die now

I wrote a column about Toys for Tots for the paper this week, and apparently caught everyone off-guard.

The column doesn't so much take issue with the notion of giving toys to underprivileged children as it does with the notion that this is enough, that the spirit of Christmas doesn't call us to somthing greater than merely handing out toys. Everyone at the office has known for some time that I'm not only a Christian but a former missionary, but unless I'm mistaken, interest in what I believe has just experienced an upsurge. I hope that's true among the community when the papers hit the stands tomorrow evening and Thursday.

Jesus doesn't ask merely the difficult of us; he asks us to do the impossible. The Cross is not a matter of inconvenience; it's about death. Jesus doesn't say, "Follow me and I'll give you everything you want," or even, "Make a couple sacrifices and follow me." What he says is, "Follow me and die."

I don't want that. You don't want that. None of us wants that. But that's what he calls us to. It's something that flies in the face of every ounce of who we are as people, our urge to matter, to have meaning in our lives, even to survive.

In exchange for dying now -- and he means death, real death to our selves -- he promises us not self-fulfillment or happiness, but grief, suffering, pain, and an eternity filled with a wilder, more unbelievable love than we've ever known before.

Everyone who knows me or who has read my blog, knows how I've wrestled with the grittiness of the faith. Paul and Jesus alike tell us that God is merciful and compassionate, sending rain upon the just and unjust alike.

And if we look at life that way, we do see incomparable mercy: Even men like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have known the untrammeled joys of seeing their children born and watching them grow through infancy and into full-fledged childhood. Even miserly scrooges can be touched by the beauty of a sunset, and the worst employers have discovered loyal workers and true friends.

But if life is beautiful, it's also foul. Children are abducted, raped and murdered. Teens are tormented brutally for being too slow in gym class, for being too smart in math class, for enjoying reading in a TV world or for watching the wrong TV shows.

Men like Matthew Shepard are murdered for being gay, and teen parents who kill their newborn children are let off with probation while people who smoke marijuana pass years in a jail cell.

Power is on the side of the strong, the wicked sit in positions of authority, and the law is corrupt. It's been that way since the beginning. God appears to be either schizophrenic or indifferent, but he claims to be good.

The defining moment of history was the Cross, where Jesus took on our sins -- became our sins -- and died. At the Cross, we find expiation for our sin. At the Cross, what righteousness we have through faith comes alive and grows us into the likeness of Christ so that God sees us fully realized in his son as we never have been realized here.

At the Cross, the old man dies and the new man comes to life as everything is stripped painfully away, and at the Cross we find the full depths of God's wild and reckless love, and everything else -- including the senseless suffering of children -- finds its meaning.

What we're left with is a love that defies understanding; it's wild, it's reckless and it's destructive. It's a raging torrent that, if we let it, will sweep us away and never let us be the same again.

Every now and then, I hear strains of that music through the noise of life, and it makes me dance with reckless abandon.



Copyright © 2003 by David Learn. Used with permission.