A Just Man

I can't imagine the heartache.  He really thought she was the one...and now, there she stands, tear stained face, obviously pregnant, trying to convince him that it was some 'miracle' and that she has been faithful to him.  He knows better.  Young girls don't just miraculously end up pregnant...but they are sometimes unfaithful.  I really can't imagine the bitter taste Joseph must've had right then.  The rage of betrayal, the humiliation he will now suffer...it surely whirled in his mind like a cyclone.  What to do now?  He could marry her anyway...everyone would think it was his child...but he would never be able to trust her...and he would end up raising the other guys child.  No, he just can't do that.  what to do...He could have her stoned...many righteous men would...but that seems so callous and brutal...what to do...what to do...What would you do?  Here is what Joseph did:

Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not wanting to make her a public example, was minded to put her away secretly.

Yes, that was the best answer...Joseph would secretly 'divorce' [put away] the woman who was to spend her life as his wife.  He would do it in secret, as quietly and quickly as possible, and then she would probably go back to cousin Elizabeth's to have the child.  That way he will not have a lifetime of heartache from an unfaithful spouse, and she can go be with him, whoever him is.

Is that what you would do?  Obviously, we know the rest of the story:  it really was a miracle, she had been faithful to Him, and the child was the Almighty God.  But put yourself in Joseph's place for just a moment.  You don't know any of this, you haven't seen the movie Trailer.  All you know is that a few months ago you packed her off to her cousin's house while you continued to make ready for your life together.  Now she's back, months later, expecting a child, with a wild, unbelievable story, expecting [or at least asking] you to be a complete fool and believe the unbelievable.  If you were really Joseph, what would you do?  I don't see me buying the Angel story, how about you?

But Joseph wasn't like most of us.  Even before the Angel appears to Joseph, his response is not one of vengeance, it is one of justice and compassion.  Joseph was a just man and evidence of that justice was his decision/intent to privately deal with what appeared to him to be Mary's infidelity.  He had no desire to 'shame' her, no vengeful spirit of putting her through public humiliation.  Was he hurt?  Yes!  Angry?  Probably.  Heartbroken?  No Doubt!  Devastated?  Of Course!  Vengeful?  Not in the least.  Why?  Because he was a just man.  What does that mean...that he was a 'just' man?  I believe it means that his way of thinking, feeling, and acting was wholly conformed to the will of God.  He acted like God Himself would act were he in this situation.  Consider the parable of the Good Father [usually called "The Prodigal Son"] from Luke 15.

But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his heck and kissed him.

He runs to his son, filled with compassion [love and pity] embraces him and kisses him.  What a tender scene of joyful reunion.  It is quite obvious how much this father loves his son, how he has missed him, agonizing nights of wondering if the boy is okay.  Praying for God to protect him and bring him home. Do you detect a judgmental spirit in this father?

Look at you!  Peeeyewwww, you STINK!  Where have you been...a pig pen?!?  Do you think you can just go live like a heathen, and then waltz right back in here like you never left, like you own the place?  Now listen boy, if you're going to come home, I better not hear any of this 'far country' talk!  Do you have ANY of the money left?  NONE OF IT?  If you want to come back here, I better see you on the front pew at church Sunday morning...Do you know what shame and humiliation you have brought on this family?...  

No, that wasn't the heart of this father [actually, that was the heart of the older brother, but that's another story].  Listen to what the father did:

But the father said to his servants, 'Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet.'

The first thing he does is send a servant home [remember that they are "a great way off"] to get a robe and a ring.  Why would he do that?  Why not drag the boy through town in his stinky, pig-pen wardrobe so the depth of his humiliation would be indelibly impressed upon him.  He should be ashamed of what he has done shouldn't he?  But the father puts the best robe, a ring, and sandals on him first thing.  If he does this, no one will know what a loser this boy has been.  No one but he and the father will know...but wasn't that the point?  Like Joseph, he was a just man, not wanting to make a public example of the boy.  That's why I believe being just is being like God.  Here is a description Jesus gives us of His Father:

You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' but I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who cures you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be the sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.  For if you love whose who love you, what reward have you?  Do not even the tax collectors do the same?  And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others?  Do not even the tax collectors do so?  Therefore you shall be perfect, just as you Father in heaven is perfect.

The father isn't interested in publicly humiliating those who have failed, and/or betrayed Him.  He isn't interested in you writing books about your dirty past, and he isn't certainly isn't interested in his children being vengeful and seeking to expose the failures of his other children to public scrutiny. God doesn't just love those who love Him.

Do the names Josef & Madga Goebbels mean anything to you?  They were friends of Adolph Hitler.  Think about that for a moment...even the poster boy for wickedness had friends...people he loved who loved him back.  Anyone can do that.  But not anyone can love those who hate them.  You see, that is, as the preacher said yesterday, the acid test of Christianity.  How do we treat those who mistreat us?

God doesn't want everyone to "get theirs", He wants everyone to come to repentance and be forgiven.  To be sure, if you refuse to repent of your sin, you are not like the prodigal, and a day of great humiliation awaits you.  But if you penitently come to the Father, he has a robe and a ring for you.  Joseph didn't want Mary to Taste the bitter anguish of her sin, he didn't want public vindication, he wanted to be like God.

So, what about you?  Are you just?  Are you minded to privately deal with the sins of others when those sins hurt you?  Or are you unjust, loving only those who love you, and seeking or expressing scorn and defamation to the reputation of those who wrong you?

When it's wrong to be All In

Through the last few months of his life, Justin and I talked a lot about being "All In" and in the end, I believe he was.  But not everything merits, or is even appropriate for, being all in.  The good things in life are the enemy of the best things in life.  So often, we get "all in" on the wrong stuff, and then there is not enough left for us to be "all in" on the stuff that really matters.  This is how I would categorize a few common things in life, in no particular order.

All in things:

Your marriage
Being a mom or dad
Learning God's Word
Being a fundamentally good person
Living [not wasting] your life
Providing for and protecting your family
Being a good friend
Fighting to remain alive [like Justin did against cancer]
Christianity


Non-all in things

Football, NASCAR Races, or sports of any kind
Video Games, TV shows, books, movies, any entertainment
Making money
Clothing, toys [electronics & otherwise], any possessions
Seeking optimum health
Education
Hobbies, Hunting, Fishing, Boating
Blogging or Facebook

Not that I have any objection to football, fishing, or facebook.  In fact, those are all good things, even important, in their place.  I have a college degree, a blog, a Samsung Nexus, and I just got home from a fishing trip to Lake Texoma with some great friends of mine [It wasn't a top notch week for fishing but the lake was beautiful and the company was refreshing.]  But if we get unfocused and end up all in on the good things, we won't be able to be all in on the best things.

So how about it,  are you All In on the important stuff and not all in on the rest, or do you need to do a little priority shuffling?

The House of Mourning

One year ago today Justin died.  Yes, there is still sorrow, and heaviness in my heart when I think of him.  It seems unfathomable that it has been over one year since I spoke with him.  It has been a roller coaster for me, and I have learned a lot about myself.  I want to share a few of those thoughts with you...the challenges, and what appears to me, right now, to be my take-away.

Sorrow - I cried at his funeral, as well as other times.  I don't know about everyone, but for me, what we call 'emotional pain' is more akin to heaviness.  It is like a very heavy weight
 inside my chest.  I guess that's why people say their 'heart hurts' when they lose someone.  It is not pain in the sense of slamming your finger in the car door, but it is pain, in a weird and yes, physical way, and I would be lying to deny that sometimes, very much today, I still feel it.
- Take away:  I do now understand those who sorrow, more than I did before.  Sorrow has made me more introspective.  Even though it is unpleasant, I do have a more realistic view of life...and death.  I know now that there is no earthly tonic for sorrow.  A vacation doesn't fix it.  A new smart phone won't dull it.  Holding a baby is about the best earthly pain killer there is for me.  But, I have found that I can have the joy of eternal hope, even in sorrow.

Help - I've always been the guy people come to for help, never the other way around.  As a result, I don't talk to others about my heartache, problems or struggles...I have felt like the answer man and the answer man doesn't need answers, he dispenses them.  That has gotten me into a heap of trouble a few times through the years.  Some stuff you just can't handle by yourself, 
you need to talk to someone else about it.  I ached for a long time about some of these things I'm sharing with you today without talking to anyone about it.  Thinking about 
talking to someone made me feel weak, and people around me don't need me to be weak, they need me to keep a stiff upper lip as they say.  That wasn't a good choice.  Then, when I did begin to try to talk about it some, I learned that almost everyone is more interested in their own problems, no matter how trivial, than they are in yours.  Thankfully God did bless me with a wife and a couple of friends who were not so self centered.
- Take away: When someone comes with a heartache or sorrow, listen to them.  Often all they need is someone to sorrow with them.  Don't think you have to have some magic answer to take away the heaviness, just share it with them.  And for goodness sake, don't be so self centered that you turn the conversation to some problem or heartache of your own.

Memories - Justin used to tell me that we are all just two generations away from no one remembering us.  I argued with him [as we often did with one another], after all, don't we still remember Abraham Lincoln?  Julius Caesar? Actually no.  No-one alive today actually remembers Abraham Lincoln.  We remember what we have learned about him, but no-one remembers him.  Justin was right, and that realization caused me to feel like I needed to remember him.  Just remember everything I could about the times we were together, on three continents, the night before his wedding, every detail, because so many of those memories are shared by no-one else, and if I lose them, they are gone forever.
- Take away:  I have learned that the only real value in memories is the blessing they are to you right now.  Memories are, like dreams, strangely personal.  No matter how hard I try to remember details about Justin, even if I were able to perfectly keep every memory vivid, when I die, those memories die with me. 
 Even writing them down doesn't help anyone else remember them.  So, when you do remember, just enjoy the moment, but don't torture yourself by trying to remember it all.  I think its wise to hold on to memories that comfort you, but you have to remind yourself that they are gone, and memories are not real life, they are just memories of life that used to be, and no longer is.

Death - I got new glasses recently, and now, everything I see is seen through those new lenses.  They are progressive lenses [low power at the bottom, higher power as you go up] and what is weird about them is that they bring some things [what I am directly looking at] into focus, but they distort other things, and they don't really fix my vision, they just help me get by.  I got new glasses metaphorically when Justin died, and now, everything I see is seen through that lens...the lens of coming death.  I became acutely aware of my own 

impending death.  Not that it bothers me, really, but it is there.  I expect death.  I'm not often surprised to hear of death, even untimely death, but I didn't often think about my own impending death.  Now I do, pretty often.
-Take away:  Like my progressives, the new glasses of keen death awareness bring some things into much clearer focus, but they also distorts some things.  One distortion is joy which I'll talk about next, I'm sure there are others that I'm not yet aware of.  As to the clearer focus, I am going to die, and just as sure as you are reading this you are going to die too.  So what will we do about it?  I'm choosing to be All In with Jesus Christ.  He is the only one who ever beat death.  He's the only hope I have of beating death.  Justin believed that, and so do I.

Joy - Death is a joy-sucker.  Not just at the moment, but for the long haul.  The biggest challenge for me has been the failure of joy to overcome the heaviness of death.  Do you remember in the Wizard of OZ when the wizard said "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"?  But once they had seen him, they knew the magic of the wizard wasn't real.  I have known, and believed, for years that there is a man behind the curtain, but when Justin died I saw the man behind the curtain.  His name is death, and he is coming.  That is a real joy-killer.  For a while, I allowed him to rob me.  Sure Christmas time is fun; gifts, songs, family...but we are all going to die.  A birthday party is great; love the cake, candle's and balloons, but we are still going to die.  Great meal tonight honey, but we are going to die.  It taints everything.  Life is irrelevant.  It becomes a brief moment of smiles and tears, then it's over.  I felt myself becoming an existentialist.  It's really very depressing.
-Take away: When I finally did talk about this, a dear friend recommended I read Ecclesiastes.  I don't know if you are familiar with Ecclesiastes, but my wife didn't think that was such a good idea.  Solomon makes a pretty strong case for existentialism.  But I took his advice, and found it strangely comforting.  I'd found a com-padre in my emptiness, and he was far beyond me.  Not only is life vanity [worthless] to Solomon, but it is Vanity of Vanities.  He confirmed that life it totally meaningless.  Whatever you build will someday crumble, what you earn will be spent, what you accomplish will fade away or be eclipsed.  Then, to top it all off, people won't remember you.  Nothing in life is worthwhile.  Then, at the end, the wise man gave me the answer.  Serve God, keep His commands.  That glorifies my creator, and that gives everything meaning.  What a shocking turn around, every little detail in life goes from worthless to worthwhile.

Over-reaction - I have become an over-reactor.  I don't know why, I don't think I've always had a propensity toward that, at least not that I'm aware of.  I have tended to make mountains out of molehills, but I've seen in myself a tendency over this last year, to just react, almost out of instinct, to what happens around me instead of thoughtfully responding.  I'm not sure why.  Justin was so cerebral that one struggle he had was trying to reason himself to a solution to the Pancreatic Cancer, and the despair that comes from facing something you can't out think.  We talked about that quite a bit.  Maybe I've just internalized that.

-Take away:  My dad told me one time that as we get older, we don't get better, we just get more of what we always were.  That is a sobering thought to me and motivates me to know that my struggle against weakness, failure, sinfulness, will not end in this life.  There isn't going to be that A-ha moment when it all clears up and everything gets easy...not until death.  We are in a war, a very real, spiritual war, and we are constantly under attack.  We must be constantly fortifying ourselves; the enemy is an expert at exploiting the cracks in our defenses...even weaknesses we don't know exist.

Change - I would love to be able to tell you that all of these realizations changed me in some fundamentally positive way.  That I'm not impatient with my children anymore because I realize I could lose them and they will lose me.  That I don't argue with my wife over petty things because my heart is set on things above and not things on this earth.  

That I'm more conscientious about returning phone calls, answering email, and just keeping in touch because I understand the fundamental need we all have for relationship.  That my sermons are somehow more insightful, more spiritual, more convicting and effective because of the angst of my soul.  But the sad truth is that I'm still the same old me.  
-Take away: I have learned that the death of a friend, though it touches you to the core, exposes who you are, it doesn't change who you are...only the death of Jesus can do that.

After he found out that he had cancer, and that it was really bad, Justin was asked to come preach in his home congregation.  Leading up to that, he told me "I know that lots of people will come just to see if I look different, and they will expect me to have some deep insight because of what I've been going through...I don't know what I'm going to say, I just don't have anything profound to tell them..."  When he went and preached, late that night the phone rang.  "So what did you tell them?", I asked.  "I just preached the gospel", he said.  "The same story I've been preaching for 30 years."  I guess that's all there is to say.  In the final analysis, Justin bet his soul on that story...me too.

Better to go to the house of mourning

Than to go to the house of feasting,

For that is the end of all men;

And the living will take it to heart.

Sorrow is better than laughter,

For by a sad countenance the heart is made better.

The heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

Ecclesiastes 7:2-4