Every Tear

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

My heart sank as the young mother told the interviewer how proud she was of her daughter. “[S]he solved the crime. She was her own hero,” Erin said with a pleased but pained sincerity.(1) Five year-old Samantha was the victim of a cruel and tragic murder, and her own tears were the evidence that sealed the case against her abductor. DNA in the form of teardrops was found on the passenger-side door of the killer’s car, irrevocably making their mark on the crime scene and poignantly making their mark on everyone that imagines them.

I don’t know how to read stories like this without retreating to the deepest whys and hows of life. The abrupt ending to Samantha’s life is another wretched symptom of a sick and desperate world. The problem of evil is a problem that confronts us, sometimes jarringly. The problem of pain is only intensified by the personal nature of our experience with it.

But something else jolts my numbed mind awake in the midst of this story: I had no idea that our tears were so personally our own. Samantha’s tears solved the case because there were none others like hers. They were unique to the eyes they came from, intricately a part of Samantha herself. In the pains and joys that cause us to weep, we leave marks far more intimate than we realize. We shed evidence of our own makeup, leaving behind a complex, yet humble message: I was here, and my pain was real. The thought stirringly brings new depth to the image of the sinful woman weeping at the side of Jesus, washing his feet with her unique tears.

There is no doubt something wonderful in the Christian hope that our pain will one day be removed and our tears will be no more. We are rightly comforted by the image of heaven as the place where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. There is much hope in the promise that there will one day “be no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:4). But perhaps there is also something wonderful about a God who has marked our tears so specifically even now, declaring that our pain is far from a generic or empty occurrence.

There is a line uttered by the psalmist that has been comforting to my grandmother through many years of loss and life. To God the psalmist confesses, “You have kept count of my tossings, put my tears in your bottle” (Psalm 56:8). Tear-bottles were small urns of glass or pottery created to collect the tears of mourners at the funerals of loved ones. They were placed in the sepulchers at Rome and in Palestine where bodies were laid to rest. In some ancient tombs these bottles are found in great numbers, collecting tears that were shed with great meaning to the ones unique to them.

How assuring to know that our pain is not haphazardly viewed by the one who made tear ducts spill over with grief and anguish. God has kept count of our sorrowful struggling, each tear recorded and collected as pain steeped with the life of the one who wept it. Like a parent grieving at a child’s wound, God knows our laments more intimately than we realize.

But also more than a parent wiping eyes and collecting tears, God has shed tears of his own, taking on the limitations and sufferings of creation personally. In her book Creed or Chaos, Dorothy Sayers writes:

"For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine… He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile."(2)

I know of no equal comfort in the midst of life’s sorrow, no other answer to the problem of pain. God has offered us as unique and personal a savior as the tears we shed crying out for answers and consolation. Every tear is marked with the intricacies of our Creator, every cry heard by one who wept at the grave of Lazarus, every lament collected in his bottle until the day when tears will be no more.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) "Justice for Samantha," People, June 06, 2005, Vol. 63, No. 22, pp. 73-74.
(2) Dorothy Sayers, Creed or Chaos? (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 4.

Rearranging the Furniture

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

History has a way of provoking life's most basic questions, sometimes with deadly force. Standing beside ruins and devastation, newscasters daily relay horrors. As harsh realities take hold, the irrepressible "why?" often surfaces in the mind of the beholder. Occasionally, even international conscience is so aroused as to ask "why?"

Yet in reality, the question of "why?" in a violent act, as painful as such a mindless atrocity can be, is nevertheless meaningless to raise unless we also ask the question of life itself—why are we here? But alas! that question is dismissed as no longer relevant in an academically sophisticated culture. Is this not, then, a self-destructive contradiction for one who debunks the notion of objective morality? Those who reduce the world to merely the physical cheat when they stray into the metaphysical.

In stark distinction, it is here once again that God's Word beckons with his pleas to a morally deaf world. Granted, the questions raised come from two groups. The deep and private pain of those for whom the loss is personal and devastating cannot be simplistically addressed. For them there is one who speaks from a cross. But there is another side to this query, and that is in understanding how and why hatred and murder can be conceived and nurtured in the human heart in the first place.

Interestingly enough, the very first murder in the Bible did not occur because of two irreconcilable political theories. The murder of a man by his own brother was an act unmistakably borne out of their differing responses to God. Trapped by the temporal, Cain was deluded by the belief that he could vanquish spiritual reality with brute force. God saw the inevitable result of the jealousy and hatred deep within Cain's heart, and in a challenge that would determine his destiny, warned him to deal with it. "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door; it desires to have you, but you must master it" (Genesis 4:7).

There are only two options: either come to God on his terms and find our perfect peace in his acceptance of us, or "play God" with self-defining morality and kill—becoming as a result restless wanderers, ever running from the voice of our brothers' blood that cries out from the ground. At its core life is sacred and of inestimable value, whether it is the life of a darling child in the fresh blossom of childhood, or the life of an elderly, weak, and frail recluse. Both have one thing in common: they are made in the image of God. That is why murder is described in Scripture for what it is, an attack upon God's image—a denial of our spiritual essence. It is that essence which gives us our dignity and our worth. It is that essence which is our glory and true home.

We may try by intellectual duplicity to rearrange the furniture of life and define it only in material terms, but each time we sit back and read of the human experience in Darfur or Virginia, Bosnia or Rwanda, we shift and turn with revulsion, realizing that there is no harmony in the secular "decor," for the cry within of the sacred cannot be suppressed. That is the reason we scream forth "why?" at the headlines: we cannot silence the still, small voice inside that speaks of the intrinsic sanctity of life, and that it ought not to be violated.

Try as we will, the logical outworking of a denied absolute cannot be escaped. God said it to Cain then and God says it to us now. "If you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door, and desires to have you." Cain became a murderer because he willfully refused to worship the living God and chose, by violence, to enthrone himself. This is an aspect of modern society we have grossly underestimated, and in the process we have robbed ourselves of even common sense. God is not only the Creator who defines us philosophically, but God is also the Provider who meets us existentially in our greatest need and gives us the confidence and comfort that we are beloved and not orphaned in this world.

If we are to ever find an answer to the haunting problem of violence, there will need to be a radical shift in our understanding. We must recognize not only the seen, but also the reality of the unseen, for the latter precedes the former. We would do well to take note that long before headlines hit like explosives in our minds, an even greater implosion takes place in the minds and hearts of those who set the news in motion. Human rule cannot deal with that internal devastation, but God can. That "unseen" war is a spiritual struggle—the choice between turning to God or playing God. For that triumph only God is big enough, and the sooner we realize and acknowledge our need for Him the closer we will be to moving from the symptomatic rearranging of furniture to the cure of coming home.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and president of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

Oh the Humanity!

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

On May 6, 1937, radio commentator Herbert Morrison sat at the naval airbase in Lakehurst, New Jersey waiting for the arrival of the Zeppelin Hindenburg, the largest airship that had ever flown. It was twelve hours behind schedule and, doubtless, Morrison was glad to begin recording: “Toward us, like a great feather... is the Hindenburg. The members of the crew are looking down on the field ahead of them getting their glimpses of the mooring mast...”(1) But three hundred feet over its intended landing spot, the Hindenburg shockingly burst into flames. It was destroyed in precisely thirty-two seconds, all before the unbelieving eyes of a thousand spectators. Morrison’s breathless account of the tragedy remains a famous piece of American journalism, particularly his cry “Oh the humanity!” which resonated with the impact of the disaster.

This phrase is now synonymous with any expression of surprise or strong emotion, but it was originally uttered by Morrison as a lament for the human vulnerability so brazenly materializing before him. As burning wreckage came crashing onto the ground and the crowd underneath did not seem to have time to escape, humanity appeared small and susceptible. Here, the symbol of German grandeur, the aircraft deemed the largest and the safest, was suddenly an image of the fragility of human life.

Often reclaimed in times of despair or calamity, the image of human life as vulnerable comes as a shock, even though we know it to be an accurate picture. We are not the towering pillars of strength we sometimes believe, but clay at best, which breaks and falls into pieces before our eyes. It is an image we receive with disbelief, if not indignation. Consequently, because we are so often reminded of human weakness in the midst of tragedy, it is easy—and often valid—to associate our vulnerability with lament. Sitting beside a cancer patient who has fought the disease with everything she has and is still losing the battle, fragility is something to bemoan. Standing within a refugee camp where disease is rampant and the death rate is more than a thousand lives a week, human frailty is not only lamentable, it is infuriating. We might even ask: Is it justifiable to see the inherent weakness of humanity as anything other than something to bemoan?

Not unlike the tragedies that jar us awake, the gospel and the cross within it remind us that human life is not invincible. Jesus spoke readily of his own death and wept at the grave of a friend. He crumbled in Gethsemane under the weight of the coming cross, sweating blood and praying in anguish. Indeed, at the very heart of Christianity is one who reminds us that humanity, like grass and flowers, withers and falls. The apostle Paul, too, racked with persecution, shipwrecks, and beatings, wrote of our bodies as clay jars, hastening back the image of David who lamented that he had become like “broken pottery.”

Scripture clearly puts forth the story of a fleeting and afflicted humanity. And yet importantly, this image is not always put forth as a lament. Far from this, Christ calls to us within our weakness and within his own weakness, demonstrating that suffering is not unfamiliar to him, beckoning us to live as he lived, bidding us to see in weakness a powerful gift. In the cruciform image of Jesus on the cross, we find that there is depth in tragedy, strength in weakness, healing in brokenness, beauty in ashes—even the possibility of meaning in affliction. Where the human Christ is our exemplar, there is, in fact, great hope within human fragility. As Paul writes:

"[W]e have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body" (2 Corinthians 4:7-10).

The gospel does not merely inform us of the life to come, of resurrection and restoration, certainty and comfort. Christ is not an escape raft for the hard realities of this world. On the contrary, the gospel must figure into what we think about our humanity in the midst of it all—and it is indeed good news even here. Jesus extends an example of what it means to be human here and now, through suffering, in tragedy, when vulnerability and helplessness lay us low, and when weakness somehow makes us strong. Here, lamentation is befitting, but so is its hopeful counterpart. For quite thankfully, Jesus is not only familiar with the tragic sense of human frailty, he also embraced weakness with passion, that he could carry us through our own.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) "Oh, the Humanity!" Time Magazine, Monday, May 17, 1937.

Expect the Unexpected

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The Christian faith stands or falls on the historical reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And yet, aside from the gospel accounts themselves, there is very little historical evidence for the resurrection. In addition, a careful reading of the four gospels seems to reveal some discrepancies in the testimony of the evangelists themselves. Skeptics and critics of Christianity pick up on these realities and run with them, and often Christians are blindsided by these attacks. What are Christians to say to these claims, and have we missed an unexpected apologetic for the resurrection?

It is true that a careful reading of the four evangelists' remembrances of the resurrection indeed reveals many different emphases and details. Matthew, for example, tells us that a great earthquake had occurred as "an angel of the Lord descended and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it" (Matthew 28:2). Mark, on the other hand, tells us that a "young man sitting at the right, wearing a white robe" was inside the tomb to announce Jesus's resurrection (Mark 14:5). Luke tells us that two men "suddenly stood near them [the women] in dazzling apparel" (Luke 24:4) and John, the beloved disciple, reports his own discovery of the linen wrappings abandoned in the empty tomb (John 20:5). Nevertheless, while there are differences in detail, as we would expect in eyewitness testimony, all four evangelists report a resurrection—of this there is no dispute.

There is another feature that is the same in all four accounts: the resurrection announcement is made first to the women who followed Jesus (Matthew 28:1, Mark 16:1, Luke 23:55-24:5, John 20:1). Many reasons have been offered as to why women serve as the immediate witnesses to the resurrection: the women stayed with him through the crucifixion, so he appeared first to those who stuck with him to the end; women traditionally carried out the burial rituals in first century Judaism, so they are witnesses by default.

While these are plausible reasons, there is another strategic, indeed, apologetic reason why the women were the first witnesses. In fact, one might argue that this is the primary apologetic for validity of the resurrection of Jesus. Women in the first century were not considered credible witnesses. They simply were not credible witnesses in court, or anywhere else for that matter. Why then did the gospel writers report them as the key witnesses to the resurrection?

Anglican priest and physicist John Polkinghorne suggests:

"Perhaps the strongest reason of taking the stories of the empty tomb absolutely seriously lies in the fact that it is women who play the leading role. It would have been very unlikely for anyone in the ancient world who was concocting a story to assign the principal part to women since, in those times, they were not considered capable of being reliable witnesses in a court of law. It is surely much more probable that they appear in the gospel accounts precisely because they actually fulfilled the role that the stories assign to them, and in so doing, they make a startling discovery."(1)

In this sense, the women offer the strongest apologetic for the witness of the gospel writers. It is the very fact that they were not considered reliable witnesses that makes credible the accounting of the evangelists, for who would make up a story like this with women as the central characters in its dramatic conclusion?

Of course, all throughout the Bible, God continually uses those whom we least expect in ways that are profoundly remarkable. Of course, this is God's apologetic throughout redemption history: Deborah, a woman, to be judge over Israel, Gideon, the least and the youngest in his tribe and family to defeat the Midianites, David, the youngest of his family and a simple shepherd to be king, Jael, a non-Israelite woman to defeat the Canaanite king Sisera, Josiah, king of Israel at only eight years old, to reform the nation, Amos, a simple sheepherder, to be a prophet among the people of God, tax-collectors, fishermen, and women, Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, Martha, and Salome. God chooses those we might be tempted to overlook or ignore, those who were the last and the least in their society to bear witness to the great work of God.

All of these witnesses are unexpected in their day and time for a variety of reasons, but they serve to remind us of an unexpected apologetic. God uses and chooses those we least expect, and would not anticipate, to give witness to God's work in this world, and in our lives. And what else would we expect of the God who raised Jesus from the dead? Indeed, expect the unexpected.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) From Exploring Reality (SPCK: London, 2005), 86-87.

My Messy House

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Kathleen Norris tells a story of a little boy who wrote a poem called "The Monster Who Was Sorry." The poem begins with a confession: he doesn't like it when his father yells at him. The monster's response is to throw his sister down the stairs, then to destroy his room, and finally to destroy the whole town. The poem concludes: "Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, 'I shouldn't have done all that.'"(1)

The confession of the apostle Paul bears a fine resemblance: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but I do what I hate" (Romans 15:7). Regret has a way of shining the flood lights on the mess within us. Norris further expounds the faithful candor of the child describing his own muddled story:

"'My messy house' says it all: with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance."(2)

The journey of a Christian through the many rooms of faith posits countless opportunities to peer at the monster within. There are days in the life of faith when I question whether I am living up to the title of Christian, neighbor, disciple—even casual pilgrim. In certain rooms of awareness I find there is no question: I am not. Yet, as G.K. Chesterton wrote in his autobiography, I have only ever found one religion that "dared to go down with me into the depth of myself."(3) This is precisely what Christ asks us to do. What we find are messy houses, filled with hidden staircases built of excuses, idols of good deeds atop mantels of false security—in short, the home of Christ in disarray at our own hands.

If we were to remain shut up in this place alone, we might begin to wonder why we should ever hope for anything other than mess and wreckage. Paul's confession marks the futility of our own efforts to clean the house. But we do not make the journeys to the depths of ourselves alone. In fact, we should not have discovered the messes had they not been shown to us in the first place. We are guided to these places in our consciences, to images of ourselves unadorned, and finally to broken and contrite hearts. Faith is the opportunity to be searched by the Spirit of Truth, the Breathe of Holiness, the God who maneuvers us through messy rooms and sin-stained walls and exposes our monstrous ways. It would indeed be a futile journey if we walked this path alone.

Instead, the very Spirit that shows us the monster in the messy house shows us the one who removes the masks and clears the wreckage. In a scene from C.S. Lewis's Narnia, the great Aslan is seen tearing the costume off the child in front of him.(4) The child writhes in pain from the razor sharp claws that feel as though they pierce his very being. With mounting intensity, Aslan rips away layer after layer, until the child is absolutely certain he will die from the agony. But when it is all over and every last layer has been removed, the child delights in the new-found freedom, having long forgotten the weight of the costume he carried.

The journey of a soul through its messiest rooms is not merely a drive-by glimpse of the depths of our sin and our need for repentance. We are shown the weight of our masks and the extent of our messes; we are handed the great yoke of our own failures. And we are shown again the one who asks to take them all from us. "Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows... But he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities" (Isaiah 53:4-5). Quite mercifully, it is through the dingy windows of a messy house that one has the clearest view of the cross.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace (New York: Riverhead, 1998), 69.
(2) Ibid., 70.
(3) G.K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 334.
(4) Story told in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 115-117.

To Unravel a Culture

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Some years ago a group of Christian thinkers were asked to answer the question: How can followers of Christ be countercultural for the common good? Their answers ranged from becoming our own fiercest critics to experiencing life at the margins, from choosing our battles wisely to getting more sleep. A case could easily be made to add many other ideas to their thoughtful list, and its project leaders would agree. The possibilities for counterculturalism are perhaps as numerous as the cultures and sub-cultures of our globalized world. The idea was to get people thinking about what it means to be countercultural in the first place, a lifestyle Jesus heralded as a man with the government on his shoulders, one from whom others hid their faces, and for whom affliction was well known.

Of course, Jesus did not come to shape an insurgent army of cultural protestors. But he did turn both culture and cultural norms on their heads, and he continues to do so today. To crowds gathered in the first century, the wisdom of the rabbi from Nazareth was different than most. He taught with authority, but he also perplexed his would-be students with words about the first being last, and prostitutes and tax collectors making their way into the kingdom before religious experts. To crowds in the current century, this radical teacher continues to herald a radical message. Loving your neighbor is a command that runs counter to most cultural norms, loving your enemy all the more so. The entire Sermon on the Mount was, and remains, the most countercultural sermon ever given.

But still, the question persists: Did Jesus come to overturn cultural norms like he overturned the moneychangers' tables? And exactly how, then, are his followers to be countercultural themselves? Are Christians to be inherently cultural naysayers, gypsies who wander through this world unattached and (hopefully) unaffected? Did Christ come to free us from the very fabric of culture and history into which our lives are woven? Or was his life's ambition to unravel something much deeper?

To begin with, I think we misunderstand Jesus as a countercultural leader heralding a countercultural message if we separate his radical life and message from his radical work on the cross. Jesus did not come to destroy culture as we know it, but to save the world within it. "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets," he told a Jewish world built upon the Law and the Prophets. "I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them" (Matthew 5:17).

Perhaps the best image of counterculturalism is an image of something that is being woven rather than unwound. Nancy Jackson, an artist who creates tapestries, notes the "countercultural" philosophy of weaving. "Weaving tapestry in our modern world requires a different mindset that has taken many years to cultivate," she writes. "It requires faith that the world will still be here in two years.... Weaving a tapestry is good for the soul." In fact, the radical message of Christ is that God is not only near us, but that God's presence is woven into all of life; God has been before us and will remain after us. The saving grace of God's work among us can be seen throughout history, in the lives we live today, and in every stroke of time to come. Jesus did not come to unravel the fabric of the human story or the human himself. On the contrary, he came to unravel sin, and to make clear the perfect tapestry made by a creator who has in mind the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Perhaps we are most adequately countercultural, then, when we live as people aware of the entire picture, when we counter the pervasive individualism that bids us to look no further than our own homes or schedules or priorities. Perhaps we are effectively countercultural when we testify to the radical work of the cross in the world and in our hearts, a cross which exchanged our guilt for grace, our ashes for beauty, our collective sorrow for joy. Perhaps we are countercultural when we see the startling colors of Christ's life in our own stories and our neighbors' stories and know that these are only small glimpses of the magnificent work that God is weaving through all of time.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

Where God Is

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In a certain town there lived a cobbler, Martin Avdeitch by name. He lived in a small basement room whose one window looked out onto the street, and all he could see were the feet of people passing by. But since there was hardly a pair of boots that had not been in his hands at one time for repair, Martin recognized each person by his shoes. Day after day, he would work in his shop watching boots pass by. One day he found himself consumed with the hope of a dream that he would find the Lord's feet outside his window. Instead, he found a lingering pair of worn boots belonging to an old soldier. Though at first disappointed, Martin realized the old man might be hungry and invited him inside to a warm fire and some tea. He had other visitors that evening, and though sadly none were Christ, he let them in also. Sitting down at the end of day, Martin heard a voice whisper his name as he read the words: "I was hungry and you gave me meat; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in. Inasmuch as you did for the least of these, you did unto me."(1)

Every Christmas, our family reads the story of Martin the Cobbler as an aid to our celebration. Tolstoy's words offer something of a creative attempt to capture the wonder of a God who comes near and helps us picture the gift of Christ among us in accessible terms. Notably, the story was originally titled, Where God Is, Love Is.

The Christian story that informs the Christian calendar gives its followers time and opportunity to remember the coming of Christ in a specific context—in Bethlehem, in the Nativity, in the first Christmas. But it also presents us with repeated opportunities and reminders to prepare for the coming of Christ again. Like Martin eagerly waiting at the window, the Christian worldview is one that asks of every day of every year: How will Christ come near today? Will I wait for him? Am I ready for him? Am I even expecting to find him? We are reminded to keep watch, to be prepared, and to continually ready our hearts and minds for the one who is already near. At the same time, the Christian story would also have us to remember how unexpectedly Christ at times appears—as a baby in Bethlehem, a man on a cross, as a woman in need.

In the book of Titus, we read that "the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men." How and where will it show up this week? In order to stay alert to the rich possibilities, perhaps we need to keep before us the radical thought of all that God has offered us: a Christ child who comes down to us, a redeemer willing to die for us, a God willing to redefine what is near—all so that we might be where God is. Christianity is not an escape system for us to avoid reality, live above it, or be able to redefine it. Christianity is a way that leads us to grasp what reality is and, by God's grace and help, to navigate through it to our eternal home in God's presence.

The story God has given us indeed feeds the hungry, takes in the stranger, and orients the resident alien who is ever-looking homeward. The focus of Christ's coming is the message of Immanuel—God is with us. The focus of Christ's earthly ministry is the declaration of the cross—God is for us. And the focus of Christ's resurrection is the promise of a future and his imminent return—God will bring us safely home. Until then, God knows all, God is above all, and God is among us, even when it seems most unlikely.

Stuart McAllister is vice president of training and special projects at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Story told in Leo Tolstoy's, Walk in the Light While There Is Light and Twenty-three Tales (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003).

The Greatest of Dreams

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963, is one of the most important and well known speeches in history. Far less known, however, is that the actual speech he had before him on the podium that day had no mention of a dream whatsoever.

For years, Dr. King had been writing and speaking about his dream. He dreamed that one day racial oppression would no longer threaten the American creed that all of humanity is created equal. He dreamed that every man, woman, and child would be seen as an heir to the legacy of worthiness, and he dreamed that the American people would learn to cultivate this worthy perspective. He spoke so often of having a dream, in fact, that his inner circle was afraid the phrase had become overused and trite. The night before the March on Washington, Dr. King and his closest advisors worked together to come up with an entirely new message. "I have a dream" did not appear in the manuscript at all.

The speech was titled "Normalcy—Never Again" and before a quarter of a million hearers the following day King began to outline the troublesome history of black men and women in America. But several minutes into this speech he paused and he turned the manuscript over. And then he launched into the words that were closest to his heart: "So I say to you today, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream."

I am not sure how often the world is changed by a revision. But this one I cannot imagine the world without. The apostle Paul writes of seeing the kingdom of heaven as if through a glass darkly. From a bird's eye view of this split decision in history, it seems for a moment that the glass was partly cleared. Dr. King's decision to talk about the dream God had given him is wrought with the vision and wisdom of God. It brings me to ask: How do I learn to live with such a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit that I could completely shift gears against the advice of the experts and before a crowd of 250,000 onlookers? But it also brings me to wonder at the God who is near us in the making of history, the God who makes all things new.

The Scriptures speak of God as the eternal weaver of time and meaning. God is the voice that spoke the world out of chaos and into abundance, the breath that blew the church out of despair into existence, and the spirit that makes things new that never were. In the fullness of time, the eternal comes near and we are forever changed. Paul recounts, "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children" (Galatians 4:4-5).

Dr. King may have launched that day into an old and tired message, but it was a message somehow made new within a world that desperately needed to hear it. Clarence Jones, one of the men who had helped with the new speech the night before, recalled the transition in King's speech, and remembered bowing his head in defeat of all the work they had put into preparing a new message. Little did he realize what could become of four familiar words when the Spirit is moving and active. "I have a dream" became the phrase that came to define the civil rights movement itself, and inspired the people of God to look again at the counter-cultural nature of God's kingdom among us.

The Holy Spirit that guides us is the one who moved David from shepherd to king, the one Jesus promised his disciples on the night he went from beloved to despised. Jesus assured them that he would not leave them as orphans, and though it looked bleak from the view of the Calvary, he kept his promise. The Spirit of God is near, making all things new, moving change into our world, bringing life into deadened consciences, whispering to us in time that one day our tears will be no more and the old order of things will pass away. God is the keeper of this, the greatest of dreams, and of the dreamers themselves.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

Distracting Ourselves to Death

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

"Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things."(1)

Though writing hundreds of years ago, Blaise Pascal captured the spirit of our present age prophetically and profoundly. With the reality of suffering and the specter of death facing us all, most seek lives of distraction. Whether or not we recognize that the fear of death is an underlying, albeit unconscious, motivation, we nevertheless recognize that our lives are filled with distractions. Whether it is in the juggling of priorities, the relentless busyness of our age, or perpetual media noise, our lives are so full that we rarely give ourselves space or time to reflect. Particularly in Western societies, we fill our lives with mindless consumption that numbs us to the eventuality of our mortal condition and our finitude. The advertising industry is not unaware of our propensity to consumptive distraction. Marketers spent over 295 billion dollars in total media advertising in 2007.(2) Perhaps we mistakenly assume that our vitality is inextricably bound up in our ability to consume.

It is easy to understand how our fear of death and suffering would compel human beings to live lives of distraction. Yet, the cost of that distraction is a pervasive and deadening apathy—apathy not simply as the inability to care about anything deeply, but the diminishment for engagement that comes from caring about the wrong things. Kathleen Norris laments:

"It is indeed apathy's world when we have so many choices that we grow indifferent to them even as we hunger for still more novelty. We discard real relationships in favor of virtual ones and scarcely notice that being overly concerned with the thread count of cotton sheets and the exotic ingredients of gourmet meals can render us less able to care about those who scrounge for food and have no bed but the streets."(3)

Sadly, our inability to recognize our own mortality and to live our lives in light of the fact that we will die leads to the diminishment of our ability to genuinely care for others—because our care, by its very nature, will demand our willingness to suffer, and to lose our lives for someone else. The more we love, the more we open ourselves up to vulnerability and the possibility of pain. And yet, if we choose against loving engagement, we are left with a diminished and distracted life.

The ancient Hebrew poets, while meditating on the brevity of life, prayed, "So teach us to number our days that we may present to you a heart of wisdom" (Psalm 90:12). It was the inevitability of death that motivated this prayer for wisdom for living. This was a wisdom that didn't try to hide from the realities of life—be they joys or sorrows—but rather sought to keep finitude ever before it. Indeed the poem ends with a cry for God to "confirm the work of our hands." Numbering life's days led to meaningful engagement in work—and this was the mark of wisdom.

Being mindful of our own death leads some to distraction, sadly, yet it can lead others to wise engagement. Jesus, himself, faced his own death with intention and purpose as he walked the way of the cross, not only up the hill to Golgotha, but also as he offered his life in loving service to those around him. "I am the Good Shepherd...and I lay down my life for the sheep....No one has taken it away from me, but I lay it down on my own initiative" (John 10:14a-18). The way of wisdom demonstrated by the life of Jesus calls us to engage our mortality as a catalyst for purposeful living. While following Jesus insists on our laying down our lives in his service, it can be done in the hope that abundant life is truly possible even in the darkest of places. For the one who laid his life down is the one who was raised. He is the one who declared, "I am the resurrection and the life; the one who believes in me will live even though he dies."

Margaret Manning is a member of the writing and speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Blaise Pascal, Pensees, (Penguin Books: New York, 1966), 37.
(2) As referenced by Allan Sloan in "Fuzzy Bush Math" CNN Money, September 4, 2007, money.cnn.com/2007/08/31/magazines/fortune/deficit_sloan.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2007090408, accessed October 15, 2009.
(3) Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life, (Riverhead Books: New York, 2008), 125.

My Brother's Shoes

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

In 1969 Simon Wiesenthal penned his thought-provoking book, The Sunflower, which captured the agony he personally experienced in one of history's darkest moments. Relating one encounter with the Holocaust, Wiesenthal described how he had been taken from a Nazi death-camp to a makeshift army hospital. He was ushered by a nurse to the side of a Nazi soldier who had asked to have a few private moments with a Jew. Wiesenthal warily entered the room and was brought face to face with a fatally wounded man, bandaged from head to toe. The man struggled to face him and spoke in broken words. Wiesenthal nervously endured the anxious monologue, finding himself numbed by the encounter. At the hands of Nazi soldiers like the one now dying before him, Wiesenthal had lost 89 of his own relatives. Here, the soldier confessed to the heinous act of setting ablaze an entire village of Jews; at his whim, men, women, and children were burned to death. With great anxiety, he described his inability to silence from his mind the screams of those people. Now on a deathbed himself, the man was making a last desperate attempt to seek the forgiveness of a Jew. The man begged him to stay, repeating his cry for forgiveness, but Wiesenthal could only walk away.

Yet even years later he wondered if he had done the right thing. Should he have accepted the man's repentance and offered the forgiveness so earnestly sought? Had he neglected a weighted invitation to speak or was silence the only appropriate reply? Seeking an answer, Wiesenthal wrote to thirty-two men and women of high regard—scholars, noble laureates, psychologists, and others. Twenty-six of the thirty-two affirmed his choice to not offer the forgiveness that was sought. Six speculated on the costly, but superior, road of pardon and mercy.

I don't know what it would take to absolve anyone of so monumental a crime. I don't know if it is possible to offer forgiveness for something so far beyond our moral reach. But I know that even in the most unfathomable places the God of Scripture somehow carries the burden of grace. Who can fathom the Son of God on the cross pleading with the Father to forgive the guilty for killing him? Who can conceive of a God who comes among his people, trusting himself to the hands of a fallen world, even knowing the troubling outcome? Who can grasp the heart of a God who chooses to love an undeserving people? To live as one marked by this disruptive grace is not easy. The command to forgive is thoroughly unsettling, in fact, it is sometimes haunting. To persist in love when we are tired or overwhelmed, or even rightfully angered by injustice, is a massive and costly request.

I have often found it easier to fit into shoes of the prodigal son than the shoes of the remaining older brother. Yet in this well-known parable of Jesus, both sons are invited to celebrate and rejoice. To the prodigal child who has squandered and defamed, God's grace is lavish. It is extravagant and poured out on those who neither expect it nor deserve it. The celebration is thrown in the honor of the run-away, in honor of the return of just one lost sheep. When these shoes are ours, we are both humbled by the Father's attention and compelled by his mercy.

Yet to the child on the other side of justice, the Father's grace is jarring and disruptive. His invitation to the feast is both awkward and demanding, a seeming call to overlook the potential of our reckless brother to strike again at our expense. These shoes are much harder to walk in. The Father's call to forgive the one whose sincerity is questionable is often agonizing; his command to love the habitual prodigals in our midst is both costly and exhausting.

But it is his request. "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?" asked Peter. But Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven" (Matthew 18:21-22). God's grace disrupts our sense of righteousness and summons us to respond in similar kind. Whether we find ourselves in the shoes of the prodigal or treading the difficult ground of the older brother there is good reason to rejoice and celebrate the unveiling love of the Father. His unfathomable grace and mercy shatters our sense of who is worthy to enjoy the benefits of God's kingdom, inviting us to the celebration regardless of where we stand.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.