by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
How did you survive losing every member of your family of origin by the time you were twenty-eight? How did you handle that—when the last one died?
“Nannie’s dead.Aunt Nannie is dead!” I kept saying it over and over to myself and shaking my head.I couldn’t believe it, and yet I knew it was true.I had just seen her body at the funeral home.
I felt sick in the lower part of my stomach—empty. My throat was tight. I wanted to cry but could not because of a lifetime of conditioning to “be a man.” But I had not expected such a strong reaction. After all, Mother, Dad, and my only brother had all died or been killed over ten years before.And Nannie was only my aunt.
No, she wasn’t “onlyan aunt.” She had lived with us for fifteen years during my grade school and high school years. She had helped spoil me and had given me almost continuous approval (or acceptance when she did not approve) all my life. Now she was gone, and a great sadness had come over me. I knew that whatever good God may have for Christians, Nannie would now have. So I wondered why my grief was so deep. But all I could do was drive around the town, which had changed so much, and show our children where Aunt Nannie had lived. And I knew something was dying inside me.
It was five months later when I finally realized why my grief was so deep when Nannie died. I had loved her very much, but there was something more. The day before, we had received the initial copy of my first book,The Taste of New Wine.I was very excited. I had secretly wanted to write a book since I was a small boy. I didn’t think many people would read it, but that did not matter.
I started instinctively for the telephone to call and tell . . .whom? Then it hit me. Everyone who had known me as a child in our home was dead. There was no one to tell who would understand about the dreams and hopes of a little freckle-faced boy who had always tried to look tougher than he was.
When I got in bed that night, I lay there in the dark and began to weep for the first time in years. A great wave of loneliness came over me. I realized that all the memories of our home had died with Nannie . . . except mine. I was alone with my past. But the flood of grief was a great release.
The next morning I could see that the previous night I had stepped across one of the many small streams that separate children from adulthood. And although in one sense I was alone with my past, in another I was not at all—God had been with me as a small boy with my hopes and dreams and is with me still. In a sense, the Lord and I will always share the memories of the past. In Him not only Nannie but Mother, Dad, and my brother Earle, may in some way that is beyond my understanding still share these memories with me. And in any case I was not alone that morning with my past.
I had never seen before this aspect of Christ’s amazing statement, “I am with you always, even until the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20 KJV)—that his presence is really the thread which runs through the memories in a Christian’s life, holding the years together, giving them unity of meaning like a string of pearls. Without his continuing presence with each of us, fear, separation, and death would scatter the Christian family in the wind. And although at times I am still lonely, God’s presence and Christ’s promises help me not to feel so alone when I face my family’s death . . . and my own.
“The paths of glory lead but to the grave”—whether the “glory” be the conspicuous achievements (or perhaps only the conspicuousness) of the “great,” or the modest successes, or the “quaint deeds” of ordinary men. Not long ago I had occasion to visit a small church in a small town inVirginiawhere my father was pastor some fifty ears ago and where I spent an important part of my boyhood.My father was quiet and modest, a man of remarkable intelligence, humor, and charm and of quite extraordinary goodness, and I found that he was vividly remembered by the oldest members of the church. But the number of these is small and becomes smaller as each year passes, and quite soon no one at all will remember him. His name will be read for a while—as on a window in the church which they have dedicated to his memory—but the name will mean no more to those who read it than most of the names on the plaques and portraits of oldbuildings mean to us. Not only will he be silent, as he has been for nearly forty years, but he will no longer speak, for there will be no one to hear him. He will be forgotten. Here is perhaps the supreme pathos of human life—not that we die only but that any real and living memory of us must die too. Unless God is to raise us from death, it is in the end as though we had never been. Our dead have perished leaving no trace except our sad, if grateful, remembrance of them—and in the final reckoning no trace at all.
Death is the “last enemy,” and no man, however strong willed and defiant, no matter how stoical or wise, can wrest the final victory from its hands. Our only hope is in God. “Save us, Lord, or we perish”—perish finally and utterly, along with all we love and treasure.
John Knox, Life in Jesus Christ
Lord, thank you for not only healing the bad memories of the past through forgiveness but for preserving the good ones in the memory bank of your mind. Thank you for your awareness of our efforts and strivings, which sometimes seems to be the only thing that gives meaning when we fail. But thank you most of all that you have promised to take our hands when they can no longer reach out to you, and lead us through the doorways between death and life. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:51-58
by Keith Miller | Weekly Devotional
Now that I’ve decided to say “yes” to God and am willing to follow Christ, I don’t know if I am kidding myself about my motives—I sometimes think I do good things for people so they’ll think I am a good Christian. How can I know for sure I’m not building my own kingdom instead of God’s?
“Mommy, I’m not sure if I am being nice to these people because I like them or because I believe it will make them think I’m a neat kid. And it worries me.Should I quit being so friendly?”
The woman who was showing me this passage was puzzled.It was from her young teenage daughter who was away at camp for the summer. The mother said that she had not worried about such things when she was a girl and asked me what I thought about the letter.
Smiling a little to myself, I realized that I could have written a similar letter at many different times in my life. The problem—of mixed motives—has given me fits in several different ways. Those of us who have a deep need to be accepted and for whom acceptance as a child was subtly contingent on our “being good” may have more trouble with motivational nit-picking than other people. Sometimes in school, I remember worrying about whether I was thoughtful to other kids because I meant it or because by being friendly to them I would likely be elected to class offices. Although I knew at some level that both motives were there and that both were pretty natural, I wanted to besuremy motives were right—like the young girl in the letter.
When I became a Christian, this occasional compulsive need to have pure motives took an especially insidious form, which brought the whole business to a head. Beginning to witness in other churches as a layman, I wondered sometimes if I were going because I wanted to tell people about God . . . or about me. This worried me, since I reallywantedto be God’s person and to do His will. On one occasion I almost called a minister and cancelled a meeting because I wasn’t sure if I were going for God or for Keith. But having put off contacting him until it was very late, I went ahead an drove to the church—knowing that my motives were definitely mixed. Before I spoke that night, I prayed silently that God would use me “if you can use a man as full of himself as I am.” After I started speaking, I forgot all about my motives.
Several days later a man who attended the meeting came to my office. he said that he had been desperate and had almost lost hope, and was considering suicide. But as a result of attending the session that night, he had decided to give life another try. After he left, I sat thinking about what had happened.
In the first place, my desire to keep my motives spotless and pure had almost kept me from helping a man who was really desperate. I saw how totally self-centered this “keeping myself righteous” is. It constitutes a strange kind of Christian idolatry—I was worshiping clean motives. Keeping them spotless was more important somehow than going ahead with mixed motives and letting God possibly help someone through me.
In the second place, it came crashing home to me that my motives arealwaysmixed to some degree-and that most likely they always will be in this life. So that for me the leap of faith in witnessing for Christ is to go, knowing my needs for attention, but taking the risk that I will speak for Him instead of for myself. I must go in faith, praying that God will use me in spite of my self-centeredness.
In fact, after all these years, I simply pray that God will free me to point over my shoulder to Him. Because when it comes right down to it, all I have to tell about is what I have seen and heard of God—how he is helping me to find freedom, occasionally to love other people, and even to accept myself . . . with my mixed motives.
What can we take with us on this journey to we do not know where? What we must take is the knowledge of our own unending ambiguous motives . . . .
The voice that we hear over our shoulders never says, “First be sure that your motives are pure and selfless and then follow me.” If it did, then we could none of us follow. So when later the voice says, “Take up your cross and follow me,” at least part of what is meant by “cross” is our realization that we are seldom any less than nine parts fake. Yet our feet can insist on answering him anyway, and on we go, step after step, mile after mile. How far? How far?
Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat
Dear Lord, help me not to be a Christian Pharisee who is more interested in “being ethical” than in loving you and your people. Be with the young girl who wrote the letter to her mother, and help her to understand that sometimes she will have to risk her motives in order to do anything good.Give us both the courage to follow you, even if it means taking the risk, as you did, of being misunderstood.I want to resist phoniness . . . yet without wallowing in the problems of motivation. It all seems very complex, and sometimes I do not even understand my behavior after the fact.So I am offering myself and my subtly mixed motives to you, Jesus, right now, asking that you take me beyond such self-centered preoccupations with taking my own spiritual temperature into your loving perspective. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
“What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then act another, doing things I absolutely despise. . .I obviously need help!…I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one out there who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question? The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. Romans 7:15, 17, 24, 25 The Message
by Keith Miller | Weekly Devotional
Keith,my life seems uneventful compared to the dramatic circumstances and situations outstanding Christian witnesses describe. I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be more committed if I could go to the Holy Land and see the historic shrines where the biblical heroes were born, called by God, and died for their Lord. Do many people feel limited by their prosaic lives?
A friend who is a top flight management consultant and a very sharp Christian layman went toEuropesome years ago. He was excited because he had always wanted to visit the Christian shrines inEnglandand on the continent. He went toAldersgate Street, where John Wesley’s “heart was strangely warmed,” toWittenberg, and to Rome, where Luther’s incisive turnings took place. But as he saw these places, which have become shrines for many Protestant Christians, he was frankly disappointed. He had expected to be inspired and awed, but these were just plain buildings and towns.
As he thought about his disappointment, he realized that these had been just ordinary places when the action had taken place that later made them important. In each case the thing that made these churches and cities shrines was that each was a simple setting in which a person made a decision concerning God’s will for himself or herself—a time when someone turned with his or her whole life, faced God, and chose Him over “things.” The events that followed were so significant that people now travel for miles just to see the site where the decision was made.
In considering this I realize that so often I have looked for a special place or dramatic circumstances in which I could do God’s will. I remembered a sermon another friend once preached about the places where faith can blossom and lives can be committed. He spoke of Moses and the burning bush and concluded the sermon by pointing out that “Any Old Bush Will Do.”
The potential shrines in our lives, then, may not be exciting sites or meetings but rather circumstances in which we run out of our own strength and turn to God, offering Him our futures, whatever the cost. The birth of a deeper transforming faith seems to be the event that melds the decision, the deeds, and the place into a shrine. And for this,any old bush will do—any old loneliness or frustration, fear, anxiety, or broken relationship—or any of the outward circumstances in which we find ourselves when we commit our lives to Him. Any of these simple “places” where faith comes alive may one day become for us a Christian shrine—any old house, kitchen sink, office chair—or wherever you are reading this . . . right now.
IN A GARDEN:
. . . I cast myself down I know not how, under a certain fig tree, giving full vent to my tears . . . I sent up these sorrowful words; How long? how long, “tomorrow, and tomorrow”? Why not now? Why not is there this hour an end to my uncleanness?
So I was speaking, and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when lo! I heard from a neighbouring house a voice, as of a boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating, “Take up and read; Take up and read.” Instantly, my countenance altered, I began to think most intently, whether children were wont in any kind of play to sing such words; nor could I remember ever to have heard the like. So checking the torrent of my tears, I arose; interpreting it to be no other than a command from God, to open the book, and read the first chapter I should find. For I had heard of Antony, that coming in during the reading of the Gospel, he received the admonition, as if what was being read, was spoken to him; Go, sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me. And by such oracle he was forthwith converted unto Thee. Eagerly then I returned to the place where Alypius was sitting; for there had I laid the volume of the Apostle, when I arose thence, I seized, opened, and in silence read that section, on which my eyes first fell: Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying: but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, in concupiscence.no further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.
Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine
ON A HIGHWAY:
“Thus I journeyed toDamascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests. At midday, O king, I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining round me and those who journeyed with me. And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language,‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.’And I said,‘Who are you, Lord?’And the Lord said,‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But rise and stand upon your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and bear witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from the people and from the Gentiles—to whom I send you to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’” Acts 26:12-18
IN AN OFFICE:
Lord, It is frightening to me to call you “Lord” when I realize that means that I am signing up to be your servant—to go and do and be according to your designs, even if they should conflict with my own. Although it is easy for me to say “Lord” most days, sometimes—as right now—I realize the awesome and unconditional response for which you are asking. And I want to say with young Augustine, “not yet, Lord.” But I won’t. Help me as I make this chair and this room a shrine in my own pilgrimage by offering myself to you right now. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
by Keith Miller | Weekly Devotional
Keith, sometimes I think my kids will never learn to be unselfish. They fight over everything and are constantly begging for new toys. Any suggestions?
When I first thought about your question, all I could remember was fighting with my brother and our father lecturing us about being so selfish. He and Mother must have wondered if we’d ever get to be grateful for what we had. So I know we were selfish.
But then I recalled an incident that took place when I was a little boy, probably about five years old. I was invited to a birthday party of a boy in my first grade class, the first one I had ever been to. I went in this boy’s house. Our house was very nice, but I could tell this house was the house of a poor family. I don’t know whether the boy’s mother had said not to bring presents, or what, but hardly anyone brought one. And I didn’t either.
I few weeks earlier I’d been given a small toy car.It was made of lead and painted bright red. It was a race car with little fins out the back. It was amazing for 1933. It was my treasure, and I carried it everywhere.In church it would keep me from crawling around under the pews. It didn’t make much noise when it rolled. Well, I had this little red car in my pocket when I came to this party, because I always kept it with me. It was my favorite toy.
After the boy blew out the candles, his mother brought out a few presents his parents had been able to get him. I could tell he was disappointed and embarrassed. I don’t know how I knew that, but I could just see it.I felt strange about how he must be feeling, and I thought, “Gosh, I’ll bet he’d love to have a nice red car like I have.”Then I just said impulsively, “Oh, here’s my present. I forgot to wrap it,” and handed him my little red car.
He was ecstatic.Going home from that party, I missed my car. But I was glad I’d given it to him. And my mother said she was glad I did, too, because it “saved the day” for the boy—whatever that meant.
I can’t remember doing that kind of thing for another kid.In fact I became a very self-centered boy and young man who had to hit the wall before I could surrender to God and be grateful that Jesus told us that it is more blessed to give than to receive even though my mother certainly had tried to teach me that. But I didn’tknowhow true that was until I remembered the day I gave a gift that really meant something to me in terms of my six year old world.So I don’t know what it will take for your kids, but I had to grow up rebelling against my parents until I was ready to hear what they had been trying to tell me all along.
Lord, thank you that you guide me toward loving in the strangest ways and have been teaching me through my parents, then teachers, friends and even impulsive nudges, until I was needy enough to be able to recognize you and receive the costly gift that’s “saved the day” for me—for the rest of my life.That’s when we know what your words mean. Thank you that my mother encouraged me. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Teach what you’ve seen and heard to your children and grandchildren. Deuteronomy 4:9 THE MESSAGE
Point your kids in the right directions—when they’re old they won’t be lost. Proverbs 22:6 THE MESSAGE
Children, do what your parents tell you.This delights the Master no end. Colossians 3:30 THE MESSAGE
