Kathleen

She had messy down. In fact, she was the first person I had ever met who made messy look acceptable somehow. 

It was the early 2000s, and culture hadn't really hit the "it's okay to not be okay" movement yet. Nobody was talking about messy being normal, let alone good. We were a world torn between an older generation that was quite a bit more stoic about these sorts of things, more proper, more put together...and this almost championing of dysfunction that we have now. You know, where it's kind of trendy to be a train wreck and unapologetic for it. 

At the same time, my world was torn between everything I'd always known and the things I was coming to find out. I was just starting to commit myself to Christianity, still wasn't entirely sure about this God, and was perfectly certain that my life wasn't clean enough to ever really fit in here. I was simply too dirty, simply too broken, simply too...lost. 

Enter Kathleen. 

She was one member of a traveling troupe of Christians known for their drama skits. This troupe showed up at nearly every event that my youth group attended, so I became very familiar with them very quickly. 

Kathleen's characters in their skits seemed to frequently be, well, messy. The girl with questions. The girl with a past. The girl with a story. The girl that would probably be shunned everywhere. In fact, the girl who talked about how friendless and shunned and lonely she was. 

The girl who sounded a lot like me, although I wouldn't have said it out loud. Not back then. 

But I'm thankful for her example. In a time when we weren't talking about how it was okay to not be okay, the way Kathleen portrayed her broken characters on stage made me feel like maybe there was a place for me in this Christianity after all. Maybe there was a hope for me. Maybe there was a love for me. (And shout out to Ryan and Drew, who so very often played the Jesus characters, for loving Kathleen out loud.) 

I think about this example often. I try more often even than that to copy it. It's because of a witness like this that I understand how important it is for us to be real about ourselves, about our lives, about our humanity. When we are authentic about who we are, we give others a welcome into their life, as well. When others see me living my messy, broken, weird life and I'm just real about it, they understand how real Jesus is, too. 

They understand that maybe there is a place for them after all. Maybe there is a hope. Maybe there is a love.

I want to give that gift to them...because I know what it feels like to receive it. 

Interesting how that all comes from the example of a woman who was real-ly just playing a character, isn't it? 

God Eternal

Are you looking forward to heaven? 

Most of us are.

Most of us like talking about that glorious day when pain will be no more, when creation will be restored, when we will know as we were meant to know and see as we were meant to see. We talk about that day when work will be fruitful instead of laborious, when love will be pure, when joy will be complete. 

We talk about heaven, and we talk about the experience that we're going to have there as creatures of a loving God. We talk about a New Jerusalem and streets paved with gold. We talk about a mansion with our name on it, with our address right outside on the mailbox. We talk about reuniting with loved ones long passed, with furry friends gone before, with unborn babies we never met. 

We talk about heaven, and it is glorious. Glorious. 

But we so seldom talk about the glory. 

Friends, what makes heaven so glorious is not that it is perfect. It is not that we will be perfect. It is not that we will be perfect. What makes heaven so glorious is that the Lord Himself is there. 

He will dwell with us, as He did in the garden. He will walk with us, as He always intended to. We will see Him face to face, as we did when we first opened our human eyes. The Lord will be there in all of His fullness, in all of His glory, and friends...God is better than heaven. (Psalm 148:13)

God is better than the best dreams we have of what eternity is going to be like. God is better than the most wonderful visions we have of what it will be like to walk through those pearly gates. God is better than anything that might reflect or twinkle off of those shiny streets of gold. The address on our mailbox is glorious only because we're living in God's neighborhood. 

You can walk across the street in heaven (metaphorically, of course), and borrow a cup of sugar from the Lord Himself. 

And that's better than any of the (admittedly) good visions we already have of the place. I promise. 

So does His Word. 

God as Coach

Remember when the Israelites left Egypt? In their minds, they wanted to head straight toward the Promised Land, but God knew that wasn't the best plan. He knew that if His people encountered all of those other strong nations right off the bat, they would probably lose heart, question themselves, question their God, and turn back to Egypt.

So He took them around the long way (which became the really long way) in order to build their strength and confidence. 

He started with leading them to a place where they thought that all they could see was the Egyptian army in hot pursuit. On one said, Pharoah and all of his chariots; on the other side, the massive body of water we know as the Red Sea. If ever there was a time that a people would think they would have to fight, this would be it. We can imagine Israel trying to calculate their chances, trying to figure out just how much fight they had in them...only to have God step in and show them how He fights. 

They watched their first enemies drown. 

They watched their second enemies defeated by marching in circles and shouting. 

Do you see what's happening here? God is slowly building their confidence as they start to encounter their enemies. He doesn't expect them to go out and fight some all-out major war right off the bat; He knows they don't have the heart for that. The stamina for that. The faith for that. So He builds it, slowly, over the course of the exodus and the entrance into the Promised Land. Slowly, but surely, He trains His people to fight. 

That way, when the time comes, they will not only be ready, but they'll know they are ready. 

This is the theme of Psalm 144 - Blessed be the Lord, who is my rock. He gives me strength and skill in battle.... He stands before me as a shield. He subdues people under me. It's really worth reading the whole thing. 

But the whole thing is about how God teaches us how to approach battle. How He strengthens us for the fights that are ahead. He stands with us, yes. He goes before us, yes. He follows behind us, yes. But everything God is doing in our lives is making us stronger for the thing that's coming up that we can't even see yet - physically stronger, mentally stronger, spiritually stronger. He's training our instincts to fight His way so that when the time comes, we'll not only be ready, but we'll know we're ready. 

And we'll know we're ready because we know Who is in our corner. 

Like the coach in the boxing ring, He's right there. He knows we've put in the work. He knows we've followed our training. He knows we're still going to get weary and sometimes, it might even look like we're losing. But He's got us. Because He knows that we know that He's got us and that He's made us ready for this. Even this.

God's Name

It's God's story; we are all but characters written by His divine pen. 

Remember in the Exodus when God got angry with His people? Moses pled with Him not to destroy them in the wilderness. Not because they were somehow worthy of the mercy, but because of what it would do to God's name for the nation of Israel to vanish. The whole world, Moses told the Lord, would be talking about 1) how God brought His people into the wilderness just to destroy them and 2) how He was wholly incapable of redeeming them from their wickedness. 

If God were to act the way that human behavior seems to demand, His name would not be great among the nations. It's that simple. 

So what we have is a story in which God is building His own name and reputation. A story in which He is using human beings to magnify His glory. A story in which He is using us to reveal Him so that all the world will see and hear and know the goodness of the Lord. 

How's that going? 

This is where it gets good. 

Because when you read God's story, one of the things you notice real quick is that His story is our stories. He names us by name. He tells, in depth, the stories of sinners (and a few saints), priests and prophets, kings and servants, a ragtag band of brothers. Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Simon, Andrew, James, John, Judas, Paul. Timothy has a couple of books of his own. Obscure folks like Titus and Philemon. Elijah and Elisha. Naaman. 

We could go on forever naming the names from the Bible, telling their stories. Jephthah. Gideon. Deborah. Need we go on? Even the non-religious, non-believing world knows many of these names and stories. 

And yet, the world isn't talking about Moses. The world isn't talking about Peter. The world isn't talking about John. As much as the world owes its faith to Paul's missionary journeys, the world isn't even talking about Paul. 

The world is talking about God. 

He spends His story naming names and talking about us and demonstrating His goodness through our names, and it's doing exactly what He intended it to do - making His name great (Psalm 138:2). He's given us all of these human characters to relate to, to identify with, so that through them, we might relate to and identify with Him. 

How's that going? It's going great. 

We're talking about Him, aren't we? Of all the names in all the stories in all the Bible and all the world, we're talking about exactly three: Yahweh, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. 

Nailed it. 

God Alone

You've probably heard about the wonders of science and all of the things that it is capable of. Whenever someone goes into remission from cancer, when a broken bone is set, when a faulty joint is replaced, we praise advances in science for the ability to heal. When we look at communications coming online for persons in remote parts of the planet, assistive devices for the disabled, self-driving cars, we praise advances in science for making life "better." When we are able to remove plastics from the oceans, purify water, restore natural habitats, and bring species back from the brink of extinction, we praise science...again...for all that it enables us to do. 

But hear me on this: as much as we like to praise science, the truth is that there are a lot of things even about what we call "science" that we don't understand. And there are many more things that our "science" cannot explain. 

These are what we call miracles. 

And God is the only one who works miracles. (Psalm 136:4)

I have worked in medicine long enough to tell you, without hesitation, that there are things happening in the world that all of our advances in science would never get us anywhere close to. There are things happening that are a dozen steps ahead of where we are. While we're still trying to understand the problem and come up with a course of action, miracles are taking place that beat us to the punch. 

I could tell you stories even from my own journey - times when science wasn't sure what to do, but by complete "accident," stumbled upon something anyway. It looks like science did it, but science had no idea what they were doing. They were throwing molecules at the wall and hoping something sticks. 

God, on the other hand, had a plan. 

One of the most confusing narratives from all the Bible for me is back in Exodus, when Moses and Aaron are performing God's miracles for Pharaoh and his magicians are coming behind them and performing the exact same signs. Moses and Aaron turned all the water in the land to blood, then we're told the magicians did the same thing. How do you know? If all the water is already blood, where did the magicians find any water leftover to prove they could do the same thing? If the land is already covered with frogs, how do you know your magicians produced even more frogs? (And why, by the way, would that be a victory?) 

I don't understand, with the completeness and totality of God's miraculous actions, how anyone could say someone else did the same thing at the same time. 

And then, I came to live in the 21st Century. Here we are, living an Egypt life, always claiming that our "science" is responsible for the things that God has done. That our science is just as good, maybe even better. That our science is the thing that's saving us. 

Friends, we have already been saved. And as much as we sometimes hate to admit it, there are things in this world our science just will never understand. We're standing over here trying to count frogs and claiming we alone have saved some water, but the truth is, these things were already done. They are absolute miracles. 

And God is the only one who works miracles.