The clock has moved, the room is silent but your mind is in the same noisy place where noon became midnight and all of your regrets clung to you with magnetic intrusiveness. In the space where last week is now this week and yesterday is now today, you labor to undo today’s problems, focused on yesterday. It’s where what might work but hasn’t yet been tried, faces what will work but won’t be tried because yesterday’s misery has taken precedence over the hopes of today. Daily solutions are suspended in frustration, filled with new possibilities while regret turns heads back to the space where counterclockwise movement has highjacked sensibility. It’s the place where sadness lingers in search of perpetual replay. In a place of impossible reconciliation, constantly regurgitated obsessions conjure hypothetical resolutions to problems already solved by time. The clock has moved and there you are, behind the imaginary hands of self-imposed stagnation. In a desperate attempt to live in a space where life can never be lived again; a place where “if” dominates “what now”? But “if” is a selfish fantasy, rooted in retrospect and retrospect is dead; a marker, a tombstone inscribed with lessons learned revealing your map to today. Now is all there is. If you miss now, you can never come back to it but you still have now. As long as there’s now, there’s hope.

Don’t waste your time swinging at a pitch that was thrown yesterday!

“Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

The grip of logic closes hard on dreams and possibilities, pouring cold-hard facts on optimism and draining the flow of believability out of all that’s spiritual. Logic’s grip, tightening in strangulation over creativity, claiming truth and redefining order to reward itself for intellect, it terminates the dream with a series of factual dots and dashes and mathematical formulas. Logic’s grip is not an embrace. It’s the strangling choke-hold of learned containment, masked in regimented prerecorded sequences. It’s the formula that always worked before for the same result. The Master’s degree in the very same boredom that drives a genius to depression. It’s the get-rich scheme that gets people rich but leaves them poorly spirited. The emptiness that pushes someone to the edge of themselves where, logically, they’ve been programmed to conclude that, to be in such a state, is undeniable evidence that there could be no such thing as God. And even if there is a God, there’s certainly no Jesus, no forgiveness and no salvation . That’s just not logical.

Logic says we’re just spirits passing through time. Ignited by a giant collision; created and re-created, we live, die and repeat until we learn the ways of perfection. Or we simply live and die: game over! Is this the logic we’ve learned?

So, logic teaches us that we should believe.
Believe in ourselves – Believe in the tea leaves, the inherent goodness of humanity, the rhythms of the universe.
We focus on our happiness – Smiles and laughter, fun and relaxation, companionship and affiliations.
We rely on our talents – Competing and comparing, absorbing and obsessing, bragging and stressing. And if we never get past our inward focus, we will always get what we always got because it is the logical progression of our linear intellect.

But belief is not the equivalent of faith and happiness doesn’t equal joy and a talent is not a calling. When belief wavers and happiness abandons and talent fades, those who have true faith in God are never stifled. They are joyously covered in the sanctity of their calling. Giving themselves away, they are shielded from the disappointment of logic’s letdown; sheltered from the fallacy of the ordinary, posing as the disciplined. Understanding that their power and authority comes from the Almighty, they are free to live the extraordinary life God has already provided for them. Free to step, full-stride into fulfillment; to compose the song that only they can write, while others grip and grapple for logic and self motivation, in the limitations of what they’ve learned to believe.

“Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” Ephesians 3:20-21 (NKJV)

Photo credit to Glen Noble

Broken, in the weakness of submission, my body torments me in opposition to this denial of principles. I’ve surrendered, but a constant reminder rings dissonant songs of my imperfections, reducing my vulnerability into the humility of mere silence. An isolated silence in waiting for the voice of righteous sustenance that hovers below audibility within the caverns of my inner sanctum. Echoes of a muted judgment reverberate the acceptance of my emptiness. In guilty acquiescence I wait to be filled; commitment calling deeper still to ignore the spasms of my shameless cravings. I sit impatiently at God’s table knowing that my feast will be determined by my willingness to hunger; my purpose purified in the process. And as this course meanders slowly down roads of limited discipline, flashes of gluttonous excess demand my surrender to repentance. Weakness shepherds my brokenness but my ears fill with thunderous sounds of fulfillment. In a heavenly burst of personal quiet God speaks to me just slightly above the level of my shrinking distractions and He reveals Himself to me squarely between His will for my life and the sin that so easily entangles me. Dominating my concentration, He captures my consciousness with the reminder that my faith is my righteousness and everywhere I find myself lacking, He fills the cold and desolate spaces with the warmth and fullness of His love. The pangs of my selfish yearnings disappear behind the vastness of His comfort. Slowly, I hunger for much more than bread, but now my desire is magnified to prolong the rewards of this denial: the very voice of God. Words of destiny overwhelm me, raw and uncomplicated; uninterpreted yet understood; separated beyond the mental grasp of language, He speaks to my heart with swords of ruthless clarity. In thunderous declarations He challenges my choices with the rewards of obedience. He reveals a beautifully unimaginable garden, visible through a path of holiness called, His Will. Unapproachable without Him, it’s guarded by the jagged tools of His righteous pruning. Trimming folly from my prolonged celebration of childishness and scheduling appointments to table my unending procrastinations, He portions my understanding to the speed of my acceptance and demands a slow, painstaking pace. The slow grind of progress is governed by my capacity to follow and every errant thought is accompanied by the sting of discipline’s sharp edges, then immediately rewarded with the graciousness of His fellowship. He holds nothing against me and He holds no good thing from me.

There, even in the apprehension of my submission, God ordered my steps through the fear of my limited endurance. There in the weakness of deprivation I was buried and rose again in a symbolic resurrection of the man God knew before He formed me in the womb. There on the edge of my endurance I saw and heard God and stood in defiance to delirium. And in an ironic twist He caused me to understand that hungering for Him, knowing Him, is all that matters.

“That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death;” Philippians 3:10 (NKJV)

About 100 days ago I went Facebook silent. In other words, I haven’t spoken to or read anything from Facebook since the beginning of the year (so if anyone received a friend request from me during that time, it wasn’t really me). I must admit that the silence originally had more to do with exorcising other people’s demons from my life than my own but I cleverly wrapped my intensions into a period of yearly fasting designed by my church. I gave up several things all at one time; some dietary, some social, and for the most part I went easy on myself, but at the end of the scheduled 21 days of fasting, God identified social media as the idol that I was most wastefully abusing.

As I approached the end of my initial commitment the anticipation of burgers and barbecue seemed a trivial reward; unnecessary fanfare for a moderate sacrifice with little purpose; an over dramatization of half-hearted surrender and nothing that moderation would not have rendered irrelevant. To resume my former diet at the same undisciplined pace would have had little to do with sacrifice, rather it would have been a blatant disregard for physical laws that would ultimately lead to a day of reckoning just beyond my immediate horizon. I got that part! But God insisted that 21 days was not enough time away from unregulated passive social interaction for me to understand how much this intrusive medium interfered with potential quiet time and potential personal conversations; how it allowed for irresponsible commenting and merciless piling on; how it allowed passive aggressive messaging through misdirection and silence. So He demanded more time with me in order to highlight how wrong my approach was to its use.

With an emphasis on peace He exposed every rabbit hole social media had opened and pinpointed my every failure to avoid going down them. The fresh feeling of disconnection was the liberating shower I needed to give me a better view of my own entanglement. It freed me, temporarily, from the constant bombardment of dissatisfaction wrapped in disappointment fed by mistreatment, misunderstanding and rage I regularly consumed. It released me from the subtle pull of social cheering and protests and the ups and downs of monitoring world temperament in search of agreement, or looking for a fight. Undoing the tentacles of random outside noise God identified each voice as a human with a need for contact, and He held me there to raise a basic question about whether I was hearing the voice or adding to the noise. Then He sent me a friend request! My freedom from entanglement short-lived, He wrapped me in a purpose beyond expressing my own brand of alternating celebration and sour grapes, bragging and whining. He acknowledged the brokenness and called me out along with everyone who uses His name to identify themselves as a “good person”. Not to get them off Facebook, not to avoid angry despondent people, not to beat them over the head with personal wrath disguised as God’s wrath, but to hear the voices of the broken and to respond as if God were a Facebook friend who regularly read your posts (because He does you know).

A lot has taken place in this hundred days and I return to Facebook with a sense of caution and respect. I have probably missed out on many people’s life experiences, both good and bad, and I offer my congratulations and condolences, my thank yous and apologies to anyone who may have felt ignored or slighted but forgive me if I don’t try to catch up. My absence has clarified, for me, the level God will go to infuse Himself into every aspect of our lives. Being absent gave me 100 days to calibrate my focus on Him and it released me from the round-the-clock drama percolating in the world. I gave God the first 100 days He’s given me this year and He honored them with 100 days of peace, vision, and confirmation. 100 days off Facebook is not the cure for the chasm between God and man it’s just a symbolic cure God used to make me aware that I was distracted.

“Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!” Psalm 46:10 (NKJV)

Photo credit to Jesse Gardner

Wedged between the exit door and the sweaty distended flesh of a severely overweight seat mate, in an overcrowded airplane with air conditioning faintly puffing out soft warm air bursts in a gratuitous gesture of courtesy, but fresh out of cool air, I found my generosity slipping out of reach along with the seatbelt that seemed miles away from my restricted stretch-capability and far too deeply buried beneath bellies and butts to recover. In that brief moment when an additional half of a swollen body spilled over into my seat from the adjacent seat before I could pull down the armrest guillotine to prevent the discomfort and loss of circulation I foresaw as I peered sheepishly over my electronic magazine, I felt disgust at my unsuccessful attempt to wave off unwanted company with the “glance and look away” move I had perfected on so many other flights. From the moment the extra seat belt extension clicked shut, locking us both into the same space like reverse Siamese twins; born separately but adjoined against our will in adulthood, through a botched surgical experiment, I knew we’d prove incompatible at some point and I envisioned an hour-long slap fight all the way back to Atlanta (but at least, I figured, I’d have my right hand to slap with if I was able to move it). The flight attendant surrendered a glance over to see if my seatbelt was on and sighed in empathy and with an almost tearful look she symbolically excused my violation of all aviation protocols with a nod and a genuflect-like motion; wishing me well and praying the extra weight wouldn’t complicate the plane’s ballast at the same time. She either gave me a pass or gave up trying to see past the mounds of gelatinous flesh to verify my safety. I’m sure she instinctively knew, I wasn’t safe.
Not long after we reached optimum altitude my personal space war expanded from another front as the over-exhausted 90-pounder in front of me pressed to maximize the comfort in her economy comfort seat, closing in the only real free space in my shrinking sovereignty and crushing my extended knees in the process. Her short legs couldn’t have possibly needed stretching and I was sure the 2.5 inches she was able to recline was only designed to discourage tall people from flying and not to make short people more comfortable; in fact it would probably leave her with neck cramps and ultimately a bill for chiropractic services. My passive-aggressive plan of attack on both fronts was to make jerking movements in any direction to get maximum friction and then make loud grunting sounds to call attention to the fact that their selfish need for comfort was becoming a major source of inconvenience for me. If I was going to be uncomfortable, I wasn’t going there alone but as long as I could bare the restriction I was determined to grunt and grind until the friction blew the lid off my manners.

I slipped into a temporary dream-state, possibly through a lack of oxygen but it wasn’t long before the need to adjust left me motionless, overheated and awake against my will for the remainder of the flight. Something was bound to set this potential confrontation into full-contact karate if I couldn’t soon stretch my cramping extremities. Fortunately the duration of my flight was long enough for me to contemplate the inconvenience of generosity and it may seem like a crazy metaphor but in the discomfort of my feelings of entitlement I realized my reaction to this situation was in direct conflict with my morning prayer ritual, my morning scripture reading and was not in line with the image of the person I claimed to be. As I contemplated the inconvenience of it all I guess I had imagined there would be a more comfortable time for me to show compassion, patience and self control. I thought everyday kindness was going to be the answer; giving when I saw need and helping people along the way. I thought I was making progress but I really wasn’t. I closed my eyes in a prayer for clarity and when the beef I had turned into lamb I laid down my anger and disgust and in embarrassment I felt the sting of what it must have felt like to be the target of everyone’s indignation. I realized that my signature “glance and look away” move was the same move everyone did to signal that they did not want to be seated next the person seated next to me and the guillotine seat divider was everyone’s rightful defense against the unwanted inconvenience of obesity. As I noticed that she had never actually faced me or looked directly at me I realized that she was used to only being seen as an obstacle to someone else’s comfort; an outlet for justifiable ridicule. Anyone would have agreed that there were hundreds of options she could have chosen earlier in life, to avoid this path to open public scrutiny; none of which were available at that moment; and, of course, there were more than a thousand acceptable prejudices we all pre-concluded about her character. I was quite pleased with myself for not completely going off the deep end as I felt justified to do. After all, I had probably been nicer to the lady sitting next to me than anyone she had previously squeezed into a seat with but the challenging mandate to the prayer I had just prayed was not just being nice; not just feeling sorry for the person but loving them enough to consider what they may be going through. Not exchanging pleasantries but loving them enough not to make the situation worse for them. Not just giving up my entitlement but forgoing it as a matter of humility, for the convenience and comfort of someone else; at the expense of my own. How am I doing with that? It’s not something I can do, but God can and He has, and I’m slightly better for it!

“Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering; bearing with one another, and forgiving one another, if anyone has a complaint against another; even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do. But above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfection.” Colossians 3:12-14 (NKJV)

Photo credit to Patrick Hendry

The church is, by all accounts, the place we meet to fellowship with like minds for the glory of God. People come to lay their burdens down and rest their cares in the support of the faithful and faithfully we support and shelter and pray for one another. Speaking in King James English, in the most noble showing of graciousness and kindness, we are sorrowful for others’ hurts and we confess our sorrow for the wrong things people may have perceived that we’ve done. We fill our Sundays with the passion of Christ for one another and prepare ourselves to be beacons for the world. We’ve saved our best for today; to give to God in public outcry; our love, our hurts, our hearts. It’s our time we set aside to be with God, to think like God, to obey God, to commune with Him. The end of a weary week in which we licked our wounds and begged for mercy and gritted our teeth as we tried, again, to raise our level of righteousness above our level of shame and embarrassment. We dodged the lunging stabs of evil knives and we are actively conspiring to be grateful for it.

And in our euphoric state of relief, we may have skipped over God’s challenges for us and religiously designed our own repetitious weekly survival ritual.

We are His church! The mystery of His spiritual fulfillment’s to be orchestrated by His faithful followers and poured out on the lost and the unfortunate, at all costs. His church was never meant to be just church, at church. It’s not just about escaping the lion’s fangs or the rusted teeth of the unstoppable bulldozer. It’s God’s pep rally; crescendo to a week of sacrifice in which we would have laid it all down if he’d asked us to. We’d have confessed our hearts in public testimony and suffered the abuse of rejection; the ridicule of public exposure, the threat of harm, the mockery of the unmerciful; shot from a cannon at close range into the tenderness of our greatest weaknesses. We’d have given our last crumb to someone in need and prayed for more to give only to have them turn against us and curse our efforts. We’d have suffered the betrayal of those whose closeness would have opened mortal character wounds. We’d have failed miserably at meeting deadlines and accomplishing goals and refocused only to fail again. We’d have gotten laid off or downsized or simply got fired for being faithful and righteous and loving. We’d have lost friends and loved ones to vicious senseless slaughter, lies and jealousy. Suffered raging natural disasters and escaped with a fraction of our lives; deeply wounded, abandoned and forever changed. There may have been no fairness, kindness nor loyalty afforded us in our recent memories and yet we would have fully spent our daily capital and faithfully waited each day to be renewed; holding back nothing for the Sunday finale.
For we know that our suffering produces perseverance; perseverance character; and character, hope.

So, with heads held high, we would have prayed without ceasing!
Understanding that we have been bought with a price!
We’d have put on the whole armor of God and felt the assurance that we could do all things!
We would have been comforted in the knowledge that He would never leave us nor forsake us!
We would have continued to walk by faith and not by sight into the next week!
Knowing that we are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation!
Proclaiming that if God is for us, who can be against us? For we are salt and light!
And though we came to Him weary and heavy laden, we came to celebrate the victory!
We’d step out of yesterday boldly confessing Jesus before men and eager to celebrate Him!

The church God loves begins on Sunday, continues through the week and never ends.
Our church building is the place we go the say “Hallelujah, thine the glory. Revive us again!

“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.” Hebrews 10:23-25 (NKJV)

In the hazy dust bowls of rural culture the phenomenon of the car-chasing, stray dog is the reality of feral cat and domestic dog frenzy. With his unkempt coiffure baring the twisted cowlicks of brutal skirmishes, he stylishly struts and boasts his pristine fight record against all comers, except maybe the car. A mud-slinging man eater, he’s not afraid to mix it up or mash it down; in broad daylight in the mud, or in the alleyways and the gutters at night. He’ll take you on in the ring or in the bushes, heavily armed in full body armor, or buck naked, layered with Vaseline. He thrives on bone-shattering blood-lettings that produce the gritty, blood-tinted drool visibly drizzled across his chalky hacksawed choppers. He bares a wide and taunting grin as if to say, “come on, is that all you got?” He’s a bully and often the physical conflict gives way to the surrender of the fearful, who’d rather be labeled cowards than endure the stench of sweaty close-quarter grappling leading up to an eventual no-win submission, finished with a fresh portion of endless ridicule. Not surprisingly, he fights dirty; filthy and underhanded, in fact. His strategy for winning is always to go low, go for the surprise; whatever it takes to win, and he has beaten every challenger so far, except maybe the car.

The mysterious irritation the car provides is the bane of that dog’s existence. With its shiny wheels flashing like strobe lights, reflecting like fishing lures, the car seems to boast of its speed and flaunt its beauty as it kicks dust in his raging red eyes and it prances just outside of his impatient reach. The intrigue of the droning engine hum and the romantic smell of hot exhaust challenges his instinct to conquer and control. Deep in his heart he’s afraid of that car but he could never resist the triple-dog-dare to go after it.

What if the dog catches the car?

A gaggle of shamed and humbled warriors would observe him in the joyful silence of their blissful egotism gloating at the total unpreparedness of the foolish dog to understand the complexities of the car’s operation. As they’d watch him fumble and flounder to gain control they’d mock his pleas for help while musing at the streaking vehicle’s raw power becoming less and less controllable. They’d laugh, no doubt and make presumptions about hypothetical prayers the dog may have prayed as his life passed before his very eyes and they’d imagine him asking them to risk their lives to save his. “Hummmph! Imagine that”. Where was his compassion when they were being unfairly persecuted? Who came to their rescue?

In the calm satisfaction of their vengeful redemption they’d pause, reflect, contemplate. Maybe they’d help, maybe not but they certainly wouldn’t want to make it easy on him. Making sure they weren’t too quick to the rescue and making sure he didn’t get away clean after all the dirt he’s done, they’d seek the only satisfaction they could gain from this ironic reversal of fortune: they’d make him pay.

Last week in American politics the dog caught the car. It may be funny watching him frantically trying to steer; it may be scary because we know the character of that particular dog very well. We know his alpha dog arrogance could easily tempt him to keep trying to drive without our help. He may sincerely want to drive the car safely and not know how to ask for help. We may be tempted to tune out and let the chips (and the car) fall where they may. We may want to make sure the dog gets what we think he deserves but I hope we don’t wait too long before we realize, that’s “our” car and we’re all in the car with him.

“Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” 1 Timothy 2:1 (NKJV)

We go high when our steps are ordered by the Word, to resist the depths of low situations; our feet never meant to tread upon the darkness of dangerous paths alone. When weighted burdens drag us through the treachery of merciless thickets and recklessness summons us into the deadly subterfuge of skillfully baited traps, He gives us wings. When rivers rise to subdue the purity of good intensions and barbarous predators stalk the secret paths of the innocent to spill their blood for sport we go high for Him and He protects us with the sword of the Spirit. When foolish trust is compromised and the security of our shaken spirits has been decimated; even in our utter disgust, we’re lifted as we go high. We go high when the ordinances of fair play lay buried beneath the coded literacy of limited opportunity and true intensions rage behind the temporary suppression of vitriol wrapped in satiny smiles and He clothes us in discernment. When the train to safety whizzes by and never makes a stop at our depot of optimism, we stretch out our arms to Jesus, the author of optimism and again, we go high.

We go high in the fullness of the mission before us, avoiding the temptation for self pity and the ineffectiveness evoked through idle minds and hands. Battling a culture of interrelated mistreatment and a common theme of disappointment we choose to bypass the misery of betrayal and rise to the culture of the King as we go high. We go high as we stare into the fear of uncertainty and He reminds us that He is the personification of a certainty and the antithesis of fear. When long-suffering wears through the tender endurance of battered enthusiasm, we are quenched by the power of His Word as we go yet higher.

When the world goes low the vortex of negativity threatens to engulf the stability of human orderliness. Fear flows like water, meandering its way through openings in search of the weakest point of resistance but God’s order is never unstable. God is faithful and faithfulness in God will take us to the heights of our ability to commit to Him as long as we continue to go high. When we go high we never stop working, we never stop praying, we never stop loving and we never forget how to avoid the thing that tempted us to go low.

So, go high America. Let’s go high. Jesus is the ultimate high and we can never reach Him unless we go high.

“God is not a man, that He should lie,
Nor a son of man, that He should repent.
Has He said, and will He not do?
Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?” Numbers 23:19 (NKJV)

A nation founded on dangerous, unbalanced bits and pieces of the principles of Jesus Christ, finds herself in a spiraling spin at the realization that the cornerstone of her strength was never the full, scriptural cornerstone of the Gospel. The portrait of pilfering pilgrims tattooed on previously claimed property marks the expanses of her covetousness, shadowed by mighty barriers around her hoarded spoils. A skewed representation of a sacred doctrine, repeatedly referenced as founding principles by a nation that gorges herself on the loss and misfortune of the ignorant. She slowly unravels as her underlying intent overlays her mask of mock generosity. Fooling herself into believing that the brand of hatred wrapped in imitation righteousness was crafty enough to conceal the utter fear she has of practicing the faith she claims to be the core of her strength. Claiming that by declaring her position “under God”, she would be glorified after falsifying her authority in the name of Jesus, all-the-while abandoning the principles she pretends only apply to the victims of her upside down justice. A claim that caused her to stake out boundaries of continuous separation and elitist cultural domination and prejudicial personhood devaluation. Out of a fear that giving is losing and that humility is the equivalent of weakness; she orchestrated her own success story, stamped it with a counterfeit seal of righteousness and promptly withheld the virtues for herself. Profiting on loss, she has manufactured complicated systems to camouflage loss potential in order to entice the unsuspecting to sponsor her obsession for gain. Then brandishing God’s promises as a weapon, she shields her own blindspots with self-indulgence and unapologetic justifications. Claiming rights to the top of a mountain she explored for the broad expanses of grace, she ordained herself gatekeeper, highjacked the banner of righteousness and twisted the message of the Gospel to suit her own greedy self validation. She has reduced her brand of Christianity to a label she uses as a shield and has managed to sever the lifeline between the church and the Christ. She has raised her children on self preservation, guttural impulses and perversions; subjected them to idolatry as a means of babysitting; their hearts unnaturally driven to fill the void left by the absence of Christ with short attention-limiting bursts of destructive pleasures; soon to become norms and traditions. Extracting pearls of biblical wisdom, she has been cutting and pasting and repackaging them in the slanted words of envious contradiction. She has become the author of confusion, hypocrisy and turmoil. The broad brush of her misrepresentation supporting the fables of the hateful, the misinterpretations of the doubtful and the nervous miscalculations of the fearful. She is a righteous experiment operating on a stagnant hypothesis, declaring her own success based on her reflection in a magnifying mirror. She is an incomplete theory, assumed perfected. The mightiest of all nations has elevated herself into the judgment seat only to expose herself to the bullseye of God’s judgment.

And now she prays for God to redirect the consequences of her stubborn refusal to yield. With her right hand on the Gospel of Truth she petitions God for an alternate pathway to salvation; an easier way. And after all is said and done America still nervously boasts and trembles in fear from her lack of preparation for the illegitimate pregnancy she is trying to hide. The world watches as her dysfunctional volcano spews the lava of discontent to the corners of the earth.

Americans cannot save America; not by complaining, not by winning wars, not by voting, not by crowning a king. The truth is that God has truly blessed America and God is continually blessing America. With every iteration of growth our belief in our own abilities raises the level of our disobedience to the point we can no longer hear God from the distance we’ve placed between our itchy ears and His Word. Will God continue to bless America? Is she even listening?

Clue:

“if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:14 (NKJV)

Imagine this!

The private sins of every man, thrust upon the frail body of one very peculiar, mischaracterized outcast. He is the exoneration of doomed generations, completed in a single act, performed in the boldness of high definition, thundering in surround sound to the deafness of profound apathy. His sin-laden, sensitive, raw nerve endings exposed to excruciating, pinpoint pain, void of the protection of skin covering, he bled profusely and publicly while the seemingly, more important matters of everyday life bustled in muted ignorance. His exposed dermis tissue pressed against needling abrasive surfaces, drenched in acidic toxicity, twisting and tearing flesh indiscriminately, He agonized to the sensitivity of His own involuntary body movements and the gentle forces of the passing breeze against the exposed lesions of our indiscretions. The rhythmic pummeling forces of constant beating reverberated through His divided concentration, yet He somehow maintained the ability to focus on a posture of constant intercession in our behalf, despite the million points of simultaneous, grueling pain He endured. The weight of His exhausted body separating the tender flesh and bone of His delicate feet and hands in a slow, painful, skin-stretching slide against the jagged edges of rusty spikes. Broken bones and stab wounds inducing short, shallow, convulsing breaths to intensify the pain of even the slightest shift in position, His physical pain multiplied by the weight and strain of the sin He carried. Then, wave after wave of God’s forgiveness and sensitivity cut through generations of secret sin, unrepentant sin and future sin to the core of His purity to bludgeon Him, in brutalizing anguish, with the stains of our imperfections. His perfect life subjected to the open scrutiny of corrupt judges and the vilest cast of unworthy characters for the sake of the cowardly, the foolish, the arrogant: me. He painfully withheld the omnipotence of His authority, considering the mere possibility that even, if only one of us turned toward Him, He would continue in the slow agony of innocent sacrifice.

Picture this!

In return, we continue in arrogance as we symbolically take part in an extension of the crucifixion; spitting in His face, plunging our swords into His side and offering Him the pungent vinegar of doubt and persistent cynicism about the truth of His life and the significance of His story. In the irony of our own hypocrisy we stand boldly on the insecurity of fables, prosecuting the literacy of His truth; often refusing even, to hear (or read of) His case. Expertly tailoring our disbelief to fit the language of our own misunderstanding, we challenge holiness with believable hearsay and inferior intellect, or we ignorantly choose to believe in the frailty of our feelings. Then, in the treachery of fearful times we tremble as we look desperately for miracles we never previously believed in. Instinctively we offer Him our luke warm, wavering, anemic commitment in expectation of an immediate response.

Conceptualize this!

He rejoices in our behalf, stretches forth His hand to us again, understanding the fickle nature of our ability to be truthful, to give or to sustain commitment and He commits Himself to us in a gesture of unmerited favor for the sake of our humility and He meets us right where we are.

Is that a miracle?

“When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,” Psalm 8:3-6 (NKJV)