Down the Drain Forever

The photo depicts what used to be Roslyn Lake, five miles east of my house. Like tens (probably hundreds) of thousands of people, we have splashed, boated and fished in this very pleasant local waterway, and picnicked on its shores, but no more.

Roslyn was part of the Bull Run reservoir, and the stream feeding it was channeled through a most amazing wooden aqueduct. We used to drive guests up Phelps Road crossing under the aqueduct trestle and up the hill to park and look down on the clear, cold water hurrying to the lake below.

Not any more. The lake is gone, and (I'm told) the aqueduct is soon to follow, victims to a political system too deeply infected with environmentalism to tolerate the possibility that a fish might die.

I digress. I really use that picture and story to point to another one, penned by Mart De Haan in Our Daily Bread.

He writes about a sewage lagoon in Sand Lake, Michigan, that disappeared into a sinkhole. "Fifteen million gallons of water suddenly disappeared."

Even more interesting was that nobody knew where the water went. De Haan quoted a (befuddled?) county spokesperson who had the dubious privilege of offering an explanation to the press: "It will depend on where it went before we can say what happened."

Curious syntax, but one gets the point.

Here's the powerful spiritual parallel De Haan drew out of that intriguing story:

"I imagined all the wrongs of my life as being like that missing filthy lagoon. ... I really don't know where they went, but they are gone. The last time I saw the real guilt of my envy, anger, and impatience, they were all nailed to the cross of a Man suffering for wrongs He never committed."

In my teen years, shortly after my voice changed, my Dad put me on to a solo written for bass voice that was a lot of fun to sing. (I will not presume the same emotion on the part of the listeners.) De Haan's story reminds me of the words of that song:

"They are buried in the deep, deep sea.
They can never, never trouble me.
Cease my unavailing fears, for my sins of all the years,
They lie buried in the deep, deep, sea."

If I Make My Bed in Hell

I found this picture on the page of a facebook friend (thanks, Jake!). When I came across it, I was preparing a message to preach in my church and it fit perfectly. In fact (as I mentioned on Sunday) I would never have thought a picture could capture the truth of 2Corinthians 5:21, but this one did.

That verse says that Jesus was made sin for us so that we can be made the righteousness of God in Him. One writer I consulted called it the most profound verse in the Bible.

God crossed many dimensions to become man and open to us the way of life.

• From infinity he came to an obscure Roman province on a dark planet in a nameless solar system in one of uncounted billions and billions of galaxies.
• From somewhere outside time he made himself subject to the oppression of the aging process.
• From perfect love he came to scorn and contempt.
• From eternal life he came to death.
• And from perfect holiness he became sin. For us, his enemies.

Sin gives rise to many griefs: shame, ugliness, rejection, isolation, despair ... the list goes on. Jesus has felt every one of them. There is no place you can go where Jesus has not been. As David wrote in the Psalms, "Even if I make my bed in hell ... you are there!"

Every single individual on this planet is loved and valued by Jesus Christ. Every person is born for joy, and because of Jesus' unspeakable payment, joy is just one step away.

Swallowed Up by Life

Saskatoon will never host anything like the Olympics. The airport, though modern and altogether satisfactory, could be described as intimate. Not a popular tourist spot, this prairie town happens to be a regular destination for me because of its centrality to ministries working among First Nations communities in western Canada.

John Revesz was born near Saskatoon. Before departing for there four weeks ago, I saw John in church and made it a point to tell him where I was going. I knew he would be interested. He was always interested in people, me included.

John couldn't see very well lately. Helen did all the driving. But he was always in church ... until a couple of weeks ago. Helen told us he was weak. Last Sunday afternoon I started a five-day meeting in Brightwood, so I wasn't home when Valerie got the call, "John is dying. Do you want to see him?"

She did, and when I got home, I phoned. "Yes," Helen said, "he is about like yesterday." So I arranged to be there in a couple of hours. But a little before it was time to go, his daughter called back. It was too late. John saw his opportunity and took it; I had missed mine.

An earthly pilgrimage is a thing of wonder. Here was a 97-year-old man whose parents had been born in Hungary, one of 10 children, Canadian-born but immigrated to America. He had worked as a farmer, preacher, mechanic, furniture fabricator, homebuilder, woodworker and handyman.

Without any religious background, John had come to faith in Jesus Christ when he was 30 years old. Astride a farm tractor one day, he heard the voice of God. So he stopped the tractor and knelt in the dirt to invite Jesus into his life. "He identified immediately with God's great grace and tender mercies," as his son, Richard, put it.

John immediately began leading young people to events where they could make the same discovery. He knew Jesus now, and it was important that other people have the opportunity for the same relationship. "Our dad made Jesus a 67-year theme," Richard said.

A good choice. The only choice, really. At the end of 97 years, he slipped away, and that's the best part. He is gone from us, but he did not go to silence, gloom or fear. He did not, in fact, go to anything less than what he knew for 97 years. No, he went to much more. His mortality, as Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, was swallowed up by life.

“Someday you will read in the papers that D. L. Moody of East Northfield is dead," wrote the famous evangelist of an earlier century. "Don’t you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now; I shall have gone up higher, that is all, out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal – a body that death cannot touch …”

So it is for John Revesz. So it can be for you.

Glad for 35 Years

When I was 10 years old my dad became the pastor of Butte Community Bible Church in Butte, Nebraska. We moved 600 miles from the Texas panhandle to Butte, population about 500 souls, and spent 5.5 years there.

That's a big chunk of one's childhood and youth, and the source of lots of stories, but the most important thing that happened to me in Butte was meeting Valerie Hansen.

She was a year older and consequently, for almost the entire time of our sojourn in that little town, just out of my reach. Nevertheless, I was smitten from the beginning. There was never anyone else for me almost from the first time I saw her. But less than six months remained of that 5.5 years before I finally wore down her resistance to the idea of dating a younger guy.

We married in the church in Butte on June 8, 1973. My dad performed the ceremony and we honeymooned in Spearfish Canyon in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

That was 35 years ago and I'm still smitten.

Marriage is a thing of wonder. Like everything else in creation, it's a physical picture of something invisible, something too profound to imagine, something God wanted us to see every day to remind us of an eternal truth.

For example, vines we have to picture that Jesus is the source of life to us and we need to cling to him ("abide in me" he said) and draw his life to bear fruit so the world can partake of him.

Bread pictures that he is sustenance for us. Seeds and soil show us that from death comes life. Stars depict that vast company of angels who constantly do his bidding. Etc. Etc.

And as Paul wrote to the Ephesians, the great mystery of marriage is that it pictures the love between Jesus Christ and his people.

Look around and you will quickly see how many people are hungry for community, for relationship, for comfort, for unconditional love … all these are part of a good marriage, and all these are offered in the community of believers (the bride of Christ). And all these we can demonstrate in our marriages.

Valerie and I just spent 48 hours celebrating that. We were at a highly popular vacation destination--the Oregon coast--where it rained and blew and stayed below 55 degrees virtually the whole time. The picture is very representative. (It's also the only one we took!)

But, horrible weather notwithstanding, we just enjoyed being together without responsibilities for a couple of days.

I still can't believe she fell for me. But I'm glad.

I'm really glad.

Pavement on the Road to Hell

I boarded a plane one day from Calgary to Denver and sat down by one of the nicest people you could expect to meet. He worked for Caterpillar and actually took a demotion because he found he was spending too much time away from his family in pursuit of money. He was cordial, pleasant, humble even, interested in other people … and, apparently, utterly lost.

At the end of a conversation about spiritual matters during which I shared my own story and a couple of favorite truth analogies, I said something like this to him: “Someday God is going to knock on the door of your heart, and it will require faith on your part to answer.”

For maybe the first time in the conversation he disagreed with me.

“No,” he said, “I don’t see it that way. At the end of the day, I believe a life well-lived will not be rejected.”

Since he had felt free to disagree, I reciprocated.

“No,” I said, “I’m afraid you are mistaken. That’s the greasy-$100-bill approach,” I replied, referring to an earlier metaphor I had used that goes like this:

If someone approached me and said, “Gary, I would like to do something really special for you. I want to give you my ranch. Here’s the deed, titles to the vehicles, all the equipment, buildings, cattle and horses … it’s yours! Enjoy!”

If that happened to me, I said, I had two choices: I could accept it as a gift, or I could refuse it.

The only other option, to pay for it, was way beyond my means. And if I dragged a greasy $100 bill out of my wallet and said, “Here’s 100 bucks, I can’t take that for nothing,” I would be insulting the giver.

So it is when we try to earn God's favor. We can never muster enough goodness to earn that favor. We must receive it as a gift, or reject it. Our highest effort cannot possibly begin to earn it.

That payment has already been made. 2000 years ago. As surreal as it may seem, on a Roman cross just outside the gates of first-century Jerusalem, Jesus of Nazareth provided the unique payment for the sins of the whole world for all time ... including yours ... including mine.

So, while a well-lived life is a goal worthy of anyone, to rely on such a life to earn a good standing with God is folly.

Maybe that's what Jesus was talking about when he said: “When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first.” (The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 13, verses 43-45)

When Innocence is Crushed

Unspeakable

That's the only word for the story about the man in Austria accused of incest. After the news first broke, I can't bear to read about it any more

That story is only one of the worst in the daily accounts of the abuse of God's gift of human sexuality.

Someone not convinced of the ultimate goodness and wisdom of God might be tempted to question what he was thinking about when he granted to man the ability to beget life. When God gave man that privilege, he gave away enormous power. Power for good, and power for evil.

(That's much different, by the way, from the ability of animals to procreate. Animals don't give birth to a soul made in the image of God. Only people do that.)

God is eternal and I am not. If my puny perspective fails to grasp what He has in mind, should I be surprised? Some day I will know even as I am known. Some day we will see what God already sees about this. Just not yet, not here.

In the meantime, we Christ followers are called to bring His blessing and healing and reconciliation to the world. Wherever there is brokenness, we can bring healing in His name.

There is plenty of brokenness in the communities of the North Pacific Crescent. Sexual abuse, for example, happens way too much in so many of these communities. For obvious reasons, it's almost impossible to get statistics about it, but anyone who works in these environments knows the stories.

Too many young girls live in dread of the night. Too many bedrooms have no doors. Too many children know so little of real childhood.

It's hard for outsiders to understand the damage done by sexual abuse. Years after the last night of horror, people are still suffering. Marriages cannot survive, families struggle. The function of entire communities can be crippled by this reality.

But that's not the end of the story. Jesus has His people in some of these places. His powerful love is bringing a difference.

One of the best examples of that is a program called Hearts Going Toward Wellness. Alaska Native leaders dreamed it up and are leading the way. Check it out at http://news.webshots.com/album/554597374ZbNGaJ

It's our privilege to participate.

Yours, too. Ask me how.

No Ordinary Life

Last week Valerie and I drove all the way across Oregon and Idaho to visit Bruce and Flo Walters. It's 720 miles from Boring to Rigby, a very short distance to honor two extraordinary servants.

The neighbors probably wouldn't use that adjective to describe Bruce and Flo. After all, they live in a nice but non-descript double-wide manufactured home on an treeless street and drive an old Toyota sedan. They wear every day clothes and eat every day food because they are every day people. But if the neighbors could see them through the lens of the Kingdom of God they would never call them ordinary.

Bruce and Flo raised their family in Idaho before going to Alaska to settle into a small community 330 crow-flight miles from the nearest road. They went simply to offer their lives to people.

When they arrived, they were given a house to rent. Flo, like any nester, wanted to start by cleaning it up, but Bruce said Let's wait for a couple of days. Dust flying out an open front door at the end of a broom would say "This house is dirty" and he didn't want to offend the community.

Of course a little dust was nothing new to Bruce, or his bride. He was an Idaho sheepherder. He grew up in the hills and benches above the Snake River and, like a certain king-to-be of Israel, lived most of his life with sheep. Like that Israeli shepherd, he killed a bear that was raiding his flock, and the .22 pistol he used to do it was more powerful than a sling only by degrees.

That had been their life, but God called them like he called Amos, from tending sheep to offering a life to people. And they went. And they served that little community, and two or three others, through 13 years of obscurity in Alaska's desolate wilderness. The gift of their lives brought help and love and grace to some very dear people, dear to the Walters and dear to Jesus Christ.

Now they are back in Idaho in retirement. The living room of that little manufactured home displays a simple wooden plaque expressing the love of those remote Alaska communities.

Bruce and Flo still live pretty much in obscurity. But they have many friends in many places, whose embrace now is all the more dear to them since they found out, about a month ago, that Flo has stage 4 cancer.

None of us knows our days. Only to God is the future clear. That's how it works: He knows and loves, we trust and obey. That He would stoop to work with people at all is something very profound. But He does. He uses the most ordinary people.

He used Hannah, the barren wife of a polygamist, to provide the priest Samuel who rescued his people from moral collapse and became one of the most prominent leaders in the history of Israel.

He used Simon of Cyrene ... and went out of his way to identify him ... to carry the cross upon which Jesus of Nazereth died to purchase salvation for the world.

He used the youngest son of Jesse, a redhead despised by six older brothers, to kill a giant and deliver his people and become their greatest king, the benchmark for all the long line of royalty. He was a shepherd, like Bruce and Flo. About him the scriptures testify that "David ... served the purpose of God in his own generation ..."

That's how God works. And because he does, in the economy of God, there is no such thing as an ordinary life.

And as Bruce and Flo would be the first to say, it isn't about us anyway ... it's about the King.

We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.