Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

He was four years old . . . barely.  Boyish innocence was tightly stitched and held fast to a deep zest for living.  He was a mosaic of the threads of a splendid tapestry whose fibers were being woven into a soft spirit that reveled in life.  I love Corey.  I love him for what he is, and what I see in him that I am not.   He is innocence untainted and unsoiled, a young boy that catches the essence of living through windows of the soul yet unsullied by life.  Splendidly exuberant, he draws in all the energy of life and expels it freely out to anyone who will embrace its gift.  He is both a repository of living and the embodiment simplicity.  One without the other would dramatically diminish him, as it would any of us.

“I have seventy cents,” he said.  Sitting at a red light, I had no idea as to the nature, purpose or rationale of his comments, arising it seemed from the incessant babbling and spontaneity that frequently marks him.  “Dad, I have seventy cents.”  Attending to the blur and bustle of the marauding traffic that rushed around me, I attempted to placate him, hoping that he would drift on to something else.  “That’s nice,” I replied.  He was irritably insistent.  My verbal pabulum was blatantly insufficient for him.  “Dad, I have seventy cents!”  His voice was emphatic.  I glanced in my rearview mirror and watched him squirming in his car seat, obviously possessing some agenda of great importance to him that was swallowed up in the supposedly greater agendas that dictated my day.  Catching my eyes in the mirror, he held out a clenched fist clutching seventy cents and with sordid determination said, “Dad, I have seventy cents!”

What We Miss

I am occupied, attending to the congestion and myriad events around me.  The traffic of my life is made up of frustrating red lights, a rare green one, and irritating yellows that flash across a myriad of my intersections.  All of the congestion of commerce and career, the snarls of success and the raucous rhythm of rush hour that I embrace as essential and necessary to achievement.

I am caught in the blindness of believing that living life means winning, being horrified that an opportunity missed is an unredeemable loss that creates a permanent setback and lifetime diminishment.  I must master life by gouging and gorging myself on its complexities at every opportunity, without having time to savor the tender exquisiteness of its intricacies.  Mine is a hoarding of life, rather than a delicate sampling.  In and through it all I miss the minute details in the mayhem, the subtleties that are the very essence of the larger things that I gorge and feed upon.  In essence, I miss simplicity.  “I have seventy cents Dad!”  It was a statement of simplicity, and so I missed it.

Crystal blue eyes and romping blonde hair, his small hands cradled two quarters and two precarious dimes.  They were clenched so firmly that his tiny fingers turned shades of red and white; holding them valiantly in front of him with arms outstretched.  His face was chiseled with a squared hint of boyish determination, the manifestation of four year old eyes apprehending the core of life and living when I could not see it.  His perceived with a crystal clear soul what really mattered when all I saw was an annoying red light and thick traffic.  “Dad, I have seventy cents!”

And then I saw it.  Quite accidently it caught the barest edge of my mind.  Out of the corner of my eye, from the farthest fringes of my life it stirred.  The simple intruded upon my chosen world of complexities.  A solitary figure sat on the margins of my wild world, passing by me except for a four year old attuned to the wonder of simplicity, hoping that the din surrounding me might ebb just enough to catch a glimpse.  I finally saw it.

Scrawled by an unsteady hand across a tattered piece of discarded cardboard, stained and bent were a handful of words.  The edges of cardboard were torn, frayed and mutilated, much like the man who held it.  It was stained and bent.  Primitive letters etched out the silent plea of a lost life.  He was no more than ten feet away, and I missed him.  The sign read, “Need help, please.”  “Dad, I have seventy cents!”

Simplicity Missed and Reclaimed

“Don’t push these children away.”  Jesus’ voice was purposeful, highlighting an eternal principal violated by stumbling men who chased after life and missed living in the pursuit of living.   “Don’t ever get between them and me.  These children are the very center of life in the kingdom” (Mark 10:14, The Message).  Simplicity is central to the infinite, which is an odd and incomprehensible dichotomy.  That which is complex beyond comprehension embraces simplicity at its core and derives all that it is from that core.  The infinite invites us to simplicity as that which is of eternal value is best seen in that which is simple and uncluttered.

Simplicity is the key that turns the tumblers to the door of the eternal.  It is the single and sole passport to an audience with the infinite.  We must suspect then that such a concept is built into the fabric of the finite as well.  Simplicity is the essence of life and living from which all else springs.  Without it complexity loses it roots, it has no grounding, no boundaries and no identifiable point of departure that defines it and shapes it.  And it is here, with the cluster of children swirling around Him in innocent admiration that Jesus declares simplicity as simply central.

The Pharisees and their malicious attempts to trap Him were barely hours old, still resonating in His mind.  God incarnate, the Creator of the universe had been asked to justify Himself.  It was indeed the absurdity that arises when simplicity is missed.  The rich young ruler and the stench of materialism were only moments away.  Face to face with God, the rich young man would prove himself unable to see Jesus in the tangled web woven of wealth and the complexity inherent in the sordid accumulation of power.  He had too much of this world and too little of the next; all of which leaves no room for simplicity.  The walk to Jerusalem, betrayal, spikes, a splintered beam, oozing blood, death . . . all of that was only a mere handful of days away.  Awash in the many manifestations of man’s sin and on the threshold of abolishing it, Jesus “gathered the children up in His arms and He laid His hands of blessing on them” (Mark 10:16, The Message).

Simplicity Lived

As you look at this picture of Jesus, do you see it?  It too is on the margins of our lives, sadly so.  Jesus is sitting, gingerly drawing an armful of giggling and squealing children into His lap.  The thick hands of a carpenter run calloused fingers through mounds of curls gracing a tiny head, drawing a smile out of a timid child with a playful and slightly bemused stare.  Embracing their innocence and simplicity as so far removed from the world He faces, the world that He will die for.

He sees in their impish and innocent faces the simplicity that keeps the world from seeing Him.  He is at the vortex of His earthly life.  In a matter of days all of history will be rocked by His death.  The universe will itself reel.  Hell will fall.  Satan will flee.  The immensity of the powers of darkness will suffer complete and uncompromising defeat.  He will defiantly tread the bowels of Hell itself and then He will rise and He will, in His resurrection, change the entire course of human history for the full course of human history.  What He is about to do is monumental beyond anything that has ever transpired in the whole course of existence.

But here, at this moment, sandwiched between these cataclysmic events, He laughs with children who have no sense of Who He is, or what awaits Him.  But, innocent they are.  And so He plays for a moment.  He tickles and gets tickled.  He tells a joke and the air is filled with the squeal of childhood laughter.  Eye to eye with gentle intensity He tells them of their immense value and of a Father’s love for each of them.  He will die for them shortly, their innocence maybe making that sacrifice more bearable and more compelling.

It is the Creator connecting through simplicity with the created in a way that is entirely unabated and unobstructed.  It is the treasure of the deep soul finding connection with the vast God through the conduit of simplicity.  The mayhem of life’s traffic, all of the red and green and yellow lights that had dogged His ministry were laid aside so that He could immerse Himself in life’s real purpose.

The Door of Access

From this adoring pile of romping children His gaze shifted, directing his words to the twelve standing about the scene.  It was not to be a lesson for children, but one from them.  Tussling with their youthful energy, He says, “Unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in” (Mark 10:15, The Message).  The contrast is numbing, even paralyzing.  The key to complexity is simplicity?  But how can simplicity ever hope to grasp complexity?  Simplicity would suggest intentional ignorance through the abandonment of the acquisition of knowledge.  It was a stunning and completely puzzling reversal.

The complexities of life and living, the minute intricacies of the Law and the sacrificial system, the unfathomable breadth of the cosmos and starry hosts that beg exploration and contemplation, the mysterious yet striking predictability of nature, the grandeur and the magnificent majesty of God as the incomprehensible “I AM” (Genesis 3:14, NIV) next to which all of creation fades and pales into oblivion is accessed through simplicity?  Here, in the laughter and play of these children laid the incalculably priceless key to kingdom access and the sole passport to the infinite?  It was simply too simple, so simple that grasping it was, in itself, complex.

Peals of laughter drew them back from contemplation, being a sweet elixir to a sullen life.  They were the voices of those who had seized the keys to the kingdom through simplicity.  Accepting as these children accepted, with innocence and simplicity, humility and obedience, through trust that never asks if there is anything else other than trust.  Engaging in a raw embracing, a simple acceptance free of attempts to determine how to shape one’s life so that it might find a shred of acceptability before God.  Freely accepting the unconditional as exactly that . . . unconditional.  And so it was in the children.

Jesus stood, the lesson now having been taught by example and by word.  He stooped, placed His hands on the children for a brief final moment and blesses them, extending into their simplicity the blessing of God.  He was able to do so because of the massive and free-roaming space created in and by their simplicity.  Access to the kingdom was granted to such as these, its evidence seen in the blessing.  It was all so simple, yet so magnificently transforming.  Lives have expended lifetimes trying to achieve what these children achieved in but a moment via the vehicle of innocence and simplicity.

A final hug, a parting embrace and the children dispersed, running into the arms of waiting parents.  A pair of them skipped off holding hands.  Sticks trailed curlicue designs in the gritty dirt.  Several ran around parents in errant circles of delight and innocent mischief.  A small cluster gathered mounds of wildflowers, pressing their nectared petals deep into their faces, inhaling their perfumed ecstasy.  The sound of laughter faded and then dissipated on the soft winds of the day.  The bevy of children scurried off to the next adventure, not realizing that they had just had the greatest adventure of all.  But simplicity embraces all life as an adventure.

Getting Back

A honking horn exploded into the moment.  The light was green.  I instinctively punched the accelerator and drove off.  “But Dad, I have seventy cents!”  How our hearts are drawn to simplicity, yet how difficult it is for us to allow it to remain so; how painful when we cannot respond to it.  Life caused me to drive by him, and to do this day I am irritated by that action.  Corey and I talked about that man, and we talked about how we could help someone with his seventy cents; seventy cents of simplicity.  Could I please have seventy cents of simplicity!  Enough to see my world like Corey does.  Oh God, could you please grant me seventy cents of simplicity!

How Do I Find Seventy Cents of Simplicity?

How do I balance complexity with simplicity?  How do I rectify the God of the universe playing with children and incorporate that principal into my world?  How do I correlate the melding of the infinite and simplicity?  Where is that common ground where I can embrace simplicity with a relentless vigor and yet live in a world of complexity?

It is not the absence of complexity, for creation is woven of it and it is the embodiment of God Himself.  It is the example of the infinitely complex God playing and romping with simple children that we must seize, hold fast to and draw from.  The key is the full embodiment of both simplicity and complexity where neither is lost or sacrificed at the expense of the other, but where the complete embrace of both brings fullness and balance to life.  The challenge is to hold to both equally.  We assume that complexity is the absence of simplicity.  Rather, is complexity not the very thing that highlights simplicity and makes simplicity so very obvious and so deeply cherished?  Is it not in the holding of simplicity that complexity has a point of origin and a benchmark which dictates it shape, tenor and tone?  And is not the fullest embrace of the two, with each holding the other in balance the very thing that maximizes life and living?

We need to live with seventy cents of simplicity, clutching it in our fists and refusing to let it go.  Allowing it to hold and ground our exploration, acquisition and understanding of life’s complexities.  It is our task to apprehend an understanding of the world God has put us in, but to likewise to maintain eyes of simplicity that keep us centered on that which is central to all of life.  Complexity that is not continually grounded in simplicity is apt to be errant, causing us to be consumed in the complexity itself.  For that brief moment, following a confrontation with the Pharisees, a pending confrontation with a rich young ruler, and only days away from death, Jesus centered Himself in simplicity.  So should we.  

Pondering Point

“I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of” (John 10:10, The Message).  Could it be that this “more and better life” is in part the ability to embrace complexity while holding tenaciously to simplicity, allowing simplicity to ground us and center us in the complicated and detailed facets of life; each providing a balancing effect for the other, thereby allowing us to embrace the fullness of life without sacrificing anything that a single focus would cause us to miss?  And is such a balance the work of God in our lives, His grace and power allowing us to achieve this dual embrace?  Indeed, I think it is.

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Not Where We Were

It seems that we have some vague and rather ethereal sense of where we’re going in this thing called life.  For the more contemplative soul, that sense might be quite refined.  For the casual traveler, it might be a bit more nebulous and scattered.  For many, where they’re going is defined by the tasks of the day, rather than enlarged by a vision for tomorrow.

In many cases where we’re going is far more rigorously defined by all the places where we don’t want to go, rather than the places where we do want to go.  At other times its definition is shaped by the opinions of others, or it’s carved directly from the bedrock of the value systems that have been built into our lives throughout the whole of our lives. In whatever way we do it, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else. 

The Detours We Create

Yet, life is not so predictable as to always wind its way to the places that we presumed it to be going.  There are those times when where we were going was mistaken as some sort of final destination when in reality it was only a step to a final destination. At other times the place where we’re going is really a destination that we had fabricated because the place to which life had originally called us appeared too big, or too far, or too steep, or simply impossible in whatever way our limited vision happened to interpret it. Sometimes our destination is to set a course away from our destination so that we can dispense with whatever responsibility or obligation our original destination might have demanded of us. But then there are those other times when life takes a sharp turn that seems little of our actions, nothing of our destination, but everything of circumstances designed to kill our journey and crush our destination long before we get within arm’s length of it.

And then in the magic of life, there are those times where we have actually pursued some authentic destination with such rigor that the trajectory has catapulted us past our destination to places that are everything of our fondest imagination. However, it might play out, we’re all headed somewhere.

The Explanation of Detours Missed

How It Happens

Yet, more often than not it’s the not the obvious shifts in our journey that are the core problem. Sure, life shows up and we get shoved down. There’s no question that the natural ebb and flow of life, whether it be titanic or miniscule, will happen to us.  Despite our frequently ego-centric inclinations to the contrary, we are not so shrewd or ingenious as to be able to traverse life in a manner that deftly side-steps everything that comes at us.  We don’t dance as well as we think we do.

Casual and Careless

Yet, more often than not, the explanation doesn’t rest in life having shown up. The much more poignant issue is that too often we are passive, flabby and lax in rigorously living out our lives. We’re far too casual and careless. Somehow, somewhere the sanctity of life and the privilege of living it out was supplanted with some sense that it’s too much work or that it’s not going to work, so why try?

Preoccupied with Pabulum

Too often we’re too preoccupied with pabulum. We’re tediously engaged with tiny things and we’re caught in the tedium of minutia because we can gather these things around us and control them when the bigger things are out of our control. Too frequently we’re goaded by the fear of big dreams and massive possibilities, so we dumb down our lives to anesthetize those fears. 

Along for the Ride

Frequently we presume that we’re some docile passenger along for a ride that’s going wherever it’s going, so we just let it go to wherever that place is. We freely surrender to passivity which is an invitation to meaninglessness. And meaninglessness is the death of the soul itself. Life is a river, we say. And the best course of action is to navigate it because entertaining the far-fetched notion of swimming against it is utterly preposterous.  

The Walls of Denial

At other times, we live in the constructed confines erected from the raw material of denial, causing us to live out a life that is in denial of life itself. We become squatters living in a squatter’s camp constructed by the flimsy materials of justification, rationalization, blame-placing and projecting. We pull in the walls due to the reality that materials of this sort are always pulling inward because they will die if we dare to press them outward.  Hemmed in by walls of this sort, the world around us is shut out and moves on without our awareness of it. 

Ending Up Where We Wish to Be

We will end up somewhere. The fact that we have a destination is irrefutable as life is a journey that presents us with no option other than the journey. We may decide that the nature and course of the journey is irrelevant, and we may take a backseat to passivity.  If we do, we have no right to complain when we end up in some place other than what we may have thought or preferred.

Yet, we can recognize that we are not automatons subject to the flux of the world within which we have found ourselves. It would seem advisable to recognize that we have an obligation to the course that our life is taking, and that along with that obligation we have been granted a profound degree of power to bring to the course. If we succumb to carelessness, or become engrossed by pabulum, or if we just let the ride go wherever circumstances take it, or if we pull close the walls of denial this thing that we call life will wind itself to wherever it’s going with no one at the helm.  And that kind of destination cannot be good.

We would be wise to inventory our lives and determine if we are in some way large or small participating in any of these behaviors.  If so, we need to root them out and expunge them from our lives.  Reclaiming a sense of vision, and then seizing our lives with discipline and intentionality will set us on a path that will land us in places that we’ve dreamt to land.  If we don’t, the place we land may not be on any land that we even remotely recognize.      

Thanks for joining us today.  You will discover “In the Footsteps of the Few – The Power of a Principled Life,” as well as all of my books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  It’s my hope that you find these books are meaningful and restorative in your life. Also, visit us daily on all of our Social Media sites to find inspirational quotes and videos.

Think About It

You are what you choose to be.  Life is not a dictated script.  It’s far from being something to which you have to surrender.  Yes, there are things that we did not ask for that we have to deal with.  Regardless, whatever our flaws there is always room to do something about them.  Always.  Some option always exists.  There are always possibilities.  Life affords us choices and chances.  The human spirit is tenacious, and powerful, and wonderfully creative.  Don’t underestimate your capabilities and your resources.  Realize that the resources that you possess outclass and outweigh any flaw, perceived or real.  Choose to view yourself differently and more accurately.  Choose to choose you for despite your low self-esteem, you won’t be disappointed.   

“The Self That I Long to Believe In” is a bold, timely, and inspirational book that will help you to effectively build your self-esteem. Get your copy at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. 

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. I hope that you take the time to enjoy all of the many programs on our podcast. You’ll find us on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. See you next time.

Dean was deaf.  It was that simple, but it was inordinately complex at the same time.  Life can have its sinkholes.  Sometimes there’s a bunch of them, enough of them to cause a broad and crippling implosion where things just cave in all around us.  Life then becomes a litany of foggy responses to trauma where we move zombie-like through whatever the day or the moment holds.  There is no forward movement in times like these.  When our worlds collapse it all becomes about survival because often that’s all it can be about.  Soon survival becomes the norm where we strive to survive for the sake of survival itself.  Life becomes abjectly meaningless other than getting through the day to fight the meaningless that will face us again tomorrow.

Dean was deaf.  But he was mentally retarded as well.  Tenderly kind, compassionate and invitingly soft underneath it all, he was the by-product of the sink-holes that had scattered themselves all around his life.  In the end, it all imploded and he retreated into his deafness and his mental retardation, finding there some seclusion away from it all.  He sat along the roadside of life watching some of it go by and ignoring the rest of it.  He surrendered to isolation and held the world at bay, barricading himself many fathoms deep within himself.  He effectively placed himself out of reach of anything.  He was a treasure lost in the stratified subterranean layers of his fear.              

He had never mastered his deafness.  Some lean into their disability and shape it to serve them.  He never leaned into it.  Some work to compensate for their handicaps by strengthening the things that are not handicaps.  He never compensated.  Rather, he decompensated down into a silent oblivion where he sat hunched and utterly alone.

Sign language and the reading of lips never broke him out of the prison that deafness had thrust him into; that place so many fathoms deep that no one could get down there.  He was somehow held inside with the world held outside.  Each could see the other from their variant vantage points, but neither could bridge the gap nor plumb the depths.  Whatever separated him from the rest of us seemed intractably immovable.

A Conviction of Greatness

Life sometimes persuades us to believe that there is so much more to something or some person even though we can’t see it.  We engage that thing or that person with a certainty that there lies within them something profound despite the fact that it’s completely hidden.  It seems that we walk circles around them, looking and probing for some crack or tear that will grant us a peek inside.  We look for some chink to wriggle through or a knob that we can wrestle with long enough until some hidden door opens and grants us entrance to the riches within.  There emerges a dogged persistence about it all because we dare not bypass what lies within even though it’s held away from us.

That was Dean.  He was a kid that I could not let go of even though there was nothing to hold onto.  His mild mental retardation put him even further away; a young man of riches unearthed that always provoked me back to him.  He was frustrating and abrasive at times, being unable to break through his own deafness and reach up and out to everything outside of himself.  His coarse and sometimes rash behaviors seemed to be an expression of his deeply engrained trepidation of the world, combined with his own frustration of choosing to seclude himself.  Because he couldn’t break out, he reinforced his isolation from the inside out, pushing everything away so that he would have a sense that it was he who was locking it all out.   Somehow he found solace in thinking he controlled it because it gave him a sense he could get out of it.  He couldn’t.

I didn’t choose to be relentless with this kid.  I had no choice but be relentless.  Sometimes what you see in another is far too convincing and too terribly compelling to let it go of it even when you meet with nothing more than outright rejection and ever-thickening walls.  And walls there were; thick, fortified and towering.  I found myself relentless in pursuit and then disappointed into withdrawal, only to do it all over again because this kid was somehow just too precious to let go of.  He needed to hear, maybe not with his ears, but at least with his heart.  I prayed that God would pull Dean aside and open up something that would open him up.      

Deaf to Life

Rejection and scorn was his lot due to the assumption of sin that others had about him.  The world was loudly silent for him.  Something was missing that he could not identify because he had never known it.  Life is indeed an orchestra full and complete, absolutely masterful.  But for the deaf man it was absolutely silent.  The musical pieces and masterful renditions for which life was created were soundless for him.  Notes and scores that were casually written across the faces of friends, that were penned in the raucous flamboyance across bustling open air markets, that found subtle notation in droning bees gently drifting from blossom to awaiting blossom all gave the faintest hints of the melodies they illustrated, but the sounds were never there.  The sheet music ran in front of him in endless reams, but they didn’t spawn a sound.

The haunting call of myriad geese aloft, the pounding surf throwing itself against a forever beach, or the fingers of the wind rustling through listless treetops were silent for him.  The roll of a distant summer thunderstorm on a humid horizon, or the raucous laughter of life rising from the soul of humanity itself was nothing more and nothing less than the sound of silence.  Entombed in a vacuum of deafening silence, the orchestra had always played soundlessly for this deaf man; vigorously indeed, but vigorously silent.  He was deaf and he was starkly alone.

He attempted to interact and engage with the music and the melodies.  But to try to participate in a world you can’t hear leaves you ever outside of that world despite how hard you try.  His lips were slow and drawn with words that were ill-formed.  He arduously attempted to wrap words around voice and syntax and intonation that he had never heard.  He spent himself in perpetually frustrating efforts to do what he couldn’t conceive and could much less imagine, to put sounds to words he’d never heard.

His words were slurred, distorted, verbally twisted and linguistically bent, readily inviting and successfully garnering ridicule, mockery and confusion from those that lived in the world of sound.  His was a life forced out onto the fringes of life, exiled there in a lonely land where silence is a hated, but forever companion.  There was no breech in the wall to slip back through in order to touch humanity so as to belong to something other than the silence.

Rejection by others was based on the errant assumption that some sin had caused his deafness.  This conclusion was elevated as full-fledged fact, rendering him an outcast on the falsest of premises.  Rejection and silence are both isolating, the difference is that one is a choice, the other is chance.  What they have in common is that the person upon whom they both fell chose neither.  It was something like a full emasculation of everything it is to be human.  This is what it was to be deaf and mute.  And so his life went.

There was a rumor that circulated.  A distant murmuring unheard by deaf ears, but caught by others said that Jesus was in the Decapolis.  This prophet and miracle worker had come.  The verdict as to who this Jesus was remained a point of discussion and debate.  Some of that was quite heated and some of it was really rather innocuous.  Yet, He was coming and the captivating risk that He was something more than a mortal man was compelling.

Had those around this deaf man tired of his dependency, these friends of his, or did they care for him?  Was he little more than an object that could be used to entice a miracle of this prophet?  Was their intent little more than a ploy for a cheap thrill?  The text is unclear.  The motive is foggy and indistinct.  But they take the deaf mute to Jesus.  It didn’t appear to be an action of the deaf man’ own accord as there is no hint of self-determination or self-initiation.  There doesn’t appear to be any sort of remote inkling that the possibility of being ushered into the world of sound is a distinct possibility.  How can you possibly know what you’re missing if you’ve never had it?  How can you desire something if desire has no place to be cultivated because we’ve no idea that there’s anything to be desired? 

Sometimes we see in and through others what we could not otherwise see because it’s not within us to see.  Sometimes we experience the passionate and vigorous pulse of desire vicariously through the heartbeat of others and we sense the pulse in them.  Sometimes our vision of the possible is only possible because we see that vision reflected in the eyes of another and we watch it listlessly dance about in their smile.  Sometimes we actually end up dancing because others have caused us to believe in the dance and have ushered us out on the dance floor even when we can’t hear the music ourselves.  Such were the deaf mute’s friends.      

And so, the rumor draws them to Jesus.  Soon the embedded mass was found.  Ushered by these friends, the deaf man pressed through the crowd.  The small entourage cuts a swath through a fluid array of assorted humanity that swelled and eddied around Jesus.  The clamor of a world of never-ending needs simultaneously sought relief.  The world clamored around Jesus seeking some shred of hope and some healing that arises from that shred of that very hope.  The crowd swirled around this wandering prophet as if in the grip of the undertow of all creation, an irresistible current from which all other currents find their sole source.  Passing through a cultural morass of assembled humanity the deaf man is drawn toward the center.

The aged, stooped and shuffling in the grip of long years wandered about in a cloudy curiosity.  Children darted in and out.  The blind walked about groping, stretching trembling arms outward, substituting touch for sight and sound for vision.  Stumbling, they made their way to Jesus.  Crutches that were terribly crude and deeply weather-worn were nothing more than primitive prosthetics that sought a miracle for an absent leg.  A cripple, his fingers clawing the arid soil drug useless appendages and tattered garments that trailed in the talcum dirt behind him.

Limp in his mother’s arms an infant teetered on the chilling precipice of death, the pallor of death strangely awash across the face of newborn life rendering his skin hues of suffocating purple.  His mother stood on panicked tiptoe, stretching her neck to catch a glimpse of something, anxiously groping toward the center of the mass.  It was all silence to the deaf mute.  It was all wildly alive, vibrant, turbulent and wonderfully riotous, but deathly silent.  From his vantage point, the drama was only partly revealed.

Pressing onward and inward, it was more of the same.  The scene was packed tight with shifting layers of broken humanity, the curious, the destitute, the rich and poor alike.  Finally the last layer of jostling, clamoring humanity parted like the parting of some glorious tapestry.  A man of silent stature stood in the crowd, yet infinitely above it.  The nucleus of the swirling mass of people and their needs was deafening in silence.  Jesus back was to them.  Slightly stooped, His hands gently rest on the shoulders of an elderly woman.  The look of astonishment was set in her eyes and splashed across her face.  A worn cane lay abandoned at her feet.  Something unusual had transpired.  It was immediately clear that there was thick compassion in His touch, His stance, and His mannerisms.  A parting word to the woman and He turns.

His gaze shifted and panned the crowd.  Mussing the hair of a playful child, both smile deeply and invade the heart of the other in a superbly divine intersection.  Another step and this Jesus was drawn to the outstretched arms of an ecstatic infant.  He moved toward her, His face electrically alive with love and aflame with anticipation.  To squeals of laughter He took her, held her high, pulled her to His chest, ran His hand across a misshapen leg and it was straight.  The convergence of two souls, He drew her deeply to His face.  And then He handed her back to an elated set of parents who now held a daughter who was wholly whole.  All of it was too much for words; it was too inexplicable to embrace in the confining catacombs of human understanding.  The only question that one can formulate is “Who is this?”

Before the answer can be formulated Jesus is drawn to the pleas of those who have brought the deaf mute, pleas the deaf man cannot hear.  The man, this Jesus stepped toward them, fastening His attention on those who had brought the man.  He seemed discerning and listening with some sort of intuition and understanding that superseded anything they could comprehend.

He then turned intense eyes and fastened His gaze on the mute.  His eyes were more than human, although they appeared to be something that was fully human at the same time.  They were infinitely deep, profoundly thoughtful and intensely focused.  A soft but chiseled spirit enamored the crowd and drew the deaf man to Jesus.  It was all a terrible yet inviting contradiction of commanding power and gentle softness.  Jesus’ eyes had the breath of infinity behind them.  The deaf mute found himself becoming entirely lost in them until Jesus took his arm, gestured and began to move out of the crowd.  God was afoot; the Creator of the universe in intentional motion toward an intentional destination.  It was all terrifying but exhilarating at the same time.

This fluid mass of humanity parted a second time, but from the inward out.  Shifting layers of broken humanity sliced a swath to the edge of the mass.  Jesus breeched the fringes of the crowd, walking with a man whose life had been lived on the fringes of life.  Jesus was in the process of isolating a man who lived isolated in deafness.  In a moment, the crowd was far behind them, their voices falling into a distant murmur.  Those that advocated his healing were absent.  Suddenly, inexplicably, this deaf mute was alone with God.

Ears and tongue; the world is drawn in through one with the self being released through the other.  They both engage in a partnership of exchange, drawing in and letting out.  They draw in the world to process it and then release it back into the world with part of the person attached; adding to life, flavoring it, affixing yet another unique note to the chorus of the ages.  There, in the world of the deaf, this dance was never initiated.  The deaf man was isolated from the world and to the world.

Drawing the man along, Jesus sought isolation.  It was within isolation that isolation would be broken.  One on one, God and man in relationship echoing back to a lost garden.  The Creator and the created rectifying lost creation in an act of recreation.  In this joint journey they walked past the rancor and raucous of an open air market filled with bartering and bantering, scales and sweeping gestures.  They skirted around scurrying children and walked past stray dogs milling close to tables spread with red meats.  A pair of centurions laden with weaponry strode past in the service of oppression, granting Jesus and the deaf mute no notice.  Passing priests in ceremonial robes stepped in pompous cadence on errands of perceived righteousness.

And then, an unexpected turn into a vacant alley made up of basalt stones that cut a manmade canyon.  The sun found scant room to watch the making of a miracle.  It casts angled rays, canting itself to catch the pending phenomenon.  The din of the open air market and the jostling of the vendors was put at a sufficient distance, becoming gradually muted and fading soft and indistinct into the background.

Then, a miracle was wrought with gestures that were so familiar to the mute.  Gestures were the very means of understanding and the way in which the deaf mute had navigated his world.  Jesus was not a God interacting in mystery, but in intimacy.  There were no methods cloaked with indiscernible actions or unfamiliar rituals.  All was simple, direct and familiar; fingers in ears and a touch of the tongue.  Saliva was a symbol of the fullest sharing of self as a participant in the miracle right along with the deaf mute.  Jesus engaged the man not as a distant entity cloaked beyond recognition in some sort of misty immutability.  Salvia was believed to have had a curative quality; a belief entirely fictional in nature.  However, the symbolism of the act provided a needed vehicle that outweighed the myth of the act itself.  So Jesus ingeniously chose to use myth as a vehicle for a miracle; a miracle done in the simple language of the deaf mute’s isolated world to obliterate his isolation.

And then there was something for Jesus Himself.  Something the deaf man could not hear or participate in.  Jesus looked up to heaven.  There is a weighted sigh of a God whose love eliminates His ability not to feel.  It was a reflection of both His heart and the heart of His Father.  It seemed to be the private pain of a God grieving over His own creation, escaping the lethal weight of it all only by virtue of His divinity.  Jesus’s sighing was likely the plaintive moan of God once again embracing the awful reality of fallen mankind as manifest in this single, mute life.   It was likely the expression of a great angst that arose from an infinite understanding of how far this man’s life was from God’s original intent for him.

There, in that alley God would meet the need of one man.  In a few days, He would meet the need of thousands with a scant seven barley loaves and a few small fish.  A few months beyond that and He would meet the need of all mankind on a barren hill.  It would be a hill that would not be sandwiched between the walls of some abandoned alley, but between two crosses and two worlds.  However, there was the need of the moment.

“Be opened!” (Mark 8:34, NIV) said this Jesus.  Not just his ears, but his life as no miracle is excluded or in any way restrained solely to the obvious.  “Be opened!”  Be free to live fully, to hear in perfect pitch the richness of the notes and measures, the scores of life and living.  Be opened to engage everything else in life that was open.  Be opened so that being closed simply cannot be.

Jesus took a step back and watched life unfold as the miracle reverberated far beyond the miracle; something like when a stone is dropped in a mirrored pool, sending ripples far beyond the point of impact.  An alien experience transpired for which the man had no point of correlation.  Sounds began to filter through.  The orchestra gradually swelled and expanded.  The void of silence filled to capacity.

Suddenly, he heard the crunch of gravel beneath his feet, shifting his weight again and again to reproduce the sound his stunned and hungry mind had never imagined.  The barking of a dog floated in from afar, the source of the sound and everything that defined it was entirely unknown.  Birds darted overhead in tangles of wild flight, cheeps and chirps synchronizing the feathered masses journey.  He was caught in the rapture of hearing his own breath.  And then words, the first he had ever heard, annunciated clearly, perfectly and concisely.  His own voice now came back to him perfect!  The cycle was now marvelously complete.

Jesus stood silently, giving the man room and time to embrace the wonder of the moment.  Miracles become freeing and claustrophobic at the same time; opening up entirely new venues that are often bigger than our ability to embrace.  Time was needed to allow this astonished man sufficient time to reorient to the miracle of a life restored.  Maybe Jesus saw in this man, this deaf mute the liberation that the cross would extend to billions.

It may be that the individual miracles, like this one, allowed Jesus to foresee in this solitary face what the cross would do in an endless sea of faces across endless spans of time.  Not the kinds of miracles that would eventually fall to the deterioration of frail bodies and the eventuality of death, but miracles that would be eternally fresh because they open up all of eternity to all who seize it.  I wonder if maybe it might have been these moments that allowed Him to endure the long moments on a lonely cross. 

And then, the first words of another human being that he ever heard.  “Don’t tell anyone,” Jesus said.  The first words seem irrational and inexplicable.  The world of sounds brings with it responsibility to the world it unveils.  Miracles bring with them accountability to both the Restorer and what has been restored.  A relationship with God brings obedience, the responsibility to act on faith even when that action appears irrational, contrary, odd or plainly wrong.  “Don’t tell anyone”.  But containment failed.  The measure of the miracle was larger than the measure of the man to contain it.  But that is what happens when an infinite God interacts within our finite frames.  What He does is always bigger than us and bigger than our ability to contain it.  Our faith may be big enough to elicit a miracle, but our faith is seldom large enough to embrace it once it happens.  Jesus took his arm, gestured and began to move out of the alley and into life.

Aside in an Alley

And so, Jesus pulls me aside at times and isolates me in my isolation.  He places creation aside and draws me to a secluded place, away from the crowds that surround me and the world that has so often thrust me to its fringes.  Often I am afraid to be there because I am confused and frightened to be one on one with God.  I would much prefer to have Him heal me at a safe distance, or intersect my life in the companionship of others, or touch me as part of something larger within which I can meld.  But one on one in some alley in my life; secluded with God?  Sequestered with the Creator?  It is both terrible and wonderful.

And then, to have Him connect with me intimately in that place of isolation?  The God of the cosmos coming to me in my isolation?  Not just in proximity or in earshot, but in my language and in the raw essence of my being.  God steps into my isolation and speaks to me there.  Not standing outside of my isolation and beckoning me out of it from out there.  But coming in, gently taking my arm and gesturing me out of it.  Partnering with me and in the partnering coming squarely into my isolation to commandeer me and rescue me. Cutting through the mass of issues, pain, self-absorption, and self-hatred that surrounds me and drawing me along with Him.

And there, in those isolated alleys of my life He frees me.  He relishes watching me come to life and then fumble with a life that’s so new that I have little idea how to hold it.  He is as amazed at watching me come to life as He was when He first formed Adam from the dust and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7, NIV).  It is just as poignant for Him, never being diminished for a God whose love for His creation rages undiminished.  God is always revealing that creation can only exist if it is constantly creating.  “He has done everything well . . .” (Mark 7:37, NIV).  Harkening to yet another statement . . . “and God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10, NIV).  In that alley God was creating all over again as He always does, doing everything well and good.

Dean’s Alley

It was all experimental, but the doctors said that the surgery might restore Dean’s hearing.  He was not enthused at all.  Dean walked through the process more like a laboratory rat that had no idea of what was happening or what the possible outcome might mean.  He was lethargic through it all, demure and distant.

But the day came quite by accident.  I turned and there he stood.  My first response was to say “hello” out of some prescribed tedium and routine, knowing that he wasn’t reading my lips.  Sometimes rote and ritual turns life lifeless.  It robs us of expectation and hope.  I felt that way with Dean.  But I said “hello” anyway.

He simply looked, canting his head a bit and registering something in those crystal blue eyes that I had never seen.  Sometimes we imagine something so much for so long that when it’s ours it’s both wonderful and terribly different than we had ever imagined it being.  I think that was the case for Dean.  He had heard my voice.  The surgery had worked.  For the first time, he had taken in the tone and flavor of the single word that I had uttered and had found himself awed by the utterance.  He smiled and seemed to wait for more.  I paused.  “Can you hear me?” I said tentatively, desperately hoping that he was no longer locked in and I locked out.

Instantly he grabbed my arm, turned and in the rush of wonder pulled me down the hall and into his room.  He stopped in the middle of that quaint room and pointed at the various objects around us in frantic gestures.  It was all so new for me that I had no idea of what he meant.  He continued to point in a manner insistent and adamant, walking around the room in a rigid gait and incessantly pointing.

Finally, I realize what he wanted; he wanted me to pronounce what the objects were, to speak their name, to say them so that he could hear them for the first time.  Picture, telephone, window, bed, floor, light, wall, rug, Craig; it was a young man surging alive with an urgency that flooded the room with a terrific and wonderful energy.  He was hearing it all, for the first time.

Sometimes you sense that you’ve been put in a place of privilege that you are completely and wholly undeserving of.  That’s where I was on that day.  God came aside this young man through the hands of a caring doctor and an experimental surgery.  Now I was privileged to stand beside him as well, inundated in a tsunami of wonderment and life.

It all went on for days and days.  I couldn’t wait to see Dean.  In indescribable awe, I watched a young man come alive in a way that makes coming alive worth all the pain and disappointment and deafness that we have to endure to get there.  A miracle came to me through Dean.  Deafness was abated in infinitely more ways that simply physical hearing.  Dean reminds me of deafness and what it can do to a person and a life.  Dean also reminds me of deafness abated when God comes along side of a single life and renders deafness deaf.            

Repeated Deafness

Unlike the deaf mute and unlike Dean, my deafness and my inability to speak to my world come often.  Frequently I need Jesus to put His fingers in my ears and touch my tongue.  Sin, selfishness and the lure of the world renders me deaf and ill-suited to speak as I should.  My condition is pitifully recurrent.  God’s presence is likewise persistently recurrent.  Daily I am in this alley with Him.  While I tire of it and find myself sweltering in embarrassment, He never tires.  He likes, it seems, these alley encounters.  He relishes taking me aside.  And I know that one day He will take me aside for that final time, that time when I will ascend to a place where deafness and speech deficits will simply not exist.  Their memory will be vanquished.  And there, in that place, I will stand eternally before God in perfection with new worlds perpetually opening up to me.  In that place the layers will constantly part to reveal something new.  His smile, the relish in His face will never be old, but always new.

Pondering Point

The loud voices in life, those that clamor for our attention are most often not the vital voices.  The fact that they have to clamor suggests as much.  It is the smaller voices that are weak, thin and easily drown out that are rich.  It is these that tend to be the priceless voices.  Their worth easily lost in the pompous and presumptuous voices that say much but hold little.  It is easy to become deaf.  And when we are, we miss the precious voices whose worth is immutable.

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Filth described her very well.  While it was an apt depiction, it failed to embrace the fullest description of what she was.  Some lives seem to be nothing more than a brutal manifestation of the accumulated slag and scum that is leftover in the wake of some departed tragedy.  These people become the thing that life has done to them, being so irreparably identified with their own tragedies that they themselves are a living manifestation of all those assorted tragedies.  Sometimes we become what life has done to us.  Hers was a life that was already an abysmal collection of untold catastrophes that resulted in filth nearly indescribable.  She was only fourteen.

Susan was of little note as she stepped off the bus that first day of summer camp.  She was one of over one hundred campers swirling in an arriving mass of anticipation.  Gathering tattered bags and a tattered spirit, her eyes were set hollow with the effects of a life lived in hatred.  Filth and a pervading stench drew her apart from the rest almost instantly.  Her soul seemed to reek with a putrid odor that handily eclipsed the smell emanating from her skin and clothing.  There was about her an inner ugliness that permeated everything else about her, that had consumed her and had digested whatever shred of good there might have been.  It all seemed to have effectively left the fragrance of any human goodness now consumed in the sludge of whatever it was that seemed to define her.

Her defense mechanism was so refined that she immediately repelled all who drew near, thrusting others so far away that she guaranteed her own isolation.  Her own woundedness was so utterly complete that the poison of the pain she felt spewed in venomous rages at anyone who drew near.  Her self-hatred was effectively projected outward onto anyone who dared draw near physically or emotionally.  She seemed as something less than human, something abominable; something terribly horrifying within which any shred of humanity was consumed and utterly lost.

The following week of camp was to be marred by ugly confrontations.  She devolved into assorted rages that were wild, brutish, entirely unprovoked and profuse.  She refused to shower.  Ferocious outbursts were filled with anger distilled into lethal poison that devastated other hearts, young and old.  Physical assaults and violent rages had an insane wildness and a touch of insanity about them.  There emerged at times something animalistic about her, something very primal that raged unrestrained by either reason or rationale.  At times the line between that of a visceral animal and a human being was blurred and terribly ill-defined. 

In the end, Susan was isolated in a lone cabin.  Her parents refused to come and get her.  Her pastor was unwilling and unable to deal with her rages as her life did not fit neatly into some clean theological rubric that he could manage.  The camp staff gathering to pray for her, but found their prayers as ineffective.  Some sort of spiritual possession was questioned, and rightly so.  She was a monster; a raging pathetic monster that we waited to relieve ourselves of at the close of camp.  Such was our judgment of her.

Judging From Fear

Judging is, I think, a manifestation of our own fears.  We judge so that we might have some sense of control and some feeling of superiority.  If we judge that which is before us, we assume we will not become whatever it is that we are rendering judgment upon.  We set ourselves apart as distinct from that thing or that person with that distinction somehow convincing us that we are different.  Judging places us above that which we judge, meaning that we will not succumb to it from our supposedly elevated position.

We judge because we fear, and because we fear we are not prone to look deeply into the person that we’re judging.  For if we look deeply, we might see ourselves.  We might be forced to surrender to the reality that that which we are rendering judgment upon is as much a part of that person as it is a part of us.  Superficial judgment allows us to bypass our own humanity and live in the lie of superiority.  The person whom we judge is then sacrificed to our thin self-serving judgments and whatever is it that God wanted to do in our lives through that person is tragically lost.     

Judgment Revealed

It was to be that final night of camp.  The next morning a mass of buses and cars would invade the gravel parking lot, snatching up sun burnt campers filled with the wild tales of a week’s adventures.  But that would be tomorrow.  For now, night had fallen, drawing up a warm blanket of thick summer air across the camp and out beyond the wooded expanse, tucking the world in at each horizon.  Crickets sang in a chorus of the night from the deep woods, lulling the day to slumber with their mesmerizing notes.  Frogs bellowed thick from a stream that meandered through a wooded ravine down a slight ridge.  Their chorus hauntingly rolled up the rise and across the slight meadow.  Lightening bugs cast dancing pinpoint pigments of yellow across the shadowy landscape and deep into the tall stands of sleepy timber.  The moon had only shaken a sliver of itself awake, mingling with the starry minions.  It was the perfect night; soft and subtle.  God’s creation was melding into perfection.

With the campers bedded down for that final night, I strolled down to the chapel now bathed in the soft shadows of night.  A few moments with God at the end of a long week seemed so right.  Drawn, I descended the winding dirt and gravel path with the soft crunch of each step muffled by night’s thick softness.  Slight shadows cut from the thin pastel light of a sleepy moon seemed to whisper something about reverence and what it is to be alone with God.

Another person had thought the same.  The outdoor chapel was framed by a wall of river rock that extended muscular granite arms around an expansive gravel floor.  Across the gravel expanse there stood a rock and timber altar with a muscular, rough-hewn cross as a shadowy sentry.  Thick timbers supported a vaulted wooden roof spread with broad knotty pine boards.  The woods beyond were alive with the night.  And Susan was there.

A shadowy figure knelt at the altar.  Her aloneness was poignant, an isolated life kneeling before an altar in a desperate hope of somehow breaking that isolation.  The crying was soft and indistinct, being defy muted by her fear of vulnerability.  The moment was a manifestation of a broken heart and deeply wounded spirit which had somehow collided with God enough to strike a spark of hope.  She was kneeling there, her fingers embedded in the rock altar, hoping that this hope would not fail her as had everything else.

We had all seen her as ugly, despicable, the slimy scum of humanity that teetered on the savagery of a wild animal.  We wanted nothing more than to see the sun break on the final day of camp and watch her leave both the camp and our lives.  We could not wait to be rid of her, to relegate this vermin back to the hole from which she had crawled.  To say we hated Susan was likely excessive.  To say we despised her was likely true.  And yet, here she was, broken.  The wounded humanity she so vehemently lashed out from was pouring out across that rock and timber altar.  Her core was exposed and for the first time I saw a slight glimpse of her humanity.  I had errantly judged it not to be there for fear that I would recognize it in myself.  Now I saw her brokenness and in it, I recognized my own.

I feared her, not knowing in that moment what to do; not wanting to do anything out of the fear of behaviors I’d observed and the hatred I’d seen spew from her.  But I found myself walking toward her anyway.  Having made no conscious decision to do anything, I stepped, my footsteps dictated by something wholly other than me.  Suddenly I was beside her in the thick dark, in the thick of night; in the thick of her night.  Without a word spoken, she reached up and took my hand and drew me down to her side with a force that buckled my knees.  Putting a trembling arm around me as if the whole of her spirit was leaning its weight on me, I felt for that brief instance the intolerable hell of her life.  And in that moment I understood why she was what she was.

Her words were to silence the night that surrounded us.  Nature drew down into the moment, stood on tiptoe so it seemed as God reached out from the expanse of that starry night and changed a life.

Her next words set me back, instantly slicing through all the things that had caused me to judge her so harshly and revealing who this really was.  She said, “would you pray with me?”  Without a word from me her heart ruptured open in prayer.  I never uttered a word.  I didn’t have to as such an action would have been only an intrusion in that transforming moment.  Massive floodgates surged opened and a enormous reservoir of pain that had accumulated over the incalculable expanse of years and events deluged the darkened chapel.  I knelt . . . stunned.  I had arrogantly diminished her in my judgments, and I experienced my own cleansing in hers.  It was a marvelous and privileged moment.

In the end, we spent over an hour kneeling in the gravel, cloaked in a deep summer’s night. Her prayers, a lifetime tidal wave of events and circumstances kept coming; of abuse and neglect and drugs.  The assorted maladies such as hunger, too few clothes, empty birthdays, numerous evictions and the rejection of society that abject poverty brings to a young life.  There was a devastating abortion and a fathomless litany of other terrifying choices that shredded her soul.  A father’s alcoholism, a brother’s suicide, and a mother’s incessant marital unfaithfulness layered in it all.  Things that I could have never have comprehended.  Hers was a devastated life beyond description; a human holocaust.

And it all poured into the night, across the rock and timber altar, down the gravel floor, out into the deep woods and into the expanses of heaven itself.  When it was done, she was free and her core was cleansed.  Likewise, I was free.  In that chapel God gave me far more than I had ever expected as I had trod the dirt and gravel path earlier that night.  I saw bits of me in her, and they were likewise swept away in her own release.

The next sunrise may have actually been her very first sunrise, the day dawning over a new life.  With the sun barely warming the eastern horizon, she went to the shower.  Her clothes were deposited in the washer.  She combed her hair into long translucent waves, brushed her teeth bright and put on fresh clean clothes.  A touch of borrowed make-up and a slight sprits of perfume rounded out the transformation.  Arranging herself in the mirror, she gently primped herself to perfection.

Susan walked into the cafeteria for that final breakfast wholly new.  Silence fell over one hundred campers.  Its power was deafening.  All of our superficial judgments had defined her for all of us.  So complete were they that we all sat there trying to somehow make them fit this new person for, sadly, we knew no other way to define her.  The old judgments of a monster melted away in the light of their gross insufficiency and a fresh understanding of this remarkable young woman seized the room.  A litany of miracles walked in with her.

At that final breakfast she went from table to table to table.  Asking for forgiveness from those she’d hurt.  Weeping with those lives she’d scarred.  Holding the faces of so many in her hands, looking intently into their eyes and telling them how sorry she was.  Hugging and holding and crying with an endless array of campers and counselors.  No one ate breakfast that morning because sometimes life becomes bigger than food and larger than any agenda.  Sometimes life intersects us so powerfully that the only thing we can give attention to is that which intersects us.  And Susan intersected us all.

A revival broke in that cafeteria.  Clusters of young lives gave themselves to God over eggs, bacon and a radically changed life.  Busses and arriving cars were asked to wait until the surge of one life changed had fully raced and run through the hundreds of other hurting lives that morning.  The vast gulf between what we were and what we could be was searingly highlighted in Susan.  And in the end, God ravaged the work of Satan and the deep pain of innumerable adolescents through the life of a single young lady who chose to see her core and live differently because of it.  It was the most remarkable thing I have ever seen.  A wretched and putrid life detested by those around her changing the very lives that had hated her, thereby leaving a legacy of life with those very lives.

An Errant Judgment

The rocks had dropped; one by one.  Each thud stirred a slight wisp of talcum-like dust that quickly settled.  With it, a slight wisp of hope and of life spun gentle eddies in her heart.  Garbled whispering rose from the gathered cluster of angered religious leaders.  Cutting glances rendered razor sharp with hatred were slung across the courtyard toward her.  Righteous indignation wrapped itself like a robe around pious bodies.  And then, a slow dispersing of those gathered in their robes and finery with the old leaving first.  The sound of feet on departing gravel built and then gradually lessened as the courtyard was emptied. 

Soon silence drifted in, leaving the scene littered still with lifeless rocks that attest to hatred halted and judgment deferred.  All that was left was a prostitute and the Son of God.  What remained was a broken woman human groveling in the acidic guilt of promiscuity . . . and Jesus.  Wholeness and hollowness stood one on one.

Half naked, the hours had been truncated with deception, discovery, detainment and deliberation.  Deep in an illicit sexual embrace, eyes were watching it all happen, peering past slightly parted curtains.  A door stood ajar.  Shooing away curious passer-byers, they collected visual evidence as to the unfolding offense under the guise of a righteous action while hiding the feeding of their own sensate passion by vicariously engaging in the heat of passion themselves.  The trap was sprung.  She was seized, a few loose garments were thrown around her naked body, heckles of debauchery were hurled at her and she was dragged away.  Her partner somehow vanished as his purpose was fulfilled.

The religious leaders had now departed.  Jesus slowly stood.  His eyes, contemplative and soft, shifted from the marks scrawled in the dirt and were drawn across the empty courtyard.  It is painful that people condemn in others that which they cannot accept in themselves.  That somehow the act of condemning it in others supposedly frees them from that very same thing in themselves.  They had in some way proven themselves invincible to whatever they were confronting because they had identified it and confronted in it another.  In doing so, they somehow viewed themselves as insulated from that same thing.

In the oddity of facing our own filth, judging is most often not a necessary action, but an action initiated out of the fear that those judging might themselves engage in such horrific actions.  Judging is too often a self-centered act designed to free the one judging from the belief that they will ever be consumed or controlled by that which they are judging.  The sense of love that one might possess for another human being had succumbed to the fear of what oneself might actually do and the narcissism of self-preservation that arises out of that fear.  It had all resulted in their judgment of this woman.  The rocks that littered the court yard yelled it loudly long after those who had dropped them had exited.  

Jesus drew a slight breath, paused and then turned.  Before Him there now knelt a scathingly hollow human being.  Few turn to the profession of prostitution unless there is wounding emptiness.  There are few people in life who are so relentlessly hollow and hold such an unyielding self-hatred as those who ply her trade.  She had likely arrived at this moment in time hollow and empty; in desperate need of a touch, of some slight affirmation.  Receiving even a morsel of someone’s heart and life might have been just enough to pull her up and out of the life that she lived.  Empathy instead of judgment; compassion instead of condemnation; love instead of legalism; someone who might look just a bit farther beyond the putrid exterior to see the wounded and bleeding person inside. 

Men had used her, violating her for a few scant coins.  They saw her only as an object upon which to release their sexual tensions and live out their distorted fantasies.  They had been unwilling to see the person who died a little more after each illicit rendezvous.  They didn’t care to see.  They had judged her too, but they judged her differently.  They had judged how she might be used by them and how the assets she possessed could be abducted in the vandalism of another human being.

Then there was the disgust of other men that was thrown out in taunts and heckling as she made her way through tight streets.  Vendors refused to sell her goods.  Still other men wanted to stone her, to kill her; to rid the world of her without understanding why she was who she was.  All of them rendered their sordid judgments, each colored by their place of proximity and point of orientation to her life.  It was the very same thing I had done to Susan.

Yet, here was a very different kind of man, the kind of man I would like to be.  His example prompts and prods me to grapple with my inadequacies rather than judging those in the lives of others.  His example convinces me that something human resides in even the most destitute of persons and that I must be diligent in seeking it out even when I can’t see it.  I must do these things so that I might do the same as He did.

Jesus had no need to judge.  He did not need to judge her to feel insulated against her atrocities.  He had no need to elevate Himself over her to feel safe from that which had destroyed her.  He was not concerned with advancing Himself or His interests at her expense.  He simply saw her humanity, He protected it, and then He allowed it to be released rather than condemned by the rendering some sort of self-serving judgment. 

He stood in the breech and turned the condemnation away.  ”’Woman, where are they?  Has no one condemned you?’” (John 8:10), he said to her.  A life of condemnation was suddenly still and hauntingly absent; she was entirely free of the condemnation that had satiated her life and shackled her heart.  It was an odd and alien experience for her.  She was no longer suppressed by the judgments of others that were designed to elevate them.  She was not sacrificed out of the need of someone else to feel superior.  She was not used so that someone else was satisfied in the using.  She was freed to be different and to do different.

Often God intervenes in ways that are outside of our realm of experience.  Often the very thing we need, we cannot conceptualize.  But it is these very things Jesus brings to us.  And in the perfect freedom of the moment that Jesus brings we find ourselves frozen.  She was frozen and unable to look up.  Her silence makes it clear.  This man had turned away the wrath that had followed her all her life.  The stones of judgment lay still in the dust.  Their voices had been muted and she had no idea what to do in a relationship where she would not be judged.

Caught in the void, she attempted to somehow acclimate to what had happened.  She floundered in the freedom because freedom is the place where judgment is absent.  She was free to be who it is she truly was without the proclaimed judgments of others forcing her to remain who she was.  She stammered with the words forming in the midst of mental groping and said, “‘No one, sir’” (John 8:11, NIV).  It was just the two of them.  Face to face with this man; alone in the courtyard of her life.

Our Courtyards

“‘Then neither do I condemn you.  Go now and leave your life of sin’” (John 8:11, NIV).  It is not about judgment or punishment.  There was no recitation of sins.  No lengthy exposé on the spiritual and psychological implications of sexual sin.  There was no need.  All that stuff was clear.  It was known.  Her choices were not the point of discourse for they were only the manifestation of pain, not the pain itself.  The lacerated core of this woman that had been heartlessly bludgeoned by so many others is what defined her.  Not the outward appearances as they are only a product of those wounds.  Not the manifestation of behaviors that are a part of all of that as well.  Not her acts of sexual promiscuity.  But the terrified and bloodied inner self that intentionally repulses all others at all costs so that wounded self will not incur further damage. 

It’s about refusing to judge as judgment only sentences others to that which we’re judging them for.  Rather, we need to take a wholly different tact and attempt to see past the behavior to the person behind the behavior so that we can release them from the wounds that so bind them.

Likewise, I have stood in many of my life’s own courtyards.  There, in those places, inherent in me is the fundamental knowledge regarding my own nature and the manifest actions of that nature.  I often pretend that to not be the case, rummaging forward through the accumulated filth of my life pretending not to know the reason for its accumulation.  Playing dumb.  Feigning ignorance.  Judging others ruthlessly so that I think myself superior and insulated from being what they are, thereby escaping accountability and the possibility of their fate.  But I know.  I know full well.

But, those that condemn me have departed.  The rightful punishment that I deserve is suspended.  Justice as I perceive it has been placated and postponed.  All that should be happening to me is not.  And in the absence of judgment is freedom.  God renders all judgment void because the cross consumes it all and renders it all as all gone.  The distractions, demands and declarations of the world as it rails against my sin is rendered silent.  Any judgments are unable to shackle me to my sin because all judgment has been suspended.  Everything that would give me pause to defend defenseless actions is absent for there is no judgment against which I must defend myself.  Every voice that would legitimately and rightly describe the repercussions of my behaviors have fallen silent.  Justice is suspended in silence.  And it is only God; my sin and God and the freedom to be different.

A Choice Freed from Judgment

What was her choice after Jesus turned and left?   She stood there, aghast and in paralysis.  The sunrise would likewise dawn an entirely new day for her.  In the months and years ahead she would wash Jesus’ feet with her tears.  She would attend to Him; push through the crowds that hailed Him and then condemned Him; follow Him through the pressing mobs and winding streets of Jerusalem to Golgotha.  She would endure the eternity that seemed those three and a half hours on the cross.  She would watch Him die, wait through that Saturday with angst indescribable, and be the first in all of time to see Him risen.  Her life would be radically new in ways incomprehensible to her, being wrenched out of the bed of prostitution and propelled to partnership with the Messiah.  All because Someone refused to bind her with His judgments and instead, sought her freedom.

The End Product

The bus had rumbled up the long gravel road of the camp, dust and diesel leaving a path attesting to its journey.  The dust and diesel was now dissipating and thinning in a slight summer breeze.  Clusters of birds raised a cacophony of song in the dense foliage of the surrounding woods.  Golden sunshine rained from a generous sky of blue.  Hundreds of sunburnt campers with suitcases, duffle bags and rich memories gathered in clusters around a myriad of cars, busses and vans that inundated the parking lot.  In the departing mayhem there was a tug on my shoulder.  A transformed face greeted me.  This was not the girl that came off this same bus six days ago. Instantly I was in the grip of hug dripping with the love of a grateful heart.  Long and rich, the hug was one of life and living.  In the midst of the embrace, she whispered, “thanks so much.  I’ll never be the same again.”

Her bus rolled off down that driveway, leaving a trail of dust and diesel as it had when it had arrived.  On board was a miracle.  God had gotten to the core of her courtyard and suspended judgment.  There she seized the second chance.  And it changed her forever.

Pondering Point

We judge based on externals.  It’s easy that way.  There is no expenditure of energy attempting to ascertain that which we cannot see.  Seizing and evaluating the obvious is easy, convenient and simple.  It allows us to render rapid judgment and avoid encountering a life at the core of that life.  It’s cheap living that is superficial and thin.  We do the same with ourselves.  We are distant from our own cores.  That however, is where Jesus meets us.  Here, at the core of our courtyards we are afforded two things.  Genuine repentance centered in the acknowledgment of our core, and then the chance to do something radically different; a wild departure into the fullness of life and the fullness of God.

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Darren and a cheap plastic fish; it was a dollar store bin filler indelibly stamped with “made in China” that bordered on being junk.  There were numerous needs in Darren’s life, so numerous that he himself was lost in them.  They were pathetic and endless, so it seemed anyway. A plastic fish was little more than a cheap toy that momentarily anesthetized a child-like mind trapped in the deterioration of a thirty-five year old body.  It was a mere trinket, a point of focus upon which to forget the realities that had bent him and ultimately broken him.  It served as a pathetic distraction from all that had cut thick furrows across his head and heart far too early and far too prematurely.  It was a cheap, plastic fish.

The years had stooped his gait and lined his hair with ever lighter shades of premature gray, cutting deep fissures across his brow and thickening young skin.  His gait had been reduced to a shallow shuffle, dragging thick shoes across coarse pavement.  He wore the soles thin on the outsides edges, further canting his gait.  His soul was much the same, deeply worn along the outside edges as well; throwing into a precarious imbalance the cadence of an already distorted life.  Darren found himself limping through a world that placed ultimate premiums on that which is new, believing that any value is inherent only in the degree of newness any object possesses.  The world viewed his worn edges as old, used up and spent.  He was unfairly evaluated as discarded humanity and rendered invisible to the eye of a world too busy.

Baggy pants were thread thin at the knees and frayed at the pockets with stitching pulled and strained at variant seams.  An oversized shirt bespoke of his desperate efforts to fit in life.  Like his shirt, it never happened.  Stained and limp, a faded handkerchief hung from a weary pocket.  A mouthful of decay filled each smile and poured out in each conversation.  Chapped lips were edged thick by coarse stubble sprouting from a grimy bed of mottled skin.  The expanse of his squared jaw and sunken cheeks were covered with a bumper crop of inattention.  His words were primitive and slurred; rolling off his tongue in seamless bursts that made comprehension nearly impossible.  Shoulders were drawn down by the weight life had exerted on him, pulling him forward in a Neanderthal sort of cadence that was long and slothful.  And he wanted to show me his plastic fish.

“Kind of like the disciples, huh?  They caught fish.  They were fishermen!” he said.  A broad smile of decay anticipated a hearty response from me.  Darren was thirty-five, yet he was enamored with a dollar store plastic fish.  “Like the disciples, huh?”  His persistence accelerated my desire to talk to a real adult.  Church was over and there were many candidates milling about.  My momentary objective was to determine how to terminate this infantile conversation and find someone with some shred of intelligence that I could talk to.  I moved to close the conversation with Darren and did so quite deftly I thought.  He would have no idea that I had just ditched him.  As I stepped away from him, he held the plastic fish in his weathered hands as if it were a precious treasure and muttered softly to himself, “I was a sinner, now I’m a fisher of men too.”

God Strikes

There are unexpected moments in life when God sends simplicity as a blinding light that is far more pure and infinitely more superior than all the intellectual musings I could devise.  Darren’s words . . . “sinner” and now “fisher of men”, though soft, backlit my soul in blinding light and thundered through the very core of my ego-centric spirit.  They rocked me, simultaneously illuminating my flagrant sense of superiority as paper thin and backlighting my egotistical self against something far greater and far grander.  A light both brilliant and revealing was thrown onto something I had unknowingly lost in the dark pool of piousness and shallow Christianity that I had cultivated.  “Sinner” and “fisher of men” represented two opposite ends of life.  One was represented by sin sheathed in death on one end, and that of salvation and the humanly unexplainable privilege of salvation on the other.  He had seized something spiritually authentic that was indefinably powerful because of its innocent simplicity.

His words drew me down with my soul melting into repentant puddles on the pavement and pooling around Darren’s feet.  And in my heart a stark thought shot through my brain.  It seized my heart and surged through my soul as the light exposed the grotesqueness of my immaturity . . .  “go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:9, NIV).  I had rarely felt so abjectly ugly and so starkly far from God.  I was sickened by myself with nowhere to run in order to get away from myself.  Darren had brilliantly backlit my life with a hand full of simple words, a plastic fish and an innocent life.  I was repulsed by what I saw in the blinding light.

Fish and Light

The cool of the night aimlessly drifted by.  Time drifted listlessly with it.  Waves gently lapped the weathered wooden hull as if the night was completely pacified with simply existing.  Sails flapped passively, rolling in a dance with an occasional listless breeze that floated out from somewhere deep in the night.  The timbered creaking of shifting weight was soft against the darkness.  Oars dipped deep and silently, spinning tiny whirlpools of water that softly gurgled in the thin veil of satin moonlight.  The damp scent of water gathered in a thin, veneer layer of mist that tentatively skirted the water’s surface.  The night was intermittently rendered musty with the odors of nets wet with nothing but water.  A distant heron hauntingly called into the night from a far shore.  Muffled voices and the lights of other boats drifted listlessly across the water.

Nets were cast in a perfectly spinning arch, pirouetting to the rhythm of the night as they were launched by thick arms sure with experience.  Slapping the water, they were given a moment to sink into the night of the lake.  Descending, the keel of the boat became smaller in the submerged descent.  The chalky white moonlight was shattered into a million moving shards of milky light on the underside of the waves, fading as the depths were listlessly plumbed.  The water cooled, darkened, and was stirred by soft currents.  All was listless in a dreamlike descent.

And then there was a massive tug initiated by the same sure arms of experience.  The net reeled and folded in upon itself, instantly enfolding everything within it.  A series of firm tugs follow in a different kind of rhythm that was much less peaceful and much more intentional.  Lunging toward the surface the net broke the liquid plane and was hauled into the coarse belly of the boat.

Again it was the same.  There was nothing in the nets embrace but weeds, water and disappointment.  A gruff remark, and then a curse edged rough with the abrasion of frustration cut the night and oozed the pus of anger into the boat’s belly.  Frustration was manifest and coarsely expelled into the night by exasperated fishermen whose finest skills could not coerce the deep waters to offer up their bounty.  The waters stubbornly chose to withhold their living treasures.  The net was hurriedly prepared by frustrated hands and launched again, and again, and again.  Frustration layered upon frustration until nothing other than frustration defined the whole of the night.

The moon slowly descended to sleep behind the horizon.  The multitude of stars drifted across the expanse of the velvet blackness, moving in unison with the turn of the universe and the winds of heaven nudging them to the same horizon.  Night would soon drift into day.  The nets remained empty.  Soon the sun stirred with the first tentative band of pastel thin light on a yawning horizon, softly illuminating empty boats.  So went the night.

This was Simon Peter’s world, that of his father and his grandfather.  His was a lineage of weary boats, hemp nets, flapping fish glinting in flashes of silver, sails and storms.  He was isolated within the world of trolling by night as the fish rose to cooler waters and sleeping by day.  Lost in this world of his, he was so engrossed in its demands that he was defined by that world, having standardizing everything else by its shape and form.  This world of nighttime fishing and the life that goes with it dictated the shape, tenor and tone of his life.  It was so familiar and natural that becoming it, for Simon Peter, was being nothing less than who he was and where he needed to be. 

There was little thought of anything else for he knew nothing else.  No other world other than the methodical frustration of sparse nets, contrary winds, too few fish to market leaving purses thin with coinage, long nights followed by exhausted days with the only promise being more of the same . . .  nothing other had backlit his life enough to see anything any different.

In His World

There was an unexpected intrusion in Simon Peter’s tiny world.  A carpenter turned prophet found His way to this place of nets, nights and weary men.  Word had spread carrying rumors of miracles that had long drifted across the lake, having reached the shoreline and lapped against the wooden hulls of the docked boats.  It was likely that many of the fishermen had gotten wind of Jesus as their sails might have caught a slight breeze.

But it was of little import. Rather, it was an inconvenience.  Like too many nights, the night had been long and fruitless.  The nets had yielded nothing more than water, weeds and weariness.  There were no fish to market that day.  The lake and the night had joined forces to deny these hunters of the deep any trophy.  The coming night would be pressed with the need to make up for a night lost.  It was time for sleep, troubled sleep at best, but sleep nonetheless.  Yet, despite the need for sleep there was an intrusion . . . of all days.

The crowd grew, giving some degree of credibility or celebrity to whoever this was.  These frustrated fishermen picked up a few words here and there, discerning pieces that remained only pieces within the fatigue that enshrouded their minds.  Religion won’t catch fish and nice words won’t mend nets.  Sweeping platitudes won’t feed hungry families, and brazen prophecies won’t raise wily fish from elusive depths.

But Simon Peter had seen what the winds of rumor had only blown.  A mother-in-law had been healed by this itinerant Jesus person.  The crippled walked pensively but surely on unfamiliar legs with crutches joyously abandoned at their feet as a necessity that was instantly rendered unnecessary.  The blind stumbled in the attempt to align faces with voices for the first time, turning to drink in deep blue skies and finding themselves hopelessly enamored by mounds of brilliant wildflowers.  The pallor of death was swept from the faces of catatonic infants with tiny arms and thin legs instantly washed alive with vitality that had no explanation, except . . .  He had seen it.

Simon Peter had attempted to correlate all of that with his world of boats, frayed nets, canvas sails and fish.  The experience and the exposure had not changed him yet.  It was only an anomaly because his world had not been directly intersected.  What he had observed was wonderment, but wonderment that had taken place some distance outside the parameters of his tiny and predictable world of wooden boats and hemp nets.  It had yet to manifest itself dead center in that world and to render everything entirely less than predictable.    

However it happened, Jesus was suddenly in Simon Peter’s boat; dead center in Simon’s world . . . ground zero.  Suddenly his boat was turned into a podium and a fisherman was turned into a chauffeur.  From the bow of this tired fishing vessel the words of Jesus droned on.  It’s not that they weren’t compelling.  It’s just that they fell upon a mind dulled with fatigue and deluged with both empty nets and empty pockets.  Sometimes the greatest messages are missed because the human mind is occupied with a miniscule net of fish drawn from some tiny puddle when the Fisher of Men is standing right in their boats casting a net into the whole ocean of men.

Scripture does not indicate what Jesus said that struck Simon, it’s what He did.  And then, the command came.  The nets had already been mended, cleaned and stowed.  Weary sails had been drawn tight and tied.  Arms were weak and heads were fuzzy.  The fish had undoubtedly descended to cooler waters, far beyond the reach of their nets and all of their accumulated skills.  And yet this Jesus wanted to go fishing.  The logical argument was of no use.  A lifetime of experience was discarded and discounted by this Teacher.  He was confidently insistent.  And so, wearily Peter mumbles, “But because you say so, I will let down the nets” (Luke 5:5, NIV).  And he does.

Oars are lowered by weary fishermen who exchanged glances washed in confusion, anger and a slight flush of stupidity for agreeing to this idiotic venture.  Plunged into cool waters, awakened oars create spiraling eddies in their wake.  The morning sun was now full, having long lifted itself off the horizon of a new day, spilling a cascade of gold that broke into sparkling flecks of yellow glitter on gentle waves.  Oars were drawn in with glistening droplets falling from their weathered edges, ever so quickly catching a slight fleck of sunlight before becoming lost in the waters below.  Arms of experience grasped the nets, spread them and deftly launch them in perfect flight.  Again, they slapped the surface of the water as they had a hundred times the night before.  A thousand times maybe.  This time however, it was different.

Backlighting

Instantly there was a slight tug.  Then, the nets were seized and sent wildly convulsing.  The pull was overwhelming, catching the strength and experience of even the most seasoned fisherman entirely off guard.  Strained arms were etched with protruding veins.  Faces were flushed red.  The boat listed under the weight as nets were hoisted to the surface.  Drawing against the collective resistance, the surface was broken in an explosive torrent of foaming water and flailing fish.  The morning sun caught and threw the first silver glint of hundreds of thrashing fish reflected riotously in the churning waters.  The water was agitated, surging white and frothy with the multitude of the catch.

Simon Peter was astounded, his mind gaping with the inability to correlate what he saw with what he knew.  A sudden panicked call went out to other boats.  They scurried and cast off in pell-mell and chaotic fashion; experienced fisherman completely inexperienced with netting the impossible.  Oars plunged deep and hard, frantically pulling against morning’s water.  A small army of boats surged forward, creating panicked wakes.  The catch spilt as a silver torrent into other hulls.  Boats creaked, listed and then dropped to the water line, rolling fat with the bulky weight of the catch.  

Simon Peter was caught in the breech of trying to draw in nets that were fraying and snapping while correlating the event in his own mind.  For him, it was irreconcilable.  It did not match his world or his experience.  He was thrust beyond his limited sphere by an event that had occurred in his world, in the very center of it, right in the middle of who he was and what he did.

It was entirely other worldly, smacking of something supernatural even.  Every sense and sensation of the miracle was inserted into the very center of his life to blow him beyond that center.  His life was now held in sharp and poignant relief against something incomprehensibly greater and immeasurably grander than he.  He was no longer compared solely to his world; a comparison which once gave him permission to mindlessly inhabit that world without thought.  Now, instantly, he was held up against something infinitely beyond his world.  And there, in the stark and contradictory contrast of a miracle happening in his boat, on his lake, with his net and his hands, he saw himself.  Here, he was backlit.

Starkly backlit by God, his life was thrust into keen and crippling perspective.  The blinding light revealed the thin veneers of his life so much so that he was exposed beyond his ability to comprehend the exposure, much less deal with it.  The din of the activity faded as Simon was drawn down, face to face with his revealed self.  The sea, the boats, the commotion of fellow fishermen . . . they all disappeared as he devolved deep into himself.  Simon Peter was fraught with himself, finding himself grappling with the reality of his person as he had never seen it before, or been willing to see it.

He turned, stepped, and lunged to the front of the boat.  Here Jesus had watched the miracle unfold; God incarnate enjoying the provision of the fish, the message in the provision, and lives about to be changed by the provision.  Simon Peter dropped before Jesus, a proclamation of utter transparency leaping from his lips in stammering honesty.  Starkly set against the activity around him he shouted, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:9, NIV).

God had invaded the core of Peter’s being and he had been illuminated against it.  Here he saw the real self.  He acknowledged what has been exposed as far too much to comprehend, and far too big to allow him to recalibrate it all into something that made sense to him.  He could not embrace it, so vast was the exposure.  So, he had to get away from the light and get it away from him.  Yet, he would ultimately find that entirely impossible.  Soon the disciples would be named and his name would be the first called in a list of many names.  It was no wonder as being backlit is often the precursor to being called.

My World Defining Me

And so I am lulled into the ebb and flow of my life, into the circumstances that swirl in variant pools around me; the eddies and rippling waters that reflect back to me more of what they are than who I really am.  And I blindly accept those reflections as me, allowing myself to become impoverished in the surrender of acceptance.  It is when God steps into the middle of my world that what I took for God I find not to be God or of God.  It is when He seats himself dead center, squarely at ground zero that I am inoperably exposed.  It is here that something vastly superior is held up against who I have defined myself to be and what I have settled for.

Too often my own light is borrowed, reflected off of variant events around me much like the moon borrowing its light from the sun and reflecting back what does not belong to itself.  My life is backlit by weak imitations that reflect things that are not their own, backlighting my life by anemic events that reflect a light so washed out that the landscape of my life is hardly perceptible.  This I eventually take for light with the eyes of my soul having become so unaccustomed to real light that its absence is no longer comprehended.  I then settle and sell out to vagueness as this kind of light provides little more than that.  All the while the profound challenges and wild passions lay a silent captive to the deep shadows that such a light casts; shadows that never surrender their contents to whatever light I bring to them until my life is backlit and the shadows are forced to surrender.

The Hopeful Shock

The shock of being backlit by Jesus rests in the instantaneous awareness that it brings.  The sudden illumination of everything makes everything vividly stark and painfully clear.  Such is the penetrating nature of this light that the light itself brazenly outlines and defines every sordid aspect of who I am, leaving no room to ponder or stew over them myself.  Neither does it give me room to manipulate what has been revealed because the clarity is so pure that it’s cognitively impenetrable and completely indefensible.  Otherwise the moment would be robbed, becoming something less than wholly divine in the thievery.

To be backlit by Jesus is to fully see and fully comprehend all at once.  All that is left for me to do is to embrace the truth vividly set before me, or squander the moment in futile attempts at denial.  More times than I can explain I have rushed to the front of the boat, prostrated myself before Him and begged him leave because I am faced with the horror of myself.

At those times my putrid disgust with myself clearly bars my relationship with Him.  Inevitably every time, He looks beyond what I cannot.  He sees who I am verses what I have become, delineating the difference in vivid starkness so clear that I cannot stand before myself.  He reminds me of His grace which makes my grotesqueness the raw material from which He weaves His glory.  And then, bedeviled and helpless by what I see in myself He calls the authentic me to works beyond my comprehension when all I want is for Him to leave.  And it is in the angst of desperately wanting to flee and break His hold on me that I am held against myself and am drawn kicking and screaming into phenomenal growth.

Making a Habit of the Light

And so I go fishing with Jesus every day.  Fishing for men?  Yes.  But also that kind of fishing that repeatedly back lights my life against the majesty of God.  It is placing myself in His presence while fighting every urge not to do so; readying me for the poignant realization that I am not what I presume to be and being with Jesus will highlight that every time.  It is not His disappointments in me for His grace will always tempter that.  It is my own disappointment in myself.  I want to avoid Him because I want to avoid the pain of personal honesty.  But I find an incongruent passion that causes me to leap into the boat because I know the joy of being honest before Jesus and what He does with that.  I am constantly, repeatedly and forever changed.

Darren and a Plastic Fish

People continued to mill about me, but they had vanished in the midst of deep thought and emotional turmoil beset within me.  I turned to Darren who was meandering off to some unknown destination; much like his life.  I reached out and touched his shoulder.  He stopped and staggered a bit as he turned to look at me, his body long worn beyond grace and dexterity of movement.  Sparking eyes set deep in worn sockets met mine, shocking me into the realization that I did not have that sparkle.  I paused tentatively.  “Can I see your fish?” I stammered.  Although a rare treasure, he instantly placed it in my hands without hesitation or forethought.  He unabashedly shared the wealth of his life in a simple gesture, freely giving to a soul that needed what he had found; handing to me what he had grasped.  I needed the authenticity of his faith and the deep conviction in whose light my own pathetic belief system shrank and ran sour.

Such treasures often come in simple packages, like Darren.  Their simplicity is in their security, as few would look there.  Few look there because few lend their eyes to simplicity because simplicity suggests vacancy and emptiness. Those who do look there find the opposite . . .  they find treasure.  They are not out to rob or pillage the treasure, but rather seek it as a precious gift that no one can hoard or hold individually.  It is bigger than one individual and made to pass to and through all individuals, so it passes much more simply through simple people like Darren.  It is to be savored, drawn fully into oneself and then left to enrich the next passerby.  Hidden away in the Darren’s of the world God has deposited His light, set to explode into any life that is so daring and so desperate as to engage the light in simple places.

I held his plastic fish, turning it this way and that, drawing down into its plastic and paint as had Darren, trying to draw out of it what he had.  “I’m going to hang it in my house,” he blurted.  “I don’t have anything on one wall.  It’s all white. Just white, that’s all.  And I’m going to hang it right in the middle,” he said.  A barren wall; like his life.  His faith was hung right in the middle of it.  And I thought, how totally appropriate and how absolutely wonderful.

I handed the plastic fish back to him.  “I’m going to go home right now and hang it up!” he said with electric excitement.  As he turned to shuffle away, I called after him and said, “Thanks Darren.”  There was no response.  He hadn’t heard me.  He was engulfed in the symbol of his faith, a captive to his mad love affair with his God and his fish.  Other people still mingled about me, but I no longer desired what they offered.  As Darren stepped into the passenger seat of a waiting car I realized that I wanted what he had.  I wanted a plastic fish.  I wanted a vibrant faith.  I wanted to be consumed with God as was this disheveled man; to have all of that hanging in the center of my life.  And he had backlit my life in such a way to show me the terrible deficits that I had.

I can still see that fish in my mind.  It is clear and vivid reminder of my faith, of following Jesus; of that to which he calls me.  Being reminded of that by an event that backlit my life so that I could see my life.  And so, Darren, if some day you are to read this, I simply want to say what you didn’t hear that day . . . “thank you!”

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Not Defined by a Journey Gone Wrong

“To let myself be defined by my greatest mistakes is my greatest mistake.”

Hi, I’m Craig Lounsbrough

Welcome to LifeTalk

It seems that we have some vague sense of where we’re going in this thing called life. For the more contemplative soul, that sense might be quite refined. For the casual traveler, it might be a bit more nebulous and scattered. Vague or refined, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else.

Some of us are not necessarily in conscious pursuit of wherever this place is. We have this instinctually primal sense that it’s there and we intuitively assume that our path will take a natural course to wherever that place is. Then, there are others of us who are myopically focused on where we’re going to the degree that everything that we do is wholly defined by that singularly beguiling destination. In whatever way we do it, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else. 

The Detours We Create

Yet, life is not so predictable as to always wind its way to the places that we presumed it to be going. There are those times when where we were going was bafflingly mistaken as some sort of final destination when in reality it was only a step to a final destination. At other times the place where we’re going is really a destination that we had fabricated because the place to which life had originally called us appeared too big, or too far, or too steep, or simply impossible in whatever way our limited vision happened to interpret it. However it might play out, we’re all headed somewhere.

The Detours Life Creates

But then there are those other times when life takes a sharp turn that seems little of our actions, nothing of our destination, but everything of circumstances designed to kill our journey and crush our destination long before we get within arm’s length of it. There’s a sense that something intrinsically unjust, stealthy and evil is always about and on the prowl, and whatever it is, it’s bound to show up. When it does, it undoes everything that we thought was secure and certain, wreaking havoc on whatever our journey had been to that point.

 Yet, more often than not it’s the not the obvious shifts in our journey that are the core problem. Sure, life shows up and we get shoved down. There’s no question that the natural ebb and flow of life, whether it be titanic or miniscule, will happen to us. Despite our frequently ego-centric inclinations to the contrary, we are not so shrewd or ingenious as to be able to traverse life in a manner that deftly side-steps everything that comes at us.

Casual and Careless

Yet, more often than not, the explanation doesn’t rest in life having shown up. The much more poignant issue is that too often we are passive, flabby and lax in rigorously living out our lives. We’re far too casual and careless. Somehow, somewhere the exquisite sanctity of life and the priceless privilege of living it out was supplanted with some sense that it’s too much work or that it’s not going to work, so why try? And so, we drift without knowing that we’re drifting because we’re no longer paying attention.

Preoccupied with Pabulum

Too often we’re too preoccupied with pabulum. We’re tediously engaged with tiny things and we’re caught in the tedium of minutia because we can gather these things around us and control them when the bigger things are out of our control. Too frequently we’re goaded by the fear of big dreams and massive possibilities, so we dumb down our lives to anesthetize those fears. We’re caught in small things, and the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.

Along for the Ride

Frequently we presume that we’re some docile passenger along for a ride that’s going wherever it’s going, so we just let it go to wherever that place is. We then turn to the hovel of our small agendas because it’s the only place that we now have to go. We become so entangled in the pull of our own flimsy agendas that we serve agendas that serve no other purpose than serving our agendas. Assuming we’re on a ride that we can’t direct, the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.

The Walls of Denial

At other times, we live in the constructed confines erected from the raw material of denial, causing us to live out a life that is in denial of life itself. We become squatters living in a squatter’s camp constructed by the flimsy materials of justification, rationalization, blame-placing and projecting. Hemmed in by walls of this sort, the world around us is shut out and moves on without our awareness of it. The outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.       

Ending Up Somewhere

We will end up somewhere. The fact that we have a destination is irrefutable as life is a journey that presents us with no option other than the journey.  We may decide that the nature and course of the journey is irrelevant and we may take a backseat to passivity. If we do, we have no right to complain when we end up in some place other than what we may have thought or preferred. However it happens, we will end up somewhere.

Defined by a Journey Gone Wrong

To whatever degree we have done it, we have contributed to where we find ourselves at this moment. The causations may have been largely of our making. Our poor decisions and impulsive choices may have landed us in dark places. We may have believed in the wrong things and justified those beliefs in spite of the painful outcomes that they repeatedly laid at our feet. We may have thought wrong, thought selfishly, abandoned any forethought, or not thought at all. Therefore, we thought ourselves to where we never thought we would be.

We may well be the author of our destinations and the surveyor of the roads that brought us to these places. Those places might be barren. They may be empty of everything for which we had hoped and void of the slightest piece of our slightest dreams. We may see no way out of them and therefore assume that we will be forced to surrender the rest of our lives journeying further into them.

All of this may be true. But what is truer is that you are not your destination. Your lack of judgement at a crucial crossroads may have placed you here, but you are more than the place at which you have arrived. Bad choices and even worse passions may have landed you in the wasteland that you’re living in. But you are not what you see around you. You are not the place within which you have put yourself.

You are more than the choices that you made and the beliefs that you errantly embraced. You are more. And because you are, the place you are at is not the place where you will are doomed to live. You are more than what surrounds you and so is your future.  

You will find “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

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Thanks being here today. See you next time.

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life"

I Was Thinking - To Think Outside the Box(s)

I was thinking.  And the more I thought, the more I realized that there is a whole lot to think about.  But in my thinking, I thought that most of our thinking (despite how much there is to think about) is really pretty standardized and chafingly rote.  We think in predetermined patterns and pre-existent templates that require no thinking, other than the commitment not to think.  We think in the way that others have chosen to think because they’ve already done the thinking, which relieves us of the need to do so.  We think we think, but the more I think about that, the less I think we think (if you know what I mean).  So, while there’s a whole lot to think about in this big, wide world of ours …we don’t. 

It seems that our thinking is constrained in a manner that there’s really not that much thinking going on at all.  Rather, more often than not our thinking is a tired process of monotonously gathering up a predictable handful of stale but safe thoughts.  And if we play with them long enough, we figure that maybe they’ll freshen up and something innovatively fragrant might actually emerge out of the rot.  If something actually does, we’re usually scared of whatever it is.  If it doesn’t (which is typically what happens) we become increasingly convinced beyond hope that life is actually as stale as we thought it was.    

Why?

Most of this appears to happen because we think within boxes that we randomly (and sometimes not so randomly) borrow.  We think within predetermined boxes because anything outside of those requires some innovation wherein we let the leash out a bit, let our thoughts find their legs, and let them run.  But we’ve discovered that sometimes that simply takes too much thought, far too much energy, and far, far too much courage, for it is much easier and much, much safer to just sit.  Or worse yet, we fear that once our thoughts have caught even the slightest whiff of a life running at full stride, they will forever refuse the short leash. 

What if our thinking were to open up fresh venues and pull back some hitherto hidden veil that suddenly revealed vast horizons that leaves ignorance no place to hide?  And what if the magnitude of such revelations is such that it handily crushes the complacency within which we’ve found so much comfort?  What if?  And out of the fear that such things might actually befall us, we peruse the stank back alleys of complacency, hastily borrowing boxes that we find deep in the darkened hovels of mediocrity.  And life becomes a journey lived within suffocating boxes rather than an adventure crafted of breathless horizons.

Our Box Collection:

The Box of Societal Norms

We think within the box of societal norms.  We grant these norms legitimacy because most of the people around us adhere to them in one form or another.  Because all these people adhere to them, we naturally grant these norms a morality, assuming that others would not dare embrace them if they weren’t sufficiently ethical or moral.  Therefore, (despite the terribly narrow nature of both the boxes and our logic), they are deemed acceptable.  To our relief, we quickly discover that if we think within these boxes we are far less likely to be met with rejection, or ridicule, or disdainful judgement, or some other rather distasteful response.  We desperately want to be in the good graces of those around us as that’s far more comfortable and far less dangerous than being in some other more adverse state of relationship with these people.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

The Box of the Mundane

We think within the well-worn boxes of the mundane as that path is quite well charted, rigorously predictable, and therefore void of anything dangerous because other people have figured out where all the dangerous stuff is and either removed it, or they’ve created paths around it.  We know that venturing off the path in life is ref with all sorts of calamity that’s just waiting to happen, and so in the box of the mundane there’s nothing to venture off on because there’s one and only one path.  It might be mundane, it might go nowhere, but it’s safe (if you happen to define ‘safe’ as refusing to live in order to effectively avoid being hurt).  In an increasingly busy world that’s careening in every conceivable direction, the box of the mundane allows us to perfectly function on autopilot since there’s only one path that we can walk.  Better yet, if we so choose we can simply sit along the side of this singular path, as this box generously allows us to somehow think (because we’re not) that sitting is a journey.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

The Box of Our Fears

We think within the box of our fears, as anything on the outside of those walls is filled with horrific danger (often of the most fabricated sort).  We’ve probably ventured out there a time or two, and when we did, we got hurt.  And so, when we were hurt, we put our pain on emotional steroids which exponentially magnified our fear.  We then took that fear and fashioned a monster that doesn’t exist, and we hunkered down in our box horrified by the fiction of it all.  And while the space out there is a whole lot bigger than the infinitesimally tiny space in here, at least it’s safe.  And safety (in our minds) is a decent trade-off, so much so that we amply decorate the box and make it homey with the scant furnishings of justification, rationalization, denial and other carefully appointed excuses.  We settle into the scantily upholstered armchair of mediocrity and wile away our days pretending that we’re not pretending.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

The Box of Our Families

We think within the box created by our families as we engaged them growing up.  In many unhealthy families, their boxes were shaped by their own demons and assorted hobgoblins that they handed the reins of power over to.  Over time, they dutifully passed those onto us lock, stock and barrel.  Sometimes these families demand that family members stay within those boxes because, somehow, we will vanish into the dank darkness of another life, or be whisked off to parts unknown by friends, or fall headlong into a career if we dare step outside of them.  Other times, family members may prompt us to move outside of the box because they have come to recognize the life-sucking quality of the box.  Yet, while they prompt us to step out, they did not know how to do so themselves.  Therefore, we must do the most daring thing imaginable and think through exactly how in the world we’re going to do that.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

The Box of Self-Esteem

We think within the box crafted by our low self-esteems.  These are often the smallest of all boxes because we dare not create any room whatsoever for anyone else to come in lest they see how pathetically awful we really are.  Sitting in our confining hovel, we know full well that there’s great adventure and untapped possibilities outside of our boxes.  There’s a good chance that we studied it, or read about it, or on those better days taken a slight peek outside before slamming the door shut again.  In fact, knowing all of that is often the most difficult thing of all.  We know outside this box of ours there’s more life than we can wrap our solitary minds around.  We constantly hear the invitations to come out.  We can imagine adventure because we’ve imagined it so many times that we can almost touch it in our minds, which makes us think that somehow we’re touching the adventure out there (which in fact, we are not).  But we doubt our ability to function in it, or find a place in it, or seize it in the cultivation of our dreams, or much less survive it.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

I Was Thinking

I was thinking that there are a whole lot of boxes.  Lots and lots of them.  But I was also thinking that they are just boxes and nothing more.  A box is not a fortified prison with towering walls and tangled barbwire, even though we have come to see it as such.  It’s just a box and nothing more.  And as a box, it doesn’t hold us.  Rather, we hold it.  I don’t ‘think’ that we have the power to move beyond our boxes.  Rather, I ‘know’ that we do.  And when we realize that power and move beyond our boxes, the parameters of our lives will explode exponentially in a manner that we will be free to think about all the many things that this big, wide world of ours has to think about.  When we do, the role of thinking will finally destroy the rules of the box.  And when that happens, we will be genuinely free.  And when we’re free we won’t be imprisoned by the dark specter of endings.  Rather, we can embrace the majesty of our purpose, and we can run with the power of our calling.

And so, I think I really, really want to think outside the boxes.  So, I think I’ll start getting rid of them.  It might take some time.  I’m going to have to be honest about them and grieve what they’ve already stolen from me.  It might be scary (in fact, I know it will be).  I may wonder what in the world I’m doing at times.  People may wonder what I’m doing as they peer out from the cracks in their own boxes.  But to not get rid of the boxes is to rot away in a box.  And I know that that is not the life for me.  And might I say, I don’t think that’s the life for you either.  So, let’s begin the process of letting the role of thinking destroy the rules of the box.  And let’s be free.

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is:

“If I don’t passionately desire freedom for all of my fellowmen, it’s likely that I haven’t been sufficiently freed from my selfishness so that I might see their captivity.”

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How do we change a nation?  We might start by changing ourselves first.  Change begins with us.  We know that, but we also doubt that changing us changes much of anything else except us.  How far does that kind of change go?  Does it really have a broad sweep and a wide impact?  Does it really count all that much?  In the scope of history, much less the scope of this single day, will it matter?  Will it really matter?

Don't underestimate the power of the one person that you are.  Don't.  Your life is staged to touch many lives.  The example that you live out, the principles that you exude, the words that you use, and the battles that you choose to fight or not choose to fight...all of this has an impact.  All of it.  It is said that one life touches six others in profound ways.  And those six others each touch six more.  And on it goes.  Do not think for a moment that the change you make and the life you live does not have impact.  And don't think that that impact doesn't outlive you, for it does and it will.  How do we change a nation?  Let's start by changing ourselves first.