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| "You don't understand now, but someday you will. After you have your own children."
I couldn't tell you how many times I have heard my mother say this. Sometimes it's spoken like a threat, a just-you-wait prophecy of karmic certainty. Sometimes it seems like an plea to just obey, to wait for the time when I will finally understand why things must happen the way they do. Sometimes it's filled with an air of resignation, as if consoling herself that even stubborn and rebellious children will eventually appreciate all that their parents do.
There are some realities that can't be understood until they are tasted, some metaphors that can't be meaningful unless they are embraced with the knowledge of experience. In the past six months, I have understood more of God's heart and His relationship to the church than I would have in six lifetimes without knowing this one reality - marriage.
An Instinctive Kind of Love
I love my father, I love my mother, I love my brothers and my sisters (all four of them!). It's an automatic, instinctive (and some might argue, genetic) kind of love that causes me to be concerned for their well-being and allows me to endure their faults (some more than others... ahem). I really wasn't given much choice in the matter. Even if they disowned me and I them, the pattern of my DNA - the very blueprint of my physical existence - would forever testify to the relationship between me and them.
I like to think that the DNA-based kind of love is analogous to the relationship that Adam and Eve had with God before the fall. It was instinctive, it needed no explanation, and it bound them down to the very nature of their existence. It was a natural result of being created in the image of God, in the same way that we are born in the image of our parents.
And then, the fall (Genesis 3). It was a cut so deep, a betrayal so complete, that even the spiritual DNA of our existence, the formerly immovable testament of our relationship to God, was damaged. Humanity became an offense to God, and He was unknowable, untouchable to us.
An Intentional Kind of Love
I love my husband. There is nothing automatic or instinctive or genetic about it. We were born with no instinct binding us together, and nothing compels me to endure his faults. And yet I do my best to be patient, to serve, to encourage, to forgive... to fill a space devoid of biological ties with a fullness of devotion and affection.
God filled a breach of this kind when He sent Jesus. A DNA-less, instinct-less, senseless, unreasonable, unequal, insurmountable, infinite divide. There was nothing desirable about us, and He had no need for us. Apart from us, He is. Apart from Him, we are desolate. What compelled Him to reach out to us, orphaned in our depravity, and say, "Come be a part of Me again"?
It's a new kind of love relationship. It's intentional, conscious, purposeful. It requires effort, but its reward is intimacy previously unknowable, satisfaction formerly intangible. It's the security of knowing that you chose me and I chose you, and the choosing was for... forever. And for those who want to deal in theological subtleties, it was, "How could I not choose You, You having chosen me?"
The Husband and Wife (Ephesians 5:22-33)
There is nothing better than following Jesus. The more I live, the more I experience, the more I am convinced of this. In the context of marriage, following Jesus has resulted in amazing peace, deep intimacy, and shared joy.
The difficulty is that obedience to the teaching in Ephesians doesn't come naturally. I don't want to be subject to anyone. I am instinctively critical, impatient, and proud. It's easy enough to get away with it when I'm by myself - I store up all my critical, impatient, proud thoughts in my head and walk around thinking about how fantastic and competent I am compared to everyone else.
With my husband's constant presence in the equation, though, all of my weaknesses are exposed. What I think and say actually has an effect on him and on our relationship. So I have a choice - I can cling to the selfishness that comes so naturally to me, or I can follow the leading of the Spirit to be more like Jesus. In choosing the latter, I find myself naturally submitting - first to the authority of Christ, and then by extension, to the authority of my husband.
The wife is to be subject to her husband, and the husband is to love his wife as he loves his own body. Being married has also allowed me to see the latter half the equation, to be on the receiving end of a wholehearted, passionate, intimate love. It's the kind of love that every woman craves, the kind of love that puts to shame the shallow, pale shadow of romance offered by movies and television shows.
If you will indulge me for a moment, it can be captured in two statements:
She says, "I respect you."
He says, "I adore you."
Together, they make the relationship complete.
Christ and the Church
All this to say, I think I understand this metaphor better now. I feel like in just six short months of marriage, I have learned something about the nature of love - God's love for us, our love for Him, the passionate jealousy and possessiveness of a lover, the binding together of something that was once separate, and the willingness to lay down oneself for the sake of another.
It is, as Paul says, a great mystery indeed.
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| Tonight at dinner I contemplated the head of a fish. A pompano, to be precise. In the absence of my mother (since I got married, you know), I bore the responsibility for picking the last slivers of tender meat from the skeleton.
As I maneuvered my chopsticks into the cracks of the skull, I couldn't help but feel a smug sense of satisfaction in the... Asian-ness of it all. Certainly this is an experience rarely braved by bak guai, with their deep fried Filet-O-fish, tuna salad, and - if they're being really adventurous - salmon burgers.
Bits of bone ground against my teeth and my lips tingled with soy sauce and ginger. I felt triumphant, euphoric. Oh, fish! If you had known what heights of rapture could result from the tearing of your flesh from your carcass, would you have resented your death less?
I paused in my self-indulgent philosophizing as I prodded at the gelatinous mass that encapsulated one eye. Opaque from cooking, the eye gazed back at me. It was unafraid.
How many Chinese uncles and aunties delight in grinding the eyes of a fish between their teeth? Too many to count. But I imagined Itachi reaching out his hand to pluck Sasuke's eyes out, to obtain the immortality of his Mangekyo Sharingan. I scooped the eye out of its socket, balanced it on my chopsticks, pondering. It still watched me, unblinking.
I set it down on a plate. I couldn't do it. And just like that, my victory melted away before me. My euphoria dissipated. As if I haven't eaten stranger things before! I felt weak. Shameful, even - like I betrayed my culture.
I turned the head over, plucked the other eye out, and set it down. Great, now there were two looking up at me. I picked the rest of the fish's head clean, but the eyes remained on my plate, and what otherwise was victorious felt... hollow. Artificial. Incomplete.
I have been vanquished by the head of a fish.
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| Let your speech always be with grace, as though seasoned with salt, so that you will know how you should respond to each person. [Colossians 4:6]
Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear. [Ephesians 4:29]
In the age of the internets, acronyms are ubiquitous. Given the verses above, do you think it is appropriate for a Christian to use acronyms online that represent phrases with unwholesome meaning? Particularly disturbing to me recently is the common use of "FML." It's tossed on casually to the end of a statement about something going wrong... but does using the acronym make you feel like you haven't crossed a line that you would if you actually wrote out, "Fuck my life"? Is the latter undesirable where the former one is not?
Discuss. | | |
| From The Silver Chair:
Then came the Witch's voice, cooing softly like the voice of a wood-pigeon from the high elms in an old garden at three o'clock in the middle of a sleepy, summer afternoon; and it said:
"What is this sun that you all speak of? Do you mean anything by the word?"
"Yes, we jolly well do," said Scrubb.
"Can you tell me what it's like?" asked the Witch (thrum, thrum, thrum went the strings).
"Please it your Grace," said the Prince, very coldly and politely. "You see that lamp. It is round and yellow and gives light to the whole room; and hangeth moreover from the roof. Now that thing which we call the sun is like the lamp, only far greater and brighter. It giveth light to the whole Overworld and hangeth in the sky."
"Hangeth from what, my lord?" asked the Witch; and then, while they were all still thinking how to answer her, she added, with another of her soft, silver laughs. "You see? When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children's story."
"Yes, I see now," said Jill in a heavy, hopeless tone. "It must be so." And while she said this, it seemed to her to be very good sense.
Slowly and gravely the Witch repeated, "There is no sun." And they all said nothing. She repeated, in a softer and deeper voice. "There is no sun." After a pause, and after a struggle in their minds, all four of them said together. "You are right. There is no sun." It was such a relief to give in and say it.
"There never was a sun," said the Witch.
"No. There never was a sun," said the Prince, and the Marsh-wiggle, and the children.
For the last few minutes Jill had been feeling that there was something she must remember, at all costs. And now she did. But it was dreadfully hard to say it. She felt as if huge weights were laid on her lips. At last, with an effort that seemed to take all the good out of her, she said:
"There's Aslan."
"Aslan?" said the Witch, quickening ever so slightly the pace of her thrumming. "What a pretty name! What does it mean?"
"He is the great Lion who called us out of our own world," said Scrubb, "and sent us into this to find Prince Rilian."
"What is a lion?" asked the Witch.
"Oh hang it all!" said Scrubb. "Don't you know? How can we describe it to her? Have you ever seen a cat?"
"Surely," said the Queen. "I love cats."
"Well a lion is a little bit - only a little bit, mind you - like a huge cat - with a mane. At least, it's not like a horse's mane, you know, it's more like a judge's wig. And it's yellow. And terrifically strong."
The Witch shook her head. "I see," she said, "that we should do no better with your lion as you call it, than we did with your sun. You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You've seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it's to be called a lion. Well, 'tis a pretty make-believe, though, to say truth, it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world. But even you children are too old for such play. As for you, my lord Prince, that art a man full grown, fie upon you! Are you not ashamed of such toys? Come, all of you. Put away these childish tricks. I have work for you all in the real world. There is no Narnia, no Overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan. And now, to bed all. And let us begin a wiser life tomorrow. But first, to bed; to sleep; deep sleep, soft pillows, sleep without foolish dreams."
I cannot help wondering - if Eustace and Jill had been able to explain nuclear fusion, would they have been more convinced that there is such a thing as the sun? If they had recalled lectures on electrostatic forces and nuclear forces, hydrogen and helium, thermal radiation - would they have been more able to counter the Witch's dismissal of the sun as nothing more than a glorified lamp?
Or, if they had recalled that the domestic cat and the lion both belong to the family Felidae, but one is Felis catus while the other is Panthera leo, and thus they are not the same at all, would they have found it easier to dispute the claim that a lion is just a large domestic cat?
I think we often fail to distinguish between the things of heaven and the things of earth because we do not understand enough about either to see clearly. When we don't take the time to learn the things we ought to know, it is easy for the enemy to muddle right and wrong, to make sin seem like righteousness, and to disguise pride and folly as justice and fair play. The things of earth seem no different than the things of heaven, and we wonder why we carry a cross when others around us seem to have no such burden.
How do we learn more? How do we understand more deeply? How do we see more clearly so that we can put aside the lies and lusts of this world and faithfully do the work which has been set out for us to do?
Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; in addition to all, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Ephesians 6:11-17 | | |
| From a previous post: "How much do I really believe that God's way is ultimately more satisfying than the world's?"
Not to be excessively indulgent in my own thoughts (which is something I tend to do... sometimes), but this is something that I've been thinking about... well, since March 2008, apparently. It goes something like this.
God promises that obedience to His commandments is blessed, both generally and in very specific instances (Deuteronomy 28:1-14, Psalm 24:4-5, Malachi 3:10, John 13:12-17, James 1:25, etc.). Obviously, we all disobey (Romans 3:23). So there is this constant struggle within a Christian, who on one hand is promised blessing poured out on a life lived in obedience, but on the other hand must also struggle against the ever-present lust of the world and the sinful desire of the flesh. How do we choose one or the other? When we are faced daily with the choice to flee or to indulge, to forgive or to be bitter, to love or to hate, to have compassion or to judge, to be humble or to be haughty, in those moments when we have to profess Christ or deny Him - the choice of obedience or sin comes down to a question of faith.
First, do you have faith enough to believe that God will bless you if you obey?
Second, do you have faith enough that God's blessing is worth having?
The first tends to be more of an intellectual exercise for me - I believe God is faithful to Himself, and having promised it, He will bring it to pass.
The second is a more unknown quantity. In some cases, as in Malachi 3:10, God very specifically tells us how we will be blessed for a particular kind of obedience. In other cases, as in James 1:25, we are simply promised... blessing.
I don't know about you, but when I am faced with temptation, vague and nebulous assurances of blessing are not concrete enough to find sure footing on. Being an engineer, I like things stated in quantitative and definite terms. If you obey, you will have a quantifiable increase in happiness; if you obey, your career will prosper; if you obey, your children will be safe. Of course, God generally gives us no such assurance, and often the ways in which I find myself blessed are somewhat unrelated to the act of obedience that brought them about (assuming the connection between the two is even that clear, which it rarely is). This is where I have come to understand the importance of faith.
I'm not talking about the faith to believe in God and the redemptive work of Christ on the cross. That has to do with salvation, which of course is of ultimate importance - but I think that Christians get stuck on that, to our loss. We think that faith is a one-dimensional thing, a one-time decision that has little to do with how we live our lives. We end up with people who profess Christ but are children of the devil, indulging the desire of the flesh, ignoring the Word of God, and wondering constantly in the back of their minds why Christianity isn't more exciting, more fulfilling.
The secular world calls all kinds of things "faith based" - initiatives, organizations, programs... there is this idea that faith is central to all that we do as Christians. What does that look like?
Faith looks like obedience.
Take the example of Abraham, the father of Israel, the one to whom righteousness was credited because of his faith. Sometimes I forget that as Abraham was taking Isaac up the mountain, when he was laying his only son on the altar, he didn't know how God would provide, how God would bless. We know the ending of the story now, but he didn't. All he knew was that God had promised him descendants through Isaac, and that God would be faithful to His promise. That faith was great enough to overcome the simple fact that a dead son produces no grandchildren, much less fathers a multitude.
That's what blows my mind - that Abraham had no idea how it was going to happen, he just believed that it would - because God said it would happen. It is much more difficult for me to obey in instances when the reward for obedience is not clear - and this is most often the case.
Another example is Moses. In the book of Exodus, God tells Moses to leave his flock of sheep and go to Egypt to bring the Israelites out of slavery. God said, "Certainly I will be with you, and this shall be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God at this mountain" (Exodus 3:12). As in, go do this, obey Me, and then after you have obeyed, taken on Pharaoh, risked your life, endured the scorn of the people you rescued, then at some point in the future you will finally receive confirmation that what you did, you were in fact supposed to do. And Moses went.
Reading through Hebrews 11 brings this discussion to new clarity. Why did all these men and women act as they did? It was because they believed something about God and the work that He had to do. Most of them never even saw the fruit of their obedience (v. 13, 39-40), and yet they suffered all kinds of persecution and scorn for their faith. Forget being threatened with execution - my faith isn't even great enough to compel me to stand up for Christ when all that's at stake is my reputation. In the face of temptation, the thought of God's blessing is far away and the appeal of sin is real and near.
Sometimes, in a moment of guilt or courage, we take obedience for a test run. We stand up to temptation. And then we grow tired, because no man notices or praises our efforts. We don't wait to see, or sometimes we don't even bother looking for, the fulfillment of God's promise of blessing. We certainly don't have the vision to look forward to blessings to be received in heaven (Matthew 6:1-6). We decide it's nice that Jesus saved me, but now excuse me while I live my life as I see fit.
Faith. Faith is believing that God's way is better, that God will bless, and that God's blessing is worth having. Faith is trusting in God's blessing even when we don't know when it will come or what it will be. Faith is believing that a life lived in obedience will be blessed beyond what we can ask or imagine, simply because He is God and He is faithful to Himself and He knows what we need.
God, my flesh craves sin and disobedience. I believe that if I obey You, I will be blessed. Even though I do not know what this blessing will look like, when it will come, or if I will even recognize it, but I trust in Your promise and believe that Your way is better than my way. Give me the strength to be like Christ in this moment and the faith to believe. | | |
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