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!