Talk Saves Lives and Things Get Better - Purity 704
Purity 704 04/13/2022 Purity 704 Podcast
Good morning,
Today’s photo a desert peak in the background of cacti, and some
purple and yellow desert fauna underneath a clear blue sky comes to us from a
friend who was traveling out west and who captured this sight last Friday at the
Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix Arizona.
Well, It’s Wednesday and I thought that this desert peak was an
adequate photo to represent reaching the
“hump” of the work week and the mention of the city of Phoenix could help us to
rise from the ashes and take flight as the bearers of hope as we progress through
Holy Week to declare the good news of life everlasting for all those who put
their faith in Jesus Christ who rose from the dead. And even though the desert could be a dry and
lifeless place, the green, yellow, and purple colors of the desert fauna in
today’s photo shows us that we can survive and thrive even in hostile
environments and difficult circumstances.
The world is a hard place and last night I was reminded that
many people are struggling just to survive in it. I worked part time as a psychiatric
technician for a Mobile Crisis Assessment Team for Columbia and Greene Counties
and I see that the greatest toll of the consequences of our decadent, drug
fueled, confused, and godless society is often paid by the youth, as we had to
offer support and counsel last night in two cases that involved children with
thoughts of suicide.
In one case, a child was living in an environment where substance
abuse, domestic squabbles, and drug dealing where the soup du jour of everyday
life. This neglect of this home environment and pressures to conform to the
images and pressures on social media had caused a twelve year old girl to
tearfully admit to school officials that they had a specific plan to take their
life and had been virtually starving themselves without their parent’s
knowledge.
In another case, a male teenager’s confusion over their gender
identity and other life pressures that come from school and a family separated by
divorce had caused them to google “how to make a noose” and to watch videos on
YouTube that demonstrated how one could take their life by hanging.
But luckily, talk saves lives and these two children’s plans
were discovered and they were being supported by school staff, mental health professionals,
and family members to get the help they needed in crisis.
I spoke to the male teenager’s parent to assure them that being
present and showing loving concern for their son and to utilize the network of
support that was available to them was the way to keep their child safe and to
help them through this difficult period.
Knowing that there is a problem is the first step in solving it and now
that the darkness of this young man’s depression had been exposed to the light,
his family, friends, and concerned teachers and mental health professionals can
give him the support he needs.
And in the other case, I checked in with this twelve year old
girl to make sure she was eating and was doing ok after revealing her secret
pain. I asked the standard questions about
suicidal ideation and making sure she had a safety plan in place to make sure
she had means to cope and to seek help if her thoughts turned dark but then I
was just sort of at a loss for what to say.
Not surprisingly, she wasn’t very talkative and there was a big silence as
I struggled to think of what to say to this young girl to give her assurance
and hope.
What does a 50 year old stranger have to say to someone in her
position?
Honestly for a moment I was at a complete loss as to what to say
but then I was moved to assure her that things could get better by sharing a
bit of my story with her.
I confessed to her that while I didn’t know what it was like to
be in her shoes, I could relate to her difficulties of being a middle schooler
with thoughts of suicide. I shared how I
was an overweight kid and how I didn’t really have any good friends during those
middle school years and how I had suffered from depression and thoughts of
taking my life. I confessed that my father had guns and that I had a vague plan
of taking my life with one of them. I
confessed that I didn’t go through with it because I was afraid to die and I
only wanted to not feel so bad anymore. I
had made vague statements of killing myself and my parents had chastised me for
having those thoughts and even though their concern wasn’t a hallmark moment their
words were enough to stop those thoughts of suicide and help me past my
crisis.
I also shared about the
difficulties of growing up in the midst of Covid-19 and shared the story of how
my son struggled with purpose when the pandemic shut down his dream of starring
in the spring musical and in person meetings causing him to need to complete
his graduating requirement via zoom sessions of summer school. But I shared that even though He struggled
with depression and purposelessness for a season, things got better. He
enrolled in college and ended up with a starring roll in last autumn’s
production of Little Women at Hudson Valley Community college.
My basic meandering message was intended to assure this young
girl that things could and would get better if she just did what she needed to do
each day to learn and to grow into the person she wanted to be, regardless of
the difficulties at home or in the world.
My conversation showed me that there was a purpose to my pain.
Now that I survived it, all these years later I could share about overcoming it,
and I could share my son’s story too, and use them to give someone hope to
overcome their crisis.
The Lord calls us to represent His kingdom on earth by loving
our neighbors as ourselves and in these two instances I feel that my simple
presence, advice, and testimony was used by the Lord to show these hurting
people the love He has for us even though I didn’t specifically mention God. God gave us life and wants us to live. He recognizes the difficulties of a world
that is broken by sin but He calls us to follow Him to overcome it and He uses
us to help others to see the goodness of life and the way out of the
darkness.
So remind yourself, that although you may be struggling that you
are not alone. Others have been through similar
struggles and some are suffering through worse situations right now. But none
of it is without a purpose. These situations should draw us to seek the
meaning, purpose, and comfort that comes from God and our going through trials
should cause us to develop patience and empathy for others.
When we suffer and survive, we can rise from the ashes and use
our testimony to show others that there is a reason to live and a means to make
it through. So celebrate your life today by thanking God for bringing you
through all your trials and for giving you the opportunity today to rejoice and
to possibly one day use your story to show someone else that there is
hope.
To paraphrase from Brandon Lake and Elevation Worship’s song “Grave
into Gardens” Our Lord is “the God of the mountain and the God of the valley, and
there’s not a place that His mercy and grace won’t find us again. So keep walking and talking with God and
reach out to others to let them know that life is worth living and if they way
the way of goodness and righteousness they too can overcome even the darkest
night of the soul.
______________________________________________________________
Today’s Bible verses comes to us from “The NLT Bible Promise
Book for Men”.
This
morning’s meditation verses are:
Luke
6:38 (NLT2)
38
Give,
and you will receive. Your gift will return to you in full—pressed down, shaken
together to make room for more, running over, and poured into your lap. The
amount you give will determine the amount you get back.”
Today’s verse are the words of Jesus that tell
us to give and we will receive and He assures us that we will receive far more
than we give.
Is Jesus some prosperity gospel preacher who is
telling us to “sow a seed” to receive an abundance of wealth.
I don’t think so. Jesus didn’t live in luxury. No, to discern the meaning of a verse in the
Bible we should always consider the context. And if we look at the preceding verse we learn
that Christ was talking about not judging people and forgiving them.
So when Christ says to give here, we could
easily make the case that Christ is saying to liberally give forgiveness to
others.
Did your pastor not teach you that?
Look at the immediate context and the following
verses. Nothing about tithes and offerings.
Nothing about wealth and prosperity.
Just a whole lot on forgiveness, not judging others, and being more
concerned with our personal sin than others.
So take that, press it down, shake it all about,
and let the humility of forgiving others and conforming yourself to the image
of Christ by repenting of your personal failures and sins run over in your
life.
We have to know that Christ calls us to follow
Him. He doesn’t call us to spend money to earn money. He calls us to give of ourselves to His
kingdom by forgiving others and by becoming more like Him.
Know His word and question anyone who would use
this verse to motivate you to give financially with the vague promise of
material or spiritual blessings. Our
faith calls us to follow Jesus not to play some giving slot machine of
spirirual or financial materialism.
God wants us to give ourselves to Him and to
others. So ante up and invest yourself
into sanctifying yourself and serving others by showing them the love of God
here on earth as it is in heaven and you will receive far more than you will
ever give.
As always, I
invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I always share insights from prominent
Christian theologians and counselors to assist my brothers and sisters in
Christ with their walk.
Today we continue
sharing from John Piper’s “Don’t Waste Your Life” .
As
always, I share this information for educational purposes and encourage all to
purchase John Pipers’ books for your own private study and to
support his work. This resource is available on many websites for
less than $5.00.
The Man with Long
Hair and Knickers
But God was graciously
posting compelling warnings along the way. In the fall of 1965 Francis
Schaeffer delivered a week of lectures at Wheaton College that in 1968 became
the book, The God Who Is There. The
title shows the stunning simplicity of the thesis. God is there. Not in here, defined and shaped by my own desires.
God is out there. Objective. Absolute
Reality (which Schaeffer pronounced something like “Reawity”). All that looks
like reality to us is dependent on God. There is creation and Creator, nothing
more. And creation gets all its meaning and purpose from God.
Here
was an absolutely compelling road sign. Stay on the road of objective truth.
This will be the way to avoid wasting your life. Stay on the road that your
fiery evangelist father was on. Don’t forsake the plaque on your kitchen wall.
Here was weighty intellectual confirmation that life would be wasted in the
grasslands of existentialism. Stay on the road. There is Truth. There is a
Point and Purpose and Essence to it all. Keep searching. You will find it.
I
suppose there is no point lamenting that one must spend his college years
learning the obvious—that there is Truth, that there is objective being and
objective value. Like a fish going to school to learn that there is water, or a
bird that there is air, or a worm that there is dirt. But it seems that, for
the last two hundred years or so, this has been the main point of good
education. And its opposite is the essence of bad education. So I don’t lament
the years I spent learning the obvious.
The Man Who Taught Me to See
Indeed, I thank God for
professors and writers who devoted tremendous creative energies to render
credible the existence of trees and water and souls and love and God. C. S.
Lewis, who died the same day as John F. Kennedy in 1963 and who taught English
at Oxford, walked up over the horizon of my little brown path in 1964 with such
blazing brightness that it is hard to overstate the impact he had on my life.
Someone
introduced me to Lewis my freshman year with the book, Mere Christianity. For the next five or six years I was almost
never without a Lewis book near at hand. I think that without his influence I
would not have lived my life with as much joy or usefulness as I have. There
are reasons for this.
He
has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness
is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not
determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing
is valuable for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and
opened for me the wisdom of the ages. To this day I get most of my soul-food
from centuries ago. I thank God for Lewis’s compelling demonstration of the
obvious.
He
demonstrated for me and convinced me that rigorous, precise, penetrating logic
is not opposed to deep, soul-stirring feeling and vivid, lively—even
playful—imagination. He was a “romantic rationalist.” He combined things that
almost everybody today assumes are mutually exclusive: rationalism and poetry,
cool logic and warm feeling, disciplined prose and free imagination. In
shattering these old stereotypes, he freed me to think hard and to write
poetry, to argue for the resurrection and compose hymns to Christ, to smash an
argument and hug a friend, to demand a definition and use a metaphor.
Lewis
gave me an intense sense of the “realness” of things. The preciousness of this
is hard to communicate. To wake up in the morning and be aware of the firmness
of the mattress, the warmth of the sun’s rays, the sound of the clock ticking,
the sheer being of things (“quiddity” as he calls it). He helped me become
alive to life. He helped me see what is there in the world—things that, if we
didn’t have, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore.
He made me more alive to beauty. He put my soul on notice that there are daily
wonders that will waken worship if I open my eyes. He shook my dozing soul and
threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and
hell broke into my world with glory and horror.
He
exposed the sophisticated intellectual opposition to objective being and
objective value for the naked folly that it was. The philosophical king of my
generation had no clothes on, and the writer of children’s books from Oxford
had the courage to say so.
You can’t go on “seeing through” things
forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something
through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the
street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It
is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through
everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is
an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.
Oh,
how much more could be said about the world as C. S. Lewis saw it and the way
he spoke. He has his flaws, some of them serious. But I will never cease to
thank God for this remarkable man who came onto my path at the perfect moment.
A Fiancée Is a Stubbornly Objective Fact
There was another force
that solidified my unwavering belief in the unbending existence of objective
reality. Her name was Noël Henry. I fell in love with her in the summer of
1966. Way too soon probably. But it has turned out okay; I still love her.
Nothing sobers a wandering philosophical imagination like the thought of having
a wife and children to support.
We
were married in December 1968. It is a good thing to do one’s thinking in
relation to real people. From that moment on, every thought has been a thought
in relationship. Nothing is merely an idea, but an idea that bears on my wife,
then later, on my five children. I thank God for the parable of Christ and the
church that I have been obliged to live these thirty-five years. There are
lessons in life—the unwasted life—that I would probably never have learned
without this relationship (just as there are lessons in lifelong singleness
that will probably be learned no other way).
I Bless You, Mono, for My Life
In the fall of 1966 God
was closing in with an ever narrowing path for my life. When he made his next
decisive move, Noël wondered where I had gone. The fall semester had started,
and I did not show up in classes or in chapel. Finally she found me, flat on my
back with mononucleosis in the health center, where I lay for three weeks. The
life plan that I was so sure of four months earlier unraveled in my fevered
hands.
In
May I had felt a joyful confidence that my life would be most useful as a
medical doctor. I loved biology; I loved the idea of healing people. I loved
knowing, at last, what I was doing in college. So I quickly took general
chemistry in summer school so I could catch up and take organic chemistry that
fall.
Now
with mono, I had missed three weeks of organic chemistry. There was no catching
up. But even more important, Harold John Ockenga, then pastor of Park Street
Church in Boston, was preaching in chapel each morning during the spiritual
emphasis week. I was listening on WETN, the college radio station. Never had I
heard exposition of the Scriptures like this. Suddenly all the glorious
objectivity of Reality centered for me on the Word of God. I lay there feeling
as if I had awakened from a dream, and knew, now that I was awake, what I was
to do.
Noël
came to visit, and I said, “What would you think if I didn’t pursue a medical
career but instead went to seminary?” As with every other time I’ve asked that
kind of question through the years, the answer was, “If that’s where God leads
you, that’s where I’ll go.” From that moment on I have never doubted that my calling
in life is to be a minister of the Word of God.[1]
---------------------------more
tomorrow------------------------
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Encouragement for the Path of Christian Discipleship
[1]
John Piper, Don’t Waste Your
Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2003), 18–22.
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