This past Saturday I was cleaning the window frames in my house. They were filthy brown with dead bugs and dirt from the past year. At the same time, the giggle-filled air of light-hearted neighborhood kids playing in greening yards danced in my ears. When I turned to clean my muck-covered rag, I caught the smile and soft baby-babble of my sweet Cariann behind me. With my fisted rag still submerged, I paused and soaked in the delight of how her focus on exploration curls her tongue over eight-month old lips. Turning back to my tedious task with a lingering smile, I felt the surge of gratitude course through my being. I felt content. I was actually enjoying myself.  How could this be?  After all, there’s a reason I choose to do this tedious cleaning only once a year. Yet, there I was, feeling content right in the middle of the mundane.

You might think that my contentment was framed by circumstance. You may be right. If it means I can delight in my daughter’s presence like that, I’d wash my windows more often for sure. Yet, again and again in scripture, biblical characters experience contentment amidst struggle or difficulty in ways that go beyond just circumstance. Daniel was content while in the lions’ den (Daniel 6). Ruth was content to live with her mother-in-law (Ruth 1:16-17). David was content to live in the wilderness rather than in the king’s palace (Psalm 131). Paul was content regardless of his imprisonment (Phil. 4:11-13). James and Peter also knew contentment when they too experienced trials and troubles of many kinds (James 1:2, I Peter 1:6). Most amazing of all, Jesus was content to sit silently before Pilate and to go willingly to his death on the cross, even though all the angels of heaven waited for his command. This kind of contentment runs deeper than circumstance.

Some would say it is a person’s positive frame of attitude that gives contentment. Sure, living with the glass half full brings with it a general sense of positive regard toward life.  Yet, doing so cannot change the reality of life’s difficulties. My springtime allergies don’t just disappear because I positively focus upon the beauty of the flowering trees this time of year. As much as I focus on the happy memories, cancer still stole my Dad’s life. There is one reality, not two halves of reality.  No matter how rosey a picture I try to paint, life’s entropic crab grass, foxtail, and dandelion still pinch and prowl the landscape. To say otherwise, is simply out of touch with reality.  If we are to truly enjoy the full places of life’s blessings, we sometimes need to have spaces for seeing life as half empty.  If we only focus on sunshine, tiny little sea horses, and chickadees, life will at best remain only half full.

As inadequate as positive circumstance or positive attitude are for framing life, they both do point to a need for framing.  The difference I see in scripture is that the biblical characters found contentment in every situation (blessing and difficulty) by trusting God to do the framing.  Instead of relying on themselves to mute or escape life’s difficulties, they relied on God’s steadfast love and faithfulness to frame their situation and attitude.  Rather than seizing control, they humbly trusted God to provide and save them. The Bible tells us amidst the lions, Daniel trusted God; grieving the loss of her husband, Ruth made the God of her mother-in-law her own; while Saul sought to kill him, David calmed himself by putting his hope in the Lord; when there was not enough food to eat, Paul saw Jesus as his strength; in the brutality of persecution, James and Peter trusted God to prevail; and faced with the crucifixion, Jesus prayed ‘not my will, but thy will be done’. St. Augustine’s prayer, I believe, frames it well when he prayed, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.”

As we walk through holy week into Easter and out to the days that follow, may we be mindful of what is framing our perspective and experience of life. May we walk with joy and courage, even in the darkest valleys of our lives, because of the marvelous light He provides for us in his crucifixion and resurrection. And may we each find our rest and contentment, in all situations, by finding our home and our power framed within an intimate relationship with Christ.

Happy Easter,

Mark

My child, listen and be wise. Keep your heart on the right path. ~Proverbs 23:19

When I watch TV, I like to have control of the remote.  It used to be because I preferred surfing all those how-can-there-be-nothing-on-channels to watching commercials.  I mean, come on.  Who wouldn’t want to simultaneously watch four different shows rather than another annoying commercial about title loans or injury lawyers?

Having young kids has mostly nixed my habitual surfing.  They have reset my radar and re-sensitized me to the fact, for their young eyes and ears, surfing can be a dangerous ride into rough waters.  But all hope is not lost.  I’ve discovered a much simpler and less dizzying way to combat the peppering intrusion of those agenda-ridden, volume-surging, commercials in my living room.  It’s called the ‘mute button’.

Do you think American life is too LOUD?  I do.  That’s why I’m thankful for the mute button on my TV remote. I’m not saying I don’t I like to hoot and holler at the TV when my team scores, just as much as the next guy.  It’s just that when all the voices, of our fast paced American life speak at us with such raised intensity and urgency, I believe it does something harmful to us.

Science seems to be confirming my hunch. Maybe you’ve heard the report that’s been all over the media in recent months.  One in five Americans is now hard of hearing.  Do you need me to repeat that? J  ONE IN FIVE AMERICANS IS NOW HARD OF HEARING.  While this is partially due to genetics, there is a growing body of research that is showing our increasing deafness is more predominately due to environmental contributions.  There is just too much noise in our lives; and it’s hurting us.

Yet, based on the witness of Scripture, I would go even further. The noise we live in every day is shaping the perspective, attitude, and desire of our hearts too.  God repeatedly calls people to mute the voices of their lives by being still and relating to Him.   Solomon in his great wisdom of the Proverbs calls us to intentionally ‘listen’ more than thirty times in as many chapters.  Unlike our culture, Jesus followed the wisdom of Solomon and made intentional listening a regular practice in his life (Luke 5:16).

I believe these times of quiet for Jesus were not only life-giving to him personally, but empowered him for his life with others.  He drew his focus, purpose, and direction from these times of communion with Father.  It was in the quiet, Jesus was reminded of Father’s deep love for him. In their communion, he found freedom to daily pour himself out for all who had ears to hear and would embrace his gifts of grace and truth.   How about us?  When was the last time you muted the voices in your life for the sake of being quiet with God?

Being quiet is often difficult for me. Yet, the more I’ve practice it, the more I yearn for the God I find within the emptiness of that space and the less scattered I am in my daily life.  I want to encourage each of us, over the season of Lent, to find a personal way to follow Jesus example and regularly press the ‘mute button’ in our lives. As we do, may God reveal his presence to us, bring his healing to our hearts, and refresh us to live our lives anew in Christ.

Mark

An interesting thing happened around our dinner table the other night.  No, my 5 and 3 year old boys did not stay in their chairs (the contrary was actually true).  Amidst my repeated requests, perhaps demands, for them to sit all the way in their chairs and eat the beef stew their mother had made, I had something of a spiritual awakening.  My boys were going on about how fast they could run, and then would demonstrate by jetting off with a “lightening fast” sprint to the living room and back.  Upon their return, with gleam in eye and grin wide, they both declared themselves the fastest.

Now combined, you might say my wife and I have more degrees than Fahrenheit.  Still, we have yet to figure out how to get our kids to expand their dinner menu from much else than cheesy dishes.  There’s Mac and Cheese, Grilled Cheese, Cheese Quesadillas, and the list continues on like that.  (It’s a good thing they also like some fruits that start with the letter ‘P’, if you know what I mean.)  Like most kids their age they seem set on defying that universal parental principle, ‘You cannot live by cheese alone’.

Well in the midst of our conversation about being fast, my wife and I suddenly glanced at each other as if we knew what the other was thinking.  Here was an opening, a brief moment in time, when maybe, just maybe, we could leverage that principle and motivate the unmotivated to eat their beef stew.  We both took our shot.  She tried the teaching approach that to be fast requires eating food that will make you strong and healthy, like beef stew.  I tried the humorous approach by pretending I was a muscle man with growing muscles because I ate my veggies.  I’m sorry to say, neither worked.  Not even degrading my persuasion to the ironic approach of offering (bribing) them with dessert worked, completely.  My 3 year old just spouted back, “I don’t want dessert.  I’ve had many treats today. I’m going to practice self-control”.   How could I argue with that?

My 5 year old, however, did budge a bit when he put it together that if he ate his stew he would not only get dessert, he would win in a race against his faster friend William.  Delighted, he gobbled the stew down.  All the while, he confirmed, with a confident tone in his voice, his muscles were indeed getting bigger.  Before I could respond, he was motoring across the house again and with exuberance asked, “Look how fast I am now, do you think I can beat William?”

As I said, my boys gave me a real gift that night.  I was awoken to a realization.   I so often respond to God’s prompting to risk and grow stronger in some way just like my boys responded to me.  God teaches me I cannot live by bread alone, the bread of my own making, but need to eat his Word too.  His Bread, his Word, gives the strength of a kind of life that does not end (John 6:51).  I know it to be true; I’ve experienced it to be true.

Yet, many times I still resist.  Like my 3 year old, there are those times when all I see in God’s inviting promise, ‘taste and see, the Lord is good,’ is the cost to my comfort. My preference in those times is to kick back and fill myself up with familiar snacks of the status quo, even if in comparison the are just Scooby snacks.   Or sometimes when I choose to obey and have been motivated to gobbled down the Word, I do so looking for and expecting instant gratification.  I want it to be like Popeye with his spinach.  So when I don’t see those powerful results on my timetable, I faint; I lose strength.  My motivation wanes and I return to my bland, but familiar, lifestyle of spiritual malnutrition.

Thank God for his grace and gift of Christ-centered community.  The process of growth and change often takes energy and staying power that we don’t have alone.  I believe that is by design.  We are not created to live our lives alone.  We are created to know and be known, to love and be loved, to grow and be grown.  It is Christ-centered community that has the power to truly nourish us with grace and truth such that we grow in ways overflowing with the life of God himself.  It is as the prophet Isaiah proclaims, “Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint” ( Isaiah 40:30-31).

Covenant has many opportunities for everyone to experience Christ-centered community through small discipleship groups.  From prayer groups, to study groups, to fellowship groups, we want to see every adult at Covenant grow and be blessed by experiencing the life of Christ-centered community. If you are not in a discipleship group, I personally want to invite you to take a risk and join one. Growing spiritually is not an inevitable event.  It takes our intentionality. I’d be glad to help you in any way I can (mark.looyenga@covhsv.org or 881-4501).

Neither is growing spiritually an instantaneous happening.  Rather it is, mostly, a gradual, sometimes erratic, process ( and that sometimes includes finding a group).  God has so much good food to give to those who will eat more than cheese, more than the bread of their own hands.  We need each other if we are not to end up malnourished.

Listen, do you hear something?  Is that Jesus calling?  Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me (Rev. 3:20).

In the Grasp of Christ,

Mark

I come from a very normal, wacko family . . . just like everybody else does.  The good news is that God loves the normal wacko family, like yours and mine, because his own was also filled with wacko, and even scandalous, people.  One only need look at Jesus’ ancestry to see it’s true.  Consider the family tree of Jesus from Abraham to David (Matthew 1:1-6):  Abraham had Isaac, Isaac had Jacob, Jacob had Judah and his brothers, Judah had Perez and Zerah (the mother was Tamar), Perez had Hezron, Hezron had Aram, Aram had Amminadab, Amminadab had Nahshon, Nahshon had Salmon, Salmon had Boaz (his mother was Rahab), Boaz had Obed (Ruth was the mother), Obed had Jesse, Jesse had David, and David became king. David had Solomon (Uriah’s wife was the mother).

This list is filled with scandalous people:  Abraham and Sarah had Isaac, but not before trying to force God to fulfill his promise of children by Abraham’s affair with Hagar.  Jacob deceived his dying father, with his mother’s help, to steal his brother’s birthright (and this doesn’t take into account that whole mandrake thing that happens later).  Judah and his brothers sold Joseph into slavery and then lied to their father saying Joseph had been eaten by wild animals.  Judah also slept with Tamar, who was his son’s widow, thinking she was a prostitute.  The family scandal continues with Boaz who was born the son of a prostitute and he married a Moabite. (The Moabites were the descendants of the incestuous union between uncle Lot and his daughters and were thus unclean).  And then, David, who had an adulterous affair with Uriah’s wife and when Bathsheba became pregnant, he had Uriah murdered and took Bathsheba as his own.

This is the stock God chose to love and call his own grandparents and ancestors when he was born from the womb of Mary.  It seems, God chose to save the biggest scandal for himself.  God became a human child within a human family.  And his birth was not to a royal family in palace sheets of Egyptian cotton or in the sterility of a hospital, birthing-suite.  Jesus was born into the filth of a stable among the stinky sheep and prickly straw which much more suitably imaged his family line.  Yes, God loves scandalous people and by calling them his own in Jesus, he redeems their heritage from disgrace.  Even with all the scandal of the past, they are the family line that now is revered as the family line that bore God himself for the salvation of humanity and all the earth.  Jesus defines them.  Jesus gives them a new future path.

I don’t know about you but I am grateful that God loves scandalous people.  It means there is hope for us and for our families.  Not our past, nor our present, nor even our family heritage need define or determine who we are or what our future steps will be.  No matter how wacko our family may be, we can draw strength and hope from God’s promise in 1 John 3:1.  In Jesus, God lavishes us with a Father’s love, adopting us as his very own children.  We now belong to his family!  If we also let Jesus enter our family line, then God will transform it just as he did the line of Abraham and Sarah.  Jesus can become our heritage and the future hope of our inheritance.

The end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012 is a great time for us to reflect upon the redemption God offers to our families in the gift of his son Jesus.  What are the wacky, even scandalous, ways of your family?  How do you see his redemption already at work?  Will you let him linger anew and love your family amidst its lunacy?  Will you let him give you the gift of a new heritage and a new future?

Gracious God, merciful Father, thank you for your love for my family.  Thank you for your redemptive and transforming grace in Jesus.  Have mercy on us, O Son of David.  Bring me into your family that mine will know your healing love.   Open my heart to your fatherly love, that I may open my heart to the family you have given me.  I receive your gracious love; I receive my true identity as your child first; and I receive you as my true heritage and hope for this day.  Help me walk and talk like you that other’s will see and know whose family I’m from.  In Jesus name, Amen.

Mark

I can remember standing as a five or six year old in my backyard with wings stretched as wide as could be, calling for the autumn winds to lift me into the freedom of flight.  And when the wind in ‘obedience’ to my call would suddenly gust up around me, I felt gloriously powerful and free, as if I was soaring.  Reflecting now on that experience, I perceived glory in the wind and I wanted, as C.S. Lewis describes, in his great book The Weight of Glory, “to be united with the beauty…to pass into it, to receive it into [myself], to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

 I’ve been thinking a lot lately about glory. The Psalmist declares, the heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1).  John Ortberg, defines glory as “the particular excellence of a thing that makes it praiseworthy.”  Thus, the glory of a rainbow is the vibrant beauty of its colors.  The glory of a cheetah is its speed.  The glory of the wind is its power.  How wonderful that we are surrounded by God’s glory!  Yet, I must admit, if all I could do was to see God’s glory, I think I would end up disappointed and frustrated.  I want more than that. I want to possess it; I want to be glorious myself.    

 As glorious as the wind may be, the glory of those windy childhood experiences was always a fleeting moment of my imagination.  Those ‘flying feet’ of mine were always covered in grass and dirt.  Those were not wide-stretched wings I had, but arms of flesh and blood and quite useless for flight.  As a result, I remember always feeling a little let down afterwards.  I was left with a lingering sense of sadness and frustration.  Lewis again explains, “At present we are outside the world [of glory], on the wrong side of the door.  We discern freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure.”  Likewise, I could perceive glory in the wind’s power, but that didn’t make me, in reality, glorious or powerful. 

 The imagination is a wonderful gift from God and it thus has its place in displaying God’s glory.  But it’s not where we ought to live.  Yet, I think, if we are honest we spend a lot of our time and energy constructing imaginary worlds for our own glory.  As these worlds inevitably unravel, we find ourselves face to face with our brokenness, limitations, and sin.  It is as the Apostle Paul puts it, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).”  Our attempts to accumulate glory for ourselves will always come up short.  A life bent on self-glorification is a life blinded and cut off from participating in God’s true, reality-based, glory.  As Ortberg points out, in our self-reliance, “we become like the people of Babel who used their intelligence, technology, and human strength to build a tower in an effort to make a name for themselves rather than ascribe glory to God (Genesis 11:3-4).”  We end up scattered, isolated, and weak. 

 By God’s grace, I have learned, and continue to learn, there is a better way to satisfy this longing for glory.  It is to surrender my attempts at possessing glory and to instead relate to the fullness of God’s glory, revealed to us in God’s beloved Son, Jesus.  When my heart and life has become incarnated with his grace and truth, I, like so many of you, have tasted and touched and experienced the goodness of God’s glory.  The mundane and unexpected happenings, the grief-stricken and difficult situations, the relational and the isolated times, can all become sacred dwelling places of God’s glorious Spirit if we bring them to Christ. 

 Relating with Jesus, the glorious one, purifies and consecrates our daily lives that his Holy Spirit may abide within us and we within Him.  Thus, we can live with our hearts fully alive.  This glorifies God and, by allowing us to participate in his glory, we increasingly experience the glory for which we were created.  This is a true, lasting, and reality-based, glory. It is a glory that we may both experience now and into eternity.  Thanks be to God!  

 For Christ’s Glory,

 Mark

Sometimes life squeezes me, pulls at me, and wears me out.  Or, as Tolkein’s character Bilbo Baggins puts it, it makes me feel like butter spread over too much bread.  It makes my soul feel translucent-thin, tired, and dry.  I’m grateful in those times for the friends I have in certain authors who encourage, challenge, and give me hope with their well written words.  They are able to capture what my heart is feeling but cannot seem to express and then offer me the gift of God’s hope in poignant ways.  One of those authors for me is Henri. Nouwen.  I’ve been reading his book The Inner Voice of Love devotionally.  Here one passage that I have found particularly timely for me.  I hope God will use it to encourage and challenge you too.

Nouwen writes:  There are two realities to which you must cling.  First, God has promised that you will receive the love you have been searching for.  And second, God is faithful to that promise. 

            So stop wandering around.  Instead, come home and trust that God will bring you what you need.  Your whole life you have been running about, seeking the love you desire.  Now it is time to end that search.  Trust that God will give you that all-fulfilling love and will give it in a human way.  Before you die, God will offer you the deepest satisfaction you can desire.  Just stop running and start trusting and receiving.

            Home is where you are truly safe.  It is where you can receive what you desire.  You need human hands to hold you there so you don’t run away again.  But when you come home and stay home, you will find the love that will bring rest to your heart. 

Mark