What God Wants For Your Life

Cheryl sat in her wheelchair Sunday after Sunday. She made her way to the sanctuary thanks to the efforts of her friends and her presence there made a difference.

Afflicted with ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, she was unfailingly hopeful, deeply interested in the comparatively minor struggles of her friends, and deeply in love with God and those around her.

When I think of Cheryl, I remember her faith and courage. I am also reminded that there are always gifts that we can give to one another — regardless of the apparent limits and frustrations that slow us and seemingly confine us.

Shortly before her death we held an appreciation dinner meant to thank her for the gifts she gave to each of us. I was away at the time, so I wrote to Cheryl. It captures only a bit of what we received from her seemingly weak hands — which were, in fact, filled with strength.

Dear Cheryl,

I had so hoped to be with you today. So, this letter is a poor substitute; and typewritten only to insure that you are able to read it.

When I was much younger, like most adults I think that I measured much of life in terms of physical well being and freedom from pain. It’s not hard to imagine why, I think. We live in a world where much of our energy is focused on staying healthy and which endlessly features perfect, strong bodies. I think it can also be traced to being consoled when I was younger with the words, “you always have your health.” In fact, of course, none of us enjoy the kinds of flawless, undiminished strength we imagine having; and those who do enjoy years of strength are never able to keep it.

What I have realized, as a result, is that true strength, growth, and wholeness is about something that lies much deeper. A strength and wholeness of soul and spirit that shines through in courage, compassion, love, and prayers that do not finally depend upon our physical strength at all.

You, dear one, are such a person; and we are stronger and closer to being whole, thanks to your life and witness. Worship will always and everywhere be about adoring and giving thanks to God. But no one who attends the nine o’clock service can have failed to notice that a congregation that goes about the business of worship with a fairly predictable set of habits, makes a singular exception in greeting you. I have watched enough congregations to know that the regular round of greetings, smiles, and hugs from young and old is not a function of sympathy. We don’t feel sorry for you. We are drawn to you.

We are drawn to you because the grace, love, and wisdom that God works out in our lives is something we see and feel worked out in your life; and that realization gives us hope. We have felt it in your smile, in your words, in the wise counsel, and gracious spaces that you have created for each of us along the way —- in the ways you have reached across the difficulties and struggles of your own life to remind us of God’s love for each of us.

Know this and hold onto it in the days ahead, Cheryl…..the space that you occupy in our lives is not tied to that space in the sanctuary where you sit every Sunday, but in our hearts and spirits.

God’s keeping and our love……

Always,

Fred

I spent some time this last summer at Creighton University. Creighton is a Jesuit University and devoted to Jesuit faith and practice.

One of the central practices in Jesuit devotion — the one that Ignatius of Loyola considered indispensable — was the prayer of Examen. Ignatius felt that the key to spiritual growth was to cultivate an awareness of when and where God had been present in the course of the day. It was so important, in fact, that he urged his followers to do the Examen, even if it cost them the little time that they might have for prayer.

One writer calls it “rummaging for God” in our lives — a wonderful, commonplace activity we have all done with far less to show for it when we have rummaged around for something we have lost.

The Examen is a practice that tells us something important about the spiritual life: Spiritual practice is preeminently about cultivating a sense of God’s presence.

It isn’t about devotional practice or about the number of hours we spend in overtly religious activity. It isn’t an anxious, endless effort to earn the love of God. The spiritual life is about cultivating a habitual awareness of God’s presence that shapes and informs the lives we live.

Rummaging around in our lives for God can be the source of inspiration, encouragement, strength, and gratitude. Not a bad result for an activity that any other time in life leads to the discovery of dust bunnies and old newspapers.

Design flaw or operator error? That’s the challenge Lent poses and Lent only offers one answer: operator error.

It’s that season in the Christian calendar that puts the whole sin-thing squarely on our plate and announces — “This is your doing, bud (or bud-ette), knock it off, turn around, do it differently.”

That’s pretty off-putting. Which is why some people run screaming the other way. Some complain that it’s unfair, medieval, dark, broody, old fashioned — or just the best of all reasons not to believe that there is a God.

But those reactions — whether they arise out of confusion, guilt, or Another Voice whispering in our ear — misses the deeper message that God is trying to get across:

“I love you my child and your choices separate you from me — they hurt those around you — and they deepen the darkness around you. It doesn’t need to be that way and I am ready to forgive you. Hear me, know I love you. Know I am willing to embrace you and let down your guard, stop your running.”

To be told our problem is a matter of operator error may be daunting, but we have spiritual responsibilities because we are children of God — because we are capable of far more glory than our selfish choices can give us.

That’s the good news of Lent.

God is not the author of suffering. But suffering radicalizes life. In the midst of it we discover that we have majored on the minor and minored on the major. If we give ourselves to God in the midst of it, we can find strength.

But whether we find ourselves in the middle of suffering or not — life is fundamentally the same. A gift from God — meant to be lived — moment by moment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gePQuE-7s8c

I don’t plan to respond at length to many posts…I think in general it’s better to let the observations people make stand for themselves. No need for me to kibitz on everything that is said. But Michaela’s response to yesterday’s post kept rattling around in my head.
Michaela observed, “For me, personally, respect also has to do with acknowledging the other as a child of God. I can, in one sense, love someone as a child of God with or without liking their behavior or choices they make in life. Does it help, in those difficult relationships we have to try to see them as a child of God?”

My own reaction is: yes and no. In one way, seeing others as a child of God makes all the difference in the world. Seeing the people we love — or anyone, for that matter — as children of God fundamentally alters the way in which we see people and, therefore, the way in which we treat them. Forget this basic distinction and people can become competitors, or the means to an end, the audience in a play in which only “I” really matter. See others as children of God and our relationships are placed on a completely different footing.

The distinction matters, too, in intimate relationships. Caring for others — loving them — is about an embrace that not only draws us closer to each other, but makes it easier for others to sense the presence of God in that embrace.

On the other hand, there is another sense in which I think God longs for us to love one another on our own terms and not just as a child of God. The identity, “child of God,” can insulate us from the gritty reality of loving someone as-they-are. Put another way, it can so insulate us emotionally that we “love people in general, but no one in particular.”

Loving others “as-they-are,” of course, is its own kind of spiritual exercise. In a sense our relationship with someone else is a laboratory for learning how to love — and love not just others, but God as well.

On a recent business trip I found myself sitting for a considerable amount of time in Hartford’s Bradley Airport. The number of places available to wait comfortably, never mind manage a bit of breakfast or a decent cup of coffee are, well, limited. So, when I found a place to take refuge for a few hours, I was determined to stay put while I waited for my seat on an over-booked flight back to Dallas.

I don’t typically pay attention to the people around me under such circumstances. “People watching” doesn’t fill a gap in my life the way it does for some — since people-interaction is so much a part of what I do day in and day out. But the couple sitting several feet from me made it impossible to miss their interaction.

Obviously married — and for much longer than anyone married that way should be — they were, as my grandfather used to put it — “going after one another tooth and nail.” Snarling at one another like two embittered, wounded animals who have energy for little more than an age old grudge, they hammered away at one another, arguing about the cost of their trip, the unexpected weather delays, and the right of the one to criticize the other.

I’ve seen people like this before and at one time I might have wondered, “Where’s the love?” But a long time ago I realized that a question of that kind — as important as it is — can obscure some facts about the complex nature of love. And one of them is this: As fundamental an emotion as love is, it has dimensions that are better captured by other words that are rarely mentioned in a situation like this. The word that occurred to me that day, is “respect.”

Now seemingly old fashioned, the word “respect” comes from the Latin and means “to look back at.” That is no doubt why, early on it was used to mean, “to notice” or “to take into account” — as the OED observes. More often than not, today it is used to characterize the attitude that is expected in the relationships between people who work together or the relationship between parents and children.

But if it is missing in an intimate relationship there is no real love to be found. You cannot love someone you do not respect. You can feel obliged to care for them, you can pity them, but you cannot love them. When two people snarl at one another incessantly, relentlessly criticize one another, track their endless grievances with the other, or simply endure one another for any reason — religious, moral, legal, or emotional, the relationship has died.

It’s worth our asking, do we “notice” or “take into account” those we say we love.

My brother Dave is ex-Army, an orthopedic hand surgeon, and a Christian. But recently he had to give up his practice because he had an aggressive and malignant tumor removed from the occipital lobe of his brain. The damage that the tumor and the treatment did to his eyesight cost him his career.

After operating on 120 patients a month who needed repairs to shattered bones and severed blood vessels, one common-place Tuesday afternoon, he took the results of his MRI, went in to see the chief of surgery, and explained, “I can’t operate anymore and you can’t afford to have me operate.” Now he is trying to sort out what he can do with his life in a world made smaller by damaged eyesight.

But he doesn’t go to church anymore in order to find help with that struggle. Why? Well, as he explains it, there are at least three reasons and I think that they help to explain why an increasing number of people think of themselves as spiritual but not religious.

One is that the church won’t stop talking to him about money. Oh, he understands the need for stewardship. He gets the expenses involved in real mission. What he doesn’t understand is the way in which the church so often lets the appeals for money take precedence over nearly everything else. Rightly, he notes, “Jesus risked everything to save others. The church risks anything and everything to save itself.”

Second, the churches he has attended won’t talk to him in a way that speaks to his life. He’s listened to clergy talk over and around life’s challenges without ever saying anything real about them. The preachers he has heard either string together a series of twenty-five dollar words they learned in seminary, or soft-ball life’s hard realities. One way or another there is little or nothing with which he can connect.

Third, on the rare occasion when the church does speak to him about the challenges he faces, as he puts it, the preacher usually “blows sunshine up my ass and tells me that everything will be alright.” It’s hard, he points out, when you’ve been told that you have a brain tumor to hear people tell you that God has a plan, that the best is yet to come, or that you are living a blessing in disguise. Saying that to someone with a tumor that claims the lives of all but three per cent who have them is worse than useless. “It’s horse shit, not just false hope, to argue that at age 52 I can do more good without my surgical skills, than I did with them.”

The third reason he gave, of course, is the real reason he doesn’t go to church.

It’s no surprise that the two friends he has that speak most readily and directly to him about the spiritual demands of life are no-nonsense, plain-spoken, recovering alcoholics. They may lack the theological vocabulary of a priest or pastor, and they may not have the time to dedicate their lives to a study of Scripture, but they have sharpened what they believe and they have refined the way that they live by bringing their faith to bear upon the hard realities of life. “The institutional crap doesn’t mean anything to them. Living their lives does,” my brother observes.

The conversation has led me to begin applying what I call “The Dave Test” to what I write and the causes to which I give my energy. Am I writing for real people who live and work in the real world? Am I writing for people who think that their faith in God ought to make a difference?

“The institutional crap” is probably not the thing that distracts you from living fully in the presence of God. Some people even use the resentment they feel toward the church to distance themselves from God. Just because you aren’t seduced by the church in all its churchiness, doesn’t mean that you aren’t hiding from God and from life. We can all be seduced by something that keeps us from living vulnerably, openly, and with energy in the presence of God — including pride in the notion that we are living vulnerably, openly, and with energy before God.

We all need to apply the Dave Test.

One of the principles in any relationship — and one that is very hard to remember — is that our capacity for growth is often directly related to the patience that someone else has for our pain and struggle. We all need help and from time to time there are things we are unable to accomplish. But more often than not, the challenges we face require some measure of energy, discipline, effort, and focus from us.

Move in too quickly. Take over when we are first asked. Intervene to make a problem go away and we foreclose on emotional, physical, and spiritual growth.

The Olympics provide an excellent image for that process. Each of these great competitors has traveled long distances with their coaches to be in Vancouver. But those distances are not just physical, they are psychic and spiritual as well. And when the day of competition finally comes, the coach is compelled to sit on the sidelines to watch his or her athletes struggle on their own.

One of the most daunting challenges any of us can face, as spiritual coaches or simply in caring for those we love, is the ability to grant others the space and opportunity to grow.

My wife and I ran around yesterday photographing the snowpeople families made in the wake of Dallas’ biggest snowstorm ever — twelve inches in twenty-four hours — nothing by northern standards, but a thrill for those of us who live here.

What struck me about the photos we took was the variety:

• Snowpeople with green hats, top hats, straw hats, and (inevitably) cowboy hats
• Snowpeople with sunglasses, Mardi Gras beads, gloves, and scarves
• Snowpeople leaning over and looking sad, leaning on one another looking for support, leaning back as if they were doing the limbo
• Big snowpeople, little snowpeople
• Even what I am pretty sure was a snow dog

Building something in the snow invites creativity and self-expression. You don’t need money to buy snow. You have about the same amount as the person next door or the next neighborhood. There are no snowpeople critics. There is no style manual or set of regulations.

People feel free to express themselves. They do it without looking over their shoulder. More often than not they build them with someone else’s help and, for a few days, before the temperatures warm, they take a bit of pride in their creation.

We all need to find occasions in our lives to do that — and more often than the number of times it snows — especially in Dallas.

The third question we can ask is, “Where will this idea take me?”

We have a student at Perkins who suffered terribly from Cerebral Palsy as a child, and CP confined him to a wheelchair. He has spent all of his life there and at the age of 28, he has already had both hips replaced to deal with the effects of long-time confinement to the chair.

A member of his church came up to James not long ago, and declared, “James, I am praying for you and God is going to get you out of this chair.” Fortunately, James had maturity to thank him for the care implicit in his statement, but then rightly told the man, “If getting me out of this chair is all that God has in store for me, then I’m ready to die now.” James wanted much more from God than simply to walk.

Where will an idea take us? The most important issue for James’ friend is that he find healing. James could focus there. He could wait for healing, plan for healing, long for healing, wait to live until he is healed. One reading of how prayer works and about what is important would focus there.

James had the maturity to say, effectively, that’s not where I should live. God has other things in mind. Other things matter more. Whatever my physical state might be, God loves me, wants a relationship with me, believes I am worthy, and valuable.

The one idea could take us into a world where we never live the day given to us. James’ approach celebrates the life he has.

It’s important to ask where an idea will take us.