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Name: Jordan
Birthday: 2/12/1989
Gender: Male
Interests: ||soda ||ice cream ||pizza ||food ||fruit ||veggies ||golden grahams ||computers ||musical instruments ||doughnuts ||water ||chick-fil-a ||black bears ||moosen ||vitamin water ||oxygen ||hooded sweatshirts ||
Expertise: making stupid movies, listening, being quiet, being all crazy when no one can see me, flushing spiders, almost crashing on a snowboard, making up stuff on guitar, not gaining weight
Message: message me
Member Since:
6/16/2005
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| When Jesus heard this, He said to him, "One thing you still lack; sell all that you possess and distribute it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me." But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich.
(Luke 18:22-23)
Storylines follow a common structure. Most of the plot is dominated by "rising action"; from the start until a greater part of the way through the story, difficulties arise and tension builds. Then on top of all this rising action comes the climax. A resolution of some sort is reached, and the remainder of the story is "falling action" as things sort themselves out and the pressure of the rising action is released.
Rising action seems to always set things in disarray and damage the goods. The hero must make a choice between saving the order and keeping the goods or continuing his quest. Friendships threaten to sour, possessions grow wings and fly away, physical health deteriorates, and the sun itself fleets away under the onslaught of untoward weather. Through the adversity, what choices will the hero make? He will have to forsake certain comforts, or else he must abandon his quest. A smooth, breezy ride devoid of gut-wrenching decisions is not rising action. Without rising action, there is no climax; and without either, there is no story at all.
The hero is offered many chances to turn aside, to reject his quest. In Luke chapter four, the devil tempts Jesus multiple times to give in under the strain of adversity. Satan confronts Jesus with a choice: continue in the Father's will, or turn aside and immediately gain relief, dominion, and vindication for Himself. Jesus chose His Father's quest over the goods. He struggled through the rising action and endured more pain than I can comprehend. He reached the climax: death on a cross. He completed His Father's quest, and the falling action that followed was His grace falling like rain to wash away my sin. Thankfully, I do have a story to tell.
He saved me. Then a new story began—the story of sanctification and service. This is the quest that the Father has laid before me. And, like all stories, it will have lots of rising action. The rising action will damage goods and upset the order of this world.
"You want to have your cake and eat it too." This maxim simply points out the fact that we can't always have things both ways. We want the pleasure of sin along with the grace of God. We want the comfort of material wealth along with the sense of purpose that comes from following God. There is nothing inherently wrong with goods, but sooner or later we will face a choice between our quest and our stuff. Lord, help me; You know I want to have my quest and my goods, too.
And He said to them, "Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times as much at this time and in the age to come, eternal life."
(Luke 18:29-30)
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| Almost two years after Jim’s death, three Auca women showed up at a settlement close to where Elisabeth was staying. She felt strongly that God wanted her to go to them: “… The guidance was unmistakable. I knew that I was to go immediately … to meet the Auca women”. She went and found two of the three, and she lived with them and attempted to learn some of their language. After a year had passed, the women decided it was time to go back to their homes in the jungle, and they invited Elisabeth to come with them. She told them, “But your people speared my husband. They will spear me [too]”. The women reassured her that their people would not kill her and pleaded with her to accompany them. After debating with herself and praying to God for His guidance, Elisabeth felt convinced that this too was God’s will for her; she went with them to their tribe.
She was resolved that to make a trip to the Aucas was her duty; nevertheless, she felt very aware of the potential danger—after all, these people had killed her husband. She wrote:
For me, the Aucas were the personification of death … It had seemed likely then that death might come to Valerie and me. And now, as … I went into the settlement … I felt prepared to meet them in a way that I would not have been had I not earlier embraced them and all that they signified for me, by faith.
Death was a very real possibility, for “… the Waorani [Aucas were] one of the most violent cultures on earth, according to anthropologists James Yost and James S. Boster”. But that did not deter her from what she saw as her duty; she wrote that “if a duty is clear, the dangers surrounding it are irrelevant”. Separate from her ideas of duty, she also felt a strong personal connection with the Aucas due to her husband’s zeal for reaching them: “The fact that Jesus Christ died for all makes me interested in the salvation of all, but the fact that Jim loved and died for the Aucas intensifies my love for them”. Impelled by Christian duty and a personal love, with Jesus and her husband as examples, Elisabeth Elliot entered Auca territory with her daughter. She did not count her physical life as too dear to lay down in caring for the wellbeing of these people’s souls. As it turned out, they did not spear her but welcomed her into their simple way of life. She lived with them for a year, in which time she learned more about their customs, progressed somewhat in knowledge of their language, and tried to share the truth of Christ with them despite communication barriers.
Frank Drown was also inspired by the example of Jim Elliot and the four other men who died in “Operation Auca.” Serving as another missionary in Ecuador at the time, Frank was asked to lead the rescue party in search of the five missing men. He describes the experience of approaching their camp on the beachhead and removing the dead bodies of the ones he had loved from the river as “good for [him]”: “I felt the Lord calming my heart and giving me a new determination to serve Him, regardless of what might happen to this body of mine”. The “fact of death” served as a tangible reminder that the Christian can expect “not only to believe in Him [Christ], but also to suffer for His sake”.
Indeed, the Drowns had already suffered much since they arrived in Ecuador in 1945 to begin their missions work. They had traveled steep, muddy trails and forded “torrential rivers”, been stricken with disease, and eaten plantains and monkey meat for food. They had lived in primitive huts in which the only furniture was makeshift pieces of jungle material, such as chairs made out of stumps and tables made of split bamboo. They write of “clearing land, planting gardens, preparing lumber for a new house, and the daily cares of providing for … family”. They did not have much privacy: “The cracks in the walls also made convenient peepholes for the Indians. Our back porch often overflowed with brown-skinned visitors … When they couldn’t see enough through the windows, they walked around the walls to peek through the cracks”. They spent “long hours” and much effort trying to gain an understanding of the Jivaro language so they could help “free [the Indians] from their fears of witchcraft, wars, and death”—these Indians who led war parties against each other and shrank their victims’ heads. These hardships the Drowns undertook willingly, even happily: “It didn’t matter that we would have to sleep under stuffy nets to protect us from the biting vampire bats, that there was no electricity, no fresh milk, and only rarely any meat. This was the place to which the Lord had called us and we loved it”.
Sometime after the rescue mission on the Curaray River, Frank had a tense moment with a suspicious Indian named Tsantiacu. He did not know why Tsantiacu was acting menacingly, but he approached him slowly, trying to talk to him. In Mission to the Head-Hunters, Frank recounts his thoughts during this encounter:
The picture of those bodies of my friends lying there in the sand came again into my mind. But this time it gave me courage. Those men faced death and had not drawn back. They had not counted their lives dear unto themselves. Was I any different from them? Did I have any more right to live than they? I thought: “Our lives belong to God. May He be glorified in me—whether ‘by life or by death!’”
He quotes a verse from the Bible, which says, “… Christ will even now, as always, be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death” (Philippians 1:20). Frank Drown strove to exalt Christ in his body by his rigorous missionary life in the jungle, and he sought to continue exalting Christ by accepting possible death. In that suspenseful moment in which he faced Tsantiacu, the prospects of life and death as a missionary merged into one pursuit. He might have said along with the apostle Paul, “I affirm, brethren … I die daily” (1 Corinthians 15:31); “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me …” (Galatians 2:20).
The deaths of the five missionaries on the Curaray also had an impact among the Jivaro Indians who had become Christians under the influence and work of Frank and Marie Drown. Some of the Jivaros and the neighboring Atshuaras had especially known and loved Roger Youderian. Frank tells that the Jivaros “all agreed that because [Roger] had died for the sake of reaching wild men for Christ, they would be willing to do the same. Their zeal to preach the Gospel increased. Attendance in the church services rose. Back-slidden members returned to the Lord …”. This echoes the effect that Paul’s incarceration had among believers in the first century A.D.: “… My imprisonment in the cause of Christ has become well known throughout the whole praetorian guard and to everyone else, and … most of the brethren, trusting in the Lord because of my imprisonment, have far more courage to speak the word of God without fear” (Philippians 1:13-14).
Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, Nate Saint, and Roger Youderian gave their lives for the cause of Christ. Their deaths are testaments to the condition of each of their hearts. Their lives were lost before the Aucas speared them; physical death was simply a jarring picture of their acceptance of the inward reality and exhortation of 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: “… Do you not know … that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.” They did not claim a comfortable life for themselves. They did not even claim earthly life at all. In the face of possible death, they entered Auca territory for “one reason: they believed it was what God wanted them to do”. They, by sacrificing their lives, encouraged others to “present [their] bodies a living … sacrifice” (Romans 12:1). The history of missions is repeating itself all over the world in the lives of people like Jim Elliot and his fellow martyrs; Elisabeth Elliot, the Drowns, and the Jivaros; and everyone who seeks to exalt Christ in their bodies, “whether by life or by death” (Philippians 1:20).
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| In January of 1956, several members of a fierce, isolated, jungle-dwelling tribe speared five Christian missionaries to death on a beach along the Curaray River in Ecuador. These five—Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, Nate Saint, and Roger Youderian—had been preparing for months to make preliminary friendly contact with the mysterious tribe to pave the way for sharing the Gospel. Hardly anything was known about the “Aucas,” which means “savages” in the Quichua Indian language, except that “they killed every outsider who came near them". The missionaries had taken utmost care in painstakingly planning their first foray into Auca territory and then bided their time, waiting for the right opportunity to initiate the operation. They had done all this under a veil of secrecy; they feared if word spread that they intended to go to the Aucas, it might be misinterpreted by others who weren’t closely involved with the endeavor and would possibly derail their meticulous preparations and precautions.
After much waiting, an opportunity finally arose for the five to embark on their long-planned-for expedition into the jungle. They flew a small plane to the selected site and camped out on a strip of sand on the Curaray River near an Auca dwelling, and they waited. Several days later, two women and one man—all three mostly naked—walked out of the jungle and spent the day with the missionaries, who gave them food and even gave the man a ride in the airplane. Then the natives suddenly strode back into the jungle and disappeared. Being encouraged by this first amicable meeting, the missionaries waited again in hopes that the three Aucas would return, perhaps with more of their kinfolk. The next day more did come—with spears.
The deaths of these five missionaries caused a great stir in the outside world. Magazines carried the story, and it was broadcast via shortwave radio as it “circled the globe and struck a deep chord among American evangelicals”. Jim Elliot and his fellow missionaries became heroes; they “became known, modeled, celebrated, almost beautified”. Frank and Marie Drown wrote that “their sacrifice electrified the entire Christian world”. However, Jim Elliot’s wife, Elisabeth, viewed the loss of her husband not as something extraordinary but as only one example in a long progression of historical missions work; she wrote:
When … volunteers … who had gone to search for the five missing men returned to tell us that they were all dead, there was little sense of drama for me. The history of missions had repeated itself. I could see that, for I had read stories of missionaries, from the Benedictine monks who crossed the Alps into Germany and were murdered by savage tribesmen, to nineteenth-century Englishmen who went to the South Sea Islands and were clubbed to death.
Jim Elliot and his four companions died in the line of Christian duty as they obeyed Jesus’ command to “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation” (Matthew 16:15). Elsewhere, Jesus said, “And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it” (Matthew 10:38-39). Elisabeth Elliot tells in The Savage My Kinsman that Jim and the rest of the men who were slain while trying to befriend and preach to the Aucas literally believed 1 John 2:17: “The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever.” They did not invest their time and strength in things that they perceived as “passing away”; instead they followed after Jesus and lost their lives for His sake, pursuing the will of God—even unto death—in expectation of living eternally in heaven.
After her husband’s death, Elisabeth Elliot struggled against the incessant questions of “why” that plagued her mind day in and day out. She said, “Obedience, if it is a good reason for dying, is just as good a reason for living. I knew that there was no other answer for me”. If out of obedience Jim could muster the courage to face death, she could through obedience face life without him: she found that she could move past the “whys” if she simply lived daily in obedience to God, completing the task that was at hand at any given moment. Thus, she continued to manage what had been both hers and Jim’s mission station in Shandia. The job included overseeing the never-ending upkeep work necessitated by the encroaching jungle, giving medical assistance to the Indians, translating scriptures into the Quichua language, teaching school and Bible classes, and guiding the new Quichua Christians—all the while coping with the demands of living in general privation and caring for her daughter, Valerie.
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| "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
—Maya Angelou
I have found that writing is a good outlet for the agony caused by pent-up stories. Sometimes putting it on paper works better than speaking it into the air, because then I can look at it. The stories inside me vary from humorous absurdities, emotional highs and lows, profound revelations, or simply unadorned truth. Probably the most painful story inside is sin. When I try to keep it deep down inside of me, my bones waste away, and I just feel like groaning. I need to stop bearing the agony of leaving the sin story untold.
We all sin. We need to confess it to God, but also to one another; as we are humbled before men our humility before God is verified. I can't tell you how many times I have fooled myself into thinking I had humbled myself before God, when in actuality I hadn't. Peace came only after I humbled myself before Christ in a Christian brother; confession is the fire that tests how true our humility is.
Blessed is the man
whose sin the LORD does not count against him
and in whose spirit is no deceit.
When I kept silent,
my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night
your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was sapped
as in the heat of summer.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you
and did not cover up my iniquity.
I said, "I will confess
my transgressions to the LORD "—
and you forgave
the guilt of my sin.
(Psalm 32:2-5)
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| In most of the poems I have written, I have given precedence to meaning over against poetic flair. I have opted to write lines with beautiful significance more so than beautiful phrases or imagery. This is especially true for the poem that follows; it is self-consciously message-oriented in what it says, and I fear it lacks the nebulous flavor of artistry in its expression. I wrote it after being challenged to seek God for vision regarding my life. In a quiet moment, I heard a single word: unified. I knew what it meant at once. That word became the title to the poem I was to write shortly thereafter.
O Lord, this vision is of Thee
For Thou my Lord, my God, art one:
Thy Son in Thee and Thou in Son
And Spirit with Thee; one, though three.
If I partake impunity
Thou giveth, to be with Thou one—
Thy Son in me and I in Son—
Let my all show this unity:
To be united with my wife
Together living as one flesh.
Our Father, Jesus, Spirit—mesh
Us; may our living be Thy life.
To be united in our home:
A place of love and soft correction
Sensitive to Thy direction;
May we follow where You roam.
To be united as Thy Bride:
One body made of many parts.
Make our many scattered hearts
Within Thy presence to abide.
To be united toward each face—
Help us, though on us they may tread,
Heap burning kindness on each head;
Lord, may our heaping paint Thy grace.
To be united in our deeds—
Lord, in whatever You need done,
May our desires and Yours be one
In tilling fields, in planting seeds.
To be united, too, in word—
Train us to be freshwater springs
Effusing life and noble things;
Lord, when we speak, may You be heard.
O Lord, this vision is of Thee
For Thou my Lord, my God, art one:
Thy Son in Thee and Thou in Son
And Spirit with Thee; one, though three.
So take away my lust and pride;
Reduce the lives I live to one:
Thy Son in me, and I in Son.
Lord, may my life be unified.
"Abstraction: the process of formulating general concepts by abstracting common properties of instances." I have never heard a better description of the way I think. I think abstractly. I was just recently telling this to my Dad in less concrete terms; my mind automatically compares similarities shared by two or more concepts and tries to unify them into something more general and all-encompassing. I speak in abstract terms—I give the generality, the theory, the common thread, and leave others the task of applying it in specific instances. I am doing it even now. I'm not showing you something I actually said; I'm showing you generally how I speak and letting you connect the dots. My mind ever seeks to consolidate, trim down, connect, and distill. In a word, my mind seeks to unify.
How fitting, then, that a vision for my life should be unity. The opening stanza of the poem follows the reasoning that God, though three Persons, is one God; moreover, Jesus desires to make His children one, as the Godhead is one; thus, shouldn't the life of His child be unified as one, with the various details manifesting themselves merely as faces of the same central thing, as sides of a polygon are to the entire figure?
"Hear, O Israel! The LORD our God, the LORD is one!"
(Deuteronomy 6:4)
"The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me."
(John 17:22-23)
A unified life is like a Lego model of a house. Each brick is a different sphere of influence or bundle of obligations, all of them put together just so to be a fitting abode for someone (or Someone). A life characterized by disunity, in keeping with the Lego imagery, is like several unfinished Lego houses; there aren't enough bricks to go around. This, too often, would be an accurate portrait of my life. There aren't enough bricks to be what I might like to be and what God wants me to be. What kind of house will I be?
"...As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."
(Joshua 24:15)
I want each "brick" of my life to be used in the way specified by the Master Builder's blueprint. For the Apostle Paul, to live was Christ (Philippians 1:21); my relationship with my wife, my home life, the discipline of my children, my location, my place in the church, my interactions with others, my works, my words—the timbre of all these should be Christ. Don't we all compartmentalize our lives? We separate this and that, hoping to save some little corner of ourselves from the all-consuming light of God's radiance. The truth is the walls need to be broken down in our hearts to let the brilliance of God's holiness be cast into every corner. We need the Lord to reduce our lives to one life. Sometimes, though, I struggle with doubt.
"...He who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways."
(James 1:6-8)
"Double-minded." "Unstable." That doesn't sound like unity, does it? I don't doubt all the time, and I don't doubt everything there is to doubt. But I do doubt. I doubt the sufficiency of God and His word. That is why I am usually so hesitant to let Him unify my life: it comes down to doubt on my part. I put up walls in my heart because I doubt that God is enough for this or that corner—I need God and something else. God and a self-help book. God and a really good friend. God and just a little bit more time. I try to build a second Lego house because I doubt that God is enough to satisfy me—I need God and more money, more popularity, more knowledge. In each of the compartments in my soul, there is a nagging doubt whether God is sufficient for that area of my life.
Recently, I had the wonderful opportunity to spend time with my beautiful baby niece. One thing that is so fun about Naomi is how happy she is all the time. She smiles and smiles and smiles. I gazed into her precious, innocent, smiling eyes one day and thought, "She doesn't know how to appear happy. She is merely happy." Naomi experiences joy on a very bare level. It is as if her soul and her body function as one thing. She appears happy because she is happy, and the moment she ceases to be happy it is readily apparent. Is this what Jesus meant when He said that we must become as little children—that we are to come as we are, guileless, in total agreement within ourselves? I want to be like that. I want my life to be unified.
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