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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Death of Gods

July 16, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“Gods, too, Decompose”

“God is dead,” declares Nietzsche’s madman in his oft-quoted passage from The Gay Science. Though not the first to make the declaration, Nietzsche’s philosophical candor and desperate rhetoric unquestionably attribute to its familiarity. In graphic brushstrokes, the parable describes a crime scene:

“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God,’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I! All of us are his murderers…Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?…Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’”(1)

Nietzsche’s atheism, unlike recent atheistic mantras, was more than rhetoric and angry words. He recognized that the death of God, even if only the death of an idol, introduced a significant crisis. He understood the critical role of the Christian story to the very underpinnings of European philosophy, history, and culture, and so understood that God’s death meant that a total—and painful—transformation of reality must occur. If God has died, if God is dead in the sense that God is no longer of use to us, then ours is a world in peril, he reasoned, for everything must change. Our typical means of thought and life no longer make sense; the very structures for evaluating everything have become unhinged. For Nietzsche, a world that considers itself free from God is a world that must suffer the disruptive effects of that iconoclasm.

Herein, I believe Nietzsche’s atheistic tale tells a story beneficial no matter the creed or conviction of those who hear it: Gods, too, decompose. Within Nietzsche’s bold atheism is the intellectual integrity that refused to make it sound easy to live with a dead God—a conclusion the self-deemed new atheists are determined to undermine. Moreover, his dogged exposure of idolatrous conceptions of God wherever they exist and honest articulation of the crises that comes in the crashing of such idols is universal in its bearing. Whether atheist or theist, Muslim or Christian, the death of the God we thought we knew is disruptive, excruciating, tragic—and quite often, as Nietzsche attests, necessary.

Yet for Nietzsche and the new atheists, the shattering of religious imagery and concepts is simply deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction. Their iconoclasm ultimately seeks to reveal towers of belief as houses of cards best left in piles at our feet. On the contrary, for the theist iconoclasm remains the breaking of false and idolatrous conceptions of God, humanity, and the cosmos. But added to this is the exposing of counterfeit motivations for faith, when fear or self-interest lead a person deeper into religion as opposed to love or truth, or when the source of all knowledge becomes something finite rather than the eternal God. While this destruction certainly remains the painful event Nietzsche foretold, God’s death turns out to be one more sign of God’s presence. As C.S. Lewis observed through his own pain at the death of the God he knew:

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.”(2)

For Lewis, it was the death of his wife that brought about the decomposition of his God. For others, it is the prevalence of suffering or the haunt of God’s silence that begets the troubling sense that our God is dying. At some profound level, the Christian story takes us to God’s death as well, perhaps for some in more ways than one. Like the Incarnation, the crucifixion leaves most of our ideas in ruins at the foot of the cross. The journey to death and Golgotha is an offensive journey to take with God. But blessed are those who take it. Blessed are those in pain over the death of their Gods. Blessed are those who mourn at the tombs and take in the sorrow of the crime scenes. For theirs is somehow the kingdom of heaven, a kingdom somehow able to hold Golgotha, a kingdom able to hold death itself.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181-182.

(2) C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 66.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Ambassadors of Reconciliation

July 15, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Recently on a drive through a small, suburban town, I saw the following message on a church sign: “Afraid of burning? Apply Son-screen.” I’ve seen similar messages to this one; “How will you spend eternity: Smoking or Non-Smoking?” “Life is Hard. Afterlife is Harder!” “WARNING: Exposure to the Son may prevent burning!” While there may be a pithy cleverness to some of these church slogans, I am bothered by the use of fear as a primary motivator for entering into a relationship with God. Why would anyone “scare” people into relationship with God? Can a true relationship be formed on the basis of fear?

Of course, the narratives of the Bible are replete with admonitions to fear the Lord. Even those unfamiliar with Christianity are likely to have some acquaintance with the familiar Proverb: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (1:7). But the fear of God is quite different from being afraid. Actually, the fear of the Lord is a component of faith; it arises from knowledge of God and from within the context of relationship with God. The fear of the Lord is reverence for God, and it reminds us of our place and our standing before that God. We are finite and fallen. God is infinite and holy. Fear is simply another name for the wonder, reverence, and praise we owe to God our Creator.

Now, perhaps these church billboards have a hint of this understanding in their message, but sadly, the result for those reading these kinds of messages is fear, or revulsion. If the only motivation to turn to God is to avoid punishment, how is that any kind of relationship? Perhaps this message results when there is confusion between the justice of God and punishment. Often, we want to punish others, or we have misplaced the desire to see others punished for a sense of justice. In contrast, the desire for justice is the desire to see things put right, made right by God. As Jesus prayed, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is a prayer for God’s justice to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Rather than making people fell afraid and focusing on all that is fearfully wrong, there is also the exhortation to proclaim all that God has set right in Jesus Christ: “Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were entreating through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:18-21).

Interestingly enough, more than any other command in Scripture, we are commanded to ‘fear not,’ and ‘do not be afraid.’(1) In fact, there are 366 commands (one for every day of the year and for Leap Year) to not be afraid. In Jesus’s teaching and message, he reserved his warnings of judgment for those who considered themselves in the “right” with God—those who defined their righteousness by their own merits. Jesus never used fear as a motivation for following him. Rather, for those on the outside looking in, Jesus extended hospitality and welcome. Indeed, in his message announcing “the kingdom of heaven is at hand; repent and believe the gospel” Jesus extends an invitation, not an ultimatum driven by fear. It is an invitation to enter into the kingdom by following him—his way, his life. Those who follow Jesus today can extend the same invitation to others who are seeking: “We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”

Perhaps understanding proper fear gives new insight to the words written in John’s first letter. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us” (1 John 4:16-19). Author Scott Bader-Saye comments that fear twists virtue into vice.(2) Fear motivated by a lack of love pursues punishment. When anyone is detached from love, fear-filled messages are sent. But when the proclamation centers on the God who ‘so loved the world that he gave his only Son’ fear is replaced by love; a love freely offered to others, by the God who has first loved us.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Lloyd Ogilvie cited in John Ortberg, If You Want To Walk on Water You Have to Get Out of The Boat (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 118.

(2) Scott Bader-Saye, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2007), 48-49.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – IS RELIGION VIOLENT?

July 14, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In a 2002 article in The Guardian, author Salman Rushdie, inspired by bouts of violence in his native India, articulated a now-common view on religion. The article was titled, “Religion, as ever, is the poison in India’s blood.” In it, Rushdie outlined the familiar stance of the vociferous new atheists, bidding the world to stop speaking of religion in the fashionable language of “respect” and skating around the obvious conclusions about both God and religion. He writes:

“What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion’s dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! […] India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.“(1)

Rushdie’s voice is merely one among many in the increasingly prevalent conversation about God, religion, and violence. Against Christianity, the critiques come quite specifically. Richard Dawkins describes the Christian story as vicious, sado-masochistic, and repellent, symptomatic of a violent God, a Bible full of violence, and followers willing to overlook that violence, or worse, to embrace it. For Dawkins and his conspirators, God is the problem that initiates the problem of violence: ”The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood-thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can be desensitized to their horror.”(2)

Unsatisfied altogether by those who try to interpret the Old Testament through the lenses of the New, those who point to Jesus as fulfilling personally and particularly some of the more uncertain images of God, the new atheists see only continuity in the violence of Christian theology. In Dawkins’ words, “New Testament theology adds a new injustice, topped off by a new sadomasochism whose viciousness even the Old Testament barely succeeds. It is, when you think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol… The theology and punishment-theory behind it is even worse.”(3)

While the vitriolic rants of the new atheists are filled with arrogance, oddities, and inconsistencies of their own, their well-voiced objections to Christian violence are hardly unique to them. For many, both in and outside the church, it is an issue deeply felt, a problem that needs a viable answer. Why is it that religion and violence often merge? And what is the solution? For the great majority of those who bravely vocalize such a question, the great “solution” of eradicating religion is simply unhelpful. And in fact some are suggesting the exact opposite, suggesting that the cure to religious violence does not rest in less religion or no religion (an argument that has been on the increase since the Enlightenment), but rather more religion.

In a carefully qualified sense, professor Miroslav Volf explains, “I don’t mean, of course, that the cure for violence lies in increased religious zeal… [rather] it lies in a stronger and more intelligent commitment to the faith as faith.” That is, commitment to the kind of faith that is itself good news, truth and beauty incarnate, a story that reinterprets all others. He continues, “The more we reduce Christian faith to vague religiosity which serves primarily to energize, heal, and give meaning to the business of life whose content is shaped by factors other than faith (such as national or economic interests), the worse off we will be. Inversely, the more the Christian faith matters to its adherents as faith and the more they practice it as an ongoing tradition with strong ties to its origins and with clear cognitive and moral content, the better off we will be.”(4) In other words, Christ’s Incarnation properly understood as a nonviolent invasion of a violent world by the God of shalom hardly fosters violence!

On the contrary, his violent death at the hands of a life-taking world is entirely reversed at the hands of the life-giving Father and the resurrection of a murdered son. His proclamation of a different kingdom is embodied in a God who steps near enough to consume us, but who offers instead a paradoxical alternative: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him” (John 6:56). No, Christianity properly understood and entirely embodied cannot be used to incite violence. It instead takes the angry words of its staunchest critics and the vile abuse of misguided disciples, and, like its liberator, lives the radical alternative to the story they tell.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Salman Rushdie, “Religion, as ever, is the poison in India’s blood,” The Guardian, March 9, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/mar/09/society.salmanrushdie, accessed January 15, 2010.

(2) Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 51.

(3) Ibid., 285.

(4) Miroslav Volf, “Christianity and Violence,” Boardman Lectureship in Christian Ethics, March 6, 2002, http://repository.upenn.edu/boardman/2, accessed January 18, 2010.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Problems of Pain

July 11, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your pain today?”

Ironically, the question, a hospital’s attempt to understand and manage the pain of cancer patients, only seemed to cause my father more pain. He hated the daily inquiry that seized him almost as consistently as the sting of the growing tumor. It aggravated him deeply, more than I could say I understood. It was a philosophical quagmire for him that somehow mocked pain and amplified the problem of suffering. If he answered “10″ in the midst of a painful morning, only to discover a greater quantity of pain in the evening, the scale was meaningless. The numbers were never constant, and what is a scale if its points of measurement cannot stand in relation to one another? If he answered “10″ on any given day would that somehow control the ceiling of his own pain? He knew it would not, and that uncertainty seemed almost literally to add painful insult to an already fatal injury.

Considerations of pain and suffering are among the most cited explanations for disbelief in God, both for professionally trained philosophers and for the general public. If a good, powerful, and present deity exists, why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? Even for those who argue that the existence of God and the presence of evil can be reconciled, the vast amount of suffering in the world certainly compounds the dilemma. We can sympathize with Ivan Karamazov in his depiction of the earth as one soaked through with human tears. We imagine not merely one person measuring their pain on a scale of 1 to 10 but innumerable individuals, and the temptation is to add all of these scales together as one giant proof against God.

In his 1940 book The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis warns us against espousing such a temptation. “We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the ‘unimaginable sum of human misery,’” he writes. “Search all time and space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone’s consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it.”(1) Or, said in another way, there are as many problems of pain as there are conscious beings—and God must deal with each and every one of them.

For someone like my dad, for whom weighing pain was both disparaging and unfeasible, this would perhaps have been one comfort in a maddening abyss of darkness. It means his own problem of pain was not lost in a sea of meaningless scales and indescribable measurements. It means that his frustrating, inconsistent ceiling of sorrow was itself held in the arms of God—and not vaguely absorbed in an immeasurable sum, or else given a distant, theoretical answer. It means that God had to come near not simply to pain in general, but to him in person.

This is exactly the scandalous confession of Christian hope. As Hans Urs von Balthasar writes, “When life is hard and apparently hopeless, we can be confident that this darkness of ours can be taken up into the great darkness of redemption through which the light of Easter dawns. And when what is required of us seems too burdensome, when the pains become unbearable and the fate we are asked to accept seems simply meaningless—then we have come very close to the man nailed on the Cross at the Place of the Skull, for he has already undergone this on our behalf and, moreover, in unimaginable intensity.”(2) On the cross, in the person of Christ, the problem of pain was God’s own, felt acutely, absorbed personally, endured as one person—and answering as many problems of pain as there are created beings.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 103.

(2) Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Scapegoat and the Trinity,” You Crown the Year with Your Goodness: Sermons through the Liturgical Year (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), 87.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Last Enemy

July 10, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In spite of the proverbial certainty of death and taxes, the human psyche has always dreamed of discovering loopholes in whatever mechanisms fix the limits. Yet though it might be possible to cheat on one’s taxes, “cheating death” remains a phrase of wishful-thinking applied to incidences of short-lived victories against our own mortality. Eventually, death honors its ignominious appointment with all of us, calling the bluff of the temptation to believe that we are the masters of our own destiny. But despite the universal, empirical verification of its indiscriminate efficiency, we continue to be constantly surprised whenever death strikes. Only a painfully troubled life can be so thoroughly desensitized against its ugliness as to not experience the throbbing agony of the void it creates within us whenever the earthly journey of a loved one comes to an end.

Such a peculiar reaction to an otherwise commonplace occurrence points strongly to the fact that this world is not our home. As Ecclesiastes 3:11 explains, God has put eternity in our hearts, and therefore the mysterious notion that we are not meant to die is no mere pipe dream: it sounds a clarion call to the eternal destiny of our souls. If the biblical record is accurate, there is no shame or arrogance in pitching our hopes for the future as high as our imaginations will allow. Actually, the danger is that our expectations may be too low, for “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Far from being the accidental byproducts of a mindless collocation of atoms, we are indestructible beings whose spiritual radars, amidst much static noise, are attuned to our hearts’ true home.

Trouble begins, however, when we try to squeeze that eternal existence into our earthly lives in a manner that altogether denies our finite natures. We do so whenever we desensitize ourselves against the finality of death through repeated exposure to stage-managed destruction of human life through the media. Or we zealously seek ultimate fulfillment in such traitorous idols as pleasure, material wealth, professional success, power, and other means, without taking into account the fleeting nature of human existence. Or we broach the subject of death only when we have to, and even then we feel the need to couch it in palatable euphemisms. With some of our leading intellectuals assuring us that we have pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps and we therefore have no need for God, the only thing missing from our lives seems to be the tune of “Forever Young” playing in the cosmic background. A visitor from outer space would probably conclude that only the very unlucky ones die, while the rest of us are guaranteed endless thrill-rides through space aboard this green planet.

But such a visitor would promptly be treated to the rude awakening that even the most self-assured of human beings are still in transit. While it is possible to sustain a façade of total control within the confines of material comforts, a functional government, and a reasonable distance from the darker side of human suffering, this opportunity is not equally shared around the globe. It would take a very specialized form of education to believe in the ability of human beings to control their own destiny when hundreds of people are being put to the sword, homes are being razed to the ground, and your neighbors are fleeing for their lives—a scenario my family lived through in Kenya. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, news anchors in this part of the world rarely preface their gruesome video clips with viewer discretion warnings, and so the good, the bad, and the ugly are all deemed equally fit for public consumption.

Affronted by such an in-your-face, unapologetic reality of human mortality, one finds oneself face to face with a dilemma: why should you devote all of your energy to making a meaningful difference in the world if it is true that everything done under the sun will eventually amount to zero? Once one has come to the conclusion that the emperor has no clothing, what sense does it make to keep up with the pretense? Sadly, some see through the emptiness and choose to end their own lives. From a naturalistic perspective, that seems to be a perfectly consistent step to take.

Yet the Bible grasps this nettle with astounding authority. Not only has God placed a yearning for our true home in our hearts, God has also promised to cloth the perishable with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality through Christ’s own death (1 Corinthians 15:54). In the meantime, the light of the gospel shines an eternal perspective upon our service unto God and humanity, fusing all of our activities with significance. When the call of God has been answered, nothing that is done in obedience to the Father, as the Son himself confirmed in life and death, is ever trivial. Thus even in the face of suffering and death, as a follower of Christ, I neither bury my head in the sand nor grope blindly in total darkness. With faithfulness and joy, I enthusiastically render service to my God,

And when my task on earth is done,

When by thy grace the victory’s won,

Even death’s cold wave I will not flee,

Since God through Jordan leadeth me.(1)

J.M. Njoroge is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) From the 1862 hymn, He Leadeth Me, by Joseph Gilmore.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Suffering of Forgiveness

July 9, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In four horrific months in 1994, at the urging of the Rwandan government, the poorer Hutu majority took up bayonets and machetes and committed genocide against the wealthier Tutsi minority. In the wake of this unspeakable tragedy, nearly a million people had been murdered.

In August of 2003, driven by overcrowded prisons and backlogged court systems, 50,000 genocide criminals, people who had already confessed to killing their neighbors, were released again into society. Murderers were sent back to their homes, back to neighborhoods literally destroyed at their own hands, to live beside the few surviving relatives of the very men, women, and children they killed.

With eyes still bloodshot at visions of a genocide it failed to see, the world still watches Rwanda, looking with a sense of foreboding, wondering what happens when a killer comes home; what happens when victims, widows, orphans, and murderers look each other in the eyes again; what happens when the neighbor who killed your family asks to be forgiven. For the people of Rwanda, the description of the Hebrew prophet is a reality with which they live: “And if anyone asks them, ‘What are these wounds on your chest?’ the answer will be, ‘The wounds I received in the house of my friends’” (Zechariah 13:6). How does a culture bear the wounds of genocide?

For Steven Gahigi, that question is answered in a valley of dry bones which cannot be forgotten. An Anglican clergyman who lost 142 members of his family in the Rwandan genocide, he thought he had lost the ability to forgive. Though his inability plagued him, he had no idea how to navigate through a forgiveness so costly. “I prayed until one night I saw an image of Jesus Christ on the cross…I thought of how he forgave, and I knew that I and others could also do it.”(1) Inspired by this vision, Gahigi somehow found the words to begin preaching forgiveness. He first did this in the prisons where Hutu perpetrators sat awaiting trial, and today he continues in neighborhoods where the victims of genocide live beside its perpetrators. For Gahigi, wounds received in the house of friends can only be soothed with truth-telling, restitution, interdependence, and reconciliation, all of which he finds accessible because of Christ.

In fact, the work of reconciliation that is taking place in Rwanda in lives on every side of the genocide may be difficult to describe apart from the cross of Christ. While it is true that forgiveness can be explained in therapeutic terms, that the act of forgiving is beneficial to the forgiver, and forgiveness releases the victim from the one who has wronged them, from chains of the past, and a cell of resentment; what Rwandans are facing today undoubtedly reaches far beyond this. While forgiveness is certainly a form of healing in lives changed forever by genocide, it is also very much a form of suffering. Miroslav Volf, himself familiar with horrendous violence in Croatia and Serbia, describes forgiveness as the exchange of one form of suffering for another, modeled to the world by the crucified Christ. He writes, “[I]n a world of irreversible deeds and partisan judgments redemption from the passive suffering of victimization cannot happen without the active suffering of forgiveness.”(2) For Rwandans, this is a reality well understood.

And for Christ, who extends to the world the possibility of reconciliation by embodying it, this suffering, this willingness to be broken by the very people with whom he is trying to reconcile, is the very road to healing and wholeness. “More than just the passive suffering of an innocent person,” writes Volf, “the passion of Christ is the agony of a tortured soul and a wrecked body offered as a prayer for the forgiveness of the torturers.”(3) There is no clearer picture of Zechariah’s depiction of wounds received at the house of friends than in a crucifixion ordered by an angry crowd that lauded Christ as king only hours before. And yet, it is this house of both murderous and weeping friends for which Jesus prays on the cross: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Far from the suggestion of a moralistic god watching a world of suffering and brokenness from a distance, the costly ministry of reconciliation comes to a world of violence and victims through arms that first bore the weight of the cross. For Steven Gahigi, who facilitates the difficult dialogue now taking place in Rwanda, who helps perpetrators of genocide to build homes for their victims’ families, forgiveness is indeed a active form of suffering, but one through which Christ has paved the hopeful, surprising way of redemption. Today, wherever forgiveness is a form of suffering, Christ accompanies the broken, leading both the guilty and the victimized through valleys of dry bones and signs of a coming resurrection.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Johann Christoph Arnold, Why Forgive? (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis books, 2010), 202.

(2) Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 125.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Unlikely Blessing

July 8, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Stranger things have happened. My friends had struggled with infertility for most of their married lives. Employing the latest reproductive technologies didn’t work and thousands and thousands of dollars later there was still no child. As a result of all this, and because of their advanced age, they had given up the possibility of having a biological child and adopted a little boy. They were overjoyed to bring this little one into their family, and we rejoiced together at his baptism. Little did we know at the time that my friend was pregnant; nine months later this couple welcomed their daughter into the world. They were truly overwhelmed by this unexpected and unlikely turn of events. Sometimes, surprise is the greatest blessing.

Surprise is at the start of Luke’s gospel narrative which begins with two women, who were both, like my friend, unlikely candidates for mothers. Elizabeth was a woman beyond child-bearing age. She was barren. Mary was a young, unmarried girl. Yet, these two women were the mothers of two of history’s most famous individuals: John the Baptist, the last prophet of Israel, and Jesus, who would be called, Messiah. The announcement of these pregnancies must have been disconcerting at best. As if this strange news wasn’t enough, it was announced to both families by an angelic visitor. The first words spoken were “do not be afraid.” Do not be afraid, indeed! These births would turn the world upside down, and would change the lives of these women; both women were the unlikely recipients of unlikely blessing.

Despite the improbable circumstances, Elizabeth praises God by saying, “This is the way the Lord has dealt with me in the days when He looked with favor upon me, to take away my disgrace among men” (Luke 1:25). Elizabeth and Zacharias were both from priestly lines: Zacharias from Abijah, and Elizabeth from Aaron. The gospel alerts the reader that they “were both righteous in the sight of God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and requirements of God” (Luke 1:5-6). However, Elizabeth’s barrenness would have called her “righteous” status into question. Childless women were a ‘disgrace among men’ in her day. Childlessness was naturally looked upon as a grave misfortune or even as a sign that one was cursed by God. The wife who presented her husband with no such tangible blessings or supporters felt that her aim in life had been missed. So the announcement that Elizabeth would bear a child beyond her child-bearing years was as unlikely as a virgin having a child.

Mary, unlike Elizabeth, was a young girl from a backwater town. No priestly line, nor royal heritage. No one would have noticed her, or thought twice about her. Yet like Elizabeth, a strange blessing was bestowed upon Mary indeed! As one author notes, “Mary, God’s favored one, was blessed with having a child out of wedlock who would later be executed as a criminal. Acceptability, prosperity, and comfort have never been the essence of God’s blessing.”(1) Mary, despite the disgrace and the suffering she would endure declares, “Be it done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

To be sure, this “blessing” would cause Joseph to want to end his betrothal to Mary, leaving her alone and with child. Angelic intervention was necessary to change his mind. And after Jesus was born, Mary would watch her son grow, watch his itinerant ministry unfold, and behold the wrath and anger of the religious leaders he challenged and confronted. Then, she would watch in horror as her son was crucified, falsely accused and innocent of all charges. She must have struggled to understand why God would not save him from that fate. Indeed, God’s blessing must have seemed very strange, or very cruel.

In general, blessing is equated with the good life. And when the term is used today, it is rarely ever used to refer to the unexpected and unwanted blessing of suffering or hardship. As one who hears these narratives today, I can scarcely see blessing in lives cut short, or in the pain of losing children far too soon. We do not get to hear much of what Mary or Elizabeth thought about these unlikely events, or how they must have felt as their sons’ lives unfolded. Yet, perhaps they uniquely understood that God’s blessings are not wrapped up in doing everything and anything we ask God to do for us. Instead, God’s blessings are often experienced in ironic, unexpected and strange ways—life emerging from death; joy from sorrow; becoming first by being last.

My friends certainly know this to be true, just as Mary and Elizabeth did. Their young daughter, not yet 12, died from a rare form of ocular cancer. They grieve her loss every day, even as they rejoice in the blessing of her short life; a strange blessing, indeed, and one that is filled with sadness. They have come to know a strange joy that Mary and Elizabeth must have also experienced. They have come to know that “joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes….”(2) Perhaps the most unlikely blessing indeed.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Alan Culpepper, New Interpreter’s Bible: Luke, Vol. 9, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 52.

(2) Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark, (New York: HarperCollins, 1969), 54.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Changing Tunes

July 7, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

A popular U.S. comic strip once held the attention of millions as it chronicled the misadventures of a boy and his stuffed tiger. The infamous pair was inseparable, lingering energetically in topics both adult and childlike. One day on a walk in the woods, six-year-old boy Calvin announces to Hobbes the tiger that he has decided he doesn’t believe in ethics anymore, because, as far as he’s concerned, “The ends justify the means.” “Get what you can while the getting is good,” Calvin reasons, “Might makes right.”

At this, Hobbes, who is a stuffed tiger in the eyes of all but Calvin, promptly pushes his human friend into a mud hole.

“Why’d you do that?” Calvin objects.

“You were in my way,” Hobbes replies, “and now you’re not. The ends justify the means.”

Finding himself in the mud, Calvin sees clearly that he cannot live with the outworking of his lauded theory. He seems to reach a brief and annoyed moment of enlightenment, until he uncovers a way to reconcile the conflict with self-interest: “I didn’t mean for everyone, you dolt. Just me.”

One of the more striking things to confront in each of the four gospel accounts, besides the human Jesus himself, is the reactions people had to him. When in his presence, some like Mary and the man with leprosy fell instantaneously at his feet, others like the young rich ruler or the people of Nazareth turned away. In his presence some cried for mercy and others who needed a doctor were confronted with the question of whether or not they wanted to be well. In the presence of Jesus of Nazareth, choices were made, theories adjusted, realities were challenged, affections transformed.

Ironically, those deemed unrighteous and dishonorable by the social standards of the day were often the most responsive to the demands of Jesus. I have often wondered if this was because they were the ones most willing to see themselves without pretense, those most willing to respond to their own inconsistencies with fear and trembling. In the presence of Christ, the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda came to see the contradictions he lived with, his broken refrain, and his need for a new song. The Samaritan woman at the well saw not only that Jesus was speaking truth, but that he was truth, and that his way of life was full of life, while her own had been forced to the sidelines. Called into the presence of Christ, Zacchaeus saw his ravenous, isolating ways and the great hunger of his life for a different sort of communion. Conversely, the rich young ruler walked away from Jesus’s instruction because it was a request and reality that he just could not face.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined the phrase “polyphony of life” as a metaphor for the various melodies of life that captivate or consume our affections. The invitation of Christ, he observed, does not come in such a way as to injure or weaken other loves, but always to provide a kind of cantus firmus to other melodies lest they run us adrift or out of tune. The cantus firmus, which means “fixed song,” is a pre-existing melody that forms the basis of a polyphonic composition. Though the song introduces twists in pitch and style, counterpoint and refrain, the cantus firmus is the enduring melody not always in the forefront, but always playing somewhere within the composition. Love of God was the cantus firmus for Bonhoeffer, the soul of the concerto and the clarifying essence for a life of various sounds and directions. “Where the cantus firmus is clear and plain, the counterpoint can be developed to its limits… Life isn’t pushed back into a single dimension, but is kept multi-dimensional and ployphonous.”(1)

It is both brave and essential to listen to the various melodies that hold our lives and shape our affections, and to ask what is the guiding song behind it all. The invitation of Christ is one that will engage all of life. The fully human Incarnate Son could make no lesser request. His invitation is that of fullness of life, a diversity of loves and desires shaped and flourishing around a firm cantus firmus. In this love, all things their find their coherence; the broken fragments of lesser songs are remade, re-tuned, and restored.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Disappointment and God

July 4, 2014 broboinhawaii 1 Comment

I struggled as a teenager growing up in Delhi. Failure was writ large on my life. My dad basically looked at me and said, “You know, you’re going to be a huge embarrassment to the family—one failure after another.” And he was right given the way I was headed. I wanted to get out of everything I was setting my hand to, and I lacked discipline.

During this time, India was at war and the defense academy was looking for general duties pilots to be trained. So I applied and I went to be interviewed, which involved an overnight train journey from the city of Delhi. It was wintertime and we were outside freezing for about five days as we went through physical endurance and other tests. There were three hundred applicants; they were going to select ten. On the last day they put their selection of names out on the board, and I was positioned number three.

I phoned my family and said, “You aren’t going to believe this. I’m going to make it. I’m number three. The only thing that’s left is the interview. The psychological testing is tomorrow, and I’ll be home.”

The next morning I began my interview with the chief commanding officer, who looked to me like Churchill sitting across the table. He asked me question after question. Then he said, “Son, I’m going to break your heart today.” He continued, “I’m going to reject you. I’m not going to pass you in this test.”

“May I ask you why, sir?” I replied.

“Yes. Psychologically, you’re not wired to kill. And this job is about killing.”

I felt that I was on the verge of wanting to prove him wrong—but I knew better, both for moral reasons and for his size! I went back to my room and didn’t talk to anybody. I packed my bags, got into the train, and arrived in Delhi. My parents and friends were waiting at the platform with garlands and sweets in their hands to congratulate me. No one knew. I thought to myself, “How do I even handle this? Where do I even begin?” They were celebrating, and yet for me, it was all over.

Or so I thought.

I was to discover later that God is the Grand Weaver of our lives. Every thread matters and is there for a purpose. Had I been selected, I would have had to commit twenty years to the Indian armed forces. It was the very next year that my father had the opportunity to move to Canada. My brother and I moved there as the first installment, and the rest of them followed. It was there I was in business school and God redirected my path to theological training. It was there that I met my wife, Margie; there my whole life changed. The rest is history. Had I been in the Indian Air Force, who knows what thread I’d have pulled to try to wreck the fabric.

Thankfully, our disappointments matter to God, and God has a way of taking even some of the bitterest moments we go through and making them into something of great significance in our lives. It’s hard to understand at the time. Not one of us says, “I can hardly wait to see where this thread is going to fit.” Rather, we say, “This is not the pattern I want.” Yet one day the Shepherd of our souls will put it all together—and give us an eternity to revel in the marvel of what God has done. Our Father holds the threads of the design, and I’m so immensely grateful that God is the Grand Weaver.

Excerpted and adapted from Ravi Zacharias’s The Grand Weaver: How God Shapes Us Through the Events of Our Lives (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007).

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What Is Good?

July 3, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

An editorial from The Wall Street Journal some years ago still comes to mind as I occasionally watch the news. The writer was describing host Larry King’s unsettling interview of a father whose wife drowned each of their five children. Peering restlessly at the television before him, the writer believed he saw not only a disturbing interview, but a rare glimpse into the culture at large. As the father spoke of his unwavering support for his wife on national television, the mother who committed the crimes sat in a courtroom thousands of miles away receiving her sentence for the murders of their five children at that very moment. When asked how he thought his wife would do in prison, he replied that she’d do just fine, adding, “She’s a good woman.”

But the writer’s angst went deeper than his discomfort over the descriptor of the mother as good, a term to which many predictably objected the following day. He noted, instead, his discomfort over the fact that the interview itself was conducted with the same work principle of any another day in the life of modern television reporting: “Interview anyone, ask anything.” To him, that the father was even there, that Larry asked, and that we looked on, bordered on a sick voyeurism. How could we call any of it good, any of us good? He concluded: “There are moments when one wants to go out to the street, stare up at the stars in the dark sky and admit, I don’t get it anymore… People keep looking for reasons inside this case. I keep wondering what’s happening to all the rest of us, soaking up these recurring, weird events from our living rooms.”(1)

More than a decade has passed since these comments, and television voyeurism has certainly escalated to all new levels. But the writer’s question about goodness remains hauntingly the same. What does it mean to be good? In the common delving out of goodness all around us, who decides if a person is actually good? A television audience? The individual? Larry King? A courtroom? And when do those of us watching move from sincere concern to shameless curiosity?

Is there an inherent determiner for naming something good? Can it really arise from no where? And if we use it broadly enough will we get to the point when the word itself is void of meaning? Perhaps we already have.

A strikingly similar question was voiced thousands of years ago in a conversation between two men—one, a rich young person; the other, a rabbi from Nazareth known for his strange stories and gossip-worthy surprises. The young man approached Jesus with a pressing question, unthinkingly addressing him as “Good teacher” before muttering out the inquiry. But Jesus didn’t get past the title. “Why do you call me good?” he asked. “Isn’t no one good but God alone?”(2)

Perhaps as unthinkingly as the rich young ruler, we have observed for years that Jesus was a good man. We would in fact be hard-pressed to find anyone today who would be comfortable calling Jesus a bad man or anything less than a good person. We would likely use the same term to describe ourselves. But indeed, what do we mean by good?

In a world where ideas creep slowly, making subtle changes that go unnoticed until havoc has broken loose and we are left like this author wondering what is happening, we do well to ask ourselves what we mean and where it comes from. G.K. Chesterton warned us several decades ago that we were tearing fences down before inquiring as to why they were up in the first place. And Jesus more than two thousand years ago inquired as to our very use of the word good: If this world is little more than a happy accident, why do you call me good? Why do you call anything good? No one is good except God alone. His statement was not meant to make us all feel like bad people. In fact it is interesting that we so strongly desire to call people good and believe that a generic, groundless goodness will suffice for all. But Jesus powerfully probes the vision that assigns goodness without a real foundation. What does it mean to be good? Who decides? And does a world without God have any basis for speaking of goodness in the first place? Jesus suggests it does not. For God gives us the very meaning of goodness. And Jesus himself embodies it.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Daniel Henninger, “She Got Life, He Was Live,” Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2002.

(2) See Mark 10:13-23.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Becoming What We Worship

July 2, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The book of Judges poses many interpretive challenges for any student of Scripture. Filled with stories of the grotesque and the tragic—the rape and subsequent division of the Levite’s concubine into twelve pieces in Judges 19, the undoing of mighty Samson, or the story of Jephthah and his vow to offer up one of his own children as a burnt offering in Judges 11—the contents challenge any contemporary reader’s sensibilities.

Despite these interpretive difficulties and challenges, the book of Judges reveals the all-too human story of our propensity towards fashioning gods to our liking, and the consequences that ensue from these misplaced affections. Perhaps no story is more poignant, in this regard, than the story of Gideon. Born the youngest son of the smallest tribe of Israel, the half-tribe of Mannaseh, Gideon grew up in a land oppressed by the Midianites, the Amalekites and the “sons of the east” (Judges 6:3). The text tells us these enemies were so numerous that they “would come in like locusts…both they and their camels were innumerable; and they came into the land to devastate it” (6:5-6).

It is for this reason that we find Gideon threshing wheat in a wine press, hiding from his innumerable enemy. After all, he is the youngest son of the smallest tribe. Despite his youth and his seeming insignificance, Gideon is visited by an angelic visitor who addresses him as a “valiant warrior.” Gideon is to be the deliverer of Israel. Sure enough, as the text tells us, Gideon and a mere three hundred men defeat the innumerable armies of their enemies. Gideon is the unlikely hero and the Israelites are so impressed by his military leadership that they seek to make him king. “Rule over us, both you and your son, also your son’s son, for you have delivered us from the hand of Midian” (8:22). But Gideon rightly persuades the Israelites that God is their king and deliverer. Had the text ended there, we would never see the clay feet of our story’s hero.

The narrative doesn’t tell the reader why Gideon does what he does next, but rather than be rewarded by becoming king over Israel, he instead opts for a monetary remuneration and exacts a spoil from the men who came to make him their ruler: a gold earring from each one totaling 1,700 shekels of gold. Today, that amount is roughly the equivalent of three million dollars. But these earrings were in addition to all the spoils of war Gideon had already collected from the slain Midianites: crescent ornaments, pendants, purple robes, and even bands from the camels’ necks. And he used this gold to craft a monument of sorts to himself—a golden ephod or decorative vestment—which he then had placed in his home city, Ophrah. While the text is not explicit about the reasons for making this costly and precious vestment, the outcome was disastrous. “Gideon made an ephod, and placed it in his city, Ophrah, and all Israel played the harlot with it there, so that it became a snare to Gideon and his household” (8:27).

While there are many applications to be drawn out of the story of Gideon, one cannot help but see the warning about the perils of misplaced affections; a desire for honor became the snare for all of Israel and perpetuated their propensity towards giving worship and honor to that which was nothing more than an idol. Subtle and seemingly innocuous, human desires can quickly become entities we worship. It is a reminder to ask: What are our desires, and what do they tell us about what we love?

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.” Human beings all have the potential to form ephods, just as Gideon did. But the things we worship and revere are far from innocuous, as Emerson warns. Indeed, long before Emerson, the prophet from Galilee warned that “where our treasure is, there will our hearts be also” (Matthew 6:21). Eventually, what dominates our innermost thoughts and imaginations comes forth as that to which we give our allegiance and devotion. Do we love what ensnares, or what liberates?

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Real World Why

July 1, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

It was the intention of my high school math teacher to demonstrate exactly what every student wonders when drudging through exercises that challenge motivation and patience to the highest degree: Why on earth is this important for the real world? Interspersed throughout his lessons were statistics that were intended to spur us on to greatness: “Life and trigonometry are in the details,” he would say, followed up by statements like: “Had the position for one of the bases of the St. Louis arch been miscalculated by only a few centimeters, the two arms of the arch would have missed one another completely.” Or, “A 1.3 millimeter spacing error in the assembly of a mirror within the Hubble Telescope, in effect, put blinders on the most powerful telescope ever made (and embarrassed a few former math students).”

There was something freeing about his vow to reveal the significance of the tedious coursework he readily assigned. He didn’t see us as indolent students asking “why bother” in harmonized whines (though our motives were undoubtedly mixed and laziness was easily one of the factors). Instead, he made it okay to ask why—even mandatory. We did well to ask what on earth trigonometry had to do with reality because however the question was asked, there really was an answer. And if we would hear the answer, we would find that trigonometry wasn’t nearly as meaningless as we expected.

I have often wondered what went through the minds of the disciples as Jesus spoke of mustard seeds, wine skins, and thieves in the night. In their three years with Jesus, I am sure the question crossed their minds: “What on earth does this parable have to do with the real world?” More than once the gospels impart the disciples questioning amongst one another, “What is he talking about?” Imagine their excitement when Jesus promised that a time was coming soon when he would “speak plainly”!

As humans we are inclined to ask why. It becomes our favorite question as toddlers and something may well be lost when we forget it. The desire to know simply for the sake of knowing is what separates humans from animals, said C.S. Lewis. We are inclined to ask, inasmuch as we must ask, because there is an answer. As T.S. Eliot penned:

We shall not cease from exploration,

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

As the disciples watched and listened, Jesus told a crowd of people a story about seeds and soil. When he finished, they took him aside and asked what on earth he was talking about and why he just couldn’t say it more clearly. “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”

Jesus replied, “I speak to them in parables because ‘though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.’ In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.’ For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes…But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.”(1)

I’m not sure he answered the question they thought they were asking. It reminds me of the circular discussions we had as children and the why-halting words of a parent, “Because I said so.” In effect, Jesus seems to have said, “I speak to them in stories they don’t understand because they don’t understand.” Yet even after calling the disciples blessed because their eyes and ears were getting it, he still explains the parable to them in detail.

What seed had to do with the real world, I’m not sure the disciples saw clearly before it was explained to them. But that the man before them had something more wonderful to do with reality than they could yet grasp was a mystery that opened their eyes along the journey and made them blessed whether they fully comprehended it or not. It seemed to matter more that they were with him—in body, in will, in spirit—than in complete comprehension. And yet he gave them permission—even incentive—to ask why, again and again.

As my math teacher urged us to see that it was our vision of the “real world” that needed revising, so Jesus compels the world to look again. His parables speak into a world that has somehow grown lackluster and leave us asking not only, “What does this have to do with reality?” but more invasively, “What IS reality?” Or, in fact: Who is reality? However the question is asked—with ears hardly hearing, with eyes opened or closed—there is an answer. The vicarious humanity of the Son suggests he indeed has something to do with it.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Matthew 13:13-16.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Souls in Paraphrase

June 30, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“Do you see this woman?” For some reason, the familiar question confronted me this time as if it were aimed as much at me as the guests around the table. Jesus was eating at the house of a religious man who had invited him to dinner. They were reclining at the table when a woman who is very easily remembered for her flaws came stumbling over the dinner guests, making her way to the feet of Jesus. Weeping over them, she broke a costly vial of perfume, wiping his feet dry with her hair. Who didn’t see her? Who didn’t notice her strange commotion? Who among them didn’t immediately recognize how out of place she really was? Yet he asks, “Do you see this woman?”(1) He was either speaking ironically or he saw something the rest did not.

The late seventeenth century poet George Herbert once described prayer in a detailed list of stirring metaphors. Among the first lines, prayer is described as “the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage.” At those words I cannot help but picture this woman lying prostrate at Christ’s feet. As she poured out the perfume, so she poured out her soul. Her prayer was one without words, her worship spilled out as tears upon his feet. Onlookers saw a fallen and foolish woman, an extravagant waste. Jesus saw a heart in pilgrimage, a prayer understood.

I remember the first time I was unapologetically honest with God. My head was bowed but inwardly I was somewhat closer to pounding fists against a divine chest. In silent reflection, I shouted internally. Everyone around me seemed to be experiencing the still, small voice, the gentle touch of a Father’s hand, the assurance of God’s glory and power, the confirmation of a hope and a future, answered prayers, even dramatic miracles. But I couldn’t feel God’s presence, or hear God’s voice at all. I had more questions and uncertainty than answers and assurance. It seemed as though I was relating to an empty throne. Like an attention-starved child, I yelled at God for existing, for forgetting to love me, for failing to understand or care.

In Herbert’s list of words, my prayer this day was perhaps more fitting “reversed thunder” or “Christ-side-piercing spear.” My words pled for the presence of God, for the love and will of a good creator in my life, for complete access to the loving Father I believed was real but just not to me. But what I was asking for sharply (and probably quite irreverently) required the wedge that stood between us to be obliterated, the chasm crossed—indeed, the human death of the incarnate Son to show how deeply the Father longs to gather us up like a hen gathers her chicks, whether we are willing or not. I likely spoke in ignorance and in anger, making claims like Job without understanding. I was likely not as interested in hearing at that point as I was at shouting. But God heard. Responding to my interrogation, God revealed my true question. I was tired of being the stepchild, and yet I had been keeping the Father in my mind as something more like a distant uncle. Seeing me, God showed me what I did not.

“Do you see this woman?” Jesus asked as the others were questioning her resolve and reputation. “I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she has loved much” (Luke 7:47). In a story that calls hearts and eyes to attention, we find that the woman not only saw God when others did not, but more significantly, God saw her when others did not. Pouring out all she had at the feet of the incarnate Son, weeping at the sight of his genuine presence, his human touch, his countercultural kindness, her silent prayer was interpreted, and answered. Then Jesus lifted her head and said to her, “Your sins are forgiven” (7:48).

Fittingly, George Herbert concludes his grand description of prayer as “something understood.” At the feet of God, broken words and hobbling metaphors are translated. Whether we know what we mean or what we say, the vicarious humanity of the Son of God holds the promise that we are heard and known, lifted to the Father by the Spirit as children understood.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Story told in Luke 7:44.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Something Understood

June 27, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In an essay titled “Meditation in a Toolshed,” C.S. Lewis describes a scene from within a darkened shed. The sun was brilliantly shining outside, yet from the inside only a small sunbeam could be seen through a crack at the top of the door. Everything was pitch-black except for the prominent beam of light, by which he could see flecks of dust floating about. Writes Lewis:

“I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving in the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.”(1)

Each time I come to the gospel accounts of the woman with the alabaster jar, I notice something similar. “Do you see this woman?” Jesus asks, as if he is speaking as much to me the reader as he is to the guests around the table. With a jar of costly perfume, she had anointed the feet of Christ with fragrance and tears. She then endured the criticism of those around her because she alone saw the one in front of them. While the dinner crowd was sitting in the dark about Jesus, the woman was peering in the light of understanding. What she saw invoked tears of recognition, sacrifice, and love. Gazing along the beam and at the beam are quite different ways of seeing.

The late seventeenth century poet George Herbert once described prayer as “the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage.” At those words I picture the woman with her broken alabaster jar, wiping the dusty, fragrant feet of Christ with her hair. Pouring out the expensive nard, she seems to pour out her soul. Fittingly, Herbert concludes his grand description of prayer as “something understood.”

The woman with the alabaster jar not only saw the Christ when others did not, Christ saw her when others could not see past her powerless categories. “Do you see this woman?” Jesus asks while the others were questioning her actions past and present. “I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much.”(2) Her soul’s cry was heard; she herself was understood.

There are many ways of looking at Jesus: good man, historical character, interesting teacher, one who sees, one who hears, one who loves. At any point, we could easily walk away feeling like we have seen everything we need to see, when in fact we may have seen very little. The risk of looking again may well change everything.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 212-215.

(2) Luke 7:44-47.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Word and Image

June 25, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The first time I remember hearing the metaphor “rain on your parade,” I was at a parade and it was raining. As a nine year old, the disappointment was memorable. To this day, when I hear the metaphor used, it conveys with heightened success all that the phrase is meant to convey—and arguably more. I remember standing in the rain, watching the once-solid crowd dwindling to nothing, the marching bands abandoning their neat rows, the bright floats bleeding in color. The optimistic few remained in their chairs, somehow assured that the show would go on. But we were not among the faithful few. “I’m sorry that it rained on your parade,” my grandpa said smiling at the perfect metaphor as we piled in the car, soggy and dispirited. With half a parade to remember, we went home, our enthusiasm thoroughly overshadowed by the rain.

We are mistaken when we think of metaphor as an optional device used by poets and writers for fluff and decoration. Much of life is communicated in metaphor. There is so much more to time’s landscape than often can be described plainly. Metaphorical imagery is unavoidable for the plainest of speakers. When I say to my colleague, “Your words hit home” or “I am touched by your message” I don’t mean that her words are reaching out of her book and patting me on the head. And yet, in a way, I do. What she had to say made an impression, opened my mind, and struck a chord; communicating so without metaphor is nearly impossible. It is the case for much of what we have to say: there is no other way to say it.

Language seems to recognize that there is something about life that makes metaphor necessary. Words in and of themselves fall short of conveying certain truths and intended meanings, so instead we draw pictures with language.

At the image of Jesus in his final moments of death, the hymnist inquired, “What language shall I borrow, to thank Thee, dearest friend?” One of the things I find most nourishing about the Christian story is its upholding of this mystery, speaking not in rigid confines but with words that always point beyond themselves, borrowing a language fitting of both the mind and the heart. There is a richness conveyed in page after page of the stories in the Bible that stretches minds and moves emotions. “O Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, how oft I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not have it” (Matthew 23:37). “As far as the east is from the west, so far [God] removes our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12).

Jesus speaks of the profundity of God’s longing using the fierce image of the animal maternal instinct. The psalmist writes of the unimaginable depths of God’s forgiveness using the immeasurable image of east and west on a map. Both paint pictures beyond the words themselves. Both seem to hit as invitations into an intimate, visceral relationship that make any sort of casual encounter seem highly unlikely. God’s own self-revelation in story and flesh vividly indicates that life can’t always be defined plainly, accepted in terms and principles. God is also far beyond the insufficient words we assign. What language can we borrow indeed?

When the Samaritan woman came to draw water at the well, Jesus asked her to give him a drink. The exchange was plainly enough about water but the words were mysteriously about life, though she didn’t realize it at first. Shocked that he, a Jew without a cup, would request a drink from her, a Samaritan without power or position, she asked if he knew what he was doing. And then they had a conversation about thirst that made her so much more aware of own thirst.

“If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?”

Jesus not only invited the woman to see her own desire plainly, he pointed her beyond the metaphor, inviting her into the real and unplumbed hospitality of the one who satisfies. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again,” he said, “but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

In this plain and potent exchange of word and image, the woman at the well found someone who told her “everything [she] ever did,” and drew her into everything she ever needed. “Sir,” the woman replied, “Give me this water.”

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Remembering Forward

June 24, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

For most of us, the act of remembering or revisiting a memory takes us back into the distant past. We remember people, events, cherished locales and details from days long gone. Of course, not all memories are pleasant, and traveling toward the distant past can also resemble something more like a nightmare than a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Nevertheless, even if we have but a few, all of us have cherished memories or times we periodically revisit in daydreams and remembrances.

Nostalgia is one such way of revisiting these times. It can be defined as that bittersweet yearning for things in the past. The hunger it creates in us to return to another time and place lures us away from living in the realities of the present. Nostalgia wears a shade of rose-colored glasses as it envisions days that were always sweeter, richer, and better than the present day. In general, as Frederick Buechner has said, nostalgia takes us “on an excursion from the living present back into the dead past…” or else it summons “the dead past back into the living present.”(1) In either case, nostalgic remembering removes us from the present and tempts us to dwell in the unlivable past. Without finding ways to remember forward—to bring the past as the good, the bad, and the ugly into the present in a way that informs who we are and how we will live here and now—all we are left with is nostalgia.

It is far from a sense of nostalgia that drives the writer of Psalm 78. Instead, the psalmist recalls the history of Israel as a means of remembering forward, bringing the full reality of the past into a place of honest remembrance not just for the present generation, but for the sake of generations to come. The psalmist exhorts the people to listen and incline their ears to the stories of their collective history; the Exodus, the wilderness wanderings, and the entry into the land of promise in which they currently dwell. “We will not conceal them from their children, but tell to the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and his strength and his wondrous works that he has done….That the generation to come might know, even the children yet to be born, that they may arise and tell them to their children, that they should put their confidence in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep the commandments” (Psalm 78:4-7).

Despite bearing witness to the work of God among them, the people of Israel forgot these crucial aspects of their historical narrative. In so doing, they did not keep the covenant and began to live in ways that went contrary to all that defined them. They forgot the deeds and miraculous signs which bore witness to God’s presence. Moreover, they lost faith and did not trust in God’s salvation. The psalmist acknowledges that they all “grieved God in the desert” (v. 40). There are no rose-colored remembrances here, no bittersweet yearnings to which they can return. Rather, the darker parts of their story are remembered even as praise is offered up for God’s long-suffering and loving-kindness. The psalmist urges the people to think about this God in the midst of their present circumstances. What had God done among them in the past in spite of their own failings? And how might they now live in light of that past?

Perhaps it is this collective remembering Jesus has in mind when he instructs those closest to him to remember. Jesus instructs his followers during that last supper together saying “this is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me” he is not calling them to bittersweet yearnings, or simply to remember events lived long ago (Luke 22:19). Rather, he calls them to remember in a way that would shape their living in the present, and for the future. Surely these intimate friends of Jesus could not have understood fully all that was implied in his call to remember him. Yet, they became his witnesses “in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Remembering the death and resurrection of Jesus, was not just a fact they rehearsed, but a lived reality that gave contour and context for their generation, and for generations to come.

In the face of an uncertain future, or perhaps a painful present, we might be tempted to dwell in a nostalgic remembering. We might wish for the comfort of selective memories. Yet, for those who want to follow Jesus we have the opportunity to ask ourselves how we are remembering forward? What stories do our lives tell? How do our lives enact the great narrative of salvation in our present day? As we think about the kind of remembrance that enlivens our present and gives hope for the future, we can join in the song of praise with the psalmist of old: Yes, we your people and the sheep of your pasture give thanks to you forever; to all generations we will tell of your praise!(2)

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Beyond Words: Daily Readings on the ABC’s of Faith (Harper: San Francisco, 2004), 252.

(2) Psalm 79:13.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Ordinary Heroes

June 22, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

by Margaret Manning on June 20, 2014

The question was asked and the room fell silent: “Does anyone ever feel they’ve lived up to their potential?” It was a loaded question, not only because it was asked in a group of persons struggling with vocation but also because the word “potential” is elusive in its definition. What does “potential” mean in a world that views achievement as athletic prowess, celebrity status, or economic success? If the exceptional is the guide for the achievement of one’s potential, how will those of us who live somewhere between the average and the ordinary ever feel we’ve arrived?

The inherent routine and mundane tasks that fill our days contribute to the struggle to understand our potential. How can one possibly feel substantial when one’s day-in, day-out existence is filled with the tedium of housework, paying bills, pulling weeds, and running endless errands? These tasks are not celebrated or sometimes even noticed. They are the daily details that comprise routine. In fact, for artists and bus drivers, homemakers and neurosurgeons, astronauts and cashiers, the days are often filled with repetitive motion, even if there are moments of great challenge or extraordinary success. It is no surprise then, with our societal standards and our routine-filled lives, that we wonder about our potential. Indeed, does much of what we do even matter when it feels so ordinary? Can the “ordinary” contribute to a sense of meeting potential, or does the preponderance of the ordinary simply serve as a perpetual reminder of a failure to thrive?

The so-called “simple lifestyle” movement attempts to locate potential in exactly the opposite ways of much of Western society. In this movement, simplicity unlocks the key to potential, and not acquisition, or achievement, or recognition. Clearing out what clutters and complicates makes room for finding potential in what is most basic and routine. In the Christian tradition, as well, there are many who see true potential and purpose unlocked by the radical call to simplicity. Some of the earliest Christians, who fled the luxury and security of Rome once Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Empire, believed that one’s “holiness” potential could only be achieved within the radical austerity of a monastic cell. There in the cloistered walls where each and every day presented simple routine, repetitive tasks, and the regular rhythm of prayer and worship, perseverance with the ordinary became the path to one’s potential.

Brother Lawrence is one of the most well-known of this type of monastic. In The Practice of Prayer, Margaret Guenther writes, “Brother Lawrence, our patron of housekeeping, was a hero of the ordinary.”1 As one who found his potential in cultivating a profound awareness of God in the ordinary tasks of his day, Brother Lawrence was an “ordinary hero.” While he attended chapel with the other monks, his true sanctuary was amongst the pots and pans of the monastery kitchen. What we may not realize in the popularized retelling of his story is that he actually began by hating his ordinary work. His abbot wrote about him:

The same thing was true of his work in the kitchen, for which he had a naturally strong aversion; having accustomed himself to doing everything there for the love of God, and asking His grace to do his work, he found he had become quite proficient in the fifteen years he had worked in the kitchen.2

Quite proficient in the kitchen. Could it be that Brother Lawrence was able to fulfill his potential by washing dishes? Despite his strong aversion, he found purpose in the very midst of the most mundane and ordinary tasks of life. He fulfilled his potential by focusing on faithfulness. This is not faithfulness that triumphs over the desire to fulfill one’s potential. Indeed, as Guenther describes it, “Faithfulness rarely feels heroic; it feels much more like showing up and hanging in. It is a matter of going to our cell, whatever form that might take, and letting it teach us what it will.”3 Availing himself to consistent faithfulness yielded the blessing of both proficiency and presence—the presence of God—right there in midst of the costly monotony of dirty pots and pans.

My friend Sylvia is one of my ordinary heroes. Sylvia shows up and hangs in there as a paraplegic. She has not been able to use her legs since she was in high school. A horrible accident, when she was just a teenager, took away her ability to walk or to run, and left her without any discernible feeling in the lower half of her body. Her spine severed, the nerves do not receive the necessary information to register sensation or stimulation.

Prior to her accident, Sylvia was an aspiring athlete. Without the use of her legs, this aspiration would be put on hold, but not permanently. Though she is paralyzed in body, she is not paralyzed in spirit. And she eventually competed in several World Championships and in the Paralympic Games. Her determination to excel at world-class competitions, despite her injury, and her intention to live a full life has been an immense inspiration to me. She drives, works at least a forty hour week, and has traveled the world. She has mastered the art of navigating the world in a wheelchair. She has not defined her “potential” by her disability.

Fulfilling one’s potential has little to do with greatness. And yet, the heroism of the ordinary does not preempt the greatness that the world confers to those who have reached their potential with staggering and dramatic achievement; for even those who achieve greatness have faced the drama of routine and the tidal wave of tedium. But to assign the fulfillment of one’s potential solely to great acts and recognition is to miss the blessing that comes from faithful acts of devotion, often done routinely and heroically in the ordinary of our everyday. Perhaps it might be said of us, as it was of Brother Lawrence: “He was more united with God in his ordinary activities.”4

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

1Margaret Guenther, The Practice of Prayer (Boston: Cowley Press, 1998), 113.

2Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, The Practice of the Presence of God, ed. John J. Delaney (New York: Image, 1977), 41.

3Guenther, 112.

4Brother Lawrence, 47.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Think Again – The Marks of Love

June 21, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Ravi Zacharias on June 20, 2014

Years ago I was given the great privilege to be in Shanghai in the home of the famed Chinese evangelist Wang Ming Dao. He told us that he was put in prison for his faith in Jesus Christ, but he soon renounced his faith and was released from his imprisonment. Thereafter, he says, he lived with such torment of his soul that he walked the streets of Beijing saying, “My name is Peter; my name is Peter. I’ve denied my Lord.” Soon, Mao Zedong put him back into prison—this time for eighteen years. Wang Ming Dao said every day in prison he woke up and sang the hymn by the hymn writer Fanny Crosby,

All the way my Savior leads me;

What have I to ask beside?

Can I doubt his tender mercy,

Who through life has been my guide?

Heav’nly peace, divinest comfort,

Here by faith in Him to dwell!

For I know whate’er befall me,

Jesus doeth all things well.

At first the guards tried to silence him. When they weren’t able to succeed, they resignedly put up with his singing. Gradually, as the years went by, they would gather near the opening to his cell to listen as he sang of God’s faithfulness to him. Eventually, they began to ask him to sing to them and to teach them the words of the song. Such is the impact of one who walks faithfully with God.

Many years earlier as a young man trying to come to terms with God’s call in ministry, I stood by a garbage dump in Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam: it was the grave of six missionaries martyred in the Tet Offensive of 1968. All alone, I pondered the price they had paid for following Christ. I asked myself whether any of them would have answered God’s call on their lives if they had known that their lives would end in a garbage dump. God knows our frailties; how loving of Him that He does not allow us to know the future. I prayed there by that grave that God would make me faithful so that I would not focus on the cost, but rather, keep my eyes on the mission to serve Christ with all my heart, soul, and mind, and on the sweetness of the walk with Him, day by day.

The Bible speaks of many who suffered on behalf on the gospel who were unwilling to abandon the precious faith entrusted to them. Consider the apostle Paul, who knew intimately what it was to write, “I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). Think of the stoning of Stephen and the heartache endured by those recorded in Hebrews 11. Furthermore, eleven of Jesus’s twelve disciples died a martyr’s death; not one of them anticipated how they would die when they came to him. If they had known where following Jesus would lead them, one wonders whether any of them would have started on the journey, for as they proved later, they were not particularly brave men.

And yet, faithfulness over the long run is the shining example of what faith is meant to be. The story of the gospel in China is only one recent example. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong burned the seminary libraries, expelled Christians from the country, and declared that the name of Jesus would never be pronounced on Chinese lips again. He tried to bury the Christian faith completely. Today, the Chinese church is the fastest growing church in the world.

Many, many times I have looked back at my own journey. Had I known the cost it would exact, I am absolutely positive that at the very least I would have had grave reservations and trembled at stepping onto the road. What I have concluded is this: The greatest of loves will often come at the greatest of costs. We may never be imprisoned for our faith, but what one deems to be of ultimate value exacts a cost in proportion.

I have a friend who spoke to me of how difficult it was for him when he finally learned the heavy cost of his sin through the forgiveness extended to him. He had betrayed his wife and family and lived through the pain of asking for forgiveness and rebuilding that trust. Somehow over a period of time he assumed that even for them, the hurt was mended and the past expunged from their memory. One day he returned home from work early in the afternoon, just to get a break. Unaware that he was home, his wife was on her knees crying out to God to help her forget the pain she and her children were bearing. It was a rude awakening to him of the cost of his sin and of his family’s sacrificial love. Now multiply that wrong by a limitless number and you will get a glimpse of what Christ bore on the cross for you and for me.

The greatest of loves will never come cheaply. The greatest of loves that you and I can ever experience is an intimate relationship with God, who has given everything for us. And yes, sometimes, it takes everything you’ve got to honor that love and it takes everything you’ve got to honor that trust. Look at any athletes who have succeeded. Discipline and perseverance are indispensable parts of their lives unless they cheat. When you have discipline, you have the marks on the body to demonstrate it.

There is always the temptation to misjudge the cost halfway through the journey. God reminds us again and again that the true measure of gain is only calibrated at the destination. That is why even Moses, when he asked how he would know that God had called him, was told, “When you get there you will know it.” That’s not the answer he wanted but that was the profound lesson he learned.

Fanny Crosby, bearing the marks of blindness in infancy by a traveling doctor’s questionable treatment, sang of God’s faithfulness and love to her dying day—and saw the end with the eyes of her soul:

All the way my Savior leads me,

Cheers each winding path I tread;

Gives me grace for every trial,

Feeds me with the living Bread.

Though my weary steps may falter,

And my soul athirst may be,

Gushing from the Rock before me,

Lo! A spring of joy I see.

That may be why, even in singing the hymn, the last two lines are repeated: “Gushing from the Rock before me, Lo! A spring of joy I see.”

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Transformed

June 20, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

If we were to draw out in symbols and timelines the road maps of our lives, we could pencil in both single and crucial moments as well as entire years marked with particular themes of development. In any picture of a life laid out before us, there are abrupt moments of pivotal formation and gradual phases of transformation. It is a paradox that insight seems to grow gradually and yet it also seems to arrive in overpowering moments of abruptness.

A dramatic example of this comes in the life of Jesus and his disciples. Peter, James, and John found themselves climbing a familiar mountain with Christ, an ordinary event in their lives together. But on this day, they were silenced by the entirely uncommon appearance of Elijah and Moses who started talking with Jesus. It must have seemed a moment of both honor and awe. Peter immediately responded to it. “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah” (Matthew 17:4). But before he had finished speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them and a voice from the heavens thundered, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” The disciples were terrified. And then as suddenly as it all began, they looked up and saw no one but Jesus.

There are transforming moments in our lives that seem isolated in both time and vividness. We remember them as mountaintops or downfalls, points in life lifted above or plummeting below the majority of the map. But are they not also much more than this? Whether distinguished by joy or pain, a transforming moment is always more than a moment. Such moments are no more isolated in the pictures of our lives than they are isolated in the picture of reality. The disciples were never the same after their three years with Jesus, through ordinary meals and extraordinary miracles, distracted crowds and disruptive mountaintops.

Professor and theologian James Loder was on vacation with his family when they noticed a motorist off to the side of the road waving for help. In his book The Transforming Moment, he describes kneeling at the front fender of the broken-down car, his head bent to examine the flat tire, when he was abruptly alerted to the sound of screeching brakes. A motorist who had fallen asleep at the wheel was jarred awake seconds before his vehicle crashed into the disabled car alongside the road and the man who knelt beside it. Loder was left pinned between the car he was trying to repair and his own.

Years later, he was compelled to describe the impact of a moment marked by abrupt pain, and yet unarguably something much more. Writes Loder, “At the hospital, it was not the medical staff, grateful as I was for them, but the crucifixes—in the lobby and in the patients’ rooms—that provided a total account of my condition. In that cruciform image of Christ, the combination of physical pain and the assurance of a life greater than death gave objective expression and meaning to the sense of promise and transcendence that lived within the midst of my suffering.”(1)

This encounter with God, like the Transfiguration of Christ on the mountainside to a small group of frightened disciples, did not merely transform a moment; it was a moment that transformed reality and thus, the whole of life. Writes Loder, “Moments of transforming significance radically reopen the question of reality.”(2)

When the disciples came to the end of their mountaintop encounter and looked up, they saw only Jesus. Moses and Elijah were no longer there; the cloud that enveloped them disappeared and the heavens ceased to speak. But Jesus was fully and humanly present to them, the glimpse of God in that transforming moment on the mountain a radical reality that would shape all of life.

To borrow from Emily Dickinson, there are times when truth must dazzle gradually, until it is given its proper place. Other times we seem to find ourselves moved nearly to blindness as we encounter more than we have eyes yet to see. Sometimes, like Peter, we interpret these moments of transcendence imperfectly at first, and it is in living with the moment that we learn to see it more. The Spirit is at work even in the deciphering, and in the final examination, the content of our transforming moments is Jesus alone, the transfigured one, the transforming one, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard Publishing, 1989), 2.

(2) Ibid., back cover.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Summer in My Heart

June 19, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

All that is found in the promises of summer has long been a theme on the lips of poets and songwriters. Poet or otherwise, I imagine we have all agreed at some point with Shakespeare: “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”

It is the time of year when we savor the days of summer, and recall what it felt like to run home from the last day of school with three months in our back pocket. For me summer vacations call to mind the shores of Lake Michigan, a scenic reminder of the origin of the word “vacation” itself; the Latin word “vacatio” means freedom.

Even so, we are sadly aware it is a freedom that does not last. Even as children on summer break we knew that vacation would end and summer would fade away. It is, in fact, this quality that makes vacations all the more sought-after; it is time set aside, time that shouts particularly of meaning because of the time with which it so contrasts. Yet regardless of its short lease, there seems a promise within the freeing days of summer that captures our hearts and remains with us through the longest of winters.

A poem by C.S. Lewis suggests that the promise we look for is that the seasons of life will one day come to a grinding halt and death will be no more. It is the hopeful possibility that we were created to know a freedom that endures. Writes Lewis:

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear

‘This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

‘Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees

This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.

‘This year time’s nature will no more defeat you,

Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

‘This time they will not lead you round and back

To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.

‘This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,

We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

‘Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,

Quick, quick, quick, quick!—the gates are drawn apart.’(1)

What if the changing seasons, the fading of flowers, and the rebirth of summer are all signposts of the eternal? In his wisdom, King Solomon saw that written upon the seasons of time is the signature of the one who made them. “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot… He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2,11). Rising sun and emerging summer declare that the heavens will neither forget nor forsake. Upon each waking flower is written the promise of resurrection.

It is this weighted promise the Christian worldview carries through the seasons: Christ has stopped the cycle of death and is coming back to bring us where he is. The effect of such a promise on the life of a believer is well illustrated in hymnist Fanny Crosby. She wrote:

I know in whom my soul believes,

I know in whom I trust;

The Holy One, the merciful,

the only wise and just.

I know in whom my soul believes,

and all my fears depart;

For though the winter winds may blow,

’tis summer in my heart.

Crosby wrote of the Christian hope she saw written across her life. Though blinded as an infant by a doctor’s error, she spoke of the light of Christ and carrying the promise of summer with her. Every season presents a similar option of holding near the hope of Christ and the promise of resurrection, until a day when summer comes true.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) C.S. Lewis, “What the Bird Said Early in the Year,” Poems, (Harcourt: San Diego, 1992), 71.

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