The Hard Work of Listening that Nobody Wants to Do

One of the first things I teach first-year rhetoric students is the difference between denotation and connotation. Knowing the difference between these two terms has always been important, but in 2017, it’s critical to engaging with a broken society.

DENOTATION is the literal definition of a word. It’s the definition you would find in a dictionary.

CONNOTATION is much more complicated. Connotation includes the social overtones of a word—the cultural connections it evokes in a given group of people.

For example, the denotative definition of the word “home” is, “the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household” (Google).

The connotative definition of the word “home,” however, is different for different people. A home might mean a place of warmth, safety, shelter, fellowship to some. To another, it might be a place of chaos, abuse, criticism, loneliness.

While the term “home” is relatively benign, many other words used in modern public dialogue are inherently explosive. Simply speaking a word like, “patriot,” “Obama,” or “Second Amendment” can produce a surge of affection or ire. In America 2017, words are triggers, which makes public discourse a walk through a field of land mines.

HOW THIS PLAYS OUT IN SOCIAL DIALOGUE : A SAMPLE CONFLICT

So let’s create a fictional but likely scenario in which to explore these terms.

Let’s say that Citizen Left is frustrated that a public university building is named after a war general who was also a slave owner. Citizen Right reads Citizen Left’s complaint, and he tweets, “Snowflakes who can’t deal with America’s actual history can get on a boat and go back to Africa.”

News of this conflict hits the press, and furious posts are written on Citizen Right’s favorite news cites, claiming Citizen Lefts are attempting to erase the past and destroy national history from coast-to coast. Journalists aligned with Citizen Right write columns about the snowballing demands of political correctness, claiming this single change will lead to removing all national landmarks. Readers on the Right grow emboldened, feeling like patriots when they stand in hostile defiance Citizen Left’s complaints.

Citizen Lefts see this response and feel threatened. Citizen Right does not simply say, “No. We do not want to change this building name.” It says, “You are the enemy for wanting to change anything.”

In the wake of this heightened response, Citizen Left feels the need to join forces with other Citizen Lefts to resist what is now a escalating movement of anger toward a declared people group. Online dialogue divides and hardens people into two groups. A request for a simple name change has become a national line in the sand.

Such a domino train of connotative conclusions is nearly impossible to stop once it begins. No issue stands alone because every single complaint or cause is impregnated with all the meaning imbued by these extreme micro-cultures. Wild expressions of generalized connotative emotion overtake focused expressions of reason, and national aggression grows.

WHAT NOBODY TAKES TIME TO SEE : OUR CONNOTATIVE CONTEXT

It’s impossible to divorce ourselves from connotation, nor should that be our prime aim. Humans are not robots, and the emotional power of words is just as important as their technical definition.

However, if America is going to heal, we must openly acknowledge the central role of connotation and begin to operate accordingly. A couple in marital counseling has to identify and admit key problems before it can to work through them, and America’s fundamental threat to unity at this time is the threat of connotative context.

Every single human being carries a connotative context into every single human interaction. This context develops over decades, beginning in our first homes. Most of us learned to either love or mistrust Jimmy Carter (or Bill Clinton) by listening to comments made by family members we trusted--not by evaluating statements during a Presidential debate. As we grow older, additional friendships and life experiences become formative, and allegiance to a faith system (or non-faith system) and political affiliations calcifies our sense of context.

Eventually, a connotative context can overtake our whole personhood, and because connotation is affective, it impacts our sense of self far more deeply than denotative facts. Connotative context is stitched together from the faces of people we know, from places that are familiar, from real-life relationships, experiences, and metaphysical affiliations grow to define “us” instead of simply defining our coordinates in a world in which we operate.

If left to itself, a connotative context becomes identity instead of simply a lens by which to see the world.

CONNOTATIVE CONTEXT AND THE CONFEDERATE FLAG:

Let’s look at one example to unpack this tendency a little more deeply.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen how the Confederate flag can evoke wild and varied responses. For one man, it evokes feelings of Southern pride, independence, and patriotism. For another, it evokes images of lynchings, KKK rallies, and threats of genocide. If these two individuals try to have a conversation, they are unlikely to find a middle ground because their presuppositions are rooted in experience.

Old white men may remember giving a happy rebel yell to the sight of that flag while riding bikes as a ten-year-old, thinking nothing of racial issues, only warmed by a sense of Southern loyalty. An African American woman may remember flagrant racial hostility that she encountered from angry men flying this flag from their trucks.

These two people have had different experiences with this one symbol, and once their connotative context is calcified by time or by pain, it’s not likely to change. The man who remembers a childhood feeling of warm glee at seeing the Confederate flag will find it very hard to empathize with a woman who feels threat of abuse at the same sight. A woman who feels the threat of abuse is unlikely to feel comforted by another man’s benign childhood memory. This one flag is nostalgic and patriotic to one person, while it is ugly and hostile to another. These two realities exist at an incredibly deep level in each of these human beings.

In fact, you may have noticed that when people argue about the Confederate flag, they use denotative details almost exclusively to support their own connotative context. One may reference the resurgence of this flag during the 1960’s as a symbol of opposition to the Civil Rights movement. Another may reference its origin as the symbol for Virginia’s Army of the Potomac. But those details almost always fall within the tsunamic force of an affective soul which remembers either feeling threatened or warmed by this flag. The real fight isn’t happening in the exchange of data, but way deep under the surface, where our first loyalties and threats are formed.

Meanwhile, to make all this more complicated, our connotative context is a reality we can hardly see because it exists too close to us. Trying to see our context is like trying to see our own eye balls without a mirror.

THE DISCIPLINE OF SEMINOTICS

The discipline of seminotics—how signs communicate meaning--might be helpful here as well. This discipline was developed by Frederick Saussure, then expanded by C.S. Pierce who introduced a triadic theory of signs. I’m offering an incredibly simple reduction of the discipline below, but knowing that a couple of these terms exist might be important.

Pierce’s model of seminotics suggests that there are three parts to how signs work in a culture:

1. First, we have a SIGN (the representation)

2. Behind this sign, we have an OBJECT (what the sign represents)

3. Finally, we have AND INTERPRETANT (the interpretation of the sign)

This language allows us to admit that every sign causing tension in our culture points back to an object for interpretants.

Ignorant people try to avoid this complexity by dismissing opponents as “snowflakes,” but it would be more intelligent and fair to take the time to say, “Here we have a sign. This sign points to ______________ (object) for me. Where does it point for you?”

Admitting this difference isn’t a move of relativism. It doesn’t require the erasing of history or the undermining of our republic. It’s a move of essential humanity—admitting that we all grew up in different contexts, in different situations, and therefore that we see the world differently.

Understanding connotation is hard and humble work, and I’m not sure how a nation addicted to pride and anger can begin this sort of dialogue. I’m incredibly angry with a huge portion of America right now, and frankly, I don’t care why certain people feel what they feel.

White supremacism, for example, is clearly a satanic force in this nation; therefore, I am unwilling to ask meaningful questions about why KKK members feel the way they feel. I don’t care what their stories are. I don’t care what their families were like. I simply want those dastardly people to go away. However, brave souls like Daryl Davis are doing the work of personal engagement, and they are seeing change as a result. I am in awe of Davis’s courage and character. If I hadn’t read his story, I wouldn’t even be able to imagine trying to do such a thing.

God also gave supernatural grace to Corrie Ten Boom as she engaged with one of her former Nazi abusers. After watching the ugliness of Charlottesville, I see now more of how astounding that move was. It would take divine empowerment to push me to care about people so driven by foolishness and hate.

I’m not ready yet to try to engage with those sorts of people. But I can take baby steps with other groups who make me angry.

For example, I’m profoundly angry with Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, and Jerry Falwell, Jr. because they have bastardized the gospel with political allegiance. I’m convinced that these men are living out the sins of the church of Ephesus in the book of Revelation, and I think they are misleading thousands of sincere believers, corrupting a gospel that should be kept pure at all costs.

I’m also profoundly angry with Eric Metaxas and other so-called conservatives who have abandoned their professed morality to operate from fear and political posturing. I believe they have done far more harm to the conservative cause than any liberal has ever done.

I am certain that these men are committing grave wrongs. I don’t think that engaging with them will change my opinion on how Christians should engage with politics. However, asking better questions of their followers might allow me to operate more humanely instead of dismissing them in disgust. And maybe if I am more humane, asking questions about fears and their sources, eventually those people will calm down enough to be able to hear my own viewpoint.

For example, when I realize that reading Left Behind twenty years ago caused a woman in Alabama to believe that Trump is preventing globalists from issuing in the anti-Christ, I am likely shake my head. But understanding her fear also helps me understand this woman’s decision-making process. And when I realize that thousands of people like her are operating out of a connotative context in which “America first” feels like it will prevent Nicolae Carpathia from planting sign-of-the-Beast microchips in every citizen, I see a fear strong enough to make a person unable to see Trump’s actual violations of Scripture.

Hearing all this doesn’t make me automatically patient or compassionate with people who should be acting better than they are. But as hard as it is to take time for this sort of thing, I still think it’s important.

I also think it’s essential to resolving some of the problems that are overtaking America at present. Why are some statues so offensive that people are willing to risk jail to tear them down? What stories are behind that? Why do certain people feel heard and represented by someone like Donald Trump? What does Franklin Graham fear so much that he is willing to use his social media page for political ends?  Why would someone feel the need to say "Black Lives Matter" instead of just "All Lives Matter?"

If individuals don’t take time to understand their own connotative context as well as the connotative context of other individuals—if we don’t stop lazily blowing all opponents off as “snowflakes”-- if we don't start seeing why different signs mean different things to different people—we are going to end up simply killing each other for stories we never took time to hear.

I reread this every few years just to remind myself of how much has changed since 1998

Declaration concerning religion, ethics, and the crisis in the Clinton presidency

The following declaration can be found at moral-crisis.org, November 16, 1998

The following declaration can be found at moral-crisis.org

To be released on 13 November 1998

As scholars interested in religion and public life, we protest the manipulation of religion and the debasing of moral language in the discussion about presidential responsibility. We believe that serious misunderstandings of repentance and forgiveness are being exploited for political advantage. The resulting moral confusion is a threat to the integrity of American religion and to the foundations of a civil society. In the conviction that politics and morality cannot be separated, we consider the current crisis to be a critical moment in the life of our country and, therefore, offer the following points for consideration:

1. Many of us worry about the political misuse of religion and religious symbols even as we endorse the public mission of our churches, synagogues, and mosques. In particular we are concerned about the distortion that can come by association with presidential power in events like the Presidential Prayer Breakfast on September 11. We fear the religious community is in danger of being called upon to provide authentication for a politically motivated and incomplete repentance that seeks to avert serious consequences for wrongful acts. While we affirm that pastoral counseling sessions are an appropriate, confidential arena to address these issues, we fear that announcing such meetings to convince the public of the President’s sincerity compromises the integrity of religion.

2. We challenge the widespread assumption that forgiveness relieves a person of further responsibility and serious consequences. We are convinced that forgiveness is a relational term that does not function easily within the sphere of constitutional accountability. A wronged party chooses forgiveness instead of revenge and antagonism, but this does not relieve the wrong-doer of consequences. When the President continues to deny any liability for the sins he has confessed, this suggests that the public display of repentance was intended to avoid political disfavor.

3. We are aware that certain moral qualities are central to the survival of our political system, among which are truthfulness, integrity, respect for the law, respect for the dignity of others, adherence to the constitutional process, and a willingness to avoid the abuse of power. We reject the premise that violations of these ethical standards should be excused so long as a leader remains loyal to a particular political agenda and the nation is blessed by a strong economy. Elected leaders are accountable to the Constitution and to the people who elected them. By his own admission the President has departed from ethical standards by abusing his presidential office, by his ill use of women, and by his knowing manipulation of truth for indefensible ends. We are particularly troubled about the debasing of the language of public discourse with the aim of avoiding responsibility for one’s actions.

4. We are concerned about the impact of this crisis on our children and on our students. Some of them feel betrayed by a President in whom they set their hopes while others are troubled by his misuse of others, by which many in the administration, the political system, and the media were implicated in patterns of deceit and abuse. Neither our students nor we demand perfection. Many of us believe that extreme dangers sometimes require a political leader to engage in morally problematic actions. But we maintain that in general there is a reasonable threshold of behavior beneath which our public leaders should not fall, because the moral character of a people is more important than the tenure of a particular politician or the protection of a particular political agenda. Political and religious history indicate that violations and misunderstandings of such moral issues may have grave consequences. The widespread desire to “get this behind us” does not take seriously enough the nature of transgressions and their social effects.

5. We urge the society as a whole to take account of the ethical commitments necessary for a civil society and to seek the integrity of both public and private morality. While partisan conflicts have usually dominated past debates over public morality, we now confront a much deeper crisis, whether the moral basis of the constitutional system itself will be lost. In the present impeachment discussions, we call for national courage in deliberation that avoids ideological division and engages the process as a constitutional and ethical imperative. We ask Congress to discharge its current duty in a manner mindful of its solemn constitutional and political responsibilities. Only in this way can the process serve the good of the nation as a whole and avoid further sensationalism.

6. While some of us think that a presidential resignation or impeachment would be appropriate and others envision less drastic consequences, we are all convinced that extended discussion about constitutional, ethical, and religious issues will be required to clarify the situation and to enable a wise decision to be made. We hope to provide an arena in which such discussion can occur in an atmosphere of scholarly integrity and civility without partisan bias.

The following scholars subscribe to the Declaration:

1. Paul J. Achtemeier (Union Theological Seminary in Virginia)

2. P. Mark Achtemeier (University of Dubuque Theological Seminary)

3. LeRoy Aden (Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia)

4. Diogenes Allen (Princeton Theological Seminary)

5. Joseph Alulis (North Park University)

6. Charles L. Bartow (Princeton Theological Seminary)

7. Donald G. Bloesch (University of Dubuque Theological Seminary)

8. Carl Braaten (Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology)

9. Manfred Brauch (Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary)

10. William P. Brown (Union Theological Seminary in Virginia)

11. Don S. Browning (University of Chicago)

12. Frederick S. Carney (Southern Methodist University)

13. Ellen T. Charry (Princeton Theological Seminary)

14. Karl Paul Donfried (Smith College)

15. Richard Drummond (University of Dubuque Theological Seminary)

16. Jean Bethke Elshtain (University of Chicago)

17. Edward E. Ericson, Jr. (Calvin College)

18. Gabriel Fackre (Andover Newton Theological School)

19. Robert Gagnon (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary)

20. Joel B. Green (Asbury Theological Seminary)

21. Robert H. Gundry (Westmont College)

22. Scott J. Hafemann (Wheaton College)

23. Roy A. Harrisville (Luther Theological Seminary)

24. Stanley M. Hauerwas (Duke University)

25. Gerald F. Hawthorne (Wheaton College)

26. S. Mark Heim (Andover Newton Theological School)

27. Frank Witt Hughes (Codrington College)

28. Robert Imbelli (Boston College)

29. Robert Jenson (Center for Theological Inquiry)

30. Robert Jewett (Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary)

31. Jack Dean Kingsbury (Union Theological Seminary in Virginia)

32. Paul Koptak (North Park Theological Seminary)

33. John S. Lawrence (Morningside College)

34. Walter Liefeld (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School)

35. Troy Martin (Saint Xavier University)

36. James L. Mays (Union Theological Seminary in Virginia)

37. S. Dean McBride (Union Theological Seminary in Virginia)

38. Sheila E. McGinn (John Carroll University)

39. John R. McRay (Wheaton College)

40. Robert Meye (Fuller Theological Seminary)

41. David Moessner (University of Dubuque Theological Seminary)

42. Grant Osborne (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School)

43. Carroll D. Osburn (Abilene Christian University)

44. William A. Pannell (Fuller Theological Seminary)

45. Jon Paulien (Andrews University)

46. John Piper (Bethlehem Baptist Church)

47. Stephen Pope (Boston College)

48. J. E. Powers (Hope College

49. Mark Reasoner (Bethel College),

50. John Reumann (Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia)

51. David Rhoads (Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago)

52. W. Larry Richards (Andrews University)

53. Daniel E. Ritchie (Bethel College)

54. Joel Samuels (University of Dubuque Theological Seminary)

55. David Scholer (Fuller Theological Seminary)

56. Keith Norman Schoville (University of Wisconsin)

57. J. Julius Scott (Wheaton College)

58. Mark Seifrid (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)

59. Christopher R. Seitz (St. Andrews University)

60. Klyne Snodgrass (North Park Theological Seminary)

61. Max Stackhouse (Princeton Theological Seminary)

62. W. Richard Stegner (Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary)

63. Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner (University of Dubuque Theological Seminary)

64. R. Franklin Terry (Morningside College)

65. David Tiede (Luther Theological Seminary)

66. Reinder Van Til (Eerdmans Publishing Company)

67. Warren Wade (North Park University)

68. J. Ross Wagner (Princeton Theological Seminary)

69. David H. Wallace (American Baptist Seminary of the West)

70. Timothy P. Weber (Northern Baptist Theological Seminary)

71. Merold Westphal (Fordham University)

72. Jonathan R. Wilson (Westmont College)

73. Edward and Anne Wimberly (Interdenominational Theological Center)

74. Harry Yeide (George Washington University)

https://www.layman.org/news86fd/

A Lovesong for the Disillusioned

You grew up listening to Adventures in Odyssey,

soaking down stories that taught your young heart

to swim against the current.

They told you it wouldn’t be easy to do what was right

because the world was dark and ever darker--

but you--

they said you needed to be willing to stand alone.

So you walked through the halls of a ratty high school,

wearing a purity ring and carrying a Bible,

defending your faith while the other kids laughed

because even if you were

the only one,

you would keep your eyes on heaven.

It was lonely to hope,

lonely to wait,

difficult to see beyond all this chaos.

“It’s worth it,” they whispered.

“Here is the pearl of great price.”

And your heart fluttered because

you saw how goodness was beautiful.

You decided you were willing to die for it.

They warned you about the coming evil,

the sly tricks of the devil,

the progressives and the humanists.

You were ready for all of it.

You sat through The Truth Project

strengthening your muscles with a ready defense.

You resolved to stand firm though all hell broke loose,

so you divided the values of earth from the stuff of God,

and you drew a hard line of allegiance.

“All of me, God,” you prayed.

“God, take all of me.”

You kissed dating goodbye,

read marriage books, prayed, and prayed,

and resigned again.

You studied Biblical womanhood,

waited for the wedding night, then

homeschooled the babies that came to you.

No matter how difficult it was,

you were always willing,

“All of me, God. All of me,”

because His kingdom was not of this earth,

and your eyes were on the prize.

Then you woke up one morning to a man shouting,

“Grab them by the pu**y, you can do anything.”

“It doesn't really matter what (the media) write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of a**.”

And God’s people said, “Amen”?

You looked round stunned.

“HERE IS THE SALVATION OF THE LORD!” they cheered,

this clanging, vulgar man

was King David, King Solomon,

a friend of the Kingdom--

lo, he was the salvation of the world.

And you stood still as a little girl

who has just been molested by her favorite uncle.

You held your empty hands out and trembled when you said,

“But here is everything you have taught us...”

They told you to shut up.

They told you that it was time to ditch the fairy tale.

They called you a snowflake and a RINO.

They said you didn’t understand anything at all.

They said you were delicate and spoiled,

they mocked you and said, “What’s wrong with you?

Don’t you know that out in the real world,

good men do bad things.”

“Grow up!” they hissed.

“The work of Jesus is dirty sometimes.”

Your knees shook as you ran from them,

and you wept as you knelt by your bed to pray.

You are weary now,

weary from a life poured out like nard on the feet of Christ,

only to be shoved back

by angry men

eager to tattoo vulgarities from a gas station wall

onto the Good Lord’s clean skin.

You have written to me quivering,

asking if the gospel was only a dream.

In your agony,

proud theologians have shoved

the equations of orthodoxy into your face,

dismissing your sorrow with a wave of a hand.

“You were never His at all!” they say,

"or you wouldn't doubt at all."

An easy answer to scratch their own itch.

But oh, you dear, tired little lamb,

let me be a mother to your broken heart.

The storm rages round and round,

and I hear your heart pounding these many miles away.

I see the strain on your face,

like a child pulled from rubble.

Come in close.

All is not lost.

Though the strong be drunk on power and on fear,

though men who claim to know God prove that they do not,

though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea;

Though its waters roar and foam,

Though the mountains quake at its swelling pride.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,

The holy dwelling places of the Most High.

God is in the midst of her, she will not be moved;

God will help her when morning dawns.

The nations made an uproar, the kingdoms tottered;

He raised His voice, the earth melted.

the Lord of hosts is with us;

The God of Jacob is our stronghold.

All you have entrusted was not wasted.

All you have believed was not a lie.

Heroes are only men,

only men,

only small and passing men.

So remember how our Jesus knelt in the Garden

abandoned by all friends,

how he wept with blood and sweat intermingled.

And here we kneel, too, following.

It is a holy posture to grieve so.

You have not believed too much;

the masses have believed too little.

Hold firm, then. Hold firm.

Whatever is true,

whatever is honorable,

whatever is just,

whatever is pure,

whatever is lovely,

whatever is commendable,

if there is any excellence,

if there is anything worthy of praise,

think about these things.

See your Savior high and lifted up.

He lives forever.

His name is holy.

You have been no fool to give what you could not keep

for that you could not lose.

“All of me, God,” you prayed, and do not retreat.

In the face of the very opposition you never expected,

pray it again.

I will pray it with you.

Why Proving God's Existence Won't Save the World

Evangelicals spend so much energy trying to prove that God is real, but most of the atheists I know wouldn’t want the God of the Bible, even if we could prove his existence.

Why? They would reject the faith because they don’t think the God of the Bible is moral.

Don’t just laugh that thought off as ridiculous. Considering some of the information many atheists have received, I can understand why some have drawn this conclusion.

If Christians want to make any progress in sharing the gospel with an unbelieving world, we need to listen to the reason atheists have this particular problem with our faith. And we need to clear some of the fog away before having surface arguments that lead to nowhere.

I. First off, there’s confusion about the facts.
 

It’s human nature to believe the worst about any worldview that we don’t like. (Look at how quickly we eat up dirty gossip about our political enemies!)  So when misinformation about our faith hits the news, many atheists stand eager to embrace the worst possible angle on Christian beliefs.

I don't like seeing this happen, of course, but I can't blame nonbelievers too much because I have made similar mistakes about others I suspect. Having this wrong done to me reminds me how important it is to be fair.

After the hard lesson is taken, though, it's helpful to think about where all this bad info coming from. I've seen two main sources, and I'd like to talk about both of those a little bit.

A. BAD INFO COMES FROM SECULARISTS WHO DON’T UNDERSTAND THE BIBLE TRYING TO WRITE ABOUT THE BIBLE

For example, last week atheist sites were giddy because Canaanite DNA was found in the Middle East. A secular writer found a verse from the Old Testament and said it was a claim that all Canaanites were destroyed. Before anybody who actually knew the Bible could get a grip on that story, the thing spread like wildfire.

Of course, that’s not what the Bible teaches. It teaches the opposite in fact, showing us why Canaanite DNA should still exist in the Middle East. But over and over again, this sort of viral brouhaha rolls out of a simple misunderstanding, adding to confusion and mistrust on both sides.

B. BAD INFO COMES FROM PEOPLE WHO CLAIM TO BE CHRISTIANS

My head literally hurts when I see bad teachers handling Scripture. I don’t mean to be an academic snob, but seriously, I wouldn’t let some of the people I see trying to interpret the Bible read me instructions out of a John Deere riding mower manual.

Some of those folks mix theology with bad science. Some mix theology with bad ethics. And while bad Bible teachers are making some of the most embarrassing mistakes I’ve ever seen anybody make on a public stage, they roar with all the confidence in the world. (I need my blog to have a GIF option. You've seen that one where the guy runs headlong into a wall and slides off, right? Insert that here.)

The Bible isn’t about being “smart,” of course; the core of the gospel is simple enough that even a child can understand it. But people who have never been taught to think clearly—people who don’t know fair principles of literary interpretation—those people often carry raw weaknesses into their attempts to teach about God. And unless God intervenes miraculously (and sometimes he does), especially if pride takes over, a lack of information can lead to goofing the Bible up super badly.

Average Joe would never attempt DIY brain surgery after watching a YouTube video on the subject. Average Evangelical Joe will, however, attempt to teach about the almighty Lord based on hearsay and gut instinct. Attempting the second is even more dangerous than the first. So much damage has been done to the gospel because of this sort of overconfidence.
 

II. Secondly, there’s a ton of confusion about how the Bible works

Somewhere along the way, the public began to believe that any story included in the Bible was also endorsed by the Living God. But that’s not how the Bible functions.

Some of the most horrifying narratives in the Old Testament don’t show us what God loves; they show us how ugly human sin can get if it runs its free course. The book of Judges says, “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” And indeed, this is a book of the Bible which teaches us how violent and selfish humans can be when entrusted to develop and maintain their own morality. These sorts of narratives show what we look like when God doesn't protect us from ourselves.

So many secondary moral issues clear up when we realize the Bible is doing this. Many teachings about slavery, the treatment of women, even genocide fall under the narrative umbrella of a culture that was thoroughly resistant to submission to God. Laws that you and I criticize would have been utterly unnecessary if God’s people had been willing to seek God’s heart. Instead, they were rebellious over and over again, insisting on doing things their own way.

This is why I get so frustrated when atheists start citing random laws from the Old Testament as some sort of claim against the Divine. It’s not that those laws never existed, but they did exist inside of a human context that didn’t fit into God’s ideal. Like a temporary restraining order against a violent husband, protections were sometimes put in place that a healthy marriage would never require.

As the New Testament expands, we see a truer picture of the sort of moral order that God intends—a morality that is based on union with his Spirit instead of just rote regulation and obedience. This is why the Old Testament must always be read through the lens of the New Testament. They are not equivalent. One foreshadows, and the other completes.

III. Despite all this, there are still confusing sections of the Bible

I’ve studied the Bible for over thirty years now, and there are still some passages that are difficult for me to understand. There are still a few passages that I feel are unjust, too, and I don’t ignore that feeling like I used to. I don’t check my brain at the door and trot along in trusting ignorance, excusing sections that seem to contradict the greater thrust of Scripture.

I will say, though, that quite a few times over the course of my life, disturbing, obscure passages have opened up beautifully once the right information has appeared. So while I was defiant and angry about unclear passages of Scripture in my twenties, in my 40's, I'm more patient about sections that seem offensive or mysterious. I don't try to hide my horror from God. I pray, “Uh, what do you even want me to do with this part because it doesn’t seem to fit with 90% of what you’ve said in the rest of the Scriptures.” I pray, “What in the world? Why would you even care about this?" I’m honest about all that stuff when I pray because God’s my Father, and I trust him with my gut reactions.

And where the Old Testament seems wonky, I interpret the unclear by what is clear. I interpret the old through the new.  And I never act on obscure teachings that seem unstable or disjointed.

I don't strain to apply stories I don’t understand as moral guidance for my soul. I WAIT FOR GOD to show me how mystery fits, and I leave it alone until he clears the confusion up. There's plenty to do in the clear, direct commands of love and compassion without getting snarled up in what is uncertain.

IV. What I've written here doesn't make the core snag of atheism vanish

Sometimes I think atheists are unfair about the Bible, and sometimes I think messed up Christian teachers distort the Bible. But even if all this is handled properly, determined secularists will still hit a snag.

Even if all narrative confusion is swept away, the God of the Bible still asks for us to trust him, and trust comes hard for people who haven’t lived in a trustworthy world.

You and I have been hurt, so we trust ourselves and not much else.

That old temptation of Eve’s serpent is still running the circuit, and it's still powerful. “Has God really said he’s going to take care of you? Why don’t you just try to be like God without involving him? You don’t need him--you can be strong on your own. You’ve got this. You’re smart enough. Just be the best you that you can be. Look at these resources around you.l and use them. That’s all anybody can do.”

Gosh it's such a sweet promise for hurt people because we want to hold the controls to our own lives so badly. Even deeper than arguments about evolution, genocide and misogyny, lies a real question of whether or not we would be willing trust a God to hold authority over us.

Lest we point too many fingers at atheists, this is the same mistrust that has led evangelicals astray for years. We make political alliances because they promise tactile safety. We make strategic plans because God is too quiet. We reach for fading comforts because eternity is too dang hard to imagine and too far away to embrace.

In fact, sometimes I think the atheists have one up on us in that they are at least willing to admit that they don't trust God. I want to trust Him always, but a lot of the time, I don't. In that regard, I suppose we all have a whole lot to confess and a whole lot to learn.
 

- -

“Fifty years ago, the main cultural tension of being a Christian in the United States was that the Christian  believed things regarded as naive and false by the general culture: that believing in an omnipotent creator  required the checking of your brain. Now the main tension is that the Christian's tradition is regarded by the general culture as immoral: that the God of scripture is a bad character, and those who adore him are misshapen by the company they keep. Consequently the work of the apologist today resembles more closely that of the early church's apologists. The Romans, to be sure, regarded the Way as false, but (more gravely) they regarded it as dangerous -- a thing that produced bad citizens.”  David Mitchel

The Push to Ditch the Terms "Conservative" and "Evangelical"

I understand the embarrassment, and I’ve had the same urge myself. However, at least for now, I’m not ready to hop on board that train. 

And my reasoning isn’t political—it’s spiritual.

I don't think most evangelicals or most conservatives are bad people. I do think many have been flattered and manipulated so long that they are now having trouble discerning good from evil.

This whole situation reminds me of that scene from The Silver Chair in which a villain throws green powder onto the fire, drugging good Prince Rilian, Jill, and Scrubb. Those three young heroes don't want to do the wrong thing, but as they breathe in the enchanted smoke, they find that they cannot tell truth from lies. They lose their ability to think clearly.

At this moment, the brave marshwiggle Puddleglum charges forth and stamps out the fire with his bare feet. He does this because this is what true friends do for one another in such times. We put our own bodies on the line to break the spell of evil.

As embarrassing and as frustrating as it is for clear-headed conservative, evangelical believers to watch the intoxication of those who abuse these labels, love compels us to go try to help them.

I realize that a whole lot of folks don't realize that they need help. In fact, many think they are the only ones who see the world clearly. 

I know many are proud. I know that many feel secure in money and in power. I know many are so full of propaganda they can't hear the instruction of the Holy Word. 

I am human enough to tremble when I see leaders of massive movements tickling the ears of millions of people with gross distortions of grace. I'm also human enough to grieve when my old heroes give in to this cause.

But despite all of this, those people who are being deceived are in grave spiritual danger. And when a brother or sister is endangered, it is right and good to try to help. Even if we feel like the cause is futile.

All my trail-blazing instincts want to cut off the old and charge into a new frontier, but I'm not listening to those instincts. Not yet.

I'm willing to give restoration the first fruits of my strength. Why? Because when a fellow soldier is wounded in battle, you run into enemy fire to drag him to safety, even if he is hallucinating.

How do we help? Here's one possibility.

In Acts 17, we find the Apostle Paul sharing the gospel with the men of Athens. He could have charged in there like a raging bull, proclaiming a new system of salvation--but he doesn’t. He’s far more shrewd in his approach. 

Paul has listened to the culture well enough to communicate on its own terms. He makes his argument by referencing an object that is familiar to his audience--something they trust and worship. He says, “For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.”

Paul does the work of redemption by unpacking the tiny bit of truth that his audience already sees. 

So, strategically, I think it's worth using the terms "conservative" and "evangelical" in a similar manner. While the connotative use of these two words has been corrupted, denotatively there is still much to unpack. It's even possible that these two words can be used to show our brothers and sisters how they have abandoned their first love. 

It's a good time to consider the church of Ephesus in Revelation--men and women who have worked long and hard for the cause of Christ while losing focus on what originally drew them to him. Jesus says, "Without growing weary, you have persevered and endured many things for the sake of My name. But I have this against you: You have abandoned your first love." Then the stern warning--if Ephesus will not repent from this behavior, the Lord will remove their lampstand. 

I don't want this to happen to my brothers and sisters. I think they began well, I just think they grew confused along the way.

I want to remind them that “evangelical” comes from a Biblical Greek root word meaning “good news.” This means that if evangelicals are not primarily about the business of sharing the gospel, they have veered off course.

I want to remind them that to be “conservative” is a call to follow the wisdom of Jeremiah 6:16, a call to look back at the old ways and find what was good in them. This isn't the work of blind nationalism, sentimentality, or cliché. It's not the work of fevered anger and fear. It's humble work involving study, reflection, and discernment. It's careful. It's kind. It's selfless.

Over the past year or two (and arguably over the past few decades), evangelicalism and conservatism have become separated from their own visions. It's so important for us to talk about this. I think that if we talk about it enough, instead of just threatening to run away and start all over, we might be able to stamp out some fires.

I don't say this because I am scared of what will happen if Christianity amputates its diseased limbs and hobbles onward. 

I say that because people I love are diseased. They are being sucked down into evil while thinking they are doing good. They are losing Jesus while trying to fight for him. They are so terribly sick, and they don't even realize they are dying.

I see millions of Christians wobbling like Prince Rilian, Grubb, and Jill, increasingly unable to see the things of God with any clarity. I see a great Green Witch who is tweeting and rallying them into their own demise.

The situation is dire, and I cannot turn my back on all those people. If the bare feet of a Marshwiggle can do any good here, I'm at their service.

So yes, I'm an evangelical. Yes, I'm a conservative. 

Men and women of evangelical, conservative America, I have seen the altar you have built, and I know this Unknown God you serve. Let me introduce him to you. Let me remind you who he is in Spirit and in Truth.

For the Love of a Kindle : In Celebration of the E-Reader

I love real books.

I love how they feel and how they smell. I love their sense of space and progression. I love their permanence.

Sometimes, however, I run into people who advocate for real books as if they were advocating for trafficked children. I think that’s a little extreme.

I know an older person who has invented body language for the specific purpose of disparaging e-readers. She doesn’t just say that she prefers physical books. She views e-readers as a moral wrong. She’s also pretty sure they cause brain damage. “I only read REAL BOOKS,” she declares, standing firm as the final line of defense against an invading army.

I get tickled when I see this, imagining the transition between scrolls and the codex between the 2nd and 4th centuries.  Maybe the old folks back then complained, “There’s no way a human brain can process the true flow of writing with all these blasted page breaks. These great works were meant to be taken in by scroll, and I’ll read scrolls until the day I die.”

Or when parchment began to replace papyrus, “These young kids have no commitment to precision. They can erase on parchment. You couldn’t erase back in my day. You had to get it right the first time.”

Was there ever a critic who griped about portability of papyrus? “I remember the good old days when somebody who had something worth saying carved it into a big, fat rock. Now THAT was a world of stability.”

For whatever little it matters, here’s my philosophy on the thing.

There are some books I only read in bound form. I tried to hit the ESV Reader’s Bible on Kindle, for instance, and that just didn’t work for me. I need the layout of the printed set to do part of the work.

But there are other books that I find much easier and more effective to read on Kindle. I’ve been taking a leisurely approach to Les Mis for the past year, and reading this book on Kindle is a far better experience than reading it on the printed page. With a click of a thumb, I can look up rare historical references, and reading footnotes is a breeze.

I’m not thumbing through a thousand pages every few paragraphs to find out what a “Saint-Jacques pragmatist” is. I touch the footnote number, get the historical nugget, close out, move on. Takes five seconds instead of thirty. That makes a big difference when you are tackling a project like this.

Here’s another confession. I bought Les Mis in three formats, audio book, hardback, and Kindle.

I knew that I would enjoy this book for the rest of my life, and I knew that this first reading would be a big part of my recreation for many months, so I took the leap.

On long bike rides, I listen to George Guidall’s brilliant rendering of the story--which is mighty helpful in some of the historical passages with complex pronunciations. When I want to go back over a specific passage in depth, I open the physical book and set Julie Rose’s translation up against several others that chose a word-for-word approach instead of an idea-for-idea method. Late at night while my husband is snoring away, I open my beautiful new Kindle Paperwhite and revel in the miracle of a 1300-page novel reduced to 7.3 ounces.

7.3 ounces. I can take that anywhere. And I do.

In every format, I am delighted with Hugo’s work. In those passages I have read three different ways, I have found that my brain picks up different things...not greater or lesser information but different information. Some details I have missed in bound form, the audio or the Kindle have revealed. It’s been humbling to realize that.

One more thought. It’s not true that all printed books are created equal.

When my friends over at the Rabbit Room print a hard copy of a book, they obsess over margins, fonts, paper quality, typesetting. This publisher is thoughtful and precise so that when you buy a Rabbit Room book, you’re buying a reading experience that enhances the reading material. When I have the opportunity to buy a book by Rabbit Room Press, I never pick the Kindle form over the hard copy.

But Rabbit Room production stands head and shoulders above the cheap paperbacks being thrown out en masse today. The classroom versions of so many brilliant novels are hideous, and I can’t blame students for being exhausted by them.

Great classics are ruined when they are thrown onto grey-smudgy, thin, stinky, cheap paper, words in tiny fonts crammed together, margins virtually non-existent, no beauty in page composition, a binding that makes opening pages fully impossible. We do our teenagers a great disservice when we hand them these aesthetic disasters.

I would much rather my students read Pride and Prejudice on a Kindle in a nice, clear Bookerly font than to mess with the headache of a poor physical reproduction. I can see why students toss many of those books aside for the SparkNotes summaries. I wouldn’t waste my time on trying to hack through such a mess, either.

All this to say, if you have been exposed to e-book shame, be free, be free. Do what you need to do to get the books read. Find the venue that works for you, and don't let anybody make you feel guilty about it. 

Because I have the Kindle app on my phone and iPad, I wrestled for a year about a Paperwhite purchase. It seemed extravagant. Now I see that it’s one of the most important investments I have ever made. How I wish I could go back in time and make myself buy this two years ago. I could have used this sweet little thing during the election. Curling up in bed with a device that won’t let me check the news or social media is helping me sleep better than I’ve slept in a long time.

Having the option of silently reading a chapter or two when I wake up in the middle of the night is lowering my stress. I don’t see headlines. I get away from all that madness and allow hours meant for rest to be restful. I wake up, click on a soft little backlit page, read for fifteen minutes, then go back to sleep without the weight of the world on my shoulders.

And while "real books" will always have a soft spot in my heart, I'm completely smitten with this little thing. Welcome to my world, Paperwhite. I think we're going to be good friends for a long, long while.  


 

A Bit of Housekeeping: a Side Note on Comments

This won't be a long post, just a little housekeeping. :)

Today I realized that I need to let my readers know that I keep a filter on comments here, and that I plan to do so for as long as I blog. There are many places on the internet where people call each other names and try to hurt others with their words, but my blog isn't going to be one of those.

While a hearty discussion between people of different belief systems can be profoundly beneficial, abusive firestorms begin when verbal hostility takes over, and these accomplish nothing but the purposes of hell.

My blog is a place to talk about ideas and seek Jesus. It's not a free-for-all where strangers are allowed to be mean to strangers. I never mind disagreement, but all comments that you offer to other readers must be civil, patient, and kind or else I won't push them through to the public eye.

Basically, I don't allow anything said here that I wouldn't allow to be said over my dinner table. If my children were sitting in a room while an adult was flying off the handle, I would ask that adult to leave my home. I'm applying that policy to my blog as well.

If you disagree with me or someone else and want to talk about an issue publicly here, take some time to do the following before commenting.

1. Ask a humble and sincere question for clarification before making angry assumptions. 
2. Remove all name calling, insults, and unfair associations in your post. Stick with the issue instead of trying to hurt people.

If you just need to vent at me,  you can do that. But when I can tell a reader is letting his/her temper lead, flying off the handle unfairly, I usually just read a sentence or two and then mark the post as "spam" without finishing it. That sort of label means all future messages from that IP address go directly to the trash, and I won't even see them.
 
Hateful comments make me feel empathy about the trauma or relational lack that leads a person to adopt a hostile style of communication, but they don't hurt me. They evoke mercy, but they are too pitiful to actually sting. At least they haven't yet.

Thankfully we live in a free country where aggressive and rude folks have other venues for their anger. I'm just not going to host them here.

This post doesn't apply to 99% of you. Of the tens of thousands of hits I got on a post this week, I only had two rude comments attempt to make it through. That's pretty stunning, if you think about it. But it's still loving to define some ground rules for a community now and then, and these are the rules for Thistle and Toad.

Oh, one more thing. I sometimes hold off on comments that make claims about public figures. That's not because the writers are trying to be rude but because I need some sort of validation before helping spread information that might hurt someone else's reputation. If you have something in such a category to share, please just provide external reference material that allows me to validate your claim.

Alright, gotta get back to some things here. I'll be back in I Corinthians tomorrow!

Take care,

Becca

On Living in Two Worlds at Once and On Paul's Inconsistencies. (I Corinthians 2-3)

NOTE: Over the years, I've learned that when my friend David tells me to read something, I should read it. He's one of those people who seems to have a knack for suggesting books that scratch an itch. A few days ago, he urged his friends to reread the book of I Corinthians because its teaching fits the needs of our American church, so I hopped on it. Today I'm continuing yesterday's post, working through this epistle. If you want to read along with me, I'll be posting on this topic for the next few days.


ON LIVING IN TWO WORLDS AT ONCE

When people on the internet disagree, they usually fight by calling their opponents “stupid," but Paul doesn’t do that. In fact, he does the opposite. He admits that there are different systems of wisdom, and that it’s possible for someone to be brilliant in one of those other systems.

When Paul critiques his opponents, he critiques them by speaking teleologically— a word which looks at the purpose or end of a thing. To critique the telos of another worldview is to ask: “Let’s look at where this alternate system of wisdom is going to end up?”

In making this distinction between God’s wisdom and the world’s, Paul writes: “...we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God...”

In other words, it is possible for a system of wisdom to look brilliant on earth, but that doesn’t mean (the telos) of that system is going to end up being beneficial or pleasant. (Need an anology? Compare this to a dating relationship that looked so promising during the first month but made you miserable after six.)

My two favorite Christian apologists are Ravi Zacharias and Tim Keller, in part because they tend to get this one rhetorical skill right.  They don’t attempt to elevate Christianity by taking nervous pot shots at secularists. When they see logical errors, they address those with humor and respect. But they only engage after taking the time understand and speak accurately about the world’s systems. They aren’t haphazard in calling other systems foolish; they address them in light of their telos — their ultimate end. (They operate like a wise parent who says to a teenager, “You can try that. But let’s talk through where this is going to land.”)

If we get this right, we will still be deeply offensive to many secular thinkers. Why? Because there’s a diagnostic built into God's system that violates the strongest values of the godless world.

The secular world believes that all truth can be found through the power of the human mind and the reliability of the natural world.  Any eternal truth that requires more than these two elements feels unfair to the pure materialist.

But God didn't guarantee that all important knowledge could be obtained this way. In fact, he set up the world up so that people who are only willing to embrace the secular currency of wisdom will be blind to the spiritual realm.

I can see why this dynamic would feel unjust to anyone who thinks the world’s system of knowledge should be reliable enough to find God. But that sense of injustice is a natural consequence of misplaced trust. If we insist on worshipping our own minds and our own ability to analyze the world, we're going to end up with the limitations of those two gods. 

Imagine a community of people living in a little biosphere, people who can’t imagine anything beyond the tiny world in which they exist. Or go back to Plato’s Analogy of the Cave, a tiny underworld in which lifelong captives of darkness can’t imagine an outside realm full of sunlight and greenery.

If we choose the small gods of our own minds and perceptions, we can insist that all we have ever known and valued is all that is fair and good to know. But our confidence doesn’t make our assumption right. 

- - -

ON DIFFERENT TYPES OF PAULING TEACHING

Several times over the years, I’ve been frustrated with Paul because some of his teachings of seem contradictory. It wasn’t until I realized that Paul openly admitted teaching different sorts of truths to different sorts of believers that the pieces began to fall into place.

Paul writes: “But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not ready, for you are still of the flesh.”

In other words, Paul didn’t teach all Christians the same things. And he did that intentionally.

We do this sort of thing with our kids, right? When our children are young, we give them less freedom and different types of instructions than we do when they are grown in trust, intellect, and character.  As their maturity develops, we begin to trust them to be heart-driven instead of task-driven.

When we read Scripture, we tend to do read it flatly, as if there were no topography to the thing. But that’s just not how the text itself claims to work. The books of the Bible, and especially the epistles of the New Testament, were written to specific people, and understanding the original audience matters.

It takes effort to be a thoughtful reader and to unpack the levels of instruction included in the Bible. But I don't know why anybody would ever think that studying the Bible should be easy. And this is the sort of effort that can protect us from making serious errors in interpretation.

I wish I had more time right now to make a huge chart, delineating the various maturity levels of the audiences Paul addresses and then listing the sorts of instructions he gives accordingly.
But as far as I can tell, the bottom line is this: maturity boils down to union with Christ-in-us. Once we really learn to walk in the Spirit, a lot of the rules that are essential in our early days of faith become unnecessary because we cannot carry out the deeds of the flesh if we are abiding in Christ.

However, it takes a long time for some of us to let go of our fleshly efforts to try be “Christian.” Like Paul, many of us will have to go through humiliating experiences with failure before we finally become willing to depend on an indwelling Lord.

A young believer may need more rules, not just to protect him, but to show him that he doesn’t have the ability to keep them without Christ. Eventually, we will learn what Paul say here,“...no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” But different believers need different sorts of instruction along the way to arrive at that conclusion. Those nuances not only appear in the teachings of Paul, but I think also in the teachings of Jesus.

Ultimately, after years of being aggravated at Paul (and Jesus) for teaching what seemed like contradictory instruction, I’ve come to see this section of I Corinthians as a key that unlocks most of the New Testament. (Tim Keller actually addresses this principle in his sermons “The Inside-Out Kingdom” and “The Upside Down Kingdom.” These two messages are definitely worth a listen, if you haven’t heard them yet.)

Paul's Uncomfortable Jaunt into Christian Mysticism

Ever since I can remember, I’ve seen Christianity taught by one of two secular methods.

Because I teach philosophy, I’m going to use two philosophical terms to describe those two methods. The first term is rationalism. The second is empiricism. It’s important for you to understand both of these if you are going to understand the first paragraphs of I Corinthians.

Rationalism goes back to the Greeks, and essentially, it means you use formal logic to prove something. According to Plato, logic exists in the invisible realm—and this invisibility was important to the Greeks because they didn’t trust their senses completely. Our eyes and ears can deceive us, but we can tell deep in our minds that 2+2=4*

Empiricism started in earnest around the time of David Hume (1700’s), and it means you use physical evidence to prove something. This works more like our modern scientific method, in which you run an experiment and trust the results of that experiment to teach you some truth about the universe. **

Modern academics tend to use a muddy blend of rationalism and empiricism, and most of us think very little about doing this. When we see Sherlock Holmes using induction and deduction, trusting both his senses and his logical ability, we think he’s smart. When we see hot heads on social media yelling things like, “Do your research!” or “Think about it!” we realize they are asking for some sort of source that can be validated. But unless we’ve done some formal study into how proofs work, we might not realize that it’s almost impossible to prove anything, really. Both rationalism and empiricism are helpful, but they’re also flawed. They remind me of those times Siri has tried to get me to a rural location, and she just gives up five miles out and says, “Please walk to your destination.”

At the time that Paul was writing this book, Greek rationalism was still in full force. Even though the Romans were dominant at this time, they had adopted most of the academic ideas of the Greeks. So when a Greek person wanted to know if something was true, he would use a rational system of logical proofs to make his argument.

Apparently, the Jews worked a little more like David Hume’s crowd would 1700 years later. They wanted physical evidence. Paul says the Greeks wanted wisdom and the Jews wanted signs, but that he wasn’t going to speak in terms of either value system. Instead, he was going to choose an epistemological value system that would make him look foolish to both groups.

Before I write any more about this, I’d like for you to read this section of I Corinthians.

- - -

For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
 and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but indemonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.
Yet among themature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
 nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.  The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

 - - -
For many years, I was a systematic theology junkie. I was raised in the Lee Strobel/Wayne Grudem/R.C. Sproul/John Piper era, and because I tend to be a bit of a nerd, I was thrilled by the promise that a rational/empirical approach to problem-solving could be applied to the Scripture. Not only did this give me a sense that I could figure things out for myself, but also, it gave me a sense that I could fight culture wars and win souls by watertight proofs.

But that’s not what Paul says here at all. My theological assumptions were based in my secular values, not in the values of the Bible.

Paul was a super-educated guy, and he knew exactly what he was saying when he was defiant here. (When he chooses to use logic and proofs other places in the Scripture, he's a master of these disciplines.) But there’s a powerful bit of irony in his statements, boasting about intentionally losing his case on every academic front that meant anything to the people of his era.

When he talked about being unimpressive in speech and presentation (trembling and bumbly), he was saying, “I’m bad at rhetoric.” Rhetoric was the formal discipline of presenting your case in such a way that you could persuade others to agree with you, and it was mega important in Greco Roman times. This was how anybody who was anybody got things done. In terms of cred, he’s shooting himself in the foot repeatedly here, taking every angle to try to stand like a fool instead of scrambling to use data or arguments to prove his faith to anybody.

Why? Why would an educated man like Paul do this?

Look at what he elevates instead.

Paul emphasizes something that I almost never hear a modern Christian academic admit these days. He says that God’s wisdom is intentionally secret. It’s intentionally hidden.

He says you can’t get to the truth of God by the common roads, and that this is purposeful on God’s part. There’s a Spirit involved here that knows our hearts way down deep, not just our minds, but our inclinations. And that Spirit is able to determine our motives.

In other words, our judgment won’t just be based on what we could figure out with our thoughts. The most central and true qualities of our souls are seen in total clarity by God. When it comes to the essence of who we are, we are totally bare and defenseless before a God who looks straight into our hearts. We can hide nothing from him. And when he judges us, he's fair, because he sees with flawless vision.

Paul says that people who attempt to use only rationalism and empiricism will never be able to understand certain eternal truths because while those two roads are commonly traveled, they don’t lead everywhere. There are some destinations that you can only reach if you are willing to operate in the realm of the spirit.

That doesn’t make the faith irrational. It doesn’t make it violate empirical truth. But it does mean that people who attempt to find God only by the mind or by the senses won’t ever find Him. There has to be a willingness to engage at the spirit level with a Being who has intentionally made it impossible to find him through the world’s most trusted methods. This is a matter of posture, not just knowledge.

Sound cruel? Sound unfair? I can see why it might feel that way at first glance--especially when we are accustomed to addressing the entire universe by the lower roads. Our value system is the value system of the secular world.

Even though these epistemological roads are lower than the realm of the spirit, they are treated with profound respect by people who are respected here on planet earth. This makes the realm of the spirit seem foolish, when it’s actually the most pure knowledge of all.

A whole book could be written about this, but I’m afraid you’ll stop reading if I keep writing. For now, go back and reread that I Corinthians passage a few more times. In light of what I’ve just told you, I think a few new things will pop out to you as you study it.

Am I going to make a case for total Christian mysticism? No. Church history shows us how strange and greedy people can misunderstand the realm of the spirit, making systematics a healthy guide for staying out of heresy. (Like bumper bowling. Ha.) Besides, I’m still too much of a rationalist to go there entirely. 

But I do keep my systematic theology and my empirical proofs in a more humble position after realizing what Paul was actually advocating here. There are things we can know, but the things we know are always secondary to knowing the Maker of all things. 

For so many reasons, both personal an interactive, that's vital to remember.

- - - - -

*This is a huge oversimplification because the realm of math was actually below the realm of pure logic in Greek rationalism. If you want to study this more, study Plato’s Divided Line Theory.

** Also a significant oversimplification because David Hume showed how we couldn’t prove causality, and we also can’t resolve the gap between our perception of the physical world and the physical world.

That Time I Said "Yes" When I Really Meant "No": One Last Thought on Eugene Peterson's Interview

When friends of mine are hurting, their pain takes root in my own belly. I feel what people I love feel, and I feel it intensely. Several times, that empathy has been so strong, a friend's suffering has disoriented my own convictions.

Once a friend of mine was going through a brutal divorce. The spouse was not only sexually unfaithful but also emotionally abusive. Flagrant affairs were thrown in my friend's face. Marital sex was used as a weapon of emotional torture. Cruelty to the entire family (including their children) was intentional and boundless. I don't know if a personality disorder was involved, but the spouse seemed to delight in setting traps for my friend, causing as much pain as humanly possible.

My friend was close to suicide, and for weeks, I spent long hours walking as close as I could. Many nights I got just a few hours of sleep because I was committed to being there no matter what. I was scared a lot. Scared I'd get a call that my friend had given up living.

When a second romance came into this friend's life, we were both fatigued. It's hard to tell you how happy I was when for the first time in a long while, I saw a flicker of joy. I saw hope. I saw this friend realize that she could actually be loved.

Waves of relief washed over me.

When you've seen someone you love on the brink of death, this sort of change is like rain in a drought. I was so thankful for this man who loved my friend.

Then they started to sleep together, and this is where I stopped knowing what to say.

I don't believe in sex outside of the confines of marriage, and I don't say that out of naivete. I'm human enough to have experienced the temptation and the excuses. I have never followed up on those temptations, but I do know how a wrong thing can seem absolutely right. I know that, and still, I hold to Biblical morality.

Yet this friend who was nearly dead seemed ecstatic as she engaged in extramarital sex. Instead of suicide threats, there were tears of, "I finally feel seen. I finally feel known."

As I loved her, I never stopped believing that sex outside of marriage was wrong. I always believed that, technically. But I also knew everything about the hellacious emotional torment my friend had experienced. Some days my compassion for my friend was so strong, I wondered if a sinful thing might somehow be used to repair the consequences of abuse. I wondered that because I loved her, and I felt so much relief that she was finally joyful.

I never changed my beliefs, but in flashes of empathy, I wondered if there were individual human exceptions to the rules. I wondered if cases of gross abuse made a difference in the boundary.

But as months went on, the sex that initially brought so much color into my friend's life brought grave trouble and pain. What felt like being known was being used. Love wasn't love; it was two lonely people leaning on one another until they both fell down. Extramarital sex had been a trap, of course--a trap that hurt everybody involved.

God's rules are always there because he loves us. He isn't trying to be cruel with any boundary, sexual or otherwise. But the intense pain of earth can cause us to mistrust him sometimes. After walking with my friend through this situation, I understand how hard that struggle can be now.

I didn't wonder if there were exceptions to the rules because I wanted to defy God. I didn't waver because I wanted to be a relativist.

I wavered because I was overwhelmed watching someone I loved suffer at close range. I wavered because I desperately wanted her to live. I wavered because I wanted her to find immediate relief instead of waiting for God's long and difficult rescue.

In those moments, I was wrong. But I was wrong out of fatigue and human empathy.

As I've grown older, several standards I've embraced "on paper" have had to work out in the context of real people. What was easy to proclaim at a distance became complicated sitting with my arm wrapped around the grieving and the dying. Getting down in the trenches has made me ask different sorts of questions.

I have emerged from those struggles holding to orthodoxy--but those convictions haven't come cheap.

I trust God's boundaries now, but I trust them as someone who has doubted them and found them solid and kind. And, I can see why someone like Mr. Peterson was caught off guard if he has lived taking the risk of loving at close range.

If someone had asked me a question about my beliefs randomly, during a season when my heart was bleeding for my friend, I might have given a rash answer from my gut instead of speaking from my spirit. It might have taken me a few days to go back to God's throne to say, "Do I really trust you? Even when it seems like your rules are way too difficult for hurting people to follow?" If I had prayed hard prayers in honest pain, I might have had to correct myself, too.

As I look across the landscape of evangelicalism, I see the sorts of leaders who bloviate and blast, and I used to be intimidated by them. But over the years, I've seen enough sex scandals emerge from this camp, I'm no longer awed by their proud self-righteousness.

I'm now drawn to gentle teachers who speak about sin with a tender understanding of how human pain works. While these tender men still hold to orthodox truth, they engage with humility and deep concern because they've taken time to weep with those who weep.

When we pray for the Lord to break our hearts with the things that break his heart, we are asking to be shown the intimate details of human suffering. That's going to involve emotional challenges we can't even imagine when we are living safe, comfortable, removed lives.

There's a huge difference between speaking of gay people categorically and speaking of your gay friend, Christine, who was brutally abused by her uncle for two decades and now feels nauseated every time she smells a man. It might be possible for me to walk with an evangelical swagger and act like an expert when postulating about the first category, but the second is a real person whose story brings me to my knees.

Do I think sex outside of marriage is wrong? Absolutely. Do I believe in the sanctity of male-female marriage? Yes.

Do I also sometimes kneel beside my bed and weep for my abused friends by name--friends who seek relief in ways that don't align with God's word? Yes. I do.

And when I pray for those friends, I don't pray simple, condescending prayers because their lives aren't simple, and their wounds aren't simple, and they bear horrible old complicated burdens that I have never had to carry.

I appeal to the father, holding up all their suffering and saying, "This story. This story. This story is so messy, God. How will you save my friend?"

As someone who has wandered into the underworld of pain with people I care about, I affirm my strongest convictions with tears in my eyes and not with hate or hostility.

I am firm in what I believe, but I am not unfeeling. And every "no," I give comes from learning the hard way that "no" is the most loving response--even when it doesn't feel like it.

Because of this, I'm willing to allow Mr. Peterson the chance to clarify without my condemnation. He has a huge heart, and he loves people profoundly. If he was momentarily disoriented because of tenderness, I get that. I've been there, too.

On the Silence of God: When He Doesn't Show up Like You Need Him to

As far as I can tell, a lot of kids growing up in Southern Protestant churches are given one of two promises.

FIRST PROMISE:

If you grew up Southern Baptist, Methodist, or Charismatic, you were probably promised that you'd be able to feel God somehow at some point.

SECOND PROMISE:

If you grew up Presbyterian, DTS/Bible Church, or maybe Anglican, you were more likely to receive a promise that God could be proven with facts and your mind.

These are broad generalizations, and I don't mean for them to be watertight--some Baptists are deep into apologetics, and some Presbyterians are more mystical. But just for kicks, let's allow for outliers here and dive into some of the problems these two promises can create.

Why do that? Because more and more lately, I'm seeing young adults who grew up in the shadow of these two promises hit a crisis of faith. When gets super hard, hurting people go back to those two expectations and shout out across the canyon of their deep doubt, asking for God to show up in the way they were promised he would.

But all they feel is silence.

That silence is scary because many people don't feel like they can take it back to their churches and say, "Hey! This thing you told me didn't work." Instead, they hold it in their bellies and fear and churn. The silence makes them lonely, and it makes them wonder if they believe in God at all.

These two promises produce different sorts of disappointments, so let's look at those individually:

AT THE END OF THE "FEEL" PROMISE

At the end of the feel promise, you reach out to God because you desperately need him, but he doesn't seem to show up. You can never honestly say, "I had a peace about it." The warm fuzzies never hit. The world feels empty, and you feel like you're praying out into a vacant universe.

God feels cruel because what kind of all-loving Father would ever do that to somebody? An earthly parent won't even ignore her child when he needs help... would it really be so hard for God to get involved?

AT THE END OF THE "PROOFS" PROMISE

At the end of the proofs promise, you find out that something Lee Strobel wrote just wasn't right historically, and you feel betrayed. Or you find out that a certain historical document conservative Christians use to validate the faith was actually doctored by a monk. Maybe you discover that other religions that predate Christianity also had a virgin-born messiah figure with twelve disciples. You run into verses or passages that contradict logically. You get worn out from trying to make them all jive.

WHY I'M INTERESTED IN THIS

First off, I've been there. At the end of both of these promises, I've hit the skids, and I have retreated into myself, terrified that I was slowly becoming an atheist. Some people might look at that fear as proof that faith is an artificial comfort, created to manage dread of the unknown. However, I don't think the fear of losing your old perspective is singular to Christianity. Whatever your worldview is, it's disorienting to have that rattled. I've felt similar fear when my opinions on other matters (like politics or the inner dynamics of marriage) have changed. I've also seen atheists fear when changing over to a posture of faith. Change is just a disorienting experience, right?

And when I couldn't get away from the fact that God was real, I've wondered if he was mean to keep so far back. Why would someone who COULD be obvious choose to be hidden?

So, before I say anything else, let me say that you're not freaking me out if you have hit this point. I get it. I know how frustrated and scared you are.

I can also tell you that so much good has come from these dark stretches of doubt in my life. At the time, they literally felt like the end of everything I knew to be true. But now that I've walked through this crisis of belief, I can put my arm around people who are there and say, "It's okay. I remember. And here's some more stuff to think about as you process the silence of God."

I'm not sure if everything I am bringing to you is right. I'm still a learner here, so check all this against the Bible and against your trusted mentors. But even if you make some corrections to this post, I think sometimes just seeing someone, ANYONE talk about this can be encouraging. It can crack open the freedom to raise your hand and say, "Me too!"

WHAT DID GOD ACTUALLY PROMISE US?

If we step away from the extreme promises our denominations sometimes make to us, it's kind of startling to see what Jesus did and didn't say about belief in Him.

He never said, "Hey! You're going to find TONS of historical and scientific evidence, and reading Scripture is always going to match up in a way that you understand it."

He never said, "You're going live at a ten on the warm-fuzzy scale, and whenever you doubt me, you're going to see my face appear on a pizza-flavored Dorito."

In fact, we see lots of places in Scripture that indicate that belief will (at least sometimes) be tough.

God sometimes refers to the truth as a secret that he intentionally hides from certain types of people. If empirical evidence alone proved the gospel, you couldn't ever veil it from anyone, right?

And to Thomas who said he was never going to believe unless he could actually see physical proof that Jesus was alive, Jesus showed up and then said, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed"

In other words, he's not always going to prove himself in that same extreme way to every human being. He might not even use a proof that works like other proofs we have used before.

I'm embarrassed and frustrated by some of the scientific, historical, and logical errors passed around inside certain versions of Christianity. But despite those mistakes, I'm pretty nerdy about research, and I still think empirical/historical/logical evidence points strongly to the reality of Christ's life, his death, and his resurrection. My research doesn't remove the gap, but it narrows it an awful lot. I think what remains is intentional on God's part.

In terms of feelings, sometimes God does show up and direct us. Sometimes we do see clearly for a season. But even the Apostle Paul had moments that were so hard that they led him to despair. ("We were under a burden far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life.")

Think about that. This guy who had experienced this major flash of God showing up directly, the guy who told us to "rejoice in all things" and said that "the peace that passes all understanding will guard your hearts" still got down the road to a point where his emotions weren't jiving with his beliefs.

YOU'RE NOT WEIRD. YOU'RE NOT ABANDONED.

I promise. You aren't weird if these disappointments have hit you.

In fact, it's taking every ounce of self-control I have to streamline this post because if I knew that I could glue your eyeballs here, I would unpack tons of the Bible and tons of examples from the lives of Christians to show you that hitting these two skids is often just part of a thinker's journey. A huge could be written about this topic. I'm trying to hit the highlights.

These hard spots don't mean your faith is dying. I know it might feel like everything is falling out from underneath you, but this season often just means that you're growing up, and sometimes growth hurts.

If you ever get a chance to listen to Monty Python's John Cleese read The Screwtape Letters on YouTube, DO IT. Do it. Do it. They are hilarious and so good. Anyway, in Chapter 8, Lewis talks about times of doubt just like this. He calls those the "troughs," and he explains why sometimes God removes evidence of himself so that we can mature in faith.

In another piece of writing, Lewis says that sometimes God lets us experience struggle so that *we* can realize what is really inside us. He knows all along what our gaps are--we just don't. So times like what you are going through right now can help you learn yourself better while also helping you learn God in a deeper way.

After that verse about Paul's despair, he says something so interesting. Get this: "Indeed, we felt we were under the sentence of death, in order that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and He will deliver us. In Him we have placed our hope that He will yet again deliver us..."

This means Pauls despair was actually a classroom that taught him not to depend on the strengths of his emotions or his logic but on the living person of God.

ONE LAST THING:

One of the worst things (I think) about the extremes of the "feel promise" and the "proof promise" is that they can sometimes decrease our sensitivity to the realm of the Spirit. While God did give us some pretty solid evidence for the faith, and while he also gives us feelings sometimes, there's also a realm of the Spirit in which confirmation isn't just a logical conclusion or a surge of endorphins.

This realm isn't often discussed by folks because it's difficult to describe. I think of it almost as a sixth sense. If we were animals, I'd use the term "instinct," but it's more than that, and it's also more than intuition. I think it's actually part of the "imago Dei"-- or the capacity for God that God put inside humans and no other animal.

Instead of hacking through a ton of theology, I just want to mention this capacity in a simple phrase. "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me."

I don't think that's describing a simple emotion, and I don't think it's referring to empirical proof. I think it's whatever word we should use for the unspeakable connection of the human spirit with the divine Spirit.

Yeah. That's going to get too complex to address here properly. But maybe saying that much will help somehow, too.

MOSTLY:

Know you aren't alone. Please know that. It's okay if you are here. Lots of people have been here. I certainly have.

It's the scariest most disorienting thing in the world to wonder if everything you have believed isn't even real. And it's hard to wonder if God is cruel or indifferent if he does exist. But over time, I've realized that a lot of my problem was rooted in expectations that God never actually put on me. And just relaxing there, admitting the truth of my struggle, and taking a big breath has helped so much.

You want to know something super ironic? When I read my Bible now, sweet, confirming emotions that fear had frozen in me for years have returned. (For several years, I dreaded reading it because I was afraid it would just frustrate me all over again.) And when I research historical and intertextual evidence now, I don't freak so much when I see bad proofs. Yeah, it still embarrasses me when Christians make errant claims. But I usually just move forward now, looking at primary sources and strong logic for what does hold water.

Now that the fear is gone, I can approach both emotions and proofs with a more relaxed spirit because I'm learning to depend on God instead of my own self. Paul was right. There's a way through the fog, and that way is a Person.

As hard as it was, I'm increasingly thankful that I walked through that dark night of the soul these days. What felt like the end of everything was actually only a new beginning. I had to shed an old skin before I could begin to emerge from it.

"When I Tell You I Love America"

When I tell you I love America, I am not speaking out of anger, blindness, or fear. I am not chanting with my fist raised, foolhardy and blazing, pumped full of populist rage.

When I tell you I love America, I am not claiming perfection, holiness, or even goodness. I am not denying that the blood of innocent men and women was sometimes spilled needlessly into this soil or into the soil of other continents--blood that secured ease and power for the comfortable and the mighty.

When I tell you that I love America, I am not embracing revisionist rhetoric that tries to turn founders of flesh into gods. The best of men are only ever men of dust who must learn to kneel before what is better still.

If I say that America is the best country in the world, I say this like I would say that my father is the best father on the planet. You will know I'm making a statement of deep and personal gratitude. You will know that I am speaking of a devotion grown in proximity and from loyality that comes from familiarity.

You will wink and say, "You can't have the best father because I do," and I won't stop the conversation to draw up a protest sign to shove in your face but wink back and say, "Aren't we the luckiest two to have each had the best father in the world?"

We will let the paradox stand.

When I tell you that my earthly citizenship is dear to me, I am not denying that my eternal citizenship is dearer still. I am a patriot like I am a lover of my husband, for my devotion to him is a foreshadowing of a deepest love reserved for a heavenly Bridegroom.

If I tell you I love my fellow Americans, that I am devoted to my kin both past and present, I say that like I would tell you that the two dearest neighbors in the state are found on my street on those two houses. Then I will tell you about how Mrs. Watkins makes the very same pecan pie that LadyBird Johnson once made, but that she adds one teaspoon of vinegar, which makes all the difference. And I will tell you about the fresh figs that grow in her back yard.

You can say, "But Canada!" and I will tease you about the poutine. Then we can share our stories and try to convince one another of the rich wealth of our beginnings, and I will bring up how the tickle weeds bend in the August breezes here, and how the frogs sound late in the night down by the pond, and our rhetoric will rise and fall while the milk and honey drips off our tongues, and we each will be the luckiest two citizens in all the world, each smitten with the homeland we were given.

And when I sing my national anthem and my heart beats wildly, that will be because I remember being a child and sitting in front of a kitchen table full of marked postage stamps, my legs swinging crossed at the ankles, learning to spell out Granada, Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, Kenya, Vietnam, Poland, tracing them all out on a map, then finding my own... this one was my home, the United States of America.

I remember the burden I felt on Nixon's resignation, my mother waking me up with a grave look on her face and saying, "You are only two-and-a-half, but you must remember this day all your life. When great men in this country do bad things, we have a good laws in this land to protect us from them."

I remember being a fiery young woman in a home where my mother kept a quote from Benjamin Franklin on the refrigerator. "Give me 26 lead soldiers, and I will conquer the world." I read that quote every day of my life, every single day, and I believed it. I knew that my words mattered because this blessed, broken land gave me the freedom to roar.

The American dream was always for me a dream of sacrifice. A dream of recognizing what had been invested in me, a dream of investing in others, a dream of compounded interest, a dream of liberty magnified, a dream of leaving a place better than you had found it when you had arrived.

And when I sang "God, Bless America" I never once thought that I was asking for God to make my nation wealthy so that it could be proud. It was always a gentle prayer for me, a prayer that we might be grateful, a prayer that we might grow in holiness and service to a world in need.

So on this eve of July Fourth, I find myself sitting alone in a quiet room, my two hands cupped in bittersweet devotion around the small flame of that same love.

Strange fires have been burning of late, old names twisted, faithful landmarks reassigned. But I remember America, the America I loved. I love that nation still.

I love her now like I might love a rebellious child storming through a gangly teenage phase, hard headed and reckless. She drives too fast, and she wears too much makeup--those dumb false eyelashes--that horrid music blasting from her room. I don't like her boyfriend. I don't like her attitude. What a headache. When will this be over?

But she is mine. So I will tend her. And I will correct her. And I will see what she might be in the end, praying over her at night while she sleeps, as her eyes flicker in dreams that soothe my mother's heart. ("She is still in there somewhere!") And I will pray, "God, Bless America" like a mother begs the Shepherd to chase His lost sheep.

Four Things I'm Not Willing to Do as a Writer

1. Network. 

For a long time, I didn’t realize what was actually going on here. I feel stupid looking back on my naïveté now, but several years ago, I thought artistic people connected with other artistic people because they wanted to swap ideas and encourage each other.  Besides, I had been a part of the real and beautiful community of the Rabbit Room, so I expected authenticity from everyone.

Then I walked into the bigger world and got it. This wasn’t just about spiritual and artistic support; this was about building a network of useful connections.

Of course, synergy happens in sincere artistic relationships. When you actually know and trust good people who know and trust good people, you tend to find folks whose hearts resonate with your own. And that’s a beautiful thing that makes everybody stronger. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

A lot of folks out there are networking for the sake of trying to get famous. They aren’t after relational substance or support-- they are connecting for the purpose of trying to advance their art. I’m not going to do that. In fact, I’ve intentionally tried to remove myself from several strategic connections when an actual relationship didn't exist. 

This boundary has encouraged my heart deeply because the people who remain in my circle are there because I know and care about them personally. And when I compliment or forward someone else’s work, he or she knows that I have no secondary goal in mind.

2. Choose Distribution over Ethics
 

Businesses need to make money, and some companies are willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that happens. Even Christian industries have formed unholy alliances for the sake of the dollar.

One powerful venue in the evangelical world is actually connected with the porn industry behind the scenes.  I dearly love some people who work with that venue, so I’m not going to call them out by name. Those folks are trying to make the most of this bad situation, and I trust their hearts enough to know that they’ve wrestled honestly with the Lord before making faith-oriented choices. But the line I’ve drawn is this: if the choice were ever given to me, I wouldn't work with that company until those alliances are broken. 

I would rather self-publish and live an unknown life as a writer--I would rather work with tiny, sincere companies for tiny advances--than support corruption within the big machine. I realize that I’m one piddly writer with almost no platform to make a difference, but maybe it will help someone out there to hear one person say this: serve the Lord uprightly in your sphere, even if your sphere is small. Commit early to making principled choices instead of positioning yourself for financial gain. You will sleep better at night.

 

3. Brand Myself

You might not know this term, but you definitely know what it means. It’s the modern tendency to reduce faith writers into logos and styles.

In our money-driven culture, publishers need writers to be simple consumer products that they can promote. This means a writer’s site needs to have a “look.”  Everything needs to revolve around a theme. Posts should be short and use a reliable voice. 

All of these minimizations make a writer more sellable. They create a predictable product that can connect with a regular readership, which equals clicks, which equals forwards within a target audience, which equals book sales, which equals profit.

I’m a huge fan of aesthetics, so I don’t see anything wrong with beautiful blogs and websites that hold to a look or theme out of a desire for artistic unity. But when the motivation isn’t artistic unity but the development of a persona/style that can go viral more easily, something is dastardly wrong.

I've been around famous Christian world long enough to see famous pastors, Christians musicians, and Christian writers who have allowed persona to dig a deep gap between what they actually believe and who they feel they have to be in public.

In private, these people are participating in all sorts of terrible things, while in public, they are maintaining social media platforms with pretty, pithy spiritual updates.  Eventually, this all explodes into a scandal—or worse, it becomes a managed cancer that twists the heart of the gospel into a watered-down spirituality that cannot reconcile with the New Testament at all.

Why is this inevitable? Because the whole concept of persona violates the teachings of the Bible. The gospel isn't supposed to be about superstardom. Paul said that it didn’t matter what Paul or Apollos did because God caused the growth, and when we move away from that core, calcifying into tiny brands of micro-Christianity, we have no center to keep us oriented.

4. Become apolitical.

Haha, about four of you thought you were going to agree with this whole post until you got to this one. Now you're squirming. My stance on this is not Jesus-trendy at all. And I get why. I really do. The political world has become so disgustingly corrupt, a lot of writers are making the decision to pull out of the national discussion altogether.

Actually, of all modern writer trends, this one makes the most sense to me. I respect those who have prayerfully made that call. Sometimes I envy them. Leave room for me on that train, in fact. Someday, I might jump on board.

But at present, I think that my own motives for going politically-neutral would be selfish. I would go neutral because I’m tired of feeling like the fight is futile. I would go neutral because I’m weary of conflict. I would go neutral because I hate challenging men who used to be my heroes. I would go neutral because I simply enjoy conversations about beauty more than I enjoy making hard, public statements about sin. I would go neutral because I have a closet full of Rich Mullins/Shane Claiborne clothes, a playlist full of folk music, and I’d prefer to never read anything Matt Walsh writes again for the rest of my life. I’d so much rather be a nurse than a prophet.

Besides, it’s stinking dangerous to be what I am, an ideological conservative who feels called to stand fiercely against the corruption within faux-conservatism. I hate being misunderstood, and most of our world can’t seem to think beyond two extremes. If you try to fight corruption within conservatism, you are automatically labeled a liberal—even if you are more conservative than most of the current conservative party—even if what you are fighting directly defies the Bible.

Engaging in politics is one of the most frustrating, exhausting things I have ever done. I’ve never identified more with Coriakin stuck on an island of Dufflepuds more than I have the past two years. (I’m sorry if that sounds condescending, but I seriously doubt that most of the folks goofing conservatism up have read those books to begin with. If they had read them, I think they would be living differently.)

Many of my thinking Christian friends are so put out with this battle, they have removed all allegiance from their government altogether. My heart is with theirs. A million times I have wanted to walk away from the whole mess. But for now-- even especially now when the gospel is being actively threatened by unholy alliances--I think it’s important to make the sacrifices of speaking truth in this regard.

Like every resource the Lord has given me, my citizenship is a stewardship issue, and I don’t want to bury talents in the dirt just because the present challenge is profoundly difficult and it feels like there’s no way to win.

But, y'all... the minute I feel the Lord giving me permission to bail, I’m out. If you hear a shout of joy rising out of the mountains of Appalachia, that's me getting the Divine memo that I'm freed up from the task. 

- - -

Anyway, this is an odd post, I guess, and I hope it doesn’t come off as elitist or judgmental. However, I don't know of a comfortable way to say some of this stuff. And I think some of this is important to name, even though it's uncomfortable.

Over and again, I’ve found that when I just crack open my own struggles and put words on them, somebody else needs those words--maybe not 2000 people, but three or four. And three or four is plenty for me--if Jesus spent his ministry tending twelve, why should I be trusted with even five or six?

These are super confusing times, and it’s easy for believers to feel alone and disoriented. Now that I’m 45, I feel more maternal every day, wishing I could put my arms around the young twenty and thirty-somethings who are trying to hack out adulthood and faith in this madness.

Know that I am praying for you. Remember that Jesus is real. He has works ready that he has prepared for you since before the creation of the earth. You don’t have to jump through any wily strategic hopes to find those tasks—he’s going to hand them over day-by-day, hour-by-hour as you trust him.

He lives in you. Take that seriously. Read your Bibles. Pour your hearts out to Him. Love what is true and good, and don’t lose heart, though the mountains around you crumble into the seas.

A Dead Fly and My First Serious Encounter with Atheism

I was one of those over-thinky kids who looks for metaphors everywhere. I always thought that nature was a book waiting to be read if we could simply listen well enough to what it was trying to say.

But one afternoon when I was about six or seven, I was sitting at the kitchen table when a huge, flat housefly landed right next to my hand and died. Boom. The impact didn’t kill the thing, he just ran out of life smack at that moment--one second he was buzzing around, the next, he was belly up with all six legs in the air. The whole scene could have been part of a British comedy, it was so dark and severe.

While that experience wouldn’t create a spiritual crisis for a lot of people, it threw little-kid-me for a loop. Until that moment, the world had been pregnant with the presence of the goodness of God, and here was this stupid random fly knocking me off my game. The whole aesthetic of the thing, the ugliness and pointlessness of it, didn’t fit into the Divine romance that had infatuated me about planet earth.

“What does this MEAN?” I prayed. “Is the world really so random?”

I hadn’t read any existentialists at that age, of course, but here was the epistemological seed of Waiting for Godot or "The Metamorphosis." I was asking, “Is there really no grand narrative of the universe?”

This dead fly felt like a flash of hard, ugly, adult reality, a look behind the Matrix, or behind the Wizard's curtain in Oz. That dead fly meant that nothing meant anything after all.

As I roll that memory around in my mind today, I still take it seriously. Yeah, these were child thoughts, but they were also part of the fundamental decision we all have to make when trying to figure out how the beauty of the world connects with its apparent meaninglessness.

As the years have passed, sometimes I’ve felt close to God, and other times I’ve felt far from him. Sometimes I’ve been swept off my feet because nature reads like a prophecy that points straight in to the Holy of Holies. Other times I’ve watched NOVA specials and seen a band of wild dogs attacking a wounded animal and creation has felt cold, void, material, and indifferent-- saying nothing at all.

Wendell Berry once claimed that the Lord, ‘goes fishing every day in the Kentucky River. I see Him often,’ and these lines make me smile, because I, too, have often met with my Lord where waves smack against the sides of a metal fishing boat. But I have had dead times, too, where I felt like a naked ape wearing sunscreen, floating in a chunk of metal, and not sensing much of anything deep at all.

So while I can tell you what I have experienced in nature, and while I can tell you what I think its beauty means, I want you to know my limitations in that exercise. I have known spiritual ecstasy and I have known spiritual drought.

I can be honest with you about both, but The Holy Spirit must finish the work every poet begins. Eloquence accomplishes nothing apart from him.

(From Chapter 8)

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.