Blog with Matthew

Mario Kart and Life

I told my son Jackson that I would split the cost of a video game that all of us – Jackson, Evan, and Cailin and I - could play together.  He choose Mario Kart for our Wii.  It has become the boys’ new favorite game.   You can choose to be plumbers, or dinosaurs or bad guys or Princess Peach and race around on a hot motorcycle, dirt bike, cool muscle car, or even a turbo baby buggy.  Then you get to race in a shopping mall or a volcano, a water world, or cityscape. 

Once, yes only once, I got first place of the 12 human and computer racers.  My biggest obstacle to placing well is falling off the track.  Some tracks are just tracks and you can drive off the road without doing much harm to your speed or standing, but some have wild cliffs and drop offs into fiery graves if you stray over the edge.  I am especially good at turning short or long and falling off the edge.  There is this one mushroom level where you jump from shroom to shroom and that gets me out without fail.  While I am dying and coming back again, I fall back into 12th place as often as not.

I have been reading through the book of Judges and it has reminded me a lot of Mario Kart.  You know many of the stories – Sampson and Delilah, Gideon and his 300 men with lamps and horns, Deborah the woman who won battles.  It is all about the cycle Israel lives out as fallen people: following hard after God doing well, falling away from God, repenting before God, and God rescuing them from their enemies in compassion and hope. 

As I thought about falling off those mushrooms in Mario Kart it made me realize that Judges was maybe not as far away from my life as I might like to think.  The cycle of Judges in the Bible takes years and years to complete, many times Israel stays true for 10, 15, or 20 years through the lifetime of their Judge.  But I think part of the lesson for us today, part of the reason God allowed us to see the pattern of Israel in this book was to show us ourselves.

We are racing around the track in our frantic world and too often we find ourselves falling off.  We pick up an old sin, we get lazy, we stop loving God like we need to.  The result is trying to pick ourselves up again, feeling like we are back in last place;  totally dependent on God to pick up the pieces and rescue us from our own mess.  We are human, it is going to happen at one time or another.

One more lesson from Mario Kart and the book of Judges – there are power-ups.  If you run over these spinning block things you can get speed-boosting turtles or better yet a supper bullet.  You press go and the bullet takes over, sending you to hyper drive with no skill required.  You can go from 12th to maybe even 5th or 6th in a flash.  I live for those moments, and if I am in 5th or 6th I might even make 1st and beat my boys.

Mario Kart’s cycle takes a few minutes, the book of Judges’ cycle might take 50 years, and usually our lives fall somewhere between.

Do you find yourself at the end today, through your own rebellion or maybe just the harsh realities of life?  Did you think you could take a curve really fast and just fall over the edge, maybe even into the lava.  You have fallen off the track again – maybe you are like me in both Mario Kart and life.  For both of us, if we come back to him again his grace is strong and power is real.  God wants us to desperately need him, where the only way through is the hyper drive bullet.  When we forget that we are already into the downward part of the cycle even when we think we are on the way up and are needing God less and less.  The cycle of Judges and the cycle of our lives, teaches us that we really need him desperately all the time.

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

“Come Thou Font of Every Blessing,” Robert Robinson, 1758

STAY TUNED, you never know what God will do

For the past four months we have been preparing to purchase a building for our African headquarters in Jos, Nigeria.  The building we have rented for the last eight years is up for sale.  It seems perfect for our needs.  For well under $300,000 we get storage for 250,000 + books, offices for about 12 staff, a retail shop, a wholesale showroom, four apartments, a large classroom, a single family - four bedroom apartment, significant parking space and more.  27 people work here and up to 16 or so call the place home.  We have seen millions of books and Bibles go out from this facility over the past years.  Moving all this would be a huge task and we are comfortable and settled where we are at.

Asking God to show us the way, things seemed set.  Our landlord agreed to sell to us, but things are not what they seemed.  He is very sick, and verbal commitments have come and gone several times.  There were more delays that we did not really understand.  And our lease is running out, we need someplace to go.

On the other hand, a commitment of $300,000 has me worried - really concerned.  Do we really have the money?  Can our cash flow take the hit, how are we to find money to buy the books Africa needs if we spend this much on a building?  Is this wisdom talking or just my lack of faith?

We are ready to buy, would have bought by now, but our landlord is delaying again.

Across town, we have heard about a property owned by a devout Nigerian Christian that he may be willing to sell.  The location is better for our needs, the building can handle more business than we can now, and the land will allow for almost unlimited expansion.   Our current place is full to overflowing, all the space well used.  This property is half the price.  That means more money to buy books that Africa desperately needs and this price seems much more prudent to me.

I do not know what God is doing, but it seems he may have had a purpose in all this waiting.  Maybe he is overruling our perfect choice for something better.  Four months of praying and waiting could be over soon.  We will see what building God gives.  We are looking for his best, not our choice.  It has not been an easy road, but in the process our faith is being built.  When we come out the other side, I am working on believing that God will use the wait, the frustration, and the building will be for our best.

For more on the Oasis building project visit the Oasis blog.

http://oasisinternational.typepad.com/oasis_international/2008/07/jos-hq-a-messag.html

Singing in Hard Times

In Acts 16 we read, " Along about midnight, Paul and Silas were at prayer and singing a robust hymn to God. The other prisoners couldn’t believe their ears.  Then, without warning, a huge earthquake! The jailhouse tottered, every door flew open, all the prisoners were loose." (The Message)

Man alive, so often I wish I was more like that.  These have not always been easy days recently and my prayer has become that I want to have joyful faith.  Not just faith, but faith, even when I cannot understand or see what God is doing, that is also full of joy.

So I was asking myself today about singing in prison and why Paul and Silas could do that -even after being flogged and striped and humiliated.  Yea, maybe The Message is a bit interpretive when it says "other prisoners couldn't believe their ears."  The "could not believe their ears" part is not in the Greek, but would you have believed your ears sitting in a dungeon only to hear people singing hymns and songs after you knew they had skin hanging off their backs in ribbons, bloodied and broken.   How could you not be amazed at that?

One phrase kept going through my mind as I considered this:

"We don't believe we have the same God"

"We don't really believe we have the same God"

Do I believe that God has the same love toward me that he had to toward Paul and Silas?

Do I believe that God extends the same grace and mercy toward sinful me that he extended to Paul and Silas?

Do I believe that God can work all to my good as he did for them?

I do have the same God as they had!  He loves me just as much, he has the same love, wants to provide for me just as much, can use all for my best and his glory - even the worst of things.

If I really believe that, that God feels and acts toward me just as he did toward Paul and Silas, it will certainly produce a song in whatever hard times I am facing.

So the question is not if I can muster up a song even when I do not feel like it, but do I really believe I have the same God that Paul and Silas had.  If I do, the singing, at least some of time, will come naturally.

Break a Leg

I was doing a radio interview the other day and we were talking about the Psalms of David – how he was so free in expressing his emotions to God.  For David, all masks were off in his prayer life.  God, I feel so empty.  God, I hurt.  God, why did you allow this to happen to me?  God, it seems like everything is against me. 

I wanted to get across the point that in order to get to the joy, we need to let ourselves be honest with God and other people about the reality and depth of our pain.

The interviewer said to me, “So you are saying that what we do with our emotions in hiding and stuffing them is like breaking your leg and never allowing the pain to bring you to the point where you go the doctor.  So your leg never gets fixed.”  I thought that was just an amazing way to look at it – I am always learning more about the emotions. 

“That is a great illustration, I love that.”  I replied.  “That is exactly what it is like when we ignore, stuff, and hold inside the hard things we feel.”

I wish I would have thought of that one myself.

To do something as violent as breaking your leg and then not go in for treatment when your leg hurts and throbs and is killing you hour after hour after hour is hard to imagine.  You only see that kind of thing on TV or in war movies - when the guy is shot and then refuses treatment as he goes on to save the day and get the bad guys.  Yet, we do this with our emotional pain all the time, don't we?

For most of us, this leaves scars and does some damage to us and those we love.  We do not live the life we could, we never get to the better joy that is on the other side.  That reflects a testimony from the Chapter Blogs this week.  Nicole wrote, “I just know I’m not as happy as I have the potential to be. For the longest time we are taught to stifle any negative emotion – don’t get angry, don’t be sad, etc - but as its pointed out in the book, God gave us these emotions, with the intent for us to use them. Nothing pent up.”  Amen, and amen to “I’m not as happy as I have the potential to be.”  That is true for me as well.

For others, they do it so often that it ends in disaster.  There is a woman we know who was never good at sharing what she was struggling with, never shared her deep feelings with hardly anybody.  She could share just along the rim of the bad stuff, things that were going wrong.  But the deep emotional struggles, how she felt about the things going wrong, were kept inside.  She seemed like she always was so patient, kind, and never got upset.  None of us had any idea she was hurting so badly.  Karen is now at a really hard place, in the midst of a serious nervous breakdown.  The broken leg, never allowing herself to scream out the pain, has crippled her completely.  We are just holding onto the hope and praying that it is not to late for Karen to get the leg fixed without permanent damage. 

Some of us may need to go out and have a good cry, take a walk in the woods and do some yelling at the trees or even at God, or share something deeply felt with a spouse that you have been hiding a long, long time.  Others of us just need to get better at letting ourselves feel and then sharing and expressing our pain and frustration.  That is my struggle sometimes.

Maybe you are living in that pain and hurt, talking about it as much as possible, and it is time to move on.  I have written about letting yourself feel the pain of life, that is part of finding your way to joy and emotional healing.  Do not, however, allow yourself to think that you can stay there.  As David did in the Psalms, we need to move through the pain to joy and healing.  I am going to think a bit more on that and will be back with a blog on it one of these days.

Trimming Trees

We were working in the yard yesterday and ended up doing some significant pruning of our trees.  There were some hanging over the flower garden that were sure to see that blooming lilies and wild geraniums and so forth were not going to get the light they need to grow.  In the front yard, there was more trouble.  Being six-foot-five, low branches over driveways, sidewalks and where I mow the lawn is a pet peeve of mine.  Let's cut them off and avoid branches in the face, OK?

I pruned and sawed and my faithful sons hauled them to the curb where the city will pick up and run them through the chipper on trash-day Friday.  Well, they say they will come for the branches on trash day in the town newsletter but they rarely do.  There is a large pile of branches in my front lawn today.

As I walked out this morning I was struck by how wilted the leaves were just 18 hours later.  The vigorous spring growth now looks like old useless scrub.  When it is not connected to the tree, the life is gone much faster than I would have imagined yesterday.  And I was reminded of the words of Jesus - actually they are some verses that are in my meditation/memorization notebook in my own scribbles.  I read them before I walked outside this morning.

“I am the Real Vine and my Father is the Farmer.  He cuts off every branch of me that doesn’t bear grapes. And every branch that is grape-bearing he prunes back so it will bear even more.  You are already pruned back by the message I have spoken.

  “Live in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you. In the same way that a branch can’t bear grapes by itself but only by being joined to the vine, you can’t bear fruit unless you are joined with me.

  “I am the Vine, you are the branches. When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can’t produce a thing.  Anyone who separates from me is deadwood, gathered up and thrown on the bonfire.  But if you make yourselves at home with me and my words are at home in you, you can be sure that whatever you ask will be listened to and acted upon.  This is how my Father shows who he is—when you produce grapes, when you mature as my disciples.

To produce fruit we need to stay connected to the tree.  All the work, all the effort, all striving will just leave us on the curb wilting if we are not connected.  I often forget that, that is why I needed to write the verses in my little black book.  Yes it is really little and black.  If I am feeling lifeless and limp, maybe before anything else I need to see if I am connected to the source of life.