Eternal Ornaments

At a Christmas ornament exchange many years ago, seven friends shared their testimony. A testimony is always a story, with a fraught beginning, a consequential development, and a transformative ending. Here are their stories, with names changed to protest their privacy.

Debbie’s life was chaos, owing to a dysfunctional family: abusive dad, passive mom, no system or order in the household.  Her father made plenty of money, but she remembers walking to school in clothes so old her teachers thought she was a charity case.  She was brought to the Lord sweetly and naturally, through high school friends who sought her out (she didn’t realize until later that they were evangelizing her).  Her life since has had its dramatic ups and downs, but she is ever “in his grip.”

Donna’s life was ignorance.  Her father wasn’t around much, especially after the War began.  At the age of three she was evacuated from London because of the blitz, and lived with two families for most of the duration.  Looking back, she can see the seeds planted in her early life, such as an occasional Sunday school, that finally sprouted when she read a gospel tract her husband brought home.  It struck like an arrow, filling her heart with joy. She was elated, and believed at once, eagerly kneeling to accept Christ as Savior.  Over the years, she’s become more grounded, learning that being a Christian doesn’t solve all your problems.  But she’s not going anywhere else.  Her favorite verse: “In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”

Linda felt unloved and insecure.  Her father died before she could know him and her step-dad, whom she called Daddy, never took her to his heart; when his own kids were born his favoritism was obvious and hurtful.  When a chain of circumstances brought Daddy’s mother to live nearby, this godly woman took Linda to church.  Though hostile to faith, her stepdad welcomed the Sunday-morning time he could spend with his “real” kids.  They never came to the Lord, but Linda did.  If her earthly father didn’t love her, she knew her heavenly Father did.  Love was at the center of her conversion, and ever since she has felt secure.

Melissa’s life was darkness.  Drug abuse, alcohol, and violence ruled the house where she grew up; she knew little else.  Certainly no gospel.  Somehow she got through high school and scraped up enough ambition to go to college.  It was there, while partying on the weekends and looking for love in all the wrong places, she met some Christian girls who started inviting her to church and Bible study.  Her conversion was quick and complete.  No backsliding; she changed like that (snap).  Her language cleaned up, her sleeping-around stopped, she was delivered from darkness into the kingdom of his glorious light.

Tabitha’s life was marked by fear.  She was afraid of everything: danger, death, hell—and this at five years old!  She knew about God because her parents taught her, but somehow she missed hearing about God’s provision for sin.  This is the classic sequence for conversions in the past: first the wrath, then the grace.  She was a tender plant, extraordinarily sensitive. Her conviction was real, even at that age—she remembers lying in bed, unable to sleep after a heinous (to her mind) misdeed that day.  She had to get up and confess to her parents, who, in the middle of the night, shared the rally good news with her.  She has believed ever since, and her life now is marked with confidence.

Tami was always Christian—can’t remember a time when she didn’t believe.  But somewhere between youth and adulthood faith is tested and personalized and purified of baby idols; for her that happened with a traumatizing church  split that put a chasm between her and close friends.  Who quickly became former friends.  She’s grateful for the ways this crisis shored up her faith and reinforced her walk, but the walk itself seemed a foregone conclusion.

As for me, my life was complacence.  My family saw to it that I was in church three times a week.  I knew all the answers, memorized the verses, sang all the verses (or at least the first, second, and last) of all the standard hymns by heart.  Sometimes I got the impression that being a Christian was pretty easy: here’s what God wants, just follow these rules.  But meandering along path, not paying much attention, I tripped right into sin.  And self-justifying, which is even worse.  I could have used a little fear of the Lord, but I never stopped believing—at the back of my mind was always a conviction that what I’d been taught was basically true, and “to whom else can I go?”  I walked back the same way I’d walked away, but this time knowing much more about myself and the depth of my need.

We hear that “There are many roads to God.”  Actually, no; but there are many paths to the one road.  Out of seven women, only three of us grew up in anything like a Christian home, so family isn’t always the path.  None were influenced by a husband or boyfriend, so romance isn’t always the path.  For two, friends in school showed the way; for one, a step-grandmother; for Tabitha and me (though at vastly different ages), it was the direct and pointed conviction of the Holy Spirit. 

“This promise is for you and your children, and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself” (Acts 2:39).  Near by and far off, he calls.  At this minute, and the next, and the next, He’s calling to himself.  I sometimes think about all the murders being committed, all the outrages, all the unspeakable crimes going on right now.  Somewhere in this world it’s always midnight and someone who should be sleeping peacefully is instead acting violently. 

Back in the days when television stations used to sign off at 11 p.m. , the official tagline was, “It’s eleven o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”  God knows where his children are, and right now, this minute, he is calling them out of darkness and into his glorious light. He is creating ornaments for his everlasting tree.

One Cranky Prophet

I’ve been reading Isaiah this month, two chapters a day.  Reading Isaiah is like riding a yo yo: up and down; up and down.  The mood changes almost mid-sentence from righteous judgment to gracious reconciliation—but let’s start at the beginning.

The LORD strides upon the scene, calling out his grievance to the heavens and the earth:

“Children have I reared and brought up

but they have rebelled against me.”  (Is. 1:2b)

This is the problem: the rest of Isaiah (and all the prophets, come to think of it) chew on that theme: Ah, sinful nation: sick desolate, ruined.  These are the judgments of the Lord, but also the natural consequences of cutting themselves off from the very Creator who put the breath in their bodies.  That breath remains and not only commits Israel to him, but commits him to Israel.  He has bound himself to them, and difficulties immediately arise.

For the first four chapters (and throughout the book) a personality emerges that a psychiatrist would label schizophrenic.  Reams of condemnation roll out, alternating with brief passages that look like the speaker is reconsidering: “Come, let us reason together . . .”

“. . . they shall beat their swords into ploughshares . . .”

“Zion shall be redeemed. . . ”

“It shall be well with the righteous . . .”

The weight of sin and rebellion drags the oracle down, down, down—but still it struggles to rise.

Chapters 5 and 6 forge a theme for the first “Book” of Isaiah (chapters 1-39).  The case against “my people” is accurate and detailed and could apply to “our people” today.  And if our people complain about His peevishness, vindictiveness, arbitrariness, and cruelty, here’s his answer:

The LORD of hosts is exalted in justice,

and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness.

He can’t be holy and righteous without judging.  And he can’t judge without holiness and righteousness.

But—what about those people, whom he made and shaped and breathed immortal souls into?  As the rock-ribbed Calvinists say, he has every right to send all of them to hell.  There is none righteous; no, not one.  But—

He has committed himself, by his very breath.

What to do?

That (speaking in purely human terms) is the Divine Dilemma.  “Children have I reared and brought up . . .”  Every parent with wayward children can sympathize.  What do you do?

You don’t stop loving them—unless you never really loved them in the first place.  If you saw your kids as an extension of yourself, intended to draw praise back to you for how well you raised them, it might not be that hard to cut them off: Sayonara, punk.  You had your chance and you blew it.

But even if there’s a smidgen of love in your complicated feelings, there’s at least that much pain.  Love is a risk.  I might even say that love is risk.  You’ve cut yourself open to admit the unknown; a being that brings its own complexity, hidden dangers, and uncertain future.  And it turns on you.  That which promised to complete you now claws at you and threatens your very identity.

God doesn’t need us for completion.  Still, what do you do . . . if you are God?  Two choices:

One, you let it go.  Let the heedless children destroy your house, trample your rules, leave your righteousness in tatters.  In the process they choke on their own autonomy and you cease to be righteous and thus no longer God.  They’ve squandered their identity and stolen yours.  Nobody wins.

Two: you exercise your righteous judgment, stop the oppression, punish the oppressors.  You are still God, but your creation is stuck in an endless round of destruction and renewal (see the book of Judges) until it exhausts itself.  Technically, you win . . . but not really, if your grand experiment reveals itself to be a failure and the fiery hallways of hell ring with Satan’s laughter.

Or wait—there’s a third option.

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given . . .  (Is. 9:6)

Higher criticism insists that this child is a contemporary born into the royal household, a brief uptick in Judah’s downward drift.  But the extravagant language—Mighty God, Everlasting Father, etc.—is a bit much, even for court-flattery.  The child the virgin conceives may be the son of a virtuous, recently-married young woman of Isaiah’s time.  But there’s another Son, another sign given to a later virgin who wonders, “Wait . . . how can this be?”

Tucked among Isaiah’s fiery images and agonized and wrathful pronouncements wrung from Israel’s struggle with God, a Man emerges.  A promised child, like Isaac and Samson; a sapling from the seed of Jesse like David; a servant and prophet like Moses, a sacrificial victim like . . . no one else.

He’s the third way, the resolution of an impossible dilemma and the reconciler of opposites.