Rescued from Compulsive Jaywalking

So if this whole thing started with a celebration, and we're invited to be a people of celebration, what is it, exactly, that we're celebrating?

Here a passage from George MacDonald that I read just the other day might be of service: "Jesus did not just die to save us from the punishment of our sins; he died to saves us from our sins"--that is, he died to re-orient our nature away from sin and towards life.

In other words, Jesus didn't just save us from having to pay the fine for our jaywalking. He actually works in our hearts so that our compulsion to jaywalk is no longer reigning over us, causing us to put ourselves and others in danger.

The old church fathers often talked about how we have been delivered from these enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil. We barely (if at all) believe the last one exists; we'd much rather coddle our flesh than conquer it; and the world seems to have a lot of nice things going for it, thank you very much, why talk so harshly about it?

Clearly we Christians can 'overdo' the propensity to identify our enemies. The results of over-eager condemnation have been well-documented. What has been far less well documented has been the consequences of pretending those enemies do not exist.

To live a life where sin (and the result of sin, which is death) no longer reigns--that's something worth celebrating. Anything less, and we are far, far too easily pleased.

Learning to Celebrate Good Times (C'mon!)

So suffering stinks. But here's what it does, at least for some of us who call ourselves Christians--it pushes us to God. Whether we're asking questions about his absence or pressing into his strength for help, suffering and hardship often brings us to God.

Success, on the other hand, seldom has that effect. For many of us, just like the Israelites in the Old Testament, once we enter into the promised land, get that job, get to a place of relative ease or blessing or comfort, we can drift away.

Given that God is most interested in who we're becoming than what we're doing, more interested in our connection with him than in keeping us comfortable, if suffering is the only way we turn to God, we can expect plenty of suffering in our lives.

Celebration, with God, in his presence, is a crucial spiritual discipline. And one that very few of us do very well.

All of this is rather ironic given that this whole Christianity thing started with a celebration: "Jesus is risen!" It was a party that started this thing. Not a new code of ethics. Not more rules. Not lame meetings. A party.

We haven't always remembered that. I haven't always remembered that.

If you're one of those kind folks who isn't a Christian who reads these posts, please forgive us--forgive me. And if you're one of my students or a former student and you've been around me when I've forgotten this whole Christianity thing is actually just one big celebration of Jesus death, resurrection, and the new life we are offered in Christ, please forgive me.

Those of us in Christ must learn how to celebrate--with God. That doesn't automatically mean it's not fun--alas, that we think that! It actually means that it's good, right, as it should be--and it means a celebration that doesn't ever have to end. Endless joy. That's the promise.

So to quote the great theologians Kool and the Gang, bring your good times, and your laughter too. Let's celebrate! It's alright.

Baseball v. Football

Try as I might, I can't really respect baseball all that much. It's quaint, cute. And the games finally get interesting around Halloween. But mostly it's a lot of standing around. There are some magnificent moments but it takes a heck of a long time to get there.

I can't help but remember one Atlanta Brave interviewed about ten years ago who said that after baseball season was over and he was in shape he could dunk a basketball.

Seriously.

Football kicks baseball's butt twice daily and once extra recreationally on the weekends.

As college football cranks up into mid-season form and the NFL is also running full-steam ahead, I'm just not sure I'm all that interested in watching the Yankees make yet another World Series run. As fun as it might be to root against the evil empire. given my limited recreation time (got to save it for important stuff like blogging, you know) I'd much, much, much rather watch a game where interesting stuff actually happens before hour number three of the game.

Quantity Time meets Quality Time, Family Life meets the Spiritual Life

One night over dinner last night, our family had one of those magical meals together. Kelly had taken the kids to the farm that day and they were bubbling over with excitement to tell me all about it.

We weren't rushed or harried. It was just us. Together. Enjoying a leisurely meal together and enjoying one another. We laughed a lot. The best parts of each of us was on display for all of us to enjoy. I was reminded not just that I love these little people and my wife, but that I genuinely like them.

It was one of those nights that you wish you could bottle up, take with you, for the stretches when it seems like all you do is correct and discipline and manage and rush around.

Early in our marriage while we lived in Richmond, Kelly and I were fortunate to have some tremendous friends, John and Sara. They were a couple years ahead of us in the marriage department and when they had their son, Mac, we got to learn a good many pre-lessons about parenting.

One night I was commenting about how involved John was in Mac's life. He was telling me about a guy from his office who was talking about how he didn't get much time with his kid, but what he did get was quality time.

"My response to that," John said, " was how do you know?"

It seems that the only way to get quality time is to get quantity time. Last week's magical dinner wasn't planned. It wasn't guaranteed. It just happened. And apart from many, many other nights around the dinner table, some terrible and most just average, we don't have that night.

What is true at home is also true for the spiritual life.

To judge prayer, time in Scripture, time in worship, or church on one experience or to try to pick or create only the "quality" experiences is bound to end up in consumerist failure. The only way we get quality time is by investing quantity time.

And since you can only do this in so many areas of life, the question sits: what, if anything, will you give your quantity time to?

Answering Ehrman's Unanswered Objections 2: Suffering, Free Will, and the After-Life

Dr. Ehrman's second un-answered objection last Wednesday went something like this.

Christians mostly claim that suffering is the result of free will, choices that humans make to inflict pain on one another--precisely the line of reasoning Dinesh D'Souza took. But most Christians believe that they won't be robots in the after life--that there will be some degree of free will in the after life while at the same time holding that there won't be any suffering.

So why is it necessary for suffering to be true in the here in order for us to have free will while it's not necessary for suffering and free will to be coterminous in the afterlife?

In the Christian story, there were only three people ever who had genuine "free will:" Adam, Eve, and Jesus. The rest of us are all handicapped to some degree by the sin nature, passed onto us by the failure of Adam and Eve.

Jesus, on the other hand, lives in a completely different way. He only does "what I see my Father doing."

Every moment of every day, Jesus does what all of us should and would do if we had any clear sense about us: he submits his will to his Fathers will. This is what Christians mean when we say that he was sinless. He never went against the will of his Father.

To borrow from George MacDonald, the will, like the self, has been given to us that we might have something to offer back to our Father. We're like a child given money from our mother to purchase her birthday present. We have been given what we call "self" and "our will" in order that we might give it back to our Father as a present that he genuinely takes delight in.

Only Jesus has ever done this perfectly in this life. But as he is, so shall we be one day. One day, his Spirit will be fully at work in our hearts. We will have the full renovation of our hearts, the promised heart of flesh in place of the heart of stone.

And so in the new heavens and the new earth, we will do what Jesus did--in his infinite freedom he infinitely and freely and gladly submitted his will to his Father's will. We, too, one day, will offer back to our Father the gift he has given us with gladness and joy.

Put another way, we will finally live fully fulfilled lives. We will finally be free of our suicidal tendencies.

In the end, as C.S. Lewis says (riffing off of George MacDonald, as he is often wont to do), there will be two kinds of people. Those who say to God "thy will be done" and those to whom God says "thy will be done."

Hell will be populated by those bent on self-rule forever and ever.

And the new heaven and new earth will be this never-ending, never ceasing joyful community of resurrected bodies who are forever offering up "their wills" to the fully good One. And in return they will receive ever-increasing joy. It shall be a glorious reversal of the Great and Terrible Exchange that went down many thousand years ago in the Garden of Eden.

And no one will ever regret the giving over of our borrowed wills...not for one second.

Answering Ehrman's Objections Part 1: Is God an Interventionist?

Last Wednesday UNC's most famous agnostic Dr. Bart Ehrman posed two very important questions that did not get addressed during his debate with Dinesh D'Souza on the question of the Christian God and suffering.

First, when Ehrman took inventory of the suffering around the world, it seemed that God did not act. The God of the Bible, it seemed, DID act--to free the Israelites from the Egyptians, for example. So how could it be that the God of the Bible existed when so much pain exists and so many prayers for rescue go un-answered?

Ehrman's answer: he doesn't. If there is a God, he/she/it is far off and un-involved in this world.

And secondly, if the answer the problem of suffering is human choice (the classic "free will" defense offered by Christians and by D'Souza that night) is it not possible that God could have created a world where free will existed while suffering does not? In heaven, for example, Christians seem to believe that somehow freedom will exist while suffering will not. Is it necessary to have suffering to have free will?

Here's my shots at answering the first of these really good, really thoughtful objections posed by Dr. Ehrman.

The first question: God intervenes in the Bible, but there's no evidence of such intervention today, ergo there is no God like that. This seems to me to take the extraordinary works of God and mistake them for normative workings of God.

The OT story of the Israelites being freed from Egypt? That happens after 430 years. That's right: 430 years. That's thousands of prayers later, God acts. If you took a snapshot at any given moment, it certainly did not appear that God was particularly interventionist.

The Bible is indeed full of miraculous and wonderful saving, very interventionist, acts of God. And those are recorded precisely because they were miraculous, they were outside the normal workings of physics and nature and politics and military.

But these are recorded in order that the character of God might be made known, not to establish a normal operating procedure for how God will behave in every circumstance. God does act, in his timing, in his way. And when he does act, there is no force or army or kingdom or natural cause that can stand against him. That's what we learn from his interventions in the Scriptures.

And in regard to today--who knows how much suffering actually is relieved by God's working?

There are literally millions of testimonies, stories, all over the world of this same God working to do miraculous things to save people from all sorts of suffering. Not every time. But sometimes. Certainly some of those stories are bogus, and most are simply un-prove-able...just like in the Bible.

But to the woman or man of faith, with eyes to see and ears to hear, the stories bear a striking family resemblance, the flair and flavor of the same Artist at work.

This doesn't answer the question of why God chooses to intervene sometimes and not at other times. But let's not paint the false picture of a God who moves at the slightest whim of people in the Scriptures who has suddenly disappeared today.

Suffering Part 3: The Final Redemption

So our lives are like a thread. There will be colors that we wish weren't in there. There will be knots that just don't seem to get worked out. Pain and suffering will be a part of everyone's experiences, to greater or lesser degrees.

As the New Testament authors wrestled with the realities of suffering--Jesus' suffering and their own experiences of suffering as they followed Jesus--they came to one conclusion: all our experiences of suffering must serve and bless us, either in this life or the next.

When we're in the midst of it, suffering and pain can feel like they rule over us--like a thick blanket we can't get out from underneath. But if Jesus did indeed conquer the grave, he has the last word on his people, not their pain, not their suffering.

And so the invitation rings out throughout the New Testament: tie the thread of your life to the finished work of Jesus Christ.

See, we're going to tie the threads of our lives to something. We'll look to tie the threads of our lives to some sort of 'driver,' some sort of energy or goal to pull us along.

On campus, it's often GPA, our talents, pre-med/pharm/law/whatever. Many of us look to other people or a boyfriend or girlfriend, our work/career paths, the next party, sexual experience, our families, whatever.

But the problem is that none of those have the power to redeem our suffering. None of those can promise to gather up the dis-colored and knotted up parts of the thread and make them whole and beautiful and good. All of those drivers are stuck in the same system that we are.

Only in Jesus Christ are we promised that all shall be well.

Only in Jesus Christ is there power to take all the ugly, broken, painful parts of our lives and make them bless us, serve us, make them to be a part of our beauty and character and goodness and joy. He stands outside of time, outside of the system as Lord over the system, to mend all those who are willing to submit to his offer of grace.

There is one driver that we can tie the threads of our lives to that gather up all our pain and make it part of our beauty--both in this life and/or in the next.

The invitation is to recklessly and repeatedly tie our stories to this Great Story, the conquering of sin and death and pain, and the promised gift that one day, he will make all things new.

Suffering With My Thoughts on Suffering, Part 2

So suffering is our problem. But God makes it his.

The Christian story is of a God who takes on flesh. He wades into our pain, becomes a man. He lives for 33 years. He gets hungry, cold, tired. People talk about him behind his back.

Ultimately his friends betray him, abandon him. He is executed in one of the most painful ways ever invented by human beings. One Biblical tradition says that he descended into hell. Three days later, he is raised again.

God comes in the flesh to take on all our suffering, all our pain, all our sin and brokenness. And he takes it on himself, coming all the way down, and comes all the way back up, to conquer it once and for all.

Suffering and death no longer have the last word on humanity. God does. Jesus does. Suffering doesn't have to define us any longer. Hope can. Hope wins.

We think (and here I'm flat-out stealing from my systematic theology prof) that we know suffering because we experience the pain of it. And from that experience of suffering, we question God's existence and his character.

But actually, quite the opposite is true. We don't know about suffering. Where it comes from, why it exists, how it came to be. We know it stinks, we feel its effects, but we don't know how much we are or aren't allowed to experience in God's providence. We don't know if things could be better or worse. We don't know much about suffering at all, actually.

In the Christian story, we are invited to be agnostic about suffering. And we are invited to be confident in the character and love of God.

The Christian story invites us to boldly yet humbly hold onto the fact that we do know God. We know God and his character because he has made it known in Jesus Christ. God who takes on all our pain, all our shame, all our brokenness and dies for you and for me. That's the character and nature of God. He has made himself known.

And the invitation to all of us is to tie our stories with God's story. We are invited to have all our pain, all our suffering ultimately and finally redeemed--in this life, and/or in the next.

Suffering With My Thoughts on Suffering, Part 1

Last night on campus, the UNC Christian Apologetics Club hosted a debate on the problem of suffering between UNC's own Bart Ehrman and Dinesh D'Souza, a Christian who's written lots of books and was a part of the Reagan administration.

Since I wasn't invited to be a part of the platform (apparently you had to have your own Wiki page) I figured I'd spout off here to my little blog/Facebook family.

First, in spite of what many well-intentioned Christians try to say, the Christian story doesn't give an answer to where suffering comes from. Before creation, in God's "history," somehow something that wasn't good or loving was introduced.

We get hints that angels rebelled, but what is rebellion? How did that concept come to be when there was just God and angels hanging out?

What we get in the Scriptures is the story that picks up when God decides to create. And what we get is a good God who creates a good creation and puts good people who bear his image in this idyllic location.

And God says to them--go and enjoy! Play, explore, enjoy one another, enjoy me, have lots of sex, do whatever you want and enjoy all of this creation. Just this one thing, this one tree in all of this vast paradise that you need to avoid. Eat of that tree, you'll die.

Of course, that's what happens. And so suffering results. Five thousand years of human history tell our story of suffering and pain and brokenness. Of people suffering and inflicting suffering on one another.

And so suffering, contrary to at least one opinion, is not God's problem. It is emphatically our problem. Humans suffer. God does not. We introduced suffering into a good creation. And we bear the scars and experience the consequences.

Suffering is our problem, not God's. Unless God chooses to enter into the situation, we are stuck in suffering without hope for redemption.

But the Christian story is this: when we were dead in our suffering, God did not leave us there. He rolls up his sleeves, and enters into our junk. God chooses to make our problem his problem. He enters into our suffering, takes it on himself, and he conquers and redeems it.

That's the good news. That's the God of the Christian story.

Nouns, Verbs, Sobriety, and Finding Out Who I Am

So the question I got last week from an older, wiser man, seemed simple: who are you? But I found it frustratingly difficult to answer. A week later, I still do.

I wonder if at 35 I should have a more concrete answer. And some responses come to mind pretty quickly, but I think that there are some easy ways to go wrong here.

For example, who I am is not what I do. What I do is a title, a job, it's the good work that the "me" performs and it's what I've been called to. But "campus minister" is, in this particular instance, functioning more like an adjective than a noun.

I apologize to you non-English majors who got lost in that sentence, stick with me.

This morning I was trying to answer the question. It won't just go away: who are you? And I came across this from Paul in his letter to the Romans that helped me a bit:

Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment... (Romans 12:3)

It seems that humility is simply seeing yourself rightly. It's not thinking of yourself more highly (or more lowly) than you ought. It's dealing with the realities of who we are, not the shadows, smoke and mirrors and play-acting that we so often (or maybe I should say that I so often) participate in.

We think we know ourselves and our stories and that we don't know or understand God. But the reality is, we do not know ourselves nor do we fully understand God. There is mystery to both.

Only God fully knows and understands us. And so the pathway to self-understanding starts outside ourselves, as we delve into the only true mirror that is God, our source, the one who made us and redeems us and sees us fully as we truly are. And as I look to Jesus, I'm starting to catch glimpses and outlines of who I really am.

One day, there's a promise that I'll get a new name, a name on a white stone known only to me and my good Father. That's who I truly am. That's who I'm becoming, by his grace. It's the name that when I receive it my heart will burst with joy and overflow with thanksgiving and be silenced and stilled with awe-struck tears: yes, that is who I am. You know me. You love me. Thank you.

In the mean time, I keep asking, seeking, trying to remain rooted in sober judgment. I am looking towards the one day when I will press through all these adjectives and come out on the other side into the presence of that One Great Noun who will show me who I truly am and who will once and for all give me my true name.

Boys Catching Up with Girls (Thanks to Cell Phones)

When our oldest son, Davis, was still en utero, we were looking forward to finding out the gender. He was the first grandkid on three sides, so grandparents were poised with credit cards, clamoring to know: pink or blue?

In the weeks leading up to the ultra-sound, I started asking friends with kids: "which one do we want? boy or girl?"

Everyone who had little kids said I wanted a girl. They talk sooner, they potty-train quicker, they're often just easier to manage.

Everyone who had teenagers said I wanted a boy. Hormones, hormones, and more hormones.

My theory has been, though, that girls come back to win as adults. They tend to maintain stronger connection with the parents. But I'm starting to wonder if the explosion of cell phone use in the past ten to fifteen years has changed all that.

When I went off to college, I didn't have a cell phone--no one did. I was always out and I wasn't the greatest at calling home. So my communication pattern settled into a call back home every couple of weeks, maybe once a month.

This has continued into adulthood.

Enter, the cell phone meets the college student experience. And with the cell phone, the advent of the 'helicopter parent.'

The helicopter parent is a fairly recent phenomena whereby the parents are way more involved in daily, sometimes hourly decisions that until the advent of the cell phone were the sole responsibility of the student. They perpetually hover over their adult child, often talking two to five times a day via the cell phone. Hence, helicopter parent.

And so I wonder, going back to my original question, if the disparity between boys and girls in terms of connection and contact with the parents has been shrunk down due to cell phone use. Plenty of my guy students talk to their parents two times a week or more.

We ended up with one boy and two girls. We'll see how it all works out for us. In the mean time, we might need to get on that family cell phone plan. Kelly and I need to practice our hovering.

Heeding the Words of my Wife

Over the weekend I made a passing comment to my wife and another regular Piebald Life/Facebook Note reader that I'd gotten fewer comments recently.

Their rather direct and honest answer: because I was posting from talks I was giving rather than more personal reflections.

So, acting on this information, here's something that's been rolling around in my head from last week.

I was meeting with an older, wiser man over lunch last week and he was encouraging me to do some life and career inventory. He encouraged me to ask a couple of 'hook' questions, among them the very basic question: "who am I?" That one was harder to answer on the spot than I thought it would be.

But the thing that has stuck with me was his encouragement to ask my wife Kelly to answer these questions along with me.

"Get her to write down her answers," he said, "most guys in their first ten to fifteen years of marriage haven't figured out how to listen to their wives yet."

Ouch. Intuitively, I knew that to be true. Both in my own personal experience and in knowing some of my friends marriages, us guys have a hard time really hearing our wives.

"Now granted," he continued, "some of that is because their wives haven't found their voices yet."

Also true. And it makes me wonder about the inter-relationship between us husbands learning to listen, to encourage, to "call forth" our wives voices.

Of course, there's exceptions to everything. Plenty of you wives have plenty of voice, thank you very much. And some men that I know do an excellent job genuinely hearing their wives.

But for many of us, there's a growth curve here in our marriages. I wonder how much is lost in terms of quality of relating and healthy processes due to all these misses...in my own marriage over the past eleven years and in the marriages of folks around me.

But hey, I changed my post for today! Look at me! I'm listening!

Saving the Whales, Leading a Freaking Bible Study, Finding Time for What Matters

So for the past six or seven weeks on campus, each large group meeting we've been casting vision for what we think a Christ-Centered Community looks like.

We've talked about a community of grace and forgiveness, a community of faith, a community of hope, and a community of love. And last week, after four weeks of positive vision, we talked about what we don't want to be.

And last week I got a chance to speak into a sickness at UNC: the sickness of busy-ness. Student life at UNC presses students to do so much. As an InterVarsity community, we long to go against that grain. We are not going to be too busy for significant relationships.

The problem is that my students got to UNC by being over-achieving, stressed-out high schoolers. Then they come to UNC. And of course, it doesn't get any better because now they're surrounded by 17,000 other over-achieving, stressed-out people.

One startling realization for many freshmen: if you skim the top 12% off of every high school and put them in the same context, not everyone's going to be in the top 12% any more.

This can either bless them with the realization of their limits, or it can drive them to an even greater degree of frenetic activity. Alas, many choose the latter path: pre-med/pharmacy/nursing/business/law, must-have a 3.9 GPA, must save some whales, tutor some kids, keep some sort of social life....and for the Christian kids, add on leading a freaking Bible study to top it all off.

This, of course, is simply a mirror-reflection of our frenetic culture. My students just have more free-time to cram more stuff into their lives because they're not working in one place from 8-6.

But here's the deal: nobody had more significant work to do than Jesus. Nobody. And he made the time and space for significant relationships.

So if the volunteering/Bible study leading/major path/work habits of your life mean that you do not have time for significant relationships, then it is almost guaranteed that you are not doing what God would have you to do. You are over-committed and out of step with the Spirit. If Jesus had time given his responsibilities and the nature of his calling, so must we.

That's not just a word for my students, is it? It's been ringing my own ears for most of the past week...

The Blankie, The Invitation, and Dropping Cumbersome Nets

One of the things about having little kids: when you're leaving to go somewhere, they always want to take their most-recently-used stuff with them. The blankie, the matchbox car, the Thomas trains, the recently strung together bead necklace...whatever.

This weekend, I traveled with 115 students to New Student Retreat. It was awesome. And as I spoke out of an old favorite passage, I was reminded of the difficulty of leaving stuff behind.

"Come follow me," Jesus said, "and I will teach you to fish for people."

This is how Jesus starts his relationship with four guys who will end up being his go-to church-starter, Bible-writing guys. An odd invitation, if you think about it--not why most of us Jesus-followers decided to follow him.

"And immediately they dropped their nets and followed him." A crazy, over-the-top response.

The disciples leave everything that they've known, their security blanket, their family business, all of it. If it would have been me, I would have tried to bring the nets with me. It's what I've always known, it's what's expected of me by my family, and it could be something to fall back on should this whole Jesus thing not work out.

But they have to leave the nets. Jesus is going to lead them through deserts and forests and cities and those nets would have only tripped them up. They have to leave the nets, there is nothing left in that for them.

Most of us who are Christians follow Jesus with one foot in another door of some sort. Most of us are walking around, trying to follow Jesus, with our hands full of another option, a personal back door, something that we're not willing to let go of, forget about, put aside in order to follow fully.

And it shows.

You know what happens if those guys don't drop their nets and follow Jesus? Absolutely nothing. Jesus still starts his church. They live their lives in relative ease and die anonymous fishermen. Instead, I'm blogging about them 2,000 years later.

There's no limit to what God can do with someone who is willing to drop their nets and follow him. I'm freshly convicted and emboldened coming off the weekend to do just that.

Now if only we can get the kids to buy-in, it'll make going places a whole lot simpler...

F.A. Part 2: Freedom from Comparison and Competition

When I was on staff with IV at VCU, there was a guy on staff at another school in Eastern Virginia who was ridiculously gifted: Kevin. Kevin went to a school where there was no IV chapter. Within four years, it had grown to like 300.

We'd meet as a staff team every couple of months. And sometimes it was hard for me to get overly-excited about what God was doing through Kevin. I felt jealous, threatened, insecure.

And eventually, God had to hold up the mirror and press me: either I could celebrate what God was doing through Kevin or I could kick against the goads and live in jealousy and insecurity. The choice was mine, but the invitation was to repent. One choice would bless me, the other would lead to bitterness and smallness of heart.

Eventually, I repented, but it still wasn't always easy to celebrate what God was doing through him...even when I clearly saw God doing good stuff through me as well.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a couple problems.

Problem number one is that most of us are functional atheists. That is, we live most of our lives as if there were no God, as if we had no good Father who watches over us and provides for us and who loves us.

Problem number two is that our identity then becomes driven by what we can do or produce. Our culture is a performance-based culture. So our identity becomes driven by how well we perform.

And the invitation in Christ is to be free of comparison and competition. Because comparison and competition is always a lose-lose deal. Either we compare and come out looking better, which leads to pride. Or we compare and come out looking worse, which leads to envy and jealousy and self-contempt.

Neither of these gives us life. In the operating system of comparison and competition, every new person we meet is a potential threat to our very sense of self. That doesn't exactly set us up for a lifestyle of serving one another, humility, and genuine love and trust towards one another.

In Christ, we are invited to a life that lives larger than the lose-lose operating system of comparison and competition. In Christ, I am deeply loved by my Father, apart from my performance.

And that frees me up to celebrate and be glad in others as well as to be appropriately glad in the works of my own hands done in cooperation with God's Spirit. There will always be people better than me at everything. My identity isn't wrapped up in having to be better than everyone else. I can just be me. That'd be a novel way to live.

Can you imagine how much more freedom we'd experience if we didn't live a life fraught with comparison and competition and all the ill-fruits that bears?

Freedom from Functional Atheism

Just got home tonight from our Thursday night large group. I was the speaker understudy for a sick co-worker (get better soon, Jfarm!) and the topic was "Pitfalls of Christian Community." The basic idea: what are we NOT going to be about as an InterVarsity chapter?

I proposed that there was one core pitfall that all Christians wrestle from whence springs all the other pitfalls of Christian community: functional atheism.

A working definition of functional atheism: to proclaim on a Sunday morning (or Thursday night) that Jesus is Lord and that he is good and that he is intimately involved in the world and in all the details of our lives...and then to live the other days of the week as if none of that were true.

Us Christians do this all the time. We sing true and powerful songs about God's goodness and power. We nod our heads in agreement as we hear truth proclaimed that he loves us.

And then we walk out the door and live as if it were all up to us, as if there were no God and we have to do what we have to do to get by, to survive and advance, to scratch and claw our way through life.

We live our lives as functional atheists: professing one thing in a "religious" context and then living completely differently the other six days and 23 hours of our lives.

And tonight as we worked through the "nots" from 1 Corinthians 13 (love does not envy, does not boast, is not proud, is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not easily angered, keeps no record of wrongs) I was in essence trying to call us to put functional atheism behind us.

The Christian life is to be lived with Jesus as Lord. One of my hopes for my students when they graduate is that they'll understand something of what it means for the gospel to shape life in real-time, with real-life situations: angry at a co-worker, tempted to hit porn, an argument with your spouse, raising kids, coaching soccer, angling for a promotion.

Jesus is Lord over all those situations. Part of our work and the work of the Holy Spirit, is to help us to live into that reality in all aspects of our lives.

And if we did that--if we actually repented of our functional atheism and lived into the power of Jesus' Lordship in all aspects of our lives--it would radically and relentlessly and gloriously set us free.

The Durham PD, The Christmas Tree, and Law Push-Back

On a street that serves as a common cut-through between two main drags in our neighborhood, the cops often set up one of those "this is your speed" displays. You know, one of those contraptions with the speed limit sign and a neon display telling you how fast you're actually going.

The one they set up down the street is pretty sweet. If you're speeding a little bit, it flashes your speed back at you. If you're more than five over the limit, lights flash and pop and sparkle.

It's probably an indicator of how broken I am, but I sincerely delight in making that thing light up like a Christmas tree every time I blow past it. There's something about having the law right in front of me that makes me want to break it even more.

This is something of what Paul is trying to argue as one part of his master symphony that is the New Testament book of Romans. The law (i.e. the Ten Commandments and all that accompanies) is a good thing, but when it meets with messed up people, it arouses rebellion rather than compliance.

So throughout the Old Testament, the Jewish people who have the law are both blessed by it and struggle to actually walk in it...just like any of us would have done.

That leaves us with a good law, people who are still completely messed up, and an extremely significant need for some other way for all that's gone wrong to be made right again.

Enter Jesus. Enter the Holy Spirit who not only speaks the law back to us but actually softens our hearts so that rather than push-back against the law, we can walk in it, delight in it.

Certainly this is a process. God's still teaching me what it means to delight in his law rather than live in my natural state and reject it.

And I probably need to work through my issues with the Durham P.D. and their speed-informing device down the road...but I love celebrating Christmas in September.

Emerson Meets Worship Meets Soy Milk

In response to yesterday's post, my good friend and fellow Fight Club member Ben Bowman emailed me this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The gods we worship write their names on our faces, be sure of that.
And we will worship something - have no doubt of that either.
We may think that our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of the heart -
but that will out.
That which dominates our imagination and our thoughts will determine our life and character.
Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we are worshipping,
for what we are worshiping we are becoming.

We are hard-wired to worship. It is not a question of if we'll worship, but where and what. We can route our worship this way or that, but we cannot turn it off.

Emerson here echoes the Psalmist who writes about the worship of idols made of wood and stone: all who worship them will become like them--that is, dumb, mute, foolish.

Not only must we worship, we must inevitably become like that which we worship.

And so the question for all of us is one of the most important ones we can ever grapple with: what am I worshiping today? Success? Money? Security? Escape? People? Power? Applause? To be left alone? All this fights for our religious affections and worship.

But this created necessity to worship must have an appropriate outlet. We must breathe--this tells us that we were created for oxygen. We must eat--this tells us that we were created for food. To attempt to breathe soy milk would be deadly. To try to meet our hunger for food with a meal of rubber shoe soles would not be the appropriate response to the drive planted within us.

And so we were made to worship God. And to worship other things necessarily leaves us hungry, never satisfied, like drinking salt water.

What are we worshiping today? What are we becoming as a result? It will, indeed, write its name on our faces and shape our souls.

Child Pornography and Sunday Morning Worship

Yesterday morning I was reading a disturbing front-page story about a man who got tangled up in the underworld of child pornography.

His story was part disturbing, part tragic: sexually molested as a child, discovering his dad's porn magazine a few years after that, drugs and alcohol addictions conquered, sexual addictions that remained un-conquered and that eventually over-ran his life. And now he's awaiting sentencing, minimum of five years.

A separate story ran next to it about how the internet has fueled the exponential growth of the child pornography industry over the past ten years.

Yesterday was Sunday. So of course I'm reading this as we're getting ready to go to church. And a part of me wondered: what's the point of sitting in a room of beautiful (and not-so-beautiful) people and singing songs and listening to someone talk about a good God when messed up stuff like this is going on in the world?

I went to church smarting. I was angry at the crap in the world and wondering what good it did to go to church in the midst of it all.

And then I got there. And then I noticed the words we were singing, the truths that we were being taught. I took the bread and the wine. And I remembered what good it all did.

Everyone worships something. The man in the article had his life built around sexual addiction that fed a disfigured industry that led to a disfigured soul and the exploitation of kids. That's the power of worship, mis-directed: lives not just destroyed but mangled in all directions.

And so I must be there on Sunday mornings. I must be reminded to worship rightly because my culture invites me to worship wrongly--and then they wonder what happened when it careens out of control.

Child pornography happens because right worship doesn't. We exist to worship, and so we will--one way, one thing, or another. And so I must worship God. And I have come to believe that he has made himself known in Jesus in a uniquely historical way.

And so I worship this God, so that I might not fall into my own version of a mangled and disfigured life with consequences in every direction. And I call others to do so as well, that they, too, might worship rightly and avoid the destruction that inevitably follows a life of mis-directed worship.

Child pornography needs Sunday morning's worship. To be sure it's not a magic potion, not a cure-all--there's all kinds of broken, messy, mis-directed worshipers gathered on any given Sunday morning in any given church.

To worship on Sunday morning does not guarantee that right worship will happen. But to not worship on Sunday morning, almost certainly guarantees that it will not.

Ephipanies at the Bath Tub

Tonight, at the end of a very good but very full day, at the end of a very good but very full week, I was giving my three kids a bath.

Some nights bath time is full of joy and off-key singing: The Wheels on the Bus, The Itsy-Bitsy Spider, the ABC's, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, all the hits.

But tonight as I soaped the kids down I found myself miles away in my head. I was thinking about work. I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking about--all kinds of things, probably. But I realized in the midst of bath time that I was completely checked out.

Davis just started kindergarten this week--his first day of school. We survived and he's still alive, five years later.

Zoe had her first soccer practice last week. She told us she was ready, we thought she'd end up picking daisy's in the outfield. Instead, she was totally dialed in, dribbled and shot like a champ, and outlasted and blew by all the boys on the team.

Emma Kate just turned two and is reciting books back to us. She'll be reading War and Peace to me by Christmas.

Five, three, and two. Davis, Zoe, and Emma Kate. This only happens once.

I love my work. And I believe it matters. I wouldn't be doing fourteen years later (that's fourteen years of fund raising) if I didn't believe in and love what I do.

But my kids matter more--not to mention my wife, who deserves my fullest attentions and affections. I'll forget by tomorrow what I was thinking about tonight while the kids were in the tub. These little ones, they'll still be here. I want to be fully present to the people in my life who matter the most.

So I'm looking forward to unplugging for a couple days over the weekend and enjoying my wife and kids. Tomorrow's the first day of soccer games for both Davis and Zoe this fall--I'm coaching or assistant coaching for both their teams.

I can't wait to watch Zoe blow by those boys.