Measuring Success???

“How do you measure the success in your Christian life?”

“How do you measure your success at Love?” might be a more accurate phrasing of the question.

Living a Christian life is “Loving God”. Christianity at its core, its most fundamental premise, is an “Unconditional Love Relationship” between a man and his Creator. Trusting God to be in your life without fear or doubt, an integral part of your life, to be your life, every moment of every day. Knowing life goes on new and fresh, moment by moment, ever changing. Never being concerned with what will happen next nor how it will affect you because He is always there and He is bigger than all of it.

To measure is to quantify.
To measure success is to quantify performance.
All of which is to evaluate for the purpose of control.
That is why man measures everything. He measures for the most benevolent of reasons, or at least he convinces himself of that fact. He measures and evaluates and assesses and compares against some synthetically established “norm”. How does my performance compare? How does it measure up? Am I successful? Am I better or worse than everyone else, and to what degree? If I can decide where I stand in comparison to the norm I can make adjustments. I can increase or decrease my efforts. I can compensate. If I can determine the answers to these questions I can gain control… or some modicum of control… at least the perception of control. Then, and only then, will I feel better about myself.

What then? What if man determines he only loves 50%, or 75%, or 90%? Is that possible? Moreover, would that be unconditional love? Isn't unconditional love "all or nothing"?
Even more frightening, would it then be possible for God to love us the same way. Is He able to love us 50%, or even 99%? What kind of trouble would we be in if that were true?

Would He have come?

John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
John 15:13 "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."

God never fails...

The Gideon Advance is done for this year. My heart is filled to overflowing. I have been trying very hard to put my heart into words. This is never easy, for the heart was never intended to function like the mind. It communicates in a very different way – by intent. I don’t seem to be able to find the words to do it justice right now. The Lord is not ready for me to share what is there. Evidently we are still working on it.

The only thing I can write for now is, as usual, Gideon did not disappoint. God met me there… He met us all there. It was inspiring and exciting, subtle yet dramatic, wondrous yet discreet, loving but direct. God is good. God is faithful. God never fails to show me His great love for me.

More when I am free to talk…

Someone to be Jesus

We All Need Someone to be Jesus

- Jim Robinson

And Jesus was traveling around all the cities and the villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the Gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every malady among the people. Now having seen the crowds, He was moved with compassion concerning them, that they had been distressed and had been dejected, like sheep not having a shepherd. Matthew 9: 35,36

Maddy’s heart seemed to be barely beating.
From the moment I saw her, slouched in a chair in the lobby of my Christian counseling practice, I knew she was very ill. I offered to help her to the couch in my office, but she refused my touch, pulled herself up straight, and followed me into my office.
Words weren’t needed, at least not at first. I could see the bones of her shoulders, arms, ribs, poking through her dirty blouse. By the time her shaking slowed and she caught her breath a bit, she sat still, shoulders hunched, tissues in her withered hand. Apparently only in her early thirties, she looked ancient. She had been abandoned as a small child by her cocaine-addicted mother. She had never known her father. I didn’t get a great deal out of her that first day. Mostly, she watched me, observing.
I’m not exactly sure how Maddy found me, or how she had the money to pay me each week, in cash; she kept this a secret, and I let her. Maybe someone had met her and pitied her, and had chosen to remain an anonymous savior. I honored her wish to keep their identity a mystery. But I knew that whoever this person was on the outside, they were most certainly Christ on the inside.
That first day, I knew Maddy required inpatient treatment. She refused.
“You need medical help right now,” I said. “You’re very sick, and unless you get treatment, you could die.”
“Dyin’ don’t scare me,” she said, and there was hollow truth in her voice, a truth I understood from my own past days of darkness: Addicts aren’t afraid of dying. Addicts are afraid of living.
“If you really want to die, Maddy, then why are you here?”
“I… don’t know. My friend brought me… she said she’d heard…that you could help.” And she stared off into nowhere.
“I want to call a place I know,” I said, “a place where some very good people work. You can go and stay with them, and they’ll take care of you. They really do know how to help you, Maddy. Will you let me call them for you?”
“No. No one can help me.”
“Yes they can,” I said. “They know how to help people like you…”
She winced.
“…and me,” I added.
The difference, all in one tiny word. And what little light was left in her eyes flickered like a not-yet-dead fire, just for an instant, back to life. She looked at me hard and long.
“I… will come back… here,” she said finally. “Only here.”
Maddy first exchanged sex for money when she was in her early teens. She could not recall exactly how the drug addiction began, or when, but over time she grew comfortable enough to speak of her homelessness, her rapid decent into the nightmare of crack cocaine. She did not look at me, but stared past, her bony hands writhing in her lap like warring spiders. Her voice droned as if she were recounting a tragic event that had happened to a complete stranger, her voice coming from a place within and yet separate from her. She told of her first time using the drug, and how everything had changed, all at once, and days and nights blurred together, and she sat in a darkened, filthy room and smoked till it was gone, then worked the streets again so her pimp would give her more. Night after night she huddled over her shrine of shame and worshipped, and time slipped away untouched and unwanted. Maddy had been snared, and drawn into the iniquitous and swift destruction of addiction, prostitution, darkness, and inevitable spiritual death.
Maddy always showed up for our sessions on time. She would shuffle in, gray and hollow-cheeked, and listen intently as I spoke. Slowly, she offered more tragic information. Born into a world of darkness, she had never known feelings beyond fear and shame. She had never been nurtured, never loved; she had been beaten and sexually abused, somehow surviving on the street in the graceless universe of chaos and addiction and violence and loveless love.
As far as Maddy could recall, her mother had also been a prostitute; one night she went out, and never came back. The biological father had apparently been black, and Maddy’s skin was the color of honey. She had a thin scar running from her left temple to the bottom of her cheek, drawn on a face so weary it was difficult to see much of the pretty girl she had once been. But she was in there. She was still in there.
For several weeks she never shed one tear, never laughed. Sorrow had beaten and numbed her. I knew, too, that she was still using; she’d never have been able to detox on her own. But I took a chance. And over time, despite her outward appearance, I began to recognize someone inside. The door would usually only open briefly, then close. Each time we met I attempted to draw one step closer to a frightened and wary little bird… just before she flew away, out of reach.
Still, she kept returning. Something kept her coming back.
One day, Maddy seemed particularly blue and distant. I began worrying that she was losing interest in our relationship, losing hope.
“What’s wrong, Maddy?” I asked.
“Thinking,” she said.
“About what?”
And something crept into a corner of her painted lips. Something resembling a smile. A deep, sad smile. I let her remain silent for what seemed a long time.
“Birthday,” she said at last, and I could barely hear her.
“What?”
“Birthday.” She looked up. “Today is my birthday.”
I sat still, temporarily at a loss for words.
“Today is your birthday?”
“I… think… so,” she said, looking down at her hands. “April second. Not sure what year…” Again, looking up: “Not sure. But April second. Seems like that’s it.”
The ghost of a smile faded. “Anyway, don’t matter, does it? Not even sure how old I am. Don’t matter…”
“How do you feel, Maddy?” I sensed the little bird, tensing for flight.
“Don’t make me feel nothin’,” she said. And the brief spark in her eyes died. “I don’t feel a thing.”
And I knew she was right.
Counselors are supposed to remain emotionally unattached from clients. But Maddy nonetheless played around the edges of my mind a lot during the next week. It wasn’t just my fear of losing her, losing what little connection we had made. Maddy’s slow but sure flight towards death brought things up from within me that I thought had been buried. There emanated from her a kind of haunted and cold wind that brought with it a heart memory, a soul-deep remembering of a time when I, too, found myself barely balanced between seduction and salvation. A knowing: We are all the same, broken. And though some of us might look better or act better on the outside, we are each of us capable — in the blink of an eye, the beat of a heart — of falling.
We need. From the beginning to the end, in need of our Christ. In need of someone to reach out and touch us in our ugly leprosy… and be Jesus to us.
I knew she might run away at any time. I prayed to God for help. I asked that Jesus might use me, to embody His embrace.
Then one night, lying in bed, right out of nowhere, He answered.
The whole thing came in one flash, complete.
The next morning I got up, went into the kitchen, and found the little box my wife kept in a drawer. I took it with me to the office.
At the beginning of our session together, I asked Maddy to wait a moment, and I left the room. She was sitting on the couch, very much alone, when I came in carrying the cupcake. A cupcake, on a saucer. A small pink candle stuck in the white icing, my hand cupped near to keep it from going out. I sat it on the table in front of her.
“Happy birthday, Maddy,” I said.
She looked at the flame. I could see it, just for a moment, reflected in her brown, broken eyes. She looked at me. “What?”
“Happy birthday. A little late.”
“What?” she said again, a whisper, staring back down at the cupcake. Her mouth began to tremble. “I’ve… I’ve never had…”
And the door cracked — and then flew open.
“…anything…”
Her tears began slowly, as if they’d forgotten how to flow. Then, like rain, hard and cleansing rain, violent and beautiful.
And laughter and wailing mixed together, choking on words that wouldn’t come, mixing like raindrops on their way to earth, on their way home.
“I’ve never… had… anything…”
Maddy held out her arms.

Then, finally, she let Jesus hold her.

"The Lord is with you, mighty warrior"

I go to Gideon as a man. I go in my frailty, my brokenness, my humanity... I go as a man. Yet, I go as a man, with my Lord, expecting to meet my Lord. I go with the "perfect love" Jesus spoke of in Matthew 5:43-48, "Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect". I go with the love Paul spoke of in Romans 12:9-21 "Love must be sincere". I go with the love Augustine spoke of when he said, "Love, and do as you want".
The power of the Lord is with me in that love.
The Lord sees me and calls me by a new name, "Mighty Warrior".
I fear not my weakness, for God is with me.
I go in the strength I have, for God sends me.
I build an alter to the Lord and it shall be called "The Lord is Peace".

Judges 6:11-24
11 The angel of the LORD came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites. 12 When the angel of the LORD appeared to Gideon, he said, "The LORD is with you, mighty warrior."
13 "But sir," Gideon replied, "if the LORD is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our fathers told us about when they said, 'Did not the LORD bring us up out of Egypt?' But now the LORD has abandoned us and put us into the hand of Midian."
14 The LORD turned to him and said, "Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian's hand. Am I not sending you?"
15 "But Lord, " Gideon asked, "how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family."
16 The LORD answered, "I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites together."
17 Gideon replied, "If now I have found favor in your eyes, give me a sign that it is really you talking to me. 18 Please do not go away until I come back and bring my offering and set it before you." And the LORD said, "I will wait until you return."
19 Gideon went in, prepared a young goat, and from an ephah of flour he made bread without yeast. Putting the meat in a basket and its broth in a pot, he brought them out and offered them to him under the oak.
20 The angel of God said to him, "Take the meat and the unleavened bread, place them on this rock, and pour out the broth." And Gideon did so. 21 With the tip of the staff that was in his hand, the angel of the LORD touched the meat and the unleavened bread. Fire flared from the rock, consuming the meat and the bread. And the angel of the LORD disappeared. 22 When Gideon realized that it was the angel of the LORD, he exclaimed, "Ah, Sovereign LORD! I have seen the angel of the LORD face to face!"
23 But the LORD said to him, "Peace! Do not be afraid. You are not going to die." 24 So Gideon built an altar to the LORD there and called it The LORD is Peace.

Dilige, et quod vis fac

“Dilige, et quod vis fac. "Love, and do what you want."

-St. Augustine of Hippo

“More than the virtue of faith, more than the virtue of hope, it is the virtue of charity that animates Christianity and governs the deeds of Christians.

It is possible to believe, and yet to act contrary to the things believed. It is possible to hope in Christ's promises, and yet to choose things that will make one's hope unfounded. Charity, which is divine love, works differently. If one's will is truly moved by love of God and love of neighbor for God's sake, he will not offend God. If his actions are directed by love, his actions are godly actions. Saint Augustine, in his commentaries on John's Epistles, writes Dilige, et quod vis fac, "Love, and do what you want."

At first sight, this seems a dangerous piece of advice. Numerous, after all, are the wicked things done in the name of "love." Augustine, though, is not talking about cheap, tawdry imitations of love: he is speaking of a love that desires God above all things and chooses the things of God; a love which treats our fellow men and women in the way that God has established, in a way that is subordinate to love of God and which flows from it.

Even noble loves can lose this priority: to the degree that they stray from the love of God, which is identical with His justice and His law, these loves lose the character of love and decay into pride, self-gratification, lust, greed, or the service of idols. To the degree that the love is truly divine charity, to that degree one's will is guided by the Spirit, and he may do as he pleases, knowing that his actions are guided by God's own will. Hence Augustine's command, Dilige, et quod vis fac.”