Ranting About the Lawn-Obsession Enigma

Not feeling too insightful today, so I'll just rant.

I do not get the suburban (largely but not exclusively male) obsession with lawn maintenance. We had a lawn service stop by our house a year ago and kindly give us a free evaluation of our lawn issues. They checked off every single weed that they had boxes for and left it in our mailbox. Thanks for the heads up. I'll leave my weeds exactly where they are, I've grown rather fond of them.

Millions and millions of dollars are spent in the U.S. annually trying to keep lawns green and weed-free. Seriously? To what end? For what purpose? So it can die over the winter and you can re-spend more millions on it?

In the Scripture there's a biblical mandate given to Adam and Eve to work the garden. They are to "husband" it--that is, to lead it in giving glory to God. Inasmuch as yard-work is a participation in this mandate, it is a good thing.

Inasmuch as it is about keeping up appearances, keeping up with the neighbors, or conveniently avoiding more important things like your family, friends, or serving others who might could use your energies, it is sin.

That is all.

Anxiety & Star Wars Themed Weddings

The weeks before I got married, people kept asking me if I was ready to get married. What, are you kidding me? No one's ever ready to get married (even if you're a guy fortunate enough to con your fiancee into a Star Wars themed wedding).

All you can know is that it's probably going to be harder and better than you can imagine.

But I was anxious. And like most of us, I attributed my anxiety to the changing situation. We tend to blame anxiety on circumstances.

But the truth of the matter is that our anxiety is a combination of the situation and our own estimation of our ability to meet what's demanded of us in a given situation.

So I was anxious about marriage in the weeks leading up to my wedding day. But twelve years in, marriage itself isn't a source of anxiety at all. I used to be anxious about being a dad. Now, the category "dad" doesn't generate any particular fear--but I am anxious about being a dad of teenagers some day.


So anxiety is a product of situation plus our own estimation of our resources to handle the situation.

Paul is wrestling with this at various points in the Scriptures. And we get a glimpse of how he handles it in 2 Corinthians 2:

thanks be to God who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and
through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him. For
we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who
are perishing...

Who is sufficient for these things?

There is it--the question that underlies all our anxiety, whether we are capable of naming it or not. Who is sufficient for this situation, this class, parenting these children, getting this work done, dealing with this family dysfunction?

Perhaps someone out there is, but I'm not sure it's me.


And here is where our culture tries so hard to make you feel good about you being you. There's billions of dollars in pills and seminars and books to be spent on trying to make you feel good enough so that these questions don't plague you any more.


And sometimes those pills or seminars or books can be helpful. But all of them are at best impartial unless they land in the same general ballpark where Paul lands:

as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak
Christ.

Paul is sincere. He is not one of those guys trying to make money peddling religious goods and services (people he separates himself throughout the letter). And here we find resonance with the therapeutic bent that rules our culture. Sincerity matters. If you're being sincere, that's worth celebrating.

But Paul doesn't stop there. He is sent by God and he stands and does his work in the sight of God. All his confidence and peace comes not from within but from without. It starts in God and is held together in God and it ends in the proclamation of God.


And I would contend that while Paul articulates Christ in a specific way as an apostle that you might not in cube world or in the classroom, your work could (and should) proclaim Christ in its excellence, thoughtfulness, and intentionality in doing it as one who stands in the presence of God himself.

Who is sufficient for these things? Here's the deal: you aren't.

But in Christ, you are one sent from God and who stands in God's presence. And his purposes in your work is that Christ might be proclaimed. And he's more committed to all that in your parenting and marriage and school work and lame reports that are due than you are.


And if you can put God in the middle of this picture and take yourself our of the middle of it, you just might find anxiety passes and peace that passes understanding starts to take root.

Unless you're the one that didn't really want that Star Wars-themed wedding.

Good News for the Rest of Us! Talent is Over-Rated

So as it turns out, talent is over-rated.

Last week I was hanging out with my former pastor from Richmond, Steve Shelby. Steve planted the church that I started attending week one and continued attending for all nine years. The church was still in near start-up mode when I started there. Now, it's over fifteen years old.

Steve was telling me about the evaluation process that he went through to be a planter. They ranked the potential planners on a scale from 1-5. The fives were the rock-stars, and many of them knew it. In many of their minds, they were going through the screening perfunctorily--they were shoo-ins.

The one's were told they should never even imagine getting near a church-plant, much less attempt to start one themselves.

Many years later, the denomination did a survey of what happened to the planters. And across the board, the 3's did the best. Steve, sitting in his well-established, thriving church, was one of them.

The 3's, as it turned out, knew that they couldn't do it all by themselves. They knew they couldn't just get by on natural skill and charisma. They knew they needed help in the form of shared leadership with staff and lay leaders. And they knew that they needed help in the form of any resources that were available to them.

5's tried to do it all themselves and crashed and burned. Talent is over-rated.

Malcolm Gladwell (that's him below with the cool hair) talks about this in his book "Outliers." The freakishly talented outliers in our society (Bill Gates, for example, or The Beatles) are not simply freakishly talented. They are freakishly obsessive about practicing. Gladwell posits the "10,000 Hour Rule." He proposes that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an outlier in just about anything.

As a culture, we are obsessed with prodigies and we are obsessed with "effortless perfection" as a Dook (er, Duke) administrator once said. We are enamored with the romantic idea that what comes from following our hearts and doing whatever seems to be "true to ourselves" without any genuine thought or training is somehow more "free" or "natural."

But, as NT Wright argues in the podcast from Fuller entitled "Learning the Language of Life," the Biblical route for growing up into true life is transformation by the renewing of our minds (see Romans 12). We do not come by a life truly worth living without a full-life engagement.

We over-estimate what people can do (or get by with) by way of "talent" and we under-estimate the power of training and study and preparation. Sometimes in Christian circles we baptize this over-romanticized fantasy by wrapping it in language of "grace." But grace, as Dallas Willard argues, is opposed to earning, it is not opposed to effort.

And so the good news for those of us who are not born as freakishly talented people is that hard and good work trumps talent. The 3's surpass the 5's--especially if they can embrace the grace of being a 3 and lean into the people and the resources and particularly the Lord who is over all of it.

And all of it makes me wonder if I'll live long enough to put in 10,000 hours worth of blogging...then, perhaps, I'll have reached the golden Promised Land: "Blogger Outlier."

Madonna, Beastie Boys, Jamz, and Avoiding Becoming a Corporate Suck-Up at Corporate

So through some fluke of history, InterVarsity has its' headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin. Crusade has Orlando, Navigators has Colorado Springs, we've got Madison. Good thing I didn't choose my employer based on whether or not you could get a direct flight.

So anyway, I was in Madison last week for my Area Director training. I actually love Madison. It's a cool town and I've gone there just about every summer for the past fourteen years for some sort of training.

But given that it's InterVarsity mecca, there's lots of InterVarsity big-wigs around. And given that there's lots of big-wigs around, I found myself hoping to be noticed by those aforementioned big-wigs.

What happens at these training weeks for me is that I insidiously begin to rank my importance based on how pursued I am and who pursues me. After all, the Important People have meetings. And not just meetings but meetings with other Important People.

In my little ledger, you're even more Important if some other Important Person instigated one of those meetings. I found myself delighted by one or two meetings, disappointed to not be noticed by others.

Why do I get around a large group of colleagues and suddenly revert to junior high social dynamics? Why not go all the way and break out some old Jamz and play Beastie Boys on my cd-player boom box? I had terrible hair, braces and glasses in junior high--why does any part of me feel the need to re-live any part of that experience?

And so I found myself confessing and repenting throughout the course of the week of my multi-faceted idol that basically boils down to being addicted to the approval of others and finding my worth and identity in the people I know and the people who know me.

If I do not doggedly repent of this foolishness, I could very well waste the rest of my days chasing after all sorts of approvals and losing my soul in the process.

I hope that some day I can go to a national IV gathering of some sort and be deeply centered in Christ, be blissfully free of the need to be noticed by anyone.

Until then, I'll just be glad for any spiritual discipline that keeps me from reaching for old Madonna cd's.

Curing What Ails Us

Yesterday I was talking with an old friend about our joint work-aholic tendencies. There's lots of reasons why this is bad and lots of approaches to how to get healthy about it.

But the bottom line is this: work-aholism at it's core is un-belief in Christ. Jesus won't provide for me, won't advance me, won't take care of me, so I must do everything myself. I worship my own ability to get things done rather than trust in him.

Work is a good thing. Hard work is a good thing. But at some point it tips over from hard work as a result or overflow of a deeper trust in Christ into scrapping and clawing and pressing in out of my flesh in order to take care of myself.

To put it another way: work-aholism is a worship of work to be the thing that provides us what we think we need. All of our sin is a mis-spending of our worship. We were made to worship. Everyone worships something(s). Sin is the giving over of our worship to things that cannot satisfy us.

The call of God is to repent of all of our mis-spent worship in order to direct it towards the only thing that is going to meet those needs and fulfill the true purpose of our hard-wired need to worship.

That's what I'm thinking about this morning as I try to get my work done in faith, hope and love springing from a worship of Jesus rather than just me trying to muscle my way through my day to accomplish a bunch of things in my own strength or ability.

Question of the Day

Why is it that sitting around a table in meetings, doing absolutely nothing other than sitting, talking, and occasionally thinking, make one so very, very tired?

Gandalf, Proverbial Bootstraps, and Gladly Being Put In My Place

So when I started this campus ministry gig, I did it in part because you get to do a lot of different things. Everything from event planning to public speaking to light counseling to marketing to overseas missions trips.

I figured I'd find out what I was good at and go from there--probably off to seminary. But what I discovered was that I was good at this--the different seasons and the variety of challenges that came with campus work. Not great at all of it, just good at lots of it.

The problem of discovering that you're good at something is that you start to believe it. I'm a dashing, hard-working young man who has pulled himself up by my own proverbial bootstraps. Bravo, me! The American self-made myth, gladly embraced.

And then you go to your grandfather's funeral. And then you have your proverbial bubble-myth loudly (and gladly) burst.

There I was yesterday, sitting in the service. Great-grandfather was a preacher. Grandfather and Grandmother were in Brazil as missionaries for forty years. In front of me are their four kids. All four serve the church either vocationally or on a serious pro-bono basis.

Beside me are a half-dozen cousins--one's gearing up for a church-plant, another leads worship at his church, another listens to sermon podcasts recreationally as he drives all over the state for his work. Another loves Jesus while directing junior high and high school band--I believe Dante has a special level of hell marked off for that. My bro and I are both full-time religious types.

The self-made man/woman myth of the American culture is just that--a myth. I was simply born into a powerful stream of grace that has caught up many generations of Kirks throughout the decades and is still carrying many of us through our lives.

This doesn't mean I haven't done any work. Dallas Willard sums this tension up gloriously (as he does so many things) when he makes this distinction: "Grace is opposed to earning, it is not opposed to effort." I have earned nothing, it has all been grace. I work hard. But the grace of God is upon me to do the work he'd have me to do.

Reflecting on this on the drive home tonight, I was reminded of one of the greatest quotes of all time--Gandalf, talking with Bilbo at the end of his adventures in "The Hobbit:"

Then the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a fashion!' said Bilbo.

'Of course!' said Gandalf. 'And why should not they prove true? Surely you don't disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!'

'Thank goodness!' said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.

Incredulous Over Cinnamon Crunch Bagels and Learning Transitions

"I can't believe you're still doing this."

It was April, three years ago, a chance meeting at Panera as I munched on a Cinnamon Crunch bagel and worked on end of the year campus stuff. He was a former co-worker who started working with InterVarsity the same year I did, and he was incredulous that I was still on campus.

To be honest, I was a bit surprised, too.

But after fourteen years on campus I'm about to transition to a different job. Same organization, but a very different kind of work. Some might say that it's about time!

What transition does for me (and I'm guessing some of you) is generate eager anticipation mixed with anxious fearfulness about the future. Depending on your genetic make-up and your past experiences, you might be a bit more on the eager side or a bit more on the fearful side.

These past several days (as I've re-gathered myself post working 14 straight 16 hour days at Rockbridge) have been good as I've been engaging more concretely with the Lord about my own transition.

I want to share some of what's been helpful for me as I've engaged with the Lord, particularly in prayer. Not because I've got it all figured out, but because it's what I'm learning about in real-time. And that's what I like to blog about!

1. To quiet my anxious side, I lean into God's past grace. I pray specific prayers of remembering how God has been faithful to me in the past. The same God who was good to bring me thus far will be good to go with me into the next step of my life.

This re-frames some of the issues that cause anxiety. Was I ready for all that these past five years have thrown at me when I came to UNC? No. But it wasn't about me. It was about the Lord. He gave me grace for each day as needed.

He is enough, I'm not. My hope isn't in my own competence but in the Lord's perfectly timed grace for each day. And so I pray that back to the Lord. And I ask for help to remember that core, fundamental truth when I get fearful about the future.

2. To center my ambitious and perhaps over-eager side, I re-frame all that I typically call "mine" in light of the reality that all things are his.

These are not "my days," they are his. I do not create any of them, they come unbidden to me. And I am only truly free when I am doing as he would command me to do at any given moment.

And so I deliberately pray over my calendar, offering him all the days that are left in my life, to do whatever he would want, whenever he would want. He is the Master. I am his servant. He calls me friend, and so I am, but I am a servant still. And so I do or don't do whatever he would or wouldn't have me to do in the days that He gives me. That's my job.

Any dreams that I might have about what the future holds must be submitted to his will for my life at every stage of my life. Either I do that or I cut myself off from life. Those are my options.

Further, these are not "my gifts" or abilities. They are God's. He has given them to me that I might have something to offer back to him, to be used in his service. They are instruments of blessing insofar as they are submitted to the Lord and his Spirit.

When I attempt to control or manipulate His gifts for my own ends, the consequences are devastating and destructive for me and for all those around me.

And so I pray prayers of submission over the gifts he's given me and I offer them back to the Lord. And so I center the side of me that is excited about new opportunities to lead and to serve. Some of that is rooted in the Lord, some of that is rooted in my own selfish flesh.

But again, it's not about me. It's about him. And so I give him back what he's given me, saying yes to him before he even asks me to do anything with what he's given to me, so that I might know life and find joy in the work ahead.

My incredulous former co-worker is now working commercial real-estate in Charlotte. I'm still hanging around InterVarsity-land, working mostly with campus staff and some with students. Maybe it doesn't sound all that different to you. It feels pretty significant to me.

But regardless, I'm hoping that I might be nearer to Jesus at the end of this transition...and I'm hoping that maybe the new gig means that I get more opportunities to munch those Cinnamon Crunch bagels at Panera.

What I Gotta' Do Before I Can Do What I Gotta' Do

So maybe I'm just getting more uptight in my old age, but today was one of those days when I had a bunch to do and couldn't do it until other, less important things got done.

Printer cartridge dry. Seriously annoying. I've got important things to print. What am I supposed to do? I got fifty emails and dozens of phone calls to make, but after a week of not having a printer that prints except in purple, I went to Staples. Printer cartridge. Check.

Oil change 850 miles overdue. I feel like I'm driving my poor beat-up 112,000 mile Mitsubishi Galant with gritty sandpaper running through the engine instead of oil. Gotta' get the oil changed. Jiffy Lube. Check.

Not much gas. Could get home, but then what? Go in the morning? Stop to get gas. Check.

Realize that I need flip-chart paper, tape, and markers for a presentation this afternoon--this realization hits after I have already left Staples far behind. Hit up Walgreens, they come through for me. Presentation props, check.

Ahhhh, now I can really get to work. None of this had any bearing on my tasks for the day, but there's something about nagging tasks floating out there, left un-done and hanging over me, that can make it hard for me to really focus on the work at hand.

But maybe that's just me.

Meanwhile, last night's large group was a great good-bye. Woke up this morning feeling centered and grateful and peaceful about leaving here and looking ahead to what God has next. I'll miss the people, but it's time.

A good gift to me. I'll be praying for my seniors to have the same deep sense of peace for their own lives.

Pilgrims, Seinfeld & the Office, and Reflecting on my Last Large Group

Tonight, for the last time, I'll join a couple hundred college students for InterVarsity's weekly large group.

I've been going to large groups on Thursday nights for the past 18 years--four as a student, fourteen as a campus staff. In the process I missed out on Seinfeld, Friends, The Office and much else that has defined Thursday evenings for most other 36 year olds that I know--I think I've caught about two episodes each.

But in lieu of sharing tv experiences with America, I have been a part of God-moments. Certainly not every week. But plenty more than I can count. And tonight's my last chance to do that with a group of students that I can in some sense call "mine."

This morning as I felt the weight of tonight's last large group, God was good to have me in 1 Peter 1. In his opening, Peter refers to the churches he's writing as "strangers in the world." What he means is pilgrims, aliens, people who are in a sense disconnected from their exact context.

There's a call for people who follow Jesus to fiercely love this world while at the same time recognizing transience--our own and the transience of the way the world is currently. This world is not our home--at least, not yet. One day it will be.

But we are not to become overly-attached to the Land of the Ruins. We are pilgrims--moving, looking, waiting, longing for something more.

Tonight's large group reminds me that part of my work in following Christ is to love recklessly but not fix myself anywhere that is not home. Home is coming. In the mean time, I am to serve and love and work and play and rest and laugh. But I must keep moving towards home.

Some day, there will be no more good-byes. Some day, we will be in a permanent place. A place we can honestly and finally call home. I think that the military-kid in me longs for that with a particular ache.

In the mean time, we must live here as pilgrims. And we look ahead to the day when He makes all things new. Come, Lord Jesus.

After tonight I'll have my Thursday nights back. Maybe I'll join the world of Thursday night t.v. Maybe I'll just read a book.

All I know is that I wouldn't trade-out my last fourteen years of Thursday nights with students for anything else...and that as a pilgrim following Jesus, he has called me to leave what those Thursday nights have represented (campus and student work) for a new work that will have different costs, different blessings.

And my work, at the bottom of all of it, is to trust him.

Getting Me to a Monastery: Desitin, Pots, Pans and PC's

I spent today retreating--a local retreat center, my Bible, my journal, a lot of quiet, and a whole lot of wide open space.

Being temporarily monastic (it was a Catholic retreat center I went to, after all) made me think about my favorite monk: Brother Lawrence. If you've never heard of him before, check out the Wiki article.

This made me think back to a post I did a couple years ago, January 2006, on how work and rest and being monastic can all come together. Take a look at a Piebald Life Classic Post In My Mind:

Last week I was reading the story of Mary and Martha in my Christmas-present-new Renovare Spiritual Formation Study Bible with cool footnotes.

The story is familiar to some of you: Jesus visits Martha's house, Mary sits at his feet and listens as Martha rushes around doing preparations--and gets frustrated at her sister for being a slacker. I can relate so much more to Martha's busy-ness than I can to Mary's thoughtful contemplation, it's good to be gently rebuked through this story.

My cool footnote talked about Martha's service in this way: "Martha was unable, like Brother Lawrence, a monk who ran the kitchen sixteen hundred years later, to cheerfully pray, 'Oh, Lord of pots and pans,' while she clattered about cooking her meal."

I've been meaning to put Brother Lawrence's prayer on a Post-It note on my computer monitor. Work is mean to bless us, along with all of it's props. When I can cheerfully pray, "Oh, Lord of computers and cell-phones, diapers and Desitin, students and their struggles, to-do lists and e-mails," than I am just beginning to enter into the fullness of the blessing intended by God for the work he has given me to do.

Any time I attempt to do my work outside the tent of the Lordship of Christ, I am missing the point. My work will then become either a source of bitterness and angst or pride and self-aggrandizing, both of these are a curse.

My work, and all of it's challenges, opportunities, accessories, and day-to-day little annoyances and joys only fully bless me when they are all brought under the banner of God's "yes" to me in the Lordship of the one who is Lord in the Land of the Trinity.

The reality is, Jesus is already Lord of those things. I don't "make" him Lord of any of it. When I pray "O Lord of pots and pans!" I am simply aligning my life with the life that runs and rules the universe. To live apart from this reality is to go against the grain and get splinters (as my theology prof was fond of saying)--broken relationships, stress and anxiety, striving and complaining.

So I'm trying to bring myself again and again back into the joy of working and serving my family by praying this prayer. I could go with "O Lord of Dell PC's and bassinets" but I find that "O Lord of pots and pans" has a much nicer ring to it.

Learning to Work the Gift of Transition

So transition used to be a season of our lives, now for most of us it's a lifestyle. But just because we live in a culture of transition doesn't mean that any of us do it particularly well.

So last week I asked my nun what might be helpful for me to get the most out of this whole transition away from campus into my new job. He suggested that the value of transition is that it takes away all the props that we have over time begun to identify ourselves with.

I've worked on campus for fourteen years. Throw in four years as a student immediately prior to that, and that's eighteen years on campus. I turn thirty-six in two days. For those of you who struggle with math like I do, that's exactly one-half of my life.

I "get" this context. I have figured out how to do some things well after eighteen years on the college campus. In a broader culture that celebrates competency and results, it's easy for me to begin to define myself by those strengths.

Transition is giving me the gift of stripping me of what I've come to identify myself by--if we allow it, it can do this for all of us. Sometimes those are good things, like friendships or a particular religious community or even a good work like parenting or being a campus minister, but they are lesser things nonetheless.

Transition kicks away all our crutches, all those things that prop us up, that tempt us to think that we have something to make us more loveable or worthy before God or before those around us.

We stand just as we are before God. Our illusions about being accepted or loved or delighted in because of how good/smart/competent/toget

her we are (or appear to be) are all done away with.

And in the process we are given a delightful gift: the realization that God loves and delights in us apart from anything that we do.

I'm hoping that I might come out of this period of transition more settled in the love of God over me than ever before. I'm trying to lean into that in prayer, looking for promises and words of that in the Scriptures, trusting that God might give me this gift as I start to freak out about what the future holds.

Transition gives us the gift of stripping us down to the core of who we actually are, not what we would prefer to appear to be. A scary thought for most of us, especially someone prone to performance like I am.

But I believe and trust that there's life on the other side of these little deaths along the way. This is the way of Christ--and as his follower, I go there with him.

Rocky Balboa, Tim Keller & "Righteousness" For Parents, Students, Cube-Worlders & Plumbers

I've been listening to some sermons by Tim Keller (aka the only pastor in the world who should ever have 40 points in his sermon--young speakers enjoy the content but ignore the delivery, you can't pull it off like he can).

Last week I was listening to a sermon where he talked about the biblical concept of 'righteousness.' In our culture this word has only negative connotations--i.e. "self-righteous."

But Keller points out that in both the Old and New Testaments, the word "righteousness" has at it's root the idea of being validated or approved of by God. And this deep longing for validation and approval is at work in all of us.

In the first Rocky movie, Rocky says that he fights and he trains not for the love of boxing but 'to know that I'm not a bum.' Rocky can't just work for the joy of the work. He has to work in order to get something else. He seeks validation and justification for his very existence through the medium of his 'work.'

This is how many of us live our lives. We can't rest. We have to justify our existence. And in the West we do this largely through our work.

But what would it mean to have already been 'validated?' What would it mean to be righteous already, apart from having to seek that righteousness or validation through what we do but through what God has freely given to us?

This would free us parents to parent without our very identity on the line as to how our kids "turn out." It would free students to learn and study and excel not out of driven-ness and anxiety but out of a deep confidence and rootedness in who they are because of what God has spoken into and over them.

And it would free all of us in the working world, whether that's ministry or plumbing or cube-world or teaching or yes, even boxing or acting, to do those things for the joy of those things.

We're not grasping/clawing/wishing for our identity to be discovered through success in anything. We have already been given our new names: righteous.

We are free to work and to rest because who we are is not decided by what we do or how well we do. Who we are has already been decided and declared. We have been accepted by our good Father. It is finished and it is very good.

In Christ, we are righteous. That is, we are already validated, approved of, and our existence is justified through nothing other than the good will of our Father who loves us and who gives us work to do not as a false prop and crutch for our souls but as a joy to enter alongside his Spirit.

That's one point (out of the 40) that's worth drilling down into.

Keller on Work on a Monday Night

Over the past several days I've been listening to a podcast from Tim Keller, a pastor up in NYC who's got a sizable following in corners of my part of the Christian world. The podcast was a couple of years old on the subject of work. Some great stuff that has had me thinking as I've started this work week.

Here's some highlights from the sermon:

- Here's a working definition of work that he quoted from Dorothy Sayers: "work is the gracious expression of creative energies in the service of others."

- He goes on to quote Sayers' take on the problem with work in our culture: work is mostly seen as a way to make money or to achieve status.

That means that the actual work done is an appendage, an add-on. For example, doctors don't practice medicine for the joy of serving people. Doctors are doctors for the money and the social status. The patients are just the means to an end, not an end in and of themselves.

This is counter to the Biblical picture of work, where the work in and of itself is prepared in advance for us to do...and the work itself matters, not just the money it provides for us or the status it affords us in our society.

3. Keller proposes that as long as money or status are the primary motivators for our work, we will always take work either way too seriously (as we strive for more and more) or we will not take it seriously enough (as we get cynical and realize that it can't actually deliver what we want it to).

4. The proper role of work is in relation to God--that is, we are to work in order to please God.

He differentiates here brilliantly between working to appease God (i.e. the idea that God is perpetually ticked and we're scurrying around to keep him happy) v. working to please God--which is the Biblical command. In the latter image, God is on the look-out for things to delight in us about. He is easy to please, and our good work brings him joy.

5. Lastly Keller asserts that there's a couple of places that work can spring out from. One place is anxious drivenness--the life that puts too much weight on work. The other place is one of apathy--a life that is cynical of work.

A third option that he offers is work that springs from God's rest, the sabbath rest of God for his people. Work that springs from deep places of rest in the gospel of Christ is work that is truly life-giving. It is work in its proper place, for the right purposes.

And it springs from the gospel of Jesus, the good news that we are no longer bound by our own works to find favor with God and purpose in life. It is given to us for free in Christ, at great cost to him.

Work springing from rest sounds awfully appealing, doesn't it?

Looking back over the past couple of months, I can see all three of these motivations at work in my soul. Lots of places where I miss the boat on the right perspective and place of work.

Keller on a Monday evening reminds me that it's all about the gospel of Jesus making a difference in how I do e-mail, meet with students, prepare for meetings, make phone calls, and write reports.

I'd love for all of these things, not to mention loving my family and writing blogs and doing dishes and all the rest of it, to spring from a deep place of rest that energizes me for the good work prepared in advance for me to do.

What I'm Doing with My Life

This past summer I had an experience with an InterVarsity national think tank where we were talking about how to faithfully and biblically think about and foster growth.

I came away from that experience with a fresh thought: that I could leave InterVarsity staff, go to business school, and make a ton more money doing any number of things related to organizational structure or consulting. I enjoy thinking strategically and (in my estimation) I'm pretty good at it.

The benefits began to flood my imagination. No fundraising. A "normal" job that I didn't have to work so hard to explain. It all seemed stable and safer...and more lucrative.

It doesn't really matter if any of these things are true or not--I might not even be able to get into business school, I might flunk out if I did. What matters is what I thought was true, because it exposes the tendencies of my heart.

I think that often we make the mistake of thinking that the substance of our dreams is what matters. I think that this far from the case. I think rather that the substance of our dreams reveals to us what our heart gets easily fixed upon, what vies for our affections and attention. And that is what truly matters.

In my case, my heart was entranced by the siren call of a life of glittering images. Obviously, this was before the economy fell apart and all of us realized what they teach us day one of InterVarsity fundraising training: all of us are paid by the Lord, those of us who fundraise are just more in tune with it.

While pondering images of an imaginary life in the car in late-July, I had a final moment of clarity. I am not going to business school. I am not chasing after the fortune and glory that I imagine might be mine.

I am not doing any of those things because my life is not my own. I have been bought with a price. I delight in serving the Lord and in the work that he has given me to do. But even if I didn't, I have no rights to go my own way. I gave up those rights many years ago when I decided to lay down my weapons and follow Christ.

I am here, doing what I have been made and called to do, for as long as He delights to have me here. When he calls me somewhere else, I'll go somewhere else. But it's not my decision. It's his. And if all of it came unravelled and I became unglued and he said "stay," I stay. It's as simple as that.

And that's what I'm doing with my life.

David's Audacity: Gifts, Calling and Competencies

One of the things that strikes me as I read through the Psalms is David's audacity--see Psalm 18 for an example of what I mean.

I was talking with a friend on Friday who was sharing some thoughts about gifts, competencies, and calling. Someone had challenged him recently to consider what it meant to lean into his spiritual gifts rather than the competencies that had been acquired on top of those gifts. In other words, the power was in the core gift given by the Spirit, not in the techniques or skills that had been learned.

And the spark that sets all this in motion, the person explained, is calling. To know that God has put you in this place, at this time, to do this work frees you to lean into the gifting with boldness and power. Calling is the spark that ignites the gift (and competencies) into effective-beyond-expectation work.

It struck me as I considered this that I think this combination of gifting and clear calling is what frees David up to be so incredibly audacious. He knows that God has called him to be king--there was an incredibly unexpected anointing ceremony in his dad's house. As time goes on, he shows himself to be a gifted leader. And of course he acquires some skills along the way.

It takes years upon years for David to finally realize his place as king. But God had called him. And David leaned into the certainty of that call his whole life.

I think so many people wander from job to job unsure of where to go because of a lack of sense of this calling. Most of us have an inkling of our giftedness, have acquired some competencies or skill sets along the way, but we have no idea about what it is that God would have us to do.

Calling is not just reserved for kings or people in ministry. One could be called to computer programming to military service or to doing a cartoon strip.

Sometimes I think that the Lord leads us through years of wandering before we receive our calling--Moses had a life experience of this sort. Sometimes I think we wander unnecessarily because we don't take the time to listen for the voice of the Lord extending a calling to us. Sometime I think he withholds it from us because he knows that we're not ready to receive it yet.

I think that apart from a faithful combination of gifting, calling and competencies, it is almost impossible to be at peace with the work that we do. It is certainly almost impossible to do it with the power and effectiveness that is intended.

Work, Rest, Control, Pigs

Friends of ours did this cool thing when they had a baby: they took pictures of their child each month with the same stuffed animal. That way you could see how much they'd grown each month.

Davis loved this pink pig. Sometimes when Davis was fussing, I would pick up his stuffed pink pig (other kids have teddy bears, Davis loved his pig) and I would animate it—voices, hand motions, break-dancing, whatever.

Davis, of course, was enthralled. His response was to reach out and grab the pink pig. Of course, once the pig was in his hands, the "life" that was in it was gone. It went back to being an ordinary stuffed pink pig. Not a bad thing, but not what had enthralled him with the pig to begin with, not what he was looking for. As soon as Davis had control of the pig, the very life that he had enjoyed about it was gone.

The same thing is true for us when it comes to our work and the bigger purposes behind our lives. The only way for our lives to have real meaning, to have real life, is for Someone Else to be in control of them. Our control is an illusion. It is something to be released and repented of again and again, any time it rears its' ugly head.

Rest re-aligns our souls with the fundamental realities of the universe. It cuts against the lie spoken to our first parents that "we might be like God." Rest reminds us that there is only one God. And we are not Him.

What Work Doesn't Do

Last week I started to post a series on work, then got distracted by the State Fair. I want to pick that back up again because the thoughts keep rolling around in my head, and that's what this blog thing is for!

Work: to co-operate with God in using our gifts and abilities to tend to the world he has given us in order to provide for our own needs, bless those around us, and bring forth beauty and life to the glory of God the Creator.

Work can only bless us under the under the umbrella and in its proper place of this co-operative relationship with God in order to point back to the power and goodness of him.

And then of course, sin enters the picture. Sin is broken relationship, first with God, then with one another, and of course with the rest of the created order. So instead of work being a joyful derivative good, a joyful good that we experience under the umbrella of a bigger and better good of a relationship with God, all of the sudden we’ve got thorns and toil and sweat and ultimately death.

Our relationship with work is way more complicated because our relationship with God is broken and as a consequence all of our relationships are messed up, including how we relate to the tasks that we’ve been given to do.

And so we’re confused. We don’t understand that work is good but it’s a derivative good.

And what happens with our broken relationship with work is that for many of us, myself included here, work becomes a place where we find our identity. It becomes our place where we try to find life. I gave you a definition of what work IS supposed to be earlier, here’s what work or your GPA or your major or your future career is NOT intended to do.

Your work/GPA/major/career is NOT intended to:

give you ultimate life

give you meaning

give you purpose

give you your identity

become your name

be the thing that defines you

be the thing that validates your existence or makes you a worthwhile human being.

But our world doesn’t know any better, and many of us get so wrapped up in our work or GPA’s or resumes or achievement . And so we become obsessed with doing as the thing that validates us, makes us important or significant in the world.

And here at UNC, we’ve even invented our own name for all of this: The Carolina way

Basically “the Carolina way” is a way of nicely saying that your significance as a human being is primarily wrapped up in how much you do: “The Carolina Way” runs on and is fueled by anxiety and grasping and ambition and fear, but the Scriptures say that life lived in step with God is fueled by faith, hope, and love.

Because here’s the deal: ultimately you cannot serve both Jesus and the Carolina Way.If you refuse to take up your cross and follow Jesus into both faithful work and faithful rest, the Carolina Way will gladly take your life and give you nothing in exchange and to draw from a warning from Jesus: you just might gain the whole world and forfeit your soul.

Work and Rest

A couple weeks ago I gave a talk at large group entitled "Why We Rest." My goal was to try to encourage over-caffeinated UNC students to slow down and consider resting as a serious spiritual discipline.

Once I started working on the talk, I realized that not getting rest was only a small part of the problem. If we have a distorted view of work then it will be impossible for us to rest.

So I started by talking about work and then moved to rest. It was one of my classic two-talks-for-the-price-of-one moments. I've continued to think about work and rest since then, so I thought I'd share some of that talk here with my lovely blogger audience:

First, hear this: work is good

In the Biblical story of creation and Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve are created and before anything bad happens, before they eat the forbidden fruit, they are told to work –to work the garden, to eat the fruit and enjoy the place where God has put them.

Work is a good thing. But it is only a good thing in the right context. I’m going to propose a working definition of work for our purposes tonight.

Work: to co-operate with God in using our gifts and abilities to tend to the world he has given us in order to provide for our own needs, bless those around us, and bring forth beauty and life, to the glory of God the Creator.

Okay, so the point of this definition is that work is intended to bless us and those around us as a derivative good. Work is a derivative good, a secondary good.

It can only bless us under the under the umbrella and in its proper place of this co-operative relationship with God in order to point back to the power and goodness of him.

Focus

July 31st in campus-ministry world means one thing: total chaos is about to descend on my hitherto summer-time feel of a placid and settled life.

My days recently are full of e-mails and details and planning and imagining and trying to remember to pray as I do all of it. It's all about multi-tasking and juggling and keeping plates spinning and trying real hard to not let things drop.

Today, in the midst of all of that, I blocked off the whole day to re-work my chapter that I'm contributing to the new Small Group Leader's Handbook that should be out by Christmas, 2009. My re-write isn't due for a couple more weeks but I know that once things get started on campus my life will be campus events and fighting to keep family time carved out. Not much room for hand-wringing over verb tenses.

There's a funny thing that happened as I approached today: I was really dreading it. When I'm in multi-tasker mode, the thought of slowing down to actually focus on any one thing for longer than 30 seconds feels really hard.

But a funny thing happened as I sat down and went to work. I really, really enjoyed it. What a tremendous thing to actually sit down and focus on one thing for longer than 30 seconds!

I wonder if there's some broader application to how we think in a high-speed world and how we are teaching students to think in a multi-tasking, multi-media world. The long, hard work of thinking deeply about anything is not something that seems to be valued. Or maybe I'm just hanging out in all the wrong circles.