Securing the Border

Jabez was more honorable than his brothers; and his mother called his name Jabez, saying, Because I bore him in pain. – 1 Chronicles 4:9

Some years ago, a person made a lot of money talking about the prayer of Jabez, but I’m not going to talk so much about how he prayed.  It’s possible that his mother didn’t mean any harm, still, if you name your son “pain”, that would seem to me to have negative connotations.  Like a lot of us, Jabez started out in life with his parents’ baggage. 

My parents were good not perfect.  I was certainly not a perfect parent.  In fact, I was pretty bad most of the time.  Most of us have experienced parent-child conflicts.  Often, because of mind parasites, abuse, and poor communication, relationships can be damaged or destroyed.  Yet, if we are going to be whole people, we have to find a way to, at the very least, forgive and move on.  To me, that is what the prayer of Jabez is about. 

My ESV says (v.10), “… that your hand might be with me, and that you would keep me from harm so that it might not bring me pain!”  Other translations give a slightly different sense: 

… and that You would make me know that You will not grieve me! (Apostles Bible, 1851)

… and that You would keep me from evil, that I might not cause pain! (New King James)

I have been called a pain all my life, Jabez says.  I could use a break from pain and grief.  Asking that his border be enlarged seems to me less about wealth or influence and more about space.  I want to give people room, to not be overwhelmed and wounded by their troubles and to not wound them with mine.

To deal with people, we need perspective, to be able to step back, to have room within our boundaries.  (If I start sounding any more like Dr. Phil, shoot me.)  We are called to bear one another’s burdens.  That’s not usually in the literal sense of carrying your mother’s backpack.  I do carry my wife’s purse sometimes.  I hate it when it clashes with my boots.  Most of the time sharing someone’s load is figurative.  They want us to listen while they vent.  They want us to pray when they are too tired, too beaten, too broken.  They need to hear us say that joy comes in the morning and that they will get through the night’s weeping.

To be a burden-bearer requires that we have our own borders enlarged to the point that, while we feel what they feel, we feel it not so deeply as to be overcome by it.  We are pierced but not to the heart for it is our part to bring God in, and He must have room. 

Maybe it’s just me.  I have known rejection, and my response was to retreat.  But is that so different than Jesus separating Himself for forty days in the wilderness?  Or Moses on the mountaintop?  Don’t we need that space to see what has happened to us, to process it, and, most of all, to hear from God about it?  

Enlarge our borders, Lord, and meet us in the middle. 

The Parable of the Mudhole

Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD will be a light to me. -- Micah 7:8

For various reasons, most of which probably should not be discussed in detail, darkness falls on me from time to time.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing (Romans 7:19).  If I have learned anything, it is that when I can’t see where I am going, the best thing to do is stop and wait for the light.  It’s a good thought, but what if the light does not come?  Wait for it. 

I have screwed up just about everything it is possible to screw up, but the worst screw ups all too often result from trying to fix a screw up.  Let’s say that you are trying to put something together, and you drop some essential fastener down a duct.  Not that that would ever happen in real life.  You’re a little peeved as you pull the grate, but the fastener is right there hanging.  Then it falls down into the duct, but it’s still in sight, not yet around the bend.  You reach for it and almost have it, but it slips and rolls away over the event horizon.  You wonder why they didn’t put the ductwork in the attic.  An hour later, the fastener has been joined in the black hole under your floor by a magnet that came loose from the string and some vacuum cleaner attachments.   Meanwhile the original projects remains in disarray, all but forgotten in the angst and frustration.

We had to plow up a ten-acre section of our biggest hay field.  Dad did the plowing one evening while I milked.  The next morning was too good a hunting day to pass up, so he loaded his hounds and told me to hook up the disk and get the field ready to sow.  I might have been thirteen at the time, old enough to be trusted with some things.  The disk was an old heavy drag type.  It may have originally been horse-drawn.  It certainly wasn’t designed for three-point equipment.  We hooked it to a drawbar.  If I remember right, there was a lever that raised the plates a little for transport. 

I got over to the field and started around.  This field has a natural pond in it, and several places near the pond, it is seepy.  I didn’t really think it through too well and just assumed that I was supposed to disk what was plowed.  Right next to the pond, I hit a spot that had no bottom and stuck it. 

OK, I could go do something else and leave the tractor and disk buried.  I knew that would make Dad mad because it would have made me mad:  nothing accomplished and more work to do.  I got off the tractor, walked away and sat down on the broken ground.  The tractor wasn’t buried or high-centered.  It looked like it would come out.  If I could have raised the disk, the whole she-bang looked like it would come out, but I couldn’t do that.  I got down in the mud and disconnected then drove the tractor onto solid ground.  It was a matter of feet.  Then, instead of giving up and going to the house, I walked away and sat down again to think. 

I don’t remember – this was most of a half century ago – if the log chain was on something nearby or if I saw it in a vision.  Anyway, I got the chain, put one end around the hitch on the disk and the other around the drawbar on the tractor.  To my utter amazement, the disk came right out, nothing busted, nothing hurt.  A couple of short ruts and a wallowed spot were the only remaining indications of my struggle.  I kept the chain with me the rest of the day but had no more need for it.

I’ll bet I sat on that tractor ten minutes cussing myself and my stupidity.  I could have sat there all day and never figured a way out.  It was walking away and getting a different perspective that allowed me to see the solution. 

It was my fault that I got stuck there.  When I experience a moral or spiritual failure and fall that, too, is my own fault.   There’s no point in blaming anyone else, but there’s also no point in wasting too much time blaming myself.  If I can somehow rectify the situation, I need to find a way to do that.  Repentance is changing the way we think about something.  We could depict it as getting off the tractor and looking at the place in which we have been mired from a different angle, from the solid ground of God’s viewpoint. 

We can’t pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and we can’t get out of a pit by digging the hole deeper.  We have to find an anchor that will hold.  We have to have a purchase on the Rock of reality if we are going to pull our lives out of the muck and the mire. 

Sometimes when we are sitting in the dark, God will shine his light on the key we would never have seen in the broad glare of day. 

Perspective

So I arose and went out into the valley, and behold, the glory of the Lord stood there, like the glory that I had seen by the Chebar canal, and I fell on my face.  But the Spirit entered into me and set me on my feet, and he spoke with me and said to me, “Go, shut yourself within your house. And you, O son of man, behold, cords will be placed upon you, and you shall be bound with them, so that you cannot go out among the people.  And I will make your tongue cling to the roof of your mouth, so that you shall be mute and unable to reprove them, for they are a rebellious house.  But when I speak with you, I will open your mouth, and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ He who will hear, let him hear; and he who will refuse to hear, let him refuse, for they are a rebellious house. -- Ezekiel 3:23-27

Most of the time, we are called to speak the truth in love.  We are to [p]reach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.  Nevertheless there may come a time when we are called to silence, when to speak out in condemnation of egregious evil runs counter to God's will.  Sometimes rebellion, rather than prodding us to declaim, binds and mutes us.  We are sent speechless into our cell.  It hardly makes sense that Ezekiel would be tied up and not allowed to speak the truth, to admonish and teach those around him.  Yet Jesus Himself said, Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.  We will set aside for now the idea that we might be persecuted for speaking the truth, though that is happening more and more.  The truth should not be wasted.  The word should be sown, not trampled and defiled.  It not only does no good, it is often misused and abused by the ungodly.  There really are those who cannot handle the truth and really have no business or right trying to handle it.  How do you get a message to people who think they know it all?

A couple of days ago we were talking about Ezekiel being overwhelmed and being a source of consternation to the exiles.  I don't think we'd need to extrapolate much to guess that Ezekiel might have seemed to have lost his mind.  A modern diagnosis might be schizophrenia.  Perhaps his fellow Jews thought him a danger to himself if not potentially to others.  Ezekiel may have retreated to his house of his own accord, but it sounds very much like someone else went in and tied him up.  He was unable to speak or to explain what was happening.  It must have seemed pretty strange to everybody involved.

Like his nation, Ezekiel was in bondage.  His apparent insanity was the cause.  Sin was the cause of Jerusalem's fall and Judah's bondage.  Their sin was the rejection of reality and the God of all truth in a sort of national insanity.  Confined to his house, unable to express himself, tied down like an animal for slaughter, Ezekiel preached an eloquent message to those around him daily. It is doubtful that many received it.  I wonder if Ezekiel, at the time, even understood what was happening to him?  He wrote afterwards as he was able, when he understood that his life had been a sign.  What was he thinking at the time? 

It is a good witness to be strong and steady and faithful in the midst of trials, to trust God even when we hurt and don't understand.  But none of us expect to be bereft of our senses, to get out of balance and become paranoid, obsessed, out of touch, or severely depressed.  What kind of message is God offering through the old boy who thinks he has been abducted by aliens?  What would we see if we watched the homeless guy in his worn field jacket with the idea that the Lord had something to do with him being where he is?  What if our lives form symbols and speak in a language that goes far beyond our conscious understanding of what we are doing and what is being done to us?  Could it be that loss and tragedy, derangement and disintegration, when seen at a tangent to our personal line of sight, is meant to speak to people, to convey truth to those know not enough to seek after it?  If we are wrong to cast our pearls before swine, can we write a message with the husks on which they feed? 

Everything isn't necessarily a sign, I don't suppose.  Sometimes the brain-dead panhandler is just a loser -- maybe.  Does the drunk ever look up from his gutter at some happy, successful citizen passing by on his way to work and think, "There, but for the grace of God, go I"?  I don't know.  My life seems pretty chaotic at times.  I get beaten up badly some days to the point I just want to, as my mom used to say, crawl in a hole and pull it in after me.  Someone watching me lose it, watching me beat on my desk in utter frustration after I have done something over for the twenty-seventh time, even as the people who have asked me to change it are asking why it isn't done yet -- they would be justified in wondering about my saintliness.  But is it a part of a message the Lord is trying to send, a word, perhaps in a bigger message, or a letter in word?  Do the drunk and the citizen, the panhandler and the desk-pounder, all this that seems so senseless in the moment fit together to form a picture that could be comprehended if one knew where to stand?

It could be.  I don't think you can see it from orbit, but I suspect that the angels, out there in spiritual space can perceive it, at least catch glimpses of it, see enough to know it's part of a really good story.  When we fall flat on our faces, are bound and mute, or are out of our heads in grief, pain, and confusion, one of them will come up and whisper, "It's not what you think.  It is beautiful.  Wait and see."