Unforced Rhythms

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”¹

"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion?" Well, yes. Yes I am, I thought upon reading those words one morning. Summer is hot—full of sweaty, heavy work. Summer is crowded with delightful people visiting my state, inviting me to join them for celebrations or conversations. This is excellent—but also draining. I crave weekends with no plans or expectations. I tend to burn out like a sparkler sometime in late July. Everything is an eager spark right until the end of the wire. Then I'm simply a bare, hot piece of metal—useless and a bit dangerous.

As if this were not already a difficult season, this summer has been full of more violence than any other which I can remember. Our country, culture, and world seem to be gathering speed for a headlong crash into something history-making, or perhaps even history-breaking. My emotional empathy feels stretched to capacity, to shattering. News reports begin to glance off of me, as if real humans were not killing others or being killed. I feel stuck inside an insidious nightmare from which I cannot wake. I fear losing feeling in my heart—in my outstretched hands wanting to comfort, wanting to heal, wanting to help those who have been bereft of loved ones, safety, and homeland.

Sometimes I shove grieving off to a more convenient time, because I simply cannot bear it and everything else my daily life calls out of me. So, I run to whatever will help me escape the things I don't want to consider or process. They might be the exact same things that normally breathe life into me, but rather than receiving them as gifts, I grasp at them, hoping they will save me. I try to force stories or visits with friends to block out the darkness, the bleeding wounds I cannot heal, the world full of people whom I cannot turn toward God.

Jesus calls, "Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest." Come. I drag my heels a good bit. Rest is deeply appealing, but when? When do I have time to get away with Jesus? It all depends on what I long for. There is always time to do what my heart longs for. One more dinner with friends, one more chapter, jotting another e-mail, a walk under the stars before bed. . .But am I seeking to meet Jesus in those places, or am I using them to distract myself from the destruction I cannot control or stop?

Patiently, so patiently, I hear my Saviour invite, "Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it." Watch how I do it. How can I do that? The answer is not difficult: read the gospels. Study Jesus. How does He treat broken people? How does He treat hardened people—like the arrogant religious leaders? How does He seek rest and refreshment for Himself? What is His motivation, His heart's desire? What work is He is doing which He is calling us to join?

Digging through the gospels shows me layers of answers to all of those questions. In recent years, I have discovered that the last two go together. Over and again in the book of John, the desire of Jesus' heart is to glorify His Father and to obey His will. What is that will? The Father desires to bring His Kingdom to earth. But here is the astonishing part: that is the work which Jesus is calling us to join in with Him! He has chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise. He has chosen the weak things to exhibit His strength. The Father is bringing His Kingdom through Jesus working in us. We are repealing the corruption and darkness of the Fall by the wholeness and light of Jesus in us.

 “What you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are—strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself—accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. 

Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings, and for that matter, one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honoured in the world—all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make.  

God's recreation...began with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God's people live in the risen Christ and in the power of his Spirit...what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted.”²

Our sorrow and suffering are not meaningless. Our work and creativity have an eternal purpose. God's own beauty, infused in this world and spread through us, is not made for destruction. We are building the Kingdom of God with every act of love, with art and creativity, with thankfulness, with every meal shared. We push back the darkness by the creative and recreative light and love of Jesus at work in and through us. It is not something demanded of us, rather, it is a gift given to us that we get to join Jesus in building the Kingdom.

I begin to understand what Jesus means when He says, "Learn the unforced rhythms of grace." Grace, charis. It means both thanks and favour. God's favour is not forced upon us, and we are not forced to give thanks for His gift. Thanksgiving or delight is an overflow of the heart, the spontaneous response to God's favour. There is that thrumming rhythm of God's grace gifted to us, our thanks to Him, and our delight or joy in giving thanks. So it goes, over and over. It is our choice to receive the invitation into the dance, to let Christ through us build His Kingdom. We must constantly lean into the rhythm, to learn to step into the dance "freely and lightly."

___________

1. Matthew 11:28-30 The Message, trans. by Eugene Peterson

2. Wright, N T, Surprised by Hope (New York: New York, Harper Collins, 2008) 208-209

Call to Discipleship

 "If we answer the call to discipleship, where will it lead us?  What decisions and partings will it demand?  To answer this question we shall have to go to him, for only he knows the answer.  Only Jesus Christ, Who bids us follow Him, knows the journey's end.  But we do know that it will be a road of boundless mercy. Discipleship means joy."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Introduction, The Cost of Discipleship

Discipleship means joy. Not happiness, or feeling good. It means that we see how wretched we were. We rejoice that God picks us up, cleanses us, and sets our feet on the path we should walk. We are no longer without direction. We may stray from the road, but He is faithful to redirect our steps.  This is His 'boundless mercy' indeed.


Discipleship means partings. We must separate from things that distract us, like 'sucker shoots' on a vine sap nutrients from the branches that need them. We must seek to have those thing pruned, even good things.

Relationships of various sorts, books or films, working out,  music, work, the Internet, and many other good things can at times be sucker shoots. Even things like 'small group' or church events can be a distraction from the LORD. We must part ways from such things, without sequestering ourselves from the world.

If we answer the call to Discipleship, where will it lead us?
Only where our Guide knows we need to go.

 

~ Johanna

Made for Some Reason

 

Surely a man of genius composing a poem or symphony must be less unlike God than  a ruler? But the man of genius has no mere by-products in his work. Every note or word will be more than a means, more than a consequence. Nothing will be present solely for the sake of other things. 

If each note or word were conscious it would say, "The Maker had me myself in view and chose for me, with the whole force of His genius, exactly the context I required." And it would be right – provided it remembered that every other note or word could say no less.

~ C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer (pp. 54-55)

Words, words, words: God made the world and its contents with them. By the word of His mouth the heavens stand firm. The Son of God is called the Word (logos). Moreover, God reveals Himself most expressly in the words of a story contained in a book. That story is the great Story, complete with a plot, interwoven themes, protagonist, antagonist, and damsel in distress. The Story has a beginning, a plight, a climax, a liberator, an ultimate sacrifice, and is still in the throes of climax resolution. God tells His Story in a variety of lives and through numerous means: poetry, philosophy, narrative, historical accounts, and letters.

Did you know that you are a part of God's grand Story? Not only that, but in "the whole force of His genius" you are in the exact context that you require. You should not have been born two hundred years ago, nor two thousand years hence. You should not have been born into a different culture, on a different continent, or to a different family (even though your family life may have extreme brokenness, God can redeems and use even that). You should not try to be someone or something you are not. You do not have to fit into the box the world offers you. You were made to be the exact person you are to carry the Story further. Your line is not just your own, but it fits into the context of the Story right now.

This idea from Lewis surfaced in another book I read recently:  

"Did you ever notice that all machines are made for some reason?" [Hugo] asked Isabelle. "They are built to make you laugh, like the mouse here, or to tell the time, like clocks, or to fill you with wonder, like the automaton. Maybe that's why a broken machine always makes me a little sad, because it isn't able to do what it was meant to do... Maybe it's the same with people," Hugo continued. "If you lose your purpose... It's like you're broken."

 ~ Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (pp 374-375)

 

If we lose our purpose, if we seek a different context than the one chosen for us, it is like we are broken. We are like a line read out of time, dropping the rhythm and rhyme. Have you ever felt out of time? As if your line had no context at all, let alone the 'exact right' sort? Perhaps you don't know what to do after school, or what job to look for, or whom you should marry, or whether you ought to remain single, or where you should live.  Maybe you feel trapped where you are. Are you really trapped, or do you no longer fit inside a constantly shrinking space?  Like a piece in a complicated machine, you will not simply 'do' in one of a number of places. You must fit exactly where the Maker has intended for you to go from the beginning.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

 ~ Walt Whitman, O Me! O Life! (from Leaves of Grass)

And as Mr Keating (from my favourite film, Dead Poets' Society) asks his class, I ask you: what will your verse be?

~ Johanna

Beyond Hope and Salvation: What is the Gospel?

“If there’s anything in life that we should be passionate about, it’s the Gospel. And I don’t mean passionate only about sharing it with others. I mean passionate about thinking about it, dwelling on it, rejoicing in it, allowing it to colour the way we look at the world. Only one thing can be of first importance to each of us. And only the Gospel ought to be.”

~ C. J. Mahaney

What is this Gospel? Is it the story of Jesus in the first four books of the New Testament? Is the Gospel narrowed down to blood pouring out, seven final words, so many hours on the cross, three days in the tomb, and the Son of Man's resurrection from the dead? Is this what causes our hearts to rejoice and colours our thinking of the world?

Or is the Gospel marvellously extensive, revealing redemption in minute detail? Maybe the Gospel is more than the story of Jesus, more than all the words etched on the leaves of the Bible. Quite possibly the Gospel is the story of the world: creation, fall, the promise of Hope, Redemption, and the trajectory that redemption takes us: into boundless, complete fellowship with God Himself.

Perhaps the Gospel is more than salvation and more than hope. It is possible that the Gospel is much more than restoring things to a pre-fallen state. Could the Gospel be making things better than they were? It is certainly all of these things and not less... And it is beyond probable that the Gospel is more abundant and invasive than we have ever considered.

How has the Gospel, the story of Redemption and beyond, changed you recently?

~ Johanna