Category: Christian Spirituality Blog

Awakening to Love

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality BlogLeave a comment

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Quite frankly, love is something that everyone on planet needs.  We all require to both receive and to give love.  But not everyone has a heart open to accepting love, and, so, find it nearly impossible to dispense love.  However, the good news is that love is near to each one of us.  We only need to reach and touch it because it is so close.

We have all likely heard the dictum “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”  Even if we have not used the phrase, the concept is common throughout the world.  Perhaps the chief hindrance to receiving and giving love is this reciprocal notion.

For example, much of Western society turns on the wheels of transactions.  This is seen in the many words we have for money and financial exchanges:  bills; coins; cash; credit and debit cards; stocks and bonds; bank accounts; 401k; paychecks, etc.  You get the idea.  We can scarcely imagine a culture without putting something into an account so that we can engage in commerce and consumerism.

None of this is neither inherently bad or good; it just is.  A problem arises when people allow the idea of transactions to seep into relationships.  When a person chooses to view the world primarily through the financial lenses of a transaction, we set ourselves up for a deficit of love.

It works something like this:   A parent invests time, money, and resources into a child’s life.  Mom and Dad do everything they can to set up little Johnny for success in this life (which, by the way, is often defined as getting a good paying job someday and being financially independent).  But when little Johnny decides to go all avant garde and does not live up to his parents’ expectations, their reaction betrays the transactional: “Look at all we did for you, and you repay us by not going to college and running off to do only God knows what!?”

Put in the context of a workplace, some bosses are only happy when the employee is producing and making money.  Management doesn’t understand why workers are upset.  Paying them more money doesn’t seem to do it.  They only see the transactional view of the world.  In the realm of personal relationships, we sent a Christmas card to that family and they never sent one back, and that makes us mad.  When it comes to God, we went to church, kept our nose clean and were ethical, and now something terrible happens in our lives.  We think God did not make good.  We invested in this God thing and He didn’t follow through with the transaction to give us the good life.

But God operates in a different economy.  Grace trumps transaction.  Grace is the gears and the grease of God’s love toward us.  The good news of Christianity is that God loves us, even when we have nothing to give, and even when we are far from the words and ways of Jesus.

“Christ died for us at a time when we were helpless and sinful.  No one is really willing to die for an honest person, though someone might be willing to die for a truly good person.  But God showed how much he loved us by having Christ die for us, even though we were sinners.” (Romans 5:6-8, CEV).

It is likely that all of us, at some time or another, have felt the sting of someone else’s disappointment with us.  They “invested” in us in some way.  We “repaid” them with a decision or a different direction than what they expected.  Or, it went the other way.  We put time and effort into someone or a group of people, and they didn’t come through for us (e.g. and ironically, pastors and church volunteers often feel this way).

The first step to awakening to love is to forsake a transactional view of relationships and adopt a gracious approach to people and to God.  God is gracious, merciful, and kind.  It isn’t just what He does; it is who He is.  He gives love because He is love.  Until we get that basic understanding, we will flounder in our human relationships because true love will forever be elusive due to the transactional view.

Grace is the most effective way to the world of love, and the best way to the good life.  Yet, surprisingly, this is at no cost to us.  What are we to do?  Give yourselves to God, as people who have been raised from death to life.  Make every part of your life an offering to God.  Don’t let sin keep ruling your lives because you are ruled by God’s kindness and not by the law of the transaction.  Awaken to love because God is love. (Romans 6:12-14; 1 John 4:8-11)

Letting Go

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality BlogLeave a comment

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Across the street from where I live is a small old cemetery.  Each morning, after arising, I go to the large patio window facing the old tombstones and I am reminded of the brevity of life.  Yes, we all shall die.  From dust we came, and to dust we shall return.  But the daily look at the graveyard is much more than a future reminder of what awaits us all; it is also a very present call for me to die to myself.

One way of looking at our lives is to discern that it is a pilgrimage into the inner depths of our souls.  As we move within, there is a great need to put away selfishness, arrogance, and the hubris of settled certainty about everything.  When I became an adult, I discovered that life was not all about doing whatever I wanted (as I so naively thought as a kid).  Instead, life was also full of responsibilities, stewarding my work, school, and relationships.  I found that if I was to do anything well, it involved a significant degree of death to self.  When I married my lovely wife, I quickly discovered that marriage was a whole lot more than sex and being fed grapes from a beautiful woman while lounging on the couch.  Instead, it was a new journey of dying to my expectations and learning to meet the needs of this other person.  And, just when I thought I might be getting a handle on this new way of life, I became a father.  Now my whole life seemed upside-down caring for this helpless little baby girl that only screamed and pooped if she was not sleeping and eating.  My goodness, more death to self so that I may care for another.

I could go on and on with this motif of death (the Apostle Paul certainly did! i.e. Romans 6).  Caring for others as a pastor; becoming a grandfather; being attentive to the great needs of society and the world; it all involves being reminded each day that the cemetery awaits me.  As I write, the Christian Church is well into the season of Advent.  The coming of Christ is quite the fascinating and gracious reality.  If you think about it, Jesus could have just appeared on earth.  He could have shown up as a fully developed adult ready for his ministry.  Jesus could have circumvented the whole thing about experiencing the pain of growing and learning.  But, instead, he came to earth through a woman.  The King of the universe gestated in the womb of Mary and was born in humble circumstances.  He was a baby, a child, a young man, and a teacher and Savior.  Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered (Hebrews 2:10-18).  And then he died.  But death could not hold him in the grave.

When I look at that old cemetery I am also reminded of a bigger picture, and a larger portrait that God is painting.  I am daily learning, even now, to continually die to myself so that Christ might live in me.  He must grow and gestate within, overtaking me so that His life might be preeminent.  More of Him, less of me.  He must increase; I must decrease.  But out of that death to self, something extraordinary and supernatural occurs:  resurrection to a new life.  Someday, just as Christ came in his first Advent, He will come again in a second Advent.  The graves will open.  With the presence of Christ in me, I shall rise again, just as He did.

There cannot be a resurrection without a death.  All great spiritualities have in common the need to let go.  Christianity just puts it in the frame of dying to self and living for Jesus so that the world will be blessed by encountering the great truth that He is Immanuel, God with us.

The graveyard does not have the last word.  It is a daily reminder that I must die.  But it is also an abiding picture that new life is possible through death, both in this life and in the life to come.

The Gift of Tears

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality BlogLeave a comment

the gift of tears

“Jesus began to cry.” (John 10:35, CEB)

I believe that one of the tragedies of our contemporary Western society is that far too many people cry alone.  Their tears go unnoticed by others.  They cry in secret.  The fact that people tend to apologize for their tears in public testifies that we are uncomfortable with weeping.  Maybe it’s awkward because we can’t explain the science of crying – it’s just so darned subjective and based in emotions and feelings.  Maybe it’s ignored and denigrated because crying is viewed as some sign of weakness.  After all, real men don’t cry; and, women who cry are just irrational (so says much of the culture).  But I think there is a more sinister reason for such a paucity of tears in our society:  We are more and more lacking the ability to empathize with others.

We see natural disasters destroy people’s lives, and we don’t cry.  We see terrible human carnage in mass shootings, and we don’t cry.  We see statistics on the staggering numbers of sexual abuse and assault, and we don’t cry.  We see war across the planet with both soldiers and innocents killed, and we don’t cry.  Instead, we use these very real human calamities and catastrophes to advance our own political agenda.  We opine and drone on about how things should be, all the while adding to the carnage with unfeeling words and calloused hearts.

I submit to you that a significant reason a person like Jesus was not racially bigoted, constantly grumpy, blindingly selfish, and aloof toward the needs of others is that he had the ability to cry on behalf of others.  Perhaps we have a crisis of virtue, bravery, truth, and concern for the common good today because we are not in touch with the need to cry on behalf of others.  Jesus said, “Blessed are those mourn” (Matthew 5:4) because he knew the power of tears.  Crying not only cleanses our own souls but also the griefs of others. It connects us with people’s pain, and does not let us remain detached to the brokenness of the world.  God’s stamp of approval is on those who are able to cry, to weep, to mourn for others.  Godliness is not found among the opinionated arm-chair politician.  Instead, heartfelt weeping and wailing over the hurts of humanity is next to godliness.

Prayer, then, becomes not a means of presenting my wish list to God but the vehicle whereby I mourn the sins of the nation; intercede for my enemies; offer petitions for those who mistreat and persecute me; and, flat-out cry for the many people who are now experiencing the pain of living in a broken and fallen world (Matthew 5:44).  A lack of civility and gracious discourse betrays a terribly sad lack of prayer for others.  One of the greatest gifts we can give to other people, whether we like them or not, is to cry for them, especially if they cannot cry for themselves.

We are told in Holy Scripture that the Spirit himself intercedes in prayer for us with groans that words cannot express (Romans 8:26-27).  If the Blessed Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit cry over the world and its inhabitants, then we have all the theological reason necessary to be about the business of weeping.  It is tears, and not so much words or social action that will cleanse, purge, and wash away the ills and evils of our current moral dilemmas.  One of the beautiful things about this is that without exception every single person has the biological equipment and the image of God within to cry.

If we find ourselves unable to do this important activity of crying, then this is where we need to allow another person to cry on our behalf.  And that takes sharing your story with another person.  Is there a trusted person for whom you can share your story?  Have you ever shared your story with God?  Can you imagine God crying over you and groaning over the wrongs done to you by others?  Are you willing to listen without judgment to another’s story?  Will you allow yourself to stop biting your lower lip and let the tears flow?  Will you see tears as a gift from God?

Living in the Present

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog1 Comment

living in the present

“You are worried and distracted by many things.” (Luke 10:41)

This statement may have been said by Jesus two-thousand years ago, but there is probably no better sentence that perfectly encapsulates today’s modern society and individual angst.  It’s almost as if we have a collective case of ADHD and cannot focus on the present moment.  I’m a time-oriented kind of guy.  Whenever I get into the mode of obsessing over the clock, my wife starts calling me “Left Brain.”  I can get so caught up in what is going to happen next, and how the future is going to shake-out, that I get worried and distracted.  Such a fascination with minutes and seconds only brings a real inability to live in the present.  There is no good end to living in the future because I just fret over what will or could happen.  I end up with the left brain compulsion to plan, strategize, and connive over every possible contingency that could ever happen.  Just so you know:  I’m not fun to be around when I get into my extreme left brain mode.

But that’s not the end of it.  If I get my left pea brain out of tomorrow, then I reflexively boomerang to the past.  I lie in bed and dig into my past like a determined archaeologist, trying to find lost words and ruminating over conversations that could have gone better.  I utter expletives about myself that I would never dream of saying to another person.  I play judge and jury, hanging both myself and the dolts who I let wrap me up like an Egyptian mummy.  That kind of stuff only erodes and ruins the soul.

One of the telltale signs that a person is living in either the past or the future is that they incessantly misinterpret and misread the present.  Adverse circumstances become personal crises, instead of an opportunity to become a better and stronger person.  Suffering gets billed as an evil to be fixed, instead of a chance to use it to improve the lives of others.  Other political or religious viewpoints get vilified because I, after all, don’t need to change, instead of me being the one in need of rethinking my presuppositions.  Football players kneeling is an offense to the country, instead of a wake-up call to the daily misfortunes of others different from me.  Faith is all about expunging my past and giving me future heaven, instead of a real relationship with God in Christ which is meant to grow, develop, and morph into a concern for living in the present moment.

Yes, we are a society worried and distracted by all of our insecurities, financial investments, cultural hegemony, and personal agendas.  We are so busy doing things important to us that we miss the present opportunity to connect meaningfully with the Jesus who loves being with us.  Instead of enjoying the moment with God, we, like Martha of old, want some help from Mary and some recognition for all the good busy work we have initiated.  Martha misread the situation of Mary sitting at Christ’s feet and, in essence, blurted-out:  “Jesus! Don’t you give a damn that I’m in here working for you while that slacker Mary is kneeling!?” (Luke 10:38-42).

Perhaps it sounds counterintuitive that in sitting down we become active, and that in being active we become distracted.  It only seems paradoxical because of our obsession with both the past and the future.  Today, maybe even right now, Jesus wants you to be with him.  The grand spiritual discovery of life with God is that, by making Jesus the center and focus of our lives in the present moment, our past and our future comes into proper perspective.  What we do begins to have real purpose and meaning, more than just trying to get by to the weekend, and more than only lamenting the past.  Time becomes our ally and simply a tool to accomplish the will of God in the present moment, rather than a hard taskmaster exerting it’s dominion over us.

It has always intrigued me that Jesus accomplished so much in three short years of his life on earth.  I have scoured the gospels trying to find a Jesus rushing to the future or regretting the past, but he never went that way.  He was always in the moment, fully engaged and fully present to the people around him.  And it all came from his own relationship with the Father, which he completely centered his life around.  Not once did Jesus get the label “Lord Left Brain.”