This week, I get a new stamp in my passport as I visit Shanghai.  For those of you who travel internationally, you will relate to the many different subtle and not-so-subtle ways you are reminded that you are not home. 

Entering a foreign country through passport control removes any doubts you may have had concerning your foreign status.  The signs may say “Bienvenidos,”  “Willkommen,” “Bienvenue,” or “Welcome” as you walk through the hall, but you are in a different line than the residents and you receive a different level of treatment.  Once inside your host country, casual conversations around you conducted in an unfamiliar language, undecipherable traffic signs, different rules of driving etiquette, native cuisine, unique table manners and the currency used to pay the bill are all signals of your true status.  You are a traveler in a foreign land.

Abraham knew how it felt to be a traveler in a foreign land.  God gave the land of Canaan on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea to Abraham and God moved Abraham’s entire family from the country of Ur in present day Iraq to Canaan.  However, Abraham never possessed the land God gave to him.  All Abraham’s life, he and his family lived a nomadic existence in tents.  Abraham was exceedingly wealthy and influential in Canaan, but he was never a native of the country.  Abraham could look across the lands from the Mediterranean to the Jordan and know his family was meant for a grander existence in the land some day.  Abraham lived in Canaan, but he was not truly at home.   

Perhaps like Abraham, you have run into some of the same subtle indications that you are a spiritual traveler in a foreign land.  You enjoy life on this earth in the area where you have been placed.  You are comfortable with the living arrangements with which you have been blessed.  However, there are times when you get the impression you are meant for a grander existence.  You look up into the infinitely deep starry heavens from a clear mountain sky and realize there is so much more in the universe than what you have seen.  You observe the beauty in the world and have the impression that the whole world was meant to be thoroughly beautiful rather than marred by man-made and natural scars.  As you live in your own body with it limitations and aches and pains, you feel something more was intended than the amazing but still fragile functionality of your human body.  You would be right.

God designed humans for an endless perfect life which Adam and Eve rejected through their sin in the Garden of Eden.  Every one of us reaffirms that rejection of a perfect existence when we individually sin.  The Apostle Paul reminds us in Philippians 3:20-21 we are just travelers spending time in a foreign land of physical existence and our ultimate destination is that state of perfection for which we were designed.

But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we wait a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.

I carry a U.S. passport but I am actually a citizen of heaven and my Heaven passport is the Holy Spirit who God used to seal my spiritual existence through my faith in Jesus Christ.  I live in my “native” country inside this physical body which feels anything but permanent.  My physical body contains a permanent soul that longs to be free from the constraints of this temporary world.  I have in effect dual citizenship – one temporary physical citizenship and one permanent spiritual citizenship.  Paul writes in II Corinthians 5:1-10 of the tension we all feel as dual citizens and perhaps in an allusion to Abraham’s experience, he uses the analogy of our bodies as tents.

For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.  For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked.  For while we were still in this tent, we groan, being burdened – not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.  He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given the Spirit as a guarantee.

 So we are always of good courage.  We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight.  Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.  So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him.  For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.

This week, I am happy to be traveling in this foreign land doing good things and doing my best to avoid evil and seeking forgiveness when I stumble.  However, I’m really looking forward to going home.  There really is no place like home!

Until next week,

Meet me at the intersection!

This week, I am in vacation fun mode as I enjoy the sweeping Great Plains of western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming.  However, over the past few weeks, I have enjoyed reading about my Facebook friends’ summer vacations and seeing the pictures recording all the fun.  From stunning mountain vistas to endless stretches of beach, my fb friends have been to almost every corner of the globe this summer.  Sparkling new Chinese cities, African photo safaris, stunning South American mountains and waterfalls (see Ashton’s fun picture above), brown bears in British Columbia, Colorado white water rafting, pristine Bermuda beaches, weathered Irish castles, misty Rhine river valley grape orchards, towering Baltic forests and tar-free gulf shores are just a few of the vacation experiences my Christian friends have enjoyed this summer. 

Can you have an active faith and still have fun?  Absolutely!  According to David, God has designed a faithful life for you that includes beauty and pleasure here and for eternity.  In the passage below, notice how David describes the provisions that God has made for our pleasure.  Although many think of God’s boundaries as restrictions that hinder us from accessing the “greener grasses” of fun on the other side, David believes these boundaries are designed specifically to provide pleasure and delight.

LORD, you have assigned me my portion and my cup;
       you have made my lot secure.

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
       surely I have a delightful inheritance.

I will praise the LORD, who counsels me;
       even at night my heart instructs me.

I have set the LORD always before me.
       Because he is at my right hand,
       I will not be shaken.

Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
       my body also will rest secure,
because you will not abandon me to the grave,
       nor will you let your Holy One see decay.

You have made known to me the path of life;
       you will fill me with joy in your presence,
       with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

Psalm 16:5-11

The grass is really greener on this side of the fence!  You have a beautiful inheritance from the Lord.  Have fun with it!

Until next week,

Meet me at the intersection!

Why?

It’s the universal question that parents of toddlers seem to hear in their nightmares.  It’s the response to every parental request, every new discovery and every new situation.  Even when they don’t verbalize the question, you can see it in their eyes.  “Why?”  Even teenagers sometimes throw their parents’ request back at them with a somewhat defiant version of the inquiry.  And what is the universal response to the question?  “Because I told you so!”

Many of you joined me in swearing to your parents when you were teenagers that you would never subject your own children to that hopelessly lame and inadequate response only to find yourselves resorting to that timeless dodge just ten years later.  It’s OK – all parents do it.  Sometimes we just don’t have time to go into in-depth explanations.  Sometimes we are so beaten down by repetitive “why” questions that we finally just take the easy way out.  Sometimes we don’t really have a good answer.  Many times, we realize the explanation would outstrip their tiny brains’ ability to comprehend the truth. 

Do you ever feel “I told you so” is the response you get from God when you ask, “why?”

It shouldn’t surprise us when we get that response from God when we repeatedly ask God, “why?”  Many times our tiny brains can’t comprehend the real explanation.  Perhaps there are other reasons too.  I have referred to Lynn Anderson’s book, They Smell Like Sheep, Volume 2 several times in past articles and I think Lynn provides some insight into why God sometimes responds to us with, “Because I told you so” or some other ambiguous response.

In chapter 17, A Heart at Peace with Ambiguity, Lynn warns that the modern American mind may be missing the boat when we approach God and His Word from an overly rational perspective.  Lynn writes:

The mind-set of the times threatens to strip our faith of symbols, rituals, dramas, mystery, poetry and story, which say about life and God what logic and reason can never say.  Instead, we analyze and explain God.  Scripture becomes mere religious information and faith simply the progressive realization of moral or “religious goals.

From this perspective, we cannot expect anything but flatness.  One-dimensional faith, like a tent with only one peg, easily collapses.  Yet we Americans tend to secure our faith primarily with the one peg of logical thought.  Faith that is only cerebral in content and only behavior-management oriented is one-dimensional.

 I am not suggesting that there is something wrong with trying to understand our faith.  And certainly nothing is wrong with management of behavior.  But many of us attempt to explain the inexplicable, define the indefinable, ponder the imponderable and “unscrew” the inscrutable.  A life of real, meaningful faith can’t be treated that way.  Trying to do so only leaves people with swollen heads and shrunken hearts.

Sometimes we seek the quick and easy answers to the big questions of life just like our little toddlers are looking for an easily understandable answer to their inquiries.  Try to explain to a little child the phenomenon of a rainbow after a storm by explaining the properties of the sun’s light as it is refracted by the millions of tiny prism-like droplets of water in the atmosphere.  How many seconds before their tiny eyes glaze over from attention deficit or pure confusion?  On the other hand, tell them the rainbow is God’s visible reminder to mankind that he will never again completely destroy life on the earth with a flood and witness the satisfaction in their eyes.  Sure, the physics lesson still applies, but the underlying spiritual message is even more important and satisfying.  Too bad we can’t all accept the mystery of creation with the faith and trust of a child!

If you have any doubt that God wants us to be comfortable with a certain level of ambiguity in this life, just read the Bible.  Many times scripture seems to purposely create ambiguity and mystery.  Have you ever wondered why God would reveal himself and his will for our lives through the writings of many authors over hundreds of centuries through an astonishing variety of literary styles?  There are many paradoxes contained in the scripture that confound the wisdom of men.  The wisest man of all time, King Solomon seemed to have come to this conclusion at the end of his life as he penned the book of Ecclesiastes.  Sometimes, we just have to accept the answer, “because I told you so, my little child.”

Think of it this way: Even if we could comprehend the limitless mysteries of God – a topic even the angels have not mastered – would we really be better off?  Lynn writes:

Mystery is precisely the point, isn’t it?  A God so small that we limited humans can fully explain him is not big enough to be worshipped.  Years back, my friend Juan Monroy, a Christian journalist in Madrid, Spain, was among those who interviewed the American astronaut, James Irwin after Irwin returned from his Apollo 15 mission to the moon.  “What did you feel when you stepped out of that capsule and your feet touched the surface of the moon?”

To Monroy’s utter surprise, Irwin replied, “Mr Monroy, it was one of the most profoundly disillusioning moments of my life.”  Monroy pressed the astronaut: “How could standing on the moon be so disappointing to a dedicated astronaut like yourself?”

“All my life,” Irwin explained, “I have been enchanted by the romance and the mystery of the moon.  I sang love songs under the moon.  I read poems by moon-struck poets.  I embraced my lover in the moonlight.  I looked up in wonder at the lunar sphere and basked in its silver, mysterious glow.  But that day when I stepped from the capsule onto the lunar surface and reached down at my feet, I came up with nothing but two handfuls of sterile, gray dirt.  I cannot describe the loss I felt as the romance and mystery were stripped away.”  Then Irwin added, almost plaintively, “Monroy, there will be no more moon in my sky!”

Although there is a piece of eternity in our hearts, God’s fingerprints in our DNA and the image of God in our spiritual beings, we cannot even begin to comprehend and thus possess God.  God reveals himself to us through his Word while he simultaneously veils himself in mystery and ambiguity.  Perhaps as with Moses, who could not survive fully witnessing the glory of God, he does this to protect us from the damage that would be caused if he were to fully reveal himself to us.  I’m certain our finite little brains could not cope with the reality of the infinite greatness of our God.  I think we have to embrace a certain level of ambiguity in our faith and just trust God when he says, “because I told you so!”

Isaiah wrote in Isaiah 55:8-9:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
       neither are your ways my ways,”
       declares the LORD.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
       so are my ways higher than your ways
       and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Until next week,

Meet me at the intersection!