In A Nutshell

I was a victim of my own fame, that is the fame which I ascribed inwardly to myself. When things were going swimmingly I imagined that I was the captain of a great ship on the sea of life, a large, beautiful schooner. I was breezing along, immune to the cares of the world about me, passing the wreckage of those who had foundered, without so much as a how-dee-do. I avoided the unfortunates lest I also run on the rocks and shoals they were cast upon. In my triumphant journey each success or honor became an adornment for my vessel, a showy bit of brass or some smart paint. I imagined, if only I could find some tropical paradise where the fish jump into your boat and the islands give their fruits willingly to the wayfarer. Ah, to be a part of the grand procession of human progress. But I deceived myself and the day came when I looked about and things were quite different.

I then found that I was still at sea, but I did not have a grand ship, oh no I had a walnut shell and a leaky one at that, no sails, no crew, no motor, only paddles. So between bailing, and paddling I found that I was making no headway. And the currents were taking me to places I did not wish to go, in fact toward the very shoals and rocks I had been avoiding.
I paddled madly, bravely, but the current was so strong that I despaired.
Then I noticed a sail on the horizon. It was a ship, it was far grander and larger than my former one was, and it was heading straight for me. I tried to paddle and stay in one place, but it seemed hopeless. So as the ship drew closer I waved my arms and paddles and yelled like a wild man, and yes, the crew spotted me, they got as close as a large vessel could to the dangerous shoals and they skillfully hove-to, backing sail to slow their progress. A boat was lowered with a single occupant, he handled the oars with swift and sure strokes, until he pulled alongside me. I still couldn’t believe that I was being rescued, but I gripped the gunnels of his boat and jumped for it. As I landed safely aboard, my tiny, abandoned shell settled beneath the waves. Then to my amazement I saw that the man who came after me was the Captain Himself. He smiled, deftly brought the boat about and headed for the ship. I couldn’t believe it, I pinched myself, I felt the seat and the sides of the boat, yes it was real. Then I got a splinter in my finger from the strake along the side and it finally sank in, the pain underscoring the reality. This was what was really happening, this was not a nightmare from which I would soon wake and find myself safe aboard my own ship, I had no ship of my own, the tiny, sinking shell was my vessel, my way of life, and the gracious Captain who risked Himself to rescue me was the Lord. When we reached His ship he gave me warm dry clothes and seated me next to Him at the table in the Captain’s ward room. With all of His officers gathered ‘round He served me Himself and was most attentive.
Finally I found my voice and said, “Captain, You risked yourself to rescue me and I am deeply grateful, but now you heap honors and favor upon me, it is too much! I do not deserve it, my seamanship stinks and I have no means with which to repay You.”
The Captain looked at me with a sparkle in His eye, he cast a friendly glance around the table and said, “My friend, I knew when I saw your dire situation that in rescuing you I would gain an appreciative companion and a great shipmate. You have all of the means to repay Me at your disposal for all I require is your total dedication to Me as your Captain. All which you need to serve Me, will be given you in time, and training, by Myself, and My faithful crew. You need no longer worry, you are now a crew member aboard My ship, and most welcome. So say we all.”
At that a rousing cheer went up around the table. And the Captain’s fine wine was poured in celebration.

Let the Sun shine

I am watching the plumes of steam which people give off. From their point of view it is wisdom. The steam comes out of their mouths rising voluminous, insubstantial. There are no real shapes to it, just wisps, one wisp is this idea, the other is another, rising gently on the breeze, thin as smoke. The only difference is that this steam can condense on the innocent, and stain them with the musings of the guilty.
Urban legends are like that, the froth of an addled brain becomes the conversation and belief of the unwary.
Well, just as you can go to an encyclopedia to check the facts of an old liar’s tale, you can go to God and ask Him what is important, what is genuine, and what is unnecessary, or false.
Because of this, we can leave the destructive, sometimes hateful opinions of others behind, like the vapor it is.
Much of what we deem necessary in our daily lives is not.
I dare not tell you what is right for you, dear reader.
Many of my pet-peeves and dislikes were not forged in the fire of His gracious attitudes.
I have yet to eradicate my old habit of being annoyed with the bad habits of others. My bad habit of criticizing the bad habits of others only amounts to judgement. I couldn’t saddle you with that.
But there is One who knows what is good for you and what is not. He is here with you now. Open the door He has been knocking on and ask Him in. Once settled, He will bring more to your life than just approval and sparkling conversation, He will heal old wounds.
Have you have been wondering why you can’t give up an old bad habit? There is likely a wound behind it. Something which has colored your outlook, distorted your thinking. He can deal with it, and set you on safe and solid ground. Oh, I am not saying this is all easy, no, sometimes it hurts to have your favorite vice revealed, and wounds which have never healed are often sensitive and painful.
But there is a better way to live, allow the Lord to shine His brilliant light into your heart. Let Him clean things up in your life, let Him show you what it means to live, to really live, live in the sunshine.

Nathan

nathan@cherandana(dot)com

Running the Salt Flats

There is a plain stretching to the horizon, well really it goes farther than that, but that’s all you can see. On that plain there is a man, he is running toward you, but he never seems to get to you, the harder he is running the slower he seems to be going. It’s like the Bonneville salt flats, even though he is miles away, you can see him. and you can tell that he is putting more and more energy into his running. You watch him and it seems he is trying one last burst of speed, then, poof, he vanishes. So you walk out to where he was and you find nothing. There is not a single trace of him, not a scrap of running shoe, or a bit of T-shirt, nothing.
This is what it is like for many people, they are incapable of fully accomplishing the things they wish in life, so they just try harder, when they have tried very hard, hard enough to harm their health, then, poof, one day they vanish and the goal is unachieved and they are gone.
This is what it is like for people who try to do great things without God. If they have any notion of God at all, they push past Him and say I don’t have time to waste on You, I have work to do. Perhaps from a human perspective they feel they are getting somewhere, but to God they are spinning their wheels. They build houses, and buy cars and yachts, but houses fall into disrepair and decay, cars wear out and die, and yachts sink or go to the breakers. We don’t even leave this world with the clothes on our backs. We cannot transfer our wealth, or our achievements into the currency of heaven.
You can’t make gold into love, you can’t take champagne and make living water out of it. You can’t take the frustrations of everyday life and extract joy from them, not without God.
Jesus said that He came to rescue the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He acted this out by putting on His sandals everyday and going out to meet those sheep. He went to the bars and alleyways. He met them and He healed them. He visited their hovels and ate with them as a friend. He went to them because they had no idea that He was there, and that He cared. Well, by the time He left town they knew.
The same thing could happen to you. Are you realizing that your life is as empty as the desert? Have your plans all crumbled into rubble? Are you dealing with past abuse to the point that you are barely functioning? Guess what? That makes you a lost sheep.

So call on the Lord, go to Him and pour out your shortcomings to Him, open your arms to Him, let Him come into your hovel, and have supper with you, let Him hold you in His arms and heal you, listen as He tells you how much He cares for you. Don’t waste another moment, let your life, your true life begin now.

Nathan

nathan@cherandana(dot)com

Wildfire

I had a peculiar feeling the other day, so I sat down to write what the Lord was saying to me. He said this is how it is, how it’s going to be.

It’s like the day you look up and there is smoke on the horizon and, dang, now there’s fire, man is it moving fast, and you see that no-one is escaping the fire -woomp- there goes another neighbor and you look at your neighbor’s place being consumed and you say “Nooo”, but there they go, they are gone already. And the fire races on, it is heading for your place now, but it does a funny thing even though the wind is blowing like crazy, even though the flames are jumping from ten feet high to forty during the gusts. the fire is splitting and it’s going around your place, you were looking for your big shovel and testing the water hose, but now you just stand there and watch in puzzled fascination as the conflagration roars on by.

Then it hits you that none of your neighbors got away in time. and you run across the field over to Archie’s place and you look for the family, but they didn’t make it. and you fall on your knees and hot tears make rivulets on your ash stained cheeks. And it’s tough being alive when the neighbors didn’t even see it coming. They didn’t see it coming, but somehow you did. And you’re standing there alone for a while, surrounded by charred shapes, stunned, when you hear a little cry, you realize it’s a child and you run toward the sound and sure enough Becky, the three year old, is hanging onto the inside rim of the open cistern. She is terrified, you reach in and you coo and make soothing sounds and you hold back the tears. You know that putting the child in the tank was probably the last thing her mother did. So you pick her up and you hold the child close and you tell her it’s OK, and you walk home slowly. You hold the child closer and wrap your jean jacket around her, she is so cold from being wet and you don’t mind that she is getting you wet. She is so exhausted that she falls asleep in your arms still crying a little.

You are crushed by the devastation, your friends couldn’t be saved, it was just too quick, too thorough, yet there is joy in the saving of one life. Little whirlwinds of black ash swirl ahead of you as you carry your precious cargo home.

that they all may be one

If you got up one Sunday morning (Saturday for those of you who are Adventist, Messianic Jews, or Jewish) and drove to your place of worship and found that it had suddenly burnt to the ground, and after driving around town you discovered that all the other places of worship had met a similar fate. What would you do? Would you straggle on back home and spend an afternoon in sad reminiscence, would you just pick up your fishing gear and head for the lake, or would you spend the rest of the day on your face before God asking Him what went wrong.
Relax, there are no wrong answers here, for if this really happened and you are His, He would get His intended message through to you, one way or another. Well, the calamity depicted above may or may not happen, but I will tell you about a calamity which has happened, and is happening. Far too many people who warm pews, read creeds, and sing hymns, never look beyond the pages of the Bible for the Lord.

Are you saying to yourself, “did he say what I think he said?”
Why yes I did, we must go through Scripture by His Spirit, to the very heart of God, in Spirit and in truth.
Jesus said, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me. He who overcomes, I will grant to him to sit down with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne.”
Revelation 3:20-21

Is this something to be ignored? Are we going to pass this wonderful statement up in favor of the Mother’s Day sermon (sorry, a pet peeve of mine).

Jesus said, “I have manifested Your name to the men whom You gave Me out of the world; they were Yours and You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word. Now they have come to know that everything You have given Me is from You; for the words which You gave Me I have given to them; and they received them and truly understood that I came forth from You, and they believed that You sent Me. I ask on their behalf; I do not ask on behalf of the world, but of those whom You have given Me; for they are Yours; and all things that are Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine; and I have been glorified in them. I am no longer in the world; and yet they themselves are in the world, and I come to You Holy Father, keep them in Your name, the name which You have given Me, that they may be one even as We are…that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.
John 17:6-11, 21

Does this sound like an invitation to a church social or to the service with the good praise band? I have read these lines many times and they always bring me to my knees. “That they all may be one even as You, Father are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us”, This should give you a shiver, this is serious stuff.

Is it not obvious that Jesus is talking about something bigger than a group of nice people getting together and agreeing that Jesus is nice too?
Many scriptures do not lend themselves to being personalized, but these two do. They are a call, a clear and startling call. And these are not the only ones, if you allow the Spirit to make you sensitive to it, you will find passages like these throughout the Bible, Old Testament and New.
If these messages have any meaning for you, then Jesus is calling you to a deeper walk with Him. He is knocking on the door, He is pleading for your heart, with the Father. He is making room for you on His throne with Him.

Is this an offer which can be put off while you check to see if there are any better ones?
Is that a stupid question or what?
Seize the opportunity, get on your face, lift your tear stained cheeks to Him and ask Him to lead you, to guide you on the path which only He knows for sure. The straight and narrow path requires a guide, and it is the Lord Himself. Quiet your foolish heart and the manic babbling of your mind. Listen for Him, listen to Him. If Jesus is your guide in all things, you will never stray. You will grow to be like Him.

It’s Like-uh-The Prodigal, man

For those who read this if you care,
in today’s essay I will not share
holy words for holy ways
I’ll tell you instead of my prodigal days.
the depths I’d sunk to I will plumb
my struggles with the demon rum
and dried green herbs in paper spun

How like the prodigal I did boast
And bacchanal parties I would host
To raise a glass, an end to sorrow
and live as if there were no tomorrow
the sunset is a pretty thing
when tinged with cannabis to dream,

but wasted days and awful mornings
sneak up on you without a warning
and drop you on the city’s curbs
to see things for which there are no verbs
When to the bottom I had settled
and failed the test
of my supposed mettle.

The great Good Shepherd had a look
and pity on my cries He took
He lifted me out of the muck
and gave me a job driving a truck
The 23rd Psalm in my mind He played
and He has stayed with me to this very day.

That’s not to say I have not wandered
and so much of my time I’ve squandered
He brought me back, in His gentle way
and corrected, held me in His sway.
For He allowed my Oktoberfest
and with vain illusions laid to rest
I seek Him now ‘most every day
He gives me His peace, to follow the “way”.

The Clods, the Rapids, and the Lord’s Hand

One morning I found myself dreaming, but unlike other times when I’ve had dreams, I am aware that this is a dream. In the dream I am beginning to wake up and I start to feel the things that are in contact with my skin, it feels funny and I’m almost certain that I have dirt clods lying all over me, I try to shake myself awake, but I am stuck in an uncertain level of consciousness, not completely awake and not really asleep.

Then I feel it, the agony of my spirit, it is straining against the clods, and it is aghast at the complacency of my flesh, it is mourning the connection, it is complaining at being tied to the clods, for you see the clods are not lying on me, the clods are me. And my blood flows like the muddy sludge in the Missouri when the spring rains stir up all of the silt, and the current breaks loose the boats large and small and carries them along to their destruction.

I am suddenly aware of the feeling that someone is digging in my dirt, and I shout, “don’t move my dirt, I just got it the way I want it .”

Then I see who is doing the digging and I recognize that it is Jesus, and He is not really digging, He is reforming, reshaping, and hey, He is throwing stuff away!

I start to shout again and then I realize, you’re not supposed to shout at the Lord even if you have a good reason. My mind interrupts and says why not? King David shouted at Him a lot. So while I am having this argument with myself, He is finishing the renovation, He shakes me and says, “get up”.

My spirit is calmed by His presence, and I no longer feel like clods all over but there is something going on in my heart, it is as if there had been a curtain over my heart and it is gone and now there is a really bright light inside. Somehow even though the clods are gone I find that my flesh is uncomfortable with the arrangement, it is trying to hide from the light, but there is no place for it to go, no place to hide.

Suddenly I see what He wants me to see, the road, it is gently rising towards the mountains and my spirit does a little dance at the sight of it.

I am dragging my stubborn flesh along the road which is full of rocks and mud holes, then I hear the Spirit, not mine, but His calling to mine. And I look up and see that Jesus has joined me, for my spirit called back to His. The road is not smoother, not less muddy, but somehow, now I am not feeling every bump and rock and our pace quickens.

There are fallen trees up ahead, but I begin to take my lead from what the Lord is doing.

He takes my hand and we leap over the tree trunks.

It is beginning to be fun.

We are pretty much running now.

Then I see it, the biggest, roughest rapids I have ever seen, there is no bridge and there is so much water that I know I can’t make it.
Then the Lord does something I don’t expect, He wades into the rapids, this time I reach for His hand as we go in. It’s tough, there are rocks the size of mini-vans and water gushing everywhere and pounding on me.
I loose my footing more than once, but He never skips a beat, He never loosens His grip on my hand. Soon we are climbing out the other side and it feels real good to be done with it. I am feeling lighter and I look around to see what I have lost in the flood, and then I notice that my body got hung up on one of the rocks, I look up at the Lord in puzzlement and He says smiling, “today we are going to My house, don’t worry you will like it a lot.”
So on we trudge, but then I notice we’re not trudging, we’re flying.

Yom Kippur

It is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, sound the shofar!!
This is the day in the Hebrew calendar when the high priest would go into the Holy of Holies, to offer the blood of the sacrifice for the people of Israel. Since Jesus died on the cross we no longer have to rely on the blood of cattle, goats, or rams to enjoy reconciliation with God. But this would be a good time to review what God has done in your life, your Yom Kippur has forever been accomplished.
So what lies ahead for you?
You say you don’t know?
I don’t know what He has for you, but I do know that He is willing to tell you what He wants you to do if you are willing to humble yourself and listen. Jesus didn’t embark on His own Yom Kippur lightly.  He did what He did so that you and I would have free access to Him. The veil separating us from God was torn from top to bottom. He opened it up Himself.
Like the ancient Hebrew high priest, Jesus went through the veil into a place where none of the rest of us could go and came out again to pronounce the blessing, the announcement of the complete reconciliation of God and man. He rose from death, to give you and me life.
To have this life is to have His Spirit.
This is what had been acted out in symbolic form since the time of Moses. Now it is available for all of us, when God promised Abraham that He would bless the whole world through his seed, God wasn’t kidding. That means every man, woman, and child on earth can seek Him and know Him personally. We can ask anything of Him in His name and He will respond to us individually. We can know Him. We can hear Him. We can walk with Him.
Yom Kippur as we now understand it, is our opportunity to throw open the door of our hearts to Him, to be united with Him.
We can finally experience shalom.

the path He shows me

why do I do the things i do?
someday i will do exactly what He wants me to.
i wish it was today, but sadly it is not, it makes me sorry that i am so stubborn.
i have not arrived, no alas i have not, but here is something to consider.
My kinsman Redeemer has appeared and He will heal me,
He has and He will make me whole, and there is not a whole lot i can do about it,
but that’s good because He can and He has promised to do it.
there is so little that i can do about it.
there is nothing i can do about it.
that is what is so neat, He can and i can’t
and that is as it should be for how else would i know how incredible He is.
if i could heal myself;
if i could manage my shattered affairs, if i could mend my tatters, my rags.
if i could see clearly, apart from Him, i would not even look His way.
that’s the blindness of pride,
the blindness i exemplified.
after so very long without a clue, He got my attention,
i once thought that i would not allow utter defeat to spoil my plans,
then even that plan fell apart,
but the failures were well worth the introduction to Him.
for sitting in the ashes of failure i looked up, to Him.
the crushing defeats are as nothing compared to the warmth of His regard.
“priests” don’t understand it, “ministers” don’t either, they point to salvation
and how they think, they are instrumental in the process,
yeah they missed the point, they missed the bus.
it is not what they are doing at all. it never was.
it is and always has been what He did and what He is doing. right now and always, forever.

you know it’s not hard, He wants us to seek Him. no it’s not hard at all.
He has always been there watching for you to look His way.

i’ve seen His face, it is human, that is the overwhelming part,
He has a human face full of tenderness, and understanding.
that is who He is to us, He is The Human, the first real human.
as humanity was intended.
His face is our face or how we will be
and to us His face is the Father’s face.
our kind and loving Father.
it is important to note that He never had a thought for Himself,
He thought of His Father,
He thought of the crippled, the blind, the possessed,
He thought of us, we who were still so far away, in sin and in time.
you know He could have walked away,
before the guards got to the garden,
He could have said “forget it”, but no, he stayed in the garden and they got Him.
Adam didn’t make it, he stumbled on his way to the orchard.
Eve was the enabler that time so long ago, but Adam stepped out. out of the garden.
Jesus stayed in the garden and faced the music for us all,
for Adam, for you and me.
Jacob would have run away,
Moses would have run away,
Peter did run away,
i would have run away,
and we would have been right.
because He is the only one who could do it.
absolutely the only one. and He did do it.
and for that reason He deserves everything.
absolutely everything.
everything belongs to Him.
the funny thing is, He did it all, to get it all, to share it all.
His love, His life, His place with the Father,
He gives to us. because,
because of what?
because He loves us.
He loves us and wants us to be with Him,
to be found in Him.
so when He calls you,
don’t start looking for your jacket,
don’t sit down to put on your shoes,
don’t try to find your wallet.
just go
He is all you need.
He really is you know.

Unless the LORD builds the house, they labour in vain that build it

There is nothing which I have to say that might be helpful to you. Seems a bit stark to say so, but it is true. If all the information I have to share with you is about me, who I am, where I come from, how I lost my moral compass when I was in my early twenties. It would be about as useful as one of those conversations you have with a stranger, where you look at the falling rain and agree that it is raining. Of course, the exchange of useful information is not the function of those awkward chats, but perhaps you can see what I am getting at.

If my story is only about my petty jealousies and my failures, my failed attempts at success, then there is not much to tell. I would be like one of those pedantic fellows who bend your ear with a tale of the sex lives of blue skinks. The reaction of any sane person to such a monolog should be an eye rolling, “shoot me, shoot me now” type of feeling. If I am only telling you of my obsessions, and hang-ups without relieving the tedium of the narrative with something hopeful or transforming, it cannot be of much real use to you

Ah, but there is good news for you and for me. For the story is not only about me. It is about God. It is about how He reached down into the abyss of my obsessions and hang-ups and began to draw me out. To know Him, to be one of His sheep. Why would He do such a thing? How could He, or would He be interested in a failure like me?

The answer to these questions is a great story. For me it is an important story. How He allowed me to stray but kept me from serious harm in a generation that killed many promising youths with drugs and recklessness. How He drew me out of the sexual revolution just before AIDS came along and swept another throng of promising people into the ash bin.

I speak of a time when you might have realized that the fellow who was recently found dead in his apartment, was the fellow who passed out in the corner of your living room at your last party. Or you would have heard of the classmate who came back from Viet Nam without a scratch except that now he couldn’t hold a job, or a match for that matter in his shaking fingers.

Gentle reader you may also have similar blessings, like the serious injury, which though terrible in itself, kept you out of the Army, and kept you from an appointment with a roadside bomb in Iraq. Or perhaps, because of old emotional wounds, you have a tendency to shrink from being a part of the gang. That becomes a critical advantage when the gang gets a bad batch of ecstasy and some of them die and others are damaged.

God has at times chosen to spare people from the horrors they have wandered into, and at other times He has chosen to let a person drink the chosen cup to it’s bitter dregs. This is how God gets our attention. If saving you from certain death and infamy will cause you to pause and consider how the impossible just happened, then He will do that. If you will not be turned from your self destructive ways He may allow you to follow them, even to their tragic conclusion, because you see, He did not choose your path. You still have free will. A person on his way down the steep spiral to self-destruction will often have signs warning him of the crash he should shortly expect. If he ignores the warnings, then how is the person’s demise God’s fault.

Human beings are a strange lot, I read recently that;

“Of the 2,501 drivers surveyed this spring, 95 percent said that texting was unacceptable behavior. Yet 21 percent of drivers said they had recently texted or e-mailed while driving.About half of drivers 16 to 24 said they had texted while driving, compared with 22 percent of drivers 35 to 44.” (New York Times article “In Study, Texting Lifts Crash Risk by Large Margin” Published: July 27, 2009)

These folks knew that their attention was dangerously divided while texting, often because of close calls. They knew that this behavior was dangerous, yet they did it anyway. We as humans are weak, we are contradictory in our behavior, and we seem to be content to stay that way.

Fortunately God has a better plan for us than we can imagine. God knows where we are headed and what we need, the problem for us is that because of free will we have to cooperate with Him to get the full benefit of His love and generosity. We have to choose Him and His ways. Hoping and wishing that you are on His side does not cut it, you have to respond to Him, turn to Him when things are bleak and also when things are good. You cannot know what God wants and what He is doing in your life until you know Him, until you can hear His voice.
Jesus said

“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.”
John 10:27 New Century Version

Listen for Him, listen to Him and obey Him. It’s funny but the majority of stories about people who have come to the Lord, start off with some impossible tragedy or trouble which is beyond the ability of the person to deal with and that is when the majority of people call on the Lord. When they have run out of resources, or guts to see it through. In those times of extreme difficulty a person begins to see how extremely limited he or she really is.

So come on now Superman, and Wonder Woman, you know that you are not really all that strong, that your resources are limited. You know that you can’t really make it on your own. Do not wait to seek the Lord. Do not put off laying aside your pride and humbly coming to Him. Open the door to your heart and let Him in, He is the only thing you really need anyway.

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”
Matthew 6:33 KJV

Seek the Lord with all of your heart, and all of your mind, and all of your strength.

Nathan

nathan@cherandanadotcom