What would it feel like?

If you’ve ever had a serious romantic relationship, you know how thrilling and satisfying it can be to love and be loved. But if you’re like most of us, you also know what it feels like to have that reciprocal joy ripped away and replaced by the deep anguish of having your heart broken when your beloved rejects you and leaves the relationship. The pain of such a thing can be so intense that it literally incapacitates us from doing anything productive for a time.

Even worse than just losing someone this way, imagine that the reason for the breakup is something awful you did to betray your beloved. So now, the person who once cherished you despises you, thus compounding the already unbearable pain of loss with the guilt and self-loathing of having only yourself to blame for it. You deserve to be hated, as evidenced by the fact that you even hate yourself for what you’ve done and what it’s cost you.

The guilty heartbroken are far more right than they know when they describe this as being in hell, something no one would voluntarily endure…unless He was our Savior.

Through a glass darkly...

I know my wife better than anyone else does, and yet I will never know her fully. I learn about her every day from my what my children tell me and what she shows me in dealing with them.

Is my wife’s identity undermined or threatened by the fact that each of my children’s description of her will differ from the others? What about by the fact that my own description of her will differ much from theirs and also from that of her mother or friends? Or is it possible that these variations actually affirm and prove the rich reality of who she is?

The logical and necessary consequence of believing God wants personal relationship with each of us is the sometimes uncomfortable fact that we will not all see precisely the same things in Him or know Him in exactly the same ways or even through the same mechanisms or means of encounter.

This is not a threat to God’s Godness, but an exuberant endorsement of it. If any mere human can be frustratingly complex and unpredictable, why should we be surprised to find God is even more so?

Being right requires far more than just opposing wrong.

Illegitimate sex is unacceptable, and yet we must treat those who do it with love and forgiveness.

Profane speech is a terrible form of social pollution, and yet we must not think our ears can be polluted with things even a completely Holy God hears.

Abortion is wicked, and yet we must treat the woman who has had an abortion with love and forgiveness.

Every man should be productive, and yet we must have compassion and generosity for the poor.

False religion is extremely contaminating, and yet we must become loyal friends to those whose religious views are wrong.

Political corruption is a grave evil, and yet we must remember that all politicians are imperfect and that our salvation is never found by selecting the right ones.

Racism is a horrible cancer, especially in America, but we must patiently cherish the racist who is also a child made in God’s image.

In short, we must always be proclaiming a standard which reminds people of the requirements of holiness and righteousness while equally reminding ourselves of the requirements of grace and love. This is why practicing only half of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is, in fact, practicing the full anti-Gospel of hell.

All that it really takes for evil to control the world is for men to think that goodness lies in merely opposing evil.

More on parenting...

Things I regularly say to my three boys:

“Stop bickering over such ridiculous things. Just be the bigger boy and give in.”

“There’s more than enough for everyone, but you have to share.”

“Stop fighting. Just go away. You don’t have to hit him back just because he hit you. I don’t care who started it. The one who quits first is the winner.”

“Be more careful! He’s smaller than you are, and it’s the bigger boy’s job to look out for the little one.”

“When he’s annoying you, just leave the area. It doesn’t matter if he’s saying something you know is wrong. You don’t have to win to be right.”

“Stop screaming. That’s not important enough to be crying over.”

“I know it’s yours, but you weren’t using it, so just let him play with it.”

“Why are you crying? Is crying going to change anything? Has crying about something ever made you feel better?”

“I know you didn’t make the mess, but I want you to clean it up anyway. Somebody has to do it, and it might as well be you. Do you remember how many of your messes I cleaned up for you?”

So, I have this theory that God allowed us to experience parenting as a way to understand Him better, but I’m still a bit fuzzy on the details….

On parenting

Having learned the concept of April Fools Day, but not the importance of only doing jokes in love, Spencer has been playing pranks on Ethan recently, for which we keep correcting him. Well this morning finally may have been the teachable moment.

See, both of them love strawberry milk, and we had just finished off a canister of Nesquik. So Spencer pretended to have a glass and told Ethan he should go get some for himself. When Ethan opened the container, it was empty, and Spencer announced his prank with laughter. Ethan, of course was very disappointed. As a good daddy, I naturally stepped in to fulfill his frustrated expectation by opening a new canister and giving him strawberry milk.

Seeing this, Spencer immediately started clamoring for one as well, which I denied. “But you gave it to Ethan,” he complained. “Yes, and I wasn’t going to. But when you tricked him, I decided to be generous and give him what you had promised because he was sad. But because you played the prank, now you don’t get any. I’d like you to think about this the next time you consider playing a joke on someone that’ll make them sad.”

The giver in me was willing to be generous, but the father in me knew he needed to learn a lesson he would remember.