In this imperceptibly vast sea of humanity, we are scarcely a drop. But in the sweeping vastness of such a turbulent sea we forget that these waters are in fact made up of a collection of drops, for without these individual drops the sea would be nothing but parched rumor and dusty myth. And because that’s the case, the turbulence engulfing this enormous body of water can be brought to a stilled calm by this single drop that we are touching the drop that everyone else is with the love that God has touched us with.
I will become discouraged and often I deeply lament of the fallenness that presses down in ever-darkening swells all around me. But I have learned that to be discouraged in the face of sin running rampant is simply my humanity finding itself vexed to exhaustion as I grapple with the wonder of ‘what could be’ as held against the depravity of ‘what is.’ Yet what I’ve learned is that discouragement is fortitude in the making, for God knows that to seize the vision of how good things can be we must first experience the wretchedness of how bad they can become. Only then will we understand the gravity of our mission and the power of goodness to achieve it.
God takes the impossible and makes it the inevitable.
Although I’m a bit tentative about it all, I would like to say that if my death saved your life I would gladly engage in such an exchange. But if I must make that exchange knowing that you are likely to reject it, and that you will turn on it and brutally ridicule it until the beauty of my sacrifice is altogether destroyed, I cannot imagine taking such an action. Yet, God does that every single day.
I think that the stories that God has told and the things that He has done seem utter implausible to us only because we lock Him into the tiny rubrics that the stories He has told and the things that He has done invite us outside of.
I think that the stories that God has told and the things that He has done seem utterly implausible to us only because we lock Him into the tiny rubrics that the stories He has told and the things that He has done invite us outside of.
When we fall to the bottom of the hole that we’ve spent our lives digging, we will find that God was there waiting for us long before we showed up. And in one hand He’s holding all of the shovels that we used to dig it, and in the other He’s got a ladder.
The greatest sacrifice is to unreservedly give the whole of oneself to another, knowing full well that such a gift must be wholly rejected, blithely tossed aside and trampled underfoot as some worthless filth because (much like ourselves) the depravity of the recipient is such that they can only be saved through the death of the giver. And I don’t know of any human who would do that, but I know a God Who did.
We wonder why God waits to step in after it’s too late. That’s because with God there is no such thing as too late.
Only the blood of the blameless Lamb, the LORD JESUS CHRIST, can wash the stain of sin to be made as clean as cotton.
Only Christ Jesus can clean your heart.
Seeing their parents' struggles, Asian American children tend to feel very obligated and motivated to live up to their parents' expectations. I think that's also why Asian American second-generation Christians can be so fervent in their faith. They understand God's sacrifice in deep, personal ways because they have family models of this self-giving.
Without faith, where is the force of being?
On every trip back to the Midwest, I step aside from my schedule and visit my parent’s graves. And with trimmers in hand I kneel down and I cut back the intruding grasses and occasional weed that has edged up against their headstones. It is not in grief that I do this, but in the fondest recollection. The tears that often visit me there are those of joy; that God had thought enough of me to bless me with parent’s rich in love, ever bound by sacrifice, and sturdy in faith despite the nature of the adversities that so often beset them. And as I leave their graves and head back to the pressing demands of my world, I depart with the commitment to live my life in a manner that my children will find no grief at my grave, but joy in knowing that God chose me for them.
We’re either ‘running from’ something or ‘running to’ something. And I think that true freedom is ‘resting in’ something.
With God, the impossible is demoted to the rank of the possible.
I must be reminded that God often seems distant because I’ve made Him smaller than what He is and my struggles bigger than what they are.
I choose not be what the world is. Rather, I choose to be what the world says I cannot be.
I skipped a stone on the glass-like surface of a sleepy lake this morning. And I watched the ripples roll out from the stone’s impact until their energy abated and they fell smooth as was the rest of the lake. And as it become smooth again, I thought that one of the greatest things I could ask of God would be to grant me the gift of a soul with such inner calm that it would smooth out every ripple from every stone that Satan could ever throw into it.
Now that I was learning that converting to Christianity entailed a whole lot more than pats on the back and potluck lunches in affluent North Texas churches. God and I had to have a serious conversation about how I was to handle the realities of being a Muslim convert and facing what was likely to be a hostile environment.
