When You Weren't Enough to Keep Them Happy.

“You aren’t enough to keep me happy.”

That’s what they tell us when they cheat on us,
when they divorce us,
when they reject our submissions,
when they don’t ask us to join them,
when they don’t invite us out on a second date,
when they stop talking to us,
when they fire us from our jobs.

They are saying that there’s something about us that’s inadequate.

“You can’t cut it.”
“You’re not pretty enough.”
“You’re not alpha enough.”
“I just don’t like you enough. “
“I don’t need you enough.”
“I can find someone else somewhere else to be what you couldn’t be for me.”

And sometimes the news hurts worse than others.

The first month she was passed over while trying out an online dating service was a little discouraging. The third month of her third year enrolled, she knew something must be wrong with her. She stood in front of the mirror hanging on the back of her door, and she grabbed the extra flesh on her belly, and she pinched it and yelled, “No wonder they ignore you! You’re old, and you’re ugly, and nobody will ever want you!”

Not getting hired for the first job stung him, but being betrayed then asked to leave after a brutal decade of giving it everything he had can felt like he wasn’t the sort of man who could give much to anyone. He couldn’t even find the courage to make up a resume. How do you try again when you tried so hard and failed so big?

The first time she didn’t like the surprise date he’d planned for her, he thought maybe she just needed to find a different angle on love. After twenty years of looking into her drawn, irritated frown, they sat at the little Thai restaurant not talking. She was staring into her phone because she knew he couldn’t please her, and because he knew the same, he didn’t try to distract her.

There’s nothing like being completely vulnerable in a relationship (in a ministry, in a mad attempt to chase a dream) and having someone see deep enough not to want you. What do you do with that? How do you move on?

Two seed catalogs arrived yesterday. The slick pages were mailbox-cold, and a sharp blast of winter trapped in each seam swept over the end of my nose while I turned them.

With a brown Sharpie I drew neat little boxes around photos of snow peas and Asian eggplant. Even as I marked them I knew I wouldn’t pay $3.95 plus shipping (shipping is always so expensive). But as if I could catch a daydream by making a line, as if I were running a fence, I enclosed them.

I tried to catch them like I catch Silver-Laced Wyandotte chicks when the McMurray catalog arrives, and just like I save pictures of Nubian goats, and Wellies, and bee hives, and vineyards - for this is how I always survive the dark months.

February is the season of rejection, you know. That's why we all hate it so much. Crisp November and the pomander intoxication of Christmas are past. The hope and resolve of January have slid into the same bad habits. And here you are again. A little too out of shape. A little too lazy. A little too alone.  A little too unwanted.

I wandered out to rummage about the dead garden, tugging at dried up stems. It is a graveyard now, apart from the Swiss chard, the onions, and a cheeky kohlrabi.

“Next year I will grow winter vegetables,” I tell myself for the thirty-second time.

I say it because I love the idea of growing things in winter.

Have you seen those huge glass containers they used in colonial Williamsburg that let in light and kept off snow? Tiny blown greenhouses that sheltered good food from the killing cold. I could get some of those. And there are winter-hardy vegetables like that blue Russian kale... I still have seeds.

photo credit: photoshelter.com

"Prepare your work outside; get everything ready for yourself in the field, and after that build your house," says Proverbs 24:27.

It’s a quirky little proverb that I take that to mean that we look big scale before we look small scale. We get the mighty machinery of our lives in order before we zoom in to the microscopic passions. We do the work of big faith, casting our bread on the surface of many waters, tending what is essential before coming back to that one favorite, that one pursuit, that one career, that one relationship that – if torn down -  opens us up to being nothing at all.

But how do we do that? It seems so counter-intuitive. In whose arms will we sleep in the meanwhile? Where will we warm ourselves by the hearth?

Everything else that remains in my garden now is skeletal and gone to seed. I bend the great, standing okra bones to the earth and crush them down flat. Pull out five dried sunflower stalks. Tear a tomato vine out of a fence. All of last year’s doing must be undone.

“Just persist,” they say. "Five more minutes. You’re almost there. Tomorrow's gonna be a brighter day." And sometimes that’s the best advice in the world, but sometimes persistence is nothing but foolishness or fear. Sometimes it is even cowardice.

I see now we should have let that one job go five years before we did. And her husband was not just difficult, he broke her nose twice with his fist. That friendship wasn't just unusual, it was corrosive. That investment keeps going further and further south. Sometimes you’ve got to cut bait so you can fish. But still, loyalty is beautiful, and people give up so easily nowadays. Maybe things will turn around. How are we supposed to know what to do?

Do you see what I mean? The world is hard to read sometimes. That doesn't make reality relative, but it does leave us terribly dependent.

So, I'm not an expert on persistence, either, but I do know how easy it can sometimes be to disengage true death from cold earth once the decision has been made. Once the weeping, and the falling, and the terror subside, when roots have relinquished their will, you can do with two fingers what would have taken all your strength in September.

Here is the basil. A zip up the stem releases a handful of dried bits into my hand. I rough them between my palms, watching brown dust pull away from tiny black seed. Infant packages of life! Eternity bound in a serif. In a pixel. Lowering my nose to hands, all breath is spiced and darling. It skips hope across my waters.

And tomatoes! Why didn’t I bring in these tomatoes? What I would give for a fresh tomato in February! Such carelessness seems a mortal sin, now. Six, sad, sagging bags of red hang low, yielding to gravity, forgotten like ornaments after Christmas.

So here is regret, besides. It points a bony finger in our faces: "Maybe some of this was my fault. Maybe I was sloppy. They all keep telling me no divorce is one-sided. Maybe I could have pleased him, her, them, it, if I had only __________. Maybe I was reckless. Maybe I didn't make the most of it. Maybe I didn’t understand what was at stake."

In the spaces birds leave when they fly South with their songs, self-accusation writes a requiem. We damn ourselves, forgetting that August was full of soccer practices, and homework assignments, and friends in need. We forget it was so sticky out, and that the mosquitoes were relentless. We forget that we work out there ten minutes and then feel sick from scratching the whelks for a week.

That doesn't mean whatever it was shouldn't have been done, but maybe it was harder than we remember. And maybe we can be a little gentler with ourselves, because confession is one thing and condemnation is another, and only the first of those two comes from humility.

And besides, we can't see clearly even if we try. They say hindsight is 20/20, but at the top of my game the best I can get is about 20/43. I am subject to a truth I cannot create which means I must be carried by a forgiveness I cannot earn.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

So then:

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me (and there are so many) and lead me in the way everlasting. 

Because none are righteous. Not one.

Stepping over withered peppers, I notice the tomatillos. They were new to the garden this year, so I’ve never watched them full circle before.

A hundred perfect lace balls. All flesh is gone. There remains only a gilded heart bearing twelve seeds. I want you to see it, because you are glorious, and sometimes I am afraid that rejection and regret have led you to forget the truth about your value. I don't mean the small truths have been lost to you, because those are easiest to remember. We go over and over our failures in our sleep. Our scars are why we barely have any courage left to try again. You know all of that as well as anything. But I am talking about a deeper truth still.

You were bought by a price. Therefore you are not your own. That doesn't just make you a servant, it makes you wanted. It makes you chased down and caught. It means you are enough to be adored.

So I try to balance this thing I have found on a post and catch a photograph of body making a temple for spirit. The problem is, life inside death has become weightless, and the slightest breeze makes it dance.

The thought of that tight, little sour green flesh makes my mouth water like opportunities missed. (See how I am tempted, too?) I start to despise myself: "I should have. I should have. If I could only do that over...  now nobody will ever want me. I missed my chance."

But here in my palm are seeds to plant from all that was wasted.

The winter has seasoned those seeds, and they have slept, and now they will wake like new wisdom rattling around inside of a discarded soul, now reclaimed as a bride.

Love, have you heard how those little things grow like weeds?

A Lovesong for the Lonely

I don't know how many days you've gone without a decent hug,

but I do know that I see your little green light flash on and off.

I've seen you fish the internet like we all do these days, 

throwing out bait on a long line in cold waters.

I've seen you listening through static, 

turning the knobs,

looking for a frequency on someone to draw you in 

and hold you, because somehow, somewhere, 

there's got to be somebody

who will let you get close enough to take 

a couple of long breaths 

with your nose buried in the fabric of a worn shirt.

You wouldn't think people could even live 

as long as we have without human contact. 

Babies die from this kind of emptiness, you know?

"Failure to thrive," they call it.

But we hold up our chins and post a picture

of breakfast, then sit and wait

for something that never happens...

because it's embarrassing to admit that we are lonely.

It sounds so pitiful, like we're failures,

like something's wrong with us 

that nobody has wanted us so far.

But honey, here's what I know. Most everybody's lonely.

Even people you think aren't.

So don't be ashamed.

You look around and you'll see a world full of people

aching to feel their lungs expand against another set of ribs,

looking for another mind to wrestle like two puppies on the carpet,

listening for someone to speak their names as familiar 

as a screen door slamming shut.

You think you're the only one,

but most of everybody is folded over in a cramp 

from the need for a good belly laugh.

You're not the only one leaning back 

because the pull forward goes off into nothing.

When People Who Talk About Grace Aren't Gracious With Me

So, loving Jesus doesn't mean you magically start enjoying the sort of people who annoyed you before you knew Him. I've been in and around ministry for twenty years, and the fact is, birds of a feather tend to flock together -- even in the body of Christ. 

Cute and coiffed women tend to gravitate toward safe, disciplined religious atmospheres. 

The bohemians tend to find artistic, creative outworkings of their faith. They smoke pipes, drink a little bourbon, bend the rules, and generally go against the norm for the sake of the gospel.

Mommy-types tend to form play groups to discuss family-oriented resources. As those women get older, their nurturing instincts tend to transition toward mentoring younger women.

Social advocates tend to find one another and rally to make strategic plans for rescuing the desperate. 

Academics tend to gather over buckets of walnuts with hammers and nutpicks, sitting for hours, reveling over little pieces of meat they have dislodged.

Salt-of-the-earth types go wherever they are needed; the spine of the body of Christ, moving without announcement into hospitals and prisons, mowing the yard of the neighbors down the street, and picking up hitchhikers. 

Loners tend to wander into deserts for meditation, and in their solitude they find truths to bring back to the rest of the body.

Faith doesn't turn us into a robots, see. It often works from within our natural personality, and I don't see how that's a bad thing, really. In almost all of these groups, lovers of Jesus will say that the resources of heaven allow them to do what they do on earth. In all their many shades of activity, they speak about the grace of Christ.

Still, it's hard when I hear people talking about the grace of Christ, but they don't extend that grace to me.

When the natural bent of others doesn't jibe with how I'm wired, when they see the worst in me, I can feel shunned. And I'm sure I've made those who aren't like me feel the same way. Because frankly, there are just some people in the body of Christ who kind of bug me.

How honest should I get here? Hmmm..

Okay, I get irritated with the "roar and swagger" folks. The Jerry Fallwell Jr. types. The Bob Jones types. The John Waynes. The Donald Trumps. People who cite Glenn Beck or Ann Coulter. They embarrass me, and they make me mad.

I also tend to get uncomfortable around the hyper-sentimental crowd. Now a lot of my best girlfriends are affectionate... but I'm talking about the sticky sweet cooing women who use phrases like, "This blessed my heart today," or "I feel a sense of peace about this." There's kind of a permanent sigh in their voices, and they call me "Beloved," even though they don't know me at all. Just describing them makes my palms sweat.

I also get antsy around artsy types who are super into their own personas. Beards on men who don't know how to change the oil in a car. Social media posts that feel like ETSY crashed into Pintrest, and then again into Anglicanism. There's a hyper awareness of image management that feels like insecurity, or maybe the need to climb ladders... I can't tell. But when I'm around this, it makes me want to go buy mom jeans, eat at McDonalds, and shop in Wal-Mart just to cleanse my palate.

Male, twenty-something seminary students who learn a couple of languages and a couple of things about theology and suddenly believe they are God's answer to everything wrong with evangelicalism. Especially when those guys start acting rude around dear, 70-year-old pastors. I want to knock 'em down. Pow pow.

Spelling and grammar snobs irritate me, too. I like it when friends tell me I've missed something, because that's just the loving thing to do. But you know those people who roam the internet day and night, just looking for an opportunity to tell someone, "You used THERE instead of THEIR!" I do not like them in a box. I do not like them in their socks. I do not like them here or THEIR, THEY'RE, THERE, I do not like them anyWARE. 

I could go on, but you get the idea. When I run into some of these folks, grace isn't the first thing that comes out of me. What comes out first is sarcasm, or maybe anger. Almost always I run and hide from them.

But let's push into this more... if those same people were to describe me, what would they say? How would I bug them? I can imagine them saying at least this much:

"She doesn't even brush her hair about two days a week. Have some dignity, for gosh sakes. She's too fierce for a woman. She has too many opinions, and she certainly doesn't mind sharing them. She's reckless. She's all over the place. She posts too much. She doesn't even take time to proofread. She goes into these melancholy holes. She criticizes everything. She's too rebellious. She's too sensory. She acts too confident without enough information. I don't trust her. She's a disaster waiting to happen."

I can imagine this because there are people out there who don't click with me. Our chemistry is bad. We aren't a natural match. And you know what? They are justified in letting this stuff irritate them. Seriously, I need to start brushing my hair. Yeah, I'm too fierce. I share too much. I'm reckless sometimes, and I need to care about proofreading. I get sulky, and critical, and restless, and indulgent. I'm overconfident. I worry sometimes that I'm a disaster waiting to happen.

Soooo.... guilty as charged. Now what? What do we do about all this mess?

It's not just a problem for individuals, either. In the church as a whole, we have traditional folks who tend to roar and rage over gay sex and abortion but who don't talk much about greed or insular living. Progressives tend to hate on Western aggression and consumerism while not giving much notice to couples sleeping around outside of marriage or coarse speech. All of our individual differences push us out into ideological clans where we tend to be tender toward certain sins and rough on others.

But guess what? None of this is altogether new.

Why is there so much written in Paul's letters about getting along with other people? Maybe it's because trusting Jesus isn't some sort of magic pill that turns us all into Stepford believers? Maybe life in Christ doesn't suddenly blank our our personalities? Maybe part of the beauty of the gospel is that it helps us (in slow time) figure out  what to do with those spiritual siblings who (frankly) bug the poop out of us on long car trips. ("Stop touching me! He's on my side! He's looking at me funny! He called me that name again! He's got my Boba Fett, and he won't give it back!!" He's breathing weird! Tell him to put his shoes back on! His feet smell like something died!)

When my sweet little daughter was in kindergarten, there was a boy whose face bugged her. She said she didn't like round faces, and besides, he cheated at Duck, Duck, Goose.

Now my daughter is one of the most tender children I've ever known. She is almost endlessly forgiving. Generous without bounds. I once saw a mean girl scratch her cheeks until they bled, and my daughter was immediately tender toward that child. She's not the kind of person who holds grudges, and she sees the best in even the most difficult folks I know.

But in all of her many loving years on planet Earth, there was one kid she just didn't like. She didn't like the round-faced kid when she was five, and she came home from homeschool co-op every day telling me how she wanted to punch him in the nose.

We never really got to the bottom of that, but to this day we laugh about it. I'll say, "What was it about that poor little boy that bothered you so much?" And she will say, "I have no idea. I just didn't like his face."

And I get that. Don't you? (Admit it. You get that.)

But Jesus said:

"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

Why would he even say that if it came natural? If it happened without our participation, without our working through it, without it being difficult sometimes... well, he would have never needed to put it into words for us.

But how? How do we do it?

I'm reading through some of the epistles today in light of the people whose faces I just don't like. I'm thinking about how these words apply still, and how it's possible to move through an initial negative reaction into gospel sufficiency. Somehow I'm relieved to hear that some of these feelings are just flat normal.

Why is that comforting? Because beyond the feelings, there's hope. There's a good strong plan for extending grace to those who aren't gracious with me.

 

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Ephesians 4:32

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 

From Colossians 3

 

The Embarrassing Reason I Didn't Help a Little Girl in Need

This is embarrassing, but the least I can do is shoot straight about it. Maybe my honesty can keep you from making the same mistake.

For several years we have been praying for a little girl in South America. She’s a sweetheart, and every time we get her letters, I’m moved by her depth and her joy.

I’m also overwhelmed with guilt.

See, I’ve always wanted to do something amazing for her. I have secret daydreams of being able to pay for her college, of being able to build her a better house, of being able to send her some massive gift that will change her life and future.

I have wanted to be her benefactor because I grew up in churches where middle-class white people went on summer mission trips to change entire cities. We started schools. We dug wells. My people did big things in a week -- community-rocking investments that we could pack into PowerPoint presentations to show to auditoriums full of donors how good we had been.

We reveled in the power of our generosity. We liked being strong enough to change the world.

So now when I look at international giving, I feel an obligation to “Go big, or go home!” It's a weird kind of pride, a perfectionism that has often paralyzed me from doing anything at all.

In all these years that I’ve been waiting for a day when it it would be easier to send $2000 than $10, I’ve missed the chance to write a little girl letters that might have encouraged her. I didn't do what I could do, because I wanted to rescue her whole life.

I’ve asked “What would Jesus do?” too much – thinking I could somehow manage the work of Divinity. Instead I should have asked, “What does Jesus want to do through me?” I wish had realized the difference between those questions sooner.

Because I was proud, because I was ashamed that I couldn’t do more, because I was embarrassed that I couldn’t charge into poverty on a white horse, I dropped a precious opportunity to invest in the simple, daily journey of a single child’s life.

And she’s grown up while I have been waiting for the perfect opportunity to “save” her.

The worst part of this is that I knew better. I've read about the dangers of this kind of thinking in When Helping Hurts; and through international adoption, I have learned first-hand about the importance of respecting the dignity of those we serve. I know how toxic a messiah complex can be. Still, I've let it take me over.

All along the way this child has sent me drawings of her trip to the beach, or palm trees, of chickens. I’ve listened to stories about the loss of her father, about her dreams for the future. And I’ve felt for her. I've prayed for her some.  Mostly I’ve felt guilty, and that guilt has pushed me into daydreaming, “I’ll make up for this somehow, little girl.”

I keep making these silent promises to her. "Someday I'm going to wow you. Someday I'm going to make a real difference in your life."

My throat is tight writing this, and I have tears in my eyes. I'm so sorry for what I've let pride work in me.

If I could do all this over, I would just send letters if letters were all I had. I would just send $5. I would let myself be humbled by my own poverty, and reach horizontally to another human being in need, instead of waiting until I was powerful and self-sustaining. I would confess my arrogance instead of letting it turn my hands to stone.

I would let Jesus be Jesus to both of us. I would be a woman in need getting to know a child in need. I would receive from Him and let what He gave me flow into her life. I would love her simply, kneeling down, so that I could look my little sister straight in the eye.

Why It’s Kind of Okay if Nobody Reads Your Blog

When I turned twenty, I burned every bit of the writing that I had done in my teen years.  Four three-ring binders, jammed full, up in flames. 

There were a couple of reasons I did that, and some of those reasons were better than others. But for good or for ill, those papers are gone forever, because there was one copy of them. Handwritten thoughts. No duplicates. Written with ink once. Wrestled over. Wept over. Now dust blowing through central Kentucky.

See, back then you could write in private.  A “diary” was something you kept under lock and key. People didn’t blog. They didn’t post to Facebook.

Of course there were professional authors who made books, but regular folks wrote to sort things out.  People like you and me kept a certain sort of privacy with ourselves so that we could hash out our questions, then emerge more whole to the public. This process  took time, and it took work. Sometimes you wrote for years, then burned everything up without a single person having seen it.

Everything has changed now, and that’s not all bad. It’s great that struggling and lonely people can find community, resources, and honest conversations with others online. But one drawback is that we can feel a weird sort of obligation to put our private stuff out there for everyone to read -- as if a little privacy were the same thing as a lack of authenticity.

I’ve definitely felt that pressure in the past, and I wish I could go back and tell my younger internet self that opening certain hard things up for public view wasn’t a moral requirement. Just because you have a testimony doesn’t mean you have to share it right now.

I don’t mean to shame people who are being vulnerable. It’s okay to be open sometimes, even about delicate issues that make other people uncomfortable.  

But it’s also okay to hide and take good care of yourself when you are in the middle of trauma. Too often I’ve tried to run around the battlefield with my guts dragging behind me, working to sew up everybody else. Maybe that’s about being firstborn, but there were times I tried to write to help people when I could have just taken a warm bath and gone to bed early. And I probably should have, for everybody's sake. People who are bleeding to death don't make very good surgeons.

Every once in a while I’ll see posts come across my social media feed that say, “Well, I’ve finally decided to blog,” as if sharing personal details about our lives is now a basic human requirement like brushing our teeth and exercising. Or people will apologize,  “I’m so sorry it’s been so long,” as if readers were in legitimate need of what hasn’t been given.

I absolutely get why folks feel that way, but when I slow down and look at what's going on under the surface here, I get concerned.  This kind of language can indicate that we are close to using online relationships like commodities.

Scores of articles have already been written about how the presence of “shares” and “likes” in online communication has changed human interaction. We can easily associate worth and identity with these digital signs of approval. And now that bloggers can make tends of thousands of dollars a year simply by collecting readers, keeping a public diary has become a legit job as well as a hobby.

Add to this the fact that everywhere you look, bloggers are competing for readers, which means "top" blogs have to kick out a perfect mix of variety and consistency to get high traffic. There needs to be a cute-but-not-too-cute real live mom at the other end of the e-line; somebody who has a stylin' kitchen, but with carefully photographed messes to let you know she’s still human. Lots of pictures. Text with quotes in cool fonts. Tweetable sentences. Forwardable memes. And all this has to come together to an online front porch that welcomes you into the heart of someone you probably won’t ever meet, but who you know for sure that you wouldn’t mind having coffee with.

I’m not being critical here. None of this is bad in itself. In fact, a lot of healing has been offered to the world through these sorts of blogs.

However, since we are replicators by nature, it’s important to look at what expectations these websites can awaken in regular people like us. Without realizing it, we can allow this dynamic to bump readership up until it is suddenly the primary goal of our writing. And we can also slip into the false belief that becoming known is a mark of successful writing. Dangerous stuff.

Besides this, other pressures can be created. First, we can feel like we always need to know the beautiful narrative running through our present disasters. This is something that can take years to figure out, but as bloggers, we need to know it right now, today, and be able to communicate it to others. This knocks down another domino. We can feel pressure to tidy up our story too fast. We try to tuck all the loose ends in and sand off all the raw edges. But if we define what’s happening too soon, we might miss what’s going on that is more important that we haven’t even considered yet. Like touching a moth while it’s coming out of a cocoon, we can distort what’s really needing to happen in a time of transition.

Writers, as you look over how words are used in our culture today, I just want to remind you of what you already know. This is not new information, so it’s not going to rock your world. But still, sometimes it feels good to have someone say what is true over you. Somehow that’s freeing, right? So here it goes...

* It’s okay to write stuff nobody will ever read. Writing is growth. 

* It’s okay to take time in your own company with your own words and your God. No, this is not selfish. No, this is not wasteful. It’s smart. It’s healthy. It can even be holy.

* It's not dishonest to hold back some of what you write.  You don’t have to be emotionally naked with the world to be sincere.

* The world doesn’t have a right to hear everything you think. Your heart isn’t public domain.

* If you do publish, number of readers is not a reliable mark of what was accomplished by what you wrote. I know this is difficult to believe in our culture. But (let me try to say this gently) ... who are you to judge the worth of what you have cast out into the world? Jesus had twelve disciples. He told only three some of what he had to say.

Some of you have been following me for years, and because of the volume of my output, you probably think that I post everything I write or consider. Well, believe it or not, that’s not true. Just a fraction of what I write ends up online, and a lot of what I keep hidden is hidden for a reason. It’s simmering. It’s not ripe yet. It's even greener than some of the reckless, unfinished stuff you’ve read that I have posted. Sometimes I come back two or three years later and rework something you've never seen, then save it another year in a draft file. I should probably do more of that.

If holding some back sounds like something you want to try, I have an idea on where you could start. This might not work for you, but it’s worked for me in the past. If you’re stuck in the “public view” mode and don’t know how to engage with a private writing life, try working on some psalms. Psalms are short.  They are honest. There’s plenty of room to stretch out emotionally and artistically. And best of all, they are easy to trash, if you want to get rid of them when you are done.

Let me know how it goes. I hope this post helps someone somehow. A couple of you have private personalities, so you don’t naturally walk around feeling pressure to share your stuff. I guess you might need an exhortation in the opposite direction now and then, but I'm not the one to give that to you. 

However, for those who are walking around exhausted from hyper-responsibility, feeling pressure to wrap every fear up with a tidy moral, feeling pressure to figure out what’s going on in every disaster to make it articulate and encouraging for the world... I want to say that there’s room for you to make room for you. You don't always have to diagnose. You don't always have to teach. You don't have to use this struggle to collect internet commodities like Mario's gold coins, and you don't have to huff and puff and maximize every ounce of pain for the Kingdom. God is the one who is working all things for good. The burden is on Him there.

Meanwhile Jesus loves you, this I know... and He reads your blog. That's a pretty great audience, even if He's the only one who does. He reads what you don't post there, too. He reads what you write wherever you write it, because He values your company and the words that express your heart.

And He's okay if You save some stuff for His eyes and ears only. There’s room inside Him for you to write, just because you need to. 

"The Kid" (a poem)

My husband is reading a bedtime story to the kid,
that eight-year-old who sneaks up behind me
and puts his hands on my face
and giggles.

I'm the kid's favorite, see.
He says he wants to be my baby forever,
that he's going to dig up some magic dust
so he can stay mine till he's a little old man.

After dinner tonight I asked the kid
why he was so sweet to me,
if he loved me
or if he loved making his daddy jealous.

"Both!" he laughed. 
Then he crawled up in my lap,
and kissed my cheeks, and winked at his papa.

"I've got your girl!" he says. A taunt.
"And I love you more than any momma I've ever had,"
he said, not knowing how that hit me in the gut
because his first momma left him in a bathroom,
and I can't imagine how terrible that was for her,
or what it was like to lose everything I've gained.

Her brave boy, my brave boy,
has stretched out into his new life with such gusto
that I forget about his beginning.
There are no seams.
He smells like mine, and laughs like mine,
thinks like mine, runs in the same grooves as mine,
grooves so deep that tonight we were comparing
family foreheads and I looked at his
to see how it matched.
"You must take after me," I said,
"and your sister takes after your dad."

That kid's been so good for us, 
worked his gospel in our place of poverty;
he's been our missionary,
and our patron saint,
held us together like glue during years
when we needed his joy, and his trust, and his love.

Now I hear his daddy working through Narnia,
and thanks to the kid, I think fond thoughts about that old man
who works all day, then helps with the dishes,
who leaves space to read to a boy
instead of flipping on the news.

The kid casts a favorable light,
leaves a trail behind him that I follow day after day,
because I was an orphan once,
until the kid found me
and brought me home.

Snowed In Together

He caught me in kitchen.

"I'm throwing carbs down as fast as I can," I said, "trying to put on weight. I'm frozen. Can't get warm. Every year I can make it alright through November and December... I can pass up all that junk food... but after you went to bed last night I ate half a sleeve of saltine crackers, just hoping for a little more insulation."

He laughed. Grabbed me through my five layers, and pulled me into himself. He said, "Bring it. I could stand a little more of you. A man likes to drive a road with some curves to it."

We were snowed in, and his hands roamed. I stretched out at his touch, worried those crackers had done their work while I slept. I didn't want him to feel it if my belly was hanging over my waistband.

He tried to kiss me, but his nose hit my new glasses and made a smear. High-index lenses, and I'm still a little bit seasick. Razor sharp in the middle, but distorted on the edges.

Our marriage has survived a heck of a past few years. We've rehashed everything we tried not to feel the first ten years and everything we tried not to say the second ten. 

But here we are still, knowing everything good and everything bad about each other. I think he still loves me (and I mean the feel-kind of love) though he loves different than I do, like a long trail of airplane steam running straight across a frozen sky. I am fire and darkness. My love shows up in an unbridled blast then limps off the stage after forgetting her lines. 

My skin seems to be falling off the bones of my face lately, and I don't know what's going on with my neck. Stress has worn grooves on my forehead, and I feel nervous, because I've seen men throw away women like me for upgrades.

I guess I've seen women like me throw away men like him, too, and it's a sad thing to watch, because marriage can feel like that unicorn in The Glass Menagerie, so delicate and so fragile... until I go down in the basement and start to move around boxes of baby pictures and Christmas cards, old receipts, and clothes we never wear packed together in Rubbermaids. Imagine the work of dividing all that up. You couldn't ever do it, really. The two become one flesh, and that means your stuff gets mixed together like gravy and mashed potatoes. Your bodies get mixed up together, and your hearts, and your regrets, and your memories, and your hopes.

My daughter said the other day something so casual, I wasn't expecting it to hit me straight in the heart like it did. She was just being sixteen, teasing, spinning a caricature out of what we would be like as old people, Grandma and Grandpa, yin and yang. She talked about bringing the grandkids over, and what we'd do, and in her certainty - in her rootedness - I saw why we have been forgiving each other so long. 

Oh, it's cold outside. Too cold to go out, but he went out anyway with the eight-year-old and made a snow man and shoveled the driveway. And when he came in, I forgot to acknowledge both. He does things like that all the time, quiet things that get absorbed into the whir.

Over twenty years he's been taking care of me.

I got a piece of his lip when he kissed me in the kitchen. That man has good, hot lips. He knows how to use them, too. 

I could feel my knees get a little bit weak even though I was wearing glasses and was full of saltine crackers. "A man likes to drive a road with curves to it," he said, and that was poetic as all get out. 

I've been letting it settle for about nine hours now. It was a darned good thing to say.

If we were first dating, I'd get so tickled over something like that; I'd write it down on a piece of paper, and stick it on my bulletin board, and dream it out to the end.

But all these years later, we've said so much, it's like I got hard of hearing. 

That's something I need to think through.

Tonight if the electricity holds out we're going to watch a movie, I guess. Then we will crawl in bed between flannel sheets that have been washed twenty or thirty times since our worst fights. It will be cold as sin in there at first, so I will shudder, and cuss, and wrap myself around him. I'll bury my ice nose in the valley between his two shoulders that worked to care for me. Shoulders that have worked to care for me for half my life almost. And when he rolls over to kiss me goodnight, I hope I remember tonight to thank him.

A Prayer from January 18

Thank you for the lack I feel. 

Thank you for every gap in my life that forces me to choose between selfish attempts to numb pain and believing that you have a purpose ready for it.

Thank you for loving me so much that you have chased me into my idols.

Thank you for being jealous for me, for holding back good things that would make me feel too at home in a place that isn't my home at all.

Thank you for letting me see my weakness.

Thank you for showing me that so much of what I hate about the world I am capable of doing in my own relationships. 

Thank you for letting me run to the ends of my greed, for letting me stand in the horror and wreckage of it, so that I can see how much I need you.

I once asked you to give me one pure and holy passion. 

I meant it then, but I didn't realize what it would take for you to work this out in me.

I didn't realize that it meant that you had to pull my fingers off of the world one love at a time. 

I didn't realize that it would mean humiliation when my position in community was stripped away, or profound loneliness when human relationships failed. I didn't realize that it would mean years of chaos, of losing what I had poured my heart into, of facing my most terrible fears.

I didn't realize that it would mean doubting that you exist at all, because I had to first lose a false picture of what you are before I could know the real you.

I'm tired now. Tired of wrestling against you. Tired of praying prayers that shove my shoulder against the doors of heaven, attempting to force you to work according to my design.

It is a strange place to be, foreign to me. Still. Like breaths taken on a surgical table while coming out of anesthesia.

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;

my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul,

like a weaned child with its mother;

like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, hope in the Lord

from this time forth and forevermore.

Genesis

The old story says there were two trees smack in the middle of the garden
and God said, "Don't eat from that one."

But see, the kicker is, the forbidden tree makes the most sense.

The Knowledge of Good and Evil is what I spend my days looking for --
"Ten Steps to Mastering Greed"
"Ten Steps to Social Justice"
"Ten Steps to Beauty"
"Ten Steps to Being a Good Wife"
"Ten Steps to A Maximized Life" --
I bust my butt looking for ways to crack all the codes.

So any dangling mango that promises  to make me more like God (WWJD, and all that) is in my shopping cart on Amazon prime, pronto. It will be here two-day, by Wednesday, because I'm hungry, hungry to figure this mess out.

Why wouldn't a God want me to be more like Him, to know whatever He knows?

Why would He walk in the garden with me in prettiest hour of the day with glory intoxicating, billowing like a train behind him, and my heart banging like it's the third movement of some symphony?

I am sick with love when we pass that one tree and I remember, "You. Don't eat that." Then I hear, "It will make you more like Him, you know."

And my heart turns, because I hate being a primate.

It was a harder choice than we think, I think.

Because even knowing what dominoes fell from that first declaration of independence, I am still unaccustomed to the veils behind which God hides, and sometimes I resent them.

I want to zoom into the text, picking through the Hebrew with a nut pick, digging out truth in perfect pecan halves, and blowing off the bitter bits.

"You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me."

And so I have so often participated in the work of the great divorce, turning from the presence of the Messiah to suck on the pit of the knowledge of good and evil.

Her Chemo

Yesterday was the first day of Jennifer’s second war on leukemia.

I asked her what I could do to help while she sits in that awful place
getting herself pickled on chemo, and she said,
“Write about how Jesus made space inside of incarnation
to weep for a man he was going to raise from the dead.”

I want you to know that I tried to do that,
but all I could do was rock back and forth between anger and fear,
because there she is, Han Solo stuck in oncology carbonite
with droids running sugar maple sap through her veins.

Strangers who explore this planet for a living
are making their rounds to her room
and I tried to make mine,
but that first glance in the door was like touching a hot stove.

Still I love her enough to push my hand down on the burner
instead of pulling it back.

My Carhartt overalls are hanging in my closet,
but I can’t look at them today,
because Jennifer should be wearing hers, tromping through some field,
putting her face up against the hot muzzle of a horse
where dragon nostrils pump steam in defiance of winter
and ice flicks her cheeks neon pink.

It froze hard last night so the ground crunches grass and clay,
and the wind today is strong enough to
flip her hat back and run its woman fingers through her hair,
hair that’s just now grown back,
and I’m a snotty mess thinking that over.

My poetry and my platitudes can’t tame a God
whose love won’t be subjected to bit and bridle,
but she already knows that
(she’s Presbyterian).

I can’t tell what breed I am yet except nauseated,
stewing in whatever chemical reaction it is
that turns helplessness to vertigo down in your gut.
I want to throw up the nothing I have to offer.

Everything sad is coming untrue,
I believe that. I do believe it.
I believe there are brave and beautiful things to say,
sweet songs to sing and stories to tell,
but first I have to hate cancer.

I have to throw myself on the bed and sob
and pound my fist in my pillow and yell.
I have to hate what it steals, hate what it demands,
hate that it gets so savage and so personal.

And no matter what I believe,
what I want right now is to yank up in front of that hospital
with Al Capone’s cadillac and a bottle of Woodford Double Oak,
and shout up, “Honey, let’s blow this joint,” squeal our tires,
turn the radio up way too loud, put the pedal on the floor
and find California.

But Jennifer asked me to think about what Jesus meant
when He sat still beside the grieving.
Instead of whipping out a parable, or a miracle, or a mob car,
He slowed down quiet like, folded himself over like origami
and tucked Himself into a tiny infant body
whose first impulse at the dung air of a stable
was to wail and to weep,
to become helpless before all things,
to take up the art of grieving.

This is the Jesus whose spit cured blindness,
who let His tears fall and mix with the earth,
and I don’t know what that means, but I think Jennifer does,
or else she wouldn’t have asked me to think about it at all.

Einsten and Pooh-Pooh

Secularists pooh-pooh the paradoxes of Christianity, and yet there are similar gaps in the realm of science which are accepted without a flinch.

For example, at this point in time, scientists are unable to synchronize quantum mechanics and Newtonian physics. Even though each model is known to work within a certain part of the natural world, these theories also seem to contradict one another at times.

When Einstein tried to synch electromagnetism with relativity, he coined the term "Unified Field Theory." He wanted to find a way to combine the fundamental forces of the earth into one consistent concept. He was unable to find this bridge, and scientists are still searching for it in 2016.

And yet, scientists do not look at these seeming contradictions and declare them primitive or silly. They do not throw out independent theories, just because they do not yet see how they connect. They remain humble, admitting that these systems are only toolboxes, not ultimate descriptions. They use them as vehicles that help thinkers explain what has happened and what is likely to happen in the future. 

Instead of obsessing on the differences between the theories, most scientists are pragmatists. They use each school of thought to prove what it can prove, and they remain curious, small, pliable in searching what is beyond their current ability to understand.

Something very different happens when secularists approach the paradoxes of religion.

By definition, a being with the power to design and implement our physical world would be more dimensional than what he has made. The lesser does not create the greater. This means that any legitimate creator would run with more mystery than physics, biology, math, and music. He could not be simpler than the world He has created.

I have heard atheists claim that “Any God who really loves us would also be simple for us to understand,” but this is an odd  demand. There is no necessary logical connection between love and comprehensibility. 

A simple god might be something we desire for one reason or another, but that is only desire. It is not rational to insist that God must be simple to be loving.

I have a lot of questions about God, but watching the faulty logic of hasty secularists often does more to confirm my faith than the propaganda of theologians. So often I find a massive gap left in the secular worldview, a gap wide enough for a little boy to run through, shouting that the emperor has no clothes.

I don’t mean that all of the prejudice which is now present in science is intentional. I think that there are some secularists who simply haven’t realized their blind spot yet. But for others, the role of Galileo and the church has switched. There are certain things certain secularists are unwilling to see, because they would push the earth out of the center of their universe. 

I have empathy for these thinkers most of all, because I think they have the highest capacity to dig into the wonders and delights of a true God. But theological disappointment is hard to overcome, and many have been shown only a tiny deity glued together from selfish human history and politics. They don't have a vision for a Being that runs in the deepest scientific harmonies of the universe. 

I understand why these thinkers have rejected the lesser god they were offered. I have rejected that god, too.  But just like some of the early foundational theories on science were flawed, some popular old theories about God have been flawed. Bad conclusions have been drawn. Horrible experiments have been run.

Yet an essential part of intelligence is discarding what doesn't resound while continuing to search for what does.

The Enlightenment was so good for humanity in so many ways, but if I could patch one hole it left, that would be humility. Just as in physics, when it comes to the metaphysical world, I think it’s wise to realize that the limitations are often ours. 

Demanding that all mysteries synchronize perfectly, immediately, instead of letting truths do their work in their realms until the bridges appear to connect them makes for bad science. It is also makes for bad theology. 

The Thankless Offering of Fighting Our Urges

I don't know why a loving God would allow certain people to be born with biological urges that pull against his commands. 

And that's not just some subtle, PC way of talking about homosexuality, either. It's a comprehensive statement.

Based on data collected by Gallup in 2015, 96.2% of adults identified as straight (though some research suggests as low as 90%). But no matter what you believe about how being gay syncs with the Bible, there's a heck of a lot more going on in our culture than whatever is or isn't happening in that 3.8% (or 10%) of our population.

For example...

More than 68.8% of our adult population is considered obese while the Bible forbids gluttony.

Statistics on infidelity vary wildly, but a modest estimate suggests that 21% of all men and 17% of all women cheat on a spouse, though the Bible forbids adultery. When questions about mental infidelity are asked ("Have you ever THOUGHT about"...) , those numbers explode. The percentage of men and women who have imagined being unfaithful is astronomical, though the Bible clearly states that whatever we want in our hearts is something we have essentially done.

7.4% of the adult population is considered either alcoholic or abusive of alcohol while the Bible forbids letting alcohol control us.

There are genes associated with violent crime which make a human 13 times more likely to participate in repeated aggression toward others, though the Bible commands us to turn the other cheek and to love others as ourselves.

18.2% of the population suffers from some sort of mental disorder, many related to chemicals of the brain which lead to financial irresponsibility, sexual risk taking, self-harm, or manipulation of others. All of these are forbidden by the Bible in one form or another.

So many of us are born with urges that contradict what the Bible commands. 

We can choose to give in to those urges because we were born with them, and many of us do. 

We can say, "I was born like this," or "I just need this right now," or "I can't resist this because it's how I was made."

We can shake our fists at any sort of deity we consider cruel enough to drop us into an impossible biological situation and yell, "This is YOUR problem, God, not mine. If You didn't want this for me, and if You are so powerful, why didn't you stinking get in my DNA when you were knitting me together and rewire me? If you don't like what You made, You should have made me differently."

I've felt that response swell up in me at times. 

I was born with some inclinations that make it very hard to submit to anything other than my biological wiring. I see how some of those urges could harm me and other people, so I fight them (and fail, and fight them, and fail). But sometimes I get so tired of feeling like I'm walking upstream, especially in a culture where so many people seem to be on float trips, yielding to wherever their current takes them. I've grown up in the era of "chase your bliss," and Mary Oliver, and all that.

And yet, when I read the broken confessions of writers who have fought battles against their urges, I'm moved by the depth of what they have learned. When I find someone who has used his or her genetic makeup as a classroom, willing to put every impulse on the table and dissect it, I am undone by the riches that sacrifice tends to provide to the world.

Joseph Campbell's _Hero With A Thousand Faces_ describes a protagonist's descent into an underworld, a journey into dark places where wisdom is gained for the culture. 

I'm not a big Campbell fan in general, but the idea that we can go into some sort of lower recesses of ourselves and face the dragons which torment us moves me. 

Zooming out, I can see the value in admitting that there are parts of me that want to destroy me -- even if they are natural, or inborn, or impossible to splice off. 

Looking back to Greek tragedy, to Shakespearean tragedy, to the old epics of many cultures, we find humans struggling against themselves. It was once understood that our first impulses were not always our best ones.

Many of the first stories (not just Christian) can be fit into a schema that runs like this: "Hero wants to ___________, because he is wired to ___________. And yet if he _______________, he will destroy himself and others."

I'm not writing this as a moral proclamation. There are many things I don't understand about biology, about ethics, about how to interpret the Bible. Don't read this and imply that I am condemning your urge, whatever it is.

However, in the middle of an "I have a right to please myself" culture, I do want to give a shout out to those brave souls who are willing to look at their desires objectively. It takes so much humility to do what you are doing. 

I know you aren't appreciated for this a lot of the time.

I know you are lonely. 

I know it's hard to even talk about your battle, because so many people think it's superstitious and pointless.

Either that, or they can't identify with your battle because they have different wiring, and they shame you for having to fight for this at all.

As you experience the fatigue of this struggle, you want to just give up and relax like everybody else. 

All around you friends giving up, giving in, resigning to the current of whatever-comes-natural to them, and you wonder if all these years of asking hard questions are just a waste of life. Are you going to get to the end of everything and regret choosing the harder path?

Besides, your fight can make the rest of us feel terrible, so we don't support you much. You make us feel bad. We don't want to see you hanging on still. 

You're like that guy who is still going to the gym in mid February after we've broken our New Year's resolution to work out. We kind of just want you to shut up.

But don't shut up. Please don't shut up.

Please don't stop trying. Please don't stop asking hard questions. Don't throw away the humility it requires of you to head back into this mess and learn from it.

You are a rare warrior in these times. A warrior and a physician.

And as you go down into the darkness to face yourself, it could be that you find a Jesus who is more dimensional than the easy, flannel-board Jesus propaganda we've been given.

It could be that as you struggle for Him and against Him, that you ask terrible questions, and make terrible mistakes, and throw away some things, and gain some others, that you emerge with truth that saves a friend from her darkness. 

And because you have gone into fear and weakness to find that truth, it will be at truth that those who spend their lives just giving in can't begin to offer.

Protecting Your Children from Reductions of a Living God

Christian parents tend to spend a great deal of mental energy thinking about how to arm our kids against worldly propaganda. There’s a tidal wave of progressive influence in our culture right now; humanism, socialism, and hedonism are being dressed up in their Sunday best, pushed into dishonest marketing campaigns that tantalize young thinkers. 

Parents understand this danger, and we are on alert. We try to make sure our kids are ready for the lies of secularism. We read to them. We talk to them. We might even sign them up for programs that will help them be aware of hidden traps

However, at this point in my parenthood, I am wondering if the most dangerous propaganda my children have encountered has been faith-based. I fear that of all the damage done, the deepest damage has been done by good people trying to do good things at all costs. And saddest of all, I wonder if there were times when I was one of those people.

I love the church deeply, so this isn’t another one of those cliché, institution-bashing posts written by a disillusioned evangelical. Writers who slam the whole of modern Christianity because of a few infections have erred as badly as those who are unwilling to see its flaws. Angry church bloggers are the Crocs of the internet. Clunky. Awkward. Yesterday’s news.

Looking at the church objectively, I think we find an organization that is largely generous, gentle, humble, and sincere. As a whole, the body of Christ does great good in America, and should it all shut down tomorrow, the masses would cry out in need.  In a flash, we would suddenly realize the beautiful, silent impact God’s people are making in our culture.

However, I do think that fear has tempted certain groups of Christians to react badly to changing times. This criticism is valid. Panic has launched desperate attempts to sway public opinion, and media resources created out of that desperation haven’t been properly researched.

Intelligent children who are exposed to this sort of propaganda can feel lonely at first, because it’s difficult to connect emotionally when you have a sense that you aren't being told the whole truth. And when kids realize major faith claims were based on exaggerations or bad logic, they are disappointed.  Of course these young people feel sense of relief when they finally escape pressure to “just believe” in what hasn’t proven intellectually trustworthy. This sort of strained, fear-driven, religious material concerns me as much as any secular effort I see in the world today.

I could be wrong, but I think every honest, humble explorer will eventually wear hedonism out like an old pair of shoes. And humanism has a way of growing stale as an open bag of crackers. 

Sure, the process of figuring out what doesn't work can be rocky; discovering the ends of ourselves tends to be painful. Wanderers often become addicted to harmful things while trying to medicate the ache for heaven, and rebels often become angry or suicidal when their chosen anesthesia doesn’t work. Materialists tend to flail about inside cynicism, or sex, or a deified government, or academic highs that tickle the ego. 

But if God allows the spiritual vagabond to live long enough, each of his pursuits will tend to turn to dust. In twenty, forty, sixty years, he will hold out his withered old hands while the allure of the earth falls through his fingers like sand. I've seen it happen over and over again.

Why? Because reason cannot negate a living God. Science cannot negate a living God. Math cannot negate a living God. Pleasure cannot negate a living God. Curiosity cannot negate a living God. God made those things, and He lives inside them. God waits at the end of our best gifts and disciplines, not outside them.

What slams a soul’s door shut to God is not joy, intelligence, or information, it is primitive resistance. The soul's door slams shut when a quiet decision is made ... a decision that we are fundamentally unwilling to comply with Authority. 

When we conclude that we would not want to be ruled by a God if there were to be one, we are unlikely to find him.  We cannot gouge our own eyes out and expect to see with them simultaneously.

But in honest, humble searching, finding God is inevitable, because God is alive, and He loves, and He chases us. He will not appear at our whims in a puff of purple glory. Sometimes he  hides Himself from the proud. Sometimes He is subtle and slower than we would like. Sometimes He asks us to walk over a bridge of mystery. But He eventually reveals Himself to the willing.

So when I think about my kids, I’m not as concerned about the world being too intoxicating as I am worried about a true belief system – Christianity - relying upon false teachings to offer a reduced version of faith. 

I wish I could go back in time now and think more carefully about what I was allowing my kids to receive with God's name stamped on it. I wish I could go back and listen more respectfully. I wish I could go back and employ a stricter filter for things of faith. I wish I could go back and be more sincere. I could go back and let God be God and not try to play His role for Him.

Because as my friend Natsu reminded me, idolatry "'means turning a good thing into an ultimate thing' (Keller)." It's idolatry to believe we can step in and jimmy rig a process, or a threat, or a culture to glorify God.  He doesn't need us to do that. 

In fact, when Uzzah tries to catch the ark of the living God because he believes a human can keep the presence of the Lord from hitting the skids, he has perhaps committed a far graver error than those who construct altars to idols. When I have parented like that, it was an insult to God and it was an insult to my children.

I Wrestled with the Lord this Morning

I wrestled with the Lord this morning. 

I was thinking about the Biblical claim that one mistake, one tiny mistake, is blamed for every ounce of death and pain I see in the world. 

Over the past month I have seen families who have lost children. I have seen violence, injustice, and need. It has broken my heart to watch it all.

But when I cry out to heaven because everything is askew, praying for relief, asking why He allowed the world to become so distorted, I am told the fault is our own.

I am told that all sorrow, disease, death, genetic mutation, and war lead back to a single bite of fruit swallowed by a naked Mesopotamian matriarch.

Beyond this, there is hell to consider. One three-second mistake made by a strange woman forever ago condemns every person I know, and every person I do not, and when I let that roll around, it feels unfair to me. It always does.

I imagine my child eating a cookie that he was told to leave alone. What would I do to him? 

Or when a stranger steals my parking spot, how do I respond? 

I am accustomed to minor offenses. 

And when real hate tickles the back of my throat as I look into pictures of horrors done by Islamic terrorists, I remember that I am commanded to love my enemies and give myself for for them. I force myself to remember that these were once seven-year-old boys trained to murder. I scrape the insides of my soul for enough empathy to believe that we are human together, and that there is hope yet.

But Eve took one single bite of fruit and God let all hell break loose.

Maybe this is easy for you to believe, but it is not easy for me. It grabs my shoulders and shakes them. It forces strong questions to the surface.

"Lord, if You are omniscient, didn't You see this coming? Why didn't You make us stronger?"

"Lord, if I can move without letting every domino fall after a single betrayal why can't You..."

and then an accusation...

"Too severe. All of this is too severe. I would not have been so harsh as this."

I was born in the age of human magnificence, and I expect to pick through Divinity like a junk drawer, throwing away dirty erasers and twist ties, discarding whatever seems bizarre or absurd, determining what is obsolete, organizing what is useful into plastic boxes.

I expect to pull out the civilized, winsome commands and push those tidy bits into sermon series glued together by three bullet points. "How to Love your Wife."  "How to Raise Happy Kids." "How to Save the World." 

I expect Christianity to be pleasant.

But the Fall is something else entirely. Something wild. Something offensive.

One mistake is made by one human being, and while God continues to make human beings individually, knitting each one together in a billion billion wombs, He makes them knowing they deserve hell forever and ever.

It makes me feel like I've fallen off a swing. 

I have simple friends who take it as it is. I envy them sometimes.

I have other friends who have looked at the equation and declared it utter nonsense.

I can do neither.

After anger, frustration, despair ... another feeling comes.

It is something like fear, but it is different, too. 

It is like looking into Hubble pictures until your knees grow weak, because you have somehow forgotten how much is out there.

It is like listening to music written halfway around the world on a strange scale. You close your eyes and trace those alien intervals. Your insides ache, because while it is foreign, it is also alive. 

It is like being a taxidermist, smoking a cigarette, listening to AM radio, sticking my knife mindlessly into the belly of a dead lion, only to watch as the thing quickens, leaps to his feet, and roars.

I shake my fist against the preposterous suggestion that humankind is born guilty, and then it blasts me back against a brick wall like a fireman's hose.

It is a dangerous thing to step up to a living God. Every leash I throw around His neck snaps.

Arguments fall through my fingers like sand while I let my raw spirit engage with the Divine. 

In His presence I can see the impulses of my heart. The cancer has been passed down.

"Eve don't you want to be like God?" the serpent asked.

And she did. And so do I. And so do all of us. It is in our bones to deify ourselves.

But if I am quiet, there is also a faint memory, a memory passed down and down and down, of what it was like walk in the cool of the day in the presence of my Creator. I can feel what was taken from me. I have missed it all my life.

That void left a mark. An irreconcilable hunger.

I have lived all my days in silence, longing for sound.

And if I will persist, not running away from mystery but into it, I can begin to see how it wasn't just a bite of a single piece of fruit. 

It was choosing independence over marriage. It was choosing mistrust over communion. It was choosing cynicism over intimacy. It was choosing to divorce ourselves from Him. 

It was choosing the hells we still choose, the same hell we blame Him for: autonomy.

A Nativity Poem for the Secular Materialist

In the beginning there was a cosmic soup, 
a goopy womb in which
a single strand of RNA collected
like plastic pop beads.

She was a beautiful five-carbon sugar  
four nitrogen-containing nucleobases: 
adenine, uracil, guanine, and cytosine.

And she spent her lonely days making houses.
By adenine she made a house of straw.
By uracil a house out of sticks.
By guanine, bricks.
And cytosine she used to construct a Manhattan high rise.

She lived in an infinite material universe
where monkeys type on typewriters hacking out novels,
and behold, it so happened that lo, 
one day RNA shouted into the void:

"You can huff and you can puff!
But I'm going to make a gingerbread man!"

Darwin showed up with hair on his chinny chin chin,
shaking a finger, wearing a wolf mask
so that she could resist him.

And she shut her eyes
to whip up a batch of cytoplasm
(just enough to keep from bursting the membranes).

At this point pages are torn out of the book, 
(we sent a shepherd boy to look for the missing scrolls),
but skip a little to the next chapter where there are mitochondria
rough endoplasmic reticulum,
smooth endoplasmic reticulum,
golgi bodies like angry dwarves,
and gumdrop buttons!

Somehow that,
just in time for the first animal whatever to eat it,
so life could replicate and advance
and let hunger drive it to level up. 
(BLOING! Bonus points!)

And y'all in an infinite universe you have to allow
for a little kerpow and bibbity bobbety boo.
Because everything goes on forever and ever.
A miracle - a fluke - a resurrection - a genesis -
has to happen somewhere,
and if you have any imagination at all,
you have to allow for the wonder of a cosmic symphony
that balances like a wooly mammoth on the tip of a pin.

The only thing that is impossible in all of this
is intentionality.

Advent 4

And there were in that same country
shepherds abiding their flocks by night,
all suffering from a nasty case
of Christmas nostalgia.

Because this year the sky was dark,
no multitude of heavenly hosts,
no midnight (shazaam!) fire-plumed messenger,
no angel feathers dropping from glory like snow
aflutter with joy from the Messiah's small, hot breath
stirring the atmosphere,
no alien encounters,
no stars to follow,
no new promises made to a tired earth.

Just silence and animal dung.
Just monotony.
Just trying to retrace what happened
when we quickened at the Savior's coming
that week at church camp,
holding hands and singing Kumbahya.

Omer and Oded
are sitting a few yards off,
scratching their groins and belching up figs.
And there was light, and then there was darkness,
and behold, it was good.

For the Spirit of the Lord hovers over the surface of the deep,
and he is musician enough to know
the importance of a caesura.

"So, You Want to Change the World?"

The facts are all there. It should only take the tiniest bit of logic to connect Point A to Point B.

Still they don't see it. They don't seem to want to see it.

You give them the facts a second time, but they seem unable to process them. You cite sources and proofs. You explain that this isn't a matter of opinion. This is 2+2 = 4.

They say 2+2 = 5.

It's like walking around in an episode of The Twilight Zone.

Your patience wears out and your anger begins to rise. Maybe if you get louder, harsher, more severe they will finally get it.

So you try shouting, but then anger is heard instead of argument. You get labeled. You get dismissed. You are a radical. A fool.

This is a cycle I'm watching happen over and over, every single day among my friends on social media.

The clear headed scream into a burning apartment building of logic that a fire is spreading. They beg the inhabitants of that building to come out. But even as the flames begin to singe their clothes, the residents laugh at the warning, point out the windows and say, "Look how stupid they are! They think we are going to burn to death."

There's a brilliant scene in the book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where a former star named Coriakin is left to rule a group of Dufflepuds. Dufflepuds are maddening little creatures who cannot process truth no matter how it is given to them. They accuse the good of being evil, and they cannot accomplish anything, because they live in a perpetual state of error.

I think about those little boogers more and more these days. Some days I feel like I am one of them. Other days I feel like I am living in the midst of them.

I don’t mean to imply that every political or cultural issue is cut and dry, and I don’t mean to imply that my view of the world is flawless. However, there are some basic, fundamental issues on the table these days with answers that feel like they should be innate. Certain things are wrong, dangerous, and abusive. It’s a given.

But it’s not a given, is it? And this is becoming more and more evident in the times in which we live.

One of the most offensive beliefs of the Christian faith is that human comprehension isn't always just a matter of Homo sapiens sucking in data and running it through their mega-ape brains. There are places in the Bible that talk about spiritual forces deceiving humans, blinding them, making them unable to see what is real.

This seems like such a primitive, superstitious idea that it almost embarrasses me to type it. At first blush, I want to chalk the whole thing up to archaic language, or to metaphor, or to anything other than what it seems to be saying.

But when I look at secular epistemology (how we know what we know), I find a great number of intellectual non-believers who have been discussing the limits of human perception for centuries. It doesn't require a belief in God to realize that the observing, thinking mechanism of our flesh is deficient.

If as a child you ever lay awake at night fearing a strange shadow on your window shade was a villain, or if you've ever drawn a hasty, wrong conclusion about another person's character, you have been recognizing this principle. Humans make mistakes.

What sort of mistakes do they make? Well, let’s play Aristotle here for a minute and stick our errors in some possible categories:

1. THE FIRST SORT OF ERROR: PHYSICAL

The first sort of error is a simple, physical error. We try to compensate for these by verification -- the scientific method (repeatability and measurability), logic, and popular opinion. But when you have creatures limited to five senses and two pounds of brain, walking around in a world that appears limited to four dimensions, among other people with those same limitations, there are simply going to be failures... times when there’s not enough sensory input or cognitive power to produce accuracy. You didn’t realize the cabinet door was open when you stood up and bashed your head into it. That’s a physical error.

2. THE SECOND SORT OF ERROR: EVALUATIVE

The second category of errors we make is evaluative. These are errors of judgment and morality. Evaluative errors are trickier to pin down, because they involve higher order thinking, but let’s make one example for the sake of discussion. Let’s say a white woman doesn’t trust black people because she’s never known any. Environment deficit is creating memory which impacts future conclusions. This is an error of evaluation.

3. THE THIRD SORT OF ERROR: SPIRITUAL

I grew up with cartoons of a fat little angel and a fat little devil sitting on the shoulders of Elmer Fudd. (Or was it Yosemite Sam?) Anyway, whoever it was, the cartoon was funny because all of us know that feeling. Temptation. Conscience. It’s a metaphor for how, "I want to eat that cake but I shouldn't" feels.

Because of this sort of humor, I grew up accustomed to angels and demons being a joke. But when I got a little older, I ran into the opposite of that, a spiritual realm that was glorified by horror films. In these flicks, the spiritual was elevated to something so pervasive and so powerful that it felt like a divinity whose worship was accomplished by hopelessness and terror.

I don’t have room here to work out any sort of responsible exegesis of angels and demons. However, what I would like to suggest is that it would be terrifically myopic, not to mention grossly narcissistic and egotistical, to believe that the only life forms that could possibly exist in the universe would exist in a way that a human being’s five measly senses could perceive them.

Imagine a proud, intelligent blind man haughtily insisting that no such thing as sight could exist because he had never experienced it. I could understand his point, of course. But I think he would be better off making a humble admission that, “If hearing, touch, taste, and smell are possible, what more could be possible besides?”

We are not altogether blind, but we are also not accustomed to using this sixth sense like we are accustomed to using the other five. The sixth sense is like a vestigial organ that seems to be a little more sensitive in some members of our species than others.

Yet even the most sensitive among us tend to perceive the fifth dimension badly at first, just like that blind man in the New Testament who received distorted vision from Jesus before being healed a second time. Walking with God is a process. Perhaps seeing clearly takes a while because He wants us to come back to him over and over again, until we learn dependence on our union with Him.

But if there are benefits to engaging with the fifth dimension, there are dangers there as well. Jesus said that we have an enemy who disguises evil so that it looks like good. That enemy schemes. He sets snares. He blinds and deceives people.

Even as I write that, I want to shake my fingers in the air and make mocking ghost sounds. "Wooooohhooo, spooky!" I know that it can all be dismissed as superstition so easily.

But I have also stood in the ocean and felt the forces of the waves on my legs. And when I walk among humanity, there are pulses that rise and fall among us as well. What I perceive here is blurry, but it still points to something. 

Jesus doesn’t leave us alone with these surges. He tells us what to do with them, and He is very clear in His instruction. He says that to be safe against aggression in the unseen realms, we have to put on the armor of God. He says that without this we cannot stand. And how could we stand? We can't even see what exists in that dimension.

Why doesn’t He tell us to just do tons of research and prove people wrong? Why doesn’t he say, “Go ye therefore and prove my existence and my ethics by statistics, and syllogisms, and by carbon dating, and by your scathing British wit?”

Well maybe that's because there are times for shutting the cabinet door so we don't hit our heads on it, and other times for simply admitting that part of this battle we are fighting is not against the powers of flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

To see one realm doesn't exclude any other. This is about an expansion of knowledge, not a reduction. 

When I was a little girl, my mother gave me a necklace with a single mustard seed suspended inside glass. The verse cited was, “If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”

What’s the Biblical context of that quote? The disciples were running around trying to do the work of Jesus, but their bibbity-bobbety-boo was broken. They couldn’t cast out darkness out of people like Jesus did, and they were probably hitting some emotions that a lot of modern believers are experiencing now... disappointment, disillusionment, frustration, and “God isn’t fixing this!”

But Jesus said something like, “Hey. So that didn’t work? Well guys, maybe it’s not just a matter of snapping your fingers and shaking your fists at stuff. Maybe your Facebook statuses, and links to data, and meme forwards, and anger, and irritation, and name calling are not going to do squat ... not even the good stuff you do... until you realize there’s an additional dimension to be addressed here. You need my power to shake things up in that realm, not yours. And if you don’t tap into that power, you’re shot. But the good news is, when you put faith in My strength instead of yours, the foundations of the earth are going to shake, rattle, and roll.”

I’m not trying to over spiritualize what’s going on in our culture today.  Some of our problems have simple answers. Some of our problems are due to a lack of education, poverty, bad nutrition, bad genetics, and bad environments. Whatever spiritual issues are present there will also need physical follow up in resources of all sorts. 

Also, I don't know what effect tapping into God's resources will have on our nation. I'm not promising a revival, or wealth, or a theme park, or anything. Maybe it's time for a different sort of work of God? Sometimes He lets his people suffer for His glory. Maybe He's going to want us to change the world by dying for it.

But if we are going to look squarely at the biological, relational, cultural, and psychological problems among us, it is only wise to look at the spiritual problems as well. If we ignore that realm, there are going to be gaping holes in our effectiveness as change agents.

In our valiant efforts to save the world, if we start seeing the same impotent results those flubbed up disciples did, maybe we need to run back to Jesus and plug into the resources He’s offering to us. Maybe that step is even essential.

If you are fired up about the rampant ignorance in our world, the dangers facing our country, the deception in our leadership.... instead of just flailing into the wind, why not get down in the invisible realm and attack things there?

Stop running naked on to the battlefield. Figure out what it means to put on the armor of God, and do it. Use His coverings. Use His weapons. Use His energy. Lean in. Lean in. Lean in. And trust. Then speak. Then do.

We have no business trying to change the world until we’ve let Him change us.

Courage, Dear Hearts

There are some positive consequences of the rise of secularism in our culture, but one of the biggest drawbacks is the effect that it has had on our communal courage.

If humans are only a bunch of organic cells, if there is no soul inside us, no afterlife before us, if we do not walk among eternal beings who will be conscious (in some form) forever and ever, then it becomes difficult to live with abandon in this passing flutter of awareness that is for a moment ours and then dissolved into nothing at all.

If humans are only advanced animals, running on instincts, drives, and reason, these 673 million breaths that we will take before we pass back into matter become terribly important.

Physical threats, relational threats, threats of all kinds become central, because to ruin this life is to ruin all life. 

Suffering through trials becomes a mortal threat, because to wade through pain is to waste the only pleasure we may ever experience. 

Enduring a difficult season in marriage or the abuse of a coworker becomes impossible. We have to find some way to make the hurt stop now, so that we can move on and get relief.

And when threats come upon our nation or our coterie, we meet them with anger and fear. We become reactive instead of strategic, because the danger is comprehensive.

That good and evil exist is embedded in natural law as deeply as the second law of thermodynamics. That hostility will threaten innocence and peace comes as surely as day after night.

And so I grieve, not that wickedness exists in our world, but that we have lost the spine to face it. Believers whisper, "Come, Lord Jesus," after a tragedy. But lo, He has come already. And He lives in many of us already. And He is not afraid.

He will come again, but until then, Christians must learn to accept the dangers of our world on a trajectory. 

In the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.

They will live lives of cowardice. Lives of beasts who have forgotten that they were created to be gods.

Friends, we are living inside of a tiny dot on a long line. To see this in truth is to live a courageous life, freed of greed, freed of whimpering like dogs, or snarling like wounded bears, or slinking like beaten apes through a forest floor.

Laugh instead. Laugh like those who are waiting for a divine punch line to be told. 

Charge into battle as if death were impossible, for it is impossible. 

Spend yourselves recklessly, generously, joyfully, for all shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of things shall be well.

How They See You

A dear friend of mine has been going through a tough time lately.

I originally wrote this for her, and then I expanded it for you. I hope it's helpful somehow.
 

"My Eyes in the Time of Apparition" by August Natterer (1913)

There are people who have chosen to see you in the worst possible light. They have misunderstood you, found the cracks in you, and picked you apart.

But Jesus has seen every flaw that you have with even more clarity; and still, Jesus loves you. 

- - - -

There are people who have chosen to reject you. They have found you lacking, declared you not enough to keep them interested. They have hovered over you and watched you make stupid mistakes (mistakes they would never make), and they have criticized you for those. You have not been pretty enough, smart enough, funny enough, subtle enough, classy enough, educated enough, quiet enough, busy enough, cynical enough, strong enough.

But Jesus has known all along that you were not enough; and still, Jesus loves you.

- - - -

There are people who have chosen to use you. They have seen how you could benefit them by your gifts, your time, your body, your position, or by your flattery. They have cozied up to spend you until you had nothing left to give them, and then they have thrown you away like a gum wrapper.

But Jesus has seen your resourcefulness as an extension of His own gifts to you. He has given you all that you have, and He needs nothing from you. He never will need anything from you. And still, Jesus loves you.

- - - -

There are people who have been threatened by your strengths. They have let envy turn their hearts sour against you. They have tried to push you down before other men to medicate their own lack. When you have done well, they have felt the sick twist of jealousy. When others have praised you, they have desired to knock you down and expose you.

But Jesus has seen your strengths in light of what more He has to offer them. He has known how little the praise of men has meant to you. He has known how it is has never satisfied you. He has known that what you have really wanted was Him. This Jesus loves you.

- - -

There are people who have deceived or disappointed you. They have made promises they haven't kept. They have preached ideals they haven't followed. They have told stories that they have not lived and proclaimed values they have not loved. They have made choices that wounded you to the core. They have not been who you needed them to be in your moment of weakness, and like a child falling from a swing, you have fallen from hope that their company would ever be a respite to you.

You have tried to ignore these disappointments, because you know you are a disappointment to others, too. You have wrestled against judgment to give grace, to hope, to turn a blind eye, to turn the other cheek. You have learned to carry no anger toward them.

But still, you are sad. Sad and lonely. And now you hide and flinch.

Here Jesus is faithful. Even when His love feels quiet, He is faithful. 

He is not like you once had imagined Him, and in this, you have felt disappointed as well. He does not snap His fingers to tidy up a life. He does not leave flaming messages in the sky, or new cars in your driveway, or bills in your pocket, or babies in your womb. He hides Himself, and you think, "He is like the rest of them. He is gone."

But then you find Him again, and again, and again, and you see that though He is mysterious, He has never abandoned or forsaken you. 

And lo, He is with you, even unto the end of the earth. Advocating for you to his Father. Bearing you up. Kissing your wounds. Hovering over your chaos.

He has loved you since before time began. He has made a plan for all things, which He works for your good. Even this. This is the Jesus who loves you.

First Sunday of Advent : Simplifying a Complex God

There is a lot of talk these days about the simplicity of the gospel.

It's true that simplicity can be a good thing. The epistles speak to the power of the simplicity of Christ. However, some of what I see called “simplicity” seems more like either laziness or spiritual manipulation.

A Curved Line Within Two Distorted Rectangles" by Robert Mangold

We live in a culture that loves easy emotional highs, so it makes sense that the evangelists of our time would try to win souls by sound bytes. And perhaps there is a time and a place for candy thrown from a parade float.

 
But there are also casualties involved in oversimplification.

Sure,  thousands of social media “likes” tend to pop up on spiritual Happy Meals, those ready-made lunches full of the easiest and sweetest parts of the gospel.

But thousands of silent bystanders are also watching this flurry, knowing that some of what has been given is too thin to hold water.

Believers critique non-believers who aren’t willing to receive God “by faith,” when many of those non-believers have only been offered a drive-through reduction of what faith means.

I wonder if at least some of the atheists of our time do not love God too little but too much to make him up.

I wonder if their hearts are not too proud but too humble to fabricate visitations of the Divine.  

Maybe they are simply waiting for more than what many evangelicals patch together badly in their uncomfortability with the silence of God or in their impatience for the mountaintop experience.

Maybe we do more harm than good when an honest soul is waiting for a real God to appear, and when we shout at him that he must hurry and pretend that he senses what he has not discovered yet.

I am wrestling with all this, because I have committed these errors.

I have participated in the mechanization of God, in the formation of a spiritual assembly line. I have put pressure on those who refused to ride that train.

For several days I have been repenting of this, because I have begun to see my error more clearly. I am so sorry for those times when I haven’t been so much in the business of offering the real, complex God, but of offering a watered down, manipulative version of Him.

I don’t agree with Karl Barth on everything, but I like what he says below about simplicity. At the top is a paraphrase of his words that I wrote for the modern reader. At the bottom you can find his actual language.

As the first Sunday of Advent comes to us, I want to begin to open my hands and make room for the appearance of a God who is sometimes simple and sometimes complex beyond understanding.

I want to stop offering caricatures of him to the world.

I want to follow His star and kneel before whatever He reveals.

- - - -
PARAPHRASE:

We expect simplicity to come at the beginning of our journey with God, but it doesn’t come at the beginning, but at the end. After we have known God for thirty years, maybe we will be able to talk about simplicity. For now, though, let’s be concerned with the truth.

Because nothing is simple in regard to God. The letter to the Romans isn’t simple. The theology of our time is not simple. The state of the world is not simple. The way God relates to the world is not simple. So anybody who is sincerely concerned with deep truth must also admit openly that he cannot make truth simple. From every angle, human life is complex and tangled.

And if we are attempting to provide an angle on spirituality that makes people grateful, why would they be grateful if we throw them oversimplifications about God that will not bear up under life’s challenges?

Let’s look at what is meant by a demand for simplicity.  In general, when people ask for simplicity, they are asking that truth would be spoken clearly, matter-of-factly and without paradox, so that no faith is required to accept it.

For example, I knew a man named Wernie. When I tell Wernie, “Christ is risen,” he is frustrated that I am using Christianese. Wernie says that I am being naïve, even superstitious, skipping over logic, science, and history. And yet, if I take a different approach, using pure argument to explain the resurrection, Wernie will protest that I have reduced something profound too much.

How do you answer a man like Wernie? He is putting me in an impossible position. He is asking me to sacrifice the threads of faith, to remove mystery, and yet to give him something that is still profound enough to speak clearly about the divine.

It is wrong to demand that faith be either wholly childlike or wholly unchildlike. Both are part of truth, as well as the realm that exists between those extremes.

I would like to be able to write to you about the book of Romans in a simple fashion. However, those I have read who claim to speak simply about this book seem instead to be speaking about something else entirely. I am not convinced by that sort of simplicity, because it seems to be missing important elements of truth.

- -

ORIGINAL:

The simplicity which proceeds from apprehension of God in the Bible and elsewhere, the simplicity with which God Himself speaks, stands not at the beginning of our journey but at its end.  Thirty years hence we may perhaps speak of simplicity, but now let us speak the truth. For us neither the Epistle to the Romans, nor the present theological position, nor the present state of the world, nor the relation between God and the world, is simple. And he who is now concerned with truth must boldly acknowledge that he cannot be simple. In every direction human life is difficult and complicated. And if, gratitude be a consideration that is at all relevant, men will not be grateful to us if we provide them with short-lived pseudo-simplifications. Does the general demand for simplicity mean more than a desire-intelligible enough, and shared by most theologians-that truth should be expressed directly, without paradox, and in such a way that it can be received otherwise than by faith alone?  

I am thinking here of an experience in relation to that earnest and upright man, Wernle. As a modern man he is deeply hurt when I say, for example, plainly and simply - Christ is risen! He complains that I have made use of an eschatological phrase, and have ridden rough-shod over very, very difficult problems of thought.

However, when I endeavor to say the same thing in the language of thought, that is, in dialectical fashion, he protests in the name of the simple believer that the doctrine of the Resurrection is wonderful, spiritual, and hard to understand. How can I answer him? He would be satisfied only if I were to surrender the broken threads of faith, and to speak directly, concretely, and without paradox. This means that the wholly childlike and the wholly unchildlike belong within the realm of truth, but that everything between must be excluded. I earnestly desire to speak simply of those matters with which the Epistle to the Romans is concerned; and, were some one competent to do this to appear, my work would at once be superseded. I am in no way bound to my book and to my theology. As yet, however, those who claim to speak simply seem to me to be - simply speaking about something else. By such simplicity I remain unconvinced (5-6).

ETERNAL God—for whom who ever dare
Seek new expressions, do the circle square,
And thrust into straight corners of poor wit
Thee, who art cornerless and infinite—
I would but bless Thy name, not name Thee now
—And Thy gifts are as infinite as Thou—

(John Donne)

Art: "A Curved Line Within Two Distorted Rectangles" by Robert Mangold