BALANCING ACT

“Get skillful and godly Wisdom, get understanding (discernment, comprehension, and interpretation)…” Proverbs 4:5 (The Amplified Bible)

The Shelby County Sheriff Posse Rodeo was a big deal every year in my hometown of Center.  There was a well-orchestrated parade and the whole nine yards.  I remember as a very small child watching and hearing those snorting, stomping bucking broncs caged in and waiting on the edges of the arena.  A cowboy would climb on, and when they opened those chutes, a horse came ripping out kicking and convulsing and maniacally throwing himself into every manner of contortion trying to throw off his rider who was attempting to break him, to hold him down, and cramp his style.  This bucking bronc is perfect symbol of  me as a child.

Of course, I didn’t see myself that way at the time.  I didn’t consider that I was some wild, gyrating terror whom necessary riders were attempting and needing to tame.  I didn’t see myself as malicious or rebellious in any way.  I just thought I was having fun.  

Most who hear of my childhood antics register a shock upon their faces.  They don’t think that kind of a childhood is in character with the school-teaching, devotional-writing adult who would be married for 40 years to a quiet, mild-mannered fellow like my Larry. I suppose that’s because since those days I have been tamed considerably. But the truth is that there’s still some of that kid in here, doing some occasional snortin’ and floppin’ around inside the chute.  

We are told in Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians that we are to be “transformed into the image of Christ from one degree of glory to the next,” so as adults we must certainly put off the childish parts of our nature that might hinder that kind of growth.  But then, Jesus Himself warns us against losing certain aspects of a childlike nature. He goes so far as to say that unless we come as a child, we can “in no wise enter the kingdom of Heaven.” 

Hmmm.  What to do? How can we manage such a crucial balancing act?

I tried to summarize in poetry my struggle with this.

Ultimate Dilemma

I want to be pretty; I want to be plain.

I want to be a barefoot dancer in the rain.

But then again, on the other hand,

I’d rather be practical and wear brown wool,

Something that will make me invisible.

I want to write poetry, be romantic and lacy;

I want to break bottles, break rules and go crazy.

I want to be vivid: I want to be pale.

I wish to inspire; I’d like to regale.

I’d like to be nameless with a face to forget

Like a chameleon that blends in and graciously fits.

But oh, this desire to be a rebel in red—

Blazing through pinks with a chicken on her head!

Can you relate?  Do you look back at the kid version of yourself and compare it to the adult model?  If you haven’t lately, I really recommend that to you. Some of the weightiest and most enduring influences upon us emanate from some of the least predictable sources.  The message is often camouflaged by the blur of activity we are involved in; without good guidance, we can’t make sense of the seeming randomness of all that is happening.  We can’t find any logical pattern or common thread or recognize the key individuals who are placed strategically in our paths, especially in our youth, and thus, we will likely miss the big picture at the time.  But we are blessed to get more chances to recognize these messages as we travel concentrically past them by way of memory. Just because we missed the lessons of our youth when we were youthful doesn’t mean we can’t glean wisdom from them later and still benefit from them and be changed by them in significant ways.

Dedicate some time to tracing the steps that took you from there to here. Then ask yourself if you are appropriately grateful for the people and events that took you from there to here.  We can learn much about ourselves way down there as a child that viewed from these heights might make a lot more sense and give us a needed change of attitude and even a crucial change of heart. 

OUR DANGEROUS INFLUENCE

“Be self controlled and alert.  Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.  Resist him, standing firm in the faith because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of suffering.”  1 Peter 5:8-9

          Just as the devil is like a dragon in his revenge, breathing fire and trying to burn to cinders our knowledge of God, he also prowls around stealthily trying to scare us with his fierce growls into paralysis for the same reason. The devil is out to destroy our knowledge of who God really is. 

Maybe he will try to convince us that God is not as powerful as he is so that we will give up on a lost cause and throw our energies behind his “winning team.”  After all, look at how the world is shaping up.  There is certainly a lot of evil out there, and good people are often victimized by it.  It doesn’t look like good will win out over evil; things just seem to be getting worse and worse. I went to a PG-13 movie last night believing it might be decent entertainment, but I was dead wrong.  All the definitions have changed.  What once indicated safety no longer can be trusted.  But the Bible says that God will not be mocked, and we know that all that is going on down here doesn’t get by the eyes of our all-seeing Father.  He is just, and one day everything will be made right.

Maybe the lion will roar that God is not as good as we thought He was or as attentive to our needs.  He will accuse Him of turning a blind eye to pain and injustice.  He will bring things to mind both afar and anear about how God is not doing His job in a very kind and loving way. He might argue that faith is not a strong enough cord to bind us to heaven, and anyway, who wants to be bound, period?

The revenge he wants can be found if he can destroy the strong faith it takes to make us the testimony that will turn the world from its evil ways. What the devil wants is strong ambassadors for the life lived with no God. He argues that we are slaves to an unkind or at least uncaring, or maybe just a weak, god. What he doesn’t roar about is that without our trust in our big God, we are not really free agents able to make our life the way we want it, the way it really ought to be; instead, we are really just a bunch of little gods who are all vying for our own way. No one ever wins, and there is never any freedom in this kind of living. There is war on every side from every other one of us competing for lordship.

But in the third chapter of 2 Corinthians, Paul outlines for us why our thinking about and our belief in our good, almighty God is so crucial and so dangerous to our Adversary: “You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts known and read by everybody.  You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” ( 2Corinthians 3:2-3).

What we believe and how we live as a result is powerful in this fallen world. It screams, louder even that the roaring lion, that there is Hope!  There is more going on than what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears.  The devil knows that there is, but he doesn’t want us to know that.  We are the letters of proof to a watching and wondering world.  

 And we are not alone as we go about trying to live faithfully. As crucial as it is for Christians to be aware of the truth of the prowling lion, let us never forget that our faithful Father’s answer to all this prowling is His own far-reaching and ever-constant ranging eyes: “For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to Him.”  2 Chronicles 16:9.

         

REVENGE OF THE IGNORANCE MONGER

“We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God…” 2 Corinthians 10:5

“…She gave birth to a son, a male child who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.  And her child was snatched up to God and to His throne…And there was war in heaven…The great dragon was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him…The the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring—those who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.”  Revelation 12: 5,7,9,17

          There is more than one reason that Satan wants us to become ignorant about God, but certainly a foundational one is revenge. Revelation 12 tells us all about it. We are given fits by him because we are those offspring in this story. We are the targets of the Enemy’s wrath, simply because we hold to the testimony of Jesus. 

          When weak ones are taken captive by cults or gangs, crafty leaders know that chains and cells are not strong enough to cause their victims to become submissive followers.  A submissive and subservient following is the core motivation of any cult leader; unreserved adoration and obedience is what he feeds on. And just controlling and limiting the freedom of the body has nothing to do with inspiring adoration.  The leader must control the victim’s thinking; he must have power over the mind of his captives.  Thus, the victim’s mind must be washed clean of its definition of truth.  No lesser degree of brainwashing could go far enough to achieve total dependence and trust. 

          It’s hard for me to imagine how that could happen so completely—

how someone’s whole framework of truth could be torn down and obliterated in a relatively short period of time.  But if I stop and recall some of the things I have done that have made me ashamed of myself, I realize that I should have at least an inkling of an idea how, on a less drastic but still dangerous level, brainwashing happens to most of us.

           I find some new truth in the Word and become so excited that my tongue practically knocks my teeth out trying to tell people about it…for a while.  It feels, for a while, like the most important thing I have ever learned, and woe be unto me if I do not help others to see it. It changes my life…for a while. 

I don’t know exactly what happens that changes things—

probably that answer is many pronged— but I think a lot of it has to do with some kind of sinister and perverted idea of vacation I buy into from time to time. Perhaps I have spent so much time studying and writing and teaching that I listen to a voice that starts yammering on about “balance,” so I taper off and give my brain some less crucial and more relaxing fare for a few days. With me it doesn’t have to be anything immoral or even borderline; just something mild and harmless that leaves my thinking in neutral. I simply quit growing for a while.

Then pretty soon I realize I am not only not thinking about much that matters; I am also not doing much that matters, and although I won’t go so far as to say I am not saying much, I really am not saying much that matters.

          If anybody can relate, can we just admit right now to each other that too much of this kind of thing can kick the teeth out of our holding to the testimony of Jesus?

          Please don’t think I am not for playing.  I am BIG for playing!  I just think we need to be watchful about subtle ways that enraged, vengeful dragon might be trying to weaken our memories of the knowledge of God, just like Paul is talking about in 2 Corinthians 10:5.

IGNORANCE-MONGER

“The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” 2 Corinthians 10:5

          Would you just look at that again, please?  There is a strong kernel of truth hiding in the midst of this passage that up until now has escaped my attention.  There’s just so many important messages here that every time I think I have it all contained once and for all in my brain, I look again, and lo!  There is still something I had missed.

          [And right here I need to stop and make a confession.  (I know this is awful, but I am secretly hoping that somebody reading this will nod and know what I mean so I won’t have to feel like such a desperately lonely heathen in this regard.) Sometimes when someone starts talking about, or writing about, or teaching or preaching or singing about a certain scripture— one of those pet ones of mine that I have spent lots of time in— there is a haughtiness that swells up in my head.  I notice that this attitude always causes my mouth to tighten into a lopsided, sideways pose that is punctuated by a dimple on one side of my chin— and not the CUTE kind, but the KNOW-IT-ALL kind. I seem to believe in those moments that I am wasting my time listening because there is no way that I am going to learn anything here.  I have studied this thing out, and there is certainly nothing anybody can tell me about it that will be new. What a terrible confession to have to make, but I hope by making it, I will go some distance in disarming whatever this horrid thing is that sells me such a dastardly dangerous lie.]

          But this morning, I told my very own self this lie as I read this scripture again.  And again, as is usually true when I fall prey to this conceit, I was wrong. (How long you reckon it’ll take me to figure this out and quit this attitude?) I have always been so shot in the head with the message about taking our thoughts captive that I have missed it.  I think this is one of those examples of not being able to see the forest for the trees.

          The trees are all worth focusing on in this forest, and I am not sorry that I have done so.  However, I think maybe the forest here is really all about verse 5:  those “arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.”  I think I have looked closely at the arguments and pretensions before, but I am not so sure that I have paid enough attention to the wording of what the arguments and pretensions are really trying to do to us. The arguments and lies we are trying to demolish are setting themselves up against our knowledge of God!

The Enemy who is sending out all this propaganda is not just trying to get us to bungle up a sacred relationship or slander someone’s honorable name or misuse our body and mind so that we give a leg up to evil. No. As infernal as all these deeds are that he might love watching us perform, He is up to something worse than even these. Our archenemy, Satan, has his hat set on destroying our knowledge of God.

          The scripture uses language to indicate that he is gathering weaponry to arm himself and his troops for all-out brutal warfare to wipe our minds’ slates clean of our knowledge of the God who will save us.

He wants us to be ignorant about what really matters. Satan wants to erase what we have learned about God

This is a stark way to end today’s thoughts, but maybe coming face-to-face with such an alarming truth will motivate us all to be vigilant to keep arming ourselves sufficiently to win the battle our enemy is waging against us.  After all, “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.  On the contrary, they have divine power…” !

CITIZEN ARRESTS

“The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.  On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.  We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”  2 Corinthians 10:4-5

Every time I read this scripture, I eagerly jump on my horse. But the problem after I get up here is that I’m tempted to ride off in all directions at once.

 This is one of those scriptures that says so much that, as a teacher and a writer ( and a hyperactive one, at that), about twelve hundred words gather on the tip of my tongue and do fierce battle with one another over who is to break down the gates of my sealed lips first.  We might be stuck on this one for days.

Paul has just finished talking about how we are to live in this world in a manner contrary to the world’s standards.  He asserts that we are equipped with supernatural weapons to wage this unconventional war.  These weapons are strong enough to demolish our enemies… and the enemies he is focused on here are our thoughts.  He labels what our thinking can do to us “strongholds.”

You and I both know this is the truth.  We know, once we take it out and purposely look at it, that what Ralph Waldo Emerson said is the plain and simple, undeniable truth:  “Sow a thought, reap an action.  Sow an action, reap a habit.  Sow a habit, reap a character.  Sow a character; reap a destiny.”  Everything we have ever done, will ever do or become will start, or has already started, with a mere, seemingly innocuous thought. (Please stop reading for just a minute and think about that.)

Almost every day, and some days more than once, arguments come parading across my mind.  They are devilish little creatures carrying big placards that display lies in vivid colors.  Sometimes they shout in red-faced ardor what they want me to buy or believe. They came to Jesus, too, in the wilderness right after he was baptized.  Their message was “Be a miracle-working savior!”  “Be a powerful savior!”  Now, undoubtedly Jesus was both of these things, but what the devil wanted was for Him to give up the long, winding road we needed Him to take and snatch hold of something less arduous, to cash in the greater purpose for the lesser.  Had He accepted the devil’s offer, we would have still been without hope.  He could not have been the perfect sacrificial Lamb of God had He made the deal with Satan.

 Satan wanted Jesus to bank on His ability to heal disease, bring back the dead, and provide food for thousands miraculously. Satan’s placards were all about promoting an agenda of instant gratification.  God’s plan for Jesus had nothing to do with anything instant or easy; God’s plan for Jesus was that He would grow up honoring His Father by resisting such urges toward shortcuts and self-gratification.

God’s vision for His Son was to show us dull earthlings, at great expense to Himself, how to live humbly, to serve others at our own expense, take up crosses that would feed the world more than temporary food, and heal them eternally, not just slap on some kind of flashy band aid.

 Our Savior used His weapons valiantly that day and all the others of His thirty- three years down here.  His weapons were God’s Word.

We are heirs to the same weapons Jesus used so well.  We, as His followers and bearers of His name, are challenged and commissioned to fight bravely against the same Enemy using this same mighty and unconquerable weaponry.

Satan is diligent to send out his placard-bearers.  When they march across our brains shouting their lies and trying to make their sinister deals; when they cavort maniacally with their shenanigans to get us to sell our Treasures for a mess of pottage, we need to do whatever it takes to snatch out our Weapons, God’s Truth, and fight.  He has armed us to the teeth.

HARD TO PLEASE AT EASTER

                                                                  MY BOY

Last night in an attempt to keep myself company, since my Larry is away from me for a while, I flipped through the channels until I came to a movie about Jesus.  This one was The Greatest Story Ever Told.  Remembering I had seen it years ago, but not recalling how I felt about it then, I gave it a shot. Right off the bat I didn’t like it.  The Jesus was all dreamy-like.  He floated when He walked; His white toga never got soiled; His voice sounded other-worldly; He even mounted the colt on Palm Sunday in a fakey, slow-motion fashion.  I berated myself at first and decided I should stick with it and quit being such a harsh judge of somebody’s noble efforts to share the Master with the world via mass media.  But finally I just couldn’t take another frame of it, so I went back to flipping.  

Next thing I knew, unsurprisingly, there He was again, this being the Easter season.  However, this time everything was different. This was Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ, which I had also seen a few years ago when it was first released. I definitely remembered how I had felt about this one, and for that very reason, I came within a hair’s breadth of not stopping and watching it again.

 I recalled being in the dark theater with a lot of other Christian friends, and how, at that time, I was so glad it was dark, and that the place was crowded with folks.  I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see the ugliness of my grimacing face and clenching jaws.  I remembered my whole body being in an incredible sense of muscular tension, every nerve alert and on edge as I witnessed my Lord being flogged and otherwise tortured in a crueler fashion than I had ever envisioned when reading the gospel accounts all the previous years of my life. Whenever others have mentioned wanting to watch it again every Easter since that year, I have instantly bowed out.  

But last night  I was compelled stop and pay attention again, in spite of what my mind replayed for me so instantly.  The movie was already at the most terrible part: the flogging before the walk to Golgotha on the Via Dolorosa. My first emotional response was one I recall so vividly experiencing before: I imagined that He was my Ben, my boy!  (Any mother who witnesses what Mary goes through while watching her son in such bitter anguish must surely feel what I was feeling.)

  As the diabolical cruelty escalated and left His blood in pools on the streets of Jerusalem, as His eyes swelled shut, and His body grew almost unrecognizable from the scourging, my body, too, was seized by such flooding emotions that I tensed and trembled and cried out to God, finally covering my eyes and shaking my head to remove my cowardly self from the harshness of this Reality that had delivered me from certain hell into Hope and Joy and Daughter-ship. Twenty-five minutes of this reality had worn me out.  My body shut down and fell in an exhausted sleep.  I awoke an hour later, feeling like a wimp, to the credits rolling.   

I went to bed thinking about the contrast of my two viewing experiences. I hadn’t been able to take seriously or respect the unbiblical “Jesus” who fell terrifically short the Son of Man who has experienced this life as a human;  and yet, I didn’t have the strength, the stomach, or the emotional fortitude to embrace the Whole Truth of the Jesus who did not fall short.

 I have read some history about crucifixion, and some medical reports, written by doctors, that aver that whatever can be depicted on screen, even the extremely graphic Mel Gibson film, will always necessarily be a watered –down version of the Real Thing Jesus suffered on our behalf.   

I am still shaken.  First thing this morning, a friend invited me to watch The Passion tonight.  I declined, recounting for her my experience, and she wisely reminded me that yes, the horrible Truth of “Good” Friday is gut-wrenching, but when we dare to look it right in the face, it makes our Resurrection Sunday communion ever the sweeter. Yes.

A blessed Resurrection Day to you all!

RETROSPECTIVE LEARNING

 [Any of you who were present recently at one of my speaking engagements will find these words familiar.  The next two blogs will be loose excerpts from the talks I have recently given in Belton and Center. I thought a couple of my points were blogworthy. Thanks for your patience and loyalty to keep showing up expecting something worthy of your time!]

“Get skillful and godly Wisdom, get understanding (discernment, comprehension, and interpretation); do not forget and do not turn back from the words of my mouth.”  Proverbs 4:5 (Amplified Bible)

Lately I have come to see some added dimensions to this scripture.  The ways we get understanding and discernment are not limited to reading other’s books, listening to other  people’s lessons or sermons, or even reading the Bible. Sometimes God, the Master Teacher, reaches us through our own memories. Come with me on a little journey as I describe some lessons God is teaching me as I work as an author.

I think I used to believe that learning happens first, and then the writing happens as a means of teaching or at least imparting what we have already learned.  (Now, translate “learning” loosely, please, because you and I both know that true learning doesn’t happen the first time a fact settles upon our brains uncontested.)  But after laboring for years with high school freshmen who swore to me that they had nothing whatsoever worth writing about in an essay, I came upon an exciting and inspiring quote by the celebrated author, E. M. Forster.  He quite enigmatically probed, “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”  At the time, I thought it was a catchy quote and true in an oblique sort of way.  But now, after having completed the writing of my first novel (a novella, really), I really do know what he was talking about!  He wasn’t quipping or being cute at all; he we was commenting upon the same phenomenon that happened to me as I wrote Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights ( amazon.com- paperback and Kindle).

When the first time we ever latch onto a truth is when we see it roll out of our pen or onto the computer in front of us, it is indeed a strange phenomenon. It is so strange, in fact, that I must attribute it to the supernatural Spirit of God at work to afford in us something I can only call retrospective learning.

As I stamped those fifty-year-old images onto solid paper— images of my daddy’s fascination with the Cold War and the Birdman of Alcatraz; visual images of the Center, Texas Dairy Queen and the Rio Theater;  and, sharp, audible recollections of Brenda Lee and Johnny Horton (“I’m Sorry” and “North to Alaska”); memories of mysterious hidden staircases in the Shelby County Courthouse—I fell into a meatier experience than I ever could have dreamed.

What I believed would be nostalgic meandering began to evolve into more profound discovery.

*        In chronicling a simple concrete confession about a clandestine midnight moped adventure, I gleaned the weighty abstraction that it almost always takes longer than we thought it would for mental realization to make its trip down into the realm of physical actualization.

*     What I meant to be a light entertaining tale about a wild-eyed hater of ruffles and petticoats turned into a stark realization about something Jesus said.  Jesus said that the eye is the lamp of the body; if the eyes are bad, the darkness is terrible.  This means that much can be gained or lost simply by the way we see things…and much of how we see things is our choice.

*         I just meant to take my readers on a vicarious jaunt down a homemade zip line from the top of a pine tree, but on my journey down I sensed a loud philosophical voice proclaiming, “It behooves us to straighten the tender sapling before it grows into a crooked tree.”

*       While making a graphic confession of a short but shameful profession as a 10-year-old fountain-pen thief, I found this pointed lesson rising up to intercept the superficial narration I really intended: Never underestimate the dangers of visionary children who are hell-bent against monotony and safety.  Never challenge the old adage about idleness being the devil’s workshop.  No truer words were ever spoken!

*      Nor should we ever underestimate God’s fervent desire and creative ability to redeem His perdition-bound children, regardless of the children’s ages- whether 10 or 90-in amazing ways!  The Almighty finds a way even when all the natural resources are shaky or depleted.