Ad Astra Per Aspera

Several months ago a seven year old baby girl died of a brain aneurysm on a Sunday evening while here mother and father were attending a church service. The child had been left home with a babysitter and they were summoned out of the service by paramedics who responded to the call.

Tragic as this sudden death was and her grief over the loss of their only child, what happened next was more deeply disturbing.

The funeral service for the girl was held in the church with pastor officiating. During the service, in an attempt to bring some meaning and comfort to the parents, he suggested that God wanted to bring spiritual renewal to the members of the church and had selected one of their most prominent families and had taken their daughter home to be with the Lord, where she was far better off than to live in this world. God’s purpose in doing this, the pastor went on to say, was to cause the members of the church to reflect upon the brevity of life and to call them to repentance and renewed commitment to the Lord. He then gave an invitation for those who wished to acknowledge their new commitment to Christ to come forward for a prayer of dedication.

The mother and her husband will never return to that church. “I could never worship a God who would do that!” cried her aching soul. “I really don’t believe that God killed my child. But what other reason could there be for her death? Isn’t God in control of everything that happens? If he loved her in the way that we do, why could he not have intervened and saved her?”

In all the discussions in my theology classes I had never dealt with the answers to her questions. All I learned in class was how to affirm the importance of upholding the attributes of both God’s sovereignty and goodness. Now, faced with this question, in the face of this woman’s grief, I found the traditional arguments for God’s goodness and sovereignty quite inadequate.

She wasn’t asking me, but I couldn’t help but ask myself. Could I worship a God who would do such a thing in order to coerce others into a response of deeper commitment? No. She did not really demand an answer to her question. She only wanted the permission to ask it.

Rabbi Harold Kushner put it this way, “I believe in God, but I do not believe in the same things about Him that I did years ago, when I was growing up or when I was a theological student. I recognize his limitations. He is limited in what He can do by laws of nature and by the evolution of human nature and moral freedom. I no longer hold God responsible for illnesses, accidents, and natural disasters, because I realize that I gain little and I lose so much when I blame God for those things. I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die, for whatever exalted reason.”

To tell a woman that the death of her young daughter was God’s plan to develop in her a deeper spiritual life and a stronger character will likely provoke the response, “I would rather have my child and remain weaker in character.”

God is often as disappointed as we are that someone’s earthly existence has ended at an early age or that someone is experiencing depression or that someone is being tortured. We remain free to assume that such evil was an undesired by-product of misguided human freedom or the normal outworking of the natural order.

Everything in me wants to promise this woman that God would never take his daughter to prove a point. I can’t make that promise.

I have a friend in her late twenties who through small groups at church camp, purity bible studies, and Christian romance novels is persuaded that God has a man chosen for her, and only her. She believes that each person has that one and only someone. She is certain that Prince Charming is preparing his heart to cross paths with her. When she meets him, she will know, and they will live happily ever after forever. The End.

A couple different breakups have re-affirmed her conviction as she’s haunted by the parting words “I just don’t think it’s in God’s will for us to stay together.” All that rings in my friend’s ears is, “there is a guy out there that God has picked for you, it’s going to be perfect, but I’m not him, so keep looking.” She is incessantly shopping for a husband and relentlessly interprets any interaction with a man as a sign from above to pursue or reject.

I am exaggerating a hair but no doubt you know someone like this. Guy or girl, they have set their standards at an unreachable height, keeping their eyes peeled for their “one and only.”

Even if God does hand pick couples and assemble marriages, what does that change in our temporal world? What does that change on our end other than plaguing our minds with a growing fear of ruining our solitary shot at love.  Entering a relationship with the “one and only” mindset projects an unhealthy amount of pressure on both people. If we knew we had one shot at true love, we would spend more time trying not to blow it than being in love. Christian marriages have just as high of a divorce average as non, and I doubt wants credit for all of the pain many marriages cause.

How do we convince ourselves that no brand of human love will complete us? That no person can be our second half? That no one can live up to the expectations of our heart except the One who created it?

Everything in me wants to promise this woman that God has a man for her that will love her til the day she dies. I can’t make that promise.

I do not know if God causes pain or arranges love. I do know that wrestling with that question is exhausting, resulting in nothing but more questions. That’s not to say that God is not big enough to absorb our accusations, because He has been doing this from the beginning. But like Kushner said, we gain so little and lose so much when we blame God.

This is part two of three. To be continued….

The catch phrase of funerals, car wrecks, break ups, and hurricanes; everything happens for a reason. What are you saying?

Are you making a scientific statement that every effect has related cause? Brilliant.

More often than not, these five words offer comfort by giving credit to the unknown.

The traditional concept of God’s sovereignty viewed God as controlling (causing) every detail and event in human history. The alternative to this, it was determined, was to be subject to chaos and confusion, leaving humans subject to the fickle winds of fate and fortune. Even our ancestors looked to the stars, or the entrails of animals, for an explanation and cause of what appeared to be random events. To live in a world without supervening order and cause was more than the human spirit could bear. Where religion took away freedom, it gave back certainty, which in the end made fatalism more comforting than faith.

The correlating Christian phrase is “God works all things together for good.”

Does God permit suffering and allow evil to impact our lives in order to produce some good? The answer is no. The fact that “all things work together for good for those who love God” (Romans 8:28) cannot mean that God uses evil things to bring about good. Rather in spite of evil, God works through all things to bring about good as the outcome of his faithfulness so that we may trust in Him.

Living by faith in God enables us to endure what must be endured by the grace of God. God is neither a distant bystander nor a personal security guard. But what is he then?

The ways God operates in our lives mesh perfectly with the ways He designed us to operate. He does not normally determine, cause, and control our circumstances, because He could do so only by controlling us to the nth degree. He does not give us jobs, rig elections, or cause certain people to be in certain places at certain times. Circumstances are people’s doing, not God’s. He can intervene in them, He has, and on occasion He may choose to. But He normally does not. His kingdom is not of this world.

Be wary of generously assigning God credit where credit is not due while failing to give Him credit where it most certainly is.

To be continued…

Some of you tune into these posts weekly and to that I forewarn you with this: I am a tormented soul. If I wow your minds with brilliance I have stumbled upon then I will surely break your heart with my suffering. I have learned that if one wishes to write well, he must be before he can say. It is a strange alchemy, that pain produces harmony. Every time I read or write I ask myself; does anyone believe what I am saying, even I?

I invite you to walk with me as though wandering through an orchard, picking and tasting the fruit that falls from the trees without the necessity of grasping at every branch. Not everything I say is new, nor profound, and certainly not correct. Take the pieces that speak to you. If these posts are a lens through which you begin to shape the image of God in your hearts, then I am privileged to have been a vessel for something greater to pass through.

Does greatness reveal uniqueness? Or must uniqueness precede greatness?

The difference between uniqueness and greatness tugs at me. It strikes me that uniqueness is to be preferred to greatness. Lewis was a great man. It is incontrovertible, and will manifest itself in yet great ways through the next generation. However, and here I must qualify my feelings to guard it from presupposition, I posses something that Lewis did not have: the perspective of my own life. All that Lewis was and said can be known by me and to that, I add my own perspective. I see him in relationship to reality. This was impossible for him. I need not add that it is just as impossible for me to see myself in relationship to reality as it was for him, but then there remains the possibility of uniqueness for others!

What I mean to say is this: the uniqueness of individuality is both a tormenting and provoking thought. It is not an original thought, yet it must be discovered by every person. It cannot be taught, only experienced. Yet it cannot be experienced without a mentor. Lewis taught me to discover the uniqueness of my own self, and I promptly treasured my uniqueness more than his greatness.

He would not mind.

This is why I cannot settle for mere greatness and become an expert in anything. Professional status in any one of the countless fields of human knowledge is far too limited in scope to satisfy the range of individual uniqueness. Let others forage in the dry dust of a career, I shall encompass their labors within the perspective of my own life and use their knowledge to build my wisdom. Not that I am a parasite. I just do not recognize the copyright of wisdom. What others have learned can be appropriated by me through the process of distillation and related to the Great Idea.

What is the great idea? Some ideas only occur once in a lifetime. Can one person know everything? Of course not. Then what should one know? Somehow everything relates to everything.

I will never know the secrets of the professional person, but neither will I spend a lifetime wandering in the labyrinth of ways that lead to only a form of knowledge. I only need to know the relationship of that labyrinth to a hundred others. I hope this turns out to be the more productive effort.

When I was in the first grade, I was by far the brightest kid in my class. School came easy for me and I knew it. In my elementary years, somehow my young mind pieced together that smart people become doctors, and doctors make a lot of money being smart and helping people. I stayed true to this career path until my junior year of high school. That year my anatomy class visited the KU Med Center in Wichita and a representative explained the educational requirements for me becoming a Dr. Spring. The same moment I found out how much schooling I would have to go through and how many loans I would have to take out to finish med school was the same moment I bailed on that career path all-together. The second I found out that being a doctor would require a huge investment on my part, not just the talent I was born with, I jumped ship.

A lot of you reading this have made some sort of profession to the Christian faith. Whether or not you comprehend what that decision means is a different argument, but for the sake of discussion I am confident that you most likely proclaim some level of belief in God and/or Jesus.

Whether our conversion experience happened years ago or last week, we have set out on this journey of faith towards who knows what. All we know is that it started with a prayer and it ends somewhere in heaven. We wake up each morning with the best intentions, but in all honesty, we can admit that we have no idea what to do. We haven’t a clue how to live this out.

Then we corner ourselves with all sorts of questions; Am I really different than I was before? Is prayer real, or am I talking to myself?  What is “salvation” anyway? What exactly am I being “saved” from? And how does one have a “relationship” with something as big as God that I can’t hear, touch, or see?

Before you wrestle with those questions, we need to back up.

I can’t just announce that I want to become a doctor and receive my license to practice medicine. I can’t offer medical advice to a sick patient just because I want to see them recover. I can’t enter an operating theatre armed with nothing but a passion for the well being of the person I’m about to perform surgery on. In other words, good intentions alone would never qualify me as a doctor. I need training. I need to spend time with experienced doctors from my field. I need to read, study, and memorize information from textbooks. I need experience in minimal risk environments before I try anything dangerous by myself. I need to learn how to become a doctor before I can be one.

On a good day, Christians wake up in the morning fully intending to think, speak, and act in a way that glorifies God. Ten minutes later we’ve already lost focus and within the hour chances are we’ve already failed. Six failures later and it’s a botched day. We think to ourselves, “Well, maybe tomorrow I’ll get back on the right track.” Many would define insanity as going about a task the same way every time, expecting different results. Does this sound like your week?

It is so hard to undo a system that is already set into place. Have you ever tried to introduce something new into your life that will help you grow spiritually? Our routines are well oiled machines and will resist the solace, silence, and growth our souls need at any cost. I hope you can begin to understand that the moment you’ve convinced yourself that salvation was a one time event, that no more participation is necessary, Satan wins.

We need training. We need to be taught. We need to spend time around people that are more mature in their faith than we are. If we want to be a follower of Christ, and see a transformation before death, then we need more than good intentions.

When we announce our intentions to invite Christ to do life with us, we become his sons and daughters. We do gain inheritance into the kingdom of Heaven. This is where my doctor analogy fails. We become heirs to the throne long before we’re qualified. But just because our souls are pointed upwards, does not mean our bodies are. There are some cravings we just won’t let go of. We have to intentionally aim at re-wiring our system.

No doubt, salvation is an immediate transformation that jump-starts the process of sanctification. Whatever day you started your relationship with Christ, you woke up the next morning with the same body, the same habits, the same routine. Our soul seeks Christ while our bodies are poised to do the wrong thing.

Nothing about following Christ feels natural, though paradoxically it is the most natural process we could go through.

Following Christ starts with “I’ll do it”, but we have to admit we have no idea how, yet. This is what Jesus meant when he told his followers to go into the world and make disciples, not converts. He wants us to follow Him, and he even wants to teach us how to do it. I’m not always cooperative enough to follow through with the second. I bailed on the idea of becoming a doctor as soon as I found out how much was going to be required of me. I have given Him my life only to take it back again to try and live the Christ life the Jeremy way.

I realize that with this post I’ve made it clear that we need more than good intentions if we’re going to follow Christ. What I haven’t made clear is what a faith with more than good intentions would look like. I plan on posting more thoughts on discipleship soon, as it is still a conflict I wrestle daily.

In my previous post I mentioned that there is a difference between earning and effort. Grace is not opposed to the latter! Salvation is free, but it’s not a coast to the finish line, or at least it doesn’t have to be. Why would you want it to be?