no pointing fingers: Acts 25

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

Acts 25. In “Silver Linings Playbook” every character is delighted to use the insanity of Bradley Cooper’s character to make themselves look better. ”Okay, sure, I may be a little, shall we say, OFF sometimes,” each character implies. ”But am I BIPOLAR? Hardly. Am I CRAZY? I think NOT. Have I ever tried to MURDER someone? Nope.”

Each person in the movie wants to put herself in a position of moral superiority. But the movie implies that when we do that, we’ve become blind to the point of craziness ourselves. Instead, we are nudged to ask: how can we love other people – and by extension ourselves — without judging?

It’s a good question. How can we? All too often we echo St. Paul’s indignation in this chapter of Acts at being unfairly accused. ”I am not guilty!!!!” Acts 25:10.

The only way we can get indignant about our innocence, however, is when we are very, very selective about which of our actions we choose to look at. We’re geniuses at this kind of selective morality. We hone in with laser-like focus on those few areas where we have even a chance of claiming perfection. Like sharpening our pencils, for instance. We’re pretty good at that. Or are we? I came across ten unsharpened pencils this morning and had to stuff them in a drawer. Okay, so maybe that’s not a great example. Perhaps we can say we are terrific at walking out the door without forgetting our keys – whoops. Scratch that one, too. When it comes down to it, the list of what we do perfectly is miniscule. But that doesn’t stop us from revisiting it like a favorite song. Even worse, we find ourselves engaged in the unattractive task of turning around and judging others for not having a sparkly (short) list that looks exactly like ours.

Why? Why do we care? Why do we want to look so good anyway? What’s our problem?

I’m not sure we know. I mean, I know we can come up with reasons. We can count on all our fingers the list of why. We want to earn love, respect, promotions, honors, degrees, acclaim and admiration. Fine. But why do we want all that? Let’s go deeper. Why do we even WANT the moral high ground over anyone? Why this drive for perfection at the expense of others?

The Biblical answer is that we all want to be like God. Sound familiar? It’s the refrain the serpent used to trap Eve: if you eat from that apple, you’ll be like God. But why did Eve fall for that? Why didn’t she say: “who cares? I don’t WANT to be like God. God is God. I’m good with being Eve.” Or better yet, why didn’t Eve say: “God loves me. God walks with me and my man in the garden in the cool of the day. I’m already made in His image. And that’s good enough for me.”

I don’t know. But she didn’t. And neither do we. We DO want to be like God – or at least to be like what we think He is like. We do want to be perfect – according to our own definition of perfect. We want to walk to heaven on our own two feet – or roll our wheelchairs – or hop on one foot. Whatever. “I can do it by myself,” is one of the first things we say as toddlers, and we’ve been saying it ever since. We spend our lives pushing away the helping hand that we all too often need.

It’s a lot of work pretending to be perfect. It’s exhausting pretending we don’t need any help. It’s also doomed. So we resort to a few other tricks. We point fingers at others to try to distract everyone from our own faults. We rarely fool others when we do this, and we certainly don’t fool God: ”You didn’t think, did you, that just by pointing your finger at others you would distract God from seeing your misdoings?” Romans 2:3 (the Message). Well, we did actually. But if God really is the all-seeing all-knowing one, it’s not the best strategy.

God longs to help each of us. God is love, and love by definition is a verb of giving. But God makes it very clear that a condition for His help is that we have to stop pointing our finger at other people. Isaiah 58:1. Why? Why is it so important to stop pointing out that we’re not bipolar, psychotic, sex-addicted or a jailbird? And if we are any of those things, why do we find ourselves coming up with another list of Nots?

The answer is that those it’s irrelevant.

The ground at the foot of the cross is level. If we humble ourselves there, we find God lifts us up and sets us on our feet. God let the fingers point at Him on the cross, so He could extend to us instead the hand of forgiveness.

All we have to do is accept it with thankfulness. And when we can’t do that, or don’t want to, and find ourselves judging others with vile abandon — God’s hand is still there. His hand is always waiting. We can feel the press of His fingers all day long. God’s fingers nudge us in the direction of giving up the moral high ground and taking instead the mantle of grace. It’s the only playbook worth reading from. Because it’s only when we’re standing on level ground that we find our true balance.

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day on January 23, 2013

why we resist conversion: Acts 9

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read Acts 9 . Conversion stories draw us in. Did the convert hear deep voices, dream of skinny cows or see neon rainbows? Did he give away his Porsche? Did she sign on the dotted line at the nearest nunnery? Conversions, like snowflakes, fall upon each person in unique patterns etched in glory. What strikes me as the common denominator is not who gets converted, but who doesn’t. There are common factors that block all of us from converting to Christianity. I know not everyone reading this even believes in God yet, but that’s exactly my point – if we don’t, why don’t we?

Perhaps the best place to start is the road to Damascus conversion story. It’s the dramatic, iconic conversion story that many people know. A devout Jew named Saul is heading down the road to Damascus, muttering curses under his breath, his pockets stuffed with arrest warrants to drag any Christian he can find to Jerusalem in chains. Suddenly, a voice calls to him from heaven: ”Saul, Saul.” Light rains down from the sky. Everyone around Saul falls to the ground. The voice asks Saul why he’s persecuting Him. Saul says, “Lord, who are you?” I love that response. Saul knows the voice is His Lord – but he doesn’t know WHO His Lord is. Jesus tells him He is Jesus, the one he’s persecuting, and says it’s dangerous for Saul to keep kicking against the goads. Saul can’t see, eat or drink. When the scales fall from Saul’s eyes three days later, he’s a changed man. He has a new name, a new mission, new friends – and the persecutor joins the ranks of the very people he’d been persecuting. And that is the birth of Saint Paul the apostle.

Embedded in the road to Damascus story are five hints of what hold us back from faith. The story suggests that maybe the biggest thing blocking us isn’t our unbelief, but something else – perhaps even our deepest need -masquerading as doubt.

The first thing that holds many of us back is hate. ”But I don’t hate anyone,” is our gut response to that assertion. Really? Think about it. Isn’t there somebody out there who’s done each of us wrong? Aren’t there people who’ve done other people wrong? Isn’t there some little cockroach of a person who doesn’t deserve space on this planet? Isn’t there someone violating God’s laws – or at least, universal Laws that we all hold dear? And, here’s the kicker, doesn’t the world need US to maintain our passionate hatred of that person in order to contain them and their misguided or downright evil ways? What would happen if we were to let go of our hatred? Who would stop that person? Who would insist that they were in the wrong? Who … beside, perhaps, the very God who made them in the first place. Because what if our hatred, like Saul’s, is misguided? What if the real enemy is the hatred itself – and the accompanying pride, the part of each of us that thinks we know best? What if – and this is supposed to be a liberating thought – what if only God knows best how to handle people – starting with us most of all?

Second, what can block us from converting is something that looks like love. What if we love people who don’t believe in God? Saul, for instance, was a devout Jew who thought of himself as an example for all. Like him, what if we were to convert – where would that leave our loved ones who don’t believe? We feel guilty at the thought of converting, as if we would be somehow abandoning them. It’s actually our pride, not love, then that thinks we have to reject love in order to help others. It comes from the ridiculous idea that we’re the only one who can help other people. What if – and this is the same liberating thought – God knows best how to handle other people? What if we don’t really have a clue how to help other people? And what if the same God who woos each of us, is wooing everyone else – in the way only God knows best? What if God invites us to let go of the people we love and trust Him to handle them best?

A third factor is guilt. What if we’ve hurt other people (and we all have), and we feel guilty about it. Saul, for instance, has already egged on the murder of Saint Stephen, and persecuted other Christians. Our guilt can make us resist God’s call, because we think it would be “unfair” for us to shoot up heavenward before them. After all, if we’ve hurt them or let them down, we don’t deserve to go to heaven before them. But that kind of thinking stems from the misguided idea that ANY of us deserve to go to heaven. In fact, no one deserves heaven. We go to heaven because God Himself paid the price for our faults on the cross. God beckons each of us not because we earned His love, but because His justice was satisfied by placing the sins of us all on Christ. He issues the same merciful invitation to all – even people we’ve hurt. It’s based not on our achievements, but His. Thinking we have to hold back because of people we’ve hurt is another form of pride. We can trust God to know best how to handle the people we’ve hurt, too.

The fourth thing that can block us from conversion is fear of the cost. We fear that if there’s a God, He’ll ask too much. It’s true that the first thing Paul is taught after his conversion here is how much he will “suffer.” The word suffer makes us shiver down to the marrow. But God never explains the suffering of Christ (as opposed to the suffering involved in living on this planet) until He’s first brought us the unimaginable joy of knowing Christ. That’s because we couldn’t understand. Paul is embraced by light and Jesus and love before he learns anything about the cost. Because even the cost is sweet when it’s wrapped in Christ. So what if we’re afraid of the wrong thing? What if we’re afraid to abandon the hopelessness and despair of a life based on the circumstances of our lives, in exchange for the joy, peace and productivity of a life lived in union with the God of love who we can trust to bring good out of bad?

Finally, perhaps the biggest thing that blocks us from conversion is our feeling that we’re unloved. Perhaps we tell ourselves we don’t want it because we’re afraid we can’t have it. Saul, for instance, was “trembling and astonished” when Jesus spoke to him. It strikes me that Saul was astonished not that the God he was persecuting would speak to him, but that the very God he’d been trying to SERVE his whole devout life would speak to him. He describes himself elsewhere as the most zealous Jew of all the Jews. He’d spent his whole life trying as hard as he possibly could to be good by following every rule there ever was, and then some. And if you’ve ever tried to do this, you know it’s doomed. You know that trying to be good and follow all the rules, does nothing but make us humans anxious. It’s an inherently insecure way. No matter how hard we try, we will always fail – and so we’re always anxious. That’s why I think Saul was touched to the core that God cared so much about him that he would urge him off the dangerous road. Perhaps we’re all afraid to believe unfailing love exists, because we worry that it might be there for everyone else – except us.

God goads us on the right path by trying to assuage all of our resistances to conversion – by whispering to, imploring, singing to and encouraging each of us about His love. He knows it’s as dangerous for us to ignore His message of love as it was for Saul. He knows that most of the sins of the world are committed by people who feel unloved and lash out because of it. That’s why He allowed us to lash out at Him instead. God Himself fell to the ground, carrying the weight of a cross too heavy for any human to bear. God Himself trembled. God Himself was bound in chains. God was persecuted. God was innocent of any crime and yet punished for the crimes of us all.

So what do we have to lose by converting except pride, fear, guilt, futile efforts to help others, bad habits and the feeling that we’re unloved? What do we have to gain except being “made whole”? God is love. How can He do anything else but love us?

That is the truth to which each of us longs to be converted. And each of us will be converted in a unique way – on different roads – with different people who believe we’ve changed and people who don’t – in whispers and sighs or in thunder and lightning bolts. But the common denominator will be the river of Love. Because no one can be converted without stepping into the river – and it’s the same river for all. Maybe that is the biggest stumbling block of all.

But the river that calls us is powerfully cleansing, and the view on the other side is bursting with light. And who knows – maybe if we step in alongside the people we think we hate, we’ll find ourselves brimming over with so much love for them that we can hardly even stand it – and we’ll find that loving them was the thing we wanted most of all, all along. It’s the kind of river where we’ll see the people we hurt twirling as they wade in alone upstream. We’ll see people who rejected us walking hand in hand with their new loves, and we’ll be happy for them. We’ll see our children lobbing baseballs over to test what’s on the other side – and watch as golden balls are hurled back, the way runners coasting downhill will high five the person struggling uphill – because they know what’s waiting for them on the other side.

by Caroline Coleman in “A Chapter a Day.” carolinecolemanbooks.com on October 16, 2012

the key to unlocking our stories: Acts 8

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read Acts 8. For most of us, stories are magical. They transport us to another time, place, world and reality. For shy people, they can help us understand others, empathize, and to feel as if, even when other people are opaque to us, at least the characters in stories – and perhaps their sensitive authors – are our best friends. Stories take us out of ourselves, and yet somehow make us more ourselves. Why? Is it simply because we can picture ourselves as the hero or heroine, wielding jeweled-hilted swords, defeating smoky-voiced dragons and rescuing hapless victims? Or is it because we recognize we’re made for more than just ourselves; that we are being woven into a tapestry larger than the corner of the world we can see; that we are both completely individual and yet somehow part of a community of love where our every choice matters, deeply, on a universal level.

All stories help us break out of prisons. Some can break us out of prisons of being self-conscious and shy. They break us out of more insidious prisons – of pride, selfishness, self-pity and self-centeredness – as Dickens tried to do, overtly, with his fiction. They can break us out of prisons of ignorance. And when they’re especially uplifting, like Laura Hillenbrand’s books, for instance, they break us out of prisons of gloom.

Beautiful writing can break writers out of a prison of jealousy. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited
is so truly deeply good, that when I just re-read it, there was no room for jealousy. I felt awe. I actually teared up reading the beginning of it, the way a friend told me that his son in the business of animation wept the first time he saw Toy Story 1. It was the way Salieri probably wept in his finer moments when he heard Mozart play. It was the way a portrait artist might weep upon beholding a Vermeer. When you spend your whole life trying to do something creative, you recognize a true masterpiece. The harder you’ve tried, the more awestruck you feel when someone else succeeds. You realize that there is genius there, greatness, the X factor, the je ne sais quoi, the thing you’ve striven for your whole life and missed the mark.

But have you really missed the mark? Isn’t part of the reason we weep when we see truly brilliant creativity in a field we do ourselves because we know that we, too, in our finest moments have at least touched glory? Maybe we couldn’t sustain it for the length of a novel, a symphony, or an entire tennis match, football or soccer game – perhaps even more than a few brushstrokes – but we know when our hand, too, has felt guided as if by a divine force. We call this feeling of losing ourselves in creativity by various names in various fields – inspiration, the striking of the Muse, being in the zone – but we all know it when it happens to us.

That’s probably at least part of what’s going on when a magician named Simon believes in Jesus when he first hears about Him, and then turns around and tries to buy his power the next. His first reaction strikes me as the reaction of someone who has tried to wield magic, falling at the feet of the One True Magic. His second reaction – trying to buy the power – is the natural human reaction. We move from awe to jealousy. We’ve all done it - this kind of flip-flop between melting at the sound of truth – and then being jealous of it and wanting it for our own glory.

At first, Simon melts. He wan’t just a two-bit magician. He’d been called the “Great One – the Power of God,” and he’d “astounded” the people of Samaria with his magic “for a long time.” Acts 8:4-25. Maybe that’s why Simon believed so quickly; Simon’s magic might have fooled the people, but clearly it didn’t fool Simon. He knew that no matter how “good” he seemed – or even was – he still wasn’t good enough – not when compared with the true power of God. Maybe that’s why he believed the moment he heard the Good News of the cross.

But when Simon saw Philip perform “signs and great miracles” and then saw Peter and John lay hands on people and pray for them to receive the Holy Spirit, Simon couldn’t take it any more. He offered to buy this “power”. He’d stopped seeing God’s love as something that freed him from prison, and locked himself back in a prison – the prison of wanting power over people. That’s probably why Peter rebukes him so sternly. Peter doesn’t mince words. He tells Simon: “you can have no part in this, for your heart is not right with God.” He accuses Simon of “wickedness” and “evil thoughts. He concludes with the chilling words: “for I can see that you are full of bitter jealousy and are held captive by sin.”

Who wants to be held captive by anything? Who wants to have “bitter” jealousy of other people’s gifts? It’s a horrible way to live – and yet everyone knows the bitter feeling of jealousy. It’s ugly, but it hits all of us. Simon, perhaps sensing the ugliness of it, begs Peter to pray for him, and boom. That’s the end of Simon. We’re left wondering what became of him – and hoping he turned his back on the bitterness and embraced joy again.

The story moves from Simon into one of my favorite stories (okay, they’re all my favorite). But this one is truly lovely. An angel tells Philip to go down a desert road. Philip obeys and discovers a Christian’s greatest gift: a man is reading aloud from the Bible and invites Phillip to explain it to him.

When you know how beautiful Scripture is, there’s nothing more wonderful than someone else wanting to know, too.

The man who invites Philip is a eunuch. He’s the treasurer of the queen of Ethiopia, and he’s reading a prophesy about Jesus written in the prophet Isaiah. It’s always moved me that the particular prophesy the eunuch reads ends with the words: “Who can speak of his descendants?” The eunuch will have no descendants because someone mutilated him when he was young. So when the man whose ability to have children had been robbed of him asks Philip if the prophet was “talking about himself or someone else,” we sense that the eunuch is asking not just if this is a prophesy but also, on some level:

IS HE TALKING ABOUT ME?????

And that question – is this story about me – is at the heart of what we love about stories. Isn’t that one of the things we always want to know when we read stories? Even as we celebrate the particularity, individuality and specificity of stories, we long to crack them open into something more universal. ARE they about us? Are they about us on some cosmic level that we sense but can’t prove? Are we the only ones who feel this way? Is anyone else lonely? Is anyone else full of self-pity? Is anyone else desperately mourning their inability to have children – or mourning that their children have grown up, or grown distant? Is someone else weeping because they were mutilated or damaged as a child – perhaps even by someone they should have been able to trust?

And what we want to know most of all is: is there a God up there, out there, who somehow allowed all this to happen, and yet can possibly care about us? Is the God of the Bible talking about US when He says He loves us? Does He see us? Does He care? Does He?

So Philip explains the Good News to the eunuch. Yes, yes and yes is Jesus’ answer to all our questions. The Bible says all God’s promises are made yes in Jesus Christ. God made us in His image. He is the creator and He is love, so we, too, were created to love, and to create. That’s probably why we are at our happiest when we lose ourselves in the act of creation. We feel connected to the divine in those moments – which is why there’s no room for jealousy. We know we’re part of something more beautiful than ourselves. We know our deepest longings can be, and even are, fulfilled in losing ourselves in creation. And so when we read that God created the world knowing it would fall – and therefore knowing He would have to die on the cross to redeem it – we sense the deeply sacrificial nature of true love, and we respond, because it is the One True Story.

And yet, we can’t stay on that plane. We weep out of appreciation of the one true story one minute – and then want to use the gifts God gave us for our own glory the next.

Part of the good news is that God knows this about us. God knew that if He made us as individuals, instead of robots, that we would choose to sin. Adam and Eve did it, and we’ve all been doing it ever since. Even if we act right, our hearts are never completely pure. With sin, death, disease and dysfunction came into our perfect world. And here’s where we get back to the Good News. God loved us so much, He came down Himself to redeem us. He died to lift us back into the heavenly realms, the place of creativity, joy and love. All He asks is that we choose to step out of our prisons into the light. He’s already unlocked the prison doors. But He never forces us to take the first step. He invites us to step out of the gloom and shadow and embrace the one true story – the only true story – the true masterpiece – the story of how Jesus Christ died to set us free.

But we have such trouble believing that, accepting it, and embracing it. We’re in prisons of our own making. So often we feel surrounded by invisible but rock solid bars of guilt, shame and fear. They mire us in depression, complaining, bitterness and woe. And the key is dangling before us at every minute. We need only enter into the one true story – the deepest magic that every other story hints at – the story of Love dying for those who didn’t even love Him back. God is standing at the door knocking – even if we, like Saul here, are persecuting every Christian we’ve ever heard of. God forgives everything. We need only admit we need His help.

If we do, He fills us with such love we feel more connected than ever to other people. We discover a connection deeper even than the shyest child can feel sitting alone reading a storybook. We discover a true connection that goes beyond ourselves, and our selfish focuses, because it’s based not on us, but on being woven together with Christ. We become, on a level that’s hard to describe unless you’ve experienced it for yourself, brothers and sisters in Christ with other believers.

But even when we’re believers, our prisons are never far away. Like Simon, who we are told did believe, we forget we’re released from prison by God’s sacrifice alone, and we think we can “earn” heaven; our gifts fool us into thinking we did it on our own, at least that now we can take the reins in our own hands and continue doing it on our own. We look down on people who don’t happen to have our gifts – and this locks us in a prison of comparing ourselves to others. In turn, it locks us in a prison of anxiety because there’s no security if our sense of worth is based on our achievement – and our achievement needing to outshine others. It’s a horrible way to live – and yet we all do it.

That’s why the story of the eunuch provides such hope. The eunuch – despite his powerful position in the queen’s retinue and his knowledge of money – knew He needed God to do the “buying” for him. The eunuch – rejected and despised by men – knew what it was like for Jesus to be rejected and despised by men. The magician – riding on the waves of his own illusion – chose to remain mired in jealousy.

How much better to respond to the message of God’s love for us with humility. May we all, along with the magician, pray that God will give us humility. May we all rejoice, without jealousy, when those people rejected by us and our society embrace heaven first. May we see in their liberation hope for us all. May our every weakness be transformed into strength. May we rejoice in our weaknesses, instead of hiding them, because they enable us to see our desperate need for God. And in the moment of dying to ourselves and our illusions of power, may we all embrace God’s new eternal life. May we recognize the true masterpiece and melt at the sight and sound of it. If we do, He invites us to enter into His story that goes on and on, forever, celebrating our individuality and yet weaving us together in a poem, a tapestry of love, that just won’t look right without every one of us in it.

by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on October 5, 2012

and if you don’t have a Bible yet, buy whatever translation speaks to you best… the New Living translation (modern contemporary prose).
The Amplified Bible (the one Joyce Meyer uses – with expanded explanations of every verse).
The Message (Eugene Peterson’s wonderful rendering of the Bible into modern slang and usage).
The New Revised Standard.
The New King James.
The original King James.
An audio version (Thomas Nelson has a 79 CD bible with Jim Caviezel as Jesus, Richard Dreyfuss as Moses, Gary Sinise as David, Jason Alexander as Joseph, Marisa Tomei as Mary Magdalene, Stacy Keach as Paul, Louis Gossett, Jr. as John, Jon Voight as Abraham, Marcia Gay Harden as Esther, Joan Allen as Deborah, Max von Sydow as Noah, and Malcolm McDowell as Solomon).
It doesn’t matter. No matter which version you use, the Word is always active and alive.

what we chase: Acts 7

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read Acts 7. A video that recently went viral begins with someone filming some peaceful deer grazing in Richmond Park. All of a sudden, you hear the sound of stampeding deer hooves. Then you hear a desperate man yell, “Fenton? Fenton! Fenton! Fenton! Fenton? Fenton! Fenton?” The deer hooves pound louder. The man yells, “FENTON??!!!” He takes the Lord’s name in vain, twice. And then the deer stampede past the camera with a golden retriever tearing after them. The man screams “FENTON!!!!!” and finally the man goes racing after, still yelling, his tweedy coat flying. Fenton chasing deer video.

We laugh because we’ve all had our Fenton moments – trying fruitlessly to stop our wild beasts from doing something really stupid. We also laugh, I think, because we all know what it feels like to BE Fenton – to tear recklessly through a park, ignoring the call of our master, because our prey is so vulnerable, so defenseless, and so very chase-able.

What can stop the Fenton in us? Yes, punishment works sometimes – knowing we’ll be deprived of our biscuits, or worse. But what ALWAYS works? As Dale Carnegie explains in his timeless pragmatic masterpiece, How to Win Friends and Influence People, if you want someone to do something, you have to show them how they should WANT it, too. It does no good to tell a human that YOU want it. We humans are just too selfish. Instead, in order to give up something we want, we need to know, really know, that our master is promising something EVEN BETTER than stampeding deer. I hope that got your attention. It got mine. Because honestly? If I were a dog, making an entire parkful of deer stampede in front of me sounds really, really fun.

I think that’s why when the high priest asks Stephen if the accusations against him are true, Stephen doesn’t answer. Instead, Stephen takes them through the story of how God rescued His chosen people, the Jews. Acts 7. It’s as if Stephen is urging his listeners to abandon their jealousy and instead to come on up and admire the view. Stephen tells them stories of how God anointed certain people to rescue His people – and how they resisted being rescued. Instead, they reacted with jealousy and suspicion – fighting the very ones sent to save them.

It reminds me of the first thing we’re taught in swimming lessons – if we’re drowning, we’re supposed to lie very very still in the water. We’re not supposed to clutch and flail at the person who comes to rescue us – or we’ll end up drowning both of us. Staying still requires the quieting of our fear. It requires trusting the one who came to rescue us – or at the very least, realizing that kicking against them is the worst possible thing we could do.

Stephen concludes his history lesson with a stern reprimand: he tells his listeners that they’re stubborn, deaf and blind to the truth. He says they’ve killed every prophet God sent to them, even the Messiah. He asks why they break God’s laws, when it was given to them “by angels.” I love that – the idea that angels gave us the Bible. I picture angels whispering in the ears of God’s chosen prophets. And Stephen asks why his listeners “resist” the Holy Spirit.

What does that mean to resist God’s Spirit? I can give you a lot of analogies, but my guess is you already know. If you’re in a river or ocean, for instance, you can feel the current tugging you a certain way – and it takes a lot of effort to swim against the current’s pull. That’s what it feels like to resist the Holy Spirit. If you’re in a car and your GPS wants you to go left and you plow on, your GPS will screech: “turn around, when possible!!!!!” That’s what it’s like to resist the Holy Spirit. When you cluck at your horse to move it from a trot to a canter, and instead the horse snorts, lowers its head, and you hear the annoying sound of its teeth ripping at dandelions – that horse is doing what we do when we “resist” God’s Spirit. It’s choosing weeds over cantering.

So did Stephen’s listeners get it? Did they suddenly melt with sorrow? Did they realize they’d been fighting God – and that all their fighting was doing nothing but making them miserable? Did they realize that resisting God’s love was causing them to fritter away all their energy? Did they see that God wanted them to tear their eyes away from weeds so He could move them into a canter?

Their reaction was to shake their fists at him in rage. They put their hands over their ears. They rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and stoned him. His accusers laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul.

And what happened to Stephen during all this? Heaven opened. Literally. Stephen cried out that he could see the glory of God, and Jesus sitting at the right hand of God. As Stephen died, he cried out the same prayer of forgiveness and love that Jesus did when he died – “Lord, don’t charge them with this sin.”

What could cause Stephen to want what God wanted in his dying moments? What could make him ask God to forgive his murderers, rather than tar and feather them? The answer is in the same chapter – Stephen could see something he wanted more than revenge. He could see love, really literally see it, and so he knew, in his very soul, that love is better than hate. Stephen is a man like us; a saint in the Bible is not someone who is perfect, but someone whose sin is taken away because they’re sorry and ask God to forgive them through the cross. Stephen, therefore, is the kind of saint any of us can be. Stephen’s kind of love is ours for the wanting, ours for the asking, ours for the kneeling.

How do I know? Because look at the lovely reassuring hint of God’s grace here in this chapter. That same young man Saul – the one who accepted the cloaks of Stephen’s murderers – is about to become Saint Paul – Paul the evangelist – Paul the writer of epistle after epistle. Jesus died for Paul’s sins and He died for ours. God knows our every Fenton moment – the obvious ones caught on video for all the world to see that go viral to our shame – and the buried ones the ones that only we and perhaps a few others know about that threaten to drown us. Jesus knew them all when he went on the cross, and He did it anyway. We never earned His love. We couldn’t have. He freely gave it. He gave everything. He drowned so we wouldn’t have to.

God asks only that we stop resisting the call of His love. He knows we’re selfish. He doesn’t threaten us with whippings. He doesn’t force us by yelling. He never huffs and puffs after us with His tweedy coat flying. He doesn’t mouth obscenties. Instead, God surrounds us with the currents of His love. He cloaks us with winds of His glory. He whispers to us of the most excellent way. He coaxes us. He buffets us with tides of joy and peace. His Holy Spirit is speaking to us, all of us, every day, wanting to be with us.

God asks only that we lay our stubborn doing down, and give in to the gift of spending eternity in His presence. He asks that we surrender to the call of love. He wants us to admit that by following the devices and desires of our own Fenton-hearts, we’re drowning. He begs for us to relax into His outstretched arms. He wants only to lift us out of the water, and send us forward, cantering into the wind with joy unleashed. He wants us to be with Him – because that is to be a saint. To be with God.

If we do, we’ll discover that giving in to God’s love is what we really wanted all along.

by Caroline Coleman on September 25, 2012 in A Chapter A Day, carolinecolemanbooks.com

how to glow even when you don’t feel like it: Acts 6

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read Acts 6. We are all attracted to glowing faces. We can feel when our own faces glow. We spend a lot of money on products that promise to give us that glow. Glowing faces are contagious. It’s hard to see someone else glow and not respond in kind – unless we’re in a really really bad mood, in which case seeing someone else that happy can make us glower, Scrooge-like. To resent when others are happy makes us feel small, miserly and bitter. That’s when we know we’re in a bad place – when we can’t be happy for someone else. We know that love rejoices for other people. But at times, we all have quiet selfish little moments, in which we don’t rejoice – as much as we would like to.

If you don’t believe me, think about when you were single, lonely and depressed, and your best friend got engaged. We rejoiced, of course we did, but there is always a little part of us, a secret place, that mourns: “when is it going to be MY turn?” Or on a personal front, when I learn that a friend is having her first novel published by a fantastic, literary publisher – I’m thrilled for her. I’m over the moon. And quietly, there’s a little stabbing sigh of: “why can’t I write a literary novel that’s good enough for that publisher??” We don’t want those stabbing sighs – they do pierce our souls. They make us feel unattractive. They are unattractive. But they live alongside us. They inhabit us, like termites, eating us up from the inside out. Left unchecked, they can, like termites, bring down our houses. They seek to define us. They seek, as the Scripture puts it – to devour us like a lion. That’s because those kind of lonely, self-pitying, selfish and self-seeking thoughts bubble up from the cauldrons of hell. Those thoughts are meant to devour us. As Saint Peter once put it: “your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” 1 Peter 5:8.

We humans are too vulnerable to a lion’s speed, prowess, teeth, claws and predatory instincts to protect ourselves. We need a safe refuge, strong friends or powerful weapons – and the intimate knowledge of how to use those weapons.

Spiritual lions call for spiritual refuges, spiritual friends and spiritual weapons. We can’t fight off spiritual lions with willpower alone. No matter how much we instruct ourselves to be happy for other glowing people, we can’t shake off those tiny predatory selfish thoughts that rob us of our own glow. We can bury those thoughts, but they’re still there, rising up out of the ashes of our hopelessness, singing to us a dirge of sadness and regret, dragging us down to the depths, wanting us to feel unloved, unlovely, and unlovable. Those thoughts can indeed devour us. They can eat us alive.

And those thoughts show on our faces. We can feel the twinge of selfishness in ourselves, and we can see it in others. We sense when their smiles crack, like paint chipping off porcelain dolls. We feel when our own smiles crack, and it makes us feel as hard-hearted as porcelain dolls ourselves.

The spiritual solution offered by Christ is, as always, the unexpected way. It is to find strength to fight off the lions of self-pity, hopelessness and despair through laying down our lives. It is, as Christ once said, to find our life by losing it. Something within us responds to those words. We hear the sound of them. We like the sound of them. But we don’t always know what they mean. What does it MEAN to lay down our lives for others – especially in the face of their glow when we feel none ourselves? Guilt alone can never motivate us to find real joy, deep within us. Guilt can restrain us. We do feel guilty when we are jealous of other people’s delight. But the guilt can’t erase our selfish thoughts. It only highlights them.

What I love about the Bible is how very real it is. It addresses these kinds of issues head on. It lovingly highlights our humanity. It reads us. It shows us that yes, we all have a selfish side. But at the very same time, it shows us how very loved we are by the God who made us, knows us, and understands us. It’s hard to describe, but the more time we spend with God, the more we begin to melt at our humanity. God’s presence brings us to a place where we weep with Him about our shortcomings, rather than rail against Him.

If we look at Acts 6, for instance, we find a scene straight out of any contemporary news story about sectarian violence. Soon after Christ was rose again to heaven, the early believers lived in unity. They shared everything. They ate together. They handed over their property to be used by those in need. Their unity convicts me every time I read it. And then, boom. Humanity reared its ugly head: “as the believers rapidly multiplied, there were rumblings of discontent.” Acts 6:1. Those rumblings and grumblings rise up within us all. We grow discontented with even unity. God places us in a garden, and we end up seeing the thorns. Here, the cause was, as so often happens, ethnic: “The Greek-speaking believers complained about the Hebrew-speaking believers, saying that their widows were being discriminated against in the daily distribution of food.” Acts 6:1.

I love what happens next. Instead of lecturing the people, and telling them to shape up or ship out, or telling them that they’re imagining things, the Twelve apostles call a meeting. The Twelve say that they need to spend their time teaching the word of God, “not running a food program.” So they ask their Christian brothers and sisters to select “seven men who are well respected and are full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will give them this responsibility. Then we apostles can spend our time in prayer and teaching. the word.” Acts 6:2-4. I love the fact that they don’t discount the problem. It suggests to me that they recognized their own humanity – perhaps they HAD been discriminating against the Greek-speaking believers. It suggests they recognized what Richard Dawkins once called the “selfish gene” inside us all – the one Dawkins quantified in bats, that would, in a bat cave, cause adult bats to statistically favor feeding baby bats who shared their genes over bats who were unrelated. And even if the discrimination was in the minds of the Greek-speakers, it was no less real, and no less important of an issue. The apostles prayed for the seven men chosen to distribute the food and laid hands on them.

And all of this brings the story to Saint Stephen and the glow. Many of us have heard of Stephen. He was the first Christian martyr. Stephen is described repeatedly here as a man “full of faith and the Holy Spirit.” Acts 6:5. He’s “a man full of God’s grace and power, [who] performed amazing miracles and signs.” Acts 6:8. Stephen has the kind of “power” God gives. He has the power that can defeat roaring lions. Inevitably, Stephen’s spiritual power brings him into conflict with people who don’t have that power. Some men begin to debate with him, and discover that none of them – not one – can “stand against the wisdom and the Spirit with which Stephen spoke.” Acts 6:10.

Most of us don’t like it when someone shows us up. It rubs up against our pride. So instead of rejoicing in Stephen’s wisdom, they seek to bring him down. They lie about him. They persuade people to accuse him of blasphemy against God and Moses. Stephen is arrested, brought before the high council, and lied about. And here is where the story takes a turn for the beautiful – right here – where we least expect it:

“At this point everyone in the high council stared at Stephen, because his face became as bright as an angel’s.” Acts 6:15.

That’s it. That’s the end of the chapter. As we read the chapter, we find humanity, tension, resolution, jealousy, selfishness, wounded pride – and then angelic beauty. What happened? How did Stephen glow at the very moment when most of us would deteriorate into fury, anger, rage and high moral indignation? Stephen was innocent. He had acted with the best of intentions. He was falsely accused. And yet he didn’t inhabit the bitterness of his accusers. What was his secret? What did Stephen know that the rest of us only yearn to know?

Stephen knew God.

Stephen knew the One who loved Him. He knew, in an intimate tender way, His Lord and Savior. He looked not at the lying people – or rather, not at the jealousy and pride hardening their faces – but into their hearts. He knew that they spoke from their humanity. In order not to resent their humanity, Stephen must have known his own humanity. To have God’s “wisdom,” as Stephen is described as having, is to know not that we are perfect, but the very opposite. To have God’s “grace” as we are told he had, is to know our shortcomings, and know them deeply . But it’s also to allow God to bring us to the place where we can weep over our smallness. And when we begin to mourn, as God mourns, we glow, as God glows. We shine with love, our of love, in love. We shine because we know we are loved, just as we are. We begin to know, in a very deep way, that God loved us so much He laid down His life for us. He did it literally, on the cross, and spiritually, by allowing Satan to devour Him in hell. He took our punishment – the lion’s claws, teeth, and roaring fury – so that we could have peace. He abandoned the refuse of heaven, in order to give us the refuge of grace. We can hide from any lion in the secret place of knowing that no matter what we sense ourselves thinking, and no matter what we do, we can be made beautiful, perfect, spotless and clean, by the cross.

That’s all God asks of us – to have faith in His love. He asks that we lay down our lives – that we stop pretending we’re all that – and instead admit our pride. Admitting our pride gives us the strength to defeat even a pride of lions. If we confess our faults, He is faithful and just, and will cleanse us of all unrighteousness. He will wipe our tears from our eyes and make our faces glow with a knowledge of His love so deep and true, that it brings joy to us in the midst of any and all circumstances – even, especially, false accusations against us when, for once, we are actually innocent. Look at Joyce Meyer – the one whose picture I took on t.v. above. She glows even as she tells millions of people a day about her selfishness, pride, jealousy and smallness – and in so doing she becomes anything but small.

We can all be like that. We can all glow. We can all shine like an angel, even in the midst of our smallest, most bitter, selfish, self-pitying, hopeless, bat-like, selfish gene thoughts. Right there, when we least expect it, we can take a turn for the beautiful. How? By weeping with God’s heart over our humanity, and accepting God’s heart in place of our own. A tender soft loving heart can defeat any lion. That’s the secret. That’s why the Bible says that the lion, one day, will lie down with the lamb. That unity starts in our own hearts now, as we allow our porcelain hearts to lie down with the Lamb of God. Our painted smiles chip off, revealing a heart of God beneath. God’s Spirit gives us a heart that can rejoice when others rejoice; that weeps when others weep; that delights in the victory of others even in the midst of our own seeming defeats. That is because we know our deepest victory has already been won. God defeated the lion for us on the cross. And if we lay down our smallness, over and over and over again, it is to lay down our lives for others. It is to glow not with our own made up beauty, but to glow with God’s beauty. God’s sacrificial love gives us the kind of beauty that lingers with us no matter how hopeless, unattractive or despairing we feel. It transcends our thoughts and encircles and enraptures us, even as we remain, still, a people who sometimes cannot rejoice for others. Our thoughts may flap their bat-like wings, but deeper still, our hearts know the truth. We do love others. We can love them. If we look to God, He gives us His love – for us, and for all humanity.

by Caroline Coleman on September 18, 2012

Mars and Venus: why we really fight: Acts 5

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

Have you ever spoken to someone and realized they’re operating from a completely different reality? Remember that best-selling book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray?
Its central premise is that women and men are from different “planets” – that men use language to build relationships, while men use language to compete. Here is a moving story from the preface, which explains why Gray started exploring this concept and writing about it. His second wife had just had a baby, and when he walked in the door, she complained that his brother had forgotten her pain medication. Gray says he felt attacked:

“After exchanging a few harsh words, I headed for the door. I was fired, irritable, and had heard enough. We had both reached our limits. Then something started to happen that would change my life. Bonnie said, ”‘Stop, please donʹt leave. This is when I need you the most. I’m in pain. I haven’t slept in days. Please listen to me.’ʺ I stopped for a moment to listen. She said, “‘John Gray, you’re a fair-weather friend! As long as I’m sweet, loving Bonnie you are here for me, but as soon as I’m not, you walk right out that door.’ʺ Then she paused, and her eyes filled up with tears. As her tone shifted she said, ”‘Right now I’m in pain. I have nothing to give, this is when I need you the most. Please, come over here and hold me. You don’t have to say anything. I just need to feel your arms around me. Please don’t go.’ʺ I walked over and silently held her. She wept in my arms. After a few minutes, she thanked me for not leaving. She told me that she just needed to feel me holding her.

“At that moment I started to realize the real meaning of love, unconditional love. I had always thought of myself as a loving person. But she was right. I had been a fair‐‑weather friend. As long as she was happy and nice, I loved back. But if she was unhappy or upset, I would feel blamed and then argue or distance myself. That day, for the first time, I didn’t leave her. I stayed, and it felt great. I succeeded in giving to her when she really needed me. This felt like real love.”

I love this story. I love the fact that Gray thought of himself as a loving person – bringing home the truth that we are so often blind to our own inadequacies. We tend to have myopic vision for our own faults and telescopic visions for other people’s faults. I also love the fact that Gray’s second wife (his first marriage had already ended in divorce) had the communication skills to tell him what she needed, in a way he could hear: “hold me now”. And I love that Gray listened, and that he realized how very good it felt to give love, and feel it received.

Gray posits this example as one where two people of opposite sexes learn each other’s languages. He says women are relational, whereas men are more achievement oriented. He says women tell their problems because they want empathy, while men think they want solutions. He says women try to change men under the guise of nurturing them, but Gray says men just want “acceptance.”

While Gray’s book is helpful in many ways (if a man is lost, for instance, he instructs women to never, ever, tell them where the right road is), and while I have no problem with its basic premise that women and men are different, I would suggest that the concept of operating from two different realities goes deeper than the gender divide. It goes to the issue of original sin – and if you don’t know what that means, just substitute the word “selfishness” and “pride.”

For instance, in Gray’s example above, Gray’s pride felt wounded when he thought his wife was attacking him unjustly for his brother’s lapse in memory. Wounded pride tends to want to wound back – so he started to walk out the door. Why? To hurt her back. The reason the story is so moving is that that was the very moment when Gray’s wife could have responded with pride. She could have yelled after his retreating back, “who wants you ANYWAY???” Instead, she cried out with humility. She used words like “help me” and “I need you” and “I’m in pain” and “I have nothing to give.” Her humility melted him – which is a testimony, in turn, to Gray’s humility. He turned around, listened, and everything transformed. In Biblical language, Gray and his wife went from having hard hearts toward each other to having soft ones.

Similarly, when Gray says women want to “change” men, and men want to “fix” women – those sound to me like different sides of the same coin called pride. Pride says: “I know what you need and I’m going to make you do it.” Likewise,when Gray says women want “empathy” and men want “acceptance” – how different is that, really? It sounds to me like, at heart, men and women want the very same thing – unconditional love, even when they don’t deserve it. And in their all too human hearts, men and women have trouble in the same way – we have trouble giving unconditional love – especially to people when they don’t deserve it.

To understand how these kinds of fights go deeper than gender differences, you can look at the many pop psychology books on the abusive husband syndrome. These books reiterate Gray’s gender distinctions – but on steroids. These books claim that abusive men are “crazy-making” because they are out of touch with reality. They say that women will ask, “would you like to go to a movie tonight,” and the abusive husband will scream, “why are you always trying to CONTROL me?” The woman, who thinks her man is speaking from a place of love and truth, will wonder what she’s done wrong. ”AM I trying to control him,” she will ask herself. Meanwhile, the abusive husband isn’t trying to work on the relationship, figure out what to do that evening, or even to lovingly help his wife improve her communication skills. He’s just trying to put her down. He’s trying to get one over on her. Like a wounded animal, he’s lashing out and trying to hurt her, to make her feel as bad as he does. Her happiness actually annoys him to the very core. Why?

Perhaps because he’s jealous.

I’m not sure where such jealousy comes from, but if, as many people say, pride is at the heart of every human evil, I would suggest that jealousy springs up easily and quickly in a prideful heart – because a prideful heart is at core hollow. A prideful heart is based on the lie that one is better than other people. Pride therefore has to constantly puff itself up to try to maintain that lie. Pride has no rest, no peace, and no joy – it is at heart insecure. Pride bristles when other people seem to have a joy. Their joy shows pride’s lie for what it is. The abusive spouse books, like Gray’s, point to reality differences that go deeper than the gender divine – differences that go to what the Bible calls life and death.

If you really want to understand what lies behind people operating from two different reality systems, the Biblical truth is that all humans – male and female – can get blinded by jealousy, insecurity, pain and self-pity. We can get so out of touch with reality that we don’t see the truth of what’s in front of our eyes – and the resulting carnage is catastrophic. Lashing out at others from a place of insecurity or pain ruins relationships. It destroys hope, and the resulting lack of self-esteem in both abused and abuser can lead to addictions to all sorts of other things in a futile attempt to numb ourselves from the pain.

There’s a better way.

The first step is to understand the blindness. If you look, for instance, at the events described here in Acts 5, it reads almost like a tragi-comedy. The religious leaders throw Peter and the other apostles of the early church in jail for healing people. Peter was operating out of such Holy Spirit power that his very “shadow” was healing the sick. Acts 5:15. John writes here in Acts that the religious leaders arrested the apostles because they were “filled with jealousy.” Acts 5:17. That Biblical insight is what enabled me to suggest above that the abusive husband is operating from a place of jealousy. His jealousy makes him want to lower his wife’s self-esteem, so that she’ll think she’s lucky to be with someone as lame as he thinks he is. Of course, it backfires, because the abuse makes her quietly hate him. But jealousy, it may not surprise you to know, is not rational.

So while Peter and the others are in jail, an angel lets them out and tells them to go back to the Temple and “give the people this message of life.” Acts 5:20. Right there is our first hint at the real Mars-Venus divide, the one that underlies our every human fight – it’s a difference not between male and female, but between life and death.

So what do the apostles do? They listen to the angel (good choice) and go right back to their preaching. And here’s where the story gets so comical I had to read it five times to figure out what was going on. The religious leaders ask the guards to bring the jailed apostles to them. The guards return empty-handed and say the apostles were not in the jail, even though the jail was locked. Someone else arrives and says the apostles are preaching in the Temple. And the religious leaders arrest the apostles all over again and say: “Didn’t we tell you not to preach about Jesus?” Acts 5:28.

Do you see what’s missing?

That’s right. The leaders don’t ask the obvious question. No one says: “HOW THE HECK DID YOU GET OUT OF JAIL?????”

That’s the sign of someone operating out of irrationality. They don’t ask the obvious question. They’re so blinded by something – here the text tells us it’s jealousy – that they don’t see the obvious.

Peter seems to understand their blindness, because he, too, doesn’t mention the angel and their miraculous escape. He tells them instead “We must obey God rather than any human authority.” Acts 5:29. He goes on to tell them the gospel – Jesus died for their sins.

If the religious leaders hadn’t been blind to the reality of God, Peter’s message of love and of God’s power – a power to which every locked door is no obstacle – they would have fallen to their faces.

Instead, they “were furious and decided to kill” the apostles. Acts 5:33.

A wise Jewish leader named Gamaliel (and I’ve elsewhere read that Gamaliel was indeed a wise man, whose writings are still honored, and who is still respected) steps in and appeals to the religious leaders’ reason. He has the apostles removed – which in itself sounds like a wise move as it presumably defused their rage. Gamaliel then tells the leaders to leave the apostles “alone.” He says that if the apostles were preaching and healing on their own, “it will soon be overthrown. But if it is from God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You may even find yourselves fighting against God.” Acts 5:38-39.

Again, the leaders’ response is comical in its blindness. The text says that the others “accepted his advice.” Acts 5:40. And yet, even though they claimed to accept Gamaliel’s advice they then had the apostles “flogged” and ordered “them never again to speak in the name of Jesus” – which wasn’t at all what Gamaliel suggested.

When someone is operating from a place where they are blind to the reality of God – they will always be this blind and this irrational. The Bible talks of a “veil” being over the eyes of people who don’t yet accept God: “Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe. They are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News. They don’t understand this message about the glory of Christ.” 2 Cor. 4:4.

The true distinction, therefore, is not between male and female, but between those who understand that they are blind, and those who think they can see. It’s between people who are full of pride – pride in themselves and their own importance and superiority – and people who have the humility to know they are so flawed they needed God Himself to die on the cross for their sins. This is the real Mars and Venus – between those who are perishing in their pride, sins and blindness – and those who say to God: help me! I want life!

There’s one more part to Acts 5, and it’s a sobering but also ultimately liberating part. The chapter starts with the story of a husband and wife who sold some property, gave part of its sale price to the apostles for the early church, and claimed they were bringing the whole amount. Both husband and wife, Ananias and Sapphira, fall down dead after lying to Peter. Peter’s words to Ananias before he keels over are chilling. He tells Ananias: “why have you let Satan fill your heart? You lied to the Holy Spirit, and you kept some of the money for yourself. The property was yours to sell or not sell, as you wished. And after selling it, the money was also yours to give away. How could you do a thing like that? You weren’t lying to us but to God!” Acts 5:3-4.

Peter describes a God here who doesn’t demand we give Him everything. God doesn’t demand anything from us. Unlike we prideful humans – who go around in our pride thinking we know what other people need, and demanding that they do it – God actually DOES know what we need, and yet He never orders us to do it. Instead, He invites us. And more than that, He knows that no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how much we long to love each other, we will always fall short. God knows we will sometimes, perhaps often, react in pride. We will wound each other – sometimes intentionally. We will slam doors shut that we need to open, and we will wrench open doors we should gently shut. We’ll trip over our own two feet and fall to the floor maintaining someone else made us do it. We’ll hug when we should refrain from hugging, and we’ll walk away when we should hug. The solution, once we start to turn to God is clear: give God everything. Trust God in everything. Follow His ways. But knowing the solution, and doing it, are two very different things.

That’s why the good news is even better than this. The good news is that God and man do operate from two different realities. We humans are full of pride when we should be humble. God is full of humility even though He could have every reason to be “prideful.” And in His humility, God didn’t scorn the shame of the cross, in order to give us life. God, like Gray’s wife in the first example, made Himself vulnerable. God, on the cross, cried out that he was in pain; that he had given all for us; that He forgave us; and that He just wants us to embrace Him.

Shouldn’t we – couldn’t we – like Gray, turn around and go back and listen to that kind of love?

by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com in “A Chapter a Day”, my blog on Scripture, literature, life and love on September 11, 2011 a day we remember for the many people who died, and the people who gave up their lives to rescue others in Christ-like sacrificial love

when you feel ignored, unloved, or just have a strong unspecified sense of loss: Acts 3

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read Acts 3. How can you not love a novel that begins with the words: ”I emerge from my depression the moment I learn of Beverly Hastings’s death. She’s not just dead. She’s been murdered. Someone, apparently, liked her even less than I did.” Perfect Is Overrated, by Karen Bergreen.

The author is a stand-up comic. She’s appeared on Comedy Central. But like all good artists, her powers of observation are moving, even in what seems like on its surface a light humorous murder mystery. Here’s how the narrator describes the effect of her father’s abandonment of her at age 3:

“I realized something was missing. It wasn’t obvious that it was my father. But my mother was acting sad – no, not sad. Odd. It was as if we had moved to a different house. Except we hadn’t… I just remember that I had a general but strong sense of loss.”

The paragraph resonated for me because my father died this summer. I realized I, too, have had the feeling that something is missing. I’ve had a general but strong sense of loss. My parents’ house does look different. It’s been almost a nameless, placeless sense of loss – until the author gave words to my feelings. She gave me a hatstand – and until that moment, I’d been wandering around hatless. Paradoxically, in the very moment of discovering my sense of loss, I felt found. I looked at her novel, and in turn, I felt looked at.

That’s what good art does. That’s what creativity does. It’s what creativity is. And if God is the Creator, then that’s what God, too, does constantly for us. He puts words to our feelings. He makes us feel known in the very same breath that He helps us realize we feel unknown. His kind of art makes us feel looked at. And because He is the perfect Artist, He doesn’t just name our feelings, He heals us of their true origins. Because God goes deeper than our surfaces losses, to the deepest loss of all, the loss that all our other losses point to and stem from – the longing for Eden; the loss that rewinds and yet propels us forward; the loss which is our hope for heaven.

The good news is even better that that we have a future hope. It’s that God can give us heaven here on earth. He can give us joy amidst strife, life amidst death, the feeling of being looked at even when we’re alone. How? We think we’ll find that kind of life and joy and fulfillment by achieving our goals – by finding a great job, spouse, child, beauty, book contract or health. But we’re made for more than that, and so everything temporal can satisfy only the temporal part of us. Our spiritual part, our deepest selves, will always crave more. We will always crave perfection. The good news is, God wants to give us His perfection. We’re not wrong to long for the perfect. We’re made for it. God gave us our desires, after all. But we can relax, and not worry that the perfect isn’t in us or anyone else – it’s in God. Here’s the kind of dance I’m talking about, the kind of dance between the crippled and the strong, the dance of looking and being looked at.

A man lame since birth has been carried to the temple gate called Beautiful, begging from everyone who goes by. He’s been doing this every day for 40 years. We’re all like that man, looking expectantly at everyone who goes by. We wonder if the people we see, or at least one of them, can give us what we long for. We wonder if somebody can fulfill our nameless, placeless, restless and relentless desires – the longings that contain and yet drive us.

“Look at me,” Peter tells the man. The man looks at Peter expectantly. Right here is exactly the moment that occurs for every one of us when we look at God. Right here is exactly the moment where heaven meets earth. It’s when our humanity meets His perfection. We look up, expecting money, that sexy spouse, that seven figure bonus, that oceanfront mansion, the Nobel prize, that Ford modeling contract, or even just an A+ for our child on his physics exam. And we hear, instead, the echo of Peter’s words to this lame man:

“I don’t have any silver or gold for you. But I’ll give you what I have.”

What DOES God have? What does God give any of us if we look at Him?

God is love. So if we look to God, He will give us the thing He’s full of: Love. Maybe if we look at God, we discover He is looking at us – in the way we’ve always wanted to be looked at.

Perhaps that’s because God’s love – the kind of love that became crippled, that gave up His perfection to make us perfect; the kind of Love who became pinned to a cross to enable us to run – is the thing our souls crave. Maybe that’s the very thing we most want, the thing we spend our days quietly, unconsciously begging for. Maybe the sense of loss, an unknown loss, that permeates our days – the sense of abandonment, of our homes missing something, of being ignored by we’re not even sure who – can be satisfied now, here, this minute, when we look at God, no matter how lame we feel. There, in that moment of looking, God will give us what we most long for.

Because He’ll give us Himself. He’ll give us His strength. He will, as Peter did here to the lame man, take us by the hand and lift us up. We, too, will be “instantly” healed and strengthened. We, too, can walk, leap and praise God. We, too, can astound the people who see us, because they KNOW how lame we are – especially if they’ve known us a long time. They’ll know we couldn’t have healed ourselves. They’ll know this kind of joy is a miracle.

After all, if God is the “author of Life” as Peter says here, why wouldn’t He want to author our lives over and over, writing and rewriting, editing, rhyming, paragraphing, chaptering, once upon a timing and happily ever aftering us? As Peter puts it, when we look to the true Author, “times of refreshment will come from the presence of the Lord.”

It’s so refreshing to do something creative. Perhaps that’s because every time we engage in the act of creativity – whether in art, relationships or work – we’re entering the presence of the Creator. Even if we’re feeling as lame as Daniel Day Lewis in the movie My Left Foot – even if all we think we can move is our tiniest toe – and even that can only happen on a good day – times of refreshment will come. It comes not from what we can do, but because we’ve entered into the presence of the truest, kindest, most observant Artist of all – the Artist who gives us all that He is and has – if we only look at him.

“Look at me.” God says it to us all. We’ve heard the echo of that request our whole lives. It’s the first thing any of us say, the moment we can string three words together. Look at me. We say it as a child. We say it when our parents are reading newspapers, talking on the phone or yelling at our siblings. We say it out loud when we’re three. We say it silently in our hearts when we’re older. Look at me. We all want to be looked at – except when we don’t. We’re made that way. It’s why we love social media like Facebook. It’s not because we’re vain, bad or selfish. God gave us the desire to be looked at.

Here’s the secret, the thing we miss, the key to the kind of life we really want. The way to be looked at, is by looking at God. Look at Him, and we find ourself reflected in His eyes in love. Jesus is the gate, the way to God, and by entering through His arms, He carries us to the place we’ve always longed for. He takes us to the home that is missing nothing – because He is always there. If we look at Him and invite Him in, He swoops in with Love, in Love, and gives us Love. He stays with us. He never leaves us. He refreshes us with His presence, and looks at us with love struck eyes until the day He comes back.

And the more valued we feel, the more loved we know we are, the more we can grow into the people God made us to be. We can enjoy life. We can be more creative. We can stop trying to get our needs met by other people, because our needs are met, on the deepest level, by the loving attention of a God who is always looking at us with love. We need never hide from Him, no matter what we’ve done, because the cross covers our every flaw. And the more we see what God is like – how forgiving and kind He is – the more we become like Him. If we look at Him, we see Him looking at us, and that enables us to look, really look, at other people. So it’s okay that when we look to God, we expect the “wrong” things. It’s okay we’re not perfect. Perfect IS over-rated. Because God is perfect. He will give us more, far more, than we can ask or imagine. All we have to do is look.

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on August 28, 2012

on why being vulnerable is a beautiful thing: John 12

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read John 12. Have you ever poured out your heart to someone, only to be met with indifference? Have you ever explained how deeply you love them, only to be told in a cold voice that they don’t love you back? We think the solution is to NEVER be that vulnerable again. But God asks us to be this vulnerable all the time – with Him and with others – if we want true joy. In other words, the thing we think is the worst possible thing, is actually the best. Here’s what I mean:

In John 12, you find John’s account of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet with perfume at a dinner party in front of all the other guests: “The house was filled with the fragrance.” Mary wipes Jesus’ dirty feet with her hair. Mary displays the vulnerability to God to which we are all called. If you read the Psalms, you’ll find that they’re full of desperate honest vulnerable cries for help. ”From the depths of despair, O LORD, I call for your help.” Psalm 130:1. ”I think of God, and I moan, overwhelmed with longing for his help.” Psalm 77:3. ”O God, why have you rejected us so long?” Psalm 74:1. ”Rescue me from the mud; don’t let me sink any deeper.” Psalm 69:14. ”I am exhausted from crying for help; my throat is parched. My eyes are swollen with weeping, waiting for my God to help me. Those who hate me without cause outnumber the hairs on my head.” Psalm 69:2-4. ”From the ends of the earth, I cry to you for help when my heart is overwhelmed.” Psalm 61:2. ”My heart pounds in my chest. The terror of death assaults me. Fear and trembling overwhelm me, and I can’t stop shaking.” Psalm 55:4. ”As a deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God. I thirst for God, the living God.” Psalm 42:1-2. ”My heart is breaking as I remember how it used to be.” Psalm 42:4. ”Why am I so discouraged? Why is my heart so sad?” Psalm 42:5. ”My heart beats wildly, my strength fails, and I am going blind.” Psalm 38:10.

David and Mary know the secret to living an abundant life lies in becoming vulnerable to God. Judas criticizes Mary for wasting money that could have been given to the poor, but Jesus praises her for doing “a good thing.” See Matthew 26:6-13; Mark 14:3-9; Luke 7:36-50 (it’s probable the Luke account is of a different anointing). Jesus had earlier also praised Mary for sitting at his feet listening: she chose the “only thing” necessary, Jesus said. Luke 10:38-42. Similarly, David spent so much time alone with his sheep on the hillside as a young boy, that he stormed onto the battlefield armed only with a slingshot because He trusted the “living God” to help him defeat a giant named Goliath. When you spend this kind of time alone with God, you learn that God looks down on humans with love and understanding: “He made their hearts, so he understands everything they do.” Psalm 33:15.

We, on the other hand, don’t understand our hearts. We can see evil in others, but we have a lot of trouble seeing it in ourselves. That’s why God asks us to pour our hearts out to Him. He knows that if we do so, He’ll expose our hearts. He doesn’t expose them to condemn us but rather to heal and transform us. It’s also why God asks us to read the Bible. The Bible is called the Living Word. It cuts between bone and marrow. The Bible exposes our heart. Here in John 12, for instance, the vulnerability of Mary is contrasted with the greed of Judas who steals from the disciples; the flightiness of the crowd who worship him with palm branches only to turn on him and scream “crucify him” a few days later; the religious leaders’s desire to kill Christ out of envy; and peoples’ fear of admitting they believed in Jesus, because they “loved human praise more than the praise of God.”

In other words, the light of the gospel exposes the human heart in its greed, infidelity, jealousy and weakness. But the gospel doesn’t end with our darkness. It exposes the darkness in our heart for the very reason that God wants to give us His light instead. The only requirement is our honesty, vulnerability and humility. The only requirement for receiving God’s help is asking for it. That’s why David can cry out to God with such vulnerability. The only way to receive help is to admit our need of it.

The pivotal verses of this chapter are Jesus’ terrifying words: “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels – a plentiful harvest of new lives. Those who love their life in this world will lose it. Those who care nothing for their life in this world will keep it for eternity.” John 12:23-25. Jesus is talking about His own sacrificial death, in which He died for our sins. He is also talking, however, about gospel living. He’s talking about a life in which we make ourselves vulnerable to God and others. He’s saying that true fulfillment doesn’t come the way we think it does – through our striving, achieving, conquering and acquiring. True joy and fulfillment comes through sacrificing ourselves for others. It comes through being vulnerable even to those who reject us. It comes through pouring out ourselves for others, and trusting God to fill us back up.

I don’t know about you, but while I can write that, and while I know it’s true, I can’t do it. It’s terrifying. It sounds like it will hurt too much. The good news is that sometimes God brings all of us to the place where we have no choice but to die to ourselves. He uses the circumstances of our lives, especially our places of woundedness, brokenness, disappointment and rejection, for good. We are all completely and utterly reliant on God all the time – but we fail to realize this. When bad things happen, we turn to God, as David did in the Psalms, with our fears, trembling, despair and brokenness because we have nowhere else to go. We discover no friend, no doctor, no medication can fill the deepest longings of our hearts, and so we cry out to the living God…

and He meets us right there in our place of deepest emptiness. He gives us His strength in place of our weakness. He gives us His love in place of our selfishness. He gives us His joy in place of our despair. He gives us His hope in place of our hopelessness. It’s God’s nature to give, because He is love. And so that’s why being vulnerable feels like the worst thing but is really the best. We discover our complete reliance on God – and since God is love, we begin to rely on the best thing we could ask for or imagine. When our hearts break, we find God’s love right there to mend us. Broken hearts hurt. But that very brokenness that we hate and dread, brings us to a place of such vulnerability that our hearts finally melt with compassion and love when we encounter other people. We stop seeing people as competition to be feared, and instead see them as fellow servants of the Living God, who are just as needy, thirsty, hungry and afraid as we are. We can embrace others in love, not needing anything from them, because our hearts are overflowing – our cups runneth over – with the love of God, a love that we find only when everything else in the world fails us. This is abundant living. And it’s the only way to find joy. When circumstances and other people hurt us, and we start to live dependent and vulnerable to God out of our brokenness, we discover that our whole houses become filled with the most expensive perfume of all – the fragrance of God’s love.

And when we feel like we can’t do it, and we don’t want to be vulnerable, and we’re too afraid to trust God – we can remind ourselves that God became completely vulnerable to us. He died naked, abandoned, and alone on the cross. Even God turned His back on Jesus on the cross, so that Jesus could experience hell for us. If God didn’t scorn the shame of the cross, who are we to be ashamed of anything? Just as the cross is ugly, and yet God transformed it into the most beautiful thing, so our shame, rejection and vulnerability seem ugly to us – and yet if we bring them to the foot of the cross, God can transform our weakest ugliest most shameful places into sources of transcendent beauty.

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on May 17, 2012

okay, okay fine: John 5

Posted on April 6, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read John 5. We all know people who don’t seem to want to get well. We turn the corner the moment we catch sight of the determined glaze in their eyes, but they sprint after us. They begin reciting their problems before we can even explain how desperately we’re needed at the dentist. Whether it’s their manipulative ex, their interfering mother-in-law, their cruel step-mother, their demanding boss or their ungrateful children, they have a problem and they need for us to hear about it. Sometimes it’s not other people that’s their problem, it’s a medical condition – or inordinate hair loss, a leaky roof, or a lemon of a car. It’s easy to spot bitterness in other people. But as with most of the problems other people have, there are areas of bitterness, hurt and negative thinking lurking inside of all of us that we CLING to, unable to imagine life without them.

If you don’t believe me, here’s my own “ah ha” moment from, well, last night. I was watching Joyce Meyer’s tv show on forgiveness, thinking, “la dee dah, I KNOW all this already. Yes, yes, when we hold onto a hurt and refuse to forgive others, we’re only hurting ourselves. Duh. I can think of 20 people who really need to be watching this show, but I’m not one of them.”

Then Joyce Meyer said, “after you’ve been hurt, many people say, ‘I’ll never trust again.’” Okay, so that struck a little closer to home. I leaned forward. Joyce Meyer said that when we do that: ”we’re trying to make the rest of the world pay for what one person did to us.”

My kitchen floor seemed to disappear, leaving a black hole around me instead. Was it possible Joyce Meyer was right? Was it possible that thinking you couldn’t trust anyone again stemmed from the sin of unforgiveness? Was I holding onto unforgiveness, just like all those other people whose bitterness I can spot a mile away? Was I trying to punish people who had hurt me by thinking, deep down, so deep down I hadn’t even known I was doing it: ha ha! Look at what you’ve done to me!! Are you happy NOW????

The answer that was trembling all around me in the kitchen air was yes. And it was clear that the person I was choosing hardest not to forgive was myself.

The scary part is that even when we do become aware of the negative thinking that riddles our days WE’RE STILL STUCK. Seriously. Do I want to get better? Yes, of course. Now that I’ve seen it. But how? How do you forgive yourself for letting other people hurt you? How do you forgive people who’ve hurt you? How do you let go – and go sauntering out into the sunshine, ready to trust and trust and trust again, knowing that to love means to be hurt, and whoop-de-doo, I don’t mind being hurt because God can keep right on healing me?

I know the theological answer. We can forgive because God forgives us. I even know the deeper theological answer. Forgiveness is so impossible for us humans that it requires flinging ourselves at the throne of God and saying: HELP ME!!!!!!!!

Okay, fine. ”God help me forgive everyone who has hurt me. Help me forgive myself.”

Foof. There. Done. Glad that’s over with.

But is it? Did it really work? Am I now ready to trust again? Because here is where I realize I am completely stuck. Here is where I begin to see that when I condemn the lame man in John 5 whom Jesus asks, “do you want to get well?” I am condemning myself. Here is where I start to have empathy with the lame man in the story – and with everyone else who is stuck, all those people I am tempted to run from. Because, well, in a certain sense, no, I probably don’t want to get well. Why SHOULD I trust again? Honestly – I’ll just get hurt again. And I’m not to be trusted. I must have bad judgment. And why should I have a happy life – don’t I want everyone who hurt me to know what a JERK they are? So, Jesus, now what are you going to do with me? I’m lame. And I don’t believe I’ll ever be anything but lame. So what can Jesus do with a lame person who knows she’s lame, wants to run again, but can’t do what it takes to get unlame – forgive, let go, and trust God to take care of the rest?

Everything. Because here is the really strange thing. Here is one of the reasons I even write this scary, let-it-all-hang-out blog that goes springing out into the black hole called THE WORLD WIDE WEB every time I press the “Publish” button on my website. Because the very act of admitting my inadequacy somehow opens me up to God’s healing.

I’m feeling better already. Why? Because the place where our hearts break is the place where Christ comes in. Because I am admitting I’m just as pathetic as the lame man who moans and whines in this story. I have empathy with him and all the other lame people in this world. Here is, perhaps, why Jesus asks us to forgive others as we are forgiven. In admitting our kinship with others, the healing begins. That lame whining man who lived 2,00 years ago is my brother. He was so lame he didn’t even know who Jesus was; the authorities, out to catch Jesus for having the audacity to heal on the Sabbath, asked him who had made him better and he had to admit he had no idea. John 5:13. Hold it. A lame man full of self-pity, who didn’t know who Jesus was, got healed?

Yes. And God will do the same for each of us. There in the thick of our dumbest, stupidest, most persistent faults, wrong-thinking, self-pity and negativity, God comes wading in and offers us a hand.

The Good News is that we don’t have to “trust” other people; Jesus didn’t. We don’t have to trust ourselves. Jesus didn’t; He knew human nature. John 2:24. We just have to trust God – the way the lame man trusted Jesus without even knowing who He was. In other words, it doesn’t take theological know-how. It doesn’t require kneeling in the right way, lighting the right candle, or saying the right words. We don’t have to memorize Bible verses, or be able to explain the difference between Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter. Jesus says in this chapter that Moses was writing about Jesus, and that all of Scripture “point” to Jesus, but the lame man didn’t invoke any Scripture or analyze Moses. John 5:39 and 46. We don’t have to have our act together. We don’t have to have banished self-pity. We just need to listen to the voice of God.

Can we trust the voice of God?

Let me put it this way – to myself as much as anyone else. Can we trust the voice of love? Can we trust the God who suffered death for each of us? Can I trust God?

Okay, okay. Fine.

Sometimes, the healing begins as simply as that. Sometimes it begins with that grudging smile, that acknowledgement that maybe, just maybe, our way isn’t the best way. There’s hope in truth. The life we want, the life of joy and freedom and peace no matter what our circumstances, begins when we start to honestly tell God our problems. We can go ahead and whine away to Him. God already knows all the bad junk inside us. He just wants us to know it, too, because only then can He set us free of it. Only then can we start to live the life we really want. Okay, okay. Fine. I’ll choose joy. Twist my arm.

posted by Caroline Coleman on Good Friday, 2012

when we feel lost: Luke 15

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read Luke 15. What does it mean when we say we feel lost? It means we have lost our bearings – either literally or metaphorically. Being lost doesn’t exist as an isolated state. It implies that we have lost some thing, place, person or sense of purpose. Being lost means that we have lost something to which we belong.

We all love belonging – as long as it doesn’t smother us. But most things in life to which we belong are transient. Life involves a constant leaving. We are always on the move, always leaving people, places and things. Sometimes we choose to leave. Other times the choice is forced upon us. Some losses are good and right. Children are supposed to leave home. Adults are supposed to leave their parents when they marry. Some losses are tragic. Children are not supposed to die before their parents. Marriages are supposed to last. Limbs are supposed to stay attached to our bodies. Other losses are annoying. Hair is supposed to keep growing on top of our heads. Our skin is supposed to stay smooth and clear. Jobs are meant to be kept. A sense of purpose is supposed to accompany our days. But it doesn’t, not always, and not forever. The things to which we feel we belong – the groups, organizations, and associations – are always changing, always shape shifting, always evaporating just as we reach out to grasp them.

All change, even change for the better, involves loss. Life on this planet, therefore, involves daily, weekly, monthly and yearly losses. Tiny and tremendous griefs punctuate our days. It’s no wonder that we all feel a little lost. The miracle is that we don’t feel completely lost, all the time.

In addition to all of our definable losses, we also have a vague sense of feeling lost for no discernible reason – a feeling that dogs us each day. We will have just a momentary pang – a “who am I, and why am I here” kind of a feeling. This sense of being lost can be fleeting, or it can linger, depending on our circumstances. We can hide from the feeling. We can bury it in work or play. But a certain wistfulness creeps up on all of us and just makes us stop and wonder.

While we think being lost like this is a bad thing, it may not be. There’s nothing wrong with anything that causes us to stop and wonder. Knowing that everyone feels this way helps, too. Sometimes, we are lost. We have lost our way, like the prodigal son in Luke 15, who spends his entire inheritance in wild living. We can lose our family, so engrossed in our own pursuits we have made no time for the less “exciting” but none the less real people to whom we’re related. We can lose touch with reality, so high on our own achievements, goals and dreams, that we start to slip into the delusional thinking that we’re more important than other people. We can lose our love for other people, like the religious leaders to whom Jesus tells these stories – so trapped in their self-righteousness they are furious Jesus eats with sinners. It strikes me that the religious leaders’ anger stems from the fact that they know Jesus is right, and yet they feel completely unable to do anything about their self-righteousness.

And so when Jesus tells these angry people three stories of loss, it is heartening to know that in all three stories, the thing that was lost was found. The shepherd found the lost sheep. The woman found her lost coin. And the prodigal son found himself – and in so doing, was able to go home. So how do these three stories help us with all of our daily losses – both known and unknown? Did someone lose us? Or did we lose someone? And how do we get found?

As always with Jesus’ parables, the characters that pepper his stories are human. What kind of a shepherd loses his sheep, anyway? A bad shepherd. What kind of a woman loses a coin? An improvident woman. And what kind of a father would give his son half his estate? A codependent father, one more intent on gaining his son’s approval than on being a good father.

Likewise, both sons in the parable of the prodigal son display their faults – some of which are their own responsibility, and others of which are the result of imperfect parenting. Who can blame the younger son for wasting at least some of his inheritance – his father never should have given it to him in the first place. And who can blame the older son for feeling slighted? No one even bothers to tell him about the party. He hears the music and dancing and has to ask one of the servants what is happening.

But imperfect parenting doesn’t account for all of the sons’ poor choices. The younger son spent everything his father gave him. He saved nothing. He doesn’t seem to have stored up anything for his future. The older son betrays years of pent-up anger. Any marriage counselor worth their salt will tell you not to use the words “always” and “never” – because those words are just not true. The older brother’s words to his father are peppered with “always” and “never”. The older brother says he has “slaved” for his father “all these years”. He says he has “never once” refused to do “a single thing” you told me to. He says that in “all that time” you “never” gave me even one young goat for a feast. Has the older brother really “never” refused his father? He seems pretty good at it here – he’s refusing to go into the party. The older brother continues his exaggeration by saying that his younger brother has wasted his money on “prostitutes”. But prostitutes are never mentioned. The younger brother wasted his money in “wild living”. The older brother jumped to the conclusion that his younger brother visited prostitutes, but he might not have. The older brother is exaggerating to try to get his father to see how he has favored a brother who didn’t deserve it. Exaggerating never helps us – it distracts our listener from hearing the truth – but we resort to it when we feel insecure; we exaggerate when we think the truth isn’t good enough.

What’s the truth? The truth is that the father seems to have favored one son, and that the favored son is spoiled. The truth is that the older son was slighted. The truth is…. that we live in a world where fathers are imperfect and were sons are improvident or bitter. So why does Jesus tell this story?

Jesus tells a story of humans because that’s the only kind of behavior we humans can understand. And yet in this parable about flawed human beings, the incarnation happens – God breaks through. How?

God is nowhere and everywhere in this parable. First, each of these three humans displays aspects of God. The amazing humbling thing is that our perfect God works through broken imperfect people. The father mirrors God in his forgiveness. The prodigal son demonstrates salvation – we can “come to our senses” because we realize that abandoning God has put us on the path to starvation, loneliness and isolation. The older son teaches us of the mercy of God: the older son reminds us that even when we choose to stay with God, we will still fall – we will grow resentful and exaggerate, nursing our wounds, and forgetting that we, too, are sinners saved by grace alone. But just because we sin doesn’t change the fact that we are living in God’s house, and no one can take that away.

Second, insofar as the parables are about humans, they reveal God’s character through contrast. The human father gave half his estate through the need for approval; God gave us all on the cross, not because He needed anything from us, but because giving is in His very nature. The inheritance God gives us is everlasting and can never be wasted; it can never be taken away from us. If we “spend” God’s love on other people – God will always fill us back up. God’s arms are always open and available to us the moment we run home. God never piles on, like the older brother. He always forgives and always rejoices when we return. Unlike the older brother, Jesus always did His father’s will. Jesus had every right to resent us for being God’s children, but instead, He rejoices along with God when we repent and turn to God.

God’s character shines through the interstices of this story, revealing His love for each and every one of us – even though we are as clueless as sheep, as predictable as a rolling coin, and as pig-headed as a child who thinks he can make it out in the big bad world all by himself. These are stories where God cracks open earth and lets us peer into heaven. There are flashes of godliness sparking out of humanity, so that we, in our humanity, can get a glimpse of what godliness looks like. We can see a human man, named Jesus, and through Him – unrobed and unmasked and lost on the cross – see God. On the cross, Jesus Christ was lost so that we would never have to be.

The message under all the parables, the groundnote of God’s message to us is: I know you, and I love you anyway. I know your heart. I know how you work. I know your greed, your inordinate loves, your stubborness, your cheating habits, your selfishness, your inability to see any viewpoint but your own. And yet despite our flaws, God can shine through – as light shines through cracks in jars of clay. Because we have it backwards. The parables shock us because we expect stories of people made perfect by God, but we get stories of imperfect people loved by a perfect God. The stories move us to the place of tears, where we cry out to God – how can you? How can you love me?

God’s answer is that He loves us because we belong to Him. We may feel lost, but we never are. We are all, as my friend Laddie recently put it, “just a phone call away from heartbreak,” and yet, we are also, all just a single cry away from healing. A shepherd may lose his sheep. A woman may lose her coin. A son may lose his family. But God never loses us. He is always with us, always. He loves us. We belong to Him. He belongs to us. We are a family. And unlike our earthly families, filled with imperfect parents and imperfect children, all the wounds in our heavenly family have been healed. Jesus Christ took the punishment we deserve on the cross. And so everything lost has been found.

So when we feel lost, or stuck in our pride, self-righteousness or anger – all we have to do is remember this: we have already been found, just as we are, and in the finding, we are found not wanting but having. We have everything through the love of God. Everything bad has been made untrue in Him. We can trust Him with all the bad things in our lives, even if we don’t understand them. He will restore our sense of self. He will restore our sense of home. He will restore our sense of purpose. He will restore our ability to love others, even when they least deserve it – because He will remind us that that is the kind of love He has for us.

And by the way, the picture at the start of this blog was given to me by Tory Baker and hangs in my bedroom – because I love it.

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on February 1, 2012

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: