What if I NEVER see a reason for my confusion, waiting, regret, and hopelessness? Is that okay? It better be.

Go ahead, solve the senselessness of stuff like 9-11

The Friday after 9-11, all the Clear Channel-owned radio station morning shows in Austin, TX gathered in one large room. It was a show of unity, to broadcast one morning show on all the company stations in town. One morning show on six radio stations with six different formats for six different audiences. Each station’s morning team would be heard on all the other stations, too. I worked for the country music station.

We did it as a community service response to 9-11. No music was played for several hours. Each morning show had a chance to share their thoughts and take questions from callers. Most of the personalities loved it.

I hated it; not my comfort zone, the other air talents intimidated me, and the audience was big and scary (weird for a radio personality, eh?).

The answer for others

I prayed about what to say if I had the chance. I hated the idea of blabbering on with some inane opinion that didn’t mean anything. The only thing I could think of was the idea I heard somewhere of the image of a quilt. From the top, the quilt looks orderly and beautiful. From underneath all you see is a tangle of chaos. From the bottom you’d think this mess could never make sense. I thought about the quilt and 9-11.

The moderator for the show was a casual friend in our building. He knew I was a believer. When the show started, he looked right at me and his very first question on this broadcast to the largest radio audience I will ever have was, “Gary, you’re a man of faith, how does all this make sense to you? Where is God in all this?”

At that moment, I realized what an out-of-body experience felt like. I could not believe he was asking me this question, the only one I had prepared for.

I told the quilt story. I said God sees the top side of the quilt and from above it’s a different view that I can’t have right now, but that I trust his view. (I wish I had added, “and one day you can have that view too.”)

It was the only thing I said the entire morning.

The answer for you

I hate the quilt. I hate simplistic explanations of complex things. It’s helpful on a radio broadcast, or to get everyone’s head nodding yes in a class. But you don’t sit down with a friend struggling with a tragedy or loss and say, “I know you’re struggling to understand, but really it’s like a quilt . . .”

It’s easy to talk about the quilt idea when it’s not something that touches me. But when I get my own personal 9-11 or Newtown or Boston Marathon finish line, then an idea of a quilt is not enough. I need reasons and understanding to get through the pain and confusion.

But I often don’t get any reasons. And so the quilt is not something I use for someone else. The quilt is for me (and you) personally.

Thus the challenge that must be faced alone: Is it enough for me to know there are answers I don’t get to see? Can I let God be really big and me be really small?

How big is God compared to me? Whatever the difference; that might be the difference I can expect between what I can understand and what I can’t.

So, what would you pick?

* * * *

The Everything Fits affirmation:

Everything about my life, everything that happens

– the family I was born into

– the circumstances I have experienced and find myself in

– my personality and DNA and wiring and gifting –

is engineered or permitted or governed by a sovereign, just, loving God who always has three good things in mind

1) to develop my personal relationship and intimacy with him

2) to accomplish his purposes in the world, and

3) to further his own awesome, immeasurable aims that are bigger than my ability to understand.

Therefore, whether it’s past, present, or future, I can have confidence and peace that somehow, someway, Everything Fits Even When It Doesn’t, and I will trust and cooperate with God in the fitting.  

Then abandon hope in this:

In the middle of confusion, waiting, regret, and hopelessness, you want an arrow.

A straight, pointy, solid arrow. An arrow that connects your troubles to wonderful “it’s all worth it!” results.

An arrow would help you endure. When you sacrifice and save cash for a down payment on a house, you know exactly what it’s for. Savings on the left, house on the right, straight arrow in between.

You don’t get an arrow.

Oh, things are definitely connected. But it’s more like the dotted line between Billy’s start and finish.

Billy knows where he’s going. He just likes to take the long way to get there.

When you’re in the middle of trying to make sense of your family, or your circumstances, or your junkie stuff, you DON’T know where you’re going. You say you believe that God knows, and has a purpose, but without the arrow pointing right at the purpose, you’re not sure what it is. You feel lost somewhere on the endless dotted line.

You’re not alone. This is normal. The long way home is how you get on the shaped-by-God team.

Expect the long dark night

The day Oswald Chambers told God he wanted a more intimate relationship with Jesus was the beginning of the worst years of his life.

From that day on for four years, nothing but the overruling grace of God and the kindness of friends kept me out of an asylum.

God used me during those years for the conversion of souls, but I had no conscious communion with Him. The Bible was the dullest, most uninteresting book in existence, and the sense of depravity, the vileness and bad-motiveness of my nature was terrific.

— from Oswald Chambers: Abandoned to God

You sincerely ask God for intimacy and you get misery! Where’s the blessing and reward? Why ask for more of God if you know you’ll end up half-crazy?

You have to go way down before you go way up. Apparently there is no shortcut.

When Oswald Chambers came out of those 4 years of the dark night of his soul, he became the Oswald Chambers the world needed. Friends called him, “the greatest demonstration we had ever seen of the Sermon on the Mount fleshed out.”

During his life he spoke to dozens and hundreds. Today, because of the man he allowed himself to become, God’s purposes in the lives of millions have been advanced. Every morning his words still speak to me.

I see the arrow from Chambers’ struggle to God’s purpose as straight and pointy. To Chambers at the time, it was the dotted line tracing a kid’s meandering to the school bus.

Expect confrontation with your own insufficiency

Bill’s wife was sick wife for a long time. One day he came home surprised to see her working in the garden. “You’d better stop and go rest, you know what’s going to happen.” He knew she had very little energy. She said she felt fine.

She was fine. Her illness had left her. And something else happened. A peace beyond understanding had been born in her.

Bill was awed by the supernatural change in his wife. He grew to want the same thing. He began praying that God would change his life, too (uh-oh). He knew that the struggle and hopelessness of her illness was key. By faith he made preparations at work and financially for a long incapacitation.

Instead, his wife asked him for a divorce.

This began his own dark night of the soul, where he was forced to confront what kind of man he must be to cause his godly wife to want to divorce him. Like his wife, and like Oswald Chambers, he was squeezed into confusion, waiting, regret, and hopelessness. Like them, he came out the other side into humility, grace, and peace.

Bill ended up with a Bible study attended by hundreds – at work. And, he mentored Harold. Harold mentored me. Through Harold my whole family has been shaped.

In heaven the arrow is straight. On earth you get the crazy dotted line.

Expect to go down so others can go up

Jesus came to earth on a mission of selflessness. His father had plans to rescue people and creation. Jesus was the plan. We know what Jesus went through to accomplish those purposes; suffering, rejection, death. But then it gets scary when he says things like

Just as you sent me into the world, I am sending them into the world. And I give myself as a holy sacrifice for them, so they can be made holy by your truth

– John 17.18-19

Yikes. He’s talking to his father about me (and you). I’m on the same mission of selflessness. No, I can’t go through what he did, but I’m still put here for God’s purposes, not mine.

That takes shaping. The shaping is not fun. If I could just see a straight arrow connecting the pain of shaping with the purpose for it, the shaping might be more bearable.

My arrow can’t be straight because all the stuff needed to make me usable for God’s purposes is crooked, confusing, and painful. It can feel like death.

For the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross. He knew that at the end of the dotted line everything fit.

I’m willing for someone to take the long, mysterious, dotted-line journey to accomplish God’s purposes for me. But, am I willing to do the same for God’s purposes for others?

Who (besides Jesus) has paid the price to be on the shaped-by-God team for you?

—-

The Everything Fits affirmation:

Everything about my life, everything that happens

– the family I was born into

– the circumstances I have experienced and find myself in

– my personality and DNA and wiring and gifting –

is engineered or permitted or governed by a sovereign, just, loving God who always has three good things in mind

1) to develop my personal relationship and intimacy with him

2) to accomplish his purposes in the world, and

3) to further his own awesome, unmeasurable aims that are bigger than my ability to understand.

Therefore, whether it’s past, present, or future, I can have confidence and peace that somehow, someway, Everything Fits Even When It Doesn’t, and I will trust and cooperate with God in the fitting.  

I am not an orange or a grape. I do not like to be squeezed.

But for most of us, peace and godliness are squeezed into and then out of us. We’re on a journey of sporadic mountain-top enlightenment, dark discouraging valleys, and numberless plateaus of numbness. The valleys and plateaus squeeze us.

The squeezing is the part we hate and pray to escape. It’s also the part that can lead to what we really want. This is the secret that peaceful, godly people want you to know.

Bad times are good ways to discover the sufficiency of God

When we moved to Texas fifteen years ago the passenger seat floor of our Camry was piled with tissues filled with my wife’s tears. Leaving family and a new grandson and starting over again in a strange land with no friends brought Brenda to the end of herself. She had been on the way to the end of herself for a long time.

In Scary Hope I describe it this way:

“Lord, how long can she go on like this?”

For years I laid on my back in bed next to my wife, eyes open, praying through the ceiling, arms raised straight up in the air like a dead horse. She was asleep and never knew.

Brenda lived an agitated, anxious life. You didn’t usually notice on the surface, but it was always there inside her like a distracting buzz.

Every day, we all have several issues we live with that are a potential source of anxiety: marriage, finances, children, work, friendships, expectations, health, self-esteem, desires, needs. These issues rotate, may be resolved, disappear for a while, and return. New issues enter the rotation and old ones dissipate. It’s part of life.

For Brenda, her soul seemed to say, “I can’t have peace until all that stuff is fixed.” Which is impossible.

Friends misunderstand you? No peace.

Pain or headache that lasts longer than a day? No peace.

Husband within twenty feet of another woman? No peace.

At every moment of every day for twenty-five years, one or more of these words applied to her: jealous, insecure, argumentative, anxious. It was all under the surface, but busting out in ways that confused a mere husband. It was always mixed with a gentle personality. Gentle and agitated, that was her.

She was a sweetheart and I loved her madly. Her suffering killed me.

One day I came home from work and she was reading a book. She held it out to me, pointed to a page and said, “Is this true?” It was something about the finished work that Jesus Christ accomplished on the cross, not just for heaven, but for here right now.

“Oh, yeah, that’s true.”

That was the moment everything changed

A supernatural peace was born in her. It was a silent, unspectacular turning point. She became a woman of grace, instinctively trusting the sufficiency of Jesus Christ for everyday living.

She had been a Christian for twenty-five years, but still believed there was something left undone in her. Then God personally showed her, in a way I still don’t understand, that all her un-dones were done on the cross with Jesus. And she believed it.

No circumstances changed. We lived in Texas for four more years. All the daily potential sources of anxiety remained. Yet peace and godliness reigned.

Confusion, waiting, regret, and hopelessness squeeze me. I want relief, I want solutions and answers, I want things fixed. I want satisfaction and release from the tension between how things are and how I think they should be.

But, I want these things more than God does. He could snap his finger and fix everything. He doesn’t, so he must have other priorities.

One of those priorities is to develop my personal relationship and intimacy with him. Like he did with Brenda.

The privilege of unresolved problems

King David often woke up in the middle of the night obsessed with thoughts of God. I have never lost sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking of God. Yet even David, the ‘man after God’s own heart,’ did not do well in good times.

He was much closer to God, much more alive spiritually, when he ran for his life, needed rescued, and lived with unresolved problems. When times were good he disengaged from his kids, got lazy, had an affair and then covered it up by killing the husband. Prosperity was his enemy. But the bigger his problems, the more intimate he was with God.

Unresolved problems must be a big deal. It must be good for me and pleasing to God for me to really experience his sufficiency personally, and not just know it in my head. It must be a big deal because he’s always creating or allowing opportunities for me to find satisfaction in him alone.

Usually, however–and knowing better–I still try to find my greatest satisfaction in solved problems. But the peace that comes from solved problems is not the same peace that comes from God.

The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let you requests be made known to God.

And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

— Philippians 4.6-7

The scent of people who personally experience God’s sufficiency

They are peaceful because they have abandoned control of how things turn out. They have given that control to someone they are convinced is trustable. They have experienced the sufficiency of the one they trust. They have accepted squeezing. That scent is the aroma of God.

Remember a time when you felt super close to God? What was happening in your life?

*  *  *  *  *

The Everything Fits affirmation. Each Monday we look at one part:

Everything about my life, everything that happens

– the family I was born into

– the circumstances I have experienced and find myself in

– my personality and DNA and wiring and gifting –

is engineered or permitted or governed by a sovereign, just, loving God who always has three good things in mind

1) to develop my personal relationship and intimacy with him

2) to accomplish his purposes in the world, and

3) to further his own awesome, unmeasurable aims that are bigger than my ability to understand.

Therefore, whether it’s past, present, or future, I can have confidence and peace that somehow, someway, Everything Fits Even When It Doesn’t, and I will trust and cooperate with God in the fitting.  

Depends on who says it, doesn’t it?

If I say it, you chuckle. Or mock.

If God says it . . . well, he wouldn’t say it that way. But he could because it’s true.

You can’t possibly keep up with someone who knows everything

When I first believed in Jesus I just could not wait until six months passed so I would know something about what I believed.

Twenty-five years later I can’t wait until I believe what I know.

Actually, I could believe it right now. I have a choice.

But, believing is harder than knowing.

Believing doesn’t mean I nod my head when someone says something that’s true. Believing doesn’t just mean I agree that all those things happened in the Bible.

Believing is that day I got fired and put my hand on the knee of my boss sitting next to me and said, “I know this is hard for you but I want you to know it’s OK because my God is very big and loves me and he’s in control and I trust him.” The words came out without me thinking because I believed it was true.

But on those days when I grumble and carry on imaginary arguments with people who rub me wrong–that is not believing. The invisible grumbling and arguing comes out without me thinking because at that time I DON’T believe God is big and in control and loves me.

You CAN believe what doesn’t make sense

To me, everything about my life – the family I was born into, all the stuff that has happened to me, the kind of person I am with my DNA and wiring and gifting – is engineered, permitted, or governed by a God who loves me, controls everything, and knows exactly what he is doing.

I believe he is always in control, always just, and always loving–and all at the same time without ever compromising any of his control or love or justice.

Really? So God engineered, permitted, or governed this mess? (Substitute anything you want for ‘mess’). That’s outrageous!

Okay. He didn’t permit it. It happened despite his efforts to stop it. He wanted to stop it but couldn’t. He tried, but he’s just not strong enough.

But you read,

By him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things , and in him all things hold together. – Colossians 1.16-17

Okay then, let’s say he’s strong enough and could have stopped it, but then that means he is not loving because he permitted this horrible mess to happen to people (or me). You call that LOVE?

But you read,

As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him – Psalm 103.11

For those who love God, all things work together for good – Romans 8.28

And the angels peer over the rim of heaven and look down upon the earth to see how God will resolve the dilemma of his love and power in the sight of man. But in the sight of man he does not.

Logic will not take you far enough

I’ve been the one. I can use logic as well as the next person. And if I don’t get answers that make sense I can stand confident in my conclusions until I have enough evidence to change my mind. God must earn the right for me to trust him because my understanding is king.

Except: I don’t understand how television works. To me, TV defies logic. Yet I still use it. Same with the motherboard of this laptop, and Pandora, and my wife’s intuition when she discerned that the homeless couple I wanted to help wasn’t really homeless and then later they returned the groceries we bought for them and tried to get a refund for cash.

And I don’t understand how an internal combustion engine can have all those little explosions going on every single second for years and propel a car a couple hundred thousand miles. But I don’t argue. I don’t have to understand. I just keep driving my 4Runner.

So do I insist that God’s ways must make sense before I trust, but mystery and ignorance are just fine for the other parts of my life?

Once I get on the logic train, I need keep going and ask, “What unimaginable logic would allow God to permit something bad to happen AND to be in control AND to be good AND to be loving? All at the same time?

I don’t know. The train stops before you get there. But it’s the same unimaginable logic that engineered, permitted, and governed the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. NOBODY understood that at the time. Yet, it all fit.

God could have enacted a plan that didn’t include the suffering and death of his son, but he didn’t.

He doesn’t leave himself out of the consequences of his own plan. He doesn’t leave me out, either.

I can fight, resist, and argue, but I’ll be on my own because my God will not be big enough for me. Or I can agree and trust him and allow him to be my comfort and my strength as he makes the confusion, waiting, regret, and hopelessness fit.

Does he really conquer giants?

And call out kings?

Shut the mouths of lions?

Tell the dead to breathe?

Does he walk through fire? Tear down walls? Set the prisoners free?

Does he fill the hills with angel armies only faith can see?

What are you trying to believe right now, even though you don’t understand?

*  *  *  *  *

The Everything Fits affirmation:

Everything about my life, everything that happens

– the family I was born into

– the circumstances I have experienced and find myself in

– my personality and DNA and wiring and gifting –

is engineered or permitted or governed by a sovereign, just, loving God who always has three good things in mind

1) to develop my personal relationship and intimacy with him

2) to accomplish his purposes in the world, and

3) to further his own awesome, unmeasurable aims that are bigger than my ability to understand.

Therefore, whether it’s past, present, or future, I can have confidence and peace that somehow, someway, Everything Fits Even When It Doesn’t, and I will trust and cooperate with God in the fitting. 

Don’t do what I do

But I’ll bet you already do.

I obsess over mistakes and failures and my dumb personality, then I compare myself to others, then I judge myself, then I get depressed. Then I think God feels the same way about me as I do.

All the while, God is obsessed with something much more important: my self-rule and self-sufficiency. He wants me to stop being my own boss and to stop trusting myself.

But, I just want to be liked and not make a fool of myself. I just want to know when to shut up. I just want to finally clean out the garage, cure my procrastination, and not drop the ball at work. I just want to stop dreaming more than doing; Oh God don’t let me be exposed like Molesley on Downton Abbey who could only talk a good game of cricket.

I would rather be a better person by my own definition than by God’s definition. When I obsess over shortcomings as if they were sin, I become my own God, inventing my own definition of sin. I make my shortcomings bigger deals than my self-rule and self-sufficiency.

I wish I’d get it all straight and get rid of my junk.

Yes I have junkie stuff. But I’m not junk.

Why does God love you?

Does he love you because you’re awesome and do great things?

Does he love you because he’s God and the Bible says ‘God is love’ so he has to do what the Bible says but it’s not really personal? And he sort of wishes he didn’t have to love you?

My friend Tony asks people who follow Jesus but feel unloved because they still mess up,

When God punished Jesus for your sin on the cross, did he hold back a little of his wrath and put it in his pocket so he could take it out and fling it at you the next time you messed up?

God loves things he created in his image. That’s you.

Right at the beginning of the Bible he says he created you in his image. Then he tells the very first people to be fruitful and multiply and exercise authority over their domain and to connect with others. This is part of his image and is your heritage.

You were not made to live a disconnected, non-contributing, helpless, depressed, excuse-filled, humdrum life. You were made to create, contribute, connect, and leave a mark. You have been specially wired and gifted to cover your specific assignment, your corner of the pool.

You are who you are on purpose

But you were made to do this in union with God, not on your own. When you don’t do it in union with him, then you look at other people, or you look for a list, to try to know what it looks like for you.

You want a familiar job description, like you see with others. With a familiar job description you’ll have an identity, and you’ll know who you are: an ‘author’ or ‘business owner’ or ‘singer’ or ‘pastor.’

What it your job description is unique, just between you and God, and is the kind of thing no one else will appreciate? What if your calling is for some crazy thing like a life of grace and patience that spreads in everyday situations, and maybe people notice and maybe they don’t? Does that count?

Do you know what happens to people who reject their unique job description and insist on doing what they’re not wired to do?

Why don’t you know anyone else exactly like you?

Do you know anyone with your exact combination of interests, experiences, fears, hopes, disappointments, passions, friends, and who also orders your exact favorite Starbucks drink?

Hot dogs and pencils are cranked out on an assembly line. Not you. You’re hand-made. One-by-one and one-of-a-kind. It’s personal. Own it.

If all the pieces of the puzzle were exactly the same, they wouldn’t fit. You have to be you to fit.

But who are you, a human  being, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ – Romans 9.20

Bigger than your faults

In Genesis 20 Abraham lies. He says his wife Sarah is his sister. He’s done this before. He’s afraid the king might hurt him to get to his wife. So the king thinks Sarah is Abraham’s sister, and takes Sarah into his house.

Later, God tells the king he is a dead man if he touches Sarah. This does not make the king happy.

He goes to Abraham and wants to know why he lied. Abraham tells him.

The king orders Abraham to leave, and gives him a passel of sheep and cattle and servants and money to take with him. He tells Abraham to go anywhere in the king’s kingdom that he wants — he gets to pick.

What? Abraham just got blessed big time. Even though he lied!

He wasn’t blessed because he lied, but despite it. Still, shouldn’t there be some consequences? Maybe not an angel of death swooping down or the earth opening up, but at least his pants should catch on fire. Anything but blessing.

This is mighty encouraging.

Only God knows everything going on, everything he’s doing, and everyone’s heart. He doesn’t have to turn over his sovereignty to some automatic cause-and-effect machine that he created. He can decide, case-by-case, the best way to bring about what he has in mind.

And apparently, when your heart’s right, if God has something he’s going to do and he’s decided to use you, he doesn’t have to let your faults stop him.

Which chunk of what you’ve read here means the most to you?

• Don’t treat your junkie shortcomings the same as real sin
• God loves you anyway
• Embrace your unique wiring and job description
• And don’t let your faults stop you if they don’t stop God

*   *   *   *

The Everything Fits affirmation: 

Everything about my life, everything that happens

– the family I was born into

– the circumstances I have experienced and find myself in

– my personality and DNA and wiring and gifting –

is engineered or permitted or governed by a sovereign, just, loving God who always has three good things in mind

1) to develop my personal relationship and intimacy with him

2) to accomplish his purposes in the world, and

3) to further his own awesome, unmeasurable aims that are bigger than my ability to understand.

Therefore, whether it’s past, present, or future, I can have confidence and peace that somehow, someway, Everything Fits Even When It Doesn’t, and I will trust and cooperate with God in the fitting.    

Every time you get knocked down or pushed around, or see things like 9/11 or Boston or Paris, you grieve and doubt and yearn for it to make sense.

My friend Oswald Chambers has something to say about this:

Tenacity is the supreme effort of a man refusing to believe that his hero is going to be conquered.

The greatest fear a man has is that the things Jesus Christ stood for – love and justice and forgiveness and kindness among men – will not win out in the end.

Then comes the call to spiritual tenacity, not to hang on and do nothing, but to work deliberately on the certainty that God is not going to be worsted.

To show that Jesus Christ is not conquered, what one act will you do today to exalt love or justice or forgiveness or kindness among men? Just one. And maybe you don’t tell anyone.

That one act will be your contribution to demonstrating everything fits.

Don’t like it. But wouldn’t change it

It was Benton Harbor. I didn’t know anything about Benton Harbor, and it was never on my bucket list, but I needed a job and they had one. They said they’d call back in a day or two.

Years went by. Decades. Millenniums. Ice Ages came and went. The sun ran out of hydrogen and burned out and collapsed. Still I waited to hear from Benton Harbor.

Finally they called. “Sorry, we’ve had some corporate changes and the job’s been cancelled.”

It had been five days.

While waiting, I read my Bible. One passage talked to me: God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. It produces a harvest of righteousness and peace in those who have been trained by it. Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. It’s not exactly that, but very close. It’s in Hebrews 12. I read it so much in those five days that I memorized it.

As soon as I memorized it, they called.

I took the word ‘discipline’ in the passage not to mean punishment necessarily, but training. The kind of thing parents do with kids. My waiting had been training. You want a HARVEST of righteousness and peace? Does that sound awesome? Let discipline train you.

Over the years I’ve used that passage to encourage others. My little waiting has encouraged someone! That fits.

That story of mine is kid’s stuff compared to yours and some others.

*   *   *   *

Disappointment

In the 1700’s Alexander MacKenzie dreamed and planned for years about finding a water route through Canada to the Pacific Ocean (the Northwest Passage). He was convinced a certain river would get him there.

He explored a thousand miles by canoe – and ended up in the Arctic Ocean, nowhere near the Pacific.

He named the river “Disappointment.”

What might have been

For ten years Paul planted churches where no Christian had gone before. He was on fire for Jesus, living on the edge, changing lives, and spreading the good news of God around the world.

Then he felt compelled to return to Jerusalem. His friends warned him not to go, that he would be arrested by his enemies. He went anyway. And spent the next ten years or so on trial and in jail.

His adventurous church-planting days were over. If only he had listened to his friends.

Too much to overcome

Dawn was a smart kid but her home life doomed her.

Her mom and step-dad were drug addicts. No electricity or running water at home. She walked to the park with plastic jugs to get water to flush the toilet. The house was filled with cockroaches, and trash was piled two feet high.

Dawn went months without showering, weeks wearing the same dress. She was mocked by classmates. She didn’t even have enough money for candles to do her homework after dark.

The summer after her junior year in high school her parents moved away and abandoned her. Dawn was seventeen years old and homeless. What a waste.

Alexander MacKenzie never found the Northwest Passage. But his journals became part of Thomas Jefferson’s inspiration to send Lewis and Clark across America to the Pacific Ocean. MacKenzie was knighted by Canada and became Sir Alexander MacKenzie.

Today the Disappointment River is named the Mackenzie River, the largest and longest river in Canada. So, does all the disappointment fit?

Paul went from church planting hero to sitting in jails and prisons, sometimes chained to a guard. He was stuck dictating letters to friends and to the churches he planted. All those churches? Gone. If he had planted more, they would be gone, too.

But the letters Paul wrote–because that was all he could do–became part of God’s words in the Bible. Paul thought he was just doing the best he could with what he had, but it was God’s plan all along for his writings to last far longer than the churches.

You can read those letters right now and take them personally as straight from God. Did that fit?

Dawn went from horrible home to no home at all. But teachers and staff at her high school helped her get a place to stay and a job as a janitor at the school. She was a straight-A student. She applied to four colleges. All accepted her. On a long shot she tried Harvard. Her history teacher wrote a recommendation extolling her never-give-up spirit.

Dawn finishes her first year at Harvard next month. She got a full ride; room, board, tuition. A homeless kid of drug addicts at Harvard. Does that all fit?

When you can, you pick your own definition of success

You pick discovering the Northwest Passage, planting churches, and a stable home life. And if that’s what you get, it fits. But even when you get what you don’t pick, it still fits.

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace          for those who have been trained by it – Hebrews 12.11

When have you been trained by something you didn’t pick?

*   *   *   *

The Everything Fits affirmation: 

Everything about my life, everything that happens

– the family I was born into

– the circumstances I have experienced and find myself in

– my personality and DNA and wiring and gifting –

is engineered or permitted or governed by a sovereign, just, loving God who always has three good things in mind

1) to develop my personal relationship and intimacy with him

2) to accomplish his purposes in the world, and

3) to further his own awesome, unmeasurable aims that are bigger than my ability to understand.

Therefore, whether it’s past, present, or future, I can have confidence and peace that somehow, someway, Everything Fits Even When It Doesn’t, and I will trust and cooperate with God in the fitting.   

How bad or dysfunctional does your family have to be to NOT fit?

I’ll try to think of one:

Great things are expected of your dad. But before you’re born he leaves his religion and marries a woman the family would never accept. They have three kids. Two of the kids die and the family story is the kids were so bad that even God was outraged.

Then your dad sleeps with a prostitute. She gets pregnant. Turns out she is actually his daughter-in-law, the widow of one of his dead sons, in disguise. She has twins. You’re the first born twin.

So your dad is also your step-dad-grandfather-in-law (or whatever) and you are the offspring of incest. And let’s say this is just one ‘highlight’ and you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Let that be a bad enough example for the moment.

So what happens to you? How does THIS fit?

Well, your name is Perez and you are in the line of Jesus Christ. And your dad is Judah, leader of one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Kings and the Messiah will come from him. His descendants still live in Israel today, a distinct national people 3,500 years later.

God did not hide you or your dad or your origin away in shame. He overcame the shame.

You can see yourself in Genesis 38. The first time I read it I thought, “Wow, I wonder what happened to him.” Because, you know, with such a bad family and start, no good could come of that. Right?

A lot was at stake with this family. This was the beginning of the earthly family that was to result in the birth of the perfect one-of-a-kind Jesus Christ on his mission from God to save the world. So does it fit?

A disrespectful person might say, C’mon God, for such an important family you can do better than this, can’t you?

Do better? Maybe this IS ‘better’ to God.  

My great grandfather abandoned his family

Our story is that his son, my grandfather, then changed the spelling of our last name to forever separate himself from his dad. The echo of this is heard with me generations later every time I say, “that’s M-O-R-L-A-N-D with no ‘E.”

But, it’s only an echo. Our family was not ‘destined’ to a straight-line repetition and payment for one person’s sin. It’s consequences have altered our family but not trapped us into a destiny.

Your destiny is a river and your parents are in the same boat as you.

THEY had a family and parents that they probably wish were different. And THOSE parents wished their parents were different.

It’s hard for the blame to stick once you link your happiness, destiny, and situation to a family and to parents. If you can pass the blame back upriver, so can they. It then gets passed back forever.

Stop the chain. Accept your family (or lack of one) as under God’s overall will and accept his ability to use it for good. Then let him.

My dad’s dad was an alcoholic. My dad was an alcoholic. I am an alcoholic. My kids are NOT alcoholics. I wrote an ebook on how the chain stopped. If God can stop that chain with me, he can stop yours with you.

Perez didn’t have a pedigreed family, yet that family was part of royal business. It’s as if God does it on purpose, to prove something. Will you let him prove something through you?

What is God proving in your family experience?

The Everything Fits affirmation:

Everything about my life, everything that happens

– the family I was born into

– the circumstances I have experienced and find myself in

– my personality and DNA and wiring and gifting –

is engineered or permitted or governed by a sovereign, just, loving God who always has three good things in mind

1) to develop my personal relationship and intimacy with him

2) to accomplish his purposes in the world, and

3) to further his own awesome, unmeasurable aims that are bigger than my ability to understand.

Therefore, whether it’s past, present, or future, I can have confidence and peace that somehow, someway, Everything Fits Even When It Doesn’t, and I will trust and cooperate with God in the fitting. 

A bazillion years ago we came home from a few days out of town and found our refrigerator broken. Water was all over the floor from melted ice. We had already been smacked with other unexpected expenses. We were stuck. It would be weeks before we could replace the fridge.

I was a new Christian. Stuff like this is a big deal when you’re first learning who God is and which end of the Christian stick is which.

I remember struggling with conflicting thoughts.

“I can’t believe God would let this happen. Doesn’t he know what’s going on with us right now? Couldn’t he have done something?” (Yeah, I know, it’s just a fridge).

I also thought, “Well he says he provides for my needs. I guess I don’t need a refrigerator right now.”

This is a question you might think about during this series over the next eight weeks.

Who is God? How do you decide who God is? 

Do you decide from what the Bible says and do your best to believe it, then interpret your circumstances and struggles based on what you decided to believe about God?

If you did it that way, you could still believe God was loving and just and all-powerful even if it looked the opposite. You might say things like, “Well, there must be more to the story that I don’t understand right now.”

Or do you decide who God is by using circumstances and struggles and what you see in the world? And so you use how life looks to decide to what degree God is loving or just or all-powerful.

If you did it this way, you would trust your reason and logic and intellect to interpret the evidence and have the final word on who God is. You might say things like, “God is good but he has his limits – he can’t be all-knowing AND all-powerful AND all-loving and still let this happen.”

People do it different ways. Everybody uses something for the final verdict to decide. I think most people probably don’t pay much attention to how they do it.

Seems to me that however you do it with a broken fridge is probably how you do it with all those bigger challenges and struggles.

How do YOU decide who God is?

——

A few weeks ago I got the itch to write about something that I realize I believe as deeply as I can believe anything right now; something that is my goal and grid for interpreting every single thought, event, problem, crisis, fear, frustration, dream, joy, and emotion of my life.

But now I’m scared because I don’t think I can do it justice. I’m afraid to sound like every trite ‘there’s-a-reason-for-it’ cliche ever heard and do more harm than good. I don’t like sounding trite. I don’t like doing harm. I’m seriously scared and I want my mommy.

Okay, end of morbid self-doubt and introspection. As TV judges sometimes say, “Ignore that last statement and do not consider it in your deliberations!” I know I could just delete it, but for some reason it seems important that you know how I feel. It must fit, but I don’t know how.

*   *   *   *

Everything Fits Even When It Doesn’t: A struggler’s guide to confusion, waiting, regret, and hopelessness.

In January I wrote an email asking subscribers to dot connector what they were struggling with. Many of you kindly responded.

You’re not alone

It seems funny to say that it’s a kindness to share what you’re struggling with, but a kindness it is because living can be a lonely confusing business and it’s good to know you’re not really alone. And the more you see the details and variety of what we all struggle with, the more you see our commonality and that maybe things are not quite as confusing as they appear.

Except it can then be especially confusing and frustrating when you put God in the middle and he’s supposed to be all-powerful and all-loving and all-knowing, and so how come everything isn’t all-great? Eh?

I spent some time one Saturday evening last month reading the emails and thinking of all our struggles, and of who God is. (That’s in contrast to my normal Saturday evening checking sports on my espn app and pretending I’m working, and so feeling superior because I’m not watching TV).

Be careful of thinking – you might discover what you believe

I woke up the next morning with a sentence in my head. It was a looooong sentence that summarized this thing I’m convinced of about how everything fits. I never thought of it in one sentence before, and I hate summary-maxim things because they’re way too simplistic (thus my fear). Yet sometimes they can be helpful.

That one sentence is the outline for what happens here these eight Mondays.

Here’s the sentence:

Everything about my life, everything that happens

– the family I was born into

– the circumstances I have experienced and find myself in

– my personality and DNA and wiring and gifting –

is engineered or permitted or governed by a sovereign, just, loving God who always has three things in mind

1) to develop my personal relationship and intimacy with him

2) to accomplish his purposes in the world, and

3) his own awesome, unmeasurable aims that are bigger than my ability to understand.

Back to the fear: This whole thing could sound like every poorly timed simplistic well-meaning cliche you hear when something horrible and unexplainable happens and someone says, “Well, God has a purpose for it.”

And the person suffering (sometimes you) thinks, “What? God made this happen? He wants me me to be unhappy and suffer?”

Or, “Gee thanks – and you know what? God has a purpose for your ugly mug, too.”

This is not something to throw out to someone who is in the middle of a big struggle

But it is something I can tell myself, and you can tell yourself too, if you want. And over these next eight Mondays I’m going to try to see this more for myself, and you’re invited to dwell with me on what it means that everything fits, even when it doesn’t, even in the middle of confusion, waiting, regret, and hopelessness.

We can understand it ourselves first, and believe it and live it, and then hold it in our hearts with grace when we see others struggling, but not clobber them over the head with it. Then if they ask, or it seems right, we can then share.

But first, WE have to have confidence that everything fits, even when it doesn’t. DO we believe it?

This IS something that can cultivate confidence and peace in the middle of your own struggle

I’m not saying you can always know how everything fits.

I am saying I believe you can be confident that everything fits. Because it does.

I’ll write on each part of that sentence progressively.

Now you:

Which part of that “Everything” sentence above is encouraging or challenging or confusing to you right now?