Sleep...Sleep Tonight

"Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones. And when you have finished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake." - Victor Hugo

God never sleeps. There should be comfort in that but I had a friend today relay the news that neither the combined efforts of her tea, her melatonin pill and her Ambein was a guarantee that she would get any sleep tonight. I had another friend tell me just last week that he is averaging only three hours of shut-eye per night. I will admit that I am sometimes no stranger to the world of 3:00 am myself. It happens. Life happens. Bills happen. Problems happen. We are surrounded by these happenings and the first thing to go out the window is our peace. Peace of mind. Peace of spirit. Peace of being.

Our pastor at church lately has taken hold of a passage of scripture and refused to let go of it: 

"Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."  - Phillipians 3:13-14

For weeks now he has been hammering it home. Sometimes to begin the service, sometimes to end it, sometimes repeatedly in between.  Scripture constantly reminds us to strive, to strain, to seek, to pursue. These are all very active verbs and their goal is always God...and the peace of God...which transcends all understanding. If you believe the bible then if you aren't at peace it's because you aren't seeking God, or you're seeking him in the wrong ways or you've gotten lost somehow, as we all do from time to time. Believers, non-believers or kinda-believers...it's all the same. We all have to decide whether or not we will dwell in midst of sleepless nights or instead, lying in the hands of God, we will close our eyes and surrender our worries, like the weightless things they are, to the winds of faith.

My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken. - Psalm 62:1-2

There's Blood in the Water

Jesus answered and said unto her, "Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." - John 4:13-14

There's a Dave Matthews song called "Don't Drink the Water". In it he portrays the persecution of the American Indians by the settlers of those days and tells of the oppression and crimes committed against them in lyrics that show the cruelty of the times. "Don't drink the water...there's blood in the water..." It is song of remembrance so that, as a nation, we will not forget what we did, and how we did it and why we can never do it again.

But there's also a danger in going from not forgetting...to also not forgiving.  This is true of us as a nation but even more so of us as individuals.  Let me ask you: how much blood is in your water?

You may not know this but you were born with a well of fresh, cool water to draw upon, there within you, for the life ahead of you, and as soon as you were able to you began to poison it. It's that whole "free will" thing. How can it not lead to sin when you have no clue how to wield it when you first realize you have it? Some people are truly blessed by the Holy Spirit at a young age and they avoid a lot of the bad choices some of us make, but I can tell you that....my well? It was a bloody mess. How about yours?

In the scripture above Jesus is addressing the woman at the well. She is a sinner, like you and me and she is lost, like you and me. But Jesus senses that she is also like you and me in another way: she wants to be found. He speaks of the water in the well in a literal sense (drink all you want, someday you will drink your last, you are only mortal after all) but also in a figurative sense (quit drinking the water of this world and drink the water of salvation, the only water that offers eternal life and can quench that burning fire within you of frustration, sorrow and hopelessness).

In June of 2008 I stopped drinking from my own well. All that blood was making me sick. As I was baptized I came up through cool water into the open face of a brilliantly blue sky and that well within me? It ran clean once again. I'm a billion miles from perfect. I am a man of many wounds. But the water I drink now? It heals me.

Triumphant Faith

You may not want to hear this but faith, true faith, is often predicated by defeat.

In the Western World, where "winning" is everything, this is a very hard concept to grasp. But I can tell you that even in something as simple as learning how to a hit a baseball I had to miss, whiff...fail, dozens of times before I finally learned how to get it right. It took hundreds of more attempts to get it right consistently. That's a baseball. Life and God are much bigger than a baseball.

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell presents study after study that prove that before anyone can truly have any hope of becoming an "expert" at something they must try it a minimum of (are you ready for this?) 10,000 times! 

The truth is that life is frustrating. If we're not careful we can misplace that frustration and start blaming God.  It's not unlike the painting telling the artist that it's not very happy with how things are looking when, first of all, the painting can only see within the frame of its own existence and, most importantly, the painting isn't even finished yet.

When you are frustrated with God ask yourself how many times have you prayed to him, spoken to him, confided in him in your life?  Is it at least 10,000 times?  If not then I've got news for you: you better keep praying. Only then will you find a faith that is not only solid, but triumphant.