Today was a strange day. I woke up early and went to breakfast with a friend. By the time I got home, I felt really low and spent most of the rest of the morning in bed. I was dreading a paper I had to write. I went to the grocery store. When I got back, I worked on my Church History script for a couple of hours. My SIM card came in the mail so now I have a phone. When I finally got to the paper around 3:00, I was shocked at how easy it was to finish. I sent in my rough draft and rewarded myself with Netflix. A friend wrote to say that he'll be working for TheosU (the website I'm filming a Church History course for) full time, a good sign because it means the company is expanding. After dinner, I read a chapter from Never Split the Difference to my mom. Now I'm listening to a podcast about the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. (You can listen to it here.) Hopkins was a poet I really appreciated in college. Here's his poem "God's Grandeur," which is one of my favorites:
A few days ago, I went on a walk through my neighborhood and discovered that another house in the community has a "free library" box out front. Inside, I found a copy of Chris Voss' Never Split the Difference, a book on negotiating that I've been meaning to read for a couple of years. Voss was an FBI hostage negotiator for about 20 years and his book is full of riveting stories and simple techniques.
The first technique Voss teaches is called "mirroring." It just means repeating the last one to three significant words someone has said. For example, if someone says, "Everyone's in town to see the big game today," you might reply with a question, "The big game?" and then let them elaborate. Mirroring tells people you're listening to them and it's a good way to build rapport.
The second technique I've learned so far is "labeling." This means paying close attention to the emotions you're picking up from someone and then stating them out loud in a non-judgmental way. For example, "it seems like you're a little worried about x" or "you sound pretty confident about y." Labeling diffuses negative emotions and reinforces positive ones. If you put out a label and then go silent for about 3-4 seconds, people will almost always reveal something about themselves you didn't already know. The information people reveal can be extremely useful.
What's most surprising about Voss' book is that although it's a book about high-stakes negotiating, at the end of the day it's really all about forging meaningful human connections quickly. It recognizes that people are far more driven by emotion than logic. If you get to the core of what's driving a person and identify with it, you can win their trust. Once they trust you, they're far more likely to "do business" with you. Whether you're negotiating with a hostage-taker, a business counterpart, or a 10-year-old who doesn't want to go to bed, you stand a better chance of getting what you want by genuinely listening and trying to put yourself in the other person's shoes.
I went to Wal-Mart on a whim the other night and picked up an electric tea kettle for $20. I’m in love with it. I had an electric kettle years ago, but it almost burned down my apartment because I kept forgetting to turn it off. This one cuts off automatically at exactly the right temperature. It also detaches from the heating element for easy cleaning. There's even a little gauge on the side that satisfies a desire I didn’t even know I had to know with metric precision exactly how much water I am brewing. I didn't know an appliance could make me so happy. Sometimes, it's the little things that get you through life.
As a Christian minister, I'm not supposed to say this, but I'll say it anyway because it's true: I have a really hard time with prayer. It rarely feels like anyone is listening.
I've been reading Stanley Grenz's beautiful book, Prayer: A Cry for the Kingdom, in which he highlights how central Jesus' relationship with the Father was. Jesus often withdrew from everything and everyone just to be alone with God.
I don't have that kind of inner life. Instead, I have a voice inside my head that usually wants to tear me down. I usually prefer distracting myself to prayer so that I don't have to hear that voice.
I can think of a couple of moments in my life, though, when I felt like God was listening. Years ago, when I was at Bible college, my Dad had been kidnapped in Haiti. I was at an all-school prayer meeting and I think I heard God tell me, "He's not going to die. I have more for him to do." I know I felt a sense of peace. A couple of days after that, my Dad was released.
On another occasion, someone I knew was trying to do great harm to my reputation and to the Bible college where I work. I came home one day and asked the Haitian lady who cooked for us to pray for me and she prayed big, bold Haitian prayers as I wept.
Later on, I fell asleep and I dreamed that I was in front of a government building. As I walked around to the back, I could see men in ski masks carrying boxes out and loading them into a big box truck. In the dream, I knew they were thieves and that if they saw me, they would kill me. Suddenly, they turned around and started walking toward me. I had nowhere else to go so I crawled into the shadow of the building and prayed that they wouldn't see me. They ran right by me, as though I had been made invisible. I woke up knowing that it would be alright and it was.
I don't know why God makes his presence so elusive or why prayer is so hard for me. But I'll keep praying, hoping that one day, I'll find the life that Jesus knew in the Father's presence.
In case you've ever asked yourself, "Why is this blog called 'The Evening Paper'?" (and even if you haven't), I will tell you.
It's from a poem by Billy Collins called "Litany." He starts by quoting another poet's metaphor, "You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine." Collins then adds a few more images to the pile before turning around in the second stanza and telling his beloved all the things she could NOT be. ("There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.")
In the last part of the poem, he tells the interlocutor what imagery he thinks best fits himself ("I am the sound of rain on the roof") before reassuring her that "you are still the bread and the knife."
One of the images he uses for himself is "the evening paper blowing down an alley." I like that image and I usually write my posts in the evening, so "The Evening Paper" seemed appropriate.
Here's a video of a 3-year-old kid reciting "Litany" from memory.
"You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.
It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.
It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine."
Yesterday, I wrote a little about Anselm, a figure from medieval church history who spent a large part of his life looking for a refuge. I resonate with Anselm's story even though unlike Anselm, I have never been homeless. For the most part, I had a happy childhood, but I did grow up in a foreign country. By the time I was a teenager, the time of a person's life when they most want to fit in, I stuck out like a sore thumb everywhere I went. As a result, I resonate with Anselm's longing for a refuge he can take shelter in.
Today, I want to talk about someone else from medieval church history, Peter Waldo. Peter was a successful merchant from southern France who in his 30s began to doubt almost everything the church he was preaching. Since he was a wealthy man, he was able to commission a couple of monks to translate the New Testament into French. He was shocked by what he read. The early church looked nothing like medieval Catholicism. Doctrines like indulgences, purgatory, and transubstantiation weren't even mentioned. When the pope declared that all Catholics had to believe in transubstantiation on pain of death, he was profoundly troubled. He kept his misgivings to himself, though. He didn't want to rock the boat.
Around 1175, however, Peter had an experience that rocked the boat for him and knocked him out of it. At a garden party he was hosting, a close personal friend who was about the same age as him suddenly collapsed and died on the spot. Peter spent weeks grieving the man, who had been the picture of health, and wondering where his soul had gone. He wondered where his would have gone if he had been the one to die. During this time, he read his New Testament for solace.
The preaching of Jesus convinced Peter that God was calling him to sell his material goods and give the proceeds to the poor. He began preaching on the street. His first sermon was based on Jesus' words. "You cannot serve two masters - God and money." He began telling people that the Bible doesn't say anything about purgatory or transubstantiation and calling them to a simple life of humility and obedience to Christ. Before long, he had several followers who called themselves the "Poor in Spirit." Since they contradicted much of what the church was teaching, the local bishop banned him from preaching. Peter appealed his case to the pope in Rome, but the pope considered him a menace to the church. Peter refused to stop preaching, so the church excommunicated him.
Peter's message spread like wildfire anyway and he spent the rest of his life preaching and evading church authorities. Eventually, his followers (the Waldensians) were forced to move high into the Italian Alps, which was the only place they could be safe from persecution. Four hundred years later, during the Protestant Reformation, they aligned themselves with the Reformers in nearby Switzerland.
A couple of years ago, I had an experience similar to Peter. I was awakened at 2 a.m. by my phone buzzing. When I opened it, I had a text message that said that my college roommate had died. Like Peter's friend at the garden party, he had been the picture of health. He had ambitious business plans, a wife and two beautiful children. Like Peter, his death has caused me to ask what the most important thing in life really is. Unless a person has something worth dying for, I'm not sure they're really living. Peter Waldo found that something and left no doubt about which master he was serving.
When Anselm was 7 years old, his mother told him that God lived “on high.” This planted a desire deep within Anselm, who grew up in the shadow of the Italian Alps, to climb to the top of the mountain and meet God.
One night, as Anselm slept, he dreamt that he took such a hike. Along the way, he met workers who claimed to be serving God, but who were for the most part lazy, irresponsible, and dishonest. (Anselm grew up in a very corrupt era in church history and he may already have picked up on that as a child.) Anselm made up his mind to tell God about these people when he arrived.
When Anselm arrived at the top, however, he was so struck by God's glory that he forgot what he had come to say. He describes having a long conversation with God in which the Lord answered all his questions before feeding him with the whitest, warmest, most delicious bread he had ever tasted in his life. In the dream, God's presence was a place of refuge. Anselm never forgot that dream.
When Anselm was 12, his mother died, leaving him alone with his father, a violently abusive alcoholic. In his later writings, Anselm describes working hard to please his father to no avail. No matter how much he did, it was never enough.
Finally, at 15, Anselm ran away from home. For the next five years, he wandered across Europe. There has never been a safe time for a teenager to run away, but 12th-century Europe was especially unsafe. Anselm was always at risk of being captured by a local land baron and forced to work the land as a serf. He learned to be light on his feet.
Finally, at the age of 20, he ended up at the Abbey of Bec in Normandy, France. The abbot, Lanfranc, was one of the greatest scholars of his day, but as he spoke to Anselm, he realized that Anselm's intellect was greater than his own. He talked him into becoming a monk. Anselm began teaching young men and eventually wrote books.
Unlike most other teachers of the day, Anselm (perhaps influenced by his upbringing) refused to physically punish his students. When someone asked him why, he replied that men do not beat trees to get them to grow straight, and men are worth more than trees. His contemporaries noticed that his students were always engaged and eager to learn.
Anselm’s kindness toward his students extended to other living creatures. Once, when he was out on horseback with several other monks, a rabbit ran beneath his horse with two dogs in hot pursuit. The other monks began laughing at the rabbit's ridiculous attempt to hide from the dogs behind the legs of Anselm's horse. Anselm, who probably saw something of his homeless, teen-aged self in the quivering, frightened creature, was livid. He rebuked the monks, saying, "This creature has come to us for refuge, and you laugh at it. How many people come to us for refuge, and do you laugh at them as well?"
Refuge is a theme that Anselm returns to often in his writings. He tried to be a place of refuge to his students, as the Abbey had been to a homeless wanderer, as his mother had been to an abused child, and as the dream about the mountain had been to a 7-year-old growing up in the shadow of the Italian Alps.
Have you ever seen someone so good it made you feel bad by comparison? In this story, Peter witnesses a miracle. A fisherman by trade, Peter had fished all night and caught nothing. In the morning, when he got back to shore, Jesus got into his boat and taught a crowd gathered on the shore for a while. After he was done, he told Peter, who was surely tired after a sleepless night, to put out into the deep and let down his nets. Peter's first response was probably one of annoyance.
“Master, we worked all night and didn't catch anything!" he said. Maybe Jesus just stared at him for a minute.
"But," Peter continued, "if you insist, Lord, I'll throw out the net again."
Of course, he ends up catching so many fish that he has to call over another boat. And then they catch so many together that both boats begin to sink.
Luke says that this incident caused Peter to see a lot more than the fish.
"Depart from me," he told Jesus. "Lord, I'm a sinner." Somehow, this miracle opened his eyes to Jesus' true nature. His awareness of Jesus' holiness made him aware of his own sinfulness.
I've never seen Jesus, but I have had this experience several times with his people.
The innocence of some believers convicts me of my hard-heartedness.
The faithfulness of some believers makes me aware of how inconsistent I am.
The deep joy of some believers exposes the shallowness of my walk with God.
The confidence of some believers' prayers puts my tepid prayers to shame.
The love some believers radiate makes the lovelessness in my own heart obvious.
The way Jesus answers Peter gives me hope, though.
"And Jesus said to Simon, 'Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.'" (Luke 5:10)
Notice both what Jesus says and what he doesn't say.
Jesus doesn't tell him, "Come on, man, you're not so bad" or "You've got your good points too" or "Look how far you've already come." He doesn't say anything that contradicts Peter's self-assessment of being a sinful man.
What he does tell him is "Do not be afraid." Peter is correct that there is an infinite chasm between Jesus' holiness and his own sinfulness, but it has been bridged by grace.
What's more, Jesus isn't content with just bridging the chasm to Peter. He will make Peter a bridge across the chasm between Jesus and others. Peter isn't just a lost soul who has been found. He's a found soul who's going to get to go fishing.
Just as Jesus has given Peter more fish than he knew what to do with, he's also going to give Peter more new believers than he knows what to do with. There will be so many that he will need help from the other disciples. He will help pull many, many lost souls into the kingdom of God. And it won't be because he's good enough. It will be because he has faith. "If you insist, Lord, I'll throw out the net again."
In the moments when we feel inadequate, I don't think the Lord would contradict that sense of inadequacy. I think he would simply tell us not to be afraid. Don't be afraid of the Lord. He loves you. Don't be afraid of your sins disqualifying you. They're forgiven. Don't be afraid of not being able to do the job he's given you. You can't do it in your strength, but he can do it through you in his.
Pope Innocent III aimed to be the most powerful pope in history. He wasn't much for humility. At his consecration, he let everyone know exactly where things were headed by declaring himself “the vicar of Jesus Christ, successor of Peter, the Lord’s anointed, Pharaoh’s god, set between God and man, lower than God but higher than man.”
Once consecrated, he immediately set about bending "Pharaoh" (the kings of secular Europe) to his will.
In 1200, when King Philip of France left his lawfully married wife to take up with his mistress, Innocent ordered him to go back to his wife. When Philip refused, Innocent put all of France under an interdict, which meant that he closed all the churches and forbade priests to dispense any sacraments. In a day when most people believed that the Mass was a sacrifice necessary to forgive sin and help you avoid going to hell, this freaked a lot of people out. Public pressure eventually forced Philip to bow the knee to Innocent.
In 1202, Innocent picked a decade-long fight with Germany over who got to be the next Holy Roman Emperor. He eventually got his way, installing a man named Otto on the throne. When Otto went back on his promises to Innocent, though, Innocent persuaded France to invade Germany and overthrow him. King Philip, who was eager to get back in Innocent's good graces, was only too happy to oblige.
In 1205, Innocent fell out with King John of England. John had refused to accept his choice for the powerful position of Archbishop of Canterbury. Innocent placed England under an interdict and excommunicated John, but John held out for seven years. Finally, Innocent called on France to invade England. Under threat of invasion, the barons of England revolted against John and put an end to his stubbornness.
Innocent's ability to bend Pharaoh to his will made him the most powerful pope in history. All of Innocent's political machinations had an unintended side effect, however--they weakened King John permanently. In 1215, the barons revolted against him again. This time, they cornered him, and forced him to sign the "Magna Carta," which stated that the king was not above the law and that Englishmen were entitled to due process.
Innocent hated the Magna Carta because it implied that kings' authority came from the people rather than from God. He immediately declared it to be “null, and void of all validity forever.” King John died the following year, however, and England descended once again into civil war. The Magna Carta remained English law.
One of the things studying history teaches you is that history has a mind of its own. It seizes the reins from those who think they control it and gallops away. Ironically, Pope Innocent, a man who believed firmly in the divine right of kings and even more firmly in the divine authority of popes, had indirectly helped lay the foundation for limited, constitutional government.
Every once in a while, a truth I've been meditating on crystallizes into a sentence. Here's the latest: "No one's sin comes from nowhere." Or, as a friend put it recently: "All sin is birthed from a legitimate need that takes a wrong turn."
I once saw this truth illustrated in the life of someone who tore a community apart with exaggerated and even false accusations against people in positions of authority. Initially, I was angry. I knew a little about this person's backstory, though. Years ago, a member of their family was brutally assaulted by a person in a position of authority. The family member lost vision in one eye, which in turn caused them to lose an athletic scholarship to the university they were attending. Of course, knowing this background didn't excuse the person's sin of slander, but it did put it into context. I could understand how someone who had been wronged by authority figures could become motivated by a distorted sense of justice to do harm to authority figures in return. There's nothing wrong with a desire for justice, but this person had allowed bitterness to corrupt it into something else.
The point, again, is that no one's sin comes from nowhere.
Even the original sin in the Garden of Eden illustrates this truth: Adam and Eve wanted to grow into Godlikeness, and God had indeed intended for them to be like him. He had created them in his own image and given them the possibility of freely choosing good over evil by forbidding them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If they had chosen to do what was right, they would have become more like God because God freely chooses to do good all the time.
Instead, they chose to believe the Serpent's lie. The Serpent told them that God was holding out on them. God knew, the Serpent said, that if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would be like God and God didn't want them to be all that they could be. If they ate the fruit, however, they could bypass God and become like God apart from God's help. Instead of becoming like God through faith and obedience, they tried to become like God by usurping and disobeying him.
Their sin didn't come from nowhere. "Becoming like God" was a legitimate desire. Disobeying God was the worst way of trying to fulfill that desire. In fact, it didn't fulfill them at all. It cut them off from God.
In the fullness of time, however, the Son of God became a man. Through his obedience to the Father unto death, even death on a cross, he showed what it actually looked like for a human being to become like God. God honored his obedience by raising him from the dead, giving him the name that is above every name and offering eternal life to all who believe in him. As Athanasius, a 4th-century Christian, put it, "The Son of God became man so that men could become sons of God."
G.K. Chesterton once said, "Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God." How would it change us if we recognized that a person's sin is always in some way an expression of their deepest need? Without excusing the sin, how can we point them to how Christ perfectly meets that need?
Late last night, I was scrolling through Amazon Prime, looking for something to watch, when a series called "Modern Love" caught my eye. The second episode, titled "When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist," looked interesting.
In the opening scene, a New York Times reporter interviews a young software developer who has invented a popular dating app. At the end of the interview, as she closes her notepad, she asks him, "One more thing: have you ever fallen in love?"
Surprised, he tells her, "No one's ever asked me that before."
"Well, do you want to tell me the story?" she continues. "Because there's obviously a story. It's written all over your face."
He begins telling her about the woman he had met at a job interview right after he arrived in New York City. She had gone in first, but he skipped his interview to be there when she came back out so he spend the rest of the day with her. Before long, he had met her parents. Everything went perfectly for the first six months.
"Her dad even liked me," he says wistfully.
"So what happened?" the reporter pries.
Six months into their relationship, his girlfriend had confessed to him that she had run into her high-school boyfriend, who had recently gotten divorced. One drink led to another. Before long, she had slept with him. She apologized tearfully, but he no longer trusted her. He broke up with her and moved out of their apartment.
He couldn't forget about her, though. A few years later, he saw her on the street with someone else. He called her on the phone and she told him she'd been engaged for the last two years.
"Two years?" the reporter asks. "That's a long time."
He agrees.
"So are you gonna do anything about it?"
He says no.
"If you still love her, you have to at least give it a shot," the reporter tells him. "If you don't, you'll always wonder what could have been."
"How do you know?" he asks.
"Do you have a few minutes?" she asks. He says yes.
She tells him that when she was young, she met an English man while on vacation in the Caribbean. They shared a powerful connection. He had promised her that he would come to her apartment in Paris a few months later once she had finished a journalistic assignment in Afghanistan. He never showed up.
For two decades, she had wondered why. One day, while she was signing books at a bookstore in upstate New York, she looked up and there he was. They spent the next several hours catching up. They were both married with children. They had both considered divorce.
He had told her that he had come to Paris but had simply lost her address. She had written it in a copy of "Anna Karenina." Someone had stolen it on a train when he went to the restroom. Since her number was unlisted and they had no mutual friends and the Internet did not yet exist, there was no way for him to find her. By the time Google did exist, it showed that she was married with three children. With sadness in his eyes, he had shown her the ticket for his flight to Paris 17 years earlier.
Their reunion had given both of them closure in different ways. It convinced her to leave an unhappy marriage. It convinced him to fix his unhappy marriage. They hadn't ended up together but at least now she knew why.
“If you still love her,” she tells the young man, “and she’s not yet married, you have to tell her. If you don't, it will mess you up."
Three months later, she gets an email from him asking for another meeting. When she gets to the restaurant, she learns that the reservation is for three. The young woman he told her about had seen her article in the newspaper and knew who he was talking about. When he called her a few days later, she had already broken her engagement to a man she didn't really love. She married the software developer, who had found the courage to call her after talking to the reporter.
"Thank you," they tell her.
The amazing thing about this story is that it actually happened (although some of the details were changed for TV). Justin McLeod, the founder of Hinge, is now happily married to Kate. You can read Deborah Copaken's 2015 piece about the "happily ever after" that almost didn't happen here.
"The sins of some are obvious, reaching the place of judgment ahead of them; the sins of others trail behind them." (1 Timothy 5:24)
If you could choose between being a nobody in this life and being forgiven, or being incredibly successful in this life but having your reputation ruined immediately after death, which would you choose?
Ravi Zacharias chose the latter. Zacharias was arguably the most successful Christian apologist of his generation. After his death last May, some of the biggest names in evangelicalism eulogized his faithfulness and intelligence. The same day he died, however, women began coming forward claiming that he had sexually manipulated and abused them.
The more his organization investigated, the more came to light. It was all true. He had abused several women in multiple countries. He had hundreds of photos of women on his phone. For years, the only person who was onto his double life was an atheist blogger no one paid any attention to.
Now, his family will have to live the rest of their lives grappling with the double life he led. The organization he named after himself will have to find a new name and get as far away from his legacy as it can. The young apologists he mentored will have to wonder whether the man they respected ever really believed the Gospel he preached. As journalist Rod Dreher put it, "How deep must your perversion be to think that you can get away with this stuff forever? ... either you must be psychotically double-minded, or you must not really believe in God."
When I first heard Ravi's story, I found myself wondering why God had allowed him to escape the consequences of his sin in this life. Why did God let him go to his grave surrounded by the adulation of millions of admirers? Another part of me thinks, "Maybe that's the punishment." No one will ever be able to say he was sorry because no one ever heard his confession. That door is no longer open to him.
When I was in college in Portland, Oregon, I went to a Sunday night service where Celestin Musekura was speaking on the power of forgiveness.
His testimony was incredible. He had been in seminary in Kenya in 1994 when genocide broke out in his home country of Rwanda. He rushed home to be with his family but they had been displaced by the violence and he had to search for them in several refugee camps. In one of the camps, he came across a group of people who were worshiping Jesus. He felt inspired to get up and started preaching about forgiveness and the love of God. Miraculously, while he was preaching, his mother heard his voice and came running forward.
After this, Celestin took the message of forgiveness around the country. It wasn't what people wanted to hear. On several occasions, members of his own tribe threatened and beat him savagely. Once, the police detained him. They suspected he was a subversive agent. After three years of this, five of his family members were murdered in a revenge killing. He says the Lord told him to forgive the killers, so he did. To his surprise, forgiveness benefited him more than it did the killers. It set him free. After that, no one questioned whether his preaching was sincere.
Eventually, Celestin founded an organization called ALARM (African Leadership and Reconciliation Ministries). The question of how genocide could break out in a country that was 90% Christian and considered a missionary success story bothered him. He realized that most people who had been "converted" had never been discipled into a Christian worldview. He began training pastors who could in turn disciple laypeople. He says God told him, “They won’t kill each other if they’re taught that their core identity is Christian,” not Hutu or Tutsi.
More recently, Celestin has been working with public officials--legislators, judges, lawyers, and law enforcement officers--to develop practices of "restorative justice," seeking not just punishment but healing and reconciliation and a better future for the whole community.
The night I listened to Celestin speak, I wept openly in the pew. He has a strong anointing from God. Everywhere he goes, his story changes the atmosphere and brings hope. There's nothing exceptional about him, though--he's just exceptionally obedient. Jesus told Celestin to love and forgive his enemies, so instead of doing what most of us do--arguing that our case is an exception, making excuses, half-obeying--he obeyed.
Who knows how many lives have been changed forever because Celestin Musekura obeyed the Lord? Who knows what could happen if we would do the same?
When I was a teenager, I was extremely lonely. I was a missionary kid and I had never fit anywhere. Most of the year, I lived in Haiti, where I got picked on all the time. During the summer, however, my family would travel back to the United States so that my parents could speak at all the churches that supported them. In some churches, people would tell me how wonderful my parents were for doing what they were doing for God. I hated how fake I had to be in response. I wasn't even sure I believed in God.
There was one small Baptist church, though, where the youth pastor was this aging hippie who knew how to play guitar and bass. He was obsessed with the Beatles but he knew all of the music I listened to too. I was shocked when I started picking out "The Man Who Sold the World" by Nirvana and he knew exactly what it was. He invited me, my brother, and my sister to go to summer camp in West Virginia with his youth group later that summer. I'd had a lot of experience with church activities that turned out to be terrible so I almost didn't go but at the last second, I decided to give it a shot.
I had a great time. In the mornings, we have breakfast and chapel. After that, we would break into groups and do different activities. In the evenings, after dinner, there was always a big campfire. We would sing worship songs together and then someone would usually share a reflection out of the Bible.
One night, on the way back to the dorm from campfire, I saw her. I had seen her earlier that day and thought she was cute, but now she was walking right next to me. She was shivering because it gets cold in the mountains at night and she had forgotten to wear a hoodie to campfire. I introduced myself in a really smooth way: "Are you cold?" She nodded. I had an extra shirt on and I should have offered it to her but I was too nervous to think of things like that. I can't remember exactly what I said but we got through basic introductions. When we got to her dorm, I think she said, "Well, good night, John Adams." Something in her voice told me she liked me.
I hung out with her the rest of the week. We were inseparable. We kept in touch all through that year and then went back to the same summer camp the next summer. That year, we rode the same bus home for 10 hours back to North Carolina. I slipped my arm around her when she got tired and she slept on my shoulder. I went off to college that fall and she sent me a letter a day until she ran out of stationery.
I saw her again the next summer, but it wasn't the same. I had an internship at a newspaper. She had her own car and a job and new friends. I didn't know what to say. At the end of the summer, I finally poured my heart out to her in an e-mail and told her exactly how I felt about her. She wrote me back and told me she was dating someone else. A few months later, they were engaged. A few months after that, they were married. That was over 15 years ago. We haven't kept in touch.
Is there a point to this story? I'm not sure. Maybe only that if I'm still not married, it's because no one else has ever made me feel the way I felt when she fell asleep on my shoulder. I'm not sure anyone ever will.
Some days, I feel unlovable. Today was one of those days. Lots of anxiety.
I've been in physical pain all day. The groin muscle I strained the other day while working out is still hurting. I'm worried I'm going to have to go to the doctor. I'm already dreading filling out all the forms.
Some days, I get tunnel vision. I feel like I don't know what my life is about. I feel like I'll never know what my life is about.
Some days, I feel like God doesn't care about me. He doesn't see me. Or if he does, he's punishing me for something.
Some days, I feel like the world would be better off without me.
Some days, I have to remind myself that this day won't last forever. Tomorrow is another day.
Today makes 35 years since the Duvalier dictatorship fell in Haiti. Jean-Claude Duvalier went into exile on this day in 1986. I told my mom that this morning and she recalled crawling under the windows in their apartment on Delmas 33 with their newborn baby (me). There was so much gunfire outside that she was afraid a stray bullet would come through the window.
Today was also the original end date for the Haitian president's five-year term. Inauguration Day for the current president, Jovenel Moise, was supposed to be February 7, 2016, but an election crisis delayed his inauguration by one year. Naturally, the president has always maintained that he still gets five years from his inauguration, which means he has one year left. The political opposition in Haiti vowed strikes and protests to force him to leave. The Biden administration published a statement this weekend indicating that it is also the opinion of the U.S. government that his term should last one more year. The protesters seem to have succeeded in shutting things down for a few days but it is unlikely that they will be able to force the president out. There has been a wave of kidnappings of schoolchildren over the last year, however, that has been making life miserable in the capital. It likely is connected to the political opposition as well, who want to make life as difficult as possible until they get power.
I'm in the USA and though I feel a little guilty enjoying my unplanned sojourn, I have to admit that it's nice not to have to worry about strikes and protests in Haiti from where I sit. Americans really do not know how good they have it relative to much of the world. In the USA, today was not remarkable for any reason except that it was Super Bowl Sunday. My Dad and I watched Tom Brady and the Bucs clobber the Chiefs. There were no power outages, the gas stations all have fuel, and children will go to school tomorrow without fear. I pray that peace comes to Haiti--I've been praying for that my whole life--but I'm not holding my breath. People were dodging bullets in Haiti when I was a baby and people are doing the same there today. Some things never seem to change.
They say, "No good deed goes unpunished." At least, that's how it feels every time I try to exercise.
A couple of years ago, I started playing a lot of basketball to stay in shape. I was working as a high school teacher and I would play with the kids before going home. Over time, however, I sprained both my ankles so badly that I had to give up playing.
More recently, I've been motivated to get back into shape and get rid of the belly fat that seems to mark every man in his 30s. I started doing ab workouts off an app on my phone called Fitbod in order to get rid of my gut. Before long, however, I discovered that this workout strained muscles that had become vulnerable in my 20s due to an operation I had to repair a hernia & hydrocele. I guess the ab workouts are out for now.
My next plan is to go running more often so I bought a pair of running shoes today. As soon as the strained muscles stop hurting, I'll start trying to build up the amount of distance I can run. I'm hoping that I can lose the belly without running into any new obstacles (literally or metaphorically) to staying healthy.
A friend asked on Facebook, "So . . . why aren't we celebrating Jewish, Chicano, Slavic, or Irish History Month?" As often happens these days, a lot of (mostly white) commenters jumped on him in the comments. I decided to answer his question this way:
Most of the other commenters are focusing on the moral/ethical aspects in responding to your question, but a historical answer would be, "Because they asked for it." BHM goes back a long way to Negro History Week, which was created in the 1920s to highlight the accomplishments of black Americans. And the reason for that would probably be that no other group has had as difficult of a time assimilating into the larger culture (which is not to say that those other groups have never struggled in American society). In white-supremacist narratives, blacks were always farthest from the "ideal." Negro History Week was a way of creating a counter-narrative.
To the question of, "Why does this one group get special treatment in having its accomplishments highlighted?", the most common answer seems to be, "Because this one group received special mistreatment for a long time and had its accomplishments prevented, discounted or ignored."
Personally, though, I don't think guilt is the best way of motivating people to appreciate black history. I think all Americans should want to know about, acknowledge and appreciate the uniquely difficult path African-Americans have had to take in this nation, if for no other reason, than that it is uniquely interesting and inspiring. I don't think you have to be black to draw hope from the fact that the light of the image of God could never be put out and that so many encountered Jesus in the depths of their despair and found the strength to push back and push through. Black history also highlights human sinfulness in that it shows the gap between American ideals and reality. The difficulty and intermittent bursts of success this nation has had in achieving unity amid diversity remind us that this world is not our home and that true and ultimate unity will only be experienced in God's kingdom but that we get glimpses of it here and now on earth.
I watched a cheesy movie with my mom tonight that I hadn't seen since high school: Runaway Bride.
Julia Roberts doesn't know who she is so she keeps ditching men at the altar. Richard Gere, a journalist from New York City who's assigned to write a story on her ends up falling in love with her. She ditches him at the altar before coming around and proposing to him at his New York apartment.
It's a silly movie but something in it resonated with me. It's taken me a long time to figure out who I am and what I want to do (and even now, I don't fully know). I've gone through a lot of different opportunities for love but haven't ended up with anyone. The closest I got was in high school. Sometimes, I mope about still being single at 35.
At other times, I look at my friends, many of whom are now divorced and I feel grateful. It's probably better to avoid the altar until you know who you are. If you don't know that, no one else will be able to tell you.
"Why would you trust a God you fear?"
I was listening to Alisa Childers' podcast today and her guest, Josh Morris, told the story of ex-Christian progressive guru Rob Bell posing the above question to him after noticing a tattoo on his arm that said "Fear God." Morris said he was so agitated by this question and his lack of a good answer to it that he eventually had it altered to cover up the words.
In his book Tactics, Greg Koukl writes that questions are powerful, for several reasons: They're non-threatening, they can teach us a lot about what other people think, they allow us to make progress on a point without seeming pushy, and they put us in the driver's seat of the conversation. They put a pebble in someone's shoe that can eventually lead them to change their mind.
Not all questions are innocent, though. Some questions, like the serpent's in the garden ("Did God really say...?") are designed to cause the hearer to doubt a belief they have a legitimate right to hold. These kinds of questions can force people into a corner in which there are no good options.
Koukl writes that the best answer to a loaded question is often another question that requests clarification. Bell's question is designed to make the hearer sweat, but a request for clarification would put the ball back in his court and subtly expose the equivocation his query depends on: "What do you mean by fear? How are you defining that word?" Or maybe, "If your God doesn't cause you to tremble, is he really God?"
Tonight, I went to the men's accountability group that I go to when I'm in the United States. It's a group of guys who do things like study the Bible, confess their sins to each other, and pray for each other. Tonight, they were inducting a new "covenant brother." He shared his testimony and the story of how he lost his kids. It was heart-wrenching, but there was also redemption in it. There were several other men in the group who have confessed shocking things. They're a rag tag bunch. What they have in common is that Jesus saved them.
When I meet with the group, I always think, "So this is what life looks like behind the mask." When I think I'm alone, I'm not. When I think I'm terrible, the guy next to me has always done something as bad or worse. When I feel lost and scared, like my life has no meaning, the others remind me that we all feel that way. And then they pray for me and invite me over for dinner.
I've lived most of my life alone. I'm grateful to be able to live this part of it in a community.
"For I have seen your face, which is like seeing the face of God, and you have accepted me." (Genesis 33:10)
As the oldest son of Isaac and Rebekah, Esau was the natural heir to Isaac and thus the heir to God's promise to make Abraham a great nation that would bless the entire world. (Gen. 12:1-3) All who blessed him would be blessed; all who cursed him would be cursed.
There was just one problem: Esau's little brother, Jacob, wanted the promise more than Esau did. One day, Esau came in from the field, famished. Jacob, knowing that Esau was impetuous, convinced him to trade his birthright for a bowl of stew. Esau foolishly took the deal.
Esau usually gets a terrible rap for throwing away the blessing. In the New Testament, the author of Hebrews calls Esau "unholy" and uses his story as a metaphor for sinners who trade their eternal salvation for temporary pleasure. "For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears." (Heb. 12:17)
But that wasn’t the end of Esau's story. In Genesis 33, after years spent in a far country land running from Esau, who wanted to kill him, Jacob obeyed God and returned to the land of Canaan. Jacob, who knew that he would run into Esau on his way home, was worried. The night before the reunion, Jacob had an encounter with an angel. He stayed up all night wrestling until the angel finally won the bout by touching Jacob's hip, leaving him with a permanent limp. Afterward, Jacob named the place Peniel (face of God), "for I have seen the face of God."
The next day, when Jacob met Esau, Esau's reaction was not at all what he expected. Esau ran to him, hugged him, kissed him, and wept over him. This scene is so moving that it probably inspired part of Jesus' Parable of the Prodigal Son. Unlike the Prodigal Son story, however, this story isn’t about a good character (the kindhearted father) and a bad character (the treacherous son). It's about two bad characters: Esau treated God's blessing as a means to an end, trading the promises for a bowl of stew. Jacob treated his brother as a means to an end, using a bowl of stew to take God's blessing away from Esau.
The resolution of this story is surprising. Jacob, who lied, cheated, and stole in pursuit of God, came to see the face of God in his brother: "For I have seen your face, which is like seeing the face of God, and you have accepted me." (Gen. 33:10) Esau, who thought he had lost God's blessing to Jacob, received it back in a way through Jacob: "Please accept my blessing that is brought to you..." (Gen. 33:11) Neither brother was healed until he had become a means of grace to heal the other.
"This ain't a song, Mr Gallagher, It's a meditation, a moan, a mantra - with a grinding, tarmac-digging, mind-cutter of a melod...
