My friend, however, seems content to let the Gospel stop there.

We are broken, we are accepted, Jesus died for us while we were yet sinners, and that is the truncated Gospel he lives by. It is only recently that I have realized, in the nearly seven years I’ve known him, that he has only encouraged the negative in me, only helped me plumb the dark depths of despair and desperation. To be shown the path down, and then be told how to live there instead of being shown the hard path out — seven years is a long time trying to accustom myself to the dark when I really just wanted light. God helps some of us know what is right, but if we wait long enough, we can be convinced otherwise and find a way to enjoy the dark.  How strange it is when destruction is disguised as help.

In conversations, he repeatedly focuses on how we must accept the particular sin we are born in, and that we ought not convict or make ourselves feel badly about our imperfections. It is a messy faith, he likes to say, and we are just broken beings. In some areas, he has taken it a step further to redefine what really is sin and what isn’t.

“Why is that now not a sin?” I would ask him, my confusion growing. Foolishly, I believed that no matter what was completely natural for my particular human nature was still serious enough for the cross.

He answers with discussions on translation variations, the imperfect human writers of the Bible, cultural differences from ancient times to now, more enlightened societal acceptance, scientific studies, and that he has talked to people struggling with various sins and they are good people and don’t want to sin and otherwise follow Christ, so he (and many others) has determined that this and that are no longer a sin.

I don’t really say much anymore. I disagree with his conclusion, but fall silent to the claim that “God must have just told us differently on this issue” out of weariness of the circular argument. I wonder about that half-Gospel of his. We are all accepted just as we are — what a relief! — but Jesus never left anyone he met unchanged.

“Go, and sin no more,” He said.

Sin — be it in thought, in deed, in desire, or in leaving one foot in the door on the hopes that someday it might not be a sin anymore — is timeless. We are as we are, but upon sincerely meeting Jesus, are not content to find a way to stay that way. He made it possible for us to not only somehow realize our sin, but to despise it enough to do all that we can to want to be completely free of it.

“Deny yourself. Pick up the cross. Follow me,” He said.

“Be perfect, like me,” He said.

“You should hate your mother and father if they should come before me,” He said.

These come along with all the messages of love. Love one another, and deny yourself. Love one another, and be perfect — holy? — like him. Love one another, but love no one, no dream, no desire, more than Him.

Love one another, and come up out of that grave you’re slowly dying in though you think you are living fully.

Finding a way to live down in the garbage ditch and rely on God’s forgiveness and grace — “I can’t help it, my flesh is too strong!” — is a terrible version of a Gospel that was meant to set us free not to things the world and body desire and say we have the right to, but free to pursue holiness, self-denial, and joy in following Jesus as we are made victorious. God is the lifter of our head, not the purveyor of reasons to stay depressed. He gives us strength like eagle’s wings not to stay on the ground and enjoy the world but to fly high above it instead. Nowhere do I see that we are to be content to be broken sinners, but are, instead, always encouraged to press against the flesh toward Christ. The moment I find myself making any excuse for sin — whether it is because of weakness or because that sin has now been redefined as not being sin at all — is the moment I sit back down in the ditch.

“Go, and sin no more,” He said, not “you’re a broken sinner doing the best you can, and that’s good enough.”

This is an impossible thing to hear over the roar of the world. The news, the media, the church, the books, the friends, the zeitgeist, the celebrities, the philosophy, the culture — it all continues along, redefining and convincing us of anything and everything but that it might be wrong. What we seek, we find, and if those are the answers we have decided we want, those are the answers we will continue to find. We turn our faith into nothing more than a popularity poll, waiting long enough for things to turn our way and be made, through reason or culture, acceptable.

The sermon series at church is using Jeremiah 6:16 as a key verse. I want to say to my friend to stop looking to the poets and the writers and those whose beliefs are the same as his and to consider the way in the Bible which was ancient and good that we modern people refuse to walk in because our heads have anchored us firmly in the fast emptying sands of time. I have another friend who is struggling with something and I want to tell her about how Daniel had decided he would pray to God before he was faced with the punishment that would bring. I want to say to her that she needs to choose now, very decidedly, whom she will serve, and in whom she will get her identity.

Both of my friends — and you, and I — will find that as time goes on the redefining will continue exponentially, resounding quite nicely in our learned minds and reasonable rock-hard hearts until each and every one of us will breathe a sigh of relief that our secret struggle and sin and hardship will be made acceptable, will be celebrated, and will become the source and identity of who we are. We will, unless we choose beforehand like Daniel, become defined by the failing, the sin, the imperfection — and take pride in it — when all along God was gently trying to be heard over the tidal wave of culture saying “let me break you, you jar of clay, and then remake you whole at last.”

But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.
– Galatians 6:14

Ten years ago, on September 10th, 2001, I boarded a train and headed west and things in the country were fine. On September 11th, 2001, I was still on the train, and, wrapped in the confusion of tragedy, the trajectory of the country changed. Somewhere on that four-day trip to Denver, I called my parents to let them know that I was OK, that the trains were packed with frantic people but still running, and that a train derailment that had happened between Sacramento and Salt Lake City was the train headed west, not east. They were relieved to get that phone call.

The tenth was good.

The tenth is always good. It is the day before. The day before someone you loved died. The day before you lost your job. The day before the accident. The day before the assault. The day before you get the diagnoses. The day before the bad news, the truth revealed, the hopes crushed. The day before your entire life collapses.

The tenth was good, but I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know the eleventh was coming, so I wasted the value of the tenth. The tenth is worth more than all the gold in the world once you find yourself in the eleventh.

The eleventh is always coming.

How you handle the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth…do you hit your knees or raise a fist in anger?

I think of Good Friday, and am reminded that even though Thursday might have seemed better, Resurrection Sunday was on the way.

We can’t live our lives on the tenth. The eleventh goes along with it, unforeseen and unstoppable. When it does, though it seems impossible, Resurrection Sunday comes, too. It might be three days or a tenth anniversary, but it comes.

Jessica Fletcher jogs and bikes and fishes. She doesn’t drive a car. She is an excellent writer, and world-renowned. She travels everywhere, and gets invited to nearly every kind of event imaginable. She is educated and educates. She knows someone from nearly every walk of life, and can schmooze comfortably with the locals as well as the rich and the famous. She is a gracious host to all guests. She is polite in the face of rudeness, determined in the face of impossibility, tenacious in the face of dead-ends, and witty in all situations. She is erudite, educated, approachable, caring, reasonable, and sure-footed in her dealings with people. She is fair, honest, and of good reputation. And, to top it all off,  she nearly always has a thickly frosted layer cake on her kitchen table. The only crack in the glass that I can see is her stupid nephew, who regularly seems to find himself as a suspect in a murder case.

She’s fictional, of course, which she should be. I would have to slap her otherwise.

A friend and I have gotten into the habit of watching an episode of Murder, She Wrote on Friday nights after coffee. I joked about how, during the introduction, I almost wished that the part where she is shown riding bike would continue about two seconds longer, where I imagine it would show her running into a mailbox or parked car. She would go flying over the handle bars and I would at last be able to exhale and accept my own imperfections. Instead, it merely shows her smiling and waving to off-screen neighbors as she rides home to write another bestseller while the music plays.

“It would be funny,” I said, “If someone came up with the Murder, She Wrote alternate universe episodes. Instead of her solving the crimes and going home successful, she would be sort of like Kenny from South Park. She would get taken out at the end of each episode by the murderer, only to come back for the next episode.”

I have a love-hate relationship with Jessica Fletcher. I don’t know why I harbor wishful thinking of her receiving bodily harm, either on bike or by a nefarious murderer in 1980′s styled clothing.

Like that woman from Proverbs 31, a frightful chunk of scripture which is the women’s equivalent to Jesus’ more general admonition to be perfect like him. I get exhausted thinking about it. Proverbs 31:10-31 (the section that describes the perfect woman) is an acrostic poem. Each verse starts with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Basically, she’s got it all down from A-Z.

And probably bakes perfect layer cakes, too.

The new normal.

The possibility of it was always there.

Last Sunday’s sermon was about the floods of life. It was a good sermon. It was an even better sermon about two days ago when, in the midst of the reality of another round of discouraging news, I realized precisely what the flood of life really meant for me, and how I was reacting to it.

I focus on my stuff.

In the path of a flood, we build dikes and pump water and fill sink holes and build up rip rap and fight the water every inch of the way to hold onto our stuff. One of the owners of the home that is now gone, along with the actual land it sat on, had earlier said, as they prepared to dike and evacuate, that “[their] whole life might be gone. This is the only house my daughter has ever known.”

How we hold on to what we know!

I realized the amount of diking and effort I’ve put into holding back the flood in my life. I dig in and hold on and fight the flow of the river tooth and nail. I exhaust myself with worry and repressed anger that the water is there and flowing so strongly and foiling every attempt of mine for successfully holding it at bay as I see fit. I can’t understand why such a seemingly destructive force is pushing at my life. I see another freelance job sliding through my fingers, and I realize I had read that opportunity wrong. The grinding weight of financial worry is a burden I wasn’t meant to bear; the flood would take it if I would let it. I see the weight of stubbornness from fighting the floods in life destroying people around me and I realize…

…just let it go.

Put the sand bags down.

Let the water rush in and wash all the stuff away; let it take it all, myself included.

I don’t need it. I don’t want it.

Take the pride, the possessions, the dreams, the anger, the loneliness, the relationships, the resentment, the guilt, the failures, the successes, the hopes, the titles, the things and people I wasn’t meant to save — take it all. It’s the only house I’ve ever known, but it’s a shack compared to what is waiting if I could only just let it all go. If it gets in the way of what the truth of life really is, if it gets in the way of the flood, take it all.

As my friend said, we’re only renting in this life.

So just take it all. The Flood can have it. It wasn’t mine, anyway.

Someone sang that song in church today. I’ve heard it once or twice before. I haven’t decided if I think it’s true.

Prayers have lately dwindled to silence. My attempts are not backed up with words, and are long pauses instead. Praying the same prayers every day for a year or two or five have used up all that I could say.

I used to pray when I walked to work. Now, I just walk mainly. I think about vague and unspecified things, like a stone skipping on the surface of a dead lake.

Same prayer as yesterday, God, is about the best I do now. Same as yesterday and the day before and all the other days.

IBID.

In the same place.

Same as above.

Maybe it’s true.