Clay gods

Public school told me I could be anyone or anything I wanted to be.  Mainstream Media popularized phrases like: “I do what I want,” “Don’t ever let someone tell you what you can’t do,” and “You do you.”  Books, t-shirts, mugs, wall art, and eye-catching memes all told me to dream big and to take command of my destiny.  Especially as a woman, I’ve often heard the message that I should reach for the stars and resist fitting into a certain box – unless of course that box is an executive office.  I’ve had unbelievable opportunities at my fingertips, and for that, I am truly grateful. 

However, somewhere along the line, I bought too much into the American dream.  With this inspirational message of limitless empowerment so prevalently preached, I found myself squirming a little bit when I read Romans 9:21.  It was one of my least favorite verses for a very long time (am I allowed to say that?).  It says:

Nobody wants to be a soup bowl.  Shouldn’t we all be made into David, The Thinker, or the Statue of Liberty? Don’t we all deserve to be molded into something glorious?  On the surface, this verse makes God’s sovereignty seem completely unappealing.  Our hearts cry out in protest with accusations of favoritism.  We question God’s love, justice, wisdom, and goodness.  We believe we have a right to equal treatment, equal opportunity, and equal blessing.  Equality becomes our standard for righteousness and justice instead of God Himself.  Lost in our own selfish desires for more, we forget that we already are all equal.  We all consist of the same formless clay – the same sinful substance.  All that we deserve is to be sent away from the Potter forever and discarded without the hope of ever fulfilling the purpose that He originally intended for us.  His love, justice, wisdom, and goodness are shown in the very fact that He chooses to work in us at all.  To work differently in different people’s lives is His prerogative. 

For me, my skewed view of equality wasn’t the only reason this verse didn’t sit well for so long.  Another facet of the American dream had become ingrained into my heart before I even realized what was happening.  The world taught me to believe in myself– which seems admirable and harmless, right?  Yet, everything can be taken to unhealthy extremes.  As much as I hate to admit it, I believed in myself more than I believed in God.  My desire to choose for myself exactly how my life would turn out seemed safer and more desirable than God’s perfect choice.  I elevated my own understanding, character, and morality over God’s and made Him out to be far smaller than He is.  One of the great battles of the Christian life is learning to see God as He is and to see ourselves as we are.  “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn. 3:30).

In his commentary, Romans: Righteousness from Heaven, R. Kent Hughes notes the following concerning Romans 9:21: “The fact is, God is perfect.  Perfect in knowledge, wisdom, power, presence, faithfulness, goodness, justice, mercy, grace, love, and holiness.  Therefore, he is perfect in his choices.  God does not answer to anyone, is not responsible to anyone.  He is totally, absolutely sovereign.”  Isn’t that what we so often want to be true of ourselves?  We want to be the Potter.  We lust after God’s sovereignty and wish we didn’t have to answer to anyone.  What a mess we would make of our lives in our limited perspective and understanding if that were so.

He does give us the gift of freedom and choice – a paradox that we can’t totally wrap our minds around.  He doesn’t force us to follow Him.  However, He is no less God, and He is still in charge, regardless of how sincerely we believe that we are in control.  We can kick back against that fact and try to live as little gods, but as our imperfect choices inevitably clash against God’s plan and design for the world, we will eventually reap the consequences of those choices and be faced with the truth.  Our wisdom is no match for His, our sense of justice is seriously flawed, and our desires and dreams are blind to the full picture.  What it all comes down to is this: will we choose to hold God high and trust His character even when the choices He makes aren’t the ones we think He should make? Or, will we hold ourselves high, certain that our own choices are far better than God’s perfect and holy design?            

Expressing Emotions

           

            Not long after a traumatic season in my life including an unexpected move, I watched Inside Out for the first time.  So many aspects of the movie resonated with my heart back then, and I could barely hold myself together.  How could a grown woman feel so much like a lost little girl?  I was experiencing so many emotions simultaneously that it made me dizzy, and I didn’t really feel like I had much control over them.  I wanted to stuff them all away like I could before, but they just kept spilling out.  It made me feel like I was completely failing as a Christ-follower.   

            See, we are told all the time that Christians should always be joyful and hopeful.  After all, there truly is great joy and hope to be found in Jesus.  Unfortunately, we can fall into the trap of equating the joy and hope of the Lord with an eternally happy, peppy disposition.  As a result, we act like Joy in Inside Out – we lock Sadness away in a room and pretend like she doesn’t exist.  She is an unsettling trouble-maker, and nobody really wants to deal with her.  Or worse, we look at Sadness like she is borderline sinfulness.

            We were made in the image of our God.  Our emotions are a reflection of His emotions.  He has given us a wide range of feelings and the freedom to express them.  Now, this doesn’t mean that our emotions never lead us astray or contribute to our sinful behavior.  God is the only One who is able to be angry perfectly, to be sad perfectly, to be jealous perfectly, and to be delighted perfectly.  We are marred by sin, and so our emotions can quickly carry us further away from God if they are not directed by the Holy Spirit’s guidance and the truth of God’s Word.  However, the emotions themselves are not sinful.  Stuffing all negative emotions down and trying to plaster on happiness all the time is exhausting and detrimental.  That’s not how God ever intended for us to live.

            The shortest verse in the Bible is John 11:35, and it says, “Jesus wept.”  I have been so encouraged by those two words this week.  In chapter 11, Mary and Martha asked Jesus to come to Bethany because their brother, Lazarus, was very sick.  Immediately, Jesus declared that his sickness would not end in death but that it would result in glory to God.  He had hope and joy, and He knew the final outcome.  In spite of the fact that His good friend was so ill, Jesus waited a couple days before journeying to Bethany.  In that time, Lazarus died.  When Jesus finally arrived, Lazarus had been buried for four days.  Even though he knew all of this would happen, and even though He knew that He was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, Jesus cried when He saw his friend’s burial place. 

He could have charged in stone-faced, rolled His eyes, and scolded everyone for their lack of faith or for their downcast countenances.  He could have been completely insensitive and pranced in happily with the news that Lazarus would be walking out of the tomb in just a few moments.  Instead, Jesus empathized with them.  Those tears didn’t mean that He had lost His joy, hope, or faith or that He was somehow immature or insincere.  They simply meant that He was sad.  He loved Lazarus, and He loved the people who had gone through the agony of watching Lazarus die.    

            It’s okay to cry.  It’s not wrong to be sad and to wrestle with the burning in our hearts.  Our sadness does not devalue our belief in Christ, and it does not automatically mean that we have lost all joy, hope, or faith.  For example, when a loved one dies knowing the Lord, we rejoice in knowing that he or she is with Him and in the hope that we will one day be reunited.  However, that joy and hope do not remove all sadness and sense of loss here on earth.  We still hurt, long, and bleed, but the difference for us as believers is that we are not completely consumed or controlled by our grief.  We are free to experience and express it without becoming enslaved to it. 

We don’t have to hide or pretend.  We don’t have to be ashamed.  God gave us a whole spectrum of emotion with which to experience and respond to life.  Our ability to feel makes us human, and it also makes us more like our Creator.  He holds us, cries with us, and hurts with us even though He already sees the glorious end.