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

how to become beautiful every day, no matter what we feel or look like: Acts 2

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read Acts 2. The February morning that volunteers unfurled the orange flags Christo and Jeanne-Claude had planted all over Central Park dawned dull and grey. In that dead winter light, those orange flags looked like, well, orange flags. Most of us who lived in the city thought, “sigh – another dumb $21 million art project we have to live with until the next one comes along.” As the morning wore on, however, the sun emerged. Sighs died on our lips. The sunshine transfigured those ordinary flags into flaming, swirling, banners of joy. It suddenly seemed as if Christo had planted 7,500 beautiful exotic tropical flowers in our communal 840 acre garden. The Gates, as the art project was called, brought tourists and city dwellers together, uniting us as we all wandered around admiring these tongues of fire. As one New York Times writer put it, the gates flickered “like a flame against the barren trees.” NY Times Feb. 13, 2005.

When my daughter was born, a nurse I couldn’t even see said, “she has red hair.” I thought the nurse had to be as delusional as I felt at that moment, after giving birth far too quickly for that pain medication I’d been banking on. How could my daughter have red hair? I’m blonde, her father is dark. Plus, how many babies even have hair? Plus, did she say I had a daughter? The nurse, it turned out, was right on all count. My daughter’s hair really is red. A hair colorist once nearly fainted at the sight of her hair. “oh, oh, oh,” he said, his whole body quivering. ”It’s red. And it has blonde highlights.” See left for proof…..

Apparently if you dye your hair red, the one thing you can’t do is get the blonde highlights in there. That’s the difference between the fake and the real thing. The real thing glows.

It’s the glow, I think, that is the acid test of real beauty.

So if a glow is the hallmark of true beauty, how do we import that beauty into ourselves? How do we become radiant? How do we bloom like exotic flowers, no matter what our circumstances? It’s hard. Because there is a sense in which the very act of trying to look beautiful chases it away. Here’s how Tolstoy once put it:

“Princess Mary sighed and glanced into the mirror which stood on her right. It reflected a weak, ungraceful figure and thin face. Her eyes, always sad, now looked with particular hopelessness at her reflection in the glass. ‘She flatters me,’ thought the princess, turning away and continuing to read. But Julie did not flatter her friend, the princess’ eyes – large, deep and luminous (it seemed as if at times there radiated from them shafts of warm light) – were so beautiful that very often in spite of the plainness of her face they gave her an attraction more powerful than that of beauty. But the princess never saw the beautiful expression of her own eyes – the look they had when she was not thinking of herself. As with everyone, her face assumed a forced unnatural expression as soon as she looked in a glass.” War and Peace, Chapter XXV.

I read that passage in bed the summer I had mono – perhaps the only way one has time to read War and Peace - and I’ve never forgotten it. I knew Tolstoy was right – we’re most beautiful when we’re not thinking of ourselves. The problem is that it’s hard – if not impossible – to forget about ourselves. Most of us are like Tolstoy’s princess, doomed to assume a “forced unnatural expression” as soon as we look in the mirror.

Maybe instead, paradoxically, true beauty comes when we do feel like orange flags on a dull winter day, flat and ordinary. Maybe beauty comes on a day when we look in the mirror and see nothing but a forced unnatural expression. Maybe beauty can only arise on a day when out, of obedience and perhaps desperation alone, we assemble together and wait for a sunshine that comes from outside of us. That’s when, suddenly “a sound from heaven like the roaring of a mighty windstorm” can come. Acts 2:2. It’s when God’s Spirit fills the whole house where we are, just as the scent of perfume once filled the whole house when Mary broke open her jar of perfume to pour on Jesus’ feet. Acts 2:2; John 12:3. When we give the little that we have – even if all that we have is our emptiness – God transforms it into sheer beauty. Flames of fire will appear and settle on us – maybe literally as it did at Pentecost, always in our hearts.

And as at Pentecost, God’s Spirit enables us to speak in the languages of other people. That’s because the Spirit first enables us to understand God’s love. Words we’ve heard before, maybe our whole lives, suddenly come through like a tempest. Words like – the Son of God died for your sins – suddenly break open. The words pierce our hearts. God’s language – His love for all, His prearranged plan of salvation through the death of His Son – speaks to us. We repent; we turn to God; we receive forgiveness.

And suddenly the world shifts. It’s as if the sun has come out. It’s as if every part of us, every molecule, every hair on our head, glows. It’s as if we become a mirror, not for our own glory, but reflecting God’s glory. His love enables us to become part of a community of people, breaking bread together, in joy. That’s the invitation, the glory and the mystery of God’s beauty. That’s the source of beauty – God, who is Love. Beauty, true beauty, comes from outside, from God pouring His love into us, from God tipping over the waterjars of heaven to fill us with Him, the most beautiful of all.

The good news is we need only one thing in order to be filled: we need to feel winter dry, dull, beyond hope – and all of heaven comes down like a mighty tempest to fill us with God’s joy.

That’s how we – all of us – any of us – can be transformed into swirling flaming banners of beauty, flickering like a flame against a barren tree.

posted by Caroline Coleman on August 24, 2012 in carolinecolemanbooks.com

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

The Answer for a Broken Heart: Luke 14.

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read Luke 14. Every day, someone drips tears into the internet looking for answers for their broken heart. Here’s a typical search engine: ”i still love my ex-boyfriend and i still cry every time i think of him and i need a bible verse for the solitude.” But what are we really looking for when someone breaks our hearts?

When someone breaks our heart, often we think we want to know why they dumped us. But do we? Do we really want to know how we weren’t enough? Do we want to hear how we have a bad temper, a bad attitude or bad hair? The thing is, when someone falls in love with us, they find those very same attributes adorable. ”She’s passionate,” they say about our temper when they love us, and they say it in an admiring tone. Or, “she’s got a great sense of humor,” they announce to their friends, about our unerring ability to find fault with every little thing we see. ”Her hair is as wild as her personality,” they say, as if we were some kind of mountain lion, and they’re so proud they alone tamed us.

But when someone falls out of love with us, every one of those same characteristics – our passion, our sense of humor, and our appearance – becomes a source of contempt. So I’m not sure we will ever get “truth” from an ex – even one who tries to honestly explain why they are breaking up with us. The Bible says to speak the truth in love, and I think that’s because there’s no other kind. Truth spoken in hatred is not truth. It’s just violence.

Sometimes we will hear truth from an ex. Sometimes people break up with us because we’re engaged in behaviors that are truly incompatible with a relationship. If they still love us but pull away in order to protect themselves, they might be able to explain that lovingly: ”I love you, but I can’t be with you while you’re buying blow on 125th street”; “I love you, but it’s not a marriage if you’ve got three mistresses”; ”I love you but I can’t live with you if you drink a gallon of Tequila every morning for breakfast.” Those kinds of truths, perhaps, can be learned from an ex, but most likely anyone who knows us well enough to know we have those problems, has already explained them to us – ad nauseum. Plus, we probably already know these are problems and if we’re not changing them, it’s because we’re not ready. We think we can’t change; we think we can’t live without those behaviors. So those kinds of truths are probably not what we’re after when we think: “I wish I knew why he left me.” What we really want to know goes deeper. We want to know why someone fell out of love with us.

The Biblical way to look at falling in and out of love is to say that someone has a soft or hard heart toward us. When our hearts are soft toward someone, their faults don’t bother us. When our hearts harden, though, the other person can do no right in our eyes. Every kind gesture is misinterpreted. Every act of thoughtfulness is condemned. Their personalities, figures and actions bother us. It is the same, of course, in reverse, when their hearts harden toward us. Hard heartedness is a reciprocal thing -it’s easily contagious. If someone’s heart hardens toward us, our heart hardens in response.

I don’t think we want answers when someone breaks our hearts. We want them back – or at least we want back the wonderful feelings we had when we first fell in love, and the wonderful open trusting appreciative way we were with each other in that honeymoon period. But often we can’t have them back. So part of the reason why our hearts break is that we discover we cannot fix our relationships. We cannot control other people. We can’t make someone love us. We can ask God to melt our hard heart toward other people. We can ask God to melt their hard heart toward us. But only God is in the business of melting a hard heart. We can do nothing to melt it in our own strength, charm and looks. Admitting that breaks us.

And here’s the transfiguring truth. Being broken open feels like the worst thing in the world – but it’s really the best thing. Being broken means we’re full to the brim with need. And need is all we need to receive. When we recognize we need, and need deeply, and need desperately, we will find Jesus, the true lover, who always loves us; who always has a soft heart toward us no matter what we’ve done; and who always wants us to find Him over and over again, every day, more and more.

We need only to admit we’ve fallen into a pit – a pit so deep we can’t get ourselves out of. God invites the poor and needy to his feast. He invites anyone who will come. The only price of admission is to admit we can’t pay the full admission price. That’s what Jesus is talking about here in Luke 14 when He says we would be foolish to start a project without calculating the cost. We can’t complete the “project” of buying or earning our way to heaven, because we can’t be perfect. Jesus knows that. That’s why He paid the price for us. The invitation is always open, always available, always crying out to anyone who is crying.

Jesus is the answer to our broken hearts. But we have to discover that answer, in a real way, every single day, over and over again. Why? Because Jesus is alive. We are called to a relationship with God, not to just some intellectual understanding. So on this earth, our hearts will break over and over – and we can rejoice in that. It means our hearts are soft. They’re vulnerable. They’re open and receptive. And just as God is in the business of softening hard hearts, so He’s in the business of healing broken hearts. He will heal our hearts over and over, one heart at a time, one day at a time – sometimes one minute at a time, one google search at a time.

Will He bring our ex back? Maybe. Maybe not. But He will always, always bring our hearts back – into fullness, joy, softness and beauty. He loves us. He makes us lovable. He transfigures and transforms us. Just as water softens the earth so flowers can grow, so our tears soften our hearts, so God’s love can bloom within us, and gardens will grow out of the places of our deepest wounds.

And maybe, just maybe, that will open us up to receive love from unexpected places, places we could never have seen or imagined while our eyes were too full of tears about an ex.

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks on January 30, 2012

Crazy stupid love: Luke 11

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read Luke 11.

I have been trying to write about Luke 11 for a week now. Yes, I went skiing in Canada. Yes, I was surrounded by old friends and new. But it wasn’t the powdery snow or the good skiing or the fine company that deterred me, but the chapter itself. I kept re-reading this chapter, and trying to understand it, and I kept running dry.

So I was going to write a long academic piece about epiphanies. I was going to quote James Joyce, and throw in a bit of literary criticism, and draw to a close by inviting you to let God lead you to an epiphany of your own. But that was because I wasn’t having any epiphanies of my own.

And then I watched Crazy, Stupid Love with my daughter and I got it.

What troubled me most about Luke 11 was the story Jesus tells about the naggy neighbor. Jesus’ disciples ask him to teach them how to pray, so He gives them The Lord’s Prayer, and then He tells them a story about a really rude naggy persistent neighbor. Jesus said that if your neighbor asks you for a loaf of bread in the middle of the night, you will tell them to go away, and that your kids are in bed with you – but because of the man’s persistence, you will get up and give your neighbor what he asks for.

And that’s the lesson on how we’re supposed to pray? I didn’t get it. We’re supposed to nag God? We’re supposed to bother Him? We’re supposed to keep at Him? Why? Doesn’t He hear us the first time? Didn’t Jesus tell us in the Sermon on the Mount not to repeat our words and babble as the pagans do? So why would He tell us to keep on asking, seeking and knocking?

So I put off writing this and instead watched Crazy, Stupid Love. At the end of the movie, the 13 year old boy who has had a relentless, unrequited crush on his 17 year old babysitter, finally gets cynical. He starts to give a graduation speech in which he says there are no soul mates, and that true love doesn’t exist. His father (Steve Carrell) leaps out of the grandstands, speeds to the podium, and says, “this isn’t my son. My son believes in grand romantic gestures. My son believes in soul mates. My son knows that love never gives up. My son is right. Love never gives up.”

That was when I started to weep. That’s what true love is like. That’s the true love we all want. We all want someone who will never give up on us – no matter how much we deserve it. We want someone to keep believing in us, even when we’ve lost hope in ourselves. We want someone to make grand romantic gestures for us. We want someone to chase us, and keep chasing, and hunt us down, no matter how hard we try to hide.

The movie credits rolled, and I was still crying, and that was when I had my epiphany about Luke 11. I wasn’t crying because I was feeling unloved or sorry for myself or abandoned. I was crying because the movie was affirming something so wonderfully true it’s almost impossible to take in.

Jesus tells the story about the naggy neighbor because that’s how we humans relate to each other. We are like this. We give reluctantly. We give because it will look embarrassing if we don’t. We give so the other person will stop bothering us. We give because we don’t want anyone else to hear about how closed-fisted we are. We give because we think we have to.

But God doesn’t have to give anything to us. He’s God. He can do what He wants. God gives because He wants to. He gives because it gives Him joy to give. God never gives up on us. God is our soul mate. God made the grandest romantic gesture of all – He gave up his life for us. And our hearts always, always, respond to these romantic stories of people who believe in soul mates and true love and the triumph of persistence, because we were made in God’s image. We were made in the image of a God who made people who believe in true love. We were made by Love, for Love and in Love.

In our world, an epiphany has come to mean any kind of “ah ha” moment, but that is not it’s original meaning. As Charles Baxter pointed out in his essay “Against Epiphanies,” an epiphany “in a traditional religious context, was the showing forth of the divinity of the Christ chid. It was, quite literally, an awful moment. Awe governed it. To adapt this solemn moment for literary purposes… was a Promethean gesture: It was an attempt to steal the fires of religion and place them, still burning, in literature.”

If an epiphany is the showing forth of the divinity of the Christ child, an epiphany is when it strikes you, like a stake through a vampire’s heart, that God loves you so much He died for you. And like that stake through the vampire’s heart, a true epiphany slays us. A revelation of God’s love kills the meanness, the pettiness, and the miserliness of us. It strikes dead all that is small in us. And in doing so, it enables in us the resurrection of Christ himself.

That’s why Jesus rails against his hosts at the end of Luke 11. He is railing against the way that religious leaders teach that you can be big and expansive and loving all by yourself. Jesus rails against religion. He rails against the idea that by following rules – by ordering ourselves to be kind to our neighbor – that kindness can enter our hearts. It just doesn’t work that way. We long to be that way. We were made to long for heroism and true love and sacrifice, but we’re not the hero. God is. Our heroism comes when we admit our need for God to be our Hero. It arrives when we lay down our pride, and ask God himself to help us. That’s when we who were mute in the face of our neighbor’s needs, suddenly find our voices. That’s when we hear knocking on our doors, and a voice asking for a loaf of bread, and we leap out of bed, and get our children to let them in, and we cook them a feast.

Why? Because we know the One who loved us so much that He died so He could prepare a feast for us. And even when we’re still miserly and pretend we don’t hear our neighbors knocking, God doesn’t give up on us. God keeps on knocking at the door of our hearts. Come on, God says. I know you hear me. ”Today, when you hear my voice, do not harden your hearts,” God said in the Bible. Did you catch that? It’s not today IF you hear my voice – it’s when. God is knocking at the doors of our hearts all day long. He knows that if we wake up, and get up, and open the door to His Love, no force on earth or in hell can shut that door.

posted by Caroline Coleman on January 20, 2012

on self-help and broken hearts: Luke 10

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

Read Luke 10. Despite flagging booksales in so many areas, the self-help book market is thriving. In an article in ABC News entitled “Want to get rich? Write a self-help book,” the authors summarize the self-help message as one in which — wait for it — you have the power to help yourself. The idea is that “we alone have the power within us to solve our problems, relieve our anxieties and pain, heal our illnesses, improve our golf game or get a promotion.”

Really? If we alone have the power to do all that, then… why do we need self help books? Isn’t it a contradiction in terms? I mean, honestly – if the self-help message were true, there would BE no self-help book industry. If we could really help ourselves, we wouldn’t need the books. Right?

In one of my favorite Sex in the City episodes, Charlotte tries to buy a self-help book with the wonderful title: STARTING OVER – ALL OVER AGAIN. Charlotte can’t even buy the book because she is deterred by the number of sobbing women in the self-help section.

One of my friends is reading a self-help book called Wisdom of a Broken Heart. Crack open any page, and it’s pretty easy to make fun of. Your broken heart is actually good, it says. You will learn from it. You will grow from it. You will be a better person. Yes, yes, we think, as we dip into our third pint of Haagen-Daz while reading it.

“We should write a self-help book,” another friend told me in Florida after Christmas, as we ate lunch at a club on the ocean. ”We’d make a killing.” We laughed and eyed the ocean front mansions surrounding us.

But broken hearts are no laughing matter. The Science Times reported yesterday that grief really can cause a heart attack: ”The so-called broken heart syndrome is real. The study… found that a persons’ heart attack risk is 21 times higher than normal the day after a loved one dies.” 21 times higher? That’s huge. Your heart can stop functioning, literally, when you are broken hearted. The article goes on to explain the risk: “Over time the risk of an attack declines, but it remains elevated within that first month. In the first week after a loved one’s death, for example, the risk was six times higher than normal….. Other studies have uncovered greater heart and mortality risks in the weeks and months after the loss of a spouse, a child or another loved one, but the new study is the first systematic look at the immediate effect.” NY Times Jan. 10, 2012 D 5.

So how do we solve the problem of a broken heart? Do broken hearts give wisdom? All truth is God’s truth. That means that while the self-help industry has part of the truth, only Jesus has the full truth.

Here’s the partial truth: broken hearts do give wisdom. Yes, of course. But not if you try to fix yourself all by yourself. The message of the Bible is that we can’t fix ourselves. The message is that we should give up trying. The deepest wisdom of a broken heart is that we need God to fix our hearts. He made them in the first place, after all.

And the message of the gospel is that God’s own Son had His heart broken on the cross, so that He could heal our heartbreaks. Look at who Jesus is. He says in this chapter that He saw Satan thrown out of heaven like a lightening bolt. Just think about that. As C.S. Lewis so famously put it in Mere Christianity, we cannot say Jesus was just a nice man who gave us a good example. Either Jesus was insane, on the level of a man who thinks he’s a poached egg, or He really was the Son of God.

And as the Son of God, Jesus came to earth to mend our broken hearts. His message is that our hearts are so broken God Himself was broken in order to mend them.

So what’s the true wisdom of a broken heart? One of the ways God brings good out of our heartache is that heartbreak enables us to hear His message. Broken hearts make us realize that we can’t heal ourselves. Broken hearts make something leap inside us when we hear that Jesus was ‘filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit.” Luke 10:21. We wonder if we can have that joy, too. The answer is yes. The joy comes from God’s presence, and it exists irrespective of our circumstances. This is the message that humans have been longing to hear since we were expelled from the Garden of Eden.

Jesus’ love heals us of our hard hearts, too. It heals us of our tendency to look the other way when someone is in need. It enables us to have mercy on others, because we know how much mercy God has had on us. And His love heals us of the tendency to overwork. We are all Martha’s, running around cooking 10 dishes in order to win the approval of some imaginary judge and jury, when Jesus says we only need “one thing.” Like Mary, all we need is to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen.

Yes, it’s that simple. It’s so simple, I have to end this post here. Because what else can I say? Jesus can mend our broken hearts. He wants to. He isn’t just dying to – He died to. And why would we let any power on earth stop Him from helping us when He loves us so much He left heaven so He could carry us there?

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on January 11, 2012

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