Mosaic ...

Have you ever seen a painting or photo from a distance that upon closer inspection was actually constructed from a series of little tiny images forming a Mosaic? When you stand very close to the art, you can see each little picture, and can make out the detail of each life. But when you stand back at a comfortable distance the “big picture” emerges and tiny unique images seem to fade into the master design. Facts do not change, distance does.

Those who reject a God of any kind must believe there is no grand design in life, no master plan, that everything that occurs is simply a matter of random chance and the decisions of others. The consequence of believing in evolution and random chance as our genesis denies us purpose and meaning in our lives. If your existence is merely random, your consequence cannot be significant.

You could argue that even under a random genesis people like Hitler and Gandhi both impacted our world, one for good, and one for evil. But if both are a product of mere chance, why is either significant? Either one could have not ever existed, or once coming into existence, either one could have made different choices that radically altered the course of our history. And now that they are both clearly dead, if only a product of mere chance, their legacy is negligible at best. Evil remains in the hearts of Neo-Nazi’s, and many other hate groups who use Hitler as their motto or hero. And pacificism is all but dead in the world, leaving Gandhi’s legacy in steep decline at best. In another 2000 or 3000 years their memories may be long forgotten; perhaps like king Nebuchadnezzar of the Babylonian empire from long ago.

But with belief in our Creator God, both purpose and meaning return to our lives in concert with a master plan, not just for our world or our existence, but with the existence of all life in the universe. This is where the concept of a Mosaic best fits the pictures of our lives today. On ABC’s new hit series “Flash Forward”, the central plot premise is that the entire world passes-out for 2 minutes 17 seconds and each person has a vision of themselves in the future. The global fainting causes much death and destruction, and the US agency investigating the phenomenon, creates an online project called “Mosaic” where anyone can post their stories or visions online and check them against others to form an overall picture of this time in the future.

The beauty of a Mosaic is that you cannot get the big picture without enough of the little tiny images that comprise it. Pull out 30% of the pieces and the grand design fades. Nor can any small tiny image claim to be a representation of the overall big picture, it takes many small images in order to construct the bigger one. It is a balance that you find in all of God’s created works. Each image is important to the overall creation, but only as it sits in harmony with the others. The beauty of how our God creates is the level of uniqueness He incorporates in each tiny piece. Each of us is unique in our appearance, DNA, fingerprints, retinal scans, and frankly in our characters. Each person created to be a part of his master Mosaic design. Each person a tiny representation of the whole. Each person, needed to fit in a particular place, a particular role, in order for the master design to take shape.

So what happens to God’s master plan when those He created refuse to be a part of his Mosaic? I believe He raises another, or gives another person an opportunity to take up the missing role. But even in this, He does not simply create a replica of the last person who rejected His calling. He does not deny our individuality simply because we refuse to play in His symphony. The uniqueness of the person who rejects His calling perishes with that person. But the role they were meant to fill, might go to another. The new person who accepts this calling will not accomplish it in the same way as the one who rejected it. Our differences prevent this. But the overall mission, the overall design, will go forward.

In Adventism, in our early church history, God saw the need to make a personal connection with a believer to relay His guidance to the specific questions of the day. It was His intention to guide and affirm our beliefs through His miraculous power, and through an expression of His love through volumes of written testimony. The first two people He called on for this responsibility both rejected the calling, though they remained believers. I imagine they feared the ridicule that always accompanies anyone who dares to testify for God. I imagine they both had lives they did not want to give up or put away in favor of writing, witnessing, and counseling those in desperate need. I imagine they had many “good” reasons to refuse God’s work. And so they did.

Had the first person accepted the call, our church would have a different Patriarch than the one we remember today. The style would have been different. The language may have been different. He may have accomplished more than his counterpart, or perhaps less as men died generally earlier than women overall. But he did not accept this calling. Perhaps he did not even believe it to be real. Until at a meeting a young 16 year old girl stands up and states that God has given her a message to relay to the world. Then the first man called realizes the reality of his calling, and so does the second. They both stood and testified as such. And God’s purpose went forward in the least likely of vessels – a girl – with only a sixth grade education and significant physical health problems from her youth. But most Adventists today know the name of Ellen G. White, formerly Ellen Harmon.

God’s plan will go forward, the only question is what role we play within it. The story of Ellen White illustrates that no role is dictated by God, it is only offered by Him. We must accept what He offers in order to do the work He would have us to do. Jonah chose to run away from His calling, but Nineveh needed to be saved. Eventually Jonah changed his mind. Moses ran away too. He tended sheep for forty years, but eventually returned to the role God had in mind for him. Sometimes God pursues those who at first reject His calling. Sometimes He does not. But each one is offered a role, and each one must make a decision of what they will do with the offer. Have you thought about your own? What role do you play in God’s Mosaic?

God is not one dimensional either. As God exists on many levels, perhaps more than our finite minds are capable of understanding, so His purposes for us extend to many different areas of our lives. He may have a role for us to play within His church, within our community, within our immediate families, and within the brotherhood of man for centuries to come in His perfect kingdom we call heaven. Just like you are capable of more than one emotion, God may have designed you with more than one purpose in mind for His Mosaic. But it is the whole of your life He is looking to affect, to make better, to free from pain, and to fit in His unique designs.

Those that have no purpose, have no hope. For your life to have meaning, it is necessary to understand the intent behind your genesis. You became a living soul because God decided to breathe one into you. Forgetting the conditions of your birth, your existence upon entering the world marks a new opportunity in the Mosaic God has designed, one in which you can play a vital role. Not everyone need be recognized as a hero, to impact our world. Some folks will take on enormous public responsibility (pray for those folks), some will live only quiet lives of selfless service (pray to be those folks), but all carry a purpose within our Mosaic.

If you don’t know yet where you fit into God’s plan, perhaps you should start asking Him. However one thing I have learned in my own life, and from seeing the lives of Moses, Jonah, and many others – it is always better to be following the will of the Lord, than trying to do your “own thing”. I do not know what ever happened to the first two men who rejected God’s call in our early church history, but I will bet they regretted that decision for many years. I will bet they went to their graves wondering “what if”. It is one thing not to know what God wants for us yet, it is another to know it, and refuse it. I pray we all accept whatever God intends for us, and even more that we begin to want what He wants, and learn to see His Mosaic through His eyes …

Used Cars and Junk Food ...

Hey buddy, wanna buy some snake oil for what ails ya? In the late 1800’s a new miracle cure was “discovered” in the form of snake oil. Its actual ingredients were mostly a toxic blend of chemicals with the exception of the large amount of opiates in the mix. The liquid heroine did as promised in so much as it made you forget whatever symptoms you were suffering from for a while. Then it gave you something not printed in the fine print (lawyers had not invented fine print yet), it gave you worse problems than you had before. I sometimes wonder why our society will accept second rate goods that satisfy the short term needs, at the entire expense of the long term.

Its like the prayer you hear so often … “Lord, give me patience, NOW!!!!” We want everything we want, and we want it now. But like the hard lesson to learn - “there is no free lunch”; we realize there is a cost to everything we want. But we prefer to pay our costs on credit rather than in cash. Credit hurts less, at least until the bill comes in. Then when in panic from what we have spent, we remember our get-out-of-jail-free-card – the minimum monthly payment – a mere fraction of what we owe (by my calculations that fraction would be multiplied over 10 years to pay the debt). Give me now, pay you later; and then it mystifies us as a nation when our national debt gets out of hand.

What is it about instant gratification that so entangles us? This idea permeates our culture. You can find it everywhere from how we shop, to how we eat, to how we travel to our needed destinations. Some call it convenience, others call it how a society advances, I just call it – “the gimmee’s”. With the notion of “instant”, we sacrifice most of the things that lend actual value to something. Think about it. How good are instant friends? How long lasting are instant romances? How well constructed are homes made instantly? I’ll give you instant messaging, and instant coffee; but my point is the same – cutting down the time it takes to build something – has an almost proportionate adverse affect on the quality of that something.

Allow me to demonstrate my premise. If I could offer you a dining experience at the nations favorite McDonald’s for some “grade A, prime USDA, beef”; or offer you the same worded menu from a much lesser known, smaller chain of restaurants called “The Palm” located in most major cities, catering to a gourmet steak crowd. Where would you prefer to dine? Depends on the time you have perhaps? Depends on how you are dressed perhaps? Can’t say money, cause it is my treat. If you have a little more time, and are not still dressed in your pajamas, The Palm offers a substantially better meal.

And here is the kicker; it is not just that you can hardly compare the quality of the taste of the food between the two restaurants. It is that the quality of the nutritional value is extraordinarily better at The Palm, than at McDonalds. A film-maker made a documentary called “Supersize Me” where he ate nothing but McDonalds food, supersized whenever offered by the employee behind the counter for 30 days. He nearly died. You could not only eat at the Palm for 30 days, if you balanced your selections, and insured you ate vegetables as well as the meats there, you could probably improve your overall state of health after eating nothing but their menu for 30 days. Their selection includes the finest foods from many food groups, and is prepared very well.

But in fairness, you just can’t make food that good in less than 5 minutes. You can’t have it sitting in a warmer waiting to be eaten for an hour and achieve the same quality control. The only way to consistently deliver food fast and cheap is to streamline the menu, and the cooking process, until what is left, looks just like McDonalds. It takes time to properly age, cut, and barbeque over an open flame, a filet mignon steak. A frozen pre-prepared burger patty made of mysterious ingredients purported to be pure beef, cooked in a friar and microwave is done in seconds. Arguably they will both kill you over time if that is all you eat, but you can see how the effects of time and effort make a difference in the end product of what you consume.

But our learned behavior of instant gratification goes well beyond how we eat and where we dine, it infects how we shop and what we buy. The cardinal sin for a vendor is to be out of stock on an item. This is the primary driving condition to move your customer to another vendor. Even a higher price will not drive customers away as quickly as being out of stock. People will pay more, if they can still get it now. If they have to wait, they are likely to look elsewhere. So once the shelves are properly stocked, the attention moves to the consumer. Everything is ready to be taken home now, but the consumer may not have the funds to cover ALL the items they have been trained to want by a barrage of media advertising targeting their demographics. This is why credit was invented. People get to buy, stores make money, banks make a fortune, the rich get richer, they pay for more advertising, and the cycle repeats over and over and over again.

OK fine instant gratification is part of our society or culture; surely it is not a part of our religion is it? Yup. We look at God as “instant Santa”. We look to prayer for “instant healing”. We like our religious ceremonies to start on time and more importantly to finish on time so we can get to lunch as our hunger arises. Even in our religion we carry over our attitudes of give it to me now. Why can’t I be perfect now? Why can’t God come now? Why isn’t my marriage or my family perfect already? The idea of long-suffering is about as foreign to us as is the Quran to a Christian. Indeed we know nothing of “long-suffering”, our entire society and governmental structures are designed to keep us from knowing anything about the word.

But how long did the world suffer in the agony of extreme evil before the flood washed it away the first time? How long did Abraham wait for his promised son and promised land? How long did Israel toil in slavery waiting for a deliverer before Moses arrived in the court of Pharaoh? How long did we await the Messiah the first time? And since then, how long? Nothing of extraordinary value comes in an instant; it comes in time frames sometimes beyond our boundaries of mortality. And during all this time of waiting, it is our Lord who suffers the most. It is He who is most pure who misses the companionship of His children who refuse to come home. It is His heart that breaks waiting for us to discover what He longs to offer us – an real and immediate escape from the pain that infects our lives.

But even accepting His gift takes us time to get used to. It too is a process of change, not the work of an instant as yet. Our humanity is simply not equipped to deal with it all at once. It is like taking a starving African child from his desert home where he has not eaten in weeks and then feeding him a feast all at once – it would kill him. He must eat slowly, with small quantities at first, until his digestive system has time to repair and rebuild. It takes time to enter a condition of starvation; it takes time to exit it. Were we to see all the evil that infects our lives at one time, the revelation would kill us. It would literally break our diseased hearts. This is why Moses could not look on the face of God. In that glance Moses would see purity and by definition would reveal in himself the evil that still plagued his life and soul. Evil cannot stand in the presence of God and so Moses would have fallen. It was enough to see the back of God.

It is the work of the evil one, to convince us to take less than we deserve. He packages it well. He is a master marketer. He makes the counterfeits sound better than their originals, but they are always lacking. Who would rather have a used Ford, when they could own a new Mercedes? Who would rather choose a Big Mac over a Filet Mignon? Who would rather have a dresser from Rooms to Go, or a hand carved Italian Armoire with designs from an artist of the Renaissance? It is not about finer things as much as it is about how we have been trained to want less than what God offers. We are trained to take the quick, the fast, and the cheap. How disappointing to a God who would create nothing less than perfection for us to occupy for eternity.

Next time you are confronted with the temptations to accept a cheap satanic counterfeit for something God would have you really enjoy, why not go for the gold standard. Marriage, unity, intimacy, and vulnerability beat any kind of cheap sexual thrill that destroys relationships and ruins a body before it has a chance to experience what divinity intended. Gourmet foods of a balanced nature are far better for mind and body, than the fast crap you can pick up from an open car window. Mild repetitive exercise is so much better than perpetual couch potato. Waiting for an item you cannot now afford, keeps your precious cash in the bank, and may teach you to prioritize your wants, your needs, and perhaps forego what is merely learned marketing behavior …

My Heart Is Shattered ...

The pain that evil has brought with it into this world feels sometimes simply unbearable. When feeling the sting of love that is NOT returned our hearts melt, our tears flow, and our understanding is often baffled. When the object of our love is no longer on this earth and therefore unable to return our love for now, we feel a loss akin to no other. But when we choose to love and are plainly rejected it is our thinking that takes the hit. We wrestle with questions that have no answers. Why would the person of our affections not want to bathe in the love we would offer? Why are our motives questioned? Why are our deeds ignored? What did we do to cause this?

When I think of the sadness that has directly impacted my own life from evil, I am astounded that often I have been the center of it all. I have been the reason for my own pain. Bad choices. Gratifying short term desires while truly killing long term fundamentals. Treating others as objects of conquest rather than precious treasure of association. My apathy and simple disinterest in the pain of others has led me to a very narrow self interested set of priorities, and my friendships with others suffer as a result. Cherishing privacy is tantamount to avoiding the world and its need. But see for a minute through His eyes, and the revelations about my own deficiencies spring forth off the map.

And that is when it hit me like never before … see the effects of evil for just a minute through His eyes. Imagine the pain our Lord must feel as He watches the events of our lives unfold. Forget for a minute that He longs to help us avoid causing ourselves such horror; He must deal with our constant rejection of His love as well. He must ask all the same questions we ponder, and be even more mystified by the lack of real answers for our rejection. I cannot imagine what it must be like for a parent to personally witness the murder of one of his children by another. I cannot imagine what it must be like to see the raping and torture that one brother does to another, or one brother does to his very own sister. Yet God can, because He sees it every day.

And who is He supposed to love? Just the victims of evil? The murdered, the raped, the abused? For are we ALL not equally victims of evil, as well as the perpetrators of these crimes? Is not our hate just as painful to Him. Is not our rejection of His constant offers to solve our problems supremely more painful to Him, as He truly is the ONLY one with real solutions for us? To grieve as He grieves is more than the human heart can bear. To see the effects of evil, the insidious disease that kills good as its primary goal, to witness it spread and take root, even in the hearts of those who call themselves His servants, His followers, that take on His very name – Christ-ians. It must be so much more sadness than we can even begin to measure.

We think we know something of rejection. Most of us have experienced it at least romantically. But He experiences it as way more than a mere jilted lover or spouse. He experiences it as our Father, our Family, our Brother, our Savior, and our Friend. We turn Him away though He gives us the life we have, the very air we breathe. He must watch us, as we direct our will into the evil it seeks, and then suffer with us as the effects of evil wreak their toll. To grieve as He grieves is more than humanity was meant to know. It is what broke the very heart of Christ while on the cross of our redemption.

But it is not empathy with God for the sadness He feels that truly shatters my heart. It is not the pain I have endured, or more often caused myself, that was capable of breaking this heart of stone. More recently I have discovered a new phenomenon in Christianity and in myself that broke me and my heart on the rock of the Lord. Not to grieve as He grieves, but to glimpse love as He loves. More than all the effects of evil combined with all the sadness it brings, it was a brief glance at love through pure eyes that shattered my cemented heart. To watch what love can do for another, is to bring my pride to tears.

I have lived my life for years following the edicts of society that men rarely if ever show great sadness. To see a man cry is debilitating at best, to see it in the mirror is dumbfounding. And even more astounding, is to see it in the eyes, and in the hearts, of other Christian men who appear to be discovering the same phenomenon the same way at the same time. Not only is my own heart shattered, and now I am moved to tears when I see His love enacted or reflected in the world around me; I see the same response from those “strong” souls I am acquainted with in the church.

Men who have no reason to break. Men who have no history of demonstrating deep emotion. Men, and yes some women as well, are responding the impact of the love of Christ is a completely vulnerable way. It is deeply humiliating to shed tears in front of another, let alone in front of those who you barely know. And it is even harder to explain when the cause for tears is not based in depression, circumstances, or the infliction of pain by another – against these conditions I and those around me seem to remain as stalwart and composed as Winston Churchill. But up against the demonstrated love of Christ at work in the life of another, there is no defense, there is no composure, there is only real naked emotional response. Against this there is only tears.

To be so deeply moved from love I must believe is a side-effect of submitting the will to Christ. It must be part of the process He is enacting in our lives as we allow Him – to mold our hearts, to realign our priorities, to see with His eyes rather than our own. I did not expect this work to have the effects it has. I did not expect to find it so difficult to maintain my own composure when sighting the examples of His great love for us. A year ago I would have labeled this behavior as some form of mass psychosis. I would have used logic to attribute it to real issues such as long term unemployment or under-employment; economic hardship; political turmoil. There are a myriad of real stressors in the world that one could blame for men breaking down.

But living inside this experience I can attest to none of these reasons. The timing does not work, for it is not when hardship presses in that the tears begin to flow. It is the gentleness, the beauty, the intimacy, the care, and the life altering effects of His love demonstrated in the life of another, or even in my own, that moves me beyond my composure. I am becoming a small child once again, perhaps too small. I thought the council Christ gave about becoming a little child to enter into Heaven meant the average mental age might be 7 or 8. For me it appears to be more like 2 or 3. Fully dependent, fully vulnerable, fully trusting – perhaps one must be younger in order to truly achieve these conditions.

For so many years we are taught to rely on ourselves. We are taught to look out for number one, as nobody else will. But these teachings run counter to the wisdom of scripture which offers us a completely different view of the world. Don’t worry about what you wear, eat, or need - seek Christ first. Do not carry your own burdens – give them to Christ so He can carry them FOR you. You need merely accept the GIFT of salvation, there is nothing for you to earn or do to be saved from evil accept allowing God to save you from it. Submission of the will, is the start of the real change in your life. But now I realize it is not just behavior that He intends to change. It is the vision we see life by. It is how we see things like grief and love. And in so doing, the unexpected becomes the norm.

We do not know, what we do not know, but our gentle Lord does. As He continues to mold our hearts, I pray for the humility to accept the changes He proposes and enacts. I pray for the humility to see myself as a mere toddler in His world, and extend my arms outstretched to Him in response. For I can think of no better place than to be carried in the arms of our Savior; and I can think of no better way to see purest love than through the eyes of its originator …