Homeroom Devotion from this morning: The Context? A monsoon like I've never seen before, with water coming down in sheets every day. It's finally tapering off, but it still feels relevant:





So this summer, I got to visit Angkor Wat in Cambodia. As you can see, it’s beautiful. I braved 100 degree weather to climb all over these thousand year-old temples. But as I walked around, something interesting happened: I got totally distracted from the buildings and totally fascinated by the sheer power of life itself—the force of nature.






I mean, look at this. It’s a tree that somehow pushed its way up through the stones and grew to this enormous height. At some point, this huge tree was a tiny sapling battling heavy rocks for survival. And it won.



Here’s the same tree from inside the temple. Look at those roots. They’re truly magnificent, aren’t they? I mean, look at them! They look like they’re pouring and melting over the temple.



Walking around, I saw all sorts of signs of how tenacious life can be. Look at this spider surviving suspended between a few orchids. How fragile life is, but how strong. Just like the huge tree was once a tiny sapling, this spider’s web was once one fragile silken thread.



But what I really want to focus on this morning is one flower: the lotus. I saw lots of exquisite lotuses floating in the moats around the temples of Angkor Wat and I took way too many pictures of them. Watching the lotuses made me curious: How do they grow? Why are they so important in Eastern religious thought? What’s special about a lotus?

So I did some research. Lotuses are actually quite remarkable. Did you know that their seeds can lie dormant for 200 years with the potential for life still sealed inside? Then, when rain comes, the shoots spring up immediately and buds form.

That’s why I want to talk about lotuses: they grow in water. This is a lesson we all need to master as we try to survive what feels like an endless monsoon. How do we bloom in all this gloom? Sorry for the rhyming. I don’t know about you, but so much grey and so much rain can start to make it feel like our problems are totally insurmountable, like there are no possible solutions. Maybe you feel like you can’t possibly finish all your work AND prepare for SATs AND fill out college applications AND actually spend some time with the people you care about in your last year here. How can it all get done? I want to give you some concrete hope today by looking at the lotus.

Lotuses grow up through muck and mud. That’s where they plant their roots. Look around you. You’ve got plenty of muck to start planting in. Then, lotuses have strong, firm stems that work their way up through the water.



As you can see in this photo of a cross-section of a lotus stem, the stems are filled with air spaces. This makes the lotus stem buoyant. The air in the stem keeps the leaves and the bud afloat above the water. The stem can sway back and forth with the force of the water and remains remarkably sturdy. What is our equivalent? How do we remain buoyant when the forces around us seem ready to drown us? I hope this will make sense to you….air fills the spaces in the lotus stem, right? Air is not the lotus itself. Everyone with me so far? Air is also not emptiness, right? It has substance. In the same way, we have spaces inside us that need to be filled by something that’s NOT us, if we expect to remain buoyant. We require more than just our own strength to survive, in the same way that the lotus requires air. I believe that the spaces inside of us are filled in multiple ways—through everything from quality music to reading good books to friends who bother to actually listen and encourage us. But most importantly, I believe some space remains unsatisfied until we know God. I do—I believe this and experience the strength that knowing God brings.

Finally, the lotus flower itself. The bud. In Buddhist and Hindu thought, the lotus bud symbolizes endless potential in the way that it keeps opening. It is said that the lotus has a thousand petals. They keep opening further and further, exposing more and more layers of beauty. This is what I believe: when the spaces inside us are filled with strength, we are able to open up more and more from the inside and reveal more and more of the beauty of life, more and more of the power of life. Who knows how many petals you have left to show us? The lotus is a flower of potential.

Even more than that, the lotus is a symbol of resurrection. The flower dies and the seeds fall. The water dries up and life appears to be gone. Then, one day, maybe even 200 years later, miraculously, life re-emerges when the water returns.

As a Christian, as bizarre as it may sound to some of you, I actually believe in a bodily resurrection. I believe that Jesus really did rise again in an actual, physical body. That’s weird, I know. Even more weird is the belief that death here is not the end—just like the initial dying of a lotus flower is not the end. My core hope is something very material, the hope of a new life. Paul says it a lot better than I can, in the book of Romans. He looks around at the world and all the problems that seem insurmountable and after talking about the hope of life and resurrection and healing, he says, “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit of God helps us in our weakness. (See? God fills the spaces inside us and makes us strong.) For we do not know what to pray for, but the Spirit of God himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words."

So I’d like you to bow your heads for a couple minutes and just think about the problems you face and the spaces inside you. Where are you finding strength beyond yourself? If you pray, ask God to help you know what you need and to give you strength to solve today’s problems and face today’s battles. Ask him to hold you up in all this water around you. I believe He will.

I had a different devotion planned and then I ran into an article this weekend about how facebook is trying to trademark the word face and it got me thinking. About faces.

Faces are special because, unless you live in an Islamic nation and you’re a woman, they’re the one piece of ourselves that we can’t hide. Think about it: your face is always exposed to other people and you’re never fully aware of what your face is showing. There are some voluntary facial expressions, but there are also a host of involuntary facial expressions. We don’t always choose what our face communicates, but we can't prevent communication. Psychologist Paul Ekman has done a number of studies on facial expressions and has found that they are universal: looking at photographs, people everywhere around the world recognize disgust as disgust and sorrow as sorrow. So, we may not be able to communicate with language always, but we can communicate with our faces and the expressions they make.

This communication through our faces is key for two reasons:

1. I believe that humans have a core desire: we want to be known. We want people to really see us. And love us. Our faces allow this.

2. I believe that humans have a corresponding core fear: we are afraid to be known. We are afraid people will reject what they find inside us. Our faces allow this, too.

So...we are stuck. We want to be known but we are afraid to be known. In fact, the weirdest thing is that since we can’t see our own faces most of the time, we can’t even know ourselves unless someone else is there interacting with us. I’m going to use an old word that doesn’t get used much anymore: beholder. We need a beholder, someone to see and know us, in order to fully know who we are.

In our wider culture, we often hear messages about being yourself and knowing yourself and achieving your dreams and, and, and...and what I’d like to say is that you can’t just be you all by yourself. In fact, you can’t even know who you are by yourself.

On the other hand, you can’t let others define you. Other people can’t make you who you are. If you allow that, you live in frustration constantly.

So we are faced with a constant tension between what’s inside of us and what others see on the outside of us. Our faces act as some sort of lens, the point of connection. Jesus talked about the eyes being the window of the soul, and I certainly believe that eyes communicate a great deal.

What do we do, then? Is there any practical value to recognizing this tension?

What do we do about the fact that we need a beholder to help us know ourselves, but we also need a sense of identity from within? I want to give you a few quick points I’ve learned:

First: I know what doesn’t work. I have tried two really bad strategies: hiding my face, which only causes whatever is happening to fester inside. And I’ve tried making my face into whatever it is other people seem to want from me. We all do this. I notice it most obviously when I look at the contortions people go through to create the right image of themselves, the right face, for something like facebook. This also causes frustration and anxiety, because I am never quite sure I’ve hidden my true self or whether I’ve met other people’s expectations.

Second: I believe that only one beholder really matters, God himself. Think about it. If God made you and your face, He, more than anyone, can tell you who you are and who you’re meant to be. More than that, he knows all of you, every little dark corner of your mind, and I believe He has decided to love you anyway. The Psalmist says,

“O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.

My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.”

So God fulfills my desire to be truly known and loved. He does not deny or erase my flaws, rather he demands that with and through his love, I continue to become more of who he intended me to be.

Third: This knowledge brings me peace. I have learned that the road to peace, or at least part of the road to inner peace, lies in authenticity. I consciously reject veils and masks. There’s something freeing about realizing that I don’t need to hide. My identity will continue to form and mold as I interact with the beholders around me. My face will change as I take on lines of laughter and worry and happiness and anger. I recognize that some of the beholders I meet will see my true face and will think me weak or proud or any number of other negative characteristics. I think they’re right to point these out, and with their help or with God's, maybe I can change my face and become strong and humble.

Fourth, and most importantly, if I recognize this deep desire in me to be known, truly known, and loved, and if I recognize that God knows and loves me, then I can extend that same kind of love to others. I, too, am a beholder. I can seek to see and know other people for who they really are, to go behind the veils and masks that we all put up. I believe people need this. And I don’t want to deny the dark corners that I find in others. Rather, I want to follow the model I’ve been given in God and simply decide to love no matter what I see, and to continue to believe that change is possible for anyone.

We don’t become who we are in isolation. In the end, our identity develops through interaction with others. We were made for community, for communion with others, so I hope you’ll take the time today to really look at your friends, find out what’s actually going on behind their faces, and decide to love what you find.