May 2010 Newsletter

1. I just had a long visit with Katie Heckel and heard many great stories about Ghana, Africa. There are more to hear. The trip was wonderful and heartbreaking. So many encounters with child slavery and abuse, stories of orphans kidnapped, and terrifying injustices done to the weakest among us are churning in my heart right now after hearing from Katie. But we citizens of the Kingdom of God pray to bring his will on earth. I'm praying for ways to be at work with Jesus, bringing the message of the cross and contact with His living love. Katie's CD "The Isaiah Project" is on Noistrade. Click here to find it. All donations go to support the orphanage.

2. Brian Mulder's CD is finished! Just last night I uploaded the final mixes to noisetrade.com. Brian flies to San Diego, CA Saturday and will be biking the 3,000 miles across the Unites States with Blood:Water mission's Ride:Well tour to raise money to build clean water wells in Africa. You can download the CD "Somewhere we're shining" for free or you can leave a tip online. Click here to get to it.

3. I'm heading to Duke's Summer Institute Sunday to spend a week in community discussing the mission of reconciliation. "...God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on God's behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." 2 Cor 19-21

Click here to find out more.

4. June Tour 2010! Katie Heckel and I will be hitting the road for about three weeks to share songs and stories about God's work among the poor in Ghana. We'll also continue to raise funds for Rafiki Orphanage. Keep an eye on www.matthewclark.net where I update my blog and such. I also update twitter pretty regularly. My user name is matthewclarknet if you're into the so-called 'technologies'.

The Lord has reminded me lately through several occasions that he has entrusted his mission to us. We are offered this incredible opportunity to live lives of great meaning, dignity, and value. I am tired of living a life of achievement for myself. I'm weary of living for things that don't really matter. Jesus has a better life. He invites us to be yoked with him and to labour alongside him. We can trust him. We fight together to keep the faith in the 'foolishness' of God. It is his work in this world through us that will result in an everlasting and righteous kingdom. A single word that has become like an endless echoing call in my heart is: participation. "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, to become like him in his death, and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead." Amen. We can pray together to learn more about co-laboring with Jesus and his people.

Like You Said

Confidence in your words, Lord, this is a prayer for my family-
Those born and yet to be born again.
There is a place of springs in the land of exile, the mean-time,
a living seed of hope. Love for the bloom to break open
is strangely watered by the seed itself.

We wait, invested in your words, which are like anchors
in a shifty place. Our survival. Our revival.
Your words came to us over the waters in the late watches
when we were afraid. You spoke to us then and we were created.
Light from the face of the Firstborn, borne still.

The pages turn, they keep me from the Turning-
the weary dream that slithers in a senseless sensual sulk.
Open your mouth, Shiftless One, divide the night from the day.
You and your double-edged sword, the alleviate of your voice.
In your light we see light, the black banners shred and disappear.

You have eyes to see, Lord, and ears to hear.
And we would be like you, groan for us, Holy Unconfused Spirit!
This is my prayer, a brittle-winged thing.
It's grateful for your cradling palms and your warm breath-
Here the Trumpet, the burning bloom from the sky breaks!

It's just like you said. Everything, just like you said.

Life really matters

Yesterday I had a long phone conversation with my dear friend Brian Mulder. He and I toured together last Fall and now he's back in Michigan getting ready to embark on an epic bicyclic exercise of trans-national proportions. He's doing Blood:Water Mission's Ride:Well Tour. If storks (the birds) wore leg garments I could probably qualify to be a trouser model on their behalf. I mean, I just ran a mile non-stop for the first time in my life this past week. I am very proud of that, and ashamed. Brian, on the other hand, will be fine. It is always sweet to be a part of his life and adventures.

Nearly two years ago my roommate Rajesh asked if he could invite his friend, who was in a difficult living situation, to join us here in this house. I really didn't want to say yes. In fact, I said no. Several weeks later, he insisted that his friend needed a better living situation. So I said we could try it if it were only for a little while, since we just didn't have room. So six months became twenty or so months. And now Sashi is heading to California to a new job and I'll be missing a great friend.

When I was in seventh or eighth grade we got our first youth minister at the church were I grew up. Two years ago I flew to East Asia to visit him and yesterday I heard him speaking the spanish that he's learning in Honduras, his new home. A good many years have passed between eighth grade and now. Richard is still a deeply important brother to me, more than I can say.

The middle of June will mean the departure of D. and Corrie Merricks and their two little boys that I love. They'll be closer to their families and new ministry opportunities in Georgia, but four of my 'tent pegs' are getting pulled up from the ground. I begin to realize how I will miss them, how their lives constitute, in part, my life. Things may feel a little strange, a little less secure as they go.

In the bookstore a few days ago, I sat reading book by a woman who interviewed many people -all of them older than one hundred years. One woman remarked that the world was missing the point of life. She said we were too worried about making money, achievement, and acquiring security. The point of life abides in sharing it through relationship.

I am struck by how important the lives of others can become to me. There are many I would love to write about and describe how I love them. We let people into our lives, that vulnerability deserves great respect and care. Love changes us though. And love is real. When I have the patience and the courage to gather attentiveness and wait with Jesus in prayer, I remember how his love is evidenced by a new creation in this frustrated heart of mine. He matters deeply to me. His love is true.

Our lives are a great opportunity to deeply matter in the lives of others. We can take that wonderful risk. Jesus has led the way.

Magic tricks or Good Relationship?

Sometimes I realize that I have believed in a sort of 'magic trick' relationship with God. If I say "In Jesus Name" at the end of every prayer then God will have to listen to me, or do what I say. That sort of thing. This created a lot of paranoia in my mind, because it added up to a belief that God can't be trusted to be good and have integrity - it was my job to keep him in line and make sure he did the right thing. And worse yet, it was up to me to repeatedly convince him to love me.

The Bible gives a better testimony. It's a big relief to learn that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was all his idea in the first place. All this love... he started it. I didn't talk him into it. I didn't come up with it. And he did it because he wanted to do it.

"You didn't choose me, I chose you," assures Jesus.

So I can stop worrying about whether I need to manipulate God. That's a needless effort for two reasons:

1. He's God, he can't be manipulated anyway.

2. He's good, so you don't need to... he always loves well.

There is freedom and peace in God's goodness and integrity and in the choice to love us so well in Jesus, a choice which was made long before I knew anything about it. It's reasonable to entrust ourselves to him wholly and let go of control and fear.

It's a simple point, but I have to re-learn it constantly.

Good News and Fear

I read an account this morning of a guy who became a believer in Jesus when he suddenly realized that for nearly forty years he had been fooling himself into thinking that he was good. He saw in a moment of realization that he wasn't actually good and that he couldn't do anything about it. He remembered what he had heard about Jesus, whom he had previously scoffed at. Only Jesus could make any change in his situation. He believed.

The Gospel is so simple you have to be taught not to believe it.

My two favorite Malcolm Muggeridge quotes:

"We have educated ourselves into imbecility."

and

"The depravity of man is at once the most unpopular of the Christian doctrines and yet the most empirically verifiable."

One of the comments on the conversion account I mentioned above was that a God who threatens people and forces conversion through fear should not be followed. I have found no relief from fear but in the loving invitation of Jesus to be freed from a dependence on myself and the world around me for salvation. As long as my hope lies in anything other than Jesus, all I know is devastating uncertainty. I know better than to trust myself.

My only hope is the payment for sin Jesus made to His Father on my behalf, the ongoing work of recovery from the damage of ruin that the Holy Spirit upholds, and the Home that waits for me.

Without Jesus, my trajectory is fixed on meaningless decay and the desperate dismal fear of helplessness to change anything.

With Jesus, all things are made new and his perfect love casts out all fear.

One of the deepest fears is that, if we really look into it, we'll find that love isn't real. Haven't we seen enough pain to make us doubt that love is possible? We do our best to keep distracted or tangled in intellect. It's too dangerous to look love in the face: what if we find empty sockets and a mocking lifeless skeletal grin? It is frightening. "I'll follow any destructive fancy if I can only protect myself from my deepest fear- the discovery that even God cannot be trusted for his love is a lie!"

I have no magic words, no unstoppable clever turn of phrase. I do believe that the love of God is alive, it's true. The beauty of it will break your heart, the strength of it will carry you to your deathbed, the purity of it will wash away the dark dream of fear. When the morning comes your own face shall shed light enough to lend brilliance to the dew.

Holy

"I walked out into the night and saw a sky that had been wiped clear of its tears, after such a long day. At the edge of the horizon slunk a few strands of ragged cloud, but ringing brightly the bell-stars held their place. Enduring Brilliance. All the storms had been far below them. Hadn't it seemed from against the ground that the smoking clouds had quenched their light? Yet they were untouched. They are promises never reached by decay."

Can you believe that? Isn't it hard to believe that purity exists? That there could be anything that hasn't been turned? That hasn't bent in even the tiniest way to evil and been lost to confusion and perversion?

If it's all been lost then there's nothing to go back to. There's no hope for healing.

But we sing... Holy.

There is One, and only One, who never gave in.

...Holy

There is One, who at all costs, stayed true.

...Holy

All the loss that has crushed and confused our hearts. All the weeping. The volcanic ache that pushes out from beneath your ribcage. The poison that pulses in this world till even beauty becomes banal. Nothing feels natural. Like death, it's all an intrusion.

But it's low clouds. The high holy stars are out of its reach.

...Holy

We've been lost for so long. Everything pure that we've forgotten, there is One who still remembers. The long years that slip through our skeletal grasp, there is One who hasn't grown weary, One whom decay cannot grip.

Let all Israel, those striving, struggling ones, say "his love endures forever."