If it Isn’t True for Everyone

(More Musings on For the Love book and new musings on the gospel)

I have been blessed for the last several months to be a part of the launch team for Jen Hatmaker’s new book, For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards (available now on Amazon).

For the last couple and one more week, I’m taking chapters of the book that meant a lot to me and discussing them. Thus far, we’ve covered crazy self-imposed expectations of parenting and responding to the millennial generation (without being crappy Christians 🙂 ).

This week another topic dear to my heart and the heartbeat of God’s kingdom: what is the gospel really, stripped of our ever-present tendencies to make it what we want it to be? Jen has a great standard from which to start that conversation.

“But then God changed my life, and everything got weird. I discovered the rest of the world! And other cultures! And different Christian traditions! And people who were way, way different from me! And poverty! Then the system in which God operated according to my rules started disintegrating. I started hearing my gospel narrative through the ears of the Other, and a giant whole bunch of it didn’t even make sense. Some values and perspectives and promises I attributed to God’s own heart only worked in my context, and I’m no theologian, but surely that is problematic.

There is a biblical benchmark I now use. We will refer to this criterion for every hard question, big idea, topic, assessment of our own obedience, every “should” or “should not” and “will” or “will not” we ascribe to God, every theological sound bite. Here it is:

If it isn’t also true for a poor single Christian mom in Haiti, it isn’t true.”(Chapter 3, On Calling and Haitian Moms)

I love this. I absolutely, stinkin’ love this. It’s so simple. Some time ago, I wrote a post on the gospel and what it really is. I asked people to narrow it down to 25 words or fewer. Some of you did, and it was great. (Mine was fourteen. Top that. OK, maybe Jesus would not be quite so . . . competitive.)

If the last year of political posturing and pontificating on how Jesus’ gospel relates to this crazy world has taught us anything at all, it’s that Christians have wildly different views on that answer. And that we are quite pleased to knock our brothers and sisters out of the kingdom ring like Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots if their interpretation differs from ours.

Ferguson a year ago touched off a hurricane of argument that has rebounded with every touchstone event. Staten Island. McKinney. Supreme Court decisions. Charleston. Perhaps the fact that the list refuses to end should be a clue that we are to take this seriously. There needs to be a gospel response. And it needs to be the real gospel. Not the gospel I carry around in my head and heart because it’s near and dear to all I’ve ever known.

It needs to be a gospel for the Haitian mamas. Because Jesus came for everyone—including me and everyone else. If what I’m saying is Jesus’ gospel response to the issues of our day is not true for the Haitian mama, it’s not true. If it’s not true for the black daughter grieving the loss of her mother in a church basement, it isn’t true. If it sin’t true for the illegal immigrant mama terrified of returning to a country that will sell her son to drug lords, it isn’t true. If it isn’t true for the gay person who won’t consider any claim of Christ because he’s read between the lines of “hate the sin but love the sinner” and knows he’s not loved at all, it isn’t true. 

Are these tough issues? Yes. Is the gospel capable of handling them? Yes. If we let it be what it is. All it is and not all it isn’t.

“Theology is either true everywhere or it isn’t true anywhere. This helps untangle us from the American God Narrative and sets God free to be God instead of the My-God-in-a-Pocket I carried for so long. It lends restraint when declaring what God does or does not think, because sometimes my portrayal of God’s ways sounds suspiciously like the American Dream and I had better check myself. Because of the Haitian single mom. Maybe I should speak less for God.”

Maybe speaking less for God involves first taking a scalpel to my God-in-a-pocket version of the gospel and learning what it truly is. All that it is and, maybe more importantly for today, all it is not.

God created. We broke. God loved. He fixed. 

We love back—we help fix. 

That’s the gospel. Winnowed down. All that it is. Not all it isn’t.

We messed it up. We all messed it up. We keep messing it up. But every once in a while, we have a chance to look around, see clearly how messed up things really are, and declare, “Not on my watch.” 


Not so long as the gospel means what it really means. That Jesus came to unmess our mess. And once we accept that beautiful, intense, mop-up grace, he wants us to help clean up the mess. He wants us to be restorers and reconcilers. Not restorers of the American God Dream. Restorers of God’s creation plan. I think it looks a tad different than we imagine. I think it’s beautiful.

To order Jen’s book, click here.

Are you interested in a book club discussion of her book? Comment below!

My Choices Are Limited

The month of May. OK, April 20-May 20 to be exact, because we don’t like to start projects when normal people would. Our month for eating only seven different foods. All month.

As a reminder, my daughter and I are embarking on a second round of Jen Hatmaker’s book 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess. A more detailed explanation can be found here. And here. We are tired of excess. And we want to find our hidden caches of it that sneak up on us. Most of all, we want to find what God is saying in the searching.

The first month of this seven, we are concentrating on food. How many food choices do we typically have? How much does the average person waste? How many stinking times do I grab something out without even thinking once, let alone twice? How does that assumed abundance ultimately affect the expectations I believe for what I deserve?

And what if we self-limited our choices to just seven? How would that teach me something about the lives of others, and the life I believe I should get to keep?

Now, abundance of food choices has not really been an issue for me lately. In fact, in the past ten months, I’ve been what you might call “dietetically limited.” (I wasn’t even sure dietetically was a word. But spellcheck does not deny me the pleasure.) After a virus that triggered a latent case of celiac disease, I have spent nearly a year unable to eat much food and unable to process most. It’s been an experience.

Many people have gushed over how good I look. (I.e., no longer forty pounds overweight.) One of my dearest friends, who can always be counted on to be real, put it differently last week.

****

Friend: So, are you stabilizing now? Like, not losing any more weight? Because you look a little . . .

Me: Concentration camp chic?

Friend: No, that’s not the way I’d put it. Exactly . . .

****

Yeah. So, too much food has not really been an issue.

In fact, I welcomed the chance to narrow it down to seven foods I know my body can work with. Maybe, by the end of a month, things would get a jump start back toward normal if I avoided anything that might upset the system. (Which is, well, just about anything.)

And I do feel better. Much better.

Which is why it’s funny that I’m being a little bipolar about the whole 7 foods thing. One minute, I’m all “I could do this forever—I love how easy it is!” and ten minutes later it’s more, “I would sell my firstborn child for the tiniest corner of a (gluten free) brownie!”

You can’t please some people.

OK, so I wonder. The things about this month I rejoice in: 

• The ease of shopping. (7 things. I don’t even need a list.) 
• The simplicity of meal prep. (A sliced tomato for dinner vegetable/fruit. Always. A banana and egg for lunch. Soooo easy.) 
• The mindlessness of menu planning. (Chicken, fish, or fried rice for dinner tonight? And . . . a tomato.) 

These, to me, are huge bonuses. So much space in my refrigerator, schedule, and mental life is freed up.

But what about the people I’m supposed to be thinking about—the ones for whom this is every day? The ones who never get to think “what shall I cook today?” because the choice is always the same. If there is anything at all. The people who would consider my seven things a list so spectacularly varied and nutritious they could scarcely imagine eating off it all the time.

All those amazing lessons I’m supposed to learn from “depriving myself”? When I think about these people, it all seems so . . . so . . . still All. About. Me. 

Any conclusions I come away with still seem so minimal compared the the one huge conclusion that no matter what I take away, I will still be privileged compared to most of the other images of God on this planet. If I flat out starved myself, I would still be exercising a choice to do that, something so many do not have. The very fact that I have choices at all. And, that I am of (reasonably) sound mind and body to make them. Have you ever really thought about that??

So maybe that the lesson I’m taking away from month one? That my mere existence in this time and place puts me at an incalculable advantage no matter what. And what does that mean? Because surely God did not give me that gift to watch me say a (sort of) grateful grace at every meal and go on with life as usual.

I’m getting what Jen says in her book Interrupted: 

“I started hearing my gospel narrative through the ears of the Other, and a giant whole bunch of it didn’t even make sense. Some values and perspectives and promises I attributed to God’s own heart only worked in my context, and I’m no theologian, but surely that is problematic.

There is a biblical benchmark I now use. Here it is:

If it isn’t also true for a poor

 single Christian mom in 

Haiti, it isn’t true. Theology 

is either true everywhere or it isn’t true 

anywhere.”

I don’t think a theology of “God thank you for all my blessings you’ve blessed me with, The End,” would make sense to that Haitian mom. I don’t think she’d understand at all if I assumed I just have so much because He just loves me so stinkin’ much. I’m incredibly adorable, after all. 

What would that be saying He thinks of her?

I think if she ever read Isaiah 58 or much of the gospels she’d wonder if I ever had.

I don’t know where this is going to go. But I know I’ve got to ask the hard questions of why I have so many choices. And I know that when God starts getting us to ask why, anything can happen.