Are You Suffering from Spiritual Stockholm Syndrome?

Another throwback on the topic of forgetfulness, this one from April 2010, just a few months before I really started living at a break-neck speed that put me in survival mode, where I started seeing my Father as the enemy...

If you watch The Amazing Race, you see that no matter how the teams start the race, usually the longer they go at their crazy pace, the more they forget everything but winning. They forget kindness, they forget love, they forget who they are, where they came from, and what they’re about. I wonder if they were allowed to slow down for 30 minutes a day to talk to their family back home if it would help them remember—remember what’s real and what really matters. But far from home, they forget.

My sister came to visit last week, and we had a great time in the city, but I can’t imagine trying to keep that pace of life up for very long. Fun for a day or a week, but continuing at that pace makes you forget. Yet, since she left, I'm realizing I've been in this race for a while now in one way or another.  I've been forgetting.  Again. Forgetting who I am and what I'm about. And I haven’t taken even 30 minutes each day to be reminded. I stopped talking to my Father regularly. Far from home, I forgot.

I read a Ted Dekker book recently that I wasn’t into at first, but I really can’t walk away from one of his novels without thinking about the human condition—my condition. The book was The BoneMan’s Daughters, and it was essentially about a girl who is kidnapped and in order to survive she assimilates to her environment and the ways of the one who holds her captive. Her father pursues to rescue her, but she treats him as the enemy. Far from home, she forgot.

It made me think about how we are all prone to Stockholm syndrome. Far from home, we forget. We lose perspective. We develop distorted alliances and pursue misguided ends. We need to let the Father remind us who we are, where we’re from, what we’re about, and who He is. We need to slow down and remember.

…we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls. It leads us through the curtain into God’s inner sanctuary… Hebrews 6:18-19

Signs of spiritual Stockholm syndrome:
1) Do you see God as the enemy, against you, just trying to make life difficult for you?
2) Are you too busy or distracted to spend 30 minutes a day to be reminded of what real and true?
3) Has survival or success or fun or other pursuits become more important to you than living for Christ?

Now life has slowed down for me, but I am still working on realigning what I know to be true, exchanging the truth for lies. I have to be reminded of what's real, who I am, who God is, and that I'm not just living to win or survive. There's more to life.

Charlotte Bronte, Anne Rice, and Dissevering Christianity

I decided that I needed to return to a classic this week after spending last week trying to figure out the mania behind the Twilight saga (which I determined comes down to the proverbial human longing for some hip, ethereal being to find us irresistible in spite of our obvious frailty and imperfection). So, I picked up Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre today because, although I have already read it twice, after twelve years I only recall that I liked it. Turns out, I really like it.

When it was first published, critics called it anti-Christian. In the preface to the second edition Charlotte Bronte addresses those “in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong” to remind them that speaking out against Christianity is not equal to speaking out against Christ. She says,

“To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns… appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.

“The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth – to let white-washed walls vouch for clean shrines.”

Have things changed so little since 1847? In so many ways, Christianity is still wrapped up in human doctrine and appearance all blended together with the creeds of Christ, and we have such difficulty separating them. I often equate pleasing the Christian subculture with pleasing Christ. But it is not so. Yet it’s so hard to separate that subculture from the world-redeeming creed of Christ.

It all reminds me of Anne Rice’s decision recently to disassociate from Christianity because of all the hypercritical, politicized ideas that have become a part of Christian subculture. She doesn’t want all the extra stuff. She just wants to follow Christ. I get that.

Sometimes, it feels to me that the only way to really separate Christian subculture, with all its narrow human doctrine and appearance, from the world-redeeming creed of Christ is to withdraw from the Church completely so that the simplicity of the gospel doesn’t get mixed in with all the rest. Yet, I’m convinced that we need each other, and so I can’t leave, messy as it may be to be part of a family, and as much as I get sucked into their ways; as much as I’m often embarrassed by them. It’s my family.

So I guess all I can do is continue spending my days trying to dissever that which has been enmeshed with Christ’s redemptive message ever since he came, ironically, to free us from all the extra stuff. I needed Bronte to put words to it for me, but that’s what I’ve been working at for some time now. That’s what she did with her novel, Jane Eyre.  That's why this novel has so much more significance to me now than when I studied it in school.  Now I understand the author.


article on Anne Rice

Don Miller comments on Anne Rice

To help with the dissevering

Made to Rule

So, we all long for control. That is no surprise. But to consider that it is our destiny and design to rule and reign is something that I have not thought much about. Though I recognize that Christ came to rescue us from prisons of fear and insecurity that rob us of our freedom of choice, I’ve not really considered the idea that God wants us to have sovereignty. I’ve spent more time thinking of how I should defer to God’s rule—how I should surrender choice and control to God. And I should.

Yet Willard says that “The deepest longings of our heart confirm our original calling.” So, if our desire for control and sovereignty is part of our imago Dei—what makes us persons, then maybe it is not all bad. We desire to accomplish and create good things, to influence and impact.

And yet, our vision and will is distorted. In our fallenness, apart from harmony with God, our longings have gone awry. Like Chaucer’s knight, we dominate and demand from others—robbing them of their personal sovereignty. And we struggle against domination from others in order to try to maintain our own personhood.

There’s so much to who we are that we can’t appreciate because we’re perverts. We have distorted and perverted love and pleasure and power. And that is what makes redemption so beautiful. All is being restored. Christ has made it possible for us to reclaim our personhood—because he made union with God possible. Willard points out that “God equipped us for this task [of ruling] by framing our nature to function in a conscious, personal relationship of interactive responsibility with him. We are meant to exercise our ‘rule’ only in union with God, as he acts with us.” We need him to enlarge our imagination of what can be done “acting in union with God himself.” We need him to redeem our rule.

And here is where surrender makes sense, “When we submit what and where we are to God, our rule or dominion then increases.” So, in a strange paradox, the more we surrender, the more freedom and control and sovereignty we have as we and God move in cooperative faithfulness to one another.

This all gets back to my disdain for goal-setting and self-improvement plans. Last year they were bad. This year they might be good. If redeemed. And I guess that’s the key I was looking for.

This seems so simple, like one of those things everybody else already gets, but it’s still sinking in for me. I’m going to have to sit with it, move it around the room a bit until I find a good place for it. And I’m only on page 28 of this book.

Ambition Redeemed

When it comes to telling a better story, questions of control and sovereignty and ambition tend to arise for me. So, starting to read Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy has been well-timed to allow the Truth to ease in and dazzle gradually. It’s helping me understand that striving isn’t all bad.

I often wonder how selfish I’m being when it comes to pursuing my desires and ambitions. To be honest, I prefer to call it selfish so I can defer and hand off responsibility and control. Then I can blame someone else (God) when disappointment and failure come. I can be passive and live safely and call it holiness—much easier.

I’m not a very ambitious person, really. I just want to change the world. Not much. So, I’ve been on this quest to figure out if world-changers just stumble upon it as they react to life as it comes (preferred) or if they actually set out with intention and ambition (more likely, dang it). It seems I might have to risk. All of this is wrapped up with complex ideas about expectations and limitations and grace and humanity and failure and fear and potential. I’ll write a book about it one day that will change the world…

For now, it’s enough to know I’m normal. Willard says so. We’re not intended to be ordinary. “Everyone, from the smallest child to the oldest adult, naturally wants in some way to be extraordinary, outstanding, making a unique contribution…” He says the drive to significance is “a signal of who we are and why we’re here.” But it is not the same as egotism, which is what I didn’t get. He describes egotism as “acute self-consciousness and can be prevented and healed only by the experience of being adequately loved.”

But egotism is often what striving and ambition has been for me. Striving without love is ugly. Brennan Manning painted this dirty little portrait of me, “When… the impostor is running amok, and I am thinking how well I have done and how necessary I am and how secure I feel in the affirmation of others and how remarkable that I have become a player in the religion thing and how deserving I am of an exotic vacation and how proud my family is of me and how glorious the future looks—suddenly, like mist rising from the fields, I am … afraid. I know that behind all my Christian slogans and conversations… there lurks a very frightened man… I have escaped into the fantasy of invincibility.”

But that egotism (and fear) is healed by the experience of being adequately loved. So, if I let God heal me with his love, then I have the freedom to dream and strive as I was meant to—to create a better story, to be ambitious, to change the world. I will risk when I’m loved.

A Better Story

Last year at this time I refused to make New Year’s resolutions. I was pretty sure self-improvement plans and goal-setting were evil. Instead I was going to trust God with the plans.

But what I learned this year is that trusting God can be such a nice disguise for fear.

At one point this past year, when I was pushing back on goal-setting, my friend called me on it, “You don’t want to set goals because you fear failure.” In my head I was reaching for some holier motive having to do with trusting God, surrender, rest, or contentment. But he was right. I couldn’t deny it. I fear failure. I fear disappointment—disappointing myself or others. And so, I play it safe. And trust God.

I remember when I was getting ready one morning, looking in the mirror and thinking, “I am a one-dimensional character in my own story.” You remember from literature class—flat and round characters? Static and dynamic? The static, flat ones stay the same; they don’t change; they have no substance; they are usually peripheral characters. Round characters change; they have conflict and crises and adventure, and they’re worth reading about. I was craving the excitement and adventure of the round character, but living without a plot.

Then Don Miller stole my idea. He wrote this book about living a better story. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. As I read it, I was confronted again with the idea that good stories involve conflict. I was going to have to face hardship and failure to tell a better story. Never mind then.

Perhaps I wanted God to write my story because I thought he would smooth the path. Remove the obstacles. Make it easy. But I know better. I wasn’t really letting him write the story at all. I was hiding behind him.

Maybe I needed that time of healing at the beginning of last year. Time without plans. Time to learn about grace and limitations. But I lingered too long like a bird that doesn’t want to leave the nest. Time to get the story moving.

Miller writes about needing an inciting incident to force our story along. “…humans naturally seek comfort and stability. Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won’t enter into a story. They have to get fired from their job or be forced to sign up for a marathon.”

So I decided to sign up for a marathon this year.

It’s more of a symbolic gesture, really. A way to remind myself that my story isn’t over, that I can face my fears and my issues and create a beautiful story, that in spite of failure or disappointment or setbacks I can move forward and not settle for an easier story, that I will face resistance when trying to create something good but I can keep going. (Plus, I do enjoy running—I just gave it up when it got hard.)

Miller says that the great stories go to those who don’t give into fear. He describes the point at which we all want to give up on our stories and find something easier. We give up on marriages and dreams and goals because we are disappointed or tired or it’s taking too long to get where we want to go. Life is harder than we thought.

I agree with Miller’s reflection, “Part of me wonders if our stories aren’t being stolen by the easy life.” We live in a culture that says life should be easy and everything should work out for you and your God should help make your life trouble-free. And everything gets small and meaningless and easy. And one-dimensional.

Trusting God ≠ ease. Trusting God = rest. But rest and ease are not the same. There’s a difficult path to God’s rest. He’s going to let things get hard. He’s still good. He’s entrusted me with a story. A redemptive story. (Aren’t those the best?) A story full of conflict and difficulty and beauty and joy.

I need to sit with him. Let him enlarge my imagination. Make the big plans. Attempt the impossible. Risk falling on my face—expect it. Receive his grace. Fail. Learn. Grow. Give him my fear. Let him give the vision. Rest. And move. Live a better story—that’s the plan this year.

Self-Hatred and Sameness

Most of us wouldn’t say we hate ourselves. But, if we’re being honest, we might agree that there are things about ourselves that we hate. There are things about me that I hate. Not just frizzy hair kinds-of-things, but character defects that are deep-seated. But I haven’t really seen my self-hatred as a problem. I figured, there are a lot of things about me that are worthy of hatred—I don’t really hate me, I hate those things about me. But it’s ok because everyone else hates them too—even God. So I can keep on hating them.

But today, as I was reading Brennan Manning’s book Abba’s Child, the thought occurred to me that if I hate something in me, I will hate it in you. And if I truly want to be a person of grace and mercy and hospitality, there is no room for self-hatred. If I hate me, I hate you. If I judge myself, I judge you. If I condemn myself, I condemn you. If I expect perfection in me, I expect it in you. We are the same.

It made me think about how I have always been uncomfortable when people judge and condemn my ex-husband for his affair. Get angry at the tragedy of it, the injury, the injustice – yes – but condemn him, and I’m not with you. An old friend of ours recently messaged me on facebook about it, perhaps trying to commiserate, but it came across more as accusing and censuring my ex. His attitude bothered me. I didn’t know why at first, but now I realize it is because I know we are the same. My ex-husband was the scapegoat, his fault more visible, but we are the same. I am no better. There is something wrong with all of us deep down. We’re the same. When they condemn him, they condemn me. I am a liar. I am a cheater. I am passive. I am weak-willed. I am an idolater. I am unfaithful. Like him. Like you.

When we don’t accept these things in ourselves, we deny them, enabling us to see ourselves as different, as better—allowing us to judge and condemn others and claim superiority. And it all comes back to self-hatred. If we can accept ourselves fully as God in fact does, our whole self including all the things that are unlovely and worthy of hate, then we can accept others because we see that they are like us. If we can extend ourselves grace and mercy, then we can extend it to others.

So really, my show of condemnation toward others is a show of self-hatred. And all my self-hatred is a condemnation of others. It is the same because we are the same. Henri Nouwen says, “It is not proving ourselves to be better than others but confessing to be just like others that is the way to healing and reconciliation.” Until we recognize our sameness, we will not be people of grace. And ultimately, grace is what transforms us.

book review: the prodigal god

Sometimes, I need to get the gospel flowing through me again. Tim Keller describes a person who is so struck with a fresh apprehension of the gospel that they feel as if they have been “re-converted.” This was my experience when I read Searching for God Knows What by Don Miller two years ago. And a couple of weeks ago, as I read Keller’s The Prodigal God, the same beautiful message accosted me. Like an addict, I so easily return to my elder-son tendencies (Luke 15:11-32)—I am drawn toward religion— to do everything right, but without living in relationship with the Father, without receiving the love and grace He freely offers. Or I live with the condemnation and shame of my younger-son rebellion. I need the gospel.

“…even after you are converted by the gospel your heart will go back to operating on other principles unless you deliberately, repeatedly set it to gospel-mode.”

As Keller fleshed out the lostness of both the younger son and the elder son in the parable, and revealed the recklessly extravagant love of the father, it shook me with life-changing truth, but more than that, with heart-changing grace of the gospel message. He shows how both of the sons are wrong, and both are loved and invited into relationship.

The picture of the father running to meet his younger son—not waiting for his speech of contrition, or for him to pay the due consequences, not expecting him to earn his way back into the family, but restoring him, and lavishing him with love, grace, and acceptance freely—is one that always astounds me.

“It’s not the repentance that causes the father’s love, but rather the reverse. The father’s lavish affection makes the son’s expression of remorse far easier.”

But Keller doesn’t stop with the younger son. He goes on to look at the plight of the elder son and the costliness of the father’s lavishness. Like the elder son, I am often motivated by fear-based moralism rather than out of assurance of the Father’s love. I fall for an easier pseudo-gospel message which, upon closer scrutiny, reveals that much of what we do for God we are really doing for ourselves—because it is to our own advantage (The Principle of the Path… hmm?). But when we understand our need and the price Christ has paid to pursue and rescue us, our self-righteous incentive is transformed into grateful love.

“How can the inner workings of the heart be changed from a dynamic of fear and anger to that of love, joy, and gratitude? Here is how. You need to be moved by the sight of what it cost to bring you home.”

Keller packs a very short book (only 134 pages) full of gospel truth and grace. The gospel is a sweet fragrance that can permeate the rotten stench of religion and rebellion. We all need to be infused with the true gospel of grace so that it overflows from our lives onto others. The Prodigal God can get you reset to gospel-mode. I hope you read it.

book review: saint

Another Ted Dekker thriller, I listened to Saint on CD during a long road trip with my sister and her kids. Again, the spiritual truths in this one knocked me over, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. At first it seems like your run of the mill Bourne-esque assassin-who-can’t-remember-who-he-is story (one of my favorite movies, by the way). But of course, it is so much more, as I knew it would be because it’s Dekker.

What I didn’t know is that our assassin is a character from a previous book that I read (both part of a series, but they can be read alone) called Showdown. But what made this so remarkable is that in Showdown, he is a character who is chosen by God, given gifts and powers, and is full of potential and zeal. Yet, in Saint, that character is unrecognizable—instead we see a skilled assassin, who, in fact, has no recollection of his true identity. You see where it’s going, right?

In the story, the organization that trains assassins believes that the key is in taking away their identity completely, causing them to forget their origins, making them believe they are someone else, and motivating them through lies. They train in a pit where they are fed lies until they believe and their memory is erased. They are sent on missions that train them not to trust any reality except the one they learned in the pit. There are parallels to our human state at every turn.

As the truth of his origins is revealed, he can’t accept it. He feels so lost and confused. He doesn’t know who to listen to or who to trust, and he only wants to return to the pit where he is comfortable instead of his true home, Paradise. I don’t want to give too much away, but what really struck me in this story was that I knew who he was—who he was meant to be, his true identity, his power, his genius, his potential—and I wanted so badly for him to know too.

I’ve been thinking about our true identities since then. I think of it as our imago Dei—the way we were meant to be and live and function. We’re deceived and trained and lied to. We don’t know who we are. And hearing the truth seems so strange. We want to hide in our comfortable pit with all our lies. But who we are, who we could be is beyond what we can fathom. What if we could see reality? Would we throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and run with perseverance the race marked out for us? (Hebrews 12) What if we could see the potential in others? Would we desperately want them to discover their true identity and be set free from the lies? What if we can see spiritual reality... if only we ask?


Had to add this link to Don Miller's blog. It's a poem for a newborn baby. It's fitting here because it's about our spiritual amnesia, and it's beautiful.

book review (sort of): the principle of the path

I don’t really think it’s fair to review a book that I didn’t finish, so I am only claiming to give my first impressions here. Before I had to return it, I read the first five or so chapters of Andy Stanley’s The Principle of the Path because it was recommended, but as I was reading so many red flags went up for me. It’s a teaching I’ve been running away from for several years after mistaking it as the central message of Christianity for too long. The main idea here is that your choices now affect the path of your life in the future. True. I agree with his basic premise, but I have a problem with it as the way of life—especially the Christian way of life.

Instead of embracing brokenness and depending on Christ for transformation, the message could be interpreted as make right decisions and you’ll get what you want in life. He goes as far as to say that if you have cancer, it is because of the bad choices you have made. There is some truth to this, but it seems to me to set us in a place of pride if life is going well for us—as if it’s all our doing—and a place of judgment toward those who are suffering. It could also bring self-condemnation for our own failures.

I agree that you reap what you sow—it’s a truth that shouldn’t be ignored. I really appreciated how he showed the correlation between our desires and our decisions. We often want one thing but don’t make decisions that will get us there, and then we’re shocked when things end badly. For example, wanting a spouse who loves God, yet dating any person who shows interest. Or wanting kids who follow Christ, but never teaching them the Word or modeling it for them. Wanting to be financially stable, but making decisions that take you deeper into debt. Then we blame God.

I have to go back to the problem of balance again. What Stanley wrote in this book is what I’ve been swinging away from because it led me to judgment and away from mercy. Maybe some need to swing toward it if it’s a principle they’ve not embraced—if they’ve been thinking of God as a sort of an escape hatch so we can do whatever we want and He’ll work things out for us. And if He doesn’t, it’s all His fault. That’s a problem.

Yet, if it’s all up to our good choices, we’re screwed. We’re lost. We’re like sheep. Sheep are stupid. We screw up. We make a mess of our lives and others’ lives. Thank God that He rescues. It’s not all up to us.

As silly as it sounds, I was really struck by this when I watched Confessions of a Shopaholic this weekend. It shows what a mess we can get into—ruining relationships, finances, career. Addictions are like this. Sin is like this. And sin is so deceptive, so enticing. We need a Savior. Is God the kind of Father that bails us out every time or the kind that tells us we made our own bed and have to lie in it? I think neither. Maybe he is like the father in this movie (not in every respect)—when she realizes the pit she’s in, he stands beside her in love, he sacrifices for her, he shows mercy and helps her face the consequences and make the hard decisions that get her out. Reminds me of our need for Christ in order to find freedom—he empowers, he transforms, we cooperate. Maybe the church should be more like her support group—they walk with her as she painfully trudges her way out of her mess. But often, we shoot the wounded.

We need to recognize our capacity to be both victim and villain. Only then can we both accept consequences and mercy. We can take responsibility for our choices and receive grace. In turn, we can extend the same to others. But this is another of those things that is so tricky to balance!

I am wary of teaching that points to our ability to choose well rather than pointing to the cross. To me, it smacks of humanistic moralism and is void of the Gospel. I fear this unbalanced teaching has flooded the church, leaving us dependent on ourselves for our own salvation and with excuses not to love others and show the kind of mercy Christ gives. Perhaps in later chapters, Stanley did indeed point to our need for Christ so I don’t want to disparage his teaching entirely. Yet, in the chapters I read, he several times knocked the concepts of repentance and forgiveness as bailouts. As bailouts, they should be condemned, but as part of our response in relationship with Christ, they should be upheld as part of the principle of the path—as they key to returning to the path. Can we return to the path any other way?

I think we need to take another look at our motivation for making good choices—is it promised success and good consequences alone? This should not be mistaken for Christianity. Paul David Tripp wrote, "There really is no place for Christ in many people’s Christianity. Their faith is not actually in Christ; it is in Christianity and their ability to live it out." If we’re not careful, leaning hard on the principle of the path could look like that. We need the balance that only Christ gives.

book review: house

I love reading stories that make me stop and think—or in this case, stop and pray. As I read House, it was almost as if God was speaking to my questions and sending me the reminders of truth that I need right now. I always put Ted Dekker’s books on my reading list when I have time to read fiction. His thrillers are always more than they seem. His stories have a spiritual dimension that always keeps me looking for the truths about God and the human condition behind the obvious storyline. And Frank Peretti is known for stories that reveal the hidden realms of good and evil. This book combines all of that.

This is the kind of book that I want to read with someone so I can sit and talk with them about all the hidden meanings and unexpected twists. At first it seems like a horror novel about two couples stranded in a haunted house in the backwoods of Alabama, but it is so much more.

Before even knowing where the story was going, I’ve been thinking (and blogging) about the book’s major themes—that because of the condition of our fallen world everything is distorted, warped, not what it seems, that we are so easily deceived and depraved and in need of Christ in order to see reality. It reminded me of how we need Christ in evangelism to open eyes and reveal spiritual truth. It reminded me of the need to pray toward that end (for myself and others). It reminded me of the spiritual battle that is raging and the authority we have in Christ. It reminded me of what we can legitimately claim spiritually and where to place my faith. It reminded me of how impossible it is to love and respond to truth without the work of the Spirit.

Much like the prophet Nathan did for David, Dekker and Peretti revealed my own need. But beside all that, it’s a pretty good story too. I also recommend Dekker’s Circle Trilogy for summer reading. It reads like a modern allegory of the human condition and the story of redemption. It has contributed to my understanding and articulation of the Gospel in many ways. Check out his website at http://www.teddekker.com/.


(P.S. The movies aren't as good as the books. Not even close.)

Disconnected

This morning on my way to the hospital to sit with my dad I was thinking about how disconnected I am from myself and from God, and therefore from others. I can go weeks disconnected—unable to remember the core of who God made me to be. In fact, I have gone years before. In the midst of spending time with family, interacting with friends, ministry, church, school work, and even prayer and worship, I can remain disconnected. I invite distraction and never quiet my soul because I don’t want to face any sorrow there. Yet, I seem to be most connected when I allow myself to grieve and be disappointed with life. Ironically, that is when I feel most alive. I was wondering if there’s something messed up about that—I’m most alive when I’m grieving? But then I started reading the book by Michael Card today called A Sacred Sorrow: Reaching out to God in the Lost Language of Lament, and it made sense. In the foreword, Ken Cope addresses what I’ve been thinking about.

“We are taught that grieving is feeling sorry for yourself, and that real strength is to not show any emotion at all. Because we do not know how to be sad, we want to get to the end-stage of grief; we want the benefits and the results of healing, but we do not want to take the time to move through the often long and painful process of grief. For too long we have been taught that shedding tears is a sign of weakness and that you must not wallow in your sorrow. And the mandate of Psalm 46:10, “be still, and know that I am God,” is lost.

“As a result of this approach to grief, we have a whole generation of people with unresolved issues, hurts, and pains in their past that have been shallowly dealt with at best, and at worst have been ignored and discounted completely. The result has been an increasingly shallow Christianity and a profound lack of understanding of the nature of God and how, as His people, we are to move and live in a fallen world. We do not know ourselves. And while we know a lot about God, we do not truly know Him. We have been unwilling to sit in our sadness and pain, and we have missed much of the intimacy that He longs to offer us.

“… We live in a fallen world, full of disappointment and loss, and we often feel empty and unfulfilled and incredibly alone. But while God is not there to fix our problems and make our pain go away, He is always walking beside us. In the ongoing journey of life, we are given the opportunity to know Him and ourselves through the process of lamenting and grieving. … If we really want to encounter God and grow in our relationship with Him, then our attitude toward grief must change from viewing it as an uncomfortable and unwanted drop-in visitor to seeing it as an integral part of our daily journey with God.”


I remember writing about The Journey of Desire, the book that introduced me to the daily spiritual discipline of grieving. Because we are far from home, we grieve this world, this life. It is not how it was meant to be, and it never will be, though we can get glimpses of home. I’ve been walking through life wondering when everything will finally be the way I want it to be—when I get to enjoy life and take it easy—so I live dissatisfied. But I remember being most satisfied when I was grieving. I need to continue to grieve my disappointment with life, even my disappointment with myself, to recognize that in my grief I am most connected to God, most connected to my true self, most alive, and most satisfied.

Thoughts on The Shack

I’ve said before that I don’t like hype. But when it comes to a book with a lot of buzz, I usually can’t help myself. I gotta know why. So, I just read The Shack. And now I know why. More than anything, this book is a book about God. Most of the dialogue is an explanation of the ways of God straight out of the mouth of the characters that represent God. That’s gonna make people uncomfortable—especially when God is represented by a large African-American woman and a small Asian woman. There is no mistaking that William P. Young, the author, wanted readers to reconsider their notions of God and the Church and the Human Soul.

I waited to read the criticism of the book until after I read it so that I could form my own opinions. As I read, I suspected what others might have problems with. But I guess what bothers me about the criticism is the same thing that bothered me about criticism of Harry Potter and criticism of The DaVinci Code, and that is the admonition to stay away lest you be infected. Mark Driscoll said, “If you haven’t read The Shack, don’t!” They treat it as evil and dangerous, and warn that if you go near it, you will be harmed because you are too stupid to think for yourself, so we must tell you what to think. Why don’t we teach Christians to think for themselves, to engage literature and art, to affirm what is good and dismiss what is not? Let’s learn to discern rightly and to trust the Spirit of truth that dwells within, instead of reacting with fear and arrogance.

Personally, I appreciated the ways that this book challenged my thinking. I didn’t agree with everything, but it made me think, to consider whether some of my preconceived notions of God are based on Scriptural truth or based on man-made paradigms. And it did contribute to my understanding of a personal but transcendent God. One review I read lumped the book in with emerging church theology, which challenges modern paradigms. It asks why do we think this, why do we do this, and is this an accurate understanding of Scripture. I like that. But, recognizing that Satan’s first deception was to ask, “Did God really say that…?” I think we have to be careful then to recognize where our ultimate determination of truth is coming from. Moderns put confidence in the rational mind; post-moderns put confidence in subjective experience. Which is right? Here, Young is challenging the rational paradigm that many are stuck in. But I think we all have to submit our understanding of truth to God, trust that the Spirit and the Word work in harmony to reveal truth, recognize that that work can occur through both experience and rational thought, and remember that we are jars of clay. At the end of the book, Young writes in the voice of the narrator, “Do I think that it’s true? I want all of it to be true… I guess you and Sarayu [the Holy Spirit] will have to figure that one out.” So, I guess with that in mind, I would like to see criticisms of the book from a more humble stance, acknowledging what stories and art do, they make us think and ask questions. Should we fear that?

But honestly, I found very little in the way of theology that I had a problem with. Young shows us one man’s journey of healing with God as they tackle the barriers keeping him from relationship with God: his erroneous views of God, his unforgiveness, his setting himself up as judge of God and others, his ideas about God’s role in pain and suffering, his self-condemnation, his position in Christ, his sense of entitlement, his view of rules and expectations. It seemed to me to be an allegory of the way that God works in our hearts to bring about transformation. In fact, as I read, some of the passages seemed to be straight out of my journals as God has been teaching me on my own journey of healing and transformation.

From what I understand, Young himself experienced a similar journey, and I imagine much of the dialogue comes out of his own experiences with God once he decided to face what was in the shack. His own shack was his metaphorical place where he stuffed all his pain, shame, and guilt after suffering sexual abuse by the New Guinea tribe his parents were missionaries to, after grieving the loss of loved ones who died too young, and after cheating on his wife. I imagine that the legalistic, wrathful god of his understanding was not the God who met him there. He must’ve encountered a God of love and healing. That is how he portrays God in The Shack.

But a cursory reading or skimming of the book would certainly upset your theology. As I was reading, red flags went up on several occasions as I glimpsed hints of universalism, but as I read on, I saw that the Scriptural truth I believe was just being presented in a new way. He seemed to be trying to undo the legalistic, religious, condemning, wrath-bent perception of God that pervades today. Instead, he shows a God who loves beyond measure and pursues people as far as necessary to bring them into relationship. Absent is an exhaustive explanation of hell or judgment. Yet there’s enough of the gospel to keep it out of Oprah’s book club. I think this book touches those who haven’t been able to tap God’s love and grace, or haven’t been able to understand God’s desire for a personal relationship because of their focus on rules, systems, self-righteousness, institutions, guilt, or judgment. I was there. I get it. I’ve been to the shack. And for that reason, I loved this book. … oh, and because it was set in Oregon, land that I love.

Significance or Safety?

"Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?" I hadn’t considered before that John the Baptist asks this question from prison after he has already professed that Christ is indeed the awaited Lamb of God. Yet, he asked the question. Like John, I ask this question. “Hey, are you gonna come through for me? I thought you were the Son of God. Should I find somebody else?” Jesus didn't come through. Later, when John was beheaded, Jesus was around. I guess no one told him how the game works.

I was just reading about this in Erwin McManus’s book The Barbarian Way. He writes, “The civilized view of Jesus is that he always comes through for us. Like Superman, he always shows up just in time to protect us and save us from disaster. His purpose is to ensure our safety, our convenience, and our comfort.” I guess somewhere along the way, I became civilized. If I’m faithful to him, he’ll come through for me, right? As I read this account in Luke 7, I realized I’m a lot like the people Jesus described,

“They are like children playing a game in the public square. They complain to their friends,
‘We played wedding songs,
and you didn’t dance,
so we played funeral songs,
and you didn’t weep.’”

Jesus wasn’t playing their games. He won’t play mine. He doesn’t respond the way I think he should. I’m coming to terms with my own tendencies to exploit and manipulate God and others to get what I want or think I need. I start with pleasing. If that doesn’t work, I rely on pity. I’ll resort to complaining and even tantrums if I have to. “Hey, are you gonna come through for me? Should I find somebody else?” But God has another purpose that is beyond me and my plans. It’s not about me.

McManus says, “Even then Jesus understood his purpose was to save us not from pain and suffering, but from meaninglessness. For Jesus, John was exactly where he needed to be, fulfilling God’s purpose for his life. Why would he save John from that? … God’s will for us is less about our comfort than it is about our contribution. God would never choose for us safety at the cost of significance.” God invites us to enter his grand epic. But he didn’t say it wouldn’t cost us. So why am I insolent when it does?

My pastor, Eric, said on Sunday that he’d give up everything else— friends, possessions, status— as long as he had Christ. Bold. I mean, what if God heard? I guess that’s what is meant by surrender. “He wants us to surrender our lives to Him and follow Him into the unknown. And if it means a life of suffering, hardship, and disappointment, it will be worth it because following Jesus Christ is more powerful and more fulfilling than living with everything in the world minus Him.”

Do I believe it? If I do, if I want to enter the story, I think it means I have to stop writing my own subplot with a script full of insolence and ease. Gotta surrender my pen.

Book Review: The Journey of Desire

"We are never living, but hoping to live; and whilst we are always preparing to be happy, it is certain, we never shall be so, if we aspire to no other happiness than what can be enjoyed in this life." Blaise Pascal

Even before I started reading The Journey of Desire, I had earnestly begun my own journey of desire. For the first time, perhaps, I was admitting my desires to God and asking what to do with them. I even wrote a poem about it back in February and a blog about it in March. I included the first half of the poem in that blog post, but here is the poem in its entirety:

Desire

In the Garden
To women came a curse
But pain is not the worst
Desire is your curse
For it is now directed
Toward the image
Of the man
That God has made
And not the God
Who beckons
From a home
We’ve never known

Desire
You are the flame
That can start a fire
Spreading quickly
Leaving scars
And open wounds
But when you die
You leave us cold
And looking for a new
Desire
You’re misdirected and confused
What do I do with you?

In the book The Journey of Desire, John Eldredge speaks to those who, like me, don’t know what to do with their desire. They have, perhaps, found themselves looking to idols to satisfy or have lost touch with desire altogether. He points out that our disillusionment after repeated heartbreak often results in denying our desires and setting up walls around them because we don’t want to be disappointed and hurt again. Sometimes we’re not even sure if it is OK to have desire—we think maybe we should kill it completely in order to live a holy life. We weigh whether we ought to be feeling this or that—whether it is OK to feel the way we do. So we bury our feelings because we don’t know what to do with them. But they’re still there, often feeding on idolatry. And frequently the message we hear in the Church is that we should fight against desire because it leads to sin. But living the Christian life isn’t about denying or burying the longings of our heart. The Christian life should be defined by passionate obsession.

“When we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.” C.S. Lewis

Eldredge places each of us in one of three categories. We are either:
1) longing—hungry and thirsty, alive
2) dead—having denied our desires or given up after so many disappointments
3) addicted—seeking temporary pleasures to fulfill our desires

My journey had taken me through categories 2 and 3. In the book, he describes the danger and subtlety in each of these—killing desire or giving ourselves over to false desire. He beautifully scatters quotes, Scripture, and poetry throughout the book to show this timeless and universal dilemma of desire, and how it is a result of the fact that this world is not our home—things aren’t as they were meant to be. We cannot find fulfillment in the things the world offers because we were made for something more. “What we have sought, what we have tasted in part with our earthly lovers, we will come face to face with in our True Love. For the incompleteness that we seek to relieve in the deep embrace of our earthly love is never fully healed.” But we all desire. Pretending we don’t desire results in “loss of soul, of communion with God, a loss of direction, and a loss of hope.”

Category 1 is where we need to be. Eldredge says we should embrace our desire—ask what is it that I want? “Don’t minimize it; don’t try to make sure it sounds spiritual; don’t worry about whether or not you can obtain it. Just stay with the question until you begin to get an answer. This is the way we keep current with our hearts.” I must admit, I did not know my heart—I’d been living out a script, acting on other’s expectations, disconnected with my own desires. The vulnerability of acknowledging my desires openly was a new reality for me. Trusting God with them, even more novel. “To live with desire is to choose vulnerability over self-protection; to admit our desire and seek help beyond ourselves is even more vulnerable. It is an act of trust.”

Based on different ideas from the book, I’ve begun a daily (and sometimes hourly) practice:
1) I acknowledge my desires to God as they arise,
2) I recognize they cannot ultimately be fulfilled in this life,
3) I remember that only God can provide true satisfaction and contentment,
4) I surrender the desire to God and ask Him to redirect it,
5) I stop striving and arranging,
6) I grieve,
7) I wait—for Home. And my hope grows in the waiting.


The results for me have been a new intimacy with God as I open up the hidden places of my heart to him and trust Him to satisfy me. The grieving restores my soul and brings healing. Also, I have experienced a shift in my desires and an increased hope for the coming wedding banquet with Christ that will bring ultimate fulfillment of the desire He has placed within me. I have less need to control and strive, knowing that the only One who can meet my needs is taking care of it. Lastly, I have a better sense of my own heart, without the baggage of oughts and expectations—I am free to feel for the first time in my life.

I’m reminded of the song “Lovesick” by Misty Edwards that I’ve been listening to over and over while reading this book, “And happy am I, to live a hungry life / And blessed am I, to thirst / Disillusionment, it is my gift within / I am blessed, I am blessed among men! … Try as I may to chase another Lover, / I find there is, there is no other / All the other Lovers fade away / Only YOU can satisfy.” Disillusionment with idols and all the things that don’t satisfy brings us to this place where we finally see “Only YOU can satisfy” and we long for what is real—what really satisfies. Disillusionment is my gift!

Book Review: Searching for God Knows What

I wrote this at the end of last summer. I wasn’t blogging at the time, but God was speaking so much to me through this book that I wanted to write it all down. I’ve enjoyed looking back on what God started then and how he is continuing to move me into an intimate relationship with him that I honestly didn’t even think was possible…

I just finished Searching for God Knows What and just started Shattered Dreams. Both books clearly make sense of what is going on in my life right now—God pursuing a love affair with me. Again, these books have revolutionized my thinking about myself, about God, and about hope. They help make sense of life in general, and I want to send copies to everyone. Doesn’t everyone struggle to make sense of life?

I’ve been referencing Searching for God Knows What in discussions about life all summer. I owned it for a while before I ever opened it. I bought it because I heard it was even better than Blue Like Jazz (also by Don Miller) and because I love books. I own more books than I can read—it’s like putting too much on your plate at an all-you-can-eat buffet. It sat on my shelf for a while. I picked it up after finishing the last book in the Harry Potter saga. I felt really empty after reading the 7th Potter book, knowing my journey with Harry and his friends was over. Since I was pretty recently divorced, in a new city, not working, and utterly alone, I was escaping all this by reading—diving into the lives of the characters, and when they were gone I was even more aware of my dissatisfaction and hopelessness. I laughed at myself for being depressed over missing fictional characters, but then I realized that it was more than their loss that was affecting me. At the time I didn’t have a TV or computer to turn to. So I saw Searching for God Knows What on my shelf and started searching.

In the book, Miller draws on wisdom from an alien, a lifeboat theory, and Romeo and Juliet to explain God and life and how we got it all wrong. I was thinking it’s kind of like apologetics for the post-modern thinker, and then, he said as much in the afterword. So, he writes about this human need to feel important and valuable—that the deepest needs of man are relational. But we’ve been living out our spirituality like it’s a formula, jumping through hoops for God instead of entering a relationship, a romance even.

He writes about how God fulfilled completely the deepest needs of man before the fall—so there was no insecurity, jealousy, shame, fear of intimacy, broken-heartedness, and all the other ailments of humanity. I can’t imagine a world without those things. In fact, I heard recently that the most serious threat to intimate relationships is low self-esteem or insecurity, which makes people defensive, cautious, needy, emotionally-protective and leads to real rejection. That’s why there are so many broken relationships—because after our relationship with God was severed in the Garden of Eden, we no longer had our deepest needs met by our Creator, and we began searching for someone or something else to meet those needs, and that can’t be done.

So, in the book he shows me that I was reading my Bible as a text book or self-help guide to find the formulas to live by, but not as a story. I love stories. I find meaning in stories—that’s why I love to teach literature. I even feel like I have a relationship with Harry Potter because I’ve entered so deeply into his story for so many years now. I find beautiful truths about loyalty, the duality of man, forgiveness, and sacrifice in his story. I love Harry. What if I found the beauty in God’s story? What if I entered so deeply into His story that I fell in love with Him? Only, He’s real, and He loves me and wants a love relationship. When I realized I didn’t have that real love relationship with God, I felt even emptier because I’ve been a Christian since I can remember, and if I didn’t have that by now, maybe I never would. I didn’t feel satisfied by God. I felt stronger toward Harry Potter than I did toward Jesus. I didn’t feel significant, important, fulfilled, or secure even though I was a Christian, and God was supposed to fill those needs, right? I felt a big gaping hole in my life. The formula wasn’t working for me.

He writes about what an alien might think of humans if he came to visit. The alien might think it strange how much we compare ourselves to others. He might recognize our obsession with having the right clothes, listening to the right music, driving a certain kind of car—all in order to be higher on some invisible hierarchy. We’re looking for other people to tell us we’re smart, or beautiful, or successful, or funny, or good. We’re looking to a jury of our peers. He says, “It is as though the voice God used to have has been taken up by less credible voices.” Other people’s opinions have become very important since the fall. The problem is we’re all looking for validation from other humans, which inhibits our ability to give validation to others.

That’s where the lifeboat theory comes in. He poses a question that his teacher asked during a values-clarification lesson, “If there were a lifeboat adrift at sea, and in the lifeboat were a male lawyer, a female doctor, a crippled child, a stay-at-home mom, and a garbage man, and one person had to be thrown overboard to save the others, which person would you choose?” After reading this part of the book earlier, I asked the students in my classes this very same question, and just as predicted, they did not hesitate in deciding who was most and least valuable. There were debates on each person’s merit and what they had to offer. No one brought up the idea that all people are equal—just like in his class. He says we live our lives as if we’re in this lifeboat, like we have to fight to prove our own value so we don’t get thrown overboard by everyone else. We look for allies—others to defend our importance. We constantly compare ourselves and get very upset when we’re disrespected or when someone says they’re better than us, as if it is a threat to our existence, like there’s some sort of penalty. Isn’t that the context of many of our reality shows? They mirror life.

It reminded me of Walk the Line, the story about Johnny Cash. I’ve never read his biography, but it seemed to me from the movie that he wanted so badly to prove his worth and value ever since his dad had said that the wrong son died after Johnny’s brother’s death. So he found his identity as a musician and looked for his significance in that, but after he became famous and so many people “valued” him, it still wasn’t enough. His father still didn’t treat him like he was worth anything. I guess the feelings of worthlessness draw people to do all sorts of things—addictions, affairs, climbing the ladder of success, jumping off, or throwing others off the lifeboat. But ultimately, all of it still leaves us unfulfilled.

Miller writes, “God wired us so that He told us who we were, and outside that relationship, the relationship that said we were loved and valuable and beautiful, we didn’t have any worth at all.” We need this love from God so that we can love others. How can we love other people purely without selfish motives, stop hating ourselves, and quit comparing ourselves to others unless we are already fulfilled? How can we see them as equals until we know the value God places on them and us? How can we be authentic and sincere unless we recognize we aren’t in a lifeboat? We need someone who loves us so much that we don’t have to worry about being disrespected, how to dress, getting older, feeling lonely, and all those other things that could get us thrown overboard by others. We need to be told who we are by the One who knows, our Creator.

He explains how God did the most selfless thing a perfect and loving Being could do by coming to get us, trying to save us, so that we can know and enjoy Him, as Adam and Eve did. He offers redemption though a relationship with himself. This may be more appealing to those who are marginalized—those whose place on the lifeboat is most threatened. That’s who Christ spent his time with, but He said the rich will have trouble coming to Him.

Miller spends some time in the book revealing how Christians don’t always represent Christ accurately. We tend to want to kick out of the lifeboat those who don’t share our political leanings or our morality instead of showing them their value, as Christ did. Instead of imitating Christ, we’ve tended to just want to defend the church and justify ourselves to the culture. My perspective on this particular topic was changed through two other books: one by Rick McKinley appropriately called Jesus in the Margins and the other also by Donald Miller called Blue Like Jazz. They reveal the Christ of the Bible, and disassociate him from our modern-day, political, right-wing, yuppie, patriotic Jesus who wants us to display anti-gay bumper stickers for His name’s sake. I, for one, am glad to leave that Jesus behind.

I have often questioned and struggled with what our motivations should be for following moral law. There are the obvious reasons that even those who don’t know Christ have for following moral law. I have posed this question to my students many times, usually with unsatisfying results. To earn God’s favor? To get to heaven? To avoid bad consequences? To feel superior to others? I believe Miller gives the answer I’ve not been able to articulate. He states, “…moral law is not our path to heaven; our duty involves knowing and being known by Christ. Positive morality, then, the stuff of natural law, is but an offering, a sweet-tasting fruit in the mouth of God. It is obedience and imitation of our pure and holy Maker; and immorality—the act of ignoring the conscience and the precepts of goodness—is a dagger in God’s heart.”

Morality flows naturally out of a relationship with Christ. I think for me morality has often been about meeting a person or group’s expectations, or it’s been about exercising my freedom or “right” to do something. But now it’s about bringing a pure offering to the Lover of my soul, and not hurting Him. I want to know Him and know the sweetness of His love. Just like the image in Ephesians 5, a woman who submits to her husband, not out of obligation but out of love because she knows that he loves her even as he loves his own life, and he will only do the best for her.
This marriage imagery is used throughout the Bible to compare Christ as the bridegroom waiting for his union with the bride, His church. It is so beautiful in spite of, or because of, the flawed state of human marriage. The purity and perfection of a union with Christ, His faithfulness, His love, inspires me to honor Him, to be pure. We miss out on this by breaking the Gospel down to bullet points, acronyms, and formulas.

Miller claims Shakespeare revealed this image of a selfless, spiritual marriage with Christ as the bridegroom in the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet. The baptism imagery is stated explicitly, yet I never picked up on it. Juliet tells Romeo to deny his name and be baptized new. The idea of giving up who you are to be united with another—with Christ—is the kind of passionate love affair I seek, yet I don’t know if I’ll ever get there because of my family name, my broken humanity. At least, I’m not there yet. It’s a tragic love story. But it is unfinished.

By the time I read the end of Miller’s book, my heart was ready for it. I’d been asking God to satisfy me, to make my desire be for Him if it was possible. I told Him I felt lost, without purpose, and empty. He’d been doing the work in me without my awareness. I started to notice that I cared about people more; much of my fear and insecurity was gone; I wanted to worship; I was no longer worried about finding someone to love me; I was more aware of my motivations; and my critical spirit was melting away. It all happened so imperceptibly, I didn’t see the transformation happening. It’s still happening. A deep, satisfying relationship with God is possible, and I’m going to have a taste of it now, and will experience it’s fullness in eternity, where my hope now lies.