“Bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease.  It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important.  Human beings judge one another by their external actions.  God judges them by their moral choices.  When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God’s eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the Victoria Cross. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.

It is well to put this the other way round.  Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those who we regard as fiends.  Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power of say, Himmler? 

That is why Christians are told not to judge. 

We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material.  But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.  Most of the man’s psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand naked.  All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others.  We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was.  There will be surprises.” 

           -C.S. Lewis (Morality and Psychoanalysis)

We really treat grace as a scarce commodity… 
I really treat grace as a scarce commodity…

I’m just wondering why we’re all so distant and suspicious and fearful… I’m wondering why I am still so distant and suspicious and fearful.  Still.  After 22 years of teachers insisting I have a God I can trust, after laying alone on bedroom floors and feeling Love roll over me like ocean currents, after reading 2000 year old love notes written for me, after the realest, relieving God-given provision… still: distant - suspicious - fearful.

I am learning more and more that failure to give is a result of failing to receive.  I have so much and yet it seems I fail to own anything - or to own what counts it seems, for I have refused to adopt as mine that which has been offered.  I still have an instinct in me that recoils at positions of vulnerability and potential disappointment, hurt, failure and embarrassment (Don’t we all?) But in me these potentials are things to be avoided at all costs.  In haunting revelation, I know I have been avoiding the grace of God at all costs. 

Putting myself in situations where the grace of God can be manifested most potently is something I must fight to do everyday.  When we expose ourselves to the Gospel, many of the tactics we relied on for our safety prior, become revealed as the worst enemy.  The Gospel always realigns our thinking. 

Everything I am tempted to run from become the places that I must run into if I really trust God as much as I say I do.  Every smile I am tempted to withhold in the event of unreciprication,
every conversation I am tempted to clutter with insincerity or safe sarcasm,
every prayer I neglect,
every fear I fail to face,
every relationship I prematurely abandon,
every motive I defend,
every person I pass off for whatever reason we justify passing someone off for (too loud, too quiet, too needy, too cold, too loose, too self-centered, too unpredictable…)
every opportunity I shuffle past,
every inconvenience I avoid,
every abundance that I waste - I am actually wasting, avoiding and shuffling past the grace of God.  Aren’t these the temptations, in the end, that when succumbed to time after time lead to isolation, coldness and death? And hence aren’t we really saying that our God does not have enough grace to pull us through on this one?   

He is already here, more plentiful than the air we breathe.  Do we ever ask, ‘Are we allowing ourselves, in this moment, to experience as much of the grace of God as he is doling out to us?’ Are we allowing ourselves the pleasure and privilege of living in a capability and desire that extends far beyond anything we’ve ever dreamed for ourselves?  Do I live a life that screams, ‘My God is abundant in security and mercy and love, regardless of the apparent risk’? The more I allow Him in these places (the distant, fearful, suspicious places) the more of Him I receive in these places. The more I receive of Him in these places the more of Him I am able to give - to others, to myself and back to Him.  Is his grace a scarce commodity that we must calculatingly allow prioritized space for?  A delicate commerce that must be held in deposits or paid in full? Are there doors you can open in which His grace will not follow you though?  Though I have lived believing this was the case for so long, I now pray we are quick to take the step of courage and faithfulness and forgiveness and openness and prayerfulness and loving kindness remembering and trusting that His unending-no-limit grace will always step to meet us there, even in the grimmest of surroundings.

(c) Stephanie Diaz-Schumm

A Word that Unlearns & Compliments From a Father

Matthew 10:34 Don’t imagine that I came to bring peace to the earth! I came not to bring peace, but a sword.

Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires.

Romans 12:2 Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

Jesus, whenrealized rightly, will always challenge the personal ideas, opinions and theology that we claim keeps us at peace.  There are principles, boundaries, strategies, rules and beliefs that, over time, welcomed or unwelcome, have attached themselves rigidly to certain places in our hearts where they should not be. They are the ideas that for no other reason than repetition and time, stay close, bringing us pain and frustration under a religious guise.  Tendencies and habits developed as we seek to attain some sort of semi-Biblical peace absent of the Jesus of the Bible.  They may remain subtle and unexpressed but they can exist fueling our most defining thoughts and desires.  Often we do not think these veils of ideas draped over our spirits and collecting dust are any problem to us at all, in fact we either 1) don’t even realize they are there or 2) actually learn, instead of confronting this cumbersome knowledge to accommodate its consistency in assaulting us.  Like a baby born with chronic leg pain who grows in to a limping man, he does not understand leg pain is unnatural and a limp is the resulting impediment - it is all he has ever known.  As a grown man now it is easier for him to maintain the limp than to treat the pain and rehabilitate his stride.

Likewise, when we are confronted by the living God His Spirit arrests our minds, hearts and bodies and we are presented with the reality of health and freedom - often for the first time in such a pure form.  This health and freedom steps in so foreign to our malnourished, imprisoned lives, but it is more real than anything we’ve previously believed.  This new voice begins to whisper to us Truths that expose our once comforting mindsets as lying, overstayed guests.  The limp of our veiled thinking always becomes evident.  What we once thought was our God-given reality quickly becomes myth, and so He asks to rehabilitate our steps.  We can let Him, or we can cling to tradition. 

The Lord will begin to tell us who we are in Him (He has always been telling us who we are, we have only finally tuned our ears to hear) When we learn it is right and good to accept His affirmation and approval the foundations of these once imperative definitions begin to show their cracks.  Nothing measures up to a compliment from our Father.  So this Word cuts us, separates our soul from our spirit - which brings me to my realization: the more I read the word of God, the more time I spend in His love, the more I allow myself to enjoy the gifts He’s given me, the more I come to see the Bible as a book of deconstruction.  What do you do with a text that shoots a hole through every barrier you grew up believing to be true and right. A Word that dissolves every fear?  What do you do with a Man who challenges your once solid ideas on what holiness and love and life look like? The Bible ‘de-teaches’ all we have taught ourselves and been taught since we slipped out of the womb on our journey toward peace, sufficiency and abundant life.  Jesus compels us to unlearn our charts and graphs of capability to return to a place of simplicity.  A place where children run carefree into His arms and fisherman need only turn to cast their nets overboard and where people who are crippled simply… get up and walk.  Jesus uses His word to ‘de-teach’ the ‘too good to be true’ mentality we adapted to keep from being taken advantage of and within His context we must begin to say, ‘this is so good, I have to believe it is true.‘  Can we wane back to a faith where we trust so quickly in Him that believing promises are effortless?  Can we wane back to a hope that will not only see a light, but be a light in the blackest darkness? Can we wane back to a mindset not too restless to be still under His work instead of soliciting our own?

In the past 2 months the structures of my mind have been carved away by the wrecking ball of a Man who came, not to placate us in our stupor but to cut away lies and expose our white-washed tombs.  With His hands filled with love He is overturning the religious, bartering tables in my temple to replace them with all I need: Himself - Good, Pleasing and Perfect.

(c) Stephanie Diaz-Schumm