And because we don’t remember, we dredge up anything else that we can remember. Forgiveness disappears; even old forgiveness. We use language like, “You Always . . .” or, “You Never . . .” Our words stick like darts on impact, but it’s okay because they deserve it, we think. They need to learn, we think.

I am not a leader in my home. Teach me to lead.

I am not proactive in the discipline of my children. Give me vision and goals.

I am a source of anger and frustration because I am easily angered and frustrated. Give me patience and self-control.

I say cruel things in my home under the thin disguise of teaching. Make me sympathetic.

I do not model Christ’s love for the church in my home. Sanctify me.

I do not have a clear grasp on what is right and what is wrong. Give me wisdom.

I am the problem. Make me the solution.

I will study Proverbs first. I will memorize scripture that models God’s plan for fatherhood. They are not the problem; they are my responsibility. My ministry.

Write your Word on my forehead. Seal my mouth with it.

Am I different now?   

For two and a half Aprils I attended a church near my home, and the preacher there liked to play a game.  He would stand at his pressboard pulpit looking out over the congregation and ask his fun question.

“Who here is a sinner?”

I understood the joke; I knew how the game was played.  I didn’t participate, but many hands went up and that’s when the Pastor sprung his trap.

“Wrong!” he’d say, chuckling at his own cleverness.  “If we’ve accepted Jesus as our Personal Lord and Savior, then the Bible calls us Saints not Sinners.  You’ve got to start believing what God says about you!”  The congregation laughed dutifully.  Ah! You got us again they said.  He’s right they said.  God thinks we are the bee’s knees. 

I wanted to believe it.  I wanted to close my eyes, turn off my mind and accept that version of Christianity where God stands outside the door with His hat in His hands waiting for us to love Him as much as He loves us.  Poor God.  Look at Him standing out there.  Rejected.

That version of Christianity says that God wants to heal us if we can just crack the code and figure out what we’re doing wrong.  It’s a Christianity where God is constantly babbling highly encouraging prophetic words to us about ourselves and about others, and all we have to do is learn how to tune in to the chatter and we can Hear From God.  That version of Christianity is all about miracles and feelings.  It demands that we examine every errant thought or coincidence, because those things may be God sending us an encrypted message from the radio room in heaven.

I wanted to believe all that, and I almost did, but after two and a half Aprils I packed up my battered and confused little family and left.  I couldn’t believe in that version of Christianity because my Bible told me about something different.  The Holy Spirit wouldn’t let me believe it; instead He broke my heart with remaining sin.  He smothered me in my own sin so that when I prayed for the umpteenth dose of forgiveness for my “mistakes” I choked on the words and begged for deliverance instead.

Have mercy on me, Lord!  A sinner!  You freed me from this bondage, but I’m ashamed. Wash me.  Give me a new heart, because this one is my enemy!  Rain fire on me to burn away everything in my life that doesn’t Praise God.

God chose to save me.  I don’t even know when He did it for sure, but whenever it happened I didn’t deserve it.  I still don’t.  That’s Grace, and I’m mystified by it.  I’m changed by it.  I’m not the same as I was.  I am a child of the King, strangely forgiven, but sin is still there and I’m still powerless before it.  When I am tempted I will fall.  I will look.  I will talk.  I will take.  I am a hypocrite and a liar. I am weak.  I am a sinner.

But I’m not a slave to sin anymore.  I will pray for mercy and forgiveness every day of my life, but I will also pray for power.  I will pray for holiness.  I will pray for the Holy Spirit of God to declare a great victory in me.  And I won’t wait.  I will struggle against sin now, in my weakness.  I will pick myself up and return to a battle that I have lost a thousand times, knowing that I will lose again unless God comes to help me.  I will put sin to death inside me, and I will persevere but only if the Lord keeps me.

Because when it’s all said and done, I’m doomed without Jesus.  We all are.  And like everyone else I stand at the precipice of eternity, and I’ll step off that edge knowing that unless Christ alone saves me I will perish.

This depression was defeat on all levels.  It was loneliness that stretched into the future like a curving tunnel with no end in sight.  It was failure and self-doubt and fear and humiliation.  This was suffering that scraped out her insides until she became hollow; it sent her scrambling into the shadows to hide.  She became a puppet that smiled when it was time to smile and slept when it was time to sleep.

Seeing her like that probably should have broken my heart. I recognized the sadness, but in those days I was hypnotized by my own demons.  I was comfortably numb, floating along like Yogi Bear on the sweet smell of a picnic basket.  I left my mother alone to take that beating all by herself.  

Looking back, I wish I could say that someone stepped in with a mighty prayer.  I wish I could say that God flew in the window on a sparkly rainbow with His Santa-sack full of blessings, and saved the day by making all of our dreams come true.  But that’s not what happened.  God wasn’t invited to this party, at least as far as I knew.

Instead, “Something Terrible” happened.  We fell into the hands of thieves who stole everything.  Literally.  They cleaned us out completely.  They took every photograph, every lumpy clay ash-tray, every ball-point pen, every stick of furniture, beds, blankets, clothes.  Everything.  I’m sure they dumped most of it into a garbage can somewhere, but to us those things were priceless, irreplaceable treasures.  Gone.

If a thing like that were to happen today, I wonder if I would trust God in His providence.  At the time I had just started to seek Him, so I don’t remember thinking about Him at all or even praying.  What I do remember is the wrenching belief that my mother would finally give up under the weight of so much sadness.  But she didn’t snap that first day.  And she didn’t snap the next day, either.

Life went on.  It wasn’t pretty.  It surely wasn’t easy.  It just . . . continued.

We stood there on the other side of “Something Terrible” with our fingers in our ears waiting for the sky to come hammering down and finish us off.  But it didn’t.  We stepped away from the rubble of a shattered life, and kept walking . . . probably wondering what was for dinner.  It wasn’t the end of the world; in fact, it wasn’t even the worst thing that ever happened. 

We had survived a thing that most people never experience, and I think that surviving was what gave my mother some of her old strength back.  She wasn’t miraculously cured, but eventually the depression would go as far away as depression ever really goes.  Today she is married to a good man – as happy as she’s ever been, and we don’t talk about those days much.  But when we do talk about them, her eyes shine. 

Anyone who has experienced “Something Terrible” knows that there’s a sense of pride in being leveled by a punch that would level just about anyone.  We had been tested; stretched way past the limit, and we didn’t break.  We could take it.  Our value is tallied in our scars.

As for me, years later I found out that we can see the hand of God best in hindsight.  And even though He wasn’t officially invited, He was still in our lives back then.  In fact, it was His fist that leveled us, but I’m not bitter about that.  I realize now that we needed leveling.  We were blind and slipping down a hill toward a cliff, and God did just exactly what was necessary to save us. 

Am I saying that God caused “Something Terrible” to happen?  No.  We chose that road for ourselves, and I can see that now.  What I am saying is that in order for God to put us on a better road, He had to pulverize the one we were on.  God doesn’t cause calamity, but I believe He often allows “Something Terrible” to steer us toward something wonderful.  

It seems like we never know we’re falling until we hit the bottom, because that’s where we land in the hand of God.

 Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. – Hebrews 12:11

“It’s Time to confess and repent and fast and posture ourselves properly before a righteous and holy God. It’s time for the men of the Church, like Daniel, to search the Scripture and know and understand what God wants us to pray.  Enough prayers for better days and sunshine. Enough prayers that are meaningless and mundane. Let’s pray prayers that shake heaven so that heaven will shake us. Let’s get serious about prayer that announces to the Lord of Hosts: We Welcome Your Intervention.”

That article gave me a new perspective on prayer and intercession and “Thy will be done.”  It forced me to see my own prayer life in a cold and brutally honest light, and it left me feeling raw but refreshed . . . as if dead flesh had been scrubbed away so that true healing could begin.

In that light I discovered that my private prayers had become a sort of new age affirmation process where I repeated positive thoughts over and over in an effort to steer subconsciously toward some goal.  Corporate prayer often became a way to say things that I thought other people needed to hear.  I guess those aren’t terrible things, but when I saw my heart in the light of the truth, I saw that I had begun to accept belief and faith as powers unto themselves.

Hillyer’s article forced me to look down and see that I had strayed from the path. 

I suddenly realized that my prayers no longer relied on the living God; I had begun to believe that it was faith that moved the mountains.  In fact, it seemed sensible to think that the stronger the faith in a miracle, the more likely that a miracle would come.  If I told someone in prayer that they would be healed, then perhaps they would believe me and be healed.  If I told someone that God wanted to help them, then perhaps when the help came they would believe that it came from God.

I recently re-read the scriptures where Jesus taught us how to pray.  In Matthew 6:10 He said, “Thy Will Be Done.”  I had always struggled with that verse because I believed that saying those four words in prayer meant that I didn’t really believe God would give me what I asked for.  It was a sign of defeat.  I always thought I should say something bold, like “I claim this healing for my friend.”  I thought I needed to proclaim that my belief was stout and sturdy enough for God to grant my wish.  Praying “thy will be done” meant that my belief was wishy-washy.

After reading Hillyer’s blog entry, I began to see that praying “Thy Will Be Done” isn’t wishy-washy at all.  In fact it’s a frightening act of faith.

“Thy Will Be Done” is asking for the Consuming Fire to come and burn away everything that is not holy.  When we ask for healing with “Thy Will Be Done,” we are not just asking for God to fix the pipes, we are asking Him to reduce the house to cinders and then build it up again in His image.  In fact, before we pray “Thy Will Be Done” we need to count the cost, because we may lose some things in that fire that we never intended to give up.

In an instant, I realized that the “power” of faith was the same as proclaiming loudly that I am willing to jump into the fire.  Praying “Thy Will Be Done” means quietly diving into the flames.

In Matthew 17:20, Jesus told His disciples about the “power” of faith.  He said, “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

In the past, I’d always interpreted that passage to mean that Faith was so potent that a tiny grain of it held enough power to move a mountain.  But I was wrong.  Jesus wasn’t saying that faith the size of a mustard seed was some great thing.  Just the opposite.

Jesus was saying that it’s God that moves the mountain.  He was teaching that God can use me mightily in spite of my tiny insignificant faith.  I just need to have that speck of trust in Him, and I need to let that trust make a real change in my life.

When I discovered that truth, I imagined myself praying before the awesome throne of God.  I could almost feel the fire of His glory thundering around me like a hurricane.  In my mind God picked me up, and in His fingers I looked like a trinket that He had rescued from the mud.  As I imagined Him holding me up for a closer look, I wondered if I would have the strength to say, “I claim this healing for my friend.”

Or would I beat my chest, ask for mercy, and say Thy Will Be Done.

At the heart of Judgment House is a play.  Theatre style.  However, instead of sitting in a seat while actors do their work on stage, Judgment House asks you to walk from scene to scene while actors play out the drama right in front of you and around you.  Even behind you.  The story is different every year, but it always has the same blunt and honest themes . . . freedom of choice, death and judgment, reward and punishment. 

Frankly, Judgment House is about someone going to Hell, and that is a concept you don’t often hear from the pulpit these days.

In fact, one hears about hell so little that it seems to have been entirely deleted from the gospel.  Instead, many churches spend their outreach dollars marketing God to the poor and suffering.  We minister God’s love to those who come to us looking for food or money.  We minister on the streets to the lost we find living in the shadows.   We look at the bottom of the barrel . . . the place where so many have fallen and lay broken and bleeding.

We go to them knowing that the gospel we preach will appeal because it offers hope to the hopeless.  They are the people who can actually feel the emptiness inside that we’re always talking about.  They can really touch the God-shaped hole in their heart . . . and it hurts.  They want blessings the way a drowning man wants air.  They’re desperate for help and will snatch at any string that is dangled in front of them.

They are our target market.  But what about everyone else?  Why doesn’t the gospel we preach appeal to them?

If we’re honest we’ll admit that the vast majority of those that are dead in their sins consider themselves to be well adjusted, fulfilled, and happy.  That translates into millions of people who simply have no room for God.  If all we have to offer is hope to the hopeless, then they don’t want it.  They don’t need it.  They have hope to spare.

Judgment House shows us that no matter who we are, or how successful we are, or how happy we are, or how educated we are, we still need Christ.  That’s the Gospel of salvation, and it doesn’t matter what we believe; one day each and every one of us will surely experience death . . . and then what?

At the end of the drama, there is a brutally honest scene depicting judgment, which is followed by an even more brutal depiction of the sinner’s torment in Hell.  For my son, the Judgment scene was enough.  Even at ten years old, the actor’s words cut deep into his heart, and he asked himself honestly if he would be ready to face judgment for real.  He felt the answer was no, and the power of that revelation broke him.  It shattered him.  

In that instant, sin became a crystalline reality to my son.  Here was a boy who is happy and well-adjusted; a boy who has trouble filling up a Christmas list for his Grandmother.  But suddenly all the video games, IPods, and cell phones meant nothing to him.  Judgement became real.  Hell became real.

I could have soothed him and told him that he had nothing to worry about because he’d recited the Sinner’s Prayer years ago.  My job, however, is not to tell him that he is saved, but to tell him how to be saved.  In my heart I know that the Sinner’s Prayer is a man-made lie so I told him what God’s Word says.  

Repent and believe.  Turn away from sin and Seek God.  Follow His commands, and He’ll reveal himself to you.  He’ll make you a new creature, but you have to go to Him; not just with a recited prayer, but with your life.

It’s a terrible thing to see your child crying.  But seeing him broken at the foot of the cross is an entirely different feeling.  The bible says that what he was experiencing was the beginning of knowledge.  As his understanding grows I pray that his experience at Judgment House will become a pebble in his shoe.  I hope it becomes a constant nagging fear that one day drives him not simply to accept Christ into his heart (whatever that means), but to beg the Son of God to save him like a drowning man gulping for air.

I was happy for him, but on the quiet drive home I began to wonder about me.  Had I ever come to Christ in tears?  Was I ever broken by the knowledge that I was a hell-bent sinner?  Does my life give evidence that the Holy Spirit of God lives within me? Am I a new creature? 

Am I truly saved?

If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth – 1 John 1:5

By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. The one who says, “I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him – 1 John 2:3-4

Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. – 1 John 2:15

The mind of the Natural man (atheist) will buck and resist imagining such a thing, but I’m asking you to try anyway.  Take yourself, with all of the things that you “know” about evolution and cosmology, and imagine that the Christian God revealed himself to you in an undeniable way.

How would such a thing change your life?  What would happen to all the knowledge that a minute ago seemed to so clearly disprove God?  I can tell you exactly what would happen, because it happened to me.

All that stuff stops mattering.  

You begin to realize that what you don’t know outweighs what you do know by an astronomical amount.  You realize that What You Know is only an insignificant grain of sand on an unimaginable desert of “Things to Know.”  You begin to realize that in spite of the fact that we can’t agree on what happened throughout eternity, eternity still happened, and something happened inside of it.  Lots of things.

You begin to realize that sometimes both sides of an argument can draw different conclusions from the same piece of evidence.  It’s all about perspective.

So there you stand.   Everything that you once KNEW laying shattered and broken at your feet, and the searchlight of your insatiable curiosity is now focused on the Bible, the one and only source of knowledge about the magnificent creator of the universe.  Can you imagine how it feels to suddenly know that such an awesome being actually exists? 

Have you ever stood in front of a powerful fan and tried to breath?  Every breath fills you up to bursting, and you feel wide open and a little afraid.  That’s kind of how it feels on the day you start to believe God exists.

It is an awesome day, let me tell you.  I’ve got chills remembering when it happened to me.  I was an atheist on an atheist message board.  One day a Christian came in and typed, “imagine a scenario where you are suddenly presented with absolute proof . . .”

As I imagined, I began to realize that God was POSSIBLE.  Afterward, my natural curiosity took the wheel and it was all over for me.  God had his revenge, He revealed himself to me and I became an anti-intellectual (or whatever it is atheists call us these days).

Afterward, there was no way I could ever support a worldview that considers the evidence and concludes that there is no God.  Why?  Because I know better.  It doesn’t matter if that makes me stupid, or uneducated, or fanatical, or intolerant, because at the end of the day the most important question of human experience is, “Does God exist?”  If you don’t know the answer to that question with certainty, perhaps you haven’t seen all the evidence?

What I said to him was, “Yeah, I prayed a lot,” but secretly I knew that he wasn’t just asking me if I prayed.  To me he seemed to be asking if God answered my prayers, because I suspected that he felt like God wasn’t answering his own.    

The people I know don’t usually talk about the vast majority of our prayers that just seem to vanish into the air like smoke.  Instead, we rejoice together over the blessings that we ask for and receive, and we keep on praying for the ones that got back-ordered.  I think we do that because believing in a Blessing Backlog or Celestial Delayed Shipment gives us hope when the alternative seems to be that maybe God doesn’t answer all our prayers.

Without hope, what can we do?  Stop praying?  Stop believing?

The day I decided to stop smoking, I started praying in earnest.  I know a few people who professed miraculous healing of their addiction, so I became a bold prayer warrior, sidling up to the throne like John Wayne asking my old buddy God for a favor.  God, I prayed, please take these cravings away from me.  Take away this addiction.  Heal me.

Nothing happened.  At all.  I even tried fasting along with prayer, but morning after morning I woke up and all I wanted was a cigarette.  There’s no question that God has the power to heal, so I kept on asking . . . but my boldness seeped away as I realized that these prayers were following all those others into the Heavenly Lost Letter file.

I started to feel like I was on my own, so I finally made up my mind and quit.  Cold turkey.  Enter sadness.  Enter despair.  Enter bristling, jagged irritability.  All I could do was look down the endless tunnel of eternity and see myself with no cigarettes, and the thought made me feel as if I would never be happy again.  I was impaled on the thought of it. 

But I didn’t stop praying.  I kept at it because I didn’t want to give up the thin hope of a Blessing Backorder – but don’t mistake that word “hope” to mean that I felt encouraged.  That’s not what this kind of hope feels like.  There’s no comfort in it.  It’s the kind of hope that kids have in treasure maps and magic wands; the kind that flickers and disappears when you think about it too much.  

What I remember though was that after a few weeks of suffering, my prayers changed.  Instead of praying “God please take this burden away,” I started asking “God give me the strength to carry this load.”  That’s when I realized what it means to live in a fallen creation. 

The way I see it, we are all lost in a terrible storm that started the instant Eve decided to eat the forbidden fruit.  This is a storm that is pouring down all of the worst things imaginable; disease, death, sadness, pain, anger, hate, cruelty . . .  You name it, and it is blowing around us like a cyclone in a snow globe.  But God didn’t want us to get caught in this storm.  In fact, He warned us it would happen and we ignored him.

So now we cry out to him, God save us!  Take away this awful storm!  But what we need to remember is that He did save us.  He sent Christ in to show us the way out.  He told us to follow Him, and bring as many others with us as we could.  It is God’s promise that one day we will be snatched out of this storm, and all things will be made new.  The problem is that for most of us . . . this ain’t that day. 

But doesn’t our hope lie in that promise?  Don’t misunderstand . . . I fully believe that we should be like John Wayne in our prayers, boldly asking God for what we want and need.  We should rejoice when we get the blessings we asked for.  But blessings are not the only answer to prayer.  Sometimes the answer is an invisible “No” that sounds like silence. 

When that happens, we shouldn’t crumple in despair, or lie to ourselves that the blessing is on the way.  I don’t want to be that guy who thinks that Trusting God means holding out your hands during prayer to catch the blessing when it falls.  I want to pray for the things I need, and simply trust God to do what’s best.  I know that He sends the rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous (Matthew 5:45).  So when God clearly tells me that there will be no miracle, and that I must remain in the deluge, I plan to start asking God for strength to endure the storm.

After I started praying for help instead of healing, I noticed that my cravings disappeared.  I stopped longing for nicotine.  I discovered that I could live my life without cigarettes and still be happy.  In fact, I can say without any tears that I may never smoke again.  With Christ’s help it’s as if I’ve never smoked at all, but He didn’t heal me . . .

He strengthened me.

During some of that time, my brother Thom was alive and still the greatest friend I ever had.  He called himself an atheist, but he was also a reasonable man and even though I never shared the Gospel with him, I expected he’d come to his senses eventually.  After all, we were young and when you are young, life is long.

Then he caught a disease that occurs so rarely that it never rated a catchy nickname like Lupus or Legionnaires.  It was tough, this disease; it worked on him like an aging prizefighter.  No flashy razzle-dazzle, just an efficient relentless beating until Thom grew so weak even the cure would kill him.

But there was no cure for that tough little disease, only a thing called “treatment,” which is just a clinical word that means “a cure that doesn’t work.”  When the doctor’s finally admitted that treatment was over, I realized that sometimes brothers really do die.  Even mine. 

That’s when I felt a call to witness to him, even though I couldn’t understand why.    At that point, saving his soul wasn’t my main concern; I just knew that I didn’t want him to spend his last days in fear or anguish.  I firmly believed the lie that says All Good Men Go to Heaven, so as far as I was concerned Thom was a good man who simply had no reason to fear. 

People loved him. 

My wife loved him. 

He was the best of me and better, and God was the lucky one.

But as the minutes of his life drained away, it was clear that the hospice nurses were about to amp up his drugs and he would be carried away from us on a purple haze.  I started to doubt my doubts.  God twisted something inside me, and suddenly I was very afraid for my brother’s soul. 

My Grandmother was there with him at the end.  She was a smiling prayer warrior, and she spoke the gospel to him for the millionth time, but I knew it had to be me.

He would believe me.

I knelt down next to his chair in front of my whole family.  There was no façade that said “you’re going to pull through this.” Not anymore.  We both knew the truth, and I cried in great ugly unpracticed sobs.  The only words I could choke out went exactly like this:

“All this [sob] God stuff [croak] is true”

It was a pathetic witness given by a child-man who had wasted too much time avoiding the truth, but my brother turned those eyes of his on me, those eyes that weren’t crying, and spoke these exact words to me through the oxygen mask.

“I know,” he said.  “You had me convinced a long time ago.”

I don’t know if he was just trying to make me feel better.  It would be like him to try to lift that burden from my shoulders, but only God knows the heart of a man.   Either way, he died not long after that.  Some people call it “Passing Away,” but that phrase seems too peaceful to describe what really happened.  He died and that’s all I have to say about that.

Afterward, I started to believe the lie again.  I began to doubt the truth of Christianity again.  He was a good man, I told myself whenever I thought of that day.  A good man.  The best of us.  That’s enough.

Since then I’ve learned different, but I’m not discouraged.  God gives us the tools we need, and if Thom’s name is in the book of life I’ll see him again one day.  Still, there’s this question that sometimes floats up from the darker part of my mind; a question that squeezes my chest until tears come out . . .

did I do everything I could?

That question hurts because the answer is no.  I didn’t.  As a matter of fact, if anyone actually led him to Christ it was my Grandmother who was so full of faith that she absolutely crackled with it like electricity.  And I know that God has performed greater miracles than this.  He’s done much more with much less.  He doesn’t need me . . . but he could have used me and that makes me sad, because looking back at the blessings I’ve received and the amazing road that God has laid for me, I regret the faith-filled life my brother could have had in the short time he was here.