The Hand of God at Work

Earlier this week I took my two girls to Lubbock Christian University to register them for the fall. We had an eventful time getting to Lubbock just barely missing a multi car pile up followed by getting food poisoning at an Arby's in Abilene. The next day was a whirlwind meeting with admissions, recruiters, advisers, registrars, and financial aid. It was a great day even though the girls felt like death warmed over from the food poisoning. By that evening it had warmed to 93 degrees but the next morning the weather changed and it was 34 degrees with a 35 mile per hour wind.

In this midst of this dramatic weather change we packed up the car to head home. It was cloudy, cold, and windy. About two hours into the drive we encountered a detour with a bridge under construction at hwy 84 and Interstate 20. The detour had us get on the freeway going west, exit the freeway, u turn, and get back on the freeway going east bypassing the bridge construction. It was in the construction detour that things did not work out so well.

We followed the detour and exited the freeway behind an 18 wheel truck. As we approached the stop sign to turn and go under the freeway there was a flurry of detour signs including large orange flags on top of the stop sign giving us a multitude of warnings and instructions. As the truck in front of us slowly pulled out and turned right onto the narrow 2 lane farm road we pulled up to the stop sign to turn left. A second or two after we got to the stop sign a new white Suburban pulled up to the stop sign across from us. My daughter, who was driving, asked whose turn it was and I told her I think it is our turn. She sat there for a moment looking at the white Suburban and I told her "it's our turn so we can go". She hesitated for a moment more and then pulled out. As we began our turn left under the bridge we heard a short honk followed by the nose of our car smashing into the side of an old Suburban that was coming down the road at about 50 miles per hour. The nose of our car sunk into the side of suburban which grabbed our car and spun us like a top- we spun almost a complete 360 in the narrow 2 lane road without bumping either curb. The old Suburban screeched to a stop in the left lane midway under the bridge. We had both stayed on the road and missed the bridge columns as well as the culverts that were on either side of the road under the bridge.

Scary, scary, scary! We quickly took stock and realized we were ok but the car was injured. We discovered it would still drive so we pulled it off into a gas station and tried to take in what had happened. As we looked back at the stop sign we realized the one thing we had missed in the flurry of flags and detour directions was the small white sign that said 'cross traffic does not stop'. We spent the next hour processing things with the police,  our insurance company, and trying to decide if we would need a tow truck. We discovered the nearest place to rent a car was 45 miles away so we made the car drivable enough to get it to Abilene by pulling off the parts that were hanging down into the front wheel.

After dropping the car off at the body shop, getting a rental car, and eating some lunch we were finally back on the road again. As we drove we processed what happened talking about the importance of never listening to anyone else in the car who is giving you bad advice and instead making driving decisions based upon your own observations. But the more significant conversation centered around the spiritual issues at hand. We talked about how both of us had been prompted to be in prayer about our trip home and had prayed asking God to give us a safe trip. My daughter had prayed asking God to keep us out of a wreck which prompted her to ask why God allowed us to get in a wreck even though she had asked him to keep us out of a wreck. As we continued to talk and process we began to realize that although God had not kept us out of a wreck he may have worked to save our lives. If we had pulled out a fraction of a second earlier instead of hitting the side of the old Suburban we would have been been in the path of a big Suburban going 50 miles an hour. It would have most likely t-boned us in the passenger front door where I was sitting. It would then have likely thrown us into the columns on one side of the bridge and knocked the Suburban into the columns on the other side of the bridge causing significant injuries to all of us.

We began to clue in on the holy brain fart that my daughter had after I told her we should be able to go. I remember glancing over at her and wondering why she had frozen up for a second... had she not done that we would have pulled out in front of the Suburban instead of bouncing off the side of the Suburban. It really appears that God used her weakness, freezing up for a second, to compensate for my backseat driving producing a bad wreck instead of a catastrophic collision. Had God completely spared us from the wreck neither my daughter nor I would have learned anything. We would not have realized the significance of what He had spared us from. We would not have learned some valuable lessons about driving and back seat driving. We would have instead continued down the road griping about an old Suburban that was going too fast down a small road and the confusing nature of the signage in the construction zone.

What occurred has the fingerprints of God upon it; using our weakness to reveal His glory, restraining how bad things could have been, and prompting by the Holy Spirit to invite God to work. Pretty cool.

The Difference Between Doing and Being

Over the last few years I have had an ongoing conversation with God that goes something like this... "God, what do you want me to do?" God's response is "I want you to be mine." When this first started a few years back in my prayer time I was a little frustrated because I wanted a concrete 'To Do' list, not a fuzzy 'To Be' list. However as I chewed on what God was telling me I began to kind of understand it. It is easy to do something but it is far more challenging to be something.

Doing is an external action that does not have any bearing upon who you are. Be-ing is at the core of you, it is at the heart and soul of who you are. You can do something that looks good to those around you while still having a putrid heart. Judas Iscariot is a great example of doing with no bearing upon who you are at the core. Way too many modern politicians are another example of doing and saying things externally or publicly while their actions hidden from the public reveal what is going on in their heart as evidenced by a news story that came out this week about a number of political figures in New York state who have been indicted on bribery charges- they told the public they would fix the economy and work for the voter and what they did was work for themself.

This is why God's invitation for me to be His instead of simply doing a few godly things has really challenged me over the last few years. The best way to evaluate how well I am doing at being God's in the depths of my heart is by what I do when no one is watching- when my actions are hidden. It's easy to look good in public. It takes far more work to be good in private in the depths of your heart. God's ultimate desire is to have our heart, not our hands because if he has our heart then our hands will follow.

Over the years I have done a number of things to help me to be God's. And I will be the first one to tell you I'm not perfect at the quest to be God's. I have discovered this quest comes in waves. There are days and weeks and months that I do a great job of letting God be the master of my heart which plays itself out through my actions. But there are other periods where I allow my heart to get cluttered with junk other than belonging to God. During these periods I find my thoughts scattered and the temptation to do and say what I shouldn't strong. Something that has developed significant symbolic meaning for me has been to write a short prayer on a piece of paper and put it in a large metal vase I got from a local import store. The prayer that I write has been consistent for the last 9 years; "God, today I will be yours." followed by the current date. It is not something I do every day, problably because it would lose its meaning and become a daily chore. Instead I only do this symbolic action when I am scattered, off course, and realizing I have not been too concerned with allowing God to have my heart.

An additional bonus of this practice has been to help me realize how often we try to convince ourselves we are acceptable to God because we have done some good things for him. When I was in college a group of Christian guys I hung out with started excusing behavior that was less than stellar by saying God will cut us some slack for what we shouldn't do because we were living good most of the time. The funny thing is we all really believed this. We really thought God would overlook one sin because of a fewgood things we had done. This plays itself out in funny ways. We try to convince ourselves that because we went to church or mass or the revival or whatever else we deem important God will consequently overlook when we do something else that we should not be doing. That is legalism.

Legalism says that God is only conerned with a few external actions so we become focused on those few specific actions or beliefs (that we have chosen) ignoring other items that are often even more significant. We focus on something religious while ignoring the way we treat people, or our lack of ethics, or our obsessession with money or our appearance or food or possessions or sex or power or...

Legalism says that we must make a list of what is a sin and what is not. However sin is not so easily categorized because the heart determines sinfulness, not a list. Think about it: For some Sunday worship is a sinful act because they are only focused upon evaluating if everything was done correctly with no heart of worship given over to God in praise; For a young couple going out on a date  holding hands can be a sinful act if the intention of the hand holding is to ultimatley get the other's clothes off; For a person protecting their family from an armed intruder killing is not a sin unless the intruder runs away and you kill him six months later when you finally track him down.

See the funny fuzzy lines that develop when we start trying to decide what is a sin and what is not a sin? Our problems come when we try to focus upon the external behavior of what we are doing instead of focusing on giving ownership of our heart to God- being God's.

God wants us to daily make a decision to be His. God wants me to daily make the decision to be His. "Dear God, today I will be yours." April 7, 2013.

Understanding God in Genesis

Do you realize your view of God can impact the entirety of your existence. A foundational place to start understanding God is in the book of Genesis and then continuing throughout the Old Testament.

Genesis 1 reveals some amazing things about God. "In the beginning God..." tells us about this god who existed before our beginning and who simply spoke to bring all that we know into being. This is an amazing claim. How could something like this exist? Who is this being? Some people stop right there and say no way- there is no being like this, God is a myth. Others jump in and use Genesis 1 to develop a viewpoint that the world was created in 6 literal days. Both of these see what they want to see through their own cultural, social, and religious bias instead of simply allowing the story to unfold.

 As the story unfolds we see a god who creates everything. Everything!  In Genesis 2 we see a god who creates humans in his image and asks them to fill the earth with offspring as they rule over and subdue it. We see a god who values companionship and who helps those he made to recognize boundaries. Moving into Genesis 3 we see another being come on the scene who seeks to confuse and mislead god's people. We see people who instead of walking daily with their god are now afraid and hide. We see a god who provides consequences and protection.

A decision that has to be made by every person is whether this is god with a little g or a big G. I believe misunderstandings about God's actions in Genesis 3 impact whether a person decides this is a god or if this is their God.

Through the years I have been surprised time and again as I have realized that most people misunderstand what goes on in Genesis 3. Most people have it in their mind that God kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden because they broke his rules. For these people God is a god of rules and following him means we must follow his rules. This god does not value mercy or relationship, he values rules.

However the reality of what is going on in Genesis 3 can be seen through a few clues. First of all we notice that God made clothes of fur to replace the clothes made out of fig leaves which were now seen as necessary after disobeying God. If God were focused upon rules then we should see no compassion when someone has broken the rules- we should instead see harsh consequences be allowed to unfold... 'you eat the fruit and have your eyes open and realize you are naked and make poky fig leaf clothes then fine, walk around with scratchy underwear!' But we don't see harsh consequences, instead we see God say 'I'm sorry you made this mistake, wear these instead, they will be more comfortable'. 

The second thing we notice is God's reason for sending Adam and Eve from the garden- to get them away from the tree of life. We see God express concern that if they eat from the tree of life in their current state they will live forever with the implication being that they will live forever apart from God. The tree of life is seen again at the end of the book of Revelation when those who have had that removed which separated them from God can once again eat from the tree- in other words with sin removed they can now live forever with God instead of separated from God. So serious is this tree of life that God was willing to kill Adam and Eve if they tried to return to the garden and the tree.
The reason for removal was not punishment for breaking God's rules but protection so that God could develop a plan to fix that which separated us from Him so that once again we could walk in the garden with him.

If God is a god of love and compassion and enormous effort to once again be able to walk with us in the garden then I'm in and excited. If God is just about rules then what's the point because at some point we are all going to mess up and break the rules. This is where the difference in who we understand God to be is important. A god working to bring me back to him can be my big G god anytime. A god making arbitrary rules and then waiting for me to break them so he can punish me will stay in the little g category for most people including me.

I'm looking forward to walking in the garden with a big G God who has spent all of time doing whatever it takes to make sure we are together and not separated forevermore.