It’s interesting to me that the first problem mentioned in the Bible is with the only problem every human being in history must deal with: Death.

“Osama Bin Laden is dead.”

The words ran across the screen and within minutes the social stratosphere burst into exuberant expression of both joy and sadness. Scores of people outside the White House cheered, allowing ten years of pen up frustration, madness, and anger to pour out. Beach balls flew in the air as if justice had been served.  The tweets burst like chatter as people celebrated the end of an era, the era of terrorism.

As I sat watching the melee occur on television, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the many images I had seen so many times on television before. When ever the radical Muslim world had scored some sort of infliction on Democratic idealism, they would celebrate in much the same way.  They would cheer in the streets as they burned the American flag.  Had we suddenly become our enemy? Were our cheers of exuberance learned on so many nightly lessons of CNN, CNBC, and MSNBC?

I was reminded of Jesus’ words, “love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.”  Was this an exception?  Had God blessed the U.S. troops in the moment to put an end to the terror?  Had God exacted justice, or vengeance?  Or had we?  Was there an exception to love, some exception to the idea that each person has dignity.  My thoughts ran to the cross.  Perhaps not.  Why do we cheer at the murder of someone, when ten years ago we weeped over it?

My friend Mike Morrell reminded me that sometimes we need a scapegoat.  Sometimes the cross serves to remind us that Jesus was willing to go that far to take on our suffering, to let us exact our vengeance onto the only one who can handle it.  God.

Tonight I weep.  I weep for those who suffered in 9/11.  And I weep for those who can’t let go of their vengeance without death. As much as we want to forget that Osama Bin Laden was not a human being, to forget is to lose site of our own humanity.

If Jesus is the Son of God, what does it mean when God chooses to engage suffering?

And its easy to think that this releasing humanity from the law is creating a new structure.  But what if its revealing God’s original structure established in the Garden.  If we examine the story in Genesis it basically had no law.  Humanity is free to eat from anything in the Garden.  The parallels in the two stories are obvious, once we understand the problem God is solving.  In speaking to Peter to eat the story is making a direct connection back to the original command.

But the problem is this. Its very hard to imagine a world with no law.  We hold onto it because it provides a not so neat little (actually monstrous) framework for dealing with fear.  All the law is is a human agreement for action.  It gives us comfort to know someone isn’t going to kill us.  So to remove is to create the potential for chaos.  Yet we can’t ignore that this is what God is doing in the story.  God is removing the construct of law in favor of grace.  Grace is infinitely harder to dole out because it requires love.  It requires holding onto the basic dignity of each human being, even in the face of oppression or even death. (see the cross)

But today I was thinking about something in regards to freedom.  Instead of the need to deal with fear, what if we’re really afraid of what freedom represents.  What if in engaging this freedom we go too far.  Could we really go too far?  Could we do something that tested the edges of freedom, only to find there really is a limit and we’re all fooling ourselves.  I was thinking about new Narnia movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and part of the story is in testing the bounds of limits.  Is there an edge of the world?

I’m just thinking out loud, but I’d love to hear what you think?

Where is the safest place to put our anger?

Some of you may have heard that Adam Walker Cleveland lost his twin sons in the middle of the pregnancy.  It’s one of those things that has no real point of ground.  There’s just no words or thoughts that can bring a sense of peace to these kind of moments. As Adam painfully states, it just sucks.

So I appreciate Adam’s honesty in his post “Yelling At God.” Adam chose to share his heart in the moment of deepest pain.

Yesterday I took a ride on my scooter out to Morgan Territory – an area that has a lot of hikes just outside of Livermore. It was a beautiful day out and I thought that while Sarah got a massage, I would take a ride. As I got out into the country, I found myself praying to God in my head and letting God know about my frustrations with what has happened in the past few days. However, as I got further out of town, I found myself beginning to audibly start talking to God and eventually found myself yelling at God.

I don’t feel the need to write out everything I said – primarily because I know some of the people who read this blog would not want to see those words. But they were things that I needed to say out loud. Certainly nothing God didn’t already know, but it was important for me to yell these things at God. Essentially – this was my “giving God the middle finger moment.”

A younger version of me would have been pretty scared to hear the things I was saying to God…but I’m not worried. There is a biblical precedent for being pissed at God. And I’m pissed. This is unfair. It’s wrong. It sucks. It’s not what was supposed to happen. It’s not what Sarah and I should have to be going through.

When we got home from the hospital on Monday night, I was just so mad. And I still am. And I know that probably won’t go away for awhile. And God knows that I’m mad. And God can take it. God can take my profanity, my anger, my tears and anything else that I might bring to God.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from the words of my groaning?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, 
by night, but I find no rest.

I am grateful for Adam’s words today.  For he chose to share his gift of pain. I needed that reminder of what it means to be human in the moments when life seems to conspire against us.  Yet Adam chose to bring it to God.

It’s so easy to miss that one of the deepest purposes of the cross is the place where we pour out our anger.  The cross is God recognizing we need a place to put it.  So God says, “Give it to me.”  And in this space it becomes our redemption.

Sometimes I think we miss the point of the cross.  We focus so much on what Jesus did for us, that we miss what Jesus was inviting us into.

I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. (John 12:24)

The cross is a way station, an interchange in the journey.  But it is NOT the destination.  We often focus on the dying part but in doing so we often miss the growth part.  Jesus is showing us our barrier and saying, I dare you to remove it, so you can discover the beautiful image that is hidden inside.

What is Jesus calling you to remove in order to discover something bigger?

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This is one of the most powerful videos on the the subject of war I have EVER seen. The speech is given by war veteran Mike Prysner.  I would really encourage you, regardless of your views of military service, to watch it. Mike strikes at the heart of the problem of war. The real enemy is racism, which is simply another way of saying, “someone not like me.”

You can read the transcript here but a few choice lines stood out to me.

“I tried hard to be proud of my service but all I could feel was shame.  The racism could no longer mask the reality of the occupation.  These were people.  These were human beings.”

“We are told we are fighting terrorists; the terrorists was me and the real terrorism is in this occupation.”

“Racism is a vital weapon employed by this government. It is more important than a rifle, a tank, a bomber or a battleship. While all of those weapons are created and owned by this government, they are harmless without people willing to use them.”

“They don’t have to fight the war, they merely have to sell the war.”

My favorite was, “Understand that their power lies only in their ability to convince us that war, oppression and exploitation is in our interest.”

“Without racism we realize that we have more  common with the Iraq people than we have with billionaires that send us to  war.”

I’ve always been frustrated at my ability to effectively communicate my tension with the idea of military service. I have good friends who have served, and while I want to honor what they have done, I cannot honor the idea behind it.  I honor the person serving but not the idea they are serving.  And I don’t think my tension is singular. The video received 6821 likes and 312 dislikes.  This video has finally given me and understanding of why.  In participating in it we become the very enemy we are seeking to destroy. To participate in it it to become it.  And I can’t desire that for anyone.

[ht: Jeff Straka]

[Note: The above video contains graphic violence.]

Sometimes I wonder if our fear of hell in the afterlife is keeping us from seeing the reality of hell in this life.

Some of you may know that I spent some time working in Hollywood.  I wanted to be a screenwriter after growing up watching movies.  I was captivated by the storytelling process in a visual medium.  Two of my favorite directors were Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorcese. To this day A Clockwork Orange remains one of the most haunting movies I have ever seen. If Kubrick and Scorcese have done anything it is display the brutal reality of the human situation.  We like to kill each other, sometimes in horrific ways.  We don’t like the idea that we are capable of such madness, yet we watch it.

Well some guy decided to mash these two directors together using 34 of their films to produce three short segments.  What is brilliant about it is that it in a very simple way captures the madness that both directors seemed to present but in a very simple narrative.  By isolating the emotion, it magnifies the emotion.  The first section explores violence.  The second section explores madness.  And the third section explores the anger of loss.  In all three sections  I couldn’t help but see the reality of hell.

The second section is particularly interesting to me because it seems to explore the reality of our own brokenness.  I think the central question in the entire human story is, “Are we good or evil?”  And at certain times in our lives we are struck with consequences that actually suggest we are evil.  The expression on the characters faces provides an amazing glimpse into that moment.  This is the moment when we’re contemplating the need and want for redemption yet it seems beyond our grasp.  That is hell to me.  It’s that moment when we see ourselves as beyond the love of God, with no hope.  If we extend that thought to eternity, we are trapped.

What do you think of the video?  And if you’re so inclined, what do you think of hell?

There are no words that can accurately describe the loss of a child.

Today at around 1:30 PM I got a email from a friend that said my friend’s son had been hit by a car and was being lifeflighted to the hospital.  He didn’t make it.  For about ten minutes I walked around the house, unable to process what I had just heard.  I didn’t want to think that this little boy, who I knew so well had been taken from this life.  What made it more real was that his name was Carter.  He was seven.  I have a son who is eight named Carter.  Our sons had played together so many times.

For the next two hours I was unable to work or pretty much do anything. Sudden death is like a syndrome that just takes over.  It makes no sense and arrests my body of its strength.  I have no control over my own emotions.  I weep as I write this. 

Did I say there are no words that can accurately describe the loss of a child.

I sometimes wonder if God cried for his own son?  Did he weep when Jesus hung on the cross?  Did he agonize over the cost of what it took to reveal how far love would go?   I have to believe the answer is yes.

Please lift up Brandon and Alicia if you can.