Postscript to the Church from the Lonely

So, for those of you who read my recent post, “A Letter To the Church from the Lonely,” this is a follow-up.

It turns out that the church I described is actually a great place full of nice people. I’ve met some of them now. As it also turns out, a number of them meant to meet me that first week, but their child spit up on them or they really had to go to the bathroom or they got sidetracked by the worship leader. (I know this because they told me this when they introduced themselves the next week.)

Guess I was supposed to experience a really lonely Sunday. God works in mysterious ways, including baby vomit.

Anyway, I went to a singles event that this church hosted. Interestingly enough, one of the points that the pastor addressed in his message to us that night was loneliness. He said that singles—and married people—need to find the answer to their loneliness in a deeper relationship with God. Then he quoted something he remembered John Piper saying about singles asking why God hadn’t provided them with a husband/wife: “That’s like asking for a glass of water when you’ve been given an entire ocean.”

This is God's love. There are lots of songs comparing it to an ocean, so that's cool I guess.

For the most part, I agree with all of that. But one question kept going through my head over and over:

“What if the reason we ask for a glass of water in addition to the sea because God made us thirsty?”

Not for marriage necessarily. Just for relationship with other people.

It’s interesting to me that when Adam was alone in the Garden, God didn’t say, “Hey, you have a relationship with me. That should be enough for you.” He said, “It is not good for man to be alone.”

Did you catch that? Alone. Even with God—even in a relationship with God that was unbroken by sin—it was possible to be alone, and thus lonely. The ocean wasn’t enough.

Introducing My Jr. High Self

Last night, I answered the question “What were you like as a junior higher?” with a story about how I used to smuggle 1000 page apologetics books out of the library and hide them whenever someone came by. This was because I felt vaguely guilty for having doubts about my faith and thought the best course of action (obviously) was to read a bunch of scholarly books that were decidedly not aimed at a thirteen-year-old audience. It was a struggle, at least by page 834, when we got into cosmology (probably the moment where I decided never to take physics).

This story was followed by a chorus of “Oh, that explains so much!” from the people I was with, which I conveniently ignored (after punching a few of the offenders).

But then I realized that, well…it did explain so much. Be a Heretic Monday now makes complete sense, as does the kind of things I say to my girls at youth group and post on my blog. I am a firm believer in Christians’ responsibility to think about their faith, question what others are teaching them, and communicate honestly with God and others. And it’s because of my fears and struggles as a junior higher.

As others shared bits of their life in middle school, it was interesting to see that pattern continue. Some didn’t mention specifically how they had changed, or what in their life now was a monument to a weakness or immaturity they had experienced six to ten years ago, but I could often see it. It was like a gallery of before and after shots, only with the grace of God doing the transformation instead of plastic surgery or a weight loss program.

I love that. I love that we don’t have to remain who we are, that seeing how we’ve changed in the past can remind us that we are constantly growing and changing even now.

It's More Blessed To Receive Than To Give

If you think I made a typo in the title, you’re wrong. In a Christian culture that emphasizes serving others and doing great things for God, it can be a strange message. But, here it goes: STOP GIVING.

Or, at least, stop just giving. Contrary to popular belief, being needy is not a spiritual weakness. Sometimes, giving too much and refusing to ever take from others can actually be a sin.

You might think that sounds crazy, right, or at least mildly anti-Christian. But wait. Wait right there. I have C.S. Lewis on my side for this one.

Take that.

But, just in case name-dropping a popular Christian writer isn’t enough for you to blindly accept my claim, here’s the actual logic behind it.

This is a passage from The Four Loves, where Lewis talks about charity, the love that’s completely undeserved: “This, though a sort of love we need, is not the sort we want. We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness, usefulness. The first hint that anyone is offering us the highest love of all is a terrible shock.”

The Orthodox Heretic

Today, I posted on Facebook about how I accidentally completed an online doctrinal questionnaire that I didn’t really need to fill out for the job I was applying for. Doing so, though, helped me think about some really important things, so I thought I’d put some excerpts here.

These are not the actual words I wrote. I sounded smarter, gave examples of how this impacted my life, and generally tried not to pick any fights. What I have here is the spirit behind what I wrote for many of these.

They’re important things to think about…even if you don’t have to fill out any applications in the near future.

The Trinity: “We believe in one God — eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent existing as three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one in nature, attributes, power, and glory.”

You want a God that makes perfect sense? You’ll have to invent one. And believe me, you won’t end up with something that even remotely resembles the God of Christianity.

Also, Jeremy Begbie’s illustration of the Trinity as a three-note chord, which is quite literally the only metaphor for the Trinity I’ve ever heard that doesn’t wind up as some kind of heresy if you think about it too hard.

Jesus’ Nature: “We believe that the Lord Jesus Christ… is both true God and true man.”

Basically, when you talk about Jesus’ nature, you’re saying, “This is true…and so is this other thing that’s pretty much the exact opposite.” And I love that.

Lots of people make fun of these type of paradoxes in the faith, but see my answer to the Trinity question above. That doesn’t mean that we should just shrug off any questions we have about our faith without trying to understand them. It just means that we need to have the humility to say we might not be able to find all the answers.

Bacon in World Religions

So, fun fact: of the major world religions, Christianity is the only one that doesn’t officially prohibit bacon.

That’s right. If someone is a devout Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or Jew, they’re not supposed to eat bacon. Pigs of the world, rejoice!

To me, this isn’t just a bit of trivia, or a suggestion for a new kind of evangelism. I wrote my final research paper of my college career on bacon in different world religions. (Always an excellent way to end an academic career—ten pages of research wrapped in greasy pigskin.)

"For where your bacon is, there will your heart be also." (Really New Living Translation)

Anyway, here’s a quick summary of the reasons other religions don’t allow bacon. (I am not even doing justice to this here, but I figured you didn’t want to read a ten-page paper about it.)

Bacon in Judaism

• The Mosaic Law includes pork as an unclean food

• Important for being set apart

• Emphasizes the fact that having specific rules even around food makes them aware of God’s lordship in everyday life

• Only Orthodox, not Reformed

Bacon in Islam

• Pork is forbidden in the Qur’an (unless you’re starving)

• Pigs are seen as dirty and brazen

• General obedience to a command of Allah

Bacon in Hinduism and Buddhism

• Vegetarianism preached (eating animals leads to bad karma), but not practiced by all devotees

• Ethics of harming animals—belief that god is in/through everything

• Could lead to violence in other areas

When It Is Not Well With Your Soul

Sometimes, when I sing songs in church and chapel about God remaining faithful in hard times, I can't really relate at the moment. My life is good, and it feels almost dishonest to sing about how I can still love God in spite of suffering. Does “It Is Well With My Soul” mean anything on sunny, happy days? Probably not, or at least not as much. 

So you know what I do?

I sing those songs to the future. I say the words with everything in me, almost like I’m pouring them into a bottle and wedging in a cork. Saving them. Waiting.

Then, when the hard days come and I’m struggling to believe that God loves me and acts justly in a world that is very, very broken, I take them out again. Because on those days, I cannot sing those words and mean them. It is not well with my soul, the name of the Lord is not blessed, and while he may give and take away, I cannot praise him for it. I’m not strong enough, not brave enough.

Which leads me to think that faith is not always what we think it is.

It is not dispensing pithy Christian sayings or inspirational Bible verses to someone who is grieving. (Not that those things are inherently bad, but that would be like taking your sick child to the doctor and having the doctor give him a toy from the treasure chest and a Batman Band-Aid instead of acknowledging and dealing with the real problem.)

Faith is not easy answers and gritted-teeth determination to be happy despite pain. I don’t even think it’s always being serenely at peace with everything that happens, although that peace may eventually come.

Real faith sometimes has to use the bottled praise. It clings to the memories of a distant promise, even when nothing around it seems to fit with that promise. It tries to sing, but when only laments come, those laments are still worship, because they contain a courageous defiance that says, like the psalmist, “I will yet praise him.”

Workout Spirituality

I have a very set routine when I go to the gym, followed in roughly the same form since first semester freshman year. Go twice a week. Walk into the building. Get on elliptical. Set resistance for 6, because it’s the number of evil. Work out for exactly 30 minutes. Wipe down machine. Get water. Leave.

If you couldn’t tell from my tone, I absolutely hate working out. I can come up with very creative new ways of complaining about it, ranging from my theory that the gym steals people’s souls and uses them to power the campus, to naming different pieces of equipment after different Disney villains, depending on their perceived level of torture.

I get no detectable levels of endorphins from working out. I’m not trying to lose weight. And I’m very vocal about the fact that no one should run unless they are running from something (like a bear or axe murderer) or running toward something (like the goal at the end of a treasure hunt).

So, many people ask me, “Why do you even work out, then?”

To which I usually sigh dramatically and give some noble reply like, “Because it’s good for me. I suppose we should be forced to suffer every now and then.”

But I’ve figured out the real answer. The real reason I work out even though I hate it is very simple: pride.

Mourning Inspector Javert

After watching the movie version of the musical Les Miserables, I began to divide things—songs, sound bites of chapel messages, Facebook posts—into “Javert would agree with that” and “That’s more like Jean Valjean.” It was pretty easy to do. The two characters give us a striking, black-and-white dichotomy of justice and mercy.

Except that what seems to be a dichotomy is actually a paradox. In God’s view of the world, it’s justice and mercy, not justice vs. mercy.

This is one reason why Micah 6:8 is one of my favorite verses. What does the Lord require of you? Seek justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God.

So, if Javert was an example of someone completely devoted to one of the defining characteristics of God, why did his story end so hopelessly? Faced with a wrong on both sides—turning Jean Valjean in or letting him escape—Javert resigned his commission in a final way.

And I cried. I cried for how close he was, for one scrap of missing doctrine that is the key to the whole Christian faith, for those few inches between his head and his heart that his strict pursuit of righteousness would not allow the truth to travel. I spent the last seconds of the closing song scanning the mass of people transformed in paradise, looking for his face. But it wasn’t there.

Domesticating Evil

“What do you think about evil?”

It was a question my Gospels professor asked a classroom full of junior and senior Bible majors, who always have deep thoughts and several cross-references to back them up (sometimes they’ll even throw in a little Greek). So I knew it would be an interesting discussion.

Several students shared about how they’ve learned a lot about trusting God in hard times, and that suffering has given them the ability to minister to others who are suffering and bring them hope.

But the professor kept pushing. “But what about really terrible evil on a large scale—like natural disasters or trafficking of child slaves or genocides?”

Or an entire class of elementary school kids in Connecticut murdered on what was once a normal school day. What about that?

And the answers came again, this time more along the lines of how God can bring good out of even the worst evil, like with Joseph. Sometimes natural disasters like wildfires are ultimately a benefit to the land. We can’t fully understand what God is up to so we just need to trust the He has a plan.

In a way, I think all of those things may be true. But I raised my hand anyway, because I just couldn’t leave it at that. There was something more that I felt needed to be said, so I said it. “Sometimes I think we need to let evil be evil without saying that it leads to something good.”

Thanks For That Image

An image is supposed to give you a better picture of something.

Is that statue in the park covered with random bird droppings really the town founder? No, but because it’s there, you have a face to the name. You can relate to him and understand him a little more.

Humans are made in the image of God. Yes, that means that we are supposed to reflect God to those around us. I’ve always known that.

But we can also learn about God by watching other people.

That one I missed.

Think about all the people you admire or love being around. Name the qualities they have that make them that kind of person. Then think about this—everything good in us comes from being made in God’s image, right? So everything you love about other people is fully present in Jesus.

Low-Fat Grace

I make fun of worship songs.

There. I said it. Sure, I know, everyone has an annoying habit. Mine just happens to be sacrilegious.

I’ve ruined several worship songs (and even—gasp!—a few hymns) for my friends by making sarcastic comments related to lines of fluff or bad poetry.

One of my favorite little gems is in the song “He Loves Us”: “If grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.” It makes me picture a giant whirlpool of death, which is not the image that usually comes to mind when I think of Jesus saving us. I mean, if grace is a riptide ocean, who’s the lifeguard, Satan?

(I’m probably alienating a large portion of my audience. So let me make this disclaimer: I do believe He loves us, oh how He loves us, oh how He loves us, oh how He loves. I’m just not crazy about the song, whether or not the version contains the “sloppy wet kiss” line.)

The people who defend the line tell me it shows that God’s grace is vast and overwhelming. At which point I snobbishly point to a stanza in “The Love of God”: “Could we with ink the ocean fill / And were the skies of parchment made / Were every stalk on earth a quill / And every man a scribe by trade / To write the love of God above / Would drain the ocean dry / Nor could the scroll contain the whole / Though stretched from sky to sky.” And I say something like, “Top that, Chris Tomlin.”

They’re right, though. God’s grace is vast and overwhelming and beyond our comprehension and description. Maybe it’s a little bigger, a little more dangerous, than we like to let on.

An Abundance of Muffins

Last week, I was making muffins for a group of about six or seven people. Most muffin recipes make two-dozen muffins, so that’s about what I was expecting from this one. Guess how many it actually made?

Over 60. No, really. That’s a 3:1 output-to-expectations ratio for those of you keeping score at home. When do you ever get three times as much as you expect out of anything? We almost ran out of dorm-kitchen counterspace to put all of the muffins. Since we only needed to keep a few, we handed the extras out to people who went past, whether we knew them or not. There was a pretty high demand, since most college students seem to forget what homemade baked goods taste like in between breaks.

Everyone could have seconds. Everyone could take one and bring it to their roommate (although I suspect a few people’s “roommates” were a fictitious ruse to sneak an extra muffin). Seeing all those muffins lined up there, warm with the chocolate melting and making the lobby smell so good you wanted to eat the air, I couldn’t have been happier.

And I realized that I want my life to be characterized by an abundance of muffins. I never want to be rich, but I want to live on a lower percentage of income so I can give away whatever I can. I want to be able to tell people exactly what they mean to me while they’re still alive to appreciate it. I want to spend time with others and enjoy getting to know them.

Sometimes I struggle with being generous with my money, praise, and time, but mostly, I am a giver. It just comes easily to me.

But most of the time, I only want to give, and I refuse to receive. It’s a strange, holy-looking kind of pride where I dodge compliments and hate asking for help and never want to admit when I’m hurting because I’m afraid I’ll be a burden on someone. And it keeps me from living abundantly.

Here are two things I know are true:

1. God has given me an abundance of muffins. Once, I made a list of all the adults (and some of my peers who I really look up to) who have invested in my life and challenged me. It was really long. “Too many people love me!” I informed my roommate, which, stripped of its context, got recorded in the infamous blackmail document. But, really, it’s true.

And those people have been incredibly generous. They have affirmed my dreams, listened to me when I needed it, taught me how to think for myself, and praised my accomplishments. Some days, I am weak and insecure, God seems very far away, and I don’t feel very lovable. But even on those days, I have this incredible gift: I can see God’s love in the way people around me have loved me. Not everyone has this. No, probably only one in a thousand people have this.

Because I’ve been given so much, I feel like I need to give to others, which is, of course, straight out of the Bible. But I shouldn’t jump so quickly into give, give, give without doing one basic kind of giving first: giving thanks. I need to allow myself to bask in what God has provided without feeling guilty. Otherwise, it will be duty that motivates me and not love.

When do I three times as much as I expect? All the time. It’s called grace, and I have to remember not to take that for granted.

2. God is an abundance of muffins. The first realization told me what I should be doing, the second tells me how to do it. He has “given us everything we need for life and godliness” and “gives generously to all without finding fault” (2 Peter 3:18, James 1:5). But if I have a hard time taking from other people, I have an even harder time taking from God. I still want to give to Him, to prove my worth as His daughter, to be constantly working for the kingdom.

The problem with this is, God doesn’t need me. But He does want me. This is an easy truth to write and not an easy one to understand. On my highest days, I imagine that I’m so spectacular that “well done, good and faithful servant” is already inscribed on my award plaque. On my lowest days, I wonder how God could use me and wonder if other people even like me.

I think I have a hard time with this because I’ve forgotten to be like Mary and sit at Jesus’ feet. I’m too busy working, doing, and trying to simply hear God say, “I love you” and believe it. I know in my head that God is the source of love, wisdom, strength, and everything I need, but I don’t like to take it because I’m too focused on doing everything myself.

This is what I want to learn over the summer. At the advice of one of my professors, I’m taking Ephesians 3:16-19 as my summer passage, where Paul prays for something that I always thought was a little strange: that the Ephesians would understand Christ’s love. Now I’m realizing why that’s so important. Pray for me if you think about it.

Once, someone read John 10:10, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly,” and compared it to a bubbling, overflowing fountain. For some reason, that picture just didn’t work for me. Big deal, there’s a lot of water. What does that have to do with me?

Now, when I think about abundant life, I see a counter-full of muffins and a bunch of happy college students. That’s abundance. And in order for me to do what brings me joy, giving, I have to be willing to receive first.