Michael Kelley's Blog, page 229

The Question of Identity Can Really Only Be Settled in a Moment of Crisis

(The following is excerpted from my book, Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal: A Boy, Cancer, and God)

… this is what happens to most everyone who encounters an event like cancer and then tries to figure out what life looks like afterward. Such circumstances are pain- ful for a lot of reasons, but one of the primary ones is because they are stripping—they strip us of money, power, prestige, health, or a loved one. And they change our lives, forcing us to ask the difficult questions of personal identity. Who are you now that you’re not rich anymore? Who are you now that you don’t work at your former job anymore? Who are you now that you can’t exercise like you used to because of your illness? Who are you now that you have lost someone close to you? Who are you? And who am I? Pain strips us of the comfortable self-designations that we so desperately cling to. Pain makes us poor. I was impoverished in my identity.

The question of identity can really only be answered in a moment of crisis. In other words, it can only be answered when something attached to our core is taken out of our control: health, achievements, career, family life, and so forth. Who are you when those things are altered or threatened? Who would the rich, young ruler be if he sold his possessions? He would not be rich or a ruler; he would have nothing external left to define himself. He would be poor. A nobody. That pov- erty opens the door for Jesus to say, “Let me tell you who you really are.”

You can get the book here.

A Prayer for the Lazy Mind

“Oh, how precious is time, and how it pains me to see it slide away, while I do so little to any good purpose.” ~ David Brainerd

Father -

The mind is a battle field, one in which I am meant to be actively involved in the fight. Despite the fact that I am to take every thought captive to Christ, I choose instead the easier path. Not so much anger, or lust, or bitterness, though there are plenty of these thoughts spinning around in my head; no, more often, I choose the path of lethargy. Of mental laziness.

Instead of doing all the things that might profit me – to think upon your greatness, to hide your word in my heart through my brain, to choose cognizance of Your presence, I opt for TV. Or twitter. Or other such amusements that continue to dull my spiritual senses.

When I look back over the course of the day, Father, I am appalled at how little time I actually spend thinking of you, and how correspondingly much time I spend thinking of something. And the saddest part is that I can’t articulate what that something might be. So time drifts in and out of life, and it is squandered by the lazy-minded like me.

Today, Lord, I ask you to not just prick my heart; prick my mind. I want to love you with every part of my being – my heart, my body, and yes, my intellect, too. I don’t want another day to go by in which I do not dwell on the unending depths of Your greatness. I want instead to be swallowed up in them rather than spend another day in the alluring “else.”

Thank You, Lord, that when you save, you are redeeming the whole of man. You have not only secured for me an eternal future, but a present in which I might probe the depths of Your great love. Help me, Father, not to be the man who sits before a vast banquet of grace and chooses only to fill my belly with crackers. For this inner life, and the battles thereof, are where I might even now enter into the eternal life in which Jesus described, that I might know You, and know the One You have sent.

May it be so. In Jesus’ name,

Amen.

Exploring the Unexplorable

Every, single time our family comes to a new place – whether a friend’s home, a hotel, a new part of the city, and particularly somewhere in nature we haven’t been before, I can count on my son, Joshua, to have virtually the same reaction:

“Let’s do some exploring.”

Don’t you love that?

I do. I love that he carries with him a sense of expectation with him wherever he goes, that here, before him, is something fresh and different. Something unknown. Maybe even a little wild. And possibly an adventure awaits behind the next rock or inside the next room.

Because it’s so apparent in Joshua right now, I can’t imagine him standing at the edge of some unknown place and having the opposite reaction. I can’t see him at the edge of a forest or a cave or a building and saying, “That’s pretty big. It looks exciting. Let’s not explore it. Because, you know, it’s so big; we’ll never be able to see everything in it.”

In fact, in our children we see the antithesis of this statement. It’s precisely because things are unexplorable that they want to explore them. They aren’t intimidated by the vastness; they are energized by it.

It’s a similar sense of wonder that the apostle brought with him to the depths of the wonders of God. Look what he says in his awe-inspired closing of the first half of Romans:

Oh, the depth of the riches

both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!

How unsearchable His judgments

and untraceable His ways!

For who has known the mind of the Lord?

Or who has been His counselor?

Or who has ever first given to Him,

and has to be repaid?

For from Him and through Him

and to Him are all things.

To Him be the glory forever. Amen.

It reads like a song, doesn’t it? But not just any song. A song of adventure. A song of new horizons. A song of excitement. Can you imagine, then, Paul reacting to the vastness of the wonders of God by saying, after these lines, “You know, there are some mysteries I just won’t ever know the answer to. It’s in God’s hands, and I’m content with that. I don’t think I’m going to explore. God is so vast; I’ll never get to the end. I’ll be content with what I know from my current vantage point.”

Of course not.

For just as children are lured by the unexplorable to explore, so are we called into the depths of the wisdom and knowledge of God. We go there not because we expect to find the end; we go there because we know we cannot.

Fridays Are For One Question

It’s almost here, friends. A week from tonight our family will be gathered around the TV to watch the opening ceremonies for the Olympics.

We’re an Olympic family (or at least, that’s what we’re telling our children. They continue to insist that we are a Dora and Looney Tunes family.) So we’re going to watch a ton of events this year.

That’s the simple question for today on the blog:

“What summer Olympic event are you most excited about watching?”

One of the Simplest Gospel Prayers in Scripture

“Lord, help me!” she cried.

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t well composed. It wasn’t articulate.

But it was real. Very, very real.

This woman, in Matthew 15:21-28, didn’t know much, but it seems she knew enough. She knew her great need, springing forth from the suffering of her child. And she knew that Jesus had the power to bring about real change. Spurred on by her desperation and her knowledge, she didn’t just say, “Jesus, help me.” Nor did she say, “Rabbi, help me.” Instead, she acknowledged what many of us fail to – that Jesus is Lord. And because He is, He can indeed help.

So she cried out those three words.

At the core, isn’t that what the gospel really is? In all our talk right now, in which I fear that the word “gospel” is becoming more and more diluted, here is the essence if what we cry to Jesus over and over again.

Lord, help me.

We are in great need. We don’t claim any ability to help ourselves. We come to Jesus, finding ourselves exclusively at His mercy.

And yet we ask, for we know that because He is Lord, He can indeed help. And because He is a good Lord, that He is willing.

It’s beautiful in its simplicity. At the end of our sermons, our book reading, our tweets, and our podcasts, it comes back to this, over and over again:

Lord, help me.

The Ten Commandments for Writers

Thanks, Jared Wilson, for this:

1. Thou shalt have no other gods before God. Neither publication nor fame nor even writing itself shall be your god, but God alone.

2. Thou shalt not make of your writing an idol, serving it as if it is sovereign. Nor shall you look to your gift or craft for the fulfillment and satisfaction and joy only Christ can give in himself.

3. Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain, but shall write ultimately for the fame of his name, not for your own.

4. Thou shalt take a day off every week.

5. Honor your father and your mother. Even if you’re writing about your troubled childhood, don’t do so in ways that shame your parents or throw them under the bus for cheap laughs or tears.

6. Thou shalt not murder, not even in your heart when another writer writes well or when a critic savages your work or when you think somebody stole your idea.

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery. If writing is your mistress, it’s still cheating on your spouse. And you’re not fooling everybody by trying to “keep it real” with the sexuality in your book.

8. Thou shalt not steal anybody’s joy or time. Nor shall you steal anybody’s work and pass it off as your own.

9. Thou shalt not tell lies. Even when writing fiction, tell the truth.

10. Thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s gifts, praise, success, or livelihood.

The greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and the second is like it: Love your reader as yourself.

The Thin Wet Line

Ah, summer…

(HT:Z)

Glass Beach

In the early 20th century, Fort Bragg residents threw their household garbage over the cliffs above what is now Glass Beach. They discarded glass, appliances, and even cars onto the land below.

At the time, the area was owned by the Union Lumber Company, and locals referred to it as “The Dumps.” Fires were lit to reduce the size of the trash pile, as the beach began to accumulate a massive amount of rubbish.

In 1967, the North Coast Water Quality Board and city leaders closed the area and various cleanup programs were undertaken through the years to correct the damage. Over the next several decades the pounding waves cleansed the beach, wearing down the discarded glass into the small, smooth, colored trinkets that cover the beach today. As the Pacific Ocean bombarded the beach, it weathered down the trash into something beautiful:

Who would have ever thought? Who would have conceived that what was discarded as trash, what was useless in the eyes of the world, what was so varied in shape, size, texture, and background, could come together to be? Pretty amazing what the combination of time and steady pressure can do to the rough edges of individual objects.

I’ve got experiences in life that remind me of this trash heap. Experiences of pain. Of loss. Of sin. Of mistakes. Experiences that I’ve dumped over the edge and lit fire to time and time again, hoping against hope that they’ll just disappear. But they’re not going to. Those experiences are embedded in my mind and heart until the day I die.

God’s not interested in making those things disappear. But He is interested in, over time, and with the constant pressure of the gospel applied again and again, making them into something different. Something astonishing. Something beautiful and new.

Redemption is real. It takes a while. But it’s real.

Fridays Are For One Question

This week, I’ve had the privilege of speaking at a Centrifuge camp at Panama City Beach, and my family was able to join me there. It’s been pretty great, but as you’ll see from the picture below, Christian has had just about enough:

See, when you have kids, the vacation isn’t actually much of a rest; you need a vacation from the vacation. Which leads to today’s question:

“What’s the most exhausting vacation you’ve ever taken?”

Clinging to that Which is Holding You

There’s a lot of swimming going on in the Kelley house right now. Our older two kids are on the summer swim team, and the two year old has finally decided that he likes the water, too.

I don’t mind telling you that I take quite a bit of pride in watching these kids swim. It’s not because swimming is “my thing;” it’s clearly not. I can rehash an experience of doing a lake triathlon in which I ended up back stroking most of the 400 yards to try and keep from drowning. I take pride because, as remedial as my swimming skills are, I had a hand in teaching them how to swim.

Every Saturday for a season I took them as individual kids to the pool for “daddy swim lessons” so they could pass the rite of passage in middle Tennessee and receive the coveted YMCA green armband which is essentially the mark of freedom in the pool. And they worked hard; they passed the swim test.

The thing is that I have the marks on my neck to prove it.

You put a child in the water and they cling to you. HARD. They cling with a violent intensity because they are convinced, in that moment, that their strength is really what’s keeping them from drowning.

But us daddy’s have a secret – it’s not their strength keeping the kids afloat. It’s ours. The reason they aren’t going to drown is because we won’t let them.

But then there’s the wonderful moment when they realize that my grip is stronger than theirs. You can almost see the freedom flicker into their eyes. They suddenly come to the understanding, in a child like way, that their perseverance – their safety – isn’t dependent on their ability to hold on. Their arms are child’s arms. They get tired. But my arms are far stronger. And even when they let go of me because of exhaustion, I’m not going to let them go.

See, I’m their father. And I love them.

I suspect the gospel is lurking there, too, during daddy swim lessons.