Tag: love

The Father Turns His Face Away

by Andrew Micah, posted in reflection, theology, worship

One of my favorite worship songs is “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” by Stuart Townend. Over the course of the few years that I’ve been leading worship, I’ve heard some objections to this song, particularly to one line of lyrics. At the end of the first verse, we sing,

“How great the pain of searing loss

The Father turns His face away

As wounds which mar the Chosen One

Bring many sons to glory.”

The line “the Father turns His face away” as a description of what happened on the cross is the line that’s drawn objections, typically from people who are very, very confident that this line implies something that theologically false about the atoning work of Jesus. Today I would like to show why that isn’t true.

First, let’s consider the way that Scripture speaks about God’s face. God prescribed a very specific blessing that was to be spoken over the covenant people of Israel by the priests. In Numbers 6:22-27, we read:

“The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus shall you bless the people of Israel: you shall say to them,

The LORD bless you and keep you;

the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;

the LORD lift up the light of His countenance upon you and give you peace.

‘So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them.'”

It makes sense to consider the way God speaks to Israel when we’re considering Jesus because Jesus is ultimately the servant of God “born under the law” (Galatians 4:4). Jesus is the one who fulfills God’s covenant law given to Israel perfectly, and as such, receives all the covenant blessings that the rest of Abraham’s children are unable to merit by their works. He has willed these blessings to all who call on Him by faith, Jew and Gentile, and that will took effect when He died on the cross (Hebrews 9:15-22), becoming a curse for us (Galatians 3:13-14) so that we could inherit a blessing. What we need to see here is that the core metaphor for God’s blessing and favor that was repeated to His people over and over again was this idea of the light of God’s face. He “makes His face to shine” and “lifts up the light of His countenance” on those whom He is blessing. This idea continues throughout Scripture. In Psalm 105, David exhorts God’s people, “Seek the LORD and His strength; seek His presence continually!” (Psalm 105:4) The word translated “presence” in the ESV is the Hebrew word that literally means “face.” David is not calling God’s people to pursue judgment, but blessing! The light of God’s face is praised and appealed to all throughout the book of Psalms as an expression for God’s blessing (Psalm 4:6, 31:16, 67:1, 80:19, 119:135). When God “hides His face,” it means that He has withdrawn His blessing from His people (Psalm 13:1, 27:9, 44:24, 69:17, 88:14, 102:2, 143:7). This is such a core idea in the way that God expresses Himself to His people. The light of God’s face is His blessing; the hiding of His face is judgment.

There are two objections that I’ve heard to the line “the Father turns His face away” as a description of what happened at the cross. The first is that God never really turned His face away from Jesus, but that it only seemed that way. This objection is rooted in a failure to really grasp either the holiness of God, or the substitutionary work of Jesus. In 2 Corinthians 5:21, Paul simply couldn’t make the matter any clearer: “For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” On the cross, Jesus took on the identity of “sinner” for us so that we could receive from him the identity of “righteous man” that he earned by His flawless human life. He became sin. What does God do with sin?

Psalm 5 reads: “For You are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with You. The boastful shall not stand before Your eyes; You hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies; the LORD abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.” (v. 4-6) When Jesus went to the cross for us, He didn’t go there to appease God for our failures to be nice. He went there to represent us as hateful, deceitful, proud, selfish, wicked people, and to be crushed for us by God’s uncompromising justice so that we wouldn’t have to be. That’s why we have access to God by faith in Jesus. Either Jesus made full atonement, or He didn’t, and if He didn’t, we are still debtors and slaves to the law. In order for the man Christ Jesus to make full atonement, He had to endure God’s righteous judgment of sin. The Father had to really and truly hide His face, because sin cannot stand before His eyes. Jesus had to be crushed without sympathy, without apology, without hesitation, without reservation, in the exact same way that we deserve to be for our sin. He was. It says, “The LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all,” (Isaiah 52:6), and “it was the will of the LORD to crush Him.” (52:10) It is “out of the anguish of His soul” that Jesus has received the prize for which He pursued the cross: “by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my Servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.” (v. 11)

The language,

“How great the pain of searing loss

The Father turns His face away

As wounds which mar the Chosen One

Bring many sons to glory

captures these truths beautifully and with biblical integrity.

There is another criticism from another angle. Some have argued that God’s judgment is not the absence of His presence but the presence of His justice. We can debate those technicalities of systematic theology (and I think there is an element of truth in that objection) but the reality is that Scripture repeatedly speaks of God’s judgment as a withdrawal of His presence and a hiding of His face. If God speaks this way about Himself, surely it is not incorrect to speak this way about Him. God, as we long to know Him, is the God whose face shines upon us, the God who fellowships with us. When sin has broken that fellowship, we feel alienation, forsakenness, and rejection. That is what Jesus endured for us. It was real, as real as the life we have in Him.

-Andy

The Fear of the Lord and the Comfort of the Holy Spirit

by Andrew Micah, posted in family of God, grace, reflection, theology

“So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria has peace and was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied.” (Acts 9:31)

As John Newton wrote in his timeless hymn, “’twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.” At the foundation of the Christian life is a composite awareness of two realities. The first is that God is great and terrible and holy, that He is more fearful than anyone or anything else. His present goodness and His present power should make us tremble to do anything that displeases Him or is against His character. The second reality is that God in His great love has redeemed us and rescued us from all ungodliness, not first by transforming our character, but by changing our identity from “sinner” to “set apart” through the finished work of Jesus. We’ve become members of His family. We are unconditionally loved by Him. All this is made real to us by the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit helps us to trust. The Spirit calms our fears. The Spirit makes the bed on which the believer rests securely.

The fear of God, without the cross of Christ, would certainly crush our spirits and make us miserable. But in light of the cross, what we know of God’s dangerous goodness, awesome dignity, and unmatched power inspires us to deeper love and worship, because we understand what an act of grace it is for God to redeem us, and because we can trust that whenever He appears to come against us in our sin, He is simply breaking down our pride so that we’ll be humble enough to receive His goodness and power in our hearts so that we can grow in His likeness. Without the fear of God, the comfort of the Holy Spirit doesn’t mean much. But without the comfort of the Holy Spirit, the fear of God can’t do accomplish anything good in our hearts. “‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.”

Some thoughts about God’s passion for our goodness

by Andrew Micah, posted in encouragement, exhortation, family of God, grace

“Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the heart.” (Proverbs 21:2)

As people with a propensity to sin, we spend a great deal of time and mental/emotional energy trying to protect ourselves from being found out as sinners. We fall short of God’s glory every day in the words we say and the things we do. And even though as believers in Jesus we know that our failures to do and be good have been completely covered by His blood, so often we try to stand in our own righteousness instead of just giving it up for the better covering we receive from God by the finished work of the cross.

One of the ways that we do this is by legalistic self-justification. We treat God’s commandments like an arbitrary set of technical rules that prescribe exactly how much goodness we need to get by, or how little goodness we can get away with. And the tragedy in this is that we trade God’s invitation to know Him deeply and share in His passionately good nature for a program by which we can get something out of God that we want–respect, vindication, and the right to be blessed.

God’s reason for giving us rules for life is not that He has some pet peeves that He doesn’t want to be bothered with. It’s not that He’s trying to shore up His reputation as a certain kind of God by establishing blessings for good behavior and consequences for bad behavior. He’s not carrying out some drudgery on behalf of the universe. God made people because He wanted (not needed) to share His glory and goodness with creatures. He created us in His image so that our lives could reflect the beauty of His infinitely good character, and so that we could experience the deep satisfaction and joy in being like Him. And His rules reveal to us what it means to be like Him. They are intended to expose the ways that we fall short so that we’re humbled before God and come to Him for mercy and transforming grace so that we can be restored to that created purpose–to know Him in His passionate goodness, and to share in that goodness with Him.

God’s not looking for people who carefully navigate life according to a set of arbitrary rules. He’s not looking for people who color inside the lines. He’s looking for people who want to commune with Him in His goodness, with all that means. Faithfulness. Mercy. Beauty. Joy. Abundant generosity. Uncompromising justice. Long-suffering love. And who out of that passion for the goodness that is only found in Him, seek to know Him through obedience to His commandments. God’s question as He examines our lives is not “did you do all the things,” but “what are you seeking?”

So often in interpersonal conflicts we examine and debate the finer points of the law instead of readily admitting our obvious failure to love, to seek good, to truly forgive, to prioritize justice and mercy. But God is looking for people who, instead of saving up counterfeit goodness to buy our way into His love and the respect of other people, openly declare our bankruptcy of goodness so that we can receive His own goodness. (Matt. 5:3) He’s looking for people who, in response to a genuine awareness of the purity of God’s heart and ways, genuinely grieve their failures to live in His likeness. (5:4). He’s looking for people who don’t selfishly insist on their rights, but surrender them when they stand in the way of blessing others. (5:5) He’s looking for people whose lives are controlled by one ruling hunger, one burning thirst: to see, understand, and celebrate His goodness, and be transformed into the likeness of Him. (5:6) He doesn’t care if we’re able to explain our actions as outwardly conforming to His rules. He cares about what’s in our hearts. And He’s bursting with desire to fill us with His fullness through the gift of His Holy Spirit and supply what is lacking in our hearts. He’s so passionately committed to this relationship with us where we see how beautiful He is and that beauty lives in us that He pursues us with discipline, with hardships and trials that help us to see what’s really in our hearts so that we’ll cry out for transformation. He loves us. Why would God share His goodness and His likeness with us for any other reason than that He loves us? This is why He searches our hearts. This is why He doesn’t give us a pass for our technical rule-keeping.

There was once a rich young man who came to Jesus with the claim that he had perfectly kept the law. This man was as much a failure in living up to the glory of God as the rest of us. His legalistic self-justification blinded him to that reality. Jesus could have exposed him, as I think many of us would, by challenging his assertions about his own goodness. “Have you really never committed murder? Hatred is the same as murder. Have you always kept all your promises? Have you really never helped yourself to that which wasn’t yours? Have you really never bent the truth to satisfy your own desires at the expense of others?” But Jesus does not ask these questions. His reply might catch us, as it did this rich young man, completely off guard. “Go, sell all you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” This was not a self-satisfied “gotcha” moment on Jesus’ part. The gospel says that “Jesus, looking on him, loved him.” Jesus was also not advocating self-denial as a way of buying eternal life. He was offering the young man an invitation to share in His own divine goodness. Before He took on flesh, Jesus had greater possessions than anyone. He had all the riches of Heaven. And He emptied Himself of all of it to seek and save the lost. What is more, He spent His entire earthly life saving up enough righteousness to buy our way into heaven. On the cross, He made Himself poor in terms of righteousness so that we could be rich. He exposed Himself to all the abandonment and suffering that was rightfully ours in our guilty, self-inflicted moral poverty so that we could receive the riches of His righteousness, and with them eternal life. Paul says, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you by His poverty might become rich.” (2 Corinthians 8:9) Jesus wasn’t asking the rich young man to do anything that He Himself hadn’t done. He was exposing how the young man’s heart was unlike the heart of God revealed in Himself, and offering him transformation. Thank God that when presented with the choice (speaking in human terms) to give up all that He had to purchase salvation for poor sinners, Jesus didn’t “go away sorrowful”! But this young man would not follow Jesus, because his righteousness was of an entirely different kind than the righteousness of Jesus. The righteousness of the young man was about measuring up. The righteousness of Jesus is about emptying self, about embracing emptiness and suffering to bring fullness and rest to someone else, about offering everything that He has to bless the unworthy with love. How can we not wonder to realize that the very things which God imposed upon us as the penalties for our failure to obey are the same things that He willingly took upon Himself to demonstrate His perfect love? Are we hearing what God is saying in this?

When God made us in His image, He made us to bear the weight of His glorious, self-giving goodness. Jesus is the “image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1:15) When we fell short of God’s likeness, He moved toward us in love. And the first thing He did was to get our picture of God straight. We were supposed to be the picture of God to ourselves, each other, and all creation. We failed. Jesus came to do that. And He did it by carrying a cross. He set the record straight about who God is. God doesn’t “measure up.” He pours Himself out. The character of God as revealed in the work of Christ is the “new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” that we are called and welcomed into by the finished work of Christ. Simply put, we’ve got to stop trying to figure out how little goodness we can get away with and start seeing every relationship, every gift, every situation, every moment as an opportunity and an invitation to be like Him. That’s what God is looking for. It’s not about a standard that we must live up to so much as it is an identity, a calling, and the burden of God’s desire which will either destroy or glorify us. And if by faith we take shelter in the finished work of Christ, we will certainly not be destroyed, but glorified. In the process, we will surely suffer loss of all that it is no loss to lose, all that is not like Him. And that also is a gift.

It is no light thing to be loved by God. It is no easy thing to be wanted by Him. It is a gentle yoke, yes, but it is a scourging gentleness. We have a name and an identity and a destiny to live up to, and all the resources of the Spirit sufficient to that calling. He has canceled all our debts, and He will never release us from His jealous longing for our glory in His goodness. And that is why, even though He has made peace with us, He makes war with our legalistic self-justification. He wants so much more for us, and that is why we’re not going to have it our way.

Encouragement for Pastors

by Andrew Micah, posted in encouragement, exhortation, reflection

God spoke to my heart today through Psalm 127: “Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for He gives to His beloved sleep.” (v. 1-2) He specifically called my attention to pastors.

There are many pastors today who are overworked and under-rested in caring for the flock of God. There is an epidemic of pastoral burnout, exhaustion, and loneliness. But God is speaking to that through these words from Psalm 127. God is inviting those who care for His house, which is God’s church (I Timothy 3:5, I Peter 2:4-5) to rest in His promise: He is building His church! He says: “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18)

When those who labor in God’s house receive this promise, they can receive rest. If God is not working to build His church, then why are we working? How can we hope to accomplish anything if God is not laboring with us? But if God is working to build His church, we can participate with Him, trusting that He will make good use of our efforts. And if God is working to build His church, then when God tells us to rest, we can rest. There’s no reason, God says, to get up early and go to bed late on behalf of Him and His work. He is working, and you don’t have to overwork yourself. Whatever mindset we bring to ministry that doesn’t build on confidence in God’s work and doesn’t accept God’s provision of rest is not from God. Sometimes we need to repent of our unbelief and go to bed! “Faith without works is dead,” and sometimes you need to put your faith into action by getting a good night’s sleep, and by creating rhythms of rest and patterns of self-care.

God didn’t make a mistake when He ordered our lives so that we have to budget time and energy to take care of our own needs in order to be rested and healthy and clean and fed and cared for. He wants us to understand that we are important to Him too! Live for others, but accept God’s guidance towards rest. What if we believed God, and saw our work more as a gift from Him than a gift to Him? He blesses us by inviting us to share in the sacrificial work that He is doing. If you’re struggling to labor faithfully in ministry today, God loves your sacrificial heart! He also wants you to receive the rest He has provided for you. Ask Him today. “Father, help me to see the rest that You have provided for me.”

God bless and strengthen you in serving His people!

-Andy

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (r) ), copyright (c) 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Remembering Cody Winton

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.

Saving is losing

by Andrew Micah, posted in exhortation, philosophy, theology, Uncategorized

Every life is going to come into judgment. None of us can escape the inevitable outcome that we must give account to God for our lives (Hebrews 4:13). The worst thing we can do in response to this knowledge is to never attempt to do anything substantial with our lives for fear of failing. There are gifts that we were given when God created us and gifts that come to us as a result both of God’s common grace and His saving grace. We can do one of two things with these talents. We can put them to use and try things and take risks for God’s glory, or we can play it as safe as possible to ensure that we never run the risk of disappointing God with our failures–as if God was not for us! There is actually a greater long-run risk in not stepping out and attempting to do risky and meaningful things for Jesus. It’s the same risk that C. S. Lewis talks about when he says in The Four Loves:

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

The things we do to keep ourselves from getting hurt and disappointed ultimately killing us. Self-protection becomes self-destruction. Playing it safe turns out to be the most dangerous thing you can do. Lewis goes on:

“I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason. ‘I knew thee that thou wert a hard man.’ Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.”

Better to take the wildest and most irresponsible risks for a sincere motive without wisdom than to be the smartest self-serving self-preserver ever. Better to blow yourself away in some presumptious and reckless enterprise for the sake of love than to live a life shrunk down to the concern of perpetuating your own comfortable existence. It’s that cautious, careful smart self-seeking that leads to every kind of spiritual and moral poverty. As it says in Proverbs, “One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want.” (11:24, ESV) Save your life, lose it. Lose your life sincerely, however unwisely, in the name of Jesus, and you will find it.

~Andrew

From The Rare Jewel by Burroughs: Enjoying earthly blessings as children of God

by Andrew Micah, posted in culture, encouragement, theology, Uncategorized

I mentioned on the blog on Saturday that I read a book last week called The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by the Puritan pastor Jeremiah Burroughs. I want to quote a passage from that book which really struck me in how it encourages us to interpret our experience of temporal blessings on this earth in terms of the realities of eternal life and eternal death. This is from chapter 3:

“A godly man may very well be content, though he has only a little, for what he does have he has by right of Jesus Christ, by the purchase of Jesus Christ. He has a right to it, a different kind of right to that which a wicked man can have to what he has. Wicked men have certain outward things; I do not say they are usurpers of what they have; they have a right to it, and that before God, but how? It is a right by mere donation, that is, God by his free bounty gives it to them; but the right that the saints have is a right of purchase: it is paid for, and it is their own, and they may in a holy manner and holy way claim whatever they have need of.”

Unbelievers, he says, can own things in a sense. You can say of someone who doesn’t have Jesus, “this is his wife, this is his house,” etc. But these things aren’t properly his because his relationship with the giver of all good things is fundamentally broken. Whatever state of blessedness an lost person enjoys is doomed to fall away from him permanently one day. But there is something different in the relationship that a child of God has with God’s blessings.

Burroughs continues, “a child of God has not a right merely by donation; what he has is his own, through the purchase of Christ. Every bit of bread you eat, if you are a godly man or woman, Jesus Christ has bought it for you.

You go to market and buy your meat and drink with your money, but know that before you buy it, or pay money, Christ has bought it at the hand of God the Father with his blood. You have it at the hands of men for money, but Christ has bought it at the hand of his Father by his blood. Certainly it is a great deal better and sweeter now, though it is but a little.“What a thought, that the blessings we experience in this life are actually something which are ours by right in Jesus Christ! Here’s an idea that is rarely conveyed by modern preachers. Burroughs can say this because he understands two very important theological truths: one, that God is the author and giver of every good thing, and two, that those of us who are in Christ have a rightful claim on God’s blessing.

For some folks this sounds too proud of a way to talk about the blessing of God. They would say that everything God gives them is an unmerited gift of grace and not a response to any rightful claim of theirs. This would be true if we were all left to our own works, our own resumes, and our own reputation in our relationship to God. In and of ourselves, the only thing we have any right to claim for ourselves from God is the punishment that our sin deserves, which Paul calls “the wages of sin” in Romans 3:23.

So when Paul goes on in the early part of Romans chapter 4 to say that “to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation,” he is making a point about what attitude we should have toward God’s blessings. In this world, a person who does work under a contract can lay claim to his wages as one who has a right to them. The employer can’t act as though he’s doing anything generous or magnanimous by paying up; he’s just paying what he owes the worker. What Paul is saying is that the salvation that God offers us in Jesus doesn’t operate on these terms, because we are all already sinners who fall short of God’s glory. We haven’t earned our salvation. How, then, does it end up that we have any rightful claim upon God’s blessings?

It’s because of what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21 when he lays out for us the great legal exchange that has taken place between us and Jesus on the cross in these terms: “For our sake [God] made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” Jesus didn’t just become sin for us on the cross; we became His righteousness before God.

We know that Jesus lived a perfect life. He “knew no sin.” Because of Jesus’ perfect life, He has a claim on God’s blessings by way of right. Jesus deserves God’s blessing. But He willingly abandoned that condition on the cross so that we could have it, so that He could be punished in our place, and so that we, in His place, could claim God’s blessings as though we had all lived perfect lives. When we say that we are saved by grace, not works, lest any man should boast, what we mean is that we are saved by Jesus’ good works which are put to our account by God’s free grace instead of being saved by our works. We didn’t do anything to earn the rights of access to God and His blessings that we have, but they are absolutely ours, now and forever, by faith in Jesus. If salvation was just God being good to us in spite of no good we’ve done, there would be no firmness to our present and eternal hope.

And while we do not experience in this life the perfection of blessing which Jesus earned for us in His perfect life and gave to us on the cross, we do experience a kind of firstfruits of our eternal inheritance in Jesus. Even if we have less than the people around us who are not in Christ, we can actually get our hopes up and really get into and enjoy God’s blessings, because we know that for us, while earthly blessings may come and go, whatever we do have is (as Burroughs goes on to say) “an earnest penny for all the glory that is reserved” for us. That is to say, it’s a down payment on our eternal inheritance.

What a better way to look at music and marriage and good food and all the things we have to enjoy on earth than to a. try to find the ultimate fulfillment of our hopes in them or b. deny ourselves or despise what God has given us in this life because we are concerned with “heavenly” things! There is a “foretaste of glory divine” in earthly blessings, and we can consider them ours by right through the rights that grace has given us.

How does all of this help us in contentment? Should knowing that God’s blessings are ours by right in Jesus make us more demanding of immediate blessing? I would think not. If we can see our eternal inheritance not set up against but instead through the smallest of earthly blessings, how can we not be content, even though our earthly blessings may be small, as God has through them conveyed a sight, however dim, of what we will enjoy for eternity? (I want to explore these thoughts further both in comparison and contrast to so-called “prosperity Gospel” teachings, but that will have to wait for another time.)

Burroughs concludes:

“Just as every affliction that the wicked have here is but the beginning of sorrows, and forerunner of those eternal sorrows that they are likely to have hereafter in Hell, so every comfort you have is a forerunner of those eternal mercies you shall have with God in Heaven. Not only are the consolations of God’s Spirit the forerunners of those eternal comforts you shall have in Heaven, but when you sit at your table, and rejoice with your wife and children and friends, you may look upon every one of those but as a forerunner, yea the very earnest penny of eternal life to you. Now if this is so, it is no marvel that a Christian is contented, but this is a mystery to the wicked. I have what I have from the love of God, and I have it sanctified to me by God, and I have it free of cost from God by the purchase of the blood of Jesus Christ, and I have it as a forerunner of those eternal mercies that are reserved for me; and in this my soul rejoices. There is a secret dew of God’s goodness and blessing upon him in his estate that others have not.”

~Andrew

Notice: Scripture quotations, unless otherwise stated, are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. May not copy or download more than 500 consecutive verses of the ESV Bible or more than one half of any book of the ESV Bible.

Songs of His Pursuit: This Man

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

Puddleglum’s Wager

by Andrew Micah, posted in fantasy literature, imagination, philosophy, Uncategorized

I made a reference in my last post to someone named Puddleglum. I’m having a hard time falling asleep at the moment and looking for a good use of my time, so I suppose I’ll put to page some thoughts concerning Puddleglum and his statement of faith upon which I have been ruminating for some time.

First of all, who is Puddleglum? For those who don’t know, he is one of the main characters in C. S. Lewis’s fantasy novel The Silver Chair, which was the fourth to be published of the seven Chronicles of Narnia (although, according to the chronology of Lewis’ Narnia fantasy, it is the sixth book to take place). Puddleglum is a Narnian Marsh-wiggle, which is to say that he is a lanky marsh-dwelling humanoid with an overall greenish complexion and webbed feet and hands. Puddleglum, like all Marsh-wiggles, constantly gives voice to a very gloomy and pessimistic outlook on life, as though he were expecting the worst possible outcome in any given situation. In spite of this, in the course of events he paradoxically reveals himself to be the one person most to be relied upon for holding on to hope when hope is hardest to get hold of.

(spoiler alert! the following includes a revelation of some of the most significant plot points and dialogue from The Silver Chair.)

When we come to chapter 12 of The Silver Chair, our friend Puddleglum has, along with two children from our world (named Eustace and Jill), been for some time engaged in a difficult and troubled expedition in search of Rilian, the lost prince of Narnia. At long last, Puddleglum, Eustace, and Jill have succeeded in discovering the lost prince, who is held captive in the underground kingdom of an evil enchantress styled the Lady of the Green Kirtle, but more properly known as Queen Jadis. No sooner have they set Prince Rilian free from the enchantments which have been used to make him a captive and a slave than they are confronted by Jadis, who attempts by her powerful spell to make them all slaves together. Her spell is so powerful that she is able to lull the Prince and the two children from our world into forgetting that there is any real world other than her bleak underground kingdom of evil. In this moment of crisis, it is Puddleglum who rises to the occasion. He puts out the Witch’s enchanted fire with his bare foot (giving off a very disenchanting smell) and proceeds to give her defiance with this speech:

“‘One word, Ma’am,’ he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. ‘One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you’ve said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies making up a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if here isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court a once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.'”

I have found in these words something very helpful to stiffen the backbone of my faith in times of trial (which is, no doubt, what their author intended). Puddleglum’s argument is simple. If God and His world isn’t what really is, life without Him is miserable and meaningless by comparison. It’s odd enough that we’d have longings for something that never was or is or will be, but even that aside, if there is no God, no meaning, no reality, then what have we lost by pretending that there is? I’ll wager you, says Puddleglum. If you’re right and I’m wrong, I still haven’t lost anything by pretending; and if indeed you are right, to give up my pretending would be to give up the only thing that makes my life worth living.

This is, I think, a much better wager than Pascal’s. (see Pascal’s Wager at wikipedia.org) Whereas Pascal’s wager is an entirely self-centered bet, Puddleglum comes at us from a very different direction. He says, in effect, “I have tasted and seen that the Lord is good. What is it to me if you say that the Lord does not exist? I would rather go on believing Him and living as one of His, because without Him, life is so miserable and empty that there’s no point to it at all. Just look how lame your version of ‘truth’ is,” Puddleglum says. “It’s so useless that I might as well not believe it, because even if it’s true, believing it won’t better my life at all.”

He can say all this, of course, because deep down in his heart, Puddleglum knows not only that Aslan and Narnia are real, but also that Aslan and Narnia are the only thing that matters. He takes the power (and ultimately his friends) out of his enemy’s hands by showing that, even if the Witch isn’t lying, they have nothing to gain and everything to lose by giving in; and if she is indeed telling the truth, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by carrying on as though she is lying. At which point the Witch shows her true colors and turns into the serpent she is. There’s not a lot you can do to someone who says, at heart,

“Whom have I in heaven but you?
    And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
    but God is the strength[b] of my heart and my portion forever.” (Psalm 73:25-26)

Those who follow Jesus are constantly being pressured by the world around us to compromise our obedience to Him. Why do we trouble our souls for a fantasy? And while we know that Jesus is so much better than a fantasy, I think sometimes it would do us good to challenge the Enemy’s false version of truth not just on its falsehood, but its uselessness, because Jesus is so much that much better than what they want us to give Him up for that it would hardly matter if He wasn’t real at all. Of course, He is. It just wouldn’t matter if He wasn’t–not enough to make us give Him up. The Lord is our portion. He’s all we have in Heaven and all we have in Earth, and all we really want for all that. As William Cowper wrote:

“But O! Thou bounteous giver of all good,
Thou art of all Thy gifts Thyself the crown;
Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are poor
And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.”

The substance of Christian devotion is to be able to say that sort of thing with an honest heart. If we can, nothing is going to pull us away from Jesus. If we can’t, something invariably will.

So hurrah for good old Puddleglum! And may God give us the strength to persevere in love like his, which is better than mere faith (I Corinthians 13:13).

Songs of His Pursuit, introduction

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