JOY and the ABACUS

Praise God for the abacus.

When He was dolling out brains and gifts, knitting me together in quiet, He crafted me into a right brain, made me a host of creativity. Math left me crying with my head in my hands through school and college. If it was not for a professor who shut the door of a classroom containing me, him, and two blackboards filled with chemistry equations, promising me we would not leave until I could solve every one of them, I would have never passed CHE101. A faithful friend tutored me for six hours before an algebra final, which I aced, and promptly forgot everything I'd just learned.

So praise God for the abacus.

This ancient tool made for counting was—in the creative bastion of art and literature of my childhood home—used for more than simply adding and subtracting. For hours my hands would spread and separate those colored beads, creating patterns and chaos. I knew it was intended for mathematics, but to me it seemed more a thing of art and beauty.

The concepts of math have always felt far from me. I am always sure that I could manage my way through them if necessary, but I have been clever about my vocational choices and I never double recipes. When I take account of what I need to count, I focus instead on beads of joy, colors and patterns of life in front of me and count them thus.

So when yet another friend brings her heart to the threshold of my inbox, when I sit across from a friend at lunch, when I get a desperate text message from another one, when the trials of our faith are near and close and oh, so painful, you will not find me saying to count it all joy.

Because counting is painful.

And, for me, counting is a process. A long, slow process.

It cannot be rushed or formulated into additions, subtractions, and divisions.

Counting all things joy means taking each bead of sweat, each beautifully painful moment, and each complicated pattern, and it means counting it, touching it, feeling it, and knowing it is part of a whole abacus. But sometimes counting is slow going and that's okay.

Praise God for the abacus, praise Him for tangible numbers and complicated patterns. But praise Him more that His math isn't always our math and sometimes what feels like our subtraction is His multiplication.

KNIT ALL TOGETHER

He said I was too submissive and she said I wasn't submissive enough. What is a girl to do with a heart like mine, whose depths are filled with big ideas and fragile sensitivity? Everything natural in me fears and succumbs, because it is what my flesh does—it is only flesh, see? But when the cream rises to the top (and sometimes when the dregs do too) it all tastes of leadership because I have been knit of strength and foresight.

And I ask myself, why have I been knit together like this? Why so strong, so capable on top? But underneath, why so timid, so fearful?

"You knit me together in my innermost parts."

I ask Him often: what does it mean to be knit?

You know me. You made me. You put each gift inside of me and you are not unaware of my fears or tendencies. Each part of me knit to bring You glory. Each part there to draw me more deeply toward You. So what does it mean that you have knit me into a conundrum?

I have found a place of rest among a people who embrace a complementarian theology, but I also find a place of influence and friendship too, among those who embrace egalitarianism—and, oh how I feel this tension among people I love. I know where I land and I land there joyfully, happily, but I only land there because, hear me, because I have been knit here.

If we talk of experience only, I would tell you that every relationship (familial, church, or romantic) in which I've been where there was egalitarian leanings has been abrasive to me. I would tell you that I have never experienced the abrasiveness that others talk about in places where the roles of men and women are defined in complementarian terms—in fact, my specific gifts and leadership have been more widely used in these places. But this is my experience alone and I cannot share it with you more than to simply say it.

Here is what I want to say today, though: I want to say that though theology is the way we see God, my theology on gender roles is never the lens through which I see God, but instead I ask, I plead, I beg the giver of all good gifts to show me theology through His character alone.

This means that when I look into my experiences, my church, my theology, my personality, my flesh, my past, and my future, I cannot see it without first seeing that He is a good, good God, who creates good, good things, and intends them for good, good measures, and I can trust that regardless of the terms we paste upon our ways, His way is always best.

Not culture's way. Not a reactive way. Not an abusive way. Not an abdicating way. Not a domineering way.

Not any way that takes my eyes off of Him and onto an issue.

He is better.

So this isn't an issue for me. I rarely think about the roles of men and women, egalitarianism or complementarianism. I never feel undermined or afraid of speaking up at church, at work, or among friends. I feel heard in every avenue of my life because more than anything I know I am heard by the God of the universe.

That's enough for me. He knows me best anyway, He knit me that way.

This post has been brewing in me for months, but I felt that this week would be a good week to pull it out because Rachel Held Evans is holding a link up to her series on mutuality in the church. I think Rachel and I would be friends even if we disagree on some key issues, mostly because as I stated above, many of my good friends are more toward her camp theologically. I'm okay with that, really. I think that the beauty of life on earth is that we're not finished yet—all of us blind beggars asking for more of God until He unveils the fullness of the new and perfect earth. 

who WANTS my CREDIT CARD?

It is a thing to be trusted.

This morning I took my boss's American Express card and drove a quarter mile to the post office. A left turn and a right turn and I was there. A package needed to be overnighted and I was free to do it, so I did, with a credit card tucked in the front pocket of my jeans.

This is a small thing, a normal thing for most employees in small non-profits like mine. If you cannot trust the fifteen people with whom you labor alongside in work like this, who can you trust?

But this is also a big thing: how easy would it have been to keep on driving straight into the Texas flatland, spending every cent possible on that card?

I'd never do it of course. But I could have.

This is what I am thinking this morning because last night I looked into the eyes of a weeping friend and said words about how true God's character is that He would entrust some of us with His broken children. His absolute goodness assures me that when He hands me the life of someone to love, hold, and listen to,  He purposes that moment for me. He entrusts it to me.

Me?

There are so many broken things behind me that I think that I cannot be trusted with anything; surely the cycle of brokenness prevents me from ever handling anything with grace or faith, let alone success.

But time and time and time again He hands me his credit card and it has an unlimited amount tied to it, and He says "Drive on, daughter. Come home when you're done, but drive on, be faithful. I entrust it to you because I know Who I Am and I've got this." 

what HE OWNS

There are strange and common fears that arrest and pull us like a horrible secret or the last page of a well-loved book—we want to know the end, yet we know when we know it it will change our lives. 

This is the calamity of living forward—there are no rewinds or do-overs, what is known cannot be unknown. But life, as Kierkegaard said, must be lived forwards, there is no other option. 

I am making spring rolls last night, cutting vegetables and rolling them inside wet rice paper. She is saying things about a decision: this choice or this choice?

If it were about shoes or a shade of lipstick, I would not have an opinion because the good Lord gifted me with only five pairs of shoes and the want of no more, and lipstick belongs on the mouths of grandmothers in Roman Catholic churches and Ukrainian family reunions. But the choice in discussion is more weighty than things like shoes or lipsticks anyway. 

When she has given me all the options I answer honestly, with as much wisdom as I can muster from my tired mind and spent soul: whichever you choose will not change the trajectory of your life and God is still good, holy, and loving. 

This is all the wisdom I can offer when my hands are messy with hoisin sauce and my heart is messy with fears of my own. 

Because here is what I know of the heart of God and the whole of our lives: we are loved and we are held and, in the end, we are finished and completed. 

It is a great and grand fear of ours to feel that this vapor we live in will make or break the backs of many, and I don’t mean to rob from you the sense of destiny on your life. But I know this and sometimes I think it is the only thing I know: He is more grand and great and glorious than the dominos I will leave falling behind me and the catastrophes in front of me. 

Your destiny will not be robbed as long as He owns the house. 

And He does, friends, He does. 

OIL and WATER and THE LIES WE TELL OURSELVES

I've got layers of lies 

that I don't even know about yet. 

Sara Groves

Here's what happened:

A friend told me something and I believed her. I do that. I'm a believing, trusting sort of person. The thing is, what she told me was only half true. Not half true to her—she told me the truth as best as she could, but it was only half of the whole truth. I didn't know the other parties involved, so what could I do? I believed her. This is what friends do.

But the water has sunk to the bottom and the oil has risen to the top and with it all the floating particles that are still coated with enough water that I can't look into that cup without seeing more of the whole story.

And my heart is sick.

Because her true-to-her story was only half of the story and now I know the other half, and the other half is my friend too, and when you love oil and water, even if they hate each other, what can you do? You believe them both with as much grace as you can muster. This is what good friends do.

But at some point the whole thing gets shaken up again and it takes a while for things to settle and while it's still shaken you feel sicker and sicker still because there are always three sides to every story, hers, his, and the horrible, awful, honest truth. With a choice so divided, what can you do? You choose truth. This is what the truest friend does.

To choose truth, though, means to lose other things, namely trust.

Today trust was lost and I mourn that. I mourn it so hard and so deeply because I have been lied to, though neither of them did the lying.

I was the one lying all along. And that is the most heartbreaking of it all.

Paul admonishes the Thessalonians to "aspire to live quietly and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you."

I'm stuck on that today because I didn't live quietly and I listened to the lies. But the lies were of my own making and they said something like this: You are big enough to handle the heartbreaking details of someone's life all by yourself. You are big enough to have an opinion on lives that aren't your own. You are big enough to discern truth from lies and from opinions and cries.

The truth is that I am not a part of the problem or the solution here; I am only a particle that floated to the top of his story, coated in the residue of her story. Just one small particle.

And if God did not give me the grace to handle this (at least without some amount of bellyaching), then it is probably best for me to simply bow out.

KISSING FEAR

People are worried about me, it seems. One post about sleeping alone and suddenly the world cares about who you're sleeping with.

Or not with, as the case may be. 

Intimacy with a man isn't the only thing missing in my life, if you want the real junk on me, you should know this: I'm feeling less than intimate with God these days too. 

The 'worship movement' send kisses to Jesus thing has always made me uncomfortable because I can count the sum total of my kisses on two hands and probably less than that. And also because I'm probably one of the few people in the world who thinks that when Solomon was songing about the kisses of his lips he really meant literal kisses and literal lips and not this pseudo expressive  moment we imagine we're having with Jesus. 

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I've never been one to wake up in the wee hours to have Jesus, journal and Jamba Juice, and so my version of 'time with God' has always been more of 'meditate on the same verse for three weeks until I have it so deeply in me I couldn't forget it if I tried.' This system has worked well for me in some seasons and not so well for me in other seasons. We are in a good season for now. 

The verse of the season is Psalm 130:3-4, "If you oh Lord should mark iniquities, Who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness that you may be feared."

I've been camped here precisely because of that last word there: feared.

I stay far from intimacy because I fear it. 

This is the same reason I hesitate to ask forgiveness from God (or anyone else), because I fear. 

So how is it that David is saying here, "there's forgiveness with God, so you can fear Him."

You see why I need to camp out here for a few days?

 ****************

I'm a fairly gentle sort of person, amiable, easygoing, I try not to cross people and when I do, I try to make amends quickly. But it is not because I want their forgiveness, it is because I fear that they will not give it to me unasked. 

But God? God grants me forgiveness so that I may fear Him? It doesn't seem to add up at first. But:

How grand is it that the God of the universe, the Creator of everything created, the Provider of everything given, and the Good of all that is good would grant forgiveness and how much more grand is it of Him to guarantee it to His children?

I find it is the guarantee that is more difficult for me to believe than the actual forgiveness.

I am the child who doesn't believe her parent heard her the first six times she asked for another quarter for the gumball machine. I keep asking because in my heart there is no guarantee. 

David is saying to us, "Hey, listen, there's a guarantee of forgiveness for you children of God, which means that He can be trusted, which means that He is more grand, more holy, more spectacular than you can imagine. Worship. Fear. Be in awe. Draw near. 

He's not marking your iniquities, so stand close, stand near, be intimate, He can be trusted." 

SHAKE and BURN

One of the things that frustrated me about Christianity, and Christians in particular, was the notion that heaven was a place where we were supposed to want to stand around a throne singing three chord praise songs to a god who was the epitome of narcissistic.

And the truth is all I could think about was: God, don't you dare come back and destroy this world and make me float up on harps singing praises to you, because I haven't even had sex yet and that seems a pretty lame trade.

You can appreciate, I'm sure, why 'falling away from faith' was as easy as the child who 'forgets' his parent has asked repeatedly for him to leave his shoes at the door. Where there's no conviction, there's no joy in the obedience.

In 2010 faith finally became something tangible and intangible at the same time and I was okay with that, but I was surprised by the theology that wooed me into deep faith and a love I'd never known or felt before.

It was the understanding of eternity this theology embraced that was so enticing and beautiful to a girl who'd experienced nothing but the seeming harsh backhand of God in a life of pseudo-faith. These people pointed out the eschatological inconsistencies in the vast majority of evangelical milieus and I was hooked. Part of the reason I had felt so gypped in my faith is because it seemed a lopsided trade where God always got the bigger and better portion: I had to endure this, so He could get glory for eternity (albeit glory brought by white robed minions on three chords and a djembe)?

Now, it seems laughable to think that way, but back then it felt sickening and disgustingly true. My heart sneered at that sort of God, even when my actions betrayed me.

But this new theology (even if it was very old theology) talked about how the purpose of everything is to glorify God whose greatest act of love toward us was coming down, dwelling among us, and then stretching out, bruised and broken, and dying for us. And so it meant too, in the face of such love, such holiness, that in eternity everything that did not glorify Him would be consumed by the All Consuming Fire.

And this captured me.

All I knew was all around me, all inside of me and all overflowing from me was brokenness—a sick, cyclical, deep, brokenness—but I still liked who I was. I still liked parts of me that seemed real and authentic and individualistic. An eternity of robotic, white-robed, harmonic minions covering acres of white clouds seemed the absolute antithesis of enjoyable to me.

The Bible, on every page, from Genesis to Revelation, suddenly came alive now with God's ultimate plan of redemption. And it was not the burning of everything and creating new, but the refining of everything and restoring it to original intent. This captured me. This retained me. This fueled me. Why?

Because it means what I'm doing here on earth isn't a waste. The truthful, honest, real, authentically obedient things I am doing will be refined, but not disposed of. Not burned up. If they're bringing glory to God (even in their fractional sliver of goodness), He's delighted in them. He's like a kid who brings home pockets of strings, pebbles, a frog, a rubber-band: worthless to the naked eye, but treasures to him. 

That's a God I can serve. That's a God who I can feel loved by because I know I'm worthless to the naked eye, but I want to be a treasure, more than anything. I can't live under the fear of being burned alive a la Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins theology. And I can't live under the tyranny of being good enough to escape refining a la holiness theology.

But to know that every part of me that is disgusting and revolting is somehow, in a strange and ultimate way, in accordance with God's plan because He knows it's not there for eternity and He's not worried about me walking through eternity with a limp—oh, I can live there. I can abide there. I can find faith there. I can rest there.

“Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire." Hebrews 12:26-29

RESIDUAL

The great tragedy of my generation, and perhaps yours too, is we cannot appreciate the residue.

Almost two years ago, when I was ready to leave the church, finished with unanswered questions, unexplained theology, and mostly my unchanged heart, a wise man cautioned me. He didn't say I couldn't leave, he didn't even answer my burning questions about tithing and church membership. He simply talked about residue.

He told me how every place into which we walk, we take with us the residue of the former place. Sometimes this is good. Sometimes it isn't. But it doesn't change the fact that there is residue.

I know this residue because I know my family, and the awful and beautiful desperation in each of us to find some resolution in our faith. The thing is, I'm not sure any one of us realizes every new place is unsoiled in our minds until we walk in there with our past and hand it with trembling hands to yet another person to review.

I have found an abiding rest among people who laud the character of God more than the handiwork of God. For my oldest brother, he found solace in liturgy and the Orthodox church; another brother finds his sanctuary among people and an adventurous life; yet another one took his to the grave and another one has sworn off religion entirely. The one who was four when he declared he would be a pastor, is 17 now and I have no doubt that wherever he goes the gospel is carried. I have yet to see where the youngest two land.

This I do know: were you to gather the doors of every church we have collectively darkened the hallway would go on for a seeming eternity.

The residue my parents left with us (and I'd venture to guess they carried over from their own parents) is a unsatiated curiosity that will not be silenced by the mere telling, but only by the experiencing.

We were the experientially educated.

This meant while other families were stuck in their routines and normality, rote reasons for what they did every single day of life, my family was on some sort of adventure to figure it out. And sometimes it looked different every year. Because this was our family we didn't know any differently, and I cannot thank my parents enough for the flexibility of spirit they gave each of us. There is not one of our brood who will not choose risk over reward every day. This is what they gave us, this is the sweet residue of growing up in my family.

But it also meant my parents were sometimes figuring it out in front of us, as we went along. And that residue was left on us as well. It felt like whiplash sometimes, the speed at which things would change, new convictions, new ways of living. It was always an adventure, but not always a pleasant one. And it left us, me at least, with more questions than answers. This is what I mean when I talk about an unsatiated curiosity--I likely won't stop until I understand something as fully as is possible on this dirt-ridden kingdom (regardless of how many things get torn apart in the process).

It also left me with a deep, deep understanding that people everywhere are figuring it out. Democrats and Republicans, Reformed and Arminian, complementarian and egalitarian, churched and unchurched, organic and prepackaged. Deeply in us, we're still figuring it out, still walking by faith, atheists and Jesus-lovers both.

And deeply in us we bear the residue of someone else who was trying to figure it out, and on and on it goes.

The great tragedy of my generation is that we fail to appreciate truth regardless of the package or label, and more so, we fail to appreciate the residue it holds and leaves on people around us.

You and I, we're shaped by ideals, ethics, theology, and practices and I guarantee not one of us arrived there on our own. 

We all carry the residue of what came before us.

The next time I find myself wanting to preach something, retweet a clever 140 characters, facebook a quote, or sink into deep thought over an ideal not my own--I want to think about this: who arrived at this thought and what reside were they carrying? And how does my residue read this differently than it was perhaps meant? Or how might my residue lend wisdom to this thought?

I think I would be quieter, less egotistical, and certainly more circumspect if I asked these questions more often.

I think the residue I would leave might be more of a pleasing fragrance than a sticky mess:

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ.       II Corinthians 2:14-17

DAY JOB

This is my day job.

This is also my dream job. As in, if you had asked me what I was hoping to do when I was sloughing my way through a double major and four minors in college, I would have neatly packaged a non-existing job description and it would have looked nearly identical to what I spend my days doing now. 

I love doing what I do so much that I keep tacking on more and more of it through freelancing, until, like I wrote in an email this week, "My right brain gets kicked into a shriveled wad."

So that's where I am right now.

The creative part of me, the part that dreams up designs and implements them, the part of me that loves paper and tactile art, the part of me that words fall out of more quickly than I can piece them together—that very big part of me—it's weary.

Especially because as much as I'd like to only work out of my right brain, there are left brained tasks to be done, taxes, administrative work, my email inbox (gah), printing orders, etc.

I've been thinking about Augustine's disordered loves the past few weeks, partly because I know my love is disordered and a mess, but mostly because I cannot solve or resolve anything.

It's not my job. Not even my day job.

JACOB, the PRODIGAL SON

There are two prodigal sons in the bible and I am always the first one: Jacob.

Jacob, that feisty thief, manipulating birthrights and blindness for his own gain, and what did he gain? The whole world, perhaps, two wives, at least, and a dozen kids, but what did he gain?

He was a man in search of what was not his, a new name, the name of his older brother; he was a slave to what he would have to work for, the wife of his youth. Everything he wanted was never within his grasp.

I am that brother.

…………………

Last night before the sermon finished out and we began to sing, my pastor talked a bit about how on good days it is so easy to believe the gospel, there are days when his soul is able to spot lies and speak truth to his propensity to walk by the law and not grace. But on the bad days, it is not so easy and those lies creep in that he has work for his salvation, that he has to work for what is not his by birth and only by grace. And oh, I felt that.

I felt that.

Then we sung about restoration, joy, and new names, and I thought of Jacob.

I am Jacob. I am always in search of what eludes me, what is not rightfully mine, and what I want so desperately. I know that wrestling he did at the valley of Peniel, I know that plea, "I won't let go until you bless me!" I know that angst, more than anything else I know, that unrelenting fervor until I have what seems possible. I will resort to thievery, bribery, or 14 years of hard labor if at the end there is something on earth to show for it.

He got what he wanted when he wrestled with God, but the new name was not the name he once sought to take and the blessing was not health, wealth, and prosperity, but a permanent limp.

…………………

The gospel is two things, it is a burden and it is light—Christ says this and I find myself still wanting it to be one or the other, but not both because my mind is simple and can only grasp what is logical. But this week I am seeing all the dichotomies in my faith, and why, perhaps, it is so difficult for so many to believe.

The gospel is full of dichotomies. Full of seeming contradictions. But I think, more and more, that this is why I believe it so strongly: I cannot live under the weight of the burden without the hope of the lightness, and I cannot thrive under the lightness without the weight of what it means.

I think Jacob must have known that. That night at Peniel, I think he must have known it in a way I can only dream about, that the love of God is deep and just and good and painful. That God gives us new names, but he bruises our hipbones in the process because we will run ahead stealing birthrights and wreaking havoc if we haven't got a limp to slow us down, remind us of the lengths to which His love goes.

Maurice Denis: Wrestling with the Angel 1893

I'M {not} OKAY

"All we need is need." 

John Gerstner

We are little playwrights, each composing our dramas or letting them compose themselves around us, each sure that our drama is not drama or each convinced that our drama is the only drama. And God made us this way, which I cannot figure my way through. He set us in a garden with a plot to tend, a tree to stay away from, and a voice to ignore—and we couldn't even do that.

I have never been a fan of drama, but it has never stopped me from feeling alone in the universe (a gross misdiagnoses).

So when someone knows and someone understands my brokenness, it is tempting to stay there. To rest in that place where I am known or I feel known. To gather in the faint light of camaraderie, join hands that are desperate for human touch, and try to make sense of the parts that have fallen apart.

But in the end, sense is not always made in the gathering and that is why we must leave the faint light, the strong and calloused hands, and move back into places where we are misunderstood and ignored and unheard.

I am grateful for those times, though they are few, the moment I catch the eye of another and our souls sigh in unison: me too.

Me too. 

...............

A friend wrote a book a few years ago and that book wrecked me from the inside out. We didn't know each other at the time and so when I tell him now what an affect that book had on me then, I make sure he knows that I am not in the business of flattery. If we were not friends, the book still would have wrecked me and because we are now friends, the book wrecks me more because I know how that book wrecked him.

But it doesn't change the fact that it was the balm and the comfort, the help and the nod I needed when I read it. I needed to be not-okay and his book helped me see that that was okay.

...............

My church has a saying, "We're okay if you're not okay," and it was the first thing I heard when I came here. This was what landed me slump-shouldered in the back row, tears falling unashamedly: to not be okay is a broken and beautiful thing.

But there's a second part of that mantra, "...but we're not okay for you to stay that way," and that is Christ in us, the hope of glory.

Glory hasn't come yet, though, so it is Christ in us for now and He is the hope of Glory—and this resolves us, sets us, frees us, calms us.

Because we, none of us, are okay.

SEEing CLEARLY

 pinterest

I was nine when I wore my first pair of glasses. Poor eyesight runs in my family, but the thing is, I had myself convinced for years that I did not need glasses at age nine.

It happened like this: I was a skinny, shy nine year old, somehow left alone in a dark room with a fat optometrist and a dimly lit letter-board. It was a recipe for a myriad of things, not the least of which was for all my fears to rouse their heads.

He stood directly in front of me and asked me, "Can you see this? How about this? How about with this eye? This eye?"

I answered him as surely as I could, but the truth was that his fat backside was in the way and if I couldn't see, it wasn't because I couldn't see, but because I was unable to see around that hulking white-coated posterior.

He wrote my prescription and I picked out frames, ugly pink plastic things, but this was 1989 and ugly, pink plastic things were the thing. I hated those glasses and would lose them frequently, particularly when I needed to practice the piano or do homework.

I could not have known it at that point in life, but it stands earmarked as the first moment that knot in my stomach kept me from telling the truth, to spare the feelings or the possible disappointment of someone.

It's strangulating, this fear. It keeps me sullen and fearful, it eats away at my friendships, it makes unhappy situations last a seeming eternity. There's no way to wrap it up properly as selflessness or humility, as I often try to do. People have accused me of being a floor-mat or codependent, but however they have described it, it doesn't fix the real problem, which is that I cannot tell you the truth.

But the reason is more surprising than I like to admit, and it's because I cannot tell myself the truth.

The truth is that I am not acting in humility or in the best interest of someone (or myself, or God) by shutting down and shutting out when I'm confronted. It is not good when the preferences of someone else go voiced and mine sequester in. The truth is that it is not for anyone's good when they are able to bandy their requests about, demanding that I acquiesce to their demands, while I keep silent about…well…anything.

I say it's because I'm easy-going like that.

But that's fear too.

The truth is that inside I'm broiling over with the fear that I'll never be with someone with whom I can be honest. And that fear turns into angst so quickly and frustration, when it gives way, turns into an ugly green-eyed monster who is a master of manipulation.

Nobody wins.

Poor eyesight runs in my family and so does fear and manipulation and anger and self-righteousness and I suspect it runs in your family too, if we are born of the same Adam. But glasses help turn what is blurry and blocked into what is seen and illuminated. And fear is illuminated by covenantal relationships.

I don't know of another fix for fear but perfect love and I think that's a lifetime search—especially if the people around you are less interested in loving well.

But I know this: Perfect Love says what it believes and it says it so strongly that it stretched out, bleeding and bloodied, and died—even in the face of fear. So I want to let that change how I'm confronted and how I confront, how I tell the truth and how I keep silent, and how I practice humility and not self-righteousness.

INVITATION and COMMUNION

In Tennessee spring comes early and it comes with a rush of green, a smattering of rain, and balmy air. And one warm day in late February, at our pentecostal university, in our capstone class full of doubters, our favorite literature professor extended an invitation to us that changed us all.

She, unlike the rest of the faculty who were mostly staple Pentecostals or Baptists, attended a small Episcopalian church a few blocks away. We all knew the church because we were not only students of literature, we were students of history and this small, stone chapel had more history on its front steps than most of the mega-churches had on their whole grounds. We smelled history just walking by it.

But that Wednesday afternoon, as the class was finishing, she was teaching on an excerpt from O'Connor or Greene, and there was a hush in our room, so quiet we could hear the birds outside the closed windows and the traffic down Ocoee street. I cannot remember what she said save for how she ended her exposition, "...so I'm inviting you all to come to church with me after this, come, eat the bread, share the wine, receive the ash on your forehead, speak the liturgy, rest in what is finished by Christ, but partaken by all of us, the fellowship of His sufferings."

I don't remember how many of us took her up on her offer, but I did, and a few others did and it was a silent group who walked those blocks to the Episcopalian stone church. We felt something holy in that classroom—it had felt so long since there was anything that felt holy in our lives so inundated by three chord songs, loud prophesies, and color coordinated worship teams.

We filed in slowly, quietly, sitting on hard, uncomfortable pews, with our knees held close and our minds alive.

I do not remember what was said in that sanctuary that day, but I know it was the first time that I tasted real wine at the communion table, the first time I knew that sharing in the sufferings of Christ was not sweet like grape juice, but bitter and stinging sometimes like wine.

It was the first time the wafer melted on my tongue, sitting there, unfamiliar in my mouth, unlike the chunks of bread I would hurriedly chew in every other communion experience.

And it might have been the first time that I understood that communion is communal and interdenominational. A shared experience with Christ and with one another.

Even though I had walked into my classroom with no thought for Lent or Ash Wednesday or Communion, I walked out of those wooden church doors heavy with responsibility and heavy with hope. I don't remember what I fasted from that first Lenten season, nor in subsequent ones, every year has been different. But I will never forget those holy moments, that quiet hope of resurrection, or those two professors of English who pushed a classroom of jaded doubters into seekers and finders.

Appalachian History Site

Continued from yesterday.

JARGON and FAITH

I went to a private university which means that my classes were mostly made up of rich, white kids, and—in my case—tongue-speaking, bible wielding kids. A few of them could sing okay.

I learned in my first week there, a transferred junior from the godless north, that Chattanooga was one of the belt buckles of the Bible belt. I still haven't figured out why a belt is the chosen metaphor for the churched area. To keep followers in line, perhaps, by the threat of twenty lashes? Or perhaps to squeeze them all back where they belonged on the ever fattening waistline of American Evangelicalism?

It was my first experience into Pentecostalism and probably my first in any sort of Baptist environment. We snobby northerners tend to group believers into sheep and goats: non-denominational or God's Frozen Few. There are no in-betweens. This is how we convince ourselves that every stranger will be converted through the power of apologetic or signs on street-corners—our methods aren't always the best.

The belt-buckle is no different, though, the jargon is nauseating and the songs tired. By my last semester in this town (curiously populated not only by churches, but also drug stores and banks—did no one else notice the abundance of all three and perhaps a telling correlation?), I was weary of pentecostal theology in word and in deed.

Jesus was not kidding when he said that some would prophesy in His name but never know Him. Aside from my small group of close friends and a few others in our English department, I wondered sometimes if anyone knew who Jesus was at all. Jesus, the man, not the concept.

Every graduate of our university had to take a capstone class in their field and I looked forward to mine from the day I began to study there. If our diploma was our ticket to the real world, the capstone class was our dues. In it we would study great works by Christians writers—we would dissect O'Connor for a final time, we would read Wilbur with confidence in his allusions, and we would wrestle through memoir by Beuchner and others.

Our capstone was taught by everyone's favorite professor of literature and joined by the famed staple of the department, who, after 50 years, was retiring after our class. This promised to be the capstone of the capstones.

It also helped that both professors whispered to us that we were one of their favorite classes ever. You can't keep a good man down and so we were a class of laughter, tears, camaraderie, and challenge—floating effortlessly by on the belief that we were believed in. And so we were.

I do not remember the content of what I learned in that class. Nothing.

This is what I do remember: we were a class of skeptics and thinkers, trained to analyze and criticize and characterize and generalize—and there are few better social constructs in which for this to happen but a private pentecostal university. By the end of four (or five) years of schooling ourselves with these methods, the church could not escape our microscopic minds.

We were a classroom full and brimming over with faltering faith.

Continued tomorrow 

A STUDY of GOD

Someone wrote me an email this week full of concern. It seems a thread of theology has changed my life and can’t keep itself from weaving into the words on this page. They named it as they saw it. They quoted my lines and captioned them with a man’s name and then they slapped an –ist on the end of his name and called me that too.

It doesn’t matter that I haven’t read a stitch of his doctrine, couldn’t name his tenets of faith if I tried—the damage was done and they might as well have put a scarlet letter on me in their own mind.

Don’t worry, I responded nicely and graciously and I think we’re still friends, though I told him if my blog offends him so much, he probably shouldn’t associate with it, otherwise other people may begin to call him one of these theological-disciples as well. You are what you eat and all that, you know? At least I am, it seems.

If transformation is the changing of one thing to another, then theology, for me, has been nothing but transformative. I told a friend once that if our theologies couldn’t be subject to change then what in life could be? And I stand by that.

I know more than anything that I want the Word and Spirit alone to be that which changes my theology, but I am no fool because it is Life that has the final word.

I cannot tease my concept or study of God apart from what He has done in and through and because and in spite of me. I am a living, breathing theology. I am like paintings by art students “A Study of Light” or “A Study in Contrasts.” I am a study of God. That is not to say that I am God, not at all, but that I perceive God and I present Him, though He doesn’t need me to any more than light itself needs permission to flood a room through a sliver of space. It exists and so it lights. God exists and so has chosen us as His vessels.

What I am saying is that what we think about when we think about God is and should be transformative, it should change us today and it should change us tomorrow. But it also should be transformative itself.

Paul called it going from glory to glory and I think sometimes we want to believe that all those changes happen in one swoop, like Paul himself, on the road to Damascus. But more and more I am convinced that there is something to be said for the progressive nature of that sentence: We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.

That, friends, is a comfort to me.

It is a warm, warm, warm blanket to me.

I am beholding.
I am being transformed.
I am going from one degree of glory.
I am going to another degree of glory.

I am a study of God, being transformed into the same image.

The Same Image.

It wasn’t lost on those Corinthians—that word Image. They knew Image. The knew Imago. They were an idol-worshiping, image-making people. But they knew Whose Image they were transforming into and it wasn’t Paul or another Apostle; and for us it’s not a dead theologian or a living one.

The truth is that the gospel reaches deep, deep, deep inside of us, pulls out the residue of us, the filthy rags of righteousness, and the dregs of our past, and redeems it for a degree of glory. And then tomorrow, the gospel reaches back into us, pulls out some more, and redeems it for another degree of glory. And this happens until breath is gone and Life begins for real.

This is a study of God.

This is how God works, not man, not my blog, not my study of the Bible, not the sermons I listen to each week or the sermons you’re listening to right now. This is how God alone works in our lives.

So, my email-friend, I hope you’re not reading this. I really hope you’re not.

I hope you’re not because I don’t want my theology to trip you up. If it illuminates God to you, then read on. But if it steals one iota of joy from you in the reading, step away, close your browser, and live! Live life forward in the fullness of what God is revealing to you today!

But prepare for your theology to change and to change you in the process.

From one degree of glory to another.

 Half-face

Since we have such a hope, we are very bold, not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not gaze at the outcome of what was being brought to an end. But their minds were hardened. For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts. But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. 

II Corinthians 3 ESV