Our stories…

It seems we can easily be so caught up in our living that we miss the story that we are creating in the midst of God’s much larger story. Too often we think of the word “story” and the old “once upon a time” words come to mind, but our stories are so much more than the fairytales that open with such words.

I was reminded of that truth once again as I read these words of Lisa Wingate in her novel, The Storykeeper:

“Our stories are powerful. They teach, they speak, they inspire. They bring about change. But they are also fragile. Their threads are so easily broken by time, by lack of interest, by failure to understand the value that comes from knowing where we have been and who we have been. In this speed-of-light culture, our histories are fading more quickly than ever. Yet when we lose our stories, we lose ourselves…”

Moment by moment we are moving toward the next day, the next thing, the next goal, or the next prayer.

Do we focus on the dark times, the deep valleys, the mistakes, and the disappointments or do we only look at the victories and goals achieved?

If we choose only the best or the worst, we do so to our detriment and miss how God used each in the story to point to Him. Our perspective about each of those comes from the context the whole of our story provides.

It is often only in hindsight we discover some of the nuggets of God’s working, how He chose to answer each prayer, and how his timing was better than ours, his answer the better one.

It’s then we realize that the poor choices we made in the past didn’t need to define us and He could show us better choices were possible now and empower us to make them. And perhaps we might come to understand that He has chosen us to be a part of HIS story, HIS grand story.

He wants us to learn from the story, the testament He left for us to point the way.

The mistakes we make are the very ones that teach us the most, that shape our character, and highlight the Lord’s grace and light, his mercy and love. If we choose not to pay attention, not to learn from them, we do so at our peril.

History has always been a favorite subject of mine. I find most of it fascinating and revelatory. It shows the tendency of humankind to ignore it and fall prey to misery many times over.

The basic principle is actually quite straightforward, and Paul sums it up perfectly in his epistle to Galatians:

¹³ You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. ¹⁴ For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁵ If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.

Galatians 5:13-15 (NIV)

That grand gift God gave mankind at the very outset – freedom of choice – has been what we stumble over again and again. We want to indulge ourselves with that heady gift of freedom to say what we wish, do what we want and often with no regard to the consequences for ourselves or anyone else. We want to do what the lyrics of the song made famous by Frank Sinatra speak of – “my way.”

One thing that might help us is to grapple with this truth John Eldredge penned in Walking with God:

“Don’t let this throw you. Things may not unfold the way you think they will when you’re following God. Remember – he is after both our transformation and our joy. The one hangs upon the other.”

If you are tempted to shun your story or believe it is of no value, look at the heroes of the faith, look at the legends of history. They have much to teach us.

“Every single one of us – even the boldest among us – will at times deny Him, or fall asleep, or fall away in our own ways. Even our greatest commitment to Him is not enough.

But still, His covenant is greater. It is not dependent on our ability to answer the questions with courage, to do the right thing, or even to keep the commitment in faith. Jesus knows that in our human brokenness, we simply cannot do it on our own. So, He made a way. He took on our shame and our sin to be with us.”

Eric and Kristen Hill in The First Breakfast

And that is the very best story we could ever be a part of.

I confess to being a Star Wars fan. Our family has great memories of waiting in line to see the very first in the movie series, Episode IV-A Lost Hope that was released May 25, 1977. It was a given that we were looking forward to Episode VII-The Force Awakens when it was released December 18, 2015.

The series brings back images of westerns of an earlier time period where the battle between good and evil was somehow clearer than many movies today.

I think our hearts are captured by the conquest of the good and right standing against the evil. Perhaps it gives us hope in our own battles and conquests that ultimately good will win out over evil, light will prevail over darkness.

When Star Wars came on the scene it took us on journeys into the unknown. There were galaxies beyond our own to discover, bizarre and eerie characters to study, and sorting out the truth about “the Force” accompanied by a musical score that accentuated the story unfolding on the screen. That same musical score would be etched in our memories as high school bands learned it and used it as a highlight of their halftime shows at fall football games.

I wonder if we recognize movies about treks into space are not the only journeys into the unknown.

Each of our days is just such a journey. Yes, I make plans and think of seasons of life common to us all, but each day unfolds revealing how little control I have over its twists and turns. Somehow I can feel less excited about that than I might in a movie.

My journey into the unknown requires so much more of me than a space movie.

One of my favorite Bible stories of journeying into the unknown is found in Joshua. For as horrible as conditions in Egypt were for the children of Israel, it became clear soon enough after they crossed the Red Sea that the trek they were beginning would expose them to much they had never seen or experienced. The conditions would not be easy and we know how they faltered under the leadership of Moses and balked at times when Joshua took the lead.

The Israelites were stepping off into the unknown, but have we forgotten that it was not unknown to God?

God knew the destination and had planned for the route He desired them to take. He also knew it would birth a new level of faith and trust in the people He had called out of slavery in Egypt. The conditions they faced would not be comfortable, but that was less significant to God. He knew these conditions would be temporary, but the development of their faith and trust would endure forever.

The Israelites needed to learn God could be trusted.

So do we.

The Israelites needed to know the land the spies had described that was flowing with milk and honey was not to be the source of their faith. Their faith and trust needed to be in the One who had bequeathed the Promised Land to them.

Page by page in the book of Joshua we discover the challenge to grow in faith that God was good and was for their good as they wandered day by day extending into forty years of their lives. The children of Israel also needed to come to grips with the unexpected challenges they faced and the fears that sought to overtake them.

I wonder if the journey was less about gaining the Promised Land and more about believing that God could be trusted.

Isn’t His first and foremost desire to be in relationship with and for us to know Him as He truly is? To know He is good. To know He is trustworthy. To know that our unknown is not unknown to Him.

Consider this…

Is that what He also wants us to see on our own journey into the unknown?

Attending a one-room schoolhouse is something most people have only read about, but for me it was a reality for the first and second grade. Eight grades in one large room provided an experience like no other.

Of course there were only a few students for each grade and as I think about it, those moms today who home school their children probably have a greater feel for the experience than most anyone else. Even so, to have 25 students in one room at different grade levels taught by one teacher meant you needed an extraordinary teacher.

My teacher’s name was Mrs. Queen and the name fit her as perfectly as the smile she always wore.

The room was arranged with desks in rows and sections according to grade level. A large coal stove stood to one side and was used to heat the room in the winter. Behind the stove were a row of hooks for coats and jackets. Bathrooms were the more primitive outdoor variety. The playground had one set of swings and an abundance of grass.

I was one of three little girls in the first grade. Our desks were up front in the room, but the front wall’s black chalkboard gave us a glimpse of what other grades were assigned and we could also hear and benefit from the instruction students above us received.

The disadvantage for me was my seeming inability to tune out the instruction for other grades and focus on my own work. It sounded more interesting than the work I was assigned. I also am and was a very auditory learner so I would zero in on all sorts of new information long before that material would be given to me. In fact, I learned a lot by listening.

I listened so well to the other girls in my class reading aloud that when it came to my turn, I could read the pages without stumbling over a single word.

It seemed like I was the best reader in the class and I got credit for that until Mrs. Queen discovered the truth.

I was not reading the words, but imitating. I pretended to read, but had instead memorized the stories in the reading book.

It was almost the middle of the first grade and I was caught. My parents were told and I needed to start at the beginning of the first grade reader again.

There are many things I learned by imitation and this may not be a bad thing, but some things do not work that way. I can imitate the way my mother crimped a piecrust. I can imitate how I use my camera lens after I watch a You Tube video. I can imitate a British accent after watching Downton Abbey.

In the spiritual realm, I cannot imitate the nature of Jesus.

It is either in me or it is not.

As a believer, I am called to often be and do what is not my duty, to love when it would be easier to resent, to persevere when it would be easier to walk away, to respond with grace when a comment made is less then loving.

If I only imitate, I will be found out as surely as Mrs. Queen detected I was not reading. I will also dishonor the Lord in my life when others discover I was only imitating.

His character cannot be imitated. It only happens by the infusion of His life and Spirit at work within me.

When the Lord created humankind, he calibrated our hearts to be lovers above all else and to have that love aligned toward Him and his designs and desires for the Kingdom here on earth. But in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve yielded the ground of their hearts to Lucifer when he nudged the desires of their hearts for the forbidden fruit, the hearts of humankind got out of sync. The original calibration went amiss.

This loving what was from God should have been straightforward and easier, but from that day forward what we longed for and desired was always influenced by the choices made back then in Eden. The allure of many things could distract us from the best things, and they did. Our sin nature pulled at the threads of our subconscious.

The wants, longings and desires of our hearts are what impact everything we do and tend to determine the course we are on. It is the battleground that either helps or hinders the renewal of our minds. And since our loves can be pulled in so many directions from an array of influences (some recognized and others not), gaining more understanding about the ground we are to guard and protect is crucial.

God knew that we needed a heart fix, a major heart adjustment to regain the clear recognition that He is love and we are made to be lovers of all things godly and good. When Jesus volunteered to come to earth in the flesh, one of the key purposes was to show us what love is, who He is and always was. He wanted to clarify what we wanted, sought, and yearned for as the crux of the matter. John showed us that in his Gospel when we saw Jesus ask the key question, “What are you seeking?

When sin had entered back in Eden, the sacrifices humankind knew from the Old Testament had been an effort to find our way back to God, but the relationship was still damaged because the blood of bulls, lambs, goats, and doves did not change the heart. But there was one thing that could and that was what Jesus intended to do when He chose to lay down his life on the cross and then allow the Holy Spirit to come to speak to us in our hearts so our hearts could begin to be recalibrated to what God planned at the outset.

Calibration means to set or adjust something so it works as it was designed to work. If something is amiss from the original settings, then recalibration is needed.

The truth is that our hearts need to be recalibrated. The Lord’s love sacrifice at Calvary opened the door for us if we have invited Him into our hearts, but life is still tricky and our adversary stays busy with his old tricks trying to lure us to love other things and distract us from the path our hearts are to take.

“While being human means we can’t not love something ultimate – some version of the kingdom – it doesn’t mean we necessarily love the right things, or the true King. God has created us for himself and our hearts are designed to find their end in him, yet many spend their days restlessly craving rival gods, frenetically pursuing rival kingdoms. The subconscious longings of our hearts are aimed and directed elsewhere; our orientation is askew; our erotic compass malfunctions, giving us false bearings.”

James K.A. Smith

Those subconscious things have often been there for a long time and they have taken ground because we practiced them as habits, we sought to satisfy longings. What we didn’t recognize at the time was that those things we were doing were also doing something to us and it wasn’t going to be easy to stop doing them. In truth they were affecting what we worshipped as they became idols we yielded to again and again.

Even as believers at the outset those old subconscious yearnings were not totally tamed, and they would haunt us and track us hoping we would yield. When we tried to think our way through the challenge, we could sometimes see what happened but that didn’t totally quell the heart’s old tastes.

Worship as a path to recalibration is a key tool because we don’t think our way toward worshipping God.

James K.A. Smith clarifies why worship is essential to the task:

“A more holistic response is to intentionally recalibrate the unconscious, to worship well, to immerse ourselves in liturgies that are indexed to the kingdom of God precisely so that even our unconscious desires and longings – the affective, under-the-hood ways we intend the world – are indexed to God and what God wants for his world.

The practices of Christian worship train our love – they are practice for the coming kingdom, habituating us as citizens of the kingdom of God.”

From You Are What You Love

I think Paul understood a great deal about what was needed to recalibrate our hearts. Listen to what he said to the church at Colossae:

^“15 Let your heart be always guided by the peace of the Anointed One, who called you to peace as part of his one body. And always be thankful.

¹⁶ Let the word of Christ live in you richly, flooding you with all wisdom. Apply the Scriptures as you teach and instruct one another with the Psalms, and with festive praises, and with prophetic songs given to you spontaneously by the Spirit, so sing to God with all your hearts!”

Colossians 3:15-16 (TPT)

Smith echoes that when he writes:

“The orientation of the heart happens from the bottom up, through the formation of our habits of desire. Learning to love (God) takes practice.”

William Shakespeare wrote the five-act comedy As You Like It that was published in 1623. A few lines from that classic are found in a well-known speech that begins:

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players…”

William Shakespeare

No, I have not been reading Shakespeare of late, but his words came back to me as I was reading a portion of “the Sermon on the Mount” in the Gospel of Matthew today in The Message contemporary rendering of Chapter 6 done by Eugene Peterson. He entitled the beginning of the chapter “The World is Not a Stage” and that set me to pondering the words penned by Shakespeare that sound so logical in contrast to Peterson’s heading to this chapter.

Most of us might agree that we play various roles on the earth after we are born and the word “roles” might suggest that we are truly actors on a stage, but that would diminish each of us and the biblical narrative we read throughout the pages of the Bible. In biblical text we are unique individuals created by God, called to a purpose with choices that influence the path we take as well as some of the roles we have along the way.

Actors on a stage do not speak words of their own choosing nor are they often representative of the person speaking them at all. Actors speak words written by one person, directed by another person who interprets and determines how each scene will be played out to the tiniest detail. They will determine our entrance and exit, what we will wear, how we will speak the lines written, and with what emphasis they will be accentuated. Actors will be tasked with making the character written by someone else as authentic as possible, but they themselves will not be authentic in their performance on stage or screen. It will be a performance, nothing more. And what is a performance?

A dictionary says this: “a rending of a role, song, or piece of music” as one of the definitions of performance.

Are we only living life as a performance? So much of what we do from childhood onward seems to focus on reaching some level of performance for every level of academic pursuit from early childhood onward. It is true in pursuing sports or music activities and later it is present in the career paths or jobs we pursue. Little wonder that we can get caught up in the way we do something and lose track of the more important things such as whether we are called to do them, how we do them, and if they represent our authentic selves and the character we are.

God’s story in the Bible tells us we are called to be salt and light, to live out the reality of loving Him and loving one another including our enemies – things that are impossible to imitate.

In the current era it seems harder to determine who is imitating and who is authentic. Insecurity and cultural norms drive us to be, say, and act in certain ways to be accepted by those around us. Instead of living out our unique path we can be drawn into seeking to be like others that someone somewhere has decided is the model that is the best choice. But if we are all the same, then why is any one of us needed for something since anyone can do what any one of us can do?

So what then is Peterson suggesting about the opening verses of Matthew 6 that points to why the world is not a stage and should not be? Here is the rending that follows his heading:

“Be especially careful when you are trying to be good so that you don’t make a performance out of it. It might be good theater, but the God who made you won’t be applauding.”

“When you do something for someone else, don’t call attention to yourself. You’ve seen them in action, I’m sure—‘playactors’ I call them—treating prayer meeting and street corner alike as a stage, acting compassionate as long as someone is watching, playing to the crowds. They get applause, true, but that’s all they get. When you help someone out, don’t think about how it looks. Just do it—quietly and unobtrusively. That is the way your God, who conceived you in love, working behind the scenes, helps you out.”

Matthew 6:1-4 (MSG)

These are a rendering of the words of Jesus in the famous passage of his teaching describing how those who follow Him, and his teachings are to live. They paint a very different picture than what we might be given from the culture around us. Culture nudges us forward to do good things and then be celebrated for those things as is our reward. Consider how Charles Spurgeon looks at this:

“We must not copy the loud charity of certain vainglorious persons: their character is hypocritical, their manner is ostentatious, their aim is to be seen of men, their reward is in the present. That reward is a very poor one, and is soon over.”

Charles H. Spurgeon

No, the world is not merely a stage with us as players of different roles, puppets being fed lines to speak and stage directions to follow. The applause of men, the acceptance of the culture by adopting cultural norms that vary over time, is not the purpose or goal of us as created humankind. If we were to look backward a short 50 to 100 years and seek to play out the norms, we would find ourselves contorted in multiple directions because they have changed in so many areas and so many ways. To suggest these changes have all been for our good or the betterment of humankind would be a hasty judgment.

Peter points the path to consider:

“So roll up your sleeves, get your head in the game, be totally ready to receive the gift that’s coming when Jesus arrives. Don’t lazily slip back into those old grooves of evil, doing just what you feel like doing. You didn’t know any better then; you do now. As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness. God said, “I am holy; you be holy.”

1 Peter 1:13-16 (MSG)