What suffering reveals

In the last week of reading Calm My Anxious Heart, we're covering our If Onlys and Whys. I think we come to these questions when we are dissatisfied with our current lives. It can be a mild dissatisfaction that gnaws away at our contentment or a deep festering pain--physical, mental, social or all of the above. So I'd actually like to use this last post reflecting on Calm My Anxious Heart to kick off a new series reading through an essay on suffering ("Formed through suffering" by Peggy Reynoso in The Kingdom Life).

I tend to not like to think about God and suffering because I end up questioning the justice and power of God. Like many people, I wonder how could a good, powerful God be loving and not end suffering?

Now a very common response from Christians is that God can bring good out of suffering (Romans 8:28). Reynoso starts her essay confronting this by saying, "...the misfortunes, illnesses, deprivation, and cruelty that cause our pain are still intrinsically bad, despite how God may use them for good." We must start there. The death, destruction, and despair that can feel too near are bad, it's ok to hate that stuff, to stop in the darkness and say it's dark.

Our church small group has been making its way through the New City Catechism and we've been stuck in a long series of questions about God's law, sin and the effects of sin. Frankly, it's depressing. Week after week, we're confronted with our limitations, our sinfulness, and the consequence of sin--death. I want to throw up may hands and say, "I GET IT! We suck, we suck, we suck and we earn suckitude (Romans 5:8)."

But do I get it? I want beauty and sunshine, I'd rather gloss over sin. It can't be that bad.

But Reynoso writes, "We err when we look to suffering to reveal whether God is just or unjust because what it best exposes is the destructive nature of sin." 

In my first encounter with depression, I lived in a lot of If Onlys and Whys. I played those tapes over and over in my mind. I would curl on the floor of my room in storms of inner pain while I clung to ugly conclusions based on lies. And I remember at some point feeling like God was saying, "You have an opportunity here. You can keep doing things your way or you can try my way. Your way is leaving you on the floor in darkness and pain." Well, I couldn't deny that. In the end, part of the way out was medication, but a bigger part was choosing God's truth over my lies. Sin is wildly destructive.

If you're fixing water damage in your house, you need to know how far the problem goes. It doesn't do any good to slap a new coat of paint over the rot because the rot's still there. Before we apply the grace of Jesus to sin, we've got to know how far the rot's gone. So we read the news, talk to a friend, visit a family member in the hospital. Suffering reveals the rot of sin to be pervasive, unavoidable, undeniable despite out best attempts. Stew on that a bit.

Holding onto treasure

This week in Calm my Anxious Heart, we're reading about letting go of What ifs and entrusting our future to God. This is a powerful vision: What if I could let go of my What ifs and let God take care of the future? I mean, I think for most people, that would be a life changing gift to be able to let go of anxiety about what might happen. So how do we get there?

Scripture memory is a discipline that helps us trust God, but everyone (including me) wants to skip it because its corny or hard. This is unfortunate. When I think about pivotal times of deep emotional stress, it helped to have a truth from scripture to hold up to the lies I wanted to believe. It's not that I didn't wander off into dark places, but when I got there, I had light.

I believe that we should treat God's word like treasure. When it comes to treasure, people have given their lives hunting for treasure, searching for gold, searching for oil. But followers of Jesus are told that:

[The decrees of the Lord] are more precious than gold,
than much pure gold;
they are sweeter than honey,
than honey from the honeycomb.
~Psalm 19:10

This is a guarantee. The word of God is freely available to us in the Bible, and its value is beyond measure. The question is not, "Is the Bible worth hanging onto?" The question is, "How to I keep this?"

The Navigators have an illustration, which I've replicated at the top of this post, that describes five ways of holding onto the Bible: hearing, reading, studying, memorizing, and meditating. Notice that the two fingers most important for gripping, the index finger and thumb, are memorizing and meditating.

You can get a long way to hanging onto your treasure by memorizing and meditating on God's word. Worry is simply mediating on an undesired outcome. Holy meditation is "worrying" on God's goodness and promises. Having scripture already memorized helps. I mean, nobody sits there and writes out their worry list for the day. The worries are already there. So if we're going to "worry" on scripture, it helps if it's already in our minds.

Here are a few verses that have been helpful for me, (and were part of the Topical Memory System that I learned in 1998.)

Isaiah 41:10 – “ So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous hand.”

Isaiah 26:3 – “ You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you.”

Luke 9:23 – “Then he said to them all,” If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up the cross daily and follow me.”

Mark 10:45 – “ For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as ransom for many.”

John 13:34-35 – “ A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love on another.”

Galatians 6:9-10 – “ Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who
belong to the family of believers.”

Hang on to your treasure. "Worry" on the word of God. 

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.

---
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.

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.

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

Now that's enough

   ...give me neither poverty nor riches,
    but give me only my daily bread.
 Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you
    and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’
Or I may become poor and steal,
    and so dishonor the name of my God.
~My father's prayer from the sayings of Agur recorded in Proverbs chapter 30

Growing up my dad would periodically tell us that his prayer was to have just enough and not too much. To be honest, as a teenager this seemed like shooting for mediocrity. Ah, how nice to no longer be a teen.

As I grow older and observe the world around me and observe the role of money in the world, I think I'm going to have to agree with my dad. Actual poverty is a grinding, difficult state (different from voluntary simplicity). And actual wealth guarantees nothing. I have directly observed that the rich don't always stay rich. The rich are not necessarily happier, and the children of the wealthy are not protected from being screw ups.

So what's the middle road? Well, I don't think it's an income level. Instead it's a heart thing. In Jesus' famous Sermon on the Mount, he instructs people to not store up treasure for themselves on earth but in heaven because "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

Growing up, my brothers and I thought we were on the lower end of the money totem pole with our thrift store clothes, no Nintendo, and the careful way my mom bought groceries. But as an adult looking back, I see that my parents made a conscious choice to invest in things greater than "treasures on earth". Even when their income was small, my parents sacrificially supported their own parents, their local church, missionaries abroad, and us their kids. We didn't have new clothes, but we did have a meaningful Christian education for the first 8 years.

Contentment in our material life is a heart issue that's independent of what we own. The question we have to ask is who are we living for? Are we looking out for ourselves or are we "seek[ing] first the kingdom of God"?

I have a number of wealthy uncles, but one stands out. He's literally the millionaire next door with his Honda Accord, threadbare undershirts, and furniture not quite old enough to be retro. His latest venture? Going to seminary and becoming a pastor for a church an hour from his home because there's a Chinese community that needs one. While pastoring might be his swan song, he's lived a lifetime consistently serving others even in the busy years of growing his company.

Living with these examples, N and I are conscious that we have choices too. Where are we storing our treasures? Are we seeking God's kingdom first? So far we've come up with a few lines of defense in a world of unsatiable wants. First, we give unemotionally. We pray and then we lop off a percentage of every paycheck for our church and missionaries around the world. This amount increases with every pay raise. Second, we shun advertising/window shopping. I don't let the stuff in my inbox and N keeps it out of our mailbox. Third, we don't prematurely retire things that are still working. We've got cars, appliances, and computers that are getting long in the tooth, but we keep them running and are saving for when they do die.

So, dear reader, what's it like for you? How do you get to just enough and not too much?

Toilet Training

Dear Children,

You may wonder when you're older what it was like for me to earn my Ph.D and quit working to be a stay-at-home-mom in the same year. Well, it was hard. In my social circle, it wasn't done. In the larger society, people were writing articles about how women who received advanced degrees and did not remain in their profession were failing women at large. Even without that, it was hard simply because the life transition was so enormous.

So I want to tell you about an experience I had when I was younger which helped me make sense of this sudden change.

My first summer in college, I was in a training program that included  a communal bathroom  for 16 girls. We were put in teams of four. On the morning of my team's turn to clean the bathrooms, I found myself scrubbing toilets while my teammates were still sleeping. I was a very bitter camper.

I huffed my way through the toilets, the shower stalls, and the floor. Then I started on a long row of sinks. Somewhere between the first sink and the last sink, I realized that while everyone else was asleep, God was watching, that these were God's sinks, and that He was pleased. No one else had to know. I didn't need to snark at my teammates.  The bathrooms were cleaner, and this was something I could do for God's glory.

In the years since then, when I've found myself doing stuff I don't like or value (or others don't value), I've been able to turn back to that bathroom experience. It reminds me that seen or unseen, valued or unvalued, my doings can be a "spiritual act of worship" and God sees.

So those years when you were small and needed a lot of "unseen" care, I remembered that God saw and his value of what I was doing with my life meant more than anything, certainly more than faceless article writers. (This also meant I didn't have to welcome your dad home with a boring recounting of all the wonderful mom-things I'd done that day.)

Anyways, as you grow up and face the twists and turns of your own life, remember that God sees and cherishes you, and that you don't need to live for the pleasure of anyone else but Him.

And about you and me: it was hard; you were worth it.

Love to you both,
Mom

The gift of belonging

You will never really enjoy other people, you will never have stable emotions, you will never lead a life of godly contentment, you will never conquer jealousy and love others as you should until you thank God for making you the way He did.
~Hufstetler in Calm My Anxious Heart by Dillow

The Hufstetler quote paints a very stark picture. It boils down to this: You can't live with others until you can live with yourself.

This quote comes from the 3rd chapter of Calm My Anxious Heart  which focuses on Psalm 139. A psalm prompts us to embrace the intentions of our Creator. In Genesis 1, the creation story, God looks at what he has made and he says, "That's good." In response this writer cries out in agreement, "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." He highlights the loving attention God lavishes on you and I from our bodies, to our thoughts, to our feelings, even to our habits. Despite having memorized this whole chapter in 7th grade, I later still struggled to thank God for making me the way He did. In fact, I wondered if he had been asleep the day I was born.

I was born to Chinese parents in the American South. I stood out; in school, in the stores, on our street. Nevertheless, all my closest friends in childhood were also Chinese. My friends' moms and dads were my "aunties" and "uncles". I merrily lived in this happy bubble of Chinese-American life until my teen years.

In the midst of my teen angst about seemingly everything, I remember thinking, "I wish I were Chinese born in China or American (White) born in America." The constant feeling of not fitting in because I didn't understand homecoming and Friday nights out and the Breakfast Club and sleepovers crescendo-ed into an inability to accept that I was not some cosmic mistake. God must have been asleep that day and gotten confused. A Wong Yuen-Ling should be born in China. And an Andrea White should be born in America. But Andrea Wong? What is that other than a mistake?

At 18 or 19, I finally noticed Ephesians 2:19, and it reorganized my inner sense of geography. I'd remembered the beginning of the chapter where Paul lays out the state of humanity: In sin, we were dead. But God, in his loving mercy rescues us in our utter helplessness through Jesus. This rescue is so complete that not only does life overcome death, but that old division between Jews and not-Jews is obliterated. Now here comes verse 19: "Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household..."

Paul was speaking to his friends in the city of Ephesus about their identity, but I needed to hear this about my own identity. All I could see what my own strangeness and alienation, the many ways I didn't fit in. I needed to know that whatever I felt about my status as a person in my community, as a person who belonged or not, in Christ I had new citizenship, new household membership. In Christ, I belonged.

Calm My Anxious Heart makes the point that if we knew how purposefully and lovingly God created us, we could give up some of the hang ups (or dare I say it, self-hate) we have about ourselves. That strikes me as right, but in my own life, the reality of belonging to God's kingdom through Jesus regardless of my own true and perceived traits has been the key to following the second half of the second greatest commandment: "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Invitation to beauty

-Sky Rift by Nicholas A. Tonelli

Over the past week, I've been buffeted by this idea that NOT complaining is a part of gospel living. We've been trained to think that sharing the gospel is about telling people about creation, the fall, and redemption through Jesus.

But I was reading a book with some friends, and the author pointed out that after the Apostle Paul, writer of many New Testament books while sitting in a drafty prison, says, "Do everything without complaining or arguing," [WHAT!!] Paul explains the reason this way:

 "so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation in which you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life. (From Paul's letter to his friends in Philippi, chpt 2)"

First of all, I get that "good" people, "nice" people should not complain or argue. I just don't always want to be good or nice. But Paul claims that this not complaining, not arguing does two things: 1) It shapes who we become. 2) It attracts people to the word of life.

Just as pianists practice scales in becoming pianists, children of God who are blameless and pure, or innocent as one translation puts it, train for it by practicing not complaining or arguing. When we choose this path, we are changed.

This change is beautiful. Think about the night sky with the stars twinkling out of the darkness. On a warm summer night, it's a wonder to behold. As the practice of not complaining or arguing takes hold, our lives light up with beauty like the night sky, and this is an offering of the word of life.

A friend recently blogged this : "There’s a mother of two I’ve gotten to know, and for a long time I felt like something was weird about her until I realized that I’ve never heard her complain. About her kids. About anything." You don't have to wear a sign that says, "I've given up complaining." People will notice because it is attractive, because it is light in a world of darkness, because it is life in the midst of death.

But let's say you don't care. You don't care about other people, you don't care to become an innocent child of God. Fine. How about this: Complaining and arguing are making you miserable.  Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a therapist lays out the 14 habits of highly miserable people.  Stuff like, "Be critical. Make sure to have an endless list of dislikes and voice them often, whether or not your opinion is solicited." or "Pick fights. This is an excellent way of ruining a relationship with a romantic partner. Once in a while, unpredictably, pick a fight or have a crying spell over something trivial and make unwarranted accusations. The interaction should last for at least 15 minutes and ideally occur in public."

The church women's study this semester is reading through Calm my Anxious Heart by Linda Dillow. The first couple chapters go back to Paul's letter to his friends in Philippi. From prison, he tells them that he's learned the secret of being content in any and every situation. Who doesn't want that? I think about my life; I think about the lives of my friends; I want peace, contentment for all of us. And I think many of us, if we were promised eternal peace and contentment at the top of a mountain, we would climb and drag ourselves up the mountain, we would walk over broken glass, we would give up our last cup of water.

After Paul says that he's learned contentment whether hungry or full, rich or poor, then he says, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." The miracle that Jesus did for Paul, that He can do for us, is that He can train us in the practice of not complaining or arguing. It will take a miracle. Thankfully, Jesus is in the miracle business. Let us join Him in His work.