lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive of "stories" Category
Little Promptings
If I had to isolate the discipline that God has been helping me to cultivate the most over the last year it would be to discern the voice and prompting of the Holy Spirit in normal, everyday, life. Truth be told, this has been hard. I’m busy (like everyone else), I’m easily distracted (like everyone else), and (just like everyone else) rather than receiving the reality that God is present and active in all aspects of my day and life, I have a propensity to isolate God to just certain spheres. To make matters worse, actually hearing and responding to God’s voice and prompting is seldom clearcut. It’s often something you do without ever knowing for sure if what you heard was really God’s voice or if how you responded was actually the most appropriate decision.
Today, however, was not one of those times. Today was clear as a bell.
I took just returned from taking the car in for a quick oil change. Plenty to do today, so I wanted to get in and out quick. However, as I walked in, there was an older lady in front of me who was distraught over learning that a major part on her car had gone bad and that the car was going to be virtually undriveable unless she got it fixed. This wasn’t just a problem of convenience for her, though it was that. Apparently, she shares this car w/ her daughter who relies on it to get to work. More than convenience, it seemed that replacing this part was going to be a huge financial hurdle. As the store manager walked back out to the shop so that she could call her husband on the store phone, I heard her describe how they would need to post-date a check and check with their landlord about either being late or needing to fall short on their monthly payment. In short, this unexpected repair was a major challenge on a couple different fronts and she was obviously beside herself with frustration and worry.
Enter prompting.
As I sat in the tiny waiting area and pretended not to listen, I felt like God was prompting me to make a major contribution toward this lady’s repair costs. I can say with relative certainty that this was God, because believe me, I am at no loss for the many different things that we could be doing with our finances
Then the internal dialogue kicked in. You can probably imagine it. Is this really God’s voice? How much should I contribute? How would I even explain myself? Should that money go somewhere else? Does it need to be accompanied by some sort of explanation? You get the point. In the end, however, I decided it was God’s voice, settled on an amount, and once the lady had decided to leave the car there and accept a ride home from one of the shop workers, I simply asked the store manager to apply a portion of her repair cost to my bill. He was stunned, but happy to do so.20 minutes later as I retuned home, still wondering if I had heard and responded faithfully, I received an email from my wife Amy. She was forwarding another email that she had just received (no kidding – at pretty much exactly the same time I was settling up at the auto shop!) from our new childcare giver, Jean. Here is Jean’s email…
Hello Amy,
Hope you are well today, and that Aubrianna is doing well.
Will you consider yesterday and next Mondays child care as a gift from me as part of my stewardship?
This means that I do not want to be paid for either days.
I am happy to be partnering with you for The Kingdom.
Have a blessed day, Jean
Jean’s gift to us was nearly an exact match to the contribution I felt like God had prompted me to make to the lady in need at the auto shop!
Wish I could say that listening and responding to God’s little promptings was always that clear cut, but the truth is that that’s not the case. It’s a cool story for sure, but at the heart of it is something more profund – the realization of what we just might be missing out on if we fail to attempt to pay attention to what God might be saying at all.
“Going to Church” Is Not A Reality I Want For My Daughter
I am one of those people who happens to believe in the importance of words. While it’s a good thing to have a broad vocabulary, that’s not what I mean. I mean that I think words are powerful. Words aren’t just symbols and they certainly aren’t neutral. Words actually DO things when we use them or hear them.
Ever been called an idiot?
Ever made a verbal promise?
Ever double-dog-dared someone to do something?
Yes? Then you get what I mean. Words are powerful tools. I would even go so far as to say that words contribute to the shaping of our realities. Just ask any teenager whose parent has told them on a consistent basis for years that they’re worthless.
This is why I have abandoned the language of “going to church.” This language reinforces a false reality. A reality in which church is understood to be a place or an event rather than a Kingdom community or family of disciples. I would submit that the idea of “going to church” is a chief hallmark of cultural Christianity, the sort of thing that, while having a ring of sincerity to it, actually reshapes our imaginations and our reality in ways counter to the biblical narrative and the purposes of God. So, a few weeks ago, as Amy and I prepared to take our daughter to a gathering of our church community, she and I had one of our first father-daughter chats.
I began to speak the kind of words to my daughter that I want her to grow up hearing – words that I want to shape her into the sort of person capable envisioning and receiving the story into which she has been born and invited – words that I hope will instill in her the sort of sorrowful/sick feeling that her father gets when he hears people relegate the Church to something we merely “go to.”
I said to her,
Daughter, you are a part of our family and our family is part of a very special group of people. This group of people has a long, long history, filled with incredible stories that you will get to hear as you get older. But here’s what you need to know. God loves this world – everyone and everything in it. He loves it more than we can even possibly imagine. He loves it so much that he actually gave himself up for it – can you believe that?! He did. But lots of things are wrong. Not everything is quite the way that it is supposed to be. But don’t worry, God is at work. He will see to it that in the end, all things will be made right again. And guess what, God has invited us to join him on this mission. He wants us to be a part of it with him as his people. With God’s help we try to live out God’s dream for the world. And because God’s own son, Jesus, did this better than anyone else ever did, we always try to follow his example. That means that in many ways, the way we live is very different from the ways that other people live. In fact, and this is difficult for me to say to you because I love you so much, it means that the more you live your life for God, the more likely it is that some people will not like you, maybe even hurt you like they did Jesus. Even still…
Like Jesus, we talk to God and listen as he speaks to us rather than living life on our own terms.
Like Jesus, when people do mean and bad things, we offer forgiveness rather than hold grudges or try to get even.
Like Jesus, when people are hurt or in need, we offer to help rather than let them suffer or assume that it’s their own fault.
Like Jesus, we go out of our way to be friends with people who don’t like or make fun of rather than ignore them or do the same.
Like Jesus, we give our money and things to people who need them even if they can’t pay us back rather than keeping everything for ourselves.
Like Jesus, we will lay our lives down for our enemies rather than try to injure or destroy them.
And that’s just the beginning! These are just some of the ways that we get to enjoy God’s dream for the world.
Now listen, there’s a special name for people who live this way together, they are called “Church.” They are the people who have been called out of the ways of the way the world is, in order to live out God’s dream for the way the world should be and will be someday. Some people think that Church is some thing that you go to, like going to a movie or a restaurant, only religious. But that’s not what it is, not at all! I know you won’t really understand all this quite yet, but the Church is a group of people who embody a whole new world! Nothing you ever do will be more important than being part of this people and adventure. Now, let’s go meet some of the people we’re on this mission with.
The first of many more conversations I hope to have with my precious daughter along these lines.
Depersonalized and Taken Advantage Of
I had something happen to me last week that has never happened before. I got dropped by my car insurance company, State Farm.
I received a letter in the mail that said on account of the three claims that I have reported in the last three years, they were no longer willing to insure me. I looked over the letter and thought about each accident. As I did, I couldn’t help but feel depersonalized and taken advantage of and I began to reflect on how prone we often are to do this very same thing to others. Here’s what I mean…
Accident #1, The Fence
The first accident happened while I lived in Memphis. I was driving down a busy 2 lane road and a car, probably 4-5 cars in front of me, slammed on their brakes and turned left w/o signaling, cutting off traffic that was coming the other way. The cars in front of me all braked rapidly as did I, but as I looked in my rear-view mirror, a car was barreling down so I decided to spin the wheel to the right where there was noting but grass and a fence in order to get out of the way. Good thing I did, because the car absolutely would have slammed into me. The result was a good bit of damage to the right front end of my car and a few broken slats in a fence.
Accident #2, Moving
The 2nd accident came just over a year later and happened while we were moving into our new apartment. We had rented a U-Haul truck to move all our stuff, so I was driving that. At one point I had to back the huge truck down a narrow alley and out onto a street. Once I actually made it to the street I had a friend guiding me as I couldn’t really see behind me or keep an eye on traffic. I could not possibly have been moving any slower, but as I was backing up to his direction, I heard a crunch. The rear bumper of the truck had done some damage to the bumper of a parked car.
Accident #3, The Deer
The third accident took place, again, almost exactly a year later. Amy and I were driving home to Ohio on the Turnpike. We were in the right lane of a two lane portion of the Turnpike heading east. All of a sudden, a woman in an SUV pulled up to our left and began honking her horn and waving her hands. Obviously this took our attention off of the road for a moment and on to her. As soon as we glanced back, we saw a couple deer on the side of the road very near our lane. Since this lady was directly beside us, there was no room for us to move over to the left and with another car directly behind us, slamming on our brakes didn’t seem like the best idea either. For some reason, one of the deer began running beside us and then jumped in front so that we gave it a good butt bounce. Off the deer went, but we lost a headlight and had some minor paint damage to the bumper.
In the event that you trust my recounting of these accidents, I hope you’ll agree that it would be hard to make a case for my being a bad or negligent driver. Instead, upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that my ill state (the one who had to file a claim) actually came about by external factors (bad driver in accident 1, bad navigator in accident 2, and dumb deer in accident 3).
My point in all this isn’t exactly to defend myself, but to point out how easy it is to depersonalize and take advantage of people when we aren’t willing to step into the details of peoples lives and circumstances.
We do this all the time. We depersonalize people and take advantage of them in making judgments and estimations based on appearances w/o being willing to step into the minutia of their lives, their circumstances and stories. Doing so is not only a source of great injustice, but it short circuits the fundamental work of the gospel.
Like insurance companies such as State Farm, it is so very tempting to just objectify people for our own purposes. For insurance companies, getting personal and refusing to take advantage of a flawed system would adversely effect their bottom line, so they depersonalize and take advantage of people. For us, getting personal and refusing to take advantage of the temptation to generalize and stereotype takes time, effort, and a willingness to have our most fundamental assumptions about the world called into question, so we follow suit.
In the midst of a culture which inclines us to function with the utmost concern for efficiency and our own best interests, I believe that Jesus calls us to the inefficiency of incarnational living and the freedom of a life lived for the sake of others. Insurance companies may take the bait, but I hope I/we don’t.
Evangelism as the Sharing of Ache and Hope
I love it when objects of two different worlds come colliding together. Think “Say Anything,” “Bringing Down the House,” or “The Toy.”
In each instance people who have virtually nothing in common are thrust into one another’s lives creating the opportunity for, to borrow a phrase from my friend Geoff, “generative tension.”
This happened in my life recently.
To the list of ‘socially awkward misfit meets valedictorian,’ ‘lawyer meets convict,’ and ‘poor black adult meets rich white kid,’ I can now add, Dan Allender meets Eminem.
A few days ago I began listening to a series of talks offered by Dan Allender, a Christian counselor, author, speaker, and the President of Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle, WA.
In one of his talks, he offered this little nugget,
Evangelism is essentially sharing our stories long enough to discover a common ache and a common hope.
Now, as my friend Annie pointed out in a conversation about this sentiment, it doesn’t capture the full scope of what might qualify as evangelism (and I don’t think that was Dan’s intention anyway). However, I do think it pushes us to a place of realization that, inasmuch as Jesus was God’s way of entering into the story of humanity’s deep aches and fulfilling its greatest hopes, we are called to do the same for others.
Somewhere in the course of listening to these talks, I came across a new music video by Eminem featuring Rihanna entitled, “Love the Way You Lie.” (ht: Jonathan Brink)
I’ll embed it below, but let me offer 2 things first, a disclaimer and a reflection.
Disclaimer: The video contains language and imagery that some might find objectionable. If you can’t get past that, please do us both a favor and skip it. I’ll say this though, the language and imagery is far from gratuitous. I think it is used appropriately and poignantly to convey the weight of the issue.
Reflection: The song and video tell the story of a couple who quite transparently have deep aches and deep hopes. The tragic irony of the situation is that they are trying to come to terms with both through a violent and endless cycle of love and hate, truth and lies.
I think the reason that I like this quote from Allender so much is that it asks us to be come alongside people as guides as opposed to stand at a distance and offer directions. There is this great tendency we have to get so focused on telling people that they need to arrive at a particular destination that we completely neglect the more important matter of identifying the “You are here” spot at which they stand. Directions, after all, are of little use unless you know where you’re starting from.
The last observation I’ll make as a result of the generative tension between Allender’s quote and Eminem’s video is that without the right direction, we create our own personal hells – something that is visually captured at the end of this clip. As people of ache and hope, when we try to alleviate our aches and fulfill our hopes in ways that God never intended, we suffer. All the more reason for those of us who have been met by God at the point of our ache and who place our hope in God’s salvific work in the world through Christ to listen to the stories of others as we share ours and allow God to do that same work all over again.
San Francisco, Strangers, and Stories: Part 2
I ended my previous post about Amy’s and my trip to San Francisco by saying that one of the highlights for me was seeing Wicked for the first time on account of its similarity to my favorite recent TV series, LOST.
The connection I want to make is well articulated in the quote,
Strangers and enemies are merely people whose stories we haven’t heard yet.
We saw this at play in LOST inasmuch as our assumptions and assessments about the nature of the main characters were subverted over the course of getting to know their history and background. Let’s face it, it’s just way harder to be so critical of Sawyer once you learn that someone was responsible for conning his mother out of money resulting in his father killing her and then himself right in front of him.
Similarly, in Wicked, we are given a story behind the relationship between the “good” witch and the “bad” witch from the Wizard of Oz. We learn that the “good” witch was actually a fairly empty-headed, spoiled brat who always got her way and was extremely judgmental. At the same time, we learn that the “bad” witch was a product of years of scorn and ridicule from her father and peers. Not only did she blame herself for her mother’s death, but she was extremely mindful and caring toward her invalid sister.
Let’s be honest, life is easier when we pretend that we can engage it in black and white. Truth be told, our need to control life in this way is probably directly related to our own fears and inadequacies.
It is when we lack contentment in who we are in Christ, that we default to judging others so that we can feel better about who we are.
… I am more valuable than him because I work hard and he’s a lazy bum.
… I am nicer than her because I saw how rude she was to the bank teller.
… We are a more devoted family than them because they are constantly missing church services.
Little do we know that…
… he was born addicted to crack and never had the sort of love and support it takes to help someone to recover from that sort of disability.
… she just found out that her 2 year old son was diagnosed with Lukemia and their family is uninsured.
… as a family, they are trying to spend time with their neighbors who think Jesus is a joke.
Stories change everything.
Identifying with others by entering into their stories is risky because we almost always discover that we have more in common with the people that we would just assume distance ourselves from as strangers and enemies that we’d like to admit.
So here’s the challenge before you you and I today (and for the rest of our lives!) – to risk entering into the pain and uncertainly of the stories of the people we consider strangers and enemies that we might identify with them as Christ entered into the story of humanity and identified with it – such is the nature and meaning of incarnational ministry and witness.
I will never be able to watch The Wizard of Oz with as much innocence as I once did. And regardless of what you and I thought about the conclusion of LOST as a television series, there is something profound about this notion of our salvation being bound up with our willingness to truly know and be known by others, especially those we are most unlike us.
Stories change everything.
San Francisco, Strangers, and Stories: Part 1
A wedding between our friends Matt and Brianna last weekend gave Amy and I the opportunity to take our first trip to San Francisco.
The wedding was held at the Guglielmo Winery in Morgan Hill and was one of the most beautiful weddings I have ever attended.
Thursday and Saturday we stayed in Gilroy, just south of Morgan Hill and apparently the “Garlic Capital of the World.” Sounded pretty ridiculous to me until we drove into Gilroy and all we could smell was garlic – seriously!
After the mandatory trip to In-N-Out…
We of course felt compelled to visit the Garlic Shoppe.
Amy was even brave enough to taste the Chocolate-Garlic Ice ream.
We spent Sunday with our friend Jeanelle seeing some of the sights around the city of San Francisco including Hyde St. Pier, Ghiradelli Square, Chinatown, Golden Gate Park and the adjacent beach. We also took the perfunctory trip across the Golden Gate Bridge.
Sunday evening, Amy and I went to see Wicked at the Orpheum in the Union Square district of downtown.
~~ Lots more pictures here and videos here
Now, Amy is a musical buff, she’s seen em all (multiple times in many cases!) but this was my first time seeing Wicked and I loved it. It was probably one of the highlights of the trip for me. Why? Because Wicked bore a striking resemblance to one of my favorite TV series’ of all time, LOST. Let me offer a quote I heard recently as a prelude to my explanation of that observation.
“Strangers and enemies are merely people whose stories we haven’t heard yet.”
More on that in my next post.
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