On the Ignorance and Poverty of my Wealth

By the grace of God I am very blessed to live in a wonderful 2 bedroom apartment with my pregnant wife in Springfield, MO. We're celebrating our 6 year anniversary this year with a "stay-cation." We're not going anywhere or doing anything, really. I took today off of work and we sat around watching season 6 of Lost on hulu using our free trial of hulu plus, which we absolutely have to cancel at the end of this week, and enjoyed each other's company. I went garage-saling this morning. It was nice. I'm a very blessed man.

But I just took the trash out. And while this week I might find it a little easier to count my many blessings, especially in light of the devastation of Joplin, MO that is getting national attention, at the garbage bin I was suddenly struck with the ruinous ignorance and poverty I'm subject to by being a normal, American citizen.

In the garbage bin I opened, I see that someone has emptied out their refrigerator, presumably because many leases are up this weekend. I always hate to see food go to waste, but something about it struck me as particularly tragic. There was a loaf of sliced wheat bread, only a few pieces missing, not moldy. A box of unopened, slightly thawed (can you tell I dug through this a little bit?) frozen taquitos. A reusable-disposable container of some kind of leftover casserole, a few half-full bottles of hard liquour, a jug of milk, now about half spoiled, I'd guess it's been there for about 2 hours, it was still cool to the touch. The most notable, and potentially salvageable thing--the item that made me dig around and look at all this--a 24-pack of Rock-star Energy Cola, one or two cans missing, still cool to the touch. I thought seriously about grabbing it, but I don't know that I like Rock-star Energy Cola because I've never tried it, and I know enough about nutrition and I'm an old man enough to know that I know that I don't want to like it. So I just let it sit there.

100 miles away, just an hour's drive down I-44, hundreds of people are suddenly homeless without food and shelter, and here is a refrigerator's worth of edible food, just spoiling in the trash can. And I'm not really scrambling to try to save it because it's been in the trash can.

We have our fair share of homeless people that wander our neighborhood here too. With our proximity to the 2 large Christian charities, Victory Mission and the Kitchen, we get a lot of homeless traffic, and even the occasional knock on the door asking for money.

Something within me is tempted to launch into a tirade about how wasteful this faceless, nameless enemy (& neighbor) is, but it's the plain truth that I am just as bad. I don't want to eat the perfectly good food or even try to salvage it for some other cause because it's "dirty." In many places around the world people would kill for these scraps, and there are even many without shelter and struggling to get their basic needs met less than an hour away.

I do not mean to complain about my station in life, on this week of all weeks, at this time when we recognize the sacrifices others have made so that we can enjoy the wealthy standard of living we all take for granted--indeed--that we even apparently discard before use for the sake of convenience. But I do think that it is appropriate to note simply the truth that in many ways our wealth, the opulent abundance that is "common" to millions, this ease and convenience of living disables us. We know very little about how to make it without the many conveniences we take for granted. And the smallest inconvenience of walking--or even driving 2 blocks to make a food donation to a local charity, or to get our hands a little dirty in order to save something wasted--this inconvenience is apparently too daunting or too expensive or too risky. We are, by and large, hopelessly dependent upon convenience and comfort.

Except for the survivors of Joplin, MO.

A particularly inspiring case is that of my friend Arin Gilbert's dad. He is a truck-driver from Joplin who (miraculously?) survived the tornado in the shelter of his sofa. His response to the case of the tragedy is particularly inspiring, and gives me hope for humanity and our nation.
If a tornado suddenly swept away my home and all my possessions, I would have no idea how to survive. I would have no idea how to hunt or gather food, or to build a shelter. In a very real way, my wealth makes me vulnerable, and weak, and stupid. I've never been forced to come up with a solution to these problems and so I am more or less helpless to solve them at 28 years old. If I were in the place of many people in Joplin, I would be utterly dependent on the mercy of others. I could not help myself. And praise God for that, because it means I have been very blessed with riches that would be unimaginable to most of the millions of people who have ever lived.

It is important to count our blessings and to share them, particularly at this time and place in southwestern Missouri. And I also believe that it is healthy to recon how fragile our apparently secure existence is on this earth, and to recon our very survival a blessing to be cherished. Take a note from Quincy Gilbert, who lives.

Disabling Comments, Enabling my Voice

I'm taking a note from Mark Sayers and Ty Melgren and disabling the comments on my blog.

Who is Ty you may ask?

Ty is this fantastic guy whom I admire very much who is a faithful member of our church and who serves Jesus and almost anyone he meets with gusto and intensity. He does so quietly and will almost never toot his own horn. Actually, I don't think I've ever heard him brag or say a single self-aggrandizing thing. He must be one of the best people that I know, and a few months ago he did a radical thing. He quit Facebook. He just closed his account. I went to tag him in a photo and found I couldn't do it. And I couldn't leave a comment on his wall to ask him why I couldn't tag him. I just had to ask him in person.

Let that sink in a moment.

I did ask him about it in person, and his answer challenged me, and I have checked in with Facebook much less often since we talked. He told me that he was finding himself constantly concerned with his status and the status of other people "in" his life. That he was only relating to people online that he used to relate to in person, and that too much of his life was constantly obsessed with these shallow and fleeting sound-bytes of self-edited reality. He found himself worried and stressed out by whether or not people would comment on his status--particularly the fact that others seemed to be interested and leave 20 comments on the most banal of posts and would seem to completely ignore the ones that he had intended to spark deeper, meaningful discussion. Frustrated with this, and following the example of a few peers (looking at you Mr. Eaton) and rumors of those brave souls who live their lives without being "connected" to the 500 million accounts of Facebook. He just opted out of the narcissism and constant striving for the praise of other people that occurs through updates and "likes."

Ty's example has caused me to question my own motivation for blogging. I have wondered whether or not the kind of things I talk about here and the things I want to see happen can happen through this media form or not. I feel that I want to have my cake and eat it too. I want the benefits of "engaging" with the bells and whistles of my culture without the cost of getting soiled by its unseemly side-effects. As a person who tends to see even the most clear-cut issues in shades of grey, I have, perhaps out of fear, opted for a middle ground.

I don't care what you think about this post.

I don't say this out of spite, malice, or some sense of superiority. In fact, I am sure that if you and I were to sit down and talk about the things that you think really matter, you would teach me a great deal about myself, God, the nature of reality, and my own weakness and ineptitude, for the simple fact that you are fearfully and wonderfully made by a loving Creator who has hidden aspects of Himself inside of you, and that no matter how broken and twisted He has placed there on purpose and will redeem if you will but ask, even if you are someone that many people consider to be a loser or a jerk. For God's love for you and for His glory revealed by your existence, you are worth knowing and listening to.

But I say this for myself. Your praise is ultimately just that. Your praise. Your opinion. What you "like" or "unlike" or find worthy of comment, while I value you inasmuch as I know you and know how to, I just can't make myself vulnerable to your whims and judgments. You aren't a just judge. You don't have the information, the goodness, or the wisdom to be. There's a lot you don't know about me, and as much if not more that I don't know about you, and for us to really hash out our disagreements, to really value each other and have a relationship worth having, we'll just have to do that by other means. And I find myself, like Ty, and like I suppose... every other person, tempted to bend my will to get you to "like" me--to approve and to praise my ego. This is wrong. And this way must be abandoned if we are to proceed in a way that is good to each other.

This is a very long way to say that I have come to think that when it comes to a blog--in which prose is posited thoughtfully and carefully for consumption and meaningful consideration for the simple fact that it takes more than a second of your time--if something is worth blogging about, it is worth blogging about with comments disabled.

What I am saying, I am saying whether or not you like it, whether or not you think it is interesting or worth commenting on, because it is worth saying and broadcasting on the internet, because it is good and true and ought to be known. Take it or leave it. If you like it or don't like it, that doesn't change what I have written, and you can certainly e-mail me or talk to me in person, but I am using this space to say things that I believe ought to be said, and if I enable the comments, I might think too much about you and your subjective little preferences. This isn't to say that those who enable comments are posting their posts in order to attract many positive comments and "likes." But I find myself too weak to engage in this meaningfully and well. At the same time, I'm proud enough to think I have something to say, even if only to the dozen or so friends who might read this thing. We can talk about it over a pint or a cup of Joe anytime you like. We could write e-mails or talk over the phone about it, or better yet write real letters! But I just can't do the comments. They gum up my creative works with insecurity and sin. So I'm opting out.

And by the way, Happy Easter. The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed.

Invitations vs. Sales

Every now and then I get up the guts and think it's wise to invite somebody to church.

Why should such a thing take courage and wisdom? Let me give you my perspective.

We live in a culture where we are constantly inundated with advertising. Many people, understandably, mistake an invitation to a Christian worship gathering as a form of advertising for a spiritual product. In fact, Western Evangelicals have done a lot to cause this misunderstanding by directly engaging in forms of communication in the name of Jesus that are indistinguishable from the predominant folk-religion of our culture, which is completely oriented around the purchase and consumption of experiences. The result of living in a culture so full of advertising with many people leads to a default position of skepticism and cynicism concerning the advertised "promise." We have cliché adages to communicate the wisdom in a position of skepticism and cynicism towards the plastic promises of so many advertisers--modern proverbs if you will-- "I'll believe it when I see it." "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

For example, Geico "could save me 15% or more on car insurance with a 15 minute phone call," but in reality they expect you to have detailed records about every car accident you've had in the last 5 years, including the time of day and date, and ticket number for the accident, as well as the insurance claim number and the insurance company of the other drivers involved in the accident. No one is prepared with this level of detailed information when they call, the call takes longer than 20 minutes, and they can't really offer a rate reduction of 15%, if they can offer a reduction at all. Now, let me tell you what Jesus can do for you in the afterlife.

That's one challenge. I think that it's a challenge that can be overcome if the person being invited is convinced that the person inviting them is doing the inviting out of a sincere care for the invited, which simply takes time and sincere love. It can't be overcome if the person doing the inviting thinks that they are advertising a spiritual product or is attempting to sell the other person their brand of religion or spirituality.

Here's the bigger challenge.

Everyone has faith. Everyone. There isn't a human being that doesn't have deeply held beliefs that guide the direction of their lives and daily actions. It is impossible to be a person and not have deeply held basic assumptions that drive the course of our actions, upon which we trust and hold to be self-evident and unquestionable to the point of risking our lives on them. The fact that a lot of people aren't aware of what they trust to be the absolute truth doesn't change the plainly observable fact that they have a certain subjective perspective on reality in which they operate that they do not regularly question and which guides the direction of their lives. This is true for the Christian, the Buddhist, the Jain, the Jew, the Atheist, and the apathetic. A person who believes that all religions are just different paths to the same mountain top, or a person whose disposition towards questions of ultimate reality, meaning, and purpose in life is apathetic or disinterested has no less faith than the Mormon or the Muslim, the only difference is that their faith isn't as well thought out or articulated as someone who fervently ascribes to a more trial-tested tradition. The person who says, "There is no god but Allah" as well as the person who says "it doesn't matter what a person's religion is," or "no one can know whether there is a God or not"--they all live and act as if those beliefs are absolutely true. They put their trust in those basic assumptions about reality and act as if their reality is really real. And although that person can give reasons for why they believe or don't believe whatever they believe, no one agrees on how to evaluate these beliefs. Without a way to test the truth of these perspectives, out of necessity we let them drive our thoughts, actions, attitudes--the very content of our time on earth and our understanding of the certain end of that time. (In that way, some of us have a test.)

The subjective nature of these beliefs and how these beliefs are formed is a deeply personal and emotional thing. To varying degrees there may be layers of reason and intellect that defend these beliefs, but if anyone tells you that they have faith in God or don't have faith in God for purely intellectual reasons and that they are completely emotionally detached from the issue, they either 1. don't understand what is being discussed or 2. aren't being honest with themselves. (I guess a third possibility is that they're not human.) It is only natural for a person to be defensive when those beliefs are challenged. This defensiveness is not rational, as can be seen in the rhetoric on many a YouTube video about evolution--on both sides. If we're really asking these questions about ultimate reality, then we all have a dog in the fight.

Now, in operating out of my faith, in acting as though the things I say I think are true on Sunday morning are actually true all the rest of the time, it is only natural to invite someone who doesn't gather for Christian worship to investigate the claims of the Gospel and into the experience of God found in giving worth to this God. How could I believe in these things, experience these things, and not want to share what I've found to be a very good thing? How cold must my heart be to not invite someone I care about? How low must that care be to not give an invitation to that experience of God?

But what of the other person's faith? Won't they be offended at the suggestion that their faith might need adjusting, that they might be wrong? Is it inherently disrespectful to call another person's faith into question even if the questioning happens only obliquely and implicitly through an invitation to share in the "fruits" of one's own faith?

I submit that the issue of where to place our faith--what we trust, what we consider real, what we bank on being true, what orients and directs the course of our lives, what we risk spending our time, effort, even our very lives on--that this issue is important enough to risk offending a friend, and to the degree that a person believes they have found real Truth, they must share that Truth. It would be wrong to hold Truth about that kind of thing to one's self. At the same time, it takes wisdom to know how to let people in on your truth in a way that they will be able to accept, since nobody likes to find out that they're wrong. (At least, whenever my faith needs adjusting it always hurts a little bit.)

But are we brave enough to face the conflict that might ensue with humility and love if the other person doesn't agree with us?

Stop Reading This

Seriously, turn your computer off right now. Turn off your cell phone and your computer, and go outside. It's a beautiful time of year.

Or listen to this. (Thanks NPR.)

Blasphemy or good advertising?

This is a screen shot from my computer while looking up a verse reference that I used to be able to find easily before I grew so dependent on Bible search engines.


What a wonderful modern world we live in, no? The Bible is available for anyone with internet access to search in at least 50 languages, for free! Can't remember that verse reference but have a vague memory of a word or phrase contained in it? Just type it in! You can even refine the search if you have an idea of whether it's in the new or old testament. Pretty sweet, really. And, as you might expect you get this service for FREE, with the exception of having to view a few family-friendly, Christian-friendly banner ads for "Christian" products (that is, if products could accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.) Voice of the Martyrs will send you a FREE copy of their founder's personal testimony there on the left. But what's this banner across the top? It seems to be a reference to the Gospel of John chapter 1, identifying Jesus as the Word, the divine Logos that was with God in the beginning, whose light shines in the darkness, though the darkness has not understood or overcome it. Then it goes through its other two states:







Just to be clear, the banner reads "In the beginning was the Word. Now there are maps, charts, notes & more. The bestselling Bible in the #1 translation. Click to learn more. (Picture of NIV Study Bible.)"

Now, I'm all for the study of the Bible and the resources like maps, charts, notes, "& more." That stuff is great, it makes the message of the Bible more accessible, and it would be wonderful if we could sell more stuff like that and pay more scholars and professionals to produce more resources that would make studying the Bible easier for everyone. Great. I believe in the business of Bible study. Pay the professionals. Make the materials. Sell them. Wonderful. Translate the Bible into English in a way that does justice to the original Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic but phrases things in a way that most people don't have to struggle to understand. Yes. Great. That takes professionals. I'll pay for it.

But am I over-reacting? Or did that ad just say, "In the beginning was Jesus, but NOW there's maps, charts, and this awesome translation of the Bible with all these resources and notes attached to it!" (Implication: you don't need Jesus, you need our Bible product.)

I understand that this isn't the only way to interpret this ad, and hopefully the people who thought it up weren't thinking that it could be interpreted this way, but... seriously? How is this not blasphemy? Anyone who gets the reference "In the beginning was the Word" ought to be offended. Everyone else won't get the "cute joke" that they seem to be trying to make with the reference.

Why do I blog?

There have been times in my life when I have become obsessed with the blogosphere. They are often short-lived and I am glad for it.

What do you read blogs for? Entertainment? Research? (Arguably the latter could be properly identified as a sub-category of the former...) Dialectical theological debate? Keeping up with old friends and acquaintances?

Often with me it tends to be a mixture of motivations and goals, but if I'm really honest it almost always starts with boredom. "I need some entertainment," I think. "Let's check the blogs."

Next I do something completely narcissistic. I check in with my own blog. Often I re-read the things I have written and think about how much I agree with them. "Yeah, that's good stuff," I think. I look for comments, little signals that I'm popular and important. But pretty soon I get bored with my own thoughts. So I go look for others.

At this point I find something I agree or disagree with. And I leave comments. My very important and highly valued praise or my superb, dismantling criticism pepper the melting pot of ideas like the saffron of the textual idea world.

Now sometimes, when somebody says something I really disagree with, I leave a critical comment, and come back several times that day to see what they said in response. This is where the obsession comes in. Pretty soon, they come back with a retort, and I shoot back, and we're having a "friendly" competition over who is smarter in the very public arena of cyberspace. We can be talking about the loftiest, holiest ideas, but as my obsessed behavior reveals it is about more than the ideas. It is about my ego.

It seems like such a waste that such an incredible blessing like the internet be resigned to the mire of my sinful nature. There must be a way to interact with people over the internet that isn't all about proving my worth to myself or others through what I write.

Some things I don't do often enough that seem to help:

1. Pray before posting. Pray to Jesus. Ask Him to fill my fingers with His words rather than my own self-centered ones. Then only type words that I wouldn't be ashamed of if He read them. (Because He is reading them!)

2. Recognize my humanity. Recognize that a lot of the time I'm dumb, selfish, and only see things the way I want to see them rather than the way they actually are.

3. Recognize the humanity of others. Other people have the same limitations that I have, and other people are people. There's a post-er behind every post and that person is made in the image of God, and Jesus died on the cross for that person.

Any other suggestions?

The Broadcasting of Self

We had a Good Friday service about a month or two ago at church, a night to remember the crucifixion of Jesus. The Gospel accounts of those events were read interspersed with somber songs of worship to our crucified Lord. It was a time to remember and contemplate the price God paid for a sinful person like me to know love and joy and life everlasting.

I found myself experiencing a lot of emotions: a feeling like guilt--but not exactly guilt in that it didn't seem hopeless but rather hopeful, as if I were recognizing a very deep personal weakness but also the way out of it. Christians often refer to this feeling as the conviction of the Holy Spirit ( conviction needn't be an emotional affair, even though it often is.) I also felt sadness over the suffering of the world that was unjustly thrust upon Jesus. Joy in the midst of sadness over my own suffering and the suffering of people close to me, the joy that comes from knowing a compassionate Savior who is willing and able to make all things right in their right time.

Anyway, it was emotional.

I think it was emotional because God was at work. I could be wrong, but that's my interpretation of the events. I had a strong sense of the Spirit's presence.* God was at work on my heart showing me my sin, His grace, my desperate need for a Savior, the sufficiency of His providence and all that stuff. Here's the disturbing part: while this is happening, I'm trying to think of how to put this deeply spiritual experience into words--particularly a sentence or so of words...that would fit in my facebook status.
What is wrong with me?

Here I am, supposedly drawing near to the cross-- the event that is the culmination of Jesus' life and ministry, the event that changed human history and the cosmic order--I'm drawing close to God and God is revealing Himself to me, it is a holy, numinous, and transcendental moment and I'm thinking "How can I sum this up so that I can tell everyone on facebook about it?"

Now, I've come to accept certain personality traits about myself that I consider morally neutral. While I do not believe the term "extrovert" is exhaustive in describing my identity, it is certainly functionally descriptive of a tendency towards meeting strangers and enjoying large groups. That tendency whether innate or learned has quite a bit of inertia to it and probably isn't going to change without some drastic psychological arm-twisting--which would probably feel like torture to me. I want almost everything I do to be shared with others. Especially when it comes to the core message about Jesus--this is really good news to me, I think it's awesome and I think knowing about it, thinking about it, and experiencing God through that core message--what Christians have called "the Gospel"--that is something I want to talk about with everyone. Of course, not everyone shares my enthusiasm, especially living in Springfield where a lot of people have a lot of enthusiasm about this "Gospel" thing, to the point that if you don't really know what people are talking about when they say "Gospel" or if you do know and you just don't think that it's true, or that it can be "proven" true, or maybe even you think it's probably true but you'd rather ignore it because of it's painful implications for personal life, if you fit into any of those categories in Springfield then you may begin to feel marginalized or pressured to accept something you can't wrap your mind or gut around--which violates a sense of identity and choice. It feels disrespectful when people try to shove their religion down our throats. And we Christians aren't always willing to take "no" for an answer even when it will probably be the answer for a long time, unless something significant takes place to cause a change to that answer. This puts someone like me in an awkward position. I've sincerely experienced something life-changing and good in the person of Jesus, but I don't want my friends who aren't sharing that experience to feel that our friendship is only a means for me to preach to them, because it's not. Those friendships may very well be an opportunity to openly discuss that (I think) Great News, but if all of my friends who were republicans were only friends with me because they wanted me to become an out-spoken republican, that would put a damper on the relationship. (Not that republican=Christian, it most certainly does not.)

Anyway, I digress. My point is I'm an extrovert and Evangelical, so maybe that explains it. But what I think what I'm trying to get at here is that maybe there are some experiences--even experiences that come about from the very public work of Jesus on the cross, that aren't meant to be shared or broadcast-ed through social networking media. Is the reason I want to sum up this deep spiritual experience on Good Friday so that I can share the Good News, or is it that I want people to think of me as a deeply spiritual person? What do I think that adding something like that to the textual noise of a few people's News Feeds will actually accomplish? Is it really sharing the Gospel or am I just broadcasting my opinion for my own sense of worth as a "good" Christian?

Could it be that some things are just too holy for our facebook statuses?


*(The language and therefore the theology of the God who created the space-time universe gets a little fuzzy when we talk about the manifest "presence" or "glory" of God. The only thing that I can figure out is that it's not that God "isn't" somewhere, because he is omnipresent, but that a lot of the time I walk around with the ridiculous idea that He isn't near, and when I experience His Presence, it's not as though God were somewhere far away and is suddenly coming over for a chat, it's just I am actually waking up to Reality, the real reality where God exists, the reality where He is present, instead of my distracted stupor that I spend way too much time in. Of course to talk about things in this way seems to imply that I am achieving enlightenment or something stupid like that by my own insight, so I prefer to talk in terms of experiencing God because I believe God is really the one at work making me aware of His Presence and power, which are always near and always true.)