Life never leaves us alone, not for a minute. We think we have it all under control, we remember the lessons we learned in Classroom Management and Interventions for Severe Behavior Problems–a class in which we got an A–which was designed to teach us to never let a problem escalate, to always stay in control of the self. Yet still, despite how much we know and remember, we have a tendency to fail.

And after failure, we sit on a log on an ugly beach and start feeling like another piece of the garbage lying upon the beach–something the wind and waves haven’t carried off, something the cliff swallows nesting on hillside above will not be using for their nests. Yet, we hope. Annie Dillard wrote that we receive grace like a man trying to fill a cup in a waterfall.

Indeed.*

I’m like the beach upon

which I sit

Staring, aghast. Sand mottled with

Debris, detritus, and grit

Is unpleasant to behold, unsightly,

Dirty and cold.

My eyes–as anyone’s–are starved for

beauty here; grace.

For there is only ruin here

In this place.

I am an ugly, untended

Beach strewn

With sticks and rope and bottles;

Garbage left over from June.

I am littered with butts, straws,

Cans and mold.

My only hope is the waves small,

Beating a hasty retreat–

No more anxious to stay on the beach

Than tiny feet.

I am an ugly Lake Erie

Beach, not a white

Sand paradise whose water

Clear and bright

Lingers close to shore–or

So I’m told.

Dirty beach that I am I call out:

“Break, O Wave, upon this place.

“Break upon this beach, separate me

“From litter, dirty me with grace.”

*Sorry for the formatting. There are three stanzas. I hope you can figure out where they are, I couldn’t get the extra space to stay.

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I didn’t watch the Casey Anthony trial. I refuse to allow tragedy to be entertainment for me. Whenever I would tell that to people who were watching they would tell me it isn’t entertainment but they could never actually tell me what it was if it wasn’t entertainment.

Finally this past week, I figured it was going to end.  I was actually happy. I figured I’d be able to stop hearing about it.  Then came the acquittal.

Then came the facebook status updates blowing up…

Some languished at the lack of justice for the poor murdered little girl.

Some cried out about the injustice in the world.

Some wondered openly if there was such a thing as justice.

Some just went too far.

“Someday the jury will have to answer for what they did.”

“ I hope that God decides to take a loved one from the jury.”

“Someday that evil woman will get what she deserves. The coals of Hell will be heated for her forever!!!”

And they went on.  Many of my Christian friends were excitedly pointing to the day that this woman would end up in hell.

This post is not about her guilt or if there is a Hell.
This post is about Christians that miss the point of the gospel. This post is about God being in the redemption business.

Moses, David, Paul are all guilty of murder. They all killed people. It would be hard to argue that Paul didn’t  kill babies younger than this little girl in Florida.  They never got the justice “they had coming to them.”

God redeemed them. I have to say I didn’t see a lot of posts by Christians saying they hoped that would happen for this woman.

You see embedded in those posts was honest anger. I get that. But I also think there was a little bit of “I’m better than HER, because I would never do THAT!!!”

Yet, James says, if you break one part of the law you break it all.

So we’re all guilty and God is in the business of offering us all redemption, even child killers.  My desire for justice rails against that. My desire to love my own skin is thankful for it.

I don’t know if this woman is guilty or not. I imagine she probably is and yet the evidence wasn’t enough.

I know that wherever she is, and whatever she’s done Jesus died and rose again so she could have eternal life and be freed from the guilt of her actions. Jesus paid it all. All to him we all owe.

In the past day or so, I’ve had a friend who sent me a couple of links to articles on Cracked.com (Warning: NSFW language) with some interesting observations.  His first was this one, based on this Cracked article:

I was reading an article about how good news no one talks about is out there. One of those was about the gulf’s recovery from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It made this point:

“What we will talk about is how no one expected fish, crab and shrimp catches to be average compared to past years or that oil chomping microbes would go to town feeding on our disaster. And more importantly, the Loop Current that was on track to carry the oil to the Florida Keys just broke. As in, it broke off into a big swirly hilariously named Franklin Eddy, which unexpectedly contained the oil in a tidy circle of cool. We’d like to think of Franklin as a bongo-playing beat poet who doesn’t have to play by your current rules, maaan.

Had it not been for Franklin, the oil would have hit the Keys and made its way up the East Coast, and there wouldn’t have been a whole lot we could have done to stop it. Thanks to Franklin, which no longer exists, much of the Florida coast was spared from the oil altogether.”

I don’t really have much of a point except to say maybe the hand of God is was in this. Its nice to remember this when life fights dirty.”

I found this profound for a couple of reasons: First off, it is a demonstration of how God is such an awesome engineer (says the professional engineer), who has contingency plans within contingency plans within contingency plans for when we make things go awry. Secondly, it just reminded me how negative I sometimes feel when I listen to too much news – because bad news sells, so we rarely hear good news (or Good News) from the news media.

The second article, 7 “Ancient” Forms of Mysticism That are Recent Inventions, made me laugh even more:

Yoga as we know it today — a set of postures (asanas) combined with breathing techniques — dates back to around the grand old year of 1960. In other words, yoga is as old as Bono.

So all of the Yoga wars that have been fought “for God” by Johnny Mac an others are all just pretty much (as previously noted) bunk.

So, maybe quoting Cracked.com from time to time is a little bit like quoting Cretin poets.