Appearances

One of the (many) things that Covid did to me was that it changed the way that I breathe. 

You would think that something so natural as breathing couldn't be changed so easily, at least not by something so transient as a virus. You would think that your crocodile brain would just keep plugging away, doing what it does and keeping your body functioning in proper form. But you would be wrong. 

Because of the way that Covid starved my body for air, I started breathing using my accessory muscles - the muscles in my shoulders and at the top of my chest. It's probably not a stretch to say that I have not taken very many full, regular breaths in more than 5 years at this point. 

A few years ago, I did three months of pulmonary rehabilitation, a program designed to teach my body to use oxygen better (so that I did not need supplemental oxygen). Part of that program focused on teaching me to breathe normally again. But to be honest with you, I never really got the hang of it. If I try to take a regular breath, I still feel air-starved, and I have never been able to figure all that out. 

Taking a full, normal breath requires breathing from your diaphragm. Breathing from your diaphragm requires you to have your core (your stomach) relaxed so that it can embrace the air and expand with it. When my rehab director was trying to explain all of this to me, she said: 

"We're not trained for that. We're trained to care about how we look to others, so we spend our lives with our guts sucked in, trying to make our bellies smaller. But if we want to truly breathe, and breathe well, we can't keep our gut sucked in. We can't care about how we look to others." 

Now, I'll be honest. I have spent most of my life not thinking at all about how I look to others when I'm breathing. I have spent most of my life not thinking at all about breathing. In fact, the only times I have thought about breathing or how it might look to others when I'm breathing is when I haven't been breathing very well. 

And yet, I must also confess that there's something in me that does tend to suck in my gut. That does tend to try to hold my core tight. That makes it hard for me to relax. 

And because I can't relax, I can't possibly breathe. 

It makes me wonder why we do the things we do, how we get the ideas that we get, what we buy into without ever pulling our wallets out. I promise you that until I started breathing like an idiot, I didn't think about how I was breathing at all, and yet, I find that I have made the same commitments about how I engage my body that it seems everyone else is making. 

How did I do that? Why did I do that? How does it come to be that I suck in my stomach and hold my core so tight all day long, to the point that it makes my body function less efficiently, but perhaps look a little better-shaped? 

What makes it so hard to undo that? Why can't I just decide not to do that any more? Why do I find myself continuing to do it, even when I don't want to, even when I am actively trying not to? How is it that I mindfully put more focus on breathing intentionally only to find that my body is still locked up tight with an agreement that I never knew that I made? 

What about you? Where are you locked up tight with an agreement you never knew you made, but it's holding you back from getting better? From getting stronger? From living the life you want to live? 

Where are you keeping up appearances - intentional or not - but not actually living as well as you look? 

What would it take to change that?  

God Sees Everything

We are living in a world that's more polarized than maybe ever. It's certainly more polarized than it was when I was growing up. Nearly everyone we see on social media posting about this or that thing that's the thing to be engaged in right now sounds more like a talking head than an actual person - they are simply repeating whatever their commentator of choice has had to say about something. 

No longer are we trained to consider multiple angles, to think about various factors that might be at play, to truly look for truth that might exist beyond what we tend to look at (even while we confess that a lot of what we're looking at may, in fact, be completely false and computer-generated). 

In our current world, everything is black and white. The number of friends I have seen on Facebook recently who have said, "If you don't agree this is clearly ______, then unfriend me now." The problem, of course, is that nothing is ever as clear as it seems when you're only looking from one angle. There's always more to a story than what you see in the headlines or the talking heads or the political persuasions. 

There's always something grey. 

One prominent story lately involved a shooting caught on camera. (Actually, sadly, many prominent stories lately have had this theme.) I said something about withholding judgment until there was more context, and a friend said, "How can you need more context? The shooting is caught on camera. They did pull a gun and they did shoot that person and that person is dead. How is that not murder?" 

In reply, I suggested another situation. Suppose that an abused woman has cameras in her home. She's finally had enough and decides that today is the day, so she grabs a gun and stands in the garage waiting on her abusive husband to get home. When he pulls into the garage and gets out of the car, she shoots him. The camera footage of that shooting shows a woman waiting with a gun and shooting a man in apparent cold blood. 

Are you ready to say that was "obviously" a murder? Of course not. If the evidence comes out that she was an abused woman, which is not caught on the 15 seconds of camera footage they are showing on the news, then you're willing to withhold judgment. Context changes everything. 

There's always more happening than what is caught on camera. There's always something that made that camera start rolling in the first place. What happened before whatever happened on tape is often extremely important and introduces the shades of grey into what we want to be so quick to say is black and white. 

This is one of the things I love about having an omnipotent God, a God who can see everything beyond my little, limited perspective of it. A God who has enough context to not see the world in black and white, but in full, living color, and to act accordingly. (And thankfully, in choosing love.) 

When Jesus entered the Temple, we are most prone to remember that He turned over the tables in righteous anger. But before He did that, Mark tells us He "looked at everything" (11:11). He didn't just storm in and explode and start making a scene. 

He walked into the Temple and looked at everything, took it all in. It was a place He was familiar with, but He didn't assume He just knew what was going on there. He immersed Himself in the fullness of the experience. 

He does the same with your life and with mine. He walks in, looks at everything, sees the context, and takes it all in. He immerses Himself in our complicated lives, which often have far more context to them than our little, limited perspectives can understand. God sees everything. 

That's why we can trust His judgment, His wisdom, and His grace. Because He truly sees it all. 

And not just the headlines that we're trying to show Him. 

God of Calm

I have been around healthcare and education for more than a decade, so between patients and students, I've seen a lot of things. Not a lot phases me. (Actually, one of my early chaplain mentors already noticed that about me.) I have always said I'm one of those folks who can walk toward the darkness like it's nothing. 

It's because I understand human experience and human nature and trauma and all of that, at least to the degree that it gives me some confidence in dealing with whatever I encounter. I know there's more that I don't know than that I do know, but what I know is enough to keep me calm. 

I also have to confess, though, that it all still churns my stomach a bit. Once I get through it, that is.

Especially if love is involved.  

So some of my favorite stories in all the Gospels are the ones where Jesus encounters demons - like He does in Mark 9:20-21.

He's just so calm. 

Look at these stories.

The demons are screaming at Him. Kids are being thrown to the ground in seizures, foaming at the mouth. A naked man has broken his chains and is pacing around. Parents are crying and screaming, holding their kids. Everything is absolute pandemonium and total fear - there are demons. 

And Jesus very calmly has a few conversations. He asks what's going on. He asks for more information. I can picture Him standing there, chewing on a piece of hay sticking out of His mouth, quietly, calmly just talking through the situation. 

Then, when it's time, He speaks. He doesn't yell. He doesn't raise His voice. He doesn't make a show of it. He just speaks, says what He needs to say, and casts the demon away without any hesitation at all. 

It's quite the contrast.

But I think it's the same kind of things that help me stay calm in nearly any situation - it's understanding. Jesus knows the human condition. He knows the human experience. He knows what demons are like, and He's seen plenty of them, even before He got here in His flesh. 

He's not intimidated. That's the crux of it all - He's simply not intimidated. 

I think it makes Him sick to His stomach a bit. It has to, to see someone He loves so afflicted. To see what trauma can do. To see and to know the pain that is happening right in front of Him. He wouldn't be human - or loving - if it didn't make Him a little sick. 

And I think love complicates it, too. It's just harder when this life, this enemy, this darkness has a grip on someone you love. 

But still, He's calm. And I think that's remarkable. 

It gives me something to strive for as I come alongside others in their dark moments.

Because we all need someone who isn't shaken standing next to us when we are. 

God's Rules

If you live in the human world, you know there are rules...and then there are the real rules, which may or may not actually be written. 

If you have siblings, you probably know this all too well. 

If you had a label in school - whether that was as gifted and talented or as a troublemaker - you also know it. 

If you watch the news, you definitely know it. 

This world is full of rules, of rights and wrongs, of things that we think ought to be non-negotiable, and yet, we see those rules broken and bent every day. We see folks getting away with the unthinkable. 

It makes it really hard to know who to trust. It makes it really hard to know what to do. It makes it really hard to know what risks to take and which ones to avoid. It can make it really hard to be consistent because when you feel like the world isn't consistent, then you feel like what's expected of you can change from day to day...or from attitude to attitude...or for no reason at all, at least not one you can figure out. 

If your parent, spouse, brother, sister, coworker, boss, company, local law enforcement, doctor, whoever changes the rules however they see fit whenever they see fit, it's hard to know how to live. 

But that's never the case with faith. 

Because God doesn't follow unwritten rules (Mark 7:5). 

This was a point of tension between Jesus and the Pharisees. See, for thousands of years, the people of God had the rules. They had the instructions that God had wanted to give them, and they had passed those down through generations. But also through those generations, the religious elite had spent their energies expanding the rules, clarifying them, making a bunch of sub-rules and expecting others to follow them. 

It's how there ended up being literally hundreds of very detailed guidelines about how to keep the Sabbath. 

So then Jesus comes in, and He simply follows God's rules, not all the little unwritten rules that men had added to it, and the Pharisees get upset. "Why don't your disciples do the 612 things we've prescribed them to do?" 

I can almost see Jesus rolling His eyes. 

This kind of honesty, this kind of straightforwardness, this transparency that we have from God - that He has rules, He's told us the rules, and He follows exactly those rules - is exactly what we need if we are ever to be able to trust Him. He's not like the world that we live in; He's steadfast. The rules are the rules, and they are right there for everyone to see and to know and to live by and to trust. There's nothing unwritten, no place where those rules bend except under the weight of the Cross. That's it. 

And that's one of the things that makes Him a God worth worshiping.

God of No Faith

Do you ever get frustrated by how often the folks around you - or maybe you, yourself - keep making the same bad decisions over and over again? Do you struggle when someone keeps sabotaging their life and you know how easy it would be to fix it? Is it difficult for you to teach someone something a second time or a third time or a fourth time that should have been so obvious by now? 

God feels that way, too. 

By the time Jesus gets on the scene, God has already done a whole lot for His people. He has already created the heavens and the earth, the light and the dark, the day and the night, the land and the sea, plants, animals, and yes, man. (And yes, woman.) 

He has already flooded the earth, but saved a remnant. He has already made His people as numerous as sand on the seashore and stars in the sky. He has already led them out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land, parting two bodies of water along the way and providing food and water where there was none, plus victory over peoples way better equipped than they were. He has already given them a king, then another king, and a whole line of kings.

He has already led them into exile, prospered them in a foreign land (again), led them back out of exile, rebuilt their holy city. He has already made promises and prophecies, every one of which has come true (or is coming true in the person of Jesus). 

And by the time we see Jesus back in Nazareth, He has already been born of a virgin, been exiled and returned home, gathered a small flock of disciples, performed a number of miracles, given sight to the blind, opened the ears of the deaf, made the lame walk, taught with authority in the religious gatherings, and here are the people of His own hometown asking, 

Can anything good come from Nazareth? 

Isn't this Mary and Joseph's illegitimate boy? 

Mark tells us He was amazed by how many, especially right there in His own home town, had no faith (6:6).

In other words, like, what else do they want Him to do for them? How much more is it going to take to convince them? 

The Gospels continue with the people asking for a sign, then another sign, then one more sign until Jesus is finally like listen, there are not enough signs in the world for you if you're not willing to believe. The entire Old Testament is a sign (and a promise). Everything that's happened since His conception has been a sign. Everything He's done since He started His ministry has been a sign. And still, there are persons who don't believe. And God is amazed by that. 

Honestly, I'm amazed by that. 

With all the overwhelming evidence that exists for the existence of, faithfulness of, goodness of, love of God, how can you still not believe? 

Well? How can you?