Photo © Unsplash/Anton Darius | @theSollers
How is it
that in our
overworked
underpaid
hyperstressed
neverhushed
go go go go
culture
we aren't
running full tilt
to the God
whose covenant sign
is rest
the God
whose binding contract
stipulates that
we were
first and foremost
created to know
peace?
Photo © Unsplash/Sharon McCutcheon
Imagine having to pay for your life
the way you pay for your heat
the way you buy your electricity
the way you purchase water and sewer.
Perhaps if we received
a monthly bill for
"Life-Services Rendered"
breath and
blood and
heart beating and
neurons firing and
general suspension of the return-to-dust clause
we would remember that
life is a utility we can't generate
and be immune to
the otherwise-all-pervasive plague
of self-sufficiency.
In the end,
what You will have of me is
all
or
nothing.
There is no in-between.
Either I will be consecrated
head to toe,
my entire being
holy ground,
or
I will be a vast, open
wasteland—
a demonic haunt.
There is no in-between.
For You
(the indwelling universe-God)
will not be relegated to
a shelf
a building or
a weekly (better-not-be-longer-than-an-hour) visit.
You will either dwell
in the midst
or
You will be completely
banished from the land.
There is no in-between.
You are uninterested
in negotiation
or compromise.
Come, then,
and take no prisoners—
except me, that is.
Captivate me
head to toe
and all that's
in-between.
Come, Divine Intruder:
Make me
holy ground.
By the time Jesus came,
the office of the high priest
was highly sought after,
often secured by bribery
and fraud
and murder.
The position had become
synonymous with
power
and prestige
and an opulent life.
But it was never meant to be that way.
The high priest was supposed to be
the one man in Israel
most like God:
consecrated to a life of service
sold out to truth
dedicated to all things right
his only luxury
the burden of bearing the beloved
forever close to his heart.
Darkness does not exist
It has no properties
no matter
no makeup
Darkness does not exist
It cannot be measured
or observed
or heard
Darkness does not exist
It functions only as a corollary
It's a symptom
a condition
/and a temporary one at that/
Darkness does not exist
It's just the absence of something else
a ghost quantity
a negative integer
Light obliterates darkness.
Every time.
It's not even a contest.
There's never a doubt.
When darkness presses in around you,
you need only remember the Lampstand.
Let the tiniest, flickering flame appear—
the darkness must obey
and immediately poof away.
Measurements specified
down to the inch—
linen curtains
crossbars
acacia-wood frames
Accessories requiring
a wealth of resource—
bronze clasps and
gold hooks and
loops of blue yarn
When God sets out
to build Himself
a temple,
He leaves
no corner untouched,
no detail unplanned.
We so casually declare
our bodies to be
the temples
of this Holy Spiriting God
while intending
to satisfy Him with
our present accommodation.
Take note:
the God who deigns
to live in you
is not planning to
make Himself
at home.
He is planning to
make Himself
a home.
Photo © Unsplash/The Joy of Film
In the Most Holy Room
of God's Desert House,
there was a small, open door
to the universe,
where God sat between
His angels and talked
with humanity.
Okay, so the angels were gold
and it was just one man
and God had to make Himself tiny enough
to be stuffed into a room.
Still, for those moments,
it was as if God could have
His cosmic family
together in the same place.
Kind of like a mom
who dreams of having everyone
home again
for Thanksgiving.
Photo © CreationSwap/CreationSwap
What kind of God is this,
who issues an invitation
to a personal dinner,
an intimate feast?
Just a little get-together
for seventy of His
(I-hope-you'll-choose-to-be-My)
closest friends.
Indeed, one gets closer
as the courses proceed.
For this mountaintop banquet
was just the amuse-bouche on God's menu
of spiritual nourishment revelation.
None of those seventy elders
could have imagined
the truth about the God
who stood on the veranda of
brilliant blue lapis lazuli,
that His invitation
to feast with Him
would eventually become
an invitation
to feast on Him,
that His offer of dinner
would soon be
an offering of Himself.
His body and blood,
our bread, our wine,
our life.
Has it not always been so?
Photo © Unsplash/Bill Oxford
Righteousness does not mean God averts His
Eyes from an ugly reality
And pretends that what is true is a
Lie to be ignored.
It means a new Power has
Taken over the operations of
Your heart.
Photo © Unsplash/Niko Manuelides
What does it matter
if the thief
kills your sheep
or it's found alive?
Why should
a sheep that has vanished
be worth
twice as much
as one that's been repoed?
Maybe it's all about
God getting justice—
not so much for the victim
as for the perp.
For to sneakily get rid
of the trace of your crime
suggests a hardness
not known to the
heart with red hands,
one so inexperienced
as to be caught with the goods.
The harder heart
requires the harsher penalty
in order to
once again
fracture the hull.
Justice for the offended
is a foregone conclusion,
but recasting the offender's heart
is much more difficult
than replacing a sheep.
Ghandi once said that
an eye for an eye
leaves the whole world blind.
Yes, but it also
leaves the whole world alive.
If the previous rule was
your hand for my eye
and then
my child's life for your hand
and then
your whole family for my child's life
and then
and then
and then
an eye for an eye
is not revenge,
but mercy;
pandemic blindness
a blessing,
compared to
the alternative.
Photo © Unsplash/Sidney Severin
Mighty God,
Great Dispeller of Night,
Awesome Disbander of Murkiness,
Glorious Dismisser of Shadows,
we prefer to hail You
as the One
who banishes darkness.
We prefer hymns which extol
the world-illuminating power
of Your light.
We never sing songs
about Your darkness-dwelling tendencies.
We don't lift our voices
to praise Your presence in the shadows,
but to question Your delay in dissipating them.
And we are careful
to keep our distance from dark clouds,
though we seem to find them just the same.
/or, rather, they methodically
hunt down and engulf us/
Mighty God,
Strong Dismantler of Gloom,
when the inky blackness swirls around me,
may I choose to praise You,
the ever-present Holy Squatter
in Earth's rundown tenement.
As long as evil persists in this place,
draw my heart out
and steel it to brave
the onslaught of the whirlwind,
emboldening me
to seek You where You are,
willing to share and shoulder
some of the sorrow and suffering
that lives in Your own heart
for this forlorn and much-loved race.
Photo © Unsplash/Brandon Morgan
Thunderstorms are my favorite.
I love watching the thick, black clouds
roll in from the west,
the wind whipping up leaves and dirt,
compressing the musty air like a balloon
until it bursts,
giving way to slick, saturating torrents.
I love the paparazzi pops of lightning,
the long, jagged, hair-trigger flashes of noon
radiating through the bruised sky,
connecting heaven and earth
in less than a second
for less than a second.
And I love the thunder,
the low, distant lion's growls
and the ear-splitting cracks
that break over your head
like an egg spilling a clangorous yoke.
As the storm rolls in,
I count the seconds between every flash
and every bellow,
anticipating the moment
when the delay is gone
and the light arrives with a boom.
In all this time,
I have never wondered
if, at that moment,
You were speaking to me.
Photo © Unsplash/Sharon McCutcheon
Exodus 18 has been
the jumping-off point
for many a sermon on delegating.
But I wonder if delegating
was what Moses was supposed to do.
He listened to his father-in-law,
but it doesn't say
whether he consulted God
on the newly-proposed
hierarchy.
On one hand,
Jethro's idea took a heavy burden
from Moses' shoulders
and broke it up into smaller
more easily-managed pieces.
On the other hand,
maybe God had intended
Moses to carry
the Israelite Cross.
On one hand,
the people could
get their disputes resolved
without having to practice
so much patience.
On the other hand,
the
plan
added
yet
another
layer
of
bureaucracy
between
the
people
and
the
God
who
had
longed
to
speak
with
them
face
to
face
as
a
man
speaks
to
his
friend.
Perhaps Moses did
the right thing.
But if he had been on
the sure path to
burnout,
why didn't the God
who was in the habit
of speaking with him every day
tell him so
Himself?
"Israel drank from the spiritual rock that traveled with them,
and that rock was Christ." 1 Corinthians 10:4
God gives.
He doesn't know how to do anything else.
He gives rain to the righteous
and rain to the wicked.
He gives water to the grateful
and water to the complainers.
God is good.
He doesn't know how to be anything else.
If you are good to Him,
He will be good to you.
If you are evil to Him,
He will be good to you.
Moses struck the rock
with his rod at Meribah
and life-giving water flowed out.
We strike the Rock and
Life is still the thing
that gushes out after us,
a flood of grace
to meet our anger,
a deluge of mercy
to defy our shame,
a surge of good
to repay our evil.
Photo © Unsplash/Evi Radauscher
In Egypt
God's people ate their fill
of meat and bread.
And in the wilderness
God's people ate their fill
of meat and bread.
For forty years
—14,600 days and nights—
God revealed to the Israelites
not that He could feed them in the desert
but that it was He
who had fed them in Egypt.
For God, the manna wasn't miraculous.
It is no harder for Him
to make bread rain from the sky
than it is to make
wheat stand in the soil or
dough rise in the bowl or
the crust appear in the oven.
God miraculously provided
for His people in the wilderness
no more or less
than He had in Egypt.
We should stop wondering
why God no longer works miracles and
start asking why we still consider
anything in this life
mundane.
Photo © Unsplash/Jeremy Bishop
There's water at the beginning
and water at the end
and water all over the middle
Spirit brooding over the deep
a rush from the Rock
precursor to wine
hushing the waves
Red Sea at attention
floodfloodfloodflood
strolling the waves
streams in the desert
rivers from the Throne
If we could recognize
the One who meets us
at all our broken-down cisterns
we would realize
that true life is a frolic
at the center of
a Forever Fountain
Photo © shutterstock.com/Melnik
The problem with sin is that we
want to have our cake
and eat it too,
just like Pharaoh,
who wanted to have his slaves
and free them too.
But not to decide
is to decide,
and not to give in
is to remain stubborn
and that has an effect.
We all think
/or want to believe/
that no matter
what we choose
we automatically
revert back to
this neutral default place
after each decision,
that our choices
don't have any lasting
consequences.
But that's ridiculous.
If you've lived in darkness
your entire life
and someone suddenly
turns on a light
you are no longer a person
who has only known darkness.
You cannot return
to saying that you do not know
what light looks like.
You may say it still,
all right,
but in your heart
you know it's not true
and that has an effect.
God is the Light of the World,
that Great Confronter who
scouts out
runs down
and passionately pursues
His darkness-dwelling
children.
He would not dream
of letting you remain
forever in your darkness.
He knows nothing of
live and let live,
has no hands-off policy,
and is generally unaccommodating.
He does not prefer to avoid confrontation.
As surely as He lives,
you live,
and as surely as He lives,
you will experience Him.
And when you do,
you cannot return
to saying that you have never
experienced Him.
You may say it still,
all right,
but in your heart
you will know it's not true
and that will have an effect.
And if you persist
in ignoring or avoiding reality
for long enough
you may just find yourself
in a chariot
at the edge of the sea,
unable to bat an eyelash
at the rising walls of water,
unable to wonder how or why the briny deep
is drawing back to reveal dry ground,
unable to think twice
before rushing headlong
into the foregone destruction
of a hardened heart.
Photo © Unsplash/Gaelle Marcel
You don’t have
Enough time to sit
And wait for the dough to
Swell when you’re quitting slavery and
Taking the wealth.
For where there was no blood on the post,
the Angel brought heartbreak deep in the night.
Those oldest boys may have been perfectly upright;
no wickedness in them had been diagnosed,
no judgment that they were, to evil, a host,
but doomed even if they were kind and polite.
For where there was no blood on the post,
the Angel brought heartbreak deep in the night.
Even a Hebrew who thought smeared blood the most
distasteful and gruesome of any known sight,
who neglected to paint the jambs crimson-bright
would suddenly find his own firstborn a ghost,
for where there was no blood on the post…
Rondel: a French form consisting of 13 lines—two quatrains and a quintet—with a rhyme scheme of ABba abAB abbaA (the capital letters are the refrains, or repeats).
