How Do We Define Strength?

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Can we handle another opinion on Simone Biles? Spoiler—I follow gymnastics, having been a gym mom for years. My daughter follows it in extreme detail. We know all the sides. So I don’t come to this imbroglio as an armchair pundit, and I come with zero tolerance for criticism of this courageous woman. 

I do come, though, with a conviction that Ms. Biles, and the discussion following her decision to withdraw from competition, mirror a debate in our Christian culture over what strength is and who defines it. 

I posted this inquiry on twitter—one I didn’t expect to get so much discussion.

The answer appears to be circular. Boys don’t go into it because our culture holds up football as the ultimate goal for male fame. Basketball is good second option for popularity. 

Sports and Other Things

When boys don’t choose a sport, funds for it go down in the most important arenas of training. As kids don’t see any heroes emerge in those sports, fewer find them interesting. Especially when they’re as difficult as gymnastics with excruciatingly slow gains. And the cycle perpetuates itself. 

Even as we had the mild debate, some declared—“Boys just prefer contact sports. They’re wired for it.” Are they? Or is it that our culture refuses to value the things boys and men can do that don’t fall into the “manly” categories we’ve preassigned? This, obviously, doesn’t only apply to sports.

Is it coincidence that the people decrying Ms. Biles are mostly white men who want to replace her as GOAT with—other white men? Could there possibly be anything else going on there?

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The debate rages in the church, most importantly for my, and I’m guessing your, purposes. What makes a person strong? How do we define courage? A large contingent of popular teachers want to answer those questions in a very unhealthy way.

Strength in the Church

Strength, to this demographic, means domineering, winning, ignoring personal pain, and refusing to value compassion. It’s the John Wayne paradigm, as Dr. Kristin DuMez has so perfectly explained. It’s what many of us have been listening to in CT’s podcast about Mars Hill.

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This popular mindset in the church doesn’t only devalue a courageous gymnast. It’s more a symptom of a pervasive illness of which, sadly, conservative church men are usually the carriers. It devalues the Christlike perspective that gold medals and power and lack of self-examination don’t make you a whole human being. 

Choosing Whole

Whole, shalom humanity comes from an entirely different kind of strength. 

• The kind that says “no” to winning when it would destroy your soul (or your body, family, etc)
• The kind that chooses to walk away, when all of you wants to stay, if staying would violate who you are and what you need
• The kind of strength that offers the opportunity to shine to someone else, when you could hoard that chance to yourself
• The kind that chooses the good of the group over the glory for yourself
• Strength that is willing to take the boos of the crowd rather than violate your conscience 
• Strength that sends a message to others that you are worth more than what you do

As most overwhelmingly support Ms. Biles, there is that contingent. That group that demands—if you won’t dance to the tune we play, you don’t deserve our praise. If you won’t conform to our definitions, we will replace you with someone who will. (Not surprisingly, a black woman never will be able to meet their definitions.)

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As so many gratefully praise Simone for her courage, what if we do the same for our leaders in the church? What if we throw off those terrible, unhealthy definitions of strength, power, and courage, and embrace the path she has shown us? The path Christ showed us, long before this. 

What if we begin to value choosing to go small rather than big? Giving away our power? Holding enough of ourselves back for our mental and physical health, our families, and our souls? Declaring that we are more than what we do, and everyone gets a chance to do what they do best?

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Being the GOAT, in ministry or in sports, is’t worth as much as we imagine. Choosing whole is where the real strength is.

Mother’s Day

He was the first black teacher I had ever had–the first the seminary had ever hired. In his class, we read about various groups of people often misunderstood– and tried to formulate a Christian response to their experiences.

The Black Experience?

I read first all the material on the black experience. I didn’t get it. Anger jumped off the pages, and I couldn’t understand why. What made these people so angry? Why couldn’t they address their own issues? Why could they not address them in a kind, thoughtful, appropriate way?

The way I would address them. The way a white, middle class, mother of two felt things should be done.

The Experience of Women

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Then we began the section on women. I read of abuse, rape, assault, and oppression. Lack of job opportunities and lack of respect. And I got angry, Real, real angry. I knew sexual abuse. I knew cat calling and male “ownership,” demeaning social expectations, and even Christian pressure to shove myself into a mold I didn’t fit. I knew all this personally, not statistically.

I knew the fear of going out too early or staying out too late simply because of my gender. I knew the worry about looking in my back seat and carrying my keys to hurt an assailant. I knew about women who were blamed for their own assault because of what they were wearing–I knew some of them personally. I knew these things, and I knew men did not have any idea of them.

I did not feel kind or thoughtful about it all. I felt angry. Angry that I had to live with the background noise of fear because I was born a woman, and no other reason.

Lightbulbs

And then, as God does, He lit the 500 watt lightbulb above my head that I had completely missed. Was this the way those black men and women felt? That was my first moment of grasping the tiniest bit of what my sisters and brothers of color feel. I will never forget it.

I have not watched the video. You know the one I mean. The one where a black man, on a jog, is murdered by vigilante men who still believe, apparently, that they live in the wild west and they are required to enforce laws themselves, with shotguns, or we will all devolve into some lawless dystopia.

Side Note: We live in one of the safest countries in the world. We have precious little need to be the good guy with the gun. Statistically speaking, the odds of a robbery in your home are approximately twice as likely as getting struck by lightning in your lifetime. “So proportionally speaking, you should prepare for a home invasion twice as much as you prepare for being hit by lightning.” 

Further, more than half of all armed robberies are drug related. So, steer clear of doing or dealing drugs, and your lifetime need for concern is miniscule. Good news, right?

But Ahmaud Arbery wasn’t breaking into anyone’s home. He was running. He was guilty of running while black. And that earned him the death penalty.

Happy Mother’s Day

Today, as I write this, his mama is having to live through Mother’s Day without her child. This is not a thing we would ever, ever wish on anyone. Yet this is both the common nightmare and experience of black mamas around our country.

I know some of them. I also know a number of white mamas with black sons. They know this fear in ways that we can never know. Ways that I can understand, because I’m the mother of three daughters. I have taught them from an early age that this world is not safe for them, either. It makes me angry that I have to do so. No one has ever had to explain to a white son that this world is not made for or safe for them. So I do understand these mamas fear and anger.

No one has ever had to explain to a straight, white son that this world is not made for or safe for them.

The deep need for a certain segment of men in this country to play vigilante self-appointed sheriff, living out their fantasy of chasing down the bad guys and making the collar, a mixture of all the John Wayne and Die Hard movies and cop shows they’ve digested, collides with something even more insidious to create the state we find ourselves in.

The belief, still, among some of those men that black bodies are theirs to do with what they like. The need to fly giant confederate flags is a symptom of this deeply embedded national sickness—some white men believe they should still have the right to be the masters over black men. They have not let this go. This is uncomfortable truth.

White Women–Listen Up, Please

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White women, I’m going to talk to you. You are a large portion of my audience. And you are powerful. Demographically, you are said to be one of the most potentially strong groups to swing elections. Here is what I need to say to you.

• It should not be deadly to run.
• It should not be deadly to sit in your living room.
• It should not be deadly to drive down a residential street.
• It should not be deadly to fit any description that only includes “black.”
• Existing while black is not a crime. It does not deserve death.
• No mama should have celebrated Mother’s Day yesterday without her child because he was born black and that got him killed. None.
• We can change this.

Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash

 

White women:

• We cannot continue to vote for candidates who mouth the words “pro life” yet remain unconcerned about the death, demeaning, and destruction of people of color.
• We cannot continue to rationalize and excuse and say “but not all” anyone. We need to see the truth that some, not all, need desperately to be talked about and dealt with.
• We cannot continue to be silent. We cannot continue to not know. We cannot continue to offer thoughts and prayers alone.We have to show up.

Go deep into your experience and tell me you don’t know what it’s like to fear simply because of your genetics, and then look at your black and Latinx brothers and sisters. Look, and listen. We are more alike than you believe.

It is the opposite of pro life to accept them as collateral damage in order to gain some semblance of “rights” we think we need. This will not end in gaining our rights but in losing our integrity and our humanity. What does it mean to gain the world and lose your soul, women? This is that intersection.

This will not end in gaining our rights but in losing our integrity and our humanity.

Here are some resources I’m learning from. Please offer some you know of. We can lean in, learn, and act together.

I’m Still Here: Austin Channing Brown

Just Mercy: Bryan Stevenson

White Fragility: Robin Diangelo

Pushing Grace

Hi. I’m Jill–writer, speaker, pastor, editor, and what my business card euphemistically refers to as a “grace pusher.” We all push something, and that’s my favorite thing.

I talk about a lot of things on my blog and in my books and articles. But usually, they focus on a few main topics. Breaking through fear (and using it). Doing faith with the next generation (and loving it!). Women as half the church. Kindness in the midst of an unkind world. Using the Bible for wisdom not warfare.  Justice. Freedom. Grace. Always grace.

I’m the kids who refused to step too far into the back yard after dark. The woman who slept with a nightlight when I was twenty. The person who would still rather face a rabid bobcat than walk up to a stranger and begin a conversation. Fear has been a close acquaintance of mine. After a few very rough years, however, I decided it wasn’t the boss of me. Fear has only the power you give it–and I wasn’t giving it anymore.

Yes–there is God, telling me to live “adventurously expectant.” To look at each day and ask, “What’s next?” Even on the days when I fear what might, in fact, be next.

“Fear not” may be the most common command in the Bible, but fear is also perhaps the most common human emotion. It’s certainly been driving a lot of our national conversation, too.

I don’t want to live life as a grave-tender, so wrapped in fear of what might be that I lose the time in between. Grave tenders may live safely–there isn’t much to fear when you’re keeping up a nice, neat backdrop for dead things. They don’t demand a lot of change. But living among dead things isn’t living at all. The abundant life Jesus promised isn’t safe, but it is an adventure, if we’re willing to leave dead things behind.

I want to live an adventure for God’s kingdom, and I want to do it with you. I want to know who I am, and I want you to know who you are, because of who He is.

I want us both to know the identity God planted in us when he chose to give humans his image. That imago dei, straight outta the garden, is still there. He hasn’t rescinded the deal. He made you and me his ambassadors–shining his image in difficult, dark places. Just like my scary old back yard, only sometimes darker.

I want to see you and hear you and know you–and I want you to know He already sees and hears and knows you. If you’re tending a grave, he wants to pull you out of there into life.

So, let’s join one another. I can’t wait to see what happens here.

PS– I’d love it if you want to hit the button to subscribe or be put on my mailing list!

*I also write occasionally for Christianity Today publications, MOPS, (in)courage, A Fine Parent, and others, as well as blog regularly for Theology Mix and The Glorious Table. If you would like to view recent articles, go to my Media page.

Jesus and the Grey Whales

I’ve been baptized with whale snot. You don’t imagine that’s the sort of thing you’d feel jealous over, but when others in the front of the boat had a whale spout on them and I didn’t, I felt the sting of cetacean exclusion. I needn’t have worried. The spouts came with amply-distributed inclusivity later on.

We spent a bit of February in Baja California Sur—a place where I was assured I could see a personal holy grail—blue whales. As a child, I devoured a book my brother gave me about endangered animals. I had those pages memorized, along with all the stats on all the animals. Blue whales, the largest animal ever created, were on the list.

After the blue whales, we flew to a remote camp at San Ignacio Lagoon to visit with another species—grey whales. This experience proved far different.

Not long ago, whale hunters dubbed grey whales “devil fish.” Whaling boats found them highly unwilling victims of the harpoon. The whales would put up a mammoth fight, intentionally swimming under and overturning boats. They proved so dangerous they were among the last to be hunted, but they were finally driven near extinction, like most other whales. Their survival reaction to danger made them a feared species n the shallow coasts where they traveled.

So these San Ignacio whales we visited are a bit of a miracle. Not only are they not dangerous, they’re considered the most friendly whales on earth. They swim to tourist boats, bringing their babies in tow, seemingly begging for a scratch and back rub. The huge mammals appear as curious about humans as the humans are about them. They rise our of the water alongside the boat, and we were privileged to interact with God’s creatures in a way I imagine God always intended. The bruises on my knees as I scrambled to kneel first on one side of the boat then the other, rocking and reaching out to touch their rubbery skin, testify to the wonder.

Yes, my husband is petting whales

And believe it or not, it reminds me of church. Most things can, when you’re a pastor. Occupational hazard. San Ignacio is the only place in the world you can touch grey whales. It’s safe there, and the whales know it. They come to the boats only there because they know they’re protected. How do they know? I have no idea. Neither do conservationists. They say we just don’t know why the San Ignacio whales are friendly, but I think it’s this. They know this is a place they don’t need to fear human nearness.

It’s also a place where they have agency to choose their level of interaction. Boat drivers at the preserve don’t chase them. They motor safely and slowly toward a group or individual, letting them know they’re there for an interaction, then they sit and wait for a whale to come to them.  

And I am petting a whale

Is your church a lagoon? Is it a place where those who have felt the harpoon of abuse pierce their skin can come for safe human touch? Can those who have been hunted by gaslighting and harmful counsel in church find a place of healing there? Can women and BIPOC come and be respected for their strength rather than called shrill, angry, and dangerous? What if my church came to be known as the one place hurt people don’t have to fear being close? What if, no matter what happened out in the wide world where they had to survive in other seasons, our small lagoon proved a shelter where fear dissipated into curiosity, play, and mutual delight?

I desperately want there to be places where hurt people can swim and trust they will never feel a harpoon in their back. Where they know the people there with them in that place want their best and want to see their joy. Where they can choose their level of freedom, intimacy, and privacy, with no one determining for them where they go and with whom they stay. 

Grey whales didn’t act like devil fish out of their nature—they behaved like devil fish in response to the way they were treated. In a place where they’re granted both agency and safety, they’re miraculous.  

Miracles along the Way

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It’s been a week. I know we say that a lot, but I honestly challenge most people to have a wilder and more stressful one. Let’s just say, it started with getting kicked out of our house due to remodeling and followed that up with a dead body. Where does one go from there if that’s just the beginning? You can fill in the blanks. 

Sunday, at the end of that week, I taught the story of the ten lepers in church. (The story in Luke is written below.) The one where ten are healed and one comes back to Jesus to say thank you? I started to think about what it took for those ten to come to Jesus.

They had to leave their safe group of fellow “unclean” denizens outside the city gates. They walked toward the entrance to their village, a place they’d once been welcome but were no more. To approach the entrance as an unclean person took a lot of chutzpah. These men showed courage as they called to Jesus for mercy. They also showed that, despite likely knowing little about him, they knew Jesus was approachable, merciful, and powerful. Note they asked for mercy, not specific healing—I love that. They knew Jesus would consider both intertwined. 

Mercy offers healing. They can’t be separated. 

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It took courage to leave their safe haven. It took courage to come near the gates. It took courage to call to Jesus. It took amazing courage not to be healed, yet turn to go see the priest as Jesus commanded. Somewhere on the road they were healed—but not right away. Mercy arrived immediately, but healing came along the way. And they had the courage to wait for and believe in its appearance.

What does this have to do with my week? Well, this week I watched as someone I love more than I love creme brûlée and key lime pie (and also to infinity and beyond) found that courage. She’d been traumatized, and horror can paralyze us easily. Trauma can make us forget to eat, terrorize our sleep, and put stress fractures in our relationships. It can make us crawl deep inside ourselves, closing off people and reality, and then worst of all, it can make that self unsafe, so we have nowhere to hide. 

Calling out for help feels frightening. Approaching the gates, calling to be allowed in to health and companionship, is daunting. So to watch someone take those steps inspires awe in me. I know how hard that slog can be. It’s beautiful every single time.

It takes courage to ask for healing. 

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For some people that’s the work of making an appointment for an annual physical that you haven’t had in, well, not annually. (I highly recommend, by the way—that’s how my PCP found my cancer quite early.) But you’re scared, and it’s hard, and you don’t know where to start. It takes courage.

For some it’s finding a therapist, but that takes time and trial and error, and that in itself is a painful trek. It takes courage. 

For some, it’s finding a new church, but you’ve been wounded so badly you’re afraid you’ll trail bloodstains on the altar, and you know that place might break you again beyond what you think is repair. It takes so much courage. 

For others, it’s confronting family for the ways they’ve hurt you, or asking for forgiveness for the ways you’ve hurt them, and that takes courage. 

Healing is usually a process that happens along the way, not a miracle of a moment. To start the journey is scary. We’re not sure how it will end. We don’t know how long it will take. We fear we’ll find it ineffective or, worse, we’ll find we’re not worthy of being healed.

That’s why I love that they call first for mercy. Jesus sees them, he hears them, and he grants mercy immediately. When we have the courage to ask, the mercy of Christ is what first reaches our souls. The healing comes—but the mercy prepares us for the journey. 

Courage, dear heart. There is light on the other side, but there is also mercy on the way through. 

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Luke 17.11-19, CEB

On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten men with skin diseases approached him. Keeping their distance from him, they raised their voices and said, “Jesus, Master, show us mercy!”

When Jesus saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” As they left, they were cleansed. One of them, when he saw that he had been healed, returned and praised God with a loud voice. He fell on his face at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. He was a Samaritan. Jesus replied, “Weren’t ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? No one returned to praise God except this foreigner?” Then Jesus said to him, “Get up and go. Your faith has healed you.”

Defining a Successful Career

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I went on an adventure in early December. Let’s begin the tale at the beginning: a few years ago I learned that a professor at Marquette University had a collection of Tolkien manuscripts that he periodically allowed individuals to tour. It took me approximately 5 seconds to arrange a date and time for the next private exhibition. 

Unfortunately, the date and time were in 2020. Two polite reschedules later, he stopped sending emails of new dates. No one knew when the collection would be viewed again—why continue pretending we did?

All this led me to check the status in November, and what do you know? The collection was out for a big exhibition at the university until Christmastime, and tickets were available. I chose to make it a whole day of adventure by also booking an Amtrak to Milwaukee. Train rides, Tolkien manuscripts, and no driving headaches on I94 between two cities? I was IN. 

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Tolkien rocked my world in 2001 when I first met his work. He did it again in 2022 last month, when I can say that after 21 years of devoted passion, I’m pretty well acquainted with that work.

I don’t know your lifelong struggles, but I have some typical ones for an enneagram 5. The zeal to be seen as competent. The deeply ingrained scarcity mindset. These two join forces to haunt me with my greatest fears. What if I never “make my mark”? What if I never live up to that “promising future” people talked about so long ago? What if, after all, I’m only mediocre at everything I’ve done, personally and professionally?

At my age, these things should be past tense, after all, and still searching the horizon for promise seems a fool’s errand. 

The thoughts have haunted my last couple years, especially. Other people wept at Hamilton when his son died. (OK, I wept then too—I’m not heartless.) The part that had me sobbing? When Burr bows his head and recognizes in the despair of the too late—“I should have known the world was wide enough for both Hamilton and me.” Scarcity mindset, with tragic results, right there for all of us caught in it to see. The world is wide, but some of us have more Aaron Burr in us than we can comfortably handle.

Back to Tolkien. A man so enamored with the world of Middle-earth he was building that he created languages for it. Detailed, logically-cohesive languages. So in love with his hobbits be calculated the stride of a hobbit and the ground one could reasonably cover so that the distances in his writing were manageable in “real” life. So committed he created maps and diaries that he singed, tore, dyed, and dampened in order to make the antiquity of them real. He charted the moon phases and years and days of events in his created world so that his prophesies would coincide, again, in “real” life. No created world in literature has this level of detail and accuracy, which contributes enormously to making his work feel “right” to his readers. 

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His contemporaries thought his time could have been spent on more scholarly publications. His publisher tapped impatient toes for 17 years from request for a Hobbit sequel to publication. The Lord of the Rings didn’t disappoint waiting readers. Hobbit readers had grown up, and they recognized its genius. Yet most people who surrounded Tolkien thought his quirky obsession a huge waste of time. He never even finished what he considered his master work, decades in the making.

Something exploded on my mind in that exhibit, as it had twenty-one years before. Then, it was the beauty of the heroic quest to do the right thing with the time we’re given. Now, it was the recognition of a life profoundly successful, but not because of best seller lists or blockbuster movies.

JRR Tolkien devoted himself to something he loved. He put every piece of his heart into creating a world and creating it well. What others may have called obsessive he called devotion to a call. In fulfilling that call, he crafted a hope that shone through his world, and the world of his readers.

He devoted himself to doing something he loved well, and he offered hope in the doing. 

What else is there? When we look for our life’s promise, what would we want other than Paul’s holy trinity of faith, hope, and love? (For as we know, Tolkien did nothing without faith, too.) Whether we’re mediocre in the end or not, what could we choose but the honest working out of faith, hope, and love? When we look to find the success of our lives, that legacy Hamilton searched for, what more could we ask than that we were found to do what we loved, do it well, and do it in a way that infused it with hope? 

He did it again. Tolkien took something that’s bedeviled me for a while and he laid it out plain in front of me, in those edit-filled cursive loops, scribbled calculations, detailed datelines, and fake-blood stained pages. Waste twelve years writing Lord of the Rings? Hardly. He was building a world and inviting us along into it. Hope and love take time. Faith informs them both. Nothing done in service to the three of them is wasted.

Embodiment

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I have a dear friend who was widowed a few years ago. Since then, she’s stretched herself to live her life’s goal, which is to be a writer. There’s nothing like death to teach us how to live, is there? She’s worked hard. And she’s grieved hard. 

This year, she entered a play writing contest and garnered one of the ten winning spots, out of thousands of entries. Did I mention I’m darned stinking proud of her? She wrote about the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death and visiting her mother with dementia and how those things didn’t always mesh well together. In one quick scene, a nurse at the assisted living comforts her with some theology and philosophy regarding death. 

Watching the video, I felt a jolt of recognition. Those were my words. Those were sentences I had said to help my friend. We’d sat at the local Corner Bakery as she talked and cried about the blows to her faith and her guilt and anger about God, the universe, and everything. I’d answered with what I believe about God and death. 

The words had meant enough to her to find their way into this award-winning play, now seen and heard by I don’t know how many people. They’d found their way into her heart. 

I cried watching that video. I cried for her pain. I cried for her children. I cried for the privilege of having God use my simple, tentative words to begin healing a broken heart. There is nothing, nothing that brings more joy to a pastor, or a writer, than this. We know that James warns we ought to watch our words and our truth carefully, because teaching others is a holy, sacred trust. We know we get it wrong too often.

The trust of God and humans cannot be taken lightly. Hearts and souls long to be healed.

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Dear brothers and sisters, not many of you should become teachers, for we who teach will be judged more strictly. Indeed, we all make many mistakes. For if we could control our tongues, we would be perfect.

(James 3.1-2)

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We’re talking about what it means to be incarnate this month in church. For Advent, I wanted to discuss the meaning of incarnation (embodied in flesh). I want us to consider how we, too, are incarnate in the lives of others, not in the sense that we are deity but in another definition of the word—“A person showing a trait or typical character to a marked degree.” 

As believers in the Christ who became flesh and blood, breath and body, how do we show his character to a marked degree? Are we being incarnate in our communities, our families, our churches, our world?

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Are we being incarnate in our random conversations that we don’t know will have an impact down the road? Is Christ’s character there at the table in our Corner Bakery? 

To “invite Jesus into my heart” isn’t a prayer for a ticket to heaven. It’s an invitation to Christ to be incarnate in my life, body, tongue, and mind. It’s an invitation for me to be incarnate, albeit in my own flawed ways, in my world.

I can’t get past that. I don’t want to get past that. I shouldn’t get past that. Words matter. Words heal or break. Words construct or deconstruct faith and hope. The Word gives me embodiment in others’ lives. What comes from my mouth, or keyboard, should show his character to a marked degree.It’s a sacred trust. 

Sightings of Home

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“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.”

C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

In The Last Battle, Jewel the unicorn finds that world’s version of heaven baffling yet familiar. Regardless of the confusing feelings, he knows it’s home, and he must discover more and more of it.

I think we, too, will be surprised by heaven. Most of all, I think we’ll be surprised that we will not “go to heaven” in the end. The Bible never uses that phrase—not once in 66 books. Instead, both Isaiah and Revelation describe the union of heaven and earth, a new creation where humans will find ultimate joy and God will forever be present. John describes kind of an Eden 2.0—people engaged in their best employment in a perfect new world that restores heaven and earth to their rightful lack of division. 

With respect to the hymn writer, we will not “fly away.”

Even the imagery echoes Eden.

“Then the angel showed me a river with the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. It flowed down the center of the main street. On each side of the river grew a tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, with a fresh crop each month. The leaves were used for medicine to heal the nations.”

Rev. 22:1-2, NLT

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The abundant flowing water and conspicuously important trees remind us of that place where humans were first offered a tree of life. As we read these words in a time of unrest that hasn’t happened in our generations, don’t these promises sound like a place we’ve been “looking for all {our} lives”? 

Do the nations frighten you right now? My own nation scares the life out of me, without even mentioning those at war in other parts of the world. A pandemic has retrained our social instincts to make us fear and avoid one another, destroying mental health and the community necessary for human flourishing. Political division has divided family. People look for exits when they do go out, spooked at the specter of gun violence anywhere and everywhere. Whole segments of the population fear the loss of basic human rights—rights people of color maintain they have never had and see slipping farther away. All the while, we’re bracing for weather extremes as we do little to stop the warming of our world. Then, there’s actual war, waged against innocent underdogs.

All in all, it seems the nations need some of those leaves from the tree of life, stat. The patient is in critical condition. 

So are a lot of us. I know I yearn for the day I no longer hurt 24/7. One day, I’ll be swing dancing and clambering up waterfalls again, a day when I won’t need healing trees because a resurrection body will never know pain. 

The promise is so much greater than flying away to some cloudy space with random harps. The Lord has planned a merging of God’s space and ours, perfecting ours beyond our current imagination and inviting us to enjoy it forever as perfected humans. 

Photo by Elijah Hiett on Unsplash

So what about now? Jesus also promised that the kingdom of God was here, now. In a way, he had broken through and begun the unification. When Jesus commissioned his followers, he told them they would do even greater thing than he had done, to the ends of the earth (John 14:12, Matt. 28:19). Jesus meant that every time one of his people did something as he would, we were planting little pockets of the kingdom in this world. 

Every time we offer kindness, healing, restoration, justice, comfort, mercy, forgiveness, generosity, hope—that’s all seeds of the kingdom planted. They’re all small places where heaven meets earth. For people who are hopeless or fearful now, these liminal spaces where they can see and feel the presence of God mean more than all the words we can spill. 

If we, like Jewel, are longing for our real home, working to bring the kingdom to our surroundings is a good way to at least set down some carpets and wash the windows of where we are now. We’ll never create heaven—humans can never eradicate evil because it’s part of us. We can, though, offer sightings of home to those who need it. 

This article first appeared here at The Glorious Table.

Vienna

Photo by Leyre on Unsplash

This song ran though my head the entire month of August. That was one persistent earworm, though as earworms go, they could be far worse. I finally began to wonder if God wasn’t trying to say something to me. Throughout the music, the singer talks to a “crazy child,” and if that isn’t how God sees me at times, I’d be very surprised. God has spoken to me in far wilder ways than through Billy Joel.

I listened to Billy Joel a lot as a young person. A lot. I hadn’t listened to this song in decades, so how did it get into my head suddenly? And why? 

I didn’t know the meaning behind the song when I was a teenager lounging by the turntable loving how a fellow pianist put words together. I’m sure I wouldn’t have understood if I had. However, as I approach a big birthday this month (tomorrow, in fact), I’ve learned more of the story.

Listen to Vienna.

According to Google, “Vienna” is Joel’s stand in for old age. The Old World setting. The accordion solo. (Yes, when you’re talented enough, you can pull off an accordion solo in a top 40 hit.) The lilt that feels like a waltz but isn’t. He doesn’t, however, intend it as we might presume. The most obvious interpretation of “Vienna waits for you” seems to be “Old age is coming, youngster. It gets us all. Why work so hard? It’s all meaningless!” Shades of Ecclesiastes.

Photo by Anthony Fomin on Unsplash

No, he means something entirely different. Age, in this song, is beautiful. It’s a time when purpose, productivity, and depth can blossom in ways we cannot imagine when we’re young. 

“You can’t be everything you want to be before your time.”

I spent so many years trying to be everything I wanted to be. I wanted not to make the mistakes my parents did. I wanted to walk in a faith that was new to anyone in my family and do it right. I wanted those perfect Christian children, and that, of course, is often what finally undoes us in our ultimately unholy pursuit of perfection. 

I wanted to prove I could be everything because that was the only way I’d ever known to be anything.

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Joel was right. There are things I couldn’t be, and patience would have been a better virtue than pursuit. A life of integrity is created like good cheese—time and careful nurture. When we try to rush it, we get a veneer of being everything that only reinforces our need to protect the surface at all costs. In my profession, we get pastoral abuse. 

We get the Colosseum of Las Vegas, not Rome. I’ve seen both. One could never mistake the former for the latter. 

“Take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while. It’s alright—you can afford to lose a day or two.”

Not because the days ultimately don’t matter but because, with good fortune, we will have enough of them to find out what makes us come alive and who we want to be. That can’t be rushed. We’ve done a bit of a disservice to our younger generations with our endless “follow your passion” rhetoric not because passions are’t good to follow but because we’re demanding people know them out of the gate. Anyone who has’t figured it out and gotten 3/4 of the way there by 30 is slacking.

Before 30 I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, and if you asked me still I’d probably tell you the same today. I won’t be grown up until my soul is restored to the perfection its Maker intended, so maybe that’s OK.

Photo by Francesco Luca Labianca on Unsplash

If we don’t have the days ahead of us? All the more reason to invest in disappearing. I’ve written and will continue to write a lot about sabbath. God invented this whole concept of disappearing and called it good. It was the way God gave us to reacquaint ourselves with God and also with ourselves. Going “off the hook” puts us back in relationship balance.

We remember our place in the economy of history—big enough to be beloved by the Creator, small enough to be a grain of sand in relative time. Losing a day might gain us a soul. 

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Please take the phone off the hook (whatever that mean anymore). Take social media off the hook. Take work off the hook. If you don’t lose a day or two, you’ll lose yourself. If we reach Vienna and that person really is a stranger (no coincidence this is the album title, I’m sure), we’ve lost too much.

So happy birthday to me. I’m entering what a viral Facebook post calls the most productive decade of human life. Sadly, Snopes has shown that post to be based on a false claim about a nonexistent study (and you so trusted in Facebook reliability, right?). To be honest, productivity may not be what I’m valuing most anyway. Still, David Galenson in Old Masters and Young Geniuses opines—there are different kinds of productivity and genius. One includes the “experimental innovators, those whose work was exploratory and filled with trial and error and decades of accumulated wisdom and feeling. Those who fit the experimental pattern did their best work later in life.” 

I’m going with that. Vienna isn’t here yet—but it waits, and that’s not a negative.

What Do We Believe about Death?

Photo by Jan Canty on Unsplash

When I was eighteen, the car I was a passenger in swerved to avoid rear-ending another vehicle. Two other vehicles—a car and a truck—hit us. Devastatingly, an elderly woman in the other car had a heart attack at the scene and died. In an attempt to comfort my friend, who had been driving and was at fault, I said to her as we left the hospital, “God must have had a reason for her to die now.” My friend looked at me and replied, “I don’t want to know that God.”

New to the faith and so young, I didn’t realize at the time what I know now—my words not only didn’t comfort my friend, they made her pain worse.

How many platitudes have you heard people utter in the face of death?

When we’re uncomfortable or uncertain, awkward words tumble out. If platitudes are the best we’ve got, though, what do we have to say in the face of tragedy? Personal tragedy, like the loss of a loved one, or a national tragedy, like Uvalde? Does what we really believe about death change what we say when we face it?

Continue reading at The Glorious Table.

Mickey Mouse, Sabbath, and Discernment

A girl in the high school class I taught showed up one morning in a T-shirt that had Mickey Mouse emblazoned on the front. I paid it little attention. It never occurred to me that Mickey was a dangerous character, plotting a school coup. I taught the class, comprised of seniors, and sent them on to their second-period class without a thought about their attire.

That is until I found myself in trouble with the principal for not sending the girl home. You see, the school had a rule against screen-printed clothing, and Mickey was an offender. Cuff him. He’ll never see The Happiest Place on Earth again.

Discernment is a gift of the Spirit. It means to be able to determine right from wrong and not to be deceived by anything that would lead us to foolish choices. As we spend more of our time creating rules about whom we associate with, what is acceptable to believe, and whose group is “in,” we’ve lost the skill of discerning guidelines created to help us flourish from barriers created for a false sense of security.

Luke narrates a story that helps us determine one from the other.

Photo by Hamza Madrid on Unsplash

One Sabbath, as Jesus was walking through the wheat fields, his disciples were picking the heads of wheat, rubbing them in their hands, and eating them. Some religious leaders said, “Why are you breaking the Sabbath law?”

Jesus replied, “Haven’t you read what David and his companions did when they were hungry? He broke the Law by going into God’s house and eating the bread of the presence, which only the priests can eat. He also gave some of the bread to his companions.” Then he said to them, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” (Luke 6:1-5 NIV)

On two other occasions in Luke, Jesus healed people on the Sabbath. Rather than be overjoyed for them, the leaders “were furious and began talking with each other about what to do to Jesus.” They had their rules. No work—including good work—was to be done on the Sabbath.

These were not God’s rules. They were human additions. Originally, God commanded humans to observe a sabbath—a healing, restoring, reconnecting day of rest. It was intended to remind us that we belong to a creating, saving God who works while we don’t.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Somewhere along the line, leaders studied the words of Scripture, interpreting every detail and creating long lists of what was allowed and not allowed.

They did this with good intentions. Life was more jumbled and chaotic after the exile, so they were returning order, giving people a sense of comfort, stability, and identity.

Sabbath is one of the most important commands, so they parsed it out and asked themselves what, exactly, “work” meant. Deliberations went on and on, which is how we come to the notion that merely picking a piece of grain randomly in a field, swishing out the chaff between your fingers, and popping it in your mouth is illegal “work.”

By Jesus’s time, obeying these interpretations had become a source of pride instead of an expression of love for God. Rules had become a way to wield power over people rather than to give them safe community guard rails.

The Sabbath matters to Jesus because the whole concept was meant to free people. Legalism about it ended up burdening people, just as it does now.

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Photo by Hogarth de la Plante on Unsplash

Jesus asks some questions:

• Is it legal on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?
• Suppose your child or ox fell into a ditch on the Sabbath day. Wouldn’t you immediately pull it out?

Also, he makes an important statement:

• The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath

Rules are made for human flourishing; humans are not made for rule flourishing.

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While we may not have to decide our own Sabbath rules, we are in the position of having to figure out for ourselves, “What are my rules going to be? What principles am I going to live by? What are my guard rails? How does Jesus help me discern them?” Most of us don’t (or shouldn’t) have these dictated to us, like clothing rules in a high school. We have to exercise our own discernment muscles.

Jesus invites his listeners, and us, to explore these helpful questions:

• Are your rules setting people free?
• Are they giving rest?
• Are they doing good?
• Are they saving lives?
• Are they helping others?
• Are they bringing you closer to God?

Discernment is not a gift for only a few. It’s a requirement. We’re all told to be wise as serpents. We’re all instructed to be responsible for our own choices and the voices we choose to hear.

Mickey Mouse rules don’t bring about the flourishing God planned. Wisdom does.

This post originally appeared at The Glorious Table.

Wally

This spot was empty in July. I had a newsletter and blog ready to send. It only needed a push of the button on the 4th or 5th. Instead, I found myself on a plane on the 5th, headed for Connecticut. I didn’t want to go.

Let’s start at the beginning. 35 years ago, I said “yes” to corresponding with a pen pal in Sing Sing prison, New York State. It was a program set up by Prison Fellowship. Wally wrote to me faithfully. He called (collect) every week. I was less faithful at writing, but I at least chatted on the weekly calls. Really, he chatted. I mostly listened, until the timer cut us off.

Through releases, returning to different prisons, drug episodes, homelessness, a terrible marriage choice, and more jail sentences, Wally and I kept writing and kept finding each other. I also moved, four times, and before the internet, keeping tabs through that was harder than you think.

Wally was a faithful friend, and also a professional thief and drug addict. Humans are a little complex that way. Someone on twitter last month asked me why I would choose to help a man she considered less than worthy instead of people more deserving. I didn’t answer. The question didn’t merit response. 

If a person can’t see the humanity of a man because he’s homeless and addicted, I refer them to Shakespeare. “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?” Humans are all equally the image of God. Wally’s soup kitchen friends, whom I met in Connecticut, are not lesser images than those of us pontificating with our on keyboards how we would weigh human worth. God’s breath in our lungs gives us all enormous weight we’re too frail to carry on our own yet too glorious not to.

I got a call on Friday July 1st that Wally had chosen to enter hospice care for his stage 4 lung cancer. I didn’t blame him at all—it was the right and dignified choice of a man who has had little choice over the entirety of his life. I started checking flights.

Friday he was resigned but feeling OK. He could be in hospice for a few months. Monday they told me he was worse, but still, he could live for a few weeks. Tuesday, they called again and said he might not make it through the day. My plane was at 6pm. It got canceled, and the assistant got me on an earlier flight. Earlier, meaning I had to leave immediately.

A lot of us were praying I’d make it in time, but when the plane landed, I had a message to call the hospital. I did, and the information was what I’d feared. We’d lost Wally just an hour or two earlier, while I was in the sky between Chicago and Hartford. I guess I’m not the first person to cry in an airport.

Wally had named me his next of kin and medical power of attorney. Wading through Connecticut law looked daunting, and the gratitude I have for the hospital staff and everyone else who gave me both assistance and compassion is enormous. They did everything so well and so kindly. At some point, I’ll be the recipient of his ashes, the dust that we all return to the only thing left, except the beat up wallet and phone I carried home.

Paintings Wally made for us while in prison

Friends, I’m still processing. 

Processing the grief of a life that could have been so much better with a family who encouraged rather than abused (and a functional, redemptive prison system). 

Processing the sadness over never hearing “God bless and you know I love you. You’re all in my thoughts and prayers,” on every single sign off to a phone call or letter. Every one, for 35 years. 

Processing the trust that a man who had learned not to trust anyone put in me to make his life and death decisions. 

Processing the love that the staff and clients of his favorite place, the soup kitchen, had for him that overflowed in a memorial service right there in the kitchen that I was blessed to conduct. 

Processing how I witnessed, for two days, the reality of the dignity of every human life.
Most of all, I’m a witness to Wally’s life, the longest running one he had. So I’m telling his story, because he deserves that. We all do. 

Doing Our Faith

Photo by L Sutton on Unsplash

I had a friend in high school with a white Camaro. Classic car. Meticulously restored. White-glove-clean inside and out. But whenever this friend had to go somewhere, he got a ride from friends or family. He owned a car, but he never drove it out of the garage. He retained it as a showpiece, but the purpose that car was built for—transportation—never happened.

Believers in Christ sometimes act like that Camaro owner. We (think) we have meticulous theology, airtight beliefs, and a knowledge of right and wrong. We’re constantly disciples, learning about God, but for what purpose? What is knowledge of God without action that resembles God? Jesus isn’t interested in us all getting a Ph.D. in Doing Church. He wants us to drive the car out of the garage and use it for its purpose.

Continue reading at The Glorious Table.