Worth the Fight - The Good Fight Blog

The furnace of affliction.

Inspired by Isa. 48:10.

Someone wrote, “for Christians, this current earth is our hell and for those who do not know Christ as Lord and savior, this is their heaven.” So very true. My last few years have been spent in the furnace of affliction. Constant struggle and degrees of defeat in all aspects of life; family, friends, vocation, faith and personal health. No rest, no comfort or peace inside this life of trouble and toil. The pressure and heat of all the issues that demand my attention and strength is wearing me thin. I feel my grace, my joy and even my hopeful expectations seep away.

What does a person become in the furnace of affliction? Full of strength, grace and patience or frustrated, and finally consumed by hopelessness? It depends on the person I have figured. God is God no matter our situations. We can choose to hold tight to Him and by doing so gain strength, patience and greater insight or we can go it on our own strength and understanding. Beware, the Bible says not to lean on our own understanding. God has greater motives and actions beyond our understanding and to trust in our own strength of thoughts might do us in. Like leaning on a sprained ankle.

My furnace of affliction is a small one, but still a place of tough lessons and great patience. Will I continue to hold on and trust or let go and go my own way? It is either burn baby burn on let me out, I quit. One who continues must go through the furnace to become the person they are meant to be, there is no side stepping. You stay in as long as the Lord God sees any humanness that hinders His work in and through you. Something of use comes from the furnace; sturdy and useful. The furnace has produced many great people throughout humanity and many more will come and go through the furnace. Yet I do feel that less and less people are putting themselves in the place for God’s refining seasons. Most it seems want to stay just out of reach of God’s refining process. I understand, sometimes I think that I should find a place that would require less of God’s uncomfortable demands placed on me. Like moving a little further away from a roaring fire because the heat becomes too much to bear. Yet the cost is moving further away from God’s presence and protection. What would you do?

Bring on the heat and let’s be done with this. I look forward to a stronger, wiser and more graceful person to emerge from this furnace of affliction and to become something of use in a hurt and deceived world. I have learned how desperately we need people who have gone through the furnace and come out refined as silver. Precious followers of Christ who are full of strength, grace, humility and joy. We need inspired, fortified Christians, those who have weathered great storms and can be truth and beauty to those who live as broken pieces of God’s glory. I imagine us as dirty and broken windows on an otherwise perfect house of God. We need whole Christians, full of joy, imagination and a peace that this world can not shake. Only those who travel through and in God’s strength come out of the furnace of affliction can be these kinds of Christians. I know of some who have lived hellish lives for heavenly purposes.

Truth and beauty inspire me to continue on, I can not find these two elements outside of God. I chose to surrender this life and let it be a usable sacrifice for King and kingdom. Everyday we have the opportunity to learn of Him and be with Him even on earth. His mercies are new every morning and heaven is one day closer. What we must struggle with and bear now will, I believe, be a part of the treasure that awaits us in heaven.

Whatever hell and affliction we face now will be only stories of adventure and intrigue in heaven, but all will end with a happily ever after for those who triumphed through the furnace of affliction.

From one who thinks and cares. m.

My Ugly baby.

There it is, it is mine, no one else’s but mine. I am solely responsible for its creation. It is my ugly baby. I will have to live with it the rest of my life and make sure that it grows up to be the best it can be and hopefully make the world a better place.

My ugly baby is my body of art. A mass of work that will always be unfinished and full of doubt and insecurity. No matter how ugly, no one is hard hearted enough to abandon their baby. It contains a part of me and it is my future, in a way. After I am gone it will speak of how responsible and diligent I was as a creator and caretaker.

Taking care of this baby will always be a source of fear, doubt and worry. What if I am not good enough, what if I can’t handle the pressure or what if I don’t have anything to give to my ugly baby? All questions that matter if I want to do this right.

I do have dreams for my ugly baby. It would grow up to be extraordinary, not just another body of creative expression, but something that truly rises above the rest. I want my baby to be strong, wise and able to stand the test and critics of time. Maybe I am putting too much hope on my ugly baby. Maybe it is destined for a simple and plain life, a life that does not disturb the status quo. But I do want the best for it. I will always seek to spur it on to greater things, that is what a good caretaker is supposed to do, right? No matter how ugly it is now, it could turn out to be some thing beautiful and full of beauty. It could make a small change upon the world.

My ugly baby could be an inspiration for other ugly babies around the world. Ugly babies rise up and unite! One of ours has triumphed and yours can too! Any thing that starts out ugly can become beautiful with love, grace and patience. There is hope for all of us, or at least we hope in hope.

The only thing I can do now is claim this ugly baby as mine, all mine. My full responsibility and duty is to see this creation go as far as it can go and let grace take it the rest of the way. Maybe we will meet up in heaven and have wonderful stories to tell. Until then, we have the daily challenge of making life as straight as possible for it and getting it on its own feet. My baby will go places that I never will and I must make sure that it has all the resources possible to succeed. Being a poor caretaker weighs on me sometime. All the things I wish I could bestow and provide for my baby are hindered by the failures in my own life. It will have to do.

You can only give your art what you have, but do not neglect it because of doubt or fear. I feel encouraged that life will reward a sincere and generous heart and any effort to make the world more beautiful is a gift in itself.

From one who thinks and cares, m.

Call for stories:

The Good Fight is looking for stories regarding artists who have both struggled and succeeded with art. Plight vs. Light. Plight is an unfortunate or difficult situation. Light, in the case, is victory and success. Just a couple of paragraphs of struggle, victory or both.

Where are you at now with your art? What hinders your art and keeps you from the artist life you are looking for? Maybe you are in full swing with your art, let us know as a way to encourage and inspire.

These stories will feed a website that will hopefully touch the lives of many people. Do your part to reach out to disadvantaged artists. Your story could be the one to bring another artist out of fear and doubt of doing their art.

That is worth fighting for.

Sincerely, Michael of the Good Fight.

A lesser part of a greater humanity.

I have always been intrigued by tattoos. Something about the permanence of something alien grafted into living flesh. Not one to be seduced into having myself marked up, but appreciating the skill and expressiveness of tattooing. I think that I have only recently come to form a solid opinion of tattoos. I would never preach against tattoos or make the effort to take a hard stance against them. But I do have an opinion against them and not for them.

I see tattoos as being a distortion of the beauty that God has inherently created in the body of humans. To look at a body untouched by human trends, culture and man-made manipulations, such as obesity, acne, piercing and the like, is to look at something harmonious, pure and natural. Everyone can appreciate the anatomical complexity and beautiful uniformity of the human body. The female body in particular is one of the most beautiful creations of God, in my humble opinion. This observation does not address the issues of disabilities, genetic quarks or abnormalities that people are born into.

This addresses the conscious decision to mark oneself with a design or graphic symbol that personally communicates something of self-importance: the body as a canvas for personal expression. I think it is very important for me to have a opinion and be able to express it. If anything really matters, than it matters to have an opinion about it. So I will take a stab or poke at this.

Tattoos have been around for centuries and will continue to be a part of humanity. There is something primal and tribal about tattoos. No matter how sophisticated humanity will become, we will always have a tribal heritage in us. Yet like most things in humanity, just because it has been with us for so long, does not mean that it is of God or the best for us. Which is a good starting place for this observation. This is not a discussion about good vs. evil, but God vs. everything else. Tattoos, I feel, will not keep one out of heaven or push one into hell. Tattoos are human and tattoos are such the kind of human invention that will not make it into heaven.

*No one should say that this observation is a statement of condemnation, but one man’s free observation. Therefore you can do with it what you want.

Back to the observation, I feel that when God made us in His image, He did so without the thoughts of marks, graphics, logos and statements of culture. The body being made for eternity, all iconography would come and go, but the template of God’s image on earth would be constant. Ideally bodies would be without blemish, excess weight, wrinkles from wear & tear from overly hard work and various abuses. Historically tattoos have been a way to brand hate, isolation and/or human ownership. Untold numbers of humans have been forced to painfully bear marks and violations upon the human body because of human ignorance. Obviously this is not God’s plan for humanity.

Animals are marked for life and survival. Marked by stripes, opposing colors, textures and designs. Praise God that humanity has different colors in skin, textures in hair and designs of body type and facial features. Yet we are distinct and beautiful in our uniformity. A general black person will have the respective features, colors, and textures of a black man and that is normal for each individual race. Yet it is abnormal to have that black man with the natural hair texture of an Asian or have the blended colors or designs of different races on one body. Sure we have Albinos, but that will be left for another time. Generally speaking humans are free of marks, stripes, multiple colors and designs.

Humans have sophisticated sounds and actions that communicate emotion and information. Animals use visual cues and elementary sounds to do the same. Yet humans are not bound by external markings, we can transcend appearance. Humans are distinct, created in God’s image. We have the ability to create and the duty to steward God’s creation. We are an uniform and pleasing image of diverse uniform color and textures. No logos, faded colors or images of skulls and hearts to break up the uniformity of beauty. So I believe that a Godly respect of the body would say no to tattoos or excessive permanent decoration of the body. Coming from a person who had three pierced holes for his ears, which was risque back then, I say this without hate or malice. I stopped wearing earrings because I kept losing them down the sink when I was cleaning them and also because I wanted a more simplified image for myself.

God vs. everything else. I would never say tattoos are evil or bad, but I would question the motivation behind getting one. Can a statement made of ink and flesh not be said in a poem, on a canvas or in a song? A song will last much longer than any human body and a painted canvas may travel more than any one person can. Why is it a rite of passage? Is character and wisdom not enough to showcase our victories and losses in life?

What really makes a solid point, for me, of not investing in tattoos or that whole subculture, is because it is a subculture. It is a lesser part of a greater humanity. Can we imagine great human contributors with tattoos? Martin Luther King Jr. Abe Lincoln, C.S. Lewis, Rosa Parks, Obama, inspirational teachers and mentors, would they get tattoos? Would they take the time to have dates, events, loved one’s names inscribed into their flesh? I don’t think people intent on doing great things for humanity will invest in the time the subculture demands, but that is not to say that great deeds of sacrifice could not come from people who came out of that subculture or who have tattoos.

Tattoos should never be a mark of negative distinction. We should all look pass the flesh and at the individual. So I would not say that tattoos are of the devil, but they are of a fallen humanity. Just like lawyers or the flu; a lesser part of a greater humanity.

If all that we do is supposed to be for the glory of God, what will ink and flesh say of dedication to God’s will? Is it disrespectful to modify what is really just a temporary gift to us? I imagine adding graffiti to the side of one of God’s beautiful temples, what would that say to God and say of His beautiful children? Will bodies have tattoos in heaven? Questions that need to be answered, I think.

I would really like to see what you have to say on this matter. I see this as a touchy subject for some, even among other Christians. They would see this as another constricting, religious statement of dogma instead of an observation of one that thinks and cares.

From one who thinks and cares - m.