Leap of Faith

In the movie Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, Indiana Jones finds himself on a quest for the Holy Grail. Along the way, he endures an escape from a Zeppelin, a fight with Nazis on top a tank, rambling through the desert and an encounter with Hitler himself.

But his biggest trials come at the end of the movie. His father, a man who he has had a strained relationship with, is dying of a gunshot wound and Indy believes that only the Holy Grail can save him. To find the Grail, though, Indy must face several tests, the last one being a literal leap of faith.

Indy stands at a giant chasm. The notes from his father’s journal say that only a leap from the lion’s head will prove his worth. For a few minutes, all Indy can do is stare at the chasm and sputter. There is simply no way he can jump that far and make it safely to the other side.

There is no way.

Tonight my dad reminded me of another leap of faith, the one Peter had to make when Jesus called to him to follow him out onto the lake, to walk on water. At first Peter is the epitome of the faithful. He walks on water.

It’s one thing for Jesus to do it. He’s the son of God, but here’s Peter, just your regular joe, able to do the impossible simply through faith.

Of course, Peter is only human and when he sees the wind, he’s afraid and he begins to sink. Jesus comes to him and pulls him up and says “You of little faith. Why did you doubt?”

I remember that when I first read those words, I read them as a rebuke as if Jesus were chastising Peter, as if Peter had disappointed him.

Now, though, when I read those words, I don’t see them as being harsh at all. I see Jesus addressing Peter the way a father might address his child who had become lost in the woods. I see Jesus as holding onto Peter and comforting him with those words.

Why would you doubt me?

And the unspoken words … If you knew how much I loved you, you would never doubt.

I, of course, have been making my own leap of faith recently in applying to seminary. I have always been a planner. I’ve been accused of planning out my day when I wake up in the morning down to what I will eat and when I will eat and how long that will take. And I will admit to that.

So to have to apply to seminary, to have to begin this journey without complete knowledge of how it’s all going to work out … it has been a huge leap of faith.

The other day, I was looking through my filing cabinet. I’ve had it since high school and in the back of one of the drawers, buried under some papers, was a tiny notebook. I had only written on a few of the pages, but on those pages were my thoughts about being called to the priesthood.

I had written those thoughts 16 years ago.

And there it was. It was like I had written a letter to my future self. All the things that I have felt this past year haven’t been new. They had been brewing in me for a very long time. And even in my youth, I knew that I would never be truly happy if I didn’t answer the call.

And so I will make that leap of faith because again and again God has shown me that it is the only option. And again and again God has shown me that if I knew, truly knew how much He loved me, I would never doubt. Those two things are very important to know in any leap of faith, that God’s way is the only way and that God loves us more than we can imagine.

In Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, Indy does make that leap. He does it because he knows that it is the only path available to him. And he must take it, if he wants to save his father.

Imagine how much easier it would have been had he also known God’s love.

Calling

Today I began filling out the application for Asbury Theological Seminary. It is something that, honestly, I’ve been postponing for a few weeks now, not because I doubt Asbury is the place for me, but because I can’t yet see how it’s all going to come together. Where is the money going to come from? Where is the time?

And because I can’t see how those things will work, I guess I’ve been too afraid to even try.

I’m only human and trusting God, giving things over to Him completely—taking myself out of it—it’s something new to me. The only I can do is keep moving forward toward the goal I know He has planned for me even if I can’t see how He’s going to get me there.

A few months ago I wrote about God speaking through the wrappers on Dove Chocolate Bars. God does speak. He speaks through our heart, through our gut. Sometimes He whispers to us at night right before we fall asleep when our defenses are down and we are like children again, ready to listen.

And sometimes when we are just too darn stubborn, God will find a way to make Himself heard, whether it be Dove Chocolate Bars, talking donkeys, or even Oprah.

Oprah celebrated her last show yesterday. I haven’t watched Oprah in a long time. I occasionally tune in when I know she’s giving away gifts, so I was surprised—pleasantly—that she chose her last show to give away something more important than any material good.

She gave away her own hard-earned, life-affirmed wisdom.

And this morning, when I was arguing with God about getting started on that application, the news played a sound bite from Oprah’s last show.

Here’s what she said: “Everybody has a calling, and your real job in life is to figure out what that is and get about the business of doing it … you … have to know what sparks the light in you so that you, in your own way, can illuminate the world.”

I admit that I’m sort of ashamed that God has to resort to chocolate bars and Oprah to get through to me, but when I heard what she said this morning, I knew that despite my doubts about how it will all work out, I have no doubt about what it is God has called me to do.

How lucky am I? How blessed to know right now and while I’m still relatively young, what it is that I am called to do? How wonderful it is to know that this call to the priesthood sparks the light in me, sets a fire in my soul. How blessed am I that all the struggles in my life haven’t dampened that flame, but have only kindled it.

That is how God works, right?

That a true calling always burns bright even in the darkest of night, even in our saddest hour.

And that the worst thing is to ignore that light, ignore the spark, because when we do, we turn our back on the greatest gift God will give us … purpose … a reason for being.

Once we embrace that purpose, once we set out on the path God has created for us … once we do that, well it’s like suddenly having wind at our sails when we had been set adrift in becalmed seas.

We don’t always know how we’re going to get there.

But we have to trust God to take us there.

Change is Painful Always

A few years ago famed pop-up book artist Robert Sabuda released his version of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. Each book in the series was given its own pop-up spread and Sabuda worked hard to distill each book down into one iconic image.

For The Magician’s Nephew, Sabuda recreated the lion Aslan leaping from the pages as he sang the world into existence. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe reveals the snowy woods and lamppost that greeted Lucy the first time she walked through the wardrobe. The Horse and His Boy shows Shasta and Bree fleeing across the desert.

Prince Caspian shows Caspian atop Miraz’s castle. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader includes a beautiful rendition of the ship itself as well as a side panel of the bold mouse, Reepicheep. The Silver Chair has Eustace and Jill riding the owls as they begin their quest.

And the very last book included, The Last Battle, shows all our favorites leaving Narnia for Aslan’s Country.

I was thinking the other day about images and what images stand out for me when I think of The Chronicles of Narnia. If I were Robert Sabuda, would I have recreated the same things he did and the answer is in some places yes and in others no.

For example, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the image that stands out the most to me contains neither the ship nor any of the characters that we love, not Reepicheep, not Edmund and Lucy.

No the image that has always meant the most to me is the image of Eustace, the boy turned dragon, facing Aslan at a spring on top of a mountain.

At some point Eustace realizes that Aslan means him to bathe in the spring and he knows that he needs to undress, but he’s a dragon and not a boy and has no clothes to take off, so instead Eustace uses his great dragon claws and starts peeling off his dragon hide. But each time he does, he finds that the dragon skin underneath is just as ugly and horrid as what he just discarded.

The lion then tells Eustace that he must be allowed to undress him, and then he begins to dig his own claws into Eustace's dragon skin. The rest of the passage reads as follows:

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone into my heart … it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.”

Aslan finishes and tosses Eustace into the water. Eustace turns into a boy again and after splashing around for a while, he emerges to find Aslan still there. This time, Aslan dresses him, finishing Eustace’s transformation.

This scene is included in the most recent movie version of the novel, but in the movie, Aslan merely paws at the sand and the claw marks then magically appear on Eustace’s dragon hide.

I think that here the movie completely misses the point of Eustace’s transformation. First of all, we cannot change without God. Secondly, we must allow God to make the changes He needs to. And third, when God changes us, when we begin to make our transformation, it will be incredibly painful and yet, like Eustace, we will feel an underlying pleasure of having the old, flawed us removed as we are reborn.

Becoming who God intends us to be is never an easy thing. It takes surrender. It takes an admission that we cannot do things alone.

Eustace hated being a dragon. He was desperate to be a boy again, but no matter how hard he tried, he simply could not tear away the dragon to get to the boy inside. He needed Aslan.

But Aslan didn’t snap his claws or twitch his whiskers and turn Eustace into a boy again, Aslan dug his claws into Eustace and ripped off all that was old and ugly and bitter and dragon-y about Eustace.

It was not painless.

It hurt … worse than anything, Eustace says.

In the end, he was a boy again, reborn.

Whenever we embark on a journey in life, whenever we decide to give over to God all that is dragon-y in our own hearts, we must know that change will not be easy. It will be horribly painful.

But if we can hold on and let God do what needs to be done, the rewards are beyond imagining.

And chief among those rewards is … freedom.

After all, carrying around the weight of a dragon can be soul crushing.

Still Amazed

It was almost a year ago that Pastor Debbie took me on a tour of the grounds at Hope and told me her vision of building a labyrinth there on church property. Even though the only labyrinths I knew of were found in mythology and had minotaurs lurking around corners, Pastor Debbie explained that the labyrinth she spoke of was not a maze, it was not something to get lost in, but rather it was contemplative prayer walk.

It’s funny how when you hear something for the first time, suddenly you hear it everywhere. Within days of Pastor Debbie telling me about the labyrinth, I found myself in a class, learning about how the brain works. We were given a book to read called A Whole New Mind and there in a chapter entitled Meaning, were pages on labyrinths, how they are used not only at churches, but also at hospitals as meditative walks.

And with that, I was on board.

Here’s the problem, though. When I get on board with something, I frequently want it to happen right away.

Timothy Keller writes in King’s Cross (and really why aren’t you reading this book yet) that “Patience means working when gratification is delayed.”

The process that eventually brought a labyrinth to Hope was a long process. It involved at its most basic level a continued dedication to removing from the grounds those things that were dead and/or choking the life out of surrounding plants. It involved paperwork in the form of a grant. It involved so many things that had to click into place before something else could happen.

Sometimes when you have a goal, when you have something you want more than anything in the world to happen, you have to accept that things happen in God’s time and that the only thing you can do is keep taking those steps—sometimes very small—toward that goal.

Yesterday I was there when the plants were finally added to our labyrinth. The labyrinth had started to take shape a few weeks ago when Pastor Debbie and Marty laid the path with rocks, but now the plants were here.

And our labyrinth went from a drawing on a piece of paper, to a 2D project in rocks, to something now with depth and substance.

It was a hot day and I think my only contribution may have been to watch others digging the holes and carefully planting the Simpson Stoppers that will eventually grow together to create the hedge of the labyrinth.

But I was glad to be there.

This morning as Pastor Debbie showed others around the labyrinth, I found myself stooping and gently lifting up some of the smaller plants that were wilting and leaning from the rain and the wind the night before. I’ve never been a fan of nature. I like it from a distance. I love it through a camera lens.

To touch it as I did this morning, to gently settle the small stem on a pinecone or dirt clod, to help prop it up so that it has a chance, this is something I would never do, but did today.

It’s one of the reasons I’m still amazed.

I sat in church this morning and realized that. I’m amazed … that I’m still amazed, that a year after joining Hope, God still surprises me sometimes in the smallest, yet most meaningful ways.

He surprises me with purpose.

He reminds me that even when I have fallen much like those tiny plants, when the world seems too heavy to bear, He reminds me that He cares for me in the way we care for those plants … with gentleness and dedication and wonder.

I'm still amazed.

I'm still blessed to be amazed on this my 100th posting.

Accidents

In King’s Cross, Timothy Keller writes that suffering occurs when there’s a gap between the desires of our heart and the circumstances of our life and that suffering only increases when we try and wrestle those circumstances into matching our desires instead of simply submitting to the will of God.

It finally all made sense to me this week. I was already having a horrible week, one of my worst in recent memory and then Wednesday morning I found myself stopped at a red light in the right turn lane, getting ready to make the last mile or so to work.

Turn right. Really that was the only thing on my mind, so you can imagine my shock when the woman next to me in the left turn lane, also decided to turn right … right into my car, running the length of her car across my front bumper.

The sound one car makes as it hits another car is excruciating, like ten million nails on chalkboard made all the worse by the seeming slow-mo quality of the crash. It just kept going and going as I frantically tried blasting my horn and putting the car in reverse.

Fortunately, both the other driver and I were okay, not so much our cars, but we were okay and I was left with this eureka moment of understanding that if I or any of us really had control over the circumstances of our lives, all the bad things that happen to us wouldn’t crowd together like some kind of flash mob gone bad.

We would spread out the trials so we could handle them better and address them one on one.

And it was in that moment, that I finally gave in (not gave up, never giving up), but gave in that sometimes life is simply beyond our control and sometimes instead of wrestling with it, we should just let life happen and see where God will take us.

Thy will be done.

Later that day I stopped by the church to see how the labyrinth was coming along. Pastor Debbie and Marty were there just beginning to lay out the stone path and I made a feeble attempt to walk it then.

I had much better luck with it a few days later on Friday.

I found myself back at the labyrinth early this morning. As I walked out behind the church there were two sprinklers on randomly spraying the trees in the early morning sun. I wondered if all the sprinklers were on and if I would have to walk the labyrinth in a hazy mist.

But the sprinklers turned off almost as soon as I noticed them, like I had caught them doing something they weren’t supposed to.

Next to the sprinklers, a large rabbit darted out into the grass from the trees. It stayed there for a minute, framed in sun and shadow and then hopped out a few more feet. A second later, a smaller rabbit joined it.

For a few minutes, I just stood there watching them, reminded that one of the first things that drew me to Hope was the quiet and the stillness in which I could feel the presence of God.

I drank in that stillness and then walked the labyrinth.

In the future when I look back on this week and how it was that I was finally able to feel some healing, I will look back on first the prayers and comfort offered to me by friends and then I will look at the little things, how a car accident taught me that no matter how hard we try to rein life in, life will happen to us regardless.

And I will think about how a labyrinth, a maze in which you cannot get lost, grounded me in the stillness of God.

No accidents here.

Thy Will Be Done

In King’s Cross, Timothy Keller writes that “suffering happens … when there’s a gap between the desires of your heart and the circumstances of your life.”

He goes on to describe Jesus at Gethsemane as he struggles between what it is he knows he has to do (die on the cross) with what it is that he really wants to do (which is live). In the end, though, Keller points out that Jesus ultimately submits to God saying “not as I will, but what you will.”

Thy will be done.

They are familiar words and I wonder if we haven’t said The Lord’s Prayer so much that the words have lost meaning.

They will be done.

Not our will. His will.

Lately “thy will be done” are the only words I find I am able to pray. The circumstances of my life right now so out of whack with what I desire to do, that I struggle to find the words to pray. I don’t even know where to begin with God.

So lately it’s been only “thy will be done.”

Today, I made it out to the labyrinth at church. Eventually hedges will mark the path, but right now, rocks serve to show the path and they do it quite well. The path is a little jagged, a little raggedy; at one point it disappears into a thicket of pine and scrub, only to reappear a few feet later.

But I walked it this afternoon, trying to think of what to say to God as I walked and finally settling on “thy will be done.”

No sooner had I thought the words though, then I heard what sounded like rain on the church roof. I was twenty feet away, but the rain hadn’t reached me yet.

As I began to feel the beginning bombardment, I ran from the labyrinth back to the church, huddling under what little shelter I could find.

The skies opened up and for about thirty seconds, it rained so hard, the raindrops pounding the ground with such force, it almost hurt to watch.

And then just like that, the clouds parted and sunlight flooded the lawn.

Rain and then sun in seconds.

And sun so bright and so hot, it made it seem like it had never rained at all.

I waited a few more seconds and then returned to the labyrinth to finish.

All the while thinking that sometimes God’s language is so perfect, it doesn’t need translation.

Rain and then sun so that it was like it never rained at all.

Let His will be done always.

Shield Your Joyous

Earlier this year I found myself in trouble for, of all things, looking at someone. If this had been the wild, wild, west, I’m sure I would have found myself in a dual at dawn. As it was, I had to sit down and explain, somewhat embarrassingly, that I have horrible vision and I was only staring at the person because I thought I knew them, but couldn’t quite see them.

All of which goes to show that there is very little we can do in life to avoid conflict.

There was a time just a year ago that one of my goals in church was to be invisible, to hide behind pillars, to melt into the pew, to slip out after Communion, to leave the guest register empty.

I found myself wanting the opposite of that, though, when I joined Hope. I had too much joy to contain. I could have tried to hide, but I think my glow would have given me away.

Despite all that, I still find myself sometimes longing to be invisible. I think if I ever go to another church I won’t say a word, I won’t even make eye contact and then maybe that way I’ll avoid being hurt.

Because the truth is when we open ourselves up to joy, we also open ourselves up to pain. Those who are joy-filled are most vulnerable because in their joy they have let all their defenses down.

It’s why during Evening Prayer, I almost always choose the collect with the line “shield your joyous.”

Suffering is hard.

It is especially hard when it comes in a place in which you have only known joy.

It makes me doubt. It makes me want to run. It makes me wonder how the world can be so cruel.

We may not know why we suffer, Timothy Keller writes in King’s Cross, but we know this: “It can’t be that God doesn’t love you; it can’t be that he has no plans for you. It can’t be that he has abandoned you. Jesus was abandoned, and paid for our sings, so that God the Father would never abandon you.”

Keller goes on to write that the words that sustained him through his darkest times were a reflection of this he found in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings:

“Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.”

Suffering passes and the light, the joy of salvation, the light of God’s love is forever beyond the reach of the darkness.

To close ourselves off from pain means also to close ourselves off from joy.

Pain will come and the only way to make it through is to remember that darkness never reaches God’s holy light.

Swimming Lessons

I didn’t learn how to swim until I was sixteen.

I grew up in Upstate New York, so it wasn’t like I had the opportunity to do a lot of swimming. I remember getting in a friend’s pool once in the middle of June and the water temperature was a crisp sixty degrees.

We had an indoor pool at our high school. It was a beautiful pool and heated. The only time it wasn’t so beautiful was when someone pulled the fire alarm in the dead of winter and sent a bunch of kids fleeing from the pool out into the snow.

And of course, it wasn’t so beautiful for me when it was time for our swimming unit in P.E. I’m still not sure how I managed to pass the unit when I was fifteen except that if you’re quiet and don’t complain, if you keep moving and splash around a bit … the teachers will usually overlook you.

Unfortunately they weren’t able to overlook me the next year, what with all the screaming and flailing around.

P.E. teachers are notoriously … well … evil … and one of the things they had us do during the swimming unit was create a whirlpool in the shallow end of the pool. I’m sure they were thinking they were just giving us a cardiovascular workout by having us move en mass in a circle. Simple at first until those crazy, psychotic laws of physics kick in.

The more we moved, the harder it was to stay in the circle, the harder it was not to be flung out into the deep end.

It was probably no big deal for everyone else since they could swim. What did they care if they wound up in water over their heads?

But for me … I was terrified.

I fought hard. But, in the end, I only remember clinging to the side of the pool, my legs kicking at the water behind me as I tried desperately to hang on.

I’m sure I made quite a spectacle of myself because when the rest of the class moved on to the next unit and left the pool until next year, I was told to stay behind.

I spent the rest of my P.E. year in the pool getting one on one swimming instruction.

It wasn’t easy. I was terrified of the water, terrified of putting my head under, terrified of just about everything, but I had an incredibly patient teacher. Sometimes her only job was to walk alongside of the pool as I swam, holding out a long pole for me to grab if I started to panic.

I never did grab that pole, even on the day that I made it out into the deep end for the first time. I never grabbed the pole. In fact I was sort of angry at it. It just seemed to be in the way.

I didn’t need the pole. It was enough that my teacher was there. It was enough that she believed in me.

I’ve been reading Timothy Keller’s King’s Cross this past week. He writes quite a bit on suffering and trust.

He writes of God saying: “I want you to keep trusting me; to stick with me, not turn back, not give up, turn to me in all the disappointments and injustices that will happen to you. I’m going to take you places that will make you say, ‘Why in the world are you taking me there?’ Even then, I want you to trust me.”

Trust is a hard thing especially when fear gets in the way, when we don't know where we're going, when we feel like we're about to be thrown into the deepest waters.

And much like my journey learning to swim, we can either choose to leave the pool and run from our fears, or we can hope that someone takes notice, that God sees us and sends us someone to walk alongside us and guide us in overcoming that fear.

It takes an abundance of faith.

But God proves Himself over and over and over again.  He never fails.

All we need is faith.