Derelict

“How had it come to this?”  It was the question I couldn’t escape.  My entire life I had worked so hard to make sure that I would find myself at the top.  I had become the master of efficiency and mutli-tasking.  My goals had been set, I had defined the steps to get there.  I was being proactive rather than reactive, and all the other 7 steps of success.  I made sure that I knew all the right people—and what would they think of me now, to see me like this?  My goodness, I still can’t see myself like this.  I can just hear their gossip now, “I knew this is how he would end up, serves him right.”  I can just imagine all the stories they are creating, and twisting, and passing on.  Oh, and their sorry sympathies.  Those are more annoying than the gossip.  “How unfortunate, what a sad turn of events for him.”  “Yeah, that poor guy.”  Yet, here I am.  What a pathetic thing my life has turned out to be. 

Now I’m in the same place as all those other people I had judged to be just as disgraceful as I feel right now.  How many times had they walked by my car at red lights holding pitiable little signs, or come up to me at the gas station with some lame story about how they needed gas money?  I knew what they were going to use that money for.  That’s why I never gave them any.  All these people can think to do when things get tough is to go get another malt liquor.  I mean, I know what it’s been like a few times to run into some difficulties, but it just made me work harder, which makes it even harder for me to come to grips with where I find myself now.  Someone who works as hard as I do doesn’t belong here! Arrgh, I’ve followed these thoughts down a million different paths, and not one of them makes sense for me to arrive here.

How in the world can I be standing in line waiting for my first bowl of soup?  But this is the only place I could think of with my stomach turning in knots for the past three days.  Gosh, I’m so hungry.  So I guess it’s either this or let my stomach keep growling.  When it boils down to it I would rather be asking for this handout than on a corner asking for money, and I just can’t imagine going through a dumpster.  Wow, has the line really been moving this fast.  I can’t believe it.  Only half a dozen more people to go.  I can’t believe I’m actually doing this!  I can’t do this.  Maybe I should get out of line, but I’m too close now it would make too much of a scene.  Great, I’m next.  I don’t even think I can look at this lady.  I just don’t know what else to do.  Oh well, I guess this is it. 

“Hello, sir, your bowl…sir.” 

“Um, oh, yes ma’am.  Here you go.”

“I haven’t seen your face before.  Welcome to the soup kitchen.  You’re in a good place now, Sweetie.  God bless.” 

“Um, yes, well thank you.” 

This is all so surreal.  I really can’t believe that it has come to this.  But, you know, the way this last year has gone, I guess she is right.  Of all the places I could have ended up, I am in a good place now.  It’s just going to take some getting used to.

*          *          *

This picture comes to mind when I think of the difficulty within someone who is wrestling with their first experience of accepting grace.  Internally, it can be such an immense battle as the striving of our own efforts struggle against the taming nature of grace.  Forgiveness and grace have a confounding character.  As author Philip Yancey often calls it “the scandal of grace.”  God’s plan of forgiveness is so simple and so easy we turn our nose up to it.  We take our haughty spirit and determine, “There must be something that I can contribute to this salvation thing.  I haven’t done all this work just to be given something for free.  How foolish would I look to put aside all I have worked so hard for, all I have amassed?  No, I won’t have it this way at all.  I demand that my work be worth something.”  At that point God is sad to allow us to earn our wage, because the wage we try so hard to earn ends up being death.  It’s like the church at Laodicea who Christ addresses in Revelation, “You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’  But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”  All our work toward happiness in this life is futile when the only labor actually required for infinite joy is to bow our head low and raise our hands high to freely receive grace.  In my favorite song from the band Switchfoot they sing, “In the economy of mercy I am a poor and begging man.  The currency of grace is where my song begins.”  It takes a poorness of spirit, a realization of depravity and our great spiritual need, before we can come to a place of accepting God’s gift of salvation.

We either try so hard to be good enough for forgiveness, or afterwards we try so hard to prove that we were worthy to receive it.  As if to say to God, “See, you forgave the right person.  I wasn’t so bad after all.”  Seriously, did we completely miss the point when we decided to follow Christ?  Are we still trying to justify ourselves?  Have we not realized, “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags?”  As the worship pastor at my church has stated, “Legalism on the outside leads to emptiness on the inside.”  What useless striving, what a pathetic mess we are sometimes, and for what—the favor we try so hard to earn is absolutely free.  As Paul states in Ephesians, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”  And he echoes in Titus, “But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.”

To put it into a dramatically profound way, our struggle between grace and pride is like the friend of Sam I Am who just won’t try green eggs and ham.  “[He] will not eat them in a box.  He will not eat them with a fox.  He will not try them here or there, he will not try them anywhere.”  I can almost see the persistence of Sam I Am in the persistence God has for us through his Holy Spirit.  Leading us to so many points in our life where we have the opportunity to put stubbornness aside and accept grace, which through our old lens of pride looks as strange a dish as green eggs and ham.  It’s not until the waters engulf Sam’s friend and he is adrift at sea at the end of the story that he finally allows the thought of trying the bizarre food to penetrate his pigheadedness.  Many times our own lives require similar circumstances of being lost in a sea of misery for us to hold our nose, lift a fork and taste our first strange bite of grace.  Oh, but the first bite is a savory one, and its not long before our heart limbers toward this strange dish of grace wanting more and more of it in each part of our life.  We long to be washed over by its simplicity, relishing in its freedom—this sweet, “renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom,” as Titus tells us, “He poured out on us generously through Christ Jesus our Savior.”

Unfortunately, for many there is always a small reserve of self-reliance, no matter how much pride gets stripped away.  Like the phoenix—the mythical bird that would die in a flame and be reborn out of its own ashes—we keep rebirthing our same stubborn nature out the ashes of despondency, getting caught in a futile cycle of obstinacy.  What is needed is to allow the last embers of our old nature to burn out in the ashes of despair, and allow the Holy Spirit to torch a flame of new birth within us.  As it is with the phoenix, it can only find rebirth back to the way it was.  We need to find a new birth through faith in Christ, because, “if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation, the old is gone and the new is come.”  As Paul also says in Romans, “count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”  Even as Christ himself explained to Nicodemus, “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit…You must be born again.”

This new birth teeters on a tenuous fulcrum of faith and pride.  At times we can see someone being propelled toward faith by the circumstances in their life, only to see a stubborn refusal in their heart resurface, swallowing them back up into self assurance.  It’s as if the situations of life are contracting this person through the canal of spiritual birth only to have the womb of self-reliance constrict and stall out the laboring process.  We think we know what will make us happy and we dedicatedly give ourselves to whatever that thing is.  Only to find out, as happy as we thought we might be, there is still this vague emptiness that writhes in our hearts.  Our heart fidgets in its malcontent for but a moment—and there lies its opportunity to give itself to grace—but alas, it drives us on to the next relationship, the next materialistic toy, the next project, the next drink or pill, the next thing we decide is the right thing to make us happy.  For, our uncircumcised hearts tell us we can figure out our happiness on our own.  As Proverbs says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.”

                                                                                            

I have fallen in love with the word derelict to describe what this hedonistic death looks like in us.   For a thing to be derelict is for it to be left or deserted, abandoned, and forsaken—and out of this neglect to become dilapidated and rundown.  Like a ghost town, or abandoned mine.  Implicit in the thrust of the word is to know that there was a previous brilliance, a sparkle of newness.  God has crafted us in his own incredible image, outstanding among all his creation.  We are a masterpiece born out of the height of his creativity.  Then in pride, to satisfy our own selfish desires, we turn away from the blessing and favor inherent to us from our original creation.  As we selfishly turn our back on God’s infinite joy in the pursuit of moments of happiness we become a derelict dwelling.  For, we are always a vessel being filled either by grace or by pride, in the latter of which we abandon God’s intention for us and soon become a ramshackle residence.

Derelict is a car at the junk yard covered in rust with weeds growing through the engine block.  You can look at that car and know there was some distant day when it had been driven off the car sales lot pristine and proud.  It is the ashes of a campfire having burned down from neglect over night.  While the evening before it roared, crackled, and snapped as the life of the campsite providing warmth and light from which friends huddled around telling stories and sharing camaraderie.  It is the house my wife comes home to sometimes when my attention has been on dinner or something else besides the kids.  The tornado of toys my three kids five and under can leave behind is quite impressive!  Derelict might be champagne gone flat.  It might be the piano of Beethoven out of tune.  It could be an off-season vacation to a beach in winter climate—no one is there.  A derelict ship is lost and adrift upon the sea.  In the hay days of the cotton south a tract of land became derelict when season after season the cotton plants would leach all the nutrients of the soil, leaving once rich topsoil to become infertile sand, unusable to grow any other crop from then on.  The American culture of slavery that ran the cotton empire was derelict in its duty to honor its own founding ideal, “that all men are created equal,” which is dwarfed to our Christian responsibility concerning our oneness in Christ.  (In God’s sweet irony, out of the African-American slaves came the one who would save the leached land of the south in George Washington Carver.  Perhaps the greatest mind that agriculture has ever seen and the one who discovered the benefit of crop rotation.)  Derelict is Israel after the Babylonian captivity when the writer of Lamentations mourns the life that the city and people of God once had.  It’s what Nehemiah saw when he returned centuries later to see the walls derelict and in disrepair.  To be spiritually derelict is to see in us a place where the fullness of God once radiated in the vessel of our body, and that radiance is instead replaced with an eerie emptiness that leaves our lives looking shambled and decrepit.  In pride we neglect the plan He has for our life.  Not that He has ever forsaken us but that we have forsaken him. 

Growing up as a kid my family took lots of vacations to the mountains.  My dad had a trail bike he would ride leading the way ahead of my mom who was on our four wheeler with my brother and me hitching a ride along with her.  We would get to the most amazing places.  Destinations that you couldn’t get to even in a four wheel drive vehicle.  And the scenery would be so incredible.  In all the scenery there was one common sight in almost all our off road adventures—a rickety, run down shack out in the middle of the mountains.  We could have been riding for an hour, several miles from any road and even further from any sight of civilization.  It seemed so out of place, in a creepy kind of way. 

To me, these locations always bid my distance.  As if there was some old life or vitality, which had died with the place and required the proper respect of a wide berth.  As a child who was given to imagination, and even more so to being afraid I was happy that we kept going down the trail without stopping.  Yet, for several minutes afterward any scenery of the mountain would be lost to me because my imagination would be filled with questions of who may have lived there, how long did it take for the person to make it, and why did they leave?  As well, my mind would play out scenarios of this house when it had been in use.  Perhaps there was a father who took his sons out to gather the lumber to erect it.  Maybe a mother who had just dispatched the day’s kill out back, which was now giving way to an inviting aroma filling the quaint cottage, with smoke from the chimney being pushed along the heights of the adjoining valley.  To think, a place having so much life and energy at one point in time, left now to simply rot in the elements. 

It makes me consider our own spiritual condition with lives so full of promise.  If we could only stick to the purpose that God has for us, to hold fast to His good work in us.  In God’s perfect creation we have fallen, abandoning the liveliness of His will to let our lives rot in the elements of a world full of sin.  To go back and consider my own life as it had putrefied in the elements of sin, selfishness and pride.  I remember that emptiness and the impulsive flits from one thing to another trying to bring back the life, which was only to come from a spiritual rebirth.  I remember how it came with sweet brokenness and contrite tears.  God had taken the run down shell of my life and placed His life into it anew, replacing the old wineskin of my life with a new one to have the sweet, full bodied new wine of His Spirit poured into me.  Where there had been only the faintest sign of God’s intended life for me He had now placed within me, Christ, the hope of glory, along with the promise that I might be conformed to the image of his glorious son.

In those first few months after giving my life to Christ I got my first Christian album.  It was the Jars of Clay self-titled album, and one song in particular became my anthem as I craved more and more of His renewal in my life.  Quite possibly the most beautiful lyrics of worship I have ever known.  I worship every time I hear it, and wept often, having brokenness still fresh within my heart.  In a glorious way God was dismantling my stubborn pride and filling me with the antidote of his miraculous grace.

I look beyond the empty cross

Forgetting what my life has cost

And wipe away the crimson stains

And dull the nails that still remain.

More and more I need you now,

I owe you more each passing hour

The battle between grace and pride

I gave up not so long ago.

So steal my heart and take the pain

And wash the feet and cleanse my pride

Take the selfish, take the weak,

And all the things I cannot hide

Take the beauty, take my tears

The sin-soaked heart and make it yours

Take my world apart

Take it now, take it now

And serve the ones that I despise

Speak the words I can’t deny

Watch the world I used to love

Fall to dust and thrown away.

(Worlds Apart)

The most beautiful thing you can allow God to do for your life is to let Him take it apart, and then let him build up for you a life in the image of his son, Christ, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus.”  If you have never allowed yourself a chance to get past your ideas of how life should be done and your own attempts to create happiness for yourself, then my prayer for you is that you would open your heart and accept God’s answer of grace and forgiveness for your derelict life.  You can almost taste it now, no more striving out of your own exhausted efforts.  You can almost feel it now, the washing of his rebirth.  Do it now.  Put away your pride.  God will take the derelict dwelling that has become your life and turn it into a dwelling place for his Holy Spirit, transforming it to radiate the fullness of life you so desperately strive for on your own.  God can do it, you can’t.  He invites you to surrender the battle and give yourself over to His grace.