Tonight I am letting the apostle Paul speak about what love really looks like. I’ll let him speak (from the Message translation):

“If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

   Love never gives up.
   Love cares more for others than for self.
   Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
   Love doesn’t strut,
   Doesn’t have a swelled head,
   Doesn’t force itself on others,
   Isn’t always “me first,”
   Doesn’t fly off the handle,
   Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
   Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
   Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
   Puts up with anything,
   Trusts God always,
   Always looks for the best,
   Never looks back,
   But keeps going to the end. . . .

But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.” (1 Cor 13:1-7, 13)

I don’t have anything to add to that, other than to quote David Gray:

“Honey, now if I’m honest

I still don’t know what love is”

It’s true. I don’t. But one day I will know Love just as fully as Love knows me. That’s the day I’m looking forward to!

Today, you signed off at 8:59 am for the last time. It made me sad. I felt like I had just said goodbye to a dear friend. This may come across as creepy and stalker-ish, but I count you three as dear friends. Brant, Pablo and Katie Rose, you made my mornings.

You made me fall in love with God again and really understand how good God is and how free grace is and what it means. You made me laugh, cry, and think. You melted a little of the ice I had let accumulate around my heart.

You showed me that it was okay to be me, even if I was not like everybody else and didn’t always do and say the right things and the right time. That it’s okay to be socially awkward and goofy and quirky. That being normal is boring, but being who God made you to be is so much better.

I will never forget you guys. There were times when work would have been almost unbearable without you and life would have been duller. You didn’t put the colors in my world, but you certainly made them brighter. My favorites were the Malarkey, Club Awesome, the joke lab, and all you did with sponsoring children with Compassion International, among other things. I was never bored with your show. Confused and befuddled? Sometimes. But never ever bored.

I think today as you were saying goodbye I had a hard time seeing my computer screen for the tears in my eyes. I wished then that I could capture one moment of you guys bantering back and forth and hold on to it forever.

I know too well that life is about change and nothing stays the same forever. Nothing can grow and transform without change. Sometimes you have to let go of what you know and embrace the unknown, as Abraham did once long ago. Sometimes you have to release the good to lay hold of the better thing.

I know whatever show that replaces you will be good, too. I will learn to love it as much as I loved this one. But I still can’t help but feel there’s a hole in my heart where you used to be. I still can’t help but feeling a sense of grief.

Thank you again for reminding me that in all things God really is good, that He really is for me and roots for me, that He loves me completely no matter what.

I pray blessings for each of you and thank God for all of you. You were a part of a lot of beautiful moments and I am better because of all of you.

Whether we ever meet this side of heaven, I thought you should know that.

I heard a really good illustration today at Kairos. Suppose you had a gun pointed at your head. I think that would inspire fear and terror and quite possibly the loss of control over bodily functions (to put it mildly). In other words, if it were me, I’d wet my pants and pass out at the same time.

Ok, now suppose you were shown the gun and the bullets being taken out. Now if the gun were held to your head, it would no longer have the same fearful effect. It would still have the ability to produce loud noises, but it would have lost any ability to do any actual damage (other than some temporary hearing loss).

If I am afraid of the devil and his demons, all I need to do is look at the Cross. The Bible says that there Jesus publically disarmed the enemy and paraded him in front of us to show Who had really won. In other words, Jesus showed us satan’s smoking gun, emptied out all the bullets, and handed it back to him.

Never again do I ever have to fear what anyone else can do to me. The only one I have to fear is the One who can destroy both the body and the soul, and that’s God. The good news is that I don’t have to fear God destroying my soul.

Think about this. The worst that could ever happen to me happened to Jesus. The very worst of hell and sin and death fell on Jesus and He took all those things to the grave and left them there. He came out of the grave unbound, bringing freedom to His children.

There’s nothing that can touch you and me as believers unless God allows it. That’s guaranteed. There’s nothing bad that God can’t turn into good. There’s nothing that will stop Him from finishing what He started in you, making you into a radiant masterpiece replica of His son Jesus.

Those things that you are so afraid of and so worried about? They’re just blanks.

That unknown future? God’s got it figured out.

Your life? It’s in the very best hands possible.

I tell myself that I am a fan of change. I tell myself that I will get bored if things always stay the same. Then change happens. That’s when I discover that the kind of change I like is the kind that is shiny, has dead presidents on it, and conjures up marvelous treasures when deposited into vending machines.

Change is scary. Change is unpredictable. Change is also the only constant in this life, other than maybe death and taxes. You can pretty much count on the fact that when you’ve got everything  figured out and you’re finally in a comfortable routine, something is about to change.

Someone you know dies or loses a loved one. Your favorite TV show gets cancelled. A favorite morning radio show that has gotten you through the morning for several months is abruptly going away. OK, that last one was mine.

The point of this is that changes are inevitable as they are unpredictable and uncontrollable. Unless you have a Ph.D in ESP, you can’t know when changes are coming or how to get ready for them. Well, sometimes you can, but many times you have no fair warning.

There’s a song I like by one of my favorite artists, Julie Miller. The chorus of the song goes like this:

“the only thing that doesn’t change
makes everything else rearrange
is the speed of light, the speed of light
your love for me must be the speed of light”

There is one other constant beside change, death, and taxes. There’s something that doesn’t change. God Himself says that He doesn’t change. He doesn’t lie or change His mind or fall back to plan B because plan A failed. God is always the same yesterday, today, and forever, as a well-quoted verse says.

God’s love doesn’t change either. It truly does make everything else rearrange. You can’t be confronted by the love of God and not be changed in some way. You can walk away and reject that love, but you can’t not choose.

I’d say that the Love of God is worth pursuing, worth whatever it will cost to find. The good news is when you find it, you find that this Love was pursuing you the whole time and that Love has already paid all the cost involved. All that’s left for you is to receive it.

Change can be a very good thing, especially when it’s you being changed and transformed by God’s love. That is the absolute best kind of change, because it’s you who gets to be all shiny and new.

I think tonight I will let a guest blogger take over. You might know him as the apostle Paul, who wrote a few of the letters we have in our Bible. I think he says what I want to say better than I ever could. And if you find yourself not recognizing the text, it’s because I am using The Message version. It’s Romans 8:31-38.

“So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture:
   They kill us in cold blood because they hate you.
   We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one.
None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.”

Just let that sink in. I hope and pray you spend the rest of the day meditating on these words (and rereading them in the more traditional translations if this one is too wierd for you). Let this be your heartbeat.

Years ago, I read a pamphlet called Tyranny of the Urgent. And for the record, I know only old people start sentences with things like “years ago.” But it was more than a few days ago.

The point of the little pamphlet was that so often we lose track of what’s important over what is most urgent. All those immediate things on that to-do list seem so very important and it feels like the world will end if all those boxes aren’t checked at the end of the day.

What gets left undone is what we never thought to put on the list in the first place. Usually, for me (and for you, I bet) is God that gets left off.

We’ve been conditioned and taught and programmed that if you’re not busy every minute of the day, you’re not living. If you don’t get everything done, you didn’t have a good or successful day.

I wonder sometimes if we really need to be that busy and do all the things we do. I heard a preacher say that the problem with Martha was that she was so distracted and stressed by all her work that she didn’t even realize that it was Jesus sitting in her living room, speaking words of life.

I think it’s okay to leave some things undone. It’s okay to slow down every once in a while and smell roses and watch children play and breathe deeply. It’s even okay every now and then to take a day off and rest and not do a bloomin’ thing.

What’s not okay is to run yourself ragged and to the point of exhaustion because you think you have to. What did Jesus say? Wasn’t it something like “Come to Me all you who are weary and overburdened (or who work yourselves to the point of exhaustion), and I will give you REST. Not a completed checklist. Not more hours in the day. Not extra arms and legs or eyes in the back of your head. REST.

I’ve heard that sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is take a nap. If that’s the case, my cat is a saint. But it’s true. Exhausted people can’t really love God and love others well.

So, take a holiday. Take a nap. Go see a movie. And most of all, let yourself off the hook about all those things left undone. All that really matters is sitting a the feet of Jesus (like Mary). That’s the most important thing. The best thing. The one thing that should always trump everything else. And it’s a good thing.