I Wouldn’t Answer Me Either

“He does me double wrong that wounds me with the flatteries of his tongue.”

 

-William Shakespeare, Richard II,  (Act III, Scene II)

I think that sometimes I flatter God more than I worship Him. 

This has been a disconcerting revelation to say the least, because truly, I want to worship God as He deserves. I want to offer guileless praise without being hamstrung by self-consciousness or rendered somnolent and mute by cold heartedness. And surely, there are times that I do,—but far too often I approach God as my benefactor, or as the just adjudicator of circumstance rather than as my intimate beloved for whom I am wholly His and He is mine. It’s wrong and I know it; and I keep trying to find my way out of this mixed-up view of God. 

I will linger with a sunset until the last flash gold dissolves into purple beyond the horizon without then describing the sunset to itself and requesting that it send some work my way. I’ll draw near to the intricate unfolding petals of a flower without complimenting it for its ecstatic colours and then asking it for direction. No, in such moments I just behold the beauty for as long as I can and marvel at the God who thought up such fanciful things and gave me the ability to revel in their glory. 

Yet day after day, my prayers are more reminiscent of giving God a shortlist of my unchanging problems than they are of sitting in His presence and beholding His majesty just for the awe and wonder that such a seat affords. Instead, I feel frustrated and powerless to change any thing at all. My Benefactor isn’t cutting the cheque that will make me feel like I have a harvest in the earth. My just and righteous Judge has other files on His desk of greater importance. Prayer feels like I’m leaving a voicemail that no one wants to listen to. I know it isn’t supposed to be this way and vaguely I know the remedy has something to do with true worship, so I’ll throw in a few compliments to Almighty God hoping to soften the whole heavens-are-like-brass feeling.

Geez, when I put it like that, I wouldn’t answer me either.

Entering his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise isn’t a say-the-password scenario. The more I ponder it, the more I discover that I keep learning the same lessons over again—deeper and deeper—like drilling downwards to the core of the matter but always circling the same territory. This new life in the Kingdom of God isn’t about having correct theology or doing the right things. It is about intimacy. It is about knowing Him and being known. I don’t just want to know who God is to all Creation; or who He is to His enemies;—I want to know who He is with His beloved. The Biblical ideal for sexual intimacy is the verb “to know”. Adam knew Eve and she conceived. Not to make our relationship with God weird or anything, but the notion of an exclusive and enthralling romance that conceives new life is the picture that we’re given. Don’t blame me, blame Song of Songs.

The moment I veer wildly off-track, however, is the moment that the circumstance or problem takes preeminence over my intimacy with God;—when I vacate our dynamic of “I am my beloved’s and he is mine”. In that instant, I begin to worship my problems; mesmerized by all their complexities; lingering in their attendant anxieties. I go on and on about them with purple prose and then flatter the Lord with a few niceties and wonder why He seems so far away and disinterested. It never even occurs to me that I may have wounded Him with my inconstancy.

Intimacy is never about procurement; even of good, altruistic things that would be of benefit to others. Feigning intimacy in order to obtain something from another person is seduction. Seduction always involves deceit about the intentions of the heart. But my Beloved isn’t after feigned intimacy. He isn’t going to enable me to play the part of a spiritual gold digger, no matter how good the things that I am after are. He wants to be loved as I want to be loved. Genuinely. Unreservedly. He longs to reveal the hidden things of His personality to the one who sees His beauty and delights in Him. He’s wants an intimacy that conceives and brings forth new life. He’s just waiting for me to want it too.

A version of this article was published in the Sept/Oct edition of live magazine. Check them out here.

The Meaning in the Stone

“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”               

       Marie Antoinette (attributed)

This spring when my hometown was still digging itself out from under a blanket of snow, I visited some friends in Europe. Germany was already bursting out with nature’s first gold—that nearly neon green of new life budding on every branch—; a place where the weight of history is felt and seen everywhere. Castles built in the twelfth century loom over the switchbacking turns in the Rhine. Cities with cobbled streets and historic architecture retrofitted to the needs of the present bustle with the lives of its people. The new and the old; the present and the past mingled together everywhere. It’s impossible to wander through a park without encountering a moss covered monument to what has gone before. Some good events, some certainly bad—many of which I didn’t recognize or understand. 

“When your children ask their fathers in time to come, ‘What do these stones mean?’ Then you shall let your children know, ‘Israel passed over this Jordan on dry ground. For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you had passed over, so that all the people of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty, that you may fear the Lord your God forever.’” (Joshua 4:21b-24)

Perhaps one of the most powerful and perplexing abilities of the human mind is our penchant to forget. In purely material terms, we process inordinate amounts of information constantly. Paying attention, for example, to the height of a step just long enough to walk without tripping, yet forgetting almost immediately the small sign of warning about the existence of a step once our need for that information has passed. If we had fallen down and bruised a knee or twisted an ankle; we would certainly remember. We remember pain in order to avoid more of it in the future. And yet, we forget the information that prevented a potential injury in the first place. We deliberately forget; moving on to our next moment; often only remembering what has hurt us, and not what has saved us. We are contradictory creatures, ruminating on that of which we ought to let go, and abandoning what we ought not to forget. And, knowing our failing, we erect memorials for the future in order to remember the past.

Yet time weathers stone and monuments get hidden in lichen as new generations of life erode the words that would remind us what the stones mean. Always of twin purposes—a warning and a reminder. Don’t forget what you knew at this moment. Don’t forget God’s miraculous provision. Don’t forget what He spoke. Don’t forget what was revealed here. Take it with you. Witness it for a generation yet to come.

Even without monuments of stone, we each have our little ways of remembering. We write lists. We set reminders. We keep mementos as witnesses. Souvenirs—to remember. We write down events and thoughts and prayers in journals; or at least, I do. Filling notebooks with the good and the bad, the warnings and the signs, the desperate needs and the miraculous provisions. I’ll write it all down and then abandon it in a box in a closet; forgetting what I need to remember as I move on to the next moment. What good is a memorial if I forget what it showed me? What good is any of it, if I don’t take it with me? 

It is a choice for forgetfulness to dismiss the miraculous signs and denigrate God’s wonders as close calls and lucky coincidences. Why should only our bruises be honoured with remembrance while the acts of God are treated as so commonplace so as to be unworthy of recall? Questions worth asking, whether I can bear the answers or not. What have I etched in the stone of my remembrance? What do I speak when I’m not trying to be good? What do I write when I’m writing for me? Do I record God’s voice speaking to me; His miraculous provision or even our inside jokes? Or, is it only my complaining sighs as I count up my scars? 

“How long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs I have done among them?” (Numbers 14:11)

Undoubtedly, the most powerful monument is the story that I repeat to myself. The perspective from my past that informs what I believe for the future—especially about God and others and myself. And so, I’ve gone back; examined old notebooks and journals;—not so much for my own words, but rather looking for His. Tilting the pages this way and that for the holographic appearance of Jesus to be revealed in the midst of circumstances that were clouded with pain. He’s there. I just have to remember. 

This article was originally published in the May/June 2023 issue of live magazine. Check them out at baptistwomen.com

Letters to Disappointment

 

Cover Art by Cody Andreasen

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about about it." 

-W.C Fields 

My grandfather used to describe the quality of perseverance--in his self-effacing, backhanded compliment kind of way--as just being too dumb to know when to quit.

This is my too dumb to know when to quit project. I began penning the first draft in an incredibly dull History of Modern Art class at the University of Calgary so many moons ago that it doesn't bear contemplating. The story has gone through countless iterations since then. The manuscript has sat abandoned wholesale for years at a time only to be woken from its slumber at intervals as I rearranged, rewrote, and then re-relegated it to the obscurity of my many, many unfinished projects. The characters have deepened, growing more complex and colourful with each draft. Even when I determined to finish it last summer, it dragged its feet to near comedic levels of finicky difficulty. It has exhausted even my superhuman tolerance for incompletion. But I introduce you at long last to my newest (and oldest) novel, Letters to Disappointment, now available in all Amazon marketplaces and elsewhere.

"'Begin at the beginning,' the king said very gravely, 'then go on till you come to the end: then stop.'"

-Lewis Carroll  (Alice in Wonderland)

Walking on the Surface of the Storm

 

“And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:2)

We all have our Youtube rabbit holes. One of mine is watching videos of storms at sea. Usually, they are filmed from a camera mounted on the bridge of a ship which implacably records the churning waters as the prow of the ship mounts high on the crest of a wave before plunging down into the valley below. An inadequate windshield wiper periodically swabs the glass impervious to intimidation by the elements at war around it. Facing a terrible storm on land is one thing—the wise man built his house upon the rock and all that—but facing it in a tiny vessel at sea is another. And really, all vessels are tiny in comparison to the size of the ocean at storm.

We’ve all been trying to hold on for a while now. Yet it seems like the wind only blows wilder and the waves mount higher and the night gets darker. Holding on is excruciating when it feels like the storm will never end; that morning might never come; and despair, rather than faith, feels as close as a breath upon your neck. What is there to lay hold of when everything around you is moving water?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately of Jesus walking on the water in the fourth watch of the night. Walking on calm water would be a miraculous feat. But traversing it the middle of a storm when the wind whips spray off the tops of the waves and the waves are cartwheeling across the surface of the turbulent deep in foaming chaos? ‘Impossible’ doesn’t quite cover it. The gospel accounts each give a slightly different glimpse of the miracle as they always do. Perhaps most arresting to me is the detail that the disciples wonder if Jesus is a ghost; so incongruous is his form to the circumstances; so uncertain is their sight of him amid the waves. It is disturbing to realize that there are some times when even Jesus seems insubstantial in the middle of the storm.

But what seems isn’t what is.

In times like these the temptation is to judge what seems and what is likely; searching for any solid piece of flotsam on which to cling. But that is how idols are made. Instead, straining to see the Lord in the middle of the crashing waves—when we can’t quite get a solid look to know for sure that our Deliverer is at hand—takes us to the outer limits of our measure of faith. It requires lifting our focus from the strain of pure endurance to fixing our gaze on the one who is Spirit and Truth. It is anchoring our sight in another kingdom and calling the things that are not as though they are. 

Man doesn’t walk on water, but the Son of Man does. 

How perplexing that Jesus walked on the surface of the storm instead of calming it. He covered the distance on foot; an experience that must have been cold and challenging as he strode up and down over the swells to reach those straining against the weather in their little boat. It begs the question for me—and for all of us, really—why doesn’t Jesus calm the storm? We’re all exhausted from straining against the wind and the waves of circumstance. We’re all tired of this long night and its troubled weather. 

Storms are catalysts for revelation, though. They bring to the surface what is hidden in the depths of each one of us and strip away the superfluous from our circumstances. They make the world formless and wild, but they have their purposes;—even if those purposes are known only to God on this side of eternity. But even so, I can’t help but feel that the fourth watch of the night is at hand and the Lord is near. You can catch a glimpse him—if you look up—he is once again moving over the face of the deep.

(A version of this article was published in the Nov/Dec issue of live magazine. Check them out here.)

Approximations of Love

Somewhere between the halls of elementary school and junior high, an insult began to circulate among us kids—a pejorative moniker that was only offensive because of the tone with which it was wielded; but wielded it was—and with the kind of zeal for indifferent cruelty at which children often excel.

“What a try-hard.” 

It looks awfully silly written out. I’m sure it sounded even sillier to any adult ears that might have overheard it. After all, perseverance, hard work and a willingness to risk are all positive attributes that maturity requires. Trying hard is generally a good quality. Perhaps this is why “try-hard” only enjoyed a brief—and perhaps geographic—season in the sun of childhood insults; falling far short of other 90’s favourites like ‘butthead’ and the ever ubiquitous, ‘loser’.  But I find myself thinking about that long mothballed insult and wondering if perhaps we were onto something without knowing it. Because inherently, the charge was not about perseverance or hard work, or risk taking—but rather, it was about inauthenticity.

And, if we’re being really honest, we all know that even when we’re trying to be authentic, the counterfeit sneaks in to parade around its phoney credentials. Like that stubborn wheel on the shopping cart that persistently sends it careening into the Stovetop Stuffing display, the imitation is always ready to sneak in to subvert the authentic article. We hear it in our voices when we say that we’d love to get together to catch up when we know that it will never happen. We know it in our hearts when we fein feeling more concern about a situation than we actually do. We can all feel it—and we feel guilty about it—so we try harder.

Nothing irritates my inner curmudgeon more than a smear of Christian syrup to gild an unpleasant pill. It irritates me because, like the old adage that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on, the counterfeit has a way of rushing in ahead of the real.

“Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” (Romans 12:9)

We wouldn’t need a reminder to have our love be genuine, if there wasn’t going to be a real and continual temptation toward insincerity. This knee-jerk insincerity isn’t ill-meant; it is just easier than roughing it through the discomforting wilderness of emotion, critical thinking and spiritual wrestling required to test and approve that which is both true and good. And usually, it doesn’t feel like we have time for all that. So, we wrap up our difficult conversations with banal statements like, “Well, God is going to do what He’s going to do…” and promise to pray and often never think about the matter again;—except to know that we don’t want to think about it again.

And then, there are those situations where genuine love feels downright impossible. What then? I can either try real hard and produce a syrupy forgery of love, or disobey the command to love my enemies altogether. The answer to this conundrum requires spiritual pursuit; discernment and a humility that acknowledges that I have no love for my enemies on my own. Loving one’s enemies requires nothing short of a miraculous work of divine intervention. The genuine love that God desires isn’t sourced in me at all, but rather in His character. It can only be supernaturally supplied. 

Human love is only a shadow; a reflection of divine love. On its own it is as dim and two dimensional as all shadows must be. Instead of being try-hard Christians seeking to generate a pseudo approximation of love, we must instead be receive-hard saints who acquire the genuine love of God spiritually and are then able to give from that same love in a supernatural exchange. We were not called to what was possible in our own strength, but rather to die to our own efforts and live supernaturally through His. If we forget this, we’re in danger of relegating ourselves to an impotent and inauthentic faith. 

And if we choose that? Well, as the kids used to say, “What a bunch of buttheads.”

(A version of this article was published in the Jan/Feb edition of live magazine. Check them here.)

Selected for Courage

 

This past fall, my brother, like so many in this season, got a puppy. Nala is smarter than any dog has a right to be, and is already unfailingly devoted to him. The breeder, who supplies dogs for the K9 unit of police services, explained that she selects for courage in her breeding program; running a series of behavioural tests upon each new puppy; looking to continue the next generation of dogs with the most fearless individuals. While a family pet might be able to cower under the dining room table during a thunderstorm, a working police dog can’t shrink back at a critical moment.

Selecting for courage is an interesting idea, especially since it seems to be a forgotten virtue these days after endless months of “Stay home. Stay safe.” Nothing wrong with home—I’m quite partial to it myself—but there is something disquieting about the constant public messaging that personal safety is the highest ideal. If that were so, we wouldn’t lionize the likes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Joan of Arc, who stood up to terrifying foes and paid for their courageous convictions with their lives. Rather, we would instead congratulate the nameless multitude who did nothing to counteract the evil of their day. Likewise, our culture wouldn’t tell the tales of the personal courage it takes to overcome overwhelming odds. Frodo would have stayed comfortable at Bag End. Aslan wouldn’t have sacrificed himself upon the stone table. Bonhoeffer wouldn’t have tried to kill Hitler. Joan of Arc wouldn’t have carried her banner into battle. And, most critically, Jesus wouldn’t have set His face like flint to go to Jerusalem to endure the cross, either. 

The personal temptation toward comfort and safety is always singing its siren song—and unless we stop up our ears like the sailors in Homer’s Odyssey—we risk being broken on the rocks of cowardice and consumed by unholy monsters. But what engenders courage? It’s a question we’d do well to ask ourselves since we aren’t running newborn babies through behavioural tests to demonstrate which one will cower at home and which will rush a bad guy with a gun.

“Courage is not just one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at its testing point.”  

C.S Lewis

Fear--and its attendant uncertainty--is a litmus test revealing where we have placed our faith. It is in the storm of known and unknown dangers where we face threats to our safety and comfort; that we instinctively reach out to that in which we have placed our trust. 

I think we hope that it will be God, but it isn’t until we are tested that we find out for sure. In His mercy, He allows this testing to reveal that we have turned to other gods—which are not gods at all—because they are solutions that we can see and touch and make with our own hands. A test reveals deficiencies for the sake of remedy,--not condemnation. Even when we are faithless, He is faithful. 

Time and again throughout Scripture He reveals His character of faithfulness; urging us to rely on Him. Faith in God will always require that we trust Him unseen against the mounting odds of what we can see. He hasn’t allowed us another option, reminding us in Hebrews that “without faith it is impossible to please God.” Faith is an attribute of God’s own character gifted to us—and it takes courage to wield it.

This past summer Nala amazed everyone with her constant displays of courageous devotion to my brother. She rode confidently on a jet ski with her head rested on his shoulder because she wouldn’t bear to be parted from him; persistently swimming after him if he tried to leave without her. There is something of Moses in that dog. “If your Presence does not go with me, bring us not up from this place.” (Ex. 33:15) Trusting God in the midst of a storm takes courageous faith that is renewed moment by moment as the wind howls and the waves mount. But courage isn’t as hard to find when we truly trust the One to whom we’re devoted. We can rest our chin on His shoulder and enjoy the ride. After all, He selected us for this courageous faith before the foundation of the world.

A version of this article was published in the Sept/Oct issue of live magazine. Check them out at: www.baptistwomen.com

Irritable for a Reason

“…you told me never to use words like that except in ex—extreme provocation, and Francis provocated me enough to knock his block off!”  

(To Kill a Mockingbird)

Back in my high school days, I wrote a series of short articles that I titled “The Irritants of Morg.” It began as an email to a friend about something that I found provoking and snowballed into a semi-regular exercise of opining sardonically about my daily life. If I’d been more of a go-getter, I might have posted my witty teen narratives on a blog, but I wasn’t; and so only a few people were readers of my brief series. I had copious material to artistically mine. Being a teenager is a provoking time without many compass reference points to keep one steady as she goes. Emotions slosh around like water in a bathtub, ready to overwhelm the margins without much warning. Sarcasm seemed an innocuous coping mechanism in comparison to some of the other options the culture had on offer; and so I wrote out my irritants with what I fondly recall was humour and gusto while trying to develop some self-control.

Recently, I’ve been thinking of reviving the old series since being provoked is a regular feeling most days. But provoked to what? Is irritation, dislike, and dark humour enough of a response;—or are these circumstances meant to draw forth something of the Kingdom of Heaven from me and drag it into the earth?

"…Since the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force.”  

(Matthew 11:12)

Such a curious verse that doesn’t sit well with our 21st century sanitized Christianity that exults niceness. We Canadian Christians are even more flummoxed by the idea. After all, being nice is a point of national pride. Yet as a result, we are in danger of being misled by our cultural expectations of what it looks like to demonstrate love; or what exactly constitutes the sort of good works that our faith enjoins us to undertake. As much as the circumstances of the last year or so have brought us all to the point of extreme irritation; what are we actually being provoked to? Is it just to be nicer and maybe more calm? No one argues with a nice, calm person. But the Kingdom of Heaven isn’t a yoga class. That ‘peace that passes understanding' can only surpass our understanding when the circumstances are anything but tranquil;—otherwise we’re just having a nice day.

Jesus was provoked and threw over the tables of the moneychangers and made a whip to drive out those who were using the temple for their own ends. Elisha was moved to prophesy a son for the Shunammite woman who was hospitable to him. David danced with abandon before the Lord when the presence of God returned to Jerusalem. Lot was grieved daily by the sin of his culture and was rescued by angels from destruction. Paul was so irritated by a spirit of divination in a slave girl that he cast out the demon and was imprisoned and whipped for his trouble. All of them—and more—were provoked to action by their response to the circumstances at hand.

These are provoking times for a reason. None of us can afford to avoid asking God the question of what exactly we are being provoked to do. Is it going out alone to kill the giant who mocks God? Is it blessing someone in their barrenness? Is it delivering those bound in spiritual darkness? Is it preaching to those who don’t want to hear? Because it just might be that these irritants that provoke us to action are divinely orchestrated inciting incidents meant to usher in the kingdom of Heaven.

(A version of this article was published in the July/Aug issue of live magazine. Check them out at www.baptistwomen.com )