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One of the difficulties of preaching, or of speaking of faith in general, is the fact that the truth has a way of being paradoxical.  Speak truth, and there is often a counter truth that must be said as well.

Take for instance, those wonderful words of Jesus, “You must turn and become like a little child if you are to enter the kingdom of God.”  Intuitively I think we understand what Jesus is getting at.  We watch our beautiful little children come up for the children’s sermon every Sunday, and we recognize that they have something we tend to lose in adulthood — that simple-hearted capacity for trust and for wonder, and that extraordinary lack of pretentiousness. Little gems of wisdom are delivered from their lips that seem to come straight from God, such as the time I asked the children what the Holy Spirit was, and five year old Mark answered, “Everybody knows what the holy spirit is!” And I said, O really, what? And he said, “God praying.” It was without question the best definition that I had ever come across for the holy spirit. At moments such as these, we adults feel the urge to take off our shoes because we know we are standing on holy ground.

But alongside of the “turn and become like little children” verse, there is also the necessity of what Paul says in Ephesians about “growing up in every way” in the life of Christ, and our Old Testament story this morning drives this point home.

The Israelites — the children of God — have just been delivered from their brutal captivity to Pharaoh in Egypt by the mighty hand of God, and initially they rejoice as only children can. But now they find themselves in the wilderness, and the wilderness can be tough. Food and water are scarce.

And before long, we see the down side of children. The grumbling, the murmuring, the temper tantrums the blaming. And beneath it all there is the theological question with which the story ends: “Is God among us or not?”

From the point of view of children, the primary image of God is that of Santa Claus. God is the one who gives us what we want. Or God is the perfectly protective parent who will make sure nothing bad ever happens to us.

Out in the wilderness the children are not getting what they want, and the possibility of dying of thirst seems quite real, and the conclusion to be drawn is that “God must not be with us.” And so they become angry with Moses, because apparently he’s a fraud – he isn’t speaking for the real God after all, because the real God wouldn’t let this happen. They know that God is supposed to be leading them to a land flowing with milk and honey.  Why, instead, do they find themselves in this place where water and food are so hard to find?

A good question.  Why indeed, didn’t God just zip them through to the promised land, the land flowing with milk and honey?  How come they had to wander in the wilderness for forty years?

Apparently they needed to do some growing up before entering the promised land.  (In short order they will arrive at Mt. Sinai where they will be introduced to the concept of a covenant, with the responsibilities that go along with keeping this covenant.)

I got an email this past week from an old high school friend who mentioned that his high school aged son had been getting into some stuff that disturbed his wife and him, and so they had sent their son off to Outward Bound, a month long wilderness program primarily for young people that teaches survival skills, and gives them intimate contact with the wilderness. There are important lessons about life that apparently can only be learned in the wilderness.

As I’ve been writing the “Confirmation Play”, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the spiritual lives of teenagers. It is not uncommon for teenagers to come to question the faith of their childhood, and in certain ways this questioning may be necessary.  Inevitably, the primary image of God we grow up with is that of Santa Claus, or God as the parent who never lets bad things happen to us. As a kids grows up, invariably they begin to have experiences that challenge these images, which commonly leads a young person to conclude that there is no God.

George Buttrick, a chaplain at Harvard a couple of generations back, recalls that students would come into his office, plop down on a chair and declare, “I don’t believe in God.” Buttrick would give this disarming reply: “Tell me what kind of God you don’t believe in. I probably don’t believe in that God either.” And then he would talk about Jesus, the corrective to all our assumptions about God.

As Christians, it all comes back to Jesus, but we easily forget this. Jesus challenges our thinking about God. Yes, he said God is ABBA, a daddy who knows what you need, and time and again he challenged his disciples to trust God and give up their fear. But Jesus is also the one who went to Jerusalem fully knowing that something really bad was going to happen to him there. So if the beloved son could end up crucified, then evidently trusting the Abba God doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen to us as well. In fact, sometimes this God we are called to trust will lead us into pain and suffering for the sake of the great love that holds the universe together.

The lesson this morning from Paul’s letter to the Philippians expresses this mysterious Jesus God truth:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death even death on a cross.”

Growing up in our faith involves learning how to empty ourselves of our claims for privilege, comfort and worldly success. We often forget that from a human point of view, Jesus was a miserable failure, not a success. Getting nailed to a cross was the epitome of failure in those days.

The question asked by the children of Israel was, is God with us, or not? The witness of Jesus is a resounding yes! but this divine presence comes not in the way we expect. Not as a Santa Claus, or the protective parent, but as one who suffers with us, and invites us to lose ourselves in the love that is seeking to reconcile the world.

It is striking that the lectionary is leading us through the wilderness with the children of God at precisely the same time as we find ourselves in the midst of what is being called the worst economic depression since the Great Depression. We have been brought into this economic wilderness by a culture that encouraged the mantra, “I want, I want, I want” without asking, “Can I afford what I want?” People at the top made grotesque profits based on this mindset – profits that ended up evaporating, taking away the savings of ordinary folk.  Ordinary folk, have found themselves in foreclosure because they took out mortgages they couldn’t really afford.

The wilderness has lessons to teach. Just ask anyone who lived through the Great Depression. It was hard, very hard, but it was also a time in which people relearned the trust Paul spoke of: “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” It was a time for relearning how to share, to get by with less, and to value what truly is important in life.

This is a time of growing up, and growing up isn’t easy. It is, in fact, a life long process, though we like to think we’ve accomplished it once we’ve finished school. As the children of Israel were getting ready to live in the promised land, we are getting ready to live in heaven, where there is nothing but love.

The wilderness is the place to learn how what it means to love, to trust, and to hope.

But the second reason was that my father and stepmother were visiting from North Carolina, and I know they don’t like long-winded preaching. We’d had a conversation in our living room the night before in which they went on in some detail about how it seems to them that preachers are preaching longer and longer these days — too long — and how they seem to be in love with the sound of their own voices, and though they assured me they weren’t talking about me, nonetheless, I was feeling pretty self-conscious as the only actual preacher in the room.   I know that I have indeed been at times long-winded, and that yes, sometimes, I am guilty of “falling in love with the sound of my own voice.”

So I got quiet for a while, and let my wife carry the conversation, but it got me to thinking regarding what exactly it is I am trying to do here on Sunday mornings as I preach and lead worship, which was a good thing to think about.

And after a while I was able formulate an answer and put it into words, and I felt really good about that.

This is what I came up with. There are two things I’m trying to let happen on Sunday morning.

First, I am trying to create an atmosphere where together we can acknowledge the simple truth that, “It’s not easy being a human being.” One of the things I love about the Bible is the way it is so honest about this fact that there is something inside us that is constantly inclined towards fear and discontent. We are those Israelites so quick to panic when we enter the wilderness, so quick to grumble and complain, getting nostalgic about the good old days back in Egypt when we were Pharaoh’s slaves. We are those laborers in the vineyard in Jesus’ parable who can’t help but compare ourselves with others, and in those comparisons make ourselves miserable.

The truth is, I think, that we all go around in this life with a good measure of fear. If that fear isn’t at the center of our life, it is nonetheless on the edges, waiting for something like the notion that we’re lost in the desert with no food or water, or that the economy is collapsing, to draw that fear into the center.

The fear can take all kinds of forms: fear of death, fear of bad things happening to us or to our loved ones. Or it can be more subtle: the fear that we will be judged incompetent, inadequate, unfit to hold our station in life.

It can be a fear which is mixed up with guilt, an underlying feeling that we’ve failed in our primary task in life which is to love, and maybe in truth we often have. And all this fear blends in with anger, and sometimes it comes out as complaining and griping, leading us to lash out and hurt others.

But most of the time, like everybody except the kid in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, we go around pretending that we do in fact have it all together, more or less.

And so when we come to church on Sunday morning, I want this to be a place where, unlike most everywhere else we might go, we don’t have to pretend anymore, that we can acknowledge the truth that it isn’t easy being a human being. That’s the first thing.

The second thing I’m trying to allow to happen on Sunday morning’s is this: The celebration of the good news that in spite of the fact that life is difficult, scary and we often feel like a failure, there really is a God who created us because this God loves us, delights in us.. that this God is revealed in Jesus as the merciful and compassionate one who longs to release us from the burden of our sin and guilt… that even if we have spent our life to a large degree being idle in the marketplace (which in fact we all have been if the measure of our life is how well we’ve loved) the vineyard owner is nonetheless gracious, knowing what we need.

And that it really is possible to begin to learn how to trust this God, to live day by day, receiving our daily bread, our daily denarius, the daily manna from heaven that provides for us what we truly need, if not what we might want.

And that whether we live or whether we die, we really are safe the hands of God. That’s how the Apostle Paul put it late in his life. Mostly likely we haven’t yet reached the state of grace in which Paul dwelt when he wrote these words.  But it makes a difference to have people to look to whose presence encourages us to believe that yes, over time, we just might be able to live with more trust, more contentment, and without so much fear, anger or guilt. That we might learn how to love more easily, more graciously.

People older than myself have jokingly told me on occasion, “Don’t get old,” referring to the hardships that are endured over time as the body wears down. And I believe it when they say that this is a hard thing to deal with.

But the one good thing about living into old age is that it might become a time in which a person learns how to trust God, loving more fully and easily.   To live more contentedly, day by day.  Aging can be the process in which  we begin to learn how to live life without clutching so tightly.

God gives us people like Lois to remind us of this possibility as we go through life. I’ve known Lois 19 years. I’ve witnessed her survive the heartache of her husband Jack’s sudden death, and then her mother’s slow death, and then a hip replacement, an attempt by con people to try and scam her (unsuccessfully, because greed isn’t a part of her makeup), as well as a recent purse snatching, and through it all she has amazed me.

She shines the light of Jesus, and she does this without any fake pretense of being perfect. She is a very human saint.

Hwa called me to tell me how when she was in the Mayo Clinic to receive her liver transplant, Lois would send her a card or letter every day, which Hwa would put up on the wall of her room, eventually covering the whole wall. Little reminders, day by day, to trust God.

Thank you Lois. Thank you God for all those signs you provide of your daily care.

This is the essence of the parable Jesus told. To understand it, we need to get a sense for the two amounts of money being referred to here.

Working backwards, the 100 denarii’s owed by one slave to another is — from a routine point of view — no small amount of money.

It was the pay in those days received by a laborer for 100 days of work, maybe $10,000 in today’s money.  No small amount of change. In some situations it could be the difference in whether or not a person faces foreclosure.

If somebody owed me ten thousand dollars, having borrowed it with the assurance that they would pay it back by a certain date, and then when the date came, demonstrated no ability to do so, well, I’d be seriously aggravated.

We’re not just talking about a few bucks. We’re talking about maybe a third of a person’s annual income.

Now the other figure: ten thousand talents. This is a figure so immense that it is hard to even contemplate — maybe 10 billion dollars in today’s money. It is the sort of debt that your average Joe or Jane wouldn’t even begin to be able to pay back even if they were to spend every day of their life earning money for the sole purpose of paying back the debt.

It is a debt so enormous that it immediately makes the other debt seem like nothing, even though the 100 denarii’s previously seemed like quite a bit.

Jesus is telling a joke — an absurdity. If there ever were such an instance when a man of common means was suddenly forgiven a debt of ten billion dollars, particularly in a day when filing for bankruptcy wasn’t an option, such a man would be so filled with wonder and gratitude at his good fortune that there is no way he would that very same day get bent out of shape about another man who couldn’t repay him ten thousand dollars.  Just no way.

The only way this could happen is if the man somehow just didn’t get it about the magnitude of the debt he has been forgiven.

Which, I think, is what Jesus is saying about us in this parable. We just don’t get it. We’re walking around filled with resentments and grudges about all kinds of perceived grievances, which from one angle, can seem pretty significant, the same way ten thousand dollars can seem like a very big financial debt. We have, in fact, been forgiven a ten billion dollar debt, which renders our ten thousand dollar debt meaningless.

Life is funny. Absurd maybe. It is so striking how things can be seen so differently from two different angles.

Who knows what the argument was all about, and what was the truth of the matter? Clearly there were two different points of view, and the clash of the two was generating a great deal of hostility.

Now the oddness of this experience for me didn’t have to do with either the rudeness of the young woman’s angry cell phone conversation in a public place — that’s all too common. Nor did it have to do with the severe hostility of the argument.  We human beings spend a great deal of time in these kinds of arguments – a great deal of time trying to justify ourselves and to blame others.

From my point of view, the oddness of this experience for me had to do with three things.

First, there was this parable of Jesus floating around in my head on which I was to preach this Sunday. There was the strange coincidence that it also dealt with an outstanding debt needing to be paid off that stirred up great hostility. The debt in the parable was $10,000. If, in fact, the money the young woman was arguing about was a student loan, it could well have been in that same vicinity — $10,000.

The second aspect of oddness had to do with the fact that this happened to be September 11^th. I had been quite aware of this fact earlier in the day as I listened to the radio and observed the moments of silence commemorating the planes crashes and I thought of those who had died. But by this point in the day, however I had gotten on with my business and forgotten what day it was.   Only later as I thought about the young woman’s conversation and remembered the significance of the day did the strangeness strike me.

Take us back exactly seven trips of our planet around the sun to 2001, and no way does this young woman’s angry phone conversation take place.

What happened on that morning seven years earlier was absolutely awful, and part of what made it so awful was that in the first couple of hours following the initial terrifying news, we didn’t know whether or not the attacks were over — whether there were more attacks still on the way.

Only as things settled a bit, and it appeared that yes, the attacks were indeed over, and that neither our lives, nor (if we were in the fortunate majority of Americans), the lives of our loved ones were coming to an end, that gratitude and an extreme tenderness arose within us. This sense we had was not unlike being set free from a ten billion dollar debt, rendering all ten thousand dollar debts unworthy of such intensity of emotion.

The third oddity to this experience for me was the fact that I had gone to the bookstore in order to get a specific book for a friend — a book by Eckhart Tolle entitled “A New Earth“, that deals with the spiritual life.

Tolle hardly tells any stories at all in this book, but one story he does tell which stood out in my mind was the following: He describes a time he received a great insight when he was a student riding the subway in the early morning on his way to the university.   His attention was captured by a woman in her thirties who was sitting alone. There was space on either side of her, and the reason for this was clear enough — she appeared to be quite insane.

Tolle goes on to write, “I was still thinking about her when I was in the men’s room prior to entering the library. As I was washing my hands, I thought: I hope I don’t end up like her. The man next to me looked briefly in my direction, and I suddenly was shocked when I realized that I hadn’t just thought those words, but mumbled them aloud. ‘Oh my God, I’m already like her,’ I thought. Wasn’t my mind as incessantly active as hers? There were only minor differences between us. The predominant underlying emotion behind her thinking seemed to be anger. In my case, it was mostly anxiety. If she was mad, then everyone was mad, including myself. There were differences in degree only.” p. 33

The monologue of the woman on the subway, the monologue of the angry young woman in the bookstore, the monologues that so often fill our own brains, whether spoken aloud or not — these monologues invariably constrict our world and keep us from living freely, loving fully.

The ministry of Jesus was all about setting people free from their fundamental sense of indebtedness. “My son, your sins are forgiven,” he said to a paralytic brought into his house for healing, which led the scribes and the pharisees, preoccupied by the $10,000 debts, to grumble.

“You are forgiven, now, forgive one another.”

Think of it this way: Someone to whom you owe everything — your life and breath, your fondness perhaps for fresh tomatoes, your pleasure in the moon and stars, all the loves of your life — someone who has given and given and given to you and who has gotten precious little in return has examined your enormous debt in great detail and knows from your credit rating that the chances of repayment are nil.

Someone who knows all of that has taken the stack of your IOU’s and torn them up, balancing your books in one fell swoop for one reason and one reason alone: because that someone wants to remain in relationship with you, and wants you to be free to respond.

The guy drove off, but he was back a couple of minutes later, having brought something within him. For a moment I thought maybe he’d brought a gun, but no, it turned out to be a big American flag on a pole which he defiantly stuck in the ground in front of us.

I had various reactions. One was, “Great, a response.” We’re out there in order to make some kind of witness; here, finally was an indication that someone was paying attention.

But I quickly became disillusioned about this not so much by the words spoken by this man, but rather by the tone struck by several of the people I was with… bombshells of rhetoric, insulting comments about the man’s intelligence. It seemed clear to me that they didn’t have much interest in engaging in real conversation. They preferred the self-centered conviction that they were totally right and he was totally wrong, while enjoying the adrenalin rush that comes in trying to beat down an enemy.

And this was supposed to be “peace” vigil.

The one exception that night was Michael Soriano, who drew close to the man, and in contrast to the shrill, attacking tones of others, spoke softly, attempting to dialogue with him on the issues at stake in war and peace.

“I have decided to follow Jesus.” Followers of Jesus are called to be peacemakers.

The questions that were addressed to Jennifer and Michael this morning, as well as to all of us, dealt with the reality of evil and the struggle of goodness against evil in this world. One of the great insights of Christianity is that the battlefront in which this struggle takes place isn’t just out there somewhere, it’s right here, running through the soul of each of us.

Jesus said, how can you call attention to the speck in your neighbor’s eye when there is a log in your own eye? Right after blessing Simon Peter, he called him “Satan.” “Get behind me, Satan!” We are Simon Peter. We can never forget that although hopefully God is using us to do some good in this world, Satan also speaks through us as well.  When we try to demonize others, Jesus would remind us to face up to our own demons first.

The presidential campaigns are in full swing, and I should feel grateful for living in this great nation where democracy has some fairly deep roots. My son Andrew recently arrived for a four month stay in Thailand at precisely the moment when tens of thousands of demonstrators had taken to the streets in an attempt to drive out the prime minister, a man who had been brought to power by another coup just a year or so earlier. The stability we enjoy here in the democratic process is remarkable.

And yet I find myself feeling disillusioned by partisan politics — the failure to engage in real dialogue with people of differing points of view; the way we so often talk past one another without ever really listening.

Jesus said, “If anyone would follow me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Here is a pretty down to earth way to understand what it means to deny ourselves in following Jesus: Deny ourselves the gloating satisfaction of “being right” that seems so preferable to the hard work required in truly listening to another person express their point of view, especially when that point of view is quite different from our own. Make it a goal of trying to truly hear what another is saying, and to listen for the words beyond the words; the unspoken fears and hopes that are a part of their point of view. Deny yourself the thrill that comes from beating your opponent into submission with rhetorical points.

Listen first.

This coming Saturday, I will be leading what I call a “Spiritual Autobiography Workshop”, in which we will reflect on our stories, where we’ve come from, where we are right now, where we’re going, and where in the midst of it all is God? Part of the motivation for holding this is that sense of regret that always seems to arise when one of our members dies, and we realize how much of their stories we hadn’t known or heard when they were still among us.

But it is also important for us to listen deeply to our own stories to discern the meaning that might otherwise be missed.

The figure of Moses looms larger than any other human being in the Old Testament. His story is a fascinating one, and he provides something of a model in regard to listening to the stories of our lives.

There is an aspect of his story that is often overlooked, and that is that Moses didn’t really fit in — that much of his life was spent as an outsider.

You probably know the story of how he was born to a Hebrew mother during a time when Pharaoh was intent on destroying all the Hebrew baby boys, and how ironically, he survived by being left in a basket in the reeds of the Nile where Pharaoh’s daughter found him. His childhood was spent not among his own people, but as a son of Pharaoh, in the midst of wealth, comfort and educational opportunities unknown to his own people. His mother, however, regularly visited him, and through her Moses maintained an identity with his birth people, and yet it was not the easy connection that comes from actually growing up sharing in a peoples’ life.

Moses had grown up a very privileged Egyptian, and yet his mother’s ongoing presence made it impossible for him to embrace his Egyptian identity.

We are told that as a young man Moses would wander out from behind the palace walls, evidently drawn by a desire for contact with his roots — the people of his flesh and blood. On one of these trips he witnessed first hand the oppression of his birth people — he saw an Egyptian guard beating a Hebrew slave. Rage arose within Moses, and, believing no one was watching, he killed the Egyptian.

The very next day Moses was once more wandering among his birth people when he came upon two Hebrews fighting.   He attempted to break up the fight, but his efforts to play the role of peacemaker for his people was rejected, as one of the combatants reveals the fact that his murder of the Egyptian had been witnessed.

And so Moses flees.  Why does he flee? He flees in part because he is afraid that he will be punished by Pharaoh for the murder he has committed. But on a deeper level, he flees because he feels as though he just doesn’t belong. Moses knows he is not truly an Egyptian, but an identity as a Hebrew evades him as well.  The desire that stirred within his heart to be of help to his oppressed people was met with rebuke.

And so feeling like an outsider, he takes flight, hoping to put this all behind him, to start over, to create a new life — a life free from the past.   Perhaps you know something of this same desire in yourself.

For a good while Moses seems to succeed at doing exactly this.  He wins himself a wife, and undertakes a career as a shepherd in his father-in-law’s sheep herding business. He has a son. Life is good, relatively speaking, free of conflict, quiet, peaceful. A little boring perhaps. He is a man without a past, or so he tries to convince himself.

And then one day as he is going about his job, he turns aside to investigate a mystery — a bush burning that is not consumed — and for the first time in his life God speaks directly to him.

Life is full of paradox — full of seemingly contradictory truths that are held together in tension. And here is one of those great paradoxes:

On the one hand, life is only truly lived in the present moment. The present is all we have. If we can’t be in the present — if we are trapped in the past, or in the future — we will miss the gift of the present.

On the other hand, every human life involves a story, and it is not possible to be fully rooted in the present unless we appreciate the story of where we’ve come from and where we are going.

Moses has been attempting to live his life as though his past prior to meeting his wife does not exist.

When God addresses Moses, the very first thing God does is claim Moses’ attention for the present moment. “Take off your sandals, for the ground you are standing on is holy ground.”

But the second thing of which God speaks is the past, specifically, placing Moses life in the context of a particular past in which God has been present: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”  This is your lineage; these are your roots.

The man who preferred to think of himself as a someone without a past is suddenly drawn up into a story in which God has been very much present to a particular human family. God has heard the cries of his people, and God is taking action in the present to deliver them.

God also references a future: a direction, a goal, an unshakeable hope. God will bring the Hebrew people out of their bondage to Pharaoh, and lead them to a land flowing with milk and honey.

Suddenly, the present is charged in a way that it had not been before, for it now is rooted in a definite past and a definite future.  Moses quickly discovers he has an essential role to play in this story, bridging the past to the future.

In order to truly embrace the present moment, it is necessary to understand the context.

Now, prior to his encounter with the burning bush, Moses had been understanding his life in recent years primarily in terms of a quest for comfort and the avoidance of suffering. What’s life about? Nothing more than avoiding pain, and finding comfort. And as such, Moses expressed what is perhaps the most conscious human theme.

As God speaks, however, it quickly becomes clear that the comfort and the absence of suffering that Moses has recently known are about to go out the window, and his initial response is to question the calling. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

And yet there is this irony. The personal history he has been avoiding it turns out makes him the ideal person for the job. As one who has grown up in Pharaoh’s court, he knows how Pharaoh thinks — he knows how to talk to Pharaoh. And yet through his mother, he knows the Israelites. His story has made him the bridge between the two cultures.

Eventually Moses embraces his calling. It is isn’t easy, in fact it will be quite hard. But it is a life with a depth of purpose and meaning that he would not have known otherwise.

Victor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist who survived a Nazi prison camp, and wrote a book about his experience and the psychological and philosophical theory he developed in the midst of that experience.

Quoting Nietzsche, Frankl declared that “He who as a why, can endure any how.” Which is to say, the great quest of life is about finding the meaning in the suffering that comes to us in our personal story.

In the context of the concentration camp, Frankl saw that it was essential to find a meaning in the suffering, otherwise, it was clear to him, he would lose the will to live. And so he found meaning on various levels: he was enduring this suffering in order to one day to be reunited with his beloved wife. He was enduring this horror for the sake of his fellow prisoners, that he might be an encouragement to them where they were tempted to give up. And finally, he was enduring this outrageous fortune in order to claim what he called the final freedom — the one thing his guards couldn’t take from him — the ability to choose his attitude towards the situation in which he found himself.

In other words, the experience of the present is profoundly impacted by the way we understand the context — the story we tell of where we’ve come from and where we’re going.

To get at this idea, consider the following: Let’s say you’ve been saving money in your mattress at home, and you’ve managed to save up a significant nest egg — a couple of thousand dollars.

Now imagine two different scenarios: In one, a thief breaks into your house, finds the cash you’ve stored in your mattress, and steals it away.

Here’s another scenario. An elderly friend comes over to your house. She is crying. Her daughter living in Louisana has just called and told her mother that her house and everything in it has been washed away by a hurricane. The daughter and her infant child are now homeless and penniless. Your friend is besides herself in worry for her daughter and grandchild. Living on social security herself, she has no money herself to send them.

Moved by your desire to help, you say to your friend, “Listen, I’ve saved up a couple of thousand dollars. I have it right here. Take it — wire it to your daughter so she can get baby food and diapers and a safe place to stay.”  Your friend breaks into tears of gratitude, moved by the unexpected love you have shown her. She leaves with the money.

Now notice this, at the end of both scenarios, your situation in the present moment is, objectively speaking, the same. You are without your hard-earned savings. It’s gone. Your back to living from pay check to pay check.

There is a profound difference, however between the two scenarios in how you experience this “going without.“ In one context the suffering has meaning — a higher purpose has been served by your suffering.  In the other you can identify no such meaning or purpose.

Another person, two scenarios. In one, the person has an accident in which he loses a kidney. In the other, the same person chooses to donate a kidney to a person who will die if they don’t receive a healthy kidney.

Again, at the end of both scenarios the objective situation is the same: The person is down to only one healthy kidney.

The experience, however, is quite different based upon the context in which the missing kidney is understood.

Part of what I’m getting at here is simply the fact that a life based upon nothing more than the desire to find comfort and avoid pain is a life that has no roots — a life that can’t hold up. We need a larger sense of purpose and meaning, and that larger meaning and purpose is written into our personal and collective stories, if only we are willing to listen deeply.

God takes our personal stories and invites us to find ourselves in God’s great story, and in saying “yes” to this invitation, the present moment becomes charged in a way that it could not otherwise be.

On a grand scale, when I ponder the discoveries of cosmologists and physicists about the origins of the universe, I am all the more awestruck by the present moment in which I find myself. Specifically, the universe has been around something like 14 billion years, and yet we human beings have only been here for a tiny, tiny fraction of that time. One way to hear this is as one very, very long “back story” to the appearance of rational, self-reflective, universe-conscious beings — in the language of the Bible, creatures who are made in the image and likeness of God. When I ponder the 14 billion years that were the necessary buildup to you and me being here, well, I find the present moment all the more awesome.  I hear God say once more, “Take off your sandals, for the ground upon which you stand is holy ground.”