I believe it was once Elie Wiesel, Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, who when asked why Jewish rabbi’s answer a question with a question responded, “Why not?” These days I feel more and more like I am occupying both sides of that conversation. I ask a question of God desiring fully to seek an answer. The response I so often end up with? More questions. My appetite is voracious but never seemingly quenched. I guess in some regards this is a good thing. To seek to know and understand God should stand at the center of our lives. The apostle Paul says as much in Philippians 3:10,”—That I may know [Christ] and the power of His resurrection, and may share in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death.” And there’s the rub… Seeking God, I mean truly seeking the God who is, not the God we want, is an incredible occupational hazard! If you want to know Him and seek Him, you have to be ready to accept all of Him, even the whole death and suffering part. You begin to scratch the surface of who God is and before you know it you are standing in front of a giant chasm. Staring over the edge you begin to realize, as much as you believe otherwise, you are not meant to seek the way over or around this obstacle. Rather, you are meant to jump in headlong. Step up. Breath deep. Jump. Wait…why are my feet still on solid ground? Did they ever leave? Why didn’t I jump? I believe this is where many of us find ourselves daily. We want to know God in His fullness. We really do want to know the desires of His heart, and we desperately want to live as He would have us live. But, our good intentions can only take us to the edge. It is faith that makes us leap. Faith tells us our questions not only are okay but necessary to understand. Faith helps us see the God who is far outweighs the God we want. Faith assures us that God is fully capable of standing up against all the slings and arrows we hold in our quivers ready to hurl in His direction like a firing squad. But is our faith sufficient enough for us to take the plunge? For many, the answer is sadly no. Why? Because they are deathly afraid of who God might actually turn out to be and what that might actually mean for their lives. N.T. Wright puts it this way in his book Simply Jesus, “Jesus - the Jesus we might discover if we really looked! - is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we - than the church! - had ever imagined. We have successfully managed to hide behind other questions (admittedly important ones) and to avoid the huge, world-shaking challenge of Jesus’ central claim and achievement…We want a “religious” leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world!” (p. 5) God is scary. Holy scary. He is Holy Sacred. But He is also Holy Love, Holy Grace, and Holy Redeeming. Holy King! Were we to let our feet leave the ground in faith, let our questions ring out into the void, and watch as the presence of God comes echoing back as a rushing wind across our cheeks, what might become of us? I don’t know. But I want to trust in hope to find out. As a wise man once said, “Why not?”

Life has been frustratingly busy lately. Well, let me put that another way: I have made life frustratingly busy lately. The constant rhythm of schedule drives my days. Wake early, take care of the kiddo, out the door, drop off the boy at day care, work, lunch, work some more, work out, dinner, time with the family, dishes, bed, rinse, repeat.  Throw in the usual suspects of stress like people, relationships, and a job that requires a lot of emotional energy and what you get is a guy who is a bit tired and run down.

Let me ask an age old questions: Why do we do this to ourselves?  I mean, I don’t know anyone who looks at their busy life knowingly and says it’s someone else’s fault that life is that way.  It’s on us.  So why do we do it?

The best I can come up with these days is simply this: fear.  I’m not talking about scary movie, dark alley, creeper fear.  I’m talking of a fear that motivates and compels, yet fatigues, isolates, and destroys.  It is a subtle fear I suspect most of us live with and live by whether we know it or not.

What is this fear?

Giving up.

Giving up the reigns of control to a God who asks nothing less than to be Lord.  And yet, for most of us, giving up feels just like that, giving up.  And we don’t like to give up.  We equate giving up with failure.  It’s like we weren’t able to accomplish it ourselves.  The task was too hard.  We weren’t skilled enough.

Yes!

Name me one person who was skilled enough to handle life on this broken planet we call home?  And yet, we try so valiantly.  If we could just work harder, work longer.  If we could just make that one change in us (or more likely in them!) then that relationship would stop falling apart.  If, if, if…AHHH!!!!  Fear compels us.  And yet it is fear that is destroying us.  Give up.

No, don’t give up on life.  No.  In truth, to continue to live life in fear is to truly give up.  The allusion of control will cause you to lose everything.  But, if you are willing to give up everything, to truly give up control, what might there to be found?

“But you, Israel, my servant, 

Jacob, whom I have chosen,

the offspring of Abraham, my friend;

you whom I took from the ends of the earth,

and called from its farthest corners,

saying to you, ‘You are my servant.

I have chosen you and not cast you

off’;

Fear not, for I am with you;

be not dismayed, for I am you God;

I will strengthen you, I will help you,

I will uphold you with my righteous

right hand.” -Isaiah 41:8-10

Strength.  Perseverance.  Community.  Life.  All ours but only if we are willing to give up.  Seek to lose so as to find.

I grew up in Waco, TX, a city known more for the the fiery end of a deranged, religious cult that occurred 30 miles outside of town than for anything that could be considered an improvement on society.  Waco is also perennially one of the poorest cities nationally per capita.  Poverty is rampant, though at times well concealed to sections of the city with so little infrastructure no one with means would have need to expose themselves to its harsh realities.

But, for some, we witnessed many of these “harsh realities” first hand.  I worshipped blocks away from a notorious interstate bridge which housed a homeless church.  I spent many hours “serving” in East Waco neighborhoods of slum lords and crack houses.  And yet, as much as I may have been exposed to the truth, it was always in a safe, controlled environment which, after enough time, is enough to anesthetize anyone.

That’s how we like our poor and destitute: safe and controlled.  Funny thing is, that’s also how we like our God.  A God who challenges boundaries and perceived notions of justice? Forget about it!  Besides, if we took time to invest in every cardboard homeless person with a tin cup, we’d be poor and destitute ourselves.  So what can we even do about it?

And all the while, God is looking at you asking, “So what are you going to do about it?”

Our God is not a safe God, as C.S. Lewis so poignantly put it in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.  He is not safe.  But, He is good.  And so to are we called to be to the least of these.  Even the least of these are still the least of God’s children.  Our brothers.  Our sisters.  Humanity.  We won’t fix it all.  But then again, God never asked us to in the first place.

He said love.

So what are you going to do about it?

Do you ever sit and wonder if we make life a lot harder on ourselves than necessary?  We think on and stress over much that is of no consequence to the majority of people in this world.  Grocery lists.  Honey-do lists.  Birthday lists.  The laundry list of things awaiting our arrival at work.  Catching the theme?

There is always something seemingly more important to do than life allows us time.  But, in spite of the truth of that last statement, we press forward in a vain attempt to bring the impossible into being all while losing our minds, our peace, and our hair in the process.  Have you ever paused to recognize that the stress you’ve created in your life is a luxury and thus should be no stress at all?  What percentage of the world’s population has the ability to stress over more than whether or not they will eat today?  Will I have clean water?  Will I sleep under a roof tonight?  Will I (literally) survive today?  Now before you think I’m getting all, “eat everything on that plate, because the starving children in Africa…”, stick with me for a minute.

Maybe we embrace our stress because we don’t want to deal with what we know is going on in the world around us.  Maybe that’s why when it comes to our spiritual lives we stress of our sin, over our not reading the bible enough, over our not praying enough, over our not getting our way in the way the church is run, our not having our preferences met in church and in life.  The reality is most of us stress over these things because we’d rather stress and get angry over things that deal with us than to actually do something about them (not to mention how doing something might cause us more stress in other parts of our already busy, stressful lives!).

We’d rather stress about us because if we actually did something for those people and their issues we might actually learn that our stresses in life which insulate and justify our lifestyles are downright wrong.  Our stress draws our attention away from the very things God calls his Church to confront in this world: poverty, oppression, negligence, injustice, broken systems of equity, war, famine, disease, slavery, hunger…

But why get involved with the things God might actually care about?  That will take time we just don’t have.  And besides, if we attempt to take care for those things in other peoples lives it might just call us to stop justifying our lifestyles and to stop insulating ourselves against anything other than our schedules, bank accounts, 401k’s, full pantries, and overcrowded closets.  If we did that, what of consequence in our own lives would we have to stress over?

Shame.