Los Angeles Reflections

"One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives" Euripides 

"Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend." - Plautus 

     
My journal, April 7th, 2014 after spending a week in California.

Today, life is good and the sun shines bright. I've been in California since April 1. I finished work at Radnor on March 31st. Since then I've been living in fellowship with some of Sam's Biola community plus the council. Our conversations have been wholesome, our play enjoyable. The group is special, although my heart is hesitant to hope too much. Life is a difficult assailant. Everyday it rises in full health, while we are weakened by strife. Life doesn't suffer the pain of a Monday. It always gets out of bed on time full of energy. The twenty-four hours of each new day stand dark and foreboding as a challenge, a test of the human spirit. 

People are funny creatures. We can live an entire life pleasantly, calmly believing a lie. The range of human personality exceeds the imagination and I am left baffled at God's creativity and disturbed by man's ability to lose himself, his purpose and his identity as God's creature. This disturbing reality only brings me back to the awesome truth of God's mercy and greatness as He is more than capable of redeeming even those so very far lost. 

I don't have many thoughts beyond these about my time in LA. It was a wonderful week full of fun and frivolous good time. Coming home has been hard and it's difficult not to look back on vacation and wish that all of life could be that way. For better and for worse, but more for better than worse life can't be a vacation. We were created to work, to serve God and make His creation into something marvelous. So I've come back to Connecticut and am working and studying and reading and praying and waiting for the next time of sweet fellowship I get to have with these great people who I am separated from by geographical miles but am close to in my prayers. 

NYC Reflections

Life is tough but worth it.


I've never been to a place that characterizes that truth better than New York City. For the past five days I've lived here in my brother's apartment. I eat my 0.99$ pizza and smoke my cigarette from his porch on the eight floor of a monolithic apartment building in East Harlem. I watch the passersby and contemplate what living in this concrete jungle does to the human soul. I watch the rats run along the subway tracks and think about the similarities between these rodents who have learned to thrive in their darkened colones and these humans who have learned to thrive in their iron cages. God created Adam and placed him in garden. As a species we have come a long way since then and I don't believe that we can ever return. The modern man who seeks God will not become what Adam was in the garden and we will not have the relationship Adam had with his Maker. For better or worse we have said goodbye to that sort of thing.

I walk the city parks and can't feel grass beneath my feet. The grass seems fake, the trees seem fake, the water seems fake. Everything about this place came in on the back of a truck. Rather than mowers I expect workers to come out with vacuums to clean the grass. Is this what God wanted when He told man to "fill the earth and subdue it"? Meditating at the 9/11 memorial brings into focus the reality that even the strongest must fall. Here in this city steeples are overshadowed by the skyscrapers, the bells are drowned out by sirens and one can not see the stars at night. It makes me sad in a tired sort of way.


I'm often overwhelmed by it all and my mind gets muddled. I don't like that every time I go outside has to be an adventure. The wisdom of Mr Baggins is true here, "It's a dangerous business, going out of your door,' you step into the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.” I like to know when I'm going adventuring and when I"m just going to buy milk. Here you can' t ever be sure. I have a few more days here and hope to learn more. As of now all that I'm sure of is that humans are powerful creatures with amazing abilities to adapt and thrive in the harshest of environments. We are capable of great kindness. I've watched a man with one arm hold the subway door for a commuter who needed to catch his train. I've had two Harlem locals help me push my car when it died in the middle of the street. I don't know that I could enjoy living in this city. I don't know if this city is the ideal location for anyone to live and grow and pursue maturity. If anything it seems like the city forces a child to grow up quick and then restricts them to a stagnating adulthood in which they cease growing up and just get older as the years pass.


Those are my thoughts for now. Thanks for reading.

Friendship With God

We turn today to the topic of friendship as it relates to God. It’s a tough discussion to have primarily because so few people these days have relationships that resemble friendship. In a world of “one-click” friends we can hardly appreciate the earth shattering significance of God choosing to offer us His royal hand of fellowship. Day after day God makes us this generous offer and day after day we are too tired or too busy or too stupid to accept. How foolish can we be? Yet, is not such the sorry state of our human heart? to be foolish? to throw away the life giving medicine? to hide from the light and seek solace in the darkness?

Consider my brother, my sister what is before us. Let’s remove right away a major misunderstanding that friendship with God is simply a gift. Such a thing as a gift of friendship does not exist. A gift is given without the expectation of any sort of return. Yet we somehow have gotten into our heads that God simply offers us this grand gift of friendship with Himself. By using the word gift we subtly allows ourselves to think that God makes us an offer without expecting anything in return. Surely friends will give gifts to each other but both the Old and New Testaments speak to what is required of us to participate in divine friendship.

Psalm 25:14 The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him, and he makes known to them his covenant.

and later in the words of Jesus,

John 15:14 You are my friend if you do what I command.

To be sure humanity is the primary beneficiary of this friendship but to imagine that I can simply accept God’s friendship like I accept a pay-check is woefully ignorant. In any good friendship there is give and take of time, emotions, ideas, and resources. These transactions of the often immaterial and unmeasurable aspects of life rarely follow rules and rarely happen the same way twice. Today you need a hundred bucks, tomorrow I need someone to send me an encouraging song, the day after we need to brainstorm ideas for paying off our students loans. The pleasure and the pain of relationships are the result of them never being the same twice. A ship can make the passage from New York to London a hundred times and will never sail on the same wave.  Friendship will not be confined to a mold and rarely can it even be confined to a pattern. Even  God who remains the same, yesterday, today and forever can only be so specific as to say, “fear me” and “obey my commands” As to the type of fear and the means of obedience, that will depend on the individual and circumstances.

Have you considered the two way nature of any good friendship? Firstly are you responding to God as He has instructed. Do you obey in any sense? Do you fear in any sense? Surely your fear may manifest itself differently than mine, as will your obedience. The master chef tells his cooks to make cupcakes, rarely will a cupcake turn out just the same as another, but who complains so long as it is a good cupcakes? Secondly and as a way of testing whether we are fearing and obeying correctly; does God respond? As we share with Him our hopes, our dreams, our fears and as we give Him our service, our obedience and our trust does He respond by sharing with us His hopes, his plans, his ideas? Has He told you what it would look like for His Kingdom to come and reign in your life? in your family, in your neighborhood, school or country? Are we looking for such a response? If not we must begin for until the sharing of such things is established the circle of relationship will remain broken. God,is amazingly capable of purifying all the garbage of our lives and turning it into something lovely. It functions in a circle.... 

To live as friends of God and not just friends but to actually live as any sort of useful Christian at all requires intentional intensive attention to how He responds. Things are no longer created nor destroyed they simply change forms right? Friendship with God is what transforms the pitiful human animal into the glorious, eternal son of God. History does not know anyone comparable to those whom God has called friends. The generals and kings of Abraham's day paid him tribute and called Him blessed. The Pharaoh of Egypt knelt before Jacob and received the old saints blessing. Moses who spoke with God face to face shown with His glory and His enemies could not stand before Him.

Brother, sister we have been called into a glorious promise. We have been offered the ultimate friendship with the Ultimate reality, the Fountain of Facthood who designs the snowflakes and conducts the thunderstorm, He gives heat to flame and guides the rivers on their paths to the sea. None can stand before His power and all will worship before before His throne.

Let us consider our ways and be wise. All has not been heard but in light of our limited understanding let’s each of us fear God and keep His commandments until the day breaths and the shadows flee away.