Delivery is not easy
March 11, 1992…I was exhausted!
I’ve delivered two babies. It’s not easy. Though 28 and 25 years ago, I remember those days well. Labor and delivery is fraught with pain, blood, sweat and tears. It’s not a pretty sight or an easy experience no matter how common it is. My firstborn weighed 9 lb. 9 oz. I labored 15 hours to get him out into the world. They say you forget the pain. “They” may have, but I have not! Was it worth it? Of course, but I’m not going to lie. It’s hard and painful work.
There’s a line from The Lord’s Prayer that says, Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Deliver.
I’ve been skating right over that word ‘deliver’ like it’s a Friday night pizza or the UPS truck. With a click on Amazon I can have dog food or paper towels at my door in two days. Perhaps most of your shopping these days gets done this way. Fed Ex can deliver an insulated cardboard box of dinners for the whole week. “Deliver” is one of those words that sounds easy and convenient.
Deliver us from evil.
As many times as I have prayed “The Lord’s Prayer” in my life, I’ve never paused to think about what I am actually asking for in that line and how it fits with the life I experience. Will I recognize an answer to this prayer if I don’t even know what I am asking? What does it mean for God to deliver us from evil? I think I’ve only thought in terms of evil out there; not evil within my own heart.
Am I treating it like something that’s painless to me and that God will do to make my life more comfortable? Am I asking God to keep things from hurting me and prevent me from suffering? Am I assuming there is no work involved in deliver us from evil?
Even as I try to cling to things: ideas, outcomes, people or possessions, I am being delivered from those that will harm me. God promises deliverance even if I can’t perceive it with my senses at a given time. When I look backwards, though, I can often see His liberating work in my life. Once when I sought freedom in my life, He provided a full time job. It seemed paradoxical, but it wasn’t. That job that ‘tied me down’ was the very path to the particular freedom I sought.
That’s where the labor and pain come in. I don’t always want deliverance to come in the way that it does. I want instant and ease, rather than work or suffering. The incident of Jan 6, 2018 delivered me from naiveté, from productivity and people-pleasing, from bondage to a false-self, from trusting only my head and not my God-given gut instincts.
It delivered me to trust in God, who gave me a marvelously designed body and voice that functioned well for me in that moment , though I’d never believed that it would. That event delivered me from trusting the system or my ability to talk my way out of things or simply will the outcome I wanted.
The justice system did not deliver satisfaction to me. Only the driver was caught and he would not give up the man who got out of the car and ran up behind me. That person remains out there somewhere. The driver was a juvenile, and since the intent of the court is rehabilitation of the adolescent, his penalty for participation was probation. Supposedly he owed me a letter of apology within 6 months. It never came. My counselor asked myself what good a coerced apology would do me. I thought about that and had to answer ‘None’. Getting that tiny ounce of flesh actually would satisfy nothing.
The only path to deliverance from anger or unforgiveness or revenge is to hope in God, to trust that He loves me and whatever is unfolding in my life is coming to me from the only disposition that he has: Love. Though sometimes painful and often hard work is involved, Deliver us is a prayer He is answering.
I’ve asked myself a lot of questions in the last few years; so many, in fact, that I entered seminary to answer some of them, plowing up the ground of my life and revisiting the platitudes to see if underneath they were true to my lived experience. I keep coming back to the theology we teach to our toddlers in Sunday School - God is love.
If God is love, then God equals Love. God’s very state of being is Love. Anything I say about God, I have to put LOVE in the space with his name. That’s not really hard if I think about Jesus. It gets trickier when I look around me - or in the mirror. The world is full of evil within and without. It’s around us and in us. We all have the capacity to cling, attach, make idols, hold grudges, puff up, and put down.
Jesus came to deliver us from that - being critical, prideful, vengeful, idolatrous, clingy, greedy, stingy…and on and on the list can go. The question is will we let Him? Delivery can be long and arduous; blood, sweat and tears. It does hurt and you don’t necessarily forget the pain. But there’s new life on the other side and it’s worth it.
