conversion – Andrew Micah

Let the Wicked Be No More

October 21, 2019October 21, 2019 by Andrew Micah, posted in creation, reflection, theology

I was reading Psalm 104 in my daily devotions today, and was startled and provoked to reflection by the last verse. Psalm 104 is a hymn of celebration for God’s greatness and goodness displayed through his creation of the earth. It’s a poetic survey of all that is beautiful in earth and sky and sea, and how all these contribute to the praise and pleasure of God. God is revealed to us as we ponder with the Psalmist God’s care for creation.

But all this ends with a fierce declaration of desire that, at least to our contemporary sensibilities (I really can’t speak to the past in an informed way) seems completely out of place. We read these words: “Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more.” (Psalm 104:35) Put that up on the closing screen of your National Geographic featurette. If I wasn’t unconditionally committed to biblical inerrancy, I might question the inspiration of this line, simply on a poetic level. There is no leading up to this expression, no setting of the table for the challenging course of coming to terms with God’s consuming justice. It just appears, at a moment when we are completely caught off guard. But it is there for a reason, and in answer to my own prayers for understanding, I believe God has given me some insight into why a cry to God for the destruction of sinners was the only appropriate way for the Holy Spirit to conclude this Psalm.

Creation is in no need of redemption, at least, not in the sense that we typically use that word to speak of the restoration and reconciliation of a moral transgressor. There is nothing morally wrong with creation. Creation has not sinned; it was submitted to the dominion of man, and when man sinned, creation was cursed for his sake. Because of this, creation groans, waiting for rescue from the dominion of corrupt humanity that was the cause of the curse. Creation longs to be restored the freedom and liberty that will come when dominion is restored to people under God who receive power from Him to rule and restore. As we hear and see creation groaning, we should ourselves be groaning for the fullness of redemption that will be accomplished when Christ returns. (Romans 8:18-25) The fulfillment that we now experience as laborers in God’s creation doesn’t compare to that which is coming, and the sufferings imposed on us and on creation as a result of the curse of sin do not compare with the glory that is coming. What creation longs for, per Paul’s words in Romans 8, is for our full redemption, soul and body, so that creation herself can enjoy the freedom and fruitfulness of life under God’s perfect dominion through us. The longing of creation should inspire us to long for the second coming of Jesus where we will be set free forever from the body of sin and made fully alive in Him, not just for our sake, but for creation’s sake also.

With all this in mind, as I look back on Psalm 104 I’m surprised by the rosiness of the picture painted. It’s not the kind of rosy suggested by “nature red in tooth and claw.” There is an acknowledgement of the presence of death (Psalm 104:29), but on the whole, creation is set forth as good, bringing joy to its creator even in the fallen state (v. 31). Why in response to this does the Psalmist cry or for the destruction of the wicked?

I think the answer is clearly this: the sin of man is all that has defiled and desecrated God’s creation. We cannot love the beauty of God’s creation without hating the sin that has caused all the brokenness in the world. If we are led by creation in worship of a wise and loving Maker, we must also with creation groan and testify against the evil that has brought such a hurtful curse on God’s good creation–the sin of man, the sin that lives in us. Sinful mankind is the one foul thing that exists in the midst of all the fair works of God, and it is the one thing that mars His creation.

When we cry out for God to consume the wicked from the earth, we cry out against our own sin with hope in the redeeming work of Christ, for though we ourselves are spared by His death and resurrection, the effect and purpose of His work is to do away with sin. He took our sins on Himself; He took on the identity of our sin. And then He was cut off from the land of the living. (Isaiah 53:8) Because of him, our sin is consumed from the earth and our wickedness is no more. It has been definitely accomplished by the work of the cross, it is being progressively realized by the transforming work of the Holy Spirit, and it will be fully realized when Christ returns to fully redeem our bodies. This is the marvel of the work of Christ, that it reconciles God’s determination to save sinners and His determination to wipe out wickedness from the earth. He made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin for all of us. To stand in the place of all the sinners and all the wicked people who would turn and put their hope in Him. He was crushed, He was cut off, He was consumed, He was no more. And when sin had been destroyed in His body, He rose from the grave, so that we might walk in a newness of life even now that is only a shadow of the newness to come. Because of this, we can lift our voices with the groans of all creation, crying out “let sinners be consumed from the earth.” If not for Christ, we could not speak these words without calling out for our own destruction. Because of Christ, it becomes a prayer for our salvation. Because of Christ, we can praise God for His justice. We bear witness with creation against our own sin that has subjected creation to the curse, and receive from Him transforming mercy instead of consuming judgment, because Jesus was consumed for us. Perhaps there is in this a fundamental idea about what repentance is–that it is taking the side of God and creation against our sin with hope in the redeeming work of Christ.

Remembering Cody Winton

September 6, 2019September 7, 2019 by Andrew Micah, posted in autobiography, personal news, reflection, what's up

Sometimes there are people in your life that make it easier to imagine heaven. People who bring you in and are totally excited to see you even when you don’t have much to offer them. People who engage life with honor and wide-eyed wonder. People who are pure in heart, honest to the core, who give without thinking twice. Who love in truth. Who overflow with effortless joy. People whose simplicity makes you a little embarrassed for the times that you’ve tried too hard to be something that you’re not, but able to accept that with kindness and move into a more authentic experience of who God made you to be.

There are a few moments in the course of my friendship with Cody I remember most clearly, and through those moments I remember all these things that were so true about him.

I met Cody Winton at a bluegrass house concert in late 2010 (I believe) played by the family band that consisted of him, his brother, and his Dad. I wasn’t even really into bluegrass music at the time. My focus, personally and as a budding musician, was on the British-American folk music that to me was more poetic and grand. But I enjoyed the show, and Cody and I in particular experienced the beginnings of a friendship that night.

At that time in my life, I was living in a very broken family situation. As a result of some of the dynamics of that situation, it was very hard to make close in-person friends. There was a deep relational divide between my parents with fear and resentment on both sides, and because I was homeschooled and not involved in too many extra-curricular activities, I really only had the opportunity to make friends with young people from families who were to either part of my Mom’s circle of influence or my Dad’s. It was hard to be honest with people in those circles with what I was feeling. There was a risk of opening wounds and aggravating tensions. So any opportunity to connect and form friendships with people outside that network was something I seized on. Especially like-minded young guys who seemed to share the same enthusiasm, vigorous hope for life, masculine values and (tragically) code of dogmatic cultural externals as an attempt at following Christ that were so important to who I was and who I wanted to be.

Cody was one of those guys—kind of. We were a part of and connected in terms of the same Christian subculture, but it was less of an identity for him, which is why I think we didn’t hit it off as dramatically as was the case for some of the other friendships I had at the time. Cody had a personal grip on the gospel that I didn’t, and it led to him eventually having something of a subversive impact for good in my life. It was eight summers ago when I was roused by the sinking realization (which I believe was the work of the Holy Spirit) that my whole spiritual life up to that point had been a self-serving con intended to promote myself in the eyes of others. We all struggle with insincerity and impurity of motives at times. I’m not talking about that. I was a complete through-and-through hypocrite who was manipulating people with the false appearance of spirituality. I realized that if I was going to get to a place of freedom and life, I had to completely tear off the mask. I had to detonate the carefully constructed image of who I was if there was any hope of real connection and redemption in my life. So I chose to confess to my closest friends what was really going on. On August 1st, 2011, I sent out an email to the handful of guys that I considered my closest friends. There were eight of them. Most didn’t respond. I can’t even remember some of their names at this point. There were only a couple that clearly offered the Gospel, and Cody Winton was the one who really understood what was going on. He told me, in short, that it was quite possible I was right about myself, and that I had to wrestle with that concern. He also told me that having a relationship with God was not about what I did to try to reach God, but about what God had done to rescue me. That it wasn’t about my effort, but about receiving and being transformed by the love of Jesus. Instead of backing away, minimizing my crisis, or rejecting me for the way that I had been using him, he cared well for my soul in a way that made me feel my own worth. Of the people that were speaking into my life at that particular moment, he did more to set me on a track towards authentic engagement with the person and work of Jesus than any others.

A couple of months later, his family band came through to do another show, but this time I couldn’t go. I was still very much working through all of the doubts and questions about my standing with God and what it meant to really know Jesus. And as part of that process, I was emotionally processing the damage done by my broken family situation in a way that I hadn’t been able to up to that point. I had counselors, but I needed to know that I had friends who cared. And for some reason, because of the email he had written a couple of months before, I felt that Cody was someone I could really trust and open up to. I remember scrambling out a letter for one of my brothers to give to him at the concert, in which I poured out a (hopefully) brief history of what was happening in my family and asked for prayer. I got an email a couple of days later, saying that he had read the letter and was praying for me. He didn’t make any attempts to fix what was going on. He included a link to a song he’d been listening to. While that song didn’t speak to the exact details of my situation (and he knew that it didn’t), it created space in my heart for me to feel the feelings of grief and loss over my broken family that I was struggling to believe in as valid.

In the days and months to come I began to open up to other friends about the brokenness in my heart over the brokenness in my situation. Many people offered sympathy. But what astonishes me now, looking back, is the way that Cody offered something more—genuine empathy for and presence with someone that, at that point, he really didn’t know that well. He made himself fully available even though he knew he was unable to fix anything, which I now realize was a brave and unselfish thing to do.

I saw Cody in person only a few times over the course of our friendship, and it was through those meetings that our friendship grew in earnest. There was a conference here in the Chicago area the spring of 2012 hosted by a national Christian teaching & discipleship organization that we both followed. I think he was serving at the conference as an intern or something. And then he and his family band came through again in the fall of that year to play another concert at the same house I met him. There was peace in my heart in my walk with God at that point, and we had a connection that we didn’t have before. There was something totally unpretentious down-to-earth and deeply real in the way that he shared in the joy of my coming to know Jesus.

What amazes me looking back is just the gift of friendship that I had from Cody. Even within the subculture that we were a apart of, Cody had some very different passions than I did. He was three years older, and in terms of his personal and emotional maturity, he was more like seven or eight years older. He was in a very different stage of life: starting out in business, exploring relationships, moving out into life on his own. I was far away from those things. I guess I always felt that Cody was more my friend than I was his. What I mean is that he had a lot more to offer me than I had to offer him. There was no way that I was going to be able to relate to and share in the excitement that he had for life as it was coming together for him at that point, or help him process the burdens and anxieties he was working through. In some ways, I was emotionally crippled and preoccupied with my own mess, and it’s only now that I’m really beginning to enter the stage of life that he was in at that point. From this place I can see how easy it would have been for him to think of someone like me as mostly dead weight. But every time I saw Cody, he was brimming with excitement to see me. He understood that his role my life was that of an older brother, and he assumed that role with genuine enthusiasm and without the slightest hint of condescension. Never, not even once, did Cody make me feel like he looked down on me.

He had (in many ways) much healthier priorities than I did, and it was in part because of that better footing in life that we began to grow apart. I became very invested in long-distance friendships in a a way that sapped my own energy to engage my in-person life in the way I needed to. Cody was one of a couple of friends in my life who kindly and consistently challenged that tendency. I remember him quoting Jim Elliot to me: “wherever you are, be all there.” I was for the most part determined to learn the hard way, and I made myself available to people who enabled the same unhealthy escapist approach to life. Cody didn’t enable it, and we began to drift apart. He was there for me, always ready to be leaned on, but he was focused on his life and work and future, and I was unable to connect with his world and walk alongside him because I was spinning my wheels in distracted relationships and pursuits that didn’t hold real promise for my immediate growth and my future.

The last time I saw Cody in person was in January of 2015, at the wedding of mutual friends in Alabama. He was there with his wife Sarah, whom he had just married the previous fall. He was, as always, glad to see me in way that made so many of my nagging insecurities just vanish in the time I was with him. We talked briefly and sang a couple of songs. It was like picking up where we had left off in the very best way. I remember thinking that I was a different person around Cody, absent of any effort or pretense, and I liked that person.

In the spring of 2015, I moved to a new church, and that move triggered a whole series of huge changes in my life and perspective. I was being personally equipped and cared for by that church, and as a result I began to become fully focused on my own spiritual and personal growth, pursuing opportunities for in-person work and ministry. I began to drift from the subculture and the points of theology in which I had found so much of my identity. What was odd is that even though I was drifting from the context in which Cody and I had become friends, I never had the fear of losing him as a friend that I did with so many other people. And perhaps that’s because Cody had a much healthier identity in Christ than I did, and I felt that I was moving towards that identity. We had very sparse contact after that beyond now-and-then connection through social media. My energy was becoming fully focused on building my life, as it had been a long time coming. Meanwhile, his energy was being poured into his young family, his work with technology startups, and so forth. And although I was content with these realities I had always supposed that our paths would come together again, and that we would enjoy more fully the friendship that had in one sense only just begun.

I really don’t know very much of the shape that Cody’s life has taken over the past few years. I don’t know what we would argue about, what we would share on a personal level, what songs we would sing. I’ve wondered.

Twenty-four hours ago I received the news that Cody was killed in a car accident early on Wednesday morning.

At first, it felt strange and foreign. And then, a steady wave of memories came back to me, the ones that I’ve described here. And many moments that I couldn’t do justice to in describing for anyone that didn’t know him personally. His self-effacing corny wit, his blunt and welcoming presence, his effortless class, his way of engaging everyone and everything with perfect stubbornness and generosity. I can’t begin to think about it without breaking down into ugly crying as I write. He was my friend, and the moments I had with him felt like something stolen from a better world. Maybe that’s why it’s so much easier for me to think about and dream about and live for heaven as I mourn the fact that he’s gone. But I think it’s even more because he was a person who, as I knew him, lived for heaven.

I’ve always been a music guy. These last 24 hours I’ve been listening to a lot of Ben Rector and Josh Turner, two guys that he turned me on to. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Rascal Flatts and Maroon 5, bands that I openly hated but secretly grew to love because of the way that he loved them. But more than that, I’ve just been lost in worship. I’ve had “God and God Alone” by Chris Tomlin and “Jesus, Only Jesus” by Matt Redman on a constant loop as I’ve been driving from Geneva to Carol Stream to Sugar Grove and back home. These songs weren’t ever part of our friendship. But they are the songs that, right now, connect my heart to the future reality of surrounding the throne of God at the healing of all things.

The best thing that I can say about Cody is that even though I often find it terribly hard to imagine heaven, it’s easy right now because how easy it is to imagine him enjoying the assembling of God’s people to give Him praise. Perhaps it’s so easy to turn in the midst of a sense of grief and almost crushing loss to worship because it’s so easy to imagine Cody enjoying the presence of God, and as I imagine him in God’s presence, what I see in his face and hear in his voice reflects something to me of what it will mean to see God when my own time comes.

I love you, Cody. Thanks for everything.

Songs of His Pursuit: This Man

October 11, 2017October 11, 2017 by Andrew Micah, posted in autobiography, music, Uncategorized

I blogged yesterday about how music plays a huge part in the story of God’s grace in my life so far and about my desire to tell that story by sharing about some of the songs that God has used to get through to me the reality of who He is and what He has done, is doing, and will do for me in and through Jesus Christ. Today I’m going to talk about Jeremy Camp’s This Man. This song was a single from his 2004 release Restored. It was a #1 single in early 2006, but to me, it seemed like the song was never played enough. It was one of the handful of songs that I was always searching for when I flipped through the four Christian music radio stations I had access to.

When I was a confused and lonely pre-teen, I really didn’t have a good grasp on the cross of Jesus and what it means for people who put their hope in it. I had some idea that what Jesus did on the cross was supposed to mean something for me in the way of atonement, but I didn’t really understand how. I’ve always been susceptible to being moved emotionally by music, and I remember that this song had a big emotional impact on me. There was something in the words, “Would you take the place of this Man / Would you take the nails from His hands?” sung in this way with this melody that made me realize that there could be hope and beauty and even glory in the midst of suffering, and not just in spite of the suffering, but because of what the suffering meant. It made me feel all the same longings I felt when I read about Narnia (and I lied in Narnia for a few years). Maybe that was the beginning of my hope that a desire for otherworldly love and meaning could be in some way fulfilled in this world instead of being shunted off into fantasies of another world that didn’t really exist. All of this came at me in a mystical sort of way, instead of being anchored in concrete propositional truths about Jesus, who He is, and what He has done. But I can say that it made me feel the sort of things that a person should feel about those truths, and made me suspect that there was a beauty to be found in the Gospel of Jesus Christ itself that was deeper than the music and the poetry, a beauty which I might somehow be able to find my way into.

Fast forward ten years, and a more perfect realization of what the Gospel is and what it means has only made this song more precious to me. When we really understand the perfect sacrifice of Jesus, all of our efforts at do-it-yourself atonement have to come to an end. This Man, hanging on a cross, rejected by men and carrying the wrath of God, has done something for us that we could never do for ourselves. He has put our sin to death, carried the wrath of God we deserved, and made a way for us to be welcomed into the fullness of God’s presence. And sometimes we simply have to stop ourselves in our efforts of making our way with God through our efforts at being good and our efforts at making up to Him for our failures to be good, and ask ourselves, “How can I ever think that I can take the place of this Man? How could I ever do for myself what He has done for me? Why am I trying to carry for myself a burden that He has taken for me?” I ask myself that question a little more frequently because of this song’s presence in my life, and it’s so good for my heart and my walk with Jesus.

~Andrew

Songs of His Pursuit, introduction

October 11, 2017October 11, 2017 by Andrew Micah, posted in autobiography, music, philosophy

Tonight I was dwelling on a song that was one of my earliest favorites and remains a favorite of mine, “This Man” by Jeremy Camp. As I was thinking about it, and attempting to put into words how it made me feel when I was eleven and twelve years old, and how it makes me feel now, I had the thought of doing a series of posts discussing some of my most favorite songs, why they are my favorite songs, and how God has pursued my heart through them. I’ll be talking about “This Man” in a future post, but for now, I want to say some introductory things to set the stage for what will follow. (Note: these posts will carry on sporadically with no definite end. They will not be an uninterrupted series, but will be interspersed with writings on other subjects.)

When that song was released to radio in 2005, I didn’t have access to an iPod or a high-speed internet connection. Spotify didn’t exist, Youtube was brand new, and our modem connection would, of course, hardly support anything requiring much in the way of data transfer. (I recall how, in the few times a week I was allowed to use our dial-up internet, I would wait patiently for several minutes at a time to load the MLB.com site). Nor did I have much in the way of discretionary income that could be spent on CDs. Add to all of this my parents’ disagreements between themselves about what sort of music they wanted their children to listen to, and my desire to stay out of that conflict, which led me to be secretive about giving too many honest indications to either parent what I really enjoyed or wanted to listen to. The result was that during my pre-teen and early teen years my free experience of the music that resonated with me most was limited mostly to evening hours when one or both parents were out and I could make free use of one of the radios in the house.

At that time I had no personal interest in the popular secular music, and indeed very little experience from which such an interest might arise. What I did enjoy (although at time with some reserve and a nagging sense of guilt, inspired mostly by my mother’s discomfort and general opposition to it) was the mainstream contemporary Christian music which was broadcast on four different FM stations in the suburbs of Chicago where I lived (and still live to the present). Probably in part because it was so much of the all that I had, I connected very deeply with the music. Not that I embraced all of it without any distinction in my preferences. Some songs I liked better than others, and a few songs I found to be annoying. But a few of the Christian songs that were popular on the radio from 2004 or 2005, when I really began paying attention, to 2009 or 2010, when my tastes (due in part to somewhat misguided moral impulses) began to turn in a different direction, provided the real soundtrack of those turbulent, conflicted years of my life (about which more will be written in future).

I had always, to some extent, known that I was a sinner, and also known that the only hope for my redemption was somehow to be found in the cross of Jesus Christ. God, however, seemed for almost all of the time to be very distant to me. This was partly because of brokenness and conflict in my own family that I did not know how to reconcile with the things we all said we believed, which brokenness and conflict led to distance in my relationship with both of my parents (although the distance was more pronounced and more honest in my relationship with my father). I really believe it was these crises, and an attempt to somehow escape the pain of them, which led to battles with ideas like solipsism and atheism in my pre-teen and teen years (about which I may write more later). If my experience is any indicator–and indeed, I think there is more than just my experience or even the experiences of others that speaks to the reality of this–there is no such thing as an honest atheist, or an honest solipsist. Ideas like these, as I understand, are simply ideological compensations for the pain of life in whatever form it comes–guilt, disappointment, grief over our own losses or sympathetic anger about the losses and hardships of others, and so forth. In saying this, I do not in any way mean to ridicule or belittle those who consider themselves atheists or solipsists. If you leave a man on his own (which is where all of us are without Christ), the pain of the world we live in and the life we live in it is a weight that will crush him. There are many, many kinds of suicide, only one of which stops a beating heart. Cutting all sense of connection to God or reality is something that a person might do as deliberately to bring an end to the pain of this life as cutting his own veins. In saying all this, my point is that while there is really no such thing as an honest atheist or an honest solipsist, there are honestly broken people who have chosen to not be honest with themselves and others about what they instinctively know to be true because, for reasons that are not entirely personally their own fault, what they know to be true is more than they can bear. I think those of us who are secure in the knowledge of the love of God should have compassion on them because God has compassion on them. I also think those of us who are not secure in the knowledge of God or His love must look to Jesus, and realize that in Him God has revealed His compassion for us, and having realized this, learn to have for ourselves some of the pity that He has for us.

At any rate, if I can point to any one factor in my life that, more than any other, kept me from letting myself go headlong into the spiritual hypothermia of those doubts about God and reality, it was music made by God’s people. There was something in the songs that tethered me to Hope. There was a love that echoed in the music and the words which, although no lengths of reassurance seemed to be able to convince me that it was really mine for the taking, I still could not let go of (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it would not let go of me). I didn’t know at all how to draw near, or even that I could; but at the same time I dared not forget it and pass it by, or let it pass me by. The moment I began to forget, I felt myself slipping into a nameless lostness in which there was no meaning, no point of reference, and no hope; and with all that I could muster of Puddleglum‘s defiant good sense and resolution, I raged against it, day after day, year after year. It wasn’t until my 16th year that I really for the first time came to understand myself as fully accepted with God through what Jesus did in His death and resurrection. For some people, that understanding (and of course the conviction of sin that must precede it) crashes in while they are going their way without much conscious pursuit of knowing God. For others like me, it comes after a lot of grappling and seeking and getting lost in one’s head and ultimately finding one’s way out into the wide reality of the love of God outside of us in which He beckons us to lose ourselves. Either way, whether we realize it or not, it is God pursuing us.

In the same way that human affection is inclined to attach itself to any place or object or thing which is associated in memory with the fondest experiences of every kind of love (whether it be familial or romantic love, or the love of friendship), my love of music is due in large part to the way that God pursued me through music. To talk about the songs I love is to talk about how God has loved me, and how I have become who I am through that love. There will as a result be some fragments of autobiography in the posts that follow in this series, and I hope those who read them will find in them something of interest that they can connect with and that may help them reflect on their own experiences.

~Andrew