on revenge and forgiveness: Romans 9

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

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

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

That’s a lot of forgiving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day

is there something divine about wanting?: Acts 22

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

Acts 22. When we don’t get our way, it doesn’t really feel good when our friends say: “God’s no is really His yes.”

Right.

Patience is a virtue that most of us lack. I mean, okay fine. We can be patient when we don’t REALLY want something. But if we actually want it? If we really desperately forget-about-everything-else want it? If we’ve lost our appetite and stare wanly out the window and can think of nothing else? If we’re in THAT kind of wanting? Patience flies out the window. Wanting and now are synonyms, aren’t they?

But barely are we cast onto the shores of this world before we learn we can’t always get what we want. So what’s the solution? Are we supposed to quiet ourselves down to a zen-like state where we want nothing? That sounds a little dull. What about a little self-talk. Can we talk ourselves out of wanting the things we can’t have? We can’t always get what we want, but if we try try try we just might get what we need? We can lie to ourselves and say we didn’t really want it, anyway; we can practice a little Aesop-style sour grapes. We’ve all done it, but lying to ourselves is never a healthy solution. Another option is to just wait out the disappointment and remind ourselves that yes, absolutely, we’re utterly miserable, but in a little while we’ll be fine and zippy again.

Those strategies work. They’re good. They’re practical. They make life go more smoothly. But they don’t take us all the way there. They leave unresolved this issue of wanting. What are we supposed to do with that? I mean, let’s face it. Wanting means we’re alive. Who wants to stop wanting? Is there a way to walk around in our wanting and enjoy it – even if we never get what we think we want?

As with most things, the solution lies in trusting God. If we can trust Him we can enjoy His presence even if He answers our prayers with silence, a shut door, or even a deep dark bottomless pit. Proust wanted to know if we can redeem the time we’ve wasted. God’s answer is: of course. In God’s math, nothing is wasted. He uses everything in His plan. God is perfect, after all. When we create, there are always unused scraps left over. Little bits of pie crust litter our kitchen countertops on Thanksgiving morning. It’s not like that with God. He rolls those leftover crusts up and flattens them out with the press of His fingers into something even more delicious, even more delectable, something just right for us.

He uses all to make something just our size.

And those friends who remind us that God’s no can be His protection are not wrong. Look at Paul being popped in jail here. It saved him from being torn limb from limb by an angry mob. We don’t know what savage lions prowl on the periphery of our lives. When another car cuts in front of us — only to drive in the middle of the road “like a poached egg,” as my English grandfather used to put it — we don’t know what twisted metal fender bender God may be saving us from. A traffic jam could be rescuing us from a gun wielding madman.

There is so much we don’t understand – both about ourselves and the spirit realm. God is weaving an eternal tapestry and we can only see a few dangling threads. For instance, in the Hebrew Scriptures (a/k/a the Old Testament), three weeks after Daniel prays for something, an angel appears and tells Daniel that from the MOMENT he started praying, the angel was sent to him. But there were spiritual oppositions that took place and caused a delay. See Daniel 10:12-13. So there are forces of evil that can oppose even angels. Evil can thwart our prayers. That sounds hard to believe until we consider those times we’ve prayed for people on a downward spiral – those friends who are drinking too much or doing drugs or in self-destructive relationship – and they go on with their behavior despite our prayers. Is that evil thwarting our wanting? It sure feels like it.

This is a detail that cracks open the edges of our world and gives us a glimpse of heaven. God brings good out of bad, but good is wrestling evil all the time and we don’t know the half of it. Maybe miracles are happening all the time in the spirit world and we just can’t see them. Maybe we’re not wrong to want a miracle. Maybe miracles are natural and our world is unnatural.

But even more than the somewhat abstract philosophical approach of trusting God in even our frustrated desires, there’s a deeper sweetness inside of waiting. The goal is to embrace the delay, to sink into the waiting, to rest in the presence of God. And in that resting in God we find such joy that our original wants pale in comparison.

Because God wants us to be in touch with our wants. He wants us to be alive to our true emotions. ”Bring me your heart,” God says over and over in the book of Psalms. Jesus makes it clear that Satan is the author of all lies. John 8:44. God wants us to have nothing to do with lies. He wants us to walk around inside the truth. He wants us to walk around inside our hearts. He made our hearts. He made them for Him. We’re supposed to open ourselves to God. It sounds like He wants us to trust Him enough to be vulnerable with Him. He wants us to get real with Him and tell Him what we really want.

And if we walk inside our wants, we may discover a want that lies deeper than all the others. We may discover that thought that lies too deep for tears. We may discover a want which will always be answered because it was made to be answered. For there is one delay over which we have total control. Have a look at this chapter. Paul tells yet again the story of his conversion. Why? Because the more we hear these true stories of Jesus’ true love for each of us the more our hearts melt. And look at what Ananias said to Paul in that story: ”WHY DO YOU DELAY?” Ananias adds: “Rise and be baptized, and by calling upon His name, wash away your sins.” Acts 22:16.

We may not get the possesions we pine for, the degrees we want, the results we expect, the friendships we long for, the promotions we deserve, the love we crave; the health of our children we try to protect; the health of our friends and family we desire; the control over ourselves we depend on. But we can always have God’s forgiveness, always. It’s only an ask away. It’s only a want away.

For there is no delay when it comes to the thing we need most. There is no waiting period for God’s love. There is no waiting and wanting about our ability to approach the throne of grace. It’s always there, all the time. Jesus made it come true already. He paved the way on the cross. He thirsted so we would never have to.

He did it because God is wanting us. God lives in want, too. God longs for us. He’s always waiting and wanting. So yes, there is a touch of the divine in waiting. Waiting and wanting is a quality we share with God. We can embrace our waiting. It’s is touched with glory. We can find in the wanting a deeper answer, one we didn’t even know we wanted until we got it:

I am with you always, even in your deepest desires, because being with me is what you always wanted all along without even knowing it.

by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day on January 12, 2013

I can’t find my way home: Acts 22

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Caroline Coleman

Acts 22. It wasn’t until I had finished half of my latte that I realized the songs playing in the coffee shop had a similar sound. They were mostly female vocalists, slightly folksy, heavy on the guitar, but with a modern rock flavor. How, I wondered, had someone come up with such a perfect acoustic rock playlist for a morning drinking coffee in the morning in a coffee shop?

Then I heard a soothing voice say: “Sirius XM Coffee House.”

No wonder the music fit. They were playing the coffee house station in a – wait for it – coffee house.

We like it when things fit. We like our belongings to fit neatly on their shelves. We like our clothes to hang nicely in our closets. We like our food to sit just so on our plates. We like our books to fit our worldviews. We like our friends to laugh at just the right places in our jokes. We like family members to get along. We want people to react in a way that makes sense. We want people places and things to belong. We want to belong.

But things don’t always work out that way. Sometimes people don’t make sense. Sometimes we don’t make sense to ourselves. We find ourselves feeling more Fox News than Lite FM. We can feel a little more acid rock while everyone else is NPR. We laugh in the wrong places. We make what we intend as a joke and realize we’ve just hurled a spear. We walk into a room full of people we know and feel like we don’t belong at all. People we once loved sometimes seem like perfect strangers.

Saint Paul here in Acts 22 tells a story of how God melted his heart out of bigotry and made him realize God loves everyone – only to find his listeners react not with joy but with hate. Human reactions don’t always make sense. Paul explained how God taught him that God loves ALL people, not just his chosen people, and his listeners reacted by screaming: “This man is not fit to live.”

It’s a strange turn of phrase. This man is not fit to live. Really? Who IS fit to live? And why do we humans think we can pass judgment on this issue? We shouldn’t, but we do. We pass this kind of judgment quickly without even thinking. We’re especially prone to do it if we lose our temper – and I personally think anger is just a manifestation of hurt. Someone hurts us – and we want to hurt them back. It’s “natural.” As I overheard a man say into his cellphone this morning on Broadway: “never send an email when you’re angry.” It’s good advice. But it made me smile, ruefully. You can guess why.

There is a very real sense in which we are all strangers in a strange land. We search and long for home. ”I can’t find my way home,” Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood were whining on my ipod this morning. Three homeless people meet and argue every day in a heap of rags outside the entrance to the Writer’s Room. ”They have nowhere to go,” a man who worked in the building told me yesterday.

“Yes, they do,” I said. ”They go here.” Everyone needs a place to go. Everyone wants a home where they feel they always belong. But most of us spend our days with a vague sense of uneasiness, feeling like we somehow haven’t quite arrived home. We feel like we’re missing something but we’re not sure what.

That’s why there’s all this talk of Roman citizenship in this chapter of Acts. If you want to unpack any verse of the Bible ask a simple question: how does this relate to the cross? This talk of citizenship is evocative of how God came down to offer us all citizenship. But instead of having to buy our citizenship at a great price like the Roman commander, God offers us His own citizenship. It’s like those friends of mine who give each other their place in the New York City marathon – you can run in my stead, they say, because they know how hard it is to get a spot. Every one of us is excluded from citizenship in heaven because the law condemns us. There is not one of us who keeps the law perfectly. Try not coveting. Try putting God before all else. Try loving your neighbor as yourself. If heaven were only for people who followed the law, heaven would be empty of all save God. For only God is good.

So God bought our citizenship for us. He knew we “lived in this world without God and without hope” and He loved us too much to leave us in that state, excluded from the thing our hearts most longed for. Eph. 2. God bought our citizenship “by ending the law.” He satisfied the requirements of the law so that we can go to heaven through his free gift of grace. No one earns their way to heaven. Instead the only way is to have our “sins washed away by calling on the Lord.” Acts 22. God’s gift of salvation falls down on us like “a very bright light from heaven.” The intense light blinds us. It opens our eyes to a whole new Way. It melts us from the inside out, showing us God paved the Way home for us. God was the one true citizen of heaven who was persecuted, hounded and killed to satisfy the requirements of the law, so that we can go to heaven without having to earn our way. We don’t have to try to “be good.” God did it for us.

And when that truth sinks in, we discover that wherever we are is home, after all. It’s coffee house music in every coffee house. We belong to our one true home no matter who excludes us. We are accepted even when our jokes are unacceptable. We run the race set before us even when we’re too tired to get out of bed. We may not be fit to live, but that’s not the standard. We are citizens now. No one can take that away from us. We are members of God’s family. It’s not based on anything we do. It’s irrevocable because it was bought with God’s own body and blood.

So what? What’s the point of all this? It sounds good to say that Jesus is the door to our home, but what does it mean?

It means that the whole world is upheld by what we mistake for weakness. It is upheld by the one who turned the other cheek. Sacrificial love – as opposed to selfish entitlement – lives at the heart of who we are, why we’re here, and how we can become the people we’ve always wanted to be. The point is to dive down deep into the gospel and search with our breath held until we find the love at the heart of it all and come up gasping for air but triumphant. We clasp onto the truth. We press in close. Jesus died to give us a helping hand. Heb 2:16. Is it no wonder we are surprised by joy when we do the same for others? When we offer a helping hand to others, we find our hands are reaching in the direction of the cross. It’s a seemingly left handed Way, but when we try it we discover it’s the only right Way, the true Way, the Way to the home we’ve always wanted but could never find on our own.

by Caroline Coleman in A Chapter a Day on January 11, 2013

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.

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

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

on being alone: Luke 9

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read Luke 9. After church on Sunday I wandered into Jimmy Choo Shoes. A pretty, diminutive woman tried on a pair of peep-toe silver sparkly shoes with three inch heels. “They’re beautiful on you,” I told her. They were. They looked like something Dorothy would have worn. ”Magical.”

“All I need to do is click my heels together three times,” she said, picking up on my reference immediately.

“Do you want to try the four inch heels,” the assistant asked her.

In answer, the woman in the silver shoes turned and wrapped her arms around her handsome diminutive boyfriend. In the three inch heels, she came up to his nose. She kissed him. ”Perfect,” her boyfriend said, with a huge smile.

She bought the three inch heels.

It was a wonderful moment. Like her shoes, it was magical. And it affirmed the joys of being with someone. Dominique Browning wrote movingly in an article called “Alone Again, Naturally” this weekend about why she thinks single women love their lives, but men can’t be alone more than three months. She claims that men walk around alert for danger, and so feel vulnerable unless they have someone to watch their backs. She says that men are “on guard” because that’s their job, and so they “don’t nest.” She says that women, in contrast, love to nest in their homes:

“Most single women I know really love their lives. Sometimes we suffer pangs of loneliness, sometimes we ache for the companionship of the mythic soul mate, but mostly we cherish our independence…. We love not being judged, not being criticized, not being hemmed in…. A marriage is a lot of work. Strike that. A man is a lot of work. Anyone who has been in a bad marriage knows that its defining characteristic is the unspeakable loneliness in which one feels shrouded, a sense of isolation amplified by not being alone… Home is where I am supposed to feel safe…. I have observe that women who have escaped loudly troubled marriages often feel safer when they are alone. To a woman, being home feels safe.” NY Times January 8, 2012 p. 2 Styles.

What strikes me is not the gender divide, but that Browning is talking about what happens to anyone who has been wounded – both male and female. It makes you want to be alone. It makes you lose trust. It makes you prefer loneliness to criticism. If you’re wounded enough, you just want to hide. Women call that instinct nesting. Men call it hiding out in their man caves. No matter what you call it, it’s the same thing for both sexes. Anyone who has escaped “loudly” troubled relationships often feel “safer” when they are alone. But safe isn’t the kind of life we’re called to. So is there a better way?

What sparked the article was that Browning fell while walking alone in a forest. She lay alone on her back, and she heard a “voice in her head” which told her two things: ”‘This is what happens when you live alone,’ it said. ’You fall, and there is no one to help you up…. It is not good to live alone.’”

Whether Browning knew it or not, this advice came straight from the Bible. The first thing Browning heard was penned by King Solomon 3,000 years ago: “Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble.” Ecclesiastes 4:10-12. The second thing the voice told Browning when she fell were the words God said right after He created Adam. He said: “It is not good for the man to be alone,” and so God made Eve.

I have no idea if Browning is familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures, if she was speaking to herself, or if God was speaking to her. All I know is that when she fell, she heard Truth: it is not good for man to be alone, and if you fall, you have no one to help you.

In an ideal world, we would all have the perfect mate that even Browning admits we pine for. We would all have the man that towers over us even in three inch heels. But we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a fallen world – one where relationships break down, people abandon us, and we abandon people. My skin crawls when married people tell me that “maybe it’s good for you to be alone.” Yeah, right. Why don’t you try it during your forties and THEN tell me that. It’s not what my Bible says. My Bible says what Ms. Browning heard when she fell: it’s NOT good for man to be alone. While God allows suffering into our lives, He never rejoices in it. He never calls bad good. Don’t get me started.

One of the big reasons that so many of us are alone is the problem of selfishness – both our own and others. One male blogger honed in on this like a lightning bolt in response to Browning’s essay; he said her article is “a perfect mental x-ray of the kind of divorced woman who talks about her ‘bad marriage’ without considering – based on all the evidence she provides – it was she who made it so.” The Macho Response. Clearly, Browning’s jab that “men are work” touched a nerve. The Macho blogger is suggesting that maybe women are work, too (something with which my ex-boyfriend would readily agree). Given that we are all “work,” it’s no wonder that so many of us alone. So what’s the solution?

What I wonder is whether it’s being alone that is really the problem. Elizabeth Bishop has written a lovely essay called “On Being Alone,” in which she asks that why is it, that when there’s “nothing to fear … so many of us seem to dread being alone”? She points out that there can be something quite lovely about being alone: ”There is a peculiar quality about being alone, an atmosphere that no sounds or persons can ever give. It is as if being with people were the Earth of the mind, the land with its hills and valleys, scent and music: but in being alone, the mind finds its Sea, the wide, quiet plane with different lights in the sky and different, more secret sounds…. Being alone can be fun; alone the mind can do what it wants to without even the velvet leash of sleep. But we can never understand this while we stand on the shore with our backs to the water and cry after our companions. Perhaps we shall never know the companion in ourselves who is with us all our lives, the nearness of our minds at all times to the rare person, whose heart quickens when a bird climbs high and alone in the clear air.”

Elizabeth Bishop is right. Being alone can be fun. If we think back to our most intense vivid moments, many of them occurred alone. And yet being alone rests uneasily on us. Why?

Perhaps the problem is that being alone strips from us the usual ways with which we block our hurts. Just as an alcoholic who stops drinking finds himself confronting emotions he hasn’t dealt with in years, so when we find ourselves alone we confront wounded places inside ourselves we’ve been avoiding for a lifetime. We find griefs. We discover regrets. We encounter guilt. We recall betrayals. We hear the constant refrain of our enemy (a/k/a the devil) that we haven’t done enough; we haven’t loved enough; we’ve failed because we are failures; we haven’t achieved enough; no one loves us and why should they – we’re unlovable.

No wonder we fear being alone.

And so when Jesus walked onto the scene 2,000 years ago and spoke of being alone, our first reaction can be to shy away from Him. ”Take nothing for the journey,” he tells the disciples in Luke 9:3. He “left the crowds to pray alone.” Luke 9:18. He told the crowds that if “you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.” Luke 9:24. When a man tells Jesus he will follow him wherever he goes, Jesus responds: “the Son of man has no place even to lay his head.” Luke 9:58. Jesus tells another man not to even bury his father if he wants to follow Jesus.

What would motivate us to “give up” our lives, to travel without any extra clothes, to have no place to lay our heads, and to not bury our fathers? Is Jesus calling us to live in a world with no peep-toe silver Jimmy Choo shoes with three inch heels? And more to the point, is He calling us to live in a world without boyfriends, husbands, wives, parents and siblings? That sounds awful.

The curious thing is that at the very same time as Jesus talked about being alone, the life He lived promoted and enabled community. In this chapter, He calls his disciples “together”. He tells them to stay “in the same house” in a town. He feeds a meal to 5,000 people when the disciples asked him to “send the crowds away.” Jesus has community even with prophets who died long ago; he talks to Moses and Elijah. Jesus is asked to heal a boy so possessed by a demon that the boy was constantly screaming and foaming at the mouth: Jesus heals the boy “and gave him back to his father.” Jesus tells the disciples to welcome children. He rebukes the disciples for turning away someone not in their group: “Anyone who is not against you is for you.”

How do we reconcile this talk of sacrifice and solitude with the reality of the gospel community? As always, the answer lies with the cross. On the cross, Jesus was truly alone. Not only was He abandoned by everyone He knew and loved, but God abandoned Him: “My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me,” Christ cried. God abandoned Jesus as punishment for our sins; if God is all that is good, then the absence of God is, by definition, hell. Jesus was truly alone – separate from God – on the cross.

Jesus was alone, so we would never have to be. Jesus’ death means that He can come and live with us, even though He is holy and we are not. His sacrificial death enables us to have community – with Him, and with each other. He heals us, even from the fear of being in relationships after we’ve been hurt. He heals other people; he can turn screamers into listeners. All who believe in Him become brothers and sisters through His blood.

We need never fear being alone. We can walk into our loneliness. We can walk around in it. We can bump up against our wounded hurt places – and expose them to God’s healing light. If, in the course of being alone, we realize that we are lonely, we can do something about it. We can seek friends. We can try new things. We can take risks. We can reach out to other people, who are perhaps just as lonely as we. We can allow our hearts to be broken, all over again, because we know the One who will keep on healing us.

And sometimes we will still fall alone in a forest with no one to help us. But even then, God is always with us. Emmanuel comes closest when we need Him most. Instead of fearing solitude, we can embrace it – because in doing so, we will be embraced by the One who loves us most of all.

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

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