unobtrusive lucidity

I just finished reading “The Slumber of Christianity” by Ted Dekker. It’s his first non-fiction title. All about renewing and refreshing our perspective off of what’s material and right in front of us, and onto the one thing that really matters…our future with Christ. It’s more than a little thought-provoking, and I highly recommend it. I also recommend that, should you decide to read it, you actually take a little time to meditate upon and implement changes in your life because of it.

I didn’t. And tonight I seriously screwed up. Not anything that has shattered or shaken my temporal comfort or security, but I know I’m gonna hear about it in Heaven at some point.

I was asked at work tonight to pray with one the patients on my unit, and, honestly, I kind of blew it off. There were two other counselors with me at the time, both of whom are Believers, who I think took my lead to some degree on that decision. I ran scared, because I am, of course professionally bound not to impose my faith on someone under my care. I could certainly receive a reprimand should I ever pray with a patient, whether or not it is at their reques, despite the fact that, educationally and experientially speaking, I am over-qualified to do so. I chose to make other things a priority, and never got around to it. That way I didn’t just blow the patient off. I wasn’t guilty of that in my mind.

Until I got home, and God started gently reminding me that I am.

So, here I am at 2 a.m. attempting to focus my thoughts, and I’m realizing that I really should have listened to Dekker’s advice a bit more closely. I started remembering things tonight. I was remembering when I moved here, to start Seminary. I had a different concept of where I was going with life at that time, a different idea of what I was trying to accomplish, but I had come here on a wing and a prayer. I had left a position with an agency that I had worked with for several years. With that position, I left a beautiful and comfortable salary. To go to school full time. For a degree that, professionally, wasn’t going to do me any good. For a dream that made no sense to most, but made sense to God, because He was the one Who had given it to me. So I landed, relocated my life, and off I went.

And now, two years later, I’ve been pulled away. My focus has shifted onto the societal definition of success that I had left behind, and I’ve began to hunger for it. I’ve began to desire that again. I’ve began to want my writing to meet with men’s applause again. I want money. Badly. I want the things that it buys. Badly. I want a nice place and sweet vacations instead of living paycheck to paycheck. I want a lot.

I’ve kind of forgotten what He’s wanting. And because I did, I made a lousy decision tonight, because I wasn’t toally caught up with Him as I should have been. I let an amazing opportunity pass me by, and someone’s soul quite literally hung in the balance.

It’s not an issue of forgiveness…not at all. I know that I am. It’s an issue of not making the mistake again. It’s an issue of returning my focus to the primary motivation: what happens after this life.

Everything else becomes extremely insignificant when compared to that. Don’t you think?

Life has a way of getting seriously complicated. In fact, it kind of stays seriously complicated. I’m getting ready to start yet another semester, which means that I’m basically not going to have time to breathe for the next 4 months or so.

I was talking to a friend on the phone just a few minutes ago. Talk about getting slammed…life just nailed him in a big way. Almost makes me feel bad about thinking anything was wrong in my life, because I don’t have anything going on that can touch his. But I’ve just been spending time thinking lately about how complicated and screwed up things can get, and it occurred to me a couple of days ago that, all too often, we make them that way. Like, we almost go out of our way to make things more complicated than it should be.

I think that’s why religion irritates me so much. We’ve taken something very basic, very real, and very attainable, and we’ve turned it into something elitist, something snobbish. I hate that. The farther I move toward my master’s, the more bogged down I get in these abstract theological concepts that just make things a lot more complex than they should be. Honestly, I think they rob us of the closeness that we should have with God, the spiritual depth that we should have to our lives, because we’re so busy worrying about all this other stuff. And to be totally honest, I think that we’re gonna get to Heaven, and God’s gonna slap us all in the head and tell we were all wrong anyway. He’s going to tell us that we all got really hung up on things that don’t matter. I don’t know if I want to say that theology is useless, but it’s close. In case, it’s definitely overdone.

I’ve really been impressed lately with how basic it is. He died for us. He wants us to accept that. Then He wants us to tell others about it. That’s not difficult. That’s not theological. That’s just true. Basic, easy to understand, not difficult or wrapped up in technicalities. Just real. I think He wants us to get back to basics. I think He wants us to stop making things so difficult, and just do this.

Really, it’s kind of nice to think that maybe life shouldn’t be so complicated, isn’t it?

I’ve found myself examining things a lot today. Thinking back on things that have happend in the last few weeks, examining decisions, examining myself, examining God, examining how they all go together. I took a real Sabbath day today, something I haven’t done for a few weeks, and just spent a lot of time driving around town and thinking. So I suppose this is going to be some kind of rambling collision of those thoughts, but I actually do have a point that I want to make here.

When I think about the church in Acts, about Jesus when He walked among us, I think of excitement. I think of people being real. He shook up the entirety of the way humans viewed religion. That, after all, is one of the reasons His own hated Him so much. I guess I see the historical Jesus as a revolutionary, someone Who wasn’t contained by pre-conceived traditions and ideas of how religion should be done, and how people should (as seminarians love to say) “do church.” I bet Jesus didn’t get hung up on petty things. In fact, I know He didn’t, because Jesus was focused on what mattered. He came save us. That simple.

Over and over this past week, He has impressed upon my heart that it is, in fact, that simple.

That’s a huge revelation for me, because I have gotten seriously side-tracked over the last few months in a lot of ways. It’s odd, really, because in a lot of ways God has been making a lot of improvements, also. But I think that we lose sight of what’s important a lot. I see so many churches so wrapped up in politics and attendance reports, business meetings, finances, traditions, and other crap that they’ve lost sight of what we’re really supposed to be doing this for. I just left a church that I had been attending for a long time, and those are part of the reasons why. Yet, when I decided it was time for me leave, when I had peace that this was what God would have me to do, I have people in that church suddenly begin taking it personally, making me feel as though as I’ve insulted them somehow. How dare I choose any option other than their denomination? How misguided I must be!

Well, that kind of garbage is exactly why I’m fed up with denominations to start with. When I see “denomination,” I see “carefully disguised way to teach Christians to hate each other.”

I was browsing the television tonight, and I kept coming across this nice traditional Christian programming: Jerry Falwell, Kay Arthur, etc. I guess that works for some, and I’m not arguing that both of those people have important messages from God, but I swear I couldn’t stay awake for more than a few seconds. The tradition seems to have become more important than the Message. The Good News has become the let’s-not-get-too-excited-about-it-news. We do the same thing over and over again, every Sunday, without even realizing the significance of the routine, the meaning of the tradition. Worse, we do it for generations, getting locked into a cycle of “I do it this way because that’s how my parents did it” without even consulting Scripture to see what God might have to say about it. Religion has overcome our spirituality. It has to look a certain way and sound a certain way for us, and if it doesn’t fit those arbitrary standards, then it just isn’t Godly, now is it?

No wonder people get bored with Christianity. If I weren’t a Christian, and I were looking in from the outside, I’m not sure I would want it, either.

I guess the point I’m trying to make with all of this disconnected banter is that we need to be real. Religion is fake. It’s lulled us into a stupor. It’s killing us. Worse, it’s killing others because it’s inhibiting our witness. There’s barely a pulse left in us, and I can’t think God’s happy about that.

I think one of the reasons people rushed to Jesus as they did when He was here was because He was real. Think about it. You know when you’re talking to someone who’s real, and when you’re talking to someone who just knows what to say. Jesus didn’t use pre-programmed answers laden with tradition. He was real. In fact, He couldn’t be anything else, because He was God. And God is real.

Maybe we should live by example?

Just a thought.

I was praying yesterday for the miners who were trapped in the West Virginia coal mine.

Coming from a journalism background, I understand the importance of getting various perspectives on a story. I bounced back and forth between CNN, MSNBC, and Fox during this tragedy. Much of the footage came from this small country church where the families of the miners were staying, praying, singing hymns, and so forth. Much was made of the “miracle” for which they were praying. When the news broke at about 11:45 last night that 12 miners were alive, there was a lot of praising going on. Then, through some completely monumental screw-up that I cannot even fathom, I awoke to the news this morning that there had been “miscommunication,” and in fact, there had been only 1 survivor. 12 were dead.

Horrific.

Yesterday afternoon, I was praying for those miners and their families. It occurred to me that all too often God is our “crisis hotline.” We believe that He’s up there, but we can’t seem to make the time to talk to Him until something horrific has happened, either in our lives, or in the world around us.

CNN posted an interview with one of the family members, who said that the event had shaken her faith in God, that she didn’t even know if there was a God any longer. They made a big deal out of the tag line they took from her words, “a miracle taken away.”

Then why in the world were we calling out to Him in the first place?

I mean, cognitively speaking, if we’re talking to Him, then we believe He’s up there, right? And almost everyone does call on Him when all hell breaks loose, don’t we? So much for the illusion of atheism. But then when it turns out that He didn’t spare us from our disaster, we choose to say that we don’t think He’s up there any longer. Sour grapes. He wouldn’t allow that to happen, right? He wouldn’t put us through that if He were a God of love like we believe He is, right?

God said, “I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion” (Romans 9:15, NKJV). Don’t misunderstand me, I’m far from being a Calvinist, and I’m not attempting to overplay the sovereignty card. But sometimes, God permits evil to happen. We don’t understand that. We can’t understand that. The “problem of evil,” as seminarians like to call it, is one of the great apologetic issues of the human condition. We haven’t, and we won’t, be able to solve it. I’m not even going to attempt to do so here. I will say that, as I’ve carefully attempted to unpack this issue in the past, it does always come back to a loving God in my mind. But there is no suffering worse than existential suffering. Never is it more painful than when it comes to your doorstep.

So when this woman said what she said, it brought tears to my eyes.

Because I can understand her words spilling from her broken heart. I didn’t sidestep, expecting lightening to strike her. Given time, she’ll unpack this for herself. She’ll be bitter for a while, of course. God is big enough to handle that. He’s patient. And He reveals Himself through the most tragic of circumstances at times. I know that tears came to His eyes, as well, when she said this. I’m begging Him to love on those families, as I know He will, during this time.

And it’s my hope that He will not just be their crisis hotline, but that they will remain with Him in order to get through this, and dependent upon Him in the future. It is that closeness, that blind faith, that effort of believing even when the belief surpasses logic, that keeps us close to Him.

Even when the horror comes to our doorstep.

Are we seriously about to start a new year?

I suppose this same thought hits me at the end of every year. It’s like you’re so busy just catching your breath from Christmas that you don’t have time to realize you’re about to start an entire new year. I’ve tried to stop and weigh it in my head on numerous New Year’s Eves, but I’ve always come up somewhat short. Because I think there’s something deeper to it than we think. I guess I’ve been really fixated on how things are deeper than we think lately. I’ve asked my friends if they had a good Christmas, and many respond with what gifts they received. I’ve done the same thing. I think we’ve missed the point somehow.

So when we think about the end of year, we watch CNN talk about how historic a year 2005 has been…and certainly that is true. We plan how we’re going to spend our New Year’s Eve, because we can’t allow it to just be one more Saturday night. Surely that would cheapen it. Surely that would degrade what we’re trying to do. The hope that we’re attempting to achieve with looking forward to a New Year. The anticipation. The anxiety. The curiosity. There’s so much happening that it all blurs. The past blurs with the present, yesterday with today with tomorrow, and we can no longer distinguish between them. And in the haste to have a good time and ring in the next year with a positive vibe, we lose sight of its true significance.

I was talking to God last night about a fresh start. I was talking with someone else today about how every day is a chance to do better than the last. How much more so for a new year? We make resolutions that have become passe, but truly this is a huge chance for us to really attempt to change things for the better in our lives. Who is our God if He is not a Giver of second, third, and many more chances? How grateful should we be for this? How much should we be focusing on this instead of on our party plans?

I’ve approached my resolutions with a different sense of devoutness this year. I’m aware that what I’ve committed to do, I’ve committed to do before God. So I didn’t make cheap ones. I made three serious resolutions. I’ve asked Him to hold me to them. I’m scared to death about how He’ll do that. But in the end, we’ll be better because of it.

It’s been a wild year. The next proves to be even wilder. Bring it! So raise your glasses of bubbly and toast the coming year. But don’t cheapen its significance. Don’t cheapen the fresh start He’s given you. Don’t let it go by in a blur.

Happy New Year!