I got understandable flack for my recent post, Palisades Perspective: Crisis or Consequence, criticizing my seemingly cruel suggestion that the LA fires are God's judgment on a modern-day Sodom & Gomorrah, ancient dens of iniquity and self-indulgence, indifferent to God and others. Jesus’ own words are far more scathing than mine, but I’m okay being the fall guy. I don't want to cause needless grief but rather, godly sorrow that sets us free. Judgment, indeed, is but one side of the coin. God is love. He’s perfectly loving, holy, and just. God's discipline is designed to spare us far worse. Not all we suffer this side of heaven is corrective, but it can all be restorative, formative, purifying, and liberating…if we come to God. On the other hand, God's judgement is a verdict.
Significant Sidebar
Please, let’s not forget that love and mercy are also for the long-suffering victims—abused, marginalized, and enduring unspeakable injustice. They have been crying out for relief and vindication while the perps prospered. Know this: God hears your cries, friend. He will avenge you.
My Mercy-filled Disasters
I have more than average experience with disaster, a survivor of an unusual childhood and grown-up life marked by contrasts of goodness and privilege, shattering sin and suffering, my own and others’. My Guideposts readers know I share a lot of my life experiences. That’s God’s way, letting our real-life testimonies serve the multi-purpose of healing, humbling, and helping us and others while honoring Him and His power to change lives if we let Him.
In a slow-rolling trainwreck that spanned years, my charming schizophrenic PhD mom squandered her inheritance, my alcoholic PhD dad left the family, and my older brother died of a drug overdose. My mom's house eventually foreclosed, and she was suddenly evicted. A houseful of Italian heirlooms landed in storage, which I arranged and paid for in a rush at twenty-one. I'm skipping many messy details, as you can imagine. The turbulent saga went on. And on.
I point out PhDs and prosperity to underscore that affluence and intellect aren’t always assets. In fact, they are often terrible liabilities if they become an end to themselves, turning us away from a more brilliant God and breeding all sorts of nastiness that is spiritually and sometimes physically lethal.
In retrospect, this succession of disasters was progressive discipline—judgment or built-in consequences, if you prefer—of the abounding sin in my family: widespread addiction, adultery, excess, ego, vain ambition, and the list goes on. Mind you, my parents weren’t monsters. They were terrific, loving, exceptional people full of virtue, yet fallible, as we all are. There's a razor' s-edge correlation between virtue and vice.
Like so many humans, my beloved parents fell prey to generational patterns and corrupt cultural ideals far from their sheltered Italian life, the corrosive powers of sin. Sorry. That’s the word that must be used, and if it makes you bristle, let it prompt you to ask why and where that leads. Like Precious in the Lord of the Rings, the lure is intoxicating, blinding us to the sprawling distortions and destruction it causes.
Had anyone been minding the spiritual store at my house, much of the disaster could have been averted. Hindsight is indeed 20/20. Please maximize our mistakes for your benefit.
Instead, an injured young woman, I turned my back on God and soldiered on in my own strength, repeating some of my destructive patterns from my family tree. God tried repeatedly to get my attention, mainly with the intense discomfort of relentless anxiety that I medicated with more: More money, more prestige, more activity, more people, more men, more stuff, more booze. I'm not unique.
I wasn’t really wired for all that so it didn’t help so much.
Meanwhile, the more scary warning shots across the bow were mercifully coupled with the relentless pursuit of the Lover of My Soul, seeking to save me from myself. Not-so-chance unlikely encounters, spiritual signposts, and unscaled eyes to see God’s love in my life prompted me to step out of the whirlwind and seek God. Even so, I battled, not wanting to be a nun or surrender the assorted, increasingly ineffective security blankets I’d collected. I wondered who I would be without them.
I kept a foot in both worlds: a battle between good and evil, if you will, the lure of the familiar and the dread of the unknown dos and don’ts of the Bible, which seemed to spoil my fun. So, I persisted in self-medicating with assorted people, places, and things.
At first, all this somewhat masked the creeping horror and emptiness, but mostly it amplified my angst. I found myself at a precipice, at what some call “the jumping off place,” compelled to choose between life and death. Not literally, thank God, but spiritually. Mercifully, my “bottom” was pretty high, riding the coattails of my parents and brother and having the grace to recognize the inevitable destination if I didn’t course correct soon.
I chose life, or Life chose me, having a transformative encounter with Christ that filled me with peace and a sense of loving liberation I can’t describe. Grace rushed in and washed me clean. All the unhealthy attachments that had once seemed essential for survival became meaningless. I was free. I was not the same person. Many of my struggles vanished instantly; the compulsion to drink was only one. I quit my high-paid, high-stress, high-profile job and marinated in Jesus around the clock. It was a blissful bubble, locked away in my Victorian rowhome, cutting off just about everyone.
Within a few months, I wanted the reins back. I started to slip into some old behaviors. I had a sip of wine and triggered all the same compulsions, suddenly fear-filled and frantic for a spiritual fix other than God.
Twelve-Step Wisdom for Living
Soon after, by grace, I landed in Twelve Step recovery, where I found a simple (not easy) system for maintaining the mystical serenity of gospel faith that had rescued me months before.
I like programs, tasks, and checklists that I can complete to meet goals. Check, check, check. I didn’t realize then that this is simply another form of empty religion and soul-numbing addiction, this doing. Ironically, it wasn't drawing me closer to God but driving a wedge between us.
Some of us might be tempted to purse our lips at the mention of addiction, as though our m extra pounds, shopping, gossip, raging, boyfriends, or Botox don’t qualify. We may race to condemn alcoholics or drug addicts as repellant and weak (hurray for weakness) and justify our more socially acceptable or hidden indulgences. God doesn't.
Jesus equalizes all sin, essentially the idolatry of putting anything before Him. By the way, this also equalizes us.
He wants to free us from all that. All of it.
Yet we persist in our various slaveries, some well-disguised as good things in our eyes.
The Twelve Steps neatly parallel core New Testament spiritual practices that help us avoid the sin that so easily ensnares us. Constant prayer and gratitude, confession to God and others, accountability, ongoing self-examination, repentance, service, and abject dependence on God in an anonymous, humbly transparent community. Daily...to give you an idea of what's suggested to maintain spiritual integrity.
Twelve Step anonymity not only guards against the hypocritical criticism and ostracism of addicts, it's also mintended to foster humility and equality. The rock star, janitor, millionaire, and monk all share their humbling sin and dependence on God—along with experiences and gifts—for the common good.
This ideal reflects the kind of community envisioned by Jesus and is partly reflected in the Book of Acts.
These time-honored practices are designed to attain and maintain our relationship with God, ourselves, and others. But just as in church, if they become gods themselves, they not only become ineffective, they separate us from God and others.
However, whether inside or outside the church, these principles and practices only work if you work them. This is not salvation by works. It's grateful obedience.
Nemesis Narcissus
The problem is that all this depends on an honest understanding of our persistent brokenness and dependence on God. This is not a place most want to live voluntarily. Our egos buck it. Once the fatal menace of alcohol (or another sin) is subdued, we can become complacent about “lesser sins” like fear, selfishness, resentment, and dishonesty, increasingly unable to see ourselves as we really are.
So does the pressure to project propriety, lest we be canceled for still struggling with this or that hidden or not-so-hidden sin. Pride is the driver of all of it, presuming to know better than God to manage our own lives, making idols of ourselves and/or other people, places, and things, and edging god out.
Cancel culture that demonizes brokenness and rewards the appearance of success--or success--can drive us deeper into denial and delusion.
Worst yet, we may know we are sinning and self-justifying, entitled, exploiting, and blaming someone else for our selfishness and bad behavior, gaslighting ourselves, and others with impunity, banking on God’s grace to let us skate.
This isn't Jesus love.
Over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to penetrate the delusion. Once this demon has folks in its grip (with our cooperation), it's super hard to see and break free. That's why seemingly normal, nice people (including priests and pastors, people), sometimes do really messed up stuff. It’s crazy evil.
Out of love, God will implement progressive discipline, as any good parent would, to prevent us from destroying ourselves or others.
Uninterrupted by the spiritual practices that help maintain our spiritual union with Christ, this sin is self-perpetuating because self-effort produces self-righteousness and superiority inclined to hide—or not see—our sin. Sin grows in the darkness and hates the light that exposes it. Narcissism often leads us to discredit, demonize, or discard people who expose it so it can thrive, growing like-minded cliques of mutual admiration that enable evil. The hypocrisy it engenders is dangerous to all of us. It can happen on a very large scale.
This epidemic of narcissism is a universal threat that can infect all of us under the right influences—often money, power, or influence. These age-old idolatries are particularly toxic and intoxicating, as evidenced by reality and corroborated by Jesus, who repeatedly demonizes wealth. Few can handle them well. A point of the continuum from original sin to Hitler. These are ancient, well-documented perils. It wears many disguises.
I can spot it all because I got it all! We're all made of the same stuff. I have gone from zero to world domination in eleven seconds. Guarding against is requires a continuous brokenness before God that I long resisted. Bad idea. In a tug-of-war with God, guess who wins? I'm now highly motivated to obey God to the best of my ability and repent promptly when I fall.
In AA, it's said that those who relapse have a far harder time getting sober again, just as Peter explained about sin. Some don't make it back. Now sub sin for alcohol. Yikes.
Because the kind of abiding God invites us to is a profoundly personal surrender and abject dependence on God. Abject is "total surrender ...completely without pride or dignity; self-abasing." (Oxford)
The ongoing maintenance of this spiritual condition features the paradoxical tension of dependence on God and cooperative use of free will, choosing not to indulge our sins (defects) and, if we fall, to repent promptly to receive the grace we need to get back on track. Childlike powerlessness and obedience are two concepts that are anathema to Americans, in particular, because of the great ease and comfort many enjoy.
For some of us (hand raise), it involved continuous surrender and often stripping away all that gets in the way. The pain is in the resistance.
God’s way of life is hard for anyone. Jesus said The Way is narrow and hard.
Most wouldn’t choose the humbling it requires. A continuous dying to self.
Palisades Perspective
In my controversial post, I highlighted God’s ironic justice of fire razing the lux properties in a city known for excess, gross income disparities, immigrants, and a large store-front homeless population, the poor and broken trod beneath happily Gucci-bound feet.
I noted President Biden's race to promise aid for those with deep pockets when countless humans live in permanent lack and the national debt skyrockets.
I didn’t address many other grievous human offenses at the epicenter of LA-- "this Godless town," as Nikki Glaser called it at the Golden Globes last Sunday--an incubator for the defects that can derail any of us under the right conditions, starting with Godless choices.
I’m not saying every human in LA is evil and due for a cosmic spanking!
I know many good, giving, God-fearing people are suffering collateral damage in a world where it rains on all of us. Sin is destructive that way. It hurts everyone.
Others are genuinely lost, who went to LA seeking stardom to find only disillusionment and despair.
Others found the success they sought at the price of peace with the continual comparison, moral compromises, ceaseless striving, and risk of rejection that can afflict any of us. A house of cards and a deeper kind of lost.
Finally, some consciously made a deal with the devil, selling their soul for the promise of pleasure. Potentially irretrievably lost, as awful as it can be.
Only God knows our hearts, deceitful as they can be. Some indeed are facing the judgement of God.
If I'm honest, though (and I gotta to be), there are times when a few voluntary compromises, and I could find myself in some less glamorous variation of these categories of spiritual fitness. Read the headlines and you'll know it's true.
It's important to know this about ourselves…and others. It's important to course-correct now.
Wherever we are in this toxic trajectory, there remains a remedy for some.
Good News
God says fire isn't only destructive; it can purify and refine, like gold in the jeweler's crucible or forest fires that clear the way for new growth .
Jesus Himself bore the full, wrath of God for our chronic waywardness in all its forms, thereby bridging the unfathomable gap between us and the perfect God of the Universe. He invites us to surrender our lives and rights to Him in exchange for eternity and priceless intangible benefits on this side of heaven, including His indwelling Spirit to live by.
I’ve finally come to see this is and is not a one-and-done. It’s a daily reprieve from the fires of real and perceived hell, dependent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition. This Amazing Grace is not now, nor was it ever, a P Diddy party pass to deny and defy God or abuse His gift, an awful offense once you’ve been rescued from death.
It isn’t the mean-hearted, fun-spoiling prohibitions of any angry control freak.
These are the omniscient guardrails of a perfectly loving parent who set the laws (of the universe) to maximize our peace and harmony with Him, ourselves, and one another.
This is the heartbroken, infuriated parent, who after trying every single loving remedy s/he could think to rescue their wayward child bent on destruction, finally says,
“I love you so much you can't imagine. I can’t bear to see how you’re destroying yourself and others. I’ve tried everything. I’ve given you all I’ve got to give, every chance. I’ve tried to protect, rescue, and support you. I’m done. I’m letting you go, though it’s excruciating to me. I can’t enable you anymore. I have to let you suffer the full, unchecked impact of your choices on your own, praying the consequences will scare you straight before you die or kill someone. I pray this wake-up call will motivate you to change. Please don’t call me from jail. I don’t want to hear any more of your foxhole prayers, short-lived self-serving sorrys, or promises to change, which I’ve heard many times before. But the minute I see and know you mean it, I’ll welcome you back with open arms, help you, and restore all the privileges of being my child. I’ll rush out to wherever you are to embrace you and celebrate your return.” (See Luke 15:11-32)
But soberly I tell you, good parent aside, it can also be the terminal judgment of a parent who has seen enough and knows their child is lost forever.
God loves us to much to let us do whatever, whenever, forever.
This is not the first time in history that we've faced disasters that seemed like warnings to course-correct rather than doubling down on self-effort, self-justification, and blame. Not by far. We've faced crises that caused us to re/turn to God, rally, and unify, only to re/turn to our same old ways...worse than ever.
It’s not the first time, but it may be among the last.
Some voices say our course as a wayward people or nation that has trampled God’s grace is irreversible and that our beleaguered country is headed for an apocalyptic end. The Bible is subject to considerable interpretation. I still believe that despite our persistent, self-blind defiance, our Loving God wants us to come home sincerely sorry for our sins against Him, ourselves, and others, ready for surrender.
2.4 billion professing Christians also profess that Jesus is returning to separate the sheep from goats and wheat from chaff that will be burned up in a terminal fire we humans are free to choose. Some have already chosen.
Signs of the times suggest He is clearing customs, or could return next Friday at 11, or in a decade. I don’t know for sure. We don’t want to find out the hard way.
The fires—real and metaphorical—in all of our lives are not meant to destroy those who are willing to re/turn. They are meant to destroy the sin that easily enslaves us so we can live the life God always intended, precious and free.
For those in Christ who are suffering now...
6 So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while. 7 These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise, glory, and honor on the day Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.
8 You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him now, you trust him, and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy. 1 Peter 1:6-8 (NLT)
For those who are seeking: These are among the sweet, love-filled promises of those who let themselves be transformed by a loving God who wants to be with us forever.
It's our choice.
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