Growth Stinks

Growth Stinks

“What is that smell?”  What I could only liken to the reek of rotting fish passed through the kitchen. It made its mark again when I opened the closet and send me rummaging through the canned goods I was prepared to find the worst.
 
Nothing. No bad tins, leaking bottles, molding dry good. I sniffed at the shiny, new cans of wild salmon bought earlier that day – a possible culprit among them? I turned over the solid white albacore, the organic whole tomatoes, and funky Chinese dried foods. Good news, bad news: nothing rotting, no oozing putrid guck. Still the smell.
 
The unconscionable stink came and went throughout the evening, me taking intermittent inhalations into the kitchen trash can, fruitless each time. I considered the neighbors, who at this time of year would be firing up their wood-burning cooker for annual Chinese New Year glutinous rice cakes (gow). I blamed it on the trash that this week now piled up for once-only pickups instead of the former, better twice-weekly sanitation collection. And I thought of the New York nuns who recently filed suit against their upstairs Asian condo neighbors for “vomit-like smells” coming from their flat.
 
Yechhhh! The breeze blew in once more through the kitchen windows and I was overcome with the stench. “It smells like manure!” I commented to my son. That’s when he said, “Oh yeah, Dad put fertilizer on the plants.”
 
Manure
Stinky stuff, excrement, manure is the stuff that helps plants grow, and like it or not it’s what helps people grow too. As Romans 8:28 reminds us, “in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” ALL things—the waste, the fall-out, the leftovers, the offal and dung. God is the master recycler who sees to it that nothing is for naught and everything can be used to grow His kingdom in our hearts.
 
One of the sayings I’ve adopted the last couple years is: People learn at others’ expense. Their mistakes happen to us, affect us, create havoc for us. Nothing happens in a vacuum, especially life, which means that, yes, bad things happen to good people. Or as the saying goes, sh*t happens.
 
So what? With God’s help and perspective, take the crap and use it for fertilizer. Do the unthinkable—embrace it and say, ”Growth stinks.” Don’t let the others’ waste, waste you. [Point of reference: scene in Slumdog Millionaire.]
 
If we want to become better, wiser, stronger, gentler, more peaceful, better balanced, compassionate, insightful, better humored, loved and loving people—get used to the stinky smells, willingly walk through the manure, and even for a time live in it.
 
That doesn’t mean succumbing to it or becoming like it, but benefiting from it. If we can learn to take the nutrients that get cooked up in the chemical cocktail that is excrement, we will be better for it. We will grow, we will stand taller, firmer, deeper and stretch out our arms to provide shade and counsel to others.
 
Stink takes courage
You gotta hold your nose sometimes. We all find ourselves in situations where conditions are unbearable, where things have gotten so bad that they have begun to rot. However, even in the worst of times, maybe especially at the bottom of the mulching pit, when we turn to God and give it over to Him, he will show us how to use it for good, for growth.
 
The apostle Paul writes about this in 2 Corinthians 2:14-16, saying:
Thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life.
 
God’s work, Christ’s central, defining act, was to bring life from death. He overpowers the stink of decay with “knowledge of him” and triumphantly transforms fallen seed into fragrant blossoms that bear fruit.
 
Courage is not just having a stiff upper lip.
Do not be mistakened: Courage is not about strength or will, it is about heart. The root of the word courage comes from the Latin word cor meaning heart. Courage rises from the heart—and for believers from a heart nestled with Jesus who wants us to do the good that gives the heart peace and does not divide it.
 
Courage does mean doing the hard thing, and at times taking the path of most resistance but the one that finally breaks through the barriers that keep us small, root-bound, less than what we are meant to be.
 
What are we smelling?
Is it rotting fish or fertilizer? An augur of death or the prelude to growth? Do we sniff demise? Or like farmers who constantly turn over the earth in the business of growth do we quiver with the pungent possibility of beginning again in fertile soil?

 

Posted via email from 40 Day Fast

Christmas

Always winter and never Christmas. Those are the conditions in the land of Narnia in the opening chapters of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Narnia lies under the spell of the White Witch who keeps Narnia under a blanket of snow and perpetual winter.
 
I never understood what that meant until this Christmas. Maybe never having lived in snow I can’t conceive the cold to the marrow effects of forever frost. Perhaps knowing that the story would have a good ending, I pre-anticipated that Christmas would come and discounted Narnia’s winter as a temporary condition. Perhaps in my many, always recurring, never failing annual experiences of Christmas, I could never fathom a world without Christmas.
 
This Christmas, however, was different. I found myself living in a metaphorical Narnia where I longed for Christmas but somehow wasn’t so sure it would come.
 
Sure, there were ample signs of its coming: sparkling lights, festive trees, wreath, cards, carols, nativity scenes, and ample reminders of how many shopping days until Christmas. But I was not looking for the day, December 25th, which would inescapably come with the turn of a calendar page. I was looking for The Coming, Jesus’s coming
 
It wasn’t the feast of Christmas I needed, but the feel of Christ. Not the fact of Christmas, but the face of Christ. Not the pageantry of camels and magi, stars and stable, shepherds, flocks, frankincense, gold, and myrrh—but the power of God intersecting, interjecting, interrupting and restarting the world with the life of Jesus Christ.
 
No calendar, merchant, newspaper, government official or even religious leader could make that happen.
 
In the spirit of giving, we have made Christmas more about others and less about Christ. Even as Christians, we fall prey to commandeering Christmas into a show for the world, a proclamation of “our” truth, and an extravagant witness to the fact of Jesus. We politicize and, dare I say, betray the Christ Child, portraying him less the prophet and more a puppet manipulated by clumsy, willful, self-interested human hands.
 
With the best intentions, followers of Jesus talk about putting Christ back into Christmas. But it’s not as easy or simple as laying Baby Jesus in the manger of a nativity scene. That’s not our job, just as it wasn’t our job to bring Jesus into the world the first time.
 
We are powerless when it comes to Christmas. Our pocketbook and those who want a piece of it would make us believe different. However, we cannot make Christmas; only God can. It was His from the beginning. We can decorate around it, name it a holy holiday, add a artificial lights, and pile on traditions and expectations—but we cannot bring Christ into the world, not others’ worlds or even our own. We can only invite him in and wait—wait for God to birth him in our lives and transform the barren cold of winter into Christmas.
 
That’s what I waited for this year. I tried to do so without expectation so that God would have His way and not me, mine. And Christ came at God’s appointed time, not just at the ringing of a bell or human passing of time. He turned on the lights once more, reentering my world with new life amid infinite hallelujahs of angels and in glory.
 
 

Come Thou Long Expected Jesus
Come thou long-expected Jesus,
Born to set Thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us,
Let us find our rest in Thee.
Israel's strength and consolation,
Hope of all the earth Thou art;
Dear Desire of every nation,
Joy of every longing heart.
 
Born Thy people to deliver,
Born a Child and yet a King.
Born to reign in us for ever,
Now Thy gracious kingdom bring.
 
By Thine own eternal Spirit
Rule in all our hearts alone;
By Thine all-sufficient merit
Raise us to Thy glorious throne.

Posted via email from 40 Day Fast