Category: Theology and Reflections

Last night at work I was talking to a friend of mine from India and he asked me if I noticed that often in life, whatever you desire you usually don’t get (strange I thought it was usually the opposite). It reminded me a lot of Ecclesiaties where the Teacher says “meaningless! meaningless! Everything is meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 1:1). The word meaningless in Hebrew is הֶבֶל (pronounced heh’vel) and this word actually is better understood as enigma, paradoxical, frustration, absurdity or in my definition a glitch. Why glitch? Because if you’ve ever played a video game or regularly use technology then you know how frustrating and even at times absurd glitches can be. You can save your work, press the right buttons, have the best setup but everything at some point fails, works slowly and glitches out.

One way you could read this verse then is “glitches! glitches! everything in life has a glitch!” This was the way I tried to explain the concept of heh’vel to my friend. Life it seems are full of these little glitches in the system of life. It doesn’t matter if you input the right commands, do the right things and think the right thoughts the glitch can always set you back and there’s nothing you can do about it. Life isn’t fair, people suffer that don’t deserve it, and those that do deserve suffering never seem to get their just desserts. You can pour your heart and soul into a job and get fired tomorrow. You can buy roses and lavish love upon your partner and be cheated on. On the flipside, you can lie cheat and steal and get everything you ever wanted. Life is indeed heh’vel and glitch-filled.

This brings to my mind a few questions that need answering:

1. How do we live in a heh’vel glitch-filled world?
2. How do we react to the heh’vel that comes my way?
3. If this isn’t how life is supposed to be, how can I fix it?

These are hard questions to answer, they don’t come easily, but I do think the Bible offers some wisdom here. The Bible is a grand narrative that tells one important story:

Yahweh God in Heaven desires humanity to flourish in a good relationship with Himself, one another, and creation. Yet we have chosen to go our own way and in the process, we have broken our relationship with God, killed each other, and pillaged the earth. God then takes it upon Himself to fix our broken sinfulness by reconciling us to Him, me to you, and humanity to the earth. He does this through Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and His ongoing work as king over the earth. 

The glitch is sin and brokenness. The glitch is something that was never programmed by the Master Programmer. The glitch advocates for injustice, destruction and death. For thousands of years, we’ve all tried to fix the glitch to no avail. What we need is the Programmer to reprogram life beginning with the heh’vel and sin in our own hearts. This is Jesus. Jesus wants to work on you, in you and for you. Just ask.

 

It’s almost 3:30 am I’m tired but I cannot sleep (so forgive me for bad grammar or spelling in this blog). Lately, I’ve had new battles, new struggles that sin and Satan have used to ensnare me. Anxiety, like sin, crouches at the door of my heart. Depression, like a mist, edges the borders of my mind ready to envelop me into despair. I once thought I was untouchable, that these things would never even be on my radar. As they say, never say never. The battle is complex but what lays at the heart of my anxieties and fears is this, the desire to be accepted and approved by others. I don’t know about you, but it’s been a while since I head God speak to me. It’s very rare for Him to actually say to me, “I love you and accept you despite your flaws.” So the sinful heart settles for the next best thing, humanity. But, it is true there is something right about wanting to be loved by others. God, of course, encourages us to love others as our selves, to build flourishing communities of Jesus loving people where we all can feel like we belong and mean something to someone. But, our hearts are fickle things. It’s not long before we perform before we act before we go above and beyond just because we’re afraid people won’t love us. We start to believe in things we never thought we would, compromising our ethics and relationships that don’t matter to us (even though those ones matter perhaps more to God). You dress differently, speak and do life in ways you know aren’t right for you, and you know deep down inside that you’re a complete and utter broken mess of a thing so you cover up yourself with more masks, more costumes just to fit the bill. And so, one of the greatest battles is the war raged over your own self. The more you cover up and reject your true self, the more you become trapped in an identity that leads to a well of brokenness and darkness.

God… doesn’t offer a way out, He offers a way through. There’s something magical about the early hours of the morning, there’s something very Gethsemane. I’m definitely not sweating blood, but despair breeds depth and introspection and these things seem to be expressed best at 3:30 am. So, like Jesus’ prayer in the garden, my whisper of a prayer to the Almighty is this:

Father forgive me for I know not what I do…

Father heal me for I am broken in despair…

Father know me for I know not myself…

Father love me even when there’s no love to be found…

Father quicken me for I am slow to catch on to life…

Jesus… come back soon we miss you…

(and so be it for all of you)

Amen.

Thought I’d write a little something something before the end of 2018.

This year has been, as all years tend to be, a battle. It’s been a battle of perspectives, knowledge, family, friends, enemies, spirituality, sin and self. This year, more then ever before in my Christian walk I’ve battled with the unknown and the darkness that looms in my own heart as well as the very real struggles of the world around me. More then any year previously I’ve come to understand more of how broken and sinful I really am and I’ve come to realize how much about the world I have yet to explore and how little of God I truly know. The spiritual road ahead has seemed so uncertain there are days I genuinely question if it’s even worth continuing to walk with Jesus. After all, I worship a person I cannot see, or hear, or feel. It’s very easy to lose sight of who and where Jesus is.

However, today I had a sort of an epiphany. You can be told something 100 times over and it won’t be until the 101st that the light bulb comes on. Jesus and His Kingdom is bigger than me. Theologically I’ve known that to be true for some time. It wasn’t until today though that I realised that I’ve been living like as though I’m the most important person in God’s Kingdom. I’ve been tremendously selfish, completely focused on myself believing God is for all people but acting like as though my relationship with God was all that mattered. All of a sudden, bam, the fog cleared, I felt a bit lighter in my steps and some of the things I’ve been struggling with have become less of an issue.

Let me be clear. God loves me more tremendously then I could perhaps ever understand. I know that if I were the only person who was to ever respond to His Gospel He’d still have sent His Son to atone for my sins. However, here’s the Good News. Jesus has chosen and called me to be a faithful blessing to others, not just myself. God’s mission is about redeeming the entire world through Jesus, not just me. His Kingdom is bigger, more loving, more powerful than whether or not I’ve had my coffee this morning. And so as it’s literally the last day of 2018 I wanted to leave you with this (for whoever is reading):

1. Start 2019 on the right foot. You aren’t the most important person in God’s Kingdom (Revelation 7:9).

2. But you are important. God loves you and wants to save you from your brokenness and sin (Psalm 86:5).

3. You are called to serve and bless others, not just to reap the benefits of your own redemption (Exodus 19:6, 1 Peter 2:9 and 2 Corinthians 9:8-11, Romans 12).

4. Let God work wonders within you. You don’t know what He has in store for you this 2019.

5. Pray (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18), preach (2 Timothy 4:2), love (Philippians 1:9-10) and serve (Galatians 5:13) to the glory of God and the joy of all people (1 Corinthians 10:31).