Dreams (Matthew 2)

Have you ever wondered about your next move? I'm not talking about a game of Risk - weighing your options between a blitzkrieg through Kamchatka or attempting to secure Siam to protect Australia. I'm talking about day-to-day living.
At this point in Matthew, the wise men aren't doing your "typical" day-to-day living, but you can imagine that they're going through the same daily routines as you or I would. They get up in the morning, have a good stretch, have a coffee... All the while, they are navigating their way through Herod's conspiratory plot to kill the Baby.
How do they know what to do each day? How do they know which way to turn? The answer comes in Matthew 2. They are getting their instructions in a dream. Similarly, Joseph is instructed - in a dream - to take his family back to Israel.
Why a dream? Angels have proven their effectiveness. There were prophets who could have been trusted. Why a dream?
The ESV reads, "...And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed..." We know that they reacted to a dream. Was this a shared dream? Did they trust the recipient of the dream so much that they'd act on it?
These are mysteries to me. I'm looking forward to studying this a little further. In advance of that - however - I can take solace in the fact that all of these things, (dreams included), worked together to protect the Saviour.
Just as the wise men - and Joseph - were able to trust the dream to guide them, the Bible has earned my trust to guide me.

Whose Father are You? (Matt 1:1-25)

Looking through a photo album, family tree or other such legacy-map usually gives cause for reflection and contemplation about our own part in the story which has unfolded.

In Matthew, it all begins just thusly. We are introduced (or reminded of) the lineage preceding Jesus.

It's far from glamorous. This is by design. In God's divine Wisdom, He chose the most unlikely of royal bloodlines. His family tree is filled with unlovely relationships which could have caused the "tree" to be discounted as good-for-nothing.

Jesus' birth was another example of the past not giving us an excuse for the present or future.

When you look at your own family tree, are there some sad stories? Are there some sins which have caused separation from a relationship with Him over generations? Conversely, are there stories of people in your family tree breaking the cycles of sin and/or addiction?

These stories aren't - in my opinion - celebrated enough. When you look at a family legacy in terms of a road map, consider the dramatic alteration in destination when someone chooses to put an end to violence... to addiction... It changes things - not only in their own life - but in the lives of those who come later in the family tree.

This brings me back to the title of today's blog. "Whose father are you?" Think of your place in the family tree, but don't think of it as the "end". With an eternal perspective, examine your place in your family's legacy. When you look back, what will your contribution be? Which direction did you take your family?

Most succinctly, what affect did you have on those to whom you've been entrusted? What have you taught your children about right living and relationship with Christ?

Prayer: Heavenly Father, You have given us the perfect example of fatherhood. You love us. You protect us. You teach us. Help us to follow Your Ways so that our children will follow Your Ways. Amen.

Biblical Karma...

Do you believe in karma? Not the weird transcendental-reincarnation kind but the practical way you live your life now counts kind. I guess you could call it—in biblical terms—reaping and sowing. However you explain it, there’s a strong salute to it in the Bible. The way we live matters, not just for eternity, but also for now. Because everyday we reap and sow in subtle ways for the kingdom. In the sitcom My Name Is Earl, the relevance of karma comes full-throttle in the form of a car—smashing into Earl right after he scratches off the winning lottery ticket. During Earl’s recovery he has a catharsis that leads him to believe that what goes around comes around. And, since Earl’s past is tainted with selfish motives and destructive behavior, there’s a pretty long list of things to make-up. The comical plot follows Earl around as he attempts to redeem himself from the history of his malevolent actions, checking people off his list of wrongdoing. I guess you could say that Earl tries to make karma work for him.For the most part, reaping and sowing doesn’t come as swift for us as it does for Earl. More than likely, we go about our lives storing up things that don’t look like much on a daily basis but over time the accumulation is astounding. A little deceit here, coupled with a small addiction to pornography, or a meager portion of jealousy, greed or gossip. On a one-time basis these issues may seem manageable, but when the weight of days adds up, the sheer tonnage comes crashing down on our unsuspecting lives. This answers the question of the failed marriage of twenty-five years and the bitter rebellion of an eighteen-year-old leaving her parents—slow and steady patterns that build a maze of darkness that finally reap within themselves the seeds of pain and hurt. It doesn’t happen in an instant, it’s more of a slow-and-steady matriculation but it always appears as if it comes out of nowhere, but, really, it’s been there all along. Building. Waiting. Storing.
The flipside is also true. When we labor in obscurity with love and kindness in the simple things of life—a cup of cold water, a deep but meaningful prayer, an act of selflessness, a heart of worship or a temptation thwarted, then we also experience the positive weight of the kingdom in an ever-increasing peace that comes like it’s always been there … waiting. And, it’s true, the weight of these small things is powerful, God uses them to transform us. The Bible is full of stories that tell of lives that get their reciprocal due. Jacob cheats his older brother out of his blessing and later gets deceived by marrying the wrong woman (which just happens to be an older sister, not the younger.) David cheats, lies and kills to get the woman of his lustful dreams and in an ironic moment he pronounces judgment on himself. There’s Saul, Samson and many others, as well. It couldn’t be truer—we reap what we sow. What we choose to do in this life matters, it all counts. However, there’s a big difference in understanding this principle and how it relates to God’s love. We don’t earn God’s love—it’s given to us as an unmistakable grace. The beauty in the biblical narrative is that we are not bound by a list of past wrongs; we don’t walk through our lives in an effort to redeem our past offenses, instead, we come to God as children with a desperate need for the cycle to be broken. We still may reap the consequences of our past, but with Christ it’s bearable—it’s possible. Of course, there’s more to reaping and sowing than going through the motions—our sophomoric attempts to make God, like karma, work for us misses the point. God wants our lives to match up to His will, to His ideal of goodness through Christ; He’s more concerned about our passionate failures than our plastic attempts at cheating destiny. This plot might work for TV, but not for real life. As Christians, we don’t enter the paradigm of reaping and sowing as hedonistic moneychangers waiting to get our goods, either. Instead, we enter the paradigm as people who can bring glory to God in our everyday actions for the kingdom—to bring the full weight of things in our lives to reflect Christ. In this sense, reaping and sowing doesn’t become a master or a heavy burden, it becomes freeing, providing an exodus from sin and doubt through the promises of God. And, it understands that a good life in the kingdom really is good. (By the way, My Name is Earl had to shut down for a few weeks recently because Jason Lee, the actor who plays Earl, got the chicken pox. And, rather than making a tasteless joke about it being bad karma to make a show about bad karma, I’ll just reference you to the tag line of the show: “karma is a funny thing” … Oh, yes it is.)
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CaraLee and I have been enjoying this show. It's flippin' hilarious. When I found this article, I couldn't help but share.

The Beauty of Suffering part I

The following 2 posts were found at www.relevantmagazine.com. Enjoy.


When I was 11 years old I remember my father telling me that we were going to have a family meeting of sorts in the living room. This seemed odd to me because we weren't a family that was ever in the habit of having meetings like this, so I was curious as to what was going on that was out of the ordinary enough as to require us gathering like this. When I walked into the family room I saw my mother with tears in her eyes, and I could tell that my father was quite upset as well. My sister Stephanie and I sat down, and my father proceeded to tell us that my mother found a lump on her breast that they thought was a tumor. He told us that we didn't need to be worried about anything, that most of the time tumors are benign, and we simply needed to pray. They were going to the doctor the next day, and he said that he'd call the school office (he was the principal at the time), and he'd have the secretary come get me when they found out the diagnosis so I could talk to him.During the course of the day I went down to the school office to check to see if they'd called at least 10 times. The call never came.I went home from school expecting that my parents would be there, but the empty house meant that they were probably still at the doctors office. I waited for an hour, then two hours, then three, but still nothing. I began to get really worried, but eventually later in the evening I heard the garage door open. I ran downstairs and opened the door to see both of my parents crying but trying desperately to hold back their tears. It turned out that my mother had an aggressive breast cancer, and she was going to have to start chemotherapy immediately after she had a surgery to remove the tumor. This would begin a grueling process for the next eight months of my mother being quite sick, losing all of her hair, and going through a battle with the disease.The cancer took her on a roller coaster of emotions, but she fought so hard. It was hard for me to see my mother whom I loved very much lose all of her hair and have to be in bed a majority of the time because she was too weak to be on her feet. Bags and bags of cards a letters came in to encourage her and to let her know that people were praying for her. I even remember her trying to write people back to thank them for the letters, but I think they were too many in number. We had baskets and baskets in her room full of letters, all of them very sincere and meaningful.As time went on the chemo seemed to be working, and the doctors said she was in remission. She began to regain her strength, and after awhile she even went back to teaching at my high school. Her hair grew back, and it seemed as though God had worked a miracle in curing her of the cancer—but I now see that the miracle was so much more profound and brilliant than I could have imagined at the time.
Suddenly, around April of 1996, she began to get very sick without warning. We came to find out that the doctors had misdiagnosed her, and they had missed the cancer spreading to different areas of her body. There wasn't anything they could do at that point to stop it.In just a few short weeks I saw my mother go from seemingly perfect health and fully regained strength to being bedridden, hooked up on a machine to assist her with her breathing. It is so humbling to see someone you love depend on a machine to simply breath. The cancer became too much for her and she had to be admitted to the hospital with urgency. For the next week I went daily her hospital bed to see her and talk to her, but she became even too weak to talk. The odd thing about it is, I really thought there was no way that God was going to let her die.I went to see my mom for the last time on April 23. I walked up to her room, gave her a kiss and told her about my day as I did everyday. She was the weakest I'd ever seen her, and she could barely speak to me. She whispered to me that she loved me, and I told her I loved her and that I'd see her tomorrow. I left with a friend who had driven me there, and my dad stayed behind to stay the night at the hospital as he had done countless nights before. The term "visiting hours" didn't seem to apply to him.That night around 4:30 a.m. my mother passed away with my father at her side. My dad drove home to get me and my sister. I was sleeping in mother's bed, and I heard my dad and my sister crying in the hallway. I went out to them, and we wept together before we left for the hospital. I went in her room to see her, but I had this very spiritual sense that she simply wasn't there. Her body was there, but life had gone out from it. Her soul had departed, and it was incredibly obvious. She had left to be with her Creator, whom she loved and and lived for.I believe that suffering is one of God's most brilliant concepts. It would seem that suffering would be a very negative thing. What good could ever come of death or pain? But in His greatness He designed life with suffering, not at all to spite us, but rather to love us. He uses this horrible thing to draw people into Himself. He used suffering to redeem all of creation through His Son.I can't begin to tell you how the story above has affected my life, but I can tell you that God has used it for His glory. He took a terrible thing and changed my life and the lives of my family for good. What a brilliant design.Everyone suffers, but with suffering comes a beautiful choice. Option one is to run away from the pain. Run away from God. Let anger and bitterness take over. And honestly, this is the easier of the two options at times. It is easier to be angry at a good God for letting hard things happen. But option two is incomparably greater. Option two is to run towards Him. To embrace Him. To embrace the pain and the suffering as ordained by Him so that we would grow. I am who I am today because my mother died. I am going to be who I will be because of the things I have gone through. I am able to relate to other and carry other's burdens in ways I would not have been able to had I not gone through pain and sorrow.I really believe that God is brilliant. I know that these simple thoughts that I have aren't even beginning to scratch the surface of His design, but He is revealing Himself to me through them. It really astounds me that He would create suffering for good. I think there is beauty in suffering. Growth is beautiful. Deeper realtionship with Him and deeper relationship with others is quite beautiful.And as I've processed these thoughts and worked through them, this ancient text comes to my mind:
Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.
And I can tell you with all of my soul that it is true. Suffering is terrible and beautiful, and only a brilliant God could come up with such a concept.

The Beauty of Suffering part II

I was standing beside my father and my sister at my mother's funeral. I'm 12 years old; I'm constantly trying to process what has gone on the past few days. All around me is this very odd mixture of true sorrow and some sort of unexplainable joy that I am unable to fully comprehend because, though I believed in Jesus and in heaven, I did not have a developed eternal perspective on things. It's one thing to believe there is a real heaven and a real eternity, and it's a completely different thing to know that everything is very eternal. During the course of that week I distinctly remember having lots of painful emotions and having no idea where they were supposed to go or how I was supposed to act upon them. I had heard that I was supposed to share what I was feeling with others, to let others “bear my burdens”(whatever that was supposed to mean to a 12 year old), but I figured if the emotions hurt me in such deep ways then why would I want to put that load on someone else? So I decided to bury them.As I said, I was standing beside my father and sister in front of my mother’s casket before closing it and driving over to the cemetery. And I don’t know why I thought that this would heal me in a sense, but as I was crying, I took a handkerchief out of my pocket, wiped my face with a sort of force, and shoved it down the side of the casket next to my mother. It wasn’t to make a kind of statement to my father or sister, but I think I was telling myself that I was not going to let this pain take over my life. Nor was this in any sort of anger, but rather it was the only way I could figure out how to cope with my life being turned upside down. I was resolved, as a 12 year old, to fight back.
Fast-forward 10 years later. I’m 22 years old, and recently I’ve just begun to deal with some of the emotions that I buried so long ago. The chain of events that led to this healing is fascinating. My friend Matthew observed over the course of time that I was constantly apologizing for things that I thought were inconveniences to him and his wife, such as eating at their house or wondering if I was intruding on their personal time. Matthew, in all of his wisdom and grandeur, told me that every time I apologized for something unnecessary, which was quite often mind you, he’d make me mow his yard that happened to be covered with a bit of dog poo from his golden retriever. His wife Jeanne told me that for each time I over apologized I’d have to stay at their house in their kitchen for 30 minutes after they went to bed, which, as you could imagine, would be terribly awkward. And although we joked about it, the three of us knew there was something deeper going on that wasn’t visible on the surface.This got me thinking as to why I felt the need to apologize for everything. As far as I can tell, it goes back to the line of thinking that if my own emotions and pains are hard for me to deal with personally, then why would I want to put those on someone else? From that point on in my life I have been so cautious as to not be an inconvenience to anyone, from every day things to deep-seeded emotions. I simply don’t want to be in the way.Then came along a short film I was watching that told stories from one man’s life in dealing with death and how he related it to Jesus dealing with his friend Lazarus’ death. The speaker pointed out that Jesus, of all people, wept. Jesus dealt with his emotions. He wrestled feelings and joined in to the pain of the situation. He didn’t bottle it in, and amazingly, he didn’t ignore it because of the knowledge that Lazarus would soon be alive. And even more astounding, you’d think that in light of the eternal perspective he possessed, Jesus wouldn’t really get that upset about much at all. But, in a moment of genius, he let the full intensity of the moment take over and mourned with his friends, and that small instant would change the rest of history in profound ways.I was relating the story about Matthew and Jeanne and the story about the short film to my father. My dad, who has walked through this with me every step of the way, asked me if I felt as though I fully dealt with the death of my mother, and before I could answer …I wept.I had not cried, I mean really cried, over the death of my mother for 10 years. I kept fighting it and fighting it as if I was showing some sort of weakness. I suppressed it because when you weep you are incredibly vulnerable, which is always a difficult thing. I fought it to appear strong, when in fact I was awfully weak.And this isn’t the way we were designed to be, is it? We were not intended to deal with these sorts of things on our own. I’ve got this friend Phil who lost his father a few years ago when we were seniors in high school, and because God took me through my mother’s death I can now sit with Phil and listen. Phil can sit with me and listen. There is an understanding between us that is supernatural, because our design is supernatural. And Phil is the exact same way I am in regards to not wanting to inconvenience others. So now, a few years later for him and 10 years for me, we start to walk down the road together of not bottling in our emotions. I really think that God made us to feel these things and to, in a way, release them. It’s so interesting to me that even though it’s been 10 years, I’m just now beginning to understand this journey. As I’ve stated before, there is beauty in suffering, even if that suffering is years later.