:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

When I didn’t think about the hard parts of the Bible, I had a very simplistic view of God.

You could boil it down to the conflict between Job and his friends. A complex, mysterious God vs. a simplistic, almost mechanical God who operates according to strict rules. I had no way of processing the difficult parts of life, let alone to face the difficult parts of the Bible.

My fragile faith depended on simple explanations for everything. If I couldn’t explain part of the Bible, then I feared that I would lose the Bible. If I couldn’t explain the hard times in life, then I feared I would lose God.

Atheism isn’t necessarily caused by asking hard questions of the Bible. I came closest to losing my faith when I asked a hard question about God or the Bible and could only find an unrealistically simple answer.

God does not owe anyone an answer or an explanation for the parts of the Bible or life that we can’t understand. However, we do God no favors when we brush away unspeakable tragedy or troubling passages with an explanation that fails to truly grapple with the full testimony of scripture.

Answers that don’t work for me in the face of difficult passages/circumstances include:

God is holy.

God is sovereign.

God is all-powerful.

I started writing this post with the goal of addressing difficult Bible passages like the conquest of Canaan where God essentially commanded the Israelites to commit war crimes. However, after reading about the unspeakable tragedy unfolding in the aftermath of tornadoes in Oklahoma, I’ve found the focus of this post widening a bit. Perhaps working through some of the difficulties in the Bible will help us as we grieve and process this tragedy as well.

A Complicated Picture of God

As I’ve been reading through the most disturbing passages in the Old Testament, I’ve seen the loving kindness, patience, and mercy of God come into tension with the justice, anger, and judgment of God. While God’s defining characteristics are love and patience, it’s a mistake to think they rule out his anger and justice.

There is sin and evil in this world, and God consistently makes it clear that he will not tolerate them forever. In fact, he will punish those who go too far down that road and never repent.

We don’t know how to measure God’s patience or his limits for dealing with evil. There aren’t formulas or clear guidelines. However, the stories in the Old Testament consistently show God giving time and warnings to people about their choices.

The Old Testament also shows that God is sometimes involved in natural phenomena, but isn’t intricately orchestrating every single thing that happens on earth. The “plan” of God is for people to obey him and to one day bring peace and justice to the earth.

When Jesus’ disciples thought that the Tower of Siloam fell on a group of people because they were wicked, he quickly rebuked them.

The Bible shows us that God is deeply invested and involved in our world. Sometimes we can understand the ways of God and sometimes we’re left confused and even disturbed by what we’ve just read. The story of the conquest of Canaan has been among the latter for me.

Why would God command his people to commit war crimes?

There are Two Ways to Ignore the Hard Parts of the Bible

I have found two ways to side step the difficult passages in the Bible.

I can avoid reading the hard parts of the Bible and settle for simple answers and explanations without digging deeper.

Or I can just rule out those passages as later additions, distortions, or myths.

There’s a part of me that wishes I could just rule out those passages.

The story of the conquest of Canaan is quite difficult to handle because I can certainly understand part of the story. The people of Canaan were doing some detestable things. They were killing children in order to worship their false gods. They prostituted women in the service of their gods as well. When the Israelites wandered in the wilderness, they attacked them.

The Canaanites weren’t powerless, innocent people. I can understand that God would desire to deliver justice and to end their evil actions.

However, when I encounter the story of the conquest of Canaan, I’m also hesitant to say that I understand why the Israelites were commanded to kill off all of the people in several towns. These are war crimes by our standards today, and it’s hard to reconcile that with God and a command for God’s people.

By confronting this story in all of its complexity, I have found that I don’t necessarily have to run from it or explain it away, even if there are still some aspects of it that I can’t quite resolve.

Jesus Makes More Sense

Some have argued that the “violent God” passages in the OT show that Jesus represents a radical change in direction. It’s almost borderline Marcionism, dividing the Gods of each testament. However, Jesus represents the culmination of God’s desires throughout the Old Testament.

There are far more passages in the OT that look ahead to Jesus, predicting a suffering servant, the triumph of God over evil, and the restoration of peace on earth. The matter of the OT isn’t that God is always violent. The picture is complex and difficult to piece together.

I’m all for discussing a variety of ways to interpret or classify a story in the OT. Modern history as we know it didn’t exist back then, so there could be some stories that function more mythically than we would suspect. However, I prefer to make my first move toward reconciling the narratives, laws, and prophecies of the OT based on the assumption that they happened as reported.

And while including a story like the conquest of Canaan puts us in a tight spot, I don’t think it necessarily ruins the whole Bible. We can look back through the ministry of Jesus and see God’s compassion and desire to save all nations. God himself was willing to come down and die for all people.

I can’t reconcile the conquest of Canaan with the radically different conquest of the cross, but there are so many significant stories, prophecies, and poems in the Old Testament that show us a loving, self-sacrificing God is far from a new innovation.

What Does the Bible Reveal to Us About God?

The full picture of the Bible shows us that God is just and holy, willing to punish those who persist in doing evil. However, God is patient, kind, and ready to forgive. God so badly wants to restore people to a relationship with himself, that he sacrificed himself to defeat the grip of evil on us, dwelling among us today through the Holy Spirit.

God chooses to live among us in a world where there is evil, pain, and conflict. While God will one day judge evil and restore peace to this world, things are not yet as God or any of us would want them to be.

I can’t understand everything about the past judgments of God, but I can see that God has taken action against evil on the cross, paying a price that few of us would ever want to pay.

A Complicated Bible for a Complicated World

Avoiding the hard passages of the Bible altered my understanding of God and didn’t prepare me for the complications of life.

If all we have is an easily understood, easily explained, neat and tidy Bible, then it’s not much good in a world that is confusing, mysterious, and extremely messed up.

I’m less and less convinced that the Bible exists to give us straight answers. If that was the purpose of the Bible, then it does a bad job of it.

Rather, the Bible comforts, questions, and disrupts us. We can see that our troubles today are nothing new and that people have been seeking out God for thousands of years, asking questions, making requests, and finding hope in the presence of God.

I’ve spent a good deal of my time as a Christian fearing the Bible wasn’t true or that part of it could be proven inaccurate. I’ve devoted hours to studying it, fleshing out the background, and evaluating my philosophical and cultural presuppositions.

I took undergraduate and graduate classes in the Bible. I learned Greek and Hebrew. All of this has been in the service of reading the Bible accurately and applying it to my life.

I’ll just come out and say it: I love the Bible.

However, loving the Bible has not made me feel loved by God.

I know it’s an old quip to say, “The Bible won’t love you back,” but this goes a little bit beyond that. what if you actually can’t “know” that Jesus loves you even if “the Bible told you so”? What if words fall flat sometimes?

Our fear of somehow losing the purity of the Bible rats out our true priorities. We don’t fear the loss of God so much as we fear the loss of the book that tell us about him. The fact that we can’t even distinguish the two in our conversations drives home the extent of this problem.

Just learning about God’s love hasn’t been enough for me. In fact, the more time I spend learning and relearning about the love and forgiveness of God, the more uneasy I’ve become.

Shouldn’t the love of God stick at some point?

Can you imagine a marriage where a wife has to keep asking her husband, “Are you SURE you really love me? Can you show me that love letter again?”

We know that God loves us, but actually claiming it and resting in it for ourselves is another matter.

Finding the Love of God Means Confronting God

Who has time to pray in quiet?

Who can escape buzzing phones, computer screens, and televisions long enough to sit in silence before God?

Nap times are short for small kids, and sometimes the baby wakes up way too early. It’s never easy to find the time you need to meet with God, but finding God’s love means taking time to meet with God.

Sometimes “meeting” God feels more like a confrontation. There is the confrontation of being in God’s presence and overwhelmed with the holy that can unsettle us. In addition, God’s love is not neat and tidy.

When I’ve experienced the love of God, I’ve been led to some uncomfortable and unruly places where I’ve been doubled over by the presence of God as well as God’s peace and acceptance. I can’t exactly make a simple comparison between God’s love and something else I’ve experienced. It’s something bigger and more complicated than whatever I can piece together.

I’ve loved theology for so long that it’s hard to step into the experience and mystery of God’s presence. Experiencing God’s love is a completely different matter when compared to “knowing” about God’s love. Both are important, but merely knowing about God’s love without sitting in God’s presence will leave us in an empty, uncertain place.

Confronting God Means Facing Our Sins

The really sticky part about meeting with God daily has been facing my sins each day.

If my mind is racing or I’m battling stress and anxiety, there’s a good chance that I’m clinging to my own plans or trying to force God’s hand in a situation.

If I’m angry, there’s a good chance I have expectations of others that are unreasonable or I need to confess some of my own issues.

If I can’t forgive, then I have something truly vile festering within.

If I’m hesitant to pray, there’s a good chance I’m trying to hide something from God—not that I ever could hide my sins from him in the first place!

All of these things come up when I want to sit down and pray. If prayer is especially hard, then it’s likely that I may have something to confess.

When I first started out writing full time and I struggled to find the right combination of paying jobs to make ends meet, I had a very hard time praying. I blamed God. I blamed myself. I blamed other people. I panicked. I made new plans. I worked longer hours.

Nothing worked, and I didn’t see how I could make time to pray.

Consequently, I felt alone and abandoned by God.

What happened?

My most important revelation has been that I’m failing to seek God and the Kingdom of God first in these times. If seeking first the Kingdom of God also adds everything else that we need to our lives, then it’s possible that seeking first “all of these things” before God’s Kingdom will leave us feeling like we have nothing.

When I don’t feel the peace and assurance of God’s love, I can convince myself that I’m not worth God’s time.

Have You Experienced the Love of God?

It still feels like a cheap trick some days to force myself into believing that God loves me.

Belief in my “unlovableness” makes it hard to love others, let alone myself.

I can turn to the Bible and try to rest on the promises of God, but sometimes those aren’t enough. There is a disconnect sometimes between knowledge and experience. You can’t bridge it by learning more. You have to do something else with what you know.

Some days it takes a tremendous amount of courage and will power to simply say, “I believe you love me, Father. Thank you for your unconditional love.”

In the back of my mind there’s a voice saying, “What about your sins? What about all of the times you’ve ignored God? You really suck at loving God!”

There are promises in scripture that I lean on at times like this, but the way I lean on them is by waiting in silence, believing that God will accept me. There is an assurance we can receive from God that is beyond words or description.

There is a peace that passes understanding because it defies description.

How many of us have stopped short at what we know?

God’s Love Is Immeasurable

If this sounds like I’m suggesting we take a leap of sorts off a ledge, that sounds about right. We’re stepping into the unknown, the unmeasured, and the indescribable.

Experiencing the love and acceptance that comes from the presence of God is not easily mapped or quantified. There is no method to it beyond the simplicity of hopeful waiting.

There are no boundaries for the love of God because it is deeper, wider, and longer than anything we can fathom.

If we can give up on trying to learn our way into God’s love and accept that he personally has something for us that surpasses anything we can conceive in our minds, we just may become desperate enough to wait with quiet expectation.

He will come—not on your timetable or according to your expectations. But he will come nonetheless. And in that moment when God shows up, the love of God for you will be without question.

That is, at least until tomorrow comes, when you need to start all over again.

I’m posting over at A Deeper Family today. Here’s the introduction:

My friend calls the local university near us a divorce factory. I wouldn’t have used that exact phrase since I know several happily married people there, but since we started my wife Julie’s journey through graduate school, we’ve seen plenty of failed marriages. It’s something we’ve talked about a lot.

I grew up with divorced parents, so it doesn’t take a lot for me to talk about divorce. We’ve been vigilant, carefully watching the ebbs and flows of our relationship as my wife perseveres through the demanding hours of her PhD work.

I’m not a marriage expert, but I think I can spot the contempt and lack of communication that marks a failing marriage.

The past nine months have been especially demanding. A few days after the birth of our first child last July, I landed two book deals that were due within two weeks of each other, while she started reading for her PhD exams.

Read the rest at A Deeper Family.

There’s at least one sure way to have a crisis of faith: try to seek the Holy Spirit and come up empty. That’s how I lived for a while: asking God for the Holy Spirit and experiencing nothing.

The Holy Spirit presents the perfect storm for a Baptist like me. I learned about the Holy Spirit, but I only really knew how to “experience” the Bible. The more I studied the Bible, the more convinced I became that the Spirit could be manifested today.

Beyond what I learned, I started meeting Christians who had dramatic experiences of the Holy Spirit. Some healed others, some had prophetic words, some had experienced emotional healing, some had dreams and visions, and others spoke in tongues.

I knew these people. They were not deceptive. Something supernatural was happening, and it lined up with what I read in the Bible. That left me with a disturbing question:

Why am I not experiencing the Holy Spirit?

The Worst Charismatic Ever

I could figure that out biblically speaking: the Holy Spirit is essential for the Christian faith. It is quite another matter to figure out a place for the Spirit in our American evangelical churches who tend to emphasize strategic planning, Bible teaching, and a Spirit functioning in the background without necessarily being manifested in ways we can feel and observe.

The irony is that I was most resistant to the Holy Spirit when I was most concerned with following the Bible literally. You would think that I would have walked around putting my hands on sick people and praying for them to be healthy again.

Instead, I just prayed for wisdom or comfort or whatever.

Forget about healing the lame. My Christianity was lame. I wanted to follow Jesus, but I also didn’t know what to do about the Holy Spirit who figured so prominently in the New Testament. Where does someone begin with the Holy Spirit?

Why Won’t the Holy Spirit Come?

Good Baptist that I was, I determined to take the Bible “at its word.” I was going to ask God for the Holy Spirit. Over and over again people pray for the Holy Spirit and BOOM!

If the Bible was true, this had to work. Why would God let me doubt him?

At my best I was uninformed and inexperienced with the Holy Spirit. At my worst, I came dangerously close to completely losing my faith because I didn’t understand how the Holy Spirit works. I had this nagging suspicion over the years that acknowledging a bigger Holy Spirit suddenly made my faith a complicated mess.

I was completely right about something for once.

Once I let an authoritative Holy Spirit loose, I had so many questions and a pile of doubts and fears to sort through.

Every time I sat down to pray, I felt like my faith was being put to the test. God is supposed to show up if I have the Holy Spirit, so what does it mean if the Holy Spirit doesn’t show up?

I expected to feel something. I’d seen people pray and have dramatic encounters with the Spirit, weeping or laughing. I’d seen people pass out. I saw marks that God was doing something.

When I prayed and asked for the Holy Spirit to come, I felt nothing.

When people say, “I just take God as his word about the Holy Spirit?” I want to ask, “But what exactly is God promising us? Should we always expect healings and miracles? If not, why not?”

How to Receive a Gift You’ve Already Been Given

The hardest part about going from non-charismatic to charismatic in my belief and practice was sorting out the place of the Spirit in my every day Christian practices, whether that was reading the Bible, praying quietly, or praying for someone.

For a season, I dreaded sitting down to pray since I feared I would not experience the presence of the Holy Spirit and spend the rest of my day questioning my faith and the existence of God.

I have very little patience for anyone who makes this Holy Spirit stuff sound simple. Some of us have really struggled with this while having the best intentions. I wanted to take it seriously, but I also didn’t know how it all worked.

As is often the case in Christianity, blueprints and expectations led me astray.

For instance, my father-in-law prayed for me once and said that he sensed the Holy Spirit coming to fill me up. I didn’t doubt him, but I also didn’t feel anything happen. I didn’t even say a single word in a tongue.

What gives?

I read about Lauren Winner asking God to give her the gift of tongues, and she prayed, “Tongues, tongues, tongues…” I could relate to that prayer.

After stumbling around with the Holy Spirit for a few years, I’ve learned that the manifestations or anything I feel is far from the point. Really, really far from the point in fact.

Waiting on God

We have an instant culture with fast food, high speed internet, 4G phones, instant dinners, and super highways that let us move at top speeds. You can’t turn the Holy Spirit into an instant spiritual fix. You don’t take the Holy Spirit with a glass of water and enjoy your afternoon after filling up.

I had to wait and persevere. I had to let others pray for me. I had to open myself up to however God wanted to speak to me or through me.

Learning to sit and wait without expectation has helped me take some positive steps with the Holy Spirit. Rather than focusing on what I expected to happen or what God’s inaction meant about my faith, I finally hit a place where I just waited to see what God would do.

In other words, I don’t ask God for something big unless I feel peace about making that request. I don’t know how the mechanics of this work or if there are any rules. I just know that prayer isn’t this big grab bag that we can access any old time. Prayer is about getting on the same page with God, waiting for his prompting, and then moving in the direction he leads with enough faith to believe he can accomplish something in or through you if he gave you the prompting in the first place.

I get nauseous when people challenge me to do big things for God or to take big risks. Small or big risks are not about faith unless God gives you the vision. Christian obedience isn’t about making a great plan and following through. I had to listen and hear God before I could take a step forward.

If I just waited with hands open, believing that God could show up if he so pleased, I could receive either a word or silence.

For all of the times in the Bible that we see God show up, there are plenty more that pass by unnoticed where God doesn’t give any messages or do anything of note. This is how we ended up with Psalms of lament.

Once I started to open myself up to the Spirit’s voice without asking for something specific, I started to hear things.

Spiritual Warfare is Weird but Real

Any time I explain the Holy Spirit to someone who doesn’t have a grid for it, I have a hard time putting my finger on what exactly I hear or how I know I’ve heard the Spirit. More often than not, I get a sense that something is true and that I need to pray it or act on it.

Most of the time, there’s a result of some sort that confirms I’d heard correctly.

In praying for myself and others, the Holy Spirit sometimes gives me a specific thing to pray about. On one occasion I was praying about our marriage, and the Holy Spirit spoke right to my laziness.

That doesn’t happen all of the time, and honestly, I don’t make it happen. I just wait for it. Sometimes it comes after a lot of waiting and sometimes it comes before I’ve even started to pray and sometimes, many times, I don’t hear anything.

Perhaps the most startling thing I’ve heard is to pray about spiritual battles. In other words, I hear that I need to pray against a spirit of some sort in a person’s life. I’ll bet that may either alarm or bother some folks. Do we really have demons trying to make us sin?

The answer I’ve found is this: sometimes.

I’ve received the profound sense that I needed to pray for certain couples “right now.” It is awkward and a bit strange, but if I listen to that urge, God brings up something that I need to pray about.

I can’t explain this. I just know that sometimes there are evil forces in this world trying to undo relationships and health. Other times sin in a person’s life is more of a personal choice. We can’t blame everything on evil spirits, but they’re out there.

Can You Receive the Spirit?

If this strikes you as both appealing and frightening, you’re in good company. There are some times when I sit down to pray, and I struggle with “relaxing” in God’s presence. I want something to happen!

The Holy Spirit isn’t about proving something to ourselves, others, or God. You can’t make God do anything, but you can enter God’s presence with open hands.

The best advice I can give someone about the Holy Spirit is to seek out someone who can provide support and guidance. The Holy Spirit is God’s gift to you, but it’s not easily received because we have so much junk in our lives that distracts us and makes it hard to connect with God.

Over the years I’ve learned what it feels like to have a quiet Spirit before God. That doesn’t mean I’m better at quieting my spirit necessarily. It just means I can spot a manic mind much easier and at least work on stilling myself before God.

The Spirit is a gift for me and for you. The Spirit helps us enjoy the peace and joy of God’s Kingdom today.

The Spirit will dramatically change our lives and put us in tune with God in new ways. The Spirit is even worth having a crisis of faith.

A bunch of my friends and acquaintances are going through tough days as writers. Some have been discouraged about book projects, others don’t know where to start, a bunch wish they were further along, and quite a few have received difficult criticism on their blogs. 

I’ve had some pretty dramatically good and dramatically bad days as a writer, and some ups and downs in between. I’ve cried on the way home from a writing conference because I’ve felt completely overwhelmed and I’ve landed 3 book deals in a matter of two months. I’ve had to cancel one project and nearly had to kill another.

I’ve had editors practically sign me up for a contract on the spot… several times… only for them to disappear after sending a brief note of disinterest.

The same ups and downs go with the blog here. Disagreements come up from time to time. Commenters have proved me wrong. Others have questioned my sincerity. Oftentimes I walk away from the comments with something else to consider that I’d overlooked.

That is not a comfortable feeling when you want to act like you have it together. And that is perhaps the most important lesson I learn over and over and over again as a writer: I don’t have it together. I will make mistakes, I will be rejected, I will be criticized, and I will have to make some major about faces sometimes.

Blog posts will pass unnoticed, books will sit unread, and editors will leave my emails unread.

I have plenty of tough times as a writer, so here are some lessons I’ve learned as a writer:

You Will Hit Walls

If you’re doing the right thing, that doesn’t guarantee smooth sailing. One of the most prominent biblical themes is opposition in the face of obedience. Following Jesus didn’t make life easier for the disciples.

If you have a calling on your life to write, it may introduce a lot of conflict and lead to some really, really hard times. You’ll watch ideas die, struggle to sort out the next part of a chapter, or come up empty on blogging ideas. You’ll wonder if you’re really the person to do this.

In a sense, conflict is a good sign. It means you care enough to have a fight over something. If it’s hard, that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just means you’re doing it and you’re experiencing reality.

The only way to avoid dry spells, discouragement, and setbacks is to stop writing. Hitting them does not invalidate you as a writer.

If you sense that God has called you to write, then expect tough times like any other disciple.

You Will Be Wrong

A number of years ago I planned an entire book around a certain research study. It received positive feedback from friends and the editor at a major publisher loved it. When a different editor took over the project, we had to cancel the project.

A few months later, I met a sociologist who told me that the study I’d been relying on was faulty. As it turned out, it was a blessing to cancel that book! I made some huge mistakes back then, and they cost me dearly in time and embarrassment. However,  I learned writing is all about making mistakes and then learning to make less of them as time goes on.

Every time someone visits your blog or picks up your book, there is a moment where conflict can flame up. They can agree with your words or disagree. If you ever try to write anything, you will make mistakes.

The plot will have holes, characters will act out of character, stories will fail to connect with your main point, or your main point could be completely wrong.

You could misuse an anecdote or confuse your terminology. There are hundreds of ways you can mess up a writing project.

Messing up is not a complete failure. You can apologize, retract a mistake, and plan to do better next time. The biggest difference between a new writer and an experienced writer is that experienced writers make less mistakes since they’ve learned from the ones they’ve already made!

Disagreement Shows that People Care

I’ve watched books and blog posts flare up with conflict, and I’ve watched them sit and die due to lack of interest.

The alternatives to disagreement are either pats on the back or indifference. Neither provide opportunities for growth unless you make the changes yourself. Criticism does that hard work for you, but receiving it is quite difficult, especially if the critic attacks you personally.

However, even the most angry attack tells you something good: people care and take you seriously. Sometimes comments sting for days, weeks, and months. One time a commenter said that I “sounded like a little child,” and the sting of that gets me when I think of it.

Stepping away from defending myself is quite hard. I want to be right and I want people to like me. However, disagreements and even arguments show that I’m at least tapping into topics that people care about and may need to be explored further.

Perhaps I need to change my approach in light of feedback from readers. Perhaps I just need to stick with my plan. Either way, I need to find my validation from God alone.

I’ve found that turning on a bit of worship music can do wonders for pulling me out of my personal pity party or my obsessions over what someone wrote in a comment or book review.

No One Said You Can’t Write Again

Whether you’ve been wrong, hit a writing wall, or struggled with criticism, none of these will delete your website, lock up your computer, destroy your books, or hide every pen in your house. You can still write.

Failures, criticism, or blank pages don’t have to be the end of your writing career.

I’ve had to return to my calling time and time again: do I sense the joy of God in my writing? Yes. Then keep writing.

That’s the abridged version of these conversations of course. I offer God all of these great reasons why I should stop writing.

In the end, I’m left with a leap of faith, a pounding in my heart, and a peace over my mind that this zig-zagging rough draft of a life is exactly what God wants for me.

This Is Your Profession’s Worst Day

Hard times will come in life no matter what you do.

Dinner will burn. Babies will cry. Calls will be missed. Bosses will be annoyed. Appointments will be cancelled. Jobs will be terminated.

We will have these peaks and valleys in all things.

So I’ll take the weeks when editors turn down my best work and my articles fail to make a splash. I’ll take the tears, the frustrations, the early mornings, the doubts, and the moments crying in the car because I just can’t imagine this not working out somehow in the future.

This is my calling. It’s the one and only occupation I’ve been sure of.

Every job will have its moments that drive you crazy. It’s not that you can choose a path that avoids the crazy. It’s more a matter of choosing your kind of crazy and loving it.

I don’t have time to write this post, and yet the current constraints on my time are the precise reason why this needs to be said.

Yesterday someone wrote an open letter to feminist women who have lost their capacity to serve their men. This assertion was grounded in the author’s negative experience with feminism and then applied her conclusions to all people, especially feminists. I believe the author had good intentions in writing her post, but myself and many others felt judged and dismissed by the way she imposed her own narrative onto others.

So here’s another take on what feminism can do… from a guy married to a “feminist.”

Several years ago my wife was burning out at her teaching job at a small town in Vermont. She needed a change. We both knew it, but she soldiered on until one day she told me that she wanted to go back to graduate school to work on her PhD.

This wasn’t just a casual switch-over to night classes. We had to quit our jobs, sell our home, sell half of our possessions, and eventually move to Columbus, OH to find the best program for her interests.

We are living in Columbus because my wife took the initiative to make a change and I essentially follower her.

There are some marriages where a wife simply cannot do this. Isn’t the wife supposed to find her joy and her calling in serving her husband?

Here’s another way to think about it. What if a husband and wife are both committed to hearing God and the wife hears God first? What if a husband could completely trust his wife to lay down her will to the Father? What if they could work together to discern God’s will?

I had total confidence that my wife wouldn’t suggest a major shift like graduate school until she prayed about it. When I prayed about it with her and sought the counsel of some trusted friends and we received a clear affirmation to go, we took that step.

On the outside, our marriage may look like an abomination to complementarians or those who advocate patriarchy, but here is where the beauty of equality came in for us. As my wife sought the Lord’s leading and asked hard questions about her own calling, I started to ask whether I’d become stuck in my own career. I’d been making incremental progress toward my goals, but I began to see our new life in graduate school as a chance to gain clarity on my future as well. Perhaps I could fast track things…

I Love It When a Plan (and Feminists) Come Together

When I told my wife about my hope to write full time, she fully embraced it and worked with me to make some huge sacrifices to make it happen. During the first two years of my freelance career, she helped us stick to a tight budget and even picked up some extra work in the summer to make up for a couple of tough breaks when a publisher cancelled a project and magazine cut my column.

When I considered giving up and just taking any old job, she prayed with me and encouraged me to not let go of this dream that God had given both of us.

Today we’ve made sacrifice upon sacrifice for each other. We work together to both lead and serve. Neither of us has to be the designated “servant” or “leader.”

Because of my wife’s support, I have two book deadlines coming up within a month of each other (and two fantastic co-authors who have been very patient with me!).

Because of my support, my wife is preparing to take her PhD exams this weekend. She hasn’t had to worry about house work, laundry, or shopping, and we split up childcare to ensure we both get enough time to work.

We’re both following the nudges that God has given us, and along the way we’ve built a life that we love. We can both work from home most days and we can share in the joys of raising our son together. Every sacrifice we make for each other is small because it enables us to give each other what we need.

Are There Happy Feminists?

We have bought into equality and feminism, and the result isn’t that one of us refuses to serve or submit. The result is that we move forward together toward a common goal, committing to make the sacrifices necessary to reach it. The mystery of the two becoming one for us isn’t that one person’s dream has to win. As we submitted to God and to one another, we found our common path together, and walking down it has both affirmed our individual callings and woven them together.

I can’t say that anyone else’s story is invalid. The author of that piece has to answer to God and God alone for the decisions she makes, and I pray that she is able to live her life with a clear conscience that is free from guilt and condemnation. If she and her husband are living in peace, then I rejoice at however they’ve arranged their lives.

However, it’s impossible for her to lift her own story up as a template for others to follow. Her story is not normative for us. In fact, when she tries to make it so, we receive it as judgmental and constricting. This letter to feminists didn’t bring the love, hope, peace, and joy that most readers  were expecting because it disregarded many of our own stories on its way to elevating one story above all else.

From where I sit, our problem isn’t that women need to do a better job of serving men. Our challenge is for all of us to pray, “Thy will be done” and to figure out what it means for us as singles, dating couples, and married couples.

What “God’s will” could be in a marriage is something I can’t tell you and something you can’t tell me.

* * *

And now that we’ve all had a chance to take a deep breath, let’s enjoy a little feminist satire from Nelly McKay…

I’m posting over at A Deeper Family today. Here’s the opening section:

During my childhood I went to family court two, maybe three times.

The hallways are long and narrow. Men and women in suits bustled in and out of offices and court rooms. Their shoes clicked on the hard floors.

“I don’t want to be here,” was all that I could think. Whatever I’d said to my parents that brought things to this point, I took it back. I didn’t care. I was far from our comfortable brown couches, my fire trucks that filled the soft carpeted floor, and my stuffed animals who I wanted to hug for protection and comfort. I had nothing other than a few G.I. Joe soldiers and this wooden bench where I did my best to act like I was entertaining myself.

I could fool my family, but I couldn’t fool myself.

Read the rest at A Deeper Family

North American Christians have a lot of anxiety about whether we’re living “radical enough” as disciples of Jesus.

We all want to learn how to get it right, and so we’ve been buying lots of books and hearing lots of people speak about how to live as a radical Christian. Some have made costly personal commitments to live simply or even in poverty.

It was only a matter of time before someone asked, “Is all of this radical stuff actually working?”

Let’s talk about the Christianity Today article Here Come the Radicals by Matthew Lee Anderson that attempts to answer that question.

The cover image features caricatures of Shane Claiborne, Francis Chan, and David Platt. Platt, sadly, got the largest head in the illustration and the bulk of the attention in the article. With a teaser that mentions all three, Claiborne and Chan get passing references with the bulk of the article focusing on Platt and other megachurch pastors.

Just seeing Platt and Claiborne mentioned in the same article left me a bit uneasy.

What are these guys doing together?

After giving a brief mention of Claiborne as the one who coined the term “ordinary radicals,” Anderson goes on to write:

More recently, Kyle Idleman, teaching pastor at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, wrote Not a Fan after realizing he had made following Jesus "as appealing, comfortable, and convenient as possible." Francis Chan caught the wave with Crazy Love, a book that tries to affirm our desire for "more God," even if we are "surrounded by people who have ‘enough God.’" Steven Furtick, whose Elevation Church in North Carolina is one of the fastest-growing megachurches, added Greater to the mix, proposing that Christians are mired in miserable mediocrity and should open our "imagination to the possibility that God has a vision for [our] life that is greater" than what we’re experiencing. All of these have hit the Christian best-seller lists, and most are still on them.

…They have both incited and tapped into a widespread dissatisfaction with many Americans’ comfortable, middle-class way of life and the Christianity that so easily fits within it. These pastors may not be saying much new about the Bible or Jesus, but their message says enough about us.

There are some helpful warnings and critiques in this article. Any time “radical” goes mainstream, we should certainly be vigilant. If anything, evangelicals have been hasty to hop onto the latest fads and trends uncritically. I’m looking at you Prayer of Jabez and your covert prosperity gospel!

However, and this is one of the bigger “howevers” I’ve written in a while, there is a shocking lack of precision in this article. So while I can read most of the critiques and see their relevance to particular people mentioned in the article, the inclusion of Claiborn in particular is akin to buying tickets for a hockey game and winding up at Disney on Ice.

As with any movements, there are going to gradients and shades displaying diversity and differing approaches even if the vocabulary in books resemble one another at certain points.

If there are a couple of mega church pastors who are using the word “radical” and making some huge sacrifices for the sake of the Gospel. Good for them!

However, there is a world of difference when you compare Shane Claiborn, the new monastics, and an inner city church like Circle of Hope in Philadelphia to pastors like Platt, Idleman, Chan, and, heavens to Murgatroyd, Steven Furtick. This is the same Steven Furtick who produced the “Haters” Video, which may be the two most uncomfortable minutes you’ll ever spend on YouTube.

And here is where the article starts to unravel for me. If you want to quickly destroy your credibility in an article, stick Shane Claiborn and Steven Furtick into the same camp, suggesting they are both fellow “radicals.” Good heavens!

Call me a hater if you will, but if there isn’t a world of difference between those two dudes, there’s at least 20 minutes of highway driving, 30 strip malls, and a couple hundred abandoned homes.

Who Is Really Radical?

There is a lot we can critique about the language of radicals in books. It’s something that I found personally challenging in the article. Heck, I wrote a book called “Hazardous.” So I’m in the thick of all of this myself.

I especially appreciate this common mistake:

The reliance on intensifiers demonstrates the emptiness of American Christianity’s language. Previous generations were content singing "trust and obey, for there’s no other way." Today we have to really trust and truly obey. The inflated rhetoric is a sign of how divorced our churches’ vocabulary is from the simple language of Scripture.

And the intensifiers don’t solve the problem. Replacing belief with commitment still places the burden of our formation on the sheer force of our will. As much as some of these radical pastors would say otherwise, their rhetoric still relies on listeners "making a decision." There is almost no explicit consideration of how beliefs actually take root, or whether that process is as conscious as we presume.

However, Shane Claiborne and the other new monastics rely on rhetoric and challenges far less than Platt, Idleman, or Furtick—if at all. Clainborne’s story has a whole lot more to do with love and brokenness and getting to know people.His commitment to the roughest neighborhoods of Philadelphia weren’t sparked by a challenging sermon or book. He just tried to help some people in need and then he fell in love. People imitate him based on story and personal connections with the people.

My friend who lives and ministers in West Philadelphia was asked by a police officer, “What are you doing in this neighborhood?” and he replied, “The people I love are here.”

So while we should be thoughtful about radical rhetoric and the ways the wealthy will try to address poverty and injustice, let’s remember that the new monasticism of Claiborne and many of my friends around the country has more to do with downward mobility. It’s spurred by a commitment to love others and is far from a hip new rhetorical challenge from Christian authors and pastors.

And before we slip into hater-mode again, let’s give Platt credit. He has what could be a cushy job, but he’s trying to take the words of Jesus seriously and is stepping out of the status quo. Critique what we will of his books or his approach that could be a bit too close to gentrification, I’ll take someone with imperfect actions over someone doing nothing at all.

In everything I say here, I’m not out to slam Platt, as much as I want to distinguish the new monastics from the movements in megachurches to pursue justice or radical Christianity. In fact, most of Anderson’s critiques of Platt and his ilk are irrelevant for the new monastics.

Are you looking for greater attention to worship forms? How about the liturgies the new monastics produce?

Are you looking for greater attention to the spirituality of the mundane? What do you think the new monastics do all day? They work!

Are you concerned about the affluence of megachurch pastors preaching about radical living? Spend a few minutes with the Simple Way in Philly’s inner city.

To lump Claiborne with Platt, Furtick, Idleman, and any other megachurch pastor or conference speaker makes a critical mistake. The new monastics and churches living out the Gospel incarnated in poor communities are simply in a different category from the suburban megachurches trying to sort out the meaning of radical discipleship.

Perhaps Platt and his brethren rely too much on rhetoric for their messages. It’s an understandable oversight, but it doesn’t hold true for Claiborne and other new monastics.

Who Can Live as a New Monastic Radical Christian?

As we would hope, Anderson is committed to asking tough, practical questions in this article. He shoots the elephant in the room when he critiques Platt’s sermon where he brought trash onto the stage in an attempt to rally his people to address poverty. Such reliance on theatrics over personal connections with people is something we’ll always struggle to sort out in larger churches.

Once again, I’m not saying Platt was wrong in his approach, only that it’s the kind of thing we need to step back and ask whether the medium undermined a well-meaning message.

Anderson is also concerned about the kinds of examples radical Christians provide for their lifestyle. Is the bar set too impossibly high for many Christians, especially those outside of the affluent suburbs?

By contrast, there aren’t many narratives of men who rise at 4 A.M. six days a week to toil away in a factory to support their families. Or of single mothers who work 10 hours a day to care for their children. Judging by the tenor of their stories, being "radical" is mainly for those who already have the upper-middle-class status to sacrifice.

This critique is once again a matter of apples and oranges. A new monastic living among the poor would never be so foolish as to overlook the needs of the poor in sharing a radical message about following Jesus. It’s enough to make me wonder how much Anderson actually knows about Claiborne and new monastics like Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. While his critique may be a worthy one for a megachurch, it fails to make sense if applied to the Simple Way community that intentionally lives at or near the poverty line.

One of Claiborne’s constant themes in interviews and speaking engagements is providing simple ideas for living the radical lifestyle. No one has done more than Claiborne to provide practical ideas for Christians at any income level to live as a radical. You’ll find plenty of ideas in his response to questions at Rachel Held Evans’ blog.

What Is a Radical Christian Anyway?

My concern with the article is that it makes valid critiques of certain pastors and books, but it lumps too many people and groups with them, creating a distorted view of radical discipleship. While I can’t speak to what the author did to research new monasticism, you can just listen to a single interview with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove to get a clear picture that we’re talking about two very different kinds of radical here.

Any time the Christian conference and publishing industries embrace a trend, there is always reason for caution mixed with hope. On the one hand, Christians are having tough conversations that are essential for followers of Jesus. We should rejoice that even megachurch pastors have jumped on this train.

However, we do the radical movement a disservice when we confuse a variety of shades with a single color.

I’m particularly interested in this article because I personally identify with the new monastic approach and values, even though my wife and I aren’t all that monkish in our own calling. We have opted for a particular lifestyle and career choices because we felt led by God to make some tough decisions that impacted our career paths and lifestyle. That’s really all there is to it.

Evangelicals have a way of overthinking discipleship or radical Christian commitment.

My uneasiness with Platt’s approach to radical discipleship is on a more foundational level.

Every major decision we make as Christians needs to be decided with the Lordship of Christ in view. With that in mind, discipleship to me is profoundly charismatic and Spirit-led (With apologies for the plug, see my co-authored book Hazardous for a bit more about this).

I could make all kinds of bold, daring, “biblical” decisions that are rooted in a desire to follow Jesus, to take big risks for God, and to step out of my middle class comfort zone, but that does not guarantee I’m being faithful to God’s calling in my life. If I don’t know how to hear the Spirit speak and obey the leading of the Spirit, how can I actually follow Jesus? Much less radically?

I would guess that Platt wouldn’t necessarily disagree with me here, so our difference is more a matter of emphasis.

From where I sit, you can’t do anything radical as a follower of Jesus unless you get spiritual formation right. If you can’t follow the Spirit, you can’t follow Jesus.

The most radical thing you can do as a disciple of Jesus is to wait for an invisible Spirit to tell you what to do with your life. If you’re worried about whether you’re living a radical enough life, the good news is that God’s Spirit will walk with you step by step.

My series on the sovereignty of God is over, and I couldn’t be happier about it. There’s nothing like trudging your way through the mystery of God first thing in the morning. And in the course of writing that series, I had to switch from coffee to tea in the morning.

Don’t even get me started on whether God foreordained that.

I’m really glad I wrote about the sovereignty of God. It has perplexed me for quite some time. However, I’m happy to be moving on. Here’s a little preview of what’s coming up next week besides the typical First Draft Father posts on Thursday and Justice Series on Friday:

What I Love/Hate about Being Evangelical

I still self-identify as an evangelical, but I’m well aware that there are some pretty large groups of more conservative evangelicals who would call me either a liberal or an unbeliever. I can’t quite understand why a movement that, while created as a protest against liberals and fundamentalists, aimed to be broad and diverse from the start has suddenly become so narrow and dogmatic.

I’d like to take a step back next week to look at what actually makes someone and evangelical and then ask, “Does it matter?”

When Will the Holy Spirit Come?

I need a little bit of time to let this series develop, but one of the themes I run into over and over again among Christians is a struggle to understand the Holy Spirit. I’ve been through some pretty hard spots myself, and I think it’s time to write about that. I also want to explore what it looks like  to experience the Holy Spirit, from prayer to tongues to gifts.

R & R for Writers

I’ve been working on a top secret project with my friend Kristin Tennant, and we’ll be unveiling it next week. If you’re a Christian who loves to write, this could be perfect for you. There will only be 30 spots, so if you want the first crack at one of them, make sure you’ve subscribed to my e-newsletter.

A few years after college, I met up with a friend who had been in the Bible program with me. He was a natural at connecting with people, and seeing him minister to a room of high school students made me realize a) Why I was so bad at it and b) I really should not go into youth ministry.

THAT was a life saver.

However, there was another side to him that was always a little restless, perhaps unsettled. I can’t quite put my finger on it, and I honestly only noticed it in retrospect when we caught up. By that time he’d found a church that had been really good for him.

The words that came up over and over again in our conversation were “grace” and “sound doctrine.”

Mind you, a Baptist like me found this different because I would talk about preaching the cross and teaching “The Word.” I still get a little twitchy these days when people use “The Word” to describe the Bible, but I’ll spare you my Barthian rabbit trail. Let’s get back to my friend…

I later learned that his church was Calvinist or Reformed.

This surprised me. For him, a church informed by Calvinism brought him tremendous peace of mind—possibly because he really understood the saving and preserving grace of God in his life for the first time. The absence of his restlessness was jarring. For me, everything that troubled me about Christianity in seminary always seemed to come from the books by the Calvinists.

Go figure.

I’ve run into this over and over again: Some folks find true comfort in the teachings on God’s grace that you’ll find among Calvinists. For a guy like me who finds way more peace in the Arminian end of things, it’s good to be reminded that even if I believe that we need to make a choice, the power and the credit and everything else really does come from God.

As I’ve personally backed away from Calvinism and seen its impact on my life, I don’t think Calvinism is necessarily the problem. Mind you, a doctrine such as predestination can be a real brain bender. That we aren’t quite sure how it works should be a given. That we sometimes misunderstand the mysterious workings of God is a no brainer.

Calvinism has some complex doctrines that are easy to misapply to our lives. Heck, I witnessed Reformed theologians arguing about how the central teachings of their theological school play out in every day life.

Whichever theological camp feels right to you, I hope you can join me in the coming weeks as I look at the sovereignty of God and the way it plays out in everyday life. This is something for all of us to consider. For many, like myself, we have struggled to understand what exactly to do with Calvinism and how to apply it to our lives.

Calvinism is not the problem here. For many, it has been a source of hope and healing. In my own case, it has left me confused about the ways God interacts with us and the decisions we make.

However, you don’t have to mingle with Calvinism in order to be confused about the role of God in our lives. In the coming days I may discuss the impact of Calvinism on my way of thinking, but I hope I never make it sound like I’m “against” Calvinism. The mysterious role of God in our lives is something for all of us to ponder and pray about.

Perhaps God did predestine all of us to be a little confused.