Destination Discipline

Life is beautiful. The natural world is filled with splendor. From the smallest leaf to the tallest tree, there is wonder in every cell of every living thing. It is truly amazing.

We are often too busy to notice or are easily distracted by insignificant things. We get sucked into a corporate mindset and convince ourselves that what we are doing makes a difference by how well we edit a spreadsheet. We seek to be entertained rather than to observe and interact with. Our vortex of self-involvement is rather astonishing.

I love to watch things grow. The birds around my feeder are so grossly wasteful. They scatter sunflower seeds like confetti. But one brilliant byproduct are the myriads of flowers that grow around and nearby as a result. I watch two leaves turn into four, then six, then ten. And then, just when I think they can’t be any more beautiful, they form a prickly round face which emerges in an effervescent show of yellow. And then there are a colony of smiling sunflowers standing and waving and following the sun from east to west each day. Right there in my backyard outside my window. What a gift! Every day is another miracle.

In contrast, there is also ugliness. I am often forced to deal with people who are cruel or unkind. There are neighbors who choose to harangue me. There are thunderstorms with great streaks of lightening. Hailstorms. Tornadoes. Floods. There is sickness. Cancer. Juvenile diabetes. Schizophrenia. Depression. Not only is life varied in its beauty, but it is also duplicitous in its bleak displays of sorrow and pain.

I was five years old the first time I lost a pet. Our dog Gypsy, a beautiful Collie whom I loved to brush and pet, was given away. She had shown aggression to my sister, who was then only three years old. My parents were afraid she would do something more serious, so they gave her to a neighbor who had fallen in love with her over the fence. I’ll never forget the night they took her away. I simply could not understand why my parents took away the animal that I loved so dearly. I sobbed out of the anguish of my little girl heart, begging them to let her stay. And for many years after she left, for I never saw her again, I hoped and dreamed that the people would bring her back. Her loss was a shadow over my childhood and something I never really recovered from.

It seems strange when I think about it now. Every fresh loss somehow stacks on top of the old losses. It’s not like one gets used to pets going away or dying. Worse, we compare them to each other. The loss of certain pets seems more prominent than others, whether because they displayed more pleasing character attributes or because they were younger or prettier. I don’t sit around thinking about Gypsy. I don’t really miss her anymore. But when I consider the pain of that loss, it is as resonant today as it was 44 years ago.

Tank when he was feeling suave

We’ve had two losses in the past week. First, our dog Tank, a boxer, and second, one of our beloved Australorp chickens. I have so many conflicting feelings. Pets are a lot of responsibility, and I was rather ready to be done having a dog. I’ve had a dog in some shape or form for the past 24 years and I wanted a break. I expected to be relieved, especially since Tank had several health issues and we had been visiting the vet or emergency vet off and on with some regularity. There were pills and special food and more sleepless nights that I like to think about. But then I remember his eyes and the tender way in which he regarded me when I took care of him. If one was able to fully convey the weight of adoration in a glance, Tank was. I felt his love for me. He was grateful for his life with us. Even at his last moments when we were saying goodbye, he seemed to say, “Thanks, Mom.” Therefore, the loss of him feels larger than my body can tolerate.

Ephraim with Jane

Jane was different. She was only a year old and in the prime of her life. She was a fat, black hen who was very insistent about her treats and liked to make happy little “bur bur burp” sounds when I wasn’t feeding her fast enough. Ephraim called her his lap chicken and was always bringing

her into the house for cuddles. No matter how many times I told him she obviously didn’t want to be held or cuddled, he insisted. And she tolerated him. She was laid back like that. And since she was rather large and meaty, she wasn’t able to run away very fast. Our one consolation after losing Tank on Tuesday was that we had Jane to cuddle. This morning, I found her dead in the coop.

So, we grieve. We experienced beauty and now we experience loss. This doesn’t mean beauty has ceased, only that our eyes are too filled with tears to see it at the moment.

So I hopped on my bike this morning to try and get my mind off searing loss. I haven’t been on a ride in many months. I found the roads had changed. Pavement had been resurfaced and intersections were under construction. The wide shoulders I ride with pleasure were cordoned off and I had to ride in the road with the scary cars (who I always fear will run me over). I thought about how the people at work are always talking about change and how we have to get comfortable with change. We have to adapt. We have to learn and grow. But I struggle with change. I want everything and everyone to stay the same. Sameness is equivalent to comfort in my mind’s eye. And then I saw the baby water turtles that had perished on the side of the road near the wetlands. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I saw several dead baby ducks. I started to weep again. “Why must everything and everyone die? Why must everything always change?”

But then I considered how silly I look. Riding my bike weeping opening. People will certainly think I am goofy for crying about little creatures who have perished by the wayside much less over a pet chicken and an old dog. And this thought made me so much sadder. Grief can make one feel so lonely because we think no one will care or understand. Grief is a terrible burden.

I found comfort today in a sermon by Voddie Baucham titled, “Fighting for joy in the journey”. He reminded me (by way of 2 Timothy 4) how we must remember the story is not all about us. The real story of life is about God and all that He is doing.

“As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.” 2 Timothy 4:5

Flowers from a friend

The story of the world and of creation is God doing all of these remarkable things to point to how good He is. When I told Ephraim about Jane dying, his choking sobs reminded me of that five-year-old girl mourning the loss of her beautiful dog. There was a brokenness that can’t be mended with social media, ice cream or any other human thing. But what is true and lasting is the gospel message of hope through Jesus Christ – who conquered death – who raised from the dead – who is alive today and reigning victorious over a sin-saturated world. His journey from the throne room of Heaven to earth was extremely lonely. The prophet Isaiah called him “a man of sorrows and familiar with grief.” So, when we grieve the loss and pain in this world and cry out to Jesus, He is able to comfort us because he knows how we feel. He isn’t distant or uncaring or too “sovereign” to be bothered with us little people. He loves us. He came to save us from our sin. This is the good news of the gospel. Death isn’t the end of the story. It’s only a chapter in the great story of life.

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” – Hebrews 4:15-16

What a comfort it is to know that there is grace enough for us in our time of grief. Grace will sustain us when we can’t take another step forward. If we are willing to surrender our sorrows and pain to God, He is able to carry us and sustain us through our darkest hours of suffering.

Bumblebee on my iris

There are more miracles happening even as I write this. There is a hummingbird hovering over the feeder. There is a brown thrasher running through my sunflowers and making a rather prominent stand for the rest of the birds to see. And while my feet are cold because I haven’t any dog to lay on them to keep them warm, I have beautiful memories of love that I wouldn’t trade for anything. And I’m sure there are so many more miracles to come. There are so many more wonderful things to see and taste and experience from the hand of God. I am once again reminded of the words of another suffering saint, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.”

And it’s true. He lives. And He does comfort us. My burden of grief already feels lighter. What a remarkable gift it is to be loved by a beautiful Savior.

I’ve never felt comfortable in my own skin. My hips are too wide, but not wide enough to deliver a baby (I’ve had 3 c-sections). My belly is too saggy. My brain gets foggy at times and I’m frequently temperamental. And all my life I’ve felt as if I don’t really fit in anywhere. But somehow, I knew the love of God was bigger than all my flaws. My body is just the temporal habitation for a soul that is traveling to a greater plane of existence. But in the interim, this world can be an awfully painful and lonely place.

“I feel broken. The only thing that makes me feel good is not pretending otherwise.” – Rich Mullins

Rich Mullins

I’ve just finished watching Ragamuffin, the Rich Mullins story. His music has moved me in recent years, though I never heard any of it when he was alive. His cd, “Songs” has been on replay in my car for a few months and I never seem to get tired of hearing buffalo hooves resound early in the morning on my way to work. Not that there are actual buffalo hooves on the album, but I can almost feel them when he sings about them. But there is another one of the turns of phrase he uses never ceases to move me to tears.

 “There’s people been friendly, but they’d never be your friend. Sometimes this has bent me to the ground.” – Rich Mullins, Elijah

The thing is, I stopped trusting church people a few years back. And lately when I go to church, and people are friendly, I think, “These people may be nice, but they are not my friends.” They have never invited me to their house, or called me, or cared one whit for me really. I don’t hold it against them. I haven’t invited them either. Part of that is fear. Another part is that sometimes I’m in so much emotional pain as I deal with my difficult life that I just don’t have capacity for anything else. There was a time in my life I spent a lot of time in house churches and in relationships with church people. And I am sad that I’ve given up on the church. I don’t think that’s right. And I want to keep trying.

Today is Sunday and I had the argument with myself again. Do I try to go one more time or do I just give up and stay at home? So, I went to the park and ran 7 miles around the lake and listened to one of my favorite (dead) pastors preach. Martin Lloyd Jones. He’s done a lot for my soul and I’m grateful his sermons were recorded for lay people like me. And then, I sucked it up and took my granddaughter to church.

It never stops being painful that my husband won’t go with me. And now, my 15-year-old won’t go either. And he gives me all kinds of lip when I ask him to. So, I drive there feeling yet again that ache in my heart that I don’t really fit at this church I’ve been attending, where most of the people have spouses and children and there’s me, the misfit.

It was Palm Sunday after all. And it seemed right to be in church, no matter how wrong it felt.

I guess that is why I found myself weeping while watching Ragamuffin. Rich Mullins gave me words for the brokenness I feel with resounding reassurance of the love God has for me in my brokenness. All of this guilt and shame I feel for sin no one can see, and all of the wrongs I do that bother the people I live with. I get to feeling like I really can’t do anything right. I mean, have you ever felt that way? And then there’s the love of Jesus that’s so much bigger than all that. And He’s just waiting to take me in His arms and remind me that no matter how “wrong” I feel at any given moment, I belong to Him.

There were tears dripping down my chin and I just kept wiping them with the sleeve of my holey t-shirt. And each tear was like a prayer saying, “I accept your love, God. I surrender.”

Because I’m pretty stubborn. And the older I get, the more stubborn I get. Which is why Rich’s lyrics reach me when nothing else does.

“Surrender don’t come natural to me
I’d rather fight You for something I don’t really want
Than to take what you give that I need
And I’ve beat my head against so many walls
Now I’m falling down, I’m falling on my knees” – Rich Mullins – Hold me Jesus

It seems crazy I’ve lost all this weight and I’m living a healthy lifestyle and I’m still rather mixed up inside my head. I honestly thought losing the weight would make me normal. Or at least more like the people around me. And I guess in some ways it does. I can have a conversation about exercise and eating healthy foods with the best of them. But then I go home to my disordered eating and I’m so glad nobody can see. Because I’ll always struggle with food addiction. I know that now. But for the love of God, I would go mad. His mercies are new every morning. Great is his faithfulness.

I was running at the park this morning and grieving my life the way I often do when no one can see. When the sadness piles up like a scratchy wool blanket and starts to smother me, I reach for music to help me breathe again. And I heard the most beautiful song by Sarah Groves and just worshipped. And I’ll end there. Because it’s true, He’s always been faithful.

“Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. ” – Ecclesiastes 4:1

Jack Reacher is the kind of dude you want on your side. He is ex-military. He is strong. He is noble. He seeks to protect the helpless. And he’s easy on the eyes. He is reticent to speak, so you don’t have to worry about him saying stupid stuff. And he is well-intended. But the best thing about Jack Reacher is he has a really strong sense of what is righteous and the drive to punish wicked men.

Evil is nothing new, which is why we need heroes. We want a large, buff guy to run to our rescue and bop the bad guys on the head. We want them to give us a hug and tell us everything is going to be alright. Or at the very least, we want a reassuring grunt and a nod after the villain has been tossed over a cliff. But since we don’t live in tv land, we are kind of stuck with local law enforcement. Unfortunately, they can’t be everywhere at once and when they do respond, they don’t light bad guys on fire to punish them for their evil deeds.

Now maybe you are thinking, “I don’t want the police to light bad guys on fire.” Well, maybe you haven’t been seriously wronged lately. This world is filled with some seriously unholy people. Larry Nassar. Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes. We are surrounded with serial sex offenders to the point the police have a database available online so people can be aware and informed. Worse, we have a seriously flawed justice system that lets bad guys go free. I think this is why the character of Jack Reacher is so popular. He takes care of business to ensure bad people meet a timely demise.

We want justice. We want wrongs to be righted. And much of what happens in this world feels wrong. But what if justice is not actually what we seek? What if what we really seek is vengeance?

One of my favorite books in the bible is Ecclesiastes. The Preacher (a king over Israel) wrote things like, “Vanity of vanities. All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” But he also wrote, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to kill, and a time to heal.” It made me wonder what a conversation with Jack Reacher and the Preacher would sound like. I have a feeling much of the conversation would them be nodding in agreement.

Reacher says, “I’m a rich man. To have everything you need is the definition of affluence.”

The Preacher says, “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity.”

Reacher says, “Hit them fast, hit them hard, and hit them a lot.”

The Preacher says, “For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.”

Reacher says, “I know I’m smarter than an armadillo.”

The Preacher says, “The wise person has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness.”

Reacher says, “Slippery slope. I carry a spare shirt, pretty soon I’m carrying spare pants. Then I’d need a suitcase. Next thing I know, I’ve got a house and a car and a savings plan and I’m filling out all kinds of forms.”

The Preacher says, “Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.”

I’m not going to lie. I kind of wish Jack Reacher was real and I knew him. There are guys like him in the real world. They are the Navy Seals and Marines that protect our country and make the world a safer place. But even they are shackled by laws that forbid them to burn bad guys up.

“Then I saw the wicked buried. They used to go in and out of the holy place and were praised in the city where they had done such things. This also is vanity. Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil. ” – Ecclesiastes 8:10-11

Jack Reacher

While watching Reacher on Amazon Prime, I’ve thought a lot about what justice is. Is justice killing the people who killed your brother? (The plot of ‘Killing Floor’.) Or is justice locking someone up for life where they can’t hurt anyone else? Because as much as I enjoy watching Jack Reacher dole out his version of justice, it doesn’t square with my worldview and feels more like vengeance. The one thing lacking in the story is any kind of accountability from God. The bodies stack up but there is no eternal significance. And in the end, Jack Reacher is just a (self-proclaimed) hobo wandering throughout the world alone. No family to speak of. No home to go to. He doesn’t have a particularly happy ending. (At least not the kind we can write about on this blog.) In the end, the Reacher series inspires within me a thirst for a truly righteous hero who doles out justice without the vengeance afterburn. Namely, I want a satisfying conclusion. Which is probably what made me think of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes.

“Though a sinner does evil a hundred times and prolongs his life, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God, because they fear before him. But it will not be well with the wicked, neither will he prolong his days like a shadow, because he does not fear before God.” – Ecclesiastes 8:12-13

Our lives bear the mark of a creator who is both righteous and just. Otherwise, where would we get our sense of righteousness and justice from? Certainly not from the hearts of men who desire evil constantly (and that would be all of us). The Preacher says we do well to ‘fear before God’. More importantly, Jesus said, “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matthew 10:28) The most satisfying conclusion in life for me is faith in and through Jesus – the savior of the world. Jesus is the hero who best suits my needs. He imparts his righteousness to me, a flawed and sinful creature. His rule and reign are forever.  His justice is supreme.

Jack Reacher is a ‘comic’ book character with some seriously witty lines, thanks to author Lee Child. The Preacher was a real king who recognized the vanity in life and pointed to the creator as the source of all that is good and wise. In some of his final words, he wrote, “and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” (Ecclesiastes 12:7) I suppose that would be the king’s retort to Reacher, after all. And probably, in light of this, Reacher would have nothing to say.