What to do when all your pigs die. Part I

Mark 5:1-20

He lives among the dead. Naked, crazed, violent, desperate, driven. His people

did not know what to do with him, so it was a relief when he fled to the tombs and stayed there, tormented and alone. Forgotten.

Who knows how he had come under the power of these demons? Perhaps he had actually invited them in himself. Perhaps they had simply seen his weakness and seized it. We only know that he was there, dying with the dead.

He stands upon the shore of the sea, still marveling at what he has seen. A furious storm howling around him like his own torments, hurling waves over the rocks. He had been driven out into that storm, had stood there letting it lash him, wishing it would swallow him up and end it all.

But then.

A sudden swoosh, like a flash of something forgotten, and the storm vanished. Disappeared. Calm settled over the sea in quiet stillness. Stars blazed overhead. He felt the power, and fear and hope surged up as the war within his soul grew frenzied.

Now he stands, watching the speck in the distance become a tiny boat that moves ever closer. He waits. The powers in him pulse with fear. His own heart, so long a prisoner, beats hard.

He does not know the Man, but the spirits in him recognize the Son of God. They throw him down in terror at those holy feet. They beg.

And then.

The Man speaks, his body jerks, and suddenly his soul is as calm as the untroubled sea. He is still. He is free.

He doesn’t even notice the disciples staring slack-jawed at the thousands of pigs squealing and hurling themselves into the water. He looks into the eyes of his Savior, who looks right back with a smile on his face. This Man sees straight into his broken soul and doesn’t flinch away.

The people come running. They see the man they feared, sitting still and calm, and they see a whole herd of pigs floating away in the sea.

They are terrified.

They don’t know who this Man is, only that he has just destroyed their livelihoods and won over one they had learned to fear and hate. And just as the demons begged to be released from this powerful presence, they beg him to leave. No questions asked. Just go.

Sometimes our healing takes different forms. Sometimes it happens all at once; in one glorious moment, the storm within us evaporates. Sometimes it looks like everything we hung our hopes on rushing down the hill, away from us, and plunging into the sea.

I wonder what would have happened if those people had asked Jesus to stay. If they had just heard his voice, listened to what he had to say. If they had stepped through the fear of the sudden unknown and asked.

What are you doing here, Jesus?

And yes, why the heck did you just destroy our pigs? And what do we do now? And why is this crazy man suddenly sane, and what is that light in his eyes?

I wonder what he would have said. Where he would have led them. What wonders he might have done, and how their lives might have changed.

But they were too afraid. And instead of laying hold of the gift that was right there—right there!—they fled from it. They sent it away.

The King of the Universe had just sailed to their shore, and they asked him to leave. They preferred the safety of their grazing pigs to the miracle of the healed wretch.

The life he calls us to is always better than the one he calls us to leave behind. If he drowns your herd of pigs, you'd better believe that’s what you needed. Maybe it’s the only way to get rid of the demons in your life. Maybe it’s the only way to be free. How will you know unless you listen?

Stop running from death

“Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the 

devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (Hebrews 2:14-15).

It is not the fact of death that enslaves us. It is the fear of death. 

I am slave to the fear of the loss that death brings. Death of my dreams. Death of my possessions. Death of my loved ones. Death of my body. Losing these things means losing myself. It means pain and emptiness. It means suffering. 

But Jesus came and lost it all too, walked into that death and through that death and now death is the way to life, it is the pathway to the freedom he meant for us to have. If my life is hidden in Christ, and Christ sits above death and rules over death forever, then death can hold no fear for me. 

Yet I still fear it and run from it. Maybe if I would just enter into death, then I’d find the life I am looking for. Maybe if I really believed that I am set free from the fear of death, then I would be free. 

“For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death is working in us, but life in you” (2 Cor. 4:6-12).

In order to have his life, I must also carry his death. The word “carry” means “to carry round, to bear about everywhere.” The word “manifested” means “to make visible or known what has been invisible or unknown . . . to make actual and visible  . . . . to be plainly recognized.”

We who live are always delivered to death. But in Christ death is not the end; it is the beginning. The beginning of his life in us. When I carry around his dying, when I bear the death everywhere, I also bear the life. And the more I am given up to the death, the more his life is visible, real, and recognized.

And during this time of Lent, we choose to die. As Julie Canlis says, we have as much to learn from emptiness as we do from fullness. There are things in my life that need to die in the desert. I come to a truer understanding of grace when I am in the desert. “Lent is a desert you impose upon yourself to make room for God.”*

We are supremely distracted. And God is calling us to leave the shadowlands and find life. Death is the way through the shadowlands. Death is not a destination. It is a way. It is not a terminus but a trail, a place we travel through, MUST travel through, to get to life. And I cannot offer life to others until I have died, and the dying is myself, and the resurrection is myself in him.

*Julie Canlis, The Lent Project, http://ccca.biola.edu/lent/#

What really matters this Lent

Maybe we are too overwhelmed with life. Or too comfortable. Or too distracted. Or too lazy.

Or maybe we’re too mad. Too full of despair. Too hopeless and afraid.

Maybe we don’t seek God because we don’t need him enough. Or maybe we need him too much, and it doesn’t seem like he is there or even really cares.

Where is God when evil men cut off the heads of his followers and shout their message of hate? Where is God when disease ravages a continent already poor and desperate? Where is he when babies die and marriages fall apart and bodies fail and people everywhere just suffer?

Where are you, God?

We need you, God.

I confess I do not understand. I feel angry sometimes—a lot—and scared and desperate.

But maybe not desperate enough.

Maybe it’s easier to ignore the questions and pain, to just duck down with my kids and my stuff and be comfortable. Or maybe I just want to stay mad. Either way, I avoid God. I don’t talk to him at all, or I hurl accusations like the fears that assault me.

But what if we just grabbed hold and clung on for dear life?

 Like Jacob wrestling all night with a God he didn’t understand. 

Like Daniel on his face, mourning for his nation and crying out to God for three full weeks. 

Like David crouching in caves, lifting words instead of weapons, sometimes in praise, but just as often in bewildered questioning.

They took hold of God and begged for answers. And God didn’t run from such confrontation. He came. He always comes. We’re the ones running away.

Daniel was visited by an angel who revealed to him a world we cannot imagine. The angel couldn’t even get to Daniel for 21 days because the battle was so intense. Forces we cannot see are raging and fighting over us. US. God’s beloved children.

A war storms around us while we play on our smartphones. Our fellow believers are being slaughtered while we flip through channels.  People in our own communities are captives to fear, need, and loneliness. And we too are full of anger and fear, and maybe we want to change, maybe we want to do something, but don’t know what to do.

I don’t know what to do. How to fix this mess. How I fit. How it even matters that I care.

But I’m convinced he’s here, and he will hear. We can’t see him because we aren’t really looking.

It’s time to fall on our faces before God. It’s time to take all this anger and all these questions and give them to him, grab hold of him and ask him to come. It’s time to stop waiting for answers and start looking for answers. Being the answers.

He won’t run from our questions. He won’t shy away from our pleas for him to come. He won’t ignore our crying out. But it starts here. With us. It begins with us moving toward him, pouring out our need for him, repenting, mourning, and asking for him to come.

Do we know what it means to truly seek him? Do we really want him to come? Are we ready for what that means, for what he will ask us to do? Because we are his hands and feet. We are his voice. Do we really want to be the answer to the questions?

Why we need Lent

Why forty?

Forty means God is up to something.

Forty is a time of testing, a time of darkness and shadows and waiting, a time of holding on tight to a God you can’t always see. Like a man sitting in the dark listening to the rain destroying his world. Like a people wandering in the desert, eating nothing but bread from the sky. Like a prophet running from his enemies and hiding alone in the cave of God. Like the Son of God facing all the rage of the enemy in the wilderness.

Forty is when God says, “Walk into the wild and wait with me. Get ready. I’m coming. I’m doing something new.”

Why the wilderness? Why the darkness? Why forty?

Maybe the wilderness is the only place he can get our attention. Maybe the darkness pulls our eyes to him. Maybe forty is how long it takes to truly hear, truly know, truly understand.

I’m not sure. I only know what I see: over and over he uses forty. Over and over he upends our lives and calls us into the wilderness. And the wilderness is where he gets us ready.

I turned forty this year. Maybe I’m just reading into the significance of the number, but I can’t help feeling that God’s getting me ready too. Lately I’ve been in a darkness that I cannot understand. Yes, some things in our life are uncertain right now. There are many unknowns. That’s part of it, but there is more to this weight on my heart. At times I feel a great yearning coming over me, a longing that is almost suffocating.

Yesterday I felt this way. I was in the middle of a weekend away with my husband. I had no reason to be sad, and yet the tears kept coming. I finally stopped and stilled my heart. “Don’t struggle,” God said. “Enter into the darkness.”

So I just started writing. I let the darkness come. And I cannot explain why, but the sorrow for our sin and lostness just overtook me, and I started crying out to God, for myself, for my family, for the broken church, and for this raging world. The longing to see him, to touch him, was so overwhelming. I could not stop the flood of words of repentance and prayer.

I think God is up to something big. I think God wants to revive his church. I think he wants to wake us up, shake us from our daydreams, and show us himself. He is calling us out of the shadowlands. He is calling us to believe him to be real in this world. He wants to set us free.

Will we go with him? Will we take those steps into the darkness?

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the forty days of Lent. It is a time when we can still our hearts and let God in. But seeing God calls for a surrendering.

What is he asking you to surrender? How is he calling you to stop, still, and see him?

I’m committed to pursuing God in a new way over the next forty days. I want to understand what he is up to. I want to trust him enough to step into this wilderness and believe that on the other side is the Promised Land. I’m tired of shadows. I want to be free. I want to see him use this church to heal this desperate world. I don’t know what that looks like, but I know it starts here.

What if we all stopped and fell on our faces and cried out to see God? What if we all really listened? What might he do?

Not dead enough

We got a bad batch of wood. 

The tree had been dead for a long time--or so we thought--and the split wood looks like it should burn nicely. That's what we need considering we rely on the heat of our wood stove for eight months of the year. But that's not what we got. 

The wood catches fire all right. The inside of the stove lights up with a promising yellow glow. But the fire gives no heat. The flames sputter as the wood sizzles and pops from the sap still lingering within. Eventually the wood burns up without ever warming our home. 

What a waste. What a disappointment to huddle before a fire that offers no warmth. What a frustration to sit in my cold house and watch all that promising timber burn itself out for nothing.

Honestly, lately life seems to resemble that wood. I often feel I am doing everything "right," everyone around me is doing everything "right," but life is a flame with no heat, a fire that pops and sizzles and never offers any true or lasting warmth. 

Am I being too melodramatic? Probably. But I can't help feeling there is some truth here. 

Be honest. Don't you ever feel, like I do, that you are just sort of smoldering? Like we're all going crazy trying to get this thing right and all we ever get is some smoke and some sparks, but no heat? And why are we going so hard, burning ourselves up for nothing? 
 
The best firewood comes from trees that are really dead, but not rotten. Our wood still holds too much of its own life to take in the life of the fire. It burns, but it burns without heat because of the sap inside.

Our wood isn't dead enough.

Bear with me here. Maybe it's a stretch to make this comparison, but I've been thinking a lot about death lately. I've been thinking about all the ways I feel stuck in life, in my faith, in relationships, and about the idea that God asks us to die to ourselves. Not just once, but every single day. 

He says the best kind of life--the only life, really--comes from death. We have to die in order to find that life. But we have this idea of death being the end. We cling to life and we try to pack every single thing we can into it before death takes us. 

But what if death is a beginning? What if we have to die to our own idea of life before we can understand God's? And what if we started looking for ways to die so that new beginnings could spring up? 

Maybe we aren't dead enough. Maybe we are trying to burn bright and hot for God, but we are clinging to a life he wants us to let go of. The old life in our core keeps us from taking on the new life of the fire. 

Maybe we are just afraid. We want the fire, but we don't really want to burn. Because then, really, what is left but ashes? And so we try to burn our own way, and the fire runs sappy with life that shouldn't be there, and in the end we are left with ashes anyway. 

Do we believe that God brings beauty from ashes, as he promises? What if we really trusted that true life comes through death after all? What if we believed our death to self would accomplish a beautiful life beyond imagining?

And if we never burn at all? We end up dead anyway, rotting away in the despair of this world, useless to everyone. 

Maybe this is a crazy metaphor. I only know that I am longing for heat. For the blaze of God's presence. I don't want to just smoke and smolder. I want to burn with him. I want to learn what is holding me back, what life I am clinging to that keeps me from going all in. 

Our God is a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29). I want to be consumed by him. 

This morning I stepped into the cold darkness of the living room and built the fire as I always do. I didn't have much hope. But for whatever reason, this wood began to burn bright and hot. My living room filled with warmth, and sleepy children gathered around, and this became a refuge, a warm, welcoming sanctuary from the cold outside. 

We could be that sanctuary, I think. We could burn hot and draw in a world weary with the cold. The question is, do we really want to?

Frazzled new year?

I'm bumping and dragging and struggling into the new year, messy house and messy heart and messy life and all. I'm asking a lot of questions and getting confusing answers that will take some sorting through. I'm feeling rather lost and frazzled these days. Can you relate? 

I don't know what I'm supposed to write or what I SHOULD say. So instead I'll share the words I'm trying to cling to, the words I want desperately to live:

"Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory" (Colossians 3:1-4).

What is your heart set on today? Where does your mind go? Who is your life?