A Love Letter to Moms Who Feel Guilty About Taking Time to Exercise

I'll never forget the day I ran into that cute 24-year-old blonde at the YMCA.

I was a mom of little ones, constantly exhausted. Two or three stolen hours at the gym were the highlights of my week.

I felt guilty about leaving the house, but I needed it. I needed time to get my brain and body back in gear before giving myself away again.

"I could hardly make myself get here," she said. "This is the hardest thing I ever do!"

I stood there stunned. The most luxurious thing I did was this gal's toughest. It shocked me to realize that what felt like indulgence in my world was a point of self control in hers.

Even now, almost twenty years later, I feel a little guilty about taking time to work out. The house still needs work. There are a thousand ways I could be giving myself to my family to make life easier for them.

But when I do take a pocket of time to stretch, to strengthen, to get my heart rate up, I'm able to be better at being a giver.

To attack our work vigorously as Proverbs describes, sometimes moms need to strengthen our arms first. You're still being a giver when you make this investment.

Moms, I know why it's hard for us to think like this. When we see the vanity of a gym-rat lifestyle promoted all over the place, it can feel selfish for us to exercise. But taking time to make sure we feel strong and stable isn't the same thing as the insecurity of a risque, workout selfie approach to life.

If you need permission to carve out time for exercise in your schedule, here's my magic wand. Poof. Go ye therefore and take care of your bodies.

I try to remember to hit "post to Twitter" every now and then when I do yoga in hopes that other moms will realize that they aren't alone in needing this kind of space in their day. I'll try to remember to do that more. If you see one of those posts, take it as one mom saying to another, "You're not alone. It's okay if we make room for this stuff."

You'll never see a risque gym selfie from me online, but you will feel a hand reaching over to grab yours to say, "Don't feel badly. This is good for us. It's good for our families. Let's go."

How to Be a Better Atheist: What to Understand if You Want to Be More Effective in Rejecting Christianity

Lately I’ve seen too many people rejecting Christianity the wrong way. I understand why these folks are confused. The name “Christian” has come to represent a lot of crazy stuff over the past 2,000 years.

But if you’re going to be an atheist, you might as well have a solid grip on what you are rejecting. So I’m going to try to make a few clarifications here to help the non-believing do that work with a little more precision.

First off, let's talk about what you’re not rejecting when you are rejecting Christianity:

1. You're not rejecting a political force.

A couple of decades ago, the Moral Majority/Christian Coalition decided to work with the GOP, and what’s grown from that alliance is now a sort of spiritual/political cyborg.

This evangelical political movement has borrowed a handful of elements from Christian morality, but the whole machine cares a lot more about gaining earthly power than it does about listening to your hard questions or talking to you about your faith. I mean, think about it. When was the last time someone fighting for political Christianity actually took an interest in your soul? It’s probably been a while, right? Now think about the last time you heard a “Christian” fight for laws, political platforms, and government benefits. Last week, probably.

I’m not saying that Christians can’t get involved in government. A responsible government is made of people of all belief systems. I am saying that a lot of what’s hitting the public eye as “Christian” has very little to do with the teachings of Jesus and a whole lot to do with an attempt to maintain cultural muscle.

2. You're not rejecting young earth creationism.

So in the 50’s and 60’s, America’s educational values changed because of the Space Race. We needed to beat the Russians to the moon, so American school shifted its priorities to produce better scientists.

There’s nothing wrong with emphasizing science—science is great. But it’s important to realize that a historical nationalistic/military shift impacted America’s epistemological values. A lot of us were taught the scientific method as kids--a method which is rooted in a philosophical system called empiricism. In other words, we were taught to trust our senses to tell us ultimate truth. And even though we never really thought about the decision we were making here, we went with the flow and accepted the fact that empiricism was the most reliable measure of truth because our nation needed students who could grow up to build bombs and rockets.

When Christians realized this shift in values was happening, they got nervous. They worried about losing credibility in a world in which empiricism was the trump card. So some Christians decided to try to engage with the new values of our time. They started attempting to find ways to make the Bible fit what was being said in the realms of science.

Some of this feels like an exercise in futility to me. If God has all the creative power, he could make an old earth look young or make a young earth look old. Besides, if he’s outside of time, the complex stuff that wows us quickly becomes a non-factor to him.

When you throw an understanding of how ancient Hebrew poetry works into that mix, and then add in two scoops of what modern physicists are finding about human inability to validate the material world, you end up with so much nuance, nobody on either side ends up standing on solid ground. I’ve yet to see a Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate that did anything more than serve as a pep rally for what everybody on either side wanted to hear from the get go. They never get to the first question, which is how to verify a system of truth from premise #1.

Some of the most thoughtful, orthodox Christians I know actually allow for an old earth creation model. I’m not saying those people are right or wrong, but am saying that Young Earth Creationists who claim, “If these chapters aren’t literal, nothing is literal,” are (in truth) making a claim for Young Earth Creationism. They aren’t making a claim for all of Christianity.

3. You're not rejecting the "Hurry and Get Saved So You Don’t Go To Hell!" bit

This point is complicated, and it involves quite a bit of church history that would likely bore you. But let me just say that in some of the revival movements, the great big package of “salvation” got compressed into Tweet-speak: “Trust Jesus, or go to hell.”

I think well-meaning Christians started some of this because they were trying to communicate what Jesus is offering in a few simple steps. But the problem is, people are lazy. A lot of folks don’t study. They don’t dig. They don’t take risks. The structure that was supposed to unpack into a lot of different angles ended up being presented as the ultimate deal. These "SparkNotes" of faith didn't just help people interpret the Bible, they took the place of it.

The reduction also morphed into some emotional manipulation that was strategic for making big congregations. While awe should exist in the presence of a transcendent, holy God--and while hell is something to fear---the fear that many pastors wield while trying to grow a church is a whole different entity. Earthly religious fear is more about controlling you than it is about helping you. Holy religious fear is about healing your wounds.

4. You're not rejecting a God who can kill anybody he wants, who oppresses women, and who encourages slavery.

I’ve seen many atheist sites that argue against these three points. They pick verses out of the Old Testament and claim to offer proof that God is an immoral, narcissistic, and bloodthirsty being. Then they cite the Crusades and try to connect the dots. They say that Christianity is dangerous and that anybody who loves a God like that either has Stockholm Syndrome or is content with being a Stepford disciple.

This topic is too complex to unpack in a tiny section of a single post. However, all those family members or acquaintances who have told you that you just have to accept all this stuff without questioning God because he’s perfect aren’t speaking for all of Christianity.

Scholars like C.S. Lewis had a lot of trouble with the brutality of the book of Joshua. Ivy League philosopher Greg Boyd spent eleven years studying the morality of the Old Testament. These guys didn’t accept easy answers, and they were honest about what they discovered as they explored.

There are so many ways Christians deal with some of these passages, and a lot of the best ways boil down to being responsible enough to interpret the Bible like we interpret other works of literature. We look at history. We look at authorship. We look at theme. We make the scholarly efforts we make to interpret every other piece of literature from Sophocles to Tennessee Williams.

One of the downsides to the elevation of science, and the subsequent treatment of the text by Young Earth Creationism, was the development of a harsh, humanistic, linear approach to Biblical interpretation. Those folks claim to life by faith, but they have embraced secular values for understanding a sacred book. I don't think they realize how proud that is, but the people who do this have actually limited their interpretative abilities instead of elevating them. And they have also violated some Biblical guidelines for finding truth in the process.

Since I’ve already named some of the errors of Christians, I hope you will let me also say that numerous citations on atheist sites do not interpret Scripture responsibly. So many snarky remarks from non-believers have more style than substance because atheist authors tend to miss what was actually being said in the Scripture.

Again, there’s not room to deal with this whole point here, but just know that a lot of people are popping off at the mouth about this stuff without having done the academic work needed to make a solid claim. When you find people who have done the work, a lot of times, their answers are much more substantial.

SO...IF YOU REALLY WANT TO REJECT CHRISTIANITY.

If you reject any of those main points above, you aren’t actually rejecting Christianity. You may be rejecting political, cultural, and financial forces that are attempting to use the gospel for an earthly end, but you aren't rejecting the true gospel.

If you want to reject Christianity, you’ve got to go beyond all that. To be a proper atheist, you must reject the heart of the faith, which is this:

Once upon a time, there was a God who made a material realm which fit inside of a more complex, metaphysical realm.

The smaller, material realm had boundaries (like dimensions and time), and God gave humans (and other creatures) the ability to sense those boundaries.

He also gave humans a unique perceptive ability to connect with Him that reached beyond the material. This ability is called "the spirit." Lots of animals have bodies, and consciousness (souls)-- I think some even have feelings--but humans are the only creatures that have the ability to connect directly in the spirit with their Creator.

Humans were also made uniquely creative, not just with problem-solving skills or tool-making skills, but with an aesthetic sense and the ability to innovate. We can call this ability the "imago Dei," or being made "in the image of God." Modern lingo? MiniMe.

Relationships are important to God because he exists in community with himself. The concept of the Trinity is kind of hard to understand, but I think it boils down to relationship between three persons that is so synchronized, all three beings operate as one.

Maybe a metaphor of the creative process will make that more clear.

When an artist comes up with an IDEA for a project, she then applies her ENERGY to that creation. When she is done creating, there is a connective POWER that binds her audience to the work she has made. So, an IDEA works out through ENERGY to result in connective POWER (Sayers).

Likewise, the Trinity has an invisible directing IDEA (the Father). The ENERGETIC outworking of the idea in the physical realm is the Son (Jesus). And the connective POWER between humans and the godhead is the Holy Spirit. Like a single piece of artwork that is unified in beauty but contains different elements of process, the Godhead is both one and three.

God wanted humans to join in that union. So, we were established on earth with a spiritual capacity that would allow us to create with him and live in his love. (Some of the first commands of God to humans were encouragements to be creative, you know.) But nobody can be creative while being a lemming. So, God made us free to either choose that artistic union or reject it.

The story of Eve talks about how humanity made a choice long ago that it still makes today. We decided that we wanted to be like God without really being dependent upon God.

I think all of us have wanted to be god-like without being subject to God's authority or his resources. We are like teenagers who want to be left alone to try things our way. But in our liberty, we tried to break free, and we tore a great big hole in everything.

A piece of art doesn't thrive without its creator. If a painting in process could yank away from its painter, deciding to try to make itself beautiful, it would look terrible. And in a similar manner, the original vision for what humans were supposed to be and do was lost.

God saw we had chosen to be fiercely independent. He heard our stubborn insistence that we didn’t need any help. But he also knew that we couldn't get out of this hole we were digging by ourselves. So he sent Jesus from the meta-dimensions, compressing him into our human boundaries of space and time.

In this tangible, physical form, Jesus took all of the separation we had created into Himself. He did that so he could patch the break up and make a bridge that led us back into relational and spiritual communion with him, the Father, and the Spirit.

Why did He do that? Because he knows it’s hell to be solo. He knew this hell of autonomy could last forever, and grow deeper, and darker, and become more lonely without some intervention. And he knew that even though it would hurt, he could help us live and thrive instead of going deeper and deeper into isolation.

It's hard for us to see this, because humans have been trying to make our own autonomy work forever--which means it's still our default. We don't hear our independence any easier than we hear the accents we learned as kids.

We notice when humans get surges of brilliance here and there. And we learn to love the thrill of our own roar. We notice that it feels good to say things like, "I am god!" and "I am master of my destiny."

But down inside us, there’s still a restless, a homesickness, a sense of loss—and that loss comes from being torn away from the heart of the creator who made us to connect with him.

When we refuse that creator, we’re going to feel a couple of things. First, we will feel proud, like we've got this and don't need help. Declarations of self-sufficiency cause an adrenaline rush, right? It's hard to give up that thrill.

But eventually, many of us will begin to feel lost and empty, like something is missing. And that emptiness can last for eternity if we remain unwilling to be vulnerable to the God we need. He won't dominate us. He will let us resist him until we harden into a forever-hell of “I’ll do this myself.” But that's not what he wants for us, because we were created for artistic community.

The next part of what I'm about to write is something you won't hear from a lot of people who call themselves Christians. I don't know why the rest of the story is hardly ever mentioned in Christian dialogue because it's all over the New Testament. It's hard to read a single book of Paul's without finding this concept. But for some reason, a lot of preachers and teachers don't talk about it much.

The whole machine of faith doesn’t stop with a single moment of saying, “Okay, save me." Sure, that's only the starting point, but there’s an awful lot that is supposed to happen after people are born into a new life in Jesus.

The New Testament tells us how to finish out the years we have on this planet, plugged in to a God who actually comes to live inside us. This new way of living is not about trying to be moral. It’s not about following a bunch of rules. It’s about letting go of effort and independence and learning to lean into a connection that is free, resource-rich, and beautiful.

You’ve seen those television shows where people who have been single for 40 years finally get married and struggle with sharing the toothpaste. Well, after years of living independently, it’s a whole new dynamic for Christians to learn community with a God who lives inside them. A lot of Christians never really explore what that means, so they continue to try to do everything on their own, using shame and guilt as motivators, and leaning on the same old broken methods of self-control and determination that they used when they were secular.

This is why so much of what is called Christianity is messed up. A laser focus on only keeping as many souls out of hell as possible has resulted in failure to implement what is actually supposed to happen after salvation. So many Christians think there’s not much more to do after walking an aisle and praying a prayer, so they fumble around post baptism trying to accomplish personal and social change, and they goof a lot of stuff up along the way.

But when Jesus comes to live inside a person, new resources for a new life are there.

People who were impatient have tools to be patient. People who were selfish have tools to be kind. People who were resentful have tools to be forgiving. Like a kid learning to drive a high-powered vehicle, we have to learn to use those tools, and that knowledge takes time. But resources for living in a new way show up once we are connected with Jesus. At conversation, we at least get the keys to the car.

The letters of the New Testament spend a ton of time talking about how when our identity changes with faith. Paul tells us that we don’t have to struggle and strain to be good like we used to; we just need to learn to depend on the gifts of a God who loves working with us, and who is helping us become beautiful like he is.

And by the way, we don’t lose our old personalities here. We fill them out until they are winsome and generous. In other words, we begin to look like a painting that has finally turned itself over to an artist who knows what he’s doing.

If you’ve never heard of a Christianity that looks anything like this, write me. We can get away from all the politics and arguing and take apart a book of the Bible like Galatians or Ephesians. Or we can look at John’s gospel and see what sort of descriptions he has for us. It’s possible that you might learn things about the faith that most people who call themselves Christians don’t see because they are distracted and confused.

In the end, you might still reject Christianity. But if you do, you will be rejecting the true heart of it, not distorted imitations. And you will have rejected it at the source, after having done some primary research, instead of floating along with sloppy, self-serving interpretations. I think this sort of clarity tends to be a good idea, no matter where we stand on the issue.

No, Moms, You Don't Have to Wear a Bathing Suit. Just Be a Really Good You.

So, it's that time of year when all the "Moms, Get out There in Your Bathing Suit" blogs start to circulate on social media.  A couple of titles I’ve read this morning?

"Dear Moms, This is Why You're Going to Put on Your Damn Swimsuit."

"Why You, Dear Mom, Should Rock Your Bikini."

"Moms, Put on That Swimsuit."

"Put on Your Damn Swimsuit."

There’s kind of a formula to most of these posts. First, we get a confession about post-baby weight, stretch marks, belly flab. Then we get a confession about what female insecurity feels like in a Victoria’s Secret world. Finally, the post ends with a call to arms for moms across the nation to wear the “damn swimsuit” and get out there and play with their kids.

I get why women write these posts. We live in an Instagram world obsessed with tight little gym bods, and regular folks (like me) need to psych ourselves up to slip into our own skin. Some of my closest friends feel emboldened after reading those posts--they read them and walk away motivated to be better moms. I’m glad to know this writing helps some people.

But "Get-Your-Swimsuit-On" posts don't motivate me. In fact, they exhaust me. The very last thing I need to hear while crawling across the finish line of the school year is a commission to prove a point to my kids, to myself, or to the world.

When these bloggers suggest that I'm shirking my maternal responsibility when I don't wear a swimsuit while playing in the water with my kids, I feel weary. When they suggest that I’m selfish if I’m not parading my mostly-naked body in front of complete strangers, I feel burdened. When they exhort me to fight sexism by stripping down (?!) so that my young sonwill realize that women should be okay with being mostly-naked in front of strangers--I wonder who signed me up for that job first place.

I don’t need a cause on vacation. I need rest.

I need to make sand castles and play in the water, but I don’t need to do those things while attempting to fulfill some sort of civic duty during the ten days a year I finally get to crash. And whether it’s right or wrong, I crash best in quick-dry shorts, a floppy hat, and a swingy, SPF shirt.

That’s not about modesty so much as it is about how I feel most comfortable around strangers. I normally wear clothes in front of people I don’t know, so come vacation, I can’t suddenly pretend like wearing almost nothing in front of a crowd isn’t weird for me. (“Hi there! I don’t know you. These are my raw nekked thighs.”)

Now I don’t sit at the beach judging other women who wear swimsuits. Sometimes I wear my swimsuit, too. But other days, I don’t want to spend emotional energy trying to be okay with feeling exposed out in public, so I wear something else. Om those days, the very last thing I need is General Blog Mom calling me to bare arms (and bare legs, and bare everything else) for some higher good.

Giving all these writers the benefit of the doubt, I thing they are probably trying to help withdrawn moms engage with their kids instead of allowing insecurity to keep them from connecting. That’s probably a much needed battle cry. But in the midst of this encouragement, a couple of clarifications would be helpful for moms like me.

1. If play is the focus, play is the focus. So, wear what makes it easy for you to play.

My friend, Tim, had a wise insight about the futility of exhorting women in traditional swimsuits to play like men:

“This is like telling our 3-year-old that she should 'run like the boys,' then putting cute little flowered sandals on her feet. Sure, she can run - but she falls literally every single time. Then we feel guilty that her brother got to go to church in his Keens. Trying to be better about this. You can't call a little girl prissy when you're dressing her in prissy shoes, or a Mom too reserved when she can't be comfortable in what she's wearing.”

Perfect example. If you are wearing something that makes you feel restricted, change into something that makes you feel like playing. If you are comfortable in a bikini, that’s great. But if you aren’t, you don’t have to feel strange about feeling strange for being exposed.

You don't have to pressure yourself to do something that is uncomfortable. Just switch to an outfit that makes you feel naturally relaxed. Wear something you can get wet, something that won’t chafe. This isn’t a performance, it’s a holiday.

2. You don’t have to shoulder the responsibility of fighting the global body image war during your little family vacation.

We live in an impossible world, girls. There’s so much pressure all around us to look a certain way. But that’s a huge, huge issue, and we don’t have to carry the entire weight of it on our vacations. We have zero moral obligation to crusade against sexism in the public sphere during the precious little time we are supposed to be relaxing with our kids. We can fight to change the world on the other 355 days of the year. And most of us do. That's why we need vacations.

3. It’s okay to show up for vacation as the most generous form of who you truly are.

I’m not talking about doing whatever is easiest here. I’m not saying you should be a lazy, selfish, disengaged, coward. I'm saying there is a value to being authentic in the passions of the personality God gave you.

I grew up with a wonderful mom who almost never "played" with us in the ocean. She didn't do beach games, and she almost never got her hair wet in the pool. She hated being splashed. When she did swim, she swam laps with real strokes. She didn't frolic.

However, every year she did tons of vacation prep for us. She always had healthy and good food ready for us in the condo, she researched places for us to visit, and she did a billion acts of service during the week that made our vacations fun.  She found wildlife preserves, and she helped us comb the beach for shells, insects, and crabs. She found historical sites and took us on tours.

She was *herself* on vacation, which was great! Her personality didn't enjoy being rowdy or reckless, and I wouldn't have wanted her to strain to become what she wasn't. That would have felt artificial and uncomfortable for us as kids.

Besides, she worked hard all year, and it was good for the kids to see her rest on those rare moments when she finally did take it easy. Dad made sure that we respected Mom’s need for rejuvenation, too, which was a great way of teaching us to honor her.  When we had more energy than Mom did, Dad took over. I loved seeing him love her that way, and it was fun to have him to ourselves during those moments.

As someone who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, it strikes me that today’s family vacations seem incredibly kid-centric. Sure, we did kid-focused things on our vacations, but we also learned to have fun with Mom and with Dad in their different ways, and we learned to respect both boisterous and subdued forms of relaxation. I’m so glad I had that diversity instead of a performance context in which Mom felt a need to change her entire personality so that I could have an idealized beach experience. It was much better for me to have the real her.

I didn’t need Mom to jump through any sort of recreational hoops to be a "better" parent than she was. I needed her to model authenticity. By doing this, she taught us that we could be our best real selves, too.

During those moments when she sat back and watched us while Dad played with us, we had fun looking over and seeing her laughing at us and taking pictures. I never once resented her for doing that. It was sweet to just be together, all of us feeling space to be ourselves.

What did Mom do when she was herself? Well, one year she helped us scrounge up crabbing gear. Then she bought an electric popcorn popper to boil water (don’t try that; you might die) so that we could cook them. She was always in "Let's figure this out" mode. She was the scientist. The artist. The explorer.

On vacations she brought Peterson identification guide books, and glue and wood for shell crafts. After we got cleaned up from the ocean, she sat quietly with us at dusk to help us arrange the treasures we had found while Dad watched TV.

I remember her attention to our watercolors.  She noticed color, line, nuance.

I remember moving logs with her to look for little bugs, and kneeling down to listen to the suckle and pop of the coquinas.

I remember how she would get up before all of us in the mornings to watch the sunrise. I never wanted to go with her, but the fact that she loved beauty enough to chase it made a huge impression on me. Her love of solitude was formative for me--it gave me permission to be okay with being sober and alone. I would need that example in years to come.

Dad was wonderful on vacation in his own right, but he would have never done the specific stuff Mom did because Mom's way of doing things wasn't Dad's way. He was a blast when he played Nerf football with us, splashed us in the pool, taught us to swim, taught us to fish. But I needed both his strengths and Mom's strengths to make a vacation experience complete.

I didn't need Mom to be Dad. I just needed Mom to be Mom.

Anyway, maybe those “Mom, get your damn swimsuit on” blog posts motivate and help you. If they do, just throw all this out and ignore me.

But if you are like me, I hope you will also feel permission to get comfortable in your own skin this summer. If your skin is more comfortable in swim shorts and a UPF shirt, you aren’t failing at motherhood. If you legitimately don’t like splash wars in the pool, that’s okay. You don’t have to spend ten days forcing yourself to be who you aren’t.

Get out of your comfort zone and do something crazy-memorable-uncharacteristically-nuts now and then, but please don’t feel badly about teaching your kids how to love a nature preserve when pool time is over. God made you with your personality and your interests for a reason. He gave you kids who need the best of your wiring.

If you can find some space in the chaos to listen, I think He will show you how to unpack yourself most generously to your kids on vacation. Because if you have trusted Jesus, you are God's little girl, you know. When He made you (and then remade you), He created something wonderful. Who you already are is worth enjoying, and the “blog-shoulds,” shouldn’t ever trump what is most beautiful about your innate, God-given inclinations.  Wear your swimsuit or don’t. But a vacation shouldn’t ask you to become someone you weren’t ever made to be.

Living with Regret in a Control-Z World

Of all the emotions I’ve ever felt, regret is one of the most difficult. It’s not just painful, it’s sickening.

With grief, you feel sorrow over loss. With regret, you feel sorrow over loss compounded by guilt. You’re not just processing pain, you’re realizing that something stupid or selfish that you have done has caused pain. And you  haven’t just damaged yourself, you've damaged people you love.

A few weeks ago, I was attempting to comfort a friend who had made a horrible mistake she couldn’t undo.  As she replayed the memory of her error, she kept wishing she could just go back a few days to prevent what had happened. I watched her grief cycle from, “How could I have been so stupid?” to “Why didn’t I just think!” to “I was distracted!” Then, as she assessed the people she had hurt, she would collapse into self-condemnation. I tried to look for a bright side, some lesson to be gained, some benefit that would rise out of the ashes. But mostly, I understood her despair. I’ve made bad decisions, too. Some of those I would give my life to undo.

I tend to be playful on the outside, but deep down, I’m a hyper-responsible perfectionist. I try to keep that part of my personality hidden, because perfectionists are (let’s face it) annoying. I don’t want people feeling judged or nervous around me. I don’t want them picking me apart because they feel picked apart by me.

So I intentionally let surface details slide at times, and I tease and volley. But underneath all that, when it comes to values or long term investments, I’m 100% type-A, obsessive, determined. I make sure that I do the most important things right. I’ll do any work that’s necessary, no matter how hard that work is, to reach the results that I want.

Well, until I don’t.

There have been times when I couldn’t finish the race.

There have been times when my flesh was too weak.

Twice in my life, devastating news has hit smack in the middle of a big hormone swing. If that news had come three or four days sooner or later, I would have been strong and selfless. But no. This news hit on the worst possible day, right in the middle of a migraine. I roared so destructively over the next 48 hours that the relational damage I caused lasted for years. There was no way to undo it.

Once in my life, temptation hit when I was so tired and so broken that I was desperate for any sort of relief. (Our tempter plays chess.) Though I didn’t give in to this temptation physically, I did let it distract my focus and my heart. In that wave of distraction, I missed crucial opportunities with people I love—opportunities that I will never be able to embrace again. I also let temptation breed resentment in my heart—resentment that may have done as much (or more) damage as any physical sin that I could have committed.

While I can name those three big regrets, lesser regrets also swarm like angry yellow jackets in my memory. In macrocosm, in microcosm, I’ve messed up so much that I wish I could undo.

A thousand times I have wasted money, resources, focus. A thousand times, I have dropped the lesser baton. I haven’t prayed for my children in the ways I should have--haven’t prayed for my husband, my students as faithfully as I wish I had. I have mocked when I should have empathized. I have raged when I should have waited. I have been selfish when I could have been a servant. My heart has been divided when focus could have healed someone.

When I look back over all those mistakes, my inner perfectionist recites tapes of condemnation. “How could you do that? Why weren’t you strong when it actually counted? None of this other stuff matters if you couldn’t handle that. It’s hopeless now. You’ve ruined it all.”

It’s horrible knowing that none of that can be erased. I live in a world where comments can be deleted and where a simple Control-Z command can undo my mistakes. But real life is permanent. And the consequences of real life are permanent.

Last week I was reading one of those hateful blog posts by one of those mean, hyper-legalistic Calvinists, and as he railed on the teachings of two different writers, he used phrases like, “burning a strange fire before the Lord” and “give an account of every word spoken.”

I felt my knees go weak, because here was the echo to every accusation I hear every day of my life. “You screw things up. Your deeds aren’t good enough.”

Actually, I know that, Mr. Cruel Calvinist. I live so much of my life tormented by my own insufficiency. And while you might talk about grace as sustenance, nothing about your haughty demeanor rings of it. When you write, I see the garbs of a temple priest scowling because the lamb I’ve brought for slaughter isn’t perfect.

I would never admit this to Mr. Cruel Calvinist, but inside, I do flinch at his confidence. He frightens me more than anyone, because if heaven really is full of people who stand scowling at people like me, calling us names, nitpicking, what use is it? What fire isn’t strange before a holy God? If an imperfect person like me can be so hard on herself, that her stomach stays in knots, what flaws would a perfect being find in me?

Today is Spy Wednesday, the day in Holy Week in which Judas was supposed to have betrayed Jesus. This was the day Jesus was ambushed, snared, double crossed. This is the day when I, too, feel the need to throw the thirty pieces of silver that I have chosen over the indwelt life over and again, crying out, “What have I done? I’ve sold him, too! I’ve ruined everything!”

Because to see yourself clearly can make you want to run hopeless away from the cross. This is the second half of the first lie of Eden.

“Eve, do you want to be like God? Knowing good from evil?”
“Becca, you know good from evil now. You also see which you are.”

I regret. I regret so much.

There is no way to undo the damage I’ve done. None.  But in the darkness of the grief of a failed perfectionist, there remains a promise.

‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

The old order of things. The old world in which scribes, and Pharisees, and type-A types come up empty handed. The old world in which Peter who has promised to die with His Lord, denies him three times, then runs to hide. The old world in which courage, determination, focus, accuracy, making the right choices at the right time wasn’t enough. The exhausting, damning, shaming, hopeless world of my best effort, two inches too short.

“My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in weakness.”

It takes a lot for somebody like me to believe that. It goes against our nature.

People like me would rather hang on to regret as evidence that we could have done better if God had given us a better circumstance. 

We would rather think, “That wasn’t fair,” or, “I was cheated,” or, “I was set up,” or “Give me another shot at it, instead of,  “That was too hard. I couldn’t do it.”

Lately when I catch myself being sucked into the bottomless pit of regret, I’m taking a leap. This leap felt super uncomfortable at first, because it goes against everything in my nature. It feels evasive. It feels like giving up. But then I remember that Paul made this leap, too.

“Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Delight in weakness? Oh boy.

If I could go back an undo all the harm I’ve done, I would do it. I’m sure that if Paul could have gone back to stop the murders he urged, he would have made that choice in a heartbeat. But there is a difference between sorrow over wrongs done and letting your mistakes reiterate your bad theology. And believing that we could do this right if the circumstances were right is bad theology.

We need Jesus. That’s why He came.

So I’m slowly praying against my shame nature, praying prayers of gratitude with a wobbling voice, gratitude that my weakness points me to Christ’s big-enough strength.  While I do this, I’m simultaneously asking Him somehow to hover over the chaos of my past wrongs and make beauty rise out of the messes I’ve made.

This is so hard. It’s a 180 degree switch, in fact.

But in glimmers, I see that there is a way to stand in the full truth of my inadequacy without letting shame and regret drive me back into the self-determination that will never produce the results I want. Jesus said, “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.” And though it is a painful classroom, regret is teaching me that he means it.

For the Love of Foyle: The Most Important Television Program Conservative America Can Watch in 2017

 For me, there's no close second. Far and above every other television show that I have ever loved stands Anthony Horowitz's Foyle's War.

Until watching this program, I never understood what fans meant when they said, "This is my show." I'm not a fan of TV in general, so it always felt a little silly to hear someone connect his or her identity with a weekly program.

I now stand corrected. Foyle's War is the show of my heart. I hold these episodes with a similar loyalty to the writings of C.S. Lewis, Chesterton, Shakespeare, Flannery O'Connor, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The setting is WWII, in Hastings--a town on England's southeast coast. Michael Kitchen plays the Detective Chief Superintendent, a police officer who is attempting to fight back small town crime in the shadow of a massive global war.

While each episode unpacks a murder mystery, so much more happens simultaneously as well. Like the best mystery stories of Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers, Horowitz uses the genre to address human nature in all of its potential wonders and flaws. Essential questions of ethics are addressed in such a way that we learn both the risks and the nuances of living uprightly in a broken world.

Week after week, Foyle shows us that it is both dangerous and vital to maintain personal integrity, and he does this in a way that is so winsome that even a rebel like me wants to make good choices at the end of every episode. As a protagonist, Foyle is shrewd without being proud. He is thoughtful, discerning, kind, brave, and principled. He is willing to stand against corruption that has infected his peers, even when he is threatened. He stares down "for the greater good" arguments, knowing that not all ends justify all means.

Beyond all this, the show is beautiful without sacrificing honesty. The East Sussex countryside is glorious, and yet scenes of bombings and battles show us the trauma of wartime. And as a viewer moves slowly from the opening episode through the last season, the reality of WWII, and the sacrifices made by thousands of families become moving realities.

When I grow weary of the state of the world, discouraged about attempting to hold to what is right and good, I often sit with an episode of Foyle's War. This show reorients my vision, reminding me that it's okay to feel alone in corrupt times. It reminds me to hold fast and to love what is lovely and true, though all the world goes mad around me.

If you have never watched this show, start with the pilot episode: "The German Woman." (Because Foyle progresses through history and plot development episode to episode, chronological viewing matters here.) I think this series is the most important show conservative America could be watching right now. It's stellar viewing for your older kids. It will likely be medicine for your heart as well.

http://www.thistleandtoad.com/wwwthistleandtoadcom/writings/2017/4/6/for-the-love-of-foyle-the-most-important-television-program-conservative-america-can-watch-in-2017

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

No matter what we think about politics, Election 2016 had a big impact on how Christians talk to one another.

Who can deny that long, brutal months of online debate between family and friends bruised us? That debate changed what we fear, what we hate, and how we speak to one another. So many of us felt relationships splinter and groan, and quite a few of us emerged from the election feeling like we had looked behind the curtain of our favorite political party and found a withered little wizard pulling levers instead of some Great Oz.

Since November, we’ve felt disappointed and hopeless. We’ve also felt discouraged about continuing to expose our real selves because we’ve seen what happens to people who are vulnerable.

Last week I was reading comments under a Christian satire site’s post, and I felt a little sick watching the mocking, hateful spirit of the conversation. A female Christian teacher was accused of heresy, perversion, and greed.

Snotty, sarcastic women and domineering, cerebral men seemed to delight in dropping fiercer and fiercer charges against this writer, and I took in their animalistic fervor until I began to wish I had never agreed to write a book at all. While I don't agree with everything this woman writes, I didn’t understand how people could be so cruel to her. She’s trying to live a Spirit-led life. What more do any of us have to offer?

Yet while I was frustrated with the savagery of those comments, they were also convicting to me.

After all, I’ve handed out biting language to my own ideological opponents. I’ve called names and used sarcasm. I’ve roared against and derided people instead of going to them directly. I’ve tried to jolt people awake with extreme analogies, and I’ve excused my cruelty with, “This is for your own good.”

Don’t think I’m being humble by admitting that much. Even as I tell you what I’ve done wrong, I start to make excuses for myself.

I can’t even confess wholeheartedly to you, because deep down, I really do think that I tend to be more accurate about my judgments than most people are. I have studied a lot, I have a high IQ, and my intuition tends to prove right most of the time. If I know something, and if I tell you something, I think you should trust me. There's my pride, right there. There's my self-reliance. See it?

But even if I am right (and sometimes I am not), does my rightness justify my rudeness? (Megan Phelps-Roper). Election 2016 says yes.

Election 2016 parallels the story of the Garden of Gethsemane almost exactly. For decades, the church has slept like Peter while it should have been praying. When danger finally woke us up, we went nuts and started whacking off ears.

I assume denying the Christ three times out of fear comes next—or maybe we will just slink off and sulk. I don’t know. But I do know that there are a couple of evangelical leaders who have made me very angry, because I think they have betrayed Christ. And even though I believe that strongly, I’m not sure how to communicate my concerns without slipping in to the sort of ugliness I saw happening under last week’s Babylon Bee post.

If spiritual gifts tests are worth two shakes—and I’m not sure they are—mine tend to come back with the gifts of (1) prophesy, (2) teaching, and (3) mercy. Breaking that down, (1) I tend to sense theological error fast and deep (2) I feel God’s delight when I write or speak, and (3) I feel other people’s suffering all the way down to the bottom of my stomach.

This is a weird mix, because Gift 1 and Gift 3 can sometimes get in conflict with one another. There are times when I let truth push mercy out the door. There are other times when I let mercy dilute truth.

The 2016 election has taught me that I must learn how to balance that tension. My old, lazy ways of looking at evangelicalism are gone because I have seen demons rise from the right now as well as the left. While that experience broke my heart almost as deeply as anything ever has, in the wake of my sorrow, I have begun to fall more deeply in love with the Bible. I’ve also begun to lean into the presence of Jesus like I never remember. A few times I’ve even found myself thanking him for the death of my old template because of what it has produced in our relationship.

I’ve been scared, discouraged, lonely, disoriented — but ultimately I am finding that when my politics and my theology divide, there is only one great treasure in this world. And as I have grieved the loss of many things I once loved, I have found delight instead of just fear in the command that there be no other gods before our Creator. He is worth that sort of devotion.

But other days, I struggle with finding the heart to write.

There’s so much cruelty out there, so much barbarism. I don’t want to engage with it.

“Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold,” Jesus predicts in Matthew, and I see now how growing cold is the great temptation in times of evil. As I watch the abuse of other teachers who have been vulnerable and tender, I want to fold inward so that I won’t face the same attacks.

It’s always horrified me to think that Jesus might have been crucified naked, but in a culture like ours, a powerful writer must be both bare and willing to receive torture while being exposed. Humiliating. No wonder Christ sweated blood in anticipation of this pain.

As I’ve worked on my book lately, I’ve caught myself whispering, “Forgive them, Father. They know not what they do.”  That’s not altogether a selfless prayer. Forgiveness is oxygen for the creative spirit. I’m speaking ahead of time to my critics because I can hear them raging and shouting already, and releasing them gives me strength to continue creating with boldness.

If I am going to write at all, I must recognize that those men and women who respond so cruelly to the sons and daughters of Jesus have spent months forwarding proud and ugly links on their social media pages. They have drunk down self-righteous rage until they are intoxicated and primed to explode. They are sure and hard. They believe they are defenders of our country and of the faith.  They enjoy tearing apart the most delicate emotions Christ’s sons and daughters reveal to them, believing (just like the Pharisees did) that they are serving their God by making holes in the flesh of Jesus. After all, the children of Christ are now his body.

I anticipate those reactions, and I’m also convicted. Like Paul, I have been Saul cheering as the children were stoned. Sometimes I still am. Sometimes I'm angry at the man behind the curtain. Sometimes I behave just like him. It’s a lot to consider.

After editors cut out this one part of the Bible, it finally started working for me...

“Quiet time” is a phrase Christians use to describe a pocket of the day for Bible Study and prayer. It’s not exactly a direct command of Jesus to have a quiet time, but quite a few churches and para-church organizations teach believers to embrace the discipline.

Over my 30+ years of faith, I've been through several stages of quiet times. When I was taking Precept classes, I embraced my daily homework like a literary scholar, coding, marking, analyzing. Other years I would print off a book-by-book reading plan that allowed me to methodically work my way through so many chapters and verses per day.

My prayer life has swung from free-form communion with my Lord to meticulous charts that break down global, community, and individual needs alongside specific lists for gratitude and praise. Okay, some mornings I've tried to pray while just falling back to sleep, too.

But even though my methods have changed, having a quiet time has often been sort of like exercise. I have done it because it was good for me and I liked the results. Some days, I just wasn’t very excited about getting started.

That’s changed over the past few months. Every day now, I’m itching to sit down for a quiet place to work through my Bible. I’m reading with curiosity and interest, and I’m finding teachings in the Bible I somehow missed in the dozens (hundreds?) of times I’ve read it before.

This change hasn’t come from a new method. It began when I found a Bible without verse and chapter numbers.

I first heard about this concept of a Bible without number markings through the Bibliotheca Kickstarter years ago. I ordered a set for my husband through that campaign, but as much as I adored the artistry of those books, I wasn’t thrilled about switching to the ASV. (Rabbit trail info: My favorite translations for study are ESV or Holman Christian Standard. My favorite translation for beauty is the KJV. My favorite paraphrase for reading is The Message. )

Anyway, when I read that Crossway was releasing a 6-volume reader’s version in the ESV, my ears perked up. I bought a set for my classroom at school, and I let my high schoolers check them out. When a 17-year-old male told me (with a stunned look on his face) that he had accidentally read the Bible for two hours without realizing it, I knew the concept had worked. One of my best friends and I bought each other a set for Christmas, and that’s when I finally got to tear into this new, old way of reading the Bible for myself.

Until they were finally gone, I hadn't realized how much visual distractions were impacting my comprehension, or how much the presence of numbers poking out everywhere gave me a sense that the Bible was somehow mathematical. The numerical quantification of words also caused me to assume that the Bible was empirical more than narrative, and I see now that this was a much bigger deal that I realized.

The versification of scripture also made me more militant about how I used it. Remember how the old fashioned Bible drills told us to “present arms?” There can be a forcefulness to the wielding of amputated Scriptural bullets. By naming book, chapter, and number, I can engage in Westernized dialectics. I can truncate complex stories into linear arguments that may or may not be indicated by the actual source material I am citing.

Once the coordinates for a tiny piece of Scripture were gone, I was immediately forced to explain greater sections of Biblical context to get any ideas across to others. When that happened, I found that I was yanked out of a imbalanced, humanistic dependence upon my own reason and thrown back into the power of a living document that was powerful without my help.

It took me a while to adjust to this. I felt disarmed and uncomfortable for several weeks. But now I see how it often feels more respectful of the Scripture’s power and of my listeners hearts to orient conversations around images and themes instead of simply numbers.

Even more importantly, I hadn’t realized how those numerical divisions were determining how I interpreted various passages. If I am reading a versified Bible, when a given chapter ends, I have several tendencies:

First, I can have a sense of “reaching my goal,” and then stopping my reading, no matter what comes next.

Secondly, I can subconsciously assume that the end of a chapter is the end of a Scriptural idea, which is not necessarily true. So many times, the flow of a section of Scripture moves beyond the end of a chapter, and I just wasn’t able to see this fully until those divisions were gone.

Thirdly, a versified Bible keeps me bound to the clock. I don't know why, but it does. Just like my student noticed, I tend to lose all sense of time when reading a words-only Bible. I just melt into it like I melt into a good novel, sinking into the rise and the fall of the picture the author is painting. This allows me to dance with my Lord while reading, listening to His guidance for where to stop and when to keep going. This pushes me into a more relational reading of the Bible instead of just jumping through hoops. I find myself in more regular conversation with him as I read, waiting for the “slow down here” or the “dig here” or the “reread,” or the “this is enough for today.”

I felt a little strange when I first realized how big of a difference the reader's version was making for me. In fact, for a while I kept comparing my verseless Bible with my versed Bible to make sure the words were really all the same. It just felt so different, and this difference was a disorienting. I almost felt like I was doing something scandalous like Jefferson with his infamous razor.

Then I realized that the verseless way of reading the Bible is closer to the original text than anything I’ve ever read before. As you might have already guessed, chapter and verse numbers weren’t in the original manuscripts of the Bible. In fact, from what I understand, our present chapter divisions didn’t exist until Stephen Langton added them in the 12th century. Before this, subdivisions of Scripture existed as early as the fourth century. Robert Estienne divided chapters into verses in 1551. So since the publication of the Geneva translation of 1557, the Bible has used a similar breakdown (bible.org). Over the past few months, I’ve begun to wonder if adding those numbers was a more serious step than our early fathers realized.

Now that I've told you my story, let me leave some room for possible differences in the body of Christ here. (The last thing the Church needs is another us vs. them debate.)

First off, it's possible that the presence of numbers impacts some personality types more than others. Also, I’m not sure if I would feel as strongly as I do if I hadn’t already had years of Bible training (with scores of commentaries and Bible classes), which helped me collect the broad strokes of how the Scriptures work.

What I do know is that taking the visual clutter out of the Bible has been revolutionary for me. It’s changed how I study the Bible, and it’s changed how I feel about studying the Bible. If you feel stuck lately, maybe this little change will help the same happen for you.

My worst crushes have always been...

My worst crushes have always been on the short, smart guys. Michael Kitchen in Foyle’s War tops the list, of course. Then there was Bob Newhart and George on Seinfeld (was George smart or just adorable?) But before all of these, there was my college lit professor, Dr. M.

It’s no big secret that I had a crush on Dr. M because we all had a crush on him. The entire college.

“You realize that all the girls are in love with you, right?” one of the female profs once asked him.

He made a little grunt and shook his head as if the principle of gravity were strange and unfathomable. But it was true. The female students giggled over him, and the female teachers understood. The first time I heard the word “man crush,” it was one of my guy friends describing his affection for Dr. M.

All of us walked around trying to talk like him, walked around trying to walk like him. We wrote down phrases he dropped in class in the margins of our notebooks and memorized them, and we spoke them to one another with reverence and glee, as if we’d carried them down from a high mountain. His quotes became epic like lines from Casablanca.

I should also probably tell you that Dr. M collected socks (even Arbor Day socks), wore colored corduroy jeans with embroidered pockets, and made coffee so bad that it could kill a small dog. He looked sort of like Juan Valdez (the coffee man) and sort of like Rhett Butler, loved the Rolling Stones, and despised sloppy criticism. He spent more time in the library than anybody I ever saw.

This is the man who taught me to read with fairness. He taught me the value of knowing where I am in time. He taught me that whatever hard work it took to get what a text actually said was worth the labor. He taught me to respect the work of other writers, and he taught me to respect myself as a thinker. He also made me fall madly in love with old literature.

The first time I heard him speak Middle English, I grabbed the sides of my desk. My knees felt weak, and my arms ached.

“What was THAT? What just happened to us?" I leaned over and whispered to my buddy. It was like hearing Sean Connery speak Elvish from the back of a wild horse. Jiminy cricket, I was going to marry this man.

These were the days before cell phones, so at night when my friends would study at Grandma’s Kitchen truck stop, I would dial Dr. M.'s office to listen to the witty messages he would leave on his answering machine. I had his number memorized, which (okay) I suppose was kind of creepy. But when the message would start, “You have reached the office of Dr. M...” I would say to my friends, “Hey! Hey! Shutup! He’s talking!” and we’d lean around and listen together to what he had left there.

While that was kind of thrilling and kind of weird, it really was not a big deal until that one night when I didn’t hear the recording beep. That was the night my 19-year-old crush went nuclear, the night all the words poured out of my mouth, words describing my love for Dr. M. in a desperate, passionate gush. “Why doesn’t he love me? He’s single! I’m single! So what if there’s a 20-year difference between us! I could make him coffee, and he could read me Middle English. We would be so happy together!” On and on I went until I finally realized that the whole thing had been recorded. He would have recognized my voice, too.

I was dead.

I almost quit college that night. I cried for something like eight hours, then I crept in his office the next morning with a puffy face and sniffled, unable to look him in the eyes. “I’m so sorry about the message...”

But he cut me off there. “The phone system wasn’t working last night. I didn’t get any messages.”

I suppose it was the only lie I ever heard him tell, but it was also one of the greatest kindnesses I’ve ever been given. Chivalry was not dead. This is the sort of man he was.

I told my husband about Dr. M. while we were still dating, feeling a little sheepish about my confession. He didn’t judge me. In fact, he started chuckling.

“What?” I asked.

“I had one of those,” he said.

“A what?”

“I was in love with an English teacher.”

Then he told me about a high school teacher of his, a dear lady who wore long, swishy skirts and librarian glasses. She talked to him about poetry and books, she read to him in Middle English, and his young heart pounded to see that the world was an enchanted place.

I leaned back at the news and belly laughed because I got it, I got it! Of course he would have fallen for that. I was grateful to hear he had. I wanted to swing that dear lady round myself.

We live in a world now where such bizarre things happen. Old men take advantage of vulnerable young girls. Old women take advantage of young men. Everything is so sexualized and perverse, there’s no room anymore for a simple, sweet, childish crush— the admiration of a young person for an authority figure.

As time has passed, I now realize that my youthful affection wasn’t so much a romantic attraction as it was deep respect for a hero. I was right to love Dr. M in a way, because he showed me what the world had been, what it was, and what it was becoming. He taught me how to engage, how to be humble, and how to work hard while chasing what was beautiful.

Unlike so many greedy men in authority positions today, Dr. M. stayed sober in this role of shepherding my heart and mind, not allowing himself to be flattered by the wild affections of a silly, 19-year-old woman who was trying to figure out who she was. He protected me, and he protected all of us. I'm so thankful for his character.

A few months back, my best friend from college wrote and said, “Dr. M’s on Facebook!”

My stomach fluttered a little bit at the news.

“He’s been out west panning for gold,” he said. And I smiled, because that’s exactly what he would be doing. I clicked around and found a picture of him wearing one of those dorky sun hats that protects your neck. A long sleeve shirt with sleeves rolled up. A tin pan full of river rocks. A mustache. A grin. Looking for a nugget of pure goodness, just as he always did.

I looked over all his pictures, but I didn’t send him a friend request. I just took him in from a distance, still feeling a little nervous and a lot thankful at the sight of a man who had changed my life. What a gift to have had a teacher who was safe, who was good, who was a gentleman and a scholar— a man who used his authority and my admiration to launch me out stronger and richer, more ready to help a world in need.

A Story Told Through a Toothless Grin

Look round you and see how the world is full-bellied, flushed, and pregnant.

Four fetal feet kick within her, for she is great with twins-- two primitive beauties, not tame wonders ruined by convention, instead Holst and Wagner who crash and thrum, with order enough to make you thirsty and with danger enough to keep you wide awake.

Photo Credit : Nate Powers, Morguefile

If you are brave enough to walk in the woods at the edge of spring, or courageous enough to walk along the foaming lips of the sea as a storm rolls in, you will find that all that is natural and unsullied by human hands speaks a language you've nearly forgotten.

All that has been left alone resounds, and her songs make you ache, and this is embarrassing and uncomfortable for you with all of your school of hard knocks graduate degrees, so you don't talk about it much.

But of all that is wrong in the world, is right also to ache, for this world was created to be read like a child reads.

Photo Credit : Madlyn, Morguefile

Once you start to hear what she has to tell you, it will pass also before your eyes like a flicker of light, and you wonder if you have really seen anything at all. Then once you admit what has come to you, once you relax into all the possibilities that M-theory, and molecular biology, and Degas, and Pascal, and Vaughan-Williams strain to promise, you will have to shove your fingers way, way down into your ear canal to deny what is impossible to deny but difficult to believe.

Because here is a love song sung in an age of lost love, see? But do not sing it. Do not sing it! You dare not hold this melody inside you because it is too much for the frail wineskins of your mortal heart. It will burst you clean.

But if you will not run, I will tell you a story that goes like this... long, long ago the most eloquent of all poets, the most expressive of all musicians, the most nuanced painter of gold light upon blue shadows decided to create a new work of art.

This Creator decided to mold dimensions with his own hands, length, width, depth, time -- and work upon this canvas a creative being that He could love and enjoy forever and ever.

Like a papa creating a playroom for his own, the Creator designed a studio--an entire planet full of pigments, marble, wood, metals, jewels, and every element that could be harnessed to make more beauty still. He planted inspiration all round and about to teach lessons of form and balance, plants, and animals, and stars--a world full of textures, and stories, and lessons packed with inspiration.

Photo Credit : Rollingroscoe, Morguefile

But the Creator knew that an artist cannot be an artist without autonomy. Autonomy allows an artist to make new ideas come to life, and so the Creator took a great risk. He decided to give his created being freedom--freedom to love him or to reject him. Freedom to abide by beauty or to turn away from it.

He got down to the business of making his beloved, formed the animal body of the created, then knelt to place his own mouth around the nostrils of his new man. He exhaled His own sweet soul-life into his creature's lungs, and at that moment, his new man fluttered and quickened and became more than an animal--he became imago Dei--a being made in his Maker's own image.

And oh, this creative creature was stunning. As he stretched out his bare arms into the light of the star his Creator had made, as he opened and closed fingers nimble enough to play Kabalevsky or do a surgeon's work inside the chest of a little child-- the Creator smiled over his work and and said, "This is delightful."

The Creator wanted to keep close company with the created, a closeness very much like the Creator kept with His own God-Kind. So the Creator walked with the man and talked with him in the cool of the day.

He also warned his man of danger, for there was one who hated the freedom and the gifts of this Adam. This enemy was a proud, hateful being who despised the Creator and all he made.

The Creator implored his man to use his freedom to trust him, to recline in his lavish love, to dwell in the life of God-communion so that death would never come to this artistic paradise. (For all that is of God is life, and all that is not of God is dead and dying.) The Creator pointed north, east, west, and south and told his creature to play, to work, to revel in every luxury -- save one single barrier, one boundary that had to be respected out of trust in the wisdom and authority of the Creator.

The warning proved true and good, for the enemy of the Creator and his created did indeed come, and he was sly, and he was wicked. This enemy convinced the created to mistrust the Creator, and so the death of separation from trust in God entered the world. And in the separation of man from God, there is death, and disease, and sadness, and loneliness, and bloodshed, and hatred, and suspicion.

Instead of choosing communion with the Creator, man chose to defy Him. Instead of choosing to yield to the warm light and love of his maker, he chose to rip himself apart and stand alone in the stone cold dark.

Photo Credit: Hotblack, Morguefile

The mighty Creator's heart was broken, but he had a plan for rescue even yet. Even in the day of her greatest sadness and shame, he whispered over the man and his wife, promising them that one day a descendant of the woman would crush the evil one who had deceived them.

The Creator gave her hope, but He didn't tell her how much that hope would cost.

In the years that followed, the death that the man had been warned about unfolded. The world was now plagued with trouble, violence, injustice. Humans learned the hard way that even their greatest strengths could not save them. They needed help or else death would grow until there was no life left at all.

And so the Creator did something radical. He shook off His rights and implanted an essential, vulnerable part of Himself into one of the grandchildren of the first woman. He made his infinite self small enough to fit inside of a human womb, small enough and yet vast enough to soak up all human wrongs into His own flesh.

This man-God stretched out his own arms to all the mistakes the created had ever done and said, "Beat me for them. Abuse me for them. Let the payment for my children fall upon me."

All the darkness and the ugliness of all dark and ugly things poured into the Creator's body. Though the gravity and the horror were great, though like a black hole the density of all history was pulled into a single lightless center, the Creator yielded. All death that was meant to fall upon the created, he welcomed in to kill himself instead.

Photo credit: Eduardo, Morguefile

And this created a vacuum inside of every soul of every person willing to offer her failures to God, a space large enough to make room for a living part of God to be implanted in her. So when this Son of God rose from the dead, his roots loosened the graveyards, his resurrection plowed up black earth souls, made them soft so that he might dig down through to plant the seed of a powerful, invisible part of His own God-nature to fill up their emptiness.

The communion that resulted from this exchange between the Creator and the created was even closer and more powerful than the communion of those first long walks in the garden. This time, the Creator wouldn't just visit His created. He would indwell them. An internal dance began between the maker and the made.

Once again there was freedom. Freedom to receive this union. Freedom to reject it. Freedom to willingly agree to trust. Freedom to unify with the giver of beauty and love. Freedom to refuse connection with him and scratch the best life possible out of death.

To woo the children of the children of the world, the Creator continued to leave whispers of His love. The crash of the sea against the rocks. The creak of old wood. The little black eyes of a fawn. The romance of His fingerprints. The ache in a chest at the end of a good story. The reaching out of a soul for a home it's never quite had.

And He left stories like trail markers, tales told by prostitutes and tough-talking fishermen. He entrusted his holiest words to the motliest crew of men and women, a rickety, traveling caravan of gypsies who cannot quite translate what they have seen, but if you are humble enough to sit at their feet, you will find mystical, magical tales of wonder.

Through toothless grins, they will tell you of buried treasures, and like a fool, like a child, you will want to listen, and you will pity them, too.

Photo Credit : Taysm, Morguefile

And maybe it will cross your mind that in the best stories there is always a Yoda or maybe a hideous old hag standing beside road asking a glass of milk, and that sometimes it take a week or two in the swamp to learn to become a Jedi.

For the way is narrow and few will walk it, but it is not narrow like membership in the country club, and not narrow like an SAT score, and not narrow like being born with Kate Upton's legs-- but the way is narrow as a fat little bluebird who comes to sit on a barbed wire fence, and stares at you directly, then nods as if she wants you to follow her.

"Why Does God Allow People to Do Such Terrible Things to Each Other?"

If God is all powerful--if he's all good--why doesn't he stop people from doing the awful things they do to each other?

I’ve had enough theological training to answer that. <Pulls up her pants by the belt loops. Spits in both hands and rubs them together.> Theologians say every terrible thing we do is somehow a consequence of the Fall, which was a way-back "don't step across this line" violation committed by two naked people I wouldn't know from Adam.

They tell me those two choices got into my blood like an STD, that I'm guilty by default, and so are you, and so is everybody else, so now we're stuck doomed to hurt-and-be-hurt because of a jillion-year-old flub up that you and I couldn't have prevented if we'd wanted to.

If we grumble that we got handed a raw deal there, we get a big, fat finger pointed at us, reminding us that we have flubbed up too. I'm supposed to feel ashamed of myself right then, and (subtract and carry over) use my shame to make myself okay with a fate of being shameful.

That works for some people, but it doesn't fix anything for me. It's circular and frustrating.

If ALL have sinned, if I'm out of luck from the get-go, that means I can't help but mess things up down here. My chances at winning the Big Game of Being Okay are about as good as some guy's driving a truck with a nail in his tire, one good headlight, wheeling around in the Appalachian mountains on a curvy road, during an ice storm.

The whole thing feels like a setup. I'm not going to make it out of this alive.

I know the theological reasons behind people doing mean stuff, but they never get down into the part of me where I ask big questions about the justice of the universe. Those reasons don't work for me because I'm not a chemist or a statistician; I'm a poet. I'm not asking something that a cold equation can fix.

So when I get full of despair about the rotten state of life on planet earth, I turn to the parts of the Bible that make the most sense to me. I will warn you, though, these are the same parts of Scripture that tend to frustrate my linear friends the most.

I have some friends who read the math of systematic theology and then say, "Oh, okay." They walk away satisfied with the long division of the divine, and there's nothing wrong with that.

But those same people also tend to get in a kink while reading verses that crawl down through my throat, and get down in my belly, and warm it up like a shot of Woodford Double Oak.

For example, Job 38-41, in which an insulted and misrepresented God roars out in a Shakespearean monologue--defending the beauty of His sovereignty before a devastated man who has lost everything, all his kids, his health, his dignity, the support of his wife, the respect of his friends.

God is relentless with that poor man, and every time I read those chapters, I find that I am holding my breath. "I had forgotten," I finally whisper. Then "Uncle!" because it is too much to bear. Then "Mercy!" then "Hallelujah," but not a token Hallelujah--rather, the ravenous realization that I'd rather be consumed by holiness than try to defend myself against it.

Or give me the graphic (almost pornographic) details of Ezekiel 16.

That passage is awkward from start to finish. I tried to paraphrase it today, tried to soften it for modern sensibilities, and I found myself stumbling all over the place. It was an exercise in futility. There ain't no way to make this story easy to swallow.

God finds a bloody baby abandoned in the wild. Nobody even cared enough to cut her umbilical cord. He rescues her, notices when she blooms into puberty, waits until she comes of age.

Then he marries her.

Are you uncomfortable yet? Well, if you are, get ready to be more uncomfortable still. The narrator of this story is going to step it up a notch.

God dotes on his young bride, spoils her. Buys her all sorts of fancy shoes and embroidered clothes, gold jewelry, a crown, fancies her up, makes her a queen of all his kingdom.

But she doesn't live like a queen. Instead, she whores herself out to foreigners from every country, goes for the guys with big genitals (that's in the Bible!), and sleeps with every man she can get her hands on.

She spreads her legs to all who pass, no restraint, no discretion, and her husband goes volcanic. He's devastated. He's scorned and broken hearted. "I rescued you and gave you everything, made you a queen, and you made me a cuckold!"

The storm of his fury passes, and then (of all things) he softens--he cannot seem to remain in anger. He will heal her. He will restore what he has diminished.

I'm not stupid. I know what a psychologist might do with that story. He might call the husband a dirty old man, or cite Stockholm syndrome for the young bride. I know the jokes critics could make here--the jokes people make in internet threads on YouTube. Just another line of proof that the Bible is whacked up, right?

And yet, I also see in this dangerous and strange story a truth that no safer narrative could convey. Through squinted eyes, I see how desperate humans are before God, how he doesn't just save us but wants to engage with us as near equals, how he lavishes riches upon us but we throw everything he gives us away to make lovers of the stuff of earth, and that breaks him and it hurts him.

At this point, a couple of seminary students reading this are scolding me, saying Ezekiel was written for the Jews, not for you and me. But no matter what they have to say, here's what I get--I get hope out of this passage. I'm hopeful because God feels. He feels. He feels.

Yes, I fear such a vivid, unpredictable God, but I'm also drawn to Him because I see here that he is somehow more like me than I had realized.

He feels anger. He feels jealousy. He feels offense at my reductions of His glory. He is jealous for me and my affection. He is capable of such intense love that he cannot stay away from me even when I wound Him.

Yes, his fury frightens me, but it doesn't leave me despairing like the dry, silent math of systematic theology. I'd rather dig up the dusty corpse of Brahms, Rachmaninoff, or Chopin and try to talk with them about my grief than take my bare ache to the gospel of equations.

Give me a God who bellows like a storm on the seas, black clouds a thousand miles wide rolling, lightning flashing, a voice on the winds calling out, "Brace yourself! Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth!" Give me that, and something in my heart will settle down into submission. That is a God I can tell is worth living and dying for.

But please do not explain to me one more time how the Fall brought sin upon the earth, blah, blah, blah and expect me to copy regurgitated righteousness in straight chalk lines on a blackboard when I'm suffering.

True, yes. Helpful, no. Not to me. Not helpful to a poet when she has been abused. Not helpful to a poet when she is grieving over the abuse of another.

In those moments, I want to get my arms around a God who feels my pain, who knows the force of emotions every bit as strong as mine and stronger (how I would weep if I could see what it means to break His mighty heart!), a God who can be impacted by what I say, who can be moved by me when I am moved. A God as sensitive as the feather from the underbelly of a titmouse, caught on a barbed wire fence.

Give me a vulnerable God in my pain, even if that vulnerability makes Him dangerous. Even if I must take the risk of an answer that will flatten me. That is the sort of God I can love with a poet's heart. That is the sort of God I can trust with the intensity of my devastation.

Martin Scorsese's Silence, and Our Strange New Evangelical America

- - - Spoilers about the film Silence below - - -

When I first heard Andrew Peterson's song “The Silence of God,” I was stunned. It was so bare. I wondered if it was even heretical.

I had never heard anything like that song because I had grown up in Southern Baptist churches singing lyrics that focused on moments of “feeling” God.

“Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place,” we harmonized together on hot summer nights. The last verse would be a cappella so that we could revel in our intimacy.

I would sometimes wear shorts to the evening services, and my bare, little kid legs would stick to the old varnish on the balcony pews. I remember peeling them off one at a time while shutting my eyes, trying to feel the “brush of angels’ wings,” trying “see glory on each face.”
I always assumed that glory was a sort of shimmery glow? Sometimes I would peek to scan the crowd and find an old, bald, fat man sweating, glistening and smiling, praising God, and I would guess this was close enough to count.

A middle-aged woman with a teased-out mass of hair sang about a garden in which the Lord walked with her. I knew about gardens. They were places of hot, hard, dirty work. You couldn't walk through them without twisting your ankles on mud clods.

I had worked rows of green beans while sweat bees stung the backs of my knees. I'd pinched tomato worms in half, and flicked spiders off my arms. I'd thrown half-rotted tomatoes that left my fingers smelling bad like grenades that exploded on the back of my little brother's t-shirt.

But the garden this woman sang about was different. She seemed to take easy walks there in the mornings while the dew was still on the roses. Jesus somehow walked and talked with people openly there, so I got the impression that the Lord must like manicured, Edenic gardens better than pragmatic rows of hairy okra and sweet corn. As she sang, her voice would shake with vibrato, and some of the old people would cry and nod their heads.

The pastor would pray, "Father God, just show up tonight, Father God. And Father God, be here among us."

I was confused by this because I knew God was supposed to be omnipresent. "Did He leave?" I thought. "Is he gone?"

Later in life, I found the phrase "all language is metaphorical" in a book--and I took a big sigh of relief to see someone name the gap between words and reality. But back then, I was troubled by the constant reaching of our descriptions--particularly in church.

I knew God was among us. These adults did too. But we were asking for the moment in which you see Him clearly, the electric flash of the transcendent, the confirmation of the Pillar of Fire. We were children crying out in the night to a parent because we needed to hear His voice again.

I knew those moments of confirmation existed because even as a child I had had a few experiences with what I believed to be God. People who don’t know Jesus will probably think I’m talking about a surge of animal joy hormone, but it wasn’t like that. I've had animal joy hormone surges.

This wasn’t just pleasure. When God showed up He gave a moment or two of clear wisdom. The emotion wasn't just happiness, it was a giddy, vibrant love of purity—not purity like we talk about purity--not just the stingy restraint of impulses. This was the completion of what all your impulses are trying to find in the first place.

This was "pure" in the same way refined metal is pure, a refined fullness (not a lack) and a merriment that has no small percentage of disappointment in it. We think of purity as forfeiting delight, but this was delight in full measure, packed down dense like brown sugar in a cup. Unlike those awful, boring images of fat cherubs sitting on dull clouds, I could see how whatever this was would draw me into adventures forever.

It was “There You are!” All as it was meant to be, just for a second or two.

I suppose that "You" was the Holy Spirit, but if it was--whatever the Holy Spirit was, I couldn’t seem to hold on to those moments in which He seemed so obvious.

Once they were over, my heart ached as if most of the color had gone out of the world. A ping of a pure note on a glass crystal, and then diminishment into the quiet, I couldn’t understand why that sensation had to cease. Why would He let us taste this, then disappear?

I’ve since read thoughts by theologians about the growth value of long spans in which God leaves us in silence, but if I remember correctly, the first time I ever encountered someone wrestling with the concept wasn't in a book, but in Andrew’s song.

He was the first person I heard admit, “I can’t hear God’s voice right now, and that's terrible and it's scary.”

It's enough to drive a man crazy
It'll break a man's faith
It's enough to make him wonder
If he's been sane
When he's bleating for comfort
From Thy staff and Thy rod
And the heavens' only answer
Is the silence of God

And it'll shake a man's timbers
When he loses his heart
When he has to remember
What broke him apart
And this yoke may be easy
But this burden is not
And the crying fields are frozen
By the silence of God

If a man has got to listen
To the voices of the mob
Who are reeling in the throes
Of all the happiness they've got
When they tell you all their troubles
Have been nailed up to that cross
What about the times when even
Followers get lost
'Cause we all get lost sometimes

If you know this song, you know these last stanzas don't finish it off. But even hearing this much, I felt a strange sort of relief wash over me. Until he verbalized it, I hadn’t realized that all those years of religious-speak, all those appeals for God to "show up” had made me feel pressure to find continual signs of His engagement.

I didn’t realize how badly I needed to hear someone I trusted say, “When God is silent--and that's often enough for me to write a song about it--I feel disappointed and lost.”

Martin Scorsese’s film, Silence, was another one of those moments for me. Among other things, this is a film about faith attempting to survive long expanses of Divine quiet. The film reveals how we expect God to show up, how He does show up instead, and the human weaknesses that appear in the massive gaps between those two realities.

Unlike Christian movies in which God provides some sort of "I have arrived" moment-- God does not show up here with a new pickup truck, a much-desired pregnancy, or a restored marriage. The God of this film lets His children wrestle with years of suffering in relative silence. Because of this, we watch people who are trying to obey Him strain and grieve--desperate for confirmation during impossible times.

There are so many angles to this film, but I’m just going to focus on the one most personal to me in this post: the traumatic impact of an older follower of Christ who abandons his pure faith.

The film opens describing the work of Christovao Ferreira, a legendary Jesuit priest who has spent 15 years attempting to evangelize Japan. Ferreira was iconic to believers at the time. Your denomination’s equivalent might be N.T. Wright, Billy Graham, John Piper, or Francis Chan—but whoever that hero is, Ferreira was this sort of leader. He was so solid, so certain, so strong that every young priest knew that he would not sell out for any reason.

When news hits Portugal that Ferreira has apostasized, Rodrigues and a fellow priest believe the news is a dirty rumor. So, the two leave home to scour Japan in an attempt to dispel the disheartening story. It is a dangerous mission, likely to lead to death, but the two young men are idealistic and devoted, and they know how important it is to to the global church reclaim Ferreira's reputation.

After arriving in Japan, the two young priests grieve to see believers tortured and slaughtered. As they experience emotional and spiritual torment, they stumble; they fail. But over and again, they rise up again in their faith to try to follow God once more.

When Rodrigues is captured by Japanese officials, his opponents try to break his faith repeatedly. The young priests heart crumbles, and he wavers on insanity, but he continues to hold fast. At last, the Japanese leaders bring his suffering to a climax -- a meeting with Ferreira.

In this meeting, Rodrigues finds that Ferreira has truly apostasized. His hero is now a Buddhist, writing a book about the great lie of Christianity. His former hero begins to discourage Rodrigues from his own belief, arguing against the gospel and its ability to saturate Japan.

Ferreira urges Rodrigues to give up his faith, to compromise, to conform. Rodrigues is devastated, but he holds fast.

The Japanese could kill Rodrigues, but for strategic purposes, they want him to abandon his faith instead. So, they place Rodrigues in a holding cell where he can hear the gasps and wails of other believers being tortured. He is told that these Christians will be persecuted until Rodrigues denies his faith.

As he praying for strength and wisdom, he finds words of praise carved into his cell wall. Laudate Eum (Praise Him). He runs his fingers into the grooves and appeals desperately to the Lord for courage and fortitude. At this moment, Ferreira enters the cell and explains to Rodrigues that those praises were carved by himself before his denial of the faith.

It is a hellish scene of betrayal and temptation. Ferreira urges Rodrigues to see how selfish it is to maintain an idealistic belief that causes others to suffer. He urges Rodrigues to see that apostasy is altruistic. He builds a case for joining with the leaders of the world out of love of the masses.

Of all the torment Rodrigues endures, this betrayal of a former hero is the worst. This man who had once led him in steadfast belief is now leading him to abandon it. It is more than Rodrigues can bear.

As I sat in the theater watching all of this, I was blown away. The timing was more than a little ironic.

Just a few moments before watching this film, I had been talking with a friend about how distraught we have felt this past year. So many people my age feel abandoned by our own older faith heroes. In dire national circumstances, we have watched several of our evangelical heroes abandon the ideals they have taught us--urging us to make alliances with forces hostile to our faith.

They have told us that this is loving. They have told us to do this for the good of the people.

Values they once encouraged us to embrace in the face of all opposition have now been discarded for what they now claim to be a greater cause. They mock us for being too committed to impractical standards. They tell us to wake up, to open our eyes, to give up our old, innocent way of looking at the world.

But before our very eyes, some of these men seem to have changed into different sorts of beings. We recognize their faces, but we no longer recognize their hearts. Their language is different, soured, horrifying. They twist the stories of our Scripture to suit their new causes.

Watching this has taken our knees out from under us.

I’m not going to get more specific than that, nor am I going to dig into what happens in the end of the film here. But I will say that this movie (among other things) helped me to understand why the last few months have broken my heart so deeply. Watching my heroes conform to the ideals of the world has been too much for my heart to bear.

These men ask us to "leave well enough alone" and move on. But we aren't sulking. We aren't pouting. We feel like we have watched people we trusted and imitated trample on the gospel. And we feel like they have called out and asked us to do the same.

So many people claim to know exactly what God is doing these days, but I will tell you the truth. I don’t. My perceptions might be all wrong.

I don't know if God is being silent, or if I have misheard Him, or if He spoke through tears of grief at a rainy inauguration ceremony. Maybe those raindrops were a particular Divine blessing like Franklin Graham indicated. I think it's also possible that rain fell on our new President because of a weather front that had nothing to do with a change in national leadership. God's kindness falls on the just and the unjust alike.

Time will tell, I suppose.

I do know that I’m profoundly disappointed in some of my old heroes. I know that I no longer recognize our strange, new evangelical America. And even though scores of people around me believe that I am too sensitive, I think it is right to be disappointed. Watching your heroes distort truth is no small thing. God holds leaders to a higher standard because heroes falling creates aftershocks that can trickle through an entire generation of young believers.

A huge lightning bolt of God's appearance didn't show up at the end of this film, but I left the theater feeling like I felt when I first heard Andrew Peterson's lyric. I walked away affirmed that it was not wrong to be sincere, not wrong to be sad, and that it was even okay to sit alone in the quiet and wait for an honest manifestation of God's presence instead of letting immediate needs force me to rush in to claim what He isn't and what He hasn't done. (What was that brilliant line about realizing that God was actually all round and about us? I'm saving that angle for another essay, but it was beautiful)

God's name is holy, even when He seems silent. In those expanses, I do not want to use it in vain. It is terrifically hard to wait at the foot of the mountain for the Word of the Lord, but I would rather wait in the dangerous quiet for what He truly is than grow desperate enough to worship a golden calf.

There's a statue of Jesus
On a monestary knoll
In the hills of Kentucky
All quiet and cold
And He's kneeling in the garden
Silent as a stone
And all His friends are sleeping
And He's weeping all alone
And the man of all sorrows
He never forgot
What sorrow is carried
By the hearts that He bought
So when the questions dissolve
Into the silence of God
The aching may remain
But the the breaking does not
The aching may remain
But the the breaking does not
In the holy, lonesome echo
Of the silence of God
-AP
 

It's Hard to Admit That You're Lonely

It’s hard to admit that you’re lonely. Something about that word feels embarrassing-- like you don’t have what it takes to keep the world happy with you.

If we lived isolated lives, being lonely would make sense; but most of us are surrounded by people from early morning till late at night. Marriage, kids, work, church, soccer practice, grocery shopping—we’re constantly engaging somehow. Add social media, and it’s possible for us to be in some sort of conversation twenty-four seven.

Push a button, and I can Skype with my son in college or text my mom who lives 14 hours away. When my husband is staying in a hotel hundreds of miles away, he can call me on unlimited minutes. Some days it feels like my entire life is a flurry of dialogue. I chat. I debate. I rant. I empathize. I teach. I mother. I love. How could I possibly be lonely in a world like that?

There must be something wrong with a person who has that much opportunity to connect, right? How can anybody feel lost in a sea of humanity? But last night I did feel lonely.

I was sitting in my bed, scrolling through my Facebook feed while my husband sat next to me reading something else on his phone. As my thumb ran over one status update after another, I felt my heart reaching out for some sort of connection. (Ironic, right?)

The inauguration was yesterday, so quite a few of my friends were posting snarky comments for or against Donald Trump, using their statuses to try to prove a point to friends and families in longstanding arguments. Because I live in the South, dozens of posts openly claimed God’s involvement in Election 2016, and I saw Trump honored as a national messianic figure.

Women were comparing Melania Trump’s style sense to Jackie O’s which caused long arguments to begin in comment sections. Someone would slam Melania’s nude photo shoots, and then there would be a rebuttal starting with, “Well, at least she’s not…” and finishing with some nasty accusation about Michelle Obama. When another insult about Melania Trump would hit, the same person who had derided Obama would remind us all that the Bible tells us not judge because we all need a second chance.  

I began to feel dizzy reading all of this.

Conversation after conversation was a convolution of self-righteous anger, self-righteous insult, self-righteous correction. Little old ladies who remember a different America felt giddy, as if their effort over the past few months had been work of defending and reclaiming a nation for their great grandchildren. Twenty-somethings who wouldn’t want that old country back if they could have it felt like they were standing up for a new era of social justice by resisting what has come to us.

On all sides, grace was demanded for political favorites and condemnation was demanded for political opponents. The Bible was cut-and-pasted into personal preferences. The faith in God that is supposed to serve as the hub of the soul’s wheel in all matters was contorted to prove political points, and I felt the same despair settle in my heart that has threatened to sink it for the past year.

I almost jumped into the conversation, then I decided it wasn’t worth it. People are too hardened in their views. Nobody really listens.

Then it fell into my heart, that conclusion I keep trying to fight against. "You're alone."

I clicked on one of my own public status updates about the election and changed the privacy setting back to “friends only.” Then I set it back tighter, blocking six or seven over-confident friends who tend to be quick to judge and fairly insensitive.

“They’re still young,” I thought, trying to protect my own heart against anger toward them. “They are walking through trauma… a sick child… a divorce…they’ve never traveled much… they’re old. For that one, I bet there’s actually a legit emotional disorder of some sort…”

Writing that down looks so severe, but I was making those excuses because I wanted my heart to say soft toward my friends. I imagine they make the same excuses for me sometimes. I hope they do.

If I'm being completely honest, there's something else, too.

Even though I know that God is real, He never seems more fictional to me than when I see the body of Christ behaving as it has the past few months. I want to find an explanation for this human madness so that I can hear my God clearly again.

Yesterday I listened (for the fourth time) to a forum on Civil Discourse in the Public Sphere, hosted by Tim Keller’s Redeemer Church. Nicholas Kristof (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New York Times) explained how the news services of America have changed over the years.

Apparently wire services once attempted to sell objective, balanced news stories to both right and left-leaning publications. At that time, it was economically beneficial for journalists to provide moderate news because buyers fell all along the political spectrum. This changed, however, when news stations began to realize that there was a demand for biased news stories.

Companies found they could make more money by feeding bias than by telling the pure truth, which caused networks to grow more extreme. Feeding anger and fear became an essential part of keeping viewership up.

As a result, we are now left with an American public that trusts MSNBC or Fox News without ever realizing how political extremism helps news stations make a big, fat profit. We trust them without seeing how they are using us. We grant them our emotions without understanding that our emotions equal news media dollars.

This has had a profound impact on American culture. Our friends and family members go home in the evenings and flip on the television to spend hours filling their minds with news stories that lean one way or another. We drink down the “we” vs. “they” mindset that keeps the major networks rich. We burst out from this extremism into public engagement and feel like experts. We rant. We roar. We attack. We perpetuate the cycle. And while we become more militant, more confident, more aggressive, we also become more isolated from one another.

In May of 2014, Janice Shaw Crouse, wrote an article called “The Loneliness of American Society.” In this essay, Crouse names the elephant in the room: more Americans claim to be lonely now than at any point in our national history. More than one fourth of Americans claim to “have no one with whom they can talk about their personal troubles or triumphs. If family members are not counted, the number doubles to more than half of Americans who have no one outside their immediate family with whom they can share confidences.”

Yesterday during the inauguration, Donald Trump said, “You will never be ignored again,” and regardless of whether we can support his politics or his character, studies show that Trump won the election because he knew how to speak to people who felt unseen. Somehow he was able to connect with a significant, silent part of America that had believed it was invisible. He conferred dignity to people who felt ashamed of having no voice. He reached out to those who felt lonely, and he said, “I see you.”

Watching him work this strategy has been interesting. As someone who wants to tend the broken, I have to ask, "What does his victory say about loneliness in America? What gaps did Trump expose that need to be addressed by people who know Jesus?"

Because most of the time loneliness is something we don’t talk about, right?

If you and I met at some sort of conference, you probably wouldn’t approach me and say, “Hey. I’m Jane, and I’m so lonely I don’t even know why I’m here!"

You wouldn’t say, “I was so excited about going to all the seminars and meeting people, but honestly, I’ve spent the past forty minutes wandering around the lobby, staring into my phone. I see groups of women over there talking, but I just bought a $5 coffee and drank it while checking Instagram, right here in the middle of all these people because I have no idea how to start engaging. I should have just stayed at home.”

And if you are a guy, it’s probably even harder to talk about your loneliness. At least in my part of the country, guys still tend to project self-sufficiency and independence. Most of the men I know consider their wives their primary relationship, and while that’s a good starting place, a single friendship isn’t usually enough. Even if a man has male friends he enjoys, it’s hard to find time to hang out when life is busy.

My husband was a pastor for ten of the loneliest years of our lives. It was a perfect storm, really. He worked day and night trying to take care of people, which meant we were often too tired to do anything but crash when the down times came. After getting burned several times by people who wanted to use friendship to subtly steer the body,  we began to fear being vulnerable with church members.

The church should be the most honest, open place in the world, but after an elder once pounded his hand on a table and yelled that my feelings didn’t matter because I was the pastor’s wife, an iron door in my heart slammed shut. I realized that I was on stage all the time.

My husband faced secret, intense competition from other staff pastors, betrayal, suspicion, and engineered corrections from the elders. Church leadership would demand that we be more vulnerable and open, but when we would try to trust people with our real selves, that never ended well.

Only after we left ministry did we feel freedom to develop real friendships again. My husband started meeting with other men regularly, and I felt permission to start telling the truth about how I was actually doing.

As awful as that season of life was, I’m thankful for the experience now. It has helped me understand how people can develop survival strategies, then get trapped inside them. Before long, you feel like a stranger in the middle of a crowd. You have to carry the real you like a two-ton weight inside your chest, just wishing someone could see what you can’t ever say aloud.
 
I don’t know what’s making you lonely as you read this post. Some of you are divorced, and some of you wish you were. Some of you are still single after years of trying to find a life partner. Some of you feel awkward socially, and some of you have been asked to leave jobs you loved.  Some of you are deeply wounded by political rifts in your friend groups and families. Some of you have embarrassing diseases you are secretly trying to manage, and some of you are choking in financial debt that you are too ashamed to mention.

I’ve been in ministry long enough now to know that if all of us could somehow sit down in one place and pour out our individual stories, though the details would differ, many of us would still say, “Oh. I know that feeling. I know it so well.”

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to zoom in to address some different types of loneliness. But for now, I just wanted to drop the topic into the airwaves and say, "I get it." As you sit in your rooms, scrolling through your phones, discouraged because it's so hard to connect in a world of constant connection, you don't need to feel ashamed. Being around people all day (and night) isn't the same thing as being seen or known. If your soul is restless, if your heart is discouraged, it's okay to admit that. In fact, I think your condition is part of a national epidemic. And admitting that is a really good starting place for change

The Price of an Honest Man

I flipped on an audio book, ran a hot bucket of soapy mop water, and began to clean the kitchen. “Alpine Pine,” is the soap this go around.

The scent is fake evergreen, but it’s not overbearing like a urinal cake. (Don’t ask me how I know what those smell like.) It’s kind of a middle ground between port-a-john cedar and Bath-and-Body Works winter candles. I don't like the smell of it as much as I like thieves oil cleaner, but every so often, I do like to hit the tile with a heavy duty, old fashioned chemical-laden scrub.

Lately I find myself doing sentimental things like that.  This morning, for instance, I wanted the smell of Folgers coffee from the red tin can, popping and gurgling inside of my great-grandmother’s percolator.

My Bialetti reminds me of that percolator somehow. Now when I spend those long, impatient minutes standing at the stove, shifting one cold, bare foot on top of the other, waiting for pressure to build, I remember her faded china plates loaded with thick triangles of chocolate icebox pie. When I’d bump the table, they would pass a gelatinous shiver. This was deep, cold, ebony chocolate so dark and so sweet you had to chase each bite.

I’m pulled back to 2017 with a rush of thick, black liquid. How I adore the startling jolt of cheap, Cuban Café Bustelo ($2.98 a bag), so mellow and so rustic, hearty as a lined flannel shirt worn to do hard winter work on a farm.

I love a rich woman’s tea, but I say coffee should be masculine and plebian, the lifeblood of soldiers and construction workers, the best of what the common man has to offer and no more. I have as little tolerance for elite coffees as I have for career politicians.

The book I listen to as I mop is Les Mis, the unabridged, 60-hour wonder translated by Julie Rose. Scholars aren’t overly fond of this translation because Rose drops in modern English colloquialisms that break the reader’s trance. I love this translation because I’m willing to stomach her misses for her hits. The most horrible thing that might happen to this particular plot is that it would be made too academic. Only the second worst, or perhaps the third, is that it might be made overly relevant.

As I was finishing the floors, these lines were read:

“Once he had left Digne, he had succeeded in disappearing and soon sold the bishop's silver--except the candlesticks. He kept them as a reminder of what the bishop had done for him--and as a reminder of his admonition: "Do not forget. Never forget that you have promised to use this silver to become an honest man. You no longer belong to evil, but to good. I have bought your soul from you . . . and I give it to God."

Hugo was writing here about Jean Valjean, the protagonist who is caught here in the greatest dilemma of his life. In the fear and dread of this awful moment, a moment in which he could keep to silent dishonesty and preserve himself from the past that haunts him, he sees the two silver candlesticks that were used to purchase his new life by the Bishop Myriel.

I thought of these candlesticks last night while watching the latest episode of BBC’s Sherlock.

(****Spoilers next, so stop reading, if you haven’t watched it yet.****)

In the episode prior, Mary (Watson’s wife) leaps before a gun to save Sherlock’s life. Mary dies. Sherlock lives. He cannot forgive himself for the sacrifice that she has made, nor the cost of this sacrifice to the husband who adored her.

In the most moving scene I have watched in this series to date, Sherlock says,

“In saving my life she conferred a value to it, a value I do not know how to spend.”

He was bought. His life was purchased by the life of another, an odd circumstance for a man who is used to being strong, competent, in charge. Suddenly this giant is living and breathing by the strength of another.

“Yes, that’s it,” I thought. “That’s it. That is the pinch I am feeling today.”

I rolled the bucket to the hallway and pulled my silver candlesticks out of a cabinet. They were a wedding gift, but I haven’t polished them in ten years.  Life has been too traumatic, to disappointing, too busy to indulge in such silly things.

I don’t even have any silver paste. Copper polish. Furniture polish. Scratch repair. Windex. That’s it.

Google, then. “Homemade silver polish.”

Martha Stewart. Reader’s Digest. They enter the feed like moments from a past life. “Do people still dye eggs with beets?” I thought. 

Here is an answer.

“Baking soda. Vinegar. Aluminum foil. Catsup.”

I can't decide, so I try all of them, scrubbing with the splayed green toothbrush my son left in the bathroom before heading back to college.

As I work, I hear, “Preach the gospel to yourself." And so I preached to my own heart while the thick, black and grey tarnish began to lift, ”Remember what you cost.”

I begin to see my reflection in the silver. I’m wearing my glasses, my hair isn't brushed, and last night I didn’t wash off my makeup.  There are dark mascara circles under my eyes. The precision of this pure silver shows too much. I'd like to be cleaned up a bit, in some flattering light.

But Victor Hugo takes me onward to the scene in which Jean Valjean realizes that he must reveal his true identity or else betray his God.

“He knew what he must do,” ... “This would be the greatest of sacrifices, while ironically being the most profound victory at the same time. It was the last step for him to take, but it must be done. In this one sad step, he would enter into sanctity in the eyes of God alone and return to infamy in the eyes of men.”

Sober admission. All tarnish gone. Yes, yes. The Light of the World could burn from such a candlestick as this. Such honesty could illuminate the darkest of rooms.

But it is so terribly difficult to keep clear things clear lately.

My Facebook feed this morning was full of bashing and insults, and my heart broke, not because my political opponents were cruel, but because those I consider my brothers and my sisters were callused.

I was reminded of that scene from Richard Harris’s Camelot in which he sees the knights of his own table enraged by Lancelot's wrongdoing, full of thirst for blood and justice. The round table is cracked, chaos and barbarism fill the land, and in this turmoil, Arthur rejects Guinevere’s offer to be burned at the stake to pay for her sins.

I can’t remember the exact words, but Arthur says something like, “Revenge, is the worst of motives.” He realizes that simple justice will not satiate a hunger so lethal.

This is how I feel looking at the response of conservative America to Meryl Streep’s accusation. My own people are riddled through with righteous indignation, full of defensiveness and anger. They trust the instigators of national division, the false, Mordridian media that profits from keeping cortisol high. 

Might for right is no more. We are now driven by an eight-year-old thirst for vengeance.

How I wish we could clean the tarnish off our silver and see our own reflections. How I wish we could simply admit our own names--that we are prisoners 24601--bought by the sacrifice of another.

How I wish we would simply say, "You're right. How terrible we have been. We're sorry. We will try to do better from now on."

How I wish we could stand strong and dignified while confessing our sins, no matter who points them out to us. How I wish we would be determined while repenting from them, men and women who live under a battle cry of, “In saving my life He conferred a value to it, a value I do not know how to spend.”

But we are drunk with revenge. Drunk, and mad, and tarnished.

I feel my own anger rise, my own self-righteousness, the fluttery, animal panic of a little field mammal whose burrow has been crushed with a shovel.  Insult, and mockery, and vengeance are contagious, and we are living in the midst of a great epidemic.

I don’t know where to turn until I realize that if I didn’t feel like a stranger in a land so strange as this, something would truly be wrong with my instincts.

It hasn’t ever been right to call such a place home, really. The smell of coffee. The sight of a fresh-scrubbed floor. Do they really back so much as they look forward?

I remember how the backs of my great-grandmother’s hands ran with thick veins beneath loose, papery skin. Her fingers were crooked from the work of giving. A sign on her mantle said, “Jesus Never Fails.” All she gave, she gave in hope.

And I am here on loan, the purchase and the property of a mighty sacrifice. That same blood runs in my veins, her blood, and HIs blood.

What does that mean? What does that really mean? I am fumbling, and I am learning.

I stop scrubbing and catch myself in the gleam of two pieces of silver, offered on my behalf by a generous High Priest.

 

The GMO Gospel

I'm an Atlas Obscura junkie. I found the site while grieving the loss of responsible American news stations, and after years of choking down Orwellian newspeak, it's been refreshing to find well-researched articles that unpack the weird and wooly history of the human race.

This morning I landed on a post from 2015 about the history of seed vaults. These are temperature and humidity-controlled chambers which preserve collections of the world's seeds so that if a global disaster wipes out agriculture, the human race will be able to plant food again.

Both my husband and I grew up as the grandchildren of farmers, so from our earliest years, we were exposed to the work of saving seeds for the next year's planting. While modern gardeners rush about to gather "heirloom" seeds, all I have to do is speak with my husband's Pappaw, and I will find tiger melon or tomato seeds that have run in the family decades.

The problem with most modern seeds is that they are highly-specialized hybrids, and many are modified genetically. A hybrid is a plant that has been developed from multiple plants, grown to resist such threats as insects, drought, or mold. Those can be helpful developments, of course. But sometimes hybrids and GMO's are either sterile, or they do not reproduce according to their kind. You get one planting out of them, one harvest, and then you must buy seeds again the next year.

Heirloom seeds, on the other hand, can be grown and regrown indefinitely. As long as cross-pollination doesn't occur, for a thousand years, the offspring of this year's seeds will reproduce the exact same fruit. Although benefits to hybrids exist, there's something wonderful about the security of this sort of genetic purity. Such a plant is dependent upon nothing but the natural rotation of the earth and the care of a good farmer to bring sustenance.

Atlas Obscura's essay, "From WWII to Syria, How Seed Vaults Weather Wars," explains how the devotion of seed vault scientists is tested during the most savage moments of human history. For example, during WWII, nine Russian scientists starved to death while protecting a seed vault during the 900-day Siege of Leningrad. Dimitri Ivanov was one of those who died of hunger while watching over thousands of packs of rice. He gave his life because he believed that the purity of the treasure he guarded had the potential to feed millions of strangers.

Interestingly, almost every major conflict of human history has also had an impact on seeds. In fact, while seed scientists have believed their work wouldn't be needed for hundreds or thousands of years, trouble in Syria required the first-ever withdrawal from Norway's Svalbard bank. Because of the crisis in Aleppo, scientists had urged deposits to be made as soon as possible. Now botanists are duplicating those preserved seeds to restock both Svalbard and the damaged lands of the Middle East once the war subsides.

As I think about the state of Christianity in modern times, I see how wars in the unseen realm have already threatened the seeds of truth and hope on a cataclysmic scale. The purity of gospel has been distorted by humanism on the left and nationalism on the right, and as a result, Christians on both sides tend to be feeding off hybrid fruits of faith that will not repropagate.

We re-create a blended theology that deflects the insects and diseases of our era, not considering the trajectory of our additions and subtractions. And this is a way to survive, I suppose. We can sell Christian books by using this strategy, and sell Christian music, and fill the plates of the masses with faith-ish blogs, and faith-ish sermons. But what will happen to this harvest when a larger disaster strikes? Will we have preserved the God-given fundamental elements of orthodoxy which are so pure that they grow life in any soil?

This is a hard question, because the original texts of the Bible are not easy. I've spent many years reading the Scripture closely and thinking very hard about the paradoxes that God allowed to remain in its pages. Verses I scoffed at when I was 20 suddenly became clear when I was 30. Passages that I accepted without flinching at 34 are more difficult for me now at 44. People who consume the Bible without ever experiencing confusion or frustration must either be far holier than I am or far more simple-minded.

But in the Bible, there is life. The word of God is living and active, though it is also primitive in places and wild in others. When my daughter was asking me about some difficult lines in II Timothy last week, I said, "Well, you know, that is one of the epistles that some scholars question. Canonicity and authorship for that book are complicated."

Then we pulled up resources that explained the questions beneath her questions. Questions about the role of women. Questions about the guilt of Eve passed down through an X chromosome. I let her see that there was nothing to fear about asking things like this, because a living God can handle it.

I told her that over time I had found something interesting about passages just like that one. Over years of walking with Jesus, I have learned that the pinch of raw Scripture can serve an important first purpose, even when historical explanations can later be uncovered to soften difficult passages. The preposterous, impossible sections of the Bible expose the limits of my obedience to a mysterious God.

After all, even if I can find an appealing explanation for the commands of II Timothy, God doesn't always make sense. I worship a God who required Abraham to sacrifice his own son. There's no historical context that could make such a request easier. It's a brutal requirement that proved a blessing, but how could Abraham have known that? Hebrews says that he trusted God to raise his son from the dead, but would that make harming him reasonable?

While the majority of the Bible shows a tender deity, there are also instances of severity so extreme that they force the division of soul and spirit. Still today, exposure to this savagery of the Word of God reveals my reluctance to trust Him beyond my own mind and gut.

No matter what I believe about the culture of the New Testament, no matter how the education of 1st century women (or whatever) impacted Paul's words to Timothy, if I am honest, the squeeze of the Bible's exact words raises a question much more important than my acceptance behind a pulpit on a Sunday morning.

Would I trust a God who asked me to keep silent, even for something so ridiculous as my gender? Would I leave a city and walk out into the wilderness if He asked me to? Would I sacrifice what I loved most for Him? Would I build an ark in a land where it never rained? Would I lay down my life, when my life is all I have known? Would I lie on my side naked and prophecy? Would I reject my impulses? My makeup? My animal instincts? My biology?

So rarely He asks bizarre, irrational behavior of his followers, but what if I were one of the ones He approached with such a dilemma? Do I hold my own reason so dearly that I would reject His leadership?

If I subsist only on culture-specialized, hybrid theology, I lose this savage edge of my faith. And after years and years of living off GMO religion, when or if God asks me to do something that conflicts with humanism or nationalism, I will not know how to plant and harvest those seeds.
This is why I try to study the Bible like a scholar while devouring it like a child. Solutions come and go, but will I give a long obedience to a God I see through a glass darkly?

I hope that as Christianity as a whole engages with an increasingly confusing world, she will feel no shame about valuing the stories and teachings of a God who has allowed fruits of mystery to grow up among his fields of rationalism. For when believers preserve pure, obedience-centered, unaltered faith, though it may require sacrifice and vision, we may also preserve life for generations to come.
 

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Photo Credit : MorgueFile, GaborfromHungary

A Canon or a Scalpel: A Few Thoughts on Christians and the Bible

Imagine that you live inside of a culture that trusts in the strengths of human beings more than anything else. Academics are heroes, of course. Innovators and scientists are “gods.” What would that sort of culture naturally expect a holy book to do?

This is a question we need to consider rather seriously because no matter what we believe about the validity of the Bible or the limitations of humans, you and I have grown up inside of a culture that has impressed its value system upon us almost daily since birth. Even if we think we have rejected the world's values, it’s likely that they have made a mighty, subconscious impression on our expectations of how the Bible works.

A culture that values science more than anything else will expect a holy book to function with the precision of a chemical or biological manual.

A culture that values linear arguments will expect a holy book to provide the ultimate seamless syllogisms.

A culture that values human ethics will expect a holy book to align with all that we have deemed humane and fair.

A culture that values literal truth will expect a holy book to provide fact-by-fact explanations of historical events.

A faith-oriented person living in a culture with such expectations is not likely to realize that his demands have a secular source at all. Societal values would be so pervasive in this situation, a believer would automatically assume that the same standards which drive science, reason, human ethics, and historicity would guide a God-given resource.

This is a vital assumption to recognize. Because if we come to the Bible expecting it to follow the standards and values of humanity, we have reduced it instead of elevating it. We have made it a slave to our demands instead of letting it exist as whatever God intended it to be.

In fact, the Bible describes the possibility of errors like this. In John 5:35-40, Jesus says, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.“

In other words, there was a group of people who spent time picking apart the words of the text, looking for something so specific that they missed the living God when He appeared in person before them. Because of this direct teaching of Jesus, we see that it’s possible to be a student of the Bible while missing the intentions and presence of the God who provided it.

I want to be careful here, because I’m well aware of the dozens of heresies that arise when the authority of the text is challenged. So much damage has been done throughout the years by lessening our respect for God’s word. I believe the Bible is inspired, trustworthy, alive, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (II Timothy 3:16).

But in the religious culture war that has grown to a head in the past forty years, Christendom has not simply worked to accomplish the training of Christians (as II Timothy describes), addressing the needs and questions of sincere disciples attempting to follow the Lord; it has striven to establish a faith-based domination of government. We do not primarily seek God as a counselor who pulls us out of the flesh to live Spirit-directed lives in our small communities, we want to know how to “win” cultural battles in the realms of gay marriage, abortion rights, and evolution.

Those goals immediately shift our expectations of the Bible.

They mean that instead of going to Genesis weary and seeking intimacy with a God who brings light and order from darkness and chaos, we must splice up Creation narratives to prove that Christianity is scientifically valid.

They mean that instead of reading severe passages of the Old Testament and emerging with a renewed sense of gratitude and holy fear for the wild, mysterious God who (for some reason) shows us mercy, we must wrangle with academic arguments about Middle Eastern slavery and mistreatment of women to prove that the God who forbids homosexuality is not a monster.

They mean that instead of reading the story of Jonah and recognizing that our biases don’t prevent God’s love for our least favorite demographic, we spend three hours Googling the digestive processes of super big fish.

Some of these consequences are inevitable because ideas run on trajectories. Leaders of the church and of the government have a great responsibility, juggling those trajectories. Besides, America has Christian roots (though perhaps not as many as David Barton has suggested), and it would be foolish to throw a good foundation away entirely.

But there are also valid arguments supporting C.S. Lewis’s warning about the establishment of a Christian political party in his essay, “Meditation on the Third Commandment.” Even back in 1941, Christians longed for a faith-based political seat from which they could attack the evils of the world.

Though this desire is understandable, it is not altogether safe. As Lewis writes:

“Whatever it [the Christian party] calls itself, it will represent, not Christendom, but a part of Christendom. The principle which divides it from its brethren and unites it to its political allies will not be theological. It will have no authority to speak for Christianity; it will have no more power than the political skill of its members gives it to control the behaviour of its unbelieving allies. But there will be a real, and most disastrous novelty. It will be not simply a part of Christendom, but a part claiming to be the whole. By the mere act of calling itself the Christian Party it implicitly accuses all Christians who do not join it of apostasy and betrayal. It will be exposed, in an aggravated degree, to that temptation which the Devil spares none of us at any time --- the temptation of claiming for our favourite opinions that kind and degree of certainty and authority which really belongs only to our Faith.“

This sort of distortion has impacted American evangelicalism deeply. I fear sometimes that we have become so invested in winning the big wars of our time, we have lost what the Bible was clearly most meant to do inside individuals and churches.

As someone who reads books very closely and very regularly, I have come to two conclusions about the Bible.

First, it would be impossible for the Bible to be entirely man-made. Though I have studied every major argument opposing my faith (scientific, ethical, literary) with relentless honesty, I have ultimately found that primary sources and historical verification have rendered each objection academically inadequate.

Even though the Bible is maddening and confusing at times, even though it is full of paradox and unsatisfying tensions, it also bears elements of validity that cannot be thrown away without throwing away basic human reason. Quite simply, if anything is true, the Bible has to be true.

But secondly, I don’t think the Bible was meant to do the work so many of us are trying to force from it of late. When we are more eager to use the Bible to do work “out there” than inside us, we make a grave error.

When we consider that 77% of Christian men are looking at porn monthly (55% of married Christian men) and 35% of Christian men are having affairs, it suddenly becomes evident why 80% of evangelicals could support a man like Donald Trump.

We have been conditioned to think that the “big important” issues of Christianity happen in the mechanics of national power— with "bad guys" like Muslims and progressives --instead of in the privacy of our homes, where with the clicks of our own thumbs, so many believing men repeatedly betray wives and little children.

We eagerly fight "villains" like Dawkins and Hitchens over the literality of the sun standing still in the book of Joshua, without letting the God who brings all the darkness to light inside us to engage with and conquer the enemies of our private souls.

We use the Scriptures a canon against opponents of Christianity-proper-and-political instead of letting it work like a surgeon's scalpel inside individual followers of Jesus.

We stay so focused on what dangers might befall Christianity in America, we fail to see what damage is growing inside Christians.

While I do think the wisdom of Christianity should impact government (as well as the wisdom of other worldviews, both secular and sacred), I think we should also be aware of the temptation to project the primary impact of our faith into secular power struggles instead of turning like children to receive the private indwelling of the living God. Certainly, the Bible focuses more on the latter than the former.

So in light of this, I wonder what would happen if we relinquished some of our distracting and desperate attempts to jump through the nervous hoops of humanism, all that proving and striving for footholds in the world, and simply let the living, active Word grow us as He has promised? After the scientific, historical, and literary questions about the Bible have been resolved in our own hearts, what if we let the Word of God change us before flailing it about like a wild blade, slashing off the ears of centurions in our fear and fury.

How sad I would be to get to the end of my life and hear my God say, "You searched the Scriptures, because in them, you thought you would find power to make your nation dominant. And yet here I was all the time, ready to fit you for specific work that I had prepared for your hands."

"You would have done so much more good if you had learn reliance. Your life could have knocked down dominoes but you were so busy conforming to the values of the world, you missed me. You fought so hard, and yet you won nothing at all. You said, 'Lord, Lord,' but you never knew me at all."

First Post on "Three Pillows and a Blanket Fort"

https://www.threepillowsandablanketfort.com/the-shortest-day-of-the-year/

The Ten Thousand Ways You Could Goof Up Christmas

Tis the season for holiday shame blogs. You know what I'm talking about, right? The posts that always seem to float around the airwaves this time of year...

Shame on you if you bought too many presents. You are so materialistic.

Shame on you if you are over-scheduled. You are so focused on the Christmas flurry of parties that you don't remember the reason for the season.

Shame on you if you are so zoomed in to your own little family that you don't remember the hurting in our midst and overseas.

Shame on you if you haven't focused on your children. They are growing up so quickly, and if you don't make this holiday magical, they won't have a healthy sense of wonder when they are older.

Shame on you if you Elf-on-the-Shelfed.

Shame on you if you didn't. 

Shame on you if you Christmas pajamaed.

Shame on you if you Santa Claused.

Shame on you if you decorated with so much shimmer and tchotchke that Jesus wasn't made the focus.

Christmas provides an epic convergence for every ounce of the mom guilt we feel all year long.

Eleven months of the year we deal with regular mom shame. The "health food" shame. The "chore chart" shame. The "making the kid read the book before watching the movie" shame. The "how to deal with immunizations" shame. The "providing a perfect education" shame.

But come Christmas, we set all of those concerns aside and obsess about how we are doing this one holiday all wrong.

I've been watching this wave hit every Christmas for more than a decade now, and I've finally decided that the writers of these posts are not trying to wreck our holidays by handing out guilt trips.

They are just processing their own weaknesses and tendencies, speaking out of the social and emotional pressures that have maneuvered them in the past, and seeking a corrective balance. They are saying, "Here's what I've done wrong. Here's how I want to change this year."

Readers who forward those posts are doing the same thing. They feel connected to certain writers because they share a struggle with the over-achievers who have tried to fit too much in. Or they identify with the introverts who have forgotten to look outside of their own little circle. Or they are the super-shoppers who have focused too much on "stuff," and now they want to experience more depth.

When I was a young mom, I used to feel threatened by these posts, but over time, I've learned to read them as confessions instead of as universal exhortations.

I no longer feel choked by everything I do (or don't do), just because some blogger somewhere has written about another of the ten thousand ways I have goofed Christmas up.

Because here's the thing--there's no way for every blogger to speak to every person's specific holiday needs. A single voice emerging from a single life in Heresitwhatsit, Montana might resonate with the Christmas mistakes you've made in the past. Then again, it might not.

God is the one who knows your story. He knows if you have been too into material "stuff" in years past. He knows if you need a simple celebration this year.

God is the one who knows if your marriage has been through trauma, or if your children are broken and need a quiet haven this year.

God is the one who knows if He has a plan for your voice at every single social event that you could possibly attend.

God is the one who knows if an older relative or a child will show up at your house, needing the giddiness of every nook and cranny lit up with tinsel and lights.

God is the one who knows if someone in your home needs material extravagance to unpack a lesson of grace.

God is the one who knows if you need a time of quiet and simplicity to make room to be filled up with Him.

God is the one who knows if you need to focus on giving everything away to those in dire need.

God is the one who knows if you need to spend this Christmas grieving with those who grieve.

I don't think I can make that call for you. I think this stuff is between you and God. He is the Wonderful Counselor who knows your heart and your calling.

After all, you wouldn't have read this far if you didn't want to do Christmas right, right? Your heart aches to wrap up the season knowing that you have invested your time and resources well. You don't want to mess this up.

So instead of letting all those "Don't/Do" posts become a spiritual burden to you, know that they are the stories of men and women revealing their hearts--men and women who are ultimately seeking the same God you are over the next few weeks. Learn from them, but don't let those stories trump your own. It's okay if those lives look different from yours. It's okay if their celebrations do, too.

But do make some time to talk to your Lord and ask Him to give you wisdom for your situation. Give him full reign over all your options, and ask Him to direct your hands and your feet.
 

Because Christmas is not a series of spiritual hoops to jump through; it's a time to honor the indwelling Lord.  He is the God who made a plan for us before the foundation of the world. All resources for His calling will be provided, so we don't have to be nervous, threatened, or strained. We just have to lean in to His current.
 

Emmanuel? God with us. We don't have to go this alone.
 

Feel that big deep breath come into your lungs? Feel the freedom and the focus?

Yes, there are a thousand ways to fail this Christmas. But there is also a living God who stands ready to walk you through a sweet, close path of celebrating His birth. That sort of intimacy--that sort of listening-- that sort of yieldednesss--is what will make this your most beautiful, meaningful Christmas ever.

Photo credit: MorgueFile (Jackileigh) 

A Thanksgiving Request

After being saturated for months in hateful election dialogue, millions of American families will sit down together tomorrow and try to share a meal. In this post, I would like to make one Thanksgiving request, and I would appreciate it if you would pass this along to others who might be willing to take my appeal into consideration. Because no matter what you believe about the Supreme Court, abortion, international policy, or economics, this issue hits close to home—and likely your home.

Please. Be sensitive to the fact that you may have sexual abuse survivors sitting around your Thanksgiving table.

Nearly one in five women in the U.S. has been raped or sexually assaulted. One in four has been beaten by a husband or boyfriend. One in three has been a victim of rape, beating, or stalking. This means that if you have five women sitting around your table tomorrow, the chances are pretty high that at least one of those has been hurt.

These are not just strangers. These are your sisters, cousins, aunts, and daughters.

Our culture tends to blame and doubt sexual assault victims, so many women may never have told family members about the nightmares they have survived. They carry the burden and the flashbacks silently.

These same woman have just watched a man who bragged about sexually abusing women win the most powerful office in the country. No matter how we feel about the rest of Trump’s platform, no matter how bad Hillary was, we need to realize that when a trauma survivor watches a man like Trump win the support of the nation, she can feel like her greatest life burden has been invalidated.

This pain grows more intense when brothers, uncles, or fathers minimize Trump's abuse. The fear she has been carrying around forever—the fear that nobody would believe or care about her trauma—is being played out on a global scale.

I will never understand why certain men seem to have the capacity to consume the body of a woman without caring about her spirit. Nor will I understand why society doesn’t rise up and rebuke them when they do so.

Several years ago, I was caught eating a meal with a man who was speaking crudely about that old Hardee’s commercial in which a young woman was riding a mechanical bull. His wife was sitting near him. Scores of men and women were sitting around him. Yet he roared on and on about how sexually appealing this actress was, laughing and expecting others to laugh.
I felt sorry for his wife, and I also felt sickened by this man's ability to objectify a stranger as if she were a piece of meat.

Finally I responded, “Yes, she was so sexy riding that bull. In fact, I think that actress looks a lot like your little sister, don’t you? I wonder if your sister would be interested in doing a commercial like that."

Those words hit him like a brick in the face, and he was instantly angry with me.

“Don’t talk about my sister like that,” he said.

“Why?” I responded. “The woman in that commercial is probably somebody else’s little sister. She's definitely somebody's daughter. Maybe we should find her older brother or her father, and you can tell them what you said about what you wanted to do to her.”

The next few minutes were awkward, but I didn’t care. I had refused to allow him to perpetuate the myth of the anonymity of the female body. Suddenly the degradation didn’t just fall on “that sexy woman,” it fell on a woman he cared about and knew. And he didn’t like it. Of course he didn’t.

Some of us seem to have forgotten that Trump's conversations about objectifying women were conversations about real people. Your cousins, sisters, daughters who have been abused know that. They know that you can’t grab a woman by the p**sy without grabbing a woman by the soul. They know you can’t rank a woman’s value at 1-10 without simultaneously ranking the value of every woman on the planet at 0.

No matter how bad you think Hillary was, no matter how relieved you are that she didn't win, as you speak about Trump, realize that women you love may be hurt deeply if you boast about him at the Thanksgiving meal. Our insensitivity about this matter has the potential to drive daggers into the hearts of our closest relatives, ripping open deep, old wounds.

Some of their stories would break your heart if you heard them. You’d drop your fork and knife and want to hunt the jerks who did this down and beat them to a pulp.

But you don’t know all those stories. You will never know those stories. And you will never know know how much courage it’s taking those women to simply show up this year.

Please, be gentle. Please be sober. Please be careful.

There may be a time for political conversations with family, but this year is not likely it. Talk about football. Talk about the weather. Tell the old family stories. Ask about how jobs are going and talk about how the children are growing. Fight about who is going to inherit the family silver. But for the sake of women you know who have been hurt by men like Trump, please leave bragging about our new President at the door.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Since the election, I've found myself back at the drawing board, trying to decide how to engage in the nation's culture wars. 

In times of stress, I tend to revert to my inner nerd, so my first instinct has been to emerse myself in research. Luther said that humanity tends to correct itself like a drunk man falling off a horse. First he falls to the right then to the left, and suppose I imagined that finding just the right evidence would sober the mad course of modern evangelicalism.

But even as I tried, I knew better. So many times over the past twenty years, I have seen how facts don't have the power to move mountains.

The beliefs of the average American are neither formed nor altered by reason. For the most part, our religion and our politics begin with affective impulses more than formal, cognitive research. What we believe about God and country is usually born in the gut, in the center of desire, nightmare, and imagination.

Many of us find our political and theological instincts early in life, then those instincts tend to interweave with a smattering of real life relationships. Over 15-years-worth of Thanksgivings, we hear that FDR destroyed America (or that he saved it). We hear praise or criticism of unions. We hear what happened to our aunts and uncles in California, or in rural Tennessee, or in Chicago as a result of legislation passed in D.C. All of these stories converge to form and then confirm a metanarrative that becomes a framework for how we interpret the entire world.

Few of us bother to fact check those metanarratives. They become too personal to vivisect. All of these beliefs have faces, because they are connected to people and situations we know.

Americans who don't have this sort of experience may decide that they want to be "a conservative" or "a liberal" by the cultural shadows those words cast. As broad strokes emerge--as we begin to associate conservatism with either selfless maturity or corporate greed--as we begin to associate liberality with social compassion or indulgent immaturity--we find ourselves drawn to or repulsed by the character traits of a party.

In such cases, almost unconsciously, without ever walking through a defined season of choosing, we look around one day and realize that we are settled in political and theological camps. We donate $10 to this or that and end up on 25 mailing lists for our tribe. We are told which news source people on our team actually trust. We receive power blurbs and media updates from websites that fortify our instincts, and we allow this information to harden our first impulses.

Increasingly, we feel a sense of belonging. We realize that we are Hufflepuff, Calvinist,  Republican, or Democrat, and loyalty to our people warms in our hearts. We see the elephant or the donkey, and we cheer with the whole-hearted devotion of a college football fan. Our political label is no longer just a word that represents an idea. It is now who we are.

I think that this is why the *labels* our politicians and theologians adopt to name themselves carry more weight than their actual adherence to the platforms they are supposed to represent. In 2016, an immoral, left-wing politician can simply declare himself a conservative, then go on to win the support of the Bible-belt wing of the GOP.

He doesn't need to model the ethics or the lifestyle of the moral majority. He must only wear their t-shirt, sport their logo, and find a megaphone in which to call out the five or six points of national disaster that will inevitably occur if "The Bad Guys" win. Even if he is one of the bad guys.

A few threats (real or imagined) and a label will do the whole job, because all of the real decisions have already been made.  Voter biases are stone solid, dug into the grooves of a party identity. When such have been established, only a stiff, personal consequence has a chance at changing someone's mind.

Zealots for the Affordable Care Act ignored all evidence-based warnings that this plan would actually cause health care costs to rise. These righteous souls roared and puffed about the humanity of socialized medicine until their own premiums hit the roof last month. Suddenly, Obamacare was a bad idea after all. 

This sort of burn, this severity and nothing less, is necessary before an individual will admit that what is happening in their own party is flawed. Even then, excuses will often be made. "It was a good idea with bad follow through," or that sort of thing.

I have experienced this tendency in myself in the past year as well. I have read the Republican party platform and nodded my head, let my heart be filled with nostalgia for Ronald Reagan, entrusted my deep conservatism to an institution that slowly veered from the labels it has given itself. 

I did not notice that we were no longer who I wanted us to be. I refused to notice.

It took the election of Donald Trump; it took his seething hatred, his haughty lies, his misogyny; it took watching leaders in the Republican party overlook his abhorrent character and methods, washing their hands of the matter and saying, "Let the people have Babies rabbas" for me to finally wake up to reality.

It took the mass evangelical embrace of Donald Trump, the bizarre behavior of Metaxas, Huckabee, and Carson, to help me finally realize that I no longer fit inside of political party willing to embrace a dastardly, vile, populist leader who actively defies nearly every teaching central to my faith.

It is difficult for me to explain how excruciating, how frightened I am by the realization I no longer belong in the GOP. After all, I am not a liberal. I am a true conservative who has been excommunicated. 

I am a survivor of a rabid virus that has infected the mind of my party, and like a vagrant wandering away from the epidemic, I am not sure quite where to go yet.

I have awakened inside that scene from the Matrix, asked to swallow one of two pills, one that will allow me to see ugly truth and the other which will allow me to slip into comfortable oblivion, the world as I knew it before. But now I know that what is familiar is not what I had hoped it was.

Not only must I decide this for myself; my conclusions will impact how I spend my time and energy. They will influence how I try to influence others, many of whom have already fallen fast asleep because they have taken the pill of least resistance.

As I've been weighing all this, I have been reading the book of Joshua. This is a beautiful, difficult book to read if you have any heart at all. It is no small irony that the chorus is, "Be strong and courageous," for Joshua isn't the only one who must be brave. The reader of this book must exhibit fortitude as well, for in the first few chapters, God commands the slaughter of women and children to make room for the people of God. He causes the sun to stand still. (Physics, anyone?) Without apology, God defies what we would expect of both morality and nature.

And by the way, to think that primitive people were oblivious to the strain of either is to underestimate them grossly. This book has always been difficult, but it has also always been mighty. For in it we also find burning, glorious truths amid the dark Ungit-like fog of holy (sometimes off-putting) mystery.

I have been particularly moved by the dance of the ark of the covenant before the people of God. For the most part, the ark goes first on this journey. In fact, there is to be a 2,000 cubit distance between the people and the ark, so that they would be able to see to follow it.

"For you have not passed this way before," the text says. Because when moving into uncharted territory, the presence of God must make a path clear for all who follow. This dependence is so beautiful, a moment by moment, step by step, reliance upon the nuances of the Lord.

Then while marching around Jericho, we find a command for the people of God to keep utterly silent until the moment God tells them to make noise. My heart pounds thinking about a company so large, moving in a hush for seven full days, not even whispering until the trumpets blast and they are told to shout--not in threats against their enemies--but out of celebration that the city has already been given to them.

I've been rolling all this over and over in my sore heart. I'm rolling over the fact that the manna stopped the minute it was no longer necessary. Rolling over God's ability to exalt His chosen leaders so that they would be heard. And as this story pumps through my veins, I conclude that I am small, and dependent, and terrifically happy to be both.

Even if the world has gone mad, the presence of God may yet go before us.  Even if my leaders have failed, and even if the prophets have worshipped Baal, God can open the necessary paths for those willing to follow Him.

God may allow a haughty political party to hide behind its walls of fear and fury while sending a small band of children to walk in silent rounds of obedience. He may ask for nothing to be said at all, not until the moment of revelation appears.

Or He may ask for us to share what we know once to test the waters, and then say, "if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town."

In a season of disorientation, all of this is a tremendous comfort. I see how it is not up to me to change anybody's mind. It is not up to me to go where God has not sent me. The ark goes before, and when He wants me to shout because He has given His glory a victory, my voice needs to be ready to celebrate.

Photo Credit: Mourge File (msthurnell)

Until the Lord Gives Rest to Your Brothers

As a first-born kid, I tend to feel too much responsibility for problems that I can't fix. Many of the lessons I've had to learn over the past twenty years boil down to "letting God be God" and not trying to do his work for him.

However, there are some situations when we need to walk away from our own comfort and security and take risks to help others with a cause. Sometimes we need to carry one another's burdens, even when it's hard, even when it's risky.

Last night I was reading the book of Joshua, and two verses popped out that I had never noticed before. These verses appear after Israel left Egypt, when two-and-a-half tribes were already settled into their new cities. After a long journey through the desert, these elite few were finally living in peace and ease.

However, the remaining tribes were still displaced. For these people, more battles stood between their homelessness and their security.

Joshua approaches the settled tribes and says, "Hey, I know you have it good right now. But you also have an obligation to help make sure all those other Israelites who aren't settled find their homes, too. You gotta help a brother out.  So get out of your Laz-E-Boys, leave your comfort for a while, and come join the fight. And I don't want you to rest until all of Israel feels as secure as you feel right now."

Joshua tells the biggest, strongest men to leave their wives, kids, and livestock, and walk through all their waiting brothers from the other tribes (which would make an amazing movie scene, if you think about it), then fight for them "until the Lord gives rest to your brothers as he has to you, and they also take possession of the land that the Lord your God is giving to them."

"Until the Lord gives rest to your brothers as he has to you."

I love that this sort of costly human service is part of God's generosity. Just look at that last verse, "the land that the Lord your God is giving to them." Sometimes God uses the sacrifices of his people to accomplish his good on this planet.

Think about a time in your life when you were feeling fatigued from travel, beaten down, homesick, afraid. Imagine how it would have felt to see a huge band of your best friends and their best friends show up and say, "We got this. We're going to help you." Imagine your relief in realizing, "They are taking on my cause. I don't have to do this by myself any more."

With Trump's election, a lot of conservative Christians feel room to take a breather. We feel like the Supreme Court will be okay. With both Senate and House dominated by Republicans, we may believe a disaster was averted, that God blessed our cause, and therefore, we can go on with life as normal.

It would be easy now to turn a blind eye to what other people groups around us are still suffering. We could dismiss the struggles of sincere refugees or racial minorities, feeling like it's not really our problem to fight those battles. We might even try to pretend like their problems aren't real or widespread. It feels so much better to just get on with enjoying day-to-day pleasures, making money, raising our kids.

But even though we can't apply God's Old Testament commission for Israel directly to America today, we can see that universal principles of godly living exist within this text. The New Testament reaffirms that those who are comfortable are not supposed to settle down in their abundance while the desperate and displaced are in need of assistance.

So who is in need around me? Even if I feel safe, who doesn't? Which stories do I need to hear that would show me what's really going on? What hard realities would never be a part of my world if I didn't do the work of trying to understand?

The settled tribes could have easily ignored the trouble of their brothers. They could have said, "Listen. I'd love to help, but I am fighting to get my own life in order right now." They could have said, "I finally realize how dangerous the world is, and so I need to get busy making a nest egg." They could have said, "I really just need to focus on my own stuff right now. My family has been been through an awful 40 years of wandering in the desert, and we have earned some time off."

Or as they felt the pull to help, they could have chosen to focus on the faults of the other tribes. "I never really liked the Levites anyway. They are such snobs. This will be good for them." Or maybe, "Judah could have prepared for this long ago. This is just how their people are. They always expect a bailout, and I'm not going to be an enabler here." They could have said, "Not my battle. I put in my time."

They could have made the same sort of excuses we make today. But how much more beautiful would it be if the church of Jesus refused to settle down into a sense of legislative safety while our brothers and sisters who are made in God's image are hurting?

Are we willing to see that until all of us are secure, none of us should relax? Are we willing to internalize the pain of those who don't feel comfortable right now? How can we take the focus off our own ease and rally to the front lines on behalf of those in need until the Lord gives the same rest to our brothers that he has given to us?

Photo credit: MorgueFile jkt_te