Avoid Rain: Be Good?

It has taken me 33 years to learn that pain in life is a given. And even still, I have to constantly relearn it as I find myself trying to escape from anything painful or disappointing. I blame Disney, really. I think Disney movies set us up for disappointment (with the exception of The Journey of Natty Gann and The Fox and the Hound which are unnecessarily painful). We’re left to believe that if Walt Disney were in charge of the world, it would be a much happier place. But we’ve got this God guy in charge who seems to value pain as much as pleasure (if not more).

Still, I got the idea from the God-followers that I could actually avoid pain by following a simple formula: if you keep from being human, you can keep from being hurt. In other words, rain only falls on the broken so don’t be broken. Keep it all together and pain won’t knock at your door. Or, you reap what you sow, so be a good girl.

Maybe there’s some truth there (like 2%), but it sets us up with a Disney-esque purpose in life: be good, avoid pain, live happily ever after. And it contradicts the words of Christ, “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous,” and, of course, Bono’s paraphrase, “Blessings are not just for the ones who kneel, luckily.”

The consequence of this formula, I think, is that at some point in life (I am a slow learner) we realize that very often life sucks whether we’re good or bad, and we feel we’ve been hoodwinked by the God-followers who promised that everything would work out fine. We think God didn’t hold up his part of the bargain—he must not be good like Walt Disney.

I admit, I’m disappointed with God. I didn’t get the life I wanted. And I was good. The formula failed me. So, now I keep trying to reprogram from Walt-philosophy to a philosophy that allows for my humanity and the complexity of a life with pain and pleasure and brokenness.

Blaise Pascal said, "Two things contribute to our sanctification. Pains and pleasures." Could it be that happiness and pain-avoidance are not the purpose of life? Maybe the journey of sanctification—the journey of knowing our true selves by knowing the true God—is the point. Maybe I can’t protect myself from pain (even by being good) and maybe I’m not supposed to.

"The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed." Frederick Buechner

Reflections at a Wedding

I miss the beauty of unblemished hope

where fewer slowing shoulds interrupted

the fast flow of could

and all was youth

drifting

drowning

in forever

where we played and planned

lifetimes of lying together
even in fabled fields of trouble
together
days of white and spring and cherry blossoms
that would never die

never

until they did
when all the why's came one day
and took it all away
replaced by something more profound
but less hope and less white
where cherry blossoms die
and love is tempered in
calming seas of good and right

and where I wonder if I’ll ever drown again

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.

The Loss of Living Here

We lose a lot of who we are when we learn to live in this world.

We can’t fully be who we were designed to be here. We teach little ones the ways of the world, and they learn quickly which parts of who they are will not be acceptable here. A lot of it is necessary, but there’s no doubt we all get squashed in order to live here. The truly free will have a hard time here.

We all start off quirky. Some adapt better than others. Some, like me, bow to the gods of status quo and become very likeable to nearly everyone by sacrificing distinctiveness. Lately I’ve been watching my three-year-old niece, who is a lot like me in nearly every way, and wondering what I’ve lost—what she’ll lose.

She is so full of life and energy and excitement. It’s a lot to handle sometimes. So we tell her the rules of living in the world. You can’t be like that, have to be more this, less that. Granted, the manipulative and depraved nature that I know in myself comes out in her and needs to be squelched—in all of us. But so much of our original design gets lost in the fray as we learn to fit, to be accepted, to remain sane, to not get hurt, to pay our bills, to be responsible, to not annoy our aunt.

I mean, I have to tell her the rules. You know, ones like “no excited, non-stop talking before 8 am.” It’s a necessary rule (to protect us both), but I feel a little bit of who she is slipping away when her big smile fades. I don’t know how long she stands by my bed waiting for me to wake up when she stays overnight with me, but when I open my eyes that big smile is there and she’s ready to explode all of who she is on me before I’m quite awake.

But to live here, in this world, we have to tell them who they can and cannot be. We all learned it. Your animated displays of emotion are not going to work out here. The face you make when you’re thinking is going to make your life difficult. Your fondness for incessant hugging is not going to be appreciated here...

The Human World has some universal rules, but there are also different rules for different worlds. Church World. American World. Suburbia World. Disney World. Sometimes it’s hard to know which rules to follow. Which status quo am I aiming for? Weird Portlander? Or proper southerner? Nice church girl? Or unconventional revolutionary? So, we end up just trying to create an identity based on the cues we’ve been given in the world we're in.

Won’t it be beautiful when we’re all finally free of the rules of this world? Free to be who we were created to be without concern for the rules of living far from home? I am moving closer to a taste of that freedom now, but I look forward to the day when I arrive and find out who I am really. And who you are.

smokers and frauds

I often feel like a fraud. I think it comes from being human. And redeemed. Being both is tricky. It would be much less ambiguous if I was completely perfect or completely screwed up. But as it is, I am neither. Or both, really.

So sometimes, this feeling of being a fraud is valid. Sometimes I am a fraud. I pretend not to be human. Or not to be redeemed.

When I pretend not to be human, I talk about God and myself in a way that impresses church-people. I’m kind of good at it. Actually I’m really good at it. I know the right phrases, what to emphasize, what to leave out—-how to gloss over my humanity while accentuating my perfection. I’ve been trained well in the art of manipulating Christians to get applause and pats on the back. I’ve been doing it my whole life. You might even say I’m addicted to it. I’m addicted to the admiration of Christians.

As a human, I like to smoke. But I’m not a smoker. I learned long ago that smoking would not fit with my strategy of winning the approval of church-people. And since I don’t need competing addictions, I haven’t taken up smoking. Yet, the other day, I smoked a cigarette with a friend—-in front of Christians. Because of my addiction to approval, I agonized over it for a while (although, I have to admit I enjoyed the seeming scandal of it a bit too). Yet it was a step toward freedom.

Freedom looks different for different people. I’m realizing that as my sense of self and worth comes only from being accepted as a child of God, I become more free in my choices because they are based less and less on addiction to anyone else’s opinion and more on a desire to love as Christ loves-–not that our motives can ever be completely pure. So, in pursuing Christ-likeness, making my friend feel welcome and received and helping her to open up by smoking with her was a way of accomplishing that. The sin would have been giving in to my concern over the censure of other Christians.

I was well aware that my choice would not meet the approval of some, yet, I was quite certain that by sharing that moment with her, I was showing grace and hospitality. I am reassured by remembering that Christ himself scandalized the religious of his day by doing things they would have found morally compromising in order to extend grace and love (breaking the Sabbath, partying with sinners).

I've had to change my understanding of the word hypocrite. Instead of conjuring images of those who claim to be Christians, but who smoke, drink, or swear, as I grew up thinking, I now think about those of us who do not give permission for Christians to express their humanity in front of us. I am a hypocrite when I pretend not to be human at all. Then I am the fraud.

I remember when I started going to this church in Portland several years ago, Imago Dei, I thought I might have to take up smoking to get in with the Pastor. He was always hanging out with the smokers on the front steps just before the service—-probably trying to evangelize I thought. Because Christians don’t smoke.

But it was there where I first encountered people who were embracing both their humanity and their redemption. It was there where I first felt that it was safe to be a sinner, and therefore it was safe to admit my need, and therefore it was where I first truly understood the gospel of redemption. I didn’t fit in as a fraud there. There, my addiction was revealed.

So, now, I don’t want to be a fraud. I don’t want to attract frauds. I want to draw those who are open about their humanity by being open about mine. That doesn’t always mean smoking, but it does mean letting go of my need to have the admiration and approval of others—-especially those in the church. If I can be human in front of Christians and redeemed in front of non-Christians, if I can be both in front of anyone, without my addiction to approval, then maybe you won’t want to be a fraud around me, maybe I can be that safe place—where you can be human and where the gospel of redemption can unfold in your life.

True Hospitality

I started today knowing I would have to battle perfectionism.

See, I had a dinner party for 15 neighbors and friends at my apartment tonight—to be in community and connect. Perfectionism tells me that hospitality means making everything Martha-Stewart-perfect. But when I go that route I get all psycho and bitchy about everything being just right—to the point where I forget to love people. I make it more about stuff than people. But lately, I’ve got this new idea about hospitality. And it has nothing to do with place-settings or cakes or centerpieces.

The hospitality industry is marketed on perfectionism. Perfectionism really is just a cover up, a sham. But true hospitality is openness. Hospitality is a way of living where I share openly my true self, my mistakes, my joys, my sorrows—not in a needy way, but in a way that invites people into who I am really, that invites people to share who they are. Hospitality is a show of grace not perfection. I show grace to myself (especially if things don’t go according to plan) and thus I show that grace is available from me to others.

This morning I decided I want to be a person of grace not perfection. I want to be a person of invitation not expectation. So, I started with me—I decided to show myself grace and lower my expectations, to invite myself to enjoy and love others and not worry so much about everything coming together just right. And I did. I loved, I laughed, I ate, I drank. And someone had to sit on a laundry basket because I didn’t have enough chairs. And the cake stuck to the pan. And the food wasn’t ready when everyone arrived. And all the plates didn't match. And I ran out of salad dressing. And it was all perfect.

Offerings

You know, we choose most things in life based on what it can offer us. A car, a job, a home, a city, a college, a spouse, a church, a friend. In the same way, we are chosen based on what we have to offer—as a spouse, as an employee, as a friend, as a leader. So, we begin to think that this is where our value lies, in what we have to offer. In beauty, in wisdom, in wit, in skill, in knowledge, in charm, in character. And we go about trying to prove what we have to offer, to prove our value.

And, of course, we want to keep concealed those things that we consider shameful—the things that we fear might reduce our value, the things that might give us away by revealing we’re not worth as much as we first appeared to be because we offer ugliness with our beauty, brokenness with our charm; the package of who we are includes what is wounded, scarred, insecure, and selfish. These things reduce our likelihood of being chosen. They reduce our worth.

This is how we are programmed to think of value and worth. It’s as if everyone has a price on their head. Maybe this is why it is so difficult to accept a love that isn’t based on what we have to offer.

I want to prove to God what I have to offer—my moral record, my faith, my ministry efforts, my spiritual maturity, my insight, my good choices, my penitence, even my suffering on his behalf. It all becomes part of my attempt to prove my worth. It also becomes part of my self-salvation project, as Tim Keller calls it. It is an affront to the cross and is anti-gospel. I can’t accept God’s love because I want to be my own savior, to be enough on my own. Yet I never will be. It takes accepting this to receive God’s love.

I was reminded today of Brennan Manning’s words that I read back in April, but they have taken this long to sink in. He said, in essence, forgiveness doesn’t follow repentance, but repentance follows forgiveness. This is so essential to grasp. All my penitence, and faith, and character, and beauty comes as a response to God’s love and grace, as a result—not as a way to earn it or be worthy of it. God’s love and grace and acceptance and forgiveness is offered before I wallow in contrition or say the right words or fix myself up.

We so badly want to offer something. Yet Christ is the only reason we have anything to offer. As Eugene Peterson says from Ephesians 5, “Christ's love makes the church whole. His words evoke her beauty. Everything he does and says is designed to bring the best out of her, dressing her in dazzling white silk, radiant with holiness.” Christ’s love gives us our value and worth—it doesn’t require our value and worth. This means we can accept His love without concern for what we have to offer Him.

For most of us, we’re not used to being loved like this. We’re used to being loved for what we have to offer. Perhaps we’re even used to being cut off from love when it seems we have nothing to offer. Being loved by God requires reprogramming. We have to learn to be loved freely. Once we can accept that love, we can accept our true value, our true identity—an identity and value that comes from the assurance of His love. A value we don’t have to prove to anyone.

I think our reprogramming has to be constant because it’s so easy to go back to default mode. I wake up in default mode, and it’s not like I can press a few buttons and be assured once again that I am loved. It’s like having to do a total system restore—wiping clean what’s there and writing program all over again. I have to be convinced all over again of God’s love for me, not just to know it, but to taste it. Without that assurance, everything else is warped. Maybe Manning is right when he says, “There is only one thing God asks of us—that we be men and women of prayer, people who live close to God, people for whom God is everything and for whom God is enough.” I’m finding that without this, nothing else matters.

I Doubt, He Draws?

Doubt and faith exist side by side. I often struggle with evangelism when I struggle with God. I feel I should have this all worked out by now. But after a lifetime of Christian teaching, I still have my own questions, so I don’t feel I can answer anyone else’s. Maybe that’s the problem with my view of evangelism—thinking I have to have all the answers. I don’t want to give trite answers. I don’t want to say what’s been said before. I want to be authentic about my own struggles with God. Maybe that is more meaningful than saying the right things? But instead, I keep it all to myself. I don’t say anything for fear that all my doubts about God will shout louder than my faith.

Sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that if God is real, he would have rescued us by now. Shouldn’t there be no more death, no more pain, no more recession, no more evil? Shouldn’t people be fed, abuse be ended, children be cared for? I know the right answers. Do I believe them? Do I want to? My nephew brought my struggles to light yesterday when he asked me if the people who died in the movie we were watching would go to hell. I didn’t want them to. My answer was lame—they often are because there’s a gap between what I want to believe and what I do believe. I see things upside down. What I want to believe makes more sense, humanly speaking. All people go to heaven (except the REALLY bad ones and the ones who are mean to me), all sickness gets healed, all relationships get restored, all bills get paid. That’s what God should do. If he were real.

I’ve been spending a lot of time at the hospital with my dad who has terminal cancer. Meanwhile, my mom is trying to help out a lady who has two kids, no money, and an abusive boyfriend. Then there's her neighbor who has custody of a baby who will have burn scars all over his body from when his father tried to kill him when he was four months old. There's my friends who want children but are barren. And you can’t go in the grocery store without reading about John and Kate’s divorce.

I want to offer more than clichés. I want a better story.

God should have rescued us by now. But if I stop seeing things upside down, I see that Christ did rescue us. How do I look beyond what I think people need in order to offer the hope that Christ gives? It’s now but not yet. Lately, it feels more like not yet.

I want to offer what people want—happiness, comfort, ease, success, money, good relationship, health. That’s our idea of rescue. That’s what I want from God. It’s difficult to see through this world’s values to see the Kingdom that is counter-cultural, to see that something greater is offered, to see that losing is winning and dying is life, that suffering is part of the abundant life. Rescue is offered freely, but with a cost. Some people don’t want that kind of rescue. Like the rich young ruler. Not a great sales-pitch.

Maybe evangelism isn’t a matter of enticing. Maybe it’s a matter of being honest about struggles. Maybe that’s a more authentic picture of who Christ is and why he came. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not what we thought rescue should be. Only God can reveal the living water. It is a miracle only he can do. Even when I doubt.

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.

Belief Detox

I’m convinced that most of my journey to spiritual maturity now days has more to do with detoxing from things I’ve picked up in church along the way so far than with learning brand new things. I’ve been unlearning a lot of things over the past few years. And I always feel so slow—like I should’ve gotten this a long time ago.

Right now it’s belief. Faith. What is belief? An encounter with a couple of Christian women a few months ago triggered all sorts of thoughts on this topic. They told me God wants me to have a husband if that’s what I want. Hmm. And they told me that if I didn’t believe that, I would never get one. Because God only gives us things when we believe Him for them. I mentioned this in a post in February after the conversation – wrestling with the issue that God gives us the desires of our hearts and all that… I told them that I want a new car too, and I asked them if I started believing God for that if he would give it to me. They weren’t as certain on that one. To be honest, this really confronted me with what I think belief is. What they said had an all-too-familiar ring to me. But it went against everything God had been teaching me recently. I challenged them in a defensive and befuddled way, but I actually had a hard time refuting their theology in the moment, so I’ve been thinking about it in one way or another since then.

This crisis counseling class I just took has me thinking about it again. People suffer. Life sucks at times. Does our faith or belief change that? No. (I feel like I’m blaspheming by saying no… Detox in action.) Why was I led to believe that it does? On my way to class the other day, I heard a guy on the radio say, “Faith does not affect the outcome of our situation,” and I was like, “Yeah! Wait… is that right? Hold up. I thought faith did affect outcome.”

It made me think about belief in Santa Claus. A few years back, my oldest nephew suspected he wasn’t real, but he was so afraid that if he stopped believing, he would stop getting presents. Is that the kind of belief God requires? If we believe he’ll give us presents, if we believe he’ll give us what we want, then he’ll come through. Is that what belief is all about? Really?

God is winking at me right now because I prayed for a digital camera last week. I can’t afford one. I just told God I’d like to have one—but no pressure. Someone just gave me one. (But I’ve been asking for an IPod now for months… nothing. Maybe I don’t have enough faith for that one?)

God does ask for our faith, our belief. When Jesus performed miracles, he often commented on the faith of those he healed. But what kind of faith? What kind of belief? Belief in the outcome I want? Or belief in who Christ is? He’s asking us to believe in who he says he is. To trust in his character. Our faith is not in believing he will give us what we want—our faith is in believing that he is enough. We believe that even if we don’t get the healing we want, the financial miracle we want, the situation we want, God is on our side, He is good and merciful, He is powerful and able. This is faith. Our faith grows in suffering as much as in miracles and answered prayers. Maybe more. We are asking for bread, and he is telling us he is the bread. We have to trust that. That is belief.

Redemptive Disappointment

Over the past few days, I’ve been contemplating the beautiful result of tragedy. I spent this past weekend with four incredible women in the mountains of North Carolina. This is the second year I’ve gotten together with my childhood friends for a weekend, and both times I’ve found it to be a healing and restorative experience. Some of the girls I’ve known since we were in the nursery together. Until last year, we hadn’t seen each other for nearly ten years. What I’m struck by as we share our stories and catch up on life, is that, for each of us, life is not what we thought it would be ten years ago. We’ve each experienced loss in different ways and suffered in different ways. We’ve each been in a place we didn’t expect to be. Grief and tragedy has plagued each of us. At least for me, my idealistic romantic notions of the way the world is supposed to work did not do me any favors in coping with the realities of life.

As I started a class on crisis counseling yesterday, my professor spoke about how we need to teach children to fail. We need to teach them to suffer. Otherwise, we grow up with this expectation that things should always go well for us—that things are supposed to go right and well all the time. I remember thinking in my twenties that life was fun and easy and perfect, and wondering if I could manage to get through my life without pain. I thought I was probably due for a tragedy, but I was pretty sure I could avoid it by living right and being good. Only people who make bad choices should have to suffer. Not me.

This translates into expectations of God. Like Job’s friends, I thought God owes me something because I’ve been good or faithful. I followed the rules. He would not allow me to suffer. A sense of entitlement is created because we don’t expect to have to suffer or feel bad. I thought that only a cynical view of life says that life will inevitably disappoint you, that people will always eventually let you down, that failure and suffering are a fact of life. I guess nobody wants to believe that when they’re young and full of hope for life.

But isn’t that part of the gospel really? It’s not cynical—it’s the givens of life in a fallen world. Perhaps it takes suffering, it takes failure for us to really understand the gospel, to be able to receive grace. We misunderstand the abundant life until we’ve been frustrated with life as it is. Only then do we really understand true hope. Until then, we’re satisfied with what C. S. Lewis refers to as mud pies in a slum because we can’t conceive of a holiday at the sea. I’m reminded of my high school students saying they didn’t want to go to heaven yet because they hadn’t had sex. But the pleasures of this life aren’t as good as it gets. Maybe we have to be disappointed by them before we realize the reality of that truth.

This weekend, each of my friends painted for me a beautiful picture of hope and faith—of trusting God through the unexpected tragedies of life in a fallen world. For a long time, I thought that faith meant believing God for what we want. Now I think it is about believing God is good and faithful when we don’t get what we want. Though he slay me, yet will I trust him. There is no question of whether we will suffer—it is only a question of how and when. And yet, we experience abundant life in a way unexpected. And we’re not done. What we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we will be like him, for we shall see him as he is. This is our hope.

Pavlov, God, and Holiness

This concept of grace first, then holiness is taking root in me. In my theology class today, the topic was sanctification. Though several views were presented, I walked away with some valuable confirmations of what I believe. One was that God pursues us relentlessly for ongoing transformation. So we can confess our inadequacy and inconsistencies openly to him because that’s what he’s already working on, and we can’t work on those things with him until we admit them (and working on them without him is futile). Once we admit them, he can empower us toward holiness. I was reminded that God does the work, and our part is to cooperate.

In a way, sanctification is all wrapped up in views of sin and sovereignty and all that. A little over a year ago I started asking, “what is up to me and what is up to God?” For most of my life I saw sin as simply a choice, an act of my will. But if sin is merely my choice, then holiness too, it seems, is my choice. This looks a lot like moralism and can so easily morph into self-righteousness.

I was reading about Pavlov and his dog earlier this semester, and I started thinking about how behaviorism looks a lot like how I used to view “relationship” with God—except instead of recognizing myself as the one responding instinctively like a dog, I was Pavlov—the cause, the mover. God was Pavlov’s dog. He responds to me based on my actions. I’m good (I ring the bell) and God will respond accordingly with the outcome I want. Only he didn’t. Not consistently. So I stopped believing, really. I didn’t stop believing in God, but I lowered my expectations of God and tried to answer my own prayers. I believed in my own power to change myself, to make myself holy through my own will and choice. I thought spiritual transformation was more about what I do than what God does.

But when I view sin as pervasive depravity that affects all of me (including my choices)—a disease, a pollution—I recognize that there’s no way I can cure myself or make myself holy. All I can do is cooperate with the work God is already doing and revealing. Admit, surrender, and receive. He does the work. I cooperate. This week, he’s working on my Pavlovian notions about holiness, grace, and sovereignty…

May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it. (I Thessalonians 5:23-24)

Grace and Cigarettes

I’m thinking of taking up smoking as a spiritual discipline. Maybe I’ll sit with God and have a cigarette. I’ve just been very struck this week with my need to embrace my humanity, my limits, my imperfection. It’s so easy for me to get into a brand of Christianity that is all about image, saying and doing the right thing, having it all together. I think of the saying, “don’t smoke, don’t chew, don’t go with girls that do,” and I want to radically break out of a Christian culture that would whittle the Christian life down to that.

Most Christians I know don’t think that way, but I just don’t get enough reminders sometimes of my need for Jesus, my humanity, and my brokenness in the Christian culture. Sometimes it seems more like it’s not okay to be a sinner …or a smoker. Often I experience an expectation of perfection—maybe it’s just my own expectation of myself. I wonder if a cigarette with God now and then could be the reminder I need not to bow to those impossible expectations, but to breathe in grace (and tobacco ...and toxic chemicals).

I think my problem comes when I regard holiness over grace. Only through grace can we ever be holy, so a pursuit of holiness must never come first. (And I’m not convinced that holiness has anything to do with not smoking, not swearing, not drinking, etc.) I wonder what it would be like if churches looked more like AA meetings sometimes—no pretense, everyone aware of their own failure, confessing openly, admitting our need, holding each other up, but full of grace and understanding for everyone’s broken condition.

I want to love and accept others as Christ did, but a preoccupation with personal holiness prevents that. I have such a hard time loving people when I’m perfect. My desire for perfection makes it impossible to love because love is messy. Perfection is my point of need. And it is the very thing that keeps me from admitting my need. I am resistant to receiving grace because I don’t want to need it—to be limited and imperfect. So, I don’t want to be human. I want to be God. How like Eve. How human.

On hearing this, Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners." Matthew 9:12-13

John MacArthur on smoking, drinking, etc.

The Cross or the Palm Branch?

How do you respond when you expect a certain gift, but instead of the gift that you want, you receive the gift that you need?

I was asked today to consider why we don’t celebrate Easter every day, and I had to admit that for me it is often because I want salvation on my terms instead of what is offered. Then I started to wonder if, perhaps Palm Sunday is often more of a reality for me than Easter Sunday.

As Christ entered Jerusalem days before his crucifixion, he was welcomed and honored with a fanfare of palm branches. The palm branch was a symbol of triumph and victory in the Roman Empire, used in celebration of military success. I don’t think this symbolism was lost on those gathered to pay tribute to the long-awaited Savior—the one they had been expecting—the one who would bring salvation from the Romans, the one who would bring peace and power through a political reign. As they hailed him that day, they were not anticipating his imminent death. They expected a different Kingdom, a different salvation, a different peace than what Christ offered that week. I imagine that when he did not meet their expectations, many were disappointed, maybe disillusioned and even angry. Perhaps their expectation prevented them from receiving the gift. It was what they needed not what they wanted.

It seems that I too want to choose what I’ll be saved from. I want a salvation that is easy, that gives me rights and privilege. I want a Savior who meets my expectations, who fixes my problems, and gives me what I want. I resonate with what David Benner writes, “We want a spirituality of success and ascent, not a spirituality of failure and descent. We want a spirituality of improvement, not a spirituality of transformation. But the way of the cross is the way of descent, abandon and death. This is the foolishness of the gospel.”

If I’m being honest, often it is my expectation of God’s gift that keeps me from celebrating the true gift. He offers what I need instead of what I want. And what he offers is actually better than anything I could conjure or imagine I want. But I have to let go of my expectation of what is good if I’m to accept God’s gift—if I’m to see the goodness of his gift. It is the gift of life. I have to lay aside the palm branch that represents my conception of what God’s Kingdom should be in order to take up the cross.

He is not the Savior I want. He is the Savior I need.