Everyone Starts in a Bad Place

I keep getting great comments on the stuff I’ve put up lately. I am very grateful. They remind me that the blog is not a waste of time, and to some degree, they provide proof of redemption. Generally, I have used my natural gifts for pointless or counterproductive pursuits, so it’s good to know that they now have a positive impact from time to time.

Redemption is a big deal. Is that obvious? I suppose it is. But sometimes we need to be reminded of the obvious, and we need to see it from a fresh perspective.

A friend of mine had a dream, and she ran it by a few Christian friends. I don’t recall all of it, but basically, the economy pooped out again, and people were going to lose their houses and live in squalor. The government offered them big lump-sum payments, to “help.” You know the government. Our “friend.”

They invited people to come discuss it, and they told them all they had to do to get the payments was to kill one person. While they were there, they saw a bunch of sickly orphan kids who were weak and spindly. I suppose they resembled kids with cerebral palsy.

Eventually, it became clear that these kids were the people who were to be killed. One per family. They would take them home and kill them, and the government would give them money and wash its hands of the matter.

The interpretation was that the government was the church, and that these kids were people who didn’t look right when they showed up. I think this applies more to the Bible Belt than to places like Miami, where virtually everyone who goes to church is tattooed or pierced or has a criminal record. I believe it applied mainly to places where successful people go to church. In places like that, people who don’t look like Christians might be viewed with less acceptance.

We have natural parts, which we can see, and we have minds and spirits, which can’t be seen. It is possible for a person to be healthy and rich in the natural world while he is starving, blind, and crippled in the invisible realm. Satan attacks us, starting before we’re born, and all of us are stunted in some way or another. Satan destroys important parts of us, like the willingness to love, the ability to express ourselves without fear or unjustified shame, the willingness to give, and so on.

I believe that if we could see our invisible parts, they might look like people with arms and legs torn off. An invisible part may be as important as, or more important than, an arm or a leg. In fact, a person who loses his legs will be okay, as long as his heart, mind, and spirit are not damaged badly.

I think these kids represent the poor in spirit. Generally, people do not come to the altar because things are going great. They come because they have been beaten to the ground, like addicts who have hit bottom. They truly are poor in spirit. We would even describe them as “dispirited” in English. And defeated people are likely to have addictions, scars, tattoos, rap sheets, really awful haircuts, and so on.

Churches in some areas are full of clean-cut, successful people who don’t want to be inconvenienced all that much by other people’s problems. It may be that God was telling my friend about this.

One of the weird things about God is that he sees the future, and he probably thinks more about the future you than the present you. You may be a pimp today, but ten years from now, you may be full of God’s faith and love. You may be running around raising the dead and healing hearts. We can’t tell who will be reformed in God’s image, but God can, and they will not always look the way we expect.

In the Bible, God compares us to lumps of clay that become finished pottery. No potter in his right mind would throw out a piece of clay because it didn’t look like a pot. You would have to be an idiot. No one expects raw clay to look like pottery. Yet it may be that we have come to expect God’s future servants to look holy and wear khakis, golf shirts from Dillard’s, and tasseled loafers. When you want to build something, it’s natural to look for promising raw material. But in the Bible, “natural” is a dirty word.

God shops at the dump and the scrap yard, because there is no place else where he can shop. Everyone, without exception, is messed up before God enters the picture. Redemption is not a favor he offers a few people here and there. It is a universal necessity. Everyone has to change, with God’s help. God never grabs someone out of the scrap pile and says, “Wow, this one is perfect.”

We have to be careful about obsessing on blessings. If you go to a non-charismatic church, you will be taught that God will do almost nothing for you, and that’s evil, but if you go to a charismatic church and watch TBN, you will probably be taught that our mission here on earth is to get God to do things for us. That’s evil, too. He will certainly do things for us, but the central mission is to love him as a person (not a concept) and do his will. This is what Jesus was talking about when he said we had to seek God’s kingdom and righteousness first.

God wants more children, and the raw material is out there. We can’t flood our churches with unreprentant criminals and turn a blind eye to iniquity, but a church should not be like a fancy living room where all the furniture is covered with disgusting plastic. It can’t be a museum, if it is to function. So we have to be open to new people, and we have to get our hands a little dirty.

The people in the dream were killing children in order to preserve their own comfort. This is what we do when we worry too much about our own blessings. Christianity is supposed to spread, like a virus. You can’t just hunker down in your mansion and wait for a pleasant death. You have to bear fruit. If you want redemption for yourself, you will have to help others get it. Otherwise you become spiritually constipated and produce little or nothing.

I am glad I’m contributing a little these days. A surprising number of people are at my church now because I brought them or I brought the people who brought them. Thank God for that. Every one of them is important. I should have been doing this 30 years ago. How many did I allow to fail?

A pimp who will listen to the Holy Spirit is more promising than a bishop who won’t. We are going to be surprised at the nature of the people who come in and advance the kingdom, and we shouldn’t be jealous of them or try to stay positioned above them. We have been warned, so we have no excuse.

Quite honestly, I do not like tattoos. Satan has always loved them, and they were banned by Jewish law. They are like signs saying, “Do not hire me; I want to go on welfare or become a career criminal.” No one should get tattooed, unless the Holy Spirit gives them an order on engraved stationery. But once you have a tattoo, you have it, and God still wants you. You don’t have to get it burned off before you can come to church. Everyone has something like a tattoo, whether you can see it or not. Whether it’s physical or invisible.

When we start living by the Spirit, things are going to get pretty weird, so we might as well brace for it.