looking through me

Tag: faith

March 2, 2015

real time

“Undaunted, Moses prayed, and he kept on praying for forty days and nights.”[1]

Forty days.

That’s real time. I get that. But for some reason, I gloss over time when I read. It’s not that I don’t read the words; it’s more that I forget to attach meaning to them. I read “forty days,” and I replace it with a mental flip of the calendar. I move past it in the split second it takes to read the words.

Somehow I miss forty days is a real span of time. It’s the six weeks I spent backpacking through Europe. It’s roughly the time between Thanksgiving and New Years.

And when Moses prayed for forty days for God to spare the Israelites after the golden calf debacle, those forty days were just as real.

But once I remember to give weight and importance to the length of time, I have to remember it wasn’t a finished story; it was a present reality. They were living it in the moment. The outcome was still a mystery.

When Moses lay prostrate before God neither eating nor drinking but pleading with God to spare His idolatrous people, he did not know what the answer to his prayers would be. And yet he prayed for forty days and nights (Deuteronomy 9:18). It was after forty days that God showed mercy.

There was no guarantee going in. On day five he was hungry and dehydrated, and he didn’t know if God would relent. On day twenty-two when the people were still down there with their man-made baby cow statue, what was he thinking? What about on day thirty-seven—was he feeling frustrated that he wasn’t the one who sinned and yet he was still praying with no answer on behalf of others?

Have I prayed for anything with a fraction of that faith and perseverance? I take silence as ‘no’ way sooner. And even when I pray for things over a period of time, it’s never with that intensity or confidence.

“Undaunted, Moses prayed, and he kept on praying for forty days and nights.”[2]

A dauntless pray-er . . . in real time. One minute at a time; one prayer at a time. That’s how I need to read it. That’s how I want to live it.

 

 

[1] E.M. Bounds, E.M. Bounds on Prayer, (New Kensington: Whitaker House, 1997) 16.

[2] Ibid., 16.

 

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February 22, 2015

communion

I grew up with a clear understanding of the symbolism inherent in communion: the bread and cup represented the body and blood of Jesus.

I started thinking about blood today. It can symbolize life, family, guilt, death. There’s a grittiness to it . . . even goriness. Yet that’s not what I usually associate with communion. I do think of the death aspect; though more often I think of the sanitized, alive aspect. My new life.

But blood is real before it’s a symbol.

It is messy. Blood outside the body tells a story. Something happened. Often it is evidence of grievous injury or loss of life.

Yet, when I think of communion and Jesus’ sacrifice and my salvation, I’m more comfortable picturing the tidy little plastic cup carefully and precisely filled with grape juice. I see it with light from the stained glass windows of my childhood filtering through it and smell the pleasant, fruity aroma. I don’t picture the dark, near-opaqueness of blood. I don’t picture blood streaming from a shredded back or dripping from a pierced brow or flowing from feet and wrists. I don’t inhale the sickening smell of too much blood and not enough life.

But today I did.

I held my broken piece of bread and my cup and remembered a real flesh-and-blood man who chose to die a brutal death that I might live. His nerve endings sent frantic messages to His brain letting Him know it was physical pain He was experiencing in addition to the spiritual separation from His Father and the emotional ache of abandonment by His friends. He could have opted out, but He loved them—He loved me—enough to endure each second and minute and hour of agony.

Yes, there is joy to communion, and light, and hope—there should be. But there should also be the gravity of what the symbols in my hand represent and recognition of what they cost.

It wasn’t a cheap salvation; it can’t be a cheap sacrament.

 

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