This is Beauty Abandoned

The other day I was at work. I work at Pal's, a quick-service, drive-through, better-than-McDonald's restaurant. I was on sandwiches, which is, in my perspective, the most . . . big station. There's just so much to be done at the sandwich station, so when it gets busy there are often two people on the station: one to drop buns into the toaster and help keep things stocked, and the other to make the sandwiches themselves. I started the shift dropping buns for a nice girl named Misha. Everything was going well: we were working excellently as a team and I was getting slightly better at the actual making of the sandwiches.

Break time for Misha.

In the thirty minutes that followed, I struggled to get through each burger, dropping buns when I could, and dwindling the stock down to nothing. By the time Misha returned, lettuce was lying all over the place, there were onions in the tomatoes, and there was no cheese, buns, chicken, or pickles. I gave Misha my best puppy dog eyes, but to no avail. "Man this place was beautiful when I left it. I worked so hard to get it clean."

Beauty cannot endure without its creator.

Beauty may be able to survive, hanging on by a thread, but never will it flourish. The creator is the one who knows what's best for the beauty. The creator cares, and knows how to care better than anyone else in the world. The creator knows the beauty's inner workings.

Take for example . . . a work of art. The creator will cherish it, take care of it, love it. Like no one else, the artist will treat its creation like a king (figuratively of course), until that creation "expires" or a new, better, more efficient creation overtakes the old.

We are God's creation.

Here's the special part though: God never gets tired of us, He never leaves us for something better. The only problem is that God is love, thus He does not desire to force us to love Him. It's not in His nature, it's not who He is. True love cannot be forced. So God gave us a choice. When we remain in God's hands he will treat us right. He knows; He created us. Although life may not be easier, God will care for us, love us, make us better. And that process sometimes is hard.

So the choice. We can remain in God's eternal care, or we can abandon His love. We can turn our back on Him. We can take the wide, easy road. The "cool" path. There are so many ways we can be tempted toward this road. So many ways we can get tripped up, and fall down the cliff onto the wide path. And certainly, it seems easier.

We are beauty. We are beauty that will never be the victim of our Creator's abandonment. But we can abandon Him if we're not careful.

Are you beauty abandoned?

This is . . . Life?

My friend died this morning.

How do you go on from there? I didn't know her well, even when I was living in Canada, sitting across the aisle from her on the bus. Holly Baycroft always seemed quiet, kinda tucked inside herself, but cool. I don't think it has hit me yet. I'm just sort of sitting here pretending to be stunned. I am sorry, but I think part of me just doesn't believe it. Almost a mixture of hearing about some distant person dying, and trying to decipher when the sarcasm is ending in a conversation. I know I should be a lot more emotional than this. I'm just not. I am however trying to be contemplative. Death has never hit so close before. Death has always dwelled in far off places like Africa and my friend's cousin's dog's mother's roommate. Death just hit across the aisle from me.

What if my mom, sister, and brother got in a car accident. Only my brother survived, in critical condition. Worse yet, what if I thought that there was any chance that they might not spend eternity in God's love. New scenario. What if I helplessly watched from the sidelines as my dad turned down a chance to spare his own life by killing my mom, only to be chopped inch by inch from the legs up with machetes. My mom is killed similarly minutes later. My sister is sold as a sex-slave and my brothers are beaten to death.

These are not what-ifs. May God bless the people who have experienced this.

I just want to go hug everyone I know. Love is so . . . underrated. How have I interacted with my siblings today? I sat and had pictures with them, and played around on the hay bales a little bit. I pushed Gabe away when he was looking for attention. I gave Val one of those "oh that's cool" kinda answers when she tried to show me something today. Told a couple of them to get serious a few times. Stood by when Gabe cried over his recently dead mouse. Scolded Val for carrying the puppies wrong. Absentmindedly nodded at Gabe when he announced dinnertime. And Nate . . . I pretty much just didn't talk to him.

My parents took me to church and then met me at a local camp a few hours later. Then I grumbled at my mom when she took away from my "friend time" trying to get our family together for pictures at the camp. My last words to her as she rushed off to work from the picture session were probably something like, "Hey mom can I go now?"

And here I sit, facebooking, myspacing, blogging, and trying to make myself look like I'm good at guitar by playing all the easy songs I know. There must be more than this. That is the beginning of a song yearning for more of life. This is the beginning of a life yearning for more of God, more of love, more of life.

Fill us anew we pray, fill us anew we pray.

Of Seeping Weeds and Better Grass

This is kind of part two of the Grass Chronicles. Last time (Of Lawns and Aphorisms) I discussed how living in one extreme can often lead to another extreme, and how comparisons against other people is not how to rise above in life. I also talked a little bit about the difficulty of keeping a clean lawn in the midst of hayfields. Let's go into that a little more. . .

So, as I was thinking and walking and looking at grass, I thought about my own lawn. At the beginning of the summer, I sprayed most of the weeds and they died off. But evidently I missed some, because now the front yard is covered with annoying and ugly weeds and things. My point is that weeds spread. This blog may be a little shorter than most, because that's just about it. Weeds, when left unattended, spread and overtake your yard, and even the yards next to you. Thus, although it may look good on you for the time being to chill near the "hayfield" lives, and you may get plenty of good-natured attention, you sure as anything had better make sure those hayfields surrounding you don't seep weeds into your life. Standing out among the less-disciplined provides recognition for a while, until the weeds that have taken over their yards start taking over yours.

Now, on to people. There are people who are organized, ambitious, and disciplined; and there are those who are not. If you are striving to be successful, it would probably help if you weren't always having to spray out the weeds of sin and other bad habits that were seeping in from non-ambitious lives around you. However, we are called to lead those weedy lives higher, call them to a place of better grass so to speak. There is a fine line dividing too much and too little time spent with each type of group. We must learn to balance that tightrope, investing in others, but not neglecting to be invested in ourselves.

It is similar with ministry. It is indeed our calling to lead people to Christ, to help them grow deeper. For some that means getting up on a platform and preaching or leading Christ's followers in worship. But we must not neglect ourselves, or else we will not be able to minister to our full capacity. My dad gave me an example of this when I suggested simply forgoing college and going straight to the mission field. He said, "A doctor can reach down to a homeless person on the street, but a homeless person can't reach up to a doctor." Same with grass. A clean cut lawn can hold position and influence with other clean cut lawns, while also influencing lawns which are not kept up. An unkept lawn, however, can only have slight influence on other lawns, without any regard at all to the well kept lawns. Same with lives. God has called us higher so we can call others higher.

Here is what I'm trying to communicate:
1) Reach up to God and respectable people, who will take you higher
2) Reach out to others on your level, to have a mutual relationship in which you help each other climb higher
3) Reach down to underpriveliged, underinformed, or undermotivated people, and give them a hand up

Reach up, reach out, reach down.

Of Prayer and Relationships

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words." (Matt 6:5-7)

Flash back about eight years.

This is my first time attending the church prayer meetings on Saturday nights with my dad. Nope, sorry. Can't sleep over tonight. But inside, I'm not too sad. I'm finally growing up. Finally to be recognized as something more than an insignificant child. I am nervous my first week. I sit quietly with my dad, soaking up the genuine spirit of the meeting, along with the religio-lingo that gets stuck in there to make everyone in agreement feel important. As I sit there huddled beside my dad, I formulate my prayer for next week. It will be grand.

This is probably my first time experiencing the kind of feeling that I believe the pharisees of old felt. You know the ones. . . they were the ones Jesus was talking to when he said, "pray in your closet." Anyways, here I come to the next meeting. Theres a lull in the praying. . . here's my chance! "Jesus. . ." I begin. Oh no! What comes after this? Dead silence. "Uh. . . please help my grandpa's leg to feel better." I blew it! My chance to impress all the mature Christians that I want to be recognized by, gone! Right out the window! As the meeting comes to a close, I am surprised to be greeted with thanks, with an almost adult-like respect. It isn't just smiling, as if to hide thoughts like, Oh man why did that kid have to come here and ruin our religious time with God. They were genuine thank-you's.

Flash forward to now. Looking back I realize that the response I recieved from my prayer may have been because of the simple joy that I gave everybody just from the encouragement of seeing a kid who seeks God. But maybe there was more to it than that.

The simplicity of a child.

Despite the fact that I'd had this huge elaborate speech of a prayer planned out, when it slipped my concrete, childlike mind, I automatically reverted back to my natural self. My natural self is the person that I am when I "pray in my closet." I was thanked not for the depth of my prayer, but for the authenticity of it. I was simply praying to God the same way that I would any other time.

My dad is a firm believer in "ask for what you want." The philosophy of this idea is that someone can't help you achieve something if they don't know what it is you want to achieve. The easiest way to help someone see what you want is to simply ask them strait up. In fact, people often get annoyed when you put too much icing on the cake and side-step your actual question.

I believe that God responds in a similar way. Not that He gets annoyed with us necessarily, and not that he doesn't already know what we're trying to ask, but God doesn't need or want to hear all the elaborate speeches we hear in prayer meetings. Our God is a god of the common folk. Proof of this? The New Testament was written in "slang" Greek (a nifty tidbit I picked up from my dad). He had the Bible written in the common tongue so that everyone would be able to know Him. Not just the scholars and philosophers. From the naive children to the stubborn elders. Everyone.

God created everyone as they are, with specific plans for them. He knows the journeys. He loves us as He created us. When we come to Him in prayer, specifically in front of others, I don't think he's looking for us to show off how "tight" we are with Him. That's silliness. It's like these stupid "top friends" on myspace and facebook. Instead of aiming for deep relationship with someone, we aim for a spot on that top friends list; whatever it takes, I've got to get on his/her top! This isn't what relationships are people! Yet, however much I wouldn't like to admit it, I myself get trapped in this relationship race quite often.

It is much the same with our relationships with God. He wants us to aim for personal depth, not the admiration of others for our vocabulary or our "deep relationship with God." I believe God is infatuated with children. Children are so genuine, so simple, so insignificant.

"Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven" (Matt 18:4).

God loves the simple. He wants everyone to come as we are. He created our "natural selves." He wants us to come to Him just as he created us. He desires for us to be one person, a person of integrity, without different costumes and masks for every situation. God wants that person that is praying fervently in the closet to be the same one praying in the spotlight. This is not to say that the spotlight is wrong. Indeed, the Bible, our life manual, encourages praying in groups. We've all heard the pastor or small group leader recite the scripture: "Where two or three are gathered. . ." However, there is also the time that he criticized the hypocrites who pray on the pedestal. So what does this mean? Does it mean that Jesus just can't decide what we should do? Definitely not. I think that both apply.

God wants us to pray like we pray like we pray. Same in the closet as in the small group as in the spotlight. The emphasis is not on how many people are watching, but on our internal motives for our prayer. Are we praying to and for God alone? Or is there an ulterior motive? Are we working up the relationship ladder to God? Or are we working up the church ladder to fame and importance?