Giving our Strengths and Weaknesses to the Lord

A man in my church committed suicide this week. Although I did not know him, I am told, he was very depressed. My granddaughter, Melissa, over at Libellus Stellatus, just posted an essay about that, and loneliness, and community. She started me thinking about the frailty of our humanity and how even our strengths are a part of our brokenness. How we need to give not just our weaknesses but also our strengths to Jesus.

I am remembering a young man I went to school with who later worked with the same apologetics organization where I had worked. It was an interesting class, "The Philosophy of Religion." The students ranged from a very devout Catholic to a Warlock or male priest of the nature religion of Wicca. And the young man who I am writing about was also a devout Christian. He had read Charles Colsen's book Born Again and had become a Christian.

But he was confused about keeping the Sabbath. His apologetics was very good, and he spent a lot of time witnessing to the Pagan in the class. But he just would not let go of the idea that Christians should worship on Saturday rather than Sunday. He was obsessed, and wrote an eighty page paper on the subject. Yet, the saddest part was; he was torn between his grasp of God's grace given in Jesus Christ and his own insistence on worshipping on Saturday.

Several days after writing his long paper he took a gun and shot himself in the head. As a way of dealing with my own grief over this I wrote a poem. I knew I could not, at the time, share this with his family, only with a few friends. So here is the poem for a friend.

-

To a Late Friend

A mind as carefully dressed

as his body,

he understood a prepositional

statement -

but not a metaphor.

-

His mind was devoted to God,

in a logical manner.

Our friend,

we never saw the void at the end

of his argument

He was looking for the perfect apologetic.

He was a hero looking for a fight,

a martyr looking for a fire.

He ended his own battle with a gun

and eased illogically and

violently

into a love beyond reason.

Rest in His Sabbath Matt.

-

And yes rest in His love, Tom

-

And may I remember that it is the righteousness, strength and keeping power of Jesus Christ that sustains me and all my sisters and brothers in Christ.

-

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)"