Brandon Clements's Blog

Sunday morning I was sitting on the front row of one of our Gatherings at Midtown. My friend Jon Ludovina was teaching on the passage from Luke 7 where John the Baptist is in jail about to be beheaded, and he sends his disciples to ask Jesus if He’s the  Messiah. (Translation: “If you’re the Messiah, you’re gonna bust me out of jail, right?”)

Jesus responds by quoting a passage from Isaiah 61: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.” (Luke 7:22-25)

Jesus rattles off a list of prophecies that he is actively fulfilling in the very moment as He heals people—He’d even raised a widow’s son earlier in the same chapter. But there is one important thing that Jesus leaves off of the list from Isaiah 61: freedom for the captives.

In the place of that part of the prophecy, Jesus instead says, “Blessed is the one who is not offended by me.” In short: “Yes, John, I am the Messiah (and you already know this). But I am not going to get you out of prison this time. You will die a martyr’s death. Blessed are you if you are not offended by this hard truth.”

The whole story is a smack in the face to our 21st Century, western worldview of God as cosmic butler tasked with the job of making our lives more comfortable. The fact that Jesus doesn’t always respond/heal/restore in the way that we want Him to (although many times He does) is an affront to our pseudo religious business deals we try to make with God (but He never signs on the dotted line).

During his talk, Jon showed the following video of a woman hearing for the first time after receiving cochlear implants to show how the people who had been healed by Jesus must have been responding.

While we watched the video, I happened to turn around and notice a blind couple in their fifties sitting near me. I watched as the woman gasps and weeps, and the man’s face began to contort. He began to wipe away tears from his face, and I followed suit.

That, needless to say, punched me in the gut.

There will be things in all of our lives that God gives a loving and sovereign “no” to. This man has lived his entire life without ever seeing his wife’s face, or the way the sun breaks through the clouds after a rain, or a newborn’s smile. Through no fault of his own he has walked through darkness all of his years, feeling his way out of danger.

Blessed is the one who is not offended by me.

I do not know this man well, but his tears did not seem like angry tears. They felt like knowing tears—like he knew what it felt like to sit behind bars, ask Jesus the question, and not receive the answer he hoped for but still trust Him anyway. They seemed like the tears of a man who knew that there would come a day when his eyes would be opened, fully and permanently for all eternity.

Blessed is the one who is not offended by me.

What is the struggle in your life that you’d really rather not have? The thorn in your flesh?

What’s the dream that doesn’t seem to be coming true—either for now, or ever?

What desires do you have to submit to the Lord although there are times you are (wrongly) convinced they’d be able to make you happy?

Blessed is the one who is not offended by me. 

Christ has proven once and for all on the cross that He is good and that He’s for our good. No circumstance in our lives could ever change that. No jail cell. No sickness. No failed dream or lost loved one. No cross that we have to carry. He has given us Himself–the great reward, the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in a field.

Blessed are we when we are not offended by the reality that we don’t always get what we want. Blessed are we when we approach God like a Father who ultimately knows best and not like a cosmic butler that we’ll fire if He doesn’t do His job. Blessed are we who remember that He is wiser and more loving than we could ever be.

Oh, and you should listen to the sermon (Jesus & Our Dreams). It’s so piercing and helpful, and a blog post could not do it justice.

On vacation at Seabrook Island last summer, Kristi looked at me and said, “I think I need to go get a pregnancy test.” Which was a surprise to both of us, seeing that we weren’t doing what the doctor told us we’d need to do to get pregnant.

On the way back from CVS, tears started to flow. “I think I just started my period.”

We wanted to do the test anyway, and after dual blue lines showed up three times in a row, we were beside ourselves. The rest of the day was a blur.

The next morning, I saw the wetness in her eyes. “More blood,” she said. “A lot.”

Father, please.

This little baby that did not even exist in my mind the day before had latched onto my soul with a fury.

Over the next days, the doctor’s office became synonymous with a knot in my throat. We heard “It’s too early to tell for sure” and “We’ll just have to wait and see” when all we wanted was to know. Either way, just to know. But we were already pretty sure, because what happened did not fall into the category of normal spotting.

Then some nurse who makes amazing and utterly difficult phone calls every day rang our phone and our lives were changed forever. In the coming months, we actually shed tears of joy over Kristi puking her guts out, because it meant everything was okay.

Fast forward several months and what seemed like an eternity of delivery, at 1:45am on a Tuesday morning after one last push, our daughter Sully made her debut into the world. As the doctor lifted her up, my smile very quickly turned the opposite direction. She was very blue and did not make a single sound. For a very uncomfortable amount of time, she was completely silent.

And don’t you know, not one time ever in my life can I remember seeing a baby come out on TV and be completely silent. They always, always cry. Blood curdling screams. And this little girl who had wrapped her whole being around my heart would not make a peep.

Father, please.

“Is something wrong?”

The doctor whisked her over to this little newborn table for the nurse to stick this thing down her throat to suction her. I walked over, crying for a different reason that I had hoped I would be at this point, and stood beside her. I put my finger on her hand and, like she knew the complete turmoil my soul was in, she wrapped her tiny fingers around mine. A moment later she let out her first whimper, which, far from a cry, was still the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.

Over the next few moments, the whimpers got a little louder, a little louder, and finally, something you could consider a cry and the air came back to the entire room. They laid Sully back on Kristi’s stomach and we were still crying but in a good way this time. I had no idea how much you could love the notoriously annoying sound of a baby’s wail.

At this point we were all “Thank You Jesus” and sighs, thinking that she was here and healthy and all would be smooth sailing from here. When your baby is not blue, it’s remarkable how stable and in control you can feel.

Until the next day, when said baby spits up her milk and chokes on it.

We were sitting around with friends, talking and laughing, and all of a sudden our baby is blue again, and I mean blue. And you know the little bulb syringe that the nurse gives you and says to keep it with you at all times? Yeah, we couldn’t find it. I’ve never run so fast in my life.

That, as you can imagine, would be something that would make the typical worry of “Hey are you still breathing?” that happens the first couple weeks of parenting even worse. I’ve never been much of a fearful or anxious person, but the one thing that has haunted me since I was a young child is a dreaded fear of losing the people I love. Which, if you were wondering, is a fear that would tend to escalate greatly when you suddenly have a darling little ball of flesh that bears your last name.

Parenting is the most fun thing I’ve ever done, and it is absolutely, positively no joke. From the first day we’ve known about Sully we’ve been confronted by the reality that we are not in control of her life and that we should not be under any illusions that we are. I can worry all I want to about whether or not she’s still breathing, but I can’t supply her next breath.

This all has been incredibly hard/good for me. Because I am a person who dines on sinful self-sufficiency. I always believe I can somehow fix the problem–I can, via my hard work or will, muster up the wherewithal to meet the needs that arise.

By the grace of God Sully, this bright-eyed little girl who is already growing too fast and smiling and cooing at me, has confronted my self-dependency more than anything in my life. I have been driven to Father, please more times than I can count already, and that is such a blessing. I’ve been given a precious little life to love, value, and look out for, but I can no more sustain her own life or health than I can sustain my own. We are all of us vapors.

This is good news, because I was not designed to bear the pressure of sustaining her life. Someone already has that job, and He will not fail at it just as He did not fail to bring her into the world when it looked like for all the world she would not be. So whether she lives to be 3 months or grows to a good old age and buries her dear old dad, all will be well because He has given and He will not take away before it is time.

We had some complications early on in our pregnancy that caused us to get some very early ultrasounds to make sure things were okay. On one of those early ultrasounds, our doctor said not to quote her on it, but that she was pretty sure we were having a little boy.

So we took that to the bank, picked out a little boy name, and were already growing attached to a blonde-headed little munchkin running around our house. So imagine our surprise a month later, (when getting another ultrasound) when the nurse asked whether we wanted to know the sex of the baby.

We already know, we said. It’s a boy.

Umm…nope.

Kristi and I looked at each other and our eyebrows almost hit the ceiling.

I don’t quite know how to put words around this, but something weighty fell into my heart in that moment and hasn’t dislodged itself since. Not disappointment–not at all. We are no machismo, “boys rule” people. I had the privilege of seeing my little sister be born (my only sibling) when I was 12 years old, so I’ve always loved little girls.

I don’t know how to describe the feeling, but I’ll tell you what I did the day we found out–I went out and I bought a shotgun. That is not a joke, I really did that. It just felt like the right thing to do. And then several weeks later I was walking through our living room and I saw a lone, pink baby sock lying below the couch–a laundry casualty from the amazing hand-me-downs we were already receiving.

I bent down to pick up that tiny sock and the Hoover Dam could not have stopped tears from welling up in my eyes.

I think part of the weight I feel is this–because of my job, I almost on a daily basis am a witness to the piercing trail of shrapnel so many dads leave in the hearts of their little girls. I see the confusion, pain, and insecurity left (in part) by fathers who did not very much resemble their true Father.

That pink sock–it haunts me. It makes me think the terrifying thought that in 20 years Sully could sit in a pastor or counselor’s office, Kleenex in hand, at least partly due to my failures as a father. Because I know that at my core I am no better than those jack-wagons who leave a wake of destruction through their children.

I want to teach her that God is love, but I am not always loving.

I want to teach her that God is faithful, but I am too often the opposite.

I want to teach her that she is valued and precious, not in the least because of her accomplishments or her dress size, but because she is deeply and unfathomably loved. But sometimes my mind is too full of me to impart the life and truth I am designed to.

I want my eyes to light up every time she walks into the room, because I think that will teach her more than most words ever will. I want the way I treat and speak to Kristi to set the bar so high that she won’t have the time of day for so many of the boys who can shave running around our schools and workplaces.

But wanting these things and being faithful over decades are altogether different things, so I think the only way forward in this parenting thing is to fall on grace like it’s my next breath, because it is. What saves me and lifts that weight on my chest is that the same grace that allows me to have a little girl will be the same grace that allows me to raise a godly woman who stands like an oak over generations that rise up and call her blessed.

The same grace that saves, heals and restores me will, I pray, be the same grace that saves, heals and restores her. The same grace will enable me to repent in front of and apologize to her when I fail her, pointing to the One who will never fail her. Because as much as I want to be for her, I will never be that.

I pray that God willing, one day far in the future Sully will stand up at my funeral and be able to say, by no small miracle, that she knows and loves God more because of the way I loved her.

That pink sock tells me that I only have a certain number of days between today and that day, so I pray I’ll make every one of them count.

I’m flying over El Salvador on my way back to the States. The beach is below, waves crawling to the shore. Not far beyond are rolling green mountains, clouds perched above them. No doubt there is a mother somewhere in that shadow walking out of her shanty, wiping the sweat off her forehead, saying “Gracias” in her mind for a welcome breeze.

There are kids below that cloud, still young and eyes full of hope. They run out of their small cinder block hut, maybe to fetch something for their Mama or to kick a deflated soccer ball. They do not yet know that the deck is stacked wildly against them. They have not had the news broken to them that they are what the rest of the planet calls “third-world”, which is a very politically correct way of saying, “Good luck, you’re gonna need it.”

I’ve been in this breathtaking country all week with a ministry called Compassion International. They brought 15 or so pastors down here to show us what their ministry does on the ground. I’ve been in third-world countries before and I’ve known about (and had a great impression of) Compassion for a long time. However, I had never seen it up close.

Compassion started with the vision of one man who saw something tragic in Korea during the Korean War. He noticed that the trash men would poke each trash pile before picking it up, and after said poking, they would pick up some piles and put them in the truck, and others they would leave alone.

He soon realized that the deciding factor for the fate of each trash pile was that if said pile moved when it was poked, it would be left there. If it did not move, it would be taken up.

And what was the thing moving under the trash pile? A war orphan, finding shelter in the only place he or she could.

He went back to the States with the crazy idea of a 1-1 sponsorship program. Pair up someone from the US with a kid like the ones under the trash piles, and through a small monthly payment provide hope and a future for them. With the help of 2 financial sponsors, Compassion International was born. Today there are over 1 million children who are sponsored through Compassion.

After touring their country headquarters, visiting several projects, and even going into the homes of children who are sponsored through Compassion, I could not have a higher opinion of their ministry. I was beyond impressed with their ministry model and their execution. Some of the more cynical among us, upon seeing the packets of children available for sponsorship, may think that there’s no way that specific kid exists. It’s just a marketing ploy, a sad picture and a made up name.

And you would be wrong. I know because I’ve been in their homes. I’ve seen them pull out pictures and letters from their sponsors like those little tattered papers were treasure.

(I met an amazing college student named David who wants to be a pastor. This was the first letter he had ever received from his sponsor.)

There were many reasons to be impressed by Compassion on this trip, but I’d like to highlight a few:

They are Christ-centered. Far from simply being a social justice or relief organization, they are spreading good news. They are proclaiming the love and hope of Jesus with abandon. By no means is being a Christian a prerequisite to getting help, but unlike other relief organizations, they do not ignore spiritual poverty.


They are church-based. This was, by far, the most surprising part of the trip for me. I assumed that a Compassion project was just that–a project. A VBS on wheels with no lasting connections. That is far from the truth. Each Compassion project is intimately tied to an evangelical church led by local, indigenous pastors. The kids in the project naturally connect with the church, and the pastors love & care for the kids and their families. Several times I was brought to tears by seeing the fierce love and commitment that these pastors have for their communities. Honestly at the projects we visited, I could not see the dividing line between Compassion and the church, in many ways because there is not a dividing line. I did not see Compassion signs anywhere–I saw the church on display in the community, and Compassion simply came alongside to empower and resource local churches to practically meet the needs of their community.


The ministry model is incredible & comprehensive. They have 3 different major programs.Their Child Survival Program starts when a child is 0-3, working with impoverished mothers and babies to work toward both survival and health. The Child Development Sponsorship Program (4-18) is the typical child sponsorship program (what you probably think of when you think about Compassion), which provides food, medical care, job skills, and other resources to kids who desperately need it. The Leadership Development Program (19-22) is for kids who excel and show leadership potential through the program, and it provides them the opportunity to go to college and receive training on how to impact their country with the same help that they’ve received from Compassion. That may not seem as glamorous as the first two, but I quickly saw the overwhelming value of this as I met several of these kids and heard their stories. I watched them shed tears over how God had changed their entire lives through being a part the program, and you can easily see that each of those kids is going to explode grace and hope all over their country.

As we sat with Compassion’s country director for El Salvador the other day, all I could think about was this sociology illustration that goes like this: suppose you happened upon a river and, to your great surprise, there were tons of babies floating down the river. An unrelenting stream of kids are actively drowning, gasping for air, helplessly swept away by the current. You’d basically have 3 options:

 Get in the river and pull babies out. This is the most direct response to the problem, and indeed what we would be compelled to do. However, the problem is you would only be able to save a few of them. It is an incomplete response. Option number two would be:
Run and get help. Raise awareness by sprinting to get as much help as possible. This would greatly increase the number of babies you’d be able to save in the long run. However, it’s still not entirely sufficient, because the babies just keep coming. Even if you could get them all, it doesn’t solve the problem that babies are in the river in the first place. A la option number three:
Go upstream and prevent babies from being put in the river. Why in the world are babies being thrown into the river? Fixing the root of the issue is essential to have a true solution to a problem.

As I sat there and listened to this man pour out his heart for his country, all I could think, over and over again was: “There are kids in the river.”

There are kids in the river.

There are KIDS in the river.

The problem is, most of us for all practical purposes hardly ever see the river. We don’t live near it and when you don’t see something for so long it’s easy to forget or believe that it’s not really true–that there is actually no such river with kids perishing by the day.

That may be an inconvenient truth, but it’s a truth nonetheless.

There are kids in the river, and after seeing it firsthand, I don’t know of a more simple or effective way to do something about it than to sponsor a kid through Compassion for $38/month. And then telling other people to do so. Compassion is doing an incredible job of all 3 areas, and after seeing it the only thing left for me to do is to pick a new child (or 17) to sponsor and hope I can go visit them one day.

And if you’re asking whether this whole approach really works, I’d like to tell you two things. First, go read this article.

Next, I want you to know the end of the story of Compassion in South Korea, it’s inaugural country. Decades later, the people of Korea kicked Compassion out in the best way possible. They invited them over and explained to them that they were now a country who could take care of their children–that Compassion was no longer needed. Thus, there is no longer a Compassion program in South Korea. Of course there were other factors in South Korea’s success, but it is undoubtable that Compassion was one of them.

And not only that, but as of today, South Korea sponsors more kids through Compassion than every country in the world beside the US & Australia.

This trip hit me especially hard in light of the fact that we are in the adoption process in one of the poorest countries in the world (Ethiopia). Kristi and I think and pray for our yet-to-be child often, and we are thrilled to meet him or her one day. However, this trip more than ever made me realize that as we quite literally help pull one child out of the river, we need to do everything in our power to prevent kids from being in the river in the first place. We pray that in 50 years Ethiopia will not need to have their kids adopted. That they would not be the ones in the river, but the ones helping to pull others out.

So we’re gonna sponsor a kid in Ethiopia and pray that that will help keep him or her out of the river. I believe we have to in order to work toward a holistic response to the heart-wrenching tragedy in a country that God has embedded deep into our hearts. And we have to raise awareness, to run to our proverbial town with the news that there are kids in the river and we can help them. Be on the lookout, because we’d love to try to get an entire project in Ethiopia sponsored.

If you’ve never heard of Compassion, check out their website. Think and pray about sponsoring a child. If you do, write to them often. You can do so (and even send pictures) online now. It was super sad to talk to kids who never received letters or got dropped by sponsors frequently. They want relationship as much as anything else.

By all means, ask me any questions that you have. I don’t know all of the answers, but I know a lot more than I did before going on this trip. From everything I’ve seen, I’m a huge fan.

I love these words from Frederick Buechner on preaching & writing.

On preaching:

X + Y = Z. IF YOU know the value of one of the letters, you know something. If you know the value of two, you can probably figure out the whole thing. If you don’t know the value of any, you don’t know much.

Preachers tend to forget this. “Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior and be saved from your sins,” or something like that, has meaning and power and relevance only if the congregation has some notion of what, humanly speaking, sin is, or being saved is, or who Jesus is, or what accepting him involves. If preachers make no attempt to flesh out these words in terms of everyday human experience (maybe even their own) but simply repeat with variations the same old formulas week after week, then the congregation might just as well spend Sunday morning at home with the funnies.

The blood atonement. The communion of saints. The Holy Ghost. If people’s understanding of theological phrases goes little deeper than their dictionary or catechetical definitions, then to believe in them has just about as much effect on their lives as to believe that Columbus discovered America in 1492 or that E = mc2.

Coming home from church one snowy day, Emerson wrote, “The snow was real but the preacher spectral.” In other words nothing he heard from the pulpit suggested that the preacher was a human being more or less like everybody else with the same dark secrets and high hopes, the same doubts and passions, the same weaknesses and strengths. Undoubtedly he preached on matters like sin and salvation but without ever alluding to the wretched, lost moments or the glad, liberating moments of his own life or anybody else’s.

There is perhaps no better proof for the existence of God than the way year after year he survives the way his professional friends promote him. If there are people who remain unconvinced, let them tune in their TVs to almost any of the big-time pulpit-pounders almost any Sunday morning of the year.

- Originally published in Whistling in the Dark

On writing:

I WISH THAT I had told my writing students to give some thought to what they wanted their books to make happen inside the people who read them, and I also wish that I had told them what Red Smith said about writing although I suppose it is possible that he hadn’t gotten around to saying it yet . . . . What Red Smith said was more or less this: “Writing is really quite simple; all you have to do is sit down at your typewriter and open a vein” — another haematological image. From the writer’s vein into the reader’s vein: for better or worse a transfusion.

I couldn’t agree with Red Smith more. For my money anyway, the only books worth reading are books written in blood. . . .

Write about what you really care about is what he is saying. Write about what truly matters to you — not just things to catch the eye of the world but things to touch the quick of the world the way they have touched you to the quick, which is why you are writing about them. Write not just with wit and eloquence and style and relevance but with passion. Then the things that your books make happen will be things worth happening — things that make the people who read them a little more passionate themselves for their pains, by which I mean a little more alive, a little wiser, a little more beautiful, a little more open and understanding, in short a little more human. I believe that those are the best things that books can make happen to people, and we could all make a list of the particular books that have made them happen to us.

- Originally published in The Clown in the Belfry

 

 

Do you hear the faint sounds of marching bands filling the air in your town? I heard that familiar drumbeat the other day walking through town and I almost jumped in the air and clicked my heels. I sure hope you’ve heard it, because like holiday bells, that will be your cue that the greatest time of year has officially arrived.

It’s football season, friends.

College football season, to be exact. Yeah I know that thing they call the NFL is supposedly coming back on, but whatever. I’m talking about Saturdays, about Kirk Herbstreit and Chris Fowler and waking up to Gameday every Saturday morning so happy you just start giggling.

In light of having Christmas every Saturday for the next few months, I want to remind Christian college football fans everywhere (including myself) of a few things:

1. Enjoy college football, because it’s one of God’s graces to humanity.

Athleticism? Sport? Cheering and yelling with friends? The ability for talented people to compete in a game that’s fun for millions of people? Gathering with friends around appetizers and nail-biter games? All grace.

God is good and He gives us good gifts. I, for one, am thankful for His gift of college football.

2. Use college football as a tool for mission.

Most definitely here in the South, and in many areas of our country, people eat up college football. I’ve lived in two southern college town/cities, and I know of nothing else that brings our culture together this much.

So throw the best parties. Have good food and drinks. Invite your neighbors, your co-workers. It is a super easy way to be on mission with those around you. My 20-year-old self would hate me for saying this, but maybe even buy a big TV so people will want to hang out at your house.

3. College football makes a terrible idol. It will not make sense of your life. 

As ridiculous as this is, it’s something I’ve battled ever since I can remember. I grew up in Clemson, and my heart is attached to that place, to all the beautiful, beautiful orange and the rolling hills and ALL THE OTHER THINGS BECAUSE I LOVE THEM ALL.

But it’s easy to make idols out of the things we love, to elevate them to an inappropriate place in our hearts, to turn to them for ultimate meaning and satisfaction. We love created things inappropriately and they break our hearts, because nothing can bear the weight of worship except the One who was made to carry it. Anything else will crumble, especially a group of 19-year-old athletes running around on a field.

It’s tempting to get caught up in the story of your team, to think it is now your story–the thing that makes sense of your life. Which is ridiculous on so many levels, but still very much so a thing. I’ve come to realize that if a Clemson loss puts me in a bad mood the next day, my love is out of whack. It means that I’ve bought into the ridiculous lie that my story and very existence is justified by my team winning. That what a bunch of young boys do on a patch of grass somehow reflects upon the meaning of my life.

But God–(are there two better words?)–offers us a MUCH larger, more beautiful, and compelling story and identity. We are His rescued and redeemed people, the ones He’s using to bring restoration and hope the the entire planet. Even Alabama’s current dynasty is a miserably pathetic alternative to that (much to the chagrin and shock of many Crimson Tide fans I’m sure).

4. Let’s be careful with rivalries. 

The other day I was behind a moped at a red light, and I looked up to see the driver wearing a shirt that said “The Year Clemson Went Down” and it had a tiger in a compromising position beside a Gamecock.

My mouth almost hit my steering wheel, and I had this sudden anger fantasy that involved running and backing over that moped a few times. (I told you I have issues…)

Rivalries are so much fun, but let’s remember that we represent Jesus and that you really might be making people hate you with your inane derogatory nicknames like Clemroids, Shamecocks, Taters, etc. Don’t be that guy who gets on Facebook after a loss and goes:

AHHHAHAHA! Clemsux really does suck and I hope they never win another game and that Tajh Boyd breaks every bone in his body…(blah blah blah & more ensuing stupidity.)

You might expect other Christians to forgive you for such an asinine thing, but what about your non-Christian friends who are Clemson fans who now kind of hate you and may get a bad taste in their mouths every time they see you for the next year?

Let’s remember that we represent Jesus, even on Facebook after a rivalry game.

——————————–

That’s all friends. These are mostly reminders for myself, and I assumed they might be helpful for someone out there.

Happy football season!

Oh, and if Clemson gets blown out by Georgia Saturday night, I’ll probably need someone to send me this post with #3 highlighted afterward…

Sometimes the things we want are not really what we want.

That is a truth that, should you put it in your pipe and smoke it, would change your life.

I’m a bit of a redneck at heart, so…Garth Brooks, of course. In college Kristi and I would ride around in my Jeep listening to him, and I’d tell her how much I loved the song “Unanswered Prayers”. She said it was stupid, that there’s no such thing as an unanswered prayer, that just because the answer was no doesn’t mean it wasn’t answered.

I told her she was right but that it wasn’t wise to argue with Garth Brooks.

Jes via Compfight

The thing about us fallen humans is that when we want things, we want them. Like a kid chasing a ball into a street, it’s the only thing perceivable in our world. The only thing that matters.

And then, that Father with His strong arms, and the way the ground disappears under your feet as He lifts you up and away from the road. You kick and scream, because how dare Him? How dare Him keep you from what you want?

Then the car whizzes by, but sometimes we don’t even see or care. We just walk away sulking, giving Him the evil eye. We asked for bread and He gave us a stone. Or so we think.

There have been times in my life where I have railed and begged and pleaded with God, making an infant’s temper tantrum look like a peaceful sit-in, only to come back months later and say, “Phew…thank God that He didn’t do that.”

Some mercies are simply “severe mercies,” as Elisabeth Elliot calls them, but some are just straight up wearing camo. They are hidden, those camouflaged mercies, behind a child’s incredulous angst that cannot imagine what could be better than that ball rolling in the street.

And the best part? He doesn’t shoo us away to learn the lesson in the corner. Those camouflaged mercies often sink in during the patient enduring of our flailing, fists beating against a Father’s chest, secured in arms that just won’t let go no matter how bad you want them to.

Because, after all, you don’t really want them too.

God never withholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good. God’s refusals are always merciful–”severe mercies” at times but mercies all the same. God never denies us our heart’s desire except to give us something better.

-Elisabeth Elliot

About a year ago I stumbled upon Frederick Beuchner’s writing. I read his Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, & Fairy Tale and was floored by it. He is, I believe, one of the most talented writers I have ever read. He can surprise with words and get past your natural defenses to not hear or see the familiar in a remarkable way.

If you’ve never read him, I wanted to introduce you to him in hopes that you’ll be as blessed by his writing as I have. I have not agreed with all that I’ve read, but I’ve been challenged or encouraged by almost everything. Below is a short passage from one of his books that I love for your enjoyment.

Marwa Morgan via Compfight

LATE ONE WINTER afternoon as I was walking to a class that I had to teach, I noticed the beginnings of what promised to be one of the great local sunsets. There was just the right kind of clouds and the sky was starting to burn and the bare trees were black as soot against it. When I got to the classroom, the lights were all on, of course, and the students were chattering, and I was just about to start things off when I thought of the sunset going on out there in the winter dusk, and on impulse, without warning, I snapped off the classroom lights. I am not sure that I ever had a happier impulse. The room faced west so as soon as it went dark, everything disappeared except what we could see through the windows, and there it was — the entire sky on fire by then, like the end of the world or the beginning of the world. You might think that somebody would have said something. Teachers do not usually plunge their students into that kind of darkness, and you might have expected a wisecrack or two or at least the creaking of chairs as people turned around to see if the old bird had finally lost his mind. But the astonishing thing was that the silence was as complete as you can get it in a room full of people, and we all sat there unmoving for as long as it took the extraordinary spectacle to fade slowly away.

For over twenty minutes nobody spoke a word. Nobody did anything. We just sat there in the near-dark and watched one day of our lives come to an end, and it is no immodesty to say that it was a great class because my only contribution was to snap off the lights and then hold my tongue. And I am not being sentimental about sunsets when I say that it was a great class because in a way the sunset was the least of it. What was great was the unbusy-ness of it. It was taking unlabeled, unallotted time just to look with maybe more than our eyes at what was wonderfully there to be looked at without any obligation to think any constructive thoughts about it or turn it to any useful purpose later, without any weapon at hand in the dark to kill the time it took. It was the sense too that we were not just ourselves individually looking out at the winter sky but that we were in some way also each other looking out at it. We were bound together there simply by the fact of our being human, by our splendid insignificance in face of what was going on out there through the window, and by our curious significance in face of what was going on in there in that classroom. The way this world works, people are very apt to use the words they speak not so much as a way of revealing but, rather, as a way of concealing who they really are and what they really think, and that is why more than a few moments of silence with people we do not know well are apt to make us so tense and uneasy. Stripped of our verbal camouflage, we feel unarmed against the world and vulnerable, so we start babbling about anything just to keep the silence at bay. But if we can bear to let it be, silence, of course, can be communion at a very deep level indeed, and that half hour of silence was precisely that, and perhaps that was the greatest part of it all.

- Originally published in The Hungering Dark

Sippanont Samchai via Compfight

It took me four hours to work up the courage, and another 30 minutes to find my phone.

My mind these days, I swear.

My fingers are sweating, but I manage to punch in the number. I swallow a lump and, after a deep breath, work up the courage to hit the last digit. The number four completes the first leg of my impossible journey, and it’s out of my control now.

My breath leaves me.

One ring. I bite my bottom lip.

Two rings. I start to feel my pulse in my throat.

Three rings. Will I get her voicemail again? Part of me hopes so. I die to hear her voice.

“Hello?”

Nope. Her real, unrecorded, breathy voice meets my ear. It’s so beautiful it makes me ache.

I panic and say nothing.

“Hello?” she says again, patiently.

I get it out quickly: “I know it’s been a long time. I…I just wanted to let you know that I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry for what I did to hurt you. I don’t have much time left, and I want you to know that I love you. I always, always have. Even when I didn’t act like it.”

A moment of painstaking silence passes, and not a fiber in my body moves.

“Hello?” she says, one more time. “Is someone there? I don’t recognize this number.” Finally, she hangs up the phone and I hear the terminal beep. My heart races.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll work up the courage to take my phone off of mute.

But then again, maybe tomorrow I’ll be dead.

Several years back, I got an email. From a guy named Thor. And I was like, “No way, that’s the coolest name ever.” So we met up for coffee at Immaculate Consumption, and I soon discovered that he was as cool as his name.

He told me his story and we became friends instantly. He spoke of his experiences around the world, of the lacking theology of suffering in the American church, and of the pearl of great price. If North Koreans he had known could joyfully be frozen to death because of their faith in Jesus, can’t we face the hardships before us in light of the great reward that lies ahead?

I left our first meeting in tears. Most of all, I saw Jesus in and all over my brother.

Over the years we became dear friends, and as his time in Columbia drew to an end this summer, I didn’t want to acknowledge that he was actually leaving. I made endless jokes about how leaving was dumb. That California was incomparable to the beauty and charm of Columbia, SC.

But then last Friday, after an early morning breakfast with friends and some tearful goodbyes, my friend drove west, racing the sun rising above him. And I miss him already.

I’ve always heard Paul’s analogy of being “poured out like a drink offering,” but at times it has fallen flat on my modern ears. I’ve never made a drink offering, so you know, there’s a bit of a cultural disconnect. The quip “pour one out” certainly doesn’t do it justice.

But as I pondered Thor’s time in Columbia and how God used him here, that phrase kept coming to my mind. As he preached a heartfelt sermon his last Sunday here and ministered to others until his last hours in town, I kept thinking about it. Poured out like a drink offering.

It’s as if a towel was dipped in God’s grace, drenched and dripping, and was squeezed out in a thousand different ways all across our city. He spoke God’s life and grace into people everywhere he went the years he lived here, and as a result people are different. Our church is different.

It’s a beautiful life, being poured out for God’s glory.

I think, though, that the best thing about a drink offering is that it keeps pouring. There are faces I see every week who have been blessed, challenged, and encouraged by God’s grace through a friend named Thor. And every week, I see them pouring into others. I see the same smile, the same grace, the same good news.

Because grace begets grace, and good news begets good news. That’s the beauty of discipleship, that the Holy Spirit is turning us all, by some great miracle, into little Christs that on our best days strike a resemblance to Him and on our worst get to display his unending mercy.