Good Grief

Throughout this long season of increasingly polarized world views and consequent political stand-offs, the words of 2 Chronicles 7:14, along with those of Nehemiah's prayer for the people of Israel, have been camped out in my heart for God's church and His people around the world. During these complicated days, I've come to understand these verses as calls to deep, personal and collective grief among followers of Jesus. 

2 Chronicles gives us the formula, and Nehemiah gives us the model. It is humility, a contrite heart, prayer, seeking, personal accountability, and repentance that will move God to forgiveness, healing, and rebuilding among His people. So far in this mini-study of grief and the resurrection we've talked about the profound nature of grief, as seen through the life of Mary (the mother of Jesus) and the nearness of God in the process. Today, I want to look a bit more carefully at the goodness and purpose of grief. 

I am sure there are other ways of qualifying the goodness and purpose of grief, but I came up with this short list to try and highlight what I think we gain most from grief when we look at it as the catalyst for prayer and healing/restoration. Good grief—the kind that draws us nearer to God—should yield at least three things.

• Gratitude
• Grace
• Giving

The reason I am so convinced of the necessity of these three products of good grief is because of the ways in which we can see God connecting them throughout Scripture as critical elements of His grand restoration project. Moreover, in the midst and aftermath of sin and death, we almost always see division and strife. Gratitude, grace, and giving do not generally function well (if at all) when we are struggling against God and one another. These are not the only problems that can turn grief from good to bad, but they are definitely a few concerns worth looking at with interest. What I've learned is that gratitude is often the jumping off point for finding the best of what grief has to offer us.

When I think about grief and its connection to gratitude I am reminded of the precious group of bereaved parents that God has brought into my life, and the ways in which so many of them have powerfully and openly expressed gratitude for the lives of their children. Those children exerted a great influence over their parents in life, and that influence continues in death. Sometimes the influence may have been (and may yet be) terribly painful in life, but the unbelievable profoundness  and inner chaos of grieving their child's death can also call up a deep appreciation for all that is good and blessed in life. They can see it more clearly through grief's tears than many of us can see through joy's smile.

We can learn much from that example. Learning to be deeply grateful for every moment of goodness—learning to see goodness in the smallest things, and finding that we live through our griefs and troubles—is one of the greatest lessons we can ever learn. When we do, we gain greater access to God's mercies that are new and abundant every morning. We come unambiguously into contact with the infinite abundance of His grace. It is then that we can say, "Lord, your grace is more than enough."

The grace we can receive through grief IS more than enough for our needs, and we know this because in genuine grief we are stripped bare of ourselves and what we hold dear. We find out what we can and do endure. We see that our true needs are really quite few, and we find, then, that God's excess and abundance is everywhere in our lives. Grief teaches us the value of each breath and each moment. 

Grief also demands that we become purveyors of forgiveness and unmerited grace toward ourselves and others in order to survive. In grief, the weight of bitterness can become unbearable, because grief does not have one ounce of energy to spare for wasted feelings that accomplish nothing and exacerbate misery. That kind of anguish cannot long coexist with God's love and Truth. They are completely incompatible.

Unfortunately, we are sometimes slow to open ourselves to grace when we grieve, but when we believe in our hearts the grace that we profess with our mouths we find that our grief has provided us with a storehouse of generous giving to others...particularly those whose pain and suffering we recognize.  2 Corinthians 1:3-5 explains the phenomenon this way.

³ Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, ⁴ who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. ⁵ For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

When we find gratitude for the abundance of grace we receive through our grief, we also find that our grief has manufactured an abundance of grace to be given to others. We ultimately learn in grief that we do not have to hoard grace for fear of one day losing it. It is really quite the opposite. Initially, the shock and fear that accompanies our grief can make us feel the need to hold onto everything more tightly. Later, we may find ourselves terrified to hold onto anyone or anything at all for fear that it will be snatched away. But if we cling to God's Word and His Truth then the tension between holding on and letting go can ease, and we can become wise stewards of our suffering and loss...generous givers of our comfort to others.

As we approach our celebration of the Christ's resurrection, there's a great opportunity for us to humble ourselves and pray, seeking God and experiencing a good kind of grief over our sins and the sins of this world.

Think about it...if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

If we, as the body of believers and followers of Jesus, humble ourselves before God to the point of grief and repentance for our sins—our individual and collective sins—then God moves. He hears and forgives and heals. I cannot think of a greater way to come to the Cross and experience the riches of Easter, which we received at Jesus' expense.

The Lord Is Close to the Brokenhearted - Promise!

Have you ever been through a bad time, or experienced a difficult loss, and had some sweet friend share this verse with you? The Lord is close to the brokenhearted...etc? I think this Bible verse may be the default choice for "religious" sympathy cards. And why not? It sounds good. When someone is absolutely crushed and brokenhearted it sounds kinda comforting to say and hear that The Lord is close at hand.

And of course He is right there and fully available to brokenhearted people, but the verse sort of suggests that God is closer to the brokenhearted than to the folks who are feeling fine. And guess what? In a sense, He is! But I think there's a catch...a bit of perspective that's needed to really appreciate why this verse is comforting.

Remember the scene in the classic Christmas film, It's a Wonderful Life, when the main character, George Bailey, has come to the end of his rope? It's Christmas Eve, and George's life unravels because his Uncle Billy lost the $8,000.00 bank deposit for the family's building and loan business. The bank examiner is in town to review the year's receipts, and there isn't enough cash on hand to cover the payments shown in the books. The whole issue can mean scandal and jail for George and Uncle Billy, not to mention the effects on George's wife and children, and the townspeople who have their money and loans with Bailey Building & Loan.  

Out of time, options, and hope, George comes unglued. He yells at his wife and children, storms out of the house, and ultimately ends up at the local bar. In a moment of deep desperation, George Bailey bows his head...right there at the bar.

George was brokenhearted, so he prayed. I won't give away the ending (just in case you've never seen the film) but The Lord was close to George Bailey. George was in trouble and cried out to The Lord, and The Lord showed up...not the way George ever imagined, but God was definitely on hand to save George Bailey.

But we do a great disservice to the verse from Psalm 34, and other verses like it, if we think of it as a kind of magic wand rather than an insight into how God works in our lives. Look at our friend, George Bailey. He'd come to the end of himself; his usual way of toughing it out through difficult situations could not save him from the bank examiner. George had nowhere else to turn except to God...his last resort. 

George Bailey's broken heart made him willing to humble himself before God. Do you see where I'm going with this? God wasn't close(r) to George because George was in trouble. God was closer than George had ever realized because for the first time George's heart was truly broken. George Bailey's prayer at the bar is a desperate, humble admission that only God could rescue him. The Lord saves those who are crushed in spirit. 

Just in case you think we're talking about situational rescue where God simply sweeps in and shows up with $8,000.00, let's look at a few other Scripture verses where we find similar words of promise. Matthew 5:3-4 says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit...Blessed are those who mourn." When we are considered blessed we are understood to be in God's favor. To be blessed by God is to receive supernatural favor—an extra, generous measure of God's underserved help and lovingkindness. 

These verses tell us something very wonderful about God. He has a special love for the underdog.

And that is as it should be. Don't you think? Isn't it generally more thrilling when the one with the most working against him—the one with the fewest opportunities and resources, the one with the most to lose—overcomes the obstacles and comes out a winner? But the thrill is short-lived and shallow if it turns out that the underdog is arrogant and proud. 

The underdogs that God is most interested in are those who are humble and who are eager to give God all the credit, and the honor and glory forever...whether they win or lose.

Take a look at these verses from Isaiah 61. 

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me,

Because the Lord has anointed Me

To preach good tidings to the poor;

He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,

To proclaim liberty to the captives,

And the opening of the prison to those who are bound;

² 

To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,

And the day of vengeance of our God;

To comfort all who mourn,

³ 

To console those who mourn in Zion,

To give them beauty for ashes,

The oil of joy for mourning,

The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;

That they may be called trees of righteousness,

The planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.”

There they are again...those same kind of promises from God that we see in Psalm 34 and Matthew 5, the same merciful heart of God toward people who are grieved and broken, the same promise to bless, comfort, and rescue them.

So...what if we read Psalm 34 in this this way: Hey! Look up! You're heartbroken? God sees you, and He's standing right there next to you with His arms open. If your heart is torn apart—if your spirit is smashed to bits to the point where you're ready to give up the entire situation to Him—take His hand. Fall into His arms. When you admit that you cannot rescue yourself, and that He is the source of all hope all the time, He will save you.

Think along the same lines as you re-read the verses from Matthew and Isaiah. The reason The Lord is so close to the heartbroken, and so ready to save the crushed in spirit, is because those people are ready to be humble. They are out of options and they are ready to relinquish their lives to the will of God. The promise to those who come to the place of "not my will but thy will be done" is that they will receive comfort. They will receive something beautiful, and experience real joy...joy that leads to the kingdom of heaven and the earth's inheritance.

But it's worth noting that the true blessing doesn't come until we're really knocked down and all the fight is out of us. Remember George Bailey's prayer? Take a look at what happened immediately after George prayed.

POW! Right in the mouth! Down goes George! And if you remember the rest of the film, George has to endure another series of humbling experiences before he comes to the true end of himself. He is forced to examine and respond to his situation through a lens of faith that came through humility and brokenness. George needed a willingness to trust in the power and blessing of God's sovereignty to turn around a seemingly impossible situation. With that kind of faith in God's ability and power, it no longer mattered to George if God sent him to jail or provided him with a way out. George found a blessing that did not depend on circumstance.

Isn't that what happened to Job—that poor soul whose entire life was stripped away, including his family, his possessions, and his health? God was right there and close to Job the whole time! He had never once lost track of what was happening in Job's life. God was in the midst of Job's unimaginable encounters with death, poverty, and sickness.  God was there in Job's suffering. He is always in our suffering too.

Still...Poor Job. He'd worked so hard to live an obedient and holy life, and he still ended up brokenhearted and crushed. But the moment that Job stopped focusing on what happened to him and why—the moment Job stopped pleading his case and was instead reminded of God's infinite power, might, wisdom, knowledge, and creativity—he became very, very humble. Job was finally ready to receive God's blessing and give God the glory. Job found God's abundant mercy blossoming and alive in an INCREDIBLE mess!

Read Job 42. When Job focused completely on God's character and nature he repented. He even prayed for some of his friends who had misrepresented God and been miserable comforts to Job amid his agony. Job also made a sacrifice. Though he had nothing left, not even his health, he went to the altar and made a sacrifice. 

Job's heart was changed. He was no longer simply a good man who gave to others out of his wealth and obedience to follow the law. Job learned true reverence and fear of The Lord. He laid down his life, his grief, and his grudge. Job sacrificed to God out of his humility and poverty. Ever faithful and infinity merciful, God receives Job's offering and blesses the latter part of Job's life even more than the first. God's favor and abundance came to Job through suffering, grief, sorrow, and sacrifice.

Dear ones, when you think about the resurrection, and when you look to the Cross of Jesus knowing that He suffered, died, was buried, and then rose from the grave to conquer sin and death, realize that you are released. You are free from the captivity of your own suffering and death. You are healed and set free. 

You will receive comfort, beauty, and joy when you trade in your sorrows for the joy of the Lord that leads you to praise. 

This is the praise we find in our Easter celebrations. Our "Yes!" to The Lord, and our "Amen!" that acknowledges the fulfillment of that "Yes!" is something we must say in faith and submission to God. These responses are found at their richest and most rewarding when they are born out of grief over the sins of this world...including the sins of our own hearts and lives. It all happens at the foot of the cross.

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Statue of Mary at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the old city of Jerusalem 

There are many ways to enter into a study of grief and it's important relationship to our celebration of Christ's triumph over sin and death—Easter—but death is typically the experience we most associate with grief. In more ways than I can enumerate here, I wish it weren't true, but over the past few years I've come to know more than I'd ever have imagined about grief. 

Grief is the reaction we have to loss of all kinds, not just death, and it is never a simple, compact, linear process that disrupts and rearranges the heart, mind, and soul over and over again until it finds some sort of resolution or fixed comfort. That does not always happen in life. The more profound or traumatic the loss, the deeper and more complex the grief. No two people experience grief or move through it the same way. To the degree that various stages of grief can be qualified, they certainly cannot (and SHOULD NOT) be calendarized or measured as normal or abnormal. In sum, grief experiences are as personal and diverse as the people who go through them.

If you want some idea of what deep grief looks like, the best image I can relate it to is the ground zero site from the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Grief comes with debris, smoldering heaps, smoke, horror, disbelief, devastation, disruption, disarray, and people traipsing through it all—some searching for survivors, some trying to contain it, some trying to make the place safe, some lost and stunned, and so on. The debris includes human and material remains—some identifiable...some not. It does not get sorted out easily.

As I have come to think about grief in this way, I have also come to perceive a mother's grief over the death of a child as the deepest I can imagine. After all, when you consider the overwhelming bond and intimacy of carrying a child in the womb—a miraculous life coming into being in the most personal human space—it is difficult to think of a deeper bond than between a mother and her child...regardless of the child's age. And I cannot fathom a mother's grief more incredible than that of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

What is somewhat ironic to me is that in all the years that I'd identified myself as a Catholic, from childhood to young adulthood, I probably never gave much thought to Mary. But in the years since I have come to consider my Christian life through the lens of Protestant evangelicalism, Mary has been increasingly interesting to me. I have been sad to realize that the iconic Mary has somewhat over-simplified and diminished the human Mary whose experiences with life and death—joy and grief—surely spanned the heights, depths, and breadth of maternal thrill and bereavement.

The Old Testament introduces Mary in Isaiah 7:14...before she was even born! 

"...Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel."

Immanuel, God with us

By the time we actually meet Mary in the New Testament gospel accounts of Jesus' birth, life, death, and resurrection, she is a very real young woman who has a most INCREDIBLE experience. Check out what happened to her and see if you can imagine yourself in the scene. I can't speak for anyone else, but as I remember myself as a 16 or 17 year old girl I am quite convinced that I'd have been way beyond overwhelmed! As if being visited by an honest to goodness angel wouldn't be enough to blow your mind, being told that you're going to bear a child in a most mysterious manner, and that your child will be known as "Son of the Most High" would be enough to make you wonder if someone had slipped something into your grape juice to make you high!

In fact, Mary's supernatural high bursts out of her in a magnificat—a song of glorious praise and wonder.

Now, I don't want to speculate as to what was considered normal in ancient times, but I have trouble believing that young women being visited by angels, and having a glorious future (as the mother of God no less!) predicted for them, was really on the continuum of anyone's expectations...even Jewish girls raised with the books of the law and the prophets. But let me point out something that you may not have noticed as I contextualized Mary's life in order to introduce you to her grief. Did you notice that the angel, Gabriel, never tells Mary that her son's life will be in jeopardy from the moment he is born until he meets an untimely and horrifying death after only 33 years? 

I feel very confident when I say that Mary never saw it coming. She may have found favor with God, and she may have been chosen to give birth to the savior of the world, but she was surely chosen because of her absolute ambiguity as much as anything else. When she came of an age to begin thinking about marriage and motherhood, I assure you she never imagined herself much differently than any other little Jewish girl of her time. She wasn't sitting on the edge of her bed every night waiting for Gabriel to show up and give her the good news.

Isaiah prophesies the crucifixion and death of the Messiah, but honestly by the time you get from Isaiah 7 to Isaiah 53, you've long forgotten about the reality of that virgin, Mary, who would have to witness her son's horrible and humiliating public execution. With these things in mind, imagine precious Mary after living 33 years with her most unusual son. By the time Jesus was betrayed by Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane, Mary and her husband, Joseph, had been visited a few times by angels, forced to pack up and move out of and back into the country to protect their son's life, witnessed their child doing some truly incredible things, and they were probably the objects of quite a bit of gossip by the time Jesus began his public ministry. 

I imagine a more grown up Mary as she comes to grips with the fact that her son's face is on the side of a milk carton and pasted up in the post office. In my mind's eye, I see her sitting alone, with her face in her hands and sobbing until she cannot breathe, while Joseph and the rest of the family are off somewhere. I can hear her crying out to God and wanting to know what ever happened to the magnificat—the blessed thrill of hope that would come with being chosen to bear God's son in a spectacular way never heard of before or since.

By the time dear Mary finds herself among the helpless onlookers to her son's crucifixion and death, she must have wondered how it had come to all this. I am more than certain that she was absolutely devastated. Talk about a let down and disappointment! Talk about living through a horror! And there, as she and her son's best friend, John, stood beside Jesus to the last, watching him die an agonizing death, she hears her precious son say, "Woman, behold your son!" 

John and Mary at the Cross of Jesus; artist Ed Odson

And Jesus wasn't saying, "Look at me, Mom! Look at what I can do!" He was telling her, before she could even process what it would mean to live without her first born son, to take John as her son. If I'm Mary, or John for that matter, that's the point where I hear the needle scratch across the album, or the car screech to a halt. "You want me to do WHAT????"

Now, if you're thinking that Mary went through all that, plus 3 days of a virtual trauma/grief coma, and that the news of Jesus' resurrection meant the pain, suffering, and grief of her loss was over...If you think Martin Scorcese yelled, "That's a wrap!" you're not understanding the quintessential humanity of Mary. She was a regular mom who had lived a very extraordinary 33 years before spending the remainder of her days trying to make sense of it all...like any mother—past, present, or future. No mother is prepared to out-live her child.

If Mary's joy was supernaturally induced to the point of eliciting the world's most exuberant song, surely her sorrow was every bit as profound...resurrection or no resurrection. It's no surprise, then, that the statue of Mary inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre shows a woman with a vacant, lost, exhausted, and completely devastated expression. You can almost feel your own brow moisten with sweat and your heart grow faint. That's grief, folks, and even the very mother of Jesus was not spared its agonies.

Our beautiful savior who triumphed over sin and death did not do so without experiencing the full weight of sin and death—grief and sorrow—and I guarantee you that the only person who came close to feeling his agonizing trip through hell was his dear mother who lived to tell about it.

The Pieta - Michelangelo Buonarroti's sculpture, housed in St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City

And perhaps that reality is the most important outcome of grief for all of us. We live to tell about it—to find the mercy in the mess, to become the story-keepers and storytellers of our dear one's lives, to use those stories as platforms from which to tell of our experiences for the sake and comfort of others, and to tell of greater joys to come when we too meet Jesus, and his mother, Mary, in heaven. If God is as merciful and wonderful as I believe He is, I well imagine beautiful Mary coming to heaven's gate and reuniting mothers—precious souls who've endured the unthinkable, unimaginable anguish of losing a child—with their cherished children who have been made whole, alive, and well under Mary's watchful eye and Jesus' loving sacrifice.

So...as you're preparing to enter Holy Week, take some time to think about the necessity of grief in order for you to receive your ultimate joy, and your greatest hope for the future.

Grace That Is Sufficient, Faith That Is Persistent

Have you ever heard a story that just sticks with you—kind of lingering in the back of your mind like a hum? 

A friend of mine was singing at her new church this past weekend, so a few of us went to the Sunday morning service and shared some encouragement with her. The message was a series of vignettes that highlighted the power of God to intervene in situations, and to expand our faith as He keeps His promises. 

One of the featured stories was about a man in Oklahoma who happened to turn on the television and stop to watch a reality show about convicted criminals serving time in prison. The Oklahoma man was led to pray for one prisoner in particular—a young man who was serving a sentence miles and miles away in a California prison. For two years, the Oklahoma man obeyed the word that he was given from God, and he persisted in praying faithfully for the young inmate. 

Then, one Sunday morning, without any particular reason, the Oklahoma man happened to look down the aisle in his Oklahoma church. Just a few seats down, in the very same row, sat the young inmate from the TV show! From that time forward, God made a way for a discipling relationship between the two men. Willing obedience to a mysterious urging from the Spirit created a path to ministry. 

Wow! Obedience brought the men blessing and God received the glory.

In the two days since I heard that story, my mind has returned to it numerous times...probably because of how familiar I am with the strange exhilaration of receiving a very clear call from God. 

Nearly four years ago, God spoke very clearly to my heart and laid a powerful calling upon it to share His love and a very particular promise with a sister in Christ. 

The terrain of that calling has included lush, fertile plains of joy and peace as well as dry, depleted deserts of grief and sorrow...and every topography in between. Yet, by His grace, my young daughter and I have remained convicted to pray for our dear one daily and to demonstrate God's love joyfully and creatively. 

It's been a time of enormous spiritual growth even in the midst of many challenges and much pruning all around. However, there's also been a lot of waiting in the dark with only little sparks of light here and there.

This morning I found myself whispering to God inaudibly, "Please...please can I have a sign from you that my breakthrough—my look down the aisle—is coming...that our blessing and hope is coming soon?" 

Then I felt myself backspacing in my silent moment of prayer. I had nearly asked for just some small sign, but what I wanted with all my heart was an enormous sign, the breakthrough itself! Swift, immediate, bold blessing. That's what I was after down deep in my heart. 

Even so, I felt hesitant to ask for more. God had heard my heart; within moments a friend messaged me to say she'd seen some robins in a park where I often take nature photos. 

Robins are very special in South Florida, and extremely special in our hearts. They symbolize the life of someone very precious to us—someone now in heaven. After several years of not seeing the robin migration come through South Florida, this year God showered us in robins right after the New Year. We had to drive a few hours to find them, but they were singing and bobbing all around us that day. We held onto the joy and promise of that sighting for weeks afterward.

Two robins in a bird bath: Rockledge, FL - January 5, 2013

Robin on the roof of a garage: Rockledge, FL - January 5, 2013

Receiving the news that there were some robins around town—particularly when the joy of our January blessing was becoming somewhat difficult to fix upon—my heart washed with fresh hope. Maybe my look down the aisle was, as my daughter believes, right around the corner and coming our way soon! 

I set out for the park with camera and binoculars in hand so that I could document this blessing that would lead soon to our fully answered prayer. 

But when I arrived at the park and began looking around, the familiar doubt—in myself, in my calling, and even in God—began to stir. I walked and looked for more than two hours, but I could not find the robins.

Somewhere along the way my mind began drifting in and out of despair to Scripture, spiritual songs, and hymns of the faith. The words kept coming and swirling about me like a tornado in slow motion. I half expected to see Dorothy and Toto!

Does the hawk fly by your wisdom...Consider the birds of the air...Consider the lilies of the field...Are not two sparrows sold for a penny...How much more will your Father who is in Heaven give good things to those who ask Him...Grace that is greater than all my sin...Your grace is enough for me...

Roaming aimlessly around the park looking for robins, and trying to cling to hope and faith for my miraculous answer to prayer, I could not help interrogating my spirit. 

Did I really believe those words? Did I really believe that the God who provides for the red shouldered hawk and the flowers I was photographing would also see me through the calling He gave me? Would He really comfort and heal the heart of our dear one? Would He move the mountains, make the crooked straight, and be faithful to reconcile and restore our beautiful sisterhood? Was His grace REALLY sufficient for me?

I looked all around. 

Could I accept as sufficient the grace of simply knowing the robins were there in the park with me...somewhere...even if I could not see them?

Could I rejoice in the blessing of bees drinking nectar?

The blessing of marsh rabbits nibbling the grass? 

Insects morphing into beautiful moths and butterflies?

Wood storks fishing in the swamp?

The red shouldered hawk scanning his territory?

The crab spider waiting patiently?

If I tell others how God's grace and sufficiency is evidenced in nature, am I not responsible for taking those words to heart and trusting in their truth? 

Wasn't the grace and promise all around me with the robins I couldn't see? I knew I couldn't deny God's presence and goodness in all I was seeing, so I had to acknowledge His presence and goodness in all that I could not yet see.

I wish I could tell you that I left the park feeling fulfilled and encouraged. My heart was still aching for our dear one...and for our look down the aisle. 

I still longed to return home and find her at my doorstep ready with one of her warm hugs and a reaffirmation of our God-ordained bond. But even in my longing and impatience, I knew I had been given the grace to remain obedient to my calling and to love faithfully and whole heartedly.

1 Corinthians 13:4-7

New International Version (NIV)

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Ruth 1:16-18

New American Standard Bible (NASB)
¹⁶ But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. ¹⁷ Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus may the Lord do to me, and worse, if anything but death parts you and me.”¹⁸ When she saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.

Dude, What Would Happen?

DWWH? is a reality-style TV show on the Cartoon Network. It features three teenage "dudes" who play out the sort of Phineas and Ferb-esque antics that are so often in the highlight reels of anyone who ever had a brother. Typically, each episode is concept/theme based. Experiments ramp up one from another in order to see just how far the dudes can push their schemes without actually delving into the realm of education. It's sort of like "what would happen" if Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure and Ferris Bueller's Day Off were spliced together as a single, ridiculous film.

This morning, I was praying with one of my dear prayer partners, and the Spirit guided me to pray over the way people treat her, and the way ambivalence and disregard seem to be increasing even among Christians and leaders who should know better. You know...the folks you'd expect to sound the alarms when the This Present Darkness culture rises around them. But not so much.

Somehow, biblical leadership often mingles with pop-psychology, and we find more and more written about how to increase self and expand territory, outreach, influence, productivity, and bottom line. The study of genuine humility scarcely exists in the popular realms. That makes me think about baseball. Ya..baseball...Babe Ruth, home runs, if you build it He will come, and all that good stuff.

There's not as much out there helping folks learn how to play what baseball coaching legend, Jim Leyland is famous for...the principle he uses to produce successful teams. It's called small ball—the emphasis on consistently getting runners on base and moving them systematically around the bases to score runs. The "heavy hitters" are surely welcomed when the bases are loaded, but they aren't necessarily the ideal because they tend to have a fairly high percentage of strike outs. Their fame and power can come at the expense of the team's ability to afford consistent, lesser-known, skill players. Their fame can compromise long-range team outcomes, especially if they go into a slump, find themselves in trouble with the law, get injured, or are found to be using performance-enhancing drugs. I won't spend the time here, but those metaphors apply in Christian leadership.

And that's what got me to wondering...

Dude, what would happen if—in this age of small groups, church planting, and pastor/CEO ministry, in this climate of leadership development, cross/intra-cultural outreach, and in the face of contemporary psychology influencing the supernatural realm of ministry—we went back to the essentials and basics—the small ball disciplines within our faith?

What would happen is the notion of Servant Leadership became less of a methodology and more of an instinctual lifestyle built on faith and obedience? What if there were a series of airport security style spiritual portals through which we had to pass successfully in order to move beyond the "small" world of consistently treating our family and friends in a Christ-like manner before we moved on to larger playing fields?

Of course, so often the learning is in the leading. While many a "great" leader has been quietly humbled at home, PLENTY have been humbled on a grand, public scale. But the realm of the nefarious is in the reality of the devil's own brand of small ball. There are many leaders—highly effective evangelical drones flying under radar—who unwittingly expand the territory of darkness by maintaining little idolatrous outposts—those protected, No Trespassing areas where they passively permit themselves to keep a campfire burning—the zones that allow for private worship of  "It'sJustHowI'mWired" idols.

Of course, we all have such outposts that enable (if not empower) us to act smug and passé (even slightly braggadocious) about being less compassionate, less wholehearted, less transparent, or even less honest than we ought to be...even through we insist that it's our business to disciple others. So let me pause here and say this very clearly because this ain't baseball, it's  the heavenly realm.

Idols are dangerous...really, Really, REALLY dangerous!

Idols bring unwanted consequences, painful set-backs, and worst of all...God's wrath. The harboring  of idols pretty much always involves brutality and death before it's all over. Is it any wonder, then, that the very first commandment is essentially an insistence upon the foundation of idol-free living—nothing that gets in the way of loving/obeying God completely? (See Deuteronomy 6:4-5.)

Look at the historical accounts of idol trouble throughout Scripture, and at best you find limited effectiveness (1 Kings 16:27) and at worst you see God's vengeance (Nahum 1:2).Our secret idol camps keep us at work with our enemy the devil...fanning the flames of disobedience, cultivating and justifying our own disobedience, and by default (one way or another) replicating our crimes against God through the spiritual DNA we pass as we lead and disciple.

Dude, that stuff is dangerous! 

Dudes and Dudettes... let's decide today to engage in the child-like wonder and enthusiasm of finding out "what would happen" if we shut down our secret (though the people closest to you know they are not so secret) camps of idolatry in our lives that give us permission to treat others with less respect, dignity, courtesy, attention, interest, reciprocity, kindness, love, generosity, grace, forgiveness, etc than we have received ourselves from Christ. Let the campfire go out and move on to a closer walk with Jesus.

So, Dude, if we find out that shutting down Camp Annie's Secret Idols (you choose your own camp name) makes it harder for us to have a broader outreach...well, it's probably not what you want to hear, but I'd say that it means we're probably at the right place on the map. We're in Camp Small Ball re-learning (or perhaps learning for the very first time) what it means to really live in a perpetual state of John 3:30 and to keep the bases loaded, and the runs coming in consistently. In the long run, that's far better rather than having a few heavy hitting games where our own legends are made. We need to play consistently in those every day small ball games where HIS Name gets all the honor, praise, and glory.

Dude, what would happen if you sent yourself down to the minors?