Put the Message in a Box

Morning,

I was just wondering if I could tap into that vast reservoir of wasted time that stretches out behind me for close to fifty years. I could use it now. It would be nice to have a little stock pile of time to use on the side so you could use the time of the current day to do your regularly scheduled programs and still get done all the things that are back logging in the production room. Some days, I feel like a one armed juggler with 5 plates in the air above my head.

The events of the last couple weeks have reminded me that everything can change in a heartbeat. Your life can be turned in a totally different direction in the blink of an eye. I’m not guaranteed to have the ability to write for the rest of my days, or to preach, or to do any of the things that I so often take for granted. And thinking like that has put an urgency on me to get moving, to produce, to write the things that need to be written.

Just last night some friends told me I needed to write on a certain topic, and they are probably correct. It should be written on. But I simply have to add it to the waiting list of things that need to be written about. I’ve been trying to push myself to get the next book done. I am so close that I can taste it. But yet, sometimes life pushes back and says not yet.

It’s hard to believe that God would put so many things in his plan that can’t get done or won’t get done but they are all around me laying in unfinished bits and pieces. Sometimes they taunt me and try to drag me down to their level. It’s then that I must remember that the ability to finish anything is a gift of God. Maybe you have never had a problem with finishing things, I don’t know. But there was a time in my life where God saw fit to not let me finish anything. I started things all the time. I had big ideas but push never came to shove and my attention was drawn off to something else, and then something else etc etc for all eternity, or so it seemed.

Apart from the grace of God poured out in lots of counseling, and many hours sitting in a 12 step circle the thing that really turned it around for me was hearing someone tell me I could do it. I can see it now. I can hear it. This beautiful, young woman who happened to be my new wife looked at me and said “Why are you a janitor? You can be so much more.”

They were simple words but in some way they were the gift of grace that I had been waiting for all my life. I remember them piercing into my heart and settling there like a seed in a sown field. They’re still growing.

God had been breaking up the fallow ground of my heart for thirty-two years before he let that word of grace be planted in my heart. He has spent the next 17 and three quarters years nurturing its growth. Because of those words I now find myself struggling to find the time, not the desire, to finish this mound of projects. By the grace of God I write two sermons, and this blogmail thing every week. I have two novels published, a third almost ready to go to press, a fourth half way written and a pile of other ideas waiting in line.
So I guess I can say it’s my wife’s fault that I don’t have the time to get all these things done.

I still am not sure how I got from back there to here. Oh yes, I do the grace of God let me work out my salvation with fear and trembling. God grew me up a little bit and allowed a maturing love to cast out some of the fears that kept me in bondage for so long.

I am beginning, just beginning to understand why God needed me to be so broken for so long before he began to restore me. I needed to know what brokenness felt like. I needed to know that I didn’t have the ability to make it through life on my own. I needed to know that I couldn’t do it without His grace. I needed to know those things so I could write what I write today.

I think some days, my wife wishes she would have kept her mouth shut 17 years ago. She doesn’t really like to read what I write, at least the novels that I pour myself into. But I don’t write because I want to make people happy, or because I want to make money. I write because I want the broken people of the world to know that they don’t have to be broken anymore. I write because even though I have always been in the church nobody ever told me the truth about life while I was there, and I want to make sure that others have the opportunity to hear the truth and nothing but the truth about the way life is.

I am so tired of lies. I’m tired of happily ever after being our role model. I’m tired of the gospel being cleaned up and sanitized and simplified for mass consumption. I’m tired of the gospel being restricted to words that don’t do anything. I’m tired of having to live a lie so that I can meet the expectations of what other people think the gospel is supposed to look like.

I, me, in all my messed up, foul mouthed, sinful mess is what the gospel looks like in the real world. I write messy things so that the broken people out there who are never going to be good enough for Christianity in the 21st century can get a glimpse of the good news that has been given for them.

I write because there are broken people who need desperately a news that is good enough to set them free from the crap they find themselves in. They need more than words. They need true and powerful words that are full of real grace for a real world, words that actually cause change to happen.

I am, of course reminded of a song, this time by World Party, called Put Message in a Box.

And if you listen now you might hearA new sound coming in as an old one disappears.See the world in just one grain of sand.You better take a closer look.Don't let it slip right thru your hand.Won't you please hear the call. Put the message in the box. Put the box into the car.Drive the car around the world until you get heard.Now is the moment, please understand.The road is wide open to the heart of every man. A few simple words so a mule could understand.He don't want tomorrow if it's just crumbling into sand.Won't you please hear the call. Put the message in the box. Put the box into the car.Drive the car around the world until you get heard.The World says Give a little bitGive a little bit of your love to me'Cause I'm waiting right here with my open arms.Give a little bit. Give a little bit of your soul to me'Cause I'm waiting to behold your many charms.Is that love in the air? Put the message in the box. Put the box into the car.Drive the car around the world until you get heard.

While it feels like there is not enough time to do what needs to be done, it is urgency that drives that feeling. It is time to proclaim good news to a broken people not so they can start going to church and live a lie under a façade of goodness but so they can be restored in every area of their lives by the grace of God to be real human beings honest about the condition they are in to the glory of God.

That is the cry of my heart that is why I do what I do.
And as long as I am able; I will continue to do it.

Until the real good news gets heard,

Brad