about days

As we pulled up to a red light, with my sons in the car helping me with church errands gathering items for our monthly mission to feed the homeless in Las Vegas, the car in front of us had a white bumper sticker with large red lettering; it read, “LIFE SUCKS.” In Las Vegas there are countless moments as a parent chauffer where you shudder at the thought of what your children will read or see while driving to church, a friend's house, or shopping. This particular sighting did not cause me to say our prophetic cry, "Look away." My heart simply began to race as I watched our youngest mouth the words to the bumper sticker, look thoughtful, and then ask, “Dad, what does 'Life Sucks' mean?”

"For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed." Psalm 139:13-16

Lord, what will we continue to become? Are the days you have formed for us always full of change and wonder? What is in a day formed by you?

The days formed by God create powerful change. The weight and pressure of every day create moments of transformation, especially as we choose God’s good and perfect will. As we choose to do God’s will, the bible becomes a gift of God’s ideas and plan for our lives helping us to continue following God. Following God pulls us through the days formed for us in the strength of God’s will, often dragging us into a world fighting against God’s perfect desire of love. When we choose to go outside of God’s boundaries of grace in the daylight hours, we run into the weight of the world fighting against God’s formative existence. Sometimes, as we live within God’s grace, life manages to create its own will of confusion and destruction tearing at the day God created for us. With daytime being created in God’s perfect will, and with the struggles of sin so prevalent, it is deep wisdom calling us to follow God in the midst of life.

When people choose to not live in love, we crash against a day formed in unconditional love, grace, and forgiveness, given in the selflessness of God. The struggle of life is between our choices and God’s formed days. The great effort is to keep within God’s grace, no matter the choices of the world against God. Giving into God’s will against the pressures of the day; giving into the weight of change evident with every day’s problems and opportunities and struggles and celebrations as they are interpreted in God’s will of love; giving into every day created by God, transforms and shapes us.

We are challenged in our faith and shaken to our core with tragedies completely opposite to your will (the death of a child, the announcement of disease, tsunami’s or hurricane’s destruction, lines of hungry and homeless at food shelters, abusiveness in a home, etc…). These evils we did not choose, these the world chose against God, and we are trampled in the midst of these choices. The choice to follow God becomes a choice of anguish and distress and we are scarred. Are these the days you formed for us; days of great pain and suffering, tragedies and sorrow supporting imperfection and sin while we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God? Are these days one lament after another crying out a liturgy of “life sucks?”

For those of us who struggle, we have a God who promises created days long before we were born, and those days are perfectly laid within the foundation of God’s love for the world. The choices nestled within this created day in God’s perfect will become a struggle in formation as we follow God’s son; a struggle for new life and new humanity in the Christ. The world in sin only sees itself and its only action becomes what it can take from an other. Our struggle is against powers and principalities that are against God’s perfect will, while we live to glorify God and do God’s will. Life is what is happening as we follow God; eternal life carries the scars of this life’s choices radiating God’s glory of being good and faithful servants. The imperfect world enclosed in a perfect will, the infinite attached to the finite, create moments of empowered struggles where we are shaped and formed into God’s likeness. These days have been created so God may be glorified and God’s perfect will can be experienced. The world is then transformed under the pressure of God’s grace; a relentless transforming grace no matter what the world chooses.

I told my sons, “You know where were going this afternoon, right? To feed the homeless. Well, for some of them life isn’t going so well and this bumper sticker talks about how difficult life can be. It's also a reminder that we need to help people, and show them life is also full of love.” They said, “Cool.”

Just a thought,

Pastor Tom