Month: December 2015

Beyond Our Imagining

Approaching Christmas, and the turn of the year, many of our thoughts go back, like, to a year ago. What were you thinking, hoping, dreaming then? You may find that they are the same things as now. The things you wanted to do, the things you wished were different, all that you wanted to change–maybe it’s the same. This time can be depressing for some. Maybe you’ve even gone through this cycle so often that you can’t imagine how things can ever be any better for you.

This is actually an opportune time to tap into a power that will help you imagine things differently, so differently that, instead of how things can ever get any better, what you can’t imagine is how great things will be.

Mary’s song (Luke 1:46-55) celebrates a God who has acted in the past, and will continue to act, to raise up the disenfranchised and downhearted. Mary–this is critical–can celebrate this God who has acted in and through her as both Lord of history and nature. That is, Mary is a key character in God’s acting in history at this specific time, and as Lord of nature in bringing about her remarkable pregnancy with this oh-so remarkable life in her. Most arguments about the existence of God focus on God as Creator, but Biblical faith celebrates God as Creator as an expression of experiencing him as sustainer and redeemer, a God who acts in a way that brings everything together: history, nature; it’s all one to him. In this way her song is, as is often pointed out, an echo of the Song of Moses and Miriam in Exodus 15, when God had acted in history and nature to deliver his people through the Red Sea.

The point is this: If God is experienced as sustainer and redeemer–as “re-creator” of life, bringing hope and new opportunity, it’s a no-brainer that he is also the creator in and behind it all.

This is the God who comes in Christ and through the power of the Holy Spirit into the very centre of our lives, at the intersection of our history and nature. The God of all power has acted in a personal way to make all possibilities open to you and me.

Your story matters. He wants to enter your life to give it new meaning and power and possibility, wherever you are in that story right now. You can’t imagine where that can lead.

Image and Worth

Let’s face it. We are all image-conscious. That’s not a bad thing. You wouldn’t want go to a job interview looking like you just got up in the morning. It wouldn’t be good to have no concern about how you are perceived by others, or, more importantly, by yourself. Self-image is important. But there is something even more important, and it keeps self-image from being an unhealthy obsession. We can benefit in this from a Biblical-historical perspective.

John the Baptist appeared on the scene when his nation’s self-image would have been very low. Luke makes a point of providing the historical-political setting in which John appears (Luke 3:1-3). Israel was surrounded in its setting and experience by powerful, unfriendly forces, and this had been the case for a long time, centuries in fact. They were ripe for a hero to lift them to new heights, reliving the glories of old, restoring their image, you could say. But who announces this? One who appears in the desert, a wild figure, pointing to one, Jesus, who is the opposite in appearance of the conquering hero.

Nevertheless, there is something about this Baptizer who recalls Elijah and the hope of the ages. Such hope would not be disappointing, because it all points to the one who alone is worthy to rescue the people–all people–from what really ails us, more than any self-image issues: a sense of worth, which cannot come just from a good self-image. It runs much deeper, and withstands what can easily cause a good image of ourselves to evaporate, say, when we fail badly. Sure we say then that we just pick ourselves and get back at it, but the truth is that not everybody does. There are countless human tragedies stemming from failure of self-image.

What is the answer when, like John’s people in their collective experience, you feel oppressed and beaten down by others, but circumstances, by life itself?

Two handy and apparently popular options are: 1. Wall owin victimization and blame of others. 2. Find victims of your own to oppress, i.e., become a bully.

Or, 3, you can change your mind, how you think and deal with such circumstances. A word for this kind of change is repentance. You can say, I’m not even going to think in such categories as options 1 and 2. No matter what happens, no matter what I have to deal with, I refuse to waste my life on what can only bring (further) pain and pointless, soul-sapping misery. I am worth more than that, not from how I view myself, but from how God sees me, loves me, and accepts me, no matter how I might, at times, see myself.