It’s All I Can Do, But It Is Enough

In his book, The Fall of Fortresses, Elmer Bendiner describes a bombing run over the German city of Kassel during World War Two. His B-17 Bomber was barraged by flak from Nazi antiaircraft guns. That was not unusual. Routinely, if the word “routine” could be used to describe such harrowing feats, Allied planes were riddled with bullets and shrapnel. But on this particular occasion the fuel tanks were hit. Remarkably there was no explosion. This was more than miraculous good fortune. On the morning following the raid, the crew asked the ground mechanics for the unexploded shell as a souvenir of their unbelievable luck.

The crew chief told them that not just one shell had been pulled from the tanks. Eleven unexploded cartridges had been retrieved. Only one would have been sufficient enough to blast the plane from the sky. So, the persistent, now even luckier crew went to the armory to find the malfunctioned shells. There they discovered that Allied Intelligence had taken possession of them. There was no reason why at the time, but eventually the crew got the answer. When the technicians at the armory opened each of the defective shells to defuse them, they found no explosive charge. They were empty, harmless, only blank casings. Except for one; this one contained a carefully rolled piece of paper, no bigger than a cigarette.

On it was a scribble of Czech. The Intelligence officers finally found an airman who could translate the text. Astonishingly it read, “This is all we can do for you now.” At great risk, a Czech worker, under forced labor by the Nazi government was rolling powder-less shells off the munitions assembly line. He was doing all he could for the liberation of Europe, and saving Allied lives in the process. Bendiner and his crew were forever grateful.

A woman once came to Jesus bearing an expensive bottle of perfume. It was worth maybe a year’s salary. She broke it open and poured it out on Jesus. This was nothing short of a scandal. This was a woman of ill repute, first of all. And to the witnesses in the room it was a wasteful, irresponsible performance, but Jesus saw the real value of her act. This was an act of worship; a sacrifice driven by her devotion to Christ. Knowing his death was imminent, she was anointing him in advance for burial. That may sound morbid, but Jesus was moved.

He said, over the muttering crowd of onlookers thinking her foolish, “Leave her alone. She has done what she could. This act of worship will never be forgotten.” Fulfilling Jesus’ words, we’ve been telling her story now for two millennia. Little things seem to matter most in Jesus’ scheme of things: A young boy with just a few scraps of bread and a can of sardines; an old widow woman with only a penny to drop in the offering plate; someone with faith barely the size of a jelly bean; a prostitute with a bottle of perfume.

Most of us, in our days of glorious youth, set out to do great things. We plan to cure cancer or travel to Mars. We hope to make a billion dollars or get listed in the Fortune 500. We anticipate political, artistic, or economic success. In the end we experience disappointment or get downright jaded. Why, because we accomplished nothing? No. We just didn’t get to check some of the big things off of our to-do list; but this doesn’t mean we failed. A public official may never be elected to the highest office in the land, but he can still work for the highest good of those around him. A physician may not invent the next great vaccine, but she can still care competently and compassionately for the patients that trust her. A stay at home mom may have traded a profitable career for sippy-cups and Pampers, but she will still make a world of difference to the ankle-biters pulling on the hem of her blue jeans. A backwoods pastor may never fill stadiums like Billy Graham, but he can still marry, baptize, guide, and love the modest congregation under his care.

Do these unexceptional things and ordinary people matter? You bet they do; more to God than anyone else. So do what you can. God will take care of the rest.

Fort Knox: No, Not That One

In summer 1998 I visited the Fort Knox gold mine operated by the Kinross Corporation. This open pit is located just north of Fairbanks, Alaska. It is the largest gold-mining operation in North America. While gold has been enticed from the Fairbanks mining district for a hundred years, no one has drilled, blasted, and processed with the immense efficiency found at Fort Knox. The mine covers more than 50,000 acres of the Alaskan wilderness. Haul trucks the size of suburban homes move more than 100,000 tons of material every day. The mill, adjacent to this massive hole in the ground, refines the material 365 days a year, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. The operation never rests.

The process amazed me. Rock blasted from the earth is dumped onto conveyor belts that feed the never-ending hunger of the mill. Once inside, the rock is mashed inside a gyrating crusher. From there it is tumbled into even smaller pieces through a series of machines that resemble the inner workings of a large Laundromat. Ultimately the ore is reduced to a thick gumbo that sits in leach tanks, mixing and interacting with lead nitrate, cyanide, and other chemicals that draw the gold out of the sludge. This final product is melted down into bars and shipped to refineries. The process is time consuming, tedious, and expensive. The Kinross Corporation must process thirty-three tons of material to produce a single ounce of sellable gold. The one small wedding ring on your left hand had to be wrung out of enough rock to match the size and weight of the Statue of Liberty. For all the effort, the finished product is apparently worth it.

My reading of Peter’s first epistle has taken on a deeper meaning in light of this visit to the Alaskan boondocks. Peter writes, “There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you have to endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. “It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold – though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world” (1 Pet 1:6-7).

The fire of today’s gold refineries burns with ruthless chemical precision. The recovery rate, the percentage of actual ore retrieved from the earth’s crust, is 90 percent. Very little of what shines is allowed to remain hidden beneath the soil. The metal is too precious, too valuable, too important to be left behind. God feels the same way about you. We enter the world as a heap of flint-like stone with hard edges and an unprocessed, wayward heart. God, using the circumstances of life, family, good and bad decisions, begins to pulverize our rocky hearts.

Over time we are broken, gyrated, tumbled, and burned. Often, there is nothing left to us but sludge. It is then that God is doing his greatest work. For when the pain is most intense, the healing and reconstructing are most evident. When the refining fires are at their hottest, God’s grace is at its best. There, deep within us, gleaming like twenty-four-carat gold, is a purified and sparkling faith; a faith we did not even know we possessed. It is a faith that would have gone otherwise unknown and unseen without the flames of adversity. God considers this treasure too important to leave in the dirt.

One of my mentors, Horace Stewart, has spent his ministry as a pastor, chaplain, and mental health professional. Often he shares this simple word of counsel with those who are in the midst of great difficulty: “Don’t waste it.” He shared those words with me once. I was not in a good place. Life was bad. Puzzled, I asked him what in hell he could possibly mean. He said, “When life is hard, God is up to something. Don’t miss it. Don’t waste it.” The testing, burning and refining of our faith, shapes us into being the people of God. It is slow work; sometimes tedious by its very nature. But little by little, flame by flame, pressure by pressure, God is producing something in us that shines like gold.

Toilet Tissue and Forgiveness

Charles Lowery tells the story of a husband and wife who reached an impasse in their marriage. Years of resentment and hurt had piled up until it threatened to smother the relationship. They made an appointment with a therapist. The therapist came to their home and began the tedious work of unpacking this couple’s baggage. It took some time to dig through it all, but finally the husband admitted that he was especially angry that in all their years of marriage his wife had never changed the toilet tissue roll in the bathroom. The wife was incredulous. She protested and countered that she had in fact changed the toilet paper roll countless times. The husband exploded in anger and stormed from the room. Shortly, he returned with several large plastic garbage bags he had been storing in his closet. He ripped the bags open and began raining the contents all over the room. The bags were filled with hundreds of empty cardboard cylinders inscribed with a date and time. Through the years the husband had meticulously recorded and stockpiled every time he had changed the toilet paper roll.

It is easy to keep a record of offenses. We all do it. We may not do it with the same neurosis of the husband with his toilet paper rolls, but we keep score nonetheless. We know who has hurt us. We know how we were hurt, and we know where and when it all happened. We keep a mental list of those who deserve retaliation, and we can recall the date, time, and place of the wrongdoing against us. How can we rid ourselves of this kind of baggage, of this kind of heaviness? It may be easy for those of us who call ourselves Christians to speak flippantly of forgiveness, but it is another thing altogether to actually forgive. Forgiveness, while liberating and healing to both the forgiver and forgiven, is a costly enterprise.

The cost, the difficulty, lies in the fact that forgiveness is not natural. It is not fair. It deprives the one who has been offended from achieving justice. Forgiveness lets the offender off the hook. It sets the offender free without penalty and without punishment for the sin he or she has committed. The mere thought of this is enough to turn our stomachs. How can someone who has stolen from us, who has molested us, who has betrayed us, who has abused us – how can these people, these crimes, be forgiven? How can we open the door on the jail cell in which we hold them and simply allow them to walk away?

The answer is as complex as it is simple. Every time forgiveness takes place, the price for that offense is paid. But it is paid by the victim rather than the wrongdoer. When forgiveness is granted, the one who has been hurt is saying, “I will live with the consequences of what has happened without vengeance and without the demand of payment. I will pay the price myself. I will absorb the loss.”

Where does this ability to forgive come from? From God, and only God. Forgiveness is not natural – it is supernatural. It is otherworldly. Every time the words “I forgive you” are spoken, this is the unearthly act that takes place. Forgiveness is the proof that God has worked a miracle of grace in us. So rather than trying to muster up forgiveness on our own, which we are truly incapable of doing, it is the better choice to ask God to do it for us. When God does, it is obvious to a watching world that something Divine is at work; and we are all, offender and offended, better for it.

No More Fatalism

Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in summer 1991. The volcano had been considered dormant for hundreds of years. When it erupted unexpectedly, more than 200 people were killed and 200,000 were displaced. One people group, the Aetas, was especially devastated by the eruption and the days that followed. The Aeta tribe is a group of aboriginal people who live on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo. For them, Pinatubo is a place of destiny. They have no choice but to call this dangerous place home. After the eruption, the Filipino government planned to build new settlements and permanently relocate the Aetas. These plans were eventually frustrated by the lack of cooperation from the Aetas. Two years after the eruption, the Aetas became tired of waiting in camps and commenced the return to their homes on the volcano’s slopes – against the instructions of Western geologists and Filipino authorities. The Aetas are ruled by doom. They continue to refuse assistance and safe relocation due to mistrustfulness of modern conveniences and the conclusion that a divine fate dictates their future. Pinatubo is not merely a place they call home. It is the only place they feel they can live.

This kind of fatalism once played a prominent role in American life as well. One factor formerly identified in the surprisingly high rate of tornado fatalities in the Southern Bible Belt was the belief that all events are inevitable and people should submit to their fate without protest. Upon hearing a tornado warning, those in the Midwest, Great Plains, and other portions of the country responded with action. They sought shelter, went to the basement, or got out of the path of the storm. Southerners, steeped in a kind of Christian fatalism, understood the threat as an inescapable act of God.

They saw themselves as powerless to act. They huddled in their clapboard houses and prayed for deliverance. This type of fatalism has thankfully eroded due to maturity and education. Those in the South now respond to storm warnings as well as anyone. There was a time when this was not the case at all. Many of us maintain this same kind of blind fatalism in our personal and spiritual lives. When the world collapses around us, we resign ourselves to a life of misery, waiting for the other shoe to drop. We give up. This is our fate; our end; the only path destined for us.

But some people of faith are resilient. In fact, resiliency separates those who ultimately prevail from those who surrender to their circumstances. What does resiliency look like? It’s hard to say, but we recognize it when we see it. Scores of studies have been conducted in recent years analyzing the survival skills of prisoners of war, victims of prolonged sexual abuse, and other trauma survivors. Resiliency is the ability to bounce back in the face of great difficulty; the knack within a person to bend, but not break, under pressure.

Resiliency enables a person to face the crippling effects of adversity and to overcome. When disaster strikes, those with this kind of endurance adapt, persevere, and somehow even thrive. These hardy souls learn to keep living without the paralysis of fear and panic. Ernest Hemingway wrote, “The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places.” That is resiliency.

I Don’t Care, I Still Hate The Dentist

Even if Jesus was this present with my dentist, I don’t think it would help.

Ken and Barbie; Homer and Marge

When Ruth and Elliot Handler’s baby girl was born, they knew she was destined for greatness. She blossomed into nothing less than a Madison Avenue sensation, and began a decades-long domination of the fashion and entertainment worlds. At ten years of age, she had already earned more than five hundred million dollars. Even today there seems to be no end to her popularity. She makes nearly two billion dollars a year. She is always beautiful, wearing one of the thousands of outfits from her closet. She’s deftly attuned to today’s fashion. She is forever the center of attention, surrounded by a smiling cluster of family and friends. She is absolutely perfect. She is Miss Barbie Millicent Roberts; better known as Barbie.

The only problem, of course, is that she is a fantasy. She is a toy – a mass of injected-molding vinyl. Yes, certain Barbies can be worth tens of thousands of dollars, but she more often than not, she ends up naked and dismembered on the floors of older brothers’ bedrooms. Barbie is a reflection of our desires. She has none of her own. This was Ruth Handler’s motivation in creating her. Ruth watched her real daughter playing as a child and saw the future. Her daughter needed more than a baby doll that did little more than arouse maternal desires. She needed a doll – a person – to inspire and challenge her to become something out of her wildest dreams. Thus Barbie was born.

As adults we learn that carefully crafted idealism and hardened reality don’t always meet. Most of us do not lead Ken and Barbie lives. We feel a lot more at home with Homer and Marge Simpson. Still, we sometimes bring those Ken and Barbie idealisms to the Bible and its characters. I grew up in the church with these Bible characters as my heroes. I was taught that I could slay the giant like David. I could have mountain-moving faith like Abraham. I could call down fire from heaven like Elijah. Much later, I learned that for all their glorious deeds, these heroes of mine had tons of baggage too. David the giant killer was also David the adulterer and accomplice to murder. Abraham, the father of faith for Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike, could dissolve into a compulsive liar if the situation so demanded. Elijah, the defiant holy warrior, once became so emotionally despondent that he nearly committed suicide. All these champions of faith were inspirational, yes, but also very human. They were real people not unlike you or me.

These same idealistic projections have been laid alongside today’s families. Christians seem to have an obsession with the “biblical family.” But I don’t think this term means exactly what some think it does. I know what many people intend by the idea. By applying biblical principles, Christians could (and the implication is should) produce the ideal “biblical” family: A strong, spiritual father; a faithful, loving mother; and two-and-a-half obedient children. The word “biblical” is used synonymously with “traditional,” as many Christians pine for a return to the days of the Cleaver family. Again, the only problem is that this too is a fantasy, about as credible as a television sitcom.

We may be inspired to reach for such an ideal as the “traditional” family, but when we do we usually find frustration and failure. Sure, a few pull it off. Most of us do not. Further, the “biblical” family, as it is commonly referred to, is not a valid example toward which to aspire. My family may be a bit screwy, but I wouldn’t trade it for Adam and Eve’s where one brother killed the other. I wouldn’t switch places with Hosea whose wife was the village prostitute. Why swap my one set of in-laws for Solomon’s seven hundred?

Most of the families found in the Bible are more dysfunctional than my own. Maybe that is all the more reason to be drawn to these examples and to find in their failures and regrets the seeds of redemption and grace. And, by the way, after more than forty years together, in the throes of a midlife crisis, Barbie kicked Ken to the curb. Ken is determined to win her back. But it makes you think. Maybe even Barbie isn’t as perfect as we thought.

God’s Will and God’s Won’t

During World War Two the Nazis set up a camp where prisoners were forced to labor amid barbarous conditions. Prisoners were ordered to move a huge pile of garbage from one area of the camp to another. The next day they were ordered to move the pile back to its original location. So began a pattern. Day after day this scene repeated itself. It didn’t take long for the impact of this mindless, meaningless activity to surface. An elderly prisoner had an emotional breakdown. Another began screaming endlessly until he was beaten into silence. A third man, who had endured years of captivity, threw himself onto the camp’s electric fence and was electrocuted. In the subsequent days, dozens of prisoners went insane. Their captors did not care. These pitiful prisoners were lab animals in a sick experiment to determine what happened to people when they were subjected to leading a life without meaning. The obvious result was insanity and suicide. So “successful” was the camp, they no longer needed to use the gas chambers.

In a strange way, this story explains the success of so many books and personal guidance gurus in our country today. The Best Sellers List is laden with the themes of finding meaning and purpose in life. We are told, and it is true, that we must find meaning in life or we risk breakdown and self-destruction. We Christians are apt to talk about purpose and meaning under the broad umbrella of a single magical phrase: The “Will of God”. If I discover “the Will of God” for my life, if I can unlock that door, open that box, uncover that secret, then, armed with divine purpose and meaning, my life will be supremely satisfying. 

There is some truth to this. But be warned: God’s will doesn’t always end with a bulging bank account, a platinum charge card, and a million dollar smile, complete with ongoing teeth whitening treatments. Sometimes the “Will of God” ends in crucifixion. Sometimes the path of meaning and purpose leads to a cross. Just ask Jesus. Hours before the crucifixion, Jesus knelt to pray in an old olive grove called Gethsemane. It was a dark, secluded place, almost haunting. And the only thing more somber than the garden was Jesus. He had come to what A.T. Robertson calls the “supreme crisis of his life.”

If you read the account you hear Jesus’ struggle. He’s not praying, using trite, churchy language. He’s begging God for mercy. Jesus did not want to continue along this path toward Calvary. He did not want to do the “Will of God.” He hesitated and balked. But his prayer didn’t stop there. In sublime surrender he submitted to the path God had for him: “If there is no other way than this – going to the limit and then beyond – well, I’m ready. Do it your way.” 

In the end we all have a single choice between two things – only two. This choice is between who will be in charge of bringing purpose and meaning to our existence. Will it be us, the creations? Or will it be God, the Creator?  Jesus opted for the latter, even though the result was unequaled suffering. He modeled for us the life of purposeful, willing surrender when he said, “Not my will God, but your will be done.”