Borrowed Light

The Courage To Tell My Story

June 3, 2015Mike Leake 1 Comment

Mr. President, you tweeted yesterday that it takes courage to share your story. This has inspired me to tell my story…or at least a portion of it.

Awhile back as I was driving to one of my seminary classes a song by Radiohead came on. The song is called Creep. Its an angry song about a young man that has a crush on a girl but he really doesn’t feel like he is good enough for her. At the end of the day he wishes that he was special like her.

“I want you to notice when I’m not around” is perhaps the most telling lyric. The young man in the song feels insignificant and unnoticed. He would sacrifice his own identity just to be someone that would be liked. For a long time this song was the cry of my heart.

I was bullied from a very young age. I’m not sure why the short kid with big ears and glasses was so offensive but I was. I identify with what Ed Welch says here:

Imagine a ten-year-old boy, smaller and less athletic than his peers, waiting to be picked for a soccer game. Two of the more “honored” (that is, cool) boys are captains, and they select teams from a group of eager participants. The two go back and forth, choosing the best players first. As players are chosen they walk to their teams, and the selection pool gets smaller and smaller. With each pick the remaining boys become increasingly self-conscious, then embarrassed. Shame, however, is reserved for the last boy standing, who isn’t picked at all. Slowly, head down, he walks to the side that is stuck with him. The opposing team, laughs while his team groans as if they have become contaminated. Apparently shame is contagious…The shamed boy will be the scapegoat for the teams loss, and somehow, he will be blamed for any teammate’s misfortune for the next week.

This was my childhood, save for the part about being less athletic. But that only added to my confusion. What was it about me that was so deeply shameful? Even if I intercepted passes and hit homeruns somehow I was still a contagion. I carried around these wounds (and others that perhaps I’m not yet courageous enough to share).

I did all kinds of things that I now regret to try to numb this pain. Things to try to somehow…someway…feel significant. Nothing worked. Towards the end of high school I wanted to take my own life, but I didn’t have the courage to do it.

And then I heard a really offensive message. It cut me to the core. It was the message of a man named Jesus. He acknowledged what I’d known for so long—I’m actually not alright. I am unclean. I am unacceptable. I am small. I am broken.

But his response to my brokenness was something different than I’d ever experienced. Rather than picking me last or booting me to the curb, he showed me the depth of His love. He went to the places of my deepest and darkest shame—the stuff that I’m not even willing to share—and he spoke tender words of care.

He didn’t back down or cover over the things that I did in rebellion. He didn’t gloss over my sin. Yes, sin. Even though I was sinned against I also responded sinfully. And He had the audacity to go there. To tell a victim that he was also a perpetrator and that I too needed to repent.

And it was here that I found healing. I’m not totally there yet. I still have pockets of shame and guilt and places of confusion. But I’m healing. And it didn’t come from me “just being myself” or pretending like I was the captain of my ship.

My healing came from God opening up my eyes to how unbelievably small I really am. Those kids on the playground didn’t know the half of my smallness. But God did. And it was His response to my deepest shame that brought healing. Rather than boot me to the curb and relegate me to the places of the outcasts—he became a curse for me. He bore my deepest shame.

What Jesus has done for me has changed everything. I’m accountable to Him. He’s my master. And in Him I’ve found true freedom. I’ve found rescue. I’ve found the balm for my deepest shame.

So that’s my story…or at least part of it. I assume that you’ll celebrate my courageous story just as you’ve celebrated that of others. Certainly it is not only certain stories that are courageous, but all of them—even, perhaps especially even, when they go against the tide of popular culture.

But I suppose my story is a bit more offensive because my story is one that impacts you as well. Because if my story is true then it means that my story is also your story. It means that I don’t hold the pen. My story is actually His story. This means we are rebels if we try to grab the pen from His hand and write our own. And it also means that Jesus is casting out of His kingdom all sin and unbelief and replacing it with passionate worshippers. There are consequences to trying to write your own story.

And so I’m praying my story is yours as well. Sure the plot is different. But at core the story is the same. Jesus redeems sinners, of whom I’m the foremost.

—

Photo source: here

Today in Blogworld 06.03.15

June 3, 2015Mike Leake

Moe Berg, MLB Catcher and Spy

I found this little bio of Moe Berg to be quite interesting. I wish that dude would’ve completed his biography.

The Age of Disinformation

This is good. There is so much application that can drawn from this piece.

You Can Almost Always Trace Legalism Back to This

And sadly many of us preachers will cater to this because we like to seem like we’ve got it all figured out.

Are You a Negaholic?

Here are 5 ways that pessimism can ruin your life. “Great, just what I need…something else to ruin my life”, think the pessimist.

This is a real thing now. I’m going to pretend like only my son is excited about this:

Review of A Week in the Life of a Roman Centurion

June 2, 2015Mike Leake

“I guess you just had to be there.”

That’s what we say whenever we try telling an exciting story and the other person responds like a deer caught in headlights. If only they could be transported and see this whole thing with their own eyes—then they’d know how epic this story actually was.

I wonder if the Gospel writers would have a similar experience if they watched over us as we read through the Gospel accounts. Don’t get me wrong—the Scriptures are clear enough to give us everything we need for life and godliness. But I’m convinced there are beautiful things we won’t catch unless we dig—and some stuff we may never see.

Also let’s not pretend that telling a buddy about the time you dressed up in a Sasquatch outfit is the same thing as the Holy Spirit illuminating God’s Word to us. But at the same time, we do read the Scriptures with Western eyes. There are going to be certain idioms and cultural things that we simply won’t understand.

It takes a really good story teller to transport us from one world into another. Gary Burge has written A Week in the Life of a Roman Centurion with the hopes of doing just that. The book follows a Roman centurion (spoiler alert: he’s the one in Matthew 8). Along the way Burge paints a picture of what life would be like for a centurion in the first century. His aim is to help the Bible come alive for us—so that when we read Matthew 8 it’s as if were there.

Burge is a good story teller. But first and foremost he is a biblical scholar. I’ve read some who say the story falls flat. I don’t think so. Granted, he’s not Stephen King. But he’s an adequate story teller. I found myself engaged in the story. More than anything it did help the world of the Bible come alive for me.

This is one of those books that I think will impact you in ways that you really don’t realize. It’s like moving to a new town. You don’t consciously know when you finally remembered that the Walgreens was on the corner next to Taco Bell. It just kind of happened.

I think a book like Burge’s will impact our Bible reading in a similar way. You might not remember where you learned about what it would be like being a Roman solider—but now when you read of one in the Scriptures there is something for your mind to attach itself to.

And Burge is a helpful guide. I’m not a student of the first century as much as I am the Puritan and Great Awakening eras, but I know enough that I would have caught some red flags. Nothing really jumped out to me as inaccurate. In fact I learned a great deal.

I didn’t necessarily agree with every aspect of how he told the story (I’m not sure he nailed the “faith of the centurion”) but I still believe this is a valuable book. I would highly recommend this book to any student of the Bible.

You can grab your copy here.