Missions

K. Norris says in The Cloister Walk that often the people who know the exact cost of something, have no idea of its value. 

Who knows what the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet with expensive nard was thinking?  She wasn’t preparing Him for burial as Jesus Himself suggests.  She was not, as some authors have suggested, breaking open and emptying her dowry, hoping for a spouse (though that is what she ultimately got spiritually).  She was not even giving Jesus a gift, for surely she knew that this man poorly appreciated the world’s treasures.  There was not even extravagance in this gaudy display.  She knew, as we all know, that extravagance relies on the audience and Jesus is not impressed…with the oil.

What did she bring?  Fragrance. 

This money is being wasted, sending all those people to Africa.  With that much money we could build a school there.  Why, we could put in twenty wells with that much money.  A van.  They really need a van.  Why wasn’t that money given to the poor?

The world looks and never sees.  The world listens and never hears. 

A child’s tin can phone conversation across the dining room table or her gathering of weeds to garland your hair carry an unseen weight of glory to which the world is forbidden or is unable to bear.  The world in its poverty can only see what could be and not what is. 

The fragrance of nard filled the room.  Missionaries’ hands hold foreign dirt and hands.  Missionary fingers plait honey brown hair into peace and loved-ness.  Missionary feet miss the goal with balls of rags and all feet rejoice that no one fails alone.

Fragrance.  The fragrance of love is much too dear to be sacrificed for houses or vans.  The weight of a forehead kiss brought 5000 miles for a sleeping child in acacia shade trumps many schools or wells.

Don’t weary yourself with the world’s concerns.  Bricks and mortar can never sweeten a sad and desperate world.  Let love walk beggarly and empty pocket-ed if it must into other’s darknesses for a ragged love will fill more stomachs than bread.  Speed the missionaries on.  If they need more money to dig the well, there is enough to go around… if there is love enough.

God's Absence

Though God's absence is a common experience for most Christians, it is always fresh and frightening for those in the throes of it.  Mother Theresa prayed to truly enter into Christ's passion on the cross and spent the next 50 years feeling God's abandonment.  For most of us, God's kindness is that we feel His presence more than not.  For me personally, though, it is more often the depth of the emptiness that assures me that I was made for filling. Today, well, for months now actually, Jesus is asleep on the cushion in the back of my boat.  It is a gift to sail alone - with Him nearby - though I would like some conversation.  It is a great disciplining to pray to a empty ceiling, to pray to a God with flat affect.  It is important for me to pray though, learning again that I don't require His feedback to believe that He hears.  It is a comfort to pray knowing that He doesn't require my affect or gyrations or goosebumps or heavy heart or goo-ness for Him to be moved.  It is nice to be a part of the swell when worship explodes with such inward force that expression just happens.  It is nice to be able to surf down the face of that wave, exhilarated and free with a power behind you that is huge and scary and so amazing that you go after it again and again.  The bigger those incredible waves, the sadder it is when swells still.  When you just sit there.  And sit there.  And sit there.  Doldrums.  The ocean is still just as deep.  The water is still water.  There is still surf somewhere.  But it is hard to keep believing that swells will come again...here.  It is disheartening to look toward the horizon and see calm.  Time to swim, I guess.  And hope.

Bread, Word, Music

A way of looking at the way people have historically engaged with Christ is, per Robert Webber, threefold.  In the first 1400 years or so, the focus was on breaking bread, mainly in the Catholic tradition.  The next way of engaging Christ was around and following the Reformation from the 1400's to the 1960's with the focus on the Word, Scripture.  The current buzz in the church is that engaging with Christ is predominantly through music.  When people talk of "worship" these days, they almost always mean singing.  
While this distinction is obviously artificial, with many exceptions, it certainly feels correct.  One of our challenges in modern Christendom is, while building new wineskins that encourage a new generation to approach God, is to constantly call people back to worship in Acts.  You don't need music.  You don't need the bread.  You don't even need the Word.  All you need is a heart turned towards God.  Every denomination has its focus and ground for its worship but every Christian must build their worship on bringing themselves humbly before god to offer their soul to His service.  And we must all learn that the tools we use to get ourselves there are, after all, simply tools and not the work itself. 
Worship is what we were made for.  It is our purpose.  Our destiny.  Do not be trapped but thinking that the avenue of worship is one street. Find YOUR expression of worship.  It may be painting, or sailing or writing or weaving.  God needs the gift He has given to you to return to Him with your fingerprints.  That is what He longs for.  It is what you long for.  Worship, in fullness and truth.

Plodding

Running.  I don't run like I used to.  I used to plod along.  More miles and longer run times is better than collapsing after a one mile sprint I thought.  So after years of jogging along I had trained my body well to never run fast.  I could plod.  Unwittingly, I had trained myself into a plodder.  So I changed the way I run.  I started slowly.  I ran, not too fast but as fast as a plodder can run, and then I would stop and walk.  No more plodding.  I either ran fast or not at all.  As time went by, my body began to realize that I was no longer a plodder.  My stretches of actual running grew longer and I did not need to stop and walk as often.  I still use this method to re-train myself each year to try to up my speed a little.
In one's spiritual growth, we must not settle for plodding.  The best way to not plod is to practice moving. Every year one should go through a spiritual upheaval.  Spend more time in prayer, more time serving, more time in Scripture.  More time in the fellowship.  You may have to stop and walk from time to time to catch your breath (Mark 6:31) but your attention to God will grow, your prayers will blossom, you will run and not grow weary.

Time with Dad

Early childhood researcher, Urie Bronfenbrenner found that fathers generally think that they spend 20 minutes a day talking with their children.  

Using lapel recorders, researchers found that those same fathers actually spent 37 seconds a day talking with their children. 

Children spend 7 hours in a school setting, 2 hours (US average) in front of the TV, and a couple of hours of the world’s cultural input through music.  How much impact can 37 seconds have? Amazingly, a tremendous amount.  Children so value parental interaction that even ½ minute can win out against 660 minutes if it comes from Dad.

Research also shows that more that 37 seconds from a parent is a better thing.

Erasing Hell

Francis Chan's new book, Erasing Hell, is getting a lot of press these days as it should.  It is an important book. Not important in that it refutes Bell's book, Love Wins, and with grace and mercy, but because it it places our position with God in the light and exposes the pick and choose Christianity of most of us.
Most of the people I have talked to about both books get stuck on the surface tension of whether there is hell or not and how off Bell is.  That is not the issue that gets my attention.  What drew me into the book was the authentic and confessional voice of Chan as he explains that he doesn't like the way God works sometimes ....But believes anyway.
Not understanding God derails many people and prevents them from coming to Christ.  But many, many Christians simply ignore much of Scripture that they do not understand or like, Scripture that gets in their way, and so invent a God to their liking.  This is common to us all and even Chan falls into this in his book though he admits that he is "rethinking".  There is a theology lens which disregards the critical nature of our participation in God's work of salvation causing adherents to believe in hell but simultaneously to believe and then disbelieve that we have any responsibility for our end - that our disobedience is critical but not our obedience.  In that theology, Chan's Grandmother's unwillingness or inability to participate in Christ's work disqualified her for heaven but our willingness (Chan's own willingness and submission) which qualifies us is not our own.  This makes a God of great power but not of justice or love.  If God makes Chan believe, then He also made his Grandmother disbelieve.  That could be true - God can do what He wants - but there is no justice in that for God and no value in our love for Him then, we being automatons.  Some would like God's actions alone to save us as Bell would like God's actions alone to save us all.  But if one looks at the verses Chan himself uses to establish that there is a hell, it is quickly evident that hell is the end for people who don't behave (or at least try) according to Jesus' expectations.  While Jesus calls us to believe Him, our response to that call by repentance and good works is essential to Jesus' acceptance of us and thus to our salvation.
Very similar to Bell disliking hell, most evangelicals reject the idea that faith and works are two sides of the currency which purchases our salvation.  Our work is certainly inconvenient in theology and it complicates the sovereignty of God and His grace.  But evangelicals often, like Bell and hell, talk and theologize their way around work hoping it will go just away.  However, it is only our western mind, as Newbiggen says, that polarizes faith and works.  Jesus could not be clearer, nor could Paul and Peter and John that both faith and response are required.  That "not all those who call me Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom, but those who...."
So, Erasing Hell is a great book about reading the Bible without the baggage we like to bring along.  Every time you sit down to read Scripture, start new.  Read it as if you just came out of the vineyard on your way home and heard Jesus talking or Paul railing at the Corinthians or the writer of Hebrews accosting a crowd.  What do you think they mean about liars and fornicators?  Don't theologize--- just, What do you think Jesus means at face value about separating sheep and goats?  Is Paul talking to my greed when he says the greedy will not inherit the kingdom?
I don't like it either.  I would love to be able to watch TV and quit making an effort to follow Jesus.  I would prefer a God who drags me by my hair to heaven despite my behavior.  But I believe the Bible and it scares me.  Do not be deceived, Paul says.  Do not think we have a wrathless God who is simply kind and endlessly indulgent.  To be sure, the amount of my effort is value-less.  That I turn... is priceless.  Thank God....!  Oh Thank God that He is merciful.

Flying by Instruments

During World War II, a pilot was attempting to land through dense clouds.  Not able to see the runway, he of course had to depend on the instrument panel to tell him whether he was level and what his altitude was.  Not a big deal for seasoned pilots.....until he developed vertigo, a condition in which a person's equilibrium system shuts down.  He grew increasingly dizzy and unable to sense when he was upright.  His mind and body could no longer tell which was is up.  This pilot began to have a compulsive belief that the plane was no longer horizontal and was listing into a disastrous roll.  Everything about his sensations, everything his body and mind were telling him was that his wings were rolling to vertical which meant they would lose altitude quickly and crash.  However....  The instrument panel was clear that the plane was maintaining altitude with wings horizontal.  The pilot, a tribute to his training, relied completely on the instrument panel, ignoring everything he knew within himself to be true, and flew the plane in and landed.
Several friends of mine - and I myself - have gone and still go through this experience spiritually.  It is very disconcerting to have everything you normally rely on, worthless against a spiritual vertigo.  God is absent.  You honestly can not discern which way is up.  It is a dark night of the soul where nothing comforts, nothing reassures, nothing about God makes sense.  One's mind and heart seems to have turned against you, trying to convince you to change your course, to quit or rethink your understanding of and relationship with God.  The experience, as extraordinarily confusing as it is, is actually a sign of maturity and testing.  It is a test against relying on what you are getting out of this God deal or believing thinking you have figured everything out.  It is, hopefully, in the end a reaffirmation that you believe not in you but have actually surrendered your ego and submitted yourself to God and His control - again.  Submitted to His story instead of yours.  The crushing doubt of spiritual vertigo is a major step in embracing God's story rather than your own.  You are forced to fly by His rules and abilities.  Flying by instruments is a painful, humble, giving up of your belief in yourself and an opening to a deeper, more profound faith which over time excises doubt and despair.  It is an experience which, if not circumvented but explored, allows you to hear God's voice in a new and richer and more radicalized (root finding) way.  Flying by instruments against the chaos of our culture's, our own, and at times even our church's imposed vertigo is a blessing as challenging as our blessing of freedom.  What are our instruments as we fly in this "cloud of unknowing"?  The Bible, holding hands with someone else, ritual/routine, biographies of saints, duty, the Office of the Hours, the Book of Common Prayer, authentic dialogue with God and the fellowship, Psalms (e.g the 40's) - and prayers to a silent God.