Jesus Wept

This is part of a digital piece I've started working on depicting Jesus Christ's celebrated arrival into Jerusalem the week before he died. Check out Luke 19:37-42

As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!" And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, rebuke your disciples." He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out."

And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace!" But now they are hidden from your eyes.

Hymn to the Works of My Hands

“Listen!” Chant the spectral choirs:

“Cast aside this ‘right and wrong,’

Come dance amid your heart’s desires,

Revel while we sing along,”

From canopies of fiber wires

Noisy with redundant song

Come hymns played on electric lyres

Lifted high by voices strong

Accompanied by violins

Tuned flat with strings of iron chains,

Thus my timeless waltz begins

With ghosts made real in tinted panes.

Mirrored rhythms meet my spins

That trace black swirls through carbon stains,

Earning looks that once were grins

From statues maimed by acid rains.

And in the glow of soft fluorescent

Lights I turn through listing haze,

Echoes from an ancient essence

Beckon in mathematic phrase.

Neon shifts of phosphorescence

Guide me through the narrow maze

To the foot of that steel presence

Where I marvel at my ways.

Revelations now translated

Fell upon me like a dove:

The glory due these things created

Is not to one who waits above.

More than God I stand equated

Loosed now from the shackles of

His hold on me through time abated

In the wake of freer love.

This world sprang forth from my own toil.

I made shores of separate seas

That at my slightest touch would boil,

On a whim be asked to freeze,

And when the sun become my foil

Found not shade in glens of trees

But towers grown from tougher soil

That did not falter in the breeze.

As my dominion greatly spread

I made the means to meet my goals,

Crafting beasts with hooves of tread

To work to death in certain roles.

So let my might be always read,

As it is written in my scrolls:

I filled such veins of copper thread

With sparks of life resembling souls.

Go write on stones of all my fame,

Carve in hurried hand of when

I the king of kings became

And conquered all this world within.

May the mention of my name

Outlast the memory of my skin,

For I did all the forces tame

Excepting one: the wage of Sin.

A Comforter is not a Blanket

I pushed my bed right up against my one big window and laid there patiently as the cold-front climbed in through the screen and settled over me like a haunting. I was suddenly reminded of the presence of my own skin. I felt clean. I realized then that the air from the vents in my ceiling had always been a dusty substitute--an artificial respiration--and now my lungs were shuffling off their atrophy and filling my veins with autumn. I opened my mouth wide and let it expand my chest with crisp and significant breaths.

Somehow this air was more real, this night was more real. Even the plucky guitar playing from my speakers and making its way to my ears was more real as it danced on the ceiling with the sound of the bushes and trees outside. It took me forty-five incredible minutes to fall asleep. That whole while I was thinking of glaciers and the New Jerusalem.

But when my alarm clock went off the next morning I started cussing the guy who invented windows. I jumped up shivering and slammed my hand on the snooze button before practically backflipping into my warm bed again. I curled myself up in a lump beneath every inch of blanket I had and fought failingly to fall back asleep. There under those blankets I realized that all of the plans I had made for that day, the people I wanted to see and the work I wanted to do, were all just going to have to wait until next year. There wasn’t a chance I was getting up from where I was. If I so much as took a step out from my bed there’s no telling what could have happened. I had a friend who got frostbite once.

I was comfortable where I was. But where did my comfort come from? Blankets. Blankets that in survival-mode desperation I had grabbed and wrapped around myself as insulation from the cold. Blankets that I put all of my trust in, but blankets that only worked if didn’t move too much. Yeah, my plans were just going to have to wait. My day was going to end right where it started.

There’s the tension. So long as we’re comfortable we’re probably not getting a whole lot done. More often than not if our main concern is being comfortable then all of our effort goes into maintaining our level of comfort. But what is that comfort? By wrapping myself in covers I hadn’t done anything to change the temperature in my room, I hadn’t put on a sweater or even closed the window. I was just ignoring the cold I didn’t want to face and letting a day’s worth of opportunities pass me by.

The sin in this attitude comes up when you realize that my plans for the day weren’t really that big of a deal, but God’s were all about eternity. I was telling God that I didn’t want to strike out on His plan, to be put in the places that He needed me to be. I didn’t want to carry out His mission, I really didn’t even care all that much about the people I would talk to that day or the work I was going to get done. All I cared about was staying there in my bed. And If you’re keeping up then you’ve realized that this has nothing to do with sleeping in and has everything to do with blankets.

What are the blankets we’ve wrapped around our lives? What are the things that keep us insulated but stuck to the place we started? Is all the work we do only to try and grab more blankets?

I don’t think we really know how much money to call a “living wage,” but we know how much would make us comfortable. And if we could save up a little more first, have our little safety net, then we could really start taking the time to live the mission--maybe even give some money to the Church. But we’re not quite there yet.

Or maybe this thing with our boyfriend or girlfriend isn’t working anymore, in fact it’s kind of just hurting us. But it sure does make you feel safe. If it ended where would we be? Alone and in the cold missing something that’s been there for a really long time so we decide it’s probably just better to deal with the consequences of a dysfunctional relationship than start all over from scratch with someone else or--even worse--not find anyone at all. “No I’ll wait it out,” we say in the back of our minds, “at least I can play the martyr for sympathy with my friends.”

And then there’s that thing, whatever it is, that we’re not quite proud of but let happen over and over again to get that cheap, momentary peace from all the stress and pressure and pain we experience in life. But the feeling doesn’t last and the hard stuff we’re too chicken to face head on all comes flooding back as soon as we try to move forward again. Rinse and repeat.

False comfort we secure for ourselves. It’s an idol. We’ve put trust in things we’ve made right out of stuff from the world that caused us the discomfort in the first place. And again, it keeps us stuck where we are, worrying about ourselves, and hiding beneath things that really are as thin as blankets.

The Apostle Paul knew exactly what it meant to be uncomfortable. We grab blankets when it gets sort of cold, but Paul was beaten within an inch of his life, stoned nearly to death, shipwrecked--not once but three freaking times--and then thrown in jail (I’m assuming without a blanket). After all of that he never forgot all the times that God had proven He was completely sovereign--in complete control of everything. Paul knew that a God who is sovereign is the only thing to trust in, and the only place to look when you really need comfort.

In a letter to the church at Corinth, Paul says, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation,” but he continues to explain that God didn’t come to just make us comfortable in a world that wasn’t. He says God truly and eternally comforts us, “that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” (2 Cor 1:3-4) You can’t comfort anyone else hiding under the blankets.

And God’s plan to use us as comforters in the world, to have us turn our eyes and our hearts to other people instead of just worrying about ourselves is in fact a way better plan than anything we could come up with on our own. Let's face it, the world is uncomfortable, but you’ll find things a lot less uncomfortable when you’re not so focused on the state of your own comfort. And to top it all off, our actions when we comfort others are ultimately telling the world the truth about a God who is Love and His wonderful Son who died for our eternal comfort.

I have one of those alarm clocks where the snooze button lasts for a completely arbitrary nine minutes. Who decided nine minutes was the appropriate amount time it took to sleep in? Why not eight or an even ten? Either way, my alarm did go off one more time that morning, and as the sunlight finally started hitting me through the blinds I threw off the blankets.

And then I made the twenty-foot sprint to my hot shower.

Cold Call

I went to a concert the other day with Aaron, a friend of mine from class. Aaron happens to work as a barista at a coffee shop. It’s not one of the local neighborhood trendy coffee shops you can find in Denton but a corporate-run, franchise-owned fast food sort of coffee shop in the suburbs because apparently in the suburbs you can’t do anything hip. That’s not to rag on this particular chain of coffee shop (they make an amazing americano), more to rag on the suburbs.

I've really come to love spending time with Aaron. He’s very open-minded and great for conversation and has that kind of I don’t care attitude you find in poets or indie rock stars. He told me in the car on the way to the concert that he sees Christians come in to his coffee shop all the time to have their bible studies. He said he didn’t mind at all that they were there, even though he wasn’t a Christian. He said that one time even one of the leaders of a bible study tried to talk to him about Jesus:

“It was an older guy, he just walked up to the counter out of nowhere and asked if I’d heard the ‘good news.’”

I wondered if it was because Aaron has messy hair that hides part of his face and is covered in tattoos.

“I told him, ‘Well I know what I’ve heard,’” and he sort of laughed at that because we both know no one can grow up in Texas and not hear about Jesus. But like I said, Aaron is very open-minded and he listened to everything the bible study guy had to say, and then we talked for a few more minutes about the conversation, about the finer points. It bugged him that we focus so much on Jesus’ death. I thought that was really profound, but I didn't really know what to say.

We rode down the highway for a few minutes not talking, just listening to the music.

“Why do y’all do that?”

“Do what?” I asked.

“Just start talking to complete strangers about the ‘good news.’ It’s like you’re trying to sell us something.”