Who Would Worship a Golden Calf? Ummm ... Us! Part 3

When we read Exodus 32, it is incomprehensible to believe that the children of Israel, having just seen the most awesome display of God's power, could attribute that power to a statue that they had just finished making with their own hands, yet that is exactly what they did.  Perhaps it is the speed and brazenness of the idolatry that shocks us, but we should not be so easily shocked.  We do it all the time.  We attribute our financial well-being to the economy or to our skill in the market, our happiness to our marriage and family, our health to our wise eating and exercise habits, our spirituality to a good church, and our safety to our security system and the safety features of our vehicles.  As believers, however, we should question this apparent logic.  We know that there are many people who are smarter investors than we are who have lost their shirts, especially in this economy.  We know of many people who have taken care of their bodies, only to be stricken with some grave disease such as the various cancers or neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimers, Parkinsons and ALS.  We know of a number of people who have made wiser choices regarding their personal security only to end up a freak accident or perhaps were in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 or even the father of one of Ashley's friends from Chiles/UNF who was killed in a motor vehicle accident on Orange Avenue on Saturday afternoon or perhaps the family of three who were crushed to death in their car 9 days ago at North Monroe and Tennessee Street; the examples are literally endless.

So what is really the problem here?  Does the physical absence of God tempt us to give credit to tangible things for providing us what ultimately only the Lord can give?  He is Lord over our finances, our health, our happiness, our safety and our spirituality.  And yes, we are called to make good and/or wise choices, even as the Israelites were called to do certain things during their exodus from Egypt.  But they could not, by doing all of those very things, actually deliver themselves.  And this is true of us as well.  God calls us to make responsible, godly choices, but unless God is bestowing His gracious favor and sovereign protection on us, we will not be okay.

This is especially germane for mid-life.  Because mid-life tends to be a time for assessing our past, we tend to do a lot of giving credit and assigning blame.  This is where we tend to get ourselves in trouble, because we tend to make assessments that take ourselves off the hook [blame] and forget God's constant care altogether [credit].  One of the most important things that we must do is to look for the hand of God in our lives!  We need to make an accounting of His presence, protection, provision, wisdom, guidance and grace.

There is something terribly wrong when we can look at our lives and not see God's fingerprints all over it!  There is something deeply idolatrous about crediting the creation with what only our loving, wise and sovereign Lord is able to do.  Yes, we live in a fallen world.  And yes, we've all had difficulties and disappointments along the way.  And no, things haven't always turned out exactly as we had planned, but when we look back, we see God's hand again and again, and we should be thankful.

In Exodus 32, we also see that God's people grew tired of waiting on their ambassador, Moses, to return.  In their minds, they felt he had been gone far too long so something untoward must have happened to him.  Thus, if God is not on site, delivering what we want when we want it, our confidence in Him begins to flag and we are prone to give our hearts to something else.  One of the hardest things for us to do as sinners is to wait.  We have far too little tolerance for delayed gratification, so when we ask God for things, we handily include our schedule for delivery in our requests.  Yet God has a completely different sense of timing than we do.  Who could have imagined that there would be thousands of years between the Fall and the Cross?  Who would have thought that world would have to wait so long for Abraham's promised seed?  Who could have imagined that God would have allowed His chosen nation to be subjugated to slavery for 420 years?  Who would have thought that these "last days" that Peter and Paul spoke of would still be continuing now 2,000 years later.  Still God has a perfect sense of timing.  His moment is always the right moment.  He never gets "off-schedule" or gets things out of sequence.  Yet the wait typically confuses us, because we reason that if the thing is a good thing, then a loving God would deliver it to us with haste.

So we, like the children of Israel at the foot of Mt. Sinai, begin to give ourselves to other things.  So though it may not be as brazen as the overt idolatry at the base of the mountain while God, in His love, was dispensing His Law, but rather a subtle migration of affection.  In ways that we likely don't even realize, we give up on God and give our hearts to things that we can see, hear, touch, taste, measure and quantify.  These things tend to become our "Plan B" messiahs.  We ask them to give us things that only God is able to give such as meaning and purpose, a sense of identity, hope and security, contentment and peace.  We hope that houses, cars, careers, experiences and people will satisfy our hearts.  We tend to look to those things to give us life or at least life to our lives.  We grow tired of waiting on God, so we drive to the mall hoping that it will be able to deliver.

And the grief of mid-life is not simply that we collect things to regret, that we fear getting old, or that we mourn the demise of our dreams or worse yet the actualization of our dreams that failed to deliver what we thought they promised.  Yes, ultimately, we mourn the fact that mid-life exposes our idols' fundamental inability to deliver.  Think about it:  The idol that Israel said would lead and guide them was made of metal and formed by human hands.  It had no mind, emotion, power or life.  It had no ability to do anything but divert the worship of those who made it.  It was bound to disappoint.  So it always is with created things.  They can never fill the void in our hearts; only God can do that.

Lastly, we all tend to blame our idolatry on others.  Look at the "logic" behind Israel's idolatry.  The people would say, "Moses and God disappeared and we didn't know if they were coming back, so we made this calf to lead us and make us feel secure.  If Moses had not been gone so long, none of this would have happened."  Or consider what Aaron said about his complicity and even leadership in this horrendous event, "I gotta tell you Moses, these are pretty evil people, and it didn't take them long to turn their backs on you.  I was a minority of one, so what was I supposed to do?"  Aaron even tried to shift the blame from himself onto the fire saying essentially, "Moses, it was the strangest thing.  I've never seen anything like it before.  I put this gold into the fire, and not only did it melt, but WHAM-O, out came this perfectly formed calf.  Now isn't that amazing?!?" 

There is a great temptation in mid-life to blame the idols that God is exposing in our lives on the people and things around us as well.  Those of us who've worked far too many hours in our lives [and I am certainly guilty of this] and whose careers tend to be our idols will justify all that time away from home by saying "no one understands the sacrifices required to pursue a career in medicine, its not like I created the system."  Others who work long hours may say "outsiders just don't understand how much it costs to raise four children and support a wife in this economy.  There never seemed to be enough money, so it took an ultimate commitment on my part to elevate my career so that I could make more.  After all, God called me to be a good provider for my family, didn't He?"  Or the wife, who was excessively controlled by the beauty of her home may say, "I know it seems like it took too much of my time and energy, and maybe I was a bit too attached to things, but I just wanted to create an environment that our kids would be proud to call home and that they would want to bring their friends to our house.  That way I would always know where they were and who they were playing with."  Or the dad who spent far too many of his parenting years angry because his heart was controlled by a drive for respect may say, "Yeah, I know that I may have been a bit too hard-nosed as a father, but kids need to learn to respect their elders.  There is far too little of that going around these days.  I didn't want my kids leaving home without learning to respect and live under authority."

What do these people all have in common?  Yes, they are all making assessments of their lives and yes, they each are having to face deficiencies in the legacies they have left behind, but none of them has really admitted that their legacy is directly tied to the desires/idols that rules their hearts.  In fact, each of them has shifted the blame for their idolatry on to something or someone else.

To be continued ...

Who Would Worship a Golden Calf? Ummm ... Us! Part 2

If we open our Bibles with humble hands, we will find ourselves on every page.  We would have grumbled about the fairly tasteless manna in the wilderness.  We would have questioned Moses' leadership when pinned against the Red Sea.  We would have been attracted to the culture and idolatry of the nations of Palestine.  We most likely would have failed to recognize that Jesus really was the Messiah.  We share identity with the people of Scripture, and because of this, there is really no struggle in our lives that the Bible fails to address in some way.

And the truth of the matter is that, like the children of Israel, we are all constantly worshiping something.  This is the radical epicenter of the anthropology of Scripture.  When we finally grasp this fact, we will no longer live in a bifurcated world of the spiritual and the secular.  Scripture tells us that we are all worshipers.  We are always in the pursuit of something and in the service of something to provide us with meaning, purpose and joy.  If God isn't the central reason for doing all that we do, then something in the creation will be.  It is an insight that is inescapable and profound.  Every moment in life is spiritual.  Every thing we do is theological.  There is never a moment -- never a word, action or reaction -- that is not somehow shaped by whatever has claimed the allegiance of our hearts.  There is never a split second that our hearts are not claimed by something.  There is always some desire that rules us.

If we watch closely, we will see that all the stories in the Bible are ultimately about worship.  The Fall is a drama of worship, and it is followed by a long string of worship dramas; that is, people allowing their hearts to be kidnapped by the creation and making disastrous choices as a result.  Underneath the struggles of mid-life are dramas of worship as well.  The crises of mid-life are not just about the surface issues of aging, regret, and lost dreams.  These things alone would be fairly easy to deal with, but in reality, the real drama of mid-life takes place in our hearts.  What we worship will make a huge difference in how we deal with the issues that almost everyone faces during the mid-life years.  To the degree that our hearts have been captured by something in creation, even if we have yet to realize it, mid-life will be extremely difficult for us ... because it is these very things in creation that tend to slip through our fingers in the mid-life years.  If we have looked to these things for life, they will start to fail us as we navigate the rocky shores known as mid-life.

Another critical tendency we have as people is to substitute the physical for the spiritual.  As we see so powerfully illustrated in Exodus 32, it is very difficult to follow a god that we cannot see, hear or touch.  Notice that when Moses, who functioned as the visible representative of God, was gone longer than the people of Israel thought he should be, they immediately turned to making a visible god that they could worship.  Perhaps this migration takes place more often and in many more ways than we think.  In subtle ways, mid-life reveals that we have replaced spiritual hope with physical hope.  We too often have staked our well-being on things that we can see, hear, touch and quantify.  When these things fail us or fade away, it often feels like life is leaving us as well.

If we pay attention, we will see this spiritual-to-physical shift all around us.  Commitment to spiritual health gives way to a focus on physical health.  Desire for physical riches replaces a gratitude for spiritual riches.  Thankfulness for acceptance by God gives way to an anxious pursuit of approval from people.  Physical food gets our attention more than spiritual sustenance.  Spiritual character has trouble competing with physical appearance.  Daily spiritual gifts from God's hands go unnoticed as we count our physical possessions.  God's presence gets taken for granted while we gush over human love.  Our identity in Christ tends to get less attention than our physical location and position does.  The shift is everywhere around us, and it becomes a huge issue in mid-life.  In mid-life we tend to assess the return on the investments that we have made.  It is then that we get hit with the fact that we have invested our well-being in things that decay, can be stolen or fade with age.  I seem to recall that Jesus had something rather profound to say about this in his Sermon on the Mount:

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.  But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal."  Matthew 6:19-20

To be continued ...

Who Would Worship a Golden Calf? Ummm ... Us! Part 1

If we can remember one of the great movies of our childhood, The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston as Moses, and visualize the idolatrous orgy that occurred at the base of Mt. Sinai while Moses was receiving the Law from God up on the mountain then we can have a mental picture of how the Lord views idolatry.  It is so easy for us to say on this side of Sinai that we would never do such a thing but, in truth, we do it every day.  I hope to share a little of what the Lord has shown me about the insidious idols of my [& likely our] heart/s in the next few blog posts.  But as we jump in let's go all the way back out into the Sinai wilderness because when we consider it fully it will literally take our breaths away.

Imagine a nation who had just witnessed firsthand the delivery from over four centuries of slavery by the mighty hand of God who in the process plundered the Egyptian nation, decimated their military and displayed his power and splendor for all to see.  For the first time in 420 years Israel was free.  God was their governor, protector and provider.  Before long they would be in the land that had been promised them so long before.  It almost feels like the end of a great novel ... we can almost hear the movie building up to its crescendo as the Red Sea collapses on Pharaoh's chariots ... the people of God have survived ... the covenant promises will all come true ... the promised seed has been preserved.  God in His glory actually dwells with His people!  And in so doing, He leads His people to the base of Mt. Sinai.  Here He would reinforce His covenant and reveal the covenantal obligations that His people must keep.  Of all the nations on earth, only Israel is given the Law because only Israel is God's treasured possession.  This Law expresses not only His authority but also His love and mercy.

Then the unthinkable happens!  Moses is up on the mountain receiving the Law from the very hand of God, and the people get impatient [sound familiar yet?].  They gather around Aaron and say, "Come make us gods who will go before us.  As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him" [Exodus 32:1].  Let this sink in for a moment or two.  These people had just experienced the most unbelievable display of divine power in history.  God had sent plaques on Egypt that not only proved His power but also mocked the power of Pharaoh's gods and literally brought Egypt to its knees.  The clear message of the plaques was not only that these were God's people and He could lead them wherever He wanted, but also more fundamentally that there is one God and His name is I AM.  God had once and for all demonstrated that the gods of the Egyptians were no gods at all.

How could the Israelites possibly consider, even for a moment, worshiping anything other than this majestic Lord?  In their impatience, they press Aaron to provide something concrete and visible for them to worship.  What they say next about these man-made gods is difficult to fit into our post-modern brains.  They want gods "to go before" them.  This phrase is not so much about the gods' location in respect to the children of Israel, but more an idiom denoting rule.  To "go before" is to lead, guide, direct and protect.  Essentially the Israelites were asking Aaron to make idols to rule them in a way that God had covenantally promised to do and had actually done as He rescued them from Egypt.

It is important to realize that Israel was asking for something more than a ceremonial idol.  They were asking for something that would replace the Almighty as the one who would provide them with identity, security, well-being and purpose.  Understanding this makes this request all the more heinous and grievous.   They were asking Aaron to provide something that would take the place in their lives that only God was meant to occupy.  It is so outrageous that it is almost impossible to fathom.  But there are still more shocking things to come.

Aaron, who had been handpicked by God and who was a first-hand witness to the glory of God that accompanied Moses' challenge of Pharaoh, does what the Israelites request without hesitation, protest or warning.  Immediately he begins collecting the gold needed to construct the god replacement that the people demanded.  What mental and theological machinations must have gone through Aaron's mind that he would be comfortable and willing to participate in such an abomination?  I can't even imagine.  The issue here was not just his willingness to be an accomplice to such an outrageous idolatry, but also a direct desecration of his God-appointed office of leadership.  Not surprisingly, Aaron had no trouble collecting enough gold to make the calf.  God had provided plenty of gold when He allowed the Israelites to plunder Egypt as they were making their escape.  Think about it, the very provision that God had given them for their journey was now being used to construct the thing that would function as His replacement.  And still it gets even worse.

Aaron collected the gold, melted it down and then used his tools to form it into something that looked like a calf.  And just when we think that we've been shocked as much as we possibly could be, something happened that shocks us even more.  After Aaron finished his idolatrous craft, the people began to chant and it is the content of their chant that blows our mind all the more.  As they dance around the calf they say, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt."  Not only are they placing their future identity and security in the hands of the idol; they are also creating a revisionist history that attributes to this lifeless beast the glories of their recent redemption.  Consider fully what is happening here.  Moses' absence runs longer than the people expected, so they replace God with a thing and call it both the lord of their future and the redeemer of their past.  Instead of celebrating what only God by His love, mercy and power could have done, they give credit to the creation of their own hands.

One would think that when Aaron heard the chant he would have been shocked into the realization of just what it is that he has done.  Not so much.  Rather than being horrified at the scene, he declared the next day to be a holy day, a festival of sacrifice and celebration to the new "Lord."  Early the next morning the people made sacrifices to their newly minted "Lord," and then went on to have a wild orgy!  Now Moses finally comes back on to the scene and when he surveys it all, he naturally concludes that Aaron must have had his life threatened to have participated in such a horrendous act.  But he would be wrong.  Moses basically says, "Aaron, what in the world did these people do to you that you would lead them into such horrific sin?"  Aaron then tries to deflect the blame saying, "You know how evil these people are?  They thought you were gone, and they wanted gods to go before them, so I collected their gold jewelry.  Then Moses the most amazing thing happened.  I just threw the gold into the fire, and lo and behold, out came this calf!"  It's hard to imagine Aaron actually trying to connive his way out this but he did [how like us].  Not only did Aaron take the lead role in Israel's treason but then he totally denied complicity in it.

So what does all this have to do with us ... stay tuned.  We are sadly a lot more like Aaron and the children of Israel than we have ever given ourselves credit for:(

It's All About Control

The biblical story from start to finish is dyed with the theme of sovereignty, and of course, God Himself is the central character.  He is good, powerful, wise, loving, sovereign; the designer, creator and controller of all that is.  He created a world of awesome and multifaceted beauty and placed man and woman in the middle of it.  They enjoyed intimate fellowship with God and had their every need supplied.  Yet sadly, they fell for an offer to be free of their submission to God, believing instead the serpent's promise that they could be like their Creator.  What a horrific moment!  They left the most wonderful place in all the universe, where they could rest in God's sure rule, in order to vie for the most dangerous thing a human being could ever do:  to trust his life in his own hands.

This moment was the beginning of the struggle that is chronicled in every period of biblical history.  It gets down to one of two lifestyles, and everyone who has ever lived falls into one or the other.  We are either resting in the glory of the sovereign rule of the Lord, or we are trying in some way to establish our own rule.  This battle can show itself in an obvious and arrogant lifestyle of power and control, or it can live as a subterranean independence that colors every action, reaction, hope or dream.  Adam and Eve were called simply to trust and obey, but they wanted their own way.  The Children of Israel were called to trust and fight, but they too went their own way.  First century Palestine was called to see, listen and believe, but they executed their Messiah.  The struggle to trust in the Lord, rest in His rule and faithfully do His will is what sin is all about.  Because every act of disobedience, whether subtle and secret or public and arrogant, is a direct challenge to the sovereign rule of God.  Every time we step outside of the boundaries of trust and obey, we call into question God's power, wisdom and rule.

To be a sinner is essentially to want to rule our own worlds.  This is at the core of Paul's claim in 2 Corinthians 5:15 that Jesus "died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for Him who died for them and was raised again."  Now if sovereignty is at the center of our struggle with sin, and if it is true that the most powerful and pervasive of all idols is the idol of self, then it should not shock us that this battle rages at mid-life [though it is a life-long struggle].  Mid-life is a time when we assess outcomes and survey what futures are left for us, so there is a strong temptation to question God's exercise of His rule.  And as we do this, it is very tempting for us to conclude that the plan that we had for our lives was qualitatively better that God's plan for us.

It can be so very difficult to consider the disappointing impact of sin on our families [such as my family as I was growing up, my son-in-law's family now and also my future son-in-law's family now not to mention all the carnage I see in the lives of my fellow church members and my patients], the decay of long-hold dreams, or even just the physical aging process [I struggle just to take a long walk on the beach with my severely arthritic knee and previously crushed ankle, not to mention a thyroid gland that mysteriously died over a six week time period in '08, hypertension and hypercholesterolemia], or a thousand other personal harvests and to rest in the One who has carefully administrated every detail of it.  In the middle of a huge sense of of loss, inescapable grief, or crushing disappointment, it can be very difficult to gaze toward the heavens and say, "You, Lord, are loving, kind and good.  You are grand in your wisdom and glorious in your grace.  You have authority that cannot be challenged and power beyond my imagination.  What comes into my life is there because of your wise counsel and perfect will.  So I will rest in your rule.  I take refuge in your power.  I hide in your wisdom and make your grace my place of retreat."  And yet, as hard as this may be to say and even harder to believe, it is this death of our claim on our own lives that can turn our mid-life into a time of gracious reordering of control, which then will in turn deepen our rest, worship and love for God.

In the end, this is a spiritual war.  Consider the dissatisfaction, disorientation, discouragement, dread, disappointment, disinterest, distance and distraction that tends to flow from our deep struggle to accept what God has allowed to come into our lives as we reflect in mid-life.  There is likely no war more important than this one.  God is in charge, and we are not.  God is intent on seeing His kingdom advance rather than endorsing ours.  The people around us are NOT under our rule, so they will not always do what we wish they would do.  We live in a world that does NOT belong to us, with people who belong to Another.  In fact, we don't even own our own lives.  "You are not your own, you were bought with a price" [1 Corinthians 6:19-20].  Ultimately, it is resting in His rule and committing to His glory that we find the greatest of joys and the highest of personal pleasures.  In fact, these are the things we were made for.

Repeatedly Surprised by God

When we read biblical history we cannot help but conclude that following God brings a life of surprises.  Whatever plans God’s people made, and however they tried to figure out God’s plans, they were inevitably greeted with one surprise after another.  There were turns in the story that no one could have possibly anticipated.   God would consistently include things or people in His plan that would have certainly been left out if His people had been doing the planning.  A principal reason for this is that we as people tend to focus on outcomes.  We are primarily concerned that things go well and that they turn out right.  Although God surely does care about the end of all things, He is at work in the process as well.

God often requires us to wait [think Abraham and Sarah].  We, however, tend to consider waiting to be a waste of time because our focus is only on the thing it is that we are waiting for.  We don’t consider the “good” to have begun until we have finally received it.  But God is not only present in the final delivery; He is present in the process as well.  Scripture teaches that when God ordains us to go through the trial of waiting, He changes us as we wait.  The biblical perspective on waiting is not just about being patient until we receive, but also about what we are becoming as we wait.  See Romans 4:20 where Abraham “was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God” while he waited for the promised heir.  Yes, even the father of the faithful was changed by waiting.

Scripture is also very clear about God using trials to mature us.  These God-ordained trials are not in the way of our lives but are one of His primary means of producing and maturing our spiritual lives.  We, however, tend to focus more on when these difficulties will end, rather than examining the good things God is doing in us in the middle of them.  Yet God is at work in the process.  He surprises us again and again with turns and twists that we could never have anticipated and would have never chosen for ourselves.

We also often get surprised for another reason … we tend to live our lives with what is good for US as our deepest concern.  We want our friendships to be happy, our investments to produce a profitable return, our health to be constantly good, our families to be united and our futures to be secure.  Now there is nothing wrong with wanting these things, but if this is all that we want, our world is narrower than it was ever meant to be.  God is not going to enter our miniscule little kingdoms to do everything that He can to make them be successful.  Instead, He has welcomed us out of allegiance to our personal kingdoms into the history-spanning expansiveness of HIS kingdom, to be part of what He planned not only before we took our first breaths, but also literally before the foundations of this world were even laid in place.  We were never created to live with our goals and needs as our deepest concerns.  Instead, we were created to know, love, serve and worship Him.  This means that we instead more strongly desire that His kingdom flourish and His glory be displayed.  Practically, this means that we end up being more motivated by the glory of God than by what we think would make us more comfortable and happy.

When we read the covenant promises that God makes in Genesis, we would not likely anticipate that a 420-year captivity as slaves in Egypt would be a part of God’s plan for His people, and yet it was.  We also would not think the promised land would be filled with warring rogue nations that would fight to the bitter end to drive God’s people out.  We would not think Jerusalem would one day be destroyed and that God’s people would be taken into exile.  With all our knowledge of the Old Testament, we too would have been shocked to discover that the Messiah would come from a working-class family in Nazareth, grow up to be a controversial itinerant preacher, and die on a cross like a common criminal.  We would have never predicted his ragtag band of followers would, under the fiercest of persecutions, effectively spread the good news of God’s saving grace across the face of the earth.  The history of Scripture is overflowing with mystery and surprise because God is in control and we are not.

So what does this review of biblical history have to do with us as we take stock of our lives in the middle?  Consider for a moment just why mid-life is a time of struggle at all.  Is it not because what we have planned for has not come to be?  Beneath the struggles of aging, regret and disappointment are the haunting questions of God’s sovereign wisdom, goodness and love.  It is at these times that our minds wander into fantasy and where we create worlds of our own making that do our own bidding.  When we do this, we are actually expressing a deep dissatisfaction with God’s rule in our lives and are wishing that we could have our own hands on the universe’s cosmic joystick.

As quasi-sovereigns, we hate waiting, disappointment, obstacles and failure.  We struggle to accept the fact that these things exist in a world that is under the wisest and most benevolent rule possible.  C. S. Lewis noted that a hardy belief in the truths of Christianity actually makes our experience of pain even more painful.  It is bad enough to have to endure pain, but as a believer, we must also say that it was not an accident and that it was sent by a God who declares Himself to be good!  To us, God’s order can look a lot like disorder and His wisdom can look like foolishness.   God’s lovingkindness can often seem to be anything but loving and definitely not kind.  All of this has to do with one humbling thing that we all have to admit:  as sinners, we want our own way.  It is hard to rest in the rulership of the King when our hearts and minds are so preoccupied with the success of our own little kingdoms.

And it is precisely during mid-life that we come face to face with the reality of who is King and just how different His will and His way are from ours.  Many of us have lived for decades in the world of our needs, our wants and our dreams.  For decades we have likely nurtured the illusion that if God really does love us, He will give these good things to us.  We too often have convinced ourselves that if we obey, then God will keep His part of the bargain and send good things our way.  We tended to think that if we parented well, then all our children would turn out the way that we had hoped.  We thought that if we worked faithfully throughout our careers, then we would harvest the seeds of these investments in our later years [only to see our stock portfolios and home values pummeled by a protracted recession].  We thought that if we kept our bodies under some semblance of subjection then the Lord would bless us with good health.  We thought that if we followed God in personal devotion and public worship and ministry, then our lives would be spiritually rich.

Remember, though, that God’s people have always struggled with the shock of His rule.  The kingdom of darkness is being destroyed by His kingdom of light, yet none of us can completely escape being affected by the carnage for deep beneath every mid-life struggle there lies a collision of two kingdoms.

If we were brutally honest what would we say it is that we want out of this life?  What are the true dreams for which we have been working?  What are the joys that captivate our eyes and control our hearts?  How much have our dreams been personal, earthbound, physical and about the here-and-now?  Have we been motivated more by OUR kingdom than GOD’S kingdom?  How is our present discouragement, disappointment and grief a window into what has actually captured our hearts?  Do we really want God to be our wise and loving Father who brings into our lives what He considers best, or do we really want Him to be a divine waiter, the all-powerful deliverer of our dreams?

May I Speak to the Manager, Please?

Have you ever wanted to stop in the middle of your life and say, "May I speak to the manager, please?" Do things always turn out the way you planned, or do you feel like your life is more out of than under control?  Midlife is one of the most common times in our lives when the delusion that our lives will actually unfold as we have planned for them to quickly evaporates.  And it is this very sense of a loss of control that is one of midlife's most powerful and difficult experiences.  Not only have our lives not worked out according to our plans, but we now are often dealing with inescapable and potentially life-altering things that we also have little to no control over.  Here's to each of us who is going or has gone through this.

Think about how little of our lives that we actually control.  We did not choose where we would be born, yet the location of our births has shaped the entire stories of our lives.  I can't help but think of this every time I travel overseas [now I realize that I tend to go to places that are way off the beaten path and that there are no Fodor's travel guides for ... i.e. medical mission trips to third world locations ... though excitedly that is about to change for the better ... I can't really discuss that here, however, as it is supposed to be a surprise; though sadly, my bride is an incredibly hard person to surprise ... yet another thing that isn't going as planned:)]. What would our lives have been like had we been born in the filth of a New Delhi ghetto, a mud-brick and straw roof hut in Cameroon or Uganda, a communist housing project in the old Soviet Union or in war-torn Afghanistan?  We did not choose the families that we were born into, but could there have been any decision more important to what we grew into?  We did not choose what period of history that we were born into, yet it has shaped everything that we have ever experienced.  Imagine what our lives would have been like had we been born into a peasant family in medieval Europe or into the family of an ancient Chinese craftsman.  What if we'd been born into slavery in Pharaoh's Egypt?  Or born on a wagon train heading west during the California gold rush?

No, we did not choose the world events that would take place around us, but there is no denying how much they have shaped our lives.  It is difficult on this side of 9/11 not to think about that group of middle-eastern men that plotted for months to hijack those planes and to fly them into buildings every time we board an airline jet.  My guess is that none of us knew any of those men and none of us were personally the targets of their attack, yet our sense of the world, our personal securities and our habits of travel have been shaped by what they did.

We do not control the progress of science and knowledge [except perhaps to a small degree for some of us], but there is no denying just how much our lives have been shaped by a myriad of discoveries that we had nothing to do with.  We all live longer because of antibiotics, statins, blood pressure medications, public health measures such as clean water and functioning sewers, food inspection, vaccinations, modern imaging studies such as x-rays, mammography, computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging.  We live much more safely and with great liberty because of the rise of democracy, free elections and democratic government.  We are able to accomplish incredibly more because of electricity, the internal combustion engine [at least until President Obama and Al Gore rid the world of them], telecommunication technology, the microprocessor and even modern plumbing.

We all should be incredibly humbled by the vast array of inventions and technologies that so greatly impact our lives over which we exercised no decision beyond choosing Ford, Chevy or Honda or Apple or PC.  My life is a perfect example.  I did not choose to be born in Amarillo, Texas to professing Christian parents.  I did not plan to grow up in the Methodist church or attend Vacation Bible School or attend confirmation class when I was twelve.  I did not plan to have a sister or even a step-brother and a step-sister.  I did not plan for my parents to divorce and re-marry or for my mother to be bipolar and commit suicide.  I did not choose my personal giftings [I would likely have chosen quite differently].  I did not plan what my home life would be like while growing up and what blessings and struggles I would encounter there.

I never planned to become a physician ... in fact, all my high school aptitude tests said that career was what I was least suited for.  I initially planned to become a chemical engineer, like my father, at least until I got to college and discovered that I actually did not like chemistry at all [despite enjoying it for two years in high school].  As a sophomore in college I changed my major to architectural engineering ... a field I still think I would have really enjoyed.  However, three weeks prior to my junior year in college, God changed by my career path as well as the college I had chosen to attend [now that is an entire story unto itself].

I did not plan to ever marry or even date Janna my wife.  The two girls I had been sitting next to during the first five weeks of Biology 101 were late to class and as I was looking back for them I "just so happened" to see Janna sitting 5-6 rows behind me, and since I recognized her from my lab I went back to sit by her.  It "just so happened" that the new professor for the second five weeks passed out a seating chart that day ... and we were "stuck" by each other for the next five weeks.  Basically, we've never left each others' sides since.

I never planned to live or practice medicine in Tallahassee, Florida or Florida at all really.  For my entire adolescence and early college years, the plan was to move up into the Colorado Rockies once I had completed my college degree.  It is an amazing and humbling thing to admit all of these things because almost none of what has happened in my life has been according to my plan.  There was no way that I could have ever anticipated all of the necessary events, locations, people, conversations, problems and even world events that had to come together for either my plan or His plan to work.  And to even stop to consider all of the things that had to come together for any one piece of our stories to unfold the way it did, it would truly overheat our brains.

I am now in my early fifties.  I do live in Tallahassee, a city that I love and call my own, but also a city that was never on my map of potential life destinations.  I am married to Janna.  She is a charming, pretty and gracious woman, full of life, bursting with giftings and in love with the Lord.  Had I shopped and planned for decades, I would not have been smart enough to say, "This is the granddaughter of two pastors and a child with an amazingly Godly heritage and legacy who grew up in Crawfordville, Florida [really?!?] and I need to find her because she is my ultimate life partner."  Yet, in the last 31-1/2 years, no one has been a dearer friend or had a more profound effect on my life than she.  I am a part of a profession that I dearly love, one that I feel very privileged to be a part of nearly every day, one that has provided a material lifestyle of living far beyond what I ever expected to earn or live, one that makes excellent use of my giftings, yet one that I would have never chosen for myself had it been the last career left on earth.  Truth be told, I couldn't even dissect a frog in high school ... and had a very difficult time doing so in college; yet on the first day of medical school, I was chosen to be the captain of my cadaver team of four in Gross Anatomy class with the honor of making the first incision ... and yes, there is a reason the class is called "Gross Anatomy."

After 25 years of parenting, I look at the lives of my four children, each unique, and am amazed at how their lives have unfolded and, at the same time, are unfolding.  As much as Janna and I have tried to guide them, we could never have planned their lives for them.  One of the most dangerous delusions for all of us is the delusion of our own sovereignty.  And one of our most dangerous idols is the idol of control.  If we spend our days trying to establish our sovereignty and our control, then we have not yet learned to rest in the Lord's control.  In this way, midlife is an incredibly important time for us spiritually because it tends to explode all the myths of our personal sovereignty and control.  The malaise of discouragement that follows is not so much an introduction to a world out of control, but rather, a God-sent reordering of control that can put us in better places spiritually than we have ever before known.  At those precise moments when we finally face the fact that we are not in charge, and in reality, have never been, we are finally ready to know and experience what it means to rest in the control of another.  Yes, Someone is in charge.  Every detail of every minute of our lives has been ordered by Him.  The problem is that in midlife our plans and His plans tend to collide.  And it is in the carnage of that midlife intersection that so many people tend to lose their way.

The Leaves Are Off the Trees, Part 4 ... Solutions

So what should we do now?  We may be alive and well in our midlife years but each of us carries some degree of regret.  We may mourn our business or career choices.  Perhaps we are carrying around a heavy weight of parental guilt.  We may linger over things that we've done or even did not do in our marriages.  We may have regrets over not being more serious about our relationships with God.  If we're sinners living in a fallen world [and we, of course, are] then it is impossible to look back at a legacy of perfect choices.

We will carry these regrets until we are finally home with our Lord.  But then, consider that future:  no reason any longer to even want to un-think a thought, un-say a word, or undo a choice.  We will not only be in remarkable peace with God, but we will finally be at complete peace with all of our choices and behaviors.  We will have finally passed over into a regretless eternity.  So there is hope for all of us.

We should also remember that it is not like we are about to die [or at least not most of us].  We are in the MIDDLE of our lives.  There is still much before us.  We can each participate in a real turn in our stories.  As God's children, we have reason to step forward in faith, hope and courage, embracing the new life that is always available to us because of the person and work of Christ.  So what kind of practical strategies are there that we may employ to this end?

1.  Enjoy the freedom of confession.  So what is that?  It is the freedom to say about ourselves what both God and we know is true, without fear of rejection, condemnation or punishment.  Confession is more than an obligation; it is one of the wonderful freedoms we have in our lives in Christ.  We are free to own up to, without fear, the darkest of our thoughts and motives, the ugliest of our words, our most selfish choices, and our most rebellious and unloving actions.  We are completely freed from our bondage to guilt and shame.

Confession is powerful and effective.  It turns guilt into forgiveness.  It turns regret into hope.  It turns slavery into freedom.  We are no longer trapped and things are not hopeless.  Our God, the One who never changes is also the One who promises and produces deep personal change.  The changes He makes in us are so foundational that the Bible's best word description is "new creation."  It's as if we are no longer ourselves but something brand new.

Confession is not only owning responsibility before God and the appropriate people [those who our sin and failures have affected], but it is also refusing to be stuck in our regrets and refusing to give up hope. 

2.  Embrace God's forgiveness.  In a fallen world, we don't really expect much forgiveness.  We see the indiscretions of our politicians and leaders paraded before us by the media on almost a daily basis.  Stupid choices we may have made early in our careers tend to be resurrected with every new job application.  Our poor financial choices follow us for years on our credit reports and can prevent us from qualifying for mortgages, getting new jobs and even cause us to pay more for whatever insurance policy we may now be trying to buy.  Married women seem to carry the coldness and insensitivity that they may have experienced from their fathers for years and decades after they have leave home.  Our mothers-in-law tend to repeatedly overlook our progress from the arrogance and impulsivity that we displayed in our much younger years.  Yes, in a fallen world, our records tend to go with us and gets flung back into our faces again and again.  In a fallen world, it is very difficult to outlive our pasts.

This is precisely why God's promise of full and complete forgiveness is so unusual and so wonderful.  God, who sees and knows everything about us, even our most secret thoughts and desires, has promised and purchased for us a blanket of forgiveness so complete that it is incomprehensible in this life.  He literally chooses to remove our sins "as far as the east is from west" in His memory [Psalm 103:12].  Think about that for minute.  The God of the universe, whose memory is completely exhaustive, chooses to remove our sins from His memory.  Even though our very sins are a direct affront to His authority, a devaluation of His wisdom, and a rejection of His love, He is so great in mercy and grace that He is willing to erase each and every one of them from His memory.  And because He does this, He releases us from our bondage to regret.  We no longer must live looking backward.  We are truly free to move on.

3.  Embrace God's sovereignty.   One of the surest and sweetest things that Scripture continuously reminds us of is that, contrary to appearances, our lives are never out of control.  No, they are always under the careful, wise, loving and powerful care of the Lord.  He is truly sovereign.  Even though it is nearly impossible for us to look around and see it in operation, there is no situation, relationship or circumstance that is not under His control.  He is always in charge.  He always knows what He is doing and why He is doing it.

Now, fortunately, His absolute control is exercised in such a way that it never turns us into robots.  Somehow, He is able to accomplish His sovereign purpose through the choices we make and the actions we take.  His sovereignty does not invalidate our choices, and our choices do not negate His sovereignty.  In the operation of the universe, the issue of the sovereignty of God and our responsibility is never an either-or; it is always a both-and.  We live our lives knowing that we are responsible for the choices we make, while at the same time knowing that God controls the details of our lives for our good and for His glory.

This balance is very important to remember during the struggles of midlife.  It also particularly important when we consider another incredible aspect of God's sovereignty:  His timing.  God's timing is always right.  He never gets things out of order.  He never does something too early or too late.  He is always able to decide between "what is best" and "when is best."  Yet in the midyears of life, it is almost impossible to look back and not revisit the question of God's timing.  Still, we should take responsibility for what we've done but trust His timing.  He gave us eyes to see what we needed to see at just the right moments.  He taught us important truths at just the right moments.  He brought people into our lives at just the right moments.  He knows who we are.  He knows what we can bear and what it going on around us at all times and His rule in our lives is always exercised at just the right time.

4.  Clarify our identities.  We as people are always measuring our potential.  The toddler stands wobbling in the middle of the room and wonders if he can manage the few steps needed to reach his mother's knee.  The kindergartener nervously scans all the other kids in the classroom and nervously wonders if she will be able to measure up.  The teenager, starting his first job, considers his potential for success and what having money of his own will open up for him.  The college freshman careens from excitement to dread, wondering if she will succeed or fail.  And we, in midlife, as we scan the sins, victories, and failures of our past, wonder what options remain for us in this life.  Will we be trapped by our pasts?  Are things now the way they will always be? 

Our assessment of our potential is always rooted in our sense of identity.  The "what can we do?" questions are always attached to the "who do we think we are?" answers.  The longer we live, the more we will tend to take on a sin and problem-based identity.  The blinders are off, and we are no longer deluded.  We have seen our harvests.  And it is tempting to let these things define us.  Perhaps some have been divorced and while divorce is a very difficult experience, it is not an identity.  Dittos for being a single parent.  While that is a very difficult experience, it is not an identity.  If we allow our experiences to become our identities they will define how we assess our potentials.

There was probably no man who ever walked the face of the earth more aware of his sin than the Apostle Paul, yet he refused to let his sin define him:  "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me" [Galatians 2:20].  His identity is not sin or problem-based, but grace-based.  He is essentially saying, "This is who I am -- a child of God.  When Christ died, I died; and when Christ rose, I rose to new life.  Not only that, but the living Christ dwells inside of me and because this is true, I am no longer living by my own power but by the power of Christ living in me."  It cannot be overstated that as we do the archeological work of midlife, we must not forget who we really are in Christ.  He is our potential!  He is our hope!  We can change!  Things can be different!

5.  Plant a new harvest.  The one comfort for both farmers and gardeners everywhere is that today's harvest will be followed by another season of planting and harvest.  Until we die, no harvest is ever the final harvest.  Our God is the author of new seasons.  He is the giver of new seeds, new roots and new fruit.  He causes flowers and fruit to grow where weeds and thorns once ruled.  He is the God of the new harvest.

In midlife, God calls us to turn from mourning over our previous harvest to planting new and better seeds.  If our parenting didn't turn out so well, maybe those relationships can be mended and restored.  Or perhaps we can be much better grandparents than we ever were as parents and sow spiritual seeds into the souls of the next generation.  If we let our careers control our previous lives maybe we can take advantage of the time we have left and the new economic freedom that midlife often affords and plant new seeds.  Perhaps we should work less and invest in family and ministry more.  Maybe we've squandered many years that we could have spent studying Scripture but we now have many new opportunities to increase our knowledge of God's Word and our potential for ministry [on-line seminary classes, evening Bible schools, etc.].  Perhaps we grieve our previous selfish lives, where all that we earned was spent on more comfortable lives for us.  We can now commit to finding specific ways that we can both give and serve.  We can consider which of our gifts, experiences, resources and wisdom can be best used in the service of others.  As we assess our harvests, we should live with a "new seasons" mentality.  Remember that the final chapter(s) has/have not yet been written.

6.  Celebrate eternity.  Paul makes this critical observation in 1 Corinthians 15:19 when he says, "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men."  As we know, this life that God has called us to doesn't make any sense without eternity attached to it.  It is only the hope and promise of a resurrection out of this life and of an eternity to follow that enables us to continue to live in this fallen world.  This world is a terribly broken place.  Nothing in us or around us operates consistently the way it was meant to.  Things regularly occur that were never meant to happen in God's original creation plan.  Sin still twists our desires and distorts our thoughts.  It still drips, like a horrible black dye, and stains every situation and relationship in our lives.  We are surely wiser than we once were, but we have not escaped our sin.

So we must accept the fact that we are sinners living in a fallen world but we must keep reminding ourselves that Christ really does live inside each of us and we must keep our eyes on eternity.  Start celebrating early.  We should let the anticipation build in us like a child counting down the days until he goes to Disney World.  We need to keep rewinding and playing the video of eternity in our minds.  The day really is coming when we will not only be released from this terribly broken world but where we will finally and forever be rescued from ourselves.  In that final place there will be no midlife regret.  There will be no things that were poorly done or left undone.  There will be no words to take back.  There will be nothing to confess and no need to repent and reconcile.  There will be no unwise investments or impulsive decisions to mourn.  The world will finally operate as it was meant to.   Whether we are aware of it or not, every moment of regret we experience is a longing for eternity.  Every instance of remorse is a cry for a better place.  Every experience of guilt and shame is our heart reaching out for a day when it will all be wiped away.  We should let our longing grow.  We should let our celebration begin.  We must live with our eyes set on eternity.  It is the only way we can make sense out of what is going on now.  Remember, Jesus is preparing a place for each of us even now.