New Life'n

It's going to be all right

You know how The Polar Express has a kind of creepy animation, plus a bunch of edge-of-your-seat and what’s-going-to-happen-next moments?

Little Sarah is 6, and all through the movie she kept asking, “Is it going to be all right?”

We had to reassure her, “Yes, Sarah, it’s going to be all right.”

Of course it’s going to be all right.

Because it’s Christmas.

Without Christmas, I’m left guessing

Does anyone really care? Does anyone know? Does anyone understand? Is anyone there? Is it going to be all right?

God could have left me his letter and expected me to just believe it. But, he did more.

He did more because there was something to be done on earth. Of course, he could have snapped his fingers and done that something from heaven. He could have rigged it so that no work on earth was necessary. But he didn’t.

He came here himself and did the work that he rigged to only be done by himself on earth in a human body.

He showed up in person and lived like I have to

He put on my clothes and lived in my house, and experienced first-hand what it’s like to live in my body. Which isn’t pretty.

He already knew what it’s like to live in my body, but, he experienced it first-hand so I would KNOW he knew.

He played in the dirt without getting all dirty

The work he did without getting dirty meant I could get cleaned up from my dirtiness, if I would only come to him for the cleaning.

Plus, he rigged it so I don’t even have to get dirty again, if I would only stick with him when I do my playing.

I’m not alone

Someone cares

Life is now rigged to turn out all right

Because of Christmas.

His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.

Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. – 2 Peter 1.3-4

Is God a crutch?

You’ve heard it

Maybe you thought it or said it yourself: God is a crutch. Man invented God because man needs a God. You need something to lean on because you can’t handle life.

The moral is that strong, well-adjusted people don’t need crutches.

Is food a crutch?

Jesus says just like food is necessary for physical life, so he is necessary for eternal life. No food, no life. No Jesus, no Life.

Is food an invention of man in his weakness and if only you were strong and well-adjusted you wouldn’t need to eat?

If you argued that food doesn’t really exist, and neither does physical life, what would people think? Would they think you were a kook? 

Jesus doesn’t say food is a crutch or that physical life isn’t real, but he does argue in John 6 that eternal/spiritual life is more real than physical life; that the eternal impacts the physical every day.

And not only does he put the priority on the spiritual over the physical, he says he is the center and source of that eternal life. I don’t know if they thought he was a kook, but after that, everybody went the other way. 

Maybe you could say that pretending that the physical is all there is, is a crutch

You know, something to lean on because you can’t handle the truth.

It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is of no avail – John 6.63

At Christmas, the spiritual became physical, so that the physical could become spiritual. 

Thankful for fog

Right now I’m thankful for mystery, confusion, frustration, and the fog.

You can major so much on the things you know that you forget there’s much you don’t know or understand.

Fog confronts you with your ignorance and blindness that you’d like to ignore

“Alright smart guy, now what do you see?”

It’s easy to trust yourself and your strengths, abilities, and experience. It’s easy to trust what you know.

It’s easy to walk in the light, when everything as far as you can see is illuminated.

Fog forces faith

I’m thankful.

How to be rescued

 

for they were too mighty for me -- Psalm 18.17

You have to know you need it

Let yourself exhale in the hopeless place. Feel it. Admit it.

Be hopeless and desperate and convinced there's only one person who can help.

Of course, you’d also leave to God the timing of it, and for what rescue looks like. You might have to stare at it before you realize that's it.

The biggest hold-up to experiencing God’s rescue?

It's something that’s good and honorable and SO hard to let go of:

A flicker of hope that somehow you can work things out

If you have that flicker of hope, you don't need rescued. Yet.

The end of scary hope

For the moment, this is all I have to say about scary hope. I think this is the 42nd post, so we went a bit beyond the 31 Days of idea.

A Scary Hope eBook is coming soon, for free. Everything here (plus more) will be compiled for convenient reading, and for easy sharing with anyone you know who needs courage and a kick to embrace hope, face fear, and get going.

You can start at the beginning of the series, and see an index of all the posts HERE.

The purpose of this blog is to encourage you to see hope where you are now, and to not be ruled by how things look and feel at the moment. I want to help you (and me) see that each moment is a step on a journey, part of a bigger thing than we can imagine. Lets try to connect the dots between the feelings and confusion of now, and that bigger thing. That purpose continues beyond Scary Hope.

To subscribe to receive each new post for free, click HERE.

Thanks so much for reading. If you have any feedback, suggestions, or comments, you can email me at gary-at-newlife-nine-one-nine-dot-com.

A little story of misplaced hope

Enter Marilynn’s doll studio and right away you see it’s bright, clean and orderly, with built-in cubbyholes, shelves, and drawers for doll and clothing parts. No chaos or confusion.

A few dozen beautiful dolls are displayed along one wall. Each with it’s own personality, dress, and story to tell.

On a workbench lie several dolls in various stages of construction. A few heads, some arms, a torso. Scraps of fabric. A bit of construction debris. If you’ve survived any home remodeling, you know how destructive things get before they improve. This little spot is like that.

That’s when you hear the praying

Urgent, wailing prayer.

The dolls on the workbench are convinced their future is hopeless and out of control. How can anything good ever come of this? Arms! Legs! Heads! Oh the humanity! They cry in prayer, desperate for relief from their predicament.

Marilynn enters, and the praying intensifies. You catch scattered phrases: “Oh no!…Please, Oh Lord, build a hedge of protection!…Rebuke the devil!…NOT THE SCISSORS!”

They don’t realize Marilynn is working to fulfill their deepest longings

And even their longings are created by her.

She treats every doll as a beloved individual. She has a personal plan for each, and prays over each one as she works and creates. Each finished doll is one-of-a-kind, with it’s own personality and mission. To Marilynn, every doll is like her own child.

The workbench dolls see only the present.

They see the gorgeous, unique dolls on display, but don’t make a connection between those dolls and themselves. They don’t realize that each of those dolls was also once in pieces without hope on the workbench.

If only they knew the love and mastery of their creator and designer

If only they knew the hope Marilynn holds in her heart for each one of them, and how nothing will stop her from pursuing that hope.

Well, some things might stop her, or slow her down: sometimes dolls roll off the workbench and hide to avoid the pain and uncertainty. Sometimes they try to resist and save themselves. They try to make Marilynn’s job more difficult; they hope she’ll get frustrated and give up.

Their hope is in relief, in escaping the process.

Their hope is not the same as her hope for their future:

See more of Marilynn’s creations HERE.

-----

To start at the beginning of the 31+ Days of Scary Hope series, click HERE. To subscribe to receive each new post for free, click HERE

I think this is why we spend so much time with TV and the internet

It’s because we have a purpose

We were made to be fruitful, and multiply, and have authority over things in our domain, and to connect with people. You see that in the first couple of chapters of Genesis.

But it’s hard work

Not just physically hard, but emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. It’s work to engage and think. It’s risky to take action, initiate, and not just sit there. It’s risky because it’s unpredictable and might not happen.

And something in us fights the work and the purpose

The thing that happened in the garden – the fall – put into us the urge to disengage and avoid what God made us for, so that we won’t do it.

That urge to disengage and avoid needs a cover to hide behind

TV and the internet (and a million other vagrant amusements and addictions) engage just enough to occupy that part of you that’s designed to pursue your purpose. It feels like something’s happening, but it’s not.

You hear the noise of the engine running, but the car isn’t going anywhere. The noise gives your inner Ferrari an excuse to stay in neutral.

When I read The Gulag Archipelago, I kept wondering why the Russians went to the effort of mock trials and verdicts. Why didn’t they ship their enemies off to labor camps to start with and avoid all the trouble of rigging and manufacturing evidence?

It was to give the people a reason to believe the lie.

The Russians knew that only a small excuse is needed to kick in our default setting of disengaging and avoiding: “See, they had a trial – it was fair…”

Your purpose, hope, and calling require engagement and action

Engagement and action are looking for an excuse to cool it

Vagrant amusements love to derail engagement and action

Just as alcohol is risky for an alcoholic, so too much TV, the internet, books, food, shopping, sports, music, travel, and etc. are risky to hope.

They deaden hope and muffle its voice

Took me three days to write this. Again, talking to myself.

-----

Thanks for reading. A Scary Hope eBook is coming, probably by Christmas, unless I get sidetracked by vagrant amusements. To start at the beginning of the series, click HERE. To subscribe to receive each new post for free, click HERE.

Confession

This whole 31+ days of Scary Hope series that I can’t stop?

I’d like to say it’s “by popular demand” but it’s really by my own internal demand.

I probably should have told you I’ve been talking to myself all along. Hope that's OK.

The coolest quote ever on hope

“He did see it. That’s why it’s here.”

-- response to the comment, “Too bad Walt Disney didn’t live to see all this,” made on the day Walt Disney World opened, five years after Disney’s death.

A pep talk from one who made it out of the wilderness of hope

I can’t talk about my years in the wilderness, my persistent hope despite long odds, and then breaking through into something resembling fulfillment.

Well, I CAN talk about the wilderness part, but not the rest, because I’m still in the wilderness, which is pretty neat since that’s often the best part of the story anyway; and once you’re out, that part of the story ends.

Steven Pressfield, however, can talk about the whole arc of hope.

The wilderness comes first

Pressfield hoped for 17 years before earning a paycheck, and then ended up a novelist, screenwriter, and an author of historical fiction (some of which even serves as curriculum for soldiers).

Let’s let him tell his own story of his wilderness. Substitute your specific hope for his of writing:

When I was struggling to teach myself how to write, I was so far gone that the idea of choice never entered the equation. The question wasn’t, Does this make sense? Am I getting anywhere?

The question was, “Am I out of my mind? How much farther down is this road gonna take me?”

From time to time I’d make a stab at returning to reality. I’d get a real job. I’d work hard, I’d make friends, sometimes I even had a girlfriend. But I could never stick. I had to write. All through this time, I was estranged from my family.

My Dad could make no sense of the choices I had made; I broke his heart. I had long ago driven my wife away. My mother thought I was crazy.

What mainstream friends I had were on my side, but, on the rare occasions when I saw them, they regarded me partly with pity, partly with puzzlement, but mainly with that look that people get when they’re afraid they’re standing too close to something contagious

The wilderness is called that for a reason; all hope seems lost 

Your particular wilderness, of course, looks different from his. But if you have any passionate attachment or commitment to your hope, you probably can relate. Pressfield says he felt he was crazy, he had no reason to hope, and even his mother ignored him. 

Sometimes in a city at night I would walk past a ballet studio and look up at the dancers hard at work. I envied them. They had each other, they had a troupe, a class. I envied actors who had rep groups and theaters.

I had nobody. Not a soul who believed in me or thought I wasn’t crazy.

What keeps a person going? As I write this, I’m aware that there are people reading who know exactly what I’m talking about. Young painters and film-makers and novelists who are in that exact same place. Lemme say this to you:

Don’t quit. Bleed from your eyeballs if you have to, but don’t stop.

What kept me going was the same thing that kept those dancers working at the barre. I just loved it. Even when the work was garbage, which was 99.9% of the time, I had to keep trying—and if you’re trying now, God bless you. Keep hammering. If you have a choice,

Pressfield tells the story of a painter friend who “beat her brains out to get better” but didn’t. She kept painting these little paintings that weren’t any good. A year later he caught up with her and her work was suddenly spectacular. No one knew what had happened, but she broke though and “found her gift.”

What if the depth of your wilderness was equal to the depth of the coming fulfillment of your hope?

Makes it feel a little different, eh?

Pressfield’s words for you and me, looking back at us from outside the wilderness:

“Don’t quit.

Keep slugging.

It takes time.

There’s a price.

Keep hammering.”

-----

Thanks for reading! A Scary Hope eBook is coming, probably by Christmas. It will contain much of what you’ve read here during the 31+ Days of Scary Hope : encouragement to go from IS to COULD BE, plus several additional chapters. To start at the beginning of the series, click HERE. To subscribe to receive each new post for free, click HERE.