Tag: human condition

Straddling Two Worlds

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality BlogLeave a comment

“You are not far from the kingdom of God.” (Mark 12:34)

It really sucks being sick, no matter what the particular illness is.

I realize those may be strange words coming from a tenured and ordained church pastor and hospital chaplain. Nevertheless, it is a truism which far too many people know about intimately.

Yet, there might be something even worse than the devastating effects of one’s own ill health – whether it be cancer or a cold, epilepsy or constipation – and that is the awful grinding reality that someone you love dearly is suffering beyond what you can do for them. If you could take their place, you’d do it in a heartbeat.

And, honestly, many, if not most, people are in one of those situations right this very minute – either needing care or being the caregiver.

As I was walking through my neighborhood last night, as I often do after the day’s sunset, I couldn’t help thinking about all my neighbors inside those lighted rooms. Every single person, I felt and knew in my bones, was going through some sort of illness that’s impeding the quality of their life; or they’re struggling to know how to pray for that friend or loved one who is profoundly ill, wondering what to do, at all.

Debilitating illness is one of those realities of the human condition that appears to be so devilishly odd in a world where billions of people worship God. If there is such a divine Being, where the hell is he!? Why do I feel so helpless?

There is something else for us to contemplate – that we live in a weird space between two worlds. The first world we are quite familiar with – the tangible reality of our five senses. But this other world is a place we are much more unfamiliar with; it has multiple if not millions of senses which we cannot see, hear, feel, taste, or touch with our physical capabilities.

Something inside of us, besides our literal brains, hearts, and guts, existentially knows that deep within us is a soul. I personally don’t care much what you want to call it – spirit, metaphysical awareness, biological wirings, gut feelings, etc. But there is a special place inside of us that is ready-made to connect with that other ethereal world of the spirit and soul.

Let me ask: What makes a young woman with cancer become driven to make a difference in the world, even though she may die tomorrow? Where does the desire bubble-up for a heart patient who could be gone before the day is out to say something of great value that family and friends will forever remember and record?

And what makes you and I get out of bed in the morning, desiring to impact the world in significant ways that makes things better, not worse?

I confess that far too often, in my own ill health, as well as the debilitations of my dear wife, I throw a daily little pity party complete with doll sized cups along with juicy gossip of how others don’t understand.

I rehearse old wounds from the past, wish things were different in the present, and fear for what is to come in the future. O, my friends, you already know this is no way to live a good life.

If we’re going to live with any sort of faith, hope, and love, we will need to recognize our place in-between these two worlds of earth and spirit.

I wish I could tell you that I have it all worked out, that I could give you some short pithy statements of experiential truth which will transform your life experience.

But I don’t.

So, here is what I try my darndest to do ever single day, as a person who seeks to touch both worlds, and who is devoted to the person of Jesus: I surrender to Love. I give myself to what is most important. And when I fail, I let divine forgiveness wash over me.

I luxuriate in the spiritual world’s reality that if somehow I lose myself, I will find Jesus – or rather that Jesus will find me. Love has its own mysterious ways of making the right connections when they need to happen.

I bask in the profound paradox that in renouncing everything I have and everything I am, I gain the greatest possessions in existence – and they are found on that other side, in the spiritual world.

I freely humble myself and resign myself to the words and ways of Jesus – even when they make no sense in the earthly world. “Love your enemy.” Really!? Okay, I’ll give it a go… and it is amazing to always see the results that happen inside of me, and in the other spiritual world, that have little to do with that other person.

The medieval mystics are not popular with a lot of people. I admit Christian mystics are strange people, and have the sort of demands of the Old Testament prophets. But I love them.

One of my favorites, Thomas à Kempis, is insistent that if you lose yourself, you will find Jesus. To resign oneself completely to Jesus, fully and totally without any wavering, is to find the appropriate sweet spot between the two worlds of physical and spiritual. Writing to his young acolytes, Thomas minces no words:

“Let this be the goal of your striving and the object of your prayer, namely, to desire to be stripped of all your belongings, and once naked, that you may be ready to follow the naked Jesus. You must die to yourself to live eternally with me.” (The Imitation of Christ)

Sometimes this happens intentionally, as one longs to connect with the Christ they sense around them. In other ways, much like C.S. Lewis, other people come kicking and screaming to the place between the worlds.

Yet, by whichever means we get there, a place of grace opens to us. From that awkward vantage point – between health and illness – we discover that binary explanations have no place in this realm. Instead, all of us move between the worlds throughout our lives.

And, I would suggest, that the best and most effective way of navigating those worlds is taking the strong advice of both the medieval Thomas and the ancient Jesus. Little do we know how close we are to finding peace and purpose in our upside-down lives:

Now when Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:20-21, NKJV)

What we truly want and long for is no further than the hospital bed we’re occupying, or any other place we find ourselves in. And, furthermore, the place to find how to help that dear loved one is to journey within ourselves, not without.

If you are like me, you don’t much like limitations. I like the feeling of handling multiple responsibilities and accomplishing them with care and competence. The last thing I want is anything or anyone getting in my way of fulfilling great and meaningful work.

But I have had to learn that my limitations – which grow every day – are actually the key to knowing how to live the Christian life, as well as just plain old life in general.

The more I become aware of my true abilities, accept them, and move with them, the more I see that the world does not spin on the axis of my ability to accomplish anything. And the more dependent I realize I truly am, the more I observe the Christ who has everything under control – even when it seems God is absent.

It is to be expected that God will eventually put us in places of great limitation. Yes,  it will frustrate us in our seeming inability to effect any sort of change to an unjust situation. We just want whatever the offending circumstance is to be exorcised from this world. Yet, it rarely, if ever, happens.

This is not some demented divine game which God is playing on us – to be caught between worlds, and to struggle with all our might to make the best of our situations as people who are both sinner and saint, sick and well, sinister and full of goodness.

No, the nature of our common human condition of hard circumstances as people of faith is meant to strengthen our allegiance and our hope, so that we may be Christians publicly displaying who God is like, and that there is such a thing as truth in the public square.

“…even though you have to suffer different kinds of trouble for a little while now. The purpose of these troubles is to test your faith as fire tests how genuine gold is. Your faith is more precious than gold, and by passing the test, it gives praise, glory, and honor to God…” (1 Peter 1:6-7, GW)

It is downright hard trying to straddle between the two worlds of spiritual hope and physical adversity. But it’s necessary, even if we are unable to discern this reality for now. Every small decision of faith made in love with a good heart has immense impact in the universe, although we may never see that great and good consequence this side of heaven.

Living between two worlds will always be difficult. And it requires a level of surrender to God that is scary. Yet we can still be safe, strong, and spiritual; because we are all in this human condition together.

Beginnings and Endings

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog, Pastor Tim's Ponderings2 Comments
Forest Sunset, by James Naughton

I’ve always thought it strange that we have New Year’s celebrations on January 1 at midnight when the year begins. The year hasn’t even happened yet, and we’re celebrating it. I understand celebrating a live birth and all the possibilities of a new baby in a family; but having worldwide blowouts about an upcoming New Year just strikes me as weird.

For some reason, we don’t celebrate the year we’ve just lived. We “take a look back” at the significant events and happenings. But there’s certainly no party around it. I suppose it’s because a lot of terrible things happen in a year. Yet, a lot of good things happen, too, that we could center some joy around.

What I’m getting at, in a round about way, is that we humans don’t do well with endings. And then we quickly become discouraged with our new beginnings – likely because we put little to no thought and preparation into how important and necessary our endings really are.

This is yet another roundabout way of saying that I (and we together) are experiencing something of an ending. For the past 1,750 days, I have provided a daily reflection upon a text from Holy Scripture. And those reflections haven’t been just a few sentences of devotional drivel, nor a measly daily crumb. I’ve written thousand-word-posts which I believe have been thoughtful and truly reflective on the text and our human condition.

However, all things must end. And this is my last post – at least for a while. I won’t be posting every day, as I’ve done for nearly 5 years! Yet, in order for me to have a proper new beginning of my own (one that I neither wanted nor asked for) I must let go of my daily blog posts.

Although I have been blogging for the past 15 years, I started doing the daily reflections at the beginning of COVID, as a way of remaining connected with my then church congregation, and with others. My thought was to give up doing it every day, once things got back to some sort of normalcy – whatever the heck that is.

Yet, when the masks initially came off and we all began seeing one another again, I found that the daily routine of writing biblical reflections had gotten into my spiritual bones. I was no longer simply writing for others; I was writing for myself. It buoyed my own faith to rise early in the morning and put some intentional focus upon crafting some scriptural thoughts on the Bible.

But that is no longer possible. My life can no longer sustain the practice. I intend to keep up the occasional post of maybe once a week. I might not even be able to do that. It might be once or twice a month. I don’t yet know.

Yet, what I do know is that I want to take the opportunity to celebrate the reality that I spent 1,750 straight days writing and posting impactful blog posts! Many of you were gracious to send me private notes of appreciation and encouragement. I especially treasure the ways some of you explained your story of how your own relationship with God has been helped.

When you boil down life to its essence, all any of us really have is our stories. Behind every event, each encounter, and all of the numbers which get crunched and the stuff that gets done and achieved, there is a story.

Stories bring just as much healing to us as modern medicine and surgeries. And they encourage, inspire, and change us in ways we cannot imagine.

The Bible, at its core, is a collection of stories. It seems God has created us as story-driven people, and so, in order to reveal something of God’s personhood and nature, we were given a grand and unfolding story of redemption.

I love reading and meditating on Holy Scripture, mainly because I love the Holy God of whom I belong and gladly serve.

I’ll continue writing the occasional post, but I will miss the daily meetings I’ve had with the Lord and with you in these past few years. Thank you for your faith, and for listening to God’s Word. What’s more, you can always avail yourselves of the nearly 2,700 blog posts on the website.

I pray that we all may learn to end things well, so that we might begin new things with some needed wisdom, humility, and grace.

May you live this day compassionate of heart, gentle in word, gracious in awareness, courageous in thought, and generous in the love of God through Jesus Christ our Lord and in the strength of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

An Advent Message of Suffering and Deliverance (Micah 4:8-13)

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog, Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year CLeave a comment
The Prophet Micah Exhorts the Israelites, by Gustave Doré, 1866

As for you, Jerusalem,
    the citadel of God’s people,
your royal might and power
    will come back to you again.
The kingship will be restored
    to my precious Jerusalem.

But why are you now screaming in terror?
    Have you no king to lead you?
Have your wise people all died?
    Pain has gripped you like a woman in childbirth.
Writhe and groan like a woman in labor,
    you people of Jerusalem,
for now you must leave this city
    to live in the open country.
You will soon be sent in exile
    to distant Babylon.
But the Lord will rescue you there;
    he will redeem you from the grip of your enemies.

Now many nations have gathered against you.
    “Let her be desecrated,” they say.
    “Let us see the destruction of Jerusalem.”
But they do not know the Lord’s thoughts
    or understand his plan.
These nations don’t know
    that he is gathering them together
to be beaten and trampled
    like sheaves of grain on a threshing floor.
“Rise up and crush the nations, O Jerusalem!”
    says the Lord.
“For I will give you iron horns and bronze hooves,
    so you can trample many nations to pieces.
You will present their stolen riches to the Lord,
    their wealth to the Lord of all the earth.” (New Living Translation)

A lot of people don’t understand much about the Bible, especially many parts of what some call the Old or First Testament of it. It seems to them like it’s all either nonsense or gobbledygook.

I am not exaggerating when I say that I have read the entire Bible not once, but hundreds of times. And there are still many places within Holy Scripture which are an enigma to me.

Part of the reason the Bible can seem so difficult is that, at times, the perspective being written about is so expansive, so large, and so wide that it nearly defies human comprehension.

The Bible reveals a God who is so transcendent that the Lord is able to see the past, the present, and the future all at once, because God is actually above everything, including time.

None of this talk on my part is meant to discourage anyone from reading scripture. Rather, it’s meant to encourage you to keep on reading it, listening to it, talking about it, and exploring its contents.

Instead of a being an impossible puzzle we cannot put together, the Bible is, instead, a deep treasure trove of knowledge, wisdom, and insight into the human condition and the human purpose for being on this earth.

The reason the biblical prophets came along – and included into the canon of Holy Scripture – is that they called people back to their original purpose for being here in the first place.

In every prophetic book, the culture, the society, the religion, and the politics of a people had strayed so far from their reason for existing, that it took what seems to us as extreme language in order to get them back on track.

There were some cases so bad that the prophet’s message to people was inevitable doom. And yet, even then, there was a nugget of grace, showing us that no matter how terrible things may get, the arm of God is not too short to pull the faithful from the brink of annihilation.

Examining the Book of Micah, there is nothing easy about it. The prophet wrote at a time when Assyrian power was dominate, and about to swallow up the northern kingdom of Israel. Yet, he spoke directly to Jerusalem in the southern kingdom of Judah.

Much like a woman in labor and about to give birth, Jerusalem’s cry of suffering will be transformed into a cry of deliverance and freedom.

But we aren’t talking about something that will happen in a few days or even a few years; the prophet was giving the people a panoramic sweep of centuries.

Eventually, the Babylonians come, take the people out of the city into exile to Babylon. It is a cry of pain. Micah was speaking about events which would not occur for another two hundred years.

Yet, at the same time, Micah was talking about his own present generation of people in Israel and Judah. What the people were doing, at that time, was leading to a future of great pain. And there would be a great crying out for salvation from it.

Injustice always creates a state of distress for some, while the ones perpetrating the unjust ways become wealthy on the backs of others who are miserable.

Babylon represented both the place of punishment and of liberation. Out of the exilic darkness, a new age bursts into the light.

Born into a time where many people were longing for God’s deliverance, centuries after the destruction of Jerusalem, after the exile and return to Judea, and after the days of the Maccabees, Jesus subversively entered human history.

Despite all of the human sin, the degradation and oppression of others, the injustice and abuse extant in the world, grace comes in the shape of a baby; mercy enters the world in the form of a child.

The God whom all things depend upon, became dependent, needing a mother to clean him up after a filled first-century diaper. Few people knew at the time that this little baby would be the one to clean up a massive spiritual and metaphorical diaper, full of the world’s nasty stinky injustice.

Presently, it is clear that the nations do not know they will be beaten and trampled – that all who are now in power will be answering to that subversive child born two millennia ago.

Each life may be a mere speck in the scope of history, and yet, at the same time, each life is precious enough to warrant attention from the One who stands above all time.

How you live makes a difference. How you are, matters.

God of both judgment and grace, we pray for all nations, that they may live in unity, peace, and concord; and that all people may know justice, and enjoy perfect freedom. Embrace the most vulnerable members of our society; end the growing disparity between the rich and poor; and grant us courage to strive for economic justice, so that all might know your mercy, and not your wrath. Amen.

Be Merciful to Me (Psalm 57)

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog, Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
“For thy mercy is great unto the heavens, and thy truth unto the clouds.” (Psalm 57:10, KJV) by Bible Art

Be merciful to me, O God; be merciful to me,
    for in you my soul takes refuge;
in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge,
    until the destroying storms pass by.
I cry to God Most High,
    to God who fulfills his purpose for me.
He will send from heaven and save me;
    he will put to shame those who trample on me.
God will send forth his steadfast love and his faithfulness.

I lie down among lions
    that greedily devour human prey;
their teeth are spears and arrows,
    their tongues sharp swords.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens.
    Let your glory be over all the earth.

They set a net for my steps;
    my soul was bowed down.
They dug a pit in my path,
    but they have fallen into it themselves.
My heart is steadfast, O God;
    my heart is steadfast.
I will sing and make melody.
    Awake, my soul!
Awake, O harp and lyre!
    I will awake the dawn.
I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples;
    I will sing praises to you among the nations.
For your steadfast love is as high as the heavens;
    your faithfulness extends to the clouds.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens.
    Let your glory be over all the earth. (New Revised Standard Version)

The Human Condition

Maybe it’s just me, yet it seems, over the past several years, that our world has become increasingly depressed, jaded, and unkind. Things like appreciation and encouragement of others are found less and less as time goes on. It’s as if we are all in some sort of collective funk, in which everyone has an underlying sullenness and frustration about them.

Humanity has suffered a great deal of change and loss, without a healthy means of grieving and lamenting for what has happened to them. In other words, we simply don’t know what to do with our hurt, so we end up projecting our hurt onto others. *Sigh*

There is something that we all share together about the human experience: Sooner or later, someone or a group of people will let us down. They will hurt us in some way. And that hurt will change us – either for good or for ill.

What’s worse, many have experienced, or will experience, some sort of abuse and victimization from another person or group – leaving them scarred by trauma. And, what’s more, there are those who have had their very lives at risk, because someone intentionally sought to kill them. 

King David’s Condition

That is the company David found himself in when King Saul, and the later when his son Absalom, sought to do away with his life.

To David’s credit, he never retaliated and did not try and turn the tables by putting a hit out on either Saul or Absalom. Instead, David cried out to God. And we get to listen in on the prayer. Today’s psalm is David’s prayerful reliance upon the God in whom he put all his trust and praise. 

The entire basis of prayer is to let God be God. So, how do we exactly do that?

Our Condition

Whenever the storms of life assail us, calloused persons trample on us with impunity, devious individuals set traps for us, and greedy organizations prey upon us, we must refuse to respond in kind.

Instead, let us deliberately praise the Lord, rely on divine protection, and pray to God, so that we might steadfastly hold on to our confidence. Because if God is for us, nothing nor no one, can be against us.

That advice may seem like a sort of pie-in-the-sky rot of ginning up positive thoughts when there is nothing positive to be seen in the experience. Yet, please keep in mind that we must never, and I repeat, never invalidate another’s experience, nor our own, when those experiences are hellish.

There is always hope. There are two unshakable truths which are constant, and are never diminished by any adverse circumstance:

  1. God is present with us
  2. God loves us

If we know nothing else, and everything seems to be descending into the abyss of tragedy, the twin towers of divine presence and divine mercy stand guard as the strongest sentinels over our dilapidated situation, and struggling faith.

Letting God be God means not to try and control things we have no control over. Rather, it means to affirm that the Lord is willing and capable of handling our worst stuff.

It could be that we are stuck in the belly of a whale because, without our knowing it, there are sharks surrounding us, who cannot get to us because of divine attention and protection.

Our perspective of life-circumstances is, at best, severely limited. It is much better to place faith in the God who sees it all, with an expansive eye which misses nothing.

One of the best things, to me, about the psalms is that they are a wonderful collection of prayers we can adopt for our own. Not only can we use them for ourselves, but we are also obliged to do so. 

If anyone has been in an adverse situation, so deep that it feels like having ambled into a pride of lions, it’s quite likely that the experience leaves one with no adequate words to say. There we are – paralyzed with fear, and unable to move. 

So, let the psalm say for you what you cannot even begin to utter yourself. The Word of God is not meant to sit on a coffee table,  or to rest on a shelf; it is meant to be opened and used for prayer. Allow it to do its intended purpose.

Who knows? Perhaps your faith in the mercy of God, and your praises lifted to God, will give rise to a newfound confidence and peace, so that you can rest secure, even when all around you is going to hell.

Be merciful to me, O God, for in you my soul takes refuge. Even though I feel the slash of people with tongues as swords, my heart is steadfast, and I will exalt your name above the heavens. Let your glory be over all the earth! Amen.