Dinner for Two

Here you are again, at your favorite restaurant, table dressed in white linen, candles burning. You can see yourself in the reflection of the silverware and the plates are so clean you dare not to touch their gleaming surfaces. You’re pretty sure you could wrap yourself up for days in the napkins… they look so soft, and the glasses… oh they are pristine crystal. You’re alone in the restaurant, the music is playing, but the silence of voices is so quiet your chair is making more noise than you. Chandeliers hang like icicles and the red carpet is as luxurious as a Hollywood red carpet. Still no one in the restaurant, not even a waiter. You’re alone but your date will be arriving soon. You begin pulling at your shirt, making sure you look as good as you did in the mirror twenty minutes ago. Mess with your hair, pull up the socks, and wipe your face for the thirteenth time. You actually get up to adjust the seat, make sure the light will hit you just right when your date walks in. Silence continues. You mess with the silverware, getting tired of waiting… you wait… in silence, as the sound of instruments drowns out your breathing. Your heart pounds as you see the door crack… still no one in the restaurant as your date takes a step through the door, you see them float across the room and approach you like the rising sun. You stand, heart pounding… you have never been this nervous. You reach out your hand as your date extends theirs. You lay your lips on their hands ever so gently, return to your perfect posture and get the nerve to greet your date with the elegance of the most suave man in town. Good evening sin, you’re looking lovely tonight, I’ve been waiting.

Sometimes it feels to me that we wait on sin, we take the time out of our day worrying about sin, avoiding temptation but in the end we greet sin with a welcoming hug like seeing family at Christmas. We hide like children playing hide and go seek, but we always want to be found. Our hunger for sin is real, and we expose ourselves to it like children playing games with their friends. People always talk about temptation and the devil, how the devil tricks you into sinning, how every time we sin we have to battle the devil to the death… but what if it’s us that we have to battle. Once the devil gets us hooked on talking about people behind their backs, drinking, gambling, sex, we get so intrigued we end up becoming a devil to ourselves. We set the table, we let ourselves fall, and we welcome sin as a teenage boy on his first date. Sin becomes comfortable, and no matter the sin, there’s always that core issue… ourselves.

A friend of mine once told me that at the root of any sin, no matter what someone is going through, you can always find a common ground with them. Sometimes the mother who has an affair with her gardener is no different than the teenage boy who can’t help but trash other people on the Internet… they’re both lonely. They both are so far from God they can’t tell their head from a hole in the ground. They have gotten both so used to sin they once again set the table for sin. Sin is reoccurring, because we are disgusting people, sometimes we have to see ourselves in order to see our sin. We spend so much time blaming our frustrations on the devil. Those dern demons are at it again, when really; the addiction to sin is what draws us back to the dinner table. The addiction to our sin, the need for attention, the comfort of a bad boy, is really what calls us to hell and further away from God. If we’re honest with ourselves the next time we get caught up in sin, we can use this opportunity to examine ourselves, what is really the downfall about ourselves that calls us back to reoccurring sin. Whether we find ourselves tempted by alcohol, or the encouragement for hate, we can usually find something about ourselves that calls us back to bashing our friends.

This is what makes the church the gorgeous bride that it is, this is why a group of people that struggle with sin is so beautiful. If we didn’t have each other, we wouldn’t have the strength to overcome sin. We can pursue God till our eyes are bloodshot with tears, but if no one is there physically, who can suffer with you…. the sin becomes so much harder to beat.

Redemption is an amazing phenomenon, and the fact that we go to church and surround ourselves with lonely people in search of redemption, it makes it all worth it. There are so many looking for grace, so many who have come from sin. As my friend also once told me, everyone is recovering from something, or trapped in sin worth recovering from. Whether it’s a mom struggling to not murder her boss at work or the father jealous of a friend’s wife, the root of sin will always be the same. The people who you thought you knew will always get caught in sin they would never dream of telling you, but taking the time to open up to someone can be the key to cancelling your dates with sin. Once we realize the core of our sin, loneliness, isolation from God, it doesn’t seem so weird when your best friend admits to have done cocaine. Once you realize making fun of your sibling is just as tragic as the girl who clings to the guy that makes her feel good for the wrong reasons… redemption can be found with the help of some fellow sinners, and the beauty of God’s grace.

It’s easy to point fingers, easy to make fun of the alcoholic at the end of the table, easy to tease the girl for doing weird things alone in her room. But when we step back, this is also a sin. Grace doesn’t come through the ability to make ourselves feel good because of what someone else does. Redemption comes from an awareness of sin, the fellowship of other sinners, and a willingness to grow out of the sin, to someone greater, someone who has never battled sin, someone who has overcome it, so that we don’t have to go through the pain of loving sin. I am drawn to redemption because I am tired of inviting sin into my life and resting on it for my comfort. I am drawn to redemption because I am so much more. I am drawn to redemption and will in return draw others to redemption. I will ultimately make the choice to no longer judge people for what they’ve done, because I am just as lonely as they are. I will make an effort to be there for my friends, make an effort to help them focus on what they can be without their sin.

We are invited to so much more. Christ is waiting for us, to get up from the table, casually make the way out of the restaurant, wave goodbye, and go to a restaurant where there are so many more… just like us, feasting at the table of redemption. 

Can You Quiet Down, I Can't Hear Myself

The older sister is on her way home from picking up her younger brother, who has found refuge in the backseat of the car. The younger brother can be heard ranting on and on about his art portfolio he has brought home from school, filled with art that is the best he has done since second grade. He sifts through his art, more excited to show his sister than anyone else- he always sought the approval of his siblings than anyone else. They travel down West Mountain Street in the sister’s tank of a BMW. The younger brother pesters his sister to look at the latest piece of art he’s done, lilies floating a pond, as the older sister loses control of the car and begins swerving. In this moment neither knows what is going on, the sister begins to panic, her sense of responsibility is plummeting as the car’s control over her increases. The tank swerves across the other side of the road as a bright blue truck comes straight into the side of the sister’s car.

The next breath of life the little brother remembers breathing is being handled out of the car by strangers, while screaming for his sister at the top of his lungs. The sister sits in the driver seat motionless, and the younger brother can feel the weight of the world on his shoulders, just a third grader. Sister gets out of the car… something the matter with her leg, the silence of both the brother and sister screams louder than a child watching their first horror movie. The sister feels the most responsible; she had failed at taking her brother home from school... a seemingly simple task. She placed him in danger of death, and now she had to face the fact of her parent’s disappointment. This is too much for a young woman to have to deal with, too much regret to have to cope with. The brother has to call his parents; the sister is an emotional wreck… too fearful of what’s to come on the other side of the receiver, the third grade brother calls. The parents don’t care about the wreck… were him and his sister okay?

In college it seems like a focus on sin is a necessary day-by-day process. There is so much coming at you, so many pressures; it’s hard to focus on God while avoiding these sins. The responsibility as a Christian to not conform is a great burden to carry around, especially in college. A university campus is a feeding ground for lust, malice, hatred, and alcohol… the avoidance of these iniquities takes all of your focus.

I recently hear of friends going to places I have never heard of, places not good for their spiritual welfare. I hear my friends confessing to drinking, because hey, it’s not a big deal on campus. Sure they will admit it’s illegal, but it’s like going over the speed limit… everyone does it here… Am I hearing this right now, driving over the speed limit is the same as drinking underage? Can it be that I am the only one that thinks this is destructive? I begin feeling guilty when I hear that my friends are merely “experimenting” with these things. Like a helpless mother feels when she loses her child in the supermarket… could I have stopped them from doing these things? How do I show them they can’t be sinning like this when they claim to be such strong faithful Christians? The more I hear about it, the more I feel my own body being weighted under their sins. This feeling can be enough to drive anyone away from the redeeming nature of Christ.

For me to focus on others sins is dangerous… I begin to think of myself better than I ought. I am okay because my spiritual life is at a place where I am comfortable enough, not desiring these sinful desires of college. That’s just it though, I’m comfortable here and all I am doing is playing daddy to other people when they screw themselves over. I am the better one of the group, and I am now at a place where they ridicule me for what I chose not to do it…not because they are that rude, but because I keep waving their sin in their face, it would be my natural instinct to put a defense too. I end up sinning trying not to sin. This is getting really confusing for my spiritual life.

I’ve learned to become like my parents when they heard me and my sister had gotten into a wreck… not continually reminding my sister of her mistake, but rather, focusing on the deeper issue… were we okay during the situation. The truth is, everyone is going to sin, in different ways, in different places, at different times. Does it do us any good to focus on these things? No, because it spiritually drains us to the point we become a father to our friends rather than accountability partners, which is what Christ has called us to be. I can’t keep bringing up underage drinking to my friends, because I’m not going to be with them when they get offered a beer at the next tailgate, or when they somehow find themselves with friends at the hookah bar. What matters is that I am there for them, whenever they need someone to talk to about what’s going on in their lives. We start to badger other Christians, seeking to “do what God wants us to, by persecuting their downfalls.” What kind of friend is this?

Christ is calling me to focus on the bigger issues: how is my relationship with Him, what am I doing to pursue Him on a daily basis rather than persecuting my friends to get an ego boast. If my friends are sinning, and they’re Christians, the Holy Spirit will take care of the badgering, why don’t I help them focus on growing in Christ rather than the world? I can daily remind them of Christ’s grace, redemption, and the beauty of living for something greater than the world. It’s not important to live in the ghosts of our past, but focus on redemption in Christ, and like my mother asked my sister and I, “how are YOU doing?” Where are our spiritual lives heading?

“You can hear it in the trail behind your voice

There’s a multitude who claim

They’ve been through the fire of fallen angels

They’ll never be the same

We live with the weight of what we’ve done

The cracks that we slip through

No time to forget about our future

Just the things that we won’t do

But you know you can’t”

-Needtobreathe

I Get So Restless

You lay in bed, your full size bed, fitted nice and comfortably with a comforter that feels like a marshmallow swallowing you whole. You just got finished watching some television, the normal school night...you struggle to get eight hours of sleep before that math test in the morning. You tried to study an hour ago, but some other things came up, but you will be okay, those other tests down the road will even out the failures of tomorrow. You lay in bed and can't help but think of what someone told your friend about you today at school. How dare they have the audacity to talk smack about you without even getting to know you first. You continue on this train of thought until you wonder what ever happened to your best friend. You two used to be so close, but now he's into some things you don't agree with, and suddenly you feel like a sad parent watching their child come home with a failed grade in school. You want to help them, you've tried to make them understand... they just don't get it. There is so much your friend isn't telling you, you feel like an open book to them, but they're closed to anything you have to say. You continue to worry yourself to insomnia about new friends you have made, wondering what they think of you, are you too much for them, too loud, are you really as crazy as they are? You dwell on your life, how it's going somewhere, your purpose layed out for you, and continue to think about your life, legacy, and some good ol' fashion gossip. What will you wear tomorrow? These thoughts circle your brain into the night, and you will be lucky to get six hours of sleep before the nightmare of the test in the morning.


You accomplish insomnia while a man five minutes down the road walks the street, looking for a bed to call his own. 


You accomplish insomnia while an inner city child of eight lays his head on a pillow, his bed the floor of his one bedroom house, surrounded comfortably by his five other siblings. He could't be happier to be in the home he is now. Sure he would like money and a sports car, but that can wait, he's got his family for now.


Why am I so restless? Why can I not seem to get an once of peace in college? It seems like I am standing in the middle of Route 66 during rush hour, people passing me by at 90 miles an hour, and I gasp for air above the business of everyone else. These faceless crowds are all a blur, they push me to keep living, keep going, keep pursuing. But what am I pursuing? What are they pursuing? I am getting so restless, like back in high school, dwelling all night on interactions that latest for a blink of an eye. And then that peace hits me like a freight train:


"In your ocean I make of thee
I feel the waves crashing on my feet
It's like I know where I need to 
But I can't figure out
Just how much air I will need to breathe
When your tide rushes over me"
-Needtobreathe


There is rest, there always has been... there always will be. The rest we can all find in Jesus Christ sometimes goes unnoticed. People live in their day, immerse themselves in their friends, and take comfort in the loneliness of the night. We worry about tomorrow, what we've done, and live in our ghosts of the past. Our fear steals our sleep, and we dwell on death and what our lives are going to mean to someone else.


But what if there's more to this restlessness, what if the peace we have so long been ignoring we embrace. What if intentionally we live for something bigger than ourselves... now that would be a beautiful thing. No longer will our lives be filled with what tomorrow brings, but rather we will live each breathe thankful we have been given the chance to walk to our next class. Our minds would change so drastically, we would actually care about our friends, sacrifice for them, because us, well we don't care about ourselves anymore, we are Christ now, robbed with peace and grace. What a beautiful image, wrapped in peace and grace.


 No longer does the future need anxiety, it is taken care of. 


We would finally listen to the cries of the poor man, the foot prints of the inner city child.


We would live like a child, without the fears of our innocence, but spending time learning about Christ, like a child learns to embrace the world for the first time. Sure we're in college and mature in the world's eyes, but in Christ we are made new like a child. For the spirit of a child will inherit the kingdom. 


Let us wake up from our restlessness, wrapped in Christ for all eternity.