Category Archives: Happy Tensions

Being shaped.

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Jon Tyson writes:
Breaking the Mold

How exactly does the world shape us into its image? I recently asked my eight-year-old daughter a question, and she replied, “Whatever.” I asked her where she learned to respond to others’ questions in this way. Her response: “Everywhere.”It’s this “everywhere” that shapes our lives.

Paul was asking the Romans to consider the larger forces that formed people into Romans. Then he wanted them to consider how Jesus transformed Romans into Christians.

For us, rather than simply asking how to make Americans Christian, we first need to ask what makes Americans American, and then decipher how Jesus can transform Americans into Christians. That allows us to see substantive progress in spiritual formation.

Pastoring in New York, not unlike the city of Rome, I’ve struggled to decipher these forces of cultural formation, and to open our people’s eyes to them.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault called this shaping of people into a worldly mold “the normalization of the individual.” Think about how these forces press us into the world’s view of “normal.”

  • Education: Almost all education is secular, even at a kindergarten level. At the college or graduate school level, belief in God is often seen as childish at best, and a serious intellectual impediment.
  • Media: Media is pervasive, pouring story after story into our lives, most of them contradictory to the way of Jesus. What was once held sacred has been transformed into entertainment. In most media, truth has been reduced to sound bites, and the sensational drowns out the substantive.
  • Marketing: One commentator estimates that we see more advertisements in a single year of our lives than someone 50 years ago saw in an entire lifetime. We ourselves have been branded.
  • Economics: We learn from our earliest years that more is better, and better is not enough. We spend much of lives trying to keep up acquire things and experiences in order to feel good about ourselves. The supreme value of life is how much we can acquire. Success is defined by one word: more.
  • Sexuality: The message of our culture is that sex is purely physical, and that as long as no one is hurt, people can determine their own sexual practices. The rise of pornography has taken sex out of the bedroom and turned it into a form of entertainment.
  • Religion: All religions are seen as equal and valid, and to claim that one is true and the others are not is cultural treason. The only belief you can hold with conviction is that there isn’t any true-for-everybody belief.

Growing up in a culture like this, we quickly find that a sermon on Sunday, or a weekly youth group talk, can hardly give us the tools to renew our minds and be transformed into the image of our Creator.

—Jon Tyson, “Breaking the Mold: Christian formation means not letting the world press us into its mold,” Christianity Today, June 13, 2011.

Paul shows us God’s heart in Romans 12:1-2:

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

In whose image are you being remade?

 

Off with the old, on with the new (part 2).

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» continued from last time …

“If I only had an enemy bigger than my apathy,
I could have won.”
—Mumford & Sons, “I Gave You All”

Poor Children

It’s often remarked by those in the West how happy people seem when they visit developing nations. They have so little, and yet they are so happy!

(Really? Being poor and living hand-to-mouth makes one happy? I thought being comfortable was necessary for a joyful life.) Perhaps they have developed more strongly what we miss in our comfortable bubbles: contentment and gratitude. While we may think that a mixture of a perfect environment, coupled with optimal opportunities will make for a great life when combined with the dreams of our parents. You know, the one’s where we accomplish everything they envisioned for us. Call it living vicariously through one’s child, and I call it pretending. Have you noticed how grateful pampered kids are today? Are spoiled kids content with what they have? I’ve said it before, kids are just mini versions of us adults, and ingratitude and greed run in our family.

Being ungrateful comes from our having unmet expectations, specific desires that go unfilled. More to the point, ingratitude means we think we deserve better. Reality is what remains when all we hoped for disappoints us. Since we know that true hope does not and cannot disappoint (Romans 5:5), our shattered dreams must instead be a sorry substitute for the life God envisioned for us.

Why do we resist His grand vision for our lives, and pursue our own tiny versions?

I tend to think we do this because we desire to be the heroes of our own story. All our lives we are  told we can do anything with our lives, that we can do amazing things. If only each of us would choose to replace our “old” life for a brand “new” one. Simple as that. Believe in yourself, try new things, and whatever you desire can be yours. Yes, we are a big deal.

Of course we think we’re a big deal. Consider how much history is being made … right this moment:

Population-weighted history of the past two millennia.

Source: The Economist

You know what happened at the beginning of that graph? A poor man born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth made more history than we would. He didn’t carry much economic clout back then, though He owns the whole universe.

It’s been said it’s not the number of our days that matter, it’s the worth of our days. In Jesus’ short three decades He accomplished more than we ever will in our medically-augmented 72-plus. His life is not even a tiny dot on that graph. Ours show up collectively as two tall lines, part of the economic output and years lived. On this scale, we could easily think we are better. Or at least we live in a better world now, right? The world was cruel back then, and remains just as cruel today as 2,000 years ago.

Even in our global village, we keep ourselves confined to our family-friendly edge of the village, in climate-controlled palaces and carriages. All the while — remember the graph — more history is being made today than ever before. More people means more opportunities for good, and for suffering. As we near 7 Billion people on planet earth, multiplied by 3,600 seconds every hour, and every moment carries more weight than every before. The question, do we want to stay apathetic, or get involved? Mumford and Sons is on to something; I think apathy is the strongest “force” in the first world today.

Consider the following, brought to us by Richard Stearns, president of World Vision, in his great book The Hole in Our Gospel:

“When Evangelical Christians where asked whether they would help children orphaned by AIDS, assuming they were asked by a reputable Christian organization that was doing this work …

  • only 3 percent said that they definitely would help;
  • 52 percent said that they would probably or definitely would not help!”

—ch. 17, “AWOL to the Greatest Humanitarian Crisis of All Time”

And this on the current plight ongoing in our little space in history:

“Fifteen thousand Africans are dying each day of preventable, treatable diseases — AIDS, malaria, TB — for lack of drugs that we take for granted.
This statistic alone makes a fool of the idea many of hold on to very tightly: the idea of equality. What is happening to Africa mocks our pieties, doubts our concern and questions our commitment to the whole concept. Because if we’re honest, there’s no way we could conclude that such mass death day after day would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else. Certainly not North America or Europe, or Japan. An entire continent bursting into flames? Deep down, if we really accept that their lives — African lives — are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. It’s an uncomfortable truth.”
—Bono, quoted in The Hole in Our Gospel, ch. 8, “The Greatest Challenge of the New Millennium.”

Since we know, there is no longer any excuse.

The question remains: what are we going to do about that?

Let’s make history.

… to be continued …

 

Off with the old, on with the new (part 1).

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Love that will not betray, dismay, or enslave you,
it will set you free;
be more like the man you were made to be.
There is a design, an alignment,
a cry of my heart to see
the beauty of love as it was made to be.
—Mumford & Sons, “Sigh No More”

Are you past-, present-, or future-oriented? When someone asks you to explain why something is the way it is, do you envision would it could be (future), should be (present), or do you dig deep in the past to see the string of events that brought about the present? Like, when asked, “What’s the deal with the housing market?” how do you process an answer? Are you prone to think of how bad it is right now (perhaps if you are selling a home), or where the market could be going, or the myriad factors that brought us up to this point?

(I am past-oriented, by the way, prone to consider the history of successive events up to the present. More on past-present-future-orientation here.)

We are all born present-oriented hedonists. Think about it: we crave food (milk), must be cared for constantly, and cannot even fathom what shall be in the future and quickly forget what just was. We live according to our strong cravings. Somewhere along the line, we must be weened off our self-centered nature and develop into responsible, mature adults. Plenty of factors play into this, such as encountering difficulties and overcoming them, devoting ourselves to faithfulness and perseverance. Though we try to find them, there are no shortcuts to true maturity. Parents may try to enter their kids into the best schools, pay their way onto the optimal select sports teams, and protect them from the big, bad, dark world.

The problem?

You cannot do all of that and properly school the human heart, or train yourself to unselfishness by taking the easy route. Environment alone, however refined and optimal, does not produce a refined and optimal man. Again, there are no shortcuts.

How many times have you watched a movie that displays all our vein attempts at the great life — of success, power, money, and pleasure? Consider the popular Limitless, and the more critically-acclaimed Lincoln Lawyer. The latter, starring Matthew McConaughey highlights the attempts of Ryan Philippe’s character to live a secret life of perverted pleasures. Philippe’s journey shows how pride destroys a whole family as they refuse to deal honestly (and personally) with their inner evil. The former stars the upstart Bradley Cooper chronicling a desperate grasping for significance and riches. (What if you could take a pill and instantly become awesome?) Both men lived in the fast-line, greedily trying to ADD a new life to their present one. Instead of confessing their faults and building a new life by turning from their sins, they sought to hide their former self and pretend their new awesome lifestyle was their true self.

Both characters — Philippe’s and Cooper’s — came across as future-oriented mature men in society, though they were secretly present-oriented hedonists. These were not men; they were juveniles not challenged in life to move past their childhood folly. Every pursuit was for pleasure — their own — and in the one more legally-minded tale, justice was served in the end. I think the reason we make, and watch, movies like this is that they reflect a deep longing in our souls. And a reflection of our arrogance. We want to be like them, because we are like them. We are thirsting for more, and wish we were more.

Too bad we cannot set aside our old lives and live new and better ones.

… to be continued …

 

Better than expected.

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Few things in life are ‘as advertised,’ and far fewer are better than expected. As my wife often writes about, expectancy is better than having expectations. True Hope does not disappoint, though we live in constant disappointment it seems, a frustration on our ill-fashioned ‘hopes.’

This week Kari and I celebrated eight years of marriage, and I must say that life with her is better than expected. I did have ‘high hopes’ for our life together, yet the trajectory of our shared life, growing in gratitude and humility together daily, as Christ leads us, has been the true joy of this adventure. Here’s to eight times eight more years together in this life!

20110701-032824.jpg

 

4,178 days: Gritty, gusty, tough and resourceful.

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Congratulations to the Dallas Mavericks for becoming the 2011 NBA Champions. The Dirk Side won over the Dark Side.

Mavs coach Rick Carlisle used terms such as grit, guts, mental toughness and resourcefulness to describe his team, saying the men he coached embodied those attributes more than any other team he’d been around. (That’s saying a lot; he played on the ’86 Celtics.) [See a great article by ESPN.com’s J.A. Adande.]

The most outspoken and fan-like owner in sports was especially silent during this trip to the NBA Finals. After the game he said:

“I learned chemistry matters, that it’s a team game. That you have to have players that believe in each other and trust each other and trust your coach. And that it’s a process. And that it doesn’t happen overnight.”
—Mavericks owner Mark Cuban (breaking his media embargo for the NBA Playoffs and Finals); via the Daily Dime on ESPN.com

MavsThere are few shortcuts in life. Sports and business commenter Darren Rovell noted that Mark Cuban had to wait 4,178 days for a title. Perseverance and faithfulness pay off. This morning he had company on the plane back to Dallas. I don’t know much about Mark Cuban, but it appears the man is growing in humility and gratitude, which is helping him muster the courage to be generous towards others.

Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, the team LeBron James left last July in “The Decision” to “take [his] talents to South Beach” after six years together, tweeted that there are NO SHORTCUTS. There may be some shortcuts, but ultimately we won’t be successful in life over the longhaul if we take the easy road.

Let’s be clear: neither road for either team was easy.

The constant scrutiny, the overplayed commentary on the faux coughs (D-Wade and LeBron apparently mocking Nowitzki, caught on local media). Some would say they did this to themselves. I agree. But it still has to be an overwhelming ordeal, self-inflicted or not. They began the year celebrating themselves, long before the season. And today the Miami Herald has a Macy’s ad offering Heat championship gear. Oops.

The Miami Heat of 2010-2011 have been together for about 340 days. Under Cuban’s leadership the Mavericks invested 4,178 days pursuing a championship. That should be celebrated. It’s not so much that they waited so long. It’s that the persevered so diligently.

I wasn’t able to watch game 6, but was rooting from afar for the Mavericks. Something about their non-superstar superstar Dirk Nowitzki makes we want to root for him and their team. (And not just because we were born two days apart.) His whole adult life is wrapped around pursuing the great prize, and in the off-season he holes up in a gym and works on his game. Gritty, gutsy, tough. No excuses. During interviews he grabs the mic and speaks eloquently, never deriding the opposition or mocking them. The young man from Würzburg, Germany seems like a class act to me. One of those people who is the same from far away as when you see them up close.

The fallout from the Heat’s loss will be as big a story as the Mavs win. The Heat were supposed to win; they almost bought themselves a championship, and the fear was this would become the new norm. The Mavs took a different route, and though they too are spending millions there are no easy fixes. After the game LeBron James commented on those who were rooting against him:

“At the end of the day, all the people rooting for me to fail, they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I’m going to continue to live the way I want to live. . . . They can get a few days or a few months on being happy about not only myself but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal, but they have to get back to the real world at some point.”

He’s right. We all woke up to our same mediocre lives. He woke up to the same personal problems he had yesterday as well. That’s true of all of us. Sports give us a mini-escape from reality, but we must face our problems and persevere through them. We are all witnesses to the challenges of life.

In the face of Dirk’s brilliant fade-away jumper, the Miami Heat probably wish the criticism would just go away. Of course they will rebound. Life treats talented people very kindly, especially those who are a business-in-and-of-themselves; LeBron’s ‘brand’ will take a hit, but after next year’s pending lockout he’ll have another chance to courageously pursue faithfulness and perseverance.

Actually, during the lockout, when the games are not televised or scrutinized — that’s when one must persevere and be faithful. If we would be awesome when everyone’s watching, we must do the daily work when no one’s there to see. If we’re honest, that’s the title we desire: to be called faithful and courageous. It takes grit, guts, and resourcefulness. A ring is just bling; becoming a faithful person who perseveres is the real deal.

All of it makes we want to get a new shirt.

[Thanks to @darrenrovell for most of these links.]

 

Constantly.

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Ask yourself:

“Does gratitude characterize your thoughts of God? Thankfulness is a good test of your faith. Its absence demonstrates that your faith is more lip service than experiential knowledge. Your days, whether easy or difficult, should be filled with thanksgiving because while life changes drastically, your God remains the same forever. He is constant — constantly good, loving, and faithful.”

—Joe Thorn, “Thanksgiving,” Note to Self, p. 44.

 

What drives us? Perhaps nothing?

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Time for installment four of our What Drives Us series looking at why we do, think and feel the way we do. The core idea is this: we either make our decisions based on God’s promises in the Gospel, or on something else.

We’ve looked at Preference, Perfection, and Protection. Now it’s time to consider the strongest force among my generation: apathy.

Perhaps ‘nothing’ drives me? And perhaps the greatest danger facing my generation and those who will follow us is not the threat of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, a down economy, or a tsunami. No, we are being washed away by wave after wave of triviality. We’re a generation deeply committed to being entertained, and thus prone to taking very little seriously. Perhaps our priorities may be a bit askew? (I am asking myself this question too.)

Does nothing drive you?

Let’s look at how this may play out in life.

Situation … response:

  • When all is well in my life … I don’t think much about God; I’m doing okay on my own.
  • When trials enter my life … I ask “why?” and blame others, because I feel like a victim.
  • When I am criticized, I … act cool and pretend it doesn’t bother me.
  • My relationship with God … good or bad, depending on the circumstances around me.
  • Motivation: Whatever feels good at the moment.
  • When I sin … I think it only affects me and don’t feel bad unless consequences impact daily life.
  • I trust … in not very much or many people. (I trust in myself.)
  • My greatest strengths/ weaknesses are … my strength is how easy-going I am; my weakness is that I won’t rise to meet challenges.
  • My identity is found in … what I think of myself, which is probably different than how others perceive me. (I pretend ‘I don’t care what others think or say about me.’)

What is the antidote?

The maturity process brought to us through accumulating responsibilies in the normal course of life. Paul talks about the transition to manhood specifically when he writes, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways” (1 Cor. 13:11). That comes in the middle of a poetic section on love. Love takes courage, putting away childish ways marked by a perspective of greed and one’s feelings of personal pride. We move past our sense of entitlement when we continually recognize all that we have comes by grace. Our hearts will overwhelm with gratitude, and we will live in humility before others and God. Maturing people grow in gratitude and humility because what drives them is something greater than themselves.

So, when a young man, for example, has not developed the skills necessary to enter a career, but has completed his college degree — something’s clearly wrong. The system has failed him and parental influences have not prepared him well for life as a responsible adult.

And it’s not just that the economy is down, though that could be the reason for joblessness for a season. Let me suggest that the real issue is that for years this young man was coddled into thinking the world revolved around him, and he was happy to live in that fantasy world. (“You can do and be anything you want to be,” his parents told him.) Things came easily, as he didn’t have to work or sacrifice too hard.

Then when a real challenge comes along he will escape into the world he knows best. This may help explain why for some men their hobbies are self-oriented (and take valuable time from their families to go ‘recreate’), while for maturing men their hobbies are renewing and constructive (the true meanings of ‘re-creation’).
Continue reading →

 

Today: groan with the earth.

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It’s not every year the the events of Holy Week align with Earth Day. But, when we think about it, it makes more than a little sense that Earth Day (today) is also Good Friday. Tonight I get to speak a meditation on the crucified Christ. We will gather to sing about the day God-in-a-bod died, the climax to the Story of the world.

The created world we live in has a stake in what happened on the day the Creator suffered at the hands of His creation. We not only trash the earth with our consuming and wastefulness; we trash the Creator with our willful sin and rebellion. (Seems like one is the symptom, while the other is the cause.)

Paul helps us see this connection:

18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we await for it with patience.
—Romans 8:18-25

While we know the Holy Week leads up to Easter, the day to celebrate the ultimate Victory, we recognize we live in a good-friday-world, full of suffering and rebellion. We suffer not as complete victims, while the created order was not complicit in our rebellion. So, we meditate on Earth Day as part of the truths of Good Friday, in hopes that the full weight of what happened on Resurrection Sunday will be ours. Christ conquered all His enemies — sin, death, Satan, and our rebellion — to bring us to God. The Creator makes us His change agents in this world, as we experience the power for transforming coming not from us but from Him and through us.

In this hope we who trust in Christ have been rescued, and are being rescued. Celebrate Earth Day by looking to the Cross where our Savior — our only Hope — willingly gave Himself for us.

 

Conquering Anxiety.

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God will give us what we want. If we hunger and thirst for righteousness, we will get righteousness. But if we want someone else, He will let us pursue it, find it, and become fully consumed with it. That thing will leave us empty in the end. It will leave us anxious.

“Anxiety … is fear and worry about what the future holds … it is being stricken by the unavoidable and the uncontrollable.”

“… Being the captain of your own ship and the master of your destiny means you are going to sail you ship through the waters of anxiety.”

“If you want to be conformed to the image of Christ, you will be. And if you don’t, you won’t.”

—Pastor Jon Furman, “Joy That Overcomes” (series: True Joy, part 10, on Philippians 4:2-9)

The Scripture:

2 Now I appeal to Euodia and Syntyche. Please, because you belong to the Lord, settle your disagreement. 3 And I ask you, my true partner, to help these two women, for they worked hard with me in telling others the Good News. They worked along with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are written in the Book of Life.

4 Always be full of joy in the Lord. I say it again—rejoice! 5 Let everyone see that you are considerate in all you do. Remember, the Lord is coming soon.

6 Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. 7 Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

8 And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. 9 Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.

—Philippians 4:2-9, NLT