Now, on this side of having kids, my mornings are a bit more…charged. The second my husband and I open the door to our girl’s room, the rigamarole begins. Before we put our hands on the doorknob, we sometimes exchange “the look.” Maybe you know the one. It’s the look of “Are you ready?” or maybe “Are you sure we can’t wait five more minutes?”  

As we head in, our eldest daughter pops her head up from her bed and doesn’t miss a beat: “Mama, Dada. Hungry, Addy. Pancake, banana.” As I squat down to give her a morning squeeze, she passes right on by me and makes a beeline for the kitchen. She is consumed with the thought, “Food cannot come fast enough, I need it now,” and her requests for food play on repeat until her blush pink plate touches the table.

Early last week, I was in a meeting and someone read Luke 12:22-34 from The Message paraphrase by Eugene Peterson. It contains one of Jesus’s more famous teachings about anxiety and worry, how the birds and flowers don’t worry, so neither should we because we are of even more value to God. 

The Message uses the word “fuss” instead of worry. And this is what felt heavy, but revealing to me about it: who fusses?! Everyone! (Despite how much we may pretend the contrary.) We fuss about the weather (Minnesota winters, anyone?). We fuss over our current lot in life, whether that be jobs, relationships, or overcommitted schedules. We can even fuss about preferences toward the everyday like food and clothing, as Luke 12 suggests. But the reason we do so is a little more complicated. The underlying reason we fuss is that we believe in just a tiny bit of karma, so when something doesn’t go our way, even though we’re doing all this good, fussing flows from the injustice that we feel has been committed. It’s a tiny, albeit fruitless attempt to right all wrongs…in our favor.

Jesus adds, “What I’m trying to do here is get you to relax, and not be so preoccupied with getting so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works.”

Bringing this back to the daily routine of my insatiably hungry daughter: her perpetual morning fussing is a picture of how it’s built into all of us, from birth — this desire to self-justify. The angst-ridden cry of “How dare things not go right for me!”, at its core, is sourced by the belief that we deserve the good thing.

It reminded me of how Old Testament Israel — just days after the Lord freed them from slavery in Egypt — grumbles and complains about the menu, their leaders, the inhabitants of the promised land … the list goes on. In fact, it’s one way to summarize the entire story of Israel: through the lens of the fussing people of God, which, again, is fertilized by the belief that they were good people who deserved good things. Even after the law came in to help pump the brakes on their propensity to trust in themselves, they used it to throw gasoline onto the fire of their arrogance and misguided sense of self.

Yet, in the midst of all of this, the Lord, shockingly, unfairly, yet persistently meets their needs. He was preparing his people for a great unveiling. As they continued to fuss about their circumstances and miss (or forget) his small provisions, the Lord readied his people for his greatest provision, his Son, Jesus Christ. Like the loving Father He is, He gave us the very kingdom itself through the life, death, and resurrection of His Son. Our greatest worry, eternal separation from God, was satiated on the cross. 

Maybe most important here is to see that the cross wasn’t a pedestal or a lectern for Jesus to simply tell us to try harder at not fussing. Instead, it was there that he bore our worst — our most strenuous complaints, our resistance to his offer of grace, and his insistence that salvation was a gift, not a trophy. On that dark day, when Israel grumbled about the True Manna of Jesus’s body itself, we all cried out with them, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” But it was through our acts of evil, that God worked for good and fed us with his grace.

Addy’s morning rituals, Israel’s wilderness wanderings, the Jews’ crucifying of Jesus — they’re all my story. And yours. The good news is that he feeds us anyway. But his plate isn’t blush pink like Addy’s, it’s blood red, full of unconditional love — the only power in the universe that can help turn our fussing into humble trust.

The post Why We Fuss appeared first on Red Tree.

“Bread, again?”
I say this to myself today, as I prepare to administer communion on Sunday.
It’s the day of my sweet mother-in-law’s visitation, which means I have to interact with people and in so doing realize that her death is real.

People ask me for prayer for their healing and the healing of the ones they loved. I can’t manufacture healing with magical words which enable my will to usurp the will of God.
I feel odd calling what happened the “will of God.” God hates death. God’s will is to reconcile all things in Christ.
Yet there is nothing that happens outside of God’s watchful eye. He ordained the death of Christ; how can I say that my mother-in-law’s death is outside of his will?
There I am, thinking theology again. Shouldn’t I have the answers to these questions?
People come to me for answers, yet what I have to give them is bread.

This week a 14-year-old boy was murdered on 37th and Bryant.
On Sunday I will show up to church not with answers to our problem of violence, nor with a strategy for the Christianization of the Northside.
But I will show up with bread, again.
This work is difficult. It’s not difficult because writing and preaching are difficult. It’s not difficult because the days are too long.
It’s difficult because the days are not long enough.
I want to change the world.
I want to change the Northside.
But things seem to be getting worse.
And all I have been given is bread.

Is this my calling?
Surely there is an answer, a 5-point strategy, or some ministerial trick I haven’t learned.
“Surely the Lord can’t be calling me to minister to the exiles for 70 years?”
I ask myself this question like I am better than Jeremiah and like the people in my church are more important than the remnant of Judah.

So maybe this is it.
If I live as long as my mother-in-law, I have 28 more years.
That is before retirement age.

If my calling is to suffer with people who are suffering, I will suffer.
If my calling is to pray for prayers that are not answered, I will pray.
If my calling is to be horrified by increasing paganization, I will be horrified.

Lord, please make this not my calling.
But with my Savior I say,
“Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”

Either way, I will hold the bread out to all who are suffering, praying, and horrified with me.
Until the day comes when You hold the bread out to us, and we share it together.
On that day there will be no suffering, nor will there be horror. All there will be is open-eyed prayer to our Savior who will speak to us face-to-face.

The post Bread Again appeared first on Red Tree.

This is likely one among many reasons the Joker is widely argued to be the best villain of all time. He has a timeless appeal as the master of chaos. It’s his unpredictability that makes him so terrifying, perhaps seen clearest in Heath Ledger’s Joker asking his victims the rhetorical question: “Do you wanna know how I got these scars?” before proceeding to tell a traumatic story usually resulting in the death of the hearer. 

Those scenes were living rent-free in my mind this week while reading the first chapter of 2 Corinthians as the apostle Paul lets us into the backstory of his own scars. Most of his scars can’t be seen with the naked eye, for they don’t live on his body but on his soul. 

Referred to as “afflictions,” “troubles,” and “pressing pressures,” Paul’s scars are the direct result of the physical and emotional suffering he experiences in his efforts to share news of comfort to all people, couched in misery and distress. 

Our miseries and troubles are wide and varying. We wake up at three in the morning thinking about that thing we shouldn’t have said to our coworker the day before. Our brother’s cancer cells aren’t responding to chemo, despite everything else in his body dying. We get blue in the face retelling the stories of ways we’ve been wronged. Or maybe we join the growing number of individuals who are saying to their financial advisor for the first time, “I don’t feel confident in my ability to make ends meet this month.” 

It’s to weary people, like us, who are well acquainted with a sense of insecurity, that Paul is writing about his own experiences in the pressure cooker of life itself: 

We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death.  

If you think about it, it’s a bit of a strange thing to zero in on, isn’t it? Making others aware of your own uphill struggles. You can quickly get dismissed as a Debbie Downer when you drone on about your hardships, so why is Paul doing so here? 

Fortunately for us, he give us his why in the next sentence: these hard things happened so that we would learn to not rely on ourselves but on the God who raises the dead. Contrary to the 21st-century obsession with escaping suffering at any cost, we’re told suffering becomes a doorway to coming to the end of ourselves. Or to say it differently, the door to God’s office is found at the end of our rope. 

Learning to rely on the God who raises the dead is a worthwhile teaching to be taken to heart and directly applied to all current pressing pressures we’re experiencing. But the Scriptures are always taking us a step further by showing us the why and how behind the what. In other words, we’re never just given an imperative or an example in a vacuum, it’s always connected to a greater story that’s meant to draw us into Jesus and his cross. See, for example, Ephesians 4:32 where we’re told to forgive others precisely because God in Christ forgave us. 

And here in 2 Corinthians Paul himself becomes a picture of Jesus whose scars and troubles are for our comfort. He says “If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation.” Before he becomes an example to us about coming to the end of our rope, he preaches a picture of salvation for us through his own suffering. 

The clearest message we have from God is his public death on a cross that in one sentence is the very voice of God saying to you “Here is my distress for your comfort and salvation.” This is the story of the Bible. It’s a story that labels all humanity as equal parts victim and villain. All are afflicted, and all are in bed with the evil of sin which leads to every form of heartbreak, pressure, and affliction. 

The resurrected Jesus has been and continues to hunt down sin-sick antagonists like us to tell us how he got his scars. When you hear of it, the death of self-reliance occurs – be it for the first time or the millionth time. His distress is for our comfort, teaching us to no longer rely on ourselves. By his wounds we are healed. 

The post How I Got These Scars appeared first on Red Tree.

I’m a fairly competitive person, but my drive in competition is often fueled by a fear of losing rather than a love of winning. In fact, if you tune in to the internal Spotify playlist I have playing to motivate myself, you may be reminded of Full Metal Jacket’s Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.

Most days, I feel like I only know how to push myself by berating and belittling myself. If I win or perform well, sure, I’m happy, but maybe it’s more a sense of relief from not losing. Fear of failing next time looms behind every victory. This same cloud hangs over my professional career – particularly in sales. After closing a deal, I’m slow to celebrate the win and instead spend time sighing that nothing blew up in my face. The momentary relief doesn’t last long though, because the next opportunity to screw up could be right over the horizon.

While I aspire to be this crazy athletic stud and super successful businessman, my fear of coming up short and failing means that I don’t go all out. I‘m afraid that if I leave it all out on the field or in exercise terms “go to failure” there will be no place to hide if I come up short. Put differently, by refraining from pouring myself out, I can hold on to my delusions and keep my fantasy alive.

Some days I feel like I’m running all over trying to keep the cracks in my fantasy from spreading and having my ideal self come crashing down. It’s on days like this when my internal playlist is the loudest and loops for hours, not just when working or exercising. If I spill water while doing the dishes, I’m a failure. If I forget to get an item at the grocery store, I am an idiot. If my car is low on gas I am a f***ing idiot-failure who can’t get anything right. Those are just a few of the classic hits.

By my own ideals, I continually fall short. The standards I have for myself prove to be a curse upon my life and self-condemnation repeats over and over in my head. When reading Scripture, I identify strongly with Moses, who had no shortage of anger management issues. I wonder if my internal monologue is similar to the anger and frustration he felt when he first brought the law down to the Israelites and found them worshiping an idol they made for themselves: 

Moses said, “It is not the sound of a victory shout, and it’s not the sound of a shout of defeat, but it’s the sound of singing that I hear.” As Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, he became angry. He threw the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the base of the mountain. Exodus 34:18-19

Whenever I read this story, I see myself on both sides. I’m the one angry about the failure, and I’m the one chasing after false gods. But recently, I’ve begun to hear a new and better playlist, but it took failing and dropping out of a marathon to hear this new music. 

Marathons take months of committed training: getting up early to beat the summer heat, long runs every weekend, and an insatiable appetite. During training runs, I fought to switch the playlist in my head to something more encouraging, “You can do this! Just have fun.” But hollow cliches rarely do anything for me.

When race day finally came around, in the most anti-climactic fashion possible, I suffered an injury and had to drop out of the race after only seven miles. As I hobbled to the spot where my wife and daughter were supposed to be cheering me on to my glorious victory, my failure was on full display and my anger was in complete control.

“God, why would you shame me like this in front of my family? Why the hell did I try to do this in the first place?”

Deeper and deeper I spiraled as I limped for what seemed like a marathon in itself. And who were all these happy people on the side of the road with their stupid signs? I now know with certainty that the “press here for boosters” sign does not work, at least not for me.

But as I turned the corner, I saw my daughter waiting for her dad. 

In terms of the race, she didn’t have a clue what was going on. She wasn’t wearing a stopwatch to track my splits. She was just looking for her dad, who she loves. As I stepped off the road and limped towards her, she threw her sign on the ground. Then she trotted towards me and gave me a hug. My daughter was oblivious that race officials put “DNF” (Did Not Finish) next to my name. If you asked her what the winning time was that day, she wouldn’t be able to answer. None of that mattered to her.

I didn’t realize I was hearing from Jesus that day, and I especially didn’t think he was answering my angry questions, but he was – he was there in that moment when my daughter threw down her sign and hugged me.   

Like Moses, and like my daughter, Jesus also throws down tablets. Do you remember that strange sequence in the Gospel of John where we’re told Jesus is writing in the sand? In John 8, the Pharisees drag a woman caught in adultery before Jesus and demand that He pronounce sentencing against her. Just like with the stone tablets, Jesus etches writing into the ground – but we’re only told about the activity, not the words themselves. Or are we? In the story of Moses, God has to rewrite the tablets a second time after they are broken, but now, with Jesus on the scene, He writes a new and personal word, “neither do I condemn you.” At that moment, Jesus is shattering the commandment, but unlike Moses, He is doing so out of love – substitutionary love. The adulterer deserves to die according to the law, but Jesus is going to cover that debt himself when he is shattered on the cross in our place.

On this side of failure, I am learning to trust God when he says “it is finished.” Every day I need to ask him to shatter the albums of my old classic hits because I keep going back to them just like that Top 40 Hit from middle school. I am learning I can give him my fear of failure because he says, “I love you no matter the outcome. You can run because it doesn’t matter how you perform…it doesn’t matter.”

Whenever a coach says, “Now go out there and just have fun,” everyone knows it’s a lie because if you want to stay on the team, you know you have to perform. But I think when God says it, he actually means it. I am beginning to see fear’s grip loosen, and I can’t help but smile when I think of Jesus, Moses, and my daughter throwing signs on the ground never to be picked up again.

The post Marathons and Shattered Tablets appeared first on Red Tree.

Recently, however, I failed to take these necessary medications after a long and busy week. I woke up in a fog and proceeded to spend the day struggling to do simple tasks, my thoughts muddled and slow to catch up. I soon recognized what was happening, and realized where my misstep had taken place. I made sure to take my pills before heading up to bed that night, and as I lay there next to my husband, I quietly confessed my struggle with the reality that I needed these pills to stay steady. I begrudged the fact that I feel completely out of control of my own mental state, especially when user error can lead to days and nights like these, where my incapacity to will myself out of this fate is laid before me. I can want to feel better until I’m blue in the face, and yet, depression will still take me slowly and silently into a dark cloud.

As I lay there, my mind wandered to the only thing that helps me make sense of this powerlessness. Who does God say that we are at our base level? Drop into any book of the Bible and it’s clear that our factory setting is broken beyond repair. The fracture that spilled out of the Garden of Eden has disjointed our souls, making it impossible for us to will ourselves out of that broken condition, no matter how much we may want to. It shuts down any avenue that may contain something life-giving, leaving us, for all intents and purposes, dead. And we are helpless to stop it.

My mental state is a byproduct of this historical and spiritual fracturing, yes, but it’s also a picture of it. If you’ve ever felt the incapacitating and unavoidable pull of depression or any mental illness, you are familiar with this feeling. This unforgiving illness displays a clear reflection of our spiritual predicament. We are sliding down a cliff into the dark, no matter how much we bloody our hands trying to keep ourselves from falling. Our great need is for someone outside of us to steady the ground beneath us, to bring light to our darkness, and to revive our flatlining hearts. 

Christ’s work on the cross was a bloody affair, the scandal of eternity. Who would have thought that the God of life would cover himself with the stench of our broken decay in order to save those who didn’t even know they needed saving? On the cross, Jesus stretched out his hand and healed the fractures that left us broken and dying on the side of the road. The price was enormous, but he was willing to pay it, bleeding out under the condition of our disease. Isaiah laments about Jesus, calling him “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (53:3). In other words, he didn’t just see my depression from the mountaintop; he lived it in the valley. And up from the valley, he bore my cross — your cross — on his back, planting it on the hill of Calvary where he would exchange his death for our life.

There in my bed, this truth didn’t miraculously heal my broken brain, but it did turn my face to the greater miracle. The miracle of the cross shines on despite the trouble that I may face here on this earth. Jesus’s pierced hands reach through the fog, regardless of my ability to see or feel them at any given moment. My temporary sickness will one day give way to eternal joy, and for that, I rejoice. But in the here and now, the vastness of God’s mercy and grace is enough. So while I take my medicine, see my therapist, or visit my doctor, I quietly rejoice over this picture of my greater need, and how it’s been resoundingly met in Jesus.

The post My Broken Brain appeared first on Red Tree.

In the weeks and months after The Batman, “Something in the Way” shot up the billboard charts. Clearly, the song hits a nerve in a way that can’t be written off as another case of 90s nostalgia.

For context, the song describes the emotional turmoil and plight of living without a home in this world. For years, the opening lyrics, “underneath the bridge, tarp has sprung a leak” were interpreted as lead singer Kurt Cobain’s attempt to put to words his own experiences of homelessness in his adolescent years. Though this would later be proved to be a myth, the homeless imagery and the angsty mood of the song expresses a frustration with the world. As if it has conspired against Cobain to put a series of setbacks in his way. But by the end of the song and its unending chorus, one is left with the impression that there’s something else going on below the surface, that maybe the thing in the way is Cobain himself.

There exists an inner dark night of the soul that can’t be cured by human achievement or effort.  Regardless of the desire to heal, the walls of the well of sadness and purposelessness are too high to scale and climb out. Something else will always get in the way, leaving you right back where you started.

This is one of many hidden messages in the life of one of the more well known prophets in the Old Testament. Even if you didn’t grow up in Sunday school, there’s still a chance you’ve heard the story of Elijah and how he single handedly took 400 false prophets to task in an epic showdown of “Whose God is Real Anyway?” If there were a hall of fame for the prophets, Elijah calling fire down from heaven would earn him one of the tallest trophies.

What often gets less stage time is the dark night of the soul that follows Elijah’s literal mountain top experience. He pleads with God to end his life the day after this career high moment. He has vanquished his enemy — there’s no long anything in his way — but he finds himself forlorn. His cry out for death resembles Psalm 88, the only prayer in the Bible that ends without a single hint of hope: “Why, Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me? You have taken from me friend and neighbor — darkness is my closest friend.”

British journalist Oliver Burkeman describes two main forms of suffering that plagues the human experience:

1. The kind that results from power disparities between groups: racism, sexism, economic inequality.
2. The universal kind that comes with being a finite human, faced with a limited lifespan, the inevitability of death, the unavoidability of grief and regret, the inability to control the present or predict the future and the impossibility of ever fully knowing even those to whom we’re closest.

The first form of suffering rightly gets a lot of airtime in the news, coverage in our scrolling, and in conversation because it’s that form of suffering that human beings can actually solve, at least in part. Campaigns to end any “ism,” that is, any form of suffering inflicted from one group to another, can be successful. In many ways, it is the form of suffering humans can do something about. Amid our pursuit of happiness, an obstacle gets in our way and must be overcome.

The second form, the kind that rests a layer deeper than what we can do to one another, cannot be solved with human hands. The problem isn’t out there somewhere, but seems to be much closer to home.

This deeper layer of suffering is no respecter of persons. It’s an inner insecurity revealed by both Cobain and Elijah. No amount of fire called down from heaven, musically or literally, can inhibit our unrest — our own dark nights of the soul. Regardless of the level of severity, if you are a human being, you have experienced that inner anxiety, even if outward circumstances are going your way. This inner turmoil can’t be fixed with outward solutions. Our efforts for resolve are in vain — there is, as Cobain diagnoses, “something in the way” and that something is us.

What hope do we have? Where do we turn?

God’s response to Elijah is a proverbial lighthouse for us. After letting him take a couple naps and giving him a sandwich, God has him go up on another mountain. But this time, God’s got something better for Elijah than a dramatic accomplishment. He sees terrifying and wondrous acts. A mountain falls apart from a windstorm. And then an earthquake and firestorm come and go. In all these, God was absent. But then he hears a gentle whisper (1 Kings 19:11-12). What comes after the gentle whisper? Nothing. No “but’s” — God himself is in the gentle whisper! Elijah expected to hear God in impressive, powerful displays, but what he needed most was the gentle whisper of God.

This whisper waits to take full shape until the New Testament, in which the person of Jesus takes center stage. He extends an invitation to come to him to find the type of soul-rest you can’t achieve for yourself. Because he is gentle and lowly in heart. Because he himself is the whisper of God.

While he’s dying on the cross, he shouts “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The people who hear the shout respond saying, “he’s calling Elijah.” In one sense, they are correct, but maybe not in the way they first intend. Jesus is calling Elijah and everyone else who has ever experienced the universal kind of suffering that comes with being human.

In love, he steps into the void of our deepest anxieties, puts them on like a robe, and then burns beneath the fiery wrath of God in our place. He became our dark night of the soul to remove the “something in the way.” Elijah was spared from the earthquake of God because Jesus redirected it to himself on the cross, when the earth shook as it swallowed the son of man. In his death, he descends to hell to break the deep chains that bind us and set us free to receive his rest.

Come to me, he says. My yoke is easy and my burden is light. Light of course means “not heavy,” but it is also equally true to say his burden is light itself, capable of illuminating our darkest darkness. In him, nothing is in the way.

—

This post originally appeared on mbird.com

The post Something in the Way appeared first on Red Tree.