It turns out rear view mirrors are important.

Dear Friend,

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about first loves. OK, we've been reading The Revelation in our own local Body, and I'm choosing to focus on a few parts that I know are helpful rather than a lot that doesn't seem helpful.

Side rant: The Book of Revelation probably wouldn't have made the top 66 if it had been written by a different author. Imagine James the Lesser, also known as James the Less, or James the Little, or James the Minor (who we now politely call James the Son of Alphaeus, but come on, the damage was already done) trying to get this published. "Um. We love you, and we really think you might need to get back on your meds. The evidence? Sweetheart. Did you read this assignment before you turned it in?" Or if Matthias had offered it up? "Hey, I appreciate you filling in for Judas Voldemort on short notice, but you really might be overreaching here. Here's some prophecy for you: Die Hard. Great Movie. Universally loved and considered by many as the best Christmas Movie ever. I know. I thought we would have had that one wrapped up, too. But Try Hard? Never gets made. Be a die hard. But nobody wants a Try Hard."

But OK. People wiser than me have told me The Revelation is both true and helpful. So I'll hang.

The Revelation does contain a particular passage to me that seems haunting. Not horsemen, or a beast or a lake of fire. Those things don’t haunt me. Why? Because I’ve read the end of the story, and I know that Jesus has the final word. What, then, is it that haunts me? It’s a passage that starts like this

I see what you’ve done, your hard, hard work, your refusal to quit. I know you can’t stomach evil, that you weed out apostolic pretenders. I know your persistence, your courage in my cause, that you never wear out.

Great work, right? A group of courageous Christ followers committed to truth and marked by endurance. And then comes the conjunction that changes everything.

BUT.

But you’ve walked away from your first love! Why? What’s going on with you, anyway? Do you have any idea how far you’ve fallen?

Don’t let the punch of those words get lost on you. I’ve heard a lot of tepid explanations of what this means. “They lost their passion.” “Their commitment went cold.” “They didn’t remain faithful.” Hold on. Wait. What? Go back and read the description of those folks again. Passion wasn’t the problem. Commitment wasn’t the concern. Faithfulness wasn’t faltering. This was a group that seemed to have none of those problems. No, the only concern was a Lost First Love.

Why is this important for you now? Madly in love. I know. Never getting lost. Oh, Sweetheart. If you only knew. The most dangerous thing anyone on the walk, or The Walk, can be sure of is that they can't get lost. Overconfidence is always the first wrong turn. So walk with me awhile, will you.

You and I know what it’s like to have a first love. Then we grow up. And go on. And whether our first love is a distant stop in the rear view mirror, or a current companion on the journey, things change. We change. Circumstances change. In the words of one of my favorite books, “Time Passes.” And first love, whether the only, or the first in a chain, loses its luster. We use code words like “deeper” or “better”. Perhaps. But one thing is definitely true. It is different. And in this case, first love isn’t something we as Christ Followers move on from at least as far as the One, or the one, we're currently in love with goes. We’re being called to turn back to it. So how in the world do we do that?

I read an article recently about people who get lost, and the mistakes that they make. It turns out that the mistakes are incredibly predictable. And tend to worsen the situation. Why? Because very few hikers can do the most helpful thing well. They can’t turn back and return to place they got lost. Why? Because very few hikers take the minutes and the moments to turn around and look back over their shoulders as they are hiking. When they need to go back, they have no idea what the landmarks look like.Everything looks different from a different perspective.

In the same way, few people take enough snap shots of the country that they’ve left behind. Oh, there are pictures. But always looking forward. Very few times do we turn around, and purposely look at pictures otherwise left for the rear-view mirror. They -- we-- don’t turn and look back. And so they come to a point when they know they’re off course, and they’re also fairly sure they can’t return to a safe place. Maybe you know what that’s like. Maybe the scariest part about realizing you’re lost is realizing it doesn’t just affect you, and you're worried about them. Maybe it's the loss of what you perceived as control. Maybe it's recognizing you were wrong. Or maybe it's feeling like this is going to destroy what others think of you. All of those feelings are valid. And for us, or for others, at least one of those feelings will come to the surface when we recognize that we're lost.

How do we get back? How do we get turned around? How do we get on the right path? Those are big questions without simple solutions. Lost doesn’t happen with a single step. So let’s take a minute and stop. And look back. Think back to the beginning. Turn around. What did first love look like? First love for The Other, or first love for the other? Is the phrase all-consuming at all descriptive? Because, more than passion or commitment or faithfulness, first love involves focus. In the beginning, we see everything though the lens of love. In "first love" we look at everything through the eyes of the other. Or the eyes of the Other. Its roar is deafening. Its reach is defining. Jesus says “The eye is the lamp of the Body. If the eye is full of light, the whole body is full of light.” Let that hit for a minute. Your focus determines your fitness everywhere else. First love is like that. It has the effect of affecting every part of us.

How do we get from first love to lost love? A subtle but persistent change in focus causes us to reconsider our assumptions. Instead of looking at the other, or the Other, for that matter, and allowing them to define us by who they are, we begin to notice what they’re not. Instead of looking, for example, at a person and seeing everything that is good and right and beautiful and true, we see them for what is bad and wrong and ugly and false. Again, this shift doesn’t happen in an instant. We move like two tectonic plates, grinding against one another until the upheaval is mountainous or volcanic. And everyone notices. Except us.

So how do we go back? Paul suggests that the change begins now with action or activity but with a change in the way I think. With intent, and follow through, “we take every thought captive to obey Christ” Changing the way I live is only possible if I change the way I think. I like what Old Uncle Martin Luther has to say (not to be confused with Martin Luther King, who also said and did great things, even though both of them had some real problems. Imagine. Both human.), Any way, Luther, whose greatest contribution to the world was the movement of the Christmas tree indoors, also wrote a few things of merit. One of them comes in his advice for children-- you know, young ones, and also anyone who would see themselves as a child of God. When explaining the commandment of Moses that you’ve perhaps heard before—“Don’t bear false witness” which can definitely benefit from more explanation rather than simply saying "Don’t lie”, he writes

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. What does this mean? We should fear and love God, so that we do not lie about, betray or slander our neighbor, but excuse him/her/them, speak well of her/him/them, and put the best construction on everything that is done by all.

Read that last line a minute. Excuse him. Excuse her. Speak well of her. Speak well of him. Put the best construction on EVERYTHING they do. That’s a radical departure from lost. That means I stop before I speak. Every time. And breathe. And dwell. If I still choose to speak, I choose to speak the best, rather than the worst. First love is focus. Returning to first love, especially if I’m lost, is choosing to focus on the good, right, beautiful and true.

You can look at this as attempt to turn everything into a fairy tale. Or you can see it as an opportunity to find your way out of the forest. And start to reset how we see the other. Or the Other. As someone who was spent a long time being a lost person and a lifetime battling with lost things, know that I'm forever in your corner.

thus spake

me