An Orchestral Metaphor

I walked, and by my side a man, shining in white robes, guided me with a gentle hand.  We came upon a great cliff, overlooking an endless expanse below, a space that stretched out beyond eye's capacity.  Below, an orchestra covered the ground, blanketing it like heavy snow.  It sprawled, so sheer in size it made tears well up in my eyes and my whole form huddle with wonder.  Instruments, all that are known to man, were being played, from the harps to flutes, violins to bass drums.  I watched the musicians, anonymous faces furrowed in concentration.
My gaze wandered in fascination over the scene, but indeed, most wonderful of the picture was the Conductor, set on a platform high above the orchestra.  He shined, and I realized that no sun shone here, and everything I saw was by Him and His radiance.  The orchestra below performed solely by His light.  He held His baton, poised with natural precision, and conducted in inconceivable, spectacular movements which never wavered and held such a position of logic and divinity as to be paradoxical.
The Conductor smiled, indescribable, as if every one of the players He conducted was His child, one who He delighted in above all.  It filled my heart, my very soul with ecstatic, fantastical joy.
"My Father," said the man beside me, gesturing to the Conductor.  "The Great Conductor."
It was at this moment I realized a curious fact.  Surprised, I gazed down again at the uncountable number of instruments, all in use, fingers on strings, pressing stops, mouths blowing through reeds.
"Why!" I exclaimed.  "There is no music.  None at all."
"There is music," said the Conductor's son.  "You cannot hear it, for it would destroy."
"But the sound," I protested.  "The sound must be incredible."  I looked with longing at the orchestra, and at the Conductor, for anything under the guidance of Him must surely be perfection.
My guide looked on me with love and compassion.  "I will let you hear a small portion, so that you will understand," he said.  He placed his hands to my ears.
I listened, holding my breath.  First, silence, but then a note swept into existence, long and clear, bowed from a violin.  All at once, the music crashed in around me.  Whatever I had expected, it was not what I heard.  The music weighed on me, an unbearable yoke of sound.  The flow of the melodies moved like liquid over me, saturated with such sorrow, despair, and loss that my entire body began to tremble.  The great pitch of sound swelled, louder and louder, deafening and defeating.  Through it all, from melancholy harmonies to tragic rhythms, I could hear instruments harsh and out of tune.  The screech of a wayward violin, the wobble of a dissonant oboe, the shrill squeak of a cracked flute.  Notes rushed in, their voices quick and fleeting, and notes were held far beyond the time they were meant, drawn out to long disarray.  My very existence could not cope with the vast, woeful sounds.  But for all its ugliness, it captivated something inside me, deep within me something surged up.   
It was horrible, but it was beautiful.
My soul sang with it, and I wept into my guide's shoulder.  He took his hands away from my ears, and the music faded away.
"How does He bear it?" I cried, staring at the Conductor, standing in the midst of all that terrible, wonderful sound.  "How does He bear it?"          
"Because He loves.  My Father loves each one of those players, unconditionally and forever.  He has written out a Part for each and every one, He has delicately structured their instruments and He wrote the Great Score for them.  But they try to rewrite it, or change it, or play their own melody entirely.  Most of them do not even look up to see that they have a Conductor, and they perpetually play the Broken Song.  If they would only look up...
"But my Father knows the plans He has.  He will create a New Score, soon.  For the melody heard is nothing compared to what is coming - the melody both heard and unheard, where Perfection shall play in the Heavens, and even the unbound stars shall sing."
I looked again on the endless sea of faces down below.  Everywhere, heads turned down and away from the Conductor, and I realized, with an ache in my heart, that many of them wept at the ground with dark eyes turned away from the light.
And above it all, the baton swung in divine motion. 
As I watched, the Conductor turned and looked at me, directly into my eyes, and I found my surroundings melting away.  I was in the orchestra, a violin in my hands, among the grand and sorrowful melody, contributing my own soul to the Great Score.  But I kept my eyes on the Conductor, and I let His hands guide me, and I played for Him.  I magnified His melody and it brought me joy surpassing all understanding.  This was but a practice, a preparation for the New Score, for a much greater melody, written by the Conductor for all who sought to play in the Orchestras of Heaven. 
Behold, this is true love.    

Christianity Clichés ~ Part 1 ~ "Jesus Saves"

~Here's an overview of what I'm attempting to do here with this blog series.~

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved." - John 3:16-17 

"Jesus Saves"

 The foundation of the Christian doctrine.  The pillar of the New Testament.  This is what I see most quoted among my Christian peers, pasted on to email signatures and bumper stickers and t-shirts, which is very good...  However, some Christians seem to only go that far.  They tell you "Jesus Saves!" but they don't answer the following questions.  Why does He save?  How does He save?  And why do we even need saving in the first place? 

A Brief Explanation and Exploration of Free Will and Human Nature

For most of my life I did not understand free will.  In the back of my mind I always wondered why evil was in the world, why God didn't just create "good beings."  Free will is something I feel is glanced over by most Christians today, not fully explained, and maybe not even fully understood.  Yet free will is quite simple, and it is the basis of everything we know and feel in the world today.  Free will is the beginning of "Jesus Saves."

C. S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, explains it eloquently:

God created things which had free will.  That means creatures which can go either wrong or right.  Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot.  If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.  And free will is what has made evil possible.  Why, then, did God give them free will?  Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.  A world of automata - of creatures that worked like machines - would hardly be worth creating.  The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures in the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.  And for that they must be free.

In the beginning God created Adam and Eve in their proper states - in a direct, personal, and unveiled relationship with Him.  If you have ever wondered why God didn't just make "good beings"... well, He did.  But He also made free beings.  A free thing must be free to be good or bad, to go right or wrong, or it isn't free at all. 

In the Garden of Eden there was the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  If God created the pre-sin world, why did he create the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?  It was Adam and Eve's free will.  It was their possibility of going wrong, and as harsh as it seems, it was necessary.  God did not want clockwork people.  Adam and Eve could have never had the full joy of God otherwise. 

So, when Adam and Eve were tempted into eating the Forbidden Fruit they unlocked in themselves their own sinful human nature (which is the inclination to do wrong), thus separating them and their future descendants from God.  Adam and Eve exercised free will and disobeyed God, which caused humans to be veiled from God.  It gave them the need to be forgiven, to be "saved."

A Life, A Death, A Resurrection - A Savior

Enter Jesus.  He came as God in a human body, tempted and tried but never sinning.  Out of every person in the world, he, of course, was the absolute least deserving of death and total separation of God, yet that was what happened.
God, being a Perfect Existence, cannot be in the presence of sin.  As fallen humans, in our sullied state of human nature, can in no way can ever be in the presence of God, no matter how hard we try to resist our free will.  So God sent His Son to live a perfect, blameless life, but after it all He made Jesus suffer on a cross, suffer pain none of us will ever be able to imagine and total spiritual separation.  Why?   Timothy Keller, in his book The Reason For God, puts it like this:

"Why did Jesus have to die?  Couldn't God just forgive us?"  This is what many ask, but... we see that no one "just" forgives, if the evil is serious.  Forgiveness means bearing the cost instead of making the wrongdoer do it, so you can reach out in love to seek your enemy's renewal and change.  Forgiveness means absorbing the debt of the sin yourself.  Everyone who forgives great evil goes through a death into resurrection, and experiences nails, blood, sweat, and tears.  

We are sinners.  We are unforgivable.  The human nature inside us makes an uncrossable gulf between us and God.  But God forgives.  God sent Jesus.  Jesus absorbed (or perhaps the better word is "bore") our sin - all of our sin, yours, mine, the world's, future and past - and suffered in death.  But sin, being only a product of free will, has no power over God.  God raised Jesus from the dead, and, in essence, defeated human nature and, it could be said, free will.  We, in all our humanness, made an unbridgeable divide between ourselves and God that no human devices can span, but Jesus "saved us."  He made a Divine Bridge out of the cross, one that he allows all people to come over to True Love and heaven.  

"For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit." - 1 Peter 3:18

Closing Words 

 How do we get saved?  Well, Derek Prince in his book The Spirit Filled Believer's Handbook says it plainly:

Let me now state... [the] basic facts of the gospel and response which each person is required to make.

1. Christ was delivered by God the Father to the punishment of death on account of our sins.
2. Christ was buried.
3. God raised Him from the dead on the third day. 
4. Righteousness is received from God through believing these facts.

If you have read this far and have not made a personal, direct commitment to Christ as your Lord and Savior I urge you to do it now.  Jesus saves, but you must reach out and take His Saving Grace.  He's standing right beside you, gently guiding you toward His Love and His Mercy.  Sometimes, even if someone claims to be a Christian, they do not fully understand the simplicity of the act of salvation.  They get so caught up in "being saved" they forget to reach out and take the saving.  

Have you believed the facts stated above?  Have you made a direct and personal response in your own life?  If not, I ask you to do it now.  Pray with me, these words: 

Lord Jesus Christ, I believe that You died for my sins; that

You were buried; that You rose again on the third day.

I  now repent of my sins and come to You for mercy and

forgiveness.

By faith in Your promise, I receive You personally as my 

Savior and confess You as my Lord.

Come into my heart, give me eternal life and make a child of God.

Amen! 

^(OvO)^

          

 

The Ending of Innocence

From the moment I was born, I began to suck from the world my human needs.  It took most of my childhood to realize the world requires something in return for what it yields.  As I drain it, it drains me.  We are caught in a two-way act of vampirism, the Universe and I, as we bleed each other dry.  And the Universe will always claim our innocence in the end, until the End of Time, when the Lord shall return and restore to us a Perfect Unity.  But until then, we are engaged in our wars against the world.
Everyone, no matter what age or religion, is struggling to retain their innocence.  I think maybe it starts as children, when we can first understand death as a concept, or realize that we are merely the tiniest particle of dust on the outskirts of a chaotic sandstorm waiting to be enveloped in the whirling winds...  Maybe we all have that one definable moment in our minds, that moment when we find we have Innocence, something almost substantial, and something so easily breakable, so easily lost.  Our terms of when and where Innocence begins and ends might shift from person to person, religion to religion, but deep down inside we all have our undeniable, unalienable Shame, that Counterpart to Innocence.
I've reached a point in  my life where I have seen so much, too much, and yet I have seen nothing at all.  "Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt," cries Hamlet.  And I'm inclined to cry with him.  Sometimes I wish I could cover myself, that I could shield my eyes and plug my ears and protect my skin all at once, in some pitiful ball, hoping the Universe will forget me.  It never does, though.
Whatever it is, the never-ending cycle of what you see on the computer screen and TV and the screaming roadside billboards, the conversations overhead, the enslaving desires of the flesh, the wars and rumors of wars, the touch of death and sickness, or a betrayal of trust... losing your innocence hurts.    To say a person "is broken" has become somewhat of a cliche, but it is true.  As fallen humans we can, and will, break.
I think I'm beginning to break.  Whatever shell of naivety I had around me is falling away.  It scares me, as if I am standing at the edge of a precipice with the world behind me, urging me to jump.  If I do not jump, will I be pushed.
I think most people my age, maybe most people in general, feel this way.  What I'm finding out about my time of life, is this is when you find out if you're someone who jumps or someone who must inevitably be pushed.  Because in life, we all must go through some irrevocable fall, but maybe we have some control over how it happens.
This, obviously, is a terrifying fact.  It is everyone's secret burden, hidden in little chambers of the heart.  We shove our broken pieces deep within us so the world cannot see them, and it seems we let the jagged edges cut us even more.
I've been thinking a lot about the shame we feel, as we grow up, as we lose our innocence piece by piece.  Why?  This is one common burden shared by humanity.  The person sitting next to you at the bus stop, the cashier at Walmart, your best friend, your worst enemy, the great masses shifting through the earth like quicksand.  We all know.  We all feel.  And we all deal with it differently.  Our books on tape, our lustful pleasures, our beauty magazines, our antidepressants, our sports channels, our casinos, our parties, our movie theaters, our Doctor Who marathons, our junk food.  
My only thought on this stems from my faith, that as Christians we should take this brokenness, this loss of Innocence, to God.  He is, quite literally, the only one who can heal your jagged edges.  I do not think He will put you back together, per se, but more that He will fill those broken parts of you up with Him, making you so much fuller than you were before.  That is why I find a certain beauty in brokenness.  Through God, as cliche as it sounds, you really can become whole again, and not only that, but much more.  Through Him, you can become Complete.
You may put your trust in the Universe and get betrayed.  It is more than likely.  You will get scarred, you will get scraped and burned and lost and found and hurt and touched and loved and hated and you will cry and you will laugh.  And you will be exposed, terribly exposed, to this ever-shifting mass of life.
I believe in something more, though.  There is Someone who will never change.
I want to go back to my fantascised childhood, I want to go back to some time before my Innocence began unraveling.  I can't.  I'm at this precipice and there is no turning back.
I think I'm going to jump.  But I do not think I will be jumping alone.  I have faith in my God.  He will not let me fall, but He will let me soar on eagle's wings.
That precipice isn't so scary anymore.  
      
^(OvO)^

This Is Not Your House

We're all someone.  We all have likes and dislikes and types of clothing we like to wear and music we like to listen to.  We each have a unique personality that allows our friends to go, "I saw these shoes at the mall that looked so totally you."
We all enjoy being 'ourselves."
Last Sunday the pastor of my church preached a sermon that I liked a lot.  In it, he compared our personalities, our likes and dislikes, who we are as people inside and out to being our "houses."  As humans, we like to think we own our houses.  We like to think we sit on a big fat piece of land in a nice house and say, "I own this, this is me."  But, as my pastor said, we don't actually own any of it.
God has the keys to your heart if you've accept Him as your Lord and Savior, but God also wants the keys to your house.  He wants every bit of furniture in every room.  And, myself included, when you hear this you don't like it.  I like being myself, I'm me, this is my house, I built it.
But none of us built our own houses.  God did, from the foundation to the chimney.  We don't have a right to throw Him out the front door and say, "I built this, get out."  He wants His keys back, and things get so much easier when you hand them over, because He'll help you with the upkeep.  When your house starts falling apart, when a storm comes, God'll be there to help you with repairs.  But first, you have to surrender your housekeys and let God into every room.  Every closet.  Every cupboard.  Don't close any doors, don't go, "Oh, not that closet, that's my stuff."  Or, "Please don't go in there, I'm ashamed of what's inside."  Those latter doors are the one that you should leave wide open for God, for He's the only one who can clean out and remodel it.  It may be embarrassing and shameful, but don't worry, God understands.  It may hurt to show Him these private rooms, but it will hurt only as thorn hurts as it being pulled out. 
It's hard to give up control of things, we as humans like to be in charge of ourselves.  But, if you think about it, this isn't even our permanent house.  Soon it would will crumble and rust away and we'll move into a perfect mansion in Heaven, and since that's eternal, how much do our earthly dwellings really matter?
God wants every part of us.  All of it.   He wants every door wide open.  He gave you a wonderful house to live in it, so live in it, don't try to own it.  Really, so much stress goes away when you give Him everything.  He wants to fill your house with peace and joy, so why not let him?
Giving up control is hard, but things get easier after that.  So try it.  I have faith that you'll see the blessings immediately.           

^(OvO)^      

Reflections for the End of the World

Everyone knows about the Mayan prediction of end of world, etc, etc, but of course no one really believes it.  There is, however, that little voice that whispers, "What if?"
I've noticed lately, in a lot of radio-pop songs, they feature lines such as, "Live like you're dying," and, "Party like we've got one night left."  It seems like our culture is bombarding us with these messages to party now and forget the consequences. And with this prediction, and that little voice, I find myself examining my life like, "Is this the note I want everything to end on?"
Thinking that is useless, because the answer will always be a big fat resounding, "NO!"  We will never be happy with our lives, up 'til the very end, and when we realize that things get easier.  Humans have always reached for the unattainable goal of being "happy" in life, and you can never be happy when you're searching to be happy, because being happy is almost an illusion.  There is just to much sadness in this fallen world.
To slip in a Doctor Who quote, "The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things, the good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant."  You will have good days, but you'll have just as many bad days, and it's separating them that's the key.
To "live like you're dying" is wrong, it just leads to dissatisfaction and unfulfillment, and in truth we can't live like we're dying because we aren't dying.
We have to live like we're living.
The surest way to be unhappy is to go looking for happiness.  Accept the bad days, enjoy the good days, live for God, serve others, and happiness should follow.
Another thing I find myself is thinking, "Did I make a big enough difference?  Did I matter?"
The answer, really, depends on your definition of "mattering."  Because, in the scope of all things human, we don't really matter at all.  Even someone like Socrates, someone who's been remembered for generations and shaped human history (if that can be considered "mattering") will one day be entirely forgotten.
On our own, we don't matter, we're just small and helpless and clinging onto the skin of this tiny little world.
The way I see it, there are two levels of mattering: the earthly level and the heavenly level.  Earthly levels is your day to day life "matterings" - you matter to your parents, to your friends, to the people you help and guide through life.  Then there is the heavenly level of mattering - everyone you've directly or indirectly brought to knowledge and Saving Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Of course, this is the only way you'll truly mattering, and it's the most wonderful way to matter.
So don't worry about mattering on an earthly level, worry about mattering on that heavenly level, and that's the only way you'll ever feel fulfilled.
The world could end on December 21st, the world could end any day really, but most likely it won't end for a long while yet.  But still, don't beat around the bush, stop looking for happiness, stop trying to matter materialistically, and start telling people a very good piece of news.
The news that one man died for the sins of all mankind.

^(OvO)^