God Doodles

“Let us pause for a moment in honor of those who gave their lives for their country,” say the speakers at a thousand gatherings across the nation.

GAVE THEIR LIVES! What a thing to say. Lord, how does one give her life for her country? I know Jesus gave his life for me, but how does one give up life for something as abstract as a country?

I suppose they’re talking about Chico. I can’t remember the rest of his name. He got blown up by a rocket, along with the rest of the emergency room at one of the many temporary hospitals in what was then South Vietnam. He was about 20. I knew him. I never thought of him as giving his life. I always thought it was taken away. I was never sure why.

I think that’s the way it is with the vast majority of our war dead. Oh, I know there are those who, without doubt, sacrificed their lives to save others, who willingly gave all they had to preserve the lives of friends. Let us give thanks for them every day. But let Memorial Day be for remembering those whose lives were taken from them in the line of duty. And let it be a day of rededication, of renewed trust in God, and recommitment to a world of peace through peaceful means.

As Abraham Lincoln said, “It is for us, the living,..” to dedicate ourselves to ensuring that their deaths were not in vain.

Sudden death does not exist. When we say of our friend, “He died suddenly in his sleep”, we are speaking what we believe to be the truth. But in fact it is not. Death does not happen all at once, but a little at a time. Our friends, and we ourselves, have been experiencing death from the day of our birth.

There is a constant wearing out; toys break, tires go flat, fan belts fray and light bulbs burn out. There is a constant slipping away; youthful waistlines disappear, hairlines recede, teeth decay and joints stiffen. There is increasing desertion; friends grow up and move away, families separate, parents die, spouses die.

Death does not happen all at once, but a little at a time. It’s called living.

So it’s easy to see how a person could transform fear of dying into fear of living.

Paul was the first to discover that living and dying are two sides of the same coin. He said, “Whether we live or whether we die we are the Lord’s.” I’m willing to bet that he made that discovery while watching Stephen’s face through a hail of rocks. The man was never more alive than when he was giving up his spirit.

Moses was working for his father-in-law, tending sheep on Mount Horeb. One day

“the Angel of the Lord appeared to him out of the midst of a bush;

and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed…” Gen.3:2

“Holy Smoke!” said Moses, taking off his shoes in honor of that holy place. After that, Moses was never the same again.

Most of us envy Moses and the many others in the Bible who had “holy smoke” types of experiences. Often I’ve heard people say that they’re so dissatisfied with the present state of their faith. “If only we could see a burning bush not burned up. Then we coud have stronger faith.”

But such thoughts are not what they seem at first. Far from expressing a desire for stronger faith, they are really a wish for the end of faith. Because faith is, according to Hebrews 11:1, “The assurance of things not seen.” Faith is believing even when all the evidence tells us belief is a waste of time. It is exactly the trusting in the unseen, unheard, and unexplainable, for which there is no proof. When we wish for some evidence, some holy smoke, then we’re seeking to go around faith to something more sure. We are saying that faith isn’t enough.

Yet faith is the method chosen by God to bring us into his kingdom. Faith is God’s saving gift to us through the Holy Spirit. This trust in the unseen is what we’re supposed to be cultivating and nurturing among ourselves.

Mystical experiences do happen. You can read about them any time you want. Why do they happen? Only God knows. They happen only to a few, though, and rarely. Most of us will never witness “holy smoke”. We will be numbered among those who have not seen and yet believe. The majority of us will be left with faith.

It is enough.