I think I like to have more questions then answers.
Because as long as I am asking questions I don't have to act on the answers I have received.
What is happening on the inside of me can have nothing to do with what is happening on the outside of me. Suicide rates are highest in the spring and at Christmas- interesting, huh? Even when there are presents and days off of work and birds chirping and grass turning green, everything inside can be empty, exhausted, silent, and gray. On the same token, things can be gray on the outside and yet there can be hope and maybe even joy on the inside. Of course even the best of feelings are always bittersweet, because there is so much pain and brokenness all around us, if not in our lives then in someone near us. But hope can be a lifeline to grab onto in the quicksand of our concrete world.
We need hope.
Hope that things will get better.
Hope that things can be fixed, things that I have broken or things that someone else broke in me.
Hope that in the torrent of blogs out there, I actually have something different to say and someone important is listening.
Hope that all I have collected and created and loved and bled for will not be for nothing.
Only in our broken moments we have room for hope. But we have to be open to it. And we have to be quiet too.
In the movie 'What Dreams May Come' Robin Williams plays a man who dies and goes to heaven. But his wife commits suicide and goes to hell. So, he decides to go in after her. When he finds her down in the depths of hell, his heart breaks. She is dirty and empty and miserable and not even aware that she is dead, surrounded by broken glass and filth. However, when he reaches her, she doesn't even recognize him. And worse yet, she refuses to go with him. So he goes along with her, pretending to be her neighbor so not to frighten her, waiting for the moment he can reveal his identity and save her. When she finally realizes who he is, she is terrified and runs away. So, he makes the ultimate sacrifice- rather then leave her and go back to heaven, he stays in hell with her. It is this sacrificial act of love that breaks the spell of hell on his wife. She accepts his help and he rescues her and brings her home, to heaven. Now, there is a lot more in this movie that I don't agree with or think is true but this scene so touched me because it tells (accidentally, I'm sure) the story of what God had to do to rescue us from the concrete hell we are making for ourselves. He had to join us here. He had to experience the pain and crap that life can bring in a personal way- as one of us. And then ultimately, sacrifice himself to get us out of hell.
I think we like to think the answers to the human problem lies with us, solely with us, if we could just find the right philosophy and make everyone aware of it and make everyone abide by it.
Ok.
So here is my belief in a simple, big picture sort of way:
We came from somewhere.
We were intelligently designed.
And I think the One who designed us must have loved us very, very much.
How could hands that carved our faces, chose the color of our eyes, breathed in us a love for music or athletics or poetry, not love us deeply, his own children?
And He made us perfect, orignially.
We were made for perfection.
This is how we know that something is wrong here.
Why would we question the condition of the world when it is all we have ever known? Unless.
Unless we were made for something else.
We were made for perfection. Happiness. Love. Excitement. Thrill. Adventure. Romance. Creating.
Doesn't that sound GOOD?!!!!!!
Doesn't that seem, I don't know, RIGHT?
In looking at human history, where would even come up with the idea that this is possible for us?
The problem (if you could call it a problem) is that in perfection is freedom.
We were not made robots.
We were made free.
Free to choose.
And we have chosen some very bad things.
We messed everything up,
in the history of our world,
in the history of our lives. Maybe even in the history of our day.
And we can't fix it.
Evil is like a snowball. It starts out as a half-truth and ends up a pedophile. It is like cancer. It starts so, so, so small and ends up closing off your airway. It's a plague and we cough it all over each other everyday. We are tangled in it, tangled in it with each other. Your evil intertwined with mine. That is why we cannot stop it. We started a epidemic that is treatment resistant, a super-bug that we can only 'manage' (if that). But we cannot cure it. And the really weird thing is that most of us like to walk around pretending like we aren't sick.
Here's the good news to what I believe:
He decided to come in after us.
The one who carved us, named us, breathed life into our infant lungs, has come for us.
Only, we didn't recognize Him.
This breaks my heart because it makes so much sense to me. It seems that becoming one of us was the only way He could get us to trust Him. We are like wounded birds who limp/hop/flee from the giant human hand that wants only to mend and care for us.
Jesus is this amazing paradox. He had a crappy life. He was often homeless and hungry. His friends betrayed Him. He received an unfair trial and was killed by His own people. He was a radical, a barefoot hippie who was people's friend. But He also was (and is) the majestic God himself. For some reason, in that mystery I find logic.
When I worry about or doubt who Jesus claimed to be (He himself said He was God), I think of the movie "What Dreams May Come". That's how much He loves me. He came for me. I am confused and I am often in denial, but I cling to to this hope.
Concrete.
I hate to even write it in so cheesy a way:
Jesus is the jackhammer.
Because my little pick axe ain't gonna do it.
But i think there are two parts to this story. Jesus can cut through my crap right now, if I let him. But all the concrete cannot be obliterated until the very end. Until everyone has made their decision. Remember happiness love excitement thrill adventure romance creating??? That is what I think is under the concrete. We often think of 'heaven' as white, cloudy, and well, boring. But the Bible says in the end, God is going to make a new earth. WITHOUT CONCRETE!!! (The Bible didn't say that about the concrete, that was my idea.) But we have to accept His rescue. And love. And forgiveness.
And that can be a very hard decision to make.
But I made it.
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." -C.S. Lewis
"... a scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited." -c.s.lewis
