Waiting in the Wilderness

As I write this article, I am sitting next to my two year old daughter who is battling a case of pneumonia. Over the past two years, Katie and I have been like nomads roaming a dry and arid land in search of water. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, we have been circling in the desert and struggling to depend upon manna for the day. Every time we store manna for tomorrow, it becomes infested with maggots; the Lord has taught us that lesson much lately. Living upon our "daily bread" (Matt. 6:11) has been testing as both Katie and I love certainties. Through Karis' illness, however, God has shown us that the only thing certain is his presence and promise. Specifically, he has said he will always be present with us (Matt. 28:20) and he has promised to work all things for our good (Rom. 8:28). Although God will ultimately bring his presence and our good to fruition in its fullest sense, he in the meantime calls us to wait in the desert. We must wander in the wilderness before he brings us to the promised land.

Waiting in the wilderness is not easy. Our American culture of convenience and consumerism suggests that if we are uncomfortable or even miserable that there is something wrong. And yet, the hallmark of the Christ story and our story is that of suffering. When Karis was first diagnosed, Katie and I cried and stopped eating for two days. I distinctly remember looking her in the eye and I said, "We can't keep this up." She nodded in agreement and replied, "We can't live like this." In fifteen minutes, she was giving Karis a bath in the back of our one bedroom apartment with her mother and singing to her as if nothing had changed. At that juncture, we both began coping with Karis' disease in different ways. Katie, to her own confession, dealt mainly through denial. However, I will focus on myself here as I must admit that Katie has not retreated from the wilderness like I have. She is an example of child-like expectation and faith that has humbled me to the point of tears. The way I have dealt with Krabbe has been through despair. I am an overly analytic thinker as it is so I tend to project the worst case scenario in any event. A wheeze is pneumonia. A seizure is a sign of brain loss and further disease progression. An increase in medication is a surrender to the possibility of her not being healed. Since all of these disaster scenarios are too difficult for me to confront emotionally, rather than taking my hurting heart to the Lord, I numb myself through escapism, abstraction, obsession. Each of these defense mechanisms I will describe briefly as each proceeding one is less and less effective at distancing from my emotions.

Escapism keeps me the furthest from my emotions because in escapism I retreat mentally. I do this through food. I do this through books. I do this through movies. I do this through video games. The difficulty lies in the fact that these things in themselves are not bad but when they are surrogates for going to the Lord with your feelings they become addictions and idols. Eventually, I have to leave my alternate reality of pleasure (created through food, books, movies or videogames) and confront the reality of suffering. Not thinking about pain only works for so long. Soon, I have to start thinking and so I retreat by thinking in a distancting kind of way.

Therefore, through abstraction, I withdraw from the pain of the situation by speaking of Karis in detatched language. I can talk in a cerebral way about medications, research, and the nature of the disease. More than that I abstract about how I am doing with the Lord. I have a mind that has a proclivity towards conceptual thinking so I will say all the appropriate theological things: "The Lord is sovereign" or "The Lord can heal." What's worse is I will even abstract about things that pertain to the heart but that I have not practiced with my heart and actions. I can say, "God has taught me that I can be honest with my emotions before him and come messy before him" and yet I haven't done that in two years or longer. I am a hypocrite and I repent.

The final way I retreat from my feelings of despair is through obsession. This mechanism is the least effective and has me the closest to having to confront my emotions over Karis. Since I feel scared, sad, and uncertain about Karis and I have no control over her life, I project those emotions into obsessional fears onto myself. What if I have cancer? What if I die in my sleep? What if I go crazy? Every heart palpitation becomes a heart attack. Every headache a brain tumor. Every racing thought a sign of insanity. All of these irrational fears are my mind's way of taking the fears I have of Karis' life being uncertain and place them on myself. In other words, since I can't control Karis' life nor my feelings over Karis' life being in danger, I, like the unbelieving Israelites in the wilderness, begin circling and circling again and again in my mind with obsessive fears. I obsess over dangers concerning myself because those are things I can control with compulsive thoughts or behaviors whereas Karis is a person who is not under my control.

Eventually, once God removes my escapes, he demonstrates that these obsessive fears are but shrubs and I am in a desert, exposed and naked before him, I begin to feel again. I feel disappointed and angry at God. I feel hurt by God's providence of Karis' sickness. Yet, by being plucked out of my hiding place, I am in the wilderness again. Ironically, when we are in the wilderness is when we are nearest to God for the Holy Spirit led Christ and leads us up into the wilderness (cf. Matt. 4). When we discard our hideouts, we must face our despair. The paradox of the Christian life lies in that we must despair in order to hope. We must be real with our emotions before the God of our emotions can give us his peace. In other words, we must go through the desert if we are to reach the oasis; the Israelites did not reach the promised land without the wilderness.

Stay in the wilderness, my friends. I dedicate this article to my wife who, through humble faith has remained in the desert and taught me what it means to look to the promise.

Basking in the Presence of Christ

Lately, I've been growing a lot in my experience of Christ and his blessings. I've felt the Lord working holiness in my life more than ever before. Paradoxically, I've also felt less holy. In view of our ongoing struggles with our oldest daughter (which you can read about here: ), I have become aware that I have been hiding from the presence of the Lord and supressing my emotions towards him. Consequently, I had felt more of a distance from him over the last couple of years. In God's good providence, he reminded me again of my utter helplessness and of the ways we avoid coming to Jesus with our hearts, especially our hurting hearts. In the following post, I will provide two extreme behaviors we as believers often engage in in order to avoid the person of Jesus. While the behaviors may seem to be completely antithetical to one another, they really have the same goal: distancing us from our savior.

Busyness
How much of our lives are characterized by a mission-oriented, goal-directed, task-focused kind of mentality? In the wake of consumerism and capitalism, we have turned the Protestant work ethic which we inherited from our Puritan forebearers into a kind of workaholic disposition. How do we imagine to experience the presence of Christ if we are continuously distracting ourselves with more projects? Often, we busy ourselves to avoid what the misery that silence brings, the onslaught of what C.S. Lewis called, "the Kingdom of Noise." We are too uncomfortable with ourselves in solitude and so therefore we lack true fellowship with the divine Son of God. Abandoning our work and experiencing Christ's presence is awkward, difficult, and troublesome to our consciences which are crowded with a thousand voices. When it seems as if the White Witch of Narnia has cursed our hearts with a perpetual winter, if we would but seek silence in the Lord, we might, like Edmund, finally hear the other noise properly: the running water of Spring. Instead of turning to returning phone calls for business, staying late in the office, mopping the floors, cutting the grass, raking the yard, we would be better to seek the uncomfortable quiet and authenticity of being before the Lord. Such an experience requires that we admit our vulnerability and helplessness though.

Bailing
If busyness tends to be the sinful proclivity of the Type A personality, bailing is the sinful proclivity of the Type B personality. By bailing, I am referring to escapism. There are many ways we can bail in today's modern world: e-mail, I-Phones, I-Pods, video games, e-books, actual books (a bygone relic), and the internet (more specifically for many: pornography). But really any of God's gifts can be turned into a form of bailing if we are avoiding an authentic, prayerful connection with Jesus. And this form of escapism that I have just mentioned is a more base or convenient kind of bailing. There is a more refined and subtle for which takes primarily in the mind and I call this abstraction. Abstraction is when we detach from the external world and live a life that is entirely in the intellect and world of ideas. Seminary students are excellent at this. I am excellent at this. I can get so attached and obsessed to an idea that I will neglect responsibilities God has placed right in front of me. More importantly, I can idolize my ideas so much (even my ideas about God) that I, ironically move further away from God and not closer to him. I place God in my theological categories and therefore I can harden and distance my heart from him over the real pain I experience over the sickness of Karis. Abstractions are safe. Suffering is not. I feel shame and hurt even writing this but I must repent.

Basking
If we are not to busy ourselves and if we are not to bail, then how do we relate to Christ? How do you relate to a friend? Do you treat that friend like a mission to be accomplished? Do you say, "Let's go to the park so I can check that off my list"? Do you bail from that friend by putting him in an abstract category (hipster, jock, intellectual, leader, etc.) that allows you to pigeonhold him but prevents you from appreciating him in all his variety and versatility? Jesus is not an assignment and he is not an abstraction. He is a Person. May we by God's grace get to know him.

Sunday Reflections on the Gospel in Karis and Kales

I woke up early to a little seven month old bouncing on my chest wanting to play. Thus, I thought I'd write a short list of things I have observed in my children about the gospel. As my readership should know, I have two children: Karis and Kales. Karis is two years old and disabled with a leukodystrophy called Krabbe and Kales is not. Watching both of them, I have learned much about what it means to be a child of God through the gospel. Through Karis' helplessness, I have discovered what it means to be absolutely dependent upon God. Through Kales' playfulness, I have recognized the need to be child-like in my pursuit of God in Christ again. Reflect upon these truths with me this Sunday morning:

5 Lessons of the Gospel I Have Learned through Karis

1. She needs to be fed directly from us just as we must be fed directly from the Father.
2. She cannot bathe herself just as we cannot wash away our own "dirt."
3. She moans when she wants her Daddy to just hold her.
4. She has to be carried and cannot move on her own.
5. She loves to hear Daddy's voice.

5 Lessons of the Gospel I have Learned through Kales

1. She is curious about God's world.
2. She wants to play with her Daddy.
3. She cries out for her Daddy even just to get his attention.
4. She babbles without shame to her Daddy.
5. She laughs when her Daddy calls her by name.

In closing, my new schedule for updating Goldfish in Winter will be three times a week. Please leave a comment if you are a regular reader. It would be helpful to know who those are.

Injustice in the Inbetween: No Country for Old Men as Morality Narrative

While this is a film that has been out for three years, No Country For Old Men (based on the book by Cormac Mccarthy) still serves as a gritty depiction of human nature and the existence of evil. Playing out like Old Testament narrative, the movie unfolds in rural Texas with a drug exchange gone awry as welder and hunter Llewelyn Moss stumbles upon the remains and decides to take the abandoned two million dollars for himself. As a result, Moss is pursued across desert and asphalt all the way into Mexico by Anton Chigurh, an indifferent yet relentless serial killer. The investigation is overseen by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who grapples with the depravity that such a case reveals.

No Country For Old Men is difficult to watch. It is essentially two hours of violence and misery that ends with little resolution or hope. And yet it is one of the most thought-provoking films I have watched and has haunted me with its themes long after the final credits rolled. Like other works by the Coen brothers, it is at once a film about good and evil, justice and injustice, moral dilemma, and ethics.

I mention it here because I think No Country For Old Men represents the dividing line for two different Christian approaches to the arts. Some believers want art to express how the world should be. In general, people operating from this worldview see art (whether it be film, literature, music or whatever) to be explicitly evangelistic or moralistic. What constitutes a good film is one that represents life in sinless fashion.

The other view and the view that I think a Reformed world-in-life view and the Bible itself (as the supreme model of art) supports is the position that art expresses how the world is. The world is a dangerous place filled with violence and men of hatred. Evil at times prospers; wickedness goes unpunished. There is not resolution to every conflict in this present age. Such tension between the fact that the innocent suffer and God is just must cause us to cry out with Job: "It is all one; therefore I say, He destroys both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; he covers the faces of its judges--if it is not he, who then is it (9:24)?"

Examining Job's remarks, we can first note that he acknowledges that both the righteous and wicked suffer. Though the film primarily displays the innocence suffering violence, it also shows both the natural consequences of sin and the natural calamity that is bestowed on the wicked. In the case of the former, Llewelyn Moss succumbs to greed by taking the drug money; although he has good motives, his avarice draws him into a path of viciousness and eventually death. With regards to the wicked suffering, Anton Chigurh is involved in a horrific automobile accident. In short, the movie's theodicy, or attempt to resolve how God can be good and suffering still exist, is complex and I believe captures the paradox of good and evil, rewards and consequences in the here-and-now that the Bible espouses.

While there is complexity to the why of human suffering, there is simplicity to the who of human suffering. Job's question is pithy. God rules and reigns over all events no matter how seemingly random. The implication of Job's inquiry is that the only antithesis to God governing all human evil, even evil that befalls the innocent, is chaos. For the majority of No Country for Old Men chaos seems to rule. The entire film is earthy, external, and visceral except for one small, well-paced concluding scene. At the end of the movie, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is describing a dream he had of following a man on horseback through snow, night, and mountains, guided only by a chamber of light. The dream concludes with the Sheriff sitting by a campfire and being blanketed by the father-esque figure who had been leading him through the night. Upon this juncture, the film abruptly ends. Although some may accuse the Coen brothers of a deus ex machina by inserting a dream sequence in the end, I disagree. I think that the transcendent, visionary tone of the dream narration juxtaposes well with the raw, chaotic atmosphere of what precedes it. Besides, deus ex machinas resolve the conflict of the film. The dream does not resolve the conflict. The loss is still real and unchanged but the dream foreshadows a world when the righteous will be rewarded and the wicked punished. Thus, the nightmare of this existence will be replaced by a dream, but a dream that is reality. Good art stimulates this transcedent longing without minimizing the presence of pain, violence, and evil. In this sense, No Country for Old Men is as true of a film as there is. Our response as the church, should be that of Jeremiah: "Why does the way of the wicked prosper?" Until that day when final resolution arrives, we should not presume to know the mysterious providence of God.