mercy

Been a while here since my previous three posts were lost. This had the effect of derailing my plans entirely. Now how to begin? How about a little update?

I was driving to work in my car yesterday, thinking about a member of my family who has no use for God. The closer you are to a family member, the more disconcerting this can be. In fact, I’m often surprised at how many Christians are not the least bit concerned about the salvation of their own family members. Perhaps they subscribe to the notion that either it’s not that important or that all the world will be saved in the end anyway (universal reconciliation).

To be sure, I have investigated the claims of universal reconciliation and been less than fully convinced. However, God’s unlimited mercy continues to amaze me anyway. It was while I was driving that I suddenly remembered this scripture:

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. (Ecc. 3:11, NIV)

We all feel the pull of something grander than ourselves, which we cannot grasp any more than we can reach the moon though it may seem near. Even the most hardened atheist seems often compelled to look to the universe in search of…something — an answer perhaps. We look and do not find, we yearn and are never satisfied. Perhaps this is eternity expressing itself in our hearts.

For the Christian believer, the thought of someone we care for missing God represents the loss of all eternity. I have often wondered how can there be a point to enjoying God forever when eternity has been lost? Who can get their mind around such a thing?

“When they crucified Jesus, they crucified eternity.”

Now where did that thought come from, I wondered? I never considered it before. God is eternal. Could there even be an “eternity” without Him? No, there could not be. In an instant I realized that all of eternity was wrapped in Christ while the Roman soldiers nailed His humanity to the Cross. I often feel that eternity when I think about those who seem to be lost and do not even consider finding the way out — all of that eternity in my heart was crucified on the Cross during the Great Shakedown between Life and Death.

Suddenly, I knew the answer was in there. I’ve known a few people who died without seeing their prayers answered for lost family members, yet those prayers were answered after their departure. I wondered just how far can God really come from behind. What we see is a far cry from what He sees. There is a judgment, though what it entails has not yet been revealed. I am beginning to think that whatever comes, it will not diminish what God has bought through the Cross of Christ. It was an eternity-for-eternity trade. Eternity crucified, eternity resurrected — fully beyond our imagination of both the good we hope will come and the evil we fear.

Who has seen eternity? Who can describe it? Yet we all feel it in our greatest hopes and losses.

Some times it’s really hard to get your mind around things when you are going through the thick of whatever it is. It sure was for me last night and today.

My mother was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer yesterday. I am watching God answer some of my prayers about her controlling nature, but not the way I expected to see them answered. I would not have wished this on her just to get her to turn loose of some legal matters and do some of the common-sense things she should have done but didn’t and let the younger members handle them. My mother is such a godly woman in many ways — always trusting God, always helping others to her detriment (co-dependent). I really had to wonder — since she was healed miraculously as a child from diptheria, “Why this?”

Before my father died, the Lord prepared me for several months and I had no clue until he was gone that that’s what it was — a preparation. This morning I remembered something a friend told me summer before last that gave me a new perspective. I remembered it this morning and it helped me to get a grip. “In every thing gives thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” I’ve certainly shared this with a lot of people since then.

No one wants to hear, “It was the will of God,” when these things happen. I don’t think any of these things are the “will of God.” But I do think they are often the “will of God in Christ Jesus.” People put the punctuation in too soon. Things that happen to us have no value in themselves except only as they draw us into Christ Jesus. God does not let the same things happen to all people, but if we follow Him, sometimes our lives are very hard because it often takes extreme circumstances to draw us out of our comfort zone and further into Christ Jesus. So it is not the “will of God,” but it may be the will of God for the moment because of what it takes to break us loose of the bondage of self and draw us near to Him. No crucifixion, no resurrection.

A friend of mine died very young in her thirties of a cancerous brain tumor. She was very opinionated and Holy-Ghost-and-fire in her thinking. We parted ways for a time after she moved, and when I found out she had a tumor I called her up. I so wished I could have patched up some of my negative feelings toward her before she had gone off. It was difficult to get her to quit trying to run my life. However, I had begun to learn the Cross and was beginning to break away slowly from the “magical thinking” that characterizes much of Charismania.

I never could have talked to my friend in the old days about what it meant to walk out the Cross. When I called her and asked how she was, she told me she felt as if she were absorbing God and being absorbed into Him. Did it take a brain tumor to produce that in her? I have a feeling it did. Is this walk not about losing our lives for His sake? But we hang onto our lives and our way of doing things even when we pray for Him to change our circumstances.

It is hard for me not to feel a tinge of anger at God over what’s happened with my mother, as she is not a little heathen wandering around in darkness. Or am I making excuses for her? My mother and I have had some differences that are hard to resolve, not the least of which is her thought that nothing evil can ever really happen to her because she is “trusting God.” I am thinking right now of all the people in my family who either think that they can command God according to scripture, or that God can’t do miracles. Both viewpoints are wrong, from where I stand. And in my mother’s case, it has got to be hard facing something that God has obviously allowed.

It is not God’s will that any should suffer, but it is His will that our little kingdoms be broken down and absorbed into the kingdom of heaven. What does it take to do that in any of us? Usually suffering and a sense that we can’t control something. My own mother once told me: “It’s always right to pray for mercy.” People think I am a little bit crazy when I tell them that sometimes I pray the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy. When I first heard it, it struck a nerve in me. Can we really pray for God’s mercy over the whole world? I don’t know how God applies His mercy, but I know He always extends it in some fashion if we will reach out and embrace it. Even His judgments are mercy, if we only could see the benefits past the vale of tears.

Now as I pray for mercy and ask God, “What are you doing?”, it occurs to me that none of what I am going through is senseless or unnecessary. We ought to approach God right and ask Him to finish the good work He has begun in us. However, I want to leave you with a brighter picture than that — that it’s not all about suffering, but it is entirely about entering into the fullness of His kingdom. What does it say about His kingdom — it is “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

So I end the Old Year in pain and begin an adventure with the New. If I have one wish, it is to fully understand what God is doing in my midst and enter into that with Him.