Saying More Than We Can Say, June, 2009 (CT)

Saying More Than We Can Say

Why the arts matter even during a recession

At a concert in Erie, Pennsylvania, I sang a song called "In Good Hands." Afterward, the church's custodian stopped by. "When you was singing that song about Jesus' hands," he said, "the sun was setting behind you, and it was making them stained glass pictures of Jesus glow. The sound of your buddy's violin was bouncing off these stone walls, and, well, you was saying more than you was even saying."

In these tough times, I worry that violins and stained glass and folk songs may become extraneous. Many people are in a state of financial frostbite; just as blood flow to the extremities is restricted to save vital organs in a case of hypothermia, resources for less essential items must be diverted during an economic crisis. Who's going to buy tickets to a film festival, ballet, or concert when there isn't enough money for groceries?

What business do I have writing songs when there is practical work that needs doing? Do the arts matter? Are they expendables or essentials?

Karl Paulnack, director of the music program at the Boston Conservatory, tells the story of Olivier Messiaen, a French composer who was 31 when he was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Messiaen convinced a sympathetic prison guard to provide paper and a place to compose; in January 1941, his Quartet for the End of Time was performed for 4,000 prisoners and guards. To this day, it is considered a masterpiece.

Paulnack asks, "Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? … And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art … Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. Art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are."

The Christian faith provides an explanation for the resilience of the human creative impulse. Consider God's first revelation about himself, the first five words of the Bible: In the beginning, God created. When we help make something—when we participate in bringing "cosmos out of chaos," as writer Madeleine L'Engleput it—we affirm the fact that we are made in the image of the Creator. No wonder we can't help ourselves. We are made to participate in the arts.

There are a thousand arguments for the usefulness of the arts in the church. Paintings and plays let us say things that we could never express in direct conversation, giving them great evangelistic potential. Poems and visual icons can be powerful discipleship tools, and Scripture mandates the use of song. Music and poetic liturgy have long been essential mechanisms for communal worship.

But the arts are also important for less obvious reasons. When we witness the transformation of raw material into something beautiful, we are encouraged to remember that other new realities can be made—that perhaps justice can be created where there is injustice, wholeness can be wrought where there is disease and poverty, and community can be made even from discord. Beauty not only suggests these ideals are possible, but it also awakens a longing for them.

When songwriter Sara Grovestold International Justice Mission founder Gary Haugen that she wanted to quit music and become a lawyer in support of the cause, Haugen told her she must continue in the important work she was already doing to move hearts and minds toward justice. The arts are not in competition with efforts against injustice; they are an essential part of the fight.

But the arts do even more than help us believe in transformed realities: they kindle faith in unseen realities. My own sense of transcendence is nurtured primarily by beauty—in the created world (mountains, oceans, wildflowers) and in the world we help create (poems, songs, sculpture). By convincing us that there is something more than the material realm of atoms and synapses, the arts open a vista to belief in God.

And when we meet this God, our creativity becomes one of the ways we delight in him. The Message translation of Genesis says that we were created "reflecting God's nature." When we are lost in some endeavor—consumed by singing a song, dancing a jig, building a presentation, or telling a story—people say we are "in our glory." In truth, we are in God's glory, participating in the beauty overflowing from the Creator himself.

Those are the times we wind up saying more than we are even saying, and knowing more than we could know any other way.

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Comments welcome below or on CT's Site.

Take Christianity Today's Arts Poll ("Are You Cutting Back on Spending Money on the Arts?")

The Benefit of the Doubt- May/June, Faith Today (Cover Story)

The Benefit of the Doubt

God wants us to wrestle with him

Doubt is a much maligned reality of a living faith. If you have it, don’t despair – most of the people in the Bible were ”a questioning lot” writes Carolyn Arends,
an evangelical author and award-winning musician from Coquitlam, B.C.

Sarah is a deep thinker. She wishes she could just accept things on the surface, but she can’t. A theological question about God’s sovereignty began to haunt her in her early 20s. She took her question to the spiritual experts available: her pastor and a local “Bible Answer” radio personality. They both told her it was arrogant to question God. But she found it difficult to be dishonest with God. So she stopped talking to God altogether.

Jenny grew up in the church and laughs that she’s saving her “rebellious phase” for her upcoming 40s. She’s had many faith-building encounters with God and loves to share them. What is harder for Jenny to talk about is the long, dark season after her first pregnancy when she had a colicky baby and a whopping case of post-partum depression. Worse, she had an agonizing sense of being cut off from God. For several months she begged God to break through the haze of her exhaustion and hormonal desperation with some reassurance of His love. The breakthrough didn’t happen. Gradually, she stopped feeling so desperate. But she also felt a little abandoned. Even now, when others testify about the times God met them in an hour of need, Jenny’s eyes well up with tears.

Richard was a minister but he’s not anymore. When a bridge collapsed unexpectedly in his small maritime town, so did his faith. His teenage son was on that bridge and drowned. After that, Richard couldn’t think of anything to preach about.

I’ve believed in Jesus since I was old enough to believe in anything. I can barely imagine a world or a life without God. And yet, now and then, I find myself sitting in a church service suddenly struck by the thought that perhaps the whole thing – faith in a personal, knowable God and all the creeds and prayers and the relationship that follow – is only a lovely dream, a benign fabrication that gives meaning to an otherwise achingly futile human existence. I refute these ideas as quickly as I can but I’m troubled by the fact that even now, after all these years of discipleship, such thoughts are possible.

I have questions about … doubt.

My research on doubt is informal. I’ve simply listened to my own heart and the half-whispered confessions of other pilgrims. But I’ve become convinced that most Christians experience doubt at least now and then. There are exceptions, beautiful ones, of believers who seem never to falter. I often wonder (as I fight back my envy) if perhaps they have received the particular spiritual gift of “faith” the Apostle Paul says has been given to some (1 Corinthians 12:9). Whatever the explanation, these unflappable Christians seem to be the exceptions who prove the rule. The rest of us eventually (or periodically) run into some set of variables – tragic circumstances, theological quandaries, physical or mental illnesses, or our own reflective temperaments – that leave questions welling up inside us.

We must determine, it seems to me, if doubt is always destructive or if it is potentially helpful. Are doubts the enemy of faith or, as American author Frederick Buechner puts it, “the ants in the pants of faith,” the very things that keep faith “alive and moving”?

The Bible encourages us to move toward faith and away from doubt. And yet, the “Hall of Fame” believers held up as examples in Hebrews 11 were almost unanimously a questioning lot. The point seems less that they never doubted and more that they came to God with their doubts. Some of them argued with or even hollered at God. But they didn’t walk away.

My favourite example is Jacob. Genesis 32 describes a mysterious encounter with a stranger whom Jacob eventually understands to be God Himself. Jacob wrestles with God all night long and tells Him “I will not let You go until You bless me.”

In the morning Jacob gets his blessing and a new name: “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel [‘God-Wrestler’], because you have struggled with God and with human beings and have overcome” (Genesis 32:28). Imagine that. God names not only Jacob but also His people, His nation, His church: Israel. God-wrestlers. It seems God wants us to wrestle with Him, to fight for Him, to grapple with the Mystery, to hold on tight and refuse to let go.

The more I read the Bible, the more I am convinced that God has empathy for our situation. I don’t think our doubts offend God. But I do think He is concerned when we swallow our doubt, when we pretend He is not beyond our understanding and when we attempt to hide our true feelings from Him (as if we ever could!).

So how do we let doubt be a fire that refines faith rather than consumes it? In my own experience, the following four principles have been extremely helpful.

Expect Some Turbulence
The other day I grabbed a cup of water from the kitchen table. It turned out it was not my water but my daughter’s lemonade. I like lemonade, but the tart flavour was so unexpected I did a classic cartoon “spit-take.” Expectations are powerful.

Many Christians expect a doubt-free walk with God. When trouble comes, we must contend with not only the questions themselves but also with the stress and shame at having the questions at all. Our panic will be significantly minimized if we understand that the majority of believers who have gone before us (from biblical heroes and Early Church Fathers to more recent saints like Henri Nouwen and even Mother Teresa) have encountered seasons of doubt.

I suspect a great number of Christians discover as they journey with God that the more they believe (the more they perceive of God) the more doubt springs up as a natural response to the gap between what is and what is understood.

To have real faith – faith that hopes for things that are not yet seen – we have to be confronted at least occasionally with a keen and painful awareness of just how unseen some of those things are. That awareness often manifests itself as doubt.

The author of Ecclesiastes claims “I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

The Bible is wonderfully candid when it refers to this incredibly good news (that we bear something of the eternal right at the deepest part of who we are) as a burden. The truth is, if we flesh-and-bone, finite creatures really do house something infinite, we can expect to feel at odds with ourselves a good deal of the time. Accepting that tension can go a long way toward helping us do something constructive with our doubt.

Don’t Forget to Remember
Every time I hold a friend’s new baby, I’m shocked by how much I’ve forgotten about my own kids’ infancies. When they were tiny, I thought every precious (and not-so-precious) detail would be etched in my mind forever. Now I can barely recall what they looked like back then. If we don’t actively remember things – by writing them down, taking pictures, and telling and retelling stories about them – we forget.

You’d think it would be easy to remember our spiritual epiphanies – answered prayers, Holy Spirit insights and touches of God through circumstances or special perceptions of His presence. In reality, spiritual encounters are particularly difficult to recall precisely because they belong to another realm that seems to vaporize when we get bogged down in our material existence.

The Old Testament prophets understood this problem. They had a habit of marking milestone moments with rocks and altars (they called them ebenezers) so that later, when it all seemed like a hazy dream, they could go back and touch something tangible and remember what God had done for them. It is critical that we do the same. Journal. Write a song. Tell a friend. Take a picture. Read the stories of other believers as a way of accessing the collective memory of the Church. Memorize Scripture. Remember.

Focus on the Who Question
Slowly, I am coming to accept the fact that if God is really God, and I’m really not God, it only makes sense that there are aspects of Him that are beyond me. This awareness allows me to see mysteries that once threatened my faith as actual grounds for belief.

At the same time, there is much that God has chosen to reveal about Himself – through creation, through His Word, through the faith community and, most wonderfully, through Jesus.

We often don’t have answers to so many of our questions. Why does God seem to intervene in some situations and not in others? When will there be ultimate justice? How will God bring it about? But we always have the answer to the Who question. If we wonder who God is, if we need to know if God truly is about justice and mercy and a love for us that cannot be exhausted, we only have to look at Jesus to get our answer.

Knowing who Jesus is allows us to trust God’s character even when our present emotions or circumstances lead us in other directions.

Don’t Stop the Conversation
Pray. Even when you seem to be talking into the void. Even when you have no words. Pray.

One of my favourite prayers is recorded in the Gospel of Mark. A father brings his very ill son to Jesus for healing. He pours out his heart to the Healer, crying, “If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.” “ ‘If you can?’ ” said Jesus. “Everything is possible for one who believes.”

I imagine the father standing there in the middle of the chaos – his epileptic boy twitching on the ground, the voices of others crying out for healing, the crush of hundreds of people jostling for position – and sensing that this is the defining moment of his life. He swallows hard. “I do believe,” he says. And then he adds instinctively, “Help me overcome my unbelief!” The father is too desperate for charades. He comes to Jesus believing just enough to trust that Jesus will help him with his unbelief. And that, it turns out, is enough faith to move the heart of God.

I will not let You go until You bless me. I do believe; help my unbelief.

These are prayers God blesses – the prayers of honest people who understand that doubt is sometimes normal and that faith is worth fighting for.

What's So Good About Good Friday? - March/April, TCW

What's So Good About Good Friday?
Learning to see darker days in a different light
Posted 04/09/09 at TCW

I love Easter Sunday. I love the way my church's normally casual congregation takes everything up a notch (or three)—the girls in new linen dresses and the boys in once-a-year ties. I love the jubilance of the music, and the preacher's grin when he urges us to turn to one another and say, "He is risen!"

Easter Sunday is the Christian faith's gold medal victory lap and its raison d'etre. It's the Happily Ever After to end all happily ever afters. Easter Sunday shouts: "Death where is thy sting?" and "Love wins!" and "God is alive!"

But here's the rub: I dread Good Friday. I dread the images of torture and suffering. I dread the somber music and the awful remembrance of the violent death of a loved one—of Jesus, the Loved One. I dread the smothering grief and the inescapable remorse and the terrible recollected cry, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Left to my own devices, I'd probably skip Good Friday. But I suspect that if I did, Easter morning would become increasingly hollow. I'd forget how much my salvation cost.

What's more, I'm pretty sure my Good Friday avoidance would cause me to lose touch with certain realities about the way the universe works on this side of eternity. I'd start to believe that you can have victory without sacrifice. I'd convince myself that you don't have to die to live the resurrection. I'd buy the lie that Christ's ultimate victory over death—and my decision to follow him—means life on this earth will be trouble-free.

The biblical writers warn us repeatedly that the Christian should not expect a life exempt from Good Fridays. They encourage us to consider every hardship pure joy because suffering is an opportunity to identify with Christ and become more dependent on him (James 1:2-4). They repeat Christ's plainspoken invitation to "take up his cross" (Mark 8:34-35).

And yet for many of us Easter Sunday Christians, when the job is lost, or the tumor is malignant, or the friendship is betrayed, we grieve not only the wound but also the fact that we can be wounded. We feel that either we're not doing faith right or that faith—that Jesus—has let us down. We don't consider it "pure joy" when our faith is tested. We consider it failure.

I'm beginning to think our expectations are not just unrealistic, they're anti-gospel. But our confusion is hardly surprising. According to some experts, we're bombarded with more than 3,000 advertisements a day, telling us we're entitled to (and must pursue at any cost) an easy, ageless, worry-free life. When we meet and accept Jesus, many of us can't help but distort his promise of abundant life into something that resembles the illusion advertisers sell us every day.

So how do we become Easter Sunday Christians who truly see (and even embrace) the good in our Good Fridays? How do we resist our sense of entitlement and the distorted expectations that are so deeply ingrained? I've found the following four principles helpful.

Check the Definitions

When I read that God "works all things together for good," I can't help but think of the marketers' definitions and assume that "good" means "easy," "youthful," "desirable," and "wealthy." But when I read the Bible, I discover that God defines "good" in entirely different terms.

New Testament Christians seemed to believe the greatest good is to become more like Jesus. They took it for granted that this process wouldn't be easy.

"What do people mean when they say 'I am not afraid of God, because he is good?'" asked C.S. Lewis, musing on this idea. "Have they never even been to a dentist?"

Evidently, early Christians also assumed that the "good" God is working toward is much more expansive than one individual's personal circumstances. God is establishing his kingdom, doing nothing less than "reconciling all things to himself" (Colossians 1:20), and the ultimate good for the believer is to be included in that process.

I'm immensely comforted when I remember that the God who cares deeply and personally about even a fallen sparrow is watching over me. But I've been a parent long enough to suspect that my heavenly father knows more than I do about what I need and where I'm going—and about what's best for the whole family. So it's a safe bet that his definition of "blessing" is different from mine.

When I'm expecting Easter Sunday and I get Good Friday instead, I'm trying to remember that God's definition of "good" undoubtedly confounds and far exceeds my own.

Re-evaluate Death

Almost all the new beginnings in my life have come from what felt at the time like terrible endings. So I know I need to re-examine my concept of "death." Frequently, what seems like a small (but devastating) death is actually a chance at new life. I can point to dozens of "dead ends" in my career, ministry, or relationships that turned out to be opportunities to change direction.

Nature gives us vivid examples of this principle. Like seeds, we must be willing to be broken in order to grow into what we were made to be. Like reptiles, we have to shed old skins. Like caterpillars, we must be entombed so we can emerge as completely new creations. When I think of all the energy I've expended resisting endings and change, I wonder what new life I've missed.

Jesus tells us to die so we can live. He invites us to surrender all the illusions we have about what makes a life good and worthwhile so we can discover real life. And then he walks with us, every step of the way, as we die a thousand deaths in the process of letting his life go deeper and deeper into us. Until at last we really and truly physically die, only to live forever.

The rumors of our demise, it turns out, are greatly exaggerated. With God, the end is the beginning.

Keep Time

In my non-liturgical church tradition, a "church calendar" is a list of youth group meetings and members' birthdays, not an ancient rhythm of days and observances. But I've been learning that many branches of Christianity throughout the centuries have used liturgical time as a way of keeping believers connected to the realities of both life and death in the faith.

Cycling through Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Passiontide, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, and back through "ordinary time" to Advent again, Christians are reminded that suffering is an expected part of human life, and, more important, that God is constantly redeeming that suffering through his resurrection power. I'm just beginning to discover how helpful the church calendar can be in correcting and realigning my own expectations.

Lent, in particular, is a fascinating season. A few years ago, when I became aware that some of my Anglican and Catholic friends went through an annual ritual of giving up some creature comfort for 40 days every spring, I responded with what I thought was a clever line: "This year for Lent I'm giving up self-control." My friends would smile but challenge me to give Lent a serious try.

This year, in my desire to more fully embrace Good Friday, I'm observing my first Lenten season. It's an experiment to see if denying myself one small but habitualized comfort (in my case, a certain kind of food) prepares my heart to more fully enter into every part of Easter.

My Lent-experienced friends tell me that disrupting even one routine can expose the crutches and illusions and substitutions that keep us from authentically participating in the life Christ offers. Lent, they claim, can facilitate a small death to self that becomes an opening to new life. I aim to see if they're right.

Expect the Unexpected

Endings that are beginnings, death that is life—God will always confound our expectations.

A couple years ago, during a jubilant Easter service, our pastor said something that stopped me in my mental tracks: "The world offers promises full of emptiness. But Easter offers emptiness full of promise."

Empty cross, empty tomb, empty grave-clothes … all full of promise. If I were writing the Easter story, I don't think I'd choose emptiness as my symbolic gesture. But then, I also wouldn't be talking about strength being made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9), foolish things confounding the wise (1 Corinthians 1:27), the meek inheriting the earth (Matthew 5:5), or the poor in spirit getting (in every sense of the word "get") the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:3). And I certainly wouldn't be talking about dying in order to live.

What is it about God that makes him so favor this kind of paradox? I guess this is what we should expect from the Servant King—the God who decided that the best way to save the world was to let it kill him. I don't understand the way God thinks. But on those days when I feel hollowed out and broken—half-dead, even—it makes me glad to remember that for Easter people, even death is full of promise.

The world makes a lot of promises. Smoke and mirrors, mostly. Frantic, cartoonish attempts to distract us from the gaping holes in the middle of our souls (or to sell us the latest product in order to fill them). There's no life in those promises.

So I'm hoping that this Lenten season, I'll be a little more willing to die to that stuff. I'm praying I'll become more aware of the empty space within, and that I'll resist the urge to fill it with any old thing I can find. I'm going to wait, carved out, vulnerable, a cracked and crumbling jar of clay, on a life God's offered to deposit anywhere there's room. I'm going to believe that if I'll just leave my empty spaces empty, he'll fill them. That, I'm convinced, is a reasonable expectation.

I'm writing this article during a particularly long Good Friday season in my own life. My mom is battling cancer, and I'd be lying if I said I was able to watch her suffer and "count it all joy."

I pray for healing and hope desperately it will come here on earth. I ask all the questions people have asked at the bedsides of sick loved ones for thousands of years. I vacillate wildly between hope and despair, faith and doubt, openness and bitterness.

But I know that we do not suffer alone, because the God of the universe wore our skin and died our death and removed its sting forever. This is no meager consolation. And even when I'm desperately sad, I look at my mom and I remember: Without Good Friday, there would be no Easter morning. So I pray through the night, and I wait for the resurrection.

Comments Welcome Here

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian Woman
Click here for reprint information on Today's Christian Woman.

Hiding What They Seek, March, 2009 (CT)

Hiding What They Seek

In my desire to be 'seeker-friendly,' I'm often guilty of concealing Jesus.

A friend was involved for years in a weekly service intended to reach out to inner-city kids, the majority of whom had little church experience and no acknowledged relationship with Jesus.

If it had been up to me, I would have made those events "seeker-friendly." I'd have focused on building relationships, avoiding anything too religious or high pressure. But my friend went a different way. Every week, he led worship, one song after another, always unabashedly about—or to—Jesus.

I'm sure some of the kids walked away and never looked back. But hundreds stayed. Many made decisions to follow Christ.

Some ministry leaders were concerned that teens who didn't know Jesus were being asked to participate in worship. My friend would reply, "How else are they supposed to get to know him?"

It's a good question. People come to the Christian faith via many different highways, but the eventual crossroad is always an encounter with Jesus. I wonder if my attempts to keep my witness nonthreatening and accessible sometimes end up shielding the unchurched people around me from their own crossroad. Jesus can certainly meet them without my assistance. But I would rather be a help than a hindrance.

I was definitely a hindrance in Mexico. My husband, Mark, is a public high school counselor. A few years ago, a group of 11th graders asked him to coordinate a humanitarian trip. He contacted one of our favorite Christian organizations, and they agreed to facilitate an excursion to Mexico to build a playground in an impoverished area. Mark was careful to explain that the students participating were unchurched; should there be even a whiff of proselytizing, parents—and the school board—would feel betrayed.

There were 24 students and 4 teachers; my kids and I tagged along. Upon arrival, we discovered that the arranged accommodations at a local Rotary Club house had fallen through. Instead, we would be sleeping on the cement floor of a church basement in downtown Juârez, one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico. Mark could already imagine the parent phone calls he'd receive when word trickled home. Weary from a long day of travel, we set up sleeping bags and tried to ignore the exposed wiring, hole-ridden walls, and scurry of cockroaches.

In the morning, we drove to the site of our project. Jaws dropped and eyes welled as we observed the abject poverty around us. But we also experienced the sweet rush of doing something worthwhile. At the end of the day, we returned to our cement floor feeling good.

All was well until the nausea hit. Sometime around 3 A.M., the first wave of students became ill; by morning, there were clusters of miserable people draped on every available garbage can. Mark held his head and imagined a new wave of parent phone calls. Mostly he threw up.

Around 9 A.M., the two local women who were preparing our food arrived on the scene and surveyed the carnage. Despite the language barrier, their distress and concern were unmistakable. They had followed all the guidelines for cooking for foreigners, and we were still sick. Eventually, one of the women approached the only teacher who could speak Spanish and asked for permission to pray for us. Too ill to object, the teacher nodded yes.

As soon as the woman began to pray, I knew we were in trouble. I thought, Maybe everyone is so ill they won't mind the praying. But my hopes for a low-impact prayer faded quickly as the woman became increasingly emotional. She prayed for five minutes. Ten. Maybe more.

Gracias Padre, Gracias Jesús, Gracias Espíritu Santo, she wept, over and over. I began a prayer of my own. Please make her stop. I don't want Mark to get fired. I don't want these kids to be put off of religion.

When she was finally done, I took a deep breath and forced myself to raise my flushed face, dreading the reactions I knew were inevitable.

Things were not as I expected.

There was not a dry eye in the room. Students were hushed, visibly moved. "That was beautiful," whispered one teacher. Several people nodded. To them, the prayer had been not unwelcome proselytizing, but a heart cry—passionate, desperate, and utterly authentic.

I was ashamed, of course, and humbled. The Holy Spirit had been moving, and I, one of the few mature believers in the room, had missed it.

I wish I had prayed different prayers in Mexico. These days, in increasing measure, I do. When faced with potential encounters with the living God, even among the uninitiated, I am learning to pray Yes and Thank you rather than Stop. After all, how else are any of us supposed to get to know him?

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Comments Welcome Here

There Goes the Neighborhood, January, 2009 (CT)

There Goes The Neighborhood

Do I have to love my neighbor if he breaks the law?

We used to live on a street in Surrey, British Columbia, we called "the Mother of All Cul-De-Sacs." The space between the houses was large enough to accommodate a dozen parked cars or a spirited soccer match. Our daughter learned to walk in that cul-de-sac, and our son shot his first basket into a full-sized hoop there. (Granted, he was on his father's shoulders at the time.) Every night, a dozen kids would spill onto the street with bikes or hockey sticks, and we would congratulate ourselves on having selected the perfect neighborhood.

A year after we moved in, the street's complexion changed. Several of the young families moved away, and we had a hard time getting to know our new neighbors.

We heard nasty rumors that certain residents were using their homes to grow marijuana. "Grow-ops" were a rampant problem in our area, but my husband and I doubted we were sharing fences with criminals. Our friendly neighbor to the right, "Van," had recently arrived in Canada but was working hard on his English. Our neighbors to the left, an older couple who gardened relentlessly, seemed reserved but agreeable.

One afternoon, my kids and I noticed a flurry of activity. We watched as our neighbors on both sides were chased and cuffed by police, and truckloads of plants and equipment were pulled out of each of their residences. A sign declaring the area to be the site of a successful drug bust was proudly displayed—in our driveway!

My husband arrived home and intercepted one of the officers walking across our lawn. Our four-year-old eavesdropped on their conversation and ran back to me. "Our neighbors were arrested for throwing dough," he said, confused and troubled. "Why aren't you allowed to throw dough?" I wasn't sure whether to clarify that the officer had actually said "growing dope."

That night, the more I wrestled with how to explain the day's events to our kids, the angrier I got. How dare those people invade our neighborhood and expose our children to dangerous criminal elements?

I was still fuming the next day when I left to perform at an event called "Love Surrey." Area pastors had organized a multidenominational outdoor service in an effort to reach out to the community—just the sort of thing I love to support. But my anger boiled backstage as some friends warned me that grow-op owners are often quickly released and face minimal repercussions.

I returned home to see Van standing in the middle of our formerly kid-friendly cul-de-sac, holding a Coke can and chatting with my husband. I was seething when Mark walked into the house 30 minutes later.

"I can't believe he's a free man," I hissed.

"Yeah," Mark shrugged. "The laws are pretty weak. But …"

"But what?" I asked, incredulous.

"Van feels terrible." Mark sighed. "He's been out there pulling tiny weeds from the cul-de-sac garden, stuffing them into that Coke can. He's trying to show everyone how sorry he is. He keeps promising it will never happen again."

As Mark told me some of Van's story (a sad tale of personal tragedy, poor choices, and exploitation by people higher up the criminal food chain), I had a sudden epiphany.

Van was my neighbor.

Of course I knew he lived next door, but I realized with a start that Van was my neighbor in the "love your neighbor as yourself" sense. It dawned on me that if I had been the lawyer trying to define the law in Luke's gospel, Jesus could have told me a story about a pot grower in Surrey.

I looked down at the new "Love Surrey" T-shirt I was wearing and winced, remembering Charles Schultz's ironic words: "I love mankind; it's just people I can't stand." I had known—preached, even—love of neighbor in the abstract. I had believed that the point of the Good Samaritan parable was that my neighbor is anyone who needs my help. But I had been thinking more of innocent victims in Africa than of drug-producing villains on my street.

I hope the kindness we eventually decided to show Van helped him change half as much as he changed the way we see the people around us. The driven professional with the BMW, the retiree with the yappy dog, the new immigrant too shy to make eye contact—these are our neighbors. And if we love the God who made them, we will love them as we love ourselves.

C. S. Lewisobserves, "There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal." There are six billion residents on this cul-de-sac we call home, each of them bearing the image of God, each of them a neighbor to be loved. We might as well start with the immortals next door.

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Comments Welcome Here

Our Shalom Vocation, November, 2008 (CT)

Our Shalom Vocation

Peacemaking is more than not making waves.

I loathe confrontation. I am sometimes called a "peacemaker," but the truth is that I have always been easily pacified by a counterfeit peace that is really more about not making waves than about right relationship. At the other extreme, I've watched assertive friends make pseudo-peace by the sheer force of their persuasive personalities.

Neither the passive nor the aggressive route brings the kind of peace Jesus had in mind when he said, "Blessed are the peacemakers." Real peace is not just about the ceasing of conflict (between relatives, ethnic groups, or nations); it's also about dealing with underlying causes. Be it the Middle East or the middle of my family room, there are forces of evil at work, manifesting themselves as greed, ego, insecurity, and sometimes aggression.

The problems are infinitely complex; my default response is to shrug my shoulders in low-grade despair. But I know better. I know that Jesus not only desires peace, he is peace. And he wants us to be not only its recipients but also its agents.

There is a scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian in which Jesus is delivering his Sermon on the Mount. A woman at the back can't quite hear, and when Jesus intones, "Blessed are the peacemakers," she asks, "What's so special about the cheesemakers?" To which her husband replies: "Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products."

It's a ridiculous exchange, but given the context in which Jesus delivered his sermon, I doubt his audience would have found "peacemakers" any less absurd than "cheesemakers." For centuries the Israelites had been promised a messiah to rescue them from a long line of oppressors. When Jesus started teaching, healing, and even resurrecting people, hopes must have soared. I can imagine Jesus clearing his throat, the locals holding their breath as they waited to hear his plan for overturning Roman rule. What a shock it must have been when he opened with, "Congratulations when you are poor in spirit," built to a focus on making peace, and closed with, "How wonderful when you are persecuted."

Jesus' audience was getting a crash course on one of his core messages: The kingdom of God is near—breaking in, alive, active—and it's nothing like you think. Two thousand years later, we have cross-stitched Jesus' words and hung them docilely on our walls, but his real message is no less counterintuitive or shocking.

The Beatitudes are not a tame to-do list of "be-attitudes." They are descriptions of what happens when the kingdom breaks into—and revolutionizes—a person's life. And each of the first six beatitudes builds toward the seventh: Kingdom people will be peacemakers.

Shalom, the Hebrew word for "peace," has expansive connotations. It means harmony, wholeness, and right relationship with God, others, self, and the earth. Isaiah offers prophetic pictures of shalom: the wolf lying with the lamb, weapons turned into farming tools, deserts blooming. Julian of Norwich must have glimpsed shalom when she said, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

Jesus promises that kingdom people will be not just shalom lovers or even shalom keepers, but shalom makers. God wants to include his children in the family business. Peacemaking is a mandate each of us is called to live out inside our own skin and circumstances, whether we work for the UN or not.

Mrs. Gagner, my daughter's first-grade teacher, is a prime example. She tells her students daily that God loves them, that he knows their names and has plans for them, that they are gifted and valuable beyond calculation. I have watched God use her to make shalom in those little lives. Multiply 26 students per class by a 30-year teaching career, and you start to grasp the staggering effect of just one aspect of one woman's life.

Mrs. Gagner would laugh if she knew she reminds me of a 19th-century Russian priest named Father John of Kronstadt. Most of his fellow clergymen refused to visit the villages that surrounded their cathedrals—chronic poverty had fostered a debauched despair that made the rural areas treacherous. But Father John would enter the slums and get down in the gutters. He would find some guy sleeping off whatever he had done the night before; he would cup his chin, look him in the eyes, and say, "This is beneath your dignity. You were created to house the fullness of God." Wherever Father John went, revival broke out, because people discovered who—and whose—they were. Shalom is contagious.

Preacher, teacher, homemaker, cheesemaker. Whatever our vocations, we are here for a reason. God's kingdom is at hand, breaking in, offering the job opportunity of a lifetime. We get to help him make shalom. Anything less is beneath our dignity.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Comments Welcome Here

Bigger Than Both Of Us, November/December (TCW)

Bigger than Both of Us

How my view of our marriage was radically shifted

Carolyn Arends | posted 11/06/2008 at TCW

For the first several years of my marriage, I was fond of paraphrasing C.S. Lewis on the difference between romantic love and friendship. "In The Four Loves," I'd tell whoever might (or might not) be interested, "Lewis points out that friends stand side by side and look out at the world, while lovers stand face to face and look at each other." I often cited this concept in support of date nights; there's nothing like candlelight and a little eye gazing to bolster a marriage.

But time, as the song says, goes by. Eventually, I found myself wondering just how many years of marital experience C.S. Lewis actually had.

Don't get me wrong, Lewis is still my literary hero. And my husband, Mark, still has highly gaze-able eyes. They're blue with gray flecks, or gray with blue, depending on his mood and the color of his T-shirt. When he's angry, his eyes turn cold; it's like the sun's been lost in cloud cover. But when he's content, his eyes are warm and alive, and I, to quote a hundred corny love poems, get happily lost in them.

Still, when two people are face to face for an extended period of time, they start to notice things. My husband, for example, has observed over the years that I'm never on time for anything, that I don't fold towels correctly, that I leave a trail of half-consumed Diet Pepsis in my wake, and that I'm incapable of backing the car into the garage in an appropriate fashion. (Three side-view mirrors have been sacrificed to date.) I, on the other hand, have come to realize that Mark never remembers to turn on his cell phone, that he keeps our bedroom at Icelandic temperatures, that he reloads dishes I've already placed in the dishwasher (according to his exacting specifications) when he thinks I'm not looking, and that he's unnaturally legalistic about backing the car into the garage. (Driving in nose-first works just fine, thank you, and not a single mirror need be lost.)

Every marriage has its quirks, of course. Two humans can only cohabitate for so long before weak spots and rough edges start to show. But add in a couple kids, stir in life's stresses and pressures, mix with some trauma and tragedy, glaze with the basic selfishness of human nature, and voilà—you've got a recipe for trouble.

A Radical Shift

A few years ago, Mark and I cooked up some trouble that no amount of eye gazing could fix. Neither of us intentionally sabotaged our marriage, but over-extended schedules, miscommunication, and conflicting goals gradually boiled over into estrangement and confusion. I cannot remember a more miserable time.

One of our problems was that I was traveling too much, performing concerts around North America.

Mark felt abandoned: Can't she see she's sacrificing the needs of our family for her ministry and career?

I felt unsupported: Doesn't he understand I'm doing everything humanly possible, burning the candle at both ends, in order to still be there for the family and live up to my spiritual calling and professional obligations?

The only thing we could agree on was that we weren't meeting each other's needs.

I found myself on a flight to Chicago for yet another concert, hunched in my seat, staring out the window, trying to hide my tears from my seatmates. Three hours earlier I'd raced out of the house (late as usual); Mark and I had exchanged a cold good-bye. I felt defensive and hopeless and very lonely. I knew something had to change. Mark, preferably.

I'd been carrying a book around in my travel bag for months—As For Me and My House by Walter Wangerin. A friend had recommended it to me as her favorite tome on marriage, and I kept meaning to read it. I wrestled it from beneath the seat in front of me and cracked open the cover, skeptical about the possibility of finding any real help in the pages. But by the time the plane landed, my understanding of marriage had begun to radically shift.

The idea I'll always remember from Wangerin's book was his suggestion that there are three entities in a marriage: the husband, the wife, and a new, holy creation—the marriage itself. Wangerin pointed out that as long as the focus is on whether each individual's needs are being met, the marriage will be filled with defensiveness and accusation. But if the focus is on what a couple can do to best serve the marriage, to deepen and widen it and help it flourish, then both partners can work unselfishly to that end.

Crammed into the second-to-last row of a 737, I began to see that our marriage wasn't just about Mark and Carolyn. God had invited us to work with him in creating something new and precious; our relationship was a being that needed care. We wouldn't think of ignoring the children God had entrusted to us. Why had it been okay to neglect the relationship he'd given us? I'd been focused on the kids, on ministry, on work, and I expected my marriage to support and sustain me through a busy time. I'd forgotten that a marriage, like all living things, needs nourishment to grow.

I came home to a distant husband and a chaotic house, and I wondered how I was going to put my paradigm shift into any useful practice. But I haltingly shared it with Mark, and I saw a flicker of something in his gray-blue eyes. I think it was hope.

Pulse-quickening Questions

It took a long time to rebuild what we'd let fall into disrepair. We had to stand, side by side, and look at our marriage as if it were a fixer-upper we were going to remodel. I began to put better boundaries between work and family; Mark worked to move from a position of guardedness back into trust. Slowly we became a team again, aiming for the same goals. And one day, 18 months after my Chicago flight, Mark murmured as we drifted off to sleep, "Hey. Things are good." And, reloaded dishwashers notwithstanding, they were.

But that's not the end of the story. In the intervening years, it's dawned on us that God calls us to look beyond ourselves not only to learn how we can serve our marriage, but also to discover how our marriage can serve the world. We're blessed in order to be a blessing; that's the way God's been running things since the days of Abraham and Sarah. Every good gift we're given—time, talents, resources—is meant to be passed on in some way. The gift of a good marriage is no exception.

So Mark and I have begun to ask some pulse-quickening questions: How is our marriage adding to the kingdom of God? Who is our marriage blessing? What are we part of that's bigger than ourselves?

This new vision of what our marriage is even for works itself out in a variety of ways. During football season, it means that I take a larger share of the domestic load so Mark can enhance his work as a high school counselor by being a volunteer coach. During my own touring season, our roles are reversed. But the best times are when we get to serve, in big and small ways, together.

Holy Together

A couple of spring breaks ago, Mark took a group of 11th grade students to Juarez, Mexico, to build a playground for children living in an incredibly impoverished area called The Kilometers. I came along, and we brought our young son and daughter as well. Conditions weren't the stuff of romantic get-aways—we slept on the floor of a rustic church basement, listening to the scurry of cockroaches and the whistle of desert winds through the holes in the walls. Fine dining was not in the cards; almost every person on the trip became violently ill throughout the 10 days we were there.

Still, there was an unmistakable sense of being a part of something holy. The high school students weren't church kids, but they met Mexican Christians who were deeply in love with Jesus, and they were intrigued. All of us wept for the indignities we saw, but we were thrilled to feel, in some small way, we were making a difference.

One night we worked on our job site long into the evening, spreading out newly poured concrete with rakes and shovels and dirty bare feet. Our backs ached, our eyes and skin stung from the constant assault of sand and wind. But a Mexican sunset is beautiful even in The Kilometers, and as pinks and oranges streaked the sky, I looked around for my husband. He was in a huddle of teenagers, all of them giddy with the power of doing something good. Our four-year-old was tugging on his sleeve, eager for him to meet her new Mexican friend. He was busy. But I managed to catch his blue-gray eyes, and for a long, romantic moment, he held my gaze. Then we looked out together, friends and lovers, at the work left to be done.

Carolyn Arends, singer and songwriter, is a columnist for our sister publication Christianity Today. She's also author of Wrestling with Angels: Adventures with Faith and Doubt (Harvest House). www.carolynarends.com

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian Woman magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Today's Christian Woman.

Comments welcome here.