Can't drink enough coffee

I'm having one of those mornings when I can't seem to drink enough coffee. My mind feels groggy and my body slow. I keep pumping caffeine in hopes that more synapses will connect. (Which means this probably isn't a great time to be blogging to the world. Who knows what I might end up writing!?)

Memorized Scripture works a similar sort of wonder on the synapses of my soul. Memorizing Bible passages doesn't come easy to me and my personal catalog of mentally accessible Scripture remains painfully thin. However, I can't deny the effect that Scriptural java has on my being. When my soul is groggy, confused or fearful, pumping Colossians 3 or Hebrews 12 (my java du jour) into the veins of my spirit has a way of bringing me to life. Drawing from memorized passages like these (passages, more than just singular random verses) quickens me to another reality in a way that just reading them from the Book does not. Routinely drinking in old favorites like Psalm 23 and the Lord's Prayer feeds my dependence on the Jesus life.

Here's to waking up and smelling the coffee! (My deepest apologies to all you tea drinkers out there...)

Spiritual formation looks like this

Here's the video we showed in worship last Sunday.
(Click here: God's Chisel)

How is this like or unlike what you experience in relationship with God?

Why it hurts

I just got back from Makenzie Stocker's funeral... it's funny how that word "funeral" sticks on my fingers as I type. The service was more of a worship event than it was like any sort of "funeral" I've been to before.

For those who don't know, Makenzie Stocker was a promising young ballerina (18 years old) who died in a car accident last Wednesday night. (She's the granddaughter of our choir director and the daughter of a new and dear friend to me personally.) More than a promising dancer, however, Kenzie was a beautiful daughter of God and unashamed follower of Jesus Christ.

One of the things that struck me today (in addition to the hundreds upon hundreds that attended the service) was a quote shared by one of Makenzie's teachers during his 'remembrance.' It's from C.S. Lewis' Four Loves:

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

One of the things that troubles me at funerals is all of the curious platitudes we slip off to one another in an effort to avoid the brokenness of our hearts. And then we don't stop at that - we start putting the same words on the lips of God such that he becomes a sort of numb and distant deity who doesn't really have a clue about what life down here is like.

Nothing could be farther than the truth.

I'm glad that the same creator and sustainer of the universe of which Paul speaks in Colossians 1:15-20 is the same One who joins the uncontrollable sobbing outside the tomb of his friend Lazarus (John 11). Ours is a God who loves and in doing so has become vulnerable.

Perhaps in our effort to "get over" grief and help others do the same, we race past a God who would weep along with us in the brokenness of his own heart?

Thanks Lutheran South Academy teacher, whoever you were, for allowing me permission to stand in the mess of my grief and in doing so to be met by God.