This week my blog turns a year old. (That’s seven dog-years and about a million internet-years). Guess it’s time to tell you why it’s called God in the Clear.

A few years ago I read a book that begins this way: “Imagine God thinking about you. What do you assume God feels when you come to mind?”

Recent studies have confirmed that we are just as likely to imagine a god filled with anger and disappointment as one filled with love and joy.

Let’s push further still. Call to mind your biggest screw-ups: times you’ve disappointed others and yourself, times you’ve acted and reacted in ways you just can’t believe, times when you’ve let sin claim large territories of your heart.

With all of your weaknesses, addictions, and flaws called to mind, picture God once more. How in the world will He react to people with the capacity for sin and betrayal like us? We are his children, sure, but we are also train-wrecks. “Surely, there’s a limit to his love,” we begin to think, “a breaking point for his patience. And if so, surely, I’ve reached it.”

The first time we (and I use we in a loose sense) reached this “breaking point” was Genesis 3. Adam and Eve have surrendered to temptation, beginning (as it always does) with the acceptance of a less-than-stellar conception of God. In a sudden wave of awareness, they can think of nothing but their sin and shame (nakedness).

Their hearts, for the first time, know a reality other than the love of God. They now know fear, suspicion, regret, and they know them intimately. They scramble to assemble a cover for their nakedness – which was the ancients’ beautiful way of expressing our intense desire to be able to fix our own brokenness – but, alas, it is completely, ridiculously inadequate.

At that exact moment, they hear God walking toward them.

What a curious time for God to show up.

Adam and Eve (i.e. humanity) hide. Besides the “I can take care of this myself!” reaction, this is the other devastating reaction we have to our own sins. We shrink. We look for the darkened corner. We get out of the clear.

But not God. Where is He at the precise moment his children need him most? Where is He when they’ve done their worst, when they’ve painted black where he created white? Where is He when they (we) are utterly convinced He’ll want nothing more to do with them?

God is in the clear. Looking for his children. Calling out their name.

Can you hear him? “Where are you?” He asks. It is, as the ancients told the story at least, the first question God ever asked. Until this moment, he has spoken decisively, using his words to shape the world. Now, he pauses and waits for our reply.

His presence in the midst of our sins, his question in the midst of our confusion – They compel us to come out of hiding. They convince us that our distorted view of God was exactly that. They let us know, from the beginning, that there is nothing we can do to ever make him be anything other than love.

God is in the clear.

Are there consequences to our sin? Absolutely. Abandonment? Never.

God’s not hiding, not recoiling from our brokenness. No, he’s coming for us.

One day that even meant putting on flesh and walking among us (again). Nowhere do we see God’s heart more clearly than on the cross, but He’s been revealing it to us ever since He stood in the clear.

I taught about family this week. Does anything bring up such mixed emotions as hearing  (or giving) a lesson about family?

One of those emotions, strangely enough, is guilt. We know what a perfect, all-together family looks like, and we know that’s not our family. We’ve heard that sermon before and we’re not the heartwarming illustration at the end.

Or to switch analogies, we’ve seen the Cosby show a million times, but the Huxtables we are not…But man how we’d like to be.

Cliff, Clair, and the kids – it looked so easy. Both parents worked full-time in prestigious, fulfilling careers that never conflicted with family time. Their house was huge, paid-off, and filled with laughter, music, and dancing. The kids had their issues, but never anything requiring more than one episode, and everyone always made it home for family dinner. Friends and neighbors visited regularly and freely, each with a story to share or a trombone to play. On our television sets, family was unapologetically beautiful.

Turning off the tv, we find a different world (clever spin-off-series pun intended). Family brings to mind joy and love but also painful memories, awkward tensions, and past guilt. And what about those who don’t fit the mold: those who choose singleness? Those separated? Divorced? Widowed?

It is no small comfort that, turning to the Bible, the families we read about seem more likely as guests on Springer than as characters on the Cosby Show. When you next read the book of Genesis, notice that it describes the history of the world, not as a story of kings and kingdoms but as a story of families. In fact, stories of the families of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob fill all 50 chapters of the Bible’s opening narrative.

The story of the world is a family affair. Thus it should be no surprise that when sin enters that story, it strikes ferociously at families. Go through the list in your mind: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his sons, Hagar and Sarah, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. And that’s just the first book!

The next time you hear someone describing, in an overly tidy way, how we should return to the biblical model of family, ask them, specifically, which of these families they have in mind.

There has never been a family untouched by sin. Not in the Bible, not in the church, not in your church. Which is some comfort, I hope.

What is in the Bible, the church, and your church, however, is a God who thought up family and still believes it to be a great idea. Your family may never resemble the Huxtables. Your relationships may never be so tidy as to fit into 30-minutes. That’s okay. Rest assured that the God who revealed himself and advanced his purposes through families as dysfunctional as those mentioned above has no smaller plan for you and yours.

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:14-19)

“That’s a lot of vodka boxes,” she said.

Yes, yes it was.

In the weeks before this, Jessica and I had discerned that God was calling us to launch ClearView as a brand new church. After six wonderful years at Southern Hills, it was time to pack up my office and clear the way for whomever and whatever God has in mind for that group of his children next.

Jessica heard that liquor stores (not exactly our natural habitat) would give you really sturdy boxes for free, and so one Friday night a couple weeks ago we drove around to, I think, five different stores, taking every box we could find.

Packing up, at least for me, was an important ritual. I gave myself the freedom to linger over certain items as I came to them: the certificate of ordination the elders presented me with on July 3, 2004, printed materials that marked various milestones for the church or for me as a minister, encouraging notes that members had given me over the years (Thank you! Those mean more than you’ll ever know.), and even some less than encouraging notes I kept for one reason or another over the years. I would say whatever prayer was appropriate for each item and then place it into a box or into the trash.

Many hours after we started, Jessica (who did all the real work while I was “reliving the moments” like some character in a Hallmark movie) totaled it all up.

Six years of congregational ministry equals 68 vodka boxes of books, files, and knick-knacks.

Who knew, right?

Seminary taught me a lot, but where to get good boxes–it left me on my own for that.

Also, I don’t think seminary taught me about transitions like this, nor that it could have. I am sure that in more than one course we talked about pastoral care, ministerial transitions, and the importance of calling and discernment, etc, etc. But 68 boxes are sufficient to separate reality from theory.

Boxes like that are definitive, and what they say is this, “Your life will never be the same.”

That’s the hard part of change. The underside of starting something new and exciting is walking away from what’s familiar. Saying yes to something new means saying no to something else, and, because God is so good, often that something else is something very, very good.

The story of Israel begins in Genesis 12 when God comes to a man named Abram (not yet Abraham) and says, “Go to the land I will show you.” God invites Abram into His plans, His story. ‘Awesome’ doesn’t quite cover it.

But, actually, that’s the second part of what God says.

The first part is this, “Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household.”
The story of Israel begins with God asking a blessed man to walk away from those blessings. The pain of this loss is seen in the increasing levels of intimacy described:

“Abram, I want you to leave your nation…and your clan…and your family. Now go…”

The call to “Go” we like. The call to “Leave,” well that’s another matter.

One lesson Abram’s story teaches is that we celebrate God’s blessings in our lives by holding them loosely. Abram trusts God more than God’s prior blessings.

Closing the office door, we were also closing a chapter in our lives, a chapter where we had built so many great relationships and seen God at work in countless ways. Given that we were married only weeks before coming to Southern Hills, it was an even more important chapter: the first chapter of life that was “ours.”

But God is honored when we trust him and not his blessings. Sometimes that trust just looks like a bunch of vodka boxes.