Jesus

It's been an interesting time for our cultural heroes, even in the short time that I have been alive. 

In the age in which I was born, our heroes were blue collar kind of guys who walked the hard road with integrity, picked themselves up by their own bootstraps, and came to live "the American dream." 

Then, they became the mighty men who not only saved themselves, but saved the world. 

Then, our heroes became the ones who bore the trauma of the culture, the underdogs who nobody else was rooting for. They carried their burdens and sometimes didn't even see the ways that the "system" kept them down, but we rallied around them anyway - offering our "privilege" to them and raising them up to hero status for all the nonsense they had to bear on their own shoulders. 

Now, our heroes are the ones who are going to therapy, who are being honest about their struggles, who can name the things they're fighting against in themselves, and at best, who are also lending their insight into themselves and the world in a new form of "privilege" to those still trapped in the old "systems." 

What's interesting to me as I have watched culture struggle to decide, even over a few short generations, who their heroes are is that no matter who they have picked, Jesus still fits the bill. 

Want a blue collar kind of guy who walks the hard road with integrity? There's a carpenter from Nazareth I'd like to tell you about. 

Want a mighty man who saves the world? I'm looking at Jesus, hanging on a cross. 

Want someone who bears the trauma of the culture, a real underdog that nobody was rooting for? Try the illegitimate son of a weak family who had to flee to another country as a refugee when He was a young boy because His life was literally in danger, but then He came back to discover that the system was entirely against Him. He was harassed by the powerful, by those who called themselves elite. He was mocked for who He was and where He came from. (Can anything good come from Nazareth?) His only friends were a ragtag bunch of misfits. Yeah, Jesus fits the bill here, too. 

But then, you wanted someone who is honest about their struggles, can name the things they wrestle with, and are also lending themselves to others who are still trapped in the "system." Fine, then. But it's still Jesus. It's the Jesus who sweat drops of blood as He faced His own sham trial and crucifixion. The Jesus who wept when His friend died. The Jesus who overturned tables in the Temple. And the One who talked to women, touched lepers, healed the lame, stood up to the elite, and was known for even eating in the homes of sinners. 

No matter what we've been looking for, or thinking we're looking for, we have to confess that every time we turn around, there's Jesus. 

He's everything we've ever been looking for. 

He's the marginalized, disenfranchised, broken, wounded, self-aware, blue collar, table-turning, system breaking, heavy-hearted Messiah who also just so happens to be the Savior of the world. 

Found Him yet? 

Therapy Culture

We've gone from a challenges culture to a therapy culture. No longer is it enough to be marginalized or disenfranchised. Now, we look to the ones who are finding their way through it, the ones who are taking a stand for putting things back together.

It's a delicate dance, for sure. You have to be broken enough to garner sympathy in the first place, but not so broken that you're considered un-redeemable. We still have our lines. There are still things we're willing to say are absolutely wrong and evil and that you can't come back from. 

So don't be any of those things. 

The reason for this is simple, and it's not because we actually have some un-stated but universally understood moral code that somehow continues to guide us even while we're not thinking about it. No, it's much simpler than that: 

None of us, as much as we get discouraged by ourselves, think of ourself as the worst of the worst. There's always someone worse than us - more broken, more disenfranchised, more wounded, more unlovable. In our own biased eyes, none of us thinks we're "that bad." In fact, for as broken as we feel, we are pretty good at convincing ourselves that we're actually "just a little broken." Enough to be chic, to talk trauma around the table, but not enough to be shunned or outcasted by it. 

And therefore, if someone else is able to come their own "just a little brokenness," then there is hope for someone like us, too. 

It's why we make headlines out of therapy. It's why we broadcast the recovery process for those we want to admire. It's why we give a round of applause to someone who is trying to better themselves. 

Because if they can get better, maybe so can we. 

It's the same thing we do with nearly any challenge in front of us we're trying to tackle - we want to see someone else do it. We want to see someone else ride the roller coaster, handle the snake, jump out of the plane, quit their job, get married, have a kid, go back to school, whatever. We're always looking for someone to set an example for us, to show us the way. To show us that it's possible...that it might even be safe. That it might even be good. 

And you know, we don't even care about the brokenness any more. We don't. I saw a headline just the other day about a famous personality who is "entering therapy." That's it. That's the headline. The story went on to say that he's "been struggling with his mental health for awhile and decided to enter therapy." That's the story. 

That story has millions of clicks. Not because that person's product is that popular, but because it's kind of vaguely known who he is as a bit of general cultural trivia, and because there are now millions of persons out there who are saying, "You know, I've struggled with my mental health for awhile...." And now, this guy is the headline because he's the example. 

Can he really heal himself? Can I possibly heal myself? 

It's definitely a shift for the better. Our world is far more functional looking for answers than questions, looking for healing than pain. 

But we're still looking in the wrong place. We're still not quite where we need to be on this....  

Our Heroes Are Broken

What does it take to be a hero? What does it take to keep yourself in the headlines? How do you stay relevant in today's world? 

Easy. 

Go to therapy. 

It wasn't that long ago that our heroes were unbreakable. They were fearless, strong, mighty. They were overcomers. We've been telling the story of the little guy for a long time, the little guy who does one thing great and becomes a hero forever. We've been telling the story of the person with the odds stacked against them who keeps on keepin' on and suddenly becomes everything that we all secretly hope we can be - successful, happy, strong, symbolic, relevant, known. 

And then we started championing the folks who have done all that and overcome some kind of systemic barrier put in front of them. Persons who have been historically misunderstood or underestimated or whatever. We knocked everyone else off the pedestal and put them up there as not just success stories, but as chain breakers, too. 

And that used to be enough. You could be strong and successful and, if you so happened to also be marginalized or wounded in some way, then all the better. 

That's why we kept seeing our celebrities parade across our headlines in various scandals - in broken relationships, in manipulative professional dynamics, in personal failure. Whenever a star failed to have a good movie in awhile or a good record or a good TV show and they wanted to stay relevant, they just made their challenges the headline and threw themselves out there. Hey, at least everyone is talking about them again. There's something about becoming the little guy - the addict, the victim, the disenfranchised - so that you can start to tell your hero story all over again. 

But there's been another shift. Have you seen it? 

Because the truth is that we're all getting tired of brokenness. Of the world's stupid things. Of other persons' stupid things. Of our own stupid things. Everywhere we've looked for a long time, we've seen something broken...because that's what we were asking for. That's what our cultural story was telling us to ask for. 

We've been praising everyone for being broken for so long, we didn't even see it happening, but then we looked around and discovered everyone is broken. And now, as the headlines keep parading across our screens, we find ourselves wondering...is there anyone worth believing in any more?

And it's not really just about them, out there; it's also about us, in here. Everyone is so broken...we feel so broken.... If there's no one we can believe in any more, can we even believe in ourselves? 

Suddenly, we're all getting crushed by the weight of our own lives because the brokenness narrative is just too dominant to break through. 

But what if...

What if there's another story? 

And that's where we find ourselves now. We find ourselves now celebrating the ones who refuse to stay broken. So if you want to make a headline these days, it's simple - 

Go to therapy. 

Tell everyone you're seeking help. Tell them you've been broken in the darkness, in the silence, in the solitude for too long and you're finally seeking help. Tell them you've entered a program. Tell them you're talking to someone.

All of a sudden, you're relevant again. And the reason you're relevant is because you're carrying the hope not just for you, but for the rest of us, too. Everyone's watching to see if it works, to see if there's really a way out of brokenness. To see if there's a way back. 

We're starting, quietly, to look for a cultural story that isn't just about our challenges, but is about our growth. It's about our overcoming. It's about our putting broken things back together - not pretending they're unbreakable, not pretending they've never fallen apart, but in the beautiful way that the Japanese art of repair has taught us, gilding them with gold until something glitters again. 

Our heroes are broken, but our worship of them is changing. Broken isn't enough any more. It's time to do something about it. 

So what are we doing? 

Full Glory

There is a full glory that is yours even as someone that you think is marginalized. Or that the world says is marginalized. Or in any case, is not dominant. 

That doesn't mean that those with more obvious power are bad or evil or that there's been some kind of misunderstanding. God certainly calls men to a different standard than that to which He calls women. 

Sorry, but patriarchy isn't the problem. 

The problem is that you're unwilling to accept yourself as something other than a patriarch. 

That's what I want to say to those who are super-busy trying to deconstruct the world around them because they haven't figured out how they fit into it yet. Instead of looking to change themselves, they are trying to tear down the rest of the world because something doesn't fit. 

The truth is that when you understand yourself, it all fits. 

It starts here: by understanding that nothing is the way that the world has lied to you and says that it is. Power isn't really power; it's force. Human beings are not neutral. Victory isn't all it's cracked up to be. And it turns out that most of the folks who are losing by the world's standard are actually winning on all the measures that truly matter - the very things your soul tells you you're looking for. 

The poor, the marginalized, the afflicted, the affected, the weak, the foolish, the lame, the "cringe" - they're the ones who already have it. 

Hmm....I feel like I've heard something like that before...

Way before we were even having this conversation, pretending we're the only ones to ever have it. Pretending we are the ones "enlightened" enough to see what is really wrong with the world after all. Pretending we're the ones who are finally gonna fix it. 

Friends, we're not the first ones. We're not the only ones. We're not going to fix it. Left to our own power, we're going to do what every other generation before us has done - we're going to promise ourselves the world and shift pieces around until it feels like we have it, only to be shuffled to the side a generation or two from now when someone else realizes the world we made for us doesn't work for them. Kind of like you're feeling right now. 

Because the truth is that we aren't really at odds with the world. 

We're at war with it. 

We don't belong here. We weren't made for this. And the world keeps trying to press in harder and harder and tell us that we were. It's the enemy pushing in and trying to take over Sovereign's territory. And we feel it. 

But we won't fix it by pretending we're gonna tear it all down. That's not how we get back to it. 

We get back to it by being more fully ourselves, not by making the world around us less. We tolerate by filling the space with the glory of the way God made us, not by eliminating all the space that there is until we somehow think we're going to climb triumphantly from the rubble. 

We get back to what we were made for, to the way this world was supposed to be, by being more of who we were designed to be. As God created us, not as the world defined us. As the embodiment of His image in us, His wisdom, His design. 

That's how we get there.  

Feminist Theology

I've been talking about this latest book I'm reading on deconstruction, and there are so many glaring fundamental errors in it - as there have been in every book on the subject I have read - that we need to look closely at what is being said. 

Again - the questions are usually valid, but the answers are usually heresy. 

And a lot of these books stem from the same starting point - they are the wrestlings of persons who are "not dominant in white patriarchy." Women, children, persons of color, queer folk, etc. They're all looking for their place in the story, especially in relation to a culture that says they are valuable and worthy and capable and have every right to do whatever they want in this world. 

I don't want to go down any rabbit holes here, so there's a lot we're not going to touch on. But what I want to point out is that the end goal of these feminist/minority deconstructionists is that they come out with exactly the same power, presence, and voice as the white male patriarchs they so despise. 

Not one of them comes out with a better understanding of the unique gifts of women. Or persons of color. Or queer folk. Or whoever. 

No. They all come out with an argument that they are powerful white males. One and the same. Exactly as the men they despise. So they ought to be treated exactly the same way as the men they are trying to tear down. 

This is something I, too, have wrestled with for a long time. 

I am a woman with a heart for God and an ache for ministry. I have been since I met God 26 years ago. The gifts that He's put in me, the calling He's put on my life, the ways that He has encouraged and trained me up...they all point in one direction. 

And I've met my share of male gatekeepers in the faith. Men who affirm my gifts, but still work to keep me out of certain spaces. Men who cannot accept that God might gift a woman in these ways for this type of service. 

In response, I have masculinized myself. Learned to speak with a firmer voice. Brought the fullness of a loud passion to the forefront. I have tried to demonstrate that I am just as worthy as any man...by becoming as much like those men as I could. 

But the longer that I have been in ministry spaces, the more I have given all of that up. Because God has not called me to become a masculinized female. He gave me these gifts in my femininity. And so the proper way to use them is as a woman. Not by pushing my way into male spaces. 

I used to think that the best way to offer my gifts to the world was to prove that women could do anything men can do. And...maybe we can. But we can never do it as well as men can. We're not created for that. 

What we are created for is to do things men can do, but to do them the ways that women will do. There's something beautiful about the way that a woman will do it. 

So it's not about standing in men's spaces and saying, "See? Just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I don't belong here." Sorry, but it does. Women were not created for men's spaces, and it's not some massive triumph to prove that we're exactly like them. 

Women were not made to be men. No matter what culture and feminism and whatever else tells us. Women were meant to be women. And what we most need is a full, robust understanding of what that means. 

And we'll never understand that if we're so busy trying to be men. 

A False Authority

Once a deconstructionist has formed a god in their own image, they'll just start talking like all the things they've made of Him are true. Like they are just naturally and obviously true and real. It will flow so smoothly off their tongue that you will think they are still worshiping the same Christian God that you are. 

But they aren't. 

And they'll usually try to talk with some kind of depth that they count on you to not understand, but that sounds like something only highly-educated persons can understand, so they want you to trust in their authority. 

For example, the book I am reading right now declares that God is just as much feminine as He is masculine and that we should not be pigeonholed into only using male pronouns for Him. This is not a new idea - plenty of persons across the ages have referenced an idea of "Mother God." And correctly, the author cites that the Hebrew word for "Spirit" is feminine, which means there is some degree of solid foundation for a feminine presence within the Trinity. 

But then, she goes on to say that the Hebrew word that we translate as "God Almighty" (El Shaddai) doesn't actually mean "Almighty." She says there's no documentation or tradition that would explain why we translate this word "Almighty." Rather, she claims, the word "shad" that begins the second word indicates a breastfeeding mother. So we should reference the Lord as "the breastfeeding God." Clearly female. Nothing male about Him at all. Can't believe how much white cisgender heterosexual males have corrupted this for thousands of years. 

Okay, fine. But the word "homeowner" has the word "meow" right in the middle of it, so we should not say anyone actually owns a home, but that anyone who has a home is actually a cat. The word "hate" actually starts with "hat," so we're not talking about persons who hold intense judgment toward someone or something; we're just talking about folks with headwear. 

Do you see how ridiculous the argument is? There's no linguistic justification to what she's saying, not a single true expert in Hebrew language who would agree with her, but she knows that the overwhelming majority of her readers will not know Hebrew, so she pretends to be more educated than you and cites something you think is high-brow and educated...and then makes a point she has no reasonable excuse for making and claims it as truth, hoping you'll just take it. 

And in the process, she has stripped God of His mightiness. Taken away His power. Claimed something different about Him than He's claimed about Himself.... God reveals Himself as Almighty. That's the definition that has been claimed for thousands upon thousands of years - by both men and women and sure, recently, "white cisgender heterosexual males" - and is consistently revealed throughout His Word. But she has decided none of that is necessary. 

And if God isn't almighty? Think about what that means about His qualifications as God. 

It's ridiculous. 

So when you're reading these books, listening to these arguments, you have to be mindful of the ways that false authority is presented. You have to think about the things they're not expecting you to think about or not expecting you to understand. You have to look not just at the arguments they are making about God (it might not be terrible to think of the feminine nature of the Lord as breastfeeding - lifegiving and nurturing), but at what they are stripping Him of to make that point. There's no other way to account for His almighty-ness without shaddai. 

Why doesn't she want the Lord to be Almighty?  

The Answers

The questions that deconstruction is asking are, in most cases, valid questions. They are important questions. We should always want to understand how dominant narratives became the dominant narratives. 

What I'm troubled by, however, are the answers. 

The answers deconstructionists tend to come up with tend to change the fundamental nature of God in ways that are simply not compatible with His own self-revelation. 

The book I am currently reading actually says this well, although the author considers it a great triumph and not a disastrous heresy. Her stance is that, "I couldn't find myself in the God of the Bible that I had been taught, so I had to find the God who looks more like me." 

At another place in her book, she says that the God she had been taught would not allow her to make the decisions she wanted to make for her life (like getting an abortion), so she had to change her understanding of God to be compatible with the "real life" that she "had" to live. 

And she says this with great joy, with a sense of accomplishment, while offering permission to "find the God that you need...because He's right there in the text." 

Well, uhm, no, He's not. 

The more you read into this author's book - and most every other book like it - the more you discover that God has been castrated. He's powerless. He's aloof. He doesn't care much about anything at all. He looks more and more like the author of the book, whose life looks less and less like His. 

Then, to add more support to their argument, they will usually cite other authors who have come up with similar conclusions to their own. They'll cite other deconstructionists who have torn God apart and made Him into something He never revealed Himself to be, but that works beautifully for them, and they'll conclude, "If Susie found a God who worked for her life, you and I have every right to do the same. She still calls herself a Christian and because we believe in God, and that makes us Christians." 

Well, uhm, no, it doesn't. 

What I see too many deconstructionists doing - in fact, every single one whose book I have read to date - is tearing down the God who created them in His image and re-creating that God in their own image.

You can usually see it, most painfully, when they stand back after finishing their work and declare, "Oh, that's very good." 

But the God they've come up with is nothing like the God of the Bible. 

That's okay, they'll tell you, because the Bible was written by men...and men are evil. And then, to bolster their point, they'll usually quote some other male author who says that the men who wrote the Bible were prejudiced in some fundamental way. So we can only trust them when they already agree with us, but when they don't agree with us, it's because they're the problem. 

The truth in every deconstruction story that I've read is that these are folks who feel the pressure of culture, who feel the dominant narrative of the non-Christian world pushing in on them, and they are desperate to find a way to make their faith meaningful and relevant in a world with different priorities. 

The problem is that they always start with culture's priorities and go searching for a God who is, for lack of a better word, "cool" with that. They'll even usually point out places where our God's story is "just like all the other cultural myths, all the other gods (like Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.)" and use this as a reason to throw out all the stuff that makes the actual God unique among these myths...because these truths don't fit the stories that cult worshipers have told for the same thousands of years. 

To them, there's nothing special about God. So they form Him with their own hands to be like all the other gods, then shape Him just a little bit more into their own image, stand back, point at their work, and say, "See? I fixed it. That's who God ought to be."

Then, they go out and have abortions. And celebrate their sin. And judge their neighbor. And condemn the faithful. And tell you they're right about all of this because the God they've "discovered" isn't the one who revealed Himself plainly and has been the same yesterday, today, and forever. 

The questions are good, but the answers...are woeful. 

And all for what? 

Because the God they found in the Bible wasn't "compatible" with the life they wanted to live, so they had to change Him.  

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?