What Can I Do?

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.  Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially those who belong to the family of believers.  Galatians 6:9-10

Anyone else out there ever get stuck watching a really distressing amount of Elmo's World?  A major feature of that show revolves around Elmo checking up on his neighbor, Mr. Noodle, who is always attempting something interesting, and usually doing it wrong.  He tries to read a book, for instance, and struggles with such basics as opening the cover and holding it right-side up.  Meanwhile, Elmo and a helpful but creepy chorus of disembodied children's voices shout instructions to him.  I think the segment is meant to demonstrate to kids that we can only accomplish our goals through persistent effort, and we shouldn't give up when things are hard.  I personally worry because no one ever addresses with Elmo the impropriety of constantly spying on the neighbors.  (Also, why do Elmo's window shade and table drawer conspire to make his life difficult? Is it because they know he's a snoop? Just wondering...)
      The medium may be a furry muppet with socialization problems, but the message is familiar.  Don't give up! If at first you don't succeed,  etc. etc. This is valuable advice if the motivation for giving up is frustration. Especially for little kids, the tendency is to be aggravated by the unexpected difficulty of a task. What to do, though, when the problem is not frustration,  but weariness? Not the difficulty of a task, but it's constancy? Or even just the sheer number of things that have to be done?
       When there is a never ending mountain of work to be done and no realistic chance of finishing, that is when even the grown-ups want to quit. Even worse,  sometimes we know from our experience that doing our very best will not be enough to make the changes in the world that need to be made. We can finish  all the tasks on the list, and there will still be needs to be met, and work to be done. How do we follow the exhortation from Galatians and not become weary?
        It seems to require a little strategic giving up. When the work is overwhelming,  make peace with the realization that it will not all get done. Tell yourself,  maybe every day that you won't finish all the things you really need to get done.  Instead, ask yourself "what CAN I do?" Here in this moment, I can accomplish something,  help someone, get something started, make just a little more out of my time. It won't happen, though, if I can't let go of my list, my expectations. I have to face, not the fear of failure, but it's certainty.  This day will get away from me.  There will be a pile of unfinished something still looming over my head. So each task I undertake must be something valuable unto itself.  I have to quit thinking in terms of getting done with everything and instead work to contribute something good to the world every time I get the chance.
        The fact that I cannot clean the whole house (or the whole living room) will not stop me from picking up the legos! I will heroically save my family from painful foot injuries!  What next?  I can't reverse poverty, but I really can give something to the food bank when the grocery store has those handy coupons at the check-out.  I should have posted at least 6 blogs in the month since I started working on blogging again.  Instead, I've spent four weeks knocking this post out a few sentences at a time.  Guess what? That's still more writing than I've done in a year.  Progress! I may never make all the difference I wish to make, but I will never stop making some difference, if I persevere.  So, what CAN you do today?  Don't give up, Mr. Noodle.

Total Depravity

               You know, I’m not a 5-point Calvinist.  In fact, I’m not a Calvinist at all, but I am quickly coming to believe whole heartedly in the total depravity of humanity, mostly thanks to Facebook.  We are hopeless slaves to sin.  I’m sure someone recently posted a pithy little picture with a caption to that extent.  Just watching the speed with which people that I know to be good people, who honestly believe themselves to be trying to stand up for what they believe is right, degenerate into outright hatefulness and cruelty in public forums is enough to show me our desperate need for the grace and the cross of Christ. 

               Apart from Christ, it seems that the natural child of righteousness is animosity toward those who are less right.  Apart from Christ, it seems that being tolerant of others can lead directly to apathy regarding injustice and abuse.  Anytime we step outside the radical and glorious light of the Cross, even our best only makes everything worse.  The more we try, the more we fail.  The less we try, the more we wither.  And just to be clear, Christians are exactly no better than the rest of the world at putting into practice what Christ shows us and offers us.

               Obviously, disagreements, even passionate disagreement, is an unending condition of the human race, at least as long as we retain our powers of thought.  The problem is, we see those with whom we disagree as the enemy.  Oh, what’s that?  You don’t see anyone as your enemy?  Then why did you post that anonymous thing on facebook calling them all morons, bigots, or whatever the insult of the day is?  Maybe you don’t have facebook.  You’re not off the hook.  There are hundreds of ways, whether on the internet or in good old fashioned casual conversation, to speak cruelly of others, and we all do it sometimes.  Whether we even realize it or not, those we see as “wrong,” we treat as being evil, and if we really don’t think they’re evil, the shame on us is doubled, because then we are being rude for no reason at all.

               This is why we all need to crawl together back to the foot of the cross.  We need some sackcloth and ashes to show our repentance for the way we speak to and about one another.  We have to realize that the grace that will break us out of the cycle and stop the escalation before one more heart is broken doesn’t come from us.  Colossians chapter 1 makes this much clear:  We are God’s enemies, because of our total wrongness, until we are reconciled to Him through Christ, because of His total rightness.  This suggests three things to me:

1.      None of us is “right” enough to be accepted by God on our own, so maybe none of us is “right” enough to vilify someone else even if they are obviously wrong.

2.      The work of the cross is powerful enough to bridge the gap between our sinfulness and God’s holiness, so surely it is powerful enough that there may be reconciliation between us here on earth, all of whom are sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

3.      Did you catch that, according to scripture, the work of reconciliation started with the One who is right?  The One and only in all of reality who had an unequivocal right to judge and reject, took it upon Himself to fix what was broken because of us.

Soooo….if you’re in any way serious about imitating Christ, and you see someone who is obviously wrong and sinning and lost, you don’t get to call them names.  You don’t get to control them.  You don’t even really get to stop them.  What you get to do is lay down your life for them, in any way you can.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, will ever heal what is wrong with all of us except for the grace of God.   How will any of us ever know just how healed and reconciled and redeemed God would make us unless we extend that grace to each other, and do so publicly, as well as privately?  I’m really tired of trying to correct the world.  I’m really tired of working to make sure that right prevails, and the evil are shamed, boycotted, and legislated against. I just want to sit, slumped and head bowed, at the foot of the Cross and ask Jesus to move in our world in a way that I cannot. I don’t care what you say about me on your facebook page.  I’m getting out of the business of fixing other people, and instead I’m just going to try to extend some grace to the broken.  The rest is in His hands, which is exactly where it has been all along.

Chainbreaker

One quick note: I composed the following blog the Monday after Easter, I just procrastinated on getting it posted.  Sorry it's not as timely or relevant as it would have been, but hopefully it's still worth a read!

Yesterday morning, the youth at church planned and led an amazing Easter sunrise service, culminating in a parade around the sanctuary to Charlie Hall’s “Chainbreaker,” complete with paper chains.  That song never, never, fails to move me to tears, which also means it causes me to think deeply about its meaning.  “You are free/you are free/drop your chains sons and daughters/come and run in liberty.”  Freedom through Christ is a common enough theme throughout Christianity, one that always stirs emotions, but what does it mean?

I felt that freedom all the more profoundly yesterday because I was not experiencing a number of other emotions that I associate with freedom.  I was tired, stressed, and for a number of reasons, a little sad.  Our congregation has been through a lot this year, and there were people that I missed yesterday.  Freedom in Christ doesn’t seem to mean freedom from pain or heartbreak, doesn’t appear to mean safety from bad things happening, and clearly is not immunity from the ability or even entirely from the desire, to sin.

So what does freedom from the power of sin mean?  Yes, it obviously means that we can be forgiven our sins and thus freed from eternal damnation, but is that the limit of freedom?  What exactly are the chains that are broken?  There’s a very subtle cycle that sin moves us into, both our desire to commit sin and the pain we experience when others sin against us, or those we love.  In the face of great pain, or the strong desire to take actions that will cause others pain, two instincts take over: the instincts to distance and devalue.  We push others away, and we tell ourselves they don’t matter.  We lessen the depths of our relationships and the strength of our commitments, as well as draining away the passion from what we used to value, and it’s pretty obvious why we do it. We don’t want others to hurt us, and we don’t want to have to care if we hurt them. We don’t want to feel how far we fall short of our values and ideals, so we set the bar lower on purpose. 

Obviously, we all do this to some extent, and this is bad, but sometimes we don’t even see how little we are left with when we follow this path.  We make ourselves so small when we allow nothing in our lives that is big enough to threaten or challenge us.  We make ourselves so small, and that tiny, tiny piece of self that is left to us becomes what we live and die for.  All our resources are turned to protecting and justifying it.  This trap of distance and devaluation is the chain that sin forges for us, the chain that holds us back from the life abundant that Christ has for us.

The hope found in the cross allows us to face our pain and our failures, to own them rather than to shrink from them, reducing ourselves thereby.  The crazy truth of God’s boundless forgiveness and ceaseless presence with us allows us to hurt without losing hope and to fail without despairing.  When this happens in our lives, we are freed from the need to turn parts of ourselves off, to make our relationships shallow, or reduce our values to lip service.  We are set free from the chain of the mediocre life.  Christ alone can halt our downward spiral into isolation, self-satisfaction, and endless quests for diversion. 

Winning the Mommy Wars

The commentators on the news this morning are at it again.  It seems that yet another study has come out revealing the astounding information that working moms struggle with guilt and stay-at-home moms struggle with feeling unfulfilled.  Really?  This is news?  ‘Cause I’m pretty sure there are also some working parents who feel unfulfilled and some stay-at-home parents who feel guilty.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that there are plenty of people who don’t even have kids who yet manage to feel both guilty and unfulfilled at the same time.  Has anyone considered the possibility that both of these emotions are just an unavoidable part of what it means to be human?

            In case anyone is wondering, I am both a stay-at-home and a working parent. That is to say I work part time, and largely either from home or with my daughter accompanying me to work.  This is the new thing, this working and parenting simultaneously thing.  It’s touted as the perfect compromise that means no one has to give up anything, and know what?  That turns out to be what we in the religion game like to refer to as a lie.  Working from home largely means the following for me:  It means I get to experience both the guilt over leaving my child to learn witchcraft from Dora the Explorer for hours at a time (parents of pre-schoolers, back me up.  We all know Dora’s a witch, right?) at the exact same time I experience the frustration of knowing that my work will never, ever really get done.  Guilt over the ploys I use to distract my child coincides with aggravation at how ineffective they actually are.  Everyone gets cranky, and we all need a nap. 

Know what?  I’m pretty sure that all the guilt, all the aggravation, all the moments of feeling like a failure at pretty much everything are in no way indications that anything is really wrong.  I never signed anything that said I get to be happy all the time, or have everything go my way.  The Bible says straight out in Romans 8 that frustration is part of God’s plan for the world.  That verse is right before the popular passage about nothing being able to separate us from the love of God.  I’m pretty sure it’s not a coincidence that those two ideas are presented together, or that everyone always quotes the victorious bit at the end and glosses over the whole “aggravation is part of the plan” bit. 

So, if we accept the premise that a certain amount of headaches, doubts, and regrets go with any path we choose, what do we do, especially with regards to the challenges of turning children into functioning human beings with minimal neurosis?  Well, I look at it this way:  It takes a certain amount of time, energy, attention, and bread-winning to make and keep a home and raise a family in it.  There are many different ways to split that work up, and how each family wants to manage that is really up to them.  Maybe it takes both parents at work just to pay the bills (or maybe there’s only one parent and you do the best you can do.)  Maybe it takes a full time parent at home to attend to the business of homemaking.  Maybe you both work part time or maybe grandma moves in to help out.  All of those systems are fraught with aggravations of their own.  It doesn’t matter what set-up you come up with, you’re going to have to work a few things out, so take a deep breath, switch off all the angry voices in your head, and figure out what is the best use of everyone’s time and resources.  Just remember these two things.

1.     Domesticity matters.  Whether it’s someone’s full-time job or everyone’s part-time job, home, and all that goes with it, is terribly important.  The temptation to measure self-worth by net-worth is overwhelming, and shouts at us that if something isn’t a revenue stream, it is of minor importance.  That pressure can drown out the deeply human need for refuge.  Creating a space that is safe, welcoming, peaceful, and maybe just a little boring is important work.  It is anything but a small or limiting task.  It can absolutely take everything a person has to give, and it is an endeavor worthy of giving everything you have.  If you doubt it, just go ask anyone who never had one.  Every participant in a home has to contribute to it or it won’t work, so no matter how many hours you put in at your job this week, don’t forget that you are needed in the place where you live.

2.     Home, work, family, career, fun, sacrifice, guilt, fulfillment, it all needs to be part of a bigger picture.  There is work to be done in this world, and for whatever reason, it seems that we are more useful in groups, (families, churches, communities, offices,) than we are as individuals.  We are also more dangerous in groups, but more on that later.  Every family looks a little different, but whatever yours is like, it’s been given to you for a reason.  What is the mission God has given your family?  What contribution can you make to the lives of others?  What is that you can share because of what you are already sharing?  Servant-hood, not out of guilt but out of purpose, may be the best path to fulfillment.

Honestly

I think honesty is waaaaay overrated.  Now hang on a minute.  I’m not saying that honesty isn’t a great virtue.  I’m not saying that honesty isn’t essential to healthy interpersonal relationships.  For a Christian, honesty is non-negotiable in contrast to its opposite: deliberate deception.  I’m firmly opposed to deception, even in the little-white-lie-to-facilitate-everyone’s-good-mood capacity.  For me, the problem is that our quest for honesty has replaced our search for truth.

As valid and valuable as it is, honesty is not truth.  In John 14:6, Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  Truth is not contained in us, nor does it originate with us, nor does it end with us.  Truth can inhabit us, but we don’t possess it.  Truth comes from God, and is much, much bigger than anything we can be honest or deceptive about.  Honesty, on the other hand, is our best attempt to “tell the truth” about what is going on inside of us.  What do I genuinely believe, perceive, and experience? What have I done or said, and why did I say or do it?  These are the things about which we can be honest.  These are the things which we can know.  Truth is something sufficiently higher than we are that we can never know it fully, at least not while we see through this mirror, dimly.

How often do we say hurtful words or commit destructive actions in the name of honesty?  “Sometimes the truth is hard” or “at least I’m not being a hypocrite,” or “No one should have to live a lie” becomes our rallying cry, and we run off pell-mell in the direction that we “honestly” want to go.  We all do this.  I’ve done it a million times.  The problem is, no matter how deeply we believe something, it may not be the truth.  Our perceptions are limited, and Truth does not belong to us.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be honest.  Deception is a terrible trap, and lies ruin lives.  It is a good thing not to deceive.  It is a better thing to try to discern what is present or relevant in our situation that might be truer than ourselves.  Our honesty is worthless when we ourselves are deceived, and you can be totally honest and still be dead wrong.

So what’s the take away?  Should we trust ourselves?  I tend to say generally not.  At least, we shouldn’t trust in ourselves only.  In any course of action, or choice of words, no matter how small, there is room for wise council, prayer, research, counting to ten, and all kinds of other steps intended to supplement and enrich our honesty.  Sometimes we simply have to act on the best we know.  Sometimes all we have to go on is what we believe.  When that happens, the best thing we can do is to temper our actions with caution and gentleness, not being afraid to speak or act, but always remembering that someday we may know better, that we can learn from others, and that everyone makes mistakes.  At least, that’s what I honestly think.

Objects in Space

When Christ says anyone who wants to find his life must lose it, He is challenging the central, sinful tenant of every human heart from first century Palestine to modern day America.  It is the principle of self-determination and self fulfillment.  Our goal, far too often is to make ourselves happy.  If we are moral people, our goal is to be happy while causing the minimum amount of damage to others.  If we are flippin’ saints, our goal is to contribute the maximum amount to other people’s happiness. 

Rarely do we ask whether or not happiness is what we were made for.  It’s as though the planet earth were suddenly feeling frisky and adventurous and said, “See you later, sun, I’m off to explore.”  Then took off gallivanting through the galaxy, and suddenly wondered why it couldn’t hold all its stuff together properly.  According to the laws of the universe, it is impossible for any object in space to orbit around itself, and without the gravitational pull of something far larger to keep it on course, all you get is an asteroid, careening around wildly and crashing to its doom on the first surface strong enough to attract it.

We want to be self-determined, but we can’t be.  We don’t have to like it, but we are nowhere near big enough to hold ourselves in orbit.  We have to revolve around something outside of ourselves, and that Something has to be far, far larger than we are.  All of us wake up one day and realize that the choices we’ve made aren’t making us happy, and aren’t fulfilling us.  I know that I wake up that way at least twice a year.  One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite shows (Wicked, for any of you who don’t know me well enough to guess) sums it up great:  “Happy is what happens when all your dreams come true…isn’t it?” Nope.  Not to be a downer, but every dream that comes true, with all the joy and wonder that it brings, also brings you to the inevitable question: “What now?” If you were counting on that dream to be the end of your journey, you are out of luck, my friend. 

Happiness or fulfillment or whatever you want to call it is a tricky thing.  It is the ultimate truth represented in every fairy tale that contains the legend of a treasure that can only be found when you aren’t looking for it.  Trying to fulfill yourself will never lead to anything but frustration.  Ditto with searching for happiness.  The only way to find either one is to get busy living for something else.  The grain of wheat will never fulfill its purpose by trying to be the best darn grain of wheat it can be.  It was made to turn itself into something else, to be used up and spent in the fulfillment of its calling, and so were we.  Happiness is a frequent and pleasant by-product of surrender, and it is one of God’s greatest gifts to us, but anything that is found within us is too fleeting and flimsy a thing to be that for which we live.

Next time we ask ourselves whether or not something we are doing is making us happy, we first need to ask ourselves whether our own happiness was the point of that action.  If it turns out that we only made that choice to fulfill ourselves, we have to seriously question our expectations.  Why would we ever think that something so great and amazing as happiness or fulfillment could flow out of something as small and narrow as ourselves?

Yeah, but she's our witch

“Yeah, But She’s Our Witch:

Why the Church Should be More like Serenity”

The best t.v. show of all time, “Firefly,” centers on a small spaceship crew trying to get by in the tumultuous universe the human race has made for itself five hundred years from now.  The rag-tag band of outcasts and adventurers that crew the good ship “Serenity” are ostensibly in search of one thing: a job.  Any work you’ve got for them, they’ll do it, from hauling legal cargo and passengers to smuggling contraband and occasionally a little gun-slinging.  They need work.  They need money.  They need food for their table and fuel to keep their ship flying.  They’re a lot like most of us.  Specifically, they’re a lot like any church I’ve ever heard of.

Churches, whether we intend it or not, are goal driven.  We’re always on the look-out for that next job we need to do, trying to discover the work that God wants us to accomplish, the causes He wants us to champion.  We look to find a mission around which we can wrap our congregational identities, believing that if we do so, a sure sign will be that our doors will stay open.  Our lights will stay on.  Our staff will get paid.  We’ll be able to do even more Godly work in the world.  The cycle of blessing will continue when, and only when, we successfully execute the job God wants us to do.

What I’ve always loved about “Firefly,” though, is that over and over again, the mission gets derailed by the needs of the people trying to accomplish it.  The crew must put their work on hold to take care of their own, and sometimes others who come across their path.  Mal takes time out from pursuing a paying job to flatten a guy who insults Inara.  When Book needs a doctor, the job comes to a full stop.  Rescuing Simon and River from danger gets in the way of, well, almost every mission that comes along.  In fact, it’s relatively rare that the crew of Serenity completes their work.  They are really not great successes.  When the crew does see a tidy profit, they almost immediately hand over every cent of it to ransom Mal and Wash from captivity.  In fact, time after time, caring for one another wrecks the crew’s plans, interferes with their work, and complicates their profit.  This is why I want to live aboard “Serenity.”

In church, we know we’re supposed to love each other.  Everyone agrees to that, but when relationships get in the way of accomplishing what we think is supposed to be our “mission,” other people are off the priority list.  Once a person disagrees with us on what the church should be doing or how we ought to do church, that person becomes expendable in our minds.  Sure, if the dispute is minor enough, we might agree to disagree, but if the difference is real and vital, then we feel justified in either winning them over or cutting them loose.  They’re going to hold us back from accomplishing our God-given mission, all that work we believe we are called to do in the world.  They become, to use a very churchy term, “stumbling blocks.”  I mean, I love you and all, but if it’s a choice between you and my mission, then it’s your own fault for not getting with the program.   

The problem is, I’m harboring a growing suspicion that the relationships we develop in church, first with Christ, and then with each other, may be the only mission we are called to in this world.  What if you are supposed to be my only cause?  Knowing you might be supposed to be my only mission.  Loving you could be my only program.  When I look at the scriptures, I see the story of the good Shepherd. 99 sheep are very definitely with the program.  They’re hanging out right where they’re supposed to be, munching on the food they’ve been provided with, staying in the boundaries, obeying their Shepherd.  That’s not good enough for Him.  A shepherd’s whole job was to stay with the sheep, and that’s the one thing He “fails” to do.  The missing sheep leaves a big enough hole that He literally walks away from the rest of His responsibilities to go and restore it, prioritizing the needs of the individual, and the troublemaker at that, over the successful accomplishment of the rest of His task.   

I want to quit thinking of you as something I can dismiss when you don’t support my agenda.  I want a friend who is most present to me when I am most useless to them. In the church, as in the rest of the world, we distance ourselves from others when they become a liability. When someone is caught in failure or sin, the world builds a pyre and the church shows up with the matches.  Where, oh where, are the friends who will show up with a spaceship and some shot-guns and announce: She may be a witch, “but she’s our witch.  Now cut her the hell down.” Where are the people willing to insist that right at the moment when a person becomes worthless or dangerous is the moment when we need to scoop them back up into the fold and hold on for all we are worth?  What, besides that kind of faithfulness will ever open up our hardened, self-satisfied hearts enough for us to be changed?  What else can it truly mean to become the body of Christ on earth?  This church thing, heck this salvation thing, is kind of a crazy idea to begin with.  It shouldn’t work.  Only love, first God’s for us and then ours for each other, will keep us in the air when we ought to fall down.