David

It was the first night of church camp, and I was up late talking with a roommate I had just met. She was telling me about her struggles with depression, how she had a history of self-injury, and how she had even come close to actually killing herself. She looked mostly at the floor, but occasionally at me out of the corner of her eye, and I knew I needed to say something to let her know I wasn't troubled by her. 

We were both teenagers, both in our awkward years, and both knew, apparently, some of the heavy darkness that dwells in this broken world. I stuttered out a few encouraging words, about how obviously God had a plan for her life and it was good to see her coming through on this side of it. I assured her that I didn't think she was weird, and I wasn't scared of her. Then, I told her part of my own story, which included a season living in locked facilities with other young persons who had troubles similar to hers. I was perfectly comfortable with her. 

But her eyes got as big as saucers. 

The next day, she moved out of our shared room and never came back. 

Later that night, my group leader - David - pulled me aside and told me that my roommate had, indeed, moved out. The things I had shared had scared her, and she didn't feel safe sharing a space with me. He told me how inappropriate it was to share my story with her and that if it was something I needed to talk about, he was always there to listen (even though David and I had just met the day before, as well). 

It honestly baffled my mind. I couldn't understand how saying, "I can relate, and I know stories like yours because I've been in dark places with them" to someone who just told me she'd tried to kill herself made me the threat. I believe so much that God has given us our stories for a reason and that we have no reason to be ashamed in sharing them and yet, here I was - ashamed. Feeling like I'd done something wrong. 

I agreed to talk to David, which is how we ended up sitting at a picnic table out behind the dorms as the sun was setting in the summer sky. I was trying to explain to him the story she'd told me, why I had shared what I had shared, what it means to me to have that story to share, what my goal was in choosing my words carefully, all of that. I was, for sure, trying to defend myself. 

But the more I talked to David, the more he started to ask questions, and the more I realized that maybe I carried more shame with me than I thought I did. I started to buffer a little bit, to deflect. I caught my own eyes gazing downward until, at last, trapped in the pain and the hurt and the darkness of my own story, my eyes were locked to the ground, barely able to make out the dirt in the darkness. 

It was now very late into the night. 

Then, David told me to look at him. He didn't demand it. He didn't ask. Somewhere in between. He encouraged me to look at him, and he waited until I could bring my tear-stained eyes just a little bit upward and almost meet his. Then, he said eight words I have not forgotten since that night: 

"Listen, God wants to bless your face off." 

He already knew that, he said, just from the few short interactions we'd had in our small group together. He knew that from the way that I talked about my story. He knew that from the heart from which I had reached out to my roommate, even if my execution wasn't as spectacular as I thought it would be. David's simple, but enthusiastic and absolutely confident, words did for me what I had been hoping my words would have done for my roommate - and all because he had made the space for us to have a real conversation in which he had been really listening. 

It is because of talks like the one I had with David that I have worked to become a listener. It's because of the slightly-damp seat at an overheated picnic table in the dusk of summer that I have worked to make a place for anyone, anywhere. It is because of being heard that I have started to encourage others to speak.

If you need a place to talk, I've got one for you. 

And, for what it's worth, David was right - God has been blessing my face off. 

But maybe the most important word of his sentence was the first one: listen. 

The Queen

No discussion of Esther is complete without talking about the queen herself. There are two queens in the story, and although we could learn a lot from Vashti, the queen I want to talk about today is Esther herself. 

The story tells us that she risked her very life to go into the presence of the king when he hadn't asked for her, that he was known to dismiss or even kill those who violated his personal space in this way. But I don't think she gets enough credit for this moment. I don't think we draw enough inspiration from this one decision. 

Because let's face it - most of us never face actual death just for asking someone a question. 

But think about the trajectory of Esther's life. She was an orphan, by the standards of the day. We don't know what happened to her father; we don't know where her mother is. We know that she has been raised by her uncle, her kinsman-redeemer, and she has grown up in a society that was patriarchal in nature. So she was a woman who would have a tendency to just be quiet and do what was expected of her and not push the boundaries, especially since she was already on her second family - she couldn't afford to be a burden to Mordecai. She might fear that he would abandon her and leave her an orphan again. 

And, in fact, throughout her story, we see her deferring to everyone. We are told that she did whatever Mordecai told her to do. She followed his wisdom without question. When she enters the king's harem and begins her year of beauty treatments, she does what the king's advisors tell her to do. When it was time to enter into the king's presence for the first time, she asked her attendant what she should take with her, and she took only that. At every point in her life, she was letting someone else call the shots, doing only what she was told exactly as she was told and never stepping outside the lines. 

Then comes the impossible moment: her uncle Mordecai tells her that she needs to go talk to the king on behalf of her people...and the king has a long-standing rule that no one comes into his presence unless he asks for them. She cannot, in this instance, simply obey both. To obey one is to disobey the other, no matter which way she goes. 

For what may be the first time in her life, she has to make a choice.

I don't think we give her enough credit for what has got to be an absolutely excruciating moment. We always focus on the danger of putting her life on the line, but what about the risk of simply making a choice? 

Most of us are never going to face actual death or even the threat of it. But we are faced with these sorts of situations every day. Some of us spend much of our lives just following the rules, doing what's expected of us, living up to someone else's expectations. Fulfilling our roles. Knowing our place. Not pushing the boundaries. 

But inevitably, there comes a point where we come up against a situation that doesn't have a simple way through. We must make a choice. 

Are we willing to make one? 

The Bible doesn't tell us how Esther made her choice, except with a lot of prayer. She gathered her people to pray for her, and then she did what she believed was right - ready to accept whatever the consequences were of that decision. 

And that's really the only way we can do it, too. We have to look at the choice in front of us, pray about it, gather our prayer warriors behind us, and then do what we believe is right - what we believe God is calling us to - and be ready to accept whatever the consequences are of our decision. 

But we must choose. We must make a choice. Not making a choice is a choice in itself, one that often favors the default or the status quo, whatever that happens to be. 

So can you choose? When push comes to shove, are you ready to make a choice? Will you make a choice? 

The Deputy

If we're looking at the lessons we can learn from the characters in Esther's story, we absolutely must talk about Haman. We're not sure what exact position he held, but we know he was very high up in the king's hierarchy, a man with great responsibility and honor under Xerxes. 

We could talk for days about Haman's flaws, about his heart, about his personality, about all of the things we can learn from him - from the arrogance it takes to demand that everyone bow down to you (even though you aren't the actual king) to the irony of accidentally erecting the pole on which your own dying body will be put on display. The lessons are many. 

The one I want to pick up on, though, is one that tends to slide by us a little more easily than others. Probably because it doesn't seem central to the grand arc of the story. And yet, God chose to include it anyway. 

As Haman is on his way to talk to the king about what they can do about that wicked Mordecai, that annoying little Jew who refuses to bow down to the kingdom as commanded, the king is looking over some records of his administration and discovers that Mordecai at one point saved his life by reporting to him the secret scheme of two of his guards, who were plotting to kill him. 

Haman then comes into the king's presence, and the king says, "Oh, good. You're here. Let me ask you something.... What should I do for an amazing man who has given me great honor?" 

And Haman thinks, of course, that the king must be talking about him. 

Haman believes that he is the best thing since sliced bread. (Did they have sliced bread in the Babylonian empire?) Haman believes if there's anybody who has ever done any good in the world, it's him. Haman believes that he is the man who is most loved, most favored, most honorable in all of Xerxes' kingdom. The fact that he's in a position of relative power and prestige only seems to confirm this for him. Haman believes he is the man. 

As a result, in his own mind, there's no one better than him. No one more deserving. No one else who has ever done a good thing, at least, not a thing good enough to ever deserve honor for it. Honor is for him and him alone. 

It's this bias that we all have toward ourselves. 

We wouldn't do the things we do if we didn't think they were the right things to do. We wouldn't criticize others if we didn't think they were wrong about something. We wouldn't be able to live with ourselves if we knowingly went against our own conscience. So our entire life is lived in a confirmation bias of our own goodness - we know our heart, we know our motivation, we know our understanding (or the things we think we understand), and we believe ourselves to be acting in good, righteous, and honorable ways. 

So of course we are good persons. Of course we deserve honor. Of course we deserve praise. We do everything with the purest of intentions. And everyone else? Well, it's hard to tell sometimes. 

When the world says, then, that someone should be honored, it doesn't take much for us to think that of course, they're talking about us. Who else would be worthy? 

But what if...what if there are actually other good persons in the world? What if there are others who are doing more than us? Who are doing better than us? Who are having more of an impact than us? Or not even "more" - what if there are others who are having the same kind of impact that we are, doing the same things we are, living just as good of lives as we are? 

Have we stopped to consider the possibility that there are other good persons among us? 

After all, no one compares themselves to the bread slice, but to the sliced bread - which is, necessarily, made up of more than one piece of the whole.  

The Uncle

It's difficult in the story of Esther to talk about Mordecai as just the uncle. Indeed, in the scope of the story, he is so much more. 

Mordecai is a faithful man. He is known to - and hated by - Haman for his faithfulness to God, which is unwavering. He is known to the king (eventually) as a faithful friend, someone who protected the king from certain betrayal and death. The folks around the king's residence seem to know Mordecai by name; he is a very real presence in the fortress. 

He is also Esther's uncle, but he is more than that even here, too. He is her kinsman-redeemer. We don't know what happened to her father, and perhaps to her mother, too, but we are told that Mordecai has raised Esther as his own. He is the Boaz of her story, a foreshadowing of the Christ figure. He has become not just her uncle, but her father.

He protects her. He guides her. He teaches her. He loves her. 

When Esther is first chosen to come into the king's harem and compete for his affections, Mordecai gives her some advice on how to proceed. Among other things, he tells her not to tell anyone about her nationality. They don't need to know she's a Jew. 

The Jews were exiles here; they were foreigners. It's clear that at least some of the natives have a hatred for them, as indicated by Haman's heart, although it's hard to tell what the widespread attitude was toward the Jews. It's not a stretch to assume it was also negative, though, as there didn't seem to be much pushback to the idea of completely annihilating them. 

So don't tell anyone you're a Jew, Mordecai advises Esther. And she doesn't. She goes through a whole year of beauty treatments, earns the king's favor, becomes the new queen, and builds her own consort all without revealing her nationality to anyone. No one in this kingdom knows that she is a Jew, except for those who knew before she came to this palace. 

But then...

But then, Haman issues a decree that the Jews should be slaughtered. All of them. Thoroughly. And Mordecai comes back to Esther to try to convince her to use her power and her place to help her people. 

He can't, apparently, talk directly to her, though, so what he does is he tells one of her eunuchs, one of her attendants, to give her the message. 

And all of a sudden, this man who did so much to protect his niece, this man who redeemed her, this man who taught her and guided her and loved her, this man who insisted that she keep her nationality a secret...has outed her. 

He told the eunuch. He told the servant. He told someone in the fortress who wasn't part of their people who exactly Esther was. And friends, those kinds of things do not stay secret. It's not like he trusted this person not to tell. The story doesn't tell us that he even asked the person not to tell anyone else. Mordecai, who has so far protected Esther, goes out and just declares to the powers that be that she is actually a Jew, and there's no hiding any more. There's no safety any more. 

He just put her life at risk. 

Because he was concerned about his own? 

Something about having our own skin on the line, something about the threat being in our own backyard, it makes us do things we wouldn't otherwise do. It turns us into persons we never thought we'd become. Mordecai spent his whole life redeeming and protecting Esther as if she was his own, but when his own life was on the line, when the lives of his people were in danger, he walks right up to someone with the power to destroy everything...and throws Esther under the bus. 

Ouch. 

It makes me wonder who I've thrown under the bus over the years in the name of self-preservation. It makes me wonder who I have loved, but betrayed over the years out of a fear for some circumstance's impact on my own life. 

It makes me wonder what I'm capable of when it feels like my life on the line.  

The King

Recently, I was reading the book of Esther, and I was struck by how much we have to learn about ourselves - how much I have to learn about myself - from the characters in this short book that has had such a dramatic impact on the story of God's people. 

And as good a place to start as any is with the king himself, Xerxes. 

We know that the king was arrogant; that much goes without saying. We see how domineering he was, how he wanted his way and only his way and always his way. We also see that he could be extremely temperamental - just look at the experiences that women had with him. 

Queen Vashti refused to come entertain him while he was drunk, and he threw her completely out of his presence. Esther was afraid to go into his presence without being invited because he was known to throw those persons out, too. It was dangerous to get on the wrong side of Xerxes. 

But what's unclear is whether or not he knew this about himself. 

All evidence says that he didn't. All evidence supports the notion that perhaps he was an extreme narcissist and had absolutely no understanding of his own potential failures and weaknesses. Maybe he had heard rumors about others who were afraid to approach him; maybe he liked it that way. Maybe he liked his power. But it seems he didn't understand how temperamental he was. 

Because every time we see him doing anything, he signs it with his signet ring. 

He makes it un-revokable. 

He makes it permanent. 

He was drunk and upset with his wife, so he banished her and signed it with his official signature and made it permanent. When he sobered up, he realized how much he missed her, but there was nothing he could do about it; he couldn't even revoke his own order. 

Then, Haman comes to him and says, "Hey, I have an idea," and Xerxes is like, "Cool. You know what you should do? Seal it with my ring, and then it will last forever." He didn't bother to check out the possible impact or consequences or even truth behind Haman's idea; he just went with it and made it permanent. 

Then, Mordecai comes to the king and tells him how horrible this plan of Haman's is and how it's going to devastate everything, including the king, whose favored wife has been permitted to be slaughtered, so Xerxes gives him the ring and tells him to do whatever he sees fit and make that permanent, too. 

At any point, you would think that Xerxes would notice a pattern that perhaps his finalization of every whim he has is not working out so well. At some point, you would think he would see that doing things hastily without thinking them through and sealing them with his ring so that they can never be changed is actually a very bad idea. 

But he never does. 

Do we? 

We live with a self-confirmation bias. That is, we do things because we think they are right and we are convinced that we are informed enough to make the decision, so it's tempting for us to want to make all of our plans permanent. This is obviously the thing to do. This is obviously right. This should be what we do forever. 

But are we aware of how often we are wrong? Do we realize how our emotions or other factors in our lives get in our way? Have we been able to learn from our mistakes? Or do we just keep pulling out our ring and sealing our fate in a fleeting moment, making decisions we can never go back on and not realizing until it's too late that maybe we should have waited?  

Jim

Earlier this week, local media broke the news that Colts owner Jim Irsay had died. 

It seems a little strange to talk about him in this space, since I never actually met the guy. Not in person. But Jim Irsay changed my life - and my philosophy - in ways that he didn't even know. 

More than a decade ago, Jim Irsay was the reason that I joined Twitter. I saw a story on the televised news that Jim was giving away his money on Twitter; all you had to do was tweet back to enter to win. And in a season when I didn't have a job, my resources were dwindling, and I didn't know what was going to happen to me, this became my new financial life plan: I was going to stalk Twitter and win some of Jim Irsay's money, and that was going to help me get through the rough stretch. 

He was only giving away a thousand or few dollars at a time, but to someone in my position, that felt like a months-long lifeline. I would watch for his posts, enter to win, count the comments, do the math, run the stats in my head, and hang on to that very small chance that I might actually win like it was the greatest hope in all the world. As difficult as it would be to be the one selected by random hat pick, it was enough hope to keep me from despairing. I honestly believed that at any moment, my circumstance was going to change, that it was going to be my day, that God - and Jim - were going to bless me with exactly what I needed. 

And they did. 

They gave me hope. 

It was slim hope, but it wasn't false hope. Jim was actually giving away that money. Someone was actually winning. Some average Joe off the street was having their life changed and blessed by something that was actually happening, and I had just as good a chance as anyone at being the recipient of it. 

No, it wasn't a great chance. No, it wasn't a sound financial plan. No, it wasn't a long-term solution to my short-term problem. But in a season in which the world was slamming doors in my face left and right, when employers refused to give me a chance because I was either over-educated or under-experienced for them, when my health (undiagnosed chronic condition) was still a barrier to my success, when I couldn't buy toilet paper and dish soap on the same week and still have any funds left over for actual food, when I was at rock bottom and could hear nothing but the sound of those slamming doors, the generosity of Jim Irsay kept at least one little door cracked open just a little bit for me. And on top of that, the very real truth that I was fundamentally no different than anyone else in the world and had just as much of a chance of...winning. 

Winning something. Winning anything. Being the one picked. 

It's a reminder to me to keep the door open for others. You never know what someone is going through, what kind of season they are having. You never know what slim glimmer of opportunity that they're looking for in you, what reassurance, what hope. You never know what a boost it might be to their soul if you hold out for them that something is possible, whatever that something is. If you give them just as much of a chance to win in this world as anyone else would have. 

I want to be the reason someone believes. I want to be the reason they keep holding on. I want to be the absolutely crazy, doesn't-make-any-sense, really poor plan for the future that someone just can't let go of. 

And I want it to be because of my rock-solid faith in the God who loves me. And them. 

Thank you, Jim, for keeping me going in a rough season. Rest well, sir. You have earned it. 

*I never won a single penny from Jim Irsay. In the end, that didn't matter. I got the greater gift. 

Mammon

When I say that we need to put away mammon and turn back to God, I can hear the objections already. And I get it. Mammon is fun. 

It's fun to be part of a travel team, even if that team plays on Sundays. It's fun to get your buddies together and go to the game or to the racetrack, even if that means leaving church a little bit early. It's fun to take a day trip to the amusement park and make memories with the kids; they probably would have forgotten that Bible lesson anyway. 

Mammon seems like all the stuff that makes our lives feel full. 

And I'm not going to go all hard-core here and say that we should only do church activities; we live in the world, and we are meant to live in the world, and we are meant to participate in our lives and be a witness in the world and we can't do that if we're not part of the things that are going on around us. 

The problem is when we fill our lives with the world and then try to squeeze God into them. The problem is when we reach the point that we're willing to give up church - church activities, worship services, Sunday school, youth group trips, senior outings, fellowship opportunities - for the things we've bought into in the world and we are not equally (or more) willing to give up the things we've bought into for church (and church activities, etc.). 

If you're more willing to hang out with your buddies drinking beer than you are to hang out with your small group, that's a problem. If your kids never miss a game, but miss church for four months in a row, that's a problem. If you've got season tickets and you're never in the pew instead of the stands, that's a problem. 

What it says is - I'm willing to give up God for some fun in the world, but I'm not willing to give up my fun for a closer relationship with God and His people. 

We use all kinds of things to justify this. The church isn't a building or a place or a time; it's the people. But if you're not with the people in the place at the time, then you're losing a big chunk of your argument. The church is the people, not the person. You are not the church by yourself. 

We say that we paid money for whatever we have from the world, and we don't want to waste our investment. But do you also give money to the church? Are you wasting that investment? Have you given your heart to Jesus? Are you wasting your opportunities there? 

We say that others are counting on us, that we committed to be part of something and if we're not there, we're letting everyone else down by our absence. Hate to break it to you, but you're letting me down when you're not at church, too. The church depends on your presence - your talents, your fellowship, your encouragement. People miss you when you're not there, and it's a very real loss. 

So none of our excuses hold water. They're just that - excuses. They're just what we say when we're not willing to say that we chose mammon over God. 

And just as a side note - if the world is more "fun" to you than God, then you haven't met God. It makes me really sad to hear folks justify their double-mindedness by saying that God just doesn't bring joy to their lives or make their lives feel full the way mammon does. If that's the case, you don't know God. 

Anyway, rant over. Just some thoughts I wanted to share this week, as my heart was heavy with them.  

Double-Minded

There are some who will say - why can't we do both? Why can't we love on mom in the morning and then go live our lives in the afternoon? And the answer is simple: you can, but it's really, really hard. 

We are a people who struggle with double-mindedness. Give us something we want to do more, and it's all we can think about. Give us the excitement of something coming later, and it's hard for us to be in the present moment. Maybe you're making breakfast in bed for mom, but you're thinking about the game later. Are you really, then, present to mom? Or is it obligatory? Can anything come from your heart if your heart isn't even in the same place as your hands? 

It's true about the church, too. If you don't believe me, ask yourself when was the last time you thought about what you were doing after church. Did you make lunch plans? Have a family reunion? Know what time the game starts? Need to mow the yard? Whatever it is, whenever we have something else on our schedule, we spend our Sunday morning checking our watch. Wanting to make sure we're not about to miss that other thing because of the thing we're doing now. 

And when you're constantly thinking about that other thing you definitely don't want to miss? You miss the thing you're supposed to be doing in the moment. 

You start timing the sermon. You start counting the choruses. You start criticizing the benediction. You step out a couple of minutes early to "go to the bathroom," but you really just want to be first in line to pick up your kids from class so that you can get in the car quickly and be one of the first out of the parking lot so that you don't have to wait another minute so that you can drive across town, pull up to the squawk box, and beat that other denomination to Wendy's because you've got things to do this afternoon. 

Did you even hear the sermon? 

Are there echoes of the worship in your ears? 

Or are you just stressed out because you've been obsessing all morning about the next thing, while missing the more important thing, which is the thing right in front you? 

Maybe we should start calling you Martha. 

Are you getting it? You can't be truly invested in any moment if you're thinking about the next one. You can't be loving mom if you're thinking about where you need her to take you later. You can't be loving God if you're thinking about what you're doing after service. You can pretend all you want. You can think you're somehow better than the rest of the human race, that you're somehow more capable of a good solid single-mindedness, but the truth about our creation is that we have to have space if we're going to fill it, and if you've only given a small space to something, you can only fill it with small things in small ways because the bigger things are pushing on it from every side and squeezing the experience right out of it. 

We cannot be present and facing forward if there's something tapping on our shoulder all the time. We're just not capable of it. 

That's why we have to be diligent about setting aside time - real time. About creating space - real space. About making sacrifices - so that we clear out all the things that want to press in and take away what's sacred...or what should be sacred. We have to sacrifice our idols - those things that have become too sacred to us, those things that have taken away our ability to be present to the things that ought to be more important but simply aren't any more. 

We have to be willing to put away mammon and turn back to God.  

Sacrifice

The truth is that when you squeezed mom in on her own day, then ran off to do the things you'd normally do on a Sunday (which is no longer church because, hey, priorities), what you really said was that your priority is the other thing. You squeezed mom into your regular schedule because you're nice like that, but then you turned and ran off to your "real" life and dragged her along and what that says is that she's not worth a sacrifice. 

You're not actually willing to give anything up for her. You're not willing to miss anything for her. You're not willing to lose an opportunity for her. You're not willing to "waste" an investment for her. 

You're only willing to give her the free time that you have in an already-busy schedule, then ask her to help make sure you make the rest of your obligations for the day. 

And this is what's happening with the church. This is why I get so animated about the ways that the world makes us so busy on Sundays and tells us it's okay. 

Because what the world is really saying is that if you want to honor God, it's okay to just squeeze Him into an empty slot in your schedule and give Him a little recognition, then move on to your obligations, your commitments, your opportunities... 

The world has made God not your obligation, not your commitment, not your opportunity. 

And you haven't even noticed.

But be honest - you stopped sacrificing for God a long time ago. 

We've lost touch with it. We don't live in an Old Testament world. We aren't required to bring ram, lambs, and male goats and the corresponding grain offering with its pour of wine. Most of us don't even understand all of the sacrifices made by God's people historically. We just focus on the sacrifice that God made for us, and when it's all about this, then we become the center of our own faith. 

God bridged the gap. God paid the price. God made it possible. So faith takes so much less from us today than it did before the Cross. At least, that's the way we're living. God just loves us, and He wants us to love Him, and all of a sudden, it's easy to convince ourselves that we can love Him from anywhere, doing whatever we want, so why shouldn't we be somewhere else on Sunday morning. 

I can love God wherever I'm at. 

I can love mom wherever I'm at. 

Except...we can't. You can't love both God and mammon. And the truth is that whatever you're making sacrifices for, that's what you love most. 

So if you're sacrificing the fellowship to go play ball, you love ball more than you love God. It doesn't matter what you say. It doesn't matter what justification you want to put on it. At this point, a lot of folks have a laundry list - I committed; I invested; I promised. Okay, great, but you're supposed to be committed, invested, and promised to God, too, and you forsook that. You tried to give Him less and call it even, but you're not willing to do that with your other activities. So plain and simple, you value them more. 

It's a hard truth, but we have to swallow it. 

You love most what you're willing to sacrifice for. And if you're not willing to sacrifice, then maybe you don't love it as much as you thought you did. 

Multiverse

We live in a world that expects us to multi-task, to always be doing more than one thing at a time. To be answering work emails and answering phones and shuffling papers. To be driving and texting. (That's illegal where I live, but it doesn't stop anyone.) To be exercising and listening to an audio book. I'll confess and say that at times, I am quite adept at washing the dishes while I am cooking and making more dirty dishes. We are being taught that simply doing one thing at a time is not enough. 

That's a discussion in and of itself, and we'll probably have it one day this week. 

But what sparked me to start to write this reflection was the realization that the world doesn't just expect us to multi-task any more; it's asking us to multi-prioritize. It's asking us not just to do more things at once, but to place an emphasis on more than one thing at a time. To experience, to honor, to value, to celebrate more than one thing at a time. 

I was struck by this on Mother's Day. Specifically, I was struck by the number of mothers on my social media feed who were posting about the activities their kids had on Mother's Day - ball games, recitals, concerts, contests, etc. 

I have written before about how the world has been coming for our Sundays. About how sports leagues are intentionally scheduling on Sundays and families are choosing between sports and church, often choosing sports while trying to tell their kids with their words how important church is...while showing them that sports are actually more important. The world has convinced us it is okay to forsake meeting together if we have something more fun to do, something we've committed to, something we've paid for or otherwise invested in. (Never mind, of course, that we were supposed to have committed to and invested in the church first and foremost.) 

But on Mother's Day, I saw so many of my friends being mothers - taking their kids here and there, running around like chickens with their heads cut off, and squeezing in a real quick breakfast or a few seconds to open the card their kid made them. 

And it just struck me what the world is doing. 

The world has gotten so busy, so fast, so full of itself that we used to take a whole day to celebrate mom and to let her relax and now, she gets a couple of hours and then we fill the rest of the day with other priorities. Honestly, she's lucky if she even gets a couple of hours. She gets a moment, then it's gone, then it's back to business as usual because the world doesn't stop any more. 

And when the world doesn't stop, it doesn't want you to stop, either. It wants you to squeeze in as much as you can and it tries to tell you that it's still meaningful...it's just meaningful with other things that are also meaningful. 

And all of a sudden, you're not just multi-tasking, you're trying to multi-prioritize and honestly, friends, you can't. You cannot fully appreciate a moment that you're trying to squeeze in before the next one. 

You cannot serve both God and mammon. 

It's not possible. 

It's a tension I wrestle with quite often, as I make deliberate decisions to avoid the traps the world is setting. But it broke my heart to see it play out so powerfully on a day we set aside to love someone who means so much to us. Are we really so busy that we can't even take a single day - a whole day - to just stop and love someone? Truly love someone? Are our schedules and our things and our commitments and our investments and our activities and our opportunities that important? 

The truth is.... 

Cindy

For a season in my life, I was scraping money together by taking odd jobs, selling handmade crafts, and rescuing trash. That was back when you could set big trash items out at the curb any old time and the trash would be sure to take them. 

I had rooms in my house full of my finds. Stuff that I walked by with my dog, then went back to retrieve when my hands were free. Stuff that still had some life left in it or...as was the fad of the time...could be restored and repurposed. I had visions for what things could become, but I didn't have the funds for the materials to get them there, so I just picked up the trash and pitched the vision and hoped someone else would pick it up for a few dollars. 

At one point, I had this really neat set of solid wood end tables. Funny story - I picked up the one end table, thinking it was cute and seeing all of its potential, and then it was months, or maybe more than a year, before I stumbled upon the second one and realized it was a perfect match. (Matching end tables sell so much better than a single one.) 

I posted my set and waited. 

And waited. 

And waited. 

How could no one see the beauty in these that I saw? A matching set! In great condition! A little work, and they'd be spectacular. 

Then, Cindy sent me a message. "Do you still have the end tables? How much did you want for them?" 

$17, I told her. I still remember the exact amount. There was something I wanted to buy for my mom for $17, and it was important to me to find it. When I tell you that I was scraping by in that season, I mean it. She said we had a deal, and she would pick them up in a day or two. 

A day or two later, Cindy showed up on my porch, checkbook in hand, and wrote me a check for $34. 

No, no, I told her. That was $17 for the set, not for each table. I only needed $17. I immediately felt guilty for somehow miscommunicating and accidentally overpricing my items. ($34 felt like a LOT of money to me at the time. Even for solid wood.) 

She shrugged and said, "The check's already written." She tore it off and gave it to me. I kept protesting, and I'm not sure I even helped her carry the tables to her car at that point because I was busy arguing. She looked at me and said, very matter-of-factly, "It's all God's money anyway. We're just passing it around," then picked up a table and started walking away. 

I struggled with that for a long time. To be honest with you, I still struggle with that. I still feel like she overpaid me, even though my rational brain knows she got a good deal in the market of the day. 

But I have never forgotten those words she spoke. In fact, you might laugh if you knew how often I say them to myself in my own head. 

I'm in a better place financially now than I was in that season, and I have the opportunity to be generous. I have the opportunity to provide and to do things I wasn't sure back then I would ever be able to do. And as I consider how to be a good steward of what God has given me, I still have those words in my mind. They help me to decide what to do with my blessings. 

It's all God's; we're just passing it around. 

And so, I try to do my fair share of passing. Knowing that someone, somewhere may think they're taking advantage of me, but that's not the case at all. I'm giving freely from what was never mine in the first place. 

Joy

The thorns in our flesh can be an encouragement to our faith. They help us to live in a state of perpetual hope, as we live also in dependence, knowing afresh the goodness of God every day. But that doesn't mean they are without their consequences. 

For the person of faith, the idea that a persistent discomfort could dissuade us from believing in God is laughable. We just double down on what we know - that God is good - and we dive deeper into prayer and into thankfulness and into trust and hope and faith and love. This sustains us. This helps to get us through. 

But the thorn still has a few tricks up its sleeve. Even if it can't shake our faith, that pesky thorn so very often steals our joy. 

That is its true devastation. 

I currently have a thorn in the flesh. I've been wrestling with it for a few years at this point, and God has not seen fit to heal me of it so far. I have been living the story that I'm telling you, the same story that Paul tells you - that story that draws deeper into prayer, dwells in hope, keeps pushing against the mountain and trying to move it by the spoonful. 

But I also have to admit that one of the greatest challenges of this thorn is that it's taken something that I used to love, something that I found great joy in, something that deeply connected me to something of God in the depths of my soul, and it has made it nearly impossible for me. When I attempt to do the thing that I can no longer do because my spirit is still willing, but my flesh is thorny, I no longer feel the joy that I felt for so many years while doing it. 

It's no longer freeing. It's no longer fun. It's no longer good. It's absolute drudgery and a big ball of nerves and wondering when or if I will ever be unbounded by these chains so that joy can fill me up like a balloon again. 

That...is the hardest part for me. 

If God never heals me, I will still believe in Him. If God never heals me, I will still trust in Him. If God never heals me, I will still hope in Him. If God never heals me, I will not doubt His goodness. If God never heals me, I will not doubt that He loves me. I will double-down and get the biggest spoon I can find, and if my spoon breaks, I will find a stick, and if my stick breaks, I will dig with my fingers, and if my fingers start to bleed, I will keep digging anyway. Whatever. Put a mountain in front of me and watch me start moving it, in whatever little ways that I can. 

My faith is not at stake here. I know the goodness and the grace and the love of God too deeply in my bones to let a little discouragement dissuade me. 

But my joy.... 

It takes everything I've got to hold onto my joy.

But I'm trying to do that, too. Because this world took my joy from me once, and it took everything I had - everything God and I had together - to get it back. 

And I shall truly be damned - in a double sense of the word - to lose it again. 

Dependence

It's hard when God doesn't heal our thorn in the flesh. It's hard to reconcile our faith and how earnestly we've prayed with the great, big, resounding "no" from the heavens, from the God that we know is good. As I said yesterday, this persistent thorn in the flesh brings with it the blessing of hope. 

It also brings the blessing of dependence. Or, we might say, continued faith. 

Let's be honest about it - most of us want God to heal the thorn in our flesh so that we can move on. So that it can become one of those good stories we tell from a place far removed from the pain. We promise that we will speak of His goodness, His mercy, His grace. We want the painful seasons of our stories to begin with "once upon a time," with the luxury of looking back and somehow ending up at "happily ever after." 

But we know the world doesn't work that way. We know we don't get all of our stories to work out this way. We know that our stories don't always get to start with "once upon a time," with the luxury of looking back. Too often, they start with "yet again" or "today, too..." One more day. One more struggle. One more chapter that looks the same as the last one. Sometimes, we have to live wondering if we'll ever be happy again, let alone ever after. 

As we say, them's the facts. Or in the language of the church, can I get an "amen?" 

When God doesn't heal our thorn in the flesh, we don't get to tell our stories the way that we want to - from the driver's seat, looking in the rearview mirror. Rather, we have to tell them with every breath. 

We have to tell our stories of depending on God every day. Of believing in Him every day. Of trusting Him every day. To heal us, yes, but more often than not, just to get us through one more day. 

We tell the story of yesterday, and it is a story of God giving us just enough to get through. And when we tell the story of today, it will be the same - God got us through. And maybe that will be the story for the day after that and the one after that and a thousand more. 

Our story, which we wanted to be this really cool story of a really powerful faith that moves mountains and throws them into the sea, becomes...a really cool story of a really powerful faith that is moving mountains by the spoonful. 

One more day. One more breath. One more trust. One more hope. One more prayer. One more thanksgiving. One more rest, and then we'll get up and do it all over again. 

We develop, over time, these narratives of the consistent, steadfast goodness of God. Goodness yesterday, goodness today, goodness for tomorrow and the day after that and maybe a thousand more after that. God may not have been powerfully, miraculously, emphatically good for one dramatic moment of healing like we've wanted, but God is powerfully, miraculously, wonderfully good in every little moment. 

And that, my friends, is a story, too. It's a good one. It's one worth telling. 

And it's that thorn in the flesh that God just doesn't heal that gives us the chance to tell it. 

One more day. One more struggle. One more chapter that looks the same as the last one. One more page of our story in which God is - as He always was and always will be - good. One more sentence in which we declare that He truly does love us. 

Hope

One of the most beautiful gifts of a thorn in the flesh is the opportunity that it gives you to hope. 

Yes, you heard me right - that thing that God doesn't seem to want to heal, that thing that doesn't seem like it's ever going to get better, that thing that makes you have to grind through significant portions of your life because it's always with you is the very thing that keeps you tethered to this beautiful thing called "hope." 

By the time it has become a thorn in the flesh, most of us have completely exhausted all of our resources. Like the bleeding woman, we have seen all of the doctors, spent all of our money, tried all of the remedies, dug through the encyclopedias of native and natural remedies, put things into ourselves that we would never have fathomed would become one with our tissues. We have run out of earthly options...actually, we probably ran out of earthly options a long time ago and we have even run out of the bizarre, crazy, other-worldly options. Even aliens aren't coming to heal us. 

We have prayed all the prayers, cried all the tears, yearned all the yearnings, enlisted all the warriors, gathered all the righteous, made our three-strand cords of friends, filled all the journals. 

All we have left is hope. 

But remember - as Christians, when we say "hope," we're not talking about a wish. We're not talking about a dream. We're not talking about blowing the feathers off a dandelion into the wind and wondering if God catches the message. (And, by the way, by the time we have a thorn in the flesh, we've stripped all the dandelions naked, too.) 

Hope, for the Christian, is confident assurance in the things we know to be true about God. Hope is trust in His heart. Hope is faith in His goodness. Hope is waiting expectantly, knowing we are wrapped in His love. 

That's why hope is such a gift. 

It reminds us of what we believe. It reminds us of what we know. It reminds us of what He's promised. It reminds us of what His Word tells us. It reminds us of the stories - of the ones in the Bible and the ones that we've heard and the ones that we've lived and the ones that we've scribbled in the pages of the journals that we just maxed out with our newest hope. 

It reminds us what He's capable of. It reminds us what He's done. It reminds us what His love means, and what it means for us to be His beloved. 

It keeps our eyes focused not on the thorn, but on the God who wore those thorns in His crown so that we would know that He gets it. He understands. 

And one way or another, this God is our only way through this. Either He will heal us, as we know He is able, or He will give us the strength - moment by moment, day by day, breath by breath - to endure, as we know He is able to do that, too. 

So our hope rests in Him and Him alone. 

And what a beautiful gift that is. 

Thorn in the Flesh

We talk so often about Paul's "thorn in the flesh" - that thing that he prayed, it seemed, so earnestly over but that God chose not to remove. Paul even tells us that - God chose not to remove it. 

Immediately, our minds go to our own troubles, our own trials, the things in our own lives that we can't seem to get rid of, can't seem to get past, can't seem to heal from. We wonder what it is that makes God want us to keep it, what it is about it that He won't heal it for us. 

We have prayed. Oh, we have prayed. We have prayed earnestly. We have prayed feverishly. We have prayed, gotten distracted, then prayed some more because we have wanted God to know how important this thing is to us. We have given up praying, then come back to it because it's the only real hope that we have of any relief, any release...and we keep coming back even when God's very clear answer seems to be a very clear "no." 

I wonder if Paul kept praying. 

Paul tells us that he prayed, that he prayed quite a bit, that he prayed the same kind of desperate, angsty prayers that we pray, but that God had chosen not to take his thorn in the flesh away. He says this with such a plainness, such a matter-of-factness that we could go one of two directions here: we could believe that Paul kept praying over this thorn for the rest of his life, always hoping, always knowing that God can even if God doesn't...or we could decide that Paul recognized that God had no interest in healing him and therefore, accepted God's will and stopped praying. 

Stopping praying over the thorn in the flesh doesn't mean you stop praying about the situation, though. Especially if you're a man of God like Paul. It just changes the way that you pray. 

Maybe Paul did stop praying for healing. Maybe Paul accepted that God simply didn't want to heal him from whatever this thing was. Paul, then, (at least, I believe) would have started praying for the grace to live with it. For the insight to keep on going. For the patience to deal with it. For the strength not to succumb to it. 

I think this feels like defeat to most of us. It's hard to accept that something is never going to change. It's hard to let ourselves believe that. It feels like giving up, especially when we know God is able. It feels like giving in to something dark and heavy, something that is taking away the light in our life and limiting our ability to do the things we want to do...even the things we want to do for the glory of God. 

These thorns in the flesh present so many challenges, so many dilemmas for us besides just the things they obviously do, the challenges they obviously present. A broken leg doesn't only affect your ability to walk. Your ability to walk affects your ability to stand, to get up, to carry things, to navigate certain terrain. It doesn't take long for the pain and inability to use a broken leg to show itself in the simplest of things - like taking a shower, having a meal at the table, attending your kid's soccer game. These things spiral. 

And yet, God doesn't want to heal us from all of them. Our God who is able also says no. 

Now what?  

Harold

By the time I got around to asking Harold, it wasn't even an ask any more. I had been turned down by so many persons who I knew had the skills to help me, but not the willingness, that when someone strongly suggested Harold - someone I didn't know quite as well as I knew the others I had asked - I was more than hesitant and already defeated. So instead of asking, I approached it as a statement. 

"Hey Harold, I've been looking for someone who can teach me how to change the brakes on my car. Do you know anybody?" 

I explained to him the folks I'd already asked, who would have been at the tops of his list, too, and how I had pretty good mechanical skills and more work ethic than I had money, and to my surprise, Harold said, "I can do it, but it'll be about a week and a half until I have some time. Can you be at my house next Thursday?" 

I'll be there. 

Thursday turned into Monday due to some kind of shift in schedule, but that Monday, I pulled into Harold's barn with my beat-up old car in my dirty work clothes, ready to learn how to change the brakes on my car. 

Unlike most men, who tend to automatically assume a request for automotive help from a young woman is a request for them to do the work, Harold had me do all of it, only stepping in when something was particularly tough. He would run over to his workbench and grab a tool, then put it in my hands and explain to me what I was doing. (I had some tools, but not nearly the array that Harold had.)

When one of the calipers seemed hopelessly stuck, Harold stepped in. Together, the two of us made an exceptionally large "cheater bar" (a long bar to get more leverage on turning a stuck part), and it took both of our body weight to snap loose the part we were working on. Harold just shook his head, looking at the rusted-out caliper in his well-worn farm hands, and asked, "Has this car been in the water?" 

No, Harold, I laughed. It's been in the weather. Ain't no such thing as a garage at my house. 

We laughed and carried on, but I have quoted that moment quite a many time since that day. 

It took us more than three hours to accomplish the job, which should have been a lot shorter than that, but all that weather on my car presented some unique challenges. Harold never lost patience, and he never took the project out of my hands. He was there to teach and to help when needed and to make sure the end result was, ultimately, safe for me to drive out of there on. And that's what he did. 

Those few hours with Harold in his barn have shaped the way that I teach and help others. I confess that I am sometimes an "I'll just do it myself" person; it can be tempting for me to just want to take over a project and do it when someone asks for help. But I remember Harold, and I remember that not everyone who asks for help wants someone to do it for them. Sometimes, they really just want a teacher, a friend, a mentor, a quality inspector - to make sure it's ultimately going to be safe for them to drive on out of there on their own work. 

So I try to do that. 

I spent more than three hours with Harold in his barn that Monday. Just a few days later, that same week (my brain says Friday, but I'm not 100% sure), Harold died. A freak accident. While packing for a trip with his wife, he accidentally knocked the battery on his heart pump loose and collapsed before anyone knew what was going on. By the time they figured it out, it was too late. Losing Harold was a big loss - a big loss. But I am eternally thankful for the time I spent with him - time that shaped me more than I was ever able to tell him. And I think about how hesitant I was to even ask him for help...and what I would have missed out on if I had waited even a few more days. 

And no, I'm not talking about my brakes. 

Positively

So how do we deal with the hatred and condemnation, the judgment, the power plays that try to make us feel like we're wrong when what we actually have is simply a difference of opinion? 

This is something I am trying to be mindful of. I'm trying to be aware of the ways that negativity simply surrounds us these days, and I'm trying to be diligent about not letting myself get sucked in. Of course, like everyone, I fail at this goal sometimes, but I'm trying. 

I'm trying to be more intentional about sharing things that I like. About putting positivity into the world. About noticing the good things and making comments about them. 

I'm trying to be more intentional about sticking to my opinions and not backing down. You don't like red candies? *shrug* I still do. They're still my favorite. I'm still going to like them. So I'll say that. I'll simply say, "Oh, well, I like them." 

Why? Because there's no reason not to. 

We form our opinions - our likes, our dislikes, our positions on the issues, our perspectives on life - through our experiences. Through our tastes. Through our own personal lenses that have experienced the world in a certain way. And while we should be open to things that expand our vision and enlarge our experience of the world, we should not be bullied by things that try to diminish the life we have lived and the way that we have lived it with the tools that God has given us to navigate it. 

I think sometimes, being steadfast about the little things that don't seem to matter much helps us - and others around us - to build a tolerance for the bigger things. 

If I shrug and say that I still like red candies, while at the same time accepting that my friends apparently don't, we learn to live together in a new way. You know what happens? We start to share. 

Get away from the candies for a minute and move with me to chips. Potato chips. When the store's got them on sale, I buy the variety box of little chip bags to take in my lunch to work. But I can't eat the barbecue ones because of a food allergy. One of my friends at work saw me eating the white cheddar popcorn one day and asked me if I liked it, and I said sure, I like it. She said she buys the same box, but nobody in her family would eat the white cheddar popcorn. I told her I buy the box, but I can't eat the barbecue ones. She told me they are her favorite. 

There are places in this world where this simple conversation devolves into an argument - however serious or not - about what's the best and how you can't possibly not like something or you can't possibly like something. We could have spoken over each other forever, trying to figure out how to justify that one of us likes something the other one doesn't and how completely backward and wrong that is. 

Instead, we just trade chips. She brings me the white cheddar popcorn that her family won't eat, and I bring her the barbecue chips that I can't. We just put them in each others' offices. It's that simple. 

How has our world forgotten that it's that simple? 

So I'm on a mission to make it that simple again, at least in my own life. I'm on a mission to keep saying I like the things I like and saying I don't like the things that I don't like and letting you like your own thing and dislike what you dislike and not making one of those things necessarily wrong. Not letting hatred and condemnation and judgment and power plays come into the conversation. 

And at the same time, I'm being more intentional about being positive, too. 

Because if you look at the comments sections (as we started with this conversation), it seems everyone is all-too-ready to jump in and tell you what they hate. I don't want to be like that. So I'm on the lookout for the good in the world, and I'm ready to speak it. And if someone disagrees with me, then okay. You know what? I still think it's good. 

And that's okay. 

Right and Wrong

Our willingness to speak out against things we don't like, rather than to speak up for things that we do like, is a symptom of a bigger cultural shift in the world in which we are living. 

You may have noticed that for all of our bravado, we actually have a very limited tolerance for diversity in our world today than we did even just a couple of generations ago. When I say "diversity," I'm not talking about gender or sexual diversity or racial diversity or educational or economic diversity. I'm talking about true diversity - the diversity of ideas. 

Simply put, you can't be on the "wrong" side of culture these days, whatever that culture happens to be in the region of the country you're located in. 

If you're left-leaning in a right-leaning region, you're wrong. If you like Coke in a region where they serve Pepsi, you're wrong. If you think they should still teach cursive writing in an area where they consider education more "progressive," you're wrong. If you're on Facebook in an Instagram culture, you're wrong. 

If you believe red candies are objectively the best in a group that prefers pink (and is willing to argue that pink is not even remotely a shade of red and therefore, doesn't count in the same taxonomy), you're wrong. (Okay, so just to be fair, my friends very clearly told me I was wrong, but they didn't seem to be judging me for it...too much.) 

The point is - our world is more black and white than it has ever been. We are less tolerant for shades of grey than we have ever been. We have very little patience for differences of opinion. In fact, we have almost completely given up on the idea that there is any such thing as an opinion...unless, of course, you're wrong, and then, we're willing to conceded that that's your "opinion," where we will use opinion as an opposition to fact. So there are facts - things that are absolutely completely true - and there are opinions - anything that disagrees with the facts. 

The problem is, of course, that facts aren't really facts. They are dominant opinions. They are the opinions held by those who feel like they have the power to hold the opinions, and then they use that power to try to escalate their opinions to fact, thus making anyone who disagrees with them not merely different with a different experience and a different perspective, but wrong. 

And of course, if someone is wrong, then it's only your duty to correct them and tell them how wrong they are. And, of course, we have completely lost our ability to do this in a civil manner - mostly because we know we are not dealing with actual facts, but with opinions - so we have devolved into hatred and condemnation, which is a reflection of the same use of power that we were just talking about. 

If it's power that makes our opinions into facts, then we must use power (force) to shut down other opinions so that they don't ever come close to looking like fact. 

Thus, we have it. Hatred and condemnation. To protect our fragile "facts" from being exposed for what they really are - opinion - and forcing us to live in a world where we disagree with one another, very earnestly, about very important things and where we would have to actually tolerate a real diversity of thought and experience and perspective. 

Are you seeing how we got here? Are you seeing how this whole dynamic shapes up?  

Judged

When we live in a world filled with hatred and condemnation, it's easy for us to start feeling like our lives are being constantly judged. When the folks around us are ready and willing - not even that, but also eager - to share their dislike of certain things, it can make us hesitant to ever declare anything that we do like. Lest, of course, we are "wrong." 

Just the other day, I had a conversation in this vein. I was at work, and something came up about being red and one of my coworkers said, "Red is always bad. It is never good. There is nothing red that is ever any good," and I said, "Now, wait a minute." Obviously, I said, red candies are the best. 

Cherry, watermelon, strawberry, fruit punch...my mouth was practically watering with thoughts of all of the delicious red candies in the world. I mean, Starburst had to come out and make an offering of just "reds" because red is so popular. Red Kool-aid is a staple in my house. Red, red, red - it's all delicious. 

And my coworkers, without hesitation and seemingly in unison, said, "Ewww. Gross. No." 

No? Really? No? 

All of a sudden, I felt it in my heart - that tension between wanting to defend my position because, obviously, red candies are objectively the best and wanting to backtrack a little bit and declare that I like other candies besides just the red ones, that I was just saying that the red ones are pretty good, too. 

And that's where we are. This is where we exist as a society. We're all living in this very tension - trying to figure out whether to actually like what we like and to defend our choices...or to back off a little bit and temper our excitement for things in order to be more socially accepted, whatever that means. 

Have you been here? 

Have you said that you like a certain new song, only to have someone else tell you it's stupid? Have you tried to place a lunch order with friends from work, only to have them look at you incredulously when you tell them what you want? Have you been shopping and seen a shirt that you fell in love with, only to have someone tell you it's the ugliest thing they've ever seen?

Have you been willing to say something positive in a world full of hatred and condemnation only to have your positivity so thoroughly questioned - not only questioned, but judged - that you start to wonder if you ever even really liked it in the first place? 

This is the consequence of living in the world that we live in. So many of us feel like we're walking on eggshells, afraid to like anything because those who don't like it are not afraid to speak out and condemn not only it, but us. Our lives are in a constant state of judgment, and in a world that also seems to have mastered "cancel culture," we're afraid of being on the wrong side of anything. 

Yet, we have to also admit that it seems like the place to be in our world is on the wrong side of everything. 

How can we live like this?  

Disliked

Here's an interesting social (media) experience for you: 

Go to the social media page of a local news network - local to wherever you live - and find a couple of political articles. Or, rather, what passes for political these days, which would be anything having to do with life as we know it. Economics, immigration, sexuality and gender, education, even actual politics. Anything. 

Now, look at the comments section. If your local news is anything like my local news (and the other random local news channels that for some reason show up in my feeds from places I have never lived), then you'll see overwhelming hatred and condemnation in the comments section of a political article. 

But you're not done. Now, go find another political article that seems to be tailored to the opposite side of the aisle. This shouldn't be too hard to do. On any given day, media love to pull us into our extremes as often as they can. Late last week, there were contrasting articles, for example, on Trump's latest articulation and Kamala Harris's public speech. (Just an example.) Now, read the comments section on this one. 

Guess what? It's full of hatred and condemnation, too. 

But you're still not done. Go find you a neutral article - something about traffic patterns or road construction or a board meeting. Something boring. Something that not very many folks would seem that interested in and, even if they're interested, they probably don't have a strong opinion about it. 

And...would you look there? Right there in the comments section, you're more likely to find hatred and condemnation than anything else. 

See, here's where this is important. 

If you read a headline that you either agree with or disagree with, as a gut reaction, and then you check in on the comments section and see them full of hatred and condemnation, you can only come to one conclusion, depending on which way you lean. If you were happy with the headline, then you assume that you are in the minority in your own community and you're surrounded by, let's say, "idiots." If you were outraged by the headline, then you assume that you are in the majority and the "big guy" doesn't listen to the "little guy" and you feel both disenfranchised and somehow also validated, all at the same time. 

But when you broaden your scope, when you read more than one thing, when you're willing to look from more than one angle, and you see the same hatred and condemnation pouring out, it's harder to think like that. It's harder to just conclude you're on the outs somehow and the whole world is messed up.

Because if that were true, then the same folks who take the time to comment with hatred and condemnation on the one post would surely take the time to comment with affirmation and celebration on the other. Wouldn't they? If this was really characteristic of the world you were living in - if you were really the minority or the marginalized and the world really is so messed up - then all the evidence would be pointing in the same direction. 

But it's not. Well, it is. It's all pointing in the direction of anger and hatred and condemnation. The only logical conclusion that you can reach is that we, as a society, are outraged. We are encouraged to be outraged. We are applauded for our outrage. We have become a people who are not afraid to speak hatred and condemnation toward the things - and persons - we disagree with, based purely sometimes on our emotional gut reactions to something. This is how we approach everything these days. Forget the "like" button; we need a "dislike" button.

We are most likely to use our voice to disagree. To condemn. To judge. To spew. 

Are we all really this unhappy with the world? With our lives? With each other? 

Ken

Ken knew more about my darkness than anybody. Not because I was talking about it - I was hinting here and there, but I wasn't really ready to say actual words - but because he created space in which he could hear what I wasn't saying. 

The first time we met, I was giving a mission report in my local church. There had been a debate as to whether a female could give the official mission report, but it was decided that since I was a minor and was willing, it would probably be okay; it wasn't real teaching or preaching. (I broke a lot of barriers in that church, but they all came with major discussions behind the scenes.) 

It was Ken's first Sunday with us as associate minister, and we hadn't met yet, but he sat somewhere near the back, near some friends and encouragers of mine who, apparently, fed his ear all night with stories about me. At the end of the service, I went to see those friends and get my church hugs, and they introduced me to Ken, whose first words were, "You're deep." 

Over the next few years, I would spend a lot of time just hanging out in Ken's office. Sitting. Mostly quiet. Shooting the breeze. Deflecting the demons. Creating a safe space. He knew - I knew he knew - but he was waiting on me to speak...most of the time...without requiring that I do so. 

My dad had died not so long ago, and I was buried in the trauma of the world I was living it. Buried so deep that at times, I could hardly breathe. Unlike most seeds, when I'd been buried, I'd developed an even harder shell. 

Ken kept telling me I could talk. He kept telling me I didn't have to. He kept picking up every hint that I ever dropped. He kept deflecting the darkness. He kept telling me what an amazing person I was - not only in spite of my trauma, but sometimes because of it. He kept telling me all the things that it didn't seem to have changed about me, or perhaps that it seemed to have refined in me. He kept pointing out the gifts that were pouring out of me at a time when I couldn't see any of them and couldn't believe what he was saying. 

His intuition into my heart was so much of what formed that sacred space. His ability to hold truth and silence and trauma and encouragement all in the same breath made it a safe place for me. It's why I liked to be there - it wasn't painted over; it was always embraced; but it was always tempered with greater things, bigger truths, holy realities. 

The way that Ken heard me when I wasn't speaking, the way that he heard the heart that underlaid the words I did say, and used that to create our space has shaped the way that I listen to the silence in our world. That I listen to the souls that are crying out. That I have learned to balance silence and trauma and truth and heart and words. Not just in my own life - finally, by the grace of God - but in the lives of others. 

I always find myself wondering if God has sent someone into my space who just needs a place to sit for awhile. Welcome to speak, but not required to do so. Respected. Honored. Dignified. Encouraged. 

And above all, simply accepted for wherever life has them right now, which doesn't diminish a single iota the totality of who they are; indeed, it enhances it. 

Because of Ken, I have learned tremendous lessons about creating sacred spaces. 

God of Healing Light

It doesn't take long being on social media before you start to see the modern versions of snake oil - the things the world says will heal you from all of your various ailments. 

Magnet seem to be making a comeback. My dad sold magnets for awhile in the 90s, then they went away for awhile as the world realized they didn't really do anything. Now, they're back, I guess. I've seen several ads lately for "red light therapy," and if you read the comment sections, it appears this is only effective at stealing your money. There are postings for "sound therapy," where you sit in a room and listen to various things or have sounds created at the bone level in your head. And there are all kinds of commercials on the TV advertising different "colors" of "noise" (pink noise, brown noise, green noise, etc.). 

It reminds me of that old Chris Rice song - smell the color nine. Nine's not a color, and even if it were, you can't smell a color. 

Except the world today wants to tell you that you can. 

It's all bunk. It's all a scam. It's all snake oil. None of this stuff actually works. 

And listen, I'm not someone who is locked into a scientific/western frame of mind who believes science is the best and natural remedies are junk and eastern medicine is illegitimate. That's not my angle here. Actually, I have successfully used natural remedies for things; I have had science fail me; and I have had more eastern-based practices incorporated into my treatment programs. 

I am for whatever works. Whatever actually works. The fewer side effects, the better. The fewer artificial ingredients, the better. 

But here's what else I know: after a lifetime of brokenness, of challenges, of trials, after a lifetime of grief and therapy and medicine and rehab and testing and diagnoses and hypotheses and everything else, I know this without a shadow of a doubt: only God heals. 

That's it. God alone can heal us. God alone can make us whole. 

And when He does, the light gets brighter. (Isaiah 30:26)

When God heals us, the light shines brighter and the blues get bluer and the reds get redder and the edges become more crisp and the whole world comes into better focus - not just for us, but for those around us who are shaped by the glory that radiates from our healed lives. 

Remember when Moses went up and met with God face-to-face and when he came back to the people, his face was just glowing so brightly that they made him put a veil over it? When you encounter God in your life, the light shines brighter. 

And what is God if He is not healing and love? 

Green noise won't heal you. Magnets won't heal you. Red lights won't heal you. God will heal you. And the light that radiates from that healing is glorious. 

That becomes the kind of light that can heal others.