"My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?"

Of the three major events of Jesus’ life—Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter—only the Crucifixion took place completely out in the open for all the world to see. And when the four writers of the Gospels set forth their accounts of Jesus’ life, they devote one-third of their time to that most excruciating event in history when God the Son hung powerless, nailed in seemingly complete failure, to a Roman cross.

So writes Philip Yancey in his fine book Disappointment With God. The book is subtitled, “Three Questions No One Asks Aloud.”

Actually, the questions are often asked loudly by skeptics; thoughtful Christians also ask them but usually much more quietly and often with some serious and irrational guilt. (The psalmists regularly asked the very same questions, so I’m pretty sure God doesn’t mind when his people today do.)

In the book Yancey, who invariably asks the right questions, is asking why God, at the very times when we most need his presence and power in our lives, so often seems silent, or hidden, or unfair. Contrary to the “name it and claim it and don’t forget to send a big check” TV preachers and more than a few megalomaniacal mega-church gurus, God doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo promising health, wealth, success, and unbroken blessing for those who get the faith formula (involving a good bit more magic and manipulation than faith) just right.

Something really bad happens on the road to the unbroken success the “faith” gurus promise. You spin out, hit the wall, flame out, face failure, get broken. Then some paragon of plastic piety hits you with another of his many easy throw-down answers: If only your faith were stronger, it wouldn’t have happened. If you had real faith you wouldn’t be wondering why God seems at times silent, or hidden, or unfair. (So shame on you for wondering!)

I hope you don’t pay attention to such “gurus.” Even the Son hanging on the cross asked his Father, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (That it was a quotation from a psalm does not strip it of its poignant reality.)

We all like it best when God’s answer to our prayers seems obvious and impossible to miss. At the cross, we’d most definitely have opted for an army of 10,000 angels wiping out Christ’s enemies. Long before the cross, we’d have given in to every one of Satan’s temptations of Christ (Matthew 4) by focusing on flashy miracles, playing to the crowds, and worshiping power (see any of that in “religion” today?).

But Yancey is right: “The spectacle of the Cross, the most public event of Jesus’ life, reveals the vast difference between a god who proves himself through power and One who proves himself through love.”




Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

"What Have You Learned From Your Failures?"

What have you learned from your successes and failures?”

That was the question the interviewer put to billionaire Donald Trump a few months ago during Trump’s brief (and, I personally hope, never to be revived) flirtation with presidential candidacy.

His answer: “I don’t see myself as having failures . . .”

I was so surprised by the answer that I may not have heard if he later tried to pull that bit of nonsense out of the ditch. Could any sane person fall into a failure more foolish or fatal than to claim to have no failures?

Two kinds of people draw breath in this world: those who are seriously weak and flawed and know it, and those who are seriously weak and flawed and don’t know it. We’re far better off being, and spending time with, the former. The latter are uncommonly tiresome, obnoxious, dangerous—and well-avoided.

Yes, we’re far better off belonging to the first group and being honest about it. But I suspect the only way that priceless knowledge can be bought is with some very costly pain. Until we’ve been hit “up the side of the head” pretty hard with one of the major bricks life sooner or later throws at us all, I doubt we can offer much real and condescension-less comfort to others who are also ordinary humans—which means at times concussed, bruised, bleeding.

Until we’ve shot ourselves in the foot and have been forced to learn that, though God’s children all dance, they also all walk with a limp, I doubt we have much valuable to offer those who want to join the dance.

We may talk a good game about grace, about how we’re all sinners in the same boat completely dependent upon God’s mercy. But until we’ve swallowed enough sea water to seem to be headed under for the last time, I doubt we can really open our hands to reach up for God’s hand or to reach out a hand to genuinely help others.

Until we’ve been aghast to find ourselves down in the depths, we deep down think in our heart of hearts, even if not aloud, that we or our group are a cut above the rest. God’s favorites. The blue birds in the class. At least a little bit gifted and talented morally. We blindly think that all we really need is a little more time to try harder, get things all figured out, and sharpen up our act.

Until we’ve been jolted into sanity by hitting bottom, we center on our problem with sins rather than our problem with Sin, worry more about outward acts than inward putrescence, focus on specks of sawdust in other folks’ eyes rather than planks in our own. We waste time gazing through the wrong end of the telescope. Nothing clears up the picture more quickly than hitting the wall with some obvious failure and living through the pain that follows. Then grace means something because it is real and precious. It has always been our only hope, but now we know it.

And then if someone asks us how we’ve dealt with failure, the answer will be worth hearing.





Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Bethlehem Will Always Trump Times Square

We all know what time does, right? Tempus fugit! I learned that phrase long ago in one of the most practically valuable classes I’ve ever taken, the Latin class at Amarillo’s Sam Houston Junior High. Mister Craddock would be proud. Tempus (time) fugit (flies)!

As I write, we’re slipping into the wee hours of January 2, 2012. Years ago I tried some future-predicting based on a very little math (a very little math is the only kind I’ve ever done). I figured that I’d likely live to see this world roll on past 2000, but that I’d be very old—older than 40!—when it happened. It did, and I was. Over a decade ago.

Tempus fugit. In a little over two weeks my oldest granddaughter will be 5. In a little over a week, I’ll be 55. Brylan’s settled on a “Strawberry Shortcake” theme for her party. I’m leaning toward something from “The Lord of the Rings” for mine. I may go as Gandalf, the wise old good wizard. All I’ll need is white hair, a white beard, and a long staff. (Hmm. The mirror says all I’ll need is the staff.) If I hang a banner, it will boast this Scripture: “Now Barzillai was old and advanced in years” (2 Samuel 19:32).

I’m way short of the wisdom of a Barzillai or a Gandalf, but I find myself on this eighth day of Christmas doing what old guys do: musing. What a contrast between the two parties! Not Brylan’s and mine, but the one in Times Square and the one in Heaven.

It’s nice that they drop the big crystal ball in Times Square each new year, but to plot a wise course for the future, it’s good to remember that earthly crystal balls are mostly hollow, about as short of real substance as sparklers and confetti.

If you want substance, Bethlehem will always trump Times Square. Mankind messes with sparklers and glitz and trumped up resolutions, valuable only because they remind us yet again of how valueless is human resolve. God sends angels from the realms of glory trumpeting the good news of real salvation that comes completely from outside of ourselves, the birth of the Savior, God’s power doing for us what we could never do for ourselves.

I don’t know how long “tempus” (time) will go on “fugit-ing” (flying). But I’m sure of this: When Times Square has long since gone dark and the last sparkler of human resolve has fizzled, the real party in Heaven will just be gearing up, and God’s joy will still be wonderfully and forever ablaze.

That’s a party I don’t want to miss!





Copyright 2012 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

God's Gift Is One We Could Never Give Ourselves

What we need most for God to do in our world and in our lives are the very things we cannot possibly do ourselves. They are also quite often the things that we, in our frequent fits of arrogance (it’s called human pride), are tempted to think we can.

God’s people in first century Palestine were quite sure they needed the Romans thrown out of their country and excised from their lives. And so they fell prey not only to the Romans but to a succession of pseudo-saviors raising rebellion and multiplying misery.

Then, almost unnoticed except by a few shepherds out on the hills near Bethlehem and some animals cramped in their stable by the presence of a guy from Nazareth and his wife who’d managed to turn the place into a delivery room, God does something to truly save his people that the mightiest general and the strongest army on earth could never have done.

Because no one who has ever lived or who ever will live has been able to live a life completely grace-filled and sin-free, perfectly righteous and yet perfectly gentle, absolutely holy and yet absolutely winsome, God sends to us at Bethlehem the very best Christmas gift, his own Son, to lift up the fallen sons of Adam and daughters of Eve to be the adopted sons and daughters of God and “joint heirs” with Christ of the very best blessings of the Father.

Ah, we could never have done that on our own! It’s God’s gift to us, and all we can do now is to accept it through faith as a gift—or not. It comes in no other way. It is a gift. And it can be received in no other way. While all of eternity is not long enough for us to adequately praise God for the gift he has given, how dare we even begin to think that, could we give them, a thousand years of our praises, our songs, our worship, our good deeds, our pious ritual, would ever be enough to in any way even begin pay God back for that wonderful Gift? And don’t we realize that to refuse to accept a gift as a gift is to dishonor the Giver?

Yes, worship the Giver!

Yes, live to honor Him!

Yes, join the angels in singing his praises and proclaiming his salvation!

But do it with real joy because you have opened your hands and your heart to freely receive the Gift God gave at Bethlehem to do for you and for me what we could never do for ourselves.







Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

God's Plan Almost Always Surprises Us

Does God ever do anything just like we’d expect him to?

A world to save, a Gift to give, a Baby to send . . .

And the greatest Christmas Present ever given is all wrapped up in swaddling cloths and laid in a feed trough.

And the mother of the King is a poor Jewish girl whose wedding, the thin-lipped gossips around Bethlehem would be quick to tell you, was much less than a discreet nine months before the birth. Mark it down—those gals could count to nine just as quickly as their modern counterparts.

And the birth announcement for God’s Son? It was proclaimed by angels whose glory split the skies, but (“who’d-a-thunk-it?”) the amazing proclamation was not made at a grand meeting of pompously assembled and well-robed religious moguls of the Judean Diocese or the Eastern Palestinian Convention or the Greater Bethlehem Ministerial Association.

No, it was proclaimed to terrified shepherds whose collars, if they’d had such, would have been decidedly blue, whose theology if you could call it that, had more to do with the equivalent of Starr Cut Plug tobacco than it did with heavenly lights. These were simple and rough-hewn men who’d spent lots of time on hills herding sheep and precious little time at all in synagogues.

They’d seen angels? Yeah, right. The folks back in town knew full well that the last time old Issachar had seen an angel he’d found him at the bottom of a wineskin.

But not this time.

Oh, some of them had been a bit sleepy just a moment before, but that had changed in a heartbeat, in the blink of an eye, as the night sky exploded with light and angels ripped apart the firmament to emblazon Heaven’s message across the shimmering sky.

God’s promise of salvation and the coming of the great King had been made long centuries before. Generations of kings had come and gone. And generations of shepherds had kept watch over their sheep on these same hills while Bethlehem slept below and, slumbering uneasily with the little city, a careworn world waited for God to rouse it with good news.

But then the message of Heaven came. The message of your salvation and mine. And it came to shepherds.

Who’d a thunk it?






Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Christmas Trees Don't Have To Be Perfect To Be Beautiful

My earliest Christmas memories are mostly wrapped around our family’s Christmas trees.

I remember Mom making creamy hot chocolate and my sister stacking the spindle of the old record player with an inch-high pile of vintage vinyl Christmas music by Nat King Cole, Perry Como, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and the Norman Luboff Choir.

Most years the tree had already been bought at (where else?) Amarillo’s Boy Scout Troop 80 Christmas tree lot. I was a member of Troop 80 and thus expected to help sell trees each year. My younger brother was not, but he was a wheeler-dealer sort who liked selling trees and often, as I recall, managed to pawn off more trees than most of the bona fide boy scouts. Jacob (I mean, Jim) always felt Jacob of old settled for far too little when he sold his hungry brother Esau that bowl of stew and only got a birthright for it. Jim would’ve held out for hard cash and then the birthright at the end as a balloon payment.

We’d lean the tree in the garage for a day or a few on its amputation-site stump in a bucket of water while it waited to be lit and glorified. Anchoring the tree in the stand was a chore. Jim and I would crawl under the scratchy boughs and slide around on our wood floor to turn each screw just the right amount. It was never straight the first time.

Then my 15-years-older sister, the unquestioned head honcho of the process, would ascend to perform the task of highest honor as she put on the lights (bubble lights, snowball lights, and all), a job in later years graciously bequeathed to me.

Then we would hang the ornaments, a tedious task but nothing like as bad as the final stage in the process: hanging the icicles.

I don’t see those long, thin, silvery strands of foil or plastic, those “icicles,” on trees much anymore. I hope never again to have to put them on one of mine.

According to my sister, they had to be hung with great care, one at a time. Ten million or so came in a box. You’d drag one out of the box and carefully place it over a tree branch. It was essential, my sister assured us, to start at the back near the trunk and make sure the icicle hung straight down on both sides of the branch. Straight down. No clumps. Which is why Jim’s preferred method of grabbing a paw-full of icicles and launching the whole wad in the general direction of the tree was sternly forbidden. No. One at a time. Until you froze there, died there, decayed there, and Christmas never came, and it was spring and you were still hanging icicles. One at a time.

I don’t know what we thought would happen—apart from sure death—if we didn’t hang the icicles exactly right. Would Santa’s sleigh suddenly crash in flight and the FAA later determine and publish for the whole world full of weeping giftless children to see that the cause was icing—not on the sleigh but improper tree icicling by two Shelburne boys at 125 N. Goliad, Amarillo, Texas, whose wanton and reckless disregard had killed Santa?

I’m sure we never did it “right.” But I remember wandering into the living room as a little lad clad in those great PJs that came complete with feet, lying down almost under the tree, looking up through its branches, and drinking in the beauty.

By God’s grace, Christmas trees don’t have to be perfect to be beautiful. Neither do lives.











Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.

Preparing Our Hearts for Christ's Coming

Whether we’ll have a White Christmas this year or not is anybody’s guess, but a White Monday on the Second Week of Advent is now in the bag.

I love it! Nothing in all of nature is as beautiful as snow. Add to that a church at Christmas with a fire in the fireplace, four or five well-lit trees, a warm sanctuary bedecked with garland twinkling with lights, some beautiful candles, snow gently descending on the lantern in the snow-scene on the video screen (matching what’s falling outside), hot coffee waiting in the fellowship hall, and what’s not to like?

It was the first day of our now-annual Advent devotionals. I think this is our sixth year to offer these little ten-minute moments of worship daily at 10:00 during the second and third weeks of Advent.

When I hatched the idea, I didn’t know if anyone would come; I was just sure I needed to—which surprised me. The last thing I needed during the holidays was another commitment, another group of services to design and lead.

Ah, but there’s that word: “holiday.” What I needed in the midst of busy-ness was a particular time, even if just a simple and short moment each day, to pause and worship and center on the “holy,” to be still and drink in some beauty and be reminded of what God had done and was doing—even if that congregation was just me. I figured that maybe a few other folks would appreciate the same kind of worship and quiet reminder. And they have.

The little group has grown a bit each year. Not today, though. The snow pretty much did us in, but that’s fine. I used the time to prepare for the next few days’ services.

Preparation is what Advent is about. The word means arrival” or “coming.” Long centuries ago many Christians began to celebrate these weeks as a time of “preparation,” preparing their hearts for Christ’s coming—joyful praise for his first coming, preparation and hope for his second, and an invitation to Christ to enter our hearts every day.

In my service preparations, I chose a number of Scriptures that urge us to live always ready for His coming. Sitting in a warm study tucked in a beautiful setting, I found some great Advent meditations written by Christians in times past. Ugly times past. Two of the writers would die in Nazi prison camps. One wrote when it seemed that the world would soon end in nuclear winter.

Not one of these faithful men wrote hopefully extolling humanity’s power to work hard to build a perfect world. Instead, they point to the beauty and power and love of the God who breaks into this world’s ugliness and comes to bring a salvation we could never accomplish ourselves. They remind me that light most brightly in darkness, and that His is the only light that can truly overcome darkness.

Yes, it’s for Christ’s coming that we prepare our hearts. His Presence is the gift we need. His hope is the only genuine hope.








Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.