Judah, Adopting, and Forsaking

Earlier this week we received two more pictures of Judah.  They told us that he was born on December 20, 2005.  That was our three-year anniversary!  That also makes him a little more than five months old right now.  And at five months old, he only weighs 9.5 pounds.  I think my baby brother Greg (who's twenty years old now) weighed 10 pounds 7 ounces when he was born.  Welcome to abandoned African babies.

We have five total pictures now.  In a sense, they're like ultrasounds for us, except they're post-birth and outside the womb.  And we're thousands of miles away.  But the Lord is there, and the Lord is here, and we rest in that.

The crazy thing is that if I love my not-yet-adopted and not-yet-legal son this much already (and I've never even met him), how much must God love His Son?  I think if I understood how strong the bond of intra-trinitarian love is, it would do at least three things: challenge me in a ton of ways, make sense out of some things, and confuse the heck out of other things.  It does all three at once when you think about this:  "My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?"

A Walk in the Park

After dinner yesterday, Cindi and I went for a walk in a local park.  It’s a good thing to be outside, especially during seasons of life that are especially busy.  It’s a reminder of many things, one of them being the fact that the world is much bigger than my little life.  Another is that God’s purposes in the world don’t rise and fall with what I’m doing or the length of my To-Do list, nor do they revolve around my inbred concerns and petty anxieties.  A third is that in light of the universe that God created and watches over and orchestrates, it is absolutely unbelievable that He genuinely and actively cares about my little life.  That’s amazing.  The fact that God focuses His love and care on me doesn’t make me think that I must be hot stuff.  It makes me confounded at His loving condescension.  On a side note, I can’t stand it when people say, “God loves you so much because He thinks you're special!”  No, God loves me because He’s special.  Because only a special person could love me.  My Bible, my conscience, and the cross all testify to that.But that’s actually not why I started writing about the park.

It was refreshing to just stop on the sidewalk and watch two large dogs chasing each other around on the grass.  You would think they were in heaven.  Pure, unadulterated fun.  Zero self-consciousness.  Tongues hanging out, running in circles.  Sometimes the creatures that God has made seem to have a sense of freedom and joy that evokes both awe and envy.  Awe because God is so creative and so good, and because life has so much potential for reflecting that.  Envy because I know I would share in that joy if I weren’t so spiritually constipated with the worries and cares that He’s promised to carry for me if I’ll let Him.

We also saw dozens of rabbits running around in various places.  They’re easy to identify when they move because their bushy white tails give them away.  It also helps when they bounce eighteen inches in the air.  What’s interesting is that it’s almost hard to explain the fascination.  Why exactly did we stand there for five or ten minutes, just watching a rabbit sitting and shifting now and then?  It wasn’t like Shamu at Sea World or anything.  But it didn’t have to be.  I think we were meant to be captivated by the glory of God—the multi-colored, variegated, overflowing, mouth-hanging-open, in-every-nook-and-cranny-of-the-universe glory of God.

The problem is, it’s harder to see and be stunned by that glory when you’re surrounded by four walls and a ceiling for most of your life, or when you spend all your breaks surfing the internet or going to the mall or watching a small box in a place called “the living room” or watching a large screen in a place called “the theater.”  I mean, I enjoy bowling as much as the next guy, but sometimes you just need to get out and look at the stars.

Or you could get out and (if you were at the park on Monday evening around sunset) watch the little gopher or groundhog or whatever he was peaking his head in and out of his golf-ball-sized hole in the dirt, waiting to see if it was safe to come out and do whatever he does when he comes out.  I thought it was safe, but then again, I’m two hundred times his size.  Or you could’ve walked by some rustling grass and realized that it was another gopher/groundhog pulling full stalks of grass into his hole in the ground to do whatever he does with them.  Eat?  Build a nest?  Floss?  Joust with his buddy up the hill?  And he was pulling them into his hole from below.  So for awhile, it looked like there was something beneath the ground yanking stems of grass down directly through the surface.  That’s an interesting sight.  And I didn’t even need to turn on the DVD player to see it.  There was another good ten minutes well-spent.  I told Cindi that I wished we could see an aerial cross-section of the small valley we were in—just take the surface off and show us the world that’s just a few inches below the world we see.

I don’t have time to talk about the hundreds of kinds of trees I saw or the huge thicket the rabbits lived in or the dog playing fetch like there was no tomorrow.  But I think you get the point.

You really could get out and see a lot of things, all of them fascinating and all of them potentially worshipful.  I’m glad I did, and I think the Lord was honored—just because we enjoyed it and because we knew it came from Him.  It’s wonderful that the God we serve can be honored by sheer joy and adoration and captivation, not just by hard work and sacrifice.

Threats, Exams, Deadlines, and Eternity

I heard about London Theological Seminary a few days ago, so I checked out their website.  It's a school that specializes in training men to preach the Word of God.  It seems to be a very purist school, holding to some ideals that a lot of students (and probably professors) talk about but that are hard to apply.  For instance:

The examination system with its attendant emphasis on diplomas and degrees has been rejected. If the threat of examinations is what keeps a man diligent in his studies, it may certainly be questioned whether he has been called of the Lord. The same thing applies if his supreme aim is the possession of some qualification.

(They qualify the above statement by saying, "This does not mean that degrees and diplomas have no place.")

I would assume that most Christian students and teachers would agree with these principles: (1) I ought to question and change my motivations if the threat of exams and deadlines is the main thing that makes me work hard; and (2) I ought to be concerned about my purpose and perspective if my primary objective in school is gaining a certain degree.

However, "the examination system with its attendant emphasis on diplomas and degrees" along with grades and deadlines is rarely "rejected."  It's just the way education is done (at least in the West).  Practically, it seems to make a lot of sense.  My point is not that exams and grades and deadlines and degrees are evil.  It's the student's heart and motivation that matters most.  But there are some very serious spiritual and practical dangers that accompany this system of education.

I have often been bothered by my own deadline-diligence and grade-lust.  I don't like the fact that I often work harder and better under (earthly) pressure than I do when that immediate pressure isn't there.  And I hate it when an assignment that should take two hours takes me four just because I had two extra hours to give and I didn't concentrate as hard as I could've during the first two hours.

I'm not into rushing assignments or "just getting things done" or "just passing the class."  I wish I had more time to let things soak, to review, to meditate.  But I also know that the pressure of a hard deadline often produces more excellent and timely work than a "get-it-done-when-you-can" assignment.  The question, though, is: should it be this way?

I want to work hard because of the Bema Seat grade that's coming.  I want to labor to the point of fatigue because my job is to get the gospel to people who are approaching the Great White Throne deadline.  I want to concentrate on all the work and ministry I do (not just the pressing work) because it's my responsibility to help prepare the church for when she'll meet Christ her bridegroom.  I want eternity, not just graduation, to be my commencement.  I want a heavenly reward, not just earthly scholarships.  I want to please my Master, not just my professors.  In short, I want to have the perspective represented on London Theological Seminary's website even in the midst of end-of-the-semester pressure.  I want eternal reasons to fuel what I do and how I do it.

And the great thing about this is that if my life is truly driven by heavenly motivations, my Bible professors will be pleased, because I will do excellent work.  If my eyes are fixed on the Lord's evaluation of me at the end of my life, I will approach my studies with a mentality that will usually earn good grades.  If my heart longs to please my Master, I will study hard for my upcoming exams.  This isn't an either-or issue.

But it is an issue where self-examination is important, because none of us is free from the sin and folly of short-sightedness.  We naturally give in to grade-centeredness and "senioritis" and summer laziness and the "I'll-do-that-tomorrow" disease.  We all wake up in the morning with an earth-bound mentality that forgets eternity, neglects the brevity of life, and minimizes the seriousness of our calling.

So if you have things to do today, work hard at them and do them well.  But do them for the right reasons.  Meet your deadlines and get your grades, but fix your eyes on the ultimate deadline and the Final Evaluator, lest you arrive there and stand before the King and realize for the first time that your work was shoddy and half-hearted and time-wasting — except when it was due tomorrow.

Judah!

I don't think I ever mentioned it here, but we decided to name our adopted son "Judah."  We got two new pictures of him today, not from the orphanage but from a couple volunteering at the Amani Baby Cottage.  Don't ask me how I feel about Judah, because I would need to employ a tool called language to explain that, and in this situation that tool isn't working as well as it normally does.

And I think he's gotten bigger since the first picture.  Goodness:

 

Vindicate the weak and fatherless;
Do justice to the afflicted and destitute.
          – Psalm 82:3