering, I realized that I never could have even thought these things in the years before.  My worldview would not have allowed it.  I needed things to be neat and clean, understandable, predictable.  Because I could not tolerate peace and turmoil existing side by side in my life, I also could not tolerate a concept such as a Love that was both beautiful and terrible.

Our willingness to accept the reality of tension will play a crucial role in our capacity to embrace a mysterious God.  Human nature is simply not big enough to see everything at once, so there will always be things we don’t understand.  Do we have to explain away why God is blessing our socks off in one area while seeming to ignore the agony in another?  Do we ignore half of the picture because we can’t deal with the fact that both halves really are in the same frame?  So many times we make God’s nature smaller and smaller because of our need to feel settled about the way the universe is run.

I think we are inclined to prefer an “either/or”.  Either the world is evil or the world is good.  Either you become bitter or you go into denial.  Few people are willing to embrace the process it takes to come through the pain into a bigger view.  I believe that instead of “either/or” we might do better to ask God to take us on a pilgrimage to discover the “and”.  There is good and evil the world.  So, how does He do it?

Did I mention that God is mysterious?

If it killed me I was determined not to be a messy Mercy.

I was NOT going to be someone who needed a GPS, a map, and a “call a friend” lifeline to get from their home to the grocery store.  I was not going to be an emotional geyser every five minutes.  I was not going to be disorganized and useless.  Yes, that is really how I felt.  What was the point of having this built-in fiber optic connection to heaven if I couldn’t convert any of the beauty into a transformational reality?  I had seen too much of the Mercy tendency to believe in the existence of a reality before it became one.  It was far too easy to live in the world of anticipation and never get to the work of making it real.  I had seen too much of my own behavior.  I was hard on myself and my entire tribe.

I set about the task with typical Mercy stubbornness and started lobbing mortar shells at anything that moved.  I carried on this way for a few years, blasting away at all the weaknessess I saw.  There was improvement, to be sure.  I had identified some real weaknessness.

Eventually, I had to stop and take stock of things.  I let the dust settle a bit so I could see what was left.  The question of “who am I” was always there in the background, but now it pushed itself forcefully to the front.  Who Was I?  Or what was left of me?  At that moment I resembled a piece of Swiss cheese more than anything.

This is when God showed up.  He had not been particularly responsive to all my frustrated questions of “WHY?!!?  WHY did you make an impossible combination?  How am I supposed to be ME?”  In fact, He usually flat-out ignored me.  So, I would go back to my mortar shells and blast away again.

But now He came, quietly, and simply turned my perspective, like the tiny shift of a kaleidoscope that causes a new cascade of colors to appear.  I realized He had not responded to me because my entire focus was trained on what I was NOT going to be.  This left Him very little room to answer the question of who I was.

You can pursue excellence out of an aversion to the alternative.  Or you can pursue excellence because it is part of the original design.  What drives you makes all the difference in the world.

Because my main focus was on what I didn’t want to be, I consistently lobbed mortar shells when a sniper’s shot was the better choice.  I would shut down, board up and suppress all my emotions, or all of my intuition so that none of it would endanger my Anti Messy Mercy policy.  Here is where I made tragic mistakes that I am still undoing.  I killed a lot of good along with the bad – and this because my focus was on eradicating the bad, not on preserving the good.

I am convinced that this matters immensely.  When you have a sense of the good, of the original design, of God’s fingerprint, you can cut away at the weaknesses while still preserving and developing the core that God made.  Your picture doesn’t even have to be complete.  Perhaps you only know a small portion of your design, but you focus on what you are building, not what needs to be destroyed.  It begins with God.

His way is to begin with what He made.

I wonder how many of you are functioning under a similar perspective as I had.  You might take a look at the things you are pursuing in life, the goals you have set for yourself and see what is the driving force behind them.  Is it a “NOT to be” or is it a “TO be”?  Your goals in themselves may be perfectly fine.  But if you discover that you have a lot of “NOT to be” floating around, I would strongly encourage you to seek God about what is the good you are trying to achieve by overcoming the weaknesses.  What is the end result?  What is the picture He has imprinted in your spirit?

You are not defined by what you are not.  You are defined by what you are.

#3 in the “Mysterious God” series

John Adams was a visionary.  He saw the future of America in ways that others had not even thought about.  He was articulate and forceful in his beliefs, he knew what needed to be done and went to great personal sacrifice to achieve it.  He lived for months or years at a time separated from his family, with little to no communication in the midst of a bloody struggle for independence, as he fought for the future of the nation he loved.  He was a father.  He was a leader.  He was a man of God who invested in his nation, his people, and his land.

Adolf Hitler was a visionary.  He saw the future of Germany in ways that others had not even thought about.  He was articulate and forceful in his beliefs, he knew what needed to be done and demanded great sacrifice to achieve it.  He demanded the sacrifice of lives in war, in concentration camps, in relentless racial and physiological cleansing, as he fought for the future of the nation he loved.  He was a despot.  A brutal dictator.  He was a demonized man who tormented his nation, his people, and his land.

How could the path of any two men veer so sharply apart?

My head was reeling that day as I left the Holocaust Museum.  It was my first time there, and as it is for most people, it proved to be a memorable visit.  The grief over the cruelty of mankind was sharpened by the memory of the two previous days I had spent basking in the history of an extraordinary man, John Adams.

I was on an east coast tour.  I started in Quincy, Massachusetts, the home town of John Adams.  After spending a few days there, I drove down to Washington, DC to visit one of my favorite spots in the nation.  While there, I felt prompted to visit the museum.  I knew I was in for a sobering experience.  I knew I would come out heavy and grieved.

As I slowly walked out of the museum and found a place to sit outside, my spirit was churning.  I realized it wasn’t the grief that was causing such tumult.  It was the size of the problem.

Our world is not a stranger to wicked men any more than it is to righteous men.  But this was the first I had experienced both so deeply in such a short period of time.  My chest felt like it was going to burst.

I was grasping to understand how our God could keep a universe running where such extremes could exist.  How does He do it?  How does He keep the fabric of humanity from shredding under the tension of such extremes?  How can two men, with a human spirit from the same God, and an immense potential for good, end up so diametrically opposed?  How can the same God love both of them?

Who is this God that can sustain a world where both the darkest evil and the purest light inhabit the lives of mankind?  Have you ever wondered how we continue to exist?

And why has He been so longsuffering with a race whose bipolar behavior is enough to send the world’s best psychiatrist to the monastery?

Who is our God?

This was a decidedly uncomfortable line of questioning.  Every question I asked left me feeling smaller, more vulnerable, more out of control in a world where forces far beyond my comprehension were at play.  I knew, even as my spirit churned, that I was looking for answers I wasn’t likely to find in this lifetime. But I had to keep asking them because every time I did, I could feel my spirit expand.  My willingness to glimpse at the frightening unsearchableness of God left me in a profound state of awe.

Opposites will stretch you.  They are often bigger than our capacity to comprehend them, and so leave us in a place of vulnerability and uncertainty.  Without even realizing it, we often choose one side or the other so that we don’t have to look at both.  Or we lessen the extremes so that the middle is not disrupted by the stark realities on either side.  We try to dispose of the tension by settling into a definable world.

Some of the greatest mysteries of God lie in our grappling with mixture, with the tensions of life, with things we haven’t a clue why they are they way they are.  This is the playing field where we can meet Him again and again, each time our spirit expanding through an awe experience.  We may not always get an answer.  Am I closer to understanding how God manages a world where John Adams and Adolf Hitler both existed?  No.  Not really.  But my spirit is bigger, more robust, more deeply connected with God for having dared to process those emotions, having dared to look at good and bad at the same time, and having embraced the vulnerability of being so completely out of my league.

What about you?  Are you willing to ask?  Are you willing to see His mysteries, even if they leave you gasping for breath?  How often do you let your spirit experience God in a world that is far from neat and orderly?

I urge you to let Him take you there.  Let Him stretch you, let Him show you Himself, and fill your entire being with awe of the God of a world where contradictions, opposites and things unexplainable all function beneath the power of His mighty hand.

#2 in the “Mysterious God” series

I love the imagery in John chapter 5.  There is a pool in Jerusalem by the sheep market.  The name of the pool is Bethesda.  On any normal day the water would be decently clean, used for bathing, and further upstream at the upper pool, for drinking.  But every so often something extraordinary would happen.  An angel would come and trouble the waters.  Stir them up, disturb the molecules, and send them away vibrating with so much life that the first person in the water would be healed.

Contrast this picture with that of an abandoned fish pond in your neighbor’s backyard.  There is still water in the pond, if you could call it that.  There is no movement, no current, no life; save the algae that grows thick on top.  The only reaction you have is to hold your nose and wonder how many thousands of mosquitoes are breeding at this very moment.

If you were given the choice between a pool visited by an angel and a stinky, moldy fish pond, which would you choose for your backyard?

Right.  No brainer.  Ok, then, what if one of these was the picture of your spirit?  Which would you choose?

Did you think the question just got easier?  Perhaps.  But the application got a whole lot harder.

Allowing our spirits to get stirred, disturbed, disrupted and overwhelmed with life is not as easy as it is desirable.  The stirring leaves us most vulnerable to a mysterious God, an unsearchable God, a God who is profoundly more good than He is safe.  We shy away from the unpredictable and the unknowable.  Anything that jolts us out of our perspective, re-arranges the molecules of our very being, sets us on our ear, and leaves our heads spinning has a tendency to remind us of just how little we are and how enormously BIG God is.

Troubled the waters.

Why does that stand out me?  It speaks to me about wonderment.  Awe.  Intrusions upon your life, bursts of heavenly color, simple beauties and intricately complex challenges.  He infuses the molecules of your spirit with the frequency of His glory.  Who is this God you serve?  If you can hardly comprehend what you just experienced, could you ever hope to understand everything about Him?  No.  Not ever.  But the life comes in the asking, in the wondering, in the willingness to ask and leave the questions unanswered.  This is your invitation for Him to come and stir the waters.

What keeps you from giving it?  Perhaps you are not even aware of the moment when you stopped inviting Him.  As a new Christian you may have been full of wonder and faith enough to move mountains.  You wanted God to whip your spirit into a froth.  You rejoiced over the perpetual state of wonderment, it was all part of the glorious encounter with your Savior.  But slowly over the years, or perhaps all in one painful lump, the permission to stir grew restricted, the angel visited less and less and the first signs of algae appeared.  You no longer wanted to be disturbed.  You were content with your worldview, not realizing that there is no neutral.  Not to grow means you will begin to shrink.  Perhaps it was out of a desire for comfort and safety, perhaps it was because of woundedness or a lack of legitimacy.

In the end, if we are afraid of the unanswerable, if we must be in control, if we must not be vulnerable, then we will continue to shrink in upon ourselves until the life waters of our spirit become stagnant.  It is like the abandoned fish pond that is never stirred, never refreshed, never troubled, and so becomes a putrid breeding ground for mosquitoes.

Troubled the waters.

We were made for awe.  We were made to embrace a mysterious God and day by day, minute by minute to experience and express the wonderment of His ways.  The enemy means to belittle and reduce, our God to expand and fulfill.  The pool at Bethesda stands for me as not only a window into the works of our Lord, but also as a representation of the life made to flow in and through our spirits.

Having said all that, we can assume the answer to the question of which pool you would like your spirit to be.

So, let’s ask a second question.

Which one of the two pools is your spirit?