Surrender

2 Corinthians 1:3-5, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. 5 For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.”

In Chris White’s lecture on the Holy Spirit last weekend, he quoted Blaise Pascal, who said “There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.”  As such it is in surrendering to the transformative power of the Holy Spirit that we can do those things we could not possibly otherwise do.  Can I love the person who wronged me?  Can I overcome my sinful nature?  Can I bring hope to a lost and broken world?  I cannot.

Can I “be perfect, as (my) Heavenly Father is perfect”?  I cannot.

But He is my strength and my redeemer.  Through the power of his Holy Spirit, I can do all things.  Provided, I think, that it starts with humbly admitting my own limitations.  I am weak.  I am prideful.  The one thing I can claim for certain is, I know which kind of man I am.  

Another moment from the Faith and Reason conference: one of my friends said that 15,000 children die every day from preventable disease.  He asked, “Does God not care about this?”  I think my answer was technically correct: all our lives are but a breath.  We are “dust in the wind”.  I read once (and did the math to confirm it) that if the earth is 4 billion years old, and those years were put on a scale the size of a football field, the one hundred thousand years of human existence would be the last inch before the goalline.  Yet God loves each one of us enough that if you were the only person who needed saving, he would have died to save you.  Technically correct, but morally deficient.  

What I should have done is describe how my aunt, who we had a memorial service for only the week before, and my uncle had a daughter who died when she was but two years old.  It was their faith in God that got them through that, every day for the next fifty-some years.  They never forgot Lynn, or stopped loving her.  Never.  And Jesus wept right along with them.  It was many years later that a friend of mine lost her two-year-old daughter and my aunt and uncle reached out to my friend to try to help her make sense of it.  Hours and hours they spent on the phone.  That is the heart Jesus has for his children.

How can I possibly save even one of those 15,000 children?  I cannot.  But I must not become spiritually numb to the suffering of those around me.  If I am open and honest about my own trials and tribulations, my own struggles, I can help my brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors with theirs.