Top 10 of the Blog 2008 (9)

"Go Green - Jesus is Doing It (2)" - May 24, 2008


30 Rock, an NBC sitcom, has been entertaining me for countless hours the past few days. One of my favorite episodes from season 2, "Greenzo," makes fun of the recent environmentalism trend. Jack, the network's CEO, asks the writing team to write a couple sketches for the networks new environmental mascot, "Greenzo."

Jack explains his logic to the lead writer, Liz Lemon, saying, "He's part of our new company wide global-eco-initiative. Do you know why?"

"To save the Earth and it's resources?"

"No, to drain the Earth's resources. Don Geiss is a genius, he's pitting all the divisions of the company against each other to see who can make the most money off this environmentalism trend. I'm going to do it with Greenzo, saving the Earth while retaining profitability."

I agree with Jack, America is caught in the grips of a green revolution that started nearly 40-years ago. Hippies and pantheists led the initial charge in the 60s; they rightfully wanted to clean up the industrial revolution's act. Moreover, they wanted speak against westernized "Christian ideals" which led to so much destruction and pollution. Now, with 40-years hindsight, Christians seem to be doing more, but was there spiritual validity to the arguments of hippies and pantheists?

Lets time travel for a moment, reevaluate spiritualism of the 60s, and discover if the hippies and pantheists truly found the best way to respect and understand nature.

Pantheism (New Age, Zen Buddhism, Spiritualism, Neopaganism, Naturalism, etcetera) are any religious systems that believe, according to historian John Herman Randall, "The world was no machine, it was alive and God was not its creator so much as its soul, its life." The pantheist would say we are all God, of one essence, therefore no creature or thing, is of more spiritual value than the next. To the pantheists there is little difference between a man, a tree, and a squirrel.

During the 60s a strong academic notion emerged that the only way to protect nature was with Pantheistic belief systems. Aldous Huxley epitomized this ideal when he claimed, "Elementary ecology leads straight to elementary Buddhism."

Professor Lynn White Jr. wrote extensively on the subject. He concluded that "what people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and our destiny--that is, by religion." In his work The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis, White explained how a westernized Christian worldview led primarily to his generation's apathy about ecology. He wrote that Christians historically disparaged and abused nature because their faith system lacked a foundation to build a deep respect for nature. He uses this example, "To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly two millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature."

White believed that God was to be found in all things. Moreover, he believed that if men saw trees as Gods humanity would no longer disrespect and abuse nature, rather respect and adore its divinity and equality of beings. For love of nature, the Pantheists led the charge against pollution. Richard L. Means picked up the rhetorical baton where White left off. He wrote that White's beliefs "should help destroy egoistic, status politics, for it helps unmask the fact that other men's activities are not just private, inconsequential, and limited in themselves; their acts, mediated through changes in nature, affect my life, my children, and the generations to come." This thought became the ultimate plea of Pantheists. They cried, even if you don't believe all things on Earth are equal, at least do it for your children's children!

And many would say we have.

In almost immediate response to articles written by White and Means, theologian Francis A. Schaeffer wrote an apologetic work Pollution and the Death of Man. With his scrupulous rhetoric Schaeffer dissected the arguments of academic Pantheists, and proposed a Christian solution to the environmental crisis of the 60s. Schaeffer conceded that the hippies and Pantheists were "right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too, a long, long time age, before the counterculture ever came onto the scene. More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture--modern man, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois middle-class-- is poor in its sensitivity to nature." Yet, he differed with the Pantheists and hippies on the solution to the problem.

First Schaeffer criticized Pantheism for being morally pragmatic. He challenged Mean's idea that we ought to do it for our children's children, by pointing out that it is still morally egoistic of humanity. How do men doing what's best for mankind escape "human egoism?" Such a plea proved that Pantheists lack a moral universal to justify their respect of nature. Schaeffer wrote that the Bible gives us the best universal upon which to build morality: the character of God the creator.

Next, Schaeffer challenged Pantheism's assertion of equality between man and nature, "Pantheism eventually gives no meaning to the particulars. In true pantheism unity has meaning, but the particulars have no meaning, including the particulars of man," so "those who propose the pantheistic answer ignore this fact--that far from raising nature to man's height, pantheism must push both man and nature down into a bog. Without categories there is eventually no reason to distinguish bad nature from good nature . . . and man becomes no more than the grass." Simply put, Schaeffer said a tree ought to be respected as a tree, because that is its created order. One should not abuse trees with deforestation, likewise one should not abuse trees by romanticizing them and treating them as humans.

We must also turn to the Church, and understand how a spiritual/secular dichotomy caused the Church's apathy toward nature. Schaeffer looks at numerous passages to point out how important the material world is to the Christ. He explains that the Lord loves his creation entirely, and we as humans should respect it, because we love God. Rob Bell explains a similar concept in his book Sex God. Bell says the way we treat a gift or creation from another human speaks to how much we love that human (this is why mothers love everything their children make). Likewise, the way we treat God's gifts and creations speaks to how we love God.

Schaeffer sums up his argument, writing "God will always deal with a plant as a plant, with an animal as an animal, with a machine as a machine, and with a man as a man, not violating the orders of creation. He will not ask the machine to behave like a man, neither will He deal with man as though he were a machine . . . If God treats His creation in that way, should we not treat our fellow-creatures with similar integrity? . . . Should I, as a fellow-creature, do the same--treating each thing in integrity in its own order? And for the highest reason: because I love God--I love the one who made it! Loving the Lover who has made it, I have respect for the thing He made." With this worldview Christians appear more equipped to fight for the environment than pantheists.

A couple questions to end with:

1. Are Schaeffer and Bell's assertions about creation biblical?

2. Is there a historical discourse in Christian literature on nature (and even grassroots environmentalism?)

3. With a new worldview on the environment are Christians more equipped to protect the environment?

4. Would changing our worldview be catering to a current cultural fad, or conforming to God's truth?

Top 10 of the Blog 2008 (8)

"Art Every Wednesday (24)" - October 22, 2008

I love PostSecret. (www.postsecret.com)

I think there’s something a little voyeuristic about it, but also, gosh. They are so incredibly frail and achingly personal and courageous. I read these, and it’s the same sigh of relief I get when one of my friends — who I always suspected was a thousand times more put together than I am — comes to me and says, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

There’s satisfaction in that. Mostly because I stop feeling alone (I never really know what I’m doing).

PostSecret started with Frank Warren, this small business owner in Maryland who loves art, especially the mysterious, subversive, changing-definitions-of-what-art-is kind (he’s a fan of Dadaism, the art movement connected to art prankster Marcel Duchamp, also check out this article about Warren’s earlier, personal foray into anonymous art). He put his home mailing address on a stack of postcards in 2004 and asked people to just send him a secret anonymously — the only rules were that it has to be true, and it has to be something you’ve never told anyone. When he did this, he somehow spoke to a longing we have to share the deep parts of ourselves, and also the fear that keeps us from doing it. The postcardsjust started pouring in and now he gets about 1,000 in his mailbox every week. He still sorts through each of them personally, he told me on the phone on Monday (I love my job), and I think there’s something about that accessibility — it’s this one guy reading each one, not a committee or a structure or someone with another agenda — that creates a safe place. Like therapy.

Despite the self-help elements to it — Warren has received messages from people saying PostSecret in some way touched their lives, and even changed it dramatically (people have decided not to kill themselves, or to propose, or to share their secrets with loved ones), and part of the proceeds from the books go to suicide prevention efforts — Warren conceives of this most of all as an art project. “I see myself as a curator,” or “maybe a film editor taking these scenes from people’s lives and weaving them together to convey this cohesive narrative about all of us, told through the secrets we hide from others and ourselves,” he said.

It’s that narrative, I think, intertwined with the art (and some of it is so fantastic, created by people who don’t belong to the cultural/artistic elite of galleries and museums), that draws me in. Many aren’t just secrets in the traditional sense of the word, but they are also ambitions…longings…past memories…jokes. Some have brought me to tears, some are just kind of gross (Warren says in this amazing interview that the most common secret he gets is “I pee in the shower,” thanks for sharing people), others make you laugh. Some are just so mysterious. There’s one on my desk right now that shows the white stone statue of a lion and simply says, “sometimes…I miss God.” Or another, on a close-up of a girl’s brown eye and another’s blue, “I’ve been trying to be you for so long that I forgot what it’s like to be me.” Not surprisingly, it’s the sad ones that grip me. Why is that a secret? I want to ask of the person who misses God. What happened to you that made this feel so heavy you couldn’t share it with friends? Why is it our first instinct to hold in pain? Frank said he gets like one light, happy secret for every heavy one.

The Tribune is asking people to make their own postcards and send them to me (101 North 4th Street) for a story I’m writing for Nov. 9. I hope I get a lot. I hope I feel more connected to and broken for the people in this community; I hope when I walk down Broadway I start looking into others’ eyes and wonder about them, instead of window shopping or sidestepping the ones who slow me down.

Top 10 of the Blog 2008 (7)

"Why I Am A Christian (3)" - October 14, 2008


If I were to make a list of reasons I am a Christian this one would have to be on the list also: it makes sense of life.

I met a guy in an airport once who was explaining to me his perspective on life. He was saying that it didn't matter what anyone believes about the universe because when we die we will find that all roads lead to the same place. It is like we are all climbing a mountain though it may look like we are all on different paths in life, one day we will meet at the peak and realize that every path was leading here all along. He seemed to be saying that no matter what our preconceptions of the universe is, the reality is such that it conforms to them all. I understand - I think - why that model of things makes sense, but I think the reality of the universe is different. The guy in the airport was saying that reality is elastic - it stretches so that no one's conception of reality is actually wrong. I want to say that the universe doesn't stretch - it is what it is. The reality of things is objective - it is one way and only one way. Think of it like a lock that only fits one key.

If that is true, then every worldview is a key that either fits the lock of the universe or it does not. In fact, every day each one of us is making our lives in to a key of a certain shape, as though we were betting without knowing it, that this is the shape of key that fits the lock. I am a Christian because I think that the gospel-shaped worldview is the key that fits the lock.

I believe this because of two things that have to be true of whatever the real key is:

1. The life lived according to the worldview that fits will not necessarily be perfect, but will be spared the friction that comes from living as though the universe is something it is not.
2. It makes sense of every inch of life.

I think Christianity satisfies both of these.

1. If the gospel is the key that fits the lock then the things that the gospel calls sin should really lead to destruction and pain, and things that the gospel calls righteousness should really lead to human flourishing. Morality is more than simply a list of do's and don'ts. Righteousness is a smooth click of the key in the lock. Sin is the painful grinding of trying to live a life against the grain.

Take the example of marriage. If the gospel is true then the list of things that it takes to have a good marriage should match the list of things people slowly become when they believe the gospel more and more. Or, to put it another way, as the gospel grows in a person and they become more patient, kind, joyful, honest, caring and compassionate, having a selfless, sacrificial love - more Christlike, they are growing the exact qualities that it will take to have a healthy marriage. If human relationships and morality are both part of the fabric of life then the worldview that fits the way life really is should create human relationships that flourish.

2. The Christian worldview makes sense of life. The Christian story is that everything was created good, it fell and was broken, and it is being made good again. This allows for us to take every new thing and know something about where it came from and where it is going. Take sex for example. Sex is something that was created good - it has a purpose and a place and that purpose is a glorious one. That is not the state we find sex in today. The gospel says that there is something wrong with our appetite for sex, as C. S. Lewis writes, "You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act - that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theater by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let the every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop of a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?" The gospel does not leave the issue there, however. It tells the story of sex redeemed, sex made right again, free of its abuses and the pain that comes of them.

That is just one example, but the Christians story makes sense of every area of life. The gospel-shaped worldview is a framework which contains every aspect of the human experience - it is comprehensive. There is a place in the framework for suffering, for happiness, for laughter and friendship, for love and heartbreak, for work, for politics, for every inch of life. It weaves them all together in a whole and makes a tapestry of them. Again, as C. S. Lewis said, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." There is a place for everything in the story; it is the light by which all of life is made visible and understandable.

Top 10 of the Blog 2008 (6)

"Art Every Wednesday (16)" - August 27, 2008


For this week's Art Wednesday I wanted to look at some pieces of art the advertising world is putting out. Looking at advertising as art is in one sense similar as viewing any other piece of art - it has a message, it is an outpouring of human creativity, it is often aesthetically pleasing (or the opposite for a purpose), they have a world view implicitly stated in them that can be read - but on the other hand it is different. Ads, like these from Visa, would not exist if they were not trying to sell something, which casts the questions "What is art?" and "What is the purpose of art?" in a new light. Is all art trying to sell something? Does an "agenda" stop it from being art?

Those questions aside, there is value in this week's subject because they are cultural texts, which can be read like any other text and held up to the light to see what they are really saying. Spend some time with these images ask what the message of the ad is, what it is saying about life, about happiness, about success, what is held up as the ideal in this worldview, what is held up as taboo? I've put a couple thoughts below each ad as fodder for thinking.

As you go, remember this: Americans are confronted with 7,000 ads a day. 7,000.























Never in sleep mode. The successful, worthwhile life is the busy life. The ideal life is one where you can surround yourself with electronic connection. It is interesting that this city is an island, which seems to be a true picture (intentionally or unintentionally) of what can be an unintended consequence of the kind of connection technology offers. Where are the human on this island? Where is the human contact? The touch? The laughter? The casual times?
























Identity is a paint by number and you are the artist. Physical appearance, especially that of women, is something to be tweaked and colored and perfected. Nature is no longer a problem, it is only a starting place. The only problem now is that there are "so many colors, so little time."
























Be in season always. It is taboo to be the one in the tree who doesn't fit the ever-changing seasons of fashion. It is worth it to stay ahead of the curve. Pay careful attention to the trends the wind blows in this season, because "this years colors might surprise you."























This might be the most exposing one. See the message about the satisfaction material goods can bring. One must ask what a family is to do if Santa doesn't bring gadgets down the chimney? Is there a a reliable way to happiness? Should we expect to attain a lasting happiness if we get better toys and our snowmen wear suits? What if those things don't deliver? Is the prescription more of the same?

Top 10 of the Blog 2008 (5)

"L'abri: There and Back Again" - Febuary 17,2008

A weekend full of lectures at the L'abri conference in Rochester, Minnesota is now over and I am going to try and put some contents from my notes (and hopefully the notes of the others who came to the conference... too many lectures and too little time for one person to get it all) on this blog. Stay tuned in the coming days/weeks for more content from the lectures and workshops. For this post I want to say something about L'abri generally. I was reminded this weekend of so many things I love about L'abri, its theology, and style of living the Christian life. Each of these deserves much longer treatment, but just to be brief, here they are:

What I like about L'abri:

1. Insistence the reality of God in the life of the Christian: God's truth is not relegated to simply a "spiritual" realm that has no contact with our daily lives. The gospel has implications for all of life, and if it is true it we should live in that reality as much as we are able. An example of how this works itself out at L'abri is in their prayer life. L'abri does not advertise, seek out workers, actively call people to come, or ask broadcast their need for financial support. They worship a God who knows their needs, who has purposes for L'abri in the lives of certain students, and who cares about all his creations deeply. This is not just an intellectual idea at L'abri; it is something they try to work into the fabric of their everyday lives and operations.

2. Common grace: This was the theme of the conference this year and something I am so thankful to God for his use of L'abri to speak clearly of God's common grace. L'abri insists that ALL people are made in the image of God and retains traces of their former glory, no matter how obscured those traces might be. Nothing is too twisted to be saved. God's mark on his creations is indelible. As Francis Schaeffer said, "We are glorious ruins."

3. Listening and respect: L'abri tries very hard to listen to every question and treat each person who brings comes to them with the utmost respect. This is not a groundless practice. It is founded on the belief in God's common grace. If God has lavished such love on his rebellious creations, how could we fail to treat one another with dignity in the light of that love? Schaeffer said that if he had one hour talking with a person he would spend 50 minutes of that hour listening and asking questions to be sure that he could give the answers that the person really needs before they parted.

4. Worldview: L'abri insists that everyone has a worldview. There is no "neutral" way to live in this world. Everyone beliefs about the nature of the world, the nature of God, right and wrong, what has worth in this life, etc. This understanding of the way that people are allows L'abri to have a unusually perceptive view of the mysteries of the actions from something so large as western culture to something as small as an individual student who comes to any L'abri branch. This vision allows L'abri to do what Luther said and "preach the gospel in precisely the area that it is under attack" to both people and institutions.

5. Art: Hans Rookmaaker said, "Art needs no justification." Francis Schaeffer wrote and thought deeply about art its power and that focus has stayed with L'abri ever since. L'abri values art for its ability to reveal the soul of a culture and its ability to display the glory of God in the talents of God's creations.

6. No sacred/secular split: L'abri has always spoken against the idea that there is a line between some things in life which are "sacred" (church, prayer, bible reading, evangelism) and things that are "secular" (the rest of the world). There is a line, but it runs between every single thing, not a group of things. There is both lightness and darkness in every area of life and the call of the church is to play a role in the flourishing of the light wherever it finds itself.

7. Hospitality: This is yet another things I find so attractive about L'abri that has its roots it common grace. L'abri places a high value on making people feel welcome, and inviting them directly into the midst of real life. It is a powerful witness to Christian truth when non-believers see the gospel prpfoundly affecting the daily lives of Christians.

8. Flow of History: L'abri insists that a person must understand how he came to be where he is before he can really understand where he is at all. An eye toward history is all over the writings of Schaeffer, and L'abri students and workers carry that work forward into our present day.

Top 10 of the Blog 2008 (4)

Review of "The Shack" - August 18,2008


Here is a review of the incredibly popular book "The Shack" written by two of the staff at the Crossing. The book is a wonderful book to read/discuss... with great ideas/themes as well as things that Christians should be discerning about.


For the pdf, click here:
The Shack Reviewed

Top 10 of the Blog 2008 (3)

"Adventures In Rest" - August 5, 2008

In her article, “Bring back the Sabbath,” Judith Shulevitz speaks of the “eternal inner murmur of self-reproach.” When I came across the phrase it struck me as an elegant and insightful way to speak of the voice I often hear within myself that tells me to doubt my own worth unless I can pay for my own way. It is an anxiety that makes it feel like the question of whether or not my life is justified is never concluded. When driven by that inner murmur work is only a means to prove that I am not a bum, and rest is only exhaustion. It calls to be satisfied, but it will never quit – not ever – through satisfying it. If the murmur ever ends, it is through stilling it at the root. It requires a quiet of soul in which activity can cease because all the work that needed to be done is already completed. This is exactly the kind of quiet the gospel leads us into.
At the outset, however, entering that quiet feels like dying. It feels like putting our very worth at stake because worth so often hangs on work and activity. But if we console ourselves with productivity when that death knocks on our door we will flee something that could be a teacher.
The bottom line is this: to be driven by that murmur of self-reproach flies in the face of a basic truth of the gospel - I don’t mean basic in the sense of elementary, but basic in the sense that if you do not understand it you may not truly understand the gospel or what it really means for how life has to change - that is, you cannot save yourself. At the heart of the gospel lies the staggering idea that all the work that ever needed to be done has been done. If this is true, then all the work we do is free to just become work again, not currency with which we try to buy our worth. And rest just becomes rest, not a sign of weakness, but a sign of humanness and that is a good thing. Ceasing ceases to feel like death but becomes an act of obedience, a discipline of faithfulness for hearts driven mad by the gospel of work.
The gospel of work goes against the grain of our humanness. As Edith Schaeffer said, “It is not a sin to be limited.” The gospel of work goes against the fabric of the universe. God is the one who feed the birds and clothes the flowers and makes his people worthy and righteous and his work stands. And it forgets that our happiness lies in our simply being creatures before the Creator – not in getting as far ahead in the game as possible, not in making ourselves shiny and worthy alone, not in climbing the mountain of human potential - but in resting in Christ, for that rest is the very peak of the mountain of humanness. That is where the inner murmur ceases and all our love and joy can rise, for that is the place we were made for. When Christ said, “It is finished” it was. The rest is polish. The deep work is done and cannot be added to and cannot be taken away from.

"The mind that comes to rest is tended
In ways it cannot intend
Is borne, preserved, and comprehended,
By what it cannot comprehend.

Your Sabbath, Lord, thus keeps us by
Your will, not ours. And it is fit
Our only choice should be to die
Into that rest, or out of it."
-Wendell Berry

Top 10 of the Blog 2008 (2)

Why We Must Think Rightly About God (1) - June 12, 2008

This morning I was re-reading a wonderful chapter from A. W. Tozer’s book, Knowledge of the Holy, and wanted to post some quotes from the chapter as well as thoughts about them.

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us… That our idea of God correspond as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us.” (p. 1,2)
Tozer makes a connection that is rapidly dissolving in the minds of some Church people today; the connection between theology and life. This connection is a sword with two edges, cutting in the direction of two errors we make in our thinking about theology. On the one hand is the danger of thinking that head knowledge is the whole of the Christian life, without that knowledge ever really “becoming true” of us. Tozer undercuts that mistake by insisting that the nature of our picture of God is such that it has a direct and immediate call on our actions/values/thoughts in our actual day-to-day lives. If the connection isn’t flowing that direction it is possible that you haven’t actually begun to worship the real God; it is the most important thing because an encounter with the real God does not leave us the same as it found us. Tozer speaks to the opposite error as well. If you listen, you'll hear both errors in the air today, but this one seems to gaining popularity. It is the idea that theology is esoteric. We must preserve the idea that theology means not less than simply “what we think about God”. The Christian life is like finding pieces of the picture of God and putting them in their right places, like a mosaic. Tozer is saying that this mosaic – what it holds and what it does not hold – is life and death. Everything flows out of that mosaic (and not just in some “spiritual” realm of life, but in all of life). If those are the stakes, then every piece matters. There is a not a category for “accessories” when it comes to theology. Everything matters.

“We tend by a secret law of the heart to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the Church. Always the most revealing things about the Church is her idea of God, just as her most significant message is what she says about him or leaves unsaid, for her silence is often more eloquent that her speech. She can never escape the self-disclosure of her witness concerning God.” (p. 1) Christians, as a body of the Church and as individuals, are continually bearing witness, both intentionally and accidentally. It cannot be stopped. This is a very comforting thing and a very challenging thing. It is comforting because it seems, at least for me, to take weight off of the enormity of the calling before the Church, as it shifts the focus from “go and DO” to simply go and BE”. If the Church is there is cannot hide its witness; it just needs to be what God made it to be, to love God, worship him with its life, to enjoy him, to love and care for what he has made. This being speaks with a loud voice, often louder than any words. But if Tozer eases the burden in one place he underscores its weight in another. He says the Church is responsible not only for what it is, but what it is not. The task before the Church is to love what God loves as a reflection of his character, and what the Church fails to be, it proclaims that God also is not. That’s a sobering reality, and what human community is equal to the task of embodying an infinite, holy God? But that is the calling nonetheless, and that is the lens we should examine ourselves with.

Top 10 of the Blog 2008 (1)

"Thoughts on Jamaica and Home" - April 1, 2008

I just spent a week in Harmons, Jamaica building houses, hauling piles of rock up hills, getting to know Jamaicans and the American who were with me. T. S. Eliot was right when he said, "...the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." I have felt that effect a bit since coming home. It's ironic to learn about America by learning about Jamaica, but that's the way it goes. So I wanted to put some thoughts down about Jamaica, America, and an incredible week.

• On the flight down I sat next to a man named Ken who told me that he is away from his family traveling 40 weeks out of the year. I looked out the window and was astounded at the beauty of the earth from above and I asked him if in flying so much seeing that beauty ever got old. He leaned over me and looked out the window and said, "Yeah, I've seen more beautiful things than that," then he paused and added, "but it's all beautiful if you can learn to see it right." If there was a theme of my time in Jamaica it was this. We were surrounded by Jamaica's tropical beauty staring at us out of every window. I saw beauty in the Jamaicans, in the hospitality they extended to us, in the work we did together, in the wonderful sense of community they share. I saw beauty in an infirmary we traveled to one day. This place was described to us as "the worst nursing home in the states multiplied by 1,000". When we arrived people were half-clothed, laying about in their own mess, barely able to pull themselves upright, see, move, or speak. We 24 Americans began to wander around the Infirmary and people would call us aside and pull us near them and asked to be read to. I could not help thinking that beyond the mess my eyes can see on the outside of this person is a human being and then I tried to offer them the simple grace of human touch, or a smile, or a listening ear.

• One road runs through the valley of Harmons. All the houses are strung up the hillside with paths leading back to the road. Walking down the road you see Jamaicans standing on the side of the road or walking down along it. Driving down the road you hear all the drivers honking at each other, not because they are angry, but to say hello because they know each others names. If you have extra seats, pick someone up and give them a ride a bit further down the road. I couldn't help compare the topography of the culture of the village with our culture. Harmons is literally a valley, but it is also a valley culturally, with all the people tending downhill towards one another, sharing common space and common lives. Whereas walking around campus you see half the people with little white wires sticking out of their ears or cell phones in front of their faces and their own private smiles on. I wonder if we are losing our common world in ways that are not good for our souls. If Harmons is a valley, American culture is a sphere, with every individual facing the danger of sliding away from every other individual if they are not careful. A large degree of shared life is a common starting place for culture in Harmons, but here we have to fight for it. When we come into a circle of people or a place where this is not the case, where people have made some change and are living life along different lines than the sphere it is an oases and an exception. But surely the gospel calls us to live a different way than the trend of our culture. The gospel leans us toward one another, binds us together and makes us a people radically for one another. Yet it is so easy to simply pick up our feet and let the current carry us somewhere else, and this should make us wary.

• Happiness is about being filled, but joy involves emptiness. There were moments of joy in Jamaica, but it was mixed in with some small pinch of sorrow. Sometimes it came in the form of a longing for home, for food, or for rest after a long, tiring day. Whatever it was the joy came in the context of weariness, loneliness, or pain and in those moments the small, simple graces the God gives were big enough to be enough. This is different from the happiness I pursue at home. At home I have enough control over my life to chase down and eliminate pain and loneliness and boredom and longing at the first sign of them. The cup stays full, but I think I might be missing something in it never being empty. Perhaps this is what St. Francis of Assisi meant when he said, "God is always trying to give us good things, only our hands are too full to receive them." I met a man named Peter who was barely able to raise himself from his bed. His arms and legs don't work. He sat out side and someone had put a tarp up in front of him to block the sun from the little spot he sat all day long. Other than that, there were few of the comforts that inundate my life. When he saw me walking toward him he started to laugh and smile and make small sounds of happiness, showing all the joy that his body would let him show. I sat down next to him and he stretched out his hand. It meant so much to him to have me simply touch him. He motioned to the Bible in my hand and worked to get the words Psalms 23 out of his broken mouth. As I flipped through the Bible and read it to him the promises asleep on its pages woke up and chimed. I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. In my Fathers house there are many rooms, I go to prepare a place for you. None who wait on the Lord will be put to shame. His sounds of joy punctuated every verse...

Top 10 of the Blog 2008

The blogosphere is a relentless taskmaster, so I am taking a page out of every other bloggers book and taking some time off for the holiday season. Over the next ten days, as we enjoy celebrating the birth of Christ, seeing family, and hopefully, rest I will be putting up the top ten posts (in no particular order) of the blog from 2008. So eat some turkey, tell your family you love them, give good gifts, and the top ten will be here when you need it. In all seriousness, one of the downfalls of blogging is that you never step in the same river twice, so to speak. Thoughts are thrown out there and then carried downstream to be replaced by new things. It is a good practice to pause, look back, and see if there is anything worth remembering. Until 2009, we wish you a merry Christmas...

Everything I think about Heaven I got from C. S. Lewis (3)

"It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply bout that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, of burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken… Next to the blessed sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” – from The Weight Of Glory

One thing I love about Lewis’s writings about heaven is that he tries to reach out and imagine heaven in words, but what he writes does not serve to limit our idea of heaven as a fence gives shape to a field but also gives it boundaries. He stretches our imaginations toward something that is ultimately unimaginable. In this quote he is removing the ceiling from our expectations of what our neighbors glory will be like.

In order to tell the story of the gospel you have to tell the part of the story that says that we are fallen. Lewis is reminding us that that was not our origin and is not our destination. Sin is the stain on your neighbor’s clothing, it is not the skin beneath. Your neighbor fell from a great height into this present darkness and it is easy to mistake what you see when you look at him or her for something far lesser than he or she truly is. In Heaven that will not be the case. Each person is made in the image of the Maker and in Heaven that image will shine out free and clear of the sin which clouded it. Yes, we are sinners, but we were glorious before that. We were made good and right and God will make us that way again. That heritage and destiny is the most true thing about the universe and every saved person in it.That destiny should be a burden, Lewis says, that we cannot reflect on too much. We live among kings and queens.

What a paradigm shift that is. Here something true of Heaven reaches backward into this present time and changes it. If this is true then we cannot live the same way. The person across from you, Lewis says elsewhere, could one day be something that, if you were to see it now, you would be tempted to worship it. The same is true of the car in front of you in traffic. Your children. Your parents. Britney Spears. The grade school bully. Everyone. Your neighbor is the holiest object now presented to your senses.

Art Every Wednesday (32)

Mankind's science is continually giving us deeper glimpses into the universe, where the Creator's art and beauty is on display. As David said,

Psalm 19
The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
2 Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
3 There is no speech, nor are there words,
whose voice is not heard.

I was recently impressed by this watching George Smoot talking about the design of the universe: its incredible vastness and beauty. This lecture is worth watching.



Images from the Hubble telescope:

G. K. Chesterton

If you have never read any G. K. Chesterton I recommend two books: Orthodoxy, and St. Francis of Assisi. Chesterton writes incredible insights into the life. He takes a while to get there sometimes, but when he does it is worth the journey. Here is an excerpt from St. Francis of Assisi which is as good an example as any of why I love him and he is worth reading:

"If a man saw the world upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging
head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasise the idea of
dependence. There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word
dependence only means hanging. It would make vivid the Scriptural text
which says that God has hung the world upon nothing. If St. Francis had
seen, in one of his strange dreams, the town of Assisi upside down, it need
not have differed in a single detainl from itself except in being entirely
the other way round. But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye
the large masonry of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers
and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment
it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and
more in peril...St Francis might love his little town as much as before, or
more than before; but the nature of the love would be altered even in being
increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep roofs or every
bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a new and divine light
of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being merely proud of his
strong city because it could not be moved, he would be thankful to God
Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be thankful to God for not
dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to be shattered into falling
stars. Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so, when he was crucified
head-downwards.:

Then later:
"He who has seen the whole world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God has
seen the truth; we might almost say the cold truth. He who has seen the
vision of his city upside down has seen it the right way up."

Art Every Wednesday (31)

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison have created a sad, poignant, insightful, mysterious, and odd series of photographs called The Architect's Brother. Many of the pieces of the series are set against an apocalyptic bacground - a blasted earth - in which the "Everyman", a plain-looking man in a suit, performs some act of healing or restoration. I had the chance to see an exhibit of their work last week in the Nelson Adkins Museum in Kansas City and it was without a doubt my favorite thing I saw that day.

The themes of the work come through in the actions of the Everyman. He often is shown atop a contraption that is somehow bringing healing and life to the earth, as in Restoration, or he is using his body and blood to fertilize the soil, as in The Exchange, or he is listening to the stories of trees, or teaching birds how to fly, or mourning an earth laid waste with waste. Here are some others:





Making Rain























The Sower























Turning the Spring























The Clearing























Passage



















Mending the Earth




















The Visitation




















The Waiting























Night Garden


















The Sacrifice

Everything I think about Heaven I got from C. S. Lewis (2)

“Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity that is to be saved, but you – you, the individual reader… blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold him, your eyes and not another’s. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have his way, to utter satisfaction… Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it.” – CSL. The Problem of Pain.

The Christian worldview gives an origin to identity and personality: we are God’s workmanship and our destiny is to become more who God made us to be, not less. Heaven is a flowering of the personality and identity of every individual, not the erasing of it. We do not join a “sea of being” like a drop joining the ocean when we die as if the “curious shape of your soul” were an accident of life on earth. God made you who you are on purpose. In Heaven all people will bring in their own unique glories and it will result in a symphony, all of it in harmony with the glory of God.

At the core of your identity lies one truth that eclipses everything else that may be true of you: you are a bearer of the image of God. This means that the essence of who you are, your “you-ness,” is good, and all good things cross the barrier of death and remain forever. The thing that makes this idea hard to understand on earth is because we are not yet what we were made to be. As C. S. Lewis elsewhere says, real life has not yet begun. You identity on earth is mixed up with the marring of sin. We see now as in “a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now we know in part, but then we shall know fully, even as we are fully known.” We are ourselves as yet “dim mirrors,” but in God made each of us to reflect him brightly in a unique way. If this is true then the goal is not to become more uniform, but to reflect him in the specific ways that our infinitely creative creator made us to reflect him. Part of the glory of heaven will be that all things that he made reflect God’s image in the same way that facets on a jewel do, with each individual adding to the glory of Heaven precisely because we are cut at different angles.

Goodness, as it grows, becomes more individual – more particular. It is evil that loses its particularity. When you destroy something it becomes rubble, but when you build something it can become unique, and that is exactly the promise of heaven, that the unique goodness that is you will blossom newly for eternity when all of you – sins apart – finds the “particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance” that was made for you and for which you were made.

The Bible: 66 Books, 1 Story

"One doesn’t need to read the Scriptures very long before noticing that the various authors often quote, refer to, or allude to things previously recorded by other writers. Begin tracing all these cross-references, and you’ll need a large notebook to keep track of them all. Or, allow Chris Harrison, a student at Carnegie Mellon University and Christoph Römhild of the North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hamburg, Germany, to compile a list and allow a computer to graph the result. They call the result, “Visualizing the Bible.” The bars on the bottom axis represent the chapters of the Bible, each bar length corresponding to the number of verses in each chapter. The colored arcs trace the myriad cross-references. “It almost looks,” Harrison commented, “like one monolithic volume.”"
-Quoted from A Glass Darkly

So Many people are intimidated by the Bible because they don't know where to begin, but it is not as complicated as it's thickness makes it look. I suggest starting with the idea that the Bible is essentially one story. It 66 books telling the story of Jesus - the story of how God made the world, pursued it when it fell and the good creation he made was twisted, redeemed it through his son, and will one day make it new again. The climax comes about 3/4 of the way through when Jesus says, "It is finished," but throughout the Bible are foreshadowings, promises, hints, and whispers of the cross and the person of Christ. It is in the prophet's prophecies, it is in the promises of the psalms, it is in the laws of Leviticus, it is in the exodus in Exodus, it is in the stories in Genesis. It is in the lamb's blood on top of the doorposts of the Israelites in Egypt and in Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacrifice up the mountain where his father will sacrifice him. It is in David's victory over Goliath, a victory the Israelites could not win for themselves, so their future king stepped in and won for them. It is in Jonah in the belly of the fish for three days nad three nights, realizing that "salvation is from the Lord." Christ is everywhere.

For more about Christ throughout the Bible read Sinclair Ferguson's short writing, Preaching Christ in the Old Testament.

Art Every Wednesday (30)

Look at this very interesting video from Death Cab for Cutie's song Someday You Will Be Loved:

The video, other than being a lot of fun visually, has a deep meaning. It is a song about relationships, but more than that it is a song about the staggering hurts that the heart can sustain in this life and the mysterious process of healing. One wonders, watching it, how the heart can survive it all, but somehow it does.

It is an illustration of one of the things I love about art: an artists creates something that is rich with meaning and everyone finds something of their own in it. A wise man once said that the best art is always changing. The best art is big enough to contain a lot of life and a lot of truth, and when you hold that up to the shimmering background of our ever-changing lives different places shine through and different places resonate. Great art has the power to meet everyone where they are - it is vast. I am not saying history will remember this little video as something great, only that it is big enough for everyone to find something in it, and true enough to life that they will.