Writing as Education

 
“I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do---the actual act of writing---turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.” 
― Anne Lamott

With God as Our Father

The Bible repeatedly refers to God as father and his followers as his children. Dependent upon our relationships with our earthly parents, this can either be a calming thought or one that leads to tension. Some of us were taught that our heavenly father was mostly a judge who showed his disappointment and anger when we made mistakes. Most of the time when I think of the relationship between father and son, my mind goes to how I feel as an adult, but perhaps the better way to imagine the concept is between a wise father and a very young child. The Bible tells us that God is far superior to humans in reasoning and love (Isaiah 55:8 is only one place we find this truth) and we can readily see that as the creator of this vast universe in which we live, he is far beyond us. When we are mere babes-in-arms or toddlers, and our fathers are given the responsibility to care for our needs and train us up in the ways that we should go, perhaps that is when we are most like the relationship between God the father and we the children.

Pastor Steve McMillan at Bow Valley Christian Church recently used an illustration that points to the truth in this. When a child reaches that age where they begin to walk (usually within a few months of their first birthday) we see the pride of the father in the child. The child manages to get up and hold onto some piece of furniture and walks along it before coming to the end of safety. At some point, they must launch out on their own and so they stretch a leg and arm out and take those first halting steps. Soon the awkwardness of legs, body, and heavy head get in the way and the child thumps down on the forgiving cushion of a nicely padded bottom. At this point we don’t see the father berate the child for falling. We don’t hear him say, “What is wrong with you? You only took three steps!” No, instead the father is ecstatic. He cheers the babe on and says, “Wonderful, you did so well. You took three steps before falling." He pulls out his cell phone and tries to capture the next steps on video. He calls his wife into the room and says, “Honey, come in here quick, see what our daughter has just done!” He calls his parents on the phone and acts like his child is the most brilliant and coordinated child on the planet. He jumps around and hoots like a mad-man, all because this child took three steps and fell hard.

So too, our heavenly father is more interested in the steps we take than in the many times we fall. Sure, he does not want to see us fall and get hurt; there is pain in his heart when he sees us scrape our knees and bruise our muscles. Yet, he is more interested in the fact that we actually walked for a while. He is there to encourage us to get up, wince at the pain, bandage the scrapes, and get moving again. Fathers do not worry about the falls. Certainly, if the child keeps falling for the next several years there may be something wrong and the father intervenes to find a way to help the son walk, but that is not the usual case. 

So, what of my life here on this earth? Am I focussed on how many times I fall or on how much progress I am making? I would do well to set myself some goals and aim toward them rather than focussing on the time I spend on the ground. My heavenly father is certainly looking at foot-steps and progress, otherwise he could not be my loving father at all.

Job and Retribution Theology

One of the strongest impulses within most of us is the belief that good people are rewarded, and bad people are punished. There is an immediacy to it. When bad things begin to happen to us, we quickly ask, “What did I ever do to deserve this?” When someone else is suffering in life, there is a natural tendency to see them as getting what they deserve. We love stories of “good people” who win the lottery. We like to believe it is because they deserve it. As a pastor and leader in the church, people often come to me for counsel and many times they speak of a feeling that they are being punished for wrong they have done. Even Jesus’ own disciples assume this “retribution theology” when they ask Jesus about their encounter with a blind man. “Who sinned, this man or his parents that he has been born blind,” they ask (John 9:2).[1] Jesus immediately corrects them and says neither, and yet you and I still tend to think that this is the way the world works. Proponents of the Prosperity Gospel use our natural tendency and try to convince us that this is indeed the way the world works.[2]

The Book of Job in the Old Testament is designed to help us understand the true way God functions. The preface of the book of Job is where we must begin and be certain to understand that Job is considered by God himself to be “innocent and virtuous” (1:8; and 2:3) long before and even after the calamities come upon him. The Accuser believes that if Job lost all that he had, and if his health was taken away, he would no longer be innocent, virtuous, and faithful to God. But God allows the Accuser to take away all of the good in Job’s life and still Job remains faithful, virtuous, and innocent.

The rest of the book is an explanation of the common understanding of retribution theology which Job’s friends and even Job seem to endorse. There is this sense in which humans are forever believing that if someone is suffering, they must have sinned; and even when the evidence suggests otherwise, we will continue to believe in this retribution theology.

Now some reading this article will argue that, indeed, retribution theology is the way in which God functions. They would show proof-texts from the book of Proverbs, or Deuteronomy 27, 28 (which connects obedience to God’s law with rewards and disobedience with curses) and tell us that is precisely how God functions. However, Tremper Longman III explains it this way.

“…one of the important contributions of the book of Job…is to undermine the idea that retribution theology works absolutely and mechanically. Sometimes sin does lead to negative consequences, but not always. Similarly, sometimes proper behavior leads to positive outcomes, but not always. Job serves as an example to warn against judging others on the basis of their situation in life.” (p. 67).

God never fully answers why Job suffers. God simply appears before Job and it is clear to Job that God is the only wise one. Job “repents” at the sight of an all-powerful God. But his repentance is not from

“sin that led to his suffering in the first place. In the dialogues, Job has grown increasingly impatient… He concludes that God is unjust. At the end of the story, he changes his attitude and behavior (he repents, in other words) toward God, now that he has not only heard about him but also seen him (42:5).”[3]

Thus, the other key learning from the Book of Job is that, regarding suffering, “…the ultimate resolution is patient suffering before a wise and powerful God.”[4] We may not understand it ourselves, but we can trust the wisdom of our God as we go through the sufferings of this life. Job is an important book that teaches about wisdom and suffering. May we read it carefully and mine all of the truths it has to offer.

---

[1] Here and throughout this article, I rely heavily upon Tremper Longman III’s excellent commentary on the book of Job and particularly the essay contained within it entitled “The Theological Message of the Book of Job.” Job (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms), Baker Academic, 2012 Commentary by Tremper Longman III.

[2] Longman p. 66, 67.

[3] Longman p. 65, 66.

[4] Longman p. 68.

River Otter Education

I have previously written about how adult Osprey teach their young to fly and said that it is delicate business because they really only get one chance to try and there can be no failures. Recently, I saw some video of a mother river otter teaching her pup to swim. The pups are born without the ability to swim or dive but their food supply is almost entirely underwater. This necessitates that they learn to swim so that they can eat.

The video showed the extreme teaching methods of the otter. The pup did not want to learn to swim. He had to learn to swim. The mother dragged him down to the water’s edge and threw him in the water. The pup spluttered his way to the surface as his thick fur kept him buoyant. Before he was able to truly catch his breath, his mother dragged him down to the bottom of the pool of water. He struggled to the surface and she plunged him back down. This recurring process went on for several minutes and appeared quite cruel to the on-lookers, but at the end of it the pup was grabbing full strokes of water with his front legs and paws, and was truly swimming and becoming proficient at diving to the bottom. A few more lessons would be needed but this pup was well on the way to becoming a star student.

The spiritual lessons are likely obvious to many, but allow me to make them explicit. We are very much like this pup. We are born into this world through no fault or favour of our own. We arrive at the whim of God and the decisions of our parents. We do not know how to swim or any of the other things we need to do in this world. We do know how to breath but could never feed ourselves or protect ourselves from the dangers of a cold night or a busy street. Our parents and our Heavenly Parent drag us into situations in which we must learn. The lessons are not gentle. In fact, the lessons are never easy. That ancient progenitor of hard-ship Job,[1] could tell us stories of lessons learned from the hard training of God. Job had wealth, status, family, and health. The Accuser asked God to let him take it all away and God allowed it. Job learned a lesson about the nature of life on earth and who God is in relation to God’s creation. It was not a pleasant lesson – okay, that’s an under-statement – it was an extremely unpleasant lesson. Job did learn from the lesson. His answer to God is summed up as, “I take back everything I said, and I sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance.” Not exactly a, “Thank you for the lessons you taught me, Dad,” but grateful just the same. To put it another way, Job realized that God is the potter and Job is the clay. “When a potter makes jars out of clay, he has the right to use the same lump of clay to make one jar for decoration and another to throw garbage into.”[2] Yet, God is patient and uses even cracked and fragile clay jars for his purposes.[3]

So, what do I yet need to learn? What hard lessons might God have for me? Because of his great love for me, I can trust that they will be appropriate for this stage of my learning curve. "He is the potter, I am the clay;" He is the mother otter, I am the pup. 

---

[1] Read about him in Job 1-42 in your Bible.

[2] Paraphrase of Romans 9:21, 22.

[3] See 2 Corinthians 4:7.

A Song for Aubrey Claire

You’ve got the world wrapped around your finger

And yes, you can change the world

I see you changing my world now

As your hand round my finger curls

You can already steal my heart

You will always inspire my thoughts

From your tiny birth, you start

Beginning to tie the knots

And, you will change the world little one

You will be a revolution

Go ahead and change this world

We wait for your contribution

This world is in need of much change

Too much poverty, war, mistrust

People looking for those who can

Be the change, lead the rest of us

Can one really change the planet?

Those words are hope and a trust

Little one, if anyone can

It’s your generation that must

You will change the world little one

You can be a revolution

Go ahead and change this world

We wait for your contribution

Think about it, make a case

Work it out, and use some laughter

Make this world a better place

For those who follow after

You will change the world little one

You can be the revolution

Go ahead and change this world

We await your work’s fruition

Even if you must change me!

Happy, Blessed, Grace

 

Poems and songs are always a work-in-progress and never feel quite complete. But then, I guess that is especially appropriate for poems about grandchildren - they are definitely a work-in-progress. This one is for Gwyneth Anna Mitchell born 2016-09-14.

Happy, Blessed, Grace

She is Blessed to be a Blessing

True Happiness guides her ways

Her voice speaks truth and life and Grace

Gwyneth Anna is born today

Grace, Grace, God’s Grace

Charisma will follow her all of her days

Gift from the Lord to do His work

Redeemed by the One who gave all

Ambassador for worlds unseen

Child of God and child of the fall

Grace, Grace, God’s Grace

Charisma will follow her all of her days

Blessed to see redemption draw near

To see His Grace and truth and light

New birth that shows the purpose

Shining bright in darkness of night

Grace, Grace, God’s Grace

Charisma will follow her all of her days

A name that comes from the old world

From a land of mountains and sea

To a place of peaks and ocean

To a girl who is Blessed and free

Grace, Grace, God’s Grace

Charisma will follow her all of her days

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

 A friend of mine is in the hospital right now and is undergoing chemo-therapy and a bone marrow transplant to rescue him from cancer. In the midst of it, they did an MRI of his brain and discovered a tumour outside of the brain but inside of the head. You might ask, “Why would one person have to go through so much?” Of course my friend and his wife will ask questions such as this, but I also see them exemplifying a life of hope in the midst of great difficulties. Despite what they are going through, they are trusting God to lead them through it. They do not know where this journey will lead but they know that God will go with them in it. This afternoon we read part of Psalm 139 together and prayed. Psalm 139:13-18 says,

You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body
    and knit me together in my mother’s womb.
Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
    Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.
You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion,
    as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.
You saw me before I was born.
    Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out
    before a single day had passed.

How precious are your thoughts about me, O God.
    They cannot be numbered!
I can’t even count them;
    they outnumber the grains of sand!
And when I wake up,
    you are still with me!

God knows all about our bodies. He knows how all of the blood vessels in our body are connected. He knows about blood/brain barriers. He knows how many hairs are on our heads or, in my friend’s case, how many hairs are not on his head right now. He made us and He cares for us. He knows how many days we have on this earth. Both God and we know that the number of days we have on this earth are indeed finite. Yet, we pray that my friend has many more sweet days of life with his wife here on this earth. Regardless of how many days we have on this earth, may we all seek to live those days with God. In all that we do, may we agree with the psalmist, and say God, “you are still with me.”

In the World But Not of the World

Thomas Merton’s classic book, The Seven Storey Mountain is a helpful commentary on how one can live a spiritual life despite pressures in the opposite direction. Merton knew how to live in the world without being swallowed up by the world. He has much to show us about the balance between solitude from and solidarity with our fellow humans. Perhaps more than any other writer, he teaches us the meaning of being “in the world” but “not of the world.” His words have been steeped in solitude and steeped in the tensions of making a living, finding his place in the world, and struggles with the sins that so easily entangle every one of us.

Gordon T. Smith quotes Merton in his book, The Voice of Jesus, and, in one of my recent blog posts, I looked briefly at one of his comments on suffering. Today, let’s go a little deeper with Thomas Merton. The following quote is certainly one that will challenge our understanding of the purpose of suffering and will encourage us to embrace, rather than reject, the pain we will all experience.

Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. 

– Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 1948

Do I embrace suffering or avoid suffering? How large or small are the items which torture me? Will I make the shift to embrace rather than deflect, avoid, or hate suffering? “Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?” (Job 2:10).

Today, I will meditate upon these things. Selah.

Earth Day 2014

Life marches ever onward
Thousands of years come and go
Constant motion of the tides
Beings that ebb and flow

Yet, there's a change this Earth Day

Parents and all grandparents
Children arrive one-by-one
This blue-green fragile planet
The jewel of many suns

Light begins a new Earth Day

Made from nothing but stardust
She shares the genes of many
One among all on this earth
Her grace is more than any

She's our little Earth Baby

Small and trivial from space
She stands out among all others
I will give her this earth
We will care for her Mother,

For this precious Earth Girl


Welcome Jordyn Katherine Haeckel (born April 22, 2014)!

Soul Building

Difficulty, pain, and suffering are things that all of us would like to avoid. We would prefer that God would simply make our lives beautiful and perfect. We would like to have God give us a perfect job, a large salary, abundant health, the ideal spouse, and wonderful kids. Some preachers would have us believe that if we become born-again Christians, and live a certain way, God will make us financially prosperous and that all of our problems will go away. What we frequently see in life contradicts such dreams of perfection and the promises of health-and-wealth preachers. Sickness and disaster come upon both the righteous and the unrighteous. Even the healthiest among us age and find that our eyes do not work as well as they once did, hips and knees wear out, and all of us will one day die.

So why must we live with all of these problems? After all, we read things like this in the Bible:

* "'For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.'" (Jeremiah 29:11 NIV)
* "And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work." (2 Corinthians 9:8 NIV)

What we sometimes miss is that God is less concerned with our physical being than he is with our soul. God uses the challenges, the difficulties, the pain, and the sorrow of this life to help us develop our souls. His desire is that our souls might be rightly fitted for a life in heaven.

John Hick, one of the greatest proponents of "suffering as soul-building," says,

One who has attained to goodness by meeting and eventually mastering temptations, and thus by rightly making responsible choices in concrete situations, is good in a richer and more valuable sense than would be one created . . . [from the beginning in] a state either of innocence or of virtue. In the former case, which is that of the actual moral achievements of mankind, the individual’s goodness has within it the strength of temptations overcome, a stability based upon an accumulation of right choices, and a positive and responsible character that comes from the investment of costly personal effort. . . .Men are not to be thought of on the analogy of animal pets, whose life is to be made as agreeable as possible, but rather on the analogy of human children, who are to grow to adulthood in an environment whose primary and overriding purpose is not immediate pleasure but the realizing of the most valuable potentialities of human personality.1

St. John of the Cross (1542-1591) wrote of "the dark night of the soul" sent to us by God to purge our soul and make us the person God is calling us to be. He wrote,

[God] is purging the soul, annihilating it, emptying it or consuming in it (even as fire consumes the mouldiness and the rust of metal) all the affections and imperfect habits which it has contracted its whole life . . . . These are deeply rooted in the substance of the soul.2

By various means God is trying to get our attention so that we might seek him, love him, and live out our lives on this earth according to his purposes and plans. Our natural selves seek comfort and a pain-free life. But God allows the challenges of this world so that our souls might grow as we pay attention to him and accept guidance from him. We may not even recognize the things God brings into our lives to help build our souls. In fact, we may misinterpret some of the events which come our way. There is a Chinese fable that is told in many places that illustrates this fact.3

There once was a man who lived on the northern frontier of China whose horse ran away to the nomads across the border. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?”
Some months later, his horse returned/bringing a splendid nomad stallion. Everyone congratulated him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a disaster?”
Their household was richer by a fine horse, which the son loved to ride. One day, he fell and broke his hip. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?”
A year later the nomads came in force across the border, and every able-bodied man took his bow and went into battle. The Chinese frontiersmen lost nine of every ten men. Only because the son was lame, did father and son survive to take care of each other.

Some people grow bitter and reject the learning that is available from struggle and pain; but, if we embrace what can be learned from every circumstance of life, our souls will grow. We can become a better person because of the struggles, become more ready for the next challenges of life, and become prepared to breathe the air of heaven.

1 John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 255-258.
2 As quoted in Scazzero, Peter. Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006; p. 124.
3 One place the story is told is in Scazzero, Peter. Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006; p. 129, 130.

Top Ten of 2012

The end of one calendar year and the beginning of another is a good time for me to look back and consider how I have grown through the year. That means looking through the blog posts of the past year and seeing what I have been thinking and writing about in 2012. After a quick perusal I came up with the following top-ten list. These are a few of my favourite posts in a, close to, tenth to first favourite order.

10. Our Time is a reminder of how grateful I am for the incredible blessings of my life. Thank-you Father for the place and time in which I live.

9. Don't Miss Your Life is the title of a song that came out on Father's day last June. It reminds all of us of the important things in life.

8. Prayer Changes Things is a bit of a confession that I am an experimenter at heart. The three styles of prayer represented in this blog show how I have spent a life-time in the laboratory of prayer.

7. Observation is all about science and the mystery of how God has put the universe together.

6. Contact is another excursion into exobiology and musings about the expanses of our universe. It reminds us that both theology and science must search for truth.

5. Dark Knight shows how deeply God has built self-sacrifice and resurrection stories into the fabric of our culture.

4. Adam and Genetics celebrates the completion of a degree and introduces a controversial yet widely held perspective on genetics and theology.

3. Higgs and Bosons pays homage to the biggest scientific discovery of the year and what certainly should have been the newsmaker of the year (contrary to what you will read about the Canadian Press newsmaker of the year).

2. Spiritual Inertia is short and to the point but reveals a quote that finally gave me the language to describe a principle of spiritual growth that I have experienced all of my life.

1. Pacing the Cage relates the lyrics of Bruce Cockburn's classic song and reminds me that I can never rest on yesterday's successes. Next year I will continue to seek to grow and develop as a person and a writer.

Together these blog posts show the spiritual journey of 2012 but there is one more event that has changed the man I am. This is also the year in which our first grandchild was born. He is certainly one of the best things that has happened to us in this year; and in our lifetime. Spending Christmas with him and his parents, cuddling his ten pound body into my shoulder, and praising God for his birth have been a beautiful way to end 2012. His small body reminds us of another tiny baby who came into the world with "fragile finger sent to save us; tender brow prepared for thorn; (and) tiny heart whose blood will save us."1 May our memories of 2012 help us become the people whom God is calling us to be. Happy New Year.

1. Chris Rice, "Welcome to Our World."

Words for a Grandson

Welcome to the world little man. You have already made a mark on my life. I have become a grandfather; you a grandson. We get to explore this relationship together and I have a surprisingly intense desire to excel at grand-fathering. From a biological perspective, you and I share one quarter of our DNA. I hope you got all of the good bits. Yet, even if you did get some of my less desirable traits, you need to know that biology is not destiny.

I am 52 and you are new-born. I pray that when you have experienced more of this life you will come to love life as much as I do. This world is so amazing and has so many things for you to learn and explore. I want to encourage you to never stop asking questions and never stop learning. I hope that you will become a student of the world and explore it with philosophy, science, mathematics, and theology. Never be afraid of truth; for all truth is God's truth.

I pray that you will find the God who created this universe. I pray that you will have a long and happy life. I also pray that you will take risks in this life and never settle for the "safe" zone. Go ahead and make some mistakes; God knows that I have. I pray that whatever you may experience in this life, you will live it with peace, and joy, and bravery.

I pray that you will go for walks in the rain and the snow; get cold and wet but love the experience. I pray that you will fight for those smaller than you; poorer than you; sicker than you; more alone than you. I pray that you will enjoy life: play music, sing, write poetry, climb mountains, drink fine wine, enjoy rich food, appreciate a loaf of bread, find love, get your heart broken, and discover a good woman to love and marry.

I pray that you will appreciate the heritage of all of your ancestors who have gone before you. You have more than a little Celtic blood and even a Celtic name to go along with it. I pray that you will live with a sense of your own mortality, so that you might live well and appreciate this life. I pray that you will live life to the fullest every second of your existence in this world. I pray that you will look forward to a life beyond this one.

Welcome, Clayton Keith Smith (born November 6, 2012).