With Him Or Without Him

There is a movie called Knight and Day released in 2010 and starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. It’s a fun movie, silly and more escapist than substantive but in the midst of a lot of outlandishly implausible action scenes and lots of loud yelling (yelling with great chemistry mind you) between the two leads, is a scene that is nicely quiet relative to the rest of the movie.

In the scene, the character played by Cameron Diaz wants to run and leave Cruises character behind. He’s just shot one of her would be suitors in the leg after which he spends a solid 5 minutes escaping from the authorities and she basically thinks he’s crazy despite the fact that everything he’s told her to that point has been proven true. And it is some crazy stuff to be fair. Spies, murder, black ops, rogue US agents, kidnapping, you get the idea.

So they escape from the cops and they turn into a parking garage and drive to the top, and she’s had enough. His character who has been benevolently pleasant and calm throughout the first half of the movie has also had enough and he flat out tells her that her chances of surviving on her own are so low as to not be realistically considered. Using his hand he lifts it up above his head and says, with him survival chances are high, without him, and here he again uses his hand lowering it several feet, survival chances are garbage. He does this a few times to somewhat comedic effect. With him? – raises hand high – without him? Lowers hand significantly.

Some members of my family recently re-located to another state. The move was brought on entirely in obedience to the leading of the Holy Spirit, but there have been some difficulties since they arrived there about a month ago. Moving is expensive, living is expensive; going somewhere with no support network is hard even with lots of money, getting on your feet in a new land is tough. Difficulty typically goes hand in hand with change, and even good change can be fraught with second guessing, anxiety, and hard work.

Consider the Israelites leaving Egypt. Compared to slavery, even wandering the desert really doesn’t seem so bad. And yet, that change was so difficult that only 2 male members of the entire party who first left Egypt got to cross the Jordan. The bible is replete with other examples of that nature. Change is difficult.

So in praying for these family members, I was hoping to have some words of wisdom for them, some encouragement, anything to be able to help, and allowing God to work through me, alleviate some of the pressure and hardship they were going through. God never disappoints. I was hoping for some profound 10 minute treatise on the Glory of serving Him, and the bounty that waited in the new land, and all of the blessings He couldn’t wait to pour out on them. Instead, and I don’t remember the entire conversation, because it was short, but instead it was maybe two minutes, and in it were only two salient points He wanted me to convey.

The first…Our worst day with God/Jesus/Holy Spirit is better than our very best day without Him. That means in the entirety of our lives if we have a day where we lose someone we love, have our house repossessed, and find out we have stage 4 cancer ( I don’t know about you, but that would absolutely qualify as my worst day ever) that is still better than a day without him in which we win the lottery, marry our true love and find out our sick grandma in the hospital is all better.

You see, God is Tom Cruise in that movie. And no I am not in any way comparing an actor to the creator of the universe, merely illustrating a point. You see things were crazy for Cameron Diaz with Tom Cruises character, but would’ve been so much worse without him. Yes there were gun battles, and car chases, and wounded ex boyfriends, but she was SAFE. He kept her safe, He shielded her from all of the bad and was simply telling her that regardless of how crazy things seemed, she was safer with him than without him. That, my friends, is the very essence of Christ in our lives. That one point he made, that life is infinitely better with him than without him no matter what it looks like around us…well it’s taken a few days to sink in, and in reality probably has not finished sinking in just yet. I wanted to share something profound with someone I love, and care about and he provided exactly that, just not in the way I thought.

The second point He wanted to make…God never leads us to failure. Yes we can exercise our free will and make decisions and choices that have a negative impact on our lives and we can absolutely fail on our own. But listening for His voice and following where He leads? Because He never fails, we can never fail by walking the path He lays out for us. It was a plain statement with immense power. If we simply obey, we can never fail. That is…intense in its direct simplicity.

Our circumstances can do two things, reveal God and his Glory to us, or be used by the enemy to cloud our judgment, and trick us into believing we’re alone and in danger. The way we look at our lives will always be impacted by our Faith. Faith and Trust or the absence of, will cause us to look at the same situation in radically different ways. When I was a boy…11 or 12 our family was fairly destitute. The arrival of monthly food stamps was like a national holiday in our home. We lived in borrowed lodging reliant on the kindness of others to ensure we wouldn’t be homeless (something we ended up being not too long after) our car, if we had one, was always in a state of near failure. We wore hand me downs from the church poor box. Things were not good.

One day on a walk with my mom, who was a single mother raising 4 children on her own with no help from a patriarch and very little from the government agency designed for exactly that, we were having a conversation. Her mood was not good, and I was trying my best to be dutiful and listen. I am the oldest male in my family and my older sister had fled our situation many years prior, making me the oldest child in the house, and so that brought with it a certain amount of responsibility. On that particular day it was my job to take a walk and listen and do my best to be a sounding board for frustrations that I understood all too well, but had no answers for. I will be 40 in a few weeks so this was close to 3 decades ago, and the particulars of the conversation are now lost on me, but at some point I remarked that yes things may be difficult, but that we should be thankful for what we didn’t have. No one was dead or dying, we were all in good health, we loved each other, we may have been poor but we weren’t living on the street, food wasn’t plentiful in the way some view that word, but we ate every day. We were alive. It was as simple as that. We had Jesus and that was enough.

Over the next few years I lost that sense of belief. It wasn’t one event or even 2 or 3, it was the slow eroding away of my Trust and Faith in what had sustained not just me, but my family for many years. I was like Cameron Diaz’s character. I may not have known what being on my own would do, or doing things my way if you will, but I knew in my mind it seemed less difficult, less crazy, less traumatic than what I was coming out of. If nothing else, if I was going to fail, it would be in absolute freedom.

We know, because he tells us, that God never leaves us. Like Tom in the movie, he’s always watching us, tracking us, keeping us safe even when we don’t see it or acknowledge it. He’s standing next to us, always with His hand out, reminding us, with me – raises hand, without me – lowers hand. With Him or without Him..always a choice and one we make of our own volition.

God is so good because in trying to bless someone else with a little truth and a little encouragement I received both myself.

There are days when I think about the younger version of me. The version that wasn’t afraid of a little hardship because I knew who was in my corner. 20 years of telling my corner guy I didn’t want him backing me up anymore, led to some truly disastrous decisions, but true to His nature, God slid right back into view as soon as I called Him, and asked me again…with me or without me? I think no matter what occurs, I’m going to follow the advice of one of those two Israelites who got to cross the river. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

With Him…always the better choice