National Day of Thanksgiving... And Ten Years of Marriage

I suppose it is quite fitting that the occasion of my tenth wedding anniversary would coincide with Thanksgiving Day.  As I realized that just a week ago, I ruminated on how significant and appropriate it was on so many levels.  Also, not by coincidence, I am taking a course on Civil War history.  So as I contemplated the history of the Civil War and the history of the National Day of Thanksgiving, I found the parallels between my marriage and this day’s history to be striking and apropos.

Thanksgiving as a national observance started in 1863 when President Lincoln issued a declaration ordering the last Thursday in November to be a National Day of Thanksgiving.  1863 had seen significant Union war progress and was viewed as a strategic turning point for the Federal effort in the traumatizing American Civil War.  After the disasters of two routing defeats at Manassas Junction, a humiliating retreat from the Virginia Peninsula, and further leadership failures at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the Federal cause in the early Spring of 1863 seemed doomed.  But the dramatic turns of events of July 1863 in the decisive victory at Gettysburg and the capture of Vicksburg gave hope to the Union cause.  Within this historic backdrop, Lincoln issued his declaration, giving thanks to God for His love and mercies bestowed upon the nation.

Similarly, in my life, I have had countless failures in my marriage.  At so many times in the past ten years, nothing but God’s kind providence and gracious love to me has kept my marriage together.  In the past three years, He has seen fit to demonstrate that my wife’s and my bonds of commitment to each other are unbreakable… bendable, and subject to remaining sin, but unbreakable.  In this context, I view our past ten years from the perspective of November 1863, and indeed give thanks for God’s mercy upon us.

Of course, the year 1864 offers other parallels in my metaphor.  1864 has been remembered as the year that saw Lincoln’s reelection, essentially sealing the fate of the Confederacy from a standpoint of political willpower.  It saw the triumph of Sherman in Atlanta.  But 1864 was also the year in which the Union suffered their most casualties due to the dogged, stubborn, persistent attacks by Grant’s Army in the eastern theater of action.  It saw the confused, fiery, terrifying combat in the Wilderness.  It saw the whole-sale slaughter of Spotsylvania Courthouse.  It saw the Fredericksburg-like disaster at Cold Harbor.  It saw the depressing trench-warfare siege of Petersburg.  Yet, despite these trials, Thanksgiving Day was celebrated by these Union soldiers on the last day of November 1864.  The civilians of the North, grateful for the tremendous cost and sacrifice poured out by their boys in blue, generously provided the entrenched units at Petersburg with a trueThanksgiving feast… incidentally exposing many to northeast staples like roast turkey and cranberries for the first time.  Thanksgiving was given to God for His aid and succor throughout that difficult year.

As I celebrate my ten years of marriage on this first Day of National Thanksgiving that coincides with said wedding anniversary, I consider the metaphor of the future years of 1864 in my wife’s and my life together.  We will doubtless encounter our own Wilderness… beset by enemies and terrors unseen.  We will certainly feel lost and hopeless in the tangle of those thickets and may entertain tempting thoughts that God has abandoned us.  We will doubtless encounter terror and fear, facing difficult, heavy entrenchments at our own “Bloody Angles”, having to dutifully fulfill Biblical orders to take the position despite how much it costs us.  We will doubtless face complete defeats when we, in our own arrogance and self-confidence, charge towards objectives without the assistance of God and be severely defeated in our own Cold Harbors.  We will most assuredly encounter objectives too difficult to take on our own and be forced to besiege our own Petersburgs, dependent upon the assistance of Almighty God for victory… which may not come for months or years.  And lastly, we will doubtless encounter the grace and mercies of the benevolence of our brothers and sisters in Christ who will provide the mentorship, counsel, and provisions that will strengthen our marriage and our resolve to see the struggle to our own Appomattox.

My Schatz (German for “treasure”), I love you more than ever before in these previous ten years.  Most of them have been difficult, and most secular counselors would have counted us as loss on more than one occasion.  Yet your love and commitment to me has only gown and strengthened our love.  Your ability to forgive has been a mirror of God’s unconditional love in forgiving me.  I find strength to face my own besetting sins in that I know I don’t have to do anything to earn your love… but I do it because I love you.  Love is an action… and not an emotion.  I pray for you and our children daily and I thank God every day… not just today… for His giving you to me, and me to you.

Finding Balance – Two Recent Examples

Example 1:  My first impression of the newest development in the scandal that has become professional cycling was one of regret and empathy.  I expressed this to one of my Christian friends in my workplace and was surprised to hear how much disdain he had for Lance Armstrong.  He filled me in on his back-story; of how he basically abandoned his family to pursue his fifth, and following Tour de-France competitions.  Regardless of the details, it highlighted something to me.  As much as I agree politically with the concept of what Rush Limbaugh calls the American Rugged Individualism, it can easily be taken to the extreme.

While statists like Obama and the rest of his predecessors, blatantly seek to kill the concept of God and replace Him with Government, not so blatantly, but perhaps more deviously, individualists just as easily kill God and replace Him with … themselves.  We shower admiration upon successful individuals in America.  People like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods are all lauded for their individual success; proof of the do-it-yourself attitude, determination, and drive that “made America great”.  But what of their wives?  What of their families?  What of their relationship with their creator.

Example 2:  I just recently saw one of those patently trite, banal, and intellectually-shallow little photos probably posted by some hack from MoveOn.org.  It was on Facebook and was of course, dutifully shared by other vapid, and intellectually uncurious emotional basket cases; the typical types that populate the left.  In the picture, it depicted on one side, an unborn child in the womb, and on the other, a starving, child raised in squalor and abject poverty.  In the caption it asked how Pro-lifers can be for saving the life of the unborn and not for saving the life of the impoverished.  Not wanting to throw pearls before swine, I declined pointing out that socialism and the other programs sponsored and popularized by leftist statists were responsible for more death and misery in the past 150 years than any Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital’s could have ever produced over the time frame of 3 millennia, but I digress.  But it did make me think that in our zeal as Christians to defend black/white moral imperatives such as homosexuality and abortion, we lose perspective on Christ’s command to love.  Now, I’m not advocating throwing money at the first pan-handler that comes around trying to score some scratch for their next bottle of MD20, but Christ fed the poor, healed the sick, and ministered to the destitute.  How many of us would invite a teenager who just aborted her baby into our homes to feed her and attempt to minister to her soul?

Balance is necessary in all things.  While believing in Calvinist theology is all fine and dandy as an intellectual exercise, if taken out of practicality, it is a detriment to practical Christian living and evangelism.  While being in a Charismatic church, getting filled with the Spirit, and speaking in tongues may leave one in a momentary spiritual euphoria, it also leaves one foundationless and unprepared for the struggles of a walk with Christ.  Balance is the key.  To paraphrase, Churchill famously said that young people who are conservative have no heart and that older folks who are liberals have no head.  When finding a balanced perspective of what our duties first as Christians and then as citizens, it’s imperative that we have both.

False Conversions: The Suicide of the Church

So today I walked out of the military chapel service before it started because I saw they had invited that female chaplain of whom I spoke of several weeks ago.  I just could not succumb to that again.  I instead went back to my room and watched a sermon delivered by my old pastor Mark Chanski.  It was entitled False Conversions: The Suicide of the Church and was based upon a sermon delivered by Washington D.C. Pastor Mark Devers.  My how that message spoke to my soul.

I contemplated why lately especially I have been so desirous of sound, Biblical, expository preaching and outside of the obvious I-crave-what-I-no-longer-have; I realize I crave it because of what it does to me.  When I leave a service filled with the empty vapid, God is love fluff and stuff drivel peddled by ‘preachers’ concerned only with the number of seats filled on Sundays, I find myself, even subconsciously, buying in to this mess.  When I do not hear the word sin, nor the word Christ… let along hell, in a message, I once again forget the true nature of myself apart from Christ… that of a worthless, hell deserving sinner incapable of good aside from God’s rich grace.  Into that slump I fall and wonder why, days later I feel so empty, lost, and apart from fellowship with my Savior.  When, however, I am consistently reminded on Sunday of how wretched we all truly are; how completely lost and hopeless we are; how justified God’s wrath against sinners truly is; and how precious, full, and free the gift of Christ is; I leave with a true, balanced understanding of who I am, joyous of the richness of grace in Christ and overcome with a sense of the debt of love and gratitude I owe that compels me to walk faithfully in His footsteps.

This is the real, personal reason why I cannot abide to be among and in these so-called churches that neglect that kind of teaching.  And the heart-stopping moment of the sermon came when Pastor Mark clubbed me with 2 Timothy 4:3, 4:  “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.”

I have rarely been struck with how current a passage in the Scriptures can be.  This was one of those times.  Paul could have written those very words sitting in Savannah, GA, on the 3^rd of May 2012, rather than from some prison in Rome to his protégé Timothy in 66 AD.

Light is a Biblical Metaphor for Christ, the Word, and Truth - Not Some Mushy Feeling of God's Love

Words cannot adequately describe how completely spiritually empty, famished, and longing I am right now.  I just suffered through the most intellectually vapid, nonsensical, self-serving rambling disguised as a sermon delivered by a female chaplain.  Now, the Pauline prohibitions of women in the ministry aside (which, incidentally is just a symptom of the greater problem to be discussed further herein), I don’t understand what people think the role of the church service is!  She started by reading I John 1 and the first two verses of chapter 2 (and it happened to be the only time the Word was even mentioned).  She then used that “Light” metaphor to spend fifteen minutes telling us how some nonsense about Holy Spirit light both spiritually and elementally … streaming through stain-glass … called her to the ministry at age 17, compelling her to ‘fill in’ preaching to a bunch of stiff white folks (she was white too, but I am certain she glared over at me during this time) and persuaded them to leap from their seats in applause at the end.  Then, she went on to butcher the Light metaphor further, ascribing it to God helping people who are hurting, blasé, blasé, blasé… I kind of faded out at that point.

I as a twelve-year old had a better understanding of scripture than that woman.  Why?  Because I read the Word of God.  I sat under the expository preaching of the Word of God.  At age twelve I could have told her how utterly ridiculous that ‘message’ was.  First off, the metaphor of Light throughout scripture.  Just off the top of my head, Psalm 119:105 states that “Thy WORD is a lamp unto my feet and a LIGHT unto my path.”  Then, John … yes, the same John who later wrote that passage she read … in opening his gospel, spoke of how the Word was God, was Jesus, was the LIGHT, and how the DARKness didn’t comprehend it.

Light throughout the Bible IS the WORD of God.  But, then again, if they actually studied the Bible in some of these seminaries, I guess it wouldn’t be a problem.  Again, if they actually read the Bible, they wouldn’t have ordained women either.

It’s gonna be a long, long year.