The Questions

Somehow, I keep ending up with books about "deconstruction" in my hands....

Deconstruction is the name given to the new movement where Christians suddenly feel like they've been lied to in some fundamental way and set out to tear down the faith they feel like they've been handed and seek to find their own way with God (with many, it must be said, deciding that perhaps there simply is no God at all and walking away into the "nones" - those with no religious affiliation). 

For many entering the journey of deconstruction, the questions are legitimate. And let me be clear - God is not afraid of our questions. 

It's important to ask why dynamics are at play in the faith that you've been taught - what your teachers believe, what shaped them, what shapes you, what defines the community you've been in, what power dynamics might be at play, what insecurities lie under the surface, what understandings seem fundamental and where they came from, and so on. 

There's not a single one of us who is a neutral human being. Faith is never going to be objective; it wasn't meant to be. At least, the Christian faith wasn't meant to be. 

In a worldview where our God desired to be in relationship with us from the very beginning, the Christian faith has always been meant to be personal. That is necessarily going to introduce some interesting dynamics into how we portray our faith to others. 

The problem, I think, begins when we think that our questions are the first ones ever to be asked. 

With every single book on deconstruction that I've read (to date), the question has been...how has this broken Christianity I've been taught about actually helped me to understand God? 

What's happening is that the Christian story someone has been given comes up against a question in their life that it doesn't seem capable of answering. At least, not satisfactorily. So everyone seems to think that their question is the one that God wasn't ready for, that He doesn't have an answer for. 

And then they go off searching for all the ways the Christianity they know isn't like them...and they usually come up with something about how it comes out of oppressive systems and was created by "white cisgender heterosexual males heavily invested in the patriarchy"...or some similar nonsense. 

Hey, uhm, spoiler alert? There's not a single white guy in the Bible. So you can stop hating on Christianity for being the "white man's religion." 

But see, this is exactly why the questions are important. Because there are things in the Bible that are either more or less emphasized depending on your cultural time and place. So those questions are important to ask. 

What I don't see being asked are the more important questions - the questions that could answer the questions that are being asked. 

See, a deconstructionist decides that the Christian faith they've been given is poisoned somehow, usually by white guys, and then literally every single thing that is ever said about God that fits into what they've conceived as the "white male Christianity" is automatically trash and anyone who speaks it is obviously brainwashed, uncritical, and detached from reality. 

But what if they'd ask questions of their community instead of just about it? What if they'd start by talking to those white cisgender heterosexual white guys and finding out the depth of meaning that the God they know has for them? What if they were more interested in discovering the God who is personal...and not pretending there's some kind of thing as an objective Christianity? 

I think we all have a lot to learn from Christians who we think are getting it wrong. I think if we'd start asking questions about their God, we might start learning some of it. 

Maybe that's how I keep ending up with books about deconstruction in my hands...because I keep believing the folks asking these questions have something to teach me about the God they know.  

God of Life

There's no such thing as a free lunch. And we're living in a world where you increasingly don't even own the things you've already bought. 

Everything today requires a subscription. Everything has a QR code to scan. You need an account set up to partake of the world. Everything seems to be behind a firewall, a paywall, or a little red asterisk noting "required field." You have to trade your privacy for something so simple as a cheeseburger these days. 

And then, just for funsies, pick out every picture that includes a fire hydrant to prove you're not a robot. 

You can't even go to the grocery store any more without a reward card and a digital coupon and two pieces of mail with your address on them. (Wait...I might be confusing the grocery store and the BMV...but only a little.) 

The point is - everything has a tether to it. Everything has a catch. We are so programmed to believe that everything has a catch that if something is actually, truly free, we can't believe it. 

Well, believe this: 

The water of life from God is free. 

Always has been. Always will be. 

Remember the woman at the well? Jesus asked her to draw him a drink, then told her that if she had asked Him, He would have given her living water...and all of a sudden, she wanted that. She wanted the water that would keep her from having to come back to the well. 

This is the water that He gives to you and me. 

It's in the closing words of the Bible as we know it, in the final chapters of God's revelation to John about just what the end of all things looks like. 

Actually, it's in there twice. 

To the thirsty, I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life (21:6) and Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life (22:17). 

This is not entirely a new idea. See, for God, life has always been free. In the beginning, He created the garden with two trees, one of which was the Tree of Life. And from this tree, Adam and Eve were allowed - even encouraged - to freely eat. 

Then, there was a fruit. And a serpent. And a sin. And a curse. Followed by a couple of angels with flaming swords and banishment east of Eden. 

But the waters kept flowing. The same waters that nourished the Tree of Life kept running toward the oceans, kept running through slavery and the exile and the aqueducts that Hezekiah built. Kept running through the Promised Land...kept running through the Promise. 

And in the final pages of Scripture, those waters are flowing in the New Jerusalem, in the restored heaven, where the flaming angels have been released and there is, once more, a Tree of Life, bearing fruit in every season - twelve different kinds of fruit, abundant life for every brother and sister - and we're right back at the beginning where all things started and where things were "very good"...

Life...is free. For anyone thirsty for it. 

I'm thirsty. How about you? 

God is Powerful

If you've spent very much time as a human being, you know that our society is a lot more bark than bite. That is, we're not very good at holding one another accountable. 

A student is given detention, but the parent calls in and argues the front office down to a warning. 

You're pulled over for speeding, but somehow get the cop to rip up the ticket. 

A felon is convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison, but he's out in 6 for "good behavior." 

The shopowner doesn't want to press charges because the young mother was only taking the food she needed for her child. 

We live in a world so full of leniency that it's hard to imagine accountability. And you might think at this point that this is a story about mercy. After all, isn't that what it is when you don't get what you deserve? Isn't that one of the things God is so well known for? 

But this is not a story about mercy. 

Because as merciful as the Lord is, He is also a God of judgment. And in all our own grace, we too often forget that. 

Revelation tells us that God's judgment comes hard and heavy. "In one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning, and famine. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the God who judges her" (18:8). 

"She" is Babylon, but let's be honest - it could be any of us. For who among us has not been unfaithful? Who among us has not turned her back? Who among us has not oppressed someone the Lord loves dearly? 

And it doesn't say these things could happen, except that God is merciful; it says they will happen because God is mighty. He's powerful. Plague. Death. Grief. Famine. Fire. ...Power. 

This is the God we so often shy away from, the God we don't want to talk too loudly about. It's the God who turns the world away, who makes them think twice about wanting to follow Him. How can you love a God who is plague and famine and fire? 

How can you believe such a God loves you? 

Well, that, my friends, is not so hard. 

Because listen, if God was all power and judgment and fire and death, there would be no Jesus. There would be no Cross. There would be no grave. A God who is all judgment doesn't have to send His Son to show us the Kingdom. He doesn't have to send His Son to draw us closer to Him. And He doesn't have to send His Son to bear the burden of creation's brokenness, conquer death, and bestow life. 

A God who is fire and famine and death doesn't give us Jesus who is living water, the bread of life, abundance, and eternity. 

And yet, if God is only water, bread, life, and abundance, then we cannot take seriously the gift of Jesus. 

So we must remember what God showed John in Revelation - that He is fire and famine and death and judgment. That, because He is powerful, all of these things come down at once, in a single day. 

But because He is merciful, thank the Lord, we are saved. 

Trauma

Here's the truth about trauma, which most folks will never be able to boil down to and understand, let alone confess: we don't want the truth about trauma. 

The truth about trauma is that the truth about trauma is very rarely, if ever, as healing as we want it to be. We're far more comfortable with the beast that we know than the box we're about to open. 

I think that's why so many - especially so many healthcare professionals - are so vehemently against calling Dr. Fauci up and asking questions about the pandemic response. 

Because they lived the pandemic response and they're still trying to figure out how to live with the pandemic response and if you change the narrative now, if you throw in a new truth, if you introduce a new dynamic, then everything changes. 

Covid was hard. It was heart-breaking. It was gut-wrenching. It was life-changing. There's not a whole lot in this world that's worse than the feelings of isolation and inadequacy and fear that defined the Covid experience for so many of us. That's even more complicated for those of us who never got our life back...or never got our loved one back. 

In the last five years, we've learned to live with it. Kind of. We've built a new normal. Ish. We've developed strategies and stories that we tell ourselves and little victories that we cling to and some kind of shadow of hope. It's human nature. It's what we do with trauma. 

But if we go back now and find out that, say, there was a treatment we didn't know about that would have worked...or that all of the isolation wasn't necessary...or that the vaccines will have long-term effects that weren't disclosed...or that something we believed was just flat wrong...now, we have to figure out how to live with that story. 

We have to figure out how to live with the betrayal of being lied to, the anger of being misled, the grief of missing moments and opportunities and seasons that we'll never get back. The truth about trauma, however healing we think it might be, only breaks us in new ways. 

And most of us just aren't prepared to deal with that. 

So we don't want the truth. We don't want someone to tell us that there was a better way. We did what we did, and we did it because we were told to do it, and we've figured out how to live with ourselves (kind of), and at the very least, we have compartmentalized all of that, and how dare anyone try to break it back open and tell us it didn't have to be like that. 

We were there. It really felt like it had to be like that. It really felt like we had no other options. Don't tell us someone lied to us and that we really had other options. We are living in stories today that can't hold that possibility, let alone (if it should prove to be that way) that truth. 

That's just human nature. It's how we're built to respond, to bounce back, to move forward. That's not a judgment...it's just a statement. This is just how we are, how God made us. 

It's something very exceptional to find someone who can deal with trauma and truth at their deepest complexities. It is rare, indeed. 

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be asking. 

Because truth is truth, whether we are capable of incorporating it into our trauma right now or not. And as history continues to unfold and new stories get written, the best thing we can do with our trauma...is work to make sure that no one else has to live it like we did. We can only do that if we truly understand what happened...and why...and how...and how to not do that to anyone else.

(And that's science, too.) 

Fauci

With science back in the news, it's important to say that one particular figure is also back in the news: Dr. Fauci. And I cannot possibly fathom how anyone who claims to "follow the science" is upset about this. 

Most baffling to me, I see healthcare professionals posting photos of nursing teams in full PPE, crowded around a gurney with patient on it, proclaiming, "If this wasn't your reality during Covid, then shut up. You don't have a right to have an opinion." 

Quite honestly, I would think that folks on the front lines - those who were watching patients die without knowing if we were doing the right things for them, those who were becoming family to those whose families were not allowed to visit, those who were spending their entire workdays in hazmat-level suits, those who were stripping their clothes off in their garages or renting apartments away from home, those who were following one guidance and then another and then another - I would think those are the folks who would most want to know if Fauci truly believed in what he was saying back then or not. 

Because if he didn't, then the post-traumatic stress that you now live with is his fault. And it might not have had to happen. 

Remember - some of the best advice that came out during Covid came from nursing units who bucked the official advice and just started trying things because they saw that what they were doing wasn't working. Some of the best "science" came from...get this...the scientific method: trial and error and feedback and trying again until something worked. Like proning patients. That wasn't Fauci. That was some nursing unit who said, "Hey, guys, what if we..." and tried it. And documented their results for the rest of us. 

Also remember that "science" in Covid changed according to public opinion. In the early days when the public was asking, for example, whether we should wear masks, the scientific community said, "No. That won't do any good." Because the science on masks was well-established. Masks had been researched and designed in healthcare settings and the scientists knew exactly what masks could and couldn't do. But then the public started screaming and crying out because "they're doing it in Asia. Why are you lying to us?" So scientists said, "Okay. Wear a mask." And then it was, "Your mask doesn't protect you, but it protects others from you." And then it became, "Anyone who doesn't wear a mask is a super-spreader and doesn't care about anyone but themselves." And then, about five years after the crisis, the science was revisited and they announced, again, that the masks probably didn't actually do anything, which science already knew but it gave into public outcry anyway. 

The point is - if Fauci knew more than he claimed to know or knew less than he claimed to know, if his guidance was, for either reason, leading us more astray from the problem and creating barriers to finding real breakthroughs, then science demands that we know that. 

Science is about inquiry. It's about doing a post-mortem. It's about looking at how things went and figuring out what went well and what went wrong and what we could do better if it should happen again and what we should never do again no matter what. 

Even if we determine that Fauci truly did the best that he knew how to do at the time that he was doing it, that's still science. We can still learn from it. 

Maybe it's the political overtone of the whole inquiry that puts you off. I get it. In a world in which so many have been trained to be so polarized by politics, it looks like a witch hunt. But the problem is that one group of persons is ready to close the door on Covid and say it was what it was and let's move on, but the other group is looking for answers. The unwillingness of some to be questioned only makes the questioners push harder. Why are those who claim to be for "science" so afraid of questions? Science is questions. 

Even under the guise of politics, it's still science. We're still asking...what did we do? How did it work? Was it really the best we could come up with? What was the impact? 

And yes, we're asking - if there was anything nefarious going on here, who is to blame? Did we put our trust in the wrong individual? How can we prevent this kind of unchecked power the next time this happens? 

Again, if you are someone who lives with the trauma of that time, I'd think you would want answers more than everyone else. Because if he was lying about even one small thing, that could have had the most dramatic impact on your experience. And you can't ever know that if he won't answer the questions. 

And if he wasn't lying about any single thing, then that should give you some relief. You truly were doing the best that we knew how to do and being guided faithfully by those who were trying the best they knew how to try. Believe it or not, that makes trauma a little easier to live with (in the long run), too.  

The Science

Science is back in the news, and the "I believe in science" crowd is showing just how very little they actually understand science. 

Yesterday, for example, the federal government announced that they want to split up the most common childhood vaccination into three separate vaccinations to see if perhaps one of them is a complicating factor in the increase of the incidence of childhood diagnoses. 

This is actually a very scientific thing to do. When you're presented with a data set that you can't explain, it's science's job - and science's foundation - to start breaking things down into smaller pieces until you can identify a link between what you're seeing and what you're doing. That's the way that science has always worked.

The outcry immediately began - no, it can't be that! We've already done the research on that! We know how that works! Except...we don't. A lot of things have changed - about humans, about the environment, about manufacturing processes, about safety regulations, about all kinds of things - since we did the science the first time. Among the things that have changed, we have also dramatically expanded, through universal implementation, the data set in ways that controlled studies can simply never account for. 

Science itself, on its own principles, would say that it's prudent to do the science again. 

Scientism, on the other hand, is the only one afraid here. 

Scientism is the religious belief in science as the ultimate source of truth. It's a proclamation and a declaration that what we know through science, we simply know and should not question. It's the idea that these ideas should guide our lives without examination because they're already "settled." 

"I believe in the science." 

Cool, bro. But one of the fundamental truths about science is that it's always changing.

Science has never been afraid of the questions. In fact, that's what it's always been about. Asking the questions, seeking the answers, asking them again when the data demands it or even suggests it. For science, the questions are fun. They are a chance to explore, to innovate, to discover something new or to develop something new. 

Scientism is terrified. 

Because if the truth you base your life on must change, scientism feels like it loses some of its authority. And it realizes that if it has to tell you something has changed, then it looks like a liar...and it has to account for the years it led you astray while believing it was doing just the opposite. 

If you ever hear someone say "the science is settled," it's not because the science is actually settled; it's because they are protecting something else, some myth they've created off the science and tried to pass off as truth. The real science is never afraid to ask the question again. 

Only the scientism will tell you that you don't have to. 

God of Rest

Well done, good and faithful servant. 

They are the words that we all long to hear, the testimony that we hope God will speak over our lives when we are finished on this earth. 

But...then what? What comes next? With an entire eternity stretched before us, what is there for us beyond that moment? 

Let us not be too quick to want to move on. Because I think that moment holds a whole lot for us. 

You see, in that moment, we will have received the gift that God has for us, a gift that many of us long for but don't think is possible, a gift that we're so quick to want to move past and get onto the rest of the work of living with God in eternity, whatever that looks like. But there in that moment, we get what God has promised first. 

And that's rest. 

Revelation calls blessed those who die in the Lord, for "they will rest from their labor" (14:13). It's the first thing He does for us; our labor is over. 

Not, let's be clear here, our work, for there was work for man even before the fall. But our labor - our toil, our ache, our burden, our bearing. From that, we will have rest. 

I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to that day. I'm looking forward to the moment when, after putting my nose to the grindstone for so long and working for so much and putting my effort into everything, including into the life of faith, and juggling the demands of the human world in the human body and the spirit ache that just doesn't go away, then in that moment when I will rest, I'm going to breathe just the biggest sigh of relief and probably melt into a big puddle of human exhaustion. 

Right before I feel that sense of peace that the Lord has promised, I will feel the release of the burden I've been bearing in the flesh. Right before I start dancing and praising, I will get to just stop for a minute...finally stop, for there will be nothing more for me to do...and I will exhale and it will feel like the first time I've ever done that, or at least that I've done that in a long time, and it will be beautiful and glorious. 

Listen, I'm pretty good at work/life balance. I'm pretty good at carving out space for myself and not working too hard, so much that I miss what life is really about anyway. And yet, even here, even on this side of eternity, every time I get a good stop in, every time I get to truly pause for a second, every time I get a season - even a second - of real rest, I feel it in my bones like that. That exhaustion, that exhale...that satisfaction of a job well done. 

We spend our whole lives setting the table, putting everything right, making sure the finest details are tended to, and then that day comes and we finally get to sit down and eat. But that moment, that one little moment, will be the one where we step back, squint one eye just a little bit, look at all we've done, and say...yeah. That's it. 

There is nothing left to do. 

Well done, He will say. Good and faithful servant. 

Now, rest. 

God of Secrets

I love scheming a little. Planning in secret to do things that I think will be amazing. Loving folks in little ways that take a little putting together, but are so worth it in the end. 

I also enjoy, I confess, dropping little hints along the way, just enough that everyone knows I'm up to something, but nobody can quite figure out exactly what I'm up to. I want the reveal to be epic and glorious. I want the love that comes busting through, right down to the tiniest details, to overwhelm the space with goodness. 

God does the same. 

See, God has been scheming since "in the beginning." Even when things were "very good," God knew He wasn't done yet because they weren't perfect. A perfect God doesn't settle for "very good;" He wants everything to be perfect, just as He is perfect. 

Along the way, He's been dropping hints. Through prophets. Through kings. Through leaders. Through lay folks. Through prostitutes and slave girls and a height-challenged tax collector. Through twelve men who couldn't have been more different, but who were brought together by the One thing they had in common. Through a little baby in a manger, crying under a bright morning star. Through nail-pierced hands dripping blood from a Cross. From an empty tomb with the stone rolled away and the grave clothes folded, a major indicator that God wasn't done yet. 

Through rubble and restoration. Through parted seas and promised lands. Through darkest of days and a sun that doesn't set. 

Through it all, God has been dropping hints about what's coming, about what He's working on. About the plan secretly unfolding before our very eyes, but beyond our comprehension. 

Waiting...waiting until that day when we who see through a glass but dimly suddenly see in full color, a reveal that will be both epic and glorious. A love that will come busting through, illuminating everything down to the tiniest little detail, and overwhelm our sacred space with goodness. 

Revelation says it's coming. It says that when the seventh angel is about to sound his trumpet, the secrets of God, which have been dribbled throughout His story by the prophets, will be revealed (10:7).

We're gonna know. We're going to finally know and see and understand...and not be able to stand. We're going to see how the threads that we've been trying to follow have been woven all this time into a beautiful tapestry that is God's glory. It's going to make sense, and our dim glass is going to become a kaleidoscope, with all the colors swirling together in mesmerizing beauty. 

It's coming. It's so coming. And it's going to be good. 

No, it's going to be more than that. It's going to be very good. 

Nope, it's going to be even more than that. 

It's going to be perfect. 

God Tagged

We live in a world where very few things can get truly lost. That is, if you're interested in your things not getting lost. 

Your phone and tech are smart enough to have "find me" features if you accidentally misplace them. And if you can't use a "find me" feature, you can program something into it to let anyone who might find it know how to get it back to you. We have little tags that we can put onto nearly anything that will let us use an app to locate it at any time, no matter where it might have ended up. We even put little chips inside of our pets so that if they get loose, someone can run a scanner over their neck and find out where they belong. 

It's gone high-tech, but this is not really a new idea. In the 90s, it was label makers. We all wanted label makers, just to put our name on all of our stuff. 

In the wild west, and even way back into extremely historic times, it was branding. Livestock was burned or tagged or marked with the emblem chosen by its owner so that everyone would know who that animal belonged to. 

We are a people who like to mark our stuff, to put our name on things so that we don't lose them. So that no one else can take them away. So that the whole world will know that they belong to us. 

...I guess we get that from the God in whose image we are created. 

Because He does exactly the same thing. 

We know that throughout the Bible, He makes clear who are His people. He leads them and follows them and meets them in cloud and fire. He guides them with favor through the world. There's no question - in Israel, in Assyria, in Babylon, in Egypt, in Philistia, in Jerusalem, and beyond - who God's people are. 

And Revelation tells us that in the end of all things, it will be even more clear. 

As God is revealing to John just what those final days will look like, as He is unveiling the judgment and destruction that is coming, as He is talking about plagues and fires and famines and destruction and the angels who are coming with tribulation and the horses and their riders and all the things that apocalypse is made of, He tells His angels not to destroy even a tree until the servants of God have His mark on their forehead (7:3).

Until everyone who is His is marked as His, don't. touch. anything. 

He doesn't want to risk losing us. 

He doesn't want us to get swept up in the destruction of all things, the way that a box of treasured memories might accidentally get put in the donation pile if it's not clearly labeled. The way that the wrong tree might get cut down if the right one doesn't have a spray painted X marking it. The way that, and I swear to you I have seen this on the news, the wrong house gets demolished because the project wasn't clearly marked. 

God's not taking any risks with us. Not with you, not with me. He's going to mark us as His own. So that not one of us will be lost. So that no one else can take us away. So that the whole world will know...

...we belong to Him. 

God Disciplines

Once upon a time, I had a boss who let me do my thing every day at work. I operated independently, performed my basic function and tasks, and thought things were going pretty well. I enjoyed my job. I felt competent. I thought they trusted me. Nothing was ever said to make me question anything at all. 

Until my annual job performance review a full 13 months after I was initially hired...and then it all came pouring out. As it turned out, I hadn't been doing anything correctly at all, it seemed. 

I remember being extremely upset with this whole thing. I mean, if you were unhappy with what I was doing or the way that I was doing it, why would you not have a five minute conversation with me when you first noticed it? Why would you let me just keep doing it for thirteen months without ever bringing it up? Now, when you bring it up, it's a long-standing pattern of behavior that has just been aggravating you for way longer than it needed to...and it's a habit I've formed that will now have to be broken. 

I just don't understand bosses and supervisors who won't take a few minutes to have a simple conversation that could change the whole dynamic for the better. I don't know why you would just keep a massive track record of perceived wrongs and then dump it on someone all at once when they thought things were not actually going so terribly. 

And yet...this is exactly what we think God does. 

So many of us think that we're going to get to the end of our lives and God is going to pull out this laundry list of stuff we've done that we shouldn't have been doing, stuff that's driven Him absolutely crazy, stuff that He doesn't like about our performance. We're going to suddenly stand before Him and get bad marks that we weren't expecting when we were just out here trying to do our best. 

But God isn't some terrible supervisor; He's a loving Father. 

He's not keeping a laundry list, waiting for that day when He can lay it all out and dump it on us and destroy whatever satisfaction we thought we had in our life and our work and our love. 

No, God is the kind of superior that we all really want - someone who brings it up right when it's happening. Someone who steps in right away. Someone who is willing to have a quick five minute conversation to keep us from driving Him even crazier and from building bad habits that we will then have to break. 

Revelation 3:19 says, "Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline." God is speaking directly to us and telling us that He's not going to let it go that way. 

He's not building a file for the end of times. He's not got a list to go over with us when we finally get a minute in His office. He's stepping in right now, coming to the place where we live and work and love, and He's willing to say, firmly but with grace, "This isn't the best way."

This isn't the way I want you to do it. This isn't the way it works best for you. This isn't the best process or outcome or whatever. Here, let me tell you a better way...and then He guides, rebukes, and disciplines so that we can do it better. So that we can get it right-er. So that when it comes to that day, that glorious day, it gets to be truly glorious because He won't blindside us with a bunch of stuff He never told us about. 

Rather, He will celebrate that we have done what He called us to do through a series of quick conversations and five minute lessons - we will have been earnest and repented. And instead of just doing what we thought was good work, we will find that we have listened and done what turned out to be better work. 

Thank God for good supervision. 

God of Help

One of the most relatable passages in all of Scripture is when Paul says that what he wants to do, he doesn't do, but what he doesn't want to do, he keeps on doing. That's all he has to say, and we all know what he's talking about...but it doesn't keep us from becoming frustrated with ourselves. In fact, many of us spend many years of our lives trying to fight these things inside of us that we can't seem to change. 

Maybe that's just who we are. 

So, then, we go back to the beginning, all the way to Genesis, and we blame it all on what we call "the Fall" - that heart-wrenching scene in the Garden of Eden when Eve picks a fig from the forbidden tree, gives some to Adam, they both eat, and the rest of humanity is ruined forever (until, of course, Jesus comes...and then comes back). It's their fault, we say, that we keep on doing what we don't want to do and can't seem to do the things we know we should. 

We're just cursed. 

We spend our whole lives wrestling with the mirror, trying to figure out how it is that we became so fallen, why it is that we can't seem to overcome it, why we can't just stop ourselves from doing what we don't want to do when we know we don't want to do it and shouldn't do it and what we want to do is actually something else. Something good. 

What hope is there for someone like me?

At some point, I think most of us decide that there is no hope for someone like us, so we pivot. We turn our focus to "that glorious day" when Jesus comes back, sets everything right, takes us into eternity with Him, and we don't have to worry about our broken, sinful, fallen selves any more. 

Until then, we guess we're just sinners, stuck in Paul's troubles on this side of Eden. 

But what if...we're not as helpless as we think? 

There are many names for God in the Bible, many identifiers that His people have called Him by. The God Who Sees Me, Lord of Armies, God with us...there are entire devotionals dedicated to pulling the names of God out of the Bible. 

Well, here's one for you from the book of Jude: 

"the God who is able to keep you from falling" (v. 24). 

The God who can keep you from making the same mistake that Eve made in the Garden (by trusting the serpent more than she trusted God), the same mistake that Adam made in the Garden (which he made by trusting Eve more than he trusted God). The God who can keep you from living in Paul's depression, doing what you don't want to do and not doing what you want to do. The God who came to live among you not just so that your eternity would be secure but so that your life would be abundant. 

This God is able to keep you from falling. 

The question, then, is whether you will let Him. 

Will you come to the Lord when the mirror keeps telling you what you don't want to hear? Will you let Him help you? 

What God Has Done

We spend so much of our time trying to get out of the lives we're actually living - trying to cultivate, trying to curate, trying to project this image that seems greater, more beautiful, more successful. All the while, we're missing out on the truly miraculous lives we're already living. 

And that makes faith harder. 

It makes it harder to believe in a good God if you believe that the life you're living is just a shadow of what you want or what you're capable of or what you think you deserve. If the picture-perfect life is supposed to be your life, if the highlight reel is supposed to be your life, if it's supposed to be only the best for you, then what does this mess that you're looking at mean? What do the piles of laundry and the doctor's visit and the car repairs and the eviction notices mean? 

It's easy to think that they mean that God isn't really good. Or worse, that He doesn't really love you. 

If, on the other hand, you remember the life you've been missing while you've been chasing the dream, if you look at all the little things that are actually going well and might actually be, well, beautiful, then all of a sudden, you remember - God is good. 

More importantly, He does love you. 

I get frustrated in the life I'm living sometimes. I'm human. I'm just like you. I don't have some kind of superhuman faith that prevents me from being disillusioned from time to time and falling into the same traps that we all do. Just look at my confession yesterday about how much time I feel like I've missed chasing something perfect when what I've had all along has still been good. 

But when I remember that the life I'm living is still good, even though it's hard - when I see all the little things that aren't just going right but that shouldn't be going right but still are - then I get my perspective back. 

The truth is that everything in my truly miraculous life is God's doing. It's all Him.  

And if that's the case, then He really is good. And He really does love me. 

There's absolutely no reason that my life should look the way that it does today. None. And I'm not talking about my life looking worse than it ought to; I'm talking about all the ways that my life looks better than it ought to. All the things that are possible for me today that shouldn't be possible for me. 

If you laid my story out on paper and followed it along, you'd think there's absolutely no way that it ends up here. Not a chance in the world. 

But...in heaven, it's certain. In God's plan, this makes perfect sense. According to His love, this life I live is obvious. 

It's not just obvious; it's good. I just have to remember that. 

And when I do, it not only makes faith possible; it makes it bigger. Deeper. More confident. More humble. 

God is good. God does love you. 

There's no better way to see that than to take off the filters, step out of the instagram, and put yourself firmly back into the actual life you're living. Right here, right now. 

Do you see it? 

It's actually...pretty epic. 

The Lost Life

Can I tell you what it does to always be chasing a life that you don't have? 

It makes you miss the one that you do. 

It's easy to see how rates of anxiety and depression are skyrocketing - it's because we create these beautiful pictures of our lives, these highlight reels, these computer-generated fantasies, and we post them online where our friends and family react just as we want them to, with proper awe and admiration. Then, we turn around and see the pile of laundry waiting to be folded, the floors that need vacuuming again, the dirty dishes that are stacking up, the oil spot in the driveway...and we feel like we've suddenly lost the life we never really had. You know, that picture-perfect life we've been projecting. 

But there's something even more insidious than that. It's that while we're busy trying to have that life, we aren't living this one. 

It's no secret that in 2020, I contracted "original" Covid - the Covid we had before we had treatment, before we had knowledge, before we had much of anything. At the time that I contracted it, we were in the middle of a surge of cases, so I didn't even get a hospital bed. (I'm actually thankful for that.) But Covid...wrecked me. 

It wrecked my body in ways that I still haven't recovered from. But that hasn't stopped me from trying. 

I spent the first few years after Covid running to doctors, pleading with them to figure out what was wrong, telling them that this isn't my life, that this isn't how I'm supposed to be. Insisting that I was not getting better. (I wasn't.) I made so many trips to the emergency room that I lost count. Every time something started happening again, I'd run to the ER thinking that this had to be the time we would finally catch it. This was going to be the batch of tests to show us what was going on. This was going to be the day I started getting my life back. 

But it never was. 

As I write, it has been almost six years since I contracted Covid, and I'm still not "better." That is, my body is still broken. And I keep thinking that I'm learning how to live with it, how to accommodate what is clearly my new life...but give me the opportunity to find something that will help, and I'll jump at the chance all over again. 

If I really slow down, though, and look at it and think about it, the thing I am most angry about in these whole six years is not getting sick. It's not not getting better. It's not the medical system that hasn't been able to help me. It's not the narratives that were told that were unhelpful. It's not the reputation I have, both with those who knew me before Covid and with those who didn't. It's not the idea of being "fragile." 

The thing I am most angry about is the increasing realization - this nagging feeling that I've had for the last couple of years - of how much of my life I have missed "trying to get my life back." Trying to get back the life that feels good for me. Trying to make things better. 

Honestly? They're pretty good. Aside from, like, randomly turning grey and almost passing out in my office and some weirdly consistent inconsistencies in my heart rhythm and the absolutely aggravating inability to drive safely, things are pretty good. 

I'm running 800+ miles a year...at a pace that pre-Covid me could only dream of. I am holding a full-time job where I am designated as the "lead" in my role. I had an amazing journey with my best friend...and am starting a new incredible journey with a new best friend. I'm not drowning in medical debt. I don't require portable oxygen. I've weaned off almost all of my medications and am down to just three prescriptions. I've lost several inches of weight around my waist, and I'm fairly solid muscle at this point. I have learned to breathe again, learned to control my heart rate, learned to walk again, learned to sleep more restfully, learned to eat better (most of the time ;) ). 

By every account, I'm a walking, talking, living, loving miracle...and somehow, I have wasted so much of this time trying to be more than that. I don't think I've taken full advantage of how incredible my story really is. 

Maybe one day, I'll forgive myself for that. 

But I tell that story to say this, because this is where we're at: this is what we're all doing to ourselves. We're cultivating and curating and highlighting and instagramming the lives we think ought to be ours, all the while missing out on the very real lives that we already have...lives that are already beautiful and wonderful and amazing and miraculous. 

And, mercifully, full of grace.

Even for a train wreck like me.  

Chasing the Dream

We're all chasing these epic lives - carefully curating what we show the world and sometimes, just making it up. 

But what the truly wise among us have learned is that the epic life isn't really all that great. The truly great life is in the things that can't be measured. 

I have worked in non-profits my whole life - with the exception of that season that I worked construction. I have worked in community organizations, hospitals, schools, universities - all of which had 501(c)3 status. And generally, that means I have spent my life working at the bottom of the community pay scale, with scant or non-existent benefits (with some exceptions). 

It also means I have watched many, many coworkers leave in search of all the things they thought they were missing - higher pay, more benefits, different hours.

With very few exceptions, I have later heard from many of those former coworkers who have said...they aren't as happy in their new place. 

In addition to finding the things that made them think life was going to be better over there, they found other things that can't be accounted for. Things like...toxic leadership, clique-y departments, longer commutes, facelessness in big systems, unfavorable hours, less benefit coverage, higher tax brackets...the list goes on and on. 

What they miss most about the places they have left are the intangibles - being known by name, having a sense of belonging, shorter commutes that mean more time at home with family and friends and active schedules, predictability of knowing your space well, being rooted in something. 

In other words, the things that don't make the highlight reel, but absolutely make life worth living. 

I mean, it's cool to post your bigger paycheck. And your new car. And your nice house. And your work badge. And all that. 

But what's worth more than all of that and can't be posted...is your peace. It's your well-being. It's your quality, not quantity, of life. 

And in all the years that I have been working at non-profits and watching folks leave for what they thought were greener pastures, I've also been watching them come back...for all the things they couldn't put numbers on. 

I've seen them take positions in other departments, take lesser pay, take fewer benefits, take unfavorable hours...just to come back to a place that they finally figured out might not have been the shiniest, but it was good. 

At the end of the day, that's what we're all really looking for. 

The dirty little secret is that if we look close enough at the lives we're living, most of us will find that we already have it.... 

Made-Up

When I was younger (think mid-teens), I had a season as a "poser," which was a pretty common accusation in the 90s. Basically, it meant that you were pretending to be something that you were not. 

I remember one time, I was shopping at a thrift store and ran across an old scrub top, two sizes too big for me, with "Medical Missions" embroidered on the chest pocket. This thing literally fell off my body when I tried to wear it, but I bought it anyway. It made me feel like I was part of something important. It made me feel like I could project a story bigger than the one I was actually living. It gave me this idea that maybe I could pretend to be something that someone would be proud of. 

So I wore that worn-out, two-sizes-too-big scrub top with pride. Yeah. Medical Missions. That's me. 

I was kind of disappointed that nobody ever asked me about it when I had it on. (And I was also secretly relieved that nobody ever asked me about it because I didn't actually have a story to go with it.) 

As kids, coming of age, we all kind of go through a similar period, some of us deeper into it than others. We're trying to figure out who we are in the world. We don't like our own story. We feel like we're too small for our space...or too big for it. We want to be something, someone, meaningful. We want to escape the trauma we're living with on a daily basis. There are all kinds of reasons we become "posers." 

Decades later, the internet is not helping us. 

We've been talking about the way that we curate our online presence, how we're all trying to make our lives epic in the way that we present them. How we're posting our highlight reels and pretending things are better than they are.

But now, we're in this dangerous age of AI and...let's be honest - some folks are just making it up. 

Completely. 

They're putting prompts into AI and coming out with photographic evidence of the life they wish they were living. It all started with stupid stuff like "potato yourself" (Remember that? You could upload a picture of yourself and AI would generate what you would look like if you were a cartoon potato...those were good times). Then, we started airbrushing our blemishes away. Then, we graduated to full-on filters. 

All of a sudden, we're at generated-from-nothing, completely-made-up existences. All it takes is telling a computer to make our lives better than the mirror tells us they are. 

It's sad, really. 

Because the truth is that there are a lot of things about each of our lives that are already epic, just quietly so. A lot of things we see as mundane are the very things that other folks are aching for in their own lives. 

Did you know there are folks AI generating houses? And families? And cars? And clothes? The most basic of things that seem so...ordinary to us. These things are someone else's dream life. 

I don't like AI. If you know me, you know that. I've never used it, not for anything - not even to potato myself. (A friend did send me a potato of myself. Full disclosure.) But man, it's just destroying our sense of everything. 

And every time I type "destroying," I accidentally type "destorying" first, and it's doing that, too. 

I just wonder what would happen if we lived our lives more authentically. If we gave each other the gift of being real. I think that's better than all the things we think AI is doing for us. I do. 

Maybe it's just me.  

True Community

Loneliness is rising. Depression is rising. Unhappiness is at an all-time high. And we think it's because we're just being bombarded every day by the headlines in the world, by more information than we can process, by problems and traumas and systems that we just can't solve. 

But that's not it. 

It doesn't matter how much you sit behind your computer screen and yell at me, how much you tell me I just don't get it, how firmly you insist that there are so many devastating problems in the world that of course, it's overwhelming...that's not it. 

Our problem is that we've pulled ourselves out of real community and settled for something fake, and we simply have no connection in the world any more. 

I don't believe any of us is called to address the headlines. I don't think we're called into the streets to protest what's happening half a world away. I don't think it's on us to try to fix the life of someone we've never met, based on nothing more than some principle that we claim to hold. 

I think we're called to hold our principles where we actually live. 

I think we're called to be in connection with our real community, with the folks right around us in our own little spaces where we can actually make a difference. 

I think if we spent more time loving on the persons God has given us - the ones we can walk down the street and talk with, the ones whose voices we know, the ones whose cars we see come and go or who we see walk by our porches every day - then I think we will make the biggest impact in the world. 

More than that, I think that if we were all doing this - taking care of our own persons in our own places, being deeply connected to and invested in our communities - then the headlines that we're so concerned about, that we're so consumed with, that we're so distracted by would start becoming fewer and fewer, too. 

I think that if we got off each other's pages and back into each other's spaces, we'd do a lot more good in the world than we ever can as keyboard warriors or, what is it we call ourselves? "Allies." 

The world doesn't need allies; it needs friends. And we can only be true friends in true relationship. 

I mean it. It doesn't mean I'm not concerned about what's going on in the world. It means that I recognize my limitations as a finite human being and I respect God's plan for one anothering, for the kind of love that happens only with real connection. 

I think we all recognize that. That's why the headlines outrage us. We look at what's happening, and our gut instinct says...why isn't someone loving that person? Why isn't justice happening over there? 

But if we are loving where we are and if we are offering justice where we are, nobody will be able to say that about the space where we live. And if everyone was doing that, well, there would be no places that would need our far-reaching love and justice; they'd already be taken care of. 

God really knew what He was doing when He gave us to each other. ...We just have to remind ourselves that that was the plan and stop trying to give ourselves to the whole world.  

Beautiful Spaces

I think at its core, life is just as beautiful for each one of us as it was in the 90s. Yes, the way the world goes has presented us with a new series of challenges, but at the end of the day, I think that if we were to actually walk into each other's sacred spaces, we'd have the same reaction. 

It's so cool in here. This is so you. 

Because your life is beautiful. It is. It doesn't matter what it's thrown at you or what you've had to face or what you're facing now, your life has been cultivating its own little touches that are uniquely yours. And that makes it beautiful. 

I think that was part of the draw for me as a kid in the 90s. Yes, my space was distinctively my space, but it was neat to walk into someone else's space and see how they lived. To learn something about your friend that you didn't know before, that you never would have known if you hadn't seen their inner sanctum. 

And that's what's happening. We have these lives that are so curated online, these highlight reels, these picture-perfect sorts of things that we're trying to project, but our real stories are in our inner sanctums, in the places shaped in our lives by the living of it. Anyone who might dare to walk into such a space would find something more of us than they thought they knew, something more true about us than all of the curated spots in all the world could ever show them. 

That's where we're most connected to each other. 

The vacation pictures, the neat-and-tidy kids, the clean house, whatever else we're projecting, it does nothing but keep us apart. It does nothing but present the image that we're not living in the same world, you and I. But these inner sanctums remind us that we are. 

More than that, they give us a glimpse of how someone else is navigating a space similar to our own. They show us what it might look like to approach life, and its challenges, a different way. To embrace joys in a different way. To shift our perspective and find something else to see in this mess of a thing we call life. 

Our testimony lives in these spaces. It lives in our actual lives. In the quiet place where we're actually living...the ones we don't think we want anyone to see. 

But what a breath of fresh air it is to see one of these. What an encouragement. What a boost to my faith and to yours. 

If someone like you is doing it in the quiet place where you live, then there really is hope for someone like me in the place where I'm living. If you're figuring it out in a place just like the one I'm trying not to let anyone see, then maybe I can figure it out, too. 

Maybe we need to spend more time these days in each others' bedrooms (not literally). We need to see the posters on the walls and the pictures in the frames and the tears on the pillows and the color choices and the hard nights and the long days and the everything...the everything that shapes our own lives, too, but only in our private places. 

Maybe if we saw more of each other's spaces, we'd be reminded all over how beautiful they really are. And, well, if your space is that beautiful...

...maybe mine can be, too. 

Relatable

Being human has never been about being cool; it's been about being...

Relatable. 

We were formed to be in relationship with one another, and we are not at our fullest until we are connected. And we are not connected until we recognize that we're sharing the same basic human experience. 

This is why we're in what some experts are calling a "loneliness epidemic." Self-reported feelings of loneliness are at an all-time high...at least since we started keeping track of things like how many persons are self-reporting feeling lonely. 

And it's because these curated lives are not lives that we can connect to. I mean, it's cool to look at a bunch of pictures of beaches and mountains and foreign places, but if you can't afford a vacation or have responsibilities or disabilities that keep you from getting away, it's not a life you can live. It's neat as an idea, but it's not meaningful. 

And there it is...meaningfulness.

Stuff becomes meaningful when it applies to our lives, and it applies to our lives when we're connected to things and to other people, and we're connected to things and to other people when we are honest about the human experiences that we're having. 

Not our highlight reels. 

See, we look around at what our friends are posting or what our family is posting or what our community is posting and for whatever reasons, big or small, we know that's not going to be us. We're infertile - that baby is never going to be ours. We're uneducated - that corner office is never going to be ours. We're drowning in debt - that new car is never going to be ours. We're disabled - that adventure is never going to be ours. And it doesn't take long before we feel like we're living in a world totally different from the one everyone else is living in. 

And it all blurs together. It's not like we're looking over here thinking everyone else is living in their own little world. No, we're looking around and thinking everyone else is living in one great, big world, and we're the only one stuck in our own little world - a world filled with laundry and bills and commutes and all the things that make a life mundane. And...isn't there anyone who knows this life? Isn't there anyone who can make this kind of life beautiful? 

Of course, we're all actually living that life. We're just not talking about it. And because we're not talking about it, we're creating those feelings of loneliness in others...and ourselves. It's a lot of pressure to try to live up to the images that we're curating. When you're staring at your fourth pile of laundry that still needs to be folded and everyone else is looking at your picture perfect family at the beach, who do you reach out to when you need someone? You can't...it will shatter the image you've created. 

So we're all living in our own little bubbles in which we think we're the only ones, but the one thing that actually connects us is that most of our bubbles are actually the same. They're full of the same stuff - the same regular, daily, human stuff that we desperately need to know that we share. 

Only then can we look at each other's walls and truly say, "It's so cool in here! This space is so you!" Because when we have that common foundation, it's okay for you to be you - I don't feel jealous about that. You're really just like me. 

But if you're not just like me, now we both have a problem....  

MySpace

I really think the whole rabbit hole of trying to make our lives epic and trending started way back in the late 1900s with a little something called "MySpace." 

The Internet was still relatively new, at least for public access, and here comes this platform that tells you that you can have your own little piece of it...to do whatever you want with. 

Listen, I grew up in the 90s, and my room was my sanctuary - as it was for pretty much everyone else that I knew at the time. There was a period where my walls were literally plastered with music posters. And cut-outs from magazines. And for a brief period, a giant mural that I painted literally floor-to-oops-onto-the-ceiling-a-little of Jonathan Taylor Thomas's face. Yes. His 8-foot-tall face. (And it was not well done.) 

*I also invited him to my birthday every year, but he never even sent a card. Hmph. 

But my room was "cool" to me. I would walk in, and I would feel comfortable in my space, and I would know there was one place in the world where I felt like I made sense. 

And actually, the same is true as an adult. We cultivate our houses and our living spaces so that we're comfortable there. So that when we come in weary from the world, we feel like we make sense again. Something is right. 

Then...MySpace. 

It gave us the opportunity to turn our own little piece of the internet into a "home" - a reflection of who we were. A reflection of what we liked, what made us comfortable, what made us feel like we made sense. 

And for awhile, it was just like we were walking into each others' living spaces. We would ooh and aah and say things like, "That's totally you!" or "That makes perfect sense." We would marvel over each other's spaces the way we'd marvel over a friend's house when we spent the night - it's so cool here. 

Until we'd start browsing around a little more and find other places that were also cool. And then, all of a sudden, it becomes a contest. "But mine is the most cool, right?" And it became an exercise in trying to learn things about the world, but without context. You can look at someone's bedroom and learn quite a few things about them, but none of it will make sense until you actually meet the person and form a relationship with them. 

All of a sudden, we found ourselves in a context-less void where we were looking at things that we thought were cool, but we couldn't possibly understand them. And if we could not understand them without knowing the person, then it slowly occurred to us that others couldn't really understand our thing if they didn't know us, so we started putting ourselves out there a little more, trying to provide context to our little corner of the digital world. 

You can see how this sort of thing spirals. And now, here we are, 30-ish years later, still trying to cultivate context in a world that doesn't actually exist when our real lives are so much more than what we can show of them. We're more human than our digital presence allows us to demonstrate, and yet, what has happened is that we've fallen into the trap of believing that what is epic is what is most human and we couldn't be further from the truth. 

See, being human was never about being "cool." It has always been about something way more important than that...

(Come back tomorrow; I'll tell you more.) 

Epic and Trending

Here's a question I have: who told you that your life has to be epic? 

It's a bit rhetorical because I know it stems from this social media world that we live in, where we're carefully curating our lives to be, well, beautiful. And exciting. And awesome. And full of all the things that we really don't feel like they're full of when we're sitting on our couches for the majority of our day, finishing off another bag of potato chips and letting our streaming services auto-play the next episode. 

I mean, let's just be honest here - that person who is always posting their runs (me! it's me!) isn't running all day; running is maybe an hour of my life on a good day. There are 23 hours I'm not doing anything else. That person who is out for a hike with their best friend...spends the bulk of their day not with their best friend. The one who is playing with their dog, their dog eventually has to take a rest. 

We are presenting our lives in moments, and they are swallowed in wholes, and we're all just trying to make our lives look epic. 

But...why? 

This morning, I was logging into my computer for the day and saw a new "trend" - presented with the idea of having a porch goose, which is becoming pretty popular again these days. It was all about having a porch goose, dressing it up in outfits, making a statement in your neighborhood...and of course, on social media, where you'll probably post your goose every time you change its outfit. 

They called this - are you ready for this? - "whimsy maxxing." 

Because we can't just call it "fun." 

Or "joy." Or regular "whimsy." It's got to be whimsy "maxxing." 

Because we live in a world where we don't do anything unless it's epic. Absolutely everything to the max. Oh, wait...the maxx. With an extra x. 

I just rolled my eyes. Can we seriously not just have fun any more? Good ol' plain fun?

Who told you your life has to be epic all the time?

There are a couple of outcomes to this. First, as has been well-documented, mental anguish is at an all-time high. Depression, anxiety...we're riddled with them. Mostly because our lives are not epic enough. At least, we don't think they are. Or because we're trying to find ways to make them more epic all the time. 

But second, we don't have normal experiences any more. We live in a world where nothing is regular. Nothing is just naturally human. Nothing is part of living. Everything is, by some measure or another, extraordinary...and if it's not - if it's really just a porch goose like half a dozen other families on our street have, too - then we desperately try to make it sound extraordinary to the point of exhausting ourselves with all the extraordinary things we are doing, which are not really extraordinary at all. 

Our trip to the grocery store - extraordinary. Look at me meal prepping (uhm...cooking), and getting a great deal (uhm...using coupons). Our drive to work - extraordinary. Cruising down the road, one hand out the window. Our job - maxxing out. Extreme paperwork ought to be the newest Olympic sport. 

And at the end of the day, we're tired...and we're craving to just do something quiet, something simple. Something "mundane." Something...human. 

We spend so much energy trying to make our lives epic that we neglect to live the epic of our lives and we look around and it feels more normal than we've tried to make it and we have the sudden realization that we've missed all of it. Every bit of it. By trying to make it more than it is and make it bigger than us and make it awesome to the maxx. 

...all when what we really want, deep down in our souls, is simply something good.  

Their Own Time

Have you ever wanted someone to do something "on their own time"? 

We usually say this when we believe that something someone is doing is infringing on our own time...or on our sensibilities. 

We say this more often than we think - let him talk about politics on his own time; let her breastfeed on her own time; let them practice their religion on their own time. 

We say it when the person in front of us in line is having a class reunion with the cashier, who they haven't seen in 10 years. "Reconnect on your own time." We say it when the patient wants to wait for their pastor to arrive and pray before moving forward with the procedure. "Pray on your own time." We say it when the gay man wants to talk about his new date. "Talk about your love life on your own time." 

It creates a lot of tension. We don't understand why the world insists on interrupting our time with their time. We have a schedule to keep, professionalism to maintain, relationships of our own to value. Don't they understand the trouble and the inconvenience they are causing to the way the world works by doing private things in public? By insisting on bringing what's meaningful to them into a space that wasn't built to hold it? 

Friends, let me tell you - the trouble isn't folks who refuse to operate on their own time. The trouble is our spaces that don't value it. 

Because here's the truth that we so often forget - every single second that they're breathing is their own time. Their life is theirs to live as they see fit. If that harshes your mellow, then too bad. It's their time, and they can do whatever they want with it. (Obviously, it's all God's time, not ours, but follow me here.) 

And that means that if the person in front of you is chatting it up more than your liking, then you're going to have to find a way to deal with that. Move lines. Or reassess your priorities. You're in public. That space is theirs just as much as it is yours.

If the patient wants to wait until their pastor arrives before you sedate them, then you wait for the pastor to arrive. That prayer they are waiting for is just as life-giving to them as whatever intervention you're about to perform. If you claim to be taking care of that patient, then you have to give them the space to receive the kind of care that's important to them. 

If the gay man wants to talk about his love life, guess what? He gets to talk about his love life. You can express your opinion, walk away, ignore him, whatever, but you can't tell him what to do with his time in his space just because you happen to share it and think it's yours. 

I'm growing weary of a world that wants to compartmentalize all of our lives, as if there's a certain time and space for everything human that we do. Of course, I'm not advocating for no boundaries at all; that's silly. But I'm advocating for us to assess our boundaries. How do we decide what's relevant and when and where? Is it just an annoyance to us or is it an actual threat? We have to stop asking ourselves what we're losing when our time is interrupted and start asking ourselves what others are gaining when we allow them the freedom to use theirs the way they want. 

Nobody just does things without a reason, and that reason is usually deeply meaningful to them. I just think we'd be better off as a people - as a community, as professionals, as neighbors, as families, as one anothers - if we'd take the time to consider that more. That's all. 

God Gives Life

Have you ever wanted to rescue someone? 

Not necessarily from something dramatic like a house fire or a car crash or a neighborhood pond, but just from the quiet little things that we don't tend to notice until it's too late. There's something in all of us that likes to play the hero, that likes to point out danger before someone else sees it, that wants to be the person who saves someone else from the troubles of this world. 

The problem is...we can't. Not really. Even if we know the risks and see them clearly, we still have to get someone to believe what we're saying. They not only have to believe us; they have to know that we have their best interest at heart. And most of the time, we just come off as a busybody or a know-it-all, someone who wants to feel superior to them. 

But even if we convince them that trouble is on the horizon and we can get them to steer away, we still haven't saved them. Because stopping someone from getting themselves into trouble isn't actually the key to saving someone.

Giving them life is. 

And we're even worse at that. 

We may stop someone from making a bad decision. For awhile. We may stop them from doing something stupid. This time. We might convince them to look for something else. But the truth about the bad things we do to ourselves and to each other is that we do them while we're searching for something...and when someone or something stops us from the bad things, we're still searching for the same thing that led us down that road in the first place. 

As long as that empty space or that hurt space or that broken space remains in our life, we'll keep searching. 

And it doesn't really matter what we suggest or offer or provide, we're just not capable of filling that emptiness for each other. 

John tells us we're not supposed to be. John tells us to stop trying to rescue each other. Rather, he says, when we see someone in sin - someone in trouble, someone heading down the wrong road, someone headed toward sure destruction, we should pray for them. We should get them to God.

Because God gives life to sinners (1 John 5:16). 

He's the only one who can. 

So the next time you want to rescue someone, the next time you want to play hero, the next time you really want to make a difference and keep someone from the pain and the troubles and the heartache that their waywardness, weariness, and wantonness is about to cause them...pray for them. 

It's the best thing you can do. 

God of Real Love

I've been wrestling a lot lately with the idea of love. It's not the first season that I've wrestled with it, and it probably won't be the last; it's such a hard idea in a world like ours. 

Most of the things that we call "love" aren't really. They're usually something much less. 

A lot of times, what we call "love" is actually appreciation - we love what someone else does for us, so we say that we love them, but the truth is...we don't. Not really. We just love what they do for us. We love the functions and the tasks they perform. We love the gifts that they share with us. 

The trouble is that when they stop performing, stop sharing, stop giving..."love" falls apart real fast. 

Sometimes, we "love" the idea of someone or something more than we love it. This is true especially for anyone who doesn't like to be alone or doesn't know how to be alone. They cling to someone or something else and call it love, but it's not really love - it's a filler. It fills the empty space in their lives so that they don't feel it so profoundly, and that creates good feelings that we call love. 

The trouble is that when we realize they're just filling a space without any valuable connection..."love" falls apart here, too. 

There are times when we love what someone or something else brings out in us. Often, this boils down to loving them because they need us, because they make us feel strong or smart or powerful in what we are able to offer them. We're at our best when we're with them because they're at their worst, so we love them...

...but looking down on someone isn't love. And using someone else to look up on ourselves isn't love, either. 

When we get down to it, very few of us know how to truly love or to be loved. Very few of us know what real love is. 

But John tells us this is what real love is: that God loves us. That's real love. (1 John 4:10)

It's real love because God isn't captivated by our performance or our gifts or our offerings. It's real love because God doesn't need us to fill an empty space for Him; He's complete just as He is. It's real love because God's not using us to puff Himself up or to feel good about who He is. 

Real love pours through until it pours out. It is offered freely, with no strings or definitions or expectations attached. That's why God is so good at it and we are so not. We're so busy trying to soak up love that we tend to hold onto at least a little bit of it instead of letting it pour through us and to those who really need it. 

The only way to truly love someone else, or ourselves, is to start with knowing that we are truly loved. We have to be full before we can let love pour through us, and that's really hard. And that's what John is saying - real love isn't our love. Not even our most pure love, the love we are supposed to have for God. 

Real love is God's love. 

The rest only makes us hungrier for it. 

God is Patient

You've probably heard it before - God is not slow; He's being patient (2 Peter 3:9). 

And there have probably been times that you've heard that, put your hands on your hips, started tapping your foot, and asked, "How much longer is He gonna be patient?" You're ready for God to move. 

Now. 

Sometimes, I find that my reflexes work faster than my brain. Someone will say something to me, and I'll immediately reply with a "huh?" or a "what?" only to have their words actually register with complete and full understanding just a few seconds later, and I have to say, "Oh, no. I got it. Sorry." Based on my interactions with other human beings, I'm not the only one who does this; it is a very human experience. 

But it also often turns into a series of interruptions, where the other person has already started repeating themselves and is now trying to clarify while I'm trying to wave them off and indicate that I already understand and am ready to move forward with whatever it is. 

If we had both just stopped for half a second before getting ourselves deeper into this, we could have avoided a lot of it. 

That's what I think of when I think about God being patient. I think about hearing Him, having that immediate reaction that I don't think I heard or understood, but then God, in His patience, gives me that little moment, that small bit of breathing room, and I realize I got it. Yup. Heard. Understood. Processed. Or, at least, processing. 

God's giving me time to let it sink in, to figure it out, to put it down into my bones and make it part of my own story. 

And quite honestly, I'm thankful for that. 

Because I'm a person who learns by doing. I learn by being actively involved in the learning and the doing and the execution of things. I learn by putting the pieces together and applying them specifically to my own heart and story so that I see how the threads weave together to make sense. 

I have plenty of book knowledge about God. I went to seminary, for Christ's sake (no, really - I don't get to make that joke often enough; I really went for Christ's sake). I have read millions of words about Him. I have a rolodex of factoids and truths and tidbits of stories tucked away in my head. (Does anybody still know what a rolodex is?) 

But the things that I treasure most about God are the things that I have learned in my heart the hard way, in the time it takes for me to learn them. In that patient little moment He gives me to figure out how it makes sense and how beautiful it is. 

Sure, He could just tell me, but I wouldn't get it in the same way. And He knows that. He knows it's better if I experience it...and I can only experience by engaging...and I can only engage by understanding...and I can understand through patience, by giving me that extra little moment to "get it." 

Got it? 

God of Right

This doesn't feel right. This life, I mean. 

In a world in which we know that God is good, that God is gracious, that God is loving, why is it that we have to look in our mirrors every day and see someone so broken looking back at us? Why is that we have to look around our dinner tables and see so much struggle? Why is that we have to talk to the empty chair next to us when for so long, our best friend sat there? 

This isn't the old question, why do bad things happen to good people? because at the core of it, that's not the question that most of us are asking. 

Most of us are asking: why do bad things happen to me? 

When I was coming of age in the youth group, the tongue-in-cheek answer to nearly every question was, "Pray. Read the Bible. Go to church." But it doesn't take us long to figure out that that's not "working." That's not changing our circumstances. That's not changing our struggle. We might know God better, but it's still a struggle to feel Him near us. Loving us. 

That's particularly true when we get stuck in a season we didn't ask for. In times like these, we usually shift our focus and start talking about things like...thorns in the flesh. Those insolvable little nagging realities of life that we can't seem to get rid of and that God apparently isn't going to take away. Paul speaks freely of his, including how he prayed for God to remove it, so this seems like the Christian approach to trouble...doesn't it? 

Maybe. 

Or maybe it's Peter who has the right mindset for all of this. 

In the first epistle bearing his name, the disciple-turned-apostle writes: And the God of all grace...after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm, and steadfast (1 Peter 5:10). I like the way that the NCV says it: And after you suffer for a short time, God, who gives all grace, will make everything right. 

Doesn't that just breathe fresh air into your lungs? 

Listen, it's tempting to misread that. It's tempting to hear it in your heart as an assurance that God will make everything all right - and then we go right back to verses like the one in Romans, where God is working all things together for the good of those who love Him. 

But that's not what Peter says. Peter doesn't say God's gonna make this all okay, that He's going to make it worthwhile, that He's going to give you some new perspective on it that makes it seem less horrible or miserable than it's been. 

Peter says God's going to make it right. Put it back in its place. Restore you. Make you stronger. Hold you up. Let you stand again. And it's not just going to be the best that God can do with it; it's going to be God's best. It's going to be right - the way you've just always wanted everything to be right with the world. That's what God is doing. 

Isn't that good news? 

Embodied

I was reminded again this week - in multiple ways - about how nothing in this world really matters until it is embodied. That is, until it's human and we can interact with it. 

Truth is truth and facts are facts, but the fact that an apple falls from a tree doesn't matter at all unless you have a vested interest in that apple. Truth is, stuff happens in nature all the time that doesn't affect us because, well, because it doesn't have an effect on us. It's only when it becomes pertinent to our lives that it really gets some skin on it. 

I'm talking about engaging with headlines. It's great to be informed about the world, but until and unless you can have an impact on it, it doesn't really matter. Christians are being slaughtered in Nigeria; young children are being raped in England; Muslims are being targeted in America. And on and on and on we go, but there's nothing that any of us can actually do about it...

...except love the one right next to us. 

The only real, legitimate impact that any of us stands to have when it comes to the headlines and to the problems of humanity is to make sure they're not happening in our neighborhoods. That's it. You can't solve Nigeria. You can't solve England. You can't solve America. You can only do your little part right here in Heresville. 

I'm talking about healthcare. We get all these young nurses coming in with textbook knowledge, but none of it matters until you're looking at the patient. Until you're interacting with them. Doctors have studied for years and know lots of things, but no patient is a textbook; they're a living human being. So that thing that you think you know everything about...isn't a paragraph on a page; it's a lived experience, and that changes it. 

And if you can't recognize and adapt to the ways that embodiment changes facts, you're dangerous. You can be smart - you might even be the smartest person in the room - but you lack wisdom. And wisdom is the thing that teaches you how to react, how to respond, how to engage. 

I'm talking about faith. You can read the Bible and go to church and buy the T-shirt and say all the right things and these are facts, but you can't really understand God unless you live Him. In your heart, in your actions, in your experience - you have to live faith to truly understand it. 

I saw a post online a day or two ago where someone was complaining about the popular quiz show Jeopardy! having categories about the Bible. The Bible, this person said, shouldn't be on a trivia show because you can't create trivia based on peoples' perceptions and beliefs and ideas. Several came to defend the category, explaining that the Bible is a static thing that exists just like any other piece of literature exists and therefore has legitimate concrete answers based in facts. It is written... 

And yet, there's a certain point to it. There are plenty of folks who are pretty good at Bible trivia, but they aren't good at faith...because they haven't lived it. They aren't living it. It's not embodied for them, so it's really nothing but a good idea. 

Embodiment is what makes it dynamic. And beautiful. And amazing. 

So we have to understand that any time we're interacting with the world, it's not this objective thing that's just out there and exists and is static and factual. It doesn't really matter how much you know...because even what you know is changed by the living of it. We have to keep our eyes - and our hearts - open to this living. It's the only way.