God and Expedia are My Friends:

Planning, Planning, Praying...

THE TRIP – Day 0.1

With the wedding date as a midpoint in our trip time frame, I began to plan the logistics of our travels. I had culled my initial list of the national parks I wanted to see down to twenty, still way too ambitious a number even for a month of driving. I got out (more) library books on the national parks, went to the parks' websites and copied maps and brochures. I searched road trip travel tips and decided that keeping the average mileage per day at about 300 miles was wise. We regularly drove 570 miles on the first day of our yearly trip back east. We also drove through both Chicago and New York City on our yearly trip. Looking west, it would appear, since we were not planning to go near Los Angeles, that the biggest city we would encounter would be Denver, a small town in comparison to The Big Three. By avoiding LA, keeping our daily mileage down, we could have pleasant manageable days of driving, even for POACA (People Of A Certain Age).

In the midst of planning the trip, I became overwhelmed by the enormity of what we were about to do. I'm a cautious person by nature, not a risk taker. (I don't get into airplanes.) Now I was planning to travel by car 6,000+ miles through 13 states, through tornado-prone plains, wild-fire prone grasslands, heat-wave prone deserts, places that have earthquakes periodically, through states with 80 mile per hour speed limits. (If people in Chicago drive 85 mph in a 55 mph speed zone, what could we expect with an 80 mph speed limit?) We'd be driving through mountain passes with multiple hair-pin turns and steep drop-offs, through parks whose websites warned us to stay 25 yards away from any animals to avoid contracting Hantavirus or the Bubonic Plague (!!!!) And what about delays? With set hotel reservations for many nights, one bad day of driving or car trouble could throw a four week schedule off pretty severely. I started spending as much time praying as planning. Did I believe and trust that God could keep us safe, sane, healthy and on schedule for twenty-five days? (Spoilers: He could, and did. He kept our car running, the severe weather just missing us, the wild fires contained when we got where we were going, the 120 degree heat two days behind us. And the drivers in 80 mph speed zones only drove about five miles over the limit! Also, no earthquakes or plague. He also protected us from the gun fight outside our hotel in Bakersfield, California, but that's a story for another day.)

Prayed up, I attacked the next stages of planning. I was brutal in my final selection of parks and got the list down to five – Zion, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Grand Tetons and the Badlands. This would make for reasonable planning and driving, but also allow for some flex time. It turned out to be a wise move and allowed us to stop and see things we hadn't initially planned to see, sites and areas I'd come to refer to as “Surprise Adventures”. I used Google Maps to plot our course and made up a calendar of our daily mileage. I then entered the marvelous world of Expedia, making hotel reservations for all the places near the parks we planned to visit and places where I thought it might be hard to get a room on the day we would be traveling through, like the middle of nowhere stretches of Utah and Nevada. Expedia made it easy to find and make reservations, and as I discovered, easy to cancel and change reservations, as I adjusted mileage and dates to make for a more sane trip. In the end, we planned on being on the road for 25 days, which included a two day visit with our daughters in Minneapolis at the end of our trip.

Partially because we are POACA, and partially because we have Luddite tendencies, we navigated the entire trip without a smart phone or a GPS, relying instead on an excellent Rand McNally atlas from 2006 that my son had rescued from a dumpster when he was in college. We also bought a 2016 copy of The Next Exit, an excellent resource recommended by our RV-traveling neighbors. This book contains listings of hotels, campgrounds, restaurants, hospitals, gas stations, and other services available at every exit on every interstate in the country. It also lists the location of every interstate rest stop and makes it visually easy to see what exits have a wide selection of services and what areas of a particular interstate have few or none, an valuable asset when approaching the vast wastelands of Utah and Nevada. We also traveled with a laptop and planned to rely heavily on the Wi-Fi networks of the hotels we stayed at to check weather and road conditions and access specialty maps for the following day's travels.

With more prayer, a fresh oil change for the car, a box of travel and hiking snacks, clothes for all weather and circumstances – including a wedding! - and two iPods of music, we were ready to hit the road...

Map out your future - but do it in pencil. The road ahead is as long as you make it. Make it worth the trip. - Jon Bon Jovi

Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. - Joshua 1:9

Next:

Flatlanders on the Road

THE TRIP – Day 1

Antioch, Illinois to Lincoln, Nebraska

570 miles

 

A Long Longing for the Road

THE TRIP – Day 0

Sometime during the summer after my freshman year of college, my roommate called to tell me her eldest brother had arrived home. Would I like to go out to a local bar, meet him and hear about his road trip through the west? “Home” for me and my roommate was the east coast - Long Island, New York. As college students, we had ventured as far as a campus in the foothills of the Catskills upstate, a whopping 100 miles due west from where we grew up. In a country 2,600+ miles wide, this was not the least bit impressive, but, hey, we were New Yorkers.* Her brother, however, had ventured as far as Ohio for his college years, and then headed west, taking the classic cross country road trip with some friends. Sure, I said, I'd love to meet your brother and hear about his travels. The year was 1972, and “going cross country” had been a cool thing for college students to do between school and work for the past decade or more. I spent the evening listening with rapt attention to my roommate's brother tell of the wonders he had seen on his trip, the national parks he visited, the landscapes he had scene along the road, the people he had met. As I listened, I could hear the line from “America”, Paul Simon's iconic road trip song playing in my head (“They've all come to look for America, all come to look for America...”). I don't now remember the specific details of everywhere my roommate's brother went or what he saw, but I do remember saying to myself “I'm going to do that someday, too. I'm going to drive west across the country...”

Post-college years and marriage took me as far west as Rochester, New York and eventually as far as northern Illinois. Yearly trips back east to visit family made us familiar with the concept of road trip in a small way. But going east 800 miles - two adults, three kids, a mini-van - it just didn't seem to line up with my vision of “going cross country”. Maybe when the kids were older, maybe when they were in college, maybe “someday”...

 “Someday” first showed its face during a trip back east a year or so ago. After the usual family visits in New York, we drove down the coast, through Virginia, to visit our son who was then living in North Carolina. We returned by way of South Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky, states neither my husband nor I had been through before. I loved being on the road, seeing the Shenandoah Valley, the Great Smoky Mountains, going through Knoxville, Nashville, Paducah. Wouldn't it be fun to do this when we retire, to take a road trip and see parts of the country we've never seen before, I said. My husband groaned. Sounds like a lot of driving, he said. (For me, it's always been about the journey. For him, it's about the destination...) But he didn't say “no”. This past Christmas he wrapped several books on the national parks he had checked out of the library and gave them to me as a token of the promise of a trip to “some” national parks when we both retired the following year. I started making a mental list of the places I wanted to see. A few days later, a young friend got engaged. He would be getting married in California in June. Would we come to his wedding? The bride lived a stone's throw from Yosemite, one of the parks on my mental list. And there were lots of national parks between Chicagoland and San Jose, California, lots of roads to travel to get from here to there, all heading west. “Someday” had finally arrived... 

 Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. – Mark Twain

*For a New Yorker's perspective on the geography of this country, see: http://brilliantmaps.com/new-yorkers-world/ Yes, the country really does look like that to many living east of the Hudson River...

Next:

God and Expedia are My Friends:

Planning, Planning, Praying...

THE TRIP – Day 0.1

The End is....Near?

Spring training is over. The real baseball season started this week. As a suburban New Yorker transplanted to suburban Chicago, I've remained a dispassionate observer of local sports teams for a good many years now. (Well, O.K., I do admit to getting excited about the Blackhawks...) When the White Sox won the World Series in 2005, I watched the playoffs and the series with a somewhat indifferent attitude. Oh, that's nice, I thought. Chicago fans get to have a championship team for a change. That other Chicago team, the perennial “Wait until next year” Cubs, have had six postseason appearances since I've lived in Illinois (and I've been here a long time...), two of which had them within reach of a National League pennant before they snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory. The last World Series win for the Chicago Cubs? The year was 1908, 108 years ago. The last pennant win for the Cubs got them an appearance in the 1945 World Series where they came oh so close before the Detroit Tigers took the series four games to three. That's 71 years for a pennant drought.

It was during the infamous NLCS Bartman series of 2003 I first became aware of the disastrous fate that awaits the world if the Chicago Cubs should win the pennant. Not the World Series, mind you, just the National League pennant. During that NLCS series I read a newspaper article about a play being performed by a small theater group in downtown Chicago. The play was based on a short story written by mystical baseball writer W. P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe Comes to Iowa, the short story the movie Field of Dreams was based on (“Build it and he will come...”). The theater group had taken another of Kinsella's short stories, The Last Pennant Before Armageddon, and turned it into a play.  The title was both ominous and intriguing, so intriguing I tracked the story down on interlibrary loan and checked it out for myself.*

The Last Pennant Before Armageddon tells the story of Al Tiller, a fictitious aging manager of the Chicago Cubs who has a dream in which desperate Cubs fans sit before a classic Old Testament depiction of God, pleading on behalf of their team:

“Please, God, we'd like you to arrange for the Chicago Cubs to win the pennant this year.”

Night after night, Al has a variation of this dream, peopled by different fans – men, women, both unknown and famous Chicagoans. ** God listens silently in the first five dreams, finally addressing the petitioners in the sixth dream:

“I appreciate your interest,” God said. “I want to assure you that I hold the Chicago Cubs in highest esteem. I have listened to your entreaties and considered the matter carefully from all angles. I am aware of how long it has been since the Cubs have won a pennant. I think you should know that when the Cubs next win the National League Championship it will be the last pennant before Armageddon...”

The biblical significance of this pronouncement is not lost on Al Tiller, and he spends the rest of this nineteen page story anxiously pondering the potential consequences of his decision-making as Cubs manager, his personal code of honour and the place of God's sovereignty in the midst of baseball and world affairs. The story ends in the bottom of the ninth inning of the final game of the National League Championship, the score tied 2-2, with Al's pitcher starting to fade and the radio in the dugout broadcasting the quickly escalating conflict in the Indian Ocean as the United States and the Soviet Union prepare to go to war over Sri Lanka...

***

Cubs fans have high hopes for their team this year, even higher than their usual optimistic early season pipe dreams. The 2015 season was a very good season, and expectations are that 2016 will be even better, maybe the best in 71 years...or 108 years. Now, I don't really believe that if the end is near for the Cubs pennant drought, the end is near for the rest of us as well. I believe God loves and esteems Cubs players, their management and their fans as His individual creations, but I don't really believe He esteems one team over another. (If He did, He'd probably be a Mets fan...) And as bad as Kim Jong Un, ISIS, global warming, GMOs, and the scary assortment of this year's potential presidential candidates bode for our future, Armageddon is not necessarily on the horizon. As I write this, the Cubs are in L.A., beating the Angels 6-0 in the bottom of the seventh inning in the opening game of the season. Here in Chicagoland, it's closing in on midnight. I think I'll call it a night and go to bed. It's too early in the season to worry...yet. Sweet...dreams?

*It can be found in the collection of W. P. Kinsella short stories entitled The Thrill of the Grass.

**Shockingly, die-hard White Sox fan Richard J. Daley appears before God in one dream - Richard J, not Richard M. W. P. Kinsella published this story in 1984, five years before Richard M. came into power, and back when the Cubs World Series drought was a mere 77 years in the making.

Front of the tee shirt: What did Jesus say to the Cubs?

Back of the tee shirt: “Don't do anything until I get back.”

Light Lenten Reflections

Week 7

Holy Week

It's Who You Know...

On November 23, 1963, a television show premiered in Great Britain about the adventures of a man from another world who traveled the universe in a faulty, stolen time-traveling machine. Despite an inauspicious start - its original broadcast time was delayed by news bulletins about the Kennedy assassination – the show became popular enough to start broadcasting internationally the following year. Originally written as a family-oriented children's show, it eventually drew a large following of adult sci fi fans. The show broadcast from 1963 through 1989, had a stand-alone movie in 1996, eventually got a reboot in 2005 and has continued with increasing popularity ever since. The show, Doctor Who, is shown in over 50 countries and, thanks to BBC America and PBS, can be seen on multiple stations in the U.S in any given week. A television show with the staying power of 50 plus years...an amazing feat. What's the attraction, and how is it even logistically possible?

For those not familiar with The Doctor, he's a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, a very social guy, choosing to travel through time and space with companions, usually people from the planet Earth. The Doctor loves humans, often acting to protect them and never asking anything in return. He and his companions spend a lot of time saving the Earth and its oblivious population from a wide assortment of alien enemies out to destroy it. This often puts him in perilous situations, some of which he doesn't survive. But, no problem – Time Lords have the ability to “regenerate”. The Doctor can die, but then comes alive again, in a new body - and as a new actor. Twelve* actors have played Doctor Who, which would explain in part the staying power of the series.

This week Christians celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the God-man who invaded our world, died on a cross only to show up alive and in a new body three days later. Why? Because He loved humans. And we were facing a mortal danger, an enemy more vicious than a dalek, scarier than a weeping angel and more insidious than the vashta nerada – Sin and its partner consequence, Death. It cost Him His earthly life to save us from that deadly duo, but He gave His life willingly and asked nothing in return. Nothing except to acknowledge and believe Who He is and what He has done...for us, His beloved human race. But many of us go on oblivious to the work Jesus has done on our behalf - calling us to turn from the sin that bogs us down, giving us freedom from the consequences of that sin, enabling a loving relationship with His heavenly Father and the promise of sharing in His resurrection life with a new body and an amazing eternity with Him. Talk about regeneration...

The Doctor's ability to regenerate, I think, only explains in part the longevity of the Doctor Who series. Perhaps part of the universal appeal of Doctor Who is that we, as fallen, oblivious human flesh, have within us a not-always-conscious inkling that we are desperately in need of Someone to save us, to rescue us from the deadly threat to our time line. Now, I know all analogies eventually break down, even a great one. And any analogy between the Doctor and Jesus Christ is only mediocre at best. Jesus is not a Time Lord. Sin is not a dalek. Eternity is not a wibbley-wobbley-timey-wimey thing. But we do have within us a deep longing for a Savior, and left on our own, we strive to come up with ways to save ourselves and fail abysmally. We struggle with doing things to get out of the timeless, universal mess we find ourselves in when we need only to believe and acknowledge and seek a relationship with the One who has already invaded our world and saved us. In the end, it is not what we do that counts, but Who we know...

Something to Ponder:

How much of your spiritual life depends on “doing” things, rescuing yourself? How much of your spiritual life depends on looking to Jesus as the Rescuer? Do you do good things because you want to earn God's approval and grace, or are you so overwhelmed by your helplessness and God's grace for you that you want to do good things for Him? What's the difference?

Something to Pray:

Grab a Bible or go to BibleGateway.com. Read Ephesians 2:4-10. Ask God to give you a greater understanding and appreciation for His mercy, His great love, His grace for you and His kindness toward you. Thank Him for the specific ways you have seen these things from Him in your life. Thank Him for having done the “heavy work” of saving you and ask Him to give you a greater understanding of what it means “by grace you have been saved through faith” and the gift it is. Lastly, commit your good works to God, asking Him to show you how to walk in them.

Atraxi: [after scanning The Doctor] You are not of this world.

The Doctor: No but I've put a lot work into it.

Atraxi: Is this world important?

The Doctor: Important? What's that mean, important? Six billion people live here, is that important?...

                     - From The Eleventh Hour (The Eleventh Doctor)

Clara Oswald: You're going to help me?

The Doctor: Well, why wouldn't I help you?

Clara Oswald: Because of what I just did, I just...

The Doctor: You betrayed me. You betrayed my trust. You betrayed our friendship. You betrayed everything... you let me down!

Clara Oswald: Then why are you helping me?

The Doctor: Why? Do you think that I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?

                                                                   - From Dark Water (The Twelfth Doctor)

...He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night, and the storm in the heart of the sun. He's ancient and forever... He burns at the center of time and he can see the turn of the universe... And... he's wonderful.

           - Tim Latimer, describing the Doctor, from The Family of Blood (The Tenth Doctor)

He who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name                                                 - Amos 5:8

I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.                                                         - Daniel 7: 13-14

*(Yes, I know...some of you die-hard fans out there would argue thirteen...)

Light Lenten Reflections

Week 6

Live Like a Narnian

When I got up this morning, the sun had already risen. I didn't actually see it, but the lightening of the clouds indicated it had most likely happened, like it did the day before, and I have faith it will tomorrow. I went out to the car later in the morning and drove to the store. I believed the car would start, run, get me where I wanted to go despite my lack of in-depth automotive knowledge. I also believed the drivers in the cars I passed on the road had a survival instinct at least as strong as my own, would stay on their side of the road and get where they wanted to go without doing anything stupid to prevent me from getting where I wanted to go. I have faith in my fellow man...within reason...

Faith...Part of the Merriam-Webster definition calls it a firm belief in something for which there is no proof and also as a complete belief and trust in and loyalty to God. In the book of Hebrews, the Bible says faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. The sun's rise tomorrow and a safe arrival at the store are not guaranteed. However, I have enough trust, assurance and conviction to believe both are highly likely, but I'm not sure if either are indicators of true, rubber-meets-the-road, faith. I believe all sorts of things because, frankly, I am surrounded by good reasons to believe them. My personal inclination is to lean toward the believable. My collection of facts about what I believe may be incomplete, but I usually have accrued enough of them to make my beliefs reasonable, and the missing pieces may even give my belief system an element of faith about it.

But faith, true faith, is when all is missing pieces, or, sometimes, no pieces at all. Of course, there is always the chance that the thing I put my faith in may be foolish, may not even be real, but the faith I'm talking about here is the faith that I have in what I can't see, but what I hope, on most days, to be true. And I go on, living my life of faith, on most days, until I come to that day, or that week, or that year of doubt. The thing or the Person I have put my faith in has not behaved like I have believed it or He would, and my faith is shaken.

My experience of faith is that it is continuous but not always constant in its weight. Some days it just seems stronger than on other days. In circumstances where there isn't much heft to my faith, I fear it is in danger of floating away. To look at the hope of eternity in light of the world around me is enough to suck the mass out of my faith on some days.

I first read C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia as an adult. If you have not read this series of books written for children, I highly recommend it. (Notice I wrote “books written for children” and not “children's books”. They are profound reading for adults...) My favorite book in the series is The Silver Chair. In part of the story, two children, a captured prince and a marsh-wiggle are trying to make their escape from a witch's underground kingdom. They have been trapped there for a long time, and their memories of the Overland, the place above ground where the noble talking lion Aslan rules, have started to fade. Their crisis of faith has been helped along by the witch's sweet magic powder and her insistence that all they remember of the real world is just, in fact, a dream or a children's story. Puddleglum, the marsh-wiggle, by nature a creature of gloomy disposition, is the last to succumb to the witch's faith-destroying tactics. But he rouses himself out of her spell to declare what I consider to be one of the noblest defenses of faith in literature:

 

“...All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I don't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that' s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say.”

Many days, my faith is strong, heavy even, but on those light-weight days that do come, C. S. Lewis, via Puddleglum, speaks weight into my faith. When I see no way, the marsh-wiggle encourages me to make a deliberate commitment to a Person. I choose to be on Aslan's side and live like a Narnian.

Something to Ponder:

How “heavy” is your faith in general? In believing and trusting in other people, in believing and trusting in what you may know about God? How dependent is your faith on the “facts” that make your beliefs seem reasonable? Think about what would happen if you couldn't “see” those facts any longer. How would this affect your faith? How do the words “blind faith” make you feel?

Something to Pray:

Grab a Bible or go to BibleGateway.com. Read Hebrews 11:1-3. Now pray it. In light of what you pondered above, ask God to give you the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen, especially in your relationship with Him. Ask Him to give “weight” to your faith. Read Hebrews 11:8-12 as it tells about God's promises to Abraham and his response of faith. Ask God to give you faith like Abraham's, to follow God even when you are not sure where He is leading you, to believe in His goodness and provision even when it seems impossible.

Faith is not intelligent understanding, faith is deliberate commitment to

a Person where I see no way. - Oswald Chambers, March 28, My Utmost for His Highest

A version of this was previously posted on the blog at www.trinitylink.com.

Light Lenten Reflections

Week 5

Mmmmm.....Tempting....

My brother attributes my great fishing prowess - including my annoying tendency to outfish him – to my ability to think like a fish. My brother is a highly knowledgeable fisherman, so I assume he is correct. A few years ago, on a trip to Wal-Mart for some random grocery item, I inexplicably found myself in the fishing lure aisle. (This happens surprisingly often.) There among the bags of Gulp and Zoom soft baits, a generic package of rubber worms caught my eye. Earthworm-mauve in color at the head, fading to a creamy rose in its tapered tail, this worm stimulated that part of my brain that thinks like a fish. Somehow I knew if I were a largemouth bass, I definitely would go for this worm. I promptly grabbed a pack of them, got my random grocery item (I think...) and went home to try out the worm in the backyard pond.

Over the next fishing year the worm proved to be very successful. I caught a lot of bass with it, some crappie and even a bluegill who should have known better than to go for something that big.. But when I started thinking about the actual size of the fish I was catching, I honestly had to admit that I didn't catch any really big bass with what was now my favorite rubber worm. Most of the bass I was getting were what I would call “teenage” or “college-age” bass, that is, not small, but not yet having reached their full weight or length maturity. Oh, I did see some big ones out there, but they either ignored the worm, or looked at it with disdain as if to say “Yeah, seen that before. Not interested. Going after one of those never ends well...” It got me thinking about the role experience and maturity has in the ability to resist temptation.

Temptation, a desire to do something, especially something wrong or unwise, is part of our human nature. There is nothing really wrong with temptation itself. It's a desire, but not yet an action. We can resist the temptation to do something that is ultimately bad for us, and after a little strain to our self restraint muscles, life goes on as usual, or we can give into the temptation and find out how bad the resulting consequences will be. Like those luscious rubber worms, temptations are things that appear to be real but are in fact just faint imitations of what we really need or long for. When we are tempted to eat an entire bag of sour cream cheddar potato chips it's because we are hungry for real food. When we are tempted to lie or misrepresent ourselves it's because we want to be accepted or seen in a particular light. When we drink too much or indulge in drugs it's because we want to feel good or distract ourselves from some inner pain, if only for the present moment. When we are tempted to enter into unhealthy relationships it's because we are wired to be in good relationships, but we don't have the patience to wait for the good one to come along. As we age and mature, I think we become more aware of the temptations out there we are most likely to succumb to, their personal consequences for us, and, if we are wise, learn to resist them. Unlike the teenage and college-age bass, we develop the disdain of the lunkers - “Yeah, seen that before. Not interested. Going after one of those never ends well...”

Toward the end of my successful fishing season, I did catch one big largemouth with that worm. It was the biggest bass, biggest any fish, I had ever caught in my life. It was an exciting catch for me. It did not end well for the fish. I was a little surprised a big bass had given into the lure of that worm, but I think it was a good reminder that our age, maturity, and experience isn't always enough to resist temptation. The ultimate way of escape from temptation doesn't come from deep down, within us, but from Above. Sometimes our resolve fails us, and without a heaven-sent escape, we human lunkers find ourselves behaving like teenage and college-age bass when it comes to temptation. We give in. And it never ends well... 

 

Something to Ponder:

What are your “rubber worms”, the areas that hold the most temptation for you? Food, money, image, relationships, sex, alcohol, drugs, other things? What are the areas you don't think are a struggle for you, that you feel a bit smug in your resistance to?

Something to Pray:

Grab a Bible or go to BibleGateway.com. Read 1 Corinthians 10:11-13. Reread verse 12. Give to God the areas you feel a bit smug in your resistance to temptation. Acknowledge that your strength is often not enough. Ask Him to protect you with His strength to keep you strong and wise. Reread verse 13 a couple of times. Ask God to “provide the way of escape” for you in the areas you do struggle with temptation.

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.” - C. S. Lewis

Sherman's Lagoon                   Jim Toomey                 1994

Light Lenten Reflections

Week 4

The Low Down on the High Places

I've recently been reading a series of books detailing the long and bloody history of some ancient kingdoms. The kings and their assorted family members run the gamut from somewhat good and somewhat noble to downright evil and conniving. There is intrigue, bloodshed, and a roller coaster of character development. The somewhat good people are flawed. The evil ones may appear to have their moments of goodness. Some characters are given pages of presence, others only a line or two. No, I've not been reading A Song of Fire and Ice, (those Game of Thrones books). I've been reading four biblical Old Testament books – First and Second Kings and First and Second Chronicles, histories having, perhaps at first glance, some similarities to the Game of Thrones world. Minus the dragons, though...

The two biblical kingdoms of Judah and Israel had their share of rotten kings whose atrocities and idolatries are condemned across the pages of the four above-mentioned books. Similarly, the good kings get shout-outs in the same books for their attempts to do things God's way. But in reading about king after king, I noticed a disturbing pattern even among the histories of the “good” kings. It seemed that not every, but most, “good” kings got dragged down by “the high places”. The pattern I was seeing read something like this:

“(Put 'good' king's name here) walked in all the ways of (previous 'good' king, often his father). He did not turn aside from it, doing what was right in the sight of the Lord. (But; Nevertheless) the high places were not taken away.”

This scenario occurs again and again, in the histories of Solomon, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Jehoash, Amaziah, Azariah, Jotham... “But the high places were not taken away...”

So, what's the deal with the “high places”? Most of these good kings tore down the idolatrous shrines, places where the people worshiped pagan gods, but why not the high places? Why were they different and why were they such a problem? Initially, before Solomon built the temple in Jerusalem, there was no central place for the people to worship God, so they thought it a good idea to worship Him somewhere. And high places, often geographically and symbolically closer to heaven, seemed to make sense as do-it-yourself worship venues. And sincere worship probably did occur at times in these high places, so they were tolerated. But after the temple was built, these high places remained, now more often than not, tainted with idol worship.

Why leave standing a place which has out-lived its original purpose, is a snare to people's spiritual lives, and is a magnet for heathen idolatry? One has only to look as far as human nature for some likely answers. We humans easily tolerate that which is overly familiar to us even if it has negative consequences. Familiar things have a tendency to become invisible to us. I have ceased to see those boxes of old photographs I put in the corner of the bedroom with the intention of sorting a year ago. They have now become invisible to me, that is, until I trip over them trying to navigate the room with the lights off. We humans are also good at tolerating compromise. Something once sort of good can't be all bad now that it's sort of bad, so we let it stay in our lives. Like those cheap but oh so stylish shoes that felt tolerably comfortable when I first bought them, but don't any longer, and yet here they are, still on my feet, still looking oh so stylish. Lastly, we humans tend to allow things to stay in our lives simply because we don't want to make the effort to remove them. Getting rid of long-standing stuff takes both physical and emotional energy. My basement contains items I no longer need or want, but have I cleaned it out? No, that would take time and energy and emotional effort I don't feel like expending at the moment, though I expect I will regret my present lack of action if I ever decide to sell the house.

“High places” in our lives have potentially much more serious consequences than unsorted photos, worn out shoes and cluttered basements. We may see ourselves walking with God like “good” kings, but like those kings, we allow areas of our lives to sidetrack and distract us and those around us from God's best for us. These distractions may be behaviors as innocuous as an occasional racy TV show or as devastating as a porn habit. They may be internal mindsets ranging from silently but habitually judging others to harboring long-standing bitterness or unforgiveness toward someone. These all pull us down and away from the whole-hearted following of the path God has called us to. And there is nothing “high” about that...

Something to Ponder:

Are there spiritual “high places” in your life, things that have become invisible to you, places of tolerable compromise, areas you don't want to expend the energy to deal with that have the potential to pull you off track in your walk with God? How would your life, your relationship with God be different if you were to “tear down” one of those high places?

Something to Pray:

Ask God to make you more aware of the negative spiritual consequences of your easily ignored “high places”. Grab a Bible or go to BibleGateway.com. Read 2 Kings 18:1-8. Hezekiah is one of the kings who did tear down the high places. Ask God to be the Foreman on your demolition team for any high place in your life He wants you to deal with. Ask Him to show you how and give you the strength to tear it down. Ask Him also for the attributes of Hezekiah – to do right in the eyes of the Lord, to trust in the Lord, to hold fast to Him, to not depart from following Him.

The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places.

- Bryant H. McGill