Many people around the world can only buy food with the change we might have in our pockets. So in response, my girlfriend and I have chosen to eat as they would eat for the next month and a half (until Easter). A few months ago, I was challenged by a preacher from Memphis. He emphasized the true immensity of God's heart for the poor, hungry, needy, afflicted and suffering. But I didn't know exactly how to respond.
Then my girlfriend brought up this dollar idea just a couple days ago. (Oddly, I had just read the beginning of Romans 12: offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.) I'm not a super-Christian. I just want to worship God more fully and rightly, and this seems to fit with God's heart.
This blog will now be on hold until Easter. I will instead be documenting my experience on this blog, starting February 6. Laura and I want to be able to look back on this to remember what it was like.
Parents always seem to remember the story of their child's birth. However stressful and painful the months of pregnancy and labor, it's worth every minute to hold the tiny life as he takes his first breaths. The joy in that single moment must be indescribable.
Of course, that single moment doesn't always come. Sometimes the baby never takes his first breaths. Here's a video story created by one woman who birthed a stillborn child five months ago:
This morning I ran across a related part of Isaiah that had hit me hard about a year ago. At the time, I was spending a week in South America preparing to lead a team of college students to Santiago for the coming summer. We went to build relationships with the Chilean college students and walk our lives with Jesus among them. We prayed that they would want to walk with Jesus too.
The planning trip was overwhelming and disheartening. I seemed to hit brick walls everywhere: with people, with housing, with language, with my own fear. I tried everything I knew, but nothing was working out right. It brought me to the point of tears. Then I read these words of the prophet Isaiah:
As a woman with child and about to give birth writhes and cries out in her pain, so were we in your presence, O LORD. We were with child, we writhed in pain, but we gave birth to wind.
Giving birth to wind--that's exactly how it felt. I was undergoing the pains of labor without the joy of the child's breath. It hurt, and it made me confused.
That's when I realized that I was trying too hard to do things in my own power. Only God himself could undertake the task. Only the Spirit could give birth to spiritual things.
As I cried out to God in frustration and bitterness, I remembered a verse in Romans 8, my favorite chapter of the Bible. It reads:
"And by [the Spirit] we cry, 'Abba, Father.' The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs--heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory."
I still hurt, but knowing that I would one day share with Christ in glory was comforting. No matter the pain (hardship in South America, the loss of a child, or any number of sufferings), this is the gift for those who believe. As Jesus says in the book of John:
"A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy."
We will no longer give birth to wind one day because of Christ.
I have wrestled with the concept for many years now.
This afternoon, I was reading in Romans. Chapter 9 is, in my opinion, one of the heaviest parts of the entire Bible. The Apostle Paul outlines God's sovereign purpose in election, saying that "God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden" (9:18).
In the very next chapter, Paul goes on to talk about our initiative in sharing the gospel: "And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, 'How beatuiful are the feet of those who bring good news!'" (10:15).
So God is fully sovereign in writing His word on our hearts, yet I am also told share the gospel? If God is sovereign, then why would he need me to share--or would my sharing even matter? And if I share, am I somehow assuming that God is not sovereign enough to change hearts himself?
This was my honest wrestling back and forth. It left me frustrated and bitter.
Then I read a book by my now favorite theologian, J. I. Packer. In his book Evangelism & The Sovereignty of God, he address this antimony (the apparent contradiction between equally necessary and correct principles).
He writes, "The Creator is incomprehensible to His creatures. A God whom we could understand exhaustively, and whose revelation of Himself confronted us with no mysteries whatsoever, would be a God in man's image, and therefore an imaginary God, not the God of the Bible at all. For what the God of the Bible says is this: 'My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways... as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.'"
Suddenly it made sense that it didn't make sense. It left me humbled and awed. Even now, as I think on the words of the Apostle Paul, J. I. Packer and the God who spans the history between them, I am humbled and awed yet again.
Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.
I am a 23-year-old finishing my journalism and psychology degrees at the University of Kansas. I enjoy hiking, reading and having long talks over coffee.
