Regaining Joy and Wonder

Posted on May 10, 2019 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

This world is full of wonder.

We are surrounded by truth, goodness, beauty.

Yet rather than pausing to drink it all in, rather than marveling at it all, I find myself slogging through each day with my head down and my heart full of drudgery.

Worse, I am discovering that this blindness is contagious. Rather than inviting my children to stop and gaze at the wonder all around, I am teaching them to plod through their days of math and grammar with nary a glance toward the splendor without or within themselves.

I am teaching them that learning is only toil rather than a work that satisfies our longing for truth, goodness, and beauty.

It is an easy thing to do three weeks before the end of school.

I must repent.

I must repent of my lack of joy and wonder. Joy in this creation and wonder in the learning of this creation.

Even in these last days of school, I must pull my head up and take time to pause and gaze.

I must invite my children to pause and gaze.

The final goal of learning is, after all, to become a better human, to become the person God created us to be.

I cannot only tell my girls about truth, goodness, and beauty.

I must show them.

And before I can show them, I must regularly repent of losing my own joy and wonder.

Beautiful Creator of all, forgive me for my lack of joy. Teach my heart never to lose awe and wonder at all that is around and within me.

Let me never cease to gaze at truth, goodness, and beauty

And in that gazing may I catch a glimpse of You.

Art credits: All photographs are copyright Made Sacred 2019

There Is Good News

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Elizabeth

Sometimes I am weary of this world.

Often I adore this crazy beauty that surrounds us. There is much to love, much to be grateful for.

Every once in a while, however, the brokenness of it all begins to weigh heavy on me.

My former pastor shares that he has cancer.

Blood work comes back and tells me I must take my daughter to a specialist.

The vitriol in the politics on my Facebook makes me just close my eyes.

There are no easy answers. For all of its goodness, the fact remains that we have sinned and thus infused our world with darkness.

The ugliness we see around us is here until Jesus returns.

The good news for right now?

He is here in the meantime.

God came down to live this same life in the midst of the brokenness.

God died on a cross so that we can be with Him now through forever, so that we can be part of Him making the ugly beautiful again.

God stayed here with us, to walk with us through the darkness. More than that, to be light inside of us that cannot be overcome by the darkness.

So as I feel the heaviness press down, I don’t try to escape the hurt of this world.

Rather, I try to lean into it as God did, knowing that He is working through me to heal.

Knowing that in the end He will heal it all perfectly.

And all that will remain will be beauty.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credit: The Holy Night by Correggio; photo of Christ on the Cross statue by Asta Rastauskiene; Pentecost by Mildorfer

Exploring Goodness and Freedom

Posted on August 7, 2015 by Elizabeth

We are in the middle of moving, so I will be fetching from the archives for the next two or three weeks. Enjoy!

Is there such a thing as good?

Not the sort of good that is only good because it results in some desired, practical outcome, but the sort of good that is good in itself. Inherently good, intrinsically good.

It would be arrogant to think that such a question could be fully addressed in this small place, but perhaps this space is sufficiently large at least to begin the wonderings.

This is a question containing quite a breadth of meaning, so it is worthwhile to ask it again: **is there anything that is good in itself, apart from any practical value it might have?**

What would it look like if the answer was no? What would our world look like if we believed that there was nothing that was good apart from its practical value? (I hasten to insert, however, that belief of some truth is not quite the same as truth itself.)

If there is no such thing as good, then that which is good becomes the same as whatever thing that I want.

When all that says “It is good” has been debunked, what says “I want” remains. ~ C.S. Lewis in Abolition of Man

**If good is the same as I want, then we become nothing but bundles of desires chasing after what will satisfy.**

American Flag

Freedom.

We in the United States love the idea of freedom, yet even that idea has changed over the years.

Freedom, for most of the time that the major religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) have existed, meant the freedom to choose what is good; it involved responsibility and even the idea of self-denial.

If you asked most Westerners today, even those belonging to Christ, freedom means being able to do what pleases me. It means doing whatever I want.

Those belonging to Christ might add “as long as I do not hurt others”.

Yet even that caveat seems to apply only to short-term harm and not to anything long-term such as caring for our earth and being committed to justice.

Look at our world and see the belief that there is nothing that is purely good, that freedom means the ability to follow my own desires.

Look at Christ, however, and see that **if good does exist than freedom is the freedom to choose that good rather than being controlled by what is not good.** Freedom means responsibility and self-denial. If there are things that are purely good, than those things should always be chosen for themselves and not for any practical value they might confer.

Many of those who pursue freedom are not truly free at all. They are controlled by their own passions and desires, forced to spend their lives chasing after what will satisfy, yet never finding it.

Those who freely choose to be controlled by Christ, however, are choosing to control their desires and to harness their passions in pursuit of that which is good. They will be satisfied.

Once again, Christ turns the wisdom of this world upside down and gives the good gift of true freedom to those who voluntarily offer their own freedom to Him.

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.

The Goodness of Creation

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Elizabeth

There is a sneaking suspicion that lurks in the back of most of our minds.

A suspicion that colors the way we look at ourselves as well as the world around us.

It is the suspicion that sin has completely undone the goodness of Creation.

It is the suspicion that sin has broken our world and our bodies so thoroughly that there is nothing left to it but the ugly.

And if we view Creation through these dark lenses, we will treat it with contempt and shame. Even more, we will increasingly view the world, including our own bodies, as though they have nothing at all to do with God.

We will fall in line with our culture’s idea that we can live perfectly well in this world without ever thinking about how to consider with our lives the glorious reality of God’s Creation.

Without beginning our salvation story with Creation itself, without including in the gospel the amazingness of God-in-flesh, we are left with a hollow salvation, one that does the bare minimum to get us through the gates rather than one that accomplishes abundance upon abundance of redemption.

When God the Son died and resurrected, He redeemed not just our souls, but our physical bodies and the entire material world around us as well.

The stuff of creation is what God the Son redeems through his becoming flesh, bearing our sin, enduring death, and rising to life. When we have a truncated doctrine of creation, we have a truncated understanding of salvation. ~ Jonathan Wilson, theologian and author of God’s Good World

Romans 8 speaks of creation in the same terms it uses to speak of men. It speaks of creation as waiting to be redeemed, as yearning to be set free from bondage, as groaning as it waits in the exact same way that we groan as we wait for our own redemption.

We groan indeed. We groan as we labor through the pain of childbirth, we groan as we struggle to live life well and fail over and over to obey, we groan as we age and approach death.

We are a part of Creation and we groan and wait and hope right along with all of this material world for the return of Christ and for the redemption and perfection of all that we know.

And we would be a bit more successful in living our lives more beautifully if we would continue to consider the ways in which Creation should guide us toward or away from different patterns of life.

The glories of Creation and the ways in which God continues to interact with Creation have the possibility of helping us to understand how a “well-ordered life in the body presents opportunities for glorifying God and enjoying Him forever by participating more fully in the glorious giftedness of Creation”. (Ken Meyers of Mars Hill Audio Journal)

There is not room in a blog to explore such huge ideas in any depth at all. I only hope to spur on thought and seeking and exploring. Share with me what God shows you?

Art credit: The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise by Benjamin West

Is Christianity Good?

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Elizabeth

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?

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.

(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.

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)

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

Good Work

Posted on October 25, 2013 by Elizabeth

We were made to do meaningful work well.

What, then, do we do with a category of work that has no significance or importance beyond providing employment?

I would love to hear what you think about this topic as I write about it over at Embracing Grace (http://embracinggrace.net/2013/10/good-work/). Will you join me?

Goodness and Freedom

Posted on July 26, 2013 by Elizabeth

Is there such a thing as good?

Not the sort of good that is only good because it results in some desired, practical outcome, but the sort of good that is good in itself. Inherently good, intrinsically good.

It would be arrogant to think that such a question could be fully addressed in this small place, but perhaps this space is sufficiently large at least to begin the wonderings.

This is a question containing quite a breadth of meaning, so it is worthwhile to ask it again: **is there anything that is good in itself, apart from any practical value it might have?**

What would it look like if the answer was no? What would our world look like if we believed that there was nothing that was good apart from its practical value? (I hasten to insert, however, that belief of some truth is not quite the same as truth itself.)

If there is no such thing as good, then that which is good becomes the same as whatever thing that I want.

When all that says “It is good” has been debunked, what says “I want” remains. ~ C.S. Lewis in Abolition of Man

**If good is the same as I want, then we become nothing but bundles of desires chasing after what will satisfy.**

American Flag

Freedom.

We in the United States love the idea of freedom, yet even that idea has changed over the years.

Freedom, for most of the time that the major religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) have existed, meant the freedom to choose what is good; it involved responsibility and even the idea of self-denial.

If you asked most Westerners today, even those belonging to Christ, freedom means being able to do what pleases me. It means doing whatever I want.

Those belonging to Christ might add “as long as I do not hurt others”.

Yet even that caveat seems to apply only to short-term harm and not to anything long-term such as caring for our earth and being committed to justice.

Look at our world and see the belief that there is nothing that is purely good, that freedom means the ability to follow my own desires.

Look at Christ, however, and see that **if good does exist than freedom is the freedom to choose that good rather than being controlled by what is not good.** Freedom means responsibility and self-denial. If there are things that are purely good, than those things should always be chosen for themselves and not for any practical value they might confer.

Many of those who pursue freedom are not truly free at all. They are controlled by their own passions and desires, forced to spend their lives chasing after what will satisfy, yet never finding it.

Those who freely choose to be controlled by Christ, however, are choosing to control their desires and to harness their passions in pursuit of that which is good. They will be satisfied.

Once again, Christ turns the wisdom of this world upside down and gives the good gift of true freedom to those who voluntarily offer their own freedom to Him.

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

This world is full of wonder.

We are surrounded by truth, goodness, beauty.

Yet rather than pausing to drink it all in, rather than marveling at it all, I find myself slogging through each day with my head down and my heart full of drudgery.

Worse, I am discovering that this blindness is contagious. Rather than inviting my children to stop and gaze at the wonder all around, I am teaching them to plod through their days of math and grammar with nary a glance toward the splendor without or within themselves.

I am teaching them that learning is only toil rather than a work that satisfies our longing for truth, goodness, and beauty.

It is an easy thing to do three weeks before the end of school.

I must repent.

I must repent of my lack of joy and wonder. Joy in this creation and wonder in the learning of this creation.

Even in these last days of school, I must pull my head up and take time to pause and gaze.

I must invite my children to pause and gaze.

The final goal of learning is, after all, to become a better human, to become the person God created us to be.

I cannot only tell my girls about truth, goodness, and beauty.

I must show them.

And before I can show them, I must regularly repent of losing my own joy and wonder.

Beautiful Creator of all, forgive me for my lack of joy. Teach my heart never to lose awe and wonder at all that is around and within me.

Let me never cease to gaze at truth, goodness, and beauty

And in that gazing may I catch a glimpse of You.

Sometimes I am weary of this world.

Often I adore this crazy beauty that surrounds us. There is much to love, much to be grateful for.

Every once in a while, however, the brokenness of it all begins to weigh heavy on me.

My former pastor shares that he has cancer.

Blood work comes back and tells me I must take my daughter to a specialist.

The vitriol in the politics on my Facebook makes me just close my eyes.

There are no easy answers. For all of its goodness, the fact remains that we have sinned and thus infused our world with darkness.

The ugliness we see around us is here until Jesus returns.

The good news for right now?

He is here in the meantime.

God came down to live this same life in the midst of the brokenness.

God died on a cross so that we can be with Him now through forever, so that we can be part of Him making the ugly beautiful again.

God stayed here with us, to walk with us through the darkness. More than that, to be light inside of us that cannot be overcome by the darkness.

So as I feel the heaviness press down, I don’t try to escape the hurt of this world.

Rather, I try to lean into it as God did, knowing that He is working through me to heal.

Knowing that in the end He will heal it all perfectly.

And all that will remain will be beauty.

Is there such a thing as good?

Not the sort of good that is only good because it results in some desired, practical outcome, but the sort of good that is good in itself. Inherently good, intrinsically good.

It would be arrogant to think that such a question could be fully addressed in this small place, but perhaps this space is sufficiently large at least to begin the wonderings.

This is a question containing quite a breadth of meaning, so it is worthwhile to ask it again: is there anything that is good in itself, apart from any practical value it might have?

What would it look like if the answer was no? What would our world look like if we believed that there was nothing that was good apart from its practical value? (I hasten to insert, however, that belief of some truth is not quite the same as truth itself.)

If there is no such thing as good, then that which is good becomes the same as whatever thing that I want.

When all that says “It is good” has been debunked, what says “I want” remains. ~ C.S. Lewis in Abolition of Man

If good is the same as I want, then we become nothing but bundles of desires chasing after what will satisfy.

Freedom.

We in the United States love the idea of freedom, yet even that idea has changed over the years.

Freedom, for most of the time that the major religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) have existed, meant the freedom to choose what is good; it involved responsibility and even the idea of self-denial.

If you asked most Westerners today, even those belonging to Christ, freedom means being able to do what pleases me. It means doing whatever I want.

Those belonging to Christ might add “as long as I do not hurt others”.

Yet even that caveat seems to apply only to short-term harm and not to anything long-term such as caring for our earth and being committed to justice.

Look at our world and see the belief that there is nothing that is purely good, that freedom means the ability to follow my own desires.

Many of those who pursue freedom are not truly free at all. They are controlled by their own passions and desires, forced to spend their lives chasing after what will satisfy, yet never finding it.

Those who freely choose to be controlled by Christ, however, are choosing to control their desires and to harness their passions in pursuit of that which is good. They will be satisfied.

Once again, Christ turns the wisdom of this world upside down and gives the good gift of true freedom to those who voluntarily offer their own freedom to Him.

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.

There is a sneaking suspicion that lurks in the back of most of our minds.

A suspicion that colors the way we look at ourselves as well as the world around us.

It is the suspicion that sin has completely undone the goodness of Creation.

It is the suspicion that sin has broken our world and our bodies so thoroughly that there is nothing left to it but the ugly.

And if we view Creation through these dark lenses, we will treat it with contempt and shame. Even more, we will increasingly view the world, including our own bodies, as though they have nothing at all to do with God.

We will fall in line with our culture’s idea that we can live perfectly well in this world without ever thinking about how to consider with our lives the glorious reality of God’s Creation.

Without beginning our salvation story with Creation itself, without including in the gospel the amazingness of God-in-flesh, we are left with a hollow salvation, one that does the bare minimum to get us through the gates rather than one that accomplishes abundance upon abundance of redemption.

When God the Son died and resurrected, He redeemed not just our souls, but our physical bodies and the entire material world around us as well.

The stuff of creation is what God the Son redeems through his becoming flesh, bearing our sin, enduring death, and rising to life. When we have a truncated doctrine of creation, we have a truncated understanding of salvation. ~ Jonathan Wilson, theologian and author of God’s Good World

Romans 8 speaks of creation in the same terms it uses to speak of men. It speaks of creation as waiting to be redeemed, as yearning to be set free from bondage, as groaning as it waits in the exact same way that we groan as we wait for our own redemption.

We groan indeed. We groan as we labor through the pain of childbirth, we groan as we struggle to live life well and fail over and over to obey, we groan as we age and approach death.

We are a part of Creation and we groan and wait and hope right along with all of this material world for the return of Christ and for the redemption and perfection of all that we know.

And we would be a bit more successful in living our lives more beautifully if we would continue to consider the ways in which Creation should guide us toward or away from different patterns of life.

There is not room in a blog to explore such huge ideas in any depth at all. I only hope to spur on thought and seeking and exploring. Share with me what God shows you?

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?

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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

This is a question containing quite a breadth of meaning, so it is worthwhile to ask it again: **is there anything that is good in itself, apart from any practical value it might have?**

**If good is the same as I want, then we become nothing but bundles of desires chasing after what will satisfy.**