Telling Stories

The other day, I was looking at the viewer stats on my blog and I became a little disheartened.  The most views I had on one day amounted to somewhere around fourteen.  Don't get me wrong: I haven't really advertised at all.  Yeah, I guess I put the link on both my facebook and twitter pages, but I think a little part of me is scared that people will- get this- actually start to read it.

There is a burden that comes with your voice in the public sphere, even if it is only on a blog.  And so I thought to myself, well, why am I doing this?  Why don't I just write in a private journal and keep those thoughts to myself?  I'm sure my readership wouldn't be too lost without me.

Then, I was rereading sections of Bittersweet by Shauna Niequist, and ran across this section.  I read,

"This is what I want you to do: tell your story.  Don't allow the story of God, the sacred, transforming story of what God does in a human heart to become flat and lifeless.  If we choose silence, if we allow the gospel to be told only on Sundays, only in sanctuaries, only by approved and educated professionals, that life-changing story will lose its ability to change lives."

I'm not pretending that I am not a religion major about to graduate with my degree.  I won't pretend that I haven't considered going to seminary and love doing some "light" theological and academic reading.  But at the same time, I refuse to pretend that I am an expert on anything.  The only thing I know is my experience, my life, and how I see that fitting into what I understand to be God's story.  At the end of the day, I have a responsibility to tell my story and how God works in the dark, dusty corners of my life.  I am the only one that can do that, so whether I have three people listening to me or three thousand, I will continue to speak to a world that desperately needs to hear.

On Flannery O'Connor and the Gruesomeness of Humanity

In one of my classes, we are currently reading selected essays and short stories by Flannery O'Connor and looking into her stories for theological implications.  Let me start off by saying that I like Flannery's stories.  I find her engaging and well-spoken and unpredictable.  But at the first read-through, I find myself going...

WHAT?!

Maybe this will give you an idea: In Good Men are Hard to Find, (SPOILER ALERT!) the Misfit and his gang shoot and kill an entire family they find stranded on the side of the road after a car accident.  That's it.  End of story.  The grandmother and villain have some snippets of conversation throughout, but the basic plot is that all the good guys die.

Regardless of whether or not you know that Flannery was a very orthodox Catholic, this is not a good ending for a story.  There is no satisfying resolution, no triumph of good over evil.  There really doesn't even seem to be an ending in the sense that we often expect.

If I were writing the story, the Misfit and his gang would ride off triumphantly (obviously in their black-and-white striped criminal shirts), only to be caught down the road by a wandering police officer.  The criminals would be caught and some semblance of justice would be brought to the story.

The only problem is, that isn't how the story goes.  And that isn't how Flannery intended it.

The ending is messy.  It's unsatisfying.  The story is gruesome and distasteful and horrible.  That's how life is.  Flannery writes this awful story and chops off the marginally happy ending, only to ask us, can you believe in the face of THIS?  Can you look at life in this way, in all the horrible, awful details, and still believe?  Even if there isn't a happy ending?  Even if something goes wrong and life just keeps spinning, oblivious and cold?  Even if God does not intervene?

In Christianity, we have a hope that God is going to tie up all of the frayed, loose ends.  As Andrew Peterson sings in his song, we know that "all shall be well."  Flannery, in a sense, asks us to hold off on that hope for the moment and look at what we've got.  She wants to say, yes, we have hope, but we also have pain.  Does my faith stand strong in the face of unspeakable horror?

So now the question is: what do you think of Flannery?  What does she challenge you to think about?

Rob Bell, Universalist?

There are so many different opinions being thrown around about the Rob Bell twitter-controversy, and seeing that they are mostly negative, I thought I might as well throw my two cents in.  So, for those of you who don't know, Rob Bell's new book, Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived drops at the end of March.  From reading excerpts and watching the promotion video, many different people- a la John Piper- are calling Rob a universalist. I won't go into it too much, but if you want to read the blog post Piper tweeted (it was written by Justin Taylor), you can see it here.

Here are my thoughts on the whole controversy:

1.  Give Rob a bit of a break.  None of us have read the book yet, and after we have, we can judge his comments, but all of this heretic talk is a bit too early.  Let's practice some Christian love and give the man the benefit of the doubt until we read it for ourselves.  Innocent until proven guilty.

2.  From watching the video, I think Rob may be trying to stir the pot a little.  He doesn't really come out and make any specific claims, just hints that he is going to challenge us to re-think some of our theology, specifically what we think about hell and salvation.  I personally don't expect him to come out and say that he is a universalist, but that he will show us a broader view of salvation than what many Christians are used to.  Maybe it's just a marketing ploy.  Maybe he is a universalist.  Who knows.

3.  Speaking of broader views of hell and salvation, a few of the things Rob hints at in the video are actually things I have some concerns with anyway, one of which is the traditional view of hell as a specific place.  I think of it as more of a state of non-being.  Hell is one of those vague Biblical concepts that is talked about, but not in detail.  The more traditional idea that it is a literal place comes more from the idea in Revelation about a lake of fire for Satan.  The Greek word, Gehenna is the only one of three words translated as hell that has any allusion to fire and brimstone (as I understand it... I am not a Greek scholar).  It actually refers to a real historical place, which is a  burning pit outside of Jerusalem.  So the word in the Bible could just be referring to this with no further allusion to a place of unending torture.  For me, it makes more sense to think of the gift of God as eternal life (which is repeated often in the Bible) and the rejection of that gift as not eternal life, or non-being.

4.  The idea of salvation that Rob alludes to is actually one that is a bit too narrow.  As Christians, it is easy to think that God is this god of justice and holiness and wrath that needs to punish humans for their sin.  However, superhero Jesus swoopes in and takes the punishment instead, thereby saving humanity and allowing us to connect with God again.  And that has some truth to it.  God is holy and humans do deserve death.  Jesus dies on a cross to repair the relationship between God and humans that is broken by sin.  This view is a bit too narrow, however.  If you believe in the trinitarian theology of orthodox Christianity, then God and Jesus are separate YET they are one.  So, God is Jesus and Jesus is God, while still being separate entities.  (btw I feel bad for the Holy Spirit right now, but what I'm going to say doesn't really apply to him at the moment.  Sorry Holy Spirit).  So, when we say that Jesus died on a cross, we are also saying that God sacrificed HIMSELF for humankind on a cross.  This is a bit different than looking at God as some giant, scary judge in the sky.

5.  Rob also talks a little about salvation being God saving humans from death.  Yes, as a Christian, if I believe I am saved, then I also believe that I am an heir to eternal life with God.  But, this is not the specific reason we were saved by Jesus 2,000 years ago.  From the garden of Eden, God recognized that the whole world was tainted by sin and was in desperate need of repair.  This includes everything: nature, weather, culture, music, art, business, relationships, humans, on and on and on.  God stepped into a broken world in order to renew and remake that world the way it was intended to be.  Jesus dies on a cross and overcomes death by coming back to life, but we have not yet seen the whole effects of this salvation.  The world is still groaning in anticipation, as the Bible puts it.  This, too, is just a broadening of the traditional view of God-saved-me-and-now-I'm-going-to-heaven.

I know I didn't flesh any of these out completely and if you'd like to talk about any of them, I'd be glad to grab coffee, but this is just a general idea of my immediate thoughts.  Theology is a sticky matter.  It is so easy to think that OUR interpretation of Scripture is complete and absolute, when the God we worship is so much bigger than that.

Again, I could be completely wrong about what Rob believes and discusses in his book, but I can't wait to get my hands on it and see for myself!  Here are links to a few blogs I found worth reading:

Jason Boyett's Blog

Gungor's Blog

What do you think?

Distance

Distance. We imagine it as far as the east is from the west. We imagine heaven so far above the earth that we can only faintly see, if we look hard enough, the softest glimmers of the golden-paved streets. We imagine God’s blessing, in its most pure and spotless form, far, far from our filth-stained hands and minds. We imagine God’s power and grace to be just far enough out of our reach that we can try with all of our might to grab the soft edges of His robe, but it is always too far away. Perhaps we imagine this because it is easier to be too filthy, too unlovable, too unworthy. To hold love and to hold grace and the awesome power of God is to have an awe-ful responsibility. Perhaps it is easier to pretend the distance is great, when it is really just within our grasp.

Hot Tea, Muffins, and Shauna Niequest

This morning I went with my good friend Mary to see Shauna Niequest, one of my favorite authors!  She was having a brunch event at the Edgehill cafe, which is about 3 minutes away from me on Music Row.  I had never been there before, but it is an impossibly cute little area and the cafe itself was incredible.  They had out muffins, tons of fruit salad, and mini cinnamon rolls to munch on while we listened to Shauna read from her newest book, Bittersweet, and answer all kinds of questions.  There were only about 30 women there, young and old, so it felt more like a intimate conversation between friends than a big, impersonal event.  I even got to meet her and take a picture with her at the end.  I feel so inspired by her writing and I am so so thankful for this wonderful opportunity to see and hear her!

Oh, one last thing, she said she has a new book coming out next spring entitled Bread and Wine.  I can't wait!  Here is a short excerpt from one of my favorite chapters, which is about being 25:

"Move, travel, take a class, take a risk.  Walk away, try something new.  There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither.  This season is about becoming.  Don't lose yourself at happy hour, but don't lose yourself on the corporate ladder either.

Stop every once in a while and go out to coffee or climb in bed with your journal.  Ask yourself some good questions like, Am I proud of the life I'm living?  What have I tried this month?  What have I learned about God this year?  What parts of my childhood faith and I leaving behind, and what parts am I choosing to keep with me for this leg of the journey?  Do the people I'm spending time with give me life, or make me feel small?  Is there any brokenness in my life that's keeping me from moving forward?

These years will pass much more quickly than you think they will.  You will go to lots of weddings, and my advice, of course, is to dance your pants off at every single one.  I hope you go to very few funerals. You'll watch TV and fun on the treadmill and go on dates, some of them great and some of them terrible.  Time will pass, and all of a sudden, things will begin to feel a little more serious.  You won't be old, of course.  But you will want to have some things figured out, and the most important things only get figured out if you dive into them now.

For a while in my early twenties I felt like I woke up a different person every day, and was constantly confused about which one, if any, was the real me.  I feel more and more like myself with each passing year, for better and for worse, and you'll find that, too.  Every year, you will trade a little of your perfect skin and your ability to look great without exercising for wisdom and peace and groundedness, and every year the trade will be worth it.  I promise.

Now is your time.  Become, believe, try.  Walk closely with people you love, and with other people who believe that God is very good and life is a grand adventure.  Don't spend time with people who make you feel like less than you are.  Don't get stuck in the past, and don't try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven't yet earned.  Give today all the love and intensity and courage you can, and keep traveling honestly along life's path."

                                                                                                 Shauna Niequest, Bittersweet

Life

I used to think I was so mature.
Now I find I keep discovering new steps in this crazy journey we call life.

Frustrated

My heart breaks tonight.  There are so many people in the world, many of them Christians, that are in need of so much divine healing and guidance.  Some are weighed down with physical issues that have no cure, some with depression that medicine cannot fix.  Some people cannot seem to find any hopeful or safe relationships, while others have been trampled by the worlds of poverty, drugs, homelessness, or violence.  Our world needs healing so badly, and the signs are everywhere.  A man spends all of his time at work in order to be more, do more, earn more.  A woman goes from man to man, never finding fulfillment, never finding a secure relationship.  Teenagers spend their time trying to be like the people on TV or the radio.  We seem to think if we could be "that" or have "that," our lives would be different.  Our churches feed us information about how to fix our marriages, how to get out of debt, and how to temper our baser nature.  We try to learn, we try to grow, we try to fix ourselves, but something is still missing.  Sometimes we even fall to our knees in prayer, or see a counselor, or try to move on and start over again.

Sometimes it seems that none of this works.

I guess you could say I'm in a melancholy mood tonight.  I realize that we are living in an "in-between" age: Christ has died and defeated sin, but the world is still not made whole.  Shalom is yet to come, this full, balanced, peaceful existence, just like we were created.  But not yet.  I am frustrated by the people who bicker back and forth, never making peace, but only getting angrier and angrier.  I am frustrated by politicians who think this is all "their" fault and they have the answer to our problems, I am frustrated by people who take advantage of others through greed or jealousy or hatred or prejudice.  I am frustrated by Christians who say they believe in Christ and all that entails but never even look a homeless person in the eye or help a family deep in poverty.  I am frustrated by a culture and a country that looks to more, more, more, at the expense of God's children everywhere.

Come, Lord Jesus.  We need healing.