Breathe Deep (The Breath of God)

Politicians, morticians, Philistines, homophobes

Skinheads, Dead heads, tax evaders, street kids

Alcoholics, workaholics, wise guys, dim wits

Blue collars, white collars, war mongers, peace nicks

Breathe deep

Breathe deep the Breath of God

Breathe deep

Breathe deep the Breath of God

Suicidals, rock idols, shut-ins, drop outs

Friendless, homeless, penniless and depressed

Presidents, residents, foreigners and aliens

Dissidents, feminists, xenophobes and chauvinists

Evolutionists, creationists, perverts, slum lords

Dead-beats, athletes, Protestants and Catholics

Housewives, neophytes, pro-choice, pro-life

Misogynists, monogamists, philanthropists, blacks and whites

Police, obese, lawyers, and government

Sex offenders, tax collectors, war vets, rejects

Atheists, Scientists, racists, sadists

Photographers, biographers, artists, pornographers

Gays and lesbians, demagogues and thespians

The disabled, preachers, doctors and teachers

Meat eaters, wife beaters, judges and juries

Long hair, no hair, everybody everywhere!

Who did Christ come to save? Ultimately, as I read, listen, learn, consider, and wrestle with my faith, I can think of only two correct and appropriate answers to that question...all mankind and me.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him." Matthew 3:16-17

Who did Christ come to save? There are a lot of different people listed in Breath Deep, by the Lost Dogs, many of whom would not be welcome in most churches. I'm still in the middle of that big road trip I was talking about in my last post. Still not reading much, or listening to much music, but this song has been on my mind all day, so I listened when I finally got to my hotel for the night.

This song has been one of my favorites for a long time, but I think I'm hearing it with different ears now. Ears that hear more truth and not just a catchy hook and a reminder to breath the essence of God deep into my being. Over the past few months, I've been sensing that I need a change of heart, a change of position, a change of mind. I'm really sensing the need to start worrying more about what I should be doing right, in terms of my faith, than about what other people might be doing wrong. Trying to live of life of what I'm for instead of what I'm against. A life of reaching out to the wounded instead of condemning them. Tall task, big change. I hope these things are on my mind for a long time to come. Lord knows I've got enough miles of road laid out in front of me to allow it for the next 8 to 10 days.

Abba, I bring my brokenness to you and lay it at your feet. Help me pause and breathe deep Your breath. I pray that You will continue to open my eyes and heart to doing what I can to bring Your Kingdom here until I can get there.

Hit the road Jack...

I'm on day 11 of a long road trip. One downside to travel like this is that I just don't end up reading much or listening to music. I left my iPad at home, in favor of my MacBook Air, and reading a book on the computer just doesn't work for me. However, I do find plenty of time, mostly at night, to catch up on Facebook, email, phone calls, texts, etc.

A few days ago, my youngest brother posted a link to an article that caught my attention. It's an editorial piece, by Shane Claiborne, that's almost 3 years old now. The title alone, What If Jesus Meant All That Stuff, was enough to get me to read it. I'm glad I did. I found resonance with Shane's message, especially in light of the questions I've had on my mind lately. I have recently begun to wake up to the idea that my faith should not be about punching my ticket to Heaven...assuring a joyful, blissful, splendiferous afterlife...or, more succinctly, avoiding Hell...it should be about trying to bring Heaven here...today.

"...too often all the church has done is promise the world that there is life after death and use it as a ticket to ignore the hells around us. I am convinced that the Christian Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die but about bringing God's Kingdom down. It was Jesus who taught us to pray that God's will be done "on earth as it is in heaven." On earth."

I feel blessed that people like Shane are around to help people like me figure out that maybe our motives for taking on the yoke of Christ need to be more thoroughly examined, and possibly even tossed out. I re-read the article today, mostly because of something that happened near me this morning. I opened the door to my hotel room to take my bags out to my motorcycle, getting ready for another long day of riding, and walked out into the middle of a "domestic disturbance." A woman was chasing a man across the parking lot, yelling at him, and clearly getting ready to do her best Roger Clemons impersonation with the cell phone in her left hand. The hotel manager just happened to be shuffling along, caught between the two of them, and ducked just in time to avoid being beaned by a large smart phone hurtling across the parking lot. This was a situation where the love of Christ was noticeably absent...and my reaction was to play ostrich. I walked over to my motorcycle, as if I was deaf and blind, strapped my bags onto the back seat and then walked back to my room to get the rest of my things. The fella hightailed it out of the parking lot while the manager confronted the woman and did a reasonable job of getting her to calm down before I pulled out and left the scene in my rearview mirror. I've been thinking about it all day, trying to assess if there was something I could have done to help or not. These people were obviously experiencing a bit of Hell here on earth...and all I can wonder is how could I have brought Heaven to them? I haven't come up with a good solution or answer yet.

As I read through the scripture, take in the writings of others who have wrestled with these ideas and questions, and try to figure things out...I have to remind myself that it's a process that might take the rest of my life. I have to remind myself that Paul (the one who wrote significant chunks of the New Testament) didn't go from being blinded to being super-missionary in a day...it took time. Patience is a virtue I struggle with.

Abba, I bring you my brokenness today and lay it at your feet. As you continue to open my eyes to those around me who are in Hell, I ask that you grant me wisdom to be able to bring Heaven to them.

Work Harder

"WORK HARDER...millions are depending on you!"

That's the bumper sticker on the back of the car in front of me while I'm sitting at the corner of Airport Road and Boardman Road. I've seen it before...several times just today and I'm pretty sure there are several cars bearing it, or something similar to it, in the parking lot at church each Sunday. I've also seen it posted as a "postcard" on Facebook by many friends, both Christian and not.

I'm looking back and forth between the bumper sticker and the guy standing at the side of the road with a sign that reads, "Help...2 kids to feed. $20 or $30 would really mean a lot." He's not looking at the cars...just standing there, staring at the ground, shuffling his feet, and occasionally glancing to his left, at the highway.

The King will reply, "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." - Matthew 25:40

This is what the Lord Almighty said: "Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other." - Zechariah 7:9-10

If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. 1 John 3:17-18

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. - Acts 4:32

The list goes on and on and on. Balance...it's all about balance...which it doesn't feel like we have these days...and for which I don't have the solution. This feels like a very unbalanced situation to me.

In no way am I endorsing our current welfare systems, the Patient Protection and Affordable Healthcare Act, communism, socialism, etc., etc. I believe our current government systems, especially those with a focus on social welfare, are far too "corrupt" to be sustainable. We need lots of reform...across the board in the private, public, and government sectors. However, my experience today ignited a fire under the questions that have been brewing in my heart and head about these issues for a long time.

When did "The Church" abdicate social welfare to the government? Why does it feel like those of us screaming the loudest about how unfair things are are the ones who should be bending over backwards to help our fellow man? Can people of faith (all faiths) reclaim this responsibility, prying it out of the government's hands? If we do, will we do it better than the government? Is the job too big for "The Church"? Too big for God?

Meijer was right around the corner...I rolled down my window and told the guy with the sign to hop in. He didn't try to buy booze, he didn't buy cigarettes. We got milk, cereal, bread, fruit, veggies...staples. He just moved to Jackson a month ago. He got a job at McDonalds but won't get his first paycheck for another week, not that I expect his first paycheck to do much in terms of being able to buy groceries. The kids are 2 months and 18 months old...Miranda would have been 18 months old yesterday.

Abba, I bring my brokenness to you and lay it at your feet. Soften my heart, open my eyes, give me wisdom.

Because He Lives

I was sitting at the kitchen table, in the Archer home, earlier today and working on a jigsaw puzzle with John and Jason when Jason pulled out his iPhone and started playing a short playlist of some songs from The David Crowder Band's latest project. As the songs spilled out of the small speaker in the bottom of the phone, I found myself singing along to a couple of hymns that many might call "fundamental" to the faith...and Jason and John both joined in. It wasn't exactly worship but it felt right and good and I enjoyed those few minutes a great deal, "For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." Matthew 18:20. It was just supposed to be a cookout, right? :)

One song, in particular, touched my heart strings. The classic Because He Lives, written by Bill and Gloria Gaither.

God sent His son, they called Him Jesus
He came to love, heal, and forgive.
He lived and died to buy my pardon,
An empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives.

The line that really reached out to me is the second one...He came to LOVE, HEAL, and FORGIVE. Those three verbs seem to be central to the story of the Gospel...but, have they been the cornerstones of my faith? Have they been the cornerstones of the faith of all who take on the yoke of Christ? I'm not sure they have, which might explain why so many people who need to experience the healing, forgiveness, and love of Christ instead feel persecuted by those who bear His name. I'm guilty of this...judging the wounded...pointing my finger instead of extending my hand...but I'm trying to change.

These days, I find myself being reminded on a regular basis that Christ reached out to the outcasts...to those who were "not good enough." Not one of the 12 disciples had been found worthy of taking on the yoke of a rabbi...yet Jesus, who was a rabbi, chose them. He made a habit of dining with "sinners" and those who were considered "unworthy" of His attentions.

I'm trying to change, from the inside out. He set the example...love, heal, forgive.

Abba, I bring my brokenness to you and lay it at your feet. Father, please keep my eyes and my heart open to loving the unloved, forgiving those who I need to forgive, and brining those who need healing to you, instead of opening their wounds.

Come What May

I got to ride down to Indianapolis this week. One of my best friends works there...it's a bit of a commute from the Jackson area, a bit over 4 hours with a stop for Starbucks...and he invited me to ride down with him on Sunday and hang out for a couple days. It's a trip I might repeat in the future...when it's not so hot. During my visit, I saw on the news that they set the record for the most days over 90 in the Indianapolis area during the month of July...but this is neither here nor there. I had a great ride down with my friend, despite the heat, and we traversed some great blacktop as we took the backroads and two lane highways for most of our trip down.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to spend the whole week with him. I had to head back home today. As I was getting back onto I-69 North, watching Indianapolis fade into the background in my rearview mirror, a small voice in the back of my head said, "Don't forget to call Sara at your next stop to let her know what time you'll be home."

It took about 5 to 10 seconds for whatever cranial control center is responsible for managing all the various aspects of my life to come to a screeching halt in response to what had just happened...now all the little voices in my head start scrambling, trying to figure out how there's any part of me, even so small, that could have forgotten what happened 18 months ago.

"What?! What just happened?"

"Ummmmm...not sure...we seem to have misplaced some important information...we're trying to find the responsible party."

"No...seriously...have you been hiding under a rock somewhere for the past 18 months?!"

"Look, I don't know why we said that...it just came out. We're trying to figure out why."

While all the little versions of me that run my existence continued to scramble around inside my head trying to figure this all out, the duet of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Dr. Chase Meridian came up in the playlist I had chosen for the ride home.

Never knew I could feel like this

Like I've never seen the sky before

Want to vanish inside your kiss

Everyday I love you more and more

Listen to my heart, can you hear it sings

Telling me to give you everything

Seasons may change winter to spring

But I love you until the end of time

Come what may, come what may

I will love you until my dying day

Suddenly the world seems such a perfect place

Suddenly it moves with such a perfect grace

Suddenly my life doesn't seem such a waste

It all revolves around you

And there's no mountain too high, no river too wide

Sing out this song and I'll be there by your side

Storm clouds may gather and stars may collide

But I love you until the end of time

Come what may, come what may 

I will love you until my dying day

Oh come what may, come what may 

I will love you 

Suddenly the world seems such a perfect place...

Come what may, come what may 

I will love you until my dying day

Come What May is a beautiful duet from the movie Moulin Rouge...I listened to it three times in a row while all the mini-me's in my head continued flailing around. Sigh...I was blessed to have have that love for 15 years...

It's no secret I've been dating. Whether good or bad, it's been happening. I was even engaged at one point, which I now realize I shouldn't have been, but it happened. It ended...unpleasantly, as things like that often do when they end; there's always a lot of hurt on both sides. It's not easy...not just because of my loss, but because it's so different from what I remember from 17 years ago...and emotions and feelings, like the ones that overwhelm me when I hear a song like this, make it even more difficult.

As I continue to move on, trying to move forward, I'm realizing that life often offers few answers to the many questions it raises. My own list continues to grow.

Abba, I bring you my brokenness and place it at your feet. You know the questions of my heart. You know the longings and desires. I give them to you.

Wrestling

How can I get this jumble of thoughts out of my brain and into this well defined and manageable space? I'm starting to wonder if it's possible. I'm wrestling with Christian pop-culture and the messages we're inundating ourselves with in regards to hardship, pain, and suffering. I'm wrestling, because I don't have an answer. The rest of this may just end up being word vomit...

You must, you must think I'm strong
To give me what I'm going through

The above lyrics are the first lines from a great song, Strong Enough, by Matthew West. BUT...I don't like them. I really really really really don't like them. I have to remind myself not to let what, in my opinion, is a poorly written set of lyrics take away from the rest of the message, that only God has the strength to get us through the turmoil of life. We can't do it on our own.

So what don't I like about those first few lyrics? It's the same thing I don't like about the kitchy "encouragement" I keep hearing on The Message between songs: God won't protect you from it, if he can refine you through it.

Those aren't the only two examples of what's bugging me, or what I'm wrestling with, they're just two of the best, most recent, examples. I feel like the message from them is that God allows us to, and/or makes us, suffer...on purpose. I'm wrestling with this because I do know and believe that God "allows" us to suffer, sin is in the world...suffering is part of the curse. However, I get this sense that it's not that He's allowing it, He's just not preventing it...not yet. He could...He's the creator of all that we know and everything we don't, Lord of the Heavens and the earth...but He doesn't.  What I'm wrestling with is the concept of Him purposefully, as part of "His plan," making us suffer. That feels like the message I'm receiving in so many sermons, songs, and pithy Chrisianisms...the message that God "afflicts" us with suffering as part of His plan.

Does God actually give us suffering and pain as part of His plan? Or...does His plan just account for the suffering and pain that a broken and sinful world brings to us? I realize it might sound like I'm quibbling, mostly internally, over semantics...but it doesn't feel like it. "For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." Jeremiah 29:11 I'm trying to reconcile the God who has plans to prosper me and not harm me, plans to give me hope and a future, with the same God who, according to what I feel I'm being taught, gives me suffering...on purpose.

Have you ever read something, had it eat at you for a few weeks, and then had to go back and re-read it again, just to make sure you were getting it? I have, I did it today...chapter 4 of Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis. It's a chapter where he talks about the need for us to not only turn to God in our times of great pain and suffering but to turn to each other or, more specifically, to people who have been trained to provide emotional and psychological support as we navigate the often dark and difficult waters of this life. Until recently, I believed in the power of counseling...for other people. Weak people. I didn't need it. After all, God won't give me more than I can handle on my own, right? That's the message I've been receiving for years. God will never put more on my plate than what I can eat.

In Velvet Elvis, Bell opens up about his own breakdown as "superpastor" of Mars Hill, the megachurch he started in Grand Rapids, Michigan, back in 1999. He shares about the pain of healing. How true healing, coming to terms with our junk, is not possible without an incredible amount of pain, "It was in that abyss that I broke and got help...because it's only when you hit the bottom and are desperate enough that things start to bet better." It can mean digging deep into our past to unearth the root causes and events that shape who we are and why we react to the world in the way we do. He talks about the healing power of salvation, the healing power of Christ, being a holistic healing, applying to the whole being, all of who we are. Healing that is supposed to bring us back in line with who God created us to be. Healing of our souls. He want's to experience shalom, which according to Bell is, "the presence of of the goodness of God. It's the presence of wholeness, completeness." Healing, shalom, that far too many Christians don't get...and that's left me wrestling with "why?"

What if God isn't giving us everything on our plates? What if the things in life that cause us the most pain, the greatest suffering, aren't from God? What if they're just really really bad things that happened to us because the world is broken? Things that happen because, until Christ returns, sin and death own this world? And what if it's this message, that God gives us suffering and only gives us what we can handle, that creates a false sense of "I can do this on my own" that keeps us from seeking help when we really really need it? A message that even imbues of with the ability to even forget that we must lean on Him? What if instead of inflicting suffering on us for our own good, and His Glory, God stands beside us, holding us, crying with us, and saying, "I'm sorry that this has happened to you, my child. It's not what I had planned, but I knew it would happen, and if you let me hold you and guide you, my plan will restore you."

What if?

Like I said, I've got more questions than answers...if I have any answers at all. I've got a reading list that's a mile wide, a mile deep, and as long as the Mississippi. Maybe He'll have an answer for me somewhere in there...maybe not. Maybe I'll just end up wrestling with it until my bones break.

Abba, I lay my brokenness at your feet. My humanness. Please help me find shalom in you.

Held

It's been a while, it feels good to be back. I didn't fall of the edge of the earth, just got distracted with some travel and other things. Over the past couple weeks I've had plenty of songs, plenty of things I've read, spark something inside...but didn't find time to write about it.

So...today I'm breaking my rule. I said I'd only write about a song, or something I'd read, if I'd actually heard or read it that same day. Today I'm gong to write about a song I heard yesterday while I was on my way to Detroit (shopping, running errands, going to a Tiger's game, etc.) I didn't get home until very late; as much as I wanted to write about it last night, I wanted to sleep more. :)

I've heard Natalie Grant's Held many times over the past year...and I don't like it. I'm still not sure I like it, but when I heard it yesterday it struck a new chord in my heart and mind. In retrospect, maybe the root of my dislike for the song is that the message is so raw, so close to what I've lived, that I just haven't been at a place where I could embrace the truth of it.

Two months is too little.
They let him go.
They had no sudden healing.
To think that providence would
Take a child from his mother while she prays
Is appalling.

Who told us we'd be rescued?
What has changed and why should we be saved from nightmares?
We're asking why this happens
To us who have died to live?
It's unfair.

No...it's not fair...is it? I had a professor in college who, when students would complain that something wasn't fair, would respond with a simple, consistent, quiet, "Life's not fair, life just is." We all knew it was coming. We all laughed when he said it. I don't think any of us really got it. It wasn't funny. It was a truth that far too many of us just don't experience in our life...until we do. At which point our response is paramount.

This hand is bitterness.
We want to taste it, let the hatred NUMB our sorrow.
The wise hands opens slowly to lilies of the valley and tomorrow.

Bitterness is easy. Bitterness can make us feel like we have control. Bitterness can present itself as a salve...but it's not. It's poison. It's sneaky. It seeps in when we're not looking, when we think we're healing, progressing, getting better...it attacks when we are most vulnerable. It can keep us from seeing, from knowing, truth. It can keep us from experiencing healing. I think bitterness kept me from hearing the message of Held, the message past the pain, past the hurt, the message of being at rock bottom...we are Held...when it's all taken away...when we've been stripped, beaten, and robbed by life...we are Held...when if feels like all we have left is the breath in our lungs...we are Held...

This is what it means to be held.
How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive.
This is what it is to be loved.
And to know that the promise was
When everything fell we'd be held.

Abba, I bring you my brokenness, I place it at your feet, hold me.