Trinity Bible Church Ottawa

My Dear Friends:

Charlie Brown has just stopped to visit Lucy at her five-cent psychology booth looking for advice.

“Life is like a deck chair, Charlie,” she says. “On the cruise ship of life, some people place their deck chair at the rear of the ship so they can see where they’ve been. Others place their deck chair at the front of the ship so they can see where they’re going.” The good doctor (Lucy) looks at her puzzled client and ask, “ Which way is your deck chair facing?” Without hesitating, Charlie replies glumly, ‘I can’t even get my deck chair unfolded.”

I can relate well to Charlie on this one. I think Michael Yaconelli expresses it well when he says, “Everywhere I look on the cruise ship of Christianity, I see crews of instructors, teachers, experts and gurus eager to explain God’s plan for the placement of my deck chair, but I still can’t even unfold it. NO wonder, when I peruse the titles in a Christian bookstore, I feel like I am the only Klutz in the kingdom of God, a spiritual nincompoop lost in a shipful of brilliant biblical thinkers, an ungodly midget in a spiritual giants.”

I no longer think that I am the only person who sometimes feels like a spiritual Klutz, a messy spiritual Klutz.

I thank God that he chose not to sanitize the Bible for its words overflow with the stories of messy people. Consider Noah. Everyone must have thought he was crazy building a huge ark in the middle of the desert. God seems to love this guy, he’s presented as a hero of great faith and strong will. Well the floods do come and we see that Noah was right to build the Ark. After a while, the floods reside and Noah triumphantly leaves the Ark gets drunk and naked./

You say, what, drunk and naked? I don’t recall that being preached or taught in Sunday school. Do you mean to say that Noah had a moment of indiscretion and weakness? Yep, Noah did, just like all people he was a mix of strengths and weaknesses. As Yaconelli points out, David, Abraham, Lot, Saul, Solomon, Rahab, and Sarah were God-loving, courageous, brilliant, fearless, loyal, passionate, committed holy men and women who were also murderers, adulterers, and manic depressives. They were men and women who could be gentle, holy, defenders of the faith one minutes and insecure, mentally unstable, unbelieving, shrewd, lying, grudge-holding tyrants the next.

Now, can we all say this together, “they were just like we are today”? We who stand in church, sing songs, smile and tell everybody everything is fine, can we admit that we are no different than the followers of Christ who have gone before us. Can we admit that we are a people who a klutzy, messy spirituality? When we can admit this, it opens the door for incredible acts of the Holy Spirit.

I have wonderful news from you, “When we sin and mess up our lives...we find that God doesn’t go off and leave us – he enters in to our trouble and save us.” (Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction)

See ya Sunday

Shawn