Motivation

Motivation.


What motivates you? What moves you? What determines how you live your life?


When I talk to Jason about ideas and theology and the questions and theories swirling around me and in me, there is usually a point in the conversation where he can't help but ask, "What difference does it make? Is your life any different if you believe one way or the other?"


As I quibble over details, I have to ask his question "What difference does it make?"


Usually, the answer should theoretically be "It makes all the difference," but then I look at my life and the lives of others around me, and I have to say that people who believe on either side of a question usually live in about the same way.


Here's a perfect example of this quibbling and questioning and the perplexing case of what life looks like on either side of the theories: What happens when we die? As a Protestant Christian, I'm supposed to have a clear, undeniable answer to that. You know, the one that goes something like if we've accepted Jesus we spend eternity in Heaven with Him and if we have not accepted Jesus, have denied Him, or have never even heard of Him, we spend eternity in Hell. Maybe that clear, undeniable answer is right. There are certainly plenty of good arguments that it is, Scripture that does in fact seem to point in that direction, and years of tradition to support it. However, in my mind at least and in the minds of many others, there is plenty to call that clear, undeniable answer into question. Maybe nothing happens, and this is just all there is. Maybe there is a Heaven and Hell kind of situation but not the clouds and halos and fire and brimstone cartoon variations our culture imagines. Maybe there's an eternity that Christians will miss out on because we've gotten it all wrong all these centuries just like the Pharisees and other "brood of viper" types always did even when they were looking Jesus in the face. Maybe Jesus IS the Way but in a different way than the exclusive evangelical Christian way we've interpreted Him to be. Really, who honestly knows? All I can do is choose one to believe the best that I can, based on what I discern from Scripture, academics, prayer, or whatever method of logic, learning, or gut-following I decide to employ.


And there's Jason's question, "What difference does it make?" Well, it makes all the difference. If Jesus is the Only Way, in the exclusive way that we believe He is and everyone who doesn't know Him is destined to an eternity without Him, how should we live? We should be living no less than extremely, radically, only to make His name and way of salvation known. That's it. There shouldn't be any other ambition, any other goals, any other way to spend a moment. Jesus said to leave behind family, to "let the dead bury their own dead," to take up crosses. He used such strong language of leaving all else behind to follow Him. If He is the Way, that's all life should be, right? I mean, what's the point of anything else? Everything else is just a distraction, an earthly idolatry, and a waste of precious time that could be used to make sure that we and everyone else around us goes to Heaven in the end.


If the truth is something a little less extreme and exclusive than that, though, life is a little different. There's less urgency, less need. At least when it comes to the question of eternity, that is. In the here and now, perhaps there is more urgency, more need to make life beautiful and satisfying for ourselves and for others in the world. If nothing happens when we die or nothing that we can be certain of or fully control, then we just make our best possible choice  and try to have a good life and, if we're nice and generous, make the lives of others nice too.


Now, before any of my readers or I write-off the second option for its lack of the truth of Christ, think about it. What do most Christians claim to believe about the question of what happens when we die? Most claim the Heaven through relationship with Jesus only route. Now, how many Christians live like that's true? Seriously. If we believed it's true, really honestly, deeply believed that in our hearts, why would we have any job other than that of a missionary? Why would we bother praying for new jobs or for our finances when we should be praying for salvation for humanity and selling everything we do have to give our money to the poor? Why would we marry or produce children when there are so many already alive and yet unsaved people to attend to? How selfish to create more people-- with the possibility that they may go to Hell no less!-- when there are plenty of other people who need our time and energy to know Jesus.


Back to the word motivation. Back to the question What motivates you? 


I think about Jehovah's Witnesses walking through our neighborhoods in 90+ weather wearing suits and knocking on doors to tell people about what they believe. I think about people going to war or strapping bombs to themselves in the name of religion. What motivates that? Why am I not motivated like that?


The question bothers me deeply. Why am I not motivated? Why am I not bursting to go to the ends of the earth to tell the Gospel of Jesus? Why do I not tell everyone I know about what Jesus means to me? Why am I not knocking on my neighbors' doors to see how I can help them and if I can share my testimony with them? Why am I not thoroughly convinced that that is the right course of action for my life?


I always go back to this idea in David Dark's The Sacredness of Questioning Everything:

My religion is my practice.  It's what I do. (pg. 35)  Will we allow a religious critique of our practice of religion?  Are we up for a redeeming word?  Show me a transcript of the words you've spoken, typed, or texted in the course of a day, an account of your doings, and a record of your transactions, and I'll show you your religion.  (pg. 38)

Even if I am a very religious Christian who goes to church several times a week, reads my Bible twice a day, and prays for everyone I know, there is still going to be a huge part of my life that involves going to work, fixing dinner, eating, cleaning the bathroom, shopping, watching TV. What then is my religion? The religious part of my day or the rest of it? Is the goal to eliminate everything else so that only the religion remains?

Jason has another recurring question, "Can you be a Christian and still like baseball?", meaning can there be any other enjoyment in your life or anything else to take your time if you're truly committed to Christ?

I'm stuck somewhere between the answer that everything is Spiritual and the answer that nothing that looks different from the lives of the Apostles is Spiritual.

What difference do the questions make? None if they're just questions, things to ponder, read about, write about... I want to believe that if I could answer some of my questions conclusively, I could figure out the best way to wrap my life around those answers, to live so that the records and transcripts of my days point to a religion that follows Jesus completely.

Right now, though, it's all just questions and books and day-to-day... thinking about teaching, checking emails from LOFT and shopping for new clothes, reading the Harry Potter series, thumbing through stacks and stacks of teaching materials and making plans, spending time with my husband and friends and family, decorating and cleaning my house again and again, keeping up with reality shows on TV, staying busy and struggling not to be busy,  going to church, wondering and theorizing about God and how He works, being a generally good person and trying to get better, struggling to refine my passions for writing and teaching into being something worthwhile in the world, and trying to find the balance of how to spend the hours of this life in the best way possible... all the while knowing that it isn't fair all I have when others do not, all the while knowing there's so much more to be done in this world...

What motivates me? What should motivate me? And what should it motivate me to do?

Looking, Breathing

I've been looking in books, looking in songs, looking in friends.

All my looking, I think, has finally brought me some glimpses of my aim-- glimpses of God.

In a word, in a lyric, in a conversation and a smile, I breathe a few much-needed breaths.

But I need more than breaths.  I need an expanse of air, a lung transplant, a heart beating properly.

I need God.  I need to look for Him in Him.

Weird revelation, right?  I've been looking everywhere, and I feel like I've started to see.  So why am I scared to look for Him in Him?  What's my hang-up?

I'm so scared of over-mysticism of faith.  I feel like everything I've ever learned about reading the Bible and praying has been a little off somehow, and it's been so long since I did either regularly without doing so as a duty-driven routine.  I remember a time when both sprang from genuine delight in them both-- delight in God, and I want that back.  I want God back.  I want to find Him in Him.

Lord, teach me to pray.

I Need.

There are two ways to be your  own Savior and Lord.  One is by breaking all the moral laws and setting your own course, and one is by keeping all the moral laws and being very, very good... Jesus's message, which is the "true gospel," is a completely different spirituality.  The gospel of Jesus is not religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, moralism or relativism, conservatism or liberalism.  Nor is it something halfway along a spectrum between two poles-- it is something else altogether.  The gospel is distinct from the other two approaches: In its view, everyone is wrong, everyone is loved, and everyone is called to recognize this and change... Jesus says: "The humble are in and the proud are out" (see Luke 18:14).  The people who confess they aren't particularly good or open-minded are moving toward God, because the prerequisite for receiving the grace of God is to know you need it... When a newspaper posed the question, "What's Wrong with the World?" the Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton reputedly wrote a brief letter in response: "Dear Sirs: I am.  Sincerely Yours, G. K. Chesterton." That is the attitude of someone who has grasped the message of Jesus.   

The above selection from Keller's Prodigal God touches my heart in the same place seared by the words of Hart's hymn in the post below.

"Let not conscience make you linger, nor of fitness fondly dream.  All the fitness He requires is to feel your need of Him." 

Feel my need.  Need.  Need.  Need.  I keep thinking about all the ways I try to make need go away.  I am uncomfortable owing, and I don't like to admit need for anything from money to driving directions and from the time of others to the grace of God.  Needing translates to weakness.  To debt.  To the stress of trying to keep up, trying to stay on even terms with everyone.  I don't want to need more than I am needed.  I want to give more than others can give to me.  I don't need anything...

I like to think my John Mayer-esque philosophy of uncertainty "Am I living it right?" is a testament to my  constant quest for the right answers and the right way to live, but maybe it's really an attempt to get out of needing-- to get out of needing God's right answers and His grace when I can't live up to them.    What I tend to ignore in my search for "rightness" is the fact that I'm never going to "live it right" because I'll always have to straddle the two thoughts of right living that Keller identifies.  I'll always struggle with conventional rightness and morality, always question how any one set of conventions can be right when so many cultures and perspectives have their own definitions of right and when the notions of right from any one view are always changing.  Yet I'll never be satisfied completely by any course of rightness that I set for myself.  I have an arrogant amount of faith in my own opinion, I'll admit, but not enough confidence to be sure I can accurately determine what's right or actually live that right out if I can even identify it.  So it all comes down to need.  Not just need, a need for divinity.  Need for God, need for a Savior.

I have to admit-- amidst all my soul-searching, all my reading, all my discussing, all my pondering-- that I just flat out can't do it.  I can't figure it out.  I can't find someone else who has figured it out.  I can't study enough to put together pieces of rightness into one picture of what life should be, and I can't live that perfection either.  I can't.  I need.

My idolatry lies in looking for answers from humans, from my brain, from my heart.  I want something to prove itself so right that I can do it and never fear that I have it wrong.  I want to be completely confident that I'm living a life that is pleasing to God and that is right and just.  All of my searching and all of my attempts to be the right kind of Christian are what the hymn articulates; all I'm doing is fondly dreaming of fitness, looking for a way to be satisfied in my own soul that I am living life the right way.

What I should be doing is something entirely different.  What I should be doing is learning to feel my need more acutely, acknowledging my need, embracing my need, loving the one who fulfills those needs, living in gratitude.

I am what's wrong with the world.  God, You are what is right.  Make me love Your rightness in worship of You and in service to others.  Help my soul to feel and know its need and to delight in You in its fulfillment from only You.  

Time Keeps on Slippin', Slippin', Slippin' into the Future...

I cannot believe it is nearly July!  I would say that I don't know where summer has gone, but I am thankful that I can say that I do.  I can mark where the time has gone.  It has gone to time with friends and family, to professional growth, to reading, to cleaning, to so many things that I have needed to do and wanted to do.  June has not been wasted, but it has been spent, and I am a little on edge about the rest of my summer because there is so much more I want to do and I just hope that I can get to it all.  I have only managed to read a few books, and my "recently read" list on this blog is pitifully only four books long, and 75% of the list consists of children's books!  I need to get reading, and I need to continue even after August arrives.  This little post exists for nothing more than to remind myself that time is moving quickly, and I need to stay driven!

Hello World

Traffic crawls, cell phone calls
Talk radio screams at me.
Through my tinted window I see
A little girl, rust red minivan.
She's got chocolate on her face
Got little hands, and she waves at me.

Yeah, she smiles at me.

Hello, world.

How've you been?

Good to see you, my old friend.

Sometimes I feel cold as steel.

Broken like I'm never gonna heal.

I see a light, a little hope.

In a little girl.

Hello, world.
Every day I drive by

A little white church.
It's got these little white crosses
Like angels in the yard.
Maybe I should stop on in,
Say a prayer,
Maybe talk to God

Like He is there.

Oh, I know He's there.

Yeah, I know He's there.

Hello, world.

How've you been?

Good to see you, my old friend.

Sometimes I feel as cold as steel.

And broken like I'm never going to heal.

I see a light,

A little grace, a little faith unfurled.

Hello, world.

Sometimes I forget what living's for

And I heave my life through my front door.

And I'll be there.

Oh, I'm home again.

I see my wife, little boy, little girl

Hello, world.

Hello, world.

All the empty disappears.

I remember why I'm here.

Just surrender and believe.

I fall down on my knees.

Oh, hello world.

Hello, world.

Hello, world.

--"Hello World" performed by Lady Antebellum

The words of this song are beautiful, and the music that accompanies them tells the story even better than the lyrics do.  The entire song sounds like worship... I don't really know how to define that, but it does.  Listening to the album today, the song caught my attention simply with its sound.  The strokes of the piano keys, the soft building base notes swelling underneath, a high and haunting piano melody breaking through just like the hope breaking through in the lyrics, drums building, strings joining and orchestration soaring, piano breaking freer and freer like the heart emerging, steel softening...

One of the things that makes me believe in God... (I've been trying to work out and articulate my reasons, and, while I'd like to have more than "feelings" to support my rationale, I'll go with only my emotion and my smattering of academic dabbling for now.)  ...One of the things that makes me believe in God is the ability of humans to reach each other with words, with music, with art, with dance.  What is it inside us that needs to create, that is moved by the creations of others?  Can this be a bit of God?  A glimpse of a Creator who glories in creation?  Is it blasphemy to say that my recent encounter with this song by a secular country music group that also sings about one night stands and heartbreak felt to me like an encounter with God?  Or are instances when we are moved by interactions with other humans-- like the moment with the little girl in the song-- truly glimpses of the divine in the form of connection between one creation and another.  Could such moments sear as they do because they are a communion of creations of the same artist?   Much has been written and sung about the oneness of humanity, about the common bonds that transcend cultural differences, and about a brotherhood that should exist. I love these ideals in the earthly realm, and I realize I hold to them from a spiritual standpoint as well.  What connects us if there is nothing greater than man?  What is a laugh or a tear?  What can explain the feelings they express that all nations can understand if there is not something greater than the individual and the groups and governments he creates?  There must be something more, and I call it God.

Listening to this song, opening my eyes a little wider to see the world and say "hello" to it in a way that I haven't in a while, I feel the meaning of the words reverberating through me-- I know He's there.  I know He's there.

As the building rejoicing of the music pulses through me, I wonder what this can be besides worship.  Why does humanity have the impulse to create beauty if not created by something beautiful, why if not for worship?  


Perhaps even our most irreligious productions come from the same place that produces praise.  Maybe even our darkest desires originate from the same core that yearns for God.  It seems to me now that it could not be possible for us to have art or appreciation for it in any way if not for a little bit of divinity, a little breath of God that must exist inside of all of us.

Note: You can and should go listen to the song on Lady Antebellum's website.  Just click the link and then the play button beside the song "Hello World."

Semantics

At some point in my life, soon after I realized being a famous writer wasn't exactly a career for which I could just fill out an application and accept the position, there was a brief flicker of desire in me to be a linguist.  I don't now remember how long that desire lasted, but I know that it was on my mind for enough of my freshman year of high school that I wrote a research paper about linguists and the study of language. Something extinguished the dream fairly quickly; the absolute ineptitude I brought to beginning Spanish class probably had a lot to do with the quelling of that aspiration.

While I can barely manage “hello” and numbers in Spanish, I realize today that I am still a linguist at heart. Words matter to me.  Deeply.  The term "semantics" and the quest of language quibblers to find exactly the right words to express ideas and concepts perfectly fascinates me.  Even the term "semantics" has a spectrum of meanings and uses.  As I use it here, I know that it denotes other meanings than the one I mean, and while that fact frustrates me, it also exhilarates me. 

I suddenly realized a moment ago that one of the biggest barriers I face when it comes to matters of faith is a huge wall of words.  I stumble over vocabulary, and I quibble over expressions.  (Ironically since I can appreciate cliches,) I choke on trite phrases that I've heard and read repeated too many times.  When it comes to faith, I question any sentence that is easy to say, anything memorized, anything "learned by heart."  I sit in judgment in my pew over terms that don't sit well with me, cry in fits of rage over words people say that I believe have lost their meaning, and scour my Bible, books, and the Internet in a never-ending search for information that might somehow satisfy my impossible desire to know for sure that the words I read in Scripture really do mean what I think they mean.  I distrust the interpretations of others, and my instinct is to reject completely any interpretation that is commonly accepted because I fear all meaning has been skewed too much to be believed.  

Suddenly now I wonder if my problem with my faith is not disbelief in its actual core but dissatisfaction with the way it is commonly expressed.  Am I really just arguing over semantics?  Is it really God and Christianity that causes my incredulity or am I really just a cynic when it comes to the words?  I want meaning.  I have to find the genuine meaning, the intended meaning, the God-inspired meaning if there is one.  I don't want my meaning or someone else's.  It's not just that I want someone to write and speak more eloquently, not that this is just a petty protest over words.  It's a deep-down desire for meaning perfectly expressed so that it can be understood and lived out.  I don't want to be confused.  I don't want to find out that I misunderstood, that I memorized and spat out the right words my whole life but didn't truly grasp the meaning.  

Funny, here's how I'll end this in total irony--

No wonder I am this way.  From my learning of Luther’s Small Catechism, I have taken as my own without realizing it, not the answers but the repeated question of the catechism, which is, after all--  "What does this mean?"

Just a Journal... in the Haze of Half a Rainbow

I fully know that I am prone to trafficking in cliches, but I cherish the possibly deluded opinion of myself that, while many of the things I find most inspirational are terribly hackneyed, they inspire me in ways that are different, new, unique to me.  One of those cliches is the rainbow.  How much more tired can a poor symbol be than the rainbow?  There's the whole Biblical story, there's proverb after quotation after witticism (my favorite by my beloved Dolly Parton) about waiting through the rain for the rainbow, and there's every piece of Lisa Frank stationery from my childhood and every childish notebook and picture book ever published with a cheerful looking rainbow somewhere on it.  There's Lucky Charms cereal, and there's Dorothy's warbled song.  There is nothing unique or new to find as far as inspiration goes anywhere in a rainbow.

But I like rainbows anyway.  And I do like their symbolism.

Today, for example, there is a little half of rainbow arc... actually less, more like a quarter, peeking out from behind the hazy purply pink clouds that followed a recent storm.  It's dusk, and the rainbow is fading, but it is there, marking the end of the rain as evening falls.

And as I see it, as this first school year draws to a close and as the summer comes with the potential of more time for planning, for personal reflection, for rest, for reading, I see that little quarter of a rainbow poking through the clouds of discontent and anxiety that have been condensing on my heart, rumbling low thunder in my head for the past several months.  Maybe all the inner strife and turmoil is as much a product of lack of time to examine it, wrestle with it, untangle it as it is an actual problem.  Maybe all the fears and questions that I've been harboring need only to be written down.  Maybe they just need time with poetry and literature, time with Scripture, time with prayer, time with sleep, time with typing and scrawling across pages to form and to gain clarity.

If the little rainbow peeking through is a sign-- rather, if I make the little rainbow a sign of my own-- today is the start of the clearing of the storm.  It's the start-- not necessarily of all sunny days and birds chirping (Who wants that anyway?) but the start of days unclouded, uncluttered, the start of days to-- wow this is gonna be corny, but I admit I like my cliches-- the start of days to search for the rest of that little rainbow.

Marveling at Redeeming Grace

The previous post of Derek Webb song lyrics and portions of the book of Hosea stand alone as a collage of interconnected stories, stories that tell the truth about the relationship between humanity and God.

We are sinners.

We are the equivalent of the harlot, the prostitute taken from prostitution to be loved truly as a wife.  Lest we think even that kind of love-- love that takes a whore and calls her beloved-- does not show grace enough, follow the analogy further.  Not only are we harlots taken as brides, we are brides who revert continually to our harlotry.  We are wives who stray, who turn to lovers and who credit our lovers for the gifts that came not from them but from our benevolent husband.  We are adulterers.  We are stained, sinful sex-addicts always looking for fulfillment in all the wrong places, valuing our trinkets and baubles and the thrill of adultery above the husband whose love for us surpasses understanding. In our vain search for pleasure, fulfillment, our next meal and our next adornment, we find ourselves no longer under protection of the husband from which we have strayed; we find ourselves reduced to slavery. The grace of our husband, though, is so great that he, benevolent as he was to marry us in the first place, extends his love further to buy us back from slavery and to accept us again as wife.     

The love of God, analogized in the love of Hosea, is love that weds the prostitute as wife and then redeems her from slavery to be his wife again.


Grace.  We say the word easily.  We know the words to "Amazing Grace," and we sing the word "grace" in praise chorus after praise chorus.  We include Grace in the names of our churches, and we say "grace" before meals. Grace is part of all our formulas for understanding our relationship with God.  We are saved by grace.  I repeat that statement easily and without need for thought.  I am certain that I can flip through my Bible and easily turn to highlighted passages explaining and extolling the greatness of that grace. Raised in the Lutheran tradition, the word grace thrills my heart, for, as a Lutheran I learn and proudly give credit to Martin Luther for articulating the motto "by Faith alone, by Grace alone, by Scripture alone."  Only by grace through faith are we saved-- not by works and certainly not by pilgrimages, relics, or indulgences.  This is the creed I have always known to believe. Grace.  Yeah, Grace.  Grace is good.  I got it.


The Hosea allegory forces me to consider what grace really is, what grace really means.  Grace is a pretty word that looks pretty on a sign with a pretty little dove painted beside it, but these things don't help me understand what grace truly means, how grace lives and behaves and acts.
Grace is what a man shows when he marries a prostitute with no resentment of her past, with no jealousy of her other lovers, with no ultimatums and with no ulterior motives.  Grace is what a man shows when he not only forgives his wayward wife for her adultery and who not only redeems her with love but also redeems her by buying her from slavery to be restored as a wife.  Imagine that kind of love, that kind of relationship.  Imagine coming to terms with a past of prostitution and relapses into adultery.  Imagine the feeling of redemption in accepting the love of a husband who accepts the past and the relapses without judgment.  There is no guilt, there is no need to apologize, and there is nothing to repay. That is the love of Christ.  He loves like the husband Hosea was to Gomer. He loves. He forgives.  The guilt is gone.  That is grace.  


The word grace needs a richer definition.  The word grace must be evaluated and weighed, felt and understood.  I need to taste it on my tongue, turn it in my head, question it in my heart, feel it like the harlot of a human that I am.  
Face to face with this kind of grace, how can I not love the God of this kind of grace?  How can I not want to share that kind of grace with the world, not just by telling stories and spouting theology about grace but by showing that grace in action?

Can't Get No Satisfaction?

In high school, all of my devout Christian friends and I went through a hardcore "Christian Music Only" phase brought about by several impassioned messages given by friends in the Christian clubs FCA and First Priority.  We believed that putting only Christian input into our minds through music would influence a more Christian output in our lives.  I don't know that it ever proved true, and I have long since abandoned the idea that truth cannot be revealed through that which is labeled "secular" as much as that which is labeled "spiritual" by the Christian subculture.   Our quest for greater spirituality, though, was genuine, and our intentions were noble; we wanted our lives to be filled less with the world and more with God.  That is still the desire of my heart (when my heart is not distracted by other, less worthy desires), and I do often find wisdom and encouragement in the "Christian input" of music produced by "Christian music labels."

The following lyric caught my attention today while listening to a little "old school" Stacie Orrico.  I definitely jammed out to this crazy, poppy stuff back in high school, and the cheesiness of the music makes me laugh a little listening to it now.  Still, the lyric is a good one and a simple declaration of the yearning I've been feeling throughout the past few years of uncovering the inherent problems with the American Dream and the ideals of capitalism and consumerism.  The lyric is a bit cliche; countless people have identified the need for "something more," and many a trite Christmas flick has commercialized the human need for more than more commercial stuff.  Still, commonplace though the "more to life" sentiment may be, how many of us actually start making real changes to live life for something more than the "temporary high," and how many of us actually manage to restrain and refocus our urging desires for "MORE" toward a more valuable MORE?  I would do well to pray a constant question each time I seek more of something-- Lord, of what do YOU desire MORE in this world, in my life?  

There's gotta be more to life...
Than chasing down every temporary high to satisfy me

Cause the more that I'm...
Tripping out thinking there must be more to life
Well it's life, but I'm sure... there's gotta be more
Than wanting more

-- "More to Life" performed by Stacie Orrico

Lord, if I must be on a constant quest for MORE, make it the MORE that You desire and not my or my country's or my imperfect human ideology's idea of the most acceptable more. 

O satisfy us in the morning with Your lovingkindness

That we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.

Psalm 90:14

You open Your hand

And satisfy the desire of every living thing.

Psalm 145:16

Why do you spend money for what is not bread,

And your wages for what does not satisfy?

Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good,

And delight yourself in abundance....

Seek the Lord while He may be found;

Call upon Him while He is near.

Let the wicked forsake his way

And the unrighteous his thoughts;

And let him return to the Lord,

And He will have compassion on him,

And to our God,

For He will abundantly pardon.

"For My thoughts are not your thoughts,

Neither are your ways My ways," declares the Lord.

"For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

So are My ways higher than your ways

And my thoughts than your thoughts."

Isaiah 55:2...6-9 

Convicting Statements for Pondering and for Action

I am currently highly under the influence of the book I most recently read, David Dark's The Sacredness of Questioning Everything.  This book has re-inspired me  to question, to think, to read, to experience, to grow, and to write.  The following are some quotations from the book that drive my current questioning and searching and that convict me to go beyond my brain and out into the world to make it more what it should be.

My religion is my practice.  It's what I do. (pg. 35)  Will we allow a religious critique of our practice of religion?  Are we up for a redeeming word?  Show me a transcript of the words you've spoken, typed, or texted in the course of a day, an account of your doings, and a record of your transactions, and I'll show you your religion.  (pg. 38)

What is my religion?  If it is shown in what I do on a daily basis, by every word, by every deed, by every decision I make, and by every way I choose to spend a dollar, does my religion point to Christ?  Is my religion of my daily life one that I can say would match the words of Jesus, the commands of God, or the leading of the Spirit?  Or is my religion a patchy, inconsistent, and inadequate attempt?  Do I even give a genuine attempt each day to live the love I claim to have made a difference in my life?  What if every person claiming to live as a "Christian" examined each day what the religion of a Christian should be and what the religion of our lives really is?

We only receive art when we let it call our own lives into question.  If the words of Jesus of Nazareth, for instance, strike us as comfortable and perfectly in tune with our own confident common sense, our likes and dislikes, our budgets, and our actions toward strangers and foreigners, then receiving the words of Jesus is probably not what we're doing. We may quote a verse, put it in a PowerPoint presentation, or even intone it loudly with an emotional, choked-up quiver, but if it doesn't scandalize or bother us, challenging our already-made-up minds, we aren't really receiving it.  Not religiously anyway.  (pg. 42)

Goal: Reread all of the Gospels.  Do the words of Jesus scandalize, bother, and challenge?  What are the challenges He gives you?

For some, their religion is nothing more than a special interest group, a bastion of offendedness and anger, the powerhouse of the saved rather than a place from which life can be viewed and lived more redemptively.  (pg. 44)
Lord, this is the yearning of my heart...  "a life that can be viewed and lived more redemptively."  Teach me to see your redemption, to live it out, and to express it to others.
If all our friends and news sources require of us is a "Ditto" and "I think what you think," we might be in danger of becoming impenetrable of wisdom, immunized against the sensation of sympathy, resistant to the pleasure of being amused by our ignorance, and closed to the joy of being wrong.  (pg. 58)
In what aspects of my life do I have a tendency to seek sources and people who allow me the blind, dull pleasure of the "Ditto" response?  What sources and people DO challenge my thinking, and how can I seek more opportunities for my ignorance and incorrectness to be exposed so that I might have deeper understanding and sympathy that lead to action?

The Examined Life

Am I living it right?

May this be the question I never stop asking.

John Mayer alludes to a possible "quarter-life crisis" as he repeatedly asks this question of himself (or, if of someone else, whom?): "Am I living it right?"   At the age of twenty-two-going-on-twenty-three, I could fall into that "quarter-life" category, and I, too, wonder if my age and the fraction of my life that I have already lived cause me to question "Am I living it right?"

What have I done with my twenty-two years?  Where will the trajectory that I have set take me in the next twenty-two, and when I am approaching forty-five, what will I think of the half-life or more that I have lived?

What will God think?  Can I even ask a question like that and know and let it be known that I am striving not to ask that question as one in fear of damnation for failing to complete a cosmic checklist or as one who presumes ever to be able to know the answer to my own question?

Regardless, I'll ask it-- What will God think of my forty-five years?  What would He say about the past twenty-two or about the past twenty-four hours?  

Do I dare to direct my question, not to myself or to John Mayer or to whatever source he may invoke, but to God?  Do I dare ask, "God, am I living it it right?"

Am I living it right, God?

I hear an answer to my question, Lord, and I can find Scripture to show it comes from You, for the answer is NO. The answer is a bold and resounding NO that I can feel in my heart just as I can understand it in my mind.  Of course I am not living life "right."  I can't even understand completely what right might be!  Even the glimpses of right I can find and understand, I cannot or will not consistently follow.

For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin.  For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate.  But if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good.  So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.  For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not.  For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.  But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.  I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good.  For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is my members [especially the members of my heart and my mind and my mouth-- my emotions, my thoughts, my words].  Wretched man that I am!  Who will set me free from the body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!  So then, on the one hand I myself with mind am serving the law of God but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin. Romans 7:14-25 [personalization to my most sinful parts added]

God, I hear Your answer and read Your Word that I am not and-- the perfectionism and the pride in me recoil-- I cannot be right or be good.  I look at the world around me just a little.   I read a little, I watch the news a little, I study a little, and I talk a little to a few people who know a little, too.  As I do, I find more and more revealed to me that is not right and that is not good, and, Lord, I confess that for a long time now, each revelation has made me more and more bitter and angry.  I have begun to loathe the world and its people-- Your creations-- for their neglect and for their destruction of so many things.  I have despised myself for what I cannot and do not do.  I have festered in frustration knowing that no matter how much I might want it and how diligently I might search for the best ways to bring it about and how much I might work toward it, I can never bring about all the right and the good that I long to see, that I feel deep within me must be possible.  I have grown angry and discontent and disbelieving in You-- how can You be good and so much here on earth be unjust and unbalanced?  I have been angry, in some moments, that this world-- so maladjusted and so broken-- even exists.  What is the point of the turmoil?  Of sickness and death and poverty?  What's more, what is the point of human beings so fallible, so selfish, so weak, so short-sighted that we allow the turmoil, sickness, death, and poverty to exist in a world that also has available in it possibilities of peace, health, life, and plenty?  Why allow humanity to continue when the portion of humanity-- including, I shudder, ME-- that has seems to seek only to have more?  Why allow a world where many die and starve and suffer injustices while few continue building deluded Babels and hoarding treasures in their overstocked, oversized barns and silos?

It has been a long process beginning to understand the role that I play in the economy of a world that breeds poverty, hatred, and war.  I am only beginning to come to terms with my own guilt in a world of injustice, and I have warped my hatred for injustice into hatred for humanity and for its Creator, into bitterness and resentment that the world is not right, and I have blamed the world and my humanity and my Maker for the fact that I am not living right and cannot live right.  That is not the response I want to have any longer.  

Lord, show me the possibility for justice in the world.  Show me the way of redemption that does not delight only in eternal life or in heaven or in crowns or in jewels for the crowns but in LIFE simply because I delight in YOU and simply because YOU created that life to be lived and to be redeemed.  I have to believe that You did not create a world of inevitable evil and hurt.  

The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.  2 Peter 3:9

Lord, surely, You do not desire the evil or the unfairness but instead love, mercy, and justice.  Continue to reveal to me the evil that I do, and continue to refine in me a vision for the good that I should want to do and should do.  Teach me to live a life that communicates and administers Your loving-kindess to the world.  Amen.