It's really me

As I write this, Halloween is less than two weeks away. I haven't been trick - or - treating in a rather long time but I have many fond memories of the holiday. Most of those memories focus somehow on chocolate. Chocolate and the making of the costume. Remember, this was a long time ago and the art of the Halloween costume was far more sophisticated back then.

You had to make your costume; there were few really cool costumes to be found in stores. Most of what was sold seemed to look like someone was trying to force a 3D kid into a 2D body. The poor kids who had to buy one looked like so many panels from Mickey Mouse or Archie comic strips.

It took weeks of brainstorming and planning just to get to the construction stage. My mother was an absolute genius at the sewing etc which was required. She made a completely brilliant bat costume for me one year set to my exacting specifications. It was so amazing it became my pajamas for several months. And there was the pumpkin costume, bright orange paint on some sort of heavy paper. It was perfect as long as you were standing...the bus ride took its toll on my pumpkin. I had left the schoolbus bench seats out of my plans.

I looked in the mirror a few weeks ago shortly after shaving my mustache and beard off. The last time I had shaved my beard completely was 25+ years ago. Years! I just stared for a while and the fellow in the mirror stared back. He seemed like a nice enough guy but very worn and tired. I smiled. He grimaced. I stared again, taking in the details, they were familiar. The face made no response to my mapping effort. There was no malice though , it seemed a safe face. It was the face of someone at peace, content within himself.

The Bible isn't really very clear about what we will look like and what we will be able to do in the next part of life. When Jesus visits friends and followers after the Resurrection He isn't quite recognizable. He has to do something they had all done together to set a useful context. He ate breakfast. Jesus was very intentional about eating with His followers. It clarified that He wasn't a ghost but He did have a body.

So then will I!

It will be part of the "I go and prepare a place for you" that Jesus promised. I spent weeks and months planning the most excellent Halloween costume just for me. Jesus is doing the same for me right now! No, not a Halloween costume; He's preparing my next body It will exceed my wildest dreams. It will be the perfect fit. It will be home.

Paul calls it a spiritual body as opposes to a natural body. It will look very much like me. By spiritual and natural I take it to mean that the body I have now is best suited for interaction with what we call the physical world. It has limitations and is corrupted.

My next body should be amazing. We see tantalizing glimpses the physics of next life scattered about the scriptures. If I came back wearing my next life body, I would seem like superman.

But the most glorious part will be the fact that I will never want to sin!

I hope this makes sense...

One of the saddest parts of this illness is having to quit working. I understand the medical reasons but still, its hard not to see your friends.

The directors of the IT department where I had worked for nearly 10 years in the world's most perfect job came by a while back for a visit and I enjoyed the visit immensely. It was good to see them again and they brought news of a "farewell gift" due to arrive some time next week. It would be, or so they said, a robotic chicken! Now THAT'S impressive.

I knew that a chicken of any sort would not cluck it's way to my door, but something would be arriving. My friends said so. I had that hope.

Hope is absolutely essential for a healthy soul. Without hope a person falls into depression, despair, anxiety and feelings of worthlessness. Hope is like light in all that darkness. For someone with cancer, it can be a motivating force to pursue whatever needs to be done for recovery.

It seems to me that there are three sorts of "hope" running about and two are not friendly.
One can be accidental or it can be fraud. It occurs when someone latches onto false information.
"If I continue this diet of leftward rotational crumberry pods and sleep in a yogurt encrusted sweatshirt I'll be ok in 3 weeks".

It happens all the time and probably should be it's own infectious disease. Dieing from false hope. Believing something to be true when it's not.

Just as frequent is the mistaken idea that merely believing something makes it true. People do this all the time. If I want it to be true it will be true.

"Did you make reservations at the restaurant?" she asks.
"No... but there should be an empty table" he reply's.
"With reservations we could have parked in valet parking!"
"There are some alleys a few blocks away, we'll be ok" he mumbles.
"I hope so" she whispers

Trusting in the imaginary, in a wish, is deadly. It's not real hope.

Hope does not depend on what we believe. Hope is built on the trustworthiness of someone or something. I have the hope, I can expect, to find a package delivered to me. My hope is because the Directors said so and they are my friends. Its based personal experience, they are truthful and dependable people.

I have another hope. It is built on the trustworthiness of God. I didn't make this up, it is just one of the truths of the Universe like gravity. The wonder of this hope is that God loves me! Because of that I know that whatever happens with this cancer thing God is waiting in delighted anticipation for me to be with Him.

"The steps of a man are established by the LORD,
And He delights in his way.

When he falls, he will not be hurled headlong,
Because the LORD is the One who holds his hand" Psalm 37:23,24

I see dead people

There are zillions of people who believe that after they die everything just stops










This is because they figure a human is just the physical body; what passes for a "soul" is nothing more than electrical impulses.

There are another zillion people who think that the "soul", a different part than the body, gets absorbed into the identityless collection of former souls and the body just stops.








There are a smaller tribe of people who believe that the body and soul are intertwined and a "human" needs both to be human. What happens to them when they die is the crucial question.

Christians believe that the disposition of your parts depends on your choice. One group has your refreshed soul joining your freshly created body living in a place designed to bring you joy by the One who knows you best and the other has the miserable old soul sent ingloriously to the other place.

One group has chosen to delight in the ways of the Eternal High King and His Kingdom, the other has chosen to follow the broken urges of the body despising the King and His ways for the chance to be a sort of Ruler of their own deplorable domain. They are sent off to manage their fiefdom along with everyone else who has made this choice - sent off because there can only be one King and the position is occupied.

Its natural to think that you have plenty of time to study the issue and make your choice. While watching a funeral procession, Jesus gives an analysis of our default condition. "Let the dead bury the dead" He says.

Being dead is our natural condition! Our choice becomes either Follow the King or stay as you are. David, in Psalm 116, writes about looking forward to walking with God in the Land of the Living. It devides up like this then...

There are dead people living their lives as though they were alive, they don't know they're dead and merely existing And there are those who have joined the King and been made alive and will some day walk in the Land of the Living.

Jesus said that Life is knowing God. Life is a measure of one's experiential relationship with God. Its possible to know a bunch of stuff about God and be dead. Choose the Kingdom of the Living, follow the King

dark night of the pillows

One of the stranger phenomenons I've been experiencing is related to the way I use a pile of pillows to find a comfortable position to sleep in. It usually turns out to be a complex construction that would make a pack of beavers jealous. Now here's the strange part. I've actually been loosing sleep because I have been dreaming about secret designs and patterns that have the key to the "Official Pillow Pile Construction" In one dream there was a diagram in a sort of Victorian pen and ink which was printed on the pillow case, and this caused me to actually wake up and try, in the dark with my eyes closed, to locate it; another time it was a Monopoly game board on the pillow.

I woke up muttering my dismay at not having an approved regulation pillow stack. After a week of this goofiness my wife very patiently and wisely suggested that I just use the pillows as pillows and not media for secret messages and just sleep.

The whole process was tiring, frustrating and confusing from analyzing too much. I was trying to sleep by my cleverness and ability to think logically.

I write this partly because I've been reading through the classic book "Dark Night of the Soul". It describes a condition Christians can find themselves in where their communication with God is disrupted or even broken.

One occasion which produces this silence from God is described this way. In Hosea 5:15-6:3 we see God responding to a lifestyle of ignoring Him and His ways. God breaks the communication and effectively hides Himself.

"I will go away and return to my place until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face; In their affliction they will earnestly seek Me."

"Come, let us return to the Lord, for He has torn us, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before Him."

"So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord."

Everything seems dark and despairing. Nothing seems right no matter how we struggle to know Him.

If God seems missing or far away it might be time for you to repent and run; run like crazy back to God and He will restore the relationship!

But there are times when you haven't been all that depraved. You've read your Bible faithfully, gone to two Bible studies a week, had long and serious prayer times and yet God remains a mystery.

The reputable Christian Mystics remind us that it is Gods way to hide from His people on occasion; Especially the genuinely spiritually mature. Whats up with that?

The reason is that although God has given us a mind to vigorously use to know Him, there are truths unknowable. A strong relationship between two people depends on knowing each other for having spent time with each other learning the otherwise unknowable about them.

C S Lewis uses a different metaphor. He discusses the difference between someone who has carefully studied a map of an area of the world. Your neighborhood for example. He might be able to tell you the relative locations of your house and the convenience store. But who really knows the area the map reader or you. You live there, have seen the sights, possibly know the neighbors.

Put it this way - who would you want as a guide to Yosemite National Park... a map expert who has never been there or someone who vacations there every summer. Of course you want the person who has stood in the valley and seen Half Dome or El Capitan or Yosemite falls. The one who has smelled the smells and seen the sights and walked the trails.

God desires to have a relationship based on personal interaction, not mutual study. He does not want to be a god of paper and ink found in books.

At the end of the story of Job, after Job endures a great many troubles, Job addresses God and says, more or less, "Before I had heard about you, now I know you."

The Dark Night of the Soul is dark because God wants us to know Him because we have been told by Him. He wants our hearts to be filled with Joy because He is here. We share secrets. He will give us each a new name that only He knows. We sit and stare quietly at Him in His presence because He is delighted we are there!

The Dark Night of the Soul is hard; it's confusing, it can be discouraging, it goes against our nature to want to have reasoned it out ourselves. It is the way to Him for anyone, there is no one who cannot simple respond in joyous love and wonder. Think of a newborn baby's responses to familiar faces. It is eternal life.

spitless

This chemo stuff has some amusing and frequently annoying side effects. I am spitless for example. I have no saliva and the result is that eating food, that often looks really tasty, is like chewing chalk. I go through a bunch of water just to finish a meal.

But I am generally so minimally affected that sometimes I forget anything is wrong. Under the observance of a doctor this is not a problem since I have regular fix it sessions to go to. Before the cancer was recognized, however, it had time to run amok in my body causing serious problems.

Had I been aware of what to look for, the tracks of its having been there, I might have taken corrective action much sooner. The prognosis would be less grim. The problem, of course, is that it all happened so slowly. If, for example I was meandering about the house and my arm just fell off, I would very likely call someone for help. But if instead a eight inch blob of tissue inside my body suddenly becomes an eight inch blob of cancer I very likely wouldn't notice. The long term consequences to me would be similar a major medical problem.

Cancer is like that. It does what it does and suddenly your about to die. Most of the time you've thought nothing was wrong or worse yet you just got used to the pain and called it normal.

Sin is like that too. We do what we do and suddenly our souls are effectively dead. Most of the time we think nothing is really wrong with that lifestyle or worse we just get used to the pain in our soul and call it normal.

Sin is the bigger problem. Sin will affect us all our lives; cancer only till we die. Faulty lifestyles may continue to afflict us, to control us, after we die in the second part of life.

If thinking about these things makes you scared spitless but everything else seems just fine you need to beware, take some time for solitude, time to do a self examination, time to visit the one who can heal us body and soul.

solitude

My wife got me an iPod for my birthday! They are wonderful tools; I have a bunch of songs, some books (I've been listening to "The Dark Night of the Soul"), and even movies!

This IPod is perfect for listening to while I wait for the 3 hours of IV chemo drips to finish. I can be mentally and spiritually refreshed while sitting still in a chair; just me and John of the Cross.

There are drawbacks to this quasi solitude. The obvious one is that while I am listening to John of the Cross I am not necessarily interacting with my world. A pair of earphones plugged into overly loud music is an easy way to seclude myself.

Although it would be a fascinating study to examine the impact of iPod isolation on society, that is not what I intend to explore. One of the reasons the isolation phenomena is so widespread is, I think, that it conveniently remedies the unfortunate fear of one of humankind's most valuable activities.

Being truly alone, in solitude is a frightening event for most people. I am not thinking, by the way, of this solitude occurring in the middle of the Gobi desert or the Alaskan interior. I am pondering being alone at home or at the grocery store etc. Its so compellingly dreadful that people will fill up their solitude with noise (enter the iPod) or television or reading or the internet... you get the idea.

The source of this fear of being alone is the expectation of what, or who, might show up to break the solitude. Like a good Hitchcock movie, this unseen but anticipated dread is lurking around every corner. The two most terrifying horrors are oneself and God.

The problem is you don't really know what you might discover about yourself in the harsh light of solitude. Chances are that it does not reconcile with your imagined self. Thus the distractions of noise and activity to scare away the terrors.

These times of solitude are really a normal part of God's structure of the universe so trying to avoid them or mask them out is akin to trying to postpone sunrise. The Mosaic law included a reminder of this regular time of solitude in the Sabbath.

By the way, when I refer to a time of solitude I don't mean a time of reading the scriptures and prayer or even of meditation. Don't get me wrong, those activities are vital to our well being. But they are times we have set aside. All those useful disciplines start with an effort on our part...

I am referring to the quiet times that God himself schedules into our lives. The mystics called it a time of contemplation as opposed to a time of meditation. When we meditate, we use our minds to study and ponder. In contemplation God instructs us. He speaks to our soul to our mind our emotions. He tells us what He wants us to know just at the time we need it. These God initiated times of solitude be they 5 minutes or 5 months are probably the most significant in our lives if we respond to Him with a eager listening soul. It is when we are to "be still and know that I am God".

God knows how greatly we need to shut up, sit down and listen so he sets apart times for that to happen. Times of solitude.

"When you said to me 'Seek my face' my heart said to you 'Your face, oh Lord, I shall seek' " Psalm 27:8

lets make a deal

One of the common ploys we humans try when we relize the end of this life is comming sooner rather than later is to start the process of negotiation. We are apparently chronic wheeler-dealers, and the end of life is not the only occasion we prayerfully bring our bargining skills.

Once during a terminal crisis with my business I was in an extended negotiation with God on how He was supposed to handle the situation. I clearly recall offering a sort of pious package to God. I would be content with whatever circumstances came along (subject to modification at a later date) and God would guarantee food clothing and shelter. I thought I was pretty noble.

Immediately God reminded me of the words of Jesus -

"Do not worry then, saying, `What will we eat?' or `What will we drink?' or `What will we wear for clothing? For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Gospel of Matthew 6:31-34

God was telling me basically - "I already promised you those very things now lets talk about the real issues" He was continuously faithful and generous in resolving the circumstances.

As I write this the anniversary of D day is just over. War is famous as a venue for the "lets make a deal" prayer. The practiced prayers and complete newbies decide that if nothing else will work maybe God might be enticed to come to my aid. Bargaining with God almost seems like an automatic response to adversity.

Its not just adversity that brings out this heavenly haggling; the opportunity for supernaturally sponsored success is a tempting scenario for a mutually convenient covenant. There are many "pious" people from virtually every major (and most minor) religious belief who in essence are counting on the notion that "if I do these things and don't do those things, you God will be obligated to grant me whatever sort of afterlife that will please me".

There are three problems, at the very least, with trying to bargain with God. The first is that God cannot be obligated by a mere human. No one can say to God "You failed". The second is that it is greatly presumptuous to suppose that God would bind Himself to an agreement He did not create. No one can say to God "here's what we're going to do; you might want to take notes". The third is that it is foolish to assume that we have anything of value to offer to God.

Actually I should modify that last thought. We do have a few things to offer to God but they are not things that can be traded away. The truth is that there isn't really anything that is "Ours" to give away. However, I can offer God my attention. God desires to speak with us but we so seldom pay any attention

We can offer God our loyalty. We are either His or we aren't. We can offer God a sense of respect and awe. We can live each day filled with wonder.

If we do we will undertake the exact opposite of "lets make a deal". We will offer God what already belongs to Him and which He has given to us so that we might choose to willingly give back to Him.