I was recently reading Galatians as part of my daily Bible reading, and it brought to mind one of the songs from my childhood: They’ll Know We Are Christians. I’m confident that everyone who went to a youth group in the late 60’s or 70’s instantly has the song playing in their heads. It was right up there with Everything to Me, Pass It On, and I Wish We’d All Been Ready in popularity. Younger people might want to check out the covers by Jars of Clay or For King and Country. Although the music was very much of its time, a part of me would like to see a song like that become popular again, because it had a message the church needs reminding of regularly.

You see, the song was inspired by John 13:35, where Jesus says, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (ESV).

Love for who? I know I’m supposed to love my enemies. I know I’m supposed to love the lost and share the gospel with them. I know I’m supposed to minister to the poor and needy. And, of course, husbands are supposed to love their wives.

Too often, we miss this crucial bit. John 13:34 is even stronger: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (ESV). We’re not just supposed to love our fellow Christians; we’re supposed to love them the way Christ loved us.

Too often, we just don’t, do we? Instead, we fight to get our way in the church, whether it’s a matter of having support for the ministry we want, disagreements about music style, or even just fighting over the color of the carpet. We gossip about each other. Sometimes it’s the straightforward, “Did you hear about . . . ” version. More often, we cloak our gossip in apparent piety with overly detailed prayer requests: “Please pray for the Whites. They are are going through a hard time with their daughter . . . .” If the prayer request includes sordid details, it’s much more loving and pious to stop at the first period. God knows the details of the need, and the whole church doesn’t need to know. Yes, specific prayer is good, but we really don’t need to know everything about everybody.

This failure to love and care for our fellow Christians is sometimes a monetary one as well. While many churches do have “benevolence funds” intended to help members in need, they tend to be limited. And it’s often easier to get people to give money for missions if the money isn’t “just” going to support the missionaries.

Is it any wonder that the world doesn’t associate Christianity with love? Perhaps we all need to work on putting these verses from Galatians into more consistent practice.

And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith. Galatians 6:9-10  (ESV)

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

Winter graduation ceremonies were held last weekend at my university. Graduation is always one of my favorite days. I love seeing excited students and meeting proud parents. I particularly like the fact that my institution encourages faculty and student interaction. Every student walks across the stage (well, halfway across the stage) and is greeted at the bottom of the stairs by the president, the provost, the dean of the college or chair of the department (depending on which one handed the student his/her diploma cover) and the faculty from the department that are attending. It makes for a great celebration.

However, there is some question about what is we’re celebrating. Certainly, graduation is an ending. For bachelor’s students, it’s the culmination of around 4 years of hard work. For many, it’s the end of formal schooling. It often marks the end of dependence on parents. For many, it marks a truer end of childhood than either the 18th or the 21st birthday. It’s the end of spending much time with the faculty students have grown close to. It’s often the end of spending much time with the friends of the college years. Close and long-lasting as those relationships often are, they frequently become long-distance relationships at graduation.

As much as graduation is an ending, college and universities don’t typically bill it that way. We hold “commencement” ceremonies. Much as we want students to look back with fondness on their years with us, we want them to look at graduation as the beginning: the beginning of true adulthood, the beginning of a career, the beginning of membership in the alumni association, the beginning of making your own money so that you can start giving back to your alma mater (a bit cynical, but true). Why? Well, we want successful alumni who do have jobs and are happy and successful and inclined to give of their time and effort and money. And people are more likely to achieve that success if they look forward.

The same thing, I believe, is true of us as Christians. We can look at that moment when we put our faith in Christ as a sort of graduation from earthly life into a life of faith in the spirit. And our success in that new life may depend a bit on which way we are looking. It’s good to remember where we came from and what we owe Christ, but we are not encouraged to dwell there. We are to be dead to our old selves and living a new life. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” II Corinthians 5:17 (ESV). “But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” Philippians 3:13b-14 (ESV).

I could go on with verses along the same lines, but I think it’s more important for us to think about what it means to look forward. Most importantly, I think it means not dwelling on what we did. Yes, we want to recognize the tremendous debt we owed and were saved from, but focusing on the details and realities of our sins will not make us stronger and will not bring us joy. It’s more likely to encourage us to wallow in guilt, which is never of the Spirit. Scripture says God no longer sees our sin once he has forgiven it, seeing, instead, the righteousness of Christ, so why do we waste so much of our lives staring at it? Instead, let’s spend that time focused on the one who forgave those sins and deepening our relationship with and understanding of him.

So we had to take the cat to the vet. Not for anything special, just her annual checkup and rabies shot. However, we did not enjoy the trip, mostly because she really does not enjoy the trip. From the moment she gets in the car until we are inside the vet’s office, she emits these plaintive meows every 2-3 seconds. Now the cat really doesn’t have anything to complain about. We don’t even put her in a carrier: she is sitting in my lap, her favorite place to be (yes, that is her in the picture, under my iPad). And she likes the vet just fine. There’s no complaining while we’re in the building. However, the minute we’re back in the car, she starts up again and cries all the way home, until someone opens the car door, at which point she races to the step up into the house and waits impatiently for a human to unlock the door and let her back into her house.

Some of you may be asking, “What do your cat’s issues have to do with your blog about faith?” Well, I think her primary problem is a control issue. While she is always willing to run out of the house and explore if an open door is left unattended, she hates being in the car and being moved by something other than her own muscles. Corners are especially distressing. It doesn’t matter that where she’s going is someplace she needs to go for her health (or back to the comfort and safety of her own home). She just doesn’t want to be taken in the car.

That issue with control is a problem that I think many of us share. We may want God to tell us where to go, but we then want to get there in our own way, often under our own power. We ask God to provide, but we want to see the provision in advance. We want to know that there’s enough for tomorrow and next week and next month and next year. We really would like to control when and how we hear direction from God, sometimes. I want to know why this happened, and I want to know it now. I want to know what my next job should be and when I should move on from this one, and I want to know that now. And when we don’t have the control we want, we don’t meow plaintively, but we do often worry and fret and pray the same demanding prayer over and over.

What we need to recognize is that God doesn’t work that way. God didn’t tell Abraham where to go: “Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” Genesis 12:1 (ESV). Most of us are familiar with this story, but we often don’t think through the reality of it, so let me paraphrase. “Leave the place you know and all but your closest family and start moving. At some point, we’ll get to where we’re going and I’ll tell you to stop.” Wow.

Then what about the children of Israel in the wilderness? When they complained about lack of food in Exodus 16, God sent manna and told them to collect just enough for that day (except on Friday, when they were to collect enough for the Sabbath the next day as well). He told them to eat all they collected that day and not save any, except on Fridays. Of course, some of them wanted to make sure they would have food for tomorrow and saved some, which went really well: “Some left part of it till the morning, and it bred worms and stank” Exodus 16:31 (ESV).

God is not interested in giving us control over our lives, at least partly because he knows we do it badly. Instead, he wants to walk with us and provide what we truly need right now as we develop trust in him. He wants us to trust him when he takes us places and we’re afraid. He holds us close, just as I keep my poor cat in my lap, and he promises us his strength. Let’s be smarter than the cat, and trust the God who created and loves us (and is really in control even when we feel that we are).

A few days ago, I had a conversation that shocked me a bit. I was having lunch with a friend and former colleague, and we were talking about future kinds of things. I told her that the job I had been head-hunted had fallen through but then mentioned a couple of other positions that I’m applying for, one of which is at a large a well-known conservative university of my denomination. Her somewhat negative reaction to my interest in that position surprised me. I know that she does not share my faith, but I thought she knew enough about me to understand that, while I might not agree with all that comes out of the mouths of well-known highly conservative evangelical Christians, that I am, in fact, a pretty conservative and definitely evangelical Christian. After all, she’s known me for at least 18 years; she has actually attended an event or two at my church when invited; and I’ve never hidden what I believe.

The conversation moved on, though she seemed distracted, until she suddenly asked, “Are you a creationist?”

I was caught a little off-guard by that, but responded honestly. “It depends on what you mean by that. I certainly believe that God created everything.”

“But, recently?” she asked.

Now this threw me into murky waters. I don’t pretend to know when and how God created everything. The arguments that the days of creation have to be 24 hour periods seem a little specious when there wasn’t even a sun until Genesis 1:14. I also tend to think that we are always on dangerous ground when we find ourselves saying, “God had to.” If that’s grounded in his character and firmly Bible-based, it might be okay to say. Otherwise, it’s usually foolish. On the other hand, there is the whole “evening and morning” thing. My own person speculation is that God is a great storyteller who may created the universe just as the action was getting started (with Adam and Eve) but with a backstory (all of the evidence, but not spending the time). Of course, since God is outside time, maybe he created in such a way that some of those seven days were really, really long. The two things I am certain of are that God did it and that all of the scientific evidence does agree with that reality when fully and correctly understood.

There was no long pause in the conversation. I stumbled through a probably less coherent version of the above paragraph, and concluded by explaining that I do believe that the Bible is basically word-for-word true, that I certainly believe that people like Job and Jonah and Adam and Eve were real people and that the things the Bible says happened to them really did happen.

My friend looked at me a bit oddly and commented that maybe the university we had been discussing would be a place I would fit in.

So here is my quandary. Have I been that bad at sharing who I am and what I believe? Or has she been ignoring the evidence I have presented?

I don’t know.

I suspect, really, that it is some of both. She certainly knows that I claim to be a Christian, that I take Christianity serious,  that I attend church regularly, that I’m a missionary kid, that I reference God and Christ more comfortably than most. But I don’t know that I have ever been as clear about my beliefs to her as I should be. On the other side, there is a tendency in a university setting for people to assume that no one really believes that the Bible is true in its entirety. There are a surprising number of church-goers among the faculty who actually don’t believe that at all, many who don’t believe in fundamentals like Christ died to atone for our sin. So I would not be surprised if she had ignored some of the evidence about my beliefs simply because no professor at a state university could actually believe that, could they? She has just realized that at least one of them (and I do know several) actually can.

I guess the real question is what do I take from this moving forward. There was a sense in which my light was shining all along, but was I allowing it to be hidden in part by my circumstances? Do I need to speak more clearly of my faith in these relationship with non-believers or people I suspect are only nominally Christian? I think the only answer there can be yes: I need to be more intentional about sharing what I believe when opportunities arise.

I don’t know what will come of my recent conversation, but I pray that it is God’s way of opening a door to talk of spiritual things. Please pray with me for the courage and calm to speak very clearly in a way that this friend can accept if that door opens.

but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect I Peter 3:15 (ESV)

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Many Christians like to show a picture of strength to themselves and the world. We point to verses like Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (ESV). We believe that we should be able to stand strong, and we often present a facade to the world and even our fellow church members that hides (or tries to hide) our weaknesses. Then we consider ourselves failures because we don’t live up to our pretense of strength and perfection. And when others see the weaknesses, they may be turned off by hypocrisy.

The sad thing is that we often get to this place with good intentions and a desire to follow God. So what goes wrong, and how do we avoid the traps?

As always, take my answers as one set of thoughts from my understanding the Bible. I would never pretend to have all of the anfswers for any of the topics I discuss.

I believe that one of our first mistakes may be that we tend to look at Philippians 4:13 out of context. Paul is talking about coping with circumstances. Look at the preceding verses: “Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need” Philippians 4:11-12 (ESV). Thus, the “all things” Paul mentions in verse 13 is doing what must be done and adhering to Christ in all of these different circumstances. We know that he hasn’t changed the subject because verse 13 continues to talk about the Philippians ministering to Paul in reduced circumstances, which is what had led him to this speech.

Am I arguing that we can’t do all things through Christ outside this context? No, but I think that we see the verse out of context and focus on the first half of it and lose sight of the second half. We were never intended to be able to do much of anything without Christ. And Christ, I believe, expects much of that strengthening to come through his body, the church. When we hide our weaknesses from our fellow Christians, we deprive ourselves of the opportunities for strength and growth that are the whole point of the church.

There’s another verse that I think we sometimes misuse to our detriment in this area. That would be I Corinthians 10:13: “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (ESV). Too often we think that this verse means that we should be able to stand strong in the face of any temptation. As a result, we allow ourselves to stay in tempting situations, and then we berate ourselves for giving in to the temptation.

But Paul is not saying that we should be able to stand strong in the midst of a tempting situation here. In fact, his point is the exact opposite. He says that God will provide a way of escape. If we don’t take that escape, then we open ourselves to the temptation. The context of this verse is also important. Paul is speaking very specifically to the Corinthian Christians who believe that they are strong and above those who are weaker and have issues with eating meat that had been offered to idols. Paul is warning them that they need to be careful about getting too close to idolatry. It’s one thing to buy meat in the market and not worry about where it came from. He’s say that it’s a very different thing to go and eat in a pagan temple and believe that you won’t get drawn into the idolatrous activity there. Similarly, if alcohol is a strong temptation, a bar is bad place to hang out. If you have issues with lust, maybe you should avoid being around scantily clad people of the opposite sex when possible. Resisting the devil so that he will flee from you looks more like walking away from the offered temptation than it does becoming immersed in it.

One other comment about strength and I Corinthians 10:13. Some people lose sight of the topic in this verse (temptation) and will say that God won’t send us anything we can’t handle. I don’t believe that’s true. He won’t send us anything that he can’t handle, but sometimes he does allow sorrow and pain to come beyond what we can bear. I believe it is always his intention that we turn to him and rely on him completely because only he carry us through such circumstances. However, I think it’s much easier to turn to God in those circumstances if we don’t feel betrayed because of a misunderstanding. God will provide a way of escape for every temptation, but there are other things he may allow to come to us that will overwhelm us and leave us utterly dependent on him alone.

Photo by Cyril Saulnier on Unsplash

There’s a song I love by Scott Wesley Brown named “When Answers Aren’t Enough.” It makes the point that whatever we’re going through, Jesus is always there and he’s way more than just an answer. That has been a valuable reminder in the past few weeks as I’ve watched tragedies unfold.

Some of those tragedies you’re all aware of: the shooting in Las Vegas, the truck in New York and the recent church shooting in Texas. These events leave us stunned and asking once again those questions about why God allows people to perpetrate such violence, in some cases against his own. In the midst of all of this public tragedy, my family has been dealing with its own private pain. One of my relatives has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer: one of those situations where the doctors all say there’s nothing to be done but to try to ease suffering until the end. Given that she is in her sixties, that’s enough of a source of grief, but she will leave behind two grandchildren that she’s been caring for since their mother’s death a year and a half ago. That leads even more to that temptation to ask why? After all, no human will caused this suffering.

I trust in God’s complete plan that he knows why he has allowed these things to happen and how all of them will ultimately “work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” Romans 8:28b (ESV). However, I don’t think that “why” is what we need today. I think we sometimes miss the comfort we are offered by getting caught up in the desire for understanding.

I believe there are two things that we truly need as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death that we are all walking through in these days. The first is to know and learn to recognize that God is here and he truly cares. The psalmist says “I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me” Psalm 23:4b (ESV). He doesn’t say evil isn’t there: it is. But God is also there, providing guidance (the rod) and support (the staff). Many are familiar with the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept” John 11:35 (ESV). However, we forget to look at the context and recognize the point of the verse. Jesus has no personal reason to be sad here. Yes, one of his good friends, Lazarus, has died. However, Jesus knows what’s going to happen. He knows why Lazarus had to die. He weeps in shared grief with Mary and Martha and the others of the village. I don’t think we will ever fully understand why the self-sufficient God who created the universe allows himself to be moved, even grieved by our pain and suffering, but he does. And he knows when we need support rather than correction and direction or answers.

The other thing we need, equally important but definitely second in chronological terms, is perspective. I think for some situations that can be earthly perspective: the one that reminds you that you’re dealing with first-world problems. I have an email from my sister that I used to use for that one. She was living in a ger (or yurt) in a nomadic village in Mongolia, and this email describes the process of washing clothes in the winter in those circumstances. It was very effective in reminding me that many of my struggles are just not that bad.

Of course, when we face not the struggles of daily life, but rather life changing and life taking circumstances, the perspective we need is not earthly, but heavenly. In earthly terms, it really is that bad. This Monday, God used the Facebook Memories feature to remind me of that heavenly perspective. A post popped up from six years ago in which I had quoted 2 Corinthians 4:17-18: “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (ESV).

Those verses can be hard to read and hard to believe. What we’re going through doesn’t feel light and momentary. But it is. Our lives themselves are light and momentary from the perspective of eternity. And when we can learn to see the world around us from God’s perspective, at least a little bit, when we begin to recognize the unseen glory that awaits us, then we can find the strength to walk on in the pain of this life, leaning fully on the support God provides.

So Halloween was yesterday, raising the perennial question of what a Christian response to the holiday should be. My husband and I have struggled and discussed and found our personal peace, so I thought I’d just share my own thinking in relation to the dilemma.

It seems to me that there are aspects of the All Hallows Eve traditions that a Christ follower should steer well clear of. The Bible is pretty definite on subjects like witchcraft and divination and the exist of spirits that are inimical to human beings. Exodus 22:18 makes the point about magic use rather dramatically: “You shall not permit a sorceress to live” (ESV). Deuteronomy 18:10 reiterates: “There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer” (ESV). Some might say this is just the Old Testament, but note that Paul lists sorcery (witchcraft in some translations) among a list of “works of the flesh” in Galatians 5:19-21. The list ends with the warning that “those who do^[b] such things will not inherit the kingdom of God” Galatians 5:21b (ESV).

It seems to me that if God is serious about his people avoiding witchcraft and sorcery, we should take that seriously today. We should recognize the reality of the spirit world and the danger of trying to manipulate or foresee through use of that spirit world.

So where does that leave us. Halloween certainly has relationships historically (and, for some, today) with that spirit world. My personal belief is that we need to be very careful to avoid involvement with those relationships. Is it a sin to dress in a traditional witch costume? I don’t know; I personally don’t really think so, but I don’t know. I’m sure that trying to cast a spell is wrong. Is pretending to cast a spell wrong? I don’t know. I think it might have to do with what your audience may think. I am pretty certain that dressing in costumes that aren’t related to the occult and going to door to door asking for candy is not a sin. I’m also pretty certain that handing that candy out is not a sin.

But what about the accoutrements, the decorations, the gore in many cases, the deliberate frightening aspect of haunted houses and the like? I would offer that I become more and more convinced that these are things that Christians should be careful about involvement in. First, there’s the purpose of them. 2 Timothy 1:7 says that we were not given a spirit of fear. So what does it mean if we deliberately involve ourselves in activities meant to scare us or others? We’re told to set our minds on things above Colossians 3. In Philippians 4:8, we’re call to think about “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise” (ESV).

I’ve come to think that while much of Halloween and the activities associated with it may not actually be sinful, much of it does fall into either activities that aren’t profitable for our growth as Christians or activities that can fall into Paul’s discussion in Romans 14 about activities that can cause others to stumble even if your faith is strong and they won’t harm your own walk.

This is one of those things that I believe every Christian has to work through for him or herself, but my own household is going to keep handing out candy but stay pretty clear of the other elements associated with the holiday.

As an introvert, I usually get home from work with a desire to hide from the world for a while. I’ve dealt with people all day long, and I’ve had enough. There are even times while still at work when I start to get frustrated with all of the meetings and coffees and casual conversations in the hall and people leaning in to my office to find out if I “have a minute.” (Note that a minute is always at least a quarter hour long.) After all, I have important paperwork to do. Right now, I need to finish drafting the Fall 2018 class schedule, write a description of a proposed program, review and edit the slides for an upcoming advisory board meeting, gather and report a bunch of statistics on our various programs, write up reports from about six recent classroom observations, and several other things that are not immediately coming to mind. And that excludes several email responses I owe people.

All of that is important. It’s all stuff that actually affects people, both students and faculty. And I’m going to shut my door for a portion of the day tomorrow to get some of the most urgent part of it done. But the reality is that when I start resenting the people who are getting in the way of my finishing the paperwork, I’ve lost sight of what’s important. Because God is not about the paperwork. God is about the people.

How do I know that? Well, there are a lot of clues in the Bible, but the most recent sign of it I ran across was in reading Romans 16. That’s the last chapter of the letter, and the end is a beautiful doxology, but the first 15 verses are a bit slow-going: somewhat reminiscent of various passages in the first five books of the Bible such as the genealogies.

In these verses, Paul is talking about a bunch of people. First, he tells the Romans a bit about the person carrying the letter, and then he greets a lot of different people by name. Some of those people are kind of familiar to us from other parts of the New Testament. Prisca and Aquila are the Priscilla and Aquila with whom Paul stayed in Acts. Rufus may be the same as the Rufus mentioned in Mark 15:21, a son of Simon of Cyrene who helped carry the cross. But most of these names are not familiar to us; many don’t appear anywhere else in the Bible.

So what’s the point of having all of these names listed? For that matter, what’s the point of all of those long lists of names in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy? Why should we take the time to read them? Why are they part of the inspired word of God?

While I am sure there are reasons I don’t understand yet, I would offer this one: they demonstrate to us that God cares about the people. Every one of those names represents someone who matters to God as an individual. If we can take nothing else from such passages, we can take comfort from knowing that the God who cared enough to have that person listed for posterity cares just as much about us as about the people whose names appear in the Bible.

And, I think, we should take those lists as a reminder that the people matter. Yes, it is important that I get the Fall 18 schedule drafted by the deadline and that I do a good job of it. That will impact 800 or so people next fall. But I can’t forget that it is also important that I take the time required to stop and listen to whatever individual is asking for my attention, because that person is important to God and must, therefore, matter greatly to me.

I have a very clear memory of my reaction to a church service during my second year of college that made me very unhappy and probably solidified my decision to change churches. I was already frustrated with the new college minister and his wife (more on the subject of God’s attitudes toward women another day), but the final straw was a sermon by the new pastor. He announced the passage the sermon was on and made his first point. I proceeded (in my arrogance) to jot down a pretty full outline of the sermon and then got more and more annoyed as he preached the exact sermon that I had just outlined.

In my next letter home, I complained to my parents at some length with the theme that there’s no point in wasting my time listening to a sermon when I obviously already knew everything the pastor was going to say. My very wise mother made the point that it was a good thing that the pastor was preaching the passage accurately and that being reminded of things could be good. I left that church soon after despite her advice, but I have later tried to remember that sometimes we do need repetition, whether we like it or not.

And, really, we don’t always dislike it. I, personally, love rereading favorite books. I used to read Pride and Prejudice once a year. Other favorites I would read whenever I got the chance. I remember staying up all night rereading The Lord of the Rings as a teenager because my family was spending a weekend at the house of friends who owned the trilogy when I didn’t yet.

We seem to be born with a love for repetition. Infants and toddlers will do the same thing over and over as they figure out the world. Rereading is a must for them. I remember sitting with my first son on my lap reading the same book over and over. He used to grab the book when I finished, turn it over, and say “‘gain” most emphatically. His record was 10 times in a row for the same book.

Children want and need the repetition as part of their learning process. As adults we often become less tolerant of repetition, especially of things we know, or things we think we know. Nonetheless, repetition is still something we need. As we read the Bible passage again, we often glean new insights, whether because we read more carefully, because God helped us reach an understanding that we haven’t had before, or because our experience has made something more relevant.

I’m currently in Deuteronomy for my Old Testament reading. Of course, the book is a repetition as Moses tells the Israelites who are about to enter the Promised Land about everything that has happened as he led them out of Egypt to Mount Sinai and then to Canaan and then out into wilderness for 40 years of wandering and finally back to the Jordan River.

Why? Why include this book that is largely a rehash of Exodus and Numbers?

I think there are a number of reasons, but I’m going to offer two for consideration. First, as I reread the opening chapters this time, I was struck at how much the voice and personality of Moses come through in this book in a way that they don’t in the previous books. Moses tells it like it is from his perspective. It’s kind of entertaining, and I think it’s a reminder that God made us all as unique people with personalities. He’s not interested in a bunch of robots. Walking closely with God won’t erase who we are: it will make us the best version of ourselves.

The other reason I want to offer is that Deuteronomy is a reminder that we do need to hear it again. The Israelites knew all of the stories. Most of them had been children or not yet born during the initial exodus, but they had heard the stories. However, they need this formal big reminder of all that God had done for them (and all that they had done wrong) as they prepared to take the next big step and to lose the only leader they had known during this forty years. This should serve as a reminder to us that we need to re-hear truth, that we need to re-visit the story of God’s work in our lives. We should never get tired of hearing the gospel, because it is the center of what God has done for us.

So how am I doing these days? Better. I won’t claim that I never get bored with a sermon. And I certainly don’t prefer sermons where the pastor tells you what he’s going to tell you, then he tells it, then he tells you what it is that he just told you. However, I am doing much better about having an open mind and trying to hear the truths that I didn’t get before or that I have forgotten or that I just need to be more focused on.

So there was a lot of moving going on at the end of September in my world. We helped move one of my sons and his wife from St. Louis to Baltimore. The same weekend, a family from our small group moved from here in Normal to Las Vegas (now there’s a life change). One thing I know for sure about both of those trips is that there was a lot of praying going on. The other thing I know for sure is that things didn’t go smoothly.

Our move was a do-it-yourself all the way: not even a rental truck, though there was a rental SUV involved as well as the purchase of a few good packing boxes. The kids had been living on a shoe string for years and had saved for new and better furniture after the move, so they donated what was worth donating and threw the rest away and managed to squeeze their lives and the cat into their two cars and the SUV. This, of course, took quite a bit longer than anticipated. The really interesting part came when the transmission on one of the cars started having issues while we were still in Indiana. So we end up driving the long way to the Motel 6 in Richmond, IN (which takes cats and is very clean, if a bit Spartan).

Of course, the next day is Sunday, so the closest rental place that is open is in Dayton, OH. The kids get the car and drop off the other at the Ford dealership. By the way, that dealership was great. If you ever need one in the vicinity of Richmond, they were wonderful. We get on the road around 11 am, knowing that we have to reach Baltimore that night because my son starts his job there on Monday morning. That day was less eventful, but my daughter-in-law had never driven in mountains before, and there are certainly some crazy drivers on I-70, so we were all pretty stressed but very grateful to reach the hotel safely that night.

The story continues with an “Available Now” apartment that wouldn’t be ready until at least the next Sunday. You may remember that there’s a cat and a bunch of stuff involved, and the kids now have to drive back to Richmond to get the car and drop off the rental over the weekend.

By all accounts the other move happening was even more harrowing. Sick kids, a snowstorm, a car stuck in the snow at one point. Sounded like quite the adventure that I would want to avoid.

So here’s the question: where were all those travel mercies that were being prayed about?

There are some practical answers to that question. My kids are safely in an apartment (a different apartment than originally planned). The cat survived their absence and didn’t wreck the new place and is beginning to settle in. The transmission was still under warranty, so the only extra cost was the rental car, and the kids say they’re currently under budget for the move plus furniture. And the other family is safely in their new home as well.

But still the angst and exhaustion and pain and frustration are real.

I don’t have the all of the answers, but I think there are a few. The first is the basic flaw in believing that Christians lives will or should be smooth. “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” John 16:33 (ESV). This is partly about tribulation because we are Christ followers, but it’s also just about trouble because the world is imperfect in its current broken state. “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another” Proverbs 27:17 (ESV). A lot of the issues we faced had to do with people being imperfect. Iron sharpens iron in a way that would be painful if the objects could feel. It is sometimes painful for us. God cares about our character, not our comfort; our holiness, not our happiness. So he’s not going to prevent things that bring pain but may bring growth with it.

However, I really appreciate all of the people praying for those travel mercies. Can you imagine if the transmission had just quit on the highway instead of allowing us to limp on to a dealer? Or if any of those scary moments that felt like near accidents had turned into real accidents? Keep praying, folks. We don’t always get to know all of the good that our prayers do, but we do know that the God we pray to is good and cares for us.