Why I'm not a planner

Days like today are the reason I'm not a planner.

So I helped a friend move today, and to do so I borrowed my dad's pickup truck and my uncle's trailer and brought them back to Des Moines. It's an older trailer but we checked over it before we left. I'm just gona say right now, I don't like pulling a bumper-hitch car trailer on the interstate in the wind anymore. It likes to pull around a lot.
Anyway, so we blew a tire on the interstate. Not really a big deal, but it was going to take longer to get back to Josh's house than we thought originally. I called my uncle and he set me up with a place to run and get a new tire, so we limped the rest of the way to DM and dropped the trailer off at his place, then I ran and got the new tire, filled up with fuel, bought a car charger for my phone, and got the new tire put on the rim. Came back to Josh's, slapped the new tire on the trailer, good to go, no big deal, let's start loading stuff now.

Did I mention I work nights? I'm not exactly a high energy person, but on days like this, I guess I just get in go mode. It's about 2 in the afternoon by now, so I'm getting antsy to get things loaded up so we wouldn't run out of daylight and I might be able to sleep a little bit before work tonight. We closed up the trailer a couple hours later, couple last minute things, grab a Mt. Dew yes please, and pull out. It's 4 o'clock in Iowa, starting to look somewhat duskish, and the traffic on the interstate is starting to pick up a lot. We pull out onto said interstate and about half a mile later I look in the mirror and realize that my brand new tire is smoking. Pull over and inspect the problem? Oh snap, the new tire is wider than the old one; it's rubbing the sidewall on the wheel well.

God's hand of providence showed through quite a number of different times and ways today. It was a busy interstate at the beginning of rush hour, but we happened to discover our smoking rubber just in time to pull over onto part of the mixmaster that had a super wide flat of concrete, making it about the easiest place to change a tire around. I was going to wait to fuel the truck til we got back closer to home, but the Lord apparently knew I'd need that extra bit to run the second time up to the tire place and grab a new new tire. Which also was a sovereignly planned escapade---I got to the warehouse about 4:45 and was able to get to the shop to get the tire mounted on the rim a second time within minutes of closing. It was 5 on a Friday; you tell me the odds of somewhere else being open.

The rest of the trip was uneventful enough. We got to the new house, got the trailer unloaded, I got the truck and trailer back to Dad and was able to get back home again in time for work tonight. And yes, the answer is willpower and caffeine.

All that to make a point. There seem to be people on either side of the pendulum when it comes to how rigid their structure is. Some have no structure, no plan, no goal, and seem to completely let life happen to them. Some plan their day down to the minute and when something comes up that messes with their plan, it throws them off their groove and they get angry or flustered. These are the people I'm talking about.

I made a general goal today, that I would help Josh get moved. And to accomplish that, of course there were some logical steps along the way. I call it a skeleton plan. Got some basic structure, but it's flexible. Some people make their plan out of legos, and legos don't flex. You can drive a tank over those things. Except when your structure is so rigid, when it does have to flex, that doesn't work very well. My parents taught me to roll with the punches. Today was fun, to be perfectly honest. I've learned to enjoy the chaos, or rather finding solutions in the middle of the chaos.  I found a tire place I didn't know existed before today. I met a couple of guys in a mom-n-pop auto shop that I likely never would have met otherwise. I found out exactly how much torque my dad's truck has when you have to punch it hard to pull onto the interstate :)

This isn't a long post, nor is it meant to be particularly deep. It's just one of my ovbservations I want to share with you. Perhaps you could learn to be a bit more flexible if you need to be. When things happen to you that you're not expecting, don't get bogged down in the fact that your plan is falling apart. You can still accomplish what you need to, but maybe you'll have to find a different course. Roll with the punches, my friends.

12 Years A Slave

I watched the movie "12 Years A Slave" tonight, and I'm not gona lie, it was I think the second movie I've ever seen to make me cry. Or at least bring tears to my eyes--don't judge. The other one was Tears Of The Sun, and I realized in the last couple hours in thinking about them that they both have to do with suffering and a total lack of justice for people. Tears Of The Sun has to do with genocide and guerilla warfare, and 12 Years A Slave, well, the title is pretty self explanatory. 

A free black man is kidnapped and sent down to the South where slavery is still very much in vogue. While there, he endures some of the horrors of slavery stemming from having very cruel masters, including watching other slaves be hanged and being forced to lash another slave with a bull whip under the master's close eye. He does his best to stave off despair, and finally, after 12 years, he is rescued and returned to the North and to his family and home. 

It's based off a true story, and though all the details of the man's life are not known, he wrote a book about his experience and was highly active in the war against slavery. But what really got me thinking for the last few hours is how Paul refers to himself in the greeting in many of his letters, namely a slave of Jesus Christ. (The word sometimes translated bondservant is DOULOS which is actually a straight up slave) Think about it with me---Paul's identity is completely interwoven and meshed and melded together with the idea that he is in total servitude to Christ. 
So the master had the right to do literally anything he chose to do with his property. There weren't the laws regarding the ethical treatment of slaves; OSHA wasn't around to protect the working force. Although if I remember correctly, animals actually had more legal protective rights than slaves, at least at some point during the time period. But the master had the right to kill, torture, or anywise beat and discipline a slave he thought to be insubordinate. There were laws that went that direction--woe to the slave who thought to raise a hand against his master, even if said master was strikingly cruel.

But my point is this: God owns us. When we accept him into our hearts and lives as our Savior and Lord, he become our master and we become his slaves, willingly. Which is why the term "bondservant" is sometimes used, to commemorate the willingness with which we place his foot upon our necks. I think of Friday in Robinson Crusoe, who takes the man's foot and places it on the back of his bowed neck. We willingly give our freedom to the one who saved us from death and damnation. 

And the super incredible part? Wait for it ... ... ... he gives us our freedom back! He gives us, our freedom, back to us. But not only that; remember the verse in Galatians 5:4? He redeemed us, that he might give us adoption AS SONS. 
There was a bible translation I heard about awhile ago that tried to be politically correct when it came to biblical terminology, and so they translated this verse "adoption as children," which is still awesome enough in and of itself, but thinking historically, remember that the sons were given the inheritance. So male, female, it doesn't matter, as a child of God, you have been given the inheritance along with Christ as sons. 

Unfathomable grace. And what was that word I read earlier? 

Oh yeah, ineradicable. 

Because the covenant isn't up to us to uphold, God be thanked. And so the promise is ineradicable. Hey, I thought it was an awesome word. 

But back to thinking, the undeserved blessings that God gives to us in return for the nothing we can give to him, well, it's hard to quite grasp the chasm that separates us in our unworthiness for them. It's like the guy in the movie; he was under an especially cruel master, and in the end he clawed his way from the grasp of the torturer into the arms of his rescuer (sorry for the spoiler). It would be like if he were to take the new clothes they gave him and on the trip back home, he jumped down off the carriage or train and rolled around in some pig muck, then sauntered back up to the group of gentlemen who had rescued him and with a smile on his face, asked if they were ready to keep going yet. 

Well, isn't it? Look me in the eye and tell me it's not. Or, you know, type me an honest message, since I can't see your eyes at the moment. 

Do we not treat our Father's grace thus? Especially every time we sin knowingly or willingly (which we all do), that's exactly what we do. We take the clean new robes of his righteousness and we get down and play in the muck puddle of sin. Which reminds of what Lewis said in Mere Christianity about how we think so small. Each of us is like a small child who is content to go on playing and splashing in his little mud puddle because he has no comprehension of what is meant by a holiday at the sea. 

So what are my thoughts tonight? I don't really know, I guess. I mean, I want to please Christ and I want to live like him, and I'm trying to read his love letter more consistently and spend increasing time with him in prayer, but I continue to groan along with Paul, "I do the things I know I shouldn't do and I don't do the things I know I should do. O wretched man that I am--who shall deliver me from this body of death?" And therein lies the true unfathomableness of God's loving grace--he gives grace to those who have trampled on the grace he already gave to them. To us. 

To me. 

So I suppose just a word of encouragement, if to no one but myself. To again quote the apostle, "For the love of Christ constrains us, because we judge thus: that if one died for all, then all died; and he died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for him who died for them and rose again." 

And my final thought; it's about the word "constrain." Etymologically, most people don't quite grasp its meaning. It has a similar picture to the word restrain, but in the opposite direction. Let's say you're trying to walk forward, but I've got my arms around you from behind and I'm not letting you go. That's restraint. 
But let's say you're trying to stay put; maybe you're afraid, maybe you're lazy, maybe you just plain don't want to. But again I've got my arms around you from behind, and with all I've got I'm pushing you forward to what we both know you should do. That's constraint. And that's what the love of Christ does.