Grab-Bag: Monster Trucks, Coaching & Silly Humanism, & Confirming My Man-Crush

A great weekend and some grab-bag thoughts to get us started this week.

*The State Fair is second in our house only to Christmas in terms of excitement-wattage for the kids. And to be honest, Kelly and I dig it, too. In part because it's so fun to watch them get so amped up for it.

Of course, given that it's the State Fair, there's lots of country involved. For us suburban-types, it can be a mixture of entertaining and sometimes disorienting.

Perhaps the most randomly entertaining portion of the day was a p.a. announcement for the monster truck pull. It concluded with one of the more memorable wrap-ups in the history of monster truck advertisements: "We'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge."

*An A+ sermon this weekend from Dave Ward, pastor for community life at Chapel Hill Bible Church. If you're at all in a season of trying to make a decision or discern God's will, this sermon is a must-listen. Check it out here.

*If anyone's watching (and I'm not sure that anyone is) the Tar Heels have won some football games and have looked pretty good doing it. I'm just sayin...

*Alternating between spiritual-formation-type book management/leadership type books. Right now I'm reading Coaching for Performance by Sir John Whitmore.

If you're a manager at any level, this book will help you think about how best to come alongside folks you're leading and help them to grow in their capabilities.

Of course, it makes all the mistakes of many secular-humanist business books. It assumes all people are good and have somehow been tainted by their upbringing and culture. Who are all these basically good people who are tainting the rest of us basically good people?

*Some good Scripture over the weekend to augment my post from Friday last week on the discipline of silence as key to growing into who we truly are from Psalm 62:

⁵For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence,
for my hope is from him.
⁶He only is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall not be shaken.
⁷On God rests my salvation and my glory;
my mighty rock, my refuge is God.
⁸ Trust in him at all times, O people;
pour out your heart before him;
God is a refuge for us.

*Been struck by how many conversations about family brokenness (current marriages, family baggage, kids rebellion) been having recently. Grateful for my own parents' perseverance through plenty of ups and downs...and more aware than ever how much power I have to bless or curse my kids.

*Further confirmation of my man-crush on Malcolm Gladwell: The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted. A great discussion of the limitations of social networking to bring real change to the world.

Lady Gaga and Finding Your True Self

A friend of mine teaches at a local Christian high school. "What do you think about Lady Gaga, Mr. Jackson?" a student asked him.

Mr. Jackson is not only not particularly interested in pop-culture, he more or less abhors it. I'm not even sure if he knew who Lady Gaga was.

"What do you think," Mr. Jackson responded, pulling out the classic teacher stall-tactic.

"I think she's true to who she is," the student responded, "isn't that a good thing?"

Mr. Jackson commented later that this student had bought the whole package of the culture that skips over the part about dying to yourself in order to truly find yourself. I think most of us would prefer that route.

A year ago this time I was in the process of filling out an application for my new job as an Area Director. Being the external processor that I am, I would have naturally preferred to have been talking about it with just about everyone that I knew.

But I sensed that the Lord was calling me into a discipline that's somewhat foreign to me: the discipline of silence. I sensed that I was supposed to go against my natural grain and share my process with just a small circle of friends.

"When words are many, sin is not absent," declares the writer of Proverbs. In other words, the more you talk, the more likely you are to sin. In our culture's paradigm, this would fit in the category of "in-authentic."

In the case of last year's process, I was not expressing myself freely. I was entering into a discipline practiced by Christians throughout the centuries of shutting up rather than running my mouth. I was cultivating intimacy with the Lord by guarding something that he was leading me into.

Any healthy marriage has things that only the husband and wife share in together. The same is true in our relationship with God. As much as I harp on the importance of community here in Piebald Life land, the danger of co-dependence on people over intimacy with God is a perpetual faith-walk hazard.

We must learn to die to ourselves in order that we might live unto Christ--and therefore find our true selves. Sometimes this means that we embrace activity that is not our natural inclination--like keeping silent about a major life process for us external processors.

While millions follow Lady Gaga on Twitter (#1 most followed, at least for this week), she fumbles around and re-expresses her "true" self about every two to six weeks. Is that really life? Is that really joy? Is that really all that "authentic" after all?

There's a much better way. But it's much harder. I'll be praying that I, along with Lady Gaga, and along with you all, might have the strength of the Spirit to walk in it.

What About Prayer that Doesn't "Work?"

While all the world has been riveted to the mine rescue down in Chile, Mark Galli has some excellent reflections on the role of prayer--what about when God doesn't come to the rescue?

Here's an excerpt:

When this sort of thing happens, I feel like I'm being set up. If prayer never "worked," I could deal with it sensibly. I could just give it up. Or give up one type of prayer—intercession. Just stop praying that God would do this or that, change this or that. Prayer could just be communing with God. But when God answers prayer like this, it sets up this god-awful expectation that God gives to those who ask.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Bowling Alone Meets Grass, Starbucks, and the Trinity

In the mid-1990's Robert Putnam wrote an essay called "Bowling Alone." In the essay he argued that social-capital was declining as it pertained to typical civic organizations. Per the title, he cites that bowling has increased by 20-percent but participation in bowling leagues has declined.

Putnam cites all sorts of possible reasons: double-income families, suburban sprawl, technology, and other now-familiar evils of modern living.

But at the same time as Putnam was writing, a number of things were about to explode to counter-act these isolating tendencies. Among them, Starbucks.

What happened in the late-90's and early 2000's was the explosion of neutral social connecting and networking cites that were more accessible and more multi-use than the classic bar (think "Cheers"). You could do a business meeting at a Starbucks or meet friends there after work.

Even as various technological and social shifts were occurring to press people into isolation, our innate need to be relational re-invented itself.

Like grass that fights through a crack in the cement sidewalk, our hard-wiring for community will almost always push through any circumstances.

God is a relationship: Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

When God creates people "made in his own image" that means, in part, that we're hard-wired for relationships, too. This is expressed through everything from Starbucks (now Panera) to Facebook and Twitter to the explosion of mega-churches like Saddleback or Northpoint whose growth was driven by their commitment to small group ministries.

We've gotta' connect. We were made for it. We're made in God's image and we must express that. Because we're fallen creatures, it often comes out in unhealthy ways.

So take a look at your own impulses for community. Healthy? Muted? Co-dependent tendencies? Eeking out in funky ways? I'd encourage you to take prayerful inventory and see if it might be time for a Starbucks run or to join a small group.

Or maybe just to grab a friend and join a bowling league.

Why the God of this Scripture?

In yesterday's post I briefly referenced a student's very good question which could be summed up thusly: how can anyone know if the God of the Bible is the real God?

There are literally thousands of different religions throughout history all over the globe. All of them claim to have inside knowledge about a deity (or deities) or insight into the truth about human existence and human flourishing. Why this Scripture over and above any other? Why the Christian "take" on God over any other of the buffet of options out there?

And why choose at all given that we might like a little bit of this and a little bit of that--and given that there are certainly things in Christianity that offend our modern (or post-modern) sensibilities?

I think, like most things in Christianity, the answer to this question lies in the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus made some fairly audacious claims. Even if you were to quibble with some of the specifics of the reliability of the four accounts of Jesus' life, there's simply no doubt that he taught and did some extraordinary things.

Among the crazy things he taught in conjunction with what he did was at least some claim of representing God, acting on his behalf, and perhaps even identifying himself with God. The gospel writer John records him as saying, "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father."

And there's little doubt that he was crucified by the Roman authorities under charges that were trumped up by the Jewish religious elite.

Three days later, everyone who knew him says that he was raised from the dead. And nearly all of them died nasty, brutish deaths rather than recant that claim. And from a small Jewish splinter group led by an uneducated fisherman has come 2,000 years of church history and the most sweeping, global faith tradition the world has ever known.

And one of the guys who met the resurrected Jesus used an interesting and important word in describing Jesus' resurrection: vindication (see 1 Timothy 3). God "vindicated" him by the Spirit--that is, through the resurrection of Jesus, God declared all that Jesus said not only about himself but also the God he claimed to bear witness to, was true.

God put his seal of approval, his stamp of endorsement on the person of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus by raising him up from the dead. No other religion even claims this. Only Christianity claims that the dude who started this thing died once but isn't dead any more.

If God raised Jesus from the dead, then God has vindicated him once and for all as the true messenger sent from the true God and all of us must bow before him, his work, and his message about who God is. God himself has declared in this raising-up that this one named Jesus has represented him rightly.

If God hasn't raised Jesus from the dead, this whole thing is the largest and most colossal sham the world has ever known.

All the evidence actually points to the former. But I gladly confess to being extremely biased.

Why Seminary Students Stink and Moving Past Being the Guru

"Seminary students are horrible preachers," I once heard Tim Keller say.

"And the reason is that we all prepare sermons based on the questions in our heads that we bring to the text or the issue that we've been asked to preach on. And seminary students are spending all their time asking one another questions that nobody else cares about.

It usually takes them a couple years to de-tox from the questions they've been thinking about in seminary before they start asking the questions that the people in their congregations are actually wrestling with."

I thought about this quote from Keller last week when a staff that I'm supervising passed on a question from one of his students. This student had read an article either for a class or just randomly on the internet that was arguing that the Old Testament names for God shift dramatically after the Abram/Abraham story and therefore all the rest of the OT (and NT for that matter) was corrupt.

So the question this student had was, "are we actually worshiping God or something else when we read and respond to the God of the Bible?"

This is a classic college student question. The type of stuff that I love to talk about--and the type of question/issue that very few of you in cube world or chasing down kids has the time or interest to care about.

But the questions I'm wrestling with as an Area Director in my new position one-step removed from students are very different from this question of who Abraham's God was.

I spent all last week helping my staff wrestle with issues of funding and budget shortfalls. The economy is doing a number on most all of them--please support your local staff worker!

The questions here are much more subtle. And God is rarely articulated directly in relation to them. When we're talking about issues of fund raising and having to take time off campus to do it and whether or not take a raise that is needed, it stirs up all kinds of angst about policies and procedures and strategies for how to raise the funds required to make a live-able wage.

And I'm beginning to recognize that these types of issues, which are much more akin to the types of issues that many of you who aren't students face, require a different approach. Rather than being the guru on the hill who delights to field questions about the validity of God, I must be the one who asks the questions.

"How does God relate to this? Where is God at work here? What does it mean to trust him? What does it look like to do this work in faith, hope, and love instead of fear, guilt or anxiety? If the gospel matters, it must matter here--how might the gospel be applied to this situation?"

It takes a different type of energy and a different approach to be the one to interject the God-questions rather than to be the one who receives and processes the God questions.

This isn't completely foreign to me. Obviously with students there were lots of times when I had to ask them to consider an issue they were facing in light of the gospel.

But I'm learning how to work it out in a different context, with different types of issues, and with people who are beyond the 18-22 window. And that's been a good challenge that applies more directly to my own life stage and the life stage of my friends. Hopefully it will make me a better blogger!

But I must confess that I do miss the occasional, very random question about Hebrew names for God in the post-Abrahamic Scriptures.

Vision and Strategy Meet Blankie and Bedtime

I tend to be a big-picture guy. I like nuance in books that I read or sermons that I listen to, but when it comes to action I just want to get to the goal and I haven't always thought through the best ways to get there.

But then God gave me kids. And my kids aren't necessarily motivated by the end game...say, getting to bed, for example. They get tired and cranky towards bed time. My solution has been to try to rally them towards bed. I've historically done this by trumpeting the wonders of a soft, cozy bed and by invoking visions of getting all snuggled up and drifting off to sleep. But they need more help than that.

After a couple of years of maddening bed time processes that ended in melt-downs, time-outs, and me and the kids locked into a grudge match, I've realized that the vision (getting to bed) isn't as helpful in this situation as breaking down the process.

So now as we're headed to bed, I focus on breaking down the process into bite-sized chunks: "We've just got four good decisions to make and then we can get to bed: quick bath, brush teeth, get pj's on, and climb into bed! Can you make that first good decision?"

When the kids are gearing up the whine-fest as we make our way toward bed ("I'm too tiiiiiired to get ready for bed! I need my blankie! Where's my doll?"), we re-direct. I try to get them talking in terms of the next good decision. This has gone a long way towards making bed-time less of a disaster and (slightly) more sane process.

I've come to realize that dealing with a task that feels overwhelming isn't helped by more pep-rallies towards the big-picture vision or goal. Nor are we helped overly-much by the proverbial stick: time-outs or other consequences, although that's certainly implemented and necessary from time to time.

What's needed is to make the change or movement towards the goal manageable. We figure out what the next good and wise decision is. And then we do that. And then you do the next good and wise decision. And eventually you move towards the end-goal.

As I've reflected on this, I've realized that unfortunately my leadership has often been overly-dependent on rallying people towards a vision but not supplying the necessary "next wise step" towards getting us there.

Not that everything needs to be scripted, but there at least needs to be the recognition that working out those next wise steps is important to get the bus moving towards the goal. And creating those "next wise steps" might be the collaborative work of a group of leaders or members of an organization.

But bottom line: it can't just be all visions and pep-rallies and slogans. There has to be concrete, practical and as simple as possible steps of implementation--be that towards bed-time or towards developing a healthier campus ministry or even in our own personal lives like developing spiritual disciplines or losing weight.

We are more likely to move if the first steps don't feel overly-daunting. And of course, having that blankie already in hand is a helpful tool, too.

How I Pray for My Kids

One of the things that I'm grateful for over the course of my life is that I've had adults praying for me and with me almost every day of my life. The older I get, the more I realize how many people don't have that experience and thus don't feel comfortable praying out loud.

So in the spirit of wanting to share with those of you who struggle with prayer but want to pray for your kids, I thought I'd share some of how I pray for my kids.

This isn't because I've got it all figured out, but because I've been given great gifts of prayer and I want to pass them along if they're helpful.

This is a rough outline of what I pray for each of my kids each night as we're doing our bed time routine. We've brushed, pottied, pj'd, read a story and read a chapter out of their children's Bible. Each one of them is curled up in bed and I sing (or we sing together) two songs of their choice--usually worship songs or hymns.

And then we pray.

First, I thank God for some truth in the song we just sang that applies to me and that kid. From "Amazing Grace" for example, I thank God that his grace is amazing and I pray that both me and them would know how amazing it truly is.

I pray that they'd never have a day where they don't know that God loves them. I pray that they'd have friends every season of their lives who remind them of the gospel and who knows how much God loves them for when they forget it. I pray for a spouse some day who knows and loves Jesus and will remind them of the gospel.

I pray for them to be a woman/man after God's own heart. I pray for wisdom, joy, peace, gentleness, strength, courage, integrity and/or character, depending on which child I'm praying for. They each have their natural gifts in one of these areas and needs for the Lord's grace to enter into their weaknesses in one of these areas.

I claim the legacy of faith and faithful service for them. My great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, siblings and many others in my family love Jesus and serve in full-time or lay capacities. I claim that for them, that many people would know the love of Christ through their lives.

I pray for practical matters of the day: a cold to be healed, for protection from bad dreams, for friends or soccer teammates that we've seen that day.

And I pray that they would, again, know the love and grace of God towards them, even as they sleep and even in their dreams.

Amen

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.

Excel, Enron, and Competence (Zap or No Zap)

My job has historically been about people, not numbers. Last spring I was working with an Excel spreadsheet and in a moment of frustration I posted on my Facebook status a very revealing question: “Can anyone tell me how to add a column of numbers in Excel?”

I rightly received plenty of mockery, along with a few kind souls who condescended to tell me how to do the simplest Excel function on the planet.

Yesterday, as a part of my new job, I was working with about a dozen of my staff team’s budgets. All on Excel. And all of them were counting me to know what the heck I’m doing as we make decisions about relatively important things like their pay checks, how much more fund raising they need to do, and whether or not they’ll have to leave campus to do it.

And so, in keeping with my last post, I was anxious. I didn’t want to screw things up. The situation called for resources that I wasn’t sure that I had—in this case, a working knowledge of Excel and a basic understanding of how to adjust and work the numbers.

In one of those instances that illustrates how random and sometimes poor the chapter breaks in the Bible can be, I was reading in 2 Corinthians 3 as Paul picks back up on the question that he posed back in chapter 2 that we considered the other day: “Who is equal to such a task?”

And after a brief tangent to start chapter 3, he comes back to continue to answer his own question: “ Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent…”

God has made Paul competent. I think that this plays out practically in two ways.

First, is the method that we all wish God would do more often: God zaps competence into us. In the mystery of his goodness and the power of his Spirit, we sometimes receive a gift that we didn’t know that we had or an insight or understanding that is clearly not of us and obviously given to us from God.

But the second method is much more common and therefore much less celebrated: God leads us into situations and circumstances in order to teach us things. Our competence comes from God as he leads us into a life of learning from people, classes, mentors, friends, Scripture, prayer, and trial-and-error.

We experience the ups and downs of this and therefore we think competence that comes in this way is of ourselves. But a moments inspection of this proves it to be utterly false. How many circumstances over which you had absolutely no control contributed to the process? How many people, opportunities, and resources came your way that were beyond your ability to manipulate or make happen?

So yesterday, I was led into a step of God-competence in Excel. In a moment of mild panic, I called my old boss. She’s been doing this for over a decade. She’s walked me through a couple of simple processes that helped me to understand how to make changes in someone’s budget so we could run different scenarios. No Enron book-cooking here, I promise.

I much prefer to avoid situations where I am generally incompetent. And when I am forced into a situation where I’m clearly incompetent, I much prefer for God to zap me with competence.

But yesterday was a good example of walking in God’s plan to develop competence in me. It’s his doing. I’m his follower, his disciple. He’s teaching me all the things that I need to know—including who to turn to for help when help is needed.

I will probably never be exceptional at Excel. That doesn’t really bother me all that much. But I do want to learn to recognize and embrace how God is at work to shape me and grow me and teach me…whether that occur via a zapping or more conventional means.

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.

Confessions of a 5'11" 138-Pound Waffle-Loving Floundering Faster

Last week I had a networking breakfast meeting with a local ministry leader. Only he wasn't eating breakfast. He was fasting.

He explained to me that recently in his spiritual journey he had discovered fasting to be an enormous aid to hearing God's voice more clearly. He said that after he fasted he had a much clearer sense of being able to discern God's will. I groaned inwardly.

At 5' 11" and 138 pounds, my metabolism runs at about 8,000 rpm's. People told me at 30 I would hit the wall and the party would be over. All 138 pounds of me ran right through that wall at 30, still going strong at 36. Take that, wall.

But what that means is that I'm a miserable faster. Sure, it's been found to be beneficial by millions of Christians before me. But my attempts at fasting have generally resulted in nothing but headaches and a case of the grumpies.

Richard Foster's charge that fasting basically kicks out the things that prop us up and reveals who we truly are underneath is none to comforting. I'm sticking with my hyper-metabolism excuse, with Foster's words duly noted.

But the words of my fasting-through-our-breakfast-appointment friend kept resonating with me. So yesterday I braced myself for another shot at fasting.

I armed myself with words to meditate on from Scripture and the truth of the gospel. I focused on the Scripture from yesterday's post: all God's promises are "yes" to me in Jesus Christ.

I rehearsed the truth: in Christ Jesus, the last word is never "no" but "yes." Therefore, fasting serves feasting. I say no to food so that I might say yes more recklessly and gladly to Christ. I fast so that I might feast on Christ--know him, his goodness and love and his will. Fasting serves feasting.

I recited the prayer that I've been reciting a good bit over the past couple of weeks: asking God that no appetite my rule over me except my appetite for him.

And I cheated. I drank apple juice most of the day.

I did okay through the morning, dipped mightily around lunch time, came back up a bit in the afternoon, dipped again in the late-afternoon, and broke my fast at dinner. And I was fairly cranky after dinner.

But a couple of things happened that I was encouraged by:

1. I had to remind myself of the gospel a lot. All day long as I was hungry I touched one or all of the above Scriptures, prayers, or truths of the gospel. I was certainly much more actively engaged in fighting the battle of faith.

2. I spent some time last night after breaking the fast in Scripture and journaling. And one significant issue that I've been looking for clarity about for the past four or so weeks seemed to become a bit clearer. I had a sense of what I needed to do and the blessing to take a step towards doing it.

3. I slept much better than I had in a while. I had released many of my cares along with the carbs from the day. I went to bed with less clutter in my internal world. Fasting had cleared out some of the nagging anxieties that had been at work in my soul and had disturbed by sleep.

And today was a good day in the Lord--some sense of favor, especially as I took that one step towards resolving my month-long question.

All in all, it wasn't a dramatically different experience in fasting. But it was beneficial, and I think that I have renewed hope that I might some day move past "remedial fasting" into actually making it a regular part of my spiritual disciplines.

But I won't do it on days when I have breakfast appointments--I like me my Belgian waffles too much to give those up.

Not a God Who Just Says No (To Sex and All the Other Fun Stuff)

The perennially most interesting days of the year for me when I was on campus? Move-in day. There's nothing quite like spending the day helping freshmen move into their dorms, meeting their parents, and fielding the question: "why are you doing this?"

Telling them that we're with a campus ministry always drew interesting responses. Some kids and parents would shriek with joy: "There ARE Christians on this campus! We've been praying that we'd find some!"

And others blew us off, quickly changed the subject, or just made it abundantly clear that they wanted nothing to do with us.

One year at VCU a student responded with a battery of questions: "you mean you go to church and read your Bibles and pray and stuff? in college? why?"

In his mind, Christianity was automatically linked with the God who says "no." No to the things that any sane college student would want to do (presumably drink a lot and have lots of sex, maybe a little recreational drug use to go with it) and yes to things that are not any fun whatsoever--like reading a 2,000-year-old book that says you can't drink and you can't have sex. Why would anyone want to do that?

And I seriously agree with him. If "no" is the last word on the God of the Bible, I wouldn't want anything to do with him either. In fact, Jesus had some really harsh things to say to people who majored exclusively on the "no" in his day--who used the "no" and the threat of the "no" to control and manipulate the people.

But the good news is that the God of the Scriptures is not a "no" God. And today I was brought to one of my favorite passages in all of the Scriptures that reminded me of that from 2 Corinthians 1.

in him [Jesus] it has always been "Yes." For no matter how many promises God has made, they are "Yes" in Christ.

Yeah, okay, so there's a bunch of no's in Scripture. But here's the deal: the no's are only there to serve the "yes." No to drunkness, no to sexual expression outside of marriage, no to adultery, no to dozens upon dozens of things.

But "no" is never the last word. In fact, it's not even the first word. Yes is always both the first and the last word to us from the God of the Scriptures.

It all starts with God's invitation to us to step into true human flourishing. "Come and follow me and live!" he shouts in every page of Scripture and throughout human history. The first word to us is "yes!"

But we push-back. We say "no." "No" to his invitation to life, "no" to living life on our Maker's terms, "no" to walking in the light. We say no.

And so God says "NO!" to our no. God is emphatic: he will bless us with every good thing in Jesus Christ. He makes promises that twist and turn and unfold into infinite beauty and splendor and wonder and awe.

"I will bless you in Jesus," God says.

"No," we retort.

"NO!" God says, "I WILL bless you."

And so we come to the point of the gospel and the point of this whole Christianity thing. The point of following Jesus is for us to run wild and free in the vast undiscovered continents of the glory and wonder and love and power and beauty and purposes of God. That is his emphatic "YES" to us...and to the whole world.

There are many religions and variations on religions in the world that are utterly predicated on the "no." But Christianity is not one of them. In fact, Christianity is the only religion that starts and ends with a God who says "YES!"

And the only religion that says that God himself went to great lengths to secure that yes for us...even to death on a cross.

Confessions of a Home Schooling Parent

So I have to confess something that I've been reticent to bring out into the light to my little blogger community: Kelly and I are homeschooling our kids.

Well, I shouldn't say kids--just one kid. It's just our oldest, he's in first grade, and the others aren't yet school-aged. We're not out to make a statement. We don't think public schools are evil. We're a bit sheepish about it. Just thought it was good for this kid. For this year. We'll take it one year at a time.

And we hope that all of us manage to escape relatively academically and socially un-scathed. We're not exactly cranking up the home-schooling propaganda machine.

At any rate, my wonderful wife had really thoughtful write-up on her Facebook notes that she has graciously allowed me to share with you all. She called it "Random Musings on Home Schooling at the Present Moment." Enjoy!

I must start by saying I don’t think homeschooling is the right way. I have no intention on debating the right way to school children, mostly because I’d probably agree with you, whatever your stance.

Children need exposure to diverse people, families should be a blessing to the community, there are opportunities galore, public school is the way to go. Yes. Private schools offer unique perspectives and methods, nurturing communities, children whose parents are invested in their education, yes. Charter schools are the perfect blend of free and diverse with interesting programs and emphases. I agree.

Nonetheless, for now we’ve chosen to homeschool our oldest, who is a first grader, for several reasons, some to do with him, some to do with the options available to us, some to do with our appreciation of a few of the benefits of homeschooling.

We have not committed to do this for the long haul. We recognize the good things about other kinds of schooling we’ve had to say “no” to in order to make this choice, or any choice at all.

The following is a smattering of observations at this point in my homeschooling career, in no particular order, with no particular purpose other than to observe what life is like these days and to get them out of my head and into yours. Thanks for helping me out here.

The house is a disaster much of the time.

The art work and supplies, the gigantic stack of library books, the schooling materials, the toys, the kitchen mess, the doors swinging open and closed as children fly through. The house gets used hard. We don’t leave it for the day and come back to it. We live in it constantly, learn, create, eat, play, make fingerprints on the walls and leave dirt in the bathroom sink. It’s an uphill battle to keep it tidy.

I talk with my kids all. day. long. It's wonderful. It's exhausting.

We cover every conceivable topic over the course of a day. They ask all kinds of questions, want to know what “the bills” are and why we pay them and what happens if we don’t. How does a wedding ceremony work? What if the kids were grown-ups and the grown-ups were kids? When is the State Fair? What’s for lunch? Can I have a new toy? What does the esophagus do? Why does that truck have flashing lights? And on and on and on. Seriously, I love that we talk and talk and talk.

And... at the end of the day, I cannot possibly utter another word.

I am so pleased that we can spend so much time outdoors, enjoying and learning about nature.

Last week, we took a hike at the river and spent the morning playing and finding all kinds of interesting plant and animal specimen. Today, we spent the morning with a state park ranger learning about fish and spending a couple of hours fishing. Next week, we’re planning an afternoon at a horse farm where we’ll learn about horses and ride one. It feels “right” to me for young kids to be outdoors a great deal, absorbing and learning about nature.

I never know if we’re doing enough of one particular thing. Enough phonics/math/reading instruction? Enough play? Enough peer time? Enough down time? Are they doing enough chores? I have no idea. Enough for what?

It’s a privilege to be there when a lightbulb goes off, when I’ve worked hard with my son and he’s worked hard and suddenly it makes sense and he’s reading! It’s a gut-wrenching drain when he’s resistant and I’m tired and we have to work out our relationship over a phonics lesson.

It’s a joy when siblings play happily and creatively together. It’s exasperating when they bicker and tease and chaos reigns. It’s a delight to spend quantities of time together so that we have inside jokes and a lot of knowledge of one another and tons of shared experience. It ‘s very confining to need some space from all the relating and not be able to get it.

I am conflicted about how much energy I must pour into my own home to make this life work. Could I be doing more, blessing more people, helping more outside the confines of these walls if I weren’t teaching my own? Yes, I think so.

But, as best I can discern, I’m following my calling for today, and I hope I’ll hear the voice of change when it’s time to make a different choice, and I try to fight back my discontent that I can’t do it all, all at once, and trust in seasons and the God over them.

So, who knows? Monday morning, the big yellow bus may come by, and I might just have my kids waiting at the bus stop, ready to go wherever it takes them. And they'd have great days and be well on their way to being great grown-ups.

But, more likely, we’ll be here around the dining room table, all of us together, talking and making a mess and learning some stuff. And that will be good, too.

Grab-Bag: Desperate for Kleenex, Nietzche and Jesus Agree, and Impossible Revenge

A quick grab-bag round-up:

*I first read "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy in junior high. I cried when I finished it (don't mock me, I was a sensitive little guy). I didn't want it to end--not ever.

I feel similarly about the gospel of John--and this time through, I was wrapping up my summer study of the questions that Jesus asks.

Jesus' first recorded words in John are a question: "What do you want?" And his last recorded words in John also have a question at the core: "What is that to you? You follow me!" he says to Peter when Peter asks if John's fate will be as difficult as his has just been foretold to be.

My study through the questions Jesus asks has been a unique and fresh experience of getting to know Jesus. Try it out if you're looking for a fresh way to study the Scriptures. Start with John...and have some Kleenex ready when it's all over (or maybe that's just me).

*I also just finished "Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership" by Ruth Haley Barton. Barton walks through the life of Moses and draws out principles of work and rest, community and solitude, vision and waiting, interceding for grumpy followers and learning to discern God's voice for direction in ministry.

This book was an excellent refresher for the soul of this would-be leader. I'd highly recommend it to all my peeps in ministry out there, most of whom (in both church-world and campus-ministry-land) are coming off the rush of the start of the school year--and are probably in need of a soul-tune-up.

*A prayer that has been re-orienting me recently: "Lord, let no appetite rule over me except an appetite for you ." Just been realizing how easy it is to let my stomach be my god, and have quite flimsy and passing desires over-run the things that actually matter most.

*One of the things that I really appreciate about Tim Keller, pastor in Redeemer whose podcasts I listen to somewhat regularly, is that he goes to great lengths to agree with people who are opposed to Jesus.

Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx are all welcome sparring partners and much of what they said about religion being self-righteous, self-justifying, and being used to oppress people is absolutely true. Christians can't dismiss them because Jesus himself said the same thing.

But the problem we're left with if we're following these guys is they don't offer any helpful alternatives. All three of them offered lame alternatives that have been tried and found deeply wanting.

And so if all four agree on the same problem but three of them have no better solutions, then perhaps those of us who find ourselves in deep resonance with the critique but in dire need of a better solution should consider Jesus.

Brilliant...and not just rhetorically cool but absolutely stinkin' true.

*Great issue of Christianity Today this month--covering everything from the global issues that Christianity is facing to uncovering Ayn Rand's deeply problematic economic philosophy...and how many Christians have bought into it. Check it out, subscribe, or just steal it from a friend. Ours is available if you're in the neighborhood.

*This from George MacDonald (and yes, I do have some degree of facial-hair envy--check out that sweet beard!): "While a satisfied justice is an unavoidable eternal event, a satisfied revenge is an eternal impossibility."

Boogers, Yo-Yo's, and 8-Year-Old Prophets

This morning as I was picking up my son's carpool buddies (approximate ages 8 and 11) to take to school, one of them spoke a prophetic word to me.

Before we moved onto the scintillating eight-year-old-boy world of songs about boogers, he pronounced to me very matter-of-factly, "My yo-yo's broken, so it doesn't rest."

Apparently, at least in his eight-year-old-mind, a fully functional yo-yo would be able to rest. Perhaps he was talking about a specific trick--maybe someone out there can enlighten me on a yo-yo maneuver that would require the yo-yo to "rest."

Regardless, it does seem that the inability to rest is a sure sign of brokenness--in yo-yo's and in people.

For slightly neurotic over-functioning people like myself, that doesn't come very easily. I can do diversions or be entertained, but figuring out what true rest looks like for me has always been a challenge. My very first supervisor told me that my biggest problem in ministry was that I needed a hobby.

I'm still working on that. But in the mean time, I'm grateful for some heaven-sent trail guides who keep me on the path of learning what it means to rest--to search for the true rest that restores my soul and keeps me operating within the holy confines of my God-given humanity.

And I pray for ears to hear that call. It can be kind of tricky to catch it in between all the talk about boogers.

"What Do I Do With a Dad Killing His Four Year Old?"

There's an awful, awful story here in the Durham area about a dad killing his four-year-old son. It's been haunting me for two days. My middle girl is four. I cannot imagine a little boy calling out to his dad to stop hurting him (he was suffocated) and his dad pressing through those cries to his death.

For two days I've been wrestling: what do I do with this? How do I think and pray this through in light of what I believe to be true about God?

Here's a rough attempt at gathering up a couple day's worth of thoughts.

First, I weep. This is awful. It is right to mourn this senseless act. It is appropriate that the killing of a child should tap into something deep inside of me. Jesus weeps at the tomb of his friend Lazarus: death was not in the original design. This should not be. And so I am invited to mourn it.

Secondly, I must guard my heart against a self-righteous demand for justice. This takes some nuancing.

On the one hand, justice is a good thing. We are blessed to be in a country that attempts, at least, to take justice seriously. God is just. God is the one true just judge who will some day judge everything and everyone rightly. We have a good instinct to want to call injustice out (alas, except for where we happen to be benefiting) and to see it put to rights. This is part of what it means to be made in the image of God.

But on the other hand, my craving for justice can become vindictive and self-righteous. It becomes about someone else "getting what's coming to them." And when I start to think in these terms I'm on perilously thin ice.

Jesus is adamant about where murder comes from: the heart. And he is insistent that we recognize that the very things that drive a dad to kill his four-year-old son are at work in our own hearts, too:

²¹"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' ²²But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.

So here's the deal: it is good to want justice. But I must realize that I am under the same sentence as this man. My heart and his both have the same sickness.

Obviously there's a difference in degree--actually killing someone is of much greater consequence in the world than calling them a name. But it is not a difference in kind. When I start to think that what this dad did is in a completely different category than what I wrestle with in my own heart, then I have lost step with the Spirit of Christ. The Spirit of Christ invites me to see the murderer and recognize myself in him.

And so I must confess that this dad and I share in the same sickness and are under the same judgment. We both have deep wickedness and deception and brokenness at work in our hearts. And we both deeply need forgiveness.

And the crazy/hard/mysterious thing is that we both have it offered to us. Jesus who "takes away the sins of the world" has already paid for that dad's sin and mine. Jesus absorbed his sin and mine at the same cross, in the same death.

There's no lesser fine that Jesus has to pay for my sin of anger in my heart than there is for that dad's sin of killing his son. Both of us require a real death, by a real person, on our behalf. No weaseling out from under that. I must face that dead-on.

The Scriptures are mysteriously silent about the question "where did evil come from?" We do not know. The Scriptures invite us to embrace a faithful agnosticism about the origins of evil.

But we are not agnostic about how it has been dealt with. Evil has been dealt with once and for all in the mighty double-stroke of the sword of the Father and the Son and the Spirit in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His resurrection is the hope for us all.

And so that is where I land. My hope and prayer is that the boy who's dad refused to hear his cries for mercy will be greeted by a good Father who always hears all the cries of those who are afflicted, oppressed, and cry for mercy.

My hope and prayer is in the work of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is in the plan laid before the foundations of the world for the Son to willingly submit to death so that the dad who killed his son and me with my own sin might be reconciled to God.

My hope is in the resurrection life, secured by Jesus, offered to everyone in real-time. My hope is that the four-year-old boy will one day be raised again from the dead in Christ Jesus with shouts of joy. And he will be raised to newness of life in a new earth without mourning or tears or death or sickness or illness--mental or otherwise.

And my hope is that I will be raised with him. And maybe (hoping against all hope) his dad will be there with us, too.

Why Jesus the Socialist Ticks Us Off

Perhaps this is just killing all that I said in yesterday's post, but here's the deal: comparison is always a mistake. When we compare ourselves with other people, we will always lose--either someone else is worse than us and we end up prideful or someone's better than us and we despair.

This is at least part of what's up with the Jesus story that Joe Moore, our Regional spiritual formation guru, had us read in Matthew 20 this past Monday at a day of retreat (where I labyrinthed and then wrote my bad poetry).

The summary: Jesus tells a story about a land owner who goes out first thing in the morning and hires some workers. He goes out again at 9, 12, 3, and at the end of the day.

At the end of the day, he settles up with his day laborers. The people he hired at the end of the day got a full-day's wage. The people who worked from early in the morning got...a full day's wage. They, naturally, grump.

And the land owner says to them, "Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am jealous?"

The passage violates our Western capitalist sentiments. Where's the justice in paying the guys who bore the heat of the day and the heaviest part of the work the same amount as the slackers who rolled up the last hour of the day?

If we let the story do its work in our souls, it will eventually un-earth our feelings of entitlement. Most of us instinctively put ourselves in the position of the laborers who work the longest day. If I work the longest, I deserve a greater reward.

But the pre-supposition on our part is all wrong. In our rush to defend our rights to get our bigger piece of the proverbial pie, we miss that it's grace to have been invited to work the field at all.

The generous land-owner goes out and calls people all day to come and work in his field. None of them deserve anything. They are un-employed and there's dozens of them to choose from. There's no shortage of labor around--it's an employer's market. Perhaps that situation reminds some of you of your current economic situation.

The generous land-owner calls people to work his field through out the course of the day. There's nothing that indicates that the laborers selected are stronger or more good looking or nicer than any other laborers sitting there for hire.

To work for the generous land-owner is a gift of grace. And he is always at the minimum faithful to his promises. The people who get the raw end of the deal from our perspective get what was promised to them--this is the character of the good land-owner.

The people who get paid for a full day's work after only working half a day get a gift in keeping with the character of the good and generous land-owner as well.

Bottom line: if we're going to grouse at the generosity of God, we are cutting off the very limb we ourselves are standing on. Grace rushes to meet us whenever we are called to follow Christ. We serve a generous Land-Owner for as many hours as he would grant us. And his reward is extravagant and generous. To everyone.

What difference does it make to you and me today that God is a generous land-owner? More than we can know.

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."

Waxing Contemplative-Loopy-Poetic with the Labyrinth

So parts of the Christian faith tradition can seem pretty weird. If you start reading the mystics or even some of the just generally contemplative-type people, they talk about candles and incense and dreams and visions and hearing voices and hurting themselves in order to experience more of God. It can get a little loopy.

I appreciate those folks...from a safe distance. And I'm particularly grateful for the contemplatives who call me to rest in Christ, trust in Christ, deepen my life-roots into Christ through prayer and meditation.

Yesterday I joined about a dozen IV staff workers at a day of retreat at a local retreat center. I've been to this retreat center several times. And on the grounds, they have a labyrinth.

It's a really simple prayer labyrinth. With the path laid out in stones and gravel. I've walked it just about every time I've gone and never really been able to enter into the experience the way that I think you're supposed to.

But yesterday was a little different. I was able to more fully enter into the experience of moving towards the center and then coming back out again.

And after I emerged from the labyrinth experience, I wrote a little hack-job of a poem that I thought I'd share with you all, if you can suffer my poor attempt.

The Labyrinth

I start out
full of energy and certainty.

This path will be clear, the direction obvious
confident that I will reach the center
(perhaps in record time)

But the path doesn't seem to know
the most efficient route.

And I am sometimes closer
and then the path turns
and I appear to be much farther out.

I start to wonder where my confident energy has gone
and I wonder where the path will take me next
and I wonder if I'm getting any closer to the goal
and I wonder at how different this path leads than it would if I were the one mapping it out
and I wonder at the unexpected turns
and I wonder at the inefficiency of it all
and I wonder at how brash I seemed at the start
and I wonder if there is any true confidence that might be found to replace it
and I wonder as I'm unexpectedly at the farthest edge
if there is any hope of true proximity to the center

And then a gentle unexpected turn.
And what seemed so far away is suddenly very close

I am only just sufficiently humbled to not cut across to the middle
and to know that this closeness, too, might pass

But I am discovering a deeper certitude
to replace my prior confidence.

I am discovering faith.
Not path-faith, as if these rocks and pebbles were animate and sovereign

Faith in the one who has laid out this path
and scripted these steps

And so I walk.
And a turn that seems to take me away from my goal
I now trust is carrying me further up and further in

Until at last I reach the center.
A simple marble bench.

Where many before me have sat and met with the Lord of the path.

Had the bench been there at the beginning
my prayers would have been bold, certain, animated, loud

But after this journey, all I know to do is offer myself,
my life, my days, to the path-Lord
and sit in humbled reflection and silence

I nod off and jerk awake with a nod. I take a deep breath
stand up. and go back the way I came.

This path is a good gift and I recognize it more freely backwards
even with its' inefficiencies and unnecessary turns
that strip me of myself in order that I might worship one who is much greater.

I walk it by faith
until I am released into
the labyrinth of the rest of my journey

In order that I might learn to walk in that way
as I have learned to walk in this.