Offense and Defense

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Relationships can fall into a cycle of offense and defense.  Some one offends you, willingly or not, they hurt you.  You defend yourself, either with your words or with your silence you erect a barrier, to protect yourself.  It's natural, it's what we do.  Then often the other person takes your words in defense as an attack on them, or your silence as an emotional embargo, the dark silence of disapproval.  So they construct their own defense to protect themselves from your offense.  And so the cycle  goes, until it is broken by something beyond natural.

This is why love is a choice, and Love itself is super-natural.  It is choosing to ignore their offence and your nature.  It's a laying down of your weapons and walking headlong into oncoming fire, putting your need for emotional safety aside to rescue a comrade-in-arms locked inside a castle of despair.

The most surprising thing I have found about the doors people shut in your face is that they rarely lock them.  They are hoping you'll at least turn the knob and try.  Every one is hoping that some one else can love them more than they can love themselves.  To achieve this is to know yourself in Christ, to be so loved that disarming yourself to love others is more your  nature than to hurt back.  To be more than complete, to have pieces left over that you can give to others, like the bread broken and multiplied, so that all were full and leftovers were gathered.  Are you that complete?  Do you really know how to love?

Things we should place more value on #1 : Discomfort

It's Saturday morning, the sun is shinning, but the shades are drawn and you're lying in bed.  You have absolutely nothing to do today.  Your completely alone, all the members of the household are away or quietly occupied, none of them require your assistance.  And it's that perfect temperature, so that you are perfectly comfortable under the covers.  And you are laying perfectly on the pillows so that your body is completely relaxed, so calm you're almost floating.

And still you will get out of bed.  Why?  Because hunger or biology will prod you.  No matter how perfect your current situation, you can't stay.  Discomfort will eventually drive you from this paradise, and this is a good thing.

From the day your mothers body flipped the switch and decided it was time for you to move out, you have been living in a world that has be designed for your discomfort.  In fact, finding comfort is a driving force in civilization.  It can be argued that the only reason you are here reading this is because in some guy in ancient Sumeria got tired of trying to remember how many jars of oil he traded for how many head of cattle, so he began imprinting balls of clay with symbols that was the first time people transferred language to objects to create a written language.

How much of your own life is built around avoiding discomfort?  You work all day, not just for sustenance, not for survival.  You work to live in a house you like, in a neighborhood you like, with a car that gets you to and fro with the most comfort you can afford.  You fill that house not just with comfortable furniture, but with things that will distract you from the discomfort that remains.  Radios, TV, cable, smart phones, computers, noise.  Because for some the most discomforting thing is the silence.

For others the comfort of silence is the goal.  So you have a "no soliciting" sign on your door, a huge fence around your yard (or you've move out far enough that it isn't a factor).  You have a phone with caller ID to avoid conversations you don't want to have, and live a life of avoiding confrontation, committed to keeping the peace, not for the sake of peace, but for the sake of avoiding discomfort.

But discomfort has a purpose.  You are a spiritual being muddling through a physical world, and the confines of this world will always make you uncomfortable, because ultimately you were designed and built for a more perfect place.  This is the sort of constant, mild discomfort you feel, even when everything else is right.  It's longing, and we all know what that feels like, even from a very young age.

But there is an even more acute discomfort, the one that comes from not being where you're supposed to be.  It's a nagging fear, a constant restlessness, a feeling of impending doom, a feeling that you have to move.  You need this feeling.  It's there because you aren't where you need to be, even if where you are is comfortable.  Even if you chose where you are because it's comfortable.  It's time to move, the cloud in moving, move with it.  Don't ignore the feeling, don't medicate it with entertainment, embrace it, understand it and find it's source.  Even if that means fasting, even if it means silence, even if it means confrontation.

Because this discomfort is your chance to "become".  It is the open door, it's your excuse to move, to change.  So don't complain, don't turn away, don't medicate.  Rise.

In defense of Joel Osteen

If your Facebook is like mine, you've had one of these two posts come across your feed the past few weeks...

Why Joel Osteen is bad

or this:

Why Joel Osteen is good

Being a huge history nerd this reminds me that no matter what persecutions Christians have faced, no matter what threats loomed on the horizon to destroy the faith, and no matter how we were fighting to win a  lost and dying world, we have always found time to try and destroy each other.  It's the not-so-great commission.

I attended a Baptist school growing up, in it there was one Catholic girl and four kids (myself included) that went to churches defined as Pentecostal (and to Calvinists defined as Armenian).  And yet somehow, even with that small number of non-Baptists, at least once a week the Bible class would be about the doctrine of Eternal Security or why everything the Catholics believed was wrong and they were probably all going to hell.  I don't immediately recall any classes on the unity of our faith.  I actually credit that class for helping me define my own beliefs, because I knew I didn't buy what they were selling, but I had to know for myself why it didn't ring true.  So I studied, and decided for myself.  In fact, at least a few dozen passages in my Bible from that time have "disputes once saved always saved" written in the margins.

Fast forward a few years, I'm in the Navy, I have precious few Christians around me, and a new person reports into our station and the first words I hear him say are "Praise the Lord!"  Thus began one of the friendships I look back on as one of my greatest friendships of my military service.  But at some point it did come up that he was Baptist, and I was Pentecostal.  We were witnessing together to some one who had asked us about our faith, and he said something that I knew I didn't agree with, and I decided right then and there that I didn't care.  For two reasons, one being the person we were talking two wanted to know if what we had was real, and what better way to drive some one from Christ than by two Christians bickering.  And two, the matter was only as important as I wanted to make it.  We were both strong in our faith, we both acknowledged Christ as the only way to salvation, why take a brother or sister to task over how we formed our relationship to Christ?

I'm not saying doctrine isn't important, but remember that doctrines are at their core, defined by man as we try to understand God through his word and our experience with him.  Doctrine doesn't' define man, man defines doctrine.  And if only doctrine was all that divides the Church.  How about what type of music we play, or which day we worship on, or even something as trivial as what we wear to church?

I like what Glenn Kaiser said, "It's all either love or sin".  When you break down our faith, that's what it all boils down to, love or sin.  Are we acting out of love, are we motivated by love, is showing love the force that drives us to win the lost, or have we missed the mark?  Have we sinned?

When you see those posts, use this as your measuring stick, does it pass the Philippians 4:8 test, and is it done in love?  Regardless of how you feel about the subject of someones comments, you owe it to them to act and respond out of love.

Why it isn't fair

We trade in a currency of injustice, in exchange for the healing of others.  Christ bore injustice against himself that we might know healing by his stripes, in particular.  In the same way, we must at times bear injustice so that we might set another free.

Which brings us to nature

The debate we see often in secular psychology circles is the debate between nurture and nature, and which of those drives us as people.  In Christian terms we talk about the difference between the flesh and the spirit.  I've have always felt that Calvinism, at it's heart, reverts man back to naturalistic state, that it divests religion of the supernatural and pushes us back into a world of predetermined, programmed creatures who cannot divert from their programming.  Some how "unless the Spirit draw them" came to mean that we are incapable of being drawn to God unless He is, in that moment calling to us.  But is God ever not calling to us?  Does He ever not want fellowship with us?  My experience has been that all mankind feels the constant pull of the divine.  That the Father is always pulling at us to be greater, to move past the natural.

Did He just create our body, or did He also create our soul?  Were we created with the innate ability to seek out our creator, or is it something only activated in specific people once we are "chosen"?

The biggest argument I see against predestination are highways.   They are paved.   Once they were paths, but some one made them straighter, cleared out brush and debris, they covered them with concrete and asphalt, all to make it more comfortable.  Monkey's don't do this.  Heck, for all their hype about opposable thumbs, they never even got around to getting central air conditioning.

In fact, lets take man off the earth.  What does the place look like without us? It looks like it always looked, minus the changes in the weather shifting around migration patterns, the world continues along a predetermined course, covered in wildlife that never builds an skyscraper.

But man does.  We have been given authority, dominion, if you will, over all the earth.  We can change it, shape it, destroy it.  We among all creation redefine creation according to our comfort and hubris.  It's our sandbox, and we're the only ones with the shovel.  I find it comforting.  If free will didn't exist, you'd never know, as you'd lack the capability to question it, to feel it, to describe it.  It would be like trying to imagine a color you'd never seen.

So I guess my question now is, how much authority do I have, and what do I plan to do with it?

I wish more worship leaders understood this

This article discusses the benefits of repetition in music.  I've always felt that music in church is the most interactive part for most, so it works better when 1.  You keep a stable of songs that everyone knows, and you do at least one of them every week, 2.  You keep the solo's to a minimum, because it makes it a performance piece instead of a congregational work.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/04/07/300178813/play-it-again-and-again-sam

Going to War

Someone called my bluff this week. Someone I don’t even like listening to, but they said to me what no one else would, and it was the right thing to say.  We were talking about my career arc, where my life was headed and such, I was telling them how hard it was to accomplish what I wanted because of the factors working against me.

“Those are just excuses”

Ouch, really?  You mean I’m just using these as reasons to not do what I’m called to do?  You mean all that’s standing between me and destiny are excuses?  But aren't they reasons?  Aren't they cold hard facts staring at me like a great iron wall between myself and fulfilled purpose?

No, those are excuses.

So I’m going to war on them.  To see if they are as strong as they claim.  If they can really keep me stuck here not moving forward.  It’s time to test their armor, see if they have more endurance than I do, or if I, through my perseverance can out last or overpower them.

They are just excuses.

I made them, I created them, I gave them power over me.  I decided that they were worth more than my effort.  They were detours that denied me passage.  Well, I’m going to jump the rails, I’m taking this off-road and off-script.  Because this is me, there is where I need to go, and those are just excuses.

This song hurts me

The fell clutch of cirmcumstance

I've been doing a lot of un-intentional counseling lately, and I learned something new. That people often blame their circumstance, their situation on other people or events that they had no control over.  And while that can be true, often it's our decisions that determine our circumstance.  We have control over much more than we think, and better decisions will lead to better circumstances.  The hardest thing about making those types of decisions is that they are the very ones that go against our nature.  If we only do what seems natural, we will forever stay in the same cycle of mediocrity and bad relationships.  Break the grip of the fell clutch of circumstance, reach for the hand of providence.

The Table

I love in that in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe they set Aslan on a stone table to sacrifice him.

When I'm struggling with understanding sin (mine only, I never understand other peoples sin fully), I just picture the road I'm on, and beside that road, off in a clearing, there is a table.  God is seated at the table, and he wants me to commune with him, but first, I have to empty my pockets.

So I empty my pockets onto the table.

He looks at each object on the table and sorts them into two groups, things I should keep and things I should leave on the table.

The rules are simple, it's up to me which items I put on the table, but once they are there I am only supposed to take back the things that he blesses.

Sin is not emptying your pockets, not putting it on the table.  Trying to hide it from God.  Even though he knows what you have in your pockets.  

Sin is trying to possess that which He has asked you to let go.  He won't stop you if you want to take it back.  But you'll only every really possess the things that he has blessed.  

Sin is not going to the table. You know it's there, but you avoid it, avoid eye contact, avoid communion.  If you won't join him at the table, how can you say you know him? 

Once the sorting is done we break bread, we drink, we fellowship.  Then I take what he has given me and continue on, and he continues with me.

America and Sexuality, part 1

In the last ten to twenty years America has changed more about it's attitudes on sexual behavior have changed more than in the first two hundred years.  There are many causes, but they all lead to the same conclusions, 

"no single snowflake feels responsible for an avalanche".

The idea of "sexual deviancy" is almost a thing of the past.  Fewer and fewer behaviors are considered aberrant.  This is due, in part, to a common mix of pseudo-science and almost universally un-examined personal philosophy.

Let's start with the science.  It's an easy road from evolution to pre-determinism (or from Calvinism to predestination, but that would be another debate).  By this we mean that if we are a collection of cells that evolved through time to change into increasingly more complex states, then we by nature pick up habits and traits that help our species to survive.  These traits are neither good nor evil, they just "are".  A man seeks multiple sexual partners to increase his chances of offspring.  A woman chooses a man based on subtle clues that let her know which one will produce the offspring most capable of surviving.  Love is just the right mix of chemicals and the right time that short circuit the brain and allow us to feel the sensation that we write songs and poems about.

And by this measure you can also see that many parts of your behavior were pre-programmed from the start, they are part of who you are and cannot be changed.  It is nature to want these things and imposing a morality that restricts these behaviors is then by definition, unnatural.  

This leads us to the personal philosophy that so many American's carry around like a chip on their shoulder which I think was best expressed by a character on the show, Lost,

"Don't tell me what I can't do"

Now, in the beginning this was a war cry of a disabled man struggling to over come a handicap, but it became an excuse to follow his own course, where ever it lead, and who ever it hurt.  We in America have a real hard time letting anyone tell us that our behavior is wrong, or gasp, bad.  No matter the circumstance, we can, given enough time, justify our actions in the sound-proof chamber of our mind until we are convinced that the course we have taken is the only course we could take.  And without any one to hold us accountable, or to question our actions, we will continue to make morally questionable choices that we would defend to the death if a stranger were to question them.

This goes well with our current (though new-found) religious introversion.  At some point it became so repugnant to express any opinion on good/evil, God/man that to do so was the ultimate faux pas.  That and politics.  Should we digress and talk about how bringing religion down to the same level as politics has weakened the church and strengthened the state?

"Never argue with a fool, he'll drag you down to his level and then beat you with experience"

But this discussion isn't about me, a person on the outside, judging your actions.  It's about how you or I determine whether our actions can or should be classified as "good" or "evil".  We shall save that discussion for part 2.