Godgrown

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  Mark 8:03 am on March 19, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

  Rotting Food is Okay 

     Reading from John 6:27: “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you…

   Yesterday as with most weeks, we picked up our produce box, and upon bringing it home, we began putting the fresh produce away into the fridge.  As usual, there were one or two old, limpy-looking goods from the previous week we had to take out of the fridge to throw away.  I always get frustrated when this happens – I watch as money we’ve worked hard to earn gets put in the trash as merely rotting food.  What a waste, what futility!  What is the point of such hard work and toil!?  This passage above says that there is a food that perishes, and an eternal food.  How do I work for this better, eternal food?  How will the Son of Man give it to me?

     “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?  Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”

     It is WORK to believe.  To believe is to WORK. How profound – I take this to mean that we are fighting and striving…not to reach salvation, not to win over converts and have the best apologetic argument…but to simply believe.  It is a struggle, like all work it can wear you out.  But this is the paradigm-altering, mind-bending, heart-wrenching work of belief.  The belief that there is a God.  That this God is conscious and aware of the plight of a tiny blue planet.  That this God is benevolent and infinitely interested in the welfare of the human race.  That this God attempts for thousands of years to regain an intimacy first intended and experienced between Creator and created, to only meet resistance and failure at every step.  Finally, this is the work of believing that this God sends his very self into the finite man, Jesus Christ, offering a pathway back to intimacy.

     This has ramifications for my day job by the way.  It changes how I work out my beliefs in the marketplace.  My work for eternal food affects my work for temporal food.  Now I’m not so bothered by food when it perishes, I’m not undone when I see markets tumble or housing prices collapse.  My life’s worth is no longer wrapped up in my job, and if I lose my job, I am not without identity and intimacy…I am not without belief.

     Work to believe.  Work to trust.  Seek first the Kingdom and his Righteousness, and all these things will be added to you!

  
   

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  Mark 9:27 am on February 1, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

  The Strands in Your Web 

  We’ve all been there.

  Look back over your life and remember the last time you fully experienced passion - something that caught your heart by surprise, gave you purpose – a sense of mission and higher calling.  Put that feeling of conviction and excitement in your mind?  Okay – good, read on…

  Now, if you can, think back to the moment when that passion was first doubted.  When did you go from pure certitude to…maybe an unmet expectation, or conflicting evidence of how you understood how things should work?  When, after receiving that divine sense of calling, did you run up against someone of importance in your life who disagreed with you or even sought to stop you in your tracks?  Maybe it was a parent subtly but condescendingly pushing you away from your intended college major and into something they wanted for you.  Maybe it was a boss dismissing your dreams for the future of your business as misguided.

  How did you respond to that first bite of doubt?  That sting of original uneasiness with your own beliefs?

  Hebrews 11:24 –

   By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, 25choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. 26He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. 27†By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. 

  What happens to a person who has seen “him who is invisible?”  For Moses, it was after 40 years of shame and isolation, away from his Israelite family, exiled from Egypt — an exiled prince! — he had every right to be in the royal family, but he has a passion - he had a reason to buck the trend…

  …and it cost him all the status quo due him in life, but that made all the difference.

  He was not focused on the anger of the king, on the doubt of his Egyptian subordinates, or his Israelite brothers, sisters, cousins… He was fixed on the passion, the original passion that found him in the wilderness – he had such a sense of his own calling, of his own intimacy with that calling, that nothing and no one would stir his fear or doubt.

  We all go through life with a web of convictions – some stronger than others.  As we learn more about the world and how it works, certain strands in the web are broken, new ones are formed (i.e. as a child, we learn that we cannot fly when we jump off the stairs in a cape).  This process continues all throughout life, and its an important part of building a cohesive sense of TRUTH in the world.

  But what strands CAN’T be broken?  Are they all susceptible to pressures from the outside – from the wind and debris that inevitably blows through our fragile webs?  I feel that I want to be stronger than that – on certain things – I am learning what those things are – and resolving myself to those certain strands help me allow less important strands to be let go of – opening my heart and mind further to the truth of things.

  Its all about becoming passionate about the right strands in your web – choose wisely, and you’ll have passion your whole life long.

  

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    Anonymous 1:32 pm on February 21, 2012 Permalink

    very cool, marcos. i like the idea of strengthening some strands in order to let go of the weaker ones. don’t spiders even clean their webs and deconstruct them when they’ve served their purpose and remain only tatters? i’ve often thought of passion as a shallow and fleeting feeling similar to romance (not just the love kind, but the life kind as well). the further i get from my adolescence of youth rallies and church camps, the less i’ve felt this sort of passion in my faith, but i think the kind you’re talking about, almost a quieter kind, has replaced the former. 

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  Mark 7:24 am on April 21, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Not Complex, Just Difficult 

  A friend of mine recently mentioned,

  “The solutions to the biggest problems in life will not be complex, only difficult.”

  This is SO true.

  When we look at the brokenness of our world, from the savage violence in Libya to a father abandoning his family to cling to his drink, you get the sense that things are very, very wicked – and turning this burning ship around will require more than well-crafted policies or enticing tax incentives.

  There is no law that will make me love my neighbor as myself.  There is no external motivation that brings me to my knees in prayer.

  We have been trying to end poverty, war, hunger, homelessness, spousal abuse, gang-violence…well, the list goes on and on.  The evening news shows begins each night with “Good evening…” then tells you all the reasons in the world why it isn’t!

  But that’s not the end of the story –

  The solutions to the world’s biggest problems…to the biggest problems in your own life… are not complex rules or well-managed institutions…no, they are quite simple…they are just difficult.

  It is not a matter of the head figuring out the solutions – it is now down to a matter of the heart.

  Can we trust our neighbor?

  Can we love them?

  Can we forgive them…and ourselves?

  Can we love our family as God loves them?

  Can we offer troubled youth a place in our family before they are sucked into the vortex of a gang?

  Can we rend ourselves of our wealth so that urban food deserts disappear?

  When Jesus quoted, “There will always be poor among you,”  he was hoping that his disciples would be convicted by what was obviously an ironic and tragic reference to Deuteronomy 15:4-11, The text begins: “There should be no poor among you…” Is Jesus misquoting Scripture?  Is he confused?  No – he’s making a point; that the end of poverty comes not with well-crafted laws of tithing, but by overcoming one’s self-centered selfishness.  ”There will always be poor among you,” was a rebuke of the disciples.

  “Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.” (Deut. 15:11)

  Did a command do the job? Did that verse end poverty at the stroke of a pen (or chisel as it were)?  No – there were plenty of people in Jesus’ day that were poor – thousands of years after the Law of Moses was written.

  Jesus knew this problem, like so many others in his world, and in our world today – can only come from overcoming the most difficult hurdle in the world — the human heart.

  

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    Jay 5:14 am on April 22, 2011 Permalink

    Life would be easier if I could disagree with you.
    The comfortable interpretation that says — since they will always be there what’s the rush, why bother, nothing can really be done about it, Jesus said so — just doesn’t cut it. If he was rebuking his poor disciples, what would he say to us with our opulence?