New Year's Res

I thought I would slip this in before the Christmas season was entirely over, and I also thought this quotation echoed the heart of someone who knew how to make proper resolutions. Here are the words of Nate Saint:

"As we have a high old time this Christmas, may we who know Christ hear the cry of the damned as they hurtle headlong into the Christless night without ever a chance. May we be moved with compassion as our Lord was. May we shed tears of repentance for these we have failed to bring out of darkness. Beyond the smiling scenes of Bethlehem may we see the crushing agony of Golgotha. May God give us a new vision of His will concerning the lost and our responsibility."  

Surprising Joy

I have been listening to kids’ books in my car. It makes driving around town oh so much more daring-suspenseful-surprising-intriguing! I’m questioning the grammatical stability of that last sentence, but I’ve recently heard others like it, so it must be okay.


Two of the freshly listened to audio books have been from The Series of Unfortunate Events (bks 9 & 10) by Lemony Snicket. These books are witty and cleverly written, but the whole premise behind them is that nothing ever goes right (or ends right) in the books. The three orphans, who are the main characters in the series, continually escape the evil Count Olaf by using their inventive skills, book knowledge and sharp teeth. Nevertheless, I believe I will take a sabbatical from the books- I’m just a little put off with the fact that one the orphans had her sweetheart swept away by a flooded stream… that just seems so depressing. Depressing, but I should have guessed; nothing ever goes right for those orphans.

I think Lemony Snicket’s books get something right, though. It is an underlying principle in the book series that ingenuity comes out of cataclysmic situations, and I think that’s not skewing things too much. It IS probably during the most difficult seasons in our lives that good things are produced, and perhaps even marvelous things, such as prolific literature, invention, art, and sometimes… sometimes even joy. I can think of quite a few occasions where things seemed pretty dismal in my life, but where I also experienced joy at the same time. Weird. Paradoxical isn’t it? Here are the top three personal examples that come to mind as I type this paragraph.

Story #1: When I was in Bogota, Colombia I sunburned so badly that I looked like a lobster. The package deal with this sunburn included heat stroke and a blistered scalp. When things started to heal a day or two later, my skin started peeling like mad. I was a little embarrassed about this, considering that I was in a country where a person’s presentation and appearance heavily mattered, but the job of combing all the dead skin from my hair seemed gargantuan. My friend Jess pulled me aside and painstakingly combed through my hair getting rid of the disgusting dead skin. I’m sure it wasn’t pleasant for her, probably right up there with looking through hair for lice, but she took the time to do it, and even lightened the situation by cracking jokes and making me laugh. It made me happy that I had a friend like her.

Story #2: When I had my wisdom teeth pulled out, I remember sitting on the couch, watching the movie Hot Fuzz and eating a strawberry blizzard, both kindly supplied to me by my parents. Despite looking like a chipmunk and feeling like I had just come out on the unlucky end of a bar fight, I felt very loved and taken care of.

Story #3 A week after I had knee surgery, I fell on a freshly mopped floor at a Forensics and Debate national tournament. I was sick to my stomach- having felt something rip during the fall I was pretty sure I had undone everything the doctors had meticulously accomplished with the surgery. In the ER, while awaiting an X-Ray, I remember giggling with my debate coach, Marla, as the guy in the compartment next door related to a friend how he accidently chopped off part of his finger with a lawnmower. It doesn’t sound very funny right now, but maybe you had to have been there. We also took turns drawing pictures and commenting on the wall charts while we waited. It was a physically painful time, but probably one of the best bonding times I had with that coach.

How about you? What’s your story?

Racing Toward Hope

I am not sure I would recommend the movie Apocalypto to you; even though I definitely consider it a worthwhile flick. Just to put it out there, it’s not for those easily offended by South American Birthday Suits. But if you can take that with a grain of salt, you will find an epic story of a man battling ridiculous odds to stay alive, and to keep his family members alive as well. The gauntlet the hero endures is jaw dropping- spear wounds, arrows through the chest, encounters with a mama jaguar, being stretched out on a chopping block as unfriendly Mayans anticipate non-surgically removing his heart- this all keeps the storyline moving. It seems like at every turn Jaguar Paw, the hero, should be a dead man, but right as you think all is lost, there is a twist in events, or the man himself finds some kind of hidden strength- unnatural endurance to spur him on- keeping him from giving into fear. There was too much on the line for him to give up hope. He craved and clung to it with all his might… and then some.


This thread of an idea, pushing beyond natural human limits for the sake of hope, seems to be a reoccurring theme in my thought life recently. It is everywhere. I see elements of it in the Christmas story, lingering around that One in the manger, with the delicious soft infant skin and the cry of a newborn. Strong traces of it are found throughout Christ’s ministry, culminating to a fever pitch at gethsemane, the cross, and with manic victory at the empty tomb. The crushing weight of Christ’s battles, evidenced in drops of blood on his brow, through an enemy who would not leave him alone during his darkest hours, and through the water and blood that poured out from a broken heart. Death did not just threaten to take him, but actually swept him into that dark stream. Comparing this story to the movie mentioned earlier, I suppose one of the main differences between Christ and Jaguar Paw was that Christ did not just passionately cling to hope. He was, and is hope.

Through the influence of my brother and sister-in-law I have started to listen to a group called Mumford & Sons. There is song written by M & S called The Cave. I have had my computer repeatedly play this tune to me over the last week and a half. Here are a few lines from the chorus that have stuck in my head:

But I will hold on hope
And I won't let you choke
On the noose around your neck

And I'll find strength in pain
And I will change my ways
I'll know my name as it's called again

I don’t know about you, but there is a lot in life that seems to be bent on sucking my hope dry. But even with the crushing weight of circumstance, and the internal battles that wage war and leave us sputtering for breath, it is vital that we hold onto hope with all that we got. All that we got… plus some.

Incarnation

"The feed trough was no afterthought. All along God has been doing His best to get next to us, humbling Himself to reach out to us. But nothing can match what happened that night in that Bethlehem cave. There a child was born among 'the sweet breath and streaming dung of beasts' and nothing is ever the same again... once [we] can never be sure where he will appear, or to what lengths he will go or what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man."   
      -Thoughts from a Dave Roper book

Twas much that man was made like God before,
But that God should be made like man- much more.           
     -John Donne