Silence (DOP #13 2016)

I couldn’t bring myself to write yesterday.

It isn’t because I didn’t have anything I wanted to write about, but rather because I didn’t know how to write it.  I suppose in a way, I still don’t how to write what I want to write.

My newsfeed was full of the news that yesterday, the rebels in the city of Aleppo were nearly wiped out.  The conflict in Syria is incredibly difficult for me to figure out.  Rebels and Pro-government forces have been fighting for so long, and so bitterly that neither side is necessarily better than the other.  While it is true that Pro-government forces have used chemical weapons, guided munitions, and artillery bombardments in an attempt to destroy those who are rebelling, those who are rebelling don’t have clean hands either.  Many rebel groups are known for their direct links to organizations we would consider terrorist organizations.  Pro-government forces regularly bomb hospitals and schools.  Rebel forces hide in those places…drawing the fire upon the innocent.

The conflict in Syria is hard to unravel, especially after nearly 5 years of fighting.

No one has clean hands.

My thoughts are filled with what-ifs…what if the UN had found a way to effectively intervene and de-escalate this conflict early in the first year?  What if our own government had enforced the red-line it set to keep chemical weapons off of the battle field?  What if the Russians had not joined the fighting?  What would have happened if Russia and China had not blocked a security council resolution with their invincible vetoes?

What if I had started writing about this sooner?

What if I had found my way there as I feel called to do?

There is plenty of blame for all sides, including myself.

As I watched videos of those who were in the rebel areas say goodbye to anyone who would listen, as they told us they honestly did not expect to live through the next few hours, I can’t even describe what was going on in my heart and in my head.  How could this be?  What could I have done?

(An example is here)

I tried to write for a while, but I couldn’t.

I lay down in my bed, safe from harm, and fought back an overwhelming sense of depression.  A feeling of total failure.  A feeling of loss.  I couldn’t speak.  It was too much.

Yesterday was my moment of silence.

Checkmate (DOP #12 2016)

Politics is anything but peaceful, but I see something coming that I feel ought to be addressed.

You’ve likely heard that President Obama has asked the intelligence community to look into recent computer hacking and its impact on the past election.  One of the most important things to a democracy is knowing that the advertised results of an election are the true results, so the integrity of an election is an important thing to guard.  There are countless countries in Africa that are in a constant state of turmoil because their election results can not be trusted.   They go through conflict after conflict simple because voting results can’t be trusted.

So, whether you agree with a single thing President Obama has done in his 2 terms or not, this is an important thing he is trying to do.

Unfortunately I believe we have been out played.

In chess you win the match by forcing your opponent’s king into a situation from which there is no way to escape to safety.  It requires delicate maneuvering and strategy to achieve this, but once your trap is set, there is no recourse.  The game is over.  The king is helpless, defeated.

We are in a political situation that has brought our country to the brink of a great divide.  Both sides are at fault, we share the blame.  Our country stands at the top of a terrible drop, teetering, poised to fall.  Our opponent has put us in a situation that seems inescapable.

I don’t know if our election results have been manipulated, but half of our country is unhappy with the current results.  They are perhaps predisposed to believe there was cheating.  The other half believes the election to have been won fairly, and will fight bitterly to defend their victory.   It doesn’t actually matter if the results were hacked by our opponents, they only have to convince us that they were, and there will be open war on our streets.

Perhaps results were affected by hacking.  In which case, our democracy is in danger.

Perhaps hacking didn’t successfully result in actually changing the outcome of the election, but it is far easier to plant evidence that it did, than to actually do it.

We may not be in checkmate just yet friends, but we may have only one way of escape.

No matter what side of the politic argument you fall on, please decide now, before the government concludes it’s study, that you will not respond in violence.

Pledge now to seek peace and unity in a disastrous situation.

We may have just one move left.

You’ll notice I didn’t implement a specific opponent.  A skilled opponent would remain invisible until the battle was already won, so perhaps there is a scapegoat being used to hide the real opponent.  There is no hope to be found in fighting against our opponent as destroying his cities and killing his people will not result in peace.  We have been outmatched, our only hope is to find unity where it can be found, before it is too late.  

Groceries (DOP #11 2016)

If you are reading from afar, it has been snowing all day today where I live.  It is actually the first significant snowfall of the year.   I think we are somewhere in the 5-7 inch range as far as accumulation.  I enjoy the snow, and I don’t mind driving in it, as long as there are not a lot of other drivers on the road.  I would probably have stayed home, but I was the audio tech for our church services this morning, and couldn’t just bail on them.

I decided to stop at Wal-Mart on my way home, I have been out of things to eat at home for a while now, and since it was still snowing heavily when I left church, I figured I better at least have something to eat in the house if the worst happens to happen.  I grabbed about $40 worth of random, easily prepared food.  Typically I shop once a month, and just buy stuff that can be frozen indefinitely.  I travel for work a lot, and it is hard to predict when I’ll be gone for weeks at a time, so fresh food is tricky in my situation.

As I checked out, I thought about how this would be the last time for a while I would be shopping for something that needed to be refrigerated.  I’m letting the lease expire on my apartment at the end of the year, and I don’t have a plan that involves a consistent living situation for after that.  I’m not entirely sure what plans I do have at the moment, I just know that I need a change.

I have been in this apartment for 16 months, which in the grand scheme of a life isn’t too long, but I never intended to stay here for even a year.  I had grand dreams of heading overseas, or finding my way to a new adventure somewhere else, so I took the shortest lease I could, and then went month to month after that.

I haven’t found a new situation anywhere, and I think that is perfectly okay.  I mentioned in an earlier post about how I often confuse comfort with peace.  Comfort is the reason I am leaving.  Life is too easy here.  I don’t want to wake up one day 30 years from now and realize that I pursued comfort over all else.  Comfort is easy.  I’ve already found it, there is no pursuit to be made for it.

I think I’ve also mentioned (or at least implied) that peace is something that needs to be pursued, worked on, worked out!  You can’t just expect peace to fall into your lap and stay there.  It has to be chased, run down, hunted!  You have to chase peace with a giant stick and beat it into submission before you can drag it back to your cave!

Many will find comfort in this life, far fewer will find peace.

So I will forsake comfort, at least for a time, as I seek to find a way to not only experience peace for myself, but open the doors for others to find it as well.  There will be risks, but I believe there will also be rewards.

It won’t be comfortable at times, but I’m sick of being comfortable.

I want peace.

19 And a scribe came up and said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” 20 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

Enemy (DOP #10 2016)

“We shall be saved from our enemies. ”

Zechariah was prophesying over the birth of Jesus, the beginnings of the Christmas we celebrate even now, 2000+ years later, when he said the above.

You should understand that Israel was an occupied country at this point, it had been taken over by the Romans, and like most occupied nations, they Israelite’s weren’t thrilled about it.   So when Zechariah prophesied that Jesus would save them from their enemies, they had a specific enemy in mind that they wanted to be saved from.   If we fast forward 33 years, we find that Jesus has perished at the hands of the Romans.  Those who believed Jesus was who he said he was had to feel utterly crushed.  The man who was to save them from their enemies, was dead, at the hands of their enemies.

We, with the benefit of 2000 years of hindsight, understand what happened, and realize that God fulfilled Zechariah’s prophecy in a way the people living in that time, experiencing the events first hand couldn’t understand.  They could not have possibly known Jesus would come back from the dead.  Especially since the only person they had ever seen raise someone from the dead, was in fact Jesus!

The Hebrew people thought that the Romans were their enemies, but God had the biggest enemy of all in mind when he inspired Zechariah to speak those words.

I think we expect God to save us from our enemies, to bring peace into our lives in the same way the Hebrew people expected Jesus to do.  We expect God to deal with the very specific enemy that is directly in front of us that we can see, hear, and touch.   I suspect that many times, when we ask God to restore peace to our lives, He acts immediately, but he acts against the real enemy in the situation.  We think God is not answering, but he is really dealing with the larger problem at hand that we are perhaps totally unaware of.

So when I, or you, ask God to bring peace into a situation and you do not see results, ask yourself if maybe you don’t understand who the enemy really is.

Jesus is after all the Prince of Peace.

I suspect he understands exactly how it works.

Luke 1

68 “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
    for he has visited and redeemed his people
69 and has raised up a horn of salvation for us
    in the house of his servant David,
70 as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
71 that we should be saved from our enemies
    and from the hand of all who hate us;
72 to show the mercy promised to our fathers
    and to remember his holy covenant,
73 the oath that he swore to our father Abraham, to grant us
74     that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies,
might serve him without fear,
75     in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.
76 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
    for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
77 to give knowledge of salvation to his people
    in the forgiveness of their sins,
78 because of the tender mercy of our God,
    whereby the sunrise shall visit us[h] from on high
79 to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
    to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Change (DOP #9 2016)

It isn’t always easy to accept our place in the world.

When we seek peace, we often look at the people around us, and focus on changing them.  We tell ourselves if our boss would just learn to do his job better, or if my coworkers would pay attention, or if my significant other would just make some effort, then we would find peace in those relationships.  We tell ourselves that we are frustrated and tired because of the actions of other people in our lives, and we need them to change to find real peace.  At least we think that might help us feel better about our lives.  We are left powerless to experience peace, because the keys to peace are not in our own hands.   We couldn’t find peace if we tried, the people we spend time with have made it impossible.  We are hurt, tired, broken.

When we seek peace, we often look at our circumstances, and focus on changing them.  If we could just pay our bills on time, if we could buy a new car, if we could find our soulmate, then we could have peace.  We recognize that we can’t do anything about the choices of others, so instead we focus on making the best possible decisions for ourselves, and just learn to cope with the consequences of the actions of others.  We are willing to put in the hard work to find peace, if we could just save a little more money, be a little kinder to our families, or just find a few hours to rest.  We put all of our energy into changing ourselves, because it is up to us to find our own peace.   We are exhausted.

For the longest time I thought that I was doing the right thing by focusing on my own actions to bring about a positive change.  I constantly struggled with trying to be good enough on my own to work my way into a peaceful and pleasant life.  I knew that I could’t blame discontent on others, even if they felt like such a part of it.  I did occasionally slip into blaming others for my unhappiness, but I would try to snap myself out of it as soon as possible, as obviously that wasn’t the right thing to do.

What if there was another way?

A friend told me last night in passing about the way she tries to pray.  It was so foreign to me.

My typical attempts to approach prayer involve lots of repetition of phrases like “your will be done” and “You can change this, but only if it is your will”  I know that God is not a cosmic vending machine, so I treat the interactions like I’m giving God the opportunity to act if he wants to, but I don’t really care either way, I mean…”It is your will I’m seeking here God, so you can’t blame me if I ask for something I shouldn’t.”

Not unsurprisingly, my prayer life does not tend to be the most fulfilling part of my relationship with God.

My friend encouraged me to pray differently as I sought peace.  Instead of saying “God please help me figure out how to fix this situation”, she recommended asking God to be present as I experience the situation.  In other words, stopping asking God to change where you are, and start asking to be changed through the experience.  Ask God to be alongside you as you face whatever it is that happens to be disrupting your peace in that moment.

It does make more sense…the Bible doesn’t say “Solutions I give to you,  answers to tricky situations will I give.  When the world gives you trouble, I’ll show you how to outsmart the world, and escape from the pain you’ll find there”.

Instead the Bible does say in John 14, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”

So instead of changing my acquaintances or my circumstances God, I think I would like to welcome you to change me.  I’m not asking you to change me so I can avoid the things that cause me stress, but instead I ask for you to change me to more fully depend on you, your peace, and your provision.