A Long Answer in a World Of Short Cuts

Like most thinking people, I have questions about my faith that are difficult to answer. However, as I have evaluated evidence for and against Christianity, several key factors have come together to convince me that Jesus was who He said He was.

In this post, I'm not going to try to convince you that my belief system is more correct than yours. I am, however, going to try to show you the "why" behind one element of my faith that might seem odd (if not barbaric) to non Christians.

Why would I take the time to give a long answer in a world of short cuts?  I'm doing this because in volatile times like ours, I think it's important to share extended human stories that help us understand one another a little better.

I've been thinking about writing this post for quite a while, but my biggest hesitation has been that the subject is complex and a bit academic. I can't dig into this topic in 800 words. Even in a 3000-word essay, I can only barely touch on the ideas I would like to communicate.

So my goal here isn't to unpack all of the beautiful complexities of this subject but to let you know that this sort of narrative exists. Maybe in additional posts we can get deeper in to what I can only summarize now.

THE OLD TESTAMENT SYSTEM OF SACRIFICING ANIMALS

The Old Testament system of sacrifice seems cruel, superstitious, and pointless to many modern thinkers because we live in an era when humans work for the ethical treatment of animals. The idea of killing a living being for meat is hard for some of us, let alone the thought of killing a living being to try to pay for human wrongs done.

Not only does the practice of animal sacrifice seem abhorrent and inhumane, the word “sin” can feel primitive and offensive to many of us. The idea that there is some sort of universal standard of right and wrong can seem preposterous to the humanist. It can also feel dangerous because determining what qualifies as "sin" also claims a huge amount of cultural power.

In addition to all of this, the thought of a substitute paying for sin seems bizarre to many moderns. We live in an era in which individualism is valued, where crime is paid for by the single person who committed that crime. We don't pay for mistakes in clans any more; each person’s innocence or guilt stands on its own.

So before we begin, if a conversation about animal sacrifice, sin, or guilt seems odd to you, I can understand why. Even though I believe in Jesus, I can empathize with these three intellectual and ethical barriers on multiple levels. I have also wrestled with how these concepts could have ever been moral and just, and in future posts, I’d like to take time to tell you more about my journey in working through them.

For this post, however, I'm not going to have room to unpack why I believe universal ethics exist or why I believe it is possible for the sin of one person to be paid for by the sacrifice of another being. I'm just going to acknowledge that those are important questions, and that I don't think you're not way off base if they come to your mind as you read.

In terms of what we do know about the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, it's scientifically confirmed that Hebrew texts describing this process predate Christ. The Dead Sea Scrolls were carbon dated multiple times by the same process used to date artifacts from other cultures. The confirmed age of these scrolls doesn’t make them true, of course, but it does mean that we know that the content of those scrolls existed before the date in which Jesus supposedly appeared on earth.

When we go to the store and buy a "Bible" the chronology of the text can sometimes get smashed in our minds. What we don't see in a tidy little leather bound book is that this isn't simply one entity, written by one person at one desk, but a collection of ancient documents that spans millennia.

This matters quite a bit because it's actually a big deal when a narrative scientifically confirmed as a 1st century CE document was predicted by a mirror story scientifically confirmed to exist 300 or more years before that. And when hundreds or thousands of tiny narrative details line up precisely across all those centuries, we have quite a coincidence on our hands.

One way those details line up across millennia is in the Hebrew temple narrative. I’m not a huge expert on the Hebrew temple or the process of sacrifice, but I do know enough to share a little bit with you. So here goes:

THE PHYSICAL LAYOUT OF THE TEMPLE

Essentially the temple and surrounding area were set up so that different people were allowed in different parts for different purposes. At the center of this activity was the Ark of the Covenant (remember the Indiana Jones movie?) Being near that ark was a beautiful and dangerous thing, because the ark represented a manifestation of the actual presence of God.

God was still omnipresent in those days. (That word means that He still existed everywhere.) But because of the inter-millennia story He was telling with the temple, He chose to reveal a concentrated aspect of His being in a unique way in the physical space in and around the Ark of the Covenant.

Some of the temple areas were only accessible by priests—and those priests could only enter certain areas certain times of the year to accomplish certain tasks. These rules didn’t exist just to create some sort of pecking order among the people of God; they existed to show the Hebrews how God’s holiness was serious and intense. Just like few of us would charge confidently into the inner workings of a nuclear reactor, the architecture of the temple was constructed so that the holiness of God would be respected.

These rules also existed to help provide a metaphor that spans hundreds of years, a multi-generational story explaining how God was working from the beginning of our species to build a unique bridge between humanity and Himself.

I love many things about my God, but his artistry in weaving the Old and New Testaments together is a source of particular awe for me. Painters use darkness to emphasize light. Musicians use harmonic tension to highlight release. Novelists use conflict to point to dramatic resolution. But in the story of the Hebrew temple, the relief of grace is revealed by the pressures of the law.

God didn't tell this story quickly. He told it using many generations of complicated human life, and I'm not sure why He did it this way. I'm sensitive enough to grieve for those people who lived in the dark expanse of time before the ultimate meaning of this story was revealed. What would it have been like to spend an entire human life in the shadow that would eventually open to light? (And what is it like for the many who still live in the shadows now?) Writing that makes my chest hurt. But I have slowly learned enough about God's character to trust that as He was creating this master narrative over thousands of years, He was also aware of what happened in every second of every individual experience. And whatever wasn't fair in the temporal realm, I believe He will make right as the trajectory of this story extends into eternity.

If you have a moment to find a Bible and read through the book of Hebrews, chapters 9-10, that would be super helpful. Here we find the author of Hebrews describing how the old temple worked as a symbol of Jesus 1000 years before his appearance. (And by the way, the tabernacle--the portable temple of the Hebrews which worked in a similar fashion--was created long before that.)

Every time I engage with Hebrews 9-10, I’m reminded of Plato’s Theory of Forms. First introduced in his dialogue The Phaedo, the theory of the Forms indicates that whatever exists on earth in a physical way has a more perfect representation in a transcendent (non-physical) realm.

I don’t know how much the audience of the book of Hebrews knew about Greek philosophy, but I have to smile when I see the similarities here. The letter to the Hebrews describes the physical structure of the Hebrew temple and then says:

“Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.”

 

In other words, everything that happened in the temple for all those years was just a copy of what Jesus was going to do a thousand years later. What Jesus did on earth inside His body sits on a trajectory that extends into heaven.

This reminds me of a mathematical fractal that exists in both a small and expanded version. Primitive forms of covering sin were like sobering, heart-sinking placeholders, early indications of what sin would cost in the body of the Son of God.

If you have ever slaughtered an animal, you know what sort of hard work it is. Even my veterinarian friend, who deals with the loss of animal life every day, is moved to see the spirit of a living being disappear. By these small sacrifices (which actually go back to the animal skin covering God made Adam and Eve after the first sin), the people of God were shown that doing evil was costly and serious business.

But lost animals were only a reminder of the greater death involved in sin. The human also dies because of his or her own wickedness, both in body and in spirit. And no animal sacrifice could compensate for the willful rebellion of a being made in God's image.

The book of Hebrews acknowledges this limitation. It says,

“For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said,

“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.

Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’”

This is where we see the end goal of all that sacrifice and loss. The body that will ultimately receive the consequence of human error is not animal, nor is it human. It is a body so perfect and so strong that it can hold all the sin of the whole world inside it. And it is so perfect that when it offers itself as a payment for evil done, the trade is even. The ledger is settled.

This post is already too long, but there is one more element of this that I want to point out before closing out for today.

In the temple, a curtain separated the Ark of the Covenant from the people. Only certain priests could approach God's physical presence in certain ways, because His holiness was such a mighty and pure power.

But that curtain reappears in the New Testament as the body of Jesus.  We see this in Hebrews 10:20 ("by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh"), but we also see it at the crucifixion, because at the death of Jesus, the physical curtain in the temple suddenly tore in half from top to bottom.

In other words, this physical piece of fabric which for centuries had symbolized humanity's distance from God ripped clean through. The New Testament is making a huge claim here. It is saying, finally, that Jesus has completed every symbol that existed in the Hebrew Temple. He has made it possible for us to access God. The barrier is now gone because of the forgiveness he offers.

I've studied literature for decades, and I've studied quite a bit of ancient literature in that time span. I get paid to understand the inner dynamics of novels and to pick apart how narrative unity and symbol work together to demonstrate greater meaning.

In all my reading, I have never found imagery from one novelist that functions as tightly as Biblical imagery does-- imagery that is scientifically confirmed to have emerged from time spans hundreds of years apart.

This single example that I have provided today is only one of hundreds and hundreds. I don't see how any cult, how any political force, or even any sincere group of confused individuals could have created such unity over so many centuries.  The chances of such artistry such existing are incredibly slim.

It would take me thirty years to describe the many more connections I have found over a lifetime of studying the Bible.  People who don't know me will probably think that I am looking for connections because I want to find them, but in reality, it's been hard for me to live a life of faith. My beliefs have cost me a great deal, and there have been many times when it would have been easier to simply walk away from them.

I'm also not building a career around any sort of faith persona. I'm intentionally keeping this blog simple and nerdy. I'm intentionally writing essays that few readers will take the time or energy to absorb instead of pumping out easy-to-digest-and-forward pieces of writing.

I'm taking time to provide the long version of what I see as truth in an era when short answers spread like wildfire because God tends to speak to me in long answers. Maybe you are wired like that as well.

Anyway,  hope that this is somehow helpful. I respect any ideological differences we might have, and I hope that you will tell me your stories as well. Of course, I do hope that you will come to love the God of the Ark of the Covenant like I do. I think He loved you so much that He tore down the curtain between you and Him by allowing His own body to absorb your mistakes, so that you might live in the sweet, beautiful mystery of His love forever and ever. But I don't expect that process of faith to happen quickly or as a result of rhetorical pressure from me, if it happens at all. Conversations about religion have become complicated, and there's so much noise in the air these days. For what it's worth, I'm patient. Let's keep the conversation going.

One Last Appeal to Old Guard Conservatives

There is no satisfaction in having been able to predict a tragedy. What I saw on the horizon several weeks ago--the slow, ideological train wreck that I tried to warn evangelicals about--is now turning into a harsh reality. The divide between conservatives is growing wider and wider, and this divide is beginning to affect far more than politics.

Key figures in new guard conservatism are taking a stand against key figures old guard conservatism. Instead of dealing with our differences, owning our mistakes, apologizing, then linking arms to face a common enemy, we are pulling apart and declaring “good riddance” to our brothers and sisters.

I don’t know if it’s too late to repair this damage, but I’m going to try one last time to name what is happening in a way that bridges the gap. Then I’m going to make an appeal to lay aside what is tearing us apart so that we can work together for a greater good.

A Hillary Clinton presidency is a danger more serious than many America has faced, but conservatives must also acknowledge that we are being attacked on at least two fronts at present. If we continue to stare only at the face of the dragon before us, we will be undone.

Anthony Bradley’s October 27 essay in World Magazine is titled: “Ruptured beyond repair: Donald Trump’s destruction of the American conservative movement.”  Bradley unpacks the deep rift that has been growing among Christians as God’s name has been used to ask for political support for Trump, then he states: “Evangelical and conservative leaders who were once allies in the culture war to promote moral, social, and political righteousness in America are now adversaries and enemies.” (https://world.wng.org/2016/10/ruptured_beyond_repair)

I think Bradley has overstated the matter— or maybe I am only hoping he has. I wouldn’t  be writing this essay if I felt like there were no hope for reconciliation. Still, Bradley's piece catches a spirit that is spreading like wildfire among young conservatives.

Similar sentiments have been made by David French in his essay “Trump Has Blown the Evangelical Age Gap Wide Open.” My heart broke reading this piece, for French writes like a young man reaching out to grab an old man who is drowning, sinking under water.

French makes his appeal by reminding older, conservative evangelicals of the pressures that were once upon them to conform to progressive theology in their churches.  In the 70’s-90’s, a remnant of conservatives held to orthodoxy despite progressive appeals to smooth hard teachings over and lean toward cultural relevance. French writes, “With liberal elites demanding conformity to progressivism, [those who conformed to culture] made their churches more progressive. And their churches started to die. The churches that thrived refused to bend.” Now younger evangelicals feel a similar test is upon them, though we are being asked to smooth over our political theology instead of our ecclesiology. (Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441515/donald-trump-evangelical-age-gap)

Likewise, Rod Dreher’s, “The Religious Right: A Eulogy” in The American Conservative explains the heart-wrenching decisions evangelicals are making to hold to their convictions against the pressures of the political facet of the Religious Right. Dreher unpacks Russell Moore’s passionate address to First Things’s Erasamus Lecture. This is a painful but vital read, explaining how young evangelicals are being impacted by election 2016. As pro-Trump rhetoric intensifies, convictions are hardening, and the schism between many conservatives is growing wider.

Meanwhile, a spiritual transformation is occurring in many young evangelicals during election 2016; skins are being shed, and a new plan for impacting a post-Christian culture with the gospel is taking root— a plan that looks wholly different from evangelistic/political strategies of the 1980’s-2000’s (http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-religious-right-a-eulogy/). So while the old guard is holding fast to 30-year-old strategies of the Christian Coalition, the second wave of conservatism is breaking off and declaring, “No. The cost is too great.”

Despite dismissive accusations of the old guard, these new evangelicals are not liberals; in fact, many feel that they are more conservative than their older counterparts. The difference is one of values. New evangelicals do not simply worry if the GOP will survive this election but whether the gospel will survive it. They do not so much fear for the future of a nation (which is dear to them) as they do for the purity of the message of their God. 

While “Christian” Trump-fury abusively dismisses those conservatives who dare stand against whatever preposterous excuses are made to win political power (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441319/donald-trump-alt-right-internet-abuse-never-trump-movement), the younger generation is saying at last, “So be it. We will go another way.”

This divide is what I feared weeks ago. This is exactly what I have been trying to warn men like Eric Metaxas, Dobson, Huckabee, and Carson about. This is why I have appealed to them on their social media pages, asking them to stop their bellowing for a moment, to step away from the daily FOX News fear frenzy and to have sober, humble conversations with young, conservative believers instead of letting a single political race dominate every aspect of decision making. This is why I have asked them to hold fast to truth and to extend brotherly respect to their fellow conservatives instead of resorting to intimidation and name calling.

Had a more sober approach been taken, young evangelicals might have linked arms with them during this election. However, pressures inflicted by the Religious Right have passed through exaggeration, through hyperbole, into outright propaganda. Articles stating that Trump is “God’s solution” for saving America, articles grasping at Old Testament stories trying to associate Trump with everyone from Jesus, to Samson, to David have felt not just bizarre but also blasphemous.

The infamous photograph of Jerry Fallwell Jr. smiling next to Donald Trump while Trump’s Playboy cover hangs on the wall behind has become the iconic representation of old guard morality. “Whatever we have to say to win, we will say it. However far we have to bend to win, we will bend. We will sacrifice everything for our politics.”

Lifelong, younger conservative voters who would have given their lives three years ago to keep socialism out of America now feel like they are being asked to sign a contract with the devil himself. And while leaders of the old guard have barked at the hesitant to “get over their spoiled, elite morality and get in the big game,” their insults, their threats, and their severity have driven off a massive segment of the conservative population that is simply unwilling to join in the frenzy. At this point, I'm not sure we will ever get those younger voters back again.

This might not be pleasant news, but it is reality. Winning at all costs has cost far more than old conservatism seems to realize. So many bridges have been burned in the past few months.

There are several ways to differentiate between conservatism and progressivism, but one standard tends to evaluate each group’s value of the past. Typically, conservatives value the thoughts and examples of the past while progressives tend to value developing new ideas. This is the main reason why I am a conservative. I value old wisdom as an essential context for innovation.

But in recent years, conservatism has stepped beyond valuing the past to reshaping it. While we have accused liberals of “revisionist history,” we have committed some of the same errors ourselves. A strange sort of nationalism has grown which attempts to take on the ethos of our forefathers while morphing the past to fit present needs.

Perhaps the best way to explain how this is happening can be found in one example--the work of David Barton, graduate of Oral Roberts University who holds a degree in Christian Education. Barton is not a trained historian, and yet he has attempted to create materials explaining America’s faith heritage for a conservative audience. 

It has been painful to watch conservative historians (not liberal historians) step in and critique Barton for his many inaccuracies. Conservative websites like Chuck Colson’s BreakPoint have admitted that Barton gave us what we wanted, and so we were vulnerable to adopting his narrative. (http://www.colsoncenter.org/features-columns/breakpoint-columns/entry/2/20123/0). Conservative publisher Thomas Nelson had to withdraw publication of Barton’s material because his work was simply not factual.

Young conservatives are weary from managing the social fallout of such escapades because the secular world mocks conservative Christianity as a whole for these flagrant mistakes. When NPR and the New York Times expose Barton, when the History News Network votes Barton’s book the least credible history book of the year, young conservatives have to live in the wake of the damage these things do.

In a similar vein, we have to manage the fallout of far-right political social media forwards that prove either untrue or exaggerated. Last week it was, “Hillary laughs at removal of ‘Under God’ from the pledge” or “Joe Biden tells lazy moms to get to work.” We Google these dramatized retellings of fumbles, looking for the real stories, and our hearts sink when we see how our own people are not being completely honest. When we try to make corrections for the sake of integrity, it feels impossible to speak the truth without being named a traitor. Any critique of Trump, any critique of Christianized retellings of history, any critique of a critique of the left is immediately subject to accusations of progressive attack.

I’m not sleeping well at night, watching this happen. Of course, I fear Hillary Clinton winning the Presidency. I'm not stupid. Clinton needs to be in jail, not running for the highest executive office in the land. She is the apotheosis of the corrupt politician—and this is why so few true liberals actually respect her. (Sincere liberals were mostly Sanders voters who are now making the best of what they've landed in 2016.)

But as much as I cannot bear to think of Clinton in office, for different reasons, I am also beginning to fear a Trump Presidency that costs the integrity of Conservative Christians. I would die for my country, but I will not make my faith bow to it. I have pledged allegiance to one nation under God, but I will not place my loyalty to the living God below my patriotism. The same Jesus who turned over tables in the temple--furious that what was once holy was being traded for earthly profit and security--still moves.

I know that God is gracious, but I don’t see how He could possibly bless what is happening now—and not just the travesty of abortion (the holocaust of our time), not just gender issues (the epitome of secular humanism), not just unbelieving men acting like unbelieving men (as they always have and always will)--  but the behavior of Christian men and women bowing to what is unholy out of fear. Our Jesus was always more severe on the religious hypocrites than he was on the prostitutes and the thieves.

Old guard conservatives seem to be expecting to patch whatever damage they’ve done after November 8, but I fear that it will be too late then. Victor Hugo wrote in Les Mis, “A man who has not been a relentless opponent in fair weather, when the enemy is at his peak, should keep quiet in foul when the enemy collapses. Only the man who has denounced the enemy’s success can legitimately proclaim the justice of his downfall.”

The point of action is now, these precious few days before the election. Now is when we need the old guard to demonstrate faith, integrity, character. Vote for Trump, if you feel this is the lesser path of two evils. Ask us to vote for him with you. But please begin to make this appeal without propaganda or deceit. Do so with honor and with a sober, honest assessment of every factor.

I am making this request because I disagree with the many growing voices who claim that conservatism should split. Dark forces move across our land, and common ground needs to be established. The elves and the dwarves need to learn to fight Mordor together. The conservative element of the church needs to have humble, painful conversations about idols we have collected while traveling through this foreign land, and we need to purge those from our midst.

Perhaps it is foolish to make this appeal when so much harm has already been done. But even if I am Don Quixote, as I look to November 9, November 10, November 11, and wonder what Christians might possibly be able to say to the world in the aftermath of all this destruction, I am heartsick. God, forgive us for all we have done to Your name.

So I appeal to the old guard, please read the articles I have linked above. Please take time to listen to us and respect us. Please realize that even if you have not seen what we are describing, it still exists, and it is still growing exponentially. Please stop accusing us for a couple of hours, dismissing our concerns because you have only one, gargantuan fear right now. We are not your enemies. This conversation needs to be had because we will soon need one another. We need one another already.

The Healing Fire of the Fear of God

I'm starting to walk my students through The Inferno this week, which is always kind of a weird experience. Christians don't talk much about hell these days, so stepping out of a confident, 21st century culture into a 14th century allegory that takes strange stabs at eternal punishment can feel more bizarre than threatening.

Though it's had quite an impact on Western perceptions of hell, I never take Dante's hell too seriously. We can learn a lot more about medieval culture from this work than we can learn about orthodox theology.

However, in the first two cantos, Dante meets three creatures that I always find fascinating: a spotted leopard, a lion, and a wolf. Critics have spent quite a bit of energy over the centuries trying to understand how these particular animals fit into Dante's message. (Do they stand for deception, violence, and lust, for example?)

My best guess is that they are derived from Jeremiah 5:6, a verse in which an allegorical lion, wolf, and leopard are predicted to attack the people of God after they have lost their fear of Him.

Jeremiah 5 is a fascinating chapter, and if you aren't familiar with it, I think it's worth your time to spend a moment looking it over. Here we find God's people stubbornly refusing to submit to Him.

God wants His people to be in communion with Him, so Jeremiah is asked to run back and forth through this disobedient city, looking for a single person who does what is right and who loves truth, so that God might pardon her. But alas, there is nobody--not one man in Jerusalem who loves what is right and true.

Like a good parent, God has already tried gentler means to discipline his rebels (v3), though they refused to listen. They hardened themselves to every appeal, closed their ears, turned their faces away.

Jeremiah pleads with God to have one more shot at convincing Jerusalem to return. He makes excuses for them saying, "They are just ignorant. They just don't know!" But as he attempts his best persuasions, he also finds that these people are not simply uninformed, they are also defiant. They don't want what God has to offer.

God zooms out and gives us a bigger context at this point. He shows us how He has poured out blessings upon these people. They've lived in abundance until they are fat and comfortable, but no good gift will satisfy them. In their luxury, they only give in to even more indulgence. They take whatever they want at all costs, just because they want it.

The language God uses here reminds me of a broken-hearted parent. Since the people have refused gentle discipline, abundance, and direct appeal, He must now be severe with them.

His people don't take Him seriously--they think He won't won't address their rebellion. How wrong they are. God says He is going to bring another nation in to take them over. This nation is going to do terrible things that finally break the pride and defiance of Jerusalem. Their resources and their children will be ravished. The physical security that has made them feel too confident for too long will be obliterated.

A stone heart that refuses to be softened can only be shattered, so God says this process is going to hurt, and it's going to hurt badly. However, even in all of this devastation, God is merciful. He's going to take them to the breaking point and hope that at last, they finally might listen.

When the people cry out, "Why? Why has God allowed this?" He has an answer ready for them.

"Do you not fear me?"

"Do you not tremble before me?"

God will then appeal to His power over all of nature, a wild and magnificent world that is compliant to His rule, save the hearts of His favorite creation of all--his dear sons and daughters. They refuse to comply because they do not want His company or His guidance: "The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule at their direction; my people love to have it so, but what will you do when the end comes?"

His people love false comforts. They love false assurance that supports their indulgence, and they are willing to trade truth to keep pleasure at all costs. This is a  nation that has lost its fear of God.

We can learn something about the tendencies of the human soul in passages like this. As moderns and as humanists, I think we tend to have an almost instant repulsion at the idea of fearing a higher power. It's not just the atheists who do this--most of the Christians I know are far more comfortable talking about grace  than fear. And when we do talk about punishment for sin, we tend to be quite mathematical and unemotional about it. Fear is rarely involved. Instead, we speak in terms of justice.

Debates held between Christians and atheists often assume that truth is an independent entity, achieved by brain power and proofs. (I will never forget a conversation I once had with a Calvinist scholar who finally admitted that Limited Atonement was not verifiable by exegesis. "Logic demands it," he said, and  from that point onward, I was no longer intimidated by hard-core Reformed theology.)

A theology that worships logic, that trusts it above all else, is essentially Greek, not Christian. For though God has given us reason as a tool that is generally reliable, Truth is ultimately a person and not a principle. That realization alone should humble us. The secular philosophists, as well, have admitted that even the most intense rationalism or empiricism is dependent upon presuppositions that depend upon a sort of faith. We are boxed in, limited in what we can verify.

Jesus says Truth is alive, which means that fear of Truth is a living exchange. When the object of fear is an untamed, animate Holiness, fear serves as a purifying fire. It serves as a compass. It serves as a confession booth. It serves as a hospital.

Interestingly, the Bible contains commands to both fear and lay aside fear, which provides a bit of a paradox. Yet this duality makes more sense to me the longer I live and see the natural inclinations of humans.

When I see people making terrible, impulsive decisions out of panic, I ask God for joy and for courage in Christ instead of the terror of depending upon fleshly solutions. Conversely, when I see people living out of smug confidence while warnings all around us call for humility, I ask God for the gift of fear to cleanse and reorient. So at different times in the same week, I find myself urging the timid to hold up their chins (for the Lord is gentle and present) while urging the haughty to be afraid (for the Lord is a burning fire). Even as a simple human being, these are my impulses, so would not a complex God have even more complexity?

Today I am thinking about the brazen audacity of our time, exercised by both those who openly reject God and by those religious leaders who try to commandeer God to serve their pet political purposes. Because these people remind me so much of the Jerusalem of Jeremiah 5, I find myself letting go of my appeals for grace and resigning to whatever God wills, admitting to Him that if Fear of the Lord is His last resort, so be it.

We have not listened to abundance. We have not listened to light discipline. We have not listened to direct appeal. Maybe healing will require something more severe.

My generation has grown up in talk of grace upon grace -- grace without a glimpse of judgment-- grace that is expected like a rich girl's new birthday pony. We toss our heads and lick the icing off the Bread of Life, dip our fingers in the sauce of God's generosity, and grow indulgent, fat, and proud.

So while to the timid, I say, "Be not afraid," to those who are quick to seek human remedies for two horrific Presidential candidates, quick to promote the lesser of two evils, quick to strategize and maneuver the forces of religion and culture so that we might save ourselves, I call out for a return to holy fear.

We have before us the essence of what we are. These two leaders manifest our national traits, and we are right to fear being left to the embodiment of our weakness. We are right to carry the sense that such narratives can't end well. We are right to respond with sorrow and confession to a prophet crying out in our midst.

Amid all the pleading for this vote or for that vote, we are wise to be humbled first by what we see, wise to confess, wise to be small before a great God and admit that we cannot save ourselves from this disaster.

I have been afraid many times the past few months, but I have mostly been afraid of the wrong things. How good it is to return to the fear that heals, because a healthy fear of God protects me from every self-destructive mistake I am inclined to make. It burns away my excuses. It burns away every lesser fear that would harm and distort my true heart.

When I drop my face in the intimate, living fear, in the awe that the presence of a true God evokes, He is never severe with me. Instead He lifts my chin and reminds me that My Dear and Holy Giant loves me with an everlasting love, that no one who comes to Him with humility will be cast out, that a bruised reed He will not break.

Because I have a High Priest who empathizes with my weaknesses, I can admit them openly. Naming them allows me to step through healing fear into the boldness of a beloved daughter who is invited to bask in the radiant light of the throne of her Father's grace.

A Species Driven by the Image of God

The second best thing about teaching is having the opportunity to read good books over again, year after year. This past week one of my classes started Dorothy Sayers's _The Mind of the Maker,_ which is probably my favorite study on what humans are, what God is, and how those two things connect.

Dorothy Sayers was a heck of a woman. She lived from 1893-1957, and she passed through Oxford when women worked as hard as men for an education but were not allowed to receive degrees.

Sayers rode a motorcycle, played the saxophone, and smoked her cigarettes in a clay pipe. While Woody Allen's _Midnight and Paris_ romanticized the era of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, I would take instead the soirees of the Inklings, those perfect pubberies between Sayers, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and crew.

Add to Sayers's resume, a son out of wedlock during an era when such an event could have crushed her. Instead of crushing her, she dug in to life and to study, growing to understand the nature of humanity and God with a piercing honesty that makes her work as powerful today as it was a lifetime ago.

She wrote plays, she wrote mystery novels, and when she fell in love with Dante, she learned Medieval Italian for the sole purpose of creating her own translation--a translation so vivid that many consider it the best ever written.

She's the sort of fierce that makes me feel at home in her presence, and whenever I look at photographs of Sayers, I feel a sensation of "there you are." She is the grandmother of my soul, as Lewis is my soul's grandfather, as Chesterton is my crazy great uncle.

And so I am reading her again, and yesterday we finished Chapter 2. The Imago Dei.

I've read many arguments on what it means that we are created in God's image, but Sayers's take on the matter is my favorite. Essentially, she suggests that among all created things, humans alone are made creators.

I'll confess that when I watch those ridiculous exchanges between Ken Ham and Bill Nye I'm embarrassed for both of them. A great many debates have taken place between Christians and atheists, but the undergirding belief that bonds both the believing and the non believing views in every instance I can think of (Hitchens/Wilson, Dawkins/Lennox, etc.) is that man is primarily a rational being.

What I'm talking about here is the essential nature of man, and most Westerners assume that we are essentially thinking creatures. This belief can be traced back through Descartes ("ergo cognito sum"), to Plato's tripartite nature of the soul/ Divided Line theory which elevated logic and cognition above all human traits. And through the centuries since, despite occasional corrective blasts of Romanticism, Western civilization (both religious and non) has generally accepted this as fact.

Thinkers like J. A. Smith have wrestled with this assumption, discussing man as thinker vs. man as believer vs. man as lover. Smith urges a correction that I believe is vital, the recognition that most of us tend to live life in a way that is primarily affective. We are creatures compelled by love, drawn to a vision of the "good life" which involves but transcends strict rationalism.

Our creative human nature, likewise, contains rationalism but uses it as a tool toward a larger pursuit. We spend our lives in the making of something new from something old. Or in the case of writing, we come as near as humans come to creating something from nothing physical (ex nihilo). (Or to use Humean terminology, we offer ideas born from impressions.)

Sayers writes that, "It is true that everybody is a 'maker' in the simplest meaning of the term. We spend our lives putting matter together in new patterns and so 'creating' forms which were not there before." And though we find shadows of this in the animal kingdom when a chimpanzee learns to make his own hammock or a raccoon learns to use a stick to dig food out of a can, the gap between animal innovation and creation and human innovation is remarkable. For the most part, animals tend to replicate by instinct or by observation. Humans develop.

Sayers claims that in our creation of buildings, music, art, books, we imitate our God. We demonstrate the imago Dei. We create because we were made in the image of a creator. (Andy Crouch touches on this some in his book _Culture Making_, by the way. Also note the works of Makoto Fujimura if you are interested in an artist's approach to this topic.)

In Chapter 3 of Mind of the Maker, Sayers carries this idea forward into a theory of creativity that breaks down into stages of idea, energy, and power. The creative process beings with the unseen IDEA, the spark of inspiration that drives a project. The creative ENERGY comes next, the activity, the doing of the IDEA in physical form. At last, there is POWER--the connective force when binds the recipient of art to the creator (or the creator to his art). This is the ah-ha, the "I hear you," the "I understand" that rises when art has spoken to us.

Sayers suggests that even in this creative trinity, we find the imago Dei. The Idea is the unseen beginning of a creation, the Father God. The Energy is the physical incarnation of the Father, who is Jesus the Son. The Power is the connective force between God and humanity--which is the Holy Spirit.

So in every good work of creativity, the imago Dei reflects God Himself. Errors in art (which she discusses in the chapter "Scalene Trinities") result from an imbalance of these forces.

A great deal changes when we begin to see God like this, when we begin to see ourselves like this, and when we begin to see others like this. As creators, we can find limitless energy for innovation and exploration. We can find curiosity, fearlessness, a perpetual pot of paint into which we can dip our brushes.

As believers who engage with an unbelieving world, we can begin to revere and embrace those who do not yet share our doctrine, for in them rings forth creative remnants of our God, working out beauty with a longing to be seen, blessed, and set free into the deep harmony of Creation that thrums in the mix.

And because we are born creators divorced from the Creator, we are implanted with Sehnsucht, the holy, restless homesickness that reaches through the limits of rationalism and empiricism (with their constraints and unverifiable presuppositions) and lands down deep into a more primal center.

If believers will learn to lay aside their pride, their strain for power, their deep trust in humanistic arguments, and begin to whisper universal truth and hope from our God-indwelt center, I think great good can be done. We abide in the Creator, like branches in the vine. Apart from this core, we can do nothing by the force of our minds or bodies.

Nor do we need to do any more, because "a thing resounds when it rings true." We are a species driven by the image of God, made to sing out in given, sweet tones that quicken by God's power what fury and flurry cannot.

A Rock, and a Hard Place, and Gross National Shame

This is the first election I ever remember feeling like it was impossible to make a moral choice.

While scores of Americans seem able to charge ahead, confidently embracing a major candidate without flinching, I have felt like every possible choice endorses at least one form of corruption. 

In fact, I’ve had bad dreams about voting this go around. In those dreams, I’m standing inside the booth, trying to force myself to push a button, paralyzed. I keep trying to make my hand move, but it will not.

When I wake up in the dark, I feel a thousand accusations hitting me. “You are a coward. You don’t get it. You are so elite, so spoiled; you expect a perfect world. Your generation doesn’t understand how evil evil can be. Grow up and deal with the cards dealt to you.”

But shame hasn’t helped me decide; it’s only weighed my heart down and made me feel trapped.

Now I don’t mean that the big ideological issues are confusing. I have seen too much of human nature to believe that large government could provide a panacea.  When it comes to this, my vision is clear.

First off, globalism is not complicated, because globalism will inevitably result in widespread abuse of the vulnerable. We should resist globalism for the same reason we advocate for the rights of individual women inside of a marriage. When the flurry of a romance dies, a woman’s autonomy--her freedom to earn a living and make her own decisions--protects her from the threat of mistreatment. The trajectory of this principle applies to the autonomy of nations.

Secondly, I know that our greatest enemy grows from within America, not from without. Lincoln was right in his warning that America will not be overcome by an external enemy but by the breaking down of her soul.

Former KGB agent, Yuri Bezmenov, has clearly shown us how the steps of such a national breakdown can occur. If you haven’t watched his interview, it’s worth your time. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qkf3bajd4) I don't mean that the Commies are coming (that's so 1982). I do mean that for one reason or another, many of the strategies Bezmenov describes are being employed. I don’t know who is driving those strategies, but I do know that we are foolish to ignore their presence. Whoever this enemy is, we should resist it.

Thirdly, I know that we must maintain a strong military. I’ve seen too much evil to believe that wicked leaders beyond our borders can be engaged with anything but ready might. Diplomacy is preferable to force, and diplomacy tends to work among civilized men. But not all men are civil.

Fourthly, I know that the weight of our governance should always lie in individual states instead of an obese federal command center. This is true for the same reason that helicopter parenting and micromanaging bosses are counterproductive. Leaders who cannot respect the independence of those who are being led do more harm than good. A light touch is always best.

So these large issues are utterly clear to me. However, when it comes down to the riddles of human rights, I have questions.

I want a government that is influenced by the kindness and wisdom of my faith, but I do not want a theocracy.  Though I am a Christian, I want the masses to have the freedom to choose Jesus instead of living in a world of laws that force them to live according to my beliefs.

Thinking through immigration is not easy for me. I am both wary and profoundly empathetic.

Legislation about religious liberties and gender issues is not as simple for me it is for some evangelicals. Though I hold to an orthodox personal stance on those matters, I’m still thinking through how a government’s response to morality should differ from the response of an individual.

I certainly think that racial injustice exists. I want to help fight against it, but since I’ve seen insincere politicians taking advantage of abused minorities, pretending to advocate for them while pursuing their own interests, I'm not sure how to help entirely. I don't immediately trust those who claim to be racial saviors.

These are just snapshots, but maybe this will show you why I don’t find myself drawn to a cold, hard party stance on every issue facing American voters. I’m torn. I’m complex. I cannot charge forth with the abrasive confidence that I see in many others at present.

But last night, a thought came to me. This thought may be too simple for you, but after months of inner turmoil, it washed through me like a breath of fresh air.  Maybe it will do you some good as well.

For the first time a good long while, I thought of a vote as only a commodity.

I didn’t think of a vote as a definitive statement on every belief that I possess; I thought of it like a dollar bill. Like an ounce of gold. Like currency.

I spend money as ethically as possible, but I don’t expect my investment to be pristine. When I order a flat white at Starbucks, I know some of my cash will go to causes and beliefs that I don't endorse. When I donate money to Compassion International, I know that there might be some waste in the system here or there. If I donate to a church, I know that certain elements of doctrine contradict my own.

When I tip a waitress at a restaurant, I know that her boss might not always be kind to her, and that he will also benefit financially from what I pay for a meal. When I invest in stocks, I know that CEO’s leading every business involved in a given mutual fund might not operate with the ethics that I desire.

As a whole, I try to do what is right with my money, and I reevaluate regularly to make sure that my beliefs flow into my investments. But if I burn every single thread of my focus in spending every single penny to perfection, I will exhaust myself before I can invest myself in activity that produces greater returns.

If I think of a vote as a commodity, I can step back and decide where the thrust of that investment goes, drop my the money in the slot, and then get busy with other work. And there’s something about this that feels healthy and right.

So many of us have begun to turn our votes into selfies. We see this investment as our profile picture, as our identity. But especially during this election, that attempt is rather silly. Only the most extreme or the most naive people actually want to identify with Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Most of us are holding our noses, sorry that it’s somehow come to this.

For normal people like us, I think it’s possible to render to Caesar what is Caesar's without trusting in Caesar, without exalting Caesar, without lying for Caesar. It’s possible to spend our dirty dollar in the best way we can, not expecting a President to be any sort of messiah, and then keep on trucking.

Guilt-mongers have tried to tell me that if I vote for Candidate X, I’m the sort of person who supports Candidate X. They tell me that I support sexual abuse. They tell me that I support murdering babies. They tell me that my vote means that I support a hundred things I would never support.

Yet that’s unfair, manipulative rhetoric, and it’s not realistic.

We’ve landed a rotten election with terrible candidates. There are no flawless choices. And despite my tendencies to self-condemn, I’m starting to realize that I can resist the gross national shame that is being constantly projected upon me.

I can resist the shameful identities political advocates are trying to pin on me no matter what I do, use the dollar I’ve been given to contribute to my political certainties and then shake the dust of this crummy little election off my feet while tending to more important matters. Because while a vote is something, it's not everything. And when I walk away from that booth, I'm walking away with 1459 days at my disposal to do higher and better good for the nation I love.

"The Accused"  by Odilon Redon

A Follow Up to the "7-Requests for Boomers" Post

Thanks for the warm responses to 7-Requests from a Right-Wing Gen-Xer: Why Boomers are Having Trouble Getting X-ers to Vote for Trump. As that post has spread, I have realized that a few more thoughts might add to the conversation.

1. Comments from Boomers have been interesting.

While I’ve had a handful of Boomer responses expressing hesitation to characterize an entire generation by a handful of traits, far more have written to let me know that they are grateful to have some cross-generational communication tips. Many Boomers have seen these tendencies in their peers, and they are eager to learn how to bridge the gap with younger Americans.

My favorite comments so far have been those that say, “Oh! I finally understand the problem! I’ve been trying so hard to convince younger conservatives of what I see, and nothing has worked! Now I know what I’m doing wrong.”

These comments don't just excite me because I feel like the younger generation needs convincing. They excite me because I know that as Boomers learn to communicate calmly, with respect, without projecting fear, and with solid research, civil adult conversation between generations will begin to take place that will grow America from the inside out.

In talking about generational traits, there will always be exceptions to the overall force of an age group. Not all Depression-survivors are frugal. Not all members of the WWII-generation are patriotic. Not all Millennials are lazy.  (Does anybody care enough about the Gen-Xers to even give us a stereotype? Ha! We’re the invisible generation.)

So discussions about generational traits aren’t meant to condemn or imprison. They are a tool for defining core tendencies that might exist in 60%-70% of two population brackets, so that barriers can be removed as those two brackets try to engage. That's the ultimate goal.

(Also, for the one person who wondered if I wrote the first post about my own family, no. My family is wonderful. I have the smartest, fairest, most loving parents in the world. I should just ignore that comment, but I love my parents too much to let this go unsaid.)

2. Where did I come up with the idea of an evangelical generational divide?

I didn’t include this list in my original post, but later I realized it mattered. (BTW: I’m not including females here because Trump’s impact on evangelical females is an essay in itself. That gender dynamic is just more complicated for lots of reasons.)

PRO-TRUMP EVANGELICAL BOOMERS(Born 1946-64)

James Dobson
Franklin Graham
Eric Metaxas
Pat Robertson (1930. Including him because he's a fixture of Boomer evangelicalism.)
Robert Jeffress
Ben Carson
Ralph Reed

PRO-TRUMP EVANGELICAL X-ers (Born 1965-1984)

Jerry Fallwell Jr.

WARY-OF-TRUMP EVANGELICAL BOOMERS (Born 1946-64)

Al Mohler

WARY-OF-TRUMP EVANGELICAL X-ers (Born 1965-1984)

Russell Moore
Andy Crouch
David French
Matt Chandler

I’m not including Wayne Grudem here, because he was pro-Trump until very recently. I think his presence in the pro-Trump camp for so much of the election indicates the general thrust of Boomer evangelicalism. Also, I'm not including folks like Jim Wallis, Shane Claiborne, or Brian McLaren because (to me) they fit more in the "renegade evangelical, emergent/pre-emergent camp." (And that's not an insult, BTW. From what I've read of those guys, I imagine they'd probably like that distinction. Ha.)

Also, this isn’t a comprehensive or objective list, so don't cite it as qualitative or quantitative research; I’m throwing it together mostly based on who I notice from where I stand. But since I’ve lived smack dab in the middle of right-wing evangelicalism for more than 20 years, maybe that counts for something. When I hear Dobson, I think my “parents generation.” When I hear Russell Moore, I think, “my generation.” From the responses I’m getting, I don’t think I’m alone in that sort of breakdown.

3. A little nerdy back story and my “I have a dream” appeal.

I teach Classical Rhetoric, so I spend the first quarter of every year working slowly (and painfully) through Aristotle’s tips on persuasion. This certainly isn’t the most exciting thing I teach. As my friend David says, "Reading Aristotle is like eating sawdust." I could read Cicero or Plato for fun, but Aristotle's writing is as boring as it gets. However, Aristotle does have some strategies for communication that could benefit most Americans at the moment.

First off, Aristotle says that ethos (or the character of a speaker) carries more persuasive weight than facts or emotions. I didn’t agree with him on this at first. I thought facts could change people's minds no matter who spoke them. But over time, I have come to see how facts matter very little to most listeners compared to personal trust in a communicator.

And not only does ethos move mountains for leaders, it also serves peers attempting to move peers to action. You've seen this play out. Americans are currently throwing choppy, reactive articles at one another without grounding those articles in their own character and reliability, but this accomplishes nothing worthwhile.

"Hey, stupid. Read the facts!" we yell. We shove data in our opponents' faces, but of course, they don't listen. By this approach, nothing moves forward. The divide widens.

For the most part, links delivered by insult are only making people angry, not changing their minds. And in the process, many of us are losing the most convincing commodity of all — the weight of our own reputations.

For months I have been watching the futility of Republicans straining to find the right news link that will tip the balance for party voters. For months, I’ve watched that strategy dig everybody's grooves deeper. Anger and mistrust are rising. Most of us feel misunderstood. Evangelical leaders are burning their ethos by stubbornly embracing this one rhetorical strategy at all costs.

It might seem like taking time to root our political arguments in the context of a bigger, personal story is a waste, but it’s not. Context is vital. America needs civil, reasoned discourse that is rooted in facts, presented in the context of trustworthy character. In other words, we need to communicate as if we were equal members of the same, living community.

One of my biggest concerns about this election (just underneath a Hillary presidency) is that we will emerge from it barbarians. I don't simply fear the old progressive/conservative split we've always heard might lead to a Civil War. My greater apprehension is that conservatives will abandon one another because too much relational collateral has been lost.

This is a sobering possibility, because we’re going to need one another no matter what happens November 8. In every single possible outcome to this current election, conservatives will still need to engage in high-level collaboration over the next four years if we want to serve the good of this nation.

I’m not into theological ecumenicalism. Kindness and gentleness should always apply to Christian discourse, but in matters of doctrine, loving lines will always need to be drawn in the sand. But in terms of politics, I think it's important to learn to find common ground.

So much of the tension between American conservatives doesn't reduce to fundamental, irreconcilable differences. We differ on peripheral matters like communication style, preconceptions about culture, and decision making techniques. We can sort this stuff out. And we need to.

4. Several of you have asked for a companion piece from a Boomer that provides calm, intelligent insights from the older generation. I’m working on getting one of those, and I’ll post it when it arrives. :) Great request. Thanks for asking.

5. Finally...

Finally, I want to thank you all for providing such humane and thoughtful comments. I’ve only had to delete a handful of responses, which is stunning in light of the reactive fervor of this election. Libertarians, Democrats, Trump fans, Conservative non-Trumpers have all written to me in one form or another with respect and goodwill. You seem relieved to have found a little cave of stability amid the madness. (And for what it's worth, I'm relieved to find you, too.)

When I look at all of the kooky conspiracy theories plaguing America right now, the one that lodges most deeply in my heart is the one suggesting that our adversaries long to divide us so that we might be more easily conquered.

Evil exists in the world, at a level more intense than many of us can imagine. And here we are, brothers and sisters, sitting around the family dinner table. We might disagree as we pass the mashed potatoes, but we are not one another’s enemies. We can have responsible dialogue, weighing our options, and acting like adults in stern times.

No matter what childish banter is happening at the upper levels of American politics right now, America is ruled by her people. From the ground up, let’s take the lead from within our homes, from within our little towns and cities, and let’s find a way to develop a civilization that could never again produce two such heinous options for Executive governance as those we have at present.


 

A strange, idiosyncratic way of looking at things.

Late last night I sat down to begin sketching out an apology to some of the people who have hurt me. The times we are living in feel serious, and with real enemies stirring up trouble in America, I don’t want to be weighed down with childish disputes.

Of course, I don't know what's coming in the near future, but it wouldn't surprise me if life soon gets quite a bit more stern for all of us. I would like to move into whatever that is with old ledgers full of old offenses crumbled up and burned. 

Listening to Les Mis has helped cast a vision for this desire. If you have only seen the musical or the movie, I think it’s worth a spare half hour to read the first few chapters. Here we find the back story of Bishop Myriel, the priest who “buys” the life of Jean ValJean with silver candlesticks.

I won't ruin your reading by describing too much here, but I will tell you that the second half of Myriel’s life begins with this beautiful line, “all that was known was, that when he returned from Italy he was a priest." I love the subtlety of this so much. Hugo doesn’t tell us what happened in Italy, but he does show us the life of a changed man who now lives with open hands, using whatever he owns to help those in need.

And oh, Myriel. He is absolutely contagious. I love him for his gentleness and humility, a man who walks in a sincerity that fills me with the desire to emulate him. Normally I listen to audio books at a high speed so that I can make it through more material quickly, but for Myriel, I am slowing the audio down and replaying paragraphs. I'm sitting before the open text and copying down words after listening to them twice or three times. I’m just so thirsty for a hero, I suppose, and in Myriel, I see a vision of “the good life” that J.A. Smith describes. He is a shining saint amid the savagery of our current political landscape.

If you are like me, the weight of the daily news sits in a sick pit in your stomach. As I watch videos of beautiful Syrian children being pulled from the rubble, as I listen to Russian leaders threatening to employ nuclear bombs during a time of peace, as I watch boisterous and serpentine leaders maneuver the public by fear and fury, my heart needs a reminder that Myriel’s life is always a choice before me. By leaning into the indwelling power of Jesus, I can always give. I can always tend. I can always have the courage and be kind.

But when I have been attacked in the past, I haven’t always made those good choices.

One of the worst things about being abused by others is that injustice can tempt us to respond poorly. It’s just so hard to stand still and wait for God when others are being unfair to us.

But when I have I exploded after injustice, lashed out, tore at my abusers while trying to expose them, I haven’t felt satisfied long term by my outburst. As time has passed, my regret for this heated response has grown, not because I have thought less of the harm done to me — I still believe the actions of my abusers were unfair and severe--but because in that moment of using my own strength to fight for myself, I forfeited an opportunity to trust God.

Do you remember when David was being pursued by King Saul and suddenly found himself with an opportunity to attack his attacker? Saul had gone crazy at this point, a madman driven by jealousy and insecurity. David had every right in the world to take him out of the game. And yet he didn’t. 

Here's how it went down. The same Saul who has been trying to kill David suddenly walks into the cave where David’s men are hiding. (Of all things, Saul need to take a pee.) David’s men are sitting there in the dark, listening to the spatter of hot urine on cave rocks (was Saul humming?) -- and here they nudge each other in the sides. Here it is. The perfect opportunity to attack. They even suggest that this was a chance that God had provided to wrap this mess up.

But David only cuts off a corner of Saul’s robe to prove that he could have done more. And later, he feels guilty about even this.

“He said to his men, “The Lord forbid that I should do such a thing to my master, the Lord’s anointed, or lay my hand on him; for he is the anointed of the Lord.” With these words David sharply rebuked his men and did not allow them to attack Saul. And Saul left the cave and went his way.”

When David shows Saul the piece of the robe, he makes an appeal instead of an attack:

“I have not wronged you, but you are hunting me down to take my life. May the Lord judge between you and me. And may the Lord avenge the wrongs you have done to me, but my hand will not touch you. As the old saying goes, ‘From evildoers come evil deeds,’ so my hand will not touch you.”

How beautiful to witness this forfeiture of justice into the hand of the Father.

This is what I have not done when I have been attacked, and as time has passed, I have seen the dangers of taking situations like this into my own hands. If the enemy can trick us into responding rashly to injustice, then he can trick us into making mistakes that leave a mark of shame upon us. Our failure compounds our rejection, and then we are left with a paralytic cycle of defensiveness and self-accusation.

In other words, our enemy is not satisfied with wounding us by others. He wants to maximize our pain and cause us to wound ourselves in the wake of our betrayal. It is a dirty trick, but a trick I’ve fallen for more than once.

This morning I was reading Genesis 43 because I wanted to look back over Joseph’s response to his brothers when they arrived in Egypt. These are the same brothers who stuffed him into a pit and then sold him to slave traders. But over time, God brought those same brothers into a position of dire need to face Joseph, who has now been elevated by God to a position of power.

Recognizing that such a drastic turn of events has come was difficult for Joseph, and he is overcome with emotion because of it.

“And he lifted up his eyes and saw his brother Benjamin, his mother’s son, and said, “Is this your youngest brother, of whom you spoke to me? God be gracious to you, my son!” Then Joseph hurried out, for his compassion grew warm for his brother, and he sought a place to weep. And he entered his chamber and wept there. Then he washed his face and came out. And controlling himself he said, “Serve the food.””

(Genesis 43: 29-31)

For someone with my personality, this scene is riveting because in these few simple words, flashbacks of my own trauma return. I know what it’s like to feel betrayed, stuffed in a pit, and left for dead. And I can imagine walking into a room where everyone who has hurt me is suddenly sitting in need of me. What emotions would pulse through my veins at that moment? What would I be tempted to think? Feel? Do?

This would be hard enough, but then to find the faces of those few sweet souls who were innocent and good intermixed with my betrayers... my Benjamins. I think this would break me. I don’t know if I could compose myself as well as Joseph did.

As I'm mulling over all of this today, I'm realizing that I don't know what it will take for someone like me to learn to turn over injustice to the hand of a living God. I’m a fighter by nature, an Eowyn. I walk hurt, disappointed, willing to slash at monsters.

But this is only the first half of Eowyn's story. Like Myriel, she changes.

Lately, I’ve been rereading that section of The Lord of the Rings over and over--the one where Eowyn learns to accept the love of Faramir. After fighting the Witch King, she finds herself rejected by Aragorn, disoriented, and unsure of what is to come next. Here Faramir meets her and wraps her round in love. In one of the most beautiful confessions I have seen, he tells her how his pity has grown to an honest understanding of who she is, and a devotion to her as a companion. And in the wake of this great tenderness, Eowyn is transformed.

Tolkien writes:

“Then the heart of Eowyn changed, or else at last she understood it. And suddenly her winter passed, and the sun shone on her. 

'I stand in Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun,’ she said; 'and behold! the Shadow has departed! I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.’”

It’s so good for me to see that someone so strong and hardened as Eowyn was transformed into a healer. Could the source of a soul’s joy really shift from the work of battle to the work of cultivating and creating?

Hope that this could be true makes me lean deep into the life of Bishop Myriel during these months of severity. I see that it is possible to give into a troubled world “like water on dry soil." I see the laying down of arms. I see the distribution of goods. I see him leaning into a light hold on the stuff of earth, and yielding to the Lord so that good might be done, even in such a time as his.  Even as such a time as ours.

It's an odd take on life amid all this roaring and spewing. But how beautiful to have someone say of you, “he had a strange, idiosyncratic way of looking at things. I suspect he got it from the Gospel."  It's enough to make me want to learn to lay down my arms.
 

"The Gift of Your Suffering to the Body of Christ" - Hutchmoot Talk 2016

(Several of you have requested a copy of the notes from my talk at Hutchmoot 2016. The following is written in speech format, not in paragraph format. I might go back later and adapt this into a proper essay, but for now, here is what I said. It was so good to see so many of you this past weekend. I love you dearly. Becca.)

- - -

As Heidi and I began to talk about how we might split up this session on exploring God's resources for the body, I found myself drawn to a topic that isn’t included in any of Paul’s official lists of spiritual gifts.

Still, it is a powerful gift because it tends to make those who receive it humble, sensitive, patient, and wise.

This gift helps make good teachers, good leaders, good shepherds.

Once you are given this gift, people listen to you differently.

They respect you.

They want to hear what you have to offer.

In fact, readers and listeners are drawn to those who are given this gift like moths are drawn to a light… they go out into the world and spread the word about your gift … and suddenly a crowd gathers wanting to know more, a crowd that you can’t keep away. 

And yet, despite all these benefits, this is the gift nobody wants.

Nobody wants it because this gift is not glamorous.

It can be humiliating. 

It can expose us.

It can destroy us.

It often paralyzes us before it opens us up to new strength.

The gift nobody wants is suffering.

I want to be careful about how I introduce this topic because mainstream Christianity has often done more harm than good while trying to unpack it.

This a hard thing to talk about because understanding the math of suffering doesn’t often remedy the emotional consequences of suffering.

If 2+2=4 runs a knife through your belly, you don’t much care how addition works. You just want the pain to stop.

So when you and I are walking through a season of overwhelming pain and a fellow Christian tells us, “God allowed this for a reason,” we might believe that is true deep down… but we might also feel rebuked, isolated, and well, angry.

In some of the hardest moments of my life, well-meaning Christians have come to me with trite-sounding conclusions like this,

when my daughter was about to have heart surgery…

when my husband and I walked through a devastating church disaster…

when I was worried about a situation with my oldest son…

and even though I haven’t hurt as deeply as many of you have, I’ll be honest, hearing religious words in painful times felt like hitting the earth after falling off a swing.

Why do religious statements like this cause us such pain?

1. First, they tend to project causality upon God. They blame Him for evil. They cast injustice onto the Father who is supposed to love and care for us. This can cause us to hesitate to approach our Refuge, a Refuge we need most desperately when we are hurting.

2. Secondly, religious statements can ask performance out of us while our hearts are breaking. Hurting people can’t perform. They can barely get out of bed, let alone jump through hoops. And that’s one of the worst parts of intense suffering, actually. We find out that we can’t do what we have to do, and this is a terrifying and hopeless realization.

So let’s make a distinction before we begin. God stands ready to make every problem and difficulty purposeful. I think that His sovereignty sometimes opens the gates to allow hard things to pass through to us– and that is baffling and sickening and devastating. But to allow pain is not the same thing as to create it. And the more I’ve thought about this, the more that distinction has mattered to me.

Many authors have written about the origin of suffering, asking how a holy and kind God wouldn’t just nip all evil and pain in the bud. If He is all-loving and all-powerful, why would He do anything else? It’s a good question.

If you haven’t read Dorothy Sayers’s address on this topic in her Mind of the Maker, it's worth your time to do so. She cuts open injustice and sorrow like a surgeon. Of course, C.S. Lewis and Tim Keller have also addressed suffering – most of you have read their thoughts, I assume -- and my recent favorite is Christopher Wright’s The God I Don’t Understand. (And not just because he has a brilliant Irish accent.)

But today we just don’t have time for all of this, so I’m not going to talk about why evil exists so much as the commodities redeemed pain tends to offer the body of Christ. I want to take your hurts in my hand and let you know that they are not wasted. All was not for naught.

If you are currently in the throes of intense suffering, I don’t expect this talk will be much comfort to you. In the worst moments of my life, there is nothing anyone could have said at a podium that would have helped me. I needed an arm around me. I needed a warm drink. I need patience and room to grieve. I needed a wide field and permission to yell until I couldn’t yell anymore.

But if you have passed through the first squeeze of pain and now stand dazed, wondering what happened to you and what could possibly come next, maybe this will help somehow. Maybe you will walk with me to the God who didn’t abandon you – though I know it may feel like he did.

I know you may not want to trust Him. You may be angry with Him for allowing you to hurt as much as you did. The thought of Him might make you flinch. But here is the God who sees you:

“He wipes away every tear. “
“He makes all things new. “
“He works all things for the good of those who love Him.”

These are statements of healing that deny neither the grief nor the severity of what you have endured. These statements invite you to be honest about the intensity of your emotions. They allow you to believe that Jesus sometimes sits beside Mary and Martha, weeping in compassion with them, days, decades, an entire lifetime after he has allowed Lazarus to die, and before he raises him from the dead.

And while Jesus weeps in compassion, it’s okay if you do, too… believing what Andrew Peterson has taught us: that after the last tear falls, there will be love, love, love, love, love.


II Corinthians: A Well-Broken Man

I didn’t appreciate the book of II Corinthians very much until the past few years.

Like most poets, I’m a Gospel of John Junkie. John fits the way I think, feel, process.

If I’m going to be linear, I want Romans.

If I want catharsis, the Psalms.

I love the Old Testament for its typology.

I love Ephesians and Galatians for their promises of grace.

I love James for his ability to convict me.

I want to love Revelation, but mostly I need it because of how it burns me and casts me belly down on the floor before a holy God.

I feel terrible admitting this, but II Corinthians was just kind of “Meh” to me compared to all that… until I realized that it was the story of a well-broken man.

In II Corinthians, we find a lover of God who has been obliterated by pain.

This is a guy who was used to being good and self-reliant--he was brilliant, powerful, articulate, successful--the kind of guy who had it all before losing it all, and even though he had a bright and shining mountaintop encounter with God during his conversion, God also let him mature in that faith by experiencing what C.S. Lewis calls the "troughs."

What Michael Wells calls the dark room.

What John of the Cross calls the dark night of the soul.

And after he's been through the wringer, Paul is able to show how trouble is a classroom that will one day transform our presence into a portable trauma center--both for people we love now and people that we will come to love in the future.

Let's talk a bit about finding a purpose in the gift of pain

The desire to help people after we have survived pain is fairly common. Even in the secular world, parents who have lost children find a way to turn their sorrow into support groups or prevention crusades for other families. Abused women take classes in counseling and then adopt young women who are battered and confused.  Addicts lead recovery classes.

So it’s not that Christians are the only ones who respond to pain redemptively, but I do wonder if this tendency resides in human nature because we are deeply marked by the image of a God who is in the business of redemption. And for the Christian who is connected intimately with a healing God,  resources for maximizing our gift of suffering are even greater.

Not only do we have access to our own experiences and the hard-won wisdom they have purchased, but we also have access to the resources of a God who sees human pain big picture and who is already working to make all things new.

Paul writes of the:

“…God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 5 For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. 6 If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer.”  (II Cor. 1: 3-6)

As Heidi taught us, we are interwoven. What comes to the one is poured out to benefit the many.

Last week I was walking my students through Tess of the D’Urbervilles (one of my favorite books), and we were talking about what we could learn from Tess by the end of Phase 3.

In other words, instead of talking down to a disgraced woman – if we were to sit at her feet and ask what wisdom she had gained – what could we learn? I was so impressed by some of the insights my students provided just by taking time to step into the role of “student of the sufferer.”

We can learn a similar concept from the book When Helping Hurts, which discusses how upper class churches tend to move into financially-challenged countries and communities feeling confident in all regards, simply because of the presence of financial resources.

However, emotionally, spiritually, financially, relationally, we are all impoverished somehow. And so there should be an inherent respect as we reach out to those in need, a recognition that we have much to learn from those who have hurt, and that if we have resources to share,  they do as well.

There is value to our wounds. There is value to our poverty.

The Credibility of the Broken:

If you've been around people who know their own poverty – people who have suffered and come to know the extent of their own weakness -- or if you have suffered to that point -- you already know how this experience causes people to replace platitudes with narratives.

Instead of throwing out, “God won’t give you anything you can’t handle,” hurting people admit quickly: “Here’s what happened to me, and I couldn’t manage it. I found the ends of my strength, the ends of my convictions. It was too much for me, and here is what happened after I realized thatI could not perform for God…”

Then, they tell you a real story. They welcome you into details that aren’t the same as your details, but you feel a resonance with them, because you get how it matters that a girlfriend of yours dropped a jug a milk on the kitchen floor after coming home from the hospital with no sleep, and then collapsed to her knees and knelt in that milk and wept.

Or she says, “I sat in my van in a Walgreens parking lot at midnight, and I cried until the anger came, and then I hit the steering wheel hard and yelled, “Why, God?” so loudly that a couple of teenagers hanging out at the other end of the store heard me, and they laughed. And I never felt as lonely as that in all my life.”

Our hurting friends say that stuff, and even though we haven’t been there, we’ve been there.

Those who have hurt deeply somehow speak our language, because they speak the universal language of human trauma. We gravitate toward them, for when they tell us what they have survived, we see how we might survive, too.

Not only are we drawn to them emotionally, though.  We are also drawn to them empirically. We sense that the proof is in the pudding…“A thing resounds when it rings true,” said Andrew Peterson, and this rings true because it has passed through the fire.

A few weeks ago, I heard Dr. Elsinore Stump speak on suffering, and I was amused by her engagement with John Milton’s writings. Because of her religious beliefs, she considers the Puritans her enemies, and yet she was so cute, talking about how she didn’t like their cause while admitting that Milton’s suffering caused his writing to grow so honest and mighty that she was forced by his pain to value his thoughts.

The same is true of many of my favorite writers. The same is true of many of my favorite friends and mentor. The good ones often hurt until they grow rich and deep.  

A few weeks ago, I was listening to Michael Wells teach on Hebrews 11 (the cloud of witnesses passage) and when he got to the section that talks about people who suffered without finding an earthly answer to their pain, I burst into tears on my yoga mat and just wept.

Was I crying out of empathy? No. I was crying because he reminded me that those who suffer faithfully without discovering a “happily ever after” on this planet are “those of whom the world is not worthy.”  It’s an honor to be in that company.

God sees this kind of pain. He hasn’t forgotten it.

How different that message is from the shame we tend to feel while hurting. When we are in pain, we are usually lonely. And suffering doesn’t just hurt, it often feels like guilt. It feels like foolishness, too -- like we should have been able to avoid it.

It is a door opened for every accusation of hell, which will make us first despair before we finally break through the birth canal of our weakness, into an expanse of reliant hope.

Our suffering proves what we think we believe, but only know after pain

One of the greatest benefits of the gift of suffering is that it burns away what we think we believe but actually don’t.

I don’t know how many youth leaders asked me in the 1980’s: “If they hold a gun to your head, will you confess Christ?” but this sort of thinking was a crucible in evangelicalism long before there was any real threat of that sort to Americans.

Still, I obsessed over that question, lying on my bed worrying about it. I wanted to be a good and faithful Christian, and I was terrified that maybe I didn’t have what it took for a time of need.

Then I found out I didn’t have what it took, and it didn’t even take a gun pointed to my head. It took a whole lot less than that for me to crash.

I met the end of my self control. I saw how I didn’t believe what I thought I believed, not really.

Through pain, God delivers us from our self-reliance and self-promotion

This was humiliating and disorienting, but it was also a tremendous blessing, because through that awareness, I had to come face-to face with my self reliance. 

I think Paul also had to come to this realization. He writes:

“For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. 9 Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. “

See that? When self-reliance is exposed, we are burdened beyond our strength… and we despair of life itself. Because that is how it feels to realize you don’t have what it takes. It feels like dying. And the stronger you are, the harder that death is.

Especially for the strong, it’s a death sentence to realize how weak we are. But there’s a purpose in this complete and utter exhaustion… to make us stop deluding ourselves about the ability of our will so that we can begin to rely upon God’s indwelling power.

This treatment of human weakness differs wildly from much of what we hear today in Christian circles.

Many of us who were growing up in the midst of the Christian authenticity movement tend to think we’ve reached health when we simply step into the light with our hardest secrets and finally admit – “I can’t fight this any more. I’m just like this. I can’t not be like this.” 

This tendency isn’t limited to any single minority segment of the population – it’s a tendency that applies to all of us.  Many—most of us are handed a temptation during suffering—a temptation that promises to make us feel happy, safe, known… finally not alone… and when it comes to us, that temptation hits right in the core of our vacuum. It makes all the sense in the world for us to chase it.

Have you ever  heard Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese”? Here’s an excerpt:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Ugh. I hate that because I've seen people live like this, chasing whatever feels good and leaving a wake of destruction behind them. And Oliver is not alone in her epicureanism. You have hard the same message in a hundred different ways, right?

Happiness is healthiness.

Chase your bliss.

Trust your instincts.

And when we are hurting, what a sweet and beautiful thought such escapes can be.

Besides, what could be so wrong about happiness? Is God cruel? Humanist/Christian theology so popular in our era tells us that we deserve euphoria. So, ifGod seems to be asking us to do something bigger than what we are able to do, He must not require it of us. He must not be serious, really. Or if He is, He must not be fair.

I’ve toyed indulgence as an escape for pain, teased it out, tested it --- and I have found it full of a strange mix of intoxication and terror. It is a thrill, a high, an endorphin rush that turns cold and empty. It is a blast of sharp pleasure before a long night of terrible loneliness. There is delight to sin, but this delight fades into a cancer of the soul.

And as much as all my flesh cringes to face reality instead, at the intersection of my honest desperation and God’s holiness, His sufficiency meets me. This process hurts. To see that what we want is forbidden, and to then see that we don’t have the strength to resist what is forbidden--to realize that all of our wounds and wants cry out for what God prohibits—that is a powerful moment. 

It is a devastating moment.  And in many circles of Christianity, that devastation is not valued.

But it should be valued, because in maturing as a Christian, there often comes a point in which we realize that these cracked, leaking jars of clay and thorns in the flesh – are severe mercies -- because they propel us into a union with God that we cannot achieve in our own goodness, in our own self-justification, or in our own autonomy.

Loving our Jars of Clay : Loving our Thorns in the Flesh

Paul explains:

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. 8 We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; 9 persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; 10 always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. 11 For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. 12 So death is at work in us, but life in you.

Again—our hurt pours out to others.

For so long, I was ashamed of myself that I couldn’t do the Christian life right. And yeah, I teach literature, so I should have known the dangers of hubris.

In every good book, pride is foreboding. It means that a tragic hero is about to fall.

But still, it took so much to shake me out of that expectation.

Some time back in the mid 1990’s, I asked God to “give me one pure and holy passion.” And I wonder sometimes if God said, “Alright, my Love. I can do that. But this is going to burn. It’s going to feel like a Lion clawing off dragon skins.”

After this, I landed in a world that felt so severe and unbearable, so chaotic, so random, that I wondered if God could be real, of if He cared for me much, if he was. In the absence of the roar of my own glory, I found the gravity of my blessed weaknesses. I learned to trace the scars and burn marks keep me from becoming conceited.

I found the terrible, beautiful thorns of my flesh.  I suffer because of them, and so I have pleaded with the Lord to remove them… but He has answered instead:

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

What then, God? What is left for me to do?

“Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

The gift of weakness. The gift of suffering.

Here we sit together today, inside of this weakness. And at the quivering end of ourselves what do we find?  A new creation.

Paul says:

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. …

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us:

"We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. “

We’ve circled round, see? We who emerge out of the cocoon of pain are commissioned to generosity.  We have been invited into reconciliation so that we can reconcile.

Look down at your hands for a moment… those hands of yours that have wiped so many tears of shame and grief from your own face. Those same hands will be transformed into the hands of the Great Physician.

You will walk into the battlefields with Lucy’s cordial, whispering the name of Aslan over those who cannot lift their heads.

And though we are all sore and weary, I am glad to be in your company…

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.

(Henry V)

Only YOU Can Prevent Election Fires?

For months, I've been wondering what's going on with evangelicals. This election has turned so many of us into angry monsters, and I keep shaking my head, wondering what has transformed us from Dr. Jekylls to Mr. Hydes.

Last night I stayed up way too late reading responses to a beautiful post Philip Yancey wrote to clarify a statement he had made, and my stomach felt sick watching how cruel people were to him.  Even Eric Metaxas, who should know better than to give in to divisiveness in the body, criticized Yancey publicly. I was severely disappointed.

But just a few hours later, I let the frustration that had been building inside me loose in two different ways that I shouldn't have. I realized that I had caught the communal anger. I let it take root in my heart, and then I let it fly.

As I was mulling all this over this afternoon, something hit me that finally made a little bit of sense. I want to run this possibility by you to see what you think. Does it work? And if it does, what can we do about it?

About a decade ago, it felt like a lot of evangelicals were in denial. Many wouldn't accept the fact that the world was changing so severely. They ignored warnings about globalism and secular humanism because it was relatively easy to move on through life without feeling the pinch of those threats.

But in the past few years, reality settled in for many conservatives. They are now seeing how their faith won't jibe with some of the legislation that's moving through America, and as consequences hit closer and closer to home, they are passing through anger into full-blown rage.

In the wake of this rage, they are now bargaining with bad leaders, trying to Jimmy-rig politics to to get the world back to what they want it to be. Evangelical pillars are not just encouraging voters to be strategic and vote for the least damaging of two (clearly) bad candidates, they are actually embracing a man who is immoral, trying to cast him as a hero. These attempts to manipulate the public by deception make any faith they have professed seem like a lie.

Why? Why would people who claim to love the truth, who have built a platform on telling the truth, on morality, on honor suddenly throw all that away? Why would they first ignore the truth, then explode, then link arms with sin?

Denial. Anger. Bargaining.

A lightbulb went off. The Kubler-Ross model of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

The Kubler-Ross model was developed in 1969 when Elizabeth Kubler-Ross noted regular patterns to grieving. Research has generally indicated that these stages are not universal; different people hit these stages at different times. But still, it's normal for people who are experiencing deep loss to work through these responses.

Today I began to wonder if this basic principle applies to larger people groups instead of just to individuals. I wonder if the evangelical world first denied that postmodernism was a powerful force, then responded in fury when consequences hit home. I wonder if now evangelicals are reacting by trying to bargain with an unethical force, hoping to push the pain of cultural death away just a little longer.

If this is what's going on, I wonder if we are likely to hit depression before healing comes? Will despair be our next temptation? If our broken hope in a flawed man crumbles away, what will evangelicalism look like in the face of that next disappointment? Will we sulk? Will some of us piously disengage from all politics and culture, working out our despair by elitism? Will there be suicides? Will there be an abandonment of hope?

Also, since some of these grief stages overlap, how do we respond to the temptations of denial, fury, and bargaining that still exist in our midst? Is there some way to address the core grief here instead of living grief-driven, reactive lives?

If evangelicals are confused because we are mourning the loss of a culture we felt comfortable in--a culture that we recognized--that is important to admit openly. It's not wrong to grieve. It's wrong to react poorly because we are grieving. If sorrow and fear of loss are behind a lot of the crazy, vitriolic responses we are reading and exchanging with our friends and neighbors, we need to see that for what it is.

Maybe admitting the problem will explain some of the bad dream we've all been living. Maybe it will help us consider the core of our restlessness so that we can take our needs to Jesus for healing before we simply react out of them.
 
Because the truth is, in our own power, we can't prevent election fires. Sure, that slogan makes for a nice sentiment, but people who grieving are subject to the weaknesses of that process. Pain can knock us off kilter. But thankfully, as we grieve we have access to Someone who can handle the weight of our emotions of loss, Someone who can take us by the hand so that we learn to walk in faith in troubled times and not in fear.

The Night the Tooth Fairy Goofed Up

When my youngest son lost his third tooth, the Tooth Fairy forgot to show up.

The next night she got a little crazy attempting to make up for her mistake. She left a note under my son's pillow with some sad excuse about being exhausted after working part-time and taking too many classes in Tooth Fairy school. Instead of money, she left him a dirty sock and a handful of used Legos under his pillow.

My son laughed and then wrote a kind letter back, patiently but straightforwardly explaining that a dirty sock and used Legos didn't meet the going exchange rate for an incisor.

The next night, the Tooth Fairy left another note thanking my son for his help, and this time she left money. Once again, all was right in the land of make believe.

I remembered this story several weeks ago after attending a forum in which two philosophy professors discussed the topic of suffering as potential evidence for or against the existence of God. Thankfully, the participants were humble and intelligent enough that the conversation didn't turn into one of those embarrassing Ken Ham / Bill Nye debacles. It was an honest discussion, genuine, and meaty, and I think we all learned something that night.

It was easy for me to respect both professors, so I felt safe asking the atheist a sincere question during the response time. Amid the formal epistemological concerns, the proofs, the claims of empiricism, faith, and rationalism, my question probably seemed a little odd. But I couldn't shake it--maybe because I'm an INFJ and intuitive, maybe because I liked him too much not to ask.

"When you were a little boy, did you ever believe in fairy tales? And do you ever miss them now?"

Some of the audience members looked at me oddly, but I think he got my meaning, at least. I told him briefly about my growing academic disillusionment with pure rationalism and my recent interest in the German romantic philosophers. I asked this because as he had spoken, it had seemed to me that he wasn't driven by curiosity alone but also disappointment.

He admitted that yes, he had been more romantically-inclined as a child. He had even considered going into ministry as a young man. But questions rose in his faith, and eventually, he had come to the point of living as a nonbeliever.

I'm not going to critique his answer here or even try to explain what I think he meant. What I would like to do instead is identify with his disappointment.

In a broken world like ours, it's not unsual for a person to slip hope in God under his pillow one night and wake up the next morning to find a dirty sock and a handful of used Legos instead of the expected Divine revelation.

This hurts, and our pain can cause us to wonder if God has forgotten us. We might wonder if He is cruel. We might wonder if He even exists. All of this is normal for a postmodern thinker's personality, and if you haven't had that happen yet, you may at some point in the future. As that moment comes and goes, whether we turn back to faith or start stepping away from it, the disappointment of such an experience can be hard to shake.

In part because I teach teenagers who question constantly, and in part because of the pain I've seen in the world, I tend to spend a significant amount of time thinking about the disappointments of faith. Because I have grown up inside an evangelical system that tends to promise certain quick results from Christianity, I think it is inevitable that believers will feel a little lost as false expectations prove themselves untrue.

For example, Tim Keller's _Making Sense of God_ addresses the fact that we tend to suggest to young people that "all nonbelievers will be more selfish, unscrupulous, and unhappy than believers." We also warn the young man that "premarital sex would make him feel empty an unfulfilled." But then, Keller asks, what if this young person "falls in with a band of well-adjusted, altruistic, honest, and committed secular people?" Or what if he finds that the experience of sex "makes him feel wonderful and alive?"

Yes, there will likely come hard consequences for these choices later. But in the immediate wake of bad decisions, even for several years, there can be a sense of relief.

In such cases, we don't face the regular sadness of God refusing to bibbety-bobbety-boo lavish abundance into our lives, but a strange sadness that's wrapped up in a paradox. We find that defying Him doesn't sting like we always had been told it would. In fact, experiments in autonomy can feel liberating -- at least for a while. And despite the physical or intellectual pleasures of rebellion, an old, sweet part of us grieves, because there are implications to such discoveries.

This is part of the reason I love how my young son charged straight into the imaginary world claiming the rules that transcend reality, even when his experience hadn't lined up with those expectations. And yeah, maybe I'm reading too much into this, because our scenario was playful. It's definitely not a 1:1 parallel with engagement with a real God. But if I squint my eyes and stare at it, I see how there was something healthy about how honest he was with his disappointment.

He didn't try to break the fairy tale and throw it away just because there was a bump in the road. He charged back into the story we were telling together and said, "What's going on here?"

I love that we have a God who welcomes this sort of childlike, honest response to our disappointment. In fact, one of the ways that the people of God are distinguished throughout the Bible is in how they come running back to God with their frustrations.

The Psalms are full of David's cries. God, where are you? God, have you dropped me?

We see Thomas's devastation after his leader was brutalized, so soured and sad that it took touching Christ's wounds to cut through the doubt. He refused anything but a real encounter with Jesus to satisfy his need for validation.

We see Paul explaining a time when he was so discouraged in the faith that he despaired of life itself. This is a prime leader of the church, God's emissary to the Gentile world, and yet he was able to be 100% honest with God about his doubts.

It's not that God's children never have doubts, it's that they take their doubts to the Creator. This is the emotional honesty that the "fairy tale" of the gospel allows.

And just so you know... I write "fairy tale," not because I believe the gospel is untrue (for it is true), but because this one story is the prime redemptive narrative to which all good tales (often subconsciously) point. It is the ultimate happily ever after. It is the Cinderella story behind the Cinderella story.

The gospel will not shatter like glass if we drop it. God is not a delicate being, fragile as the religious propaganda of our time. He stands ready to welcome our disappointment into His heart.

How much I have to learn from a child returning to the Tooth Fairy! Because even though my kid knew good and well that this particular narrative was play, he was still making a statement about how stories ultimately work. "This isn't right! I'm disappointed! And I know enough to know this exchange doesn't end like this!" was his claim. In the trajectory of this matter, my son was dead on.

God's answers may not be what we expect, neither immediate nor direct. Some mornings we may wake up to find what feels like a pile of junk waiting for us, even after we've approached Him multiple times. But we need not fear being brutally honest with the Lord who makes all things beautiful in his time. The author of the human narrative seems to have a soft spot for children who come to him asking raw questions. I don't think the humble seeker of truth, the expectant heart, the pilgrim who knows how stories work well enough to keep turning pages, will ever be turned away.

"The Dastardly Dangers of Winning at Writing"

If you could only win at writing,
would it scratch your itch?

When you finally managed to snag the attention you never got,
or the praise, or the trust,
or the respect,
would you know at last who you are?

Haven’t you seen how the surge of victory
inevitably rolls down, down
into a starving doubt?

Love, it is far worse for the winners.
They shudder,
procrastinate, and stutter.
Their eyes are wide,
their veins full of cortisol,
their countenance reads:

“What did I do?
How did that happen?
Can I do it again?
Do I have it in me?”

They pull the veil down like Moses,
afraid that their glory is fading.
If you could know them truly,
you would want to tend them, not be them.

Stop wanting their burden.

Stop wanting a hunger that is worse
than than the hunger you already carry in your gut.

Blessed are you who have both words and questions.
Today you have a God who will meet you in their intersection.

Blessed are you who have been taken into the desert,
far from the commodities of the city.

Blessed are you who reach for truth in privacy
who write for three honest men,
or twelve,
or for a little child.

Blessed are you who create rough drafts, who revise,
who read your manuscripts aloud in some chequered wood
before a living God. (The groves were His first temples.)

This is the land of milk and honey.
This is your masterpiece complete.
You have already arrived.
 

Nuclear Feline Irritable Bowel Syndrome

We were prepping for our adoption trip to China, and I needed last-minute rabies shots for Betsy (golden retriever) and Pippin (the tabby cat). I was nervous about letting my kids hold the cat because you never know when a cat is going to freak out, so I pushed him into our Schnauzer’s kennel, which was pretty much the worst thing that could happen to this particular cat.

The cat hated that Schnauzer. He hated him so much that when the Schnauzer would show up in the same room, the cat’s back would arch, and he would instantly go up on tiptoe, trying not to touch the same earth that dog had walked on.

So as I shoved the cat into the kennel and locked the door, he looked between the bars with a glare of betrayal. Then he pulled his sides in, trying to minimize fur contact with Schnauzer walls. His breathing slowed. He let me know that he would rather pass out from lack of oxygen than corrupt his lungs with microdog air.

A surly hatred settled in the cat's face. His eyes started to glow like the eye of Sauron. He felt a need to say some of the curse words he’d learned on late night television, but alas, he could not.

I was about ten miles down the road when the cat willed himself into the only protest he could manage, situational feline IBS. This is when a cat chooses to blow out both his ends at once. If you need more explanation here, imagine someone bursting two water balloons full of everything that’s normally kept inside of a cat for good reason.

All things work for the good of those who love the Lord, and so this particular moment was beneficial for me as a Christian poet. As a young mom, I had already learned to charge forth into yellow arcs of projectile infant poop. I had survived the golf-ball-sized milk clot that forms in a blue sippie cup when it's kept under the couch for six months. I had learned to catch vomited smashed peas in my bare hands and wipe breast milk urp out of my hair (checking for curds) while walking through the grocery. Once I even pulled an uneaten half (half, mind you) of one of those four-inch Texas "water bugs" out of a child’s mouth while calling 911. (“You shouldn’t let your child eat cockroaches,” the operator said. “Oh really? I had no idea. We eat filth-habitating insects ALL THE TIME in this house. I’m just calling emergency services because I’m lonely.”)

But cat squirts took my mom cred to a whole new level. Beyond this, they gave me an unexplored realm as a writer. This was my "Dulce et decorum est" moment. Being a person of great insight and resignation, I thanked the Good Lord for this opportunity...

No, that was a lie. I just lied to you. I did not thank the Good Lord. I retched and rolled down the windows. Then I remembered why our windows weren't already down, even though the air conditioning in the van was busted that summer. The 110 lb golden retriever whose singular goal in life was fun thought open windows equaled, “JUMP OUT.”

Mass of lurching dog. Kids screaming. Cat squirt tsunami rolling to the front of the kennel. Some dude in a Ford F150 trying to pass me on an Appalachian 2-lane while flipping me the bird.

And I was going to barf.

I could not barf. Moms don't barf in crisis.

I tried to keep this in perspective; after all, we were about to travel to China. Maybe this was some sort of basic survival training for life in a country where people eat duck faces and snakes on wooden skewers. And besides, there was that surgeon in Antarctica who performed his own appendectomy. I got this. I got this.

Calmly, I pulled over on the side of the road to remove the poo-covered, insulted kitty (his mind filled with the blackest of thoughts) from the Schnauzer kennel. Poo kitty instantly bolted for his life, scratched his way up my neck, and tried to heave himself out the (now closed) driver's side window. Cat poo paw smear marks down the glass. I shoved him back in the kennel.

The cat looks at me like I looked at my husband that time I asked him if I was fat and he answered, “Bec, you look healthy.” (Healthy?!)

I want you to know this, too, because it's important. I'd JUST cleaned the van out for our trip, meaning that mega stash of 4000 extra Chick-Fil-A napkins every mom keeps in her van was gone. The wipes were gone, too. (Never take the wipes out of a van, people.) All I had was a blue plastic Solo cup and three used Kleenex.

It's getting hotter. The dog looks at me and says (like golden retrievers do with their big brown eyes) “I hate to tell you this, but I'm boiling in this fur, so if you don't mind, I think I might toss my Purina."

I pulled over into another parking lot, grabbed the blue plastic cup, and started bailing out the kennel as if it were a sinking life boat.

At this point, I was reminded of several things. First, cats don't like leashes. Secondly, even if a golden retriever is about to barf, she still wants to get out of the van and meet all the nice people who are parked nearby. She is barking. Jumping. Her ten-foot tail is wagging through the liquid poo I am scooping.

I have an epiphany. All of a sudden, I realize why a blue solo cup isn’t the instrument of choice for most bio hazard cleanups.

In one last, desperate attempt to find napkins, I reach under a seat and find a tiny bottle of raspberry hand sanitizer. Fighting panic, I squirt this all over everything I can reach. “Kids, put this on!” I panted, as if it were a gas mask in a chemical attack. They looked at me with large eyes. Silent. Confused.

I cranked the car and drove another three roads. Four. Five. And what is that? A car wash! (Were those angels singing?) A car wash across the street from the vet.

Was it a manual? Please be manual! YES! It was. I pulled in with fifty cents in quarters and ten minutes before the appointment.

And here is where I learned one of the most important lessons of my life. If you remember nothing else from this story, please remember this one thing.

If you must ever use a high-powered water stream to blast cat diarrhea out of a plastic kennel, close your mouth first.

Always close your mouth first.

Today as I was perusing Facebook, this old story came back to me.

I stumbled into a political discussion that just about made me sick, it was so messed up. Facts were bad. Assumptions were worse. It was a 40-napkin cleanup job, at least.

Eager to check a mess off my list, I charged right on up to that baby, holding my breath and cranking my social media water pressure up to "high." I was going to fix it. I dropped a couple of quarters in the machine and just about pushed the trigger on my sprayer.

Then I paused. The best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that. The summer of nuclear feline IBS.

I might be slow, but I'm not stupid.

So I decided to go wash some dishes instead. And you know, it's easier to get dried oatmeal off a bowl than the taste of certain conversations off your tongue.
 

"Hell, Yes. I Got This. Back Off, and Leave Me Alone."

I don't think most nonbelievers would decide to worship Jesus if they had more scientific evidence because I think the main barrier to God isn't academic, but a deep resistance against the idea of divine authority.

Most of the atheists I know think the God of the Bible is unethical, frustrating, and unstable. It's not just that they don't believe in God; they wouldn't want to follow a God like the one they've seen described.

However, just for kicks...

The Dead Sea Scrolls have been carbon dated. We know they are older than the appearance of Jesus. In these scrolls are books that provide thousands of symbols and prophesies showing that Jesus would not only come to earth, but also that He would do exactly what He did.
I've read a great deal of ancient literature, including religious texts from various religions. The sort of prophesy/fulfillment I'm describing here is unique to the Bible.

These are not vague nuances that could be stretched to connect somehow to Jesus. These are correlations so tight that if they were included in a novel written by one author, any literary scholar would consider them foreshadowing (to the point that the connections would almost be too obvious).

One of these instances of foreshadowing occurs in the Old Testament book of Numbers, Chapter 21. The people of Israel had rebelled against God and so God sent snakes among them to bite them, and many of the people died. When the people were sorry, God commanded Moses to make a bronze snake and lift it up on a pole, so that anyone who looked at it would live.

This story may seem simple, crude, even harsh. I can understand ethical arguments resisting a God who would send snakes among his people as a means of judgment. If I were an atheist, that is the angle I would take with this story.

But what I cannot argue against is a vivid correlation between this early description of God's judgment/rescue and life/death of Jesus.

The theme of the lethal snake goes back to Genesis, of course. But in Numbers, we have a bizarre picture-- a sculpture of a deadly snake lifted up on a pole, a snake with the power to save anyone who was willing to simply look up at the snake to find life.

The creation of a sculpture like this is unusual for the God of the Bible. He typically avoided graven images of any sort. (Remember how He hated the golden calf?) So why is that sort of sculpture okay here?

Well, God was looking ahead hundreds of years, to when Jesus would take lethal sin into His own body and be lifted up on a pole to die, so that anybody who might look to Him for salvation would live.

Jesus became the serpent, the sin of the whole world, and then took on the punishment for sin.

That is why some of my favorite illustrations of the Numbers passage show a human face on the serpent hanging on the pole. When I look back at this old image, I realize that the sins of people who have hurt me hang there inside Jesus. The sins of my own life hang there, too. The serpentine wickedness of humanity is caught in the body of a God who was willing to send Himself to absorb all of our evil and then die for us so that we might live.

This sort of imagery/fulfillment happens thousands and thousands of times across the Old and New Testament. It would be mathematically impossible for such connections to be coincidental. As someone who studies literature every day of her life, I cannot deny that (despite the maddening mysteries of the text) there is a coherence to the Bible's deep narrative that is unique.

I don't expect this to change anybody's mind, because the greater issue most people have with Christianity isn't veracity, but resistance against a God who would dare to punish sin with death. That idea is abhorrent to most nonbelievers. "How dare He judge us!" is a more common and fundamental protest than "Does He exist?"

And if I'm honest, the former is more often my own argument against God, as well. How I fight against that sort of force!

I am fiercely independent, and I'm smart enough to feel able to choose my own ethics. It is a war for me to engage with a Being who would dare to claim authority that would trump my own. (Especially since I disagree with His ideas so often.)

This is why, if we were to have an honest conversation about God, I would want to spend more time wrestling with the idea of Divine authority than on attempting to validate the science or historicity of the Bible. The academic side of Christianity is a piece of cake. It's not hard to find enough proof to make the Bible trustworthy.

What's hard is getting to the point where an independent human is willing to admit dependency on a greater life form.

The cramp of the Christian faith isn't in intellect; it's in the same old thing that's always torn humans apart from trusting God: "Eve, you want to be like God without God? You think you can figure out goodness on your own? You want to handle decision making without worrying about someone else deciding what's right or wrong?"

"Hell, yes," she says. "I got this. I don't like Your way of doing things. Back off, and leave me alone."
 

Those Who Taunt Your Long, Hard Obedience

It's beautiful when God uses our worst mistakes to help others who have failed. The compassion and wisdom we gain during our lowest times help us extend a loving hand to friends who are fighting shame over their own disasters.

However, lately I’ve noticed progressive Christians taking a different approach to failure. While living lives of open indulgence, they shake a knowing finger at those who are sincerely struggling to trust God. And then they accuse them of legalism.

I know how devastating it is to be accused of this, because someone did it to me. The hit came at a time when my husband and I were struggling in marriage, and I was trying so hard to find God’s strength to make good choices for our family. We had lived through a long string of traumas in a short amount of time, and I was exhausted and hurt. Satan had done his job, and I had caught a glimpse of how easy it would be to quit fighting. I had already made some mistakes of the heart, and wasn’t sure I was going to make it through more external challenges unscathed.

It was here that a friend of mine accused me of being proud because of my beliefs in God-given moral standards. Specifically, I believed that God doesn't want His people to have sex before or outside of the covenant of marriage.  

As I fought to trust God in my time of darkness, I felt my friend’s condescension and his judgment. He treated me as if I weren’t grown up enough in the faith to understand how grace really worked. He acted like He knew God better than I did because he had found the "freedom" to sleep around while claiming devotion to Christ.

Since then, I’ve noticed this sort of thing happening more and more in postmodern Christianity. Either by open challenges to God’s standards, or by subtle implications, the weary and battered now have to face cynicism and judgment from progressive believers during their most trying times. And often, this judgment comes with a prediction that our messy battles for obedience will be utterly lost.

These judgments are very different from Paul's boasts about his weaknesses. Paul talked about his struggles as a platform for advocating union with Jesus. He didn’t undermine obedience by calling it legalism, he urged his followers to learn obedience as a fruit of their unity with God.

Paul didn’t undermine obedience by calling it legalism, he urged his followers to learn obedience as a fruit of their unity with God.

His confessions weren’t defenses of his own sin, they were a work of transferring glory from himself to God.

In fact, many times, he called the churches out of immorality and indulgence so that they might go deeper into their true identity in Christ. He used the commands of God as a catalyst to propel believers into the sort of dependence that Jesus exhibited on earth. He taught us unity with Christ by showing us what we were incapable of doing on our own.

Today, though, a believer who tries to embrace Paul's sort of discipleship is likely to be accused of pride or performance Christianity.

When I was first hit with this sort of accusation, I was too hurt to think about why it was being directed at me. I had no delusions about my own glory because I had seen my weakness, and I was staring temptation square in the face. I didn't think I was righteous; I knew I wasn't. I had caught a glimpse of what I was capable of doing, and frankly, I was too sore and too scared to be much of a Pharisee.

But as time as passed, I have begun to see why my friend attacked me in the way that he did. These sorts of judgments must be made by people living lives of indulgence. There’s no other way for them to survive the weight of their own choices.

When a Christian decides to chase pleasure no matter what, he has to redefine morality if he is going to continue to claim his faith. He has to find a way to elevate his own choices, reworking the gospel to fit the permissions he has granted himself.  

If, during this time, he encounters someone who is trying to lean on grace to find obedience, the friction burns. He has to lash out and condemn, or else he will be convicted of his own defiance against God.

When a Christian decides to chase pleasure no matter what, he has to redefine morality if he wants to continue to claim his faith. He has to find a way to elevate his own choices, reworking the gospel to fit the new religion he has created.

Sometimes this accusation is more subtle than it was in my life. One popular manifestation of the same hostility is the, "When you crash and burn, call me" attitude. Yeah, this may look like some sort of wide lap of grace at first. It may sound like a Ragamuffin blessing, a perpetually open door.  But if we take a close look at what is being implied here, it’s not just a tender welcome, it’s a prediction that we will blow it. And depending on the context in which the offer is made, it can also be a judgment against our trembling attempts to hold fast to the commands of Jesus.

I have made so many awful, embarrassing mistakes in my life, but I don’t want anyone else to repeat those mistakes, just so I can feel better about my own story. And as I find ways to talk about my flaws, I don’t take refuge in the fact that my mistakes are common mistakes to make, but in the wonder that Jesus loved me enough to pay for them.

We live in a time when religion is obsessed with selling itself in a simple, consumer-oriented package; however, I’m not responsible for constructing some sort of marketable narrative that resonates with the masses. I’m responsible for telling the world what the Savior has done for one soul, using the real-time failures that I have chosen. No more. No less.

True love doesn't want to bring others down so that shame will have more company. It is not so selfish as this, and it has a more sober, mature understanding of the consequences of sin (even forgiven sin) in real lives. Nor does true love condemn the sincere while they are hanging on their crosses. Love doesn't judge them in their pain or cry out, "When you hurt badly enough, you will also curse God and do what I did, and then you will understand me, and then you will be more grown up than you are now."

Spiritual depth is not some sort of prize obtained solely through a catastrophic moral crash. Depth is obtained by the manner in which a sovereign God chooses to work in each person and by the response of each person to God's works.

It is true that God may allow any one of us to fall hard, and we may grow wise in those failures. But God may also teach us great things while we live a long, lonely, difficult life of sincere obedience.

Just because a pilgrim is struggling with less sensational sins doesn’t mean he or she is learning less about need. You or I may never commit the edgy, fleshy sins that make for one of those prime time religious movies or a hit CCM chorus, but our failures don't have to be spectacular (on the world's scale) for us to learn about our utter dependence on grace.

Let me say this plainly. You don't have to sleep around. You don't have to be an addict. You don't have to be a cynic or a blasphemer to really know what reliance is.  If you have done those things, there is grace for you... but you aren't "failing failure" if you haven't.  I’m so sorry if postmodern teachers have made your struggles feel somehow less intense because they have compared them to dramatic church-camp stories of sensational sin. And I'm sorry if they have made the sincere deaths you have died to yourself feel like legalism instead of trust.

I’m so sorry if postmodern teachers have made your struggles feel somehow less intense because they have compared them to dramatic church-camp stories of sensational sin. And I'm sorry if they have made the sincere deaths you have died to yourself feel like legalism instead of trust.

Sometimes the quiet struggles that remain year after year are the hardest. Sometimes failing is complex, and private, and ruthless in ways that doers of big, loud, selfish deeds can't begin to understand. God does not till all fields in the same way.

Sometimes the quiet struggles that remain year after year are the hardest. Sometimes failing is complex, and private, and ruthless in ways that doers of big, loud, selfish deeds can't begin to understand. God does not till all fields in the same way.


To know grace, we need to know only how to rely on the person of Jesus with the weaknesses we already have. We only need to have the heart of our self-dependence revealed and to see how that dependence can be replaced with Divine power.  


To get us to this point, Jesus chases each sheep differently, writes each story differently, and He will work with you wherever you are right now. No matter what you have or haven't done to this point, you're already messed up enough; you don't have to slam the glass vase of your obedience on a slate floor to qualify for His healing.


If you are in the hard, painful place of dying to self, of holding to a promise of God, of yielding more and more control to your Savior--and if while you are suffering, you are hearing accusations from postmodern teachers who feel threatened by your story because they are living lives of indulgence--please realize that those messages say a lot more about those people than they say about you.


Those teachers don't get to tell your story for you. God hasn't made them your interpreter. You aren't necessarily a legalist who must crash, and it isn’t inevitable that you are going to lose this war you are fighting. It’s quite possible that Jesus will meet you right here in your present battle and carry you the rest of the way. It’s possible that you will learn utter dependence on Christ before you taste the consequences of a gross moral failure that destroys your family.


And besides, here’s what I know about you. You already have crashed a thousand times. All of us have. We already know failure. We already know how deeply our weakness runs.


The judgment you are likely receiving from postmodern Christians as you walk in painful obedience, finding out your own limits and running to God to hold up your arms, is unkind and unfair.  And you need to know that when anyone waits eagerly for you to know your own ruin because he has a desire to be the hero of his own narrative, he is being a consumer, not a giver.

So run to Jesus when you hear these taunts. Open your heart before the Living God and ask Him to examine you. Admit your weaknesses and your temptations, and apply the strength He freely gives. Thank God for the struggle that shows you how much you need Him. Receive His love for obedience to a King who is worthy of our entire lives. Fixate on the hope before you. Revel in the Kingdom to come.

Then accept no names for yourself but what He gives you. And remember that a religious sheepskin on the bloodthirst of man is not a Divine commission.

"The Gospel I Have Missed: The Little Engine That Couldn't"

After the honeymoon stage of our church plant was over, I began to admit that I was frustrated with one of the key members of our leadership team. While my husband and I moved chairs before and after services, this guy would walk around like he had sand in his pockets, dragging his feet, and chatting up church members like a country clubber. 

And it wasn't just about the chairs. When it came to grunt work or any sort of service position, he regularly seemed to find a way to disappear.  Still, when he talked about ministry, he was strategic about getting to know the right people who might move him up a ladder.

His wife wasn't much more helpful. She had a mistrustful, negative attitude about the elders, refused to read resources the rest of us were reading to try to develop a common vision, and then pretended to be all sweetness and gentleness to the public. I was astonished that anybody could be so delicate in public while being so hostile behind the scenes.

These were the early days of my adult faith, and I was a firstborn child. My default is hyper-responsibility, so I fluctuated between trying to carry the work of those two jokers and trying to get rid of them. Meanwhile, I busted my tail behind the scenes, trying to pick up balls that were dropped. I felt like if I weren't strong enough, the church as a whole would suffer. I felt like if I did enough, I could keep it in tact.

My husband is firstborn, too, and we both nearly killed ourselves during those years, trying to compensate and cover for those who wouldn't carry their share. And here's the sad thing--once we had learned to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders, it was hard to put it back down. We transferred this same approach to every difficult situation within the church. We wore ourselves to a thread trying to be all things for the glory of God.

Day after day, one thought remained in the back of my mind: "God will show them." I didn't mean that as vindictively as it sounds (though maybe more than I want to admit). I didn't want something bad to happen to those people, but I did want them to learn service, to learn humility, to learn to help instead of always expecting to be helped. I felt like eventually the hypocrisy of their lives would catch up to them, and I thought that as long as my husband and I were walking in integrity and service, God would bless us for our faithfulness.

But this isn't what happened. In fact, what happened was just the opposite.

If you know the real heart and method of the gospel, you're not going to be surprised by what I write next. You'll maybe laugh and say, "God knows what He's doing. He knows what it takes to get through to a hard case like you."

However, if you are that first born kid who tends to work like I did for so many years, if you tend to be the older brother in the Prodigal son laboring from dawn to dusk to try to please God, you might feel a little like you've fallen out of a swing before I finish this story.

Because instead of lavishing rewards on me, God allowed more and more weight to pile up on my shoulders. He allowed relational problems, medical problems, marital problems, financial problems, problems with my children. 

All the while, some of the same people who had been duplicitous seemed to thrive in everything they touched. I had expected a sort of "eureka" moment where God would step in, rip through their dishonesty or laziness in public for all to see, and then wait while these guys confessed, "Oh man. I've really been a turd." Instead, their games worked! Everyone seemed smitten with very people I knew to be charlatans!

I concluded that sacrifices and hidden service must be irrelevant to God. If He was going to let schemes and tricks work--if He was going to bless maneuvering and posturing instead of purity and selflessness-- what good was anything I had tried so hard to do? And at that thought, I felt like I'd been flattened by a truck. It wasn't fair.

 "What's going on here, God?" I prayed. "What's wrong with me that I work so hard to please you while You just reject me and make my life impossible? Is this some freaky predestination thing where I'm just a styrofoam cup You want to throw out after you use me up?"

At first I thought I was being superstitious, imagining things, but with each new situation God allowed me to break deeper and deeper. First I had to walk through disillusionment with the Christian establishment, so many heroes fallen. Then it was the humiliation of financial need. Next it was the suffering of friends lost. After this I had to face deep problems in my marriage and core fears about my children. Then finally, I stood before God with a ravaged faith, not sure what I even believed at all. The core of my heart was broken.

Can you see the progression here? (Mothers will.) Slowly, the temperature was turned up more and more, until I was flattened.

Add to this employment. I suddenly had to work full time. There was no space, no room. My heart was messy, and so was my house. I felt like a failure no matter how hard I worked or no matter how little sleep I got.

I kept collapsing under grief and exhaustion-- and more than grief -- disappointment, anger, and a sense that God had betrayed me. "I tried so hard to give You everything I had!" I prayed. And I would shudder with pain when I saw how those who hadn't even tried to obey were given a fancy coat and a prime rib buffet for a party with their friends. 

You can mock and criticize the older brother in the prodigal story all you want, but until you've BEEN that guy, until you really have busted your butt in the sun day after day, worn yourself completely out while your punky kid brother who never did squat gets celebrated for screwing up his life and then wandering back in the door -- until then, you never realize how severe a thing grace is.

I will work my hands to callouses. In the staring contest of "do the right thing," I simply will not blink. I will go down on the ship. I will offer my body for the cause. I will outlast you, out sacrifice you, out perform you "for the sake of the kingdom." And at the end of that, I will expect God to be awfully glad He has somebody like me on His team.

If you are cringing right now, don't worry. You should be cringing. This way of looking at God, at the Christian life, at my purpose on planet earth is horrific. It is so proud. So ugly. So demanding.

And it's crazy how someone who would have told you twenty years ago that God's love was free and couldn't be earned (me) would still buckle down and live expecting the opposite. The only way, the only way a fierce, independent, get-it-done sort of person like me could learn this was by living through a decade or more of finding out what I couldn't do. It took getting to the end of myself to say, "If God helps those who can manage themselves, I'm out of luck. I'm weak, and I need help."

Paul said that he had learned to thank God for his weaknesses, and I feel like that's because he was a lot like me. He was one determined, type-A, dude, ravenous about academics, willing to jump through the performance hoops.  He was articulate and strong in so many ways, and yet God blessed him not with ease, but with crazy difficult trials and then with a thorn in his flesh that poked so deep, it taught him his own limits.

"I'm not able to be good enough for God." Thanks be to God. That's what Paul learned.

When I look back at how desperate I wasduring those years when I was so shocked to see God blessing the scoundrels, I want to go back in time and comfort my young, frightened heart. "It's not that He doesn't love you," I want to tell myself. "It's that He loves you so much that He would rather let you hurt right now than live believing that you could earn His affection."

"Because if He let what you are trying to do seem to work, if He let you believe that you could earn His affection by being good enough, you would never understand the true depths of what happened when He saved you. And you would never understand what He wants to do with your life next."

But that part of this story is for a different day. (To be continued.)

Your Local Public School Teachers and Your Faith

I’m seeing so many posts in my Facebook feed this week about public schools. It’s understandable that parents are concerned. What the government does with the minds of our children is vital. We have battles to fight and lines to draw.

In light of this growing concern, I have an idea that I’d like to share with you. If you think it’s a good idea, maybe you could share it with others, as well?

What would happen if Christians and churches all around the country made a unified effort to adopt individual public school teachers in their local communities? What if we found out the names and needs of those men and women who spend long days training America’s children and then found ways to support their practical needs?

Even if our own families home school or private school, people "out there" are trying to help kids who remain in the system. Their job is exhausting sometimes; they don’t get paid much; and they often have to work without affirmation, adequate resources, or volunteer help.

So while we are fighting whatever political battles we must fight, can’t we also fill the local battlefields with immediate encouragement and assistance? Can’t we be voices of love and life to those who engage with America’s children every day?

Maybe your small group, Sunday School class, or home school co-op could adopt a public teacher or two? Maybe your family could do the same? 

I’m including a list of possible ideas below that might help you think of how you could get involved. You might have another idea that's even better. If so, add it in a comment so that others can jump on board!

1. A coffee or grocery gift card and a Thank You note

2. Movie tickets

3. A gift basket full of : pens, pencils, glue sticks, Kleenex, Post-It Tabs, and a few fun items to brighten a classroom

4. A “What Do Your Students Need?” questionnaire that offers to help provide items for kids who come to school with nothing

5. A “What Do You Need?” questionnaire that offers to help provide items for teachers with limited classroom budgets

6. An offer to come in after hours or on a weekend and clean the classroom or paint playground equipment

7. An offer to come and help as a tutor or aide (depending on school requirements for background checks)

8. An offer to spend a Saturday doing yard work for the teacher at her house so that she can get a true weekend off

9. A nice, framed poster to hang in the teacher’s classroom (Check with fire code regulations first.)

10. A “socks-of-the-month” club (or “fresh-fruit-of-the-month, or coffee, or chocolate) that leaves a little present for your teacher twelve times over the next year

11. If your small group or Sunday School class is able financially, maybe an offer to help with a major life need. Medical bills for a disabled spouse? A new computer? A vehicle that works?

12. Or, go crazy and pool money to send a tired teacher on a vacation. A lot of teachers never take vacations because they are just too expensive.

Some of these steps are quick and easy, and they wouldn’t take much time or money. Others are more extravagant. However, I’m guessing that by taking even the simplest of these steps, Christians can let those who are caught in the middle of society’s ideological battles know that we see them and that we care.

Even if these teachers do not know Jesus--even if they are hostile toward Him--maybe we can still move in and be generous and kind. We don't need to smother teachers with religious platitudes or exhortations. Once we explain who we are and why we are doing this, no more needs to be said unless we are asked.

Simply being there to help is enough, because when we reduce stress in a teacher’s life, we minister to every child she teaches. And who knows? Who knows what might happen if the body of Christ begins to act like the hands and feet of a loving God to those who touch nearly every child in America every day?

Maybe what was taken away when prayer was removed from school could be restored by the followers of Jesus offering real-time human service and happy generosity in a time of need—and not just restored, but magnified beyond any results any of us could presently imagine.

Leah (Part 2)

She could have walked in front of the television naked and Jacob wouldn’t have seen her. Leah was utilitarian, the wife they asked to run to the CVS at 11:30 to pick up a gallon of milk.

“Can you get that, Leah?” Rachel whined, commanding as much as asking when the phone rang, and Leah dried her hands on the dishtowel. Jacob sat on the sofa with Rachel’s head in his lap, playing with a curl of her pretty hair.

When he came to her, it wasn’t gently done. The farmer who bred his sheep impregnated his first wife, planted his seed by the moon in all his fields like a man driving a tractor.

Still, the God who causes growth opened her womb and gave Leah a son.

That boy was born with his father’s hands and chin, and when Leah saw it was so, she folded cloths and wrapped them around her to staunch the blood.  Weak yet,  she carried her boy to his papa to claim the bond that bound them.

Behold, a son. Ruben. "Surely he will love me now," she thought. But Jacob pulled the swaddling back, checked the boy over, and was glad to see that the umbilical cord was cut clean.

Six months. Then, cracking his back, Jacob sat on Leah's bed to kick off his work boots. It was time to get this over with. The last deed of the day was quickly done, then he walked out of the room saying, "Clean out the van tomorrow, Leah. I need to take it to the shop."

She didn't wait till morning, got dressed and got out of bed right then, walked into the cool night air and cried her eyes out, stuffing empty water bottles and plastic wrappers into an old grocery bag bag. Sat in the driver's seat and wept, then as she shut the van door behind her, the God who hears mixed a second son to life inside her.

He was a boy with his father's feet and his mother's ears. She stayed in bed after labor this time, traced the lines of his little face while he sucked at her breast, and then she slept.

A third planting season, then Levi. "Three sons is  lucky," she thought. “ Jacob will see how I do him good, will become attached to me, his good luck charm. Leah felt a line of power run through her belly. To be worth something; to be a producer; it cannot be dismissed.

But here was Rachel.

Rachel sulked and wept, so Jacob took her off for the weekend  to a pretty hotel in the mountains, bought her a monogrammed bathrobe and roses that she carried home in a blue glass vase.

Two years more. Leah's body was ruined. Stretch marks and a belly paunch, varicose veins, fat on her hips. Fat on her legs.

But it didn't matter. Fat or thin, worn or new, it was all the same to Jacob. He never looked. Never felt.

So when Judah was born, Leah put all four boys in the car and went to the beach solo, wore a tankini and a floppy brimmed hat and said she didn't care who saw her.

She stood in the tide up to her knees, watched the waves shake her thighs. "This time I will praise the Lord," she laughed.

They were good boys who loved their mother. Ruben brought her presents to try to lift the weight he'd spent his whole life under. He was a tender child, old enough to know when his mother suffered.

He had seen her hope rise and fall so many times, watched her cheeks turn pink, watched her sing while doing the housework, and then, watched her sink again.

He knew the mandrake was supposed to bring more sons, and he knew how his mother carried children inside her like music she was writing, so he pulled the plant out by its roots and said (again), "Mama, it will all work out somehow."

But Rachel saw and called out for it. She wanted the gift, and what Rachel wanted, she got.

It was the straw that broke the camel's back--Leah snapped. At last, she let go and said everything she had wanted to say from the beginning, since the first year, since the years before that.

For one moment, fire.

"You took my husband! Now you would take the gift my son brings me?"

Shock on Rachel's face. The beginning of a pout. Then when there was no softness in Leah, desperation.

"Please. Give it to me."

A weak spot. Leah took note.

A trade then. One night. One night with the husband you stole.

A deal among sisters. A deal among wives. A transaction.

“You will sleep with me tonight," she said to Jacob, as businesslike as he had ever been with her.

This time she was the consumer. This time she was in control.

"I have paid for your services. Your stud fee.”

There was nothing more to discuss. Turning, she walked into her room and undressed like a woman in an exam room. It would be over soon enough.

She named the boy Issachar, because God tended her when Jacob would not. And every time her husband spoke the boy's name, he would confess that there is recompense.

How nice it would be if the void would last. The anesthesia of cynicism. The disengagement. But a wife. A wife is meant to be loved.

The earth trembles under three things; it cannot bear up under four: and in the seismic quake, the unloved woman learns to see through her husband into two worlds at once.

She learns the hand of God through a glass darkly. She praises, then she sleeps alone.

"Zebulun, the gift of God, oh ache, oh ache to be enclosed, to be indwelt. I've given him all these boys, and what is my crime? To have been born plain?"

The seed of woman would crush the head of pretty satan, that angel who preened, and sulked, and flaunted. But the woman, and her daughters, and the daughters of her daughters would strain and groan against a world cursed like a women in labor.

Those women who bear the DNA of the Messiah often live their first lives not knowing, not seeing, not understanding the measure of themselves. They can wish for a blow of the fist instead of the blow of a blind eye. They can live out their years in the shadows, taking a few steps in the next world, gaining confidence to praise God like a kite borne on invisible winds, then twisting and turning on their strings, falling to earth, walking on and on with Jacob after Rachel dies, through the mourning, through the obligatory ceremonies, through age, through the kiss of a grandchild, through the letting go of what was supposed to be, through resignation, through being packed into a tomb that is planted like a seed inside of an unloved woman's womb, waiting for spring.

- - - -

"Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise; thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies like thy father's children shall bow down before thee."

"The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be."

"Two Women" by Milton Avery

"Two Women" by Milton Avery

Leah

I wonder how it felt to be Leah,

that handsome young man showing up

from out of town,

the flutter of maybe-he-could

before you remember

why he'll never even see you.

You watch him for seven years,

stumbling over his love for your pretty sister

while you carry letters back and forth between them.

"Tell her I love her," he says to you,

looking through you, and when she flushes

she is so beautiful.

Then the pang, knowing

you're the schoolmarm

reading a romance novel,

the crazy cat lady,

the cosplay queen who

tries to laugh it off.

The spectator.

But you're not a spectator,

you're part of a bad deal, a wife swap,

and for one night you find out

what it is like to be wanted more than life,

to hear praises roll off his tongue

as he gasps.

"You are so beautiful," he says in the pitch dark,

"So perfect," he whispers over you and

kisses you on your forehead,

telling you he would have worked twice as long

for you, then sleeps with his hand

on the bare turn of your hip before

the dawn that breaks with a shout.

"The ugly one!"

"Where is my real wife?"

"Where is the woman I actually wanted!"

Leah still sore, still shy, still naked

from the first night and the last night

he would ever be more than animal with her,

pulls the sheet over her shoulder and turns away,

numb.

How then did Leah learn to turn her ugly eyes

up to the God who made her a freak show?

And after finding out how sweet

a human mouth tastes,

after knowing what was being spoken

in the next tent over while she learned insomnia,

how did she learn to drink at last

from the rimless cup of God?

By Odilon Redon

"Woman with a Veil" 

A Letter to the Parents of College Freshmen

Such terrible advice tends to be written by parents who are still raising children. The older I get, the more I’m inclined to listen to wise and seasoned souls while pushing books and blogs written by younger parents way off to the side.

Those of us who try to write from the middle of things may be able to describe the details of how a situation feels with more accuracy, and we might be able to share little tips that are keeping us afloat, but we can’t offer any long-term perspective on the whole of child rearing. Our hearts (and identities) are still so engaged in our kids that we can’t tell our story without trying to talk ourselves into or out of something we are trying to believe. Besides, kids need some privacy for growing up.

Over the past few years, I’ve taken a big break from writing about raising my kids for those reasons. As my teenagers got older, I began to realize how much of my own worth I had bound to them and their choices, and I wanted to give them freedom to walk in whatever plan God had for their lives without being dissected by my public evaluation.

But today as I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, looking at pictures of so many parents dropping kids off at college, I found myself wanting to reach out to those parents with some of the lessons I have learned (through many tears) over this past year while my oldest son has been away.

These lessons probably won’t apply to all families. I don’t think all of them will even apply to my second child, or maybe even my third. My kids have strong personalities, all different in the risks they take and the questions they ask. But I still feel like some of this might be helpful to a few mothers who are gasping for air during the first few weeks of separation.

So here we go: four beliefs I used to hold about parenting a college freshman, and what I've learned the hard way.

1. The choices my kid makes at college define me as a parent.

Well, maybe. But that doesn’t necessarily work the way I first thought it did.
College isn’t some sort of final parenting assessment where my kid has to jump through a bunch of hoops and prove that my morality was lived out well enough that he wants to embrace it. I absolutely get why parents feel like this. I feel that expectation, too, and I feel the guilt of self-blame when my kid doesn’t make the same choices that I would.

For years I’ve been listening to Christian parenting resources that have promised me that if I did my job well, my kids would go off and value the same things I do. However, that’s an incredibly self-centered way to think about things, and it reduces our children to too few dimensions.

It makes them extensions of us instead of independent adults who have to wrestle with a living God. It puts them under pressures that are unfair and unhealthy, asking them to answer questions for us about ourselves, when this is the season of life when they need to be answering questions about their own identities.

Besides, a lot of the teachers who taught us that if we did “X” as parents our kids would do “Y” (Bill Gothard, Doug Philips etc.) have now been exposed as perverts. Sure, as a young, insecure parent, it was comforting to be sold the idea that we could create a safe little social amoeba that would protect our children from evil, but that promise wasn’t true -- there’s no antidote for living in a messed up world. And folks, when strict moral leaders are repeatedly discovered feeling up teenage girls, that’s a pretty strong indicator that we’ve put our faith in a faulty religious system instead of in a living God.

Maybe my identity as a parent is not about my kid’s choices so much as it is about my unconditional love. We’ve been telling our kids all these years we are committed to them no matter what. What if they need to see this is true? We’ve been telling them God is powerful and sovereign. What if they need to see us trust while they step out into a realm we cannot control?

What if THEIR performance doesn’t define us, except for the opportunity it provides to function as a backdrop for OUR willingness to trust God?

Yes, it’s difficult to transition from authority figures to coaches of young adults we would rip out our spleens for. But it’s absolutely unfair for young people taking their first steps into a vivid and alluring world to bear the full weight of their parents' identities. For their sake, we have to find an internal foundation that doesn’t rely on their questions or experimentation.

2. The gospel should make my kid make good choices.

This one is so tempting, but it’s totally backwards. In fact, the gospel exists because my kids are going to make some bad choices.

As a mom, I have been so overbearing and so protective for so long, trying to shield my children from every danger and every risk. I really believed that I could be winsome enough to tell them what was out there so that they wouldn’t want to go look for themselves. I wanted to tell them about evil so that they would never have to know it.

But then I remember my first two years of college. I remember being in an unhealthy dating relationship, going to a party or two I shouldn’t have gone to, being cocky and crude, flirting and faking it, trying out ideas my parents would have hated, making some rotten, dangerous decisions, and finally getting the news that one of my friends had died in a car wreck.
I remember collapsing in a heap in my dorm room in the dark, disgusted with myself, feeling like a fraud, and despising everything I had tried to make of my own life. This confession was a big step for me (though it felt like dying at the time) because I was a high performer. I could get high grades without much effort, and almost everything I touched worked. For so long, I felt strong, brilliant, and in control.

It took failure and fraud for me to realize that I couldn’t drive the ship alone. I finally saw how much I needed help. Even though I had asked Jesus to live in my heart when I was ten years old, it wasn’t until I was twenty that I saw the first glimmer of what grace actually meant. I had to screw up royally before I could really appreciate what God had given me.

See, I had to find out that I wasn't the hero. And I had to find out that I didn't need to be, because God was standing ready to take on that role. My kids are going to need to find that out, too, and I'm not sure there's an easy way to make that discovery.

3. If my kid can just get through four years of college unscathed, he will be okay later on.
As a parent, I always tend to focus on the immediate danger. I tend to pray like this, “Oh God, please, please, please, please just get him through this next little bit, and then I know we will be in the clear.”

But that’s not the prayer of someone who trusts God big picture. It’s more like wishing on a lucky star.

Lately, I’m watching so many of my peer friends who were “good, moral, religious kids” in their 20’s crash their lives in their 40's. They are having affairs with people decades younger than they are. They are abandoning their kids. They are losing their faith, finally admitting that they have been faking it. It seems like so many folks who sort of held it together for years are now collapsing in a midlife heap.

And as bad as the consequences would have been for those friends to have made ugly mistakes at 19 or 20, the consequences of free fall might be even more severe now. They are now in positions of influence where their weakness is affecting hundreds or thousands of admirers, and where it is impacting children who will never fully recover from the trauma they are living as a result.

So many times over the past few years, I have remembered how it felt to be utterly broken in that dorm room floor, weeping, crying until I was vomiting over what I had become. As I have fought the silent wars women my age tend to fight, I haven’t forgotten that pain, that disgust, that desperation. As bad as it was for me to make those mistakes then, it has been good for me to remember why I never want to make them again.

I don’t have the strength or the selflessness to want this sort of experience for my children. Sometimes I even feel a little jealous of parents whose young adult kids don't ask hard questions, but march faithfully through young adulthood checking off all the religious boxes. Out of fear and fatigue, I want to reel back time and make my children less inquisitive, less bright, less honest.

But that impulse is so terribly wrong. It's wrong, because it's dishonest. It's wrong because it's controlling. It's wrong because it is coveting another person's story while Aslan tells each person only his own. It's wrong because it seeks immediate relief instead of long term good.
If my kids do go through harder stuff in the younger years, I should realize that some vaccines work by injecting a little tiny dose of a lethal disease into a body at an early age, so that later on the body knows how to fight it. Who knows what devastation they might avoid at my age because of painful lessons they've learned in college?

4. I have to keep my kid from doubting God in college.

What does this statement reveal? Does it show that we don’t believe God is going to chase our kids down? That God is going to be shocked and defeated when a thinking young person runs into huge questions? That our children’s experience with God cannot exist if we aren’t preserving it for them?

Almost every single Christian teacher that I respect deeply went through a period of atheism (or serious doubt) in his twenties. And in every single case, those teachers were ultimately expanded by that season, even grown through it, so that they could reach out to others later on.

I would never choose this pathway for my children, but I cannot see the future, or how God might want to use my kids in the world. C.S. Lewis mined his years of secular materialism and rationalism for decades, creating work that has reached millions. He understood atheism, because he had lived it.
If I had been his mother (if I had been alive during that season of his life), would I have wished away all those years? Would I have sacrificed all the fruit that came from them for the sake of my own comfort in the present? Probably so. A mother's love can be so greedy. But how much darker the world would have been, had my wish been granted.

- - -

Moms, as painful as it’s been to learn to trust God with a kid I love more than my own life, it’s been mighty good for me to have to wrestle through some of these battles. When my son started college last year, I was worried about his faith, but fighting through these fears has exposed gaps in my own faith that I had pushed aside.

I feel like I’ve aged ten years in this past twelve months. God has finally pried my hands off the kid I wouldn’t let go. I’ve clung to him (at least internally) like a mother in one of those stories you read about primal tribes -- -where the men of the village charge in and rip a son away from his home for his right of passage into manhood.

Was it Robert Lewis who said, “A boy becomes a man over his mother’s dead body?” I didn’t believe that when I first heard it, but now I do. I have clawed at God, punched at Him, wailed, and gnashed my teeth. "GIVE ME BACK MY KID!" But the truth is, this break needed to happen. There are things he needs to know that I cannot teach him. I have to let the two of them hash it out.

I get so angry with pro-choice advocates acting like a fetus is just an extension of a mother, because a baby is his or her own person. He’s not a gall bladder. He’s a living person who starts life inside another living person. And yet, I have seen my children as extension of me, even outside the womb. I have believed I own them somehow. I have believed I could determine and control too much. It’s been brutal to realize that they belong to God’s will and not my own, and that no matter how big my love is, my love isn’t a remote control. Work has to be done between the Divine and my kids, and I can’t be a part of that conversation right now.

I don’t really believe in baptizing infants (though I respect the covenant theology of why some people do), but I do think there’s a benefit to parents having some sort of moment in which they “turn over” a baby to God. It must have been so comprehensively counterintuitive for Abraham to turn over Isaac, releasing every animal instinct he had to hold close and protect. But there is a verse in Hebrews 11:19 that we sometimes miss, explaining more about this offering: “Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.“

That’s what you do when you turn your kids over to God. You go against your natural groove. You fight yourself and your fears. You learn to pray different sorts of prayers and trust a God who can do what you cannot — raise your child from whatever death your failures have left upon him. You learn to believe that He is beginning a new story in your child, and that it’s okay if you can’t see how it ends quite yet.