About Caroline Coleman

Caroline Coleman is a speaker, writer and lawyer. She is the author of LOVING SOREN (B&H 2005)

when people lie about us: 1 Corinthians 1

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

1 Cor. 1. A friend of mine named John had just become famous. He was driving through a rural area relaxing to the only radio station when it became a call in show whose sole purpose was to describe how terrible John was. Caller after caller dialed in. They told lies. They twisted everything my friend had ever done. Steam billowed from John’s ears.

“Turn it off,” John’s aides begged him.

John yanked the dial and jammed up the volume.

“Change the station,” John’s aides cried.

“There IS no other station.” John pounded the dashboard. ”These people are LYING about me!!” Finally, he couldn’t take it any longer. He flipped open his cellphone and called in.

“Wow!” the radio talk show host said. ”We have the man himself!” John started defending himself. The host cut him off and took more callers.

The next day the story hit the national news. John now says that calling in was a rookie mistake. He says that if he’d kept quiet, the only people who would have heard those lies were the 40 people who happened to be listening to that one little tiny good for nothing rinky dink radio station. Because John tried to defend himself, the lies went viral.

That’s so often how it works, right? Trying to defend ourselves can make the lies spread faster than wildfires in the west. So what are we supposed to do when people say bad stuff about us?

Clearly the only solution is to call up the liars, tell them their mothers wear army boots and threaten to tell everyone we know they still wet their beds at night.

Okay, okay. Probably not. But honestly? Aren’t we tempted in our hearts to do something like that? Don’t we lie awake at night hatching evil schemes of revenge? Don’t we despise them in our hearts? We picture all the bad stuff we know about them and recite it to ourselves. As a pastor named John Yenchko said in a sermon once, we take a virtual snapshot of the liars at their absolute worst and keep it handy in our breastpocket. That way we can pull it out whenever we want a quick fix. Who among us would have the strength to do nothing if, like my friend John, we listened to a channel tuned in only to bad stuff about us?

The thing is, we all DO have a channel tuned in to only bad stuff about us. It plays 24-7. It’s inescapable. There’s a voice of accusation leveled at every one of us all day long. The Biblical explanation is that we have an enemy who does nothing but accuse us, and everything that enemy says is a lie. Rev. 12:10 and John 8:44.

No WONDER we feel so defensive. No WONDER we feel vulnerable when other humans tap into that same channel. No WONDER our blood boils. No WONDER we can’t just let it slide.

We’re used to hearing all that bad stuff the enemy tells us about ourselves. We all have our ways of trying to drown out that voice. But we don’t want the volume any louder. And we certainly don’t want anyone ELSE to hear it. We don’t want anyone else to hear about how we’re failures, selfish, self-centered, lazy, good-for-nothing, pathetic, wimpy, indecisive, cruel, unloving, uncaring, careless, thoughtless, unloved, unlovable, lying, cheating … okay. I’ll stop. But that’s the voice of Satan. It’s loud. It’s cruel. It’s relentless, and it’s untrue.

Is it untrue? Really? Because hey, aren’t we all those things some of the time? Absolutely. But a grain of truth doesn’t make a lie true. It just makes it insidious. It makes it, well, diabolical.

So what’s the antidote? What do we do when our enemy comes up alongside us snickering and tosses a box of kryptonite in our laps? And what about when the enemy gets our friends in a weak moment, and our friends lie? Or what if our friends think it their duty to share the worst rumors they’ve heard about us: “I’m only telling you this because I LOVE you SO MUCH, but you should know that so and so is going around saying you’re a cheating lying skunk.”

Honestly? Do we really want to even know??? Wouldn’t we have been happier not knowing? Couldn’t they have found enough love in their hearts to not tell us the gossip?

We know we shouldn’t pay attention to false rumors. We know we’ve said bad stuff about other people that we didn’t really mean. We’ve said things we haven’t really thought through, that we didn’t have a strong foundation for. And the moment we said it, we probably forgot all about it. So why should we pay much attention to what other people say?

The Bible is full of practical wisdom like that about why we shouldn’t pay attention to lies. There’s fortifying verses about how truth stands the test of time. Lies are exposed. God protects the reputation of those who love Him. God is our vindicator. The only people truly interested in slander are liars. I’ve stacked those verses up like dominoes at the end of this post.

That kind of shrug-if-off approach can work some of the time for some of the rumors. But what if the rumors are just plain mortifying? What if they get us fired? What if they make our spouses walk out? What if they dominate our thoughts and block out every shard of common sense we ever had? What if we get obsessed with revenge? What if we bore ourselves silly talking about something unfair, and yet find ourselves unable to stop? What then?

Here is where we get to slide into 1 Corinthians 1 and rest there, the way disco dancers sliiiiiddddddde into a split, grin, and say, “Hey, baby.” Yes, that kind of a slide. Because this chapter of Paul’s is full of the kind of restful truth that makes us say, ahhhhhhh. Ready? Paul says that God “makes foolish” the wisdom of the wise, and that he makes wise the foolish. Paul says God gives wisdom to the “despised” of the world. Paul says Jesus will keep us “strong” to the end so we’ll be free from all blame when Jesus returns. He says that God’s “weakness” is stronger than the greatest of human strength. He chose things “despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important.” God didn’t choose people the world thinks wise, powerful or wealthy. He chose things the world considers foolish to shame those who think they are wise and powerful.

So, like, what? Does that mean that it’s good to be dumb, because God makes dumb people smart?

Yup. Kind of. It means that there is something really, really wonderful about recognizing that we just don’t have it all together. And whether it happens because we have thwarted desires, or friends betray us behind our backs, or strangers lie bald-faced about us, it doesn’t matter. One way or another, every one of us discovers that we’re not as wise as we thought. We discover there are things we can’t fix. We find that things like our reputations are completely outside our control.

Because frankly, there really isn’t ANYTHING we can do if people are determined to launch a smear campaign. Defending ourselves backfires. Litigating to prove our innocence can take years and cost us our house, our possessions and our family. The House of Sand and Fog stands as a testimony to the cost of revenge. And the more we talk about it, the more fuel it adds to the flame. Once lies go viral, we really can’t defend yourself. We’re stuck. No matter how wise we are, we’re not smart enough to outsmart evil.

Which brings us to the wonderful, liberating, beautiful place of launching ourselves into the arms of God, the way we did when we were little – at least if we were lucky enough to trust our parents. We turn away from the lies and turn to Jesus and say: “HELP!?”

And He does. When others lie about us, the first line of defense is prayer. That’s the kind of wisdom Paul is talking about. Because in God’s world, really? These lies are so irrelevant. God knows the truth. Jesus “is” the truth. Lies, smear campaign, gossiping, the passing of embarrassing information– none of it matters to God. He knows what’s what.

Ready? Here’s what God knows. He knows the worst possible stuff about us. Worser than worse. He knows stuff we don’t even let OURSELVES know. God knows the worst things we’ve ever done, thought or said. And to all that, when it comes to love God says a big: so what? Even the truth about us doesn’t affect God’s love for us. It affected our ability to go to heaven. So to all that bad stuff, God wept. He died. He suffered. He received the penalty we deserve. And our every bad thing is erased if we ask for God’s help. The only requirement for receiving God’s mercy is asking for God’s mercy. Everything else is done.

So here’s where we get back to the perfection of 1 Corinthians 1. To get to walk into the world where we never need fear for our reputations again, we have to be willing to let go of our pride. Because the wisdom of the world is based on pride. The wisdom of the world is therefore ominously scant. God’s wisdom is based on truth. In truth, there’s no room for pride. Truth says we all fall short of the glory of God, and that God loves us all so much, He went to hell for us so we don’t have to. Truth says we’re not better than anyone – not even the people who lie about us.

Hallelujah. That’s the only radio station we want to listen to. And because we’re oh so human, the only way to get that truth into our heads is to tune in to God’s voice every single day. Every day we wake up full of pride, ready to do it all ourselves, by ourselves, because hey, we’re sure we can. And within seconds, minutes or hours, we’ve been humbled back into wisdom.

Glory is a gift from God, freely offered to us all, but only a really foolish man is willing to grin and accept it. There’s a secret to living a rich full life, and it bursts out of the Scriptures. It’s called believing in a God who lifts up the things the world despises and makes foolish the wisdom of the world. We have a God who is so wise, that to hang with Him makes us wiser than any philosopher, scholar or thinker this world has ever known. So if you want to be smarter, if you want to be stronger, if you want to be braver, and if you want to try new things, if you want the strength to ignore the liars – hang with Jesus. He promises all that and more. Life with Him makes streams of living water flow from our hearts. But it’s always going to look a little different than we expect, and that’s to be expected. Because guess what? He’s God. And we’re not. That’s the only rookie mistake that matters, and we all do it.

The best part of all this is that we get to let go of revenge. I mean, yes, of course. We all KNOW revenge is a bad idea. But just trying harder backfires, the same as trying to defend our reputation does. Instead, when we give up and trust God to defend our reputations, something magical happens. We stop needing to despise the liars in our hearts. We stop looking down on them. We stop trying to believe the lie that we’re better than they are. We accept true wisdom, the kind that admits we’re not so perfect, either. We slip into a world of grace. In that world, we know we need forgiveness, and we’re willing to forgive.

It’s a beautiful place to live. And honestly? It’s the only place where true living can begin.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day on lies, truth and the beauty of wisdom

Some fortifying verses to cling to when people lie about us:

“People with integrity walk safely, but those who follow crooked paths will slip and fall.” Proverbs 10:9.

“The godly are rescued from trouble, and it falls on the wicked instead.” Proverbs 11:8.

“With their words, the godless destroy their friends, but knowledge will rescue the righteous.” Proverbs 11:9.

“Truthful words stand the test of time, but lies are soon exposed.” Proverbs 12:19

“No harm comes to the godly, but the wicked have their fill of trouble.” Proverbs 12:21.

“The life of the godly is full of light and joy, but the light of the wicked will be snuffed out.” Proverbs 13:9.

“Only simpletons believe everything they’re told!” Proverbs 14:15.

“Wrongdoers eagerly listen to gossip; liars pay close attention to slander.” Proverbs 17:4

“Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent – both are detestable to the Lord.” Proverbs 17:15.

“The crooked heart will not prosper; the lying tongue tumbles into trouble.” Proverbs 17:20.

“Intelligent people are always ready to learn. Their ears are open for knowledge.” Proverbs 18:15

“A false witness will not go unpunished, nor will a liar escape.” Proverbs 19:5.

“Sensible people control their temper; they earn respect by overlooking wrongs.” Proverbs 19:11.

“The Lord’s light penetrates the human spirit, exposing every hidden motive.” Proverbs 20:27.

“The godly may trip seven times, but they will get up again. But one disaster is enough to overthrow the wicked. Don’t rejoice when your enemies fall; don’t be happy when they stumble. For the Lord will be displeased with you and will turn his anger away from them.” Proverbs 24:16-17.

“Don’t testify against your neighbors without cause; don’t lie about them. And don’t say, ‘Now I can pay them back for what they’ve done to me! I’ll get even with them.” Proverbs 24:28.

“Like a fluttering sparrow or a darting swallow, an undeserved curse will not land on its intended victim.” Proverbs 26:2.

the beauty of birth defects: Romans 16

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

Romans 16. In my favorite Twilight Zone episode, The Eye of the Beholder, a woman named Miss Tyler lies in bed with bandages covering her entire face. She tells the nurse she hopes the surgery to fix her face has been successful. She says, “ever since I was a little girl, people turned away when they looked at me.” She begs the doctors to take off her bandages. Finally, they do. Masked surgeons cut her bandages slowly. They’re nervous about seeing the results of this, her eleventh face surgery. They unwrap the last bandages. The surgeons gasp. They recoil in horror. The camera shows us the woman’s face. She looks like a young Marilyn Monroe. The camera pans to the surgeons and nurses, and we see for the first time that they have the snouts of beasts. Miss Tyler is devastated. She asks that her life be terminated. But the doctors say she has to go live with her own kind. A man straight out of Hollywood Central Casting tells her she can live in a village where she will be loved. He says she just has to say over and over, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Throughout history, we humans ostracize people who don’t meet our local standards of beauty. We do this even though the aspects we consider beautiful – dark or fair, curvy or lean, muscled or lanky – vary from generation to generation, country to country, and even race to race. Hispanic women in the United States, for instance, have implants placed in their rear ends to pad out the very spots that Caucasian women knock themselves senseless in spin classes to reduce. People in Ruben’s day valued the rounder woman; Twiggy came along when fashion valued stick figures; women with breast implants today are being cast aside in Hollywood in favor of those with a more natural look. Fashions change like waves, cresting high, only to crash and dissipate on the shores of our lives.

We know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and yet we continue to mock, judge and condemn anyone who looks a little different. We all do it. Sometimes we do it out loud. More often we do it in our hearts. We are a harsh people. Why?

C.S. Lewis said the problem is that we all want to be God. He said in Mere Christianity, the book that made me embrace Christianity, that we put down others in a vain attempt to elevate ourselves. Lewis said pride needs to put others down: “each person’s pride is in competition with everyone else’s pride… pride is essentially competitive… Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man…. Pride always means enmity – it is enmity.” Lewis goes on to say every one of us has pride, although we are usually unaware of it: “There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves.” He added that pride causes enmity with man and God: “A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 8: The Great Sin).

The problem is, of course, that this kind of thinking backfires. We ensnare ourselves in the very net we set for others. Because if we live in a world where we criticize others to feel better about ourselves, we make ourselves vulnerable to the criticism of others. With the measure we use, we will be measured. We need a higher rock to lash ourselves to. We need something outside ourselves to provide an objective measure. We need a golden standard that is so perfect we respect it, and yet one which we can actually meet so we get to rejoice about ourselves and our lives instead of feeling glum, depressed and afraid.

My handsome son was born with a cleft lip and palate. In times past, and even now in certain parts of our world, people with birth defects were hidden away in closets or even left to die. Yet when he was born, my son was the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen. His cleft lip was cute. He’s had many surgeries in the past 18 years, including a major jaw surgery two days ago that lined his upper and lower jaw up so perfectly it stuns me every time I look at his profile. But in his mother’s eyes, he was as beautiful the day he was born as he is repaired. And being his mother gave me eyes to see how very beautiful all those other children in the craniofacial unit were, whether or not they had chins, cheekbones, noses or ears.

We tend to brush off that kind of truth. Oh, yeah, we think. That’s a mother’s eye. We say it as if there’s something wrong with that kind of eye. And sure, maybe we know intellectually that if God exists, He should see us with the kindness of a parent’s eye. He claims to be our father, after all. But we want more than what we think of as a blind love. That doesn’t fully satisfy. We want to be seen as we are and still loved. Somehow.

The good news of the Bible is even better than that God sees us with the tenderness of a mother’s eye. There is something almost magical here about having defects. The best analogy I can think of is that if you’ve ever had a back massage when your back was thick with knots, you know how AMAZING it feels to have those knots smoothed out. While you’re having the massage, you almost wish for MORE knots because it feels so good to have them fixed.

That’s the kind of healing God gives us. That’s the blessing that lies in our every defect. The healing of God more than restores. It lifts the defective parts of us into a place of such exquisite beauty that it goes beyond the earthly. Our every flaw becomes glorious. Our weakness IS our greatest strength. Our poverty IS our richness. Our weeping IS our joy. Our emptiness IS our fullness.

It’s hard to explain. It’s harder to understand. It’s something about how thankful we become. It has to do with the way we melt when we are healed. It has to do even more with the way we are freed of that harsh, judging, nose in the air, critical way of living and being. We become restored by God not because we have earned it, but because He loves us. There is something about God and His love, generosity, kindness and infinite power of healing that embraces defects with such tenderness it makes us weep. We are released from the iron deathly grip of pride.

And there is more. When Jesus heals people He talks of a “power” going out of him. Just as in fantasy fiction, it costs the superhero to save the world, so it costs God to heal us. This is not a free salvation, at least not for God. It’s free for us. All it costs us is our pride. We have to be willing to “lay our doing down” and just receive. We know that the massage therapist who works on our backs, for instance, is giving of herself. She’s putting her back into ours. We can’t have our knots fixed unless we lie still. It’s a metaphor for what God does. He poured out himself like a drink offering in order to save us. His bones became out of joint. He was melted down like wax. He thirsted so streams of living water could flow from our hearts. He died so we could live.

And this brings us back to the mother’s eye. The reason God can look at us in all of our defects – our laziness, selfishness, cruelty, indifference, disloyalty, infidelity and worse – and yet see us as stunningly beautiful is that when God looks at us He sees Jesus. Jesus took our place on the cross. He took our defects on himself, so we become flawless before God. The prince swapped clothes with us paupers to clothe us with his royalty. If we accept this gift, God sees us as “altogether beautiful.” Here is the rock on which we can stand. God knows all about us, and yet through Christ’s sacrifice He sees us as “without spot or blemish.” God’s justice is perfect. His laws are eternal. He knows we all fall short of that standard. And yet He sees us as perfect because Christ was perfect. He sees us through the filter of Christ’s sacrifice.

Picture Jesus walking down the road and finding a girl crying because she was born with the snout of a beast. Jesus says to her, “here. Please. Take my face instead.” Christ gives her his own face and for the rest of his life, He willingly wears her beast’s snout. Not only that, he explains to the girl how everyone else has the same snout. He offers the same divine exchange to all of us. He loves us all so much He wants us to be the most beautiful we can be. That’s why He endured scorn, abandonment, judging, mockery and death on the cross in order to clothe us with His beauty.

We all have birth defects. We were all born with weaknesses. We need air brushing on the outside and a sea change on the inside. We have wounds from the unkindness of strangers, the cruelty of lovers and the bitter medicine of tasting our own failures. Yet the worse off we are, the better it is. Because our every defect just makes more room for God’s kind of redemption to shine through us.

That’s why we can rejoice in our defects. God’s world is so much more beautiful than ours. He lifts us from an operating room life, where we’re cutting each other down. Instead, He transplants us into a broad meadow full of sunlight, warm breezes, flowers, laughter and the freedom to roll down every hill we come across. He eliminates our pride and frees us from enmity.

So here, as the book of Romans draws to a close, Paul talks with love of some of his brothers and sisters in Christ. Paul embraces the very believers he once tried to murder. The defects of his former harshness make him all the more tender and grateful at how much love he finds himself bearing for the very people he once hated. He has nothing but praise for these people. He has learned to see the best in them. He’s let slip from his grasp the hard world where he once saw only the worst. He no longer needs to judge and condemn. He’s been set free from all that. He’s thankful for their help. He calls them his dear friends. He says he respects them. He says Christ approves of them. He is a living testimony to the beauty of joining Christ’s family.

In God’s family, our defects become beautiful because they’re the places where we meet our Lord. We don’t just have to repeat firming mantras to ourselves about beauty being in the eye of the beholder. Instead, we can actually know beauty. We become beautiful by living with God. He lives within us. And once we experience that kind of love in all its richness, we see the whole world through new eyes. God’s love helps us love even those who turn away from us.

And we never have to turn away when we look at ourselves again.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day, on the beauty of birth defects and the death of pride

my historical novel on amazon:

LOVING SOREN is also available at Barnes and Noble…. and wherever books are sold, as they say… and I can’t recommend enough:

how to embrace wisdom instead of rules: Romans 15

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

(Romans 15) We all need wisdom. We want to know how to choose our path. The best piece of advice I ever received was: “Don’t be ruled by the SHOULD’s in your life.” Here’s my own take on that advice: AVOID RULES.

I know. I know. This is a Christian blog, right? So how come I’m saying what sounds like carpe diem. Stay tuned.

The thing is that in the Hebrew Scriptures, wisdom is a person. King Solomon wrote 4,000 years ago that wisdom is standing at the crossroads of our lives and crying out to us. Proverbs 8:1-11. Solomon said that right there where we have to make the most important decisions in our lives, there in the place “where the paths meet,” wisdom takes her stand. So why are we so worried? Wisdom is telling us which way to go. She’s calling in a loud voice. Wisdom isn’t a list of rules but a person who wants to be in a relationship with us. So the solution to our every choice is not to run through a to do list of musts and shoulds and thou shalts, but instead to embrace wisdom.

How do we do that? It’s so simple. It’s like algebra. Remember? We are given an equation to solve for x and y, and to figure out what the unknown variables are we plug in information about them from another source. So to figure out how we listen to the person called Wisdom in Proverbs, we flip over to the New Testament. There Paul tells us that Jesus Christ “is the wisdom of God”. 1 Corinthians 1:24. Jesus IS wisdom. So putting those concepts together, if we want to find wisdom, we just have to embrace Jesus.

We shouldn’t be surprised, Jesus also said he was the way, the life and the truth. Truth is a person. The way is a person. And life is a person. Embracing Jesus brings life. Harping on rules is a fast path to a miserable life.

How do we embrace Jesus? Again, the answer is easy. Jesus has already embraced us. He’s done the hard part so we don’t have to. He loved us before we even loved Him back. So doing a little God math, if we want wisdom, we embrace God’s love for us. We accept that none of us is wise enough to make right choices all the time. We admit we need mercy not justice. We realize we are so far from perfect that God came down to die for us. We ask for help. And we collapse into His arms and say thank you.

So how does collapsing into the arms of wisdom make us wise? The first thing to realize is that we are all losing our moral compasses all day long. We stand at the crossroads from the moment we wake up. Right away, we start to have choices. Will we look forward to our day? Will we anticipate great and wonderful things? Will we expect goodness? Will we have hope?

All that happens before our feet hit the ground. Then come choices that relate to other people. How will we treat them? How will we react to the way they treat us? These choices come at us faster than arrows in a 3D movie. We duck. We bend. We weave. We go into denial. We avoid. But the choices come all the same.

We think we need rules to navigate through these choices, but rules only take us so far. For instance, we could make a hard and fast rule for ourselves: ALWAYS RESPECT OTHER PEOPLE’S PROPERTY. That sounds good. But what if our child locks herself inside a friend’s bathroom and starts to scream bloody murder? No brainer. We would kick down the door and rescue the child. We wouldn’t think twice about that door. The rule ALWAYS SAVE A LIFE trumps the rule ALWAYS RESPECT PROPERTY RIGHTS. Of course. But why? How do we decide which rule is more important? Where do we GET our moral compasses? How do we always choose best among all those prickly “always” and thorny “nevers”?

For instance, Jesus praised some men who tore down a roof. Luke 5:17-26. Didn’t Jesus respect property? Didn’t he care about that poor roof? Scripture says Jesus praised the men for having “confidence” in Him and his ability to heal their paralyzed friend: the men had lowered their sick friend through the tiles in the roof so Jesus could heal him. And He did – of his paralysis and his sins.

So if our God is happy when we start to tear down roofs, but only when we do it at the right time, or for the right reason, then we need more than rules to navigate our way through life. We need to love the one who is always honest, always right, and always leads us to the miraculous combination of love and mercy.

Because we humans aren’t so good at finding the right combination of truth and grace. If we’re all rules all the time, we’re dried up sticks who bore even ourselves. If we’re anything goes, no problem, dude, we become as floppy as overcooked pasta.

To embrace Christ allows us to hear His voice. That’s why loving Jesus back gives us the wisdom we wanted. Wisdom is a gift. And here’s the thing about rules. Rules will NEVER give us life. They are heavy. They are a burden too onerous for us to bear. They rob us of joy.

God wants us to choose life, not rules. He says come and hang with me, and we will walk through this journey of life together. That’s the kind of thinking that allows Paul to point out that some people can be “stronger” than other people, and yet be inconsiderate. Romans 15:1. Oh, right. Sometimes we get “strong” in a certain areas, including even faith, and we become “weak” in sensitivity. Jesus reminds us to look back in kindness. Or we can get impatient at how much time it takes to “live in harmony” with others, and forget that the end game is not getting others do do what WE want, no matter how “harmonious” that sounds, but it’s giving praise and glory to God “in one voice.” It means our voices will rise together with such beauty that even the trees and mountains join in. Those are the kind of things rules will never teach us.

As Paul says, sometimes all we need is a “reminder.” Romans 15:15. But we need these reminders all day long. Because love is subtle. It’s nuanced. Most of all, the kind of love God calls us to is not our natural way. Let’s go back to that choice that confronts us the moment we wake up. Will we live each day in hope? Hope is powerful. Romans 15:13. Without hope, we wouldn’t even get out of bed. Some of us hope in work. We hope in ourselves. Or we might hope some unknown person will spot us in a crowd and say, “hey, you’re what I’ve been looking for!” Those hopes are fine. They’re okay. They work up to a point. But none of them works the best. That’s because the best hope of all comes not from ourselves, or other people, or being “good,” or doing the “best” we can, but from the glorious love of God. That’s why Paul writes to the citizens of Rome: “I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.” Romans 15:13.

There’s a lovely solution to our every choice, and it has nothing to do with ordering ourselves around all day and saying, “I SHOULD do this and I SHOULD do that.” It’s to just hang with Jesus. When we start to love Jesus, and realize how much He loves us, we relax. We are so filled with love we start doing the things we wanted to do all along, but couldn’t no matter how hard we tried.

Embracing Jesus is where life begins. Our thirsts are quenched. Our wounds become healed. The roof of heaven opens. We hear the trees sing. The mountains sway. The mountain goats leap. The stars shout GLORY. There’s no time for emptiness, despair or hate because we are embracing love. Life becomes a thing of joy where we don’t have time to wonder if anyone else is obeying the rules, because we’ve left all the rules behind. We’re too busy loving back the one who created truth in the first place.

posted by Caroline Coleman in a chapter a day, on how do i find wisdom.

the ancient overgrown pathway to healing: Romans 14

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

We humans need healing in so many ways, for so many things. So what if someone were to tell you that you could be healed of all your hurts? What if they said they could help you connect with other people? What if they said they could help you get in touch with yourself? What if they said: “come with me. Fly with me to a thick overgrown jungle. Hack your way through the underbrush. And in an ancient ruined city, I will show you a way to total healing”? Would we book our flights?

We might. When we humans really want something, we open our wallets. We endure bumpy bus rides. We squeeze ourselves into airplanes. We perch on ripped train seats. We do that for movies. We do it for vacations. We do it for anything that seems worth it. As one of my favorite books on dating says of finding a man who will treat you properly: “men will fly across the world just to surf a wave. You want to be that wave.”

So what if instead of searching for a wave (or for a muscled bare chested man riding a wave), our ears perked up when we heard a voice that told us to stand at the crossroads and look, to ask for the ancient paths. We lean closer. We like the idea of a journey. Something in our heart rises up at the thought of finding ancient paths. We fill our water bottles, pop our malaria pills, tuck our machetes into our belts and walk along the ancient overgrown paths. We hear a voice telling us when to go right and when to go left. We listen because we want to get there.

When we reach the ancient ruined city, however, we are annoyed. We are told that before we can meet the king, we first must perform a task. We have to wash in the river of life because we’re dirty from our journey. It’s not the washing that annoys us. It’s that we have to wash in the SAME river as everyone else. We look around. We can see that our fellow travelers are mud-stained and filthy. But US? No, we’re good enough to meet the king of the city just as we are. Why do we need to wash first? Plus, what if we get a disease from all those other unwashed souls?

And then we look at the river. It’s warm. It’s refreshing. It’s crystal clear and blue as sapphires, and we think, “hmmmm. Maybe it’s not sooo bad.” We strip off our dirty clothes and jump in. And there, we discover we actually enjoy swimming in the same delightfully warm and refreshing river as everyone else.

That’s it. That’s the secret. That’s the solution to all our problems. The answer is to wash ourselves in Jesus’ love. It’s to accept the river of life that flows from the throne of God. It’s to be cleansed of all our mistakes by the cross. Why should we resist grace? The problem is that grace says that if we want to leap into the river of life in this ancient city, we’re not allowed to judge anyone else. We stop short, glance at our watches, and wonder if we have time to catch the next flight out.

Why? Because if someone tells us to do something hard, we roll up our sleeves and give it all we have. We want to prove ourselves. But if God tells us to do something so easy anyone can do it, we balk. See 2 Kings 5 (“Sir, if the prophet had told you to do something very difficult, wouldn’t you have done it? So you should certainly obey him when he says simply, ‘Go and wash and be cured!”).

So lean into Romans 14 and see what is required for healing. Paul says that we are not to judge other people. Paul says we shouldn’t judge people, for instance, whose consciences lead them to be vegetarians. We are not to judge people who honor the Sabbath on different days than we do. It says we are responsible for our own consciences. It says we are to keep matters of the conscience like whether we have wine or not “between ourselves and God.” And it asks: “who are we to condemn another man’s servant?”

Who indeed. That is the million dollar question. Who ARE we when we’re not judging other people? Have we met ourselves as just a human being? Have we met someone who can’t look down at anyone else? Have we met fellow servants?

Yes. Unclothed of judging, we find ourselves as a human who can actually love other people. We find a human who can set aside old hurts. We find a human who doesn’t have to try to control anyone else. We have a human who discovers she can barely even control herself. We find a person who needs God’s help, just like everyone else.

That’s because when we ask for the ancient paths and try to follow the good way – we discover we can’t. We do judge others. We feel an ugly need to think we’re better than other people – at least ONE person. We discover we withhold ourselves from others, even people we’re married to, because we want to punish them for hurting us. We put up walls, and they’re rock solid. We find we’ve become a stranger to our own emotions because we can’t handle our rage, disappointment and hurts. We’ve become numb. We’re full of anxiety because we’re afraid of doing the wrong thing. We’re afraid we will be judged.

God offers a different path. He has every right to judge us but offers to forgive us instead. He wants to heal our every wound. He will forgive all our mistakes. We don’t have to be numb about our mistakes or in denial any more. We can remember them without being crushed. God gives us the most powerful tool of all for enjoying other humans. He gives us the power to forgive them everything bad they’ve ever done to us.

It’s that simple. We can be healed if we forgive and are forgiven. And because the simple is impossible for us flawed humans, God helps us. He endured all the judging, criticism, condemnation, blame and punishment on the cross so we can be set free. God knows it’s hard to forgive. So He helps us forgive others. The ancient paths are a place where God gives us a new heart. He helps us assume the best about other people. It’s a place where God assumes the best about us. The kingdom at the end of the ancient paths is a place of “goodness, peace and joy.”

It’s worth opening not just our wallets, but our hearts for. It’s worth leaning in to those words. It’s worth giving it a try. What do we have to lose? We’ve tried everything else. And hey, how did THAT turn out? Not so good, right?

There is a good way. Jesus is the way. He’s the person we’ve looked for in every book, movie, and in the crest of every wave. He’s the one who made us, who loves us, and who longs to heal our every hurt. If we walk in the way of grace, we will find the rest we’ve always longed for. Because God longs for us, too. He’s hacking His way through the undergrowth to find us, no matter how lost we are. His voice is calling out. He calls us each by name. And that’s why our mistakes are okay. Because God uses everything – even all our wrong pathways – to lead us straight to His open arms. All we have to do is let God find us, and we’ll weep for joy at the beautiful way he restores everything ruined.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day: on healing

how to stop hating ourselves: Romans 13

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

read Romans 13. Why do we sometimes hate ourselves? It’s ridiculous, right? Why should we level such ugliness at ourselves? What a waste of time. How wrong. If anyone ELSE hated themselves we would tell them to stop. But when we get in self-hatred mode, we pile on: WHAT?! We think. WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME??? HOW CAN I HATE MYSELF?? I HATE MYSELF FOR HATING MYSELF!!!

It’s an endless loop.

We become like the woman in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror,” searching the reaches of a lake for what we really are. But all we see when we look in any mirror when we’re in Self Hater Mode, is our aging self rising toward us day after day “like a terrible fish.” Any minute now, and our dentures and Depends will leap out of our mirrors and chase us down the street, singing.

So here’s my little story about the day I hated myself last week. I tell it because as my friend Christina Culver says: “this story about me is really about you.”

Like most of these Hater Days, it started out with a black-and-white intense ambition. All I wanted to do was take the subway down to the Writer’s Room and work on my new novel. But boring desk work was calling my name. Okay, let’s be honest. All desk work is boring. I wanted to ignore it, but my “complications were developing complications,” to paraphrase the movie BRAZIL. So I started working my way through the enormous stacks of nothingness. All of a sudden, it was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and the desk seemed piled even higher than before.

There’s this odd alternate reality to deskwork. Like a black hole, it can swallow all our time. It’s ravenous. Every little project seems to generate ten more little projects. And it’s harsh. It gives no praise. It only makes more demands. The tyranny of the immediate has a way of elevating unimportant tasks to the level of emergency. Enough was enough. I abandoned ship and got myself outside. I blinked a few times at the sight of the sun. I headed toward the subway. But the mantra in my head was loud, insidious, extreme and relentless: what is your problem what’s wrong with you how can you waste so much time doing nothing you’ll never finish your novel you’ll never get another book published you’re a hopeless person a hopeless writer a hopeless failure and you always will be.

That was when I saw the open church doors. Oh, no, I thought. Not that. Please, no, Lord. Don’t ask me to go pray. Not now. I don’t have time.

I heard that phrase in my head: “too busy NOT to pray.”

Reluctantly, I obeyed. I walked into the church, scuffing my feet in rebellion. My eyes adjusted to the darkness. I sat in the back pew. That was when I saw a man sitting on the altar talking on HIS CELLPHONE.

Yes. Can you believe it? That was my reaction, too. I took him for a tourist who had wandered into the church for a quiet place to talk loudly. All my self-hatred got projected on him with laser like intensity. My safety radar started its siren: weeir weeir weeir. After living in New York City for a long time, you learn to trust your gut. If someone gives you an uh oh feeling, you hightail it out of there. So I watched the man warily. But I didn’t leave because I felt pretty sure the Holy Spirit had told me to be here and my own way of handling the day wasn’t working out so well.

The man was yelling into his phone, in a harsh, Algerian-sounding, French accent:

“Pleeeeeeze. Listen to me. Pleeeeeeeze. Do NOT interrupt me. You keep interrupting me. Pleeeeeeeze. Let ME speak. Pleeeeezzzzze.”

He was killing me. Yet another person I needed to pray for. And clearly, I had to pray for him FIRST because until he calmed down, I wasn’t going to be able to pray for anyone else.

So I prayed that God would help him stop being so rude. I prayed God would help him speak in a more loving voice. I prayed God would break in and help him speak in a kind tone to the unseen person on the other end of his phone.

I must have glared at him while praying (oops) because he glanced at me, walked down the aisle, and started talking from the back of the church. Of course, that only meant I could hear him MORE clearly. My annoyance grew. I wondered if I should leave. Clearly, coming here had been a waste of time.

Suddenly, I heard the man say into his phone as clear as a bell:

“Do you think God created man to be depressed and sad all the time?”

I sat straight up. Why no, I thought, with the surprise of revelation. He didn’t.

“So where does this negative thinking come from?”

The devil, I thought.

“It comes from our enemy, the devil.”

Exactly.

“When the negative thinking comes, say, ‘I do not accept that because it’s not from God.’ And it doesn’t come back. It’s a spiritual war. By our own strength, it’s impossible. But when you let God fight inside you, you always have the victory. But you need to be born of the Spirit. The devil is using your spirit against you. So you have to push these thoughts away. God doesn’t want you to have them. You must reject them. You must ask for God’s help. The Holy Spirit will tell you God loves you. The Holy Spirit will fight these negative thoughts for you. God will fill you with peace and joy. Jesus comes inside you and helps you. What? No, I know you don’t believe in God or the devil yet. But please. You must listen. This is the truth.”

The man’s voice was calm. He spoke kindly. And I can’t tell you if the person on the other end of the line heard him, but I know I did. I got up, smiled at the man and said, “you preach a good sermon.” He glanced at me absently and went back to his depressed friend. Then I took the subway down to the Writer’s room and got more done in two hours than I’d gotten done in a week.

That’s how God works. He weaves us together in His tapestry. God wanted me to cheer up. He wanted the man to speak the truth in love. He used the man to bless me, and I hope me to bless the man. We don’t have to don shining armor and jewel encrusted swords to fight the battle of good and evil. We just have to try to listen to God’s voice, even when we don’t want to, even though we’re not very good at it. That’s why Paul talks here in Romans 13 about the importance of obedience. It all comes down to trust. When we make ourselves obey God, even when we don’t feel like it, beautiful things happen. God always knows what HE is doing. He takes our small things – like giving him five minutes in a church to pray – and weaves them into something infinite and gracious.

God asks us to remove our dark deeds “like dirty clothing” and instead to “clothe” ourselves with “the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Romans 13. We tend to focus on our dark deeds. That’s where self-hatred comes in. We focus on the bad. We peer in the mirrors of our life and see only wrinkles sprouting wrinkles, complications having complications. We project ourselves into the future, and we imagine that future without God helping us. The image is bleak. But we have it backwards. God is with us now, and He won’t abandon us in the future. As Sarah Young puts it in Jesus Calling, we were not created to live a future without God.

God wants us to look in His eyes like a mirror. He wants us to see reflected back at us His love, not our hatred. He wants us to focus on His generosity for us instead of our own miserliness. He wants us to think about His forgiveness. He wants us to leap for joy like a calf released from the stall because of all He has done for us. So when those dark thoughts come pressing in, as they so often do, we get to say: ha! I know where you come from. Back you go.

God didn’t create us for depressing negative thoughts. He created us for Himself. And no matter how much we fail, God longs to cover us with Christ’s perfection. If we accept those clothes, we become the best dressed, most beautiful, most successful, most glorious person who ever walked this earth. Because when we beg God to cast off our darkness, God clothes us with Christ’s presence. And in Him, we are perfect no matter what. In Him, our self hatred melts away. In Him, we can cry with tears of relief. In Him, there is no room for hatred but only for love, reflecting back at us forever, singing.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day on “i hate myself today”

on new words, true words and i do words: Romans 12

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

We love new words. They make us feel like we’re not static. We love to turn words like lathes to reflect our new experiences. The Internet is the perfect tool for accelerating the coinage of new words. Urban Dictionary, for instance, is a nimble online organic dictionary that can add new words the very day they’re uttered. It’s wonderful. All that’s required for a word to make it into the urban dictionary lexicon is for people to like it. And the number one reason people choose to like a word on Urban Dictionary? They like a new word because it’s funny.

So modern English is apparently going to be funnier. Ha.

But the thing is, words have always had shadows (see e.g., “words have shadows, too – you hear?”). The existence of a dark underbelly to words doesn’t necessarily conflict with the humorous trajectory of the Urban Dictionary lexicon; perhaps part of the reason we find words funny is that they do reflect the nuance of human experience. And if you look at urban dictionary, most of those words and concepts are pretty dark – as with one of today’s words, “grey driving,” a slice of ageism which refers to those who drive like myopic grannies. So our new words will continue to reflect both the light and the shadows of human experience. They will evoke the grey. Because our words are asymptotes. They’re always approaching the real experience but never quite getting there. That’s why even the most articulate among us stumble sometimes when describing things:

“It’s like so hot out today. I mean it’s like warm. Muggy. Humid. Gross. I mean, better than like January. But it’s like August in May. It’s so um July. It’s like summer in spring. It’s um. Yeah. It’s um yeah.”

We all wax unpoetic at times. It’s always yeah um yeah at some point during our days. The ancient Greeks argued about whether the names we give to things are merely conventions or if names can get at the true essence of their own meanings. (see e.g. “Plato’s Cratylus“) It sounds like those Greeks were hoping to come up with onomatopoeic words for every concept. Wouldn’t that be nice? It would turn every sentence into poetry. Instead of words being “pale shadows of forgotten names,” as Patrick Rothfuss once put it, words would be bright light-filled orbs.

Unfortunately onomatopoeic words work beautifully in only certain arenas. They’re wonderful for collisions: bam, bang, clang, click, thud, bash, whop. They work wonders on describing the movement of air: whoosh, flutter, whiz, whisper. They’re dandy for animal sounds: baa, bark, hiss, cuckoo, cock-a-doodledoo, meow, oink, ribbit and quack. But those of us who are adults are hoping to rise above picture and comic book level – at least one day.

So how do we keep our words fresh and new in a nuanced sophisticated way? Can delving into Urban Dictionary put us on the right track? After all, it’s so cutting edge if we go there we can find the world transforming in real time. But wait. Hold it. Isn’t this the Heisenberg uncertainty principle at play? Isn’t the moment a word makes it into a dictionary, even a modern slangy one with a questionable criteria, by definition the moment that word becomes part of the “world”? Yes. Oh no! We’re doomed. How do we stay even fresher than the Internet? How do we stay so true to our experience we don’t even need any self-appointed “editors” to “like” us? The answer must lie in living a fresh and new yet nuanced sophisticated life. How do we do that? The answer:

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2 NIV).

I’ve always loved that sentence, long before I believed in God. Something independent and freeing rises up in us at the thought that we can escape conforming to the pattern of the world. We’re made for more than a cookie cutter life. And a transformed mind will automatically be able to speak in a transformative language.

So how do we avoid conforming to the patterns of the world? Luckily for our questing independent souls, God is so fresh, so new, so alive, that to cling to Him is to be transformed. I know that sounds impossible. How does our independence get realized through clinging? The answer is that God made us that way. We will always cling to something. But to cling to anything less than love will diminish us. Clinging to Love fulfills us. That’s why God urges us not to do more, but to get to know Him.

Getting to “know” God, in all the lovely intimate ways we use that word, is the only way to become newer than the newest word coined. And the way we do that is to move into His words. It’s the only way to even begin to follow all the wonderful advice Paul plops into this chapter. In fact, his advice is so transforming, I pretty much have to sprinkle it into this blog and let it whisper to you on its own. For the words of the Bible are “alive.” 2 Timothy 3:16. Scripture is more active than even onomatopoeia. It transforms us from the inside out. These words go bam inside our hearts. They flutter, whisper and whiz.

For instance, Paul warns us: “don’t think you’re better than you are.” Bam. The moment we read those words, we realize: guilty as charged. We didn’t know we were thinking it until the word met us where we are. Paul then says: “don’t just pretend to love others. Really love them.” Whoops. Those words expose to us the truth that sometimes our love is so fake it disgusts us. Paul keeps going: “hate what is wrong.” We read that and realize sometimes we DO love what’s wrong. What’s wrong with us? ”Never be lazy.” Never? Okay, so failing on that one, too. ”Be patient in trouble.” We cringe. We know that when trouble comes we prefer to whine, complain and retreat. And apparently retreating is out: “always be eager to practice hospitality.” Seriously? Always eager to have people over? Always?

While we’re still reeling from all this good but crazy hard advice, Paul keeps going: “Bless those who persecute you. Don’t curse them; pray that God will bless them.” Got it. Don’t wish their house will fall down on their sorry heads. Ask God to shower them with roses. No problem. Bring it on, Paul: “Be happy with those who are happy, and weep with those who weep.” Wait. You mean we don’t get to tell them to suck it up? We don’t get to preach at them? We have to sit and cry with them? But what if that puts US in a bad place? What if going there with them means we – gasp – have to go there, too. This is when we want to stop reading, but we can’t. Paul is crescendoing: ”Don’t be too proud to enjoy the company of ordinary people.” Whop. ”And don’t think you know it all!” Okay. But what if we DO know it all. What then, Paul?? ”Never pay back evil with more evil. Do things in such a way that everyone can see you are honorable. Do all that you can to live in peace with everyone. Dear friends, never take revenge. Leave that to the righteous anger of God. For the Scriptures say, “I WILL TAKE REVENGE; I WILL PAY THEM BACK,’ says the Lord. Instead, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals of shame on their heads.’ Don’t let evil conquer you, but conquer evil by doing good.” Romans 12:3-21.

Sigh. We know we want to be like that, and at the very same time, we know we’re not. But the reason these words are called good news, is that all we have to do is know the only one who IS like this. He takes care of the rest. His words whisper in our hearts. He tells us He loves us even when no one likes our words. He loves us even when no one thinks we’re funny. He loves us as we are. He really loves us. He doesn’t just pretend to. He hates when we do wrong things, but he’s patient with us. He’s always eager to welcome us. He loves us even when we hate Him. He laughs when we’re happy and weeps when we’re sad. He doesn’t pay back our evil with evil.

Instead, He promises that because of the cross, He forgives us no matter how many times we’ve cursed others. He says He became a curse Himself so He can always bless us. He tells us we can be the greyest drivers through life of all, but He’ll always steer us in the right direction. He says we can slam on the brakes at the very wrong time, and no matter what we hit in our skiddering sideways path, He’ll rescue us. He says that when our enemies curse us, He knows how it feels. He asks us to trust justice to Him.

He knows our hearts because He made them.

Those are words that rise up like hot air balloons and — pop. We find ourselves being kind to our worst enemies, not because we hope God will “get them,” but because God is so very kind to us. When we get to know Him through His words, we find we’re exploding with a lightness and joy we didn’t even know existed. When we let go of the world’s lexicon and cling to Him instead, we find that the oldest words of all can be the newest. We find there the message that we are loved, and through His love we can be rewritten into a dictionary full of words like hope, hospitality, kindness and forgiveness. His love shines brighter than any shadow the world can cast.

He is the word we’ve been looking for our whole lives.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day

on time travel: Romans 11

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

read Romans 11. After seeing the new Star Trek movie, how can one NOT rewatch its predecessor on demand. Both J.J. Abrams versions are about the youthful Spock, Kirk and other Starship Enterprise heroes. There is something so satisfying about seeing them reveal their characters even at a young age. Kirk is already rash. Spock is coldly logical. Bones is full of fear. Scotty is full of ideas. Watching them is a form of time travel in itself. Because for those of us who watched the t.v. show as children, our subconscious was busy imagining how a young Kirk would have played off of a young Spock. Our subconscious imaginations get realized in the two newest movies.

“I would cite regulation, but I know YOU would simply ignore it,” a young Spock tells a young Jim Kirk in the first new J.J. Abrams movie (called Star Trek 9).

“See. We ARE getting to know each other.” The young Kirk whops the young Spock on the chest. Spock stares impassively ahead, which is Vulcan for an eye roll.

The exchange makes us smile, because the two men will spend the next 125 years re-enacting the same dynamic.

At the end of the first new Star Trek movie (don’t worry, not the one on the big screen), the young Spock meets his future self. Spock realizes that his future self had conspired with Kirk earlier in the movie without his knowledge, and asks why:

“Then why did you send Kirk when you alone could have explained everything?” the present Spock asks his future self.

“I could not deprive you of the knowledge of what you could accomplish together. Of a friendship that would define you both,” the future Spock says.

Okay. I’ll be honest. It made me cry. Yes, I know. It’s just Star Trek. But honestly. I grew up on that show. I have three brothers and we had one t.v. So guess which gender choice won out?

The thing is, every human being is different than every other human being. God knows that our selfish tendencies make us want to hunker down into our character issues and fight the people whose character issues jut up against our own. But just think what we could all accomplish together if we allowed our character flaws to be softened on the sharp edges of friendships. Just think what would happen if we allowed our friendships to define us. What would it look like to love even the unlovable?

It would look like a too merciful world, wouldn’t it? It would look like a world that was too easy on people. It would look like a world full of push-overs. We’d be wimps. We’d be doormats. Wouldn’t we?

Or do we have it wrong?

What is true strength? What is true dignity? Isn’t it to be kind to people without needing anything from them? Isn’t it to give without expecting anything back? Eleanor Roosevelt said no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Right. Got it. But how do we do that? Is it even POSSIBLE for us humans to be nice to people without expecting anything in return? Can we really be abused and not have it harm us at all?

I don’t think so. We’re just not made that way. If we’re nice to someone who hits us in return, it DOES rob us of dignity. We do feel dumb. If someone tries to take something precious from us, and we open our arms and say, “here. Take everything else I have, too. It’s yours,” we feel like we’ve failed. If I know that my next door neighbor is a drug addict, I should lock my door. Right? Otherwise, if he slips into my home in the dead of night, steals my jewelry, and oh whoops, shoots me in the eyeball when I stumble out of bed and discover him in the act, it’s my fault for unlocking my door. Isn’t it?

Yes. Of course. Jesus told his disciples to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Matthew 10:16. So how do we walk the line between not giving people the opportunity to sin against us, and yet turning the other cheek? How are we to be wise? How do we know when to lock our doors and when to swing them wide open?

I have no idea. But I know the one who does.

Jesus is wisdom. He is kind and yet has self-control. He is strong and yet gentle. What’s His secret? Okay, so I happen to believe Jesus is God. That helps. But then let’s go further. Even if you don’t yet believe in God, do a thought experiment. If the God of the Bible existed, how could God be strong and yet gentle? Why isn’t He all thunderbolts? How can God give to us even before we love Him back? How could God have given up His life for us, even though we are so selfish and stubborn we’re the ones who killed Him?

I think God’s secret is that God can give because God doesn’t need anything from us.

Why? Because God IS love. Love, real love, doesn’t need anything. It’s complete in itself.

It’s not that giving to abusers is free, even for God. The Bible is clear that it costs God to give. Our rebellion “grieves” Him; it breaks His heart. Ephesians 4:30. We need only look at Jesus weeping and shaking in the Garden of Gethsemane to know that. When the sky weeps in Mel Gibson’s movie version of the Passion, we feel sure Gibson got it right. The sun went dark and the earth shook when Jesus died. Matthew 27:45-53. Jesus wept when his friend Lazarus died, just as we sense God wept when His Son died. Jesus’ entire body was jolted through with spiritual darkness when God turned His back on Him on the cross. Jesus groaned in agony: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani on the cross. Or as we put it in King James English: MY GOD MY GOD WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME?? Matthew 27:46. Jesus suffered hell for us in that moment. He was separated from God.

Love hurts. Even for God. Especially for God, as He IS love.

So if love cost God everything, why can He still give without needing anything in return?

I don’t know. I can’t say I really understand that kind of love. I’m not sure any of us can. But here’s the thing. Love works. It’s the only thing that works. Love is stronger than hate. It’s stronger than enmity. It breaks down walls. It melts resistance. Often we can’t even see how love is working. Often we can’t see it work in our lifetime. But love is never wasted. How do we know that?

Because anytime we have ever really loved we know all the way down that it’s the best way. We also know it’s better than anything we’ve felt before. We know we want it all the time, but we don’t know how. So here’s how. Ready? We just have to love God back and trust Him to do the rest. When others hurt us, we trust God to restore us. In other words, we just have to love love.

Love is the ultimate time traveler. Love is outside of time. Love created time, after all. And love sees all that ever was and ever will be. Love sees that He defeated evil on the cross, and He sees the working out of that salvation in the future. Satan’s days are numbered. Ours are infinite. We just need to start trusting in the things we can’t see. We need to acknowledge our character flaws – our impetuous tendencies, our coldness, our conspiracy theories, our crazy ways – and offer them up to God to be softened down by relationship. We need to be in relationship with God, and by being tenderized by his grace – his “undeserved kindness” – allow Him to start restoring our relationships with others. Romans 11:5.

We need to time travel into the future, where there will be a new heaven and a new earth. We need to time travel into our past, and talk to God about our hurts and allow Him to heal them. We need to forgive and let God be God.

There’s this wild wonderful way about God. He can turn rejection on its head. He says that when those who reject Him finally accept, it “will be even more wonderful.” Romans 11:15.

That’s God’s secret. He doesn’t hold rejection against us. He will accept all of us. He holds out his arms and only rejoices when His people finally come to Him. That’s love. It’s not our way, so our only hope of living that way is to embrace the one who IS that way. By embracing Him, we discover we have embraced ourselves.

It’s impossible for us to understand God’s ways. We can’t give him advice. We can’t give God enough that He needs to pay us back. We can just give Him thanks and glory. Romans 11:33-36.

And when we can’t do that? Well, luckily God knows all our character flaws and loves us just as we are…

Please, Captain. Not in front of the Klingons.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day

the one true story: Romans 10

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

Story is one of the main ways we try to make sense of our lives. We tell anyone who will listen, and even those who clearly aren’t listening, who we are, where we are headed and how we hope it will all end. We feel lost when we lose sight of what we want, just as novels go sour when the author can’t articulate what her character wants. We like to look for redemption in our suffering, because we want to believe our pain has a purpose. Sometimes we tell our stories inside out because it’s the only way we know how. Sometimes we hide our stories from ourselves. We hear ourselves give the wrong punchlines. We know what really punched us was something we would never say out loud. Other times we hear ourselves elevate secondary characters to the status of main. Or we get mired in backstory.

Or we hear ourselves tell others our dreams, and then we know we’re really sunk. As Joyce Carol Oates once said to me in college (yes, yes, I get to say that), “dreams are only interesting to the person who had them.” But we find ourselves going on and on anyway: “and then the Ferrari turned into the kitchen sink and the neighbor’s tomcat got sucked down the drainpipe and turned into a hippopotamus who flew straight at the garbage man.” We see our listener’s eyes glaze over, but on we go anyway.

Is it the sound of our own voices that entrances us? Or is there perhaps a truer story pulling at our heartstrings, one we’re not quite ready to hear it yet?

Our friends usually know our real stories. To them, perched on the outside, it’s obvious. But we don’t get to have that perspective, except in rare flashes of insight that give us the disembodied feeling of being an outsider to our own lives.

Most of the time, we see the story we want to believe. Other times, we see the stories cynicism births. We assume the worst about ourselves and everybody else. Those assumptions cause us to see our lives as tragedy. We’ve become an unreliable narrator.

Sometimes we veer away from our stories because we brush up against evil so terrible we mistrust our senses. One minute we’re talking to a fellow human being, and then a flash of greed, deceit or jealousy crosses their faces. It’s as if we can see the grinning skull lurking beneath their skin. We shiver and feel as if we’ve just looked in the mirror.

How do we tell our true stories? Who are we really? Where did we begin and where will we end? And how are we to enjoy this middle part that we are in?

Here is where the elegance of Romans 10 comes to our rescue. Paul says the problem for every single human being is that we think we have to prove we’re “good”. He says this causes us to try to write the wrong stories for ourselves.

Paul says we “cling” to the idea that we follow the law. In the Bible, that kind of thinking is called “religion.” Religion kills. It kills our friendships, relationships, stories and selves. Not only that, religion is based on the lie that we can obey “all” God’s commands, all the time. And so our stories veer off course. They become fantasy.

Instead, the true story is simple: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Romans 10:9. That’s all. It’s not complicated. In fact, for most of us it’s the simplicity of it that offends us. We think we have to do something hard, preferably Herculean, to earn our way to love. We think we have to write our own stories our own way, with ourselves as the hero.

But if we listen to our stories, we are never really the hero of them. We always look to something else us to validate us. That’s how our stories go. We tell the story where that man loved me. Or we give the story where we landed that deal. Or we narrate the story in which that crowd cheered for us.

God stills us the way a mother calms a screaming baby, and says: hush now.

The true story for each of us is that we are already validated. We have an author who loves us and gives us meaning. He writes the poem of our lives. He made us each the lead character of our poem. He poured his love into writing us. His hands bear the marks to prove it. He shed his blood, literally, to write happy endings for each of us.

That’s the one true story. Believing it enables us to tell our real stories without embellishment. Our real stories include our failures. They include the boring parts. They have chapters where we wander off piste. We have plotlines where people we love attack us for no reason, brandishing weapons, and then embrace us the next moment. There are seemingly senseless, seemingly random events in all our lives. But we don’t need to hide them when we trust God.

Instead, we can be present in our own lives. We can experience our failures in all their pain but without shame. We find that God lifts our heads and erases our feelings of inadequacy. We can look to the Lord as the source of our peace. We can be rejected by others and crumble — but not fall. We can be lifted up again. We find healing from even the worst evil through forgiveness. We can see ugliness in others and ourselves without being destroyed. We are loved, despite it all. We see ourselves break our deepest resolutions, and we’re sorry. Obstacles in our paths flatten us, but not for long.

Perhaps we can never see the big picture, except in broad brushstrokes, but we know there is one. We experience the peace that comes from spending time with the author. We become the person the author intended us to be. We find our true name. We find our real character.

It’s as if the cross acts like one big Search and Replace. God searches for our sins and replaces them with Jesus’ perfection. He covers us with His love.

Best of all the same story is for all: “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Romans 10:13. It’s the most open story known to man.

And when we realize our happily ever after might just be real, we get so excited we start to tell others the same story. We get breathless as we start to see how the whole universe is held together by the breath of the one who called us into being.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day on May 7, 2013

on revenge and forgiveness: Romans 9

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

We hate everything about bullies — the bullying, the being bullied, and the standing by silently while someone else is being bullied. The bully feels helpless in the face of his own senseless rage. The victim feels oddly and wrongly ashamed, as if something in their very being invited mistreatment. The silent bystander feels in some ways worst of all, both victim and victimizer, complicit in guilt and yet deemed worthless enough by the bully to be subjected to watching their crime.

I once heard a Vietnam vet describe the concept of what he called “third party forgiveness.” He said we need to forgive not just the things others have done to us; or the things we have done to others; but also the things we have seen others do to other people.

That’s a lot of forgiving.

The problem is there is something inside all of us that prizes revenge. ”I hope that man that incarcerated those three women for ten years DOESN’T get the death penalty,” someone said to me yesterday about Ariel Castro. ”I hope he is put in a prison where others mistreat HIM, so he experiences the same thing he did to those women.”

Holocaust victim Elie Weisel said something similar about Bernie Madoff. Weisel should know better. He wrote in his memoir Night that when the Nazis treated him like an animal, he found himself behaving like one. And yet when Weisel lost most of his money to Madoff’s ponzi scheme, Weisel wrote that he hoped Madoff would spend the rest of his life in a prison cell with a video running 24-7 of his victims. Weisel said this before Madoff’s son committed suicide. I’m not sure if Weisel still feels Madoff needs a 24-7 video after that kind of a consequence.

Why do we want bullies, criminals and other people who have maimed us to experience the hurt they inflicted? Why do we want to exact an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? What is it in us that has an automatic revenge button that gets triggered the moment someone hurts us?

Is it possible that we each have a sense of divine justice? Are we humans so made in God’s image that we automatically know that a wrong must be punished? Do we have God’s laws written on our hearts, as the Bible says of our consciences? I can’t think of any other explanation.

And yet when we talk of exacting revenge like this, we forget the most important thing. If our sense of justice comes from God, why do we find it so hard to trust that same God to exact justice in the best possible way? That is part of what Paul is trying to get at here in Romans 9. He’s saying who are we to argue with God? God is the potter. We are the clay. Part of peace comes from recognizing that the potter has the right to do whatever He wants with the clay. Romans 9:20-22.

No one could read about the hell house those three victims of Ariel Castro lived in without weeping. The policemen who released the women were crying. The women saw the sunshine twice in ten years. We feel the pain of those three women, even as we know we can’t even imagine their pain — and that, too, is part of our pain. We are the bystanders who want to suffer for others but can’t.

Luckily for us, we have a God who did suffer for us. The potter could have broken every one of us clay jars. Instead, God became clay Himself. He was broken for us. He suffered the pain of hell so we wouldn’t have to.

Because His justice was satisfied on the cross, God forgives us, but His only condition is that we forgive each other. He wants us to forgive the things we see others do to others. He begs us to let go of hurts others have inflicted on us. He longs for us to receive His forgiveness. He says it’s the only way to heal.

If someone really needs to see a video 24-7 of all the wrongs they’ve inflicted on other people, God can do that, too, by playing it on the screens of their minds. Maybe that’s already happened to Madoff. Who knows. But maybe not, because we humans don’t really know what kind of spiritual torture other people deserve. We don’t know what kind of suffering their consciences have imposed on them. We don’t know what kind of suffering their hard hearts have given them.

There is nothing more painful than having a hard heart. Hard hearts condemn us to live in a world of hate, rage, suspicion and loneliness. All crimes come from hard hearts. No matter whether we are cruel to others, indifferent, thoughtless or actively malicious, everything evil we’ve ever done comes from the same source: a hard heart.

A hard heart can only be broken with softness. God has a soft heart toward us that offers us only kindness, sweetness, love and mercy. We don’t really understand mercy. It’s not our natural response. But while we may not understand it, if we go there we discover it’s the best place to live. It’s a tender place. It’s a vulnerable place. It’s a scary place. And it requires knowing we need mercy. It requires letting go of justice and the law and “well I did THAT so maybe I didn’t do THAT but you did THIS and I deserve THAT.” It lets us instead focus on God’s forgiveness for us, not on focusing on what others have done wrong. Only when we accept the need for mercy can we love others – all others — even the bullies. Even when we have met the bully and he is us.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day

on loneliness … Romans 8

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

“It’s so lonely I can’t bear looking at it,” John said to me. We were on our third date looking at a Hopper painting. He winced as he said it. And he never called me again.

Loneliness is odd. You can feel lonely even when you’re with someone else. Sometimes being with other people only accentuates our loneliness. To be honest, it wasn’t “Christina’s World” that caused John to make that comment. I just put in this version of “Christina’s World” because when I’m with a lonely person, I often feel like that silly man waving my arms and legs, trying fruitlessly to get their attention.

The Hopper painting that made John feel so lonely was this one, “Morning Sun”: The interesting thing was, John had already told me that he LOVED spending time alone. He said he spent days on end completely alone. He glanced at me when he said it, as if evaluating whether I’d be able to handle that. He was a scientist. His work involved the kind of uninterrupted thinking time that all artists, inventors, philosophers and creative types of every description not only require but crave. It’s like a hunger in us. We run dry after a while if we spend too much time in the company of others. We need time alone. So why then do we fear the very thing we love? Why did my scientist date recoil as if he’d been BURNED when he looked at this Hopper painting ? After all, the woman is looking out of a window. She is presumably looking at something. And there’s more. She isn’t really alone. The artist is there.

To John, however, in that moment, the woman was terribly and awfully alone. Edward Hopper the artist managed to make John the scientist feel her loneliness. Hopper affected John’s emotions, the way all artists aspire to do. Harrison Ford spoke on Charlie Rose last night of why the script for the Jackie Robinson movie grabbed him. ”I’m still ambitious,” Ford told Charlie Rose. ”I’m an actor. I’m not happy unless I’m working. But I don’t get to work enough because I’m picky about what I do. I only want to do scripts that interest me. If I can’t be a leading man anymore, I’ll be a character actor. As Ben Kinglsey told me, ‘when you put on a mask, you can tell the truth.’ But there aren’t even enough interesting character actor parts. The script for ’42′ wasn’t talky. Talky is bad in a script. A good script makes you FEEEEEEEL something.” Harrison Ford’s eyes gave his trademark serious yet yearning twitch. I felt something just watching him. The years evaporated. I saw Indiana Jones on the screen in front of me. Ford is a gifted actor, just as Hopper is a gifted painter. And Harrison Ford was right. In ’42′, when a pitcher HURLS a ball at Jackie Robinson and it SLAMS into his head, the entire audience ducks and winces. We literally feel his pain. That moment is more effective than any 3-D special effect, because it’s not a special effect. It’s an actor, in this case, Chadwick Boseman, empathizing so deeply with his character that the audience empathizes, too. The movie implies Jackie Robinson was the loneliest man on the baseball pitch, and yet ironically at the same moment the movie brings us all into the loneliness of his world and thereby expands it.

Which brings us back to loneliness. What IS loneliness? And if we actually like being alone sometimes, is it even really loneliness that we call loneliness? Do we have the right vocabulary? Is there another word, another language, another world that truly evokes and explains and heals the feeling we call loneliness?

It’s not an abstract question. Loneliness can drive even the calmest most rational human to extreme, dangerous and even violent behavior. The press is full of speculation that loneliness was a driving force behind the Boston marathon bombers, the Columbine massacre and any number of other violent acts. See e.g. “The Teenage Brain May Have Driven Tsarnaevs to Violence.” The lonely brain is susceptible. A lonely person will sacrifice what she knows to be right in order to satisfy her hunger. A lonely person can become what we call desperate. He will do things that are backwards. In fact, we usually do. When we’re lonely, the more we cling to others, the more we tend to drive them away. We behave in ways that achieve the opposite of what we crave. Murder, for instance, isn’t calculated to give us friends. Or we accept bad relationships because we lie to ourselves that they’re better than nothing.

Loneliness can also compel us to erect walls around ourselves. Sometimes, we’re so afraid of being hurt, we build walls to “protect” ourselves, which prevents us from finding the kind of restorative relationships that can end our loneliness. What is wrong with us? And what is this beast called loneliness? What will truly feed it, satisfy it or starve it to death?

Romans 8 is a long and beautiful expose on what it truly means to be a Christian. It opens with the claim that there is “no condemnation” for the person who is “in” Christ Jesus. It moves on to claim that “all things work together for good” for those who love Christ and are called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28. This is a verse that many people cling to with every bone in their body. They call it their “life verse” and trust that God has a purpose in even the most seemingly meaningless tragedies. The chapter ends with the promise that “nothing” can separate us from the love of Christ. We may understand intellectually why never being “separated” from Christ might have something to do with satisfying our loneliness. Our heads can understand the concept that if we believe in Jesus we get accepted into His family. We might see how the kind of forgiveness Christ both offers and calls us to might relationships and bring healing to our wounds. But how do we truly believe that? How do we take it into our lonely hearts, not just our heads? I think the answer lies in Paul’s opening statement that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ. But what does condemnation have to do with loneliness?

Everything.

Because I could tell you that when Paul says everything works together for good for those who love Christ, it was good that that scientist John never called me again. I could speculate that I never could have handled dating such a loner. I probably couldn’t have. I could further tell you that John closing the door, opened the door for me to have a much better relationship with a man much more suited to me. And right now, that would be true. But what if that had been MY LAST DATE EVER? What if no one ever called me again? It happens. It happens all the time. There are many people in this world who are sick, dissatisfied, old, drug addicted and alone. Where is the good in that? How can God satisfy our desire for companionship in a world where sometimes we ARE desperately alone?

I would suggest that it’s not being alone that’s really the problem. I think a much deeper, and often undiagnosed problem, is this issue of condemnation. The real problem is guilt. We all fall short of other people’s expectations and our own, and our instinct is to hide. Witness Adam and Eve. The moment they bit into that apple, they lost their fellowship with God and hid themselves. They felt naked. They felt it keenly, as if it hurt them. As with Adam and Eve, our inadequacies cause us shame. When our marriages fall apart, for instance, we are embarrassed. We feel like we’ve failed. We want to hide our failures, even though the only way to heal them, of course, is to share with others who can say to us. “Don’t worry, dude, been there. Done that. We’ve all failed. And we come through. It’s okay. I still love you. Maybe your spouse will never love you again, but it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.”

Actually, it kind of does. There’s an even better answer to our inadequacies, hidden in plain sight in this opening line of Romans 8. There is “no condemnation” for those in Christ even though we ARE all guilty. No one is good. Don’t hit the toggle switch. At least not yet. I don’t mean we’re not lovable. We are. I don’t even mean we’re awful. We’re made in God’s image. But none of us live up to the standards to which we aspire. Even if we’re moral relativists and we’ve bought into the (philosophically untenable) notion that there is no right or wrong and the only standards which matter are the ones we set up for ourselves, none of us live up to even those. Pastor Tim Keller once said that if we wore a recording device around our necks for a week which recorded every standard we say OTHER people should live up to, none of us would live up to even that code. Listen to ourselves. We condemn others all the time: ”I can’t BELIEVE he did that. Can you IMAGINE? I NEVER would have done that. I NEVER would have treated anyone like that.” Of course we all have. We just forget.

So what Paul is talking about here is that when we are “in” Jesus Christ, there is no more of this condemnation. Because Jesus took the punishment we deserve, He accomplished what all of our “trying harder” never could. When God looks at us, He sees Christ’s record. Christ lived the life we all aspire to but never can, and then He took the consequences we deserve. When we are “in” Him, there is no more condemnation. There’s no more shame. There is no more unremitting guilt. There is no longer any need to hide. We don’t need to put on a mask to tell the truth. In theory, being a Christian SHOULD mean the end to hypocrisy. We no longer have to pretend we’re perfect. ”Sh*t,” we can say. ”I just f*cked up again.” And then we catch ourselves, grin sheepishly, and realized we’ve just done it again.

Because perfection is like walking on water. It’s something a human can only do in that moment of suspended time when we’re lost in prayer with the God who loves us, made us and died for us. The rest of the time, we fee like we’re sinking and struggling not to go under. We all have negative and critical thoughts. We are hypocrites who condemn others with withering glares for the very things we do all the time. We present ourselves as perfect. We engage in not just these covert sins, but overt ones. Most Christians like to talk about their sins as something in their past that God has “saved” them from. And that is true – but only in a sense. The Christian journey is one in which we go from “glory to glory.” Yes, sometimes God lifts us out of chemical dependency, sex addiction, dishonesty in the workplace, and a whole host of other behaviors which will guarantee an empty, miserable lonely life. But sometimes we fall right back into the same behaviors. The author of the famous Hound of Heaven poem, who so movingly describes God pursuing him as relentlessly and passionately as a bloodhound, is supposed to have died a lonely miserable death in the slums of London, falling prey to the same opium addiction that caused him to celebrate God’s victory.

So where is the victory there? Where is the hope? Where is the joy? Where is the end of loneliness if we find ourselves sometimes doing the same old same old? Why should anyone even want to be a Christian if the Bible doesn’t promise a pain free life?

The answer is all around us. It’s shimmering in the air. Romans 8 is quivering with it. The answer is that no matter what happens to us in this world, whether it’s our fault or that of others or a mixture of the two, we have only to reach out and beg for God’s help. We need only ask. We need only crash through the walls of pride we’ve foolishly erected around our wounded hearts and cry out for the living breathing God: HELP ME!!!!

And He will. He does. He is longing to. He adores us. He has every right to condemn us. He, more than any human, knows everything we’ve ever done or thought. And instead of condemning, He suffered for us. He felt our pain. He didn’t feel it in His imagination, the we we do when watching a movie like ’42′ or when looking at a painting like ‘Morning Sun.” He did it in reality. Jesus really suffered the eternal consequences of sin for us. He really did. And then He rose again, and holds out his hands to each of us, without condemnation, only love.

That’s what Romans 8 is singing about. That’s why Paul writes about the joy of those who live “in” the Spirit. We become united with Jesus. We become one with Him. We live “with” Him. We can never be “separated” from Him.

How does that play out in real life? What if we fall back into doing something we know is wrong, and find ourselves unable to dig ourselves out of the pit of our own making? What if we’re not sorry yet – at least not sorry enough to stop? Right here, in the unrepentant yet still believing heart is where grace and truth meet and dance. It’s here where the believer lives. How can God say through Paul that there is “no condemnation” for us even when we sin again and aren’t quite ready to stop?

All I know is this: no matter what we have done, continue to do, or will do, all we can do is hold onto Christ. We can beg for more of His Spirit. We can ask to drink from the river of life. We can keep on crying out. We press in. We cling. We ask, seek and knock. We lean in – a phrase from the Bible not Sheryl Sandberg.

And if we sense that we don’t feel sorry, we can ask for the gift of guilt. Because guilt, real guilt, isn’t a bad thing. It’s a gift of God that is meant to spur us on to be sorry. And from that place of sorrow, God can lift us up into the beautiful place of forgiveness. Condemnation comes from hell. It says we can never be free. It’s a lie. Godly guilt leads to sorrow, repentance and new life. 2 Cor. 7:10 (“the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads us away from sin and results in salvation. There’s no regret for that kind of sorrow. But worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death.”)

A world based on forgiveness rather than condemnation is a beautiful place to live. It’s a world that gives us the sweetness of God’s presence, and it has nothing to do with our behavior. We’re “free” from the law. We live in the Spirit. All we need to do is groan from our hearts, and the Holy Spirits translates our groaning into the most beautiful articulate painting of a prayer ever imagined or created. Romans 8:26.

And somehow in that world of freedom, it’s all going to be more than alright. Somehow, we leave sin behind the way people on a rocket ship see earth getting further and further away until it’s a distant blue ball. Somehow the more we recognize our weaknesses, the bolder we become. Our poverty opens the door for the sweetness of relying on Him.

God’s ways are not our ways. But they’re better. In His world, we are never alone, no matter what we’ve done. The artist is always there. He sees us. But what we forget is that He is watching us without condemnation. He is watching us with love. He is, perhaps, more like that silly man photoshopped into ‘Christina’s World’ at the beginning of this post that we realize. He’s doing all He can to get our attention. He wants us to stop hiding from Him, lift our faces to Him, and enjoy the warmth of the morning son.

Because He LOVES us. So yes, maybe loneliness is the right word for that painful ache we can feel at the most unexpected times. We are all lonely for unconditional and undeserved love. We feel alone in our pain, alone in our guilt, alone in our condemnation. ”I feel lonely,” we think, and the pain presses deeper. Sometimes we feel guilty for feeling lonely, as if there were something wrong with us for being alone. But loneliness is a gift if we use it well. The pain can spur us on to seek the sweetness of the relationship we were created for. Maybe we miss the mark because we look to this world to solve our loneliness, when we need to look to the source of love first. We are already loved by the one who made us. We are already forgiven. If we look out THAT window, we will find the most beautiful view of all. We’ll find the acceptance we’ve always hungered for.

God’s love so fills us to overflowing, He enables us to give to others. He helps us take our minds off ourselves and love others – and in that kind of math, loneliness dissolves. We discover we no longer think the words, “i feel lonely.” So no matter how many people never call us again or hit us on purpose with baseballs or hate us sometimes even with good cause, we can keep on giving, keep on loving, keep on holding our heads high, because the more people take from us, the more room in our hearts there is to cry out to God and allow Him to fill us to overflowing with the thing we most want. We are called to the purpose of helping Him love the world. That’s what Paul says here in Romans 8 – we are the first of many to come. We’re to give others the same helping hand Christ gives us. And even when we fail miserably at that, there is no loneliness in our failure. We can admit it, be deeply sorry, be deeply forgiven, and keep on engaging in God’s world, a world full of morning sun.

For as Paul says: if the only perfect one doesn’t condemn us, who can?

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day on May 7, 2013

About Caroline Coleman

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: