Anna

by John Fischer

We have a little twelve-pound Chihuahua that was my wife’s Christmas present a year ago. I grimaced when I found out, a few days before Christmas, that this was what she really wanted. I was of the persuasion that real dogs are supposed to be big, but I now have to admit, this little addition to our family has brought us much joy and has become a source of boundless entertainment. Not hurting for personality, he prances about with an air of respectability that makes you not want to embarrass him by laughing in his face until you remember he is a dog and probably won’t take it personally. He has a little wrinkled brow that provides a serious addition to the humor of his antics. We called him Blitzen because we heard he was a reindeer-head Chihuahua and he came to us at Christmastime, but Reepicheep, the serious little mouse in the Chronicles of Narnia would also suit his character well.

Lately, Blitzen has taken to exhibiting a strange behavior that has him refusing to come in the front door, as if some invisible force is preventing him from entering the house. It works the same way going out. He will stop short of the door and no amount of coaxing will get him across the threshold. We have to pick him up and carry him.

It’s both comical and pathetic to watch him sitting there whining and shaking with desire to cross, but completely unable to overcome whatever unseen barrier it is that he imagines. You can get down on your hands and knees as little as two feet away, and beg him to come to you, but he won’t. Perhaps some bad experience — whether getting caught in the door or slipping on the floor just inside — has become frozen in his memory, but he cannot shake it.

I am convinced God has given us pets to see the silly things we do, and in this case, I can’t help but see my own fears when he does this. What are those thresholds in my life that I can’t cross because of some imaginary fear or bad experience from the past that haunts me? More often than not, our fears are just like this — invisible barriers to faith that keep us from moving on in our lives. Satan is a real force, and he can set difficult things in our paths, but I rather think that most of the time he locks us up in the smoke and mirrors of our imaginations.

If Blitzen would just take one step out, he would find there is nothing to fear, and not only that, there are strong, loving hands waiting for him on the other side. In such situations, our moving ahead in faith (and finding the same results, I might add) isn’t any more complicated than that.

I’m on an island at a busy intersection
I can’t go forward. I can’t turn back
Can’t see the future
It’s getting away from me
I just watch the tail lights glowing

One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing

Lyrics by Bono from the album U2//How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb

by John Fischer

There’s one thing that, more than anything, will cure the tendency we all have to appear like we have it all together when we don’t, and that would be a close relationship. You just can’t fake it with a real friend.

I wish we didn’t have to do this to ourselves. We just don’t seem to be able to let go of this need to look like we are better than we are. We walk on water. We have perfect children. God and us are just like this… Humbug.

Here’s what we all know, but rarely take advantage of: You can fool some people, but you can’t fool everybody; and the ones you can’t fool are your best friends. (I suppose you could turn that around and say if you are successfully fooling everybody, you probably don’t have any close relationships, and if that’s the case, you might want to do something about that.)

In a staff meeting recently, Kay Warren (her husband is that guy who authored The Purpose Driven Life) shared that when she was suffering through the long night of her cancer, her closest friends were the ones that she could tell, “I don’t get it. I don’t get God’s system — whatever He’s supposedly teaching me here. I don’t get why I have to learn it this way.” And she remembers now that all they could say at the time was, “I don’t get it either, but God is good.”

That’s a pretty good response, actually. Job could have used a friend like this instead of the ones he had who were constantly trying out their latest theological theory on his situation while he had to live through the real suffering. Sometimes all you can say is: “Yeah, life is hard but God is good.” Or as my kids would say it: “Life sucks but God doesn’t.”

But going back to our antidote… we don’t even get this far if we are not honest. If we’re not honest, we’re not going to get any real help, and we’re not going to have any real friends. Canadian folksinger Bruce Cockburn has a line in one of his songs about kicking at the darkness. I believe this is what a good friend does — sits up with you in your misery and kicks at your darkness. It may not help much, but it’s flesh and blood communion. God does touch us in invisible ways, but he uses people, too, and no one’s going to be able to do this for us if we don’t let anyone close enough to know what we are really going through.

So let’s stop boring each other with our supposedly perfect lives, and get down to the godly business of having and being friends who really care.