12 Years

This is going to be rambling and I am going to mix a few metaphors, bear with me. 

A river is the common metaphor for time. Time only flows forward, never backwards. Time moves constantly and takes anything along for the ride. The question then is are we moving through time or are we the agents of movement? Do we move time forward by our decisions or is time just rapidly moving ever forward, sweeping us in it? People have been going to rivers for peace and quiet, for meditation and contemplation, as long as there have been people or rivers. I think it's because we recognize the power of something outside of ourselves. It takes years of schooling and millions of dollars of technology and teams of engineers to stop what a river does just by being a river. Rivers don't have engineers telling them where to go, how fast to flow, and what to flood. Rivers are just natural occurrences--reminders of the power of the natural world and its general apathy toward human desires. 

I think we don't move time forward as much as get caught up in the stream. Well, I think that most of the time. Sometimes I lean more towards the side of my decisions are important enough to move time itself forward. But then I remember the time the river took a turn.

Twelve years ago the planet changed as far as I am concerned. On 2/27/07, my dad died. This was a catastrophe. Nothing happened in the years prior to prepare me for life without him. Nothing has happened since to make me miss him less. To be honest, nothing has happened to make any of this make any sense or make it any easier. If anyone were to tell you that grief is best aided by time, that person is a liar. 

Sure, I'm not crippled by grief after 12 years, but it still grabs me. 

You know how you might drive past a town with a paper mill or some kind of factory and it just smells horrible? You might wonder how anyone could ever get used to living with that terrible smell. You might think you would always be miserable living in a town with an odor. The truth is, you'd get used to it. Food would taste normal again after a while, and you'd be able to ignore the smell in the bleachers while watching a baseball game with your friends. Then, maybe you'd go on a long vacation and you'd return to rediscover how your town smells. Grief is living in a town that smells like rotting garbage all the time. Eventually you get used to it, but that doesn't make it go away, and it doesn't mean you forget it. Something happens and not only are you reminded of grief, but it feels like the day it happened all over again and you have to get used to it all over again. 

God is different these past 12 years. Not in a way that challenges Immutability. I'm not a heretic. God isn't changing, but my experience of God is changing. The best way to put it is my God is getting bigger and bigger by the year. The tiny God of 12 years ago wouldn't be able to handle where I've been or what I've learned about the world since then. God on 2/26/07 fit really well into my pocket and was there when I needed to pull handkerchief-God out and wipe away a quick tear. Then the river of time took the big turn on 2/27 and pocket sized God got really big really fast. 

God was bigger than my religion or my Christianity or my church. God was bigger than my grief and my pain. God is bigger now to me than He's ever been. There's a line from my favorite songwriter Aaron Weiss I repeat to myself quite a bit. "Blind as I'd become, I used to wonder where you are, these days I can't find where you're not" It's a bit of a mantra to me.

If God is in the pain, then where isn't He? If God is in the midst of death and grief and sadness, then why limit Him? 

The past twelve years have been an exercise in me learning to not be surprised by God anymore. I know God loves me. I know God is FOR me, and WITH me. I know these things. Even when I rediscover how bad the town of grief smells, I remember those things. Even when I am depressed, and unmotivated, and beaten down by life. I can either choose to react positively or negatively to every situation the river puts in front of me, and no matter which one I choose God will still be for me and with me. The town doesn't stop stinking, though. 

From Anger to Action

Toddlers are a glimpse into our own unfiltered behavior. They haven't learned how to behave and hide their true feelings from society, so they act the way they feel like acting. When a toddler loses his kite in the wind and sees it sail into a tree, he loses his mind. He falls on the ground, kicking and screaming, he wails at the sky as if the gods have conspired to torment him, he pays no attention to his own ability to walk over to the dangling string and regain control of the kite. When a toddler is over-tired, the smallest thing can set him off into a rage nightmare. His guards are down and the injustice he feels over bedtimes or candy are coming pouring from a volcano of raw emotion. But he doesn't actually do anything to make himself more likely to get what he wants.

There is a lot to be angry about these days. If you watch the news, or read twitter for three seconds, you can work yourself up into a frothing mess. It is inescapable how many wrongs need to be righted and how many systems need to be totally destroyed and rebuilt. It is infuriating how hypocritical those on the "religious right" can be, and how blind they are to it. If I allow myself to think about it for too long, I become a furious mess. But I don't actually do anything about it.

I watched a sermon on YouTube by a pastor out of New York named Carl Lentz in which he talked about how too many people are "angryvists" and not many are activists. That struck me. How many times am I angry, righteously angry, but content to do absolutely nothing? As if being angry about the state of the world is somehow going to do something. Anger is a largely useless emotion. It is a primitive reaction in the most ancient parts of our brains to stimuli we find at odds with our desired method of survival. We get most angry when we are most stressed. Like a toddler who is over-tired, we are more prone to erupt when we feel distressed. When we are overcome with anxiety, we aren't ourselves. Anxiety causes stress, and stress makes us more irritable. When we are irritable, a tweet from a politician we don't like can set us ablaze. When we are stressed, we can watch a report about racial injustice and spew venom for twenty minutes about how miserable the hearts of the people in power must be to allow this to go unchecked, then we sit back down and check out another show on Netflix. We don't do anything about it.

What's at the core of your stress? What is causing you to be irritable? It's more important to know why you are irritable than it is to know what is irritating you. If you give an over-tired three year old what he is yelling about, he will only get irritated about something else. Even if the problem that you think is so irritating gets solved, you will only get irritated about something else.

One of the most common sources of anxiety is fear of the unknown. It's why half of the scary movies in the world take place under water or in space. We don't know much about sharks, so they terrify us. We don't know what we would do if aliens were real, so we freak out at alien movies. If we are truly honest, we don't know a whole lot. When we lie in our beds alone with our thoughts and the darkness and the uncaring ceiling, we really feel like we might be wrong about everything we think we know. The entire field of epistemology exists precisely to show us exactly how little we can be sure we actually know. Our ignorance of the future, of what is going to happen tomorrow, of whether it's all going to be ok--these are the sources of our anxiety.

The opposite of anxiety is confidence. Confidence is attractive because we want to be associated with someone who isn't as anxious and insecure as we are. Confidence leads to action while anxiety leads to stress. When you can manage your stress enough to funnel your disgust about the state of the world into action to end the injustice you see, you are operating from a confidence in something outside of yourself. We can't be confident in and of ourselves. We need something to be confident in so we can act.

One of the most famous activists--a man whose anger was proved righteous in his action--was Martin Luther King, Jr. He didn't just talk about injustice, he didn't yell and scream about hypocrites, and he didn't just send tweets with a hashtag that aligned him with the "good guys." He went out and did something. He stood on the steps of the Alabama State Capital building on March 25, 1965, and delivered a speech entitled Our God is Marching On. You should read it. He ended the speech with the key to his confidence. Dr. King gives us and his listeners that day a glimpse at how he overcame anxiety based in ignorance about the future and leapt into activism driven by confidence. He asks over and over "How long?" and answers it "Not long!" followed by a reason he is confident his cause will be victorious. He was confident in his belief that "no lie can live forever," and that "the moral arc of the universe is long, but  it bends towards justice." Dr. King believed those statements enough, he could be confident and funnel his emotion into action.

We can be confident in the same things. We can be confident God is ahead of us, drawing us and the world forward. God is for our progress as we move the world towards justice. We can't sit and be anxious, shouting and making more enemies that friends. We have to base our knowledge on the belief our God is marching us toward justice, and then act accordingly. We won't ever fully know anything. In his letter to a group of Jesus followers in the ancient city of Corinth, the apostle Paul--at the end of a brilliant rant about the power of Love--reminds us we only see a dim reflection of reality, but one day we will see face-to-face. We will know in the way in which we are fully known. Your fear about the future is a sign of your lack of confidence if how fully you are known. My angry tweets I thankfully delete more than I send are a sign of my lack of confidence. My rants about the hypocrites in politics are exercises in insecurity.

When he asks "How long will Justice be crucified and Truth bear it?" Dr. King confidently answers, "not long." Let's move beyond anger and into action. Let's move beyond ignorance and into confidence. Let's manage our stress, speak truth into our anxiety, and share the confidence we have with Love. Because Love is the anchor, the bedrock, the foundation. Love is the thing behind the thing behind the thing. Love is the motivator and the engine of all things. Love is creating and building and moving us all towards the Lover of our souls. 

Contentment Through a Different Lens

There once was a man who had a son. One day, he bought his son a pony. The man said to a Zen master, "Isn't this great!"
The Zen master responded with "We'll see."
A few days later his son was riding the pony, and the pony bucked the boy to the ground, breaking his leg. The father said, "Oh no, what a tragedy!"
The Zen master said, "We'll see."
A few weeks later a war had started with the neighboring village, an army recruiter came by the boy's house, but left because the boy still had a broken leg. Many young men were dying every day in this war, so the father was relieved his son didn't have to fight. He said, "Isn't this fortunate!"
The Zen master said, "We'll see."

This story is a famous one. It has been used to talk people down from despair and remind others to calm down with their excitement. For some, it's a dangerous example of stoicism. To me, it has challenged my thinking on contentment to the core.

Each person will go through significant ups and downs in life. Every follower of Jesus has been Peter on the mount of transfiguration, wanting to stay forever in the intimate presence of the Divine. The problem is, we have all also felt like Jesus on the cross--begging God to reveal Himself in our dark moments and suffering.

What does the story of the boy and the pony mean for the follower of Jesus? Do we practice "managed expectations" to the point we are never excited by nor frustrated about anything? Going through life without emotional response seems like painting without color. God gave us emotion in order to keep life from being milquetoast.

At the same time, there's a beautiful contentment found in the story. Nothing seems too bad or too great for the Zen master. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would fly off the handle at a parking ticket or an overcooked burger.

It's difficult to be content with your situation in life if you view yourself through the lens of facebook. Everyone of my facebook friends seems to be having either the greatest day ever or is severely depressed. No one ever posts "pretty average day" on facebook. Because of this, our human nature and its need for comparison has a field day with facebook statuses. We are either doing much better or much worse than everyone we see, and we forget how phony the entire process of posting on facebook actually is. The secret to contentment is being self-aware, and unchanged by what is happening in anyone else's life.

Always our example, Jesus Christ talked about and modeled perfect contentment in all things. It was His contentment, obedience, and love which held him to a cross for us. He taught us to look at the flowers and birds and to understand God takes care of their every need. Our prayer "give us this day our daily bread" is a statement both of our contentment with only what we need for today, but also our willingness to rely on God's daily provision.

Contentment, as modeled by Christ is the melting away of the self and the immersion of our souls in the daily mercies of a loving, creating, moving Father who will make sure we are OK. It's human nature to look at what others have and wish it was ours. It's human nature to want better things in our lives. It's Christ to live in the knowledge that God didn't reach out to us to make us a sensation, but to make us His. 

Life-Prayer

This Sunday, in every church in America, there is going to be someone talking about his or her prayer-life. maybe not the pastor, but someone. He or she will approach someone else and ask them about their prayer-life.

"How's your prayer-life?"

Prayer is important. In fact it is so important I didn't want to write this at all. I didn't feel qualified nor good enough at it to write about prayer. I mean, there are times in my life where I feel my prayers bounce back off the ceiling and hit me hot in the face. Useless words spouted at a God who is either not listening or just doesn't care?

What if there was more to prayer than talking to God? Not that talking to God isn't crucial, because it is, but what if that was just a part of the story? In Ephesians 2, Paul tells the church at Ephesus they are God's poem, his workmanship, his masterpiece. If that's the case, there might be more required than just a few whispers towards the ceiling before bed.

Most great musicians will tell you they don't know how a song works before they play it in front of an audience. Sinatra used to bring a crowd of people into the studio when he was recording. It helped him to see the people react to the song. Dylan used to do a similar thing. I once saw a documentary on Jay-Z making the Black Album and he was bringing two or three people into the studio with him just to listen to the beats he was choosing between. He knew if it didn't play in front of a crowd, it didn't play.

Maybe there's a part of prayer that's more like that. Maybe prayer plays in front of a crowd more than in a quiet room. Not in a "look at me, are you seeing this?" way, but in a "are you SEEING this?" way. Maybe prayer is part of the mystical union we have with one another which allows us to feel what someone else is feeling, to experience pain and joy with someone, and to learn from someone else's mistakes.

Just like any other healthy relationship, we need to spend time alone with one another. The nature of that time alone with God is extremely important, and as I talked about earlier, you don't actually have to be in solitude with God to have solitude with God.

There's nothing worse than someone bragging about their alone time with God. The public life-prayer is for other people, to encourage fellow Christians and to bring us closer to a true understanding of the above-all in-all through-all Savior we worship. We need a little spiritual PDA. The time you spend with God alone, the things you say, the things you do--some of that stuff needs to stay private.

Don't kiss and tell.

I once read an article in a surfing magazine that basically said surfing along is only honorable if you don't tell anyone about it. Prayer and fasting are done best when you don't tell anyone about them. How many books or blogs (hopefully not this one) are really just some person telling you how awesome his or her spiritual life is, hoping you think he or she is super pious? 

That's dumb.

I hope this is an honest account about how little I have it all together. That said, while prayer is beneficial when done in secret, your life-prayer is public. Your actions should be love letters to God or at least sappy texts sent in the middle of the night.

Prayer is done in secret, in your head. Life is done on the world stage. Prayer is your behind the scenes director's commentary to life. you can't be good at one without getting better at the other. 

But still. Don't be that guy. Don't try to make people think you're "super-spiritual guy" at the expense of the truth. It's lame. More importantly, it robs us of our joy and takes away from what is actually happening when we unite our spirits to God's in prayer.

You're like wood. Fire wood. When you put wood in a fire it burns. The wood ceases to be wood and becomes something else entirely. Some of it becomes ash. Some becomes charcoal, but most of the wood becomes fire. Prayer is you putting yourself in God's fire, knowing you will be changed. Knowing the Divine will consume you and transform you into Himself.
Don't you want a prayer life like that?

Rediscovering Wonder

How much do you believe in miracles? Everyone who says he or she is a Christian is someone who believes in miracles to some extent, or do they? I mean, you believe that a man died and then rose from the dead.

You believe that this man was actually also God.
You believe that the death and resurrection of this God-man atoned for the sins of mankind.

So already, everytime you attend a church service and profess belief in this miracle, you should be thought of as a person who believes in miracles.

Until someone claims God healed their cancer.
Until someone tells you God spoke to them.
Until someone tells you God is calling them to do something drastic.

Why do we suspend our belief in a supernatural God who does supernatural things when that God helps us or someone in our group of friends? If a man walked into your church and announced that God had healed his wife of cancer miraculously, would your first thought be "Well, God gave doctors their gifts and talents so in a way that might be true?" If so, repent of that.

We believe in two worlds, a physical and a spiritual. We believe in a mystical, eastern faith based on the facts of God's transcendence into the natural order and beyond the natural order. We believe in a Savior who, after He rose from the dead, told His followers they would do and see greater things than He.

St. Francis once saved a village from a wolf who was menacing the villagers. He approached the wolf in the woods and spoke to it, making an arrangement with it to not attack the villagers or their livestock if they promised to put food out for it. "Brother wolf," as St. Francis called him, bowed to Francis and placed his paw in the saint's hand as a sign of agreement.

I know many of you are going to immediately draw the line at becoming God's Dr. Doolittle. Most of you will probably say this story is bogus. The story of Francis and the wolf of Gubbio is one of the most well-known stories of the saint. It was recorded by historians of his day as well as other events from his life. That said, if we throw out stories like this one, how much of Saint Francis' life are we to throw out? If the same historians who recorded this story as "history" also wrote other, more "believable" stories about St. Francis, do we throw those stories out too?

St. Peter, under the power of the Holy Spirit, healed a paralyzed man. That story is recorded in the book of Acts. Do we believe that story simply because it's canonical? Do we throw out any miracle that didn't occur in the Bible because someone with "the Apostle" before his name didn't write about it? Did God just stop doing miracles?

I believe in miracles. As I attempt to curb my cynicism and embrace the mystical, I am learning more about the God I serve: a God who really enjoys invading the natural world and shaking things up a bit. This God has acted throughout history and the Bible is record of those actions. This God didn't stop acting because John finished writing Revelation and so there was nothing more to be done. This God is continuing the work that STARTED on the cross, and is not content with allowing people to live mundane, fruitless lives devoid of wonder or mystery.

Run back to it. Run back to the child-like acceptance of miracles. Return to the mystery of God's continual dance throughout space and time.