Winning Gold

There's a lot on my mind.

Olympics . . .
A commissioning service . . .
And faith.  Authentic faith.  Gritty, real faith that takes the love of God seriously.

I have spent the past two weeks watching all kinds of people bike, swim, run, jump, dive, leap, flip, throw, row, paddle, or fight their way to glory.  How many hours have they dedicated to honing their skills for that micro-chance at Olympic glory?  Some of them train for thousands of hours to lose by a hundredth of a second.

And all for a wreath that fades.

Canada won a single gold medal.  I watched the girl win it.  You'd think I'd be able to remember her name.  But I couldn't.  Mere days after it happened, and already I'd forgotten.  What will happen in the weeks and months and years that follow?  What will happen in Rio, when someone who is a fraction of a second faster, who sticks the landing just a little tighter, who splashes a drop of water less, snatches the glory and claims it for him or herself?  Even Usain Bolt's glory will fade.

The Olympics brings out the best in us.  For two weeks, all countries live and work under a single flag with a single anthem.  There is beauty in watching someone do what they do really well.  There are lots of great stories, stories of courage and dignity, of perseverance and grace.  I love the Olympics.    But just as they bring out our best, they bring out our worst.  The single flag doesn't erase ugly rivalries.  There are accusations of cheating and conspiracy.  There was a lot of posturing at the Olympics.  A lot of steely stares, a lot of muscle-flexing and pointing fingers and kissing to the crowds.  Much as the Greeks imagined their gods doing, I'm sure.

And while the Greek gods posture and gloat, while the athletes sweat and strain muscles and bones to the point of breaking (and past), we sit in our armchairs and look on and cheer. We look down at our flabby selves and imagine ourselves honed and chiseled and standing on a podium with a medal around our necks.  But that's as far as it goes.  Because we all know that Olympic gold is for the elite.  The wreath that fades is for a select few.  It's not for paunchy, middle-aged couch potatoes with illusions of grandeur.

This morning, I attended a commissioning service for a family that is leaving behind all that is familiar to move to Togo, West Africa, to build a hospital.  It was a beautiful service.  This family is well-loved, and will be dearly missed by their own families and friends alike.  We all know they go with God.  They have spent months in a whirlwind preparation, but really, when I look at them, God has been preparing them for years.  Today, their church family and their blood families gathered around them and sent them, with their blessings, to do the work of God.  I am honoured to have been part of it.  (You can follow their story at www.notafrica.blogspot.com.)

I thought, as I was driving home, how wild and crazy it all is.  I mean, think about it . . . packing up a home and a business, leaving behind family that loves you beyond measure, and heading off to a developing country with five kids in tow . . . for what?  There's not even a medal involved.  No one is going to sing their national anthem.  No one is going to raise their flag.  There's no glory.  Just a whole lot of guts. I had the same reactions from people when I made my own journey across the ocean to spend an extended period of time in a developing country.  I was suddenly a "super-hero" Christian, one of the extra-spiritual ones who actually does crazy things for God.  We like to watch and clap and cheer and admire them, and tell other people that we know them, but perish the thought that we do it ourselves.  Kind of like the Olympic athletes.  We love watching them do their thing as we breathe a sigh of relief that we don't have to go to all that hard work, and we reach for another handful of potato chips.

Except that this family is not made up of spiritual Olympic heros.  They're an ordinary family with ordinary jobs and ordinary kids who love and follow an extraordinary God.  Just like I was.  No super-hero faith there, let me tell you, just a whole lot of fear and a conviction that it was where God was calling me.  And that means that anyone who takes their faith in any way seriously is fair game.  If God can call me, if he can call my friends to Togo, he can call anyone.  Maybe, just maybe, he does call everyone to take big risks, make big sacrifices, and step way out of our comfort zones, but we are too busy being spiritually flabby and lazy to be obedient.  Maybe, if we took our faith seriously, we'd all live radically.  Maybe radical would become normal.  Maybe we'd stop looking at ordinary people who follow an extraordinary God as super-spiritual Olympic athletes and start seeing them as, well, ordinary people who follow an extraordinary God.  Maybe we'd stop thinking about living out of authentic faith as a spectator sport, and all join in the game.

We'd win a wreath that never fades. A crown that is laid up for us.

We'd stand for a single Kingdom.

We'd live under a single flag.

We'd sing a single anthem. 
I think it would go something like this:

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,

Who was, and is, and is to come.

Worthy are you, O Lord, our God

To receive glory and honour and power,

For you created all things,

And by your will they were created and have their being.

And the only posturing we'll do is to take the crowns from our heads, and throw them before His throne, and he'll get the glory.

That's an opening ceremony I don't want to miss.

Now I've got to go . . . I'm in training.

One Hour

They sat down behind me in church.  I heard, "Ok, we've got one hour!"  They went on to discuss all the rest of their plans for the day.  Nice things.  They didn't say they were headed to the casino to feed a gambling addiction, or that they were going out to the local bar to get soused, or that they had plans to rob a bank or commit some other kind of felony.  No, just normal things.  Things like picking up a daughter from one place and dropping a son off at another place.  Groceries that needed to be bought, and dry cleaning to drop off.

But I felt so sad.

They had one hour.

I'm not going to judge them.  But I do judge myself.  How many times do I do the same thing?  I have one hour.  One hour squeezed between work and running to the barn and taking the dog for a walk and responding to emails and cooking dinner and mopping the floor (which is perpetually covered with dog prints as big as my hand) and checking Facebook.  Nothing horrible.  Nothing shocking.  In fact, some of it is mighty fine stuff I'm doing, even stuff I'm doing for the Lord.  But in all that busyness, I wonder if what what I am really saying is, "Ok, God, you have one hour."

Is that what my faith means to me?  One hour, here and there, tucked between laundry and dishes?  Is my faith living my life with God tacked on?  What does it mean for him to be the centre?  For him to be my heartbeat?  It can't be a constant high.  There are days and weeks that my faith is putting one foot in front of the other.  There is no hype and fanfare, no fireworks or explosions, just, as Eugene Peterson calls it (and Nietzsche before him -- yes, I had to look up how to spell that), "a long obedience in the same direction".  But oh, how I pray that my whole life, my every heartbeat is devoted to that long obedience.  I hate the thought that my LORD becomes an aside, perhaps even an inconvenient aside, that I set my timer for him and when it rings, I run off to take the bread out of the oven, or switch the laundry to the dryer and cast him from my mind until the next hour.

I know, I've heard people who talk about doing the laundry for God, mucking out the horse barn for God, writing complicated accreditation reports for God, and so on.  I get that.  But really, it's hard to keep that kind of focus.  I start off doing laundry for God, and somehow, over time, it's just doing another load, and God gets lost somewhere between the rinse cycle and spin.  I'm not sure what it means, in really practical terms, on a day-to-day basis, to do my laundry for God.

But honestly, it leaves my heart absolutely bleak to think that my faith could become, or is becoming a blighted little thing that tucks God into a corner to be pulled out at convenient times, or even squeezed in at the least inconvenient times.  It makes me shudder to think that I could walk into God's presence and sit down and think, "Ok, God, you've got an hour."  I want to sit.  I want to linger.  I long to be in the presence of God.  And in those times when I don't want to sit or linger, I want to want that.  I wish for the longing to grow, not to wither and die.  I don't ever wish to be satisfied with an hour.  I think of Psalm 84, where the psalmist is jealous of the birds who nest in the temple, because they get to stay while he must leave.

"My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the LORD; 

my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God" (Psalm 84:2).

So I reevaluate.  I refocus.  I recommit.

Ok, God, you've got one life.

When a Horse Forgets

We don't know much about his history.  He was sold at auction on Saturday.  By the following Tuesday, he was back at the auction.  He was labelled crazy and sold for meat.

We brought him home.  He is only four years old.

When I first saw him, he was bossing all the other horses around.  Hooves flew.  Teeth bit.  Ears were pinned.  He wouldn't even let me near the other horses.

Today, I saw him again.  This time, he was standing alone in a corner.  All the other horses had learned their lesson:  stay away.  But he didn't want to be alone.  The moment he saw me, he charged up to me.  But his behaviour was bossy and aggressive.  Charging me, head up, like he bossed the other horses.  I waved him away.  When I went into the barn with my horse, he tried to push his way in.  He paced, head flung up, back and forth, across the door.  He reared up against the door, like he was trying to crawl in.

 It's tempting, when I see him like that, to try to "love" him out of it.  It's tempting to think that he's lonely and wants company and to accept his attempts to charge up to me as a quest for attention.  After all, he is awfully cute and little.  But it doesn't work.  I tried to give him an inch and he took a mile.  He wanted my attention, all right, but on his terms.  He wanted to be in control.  But he is, after all, only a horse, and not a human, and is not capable of determining safe or healthy terms.

 So I kept him away.  When he tried to charge up to me, I quietly but firmly insisted he keep his distance by raising my arms, the best I can do as a human to pin my ears and swing my head the way a horse would to drive off another horse.  In no time at all, he was acting as though I had a bubble around me, respecting my space.  He was learning that he couldn't be with me strictly on his terms.  I had a say in this, too.  That's more normal horse behaviour.  But because he didn't know how to be with me appropriately, he now avoided me altogether.  Instead, he went up to the gate and grabbed it and started shaking it, giving just a little sign of his distress.

The more I watched, the more I saw a horse who was truly miserable.  He cribbed (an addictive behaviour that involves grabbing onto something with his teeth and sucking back air, which, apparently, gives a mild high.  Not being a horse, I've never tried it, so I don't know excatly how it works).  He paced.  He stood with his nose in a corner and his back to the world.  He chased away the other horses.  He charged at me.  He grabbed the gate and shook it.  All of it pointed to a very unhappy, stressed-out horse.  Crazy?  I don't know.  It was more like he had no idea how to relate to other horses or people except to push them all around, and when he pushed them around, they all ran away and left him by himself.  For a herd animal, being alone is torture.  He had forgotten how to just "be" with other horses and with people, so they all thought he was crazy and left him abandoned and miserable.

And although keeping him away keeps me safe, it leaves him lost in his unhappiness.  I needed to help him remember how to "be".

Again, it is tempting to love him out of it.  Now that he was respecting my space, I could have gone up to him, thinking to give him affection, and crowding his space the way he had crowded mine.  But he doesn't understand affection that way, and all that would do in his mind is make me the bully instead of him.  I had to teach him how to be with me politely and with respect, but respecting his choice to be with me or be alone.

But how do you establish boundaries with a horse who has none?  Advance and retreat.  Horses perceive advance as authoritative and predatory.  They perceive retreat as inviting and safe.  It is the most basic of horse language.  When he behaved abnormally or aggressively, I advanced, asserting my authority.  When he behaved normally and respectfully, I retreated, inviting him to be with me.

So he stood there with his head flung up, looking at me over his shoulder out of the corner of his eye, and I walked slowly toward him, facing him.  He lowered his head a little and swung it to look at me.  That's more respectful horse behaviour.  He was acknowledging my presence without charging into my space.  I stopped, lowered my head, and waited.  He went back to shaking the gate.  That was abnormal behaviour, so I advanced again.  He stopped and turned his head to look at me.  I stopped as well and lowered my head.  This time, he turned his whole body to face me, without challenging me.  I took a step back, still facing him but giving him space, and rewarding his respectful behaviour.   We stood for a few minutes looking at each other, each respecting the other's space, and then I slowly turned away from him and watched him out of the corner of my eye.  Turning away after acknowleding another horse's presence is the ultimate "retreat" and is their way of inviting the other horse to approach.

The poor boy did not know what to do.  I wonder if he had ever been invited to approach.  He stood there, a long time, watching me.  How could he dare to be with me when he wasn't the one in control?  Could he dare?  He had a big decision to make.  I didn't move.  His head came down.  Another sign of calm and respectful behaviour.  He still didn't dare to move, but he was thinking.  Finally, he took a step forward.  I waited.  Another step.  One more.  I took a step away from him, giving him space, rewarding his respectful approach.  And he very quietly, very respectfully came up and brushed his muzzle against my arm and then stood back and waited.  I stroked his head, scratched his ears, ran my hands down his neck, and walked away.  He followed, head down, quiet, respectful, the way a horse will follow a good leader in the herd.  He was remembering how to just "be" and for the first time that evening, he relaxed.

There was no violence.  There was no coersion.  He chose to trust me.

And it showed me, once again, that boundaries are not walls that hinder relationships, but instead create the space to allow a relationship to be born.