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Faith Life

When Thinking Is No Longer In Style

The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell on. ~Dallas Willard

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Reason. Wisdom. Critical thinking. Thoughtful analysis and open dialogue.

So, so last season.

Thinking, a quaint but unstylish activity, now shoved to the back of the closet.

Because the new styles dazzle us, as they parade down the runway.

This season’s fresh new look: Fear-driven rants. Self-righteous sentiment. Delicious self-pity. The whimsical, melodramatic wave of the crowd. Who would trade the temporary buzz for the ponderous world of the thoughtful?

Don’t confuse me with facts, it’s easier to relax with the flow. I’d rather not know what you are thinking, I’ll only get confused. It hurts to use my brain.

Ah, but your brain is being used. You’re just not holding the controls.

The Wisdom Of The Wise

Bluntly, to serve God well we must think straight; and crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil. And when the crooked thinking gets elevated into group orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, there is always, quite literally, “hell to pay.” that is, hell will take its portion, as it has repeatedly done in the horrors of world history. ~ Dallas Willard in Renovation of the Heart 

Bringing Thinking Back

Read great books. Study the Bible. Take a class, learn a new skill, explore a different language. Surround yourself with smart people who will challenge and disagree with you. Admit your ignorance, be grateful you don’t have to remain that way.

Begin and end each day unfashionably unplugged from the wordy wastelands of this world. With mouth closed, ears open, eyes focused, thoughts directed upward, think about these things:

  • whatever is true,
  • whatever is noble,
  • whatever is just,
  • whatever is pure,
  • whatever is lovely,
  • whatever is admirable,
  • whatever is excellent,
  • whatever is worthy of praise,

and pray to become what you think.

What do you think about thinking?

Philippians 4:8

Photo by Melanie Hunt

 

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Faith Life

A Passport, A Pencil And A Child

…and a little child shall lead them. Isaiah 11:6

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A redwood grove in the Santa Cruz mountains, a determined child, a simple tool to break the ice.

The Annual All-Church Retreat.

We were each given a little book, assembled like a passport. “Have as many people sign it as possible (like a stamp from each port of call), and as you exchange signatures, take a few moments to get to know each another.”

Some left the passports in their rooms, pages blank and forgotten, but others were more cooperative, awkwardly tapping shoulders of people they had never met.

Then there was Jason, six years old, but wise in his intuitive grasp of what was needed. Passport and pencil in hand, he wandered the camp, approaching each of us in turn. Earnest, purposeful, he spent the weekend covering the pages of his book–name after name.

Saturday evening the leaders awarded a prize for most signatures gathered–a teenaged girl raised her arms in triumph. Jason was undeterred–the prize was not what mattered.

At the late-night concert I watched him walking up and down the aisles, pointing to each person in turn, searching his memory, silently pursuing. Stepping over our feet to claim one more for the book, he seemed oblivious to the music or the propriety of his actions. His mom told me Jason was normally  shy, and uncertain around strangers. I was filled with wonder at his tender, tenacious spirit.

What The Passport Reveals

Sunday morning found Jason still looking–145 names, but was there someone he had missed? We gathered in a grove of redwoods for the closing service–worship, praise, communion, sharing. The pastor asked, “What do you want to thank God for?”

A lonely widow stood, tears streaming down her face. “Bless you, whoever gave us this way to welcome each other. So many Sundays I try in vain to catch just one person’s eye. Everyone is so busy, rushing off with things to do. It meant so much to have many of you approach me. Please, let’s keep doing this.”

A young man, awkward and slow of speech, grabbed the microphone and agreed, “You were all so nice to me! I’m used to people being mean. Thank you.” He cried, too and told us he loves us.

Others stood, the sharing continued.

But the leaders were choked up, something holy was happening. Someone was there, tapping on our shoulders, tugging on our hearts. We grew silent–no one knew how to express in words what we felt.

It crossed my mind we should take off our shoes.

Drew was asked to close the service. He hesitated a moment and stood, holding something above his head. “Here is my benediction: I have in my hand Jason’s passport. We are all in it. No one is left out, we all matter.”

What else was there to say?

Christ walked among us in the guise of a little boy one weekend. And we, his church, for one shining moment looked just like Him.

How many names are in your passport?

[I shared this story my church’s newsletter eleven years ago. Congratulations to Jason, now a high school graduate! Years have passed, but the Spirit of Christ still pursues, pointing to each one of us in turn…]

You may also like:  Life Is A Group Project   Hope For A Small Heart    Goodness Happens.

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Faith Life

The Most Ignored Prayer

The world will go limping until Christ’s prayer that all may be one is answered. Charles H. Brent.

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The most ignored prayer is the prayer Jesus prayed for Christians living today.

One prayer. For today. But ignored.

It must have gone something like this:

Father,

I pray they will live long and prosper. I pray they will win elections and their constitutional rights be upheld. I pray they enjoy good health, and avoid the obvious sins. I pray they will embrace correct doctrine and find effective ways to silence those who don’t. I pray their preachers will be entertaining, their music not too loud, their TV inoffensive. I pray they will have good quiet-time habits, and write inspiring blogs. I pray their diets work, their children succeed, their marriages last. I pray they get good jobs, they live where they want to, among the people they prefer. May life be easy and painless and undemanding.

Amen.

Oops, wrong one. That was my prayer. Try again.

I pray that they may all be one, Father! May they be in us, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they be one, so that the world will believe that you sent me. John 17:21

Oh. That was the prayer? That people would be so astounded by Christians’ love for God and each other they’d come looking for the same?

That Christians would be known as people who,

  • let go of our grudges,
  • reject our unkindness and
  • cynical delight in someone else’s fail?
  • Who speak up for the silenced,
  • and are silent when we’d rather vent,
  • and stop avoiding,
  • start embracing,
  • and love one another with the self-denying love of Christ?

It’s a costly choice to be the Father’s answer to the one prayer Jesus prayed.

Oswald Chambers: The Prayer Of Jesus

“Are you helping God to answer that prayer, or do you have some other goal for your life? There is one prayer which God must answer, and that is the prayer of Jesus–

The things we are going through are either making us sweeter, better, and nobler men and women, or they are making us more critical and fault-finding, and more insistent on our own way. The things that happen either make us evil, or they make us more saintly, depending entirely on our relationship with God and its level of intimacy.” Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest.

Have you embraced Jesus’ prayer for you?

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Faith Life

Weeds Or Wildflowers? The Gardener Decides

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I can’t tell if these are weeds or wildflowers.

Each year they appear, uninvited. Unlike the practical perennials I favor, these intruders sprawl, indifferent to edges and hedges and less assertive flowers they smother.

I try to ignore their cheerful yellow greeting–weeds are tricky.  Am I gazing at a toxic invasion, or a brief but harmless grace?

Weeds And Wildflowers Surprise

I thought I knew what my life would look like by now. It used to seem so simple. The journey to success and happiness was laid out like a flagstone path, a well-trimmed route across life’s meadow. Clean up your toys, get the grades, make wise choices, interview well, choose your battles, invest wisely, exercise and eat right, say your prayers.

No one mentioned how far seeds scatter at the whim of a breeze, and of roots sent deep when you’re not watching. A landscape artist of a different sort is sowing mischief, or is it kindness? Either way, weeds happen, both nettle and nice, and we’re not sure which they’ll turn out to be.

Some of you are nodding–you’re looking at a weed right now. A pink slip, a lab result, a moving van, a phone call, an interruption, a disruption, the corruption or correction of your finest dreams. You didn’t plant it. You are caught by surprise.

Weeds Or Weeded?

I take a second look at the buttery blooms filling my front garden. Maybe all along I’ve been mistaken. What if I’m not the gardener here but the soil, and someone else decides what grows?

What if the path doesn’t lead to somewhere I want to be, but to someone I’m meant to be? What if I don’t weed, but I am weeded? What if wildflowers appear and perennials prosper, or both shrivel for a time in the heat, but a successful crop of my own design was never the point of it all?

The results I use to define my life are only fading glory. The disruptions and detours I’m tempted to root up may have been sown there for a reason. In the moment, I can’t tell if what I see are wildflowers or weeds. Can I trust the Gardener to know?

But as for the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance. Luke 8:15

Are you surprised by weeds and wildflowers too?

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Culture Faith Life

When Being Female Is Hazardous To Your Health

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. ~Genesis 1:27

female tears

Their faces haunt me. For their gender alone they’ve endured pain no one should bear, and every day there’s another story, another news update or atrocity uncovered.

When has it ever been so hazardous to be female?

Cleveland and Oxford, New Delhi and Saratoga make headlines, but all over the world infants are aborted for lack of a Y chromosome, elderly women and tiny girls raped for no reason.

Just one story should be enough. Just one child trafficked or passed around at parties should make us shake with rage, and disturb our sleep until every female is safe.

I’m tired of excuses, the ones kept handy to explain it away–she asked for it, she dressed that way, she drank too much, she ran away and into danger, and well, boys will be boys, and always have been. 

I’m angry at Victoria’s Secret, Maxim, and Abercrombie, at The Bachelor and 50 Shades of Grey. I’m tired of the fiction, Christian or otherwise, that a woman is defined by the man at her side. I’m tired of seeing shame in female glances due to dress size or dress downs or someone’s cold sneer.

I’m angry when women play the games we despise, when with gossip and mean-girl strategies we diminish each other. When we stay silent and dumb ourselves down, I’m sad for us all, for

  • doors firmly shut,
  • ministry divided,
  • mutual encouragement that never happens due to jealousy or fear.

God Sees His Reflection In Both Male And Female,

and too often we forget it. What kind of world do I long for? A world where every female knows herself first as a beloved child, as a human being made in the image of God. A world where we all remember: to hurt her, shame her, exploit her, or ignore her is to despise her Creator, to deny His worth.

And the worth of every human male as well.

Do you ever get angry for these vulnerable ones?

[Thank you Dave, Jeff, and Scott for valuing me as the human being I am.]

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A Minor Character In Someone Else’s Plot

All the world’s a stage. ~William Shakespeare

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Last weekend I drove north to see Phantom of the Opera with my High School teacher son. The plot was stunning, the talent impressive–the students earned the thunderous applause.

If I squinted my eyes I could see my much younger self, watching the lead actors take their bows.

Every year of high school I tried out for a main role. Every year, my shaking finger traced the posted list until, somewhere at the bottom of the typewritten page, I found my modest part.

“There are no small parts, only small actors,” every cast is told. But lesser characters get fewer lines, and seldom get a solo. The message is clear right from the start–the plot’s about somebody else.

Do you ever feel like a minor character in everyone else’s plot?

No one notices me, I have no voice, I’m never heard, I’m overlooked, I’m not appreciated, the spotlight never turns towards me. I thought by now I’d be playing the lead, and I’m still just part of the crowd.

Searching For A Better Plot

You’d settle for even a nod from the audience, a note in the mail that says, “well done.”

  • But the same person has hogged the attention again and you leave the party, annoyed.
  • In your work or ministry setting you are often ignored and you wonder if you should move on.
  • You are surrounded by people of lesser talent, but it’s you who is overlooked.
  • You dream of the big break–an agent or angel–someone willing to trumpet your worth.

The truth is, whether you are a main character or an unnoticed extra depends on only one thing–who gets to tell the story.

I think Jesus meant what he promised, “the last will be first and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16). Someday the stars of the stage will be silent, enthralled by the tales of unknowns. And those who travelled on a third class ticket will walk the red carpet in style.

Then both lead and bit player will lay down their scripts at the feet of the only true Star. The credits will roll, unnoticed. No one will care anymore.

Are you embracing your bit parts, your eyes on a better plot?

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What Dallas Willard Knew: Our God-Bathed World

Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us. ~Dallas Willard

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Dallas Willard, renowned theologian and scholar, breathed his last mortal breath on Wednesday and woke up to beauty no words can describe.

And he was a man of words.

Dallas Willard’s writing, like strong lenses for lazy spiritual eyes, sharpened and shaped my view of God and the Bible in ways few authors have. His thoughts were not easy to follow–Willard wrote like the brilliant professor he was. But his books are worth a wade. In tribute to this great saint, I give you a taste of the joy Dallas Willard glimpsed from afar and now feasts upon forever. From The Divine Conspiracy:

Dallas Willard: Our God-Bathed World

“God leads a very interesting life, and he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.

“While I was teaching in South Africa some time ago, a young man took me out to see the beaches near his home in Port Elizabeth. I was totally unprepared for the experience. I had seen beaches, or so I thought. But when we came over the rise where the sea and land opened up to us, I stood in stunned silence and then slowly walked toward the waves. Words cannot capture the view that confronted me. I saw space and light and texture and color and power…that seemed hardly of this earth.

“Gradually there crept into my mind the realization that God sees this all the time. He sees it, experiences it, knows it from every possible point of view, this and billions of other scenes like and unlike it, in this and billions of other worlds. Great tidal waves of joy must constantly wash through his being.

“It is perhaps strange to say, but suddenly I was extremely happy for God and thought I had some sense of what an infinitely joyous consciousness he is and of what it might have meant for him to look at his creation and find it ‘very good’ (p. 62-63).”

There was no room in Dallas Willard’s theology for a miserly, vindictive or petty kind of god. His hope was anchored in Jesus Christ, who demonstrated once and for all, “the fondness, the endearment, the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward all his creatures.” Including you.

Is there one particular author who has shaped your understanding of God?

Photograph by Melanie Hunt

 

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Culture Faith Life

Practice Seeing Every Day

Vous, au contraire, vous êtes heureux, vos yeux voient et vos oreilles entendent!

But you, on the other hand, are blessed. Your eyes see and your ears hear! ~ Jesus (Matthew 13:16)

French flag

In a month, I travel to France! Meanwhile, I’ve opened my own practice. I practice packing, I practice sketching, I practice with paints, I practice my French. Je pratique.

Practice French

We sit at a table in the shade, the bouteille d’eau I sip from sweats moisture as the day warms. Un cahier rests by my elbow, its lined pages covered in scribbled notes written with le stylo I grip in my hand.

Right now my brain is cooking. The discussion is en français and my tutor has a lot to say. His paint stained hands gesture with the eloquence of a Parisienne, his grammar is foreign, yet familiar to my heart. Earnest and intelligent, this twenty-something will change the world.

We speak of a time in the past, when culture was not macdonaldized and our souls weren’t numbed by  TV. He waves a finger to remind himself–we can’t just go backwards in time. Desperate times are listed on every decade’s page. I chime in, “Les Miserables,” and he nods, “Exactement.”

He tells me his generation cannot be the hope, l’espoir d’humanitie, alone, but his children will complete the task. I recognize his vision, it mirrors my own longing for the world to be made new.

Quand j’etais une jeune fille, when I was young, my generation dreamed of change. Long-haired and starry-eyed we sang of  peace and justice and a world filled with love. We would be different, we would not conform. Je suis triste, I tell my tutor. I am sad. My generation is just as greedy and indifferent as those who lived before.

I quote a french expression, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Though a native of France, he has never heard the saying. Bon. Good. It’s a proverb for cynics, for those who’ve given up.

Our time has ended and I look across at this young man, his eyes filled with hope and the pain of the world. With hesitant French I compliment him. Vos yeux viorent…your eyes see.

Practice Seeing Every Day

Later I turn to Romans 8, a chapter filled with groaning. Creation groans to be set free from decay, God’s people groan for redemption, and the Spirit groans along. Unhampered by any pain of his own, the Spirit enters ours. He prays for us, for the world, with sighs too deep for words.

Do I pray along with the Spirit or close my eyes and reach for the remote control? My hope is no longer found in human solutions, but I’m a human God can use. An instrument of change in the Spirit’s hand, I must practice every day.

Jesus, help me share your light and hope with the open-eyed I encounter today. Amen

Where are you called to be the eyes that see?

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The Silence Of God Has Its Reasons

Music is the silence between the notes. ~Claude Debussy

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Writers connect the dots with a pencil of silence; words without white space will never be read.

Artists consider the “negative spaces.” The area around the important subject is painted with great care.

Musicians are as faithful in counting the rests and the pauses as they are in playing the notes.

The prophet Elijah stood on a mountain, discouraged and alone, and waited for God as the “sound of sheer silence” beat in his ears (1 Kings 19:12).

Are you waiting like Elijah to hear from God–in the spaces, in the rests, in the silence?

God’s Silence

I don’t remember how long it was, it seemed to last forever. As far as I could tell, God had checked out of my world.

My prayers fizzled and fell unheard to the ground, my Bible-reading was as refreshing as chalk. No hope, no encouragement, no sense of peace, I cried out each day, “God, I need feel your presence, to know you care, and answer prayer!” No reassurance came–no miraculous answer, no uplifting card arrived in the mail, my Bible refused to fall open to a verse meant just for me. Even God’s creation seemed indifferent.

Dusk is my favorite time to pray, when the boundary between earth and heaven seems thin. So I went for a walk one evening, certain I’d be given a sign–a shooting star, the benediction of a songbird, a rush of warmth for my long-chilled heart. By the end of the walk, my gut ached with sadness, “I matter so little to God, even a crumb of encouragement is too much to ask.”

As I neared my home, I was startled to hear a soft voice, singing a hymn I’d learned as a child. Be still my soul, the Lord is on thy side.

The voice, I discovered, was my own.

Silence Has Its Reason

The early church fathers taught what we forget to our sorrow: The silence of God has its reasons, and we will all feel the chill of its touch. The deepest desire of every human being is to draw near to God, and to believe his love without question. Nothing else will satisfy. But how can we know we hunger for God unless he withholds the food we like better?

After one line of that old hymn, I knew:

  • I really do love God, not only what he gives me.
  • I really do trust God, even when my unsteady mind forgets.

My wandering heart is learning faith, and silence is sometimes its tutor.

What have you learned in the silence of God?

 

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