Sing Joy About Grief

There are so many paradoxes in life.

If you know me then you know I love to define things by their opposites. I find it truly helps me to see what something is - simply by seeing what it really isn’t.

G.K. Chesterton says that you don’t know what you want to say until you know what you don’t. I agree.

You don’t know war ‘till you’ve seen the absence of peace. Joy is magnified when in the midst of great grief. You don’t despise pride ‘till you’ve seen love’s purest act. Sun and shadow. Hope and despair.

Yet oftentimes these things are so blended and combined that there isn’t so much of a definition, but a lot of muddy opinion. Some man's joy is another man’s grief.

Mix Red, Blue, and Green light together and you get brilliant white light. Do the same with paint and you might as well have thrown up your dinner with the black gruel that you will have made.

So even absolutes and conclusion can be a matter of opinion.

Enough poor philosophy though. What I’m trying to get to is a dissecting of my last post's statement: God is good.

Three big words.

Firstly “God”: Here I’m referring to the Christian God. Whom men can come to through Jesus, and His act of pure love on the cross.

Secondly “Is”: This is a verb. Probably one of the most complex and fundamental of all verbs. But you know what it means and how it’s used so I’m not even gonna explain.

Thirdly we have “Good”: Hmmmmmm. Well that certainly depends.

I personally think good is often a terrifying thing. Just wretchedly terrifying and beyond understanding.

So many things done in the name of good intentions have been, in fact, very bad things.

And some bad things, have brought about such good.

My Dad and I went for a drink tonight and he recalled a story about his father. During the Second World War my grandfather, a soldier, was at some point “thrown in the slammer” (he had done something bad) and was transferred to another regiment. His former regiment went on to D-Day - while he didn’t.

It became clear that if he had never done that “bad thing” we might not have been there having a drink.

A startling realization.

So saying God is good may not look like what we think.

Banana bread is good but so is chemotherapy.

Have fun is good but so is punishment.

Redemption is good. Yet only through the scourging, the separating, and the slaughter of Jesus. None of those are good things, but it certainly was the best thing ever.

I’ve had to make many hard decisions in my life, just like us all (some more than others), that are very much for the best, but are often-times (such as it is for most of life’s biggest decisions) wretchedly terrible.

I remember a scene from the movie “Master and Commander” (about a British warship trying to find and destroy a French warship during the Napoleonic Wars) where a young boy suffers an infectious injury to his arm (whilst doing his good duty) and they have to amputate (and in a time before pain-killers!). The boy goes ahead with the amputation willingly and quietly because it’s a good thing. He lived.

Sometimes we have to cut off things we love to continue to enjoy other things that we love. Like an arm for life.

Now God is good right? So we can find a supreme and infinite joy and goodness by coming to Him and loving Him and living through and in Him. The problem is that we are not good, and therefore we all too often have to make the painful decision of cutting things off that are dimming, or tainting, or killing that God given goodness.

The thing to cut off is the infection. Your life. And come to Jesus, Who has great goodness to restore you with.

This is a one-time thing but also a process. A continual surgery that ends with the gaining of life.

So when we’re told “things will work out for good” (usually in the midst of great pain) we can be assured that with God, Who is good, first in our lives that the working out of good is true. We have salvation.

Like a sliver, it just has to be worked out.

So accept Jesus, Who accepts all who come to Him in spirit and truth, and sing joy about grief.

‘Cause it’s all just a while ‘till it’s all worked out for good. In Jesus’ name.

Broader Than The Sea (Part 2)

** This post is a Testimony of what I see as truth, it is not intended as a Theological Essay **

I had a dream last night of crossing the Ocean. I went with a man I didn’t know in a small rowboat. The sea was huge, a giant with a voice of depth and an immovable will. My dream ended with me and this man looking around us at the nighttime sky, it’s roundness like a giants umbrella with little holes that sparkle evidence of the heavens behind. The moon was gone, fallen behind the shadow of the fallen planet. We could go no further, the depths beneath us as deep as the depths above us, both black as the pupils of our eyes and our hearts as tired as our arms. The last thing I remember was an overwhelming sense that the sea had beaten us. Then the view of endlessness took the little breath from me that the rowing had left and I awoke to find my cold, still room and the presence of Almighty God flooding my soul.

Tonight. I walked through downtown London. It’s a clear evening and the moon, when seen clearly from behind the steeples, blends gently into the sky. Those steeples tower menacingly into the above, getting darker as they rise out of the light, seemingly trying to reach the stars. And the soft sound of stillness eases my mind into memory. I am happy and my heart is light but my memory, for the most part, is strong. The sun looked like the moon when I sat on the shores of Lake Huron just a few months ago. But those months may well have been a lifetime to me. In a purple shirt before the colourless sky and reverently still water, I reviewed my notes for a short talk, or sermon, I had prepared for the young adults. A passage I had read a thousand times sprawled out in black on white before me. But what it said was much less clear to me than black and white. I thank God everyday for His word, but by God I cannot always hear what it is He is saying. This moment though I will always remember ‘cause as I looked up from the page to the sky and His words hit me harder than I’ve ever been hit before by any revelation, “there is only one who is good”. Black and white. There was no horizon, no movement or focal point – even the sun was tame and able to be looked at with the naked eye as it floated in a sea of white sky. Like the moon tonight, floating in the sea of black. God is good. Through the following months everything else I ever knew fell apart – literally everything. Until I was lying in a hospital bed, unable to cry or think clearly, looking out my window at the moon and remembering that “there is only one who is good”.

Steeples. From my hospital window I could see seven steeples and on Sunday morning many people gather there to worship the same God who had left me to suffer in my own mind and curtain-walled room. I could not see what I saw on that beach but I knew it was true, despite my blindness. Backtrack with me two weeks before I was in the hospital. I was playing piano at 3a.m. in my parent’s basement - but there was only one song I could sing and of that song only one verse I felt really able to sing. Things really started to fall apart in my mind and heart then. When there’s only one thing you know, life becomes very simple. “Holy, holy, holy, though the darkness hide Thee, though the eye of sinful man Thy glory may not see. Only Thou art holy, there is none beside Thee, perfect in power, in love and purity.” I would say I lost my faith. I truly did. I lost it - but it didn’t leave, it’s just that my soul became so dark that I couldn’t find it. My sinful eye could not behold light.

Why did God do this to me? Why did I become a monster of confusion and hate? My prayers were prayers of longing for righteousness, for clarity, for holiness and for love! I have journals full of them. Why did God give me a stone instead of bread? A serpent instead of a fish? Where was God when I needed Him most?

But it’s funny how we perceive gifts isn’t it? Isn’t chemotherapy a gift of sorts?

There’s a long passage that I want to share with you from John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion that states, more clearly than I could, what I wish to say.

“… It is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself. For (such is our innate pride) we always seem to ourselves just, and upright, and wise, and holy, until we are convinced, by clear evidence, of our injustice, vileness, folly, and impurity. Convinced, however, we are not, if we look to ourselves only, and not to the Lord also —He being the only standard by the application of which this conviction can be produced. For, since we are all naturally prone to hypocrisy, any empty semblance of righteousness is quite enough to satisfy us instead of righteousness itself. And since nothing appears within us or around us that is not tainted with very great impurity, so long as we keep our mind within the confines of human pollution, anything which is in some small degree less defiled delights us as if it were most pure just as an eye, to which nothing but black had been previously presented, deems an object of a whitish, or even of a brownish hue, to be perfectly white. Nay, the bodily sense may furnish a still stronger illustration of the extent to which we are deluded in estimating the powers of the mind. If, at mid-day, we either look down to the ground, or on the surrounding objects which lie open to our view, we think ourselves endued with a very strong and piercing eyesight; but when we look up to the sun, and gaze at it unveiled, the sight which did excellently well for the earth is instantly so dazzled and confounded by the refulgence, as to oblige us to confess that our acuteness in discerning terrestrial objects is mere dimness when applied to the sun. Thus too, it happens in estimating our spiritual qualities. So long as we do not look beyond the earth, we are quite pleased with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue; we address ourselves in the most flattering terms, and seem only less than demigods. But should we once begin to raise our thoughts to God, and reflect what kind of Being he is, and how absolute the perfection of that righteousness, and wisdom, and virtue, to which, as a standard, we are bound to be conformed, what formerly delighted us by its false show of righteousness will become polluted with the greatest iniquity; what strangely imposed upon us under the name of wisdom will disgust by its extreme folly; and what presented the appearance of virtuous energy will be condemned as the most miserable impotence. So far are those qualities in us, which seem most perfect, from corresponding to the divine purity.” (The Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin, Book 1, Section 2, Chapter 1.)

Had I read this in the tempest of my pain I would surely have scoffed. For in my world, during this time, the sun was quite absent, gone to sleep when I was awake - the world, the sky, myself, and all those around me were all dark and in darkness. But God was with those who were beside me, or so they said. The name of God was emptiness and a memory of fiction. I didn’t know what was real anymore. People told me that my whole life up to this point had been a fabrication of my mind, including my religious, or spiritual, experiences. I was shattered. I read the prayers of puritans and they seemed nothing more than pious and proud literature. A Christian competition for holiness. Everything fell into that for me, nothing was real. My love, my faith, my hope, my friends, my knowledge: all sand. I was no-longer in a boat trying to find shore in the dark, but I was beneath the waves and storm in the silence of pure despair, I gasped for air and all that came was water.

Where was the whale to swallow me and set me straight?

I wrote a song there called I Don’t Know. Here are the lyrics to the fourth verse in the song. I post this to describe my mind in that time.

I want to move on but the engine won’t take

I want to break the silence but the silence won’t break

I want to feel your warmth but all I feel is cold

I want to be young but I keep getting old

And every time I think my heart’s dead

The depths of it awaken and turn the black to red

In the dark but beating

In the depths but breathing

In the cold but burning

In the tempest of mourning

Love lives and stills storms

‘Cause when it’s blood we sow

The love it grows

The love it grows

But I still don’t know

I just don’t know

Music. For some reason it seems my soul’s last resource for feeling is music. Music is good because it is constant. I know that if I hit certain notes at certain times it will portray certain emotions and feelings and messages. A song can paint a sunset sad or glad. A song can bring romance or war, or both. A song can add to words, sometimes, what words alone cannot do. It can be the soul’s groaning – which can be more powerful and more true than the greatest combination of powerful words, the greatest speeches, the most affluent prayers – all shadowed by the moans of pain or gladness that the soul sings in the quiet, in the dark, in the stillness and in the passing. I came with a guitar and these songs and they became more than an enjoyment for me, but a connection with those other patients in this hospital. We’d gather around daily to play for hours, and I’d sing to them all my songs. They loved it and so did I. I was one with them and they were one with me. It was strange and unexpected.

There was something even stranger that happened in my heart while in the hospital. It gave up but, oddly, it couldn’t. I’ve never gotten to the point where I could entirely give up so I had always assumed it to be a possible thing, but it’s not. I renounced my faith and then my faith was needed… not by me though, by the others in the hospital. Of all the broken people in the world, this place certainly had a high concentration of them – and not the sort of “broken” we see in comfortable, middle-class, weekly, Bible-memorizing Christendom, but a real, deep, permanent brokenness. From listening to my songs they felt as though I was someone they could come to (even though I certainly wasn’t) and I was asked about God. Shockingly I couldn’t say anything bad about Him, only myself. God was real to me still, and greatest of all, He was good! God is good. It was still there in my heart, stronger and newer and purer than ever before. I hated it at first. I loved my negativity as a validation of my hurt. But when I sat on my bed once again and turned on my light to read from my Bible for the first time in weeks, it fell open to Lamentations 3 and I read “Is it not from the mouth of God that both good and bad come?” The tears finally came. All the hurt that had been finally dripped out my eyes and landed, hot, on my shirt. God knew where I was, and He Himself had been there too. Abandoned and broken. God, though He was not with me or emotionally present in my heart as a comfort (as I begged for – where is this light burden and easy yoke!?), was there in the most real way I’d ever experienced. I flipped to John and read as though I’d never read before. “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” I read John aloud to the broken people of the eighth flour, and we all learned anew together. That the ultimate demonstration of the goodness of God is shown to us by the fact that Jesus died on the cross, as an act of pure love, that we, the unholy and broken, might be holy and whole by believing and becoming one with God, in all goodness and holiness, through Jesus Christ. Made wrong to right by mercy, made darkness to light by His grace.

So why is this part 2 of Broader Than The Sea? Because I have found my first shore on the ocean of God’s character – the one thing that I will always cherish as the most important characteristic of God, which saved my life and my faith. Of all the things that there are to know, and there certainly are many. And even more things to know about God, some true and some not, there is one thing that is sure and is true and God has revealed to us: that He is good, through and through. Bad is not in Him. He is not a liar or a sinner. He is holy, pure, love. God is good. I am not. But God is good. Oh heavens, God is good!

Broader Than The Sea (Part 1)

This August evening I saw the sun go down. Found myself thinking about how it was the same noon-day sun that was shining down somewhere else further West. It is a large world we live in and there are many things I don’t come close to understanding. It is beautiful too. This particular August sunset was no irregularly awesome sight – but awesome nonetheless. Geese flew their southbound root while crickets took up their chorus and the big dark clouds were like flat light-framed mountains pinned against the sun-painted orange sky. Beams of light shot through the air like towers that no man’s hands could build and that my mind tries and fails to understand. It just is and I don’t fully get it.

This makes me think of God. My feeble and stupid heart does not understand but longs to apply glory and praise. I cannot to myself. It would be folly to see the sky and the glorious universe and apply its glory to my pride. And so my heart’s deepest longing and the deepest meaning of heaven and earth are applied to God’s creative and powerful hand. To the glory of God – the meaning of all things. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1) And that’s the song my heart sings and finds it’s humble comfort and joy in.

Of the stars Isaiah says “Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name, by the greatness of his might, and because he is strong in power not one is missing.” This God of Whom Isaiah speak knows these stars by name, these Billions of stars all held in place – not one is missing. The Bible is full of words that ascribe the glory of the universe to God. In many beautiful ways the beauty of what widely is unknown can be said.

But standing there – looking at the sun from this small planet in a small corner of the universe is really just a part of the unknowing and part of the beauty. Words cannot really describe it. But is not the Creator greater than the created? Is not a painting to the glory of the painter? Or a magnificent bridge but a taste of the brilliant mind that designed it? So I look to this non-irregular sunset like a painting, or for those science minded - a brilliant design of things happening, and ascribe this glory that I don’t really know anything about to, well, to God who I must not know very much about either (to be touched on in Part 2). I cannot fathom.

I sit now in my room and look at my bookshelf. A room says a lot about a person and so does a bookshelf. I hope that both of mine would tell you that I pursue and seek to understand Christianity. I know my bookshelf would certainly tell you that I like to read about Christianity. But it is a feeble bookshelf compared to some. There are some heavy books – the Bible being there but not the biggest by any means. In fact the longest of the books is a book that tries to understand and break down what the Bible says about God. It is only one of many. If you think there’s a lot of stars you should look up how many books are written about Christianity and the Christian God. It is because it cannot be fully done. You would have to write an endless book to describe God.

Just yesterday I tried, for fun, spurred on by a tired-of-being-lazy mindset, to come up with my own Cross-References (I called them Power Parallels) for a chapter of the Bible called Romans 1. I got through the first few verses in about 30 minutes with over 10 themes I could have drawn from and over 25 different references to the same idea or thought. The thing is that each one of those references had it’s own set of words and ideas that expanded and added to what was being said in Romans 1. And I am only scratching the surface – what I’ve done is a drop of water in the ocean. It’s a wonder to me that the man who wrote Romans endured till chapter 11 before breaking out in praise “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.”

I have said these things for a purpose. I draw parallels between a sunset and the knowledge of God not to say they are always the same thing. The knowledge of God or “Science of God” is something called Theology - and very few people can take Theology and experience (like watching a sunset) and mix them together. C.S. Lewis a great Christian thinker (and very popular) ran into this very same problem when trying to talk Theology to a group of R.A.F. soldiers. He described his experience of a man standing up and telling him that he’d felt God in the dessert once at night and that this “God” that Lewis was talking so plainly about (as if it was understood) was a weak and flimsy in comparison to what had been experienced. Lewis agreed with this man and I agree with them both too. So why is it necessary to have knowledge of God? What good does it do to understand something not-understandable but that one can experience so greatly. I could see a sunset and trust God that God is great could I not? Need I go on about how God created things and upholds things and does things for different reasons? Those are the people who don’t actually understand God at all aren’t they? The one’s that think they do.

Lewis says this concerning the man and his experience and hostility towards theology, “I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.”

Now I’ve gotten off track a bit here and I’d like to bring it all back together. I don’t want this letter, which started out with a glimpse of the glorious creation of God pointing to a God who is greater and than his greatest creations – by far. Like a man is greater than the statue he made. I’ve gone into how much knowledge there is about God and how, since this knowledge is of God and from God, it is only a fraction of the glorious God and all that there would be to know if one could know God – but like a baby looking at his father he doesn’t really understand. And then I went into “so why try?” When a baby looks at its father does it need to understand the father to feel love? Does saying in a book “her eyes were blue” compare to seeing a beautiful woman with blue eyes? Or looking into those eyes? So why don’t I get my head out of the Bible and books that help with understanding Christianity and just start going and doing? I provided the Lewis quote for that. It would be no good to just look at the ocean if you wanted to get to America. So one must know and do – they rely on one another.

There is a point I’m trying to make that I have not yet said. I would defeat myself if I left it at saying one must know and do without describing what Lewis calls “America”. Now Lewis is very good at always pointing out the flaws in the metaphors he uses - but he did not this time. He described God as the ocean, with it’s contours and edges that have been traced out and maps have been made. But I challenge that and say that while we have traced out much of the contours and shores of God’s character as he has revealed to us through the Bible – it is not all there. There is much more. One will never land on the shores of America by figuring everything out and conquering the sea. This sea is not a sea to be conquered – no one has traced out the shores of America yet – we don’t really know where they are or how far it is to them. Every ship has sunk in the sea before drawing out all its edges and that's the point. But they’ve sailed according to the maps that already have been made. On their way to “America” – the complete knowledge and perfection and glory of God.

“So Can you find out the deep things of God?
Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven —what can you do?
Deeper than Sheol—what can you know? Its measure is longer than the earth
and broader than the sea.” (Job 11:7-9)