Monday, January 11, 2016

What's A Good Little Christian Girl To Do On The Decks Of The Cultural Titanic?

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar (Greek: hissing and crackling), and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness?  2 Peter 3: 10-11

How should I live my life in the today's world? It's my daily prayer: "Please give  me great wisdom to navigate the quagmire and labyrinths of our present culture." I read the news and sometimes feel as though we are all drowning in a cultural Titanic that sinks ever lower with each passing hour. I hear things that make me want to rage! Starving children in Syria, mass rapes in Europe, mass murders everywhere, infanticide in America...inequities or blatant wrongs forced  upon us by the laws of our lands or chosen as a result of our spiritual autonomy. I feel choked by it all. Political correctness shuts some of our mouths, too afraid of offending to say the obvious: "Hey, people, this is just wrong and we know it in our hearts!" Sometimes it is our families that become arch enemies on the other side of our beliefs. How do we keep relationships when we are so far apart in ideology? Sometimes the work place or even our church. It's complicated. And I need to keep my head above the waves.

In light of the fact that the end of things as we know them is nearer than it was yesterday, that the Lord will come back to judge this earth, that I belong to Him and believe, counter cultural though it is, that Jesus will return and the Bible is prescient on this subject, what am I supposed to be doing? What sort of person am I supposed to be?

Humble, first of all. He has told you, oh man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8. To know my God is a deep and mysterious privilege. I didn't earn it. I was even given the faith to have the faith to believe. Therefore, who am I to judge another's lack of faith? God's heart in these days is merciful toward those sinking with the ship. He's unwilling that any should perish, but wants all to repent (2 Peter 3:9). He says this right before the admonition attached to the question of how we should be living in light of the times. But that doesn't absolve me from the "do justice" part of the equation. Do the right thing. Don't get caught up personally with the tide of the times and drown along with those rejecting God's open call to repent. Even when it's unpopular, laughed at or, even worse, the cause of my death, I do what God says...humbly. Mercifully praying for the very ones who hate me as Jesus did from the cross. "Father forgive them for they don't know what they are doing."  The idea that I can do this on my own is ridiculous. But I can do all things through Christ Who gives me strength (Philippians 4:13).

Wise, too. Reverence for the Lord is the beginning of that search. Knowing Who He is and reaching for not just a head knowledge of the Word of God, but stretching deeper into knowledge of the heart of God. What does He want in our culture right now? How is His heart broken over our continued rejection of His proffered goodness? That means I spend more time with Him, covered like a baby eagle under the immense wing span of her mother, kept close to the heart beat, warmed in the nestling. Assured that the God of All will one day right all wrongs. That the Judge of All will unfailing pass sentence on those who create the horrific havoc that pervades so much of the world today. Righting wrongs isn't my job. Judging the world isn't either. My job is to keep close to the One Who reigns, now and forever, and to follow His instructions for my own right living in the midst of chaos. Sometimes that means I will offend others. I know this. And I will need to be ready to give a defense for my faith. Now who is there to harm you if you are zealous for what is good? But even if you should suffer for righteousness' sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; but do it with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:13-15).

And holy. Not holier-than-thou. That's not what I mean. Holy means to be separate, set apart, not like the rest. It is a call to live what I believe because it pleases my heavenly Father, not so I can strut about on the decks of the sinking vessel and spout scripture verses. I am a member of God's family, and I love the head of the household with all of my heart. I want to be like Him. And, as a child of God, I know what He expects of me. He's an exemplary father that way. There are things I won't do because it breaches my Father's trust. He has rules, yes. And they give me boundaries across which I cannot set foot. I belong to Him is why I must say no to others, sometimes. Why I must cry out for what is right sometimes. It is also why I can't judge another who belongs on the outside of the family of God. Those who are not His don't have to play by His rules, nor can they. But I am called to live like my Father commands, and I joyfully obey for the look in His eyes when He's pleased.

I don't always live it to the fullest that I ought to. But it's my desire to live for Christ in a world that increasingly scoffs at such "foolishness." Paul summed it up in 2 Corinthians 2:15-17: For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word, but as men and women of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God, we speak in Christ. Sometimes I'll bring the stench of death; sometimes the fragrance of life. And I ought to live in such a way that more and more as the day approaches when the ship has sunk below the horizon, I will still be found throwing out life jackets and calling out to Christ to pull some from their deaths. May it be so.

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

There are more tears to shed, Mr. President

In the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will become lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless,
unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.  2 Timothy 3

I was struck, as I know all of us were, with the tears our President shed over the slayings of the Sandy Hook children by Adam Lanza in 2012. It was a heartless act. A young man driven by his own demons to destroy the lives of children and teachers...helpless, innocent, vulnerable, with no means of protection against the onslaught of bullets shot from the gun of a twenty-year old kid who'd just murdered his own mother. For all of us, the horror of it is fresh when we remember. How could this be? Where does this cold, calculated ability to take the lives of the innocent come from? Some deep well of hatred? Years of untreated mental turmoil? In the wake of the slaughter, the blood of the innocent cries out to us for change! Our President proposes we give up our guns. I know where this comes from. It was a gun in the hands of a troubled young man that left him dead, his lifeblood mixed with those he killed.

As I keep turning the news conference yesterday over and over in my mind, it is never the gun that kills. I know. I know. If the kid hadn't had one, he wouldn't have used it. But the why of Adam Lanza's need to blast into Sandy Hook to kill seems the bigger question than the method he used to quench the soul sickness that prodded him to his task that morning. And not just him at Sandy Hook, but of the several mass murders in the past seven years...more than any other decade stretching back to 1982 (incidents where four or more people were shot in a single event, FBI definition). Could it be that something is going horribly wrong with our hearts?

Since Roe v Wade passed in 1973, 57,762,169 babies have been aborted. What was once going to be "safe, rare and legal" is now "abortion on demand." A holocaust of death, bodies stacked in garbage dumps, stored in refrigertors or in jars, liquidated and disposed of in land fill. I've walked through the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, transfixed by the horrible things done to the Jewish people in World War II. But even then, nearly 58,000,000 people weren't killed. We, in America, are guilty of the worst mass genocide ever perpetrated on Earth!

Don't stop reading yet. This is on my heart because I reread the prescient words of Mother Teresa on the subject of abortion, and I know she is right about what has eventually happened to our hearts over the years as we have hardened them toward the children in our wombs. Yes, children. If we want them, we are having a baby. If we don't, we get rid of tissue...a fetus (look up the word in the dictionary, by the way). 21% of all pregnancies now end in abortion (CDC), over a million are performed in the United States on average every year, 1000 every day. And entire people groups are diminishing because of it. And we wonder over the heart that respects life so little that he would shoot up a classroom. When the mothers of our country embrace the "right to choose to kill their unborn." To take the life of another body within her own. Here's what Mother Teresa said would happen to us with the passage of Roe v Wade:

"We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, of killings, of wars, of hatred. If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other?"
"America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has shown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts--a child--as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent upon, the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign."

Though I respect yesterday's tears shed by the leader of the free world over the children massacred at Sandy Hook, I would pray our President and our nation could begin to wail and mourn over the masses of innocents we slaughter every day in our country. Mr. Obama has praised institutions that perform massive numbers of abortions...blessed them, even...no tears for the millions of children killed, not with guns, but with malice aforethought by their own mothers. On a sterile table with an assisting physician. Roe v Wade was the beginning of the end for us in respecting the most basic elements of human life. I'm sixty-seven. I remember what it was we wanted as women. Why we wanted abortion. The number one reason was so that we could be as sexually free as men. Not having to bear the brunt of a pregnancy, we wanted to participate in "free love." Turns out it costs the lives of millions of innocents. Mother Teresa again: "It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you choose." And so here we are. Throwing into the garbage cans of our metropolises the remains of our most precious gift--a child--so that we don't have to be bothered with the thing. And we wonder why hearts have grown cold, children grown disobedient, ungrateful and heartless.

My heart aches for Sandy Hook parents, too. But where are the tears, Mr. President, for the others whose lives were not celebrated, who were lost in their innocence by the painful and horrific act that tore them from their mothers' bodies? Where are the burials for the children stacked in dumpsters or stored in clinics or vaporized or sold for their parts? When we begin to ache for our lost consciences, repent for our growing selfishness, cry out for the lives of those dying without cause, maybe then we will see the Titanic that is our American culture right itself again.