Believing God

You know? John the Baptist was beheaded when Jesus walked the earth. And the fact that this happened is helping me right now, because things have happened that feel like great defeat.

I'm studying David right now, and there's a defeat that he experienced. Beth Moore said something about it to me today, something like wishing, every time you read through David's life, that somehow, this time, he'll run for his life from Bathsheba at the first sight of her, as if you're reading in the present, and you just know he'll make the right decision. But soon, you remember it's not happening; it happened, and it can't be changed.

I find myself saying sorry to the Lord in deep sincerity about some of those things that have happened, things in the world that miss his mark. That's what they must have felt when John the Baptist was beheaded, like God forgot about being able to save people.

I'll just say I'm feeling it a little bit now: the mother of a six-year-old succumbing to cancer on Tuesday, a nice old man stroked out and unable to speak with me, only pleading for me to understand, somehow, what he can't say, Law and Order shamelessly announcing the most horrible things anyone could ever imagine as to entertain.

Yet He lives, doesn't He? We know He died, and they must have all felt the weight of that as a gruesome mistake in the kingdom - they must have thought that, after spending all that time with Him, He wasn't the One.

But Jesus didn't stay dead. And He is making all things new. And it tears up my heart. It's the only thing that helps us lift up our heads again. We ought to, you know. We ought to lift up our heads, because it's the action that comes out of believing that Jesus is alive.