Moving Van Theology: Seeking a Homeland

One week from today, I will be moving to Minnesota to start a new job. This is an exciting and terrifying thing.

Packing and organizing all of my things, however, is only terrifying. And also extremely boring and not rewarding at all for someone who hates details and planning with a passion usually reserved for rodents and parasitic insects.

Boxes, Part 1. Did I know I had this much stuff? No. No, I did not.

So, what’s a disorganized person to do? Think about theology while folding T-shirts and getting rid of old scrapbooking supplies, of course. So, I present for your consideration: Moving Van Theology. It’s what’s kept me sane over the past few days.

Hebrews 11 has been my favorite chapter of the Bible since I was old enough to decide that I needed a favorite chapter of the Bible (probably in my slightly-self-righteous sixth grader phase). My logic went (and goes) something like this: it has stories, and stories are great.

There are a few verses in the middle of the chapter that always seemed strange to me, though. They form a beautifully melancholy interlude, like someone decided to throw a bridge in a minor key into some peppy little pop song. (Someone please tell me you just inserted a movement of “Moonlight Sonata” after the chorus of “Call Me Maybe.” No? Just me? Darn.)

Anyway, this is what Hebrews 11:13 says: “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.”

Wait, hold up. They did get what they were promised…didn’t they? Noah saw the rain come, justifying the crazy build-a-boat-in-the-desert scheme that had been his reality for decades. Abraham and Sarah were changing diapers at the age most people are checking into a retirement home. Moses eventually left a ruined, plague-broken Egypt behind him without even an “I told you so” to Pharaoh. The walls fell, the armies fled, the lions decided it wasn’t time for dinner after all. Victory and vindication arrived at long last.

The Bikini Debate

If you haven’t already seen this video that’s been circulating on Facebook, take a look. It’ll be an interesting ten minutes of your life.

To recap, Jessica Rey, creator of a vintage swimwear line, talked about modesty and how women wearing bikinis cause men to view them as objects. This generated a surprising amount of discussion and debate—check out the comments on this blog for a sampling. Here are the two basic responses from Christians I’ve seen in various places on the Internet.

One: This is so great! Christian girls have no business running around wearing skimpy bikinis. Don’t they know how it affects men?

Two: This is outrageous! Christian girls should wear whatever swimwear they want—they’re not responsible for the reaction of others. Men need to learn how to control themselves.

And those are mild ways of phrasing the debate. I’ve also read a few comments that questioned the salvation of parents who let their teenage daughters wear bikinis and some that pointed to Rey’s attitude as one that leads to a culture where rape is common because people see the woman as the one to blame.

One of the Rey Swimwear suits

I want to say something totally different. See, I think that this discussion on swimwear is actually bringing up the central issue of Christian ethics, one the apostle Paul wrote about more than any other. (Seriously. I bet you didn’t even know Paul talked about swimwear 2000 years ago.)

When you strip down the bikini debate, both sides are really looking for someone to blame. There is a central fact: women in skimpy swimwear often cause men to lust. So whose fault is it? The anti-bikini people emphasize the responsibility women have to keep men from stumbling by the way they dress. The pro-bikini people are outraged that men aren’t being held responsible for their own lust.

But guess what? Christianity has never been about shame and blame. It’s about grace and love. So why aren’t we talking about those things? Because when you start talking about loving others, it’s no longer about whose fault it is. It’s about something else.

How to be a Conversation Terrorist

(Part Three of "Things I Learned In College.")

 

Okay, so the title of this post sounds way more violent than it actually is. Some of you are probably thinking, “Um…how does Amy’s mind even work?” And the answer to that is…it’s complicated. But I’ll try to explain this one.

“Conversational terrorism” is my name for what happens when, for some reason, you need to hijack the conversation. People are talking about something that you’d rather not talk about, and you need to act quickly to redirect the course of the conversation. Except in this case, it’s a positive thing, unlike terrorism. So maybe it’s a bad analogy.

Anyway, here are five of my best tips for hijacking a conversation, particularly if your friends start to badmouth another person.

One: “Well, I’ve learned that for everything I find annoying about someone else, there’s probably something about me that gets on their nerves.” Or a similar speck-log-we’re-all-humans-and-have-annoying-things-about-us type of statement. Sometimes it’s helpful to remember that I wouldn’t want people talking about all of my flaws and faults when I’m not around. And they totally could, because I have a lot of flaws and faults.

Two: “I can’t judge. I wouldn’t want their job. Can you imagine how stressful it would be to….” Or a similar put-yourself-in-his-shoes statement. Because sometimes we judge people by the fragment of their lives that we’re experiencing right now. This is somewhat similar to opening a book to a random page in the middle and seeing the main character say something mean and condemn him without looking for context of any kind.

Three: “Hey now. That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” Or a similar point-out-that-you’re-kind-of-being-a-jerk statement. This is more direct and has the potential to make the other person defensive. A likely response is, “I’m just saying it like it is.” At which point you can try 1 or 2, or say something positive about the person being gossiped about or just shrug and move on with a different conversation.

Four: “Okay, this isn’t fair. He’s not even around to defend himself.” Can be said in a joking-not-joking kind of way, or just straight up serious. People usually get the point without feeling backed into a corner. Everyone secretly hopes no one is talking badly about them behind their back. It’s a simple Golden Rule thing.

Five: “Hey, did you know that giant squid’s eyes can be as large as a beach ball?” This is not just a random subject changed. After I saw this comic strip, I looked up some facts about giant squid to use to abruptly (and slightly passive-aggressively) change the subject away from gossip. It’s actually pretty fun to do.

There you have it. Five of my favorite conversational terrorism tactics. Use this information responsibly, my friends.

How To Manipulate Yourself

(Part Two in a series of "Stuff Everyone Should Learn in College. Last week's was "How Not To Fall In Love With Everyone." Moving on to academics....)

This could also be called “How to do things you don’t want to do,” but self-manipulation is a more interesting way of putting it. Seriously, though, motivating yourself to get unpleasant things done is a fascinating study in your own psychology.

For example, I really like eating cookies. They’re not particularly healthy. So I figured out something that I liked to do more than eating cookies: giving cookies to other people. Perfect.

And, if I had a daunting research paper to write, there were several tactics I could take to get myself to work on it.

           
A. Convincing myself that the topic was fascinating and important for my personal development (this actually worked with a lot of my exegetical papers).

         
B. Planning a movie night or board game party…but only if I got the work done.

            
C. Giving myself a stirring speech about discipline and the value of a liberal arts    education.

           
D. Dressing up. (Seriously. When I wore business casual, even around the apartment, I got way more done because my brain thought I was doing real work.)

            
 E. Rewarding myself with chocolate. Really sophisticated, but hey, whatever works.

Obviously, that list is going to look different for different people. But when you've got a stack of homework to do and you'd rather be on Facebook, you need to know what's going to tip the scale from "want" to "should."

It’s not like that covered every scenario in my college career, so I could do every mundane task with perfect joy and happiness. There were times when tricks wouldn’t work—I imagine that’s true for everyone. Sometimes, even if you know yourself so well that you can find all of your motivational triggers, nothing seems to work to make you feel like doing whatever it is that needs to be done.

And then you do it anyway.

Yep. That’s it. That’s basically the secret to how I got good grades in college.

Added bonus: a big part of being an adult is doing things you don’t particularly want to do. Sometimes you may be able to trick yourself into enjoying doing the dishes for the hundredth time…but sometimes you won’t. And sometimes you won’t want to go to work or love your spouse or deal with a discipline problem with the kids…but you do it anyway.

Practice now. It’s going to be a long life if you don’t learn this one early.

But, I mean, you might also want to keep some M&Ms around. Just in case.

How Not To Fall in Love With Everyone

(Part one in a summer series of basically the most important life skills I learned or started to learn while in college. It’ll go on as long as…well, as long as I can think of important things I learned while in college.)

Easily the most annoying interactions I had at college were talking to or overhearing girls who described the attractiveness of guys around them, and the comparative unworthiness of the girls those guys were currently dating. (Which was occasionally followed by complaints that guys objectify girls. And as much as I love irony, when it’s mixed with equal parts hypocrisy and cluelessness, it’s a little much.)

If you ever find yourself about to start in on one of those conversations, let me say one thing really loudly and with all of the emphasis I can possibly muster:

HE’S NOT YOURS.

Right now, I kind of want to launch into a rant about how, if you can’t stop yourself from daydreaming about someone in a relationship, you plan on stopping yourself later when that person is married. And how, contrary to popular (read: Hollywood) belief, you actually are in control of your own emotions.

But then I realized that’s not even the point (and that I could say it a lot shorter just by summarizing it in one paragraph). Because even if you are dating someone, he or she is not yours.

Let me explain.

Five Things I Learned in College

Recently, I found an old journal from the summer before my freshman year of college. (And by “found,” I mean that I’ve been doing actual archeological digs to get rid of mounds of papers, ticket stubs, old folders, and other office supply debris that have accumulated on, in, and under my desk.)

As this journal was found in one of the lower strata, it’s pretty obvious that I hadn’t read it since the day I wrote it, August of 2009. Only a few pages are filled out, and one is a list of qualities that I wanted to develop during four years at college. It is, as I put it, “a reflection of all my weaknesses and failures,” the person I wanted to be as an eighteen-year-old but knew I wasn’t yet.

Guess what? I’m still not there yet. But it’s interesting, looking back at this list, that many of the ways that God specifically intervened in my life to change me were in these areas. Here are a few of them:

I want to be someone who…

Doesn’t need the approval of others.

            Okay, fine, this one is always going to be a struggle, because I love people and want people to love me. However, during these past four years I’ve learned how to distinguish between rejecting rejection and rejecting constructive criticism. The first one is good (not investing my identity in what people think of me and letting it control my actions). The second is terrible (ignoring ways I can improve pointed out by people I respect). What people think of me still matters…but the circle of whose opinions matter is getting smaller, and most of those people love me anyway.

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

What I Learned On My Summer Vacation

Despite the fact that this sounds like a second-grader’s back-to-school report, I promise you that it will be full of deep insights and life lessons.

Or maybe not. But it should be entertaining at least.

Tomorrow is my last day at my Focus on the Family internship. It’s been a great seven weeks, partially because of the cool stuff I learned. Here are some of the individual stuffs, broken down into bullet points to distract you from the fact that I just used the word “stuffs.”

• The quickest way to the heart of a conservative Christian ministry is by distributing free cinnamon rolls along with extra cream cheese icing to spread on them. I have no idea why people promoting a credit union were doing this. But I am fully in support of it.
• I used up two full pens writing letters and journaling, and one red pen editing. That means that I’m twice as creative as I am critical.
• The following conversation was great: “What’d you do this morning?” “Fought Nazis. You?” “Oh, I crushed children’s hopes and dreams.” (Referring to fixing plot flaws in a kids’ book about WWII and judging entries for Odyssey’s “Get in the Show” contest, respectively.)

Learning the Hard Way

Sometimes, lessons you learn are obvious, timeless, and can be woven seamlessly into a brilliant allegorical narrative.

Other times, you just have to go over there by Qwerty and talk about what you learned today. Some lessons might not be very clear from just the story itself, so you have to spell it out. Which is what I'll be doing on Qwerty, the name I just gave the computer I'm working on.

Qwerty is not my computer. And this is not the blog post I intended to write.

The real blog post for today is sitting quietly on my hard drive, safe and sound . . . and out of reach. It was written several days ago and has been proofread twice, all set and ready to post.

Until a seven-year-old threw an exercise ball at my computer and cracked the display.

Just a typical day in my life with my host family here in Colorado. The poor kid ran away and hid from me the rest of the night. Which is a real shame, because he missed admiring the splintered cyan-yellow-and-magenta glory that is my computer screen.

You would think that there wouldn't be a lot to learn from this (except for the obvious "don't-make-kids-mad-by-doing-homework-on-your-computer-instead-of-playing-with-them"). But this one has more moral-of-the-story potential than a contrived sermon illustration or one of Aesop's fables.

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.

Defending Snail Mail

Letters are scary things, apparently. Or they take too much time to write. Or there’s the rising costs of stamps. Or that disgusting glue on envelopes.

Yes, there are lots of excellent reasons not to write letters.

But there’s one very good reason why you should, and it sounds a lot like the Golden Rule. Think about how excited you get when you get a real letter in the mail. (If this never happens to you anymore, send me your address. I’d be happy to give you this experience so you can relate.) It’s nice to know that someone cares enough to take a writing instrument in their own one hand and jot down a note.

So do that for other people.

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.