I’ve talked about Jonah before. I’ve talked about how he ran from God, and even was willing to run from God to the point of his own death. God saved him from death by having a fish eat him.

Probably nicer to have been saved by mermaids, but nice wasn’t the point.
Tonight I wept. In Winona right now it’s 5ºF and there is snow everywhere. I’m in Costa Rica, where even now at 12:30am it’s still a balmy 69º  and no snow for a thousand miles. I’m in a paradise. Nice hotel, beautiful women, amazing sights, and it’s warm.

But I wept. Alone, sitting on the floor of the bathroom in total darkness.  Some of you know my story, and some of you don’t. Very long story very short. A year and a half ago my fiancée left me in an instant message.

How worthless am I?

Every day since then has been a challenge. I am perpetually nagged by a most profound desire to run away from everyone I know and be surrounded by strangers. Every morning I wake up wishing my first sight was a ceiling I didn’t recognize. If I had to sum up the ambitions of my life into a single statement, it would be to remain at least busy enough to prevent suicide. I am broken beyond repair.

I am in the stomach of a very big fish.

It occurred to me then that when Jonah said to himself in the darkness of a disgusting fish, certain of his own painful demise, “Yeshua Jehovah” that he was not pleading for his life. He didn’t say Jesus is God, so please make this fish spit me onto the shores nearest Ninevah. He simply and utterly acknowledged the work of God.

When this happened, God saved him.

Now I’m not going to get into the pit on these guys, just come talk to me if your interested, but I want to start to define some things so I can continue to build my argument, which kind of coincides with their’s, sometimes, but I won’t talk about that here. Ready? go.

1) God is Love.

2) I  am Self.

3) Self is not Love.

4) I am Selfish.

5) Love is not being Selfish.

The End.

One of the greatest challenges the church faces today is insulation. It is distant and removed. We gather in closed buildings and sing our own songs, talk to our own friends, and generally avoid contact with the outside world as often as possible, with the occasional exception of doing something “evangelistic” where we perhaps move from the church sanctuary to the church parking lot, put up some grills, and wait for people to come eat our food and listen to our songs and then we get them ready to invite them into the church sanctuary. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Today, if you want to find a Christian, you need to go to a church. If you wanted to find Christ, you had to go to a bar.

Jesus didn’t spend his time forming clubs or committees. He did not start a Christian rock band and go on a tour of churches to win people to himself. He did not stand outside abortion clinics and picket. In fact, he may have spent his time inside. He didn’t make company with the people who thought they had the religion thing figured out. Jesus spent his time with sinners. He spent his time with drunks and shady businessmen, skanks, whores, thieves, murderers, and the quintessential outcasts of his time, the tax collectors. Jesus cared deeply about all of them enough to feed, clothe, heal, and die for them.

The problem with caring is that it’s hard to care for a person you can’t see.

Fortunately, the solution is simple. Go to where people need clothing, food, or healing. Go to wherever people have broken hearts. Go to the places where people need Christ, and be Christ then and there.

If Jesus were here today, he would be holding hair while drunk students puked. He would offer rides to women on the way to have abortions. He would be a friend to those everyone else cast out.

If Jesus were here today, he’d be spending time with sinners. Why don’t we?

It was nothing. The little loop of paper used to hold the napkin, fork, and knife all together at a restaurant. She had creased it on two axes, making it into the shape of a small 4 pointed star. But it wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t quite straight. When you pressed every edge, you could see that the corners in the middle didn’t come together symmetrically. It was every so slightly imperfect, and that bothered me. It bothered me so much that I could basically feel it staring at my arm as it sat there on the table. It was screaming at me with its slight imperfection.

But to her, this imperfection was intentional. It was not meant to be fixed, nor straightened, nor tossed aside and retried. All was exactly as it should be. Its purpose was fulfilled.

I sometimes wonder why I’m imperfect. I mean, God knows what He’s doing, and yet I’m still all messed up. I’m clumsy or I’m lazy. I let small details tear my mind apart. I get easily jaded, suffer terrible shifts of my disposition. I’m arrogant and I think I know more than most people. I’m foolish, and know less than most. I have a stripe of exceptionally short hair on the back of my head that I can’t explain. I can’t even remember the first 20 years of my life.

And God made me.

This confuses me to no end. Even still, but I understand it just a bit better than I ever did before. You see, I am an imperfect fold. My edges don’t line up and I’m asymmetrical. I screw up and fall down and make mistakes as much or more than anyone else I know. But that’s all part of the plan. It is part of the purpose. I wasn’t made to be this beacon of what people are supposed to be. I was made to seek God. I was made to learn lessons and to grow and to find my way. Perfect people don’t find their way. They wouldn’t be perfect if they were somehow not on it. If a perfect person wanders off the path and remains perfect, there is only one conclusion. The path was wrong.

But I’m not that person. I make mistakes and I know that for a fact. I don’t know where my life is going, and really for that matter, I don’t know from whence it came. But every time I stumble off the proverbial path, I find out where my path isn’t. I learn something about myself and what I can or cannot do. I learn something about God and what I can and cannot understand. I learn something about the people around me or the world in which they live. It’s all part of the process to becoming who we were intended to be.

I once said to a friend about a photo I had created… it was meticulously crafted and required a great deal of time in both shooting and editing. In fact, it took nearly 10 hours for this one photo. When I told that to this friend, she asked why I would spend such a great deal of time on the photo. “You will place your nose an inch from this print, and see no error, except where error was intended.” Every spot and blemish, every shadow and highlight had its place in that photo. Even those that looked unpleasant or unseemly were perfectly intended.

When you look at me, or more importantly, when you look at yourself, know this. You will see no error, except where error was intended. It’s in those errors that God makes Himself known, and there is nothing more valuable in your entire life.

It is water for a man dying of thirst. It is sight for the blind; it is air for the drowning. It is the sight of someone loved after waking from a coma. It is peace.

Love always hopes. That expression kills me because it is so hard to let go. I loved, and was left. And she’s not coming back. So what is this hope for? What good is it?
I’m starting to believe that it is not such a specific drive. The focus is not that simple. The hope is not to be for that person but rather for what that person represents. Over and over Christ compares our relationship with Him and God to a marriage. That is love. All the forgiveness and faith and trust and patience that you need for marriage is needed with God. It is provided in perfection, and for perfection in its return we strive.

We do not hold hope in love for a person, rather our hope is for love with God.

Our love with God so easily suffers from abstraction. Love with God is difficult to see because so much of it is expressed in ways and forms we cannot see. But love with a person is physical. It can be seen, touched, and felt, though not always can it be quantized. It is a kiss, or a smile in a crowded room. Eyes locked so tight as though they were the only eyes present. Love is a shoulder soaked in tears or a joke at the most excellent moment. Love is a perfect hug.

It is in these things that God’s love is understood. In these things that God’s love is felt. I do not understand how God forgives me, but I understand when a friend forgives, and often that’s as close to understanding as I need to get. It is the expression of love and hope in those around us that causes us to fathom what God shows us, and what he wants from us.

My hope is not simply to love and to be loved by this person. My hope is to understand God’s love through it.

Looking back on the past year, I’ve gone through so much crap and trials and stress that it borders on ridiculous. I very frequently found myself asking where God was, or why He wasn’t helping me.

The answer, of course, was in the people I asked. God was right there.

I don’t mean to jump onto a string of blasphemy, so first of all I’d like to point out that my friends themselves aren’t God. But the simple truth is that God was present in those friends. When I wanted God’s comfort, he comforted me with friends. When I wanted God’s company or God’s advice, he gave me those things in the form of the people around me. And frankly, if I didn’t have that, I would be in a much worse way right now.

This issue of course isn’t so straightforward as to be a one-way street. If my friend is how God shows Himself to me, then I suppose that means I’m supposed to be showing God to my friend too, right?

Sometimes this is a really easy issue to grasp. All you have to do is be a friend. Most people have a pretty basic understanding of that. But it’s the times we don’t want to do it that it is the most important. When we just had a long day at work and really want to nap instead, or we’re spending time for ourselves, or in a “quiet time”. It is then that you need most to be there for people, and consequently, when it is most difficult, it seems.

I was talking to one of my most trusted friends just a few days ago, and she was telling me that she felt like she wasn’t a good friend at all, citing that she was frequently busy and overwhelmed with things to be done, often unable to come over when I was having people over, or the sort. And I said to her, “Yeah, you’re busy and you have far too many things going on for any one person. You have a small nation of people constantly competing for your attention. But you have always been there for me when I needed you most, whether by coincidence or divine appointment. I can’t be sure, but you have always been there when I hurt most, and thus have been the truest friend.”

This is just one facet of the way Christ intended His church to be. So often we talk about relying on God to provide all of our needs, which is well and good, but in that we sometimes cause it to be very abstract. In my life the biggest way I’ve seen God provide for me was by the simple generosity and friendship of His people. My friends.

Keep it real, folks.
Peter

Why We Serve

http://www.sermonplayer.com/c/thebackporch/audio/12760_2552.mp3

 Peace.