The Wisdom of Hobbits

A special dedication tonight

To Brian, my best friend and faithful companion there and back again.

And to everyone in the middle of their story.

Tonight I’m thinking about a different book. I may be going a little bit nutty, but it does seem like God has been answering my prayers tonight with LOTR movie quotes and it feels, quite eerily, like I’m having a conversation with a little hobbit whose spirits are hard to dampen.  

I, like Frodo before me, am having a good wrestle with some truth, even though, deep down, I know the fight is useless and truth will win every time, I doesn’t feel that way right now. So I’m sitting here feeling rather sorry for myself in my current predicament. I’m wishing very much that my abnormal life could at least appear normal so I could pretend it was normal. The weight of circumstances, like that of an evil ring that doesn’t want to be thrown into a volcano, is growing with each passing day.  I’ve reached what seems like the breaking point. I don’t want to keep going. I’m scared and miserable, despite what I know to be true, despite what I know needs to be done. And I guess I’m, in a way, getting a pep-talk from a fictional Hobbit. This particular pep-talk comes from the end of the Two Towers (I honestly don’t remember if it’s in the book, so I’m quoting the movie. If you think that makes me a Tolkienian poser, please also consider that while I have read the trilogy three times, I have seen the movies three or four dozen times. Also, please don’t calculate how much time that means I have roughly spent watching those films. I did, and it was rather depressing, but I digress).

For the purpose of illustration, and for fun, I have decided to dictate how that conversation is going, and it goes something like this…

 “I can’t do this, Sam,” I groan and curl up into a tighter little ball, resisting the urge to cry but not the one to pout.

“I know,” he says, empathetically. “By rights, we shouldn’t even be here, but we are.”

“I’ve been carrying this around for too long. Something has got to give. I have done my best, done what I was told to do.  Why can’t it just get easier instead of harder?!”

He considers this a moment, and then perks up like he has a bit of wisdom to share. “It’s like the old stories, the ones that really mattered.”

I immediately picture Joseph at the bottom of a pit, listening to his brothers negotiating his price, a throng of a hundred thousand people coming the Red Sea, knowing they need to cross and they don’t know how that could possibly happen. I see Sarah placing her hand on her belly watching all the young women play with their children and wondering if God’s promise would actually come true.

“Full of darkness and danger, they were,” He continues. “And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?”

“It can’t!” I interrupt, frustrated. “It can’t go back to the way it was because even if it was as fine and dandy as it used to be, I can’t ignore the things that I now know were wrong and that I need to change.”

Sam nods, understanding, and puts his hand on my shoulder. “But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow.”

I want to protest, but I know it’s true. I know that even if circumstances don’t change, there is a better life to come. I don’t want to say it, because hope seems like too dangerous a word tonight. But I listen because it’s what I need to hear.

“Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.”

This sounds a little too bright and perky for this hour, but I can’t argue with it.

“Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why.”

I know what I need to do. Even if my tale of faith won’t make it into canonized scripture to be read by billions throughout the generations, I know it still means something, and it still matters, and I’m still relying on the same God who came through for all the others time and time again.

“Folk in those stories,” Sam says, as if he’s talking about me now, “had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

I think about what I’m holding onto. It’s more than "there is good in this world it's worth fighting for". It’s that God exists outside of the norm, outside of our human experience, outside of what is commonplace and expected. He’s called me out of those things and into the world of faith, and even if it’s messy and painful and exhausting, it’s where I am. It’s where I should be, and somehow, it’s better than anywhere else I could be.

This is going to pass. Somehow. The story will mean something. Eventually. It’s not going to change tonight. It may take years like it did for Sarah to have the child God promised her and like it did as Joseph went from slave to prisoner to second in command of all Egypt. It may take a form I would never have thought possible, like it did for those people who watched the water split apart and walked on the bottom of the sea. If this is where God has me, then I need to stop trying to fit into normal. I need to stop longing for my cozy little Hobbit hole and tea cake. I can’t be ashamed anymore of what faith looks like to everyone else. If there is going to be a story here, it needs to be told because it means something, even if I’m still entirely "too small to understand why". 

The Dismembered Bride

The church is often called the bride and Christ the bridegroom. The role of the bride is to make herself ready for him (Revelation 19). She spends the day preparing, making herself beautiful, waiting in excitement and anticipation of the one who will come for her.

Forgive me if I over-extend the metaphor here, but I have a point. This is what I have seen recently from a great many people in the church. The bride wants to be pure and perfect, but then, this hair is out of place so she pulls it out. This fingernail is crooked so she trims it. One thing doesn’t seem quite right or doesn’t go with another part, and she cuts it off, bit by bit, until the bridegroom shows up and his beautiful bride has been pulled apart and limb from limb. In an attempt to perfect herself she has divided herself, leaving her groom with all of the pieces he loved, but none of them together.

I understand perfectly the desire for the truth and perfection of faith. My desire is to not be deceived and to understand as much as I can as clearly as I can, but I do not understand the relentless unsolvable debates and death matches Christians engage in among themselves. It’s not that I don’t think these topics have value in discussion, it’s how they are discussed that causes dismemberment.

In college, one of my favorite things about the first day of the semester was to observe the personalities I would be in class with. You see, even the most learned of professors, I had the honor to be taught by, would approach these difficult topics (such as predestination, works and faith or faith alone, denominational differences, women's roles in the church, old-earth new-earth, post-trib pre-trib, cessationism continualist) with an understanding that they couldn't say definitively that they were right, but would explain their own opinions. And even if I didn't agree entirely, I respected their humility and felt they were worth listening to. Then they would open it up to the class for discussion, and as soon as the freshman Biblical Studies majors would start having at it, I would tune out and start doodling. They were always absolutely convinced they got it right, and if they could shout loudly enough, they could win.

I know it doesn’t stop at the classroom. I know there are debates and arguments among large groups of believers that carry so much “zeal” that anyone from the outside would only see it as animosity.

I could stay out of the conversation in the classroom, but sometimes it hits when I’m not expecting it, from people I’m not expecting it from. And maybe this makes me a coward, but I duck out as soon as I can when I realize it’s no longer a discussion, but more like being yelled by a brick wall.

You see, I know what the Bible says. I know who said what in what context and who said whatever seemingly conflicts with the first guy. I see things that confuse me. I wrestle with them in coversations with people and on my own with God. I see a need to strive to understand. But I also see a need to let things lie when there isn’t a way to go.

My approach is to look at what God says like a geometry text book being presented to a first grader. Everything written is true. Some things are easy to understand, like circles, triangles and numbers, but the rest is too big and the details get kind of lost. The more we talk to the author, the more we understand, but we're still little and we can't fully get it. What we may see as discrepancies are just truths we can’t grasp yet, and maybe were never meant to.

Bottom line, I chalk it up to a really big God trying to explain the workings of his mind and the universe with itty-bitty people. We should never stop searching, but we need to stop fighting each other. We need to listen and we need to share the wisdom we have, but we can do that without lopping off body parts. 

I’m writing this while watching the Hunger Games and I am reminded of a line from Catching Fire. “Remember who the real enemy is.” If we don’t stop tearing our-self apart, we can’t be effective in the real war.

Jesus would often speak in parables and would say “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear,” (Mark 4:9). Sometimes the Bible works like that too. It's not always clear at first glance, but that means we have to seek God and wait to understand in our time. That often entails hearing another opinion, sharing our own, and, if your mind isn’t changed and you haven’t changed theirs, then letting it go for a while.

I think that, as a bride waiting for out groom, we have to start accepting that.

We have to remember we are all on the same team. Our goal is to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. While we also need to keep each other accountable to the truth, we are called to do so in humility and love. If there is an impasse, we need to leave it up to God to defend his own truth, and walk away from the battle.

We don’t know the time when the Bridegroom will return, but we know he doesn’t want to return to a bloody mess in place of his beautiful bride. 

Words from the Belly of the Whale

I almost didn’t write tonight, just like I haven’t written for the past few weeks. I could spin a lot of excuses about how I was busy or didn’t have anything to say, but the truth is, I was just scared.

Vulnerability makes everyone feel icky. I am no exception. The ickiness was so intense these last couple weeks that I have neglected to write for fear of it further intensifying. But God called me to start a blog and share the stuff that he and I talk about and I let my fear get in the way of what he called me to do, so like Jonah running from Nineveh, I ran from you people. Now I’m in a bit of a whale sized capsule of ickiness. And so I say I'm sorry to my handful of faithful readers and anyone else who may have perhaps needed the words I was too scared to write.

So to make up for lost time, I guess this post in kind of two in one. First is about vulnerability and how fear affects the bodyof Christ. And second it’s about knowing what God thinks of you and living by that before anyone else’s opinion, even your own. I don’t know exactly how personal all of this will get, but if I’m battling the fear of ickiness, may as well face it head on.

To put my thoughts and personal revelations about God on the internet brings both moments of excitement and ones of terror. I admit to being sheepish even in the way I phrase certain truths. In some cases, that kind of tip-towing is good and useful because there are some delicate and easily misunderstood topics that require care. Other times, it just makes me appear less sure than I am about the incredible invincibility of God’s word, and that sucks.

Writing these posts puts my personal walk with God on a page accessible for anyone. Accessible for anyone to misinterpret, for anyone to speak badly about, to question my faith and my character and sanity and use of the English language. And for about three weeks, I didn’t want to give you all that chance.

Now I'm having to repent and say sorry and it's making me all the more vulnerable and all the more icky, but I also know I'll feel better for it later.

Well, I'm pretty darn pissed off at ickiness. The fear of discomfort that stops people from doing what they need to do, the sneaky little lies and justifications Satan deposits in our minds have the function of chaining us back, sewing our mouths closed, and restraining the true Gospel. And I am guilty of thinking my comfort was more important than what God may want to do through me.

There are an awful lot of lies floating around and what I really need is to just lay down some truth. The truth is that when we humbly seek God and to understand him and to share his truth, he has us covered. He won’t let us fall without also granting redemption. And it is sometimes worse to miss an opportunity than it is to make a mistake by taking action.

If you are seeking god humbly and prayerfully, especially around others who do the same, there is no shame in vulnerability. If you later find out you were wrong, you repent and move forward. If someone says you were wrong and you weren't, you're covered by God. He will defend his truth, it s not your burden to defend him or yourself. If you have a struggle that you're afraid of sharing because you either don't know someone well enough or you know them too well, but God urges you on to seek help among the body, nothing they can do in judgment will negate God's intentions for you and the rewards you will receive by obeying him.

Being vulnerable and still having peace is dependent on knowing that what God says about you is true and what anybody else thinks is irrelevant. If you're afraid of speaking because you may be wrong, if you're afraid of going because you might come back in shame, if you're afraid of trying because you may fail, listen for the truth and declare it, from the rooftops, to the masses, or online.

Which leads me to part two, there are a lot of lies Satan would love to have us believe about ourselves that make it all the harder to do what God tells us to do. Satan wanted Moses to believe that he couldn’t speak well enough to be effective. The truth was that God’s power was not dependent on Moses’ ability. The only way to combat those lies is to declare the truth so, (gulp) here goes…

I am really really bad at thinking good things about myself. I either assume other people don’t see them or will think of me as conceited if I do. I struggle with believing I have anything to offer. I feel like a nuisance people want eradicated. I feel like my struggles and pain are too much hassle to bother anyone else with, and I am even afraid that someone is going to misread this as a call for attention or compliments. I struggle in believing that I can only do more harm than good, and that avoiding ickiness and pain was made possible only by giving into fear. I hide a lot and strive to keep out of the way. I feel almost dirty trying to force myself to feel differently, because doing so would just prove that I really am conceited or selfish or annoying.

I feel called to declare something that makes me feel more uncomfortable than anything else I have ever written. I can imagine all of the ways someone can twist what I know to be true, and how I may regret this tomorrow. But I know it is the truth, even if it's hard to believe sometimes, and even if there is another force trying to make me forget it.

(Deep breath because I'm really uncomfortable actually writing this) God has revealed things to me. He has given me wisdom and I have things to offer other people. My words have value. I am a blessing, not because of anything I have accomplished, but because of how God has chosen to use me.

God says to me "I have given you your worth." "I have called you to speak, write, and lead with what I show you." "I have redeemed your mistakes and will always do so." "You are a treasure, not an issue." “I have chosen where you are, who you are around, who comes into your path. Don’t hide anymore!” “I give you words and you can trust what you say when you follow me.” “Only what I say about you matters.”

So here is a lesson in knowing what God says about you and ignoring what you say about yourself. My prayer for anyone reading this is that you find the courage to declare the truth and fight the lies so as to never be afraid to act according to your calling.