And so far, I’ve been able to persist.  It’s been hard, but for the sake of the call we’ve endured.  We’ve persevered and pressed on despite difficulty.  But now I think things may be going too far.  Satan has taken over my iPhone:

(It did this after taking it to the Genius Bar and doing a software reset restoring system defaults. Before the software restore, it would go into my phone and call people listed in my favorites list.   They suggested the display is broken.)

For those of you who know how much I love Apple products, and in particular, my iPhone, you know how big a deal this is.  You know that ministry just might not be worth doing if the cost is losing my iPhone.

I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do.  I can receive calls, because when I answer my phone and put it to my ear the display is disabled.  But it’s really hard to place calls.  I’ll probably use Google voice to make calls for a while and replace my phone later.  Until then, I’ll daily be reminded of the cost of carrying my cross for Christ.

The church that Mary and I are a part of wants to be a place that takes the call to be the hands and feet of Jesus seriously.   We want to be a community that makes a difference in the world.  That’s why we’re partnering with One Day’s Wages to try and raise money for the flood victims in Pakistan.  Here’s a blurb from the ODW website:

This natural disaster is affecting nearly 20 million people – more than the Haiti Earthquake AND 2004 Asia Tsunami combined,many aid organizations are estimating. This is due largely to the loss of infrastructure: homes, businesses, crops, health and education services, that will take years to rebuild.

Unfortunately, there has been relatively little response to this crisis by the international community, when compared to other large natural disasters. The lack of response to the crisis is affecting flood victims, as many aid organizations are struggling with lack of funds to respond to the disaster.

For this reason, ODW has chosen to partner with two organizations -KASHF and World Vision. Both these organizations already have a very substantive presence in Pakistan and are currently engaged in the relief efforts. All donations through ODW’s Pakistan Flood Relief Fund will be evenly distributed between these two organizations.

If you’d like to join the New City community in contributing to the Pakistan fund, whatever the amount, you can do so here:

http://www.onedayswages.org/donate/org/new-city-covenant-church

We’d also appreciate it if you could share the link on facebook or twitter.  Thanks!

Abraham Lincoln is a legend.  He is known for being a wise, steadfast, and visionary leader who moved the United States through the Civil War and out of slavery.  But that is certainly not how he was known during his lifetime.  He was perceived by many as waffling, inexperienced, and a failure.

Lincoln faced repeated setbacks and discouragement.  He was dirt poor growing up and at times he had to forego even the most basic comforts.  He struggled to succeed in business early on, and then lost election after election in politics.  He lost more elections than he won before he became President, and he was largely unknown and unproven as a national politician.

He also made a lot of mistakes.  He was less of a visionary leader who pushed the country ahead into new territory and more of a reactor to the circumstances that were thrust upon him.  The Civil War happened to him.  It was a forgone conclusion before he was sworn into office.  The decision to free the slaves was an arduous and difficult one for him ultimately driven by a desire to recruit more men for battle than out of philosophical or visionary zeal.  His plan for solving the slavery problem was to colonize slaves in Central America.  He did not believe slaves were intellectually, morally, or culturally equal to their white masters.  He was a flawed president who was trying to do the best he could.  As Lincoln himself commented, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”  But isn’t that true of you and me too?

No one wins every battle and we all make lots of mistakes. The difference between Lincoln and most of us is that we give up.  What Abe had, and what we all need, was perseverance and integrity.  When life gets hard, really hard, we are tempted to give up or compromise our character to get ahead or get out of our struggle.  We quit on jobs, relationships, and God if things don’t go well for us.  We give up playing by the rules and rationalize cheating because we’ve got it hard.

Lincoln is remembered as a hero of American politics because he never compromised and he never gave up. He isn’t remembered for knowing everything or always doing things right.  He is remembered for being honest.  He is remembered for persevering and leading the country through tremendous hardship.  He is remembered as a legend because of how he responded to pain not because he avoided it.

We do not get to choose what difficulties befall us, but we can choose how we respond. We can choose to take shortcuts out of our difficulties by giving up or compromising our character, or we can persevere and become legends.  One doesn’t become great because life is easy and things go well.  We become great when we respond well to resistance and persevere through our problems.  If we avoid hardships, we miss out on our opportunity for greatness.  Maybe that’s why Merton said,

“Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”

What if God actually helped us?  What if, in our moment of pain, we could pray and our pain would go away?  What if, when we suffered, we could ask God for help and our suffering would actually cease?  That’d be nice.  It would be nice if knowing Christ meant saying goodbye to pain.   But since it doesn’t, I’m glad that Christ suffered.

As Jesus was nailed to a cross, God didn’t help him either.  He abandoned him.  And for some reason, that’s “Good News.”  Jurgen Moltmann attempts to explain why:

“suffering is overcome by suffering, and wounds are healed by wounds.  For the suffering in suffering is the lack of love, and the wounds in wounds are the abandonment, and the powerlessness in pain is unbelief.  And therefore the suffering of abandonment is overcome by the suffering of love, which is not afraid of what is sick and ugly, but accepts it and takes it to itself in order to heal it.  Through his own abandonment by God, the crucified Christ brings God to those who are abandoned by God.  Through his suffering he brings salvation to those who suffer.  Through his death he brings eternal life to those who are dying.  And therefore the tempted, rejected, suffering and dying Christ came to be the centre of the religion of the oppressed and the piety of the lost.”

Because Jesus’ bore the full weight of suffering that is the human condition, we can reinterpret our encounters with pain.  Rejection is a reality for the most godly among us.  Temptation is to be expected.  Pain cannot be avoided.  Christianity does not promise us freedom from the life we loathe.

But in all of these painful experiences, we find hope of God with us.  If God was revealing himself to us in the life of Jesus as he experienced suffering, then we have hope that God is right in the midst of these very same experiences with us.  For you and I, we too can become god-like not in our triumphalistic avoidance of suffering, but in our sympathy with the pitiful life of Christ.

If Christ’s life had been one devoid of suffering, then he would be of little help to me.  If he had gone from victory to victory, then I would only be left feeling like I was doing something wrong.  When I feel rejected by others, when I suffer under the weight of temptation, or I feel the pain of physical limitations, I would have felt distant from God and rejected by him in my suffering.  If Christ had not suffered, pain would put me outside the presence of God.

Thank goodness that’s not the story of Jesus.  Thank goodness the story of Christ is one of rejection and suffering.  Thank goodness that God is near to the broken-hearted of the world.

God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross.  He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.  Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering .. Only the suffering God can help … That is a reversal of what the religious man expects from God.  Man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world. ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Only a suffering God can help.”  Considering the condition we find ourselves in, only a suffering God can help.  In the crucifixion of God in Christ, I find God in the pain of my own crucifixion experiences.  Thank God, Jesus suffered.  It is only by his suffering that I can find hope in the midst of my own.  I am accepted and loved by God despite feeling God-forsaken.

The Rolling Stones sang the song, "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Image from flickr.

Life’s hard isn’t it?  At some point we’ve all had to come to terms with the fact that we aren’t going to get what we want.  The thing that we won’t get can be as mundane as a new camera or as meaningful as a new job, a spouse, or a child.  Sometimes, even with the most important things, we have to face the reality that we can’t always get what we want.

What I’ve found is that in these moments of dealing with our inability to get that which we want, something profound can happen.  We are forced to let go of the hopes and dreams we had surrounding this thing and figure out if we can keep living without it.  Usually that process draws us much closer to God.

This happened to me about five years ago.  I was working at a church in Boston, but I knew that it would soon be time to move on.  As I prepared to leave the job I had, I was eagerly awaiting news about another job that seemed a near certainty.  Then after I left the job in Boston, the job I expected to get fell through and I was left in the lurch.  I had miss timed my jump into this new ministry, and I was left without a job.

As this unfolded, my anxiety level escalated.  When I heard they didn’t want to hire me, I felt like a nobody, a loser.  I felt like I was without an identity.  The pain I felt at not having a job exposed just how much of my sense of self-worth and value was based on having a job in ministry.  I had to come face-to-face with the reality that I didn’t get what I wanted.

But in not getting what I wanted, I got something much better.  Because I didn’t have a ministry job for more than a year, I had to deal with my false sense of worth that was rooted in having a ministry job.  I had to deal with my false sense of identity that was tightly inter-woven with my vocation.  I had to deal with what equaled idol-worship of my vocation in ministry.

Not getting what I wanted was the best gift I could have gotten.  It forced me to deal with my issues.  I felt like I would cease to exist without this job.  Then, when I didn’t get it, and low and behold I continued to exist.  I was still a husband, a father, a son, and a child of God.  I remained a valuable human being created in the image of God and passionately loved by him.

Sometimes God’s gift to us is received in the void of the thing we most wanted.  The loss of these things can be tremendously painful — as it was for me — but through its absence we can learn to find our identity in God’s love for us not our possession of titles or things.  Now that I am in ministry I’m thankful for this lesson.  I can engage in ministry without needing it to validate my ego.  I can give to my church and those in it without that unhealthy co-dependency that happens when a pastor has his identity rooted in the success of his mission.  In the midst of my pain and the feeling of deep loss, the reality was God was with me.  He was giving me something much better than a job.  He was giving me freedom from my worship of vocation.  He was giving me an identity that is defined by his unwavering love for me, regardless of where I work.

There’s often a lot of talk by Christians lamenting the non-religious nature of our government, but what I find ironic is that the early Christians faced criticism from the government lamenting that they weren’t religious!  The Roman Government repeatedly called Christians atheists and even killed them for it.  In fact, the first martyrdom recorded in Christian history outside the pages of the New Testament was due to just such a fact.  Polycarp, a devoted Christian was killed for not being religious 1,854 years ago from this upcoming Monday (scholars believe he was martyred on February 22, 156).

And when finally he was brought up, there was a great tumult on hearing that Polycarp had been arrested.  Therefore, when he was brought before him, the proconsul asked him if he were Polycarp.  And when he confessed that he was, he tried to persuade him to deny [the faith], saying, “Have respect to your age” — and other things that customarily follow this,  such as, “Swear by the fortune of Caesar; change your mind; say ‘Away with the atheists!’”

But Polycarp looked with earnest face at the whole crowd of lawless heathen in the arena, and motioned to them with his hand.  Then, groaning and looking up to heaven, he said, “Away with the atheists!”

But the proconsul was insistent and said: “Take the oath, and I shall release you.  Curse Christ.”

Polycarp said: “Eighty-six years I have served him, and he never did me any wrong.  How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

ed. Richardson, Early Christian Fathers pg. 152

To the Romans, Christians were atheists.  They didn’t participate in the religious practice of the Roman Empire.  They were often criticized, blamed and scapegoated for the maladies afflicting the Roman empire.  As Christianity spread and their numbers grew, more and more people reasoned that the gods were mad at the Romans and were punishing them for all these Christians who stopped being religious.  Significant writing takes place by early Christians trying to justify themselves as good citizens despite not participating in Roman religious practice.

I find it ironic that the tables have turned.  Now it’s the Christians who are in political office or positions of power that are the ones who are putting “atheists” on trial.  Our country’s problems are blamed on their faltering morality or their lax religious practice.  When natural disaster strikes, the economy tanks, an epidemic breaks out, or when they just need to rouse the troops for re-election these leaders are quick to blame all our woes on the “sinners” who are causing God’s curse on our country.

But that’s not how Christianity works.  God isn’t sitting in heaven waiting for a quota of religious participants to be met before he blesses a country.  He isn’t looking for sacrifices to pile up before extending his grace.  He isn’t looking for us to be good first before he can be gracious in response.  God’s favor and goodness don’t depend on our religious practice.  We can’t earn his grace.

A Christian’s engagement in religious practice is never done to earn God’s favor, it is always done in response to it.  God already loves us, and we engage in religious practice because we need constant reminders.  We engage in prayer, because we need to regularly refocus our vision of love for God’s world and for us.  We show up for a worship service on Sunday because we need to discipline ourselves to worship and give thanks even when we feel like complaining.  We engage in sacrificial service because without it we become so self-absorbed we’re libel to forget about the needs and concerns of those around us.  Religious practice helps us tap into God’s love for us and live out God’s love for others.

Like Polycarp, Christians should resist the notion that going to church and national blessing are yolked.  Like Polycarp, we should embrace the scorn of power-hungry leaders who use religion as political leverage and then call us atheists when we don’t subscribe to their agenda.  Knowing that Polycarp and the early church fathers were called atheists first makes me feel like I’m in good company.  Plus, Polycarp called them atheists right back.

Last night on my way back from Denver I had the privilege of sitting next to a cop.  This individual was working on a case aimed at arresting some people engaged in sex-trafficking.  She shared some stories, and she talked about the anger she feels when she hears the stories of abuse that these girls are subjected to.  It was sad to hear, but it was also a shocking reminder.  It’s all too easy to forget that slavery, human trafficking, and the sex industry are billion dollar industries that are often hidden from our sight.

Sex trafficking is easy to miss.  We think that it’s something that happens in other parts of the world.  It happens to other people in other countries — people who look different from us, or speak a different language than us.  But that simply isn’t true.  Women and children are stolen and sold into sexual slavery in the suburbs and cities in which we live and work.  The case she is working on is taking place right here in the US.   Here are some other simple facts about the slave trade from ijm’s site:

• Human trafficking is the world’s third largest criminal
enterprise, after drugs and weapons. (U.S. Department of State)
• Worldwide, there are nearly two million children in the
commercial sex trade. (UNICEF)
• There are an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 children, women
and men trafficked across international borders annually.
(U.S. Department of State)
• Approximately 80 percent of human trafficking victims are women
and girls, and up to 50 percent are minors. (U.S. Department of State)
• The total market value of illicit human trafficking is estimated to
be in excess of $32 billion. (U.N.)
• Sex trafficking is an engine of the global AIDS epidemic.
(U.S. Department of State)

As I talked with my new friend, I was struck by the kingdom nature of her work.  She said that she had been contacted by churches in the past who wanted to help.  They asked if they could do investigative work.  They wanted to go into dangerous areas and do stakeouts.  She begged them not to do that.  She didn’t want to get a phone call from them after they had gotten themselves caught in the middle of a shoot-out asking for help!  As we talked, it seemed clear to me that the church’s role is awareness so that we can fight against slavery at a systems level (advocating for better laws and funding to fight trafficking) and help with victim recovery — the church can come along side those who have suffered at the hands of sexual slavery and help them to find healing for their wounds.

The work that my friend is doing is really important, and only she can do it.  God is against slavery and the church is about God’s business, but we aren’t equipped to bust human trafficking rings.  Trained police officers who catch sex trafficking rings are doing God’s work.   They are executing justice against obvious oppressors of the weak and vulnerable.  Psalm 12 is one of the great psalms crying out for God to act on behalf of the vulnerable, particularly vulnerable children.  I pray this psalm for my new friend as she engages in God’s work of fighting against sexual slavery.  I pray that God would work through her to protect and save the weak and vulnerable caught in the sex trade.

“Help, LORD, for the godly are no more; the faithful have vanished from among men. Everyone lies to his neighbor; their flattering lips speak with deception.

May the LORD cut off all flattering lips and every boastful tongue that says, “We will triumph with our tongues; we own our lips—who is our master?”

“Because of the oppression of the weak and the groaning of the needy,

I will now arise,” says the LORD. “I will protect them from those who malign them.” And the words of the LORD are flawless, like silver refined in a furnace of clay, purified seven times.

O LORD, you will keep us safe and protect us from such people forever. The wicked freely strut about when what is vile is honored among men.”

(Psalms 12:1–8 NIV)

At breakfast one morning, a wife looks at her husband as he reads the financial page of the newspaper, just as he has done every morning for the past twenty years.  She longs to yank away the paper and tell him she is just as in love with him today as she was the day they were married.  But she isn’t sure it’s true.  She isn’t sure he loves her.  She isn’t even sure who he is anymore.  She stares at the back of the paper that covers his face and under her breath asks, “Where are you?”

A young executive drives home after a long day’s work.  Once again he’s running late.  He picks up the car phone to tell his wife that he’ll be a bit late for dinner but will get there as soon as he can.  His little girl answers the phone and asks plaintively, “Where are you, Daddy?”  Immediately he realizes that he’d forgotten all about her first piano recital that afternoon.  After he hangs up, he looks into the rearview mirror, disgusted with himself.  He can’t get the question out of his mind.  Where are you? He remembers how much it hurt when his own father missed his first Little League game.  This isn’t who he wants to be.  It isn’t who he used to be.  ”What happened?”  he wonders.  ”Where am I?”

A recently widowed woman goes to bed alone.  It is the worst part of the day.  She has drunk a bit too much wine, in the hope that it will help her pass out quickly.  But the grief is stronger than the alcohol, and the tears start to flow as soon as she lies down.  Her hand slides over to her husband’s pillow as she asks, “Where are you?”

Some of us are lost in lonely marriages, others in the blind pursuit of success and still others in their grief.  We struggle to find a way out, but the harder we try the more lost we become.  Sometimes we get so lost, we don’t even know where or who we are.  It would be good to have someone find us, to tell us it’s going to be okay.  It would be good to have hope.

Barnes, Yearning pg. 111-112

In the book, Yearning, Barnes is “making a motion that we face reality.”  He argues that we aren’t meant to be satisfied or whole.  As exemplified in the passage above, he writes about life with a refreshing honesty often missing in Christian authors.  He offers no platitudes and no easy spiritual solutions to our broken lives.  He even discourages us from focusing on becoming arguing instead for just being.  And yet he believes there is profound hope for us Christians.

The Bible provides one vignette after another of the grief-stricken God in search of the creatures he loves.  This great story of God’s search for humanity culminates in the arrival of Jesus as God in the flesh.  Jesus walks through ordinary streets and villages, looking for those who have lost their way.  It is the end of a journey that began with God’s first walk through the garden.  Jesus’ birth, teachings, miracles and death are all paraphrases of the Creator’s great question, “Where are you?” pg. 112

If God continues his search for us that he began in Eden, then salvation is being found by him.  But when we are found we shouldn’t expect to be rescued.  God’s salvation isn’t a rescue from this world or our problems but a promise of his presence with us.

We don’t usually think of salvation as having God with us  We would rather think of it as our being with God, and as being saved from how it is.  We would rather think of ‘the victorious Christian life.’  But in Jesus Christ God is revealed as the Savior-Immanuel, which means that salvation is not our ascent out of the hard, pain-filled, compromised conditions of this world.  Salvation is God’s descent down to the lost world that he loves. pg. 116

Salvation doesn’t mean we will no longer struggle with our broken self in a fallen world.  Therefore, he argues let’s be honest about it.  As a pastor he’s walked with people through some hard life circumstances.  He’s seen people battle illness, lose children to rebellion, and spouses abandon one another.  The church is supposed to be the place where people can go to be honest about their pain and then be received with grace, but too often it’s the last place people want to go when they have a problem.

Too often the church just promulgates a spiritualize version of the world’s favorite lie that if you just buy this product all your problems with go away.  The church begins to peddle the promises that if you’ll only come to our church, join a small group, go on this mission trip, pray this prayer, read your Bible, or pray so often,  then you will experience healing and be on your way to becoming whole.  For those of us who try these things and still feel deep dissatisfaction with life, we fear we’ve done something wrong.  We fear we are missing out on what everyone else has.  We worry, maybe I didn’t pray quite right or I didn’t ask for forgiveness for all my sins, or I didn’t…  This is a lie.  It’s a lie that prevents people from being honest with one another and experiencing grace.

I love this book.  In it I find the freedom to be honest about life.  Barnes beautifully articulates the tension between “being saved” and feeling forsaken.  I found myself wanting to read half the paragraphs to my wife.  You know a book is good when your wife starts to role her eyes when you tell her you want to read yet another passage to her!  I highly recommend this book.  It’s very easy to read, theologically accessible, and I imagine it will be encouraging to anyone who’s ever felt like they’ve failed at life.

As a counselor, I am struck again and again by the universal nature and influence of death and loss.  Everyone has or will lose someone they love.  It is only a matter of time.  While death is universally experienced by all, grief is processed so differently and individually.  But everyone has to answer the question, “How do I go on and how do I live?”  

I just finished Believe: A Young Widow’s Journey Through Brokeness and Back by Jennifer Silvera today with streaming tears of conviction and of sorrow. Conviction for how now to live and sorrow for this woman’s loss.  I am struck by how poignantly and clearly she captures the raw and  unending nature of grief and loss.  

Jennifer’s husband, Shawn Silvera, was killed at the age of 32 in 2005 in the line of duty in Lino Lakes, MN, leaving her with a two children under the age of 2.  She is about my age and yet writes with wisdom of one who has lived a long life.  I met her at a function last month (www.believenow.com) where she was the guest speaker. I was struck by her honesty, humility, and quiet strength even in the midst of still fresh sorrow.  I was intrigued.  I found out she had just published her story that month.  I bought the book to support her.  As I read her book, I was struck by how her book supported me.  I cannot imagine her pain and how she manages to rise each morning, leaning heavily into God’s presence and strength.  

A number of quotes from this book remain with me and serve as reminders of both the precious and fleeting nature of my life.  I don’t intend to be cohesive in thought or pithy in this blog, just a conduit of a powerful message.  If it makes you curious, you will have to get the book.  She writes:

•   ”I don’t want to settle for an unfulfilling life because I LACK THE COURAGE to go after the life I really wanted” (p. 216).
• “The best therapy for loss is to do something with the grief” (p.213).  (She writes this not as one who does not know grief but knows it so well that it consumes her daily and therefore must do something in order to not let death win twice.)
• “I feel closest to God when I am creating something new” (p. 213).  I resonate with this immensely.
• “It’s a lonely place to to be stuck in hate” (p 107).
• “Jennifer, our lives can become death or death can be one part of our lives. We choose.”  (a statement from another widow to the author, p. 110)
• One moment of many moments when she felt like she could no longer go on, she wrote this prayer: “God when I am immobile, be my movement.  You are my heart’s healing.  Take your place in me.  You see all the dimensions that intersect grief.  All the levels and layers of hurt.  Be my promise for the future. Be my comfort for the past.  Be my reflection for the moment.” (p. 119)

See the beauty.  See the blessing.  Be here now.  (her words not mine)

One of the attributes of this sort of leader is what he calls the pain principle:

The pain principle grows out of two axioms: (1) For leaders, pain in life has a way of deconstructing us to our most genuine, humble, authentic selves.  It’s part of the leader’s job description. (2) For most people, regardless of culture, it’s easier to connect with a leader’s pain and short-comings and mistakes than her successes and triumphs.

I resonate with this principle.  It’s the essence of Henri Nouwen’s Wounded Healer metaphor, which has been a guiding principle for the way I strive to do ministry.  It doesn’t mean I celebrate brokenness, it just means I’m honest about who I am.  I don’t want to glory in failure, I just want to be open enough about my failures so that everyone around me can see the successes God can bring out of failure.  I don’t want to focus inordinately on my weakness, I just want to point to God’s strength in spite of my weakness.  The pain principle…I like that name.