Rainy Day Challenge

 

Rainy days are a challenge.

 

The boys are creative, so they manage to entertain themselves. For a while…

 

But then it gets ugly…

 

 

Our house is in The Heights area of Little Rock. It’s an 1100-square foot bungalow with two bedrooms and one bath. And 8 people. Granted, six of them are relatively small, but the house shrinks quickly. Especially on rainy days.

Most days we get outside – go to a park, go climb a mountain, hit the Museum of Discovery, the zoo, and, soon, the swimming pool. This is to keep our sanity. But on rainy days all those options wash away with the sidewalk chalk, and entertainment options become slim.

But one joy of a large family is the ever-present playmate. As close as the quarters are in our house, the boys go crazy when they’re alone too long. No matter the mood, the rivalries, or the general atmosphere inside, they eventually find their way back to each other. Today it was through face paint and a wooden block obstacle course, specifically designed for Matchbox cars tied with yarn. 

People warn me I’ll miss these days, especially when adolescence rears it’s hideous face. And, on days like today, they’re right. It’s been one long, mostly peaceful day watching our boys do what they do best – be brothers.

And That’s It

Last night I went to hear David Sedaris read from his new book, “Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls.” Being around a professional writer is always fascinating. Just like everyone else, I want to know their secrets. I want to know what makes them write such great stuff. I want to know what magical potion they chug each morning before sitting down at their desk – the potion that, though it surely tastes less-than-stellar, produces best selling novels.

Just give me the secret!

Unfortunately there isn’t one, and that seems to be the running joke among all published authors. One does not sit down at his desk and bang out five chapters, flawless, ready for print, in half an hour. Yet that seems to be my expectation. If I start writing and don’t like where it’s going, I scrap it and assume I have nothing to say. Then it’s days, even weeks, before I sit down to write again.

I suppose my bar is set a tad high.

Malcolm Gladwell destroyed my hopes of becoming an overnight writing sensation when I heard him say in an interview that to become really exceptional at something, a person must spend 10,000 hours at it. That’s the equivalent of four hours a day for ten years.

And then you’re ready!

Four hours a day. For ten years. Banging it out no matter how you feel, no matter how good it is, no matter what you do or do not have to say.

Four hours a day. For ten years.

There’s your potion.

Macklemore wrote a song about this phenomenon called, appropriately, “10,000 Hours.” Here’s a good line (or depressing, depending on your perspective):

The greats weren’t great because they could paint

The greats were great because they paint a lot.

And that’s it. If you want to be great, get to work. Everyone says so.

Want to play in the NBA? Shoot 15-foot jump shots four hours a day for the next ten years.

Want to play trumpet at Carnegie Hall? Practice those scales until you’re playing them in your sleep.

Want to be a neurosurgeon? Memorize every latin prefix.

As for writing, I’ve looked for secrets in dozens of books from Stephen King to Anne Lamott to Stephen Pressfield to Donald Miller to my sophomore English professor. They all say the same thing – get to work! And be ready to get to work the next day. And the next and the next and the next and the next…until ten thousand hours have passed.

Then, by all means, write that novel.

Parenting. Or Chinese Water Torture

Most days start like Leave it to Beaver. We’re happy to see our boys – genuinely happy when they wake up – and we greet them like this:

“Good morning. How are you today?” (Hug)
“Hey pal! How’d you sleep?” (Hug)
“What can I get you for breakfast?” (Hug)
“Want some juice?” (Double hug)
“I love you so much!” (Hug, snuggle, hug, hug)
“I’m so excited and thinking positive thoughts about our day!” (Family hug, maybe a song)

And here’s how our nights end:

“No! I said do NOT come out of your room!”
“Lay down! You already went to the bathroom eight times!”
“Too bad, you should have eaten more dinner!”
“I’m not kidding, if you get out of bed one more time…”
“DID YOU SERIOUSLY GET OUT OF BED AGAIN?”
“I know it’s dark! It’s called NIGHT TIME!”

So what happens between breakfast and bed time?

Most days it’s nothing especially catastrophic. Nothing traumatic. Nothing overwhelming or requiring an ER visit.

Just a Slow. Constant. Drip.

“Mommy!”

Drip.

“Give it back!”

Drip.

“Do I have to eat this?”

Drip.

“I accidentally (fill in anything you’d like)”

Drip.

“I need to go potty. Never mind.”

Drip.

“Stop it!”

Drip.

“Oops.”

Drip.

“That’s not fair!”

Drip.

“Why does HE get to…?”

Drip.

Diaper changes.

Drip.

Meal time.

Drip.

The crying.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

You get the idea.

Raising boys is awesome, adventurous, and just plain fun most days. But there’s not a parent in the world who hasn’t felt the slow constant drip of the daily parenting grind. From what I’ve gathered it doesn’t get any easier; the drips often turn to leaks and sometimes, despite our best efforts, full-fledged disasters. This parenting business is no joke.

But can you imagine life without them?

(Okay, fine, you CAN imagine life without them. I’ll give you a second in that happy place).
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Now, do you WANT life without them? I didn’t think so.

Here’s the great part: while we sleep tonight, the plug will be pulled as all those drips wash down the drain and disappear into who knows where. And all of today’s exasperated exhaustion will miraculously respawn tomorrow as pure joy for another day with our six beautiful, infuriating boys.

So to all you parents out there, you’re not alone. We all want to do better. We all wish we had handled that situation with more grace and less growling. We all wish we had more time, more energy, more intentionality, more organization, more spinach. We all regret something. We all fear what our children might become. We all feel inadequate.

We all feel the drip.

But tomorrow’s a new day. Be a little better than you were today, that’s really the best we can aim for. And grab your umbrella; those drips are coming!

What a Recovering Fundamentalist Learned at Subverting the Norm 2

Last weekend Ian – our worship minister – and I drove four hours north to Springfield, MO for Subverting the Norm 2, a conference about radical theology. “What is radical theology,” you ask?

I have no idea.

In fact, most presenters spent the opening six or seven minutes of their presentations explaining what they mean when they say “post-modern,” and the rest of the time explaining what radical theology means to them. This was not the premise of their speech, per se, but it was at the heart of each message.

Radical theology is primarily about making room for doubt. It begins with the assumption that God is not real and works up from there. I would say most of the people at the conference call themselves “Christian,” and most believe God exists. The question of radical theology, though, is essentially, “Can we know who or what God really is and, if so, what is God?”

The question posed by Subverting the Norm 2 was, “Can radical theology exist in churches?”

It was far different from the conferences I’m used to attending, which usually involve three things:

1. The most popular speaker/author/blogger the conference can wrangle in

2. The most popular band/worship leader the conference can wrangle in

3. T-shirt canons and various other gimmicks.

That’s not to say these conferences are shallow or fruitless; I usually end up feeling very filled and encouraged by the end. But Subverting the Norm 2 (henceforth “STN2″) was very, very different.

The primary difference for me rested in what was and was not assumed. At your typical conference (say Catalyst or Youth Specialties) every speaker, band, presenter, vendor, and sponsor operate with one common assumption: we all believe God exists.

Which, one would think, is good for a Christian conference!

What sets STN2 apart is that God’s existence – and the Bible’s accuracy and the Church’s authority, among other things – is never a given. At the heart of radical theology is room for doubt, room for really, really hard questions, and room to say things like, “Gee, what if God isn’t there? And, if he is there, what if he’s not at all like I’ve always thought?”

While this might frighten some in the non-radical theological world, it invigorates me. I believe God exists. I love scripture. And I love the Church. But there’s something freeing about stripping away the veneer of certainty on which most mainline churches build their buildings. There’s something real about unearthing the Trees of Tradition to see if the roots are actually deep and pure and binding or if, beneath the dirt, lies something else altogether.

As I explained to our Bible class Sunday morning, I’m a “Talk-About-the-Elephant-in-the-Room”-type person and preacher. When I encounter a text that challenges a traditional belief or tradition, I enjoy being confronted with its truth and challenging our church with it. So at STN2 I found an entire conference dedicated to addressing some of our biggest elephants.

The moment that defined the spirit of the conference best for me was when Namsoon Kang honestly asked at the outset of her presentation, “Why do we want to subvert the norm?”

See! Nothing is assumed. Nothing is taken for granted. Nothing is exempt from intense scrutiny.

To put it simply, STN2 forced me to be honest on a level I’ve never before experienced. Even in my undergraduate Christian education, no one ever challenged me to ask if God is actually there. Or if the way I think about God and Jesus and the Church is real or just a representation of the culture in which I learned about God, Jesus and the Church. Questions like that were written off as heretical, threatening, dangerous. However, after having experienced this sort of challenge, I am convinced that if I were a layperson in a church, I would expect my pastor(s) to be wrestling with these questions of doubt. How can a church know they are hearing Truth when some questions aren’t allowed to be asked?

I hope my doctor pauses to ask if a medication actually works before prescribing it. Sure brand name drugs bring the biggest bucks to the practice and the drug companies, but what kind of doctor prescribes something without ever having asked if it’ll cure what ails ya’?

Many pastors have never paused to ask, “Is God really there?” We are afraid to doubt. We are afraid to confront the hard truth that we might be wrong. We are afraid to disrupt the lucrative practice of selling Jesus as a brand name drug, so we continue prescribing something we’ve never examined deeply, intently, or personally.

But think of the power that comes from a pastor seeking the truth about God, Jesus, the Church, and existence as a whole. Think of MLK asking, “Is every person really created equal?” then beginning a movement from what grew out of that question. How much greater the fruit of those who take the time to dig deeper, to be honest, and to trust their doubts!

Jesus Wants Nobodies

Sunday I talked about 1 John 2:15-17 which, in my opinion, is the most important passage in 1 John because it speaks to our humanity and the things that drive us. Here’s the passage:

“Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you. For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions. These are not from the Father, but are from this world. And this world is fading away, along with everything that people crave. But anyone who does what pleases God will live forever.”

1. We either love our world or we love God. We cannot love both simultaneously.

2. We know we love our world when we define ourselves by it. When we define ourselves by our careers or relationship statuses or children or parents or significant others or style or music or dialect or nationality or hair color or body shape or athletic ability or alma mater or how we order at Starbucks, we have loved the world and not God.

3. This is dangerous because what will we do when we lose our job or our relationship or our children or our parents or our significant others or our style or our music or our dialect or our nationality or our hair color or our body shape or our athletic ability or our alma mater or how we order at Starbucks? What do we do when those things vanish? What do we do when those things no longer adequately define us as individuals, as humans, as God’s children?

4. When Jesus came to redeem us, it wasn’t just to let us go to heaven, it was to bring heaven here. And in heaven all identity rooted in the world is destroyed. In heaven you are not your career or relationship status or a child or a parent or significant other or a style or music or dialect or nationality or hair color or body shape or athletic ability or alma mater or how you order at Starbucks. 

In heaven, you are exactly who God made you to be. You are you. Just you. Every worldly way we identify ourselves was crucified with Jesus, and a brand new you came out of the tomb. 

5. This is one way to love God and not the world – to lose your identity. And this is what Jesus came to do. Jesus redeemed the woman caught in adultery

Zacchaeus the tax collector

the blind man

the man with leprosy

the woman who couldn’t stop bleeding

the man with a shriveled hand

the paralyzed guy whose friends lowered him from the roof

Their redemption was not just forgiveness, not just healing, but redemption came by Jesus declaring,

“YOU ARE NO LONGER WHAT THE WORLD THINKS OF YOU! YOU ARE NO LONGER THE SLUT, THE GREEDY JERK WHO STOLE EVERYBODY’S MONEY, THE BLIND GUY, THE UNCLEAN MAN, THE UNCLEAN WOMAN, THE GUY WITH THE WEIRD HAND, THE GUY WHO CAN’T WALK. YOU ARE NOW THE YOU THAT GOD MADE YOU TO BE!”

He even did this with people who, as John warned, took pride in their position and possessions. The Pharisees and teachers of the law were robbed of their control when Jesus knocked them off their self-made pedestals and robbed their pretentious identities. Pilate, the governor of the region, one of the most powerful men in Rome, was just a fella. Just a man. And Jesus treated him as such.

6. So who are you? Are you the sum of your external circumstances. Are you trying to prove yourself to the world by being good enough, cool enough, smart enough, parental enough, creative enough, different enough, rebellious enough, angry enough, nice enough, successful enough, rich enough, poor enough, well-dressed enough?

Stop. Let it go. Because if you do those things the love of God isn’t in you. Not because God is mad so he’s giving you the silent treatment. But because you are trying to get everything God offers through things that are not God. And it doesn’t work.

Stop. Let it go. Quit trying to prove yourself to people who don’t really matter anyway. Stop trying to prove that you’re a Somebody. Because Jesus invites us to be Nobodies. And Nobodies are what heaven is all about.

Our New Little X-Factor

Silas and I went to the store this morning for bread and juice various other items. I took him along because he is our new X-Factor. That title once belonged to Canaan, but no longer. The X-Factor is the kid who changes everything, no matter the circumstance. If we were to ask someone to babysit our boys, we would send Silas to one sitter and the remaining five somewhere else. The sitter with the older five would have an easier time by far!

He’s the X-Factor.

Fortunately he’s growing up a little. He responds to simple instructions (throw away your diaper, get in your high chair, come down off the roof, etc.). He’s not as aggressive as he once was, though face masks and protective cups are never a bad idea.

Most importantly, screaming is no longer his language of choice. He uses some signs for please, more, help, and something with his middle finger we can’t quite figure out. He even says some words when prompted, but they mostly sound like “Pbat!”

Still, he’s growing up. And that’s fun. He could very well be the last baby we ever raise, so we’re enjoying the small things. We didn’t get to see Judah or Canaan morph from infants to toddlers to little boys, so something about struggling through the process with Silas feels sacred.

Anyway, happy parenting everybody!

Sin Revisited

SIN

Yesterday I preached about sin. I was a little anxious because I know a sermon on sin is only slightly better than a sermon on the church budget. But it’s a necessary discussion and one the apostle John tackles unapologetically in his sermon called 1 John. 

We need to acknowledge sin as a very real, very powerful presence in our world. It’s hard to look at the state of our global society and say there is no sin. Look at the greed; look at the violence; look at the hate. Sin is real. John says in chapter 1 of his sermon that if we say we have no sin “we make God a liar.” 

The God of scripture is a God of redemption. Essentially every story – yes, even the violent ones – point toward redemption. And when Jesus arrives, God’s redemption manifests itself in human flesh. And after that human flesh lives his life teaching us to love and share and forgive, he’s nailed to a cross and humanity’s redemption is once and for all accomplished.

So if you tell God there’s no such thing as sin, you tell God his very essence is a lie. If you believe in the God of scripture (which opens up an entirely new conversation) then you believe in sin.

If you do not believe in the God of scripture, I encourage you to open a newspaper, turn on the news, read a blog about poverty or militant dictators or 3rd world suffering. Do this, then say with a straight face there is no sin.

JESUS

Jesus showed us lots of things, and one of the most important is how to handle sinners. The apostle John also wrote a story about Jesus from his perspective. In 8:1-11 of his gospel, he tells a story about a woman caught in adultery. The Pharisees and teachers of the Law drag her to Jesus, who is in the temple teaching a crowd of people. And before the entire crowd they announce that the woman has been caught sleeping with a man who is not her husband, and that the law of Moses demands she be stoned to death.

They turn to Jesus, “hoping to trap him.”

Jesus stoops down and draws in the dirt. He stands up and says, “All right, but the first stone must be thrown by the person who has no sin.” And he drew in the dirt again.

One by one the Pharisees and teachers of the law dropped their stones and walked away.

A few things:

1. The Pharisees are right. 

And Jesus acknowledges this. The law clearly says she must be stoned. To say otherwise is a misrepresentation of scripture. However, the Pharisees are operating in the realm of analysis, while Jesus operates in awareness. Rob Bell describes the difference in this blog post titled ‘how about a short sermon.’ Analysis asks “What?” while awareness asks “Who?” Analysis leads to certainty while awareness leads to exploration. Analysis breeds judgment while awareness invites grace. 

The Pharisees chose analysis; Jesus chose awareness.

2. The Pharisees chose the wrong battle

They often picked analytical fights with Jesus, and they always lost. In this story Jesus turns their analysis against them by permitting the stoning but only if it’s instigated by someone who is flawless. Of course, declaring oneself flawless is heresy. So the Pharisees found themselves trapped between upholding the Law or breaking it.

Jesus did this because his fight was on another battlefield. And that battlefield was in the heart of the humiliated woman lying in the middle of the crowd. Jesus saw someone hurting. Someone broken. Someone whose humanity had been robbed. And his fight was one of redemption and grace, not judgment and punishment.

3. We have a choice

You and I are often somewhere in that crowd. We are somewhere between the Pharisees holding their stones and Jesus drawing in the dirt. We are capable of showing grace, but not always willing. And, at least in the Christian world, we are far too often the stone holders ready to inflict punishment on wrongdoers. After all, scripture is clear.

But what happens when we find ourselves in the middle of the crowd? What happens when we become the woman. What happens when our sin is exposed and the people begin gathering their stones and we desperately scan the crowd for a messiah drawing in the dirt. 

What then? Are we okay with sin analysis or would we prefer grace awareness?

US

It’s time for the Church to stop condemning. 

It’s time we took our appropriate place in the center of the crowd with our sin exposed, waiting for the final word from Jesus. 

It’s time we start looking more like Jesus and less like Pharisees.

It’s time we stop analyzing sin and start exposing grace.

It’s time we join God in his pursuit of redeeming the world.