Piebald Life

Blogger Vacation

2010-12-20T22:07:00.002-05:00

I'm taking Christmas break from Piebald Life land. I'll hopefully be starting back up in the New Year, so follow me through Google Reader, here on the site, or just keep an eye on Facebook!

Merry Christmas!

When Do You Hold Prodigals Accountable?

2010-12-16T15:07:00.004-05:00

I just got back from spending several days with about 70 other InterVarsity staff at our Regional staff conference. We typically alternate at these annual meetings between training years and spiritual formation years. This year was a spiritual formation year.

We spent a couple days living, breathing, and soaking in Jesus' parable of the two lost sons and one recklessly generous Father. Hence my blog posts last week pondering the story.

Of course, since there's 70 InterVarsity staff all together studying this passage and sharing together, the time in Scripture and prayer and the caliber of the testimonies was outstanding. It's an honor to work alongside such tremendously gifted and honest people.

But also given that it was IV staff who were studying this passage together, the majority of us resonated more with the older son's lost-ness than we did with the younger. The older son is the one who follows the rules, obeys the Father, stays at home and works hard while the younger son goes off and parties his Father's money away.

But the older son is so caught up in his own self-righteousness that he misses the heart of the Father.

So towards the end of the time, as many staff confessed their resonance with the older son's issues, one staff asked me a great and very thoughtful question. If I'm an older son-type, I know that the worst parts of my staff work will be to want my students to behave like older sons. I want them to work hard. I want them to be diligent and faithful. If they sign up to be a small group Bible study leader, they need to do it. My chapter runs much better if I've got a leadership team of older sons!

So if in the parable the younger son is welcomed home seemingly without consequences for his drunk and disorderliness, what does that mean for us in terms of holding others accountable for their actions?

I was pondering this in the car with my wife on the way home and I think there's a couple directions to go with this.

First, the younger son's part of the parable ends with the welcome-back party. But part of being welcomed back into the family means precisely to enter into the common life of the household. The next day there will be chores to do around the farm. There's a certain level of entering responsibly into the daily life of the family that would naturally occur.

In other words, eventually the party is over and there is at the very least work for the younger son to do. He's not doing it as a servant, he's been welcomed back fully as a son. But there's work to do nonetheless.

But perhaps the bigger issue for those of us in authority over others as we think about accountability is the question of the "no" serving the "yes" that has often been a topic of reflection here.

If I'm going to confront someone for something they've done or not done, the question of my own motive can never be far from my thoughts. I have all kinds of older-son-syndrome motivations that can hijack a perfectly reasonable and good conversation that I'd need to have with someone.

So the question is this for me: if I'm confronting someone with a "no" to their activities--say it's someone who's not following through on a commitment to lead a small group Bible study--then the question is can I see the "yes" that my "no" is supposed to be pointing to and articulate that faithfully?

In the Scriptures, God's "no" is never the last word on us...at least, not yet. Throughout the Scriptures, God's last word to us is always "yes." There are lots of no's, of course. But the no's of God are always meant to serve his final and absolute yes to us in Jesus Christ.

"No" to idolatory, because if you worship some no-god, your soul will shrivel up and die. No to broken sexual expression because our sexuality is meant to bless us and others around us, not used like some weapon to exploit, consume, or entertain us. Every no points to a yes.

So if I'm going at someone and holding them accountable out of anger or frustration--just with my no, in other words--then I'm probably not in step with the Spirit. If I can approach someone with a no in order to point them to God's greater yes, then at least I'm in a posture of loving them and being for them, not just dropping the proverbial hammer on them.

This doesn't solve every issue, but it's at least a decent place to start.

Why 20 and 30 Somethings Are Leaving the Church

2010-12-12T21:01:00.000-05:00

I'm a couple weeks behind in my reading, but last month Christianity Today ran a really interesting piece on why 20 and 30 somethings are leaving the church.

As someone who's spent much of the the last 15 years trying to help 18-22 year olds grow up into the church, this article struck a deep cord in me.

It's worth a read for anyone who's a 20 or 30 something, who's in church or para-church ministry, or who finds themselves one of those 20 or 30 somethings who left the church along the way.

Check it out here.

Prodigal Prayer

2010-12-12T20:57:00.002-05:00

After spending the past week or so in the Prodigal Son story from Luke 15, I've come to this prayer.

That I might be as bold and audacious in prayer as the younger son without the rebellion. And that I might be as obedient and faithful as the older son without the self-righteousness that walls me off from entering into the joy of knowing the Father.

Dashboard: Nouwen, Smith, Barth, Willard & Getting Things Done

2010-12-10T11:17:00.005-05:00

A quick review of books, podcasts, music and other stuff that I've been imbibing...

*If you're looking for a book that will do some significant soul-tune-up work in just a few pages, you could do no better than to spend some time with Henri Nouwen.

I've just finished his "The Way of the Heart" and, like nearly all of his books, it packs a serious punch without trying too hard. Nouwen drills down into the importance of connecting with God through solitude, silence, and prayer.

I'm terrible at all of these things, and yet Nouwen invites me in, gently, persistently, into the heart of the Father without guilt or manipulation.

Nouwen (who died in 1996) has dozens of books. I've only read a handful but they are always insightful, warm, and powerful. Put this on your Christmas wish-list.

*Prior to that I read James Bryan Smith's "The Good and Beautiful Life." This is part two of his "Good and Beautiful" series. The first one, "The Good and Beautiful God," was a spectacular gathering up of the whole of the Christian story that was refreshing in its simplicity without feeling watered down.

This follow-up effort focuses on the formation of character as we follow Christ, particularly viewed through the Sermon on the Mount. It's a solid effort that invites us into genuine transformation of our hearts through thoughtful exposition and practical implications.

I found TG&BL to be not quite as captivating as TG&BG, but it might have been the difference between reading the latter at the beach this summer (where everything is slightly more glorious) and the former in between meetings and on airplanes and in the margins of my day.

*In my Ipod: Dallas Willard's weekend conference at Bethel Seminary in 2008. Willard is rabid about what Smith writes about in TG&BL (they're buds--Smith studied under him for many years): that genuine life transformation is critical to any real Christianity.

I'll blog more about this later next week, but for now let me say that I *heart* Dallas Willard's thorough and deeply studied approach to the Christian life. If you're getting ready for a trip somewhere and want something to chew on while you drive, download this via Itunes U.

*Theological reading that I just finished: Karl Barth's "The Epistle to the Romans." This is Barth's commentary on Romans, and it is outstanding.

I started reading this sometime early in the summer more or less devotionally over my breakfast every morning. I just finished it at the beginning of December. If you're looking for a New Year's resolution to stretch your mind, I'd recommend ordering this and reading a bit of it each day.

*Business/Leadership Book: I just started "Getting Things Done" by David Allen. I've heard a good bit of hype surrounding this book--that it'll bring organizational certitude to even the most organizationally inept of us. So far, it's living up to the hype--some really solid thoughts about how to get things done...even for guys like me.

Non-Drunk and Non-Disorderly Meets a Generous Father

2010-12-09T12:38:00.003-05:00

True confessions: I've never been drunk. Perhaps for someone in my line of work, this should be something to be celebrated. But I find it hard to confess in just about any context, even amongst other InterVarsity staff.

It's not that I don't drink--although I didn't until I was twenty-one. And it's not that I am all that righteous or holy.

Partly I was scared and intimidated by the whole scene during the years when I would have been drinking foolishly. And more than that, I'm a classic, first-born son, doing as I was told. I was told that it was wrong to get drunk. That it could become an addiction that could ruin your life. So I didn't get drunk.

This week I'm studying Jesus' story of the prodigal son. Quick summary if you're unfamiliar with it: a man has two sons, the younger son (and of course it's the younger--Jesus totally gets birth-order psychology) demands his inheritance and goes off and parties it away.

He's broke and starving when he "comes to his senses" (one of the greatest phrases in all of Scripture). He returns home to his father who sees him coming, runs out to him and welcomes him home with a lavish feast.

The older son is out working in the field (of course, that's where he's supposed to be! Jesus totally gets birth-order psychology!). He comes near the house, hears the party, finds out what's going on and refuses to come in even after the father comes out and pleads with him.

The older son's response to the father is telling of his heart: "All these years I've been slaving away for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property on prostitutes comes home you kill the fattened calf for him!"

It doesn't require too much imagination to hear the self-righteous indignation in the son's voice.

As I've sat in this story all week long, it doesn't take much work for me to locate myself in it. The older of two sons, the one who's never been drunk at least in part because I was obeying my parents. I don't disobey orders. I walk straight and narrow. Just like the older son.

And just like the older son, it could be easy to be self-righteous about all of it. Which is certainly a temptation for me from time to time.

But what's captured me this time through this story has been the father's response to the son:

"My son," the father said, "you are always with me and everything I have is yours."

With-ness. This is the Father's priority for me. Do I take delight in the fact that in my lack of rebellion I have been on the Father's property all along? Have I stayed at home but run away from my Father anyway? Have I been around God's stuff but neglected to actually know anything about God's heart?

Oh, but the stuff is there, too. And for some reason I'm sinking my heart and prayers this time around by the fact that the son could have thrown the goat-party he wanted for himself and his friends. But he's been too uptight. He's been too workman-like to enjoy the place.

C.S. Lewis somewhere writes that we will be judged as much for the proper and right goods that we don't enjoy as for the ways that we abuse or mis-use those goods. I don't want to come to the end of my life and realize that I could have and should have had a good bit more fun around the place.

My Father is always with me. And everything he has, he's invited me to share in with him. That's a fantastically ridiculous and wonderful gift given to me in Christ. I hope I don't forget to enjoy it along the way.

Overcoming Disappoinment

2010-12-08T12:02:00.003-05:00

Disappointment is the death of a hope or dream. Like all deaths, it's good to grieve. Some of you would rather skip that step. That's foolish. There's only so much sweeping things under the carpet you can do before it starts to smell real bad under there.

But for those of us who have no problem grieving disappointment, there's the equal and opposite temptation: to dwell in disappointment land forever.

Grief can be such a powerful and loaded-up emotion that it can demand all of us. And for a season we might need to pay that steep cost--especially if the disappointment is life-altering in some significant way.

But eventually you reach the point of diminishing returns. Your grief over your disappointment is no longer healthy or processing. It becomes wallowing and incestuous--an endless rehearsing of the events or the feelings.

There comes a point when you have to either decide to allow grief and disappointment to be your God or God to be your God. They aren't fundamentally mutually exclusive--certainly God leads us through grieving processes and, in fact, grieves with us. But there comes a point when he invites us to carry our grief with us into another season, towards a different destination.

And so we have a choice to make. Will we take up this cross and follow Jesus, or will we linger over the disappointment, nurse it, keep the anger and hurt fresh by recycling through the whole thing over and over again?

My father-in-law worked at Kent State University for several years, a campus famous for the shooting of students during a Vietnam Protest. He talked about how for some of the folks who were around back in those days, the clock stopped. They were so shocked that something like that could happen on their beloved campus and they just couldn't move past it.

Alas that some of our lives are stagnating by pooling at the place of disappointment well beyond the shelf life of healthy grieving.

There comes a time when you've got to move on. Some of us try to over-rush that process--those of you in this camp need to allow Jesus to tend to your wounds rather than rush on. But many of us are tempted to over-stay our welcome.

And for us, the point is that this life doesn't stop because of disappointment. There's good work prepared in advance for us to do by our Father. If we let disappointment hijack our lives, we pay the steep cost for the idol we have made in the image of our shattered hopes.

There comes a time to say good-bye to the disappointment and move on.

Fighting Christmas Consumer Culture Over My Kids

2010-12-07T13:00:00.002-05:00

As the Christmas hype approaches mass media frenzy with our kids, we're trying to figure out how to help them be decent human beings in the midst of so much advertising and stuff (and promises of more stuff) coming their way.

The problem is that there's no magical path towards character and contentedness. Deprivation does not guarantee that they won't long for more stuff. Spoiling them certainly doesn't, either.

And the goal isn't to shame them into not wanting things that they see on t.v. or that their friends have or that they see in the Sunday paper. This is the wrong approach that many parents take who rightfully are concerned about their kids character during gift-giving season.

The goal is to help them grow up to be grateful for what they have, delighted to give to others, and, yes, grateful to receive as well. We must learn how to receive well, not to deny the value of receiving altogether. This, too, is part of character-development. If we never learn how to receive well, we will never be able to receive the gift of grace offered to us by God himself. I know some of these people. Being unable to accept a gift given in love is not a healthy thing.

All of this has to be done in age and stage appropriate ways. Our seven year old will get more of what Christmas is all about than our three year old will. And we shouldn't expect our seven year old to have thirty-year-old understanding of the more important things in life.

But we can help them to understand that it's important that we give and care more for others than be fixated on our own wants and desires. And that's mom and dad's job. If we don't create that space intentionally then character won't happen. People drift by the boatloads into self-absorbed consumerism. No one drifts into deep character.

So we're (finally) getting into gear with adopting a kid through World Vision--at least starting the process of figuring out what part of the world we want to invest in. And this past Sunday our church small group wrapped presents together that we bought for a family in need here in Durham.

And we're trying to put some limits around how much stuff they get. They get three gifts from us, like Jesus received from the three Wise Men. We try to avoid stuff that's just Christmas-morning buzz (i.e. cheap electronics that will break in two weeks) and go for things that they'll still be excited about using through the spring.

Much of this is my wonderful wife's doing. I appreciate how thoughtfully she's engaging the season and trying to help our kids grow up into Christmas time faithfully.

Only time will tell if we do a good job with our kids in regards to "stuff." My hope is that we can at least equip them with an alternative story about life that anchors it in something much bigger than either "more is always better" or even "you should feel guilty about wanting more stuff since you've got so much already."

And probably for next year, we need to see if we can get off all these toy catalog mailing lists that feed the imagination in all the ways that we ultimately don't want.

Handel in My Head Meets Swirling UNC Students on the Crosswalk

2010-12-06T11:45:00.003-05:00

About a year and a half ago now my battery died in my car. Apparently, this was the first time since purchasing the car used that I'd ever changed the battery because the stereo/CD player is asking for a code that I have no recollection of ever knowing.

So what that means is that I listen to my Ipod while in transit. And last week, given that it's Christmas season, I was listening to Handel's Messiah as I found myself driving through UNC's campus on my way to a meeting with one of my staff.

The resulting experience gave me pause to consider.

In my ears, the London Philharmonic was in full throat, proclaiming the news that "unto us, a son is given." This good news that changes everything. In him heaven has given so much that heaven can give no more (Valley of Vision). God rips open the roof and come to get us himself.

But outside my car, students swirled about in the midst of a class change. They didn't hear the music. This good news that changes everything was perhaps known to some of them, perhaps not.

Either way, it was hot and fresh for me right then...and the thought that this Son given to us might be foreign to the students swirling around my car in the crosswalk, or cause for ambivalence, or even and especially cause for hostility, was crushing.

There are times when I wonder if I did enough while on campus to take this good news out of my head and onto the campus. Nothing specific that I regret doing or not doing. I just wonder.

And there are times when I wonder if in my daily life, I am faithful to get this song out of my head and out to friends, family. Not obnoxiously. Not arrogantly. But winsomely, graciously, boldly, deliberately.

I will continue to crank some Christmas tunes over the next couple of weeks. And my soul, I'm sure, will have moments of pure bliss and joyful worship.

But if it doesn't overflow to bless the people around me, especially folks who don't know, then it's all just further self-centered, self-absorbed, consumer me.

Willard on the Hazards of Political Correctness (Even if You Like It)

2010-12-03T11:00:00.002-05:00

"Once moral knowledge disappears, political correctness takes over. Moral direction without knowledge becomes political correctness. The reason why political correctness became so important in recent years was because moral correctness disappeared.

Political correctness does not require knowledge, it only requires advocacy. That's one reason why in this country you will hear over and over people will be urged to vote regardless of whether they know anything about the issues. Knowledge is not required to vote...

And that's what it means to speak merely of political correctness."

-Dallas Willard

The Best Prayer Ever Prayed For Me

2010-12-02T11:30:00.001-05:00

Two years ago this time I was in the midst of a moderate personal crisis. I had just started my sabbatical after I super-over-reacted to a really hard fall on campus.

My wonderful former church, All Saints, gave us a great gift during Advent. During the Sunday school hour they did a 'soaking prayer' service. Quiet music in the background, candles, silence and prayer with prayer ministers circling the room, praying over the circle of eight to fifteen of us who showed up.

Every so often the prayer ministers would stop and pray for one of us specifically--laying hands on our shoulders and praying silently. If they sensed that God spoke a word to them for us, they would write that on a note card and lay it on our lap.

Two years later, I still have three of those note cards from my two weeks of soaking prayer. They have regularly spoken words of truth and grace to me in the midst of various circumstances.

But one of them stands out as probably the best prayer anyone has ever prayed over me. It was extremely pertinent two years ago in the midst of my re-finding my security and peace in the Lord. It continues to speak to me in its simplicity and clarity:

"Alex, float in my river. You can relax. I will carry you where I want you to go."

Floating in the great River of the Spirit of God for an occasionally over-amped guy like me is an invitation to pure and holy repentance and a more faithful trust in the Lord. It has led me into the peace of Christ again and again.

May it bless some of you out there who might resonate with my struggle.

Crisis Options

2010-12-01T12:26:00.002-05:00

It seems to me at some point in any crisis--be it small, medium, or catastrophic--the road forks and you've got three choices.

Either you will continue to obsess and fixate over things that you have zero control over. This is most common amongst us type-A and type-A wannabe's.

Or you will quit on the whole enterprise, attempt to avoid and escape through any number of numbing and escaping venues (alcohol, drugs, entertainment, etc.).

Or you recognize that there's things that you can control and things that you can't. And so you center-down. You realize that the things you can't control need to be let go into the hands of the Father. And the things that you can control are almost all internal or in very close proximity to yourself. And so you find peace and rest in the fact that you can only do what you can only do. And the rest has to be left up to God.

I think the Lord's been leading me through a series of things over the past five to six years to learn how to choose door number three. And it's hard to get there and walk through that door. But once I do, I'm finding a lot of life on the other side.

Passing Out With Contacts Meets Walking Out on God

2010-11-30T10:58:00.005-05:00

True story: when I first got contacts in junior high, I was so excited about it and yet so weirded out by this piece of plastic going into my eyes that I passed out in the eye place as soon as they were put in my eyes.

Once I recovered, I spent the whole next week blinking often and hard. My body took several weeks to get used to this uninvited guest intruding in my eye. My friends at school would mock me mercilessly by blinking hard back at me.

Since then I have often wondered who was the first person to ever try putting contacts in their eyes. Seems like a rather dicey proposition to me.

During my five years on campus at UNC, I had an inordinate number of students walk away from the faith. A few of them cited how "unnatural" the whole thing felt--like it was something that they were trying too hard to believe or do. It felt alien, constricting.

But I wonder if the correctives offered by Jesus and the rest of the Scriptures aren't rather like how my body responded to my contact lenses. In order to see correctly, something foreign had to be introduced. And it took my eyes a while to get used to it. But eventually I adjusted. I pop contacts in with aplomb each morning, no passing out.

The truth of the matter is that the words of Jesus and the Scriptures ARE alien. They ARE foreign. They aren't intuitive. If they were, we wouldn't need them so desperately. And what I find is that we often over-estimate our own ability to discern what is good and right.

So I suggest that we need to be brutally honest in prayer to God about the things that we find constricting, challenging, or just plain weird in the Scriptures.

But we also need a healthy dose of humility before the reality that what doesn't make sense to us now sometimes makes sense much later. And sometimes we're certain about something that later turns out to be the wrong decision.

Hearing God Through the Piano on the Floor

2010-11-29T11:47:00.004-05:00

Over the weekend my mom (who teaches music appreciation classes at the local community college) was telling me about Beethoven's struggles with deafness as he grew older. By the time he composed one of the greatest hymns of all time, Ode to Joy, he was nearly completely deaf.

In order to continue composing, he cut the legs off of his piano so that it lay flat on the floor. And he would lay his ear to the ground and hit the keys as hard as he could so that he might be able to hear the vibrations through the floor.

I don't know that Hollywood could invent a more stirring scene.

As I later considered Beethoven's commitment to his work, it struck me that I am not nearly as committed to hearing the voice of the Lord.

There are some seasons of life when I desperately need to know God's direction or command. But what I find is that when it's convenient, accidental, or he beats me over the head with a two-by-four, I hear him. And when it's not convenient, when it doesn't just sort of happen to me, or when it's much more subtle than the two-by-four method, I often miss it.

Obviously I have been given the Scriptures and most days I simply need to walk by faith in those and do not need another, more personal, word to me. I really need to trust and obey what I already have been given to trust and obey.

But there are some seasons when I need more specific guidance and a more personal word. And in those seasons, I'm wondering if I'm willing to do whatever it takes to hear him.

Perhaps cutting off piano legs and pressing my head down to the floor while pounding on the keys is roughly equivalent to a day or two of solitude, fasting, silence, Scripture, and more and more silence and solitude.

Whatever it might be, I'd like to eventually be the kind of person who is that intent on hearing from God as I need it. I just hope that I don't have to lose my hearing entirely in order to hunger for it.

God is No Southern Gentlemen

2010-11-23T16:31:00.003-05:00

One of the images I received about God from my Southern Baptist upbringing was God as (southern) gentleman. God is perfectly polite, I was told, and will not do anything untoward toward us. He is careful and debonair and respectful--holding chairs and doors and always careful to not offend.

This was part of the narrative underpinning of the free-will theology. It's the God who steps back and respects our wishes.

And while I'm less and less certain about what I think about the whole free-will/predestination debate (or even if it matters) I'm absolutely sure of one thing: God is no southern gentlemen.

God is a passionate, jealous lover. He is reckless in his pursuit of us. He absolutely hates, despises, abhors all injustice and the oppression of the poor, weak, marginalized. He hates even more the sin in our lives, the idols that we worship in his place.

God is no southern gentlemen. He is far from poised or polished in his relentless pursuit of all that is his. He sweats and bleeds and cries and dies a gruesome criminal's death to buy back what is his by virtue of creation. It becomes doubly-his after we hand it over to the reign of sin and death through the power of his death and resurrection.

God is no southern gentlemen. He is the great hound of heaven. He tracks after us. He chases us down and corners us into places of despair, emptiness, loneliness, isolation--anything and everything so that we might see that life without him is no life at all.

God is no southern gentlemen. He is too reckless, too playful, too improper for all that. And he will not stop being God in order to fit our neat categories. God is not safe. He is good.

That's something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.

The Good News About our Father as Medication for Testing Hemorrhoids

2010-11-22T11:45:00.001-05:00

A little over a week ago I posted about the idea of the Lord testing us. I've been in something of a season of testing over the past couple of months--nothing scandalous, just the kind of stuff that you wrestle with in your own head and would only make sense to the people who know you best.

I wrote last week that I thought I had come to the end of the season of testing. But, like a bad case of hemorrhoids, I've had an unexpected flare up.

All of this has driven me back to a passage I preached on last Sunday at my church, Mark 6, the feeding of the 5,000. I summarized the story itself like this:

Jesus leads his disciples into a place they would not have chosen themselves
He rejects their perfectly reasonable plan to deal with the situation
He instead gives them a command that they cannot possibly fulfill
In order that they might have to rely on him and give him all their resources
So that they might taste and see that He is super-abundantly generous and good.
Do you think Jesus might be doing the same thing in your life?

And as I continued to think and pray on the passage, I came to a place of seeing the gospel in all of this. Jesus is not asking us to do what he has not already done.

A couple of years after this event, Jesus will be led by the Father to Jerusalem. He will spend the night wrestling in a garden with his Father's impossible command. In the end, he will offer up to his Father all his resources.

And in the Father's hands, this one man's body is taken, multiplied, and blesses the entire cosmos: "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the [whole! entire! for all time!] world!"

So Jesus offers himself and through him all peoples are blessed. But Jesus is not a victim of his Father's plan. Three days later, he is raised from the dead and exalted above every other name for all eternity. In the mystery of time and space and God who is over time, somehow an event within time changes the very identity of the Son.

So that at the end of all things, at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord.

So Jesus is called to sacrifice. He obeys his Father. The many are blessed. And Jesus is not forgotten, steamrolled, or a victim of his Father's plan. He is taken care of.

So it is with us, my friends. Jesus, our great Older Brother has gone ahead of us and shown us that our Father and His Father is trustworthy and good not just to the people out there but to us if we will trust him. We can trust him with all our days, all our times, all our concerns, all our fears, all our desires, all our needs, all our passions.

Jesus has gone ahead and shown us that this bridge can carry all our weight. We can cross over. We can give up to the Father all of ourselves because he has already been proven to be faithful and true in our Older Brother, Jesus, who has gone ahead of us. He entrusted his Father with everything and he has been exalted as a result. And so shall we be if we follow in his steps.

All testing is about trust and belief. Who or what will I lean into for life? Jesus has shown us the way. The invitation is to follow him--even and especially when it costs us everything.

Why Jonah's a Southerner, Ya'll

2010-11-19T12:24:00.003-05:00

After wrestling with the grumpiness of Jonah in Jonah 4 last week with my staff friends, I've decided that Jonah was probably a Southerner.

Quick Jonah re-cap: Jonah gets a call from God to go and preach to the people of Nineveh. Jonah hates those people, so he runs in the opposite direction by means of a boat heading towards Tarshish.

God sends a storm, Jonah convinces the sailors to throw him overboard. God sends a big fish, swallows Jonah up whole. After three days in the belly of the fish, Jonah repents, the fish spits him out, he goes to Nineveh and preaches for three days.

And all the people of Nineveh demonstrate astounding repentance. From the king to the poorest, they repent.

God is pleased. He doesn't destroy the city as he threatened. But Jonah is ticked. He grumps at God:

“Isn’t this what I said, LORD, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

So you see, Jonah knew God's character. He knew what God was like. But he didn't love God's character. In fact, God's character was in the way of his own preferences and plans. He would have liked to have seen Nineveh blown up. But God's compassionate and gracious and so he relents.

And so Jonah was like a good Southern kid. Raised in the church, knows who God is, knows all about God. But us good southerners don't always love who God is. We can recite the lines but that doesn't always train our hearts and shape the paths of our lives.

Jonah was a southerner, ya'll. He knew about God but he didn't worship and delight in him. Just like plenty of us.

And the hope we have for ourselves is the same hope we have for Jonah. The book of Jonah ends maddeningly incomplete. We don't know what happens to Jonah, if he relents of his grumps or not.

But the only way we could have the book of Jonah is if Jonah himself wrote it. And so our hope is that an older, more mature Jonah himself is writing this years later. He is showing us his mess, warts and all, that we might see ourselves and repent of knowing about God rather than delighting him.

So, my good southern-style friends, I've got an invitation for all ya'll: let's not fall into Jonah's trap of being able to recite truths about God without loving God himself.

And if we find ourselves in that place, let's repent as we think and hope that Jonah might have, and put ourselves fully in the faithful and good hands of the God who is, indeed, gracious and compassionate and rich in mercy...even to stubborn Southerners like us.

Fear and Faith: Two Responses to the Same Situation

2010-11-18T23:30:00.002-05:00

Just got back from spending a couple days with several InterVarsity staff in Chicago. We were discussing what it meant to help our work on campus grow numerically and develop in faithful ways.

One of the coolest parts about my job is that I get to occasionally spend time with people from across the country who are deep, wise, innovative, and way more gracious than I will ever be.

And in spending a couple of days together, of course there's going to be gems of insight shared.

One such gem came out during a conversation about helping people through the fear of change. We were discussing how a proposal that we were making would generate fear in certain people.

"Fear," said one woman on the committee, "is the exact same thing as faith. Both of them are responses to something unknown."

Been thinking about that thoughtful insight for the past day or so. Fear and faith are both in operation in the same context: the unknown. I wonder if fear is the defensive movement, the self-protective, self-preserving response to what's unknown. And faith, then, is the proactive, engaging, even risky response to the unknown.

What's somewhat striking about all this is that "people of faith" aren't typically thought of as people who take risks or who are bold. Typically I think of "people of faith" as very nice, sedentary, predictable, orderly and civil.

But faith at work is seldom predictable or sedentary. In those rare moments in my own life when I've really lived out of a center of gravity of faith rather than fear, it's led me to do some things that I might not have done were I in my right mind.

Jesus at points throughout his ministry would comment on the faith (or lack thereof) of individuals or communities that he encountered. I shudder to think what he might have said about me had I bumped into him on a dusty road somewhere in Galilee.

But for today I think that my colleague's insight is enough to get me thinking and praying about how I might begin to take off fear as a response to the unknown--fear of failure, rejection, insufficient provision, insufficient emotional or physical stamina, and all the other host of fears that operate just below the surface--and replace those with faith.

Celtic Morning Prayer

2010-11-17T11:45:00.001-05:00

Been at some staff meetings this week where we've prayed using a wonderful prayer guide from the Northumbria Community. Here's the liturgy that we've used for the morning prayer. Even if you're not a big fan of using someone else's script to pray, see if the Lord might use this to spark your own prayer life today:

Opening Sentences
One thing I ask of the Lord,
this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life;
to behold the beauty of the Lord
and to seek Him in his temple

Call: Who is it that you seek?
Response: We seek the Lord our God.
Call: Do you seek him with all your heart?
Response: Amen. Lord have mercy.
Call: Do you seek Him with all your soul?
Response: Amen. Lord have mercy.
Call: Do you seek Him with all your mind?
Response: Amen. Lord have mercy.
Call: Do you seek him with all your strength?
Response: Amen. Lord have mercy.

Declaration of Faith
To whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
And we have believed and come to know
That you are the Holy One of God.

Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ,
King of endless glory.

[Scripture: Psalm & Old and New Testament Readings; Meditation of the Day; Prayer]

Canticle
Christ as a light,
illumine and guide me.
Christ as a shield
overshadow me.
Christ under me;
Christ over me;
Christ beside me on my left and right.
This day be within and without me,
lowly and meek, yet all-powerful.
Be in the heart of each to whom I speak;
in the mouth of each
who speaks unto me.
This day be within and without me,
lowly and meek, yet all-powerful.
Christ as a light;
Christ as a shield;
Christ beside me
On my left and right.

Blessing
May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you,
wherever he may send you.
May he guide you through the wilderness,
protect you through the storm.
May he bring you home rejoicing
at the wonders he has shown you.
May he bring you home rejoicing
once again into our doors.

Unpacking the Feeding of the 5,000

2010-11-16T11:15:00.003-05:00

...and I managed to do it in 27 minutes! Don't just sit there, check it out yourself!

God's Testing and Falling into Beautiful Deaths

2010-11-15T11:55:00.002-05:00

I don't like to think about the fact that God tests us.

I like to think about God's redemption, the ways that he brings life and peace and joy...all those things that I fight to believe and want to believe about God and his ways with me. But I don't like to think about God testing us and I don't think that I experience it very often.

But recently I think I've been in a testing season of my life. The stuff that I'm being tested over is mostly about the battle for my heart and for what I'll give my allegiance to. They're the kind of issues that make sense inside your head and with a few close friends but wouldn't seem all that important in a vacuum.

And while I don't like to think about it, it's clear throughout Scripture that testing comes from the Lord. This is what many of the New Testament writers attribute persecution to--testing that is proving whether or not their faith is genuine.

Compared to being thrown in jail or being burned recreationally to light parties (thank you, Nero), the type of testing I've been through seems almost trivial. But I think the goal is the same regardless of how the testing comes about: it's a refinement process.

Our heart gets so muddled and our affections so easily diluted. It's easy to get lost and for our love for God to turn lukewarm. And so he tests us.

One reason why I don't like to think about God testing me is that I don't like to think that God is up "in the sky" playing games with us. But he's not.

This testing is a real testing. And this refining is mission-critical to the development of our character and commitment. If there was some other way to deal with the idols in our hearts, he would do it. But sometimes there's not. And so he tests us.

Recently a friend of mine reminded me of something that I posted a couple of years ago--I wonder if fall is God's way of reminding us that some of the deaths that he invites us to die can be beautiful.

Testing is one of the ways he invites us to die beautiful deaths.

In the past week I've made small steps towards staring down some old demons. It's been exhausting and exhilarating all at the same time. And when this is all over, I'll be glad to take a rest.

But in the mean time I'm leaning into some promises from Scripture: on the other side of all the deaths God calls us to die (beautiful or not) is always, always, always more life.

My Plans Meet Eeye-Ore and the Christmas Carols

2010-11-13T11:15:00.002-05:00

Periodically over the course of our lives, those of us who attempt to live out this following Jesus thing at all seriously bump up against the reality that God occasionally refuses to get on board with our reasonable plans.

We make what seem to us to be perfectly reasonable plans for relationships, career, what to do with our money, how to view sexuality and marriage and worship and raising our kids. And then we find either in the Scriptures or circumstantially that God says no to our plan.

And at this point many of us quit on God in order to do our own thing. Happens all the time. Some of you can identify the fork in the road where God said "no" to something you wanted and so you said "no" to God. Some of you are perhaps at that fork in the road right now.

Some of you said "no" to God's "no" several weeks, months or years ago and now you're on your way back to God. Your plan that sounded so very wise and reasonable back then doesn't look so wise and reasonable now.

As for me, I've certainly had times when I've chosen to say "no" to God's "no." But more often than not at this point in my life, I'm accepting it, but kind of passive-aggressively. I get angry. Then I pout and mope and get all Eeye-Ore-ish.

If it gets really bad, I start listening to Christmas carols. Don't ask me why, I'm not even sure why. It's just how I roll.

When we strip away the outer-wrappings of whatever it is we're wrestling with God about, the issue almost always comes down to this: who will you trust to decide your life and direct your future? Who am I, who are you, going to trust with the steps of our lives?

I've hit some Eeye-Ore patches over the past six months. I've dialed up a little Handel's Messiah a couple times this fall. I've been angry and wondered and pouted and struggled with God and with anyone who I can get to listen to me.

But I think on the other side of some of it, I'm coming out with roots pressed deeper into the love of God. I think that I'm weathering this storm still--not done yet--but it's starting to abate.

And I think I can already sense there's fruit from it. I think I'm more committed than I was a couple months ago to trusting God with my plans.

In a couple of weeks, I'll have the official green-light to start playing Christmas-type music without the prerequisite of being in a funk.

My prayer is that as I continue to press ahead towards the celebration of God coming to get us, I'll find myself not only glad to celebrate what he's done in the past, but more reckless than ever in trusting him with my future.

Faith and Food

2010-11-11T11:56:00.002-05:00

Historically when the topic of being a vegetarian, vegan, or some other alternative food-source person comes up, my response is that me and my people have worked too hard to get to the top of the food chain to give it all up now.

But in this month's Christianity Today there's a really thoughtful article about food and how our relationship with how it's produced, distributed and consumed should be impacted by the fact that we know the one who is God over all of it.

It's call "A Feast Fit for the King." Check it out.

I'm probably still not ready to abdicate my place on the food chain. But I can respect someone who's thinking deeply about how faith and food might come together.

Hard Times

2010-11-10T12:15:00.001-05:00

This week I'm preaching one more time at Chapel Hill Bible Church. Last time they invited me to preach it was Labor Day weekend--which just happens to be one of the biggest travel weekends of the year. Which is what you do with a guy you've never heard speak before.

So here I am, a non-holiday weekend. I'm moving up in the world!

At any rate, I've been given free reign to speak on whatever I want. So I'm speaking out of the passage that I've probably taught out of more than any other passage over the past 15 years--Mark 6:30-44, commonly referred to as "The Feeding of the 5,000."

If you're not that familiar with the story, check it out real quick and then come back

Like I said, I've taught on this Scripture more than any other--at least a two dozen times. But this time around, God's kicking me in the butt with this summary of the point of the story:

Jesus:

Leads his disciples into a situation that they would rather not be in

Rejects their perfectly reasonable plan to manage the situation

Issues a command that they cannot possibly fulfill

In order that they might have to depend on him

And in so doing they experience the super-abundance of his grace, power, and blessing.

And so the question is: could God be doing the same thing in your hard times right now?

Paul's Pain, Tom Petty, and "Jesus Taught Me Customer Service Skills"

2010-11-09T14:02:00.006-05:00

If you're ever in a leadership context where people are hacked off at you and you feel like it's unfair and unwarranted, I suggest two things. First, pray and talk with folks you trust to see if it might be true. Secondly, read 2 Corinthians.

The Corinthians were a pain in the butt. At least a loud minority of them didn't like/respect/trust Paul and they made life miserable for him.

Both 1 and 2 Corinthians have this dance of Paul now encouraging them, now scolding them, now having to prove himself and his authority to them. It's an interesting dance that makes for some of the most profoundly moving and some of the most awkward Scripture writing we have recorded.

But as Paul does this dance of trying to prove himself and his credentials to the Corinthians a couple of times he summarizes his position with statements like the one found in 2 Corinthians 10: 17-18:

"Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord." For it is not those who commend themselves that are approved but those whom the Lord commends.

This struck me as I was reading it over the weekend--we are a fame/shame based culture. There are countless talk shows built around different pop-celebrities and everyday people's 15 minutes of fame.

If fame is our goal, self-advancement and self-commendation is mission-central. To rely on someone else to commend you (particularly God, who we're not even sure is there) is utterly foolish.

But if we read the Scriptures, it seems pretty clear that advancement of God's people is God's work.

This is tricky--when you're looking for a job, you've obviously got to fill out the application. But in what spirit? How do you represent yourself? What does it mean to bear witness, even in a job application, to what God has done in you and through you?

This doesn't mean saying "Jesus taught me customer service skills." But it does mean that even filling out a job application is an opportunity to tell of what God has done with you and through you all along the way.

And then you submit the opportunity, who you've been, and where you're going to God. And then you leave it there. And then you wait.

And to quote the great philosopher Tom Petty, sometimes "the waiting is the hardest part." Because that means the center of gravity in terms of the control of your life is outside of yourself and on Him.

The fundamental question then becomes "do I trust that God is faithful or not?" It's not actually about the thing we want. It's about who we trust to get us to where we need to go. Most of the time I'm a functional atheist about such questions--I think that I know best where I need to go.

But the reality is that when I allow God to commend me, allow him to advance me, allow him to lead me--those are the times when I've experienced the deepest disappointments as I wrestle with a "no" received...and when I've been most blown away by his goodness to me.

Puke Runs Like Rivers and The Importance of Seeking Forgiveness

2010-11-08T11:30:00.003-05:00

Over the past five or so days, puke has run like rivers in our house. It started with Zoe, progressed to my wife Kelly (laid her out for a couple of days), and struck Davis and Emma Kate in an epic puke-duelling match in the middle of the night on Friday night.

I have been the lone healthy one through all of it. I'm faintly hopeful that my time might not come at all. I'll be sure to keep you posted.

At any rate, being the lone healthy one over the past five days has meant a lot of work. We've undergone a self-imposed quarantine over the past several days and we've all been up in the middle of the night with sick kids.

Yesterday, in the midst of my own sleep deprivation and tired and somewhat cranky kids, I lost it with my oldest son. He and Zoe were bickering for the millionth time in the previous ten minutes and I just yelled at him.

It's never pleasant to see the ugly sides of yourself. Mostly, I like to believe that my most pleasant sides are the "real" me and that those ugly sides are the aberration. I think if I'm honest, however, the unfortunate reality is that it's quite the opposite.

The episode occurred just before dinner. About five minutes later, I had cooled down. I knew what I needed to do.

"I'm sorry for yelling at you, Davis. Can you forgive me?"

"Yes, Daddy," my sweet boy said to me in his sweet little voice, "I forgive you."

It's never good and yet always good for my ego to apologize to my six, four and three year-olds.

I have spent so much time with so many students over the years who had zero capacity to own the ways they had blatantly sinned against and hurt someone else because in their family they never did it. They never saw an adult parent take responsibility for sinning relationally against them or anyone else.

And so they were completely crippled in their ability to live in reality where we sin against each other all the time. Not only were they disasters relationally in the present. Their future marriages and families were going to bear the burden of the pride of those parents. A train wreck was preparing to repeat itself with each successive generation.

Later that night, we were going around the dinner table and sharing what we're thankful for--sort of a Thanksgiving primer. "I'm thankful for my daddy," is what Davis said.

And I'm thankful for him and his willingness to forgive me. And I'm thankful for parents that taught me the value of owning up to mistakes and making things right. And I'm grateful for other mentors who taught me this value along the way.

Hopefully I'll avoid the bubonic plague that's been steamrolling the Kirk house over these past several days. But whether I'm also steamrolled later today or not, I'm hopeful that my kids will grow up with a daddy who's not going to steamroll over them...at least not without an apology, shortly thereafter.

The Last Word on the Most Over-Rated Candy Ever: Tootsie Rolls

2010-11-05T11:15:00.004-04:00

Earlier this week (as I was pillaging my children's Halloween candy) I posted on my Facebook status: "The most over-rated candy ever: Tootsie Rolls."

This, of course, drew the ire of some FB friends and the rabid support of others. My faithful sparring partner Michael Whitman commented thusly:

I thought it was a well known fact that Smarties were tied with Spree for the title of "most over-rated candy". Since when can anything with Chocolate (even bad chocolate) in it be over-rated?

Of course, given the gravity and seriousness of this conversation, and this comment in particular, I have been pondering the subject all week.

I believe that Smarties and Spree win out over Tootsie Rolls because they are one thing and they do not pretend to be very good at it. Smarties and Spree are simply tart artificially-flavored fruity things. And they deliver on that.

Tootsie Rolls, however, attempt to be chocolate-like blended with Now & Laters. And the result of this hideous combination is that it does neither well. It delivers neither the limited promise of a Now & Later nor on the near-infinite promise of good chocolate.

This, my friends, is the problem: to do something excellently requires disciplined focus and singular-ness of thought.

In this case, Tootsie Rolls fail due to the un-holy blending of very bad chocolate and Now & Later chewy-ness (I concur with my FB friend Ed Hoppe: "all that work chewing and no real pay-off"). Whereas Sprees and Smarties are simply Sprees and Smarties--no attempts at blending tarty-fruity-crunchy with, say, black licorice.

Of course, some might object that there are exceptions to this rule: Peanut Butter cups, for example, blend peanut butter and chocolate. Creme-filled donuts also seem to violate the sacredness of the "do one thing in order to do it well" principle.

But the exceptions do not overturn the rule. They are simply that--exceptions. By and large in life to be excellent at anything takes rabid focus.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book "Outliers" where he posits the 10,000 hours of practice rule for freakishly good "outliers" like Bill Gates or The Beatles.

Jim Collins also talks about this in his epic study of various companies in "Good to Great." The companies that made the jump from good to great had what he calls a "hedgehog" concept--a single, unifying vision or principle that guided them in making hard decisions. The "also rans" tried to do everything; ergo, they remained also-rans.

There are few people who are excellent at anything. I'm not sure that I have what it takes to get there, either. But at thirty-six, I'm beginning to get some inklings of what it could possibly look like to find my one thing and to develop it more deliberately. Maybe I could still squeeze in 10,000 hours of practice before my time runs out.

Bottom line: Tootsie Rolls are terrible and terribly over-rated. And that's because it tries too hard to do too many things and ends up doing neither of them well. I'd prefer they just changed the name to "Halloween bucket space-eater-upper" in keeping with truth in advertising.

But all of this has got me thinking that maybe I've got some things in my own life that are just taking up space. And I've got to go to God with this, but maybe it's time to focus and figure out if he's made me to be chocolate or a Now & Later.

Or maybe he'd prefer me to stay multi-focused and do his work through me in my weakness rather than becoming omni-competent at any one thing. That's his call--he made me and prepared good work in advance for me to do. I trust him. But I think it's good to at least be asking the question.

Either way, we've got tons of leftover Tootsie Rolls here at the Kirk house, if anyone wants them.

The Job of the Spirit

2010-11-04T11:30:00.001-04:00

"The job of the Holy Spirit is to convince us that Jesus really does love us."

Good word from a former student (thanks, Dacker) who was quoting a YWAM (or some other para-church) guy.

The Four Questions that Drive All of Our Lives

2010-11-03T11:30:00.004-04:00

So the reality is that Americans aren't very generous. We don't give away much of our money. And two factors that we tend to think should move us more towards the generous end of things don't do so at all.

Rich people give away less money than non-rich people do, speaking in percentages. And generally speaking, religious people don't give away any more of their money than non-religious people.

There's lots of hand-wringing about this in conservative evangelical circles, even though we do a little better than the broader religious world in terms of our giving.

In that aforementioned evangelical-Christian world, coaching and training people in how to budget their money is big business. This is really good and helpful. We need to know how to handle our money so that we honor God with all of it--in what we give away and in what we do with the rest of it.

But every single one of us make decisions based ultimately on the four key questions of life. Our lives run on the rails of how we answer these four questions:

1. Who (or what) is God?

Does he/she/it even exist? Does he have a particular nature? Is he happy or perpetually ticked? Is he near or far? Is God in the earth or wind or trees or us or is God outside or over those things somehow?

2. What does God do?

If God exists, is he/she/it active or passive? Is he a judge? Ruler? Redeemer? Apathetic? Does he wind it all up and let it go or is he involved and moving around the furniture? The world is messed up (so we think) so what is God doing about it--or maybe he can't do anything about it even if he'd like to?

3. Who am I/are we?

Am I a god? Am I alone or watched over and provided for? Am I lost or found? Am I in need of a little improvement or death and resurrection? Am I basically good or basically bad? Am I guilty or innocent? Is my identity found in my geography, resume, family, social circle, number of Facebook friends, GPA, current title and/or office size?

4. What should I/we do?

Obey our thirst? Follow the rules? Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die? Get good grades? Work hard? Hoard whatever we can get or give to the poor? Vote Democrat, Republican, or abstain altogether? Does anything we do matter at all? Or on the other hand, does what we do get weighed on some cosmic scale at the end and dictate our fate--to be re-incarnated as a slug or welcomed into some kind of heaven?

Okay, so there's the Big Four questions. They are the most important questions we can ask and they matter in this order--God's character first, God's activity second, our identity third, our activity fourth.

It is worth noting that when we bother at all with these questions consciously we are generally obsessed with question number four. And that matters, but it matters the least. To get the answer to question four (what do I do?) without knowing the answers to questions one through three would leave us with simple, mindless activity.

The Scriptures are obsessed with question one--they are obsessed with the nature of God. We are obsessed with ourselves. Therefore, our lives are thin on joy and peace and are rife with anxiety and fear.

And while all of that sounds kind of theoretical, it has everything to do with everything--but let's circle back to the issue of our money.

If I get the best budgeting training that money can buy, but I fundamentally think that the character of God is distant and that it is up to me to make my way in the world, what will I do with my money? Am I going to be generous and give it away? Nyet. I will hoard it, just like everyone else.

Our lack of generosity is a theological problem as much or more so than it is a budgeting problem. Not hating on good budgeting, just saying that it's not the core issue for most of us.

These four questions plays out every day in thousands of ways. How do you study for your exams? How do you relate to your kids or your spouse or your annoying neighbors? What are the fears you carry? What are you anxious about? What are you hoping for? What are the dreams that you carry around? What bitterness and un-forgiveness or disappointment plagues you?

All of this can be traced back to how we answer those four key questions. And it all happens most often beneath the surface. So it might be worth starting to dig around down there--what are your answers to those four questions? And how does that impact your life...every day?

Rice-A-Roni, Googolplex to Pluto, and the Gift of the Holy Spirit

2010-11-02T11:30:00.003-04:00

Our children have an obsession with "googolplex." Something about it being the largest number we can say just makes it extremely handy. They are also fascinated with space, but a little fuzzy about what's in it.

So Emma Kate (age 3) and I have a sort of call-and-response liturgy. She'll say to me, "I love you from here to Pluto googolplex times, Daddy!" And I'll say back to her, "Oh, man, that's a lot! I love you from here to the nearest black hole googolplex times, Emma Kate!"

It makes for a whole lot of love around the Kirk house--on our good days, at least.

It seems to me that for many of us who didn't grow up in a more charismatic Christian tradition don't have any idea what to do with the Holy Spirit.

For those of us in more evangelical circles, we'd rather have Jesus. The Holy Spirit is like the consolation prize on a bad game show: a year supply of Rice-A-Roni and the Holy Spirit.

But the Holy Spirit is the love and power that occur between the Father and the Son. It's like they're going back and forth, telling each other how much they love each other--even more than from here to Pluto googolplex times---and it's so fierce it gives rise to this third member of the Godhead, the Spirit.

Ever visited a family that just loves each other so much you can feel it? Ever been to a family reunion or a a home that's centered, rich, joyful, loving, gracious? It's authentic, peaceful, enveloping. It makes you feel right at home.

This is the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God is the Spirit that invites us into the presence of a perfect and holy and loving God and empowers us to feel right at home--even when we have no business being there. The Holy Spirit is the power and peace of God, extended to us as we join his family.

Hopefully Emma Kate and I will continue to grow in our love for each other. We might even get a better concept of what "googolplex" really means.

But a far greater gift to us both would be to embrace this gift of the Holy Spirit offered to us by the Father and the Son. A "welcome home" gift that frees us from worry, fear, anxiety, doubt, sin. The Spirit that embraces us as sons and daughters of God.

Now Hear This: How to Handle Conflict

2010-11-01T11:55:00.000-04:00

Conflict, wrongly handled, destroys communities. I wish that this only happened on the college campus with 18-22-year olds. It doesn't.

It's much, much worse when old people like me have never learned to handle conflict and then it blows up in a church. And then the church blows up. And the damage is much greater because there's more dynamics in a church community with zero-eighty year olds than when it's all 18-22 year olds.

All because people have no idea how to handle conflict. Or they do know, they're just too scared to handle it the right way.

So here it is. Take a deep breath and read this carefully. You will have conflict with someone at some point. Some of you are dealing with a conflict-type situation right now. Some of you are advising someone who's trying to figure out what to do with a potentially conflict-laden situation.

Whatever it is, please, please, please don't screw this up. It does damage. It's not convenient. It's just holy. Here's an opportunity to live with integrity rather than slouch towards what's easy because following Jesus isn't about making your life simple. It's about making you good.

This is all coming from Matthew 18. Check it out for yourself if it helps.

First, if someone sins against you or hurts you, you need to talk to them. To them. First. Not your mother. Not your girlfriend. Not your small group. Not your best friend. That's called gossip. That's called sin.

Now I recognize two things: sometimes you need help to do the right thing like to confront someone who's sinned against you. Sometimes it's not exactly clear if you've been wronged. And so yeah, there are times when you've just got to talk it through with someone.

But I also recognize that our capacity for self-deception in this area is spectacularly great. And so we've gotta' be ruthless. Unless you're really, really, really not sure about what needs to happen, you've got to go to that person first.

If and only if they do not listen to you, then and only then does Jesus invite you to talk to someone else. But the purpose of that conversation is not to malign. It's to invite one or two people with you to go together in the hopes of winning the other person over. You go back to the person with those friends. Not just talk about them behind their backs.

If they still won't listen, then you go to the authority in your church or fellowship. And they help out with the dispute.

What I find with both students and old people is that the break-down happens with step one. Because people don't have the courage to have the hard conversation with the offending person. It's always easier to gossip than to have holy and healthy conflict.

Sin is always easier at first than holiness. But the returns on sin are perpetually diminishing. And the returns on holiness are perpetually compounding into infinite goodness and joy. That's the choice set before us with these commands.

Brothers and sisters, what makes the church different is not that we don't have conflict. Of course we're going to have conflict. What's to make us different is how we handle the conflict. Jesus gives us clear instructions.

It's about time we started taking him seriously.

Ipods, State Fair Rides, and What to do with Your Self

2010-10-29T10:59:00.007-04:00

The fall after I graduated, I was working for IV at Virginia Commonwealth University--and perpetually feeling stressed out. I was in over my head, working at a commuter campus and getting to know students and over-functioning as I tried to figure out how to do my new job.

One weekend that fall, I went back to UNC to visit some old friends--it was oasis-like: laughter, re-telling old stories, inside jokes, and new memories.

I was sharing this with my supervisor afterward, Kim Green, and she made a comment that has stuck with me for fourteen years: "It's great to be with the kind of friends that allow you to forget yourself."

This struck me because of course I've grown up in a culture that says it's about finding and expressing yourself, not forgetting yourself. In fact, I would have said that I was finally around people who allowed me to be myself.

But the reality is that her description was much more true. In the stress of my first semester in ministry, I was super-self-conscious. I was hyper aware of how I was or wasn't fitting in, how I was or wasn't being successful.

And it was, indeed, a tremendous gift to forget myself for a weekend and just be with people who I loved and who I knew loved me.

Several years ago Apple developed a personal MP-3 player to give the old Sony Walkman a much-needed face-lift. They called it the Ipod. And ever since the explosive success of the portable music player, Apple and everyone else has spent a small fortune finding new accessories that they can sell us that are all about the "I," from Ipads to Iphones to ILife to ICal.

It's all about tending to the very hungry "I" that strangely seldom experiences true satisfaction for very long. In our overly-self-conscious age where image is everything, the I must be tended to and worshiped.

We cannot forget ourselves, even if it would be good for our souls. It's not good for business.

I was thinking about all of this yesterday as I came across this excerpt from a story by George MacDonald:

I sickened at the sight of Myself; how should I ever get rid of the demon? The same instant I saw the one escape: I must offer it back to its source--commit it to Him who made it. I must live no more from it but from the source of it; seek to know nothing more of it than He gave me to know by His presence therein...

What flashes of self-consciousness might cross me, should be God's gift, not of my seeking, and offered again to Him in every new self-sacrifice.

Elsewhere MacDonald writes that God has given us a self in order that we might have something to offer back to God.

As I was praying over these thoughts in my journal later that morning, I considered an image of my kids at the state fair. They love the rides. When the gate-keeper at the ride opens that door to let them in, they thoughtlessly hand over the three tickets on their way through for the joy set before them.

What if my heart and mind and imagination were so fixed on the joy of the Land of the Trinity that I would gladly and heedlessly hand over this "self" on the way in? You mean all I have to do is check this coat at the door in order that I might roam free in the vast, undiscovered continents of grace and love and beauty and truth and wonder? Why would I even hesitate?

But of course, I do hesitate. The appetites of the self speak loudly and I wrestle with fears and anxieties and pride and desires. Some of these have kernels of God-given-stuff to them. Others are destructive and evil and must be killed off altogether.

There's a gift in God's invitation to die to ourselves daily. The demands of the self make for a poor life-compass. I spend too much time obeying my thirst rather than obeying God. My life is the poorer for it.

My prayer, then, is that this thing God has given me called the self might be released into his care. That I might entrust all of it to Him. And in so doing, all of me might be raised back up into newness of life where I forget myself for much of the time, delightedly so, and tend to myself only as the Lord would direct me.

Hitting Blogger-Puberty (Mid-Life Crisis?) with Piebald Life

2010-10-28T11:45:00.005-04:00

So I started Piebald Life almost exactly five years ago. I started it because I had just gotten something published over at BuildingChurchLeaders.com and the kind editor offered to link to my web site.

I didn't have one. So I started Piebald Life.

In the intervening five years, I have spent many words in these posts wrestling with issues that came up in conversations with students as a campus minister with InterVarsity at UNC-Chapel Hill.

My students over the years have forced me to think more fully and wrestle deeply with matters of faith, ethics, politics, and the outworkings of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus than I would have on my own. And for that, I'm deeply grateful.

Being an external processor, these posts have often been half-baked attempts at taking half-baked conversations or responses to students and continuing to refine them.

But as I wrap up year number five here with Piebald Life, I'm hitting blogger puberty--or maybe blogger mid-life. Mostly this is driven by my job shift from campus staff to supervising campus staff.

I'm not having the same types of conversations on a daily basis with students who have too much free time and classes that make them question every aspect of their faith. I'm not hearing those questions that drive me back to the Scriptures to wrestle with the deep questions of meaning and purpose.

I miss that the most, I think, as I'm in month number four of my new job.

And so I'm in a bit of a transition with Piebald Life as well. The stuff that I've desperately needed to process isn't quite as obvious as it once was. Looking back over my posts the past several weeks particularly, I feel like my blogger-voice has cracked many days as I'm trying to find my new voice.

My head is in much less abstract space than it once was. I'm thinking more about practical things: fixing my daughter's hair, working with co-workers, helping to build teams, studying budgets and spreadsheets.

So I'm not sure where that leaves me with Piebald Life. I think part of what's motivating this post is a half-baked apology for some of my half-baked posts over the past couple of weeks and gratitude for folks who are sticking with me.

I think that there's rich ways that life with Jesus intersects fixing my daughter's hair, working with co-workers, helping build teams, and studying budgets and spreadsheets. I'm just still figuring out a) what that is and b) if there's blogger material there or not.

A year ago, I would often have two or three blog posts "on deck" to churn out--either in my head or actually cued up to post. Over the past couple of weeks there's been many days where I'm wondering as I sit down to type what the heck I can talk about.

If I'm just making noise here in my very small corner of blogger-land for no reason other than sheer force of habit, then I'll seriously consider if the world needs more cheap words. I value and respect words too much to want to have them be used cheaply.

On the other hand, part of the value of the blog for me has been the discipline of writing. Posting about five days a week for the past five years has developed me as a better communicator. And I want to continue to see if I can make this transition to finding my new voice as I tackle different types of subjects than I have in the past. That can only come with some floundering as I find some sort of stride.

In the mean time, let me again say thanks for the students who have taught me so much and for the folks who read and the many responses on the blog, on Facebook, or off-line via private emails or conversations. I write to process, but I'm more fully refined by the feedback. Thank you.

And maybe the good news in all of this is that a blogger mid-life crisis means that I avoid my own later down the road.

Why I'm Not a Pacifist (or Socialist)

2010-10-27T12:45:00.001-04:00

During my time at UNC, I had several conversations with students who either were pacifists or who were seriously considering it. They were really thoughtful students, often studying a combination of Jesus' teaching (particularly the Sermon on the Mount) and the history of (and current expressions of) Christian pacifism.

Of course, just last week I was at UNC visiting a staff and a random middle-aged woman invited me a to socialist convention in Chapel Hill. There's about twelve socialists left in the world--most of them reside in France, I believe (please, no Obama comments)--and one of them lives in Chapel Hill.

But anyway, I was listening to an N.T. Wright podcast last week. And he had a brief aside on the issue of pacifism that sparked some better ways to articulate my own half-baked response to the invitation to cross over the pacifist side.

To briefly sum up, he argued that if there is nothing in place to enforce rules, then "the bullies and the bad guys always win."

He didn't elaborate much, but I think that gets to the core of it for me. Apart from a willingness to take on those that abuse power and exploit people (the orphan and the widow come to mind as the biblical poster-children for who needs protection and is most likely to be exploited) then we are conceding too much ground in the work given to us to do.

The command in the Garden of Eden was to tend to the Garden, to exercise dominion, to bring order out of the created order that teemed with life. This was good work, untainted by the fall.

Post-fall, the call to help bring order is no less in place. Anarchy and pacifism are vaguely related in that in either context, the victor will inevitably be whomever can connive, bully, and over-power the weaker, the needier, the ones who are more disadvantaged.

And so I believe that there are times (and certainly they are less often than our American history books would have us to believe) when military force is necessary to exercise holy and healthy dominion over the world.

Of course, the problem is that all those in power (even and especially Christians) are as much a part of the problem as anyone else. No one is "clean" when it comes to the question of sin impacting motives.

But to absolutely remove the option of military force, as sophisticated and thoughtful as the arguments are, seems to ultimately be overly-simplistic. The proper use of force to help keep or enforce moral order is a complex and weighty matter that I think calls us to draw upon the all the depths and breadth of the gospel.

We are commanded to care for the orphan and the widow. Is this only inclusive of acts of mercy and service? Does it not demand that we take on those who are committed to systematically exploiting the weak in ways that in some rare cases will require force?

Again, I recognize this is complicated The 'myth of escalating violence' means that responding to violence with more violence often complicates rather than solves the problem. And as Americans we are particularly indoctrinated with those myths.

But it's also a myth that providing bread to people as they march to gas chambers is finally more faithful than taking decisive action to end the oppression.

This whole thing is complicated. And that's not a bad thing. And this complication is part of why I think it has to stay on the table as an option: it demands of us as Christians that we wrestle with the truths and commands of Christ in a complex and challenging world...one that even includes those dozen or so socialists.

Friendships & Life Stages & Partying Until 8:30 P.M.

2010-10-26T11:15:00.005-04:00

I was talking with a friend of mine on staff with IV in Charlotte who's wife just had their second kid. We were talking about the challenges of trying to have legitimate peer friendships while juggling work (in our case, very relational work) and growing demands of family.

I think that my relational hey-day was probably college. When else do you have that kind of incidental time with people all doing the exact same thing as you?

The two single years in between college and marriage were harder places to find community Even in a church where there were lots of other single twenty-somethings, we were all scurrying about trying to make our way through degree programs or getting started with this new work thing.

Post-college, I think that the easiest time relationally was married, no kids.

In some ways, making friends when married got more complicated. The question wasn't just if I clicked with a guy. It was I had to click with the guy and I had to be able to at least tolerate the wife. And then my wife had to click with the wife and at least be able to tolerate the husband. Fortunately, we worked through this gauntlet with a number of great couples while in Richmond, Va, particularly at West End Pres.

But I think it got easier for me after I got married because for the most part women are just better at initiating with one another. Marriage for me meant that I got invited/tagged along to a lot more events, more parties, more places where people were hanging out.

Maybe I was just lame before and now that I had a super-cool wife, I got to ride her coat tails. This is one perfectly reasonable explanation (and perhaps I need to just deal with it). But I think that at least part of the reason is that men struggle to initiate with one another and with women...well, it's gets complicated and messy sometimes, but at least they get things off the ground relationally.

Then kids come along, of course, and they act as 6-pound, 8-oz wrecking balls through your social life. If the kid has to be in bed by 7:30, you've got to be there, too. There's laws about that sort of thing.

And now at ages 6, 4, and 3, our kids are starting to enter into the world of birthday parties and 2.5 soccer games every weekend, so our discretionary time is approaching nil.

I'm in a season right now of being very grateful for some close friends but also feeling how busy life gets and how hard it is to maintain friendships. Kelly and I had dinner with some friends last weekend. We started the e-mail thread trying to find a date back in April. That's six months, people. That's ridiculous.

I've always rolled my eyes at some people's celebration of relationships that they don't bother to keep up with but "can always pick up as if we had just talked yesterday." Seriously? What kind of community is that? It always sounded lame and shallow and lonely to me. But I'm starting to see the value of it. Maybe I'm just selling out.

Or maybe I need my wife to pass along some more pointers on how to get invited to the cool parents parties. I hear some of the really wild don't close down until 8:00 or even 8:30.

How To Deal With a Break-Up

2010-10-24T21:46:00.003-04:00

So there's this odd thing that happens, at least in Christian circles, when it comes to dating break-ups. People try to continue to be friends immediately afterward.

This, of course, is done with the best of intentions. Jesus tells us to love and serve one another. The person doing the breaking-up doesn't want to cause undue hurt to the person they're breaking up with. And the person getting dumped doesn't want the thing to end to begin with.

All of this adds up to well-intentioned foolishness.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Clean Break.

Here's the deal. If you're the one getting dumped, you aren't ready to be friends. You need time and space to allow emotions to settle down.

You want to be friends, but you're not ready. You still want to be dating. The other person doesn't. You're pretending to be okay in the hopes that the other person will change their mind. But that's not where this thing is headed. And it takes a little while to get used to that idea.

Hence, the clean-break. If you give it six to eight weeks with little to no contact, you can actually be friends again in about four to six months. If you try to be all b.f.f. right away, it'll take you four to six weeks to realize you're fooling yourself and it'll take you eight to twelve months to recover.

So if you're the poor soul who's just gotten dumped (or maybe divorced or laid off--the applications are myriad), take heed: the clean-break is your friend. It hurts more initially but it means a healthier you, more quickly, in the long-run.

Feel free to pass it along.

Rio's Separation Anxiety and Learning Holy Celebration

2010-10-22T09:38:00.003-04:00

Our third year of marriage, my wife Kelly and I got a dog. He was a used dog, we got him from an animal rescue. We named him Rio.

Some of our friends at that stage in their marriage were getting dogs to prepare them for kids. We should have had kids first to prepare us for the dog.

Rio was a great, great dog when we were home. But when we left, he freaked out. He would panic-bark for hours, shred curtains, trash, books, and generally make a nuisance of himself. Our neighbors in our apartment loved him, of course.

Rio had separation anxiety. And we tried to train him, medicate him, reward him and punish him, but nothing worked. Eventually we had a kid and we just couldn't handle a high-maintenance dog. I still remember crying as I dropped him off at an animal rescue.

The core problem of our humanity is that we are born separated from God. And all of us have separation anxiety, we just don't call it that.

And rather than running around panic-barking for hours, we scurry around frantically trying to order our lives so that they make sense to us. We chase after whatever we call "success" in order to silence the disquiet in our souls.

The worst of it is when we actually achieve whatever it is we think looks like success at any given moment. Because the original temptation was "you will be like God" and temporary successes reinforce that illusion.

What drives us more often and more desperately to God--success or failure? The biblical history of Israel and a couple centuries of church history show that God's people become self-enamored when they achieve and God-dependent when they're desperate. Come to think of it, my own life shows much the same pattern.

And so as Christ-followers, we must learn the discipline of God-ward celebration. We must learn to grow up into turning towards God with joyful celebration in the aftermath of a 'win' as deeply and desperately as we turn to God in the midst of dire straights.

Rio never got over his separation anxiety. This side of the grave, neither will we--even those of us who know Christ do not experience the same closeness we had in the Garden before the Great and Terrible Exchange.

But we can become aware of how our separation anxiety drives us to unhealthy lives. And we can begin to grow up into the discipline of celebrating success with the God who is reigns forever in victory.

A Theology of Sleep

2010-10-21T11:45:00.002-04:00

Recently I was with a staff who shared some thoughts from a book she had been reading.

Given the fact that God made our bodies to sleep for about one-third of our lives, maybe he's trying to tell us that it's really much more about him than it is about us.

The Conductor, The Life Coach, and Moving Beyond Responsible Disasters

2010-10-20T11:30:00.004-04:00

So yesterday we talked about Sir Whitmore's keys to coaching greatness from his book "Coaching for Performance:" awareness and responsibility (all with a cool British accent that I'm hopefully presuming that he has).

The goal of the coach is to increase awareness and responsibility by asking patient questions to help the coachee grow up into these two traits in their work and/or personal life.

Check and check. These are both good things. Jesus (and the rest of the New Testament along with him) uses plenty of language that would go under the headings of "awareness" and "responsibility."

But this whole humanistic unleashing of the infinitely glorious goodness of each human being that's locked away and encumbered by the evils of society, parents and religious upbringing through the power of awareness and responsibility just doesn't satisfy me. Even though these are good things. And I've been trying to figure out why.

I think it's because I've known people who are aware and responsible who are still disasters. They're over-aware, over-responsible, and can't do a thing about it. They're caught up in guilt about the past, anxiety for the future, and a combination of a need to "be responsible" all the while remaining stuck in all kinds of fears that they have little to no ability to do anything about.

And then there's stuff in us that just won't go away, isn't there? Thoughts, feelings, moods, dark dreams, shadows, memories. Thin humanism with all its feeble attempts at wishing away a core nature that is tainted by sin just can't deal with both ends of us: the glory of our humanity and the depths of our darkness.

Ultimately, awareness and responsibility cannot bring full healing to our souls. They are good things, but they are means to a further end and not the end itself.

Not the least reason, of course, being that awareness and responsibility cannot address our most fundamental problem: separation from God. If awareness and responsibility were all that the Scripture taught, we'd be hopeless.

Awareness and responsibility must spring from and be boundaried by a larger story, a larger framework: forgiveness and grace are ours in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Only in Christ can we be aware of all of our junk (past and present) and not have it condemn us. Only in Christ can we be fully responsible moral agents as well as have the power to be changed into repentant saints.

Whitmore offers a beautiful illustration of all our sub-personalities being directed by the deepest, most central "I" like a conductor over a symphony. But in reality, that "I" cannot help but be enmeshed in all those sub-personalities--many of whom will remain mysteries to even the most self-aware of us until the day that we die.

The real goal is to hand the baton over to Jesus. To allow him to conduct the symphony of sub-personalities and to ultimately win over the deepest "I" that is our truest self. That "I" who is made in God's image, is fallen from God, and who struggles always with sin and pride and self-defeat.

That "I" is rabidly loved by a perfect and good Father, redeemed by His Son, and empowered by His Holy Spirit into new creation that leads to new-ness of life. That "I" and all of his or her sub-personalities are no mystery to God as they are to themselves. God who made us, knows our fragmented natures, and is eager to redeem all of it.

And I'm grateful to Sir Whitmore for helping me to understand how awareness and responsibility are two key steps in that redemption. And I'm even more grateful that those aren't the final words in what it means to finally get there.

Life Coach Jesus, Part 1

2010-10-19T11:15:00.004-04:00

In yesterday's Grab-Bag post I briefly touched on a book that I'm finishing up called "Coaching for Performance." In it, Sir John Whitmore (it'd be much easier to read if I could conjure up his British accent) argues that the key to developing people is a coaching approach that taps into human potential and unleashes it.

Whitmore boils the coaches' job down to a couple of core concepts. The job of the coach is to raise the coach-ees awareness and personal responsibility.

Awareness, Whitmore argues, is imperative. People must be made aware of their own inclinations, made aware of group dynamics, made aware of goals and desires of the individual as well as the group/team/company.

People must grow most of all in self-awareness. Towards the end of the book, Whitmore gets super-deep into the psychology of coaching.

He argues that a good coach understands that all of us have multiple sub-personalities. And that the coach helps the "I" underneath all those sub-personalities eventually act as the conductor of the orchestra. The fully integrated "I" stands over and above all the potential warring personalities and voices (say, the voice that tells you to get out of bed early to exercise v. the voice that tells you to hit the snooze bar) and brings them into harmony.

And this, of course, leads us into the responsibility piece. The coachee must not only be aware of the multiple personalities at work in his psyche, but must also take personal responsibility to master them.

If this combination of awareness and responsibility is the key to awakening a healthy, motivated, fully functional human being/employee, then it's obvious that the old top-down methods of high-control in management are utterly useless in Whitmore's understanding.

If the employee only does exactly what they're told because they're afraid of consequences, it does nothing to increase their awareness of a situation or their ability to fix it OR of their sense of responsibility to take the initiative to do the fixing.

It would seem that this talk about awareness and responsibility lines up rather nicely with Jesus' talk in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus goes to great lengths to shake us up out of our self-righteous stupor--to make us aware of the sin at work in all of our hearts. And he calls us to go to great lengths to own the corrective: gouging one's eyes out, for example.

And yet all of this talk of awareness and responsibility, as helpful as it might be, ultimately can't really deal with our most essential issues in life. But at this point, this post is too long already.

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

2010-10-18T11:15:00.004-04:00

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

2010-10-15T11:30:00.002-04:00

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?"

2010-10-14T11:30:00.004-04:00

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

2010-10-13T11:30:00.002-04:00

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?

2010-10-12T11:15:00.004-04:00

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

2010-10-11T10:41:00.004-04:00

"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

2010-10-08T13:03:00.004-04:00

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

2010-10-07T15:44:00.003-04:00

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

2010-10-06T14:18:00.004-04:00

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)

2010-10-05T12:21:00.003-04:00

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

2010-10-03T21:20:00.003-04:00

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

2010-10-01T11:30:00.000-04:00

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)

2010-09-30T11:30:00.002-04:00

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

2010-09-29T11:30:00.002-04:00

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

2010-09-28T12:15:00.007-04:00

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

2010-09-27T12:00:00.002-04:00

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?"

2010-09-24T11:30:00.002-04:00

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

2010-09-23T11:30:00.001-04:00

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

2010-09-22T13:45:00.004-04:00

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

2010-09-21T11:45:00.004-04:00

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.

Ten Weeks In and Experiencing Extrovert De-Tox

2010-09-20T11:45:00.006-04:00

So I'm a good ten-ish weeks into my new job and I've had some excellent moments already. It's encouraging to see the staff I work with do good work. It's fun to come alongside and brainstorm and encourage and get to know them and their students.

And it's been really cool knocking on some doors at campuses where there's no InterVarsity work and seeing what might open up. One campus in part icular has seemed to pop with potential and I'm hopeful that we might be able to plant there in the fall.

But there's been some challenges, too. Being the flaming extrovert that I am, I have missed the crowds. I'm getting some great one-on-one time with my staff. But that's not quite the same thing as being at a large group with 300 students. I always came away energized by large group--even when it was bad.

This has led me to some good reflection. God has made me as I am--he knows how I'm wired.

But that wiring needs significant redemption. I can become addicted to the crowds. So part of the blessing of this job change for me is the move to a slightly more solitary job in order that I might not become addicted to the crowd.

In other words, as a a part of these first several weeks of my new job I'm going through de-tox. Love the crowd too much, you can become addicted to the crowd--you can start to use the crowd to prop yourself up rather than being free to bless the crowd. Jesus loves me and the people around me too much to allow me to live out my addiction for too long.

I will always love people--the more the merrier in my book. But my hope and prayer is that as I submit myself to the Lord in new ways in my new position that I'll be a healthier extrovert because I have cultivated that introvert side. I hope to be more fully human and allow others to be human, too.

So that's the first few weeks in the new gig. I look forward to seeing what God has next.

An Open Letter to UNC Students: Recanting Carolina Way Bashing

2010-09-17T11:15:00.005-04:00

Dear UNC IV Students, Past and Present,

During my five-year reign of terror as an IV staff on campus at UNC, I regularly dismembered the UNC cultural artifact known as "the Carolina Way." I am hereby repenting of said dismemberment, with significant qualifications.

"The Carolina Way" is UNC-speak for all that the university holds dear: academic achievement, service, justice, and social and relational polish. It is the myth of the perfect UNC student. It is the super-sizing of the impossible self.

In Biblical terms, it is the attempt at self-redemption and self-justification. It is an an attempt to find meaning and ultimate purpose without reference to God, His cross, or His resurrection. It is an attempt to fill the God-shaped void in our hearts with a Carolina-blue Superman or Superwoman.

As such, it is, of course, sin. And I saw it wreaking havoc on many of you particularly during my first four years on campus. I saw it ruining your sense of peace, over-running you with anxiety and frenetic activity--and I saw how it pushed you more onto your own flesh and hard work than towards Christ.

And so, of course, I pushed back against it. Hard. The Carolina Way became an easy pinata for me to take a stick to and thrash in an effort to correct the death that was at work in your lives. And I think that the corrective was important and good.

But my last year at UNC, I began to wonder if I over-corrected. And so I backed off on bashing the Carolina Way. And here today, I want to recant and suggest a better alternative. I want to suggest that the arm of the Lord is not too short to save and redeem even the Carolina Way.

Because of course justice, academic rigor, service and healthy social interaction are not bad things. They are good things that are in need of Jesus to intersect them and bring fullness of life through them.

And Christians across the centuries have displayed these attributes and worked their butts off to bless literally billions of people in the name of Christ: apostle Paul, Augustine, William Wilberforce, and in the last 75-ish years Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gary Haugen.

As long as the Carolina Way vies for your identity, affections and final purpose, it's death. If the Carolina Way goes through the lens of the cross and the resurrection of Christ it has potential to bless many people.

So thanks for your grace and forgiveness for your over-correcting former staff worker. I hope and pray that many generations of UNC students might graduate to bless many near and far-away neighbors in the name of Jesus.

Pandoran Box Fears, Giving, and Breakdancing

2010-09-16T12:47:00.004-04:00

The top two things that couples fight over are sex and money--not sure if its in that order, but I think that depends on the couple. In churches, which operates with a weird mix of characteristics including marriage, business, social club and philanthropic organization, I think money probably leads hands-down.

So it's no surprise that I've had lots of interesting conversations with friends who are on the journey towards faith about giving money as it relates to trust in God--whether that's giving to the church or any other faith-generated giving.

I had one conversation a while ago where someone who's on the journey towards Christ and who was asking the "where's this going to lead" question.

If I start giving some of my money in response to God, what am I getting into? Is it okay if I save for retirement? Will it mean that I stop saving for my kids' college? Is it okay to have cable t.v, a nice house, a couple cars--or will all those things have to be given away, too?

This person, like most of us, was trying to minimize potential collateral damage. If he opened the proverbial pandoran box, what's to keep things from careening out of control into living in a commune with AIDS victims in the slums of Kenya? Was it possible that God would ask that much of him?

The answer, of course, is maybe. But I didn't think that would help very much.

So I made an analogy. Every dad delights in the first steps of his kids. For a very small percentage, those first steps will some day lead to training for the Olympics or in some other way building their entire lives around walking that leads to running. Still a few more will run marathons or half-marathons.

But for most of us, those first steps are simply indicative of what we'll be doing for most of our lives. Walking is a certain freedom and power. Not being able to walk is debilitating. And when you take those first steps of walking, there's no telling where it all will lead. But all of us need to walk if it's at all possible.

Same thing with giving. Giving as I've argued before, should lead us to breakdancing. Because money lies about its own power and giving it away frees us from one of the most powerful lies in all the universe.

Every dollar put in the offering plate or given to your favorite InterVarsity staff worker (I couldn't resist) should be accompanied by a jig and shouts of joy. Again, this month, I'm choosing freedom! Again this month I'm saying a resounding "no" to the lies I'm tempted to believe about what money can do for me! Again this month I'm saying no to becoming a slave to money! Again this month I'm choosing to trust Jesus to give me life, to be my security and to take care of me rather than these digits in my bank account!

Giving is treason against all the forces of evil that have staked a claim on us. It is an act of rebellion against the forces that conspire to destroy us--even and especially inside of ourselves.

And for some of us, that first act of giving might put us on the path that leads straight to a life of poverty and giving up everything in order to follow Christ--just like the Olympic athletes. But for most of us, we take those first steps of giving in order to know the freedom from money as a god--and that's more or less where we stay for the majority of our lives.

No matter where it leads, if we're not yet walking, it's time to take that first step.

The Place Where Angry Atheists and Christians (Wrongly) Agree

2010-09-15T14:05:00.005-04:00

So I want to note a strange place of intersection and agreement in our American culture between angry atheists and many Christians.

Angry atheists and many Christians have one thing in common: they both mistakenly believe that if there’s a God, we shouldn’t have to deal with opposition or calamity.

And Christians will go even further than the angry atheists and add: especially if I’m doing what I know or think God wants me to be doing. “I’m obeying God, doing what is right or good—why is this happening to me?” or "Why isn't God doing his part?" are frequent ruminations amongst those of us who call ourselves Christians.

This is an odd thing if we step back and look at. Christians follow Jesus who’s whole life was marked by 2 things: obeying God and by opposition from start to finish.

Christians sometimes mistakenly think that if we’re doing something God wants us to be doing that God OWES US “smooth” that we DESERVE smooth.

But the good news is that God doesn’t operate with a ledger. This isn't a math equation and nothing in the Christian life is about getting what we deserve. If we were keeping score or count, all of us would lose miserably.

Following God is about a life of mysterious grace, not a life of keeping count of what we imagine or think we’re owed.

And we see that most remarkably in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ himself. And in him, we see the true promise: not that we bypass opposition, but that opposition emphatically does not have the last word on us.

In Christ, God has the last word on us, not our opposition--not even death which is biblical shorthand for everything that's set against us.

Prior to Christ, death was the one great last opponent that no one escaped from. But now in Christ, there's victory over all our opposition--including our own conflicted selves, the world, the flesh, the devil...and most especially, from the power of death.

Now if only angry atheists and those of us who call ourselves Christians could come to the place of living into that reality--that would be something worth talking about.

How Round-Up at Panera De-Supersized Me

2010-09-14T11:45:00.001-04:00

Two falls ago on campus, I came into the year with tons of high hopes. Our ministry had grown the previous year to record numbers, we had some strong people in place and a clear vision and some good culture-changes. We were ready (so I thought) to take off.

And then the school year actually happened. And for a number of reasons (including some that I do not fully understand) the start of the year was a train-wreck. What I thought was going to be a year of momentum and success and growth started out a disaster.

And I became a train-wreck. I couldn't sleep at night. I was anxious, angry, taciturn, grumpy, perpetually frustrated. My wise wife saw how I was sinking with each successive speed-bump and she called me out: I needed some perspective on all of this. I took a four month sabbatical.

Over the course of my sabbatical, I spent countless hours at Panera with my Bible, journal, and my Ipod shuffled through Handel's "Messiah" endlessly. And while I sat there at Panera with my Bible, journal, and Handel, the Lord began to ask me some significant questions.

Who's kingdom was this about, really? Was this Jesus' kingdom or Alex's? Who's name was I seeking to advance? Was it about His name or mine?

In my self-deception I had taken my own ego and this work (supposedly done in God's name, for God's name) and made it all about me. I claimed it was all about Jesus, Lord over the universe. Really it was all about me, becoming super-sized. I spent many hours spraying the Round-Up of repentance on the roots of my self-absorption and re-rooting myself in Jesus

And so yesterday's post about the importance of overcoming our self-deception rang in my heart this morning as I read Jesus' question at the end of John to the guards who are coming to arrest him and take him to his execution: "Who is it that you seek?"

Jesus knows who they seek. They seek him--to arrest him and to kill him. He has been praying about this, talking about it with his friends the disciples. The question isn't out of ignorance, it is to bring what is being done in darkness into the light.

And the question has the same impact as I considered it today: who is it that I seek? Do I truly seek the One who made me, died for me, rose for me? Or do I seek a Jesus made in my own image? Do I seek to be like God (the first temptation) or do I seek the one who is God who invites me to make my dwelling in him and allow him to dwell in me?

Is this whole God thing really just an extension of my own ego or is it the Holy Other who comes to meet me but who will only meet me on his terms. There is no negotiation between my ego and Jesus. I will love one and hate the other. One will win and one will lose in the battle for supremacy in my heart.

Who is it that I seek? Is it Jesus or is it me, supersized?

For today, at least as best as I can see and know and understand, I give myself to Jesus. And I recognize that sometimes the one that I call Jesus can sometimes be just a smokescreen for self-advancement. And so I can only give all that I know of myself--including my perpetual temptation to self-deceive--to all that I know of Jesus and ask him to sort it all out.

Good thing he's good at that sort of thing.

Why I Don't Trust Myself (And What I Do About It)

2010-09-13T11:08:00.004-04:00

So there's a lot of talk in both religious circles and the pop-psycho-babble Oprah's book club circles about being true to oneself, about finding out who you are and living into that.

And clearly there's much to be said for this. In our cult of personality world where the Hylton sisters can be famous just for being famous, it can be tempting to build a life of appearances rather than anything of substance.

Even in religious circles, there's personalities that we can be tempted to emulate in self-defeating ways. In the galactically famous David v. Goliath story from the Old Testament, the voice-cracking, zit-popping pre-teen boy David tries on king Saul's armor first before discarding it in favor of his trusty slingshot and a couple of smooth stones. He was a shepherd, and he would take Goliath down as a shepherd.

But there's a problem with all this 'be true to who you are' talk. We don't have any earthly idea who we actually are.

This is in part because of a lack of information. But it continues well beyond our own pre-teen, voice-cracking, zit-popping years. And that leads us to the real problem: self-deception.

We tremendously under-estimate our own capacity to self-deceive about who we think we are and why we do what we do. Self-deception is the proverbial monkey wrench in the battle-cry of 'be true to you!' that rings out from Oprah to Dr. Phil to the messages of moralistic, therapeutic deism that so drive much of our religious landscape.

And so I am deeply skeptical of my own ability to find my way towards being faithful to me...or even of that being a laudable goal.

On thing that helps me are tools: I like stuff like Myers-Briggs personality tests and the Enneagram not because I'm self-absorbed (although that might be true) but because it helps me to see myself. The Spirit uses this stuff to help me see myself for who I truly am.

This is particularly crucial for a couple of groups of people: leaders and parents. If you don't know your un-healthy tendencies, you'll most likely pass those along to the people you're leading...a particularly unsettling thought when it comes to the little people.

Ultimately, we will always remain a mystery to ourselves. There will be parts of ourselves that will always make us sad or surprise us.

But there is One who knows us. To the one who made us, we are no mystery. We're fully known, even the deepest, darkest corners. That passing thought you're shocked by? No shock to God.

We were made to know God and to be known by God. And God is patient with us. There's stuff about God that we can't handle. And there's stuff about ourselves that we can't handle yet, either. He is good to show us himself and ourselves as we are ready to receive it. We can deceive ourselves nearly infinitely--no personality test can outsmart our self-deception. But we do not ever deceive God. That's good news.

And in the end, I do think that we are most fully human when we are doing what we were made to do. I think how we get there however is often less to do with digging into ourselves and more about looking for help outside of ourselves.

Why I Don't Believe in Prayer

2010-09-10T09:47:00.003-04:00

So prayer doesn't really "work." It's not like a magic potion that you wave over your situation to make it instantaneously better. I don't believe in the power of prayer.

This is important to establish because of what I talked about earlier in the week from Nehemiah regarding prayer. There I said that prayer establishes a boundary around the power of something to define us. It helps us to remember that God is God and he's over the situation, which puts a limit around the opposition or situation that we're facing.

But the reality is that simply praying doesn't do this. There's some ways that we pray that actually leave us worse off than when we started.

Prayer goes bad in a couple of different ways.

Sometimes in our prayers we are spending time simply reciting or re-hashing how right we are and how wrong the other person is. This is part of Jesus' point when he tells the story of two pray-ers: the religious guy who stands proud before God and declares aloud how glad he is that God did not make him like a common sinner and the tax-collector who humbles himself before and asks for mercy and forgiveness.

When we pray simply as an excuse to self-justify before God and to rehearse our own righteousness to ourselves, we sin. We would be better off in some cases to not have prayed at all--except that God who is rich in power and mercy can sometimes cut through even our praying in arrogance.

Another way that prayer goes wrong is when we pray as functional atheists. We sort of feel compelled to pray about a situation but we don't genuinely believe that God is the third-party active who can or who would do anything about the situation.

Prayer in this case is simply worrying out loud, to borrow Dallas Willard's wonderful phrase. Not much power or freedom or release there, either. In fact, it's just making things worse.

It seems to me that the key to prayer is in the word "submission." We submit our requests to God.

Not in the same way that we submit an order at the drive-thru with the expectation that we'll get what we ordered. But in a way that recognizes a couple of realities: God is God, he is active and alive; we might be wrong or at the very least in need of some level of correction ourselves; and what God's up to in any given situation might not be what we expect or desire at this point in time.

And we do this boldly. Submitting our requests to God means neither the drive-thru experience NOR the "let me try to give God the right answer" experience. We speak our minds and our hearts with an earnest outpouring of what's truly there. And then we recognize that God is God, and we give it over to him--we submit those minds and hearts and desires and dreams and all that we would will to happen to the God who is Lord over us. This is what Jesus does in the Garden, before his execution.

When we genuinely come before God as we are and then submit ourselves and the situations that we're facing to the God of the universe, then we're finally praying.

And then, my friends, we have established the boundary around the circumstances of our lives to define us. God defines us. We have given our circumstances over to the higher power so that I might see me and my situation in light of a larger story that re-casts what appears to be true in light of the larger realities of what we know to be true.

"I don't believe in prayer," my systematic theology prof once said, "I believe in the God who is Lord over prayer."

Yep, that's it.

Last Grab-Bag Thoughts on Having the House Broken Into

2010-09-09T14:21:00.006-04:00

Some final thoughts (for now) from the past couple of days post the break-in at our house over the weekend.

*Plenty of folks have thoughtfully asked about how the kids are doing. That was actually one of our worst fears as well--particularly as our six and four year old are both pretty finely-tuned emotionally.

But the Lord's been good to help us help them navigate this. We've talked some about forgiving the guys who did it. We've laughed about them trying to use our dysfunctional microwave and how it would burn their popcorn. Zoe prayed two nights ago about forgiving them.

We've been helped by the possibly fictitious but functional idea that the guys who did this clearly knew that we weren't home and wouldn't have broken in if we had been home. Home, then remains safe for us while we're in it.

It still comes up randomly, and when it does we talk through it. They're a little spooked but seem to be processing it well.

*Lest I come across here in these posts as completely angst or anger or sadness-free, I've definitely had my moments. In particular, my wife's computer had tons of pictures on it that we didn't have anywhere else. Lots of great pics of our kids, totally lost for good.

And we're terrible at taking video of our kids, but what little video we did have was stored on the video camera that also walked out with the thieves.

These realizations have dawned on us at random intervals and have definitely been cause for less than happy thoughts. But it's also pushed us to more prayer and releasing the things that we need to release.

*I joked yesterday that my wife says this is my fault for preaching a sermon on "Overcoming Opposition" on Sunday. If you're interested in listening to the aforementioned sermon, you can do so at the Chapel Hill Bible Church sermon podcast page. For those of you not-so-techno-savvy, your computer most likely has an MP-3 player already installed. All you gotta' do is click to play.

Given the tremendous mental acuity of Piebald Life readers most of you would recognize the influences that have shaped my speaking.

So let me here and now recognize those influences, in no particular order: Monty Python's "Search for the Holy Grail," Steve Shelby, Andy Stanley, Tim Keller, Miroslav Volf, the good folks at All Saints Anglican Church, and of course all the students who have had to suffer under many of talks over the years and have been gracious enough to give me constructive feedback.

Oh, and apologies to the good people at Harris Teeter.

*Given the obvious reminder of the fragility of our homes here on earth, the question that Jesus asks in John 14 that I read over the weekend as I continue my study through the gospels of the Jesus' questions is particularly poignant:

In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.

Amen, come Lord Jesus! A big house! Lots of rooms prepared for our arrival! And my guess is that none of the microwaves burn the popcorn.

Further Reflections on Having Our House Broken Into

2010-09-08T13:55:00.005-04:00

So there were two high-water-mark events of our Labor Day weekend. The first was that I got to preach on Sunday at Chapel Hill Bible Church and the second was that our house got broken into while we were away.

Given that the sermon was about "Overcoming Opposition" my wife only half-jokingly says that the latter event was clearly my fault.

And I say that given that the sermon topic was assigned to me out of Nehemiah 4 by one of our pastors, it's clearly Dave Ward's fault. Dave, you'll be getting a bill shortly.

But it has been striking how the fruit of my time in Nehemiah 4 is really applicable to what we've experienced with the break-in.

Quick summary: Nehemiah is a Jew in captivity working for the king as the cupbearer, Jerusalem is in shambles and conquered. Nehemiah gets permission from the king to go and re-build the wall of Jerusalem, he rallies the people to go to work.

Nehemiah 4, a couple of guys aren't excited about the Jews re-building their wall and they set themselves against Nehemiah and his efforts. Hence, "overcoming opposition."

Nehemiah does a number of things that are instructive...and that have shaped how I've thought about our little episode.

First, Nehemiah never talks to the guys who taunt and insult the builders. He only talks to God. Prayer puts a boundary around the power Nehemiah's opposition will have over him and his people's work.

God is always the third party, active, throughout Nehemiah. And part of the intensity of an oppositional situation is how much it locks us in emotionally. We're having conversations in our head. We're internally embroiled in a toxic environment. And so we cede power over our lives to our opposition.

But prayer diffuses this Cold-War retro experience. It puts a boundary around the power the situation will have over us and it puts victory squarely in God's court. Final victory is his, not ours.

This is the victory I celebrated in yesterday's post that the Lord has worked in my heart. Several months of prayer has really freed me to not freak out that some of our stuff got stolen. It's not mine, anyway. It's God's. I gave it to him just that morning. He can do whatever he wants to with it. He is Lord over me, my stuff, and the guys who took my stuff.

Secondly, Nehemiah not only prays but he posts a guard. Some of us will pray and not post a guard when facing opposition. Others of us will just post a guard and not pray. But biblical wisdom calls us to do both.

So we're considering an alarm system--even just something that made a ton of noise if someone broke in. I'd love a dog, personally, but given that a dog would have been either boarded or otherwise out of the house (since we were traveling) it's hard for this particular instance to build my case!

And in the final analysis, Nehemiah (and we) trusts in the Lord to do what only he can do. The guard is not Nehemiah's hope. God is. God is the one who works through guards to protect innocent people all the time.

Alarm or no alarm, our hope is not in an alarm. Our hope is in the God over our home and our lives and our kids who works through stuff like alarms to keep people safe.

And finally, I believe that we're allowed biblically to identify our opponents. Scripture does so all the time. But we do so in order that we might do as Jesus did: we love them. And this, my friends, is perhaps the greatest challenge of them all.

And it's why we need Jesus, who dwells in us and who has already done this perfectly, to do it through us.

Reflections on Having Our House Broken Into

2010-09-07T16:03:00.004-04:00

So when the family and I got back from a weekend trip to see the grandparents (in between coming back to preach at Bible Church on Sunday) our house had been broken into. My wife's computer got taken, along with a handful of other electronics: DVD player, microwave, cd player, etc.

We were supposed to be headed straight out to a birthday celebration, so some great friends came and took our kids to the party (thanks, Kortus family!) while Kelly and I talked with the police and straightened things up.

It's sobering to get your house broken into--it makes you feel vulnerable. Our room was totally trashed--they went through drawers looking for jewelry or gold bars or loose diamonds or enriched uranium or something. I'm sure they were disappointed to find that my sock drawer contained only socks.

It's funny what they left: our old t.v. was too big and old and heavy to take. Ditto our printers. Some of what they took was in need of replacing anyway--our cd player wasn't working and the microwave was burning the popcorn.

As we straightened some things up and drove to pick up the kids, we prayed. My wife prayed really generous prayers: that the men who did it would know the love of their Father, that they'd repent, that they'd find good work to do, meaningful work to do.

I've felt really gracious towards them as well. Been praying for conviction for their hearts mostly so that they'd come to their senses and end up living a life worth living. And I'm grateful that they weren't malicious. They were looking for stuff to sell and money to take. They could have done much more damage to the house.

Our kids have been a little spooked, but they've been okay. And insurance has been only moderately difficult to deal with.

Over the summer I realized that I was somewhat worried about our stuff--mostly worried that something "big" could break (like a car or roof or plumbing or wiring) and worried that we didn't have the money to fix it.

And so I started praying for the stuff. Daily, I give back to the Lord our cars and our house and our roof and plumbing and electrical and tell him that I trust him with it.

And what I've found over the past 23-ish hours since coming home to a plundered house is that this has worked to root in a new perspective on my stuff. It's God's stuff, not mine. He can protect it. He can allow it to be taken away. Either way, we ask him to provide for us what we truly need.

As I work with insurance adjusters and electricians and window-repair people, I'm trying to honor them as God might. And even as I hit grumpy patches today, I'm praying that God would give me a trust in him--the one who's Lord over my family, my stuff, my insurance company...all of it.

And I'm praying that I might learn to release other things to him alongside our stuff. I'm praying that I might grow up into a man who is surprised to find himself free from the things that would otherwise take up way too much prime real estate in my heart and my soul.

That...and of course I'm praying for continued favor with the good folks at my insurance company. USAA, have I told you lately that I love you?

Overcoming Opposition Pt. 1: The Pre-Game Coin-Toss and Why Opposition Matters

2010-09-06T16:30:00.004-04:00

Over the weekend I was given the opportunity to preach out of Nehemiah chapter four with the topic "overcoming opposition." First, we needed to carve out what we meant by "opposition" since next week they were going to tackle "overcoming conflict."

So here's my arm-chair definition for you: opposition is conflict calcified. It is to be in a situation where someone or something is implacably set against you that will not be negotiated with without a winner and a loser.

When there's conflict, you can often work it out. There's room for dialogue in a conflict, maybe even end up with a win-win. But not so in an oppositional situation.

I have a deep love, as I professed last week, for football in all its various forms. And when two teams go out for the coin toss, they aren't meeting to negotiate a peace treaty. There's no settlement being offered. They are opponents. One will win and one will lose.

Opposition is conflict, calcified.

This makes the opposition conversation a bit more difficult because not everyone has faced true opposition. All of us have had conflict, but not all of us have experienced genuine opposition.

But here's why this matters for us and why it's important for us to engage with this topic: opposition is a crucible, it is a deeply visceral experience. What opposition does to us emotionally, psychologically, spiritually and physically is extreme.

For many of us an experience of opposition will be one of the most defining moments or seasons of our lives. It will be a fork in the road, where the trajectory will be radically altered for good or for ill.

For some of you, that's already happened. You look back and you can identify an incident or a season of opposition that was a turning point in your life--again, either for good or for ill.

So here's the deal: if the God of the Bible and the work and the message of Jesus Christ do not matter here, then they do not matter at all. Opposition matters. And how we deal with it matters. And so if God matters at all, he must matter here or else we should just pack this whole thing up and go home.

The good news is that God has much to say and much to do with how we deal with and address opposition, as we'll see as we look at Nehemiah chapter four.

The Critical Error of the University

2010-09-03T13:15:00.002-04:00

We would never just send a bunch of college freshmen into a chemistry lab and tell them to find their own way among the chemicals. That would result in a disaster.

But that is precisely the university's position when it comes to matters of conscience and morality and what is truly the good life. The university doesn't want to help them in the most important areas of their lives.

We foolishly encourage experimentation when there are clearly some paths that are wiser than others and have been proven to help foster the truly good life. But we do not teach these things to our students. And this has disastrous consequences.

We load them up with all sorts of knowledge and information and give them no moral compass to help them steward these things well. We arm them with dangerous weapons and do not bother to teach them wisdom.

And so their lives explode, just as if they were given free reign in the chemistry lab.

This is the critical error of the university over the course of the twentieth century.

-Dallas Willard

Are You Ready for Some Football?

2010-09-02T11:45:00.002-04:00

So this weekend the college football season kicks-off. I rank football a little lower than the automobile and a little higher than the light bulb among the greatest American inventions of all-time.

In football, glory is a zero-sum game. There's a winner, there's a loser. And players who hog the glory are frowned upon by some fans and delighted in by others and occasionally hated by their own teammates...because if one dude is hogging the spotlight, they're not sharing it with others.

This is how it works in the working world, too. If someone in your office is glory-hungry, they're often stepping on or over others to get the glory.

And so when we read in the Scriptures about the centrality and significance of the glory of God, we get a little squeamish. Does that mean that God gets all the attention while we get steamrolled? Do we get lost or overlooked if God is the one glorified? And does all of that mean that God's arrogant and self-centered?

The last question Jesus asks in the Lazarus story helps us navigate these good questions.

Yesterday Jesus wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. Today, we see Jesus standing outside the tomb, ready to do the mighty work he's come here to do: raise Lazarus from the dead.

"Take away the stone," Jesus says. "But Lord," says Martha, dead Lazarus' sister, "by now there's a bad odor. He's been in there four days." Jesus says, "Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?"

Here we touch again upon the gospel writer's obsession with the word and actions associated with "belief." And here, as we see throughout the Scriptures, belief isn't simple mental assent. It requires obedience. We cannot say we believe if we will not do what he says. It's that simple.

And Jesus offers a carrot: you will see the glory of God. And what happens afterward helps us sort through our innate conflicted-ness over being "victims" of the glory of God. They take away the stone. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead.

Ladies and gentlemen, here is what happens when we are fixed on the glory of God: all of our deepest needs are met. Everything that we were made for (love, hope, peace, reconciliation, joy, victory, rest, purpose, power, beauty, wisdom) happens.

God's glory is not a zero-sum game. The glory of God being expressed in your life and mine means that everything about our lives gets caught up in the redemptive story of life. Right-ness replaces wrong-ness. Laughter replaces mourning.

God's glory and our good are intertwined. He has designed it all to be so. Praying for God to be glorified in every area of every situation of our lives, our family, our friends, our nation, our politics, our economy is essentially the most self-serving prayer you could ever possibly pray--in part because of the glorious un-selfing that happens as you pray for God to be glorified.

Seeking our own, raw, self-glorification is suicide. Seeking God's glory for these sisters meant that they got their dead brother back. This is the glory of God: that we are fully-alive human beings--a dead guy named Augustine said this many centuries ago, echoing the words of Jesus in John 10. That's the good news of the glory of God.

And here's some more, slightly less, good news: are you ready for some football?

Jesus: The Anti-Drive-By Cliche Guy

2010-09-01T13:45:00.004-04:00

So when you're in crisis or times of extreme grief, the worst thing that can happen is a visit by drive-by cliche guy.

Drive-by cliche guy (or girl) shows up in the midst of your grief or crisis and feels compelled to utter a pithy one or two sentence reason why what you're experiencing isn't really all that bad after all and why you shouldn't be so upset about it. He gets extra bonus points if it rhymes.

If you've ever been through grief, you've had it happen to you. Some of you are that person. On behalf of everyone in the entire world, please stop.

The people we most appreciate during times of crisis or grief often don't say anything memorable at all. They are simply walking with us. They grieve with us. They share in it as best they can. They don't attempt to fix us or our perspective--at least, not overly-quickly.

This is part of what's so compelling to me about Jesus as we pick back up on the questions Jesus asks throughout the Lazarus story in John 11.

Last Thursday we looked at the rhetorical question: "are there not twelve hours of daylight?" The invitation was to walk in the light...and sometimes I like that, sometimes I don't. On Friday we looked at the pinnacle question in John that Jesus directs to Martha smack dab in the middle of her grief: "I am the resurrection and the life...Do you believe this?"

A rather difficult time to be attempting to answer such a weighty question--you could almost call Jesus rude here. But Martha's response is extraordinary, one of the most compelling and humble and bold responses to Jesus in all the Scriptures.

The third question shows that Jesus hasn't just come to be drive-by cliche guy. After talking with Martha, Mary comes out to meet him as well. And after a brief interaction with her, Jesus asks a simple question: "Where have you laid him?" And then comes the briefest verse in all the Bible: "Jesus wept."

This is what friends do when someone dies. They weep. Jesus arrives on the scene, Lazarus is dead, he has already declared that he is coming to raise his friend back to life. But Jesus weeps.

"Where have you laid him?" is a question that invites us to bring Jesus to our saddest places, hardest places, most broken places.

The places where we've buried our hopes and dreams. The places where our lives have forked in ways that to us felt catastrophic: the break-up, the divorce, the rejection, the death of a loved one.

Jesus asks you and he asks me along with this crowd: "Where have you laid those dreams? Where did you bury your hopes? Can I come there and weep with you? True, I have come here to redeem and heal and to raise up new life. But before we get to that, I want to share in your sorrow. I want to walk alongside you in your pain. I love you. That, too, is why I have come."

This is one of the most compassionate questions Jesus asks throughout the Scriptures, "where have you laid him?" And it is good news to all of us as we experience our own seasons of sorrow, crisis, and grief. As things and people and hopes and dreams at times die and are buried. Jesus speaks a word of presence and comfort: I weep alongside you.

That, my friends, is a good and beautiful God.

The Kirks Go Camping, My Smelly B.O, and True Spiritual Maturity

2010-08-31T12:57:00.005-04:00

This past Friday night Kelly and I embarked on something we've been talking about doing for quite some time: our first ever family camp-out.

It was just Friday night. It was just thirty minutes away down at Jordan Lake. We figured if everyone was melting down at 2 a.m, we could come home and get a decent night's sleep.

It actually went spectacularly well. Our kids were satiated with hot dogs cooked over the open fire and s'mores for dessert. We all (eventually) slept and we had a great time wading into the lake and playing in the woods. Score one for getting back to nature for the Kirk family, hopefully we'll be able to do something a little more ambitious next time.

Of course, being a guy, the fire makes the camp out for me. It was a small-ish one, but hey, open fire is open fire.

While I was there, I was surprised at how not-smelly I was. I generally associate camping with serious body odor, soot and ashes and everything smelling like smoke. I assumed that this was not the case on this particular trip because we weren't there that long and that we kept the camp fire intentionally small.

And then I got home. And once I was away from the great outdoors and the constantly smoldering fire, I realized that my previous evaluation of my odor was way off. I stank. Everything we brought with us stank. Smoke-smell permeated all our stuff. But it wasn't until I was out of it that I could recognize it.

And this is how it is with our spiritual and moral condition. Scripture describes coming to Christ as coming out of the darkness and into the light. As we do so, we begin to see ourselves as we truly were. The darkness had hitherto covered up many things. Now those things are exposed.

Often in Christian circles we talk about spiritual transformation as if it were an ever-increasing experience of personal improvement.

But Calvin and other Reformers talked about the Christian life not (primarily) as increasing personal improvement but as perpetual repentance. Spiritual maturity, they argued, was about repenting from our ever-at-work sin as soon as it was revealed to us. Cutting down the lag time between seeing our sin and repenting of it was the goal.

There are few places in our lives where we are more self-deceived than in our estimation of our own moral goodness. We will almost always think of ourselves way too highly or way too lowly.

This is why we need the light of Christ. If we're constantly judging by our own internal lights, we'll mis-diagnose the reality of the situation and therefore mis-prescribe what is necessary for healing.

All I needed on Saturday was a good hot shower and to either wash or burn my clothes (Kelly voted for the former). In my spiritual journey, the work is even simpler but more demanding: repentance (literally: "to change your mind" or "turn around") works a cleansing that's much more thorough.

Fight Club's Final Engagement

2010-08-30T10:54:00.006-04:00

So I have a theory: most men are relationally stupid/handicapped/ridiculous.

Most men, myself included, have minimal inclination towards genuine relating. We'd rather talk about sports, the stock market, our work, cars/boats/hunting...just about anything other than what's actually going on in our own souls.

Of course, this is most often because we have no idea what's going on in our own souls. Which is perhaps not a uniquely male problem. But our inability to communicate much beyond the surface of events and facts makes it perhaps all the more likely that we'll never get to that level of discovery.

And so it was with great reservation that I sent the following invitation last July to a group of guys from church:

So I’m reading Romans 1 and three things seem to mark Paul’s life: prayer, community and mission. And I’m thinking that I could use help in all three areas.

And I’m realizing that I believe deeply in the power and value of community and that I spend much of my life building it for other people but don’t partake of it myself as much as I need to or should.

And I’m thinking that my life would be much richer if I had a group of guys who (to use Sean Jecko’s wonderful image) served as a sort of ‘board of directors’ in my life, to discern wise decisions from foolish ones, to encourage me in my husbanding/fathering at home to my wife and kids as well as to pray for me in the mission God has called me to on campus.

I’m thinking I’d love a group of guys who shared life together a little more deliberately, recklessly, courageously, humbly, boldly. To remind one another about the gospel when we forget it, to encourage and challenge and push and question and learn from one another.

From this invitation, Fight Club was born. It was six of us initially, then five.

Over the course of our year together, nearly all of us had seismic opportunities, challenges, transitions, and/or family issues to deal with. Some of those were once-in-a-lifetime, forks in the road. Some ended well, others not as we would have liked.

Over the course of our year together, we learned to be a community of guys who cared for each other. For some of us, the question, "how is it with your soul?" was a familiar and easy one to engage. For others of us, the question and the accompanying new language it required was difficult at first.

We listened to one another's stories. We received the different gifts we each brought to the table. We shared about our lives each week and we went to battle in prayer for one another. We stuck it out even after a stretch around December where we didn't meet for several weeks and I wondered if Fight Club was over and done with.

It wasn't. The Lord had significant work for us to do together this spring.

And then, it became clear that the season of Fight Club was over. Several guys are leading new small groups this fall or are eager to do a small group Bible study with their wives. Kelly and I are in a new church and needing to really root-in there.

So we closed out last night. Each guy took a turn in the hot seat. The guy in the hot seat shared how God had used Fight Club in his life over the course of the past year.

Then each of us affirmed the guy in the hot seat, told him what we've appreciated about him. Then each of us exhorted the guy in the hot seat--spoke specifically into what it will look like for that guy to follow the Lord, called them to take off sin and press on towards Christ.

The guys were generous with their affirmation and spot-on with their exhortations. When it was my turn in the hot seat, they encouraged me greatly in my gifts and their warnings and exhortations for what it would mean for me to continue toward Christ were spot-on. We knew each other, loved each other and wanted Christ for one another. A marvelous and rare gift of grace.

I've been in a bunch of small groups over the years. Some have been fantastic and others just sort of average. But I don't know if I've ever had a group of guys who were more willing to talk about the deepest, hardest, most raw places of our souls as I've had with this group of guys.

Thank, Fight Club guys. You've been a tremendous gift to me and my family and my work this past year. Most guys go their whole lives without conversations the caliber of which we participated in nearly weekly. I pray for each of you to continue to grow in your love for the Lord and for each of you to find men who will continue to ask "and how is it with your soul?"

And I pray that for each of you, o faithful blog readers, as well...especially for the guys.

John's Obsession, Martha's Confession, And Jesus' Death-Defying Question (Part 2)

2010-08-27T12:45:00.006-04:00

So in the three 'synoptic' gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all thought to be working loosely from Mark's manuscript) the key question surrounding Jesus is his identity. Thus, the central question out of Jesus' mouth in each is the famous: "Who do you say that I am?" issued to his disciples.

But in John, the central theme is belief. Who believes in Jesus, who doesn't, and what it means to have authentic belief worked out in real-time are something of an obsession with John and how he tells his story.

So it makes sense, then, that the most critical question posed by Jesus in the book of John is not about identity, but about belief.

The second question driving the Jesus-raising-Lazarus story raises just that issue.

After waiting a couple of days and talking to his disciples about walking by light v. walking by darkness, Jesus heads to see his dead friend and his family. Martha, the most kinetic of Lazarus' two sisters, rushes out to meet him.

The dialogue upon their meeting is full of emotion and power. Martha proclaims that if Jesus had just been there, Lazarus wouldn't have died. Jesus offers that her brother will rise again. Martha replies in the affirmative, "on the last day."

Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?

There it is: the belief question. Jesus arrives late to the dead-man's party, he's let him die on purpose and he's arrived to "wake him up." But he's got work to do before he gets there. He's going to press people on this issue of belief: I'm the resurrection, I'm offering you life, do you believe this?

"Our lives run on the rails of our beliefs," Dallas Willard writes. What we believe about human flourishing, personal happiness, the role of state and church and family and employees and employers and God all drive much of our lives--whether we realize it or not. Our lives run on the rails of our beliefs.

Jesus, of course, knows this. And so he presses Martha (and us) to deal with him in relation to the most critically devastating part of our existence: death. If we can trust trust Jesus as we stare down into death, we can trust him anywhere. If we can't trust him here, we will trust him no where.

Jesus has a lot of nerve, pressing a grieving sister to answer this caliber of question at such an emotionally intense time. But here's what matters most. If she cannot or will not trust Jesus to be the resurrection life that he claims to be, she will not know life herself.

And so Mary responds with what I consider to be the most profound and simple confession of Jesus. Uttered, I think, with less bravado and enthusiasm and more of a gently submissive voice, full of faith mixed with a humble resignation:

"Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world."

Would that I would do so well in my times of sorrow as this.

The Said Dead Man, The Rhetorical Question, and Confessing the Sometimes

2010-08-26T16:15:00.001-04:00

I'm coming to the close of my summer in the gospels (well, just Matthew and John, really) looking at questions that Jesus asked. It has been a spectacularly rewarding study.

And right now I'm camping out in one of my favorite stories in the Bible, looking at it through the fresh lens of how questions drive the narrative.

John 11 is the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. I have often thought that if I could choose just one chapter of the whole Bible to have for the rest of my life, it would be this one.

The story in brief: Jesus' friend Lazarus is sick. Jesus hears about it, waits a couple deliberate days. Lazarus dies. Jesus goes. Jesus has intense interactions with sisters of dead man. Jesus raises said dead man from grave.

There are four questions that Jesus asks in the story, I'm going to unpack each one over the next several posts as an excuse to revel in this passage a little bit more!

The first question is one of Jesus' favorite-type of questions: the rhetorical one.

Jesus hears about Lazarus' sickness, waits a couple days, then he announces to his disciples he's going back to Judea (where Lazarus is/was). His disciples freak out: the people there just tried to stone you, dude, you wanna' go back there?

Jesus replies: "Are there not twelve hours of daylight?" And he goes on: if you walk by day light you won't stumble, it's when you walk by night that you stumble because you don't have any light.

A typically esoteric response from Jesus (at least as John tells it), but the question it left me with the other day was clear enough: do I love to walk in the light? And honestly the answer is: sometimes.

Sometimes I love the light, I delight to not be stumbling, I delight to be able to see and follow Jesus into a situation with clear conscience, no mixed motives, no hidden agendas. Sometimes I am glad for the light.

But sometimes I have ideas, plans, schemes, hopes, or dreams that I'm not sure are the Lord's and I'm not sure that I want to find out. It's not always expedient to pray, listen, wait. And I'm not always sure I want to hear God's answer.

Sometimes, I prefer to stumble around in the darkness in the hopes of finding some sort of personal advantage or getting some gain or pleasure or accolade. Sometimes, I find myself clinging to the darkness and avoiding the light.

"Are there not twelve hours of daylight?"

Yes, Lord, there are.

"Do you walk in the light or do you walk in the darkness?"

Sometimes I love your light. And sometimes I confess that I avoid the light and walk in darkness.

"Those who walk during the day do not stumble....but those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them." (11:9 & 10)

O Lord, give me faith.

Grab Bag: "Precious" Is, Starfish: AA, Wiki, & the Church in China, and Podcast Gluttony

2010-08-25T19:45:00.006-04:00

A quick round-up and review of some books, movies and podcasts that I've been imbibing over the past several days...

*My wife and I rented "Precious" last weekend. It was about as intense, disturbing and redemptive as a movie can get. If you can stomach some pretty awful child abuse, it's a pretty fantastic movie: A-

*I'm always interested in reading business management, leadership, and trends-types books--they keep me from getting overly-immersed in the Christian ghetto. The Starfish and the Spider is an interesting look at how leader-less organizations are rather un-stoppable. Cut off a starfish "leg" and another grows in its' place. Cut off the head of a spider, and the spider's dead.

When big record companies go after file-sharing fiends like Napster, all it did was further decentralize file-sharing: Kazaa which morphed into Kazaa Lite which was radically de-centralized by Emule. The big labels acted like file sharing was a spider. But by shutting down one version of it, all they did was further de-centralize it, making it harder and harder to stop.

Other examples of de-centralized phenomena are Alcoholics Anonymous, Craigslist and Wikipedia. As I read it, though, all I could think of was the explosive growth of the underground church movement in China. I wonder if a century from now, one of the most studied "Starfish" organizations in all of history might be the underground Chinese church.

An interesting read if you're into this sort of thing, it's most compelling when it's story-telling rather than trying to draw out the "principles of a starfish organization:" B+

*This past weekend we rented "The Time Traveler's Wife." An average mix of decent plot, decent acting, and a decent (but not great) date-night movie: B-

*Last week I finished listening to the book "Jesus Asked" read by the author, Conrad Gempf, in short 10-13 minute podcasts--half of a chapter in each podcast. The podcast was suggested by my good friend Steve after I shared here about my summer study of in the gospels of questions that Jesus asked.

Gempf (whom I had never heard of before) tackles a potentially dry study of the gospels by an academic and turns it into a thoughtful but delightfully light look at the questions Jesus asked and the questions behind the questions that Jesus asked.

His quirky asides and playful approach to the Scriptures augment his deeply thoughtful engagement with Jesus and the various ways that Jesus questions "work" to engage, expose, and invite his listeners in.

I'd highly recommend downloading these podcasts if you're looking for something to shake-up your own study of the Scriptures. You can listen to it on the way to work and it'll give you food for thought all day long (oh, and bonus: it's free): A

*Upon finishing Gempf's podcasts, I went scouring Itunes and Itunes U for more good (free) stuff. And wow, there is definitely good stuff out there to be had.

In particular I'd recommend downloading Tim Keller's "greatest hits" sermons. Also lots of addresses by N.T. Wright and Dallas Willard (two of my most formidable mentors), some incredible speakers in the Catalyst podcast library, and I've downloaded the Freakonomics podcasts (done by the same guys who wrote the book) but can't vouch for their quality as I haven't listened to them yet.

Trouble Sleeping? Try This: The Daily Examen

2010-08-24T16:45:00.000-04:00

One of the most remarkable trends in the world of pharmaceuticals is the explosive growth of sleeping aids. Americans have a hard time sleeping.

And while there are certainly good reasons to go the chemical-route, I would hazard to guess that at least some of the problems us Americans have in getting to sleep have less to do with the chemicals in our brains and more to do with issues of conscience, fear, anxiety and guilt...all at least partially emotional and spiritual issues.

A couple of weeks ago, I led a retreat with some InterVarsity staff where at the end of each day we engaged in an ancient Christian practice from the Ignatians called The Daily Examen.

The daily examen is an exercise that you can do very quickly that helps to review the day, release it to the Lord, and free you to rest a little easier at night...as well as draw nearer to God! Two great things in one!

There's no "official" Daily Examen exercise, but here's a format that I stole from someone else and used with my staff team a couple of weeks ago that might be worth copying and pasting and putting on your nightstand:

The Daily Examen

An important Spiritual Discipline is to take a few moments at the end of each day and recall where you saw God’s gracious activity in your life in the day. This is an ancient and simple method of helping you call to mind what you have seen, heard, understood, tasted and touched of God in the day that is drawing to a close. It is a way to help you pay attention.

Take the last few minutes of your day – as you lie in bed – or as you kneel to play before going to bed and …

1. Thank God for the gift of life this day and for all the blessings of life.

2. Ask for grace and guidance to recognize His work in your life this day and to see your transgressions and sin.

3. Slowly review the day -- hour by hour, in sections of the day – morning, afternoon and evening or interaction by interaction etc.. Don’t be too obsessive!

* Wherever you saw God in your day – say “thank you”.

* Wherever you were sinful or non-responsive to His presence – confess that and say ask for forgiveness.

4. Finally, ask for God’s grace of healing in one particular area in which you need transformation. It would be best if this was the same thing night after night -- this will keep you attentive to His work in this area and will keep you focused.

You might want to close by lifting both hands, palms up, toward heaven with a prayer of this sort:

Merciful God, you have delighted in me all day as my good Father and I as your true child. This day is done and I release it to you. All that I did wrong is yours to redeem. Anything that I did well is yours to bless and put to good use for my good and the good of others. This day is fully left in your hands to do with as you will. You are Lord over all my days. Let them all bring you glory and let me walk in your peace. Amen.

This should not take you more that a few minutes. If things come up which you want to explore more thoroughly write them down and prayerfully explore them in the morning.

Time-Out, Spaghetti, and Baby Jesus

2010-08-23T15:15:00.001-04:00

[My wife Kelly posted this great note on Facebook and has graciously given me permission to kick this week off with it. Enjoy a little slice of life in the Kirk home!]

A couple of years ago when our oldest two kids were toddlers, their Gram, who had been a preschool teacher in a previous life, thrilled the kids with a sweet Christmas craft. Using Quaker oatmeal containers (and don't all good preschool crafts begin with Quaker oatmeal containers?), they created little mangers for Baby Jesus, filled them with straw, and placed a perfectly-sized baby inside. Little Davis and Zoe had a wonderful season of playing with the baby Jesus and his cozy manger.

When, sadly, it was time to put away the Christmas decorations, I carefully wrapped and packed the mangers for use the following year. The baby Jesus? He stayed in circulation, a decision I have come to regret.

In the years that have followed, "Baby Jesus" (for he retains his name despite his lack of contextual manger), has become fully engaged in the life of the Kirk family babies. And may I digress here to inform the patient reader (hi, Mom!) that our gaggle of babies includes the unfortunately named "Mafen" and "Spaghetti" and "Waddle." I'm highly concerned about the nomenclature of my future grandchildren. But more on that another time.

So, Baby Jesus being an integrated member of the Tribe of Babies, I regularly hear comments such as, "Mom! Look at Baby Jesus doing a cartwheel!" or "Mom! I just dropped baby Jesus in the sink!" or "Mom, Baby Jesus and Mafen are having a cage fight. I think Baby Jesus is totally going to take her."

Humorous, yes, but in that uncomfortable even-though-the-DaVinci-code-was-sort-of-an-entertaining-book-I-don't-think-Baby-Jesus-should-be-marrying-Spaghetti kind of way. If you know what I mean.

Next topic. Emma Kate. She's two, almost three, and boy, has she had a summer. In the span of 14 days, she potty trained, moved into a big girl bed, and gave up her pacifier. The trifecta of change. When a girl can no longer pee in her pants, sleep in a cage, or suck on a binkie, she's got to do something to express her feelings, so express she has.

But wait, there's more. Bye-bye nap. Take two hours of sleep from her life, add exhaustion to the miasma...well, let's just say we have considered some lovely boarding schools for toddlers.

We, being enlightened and veteran parents, have recognized the stress of transition and exercised additional patience with her, at least in our best moments. (Our best moments occur at least once a week. We're good like that.) Despite our sympathies, within appropriate developmental limits, she is expected to obey her parents. It's hard. We know that. She would rather not. We know that, too, and even identify. But, believing it is in her best interest to develop this skill, we have held her to the standard.

Thus, she's spent about 1/3 of her waking hours in time-out, carefully and deeply considering, (even though it may appear to the untrained eye like she's just yelling her head off) ye olde fifth commandment about honoring her parents so that she may live long. I really like that last part.

Now, our dear girl is a non-stop talker. As the summer has worn on, her primary topic of endless one-way conversation to to all those under her domain: the importance of obedience. There aren't many that fit the category of "under her domain", but if you do, chances are that you, too, have been relegated to time-out on the bottom step recently.

Today, the pool toys were all given firm discipline and were sent to the pool-equivalent of the "bottom step of doom." (We don't really call it that. "Hell" has a much zippier ring to it.) Fascinating stuff as a parent, to see your words and actions reenacted and directed to the pool noodles and plastic sharks.

It has actually been encouraging and amazing to watch her begin to process this obligation she has to obedience. In the midst of this, be not concerned. We delight in her and laugh with her and read to herand play with her. She is joyful and chatty as ever, fearless as she jumps off the diving board, overjoyed to be a ballet student in her sister's "class", curly blond hair now long enough for a little ponytail, endlessly playing CDs, singing songs, and doing the hand "lotions." So she's a happy, loved girl. She's learning.

Now for the moment you've all been waiting for, the magical moment when I bring these diverse threads together. It happened this evening as we were preparing for a quick errand, the whole family to pile in the car for an exciting ride to the auto repair shop. All of the children had chosen a companion for the car ride. Davis had his Chickie, Zoe had her Mafen. Emma Kate was in a tight spot. She had a recalcitrant subject to deal with.

Finally she announced, "Well, Baby Jesus obeyed me so now he is allowed to go for a ride in the car."

Lighting flashed. I'm thinking Baby Jesus better get back to the manger, and on the double.

Fight Club: How Being Brad Pitt Revealed My Discontent (Part 3)

2010-08-20T13:30:00.007-04:00

Quick background for those of you who are new to Piebald Life: I've spent the past fourteen years working in campus ministry with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. I spent nine years working at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va and the past five at UNC-Chapel Hill, which is where I got on this IV merry-go-round to begin with as a student.

This summer I've taken a new position with InterVarsity as an Area Director for the Central Carolinas. Instead of working with students, I'm working with campus staff who work with students at UNC-Charlotte, Davidson College, Elon University and UNC-Chapel Hill.

This transition has gone relatively smoothly in terms of the outward circumstances: my first big "test" was a four-day meeting with all ten of the staff that I supervise from all four campuses--it went about as spectacularly as I could have dreamed.

Like any newbie, I'm learning my way around the parts of the job that are ne--like understanding insurance and employment forms. And I've enjoyed talking with each of my staff weekly and being a sort of consultant as they gear up for the start of the fall.

All this left me wondering a couple of weeks ago: why am I so churned up internally?

I was talking about this at Fight Club a couple of weeks ago-- the name of the guys small group that meets at my house every Sunday night. One of the wives coined the name and I figure that since I lead it that makes me Brad Pitt. Definitely Brad Pitt.

I was verbally processing my inner-angst when I stumbled upon a realization. In my new position, I do not yet know what "success" looks like. Over the past fourteen years, I've more or less developed my own schema for how to measure success: X numbers of students involved or seniors at senior night sharing how they've grown and matured while in college.

Having clear pictures of what it means for me to be successful are very important to me. I am realizing that all the more as they are taken away.

And what I'm realizing is that most of that was deeply unhealthy anyway. And so I've been internally angst-ridden because in the transition the Lord has removed the un-healthy sources of my identity.

This is, of course, a gift if I can get there emotionally. To be free from the tyranny of numbers and of the pressure to perform in order to feel that I am a worthwhile human being would be a tremendously wide-open place to live.

And soon I'll replace those old measurements of success with new measurements of success, and I will again be in the same place of fighting those same battles.

But in the interim I have a tremendous opportunity for personal growth: to be stripped of my external props and to lean into Jesus alone for my identity is what I am meant to do.

The Fight Club realization a couple of weeks ago was a real turning point for me as I'm transitioning into my new job. There's some clarity about what this season is supposed to be about for me in terms of my walk with the Lord and what it means for me to serve faithfully as I continue to learn my new ropes and care for my staff.

And in the mean time, maybe it's time to dust off the old Fight Club DVD and see if there's any more spiritual lessons to be learned...my guess is that there's probably not.

Sources of Our Dis-Content Part 2: Over-Staying the Sell-By Date

2010-08-19T15:15:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I posted about a common source of our discontent: living with our eyes fixed on the greener grass in the rear-view mirror.

Today I want to talk about a different source of our discontent: holding onto things that are supposed to be given away.

At the beginning of the week I got an invitation to speak somewhere. It was a generous offer to do something that is right up my alley. I was super-pumped to get the invite. Being the over-eager, impatient man that I am I wanted to cut out all the "let me think about it, pray about it, and talk it over with my wife" stuff and cut to the "yes" right on the spot.

But fortunately I've learned to restrain such impulses. And as I've talked it over with my wife, thought it over, and prayed about it, the Lord's brought this quote from George MacDonald up again and again:

"The will has been given to us that we....might have something to offer up to God."

Further reflection on this statement has found it to be most applicable to many areas of life. My mind has been given to me that I might have something to offer up to God. My imagination. My emotions.

Tease it out further: our relationships (spouse, kids, friends, parents, siblings) have been given to us that we might offer them back to the Lord. Our money. Our sex drives. Our homes. Our jobs. Our gifts and abilities and talents. Our challenges and adversities.

And my speaking invitation.

All of these things and more have been loaned out to me in order that I might give them back to God. It is much like the illustration C.S. Lewis (who, by the way, steals nearly everything from George MacDonald) gives in Mere Christianity:

When we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to his father and saying, "Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present." Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child's present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.

So I've been given an invitation that I am excited about in order that I might gladly give it back to my Father. And this doesn't make God any richer. It's just living into the reality of the situation.

I trust that the God who made me, loves me, and delights both in me and the people to whom I would speak has great gifts to give to me and to them. I am glad to entrust all of myself to the character of the good God who opens up opportunities for me in his timing for his purposes for my good and his glory.

All of this brings Him and me great joy.

And here, of course, is where our discontent comes in. When we cling to what we should give away, it rots. The "sell-by" date on all of God's gifts is basically immediate. The longer we imagine that something is ours to cling to as if it were an inalienable right, the more rancid it becomes.

Our gladness only comes in treating temporal and passing things as they deserve to be treated--that includes all that we typically refer to with the possessive pronoun "my" as in "my weekend" or "my life" or "my family" or "my career" or "my money."

And our gladness only comes as we treat things of infinite beauty and worth as they also deserve to be treated. To mistake the two and to join our lives with what is corruptible and destined to eventually die is to be joined to death, and so to die thousands of slow deaths ourselves on our way to each of our graves.

And conversely, as Lewis again says, if a person is united to God, what else can they do but live forever?

Sources of Misery Part 1: The Greener Grass in the Rear-View Mirror

2010-08-18T19:15:00.001-04:00

It seems to me that one of the chief causes of misery for many people is the condemning of the present by comparing it to an overly-romanticized remembrance of the past.

For some people, the grass is always greener in the rear-view mirror. They complain mightily about how things were at their old job, church, neighborhood, or simply at an earlier season in life.

But in Christ, the past is not ours. Not ours to overly-glorify. Not ours to regret. Not ours to cling to. In Christ, the past is His. His to redeem and make to serve our good.

The present is the only place where we can fully experience and know God's work. Being awake to the wide-awake real, the real presence of Christ in real-time, exactly where we are--that is the invitation of God to his children.

This is true even and especially when the present takes us away from a place or a time that we have loved. To hold a glorious season of the past loosely unto releasing is almost as hard for some of us as letting go of past mistakes. But both are ours only for the giving over to God, not ours for the hoarding.

In the end all of our story must be handed over Jesus. And in the end, this present moment is the sphere and realm of the work of the Holy Spirit. We can either receive that gift or reject it because it does not live up to the measure of what we had experienced in the past.

But to reject this day and all that it has to offer us is finally to reject the work of God in real-time. To reject this day's work, people, challenges, chores, and recreation is to miss the myriad opportunities to explore the un-discovered continents of God's grace and love that are available to us each day.

Time to stop looking in the rear view mirror. The grass probably wasn't as green as you remember it anyway.

Book Review: "Good and Beautiful" Hits it Just About Right For All Readers

2010-08-17T15:50:00.002-04:00

With a fair degree of regularity (and it is important to be regular these days after all) the Christian publishing world cranks out books that attempt to re-tell the foundations of the Christian story with freshness and clarity.

Usually, these attempts fail miserably--they slouch into cliche or lose their energy at some point or another. Often they fail to strike the balance of engaging in some degree of nuanced thinking while at the same time not getting bogged down into the details of more weighty theological matters or debates.

But it gives me great pleasure to report that The Good and Beautiful God by James Bryan Smith manages to mostly avoid these traps. And in doing so, Smith offers a compelling and grace-filled picture of the good and beautiful God that invites us to come further up and further in.

Smith manages to cover the character of God in his grace, love, holiness, justice, generosity and power in ways that are refreshing for those of us who have been around for a long time and accessible for those who might be in process with engaging the Christian story.

After I finished it, I ordered a couple more copies as give-aways for people who I know who are "on the journey" towards Christ. I loved it for where I am, and I think that it would aid them as well--an impressive feat for any author covering such far-ranging topics.

If Smith falters anywhere, it's in his assumption that most people have "angry God" baggage that they need to work through. He spends much of the early chapters of the book trying to do faith-rehab with people who have come from church experiences where God was portrayed as perpetually ticked off.

He eventually engages with people coming from the other end of the spectrum ("if there is a God, I'm sure he loves me and is alright with me doing whatever") several chapters in. And when he does so, he employs the same thoughtful, gracious approach without compromising any of God's character.

Perhaps the most insightful part of the book for me over the past several weeks has been his proposal that since Jesus has already paid the price for our sin, sin no longer separates us from God.

If we are separated from God post the cross and resurrection, it is because of our self-righteousness--that is, our stubborn refusal to accept God's forgiveness and grace that is coming toward us in Christ. Only our self-righteousness can keep us from God now that the sin problem has been dealt with once and for all.

This is good news for those of us who struggle still with guilt and shame. To remain in guilt and shame after Christ is to live in stubborn refusal to accept the sacrifice of Jesus. It is to demand that we somehow be dealt with based on our own performance rather than Jesus'.

But that whole system has been done away with--thanks be to God. And the invitation is to live according to grace rather than performance.

This is the first book of a three-part series from InterVarsity Press (wait a minute, isn't there another really, really incredible book from IVP by some guy that I know?) riffing off of the same title: The Good and Beautiful Life and The Good and Beautiful Community.

After reading this offering, I've got the other two shipped and on the way.

An Open Letter to High School Teachers: What's With You and The Bell?

2010-08-16T15:45:00.001-04:00

It's now solidly a week-plus after "tax-free shopping weekend" here in North Carolina, which of course means that most students are gearing up to head back to school.

I'd like to take this opportunity to register my complaint to all you high school teachers out there: what's the deal with your relationship with the bell?

At the beginning of the class, the bell sounds. This bell, I was always and repeatedly told, is the final arbiter of "tardy." If you're not in your seat, ready to capture every golden moment of the class when that bell rings, you're a disgraceful human being. And you're late.

However, the very same bell also sounds at the end of the appointed hour together. And somehow this same bell, which makes the exact same sound to signal the end of our golden moments together as it had before to begin it, had lost its sovereign authority whilst we were eagerly studying under the leadership of our venerable elders.

The bell for dismissal was a "signal" or "reminder" bell. The teacher alone had final authority to dismiss the class. If that was several minutes after the bell sounded, so be it.

Good teachers, I implore you on behalf of poor, innocent, saint-like high schoolers everywhere: all we're asking for is a little consistency. If the bell starts the class, the bell should end it. If you get to end the class, then you should be the one to start it.

Is that too much to ask?

Alex

P.S. Oh, and best of luck to you as you start the new year. People think that because I worked with college students I could also swing high school ministry. Absolutely incorrect. You could not pay me enough money to work with high schoolers. Median age: 15, median age: 20. Huge difference.

Three Boy Ducks in a Row and Serving Without Getting Soaking Wet

2010-08-13T12:13:00.004-04:00

One of the things that I really love about my six-year-old boy is that he's got a sweet, sweet disposition. He's eager to please, eager to meet other kids (especially if there's a ball involved), and earnest about taking care of younger kids.

Last week at the beach, we met Citizen, a four-year boy that Davis buddied up with at the pool. They played together for a while and we connected with their parents. We promised to look for each other on the beach the next morning.

However, the next morning Davis found a new buddy, Jack. And Jack was a big, bad 7-year-old. Davis was smitten, following him around and eager to play whatever he was into.

Citizen showed up later that morning. And he was excited to see Davis...except Davis was too busy trying to impress and keep up with Jack to pay much attention to Citizen. The three of them walked around like ducks in a row: Jack in the lead, Davis eagerly behind him, Citizen chattering away at Davis, trying to keep up.

When Davis was in the position of authority and "power" by virtue of being older, he was very present and thoughtful about caring for a new buddy. When he was displaced from that position by virtue of being in a new relationship where he was the young one, he was too busy trying to keep up to serve Citizen in the same way.

I think this is true of all of us. It is impossible to serve from a place of uncertainty--at least for very long. We are hard-wired to make sure our own needs are met and then to serve from the overflow of that. If we are in deficit (emotionally, physically, etc) it's extremely hard to give to others.

And that's one of the reasons why the Scriptures promise us so very, very much.

Paul spends 11 chapters in Romans extolling and celebrating and outlining and working out all that God has done--the extravagance of his grace and mercy and power and wonder and all of the goodness of Jesus. Then he hashes out in great detail all the implications for us--we are not condemned, we are holy, free, filled with God's Spirit.

It's not until chapter 12 (out of 16 total chapters) that Paul makes the turn to the "therefore:" "Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship." (Romans 12:1)

He spends eleven chapters telling us about God, God's plan, God's great love for us and all the implications for our identity and our certainty and our confidence. And not until he's unpacked all of that does he call us to serve God and serve one another (see the last four chapters of Romans!).

Serving out of an insecure place is like trying to pull someone up into a canoe in the middle of a river. You will both fall in and get wet. Serving out of the place God has put us is like pulling someone out of a river while standing on a rock.

God says all the infinite riches of his love, grace and mercy are poured out on us. And then he says to us in that place of perfect security and provision: "serve."

Apart from serving from that deeply rooted place, there are only two possible outcomes: serving that leads to burn-out, serving that leads to a deep-rooted self-righteousness, or serving that pretends to be about the other but is really about propping myself up--a using of others to make me feel good about me rather than a genuine serving of the other.

I gently encouraged Davis to tend to Citizen some--and he sweetly did so, or at least tried. I'm praying for him and for me, that we'd find our deep rootedness in the infinitely secure Christ so that we might be able to serve and love others...without getting soaking wet.

Full Disclosure: Know Yer Blogger

2010-08-12T16:00:00.002-04:00

Just so you know, I'm mostly this:With a strong bit of this mixed in:
Just so that we're all on the same page (and thanks, Daniel, for the inspiration).

Bunk-Bed Gravity, Getting My Groove On, and My Singing Kids

2010-08-11T16:00:00.000-04:00

[Ed's note: over the weekend my wife went to a baby shower of some old college friends who complained that my posts of late had been overly-theological and not enough cute kid stories. I hope that this post might assuage my mommy demographic. To the ladies of Labor Day!]

The de facto arrangement between my wife and I is that I bat lead-off and clean-up with the kids. I get up with them and get them breakfast and get the day started. And I put them to bed at night--stories, songs, prayers. She does all the hard stuff: life in-between.

In my extended family I am surrounded by musical genius. My mom, grandfather, and multiple aunts and cousins are (or were at one point) professional musicians. Those genes somehow skipped over me. I'm not abysmal musically, just extremely average.

But at night, singing to my kids, I'm a rock star. They most often request "campus songs"--worship songs that we would sing at our weekly large group meeting or that they heard at Rockbridge, our year-end camp that my kids attend along with the students.

And recently their favorite song is a gospel song, "Bless the Lord," which is one of the coolest songs ever. And of course, since it's a gospel song it requires not just vocals but a little groove as well. If you've never heard it you can groove and listen to it here for yourself.

We've sung "Bless the Lord" so much over the past six weeks that they know it by heart now. So this week instead of me singing to them at bedtime, all three of them delight to sing the song to me. Each night, I get a solo (or accompanied by dad) performance of a song where they command their soul (like the Psalmist does) to "bless the Lord."

Unfortunately, they have their father's singing voice. But worshipping alongside my two, four, and six year old is enough to make me well up with joy each night.

I can hear the angry cynic's objection: "You're just socializing your kids into singing a song to a 'God' who might not even exist. Why not just let them make their own decision? Why must you force them into something that works for you but not not work for them?"

My response: guilty as charged.

I am raising up my kids to worship the God who made them. I believe that this is as much a fact as the realities of gravity. I am teaching them to trust and revere and understand the workings of gravity in ways that they can understand at this stage. And of course they will understand much more as they grow.

But they need to know some things about gravity now--that they need to be careful coming down the stairs, that the railing on the bunk bed is there to keep them safe at night.

And I am teaching them to worship the God who made them. If they do not worship Him, they will worship something else that will enslave them. My kids were made to worship Jesus. That's what ultimately will make them most human. One day, by God's grace, we will all five worship God together in perfect and un-ending joy forever more.

And they will have many decisions to make as they grow up. What will they do with gravity and what they will do with the God who made them to worship him are both important decisions. I cannot make those decisions for them and I do not wish to do so.

But in the mean time, we will talk about the workings of gravity and we will sing worship songs to God together. We will bless the Lord together now in the hopes that they will grow up into a full-fledged understanding of who they're worshipping--and why.

The songs will change, as will their understanding of why we would sing at all. But the God and the gravity that are ever-present in their lives demand recognition now. And so we'll sing.

I'm just relieved that they don't keep score of my musical abilities.

Hebrews, Gladwell, & The Better Blood (Part Two)

2010-08-10T16:57:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I talked about how Macolm Gladwell is like a many-armed Hindu god, plucking anecdotes from all over the place and drawing connections that seem unlikely.

And the writer of Hebrews is...well, I can't bring myself to say that he's like a many-armed Hindu god, but he's something like it. He's grabbing all sorts of Old Testament stories and showing how Jesus fulfills them.

A couple of weeks ago I was looking at a passage in Hebrews 12 where the author drops a little snippet of something that, upon a little reflection, yields a beautiful glimpse of the gospel:

You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Heb 12:23-24)

Okay, so what the heck is the blood of Abel doing here? And what's the better word that is being spoken?

Going back to Genesis 4 we see the very first human-to-human consequence of the Fall recorded in Genesis 3. Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain (the oldest) and Abel. Cain works the ground, Abel is a hunter.

Cain brings an offering to the Lord that (for whatever reason) the Lord doesn't look upon favorably. Abel brings a more scrumptous offering, and the Lord accepts it gladly. Cain gets grumpy. Cain kills Abel.

The Lord asks Cain, "where is your brother?" And here comes one of the most quotable statements in the Scripture: "Am I my brother's keeper?" And then the Lord speaks:

"What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. ¹¹ Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. " (Gen 4:10-11)

So Abel's blood calls out the rightful condemnation of Cain: "Guilty!" The first homicide in history. Cain kills Abel in a fit of jealous rage. And his blood cries out a word that condemns Cain to wander and live a fruitless life (see Gen 4:12).

The author of Hebrews grabs a hold of this and delightfully turns it on it's head. Jesus' blood speaks "a better word" than the blood of Abel. In fact, it speaks the exact opposite word: "Not Guilty!" is the cry of Jesus' blood, offered as a sacrifice in our place, on our behalf.

And the irony of it all is that Jesus' blood, apart from the intention of God from the beginning of the world, should actually echo the blood of Abel. We, too, are guilty. We have killed the Son. Our lives are filled with bloodshed, adultery, theft, grumbling, hatred, and all the outworkings of the death that Adam and Eve introduced into our hearts on the day of the Great and Terrible Exchange.

And yet the blood of Jesus cries out not to condemn us (even though it might) but to forgive us. This Son who was slain has his blood poured out on the ground and it speaks a word of grace, love, a covering and an offering that shockingly and completely unexpectedly re-directs everything.

It is a word of hope and of a beautiful, fruitful future. Life, not death. An invitation home, not a condemnation to a lifetime of wandering.

And so hurray and Amen to this blood that speaks a much, much, much better word than the blood of Abel!

And hurray and Amen to the Spirit-guided genius of the writer of Hebrews who leads us through the Old Testament with a joyful touch, finding the wonder of Jesus at every turn....even the ugly ones.

Malcolm Gladwell, The Hebrews Author, & Picking an NFL QB

2010-08-09T07:51:00.000-04:00

Last week I was at the beach with the fam and got some great reading in. Funny how that wasn't happening just a couple years ago with really little kids. But at ages six, four, & two I'm able to squeeze a page in here and there in between squeezing out sun screen for my pasty-white-skinned kids.

One book I read was "What the Dog Saw" by Malcolm Gladwell. If you've never read anything by Gladwell, you should check him out. He brilliantly ties together random people and social trends and shows how seemingly un-related things are connected.

For example, in one of the essays in "What the Dog Saw" Gladwell draws a parallel between how hard it is to identify good teachers coming out of college with drafting a pro quarterback into the NFL. The wash-out rate is high in both cases, and all the education and profiling in the world can't guarantee success in either endeavor.

The trick with Gladwell is to come along and enjoy the ride. If you over-analyze or object to every little thing, you'll miss the music of it. One reviewer said, "he's like a...many-armed Hindu god of anecdotes; he plucks them from every field of human endeavor."

The New Testament book of Hebrews is one of the most mysterious and opaque books of the Bible. In my first serious reading of it just after college I about gave up on making any sense of it.

But as I began to get more familiar with the Old Testament, I began to see things a little more clearly in Hebrews.

The author of Hebrews (no one knows who it is, but it's certainly not Paul) is like Malcolm Gladwell. He plucks stories and illustrations from the history of Israel with reckless and joyful abandon. He eagerly gathers up bits and pieces from the stories that would have been familiar to his audience and shows how Jesus fulfills all of it.

And just as Gladwell doesn't bother to spell out the rules of football in his piece about quarterbacks and teachers, neither does the author of Hebrews take too much effort to try to get 21st Century Americans up to speed on all his allusions and metaphors.

Much of the New Testament has bits and pieces of this. But Hebrews takes it to another, dizzying level. And if you can buckle up and enjoy the ride (and spend a little time digging into what the heck he's talking about), it's spectacular.

Tomorrow, I'll drill down into one particular exquisite example of this that's captured my imagination recently. But in the mean time, for some very insightful thoughts on the book of Hebrews, check out my friend Steve Tamayo's blog as he's working through Hebrews.

The Spender, The Saver, and Finding the Sweet Spot for Both

2010-08-06T15:40:00.000-04:00

Several years ago I was talking with someone who's been married just over a year about their finances. She's the saver, he's the more-free-to-spend-er. It seems like there's always one of each in every marriage.

Her temptation: to be a bit self-righteous. She's the more self-restrained, after all. And she's the one who's setting them up for a good life in the future.

But as we talked, it was clear that it was easy for her to be a fearful saver. There were times when she was grasping for security. It wasn't a glad, confident, hope-filled saving that motivated her to say no to buying frivolous things.

In the New Testament, Paul writes to the Galatian church. They're fighting over circumcision--Jewish boys were circumcised as a symbol of their identity as a part of God's chosen people. As non-Jews enter into the mostly-Jewish Christian community, the question looms: do they have to get circumcised?

Paul argues rabidly against it. He argues that faith, not circumcision, is now the true marker of who's a part of God's family.

He summarizes his argument with this compelling statement in Galatians 5:6:

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, butonly faith working through love.

And so it is with how we handle money. In Christ Jesus, neither spending nor saving is of any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. That can look like saving, it can look like spending.

But it's gotta' come from faith, or else it's simply another un-healthy expression of a grasping, needy, soul trying to prop itself up rather than allowing itself to be cared for by a good and beautiful God.

Tripping Over Artists & Kicking Against Gifts

2010-08-05T03:45:00.002-04:00

I spent my first two years in campus ministry at a campus that was very different from what I had experienced as an undergrad. My move to Virginia Commonwealth University from the University of North Carolina was "un-smooth" to say the least.

My experience at UNC was (in my mind) the quintessential college experience: dorms, basketball, football, and the dangers of prolonged exposure to dining hall food.

VCU is a commuter campus in downtown Richmond. It's more famous for the art school (complete with all those quintessential trimmings: tattoos, spiked hair, and piercings where I thought God never intended piercings) than the football team (it had none).

I spent the first two years in a posture of fear, intimidation, disdain and antipathy. And it showed. The chapter went from fifty to fifteen in my first two years.

I spent those two years tripping, stumbling, kicking against the gift that VCU was to me. It wasn't what I was expecting. VCU wasn't what I thought I was going to get from God. So what was supposed to be a gift to me was my curse.

This is something of what Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 1:22-24:

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, ²³but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Paul is asserting here that the Jews want God in one specific package (signs) and the Greeks want God in a different package (wisdom) and because they are so fixed on how God "should" manifest himself according to their definitions, they miss him.

And so the Jews and the Greeks both stumble over the gift of God crucified. It's not what they expected so they refuse to accept it. And so they miss God's gift.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think that many of us spend at least some portion of our lives kicking against the gifts that God has put in our lives, rather than graciously and humbly submitting to them, receiving them for what they are.

Perhaps you're doing it now. Think about it.

Virginia v. West Virginia and Exploring the Infinite Undiscovered Country

2010-08-04T15:00:00.000-04:00

In keeping with my summer study looking at the questions Jesus asked, I'm skipping from Matthew to John--one synoptic and then on to the gospel writer who captures some different sides of the mystery of Jesus.

The second question that Jesus asks (at least in the NRSV) is directed to Nathanael at the end of John chapter 1. Nathanael is invited to "come and see" the Messiah from Nazareth by Phillip, who was just recently called by Jesus to follow him.

Nathanael, like many of you, is a bit skeptical and cynical. "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" It's kind of like how Virginia think about West Virginia and North Carolina think about South Carolina and how South Carolina thinks about...well, I'm not exactly sure who South Carolina compares favorably towards.

Nazareth was a summarily under-whelming place. And Nathanael doubts that someone as great as the Messiah could come from there.

But he comes, upon the insistence of Phillip. Jesus calls him by name immediately and declares that he "saw" Nathanael under the fig tree. Nathanael is shocked and utters a strong declaration of Jesus' Messiah-ship right on the spot.

Jesus asks (in summary): "Do you believe because I said I saw you? You will see greater things than these!"

I pondered this question and the pronouncement afterward. And it pressed me to ask this question: where have I been too easily satisfied with what I know of Jesus? How have I allowed only just a few pieces of understanding or insight or comprehension to satisfy what needs to be an insatiable hunger?

If Jesus is the (as he's called in the Scriptures) the source of all wisdom, truth, knowledge, beauty, power, and love to an infinite degree, have I even begun to scratch the surface of who he is and what he has to offer?

Do I settle for believing in a very, very small Jesus who I've seen do a handful of spectacular things over the course of parts of my life? Or am I willing to take Jesus up on this invitation: I will see greater things than these if I will set my heart and mind and imagination on a journey. If I will be fixed on him and be willing to follow him into the infinite expanse of his joy.

So I'm praying for my little shell around Jesus to be cracked. I'm praying for my imagination and heart to be stirred and my mind to be awakened. I'm taking a deep breath and strapping on my hiking boots. There's vast, undiscovered Jesus country out there waiting to drench me in wonder and admiration and sober-minded awe.

If only I wouldn't be quite so easily satisfied.

What To Do with Jesus and Judgment Part 2: The Cliffs of Dover & Driver's Ed Videos

2010-08-03T15:00:00.003-04:00

So yesterday we talked about Jesus' judgment parables having nothing to do with being left behind at the end of all times. They have much more to do with the immediate context of the people of Jerusalem. They will kill him and they will be judged for it. And of course they are, in 70 A.D. with the destruction of the temple.

So this has nothing to do with us...and everything to do with us. If the Jews of Jesus' day will be judged for rejecting their coming Messiah, so will we.

And so we still have to wrestle with the question of Jesus and judgment. How are we to read these parables of judgment and trust that God is good, gracious and loving?

I've never been there, but I've been told that the Cliffs of Dover have warning signs: if you get too close, the wind is strong enough that you can and will get blown over the edge. The signs warn you that you will plummet to your death if you're not careful.

The signs have no malicious intent. They are stating facts. They are posted out of concern for the health and well-being of all who approach. They are warnings.

And so it is with Jesus. Warnings are warnings. They are given to us to keep us away from getting blown over the edge. Certain behaviors carry with them natural consequences.

The universe is designed a certain way: fall off the edge of the Cliffs of Dover, you splat down below. Push away the God of the universe, it results in certain un-pleasant eternity alternatives.

And so Jesus warns, pleads, weeps and even warns us: "let all who will, let them come home!" This is the point of the warnings in the gospels. They are stern and harsh sometimes, like a driver's ed video, to alert you to the sober reality of what's at stake.

We must remember that Jesus' "no" is always there to serve his "yes." The parables that speak of judgment are there as an emphatic "no" to our self-absorbed or foolish or ignorant or arrogant movement away from God in order to bring us into the "yes" of a life deeply connected with his grace and love and mercy.

A life that will run in that same direction for all eternity.

What to Do with Jesus & Judgment, Part 1: It Ain't About Being Left Behind

2010-08-02T15:18:00.003-04:00

Last week I was wrapping up my journey through Jesus' questions in the book of Matthew. As Jesus gets nearer and nearer to his death, his stories and parables get more and more jarring. Lots of people cast out, judged, and lots of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

These are the passages that make me look quizzically at those who proclaim to love "nice Jesus" but who despise "mean Paul." Such people haven't actually read much of what Jesus said and did, I don't think.

Ever notice Jesus never once uses the word "grace?" Everything we know about grace comes from those who wrote after the "Jesus event" and who were his primary interpreters--Paul, most of all.

But I digress. The point is if we take Jesus seriously, we will run into some hard passages. Today I want to help us navigate the judgment passages. What are we to do with all this separation of sheep and goats and people cast out?

The first rule of any Bible interpretation is this: context, context and more context. Many of Jesus' judgment parables are in Israel and are specifically about Israel. Jesus has come as the last and final prophet of whom all the prophets spoke. They treated them poorly. They will treat Jesus poorly, too--in just a few days they will call for his execution.

Many of the judgment parables Jesus tells (wicked tenants, wedding banquet, ten bridesmaids all in chapters 21-24) are all happening in Jerusalem, after the triumphal entry, and are surrounded with weeping for Jerusalem and prophecy about the destruction of the temple. Which leads us to...

The destruction of the temple. This is was a cataclysmic event in the post-Jesus early church (and obviously as well for the Jews of the time), around 70 A.D. There's a war between Rome and the Jews, the Romans come through and flatten the temple.

This is what Jesus is what Jesus is talking about in all of this prophecy. Any early Christian reading the gospels in the first and second and even third generation of Christianity would have read and understood that the judgment being doled out is specifically talking about the destruction of the temple that actually happens within a generation of Jesus death. Jesus is not talking about being "Left Behind" at the end of all times.

Jesus pronounces judgment on Jerusalem, whose people are about to judge and destroy him. That judgment comes true shortly after his death with the destruction of the temple. Jesus asserts that the temple in Jerusalem will be destroyed and that he has come to replace it.

They'll destroy the temple, but they will not be able to destroy his body. Destroy the building, it will be many years before it is raised again. Destroy his body and in three days it will be raised up again.

Jesus is now the place where God meets people and where people meet God. It is the place of sacrifice, prayer, worship. In his body all these functions of the temple are completed. The temple was only a foreshadowing of what was to come--the true Temple was now here.

And the people were about to destroy him. And there is a consequence to their rebellion--they will be judged. And so they are.

And yes, that is a warning to all of us, 2,000 years later. But that's better left for tomorrow's post.