i am a green olive tree

[7 minutes]

But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever.

Psalm 52:8

David wrote this only one chapter removed from his confession to God when a broken, sinful man. The chapters aren’t chronological, of course, but their arrangement seems to be — for me at least — by design.

Looking back over the arc of our lives, we can dredge up seasons when we wondered if we’d ever get past our failures. In other seasons, we’ve known the inestimable joy of intimacy with God we never wanted to end. Hello sanctification.

In Psalm 51 David is the guilty man. In Psalm 52 he is gutted by the crimes of another man — Doeg the Edomite. Doeg brazenly murdered 85 innocent people in cold blood. The slaughtered were priests, together with their wives and children. Their crime? They gave David sanctuary when he was on the run from King Saul. David was beside himself with fury.

“How dare you, Doeg! You will face the wrath of a just God, you dog! You think you’re a big man, all high and mighty, plotting my demise. But it is you who will go down. Me? I’m a green olive tree in God’s house, big boy. You, on the other hand, are kindling for the lake of fire.”

No doubt David was reeling from the news of the priests of Nob and their families. It wasn’t enough for the vile Edomite to kill the priests, he massacred their families too. They died because they all stood with David!

Talk about survivor’s guilt.

selah

In the middle of this painful psalm is a Selah. It’s a strange place for a Selah, sure, but David tacks one on.

You love evil more than good, and lying more than speaking about what is right. Selah

(v3)

Selah.

Catch your breath.

Gather your wits.

Get quiet.

Be still.

John Andrew Bryant has battled mental illness his entire life. His brain never turns off; it is always noisy in there. His affliction is a daily surrender and his dependence upon God for the healing of his mind is evident in his words. John describes finding a “foothold” in those especially stormy times when his brain is firing in all directions.

“What I have in Christ is the simple, painful renunciation of the urges created by my brain, the ability to say no to desires and compulsions that will not just go away. I wish it was more. But that is all it’s been: a foothold in the storm of thought and feelings…that foothold, that boat, that kernel, is not a place where I do something to be okay. It is a place where I don’t. That patient, quiet understanding is the place where I stand with Christ and don’t do anything to make things right or win or be okay. It is the place where I don’t fix, the place where I don’t defend myself, the place where I don’t figure things out, and the place where I don’t know for sure. The place where it is somehow possible to not engage those compulsions. The place I stand with Christ and endure what it feels like to not do those things. The place where I’ve learned to stand with Christ by being quiet.”
A Quiet Mind To Suffer With, p17-18

That is David’s Selah here in the 52nd Psalm. He reminds himself with that Selah that however much evil swirls about him, he is not its victim. He must not surrender to it. Lady Macbeth told her husband to “screw his courage to the sticking place,” and this appears to be what David – albeit righteously – was telling himself to do.

I am tempted to substitute the name Jesus where I see a Selah in scripture. I don’t think it breaks any rules, personally.

My heart is broken. Jesus.

I’m hanging on by a thread. Jesus.

Lord, I don’t understand. Jesus.

My only hope is you. Jesus.

This too shall pass. Jesus.

Once upon a time, twelve men sat for an important gospel meal. The scene was humming with observable tension as it was the last Passover in which Jesus would take part. While he was speaking, John, we are told, leaned against his Messiah’s breast. Although the atmosphere was charged, the beloved disciple anchored himself to the Rock.

Think of Selah, then, as pressing into Jesus. Selah, where you don’t fix or defend or try to figure out. You listen. You wait. You trust. You are still.

Like a tree.

a green olive tree

David imagines himself in verse 8 as a tree, but not just any tree. He is God’s tree, a temple tree. He was a well-manicured olive tree, not some scrub tree out in the wild. His roots were resolutely screwed into the sticking place of holy soil.

David, consummate lover of nature, appreciated the beautiful trees in Jerusalem. Adorning the temple grounds, no doubt, were flowering olive trees whose aroma misted the air. He knew they provided the oil for worship in the holy place and said “I’m one of those trees.”

Before I’m anything, I’m a worshipper of God. The Lord made me to love him and enjoy him forever. Doegs and Sauls and Goliaths come and go, but I’m rooted in the faithfulness of God.

The thing about olive trees: they are capable of surviving the worst that life can dish out. There’s an olive tree in Crete that is close to 3,000 years old. Believe me, it’s seen some stuff. Paul was shipwrecked by a horrible storm that drove him into the sands of Crete in Acts 27. That tree is still producing olives today.

I’m one of those trees. I’m precious to God. He is invested in protecting me, so I will not be defeated by those who wish ill upon me. The times I’m living in will not get the best of me. I’m living in the Land of Selah.

Let that cruel dog Doeg and his ilk be who they are, they won’t affect me. They can choose evil but I will stay planted here in the garden of the Lord.

What are you going through right now, beloved? What’s got your goat? Who’s oppressing you? That hard thing in your life may be a person, it may be a condition, it may be a situation. Your hardship hurts even more because it’s out of your control and it’s not letting up. I get it.

Step back like David did and see the bigger picture. See a Land called Selah. Can you see it? Now look closer and see a City in that Land called Peace. Picture yourself there, planted in its soil, loved and cherished and protected by God. You may not think so, but you are thriving. It may feel like you’re losing, but God sees olives in you.

Let them cancel you. Let the situation play out. Ignore the lying voices inside your head. Screw your courage to the sticking place and hang your hope on the sure peg of Selah. Hollywood is going to be what it is. Politicians will be who they are. The world and its pleasures are passing away; let them go the way of the dust. Stand your ground, Olive Tree. It’s okay. He’s got this. He’s got you. You’re safe. Just be still, stay rooted, and “trust in his unfailing love” (v8).

Selah, beloved. Jesus.

God is in the groaning

Scripture: 2 Corinthians 4:15-5:4

Fellow pilgrim, follower of Christ, brother and sister in the faith, we are not built for this world. We are made for the next.

Paul invites us to GROAN over our situation. He puts us in a chapel with a soft organ playing “Abide With Me” and “I Come To The Garden Alone” in the background.

Candles flicker in the stifling air.

Grim-faced pallbearers line the front pew and fellow mourners flank us on every side.

He sets us in front of an open casket; we look inside and see…ourselves.

This life has taken its toll on us and we see the effect of it in our corpses. We mourn. Lament. Groan.

Reality hits us:

We are not made for this world.

C.S. Lewis wrote in ‘Mere Christianity’,

If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.

Paul tells us the most natural thing for us to do is GROAN.

We’re not alone, either. Romans informs us even creation feels deep pangs of anxiety and later in the same chapter, that the Holy Spirit himself groans wordless prayers in his intercessions for us.

“Jesus knows all about our struggles,
He will guide till the day is done,
There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus,
No not one; no not one”

It might surprise us to turn around inside that funeral chapel and see who the mourners are. Trees and mountains, seas and forests, flowers and soil, stars and planets. Each weeping alongside the broken-hearted saints who long for release from the pain of this earth.

Nightbirde

A young 30-something singer/songwriter known to her fans as “Nightbirde” experienced career-ending cancer in her lungs, spine, and liver. The pain of her battle with cancer is found in these words she penned last March, nearly a year ago:

“After the doctor told me I was dying, and after the man I married said he didn’t love me anymore, I chased a miracle in California and sixteen weeks later, I got it. The cancer was gone. But when my brain caught up with it all, something broke. I later found out that all the tragedy at once had caused a physical head trauma, and my brain was sending false signals of excruciating pain and panic.

I spent three months propped against the wall. On nights that I could not sleep, I laid in the tub like an insect, staring at my reflection in the shower knob. I vomited until I was hollow. I rolled up under my robe on the tile. The bathroom floor became my place to hide, where I could scream and be ugly; where I could sob and spit and eventually doze off, happy to be asleep, even with my head on the toilet.”

Then she courageously added,

“Call me cursed, call me lost, call me scorned. But that’s not all. Call me chosen, blessed, sought-after. Call me the one who God whispers his secrets to. I am the one whose belly is filled with loaves of mercy that were hidden for me. Even on days when I’m not so sick, sometimes I go lay on the mat in the afternoon light to listen for Him. I know it sounds crazy, and I can’t really explain it, but God is in there—even now. I have heard it said that some people can’t see God because they won’t look low enough, and it’s true. If you can’t see him, look lower. God is on the bathroom floor.”

Nightbirde died last month.

Did you hear her groaning? This precious girl, blessed with singing talent and promised a future? Her candle snuffed out. Her song tragically morphed into her obituary.

Nightbirde groaned, but found in her groaning on the bathroom floor that God was there.

God groans when we hurt

Nightbirde included this paragraph in her brief ‘memoir’:

Call me bitter if you want to—that’s fair. Count me among the angry, the cynical, the offended, the hardened. But count me also among the friends of God. For I have seen Him in rare form. I have felt His exhale, laid in His shadow, squinted to read the message He wrote for me in the grout: “I’m sad too.”
—Nightbirde, ‘God is on the Bathroom Floor, March 9, 2021

Our Lord promised us in Isaiah 63:9 “when we suffer, He suffers.”

Mary and Martha groaned because their brother was gone. Jesus visited them in their sorrow… and what did he do?

He GROANED.

Before “Jesus wept,” he groaned. “He was deeply moved” (ESV) is, quite literally, “He was angered in spirit and troubled himself.” The word describes a warhorse snorting and stomping its hoof, itching to charge into the fray and face the enemy.

Sometimes our suffering, or seeing another suffer, makes us just plain mad.

Jesus knew that anger.

Our Savior doesn’t just “feel your pain.” He also hates it. He hates what it does to you. Yes he knows the long game, that every eye will be dried one day and there will be no more pain, but he also meets us in our moment with mercy and justice on the bathroom floor.

God is on your side in the groaning

The Lord is with you when your spouse leaves you for another; he’s with you in the doctor’s office when she tells you the bad news, the worst news. The Father’s with you at the bottom of a cliff. He’s with you when you’ve cried yourself to sleep over your prodigal child; and he is with you when your bleeding heart is inside a casket as it’s being lowered into the ground.

I’m spending my mornings reading from the book of Jeremiah.

Just this week I was reading where he felt “deceived” by God. He had just preached a sermon that got him slapped and put in chains and in a very raw and earnest moment he accused God of “deceiving him.”

This word is used throughout the prophecies of Jeremiah. The major “flaw in the system” in Judah was deception and lies and Jeremiah calls it out again and again.

Now, however, he applies it to God.

How could you, God?
Why?
This is unbecoming of you! How dare you! I am your prophet and you are treating me this way?

He threatens to retire. To quit. To just walk away.

But four verses later, he has a change of heart. God meets him in his anguish and gives him a vision. Jeremiah saw in the Spirit that God was with him…and not just as a friend!

Jeremiah saw God as a WARRIOR standing over him, protecting him, shielding him.

A eulogy of no regrets

Paul, the officiant, delivers a pitch-perfect eulogy. In our fog of beleaguered sorrow, he waxes pastoral as he answers each of our complaints with gospel hope.

“Yes, you’re wasting away…but that’s just your ‘tent’; the real you is glorious!”
“I know these troubles are all you can see; to you they seem impenetrably mountainous. I assure you, God’s love for you is an eternal mountain range and these trials are but dust in the wind.”
“Beloved child, you can see no end to your groaning, but your Father is wise, loving, and good; BUT YOUR FATHER SEES…AND HE KNOWS; he keeps his eye on the clock and his hand on the thermostat.”

We groan, but don’t give up.

Why?

Because we know a secret.

Paul stacks hyperboles, showing how small our worst trials and troubles are here on earth (as well as our happiest moments) compared to what is being prepared for us in glory.

The day after tomorrow Sandy and I will be venturing out west with friends to see the Grand Canyon. I’ve never seen it. I cannot tell you how excited I am.

Even so,

Pastor Paul tells me I can put that glorious event on one scale — standing on the precipice of the Grand Canyon — then pile on the other side of the scale, higher than the heavens, the Day of my uncovering as I stand in the presence of Jesus.

Now, that’s something for which I really, really, really can’t wait.

I only have one message. I’ve shared it forty years in life, word — and groaning — all across the country. It’s my soulsong, my life verse, my core theology, and my eulogy:

God is God,
God is good,
God is good at being God.

And (don’t forget this),

God is good at being God in all our groaning.

Selah, beloved.

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thirty thoughts

John 11:25-26
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

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Today our son would turn 30.

We miss him:

His easy manner.

His cocked-and-ready smile.

His crazy, over-the-top humor.

His adventurous spirit.

His companionship.

His quick wit.

The way he so easily befriended the marginalized.

How he was completely cool with his being adopted.

How he hated to see those he loved suffer.

When he played his soothing guitar late at night.

How he always, ALWAYS, said “I love you” at the end of a phone conversation.

How he loved surprises.

His sincere questions about faith and life.

How he despised hypocrisy.

How easily he could forgive.

How hard he hugged.

Whenever he did his Chris Farley impersonations.

Even his tattoos (not all of them, mind you).

How he was his own unique brand.

Today he would turn 30.

Our faith reminds us every day we will see him again; not some idea of him or a mystical hologram version, but him.

In all His glory.

CS Lewis once said regarding those we love who are now in heaven we’d be tempted to fall down and worship them as the version they are now, so great is the glory they are wrapped in.

What a glorious thought.

A blind friend came to the funeral home and handed me a scrap of paper with a message his wife helped him write. It said, “Next time you see Graham he will be running toward you, gleaming.”

That will be then, thank Jesus, but today we grieve that that day is not today.

We miss him something fierce.

Another friend told Sandy and me after the funeral, “I don’t want to ‘be remembering’ Graham, I want to be knowing him.”

We do too.

I’d want to hug him hard and tell my boy so many things so much differently.

But the one thing I’d say exactly the same is “I love you son. I’m glad you’re mine.”

What I want to say to him on his 30th birthday…

What I really, REALLY want to tell him is:

“Graham Scott Mitchell, we’re so happy to see you again. We’ve missed you like you wouldn’t believe.”