To Finity, Then Beyond!

Ok, this week is the last in this burst based on Ravi Zacharias' presentation "Growing Through Our Disciplines" (I think that's the first time I put the title in here).  Here again are the links, again to the fifteen minute edits part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4.  So far, the 'tudes that have been discussed were solitude, gratitude, and certitude.  This week's 'tude is finitude.  Spellcheck doesn't like it, and even I thought Ravi may have made it up, but a couple of different dictionaries pull it up as a scholarly word, one that means exactly what it sounds like, simply the state of being finite.

A knee-jerk reaction to this might be simply responding that we are not finite, our souls will live forever.  That is true, and not the direction this 'tude goes.  The finitude here refers to our lives and time here on earth, and what we do with that.  Ravi quotes C.S. Lewis with the line "We do not have a soul, we are a soul.  We have a body."  That soul will go into eternity, based on the actions of this body, during this body's finite time in the world.  I've been getting the newsletter from Voice Of The Martyrs  for several years now, as well as keeping up with email and twitter lists from them, and it never ceases to amaze me the handle that some people have on this finitude, even if I didn't have that word to attach to it yet.  In parts of the world, believers have to hike miles into the woods to have Church services in order to avoid severe harassment, imprisonment, torture and/or death.  They risk their bodies here to tell others about Jesus, knowing that even if that act does cost them their body, it's just the finitude they knew had to dealt with.

How many of you were believers in school, be it public or college?  That was a finite opportunity to touch a lot of people, wasn't it?  Yes, lots of our Facebook and Twitter friends are old school buddies, but think about the masses that you were immersed in every day in that period, even if it was a small school.  Moving forward, to present day, think about your work, that 50 hour a week commitment that replaced school as the major time consumer in life.  How many people do you interact with there?  How many have disappeared from there, quitting, moving, being promoted, laid off, whatever the reason, their finitiude had passed yours.  Did you use that crossing of paths?  Did you put it off until tomorrow? Some of those persecuted believers I mentioned aren't the only ones in their countries facing a shortened finitude, and that person they choose not to speak to today may be another mark on a list in a dark prison by tomorrow. 


Dealing with spiritual life and prayer, finitude is the fuse we have burning.  As believers, we know that once that fuse burns up, we have infinity to worship and fellowship with God. We don't have infinity to let others know, to leave and live a legacy that will outlast our own finitude.  Properly using our own limited time is the fuel for this life, as are the other three 'tudes from this series.  Solitude gets us in communication with God, filling our spiritual tank for whatever lies ahead, be it growth, attack, or even a streak of the mundane.  Certitude keeps the motor running, knowing that there is a final goal, and the potholes and roadblock here won't matter, only how we handle them will.  Gratitude makes those hard times easier to handle, and makes the good times praise to God, not blocks of pride. 

I was sad for I had no shoes, 'till I met a man who had no feet

Keeping on the same path, working off Ravi Zacharias's sermon series (these links are to the same sermon, broken up into 15 minute portions, in case your drive to work isn't quite 30 minutes long part 1 part 2 part 3 and part 4) on prayer life 'tudes.  Today's 'tude is gratitude.  Right now, that's a huge one for me personally.  This month marks a year after my family and I packed up everything we could, and took off 1500 miles from anything and anyone we knew.  Now, we are in the process of moving to a bigger house, which is always a pain, packing, cleaning, arranging, dealing with utilities, schools, post office, ect.  But it is absolutely amazing to look back at this last year and see that it definitely wasn't easy, and it wasn't always fun, but through the whole thing we made it.  Not on our own power or resources or abilities, but because God was watching over all of us the whole time.  That inspires a great deal of gratitude, looking around and realizing that even through what seemed rough times, there was a roof over our heads, food in our stomachs, and clothes on our backs.  Sometimes we weren't sure if they would be there tomorrow, or the next week, or next month, but they always were there.
Whenever I see talk of prayer and gratitude, I always think about how unbelievably blessed we are in America.  Our definition of poverty and being poor is miles and miles above so much of the rest of the world's definition, it's frightening.  Our definitions of repression and persecution are so many miles above what others in the world face, it's equally disturbing.  I'm certainly not downplaying the plights that people face in the U.S.  It's just so much different worrying if the food stamps will stretch to the end of the month than worrying about if the bag of rice will stretch until enough work can be found to earn the money for another one.  It's so much different worrying that you might not get a promotion because your boss doesn't like your faith than worrying that someone is going to break down your door with a machete and a machine gun because they don't like your faith.  It would be real easy to segue into a whole lot of political commentary here, especially given some current events and activities going on right now, but that isn't the point of any of this, so I'll bite my tongue and save that rant for later.
But beyond any of these, believers in America or anywhere else in the world have something underlying all of this to be grateful for, and to carry that gratitude into their prayer life.  Regardless of our worldly conditions, we can be grateful that there is a place reserved for us in Heaven, and almost as important, the strength and direction to get us through this life until the time to move into that new house comes for us.  So, right now we have the bricks of certitude, solitude, and gratitude in the foundation of our prayer life.  Next week, the last 'tude, and a bit on how to put all of these together to make our prayer time a time of communion, communication, and growing.  If you just can't wait to find out, follow the links at the beginning of the column, and listen for yourself.

Just Leave Me Alone!!!!!

Ok, as promised, I'm going to continue working off of a presentation from Ravi Zacharias (specifically this one part 1 part 2).  In the talk, he gives four 'tudes to carry into our prayer life.  Last week was certitude, this week it's solitude.  Solitude is not very popular in this day and age.  It's almost become a dirty word.  We have the idea that wanting to be alone and away from everything is unhealthy.  Too much of it certainly is, but regularly shutting out the world, especially to commune with God, is not just healthy, it's a necessity of prayer life.  There are numerous times throughout the Old and New Testament of God's people stepping away from everything so they can focus entirely on listening the what God has to say to them.  One of the best known examples is from Jesus Himself, in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Hours away from the culmination of His earthly mission, He went away from everything, even His closest disciples, to pray to God, to confirm His instructions.  Numerous other times throughout the Gospels Jesus withdraws, departs, and sends everyone away for His prayer time.  If that's not sufficient evidence to show it's an important idea, I don't know what is.

Solitude is very difficult in our modern times.  We have created such a connected world, such a 24/7 world, that getting off the grid, even for an hour a day often seems impossible.  But remember the words of Jesus when His disciples were falling asleep as He took His solitude, "Could you not tarry one hour?"  Trust me, I know it's hard to shut off the cell phone, step away from the keyboard, kick the thoughts of all that stuff that needs done and what we want to be doing out of our heads and just be open to what God is giving us.  But it is possible.  And I'm sure, based on the testimony of many others, that the more one does it, the easier it gets.

When we do manage to shut the world out, just for a little while, we put our focus where it's supposed to be, on God and His directions for us.  As that focus becomes more of a regular part of our prayer life, it starts seeping into the rest of our lives too.  The more of that focus that our hour by hour life soaks up, the more we are able to see each step of the path we are supposed to be walking, what the actions are that God wants from us in that everyday life.  Isn't that worth waiting an hour to see the latest Lolcat or learning that your Facebook buddy is having a steak dinner tonight?

Four "tudes" part 1

Going to do something a little different.  I've been listening to to a sermon by Ravi Zacharias (this one specifically part 1 part 2, I highly recommend this guy) and have been thinking about the four "tudes" that he discusses we need to bring to our prayer life.  So if this works, I get a month's worth of blogs by talking about each of these and expounding my own impressions on them.  However, I'm going to start with the last one, because it connects to a recent news event.
At that big hadron collider, scientists believe they recently managed to push particles faster than the speed of light.  One of the mainstream news articles said that the event won't make any big deal in the real world, but it would be significant to scientists.  If it proves correct and reproducible, it yanks a major foundation block out of science's vision and understanding of how the universe works.  Part of Einstein's work said that if matter approaches the speed of light, it also approaches infinite mass, meaning in a nutshell that matter gets infinitely heavier the faster it goes. That means if something solid reaches light speed, it's weight will make that solid too heavy to move.  Assuming the experiment was accurate (the jury is still out on that, as with any major discovery) it means something is missing from that foundational equation.  Science may have to do a whole lot of rethinking about how the universe works.
The "tude" related to this story is certitude.  In the world, Einstein's work has long been considered a nearly indisputable fact of life.  Yet suddenly, the world is faced with the possibility that their long held belief may just be wrong.  This has happened many times over the centuries.  The world has gone from flat to round, from the center of the universe to the center of the solar system to somewhere on the edge of one galaxy.  We can find very few worldly things that have not changed, especially in our modern world.  But in the spiritual world, especially in our prayer, we have to come with a sense of certitude.  Not certitude that we are coming to a magic genie who will grant all our wishes if we are good enough people, but a sense of certitude that we are coming to the one, true, almighty, omniscient God of all creation, who loves us and has a plan for us.  Looking throughout the Old and New Testament, we find the powerful men and women of God were always certain of God and His power and plans, and the times they weren't certain was when things went badly.  Moses wasn't able to enter the Promised Land because he didn't follow God's orders, letting his anger and impatience take over.  Peter was walking on the water with Jesus until his sense of certainty slipped, and with it, he slipped down into the water as well.
We are never going to get physical, irrefutable certainty in this world until the sky splits and Jesus comes back.  That's why it's called faith.  But while we are here, that faith is bolstered as long as we walk with that certitude.  Certitude saved Shadrach Meshach and Abednego from the furnace, even if that certitude included the possibility that God's plan wasn't to save them.  How does your situation stack up to that?  Is it so much worse that you can't walk with that same certainty?

A little different vibration....

Last night I caught a few moments of Coast To Coast AM, one of those radio shows that delves into various conspiracy theories, alternate universes, aliens, ect.  The guest was talking about her belief in parallel universes, and lost spiritual abilities that civilization has cost mankind.  As she and the host are going on about these, I'm sitting there wondering how on earth these ideas are more acceptable to so many people than the far out concept of one omniscient, eternal God speaking the universe into being, molding man out of the dust, and setting forth a plan for that man and all his descendants.  Entire universes existing at slightly different vibrations than this one are fine for comic books and sci-fi movies, but what drives so many people to grasp this and other new-age or in many cases old-age theories instead of turning to the Bible.
Further thought points to one direction in particular.  Accepting the Biblical account of the world means accepting responsibility for oneself.  It's been a while since I read up on the various other religions of the world, but I don't recall any of them laying down the type of black and white, clean cut, eternal consequences for mankind's actions.  Some say you just keep trying until you get it right, some say we just cease being, some saw there is a lot of weighing of all our actions and thoughts that decide our eternity.  Only the Bible lays out the idea that only those who accept God as the Almighty and accept the sacrifice of Jesus for their own sins will go to Heaven, everyone else will spend eternity in the lake of fire with the rebellious angels.  No "you were pretty good in life, didn't kill anyone or torture kitties, you can get in".  That's a very hard concept, especially in our everything is equal mindset.  Yet I don't see how it's really a harder concept to believe in than the idea that everything in creation is just random chance.

Use Your Disillusion

The first time I heard a rapper by the name of 2pac was watching Yo MTV Raps many many moons ago, and a song came on called "Brenda's Got A Baby", a track about not just another teen mom in the ghetto, but how her situations and choices affected those around her, including and especially the baby.  I ended up digging up the album (way back when, we had to go to the record store and actually sift through racks of tapes, then cd's, not just type a name into Amazon.  That's a topic for another day, though)  The album had some typical party it up, shoot em up gangsta rap tracks, but along side the aforementioned "Brenda" were a couple of others, like "Part Time Mother" which lifted the Stevie Wonder song to tell the tale of several people, even an unsuspecting father who find themselves taking care of little ones, and "If My Homies Call" a reminder to people from 2pac's past that he may be breaking out, but not forgetting them.  All of these put together a vision, a mindset that the way things are in the community isn't the way they have to be, that there is more to life than gangbanging, that there are consequences to actions that have to be handled.  As time went on 2pac got bigger, and for a while there were still some glimmers of that hope and optimism with tracks like "Keep Ya Head Up" and "I Ain't Mad At 'Cha".  But there also seemed to be a growing disillusionment with the world, a giving up of that hope for a better world, choosing instead to get immersed in the world, with sex, drugs, drink, money, and violence.  That immersion led to 2pac's time in jail and eventually to his shooting death.
I admit to not following the hip hop scene like I did back then, but it really seems like since then, the general attitude has skipped over any hopefulness for a better day and jumped straight to that disillusioned state.  Criminal charges, jail time, inane material excesses all seem to be even bigger badges of honor then they were in the past.
This is far from a black problem, or a gang problem, or a rap problem, the rap scene and it's evolution just provide a very blunt illustration of a far reaching issue.  We seem to be leaping to apathy in too many areas of the world, from our entertainers to our schools (students and teachers) to our work places to our elected officials.  It's not a new problem either, rearing it's ugly head in the days of "tune in, turn on, drop out" or Marlon Brando's response in The Wild Ones to "What are you rebelling against?" which was simply "What have you got?"
Taking a step back from the issue, such disillusion is no surprise, simply because it's all based on the world.  Whenever we look to the world for fulfillment, we will be disappointed, because the things of the world will either fail to satisfy, or fade away, or both.  The new car becomes the old car.  The latest model (fill in the blank) becomes outdated.  That's the hole in the mindset.  We want things to be better, but when we limit our solutions to worldly ones, providing material things to those in need, depending on book education to get them out of generational squalor and violence, we just build a house without a foundation.
I've been working on this one for a while, and was going to put it on the back burner for something more 9/11 oriented, but then I realized that the ten years since that atrocity is a fine example of my point.  In the days and weeks immediately following the attacks, there was a unity in the US.  We put aside most of our differences and stood as Americans.  Then, slowly, but predictably, stuff started getting in the way.  Distractions and disagreements chipped away at that unity, that hope for a better day, until now, as dozens of headlines ask "What Has Changed Since The Attacks?", the answer is very little.  We're right back where we were, and in some ways, we've slipped down a few pegs.  If you've ever read Watchmen, you'll remember the plot to unify the world forever via a tragedy.  Evidently, such a vision only works in the comic books, because eventually, that disillusionment still sinks in.
My own worldly mindset tells me that the church should be doing more to instill that missing hope on grander scales, making more big stories of sweeping encouragement.  We know that the world's promises are empty, and there is a better goal.  But when I do my own stepping back, looking back to the real instruction book, it's not mass hope and change that are the focus.  It's the real hope and change granted the believer, the strength to move past the tragedy, past the mundane, and keep heading for the Kingdom.  We all like the big splashes, the huge revivals, but history tells us that those fade away or fall apart or sometimes even get corrupted .  The individual who learns real joy, real contentment, and lives it out may not make the big splash, but the ripples will travel further than any of us will know on this side.

When is a spade not a spade?

Somewhere in my boxes of stuff, I have a pretty realistic plastic skull.  One of those plastic Halloween decorations.  He's been beat up quite a bit over the years, the lower jaw is gone, and so are the teeth from the upper jaw, and the cap doesn't stay on either, so he's pretty much just a pair of empty eye sockets staring out at the world.  Being an old metalhead, skulls are nothing new to me.  Album covers, tshirts, and jewelery frequently place the bones that protect our brains in great prominence.  Most of the time, the reason for this is that the skull is commonly viewed as a symbol of death.  Our traditional poison markers are skulls, the age old jolly roger flag often meant death for those on the boats it chased down, even the hill Jesus was crucified on was named Golgotha, place of the skull, for its use as an execution site.  However, anymore when I come across my little plastic skull, I find myself fascinated by the intricacies of it's design.  Just what can be seen in this facsimile is really amazing when one thinks about it.  The eyes both placed forward, to allow for depth perception.  The large area to contain a significant amount of brain matter.  Although the teeth on mine are all gone, the layout of biting, tearing and grinding teeth so that we are not limited to a single type of food for nourishment. 
Many people try and tell me that all these are the result of random chance, a happenstance of time and proteins converging in just the right way.  It really seems to me that the poor, demonized skull could easily be changed from a symbol of death to a symbol of intentional design.  Symbols change constantly, correct?  Their meaning is based on perception, not necessarily intent, right?
We can certainly see that in people's perception of the church and it's symbols.  As time has gone on, for reasons deserved and undeserved, the church and the cross and all the other signs of God's people have come to mean very different things then they were intended to.  For some a church steeple is a symbol of a place they were rejected from for their choices in life.  To others a cross is a sign of bigotry and hate.  I'd like to say those impressions are all lies spread by various evil camps, but the sad fact is some people who lay claim to be Christian have had a heavy hand in enforcing those definitions of our symbols. 
Would I go so far as to say we need to replace the time honored signs of faith with new ones, like the lowly skull?  No, my suggestion would be that we all do our own part to reclaim those symbols.  Let the necklaces and tshirts be motivators, not just to others around us, but to ourselves.