How to eat an elephant

Back in college, I studied Russian. Actually, I should say I studied Russian grammar or even Russian linguistics. And then, I went to Russia. And surprise, surprise, I couldn't speak Russian. I felt ashamed that I knew so much and could use so little. But I wanted to learn how to speak Russian.

So I decided that each day I would apply one new grammar rule. I gave myself permission to ignore every other grammar rule except the rule I picked out for the day. With time and a lot of trial and error, and the patience of the kids I was working with, my Russian improved.

This reminds me of one of my husband's jokes: "How do you eat an elephant?...One bite at a time." The elephant was speaking Russian, the bites were one grammar rule at a time.

When I think about the Christian life, I feel we get a lot of "Once, I ate an elephant" and a lot less, "One bite at a time."

We imagine what a holy life looks like and we think, "if only I prayed more and did that Beth Moore Bible study and got an accountability partner and served in the children's ministry and volunteered for the upcoming service project with my husband and kids and...who am I kidding? This is never going to happen"

When it comes to life with Jesus, I think that the big picture, the whole elephant is important. Becoming holy is what God asks of us. But we need to live in the one bite at a time. We don't like bites because they are mundane and even doable, but I think that's where trusting Jesus flowers.

So in one relationship that went off the rails, the elephant was a healthy relationship, the first bite was not being in bed together. Not sitting, standing, and definitely not lying down. Other bites later on would include an evening cutoff time for phone calls and a complete break from communicating for a while.

That was the last of a my string of inappropriate relationships with other women. So on this side of things, the elephant is not only a healthy relationship with that woman, but healthy relationships with other women in general and with my husband. But if you only see where I am now, you don't know how small that first bite was and how it was a miracle empowered by the Holy Spirit.

Maybe you've always been impressed by people who memorize scripture. Well, once, a roommate and I decided to memorize the book of Philippians. That sounds like a huge elephant. The first bite was Philippians 1:1. That's it. We added one verse a day, six days a week. It really helped to do this with a friend to smooth over the times when I just wanted to throw in the towel. Anyways, lo and behold, about four months later we were done.

But to the more mundane, I'm not a star housekeeper. It's easy for me to feel like if I can't get it all right, it's not worth doing any of it. So I'm learning to live in God's grace and accept cleaning by bites. One year, the big accomplishment was mopping once a week. Later, I added cleaning the bathrooms. And more recently, I put all the bedsheets on a schedule instead of whenever I remembered them. (I know all you neatniks are freaking out, but Jesus loves me even in my grossness.)

I'm a big picture person, so it feels strange for me to be the one to say this, but I think we need to think about individual bites more often.

If you're a wife, what if the next time you see your husband, you just smile and choose not to air the complaints of the day? Add a kiss for flair.

Or what if the next time you're lonely, you stay off the internet, just this once, and you pick something healthy or even neutral to do? Rearrange a closet, go for a walk, pick up a project you never finished, get gas for your car, change the batteries in your smoke detector. I don't know. Anything. Even a 5 minute thing.

I've been at war with depression lately as my medication has been changed. My bites are

1. not skipping exercise 
2. adding two cups of milk a day--it's a long story 
3. reciting John 6:68-69 over my dark thoughts. 

It's not magic. I haven't finished this elephant, but the alternative is to lay down and die. And I'm not ready for that.

So how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

--
Watercolor by Fritz Ahlefeldt, hikingartist.com

What am I supposed to do with my life?

The Calm My Anxious Heart chapter that we're reading in my women's Bible study talks about purpose in life and encourages everyone to have a purpose statement. But it's really short on how to develop one other than to open your Bible and have magic happen.

At the same time, I've been listening to some old talks by Alan Andrews, a former president of the Navigators, and they've made me think of some questions or experiences that can be useful in identifying purpose.

In the first talk, Andrews mentions that all followers of Jesus have 3 callings: to repentance, to discipleship, and to laboring. So the first call is to turn away from our sin and toward Jesus and his saving grace through his death, burial and resurrection. The second call is to discipleship, which Dallas Willard describes as a lifelong apprenticeship with Jesus meaning we learn how to live by watching and being with Jesus.

The third call is laboring which to Andrews and the Navigators is about the work of moving people in the direction of Jesus either in a conversion experience or a discipleship process. I think about laboring as service. Sometimes people need to be served with truth about Jesus or how to have an ongoing walk with Him, and sometimes people need to be served with general acts of friendship, and sometimes people need actual serving that they could never repay.

If these are primary callings from Jesus, then when we throw up our hands asking "Am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing with my life?" we can start with these follow up questions:

1. Am I living a life of repentance where I'm walking away from sin and toward Jesus?
2. Do I allow Jesus and what I know about Him from the Bible to govern my choices?
3. Am I faithfully serving others, making someone(s) other than myself a priority?

I think these are important questions because I wonder if we see the purposes God has in our lives as we allow Him to shape our character and reveal our gifts.

We need our character to be God-shaped because purpose without God is like traveling with a broken compass. You'll get somewhere, but it probably won't be where you want to go.

We need to understand our gifts because we're told in scripture (I Corinthians 12, Romans 12, Ephesians 4) that everyone has some spiritual gift and that the differences are like the different parts of the body--critical functions that are different but part of a working whole. And we recognize our gifts and our community recognizes our gifts as we serve.

So if you're trying to figure out what your purpose in life is and you haven't submitted to the rule of Jesus and developed godly character, start there. And if you've done that, then start faithfully serving others. If you've been slacking at work, stop slacking. Do your job (even if you hate it). If you've never helped out your community, i.e. neighborhood, city, local church, do that for a while (even if it is uncomfortable).

You might not be writing a purpose statement during that time, but you're learning to entrust your life to God, and that thrills him, and what's the point to all this if we're not pleasing God?

But let's say you've done all this and you really want to have a purpose statement. I think some quiet time alone with God, reviewing your experiences in God's word, in work, play, and service, I think you'll see themes. That's where the purpose statement comes from.

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I'll write my personal reflections up in another post since this has gotten long. Oh, and before I forget, my favorite book on this topic is Os Guinness's The Call.

"I'll sleep when I'm dead"

Mountain and Water by
Chen Chun Zhong

My freshman year, I was part of a program that made a t-shirt saying, "We didn't want to sleep anyways." So I was raised in a culture that valorized anything that produces exhaustion--work or play.

It's fitting then, this spring break to think about rest because Jesus offers something very different from our apprehensions about not working and missing out and not having enough.

"I'll sleep when I'm dead."

 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” ~Matthew 11:28-30

"Work hard, play hard(er)"

"There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience." ~Heb 4:9-11

"YOLO" (You only live once)

"Be still before the Lord
    and wait patiently for him;
do not fret when people succeed in their ways,
    when they carry out their wicked schemes.
Refrain from anger and turn from wrath;
    do not fret—it leads only to evil.
For those who are evil will be destroyed,
    but those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land."
 ~Psalm 37: 7-9

Kingdom economics--forgiveness

Rebrant's Return of the Prodigal Son

Our family recites the Lord's Prayer together every evening, and every evening we get to "and forgive us our debts and we forgive our debtors" and I get a little twinge in my gut. The whole prayer is about God and what he does and then bam! I've got a part and it's hard. And it's not like this is a rare, Jesus one-off. He doubles down on this a few verses after the Lord's Prayer and again in parable form:

32 “Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. 33 Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ 34 In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. 35 “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
~The Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 18

Forgiveness is a big deal to God, and it's a big deal for us.

Forgiveness is a big deal to God in that it is through forgiveness that we big rift between us and God is healed. The whole Jesus cruelly killed on a cross thing? That's because we are people who give God the finger in thought, word, and deed day in and day out. And it's not going work for God to say, "That's ok, it doesn't matter, come live in my happy, happy!"

Instead, the story of the whole Bible is more like this, "I have loved you so much, I cannot bear this separation. So I will take on the form of humanity, and I will live your human life and I will take the punishment for your rebellion on my person. I'm paying for your debt, so the slate is wiped clean. Now, come live in my kingdom."

So our part is to become members of God's household, people who have accepted God's forgiveness of our debts through the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, and now choose to live under God's rule instead of in rebellion to it.

What, then, is this bit about "as we forgive our debtors"? Well, going back to the parable quoted above, the master was angry at his servant because the servant was forgiven by the master but wouldn't forgive another for a lesser amount. We are so much like this servant. Forgiveness is harder than it seems like it should be.

When I struggle to forgive, it's usually because the other person hasn't asked for forgiveness. But the older I get, the fewer apologies I get. Maybe my parents just made us apologize to one another all the time, I don't know.

Anyways, I have had to learn to sit under the waterfall of grace and ask God to help me forgive the same person for the same unapologized hurt over and over. John Piper suggests that our prayer should be "Forgive my failure to forgive X." The very thing I need forgiveness for is my lack of forgiveness

Another point Piper makes is that this prayer, "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" shows us that God is willing to work within our own belief system. If we live in a world of karma, aka "payback is a bitch", then how can we go to God and expect him to extend mercy? If we live in a world of mercy, aka "Jesus takes the fall", then we are operating in Kingdom Economics.

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Today happens to be the first day of Lent. Here's what I've written about and during Lent.

Preparing for Lent

After a few years of celebrating Advent and Lent, I am finding them a nice "spiritual corrective". If in Advent, I am taught a particular lesson, I have a few months between Christmas and Lent to apply that to life, and then Lent starts and I get to reexamine my apprenticeship with Jesus and then a bit more than half a year to practice before another Advent and another season of reflection. Anyways, Lent this year is rather late and starts tomorrow, March 5th.

Lent is frequently associated with "giving up" something of removing something such as meat from the diet, or sweets, or tv, or social media. People have lots of reactions to this. One useful voice in the commentary is this talk on asceticism by Dallas Willard. The language is a bit heady, but it's worth the work to get through.

Lent is typically conceived of as the 46 day period between Ash Wednesday and the Saturday before Easter. A number of people have recommended using the time for focused reading in the Bible. Here are a few plans I found.

Small: The Gospels
Medium: The New Testament
Large: The whole Bible

For something different: Readings from the Church Fathers
EDIT: The above link lists a website for the readings that is incorrect. It should be http://www.churchyear.net/lentfatherscomplete.pdf


God bless you as we journey toward Easter.

Grace: The mini play

INTERIOR CHURCH -- PRESCHOOL ROOM -- LATE AFTERNOON

Andrea slumps against a wall with a box of blocks after two hours of wrangling a particularly defiant Beatrice. Beatrice holds a yellow block and stares at toys. Cathy plays in the kitchen set in the corner.

ANDREA

Beatrice, put the yellow block in the box or we can go out into the hall again. 

BEATRICE keeps playing for a moment, then walks over, puts the block in the box, and twirls away.

ANDREA

Beatrice, that was great! High five!

BEATRICE stops mid-twirl to come back for high five.

BEATRICE

I love you! (Throws herself in Andrea's arms)

ANDREA

I love you, too!

CATHY

Even though she does bad things?

ANDREA

Even though she does bad things. Because Jesus loves us even though we do bad things.  

Lent for Protestant Kids

It was surprisingly difficult to find stuff for Lent for protestant kids. I didn't grow up with Lent, but it's become more popular in evangelical, protestant circles. I'd like to think this is partly because people are moving deeper into a life-long apprenticeship with Jesus as Dallas Willard calls it. Anyways, I won't go speculating.

I did pick up a Catholic book several years ago, but as I was looking over it this year in preparation for Lent (which starts March 5th this year), there are too many thing I'd need to explain as "this is a Catholic thing and not something we hold dear to". For example, I think in the Ash Wednesday reading there's a bit about thanking Jesus we've been baptized into the kingdom. Except that we didn't have our children baptized as infants (I'm less and less opposed to this, but we just didn't).

While I'm doing this, let me just say that "liturgy" and "tradition" has generally gone over like gangbusters with our kids. We have morning and evening prayers. Yes, we do the same prayers/songs everyday, but the kids know the prayers and it's part of the rhythm of our day. The Lord's Prayer in 2 year old garble is adorable.

For Advent we starting putting up a Jesse Tree 3 years ago, and the kids have enjoyed listening to stories and putting ornaments up on a little Christmas tree we kept from our apartment years. This past Christmas we added something my in-laws dropped off which is a clothesline that we clip a new name of Jesus to each day. Kids loved it.

But back to Lent!

Here's what I've found so far:

Family Devotions for Lent
Best for age 4+
My favorite in terms of simplicity. Each day has a scripture, a prayer and a question

Lent Activities for the Family
Best for age 3+
Fun activities and reflections through Lent

Lenten Devotions
Best for age 3+
Works like a Jesse Tree; has a printable ornament and matching scripture. You can easily print out, color, and hang one each day. About half way between the first two in complexity.

Trail to the Tree
Best for age 5+
Laid back (only 17 days) and artsy, this one is from Ann Voskamp of One Thousand Gifts fame

Once we figure out Lent, I'm thinking about how to incorporate a Catechism into their spiritual education.