Play With Me, Daddy

“Play with me, daddy.”

I must hear that a couple hundred times a day. Sometimes, I’m ready to play, and it’s tickle fights, wrestling matches, Avengers figures, cars and trucks until we can’t stand it any longer. Other times, I’m not so ready to play, and I try to beg off. If you’re a parent, I’m sure you can relate.

But lately, I’ve noticed something. When Jon says “Play with me”, he’s using the word play in an entire different way. In fact, it may be an entirely different word.

I hear play and I think interaction, me and him using our imaginations to create scenarios and worlds where the toys we use and the time we share transport us together into another place. But it’s a separate togetherness: we each act independently within the game, each one doing what we imagine our characters should do. I think play, and it’s really all about collective yet distinct imaginative effort. Me and him as two.

When Jon says play, it’s less about imagination or collaborative effort. It’s more about him doing what he wants to do while I sit in the same room with him. Sometimes he’ll hand me a truck and tell me where to drive it. Other times he forgets I’m even there. The only thing he really needs is for me to remain physically present; my mind can be a thousand miles away as long as he can still use my arms as bridges and my belly as a mountain. I am another toy for him to use.

It’s ugly, but sometimes I get frustrated by this kind of play. My son has some cool toys, and the idea of just running the same four trucks over my stomach for an hour and a half makes me feel a little…I dunno, bored maybe? I want to line up action figures and trucks and Lego castles and create our own fantastic battles and worlds. I understand on a deeper level what play can really be, and I want to explore that deeper level.

My son, who’s only four, doesn’t get that yet. So he’s content to play at his level, happy to have a few small toys and a daddy who will simply sit with him for as long as he needs. He doesn’t know what he’s missing because he hasn’t learned there’s anything to miss. Developmentally, he’s right on schedule and I have to stop and remind myself that, as his father, I have to work with him where he’s at and gently expand his world a little bit at a time.

I bring all this up because it’s sort of where I’m at with God right now. For a long time, I’ve been content to play at my level, which is to do what I want to do while having the security of His presence. But God’s been gently expanding my world; He’s calling me out into places of much deeper meaning and discovery, not because I’m special, but because He has something He wants to show me. I still want to play with a couple of trucks.

He wants to help me build worlds.

Like my son, I’ve been content to just do my thing. But also like my son, I’ve learned to put my hand into my daddy’s and let Him lead me into something else. It requires trust and faith that He won’t lead me into situations where I’ll be hurt; it requires me loving Him enough to surrender to something that stretches me, pushes the envelope of what I think I can do. And when I find I’m at my limit, He lovingly picks me up into His arms and lets me rest, reassuring me that we’ve done enough for the day.

Sometimes, I worry about what other people might think of what He’s teaching me. But He doesn’t. And I trust Him.

Because He loves me.

God In The Whirlwind?

I haven’t been keeping up with the devastation in Moore, Oklahoma. From what I’ve read, it’s a sad and horrifying natural disaster, and the response of countless people with donations of time, money and supplies has been heartening. Sometimes, we forget that people are capable of tremendous acts of sacrifice and kindness. It’s a shame that we only remember when something like this happens. In fact, there are a lot of things that we don’t think about until something like this happens. The value of human life, the need for community, the presence – or absence – of God in everyday life.

Depending upon where you fall on the religious spectrum, you might have very strong feelings about that last one. Some people will tell you that the tornado is a message from God, a statement of destruction to wake us up to the various moral failings of our country. Some people will tell you that God wasn’t in the whirlwind at all, that nature just strikes at random and we are all held hostage until Jesus returns and reboots the universe for God. Others take a middle road.

And there are a great many people who will simply say they don’t know.

Why is it that we only look for God in times of tragedy? I’ve heard a lot of preachers expound on the topic, and the consensus seems to be that we’re selfish by nature; that human beings, by default, will seek only those things that satisfy themselves. Therefore in good times, there’s no need to seek God, because the circumstances of our lives dictate Him as unnecessary. Since we have what we need, we obviously don’t need Him. It is only when the universe becomes cruel, when we see rubble piled atop the tiny hand of a child, that we seek out God for accountability. Where were you? How could you let this happen?

The problem, this view suggests, is that we don’t see the world correctly.

I think there’s truth in that idea. But I don’t know that I agree with all of it anymore. I think we are self-seeking creatures, but for some folks that means seeking God in good times as well as bad; I think we do tend to take the good times for granted, but I think we often look harder to see the evil in the world than we should; I think we do turn to God in times of trouble, often in anger or despair, but we do so seeking for some sense of answer, some idea that the things that scare us can also offer us wisdom for healing.

We turn to Him for hope that we might not otherwise see.

Sure some might turn Moore into a referendum on God’s character, but they assume that God is capable of the evil found in the destruction and not the good that comes from the people who respond. They suggest that God is an impersonal force, and thus cannot be present in the humans who are there to help rebuild. They give Him credit only for those things that would discredit Him, as if His only purpose is to be the cosmic bad guy, a reverse deus ex machina that gives us a target for a rage we otherwise wouldn’t know how to express.

It’s funny, but in denying God, they embrace a big part of what makes Him God: His ability to absorb our anger, fear and frustration, yet still love us all the same.

I suppose I should answer a few questions before I close this post out. Do I think God caused the tornado? No, I don’t. Do I think God could have diverted the tornado? It’s possible, sure, but that line of thinking is usually a zero-sum game. Do I think God was present with the victims? Yes. Do I think God is still present in the aftermath, working through the people who will rebuild – both physically and mentally – the town and people of Moore, OK?

Without question.

In the Old Testament, an ancient prophet of Israel went up on a mountain to see God face to face. There was an earthquake, but God wasn’t in it. There was fire from heaven, but God wasn’t there either. There was a great whirlwind, but still the presence of God wasn’t there.

It was only after those events, only after the cataclysmic natural phenomena that left the prophet still searching for the presence of God, that the prophet found Him. The Bible says that God came in a still small voice that the prophet heard. And when he heard it, he knew he was in the very presence of Almighty God.

It is a story well worth considering.

God is Good, Life is Hard

“I heard something not too long ago,” my friend, Dawn Hood, said one day while we were chatting in her office over coffee. “God is good, life is hard. Don’t get the two confused.”

If anyone would understand the power and wisdom in that statement, it would be Dawn; diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant, she not only survived the surgeries, treatment and pregnancy, she came away with a fantastic son and a heck of story. The words, obviously, stuck in my head.

And now I’m living them.

After much prayer and consideration, I resigned from my position as the Youth Pastor of Chestnut Grove Baptist Church on May 2. It was hard. I was graciously offered a three-month severance to help my family through my time of transition because I’m leaving with nowhere to go. No job offers. Nothing immediate on the horizon. Just the overwhelming sense that God wanted me to stop and listen for His direction.

I know it will involve writing. That much has become clear over the last three years. It’s a passion I’ve had forever, one that I almost followed but turned away from because I wasn’t ready. I am, I think, ready now. What that will look like, what that will mean, I don’t know. But I can only do what I know God has directed me to do, and that is put my life completely in His hands and wait on His timing.

And that’s hard.

Not because He’s unfaithful. Not because He won’t deliver. It’s because I’m so used to having things lined up – so used to “helping” Him move me from place to place that being completely out of the loop on this round is a bit unnerving.

It’s also hard because of the people it affects. I spent a bit of time on the phone this evening with a wonderful, sweet woman who was just in tears over my resignation. It’s hard – or it should be – to break good people’s hearts. It should never be easy; at least, not to my mind.

And so I come back to Dawn’s words: “God is good. Life is hard. Don’t get the two confused.”

I haven’t.

I’m hoping I can still say the same tomorrow.

The Nakedness of Feet

This weekend, I was privileged to be the speaker for Crossroads Church of Walton County’s Hero Weekend, a two-day discipleship extravaganza complete with muddy obstacle course and hyper teens.

It was awesome.

Of course, it’s natural for me to feel that way – I love working with students. They’re exhilarating. They’re exhausting. They’re full of questions. They’re full of awkward silences. But it was also awesome for another reason: the theme lent itself to the perfect intersection of my nerd tendencies and my Christian faith. I simply cannot remember the last time I enjoyed developing sermons more. There was something so wonderfully fulfilling about writing messages that combined themes from superhero comic books and the life-changing truths of the Gospel.

I’ll post my first two messages tomorrow and Wednesday (I think they’ll translate just fine), but I wanted to take second tonight to write about something that happened at the closing service on Saturday night. The topic was serving people, and I took the kids to John 13. In that passage, the Lord of all the universe, the God who spoke man into existence, knelt down on his knees and gently washed the dirt from the toes of his creations.

I read that passage to them, and spoke only briefly. Then, I told them what the real sermon was going to be: the students would take off their socks and shoes, sit awkwardly in their chairs, and let their small group leaders wash their feet.

You’d have thought I asked them to naked mambo in the parking lot.

Some kids immediately grabbed their shoes. Others looked nervously around. Still others silently mouthed “I can’t do this” to me from across the room. I gently but firmly told them they had no choice: as Jesus says in that passage, “If you don’t do this, you have no part with me.”

Soon enough, there were naked feet everywhere.

Now, I know what a lot of people say about this age group being an over-sexed, over-exposed generation. I routinely shake my head at the stories about sexting, SnapChat, Omegle, and other horrible ways that teenagers put their private parts into the public domain. It certainly seems that they aren’t shy.

But when the rest of you is clothed, you’d be surprised at how vulnerable naked feet can make you feel.

Now personally, I’m not a feet man. I have a strong dislike for my own simian-inspired toes, so I rarely ever go anywhere sans closed toe shoes. So the notion of pulling my puppies out in public is stomach churning. It’s also not surprising.

But if this generation really is as sexual as we are led to believe, then the genuine modesty and shyness I saw on Saturday night was a sign of hope. Maybe it’s because of the group setting; maybe it’s because they’d just gone through a massive mud-covered obstacle course; or maybe it’s because this group in particular is more modest in all things, and so the showing of skin in any form is unusual.

Maybe it’s all of those things. But all I could think was this: when so much of you is exposed on a regular basis, it’s easy for your flaws to be hidden. People tend to focus on those parts that only interest them and you can hide in their selfishness.

Uncover only a certain part ourselves, especially a part that many of us think is ugly to begin with, and those flaws can’t hide. They are brought into focus. Magnified. Highlighted.

We are shown to be what we really are: imperfect.

That was the lesson I wanted the students to understand. We cannot hide in the sight of God. We cannot mask our imperfections. When the Holy Eyes of the Lord fall on our hearts and souls and lives, He sees everything. Each thought. Each desire. Each sin. We are unmasked.

And yet the beauty of this passage is that same God still bent his knees and washed the feet of undeserving sinners; he cleansed the nastiest places of their physical bodies as surely as he intended to cleanse the nastiest parts of their souls.

I think they got it. In complete and utter silence, fifty teenagers sat as adults – some much older than them, some near their own age – slowly made their way around to each one, cascading water over feet. One young person was so overwhelmed, it seemed like a breakdown; turns out, it was – the student had committed their life to Christ.

Sometimes, it’s the littlest things that get to us; sometimes, it’s the tiniest detail that brings our facade of pride and perfection crashing to the ground.

And sometimes, that’s a very good thing.

Fear Is Our Native Tongue

Yesterday, someone blew up the finish line of the Boston Marathon. What once was a foreign thought – the idea that anyone would dare attack our country and its citizens – has become commonplace. Once again we turn on the news, or log on to our favorite website, and we see images of horror, bloodshed, chaos and fear. People rush to speculate; people rush to pontificate; people rush to say something about the events of the day because that’s what we’re trained to do. And amid all of this rushing and saying and thinking and debating, one thing becomes as crystal clear:

Fear is our native tongue.

We speak fear fluently. We are well-versed in the hushed tones of terror. We flawlessly recite the levels of warning, the various ethereal connections that may or may not be behind this bombing or that shooting. We can converse the existence and depth of human depravity and violence with the best of them. It is as natural to us now as breathing, and it’s been this way a long time.

Sure, the outpouring of violence over the past two decades seems staggering, but the vocabulary of fear was ingrained long before Oklahoma City, long before Columbine, long before the towers fell. We began speaking fear when someone realized it was a great way to sell products. We began speaking fear when someone realized it was a great way to get someone to walk an aisle. We began speaking fear when we realized that the single greatest weapon in the hands of fallen men is the uncertainty of this life and our place it.

We began speaking fear in Eden. And we’ve not stopped since.

It sounds hyperbolic, doesn’t it? I’m taking things over the top to make a point, aren’t I? No. This is the human experience – we live in fear. Fear that our lives will be too short. Fear that our lives will be too long. Fear that our lives will be meaningless. Fear that our shampoo isn’t doing its job, fear that our car says the wrong thing about us, fear that our jeans make us look fat, fear that our ice cream is made from hormonally charged milk. We worry about everything from our choice in toothpaste to our choice in partners; from where we live to where we vacation; we are afraid, either consciously or subconsciously, for almost every waking moment of our lives.

And when things blow up, when bad things happen, we no longer truly sense that they are aberrations; we no longer believe that the good guys will find the bad guys and the good guys will win; we’ve been conditioned by fear to believe that there’s more to the story, that the rabbit hole runs deeper, that sometimes the bad guys not only win, they win big. We feel that way because that’s what we think of the world. We live in fear, and we follow it blindly.

But what about the people who courageously ran into the face of danger yesterday? What of the brave men and women, both in and out of uniform, who put themselves in harm’s way to bring order into the chaos, to shine the light of hope in the midst of the smoke and rubble? We point to them and say, “They weren’t afraid! They refute your point!”, only they don’t; they actually make us more keenly aware of how steeped we are in fear, because their bravery is seen as exceptional – which means that it’s against the grain. Which means that the grain is to run away in fear, which is exactly what I’m suggesting we’re conditioned to do.

I mean, look at the lives we’ve willingly surrendered to: we have less freedom now than ever before, and we’re okay with it because we’re afraid of the alternative. We’re okay with a government that can tap our phones and search our homes and send unmanned drones over our heads because they protect us. We’re afraid of what’s out there so we’ll take the devil we do know over the devil we don’t, and we’ll hope that things don’t go south. The illusion of protection is now our greatest security, despite the fact that the world keeps rupturing that illusion with evidence that it doesn’t exist.

Fear owns us. Lock, stock, and double-barreled shotgun.

What’s the alternative, you ask? What choice do we have but to live in – embrace – our fears and do what we can to mitigate them?

We choose to be free. We choose to let go of the things of this world, the things that are temporary and always passing away from us, and grab hold of the one thing that is eternal and never changes. We choose Christ and His Kingdom. We choose the infinite, immutable God and we rest in Him. We commit ourselves to His character, His goodness, His love, His mercy, and we drive out the fears that consume us and we learn a new language.

Hope. Not the stuff of dreams, not the wishful musings of an uncertain people, but the confident assurance that what He says is, and always will be.

“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear.” Because fear has to do with punishment, with punitive measures, with loss. We fear losing the things around us because those things are temporary – our fear is not meant to the posture of our lives, but the signpost that points us to the existence of the Perfect Love that gives us the certainty, the security, we all crave. We are not meant to embrace fear; it is not meant to be native to our souls; it was and is always meant to be foreign to us, a discomfort that we shed when we turn to God and Christ.

So let’s shed it. Let’s lay aside our fears. I’m not suggesting we live as Pollyannas, but we cannot live as cowards. If we wish to conquer evil, then we begin by recognizing it has already been defeated. If we wish to slay fear, then we begin by embracing the One who has already slain it. 

Today, as our nation continues to exhort its citizens to pray for Boston, let us really do so. Only let us stop to consider exactly to whom we’re praying, and let us not stop with mere platitudes for healing and restoration, but instead let us be bold and pray for the final eradication of the fear and evil that surrounds us. Let us pray that His “kingdom come, [His] will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”

And let us agree with the Apostle John: “Even so Lord Jesus, come.”

Quickly.