UNMERITED LOVE

Last night my wife and I celebrated 11 years of marriage and we have the picture to prove it.  But as everyone who is married knows, marriage is not all sunshine and rainbows.  It is often hard work highlighted by moments of beauty, sacrifice, and love.  But more often than not it is just hard work.  I don't know who said it but I think it must be true that anything worth having will cost you something.  In the case of a good marriage I am convinced it will cost you a LOVE that is beyond your capability.

Reflect with me for a moment on this:

Our love for each other is not enough to get us through. 

Don't misunderstand me, I love my wife.  She is my highschool sweetheart and we have officially been together in our lives for longer than we have been apart. We started dating when she was 13 and I knew the first time we kissed in the movie "Fools Rush In" that  I love Sarah.  But our love is not enough.  Each of us have come to points where we were below zero and without hope.  The moments when we have been ready to throw in the towel stand out to me as monuments to the fact that our love has consistently fallen short.

Love falls short when we base our loving each other on how we feel, or weather or not our needs are being met.  There are lots of reasons why our love will fall short.  Sometimes we love based on the good deeds of our spouse and then when the deeds are not present we withdrawal the love. 

7 years ago Sarah and I were climbing our way out of a dark hole in our marriage.  To summarize the high points of the previous years it would be fair to say that our trust in each other had been shaken, our intimacy was lacking, and we had little to no community in our lives.  As we survived day to day I remained consistently difficult to love.  I would like to say that it is a testament to Sarah that we stayed together during those years but it is more of a testament to God's hand in our marriage that we did not divorce.  When our love for each other was no longer enough, it was God's love for us that got us through.  Sarah must have been on empty for months on end but she also had started to do something crazy.  She started to pray for me.  As she would pray I would get upset and hate her more.  My actions and attitude did not deserve love.  But, Sarah's love for me was not her own.   Her love and her actions were being shaped and changed by God's love for me.  Her love was not her own.  Her love falls short.  His love never ends. 

This is my whole point.  I am convinced that love that keeps people together must be a love that is beyond our capability.  It must be a love that comes from God.  Because God knows that I have been unlovable and untrustworthy.  But isnt that the beauty of love that flows from God?  That His love is unmerited, unearned, and most of the time unrequited. 

The good news of Jesus seems to show every where to me these days.  After 11 years of marriage, the love that we needed to get us through didn't even come to us from each other.  It came from the true love story that is bigger than us all.  The unrequited love of Jesus extended to us in the brokenness of our marriage to heal us and set us back on our feet.  

Synonyms of Perspective

Sometimes the thing we need more than anything is to get a new perspective.

That thing in front of you feels so big and devastating you want to run.  Or perhaps its that marriage, broken relationship, death, family drama, those out of control kids that make you feel like jumping out the nearest window.   Maybe your not ready to jump out the window but you are beginning to feel like the room your standing in is getting smaller and smaller each time that person walks in to it with you.  All the air gets sucked out and you feel like your drowning.  

 What you need to get is another perspective.

Recently I got out of town with my family to visit a family member and stared at the ocean and green hills and valleys of Marin county.  As I stared at the green hills covered in cows and tall grass as far as the eye could see I began to feel small.  The smaller I felt in relationship to the hills and many cows the smaller my problems seemed in comparison to the beauty of the landscape.  I'm not saying that staring at hills and cows will solve all your problems but perhaps getting out of your situation long enough to look at something different might shift your thinking about that thing your in and bring you that fresh breath that keeps you going.  

 

 perspective

noun

1. =  outlook, attitude, context, angle, overview, way of looking, frame of reference, broad view • The death of my mother gave me a new perspective on life.
2. =  objectivity, proportion, relation, relativity, relative importance • helping her to get her problems into perspective
3. =  view, scene, prospect, outlook, panorama, vista • stretching away along the perspective of a tree-lined, wide avenue

It cost us all

I wanted to take a moment to reflect on Easter before the day is done.  A thought that has consistently been on my mind is that
NONE OF US
MAKE IT THROUGH LIFE
UNSCATHED.
I guess what I want to get at is the idea that no ones story will come without conflict
good choices
poor choices
epic failures and
epic successes.
At the end of the day we each are uniquely human in our failures weather it is our addictions, moral failures, or inability to forgive.  NONE OF US MAKE IT THROUGH LIFE UNSCATHED.

In a very clear way......
this fact that we will not make it through life without the implications of our choices,

which are present and heavy on our hearts                                                                        

is the reason why EASTER is such a big deal.  

Jesus came.  Jesus lived.  Jesus made a conscious decision to live a fully human and fully God like existence in which no one comes out unscathed.  Easter means that Jesus assumed the implications of all of our choices.  It cost Jesus the implications of our choices. No one comes out unscathed, not even Jesus.

He carried all implications of our choices to the grave and back for loves sake.

Living in the Tension

Regularly I come to moments where I want what I don't need and need what I don't want.  What I want is to be out of the tension of not knowing where the path I'm on is leading.  What I need is the courage to walk down the path with open hands and an open heart.  What I want to do is run.  What I need to do is stay the path.  Isn't life interesting and uniquely better because of the tension?  No story worth reading happens without a good dose of tension. 

REST MY OLD FRIEND

Seldom do I have an afternoon free to sit and reflect.  Usually, before I know it my moments are filled with meetings, emails, and phone calls.  

But, today is unique.  

It is unique precisely because none of the normal things that would fill my time and space have appeared and my old friend rest is calling my name.  

Rest beckons me to slow down and enjoy the afternoon with my children.  Rest reminds me that the most important moments happen face to face, not face to phone or face to computer.  

My body is tired in the best way.  Without fail rest opens her inviting arms to embrace me with a gentle warmth and comfort.  

As my shoulders relax, my body eases into the swing on my back porch the happy voices of my children ring in the air.  They still spend much of their time with rest on their side.  Perhaps I should as well.

Rain Like Tears

The cardboard sign slumped in her hands as rain like tears fell from the grey sky.  "Anything Helps" the sign read.  Yet, car after car drove past without a hesitation.   Anything helps, but no help was coming so far today.  With each passing car the woman with wrinkled face and hands mumbled under her lips angrily to no one.   Her umbrella stood in her right hand like a twisted old tree in an abandoned parking lot.  The skeleton of the umbrella that held up the tent that was meant to keep her dry had long since failed as if a metaphor for her life.  Anything helps, but no real help was coming.  Rain like tears continued to fall.

From inside the coffee shop I could see her when the rain would settle to a slow drizzle.  Wondering what her life must be like I considered buying her a coffee.   As I stood to walk to the counter I noticed movement in the direction of the sign lady.  Turning to see what was happening from my perch I was surprised to see two more people with signs.  Another woman with wrinkled face and hands struggled in her wheelchair to make her way towards the umbrella holding woman.  With only one working leg the woman in the wheelchair shouted as tears like rain fell from her face.  The bearded man stood silently across the street, his sullen eyes shouting what the sign read.

A knot in my stomach formed as wondered what I could do to help.  The woman in the wheelchair, clearly distraught, turned and wheeled away as the bearded man seemed to console her.  Down the hill they walked as the rain fell heavy on their heads and shoulders.  I turned to go to the counter to buy the cup of coffee and the woman moved out of my view.  As I opened the door of the coffee shop the cold wet air hit my face and took my breath away.  Immediately I lowered my head and pulled my hoodie up to keep me dry.  I charged in the direction of the woman with wrinkled face and hands determined to bring anything to help.  As I made it past the first row of cars my head lifted to find the woman while the rain like tears fell without relent. The umbrella woman was nowhere to be seen.

Care About What Matters

I was just about to sit down to do something that I really need to do, homework. But, part of the homework/writing process for me is procrastination. Today as I was driving from coffee shop to coffee shop looking for an open table to work at I turned on the radio and began to listen to some good old fashioned talk radio. I listened to NPR for a few minutes than shifted to Rush Limbaugh, then to Sean Hannity. Typically I listen until I get bored with what is being said or until I think what the people are saying is stupid. More often than not it is that I get bored. I am not a politically minded person so if you are and you happen to be one of my four followers and are offended please don't be. I just personally don't care that much about politics.

What bugs me the most is that we (we is a generalization based on radio personalities who are talking to a lot of people) seem to care about stuff that doesn't really matter. To be honest I don't care about some senator who owns a ranch that had a rock on it that had the "N" word painted on it in 1983. Its not that I want to be dismissive of politics or people who care about them, its just that almost every time I began to listen to commentators either liberal or conservative I get frustrated because I rarely hear them talking about things that matter. Instead we argue about rocks and really stupid things people did in the middle of nowhere two years after I was born.

How weird that we can spend an incredible amount of money, emotional effort, and energy in all kinds of directions and completely miss the heart of life. How different would our world be if we began to actually care about things that matter. I would like to stop arguing about rocks so that I can feel better about myself and I would like to start to talking about the condition of peoples hearts.

This was the most difficult thing for me as a teacher. I was being paid to give students an education in the area of history, which really does matter. However, what I noticed while working with students who had been kicked out of many other schools was that while history was important it was not as important as what was happening in their hearts. Who they were becoming was of higher importance than the history assignment I was supposed to be giving. A popular quote among teachers goes like this:

"Kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."

People can argue about rocks all day. I want to talk about our hearts.