Wrestling With Angels

Lessons From an Usher

2011-12-28T17:38:00.000-08:00

Lessons From an Usher
What I learned about humility from a gentle greeter.
(In the December issues of Christianity Today, posted online 12/27/2011)

A seminarian recently told me about the time he was chatting with a high-achieving classmate after they had both completed a difficult final exam. "You know that question on humility?" his friend asked. "I nailed it!"

The irony got me thinking about my friend Jimmy.

Jimmy is an usher at a church I used to attend; he takes his duties seriously. Every Sunday, Jimmy is a reliably warm, bespectacled, suspendered presence in the church foyer, handing out bulletins, clasping hands, and sneaking candy to the kids. Knowing my interest in music, Jimmy is always keen to report to me (even now, when I come to visit) which gospel quartets he recorded off the radio over the past week. Once, he gave my young son a wristwatch he no longer needed, out of the blue, much to their mutual delight.

There is something unusual about Jimmy. I know nothing of his background—there may have been an accident in the past or simply a genetic quirk. I only know that he is what some people call "a little different."

At a New Year's Eve service several years ago, I discovered that Jimmy is different from most of us in the best possible way. The church congregation traditionally celebrates Communion together just before midnight, and then invites people to share some of the past year's triumphs and trials. That particular year, there was a moving mix of thankfulness and heartache—cancer healed and cancer raging, jobs found and lost, relationships mended and some still up for prayer. Eventually, Jimmy stood up and asked if he could tell us about a praise item.

"This year," Jimmy started, with tears in his eyes, "I learned how much I can count on God. See, I promised him I would pray for a list of people every day. But when I started, I couldn't remember who I was supposed to pray for, and I got frustrated. So I asked God to help me remember. After that, all the names came to mind, every time. And I never could have remembered on my own, so I knew it was God!" And then Jimmy sat down.

That night, Jimmy taught me something important about humility. Richard Foster defines humility not as a "less-than" type of self-abasement, but as an ability to "live as close to the truth as possible: the truth about ourselves, the truth about others, the truth about the world in which we live." When we are humble, we are un-fussily realistic about our strengths and weaknesses—about what we are capable of, and what we are not. We are also clear on the fact that we are not God, and that we cannot heal or transform ourselves on our own. Thus, when growth or change happens, it is only in humility that we can identify God's care and provision for us.

When we are proud, we don't have an accurate picture of the way things really are, and we end up believing we are engineering our own progress. And then we wonder why we don't see God moving in our lives. This phenomenon might be another layer of what the apostle Paul meant when he told us we would best know God's strength in our own weakness.

A few weeks after that New Year's Eve, I found myself praying about a financial shortfall my husband and I were facing at the end of the month. Three days later, an unexpected check arrived in the mail, matching almost to the penny the amount we needed. My skeptical mind knew the money could have been purely coincidental, but in that instance I had the unprovable but resolute sense that it was God's answer to my prayer. I was of course flooded with immediate gratitude, but within minutes I was undergoing mental gymnastics. What if I hadn't prayed? I wondered. Would God have provided anyway? Do I really have to ask when he knows our needs before we do?

I don't generally hear the audible voice of God. But that particular afternoon, I could have sworn I heard a chuckle. Of course I would have provided, it seemed God was saying. But you wouldn't have had the joy of knowing it was me.

Jimmy has the kind of humility that allows him to recognize God doing what only God can do in his life. He may never go to seminary, but he has a rather advanced understanding of what James and Peter might have meant when they told us to "humble ourselves in the sight of the Lord." I have known for a long time that humility is required in order to acknowledge God's supremacy. But what Jimmy has taught me is that humility not only helps us in the offering of our prayers. It is also essential to recognizing their answers.

Power Washed By God (New CT Column)

2011-10-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

Power Washed by God
The blessings—and danger—of divine proximity.
(In the October issue of Christianity Today, posted online 10/17/2011)

Last summer, we hired a man with a power washer to clean our deck. As he blasted the dirt that had defied our feeble garden hose, I found myself wishing all the muck in my life could be dealt with so efficiently. Sticky kitchen floor? Messy relationships? Unleash the water pressure!

But not so fast. Two weeks earlier, a neighbor's teenager, Matt, was cleaning the driveway with a rented power washer when he felt an ant crawling on his calf. Instinctively, he turned the nozzle toward his leg, obliterating the insect—and, unfortunately, some layers of muscle and tissue. Matt's injury is not uncommon; an online search produces innumerable accounts of gruesome wounds and even fatalities related to the use of pressure washers.

So I decided to give my handyman and his potentially flesh-stripping machine a wide berth. I had to do some reading for a biblical studies course, so I sat by my kitchen window and kept one eye on my yard and the other on the Pentateuch.

I was making my way through Exodus, feeling a little jealous of my spiritual ancestors. It seemed they never had to wonder if God was there. They had only to follow pillars of cloud and fire, gathering up the manna served fresh daily from God's kitchen. At Sinai, Yahweh made his presence even harder to miss, clearing his throat with thunder, lightning, trumpet blasts, trembling mountains, and billowing smoke.

I wondered why the present-day actions of the immutable God sometimes seem so muted in contrast to the God of Moses. I wouldn't mind a pillar of cloud or fire when I need direction, or some manna on my front lawn when I pray for provision.

But 10 chapters into Leviticus, I sobered up to the dangerous side of God's proximity to the Israelites. They had just set up the tabernacle, and two of Moses' nephews had been recruited for the priesthood. When they failed to follow protocol and offered "unauthorized fire" at the altar, "fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord" (Lev. 10:1-2).

This seems a little harsh. Two guys make one mistake their first day on the job, and they get "fired." But other similar incidents had the same tragic result: Achan's stashed plunder (Josh. 7), Uzzah's casualness with the ark (2 Sam. 6), Ananias and Sapphira lying about their offering (Acts 5). In each case, God was inaugurating a new era in salvation history, and in each case, his holiness was underestimated with dreadful consequences.

These episodes remind me of a strategy employed by one of my schoolteacher friends. On day one, he sends the first unruly student into the hallway, knowing that an early show of authority makes the rest of the year go smoothly. It is tempting to think of the disturbing accounts of God's judgment as cases of extreme classroom management.

But as I struggle to reconcile Yahweh's apparent "zero tolerance" policy in these stories with the inexhaustible mercy we see in Jesus, I wonder if both the wonderful and awful aspects of God's power experienced at close range aren't more like the blasts of a pressure washer than the techniques of an irate teacher. God's holiness is the very thing we need to get wholly clean. But, unmitigated, it's too much for us. We can't survive it.

Maybe Yahweh's holiness (and its sometimes fiery consequences) became more visible at turning points in salvation history less because God wanted to set a stern example, and more because at those moments he'd drawn particularly near to his people in all his power. As envious as I might be of God's visibility to the Israelites, they clearly sensed the danger inherent in his proximity. In Exodus, they ask Moses to speak to God on their behalf, so they can stay at a safe distance.

When I grasp that God's holiness is necessary for my cleansing but is also, by its nature, a vaporizing force, two things come into clearer focus. First, I begin to perceive God's judgment as no more malevolent than the blast of water from a pressure washer. It is simply God's holiness doing what God's holiness does. Second, this reality points to one reason we need a mediator. Jesus is the only human who could vicariously absorb (and ultimately survive) the cleansing we so desperately need. Because of him, we are washed not by a force so intense it annihilates us, but rather by the blood of the Lamb.

Just like I wish I could turn the power washer on all the messes of my life (without the resulting carnage), I still find myself longing for more visible manifestations of God's nearness and power. But in the final analysis, I am grateful that the God who once resided in a cloud on the mountain now lives in us, baptizing us not with an obliterating flood, but with his Spirit.

Copyright © 2011 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

A Both/And Path to Truth

2011-08-30T08:52:00.000-07:00

A Both/And Path to Truth

Why the narrow way to faith is also expansive.

(In the August issue of Christianity Today, posted online 8/15/2011)

My friend John Blase is a writer who chooses his words with utmost care. So when I noticed he refers to his wife as his "girlfriend" in his blogs, I knew the quirk was intentional. It turns out the habit goes back to the time when John was asked whether the lovely lady next to him was his wife or his girlfriend. He gave the only answer that made sense: "Yes."

I've been thinking about John and his girlfriend/wife a lot lately, especially when I read my Bible. Is it faith or works? I demand of the text, and the answer seems to be: "Yes." Is God a God of revelation or of mystery? Is he as close as a whisper or beyond all things? Yes. Yes. Is the kingdom of heaven now or not yet? Should I be wise as a serpent or innocent as a dove? Should I fall headlong into grace or work out my salvation with fear and trembling? Yes. Yes. Yes.

A lifetime of evangelical thinking has primed me for either/or questions,breeding a deep distrust of both/and propositions. After all, one of the distinguishing features of Christianity is its insistence that there is one way to God. A wariness of pluralistic worldviews is completely warranted. But if I'm not careful, that insistence can mutate into creating artificial schisms that fly in the face of a God who desires to make us whole in radical ways.

When we fall for false dualities, we end up arguing over whether the gospel is concerned with ministering to the poor or proclaiming the Word. We believe our theology must emphasize either a free gift of grace or a call to holy living. In a myriad of areas, we polarize, dichotomize, and greatly minimize the life God has for us.

In his book Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith, Richard J. Foster argues for a larger, less-fragmented view of life in Christ by exploring six great traditions that have ebbed and flowed throughout Christian history. My husband and I once used these six "streams" as curriculum for adults at a family camp. It was fascinating to observe the ways that personality and denominational background influenced affinities and aversions to the various traditions.

Our introverts extolled the Contemplative Tradition, with its focus on prayer and meditation. The activists among us couldn't wait to cover the Social Justice Tradition. Our Pentecostals wondered why we were taking so long to get to the Charismatic Tradition's exploration of the Spirit-filled life, while the Baptists felt we should begin and end with the Evangelical Tradition and its insistence upon the centrality of Scripture. Most of us were intrigued by the Incarnational Tradition's assertion that all aspects of life should be lived sacramentally; almost none of us had a natural attraction to the Holiness Tradition, because an emphasis on virtuous living had been so frequently divorced from grace in our past experience.

Foster's careful analysis showed us how these traditions have informed, provoked, and corrected each other over time. Even in our little camp group, we saw how our various inclinations could help us balance each other; it took all of us to make up the body of Christ. And we could concede that, while we'd always be naturally stronger in some areas than others, there was no excuse for completely ignoring (let alone disparaging) whole planes of life in God's kingdom.

This insight is easier to write about than live. Efficient people and organizations are lauded for decisive and focused thinking; they find a singular mandate and stick to it. The paradox that so typified Jesus' teaching is expansive, complex, and nuanced. It requires mulling and wrestling; it forces huge shifts in paradigm and, eventually, practice. When we are asked to hold two seemingly opposite truths in tension, we experience confusion (which can be painful) before we get to any sort of cohesion. So, we often bail and settle for one pole or the other, congratulating ourselves for taking a stand, but losing at least half of what God has for us in the process.

Most of us would like our faith to reduce tension. But, according to Jesus (who told us to be anxious for nothing but always alert, to be last in order to be first, to be weak to be strong, and to lose our lives to find them), tension is required.

When my producer friend Roy Salmond noticed that his church included a desire for "vibrant faith" in its mission statement, his musical mind instantly linked vibrancy with vibration. A vibrant faith, he warned his fellow congregants, may necessitate oscillation and tension. In the absence of motion, there's no music.

I too desire a vibrant faith. So I am trying to remember that the Way is narrow, but the life we're called to is wide and deep. Still, I can't help asking: Is following Jesus an act of simple trust, or an adventure of unimaginable complexity?

Yes.

Comments welcome below, or join the CT Discussion

Hardworking Sloths

2011-06-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

Hardworking Sloths
Disguising Spiritual Laziness
Carolyn Arends
(In the June issue of Christianity Today, posted online 06/13/2011)

My family used to play "Where's Waldo?" with a three-toed sloth at the zoo; eventually we'd find him suspended like a hammock from a tree branch above us. I used to think he got a bad rap as nature's laziest creature. After all, I don't have the strength to hold myself upside down on a set of monkey bars for 10 seconds. Then a zoo volunteer explained that sloths have curved claws that allow them to dig into branches and hang without effort. Our sloth, it turns out, really was as unmotivated as he looked.

I found myself thinking about that lethargic critter the other day while listening to a recorded Eugene Peterson lecture and arguing with my MP3 player.

Peterson: Pastors are highly susceptible to the sin of sloth.

Me: What are you talking about? Pastors are some of the most overworked people alive.

Peterson: Sloth is most often evidenced in busyness … in frantic running around, trying to be everything to everyone, and then having no time to listen or pray, no time to become the person who is doing these things.

Score one for Peterson.

I'm not a pastor. But I am busy, like almost everyone I know. When Peterson declares that "the pastor's primary responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God," I can readily apply that job description to my roles as wife, mother, musician, and author. The mandate can be stated even more succinctly regarding my task as a human: Pay attention to God. If I don't, I'm guilty of spiritual sloth, no matter how hard I'm working. In truth, there is an inverse relationship between how overwhelmed I am doing things and how much energy I can give to being attentive.

But did I mention I'm really busy?

Part of the problem is that spiritual receptivity requires unglamorous practices like prayer, time in Scripture, and attentiveness to what God is doing in the people around me. Telling me, "Prayer promotes spiritual growth!" has as much wow-factor as announcing, "Reducing calories leads to weight loss!" I want something new—a development that will lead to breakthrough. Peterson observes that spiritual disciplines have "not been tried and discarded because [they] didn't work, but tried and found difficult (and more than a little tedious) and so shelved in favor of something or other that could be fit into a busy [person's] schedule."

Scheduling is no small matter. Attending takes time without offering quantifiable results. It requires stillness in a culture that rewards industriousness. It's inefficient in a world that considers getting things done next to godliness. A pastor who refuses to be slothful in the areas of silence and reflection stands a good chance of getting fired.

Our emphasis on external productivity over internal fidelity goes back a long way. Consider the case of King Saul, reported in 1 Samuel 13. Early in his kingship, Saul and the prophet Samuel had an understanding: Samuel would lead the people spiritually, and Saul would lead militarily. However, holed up with his troops facing a brigade of Philistines, Saul faced a dilemma. Samuel failed to show up on time to offer the sacrifice that Saul and his men relied on to keep them in God's favor. As typically happens when things go off schedule, disorganization set in. The longer Saul waited, the more restless his men became; he was losing them.

Saul did what any good manager would do. He took action. He offered the sacrifice himself.

If I were conducting Saul's job evaluation, I'd give him a bonus. He took initiative and solved the problem, saving time and boosting morale in the process. But Samuel didn't see it that way. He told Saul he had failed to keep God's command, and thus would be deposed by an incoming king—a "man after God's own heart" better suited for the job.

God is not looking for leaders who take matters into their own hands. He values faithfulness over efficiency. It's no good to organize the whole world yet be oblivious to the God who created it and holds it together. Yes, we have practical commitments we need to take seriously. But part of being responsible is being response-able: centering our lives in such a way that we can respond to the world around us with the mind of Christ. Such response-ability is impossible if our obligations crowd out any opportunity to get to know him better.

It makes sense that the sloth is the official mascot of spiritual lethargy. I've begun to see my incessant busyness as the set of claws that keep me holding on for dear life, dug in, hanging upside down, not getting anywhere. With God's help, I want to let go, trusting him to show me how to live right side up. My job is to pay attention.

Comments welcome below, or join the CT discussion.

Going Down Singing

2011-04-18T12:28:00.000-07:00

Going down singing
Why we should remember that we will die.

Carolyn Arends
(In the April Issue of Christianity Today, posted online 04/18/2011)

The day before he died, my father wore what his doctors called the "Star Wars mask"—a high-tech oxygen system that covered most of his face. Pneumonia made his breathing extremely labored, but that didn't keep him from chatting.

"Pardon?" my mom would ask patiently, trying to decipher his muffled sounds. Exasperated, he'd yank off the mask, bringing himself to the brink of respiratory arrest to ask about hockey trades or complain about the hospital food.

After several hours, he gave up on conversation. He started singing.

"What are you humming?" my mom asked. My dad repeatedly tried to answer through the mask before yanking it off again. "With Christ in the Vessel, I Can Smile at the Storm," he gasped. "Wow," murmured my mom, before singing it with him.

My dad learned "With Christ in the Vessel" at Camp Imadene in 1949, the summer he asked Jesus into his 8-year-old heart. Six decades later, hours before his death, that silly old camp song was still embedded in his soul and mind, and he was singing it at the top of his nearly-worn-out lungs.

I have never liked thinking about my own death. But I've considered it enough to know I hope I go down singing, or at least speaking or thinking, something about Jesus.

I suppose that is why I found myself sobbing on an airplane while reading Margaret Guenther's The Practice of Prayer. In one section, Guenther discusses the Eastern Christian discipline of continuously repeating the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." She reports her own efforts to incorporate the practice into her daily life, even sizing up the logs she chops for firewood by the number of Jesus Prayers she'll likely get through before they are cut.

I love the idea of having such truth-giving words ingrained into my routine. But here's Guenther's line that really got to me: "I hope that by imprinting [the Jesus Prayer] on my subconscious, it will be with me for the rest of my life, especially at the end, when other words will perhaps be lost to me."

Guenther, a former professor at General Theological Seminary in New York, is an accomplished and educated woman. Yet she is humble and practical enough to do what she can to prepare for her own death—and for the possibility that even before her death, her mind might fade into dementia. In a culture consumed with denying mortality, here is a woman who plans for it, in a way that affects the minutiae of her life now.

Many early Christian communities encouraged believers to engage in the spiritual discipline of considering their own deaths—not in order to create morbid fear, but to put this life in the proper perspective. Memento mori, medieval monks would say to each other in the hallways. "Remember your mortality," or, more literally, "Remember you will die."

Death unaddressed is the bogeyman in the basement; it keeps us looking over our shoulders and holds us back from entering joyously into the days we are given. But death dragged out from the shadows and held up to the light of the gospel not only loses its sting, it becomes an essential reminder to wisely use the life we have.

When we remember the mortality of those around us, they become more valuable to us. Madeleine L'Engle once noted that when people die, it is the sins of omission, rather than the sins of commission, that haunt us. "If only I had called more," we lament. Remembering a loved one's death before it happens can spur us into the sort of action we won't regret later.

And remembering our own mortality helps reorder our priorities; a race toward a finish line has a different sense of purpose and urgency than a jog around the block. When a believer acknowledges that he is headed toward death (tomorrow or in 50 years), he can stop expending the tremendous energy it takes to deny his mortality and start living into his eternal destiny, here and now. And he can be intentional about investing himself in the things he wants to be with him at the end, much the way Guenther seeks to make the Jesus Prayer a permanent part of her psyche.

I don't want to romanticize death. My friend Bernie calls it "the Great Gash," and I must confess that on the six-month anniversary of my father's passing, the hole left by him is still gaping.

But though death hurts, it is not the end. Though we mourn, we do not mourn as those who have no hope. And so I offer my dread of death to the Author of Life, asking him to help me to number my days rightly. I don't know how many I've got, but I want to use every one of them to get the truth about who Jesus is—and who I am in him—more deeply ingrained.

That's why I'm teaching my kids "With Christ in the Vessel." We sing it at the top of our lungs.

Comments welcome below, or join the CT Discussion

Satan's a Goner (Lessons Learned From a Headless Snake)

2011-03-25T22:36:00.000-07:00

Satan's a Goner

A lesson from a headless snake.

Carolyn Arends | posted 3/25/2011 10:10AM

As a kid, I loved Mission Sundays, when missionaries on furlough brought special reports in place of a sermon. Sometimes they wore exotic, foreign clothing; they almost always showed a tray of slides documenting their adventures. If they were from a dangerous enough land, the youth in our congregation would emerge from our Sunday stupor and listen intently.

There is one visit I've never forgotten. The missionaries were a married couple stationed in what appeared to be a particularly steamy jungle. I'm sure they gave a full report on churches planted or commitments made or translations begun. I don't remember much of that. What has always stayed with me is the story they shared about a snake.

One day, they told us, an enormous snake—much longer than a man—slithered its way right through their front door and into the kitchen of their simple home. Terrified, they ran outside and searched frantically for a local who might know what to do. A machete-wielding neighbor came to the rescue, calmly marching into their house and decapitating the snake with one clean chop.

The neighbor reemerged triumphant and assured the missionaries that the reptile had been defeated. But there was a catch, he warned: It was going to take a while for the snake to realize it was dead.

A snake's neurology and blood flow are such that it can take considerable time for it to stop moving even after decapitation. For the next several hours, the missionaries were forced to wait outside while the snake thrashed about, smashing furniture and flailing against walls and windows, wreaking havoc until its body finally understood that it no longer had a head.

Sweating in the heat, they had felt frustrated and a little sickened but also grateful that the snake's rampage wouldn't last forever. And at some point in their waiting, they told us, they had a mutual epiphany.

I leaned in with the rest of the congregation, queasy and fascinated. "Do you see it?" asked the husband. "Satan is a lot like that big old snake. He's already been defeated. He just doesn't know it yet. In the meantime, he's going to do some damage. But never forget that he's a goner."

The story captured our imaginations then because it was graphic and gory—a stark contrast to the normally genteel sermonizing we were used to receiving. But the story haunts me because I have come to believe it is an accurate picture of the universe. We are in the thrashing time, a season characterized by our pervasive capacity to do violence to each other and ourselves. The temptation is to despair. We have to remember, though, that it won't last forever. Jesus has already crushed the serpent's head.

Recently I heard a message from theologian Gary Deddo that got me thinking about that snake. Deddo challenges the tendency many of us have to be dualists—imagining God and Satan as equal foes deadlocked in mortal combat. To be certain, Deddo acknowledges, there is an immeasurable amount of evil in our world. But compared with God's love and power, all the evil in the universe doesn't cover the head of a pin. Love wins. Satan doesn't stand a chance.

Thus, though we wrestle with the brokenness that plagues the world, and ourselves, we do so not with grim resignation but with hopeful defiance. We face both our addictions and afflictions not with a faint, white-knuckled hope that someday we will be healed, but rather with an assurance that we are living slowly but surely into the healing already obtained on the Cross. There is still a waiting. In some cases the healing may not come in fullness until we are face-to-face with our Victor—but come it will. Guaranteed.

I've been trying to figure out what all of this means with respect to the way we deal with evil and injustice in our world. In linear, human time, perhaps the safest thing to do is batten down the hatches and wait somewhere secure till the thrashing is over. But one of the mysteries of living in God's time rather than our own is that, although the end of the story has already been determined, somehow he is still using us to write it. Because Jesus lives in us through his Spirit, we are called not just to anticipate the overcoming but also to be part of bringing it to fruition.

And so we are called to fight poverty, oppression, greed, and malice—in the world and in our own spirits. We are invited to live in light of the reality that greater by far is the living God who is within us than the dead snake thrashing about in this world.

Comments welcome below, or join the CT discussion

Can't Get No Satisfaction

2010-12-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

Can't Get No Satisfaction

Addiction is the spiritual disease of our time.

Carolyn Arends | posted 12/09/2010 09:19AM

I've never met a potato chip I didn't like. Actually, I've never met a potato chip that didn't call my name from behind the pantry door until I was forced to eat it and every one of its salty companions. So when I heard the phrase "carbohydrate addiction," I knew nutritionists were on to something. It turns out there are foods that can actually increase your hunger when you consume them, creating an escalating, recurring need for the very substances that intensify the problem.

The reality of carb addiction is accepted more widely in popular culture than in scientific communities. But most people can verify anecdotally that some food only makes them hungrier.

It seems to me that this phenomenon symbolizes much of what plagues the human condition. We drink liquids that dehydrate us. We buy objects that require us to buy more objects. We make some money, ratchet up our lifestyle in response, and find we need more income to sustain us. The harder we work, the more work there is to do. And the harder we play, the more elusive the fun. Ask anyone working in Hollywood special effects, or in extreme sports, or in the sex trade industry, and all will tell you the same thing: Yesterday's thrill is today's old news. We always need more.

One of the hallmarks of addiction is "tolerance"—the experience of requiring an ever-increasing amount of a particular substance or behavior in order for it to satiate us. We recognize that dynamic indisputably in chemical dependencies. But it's harder to spot for those of us who are compulsive about work, food, approval, ministry, possessions, intimacy, social media, security, or any other number of more culturally acceptable addictions.

Gerald May was a psychiatrist whose work with chemically addicted people convinced him of two things: Addiction is, at root, a spiritual issue; and every human is addicted to some variety of substances, behaviors, and thought patterns. In his classic Addiction and Grace, May argues that each of us has a profound desire for God. When that desire is inevitably frustrated or misdirected in a fallen world, we experience pain. We deal with that pain in two ways. We repress the longing, or we attach it to something else.

According to May, attachment "bonds and enslaves the energy of desire" to certain people, things, or behaviors until we are obsessed by unworthy masters who can never truly satisfy. Tragically, our attachment to anything other than God (even to things that are not themselves bad) uses up our desire for God. It truly "wastes" us.

May calls addiction "the spiritual disease of our time," but it's not an exclusively modern phenomenon. There's a passage in Haggai that seems so shockingly current that it's hard to believe it was written over 2,500 years ago. The Israelites had returned from their Babylonian exile to find the temple in ruins. They intended to rebuild it, but had their own places to fix and fields to replant; they were too busy.

"Is it a time," God asked through the prophet, "for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin? … Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much, but have harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it" (Hag. 1:4-6).

Work that is unproductive, food and drink that don't fill or quench, money that doesn't last. The Israelites, to quote a much later poet, can't get no satisfaction. God tells them that life is a treadmill of diminishing returns because they have neglected the temple, and the only way to enjoy the sort of productive, satisfying existence he intends for them is to spend time in that holy place once more.

Throughout Scripture, God continually develops the concept of the temple as the place he meets with his people. By the New Testament, it's clear that the temple is now inside of us. So I read Haggai and begin to understand: Satisfaction comes only when I spend intentional time with God. It comes when that original longing for God—a desire that's been mutated into a thousand splintering directions—gets redirected back to him.

Six hundred years after the Babylonian exile, Jesus addresses every problem Haggai describes. Crops don't grow? Christ is the Vine, and we are the branches. Food and drink don't satisfy? Jesus is the Bread of Life and Living Water. Clothes don't warm? The Messiah alone can cover our sin. Wages disappear? Store up your treasures in heaven.

The desire for fullness, wellness, wholeness, productivity, security, and satisfaction turns out to be a desire for … Jesus. All substitutes, even salty, crunchy ones, only intensify the hunger.

Comments welcome BELOW or on CT'S SITE.

Hospitality Sweet

2010-10-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

Hospitality Sweet

One of the forgotten keys to the dynamic worship of God.

Carolyn Arends | posted 10/06/2010 10:07AM

On a recent family vacation, we stayed with two sets of friends. We spent the first night in a small prairie town, in the lovely but simple home of some fellow musicians who fed us hamburgers and offered us a hide-a-bed. The second night we spent visiting the gorgeous, new urban house of wealthier friends who fed us organic roast and outfitted the guest bed with 1,000-thread-count sheets. In both places, the hospitality was extraordinary. Both hosts thought of what we needed before we did—clean towels, snacks for the road. Although the resources were quite different, the spirit was wonderfully the same. We felt so at home both nights that we talked into the wee hours about things that mattered, including our jobs, our families, and our churches.

I've attended some 2,000 church services in my lifetime, both as a church member and as a guest musician at a wide variety of gatherings across North America. I've participated in many different approaches to "doing" church.

We've sung from hymnals, songbooks, and PowerPoint slides with slick video backgrounds. We've been accompanied by choirs, folk singers, and rock bands. We've heard preaching from ministers in robes, suits, and graphic tees. We've met in cathedrals, sanctuaries, gymnasiums, and living rooms. We've read formal liturgies and followed the unspoken liturgies of a particular church's service format. Almost always, we have taken an offering.

We have called it all "church," and we've argued about the right way to do it in order to give God glory, reach seekers, and foster spiritual growth. Sometimes we've had trouble separating our aesthetic preferences from our theologies and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

I have my own biases, and it's almost impossible to perceive any worship service outside of that lens. But lately I've been constructing a mental catalog of gatherings I've attended that were especially worshipful, challenging, or nourishing. I've been shocked by how widely they range in style, size, and polish. I can recall a wonderful communal awareness of God's presence in churches mega and miniscule, charismatic and conservative, contemporary and classical. (And I have found only empty ritual in a similar range of gatherings.)

Evidently, God will move wherever and whenever he pleases, regardless of our resources and plans. But when I look at my list of the most memorable gatherings, I see certain commonalities. Each of those services—whether led by a gifted team of professionals or by decidedly less proficient volunteers—was thoroughly Christocentric and profoundly reverent. No surprises there. The common characteristic that I least expected? Hospitality.

Robert Webber was the first person I heard speak about hospitality in the context of worship. He told a story about attending an unfamiliar church while traveling. About half of the church members constituted the choir, sitting up front in the loft. When it was time to sing, the choir director turned to the congregation and took the time to teach each parishioner his part, going over the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass lines until everyone knew what to do. Webber claimed that in the course of the opening song, guided by the choir at the front, he went from being a stranger to someone who belonged. He knew exactly how to enter into that community's worship, because he had been taught his part in it.

"In the church," Webber concluded, "singing is hospitality."

I've been in churches where the singing (not to mention the praying and preaching) is impressive and professional, but not hospitable. Those services have been more of a show than a family reunion, more a presentation than a meal together at a life-giving table. They have been effective to a point, but they haven't held a candle to hospitable churches that use every resource available (from the church's architecture to its care in establishing and teaching its liturgies in any style) to make each person included and sure of her part.

Hospitality matters because every time we worship together, we are drawn not only into our particular community, but also into the community of angels and saints who are always praising God. Even better, we are being reminded that we are included in the circle of fellowship between the Father, Son, and Spirit. The Son is the true worship leader who helps us express our thanks to the Father, the phenomenally hospitable God who invites us to make ourselves at home with him.

Church is powerful when it embodies this inclusion—much like our hospitable friends did on our recent family vacation. When church is like that, it becomes the home away from home where we offer each other a place to reunite, be fed, commune, wash, rest, and receive what we need for the road.

Relationship That Leads to Life

2010-08-11T13:44:00.000-07:00

Relationship That Leads to Life

Why God's law is good news.

From the August Issue of Christianity Today

Posted online on August 11, 2010

My husband and I are trying to get our kids to consistently do their chores. We've tried threats and rewards but worry that our extrinsic motivators are holding our kids back from learning to obey simply because it's the right thing to do. "Gee," we long to hear them say, "my folks love me and know what's best for me, so I better pick up that broom and chip in."

Our struggle with our kids got us thinking about God's struggle with us. Surely he wants us to do the right things for the right reasons. As his people, do we behave "Christianly" because of extrinsic or intrinsic factors? As his church, what are our ideas about moral development?

I once spoke at a family camp of believers and nonbelievers who had been meeting for years. One morning, a seminary graduate shared his story with the group. David had weathered a crisis of faith when his father—a sternly religious man and prominent church leader—had been exposed in chronic sexual sin. David said that healing had come slowly and that, looking back, he realized the Christianity of his upbringing had overemphasized "morality" in place of "relationship."

It sounded to me like David's dad might have benefited from a little more emphasis on morality. And I worried that David's take was not what the group needed to hear; two affairs had fractured their community in recent years. To me, it seemed they were suffering from too much relationship and too little morality.

I remember my reaction now with chagrin. I've since seen individuals and church communities with a robust focus on morality fall countless times. I get David's point: An emphasis on holy living without a genuine, life-changing relationship with a holy God can lead to rigid legalism on the one hand or secret sin on the other—and often it leads to both.

I also know Christians who emphasize relationship—and God's un-earnable, inexhaustible love—yet who have catastrophic moral falls. Such failings do not disqualify us for God's forgiveness, but they often have shattering consequences.

So what works? When it comes to shaping character and behavior, is it better to focus on God's law or his grace?

Psalm 119 is a love song to God's law, which seems odd. My friend Steve Bell says he never understood such passion for a moral code until he thought about children playing near the edge of a cliff. Without a fence, the children are always in danger, never able to relax. But if a barrier is installed, they can play freely and without fear. God's law is God's grace. It's a safety fence that brings incredible freedom.

Of course, it's only a matter of time until a kid starts to wonder what's on the other side of the fence. If she doesn't know or trust the fence builder, she might suspect that the barrier is holding her back from bigger fun. So she hops the fence, a lemming for false liberty. Humanity has an extensive track record on this front.

Fortunately, there's more to the story. God's law is not only a safety fence; it's also a mirror that shows us we can't live up to his standards without his help. Jesus comes not to abolish the law but to finally fulfill it. Yet many of us keep hopping the fence. Why? Partly because we still don't really know and trust the fence builder.

God doesn't expect morality in the absence of relationship. The first line of the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20) is not, "You shall have no other gods before me," but, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery." God defines the relationship first, then describes a life lived in its context.

Psychologists warn that extrinsic motivators for morality erode intrinsic ones. When our preachers thunder warnings about living right to avoid God's wrath or earn his favor, we run the risk of drowning out that still, small voice that beckons us to live out the holiness given us solely by our Father's grace.

Conversely, when the message is that our behavior doesn't matter, that God's grace is unmerited and therefore morality is not a major issue, we seem not to know our Father at all.

In the end, it isn't morality versus relationship. It's morality because of relationship. "Grow up," Jesus says in his most famous sermon. "You're kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you" (Matt. 5:48, The Message).

If we know our Father loves us, and we love him, we'll trust whatever he asks of us. We won't need the threats and rewards that can skew real faith toward pharisaism. We'll just pick up our brooms and chip in.

The Risks God Takes

2010-06-17T14:59:00.000-07:00

The Risks God Takes
Why a little church history is a necessary--and dangerous--thing

From the June issue of Christianity Today
Posted online on 06/17/10

My kids are growing up in North American evangelicalism, just like I did. My husband and I load up the family wagon every Sunday for primarily spiritual reasons, but as a byproduct, we are also marinating our offspring in a specific cultural broth. By the time they leave for college, they will have spent 18 years in a Reformational stew.

Church culture is the norm for our kids. They have no reason to believe that Christendom has ever been different, although they do recognize progress in that they can wear jeans on Sunday mornings.

One of the quirks of growing up in certain streams of evangelicalism is a lack of historical context. In my youth, a church father was a dad on the deacons' board. If we had to summarize Christianity's history, we would probably reference the apostle Paul, Billy Graham, and our congregation's building committee.

I would have remained ignorant if it weren't for books. G.K. Chesterton cajoled me to respect tradition as a way of "giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors." My ancestors, it turns out, are a lively bunch. I discovered them scattershot—Augustine's introspection, Eckhart's mysticism, Therese of Lisieux's humility, Benedict's organizational genius. I began to see church history as a trove of devotional information, a 2,000-year stream to be mined for the golden testimonies of saints who pursued God and recorded what happened.

Hungry for context, I delved deeper—and soon realized why we don't share much church history with our kids.

Yes, there are bright lights in the story. But there are also dark moments when the church and state joined hands to form one iron fist. Sacramentalism (the teaching that God's saving grace comes only through the sacraments) was often turned from a means of grace into a way to secure power (for only the church could perform the sacraments). To challenge official church doctrine meant consigning your soul to hell—and the church would likely help you get there quickly.

When Tertullian claimed that "the blood of the martyrs is seed of the church," he could not have dreamed how much blood would be spilled at the hands of other Christians. Like that of Jan Hus, a Bohemian preacher who argued that Scripture should be available to the masses and have the ultimate authority in doctrinal matters. Seeking church reform, he preached against corruption.

When Hus refused to recant his positions before the Council of Constance in 1415, he was condemned as a heretic, strangled, and burned. But a century later, his blood helped to seed the ideas of Martin Luther and Menno Simons. Out of the pain of their difficult labor, my own church tradition was born.

Then there's the case of Michael Sattler, a 16th-century Anabaptist who was pronounced an "arch-heretic," tortured, and executed for concluding that Scripture did not advocate infant baptism. A few days later, Sattler's wife was drowned for holding the same view.

How do we process these stories? I open my Bible, and I recognize my debt to those who fought for the accessibility and authority of Scripture. My church holds a baptismal service, and I think of those who were drowned for claiming the right to be baptized as adults.

I recognize, too, that without dissenting voices, there would have been no Reformation. This tempers my response to fellow Christians whom I believe are doctrinally unorthodox. I disagree with them as my conscience dictates, but I must also respect them as potential sparks in a reforming fire. As long as the church is made up of humans, it will need reform, and reform will require dissent from the status quo.

The story of Christianity ultimately leaves me shocked at the risks God takes with humans. Even the greatest lights in church history were dishearteningly imperfect. For all his heroism, Luther attacked the Jewish faith so polemically the Nazis later misappropriated his writings for their anti-Semitic cause. Reformer Ulrich Zwingli advocated justification by faith and concern for the poor, but he also endorsed the executions of two of his brightest disciples because they became Anabaptists. Simons was an inspired Anabaptist leader, but he overzealously excommunicated many who did not live up to his pious standards.

Yet God did great things through these flawed people, much as he did with Abraham, Isaac, Peter, and Paul. As long as there is a human element in his church, it will be prone to corruption. But as long as his Spirit moves, there will be reform and renewal.

When our kids are ready, we will give them context for their religious heritage. For now, they do not understand that the church they file into on Sunday mornings is a place as dangerous as it is holy. But if God is willing to keep taking a chance on it, so are we.

What do YOU think? Please comment below or on CT's Site

Allow for Space in the Music

2010-04-12T10:47:00.000-07:00

Allow for Space in the Music

Acknowledging the mystery of pain.

From the April issue from Christianity Today
Posted online 04/12/2010

Eighteen months ago, my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer, and my father's rare neurological disease took a hairpin turn for the worse. Their busy lives dissolved into months of treatments, complications, and worst-case scenarios.

Caring for them has been my first real experience with prolonged suffering. I had no clue about the malaise that can spawn from the union of chronic pain and diminished hope. My parents have been heroic. But they have also groped for the meaning of their pain and its remedy, and have found neither.

Through it all I have tried to offer comfort, and I've watched others do the same. Sometimes our words have been balms. Sometimes they have been hand grenades.

I recently asked friends online what words and actions had been the least helpful in trying times, and I got a passionate and prolific response. I recognized many of the platitudes listed as things that had come out of my mouth.

Many responses fell into a category I call "Invalidation of the Present Pain." With a bombastic mix of well-meaning fervor and unconscious impatience, we attempt to rush our wounded friend to closure. Classics include "It will all work out in the end," "Time heals all wounds," and glib recitations of Romans 8:28.

Many of those responses are wonderfully true. But so is Jesus' observation that it's those who mourn who are comforted (Matt. 5:4). He knew better than anyone the Happy Ending that awaits us, yet he was deeply respectful of the pain of our present condition. John 11:35 tells us that when Jesus' friend died, he wept; the Greek word refers to a passionate outpouring of grief. So perhaps it is more Christlike to feel pain rather than to try to expedite it.

Other replies revealed what I call "Formula Thinking," an assumption that a uniform explanation can be applied to all suffering. We believe affliction is either discipline from God or an attack from Satan, and that the right degree of repentance—or faith—will turn things around.

The idea that God blesses the good and punishes the bad, and that circumstances line up accordingly, is antithetical to the stories of New Testament believers. (It was also the error of Job's well-meaning friends.) It provides the illusion that we can control outcomes. When people are in pain, we reflexively look for something to blame, so we can avoid that variable and keep out of harm's way. Tragically, our judgments are often salt in our friends' wounds.

Still other responses fell into what I call the "Forced Meaning" reactions. "God has a reason for everything," we claim, and then we try to ram horrible tragedies into redemptive molds—suggesting that cancer, rape, and earthquakes are wake-up calls, strange expressions of grace in God's epic story. But does the Haitian mother holding her child's mangled body really have a chance of finding comfort in this platitude? Is it true?

Scripture reveals a sovereign God actively working in human events, but it also speaks clearly of free will and its consequences. I cannot begin to fathom the tension between the two. But I do believe that most of our suffering is the result of brokenness, and that God is more interested in reconciling all things to himself than in blowing them apart. Yes, God brings good out of tragedy (it's one of his specialties), but that doesn't mean he necessarily engineered the horrors.

After the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami, theologian David Bentley Hart responded eloquently to the Forced Meaning bias, saying that Christians shouldn't "console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God's goodness in this world, or … assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred."

So what can we say in times of trouble? I asked my friends what responses had helped them the most, and their replies reminded me of a piece of advice attributed to Miles Davis: "Think of a note and don't play it." As a musician, I understand—allow for space in the music, don't always rush in, and listen. As a friend and a daughter, I'm starting to get it, too. Sometimes the most helpful thing we can do is think of a truth and embody it rather than say it. When we long to tell a hurting friend that she's not alone, we can simply sit with her as a tangible reminder that she isn't. When we want to reassure a struggling family that God cares for them, a well-timed casserole can demonstrate that very fact. Only when we acknowledge the present pain—and the mysteries that likely shroud its cause—do we earn the right to affirm God's goodness in the midst of it.

And only when we mourn—for ourselves, for each other, and for a world groaning for redemption—can we be comforted … and be a comfort.

Comments welcome BELOW or on CT's Site

Strength in Meekness

2010-02-15T14:54:00.000-08:00

Strength in Meekness
What to do with the anger that saps strength.
From the February issue of Christianity Today
Posted online 02/15/2010

(Note -- if you'd like to hear "Roll It", a song on my new cd inspired by the ideas in this column, go HERE)

My grandmother was great, but she had that special mother-in-law gift of raising my mother's blood pressure. A well-timed comment about cooking or child-rearing would leave my mom stammering and defensive.

As a teenager, I would walk by and whisper, "Water off a duck's back, Mom." She came to understand my code—Let it go; Nana doesn't mean anything by it, and we know you're a good wife and mother—and my whispers usually helped. But now I wish I had known to say, "Roll it onto God, Mom."

Psalm 37:5 tells us to "commit your way to the Lord." Translated, this verse says something like, "roll onto Jehovah thy way." At certain family dinners, that means passing the gravy and "rolling" the need to defend ourselves—as well as our more serious needs and concerns—onto God.

Jesus was quoting from Psalm 37 when he said the meek will inherit the earth, and it turns out that the whole psalm is a primer on meekness. I have always been a little over-meek (reticent, shy, too deferential). So when I read the Bible and find the meek congratulated, I'm delighted.

But there's a catch. It turns out that only two people in Scripture are described as "meek": Moses and Jesus. So meekness likely has little to do with timidity.

If meekness isn't weakness, what is it? The word has an association with domesticated animals, specifically beasts of burden. At first blush, this etymology doesn't thrill me; I don't particularly aspire to be ox-like. But when I think about it, an ox at the plow is not weak but extraordinarily strong. The key, though, is that his power is harnessed and directed. Perhaps meekness is strength that is submitted to an appropriate authority.

Shortly after I began writing this column, I found myself in rare conflict with a friend. At first I thought my anger was giving me strength, bolstering my courage so I could deal with the issues. But the anger soon betrayed me, sapping my energy and compromising my ability to act according to wisdom and divine direction. It's only as I have turned my hurt—and the overwhelming urge to prove that I'm right—over to God that I've begun to be able to respond (and sometimes resist responding) from a place of holy, rather than human, strength.

Psalm 37 is all about strength in meekness. It deals with trusting God to be God, and with not trying to do his job. The meek, for example, don't repay evil for evil; they rely on God for justice (vv. 1-3). Several verses mention that the meek don't fret. And the meek let God provide their hearts' desires rather than trying to manipulate people and circumstances to get what they want (v. 4).

How much energy do I expend trying to secure provisions, control outcomes, and manage people's perceptions of me? Psalm 37 tells us that the meek give that labor up. They trust God's claims that he will provide, protect, and defend, and in so doing free up resources for putting their hands to God's plow. It's a good plan.

But here's the thing: I would be fine with rolling my burdens onto God if I were guaranteed resolution. There's a joke that describes the effects of playing a country song backwards: Your spouse returns, your dog is resurrected, and your truck starts working again. I wish that surrender to God worked the same way.

But faith isn't like that. The biblical witness is that circumstances often get more challenging, not less, when one's way is committed to the Lord. So why roll it onto God if "it" (the need, circumstance, quarrelsome friend, or critical in-law) isn't necessarily going to get fixed?

There are stories about prisoners in Nazi camps who were made to move heavy boulders from one end of a field to the other, only to carry them back again. Many of the men were eventually driven mad, not by the backbreaking nature of the work, but by its futility.

It isn't the experience of being misunderstood (or suffering or poverty) itself that will undo us, but rather the sense that we are enduring hardship to no good end. That's why the apostle Paul emphasized that we do not labor in vain (1 Cor. 15:58). We discover there is no wasted effort or pain, because there is nothing that God cannot redeem.

I have a choice. I can wear myself out pushing the boulders of my life around my prison yard. Or I can be meek, and roll those burdens onto God. I'm not sure exactly what Jesus meant when he said the meek will "inherit the earth," but I've certainly discovered that this world is a better place when I roll it off my shoulders and into his hands.

Comments welcome BELOW or on CT's site

Our Divine Distortion

2009-12-18T11:01:00.000-08:00

Our Divine Distortion

We can't see God clearly without Jesus. O come, Emmanuel.

From the December Issue of Christianity Today

posted online 12/18/2009

When I found a brand new lap-top for half price on eBay, I told my friend and musical colleague Spencer about my bargain of a find. He was worried: "Usually when something's too good to be true …"

"I know," I replied impatiently, "but the seller has a 100 percent approval rating."

"Be careful," warned Spencer.

"Of course," I assured him, annoyed. I wasn't born yesterday.

I sent the seller $1,300 and discovered in very short, sickening order that I had fallen prey to a classic scam. A fraudster had hacked someone's eBay identity in order to relieve easy marks like me of our money.

I felt an absolute fool—and didn't want to tell Spencer. The next time I saw his number on my caller ID, I didn't answer. I could just imagine his "I told you so."

Soon, I was avoiding Spencer completely. And I started to resent him. Why did he have to be so judgmental? Why couldn't he be on my side? Why was I ever friends with that jerk?

Eventually, we had to fly together to perform at a concert. "Whatever happened with that computer thing?" he asked an hour into the flight. Cornered, I finally confessed my foolishness, dreading the inevitable response. But as soon as I told Spencer about my mistake, a strange thing happened. The enemy I had turned him into evaporated. Spencer turned into Spencer again, my teasing but deeply empathetic buddy.

As embarrassed as I was by my eBay error, I felt even dumber about the way I had allowed my shame to distort my perception of a best friend. If my hand had not been forced, I would have remained estranged from him indefinitely.

I've always considered myself perceptive, but the longer I live, the more I discover my susceptibility to misinterpretation. This is true of the way I view my friends, truer of the way I see my enemies, and perhaps truest of the way I perceive God.

I was raised to understand that sin's gravest consequence is the way it forces God to perceive me: God is holy, I'm not, and there's no way he can even look at me until I have the covering of Christ's blood. In my teens, I clipped a poem out of a youth magazine in which the poet asks—and answers—a pressing question: "How can a righteous God look at me, a sinner, and see a precious child? Simple: The Son gets in his eyes."

But what about how I look at God? I've often been oblivious to one of the most insidious byproducts of the Fall: Sin affects my perception of God. Or, to turn a phrase from that poem, the sin gets in my eyes.

Before Adam and Eve had fallen for the first lie, they basked in God's company. But after a few bites of forbidden fruit, they no longer looked forward to seeing their Maker. When he came calling, they hid.

Had God changed? No. Adam and Eve's brokenness altered their perception of God, not his character. Ever since, we humans have been letting our shame poison our understanding of God. He becomes an ogre, or a bookkeeper, or maybe just a disinterested, detached monarch.

Many of us unconsciously relate to God our Father as a Godfather—there's a lot he can do for us when he likes us, but don't get on his bad side. So we avoid him. And the longer we refuse to take his calls, the worse the distortion becomes.

But here is some good news: Jesus is the antidote to our misperceptions. When we speak of the Incarnation, we acknowledge that Jesus is "God con carne"—God with meat on. Our questions about God's character—Is he really about mercy, justice, and a love that just won't quit?—are answered in the person of Jesus.

In one sense, Adam and Eve were right to fear facing God. The consequences of their choices were painful. But even God's seemingly harshest judgment—banishment from the Garden and the Tree of Life—was rooted in love. If the first humans had accessed eternal life in Eden, they would have remained in their brokenness forever. God chose another way—a death and resurrection way that would cost him much—because he was and is and always will be with us and for us.

Christmas clarifies this resoundingly. That's why every time the angels announced Christ's birth they said, "Do not be afraid." Yes, we should fear sin's consequences. But we need not fear the perfect love of a God willing to come and shiver in our skin to save us.

We do not have the power to change God's character. Our Father is our Father. Always has been, always will be. But we will never see him for who he really is until the Son gets in our eyes.

Comments welcome BELOW or on CT's Site

Come, Lord Jesus

2009-10-12T12:05:00.000-07:00

Come, Lord Jesus
Oh wait, He's already here.
From the October issue of Christianity Today
posted online 10/12/2009

I was a guest musician at a church in Winnipeg, engaged in the familiar liturgies of a pre-service prayer huddle. One person prayed for the congregation's safety in inclement weather, another for the technical aspects of the service, and a third kindly remembered my family back home.

When my turn came, I must have used a phrase like, "God, we invite you here among us." I clearly recall the minister's prayer, which followed mine: "We know we do not have to request your presence, because there is nowhere you are not. So we celebrate the fact you are already here with us now."

My head stayed bowed, but my face burned. This guy is correcting my theology with his prayer!

The service went as planned. But throughout the evening, I was mentally defending my choice of words. Of course I know God is everywhere—I've read Psalm 139! I was requesting an extra measure of his presence, an outpouring of his Spirit. Or, if you want to be more precise (and clearly you do), I was praying that God would help us to be open to him. Aren't we just arguing semantics?

I never articulated any of these thoughts to the minister. But the dialogue I've had with him in my head ever since has gradually refined my thinking—a case of iron sharpening particularly dull iron. I now believe that pastor's gentle correction was necessary.

If the psalmist is right—that there truly is nowhere we can go to flee God's presence—why do we act like his attendance is intermittent? And why do we assume it's dependent on us?

"Halfway through the retreat, God showed up," we say. As if he wasn't there before we were, drawing us to that time and place.

"Lord, we welcome you to come," we pray. As if he needs us to usher him into the world he created. As if we do not "live and move and have our being" in him alone (Acts 17:28).

In the Gospels, Jesus makes a simple proclamation with seismic implications: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near" (Matt. 4:17). For those of us who grew up in the hot, scary shadows of brimstone pulpits, the command to repent causes an involuntary shudder. But the Greek word is metanoeite,* which is more invitation than threat. It means "change your mind" or "reconsider."

Reconsider what? According to Jesus, everything you thought you knew about reality. Why? Because the kingdom of heaven is near.

Most of us think of heaven as somewhere out there, the place where God watches from a distance and we will one day join him. But for the biblical writers, heaven is close. In fact, the "first heavens" is a term used to describe the earth's atmosphere. So when Jesus describes the invisible (but very real) realm that God inhabits, he lets us know it's not only out there, but also as near as the atmosphere surrounding our bodies and the air we breathe.

That Winnipeg minister was calling me to repent—to reconsider what I thought I knew about reality and the way God pervades it. I don't have to invoke God's presence. I only have to attend to it.

This change of heart and mind alters the way I approach discipleship. I suspect I have sometimes unconsciously used spiritual disciplines as smoke signals to get God's attention. Now I am learning that they are simply ways of letting him capture mine.

A similar change has occurred in my orientation toward evangelism. I don't have to give a nonbeliever something I have that she doesn't. I need only invite her to open herself up to what God is already doing all around her.

The other day I was trying to describe this shift in my understanding to my friend Roy Salmond. He ran to pull out an article he'd read in Time magazine more than a decade ago. It's an eloquent piece called "The Game of Catch," by Roger Rosenblatt, about baseball, parenthood, and the wordless communication between a father and son tossing the ball around. While the article is in no way religious, one thought in particular has permanently changed Roy's view of life with God.

"They do not call it a game of throw," Roy quoted, grinning. "They call it catch."

Oddly enough, I understood exactly what he meant. Spiritually speaking, I've been preoccupied with throwing the ball; this turns out to be a case in which it would be better to receive than to give.

God is the initiator. We love because he first loved us. We're here because he thought of us and welcomed us into his world. Yes, he stands at the doors to our hearts and knocks, but we need only let him in. We don't have to summon him from another country or galaxy. The kingdom of God is already near.

Repent. It's time to play catch.

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

* Thanks to the kind folks who pointed out that the correct tense of the Greek for repent there should have been "metanoeo". I repent of getting my Greek grammar wrong!

Comments welcome BELOW or on CT's Site

Matter Matters, August, 2009, CT

2009-07-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

Matter Matters

Lessons learned between the couch and a 10k race.

In a department-store line, I watched an undergarment commercial on a screen above the cashier's desk. It featured women expressing dissatisfaction with their figures, while the camera zoomed in on their chests.

It seemed I was watching a series of dismemberments, as the infomercial's editors divorced body parts from their owners in order to direct attention to deficiencies in quality and trajectory. I was struck by how tragic it is that millions of humans—impossibly complex in neurological makeup, fantastically unique, and almost unbearably freighted with potential—walk around obsessed with perceived appendage inadequacies (or superiorities).

This is no news flash: We live in a body-obsessed culture. Materialism—the conviction that only matter can be proven to exist and that belief in transcendence is at best a fond hope, and at worst a dangerous delusion—is the spirit of our age. Ironically, it leaves us with no spirit at all, just our bodies and their appetites, unbridled and insatiable. No wonder we approach the fridge—and each other—with a predatory eye. We're just trying to survive.

I believe that the only cure is to embrace nonmaterial reality as an integral part of the universe and ourselves. The conviction that we cannot be reduced to bodies is foundational to my worldview. It has also enabled me to justify avoiding any sort of consistent physical exercise for much of my life.

My husband is a kinesthetic person; if he goes too long without activity he gets restless. I, on the other hand, can be perfectly and indefinitely happy with a book and a comfortable couch. Although I often have felt a vague sense of guilt (and, lately, gravity), I have found a way to spiritualize my inclinations. I focus on soul things (books, ideas, music, relationships), not body things (exercise, nutrition). It's always seemed to me that exercising for exercise's sake is like wasting your life constantly fine-tuning your car rather than driving it somewhere.

Then, this past year, my parents got sick. Seeing how stress on the body—both theirs and mine—affects the well-being of the soul, I began reconsidering my position on exercise.

So I promised my 11-year-old son that I would run a race with him, and I downloaded a "Learn to Run a 10k in 13 Weeks" training guide. And I started to run.

Actually, run is a strong word. I began to shuffle forward in a continuous motion. But this was no small thing. I started rising an hour earlier than normal to jog before the kids got up for school. My friends said, "Who are you, and what have you done with Carolyn?"

I've been shocked by how spiritual an activity exercise has turned out to be. When I am running I am uniquely awake and open; it's not uncommon for me to wind up crying, laughing, praying, or praising. The neighbors must find this unsettling; I find it fascinating.

I suspect that my longstanding protest against materialism has made me susceptible to another time-honored heresy: Gnosticism, the belief that matter is inherently evil. Gnostics wondered how a perfect God could be defiled in imperfect human form. Gnosticism had to be struck down repeatedly in order to reach an orthodox understanding of the Incarnation: Jesus was fully God and fully human. The Word became flesh (John 1:14).

The Incarnation shows us that matter is not all there is. But it also shows us that matter matters. Jesus came a long way to take on our molecular structure. He pointed to other kinds of existence, telling his disciples, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about" (John 4:32). But he also fully inhabited our bodily reality, so much so that many of his miracles involved food, drink, physical healing, and even resurrection. One of his final earthly acts was to cook fish on the beach for his friends.

So maybe our bodies aren't the cars that drive our souls to the altar. Maybe they are an integral part of what we lay on the altar, and are up for healing and holiness with the rest of us.

After all, Jesus called us to love God with our hearts, souls, minds, and strength. Just as his words disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed, they call the overactive to stillness and activate the overly still. They restore the soul to those who overemphasize the body, and redeem the body for those who focus only on the soul.

"The physical part of you is not some piece of property belonging to the spiritual part of you," says The Message translation of 1 Corinthians 6:19-20. "God owns the whole works. So let people see God in and through your body"—even if that means shuffling forward in a continuous motion, one step at a time.

Comments welcome below or on CT's site.

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

2009-06-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

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.

Comments welcome below or on CT's Site.

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

2009-05-11T14:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-09T10:47:00.000-07:00

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.

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Hiding What They Seek, March, 2009 (CT)

2009-03-30T23:41:00.000-07:00

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?

Comments Welcome Here

There Goes the Neighborhood, January, 2009 (CT)

2009-01-22T09:18:00.000-08:00

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.

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Our Shalom Vocation, November, 2008 (CT)

2008-11-10T14:48:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2008-11-07T17:29:00.000-08:00

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

Comments welcome here.

Theology in Aisle 7, September, 2008 (CT)

2008-09-27T01:56:00.000-07:00

Theology in Aisle 7

Trying to organize a God who transcends.

I love office supply stores. Reams of fresh paper (Aisle 16) and boxes of unsharpened pencils (Aisle 5) still give me back-to-school butterflies, the sense that the future is yet to be written and anything is possible. But I'm most drawn to the bins, sorters, and all manner of organizational aids in Aisle 7. They glisten with shiny plastic promise, reminding me I am just one astute purchase away from transforming the paper-riddled chaos of my life into structured bliss.

Recently I found just the thing, a two-foot black box with an open front divided into eight sections. I used my label maker (Aisle 3) to give each compartment its purpose, happily imagining soccer notices and utility bills lying obediently in their designated places. My husband came home and grinned at the box, envisioning it as next month's addition to the rejected-organizational-aid pile. "That," he told me gently, "is a junk collector."

But it will be organized junk.

I labeled one of the compartments "seminary"; this time the back-to-school butterflies were not merely nostalgic. I've begun chipping away at a master's degree, and on the same day I bought my new organizer I decided on a concentration in Spiritual Theology. I've been longing for more structure, not only in my office but also in my faith.

I've been searching for frameworks, outlines, contexts; ways to more thoroughly understand what I believe. The studies I've chosen emphasize systematic theology. The very word systematic gives me that Aisle 7 rush. I can hardly wait to be organized!

But there are people—wise, godly people—who grin at me like my husband did at my organizer. "Do you think," asked my friend Barbara, who happens to be a theology professor, "that part of you is looking for control?" I stared at her blankly. No, part of me isn't looking for control. All of me is looking for control. I hate chaos and uncertainty. I am deeply bothered by doctrinal divisions within even the small confines of my own church tradition. And honestly, I really don't like it when God behaves unpredictably, when he seems to be as much about mystery as he is about revelation, and when he refuses to fit into the slots I have labeled for him.

Faith would be much tidier if God could be contained within mutually agreed upon doctrinal positions. Scripture would be much more manageable if it were pure exposition, if there weren't all those sprawling narratives, wistful poems, and cryptic apocalyptic visions. Why didn't God give us his Word in sermon points that spell out catchy acronyms? Why is it all so messy?

Even our most precise expositor, the apostle Paul, holds revelation and mystery in tension. In his letter to the Ephesians, he proclaims, "God has now revealed to us his mysterious plan regarding Christ, a plan to fulfill his own good pleasure" (1:9, NLT). But for all the time Paul spends explaining things, he still has the nerve to celebrate everything he can't understand about God. "Oh, how great are God's riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his ways! For who can know the Lord's thoughts? … All glory to him forever!" (Rom. 11:33-34, 36).

This, I'm beginning to understand, is my challenge: to immerse myself in all that has been revealed about God while celebrating all that is mystery. We have a God who both transcends our messy lives and incarnates himself in them. That reality is hard to organize, but it's the best news there is.

There's a story, often credited to E. Stanley Jones, about a missionary who gets lost in the jungle. He comes upon a village in the middle of the trees, and asks a resident to lead him out. The local agrees, and for an hour he walks ahead of the missionary, clearing a way through the foliage with a machete.

Eventually the missionary asks, "Are you sure we are going the right way? Isn't there a path somewhere?" The villager smiles. "Friend, I am the path."

"I am the way, the truth, and the life," Jesus tells us (John 14:6); "I AM," declares Yahweh (Ex. 3:14). My ideas about God are not the path. My church tradition, helpful as it is in pointing to him, is not the path. I plan to spend the rest of my life learning the best terminology we have for our understanding of what God has done and is doing, but the terms are not the path. Only God is. Only he can lead me through the jungle that is my life and into the boundless adventure of life with him.

Praise God, there is not a thing in Aisle 7—or in the universe—that can contain him.

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Here's To All The Losers, July, 2008 (CT)

2008-09-27T01:46:00.000-07:00

Here's To All The Losers

Why defeat at the hands of God is magnificent.

If you like action-adventure, check out the Genesis 32 account of Jacob's Jabbok River wrestling match. Jacob is camped out and stressed out, awaiting a potentially dangerous confrontation with his estranged brother. His worries are interrupted when a stranger jumps him in the darkness. By morning, Jacob realizes he's spent the night wrestling God; somehow he manages to limp away blessed. In the process, he learns that God is more than willing to be grappled with, and that holding on for dear life is the way to go.

It's amazing—and sobering—to realize that Jacob has the strength to resist God. It isn't until the angel of the Lord dislocates Jacob's hip that Jacob surrenders and requests what he's really been fighting for—a blessing. My husband, a wrestling coach, tells me the hip is the wrestler's pivot point, the core of his strength. God can't give Jacob the blessing he desperately needs until he incapacitates him at the center of his human power. Frederick Buechner calls Jacob's resounding loss The Magnificent Defeat.

There's something familiar about Jacob's story.

I'm a singer and songwriter. I recognize that such a vocation is more fun and fulfilling than anyone deserves, and I've spent most of my professional life grinning at my good fortune. But last year, I found myself in the midst of a tour feeling miserable. My own company was handling many of the details, and every night I took the stage consumed with logistics. I've always loved the fact that performing forces me to be in the moment, but this tour I was definitely somewhere else. I'd find myself disoriented in the middle of a song, unsure whether I'd already sung the second verse. Something was wrong.

I prayed. I asked God to restore to me the joy of singing about my salvation. I begged for the ability to be focused and present. And I worried. I suspected that the blessing of my vocation had run its course, and that it was time for me to investigate Tupperware sales.

Three weeks into the tour, I lost my voice. As you might imagine, a singer's voice is an obvious and vulnerable pivot point of strength. I reminded God that it would be helpful to my singing ministry if I could sing. But my voice did not return.

I called a vocal coach and got instructions. "Hourly, sit at a kettle and breathe in the steam. Then add salt to the water and snort it. Put drops of oil of oregano on your tongue. Apply peppermint oil to your upper lip." (Caution: Over-application of peppermint oil leads to a condition I remember now as the moustache of fire.)

I spent 24 hours sequestered in my hotel room in an involuntary silent retreat. No interviews, no fretful logistical phone meetings. I steamed without end. By concert time, my skin had never been smoother or softer. But I still had no voice.

A funny thing happened when I took the stage. I felt calm, and present. The whole quiet day I'd had nothing to do but steam, read, and pray. A paraphrase of Psalm 23 ran through my head: You make me lie down by still waters—or steamy, salty ones. I walked up to the microphone and had a sudden conviction that my voice would be not only restored, but also brilliantly transformed.

It wasn't. I still couldn't sing. Not a bit. I croaked, I cracked, I sort of whisper-rapped. It was awful. But the audience leaned in. They smiled. They prayed for me and breathed with me. Never certain what my swollen vocal cords would do next, I was in the moment, adapting, adjusting, and—eventually—enjoying a new and improbably wonderful way of doing ministry. It was, to both my chagrin and my delight, one of my best concerts ever.

As wrestling matches go, my laryngitis bout was barely a skirmish. I've had much tougher (and longer) fights, and I've got friends facing challenges I don't even want to imagine. In some cases (cancer, AIDS, and worse) I'm pretty sure the opponent is no angel of the Lord. But there is testimony among believers past and present that at the end (and only at the end) of the human rope is strength and peace beyond compare. Maybe that's what Jesus was getting at when he said the poor in spirit get the kingdom of heaven. With death on a cross looming on his horizon, he was intimately familiar with the victory that comes only through magnificent defeat.

I don't know that it ever feels good to have our own strength overcome. But if we want to be blessed, if we want to relocate from living in our own resources to resting in the middle of God's goodness, power, and provision, sometimes a little dislocation is necessary.

Just ask Jacob.

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The Grace of Wrath, May, 2008 (CT)

2008-09-27T01:21:00.000-07:00

The Grace of Wrath

Is there any story about God that isn't a love story?

When Evan Almighty hit theaters last summer, some evangelicals worried that elements of the movie were sacrilegious. One of their particular objections got me thinking.

In the film, God (played by Morgan Freeman) claims that people miss the point of the story of Noah's Ark because they think it's about God's anger, when really it's a "love story." Some Christians saw that statement as an offensive distortion of the Genesis account of God's wrath. Their protest left me pondering what I suspect is a fundamentally important question: Is there any story about God that isn't a love story?

Growing up, I had two images of God. The first was a painting on my bedroom wall, Bernhard Plockhorst's Jesus Blessing the Children. After bedtime prayers, I would drift off imagining I was one of those children in Jesus' embrace. Everything about that picture reinforced the first thing I was taught in Sunday school: God Is Love.

My other image was a mental one I'll call "The Vengeful God," a peeved Father Time crossed with an accusing Uncle Sam. That picture helped me remember that God hates sin, and reinforced the second thing I learned in Sunday school: God Is Holy.

We sang about grace at my church, and we meant it. But we suspected that an exclusive emphasis on God's love would lessen our desire to live holy lives. So periodically, our preacher would thunder about God's wrath and judgment, ensuring we were never "soft on sin."

God is love, BUT God hates sin. How does one hold those two realities in tension? I unconsciously developed a theology that intermittently had God the Son and God the Father in a good cop, bad cop routine, with the Holy Spirit stepping in as a sympathetic parole officer.

I professed that God was love all the way through, but deep down I couldn't help assuming he was a bit like me. Even his love had to have limits. It stopped at sin and turned into wrath. Naturally.

My understanding began to change when I read Baxter Kruger's depiction of God's wrath as his love in action—his emphatic "No!" to anything that leads to our destruction. That perspective flipped a switch for my husband and me. If our daughter stepped into oncoming traffic, she might perceive our reaction (screaming "No!" and yanking her out of harm's way) to be harsh and unloving. But in reality it would be an expression of our fiercest and purest love. Is that how it is with God?

What if God's wrath is not a caveat, qualification, or even a counterpoint to his love, but an expression of it? What if God grieves sin less because it offends his sensibilities, and more because he hates the way it distorts our perceptions and separates us from him?

Recently, my friend Liliane told me the story of her conversion. Years ago, someone handed her a pamphlet with Jesus on the cover asking, "Do you love me?" Honestly, I can't say I do, Liliane whispered to Jesus. I really like you, though. I want to get to know you.

For a year, Liliane attended church and spent time with people who knew Jesus. One day, with a start, she realized she did love him. He'd captured her heart.

"That whole first year, I didn't read the Bible, and I'm really glad I waited," she told me, laughing at my raised eyebrow. "You know how, when you're with someone you really trust, you can say the hard things if you need to? Now that I know God, I see his love all through the Bible, even in the hard bits."

There are some pretty hard bits in Scripture. It is difficult to frame, say, the saga of Sodom and Gomorrah as a love story. But if we truly believe that God not only loves, but is love, we must believe there is no action he can take that is not animated by love.

My church was right to be concerned that an inadequate understanding of God's righteousness would lead to sin. After all, one of Satan's strategies with Eve was to undermine the reality of God's judgment: "You will not surely die."

But his more sinister tactic was first to get Eve to doubt God's love and character: "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" His strategy worked then, and it works now. Our sin is rooted not only in a lack of reverence for God's holiness, but also in a profoundly insufficient understanding of his love.

God is love, SO God hates sin. We are loved with a holy love that cries "No!" again and again to the things that destroy us. We are part of an epic love story, and what we all need desperately is to know the Author better.

Comments Welcome Here

Carbonated Holiness, March, 2008 (CT)

2008-09-27T00:17:00.000-07:00

Carbonated Holiness

Laughter is serious business.

Recently, I threw out three boxes worth of my kids' Sunday school crafts. I felt heartless and vaguely evil. But really, one can only store so much Fun Foam in a single house.

Still, there was one piece of art I was compelled to save. My daughter had cut out and colored pictures of children engaged in different acts of worship, and glued them onto a sheet. (She was three; you were expecting decoupage?)

Bethany had been particularly proud of this assignment because of the gluing part. (I think she may have a future in adhesives.) The day she brought it home, I acknowledged the excellence of the glue-work and then asked her to tell me what the pictures represented. "Praying! Giving! Reading the Bible!" she shouted as I pointed to each scene.

I saved the best picture for last—a boy with his mouth open wide in song. Singing is my favorite form of worship. I knew it would be Bethany's too, what with her mother being a singer and all.

"Laughing," said Bethany, when I pointed to the boy with the open mouth.

I stood corrected. Laughing is my favorite form of worship.

I've been backing up my laughter-as-worship theory for a while now, collecting various quotes on the matter. I was recently compelled to stop reading Anne Lamott's Plan B long enough to shout "Yes!" (complete with fist-pump), and scribble this line on an airplane napkin: "Laughter is carbonated holiness." And anyone who knows me will understand why I give a hearty amen to this bit of wisdom from Woody Allen: "I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose." (In my case, there was an unfortunate incident involving Diet Coke, and the memory of it gives poignancy to the idea of laughter as carbonated holiness.)

But my favorite quote may be this one from Karl Barth: "Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God." Of course, Barth must have meant the good kind of laughter, born from joy or relief or the sweet surprise of community. There is also derisive laughter, rooted in pettiness or vulgarity or cruelty. It's not hard to tell the redemptive kind—laughter that is reflexive, even involuntary worship—from the destructive kind.

Laughter can change and grow, and sometimes it changes and grows us. Consider the laughter of Abraham's Sarah, blossoming from incredulity into incredible joy. When Sarah had a baby at long, impossible last, she named him Isaac—which means, of course, "laughter."

A good laugh is a release—even if only for a moment—from worry, strife, and self. It is a sudden, often unbidden confession that someway, somehow, all is well, or at least there is a hope that it can be.

It's telling that we talk about "gales" of laughter. We instinctively recognize that laughter belongs to the world of wind, or Spirit—unexpected joy arrives on the gust of a fresh current and carries us to a different place from the one where it found us. That is why I suspect that Lamott is right—that laughter is holiness, that it is part of the life of God, and that to laugh from your belly is to worship the Giver of all good gifts.

Trinitarian theologians use the word perichoresis to describe the happy fellowship of the Father, Son, and Spirit. Their relationship is often pictured as a tireless and joyful divine dance. I can't think about that holy dance without remembering certain jigs that have been known to take place in our family room. (For shy, repressed, reserved, uncoordinated, Canadian Baptists, we can really cut a rug.) When our kids were toddlers, my husband, Mark, and I would twirl and spin them until they were helpless with laughter so hard it was soundless, and then we would laugh at them laughing until we were all worn out with gladness. If we'd have thought of it, we could have quoted the psalmist as we held our aching sides on the family room floor: "Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. … The LORD has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy."

It's serious business, laughter. It's the kind of sacrifice of praise that puts our insides right. The old cliché is true: Laughter is a medicine that reminds us that our sickness will one day be healed and we shall be whole and holy. Until then, laughter is the Elmer's Glue that attaches us to the goodness that inhabits this world, and to the gladness that hints at the world to come.

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