:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

John the Baptist had some dirty work to do. I’m not talking about munching on locusts or roaming around the desert. I’m talking about challenging people to bring their sins out before God, confess their sins, and prepare themselves to enter God’s Kingdom.

This was not flashy ministry. He didn’t perform any miracles or signs that we know of. He simply pointed people back to God, and the only way to God involved repentance. He challenged people to face their issues.

There is no short cut to revival.

Any serious steps forward into the holiness and joy of God must first trudge through our junk, our dark areas that we’d rather forget. If we want to go anywhere with God, our dirty baggage needs to be tossed. Otherwise it will hold us back.

As I look back at my own life, I’ve seen this principle time and time again. In fact, there are times when I’ve opened myself up to the Holy Spirit’s leading and suddenly discovered some bitterness or anger I’d been hiding just below the surface.

It’s not pleasant to have my personal delusions challenged.

And yet, growing into the freedom and power of God’s Kingdom demands an ongoing housecleaning. Oftentimes I also find that once I stop clearing things out, I begin adding more junk.

Living in God’s Kingdom is a constant work of faith that is demanding, but promises rewards that we have yet to fathom.

I like it when God offers me an easy choice.

The big decisions regarding our move to Columbus were easy. That is, once we looked at the facts honestly. Ohio State clearly was the best place for my wife Julie to pursue her PhD. We were walking one day back in Connecticut discussing our choices, and I remember when we hit the point where we realized it wasn’t worth being uncertain any longer.

We knew where we needed to go because so many details had lined up in answer to our prayers.

When it was time to look for an apartment we didn’t need a rainbow pouring down from heaven on the right place for us—though that would have pretty awesome.

We found one place and one place only. That place also happened to provide what we’d been praying about.

The big decisions have been easy.

The details rarely are.

But then the details are where we do the heavy lifting of faith and grow. On our first night here I was laying in bed, stiff and exhausted after a full day of driving. Our rabbits were bouncing around in their play pen next to our bed, getting used to the new place and trying to decide whether they’d like to try killing each other or not (see rabbit bonding).

It was hotter than hot. Our air conditioner didn’t seem to be working.

I began to pray. I don’t know what was going through my mind until this phrase came to me, “Trust the process.”

It was a moment of undeserved grace that God poured on me. We had a couple of long, hard days after that night—moving is always a trial—and those words sustained me.

God has a process for us that may well be demanding, painful, and upsetting. And yet, the thing about God is that he’s actually in that process.

I don’t think it’s helpful to speak about God causing pain because he’s actually with us in the midst of hard times, grieving when our hearts break and shaking his head when the smoke detector goes off at 3 AM for no apparent reason. I don’t know how cause and effect works in relation to God, but somehow God is both all powerful and intimately connected to us in the ups and downs of our lives.

I transplanted some perennial flowers from my in-laws to our new place, and I can really relate to them right now.

I’ve been hacked out of what’s familiar and shoved into a place that is totally different. I’m slowly adjusting and sticking my roots in, but I still feel out of place, off-balance, and overwhelmed. I fear that I may wither in this new place.

And yet, transplanting is a process that works. In fact, some perennials need to be broken up and transplanted in order to thrive—or so I’ve been told.

I have to trust that those flowers will take root and bloom next spring. Transplanting is a process that works. By faith, I trust that the same will be true for us.

For a few summers in my Jr. High and High School years, I spent a week with family at the beaches of North Carolina. The ocean down there was pretty rough in comparison to the tame beaches of New Jersey that I’d known for my entire life.

You had to leave your feet in order to reach any decent waves, but then the current would grab you and send you down a block. I’d ride a wave in, and then walk back to where I’d started. The first few times I left my feet and put myself at the mercy of the current was quite uncomfortable.

There’s this unsettling moment where you’re standing on firm ground and you want to get somewhere else, but you need to leave what is solid and certain in order to get there. There was a gap in my plans between leaving the beach and catching a wave, a gap where something could go wrong and a rip current could drag me out to sea.

Speaking for myself, sometimes in life I don’t know whether I’m in the clear, safely riding in the wave or still bobbing in the water, waiting for the next thing. It’s easy to second guess myself and to worry if I’ve made poor decisions instead of acting out of faith.

So much in our lives hinges on hearing God.

I don’t know why this is, but it’s always easier to panic and worry than to stop and seek God’s leading. Why is that? Perhaps worry at least feels like we have some semblance of control.

The last verse of Matthew’s Gospel shares this from Jesus, “Be sure of this: I am with you always, even until the end of the age.”

It’s a comfort to know that we have a God who not only sends us into the world to do his work, but he promises to go with us. If we can stop, wait, and listen for his leading, he’ll be there for us. Perhaps he won’t show up in ways that we expect, but as we discipline ourselves to wait patiently, something the Psalms talk about quite a bit, we’ll find that he is more than able to give us the faith and hope to survive our gaps.

I wish I knew why some folks go through tougher or longer gaps than others. In my own life, I’ve noticed that God sometimes delays giving me things that I want because either A) I’m not ready to do anything worthwhile with them or B) I don’t really need them.

If we are in a relationship with a God who promises to be with us, we need to lean heavily on that promise during the gaps in our lives. A gap between what we know and what we want presents us with the uncomfortable but valuable lesson that we can have joy when God alone sustains us.

We just may find that we’ll be better prepared for the next season in our lives if we learn from the gaps.

I had a bit of a grumpy afternoon yesterday. We were expecting thunderstorms, and I somehow got into a huff about our afternoon being ruined by rain and lightning and hail the size of hamsters.

I wanted to be outside, enjoying sunshine, not keeping a constant eye on each new wave of dark clouds.

I don’t know what gets into me sometimes. I just sort of a stew a bit and somehow I get worked up for a few hours. It passes, and I realize that the world isn’t so bad a place. We have rabbits who frolic about our home. There is coffee to drink each morning. Blueberries are in season.

Life is good.

I was praying this morning, and I began to think about Jesus’ teachings about fruitfulness in Matthew 21. Without sounding too dramatic, Jesus said that bearing fruit, i.e. producing the kind of life that God desires, is really, really important.

Ethics and practice are inextricably tied to our salvation in the Kingdom of God. Jesus wants people who actively reflect God’s character and nature. If we don’t reflect God’s nature, then we need to figure out who our Lord truly is and which kingdom we’re living in.

I began to think that I hadn’t been all that fruitful yesterday. Then I realized that I’d been plenty fruitful to a certain degree, but I’d been producing the wrong kind of fruit.

Yesterday I was producing the fruit of control and selfishness, wanting things to go exactly according to my plans. Rain in the afternoon, eh? Then I’ll just be tense, grumpy, and moody about it—introducing my fruit.

We’re always producing something. The scriptures make it really clear that the fruits of God’s Spirit are things like peace, hope, self-control, and even patience for dealing with rabbits who nibble on coffee tables. It shouldn’t take us long to figure out what’s influencing us based on the fruit we’re producing in our lives.

If you’ve had a yesterday like mine, take heart. God wants us to be fruitful. He’s not sitting back waiting for us to let him down. He wants to help you and me rest in his perfect strength today and make a clean break from yesterday. We can produce good fruit today because God is passionate for his people, compassionate when we repent, and powerful enough to change us.

I pray that you’ll produce fruit today that results from time spent resting in God’s presence, enjoying his favor for you. May you abide in his goodness and love, allowing his power to bring about good works and joy in your life.

I like to think of myself as a pretty reasonable person. I arrive at logical reasons for what I do and believe, and I’m even kind enough to share them with others, expecting them to follow along.

I’m reasonable, that is, unless I’m not.

A few years ago my family wanted to go on this big kayaking and camping trip. The forecast was for rain, but we went anyway. I remember thinking that it was going to be a huge disaster.

It rained the whole drive up and during our first paddle. The whole time I kept thinking how doomed we were. It was raining during our camping trip! How terrible! I mean, we were surrounded by water, and it was terrible to get wet by water that wasn’t in the lake, right?

Then the rain stopped and we had wonderful weather for the rest of the trip. I had a great time camping out on an island because we didn’t have to worry about bears quite as much, though I’m sure they can swim, and kayaking has to be one of the most relaxing ways to see a ton of scenery.

And who can resist the call of a loon in the night?

I thought that I was so reasonable to doubt the success of our trip. It was quite humbling to realize how wrong I had been. I would have missed out on a great adventure if I’d been my stuck in the mud self and stayed at home.

I’m reasonable with lots of other things, but they’re all different from my judgment about the kayaking trip. I’m pretty sure that I’m right about this stuff. I’m a reasonable person who comes up with reasonable beliefs and practices.

So when I dabble with something like, say, theology, I can come up with all kinds of reasonable explanations that describe God. I have a reasonable God who makes lots of smart decisions.

Come to think of it, God must be a lot… like… me.

Since I like dabbling with this theology thing, here’s a thought:

What if God reveals himself to me as unreasonable?

In other words, I’m not saying that God could be wrong. I’m saying that I could be wrong about God. I could create standards for God that I believe to be reasonable, only to discover that I was wrong.

Can I still worship a God who doesn’t fit my own criteria for what is reasonable? What if I’ve created an image for God in my theology that doesn’t actually reflect the character and nature of God?

We could take this in a bunch of directions. We could get philosophical and talk about what it means for God to change or to not change. We could get personal and talk about issues like pain, evil, salvation, the Kingdom of God, and even homosexuality.

What will conservative Christians do if they find out that God welcomes people that they pegged as outsiders or those deemed to be living in sexual sin?

What will liberal Christians do if they find out that God really will punish those who refuse to believe and that certain sexual lifestyles are not acceptable in his sight?

Theology can only take us so far. We’re dealing with approximations at best when we talk about God. We can study the Bible all we want, but at the end of the day we’re just talking piles of dust and spit trying to define a deity that we can only see in a mirror dimly.

We know some things about God, but as NT Wright says, we can’t be 100% sure that all of our beliefs are right. And if we one day discover that God is different from us, what will we do?

I don’t think you can blog a rebuttal after standing before the judgment seat of God. Actually, I’m pretty sure about that one.

At a certain point we bump into our limitations and the likelihood that we have been wrong about God in some ways. We have to decide whether we’re willing to stick with God even if he dashes parts of our theology to bits, even if he appears unreasonable, intolerant, or too inclusive.

This is why Christianity is about more than an idea or a belief. Christianity is about an encounter with the living God. I’m talking about those moments when the hair rises on the back of your neck because you can sense God’s presence and hear him speak to you.

Our theology helps us seek God out, but at the end of the day, our time in God’s presence where we hear from him make up the substance of daily discipleship for all of us. When Jesus speaks of the final judgment, his criteria is whether we knew him. I for one am glad that I took my last theology test in seminary.

Having gone to seminary, I sometimes think that I should be able to whip up some pretty sophisticated and profound prayers. It’s not that I took any classes on “Effective Prayers Before Meals” or “King David’s Greatest Hits.” I just think that with all of this theology crammed into my head, I should be able to formulate some really awesome prayers.

OK, I’ll be honest—theology really does change how we pray. However, theological training does not make one particularly better at seeking out God, listening to his Spirit, and speaking to him.

While my theology has helped me pray with more power, there are some prayers that I simply can’t improve. They seem sort of lame. What’s even more surprising to me is that a lame prayer can still be quite effective.

Here’s my lame prayer. At the start of each day I say something like this: “God, I offer myself and my work to you and your purposes.”

I suppose I could say more. Heck, I’m a writer. I could get that sucker up to 500 words in 20 minutes. What I have there always seems good enough because it drives at the heart of what needs to happen.

When we offer ourselves to God and open our lives to him, that’s often all he needs to get started.

That prayer isn’t a guarantee that every day will be good. I still need to keep myself on track, focus, and make good decisions. I can still make selfish decisions or lose my temper. I also need to pray a lot more than that simple sentence.

However, by offering my day to God and letting him work through me, I’ve also moved myself away from taking all of the credit. Pride is a huge struggle for writers, and I’m sure I don’t even know the half of my issues with it. If I finish my day and want to take all of the credit for my accomplishments, I know that I didn’t offer myself to God as an act of worship.

If I feel like God has carried me throughout my day and empowered me to do my work, then I have a deeper sense of fulfillment and joy because I’ve experienced God’s presence in my life and drawn glory to him.

The difference is subtle, but you’ll know it when you see it.

God wants to work in  and through us throughout the day. Sometimes it only takes a lame prayer to change everything.

How do you carve out time with God throughout the week?

Read more about creating spiritual “white space” to meet with God at Faith Barista today: How Ordinary You Holds Extraordinary Value.

You haven’t really lived until you’ve sat around the dinner table with a bunch of Catholics in their 50’s and up who braved the ruler-brandishing nuns of Catholic parochial schools. It sounds like they survived a military campaign or a long stint in prison.

“And then the nun slammed that kid’s head smack into the chalkboard…”

I kid you not. That is a real story.

There are lesser offenses, such as the nun who paraded the aisles with a ruler and whacked every single kid on the knuckles because one person talked. Even the Catholic school I attended used the same policy of punishing everyone for the offenses of the few—this was a world where ADD and ADHD remained relatively unknown.

Of course there were some kind nuns about, but they never make it to the dinner time story selection.

After escaping something like Catholic school, it’s awfully tempting to mock what you once feared. That’s why the scene in the Blues Brothers is so hilarious and over the top. Anyone who has ever cowered before a nun loves the idea of a nun who exchanges her ruler for a sword and who can levitate when angry.

When we move away from the power of someone or something we used to fear, it feels really good to mock it. It’s like you’ve confirmed that it no longer has power over you because you can laugh at it. We swing away from one extreme of fear into another of joy and humor.

A lot of former fundamentalists such as myself have done our fair share of “swinging” as well. We swing in our beliefs over the end times, the nature of truth, judging others on appearance, the authority of the Bible, politics, ethics, and who knows what else.

I have a lot of friends who are swingers—that is, former fundamentalists who have swung away from their former beliefs into  a different notion of Christianity altogether.

One of the problems with swinging, is you alienate yourself so completely from your past, that you don’t understand how it has shaped you. I can call myself a progressive-ish evangelical all I want, but at the end of the day, I’m always going to be tempted to choose the non-fundamentalist path.

When I swing away from fundamentalism, I don’t understand how it impacts me or where its beliefs come from. Swinging leaves me vulnerable to blindsides, especially in my history of theology.

And this is nothing new for Christians. The fundamentalists did their own swinging away from liberalism, not realizing they were operating within the same confines set up by the agenda of the Enlightenment where all knowledge had to be grounded in scientifically verifiable facts—hello inerrancy.

I am pretty happy to swing away from fundamentalism into the relatively undefined world of progressive-ish evangelicalism, but I’m often reminded that swinging brings its own problems. I need to not only understand the impact of fundamentalism on my own life, I need to appreciate the ways God is working among fundamentalists today.

The truth is, if the Gospel I believe in is really true, then God has not swung away from the fundamentalists, evangelicals, progressives, or any other Christian camp. If we’re all devoted to the same God, then he is, in a sense, immovable.

God does not swing and shift with the times. Our perceptions of him will shift because we see in a mirror dimly, but God sees things as they truly are.

The amazing thing is that despite seeing us all as we truly are, God will not swing away from us. And even better yet, God is not afraid of nuns.

We have been sorting through some old pictures as we try to downsize our boxes before moving next week. I’ve flipped through albums that were literally nothing but shots of Flyers games. We had pretty good seats, but I still can’t believe I thought that each picture I took would look all that different from the twenty others I had snapped.

Other pictures document parties in high school, family vacations, and odd college outings such as our disco bowling night. A lot of these pictures feel kind of awkward to me, perhaps digging up memories of insecurity, uncertainty, and turmoil in my family.

It makes me glad that I didn’t have a digital camera that would allow me to take 80 pictures of every single event and then shared with hundreds of people at once on the internet.

I catch myself in a kind of retrospective self-loathing when I look through old pictures.

That’s when I didn’t understand how to listen to Julie.

That’s when I judged people for listening to secular music.

That’s when I was stupid enough to have a crush on a girl who was completely wrong for me.

That’s when I didn’t feel accepted.

There’s a temptation to hate myself when I look back. If I’m not careful, it can creep into the present as well.

Heck, I may as well dread how awful I’m going to be in the future while I’m at it.

This self-absorption in my self-perception is a never-ending downward spiral that will not only make us miserable, but will also alienate us from others. It’s not rooted in reality, even though I’m sure I was sort of a tool at times.

As I look back on my friends, I don’t remember any of them as terrible people. Even the ones who wronged me have been forgiven—we’ve moved on and made new, better memories. I have grace for my friends, and therefore I’m pretty sure that they have grace for me.

OK, maybe there’s still someone who has it out for me. It could happen!

By digging up my memories of the times I was terrible, I’m acting like someone who can’t forgive and forget. I have to keep digging up the terrible stuff from my past in another doomed attempt at making things right. I have to remember what kind of person I really am.

I can’t forgive myself some days. And yet, God is fully capable of forgiving me.

God takes the terrible out of us. He has conquered the power of sin and death, and that includes the guilt of our past and the dread of the future. He rewires us by lavishing his love on us—and I don’t use a potentially cheesy word like “lavish” lightly. This is the firehose of God’s love (UHF reference).

To not only know but to experience the depths of God’s love is to experience radical acceptance that will not tolerate excuses or caveats. The past is healed, and the future is hopeful.

I can still bury myself in those old photo boxes and lament that I’m a terrible person. I can move away from God’s love.

However, his mercies are new every morning. He takes terrible people again and again. For those who are willing to sit in his presence, to wait for his deliverance, and to walk throughout their days mindful of him, there is love, peace, joy, and the end of all that is terrible.

When we abide in God, we can remember that we are loved people.

I was the kid who didn’t know what he wanted to become.

Even in college it was all bit fuzzy in my mind. I’d considered full time ministry and writing something someday sounded nice too, but there wasn’t this overarching drive to fulfill a certain dream.

My dreams that I’d hoped to find in the table of contents of my life were tucked away in the footnotes, little markers in my past that eventually made the connections between events such as my first dabbling with writing in Jr. High on through the book I helped research in college for a professor.

Sometimes dreams surprise us, taking shape over time.

They’re not any less real or important because it’s taken us a while to figure them out. In fact, we may be so relieved to discover that we have a dream—something that we’d give our lives to accomplish—that we jump into it, immersing ourselves in it.

What do I care about most?

My dream of writing evolved from a side project, into a career in nonfiction writing, into a career in nonfiction and fiction writing. 

The further I go into book publishing and writing for magazines, the more I’ve had to wrestle with the balance of holding onto a dream, while still submitting it to God.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sleep deprived and my mind buzzing with everything I have to do before we move, the last thing I felt like doing yesterday evening was sitting in rush hour traffic. However, as fate would have it, I joined a long line of red tail lights winding their way through downtown.

I had so many things I needed to do, and honestly, I just wanted to go to bed. Sitting in traffic wasn’t helping me in either department.

When I get really tired, I sometimes get emotional. I use phrases like, “point of no return” and “starting to melt down” when I feel like this around my wife. She switches into emergency mode and helps me get to bed as fast as possible. Stuck on a highway with nowhere to go, I felt trapped.

I thought of turning on the radio, but then, in a moment of grace, I heard, “Why turn on the radio?”

I wanted distraction. I didn’t want to face the emotions swirling in my mind about how much work I have to do this week before we move next week. I didn’t want to think about the packing and projects before moving. I didn’t want to think about leaving our friends here in Connecticut.

I could barely hold back the emotions that wanted to throw me into chaos, even as I inched forward in an orderly line of cars. Worse than that, I didn’t believe that God could handle that moment.

I didn’t want to be quiet and still. Who knows what could happen if I let myself sit in silence, if I stopped. The thought terrified me for a moment, but then I realized that I needed that stillness and silence especially because of the chaos in my mind.

I’ve been trying to deal with my fears, frustrations, and emotions by running from them or keeping busy trying to fix them. I fear the silence, that moment when I stop and everything crashes in on me. However, that was the time that I needed to reach out to God and let him work in the silence and in my life.

It was hard work to force myself to focus on God’s goodness and his love for me. I’m sure that it will be a struggle in the coming days to continue doing so.

Yesterday I learned that God is present in our silence and in our fears. He has something to say, but we have to first stop and listen.