Breakthrough series 6: Truly dead, truly alive

Immovable

Its a world full of people

A client related a great story to me. A woman accidentally shut herself inside a cold room on a Friday afternoon. 

No one heard her shouts and her body temperature was falling rapidly. Then, a good while later, a security guard found her. "What led you here", she asked? 

"Mam", he added, "of all the employees who work here, you are the reason I come to work. You greet me in the morning, you wave to me at night and when you can you chat or give me some food. So I wouldn't have missed anyone else, but I was expecting you to come out of the building and wave to me as you went home, and when you didn't appear I knew something was wrong. I searched all over until I found you down here, in this cold room".

At my right hand

Years ago I saw a drama in mime, in which Jesus was "nailed" to a man who assumed the configuration of a cross. On the other side of the stage, His father assumed the same position, alone - but as His son winced and reacted to every jolt, so did He.

Standing tall

The human sense of consciousness revolves around three spheres: the mind, the body and the soul. C S Lewis argued that the soul is not an entity but a state of being. Traditional bible views are that the soul is the seat of our emotions. I am assuming the latter although I also accept the former.

Thus, we have an intellectual, emotional and physical pillar.

The Law of Moses argued that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and strength (body). In our vernacular that implies intensity, the kind of intensity I would reserve for my wife or my children.

Keep going until it makes sense

So much of life proves that waiting is useful. 

A top restaurant will insist that good food takes times. 

A mother with child knows that once her course is run her joy will be full. 

A student pushes through the years of learning, motivated by the prize beyond and the value of waiting for it. 

A farmer reconciles himself to the idea that what seems like nothing is happening will yet bear fruit. 

Watch me Dad

One of the most primal cries of all children, is "watch me Dad". It is driven by a human instinct for approval.

The symbol of that approval is inevitably our highest known point of reference and it timing in our lives is akin to a pilot setting his gyro compass and altitude before taking off, so he can have a reliable reference system for navigation.

Growing up

I am sure that words like empowerment and autonomy don't sit comfortably with all, although this site speaks to people in the workplace, not theologians.

To bridge the gaps

What causes paths to cross and people to meet, so often by mere seconds or fleeting moments, which might never have been had they occurred seconds sooner or later?

That my will may be done ...

Psalm 139: 5 says, "You hem me in behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me." Its a familiar feeling for many who have times of contradiction and frustration in their lives.

The lifecycle of organisations predicts that uncertainty will precede progress

In business logic we refer to "the lifecycle of organisations". It describes how a firm goes through a startup, restart or revival phase, followed by growth, then maturity or stability, before finally going into decline or a contraction phase.

A light in the darkness of trouble

David spent a lot of his early life darting from cave to cave, and living in the caves of the Shefelah, where he tried to interpret his life struggles. It was at times like those that he wrote some of his most haunting Psalms.

Loaves and fishes

Jesus, in one of His most practical moments, had a need to feed 5,000 people - and He delegated the task to His disciples, but all they could think of was to send everyone home. That was not His objective.

There is always a way

Andy Drufesne, in Shawshank Redemption, spent years making no sounds, nor drawing the slightest attention to his inch-by-inch drive through his prison wall with a small rock chisel.

Trees shed leaves and Fiona fed Shrek, but I shred my tie and almost lost my neck

Interesting things do tend to happen to interesting people. Whether that describes me or not, only you can judge, but I sure have had some interesting moments.

I was recently reminded of a bizarre moment when I took a pile of documents to the office shredder. Most people preferred to simply dump their documents into a large waste bag, so that a worker could bulk shred everything later in the day, but I thought ... well actually maybe I didn't think at all, but I can't remember what I was thinking.

Its what I did that matters. I decided to quickly shred my own documents rather than entrust their confidential content to a worker. Unfortunately, that was in an age where the wearing of a tie at work was commonplace. I had just started shredding when my tie caught in the machine and moved up my tie so fast I only just had time to stop the machine before losing the tip of my nose.

The candle burnt out long ago, but the legend never did

On this day in 1962, Marilyn Monroe took a fatal dose of sleeping tablets to escape her complex life. Although she raised the ire of the secret service for her indiscrete sharing of JFK's inner thoughts and worked her way through a few husbands, she could find no satisfaction. How sad for a girl who had so much going for her ... beautiful, talented and desirable. Well it was not to be. After 36 hectic and often exciting years, she burnt out and left the world stage: but as Elton John noted, her legend lives on.

She reminds me of the woman at the well, one of the most insightful human exchanges ever recorded about Jesus. It was not a parable, but a real-life exchange that could take another two thousand years to fully interpret. What a remarkeable person He was, so wise and yet so profoundly economical in His style. He could convey a wealth of meaning in a sentence.

Where do we stand?

One of the greatest causes for human crisis results from misrepresentations of God. The dark ages marked a significant eon of human crisis, driven by ignorance about God and His heart for humanity. Fear of the unknown reduced all unknowns to the devil’s work, which enslaved humanity to ignorance, suspicion, superstition, fear and all the more obvious consequences of that age: dungeons, death and disease.

Aside from many other obvious social deviations, we each have our own personal misconceptions of God. It all reminds me of a little Church Mouse cartoon, which shows a mouse saying “Lord, just look at what is now available in the Internet”, to which a voice in heaven replies, “I’d rather not”.

Okay, enough of the more patently negative aspects of human attitudes to God. To me it is more tragic that believers are getting into trouble because of their misconceptions.

My tower is bigger than yours ....

Cities and nations of the world are all bent on carving out their identities through spectacular engineering feats. Its fun enough and well worth following, but is it necessary? Where is it headed, what is driving it and where will it end?

I stood on top of the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower, but missed the opportunity to go up the World Trade center tower. However, even then Sears Roebuck in Chicago held the world height record.

My brother later went up the CN tower in Toronto and walked over its scary glass floor. He claimed the family record, for CN was, at 1,800 or so feet, the tallest building on earth. Then Petronas built its own twin towers in Malasia, but China outdid it with the Shanghai tower, which become the tallest office building at 1,670 feet. Now all that has changed. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is not only the tallest office block, it has bypassed CN, topping out at an incredible 2,716 feet or 880 metres: a mere 120 meters short of a kilometer. It holds numerous records including highest free standing structure and tallest office block.

The Japanese are now considering a 1 km building. Maybe we have finally caught up with the biblical goal of Babel. Although we have reached the heavens and now have the power of the gods, via sattelite technology, maybe the quest for tallest building will yet reach extreme levels.

But what is it all about? All this one-upmanship reflects what is happening in the streets below. We are all seeking to define ourselves and outdo others. Divine disruption confused the cause of Babel, but our own mindless quest for power and prominence has confused our entire human objective, for in all our seeking to satisfy human needs, we are fast denying that need to wipe out jobs, erode economies, kill forests, poison rivers and the air about us - all for the sake of progress.

Methinks we are losing the plot. We will indeed lose our way ... until our culture acknowledges and bows to the throne that is higher than any other.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ http://www.4u2live.net/

Celebrate Life

Coldplay's iconic hit, Viva la Vida, means "celebration of life", yet is about death. However, it is not a dark celebration of death, but the triumph of life over death.

The album cover, features Delacroix's "liberty leading the people (into victory)", symbolising the triumph of new life over the old enemy, "I used to roll the dice, feel the fear in my enemies' eyes, listen as the crowd would sing, now the old king is dead, long live the king".

Death boasts, "One minute I held the key, next the walls were closed on me, and I discovered my castles stand upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand". The poet alludes to great biblical imagery about building on sand and the folly of Lot's wife who looked back to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Then the triumphal albeit tragic refrain, which echoes that fateful day of Calvary, when the King of Life met the ruler of death in the darkened canyons of hell, "I hear Jerusalem's bells a ringing, Roman cavalry choirs are singing, be my sword, my mirror, my shield, my missionaries in a foreign field."

The words continue with haunting lyrics about the cold winds of death and shatttered lives, but what happened on Calvary's windswept sides will live on forever, beyond the stars, beyond the fullness of time, beyond the end of the ages, long after the worlds as we know are gone and the universe is folded up like a garment. Even then the bells of heaven will ring as a perpetual reminder of that one, climactic moment that forever changed the destiny of men, angels and heaven above.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net
Image courtesy: www.mpam-tetelestai.org/mission.html

Small beginnings, great outcomes

We are all likely to fail, get lost, be reported overdue or drift off course. The reasons are complex, but the journey to restoration is where our ideals about God will be transformed into the rocky foundations that will sustain us and our descendants. To every crisis will come a turning point, a small beginning that will provide a seemingly fragile thread back to high ground, but en route God will reveal His heart to us and interpret life. The only thing He requires of us in what is otherwise His workmanship in us, is a heart of faith. That is the only thread He needs to transform us from fragile wanderers into victorious history makers.

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