A woman at a retreat in New Jersey was at a very happy time in her life: her children were little and adorable, her husband loved her, they had money enough, and health. So what was her problem? Well, when things are so good, and when you see others around you, no more or less deserving, who suffer, then you become fearful “waiting for the other shoe to drop,” as she put it.

I understand that fear. Do I trust God’s gifts, or do I wonder if they are a set-up for a fall? We are always reminded that God is not a “tame” Lion. Is it quite safe, then, to be happy when something good comes our way?

Today I am blissful about a wonderful thing God has brought into my life. Do I dare give myself over to its full enjoyment, or will I be put to shame, even as I am in the midst of praising God for it?

The Proverb says “Guard your heart” (4:23) — but, surely, not against God! Surely it means against temptations of various kinds. It cannot be that God’s gifts are Trojan horses, not “the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:16). Everything that your eyes can recognize as a “good gift” (v.16) is a good gift, so “do not be deceived” (v.16) to think otherwise. Enjoy with abandon your little children, your house, and the spouse the Lord has given you. And if the Lord sees fit to send a time of suffering by and by, there will be grace aplenty for that too.

“I swear by Apollo…and I take to witness all the gods…to keep according to my ability and my judgment the following Oath.”

All I had ever heard of the Hippocratic Oath was the popular shorthand: “Do no harm.” So it was interesting to learn of its religious covenantal structure, similar to the covenant God enacted with ancient Israel, which in turn resembles ancient Near Eastern Suzerainty treaties. “The original [Hippocratic] oath is redolent of a covenant, a solemn and binding treaty” (Dr. David Graham, in “Journal of the American Medical Association,” 12/13/00).

Covenants are legal documents stipulating terms of relationship. The Great King tells his vassal kings how he is to be worshipped. The conditions are spelled out; the ceremony is performed before witnesses; blessings and curses are finally attached to the keeping or breaking of the covenant. The Hippocratic Oath ends with a self-curse for covenant violation: “If I fulfill this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art….If I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite of all this be my lot.”

The history of the Old Testament is, of course, the history of Israel’s serial covenant unfaithfulness. But there is one strange twist to the story. In Genesis 15, God has Abram set up a covenant ceremony in the traditional way — animals cut up and placed side by side — and we are expecting Abram to walk between the pieces, visually signifying: So be it done to me as to these animals if I break my covenant to you.

Then the most unthinkable thing happens: The King of Kings and Lord of Lords steps up and walks the line himself, in the form of a smoking torch. The God of Abram says, in effect: So be it done to me as to these animals if I ever break my covenant of love to you and your descendants.

Going back to the clutch again after forty years is almost, but not quite, “like riding a bicycle.” I stalled out a couple times with my kids in the car and they are embarrassed to the point of not asking for rides anymore. (Perfect)

It occurs to me that instruction manuals and human teachers have their limitations. Words can only go so far in explaining how to drive, knead bread, play piano, or perfect a triple axel. There is much to learning that is by feel and experience. You can tell me I have to release the clutch slowly and depress the accelerator to move from a parked position into first gear, and that is helpful. But it took a week of being the proud owner of a Jetta to find that spot where it happens seamlessly and the car doesn’t cough.

This has applications in the non-automotive world. The Bible is not like a Middle Ages book of casuistry that tries to cover every imaginable ethical situation. Scripture is sufficient for life, but as a matter of fact it doesn’t cover everything in detail — like internet property rights. For many things you need the feel that comes from lots of experience. The Bible calls that wisdom and exhorts us to seek it as “silver” and “hidden treasure” (Proverbs 2:4).

Preacher Thomas De Witt Talmage tells that one day in the early 1630s a woman, whose name is forgotten, handed a tract to a bad man by the name of Richard Baxter. He read it and got saved.

Puritan Richard Baxter wrote a book entitled “The Call to the Unconverted,” which was read by many, including a person named Philip Doddridge. Hymn-writer Doddridge then wrote “The Rise and Progress of Religion,” which won multitudes for the kingdom, among them the slave emancipator William Wilberforce.

Wilberforce penned “A Practical View of Christianity,” which ambushed Leigh Richmond into God’s service. Richmond produced a tract entitled “The Diaryman’s Daughter,” four million copies of which were disseminated in fifty languages before 1848.

It all reminds me of the little boy whose mother made him take a lunch with him the day he went into the countryside to hear an itinerant preacher. The preacher preached on and on, and the people who were gathered on the grassy hill were hungry. “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?” is the question Andrew asked, and that we keep asking to this day — when we should really know by now that it’s the willingness, and not the size of the gift that counts with God.

As I was walking out of King’s College at the Empire State Building the other day, Professor Bill Edgar’s wife said to me, “You should do a blog about the weather.”

“The weather,” that was an interesting way to put it. I knew she had in mind the earthquakes that had just ripped China, the cyclone that socked Myanmar, and the tornados that tore up western United States. Her choice of language brought me back to “The Wizard of Oz,” when four pilgrims to the Emerald City nearly succumbed to the “weather” of the poppies’ narcotic fumes, and Glinda sent a summer snow to reverse the curse. “Unusual weather we’re having, ain’t it,” said the Lion, in splendid understatement, as the wayfarers revived.

If you have an imagination, you can add to that inclement strangeness the recent economic weather, with yet more foreclosures and other cosmic ripples in the forecast. Stretch the concept a bit more by including rumors of worldwide “famines,” “nations rising up against nations,” throw in the 60^th birthday of Israel, and you have the “unusual weather” Jesus described in Matthew 24, precursor of the storm to end all storms.

Christians are often ridiculed, even by other Christians, for seeing portents of the eschatological “birth pains.” But I’m not the one who said, “From the fig tree learn its lesson…when you see all these things, you know that he is near, at the very gates” (Matthew 24:33). Jesus himself commands his people to monitor the situation: “Keep watch” (v.42), “be ready” (v.44).

Anyone with blood running through his veins is thinking about suffering right now. In whatever direction you turn on the compass, it’s there. A whole branch of philosophy called Theodicy has evolved to explain the problem of evil. Here are a couple of thoughts to steady wobbly knees, namely my own:

First, whenever I am just about to bail out of Christianity because of the problem of suffering, it is then that I am confronted with a different problem on the other side — the problem of good, and of beauty. In the beginning, the bugbear was that evil didn’t seem to fit my theology of a good God; now, in the new camp, it is all the goodness and loveliness I see that are a philosophical fly in the ointment.

Next, I concede that there is a lot about justice and righteousness that I don’t understand. I can’t even make up my mind whether it’s okay to take my dog to a park that has a “No dogs” sign that is universally ignored. And even from nation to nation we can’t agree on things like the just way to deal with criminals. Life in prison? Electric chair?

Also, I have noticed that I am not inclined to want God when I am doing quite well without him. If we presume that we are made for relationship and eternal bliss with him, I am advantaged if he uses the megaphone of affliction to get my attention.

C.S.Lewis challenges the oft heard wail about the “unimaginable sum of human misery.” He says “there is no such thing, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there can be in the universe.”

I was leafing through the February 18, 2008 Newsweek at the optometrist’s office and found this article: “How to Train a Husband.” Subtitle: “Want an obedient spouse? A new book says you should coach them like animals.”

Having not much else to do while I was waiting for my son, I decided to play with this a while, and switch around all the gender words as I read, starting with the title:

“How to Train a Wife: Want an obedient spouse? A new book says you should coach them like animals.” (Wow! Much more arresting.)

Paragraph one: “…Sutherland, a journalist who spent a year at an animal-trainer school and decided to apply the trainers’ techniques to [his wife’s] annoying habits.”

The article cites a current BBC reality show called “Bring Your Husband to Heel,” in which a dog trainer teaches women how to make their husbands sit and stay. I wonder how that would play if we snapped the leash (or “lead”) on the wife rather than the hubby.

I don’t know what goes on in the inner sanctum of publishing, but I’ll bet my revised version of this Newsweek article — even presented as tongue-in-cheek — would be dead in the water if I pitched it to an Editor. I know that partly from hanging around the greeting card section of CVS, where you will find “stupid husband” cards but no “stupid wife” cards. And I know it partly from just being alive in a century and a country where there are carefully enforced, unstated double-standard gender-bashing rules.

After the death of his beloved wife “H.,” C.S. Lewis began to notice a disturbing phenomenon with respect to his memory of her:

…I am thinking about her nearly always. Thinking of the H. facts — real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them. Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt. I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan’t). But won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me. ( A Grief Observed)

I have noticed the same phenomenon with respect to my thoughts of God. When I drift away from close daily intimacy with him in his Word, I begin, ever so subtly, to reconstruct him in my own image. This process begins to happen some time before I realize it, of course, when I am still convinced that I know exactly who God is. It’s only when I come back to the Bible that I realize how dangerously close I had come to constructing an idol — a god made to look and sound like the desires and opinions of Andree Seu.

Lewis continues like this: “The most precious gift that marriage [let me substitute “adoption in Christ”] gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant — in a word, real.”

I told my son about a problem I was having with his younger brother, and he said, “Why don’t you give him a compliment sandwich.” My most laconic offspring then left me alone to grapple inductively with the concept, and here is what I came up with:

The “compliment sandwich” is what the Apostle Paul served up when he also was having trouble with the brothers. On either side of the ham of rebuke or salami of exhortation, he would present the bread of encouragement, the better to make the meal more palatable. Here was Paul’s style:

• You guys are terrific! I’m always boasting to the other churches about you! I have such confidence in you!
• Here are ten things you need to change immediately.
• I can’t wait to see you! I have such confidence in you! I love you!

Consider his first letter to the Corinthian church:

• I keep thanking God for you; your speech and knowledge have never been better! (1:4,5)
• You’re fractious and partisan and divisive (1:10-17). You’re carnal and jealous and immature (chapter 3). You’re arrogant and lacking in meekness (chapter 4). You put up with sexual immorality (chapter 5). You’re lawsuit-happy (chapter 6). Cut it out!
• I can’t wait to see you! I have such confidence in you! I love you! (chapter 16).

Everybody needs to be told when he’s doing something right — even if it’s just a little something, and if on balance it’s pretty messed up.

I can gauge my spiritual life by the degree to which I poeticize the Bible. An instance of that came to light today. I learned that someone I had deeply offended had refrained from telling me my offense until he could deal with it sufficiently in his own heart to avoid sending me a hurtful letter.

I was immediately reminded of Paul’s identical motive in his words to the Corinthians:

I wanted to visit you on my way to Macedonia….Was I vacillating when I wanted to do this? Do I make my plans according to the flesh, ready to say ‘Yes, yes’ and ‘No, no’ at the same time….But I call God to witness against me — it was to spare you that I refrained from coming again to Corinth….For I made up my mind not to make another painful visit to you. (2 Corinthians 1:16,17,23; 2:1)

Like Paul, my friend chose to bless me when his baser self wanted to hurt me back. In order to pull off that soul transaction, he had to suck up the pain himself, take on my debt himself rather than handing me the bill.

All of which made me take a second look at something Paul said later in the same letter:

[We are] always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also my be manifested in our mortal flesh. (4:10,11)

Nothing poetical or romantic about that.