The Wastefulness of God

Guest Post by KG:

I went with my wife Su one day, one rainy day, as she stopped at a couple of garage sales. I sat in the car and waited while she ‘cased the joint’. As I set I began to watch the rain, how it washed everything: the streets the houses the cars and the lawns. Suddenly a fall leaf fell on the window and was immediately pasted there by the misting rain. My attentions to the effect of the rainfall shifted to the leaf. I was struck by its amazing beauty and complexity between the serrated edges, its symmetry and the articulate branching of the veins. As I looked closer and closer it seemed that they spread out ever more finely. "What a waste" I said to myself without thinking. I knew that there were millions of leaves that littered everything and each was as artistically crafted as the one on my car window.  “Isn’t such careful architecture and finery spent on this one leaf (or any leaf for that matter) just a waste of good art?” And it is all so temporary, just a few months of the year. The tree takes in sunlight, minerals and moisture and builds its bulky foliage. And not just any foliage but these masterfully crafted leaves... hundreds of millions of them. I knew that in the leaves that populate each tree (I’m told 6 million on the average large elm) there are millions and millions of cells in each leaf, every one of which has a blueprint for building another tree with leaves included.  In the end there is just decay and dirt, like the artist who completes a masterpiece only to crumple it up and throw it away. What a waste.

It didn’t take long for my thoughts to multiply. What I judged to be the case in the single instance of this one leaf/tree is true of even more that I wasn’t seeing. This is true of every living plant whether it blooms and is carefully cultivated in the flower pot or wild and grows on the remote and inaccessible mountain side. This is true of every enormously complex insect that roam's the forest floor or the farmer's field or for the briefest 24 hour life hovers over and inhabits the decaying carcass on the shore of an island. This is true of every animal that lives as a child's pet or inhabits the sea or roams the Serengeti or clings to the roof of the nearby cave. This is true of the grass that grows or the plants that sprouts up in the otherwise vacant field or the fungus that pops up everywhere and in abundance over all the earth however extreme the condition. Billions of times over again and again this exquisite parade marches relentlessly on. Finally, this is true of people whatever their color or size for however long their life may be.  And then the uninvited thought came to mind: and a large majority of all that wonder no one will ever see. What a waste.

Looking back I have to admit that it is clear to me now that I was indulging in an all too familiar way of thinking, a God absent or ‘horizontal’ way of thinking. I am a believer but I am not surprised at the things that go on in my head. I have found that it is not at all unusual for me to carry at least two contradictory ways of looking at events or issues in my head at the same time. In the case of my reflections on the leaf pasted against the window it is this sort of  ‘horizontal’ thinking. It is for me the default way of looking at things. It is that way because that is natural to me. And it natural to me because it is my earliest way of looking at life, i.e. with God there but only figured into the scheme of things. The other way of looking at life, a very different ‘other’, is the God tempered world and is ‘vertical’ in its orientation. I have been at pains to fit into it ever since God’s world caved in on me. It is the God-haunted world in which I now live. Because of that I live a dimensionally challenged life shuffling between life in the vertical and the horizontal.

The world is described in Genesis as a “good” thing. It is so not because God was merely commenting on how the things he had made met some necessity or satisfied some particular need he had.  When God said “it is good” he meant little more than that it flowed from his own goodness and was like himself, good. He liked what he had made, much like an artist who reflects on his own finished work. He liked it which is more than just a statement about God’s ‘tastes’.  It was good and he was satisfied with what he had made. If there was an audience it was the artist himself. It was what he wanted. As he said in his final inquisition of Job, “Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain and a way for the thunderbolt,  to bring rain on a land where no man is, on the desert in which there is no man, to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground sprout with grass?” (Job 38:25-27). In other words, no one ever sees some of God’s best work. God’s ‘performances’ are meant to satisfy an audience of one.

This exquisite orchestration that I took to be a ‘wasted’ effort was and is for the designer of that leaf a personal thing, his thing, and because it is his work, his fingerprints are left all over it. G. K. Chesterton talks about his own experience  in his book Orthodoxy. There he says that the impression left on his thinking by this phenomena of recurrence in nature was eventually life changing for him. “Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.” In other words, the occurrence of reoccurrence can have other than prodigal implications. Seen from the vantage point of the vertical our Father is younger than we are. He has the eternal appetite of infancy which in the moment of finishing a task shows his delight with the joyful appellation ‘do it again’. It is to his glory that he seems to exult so evidently in the repetition of the things he deems to be ‘good’. How else might a God drop hints about his life?

My time in those  idle ‘arboreal’ moments  eventually landed me in the lap of an ongoing project. It is a project begun years before when I had read something C.S. Lewis had written in Christian Reflections. It had made sense at the time but was hard to integrate into my selfish life, my life framed in the horizontal. Lewis had made the observation that there is an important difference between gratitude and adoration. Gratitude exclaims, very properly, "How good of God to give me this." Adoration says, "What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!" He adds,  in adoration “(o)ne's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.” I suppose that for me gratitude begins and ends in the self. That’s not a bad thing. God calls us to do it. But adoration takes us beyond ourselves. It is genuinely “un-selfing”. It is a moment of wonder into which I am, for at least a moment, erased.  Adoration always leads me to follow the moment back to its source. It was just that sort of moment I was having that wet Fall day.

Sometimes our first thoughts on a given subject aren’t our last thoughts on that subject. At least it shouldn't be when two plains of existence are lodged in the same person’s head. In all of my attention to and thoughts about such beauty my first thought suggested the conclusion that without an audience, without watching eyes, all of this is gloriously wasteful. My second thoughts however led me to wonder about the kind of being who ladles such attention on something so ephemeral. It was truly (eventually) a timeless moment. While my bride was hunting treasures I was preoccupied with unpacking one, “lost in wonder, love and praise”.

Awake or Asleep?

Guest post by KG:

And with this, where a better book would begin, mine must end. I dare not proceed. God knows, not I, whether I have ever tasted this love.  Perhaps I have only imagined the tasting. Those like myself whose imagination far exceeds their obedience are subject to a just penalty; we easily imagine conditions far higher than any we have really reached. If we describe what we have imagined we may make others, and make ourselves, believe that we have really been there. And if I have only imagined it, is it a further delusion that even the imagining has at some moments made all other objects of desire—yes, even peace, to have no more fears—look like broken toys and faded flowers? Perhaps. Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is something. If we cannot "practise the presence of God," it is something to practise the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like men who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to be no longer perfectly asleep. But for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters.

This quote is found as the last paragraph to the last chapter of C. S. Lewis’ book The Four Loves. It is an unexpected statement that seems to be an open confession, the final word, of a man who has just finished giving a guided tour of what is meant by God’s command to love one another. It is, for sure, an odd way to end a book. I say it is an ‘open confession’ because Lewis’ stated reason for not taking us any further is this: “God knows, not I, whether I have ever tasted this love.” Therefore he cannot be our guide taking us “further up and further in”.

There is something about Lewis’ admission that I have always liked. Admittedly, for me, there is a lot to like in Lewis’ writings. I need to explain. I am by no means a C.S. Lewis expert. The hyperactivity of my youth had not given me much time for interest in reading at all. But when God became a serious pursuit in my life I began reading in earnest. Apart from the Bible, providentially I began reading Lewis’ books. The reason was that on almost every page of most of the books I read I made discoveries that I have blessed God for these discoveries ever since. I have since found along the way of my Christian walk that I have lots of traveling companions. I am not alone in my appreciation of his work.

In regard to the quote under consideration, Lewis explains why he did not go any further than he went is not merely a matter that will be solved by a bit of  academic insight. When he says that he fears he may have only tasted this love he goes on to clarify: “Perhaps I have only imagined the tasting. Those like myself whose imagination far exceeds their obedience are subject to a just penalty; we easily imagine conditions far higher than any we have really reached.” At least part of what he seems to be saying is that though a person possesses a great deal of technical understanding of the meaning of ‘love’ both in the biblical and historical senses (which of course he has), it should not therefore be assumed that they are the right sort of person to tell us about what it means. In other words, just because it can be reached does not mean that it has been grasped.

The apostle John does not hold back when it comes to telling us about love. He simply points to Jesus: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” 1 John 4:10 Beyond that, as if he has only partially defined love,  John says that the fullest definition comes with an application, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” In other words, part of the fuller definition of love is its exercise, both for God and for his children. According to John, loves practical expression is so much a part of its definition, he can go on to make a remarkable observation: “If we love one another God abides in us” (which is startling enough) “and his love is completed in us.” This is truly amazing. As if pointing to Jesus and his sacrifice for our good is not summary enough, it seems that love’s fullest and most complete meaning is found in its practice. We apparently play a part in the fuller description of the love God intends. Exegesis only tells part of the story. I suppose Lewis’ professed hesitancy to go any further into a description of the biblical meaning of love has something to do with the fact that in the end its fullest meaning is found in its expression in our lives.  It seems the test of love is how the person expressing it actually relates to saints, scholars and, perhaps more so, how that person relates to rascals.

The real ‘bang for the buck’ for me in this final word to Lewis’ book on love however had little to do with the high calling of God’s love on us and more to do with what bubbled up in me when I read the quote.  It should not be assumed that I am trying to finish Lewis’ thoughts after him. Nor that I am attempting to ‘psychoanalyze a dead man’. He says he dare not go any further because he may only be fleshing out his own imaginations rather than describing the complete truth about love as it is laid out in the bible.  It was there that I saw not Lewis but myself. Here Lewis had acted on what he feared about himself. Despite his considerable academic strengths he knew he could very well lead himself into mistaking the ‘imagined’ for the ‘real’. Suddenly I saw myself and what I had not been humble enough to fear that I might discover in myself. Years in college and more than adequate grades, reading good books, preparing and delivering thousands of lectures, lessons and sermons,  responding to skeptics and giving biblical counsel to saints in need had all led me into imagining  that my grasp equaled my reach. In this Lewis quote God t-boned me. (It is because I am such a headstrong disciple God has on a number of occasions, in his sometimes severe mercy, gotten my attention in just this way. It is not unlike the word to king David, “Though art the man.”)

One of the many happy discoveries of following Jesus is that my God is both knowledgeable of my truest condition and dedicated to correcting it. The discovery that Lewis had no doubt made in his own life is no doubt what the apostle Paul had previously discovered about the believers around him. And as a result he passed on to us grateful saints who live now generations later: “Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you.” (Philippians 3:15) Yet another reason to give thanks to a God who is good in both his description and his expression.

Lessons From the Stairs

Guest post by KG:

Several years ago we purchased a house. My wife was sold on it the first time she saw it. Little did I know that half of what she saw in the house was not what anyone else could have seen. When I looked at the house I saw what needed to be done. When she looked at the house she saw what COULD be done. What could be done involved, among other things, removing all the lath and plaster walls. I knew very little about home repair/improvement when I started and debatably more when it was all said and done. Anyway, part of the project of removing the plaster involved removing the plaster along the stairway. 

It was just those stairs that provided me with a trip… all the way down. It started at the top. About half our time on the stairway starts at the top. But this time was unique. Rather than traveling by foot I used a variation of back, bottom, and head. Now, the way I see it, some experiences are so powerful that they need to be thought through - things like marriage, raising children, surgery, IRS audits, auto accidents, angry exchanges, investing in a house, and on occasion falling down a flight of stairs. So as not to waste a golden opportunity, that is just what I did... think about it.

On the way down, I can assure you, I was not rethinking the color scheme for the bathroom. It was just crack, thump, bump all the way down. By the time I had reached the bottom I had lost my interest in how painful line 32 of that year's income tax form was going to be. I was mostly interested in where parts of my body were in relation to other parts and whether or not most of them came along for the ride. Almost nothing else mattered! Life on the stairway, for the moment, was screaming at me and that's about all that I had time for. Mark Twain was right; a man who has had a bull by the tail (or in my case has fallen down a flight of stairs) knows four or five things more than someone who hasn't.

There was a second reason that this particular moment would get my undivided thoughts. "Why fall down the stairs in the first place?" That's a pretty good question and in my case there was a pretty good reason, but to tell why would only add insult to injury. One thing I will say is that whatever my reflections may amount to, the short of it is that I only had myself to blame. Even if I didn't have myself to blame for what happened it had all happened just the same. Gravity worked! A fall is a fall. You can say "I'll never do that again" or "Man, I'm glad that's over with" or of course a variety of other things that saints just shouldn’t say even if the heat of the moment suggests them. In the end I had to conclude this one thing: It's just like life. We are constantly asking questions of it like, "Why did this happen to me?" or "What's the meaning of that?" We can bless it or curse it, but still, what happens happens. But more often than not and despite the needling questions we ask of it, we still get the silent treatment. When we ask "why?" we the typical response is the silent treatment.

If we change the frame of reference from ‘it’ to ‘you’, from addressing ‘life’ to addressing ‘God’ we may get some work done.  As it turns out we may not be asking the right questions of our disagreeable encounters with the sharp edges of life. More to the point, we may not be asking them of the right object. If we think about it and listen hard enough rather than being the interrogator we will realize we are being interrogated. So often it turns out that we sit in the seat of the questioner throughout the experiences of our lives. Despite the fact that it is not just an idle enquiry. Meanwhile he demands an answer - an answer in deeds, not just words: "What do you live by? What makes you tick? What/who do you trust?" ‘Life’ will not say a thing. It will remain mute. Whatever questions come will come from the one who is not silent. ‘Life’ is just God’s a sock puppet. All things play into his hand.

Poor pathetic Job had plenty of questions that he needed answered. He was up to his 'potsherds' in questions. But when God finally spoke he didn't answer one of Job’s questions. Don't misunderstand. He didn't address one of Job's questions directly, but what he did say satisfied all of his questions. He turned up asking questions of Job, dozens of them. His questions weren't malicious or angry. It's not until Job began to listen that he finally understood himself. (see Job 42:4-6) The most important questions are not our serrated “why’s!?” rather the questions God is asking us.  More often than not he asks us through our struggling encounters with life.

There comes the time, and it's more often than we think, when we need to listen. We talk too much. Whose side of the conversation do we think is more important anyway - ours or his? Admittedly, sometimes life "gets in our face" demanding our attention. But the counsel of the sages is, "be still and know that I am God." (Psalm 46:10) My lesson/advice? Use the stairs, and life with caution. And always, through thick and thin, "be slow to speak and quick to listen."

- KG

Of Thunder & Prayer

A guest post by KG:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 

Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. 

There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. 

Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. 

(Psalm 19:1-4)

Our age has the distinct privilege of looking more deeply (whether microscopically or telescopically) into the physical world than any generation that has gone before us.  It is hard to avoid the notion that we are looking at something that has been crafted. (Even Richard Dawkins, the inveterate atheist concedes as much.) Whether we considering the architecture of ameba or galaxies everything has an artistry that invites us to look at it as well as beyond it to what must be an artist. Even chaos has a calculus. The heavens do have a language all its own. And we are so crafted that we can understand its dialect. We can hear its speech and it is “talking its head off”.     

 I just heard the thunder the other evening. It was great. I have always enjoyed thunder and thunderstorms. It was one of my childhood thrills while growing up in the Texas Panhandle. Michigan/Missouri thunder is not quite so "mythic" but it is thunder none the less. Thunder speaks to something within me. And it almost always meets me when I’m in the middle of doing something else. It never needs to be introduced. It rumbles into my awareness, echoes between my ears and almost always swamps every other conversation. Thunder is an unapologetically rude wonder. 

Job says "He unleashes his lightening beneath the whole heaven ...after that comes the sound of his roar. He thunders with his majestic voice ...God's voice thunders in marvelous ways. He does great things beyond our understanding (Job 37:3-4)." Being an audience to a thunder storm makes it a little easier to imagine how falling into the hands of the living God would be a uniquely alarming experience. Sometimes I wonder, "How could I possibly approach such a thundering God”?  At the same time I think “How could I avoid him”? Sometimes it seems like I'm on a fool's errand when I pray to God, that only a fool would enter into such a dangerous circumstance. (In prayer, Eugene Peterson reminds us, we are brought into proximity with the one that breaks cedars, shakes and strips forests bare making the oaks whirl. Ps. 29) Only a fool would believe that such thunder cares that it exists, let alone that it would hear our squeaking words.  The remarkable promise, the even more remarkable experience is that, unlike climatologically turbulence, he does hear our squeaking words.

Sometimes it seems like a fool's errand to pray. Other times, however, it's clear that only a fool wouldn't pray after coming to this bellowing God. John Donne said about his own life with God that he did not need God's music, he needed God's thunder. We all need to be interrupted. To fall into the hands of the living God is a terrible thing we are told. But when you think about it, though terrifying, his hands are also the only place where we can find an answer to our deepest londings.  "Every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of heavenly lights." (James 1:17) As Mr. Beaver says in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe,  “He may not be safe but he is always, always good.” Pray on.

- KG

His Life in Me

Guest post by KG:

I have labored under the burden most of my life with not having reached a saints perfection. I am a practicing ‘imperfectionist’. Worse yet, I think of myself as an incompetent perfectionist. I am bothered by my many failures. I desire to be and do better but I, sadly, I am not. That very same annoyance is only magnified by my Christian walk.  I have been included ‘in Jesus’. Not only is my history literally littered with failed attempts at life lived in the horizontal, when I became a Christian I gladly included a vertical dimension which has Jesus Christ at the center. In light of that fact, the trail of littered failures only grew exponentially. When compared to Christ understandably the failure factor has not gotten any smaller.

Lest my moaning confessions sound like an all too public airing of my own dirty laundry I need to add something that in the end transforms the crisis. In 2 Corinthians 4 Paul says that God has illumined our dark hearts with the light of Jesus.  “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Vs. 6 He says it is not unlike placing a treasure inside a clay jar.  What appears to be a monumental waste of God’s good efforts, he goes on to clarify has the genius of God’s purpose in it.  His intention is to show that the goal of his project has little of us in it, save the storage space. His purpose is to point to himself as being our rescue—our savior. And then he says, what for the life all too familiar with failed attempts, the complicating words: “For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.” Jesus’ life is shown to those around me through my mediocre life. It seems like a bit much.

I said before that all this is intended to add something that turns my failure rate into something entirely more than a mere moaning confession. Paul’s intention is to turn my eyes off of myself and onto another. He says so explicitly—“ to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us”. It is the way God has of showing that it is his work and no one else’s, least of all our own. He first shows us it is so by saving our muddy lives and continues the project by living within us. The light that illumines my inner darkness is not somehow the light that I am somehow commanded to approximate. As Paul describes things, to show that “the surpassing power belongs to God” and not to us, he surrounds that sacred event with a veneer of failure and defeat, my failure and defeat. In fact our failure becomes a significant factor in the course of God’s plan. The first failure was the world’s response to Jesus which culminated in the cross. Since the world’s response was my first response to him, the burden to muster Christ’s life does not rest on me. After all I am the problem. My burden is to reflect not generate his light in me. I must decrease and he must increase. C.S. Lewis captures Paul’s thought in a way that only he can.

“'Originality' in the New Testament is quite plainly the prerogative of God alone … The duty and happiness of every other being is placed in being derivative, in reflecting like a mirror… If I have read the New Testament aright, … our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed; in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours. ….. I am saying only that the highest good of a creature must be creaturely—that is, derivative or reflective—good.”

Otherwise called grace, God’s labor in us is not to teach us new tricks but to let him shine through us, to point to Jesus by habits that express what God’s grace has done in us.

Oswald Chambers says it well:

“It is not a question of being saved from hell, but of being saved in order to manifest the life of the Son of God in our mortal flesh, and it is the disagreeable things which make us exhibit whether or not we are manifesting His life. Do I manifest the essential sweetness of the Son of God, or the essential irritation of "myself" apart from Him? The only thing that will enable me to enjoy the disagreeable is the keen enthusiasm of letting the life of the Son of God manifest itself in me.”

I suppose this in part of the reason that so often in Paul’s letters all of the action of the life of a disciple of Jesus is said to take place “in Christ” or of Christ being “in us” (over 160 times in a variety of different contexts).

The whole idea raises a number of questions. But to side step the questions by ignoring the glory of such a remarkable event seems an odd and costly way to proceed. In fact, I suppose I may have ‘failed’ to get it right. If so, I will have to deal with that very familiar habit. Until then I motor on in the sobering and wonderful implication of his life in me.

- KG