Month: June 2021

WAITING ON GOD AND GROUNDHOGS

WAITING ON GOD AND GROUNDHOGS

I got my first groundhog last night. The ten-pound thief was tearing up my farmer friend’s soybean field, and I wanted to help. Plus, I like shooting. But I didn’t realize till later how much groundhog hunting has in common with spirituality.

Several verses come to mind, but these two will do:

34       Wait for the Lord and keep his way,

and he will exalt you to inherit the land[1]

10       Be still, and know that I am God. [2]

Groundhog hunting takes a whole lot of waiting and being still. We waited an hour before we saw one but couldn’t get off a shot. At an hour and fifteen minutes, I was ready to get down and walk. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Brian, the farmer, and Glenn prepared ahead of time. Brian provided intel on their location. Glenn, a lifelong hunter who grew up farming and knows how to stalk them, knew just where to park the truck. He also knows what weapons work best and how to maintain them. When I arrived, I found my gun would not work. Glenn gave me his best groundhog gun, a beautiful Marlin .22 magnum with a scope. I did not have a seat and would not have lasted long sitting on the truck bed. Glenn gave me his best camp/hunting chair. I did not have a rifle prop for the surprisingly heavy .22. Glenn had a high-tech one that took the load off my arms for over an hour. I just showed up. Glenn was prepared.

Waiting on God is not a passive activity. Doing it well requires preparation. We need accurate intel available only in God’s Word. We need to “watch and pray and stay awake,” as Jesus taught. We need to “pray at all times in the Spirit and keep alert,” as the Apostle Paul wrote. And we need to be quiet and keep still for a long time, much longer than the hour and a half I spent waiting for the groundhog.

After watching the old tobacco barn and field across from it for one-and-a-half hours, I laid the rifle across my lap and started talking. That’s how long I can last without flapping my lips. Then, I looked left, and there he was, a little over fifty yards away! I was surprised but not too surprised to level the crosshairs on the critter and pull the trigger.  

When we wait patiently on the Lord, informed of his ways, and prepared to obey, we may be surprised when he reveals himself. That’s ok. Just be ready to act.

[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (Ps 37:34). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

[2] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (Ps 46:10). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

WHERE IS GOD WHEN IT HURTS?

WHERE IS GOD WHEN IT HURTS?

Tragedy has tinted our town the last several weeks. As the world emerges from the pandemic, our small community has lost our excellent high school JROTC leader to sudden death and then one of the high school secretaries to sudden brain seizures. A church member’s son is diagnosed with cancer, and my wife’s brother is suffering from crippling sudden onset brain seizures with no precise diagnosis.

As Phillip Yancey poignantly asked: Where is God when it Hurts?

The Bible is clear about the source of suffering[1]. We live in cursed bodies, with cursed psyches, and cursed spirits, on a cursed planet, under a cursed system in a cursed time. Men will commit crimes against one another. Accidents will burn houses down. Even the earth will oppose us and challenge us at every turn until we return to dust.

We should therefore adjust our expectations accordingly. Of course, we may not like the answer. But the question is not whether we like it. Instead, does it make sense of reality as we know it? I believe that it does.

But all of that is abstract. Suffering is very personal stuff.

Nineteen years ago, I accompanied my friend Phil to the spot where his 18-year-old son Joseph had just died in an inexplicable car wreck. My heart wrenched as I watched my friend implode in grief. I spent the next three months so angry with God that I could not speak to him except on a professional basis. How could He let that happen?! Two years later, I buried one of my best friends, the victim of a car hitting his bicycle. Two years after that, I answered the phone late one night to the wails of a grieving friend and shortly after that buried her twenty-year-old son, a drowning victim. Finally, in August of 2010, I buried my 53-year-old brother, dead from a sudden heart attack. There was no explanation for any of these losses that made any sense. I grieved to the bottom of my soul, just as you do in your losses.

Where is God when that kind of stuff happens? Philosophers offer two answers: There is no all-powerful, all-loving God. Or there is an almighty God. He just doesn’t care.

But the Bible offers a third alternative. We can hear it in one of the most overlooked things Jesus ever said, something he wailed aloud from the Cross: “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!?” (Matthew 27:46).

God is not up there, distant, aloof, impassive while we suffer. He is down here suffering with us. He has taken every single pain, every ounce of tragedy, every shred of injustice, each moment of mindless terror, “rolled it into a ball and eaten it, tasted it, fully digested it, eternally.”[2] God is in Christ, suffering with and reconciling the world to himself.

Where is God when we suffer? He is suffering with us.[3]

The Cross is stunning proof that God cares about our pain. As the universal symbol of Christianity, we are so familiar with it that we forget how violent, how brutal it was. Our word ‘excruciating’ comes from the Latin for crucifixion. Yet, we wear it around the neck like a trophy. In his death, Jesus, God in the flesh, fully identified with our suffering. He did not have to do that. He chose complete identification with suffering humanity.

When tragedy strikes, words on a page or the lips of a friend cannot fill the breach in our souls. Despite all the things he had promised, all the times he predicted the resurrection, Jesus’ disciples dispersed in depression. Their hope, it seemed, was empty.

But that was Friday. Sunday was coming. The world, suffering, life, and death itself were turned on their heads when it came. The Cross tells us that God fully identifies with all the suffering of the world. The resurrection reminds us that one day he will turn suffering on its head.

God, our heavenly father, is not holding us at arm’s length. He is embracing us. He is beside us, holding us up. He is weeping with us. He knows the emptiness of our grief and the hollowness in our hearts. He knows and shares these things with the whole world of suffering but especially with his people. On the Cross, he absorbed it, and through us, he absorbs it still.[4]

Take the Cross out of the center of Christianity, and you remove its core. It becomes just another system of morals and principles. But if you embrace the Cross, you find a God there who is unlike any other, a God who will go to unimaginable lengths to commune with his creatures. He will commune with us to the death on Friday so that we can conquer death with him on Sunday.

[1]See Genesis 3: 17-19; Romans. 8:18, 22-25)

[2] Peter Kreeft, quoted in ‘The Case for Faith’ by Lee Strobel, pg. 63.

[3] 2 Corinthians 5:18-19.

[4] 1 Peter 5:7; Romans 8:22-26;

THE SECRET KEY TO SUCCESS

THE SECRET KEY TO SUCCESS

“I, wisdom, dwell together with prudence;

I possess knowledge and discretion. [1]

“How have you ridden motorcycles for forty years and never been hurt when seven of my friends have been badly injured or killed on them?” The more I thought about my young friend’s question, the more safety precautions I listed. But then I realized it boils down to one thing, and that one thing is the secret to everything. It’s the secret to motorcycle safety and economic security. It’s the secret to physical health and psychological wellbeing. It’s the secret to a successful life, and it is baked into the universe as surely as gravity.

The secret is margin.

The old word for it is prudence, and its spiritual roots go back to the Garden of Eden when our first parents decided they could do life without God in their hubris. “Cursed is the ground for your sake,” said God. “In pain, you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it will grow for you. By the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread till you return to the ground.” The need for margin was born that day—the cosmic Murphy’s Law—and whoever observes it reaps the benefits.

An airline pilot and flight instructor who was retiring after fifty accident-free years (we never hear about those guys, do we?) boiled it all down to one simple principle: Always fly with the idea that if anything can go wrong, it will and work hard to prepare for it. For example, most general aviation accidents result from fuel exhaustion. The veteran’s advice? Never assume the gages are correct. Always know exactly how much you put in before you launch and exactly how many gallons per hour that ship burns. Then land and refuel when you think you have one hour of flying time remaining. Simple right? Impose a one-hour fuel margin and NEVER break it. That’s prudence. That’s margin.

It is the same with money. We live in a world of economic hazards. Anything can go wrong and usually will at the worst possible moment. A tornado can blow your house down or flood it. A pandemic can destroy your job. Yet few operate with any self-imposed financial margins. We fly along on credit with little to no reserve, assuming that all will be well. Until the bottom drops out, the sky closes in, and our economic engines start to sputter. Safe landings are hard to come by in those situations.

But the biblical principle (see Proverbs 6:6-11) is simple: Work hard, spend less than you earn, set aside funds for future contingencies, and do it consistently, year after year. Then the poverty tsunami cannot catch you, nor the scarcity bandit overpower you.  

Margin. Prudence. Marriages need it, churches need it, and people need it. With it, we have enough to make it through the inevitable tough times brought on by the fall. Without it, we fall apart.

[1] The New International Version. (2011). (Pr 8:12). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.