Anchors

I made a startling observation yesterday. I was locking my bike to a bike rack outside of a grocery store, when I noticed the rack felt a little wobbly.

Upon further investigation I realized you would only need to unscrew a small bolt and the entire rack, plus whatever happened to be locked to it, would be yours!

This was slightly disheartening as I locked my $1500 cross bike to the rack and surveyed the parking lot for suspicious looking characters, of which I found many, but decided the convenience of leaving my bike outside the store outweighed the risk of potential theft.

This experience got me thinking about the false sense of security we take from all sorts of things: money, accomplishments, relationships, possessions, health, etc. But in the end these things are very similar to the bike rack - they appear secure but can and will let us down.

Hebrews 6.19 talks about the "hope we have as an anchor for our souls, firm and secure." The hope in this passage is that Christ has gone before us, reconciling us to God, and freeing us from the futility of anchoring ourselves to things that will not hold us.

I am constantly challenged to detach myself from those things that promise security but never deliver in the way God does.

Baggage

Is it possible to meet people without bringing the "baggage of the past" into our interactions with them? In other words, do we allow each of our encounters with others to be fresh, unstained by people's past shortcomings? 

This isn't to say we should return naively time and time again to a merchant that rips us off, or to a significant other who abuses us, but we should allow people to change. 

This might be a great opportunity to treat others as we want to be treated; to give people the benefit of the doubt. 

Many of those who have wronged us may have no idea how their actions affected us. In this way it would be unwise for us to assume that they are constantly malicious - that attitude would only increase the distance between us. 

The Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6 is followed by a line that should cause us to pause: "For if you forgive others when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive you."

Meeting others fresh, forgiving them for harm they have done us, is foundational to the health of our lives and our communities. May we have the grace and mercy to forgive as we have been forgiven.

Filling Space

Jesus tells a parable: "An unclean spirit goes out of a person, and it wanders through the desert looking for a place to rest, but it finds none. So it says, 'I will return to my house (the formerly possessed person) from which I came.' 

It comes, finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the person is worse off than before."

In the ancient world things were "unclean" that conflicted with the god one served. The Israelites for instance, considered other nations unclean because of their opposition to Israel's values.

Israel even had a whole slew of rituals in place to help a person become "clean" who had forfeited his or her purity by associating with things not "of God." 

The person in Jesus' parable did well by "evciting" the thing that was contradictory to the heart of God. But they didn't fill their life with anything else, and so they were incredibly susceptible to the things that drug them down in the first place. 

How many of us have seen this, either in our own lives or that of others? We give up something, become better for it, but don't take action to replace the vice with virtue and end up falling even further than before.

Here's to ridding ourselves of things that run contrary to the heart of God, and then filling those spaces with things that make us more who we are supposed to be.

Spelling Sin

Hebrew Letter Aleph

Hayt, is the most common word for "sin" in the Bible. When transliterated into English the word ends with a "T", but in Hebrew it ends with a silent Aleph, the first character in the Hebrew alphabet. 

Things like a silent letter in such a powerful word did not go unnoticed by the Rabbis, whose specialty was squeezing profound meaning out of the smallest details.

Rabbi Baal Shem Tov, who is considered the father of Hasidic Judaism, was once asked by a student why the letter is even in the word. 

The Rabbi responded, "We all know that Aleph is the first letter of the alphabet and represents the first cause, root, and essence of all existence - God." 

He goes on: "The letter Aleph is silent in the word for sin in order to teach us that when a person commits hayt it is a sign that God's presence is not being 'pronounced' in his life. The sinner has temporarily forgotten the Aleph of the world."

It is a struggle to place God at the center of my life. But the more I acknowledge the Aleph the more I feel I am living as I was made to live.

Quote from R. D. Zaslow's Roots & Branches: A Sourcebook for Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity Replacement Theology, and Anti-Semitism.

Don't Look Back

Pillar of Salt

The moment you start arguing you have lost the battle. This is standard teaching in the psychology of addiction. It shows the connectedness one has to the destructive activity or thought process.

I was recently reading the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the ancient cities that were destroyed by fire from heaven because of their depravity. I was struck by the main character's refusal to cut the ties to places that epitomized horrific dehumanization.

God sent angels to deliver Lot and his family from the coming destruction, and the text tells us he, "lingered" (Gen 19.16) - so much so that he had to be drug from his home. His wife is famous for being the one who looked back on the cities as they were being razed, and was turned into a pillar of salt.

A professor I know likes to say, "we humans are inherently addictable." It may be the control, the predictability, the physiological connection, but whatever the reason for the addiction, it robs us of our humanity.

This is a very serious subject and one that can hardly be touched in a blog post, but if you have recently taken steps to free yourself from things that were robbing you of life, keep prodding along and don't look back.

You are leaving a realm of bondage and are entering a life of incredible freedom (Rom 6.22). I have found that staying as far as I can from the things I justify as innocent, but know they will only drag me down, is one key to living freely. 

Catching Thoughts

What are you thinking? There is a great line in Paul's letter to the community in Corinth, where he notes that, "we take every thought captive to obey Christ" 2 Cor 10.5. 

The Greek word for thought, noema, means "facility of reasoning," and the one for captive, aichmalotizo, means "to get control of." 

So another way of saying it would be, "get control of your thought process."

How many of us are burdened by thoughts of self-doubt and insecurity? Of lies that we have been told about our bodies or our talents (or lack thereof)? 

How many of us entertain thoughts that objectify other human beings, dehumanizing them to feed lust? 

How many of us are constantly thinking about how much more important we are than everyone else?

How many of us give free reign to thoughts of anger and bitterness? 

How many of us spend far too much time trying to be someone we are not because somewhere along the way we were told we weren't good enough?

We all know the thoughts that tear us down and rob us of life, or build us up and rob us of life. Maybe a passage like this could become our mantra. 

Seizing the destructive thoughts that run through our minds is key to experiencing the life we are meant to live. And in the end, we all know we are so much better without them (Jn 8.32).