The opportunities to write have been few in the past couple of months. It’s ironic that I would be working on this chapter on “Perseverance” for so long! This comes out of sequence to the list of life skills in 2 Peter 1:5-8. However, I’ll fill in the other chapters in the coming weeks. This topic has been on my mind and heart continually as I have seen physical, financial, and marital distresses all around. I hope it will provide some perspective for you own call and walk.
Roger
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Monday, December 15, 2008
HANDHOLD #5 "Perseverance" 2 Peter 1:7
"Suffering Well"
...add to self-control, perseverance 2 Peter 1:7
We were wolfing our lunch under a cloudless sky at a roadside table in Poncha Springs, Colorado. Not much of a place, but it represented a trip-defining right turn on the map for us. We had pedalled south out of Buena Vista that morning, our second full day on our quest to reach Cortez in the extreme southwest, Four Corners area of Colorado. Five days, seven high passes, fueled by Kool-aid, tuna fish, and peanut butter. Twelve of us had left Denver on bicycles. Ten speeds. Heavy old Schwinns and Huffy’s weighing over thirty pounds. This was medievil biking. We really didn’t know what we were doing, so we pooled our ignorance, and concocted what had turned into a fine and pleasant form of misery previously unknown to any of us. We wore cut-off jeans and Converse sneakers. This was 1973 and real bicycle helmets hadn’t hit the market yet. So, we wore hockey helmets, ironically labelled “Cool Gear.” Not a stitch of lycra, or padding of any kind. Cotton T-shirts. We were sore and sunburned. But now we were in too deep to back out. Poncha Springs was our Rubicon. This was the westward turn that would test every commitment we had made to each other. As we gulped our grape Koolaid and downed PBJ’s we couldn’t keep our eyes from wandering upward, to the west, to the place we had to ride. The big one loomed. We didn’t want to talk about it. Monarch Pass.
The highway undulates through the valley we had ridden that morning, hugging the foothills along the Arkansas River. It was beautiful riding: the river, the fragrance of freshly cut hay in the meadows, and, except for a few challenging hills, an easy pull. The brilliance of the Rocky Mountain sun, the pristine air, and the breath-taking vista, however, could not suppress our latent fears. Now we were turning West toward the spires and crags of the Rocky Mountains. There before us was a road that lead only upward. Seventeen miles to the summit of Monarch Pass: elevation 11,312 feet. Four thousand vertical feet of climbing against the gravity of both body and soul.
These teenagers had been full of surprises. Adult and child, athlete and whiner, comedian and mutineer were stirred together in a volatile mix. They were exasperating, resilient, demanding, altruistic, childish, selfish and tough. This day they were inspiring. Knowing full well that there was no way to soften the reality of at least three hours of six percent, uphill, first gear grinding to reach the top, they set out with dogged, sun-burned determination. Four thousand feet had to be climbed with leg, lung, and will power alone. With a wide range of motivations and abilities, they were soon sorted into clusters of fellow survivors. Gasping, hunched, and glassy-eyed they fixed their stares at the pavement just in front of their tires as the pass rose relentlessly upward. “Snails pace” acquired a working definition on that afternoon. But they did it! Eventually everybody summitted. They amazed themselves, and cheered victory to each other at the top. For most, this was the pinnacle of any physical challenge they had ever attempted. There was a high-five celebration when the caboose finally arrived, and a glow of utter satisfaction on every face. Brownies were awarded as the ultimate pay-off for their courage. As we flew down the Western side of the pass, the hoots and cheers never stopped.
Fresh off that victory, we spurred one another on and rode a hundred miles the next day into Montrose. When I think back on our inexperience, our ludicrous attire, and our greenhorn unpreparedness, it is utterly audacious that we even tried this, much less accomplished it. Time after time we met people at rest stops and mountain summits who asked: “How did y’all get here.” When we replied that we had ridden our bikes from Denver, they were a the study of ambivalence. Were we lying, or crazy? This dropped-jaw amazement just fueled our team with more determination.
But, we weren’t done. We still had huge, looming challenges on our horizon. We were headed into the “Switzerland of America” and its legendary “Million Dollar Highway.” The fourth day would take us to Red Mountain Pass, 11,008 feet in elevation. From the Swiss-like village of Ouray the pass looks endless, and dangerous. No guard rails. The “Million Dollar Highway” is cut into the steep scree slopes the color of rusting iron. A lapse of concentration, or a lane-hogging flatlander behind the wheel of an RV, and a cyclist would be gravely injured. But, the group was becoming resolute. They were eager to grind it out, to tackle the pass. Again we left river and meadow, and finally, timberline, behind. We summitted and celebrated after 3,500 feet of vertical gain. We posed for a victory picture and then broke the sound barrier on our descent.
This gaggle had melded into a team. We had learned how to encourage one another. We fixed flats and kept moving. We sang and joked and teased. Our unity was hard-won from the agonies of climbing, camping, freezing and burning together. As we cruised down this final pass, following the Purgatory river into Durango, we were Lance Armstrong. We were the Tour de France. We were indefatigable. Celebration time. Chocolate shakes all around. All our passes were behind us. Now, all that remained was a forty-mile cruise into Cortez, a victory lap of sorts, our Champs Elysees.
The mistake we made was to ask an out-of-state tourist who had driven into Durango from the West what we could expect of the road ahead. “Oh, it’s mostly level,” he said. “Probably downhill, slightly rolling, in the direction you’re going. Easy travelling.” He set our expectations on coasting and cruising, and sowed the seeds of our demise.
Assumptions were made, and frozen into place. Expectations were set by that innocent, but erroneous description of the road ahead. We were soon to discover that when the assumption is the enjoyment of a downhill cruise with little exertion, then every uphill becomes an insult, a personal and painful affront. The offense, the seemingly conspiratorial torture of first-gear grinding, fueled anger that had to be vented somehow. Our resilient and intrepid team rapidly fragmented into an anarchic, epithet-spitting mutiny.
Leaving Durango to the West, we began to climb, completely contrary to our assumptions. We climbed and we climbed. It was hot, dry, and our sunburned necks were being fried. The hill wouldn’t end. This wasn’t the plan. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It isn’t fair! The irresistable force of expectation ran headlong into the immovable object of reality. Seething frustration boiled up from the seemingly senseless grinding. The breathless heat blotted out all memory of mountain highs and victory pictures. Who planned this trip? This is stupid! I’m quitting! You leaders are morons!
Expectations are stubborn things. Once fixed in our minds they become our axis, the center of our universe. Every experience is sucked into the gravitational field of these expectations. And, if our experience does not line up and neatly orbit around our expectations, we want to hurl this reality into outer darkness. We would rather burn Copernicus at the stake, along with his irrefutable evidence, for suggesting that we had gotten it all wrong. We need a new axis for our universe. We need to challenge and replace our long-held assumptions about how things work. Unmet expectations can produce such imbalance, such cognitive dissonance, that a massive expulsion of inconvenient and irritating facts is inevitable. We want our universe to run as we designed it, or as we expected. On this day, in this heat, under these unanticipated adversities, we witnessed such an explosion of blame, anger, and rejection that our whole universe was stunned into a cosmic funk. Our team disintegrated into isolated planets of misery and retribution.
Seven uphill miles was all it took to generate such a spiteful funkiness in those young people that they wanted to blow up Colorado. A hundred times we almost dissolved into unrecoverable anarchy. This motley team erupted in a toxic cataclysm of blame, selfishness and sullen spitefulness. Mutiny was in full swing. We were on the verge of mayhem, and murder was whispered. Gone was any memory of sweet teamwork. Vaporized was every vestige of encouragement, vision, humor or patient endurance. Unfulfilled expectation raged like a wildfire, fueled by parched throats and aching quads. Imagination did everything possible to retain the stubborn expectation that ease and coasting was a divine right, and dispel the inconvenient and unremitting reality that gravity was relentless and unavoidable. Some sinister power must have tilted the earth to make us suffer. Some incompetent leader had tricked us into this misery, held in secret until this last day. This hill was put here on purpose just to taunt us, the sun is scorching with a personal vendetta, and the whole world is stupid, stupid, stupid. One brazen fact was stubbornly repelled: nobody is going to climb this hill for me. I’m the only one who can do it. The Next Right Thing, the next pedal revolution, was the least favorite option.
Scott Peck once started a book with this statement of biting realism: “Life is difficult. Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy.” (Road Less Travelled p. 15) Whether he knew it or not, his thoughts echoed those of the Apostle Peter, who, nineteen hundred years beforehand declared: “Dear friend, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering as though something strange were happening to you.” (I Peter 4:12) Peter is the man who now coaches us with The Next Right Thing in his array of life skills.
So what does this brilliant life coach suggest for the weary slogger, the frustrated, angry or disenfranchised victim? “Perseverance,” says Peter, is The Next Right Thing for many whose journey seems endlessly uphill. But, we would rather hear of some other way. Can’t I quit, or catch a magical ride, or simmer in an angry snit instead. Wouldn’t anything be better than to be coached to persevere? Persevere in the same old routine, through the same level of pain, with the same old cast of characters? Yes, this Least Favorite Thing is The Next Right Thing given to us through the divine power and wisdom of the Father, because He knew we would need it in this uphill, sun-scorched world (2 P 1:3).
Perseverance needs careful definition. We need to split a semantic hair, to distinguish its nuance from another word which is often used as a synonym: that word is endurance. Our Rocky Mountain bikers had demonstrated endurance repeatedly. What they had yet to embrace on that maddening hill west of Durango, was perseverance. The difference is huge. These novice cyclists had endured much. They had shown tenacity, a capacity to suffer, and a growing tolerance for delayed gratification. By the time we reached Durango, they had ridden three hundred and fifty miles, awakened in soggy tents, and broken ice from their bicycle seats in Silverton. They had spent eight hours per day in the saddle, and endured the hassle of waiting for slowpokes, the lonely fog of fatigue, and the unavoidable grunge of sweat and camping. They endured. But, here is the important distinction between endurance and perseverance. Each day they endured because they could see a finish line, or a series of finish lines. They were promised an end at the next rest stop, meal, town, summit, personal victory or campsite. Those became their intermediate and achievable goals. Despite their suffering they knew there would be an end, and some modicum of reward, and so they admirably endured.
Perseverance is not like that. Though perseverance requires the same expensive and exhausting expenditure of energy, the same exertion against inertia and gravity, it lacks that one glimmering, shimmering appeal: a finish line. Perseverance lacks an end, or at least, a known end. Perseverance is a steady persistence, a courageous fortitude, a doggedness and steadfastness with a very disturbing caveat: the finish line is not known, or it is unseen and lying on the far side of an infuriating and ugly hill instead of at a summit in the pure, alpine air. Perseverance is that courage that presses on when the end is not what we envisioned, what we wanted, or a match for our raging expectations.
Endurance is running the mile.
Perseverance is running a household.
Endurance is learning Algebra.
Perseverance is learning to live with diabetes.
Endurance is rehabbing after knee surgery.
Perseverance is starting life again after divorce.
Endurance is winning eight Olympic Gold Medals.
Perseverance is living with two preschoolers in the house.
Endurance is hard.
Perseverance seems unfair.
Because we live in a culture of sound bytes and Extreme Makeover, it is easy to slip into the assumption that somebody, somewhere has a magical solution. Add to this the formula mill of evangelical publishing and broadcasting, and the insurmountable expectation is that perseverance must be only for those losers who can’t step into their spiritual victory. But, it turns out, and the Apostle Peter affirms, that much of life can be met only with The Next Right Thing called perseverance, seemingly the least spiritual of all the options.
Brent and Sarah have a magnanimous spirit exuding from every pore of their lives, and every word from their mouths. How wonderfully he encourages, and how insightfully she teaches. Their legacy will be one of self-giving servanthood, and humble faithfulness. They are truly the pillars, bastions of grace, of which any healthy church is built. But, unseen by many, they must relentlessly carry huge weights which sap their energies, and remove them from circulation. They give days of each week to care for a grandson whose father is MIA. Sarah continues in a high-stress job despite a heart functioning at sixty percent. Aging parents and extended family, most of whom live locally, require constant expenditures of free time, holiday plans, and vacation days. They have endured uncountable laps of this long run, and there is no end in sight. When they do have moments to ponder, and project into the future, they see no changes. In fact, they see only deeper risk, more complications, and further erosion of health and resources. Each day as they awaken to work, grand-parenting, complicated dynamics of extended family, and financial austerity, they are met with the only choice they have. It is their best choice, but their least-pleasant choice to live a God-honoring life: perseverance. Where’s the downhill coasting, or the ultimate victory, in that?
Our coach, Peter, in his list of life-defining skills (2 Peter 1:5-8) makes a logical sandwich with perseverance as its meat. This chewy, tough, dogged form of endurance is sandwiched between self-control and godliness. The private battles against anger, retreat, self-gratification and vengeance won with self-control, usher in the longer war against inertia and despair which must be fueled by perseverance. This, then, creates a character of humility and inward piety which displays authentic godliness in the real world. Self-control links to godliness through the fibrous connective tissue called perseverance.
Author Tim Hansel defines perseverance as “Courage stretched out.” (Holy Sweat) Consistent and incremental courage builds a bridge to obedience with girders of perseverance. Life in this real world must bear the weight of hassle, suffering, and fools in order to span to the shore of godliness. Perseverance is what supports and strengthens that bridge. It stands without fanfare. The traffic of our lives, and the lives of others, flows across it. Perseverance bears the weight of challenging, incessant, heavy life, and makes the commerce between personal faith and public witness flow without interruption. But, it is a strain. It requires strength. And, there is no end in sight.
Many friends flash across my mind whose perseverance is epic, but unheralded. They are head down, low-geared, and struggling, but still ascending. Words they live with like “recurring...chronic...persistent...senseless...unfair...unexpected” dominate their daily experience. They are being squeezed economically in the vice of family needs and a downsizing industry, tested to their limits every day by special needs children, made frantic over grandchildren facing chemo-therapy, and pouring fading hope into a marginal business or an eroding marriage. The way they foresee is hard, and the end they see is not pretty, nor pleasant. Formulas for success seem designed for a different world than theirs. They slog on, and have no other option. They groan along with the groaning creation described in Romans 8. Though the conditions are undesirable and harsh, they have made a choice to suffer well, recurringly. They have chosen resolute perseverance with self-control, and have not insisted that somebody somewhere owes them a free ride.
We may choose to suffer well, with perseverance, or we can seethe in a mutinous snit about the unfairness of a universe turned against us. The next best thing about the Bible, besides its crescendo of victory, resurrection and redemption, is its utter clarity and truth-telling regarding trouble on a groaning planet. Trouble is not grudgingly acknowledged as if it were a forced confession under prosecutorial questioning. It is headlined on every page of scripture. Jesus took away any pretense when he baldly asserted: “In this world, you will have trouble.” (John 16:33) Paul makes a theological blanket statement, leaving no one immune, or insulated, from distress in the eighth chapter of Romans:
“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” (Romans 8:22-23)
Even those of us with the slightest acquaintance with a biblical world view should not be surprised when trouble comes. But, moderns, even believers, ghetto-ized by formulas and quick-fix assurances of easy victory, whose assumptions are fed on the chip-and-dip empty calories of the media, find it hard to chew on the sinewy gristle of perseverance. But there it is, immediately following Hebrews 11, the stirring chapter documenting the great triumphs of faith, and faithfulness.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1-2)
This high-tensile strength piton called perseverance is driven into the rock of Jesus’ example, and the Father’s faithfulness, and our whole life hangs on it. Hupomeno is the Greek compound word. It welds two concepts together: bearing up, and under. The visual picture is that of bearing up under, remaining true under pressure and stress. Despite the pressure, pain, disappointment or fearsome potential, perseverance hangs onto what it knows, to Whom it trusts. After all the inspiration gained from the galaxy of faith and victory displayed in Hebrews 11, the first brawny word of counsel in Hebrews 12 about actually living life today as these ancient examples lived involves grasping hard life with the gritty handhold of perseverance.
Maybe we should think more personally, more practically. Is perseverance The Next Right Thing for me right now? Is there an unwanted, unexpected, and deeply disliked circumstance looming before me, or already upon me? It’s unfair. Chronic. Daily. Painful. Embarassing. Unforeseen. It won’t lie down, and it won’t go away. Blame and ranting have not succeeded in making it stop. Prayers for deliverance remain unanswered. It appears to be my lot, my inescapable burden. It is the climb that I, and I alone, must make. Will I suffer well, or fume, blame, demand and vaccilate in wasteful frustration?
But, before we can make an ultimately redemptive choice to persevere as The Next Right Thing, we need to defang a debilitating lie regarding its pedigree. Perseverance, in an age of Olympic Gold Medals, victory stories, and health-and-wealth formulas, is made to appear as one of God’s lesser (much lesser) graces. In the shadow of a zillion victory stories and hundreds of pain-relieving regimens, perseverance seems the fall-back option for the remedial, the not-quite bright. In fact, faithful Christ-followers who persevere month in and month out, procedure after procedure, biopsy after biopsy, day upon day, are frequently viewed as defective. This is never verbalized, but it is often felt, and transmitted. We, if we are in this cycle of perseverance, feel somehow that we have failed. Or worse, God has failed. Perseverers are plodders, pedestrians, remedials, the also-rans, the forgottens. Perseverance is needed only by those too dense or disobedient to achieve victory or escape. Perseverance is the redheaded stepchild of discipleship. Perseverance is what you get when your faith, or your mind, or your will, is weak.
So, along with trouble, we often travel with Job’s counselors, both external and internal. Friends, eager to help, don’t encourage perseverance as a grace, but only as a fall-back default. “Hang in there!” is the street-version bromide tossed over the shoulder as they leave the hospital room. It’s a way to end the conversation, because to hang with us in the endless round of daily perseverance seems to encourage and justify our faithless solutionlessness. As with Job, well-meaning friends packing answers are ready to help and counsel almost anything except the sheer dogged endurance for the day ahead, in all its embarassing weakness and repetitive, logistical reality.
What can be said as an answer, or as a key to victory, to the couple whose seventeen-year-old son is as rigged as a log, his body frozen in endless spasm. He now weighs more than his mother, and his needs are 24/7. Every medical intervention has been tried. Home care is needed. Countless emergencies have roused them at night. Medical bills, bottomless bureaucracy, and mind-numbing fatigue compose the fabric of their conversation. When can they ever rest, or go out on a date? What is their future? Where, or where, is the finish line?
We need an extreme makeover of this castoff virtue called perseverance, a re-issuing of a resource too seldom valued, and too quickly disdained. Though it is never easy, and will frequently be excruciatingly hard, it is not a shame, or a lesser grace, to persevere. Peter not only writes of this: he lived it. His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness...(2 Peter 1:3) The list of what God has provided does not include an asterisk with *perseverance. (Footnote: *this attribute will be your default status after you have failed to achieve real spiritual victory.) Peter’s preamble should put the lie to any such devaluation of perseverance. God has given it. It comes from His hand. It is not sub-Christian to hang in there with recurring courage, even when it has been months, or years, since the last hi-five. Admiral Jim Stockdale, a prisoner of war in Vietnam, in retrospect, captures the resilient sheen that perseverance casts over all other virtures. Tortured and imprisoned for eight years, he was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. (Good to Great p. 85)
One could posit that Peter’s whole apostolic career was one long triathlon of perseverance. Few of us would want to know what he knew from the very beginning of his peripatetic preaching, coaching ministry. Peter was given irrefutable knowledge from Jesus himself from the outset of his commissioning that he would be waging a war of diminishing returns, culminating in death. From a human, physical perspective, there would be no spectacular ascension, as with Elijah, no peaceful retirement lecture circuit, no university tenure, nor some stirring, heroic martyrdom. When Peter was re-commissioned by Jesus to “Feed my sheep,” he was also shown how his life would end. When you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go...Follow me! (John 21:18-19)
One can only imagine the stunning and breath-taking impact of these words on Peter. Spontaneous, powerful, manly, adventurous, independent, and courageous Peter would end his life in helplessness. His physical body would either be impaired from weakness, or restrained by fetters. His ready will and loyal heart would be overridden by the will and power of others. He would be forced to go where he did not want to go. John informs us that Jesus showed him his end to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.
Upon hearing this, two blows must have landed simultaneously on Peter’s solar plexus: The first is that he would die as an old man, weak and helpless. Implication: the promised Kingdom ushered in with trumpets, angels, justice and fire would not come in Peter’s lifetime. Israel would not be liberated. Bad guys would not meet their judge. History would not crescendo under the thunder of Peter’s preaching, no matter where, or with what power he proclaimed the gospel. There would be no final summit, historically speaking, for Peter to celebrate. He was not ascending to a spectacular, definable victory.
The second thump from this news must have been that it would be by his death that Peter would bring glory to God. Not his gifts, or his organizational skill, nor his homoletical eloquence would be the benchmark of glory. His death, ignominious and unwilling, perhaps untimely, from a human perspective. This seemingly senseless final straightjacket of inability would be terminal. What a prospect to ponder for your remaining years! Yet, Peter, knowing full well that he would never enjoy the summit of comfort, fame, national liberation, or peace, put his heart and life on the line every day and persevered.
We need perseverance, it seems, not only because we want to survive, but because no matter how slowly we are moving, or how weakly we are following, others are watching, and drafting off our obedience. As with Peter, perseverance, which is not glorious to the practitioner, is immensely glorifying to the Master. Perseverance practiced and embraced is a grace observed for every other fellow struggler. The perseverer validates the core theology of the Fall, and the need for outside intervention. Perseverance speaks truth in slogging, just as gratitude shouts truth in victory. The Master is in view, and he is glorified.
Peter followed, even when he was in possession of terrible knowledge. The uphill would never end. He would never coast into meadows of ease. He wasn’t going to meet his end with a sound track, the rapture, a chariot of fire, or on a victory stand. Here we find Peter, writing some thirty years later, coaching a new generation of believers to accept the assignment God is giving to them, both individually and collectively. Echoing in his ears were the words of Jesus, when Peter wanted to know if his assignment was fair and equitable with the task and circumstances placed on others: ...what is that to you? You must follow me. (John 21:22)
Truth be known, some of us have resisted the development of perseverance in our array of life skills because we insist on knowing the outcomes first. We demand full disclosure, not only of our risks and benefits, but of the very mind of the Master. We want full and comprehensive disclosure of what this exercise will do for me, what it will gain for me, how it will impact me, before we approve the Master’s plan. We feel entitled to the blessings and privileges of others, the joys and perks of a friend, the notoriety or platform of a contemporary, rather than humble acceptance of our own assignment. But true perseverance listens to the call, receives the sometimes brutal facts called reality, and follows. Perseverance bears the Name with hope, humility, and expectancy. How we need this tough grace in a culture laced with ubiquitous narcissism, and flat denial of brute facts.
But there is a more practical, earthy reason we need to develop perseverance. There are fourteen mountain summits above 8,000 meters (26,000 ft.) on the planet. They have legendary names like Everest, K2/ Cho Oyo, Llotse, Makalu, and Annapurna. They are infamous for their “death zone,” which is the height above 26,000 feet. Above this altitude all humans rapidly degrade and will eventually die due to diminished oxygen. Though many have summited without oxygen, every climber knows that, once in these stratospheric climes, they are racing the clock. They must push to a high camp from which to launch a final assault. Then, usually very early in the morning, perhaps two or three AM, they make their final assault on the summit. They must summit and get back down as quickly as possible. It is a well known, dark reality of climbing, that most mountaineers do well on the ascent: they are focussed on the goal, and enduring of the suffering. But many, tragically, die on the way down. The descent is the most dangerous part of the climb, both physically and mentally. The body is exhausted, and the mind is cloudy. Psychologically, the thrill is over. The goal has been reached. The summit registry has been signed and the pictures have been taken. It is on the descent that a very critical shift in thinking and acting must take place. The climber, who has been choosing and willing, and enduring the upward pursuit of the summit, with all its measurable glory, must now shift his attention and focus to just getting back to the tent. One careful footplant in front of another. Don’t stumble. Concentrate on the next step, the safe belay, proper hydration, and staying warm. What was a once a guazy quest is now a migraine. What was once a vision is now altitude sickness. Heroism has been reduced to simply not sitting down, not quitting, not dying. This is perseverance. It gets us to the next safe step, the next gasp of oxygen, the next minimal, incremental stage. Perseverance values the descent, with its routinized checklist, and concerns for basics. This is not glory yet. It’s basic survival for now. But, unless we learn perseverance in the fog of fatigue and fear, we will not arrive at the next tent, with its hot cup of tea, and cadre of fellow-strugglers. Though no one can persevere for us, there are many who are like us, and who will join us.
Googling “get rich,” I received 39 million references in .17 seconds. For “get well” there were 202 million references in just .18 seconds. “Be successful” gave 65 million possibilities in .5 seconds. These are samples of the raging desire for a fix, a bail-out, a pill, a sweatless nirvana on earth, hopefully this week. Our life coach Peter would have loved that too. But, he loved his Lord and Master more than he craved instant answers. And so Peter gives us a handhold which none of us want, but which all of us need. Persevere. It is the Master’s provision for this life, and the one to come.
"Trees above timber line have a dimension to their growth not often recognized by the casual passerby. It is the rare and elegant quality of the actual wood produced with the wind-tossed trees. Its grain is of exquisite texture interspersed with whorls and curving lines of unusual gracefulness. The stresses and strains of being tossed and twisted by the wind and sleet and deep snows of winter produce an extra flow of resins in the tree. Not only does this give the fibers a remarkable tight-grained texture, but it gives off also an exquisite fragrance.
An expert violin maker, who is a master craftsman, tells me that he spends weeks each summer searching for special trees above timber line. From these he takes his choicest material to create musical instruments of the finest quality and tone.
Wood produced in the high and tough terrain above the usual timber stands bears within it a rare timbre and lovely resonance not found in ordinary lumber cut at lower elevations. The fury of storms, the shortness of the growing season, the wrenching of the winds, the strain of survival in such an austere setting—all these combine to produce some of the toughest, choicest, most wondrous wood in all the world.
Here is wood grown on a guant rock ridge on some remote mountain range that one day will grace a violin, cello or guitar in Lincoln Center. From those tree fibers will come the finest music ever made by man. It’s melodies and notes will enrich a thousand listeners, and, by modern communication, encircle the globe to inspire a million more.
But it all began with a sturdy tree, set apart, growing slowly, unknown, all alone on a distant hill against the sky edge." (Sky Edge, Philip Keller, p. 85,86)
...add to self-control, perseverance 2 Peter 1:7
We were wolfing our lunch under a cloudless sky at a roadside table in Poncha Springs, Colorado. Not much of a place, but it represented a trip-defining right turn on the map for us. We had pedalled south out of Buena Vista that morning, our second full day on our quest to reach Cortez in the extreme southwest, Four Corners area of Colorado. Five days, seven high passes, fueled by Kool-aid, tuna fish, and peanut butter. Twelve of us had left Denver on bicycles. Ten speeds. Heavy old Schwinns and Huffy’s weighing over thirty pounds. This was medievil biking. We really didn’t know what we were doing, so we pooled our ignorance, and concocted what had turned into a fine and pleasant form of misery previously unknown to any of us. We wore cut-off jeans and Converse sneakers. This was 1973 and real bicycle helmets hadn’t hit the market yet. So, we wore hockey helmets, ironically labelled “Cool Gear.” Not a stitch of lycra, or padding of any kind. Cotton T-shirts. We were sore and sunburned. But now we were in too deep to back out. Poncha Springs was our Rubicon. This was the westward turn that would test every commitment we had made to each other. As we gulped our grape Koolaid and downed PBJ’s we couldn’t keep our eyes from wandering upward, to the west, to the place we had to ride. The big one loomed. We didn’t want to talk about it. Monarch Pass.
The highway undulates through the valley we had ridden that morning, hugging the foothills along the Arkansas River. It was beautiful riding: the river, the fragrance of freshly cut hay in the meadows, and, except for a few challenging hills, an easy pull. The brilliance of the Rocky Mountain sun, the pristine air, and the breath-taking vista, however, could not suppress our latent fears. Now we were turning West toward the spires and crags of the Rocky Mountains. There before us was a road that lead only upward. Seventeen miles to the summit of Monarch Pass: elevation 11,312 feet. Four thousand vertical feet of climbing against the gravity of both body and soul.
These teenagers had been full of surprises. Adult and child, athlete and whiner, comedian and mutineer were stirred together in a volatile mix. They were exasperating, resilient, demanding, altruistic, childish, selfish and tough. This day they were inspiring. Knowing full well that there was no way to soften the reality of at least three hours of six percent, uphill, first gear grinding to reach the top, they set out with dogged, sun-burned determination. Four thousand feet had to be climbed with leg, lung, and will power alone. With a wide range of motivations and abilities, they were soon sorted into clusters of fellow survivors. Gasping, hunched, and glassy-eyed they fixed their stares at the pavement just in front of their tires as the pass rose relentlessly upward. “Snails pace” acquired a working definition on that afternoon. But they did it! Eventually everybody summitted. They amazed themselves, and cheered victory to each other at the top. For most, this was the pinnacle of any physical challenge they had ever attempted. There was a high-five celebration when the caboose finally arrived, and a glow of utter satisfaction on every face. Brownies were awarded as the ultimate pay-off for their courage. As we flew down the Western side of the pass, the hoots and cheers never stopped.
Fresh off that victory, we spurred one another on and rode a hundred miles the next day into Montrose. When I think back on our inexperience, our ludicrous attire, and our greenhorn unpreparedness, it is utterly audacious that we even tried this, much less accomplished it. Time after time we met people at rest stops and mountain summits who asked: “How did y’all get here.” When we replied that we had ridden our bikes from Denver, they were a the study of ambivalence. Were we lying, or crazy? This dropped-jaw amazement just fueled our team with more determination.
But, we weren’t done. We still had huge, looming challenges on our horizon. We were headed into the “Switzerland of America” and its legendary “Million Dollar Highway.” The fourth day would take us to Red Mountain Pass, 11,008 feet in elevation. From the Swiss-like village of Ouray the pass looks endless, and dangerous. No guard rails. The “Million Dollar Highway” is cut into the steep scree slopes the color of rusting iron. A lapse of concentration, or a lane-hogging flatlander behind the wheel of an RV, and a cyclist would be gravely injured. But, the group was becoming resolute. They were eager to grind it out, to tackle the pass. Again we left river and meadow, and finally, timberline, behind. We summitted and celebrated after 3,500 feet of vertical gain. We posed for a victory picture and then broke the sound barrier on our descent.
This gaggle had melded into a team. We had learned how to encourage one another. We fixed flats and kept moving. We sang and joked and teased. Our unity was hard-won from the agonies of climbing, camping, freezing and burning together. As we cruised down this final pass, following the Purgatory river into Durango, we were Lance Armstrong. We were the Tour de France. We were indefatigable. Celebration time. Chocolate shakes all around. All our passes were behind us. Now, all that remained was a forty-mile cruise into Cortez, a victory lap of sorts, our Champs Elysees.
The mistake we made was to ask an out-of-state tourist who had driven into Durango from the West what we could expect of the road ahead. “Oh, it’s mostly level,” he said. “Probably downhill, slightly rolling, in the direction you’re going. Easy travelling.” He set our expectations on coasting and cruising, and sowed the seeds of our demise.
Assumptions were made, and frozen into place. Expectations were set by that innocent, but erroneous description of the road ahead. We were soon to discover that when the assumption is the enjoyment of a downhill cruise with little exertion, then every uphill becomes an insult, a personal and painful affront. The offense, the seemingly conspiratorial torture of first-gear grinding, fueled anger that had to be vented somehow. Our resilient and intrepid team rapidly fragmented into an anarchic, epithet-spitting mutiny.
Leaving Durango to the West, we began to climb, completely contrary to our assumptions. We climbed and we climbed. It was hot, dry, and our sunburned necks were being fried. The hill wouldn’t end. This wasn’t the plan. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It isn’t fair! The irresistable force of expectation ran headlong into the immovable object of reality. Seething frustration boiled up from the seemingly senseless grinding. The breathless heat blotted out all memory of mountain highs and victory pictures. Who planned this trip? This is stupid! I’m quitting! You leaders are morons!
Expectations are stubborn things. Once fixed in our minds they become our axis, the center of our universe. Every experience is sucked into the gravitational field of these expectations. And, if our experience does not line up and neatly orbit around our expectations, we want to hurl this reality into outer darkness. We would rather burn Copernicus at the stake, along with his irrefutable evidence, for suggesting that we had gotten it all wrong. We need a new axis for our universe. We need to challenge and replace our long-held assumptions about how things work. Unmet expectations can produce such imbalance, such cognitive dissonance, that a massive expulsion of inconvenient and irritating facts is inevitable. We want our universe to run as we designed it, or as we expected. On this day, in this heat, under these unanticipated adversities, we witnessed such an explosion of blame, anger, and rejection that our whole universe was stunned into a cosmic funk. Our team disintegrated into isolated planets of misery and retribution.
Seven uphill miles was all it took to generate such a spiteful funkiness in those young people that they wanted to blow up Colorado. A hundred times we almost dissolved into unrecoverable anarchy. This motley team erupted in a toxic cataclysm of blame, selfishness and sullen spitefulness. Mutiny was in full swing. We were on the verge of mayhem, and murder was whispered. Gone was any memory of sweet teamwork. Vaporized was every vestige of encouragement, vision, humor or patient endurance. Unfulfilled expectation raged like a wildfire, fueled by parched throats and aching quads. Imagination did everything possible to retain the stubborn expectation that ease and coasting was a divine right, and dispel the inconvenient and unremitting reality that gravity was relentless and unavoidable. Some sinister power must have tilted the earth to make us suffer. Some incompetent leader had tricked us into this misery, held in secret until this last day. This hill was put here on purpose just to taunt us, the sun is scorching with a personal vendetta, and the whole world is stupid, stupid, stupid. One brazen fact was stubbornly repelled: nobody is going to climb this hill for me. I’m the only one who can do it. The Next Right Thing, the next pedal revolution, was the least favorite option.
Scott Peck once started a book with this statement of biting realism: “Life is difficult. Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy.” (Road Less Travelled p. 15) Whether he knew it or not, his thoughts echoed those of the Apostle Peter, who, nineteen hundred years beforehand declared: “Dear friend, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering as though something strange were happening to you.” (I Peter 4:12) Peter is the man who now coaches us with The Next Right Thing in his array of life skills.
So what does this brilliant life coach suggest for the weary slogger, the frustrated, angry or disenfranchised victim? “Perseverance,” says Peter, is The Next Right Thing for many whose journey seems endlessly uphill. But, we would rather hear of some other way. Can’t I quit, or catch a magical ride, or simmer in an angry snit instead. Wouldn’t anything be better than to be coached to persevere? Persevere in the same old routine, through the same level of pain, with the same old cast of characters? Yes, this Least Favorite Thing is The Next Right Thing given to us through the divine power and wisdom of the Father, because He knew we would need it in this uphill, sun-scorched world (2 P 1:3).
Perseverance needs careful definition. We need to split a semantic hair, to distinguish its nuance from another word which is often used as a synonym: that word is endurance. Our Rocky Mountain bikers had demonstrated endurance repeatedly. What they had yet to embrace on that maddening hill west of Durango, was perseverance. The difference is huge. These novice cyclists had endured much. They had shown tenacity, a capacity to suffer, and a growing tolerance for delayed gratification. By the time we reached Durango, they had ridden three hundred and fifty miles, awakened in soggy tents, and broken ice from their bicycle seats in Silverton. They had spent eight hours per day in the saddle, and endured the hassle of waiting for slowpokes, the lonely fog of fatigue, and the unavoidable grunge of sweat and camping. They endured. But, here is the important distinction between endurance and perseverance. Each day they endured because they could see a finish line, or a series of finish lines. They were promised an end at the next rest stop, meal, town, summit, personal victory or campsite. Those became their intermediate and achievable goals. Despite their suffering they knew there would be an end, and some modicum of reward, and so they admirably endured.
Perseverance is not like that. Though perseverance requires the same expensive and exhausting expenditure of energy, the same exertion against inertia and gravity, it lacks that one glimmering, shimmering appeal: a finish line. Perseverance lacks an end, or at least, a known end. Perseverance is a steady persistence, a courageous fortitude, a doggedness and steadfastness with a very disturbing caveat: the finish line is not known, or it is unseen and lying on the far side of an infuriating and ugly hill instead of at a summit in the pure, alpine air. Perseverance is that courage that presses on when the end is not what we envisioned, what we wanted, or a match for our raging expectations.
Endurance is running the mile.
Perseverance is running a household.
Endurance is learning Algebra.
Perseverance is learning to live with diabetes.
Endurance is rehabbing after knee surgery.
Perseverance is starting life again after divorce.
Endurance is winning eight Olympic Gold Medals.
Perseverance is living with two preschoolers in the house.
Endurance is hard.
Perseverance seems unfair.
Because we live in a culture of sound bytes and Extreme Makeover, it is easy to slip into the assumption that somebody, somewhere has a magical solution. Add to this the formula mill of evangelical publishing and broadcasting, and the insurmountable expectation is that perseverance must be only for those losers who can’t step into their spiritual victory. But, it turns out, and the Apostle Peter affirms, that much of life can be met only with The Next Right Thing called perseverance, seemingly the least spiritual of all the options.
Brent and Sarah have a magnanimous spirit exuding from every pore of their lives, and every word from their mouths. How wonderfully he encourages, and how insightfully she teaches. Their legacy will be one of self-giving servanthood, and humble faithfulness. They are truly the pillars, bastions of grace, of which any healthy church is built. But, unseen by many, they must relentlessly carry huge weights which sap their energies, and remove them from circulation. They give days of each week to care for a grandson whose father is MIA. Sarah continues in a high-stress job despite a heart functioning at sixty percent. Aging parents and extended family, most of whom live locally, require constant expenditures of free time, holiday plans, and vacation days. They have endured uncountable laps of this long run, and there is no end in sight. When they do have moments to ponder, and project into the future, they see no changes. In fact, they see only deeper risk, more complications, and further erosion of health and resources. Each day as they awaken to work, grand-parenting, complicated dynamics of extended family, and financial austerity, they are met with the only choice they have. It is their best choice, but their least-pleasant choice to live a God-honoring life: perseverance. Where’s the downhill coasting, or the ultimate victory, in that?
Our coach, Peter, in his list of life-defining skills (2 Peter 1:5-8) makes a logical sandwich with perseverance as its meat. This chewy, tough, dogged form of endurance is sandwiched between self-control and godliness. The private battles against anger, retreat, self-gratification and vengeance won with self-control, usher in the longer war against inertia and despair which must be fueled by perseverance. This, then, creates a character of humility and inward piety which displays authentic godliness in the real world. Self-control links to godliness through the fibrous connective tissue called perseverance.
Author Tim Hansel defines perseverance as “Courage stretched out.” (Holy Sweat) Consistent and incremental courage builds a bridge to obedience with girders of perseverance. Life in this real world must bear the weight of hassle, suffering, and fools in order to span to the shore of godliness. Perseverance is what supports and strengthens that bridge. It stands without fanfare. The traffic of our lives, and the lives of others, flows across it. Perseverance bears the weight of challenging, incessant, heavy life, and makes the commerce between personal faith and public witness flow without interruption. But, it is a strain. It requires strength. And, there is no end in sight.
Many friends flash across my mind whose perseverance is epic, but unheralded. They are head down, low-geared, and struggling, but still ascending. Words they live with like “recurring...chronic...persistent...senseless...unfair...unexpected” dominate their daily experience. They are being squeezed economically in the vice of family needs and a downsizing industry, tested to their limits every day by special needs children, made frantic over grandchildren facing chemo-therapy, and pouring fading hope into a marginal business or an eroding marriage. The way they foresee is hard, and the end they see is not pretty, nor pleasant. Formulas for success seem designed for a different world than theirs. They slog on, and have no other option. They groan along with the groaning creation described in Romans 8. Though the conditions are undesirable and harsh, they have made a choice to suffer well, recurringly. They have chosen resolute perseverance with self-control, and have not insisted that somebody somewhere owes them a free ride.
We may choose to suffer well, with perseverance, or we can seethe in a mutinous snit about the unfairness of a universe turned against us. The next best thing about the Bible, besides its crescendo of victory, resurrection and redemption, is its utter clarity and truth-telling regarding trouble on a groaning planet. Trouble is not grudgingly acknowledged as if it were a forced confession under prosecutorial questioning. It is headlined on every page of scripture. Jesus took away any pretense when he baldly asserted: “In this world, you will have trouble.” (John 16:33) Paul makes a theological blanket statement, leaving no one immune, or insulated, from distress in the eighth chapter of Romans:
“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” (Romans 8:22-23)
Even those of us with the slightest acquaintance with a biblical world view should not be surprised when trouble comes. But, moderns, even believers, ghetto-ized by formulas and quick-fix assurances of easy victory, whose assumptions are fed on the chip-and-dip empty calories of the media, find it hard to chew on the sinewy gristle of perseverance. But there it is, immediately following Hebrews 11, the stirring chapter documenting the great triumphs of faith, and faithfulness.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1-2)
This high-tensile strength piton called perseverance is driven into the rock of Jesus’ example, and the Father’s faithfulness, and our whole life hangs on it. Hupomeno is the Greek compound word. It welds two concepts together: bearing up, and under. The visual picture is that of bearing up under, remaining true under pressure and stress. Despite the pressure, pain, disappointment or fearsome potential, perseverance hangs onto what it knows, to Whom it trusts. After all the inspiration gained from the galaxy of faith and victory displayed in Hebrews 11, the first brawny word of counsel in Hebrews 12 about actually living life today as these ancient examples lived involves grasping hard life with the gritty handhold of perseverance.
Maybe we should think more personally, more practically. Is perseverance The Next Right Thing for me right now? Is there an unwanted, unexpected, and deeply disliked circumstance looming before me, or already upon me? It’s unfair. Chronic. Daily. Painful. Embarassing. Unforeseen. It won’t lie down, and it won’t go away. Blame and ranting have not succeeded in making it stop. Prayers for deliverance remain unanswered. It appears to be my lot, my inescapable burden. It is the climb that I, and I alone, must make. Will I suffer well, or fume, blame, demand and vaccilate in wasteful frustration?
But, before we can make an ultimately redemptive choice to persevere as The Next Right Thing, we need to defang a debilitating lie regarding its pedigree. Perseverance, in an age of Olympic Gold Medals, victory stories, and health-and-wealth formulas, is made to appear as one of God’s lesser (much lesser) graces. In the shadow of a zillion victory stories and hundreds of pain-relieving regimens, perseverance seems the fall-back option for the remedial, the not-quite bright. In fact, faithful Christ-followers who persevere month in and month out, procedure after procedure, biopsy after biopsy, day upon day, are frequently viewed as defective. This is never verbalized, but it is often felt, and transmitted. We, if we are in this cycle of perseverance, feel somehow that we have failed. Or worse, God has failed. Perseverers are plodders, pedestrians, remedials, the also-rans, the forgottens. Perseverance is needed only by those too dense or disobedient to achieve victory or escape. Perseverance is the redheaded stepchild of discipleship. Perseverance is what you get when your faith, or your mind, or your will, is weak.
So, along with trouble, we often travel with Job’s counselors, both external and internal. Friends, eager to help, don’t encourage perseverance as a grace, but only as a fall-back default. “Hang in there!” is the street-version bromide tossed over the shoulder as they leave the hospital room. It’s a way to end the conversation, because to hang with us in the endless round of daily perseverance seems to encourage and justify our faithless solutionlessness. As with Job, well-meaning friends packing answers are ready to help and counsel almost anything except the sheer dogged endurance for the day ahead, in all its embarassing weakness and repetitive, logistical reality.
What can be said as an answer, or as a key to victory, to the couple whose seventeen-year-old son is as rigged as a log, his body frozen in endless spasm. He now weighs more than his mother, and his needs are 24/7. Every medical intervention has been tried. Home care is needed. Countless emergencies have roused them at night. Medical bills, bottomless bureaucracy, and mind-numbing fatigue compose the fabric of their conversation. When can they ever rest, or go out on a date? What is their future? Where, or where, is the finish line?
We need an extreme makeover of this castoff virtue called perseverance, a re-issuing of a resource too seldom valued, and too quickly disdained. Though it is never easy, and will frequently be excruciatingly hard, it is not a shame, or a lesser grace, to persevere. Peter not only writes of this: he lived it. His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness...(2 Peter 1:3) The list of what God has provided does not include an asterisk with *perseverance. (Footnote: *this attribute will be your default status after you have failed to achieve real spiritual victory.) Peter’s preamble should put the lie to any such devaluation of perseverance. God has given it. It comes from His hand. It is not sub-Christian to hang in there with recurring courage, even when it has been months, or years, since the last hi-five. Admiral Jim Stockdale, a prisoner of war in Vietnam, in retrospect, captures the resilient sheen that perseverance casts over all other virtures. Tortured and imprisoned for eight years, he was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. (Good to Great p. 85)
One could posit that Peter’s whole apostolic career was one long triathlon of perseverance. Few of us would want to know what he knew from the very beginning of his peripatetic preaching, coaching ministry. Peter was given irrefutable knowledge from Jesus himself from the outset of his commissioning that he would be waging a war of diminishing returns, culminating in death. From a human, physical perspective, there would be no spectacular ascension, as with Elijah, no peaceful retirement lecture circuit, no university tenure, nor some stirring, heroic martyrdom. When Peter was re-commissioned by Jesus to “Feed my sheep,” he was also shown how his life would end. When you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go...Follow me! (John 21:18-19)
One can only imagine the stunning and breath-taking impact of these words on Peter. Spontaneous, powerful, manly, adventurous, independent, and courageous Peter would end his life in helplessness. His physical body would either be impaired from weakness, or restrained by fetters. His ready will and loyal heart would be overridden by the will and power of others. He would be forced to go where he did not want to go. John informs us that Jesus showed him his end to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.
Upon hearing this, two blows must have landed simultaneously on Peter’s solar plexus: The first is that he would die as an old man, weak and helpless. Implication: the promised Kingdom ushered in with trumpets, angels, justice and fire would not come in Peter’s lifetime. Israel would not be liberated. Bad guys would not meet their judge. History would not crescendo under the thunder of Peter’s preaching, no matter where, or with what power he proclaimed the gospel. There would be no final summit, historically speaking, for Peter to celebrate. He was not ascending to a spectacular, definable victory.
The second thump from this news must have been that it would be by his death that Peter would bring glory to God. Not his gifts, or his organizational skill, nor his homoletical eloquence would be the benchmark of glory. His death, ignominious and unwilling, perhaps untimely, from a human perspective. This seemingly senseless final straightjacket of inability would be terminal. What a prospect to ponder for your remaining years! Yet, Peter, knowing full well that he would never enjoy the summit of comfort, fame, national liberation, or peace, put his heart and life on the line every day and persevered.
We need perseverance, it seems, not only because we want to survive, but because no matter how slowly we are moving, or how weakly we are following, others are watching, and drafting off our obedience. As with Peter, perseverance, which is not glorious to the practitioner, is immensely glorifying to the Master. Perseverance practiced and embraced is a grace observed for every other fellow struggler. The perseverer validates the core theology of the Fall, and the need for outside intervention. Perseverance speaks truth in slogging, just as gratitude shouts truth in victory. The Master is in view, and he is glorified.
Peter followed, even when he was in possession of terrible knowledge. The uphill would never end. He would never coast into meadows of ease. He wasn’t going to meet his end with a sound track, the rapture, a chariot of fire, or on a victory stand. Here we find Peter, writing some thirty years later, coaching a new generation of believers to accept the assignment God is giving to them, both individually and collectively. Echoing in his ears were the words of Jesus, when Peter wanted to know if his assignment was fair and equitable with the task and circumstances placed on others: ...what is that to you? You must follow me. (John 21:22)
Truth be known, some of us have resisted the development of perseverance in our array of life skills because we insist on knowing the outcomes first. We demand full disclosure, not only of our risks and benefits, but of the very mind of the Master. We want full and comprehensive disclosure of what this exercise will do for me, what it will gain for me, how it will impact me, before we approve the Master’s plan. We feel entitled to the blessings and privileges of others, the joys and perks of a friend, the notoriety or platform of a contemporary, rather than humble acceptance of our own assignment. But true perseverance listens to the call, receives the sometimes brutal facts called reality, and follows. Perseverance bears the Name with hope, humility, and expectancy. How we need this tough grace in a culture laced with ubiquitous narcissism, and flat denial of brute facts.
But there is a more practical, earthy reason we need to develop perseverance. There are fourteen mountain summits above 8,000 meters (26,000 ft.) on the planet. They have legendary names like Everest, K2/ Cho Oyo, Llotse, Makalu, and Annapurna. They are infamous for their “death zone,” which is the height above 26,000 feet. Above this altitude all humans rapidly degrade and will eventually die due to diminished oxygen. Though many have summited without oxygen, every climber knows that, once in these stratospheric climes, they are racing the clock. They must push to a high camp from which to launch a final assault. Then, usually very early in the morning, perhaps two or three AM, they make their final assault on the summit. They must summit and get back down as quickly as possible. It is a well known, dark reality of climbing, that most mountaineers do well on the ascent: they are focussed on the goal, and enduring of the suffering. But many, tragically, die on the way down. The descent is the most dangerous part of the climb, both physically and mentally. The body is exhausted, and the mind is cloudy. Psychologically, the thrill is over. The goal has been reached. The summit registry has been signed and the pictures have been taken. It is on the descent that a very critical shift in thinking and acting must take place. The climber, who has been choosing and willing, and enduring the upward pursuit of the summit, with all its measurable glory, must now shift his attention and focus to just getting back to the tent. One careful footplant in front of another. Don’t stumble. Concentrate on the next step, the safe belay, proper hydration, and staying warm. What was a once a guazy quest is now a migraine. What was once a vision is now altitude sickness. Heroism has been reduced to simply not sitting down, not quitting, not dying. This is perseverance. It gets us to the next safe step, the next gasp of oxygen, the next minimal, incremental stage. Perseverance values the descent, with its routinized checklist, and concerns for basics. This is not glory yet. It’s basic survival for now. But, unless we learn perseverance in the fog of fatigue and fear, we will not arrive at the next tent, with its hot cup of tea, and cadre of fellow-strugglers. Though no one can persevere for us, there are many who are like us, and who will join us.
Googling “get rich,” I received 39 million references in .17 seconds. For “get well” there were 202 million references in just .18 seconds. “Be successful” gave 65 million possibilities in .5 seconds. These are samples of the raging desire for a fix, a bail-out, a pill, a sweatless nirvana on earth, hopefully this week. Our life coach Peter would have loved that too. But, he loved his Lord and Master more than he craved instant answers. And so Peter gives us a handhold which none of us want, but which all of us need. Persevere. It is the Master’s provision for this life, and the one to come.
"Trees above timber line have a dimension to their growth not often recognized by the casual passerby. It is the rare and elegant quality of the actual wood produced with the wind-tossed trees. Its grain is of exquisite texture interspersed with whorls and curving lines of unusual gracefulness. The stresses and strains of being tossed and twisted by the wind and sleet and deep snows of winter produce an extra flow of resins in the tree. Not only does this give the fibers a remarkable tight-grained texture, but it gives off also an exquisite fragrance.
An expert violin maker, who is a master craftsman, tells me that he spends weeks each summer searching for special trees above timber line. From these he takes his choicest material to create musical instruments of the finest quality and tone.
Wood produced in the high and tough terrain above the usual timber stands bears within it a rare timbre and lovely resonance not found in ordinary lumber cut at lower elevations. The fury of storms, the shortness of the growing season, the wrenching of the winds, the strain of survival in such an austere setting—all these combine to produce some of the toughest, choicest, most wondrous wood in all the world.
Here is wood grown on a guant rock ridge on some remote mountain range that one day will grace a violin, cello or guitar in Lincoln Center. From those tree fibers will come the finest music ever made by man. It’s melodies and notes will enrich a thousand listeners, and, by modern communication, encircle the globe to inspire a million more.
But it all began with a sturdy tree, set apart, growing slowly, unknown, all alone on a distant hill against the sky edge." (Sky Edge, Philip Keller, p. 85,86)
Friday, October 10, 2008
Handhold #1: "FAITH" 2 Peter 1:1
I am likening our journey of faith to a climb. It's not a climb into perfection, elitism, nor pharisaical list-checking. No, it's a climb of challenge and adventure, but it does involve exertion. In rock climbing there are many skills, an array of practiced and familiar moves that are used as needed on every climb. Like a climber, Peter shows us the key handholds we should visit and revisit, practice and refine. It isn't that we ever climb beyond using these. Rather, we use them over and over again, according to the clallenges and dangers we face. No spiritual ascent can begin without this first, most basic handhold. Peter starts with "Faith."
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I am so ticked at Alan Webb. I don’t even know him, but I’m mad at him because he could be living my dream, and he’s blowing it. I’ve invested my hopes in him, and he has squandered them. Repeatedly. So much talent, potential, and proven gifts. Such mediocre delivery. The distance between his potential and his competitive fire is measured in light years! Aaargh!!
I’m watching the Olympic Trials’ Track and Field Meet. Its culminating event is the 1500 meters race, the metric mile. Only the top three will go to the Olympics. It’s do or die. One shot. Don’t fall asleep, or get boxed in, or years of training, and the potential for sending the best to compete with the world will be lost. Alan Webb is one of the very best, and favored to win. He’s my favorite. I want him in the Olympics because he is one of the few Americans who have a remote chance of winning a medal. What a running machine! He set the High School mile record, a world-class three minutes and fifty-three seconds (3:53), eclipsing the legendary record of Jim Ryun way back in the 60’s. Since High School, he’s become the American record holder with a mile best of three minutes and forty-seven seconds (3:47). He ran the best 1500 meter time (about 100 meters shorter than a mile) in the world last year of 3:30, including one of the best times at 800 meters (the half-mile): 1:44. That’s blazing! To put his speed in perspective, just draft any eight guys you can suit up from your office, gym, locker room or church and set up a relay to race Webb over a mile distance. You each run half a lap, while Webb runs the entire mile. Your team would get toasted! He’s that fast. He’s all-world. That’s Alan Webb.
But, he’s doing it again! This is the Olympic Trials, and he’s running along in the back half of the pack at a pace at least ten seconds slower than what the Olympics will require. He looks confused, unfocussed, lost, unwillingly dragged along. But I keep hoping. I’m out of my chair by the third lap, and screaming at the screen as they enter the bell lap. Webb gives a surge and pulls into the second lane, running fifth or sixth. With two hundred meters to go, the entire field is still potentially in the race because of the dawdling pace. Webb surges again, but so does everyone else. Coming into the home stretch, I hope for that burst of blazing speed, but he is actually losing ground. Alan!! What’s the matter with you! How did you let yourself get stuck in this position, again? Bernard Lagat cruises to a win in 3:40, followed by Leo Manzano and Lopez Lamong. Alan Webb finishes fifth. Fifth, in 3:42. He could run that on a Tuesday in practice. The worst part is he was never even in the race. Never a factor. Never set the pace. Never took it out and forged even a gallant loss. Just a slothful, wasted, mediocre mid-pack finish.
No, it’s not a finish. He never got started. It’s a loss, a waste. Something got thrown away at the start and middle of that race, becoming obvious at the end. Thousands of miles of training, repeat 600’s and 800’s and 400’s during grueling workouts on the track: lost. Speed training, over-distance training, weight training, ice baths, monk-like withdrawal from social life, massages and dietary vigilance: lost, kaput! I’m sick of you, Alan Webb! You disappoint me. You threw it away! I’ve quit hoping in you, you dream-killer.
The horsepower behind my frustration is classic transference. It takes no doctorate in psychology to recognize my angry response as simply projections of myself onto Alan Webb. He arouses my anger at his under-performance because I recognize myself in him. I don’t run like him, but I am him! I, too, am the race saboteur, throwing away opportunity and wilting under challenge. My inner frustration with my slothful and wasteful self becomes a flamethrower directed toward a guy I’ve never even met. I, too, have subverted my own promise and potential, and I hate it when Alan Webb holds up that mirror, and I see myself in it. I fall so far short of my potential, my vaunted plans, and Alan Webb is living out my regrets in his Olympic Trials 1500 meter race. I disappoint myself, and vex my friends, who watch me from the bleachers, wondering where my head or my heart really is.
It’s the same sickening desperation one gets as we watch the mishandling of opportunity by the disciple Peter. Perhaps, in some subterranean way, it’s also why we are drawn to this man. Peter, who got to breathe the same air and walk the same miles as the Son of Man is exhibit “A” for displaying that advantage does not always translate into diligence, or immediate success. Peter had raw strength, talent, and big personality. He gave a great press conference, proved to be an effective spokesman, and was prodigious in his work. But, Peter had so many moments of spectacular loopy-ness, transparent hubris, and ghastly betrayal. What an accident waiting to happen! What a team-wrecker and poster boy for disappointment; for everyone else and for himself. His early career was marked by over-promising and under-delivery. He was corrected and rebuked by Jesus, privately and publicly, more than anyone else in scripture.
Say what you will about him, but he held nothing back. He publicly pledged loyalty, he stood alone with a borrowed sword, and he alone stepped out of the boat to walk on water. Peter paid the price for his visible, sometimes brash, notoriety. He learned from the blunt force trauma of correction when bumping his head against the Lord’s own purposes. He was roundly rebuked by Jesus for his resistance to God’s will that would be expressed in the cross. He was repeatedly embarrassed and disheveled by his own outbursts of human fallibility. At times, everyone around Peter must have groaned: what are you doing? You’re squandering your opportunity! Run to the level of your potential! Get your head in the game!
All the more amazing is that in the end Jesus singled out this man for a special commission, preceded by a tender and merciful restoration. The story is well known: how Peter swore loyalty, even if it meant standing all alone in that loyalty, to Jesus. The next thing we know, he is denying any association with Jesus, swearing with oaths that he doesn’t even know him. Cowering under a simple question from a harmless servant girl. Finally, Jesus, in the breathless agony of his own suffering on the cross looks at Peter, piercing his heart, bringing crushing conviction, and causing him to weep bitterly in regret.
If we left the story there, Peter would be a biblical Alan Webb at his Olympic Trials debacle. Highly privileged; deeply flawed, and desperately disappointing. But, Peter experienced grace. Peter came to see that he was not just the sum total of his most dismal performance on his worst day. Peter was touched and changed by grace, not on the podium of victory, but in the dark corners, under the bleachers, in lonely defeat. Jesus came after him in his disgrace, embraced him when he still stunk, and called to him when he wished he could die, or hide forever in his shame. This relentless grace was the beginning of the end for the old Simon, and the birth of the new Peter.
“Precious faith” is how Peter summarized this grace in the very first verse of his letter. It was grace experienced: personalized, absorbed, and life-altering. This all-encompassing description of Peter’s gratitude begins to fill in the silent years since Jesus’ restoration of his disciple. Peter opens a window, through this intimate and tender description, to his personal journey and his spiritual transformation since that catalytic moment. He is the only writer in the New Testament to use this word “precious,” and with it he explains a relationship with his Master that contains hope for the Simon, the Alan Webb, in me.
There is some dark and inscrutable psychology in many of our heroes that seems set on subverting their own success, that tragically, even masochistically, snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. This moth-to-the-flame self-destruction is maddening, even horrifying, to witness; and very sad. It seemed to be at work in Peter from his very first encounter with Jesus. Luke (5:1-11) records how Jesus was standing on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, teaching the people. Seeing two boats and their owners nearby, Jesus asked to be launched out a ways from shore so that he could teach the people from the boat. In one of the most familiar stories of scripture, when he is done teaching, Jesus challenges Peter to “Put out into deep water, and let down your nets for a catch.” Already weary from a fruitless and fishless all-nighter, Peter resists, but then he summons minimal energy to placate the Master with compliance. Then came that storied catch so large they had to call for help to save their nets from breaking. The bounty was so huge it almost sank both boats. What a sign. What an indisputable demonstration of divine power and grace.
It is at this point that Peter displays something at once incisively prophetic and sadly pathetic. He shows what so many of us know of ourselves: devotion and dysfunction, all wrapped in an amorphous wad of neediness. He fell at Jesus’ feet in an act of unrehearsed and unself-conscious worship. Peter was instantly humbled, intensely grateful, and smitten. In pure transparency he cries: “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man.”
Peter’s first response when he found himself at ground level with divine power and holiness was exactly right. He was laid bare, undefended, and indefensible. He was instantly stripped of all self-confidence, and grasped that he could not live in the white-hot intensity of Jesus’ holiness and majesty. He knew at once the might, purity and overpowering-ness of the Lord’s awesome authority. He had fallen into the hands of the living God, utterly condemnable in his sin. With reflexive, terrified urgency he just wanted to get away to safety, to dodge the laser beam aimed at his iniquity.
At just that moment, when Peter is completely undone, lost, abjectly repentant, and flailing, Jesus speaks. “Don’t be afraid.” And, in a brief sentence that follows, Jesus shows Peter the future, his redemption, and his own assignment in that future: “from now on you will catch men.” From complete spiritual asphyxiation Peter’s lungs are instantly filled with life-giving grace. He is made, miraculously and undeservedly, alive again. He is reborn. Immediately, Peter displays what becomes his signature: wholehearted, unreserved, instantaneous action. He left everything and followed Jesus. From that instant the fisherman became a leader, an initiator, a spokesman. The muscle used for pulling morphed into magnetism for leadership. His grip for working the rigging transformed into singular loyalty to his rabbi. His eagerness and transparency were everything a teacher could want in a disciple. They were also, too frequently, the bane of his mentor. Peter is a handful, a complex personality, a high-maintenance disciple. Along with his incredible courage, his unvarnished love and loyalty, Peter displayed more than his allotted quotient of foolishness. He was impetuous and boastful. At several critical moments he was asleep, literally. This raw follower was an inscrutable amalgam of competitiveness, impetuosity, and infamous disloyalty at the very crux of Jesus’ agony.
This is the man who writes his full name as the signature at the top of his letter, a name full of irony, paradox, and hope. “Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ.” (2 Peter 1:1) Now, perhaps thirty years later, this man had learned some things about following Jesus and about himself as his follower. It seems more than incidental that he signs in with both his given, family name, and the name which Jesus gave to him. Simon, the raw fisherman is also Peter, his new identity. Over these thirty years he has learned the difference. These two names signal the complex alloy that was the man. Train wreck and talent. Success and scandal. Courage and cowardice. Warrior and wimp. Simon is Alan Webb. Simon is me. Peter is the rock of a man Jesus smelted from lumpy, raw material called Simon.
Peter is now writing as an experienced veteran in this climb of obedience and faith. He is sending a letter to fledgling churches, outposts on the Roman frontier in northern Asia. They, like him, have been called to follow Jesus. But, it is hard slogging. They face opposition from the culture, sabotage from within their own ranks, and from within themselves. So, this experienced veteran of grace and faith is now coaching them, drawing lessons from his journey of faith, and his experience of his living Lord. Like a climbing instructor teaching pupils whose lives will depend upon their mastery of basic skills, Peter is laying out a series of reliable, repeatable, and ever-adaptable handholds. These will aid them, not only for survival, but toward maturity and mastery, as they progress in their discipleship. He will show, name, and encourage the use of eight handholds. He lists them in a sequence that can be read in seconds. (2 Peter 1:5-8) The more we know of Peter’s own journey, however, the more we recognize that these handholds have been his anchors over many years of gritty faithfulness since he first received his commission from Jesus.
How illuminating that the first handhold he shows them is “faith.”
To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours. (2 Peter 1:2)
Peter, the manly man, is the only New Testament writer to use the word
“precious.” He uses it twice, once in each of his letters. (1 Peter 1:19; 2 Peter 1:2) Here he uses it to describe the faith he has received. It is faith in the Person who sought him out, trained him up, and washed him clean. This faith is precious because it isn’t invented, conjured, jury-rigged or fantasized by human longings. Peter wasn’t looking for Jesus, but Jesus came looking, and calling, for him. Jesus drew Peter into faith, based on his demonstrations raw power, incisive knowledge, and personal holiness. This faith is grounded in the Man, the Son of Man, the man of all men: Jesus, his Savior whom he knows and follows. This faith is a treasury of shared history, witnessed miracle, and personal transformation.
This is a faith Peter holds onto with a fisherman’s calloused grip. Faith in Jesus has produced a life-sustaining relationship he has treasured through thick and thin, a morsel he savors continuously. Peter knows his faith is anchored in God, and in His incarnate Son. It is objective faith in experienced fact, not subjective longing for things imagined. He has received this faith through the righteous life, atoning death, and propitiatory peace with God purchased on the Cross by his Savior. This is a faith that is completely unrelated to feel-good, mystical experiences with harmonic convergence in Sedona, or sleeping under crystals, or some vague desire for goodness in the human soul. No. Jesus found Peter and called him. It was God’s initiative, the Savior’s voice, and Peter’s simple, stumbling responses of trust that he now describes as this “precious faith” after all these years.
This man knows, as only a desperate recipient can know, that “grace and peace” can be ours “in abundance.” He is a living laboratory of grace at work, a transparent example of a man sustained by a faith that has become precious. This faith in Jesus was the very first handhold Peter ever had on things spiritual. But, Peter recognizes that even prior to this so-called starting point, there was a purpose and plan of God. Peter’s faith was not muscled up in an exasperated groping for meaning in life, nor by some nebulous longing for connection with the supernatural. Instead, Peter was a recipient of this faith through the righteous obedience of Jesus Christ (v.1), foreordained by God, and demonstrated on the cross. Jesus found Peter, and called Peter. By faith Peter finally, and fully, received Him. Peter found stability, not by looking, but by receiving. His faith was anchored in God, not in the attributes of his own fickle heart.
Many people testify, after surviving a flood, accident, or tornado, when the microphone is thrust into their face: “My faith got me through.” This answer always needs a follow-up question: “Your faith in what…in whom?” Peter is not hanging his faith on the skyhooks of emotion, or the cobwebs of nostalgia. His faith is anchored in the eye-witnessed miracles, life-defining teaching, and sin-covering atonement of Jesus the Christ.
So, let’s return to the walking paradox: the new man Peter, inhabiting the body of Simon. We can trace in this name, Simon Peter, two defining New Testament doctrines: justification and sanctification. Peter is the name which signifies the man who has been given, and receives, everything. He is the recipient of grace, through faith. The instantaneous, once-for-all, trusting of the Son’s finished work on the cross is the substance and ground of Peter’s saving faith. He is forever re-positioned in God’s sight. He has crossed over from death to life, from darkness to light, from enemy to friend (John 5:24 etc.) His sin is covered, paid in full. Peter’s faith is anchored in the objective accomplishment of Father and Son to kill death and remove its pall of fear over humankind. Once an alien and enemy because of an unpayable debt of sin, Peter is now justified by the mercies of God in the substitutionary sacrifice which paid all sin debt. His position is entirely, and irreversibly, changed.
That’s the Peter we see in his humility, recognizing his bankrupt unholiness, and crying out “Go away from me, Lord: I am a sinful man.” It is the only solution Peter, or any person, can find when white-hot holiness convicts the conscience. Get me away from the knowledge of my own failure and sin! But, of course, the physician of souls has a cure Peter never could have imagined. He knows Peter at his worst, and does the opposite of what is expected. Instead of abandoning the wretched, he comes to heal and restore. Such unfathomable grace, displayed in purpose and power, is what changed Peter. Peter cast his empty-handed faith onto God’s accomplished plan. He was saved. (appendix: Steps to Peace with God, http://www.lifesbigquestions.com/ )
But Simon still lingered. Simon the selfish. Simon the competitor. Simon the fearful and flaky. Simon the course and crude. Simon the braggart and traitor. Simon was not sin-free, or even sin-averse, as snapshots of him in the New Testament clearly display. Simon is the grim and surly shadow trailing the free and forgiven Peter. Simon is the old-natured fool sabotaging the new-natured apostle. Perhaps to many of us it appears, as miraculous as is the justification of the condemnable sinner named Peter, even more stupendous is the sanctification of the train wreck named Simon. But, this, too, is what the doubly-named Simon Peter packed into this word “precious.”
It’s the Simon in me that I’m yelling at when I see Alan Webb losing. He is me, blowing the opportunity and underperforming in the heat of competition. This Simon is the man in me that reneges from challenge, shrinks in fear, and dissembles under pressure. Simon is the puny man, the caricature within. I live with Simon, but I want to be Peter. I long to unite the bifurcated person within, to become as fruitful and faithful as Simon Peter, to see the transformative power of Jesus be more than theological theory. I want to be whole, as Simon Peter became whole, a fully integrated person bearing the descriptors “servant” and “apostle” comfortably and unself-consciously. The simple phrase “precious faith” written by the unified man, Simon Peter, gives me hope.
The scent of sanctification wafts through these introductory words, and this is where Peter turns into a coach. Whereas justification is anchored in what God has accomplished for us, sanctification is experienced by allowing God to work in and through us. We can’t add anything to our position. We are justified solely by God’s grace, plus nothing. But Peter insists that, having been “given everything we need for life and godliness” (1:3) we now need to “make every effort” (1:5) to participate in our calling and obedience. This is practical, daily obedience to a process theologians call “progressive sanctification.” Simon Peter did not arrive at maturity by some magical and esoteric transmigration. He learned his way into maturity by practicing his daily grip on handholds of practical spirituality.
This, too, began with Jesus, and not in some kind of self-help makeover strategy. John records Peter’s being summoned, challenged, and restored by Jesus. (John 21:15-19) Jesus calls for him specifically, calling him from the squalor of his ghastly performance and his pungent shame. Countless scholars and teachers have analyzed this story, and drawn many lessons from is form, its grammar, and its tenderness. What surprises and encourages me is that Jesus specifically and repetitively speaks to “Simon,” not Peter. Simon, not the Rock. Simon, the denier and oath-spitter. Simon the turncoat. Simon the true, but dysfunctional worshiper. Jesus calls to him, and asks him essentially the same question three times: “Simon, do you truly love me?” I find it significant that Jesus uses his pre-faith name, his pre-Rock identity with which to address him. It is Simon the failure he calls, forgives, and restores. It is in the old person Simon that grace will show its transforming power. Simon is redeployed. Simon is shown his future with its sobering challenges. Simon is again called: “follow me.” Simon has a new life.
Remember the unpolished Simon’s first response to Jesus? It contained sparkling clarity about his guilt: “I am a sinful man.” This is conviction of the Holy Spirit. This is exactly, surgically correct. Only justification by grace at Christ’s expense, received through faith, could save him. But, did Peter make the same mistake, at first, that I have made? He embraced his new position, but accepted his old definition and condition as fixed. Peter is the changed person, but Simon—well, he’s unchangeably, and irrevocably Simon. Did his reply become a self-fulfilling subscript, a subverting message that went something like this: “I am nothing more, and will never be, anything more than a sinful man?” Could it be that Simon’s experience mirrors my own? Though I have found freedom, forgiveness, and joy in salvation that Jesus freely offers, it isn’t yet “precious.” It’s only for a part of me, the future, positional, and theological Peter. But, the original Simon-in-the-flesh part of me is untouchably substandard. I’m still the old, unredeemable, pathetic Simon. I am a sinful man. I’m a box of worthless flesh and unworthiness, but I have a UPS label that will one day deliver me to my home in heaven once my sad transit through this world is done. I “have a new name written down in glory” but on earth I’m just a sinner saved by grace.
Jesus called all of Simon Peter: By powerful three-fold process, which echoes the Old Testament standard on incontrovertible witness, Jesus pulls Simon over an unforgettable threshold (John 21:15-19): “Do you love me?” Jesus asks three times. “Yes, Lord you know I love you,” Simon answers, three times. “Feed my lambs, take care of my sheep, feed my sheep”, is Jesus’ triple repetition and call. And then, finally, Jesus simply says what he did at the lakeside, calling to the husky fisherman, so eager and raw: “Follow me.” Jesus wants Simon, yes Simon, to hear this reiterated call into service and usefulness, after all he has squandered. Simon, you are not a loser, a sinful man as your core identity. You are nothing less than a follower of the King of Kings. Begin to live like it, no matter what life brings to you, no matter how often you slip, and no matter how dark your interior.
There are many erudite expositions of this restoration story, with insightful nuancing, of this exchange. But, let’s not miss the calling of the whole man, Simon Peter, at a place and time when he was split, severed from active discipleship, and already adjusting to a benchwarmer’s complacency. Jesus called Simon to join with Peter, to become the conjoint man, who not only trusts Jesus with his sin theologically, but trusts Jesus with himself daily. His self-definition was half true, but fully dangerous. God, through Christ,. came to make a new man, progressively and faithfully more and more conformed to the image of His Son.
Simon was already back doing what people automatically do: when trouble or defeat, or failure hits, go back to what is safe, predictable and risk-free. Stop looking at the summit. Cease climbing. Play it safe. So, Simon went back to fishing. His dysfunctional theme song having again been proven correct, he runs back to Galilee to fish harder, work longer, keep safe, and forget the riskiness of following his Master. Tragically, many of us make the same decisions because of a choice we make. This is described in the following choice:
“Eventually, we each find ourselves arriving at a pivotal place on our journey with God. We stand before two roads diverging in the woods, and our choice will make all the difference…It’s the most important ongoing decision any of us will make as Christians. As we’re walking down life’s road, we arrive at a tall pole with sigs pointing in two different directions. The marker leading to the left simply says Pleasing God. The one leading to the right reads Trusting God. It hard to choose one over the other, because both roads have a good feel to them…Pleasing God and Trusting God are both admirable, but since I can have only one primary motive, I ask myself, ‘Which of these motives best reflects the relationship I want to have with God?’”
(TrueFaced: Trusting God and others with who you really are. Bill Thrall, Bruce McNicol, John Lynch. NavPress p.37-48)
Simon, like me, wants desperately to Please God. It sounds so godly, dedicated and humble. The motive is good, but slightly askew. It morphs into a nearly ineradicable vow that drums on the conscience and will: “I am determined to please God so that He will be happy with me.” He failed. We fail. So, we buy a bigger, faster fishing boat and knuckle down to pay off our failure with good, solid behavior. We are oblivious to the fact that Jesus doesn’t need more fish. He wants the man. We wear the mask of chipper buoyancy, but we hide our toxic memories and secrets in our dutiful, safe, busyness.
But now, thirty callused years later, Peter’s faith is ruggedly vibrant and alive. When Jesus called him the second time, he took the other road, the road that says Trusting God. Gun-shy, hesitant, sobered with his frailty, Peter made the simplest, humblest choice. He began to live out a new decision: “I will trust you with myself, my true self.” There he was washed in grace, and gained the most important toehold in discipleship—trusting God with the next move, the next right thing-- daily. Simon Peter began to trust God with himself: the whole rat’s nest of twisted motives and convoluted pathologies he brought to the table. He trusted Jesus Christ for forgiveness, objectively purchased on the cross. He also began to live in transparent trust as he daily confessed his fresh sin, and immersed himself in waves of purifying, cleansing grace. Simon Peter became whole. The man of frailty and failure became the apostle of faithfulness.
What hope this gives to every one of us. Simon Peter is a fellow struggler. His name displays his journey. It is the race, and the climb, that every one of us can choose.
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I am so ticked at Alan Webb. I don’t even know him, but I’m mad at him because he could be living my dream, and he’s blowing it. I’ve invested my hopes in him, and he has squandered them. Repeatedly. So much talent, potential, and proven gifts. Such mediocre delivery. The distance between his potential and his competitive fire is measured in light years! Aaargh!!
I’m watching the Olympic Trials’ Track and Field Meet. Its culminating event is the 1500 meters race, the metric mile. Only the top three will go to the Olympics. It’s do or die. One shot. Don’t fall asleep, or get boxed in, or years of training, and the potential for sending the best to compete with the world will be lost. Alan Webb is one of the very best, and favored to win. He’s my favorite. I want him in the Olympics because he is one of the few Americans who have a remote chance of winning a medal. What a running machine! He set the High School mile record, a world-class three minutes and fifty-three seconds (3:53), eclipsing the legendary record of Jim Ryun way back in the 60’s. Since High School, he’s become the American record holder with a mile best of three minutes and forty-seven seconds (3:47). He ran the best 1500 meter time (about 100 meters shorter than a mile) in the world last year of 3:30, including one of the best times at 800 meters (the half-mile): 1:44. That’s blazing! To put his speed in perspective, just draft any eight guys you can suit up from your office, gym, locker room or church and set up a relay to race Webb over a mile distance. You each run half a lap, while Webb runs the entire mile. Your team would get toasted! He’s that fast. He’s all-world. That’s Alan Webb.
But, he’s doing it again! This is the Olympic Trials, and he’s running along in the back half of the pack at a pace at least ten seconds slower than what the Olympics will require. He looks confused, unfocussed, lost, unwillingly dragged along. But I keep hoping. I’m out of my chair by the third lap, and screaming at the screen as they enter the bell lap. Webb gives a surge and pulls into the second lane, running fifth or sixth. With two hundred meters to go, the entire field is still potentially in the race because of the dawdling pace. Webb surges again, but so does everyone else. Coming into the home stretch, I hope for that burst of blazing speed, but he is actually losing ground. Alan!! What’s the matter with you! How did you let yourself get stuck in this position, again? Bernard Lagat cruises to a win in 3:40, followed by Leo Manzano and Lopez Lamong. Alan Webb finishes fifth. Fifth, in 3:42. He could run that on a Tuesday in practice. The worst part is he was never even in the race. Never a factor. Never set the pace. Never took it out and forged even a gallant loss. Just a slothful, wasted, mediocre mid-pack finish.
No, it’s not a finish. He never got started. It’s a loss, a waste. Something got thrown away at the start and middle of that race, becoming obvious at the end. Thousands of miles of training, repeat 600’s and 800’s and 400’s during grueling workouts on the track: lost. Speed training, over-distance training, weight training, ice baths, monk-like withdrawal from social life, massages and dietary vigilance: lost, kaput! I’m sick of you, Alan Webb! You disappoint me. You threw it away! I’ve quit hoping in you, you dream-killer.
The horsepower behind my frustration is classic transference. It takes no doctorate in psychology to recognize my angry response as simply projections of myself onto Alan Webb. He arouses my anger at his under-performance because I recognize myself in him. I don’t run like him, but I am him! I, too, am the race saboteur, throwing away opportunity and wilting under challenge. My inner frustration with my slothful and wasteful self becomes a flamethrower directed toward a guy I’ve never even met. I, too, have subverted my own promise and potential, and I hate it when Alan Webb holds up that mirror, and I see myself in it. I fall so far short of my potential, my vaunted plans, and Alan Webb is living out my regrets in his Olympic Trials 1500 meter race. I disappoint myself, and vex my friends, who watch me from the bleachers, wondering where my head or my heart really is.
It’s the same sickening desperation one gets as we watch the mishandling of opportunity by the disciple Peter. Perhaps, in some subterranean way, it’s also why we are drawn to this man. Peter, who got to breathe the same air and walk the same miles as the Son of Man is exhibit “A” for displaying that advantage does not always translate into diligence, or immediate success. Peter had raw strength, talent, and big personality. He gave a great press conference, proved to be an effective spokesman, and was prodigious in his work. But, Peter had so many moments of spectacular loopy-ness, transparent hubris, and ghastly betrayal. What an accident waiting to happen! What a team-wrecker and poster boy for disappointment; for everyone else and for himself. His early career was marked by over-promising and under-delivery. He was corrected and rebuked by Jesus, privately and publicly, more than anyone else in scripture.
Say what you will about him, but he held nothing back. He publicly pledged loyalty, he stood alone with a borrowed sword, and he alone stepped out of the boat to walk on water. Peter paid the price for his visible, sometimes brash, notoriety. He learned from the blunt force trauma of correction when bumping his head against the Lord’s own purposes. He was roundly rebuked by Jesus for his resistance to God’s will that would be expressed in the cross. He was repeatedly embarrassed and disheveled by his own outbursts of human fallibility. At times, everyone around Peter must have groaned: what are you doing? You’re squandering your opportunity! Run to the level of your potential! Get your head in the game!
All the more amazing is that in the end Jesus singled out this man for a special commission, preceded by a tender and merciful restoration. The story is well known: how Peter swore loyalty, even if it meant standing all alone in that loyalty, to Jesus. The next thing we know, he is denying any association with Jesus, swearing with oaths that he doesn’t even know him. Cowering under a simple question from a harmless servant girl. Finally, Jesus, in the breathless agony of his own suffering on the cross looks at Peter, piercing his heart, bringing crushing conviction, and causing him to weep bitterly in regret.
If we left the story there, Peter would be a biblical Alan Webb at his Olympic Trials debacle. Highly privileged; deeply flawed, and desperately disappointing. But, Peter experienced grace. Peter came to see that he was not just the sum total of his most dismal performance on his worst day. Peter was touched and changed by grace, not on the podium of victory, but in the dark corners, under the bleachers, in lonely defeat. Jesus came after him in his disgrace, embraced him when he still stunk, and called to him when he wished he could die, or hide forever in his shame. This relentless grace was the beginning of the end for the old Simon, and the birth of the new Peter.
“Precious faith” is how Peter summarized this grace in the very first verse of his letter. It was grace experienced: personalized, absorbed, and life-altering. This all-encompassing description of Peter’s gratitude begins to fill in the silent years since Jesus’ restoration of his disciple. Peter opens a window, through this intimate and tender description, to his personal journey and his spiritual transformation since that catalytic moment. He is the only writer in the New Testament to use this word “precious,” and with it he explains a relationship with his Master that contains hope for the Simon, the Alan Webb, in me.
There is some dark and inscrutable psychology in many of our heroes that seems set on subverting their own success, that tragically, even masochistically, snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. This moth-to-the-flame self-destruction is maddening, even horrifying, to witness; and very sad. It seemed to be at work in Peter from his very first encounter with Jesus. Luke (5:1-11) records how Jesus was standing on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, teaching the people. Seeing two boats and their owners nearby, Jesus asked to be launched out a ways from shore so that he could teach the people from the boat. In one of the most familiar stories of scripture, when he is done teaching, Jesus challenges Peter to “Put out into deep water, and let down your nets for a catch.” Already weary from a fruitless and fishless all-nighter, Peter resists, but then he summons minimal energy to placate the Master with compliance. Then came that storied catch so large they had to call for help to save their nets from breaking. The bounty was so huge it almost sank both boats. What a sign. What an indisputable demonstration of divine power and grace.
It is at this point that Peter displays something at once incisively prophetic and sadly pathetic. He shows what so many of us know of ourselves: devotion and dysfunction, all wrapped in an amorphous wad of neediness. He fell at Jesus’ feet in an act of unrehearsed and unself-conscious worship. Peter was instantly humbled, intensely grateful, and smitten. In pure transparency he cries: “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man.”
Peter’s first response when he found himself at ground level with divine power and holiness was exactly right. He was laid bare, undefended, and indefensible. He was instantly stripped of all self-confidence, and grasped that he could not live in the white-hot intensity of Jesus’ holiness and majesty. He knew at once the might, purity and overpowering-ness of the Lord’s awesome authority. He had fallen into the hands of the living God, utterly condemnable in his sin. With reflexive, terrified urgency he just wanted to get away to safety, to dodge the laser beam aimed at his iniquity.
At just that moment, when Peter is completely undone, lost, abjectly repentant, and flailing, Jesus speaks. “Don’t be afraid.” And, in a brief sentence that follows, Jesus shows Peter the future, his redemption, and his own assignment in that future: “from now on you will catch men.” From complete spiritual asphyxiation Peter’s lungs are instantly filled with life-giving grace. He is made, miraculously and undeservedly, alive again. He is reborn. Immediately, Peter displays what becomes his signature: wholehearted, unreserved, instantaneous action. He left everything and followed Jesus. From that instant the fisherman became a leader, an initiator, a spokesman. The muscle used for pulling morphed into magnetism for leadership. His grip for working the rigging transformed into singular loyalty to his rabbi. His eagerness and transparency were everything a teacher could want in a disciple. They were also, too frequently, the bane of his mentor. Peter is a handful, a complex personality, a high-maintenance disciple. Along with his incredible courage, his unvarnished love and loyalty, Peter displayed more than his allotted quotient of foolishness. He was impetuous and boastful. At several critical moments he was asleep, literally. This raw follower was an inscrutable amalgam of competitiveness, impetuosity, and infamous disloyalty at the very crux of Jesus’ agony.
This is the man who writes his full name as the signature at the top of his letter, a name full of irony, paradox, and hope. “Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ.” (2 Peter 1:1) Now, perhaps thirty years later, this man had learned some things about following Jesus and about himself as his follower. It seems more than incidental that he signs in with both his given, family name, and the name which Jesus gave to him. Simon, the raw fisherman is also Peter, his new identity. Over these thirty years he has learned the difference. These two names signal the complex alloy that was the man. Train wreck and talent. Success and scandal. Courage and cowardice. Warrior and wimp. Simon is Alan Webb. Simon is me. Peter is the rock of a man Jesus smelted from lumpy, raw material called Simon.
Peter is now writing as an experienced veteran in this climb of obedience and faith. He is sending a letter to fledgling churches, outposts on the Roman frontier in northern Asia. They, like him, have been called to follow Jesus. But, it is hard slogging. They face opposition from the culture, sabotage from within their own ranks, and from within themselves. So, this experienced veteran of grace and faith is now coaching them, drawing lessons from his journey of faith, and his experience of his living Lord. Like a climbing instructor teaching pupils whose lives will depend upon their mastery of basic skills, Peter is laying out a series of reliable, repeatable, and ever-adaptable handholds. These will aid them, not only for survival, but toward maturity and mastery, as they progress in their discipleship. He will show, name, and encourage the use of eight handholds. He lists them in a sequence that can be read in seconds. (2 Peter 1:5-8) The more we know of Peter’s own journey, however, the more we recognize that these handholds have been his anchors over many years of gritty faithfulness since he first received his commission from Jesus.
How illuminating that the first handhold he shows them is “faith.”
To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours. (2 Peter 1:2)
Peter, the manly man, is the only New Testament writer to use the word
“precious.” He uses it twice, once in each of his letters. (1 Peter 1:19; 2 Peter 1:2) Here he uses it to describe the faith he has received. It is faith in the Person who sought him out, trained him up, and washed him clean. This faith is precious because it isn’t invented, conjured, jury-rigged or fantasized by human longings. Peter wasn’t looking for Jesus, but Jesus came looking, and calling, for him. Jesus drew Peter into faith, based on his demonstrations raw power, incisive knowledge, and personal holiness. This faith is grounded in the Man, the Son of Man, the man of all men: Jesus, his Savior whom he knows and follows. This faith is a treasury of shared history, witnessed miracle, and personal transformation.
This is a faith Peter holds onto with a fisherman’s calloused grip. Faith in Jesus has produced a life-sustaining relationship he has treasured through thick and thin, a morsel he savors continuously. Peter knows his faith is anchored in God, and in His incarnate Son. It is objective faith in experienced fact, not subjective longing for things imagined. He has received this faith through the righteous life, atoning death, and propitiatory peace with God purchased on the Cross by his Savior. This is a faith that is completely unrelated to feel-good, mystical experiences with harmonic convergence in Sedona, or sleeping under crystals, or some vague desire for goodness in the human soul. No. Jesus found Peter and called him. It was God’s initiative, the Savior’s voice, and Peter’s simple, stumbling responses of trust that he now describes as this “precious faith” after all these years.
This man knows, as only a desperate recipient can know, that “grace and peace” can be ours “in abundance.” He is a living laboratory of grace at work, a transparent example of a man sustained by a faith that has become precious. This faith in Jesus was the very first handhold Peter ever had on things spiritual. But, Peter recognizes that even prior to this so-called starting point, there was a purpose and plan of God. Peter’s faith was not muscled up in an exasperated groping for meaning in life, nor by some nebulous longing for connection with the supernatural. Instead, Peter was a recipient of this faith through the righteous obedience of Jesus Christ (v.1), foreordained by God, and demonstrated on the cross. Jesus found Peter, and called Peter. By faith Peter finally, and fully, received Him. Peter found stability, not by looking, but by receiving. His faith was anchored in God, not in the attributes of his own fickle heart.
Many people testify, after surviving a flood, accident, or tornado, when the microphone is thrust into their face: “My faith got me through.” This answer always needs a follow-up question: “Your faith in what…in whom?” Peter is not hanging his faith on the skyhooks of emotion, or the cobwebs of nostalgia. His faith is anchored in the eye-witnessed miracles, life-defining teaching, and sin-covering atonement of Jesus the Christ.
So, let’s return to the walking paradox: the new man Peter, inhabiting the body of Simon. We can trace in this name, Simon Peter, two defining New Testament doctrines: justification and sanctification. Peter is the name which signifies the man who has been given, and receives, everything. He is the recipient of grace, through faith. The instantaneous, once-for-all, trusting of the Son’s finished work on the cross is the substance and ground of Peter’s saving faith. He is forever re-positioned in God’s sight. He has crossed over from death to life, from darkness to light, from enemy to friend (John 5:24 etc.) His sin is covered, paid in full. Peter’s faith is anchored in the objective accomplishment of Father and Son to kill death and remove its pall of fear over humankind. Once an alien and enemy because of an unpayable debt of sin, Peter is now justified by the mercies of God in the substitutionary sacrifice which paid all sin debt. His position is entirely, and irreversibly, changed.
That’s the Peter we see in his humility, recognizing his bankrupt unholiness, and crying out “Go away from me, Lord: I am a sinful man.” It is the only solution Peter, or any person, can find when white-hot holiness convicts the conscience. Get me away from the knowledge of my own failure and sin! But, of course, the physician of souls has a cure Peter never could have imagined. He knows Peter at his worst, and does the opposite of what is expected. Instead of abandoning the wretched, he comes to heal and restore. Such unfathomable grace, displayed in purpose and power, is what changed Peter. Peter cast his empty-handed faith onto God’s accomplished plan. He was saved. (appendix: Steps to Peace with God, http://www.lifesbigquestions.com/ )
But Simon still lingered. Simon the selfish. Simon the competitor. Simon the fearful and flaky. Simon the course and crude. Simon the braggart and traitor. Simon was not sin-free, or even sin-averse, as snapshots of him in the New Testament clearly display. Simon is the grim and surly shadow trailing the free and forgiven Peter. Simon is the old-natured fool sabotaging the new-natured apostle. Perhaps to many of us it appears, as miraculous as is the justification of the condemnable sinner named Peter, even more stupendous is the sanctification of the train wreck named Simon. But, this, too, is what the doubly-named Simon Peter packed into this word “precious.”
It’s the Simon in me that I’m yelling at when I see Alan Webb losing. He is me, blowing the opportunity and underperforming in the heat of competition. This Simon is the man in me that reneges from challenge, shrinks in fear, and dissembles under pressure. Simon is the puny man, the caricature within. I live with Simon, but I want to be Peter. I long to unite the bifurcated person within, to become as fruitful and faithful as Simon Peter, to see the transformative power of Jesus be more than theological theory. I want to be whole, as Simon Peter became whole, a fully integrated person bearing the descriptors “servant” and “apostle” comfortably and unself-consciously. The simple phrase “precious faith” written by the unified man, Simon Peter, gives me hope.
The scent of sanctification wafts through these introductory words, and this is where Peter turns into a coach. Whereas justification is anchored in what God has accomplished for us, sanctification is experienced by allowing God to work in and through us. We can’t add anything to our position. We are justified solely by God’s grace, plus nothing. But Peter insists that, having been “given everything we need for life and godliness” (1:3) we now need to “make every effort” (1:5) to participate in our calling and obedience. This is practical, daily obedience to a process theologians call “progressive sanctification.” Simon Peter did not arrive at maturity by some magical and esoteric transmigration. He learned his way into maturity by practicing his daily grip on handholds of practical spirituality.
This, too, began with Jesus, and not in some kind of self-help makeover strategy. John records Peter’s being summoned, challenged, and restored by Jesus. (John 21:15-19) Jesus calls for him specifically, calling him from the squalor of his ghastly performance and his pungent shame. Countless scholars and teachers have analyzed this story, and drawn many lessons from is form, its grammar, and its tenderness. What surprises and encourages me is that Jesus specifically and repetitively speaks to “Simon,” not Peter. Simon, not the Rock. Simon, the denier and oath-spitter. Simon the turncoat. Simon the true, but dysfunctional worshiper. Jesus calls to him, and asks him essentially the same question three times: “Simon, do you truly love me?” I find it significant that Jesus uses his pre-faith name, his pre-Rock identity with which to address him. It is Simon the failure he calls, forgives, and restores. It is in the old person Simon that grace will show its transforming power. Simon is redeployed. Simon is shown his future with its sobering challenges. Simon is again called: “follow me.” Simon has a new life.
Remember the unpolished Simon’s first response to Jesus? It contained sparkling clarity about his guilt: “I am a sinful man.” This is conviction of the Holy Spirit. This is exactly, surgically correct. Only justification by grace at Christ’s expense, received through faith, could save him. But, did Peter make the same mistake, at first, that I have made? He embraced his new position, but accepted his old definition and condition as fixed. Peter is the changed person, but Simon—well, he’s unchangeably, and irrevocably Simon. Did his reply become a self-fulfilling subscript, a subverting message that went something like this: “I am nothing more, and will never be, anything more than a sinful man?” Could it be that Simon’s experience mirrors my own? Though I have found freedom, forgiveness, and joy in salvation that Jesus freely offers, it isn’t yet “precious.” It’s only for a part of me, the future, positional, and theological Peter. But, the original Simon-in-the-flesh part of me is untouchably substandard. I’m still the old, unredeemable, pathetic Simon. I am a sinful man. I’m a box of worthless flesh and unworthiness, but I have a UPS label that will one day deliver me to my home in heaven once my sad transit through this world is done. I “have a new name written down in glory” but on earth I’m just a sinner saved by grace.
Jesus called all of Simon Peter: By powerful three-fold process, which echoes the Old Testament standard on incontrovertible witness, Jesus pulls Simon over an unforgettable threshold (John 21:15-19): “Do you love me?” Jesus asks three times. “Yes, Lord you know I love you,” Simon answers, three times. “Feed my lambs, take care of my sheep, feed my sheep”, is Jesus’ triple repetition and call. And then, finally, Jesus simply says what he did at the lakeside, calling to the husky fisherman, so eager and raw: “Follow me.” Jesus wants Simon, yes Simon, to hear this reiterated call into service and usefulness, after all he has squandered. Simon, you are not a loser, a sinful man as your core identity. You are nothing less than a follower of the King of Kings. Begin to live like it, no matter what life brings to you, no matter how often you slip, and no matter how dark your interior.
There are many erudite expositions of this restoration story, with insightful nuancing, of this exchange. But, let’s not miss the calling of the whole man, Simon Peter, at a place and time when he was split, severed from active discipleship, and already adjusting to a benchwarmer’s complacency. Jesus called Simon to join with Peter, to become the conjoint man, who not only trusts Jesus with his sin theologically, but trusts Jesus with himself daily. His self-definition was half true, but fully dangerous. God, through Christ,. came to make a new man, progressively and faithfully more and more conformed to the image of His Son.
Simon was already back doing what people automatically do: when trouble or defeat, or failure hits, go back to what is safe, predictable and risk-free. Stop looking at the summit. Cease climbing. Play it safe. So, Simon went back to fishing. His dysfunctional theme song having again been proven correct, he runs back to Galilee to fish harder, work longer, keep safe, and forget the riskiness of following his Master. Tragically, many of us make the same decisions because of a choice we make. This is described in the following choice:
“Eventually, we each find ourselves arriving at a pivotal place on our journey with God. We stand before two roads diverging in the woods, and our choice will make all the difference…It’s the most important ongoing decision any of us will make as Christians. As we’re walking down life’s road, we arrive at a tall pole with sigs pointing in two different directions. The marker leading to the left simply says Pleasing God. The one leading to the right reads Trusting God. It hard to choose one over the other, because both roads have a good feel to them…Pleasing God and Trusting God are both admirable, but since I can have only one primary motive, I ask myself, ‘Which of these motives best reflects the relationship I want to have with God?’”
(TrueFaced: Trusting God and others with who you really are. Bill Thrall, Bruce McNicol, John Lynch. NavPress p.37-48)
Simon, like me, wants desperately to Please God. It sounds so godly, dedicated and humble. The motive is good, but slightly askew. It morphs into a nearly ineradicable vow that drums on the conscience and will: “I am determined to please God so that He will be happy with me.” He failed. We fail. So, we buy a bigger, faster fishing boat and knuckle down to pay off our failure with good, solid behavior. We are oblivious to the fact that Jesus doesn’t need more fish. He wants the man. We wear the mask of chipper buoyancy, but we hide our toxic memories and secrets in our dutiful, safe, busyness.
But now, thirty callused years later, Peter’s faith is ruggedly vibrant and alive. When Jesus called him the second time, he took the other road, the road that says Trusting God. Gun-shy, hesitant, sobered with his frailty, Peter made the simplest, humblest choice. He began to live out a new decision: “I will trust you with myself, my true self.” There he was washed in grace, and gained the most important toehold in discipleship—trusting God with the next move, the next right thing-- daily. Simon Peter began to trust God with himself: the whole rat’s nest of twisted motives and convoluted pathologies he brought to the table. He trusted Jesus Christ for forgiveness, objectively purchased on the cross. He also began to live in transparent trust as he daily confessed his fresh sin, and immersed himself in waves of purifying, cleansing grace. Simon Peter became whole. The man of frailty and failure became the apostle of faithfulness.
What hope this gives to every one of us. Simon Peter is a fellow struggler. His name displays his journey. It is the race, and the climb, that every one of us can choose.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
The Intro
Hello, friend,
In this installment I am introducing you to my writing quest. My working title for what will hopefully become a book is THE NEXT RIGHT THING. I am exploring a single, short passage of scripture, 2 Peter 1:5-8 wherein Peter admonishes us to “add” seven qualities to our faith. These qualities are not levels of elitism, nor bragging rights of achievement. They are an array of ever-useful and gracious handholds as we ascend toward maturity in Christ. Continual vigilance to these disciplines and skills will yield a productive and useful (fruitful) life. Like a violinist, or gymnast, a fireman, or a surgeon, the passion for excellence never becomes actual unless it passes through daily, and continuous, exercises. Walking toward maturity in Christ is something for which we should “make every effort.” Because of the faith we have received through the grace expressed in Jesus, these life skills are welcomed as practical and proven means which give us a grip in the slipperiness and murkiness of life. This is just my introduction. I hope it will whet your appetite for more.
Roger
The Next Right Thing (TNRT): Everything Necessary (Intro)
"His divine power has given us everything we need for life..." 2 Peter 1:3
The small airplane was splayed across the mountainside like a hat-pinned moth in a biology display case. Fully intact, and with no visible damage, the Cessna 172 was an eye-catching curiosity for every traveler going Eastbound through the Eisenhower tunnel at Colorado’s continental divide. It sat as an aluminum monument to one of our worst fears: the dangers of mountain flying in a small plane. There it rested, frail and motionless, just above the West portal for all to see, and ponder. Amazingly, the pilot had walked away unhurt, save for his bruised dignity and dented ego, having quite conspicuously undershot the saddle in the Rocky Mountains by several hundred feet.
I asked a pilot friend, with whom I would be flying over these mountains in a few days, what might have gone wrong. There was more than mild curiosity behind my question. My own seat would be skimming these snowcaps soon on my first flight, with him, in his small plane. I needed some assurance of both basic aeronautics and pilot competence. Bob, in his dispassionate, linear analysis, was eager to deconstruct the mishap into its component parts. “The pilot did almost everything wrong. He made a succession of decisions he never should have made, starting with his flight plan, and including his final approach to the mountain pass.” Bob explained that this model of plane was marginal, at best, to safely clear the 14,000 foot Rockies. The engine was normally aspirated, not turbo-charged, and needed ideal conditions to fly at this altitude. More telling, however, was the direction the pilot was apparently flying. With hand motions, Bob explained that because small aircraft behave like cottonwood spores on the unseen currents of air, and because near mountains wind sheer and downdrafts can be severe, the pilot must always allow for very sudden, strong winds. That’s why a wise pilot will always zigzag his way toward a high pass. He will fly almost parallel to the range, approaching the pass at a slight angle. That way, in the event of sudden loss of altitude, he can sheer off toward the valley, circle around, and try again. This pilot was flying directly at the pass, and when the plane was not high enough, or there was a last-minute down-draft, he had no way to correct. There was no margin for error. It was a recipe for death.
“But, I have to give this pilot credit,” said Bob. “His very last decision was exactly right. It was the best of all the choices he had made that day, and a final decision to be admired even by veteran pilots. It took guts and skill. When he saw that he was certain to crash head-on into the mountainside, the pilot, at the last instant, pulled up on the stick, stalling the plane’s forward air speed, which caused it to flutter gently to the ground like a falling leaf on the porch.” When his life was on the line, he did the one right thing he could have done, and he walked away to fly another day, a much wiser pilot.
This pilot performed at his highest level, not to achieve perfection, nor even to reach his intended destination, but just to avoid catastrophic loss. His options were reduced to doing just one next, and only, right thing. When everything, including his life, was on the line, he actually accomplished a considerable victory: he walked away, to pick up the pieces, and resume his life with new wisdom, earned in the crucible of calamity. The searing clarity of having only the least worst thing left as an option, and then applying his acquired knowledge and skill to that maneuver, brought him life-saving safety. And another shot at life!
At first this might sound like a depressingly defensive approach to problems and challenges. But in a dangerous, complex, and fallen world executing The Next Right Thing can literally mean the difference between life and death. Of course, these scenarios of the least worst option are not what we visualized when we set out. We wanted to put our drive in the fairway, but we find ourselves in the unplayable weeds. Then we have to take a penalty, and hit a lay-up instead of reaching the green in regulation. Our score goes from a birdie possibility to a bogie reality, or worse. At times, despite a flash of vision, and applied, prodigious energy toward a goal, an agonizing inch, not the soaring leap, is the only way forward. Wise behavior in extremis often means settling for what seems bad, very bad, at the time, but still recognizes options in the midst of crisis. In the end, it avoids the worst. But, this blunder seems so far short of the success story we had charted, or the scenario of dashing skill and breezy security we had imagined for ourselves.
Worse yet, others may be watching. We’re embarrassed, ashamed to be seen in this mess. A string of over-confident, loudly verbalized goals, promises and choices comes echoing back. Now it’s obvious we’re not going to make it; not on this flight. I am soon going to leave a monument to my presumption, my failure, my inability to wrest success out of the downdraft of the forces against me. But, the next choice, The Next Right Thing, is actually the most courageous thing I can do. We realize, as we lose altitude, and haven’t the power to pull off our flight plan, that the shimmering dream we had, the dazzling vision, can’t be realized today, this instant, or anytime in the foreseeable future. Reality can no longer be avoided. We are staring at a scary, embarrassing, and completely unforeseen crash landing. This very visible failure is not what was promised in our original intentions, the brochures, or the travel plans. But, sometimes, despite our denial and desperate efforts, it is the only choice we have.
We all have a natural desire to succeed by leaps and bounds, by the shortest and most painless path possible. We longed for that blinding insight, the brilliant resolution, the God-delivered certainty. But here we are, confused in the thicket of competing demands, conflicted relationships, and reverberating fears. Our best, our passionate gifting and longing, lies shrouded by a fog of rumbling threats, taunting fears, or urgent trivialities. And, it looks like, though we might well walk away from the scene with our life, our best attempt will appear to others what it actually is: an ignominious, and painfully visible, failure.
I have the frequent, and dubious, opportunity to visit scenarios of such collision and carnage. Kris and Teri’s marriage that began with white prancers and Wolfgang Puck cuisine as bride and groom soared off to a Micronesian honeymoon. But, now they sit in isolated bitterness, un-touching, mere husks surrounding a vacuous emptiness that was once a lustrous and guazy dream. That dream is crumbling, moldering, rusting, because two saboteurs pour daily acid rain onto a once verdant promise. Like a termite-riven, wooden house, the thinnest coat of paint is the sole veneer holding it together. The fiber of a covenant has been eaten away by the craven nibblings of a thousand fault-findings and a zillion put-downs.
Or, there is Scott’s promising, bold, and creative business plan that now lies drowning in a pool of red ink. With brilliant insight he had detected the niche, and had foreseen the market potential. But the economy hit a downdraft, potential customers halted proactive investing, and this beautiful, diaphanous solution is swatted away like a bothersome moth, as fragile and vulnerable as the wisp of thought from which it was created. The dream dies, and along with it, the lien is called, the house foreclosed, and a family is left floundering in breathless panic, its leader a broken arrow.
John and Sarah awaited the birth of their first child with tip-toe eagerness. Every contingency is anticipated. The nursery is state of the art, and festooned with wall art, wallpaper borders of chubby cherubs, glider rocker, baby toys and ablutions for every known body part. A stroller designed like a Mercedes Benz sits in the living room. It transforms itself into more configurations than a rubix cube. Diapers, bibs, outfits, changing table, socks the size of glove fingers, all perfectly color coordinated and monogrammed, await the arrival of this most wanted child. Then, something unforeseen. At 3 AM, during the twenty-seventh week, contractions begin. In the mad, blurry rush to the hospital, all proactive plans are forgotten. The baby is coming, on his own terms, and this gate-crashing entrance will render every decorator color, crib design, and neat baby appurtenance an instant irrelevancy. His lungs aren’t functioning. His heart is weak, and it’s uncertain whether his eyes will ever see the beauty of the colorful preparations made for his coming. A normal, bouncing, and tender infancy has become a medical emergency, stretching into the foggy, seemingly endless, gray future. Everything is on hold. Incubators replace a mother’s arms. Intubation, oxygen, monitors and tubes entangle this three pound patient, and frustrate a father’s desire to touch flesh, the skin of his firstborn. An army of specialists and an encyclopedic data dump overwhelm these fledgling parents, and their innate desire to hold and cuddle a normal infant.
At times like this, prayers for guidance seem to bounce off the ceiling, while well-meant, pious platitudes from Job’s counselors drizzle on our dank discouragement. Confusion mocks our former confidence, and monochrome half-light makes for a featureless landscape. Where is the signal, the breakthrough, the beacon, the landmark? Where is God at such times? What does he want of me? Why wasn’t I warned? Most elementally, how am I going to survive, to breathe my next breath, to pay the mortgage, to salvage my career, or my marriage? How can I know God’s will and seize His strength in my crisis of clarity? Can I still trust Him? Where do I take my broken heart? Where does a savaged soul find a friend, a train-wrecked hope get rescued, a bone-weary mind go to grasp truth? What will people say?
This book is about that kind of experience, that kind of world. This is the arena where the body slam is not some fake, Smackdown ballet. This is the real world, the creation which fell from innocence, and which manufactures complexity, pollution, fear and betrayal with unregulated inventiveness. This is the world where wind is knocked out of me, and no objective information can assure my spasmed diaphragm that I will ever breathe again. It’s the real world, the one every one of us inhabits, and—sooner or later—experiences with blunt force trauma.
In such a context, where we hear tales of twenty-two year old wizards spinning a dorm room inspiration into a billion-dollar bonanza overnight, or where motivational speakers promise surefire success and herculean confidence in five easy steps, and where spiritual mentors slather us with guaranteed victory, it feels utterly pedestrian and defeatist to simply and humbly focus on doing what this book is going to highlight: do The Next Right Thing (TNRT). Don’t shoot for the moon, or for your dreams. Collect the shards of your broken vessel to receive a few drops of sustaining grace. Our exhausted resilience, our stalled creativity, our fruitless theological spinning eventually forces all of us to this anaerobic simplicity. But God, in his counsel, repeatedly comforts and guides toward this trustworthy and available beacon. Don’t get ahead of yourself. In the crisis there is always The Next Right Thing to choose, however desperate it may feel, however incomplete and feathery its substance at the moment.
To resort to the simplicity of choosing The Next Right Thing in a time of confusion, pain, or crisis is not a defeatist concession to perpetual mediocrity, or faithless pragmatism. Nor is this a bumper-sticker solution, chirped in perkiness, with which to torment the troubled. Far from it! Despite how we may have contributed to our own trouble, or strayed from a wise trajectory, we can, at any point, choose to do The Next Right Thing. Failure to perceive this option, and embrace this corrective, is actually the prideful last choice of every fatal crash, unrecoverable financial debacle, and paralyzing personal defeat.
Stated positively and proactively, the ability and practiced life skill to simply do The Next Right Thing, is the very focus that makes a champion. How often we hear in the post-game interview: “We knew if we just concentrated on our game, and executed what we did in practice, we would come out on top.” Champions, whether in sports, or life, do not get ahead of themselves. They do The Next Right Thing (TNRT) in the context they inhabit. They live in reality, in sequence, in the now, moving and flexing in the dynamic tensions of change. Even when the next choice requires a course correction, or snail-like, incremental progress is all that is accomplished, the reiterated and trusting practice of choosing TNRT lays the groundwork for reward, progress, and ultimately, victory.
For my part, I know that there are so many things I don’t know, though I am a teacher, a student of scripture, and a mentor. I don’t know how to counsel a friend out of credit card debt in one simple, spiritual, gymnastic back-flip. I do not know the ultimate purpose God might have for the illness, or the unfairness, you have suffered. I have no watertight guidance system for constructing a roadmap for your career or your calling. I don’t know whom you should marry. I’m not sure if I’ve made the right investments for my own eventual retirement. I don’t know the future. I can’t even master the comprehensive data available to me today! I frequently feel overwhelmed by the mountainous piles of unread, unmastered data that surround every decision. Along with inscrutable fogginess regarding my own future, I vicariously participate in scores of other dilemma-ridden lives.
But I am learning to walk. That is, I am becoming more appreciative and restful with the pace of the ancients. They were pedestrians. Though “pedestrian” is used today as an adjective implying dullness, ordinariness, inanity, and mediocrity, the Bible uses it as a simple verb of faithful movement. We ”walk” with God. We are to “walk” by faith. We are admonished to “walk” in the Spirit. When we live and walk this way we are living moment-by-moment in dependence, relationship, and faith. And--here’s the key—we are progressing one step at a time. At this pace we are practicing instantaneous obedience to wisdom delivered in practical, incremental steps. When we walk in this way and choose TNRT, we demonstrate that we are humble, teachable, alert and available.
It is essential that this habit of TNRT not devolve into a formulaic bromide which replaces the majestic purposes of God, simply to make ourselves more comfortable, our lives more manageable, and our faith better insulated from risk. TNRT is by no means a diversion to keep busy so that we don’t have to think, or feel, deeply. Nor should this approach dumb down a thoughtful strategy toward participation in the mission of God, or miniaturize the majesty of the Most High and the incalculable nobility of serving Him. However, when you or I faithfully choose TNRT, with the emphasis on obeying the next “right” (God-honoring) counsel, are we not then allowing the living Lord Jesus Christ to be “a lamp to my feet” (Ps. 119:105 NIV), and walking with him, at a pace He has prescribed?
TNRT is not an elite, spiritual diet-and-exercise spa for the positive and energetic. It is an essential survival strategy when life body-slams us with crisis. Every one of us will plunge headlong into crises of our own making, and/or crash head-on into catastrophes churned up in a dangerous and fallen world. When the wind is knocked out of us in this crucible of sickness, accident, downsizing, and brute force, what are we to do? At such times we are not asking about the distant future, or parsing the nature of the Godhead. What we need to know at these moments is simply what to do next. What is The Next Right Thing? What is the next step? Is God still working? Is He pleased with me? Will I ever breathe again? Is there still a meaning to my life?
At such times we don’t feel heroic. We feel afraid, overmatched, and bereft of skill. We think in minutes, not months: the next breath, not Pilate’s conditioning. Life gets compressed, and options narrow. It isn’t just pilots strapped into thin-clad aluminum airplanes that experience this. It is all of us. And, the question is: “What do I do in this situation?” When not only my visible body, or measurable livelihood, or treasured marriage is at risk, but also my hopes, dreams and assumptions are crushed, what is left? What good is a faith that doesn’t keep me buoyant and aloft? How can I be a leader, or stay in the game, or sense any fellowship with God and others when a debacle is at my doorstep? When all the work, love, investment, or passion of a decade is put in peril by the next decision, how can I possibly do anything that is right, good, or godly?
Fortunately, our path as Christ-followers is well-trodden by men and women who simply walked, at pedestrian pace, as disciples. Their initial steps of faith became a reiterated march of obedience. This book echoes with the faith journey of such people: Peter, Paul, Abraham, Esther, Ruth, and Priscilla. Sometimes we don’t recognize these Bible heroes as peers, or pedestrians, because we have failed to see how scripture has compressed their lives into a few verses. We are seeing the video highlights, often on fast-forward, but sometimes the documented steps are three years, or forty years, apart. If we slow down to appreciate the sequences, the wide spans of time, and dwell on their real fears and tears, we will begin to recognize their earthy humanity. Then we will learn to imitate their walk, and participate with them in the story of God in this present world. Their peripatetic rovings instantly remind us that life is filled and kept full by retaining and savoring the droplets of guidance, the increments of obedience, the flickers of light which come as they obediently and sequentially chose The Next Right Thing. They walked. Nobody sprinted.
This book is for people like me who are not prescient, omniscient, or even lucid about outcomes. Moments in sequence are doled out to us daily. We notice the clock, but we don’t control time. We don’t know the future, but we have to act today, with inadequate, sometimes conflicting, information. We know a lot, but much of our knowledge seems as relevant as the weather in Bangalore. The pressing question is: “What should I do next?”
Weary warrior, fog-bound slogger, beaten runner, exhausted caregiver, there is more than a last gasp for you. There really is The Next Right Thing to choose. It is right. It is next. It is all God has given for now. That means it is good, and useful. It will keep you alive, hungry for more life, and intently teachable. This way of living is the opposite of complacency and nonchalance. This is life lived with the intensity of the apostles: storming heaven with prayer, savoring every delicious breath in the realization that it could be the last, and seeing God’s fingerprints in everything from the provision of daily bread to the prophecies of history’s climax. This is the way to live, because it is everything God deems to be necessary.
In this installment I am introducing you to my writing quest. My working title for what will hopefully become a book is THE NEXT RIGHT THING. I am exploring a single, short passage of scripture, 2 Peter 1:5-8 wherein Peter admonishes us to “add” seven qualities to our faith. These qualities are not levels of elitism, nor bragging rights of achievement. They are an array of ever-useful and gracious handholds as we ascend toward maturity in Christ. Continual vigilance to these disciplines and skills will yield a productive and useful (fruitful) life. Like a violinist, or gymnast, a fireman, or a surgeon, the passion for excellence never becomes actual unless it passes through daily, and continuous, exercises. Walking toward maturity in Christ is something for which we should “make every effort.” Because of the faith we have received through the grace expressed in Jesus, these life skills are welcomed as practical and proven means which give us a grip in the slipperiness and murkiness of life. This is just my introduction. I hope it will whet your appetite for more.
Roger
The Next Right Thing (TNRT): Everything Necessary (Intro)
"His divine power has given us everything we need for life..." 2 Peter 1:3
The small airplane was splayed across the mountainside like a hat-pinned moth in a biology display case. Fully intact, and with no visible damage, the Cessna 172 was an eye-catching curiosity for every traveler going Eastbound through the Eisenhower tunnel at Colorado’s continental divide. It sat as an aluminum monument to one of our worst fears: the dangers of mountain flying in a small plane. There it rested, frail and motionless, just above the West portal for all to see, and ponder. Amazingly, the pilot had walked away unhurt, save for his bruised dignity and dented ego, having quite conspicuously undershot the saddle in the Rocky Mountains by several hundred feet.
I asked a pilot friend, with whom I would be flying over these mountains in a few days, what might have gone wrong. There was more than mild curiosity behind my question. My own seat would be skimming these snowcaps soon on my first flight, with him, in his small plane. I needed some assurance of both basic aeronautics and pilot competence. Bob, in his dispassionate, linear analysis, was eager to deconstruct the mishap into its component parts. “The pilot did almost everything wrong. He made a succession of decisions he never should have made, starting with his flight plan, and including his final approach to the mountain pass.” Bob explained that this model of plane was marginal, at best, to safely clear the 14,000 foot Rockies. The engine was normally aspirated, not turbo-charged, and needed ideal conditions to fly at this altitude. More telling, however, was the direction the pilot was apparently flying. With hand motions, Bob explained that because small aircraft behave like cottonwood spores on the unseen currents of air, and because near mountains wind sheer and downdrafts can be severe, the pilot must always allow for very sudden, strong winds. That’s why a wise pilot will always zigzag his way toward a high pass. He will fly almost parallel to the range, approaching the pass at a slight angle. That way, in the event of sudden loss of altitude, he can sheer off toward the valley, circle around, and try again. This pilot was flying directly at the pass, and when the plane was not high enough, or there was a last-minute down-draft, he had no way to correct. There was no margin for error. It was a recipe for death.
“But, I have to give this pilot credit,” said Bob. “His very last decision was exactly right. It was the best of all the choices he had made that day, and a final decision to be admired even by veteran pilots. It took guts and skill. When he saw that he was certain to crash head-on into the mountainside, the pilot, at the last instant, pulled up on the stick, stalling the plane’s forward air speed, which caused it to flutter gently to the ground like a falling leaf on the porch.” When his life was on the line, he did the one right thing he could have done, and he walked away to fly another day, a much wiser pilot.
This pilot performed at his highest level, not to achieve perfection, nor even to reach his intended destination, but just to avoid catastrophic loss. His options were reduced to doing just one next, and only, right thing. When everything, including his life, was on the line, he actually accomplished a considerable victory: he walked away, to pick up the pieces, and resume his life with new wisdom, earned in the crucible of calamity. The searing clarity of having only the least worst thing left as an option, and then applying his acquired knowledge and skill to that maneuver, brought him life-saving safety. And another shot at life!
At first this might sound like a depressingly defensive approach to problems and challenges. But in a dangerous, complex, and fallen world executing The Next Right Thing can literally mean the difference between life and death. Of course, these scenarios of the least worst option are not what we visualized when we set out. We wanted to put our drive in the fairway, but we find ourselves in the unplayable weeds. Then we have to take a penalty, and hit a lay-up instead of reaching the green in regulation. Our score goes from a birdie possibility to a bogie reality, or worse. At times, despite a flash of vision, and applied, prodigious energy toward a goal, an agonizing inch, not the soaring leap, is the only way forward. Wise behavior in extremis often means settling for what seems bad, very bad, at the time, but still recognizes options in the midst of crisis. In the end, it avoids the worst. But, this blunder seems so far short of the success story we had charted, or the scenario of dashing skill and breezy security we had imagined for ourselves.
Worse yet, others may be watching. We’re embarrassed, ashamed to be seen in this mess. A string of over-confident, loudly verbalized goals, promises and choices comes echoing back. Now it’s obvious we’re not going to make it; not on this flight. I am soon going to leave a monument to my presumption, my failure, my inability to wrest success out of the downdraft of the forces against me. But, the next choice, The Next Right Thing, is actually the most courageous thing I can do. We realize, as we lose altitude, and haven’t the power to pull off our flight plan, that the shimmering dream we had, the dazzling vision, can’t be realized today, this instant, or anytime in the foreseeable future. Reality can no longer be avoided. We are staring at a scary, embarrassing, and completely unforeseen crash landing. This very visible failure is not what was promised in our original intentions, the brochures, or the travel plans. But, sometimes, despite our denial and desperate efforts, it is the only choice we have.
We all have a natural desire to succeed by leaps and bounds, by the shortest and most painless path possible. We longed for that blinding insight, the brilliant resolution, the God-delivered certainty. But here we are, confused in the thicket of competing demands, conflicted relationships, and reverberating fears. Our best, our passionate gifting and longing, lies shrouded by a fog of rumbling threats, taunting fears, or urgent trivialities. And, it looks like, though we might well walk away from the scene with our life, our best attempt will appear to others what it actually is: an ignominious, and painfully visible, failure.
I have the frequent, and dubious, opportunity to visit scenarios of such collision and carnage. Kris and Teri’s marriage that began with white prancers and Wolfgang Puck cuisine as bride and groom soared off to a Micronesian honeymoon. But, now they sit in isolated bitterness, un-touching, mere husks surrounding a vacuous emptiness that was once a lustrous and guazy dream. That dream is crumbling, moldering, rusting, because two saboteurs pour daily acid rain onto a once verdant promise. Like a termite-riven, wooden house, the thinnest coat of paint is the sole veneer holding it together. The fiber of a covenant has been eaten away by the craven nibblings of a thousand fault-findings and a zillion put-downs.
Or, there is Scott’s promising, bold, and creative business plan that now lies drowning in a pool of red ink. With brilliant insight he had detected the niche, and had foreseen the market potential. But the economy hit a downdraft, potential customers halted proactive investing, and this beautiful, diaphanous solution is swatted away like a bothersome moth, as fragile and vulnerable as the wisp of thought from which it was created. The dream dies, and along with it, the lien is called, the house foreclosed, and a family is left floundering in breathless panic, its leader a broken arrow.
John and Sarah awaited the birth of their first child with tip-toe eagerness. Every contingency is anticipated. The nursery is state of the art, and festooned with wall art, wallpaper borders of chubby cherubs, glider rocker, baby toys and ablutions for every known body part. A stroller designed like a Mercedes Benz sits in the living room. It transforms itself into more configurations than a rubix cube. Diapers, bibs, outfits, changing table, socks the size of glove fingers, all perfectly color coordinated and monogrammed, await the arrival of this most wanted child. Then, something unforeseen. At 3 AM, during the twenty-seventh week, contractions begin. In the mad, blurry rush to the hospital, all proactive plans are forgotten. The baby is coming, on his own terms, and this gate-crashing entrance will render every decorator color, crib design, and neat baby appurtenance an instant irrelevancy. His lungs aren’t functioning. His heart is weak, and it’s uncertain whether his eyes will ever see the beauty of the colorful preparations made for his coming. A normal, bouncing, and tender infancy has become a medical emergency, stretching into the foggy, seemingly endless, gray future. Everything is on hold. Incubators replace a mother’s arms. Intubation, oxygen, monitors and tubes entangle this three pound patient, and frustrate a father’s desire to touch flesh, the skin of his firstborn. An army of specialists and an encyclopedic data dump overwhelm these fledgling parents, and their innate desire to hold and cuddle a normal infant.
At times like this, prayers for guidance seem to bounce off the ceiling, while well-meant, pious platitudes from Job’s counselors drizzle on our dank discouragement. Confusion mocks our former confidence, and monochrome half-light makes for a featureless landscape. Where is the signal, the breakthrough, the beacon, the landmark? Where is God at such times? What does he want of me? Why wasn’t I warned? Most elementally, how am I going to survive, to breathe my next breath, to pay the mortgage, to salvage my career, or my marriage? How can I know God’s will and seize His strength in my crisis of clarity? Can I still trust Him? Where do I take my broken heart? Where does a savaged soul find a friend, a train-wrecked hope get rescued, a bone-weary mind go to grasp truth? What will people say?
This book is about that kind of experience, that kind of world. This is the arena where the body slam is not some fake, Smackdown ballet. This is the real world, the creation which fell from innocence, and which manufactures complexity, pollution, fear and betrayal with unregulated inventiveness. This is the world where wind is knocked out of me, and no objective information can assure my spasmed diaphragm that I will ever breathe again. It’s the real world, the one every one of us inhabits, and—sooner or later—experiences with blunt force trauma.
In such a context, where we hear tales of twenty-two year old wizards spinning a dorm room inspiration into a billion-dollar bonanza overnight, or where motivational speakers promise surefire success and herculean confidence in five easy steps, and where spiritual mentors slather us with guaranteed victory, it feels utterly pedestrian and defeatist to simply and humbly focus on doing what this book is going to highlight: do The Next Right Thing (TNRT). Don’t shoot for the moon, or for your dreams. Collect the shards of your broken vessel to receive a few drops of sustaining grace. Our exhausted resilience, our stalled creativity, our fruitless theological spinning eventually forces all of us to this anaerobic simplicity. But God, in his counsel, repeatedly comforts and guides toward this trustworthy and available beacon. Don’t get ahead of yourself. In the crisis there is always The Next Right Thing to choose, however desperate it may feel, however incomplete and feathery its substance at the moment.
To resort to the simplicity of choosing The Next Right Thing in a time of confusion, pain, or crisis is not a defeatist concession to perpetual mediocrity, or faithless pragmatism. Nor is this a bumper-sticker solution, chirped in perkiness, with which to torment the troubled. Far from it! Despite how we may have contributed to our own trouble, or strayed from a wise trajectory, we can, at any point, choose to do The Next Right Thing. Failure to perceive this option, and embrace this corrective, is actually the prideful last choice of every fatal crash, unrecoverable financial debacle, and paralyzing personal defeat.
Stated positively and proactively, the ability and practiced life skill to simply do The Next Right Thing, is the very focus that makes a champion. How often we hear in the post-game interview: “We knew if we just concentrated on our game, and executed what we did in practice, we would come out on top.” Champions, whether in sports, or life, do not get ahead of themselves. They do The Next Right Thing (TNRT) in the context they inhabit. They live in reality, in sequence, in the now, moving and flexing in the dynamic tensions of change. Even when the next choice requires a course correction, or snail-like, incremental progress is all that is accomplished, the reiterated and trusting practice of choosing TNRT lays the groundwork for reward, progress, and ultimately, victory.
For my part, I know that there are so many things I don’t know, though I am a teacher, a student of scripture, and a mentor. I don’t know how to counsel a friend out of credit card debt in one simple, spiritual, gymnastic back-flip. I do not know the ultimate purpose God might have for the illness, or the unfairness, you have suffered. I have no watertight guidance system for constructing a roadmap for your career or your calling. I don’t know whom you should marry. I’m not sure if I’ve made the right investments for my own eventual retirement. I don’t know the future. I can’t even master the comprehensive data available to me today! I frequently feel overwhelmed by the mountainous piles of unread, unmastered data that surround every decision. Along with inscrutable fogginess regarding my own future, I vicariously participate in scores of other dilemma-ridden lives.
But I am learning to walk. That is, I am becoming more appreciative and restful with the pace of the ancients. They were pedestrians. Though “pedestrian” is used today as an adjective implying dullness, ordinariness, inanity, and mediocrity, the Bible uses it as a simple verb of faithful movement. We ”walk” with God. We are to “walk” by faith. We are admonished to “walk” in the Spirit. When we live and walk this way we are living moment-by-moment in dependence, relationship, and faith. And--here’s the key—we are progressing one step at a time. At this pace we are practicing instantaneous obedience to wisdom delivered in practical, incremental steps. When we walk in this way and choose TNRT, we demonstrate that we are humble, teachable, alert and available.
It is essential that this habit of TNRT not devolve into a formulaic bromide which replaces the majestic purposes of God, simply to make ourselves more comfortable, our lives more manageable, and our faith better insulated from risk. TNRT is by no means a diversion to keep busy so that we don’t have to think, or feel, deeply. Nor should this approach dumb down a thoughtful strategy toward participation in the mission of God, or miniaturize the majesty of the Most High and the incalculable nobility of serving Him. However, when you or I faithfully choose TNRT, with the emphasis on obeying the next “right” (God-honoring) counsel, are we not then allowing the living Lord Jesus Christ to be “a lamp to my feet” (Ps. 119:105 NIV), and walking with him, at a pace He has prescribed?
TNRT is not an elite, spiritual diet-and-exercise spa for the positive and energetic. It is an essential survival strategy when life body-slams us with crisis. Every one of us will plunge headlong into crises of our own making, and/or crash head-on into catastrophes churned up in a dangerous and fallen world. When the wind is knocked out of us in this crucible of sickness, accident, downsizing, and brute force, what are we to do? At such times we are not asking about the distant future, or parsing the nature of the Godhead. What we need to know at these moments is simply what to do next. What is The Next Right Thing? What is the next step? Is God still working? Is He pleased with me? Will I ever breathe again? Is there still a meaning to my life?
At such times we don’t feel heroic. We feel afraid, overmatched, and bereft of skill. We think in minutes, not months: the next breath, not Pilate’s conditioning. Life gets compressed, and options narrow. It isn’t just pilots strapped into thin-clad aluminum airplanes that experience this. It is all of us. And, the question is: “What do I do in this situation?” When not only my visible body, or measurable livelihood, or treasured marriage is at risk, but also my hopes, dreams and assumptions are crushed, what is left? What good is a faith that doesn’t keep me buoyant and aloft? How can I be a leader, or stay in the game, or sense any fellowship with God and others when a debacle is at my doorstep? When all the work, love, investment, or passion of a decade is put in peril by the next decision, how can I possibly do anything that is right, good, or godly?
Fortunately, our path as Christ-followers is well-trodden by men and women who simply walked, at pedestrian pace, as disciples. Their initial steps of faith became a reiterated march of obedience. This book echoes with the faith journey of such people: Peter, Paul, Abraham, Esther, Ruth, and Priscilla. Sometimes we don’t recognize these Bible heroes as peers, or pedestrians, because we have failed to see how scripture has compressed their lives into a few verses. We are seeing the video highlights, often on fast-forward, but sometimes the documented steps are three years, or forty years, apart. If we slow down to appreciate the sequences, the wide spans of time, and dwell on their real fears and tears, we will begin to recognize their earthy humanity. Then we will learn to imitate their walk, and participate with them in the story of God in this present world. Their peripatetic rovings instantly remind us that life is filled and kept full by retaining and savoring the droplets of guidance, the increments of obedience, the flickers of light which come as they obediently and sequentially chose The Next Right Thing. They walked. Nobody sprinted.
This book is for people like me who are not prescient, omniscient, or even lucid about outcomes. Moments in sequence are doled out to us daily. We notice the clock, but we don’t control time. We don’t know the future, but we have to act today, with inadequate, sometimes conflicting, information. We know a lot, but much of our knowledge seems as relevant as the weather in Bangalore. The pressing question is: “What should I do next?”
Weary warrior, fog-bound slogger, beaten runner, exhausted caregiver, there is more than a last gasp for you. There really is The Next Right Thing to choose. It is right. It is next. It is all God has given for now. That means it is good, and useful. It will keep you alive, hungry for more life, and intently teachable. This way of living is the opposite of complacency and nonchalance. This is life lived with the intensity of the apostles: storming heaven with prayer, savoring every delicious breath in the realization that it could be the last, and seeing God’s fingerprints in everything from the provision of daily bread to the prophecies of history’s climax. This is the way to live, because it is everything God deems to be necessary.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
DNRT
I admit I have had a skeptical and narrow attitude about blogs. I always wondered where these people find the time, or where they arrived at the presumption that everyone in the blogosphere would want to read their every brain burst. Now I’m joining them! However, I am doing this intermittently, almost solely as an exercise to keep me writing. So, you are merely an unwitting victim to my authorial aspirations. You may exit now.
However, if you choose to read, you will find most of what I am writing aims at the theme of Do The Next Right Thing (DNRT). I am speaking on the subject this summer, and writing on the subject for some as-yet-to-be-determined publication. But, not everything will be serious. Sometimes I’ll just afflict you with something whimsical, or a story that has no particular deep moral, except that it’s enjoyable to tell.
Such is the case with this bit of poetry. I’ve been thinking about it because some of us are preparing for the IronWorks Bicycle Tour (Sept 7-10). As you may know I have spent considerable time in the saddle over the past thirty-five years. I wrote this poem as I travelled through the state of Washington on a sabbatical journey by bike from Seattle to Missoula, Mt. I had a crummy map which did not alert me to most the huge climbs I would be making. And, one morning, leaving the little town of Twisp, I encountered the equally memorable pass called Loup Loup. The highway department had just spread a sealcoat of tar and gravel over the road, and that just added to my misery, frustration, and fatigue.
Somehow the rhythm and snarl of a poem by Robert Service came to mind: The Cremation of Sam McGee, and I put this down as my memory. It’s best read while chewing a cigar, or some beef jerky, with a hoarse throat from the dusty road.
The bike trip won’t be this tough. Sign up!
LOUP LOUP THEOPHANY
Heavy-laden leaving Twisp
Full on breakfast, spitting grit
From the tar and chips they spread down on the road.
Hung a left up Loup Loup pass
Dared the Devil brew his best
To defeat me as I lugged my pannier load.
He dealt thirteen miles of testing,
Six percent, deep knee-joint stressing
Made my eyeballs sweat and quads to burn like fire.
So, in full sweat by nine-thirty
As the white line shimmered, blurry,
I determined to make Lucifer the liar.
Churning in the breathless heat,
Up and up I made him eat
Every taunt he threw to make me give it in.
Not a pinhead spot of shade
This side of hell did shadows lay
Across the road that I sure swear began to spin.
When my nose hairs caught on fire
I knew then my straits were dire
And it flashed across my brain that I’d been had.
Then I saw the summit sign
And knew Victory was mine
And announced with swollen tongue: “That wasn’t bad!”
For as every biker knows
Though he aches from hair to toes
Somewhere deep this thought is rooted, crystal clear.
That though pain can cause confusion,
This is true and no illusion:
God lives at the summit and IT’S ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE!
7/6/98
DNRT,
Roger Thompson
However, if you choose to read, you will find most of what I am writing aims at the theme of Do The Next Right Thing (DNRT). I am speaking on the subject this summer, and writing on the subject for some as-yet-to-be-determined publication. But, not everything will be serious. Sometimes I’ll just afflict you with something whimsical, or a story that has no particular deep moral, except that it’s enjoyable to tell.
Such is the case with this bit of poetry. I’ve been thinking about it because some of us are preparing for the IronWorks Bicycle Tour (Sept 7-10). As you may know I have spent considerable time in the saddle over the past thirty-five years. I wrote this poem as I travelled through the state of Washington on a sabbatical journey by bike from Seattle to Missoula, Mt. I had a crummy map which did not alert me to most the huge climbs I would be making. And, one morning, leaving the little town of Twisp, I encountered the equally memorable pass called Loup Loup. The highway department had just spread a sealcoat of tar and gravel over the road, and that just added to my misery, frustration, and fatigue.
Somehow the rhythm and snarl of a poem by Robert Service came to mind: The Cremation of Sam McGee, and I put this down as my memory. It’s best read while chewing a cigar, or some beef jerky, with a hoarse throat from the dusty road.
The bike trip won’t be this tough. Sign up!
LOUP LOUP THEOPHANY
Heavy-laden leaving Twisp
Full on breakfast, spitting grit
From the tar and chips they spread down on the road.
Hung a left up Loup Loup pass
Dared the Devil brew his best
To defeat me as I lugged my pannier load.
He dealt thirteen miles of testing,
Six percent, deep knee-joint stressing
Made my eyeballs sweat and quads to burn like fire.
So, in full sweat by nine-thirty
As the white line shimmered, blurry,
I determined to make Lucifer the liar.
Churning in the breathless heat,
Up and up I made him eat
Every taunt he threw to make me give it in.
Not a pinhead spot of shade
This side of hell did shadows lay
Across the road that I sure swear began to spin.
When my nose hairs caught on fire
I knew then my straits were dire
And it flashed across my brain that I’d been had.
Then I saw the summit sign
And knew Victory was mine
And announced with swollen tongue: “That wasn’t bad!”
For as every biker knows
Though he aches from hair to toes
Somewhere deep this thought is rooted, crystal clear.
That though pain can cause confusion,
This is true and no illusion:
God lives at the summit and IT’S ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE!
7/6/98
DNRT,
Roger Thompson
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