Living Phoenix

Tag: mercy

  • God Spies With His Little Eye Something Beautiful

    God Spies With His Little Eye Something Beautiful

    Romans 10:11: “As Scripture says, ‘Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame.’”

    What an awful, miserable, journey the death march of grief. To suffer the loss of love is to suffer the pain of death a hundred times a day: with every memory, hope, and dream. To suffer shame in grief, is to suffer the pain of death of the person whom you loved a hundred times a day: with every breath, every thought, every wandering moment. By the time the chaos of the mind slows, you are too far along for denial to protect you any longer. The anger and bargaining oscillate at a lower frequency; simple small electrical discharges in random moments throughout your day. Acceptance has visited you as if in a dream but remains an illusive apparition. Yet, now, there lies an opportunity to be still and to know.

    In those moments, rather than pleading “why”, there is a chance to ask the real questions. Your conversations with God have been raw and exhaustive. You’ve shaken your fist, spit, screamed, cried, begged, praised, worshiped, fallen asleep, and woke up with sun every morning. And each morning his mercies were new. But even then, I had to ask: Can God see me through all of this shame?

    So, I asked him, “God, can you see me through all of this shame?” “Can you even look upon me and recognize me?” I look in the mirror and I see the man that failed. I close my eyes and I witness my mistakes. I feel my emotions and they tell me I am a failure, beyond redemption. I am scared. Scared of what it is hard to say: loss, never having my person again, repeated failure, my reputation, my legacy…I’m scared that I am unredeemable. As I closed my eyes and shared my fears with God, I found myself in a beautiful green valley, surrounded by tall green hills, the fire burning off to the side, neatly maintained, and Jesus standing there with his arms held out. Our place, the safe space he created for me to see him and hear him where my thoughts quiet and my heart is open enough to receive.

    God spoke. “I see you. I see only you. I made you from myself, a reflective piece of my body, innocent the day my spirit conceived of you. I named you before you were born. And it means ‘Bold’. I see a compassionate man, with passion to heal others. I see a love for my creation, a joy in the beauty of nature. I see only the man I created and the purpose I created him for. I cannot look upon your sin. I only see you in truth. Your untruths and your sins were forgiven and redemption was purchased, not earned, but given by my sacrifice. I feel your sadness, I feel your hurt, I feel your grief. But shame- I despised the shame I took upon myself at the cross, and it died with me, and I rose again so that you do not have to carry that burden. Your story is not over. I am the way, the truth, and the light. None of these can be obtained without the other. Follow me in truth and you will live in the light. Joy will fall upon your heart again. My kingdom you will serve. My peace I will give you beyond your own understanding. You serve the one true King and you are a jewel in my crown upon the throne I sit. Get up and start moving, I will be your strength in weakness. I see you.”

    I cannot tell you how real my experience talking to God has been. That what he promised he has continued to fulfill faithfully. I wouldn’t have believed it myself, a once staunch diest who never doubted a creator or believed he was interested in intervening in my life. But as I stood up and moved, he consistently performed miracles in my life. I am still sad. I still hurt. I still grieve. And often I find my mind wandering, accumulating fear, whispering to me how disgusting of a failure I am. So, I return to that valley constantly, and he is always there, reminding me of my true identity.

  • Exploring Our Innocence After Loss

    Exploring Our Innocence After Loss

    I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself up for me. – Galatians 2:20

    The word innocent; it burns my own tongue and lips to utter and sits like a hot knife in the back of my mind. I am not innocent. I know, with all of my heart, that I am a good man. But innocent? No, I lost that long ago- or so, I thought. I have carried by guilt and shame like war trophies around my neck, felt the wrath of human judgement that burns like the fury of hell, and condemned myself to a place of suffering deserved by those who dare to violate the foundation of their moral values. This feels just. It feels deserved. Righteous punishment.

    It is not surprising, then, that hearing God speak to me that I am innocent before him is painful, if anything, and impossible to comprehend. The idea that, perhaps, I never lost my innocence. Indeed, it could be so, as I was born into sin, that I never started at a place of innocence in the first place. I wasn’t born with it, I didn’t earn it, I’ve lost it many times: redemption. As I wrestle with my loss, a great loss due to my own confusing choices, I feel nothing but guilt and shame. Therefore, I wrestle too, with the idea of redeemable innocence. The idea that God redeemed me, that he only sees the real me and not the version of me that operated in falsehood, and upon that redemption is my innocence. I am not inherently innocent, but it is by his redemption that I am free of guilt. That does sound lovely. There is nothing more difficult to make sense of than this concept when you are suffering the loss of your own sin: actions, for which, you are guilty.

    The only way that I might even begin to partially understand this concept of true unconditional love is to step outside the human constraints of time. We see each other from moment to moment. Always looking for confirmation that the person we are most vulnerable to is not who we thought they might be. Easily erasing the true heart and good of a man by summing him up by his mistakes and poor choices. After all, we must protect ourselves first, right? If they could do this now, they could do this 20 years from now. I thought they were good, but they proved me wrong.

    The idea of unconditional love is a reflection of God’s love. He loves who we truly are. That is to say, that he loves the unique person and identity you were born with, delineating between the person who acted in sin and the person that truly exists. He is just to redirect us and remind us of who we are, but he does not recognize us as our sin. He cannot look upon sin, he only sees who we truly are. That is why we say, God never gives up on us. He cannot. This means, we are not only forgiven, we are not only free of guilt and shame, we are innocent. We seem incapable of doing just that for the people we love even the most. And we seem incapable of doing that for ourselves.

    Grief is a game of loss in life. The steaks are literally life or death. So we have to search for the sparks of hope that are whispered between the screams of our tortured souls. One of those whispers that longs to be heard is: That is not how I see you. I see the real you. Redemption is yours and you are innocent not because you paid the price of suffering, but because I already did.

  • Our Identity is Our Compass: so how do we navigate through grief when it’s lost?

    Our Identity is Our Compass: so how do we navigate through grief when it’s lost?

    Knowing your true identity is our only fail proof navigation system in life. It is not about “finding yourself”. It’s about being honest with God and asking Him to know yourself, as He knows you.

    The loss that brings your greatest grief strips you naked. It reveals your most vulnerable self to yourself and to the world. The bruises, the lacerations, the bites and scratches, the decaying flesh: frozen in time and space, unable to move and avoid the embarrassment and shame of your appearance and place. The universal experience of grief is not pain, it is the endless questions that plague your heart and mind. In this state, battered and deformed, it is hard to recognize yourself. You remember who you thought you were: who you were known to be. And you remember the mistakes you made, the horrible things you called yourself, and the horrible things people now call you. This, at a time when you are most vulnerable and must lean on whatever identity you can summon. How easy it is to believe that you are a wretched soul, deserving of this, and that this grief is your true identity.

    The truth be told, if we were true to our identity we would rarely experience an unhealing grief. If we could forgive others, forgive ourselves, see God’s hand, and make our choices only within the true unique identity he gave us, we would have never have faltered and we would remain in his peace. We would not have lost our person to bad choices. Or we would celebrate the life of the person taken from us and heal in understanding of God’s eternity. But the struggle of dishonesty about our identity begins like a quiet and unseen virus, infecting our self perception before we start to display the symptoms. And when we are laying in the ashes of our most profound loss, what we need of who we are is hardest to see.

    Honesty and confession. That moment where we find ourselves with only a shallow breath remaining and no will to go on- no more self defense, no energy to fight, no sense of direction- accepting the wave of self defeat and hoping for death…that moment is our opportunity to tell God what we call ourselves. Tell God the names and descriptions of what we believe has become our identity. I told God that I believed I was alone, unloveable, unredeemable, a failure, a bad husband, a bad father, a bad friend, a bad son, a bad brother, insecure, unworthy. I imagined myself sitting in the burning dirt and brush, bleeding and broken, unable to stand. The car I was in only moments before, full of a happy family, a loving wife, a satisfied husband, now wrapped around a tree, mangled in a heap, still smoking. I wrote those names on a list as Jesus walked up behind me. Reaching down with one hand he grabbed the list, dark and shaded in gray scale and no color. As his hand took the list a light spread down the paper and my outstretched arm. His other hand grabbed me by the side and lifted me up. As the light flooded in, like a rapidly rising sun over the horizon, the landscape was revealed. I was there, again, in the valley between flush green mountains, the fire burning beside us, flames dancing as if rejoicing my prodigal return. His arm never left me, but he reached down with the other hand and placed my list into the flames. It flashed, consumed by the fire, and a dove emerged: beautiful, white, disappearing high over the surrounding hilltops. Gentle, genuine lover, caretaker, resilient, father, son, friend, protector, fighter, servant, willing; He called out the names of my identity as he saw them, written on his heart. He pointed to look above me and there were the pieces of my world, his many angels working diligently, picking up the many fractured parts, building new ones, and putting it slowly back together.

    Our identity is unique to us. But it was gifted and generates its actions the same: through love. And because he first loved us, that while we were yet his enemies he died for us to live eternal as his children. There is no condemnation in Christ. That is hard to understand when the blisters of self condemnation still drain from your grief and shame. But it is true. And if we accept our honest and true identity, we have all we need to remain in his steadfast direction.

    Jesus had an identity that was unique to him and served as his compass throughout his life and ministry. It was proclaimed when he emerged from the water, held by John the Baptist: ” And a voice from heaven said, “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.” Matthew 3:17. He chose not to accept the false identities hurled at him from those who loved and hated him, the world, and evil. And his path, his identity, brought us to freedom.