Brody is a male lion who lives at Turpentine Creek, just outside of Eureka Springs. I was standing a few feet from Brody when one of his caretakers prepared to shove ten pounds of raw meat through head-high feeding hole in Brody’s pen. Anxious for the food, Brody swiped at the big hunk of meat with his huge paw as it started through the hole. He smacked it and it fell out on the wrong side of the pen. The raw meat landed a few inches from him but perfectly out of reach outside the cage. He roared, as it were, exactly like an angry lion.

They say you can hear a lion roar five miles away. I believe it. Brody was loud.

He was so angry and frustrated. He crashed against the steel mesh of his pen and glared wildly at me, roaring all the while as if it were my fault.

Brody’s mouth is huge, his legs are muscular, and he is quick. I told my wife later, if I’m ever in a jungle and a lion runs at me, he won’t kill me. I think I’ll die of fright before he gets to me. God made an awesome, fearful animal when he made the lion.

As he roared in anger and pawed and raged, shaking his huge mane in his fit, it struck me how quickly I and those around me who watched would die if he broke loose. A single swipe of his paw and claws and it would have been over.

But as Brody roared, instead of being slashed by his huge paw, what struck me was a simple thought. Lions are not personal.

As Brody roared, I imagined living in a village and knowing the stories of other villagers or family members who had been attacked or eaten by lions. I remembered watching “The Ghost and the Darkness”, a movie about the Tsavo man-eaters, two lions who killed about 135 workers who were building the railway from Uganda to Mombassa in the late 1890′s.

No one eaten by a lion is eaten because lions are personal. Lions eat meat. Lions kill because lions kill. Lions are not personal.

Like many people, I want there to be meaning in the events that happen around me and to me. Perhaps it’s too much ego, but I tend to expect things happen for a purpose, that there’s a message I should gather from events. And the more significant the event, surely, the more important the message must be.

22 years ago I sat in the aftermath of a knife attack by two men against three children. For 22 years, I’ve searched, I’ve longed to find some message, some purpose, some justification that seems just. And there is none. It does not exist.

And now, after experiencing a lion’s fitful, angry rage a few feet away, I know the only message is that lions are not personal. They kill because lions kill.

Some bad things are simply bad. No matter how much they hurt, they are not personal. They just are. So today I’m walking away from the cage.

When we think wild thoughts about God we need tent pegs to keep our tents from flying off in a storm of confusion. Or maybe like in the Old Testament, we need piles of rocks we can use as reminders when we see them. The Hebrew nation crossed the Jordan river into the promised land and God told each tribe to gather a large stone and pile them together for a place of remembering so they could tell their children. We need stones for remembering.

No one can tell you what your own Theological stones look like. You have to drive down your own tent pegs. You have to discover your own rocks; you must work it out in fear and trembling; you’ve got to find the theological foundations – those stones of remembering – which you can hang onto and which give you the courage and security to think wildly about God and ask fearful questions.

Just a few thoughts … from RickWheat.com

Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three-person’d God

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

John Donne (1572-1631)

We all have moments which sparkle in our experience of life. These incredible events, impossible to forget, overwhelm us with sheer joy.

You pop the question and she says, “Yes!” You’re named Employee of the Year. Your dad says, “I love you,” and you know without doubt he means it. You watch with big-eyed astonishment as your own baby inhales her very first breath. And then you laugh with giddy tears when she lets go with her very first cry. You sit with your children beneath twinkling stars on a cold, clear, dark night, a cold night … but you’re warm. Or, after decades together, your husband looks at you with misty eyes because he loves you more now that ever.

The light that glistens from these events illuminates who we become.

And these good things we celebrate. We cherish them. We retell these stories to our children and to our grandchildren. We thank God for these good and perfect gifts which come down from above from the Father of Light. We’re better because of them.

God himself … will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

But not every remembered event is good. Some things we cannot remember without somber reflection or even melancholy pangs of guilt. It may be a queasy feeling you get when you receive a letter from the IRS and remember you’ve “tweaked” last year’s numbers. It may be the lie you tell your husband about an affair you almost had. It could be words misspoken to one who could have been a great friend, words for which you were too proud to apologize.

Years later we remember these missteps we’ve made along the way. And the twinges of guilt we feel for what we’ve done to ourselves and others … well, we know we’ve earned it.

Then death and the grave were themselves hurled into the lake of fire …

Worlds away, beyond these regrets for our own actions, like on the dark side of the moon forever away from any light, there are things which happen to us that we’ve not asked for and we feel pain we have not earned and cannot comprehend. Losses occur which we wouldn’t choose in our most deranged state of mind.

The miscarriage of the baby you’ll never know … a car wreck that leaves you a widower … watching a child die and not being able to stop it … being raped by an uncle who calls it a special relationship. These things immediately suck life out of us, filling our hearts with black, hot tar, because they push us close to death.

And after them we live in pain.

Time passes and you begin to touch these wounds on their surfaces. You do it with a glib sort of detachment that allows you to momentarily ignore their impact. You shrug your shoulders and sigh, “That’s Life.” Or you say, “You know, it just goes to show that we really have no control.” And if it’s someone else’s experience … “Man, I’ll pray for you.”

And with the passage of enough time, one begins to pretend he’s unchanged or even stronger.

But inside … that hot tar that burns our heart hardens. Life becomes thick. Sparkles of joy disappear. And even years later we cry when we remember.

And regardless of our faith, our hope or even our love, the darkness still hides who we might have been had we not experienced the loss. And so we work hard to protect those places in our hearts that nothing else can touch. Like Jonah we cry, “I am angry even unto death,” for life as we have known it is over.

Then I saw a new Heaven, and a new earth … for the first Heaven and the first earth had disappeared. And the sea was no more.

Nothing which has cursed man shall exist any longer; the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be within the city. His servants shall worship him; they shall see his face …