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March 6 - April 14, 2022
Little did I know that the pain was under assignment: it was making room in my life for another operation well beyond the reach of any surgeon’s scalpel.
God asked me to fast mental and physical strength. He invited me into holy weakness. I found Jesus there.
Jesus fasted omnipresence and clothed Himself with flesh. He fasted being worshiped by angels and accepted the disregard of man. He fasted the Voice that birthed planets and submitted to the silence of thirty hidden years:
To humble us, to test us, to know what is in our hearts . . . such is the sifting power of helplessness. In our daily lives, we may prefer self-reliance. But perhaps utter dependence is the truer friend of our souls.
We all guard against sins of commission and we are vigilant toward sins of omission. But achievements—even in small doses—can make us vulnerable to sins of addition: adding niceties and luxuries to our list of basic needs, adding imaginations onto the strong back of vision, adding self-satisfaction to the purity of peace.
Jesus lived a truly uncluttered life and died a focused, eternally fruitful death. How I long to follow His example.
God seems more interested in what we are becoming than in what we are giving up.
Faith, in general, is less about the sacrifice of stuff and more about the surrender of our souls. Lent, in kind, is less
about well-mannered denials and more about thinning our lives in order to thicken our communion with God. Decrease is holy only when its destination is love.
“Spiritual disciplines do not transform, they only become relational opportunities to open the heart to the Spirit who transforms.” — JOHN H. COE5
Christian spirituality, the contemplative life, is not about us. It is about God. The great weakness of American spirituality is that it is all about us: fulfilling our potential, getting the blessings of God, expanding our influence, finding our gifts, getting a handle on principles by which we can get an edge over the competition. The more there is of us, the less there is of God. —EUGENE PETERSON1
Regret empties anticipation, flattens dreams, and suffocates hope, because regret is a form of self-punishment. Whereas hindsight helps us learn from the past, regret beats us up with the past.
His longing was to draw his generation’s attention and allegiance to the Messiah. From John’s perspective, the true value of people seeing him was that people would then be positioned to see through him and gaze at Jesus. By willingly decreasing, John increased others’ view of the Savior.
Attention is not innately evil. It becomes evil when used as a self-serving end instead of a God-serving means. Those who steward attention as means and not end stand tall and serve strong, knowing that all gifts come from God and can therefore draw attention to God. Praise slides off such souls like water off a window2 into a cup that is offered to God alone.
It’s an act of reverence to ask questions of the story. The Jews are confident that the story is strong enough to be tried and tested. . . . Around the table, a Jewish child has “That’s a good question!” drummed into his or her soul, not, “You don’t ask that question”. . . Questions are as sacred as answers.
Faith in Christ is not an airy substance that rests on unquestioning souls. Biblical faith is muscular, thickened more through trials than ease. The Author of our faith is more than able to address the identity crises His unexpected words and ways may trigger.
Who is Jesus? Jesus is more than we thought, hoped, or imagined. His wildness is a source of wonder, not of worry.
John’s question did not make Jesus nervous.
“We have never reaped such a harvest from any seed as from that which fell from our hands while tears were falling from our eyes.” — C. H. SPURGEON (1834 – 1892)3
John’s death marks a turn toward the cross in Jesus’ ministry. From this point forward, Jesus more intensely taught upon and demonstrated the revolutionary nature of His “upside down” kingdom.4 Consequently, the religious tension that eventually nailed him to the cross dramatically escalated. Alone on that mountain, as Jesus grieved John’s death, He anticipated His own.
“[God] draws the curtain about the bed of his chosen sufferer and, at the same time, he withdraws another curtain which before concealed his Glory!” — C. H. SPURGEON (1834 – 1892)5
Fear, by nature, distorts reality.
“To endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ. When it comes, it is not an accident, but a necessity.” — DIETRICH BONHOEFFER (1906–1945)
On the cross, leadership dies. On the cross, success dies. On the cross, skills die, and excellence dies. All of my strengths—nailed to the cross. All of my weaknesses—nailed to the cross. All of my yearnings for bigger and better, for anything other than Christ himself—nailed to that same cross.5
perhaps focus on faith-fueled unity flourishes in times when the church is regularly reminded that they are aliens and strangers on this earth.
We tend to view a miracle as a divine deposit on more miracles. We like our miracles to be perpetual, thank you. Once raised, we want Lazarus to live forever. But he cannot. So we are bewildered when the recipient of the miracle still dies. It seems to me that miracles are less of a promise for tomorrow and more of a manifestation of God’s love and power for today.
Bestow upon the bewildered permission to not edit their honesty.
Though I can only guess about God’s motives, I do know mine: as a parent I speak as an investment in my children’s futures, even when they cannot understand.
“No matter how we rationalize, God will sometimes seem unfair from the perspective of a person trapped in time. . . . Not until history has run its course will we understand how ‘all
things work together for good.’ Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.” — PHILIP YANCEY1
To change our defaults we must first address our theology of uncertainty. And to address our theology of uncertainty, we must first befriend mystery. Anglican clergyman Jeremy Taylor is quoted as saying, “[A] religion without mystery must be a religion without God.”2 Mystery is a given for relationship
between the Infinite and the finite. As we follow Jesus into uncertainty, we are free, in the words of Gerald G. May, to “join the dance of life in fullness without having a clue about what the steps are.”3
To dance when we do not know the steps requires us to value our Partner above our performance. To dance in the dark demonstrates a lavish display of trust. Lent, in its mystery, is an invitation to dance.
Did tax collection have anything to do with the beggar’s poverty? Did Bartimaeus’s praise inspire Zacchaeus to accept Jesus as the Messiah? Is it possible that the beggar helped make spiritually rich the man (or category of men) who made him financially destitute? Was Bartimaeus among the recipients of Zacchaeus’s exuberant, repentant act of restitution?
Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly. (Mark 14:4–5)
Why this waste? Because love does not calculate. What an honor: to be remembered as one who loved lavishly. Today, fast stinginess: seek an opportunity to be irrationally lavish toward someone who cannot possibly return the favor. Give because you love. Give without letting reason ration out your love in stingy portions.
Let us imitate those who have gone out to meet Him, not scattering olive branches or garments or palms in His path, but spreading ourselves before Him as best we can, with humility of soul and upright purpose. So may we welcome the Word as He comes, so may God, who cannot be contained within any bounds, be contained within us.” — ANDREW OF CRETE (AD 660–740)3
His love did not shrink back even when His love—for a moment or, sadly, for a lifetime—would ultimately be rejected.
Rowan Williams notes, “In suffering, the believer’s self-protection and isolation are broken.”
we continue to see how pain, for Jesus, prompted an increase, not a decrease, in His vulnerability toward man and His heavenly Father.
God holds back; he hides himself; he weeps. Why? Because he desires what power can never win. He is a king who wants not subservience, but love.
No one understood God’s goodness and control more than Jesus, and He still wept. Which means we can too.
So Jesus purged the temple in fulfillment of prophecy (Malachi 3:2), confronting religious corruption that profited and prospered at the expense of the poor and the foreigner.
Holy gets angry. So does this mean we need to buy ropes and start making whips? No. But perhaps we need to stop hiding safely behind hashtag campaigns and instead show up and speak out. And perhaps the next time we feel angry about corruption and injustice, instead of stifling the anger, we should ask God what He wants us to do with the anger. Odds are, He probably feels angry too.
“Joy and sadness are born at the same time, both arising from such deep places in your heart that you can’t find words to capture your complex emotions. But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence.” — HENRI NOUWEN (1932–1996)
A dear friend, Dr. Beth Grant, once said, “Choose carefully what you are willing to die for because you can only die once.”
Our reality does not frustrate Jesus. Our hypocrisy does.
“The question asked is not, ‘What should be happening in my life?’ but ‘What is happening in my life?’ The present moment, the present set of circumstances, the present relationships in our lives—this is where God lives. This is where God meets us and gives us life.” — ALICE FRYLING1
Evidently, valuing something more than truth limits our interaction with
Jesus. Taken seriously, this is rather sobering. Do we value something more than truth? Have control and position become more precious to us than sincerity?
