The dangerous business of learning, joy, and entering into glory.

Learning is hard.

As if learning something for the first time is not hard enough, to relearn something is just brutally tough. Some might say that G-d has a way of returning us to His deepest graces when we breakdown and admit we didn’t get it the first time. We swung, and we whiffed. When we have to start over with child-like humility. Have you ever had to relearn something? Have you ever felt the awkwardness that comes from trying to intentionally not do something the same way you have always done it? It feels so inefficient. You are gambling what is known and comfortable for a chance to just possibly be better.

It is risky business relearning something.

It often takes some hard convincing or motivation from something outside your control. Nothing makes you learn how to do something right like a lack of options to do otherwise. You need evidence that is beyond dispute. You need a push off the edge of a cliff you have seen a million times before. Maybe you look like a baby giraffe when you handle a basketball, but after seeing a few hundred other people do it much prettier and more efficient you think maybe it is time to go back to the drawing board. Or maybe you learned guitar before YouTube and have what might be described as a ‘Kung-Fu” grip on the cords, only to discover it lacks a smoothness needed to make difficult transitions. The kind of transitions needed for the more beautiful and complex music. Relearning to make those cords with the right finger positions and flexibility will be painful. Your hands will feel like a nail has been driven into them. Things you once did easily the wrong way now become hard all over again for new reasons.

It might shock or even cripple your confidence for a season. You will make the same small mistake a quarter of a million times. Simple things will become hard again; hard things will become seemingly impossible.

You may find yourself wanting to throw something across the room in frustration… (Obviously not speaking from experience)

As an American, I hate steps backwards. While it is true that while here in France I miss the way things work in the States, it has become clearer to me that we are pragmatic to a fault. We are prone to think that if something works, then it must be right. We have been known to force things, instead of moving with wisdom. Progress, progress, progress… even if it’s in the wrong direction. Racing off a cliff is only considered progress if your goal is falling to your death on the ground below. We keep forcing things in order to justify the original reason we forced things until something so unmistakable, so unavoidable stops us in our tracks.

It is a tough pill to swallow when one finds out that we became really good at doing something wrong.

It is not eating humble pie, it’s eating humble all-you-can-eat-Chinese-buffet and then going to McDonalds for seconds.

The real culprit, that nobody ever catches, is the way in which we learned in the first place. It does not become apparent to us until we have to relearn something that the short cuts we took early on were actually just really fancy dead ends. In the world, backtracking is the new walk of shame. While that may be true for the world, it is not so among us who have been found by Jesus.

For us who follow Jesus, our whole existence is marked by repentance. A constant tuning of our heart strings to His great symphony; a whole life full of reformation. Our life is a sinner’s prayer admitting we are wrong and needing to learn all over again, with our death being the final ‘amen.’ It is a dashing attempt to be resurrected out of one ditch without over correcting into another. Our lives are more about the G-d we are in the process with, than the results we might take out of context on any particular day (because if Facebook has taught us anything, it is that anybody can find an antidotal story to support anything).We trust His providence to sort that out in the end, more than we trust the polls about who we are or are not.

Thus we can let His grace and the pain of every moment shape our clay hearts without embarrassment. We can learn and re-learn in constant fluidity and joy.

I would argue the awkward, constant transition of Christians from sinners to saints is not their greatest shame as many suppose or attempt to point out. Many would paint the Christian a hypocrite halfway through the learning process, thinking our faith to be something without movement or transition. More often than not, this is no more than a veiled excuse for their own lack of transformation or change. They want to see us as satisfied with static so that they are somehow less accountable for their own lack of desire to change.

Nevertheless, we are called names.

As we all might attest, name-calling is a powerful deterrent. It probably has discouraged more than one of us before we ever really began to try something. We were too afraid to hear the word “stupid” to really put ourselves out there. Not only that, but it has a way of weeding out those who might want to do it for reasons less than wholesome.

When the shifting winds of culture are blowing hardest against you that is when the rest of us come to find what you are really about and if you want it. Whatever ‘it’ may be.

I want to affirm to you something you are afraid to believe: that G-d, in His infinite patience with you, may take years to reteach you things you think you already know. What we want instantaneously and with little cost, He will reteach with a meticulous attention to timing such that we ‘get it’ in ways we never thought possible. He will play the long game for the sake of our hearts. He will do this with zero limitation as to what He will use or how He will use it. I will say it again, He will use absolutely everything, and despite any theological or philosophical reservations you might have one way or another. He is dangerous like that, whether you like it or not. Even a casual reading of the Holy Scriptures will lead you to this conclusion.

He has never been bound to ask you your opinion before He does the greatest good or draws out the deepest glory. Just a side note to be clear; your sense of preference does not order the universe. The quicker you can adapt to that reality, the better suited you will be to live joyfully in G-d’s world.

As I have said before, something I have learned in walking with Jesus is that He employs all things to accomplish His will and is a serious fan of the well-timed play. He will risk appearing boring in order to let something play out until just the right moment, until nearly everybody has stopped paying attention or praying. It seems scandalously obvious when one considers He rolled out the red carpet for the entry of Himself into history throughout millennium after millennium. Read in the Old Testament how good He is at taking His time. He is patient. A word we are not good at.

Carefully not considering your limited understanding of timing, He does all things well.

He gives our human race time to discover all the different ways we cannot fix this mess we have made. He lets us run after all kinds of false saviors. He wants us to have a long track record of our own failures at fixing what is broken in our hearts. Almost as if He wanted to use human history to prove emphatically all the ways we are not Him and that our ways are not the Gospel. You look to the left side of the Book and you find that neither governments, nor religious systems, nor wealth, nor sex, nor prophets, nor armies, or nor laws can fix what only Jesus is the cure for. He has a monopoly on the Savior business, a corner on the market. And cousin, business is good.

This is why we trust Him when He invites us to circle the wagons and relearn something we think we got figured out. He has an end game that we can trust.

Sure, He could do things within a blink of an eye, but this is more about Him drawing us into an absolute dependence on His grace than it is of just achieving external results while leaving the heart back at the starting line.

If this does not on some level scare you to death then you are not getting what I am trying to say. G-d loving us enough to not leave us where we are is a dangerous proposition, which is maybe why I laugh when some people throw it out there on twitter like it’s not. It means that laughter and mourning, joy and pain, solitude and company, comfort and difficulty, evil and good, life and death are all at His disposal to move us closer to glory. Go ahead and change into your big boy pants if you soiled your other ones. Jesus, Paul, and a host of other faithfuls are onlooking to see what you are going to do with the grace He has given you for this time in Church history.

It might be a time to go back to the drawing board. It may be a really good season to unlearn some of the worst things that are nothing like Jesus in your life. It may be that there are already some things happening in your life that are agents of G-d, good or bad, that are trying to convince you to let off the gas pedal while you are hurling down the wrong road.

I know that is where I am living right now and I see no change of address in the foreseeable future. As hard as it is to type and as hard as it is to even think about; I am learning to walk again for the fourth time. This is not figurative, I am literally having to relearn how to walk again. I recently tore the ligament in my right knee. Again.

This is the third knee surgery that I have undergone since I arrived on this planet. I wish I could say it is not discouraging – but it is. The first time I tore my ACL I was playing football in high school and was followed by one of the most epic downward spirals of my life. I went from squatting 500 lbs to not being able to squat my own body weight. The physical tax of relearning how to do things all over again combined with a thick fog of depression made for a dangerous adolescent cocktail.

I did not know it then but it was an assault upon my idolatry towards sports, which He does not take too kindly to.

After years I recovered a fraction of my athleticism. The second time was in the Himalayan mountains (long story). I will just say that the second time knocked the breath out of me.

Again.

As I went from bed, to crutches, to limping, to walking, to only a shadow of the athlete that I once was… I felt that a part of me had died. A very important way that I had always seen myself had ceased to be. I was no longer an athlete; I was just His. He refused to let me define myself on any other terms than His and I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the best thing that could of happened to me. G-d forbid I become a 50 year old man still living through what I did or did not accomplish on a field playing ball… especially when there is a King to love and a Kingdom to build. I thought that was enough. He made adjustments. Even when I broke my ankle so nastily that it required surgery and had to learn to walk a third time it was somewhat familiar. I was going to have to go there, again.

He was slowly and methodically unraveling the things I used to cloak my pride.

Again. And Again.

It was like the stone knowing exactly how a certain tool in the mason’s hand feels on its skin. I braced for impact. It was relearning how to lean on Jesus while I limp. It was lots of down time for a person who hates down time. It was learning to pray while your mind swirls back and forth between the throne room and the throbbing pain.

I felt like Jacob with a new name and an injury I would carry for the rest of my life, both of which would remind me of something profound about the character of G-d. Something about how He defines good.

When I got the news that I once again was going to have to find myself waking up in a hospital bed without the ability to walk, it was deteriorating. We were knee-deep in changes and drama within our work environment, questioning whether we could effectively continue our work here in France or not. We were drowning in homesickness as Christmas hurled just around the corner. Not long after I injured my knee, I was caught up in the Paris attacks of last November, which just elevated our emotions through the roof. Our gaslight was clearly on. As military was being deployed at our kids’ schools and around some of our Churches, we started to think this had to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. I hated it most for my wife, who had a new baby to care for and now a less capable partner to help shoulder the load.

It felt like total deconstruction.

I woke up from surgery trying to feel my toes and claim them as my own again. I stretched my foot off the bed like a bird stretching its wing out for its first flight, destined to end in a plummeting crash. I wrestled to get the muscles to work in unison, or at all. In this moment, there is no time for thoughts like “I am too old for this,” or “Why did this happen?”

There is only the next step. And the next. There is only grace.

It hurt to straighten my leg and it hurt to bend it. I felt awful if I took medication and I felt awful if I didn’t. My physical therapist took some significant time to inform me that what she was going to do to me was best described as ‘torture.’

Learning has its cost and pain is the highest form of tuition.

The other thing about relearning something is that it does not happen in a vacuum. There are onlookers. Once I started learning how to limp around or even walk a little, it was scary how much I fell down in public. The doctors said that my legs are slightly different lengths because of the surgeries and that my balance would have to be relearned. So, I went from being an sportsman who prided himself as hard to bring down, to a child learning to crawl through the streets of Paris as I speak French that few 4 year olds would covet. I remember just a few months ago, I was with a young French guy I am discipling and we were walking through the city after it rained. I failed to notice the surface of the ground had changed into a metal material and was soon sliding around like something akin to Bambi on ice. Luckily, there was only a few hundred people around. Seriously, it is a miracle that G-d uses me at all among the French. That I would get to share the hope that I have with my physical therapist each week as she tortures me is ridiculous. Or the fact that I have had countless people hear about Jesus through this messy downward spiral is beyond belief.

I could close my eyes and wince, or just ride it out with wide-eyed wonder.

Maybe this is why I love Him as the G-d of the messy.

He defies all logic and loves so thoroughly in a world falling apart. He overcomes strength with weakness to make His enemies seem silly, all while rescuing some of them to be His sons and daughters. He has put all of us on a path we would have never chosen for ourselves and has employed instruments we would have never written into our own stories. There is nothing for us to do or say.

There is only for us to enjoy Him in it and look forward to what He will bring us to be through it.

As I see my daughter go from struggling to roll over to struggling to crawl, I see my own lack when I try to answer my Muslim neighbors questions about Jesus in less than stellar French. When she fights to move from an army crawl to pulling herself up onto those tubby, yet wobbly legs; my mind darts to our Church plant and the hope set before it.  In both cases, there will be tears and there will be times of failure, but in the end we know that we were made for this. It is altogether miraculous and full of glory.