Be Right or Love the Person?

“Is it more important to be right or to be loving?”
Angry
I ask her the question as she stands with her hands on her hips, righteous indignation quivering through every inch of her little body.
Frustrated
It seems an easy question when put in such stark terms, but which of us answers it correctly in each one of our little choices every day?
Certainly not me.
I find myself struggling with whether loving the person or desiring to be right is more important.  I wrestle with the decision of whether having the perfect event or loving the person is better.  I fight hard against the desire to let my agenda, my task list trump the to-do of loving the person.
Love God.  Love people.
Love the Lord your God
It is that simple.  It is that hard.
Pride stands in our way.  Desire for an experience to be amazing puts up a wall.  Need to feel accomplished plants its roots.
Yet it truly is simple.  Will we obey our own desires or will we submit ourselves to God?
Stubborn
“To be loving.”  The answer barely escapes through her gritted teeth.  She doesn’t want that to be the right answer.
I know, my darling.  I know.  I, too, want a different answer.  I, too, want to protect myself, to protect my perceived interests and rights.
The trouble is that when you commit yourself to this God of power and love, you commit to letting Him defend you.  Your job is to obey.  In this case, that looks like love.
It is making yourself vulnerable in order to love the person.  It is making yourself nothing in order to love the person.  It is making yourself a servant in order to love the person.
Love God.  Love people.
Love your sister
It is that simple.  It is that hard.

Fairy Tale Truth

I love how much truth can be found in fairy tales and myths.  I love that God chooses to give us glimpses of Himself and His Word in the words of storytelling throughout time.
Reading Fairy Tales
We often view Christianity as rules and laws, as limitations on our freedom.  We wonder why God puts so many limits on our fun.  I recently experienced a switch of perspective.
I am reading Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton.  In his book, he points out that in fairy tales, there is always an “if”.  You may go to the ball IF you return by midnight.  You may marry the princess IF you never let her see a cow.
The Princess
All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend on one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden. ~ Chesterton
Everything beautiful and glorious that cannot be understood is dependent upon a condition that equally cannot be understood.
In fairy tales, this does not seem unjust.  If Cinderella asks her Fairy Godmother why she has to be home by midnight, the Godmother may reply “why should you go to the ball for any amount of time?”  If the miller asks “why can’t I let the princess see a cow?” the fairy may reply “why should you get to marry the princess at all?”
Wild and fantastic
Fairy tales never focus on the condition.  The condition is so small as to seem irrelevant.  The focus is on the dazzling, the wild, the fantastic vision.
We don’t focus on the vision.  We focus on the limitation.  We wonder why we must not get drunk instead of marveling at the beauty, the deep color, the richness of the wine.  We wonder why we must only marry one person instead of living in wonder at the existence of sex.
No restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself…keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman…It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. ~ Chesterton
What a beautiful change of viewpoint!  To look not at the limitation but at the wonder of the permission.  To not complain about being asked to keep our words pure but to wonder at the startling glory of language.  To not gripe of not being allowed to eat all that we desire but to be astonished at the wild and vast expanse of color and taste of food.  To look upon the dazzling, wild, fantastic vision.
Vision
In Christ, all is made sacred, so search for Him everywhere.  Look for Him in the stories and fables, in the myths and fairy tales that you read.  You will find Him there.

Stories

Art credits: Fairy Tales by Jessie Willcox Smith; Fairy Tale Barnstar by Arman Musikyan; In Fairyland by Richard Doyle; A Fairy Tale by Dorothy M. Wheeler; The Fairy Tale by Walther Firle

Keep Fighting

To live life well is hard.
It is difficult to live deliberately, to continue to work for the good of yourself and those you love.  It is easier to coast, to react, to let things slide.
Messy Table
Messy Sink
For myself, it is easier to let the clutter pile up than to keep our house feeling like a home.  It is easier to read mind-candy sorts of novels than to ponder the nature of our God and this universe.  It is easier to let my children learn on their own or through their schools, to allow my girls get away with small acts of unkindness and to be passive in the way they discover God than to fight for their hearts and their minds.  It is easier to let my relationship with my husband drift, to sit in our separate corners in the evenings than to work to know him and enjoy him.
Often I do not want to fight.  I do not want to fight for what is good.  I do not want to fight for what is God-honoring and God-pleasing.
Yet I fight anyway.  I fight because I love and, in this world anyway, loving requires you to fight.
Loving Well
I don’t fight perfectly, though.  I fight in fear of the needs that others have.  I fight in fear of my own inability to give anything good.  I fight in fear of doing the wrong thing and causing irreparable harm.
But still I fight, imperfect as it may be.  I fight in obedience to One who fought for me.
Christ Fought Well
Just like you.  You go and you fight. You go to the bedside of the sick or even the dying and you fight.  You go to the home of someone who is lonely and you fight.  You go to a meeting of a church group in need of volunteers and you fight.  You go to the food pantry, the orphanage, the shelter, and you fight.  You go to funeral, the party, the study, and you fight.
We go because it is where His way leads us; and again and again we are blessed by our going in ways we can never anticipate, and our going becomes a blessing to the ones we go to because when we follow His way, we never go entirely along, and it is always something more than just ourselves and our own emptiness that we bring.  ~ Frederick Buechner
So keep going.  Keep fighting.  And be blessed because when you go and when you fight, you are never fighting alone.

Art credit: photo of Christ carrying the cross by Asta Rastauskiene

How to Give Yourself Grace

I’ve written about it before in this space, but since I will never act perfectly until the day I see my Lord face to face, I will just have to continue to write about it in hopes that this act of writing will somehow help me.  Perhaps it will help someone else as well.
Grace
I want so desperately to follow Jesus without having to fight against myself; I want to do the right thing at the right time without a raging internal struggle; I just want it to be easier for me to obey.  Will you join me over at Embracing Grace to talk about the grace God gives us even when we can’t give that grace to ourselves?  I’d love to meet you over there.
(http://embracinggrace.net/2013/11/how-to-give-yourself-grace/)

Living by Formula

Formulas are nice when you want to control your results.

Formula

Living creatively is risky.
creative architecture
Yet the first thing that we are told about this God in whose image we are created is that He Himself is creative.  He is a creator.
God Creating
You can never tell what will come of living creatively.  Even many who are courageous enough to practice an art form and share it with the world would prefer to live more formulaically.
paint by number
Many of our choices in this life can be directly guided by what God says through His Scriptures.  Am I angry with someone?  I should not kill them.  Do I see something I like in a store window?  I should not steal it.
Yet there are so many other areas in our lives where we are asked to live as courageously as artists, to be riskily creative with our choices.  We ask God where we should live, where we should go to school, whom we should marry, what sort of career we should pursue, how exactly we should parent our children, and we are dissatisfied with the answer that God can use us wherever we are and on whatever path we choose.
Looking for answers
There are other, more specific situations, in which we long with all of our being to do the right thing, to obey God, to be like Jesus, yet that right thing is far from clear.  This is where we yearn for a formula.  We desperately want to be able to turn to a page, a verse, and get a specific answer for a specific issue.
We tell ourselves it is because we want to obey, yet perhaps it is often closer to the truth that we simply do not trust God’s Spirit in us.  We do not trust that the Holy Spirit can guide us in the way that honors God.  We are too fearful to take the risk of living like an artist.
I have been in the middle of just such a situation this week and have found myself searching anxiously for a formula to tell me what to do.  I was attacked by a dog, a dog that is owned by a neighbor with a history of keeping dogs who have to be put down for attacking people.
Whether or not my neighbor knows God, I am not aware.  What an amazing opportunity to make God known to her!  And I live in a neighborhood filled with children.  God asks us to protect the weak, to care for those who cannot care for themselves.
children playing
How can I do both of these things?  How can I glorify God to my neighbor and protect the children of our neighborhood at the same time?  Certainly an eternal soul is more important than any physical harm, yet God also calls us to work toward justice and the defense of the weak.
Part of the trouble that I (and most of you, I would wager!) like to know my path several steps in advance.  Preferably enough steps in advance to allow me to see the end.  I do not like walking forward when I can only see the space where my foot will land next.
I knew my next step.  I knew that God was asking me to meet with the owner of the dog and just speak with her, but that wasn’t enough.  I wanted to know what would happen after that.  I wanted to see all the way to the end, to know how I would both protect the children and make God known to my neighbor.
Loving the Children
Loving our Neighbor
God did not ask me to plan out all of my steps to the end.  He did not tell me the formula I should use to accomplish both of these goals.  He did not give me the task of making certain that everything was ordered perfectly in order to reach His aims.
He only asked me to do the first thing and to trust Him with the rest, to live creatively and allow the Spirit to guide me one step at a time.
So I did.  I met with the dog’s owner without knowing what would come next.  I took the risk of starting down this path, trusting that God will shine His light ahead when the time is right.  I don’t yet know the ending to this story.  I don’t know how God will work things out.
Lighting One Step at a Time
So I live like an artist, taking the risk to wait for His light without planning all of my steps to completion, knowing that God is far more able to control the ending than any number of formulas that I might follow.
Even though I still like formulas.

 

Art credits: God Creating the Sun, the Moon and the Stars by Jan Breughel; Paint-by-numbers photo by Isabelle Bart; Christ with the Children by Carl Bloch; Christ and the Samaritan Woman by Henryk Siemiradzki

Is Christianity Good?

I was listening to my Mars Hill Audio Journal recently when I heard one of the guests claim that the current question about faith for the younger generation (ages 18-35) has moved from Is Christianity true? to Is Christianity good?
Creation of Adam
I am on the upper end of this demographic and this claim at first struck me as false.  After all, much of my youth, especially in high school and college, was spent learning apologetics, learning how to prove to everyone around me that Christianity was true.
Chris Chrisman
(This book not particularly recommended!)
We’ll ignore the fact that most people turn to Jesus because of a friend who lived Jesus rather than because of a stranger who argued Jesus.  I was taught all of the classic defenses and I read all of the classic books: Mere Christianity, A Case for Christ, etc.
None of this is bad.  It is wise to know whether or not your faith is true, to know whether it is intellectually probable.  It would be foolish to “believe” solely because you were raised that way.  The question of whether or not Christianity is good simply never occurred to me.
Yet the more I thought about it, the more I think that perhaps this claim is, after all, true, at least to some degree.  Even beyond the question of whether Jesus is necessary (if you persist in believing that you are not “that bad” then you will not believe that you need such an ultimate sacrifice as the cross), if you believe that human dignity and human good are based on human freedom, and if you believe that freedom is synonymous with autonomy, than Christianity is emphatically not good.
chains
Christianity speaks much about submission, about losing your life, about obedience, and these words sound oppressive in light of what most believe about personal freedom.  Yet any thoughtful person knows when it is articulated clearly that limits are good, that complete autonomy for every individual leads to unsustainable living conditions.
After all, limits provide constraints, but they also provide direction and therefore opportunities.  Leon Kass, an American physician, scientist, and educator, pointed out that gravity is a form of limit but without it we could not dance.
Many of us who follow Christ try to retool the Bible to fit what modern culture has taught us is good.  We want to make Jesus less about submission and more about social justice.
I think most of us do doubt at times whether Christianity is truly good, wondering whether freedom might be a better path.  After all, our culture has taught us that the ability to make all of our own choices is more important than the quality of any of those choices.  Our own Supreme Court has stated that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”.  (Planned Parenthood vs Casey, 1992)
Christ's Freedom
If we can pause for a moment, however, and remember that freedom is not the same as autonomy, then the gospel begins again to become good news rather than being burdensome and dictatorial.
If we can remember that freedom means being who we truly are, being who we were created to be, even being allowed to participate in the Being of our Triune God, than God’s way of submission becomes the way of love rather than the way of oppression. God’s path of obedience becomes the path to becoming our true selves, free from all of the appetites and desires that threaten to enslave us.
Thus the answer to the question “Is Christianity good?” is an emphatic yes.  But only if we step back from our culture’s definition of freedom and move back to a truer definition.  A definition that replaces our autonomy with our very truest selves.
I know which one I would rather have.
What have you found in your relationships? Do people care more about whether Christianity is true or whether it is good?
Art Credits: Creation of Adam by Michelangelo Buonarroti; photo of chains by Javier Gonzalez; photo of Christ by Asta Rastauskiene

I Don’t Want to Be Holy

Be holy” says God.
But we don’t want to be holy.  We want to cling to our busyness and our pride and our little insignificant sins that really are more foundational than we would like for them to be.
Yet every once in awhile we surprise ourselves with a momentary longing to be holy.  Will you join me over at Embracing Grace as I talk about what this means?  I’ll meet you there.
Monet
(http://embracinggrace.net/2013/09/i-dont-want-to-be-holy/ if the above links didn’t work.)

The Town of Villacor

**Be gentle with me, my friends.  I’m experimenting with a different style…just for the fun of it!**
Once upon a time, there existed the town of Villacor.  It was a beautiful town, full of beautiful people.  The townspeople of Villacor loved each other and loved their town.  They were lovely because they loved.
This town was ruled by a king.  He had lived in the town at one time, but now was absent, having returned to his own country for a time.  The townspeople didn’t remember him very well, but they loved each other and loved their town, so they tried to care for each other the best they could.  All was lovely because they loved.
Over time, the townspeople began to feel a strange kind of burning inside of them.  They weren’t sure that they were very important to the king anymore.  He hadn’t been to visit them in such a long time, perhaps he didn’t care anymore, maybe he wasn’t ever coming back.  Besides, they reasoned that if he did ever return, surely he would take them away to his own country, which must be perfection itself, rather than forcing them to stay in their own place.
As they wondered these things, the townspeople of Villacor began to love not quite so well.  It showed up in small things at first: an unkind look, a piece of trash, a little less food left for the animals.  Yet as time went on and the king did not return to look after his town, this not-loving grew bigger and bigger.  And things began to look less lovely because they were less loved.
The town grew dirtier and more cluttered.  Even the people began to look ugly.  The people began hating each other and hurting each other, which left scars.  The animals were neglected and began to turn on themselves and to destroy the plants for food.  All was ugly because they were not loved.
Then one day a small group of Villacorians looked around at each other and at their town and decided to trust what the king had told them.  If the king had promised to return, then he would one day return.  If the king had said that he loved them and loved their town, then it must be so.  And if the king loved their town, then he must mean for them to remain in it.  This little group of people looked around at the town that was loved by the king and they began to love it too, for his sake, even though it was still ugly for having been so unloved.
This little group began caring for the town and for each other.  They treated their fellow townspeople with kindness and gave grace in return for hate.  They picked up trash where they found it and tended the plants and animals.  The town and its people began to look a little more lovely because they were once again being loved.
Time continued to pass, and even though the king still had not returned, the little group of townspeople worked hard at loving their town as their group grew and grew until finally, once again, the town was beautiful, full of beautiful people who loved each other and loved their town.  They didn’t know when the king would return, but they trusted that he would someday return because he had promised that he would always love them.  They were lovely because they loved.
Finally the day came.  Trumpets sounded over the trees and lakes as the sun burst over the hilltop.  The townspeople of Villacor rushed out of the town into the countryside to greet their king.  They surrounded him and brought him back into their town to show him how they had cared for their town.  They showed the king the beauty and cleanliness of the town, the well-tended plants and animals, and demonstrated the acts of kindness that they showed to each other.
One small girl asked the king why it had taken so long for him to return.  Another little boy asked if the king was going to carry them all back to his own country.  The king smiled at them all and said, “My children, I was waiting for you.  It was only when you began to care for the town and each other that everything grew into the way that I had intended all along.  When you began loving each other and loving your town, you changed into a new people and a new town, as beautiful as you were in the beginning.  Now I have come, and rather than take you away from this town you have learned to love, I will now make my home with you.”
And the king’s love became a physical shining that encompassed them all and made everything it touched even more beautiful than it had been before.  They were lovely because they were loved.

Patience

Today’s post is written by Amanda Wen, a good friend whom I met while in worship ministry at our church. She is an amazing musician and I could listen to her play cello all day, I think! We have a lot of fun playing together. We have had all three of our children within months of each other, which made it even harder when they moved away from us. She was pregnant with her first when she came to visit me in the hospital after birthing my first. She asked if the labor (30+ hours!) was worth it, to which I think I replied, “Ask me in a couple of weeks.” She, too, is a wise and funny friend, which is a beautiful combination. If you want to read more of her writings, visit her blog: Life, The Universe, and Pachelbel at oucellogal.livejournal.com. You’ll have to ask for an invitation to read, but it’s well worth it!

 

There’s a joke that if you pray for patience, God will give you children. I don’t recall ever praying specifically for patience, but I have three children anyway: two boys, ages two and almost four, and a little girl due in January. (note from Elizabeth: Amanda had her baby, Selah Joy, on January 16. Mommy and Baby are both doing beautifully!) I see a lot of myself in both of my boys, but it is my older one who is most like me: stubborn, high-strung, and disinclined to tolerate change, disruption of a routine, and being told to wait. This conversation takes place frequently:
Him: When are we going to do (desirable activity)?
Me: At (time).
Him: But THAT’S TOO LONG. (He says this even if the aforementioned time is only ten minutes away).
Me: Then you’ll just have to be patient.
(Sorry, kid. You got some lousy genetic material from your mommy).
Right now, I feel stuck in a season of waiting. My musical career is currently taking a backseat to my children, one of whom I am not-so-patiently waiting to meet. As a freelancer, I have no guarantees from anyone that my job will be waiting for me when I resurface, so every time the phone rings with a job opportunity I must turn down, I wonder when they will eventually give up on me and stop calling. And I watch, and more than occasionally envy, the blossoming careers of some close friends and wonder if I will ever join their ranks.
So many others wait for things that are so much bigger, so much more important, than this. They wait for healing. They wait for relief from financial pressures. They wait for children, for a spouse, for someone they love dearly to come to know the Lord.
How are we to be patient in situations like these?
In recent weeks, I’ve been studying the life of Abraham in my Bible Study Fellowship class. Abraham was a guy with some pretty inspiring faith, faith I know I do not possess. He had a comfortable life in a wealthy, sophisticated city, with no reason to leave, except that God called him to do exactly that.
1The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.
2“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
3I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
Let’s take a closer look at that first part: God calls Abram to “a land I will show you.” Translation: Abram didn’t even know where he was going. Yet he obeyed.
God also promises that he will make Abram a great nation, yet at this point in his life, Abram was about seventy-five, his wife sixty-five, and they had no children. Yet he believed.
I appreciate that the Bible does not make it sound like Abram believed effortlessly, without mistakes or stumbles. In the course of the quarter-century he waited for God to fulfill this precious promise of a child, he lied out of fear, he took matters into his own hands and had a child with his wife’s servant, and he questioned God on many occasions. Genesis 15 records one of these conversations:
2But Abram said, “Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?” 3And Abram said, “You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir.”
4Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.” 5He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”
6Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
Of course, we know the rest of the story. Abraham and Sarah eventually gave birth to Isaac, their long-awaited miracle child.
So how do we get this sort of patience?
We can’t do it on our own. That’s something I know for a fact, because I have tried, on numerous occasions, and failed. “Just be patient” is useless advice ( and something I’d do well to remember when dealing with my oldest)!
And the Bible makes this clear. In John 15:5, Jesus says, “…apart from me you can do nothing.”
But at the beginning of the verse, Jesus says something amazing and wonderful. “If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit.”
Fruit…like love, joy, peace…and patience.
Paul learned this lesson, as we see in the fourth chapter of Philippians.
I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. 13I can do all this through him who gives me strength.
Only by remaining steadfast in Jesus can we learn to wait for the things he has promised us. To be honest, I’m not entirely certain what that looks like, either, but if I am to learn how to be patient, how to teach my children to be patient, I am determined to find out. So I will endure, I will look to him when I struggle, I will ask him for help even before I find myself struggling, and I will trust his promise that his word will not return empty, that he does intend to fulfill the promises he has made to me, that he will enable me to do everything he has called me to do.
Even to be patient.

Why I Want To Join

I am a logophile, a lover of words. I love the way that different words evoke different emotions, and even when two words have the same dictionary meaning, they can still have very different connotations. 



I love searching for just the right word that paints exactly the picture I want so that others can see what is in my mind.

Five Minute Friday


Every Friday, I get a writing prompt. Just one word, to challenge me to write for five minutes without editing. Just to practice my craft, to practice being able to find exactly the right words. A few Fridays ago, the word was “join”.

Join.

My heart was immediately flooded with emotion, just from that one simple word. Everything from sadness and self-doubt in remembering times I was not asked to join, to desire and longing to join…anything.

What is it about that word? Why does it evoke so much emotion? 

It makes me want to belong, want to be a part of something. Not just anything, although there is a part of me that might want to belong to anything, but to be a part of something that really matters. 

I want to join, to be an important part of an important group that is…I don’t know, changing the world?

It almost seems a bit ludicrous, that a such small, simple word can pull such complex feeling out of me. As I thought a bit more about it, though, I realized that this is probably something that God put into all of us. 

I wonder if God has placed a strong desire to join, to belong, to be a part of something, into each of our hearts in order to draw us closer both to Him and to each other and the community He has placed each of us in.

Yes, this is a difficult thing and involves risk and vulnerability on our part.  Yet, as I wrote last week, it is God asking us to do what He has already done.


Perhaps, if we who follow Christ can find the courage to also follow Christ’s example of opening our hearts to those around us, then God will use that desire to join, to belong, that He has placed into all of our hearts to draw those He is pursuing into His community.

I will pray for courage. I will open my eyes to discover those to whom God is asking me to open my heart. I will trust God’s Spirit to do the rest.

Will you join me?