:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

I’m taking a day off from the Belonging series to share a contribution to Prodigal Magazine’s Living a Good Story series. We’ll pick up tomorrow with our regularly scheduled programming.

While taking a walk two years ago, I began to think in tweets.

That’s when I knew I had a problem.

Twitter has been great for sharing my writing , meeting colleagues, and sharing what I enjoy, but I began to live my life according to what was tweetable. And if I wasn’t consciously trying to do something tweetable, my first response to a funny scene, clever idea, or even bad pun was, “I wish I could tweet that right now.”

Twitter has elevated the mundane to the loftiest of heights. It kills our imaginations, our thinking, and our hope of becoming people who can deeply concentrate on one topic for a sustained period of time in order to understand it. For all of the times that I’ve found great ideas and links on Twitter, there are four times when I’ve read something trite or useless that merely distracted.

Think about the madness of this for a moment:

Someone stopped creating, thinking, drinking, eating, or doing something just to type something like, “Mmmm, nachos are gud!” or “Waiting in line again!” or “Awesome movie last night.”

It would seem to me that the first step in living a good story is to stop telling everyone about the mundane details of life and to focus on real life.

I hate to write this, but I had a “Twitter stream of conscious” tendency in my brain. I want to be clever. I want more people to follow me. So I began to serve Twitter with my life, hoping I could think of something clever to tweet.

More than all of those things, I want to become a better writer who is capable of writing four or five pages in his journal every day. I want to write punchy and perceptive blog posts. I want to tap into the most pressing issues of my generation and write books that help people.

Twitter is not the ticket to do any of those things.

In fact, Twitter will not help us with anything that requires deep thought, discipline, or perception.

Make no mistake, Twitter is great for quickly spreading a good idea. I use it every day. It’s the Big Bird of networking tools.

However, Twitter is a lousy living tool. In fact, Twitter can become a distracting obstacle to deep thought, art, or relationships.

I have a little mantra that I use to fight off my urge to tweet bad puns or the random things people say in the café around me. Here it is:

“Are you creating something?”

Twitter is the bullhorn you use on the corner to proclaim the creation or existence of something. A bullhorn won’t write in a journal or swipe a bit of paint on a canvas.

I guard my walks because they provide the solitude I need in order to write. My mind is free and clear from the clutter of a feed. I can return to my computer with those ideas and write something because I’ve lived something and thought it through.

If it’s good enough, I may even tweet about it.

When I put together my first draft of Coffeehouse Theology, I sent it to tons of friends to get their opinions. Tons. I’ll be owing my friends favors in return for the next two generations.

One of my friends said something like this, “You seem to like all of this emerging church stuff, but you don’t point out what’s wrong with it.”

Insert: double-take, wounded look, and passionate reply, “Something wrong with the emerging church??? What do you mean?”

I’ll just stick a footnote here in the middle of this post since no one reads footnotes and note without any foot that this was in 2006 before it became fashionable to stop emerging… or whatever.

Still, my highly intelligent friend shocked me. How could he doubt the goodness of this new movement trying to recover practices from ancient Christianity and critiquing the ways Christianity had been infected by Enlightenment Rationalism? I mean really, is that not awesome sauce—that is, before Parks and Recreation taught us to use the phrase “awesome sauce?”

While my time with the emerging church stuff taught me to be jaded and suspicious about the Enlightenment’s effect on Christianity, I hadn’t yet thought that this emerging stuff needed to a taste of its own medicine. Could I find the downside?

As to the details of that, I’ll leave that to the experts. All I know is that I used to think I was on team awesome. I could see the flaws in fundamentalism, mainstream conservative evangelicalism, Catholicism, and mainline liberalism, but I could not see any flaws on team awesome.

How could I see flaws on team awesome? Would I not join team awesome unless it had all of the correct answers?

Clearly the people with the flaws were those not on team awesome… All that to say, it took me a little bit of time before I could see my friend’s point.

And here’s the thing: We have lots of team awesomes. I just read about a NEW team awesome on a popular Christian blog. Only this time the blogger mentioned the conservative flawed team, the liberal flawed team, the emerging/missional flawed team, and the NEW team awesome that doesn’t have any flaws.

The new, cutting edge, revolutionary, game-changing stuff never has any flaws because its part of team awesome. That is, until it’s not.

Reading that post brought me back to that conversation with my friend and the first time that I realized I was a member of a made up team awesome. After looking over the emerging/postmodern context stuff, it didn’t take long to find some flaws that tarnished my image of team awesome.

We were now team pretty good.

In all of this, a lesson from writing a Bible commentary may help. I know, I know, you probably think I’m losing it after reading that last sentence. Just bear with me for a moment…

When writing a commentary about a tricky passage, Bible scholars start with the least likely meaning of a passage and then work toward the most likely meaning. In other words, they rarely say something is “unbiblical” or “wrong” and they rarely say that one perspective is the “certain” or “biblical” meaning.

I always liked this approach to Bible study because it keeps us in our place, seeing things in a mirror dimly, realizing that God’s thoughts are not our own. We all have our most likely take on a Bible passage, but we don’t need to create unrealistic team awesomes that are 100% correct and don’t have any flaws.

At our very best, we’d all be kicked off team awesome if it did exist.

We’re stuck with team pretty good, providing the most likely answers to life. What may surprise us is that a “pretty good, most likely answer” is really all we ever needed.

Years of being blessed with a low checking account balance forced me to rethink my approach to Christmas. Those were not easy years as I tried to tell myself that Christmas isn’t all about the presents, while fearing that my family would consider me cheap or inconsiderate.

A budget gift is a budget gift.

In a happy case of irony, my focus on gift-giving lead me back to a better conception of Christmas.

If art thrives on limitation, gift-giving followed suit. If I only had ten dollars to spend on each person, I had to ask very different questions for gift-giving, the most important being: “What would this person never buy for himself/herself?”

This lead to a series of time-consuming projects such as homemade applesauce, unique jams, hot sauce, and framed photographs. Everything was tailored to the specific needs of each person and in most cases kept us within our budget.

The first time I gave my grandmother a jar of homemade applesauce, she opened it right away and burst into tears at the first taste. She hadn’t eaten homemade applesauce since the last time her mother had made it. My mom guards her jar of blueberry jam, while my in-laws don’t miss a meal without their hot sauce.

As we’ve reached greater financial security, we’ve been able to spend more money on gifts, but our question remains the same. Oddly enough, the homemade gifts are still a big hit. In addition, we’ve begun to keep our Christmas spending under control by joining together with family members to buy one large gift that someone would never purchase on his/her.

I organized some pretty epic purchases that both met a relative’s need and ensured a minimum investment—the biggest ticket item being a computer for my wife before she entered graduate school. I’d share some examples from this year, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise for anyone.

Ironically, the more I’ve thought about my gift-giving strategy, the more I’ve been drawn away from focusing on giving gifts and pondering the power of God. Isn’t Christmas all about the power of God to do for us what we could never do for ourselves?

I love the promise that Gabriel made to Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

God overshadows us. He breaks into our gift-giving madness to remind us that our iPads will one day break, our E-readers will be replaced, our shirts will unravel, and even our jams will go rotten. We can’t beat greed, materialism, and selfishness on our own. We’ll keep thinking that these bits of technology and clothing are what we really need.

God knows that we need to overshadowed. We need him to overcome every competing desire in our life. Only he can overshadow every idol that tries to replace those quiet moments where we sense that the loving touch of God is what we were made to experience, even if we think we’ll be fulfilled by touching what we have made.

There is incredible joy in giving someone a gift that he could never acquire on his own. In fact, meeting a real need is the best kind of gift giving. God knew that when he overshadowed Mary with his power and sent us a Savior as the greatest gift—doing something we could never accomplish on our own.

May we find that joy both in our relationships with God and with one another. May we find what only God can give and meet needs that would otherwise remain.

This post is part of World Vision’s 12 Blogs of Christmas Project about the true spirit of Christmas. In order to learn more real needs that you can meet this Christmas season, check out the World Vision Catalogue.

Do you have your own story about the true spirit of Christmas? Share it today at the World Vision blog.

He was a no name assistant on a team full high profile talent. His superiors were household names throughout town. They were the people everyone talked about and looked up to.

One devastating day, this no name member of the team saw one of his superiors commit a horrible crime. Usually the witness of a crime calls the police. These isn’t much to debate here. However, he didn’t reach for a telephone. He thought too much, and we’re left to speculate on what went through his mind…

If he called the police, there would be a scandal. The lowly assistant would receive criticism as a whistle blower. There would be allegations made, the superior would most likely deny them, and who knows what would happen in the midst of a trial. It was his word against the word of a superior. Who would believe him?

To make matters worse, he would most likely be fired or marginalized. Who would hire a whistleblower who didn’t know his place?

What should a lowly, assistant do if he wants to protect himself?

There are easy ways out and half measures available, and he opted for that route. He followed the kind of procedures you’d observe when dealing with financial indiscretions, not a major crime. He reported the crime to his superiors, and they followed the same strategy of doing something without doing enough.

In the process, the no name assistant was able to take some kind of action without appearing disloyal. He told his other superiors without causing a national scandal. He protected himself. Who doesn’t want to protect himself?

Selfishness shines through in this story. It is a cancer that prevents us from seeing the world through the eyes of others, the victims and the weak. Selfishness seeks to ensure our own safety and security above the well-being of others. It asks, “What’s right for me?” regardless of the consequences to others.

I confess that I often want to protect myself, to preserve my own comfort at the expense of others. I don’t like the thought of taking a stand and alienating myself among the people I like.

It never feels good to be alienated or rejected by your own people, to lose colleagues because you don’t see eye to eye on ethical matters, let alone a crime. So, instead of being rejected by my own tribe, I look for half-measures, easy ways out that can preserve a shred of my integrity without offending “good people.”

Jesus tells us to love our enemies.

The prophets demand that we pay our workers fair wages.

God tells us that he hates injustice.

I read these words and look for easy ways out. I don’t want to choose a path that is too costly. I look for half-measures. I don’t want to be the whistleblower who challenges the rest of my team.

It’s all so clear when the story involves sex abuse and a college football team, but when it comes down to my views on war, the policies I protest, the shopping decisions I make, the ways I donate money, etc… the lines become murky again.

Should they?

It may help to remember that ten or twenty years from now, we’ll all look back at our lives and begin to ask ourselves, “Did I choose the right course or did I only try to protect myself?” With the benefit of hindsight, we’ll see the fruit that comes from our decisions. We’ll see whether we benefited from self-preservation or from serving and preserving others.

May God give us the courage to protect those who are vulnerable and abused.

Yesterday, I searched for general “leadership failure” and the overwhelming results mentioned the failure of Christian leaders.

From affairs to power struggles to personal meltdowns, the internet results suggested that Christian leaders have issues with time management, character, sin, relationships with colleagues, and communication. Are Christian leaders alone in the failure department?

I dug into general leadership failure trends, and I found an article at Psychology Today that shared the following numbers:

“In the past two decades, 30% of Fortune 500 CEOs have lasted less than 3 years. Top executive failure rates [are] as high as 75% and rarely less than 30%. Chief executives now are lasting 7.6 years on a global average down from 9.5 years in 1995. According to the Harvard Business Review, 2 out of 5 new CEOs fail in their first 18 months on the job.”

Those are some pretty staggering numbers. The article goes on to suggest a number of reasons why leaders fail. These include hubris, resistance to change, and hostility toward colleagues.

It’s hard to say whether the existing conventional wisdom on leadership is inherently flawed or whether these washed up CEOs are simply failing to execute wise practices. Likewise, it’s hard to point to a cause behind the failure of Christian leaders. Do we expect too much from them? Are they just as sinful as the rest of us?

I’m honestly the last person to prescribe a path forward for Christian leaders, but I’ve seen what seminary students and pastors read when it comes to leadership. I know what church leaders talk about and where they look for their examples of excellent leadership.

Our church leaders look to the business world for lessons on leadership.

Can we learn something from good leaders? Sure. This is not a black and white matter.

The main point for consideration in my view is that we need to ask whether the high failure rate of CEOs in the business world tells us anything about the quality of the advice in our business books. Even if a small percentage of CEOs can rise to the top, overcome tremendous odds to succeed, and publish a book about “how they did it,” should we fawn over the advice they offer? What works for a small group of successful CEOs may not apply to other CEOs, let alone the pastors who read leadership books.

What’s more, if that Psychology Today article is right about CEOs failing because of pride, resistance to change, and failure to communicate, the solutions to these problems are not necessarily found in leadership books.

Do you struggle with pride? The cross has something to teach you about that.

Do you fight change? The Holy Spirit can change your mind.

Do you fail to communicate effectively? Love will help your relationships stay healthy.

The failure of a church leader is a tragedy, but today it’s not surprising. In fact, church leaders are in good company, since the leadership models that many churches follow seem to produce high failure rates in the business world as well.

Christianity has something to say about leadership, failure, restoration, and rethinking a new way forward. A good place to begin is admitting that the CEO leadership model is not the most healthy way forward for our leaders and their churches.

The solutions to our problems may be right under our noses.

The original prosperity gospel makes my greed the limit for my prayers and actions. It compels me to ask for more provision, more blessings, and more possessions for myself.

I’m asking myself this question today: Would it be helpful if we redefined the prosperity gospel?

The limit for the new prosperity gospel will be the needs of those around us.

We are called to give of ourselves and our possessions until everyone around us is prosperous.

We earn money so that we can care for our families and our neighbors. There is wisdom in accumulating wealth for our own rainy days in the future, but the new prosperity gospel recognizes that many of our neighbors have rainy days now. If we don’t help them, who will?

It’s true that we need to be responsible with the money we have earned, but the new prosperity gospel recognizes that we can hide behind responsibility as an excuse to avoid generosity and love for neighbor. In fact, the new prosperity gospel thrives on love for neighbor because we see how generous God has been to us. It compels us to become joyful givers, spreading God’s prosperity to others.

The original prosperity gospel is all about making myself and perhaps a few others in my circles prosperous.

The new prosperity Gospel is about spreading the wealth, sacrificing so that our neighbors have food, healthcare, shelter, and the ability to care for themselves. All that we call our own comes from God, and therefore our “possessions” become assets in God’s divine economy to use as he pleases for his message of prosperity where the needs of all are met.

Imagine you grew up in a home where your father beat you, your mother never hugged you or said she loved you, where there were no jobs, no one attended college, and your only chance of earning money and respect was crime.

Imagine never having a family dinner, never hearing the words, “I love you,” and never feeling at peace at home.

Imagine the relief you find in drugs and alcohol—they dull the pain. Imagine the hopelessness that comes from a life of crime where there is no escape hatch.

Imagine hitting rock bottom in a prison. You’re stripped of the few things you own, given a pair of dull scrubs, and enter a hostile environment where everyone is out for himself.

Imagine someone coming into that hell and telling you that you matter and that God loves you. You’re ashamed of what you’ve become, but someone takes time out of his/her schedule to visit you and to even visit your family outside of prison. Would such a person make a difference in your life?

That is the power of occupying poverty.

I spent a bit of time during my childhood driving up I-95 in Philadelphia. Right next to the highway sits a huge, old prison with dark stone walls with massive guard towers looming over the prison below. I always wanted to turn away from it when it came into view.

Years later I began visiting prison inmates for church meetings, and I discovered that while I had always turned away from prisons, God was looking right into them. God in fact is very concerned about healing the broken people in our prisons and wherever else they are found.

We preach something when we serve among the poor, the outcast, and the imprisoned. We counter the narrative of our culture that is preoccupied with beauty, celebrity, wealth, and power. Serving among the poor is a way of opting out of our consumer culture that medicates by spending money and accumulating power.

There is a lot to be gained by examining how these messages stack up alongside political activism. The Occupy Wall Street protests are a pretty good example of another way to speak out against our culture.

I spoke with a pastor the other day who suggested that a more effective way to subvert the big banks and corporations, those waging class warfare among the poor and carrying too much political sway, may be serving among the poor. I’m deeply fascinated by this suggestion.

I don’t think that Occupy Wall Street is a waste. They are calling for some very good things, especially campaign finance reform. I think it’s a bipartisan point to say that we have the best government money can buy. We desperately need campaign finance reform to prevent wealthy corporations and individuals from essentially buying legislation and regulatory concessions that are not in the interest of the majority.

However, there are other ways to opt out of the corporation-controlled world. In fact, we can make life better for the poor, take away from the power of corporations/banks, and declare the coming of God’s Kingdom by serving among the poor. In other words, protesting can be good and effective, but Christianity offers a way to not only protest but to embody an alternative way of living that makes our world better.

The Message of Occupy Poverty

Imagine this for a moment… Thousands upon thousands of Christians in America cut up their credit cards and focus on serving their neighbors. They visit prisons, they volunteer at shelters, they give away their possessions to those who need it, and empower the poor to find jobs and rebuild their neighborhoods.

If evangelical Christians at their lowest estimate make up anywhere from 5-10% of America’s population, then we have an opportunity to significantly impact the power balance of America. Rather than backing a politician to carry our message, we ourselves become the message of God’s coming Kingdom.

These are small, mustard-seed movements that can grow. The prison churches I’ve served in only have about twenty guys out at any one time, and at most I only prayed with five guys at each meeting. These were not quick and tidy fixes.

However, by occupying poverty, God changed my priorities and made me a much more effective messenger for the Kingdom. Now that we live in a new town, I’m looking forward to the new places where God will call me to occupy.

We could very well read the Gospel of John as saying, “The Word became flesh and occupied our world.”

When I think about King Nebuchadnezzar turning into a wild beast in the book of Daniel, I’ll bet he was working on a household project. I’ve never felt more like a wild animal than when I’m working on something that requires precision and patience. I have neither, and when things inevitably go south, the beast from within emerges.

I wonder if the Babylonians had plumbing that gave them fits?

I grew up driving around with my dad on Friday nights when we had our weekend together. He’d inevitably have a phone call while driving me to his place, so he’d parallel park his white station wagon on a crowded city street and lead the way into a row home. I usually carried a wrench or an extension chord just to look useful.

We usually ended up in the kitchen to unclog a drain or in the basement to work on the water heater—where the real money would be made.

My dad was the master of his own schedule, but he also bore the burden of his small business. He could sleep in if he took me to a Phillies or Flyers game the night before, but the work had to be done all the same. 

I never saw myself soldering pipes with a torch or putting faucets together. I’m not wired for that. I used to think it was odd that I was so unlike my dad. How did he manage to keep all of the handy man traits to himself?

As it turned out, I did pick up some qualities from my dad, but they’re not what I expected.

What I Learned Without Knowing It

More than anything else, I’ve never been able to stomach the thought of working in an office all day. I don’t see working in an office as a bad thing. I know lots of people have really fascinating jobs that they enjoy that involve sitting in an office.

When you grow up roaming the streets of Philadelphia with your dad, somehow an office doesn’t fit what you imagine a job should be. As I’ve embraced my calling to write, I’ve also discovered that my lifestyle is a lot like my dad’s.

If I have a crazy day that keeps me up late, I sleep in. If I need to clock in for a few hours on Saturday, I make it happen. The difference is that I tinker on a computer in a café while my dad deals with flames, water, and heavy chunks of pipe.

I think we’re both happy with this arrangement.

We Absorb More Than We Expect

In the aftermath of the STORY conference, one of my colleagues that I met there has been absolutely on fire on her blog. I too have noticed that I’m more excited about my writing projects. These happenings make me wonder if being around so many people with fresh, creative ideas helped us take steps forward in our own projects.

We need to spend time with the kinds of people we want to imitate. That works for professions as well as for disciples of Jesus.

What’s really cool to see is that a gathering such as a conference can have excellent short term effects, but we still need the long term examples of others in order to really shape who we become. Seeing how my dad worked day in and day out gave me a picture of what a job could look like, and it really stuck with me.

We are porous. Our resistance to outside influences is limited. What we see day in and day out may well shape us into who we become. And therefore the matter before us is: How will we surround ourselves with the kinds of people worth imitating?

I used to think that I needed to figure out my identity so that I could be happy. If I don’t know who I am and what God put me here on earth to do, how can I reach any kind of fulfillment?

Well, I was wrong about that.

The truth is that I can figure out who I am and what I’m here to do and still be miserable.

Knowing my identity certainly takes a lot of pressure off, but that’s only just a small piece of the puzzle. Coming to grips with who you are is like finding the map that will guide you to where you need to go. But you still only have a map and you need to go somewhere.

The part about identity that I’ve missed for so long is figuring out what to do with it once I figured it out.

I have been given gifts and passions that I’m supposed to use for the benefit of others. When I embrace who I am, I also need to use that identity to embrace others.

This matter of identity is not a personal spiritual exercise that I sort out with God and keep to myself.My identity is actually quite public in the sense that it becomes a tool that God can use to bless others.

When God is able to use me to bless others and to bring his Kingdom to earth, I can then find my greater identity that trumps all others: I am a disciple of Jesus committed to the coming of his Kingdom.

This post is part of the Thursday Faith Jam at Bonnie Gray’s Faith Barista blog. Visit her blog today for links to more posts about identity.

I love my family, but we’ve had our issues. The “messy” bits of my life aren’t that important to me now. What’s important is that I figured out how to survive in some pretty dysfunctional situations and am now on good terms with all of my family.

What’s even more important is that God sustained me throughout those tough times in my life.

Having made it through some dysfunctional seasons where I wasn’t on the same page with some people I loved, I’ve learned a thing or two about dealing with conflict. While I’m not an expert, I know dysfunction when I see it, and I have some relational muscles I’ve developed over the years as I’ve done some heavy-lifting in my relationships.

Heaven knows I don’t have any other kinds of muscles to speak of… that is, unless a hard head counts.

So I have two things I want to say:

1. Christians sometimes operate like a dysfunctional family.

2. Christians can use the same relational tools I’ve used with my own family (and others have as well) in order to sort out their issues with one another.

I feel like the first point is a no-brainer. However, the second one may be a bit tougher to swallow. I mean, aren’t we supposed to be one, just as Jesus and the Father are one? Isn’t the Holy Spirit supposed to make us one heart and one mind.

Yes, but…

In an imperfect world we need to commit ourselves to prayer and the work of the Spirit, but we’re not always at the same place as one another. In some situations the unity of the Spirit is something that we should aspire to, but we should also bring a dose of realism to our prayerful idealism and hopes.

Here are three things I’ve learned from navigating family conflict that apply to relationships in the Christian family:

• Learn when a conflict is worth it.
• Learn when to set up boundaries.
• Never forget that you’re family.

The first principle teaches us to walk away from fights that can’t do anyone much good. Sometimes we have to accept defeat, even if we know we’re in the right.

The second is about defending yourself from spiritual or emotional abuse. Sometimes you just need to stop the bleeding before anything else can happen.

The third reminds us that God’s word stands and his Spirit will win one day despite our imperfections.

May we be made one some day in the perfect love of God.