If there is one thing I could say to those who take such
pleasure in being set in their positions
and look in the end at the Last Judgment to be vindicated, I have a surprise
for you. The industry of your religion will not save you and in the end, you
will be as all the great and small as this great sea of humanity gives up its
dead. No, it is not about the building of churches and the crushing of
self-will, it is about loss. Loss is not something that can be taught or
trained into a person by discipline, it is the living of a holy life. Not in
the sense that it is without sin, on the contrary, it is living a life set
apart and one open enough, honest enough to be exposed to fire and light of the
presence of God. It is said that this light causes those to run and hide and to
call upon the mountains to cover them and some even desire the floor of hell
rather than the great halls of God. What is the light…really? It is honesty
with one’s self. To lay bear one’s very person to the light of God. To admit
failure and sin and darkness and…our depravity and yet to embrace the hand of
God who would lift us from the miry clay and plant us unbelievably in another
world.
It is to be honest enough to admit:
1.
The reprobation.
2.
That we doubt.
3.
Our faith is weak and impotent
4.
Our love grows colder with each passing year
5.
Our hearts point back more than they do ahead.
6.
Confusion
over just what is the will of God.
7.
We grow weaker with each passing day, we truly
are but a shadow
8.
We are prideful to the point of causing personal
and collateral damage
9.
We are fearful that we have failed.
10.
We are horrified that our lives go up in the
balance and are nothing.
Quite a requiem for a Christian isn’t it. Yet I would venture
to guess more than one of my points resonates in your inner most self. Why?
Because as I said it is all about loss, in the list above all grandeur and self
aggrandizement is lost in the sands of the Negev that strips us of life, expectation
and position. It is in this crucible, that the man or woman of God is truly forged
– in the forge of honesty – the courage to face who we truly are in all our
ugliness and to despair of having any semblance of life outside of the grace
and mercy of a Holy God.
The other day, I was on my usual run through the
neighborhood at dusk. Turning up a hill and feeling the strain of moving uphill
I bent my head low as if to somehow compensate for the upward slope when my eye
caught a small object in the road. I swept past it barely missing it and kept
on. But something made me look back again and again. Drawing up to it I found
it to be a fledgling that had somehow popped out of its nest and onto the
street. Quietly sitting there in the middle of the road waiting on something or
someone. There we were eye to eye. I did not know what to do, so decided that
it was best that I continue my run and leave it where it was. I made up my mind
that I would return to see if it was still there and hoping that it would not
be. That somehow, the mother would count the heads and decide one was missing
and so search and find it, taking it home to the nest. Thirty minutes later as
I returned to check on it, my little friend was still where I had met him. I
decided that I was going to save him. Take him home and take care of him if
need be. My wife was surprised to see what I had brought in and the look on her face was one of
compassion and yet helplessness. What could we really do for it. We gave it
some milk believe it or not and it perked right up. So much so it started to
pop out of the large cup where we had made it a little resting place. We
covered over it and through the evening we would check in on it to see if it
was doing okay. It was but you could tell it was only a matter of time before
it would succumb to the inevitable every created thing will one day face. My
heart broke. There I was a grown man, with a tear in my eye for a little thing
that was yesterday a bump on the road. I knew what had to be done and so on my
way to work I took my little friend back to the place I had found him. As I let
him go, my prayer went to heaven that this wasn’t a loss I wanted. As I let him
go under a bush for protection, I saw him stop for a moment and look back at me
as if to say ‘Why are you letting me go?’ and then skittered off under the
bush. Driving into work, I could not get over that last moment. It replayed
over and over in my mind. Maybe it was the loss I thought I could somehow stem
and change but in the end, I realized by doing so, I was intervening in powers
and forces too great for me and in the end the result would have been death and
eventual loss. I couldn’t help but wonder why such things happen even to the
birds of the field.
In my reverie, I believe God whispered something of truth to
me. I remembered the scripture of Jesus regarding the Father’s care: Not one sparrow will fall to the ground apart
from your Father (Mat 10:29) – His eye is on the sparrow. It is as if God for a
moment let me see the situation from His point of view and His words to me were
not about keeping but letting go. It is not resignation, it is submission to
the will of God and to see His hand in it all, even the parting of a man and a
little bird on a neighborhood street. I thought of my children and my wife and
all that had happened now years ago. The parting was so bitter and jagged. Yet God
was there and saw it all. He was there and I have no doubt His heart broke.
Children can a times think only of the immediate and the momentum that drives
them inexorably towards eventual regret; in that frozen moment nothing is more important
that what is perceived the right way. Who can blame them? I had a key part in
that momentum being not only their father but pastor. And I had taught them
well to be soldiers in a desperate battle and to think only of the mission and
purpose and not focus on anything else…and they had learned well. They had
learned to cut losses, measure relationships in a balance to find them wanting,
to pack and move to another theater and
unpack, to march to the beat of an authority blindly, to take any hill at any
cost of life. They had learned from me how to shoot their own wounded – no longer
of use to the cause. This is the bare nature of dysfunction and misplaced
allegiance, it is what it is: idol worship. When men and woman stand in the
place of God all the while proclaiming themselves to be conduit of that
presence yet having lost it long ago—if they ever did have it.
What did I learn in that moment where bird and human eye
met? I saw it from God’s perspective and understood sovereignty more that I had
ever studied. It was allowing the force take precedence and to let what had
been set into motion play out. Moreover, in witnessing and letting it happen,
letting his own heart break over it. It
is not that God does not care or does not see the injustice…He does. It is not
that God is immune to the situations that do not go as planned…baby birds have
always fallen out of nests…some are rescued and others are not. But one thing I
learned that cool autumn morning….
His eye is on the sparrow…his eye is on me and my wife …His
eye is on our children; and His heart breaks. His is the God of parting and in
that moment where one becomes the part of another’s past, there is God and it is as B.B. Warfield once
said – ‘To believe that God Is not in control is to remove all comforts’.
In the end of it we will all see that literally we peered
through a glass darkly and this it is those who say they see that are blind…and
their sin remains. To those of us who have an inkling of this opaqueness, there
is a chance of compassion and graciousness and reconciliation. That is my hope.
In the end, there is a great feast in the halls of heaven and all will sit down
together and eat with the Master. All the soldiers from all the theaters will
beat the swords into plowshares like the rest and take their place at the
table. Eyes will meet and understand and all will be forgiven.
He is the God of parting and yet He in the end will draw
together the loose ends and frayed pieces and weave the most beautiful of
tapestries.