Because He Flows With Unquenchable Hope

Perhaps the deepest sorrow dwells in the land of hopelessness. What a barren land that must be. An emotional desert where weary limbs lunge for a solution, only to come up empty. And how many mirages can a soul pursue before abandoning the quest?  Was the ancient Latin playwright, Terence, correct when he wrote, "While there's life, there's hope?" Knowing that many die at their own hand in the land of hopelessness, I would consider the converse more accurate -- "While there's hope, there's life."

That's why I follow Jesus. He never walks me through the wilderness of despair. 
He accompanies me always, even through the valley of the shadow of death. Still, wrapped in darkness, I have a defender, and provision, and comfort. [Psalm 23] 
[John 10]

My hope in Jesus is not blind optimism; not a hope against hope. In him, hope is synonymous with certainty; one that never disappoints. Considering who he is and what he can do, no circumstance of mine can render me hopeless. Jesus is God, and nothing is too hard for him. All things are possible through him. He is compassionate and generous. He is loving and wise. All that he plans, permits, and pairs, he braids with benevolent hands. Jesus IS my hope.

Right now, I am praying for Christ's river of hope to flow for my family. Benny is my son-in-law's nephew (my grand-nephew-in-law?) The mountain he and his parents must climb is steep. This precious two year-old has been diagnosed with alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, a cancer that will subject him to many months of chemotherapy and radiation. You can follow Benny Boots' Battle on Facebook (please help any way you can.) And pray for him with fervent hope, because a wise and loving God, generous and compassionate, has Benny wrapped firmly in his arms. Pray that mom and dad, Sharan and Lionel, can rest in the comfort of that hope.

And follow Jesus. Walk unfaltering in his footsteps that you may conquer the mountains YOU will face. Believe that when you cannot walk, he carries you. Trust that he will work all things together for your good, even things that end in ugly syllables like -sarcoma. God's river flows with unquenchable hope. Drink deep; there are springs in the desert!

Because His Love Knew No Limit

Something miraculous happened when the Roman provincial government put a Nazarene carpenter on a cross. They didn't understand that they were killing the Creator. They were putting to death the Giver of life. They pierced the hands that held their eternal destiny. They nailed the feet that walked in the Way that every man and woman should follow. Thorns crowned His regal head yet adorned with the sovereignty of the universe. Rough wood raked His ravaged back where children once had ridden. Their spearhead violated His side where lepers and mad men once clung in gratitude. And those who once clamored to be close to Him kept distant in the shadows. The smug and cruel gathered though, and slung their insults and their spit. Mocking mouths challenged His power as if they knew anything about the meaning of His suffering. 

Then something miraculous happened. 

Jesus spoke. 
Through blood-caked lips, he prayed, "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they are doing." 

Forgive them! Forgive their mockery. Their callous indignities. Their cruelty and self-righteousness. Their violence and expediency. Forgive their bloodlust and their malignant sense of justice. Forgive their blindness to truth. Forgive their fear and their ignorance of love.

Forgive their ignorance of love.

"This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us." 1 John 3:16

This is why I follow Jesus. His love knew no limit. His life defined love's highest meaning. He made clear the divine core of love - costly acts of service. Love is in losing so that another may gain. Sacrificial at the heart of it, generous, beneficent. 

This love of Christ opens our blind eyes to truth. He helps us to see our complicity with the callous and the violent, the fear-driven, and the self-righteous. Our mocking soon sticks in our throat. We wipe the spit from our lips, but we cannot wipe the blood from our hands. The old slave spiritual asks rhetorically, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" Yes. Yes, I was there. And "sometimes it causes me to tremble ..."

Trembling, stained, contrite, and in tears, I hear the voice of Jesus break through. "Forgive him, Father. Forgive him." And then I run to His blade pierced side. Another leper, healed. Another mad man, restored to his right mind. Another sinner, saved by the love of Christ.

This is why I follow Jesus. His love reaches even me.

Because He Makes Friends Everywhere

“…but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” John 15:15

Relationships have a kind of mathematics to them. Like ... the measure of the depth of a friendship is directly proportional to the level of mutual trust. Sounds a little nerdy, but I think you know what I mean.

A few years back, I wanted to do something special for my wife on our anniversary. A friend of ours overheard me processing some options for the big day. “Here, I think she’ll enjoy this,” he said as he wound something around in the palm of his hand. Freeing it from its metal ring, he extended a key in my direction. “I know you like road trips,” he offered with a smile.

Under some wildly divine circumstances (which is a story for another day), my friend had come to possess the car of his dreams – a 1980 Porsche 911 Targa. She was sleek in gloss black, stylish with her removable hardtop roof. One might expect a possessive approach to an object of such high esteem, but instead my friend cheerfully surrendered the key. 

Wow! 
He trusted me.

Sandie and I DO like road trips, and long weekends away. We often have a friend housesit for us. We grant access to our home and its contents, our truck, and our son – I mean, our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. (Such a sweet boy.) Another example of trust within a friendship.

As a pastor, I have individuals and couples come to me for counseling. In that confidential environment, they grant access to their secret information, private thoughts, and guarded emotions. Therapeutic ministry simply cannot happen without a level of trust. I prove my trustworthiness by no breach of confidentiality and I open myself up to my counselees. I become more than a clinician to them. I become their friend.

Jesus came to befriend us. He came to grant us access, to toss us the keys, to pull back the curtain of heaven and entrust the Word and the Spirit of God to us. Read His story. See how he made so many diverse friends. Study the context of the first century Palestinian world under Roman rule. Then, understand the profound implications of Jesus befriending Zealots and tax collectors, Jewish women, Samaritan women, and women of ill repute, uneducated Galileans and elite Pharisees, strapping centurions and sickly lepers.

That’s why I follow Jesus. Because I know that He does not discriminate. Nothing about me or about you disqualifies us from His generous love or His revelation of truth and life. He has daily bread and living water for all. He calls us "friend."

And what a marvelous diversity of friendships we can develop through friendship with Christ. In humility and amazement, I consider my friendships with young and old, men and women, speakers of an array of languages, living in China and Chile, Germany, Jordan and Turkey. We are connected in heart and spirit. We trust each other, because we are all friends of Jesus.

“All that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” “I call you friends.”

He gives us access to higher levels of trust and deeper friendship with God.
That’s why I follow Jesus.

Because His Power is Pure

Two dusty-headed boys leapt for joy as the appliance guy jerked his truck into gear and sped out onto the street. Now they were free to claim their corrugated prize. Hardly anything stokes a kid's imagination like 98 square feet of refrigerator box. With gleeful fingers, two cardboard engineers dragged their raw material from the garage to the strip of lawn beside the driveway. Immediately, they flew into a frenzy of drawing and painting, delighting in the roar of steak knife through pastey brown paper. They barely talked to one another, as if the blueprint for this masterwork had already been hard-wired into both of their brains.

A few hours later, they finished her. Every square foot - square inch - of appliance box bore the creative signature of those engineers-now-turned-astronauts. Against a blue mortise above the porthole windows, white letters proclaimed, "Rockit 2 the Moon."

As night began to fall, the intrepid "rockitmen" realized they could not move the mother ship for fear of damaging her. Up went the two-man tent. Out came the flashlights and slingshots. These guys had the right stuff! Surely, a moon shuttle would be snatched away in the wee hours if front-lawn security wasn't maximized. When you've got lunar transport power, there WILL be thieves!

Days went by and our box jockeys enjoyed their interplanetary treks. But the truth is, a shuttle that can't survive a move to the backyard has only imaginary power. It never will "rockit" anyone to the moon. And that's why there were no thieves. No one conspired to seize the cardboard conveyance for their own pro-lunar purposes. There simply wasn't any real power there.

Sometimes, when I tell people that I follow Jesus, they wonder how I could do such a thing. After all, so much violence and hatred have flowed from Christians in the course of history, so much strange and cultic behavior performed in the name of Jesus. And my reponse is, "That's true." But when a person or a cause is seen to have real power, it will inevitably be hijacked. There WILL be thieves. Nevertheless, weird and wicked misappropriation of Jesus' name does not diminish the real power of Christ and His message. It simply means we have to do our homework.

Read through the four New Testament stories of the life of Jesus (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.) Notice the supernatural power of Jesus. Now ask yourself, "How did He use that power?" He fed people. He healed people. He saved lives by stilling storms. He set people free from the torment of demons. He raised a delicate child, an only son, and a beloved brother from the dead. How pure and compassionate was Jesus' use of power!

Is there any supernatural hatred and violence in the Jesus story? Even at the height of His anger, in the midst of moneychangers defiling the temple, Jesus tempered His emotions and reined in His power. He used only His ordinary human strength to overturn the tables. My God, He could have launched them into orbit. He could have vaporized them! But that is not the character nor the will of Jesus. He has real power, matchless power, but His power is pure. Jesus did not stone the woman caught in adultery. He never laid a hand on His enemies. He did not strike back at those who struck, tortured, and crucified Him ...

With His power, Jesus flexed His mercy and produced not retaliation, but reconciliation. By His power I am fed, healed, saved, set free, and blessed with abundant and eternal life. I love Him to the moon and back!

That's why I follow Jesus.
Won't you?

"When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”  John 8:12

Because He Has Perfect Balance

"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory ... full of grace and truth." John 1:14

For most of my life, I was taught that there are five senses - seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. They are distinct senses because specialized structures like skin and eyeballs register different sensory inputs. And each sense can accomplish its task independent of the others' structures; you don't need your nose to see, or your tongue to hear.

Then one day it occured to me - what about balance? Someone without sight or hearing standing on a small platform can tell if that platform begins to slowly tip to one side. He can't see, hear, taste, or smell the platform tip. Even without the sense of touch perceiving any shift in weight, as an astronaut in orbit, he can still tell when he's tipping sideways. It's those specialized structures, those canals filled with fluid inside his ears, that tell him he's off balance. So for me, balance passes the test. The sixth sense is not the ability to see dead people; the sixth sense is balance.

Nevertheless, while the wave of pride washed over me for discovering the secret "sixth," I realized there was still a great deal of imbalance in my life. I can walk and not fall over; great! But what about balancing the commitments in my life? Family, vocation, recreation. What about balancing my financial affairs? Earning, spending, donating, investing. And what about one of the rarer considerations in the realm of balance - balancing grace and truth? How often do we ask ourselves, "How well am I tendering the twin necessities of grace and truth?"

Grace empowers me to grant a second chance, to extend forgiveness. Grace makes room for imperfections. By grace, I give myself and others permission to miss the mark or exceed the deadline. Grace is a neccesity. Without it, I become ruthless and condemning.

Truth stands in contrast to grace. Truth establishes the deadlines and draws the "x" precisely on the mark. Truth sets standards of excellence. By truth, we engage reality and accept responsibility. Truth is also a necessity. Without it, I grow careless and licentious.

Rightly balancing grace and truth is an unrelenting challenge. That's why I follow Jesus. He is FULL of grace and truth. There is nothing lacking in him in regard to knowing truth and living by it. And there is nothing lacking in him in his provision of grace. The balance is struck to perfection in the person and work of Jesus Christ. If I follow him, perhaps I can live like him.

My un-Christlike self falls quickly upon the ones who transgress truth, yet falls over backwards to extend grace to me. I forgive myself too swiftly and others too slowly. I take God's grace lightly and set his truth aside. In those moments, I need to fix my eyes on Jesus. I need to follow him so close that I can hear him - almost smell, touch, and taste him. To stand in the place of balanced truth and grace, I must walk in the footsteps of Jesus.

That's why I follow him.
"...Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." John 1.17

Because He's an Artist with Power

"In the beginning, God created the heaven's and the earth." Genesis 1

"In the beginning was the Word ... and the Word was God ... All things were made through him ... and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us ... the only Son ..."  John 1

"... the Son ... All things were created through him and for him ... and in him all things hold together."  Colossians 1

"... these are written that you may believe that Jesus is ... the Son ..."  John 20

I follow Jesus because he is the creator and sustainer of the universe. What beauty! What power!

Here in Northern California, I get to see the towering Redwoods and the curvaceous hills, the snow dance in the Sierra, and the whitecaps churn across the Bay. I live in an era of jet air travel, digital photography, and satellite telescopy. I've stood in the Belizean jungle, on Alaskan glaciers, and beside stalagmites in a Bermudian cave. I have peeked at my old Bronx neighborhood from Google Earth, and beheld trillion mile distances from star field to star field thanks to Mr. Hubble. And you probably have similar stories to tell.

We live at the vortex of awesome! If you doubt it, follow National Geographic on Instagram. Visit the Annenberg Space for Photography (in person if you can; the exhibit closes April 27). Or just Google 'nat geo photography' and be blown away. Better yet, go take a walk. Look hard and think hard about what you see. Touch it. Smell it. Taste it. Isn't it amazing?

You see, we never just encounter art. We encounter the artist. Beauty. Power. Skill. Subtlety. Complexity. Commentary, on the state of the soul behind the creation. The majesty of the masterpiece is the glory of its maker. So what happens when we consider that WE are Christ's handiwork, too? I do not merely behold his majesty, I manifest it. I move and breath and have my being in it! In Him! A unique expression of the divine design - I am GodArt of the highest order, as is every human being.

Now, imagine a world where every person held themselves, their brothers and sisters, and the whole of creation in awestruck esteem. Imagine a planet honored, nurtured, and protected at every turn. Imagine what Jesus intended when he stepped back from his canvas and praised the goodness of his work.

That's why I'm following Jesus.
He's the maker of all things, who also said, "I am making all things new!"
Oh, I definitely don't want to miss that.

The Hierarchy of Followship

A lot is made of leadership, but following is a big deal, too. People really like to follow. Some of the people I follow on Twitter have multi-millions of followers. We follow on Instagram, too, and we congregate as friends on Facebook. Sports teams, screen actors, and musicians all have followings. There's "THE Following" with Kevin Bacon. (we even created a party game following Kevin Bacon!)

 I follow my wife - around the house and around town. I love her! I like to be with Sandie. I want to employ my strengths for her, make her life easier if I can. In many ways, following shows what you're made of and what your values are. Following reveals what you aspire to. And there are different magnitudes of following. I certainly don't follow the NFL the way I follow my bride. (Well, not from Valentine's to Thanksgiving anyway.) Your hierarchy of followship says a lot about you. That's important to consider in light of your social circles, because many will jump on your path to follow who you're following. Especially the young ones. We have influence.

That's why I'm creating this blog - "Why I Follow." Since I have some influence (as we all do) and since we're all followers of some kind (not always sheep-like and uncritical, but followers in the best sense of it), I'd like to tell you who I'm following and why. I'd like to tell you about the one who draws my highest magnitude of followship and who sits at the top of my hierarchy. I'd like to tell you about Jesus Christ.

I promise, I won't assault your eyes with "shoulds" and "oughts,"or insult your intelligence with any kind of religion sales pitch. I just want to tell you about the One I follow, and a little bit about why I do that. And if there is any influence embedded in my stories, and you feel moved to jump on this same path, go for it -- follow Jesus.

"When Jesus came down from the mountain, large crowds followed Him." Matthew 8:1