The March 4th Challenge

If there is one thing I have learned in this whole grieving process after losing my dad, 

 IT IS OKAY TO BE SAD. 

Our culture is so obsessed with happiness that sorrow makes us completely uncomfortable. I sometimes wish I could wear sackcloth and ashes on my head like in Biblical times so people will know to treat me with extra kindness and grace. Instead, I wear a black watch to proclaim my state of mourning, even if I am the only one who knows. Oh to live at Downton and wear awesome black dresses for months at a time and have a lady’s maid- but that is another post!

We are so uncomfortable with public grief that people ask how I am doing but don’t really want to hear the answer. When someone asks, “Are you okay?,” I sometimes say, “No…I know I will not truly be okay until I get to heaven, and I will spend the rest of my life learning to be ‘okay’ with that.”

 Debbie Downer…awkward silence…crickets… 

Losing Dad was the turning point, the hinge that opened the door to true suffering and sorrow for me. It ushered in a new season in my life, as I feel like much of who I am is now defined by who I was before and after his death.  I have always been an expert cryer, but since Dad’s death, the tears fall in gushing gallons at times.

 A friend told me once that tears are worship- evidence that this is not how it was supposed to be, proclaiming our longing for all that is fallen to be restored. A believer’s tears shout to a broken world the painful desire and hopeful praise for the only One who can make it right. 

My dad had the same propensity for tearing up that I have, but he was also the best encourager of anyone I have ever known. Almost every morning of my adolescent life, I awoke to find a 3x5 index card on my dresser with his handwritten scribble of an encouraging quote or just a note to say, “I love you and I am so proud of you.” He had the gift of words and he used them frequently to give life and grace to most everyone he knew. Salt and Light.

But here’s the thing. We seldom use our sadness because we are so quick to try to fix it—because it hurts, because it is uncomfortable and inconvenient, because it casts a dark shadow on everything else in life. Because it makes even the smallest task seem impossibly hard. Our knee-jerk reaction to sadness is to MAKE. IT. STOP.   (I do realize that there are mental and emotional conditions and circumstances which require medical help in intense times of depression, and I am not begrudging those treatments or talking about those times here. Medicine can be a gift of God to heal). 

However, in every trying time God gives us, He has a purpose. We must stop to consider what that might be or else we just survive our sadness or wish it away. Believe me, I have had a lot of days where I am just trying to survive, and I have wished it all away more times than I can count. That is okay, too, and natural, I think, for as long as it takes.

But consider God.  Is it all just an accident? Are His hands tied behind His back as He watches us writhe in pain, groaning and crying out for mercy? No. God doesn’t just let me get to the end of my rope. He TAKES me there. 

He is totally sovereign. Should we accept good from His hand and not bad? Do we want the Giver or the gifts?  Is our affection so shallow and fickle that in our finite understanding we perceive God to be a certain way or do not feel He is working out His plan correctly, so we bolt?

He never ran away from us. He could have climbed off the cross but He willed Himself there. Through the pain, the betrayal, and the embarrassment, God accomplished a great purpose in Christ’s suffering. What purpose might He have in yours? 

We have a choice. We can’t go back, we can’t even hold onto this moment. We can only move forward in His perfect timing.

I am using this day, March fourth, to consciously MARCH FORTH.  I hope to reflect on what God is doing with me in this season and to ask Him what he would have me do and by His grace to do it. 

My mom, who has exhibited such hopeful grief, is going to Africa for two weeks this summer to tell people how to find life. My ten-year-old nephew Tate shared his testimony with his peers and how Jesus transforms hearts. One of my dad’s best friends raised money to build a press box at the local high school baseball field in memory of my father and of his great love for baseball and his dedication to helping local players. Dad’s Bible Study continued their tradition of having an annual banquet for the widows in their county on Valentine’s Day, naming it the Robert Alston Sweetheart Banquet after my dad because of his vision and dedication to care for widows.  It goes deeper than just paying forward the encouragement we have received from him.

It is proclaiming the infinite goodness of God in the deep chasm of suffering. It is uniting ourselves to Christ in His suffering and allowing Him to change us as only He can into His likeness. God doesn’t give you suffering only to put you at odds with a broken world.  He gives you suffering to put you at odds with yourself. And as we rise from the ashes, which I someday hope to do, to be changed. To be different. To never be the same. As an old friend Isaac Hunter used to pray, to “apply His Word to our feet that we might not just be hearers of the Word, but doers also.”

For me, March fourth will be a new holiday. A day to remember my precious dad and to honor his memory by what he did best: to overcome adversity and choose joy, to be an encourager, and to MARCH FORTH with great purpose for God’s ultimate glory. 

“March Forth” for you may mean getting out of bed today and making breakfast for your children. It may mean finding one thing to thank God for each day, even though the sky is falling. It may mean donating to those in need, baking a new neighbor some cookies, or forgiving a bitter hurt you have been holding onto. It might be as simple as looking in the mirror and telling yourself, “I was made in the very image of Almighty God.”  It may mean reconciling yourself to God by accepting what Christ did for you on the cross. It may mean picking up a Bible for the first time in your life and receiving the Bread of Life.

Easter is almost here. Resurrection is upon us. How does God want to use your suffering, your pain, to propel you forward for your good and His glory? How will you rise up and MARCH FORTH? What will He use you to do for the kingdom today? 

Why I Will Not Wish You Happiness and Health in the New Year

Happiness and health are the weak cornerstones of our culture, the false pedestals we have built to uphold our shallow and shaky theology about what God intends life to be about. When they crumble or disappear, which they inevitably will, they bring our worlds and our view of God down with them.

Happiness is not a bad thing and neither is good health. I love to laugh! I love to feel good! I want those I love to experience these wonderful gifts from God, but they are fleeting. Neither health nor happiness is ultimate. Our obsession with them has made them appear to be the pinnacle of experiencing life, but Biblically speaking, this just is not so. An army of healthy, wealthy, happy Christians breeds no depth, no compassion, no urgency or dependency. 

Does that mean that we should not enjoy life and be happy? Exercise and eat right, spend money on vacations with our family, a new house, or save for the future? No. I am simply saying we cannot put our HOPE in any of those things, as they will inevitably let us down. We put our hope in the One who richly provides for all our needs. 

Here is what Jesus said. “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart! I have overcome the world.” In other words, the things of this world—our circumstances, our bank accounts, our bodies, our relationships, our health- they will all disappoint us eventually...but put your hope in Me! I am not of this world. I will never disappoint you. 

Following many years of a happy and healthy life, I have had three years of a very difficult pregnancy, some extreme struggles with low iron and thyroid disease, a husband with cancer in his lung, and losing my dad unexpectedly. My little box of health and happiness has effectively been burst. This surely can’t be what Jesus meant when He said, “I have come that you might have life and have it to the fullest.”

Jesus Himself was homeless. He was ridiculed, mocked, run out of town, betrayed, denied, beaten, and crucified by the very ones He came to save. Scholars believe Jesus probably lost His dad Joseph at an early age. He looked into the faces of his dearest friends and knew the brutal deaths most of them would endure. What pain, what disappointment.  If happiness and health were what He came to bring, He would have been a cruel liar. He came to bring infinitely more.

This is why He came. In the middle of the darkest time of my life, in the process of losing what I so greatly value, I have found infinitely more. Beyond the ink on my Bible’s pages, I have truly discovered joy in sorrow, peace in pain, hope in distress, eternity in mortality, and I have experienced the presence of God so near I could almost feel His breath on my shoulder.

I would not wish these last three years of my life on anyone, but I also would not trade them for anything. I choose to accept daily with gratitude and trust all that the Lord has done and will continue to do in the years to come. For my good and His glory.  

This is the incredible mystery of the Gospel, the great exchange. We get fullness for our emptiness. Robes for rags. Dancing for mourning. The last first. The lost found. The broken made whole in Him on whom there is no spot or blemish.  I have Christ. And He is enough. Forever.

I will not wish you a happy and healthy new year because I pray for us exceedingly more than that. A wish has no power behind it, or as my dad used to say, “Wishin’ won’t paint the porch.”  So here is what I pray for those I love in this coming year:

I pray you will choose JOY in all circumstances, which is a great deal better than happiness. I pray for the PEACE of Christ to rule in your hearts no matter what storms you might be facing. I pray for you an abounding HOPE and FAITH in Christ, that you will seek first His kingdom and His righteousness. And I pray that He would be your portion, your all in all…that you would know Jesus and LOVE Him deeply, just as you are fully known and immeasurably loved by Him. 

I pray we would be marked by serving those who have need rather than seeking to eradicate our own needs. And I pray our collective journey heavenward will be toward holiness rather than happiness. 

A Joyful and Hopeful New Year to all. Life abundant. For our good and for His glory.

Son Rise

There is fresh cut stone and unsettled dirt, the deep Georgia red clay my dad spent half his life trying to get back to. And now it engulfs him. It is where his ashes lie, in a box, covered up in darkness, several inches below the air and sunshine and the creeks and hardwoods he so loved. It is in a sense poetic. Man came from dust and to dust he will return, ashes to ashes. 

Though he has been technically gone for six months, there is a stifling finality to his death now. Thanksgiving was definitely different this year. We had a different turkey carver and blessing sayer (Thanks, Trav), but it will forever be the weekend we buried my dad. 

 A tiny plot of land and a headstone mark the dirt and flowers, the place we will now go to “pay our respects.” I am not even sure how to begin processing the fact that this greatest of men, who held my heart in his hand since the day I was born, is reduced physically to ashes in the ground. 

He is again just a stone’s throw from sisters Mary and Edna Fort, both retired school teachers, who lived across the street.  A decade ago, Mary, then in her nineties, would call my dad frequently with this request, “Robert, I just baked a homemade pecan pie. Meet you half way?” Dad would dart out the door and meet her in the middle of the driveway they all but shared to retrieve the warm pie and to visit with his friend. He in return brought the Fort sisters roses from his garden nearly every week of the summer and made them laugh over a cold Co-Cola. 

He now shares the same piece of earth as Sam Jones, who once stormed the beach at Normandy and as an eighty-year-old former sheriff always sat with his back to the wall, just in case.  George Garrett is close by, a man who watched the horror of Japanese planes flying over Pearl Harbor while bombs rained from the sky. Needless to say, my dad is in fine company. His ashes are in their temporary resting place. 

“For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep.  For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.”  1 Thessalonians 4:14-17

I have been thinking a lot about this, when Jesus comes back, the “rapture”- when believers alive and dead will be caught up with Christ in the clouds, and also the second coming- when Jesus reigns over His kingdom and does battle with Satan once and for all. It is something I have always believed and trusted in, but my lack of true understanding over the details of it have kept me from really studying the second coming of Christ. 

If I were to tell you about Jesus, I would certainly talk about His first coming, as a baby…His sinless life, His death on the cross for the sins of the world. I would definitely talk about His resurrection, and how He conquered death so that through trusting in Jesus (by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone), we have confident access to knowing God and spending eternity with Him.

Ashamedly, I am not positive I would mention arguably the most crucial event next to the doctrine of salvation, Jesus’ second coming. The thing that all believers, alive and dead, the angels, and all of creation continue to pine for is when Jesus Christ will return in body to earth and right every wrong.

The story does not end with Jesus’ resurrection or His ascension. It doesn’t end when as believers we die and go to live with God for eternity in heaven. That is a breathtaking part of the story, but it is not the end. 

Not surprisingly, the second coming of Christ is mentioned around 240 times in the New Testament. But get this-- the Old Testament talks about the second coming of Jesus about twenty times more than it mentions Jesus’ first coming (The Second Coming of Christ, Dr. Don Butler). This is astounding to me!

 Before Jesus ever came to earth as a little tiny baby (so sorry, but I can’t help but think Ricky Bobby here), the majority of writings about Christ in the Old Testament look forward to His SECOND coming, not his first. And yet, we rarely ever teach about the second coming of Christ. 

Dad, even though he is free from sin and his mortal decaying body, still anticipates the Day when Jesus will return to redeem all that was lost and broken by the fall….just like the believers who are still alive. Even though Dad is with the Lord, there is something unsettled, unfinished.  He has the same longing now as he did while he was alive. 

The living and the dead in Christ are united in the fact that we all look expectantly for Jesus’ second coming. We collectively groan for the same thing: maybe today Jesus will come down to redeem everything once and for all. That is a really sweet thought for me.

 I remember when I was nine years old we took a family trip to Washington, D.C. and one of our stops was to the Arlington National Cemetery. Not surprisingly because my dad was a huge patriot. It was moving. 

I remember driving through and seeing row upon heartbreaking row of tombstones. I looked out the window and watched each line pass my gaze. It reminded me of orange groves when we would drive to Georgia from Florida growing up. In one glance it looks chaotic and then as you move ever so slightly, the rows align perfectly. 

I remember thinking even as a child in Arlington how unusual it was that the rows were not parallel with the road. It was as if the tombstones were looking off somewhere aloof and distant, unaware of the road in front of them. This is because the tombstones are not aligned with the road. They are aligned to face the east. 

 

In the Arlington Cemetery, in the Hamilton Cemetery, and in every other cemetery in the world, something extraordinary happens each morning. The sun rises in the east.

I don’t mean this only in the optimistic sense that it brings a new day or that times goes on and eventually the raw wounds will give way to scars. 

Listen to this…

 Most headstones in the Western world face the east. They face this way because Jesus is coming from the east when He returns to redeem all that was lost.

Powerful!!

“For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man." Matthew 24:27 

This beautiful tradition symbolizes the great rumbling of anticipation, the undercurrent through all of history, the unfinished business of the Risen Lord. The tradition of burying the dead to face the east does not exist for the dead, so they will be raised looking the right way or some nonsense like that. God can raise the dead from any direction and any place and time in all of history he chooses.

The eastward facing graves exist for us, the living. The tradition reminds us to look to the east every day with joyful hope and confident anticipation and to remember that the dead are longing for Christ’s return along with us. The sun’s rays hit those headstones to proclaim that death has no victory, no sting for the believer because we have a hope that will not disappoint us.

Biblically speaking, “ashes” is not coincidental when talking about the beginning and end of our physical life. God made Adam from dust and to dust will man return. In the same way, “the east” is not a coincidental phrase when talking about the fall and redemption of man—the birth of sin and the death of sin.

Look at where God planted Eden. Genesis 2:8 says, “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.” The first Adam, the beginning of mankind was formed in the east. The fall of man, the original sin, happened there...just as the redemption of all mankind will come from the east. 

God saved His people from Pharaoh’s army with help from where?  The east. Exodus 14:21, “Moses stretched out his hand over the sea and all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land.” 

Ezekiel saw God returning from the east to dwell with His nation again. The glory of the Lord entered the temple from the east gate. “Then the man brought me to the gate facing east, and I saw the glory of the God of Israel coming from the east. His voice was like the roar of rushing waters, and the land was radiant with his glory.” Ezekiel 43:1. After God passed through the east gate of the temple, it was to remain shut. No one was allowed to walk through it because the Lord Himself had passed through it. And the gate will remain shut until the Lord returns and again enters it…from the east. 

The second Adam, Jesus, comes from the east. The three kings saw His star "in the east" (Matthew 2:2). “Who has stirred up one from the east, calling him in righteousness to his service? He hands nations over to him and subdues kings before him. He turns them to dust with his sword, to windblown chaff with his bow." Isaiah 41:2

Just as we came from dust and will return to dust, so the fall of man in the east will be redeemed by Jesus when He comes from the east. God has great purpose and resolution in every letter of His perfect Word. 

I have never seen my dad wear any piece of jewelry except his simple gold wedding band. To say he was not a jewelry kind of guy would be a major understatement. He was a country boy, and probably “the most informal person I have ever known,” in the words of his friend Allen Levi.

After the death of Allen’s brother and our dear friend, Gary Levi, my dad wore a bracelet each day in Gary’s memory. It was a white glow in the dark rubber bracelet with the words “Perhaps Today.” Gary Levi signed letters with those hopeful words. “Perhaps Today” is the mantra of those who yearn for the return of the King. They wake each day looking for Him.

 My bedroom window faces the east. Every morning the sun comes pouring into my window, reminding me where to place my hope. The sun has definitely set on me these last six months, but even in the darkness of my room in the middle of the night, I can make out the precious letters on my dad’s glow in the dark bracelet “Perhaps Today.” 

"For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night....But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake..." 1 Thessalonians. 5:2, 4-6

And after every night, sometimes to my amazement, the sun still rises.

Every morning, its hope-giving rays illumine the bronze letters “Robert Stanley Alston” in Hamilton, Georgia and its same life-sustaining rays filter through my shutters to brighten the darkness of my room and my heart in Tuscaloosa. 

With every new sunrise, the Lord reminds me of the impending consummation I crave, and He graciously restores in me the expectant hope that, perhaps today, His Son will also rise up out of the eastern sky. In other words, it's Friday for now...but Sunday's a comin'...

“He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming soon.’ Amen, come, Lord Jesus. The grace of the Lord be with God’s people. Amen.” Revelation 22:20-21

Come quickly. 

1 Corinthians 15:50-54

^!!!!!!!!“ I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.  Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” !!!!!!!!! WORD!!!!!!!