The Hero: Seeing Jesus in Infinity War and in the stories around us

The lights flicker in the empty train station. A man has fallen, while the woman beside him pants as she faces their two mysterious attackers. They have put up a good fight, but they are almost spent. It's only a matter of seconds before their enemies kill them.

A whistle blows, and a train whizzes by. The four people squint; is that a figure in the shadows, its image flashing between the train cars?

It is. As soon as the train is gone, Captain America steps into the light.

The audience erupts into cheers—they can't help it! This hero is beloved, and his timing couldn't be more perfect. He strides in and deals some well-aimed blows that send the enemies crawling.

I've watched this scene twice so far, and every time, tears follow. Something stirs within me as I see elements of the real Hero: Jesus Christ. Our story, The Story, is about Him, and He doesn't fit into our molds. Yet we so easily forget and assume that we are the main characters.

This mistake comes from forgetting who Jesus is. We see this in the Gospels. The Jews didn't recognize their Messiah, not because they weren't looking, but because they were looking for something that He wasn't: a warrior who would overthrow their physical oppressors. Even some who loved Jesus thought He was just a great prophet. Many walked and talked with Jesus without realizing who He was!

How much more might we fail to see Him?

Jesus is the Hero, fully God and fully man. If you ever wonder how different a cult, religion, or worldview is from Christianity, find out what that belief system says about Jesus. It might sound pretty good at first, but if it denies Christ's true identity, it's displacing Jesus as the Hero.

He calls Himself “the cornerstone” for good reason. The whole Story rests on Him.

I have had some good conversations about Jesus with a friend. He loves Jesus—or thinks he does. We have discussed faith and agree on a lot, but this friend denies that Jesus should be Lord. He can't accept that crucial detail, and he lives in fear as he tries to be the hero himself.

Even if we recognize Jesus as the Hero, our ideas of Him are often inaccurate. Jesus may have emptied Himself to put on flesh, but that doesn't mean that He steps into our perfect little boxes. He is God! He is supposed to stump us! Our faith is reasonable, but that doesn't mean that the infinite God of the universe has to always make sense to our puny brains.

Recently, a Muslim friend showed us a YouTube video of a former Christian who had converted to Islam. This convert had tried to convince Muslims of the Trinity's plausibility.

“God is like an egg,” the man argued.“He has a shell, egg white, and a yolk, but He is all one.”

“Then what if you have a double yolk?” His Muslim contenders asked.

So the Christian tried again: “God is like water. He is liquid, solid, and gas.”

“But then He couldn't be all three at once,” the Muslim apologists argued back.

With arguments like this, the man's “faith” broke. He converted to Islam because he couldn't come up with a small, concrete analogy about an infinite God. There are better analogies out there, but the video made me want to laugh. 

If we could reduce God and His mysteries to a petty analogy, wouldn't He be a lot less great?

Jesus didn't come to make God more understandable. He came to turn our thinking upside down—or really, right-side up. People didn't listen to Jesus and say, “I get God now.” Instead, they heard Jesus talk about feasting on His flesh and declared, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” (John 6:60, ESV)

Recently, after discussing theology with some Christian friends, I found myself reading the Bible to find supporting evidence for my side of the discussion. But the Spirit convicted me of this. We need to read God's Word to know who God really is, even if it means pushing past our preconceived ideas of Him and how we think He works. In the end, knowing Jesus is all that matters, and I'm pretty sure that, like in the book of Job, God is going to show up in the end and tell us that we were all wrong about Him in some way.

Finally, even when we start to get who Jesus is and that He is bigger than our ideas of Him, we forget that our Story is about Him. In his book Crazy Love, Francis Chan says that we are like extras in a movie. The back of our heads may appear for a second, but Jesus is the star of the film. But for some reason, we act like the movie is about us.

We're wrong.

The Scriptures point to Jesus (Luke 24:27). “[F]rom Him and through Him and to Him are all things”; no wonder we can't know His mind or expect to be the star! (Romans 11:33-36)

God is setting the stage. No matter how bad things get, everything is building to that moment when we'll see that dark form flickering behind the train. Everything is building to that moment when the Hero will step into the light. And when Jesus shows up for the final throw-down, no one will doubt who the real Hero is. As He descends from heaven with a cry of command and takes His throne in glory, all eyes will be opened, and we will all recognize Him (1 Thess. 4:16; Matt. 25:31).

Better than Captain America, our Hero will return to make everything right. And when He does, perhaps we will put our hands over our mouths. Perhaps we will burst into cheers and tears of joy. Or perhaps we will fall down at His feet at last.

Click here to listen to Andrew Peterson's song, "Rise Up"

Rise Up

Every stone that makes you stumble

And cuts you when you fall

Every serpent here that strikes your heel

To curse you when you crawl

The king of love one day will crush them all

And every sad seduction, and every clever lie

Every word that woos and wounds the pilgrim, children of the sky

The king of love will break them by and by

And you will rise up in the end

You will rise up in the end

I know the night is cruel

But the day is coming soon

When you will rise up in the end

If a thief had come to plunder

When the children were alone

If he ravaged every daughter

And murdered every son

Would not the father see this?

Would not his anger burn?

Would he not repay the tyrant

In the day of his return?

Await, await the day of his return

Cause he will rise up in the end

He will rise up in the end

I know you need a savior

He's patient in his anger

But he will rise up in the end

And when the stars come crashing to the sea

When the high and mighty fall down on their knee

We'll see the sun descending in the sky

The chains of death will fall around your feet

And you will rise up in the end

You will rise up in the end

You will rise up in the end

I know you will

Finding Life in Grace and Truth

After King David sinned by sleeping with Bathsheba and murdering her husband, God said...

• I anointed you
• I rescued you
• I gave you the house where you once were a servant
• I gave you people to love
• I gave you two kingdoms
• I would have done more.

"So why have you shown such contempt for the word of Adonai and done what I see as evil?" (2 Samuel 12:7-9 summarized)

Contempt for His word?

First, notice that this doesn't say contempt for God but contempt for His word. They are the same but we often don't realize it.

We can't say we love God yet deliberately go against what He says.

King David slept with someone he wasn't married to while pretending to love God. He plotted murder, not directly but indirectly. He didn't do it with the intent of spitting in God's face, but in order to satisfy his own pleasures, to look good, and to not get caught, he spit upon God's word.

What things do I do to look good instead of honoring God's word, and consequently, God?

Evil in His sight?

Second, God didn't just call David's actions evil but evil in His sight. 

Is there a difference?

Why, no.

If something is evil to God, it is evil. Yet I think God might have worded it this way because He is less concerned with what we perceive as evil and more concerned with what He perceives as evil.

God's perspective is the only one that counts. His opinion is the only one that matters.

"If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our heart." (1 John 3:20)

Yeah, what about the other guy? What is that to you? You follow Me! (Jesus in John 21:22, paraphrased by me)

The first mistake

Lastly, notice that David sinned because he focused on what he didn't have instead of what he did. God had blessed him with much and would have done more. But David focused on what was over the wall instead of what he had.

Didn't the first sin in the Garden start this way?

Gratefulness is one way to avoid new sin. I don't say that it's the antidote or the prevention. The blood of Jesus Christ (what He did to pay for sin) is the only antidote and the grace of Jesus (His undeserved favor, power, and victory) is the only prevention. We cannot earn either. 

But gratefulness is also a grace and a gift. When we are enraptured by our gifts and most especially our Giver, what more can we want?

Margaret Mauro, a 22-year-old poet, summed it up well in her poem, "The Young Christian":

Farewell—Henceforth my place

  Is with the Lamb who died.

My Sovereign! While I have Thy love,

  What can I want beside?

Thyself, blest Lord, art now

  My free and loving choice,

In Whom, though now I see Thee not,

  Believing, I rejoice!

Shame on me that I sought

  Another joy than this,

Or dreamed a heart at rest with Thee

  Could crave for earthly bliss!

These vain and worthless things,

  I put them all aside:

His goodness fills my longing soul,

  And I am satisfied.

Thankfully, David's sin is not the end of the story, and it never need be with us either. He did an about-face away from his sin and continued in an ever deeper relationship with God, and God called him a man after His own heart. Still, the beauty in the truth and grace that God showed him is incredible.

That truth and grace are available for us too in Jesus. (John 1:14)

Heavenly Daddy, help us to be satisfied with You. Help us to see things from Your perspective and to love Your Word honestly. Yet thank You that when we mess up, Jesus' sacrifice is always enough. 

Looking back and forward: how has Love shaped our Adventures?

“In friendship...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another...the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting--any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian friends, "Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another." –C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

As the new year approaches, this is a great time to look back over the old. What happened in your world? What lessons did you learn? How have you experienced Love, Life, or Adventure?

Music on the streets of Chicago

This year, I explored Chicago, Abu Dhabi, Zurich, Washington D.C., and Shenandoah River State Park. I finally scaled Mt. Washington, and I forged some new, life-changing friendships while strengthening old ones.

But the fact is that we don’t pick our friends or our adventures. God does.

He had 2015 all planned out from the beginning, and he knew that he was going to convict me of jealousy, fear, and a judgmental spirit before it all began.

He also knew that he was going to blast me with his Love and start transforming each area in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

Love has shaped my life this year. How has Love shaped your Adventure?

Just think about what the Giver of Love has in store for next year!

The best is yet to come…

At the Art Institute of Chicago in March 

Abu Dhabi with my sister in June 

Zurich, Switzerland in July

Swimming in a waterfall in Shenandoah River State Park 

with my brother in August

Mt. Washington with friends in September

Other songs of love, life, and adventure

Change-up time! If themes of Love, Life, and Adventure resonate with you, then maybe you'd like to look up some music artists who are on a similar quest! 

And if you like my blog, then there's a pretty good chance that you'll like artists like JJ Heller and Andrew Peterson. I love their deep and meaningful lyrics that wrestle with real-life issues and come through with gold. Brandon Heath is another artist whose music encouraged me over the summer. 

I was astonished when listening to one of JJ Heller's most recent songs because it had lyrics that sounded like I could have written them! 

As my blog subtitle suggests, music is a super important way to connect with truth.

I hope you'll be edified by these songs as I have:

Listen to JJ Heller's "Sound of a Living Heart"

Listen to JJ Heller's "Loved"

Listen to Andrew Peterson's "Be Kind to Yourself"

Listen to Andrew Peterson's "Rest Easy"

Listen to Andrew Peterson's "After All These Years"

Listen to Brandon Heath's "Love Never Fails"

What music helps you to connect with truth?

Learning to breathe: how do I slow down?

If we’re from a time-oriented culture like the United States, slowing down is a huge struggle. How do we do it? The answer is simple: focus on being instead of doing.

All my life, I focused on the things that I did. I identified myself by a long string of activities and accomplishments: student, artist, teacher, actor, writer, etc. But do titles like these really tell people who we are? Not really.

Yet because I had measured my life by my accomplishments, it was very easy to feel like a failure if I didn’t measure up to my standards—or what I believed to be God’s standards.

All of that changed when God shattered my old identity and gave me a new one. No longer was everything hinged on earning anyone’s good opinion. No longer did I have to strive to create my own identity. I already had an identity, bought and paid for! I just needed to live it out.

This was easier said than done, but breaking a finger certainly helped. I was forced to slow down, to listen, and to take long walks in the woods because that was the only exercise I was allowed.

Then God told me to go to Florida for part of the following summer. A halfway house was opening up for women, and we were told that teachers were needed to help women learn basic life skills. I cheerfully volunteered to go, and after I had scraped together some money by painting fences, my friend Mary and I hopped into my parents’ silver Nissan Versa and made the long trek to the Sunshine State.

Things didn’t pan out quite like we expected. We went to do great things for God, but when we arrived, only one woman was at the halfway house and no teachers were needed. I did secretary work for a Recovery group, and we cleaned and painted around the church property where we were staying. But really, there wasn’t any great work for us to do. 

So for five weeks, I put on my brakes and focused on being.

The therapy of being

After living out of “doing” for so long, hanging out in Florida was like going through physical therapy. I practiced the therapy of being.

If you’ve ever gone through physical therapy, you know that it isn’t just a relaxing massage. Every week, my physical therapist unwrapped my swollen finger and told me to bend it as far as it would go. With painful slowness, I stretched my stiff finger and bid it to bend, and my therapist would cheer me on and measure my efforts every week—one millimeter at a time. When I started squeezing sponges, I felt prouder than a heavyweight champion.

My physical therapist also poked and squeezed my finger sometimes.

“Does that hurt?” he asked.

“Nah, not really.”

“You must have a high pain tolerance. Most people would be kicking me in the shins right now.”

Huh. For some reason, that didn’t surprise me. I had trained myself not to feel much of anything for a long time. Maybe there was a reason I couldn’t cry in testimonies like other girls could.

My physical therapist would also wrap my finger into a bent position and leave me like that for awhile.

That was what Florida was like: sitting curled tightly into the position of being, without the ability to do anything else.

It was exactly what I needed.

And as I showed up to the tiny church every Sunday in the stifling, deserted months of August, people seemed to be happy that I was just there. And I realized that sometimes just being can be a blessing to others. The greatest gift we can give to somebody is the gift of ourselves.

Of course we still did things in Florida. We . . .

• visited lots of people 
• played tennis
• searched for gators 
• read books 
• raided Krispy Kreme donuts 
• found thrift stores 
• welcomed in a sunset on the beach with guitars. 

Each activity was like an adventure as I stretched my fragile fingers and practiced some independence without a lot of people looking over my shoulder.

But mostly, I settled in to relax and listen. God spoke to me a lot through the book of Galatians. It’s a book that resonates with freedom.

Healed to help others

I went to Florida partly because I needed space from my home environment and the Bible school campus where I lived. On my way down, I asked God to put the people on my heart that He wanted there. But as I stretched my limbs a thousand miles away, God put the Bible school students back at home on my heart once again.

So when my dad asked me if I would consider returning to the Bible school to fill the recently vacated position of “dorm mom,” I prayed about it seriously. At first, I wasn’t sure it was wise. The past ten months had taught me one thing about myself:

I was broken.

How could a broken person minister to anybody else?

But then I read this footnote on Mark 9:30-37 in my Recovery Bible:

“God heals our hurts so we can help others get the healing they need, not so we can rise to a higher position in society. If we fail to help needy people, we are pushing Jesus right out of our life.”

God doesn't wait for us to be perfect  and whole people before He is ready to use us.

I knew then that God wanted me to be the next dorm mom.

The girls in my dorm

And so I returned.

That school year was good. It was hard sometimes, but it was very good. As I struggled to do college on-line and love the six girls God had placed in my life, I kept up the practice of being. I couldn’t be and do everything that the dorm mom before me had done, so I learned to be who I was instead.

The freedom of being

My newfound freedom in being started changing a myriad of other aspects of my life. I had beaten myself up for so long whenever I didn’t behave a certain way, so I started varying my habits: I brushed my teeth when I felt like it, I went to bed when I felt like it, I got up at a different time every morning, I read my Bible as much or as little as I wanted, and sometimes I went to prayer meeting and purposefully didn’t pray out loud just so I could leave under the full knowledge that God loved me anyway.

His love wasn’t nearly as conditional as I had been treating it.

Not that discipline and good habits aren’t important. They are. But self-discipline should never be the driving force of our lives because it places more emphasis on self and less emphasis on the Spirit. Living out Christ’s life in our new identity means living by His Spirit’s guidance, not our own willpower. 

As I learned this, God again used my friend Mariah to teach me. If there is anyone who knows how to slow down and enjoy the Life that Jesus has given, it’s her. So I slowed down and practiced breathing.

And being.

I will close with Galatians 2:19-21 from Eugene Peterson’s The Message Bible. It sums up a significant part of my life:

"What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn’t work. So I quit being a 'law man' so that I could be God’s man. Christ’s life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not 'mine,' but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.

Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God’s grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily."

Let’s not only wake to the Life that Jesus died to bring. Let’s allow it to course through our veins. Let’s breathe in the oxygen of Love and learn how to be who He made us to be.

We can only enjoy the Life Jesus gave if we slow down enough to be. 

Establishing identity: why does Love hurt?

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

We may have found Life, Love, and Adventure, but that doesn’t mean that our lives are completely safe. In fact, Love may be one of the most painful things we’ll ever experience. Love hurts because it helps us to feel. It draws us closer to the hurt of others and makes us face our own hurt and discover who we are. But in this hurt, we are healed. 

Love is a purifying fire. 

Peaceful friendships

I have mentioned that ever since I was a little girl, I lived in the fear of people and their rejection. It’s important to mention that I had no idea that I lived this way or feared anyone. I was devoted to pleasing God and didn’t care what people thought—or so I thought.

I also surrounded myself with friends who were remarkably like me. I never fought with my friends growing up—ever. The closest I came to an argument was when I was twelve and my friend Cara told a boy I liked that she had taught me how to play ping pong. I thought she was taking credit for my ping pong skills, so I fiercely denied it, even though she was right.

But other than that, scarcely a ripple disturbed my friendships. Oh, we had some tense moments in Bible school, but they were only the normal tensions that occur in dorm life when people live in close quarters and grate on each other over long winter months.

Then God sent my closest friends far away to college and told me to stay home and go to school on-line. But He sent me another friend. Her name is Mariah.

Loving a tiger

Mariah

I have written about Mariah before under a different name. Now I’m confident she wouldn’t mind if you knew her real name.

At first, we seemed as different as two people could be. Her wrists are about as thick as my two wrists put together. She hated words and girly things and following a schedule, while she loved ninjas and juggling knives and sticking random food up her nose. She rarely thought things through before throwing herself into them (once she blithely agreed to share a hotel room with a strange man), except when she thought things through too much and entered a dark inner storm and scowled for days.

With typical shrewdness, I took advantage of her spacy spontaneity once by suggesting she drink from a mud puddle. She did, and of course I shoved her face into the mud.

We have been great friends ever since.

After God told me what He really thought of me, I started looking for ways to show the Love God was showing me. Mariah was there, and so I started to love her. It wasn’t always easy. She came from a difficult background, riddled with addictions and scars. She was a tiger who wasn’t ready to let very many people close. 

With an unprecedented thirst for danger, I pressed forward anyway, rattling her cage again and again before strategically withdrawing until she was tame enough to see me again. She was too wild to love me back at first, but that was okay. Love gives and gives without expecting return, and I started learning how to do that.

I loved her enthusiasm, her whole-heartedness, and her ferocity for God. She taught me things that no one else could, and my friendship with her taught me things about myself. As I loved her, I gradually started opening my heart. The hard, cold sepals that had encased my heart for so long started to curl back, and the petals inside started reaching for the light.

The tiger hits a nerve

But at that point, the tiger was still licking some wounds from her past, and when I got too close, she scratched me—hard. She declared one night that she preferred another friend.

The sepals that had protected my dormant heart for so long no longer shielded me. One statement of rejection from her stabbed a nerve at the center of that flower—a nerve that I hadn’t left exposed for a very, very long time.

But it had always been there.

I had buried it under loads and loads of dead things, barricades between my heart and the rest of the world. But one metal pole remained lodged in the layers of decay. This pole was the theme of jealousy that ran through my life, rooted in a fear of rejection that had colored every friendship I ever had. It remained lodged at the center of my deepest hurt and identity.

When Mariah rejected me that night, it was like someone took a hammer and banged on that pole.

Suddenly, I was five years old again, hearing, “I don’t want to play with Kayla.”

I had never felt those words so keenly since I first heard them because I had buried my heart so deeply and injected it with so many pain killers that it hadn’t felt anything at all in a very long time.

But Love had unearthed it.

Surgery and physical therapy

It took six months of processing this event before I recognized that I had a fear of rejection. I had been in denial of it most of my life, but when I found myself crying about little things that should never upset a healthy person, I finally admitted it.

It took another three months to realize where this fear of rejection came from. I was going through reverse culture shock, minor depression, and self-isolation then because I had spent a summer teaching English in the Middle East and hadn’t wanted to come back to my world of pain and problems. But the Giver of Love took me by the hand and walked me through a valley of shadows that winter, showing me lies that I had believed most of my life.

And he showed me what I wrote about in my other post, "The search begins.". I had a fear of rejection that was rooted in the identity I lived.

My identity was entirely based upon the earned opinions of others. Plain and simple. I had lived out of that identity for seventeen years.

My finger's x-ray with
three pins

On the same week that Jesus revealed my brokenness, I broke my finger. I’m not kidding. 

I was playing basketball when I caught a rebound and a thirty-nine-year-old man tried to steal my ball. I knew that if I didn’t get it out of his hands in two seconds, he would call it a jump ball and we would lose possession. Heat rushing to my face, I gripped that ball and threw my whole weight onto it, trying to push it out of my opponent’s hands. As I fell to the ground, he held on, but so did I. My left middle finger broke, one complete piece separating at the joint. The bone slipped a couple weeks later, and I had to have surgery and three pins put in place.

The entire process paralleled the spiritual healing process I underwent that winter.

Broken finger bones are very tiny things, just like the incident of rejection in my childhood. Yet despite their insignificant size, they can have very far-reaching consequences. After my surgery, my hand was wrapped in a hard, enormous white bandage. I was surprisingly helpless for awhile. The simplest tasks became a challenge. I couldn’t...

• cut my food 
• type 
• do my hair 
• open jars
• make a sandwich
• wear coats 
• play guitar or violin
• play piano
• shower without help 

I was banned from volleyball, running, and any other physical exercise except walking.

Broken fingers can also be surprisingly costly. I had no idea when I fought that man for my basketball that I was making a $7,000+ decision. I had no idea when my five-year-old heart cracked that I would end up stifling it in a dark box until Love broke it out again.

I broke my finger in December 2013. After it came out of its bandage in February 2014, I began physical therapy.

At the same time, I began a different kind of therapy. Who was I? I didn’t even know anymore. I had lived my whole life thinking that I could only find fulfillment in pleasing God or people, and my identity was shattered. I needed a new canoe.

Our new identity

Gradually, God started to show me that I was His. I was His daughter. I was His Beloved. There was absolutely nothing that I could ever do or would ever need to do to earn His love, because I already had it. 

No conditions. 

No fees. 

No questions asked.

In Jesus, we are and will always be enough.

This is our identity.

We don’t have to earn it. Our identity is a gift just like everything else Jesus gives. If we were able to earn even a piece of it, then we would get part of the glory for the gift. The spotlight must always be centered on Jesus. But He offers this identity to all of us, and all we have to do is follow Him and accept it. 

Jesus opens His arms and calls, “Stop fighting to prove yourself! Come to Me. I will give you rest. Rest in Me, and I will show you who you really are. You are dearly beloved.”

Learning to live out of this new identity has been a process. It was especially difficult in the first several months. Almost every decision I had ever made had been based on how I could keep people or God happy with me. For the first time, I realized that I didn’t have to do either, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Should I behave selflessly or selfishly? Even my “selfless” acts had been driven by selfishness, so I didn’t even know which way was up or down. 

I had spent so long unconsciously living a lie that I didn’t know how to live out truth.

But Jesus was there, whispering, whispering, whispering. My surgery limited me physically so I had to slow down, and at the same time I started slowing down my spiritual bustle so I could listen to His words of truth.

You are Mine.

Fret not, dear one.

Rest in the identity that I have given you.

He is saying the same to each of us.