Also Because It Makes Me Happy

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(Photo cred:  www.carolinamountaindog.com)

I recently discovered a new depth of ‘amazing’ to the grace I’ve known since I was eight years old.

It is, of course, amazing because I’ve never deserved it, and because God is so amazingly different from me.  Everything He has done has been exactly opposite of the way I would have done it, and has been achingly, beautifully successful according to His plan.  I am talking here about everything from the two hummingbirds fighting over the feeder to the certain moment when He returns and every knee will bow, willingly or not.

But it dawned on me the other day that His grace is also amazing because He kindly knows I love, need, and want to be amazed.  I am made to be amazed by Him and my highest joy is when my mouth is wide open in awe that, yet again, He has orchestrated a beauty that none of the masters of any artistic medium could come close to; that He has calibrated a meeting of two people, or moments, or events that no engineer or architect could approach even with impeccable mathematics.  He, the chief Architect, Engineer, Mathematician, Artist, and Lover of His children, amazes me because He knows it makes me happy.

And that’s just another way of saying that He loves me.  And that’s amazing.

It’s amazing, too, because it is so easy not to believe it, or to forget it.  As the hymn writer says, sometimes, “darkness veils His lovely face.”  It does.  A cloud of my ignorance and dust-weakness covers me, and I feel the God of the universe at war with me.  Being thrust exposed before the lions in the coliseum, heart-stopping as that must have been, is nothing to being thrust exposed before the Lion of the tribe of Judah in His righteous wrath.  This is the outer edge of darkness and abandonment.  But the hymn writer reminds me that when that happens, as it does to every earnest heart, it is then that “I rest on His unchanging grace.”

His grace hasn’t changed.  It is there all the while, a rock for me to stand on as I grapple with the darkness that would vanquish me, but can’t!  It is the daily experience of one of God’s own that ‘weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning!’

The shell-shocked man whose wife has left him discovers new love in a sweet woman.  The anxious mother takes her child to college and the first person she encounters on the new campus is a blood relative!  The rebellious, drug-addicted teenager stands before his church a repentant young man declaring God’s drawing him out of the fire. The sweet and sassy saint waiting three more long weeks for her cancer surgery dines with friends under the evening sky and says, “God is faithful.  He is taking care of me.”

Examples of amazing from the last 24 hours of my little life.  How kind He is!

~

Veronica Mars: Looking East For Sunsets

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Dear 14 Year Olds Just Discovering Veronica Mars:

I am eleven years late for this conversation, but that’s about where I lag behind pop-culture.  And if you are 14 now then you were three when Veronica made her debut in 2004 and just now old enough to have her on your radar.

So here we both are, ready to talk.

Andrew and I watched the first three episodes last night and after sober meditation, Veronica joined the other cutting edge series that we cut off in its prime – Breaking Bad.

The fact is it was hard to stop watching.  Both Breaking Bad and Veronica were engaging stories, good acting, effective musical score, pretty people, interesting video work.  Both had characters with some complexity to them.  They hooked us and drew us in quickly.

So to stop watching required an actual decision, a push-back against inertia and the suction of the couch.  Once done, the real work began of articulating why Veronica Mars was so disturbing to us.

I watch anything as a parent.  I can’t help it.  What world are my children getting from me to work with and give to their children?  Veronica’s world was breathtakingly immoral. There was loyalty, I guess.  And sacrifice of a sort.  But her high school world was more like the seedy and pornographic world of adults who die of violence and disease.  The dialogue was vulgar and aberrant. It hurt me for your sakes that this was depicted for you as normal life.

Perhaps you would protest that this is the real world of a typical high school campus and I am in a bubble.  No doubt.  But if it is the real world and the show’s noble goal is to expose and condemn dark topics like rape and abuse of authority, it certainly takes its glamorous, lucrative time doing it.  By the end of the series are the fans indignant about injustice?  I doubt it.

Or you might tell me it is noir on purpose, some people like it, and to just turn it off and don’t watch.  I did and I don’t.  But it is still out there for you to have to deal with and I am pointing out some flaws in its message.

Andrew asked me who I thought the target audience was for this series.  I decided that it was aimed at 14 year olds who had suffered abuse or neglect at the hands of people who should have cared for them, vulnerable 14 year olds who would be tempted to follow a hero like Veronica into the moral void.

In episode three, the “moral” that came out of the void was “Be true to yourself!”  In that episode a man disappeared early from his son’s life.  When the son found his father, the man was being true to himself and was now doe-eyed, long haired, and wearing a dress.  A creepy moment indeed when the boy said, “Dad?” to a woman.

And that was the moment I realized my soul couldn’t take Veronica Mars.  My soul cannot embrace a story, compelling as it is, that is empty in the middle.  “Be true to yourself” is an empty message.  It is a false one.  Children cannot call a woman “Dad.” Dad cannot call himself “woman.”  You cannot look east and call it west and still live in reality.  Veronica wants you to believe you can, that your west is whatever you want it to be.  And that’s fine until you are looking for sunsets. Then you better find real west.

Our life story doesn’t have to be empty in the middle.  Emptiness is a choice.  It may be the popular one, but it’s not the only one.  Fullness is available even in the midst of this real life.  It is possible to be fully known and still fully loved.  That is what is missing from Veronica’s world that pierces when I watch. No one there knows the filling love I know and they careen from emptiness to emptiness.  It’s hard to watch people die of thirst.  It is certainly their right to do it, and to make TV about it.  But it is my privilege to say, “Hey!  There’s water over here.”

Because I am human, there are times that I experience the emptiness of the void.  I feel it behind me, gaping.  And as I teeter there, held only by the steadfast love of God, I wonder how it feels to be standing on that edge without the saving love of Jesus.  How does anyone even stay sane?

I am sorry that you’ve been fed the ‘be true to yourself’ lie.  You can’t be your own answer.  It doesn’t work that way.

I can’t be both myself and the one who saves me.

“When I thought, ‘My foot slips,’
your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up.”
Psalm 94:18

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