Because I probably do more dishes than any other single activity, I tape verses to the cupboard door before my face. This week it’s Exodus 33:13:

“If I have found favor in your sight, please show me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.”

Of course it isn’t very long before two years of seminary exposure kicks in and I begin to question whether I can even validly apply this verse to myself in prayer. The context is historically specific — Moses has been tapped to lead a recalcitrant people to the Promised Land. The speaker of the words is a special figure — prophet and foreshadowing of Christ. The reference to “this nation” is to ancient Israel. 

The question is not a trifling matter inasmuch as one could pose it about almost any verse in the 39 books of the Old Testament. Unless this is straightened out, both my reading and praying are hamstrung to some degree.

What I have arrived at is the childlike reasoning, based on such verses as 2 Timothy 3:16 and Luke 24:27, that all Scripture is mine, and I may pray it all for myself. Moreover, as to the particular verse in question, the New Testament tells me that everyone who testifies of Jesus is a prophet (Revelation 19:10b), and we who call on Him are a “holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9).

But it’s more than that. God’s Word is a living word and not a dead word. I believe that Bonhoeffer was right: When I read the Bible I must think here and now God is speaking to me.  

“You’re a much neater person healed than you would have been well.”

That’s what Beth Moore told her husband when he mused wistfully about what kind of person he could have been if not for the tragedy and “set on fire by hell” stuff of his youth.

And with that insight, I hope we can once and for all stop hitting the rewind button on our lives and wishing we could start over again — with a different father, a different personality, and a different hand to play. We have all done unto and been done unto. We all bear scars, both self-inflicted and inflicted by others. But cheer up. As Flannery O’Connor said, anybody who has survived childhood has enough material to write a book. And, more importantly, enough experience to be useful to a hurting brother or sister somewhere down the line.

As a “well” person you would have been insufferable. Even now, after battling the bulge for twenty years, if you ever lost that fifty pounds, it would be hard not to swap the problem of obesity for pride. Sometimes God will send a tiny reminder of an overcome addiction or condition (like depression) to give you fresh compassion and humility, rather than your having to rely on memory.

I know a teenage girl who is working hard through forgiving a cult that messed up her life. I wish she could see how beautiful she looks to me.

I finally figured out how to summarize what Bible teacher Beth Moore has done for my Christian life: she has taken back out of the “not yet” basket all the things that belong in the “already” basket. (People of my church affiliation will be familiar with this quaint terminology.) Few theological concepts have done more mischief in my life than this one.

The “already/ not yet” is a catchy formulation that has some value as a way of explaining that Christ has purchased a great salvation for us, some of whose benefits are available to us now (“already”) and the rest of which will be ours at the Second Coming (“not yet”). Can I receive my glorified body now? “Not yet.” Is it time to stop daily confessing my sins? “Not yet.” Can I be with the Lord in every sense now? “Not yet” (Philippians 1:23).

But any slogan can end up displacing the reality it was meant to capture, and though Systematic Theology is helpful, the Bible has to be primary; it has to be the constant touchstone of truth. “Already – not yet” has become a hackneyed mantra invoked in a way that discourages a fresh word from the Spirit in my Bible reading.

I am not at all convinced that all of the power that Christ won for His church is not being seen today because it is meant to be “not yet.” Know what I mean? (Ephesians 3:20).

Conversation is an art. Even with God. When I first set myself to seeking Him with all my heart, my prayers were awkward, like a person on a first date.

Over time I have noticed a change I did not expect.  My prayers begin to resemble those recorded in the Bible. I find myself lingering long over sentiments about God’s awesomeness, holiness, mercy, great deeds — and similar things I used to pass over quickly in Paul or Ezekiel as the obligatory, overly pious, and slightly boring prolegomena to the interesting bits in prayer.

More of my dog-walking time than ever is taken up thanking Him. And I didn’t realize how many things He has done for me until I started “counting them one by one,” as the old hymn goes. If thanksgiving is pleasing to God, it is energizing to me. It’s not for His sake but for ours, turns out, that He bids us “enter His gates with thanksgiving.”

Like Moses and Daniel, I find myself wrestling more on the basis of God’s Name (His glory or reputation). I am also thus emboldened to ask more vehemently, because I stand on better footing. The contents of my prayers has changed too. I like the joke about the 6^th grader who handed in his completed geography test, praying, “Dear God, please make Chicago be the capital of Illinois!” But I don’t ask for those things so much anymore because I know better, being a parent myself.

The most interesting change in my prayer life is, unfortunately, ineffable. It is as if the Holy Spirit takes over at some point and does the praying. This is my favorite part, because I still don’t know how to pray as I ought.

God is creative. But that’s like saying Jacques Yves Cousteau liked fish. Vern Poythress, in Redeeming Science, calls it a Trinitarian creativity—the Father is “Author” who conceives an “Idea,” the Son is the Word or “Energy” who articulates it, and the Spirit is the “Power” or concrete application of the creative plan. I am not so fancy. I just say, God is creative.

You and I are creative because God is creative. We are able to put together  unlikely things, even link things that no one ever thought to link before, because of God in us by his Spirit (Just the way God decided to put blue and green together, in sky and leaves, and it “works”).

This creativity applies to (among other things) the way we read and interpret his Word. When we stay close to the heart of God in prayer and devotion to His Word, He goes on His creative spree again and makes us see links between parts of His Word that perhaps no one in the world ever conceived of precisely in that way before, in ways that are analogous to His own ex nihilo creativity.

In a recent blog post in which I wished out loud for more sympathetic understanding among Christians, God brought to my mind the verse “Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated and untrained, they marveled. And they realized that they had been with Jesus.”

I was taken aback when a responder took issue with my yanking the verse out of context. But see, this is what the Spirit does! He fires creative connections left and right. He takes our seminary training wheels and blows the doors off our academic paradigms. He proves over and over that He is both too big and too small for our net.

Because he was too blind to see it himself, Pharaoh’s servants screwed up their courage to tell him:

“How long shall this man [Moses] be a snare to us? Let the men go, that they may serve the Lord their God. Do you not yet understand that Egypt is ruined?” (Exodus 10:7).

We tend to be the last ones to see our own ruin: “Strangers devours his strength, and he knows it not; gray hairs are sprinkled upon him, and he knows it not” (Hosea 7:9).

There is a Christian institution I know that is the last to see that it has become a “horror…a reproach, a byword, a taunt” (Jeremiah 24:9). It continues to pipe out cheery newsletters, healing its wound lightly, “saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace (Jeremiah 8:11).

When I asked an insider why they don’t stop business-as-usual and call a week of prayer and fasting, he said they didn’t want the matter to spread beyond the boundaries of the community. That’s very different from King Josiah’s style (2 Kings 23), or Moses’ (Numbers 14), or Nehemiah’s (Nehemiah 9), who called for public, sackcloth-and-ashes repentance.

Esther also knew better than to make a move without insisting on three days of a fasting back-up (Esther 4:16). Zipporah averted her husband Moses’ ruin by quick, godly thinking (Exodus 4:24,25). And even an evil man in Luke 16 had the good sense to take drastic action to avert his ruin.

“A little folly outweighs wisdom and honor” (Ecclesiastes 10:1). It is a commonplace that “more is caught than taught.” Who will be attracted to the Lord’s kingdom when in the time of testing of our faith, we prove that we don’t believe a word of it?

For all its pain, the book of Job has its delights. My daughter, a bit of an equestrian, loves its ode to the horse (39:19-25). I myself have recently been delighted by a different kind of find.

To the first-time reader the monologues of Job and those of his four friends seem all of the same cloth.  In a second reading, tonal differences emerge: the discourses of Eliphaz, Bibldad, Zophar, and Elihu seem detached, clinical, bloodless, and seminarial — as if God had nothing better to do all day than be a doctrine. Job’s words, by contrast, are emotional, transparent, and human.

But here is the most interesting thing. At no time in the book do the friends ever break from the “horizontal,” Job being their addressee and God their subject matter. We feel the friends are speaking about God as about someone far off, like the sun.

But look what happens when Job speaks. He goes along like the four visitors at first, on an eye-to-eye level. But at some point he seems to switch — seamlessly — from talking to men to speaking to God. He goes airborne. In 6:8 we are not sure. In 7:7 we have a clear eruption to God in the midst of a response to Eliphaz. By verses 12 to 21, the transition is complete, though we never saw a signpost.

In chapter 9, Job begins earthbound in answering Bildad. But so very present is God to him, that like an unsuppressible bubble of carbon gas at the bottom of a glass, he rises to God. And by verse 28, he is pleading with his Savior as if alone with him in the sanctuary, his friends’ noisy cavils having faded to white noise.

In the ways of a person who lives in constant intimacy with God, there is a fluidness of conversation between the vertical and horizontal all day long.  

Is there anything about you that, if people only knew, they would not judge you so harshly? Maybe something physical, something so odd that you don’t tell anyone because no one would believe you, but it is something that explains a lot about you? Or maybe it is a fault that, by God’s grace, you have made much headway in overcoming — and what people are reacting negatively to is actually a much improved you! They should only know how bad you used to be!

We need to be aware, especially those who are endowed with natural equanimity, that what comes easy for you may be a moment-by-moment battle for others. It’s all good, because God uses that “thorn” they’re saddled with to develop a desperately pleasing clinging to Him in faith. But it might not look like much from the outside. The person looks to you like an oddball. The fact is she could be in a mental institution and — glory to God! — she is functioning in society. A little benefit of the doubt please.

We all want to be understood and accepted. But most of us have learned not to expect much from one another in the way of understanding and patience. How sad. We have learned that people are pretty much the same — Christian or non-Christian: they’re nice when you’re nice or when you appeal to them, and not nice when you sin or you look like a loser. Push a Christian more than an inch and he will react pretty much like a pagan.

But God has called us to be extraordinary. Paul chided the Corinthians for behaving like “mere men” (1 Corinthians 3:3). The place where God is glorified is the distance our love pushes through beyond where the world stops loving. Let us beseech the Lord for unkillable love. Let the world “[take] not that these men have been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

Thomas the Tank Engine has the goods on us. Here is the plot of Good Morning Engines, which I read to my granddaughter.

Thomas and Percy are trying to catch a few winks in the engine shed, but James in the adjacent berth is boasting on and on about a special early morning run he’s been assigned to—taking people to town for a royal parade.

Morning comes and Thomas is up promptly to transport passengers on his branch line to the junction where James is to pick them up and take them to town. But when Thomas arrives at the station, James is not there! He had stayed up so late bragging that he has overslept.

“‘Oh no!’ says Thomas. He waits and waits but sees no sign of James. … Thinking fast, Thomas calls over to Percy. … ‘If you make half of James’ stops, and I make the other half. …’”

James is an obnoxious vehicle who has lorded his privileges over Thomas and Percy. And now, by his own sin, he has put himself in the position of being disgraced. There is not a person in a thousand who will not sit on the sidelines and privately gloat at his misfortune.

But the author of Good Morning Engines—whether he be Christian or no—knows instinctively that that is not the right way, not the beautiful way. Though he himself may never in his life have risen to the virtue of Thomas, he recognizes it as virtue. He yearns to be treated the way Thomas and Percy treated James, when he himself should be caught in a sin. He yearns to be a man like Thomas and Percy.

“They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts” (Romans 2:15).

Trust is built on a track record. We trust God because He has been as good as His word. And indeed, He everywhere invites us to trust Him on this basis: “Remember what I did to Pharaoh.”

In 1832 a preacher named William Miller went on tour predicting that Jesus would return on October 22, 1844. That’s why you’ve never heard of him. A better prophet may be Russian scholar Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who warned, twenty-three years before “9- 11,” about underestimating the ideological gulf between us Westerners and Muslim countries. If he got that right, maybe we should listen to what else he has to say:

The persisting blindness of superiority [of the West] continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems,…that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction.

But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this.

 Solzhenitsyn thus rejects the prevalent doctrine of the eventual “convergence” of nations: “It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these world are not at all evolving toward each other and that neither one can be transformed into the other without violence.”

Something for the next administration to think about when devising foreign policy.