When broken people in a fallen world decide that they will fight, suffer, and live and to maintain what is beautiful in this life, I think there is little else as as moving to watch unfold.
About six hundred people raised half a million dollars, and came together to walk for the organization STOP CHILD TRAFFICKING NOW. A few minutes before they were about to break the ribbon to kick it off, I watched one of the leaders give a hug to a woman on the sidelines wearing a huge, glowing smile. Their whole demeanor was wrapped in joy, with a sense of "we did it." All of those long hours event planning, marketing, recruiting, hiring, advertising, all of those sleepless nights finally paid off and they stood their witnessing the fruit of it.
It reminds me of the verse, “May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us, establish the
work of our hands for us, yes, establish the work of our hands.” (Ps 90:17)
There was a time I believed comfort was my highest desire. Safe parameters.
But the breathless awe, the fire, the influx of joy that flows from a heart ruined for this world and determined to bring about the good is far more beautiful in comparison. I could never have enacted the shift of desire on my own. We are made of sin, but connected to God we are in a state of glory.
Like new eyes seeing new light,
In the same room with the same song
When indifferent for so long,
Now I'm melody, I am love-struck.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Living or Thriving: A Consequence of Motives
Summer nights are purposeless and wonderful. On one of these I started skimming through "Eat That Frog" at Barnes N Nobles, a time management book that I seriously needed to both diagnose and remedy by organizational issues. Sick of my unsuccessful, grossly mediocre existence, I slowly lapsed into life planning mode. I began to see this picture of myself as the glistening wonder of perfection who accomplished all she set out to do. With the simple implementation of these methods my life would be so much better. I would be organized. Successful. A vision of beauty. Lets be real, all I needed to do was memorize each principle and force it into habit.
After the second chapter I put it down and started regurgitating all of the information to the helpless victim of my mother sitting across table. My mom, being a combination of selflessness and endless zeal for learning, was actually engaged in listening to me ramble about my sorry life and how these principles were going to help me be more organized. But sometimes rambles have purpose. This time it led to a realization gem I discovered as it came out of my mouth. The blurb went something to the effect of, "Mom, this book makes really good points, but the reason why I'm uncomfortable modeling my life habits out of it is because, although I would be made more effective, I don't know if the goal of life is effectiveness."
I promise I'm not just playing Mrs. philosophical here to be cute or clever. Getting to the root of things actually makes a huge difference. So we're all aware that our lives, broken down, pretty much are determined by what we do. I once heard a quote I loved, "You create your habits, then your habits create you." The problem is that we get so used to living a certain way and dealing with the consequences, that we often fail to see the importance of re-thinking why we're doing something, and whether or not its a legitimate reason. The second problem is that too many of us let our immediate external influence, literally, decide what our values are. Whether its contemporary culture, family, friends, or books we've been exposed to. And the third problem is our lack of confidence in the fact that we are fully capable, in the most practical way, of changing our values and habits to crate a different life for ourselves. Point blank: we're creatures of choice. Our choices determine our lives.
All of what you do flows from why you do it, whether you're aware of your motives or not. All of why you do things stems from what you believe is important. Thus, all of what we do (skipping a few steps) is determined by what we really think is important. For instance, the book Eat That Frog is tooting the horn of time management for the purpose of being the most effective that you can. I think its great to be successful, efficient, and proficient at your vocation. However, efficiency was only ever meant to be an outcome, not a fundamental. So it follows that if efficiency is your Bible, well, you might be moderately happy but you won't be thriving. Because you were not made to be merely efficient. Everything that makes up you was fashioned for something more profound, more beautiful.
Do we want to be human doings or human beings? Is the purpose of life to make every minute count and be so conscious of the counting?
Really, now, what should our Bible's be saying? We all need one; we all have one. It might not be the Christian Bible but you still operate by something that propels you to make all of the decisions that you do. According to our friend Webster, the definition of Bible is "any authoritative book. The Scriptures of any religion." Your Bible could be the randomness of your desires at whim. It could be a combination of what school has taught you is important, and the values your family raised you with. Regardless, I think it would do us all a great service to blow off the dust of our Bibles, find out what they really say, and see if they are harmonious with the truth that formed the foundations of the earth by which everything operates in accordance with. If they are dissonant we are bound to be frustrated. Endlessly lacking.
So discover. Analyze. Decide. Change.
The difference between living for efficiency at base or living for something like grace, love, and the glory of God is astronomical. You will not just live, but thrive.
After the second chapter I put it down and started regurgitating all of the information to the helpless victim of my mother sitting across table. My mom, being a combination of selflessness and endless zeal for learning, was actually engaged in listening to me ramble about my sorry life and how these principles were going to help me be more organized. But sometimes rambles have purpose. This time it led to a realization gem I discovered as it came out of my mouth. The blurb went something to the effect of, "Mom, this book makes really good points, but the reason why I'm uncomfortable modeling my life habits out of it is because, although I would be made more effective, I don't know if the goal of life is effectiveness."
I promise I'm not just playing Mrs. philosophical here to be cute or clever. Getting to the root of things actually makes a huge difference. So we're all aware that our lives, broken down, pretty much are determined by what we do. I once heard a quote I loved, "You create your habits, then your habits create you." The problem is that we get so used to living a certain way and dealing with the consequences, that we often fail to see the importance of re-thinking why we're doing something, and whether or not its a legitimate reason. The second problem is that too many of us let our immediate external influence, literally, decide what our values are. Whether its contemporary culture, family, friends, or books we've been exposed to. And the third problem is our lack of confidence in the fact that we are fully capable, in the most practical way, of changing our values and habits to crate a different life for ourselves. Point blank: we're creatures of choice. Our choices determine our lives.
All of what you do flows from why you do it, whether you're aware of your motives or not. All of why you do things stems from what you believe is important. Thus, all of what we do (skipping a few steps) is determined by what we really think is important. For instance, the book Eat That Frog is tooting the horn of time management for the purpose of being the most effective that you can. I think its great to be successful, efficient, and proficient at your vocation. However, efficiency was only ever meant to be an outcome, not a fundamental. So it follows that if efficiency is your Bible, well, you might be moderately happy but you won't be thriving. Because you were not made to be merely efficient. Everything that makes up you was fashioned for something more profound, more beautiful.
Do we want to be human doings or human beings? Is the purpose of life to make every minute count and be so conscious of the counting?
Really, now, what should our Bible's be saying? We all need one; we all have one. It might not be the Christian Bible but you still operate by something that propels you to make all of the decisions that you do. According to our friend Webster, the definition of Bible is "any authoritative book. The Scriptures of any religion." Your Bible could be the randomness of your desires at whim. It could be a combination of what school has taught you is important, and the values your family raised you with. Regardless, I think it would do us all a great service to blow off the dust of our Bibles, find out what they really say, and see if they are harmonious with the truth that formed the foundations of the earth by which everything operates in accordance with. If they are dissonant we are bound to be frustrated. Endlessly lacking.
So discover. Analyze. Decide. Change.
The difference between living for efficiency at base or living for something like grace, love, and the glory of God is astronomical. You will not just live, but thrive.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
I See God.
I remember his small beady eyes listening intently to my frustrated declaration of confusion over why truth is so damn obscure in a world where supposedly God wants us to find it. After a few seconds of quiet he said something I've had a hard time forgetting since then. From the mouth of an academic--a rationalist, he said, "have a little faith, Leah." In the short pause I was given a view of myself from the outside. Profound mistrust masked in academic piety of my quest to get concrete answers. The power in his accusation was in its succinct expression. I realized that I virtually had checked faith at the door.
A lot has transpired in short six months between that conversation and where I stand now. Essentially what I've come to realize is that God would not have left truth as hieroglyphics to be deciphered by a handful of academic elites who would eventually make claims to, in fact, have come to terms with understanding the nature of everything.
Last year I lived solely for one desire: to find truth. It being my first year at a prestigious, rigorously academic college, my genuine belief was that the means to discovering truth was through logical analysis of both religious texts and philosophical treatises, and the faculty of my mind to somehow synthesize it all. The process was really daunting. To be honest, that approach only led to a deeper, more complex confusion. I started to wonder how people were to find truth and whether it was even possible.
Believing in God was easy. Mere logic and inquiry will prove that. But which God? Is he knowable? How? After a long, hard year of questioning I came to the defeatist conclusion that truth had to exist in order for the world to operate, but while we are capable of hypothesizing about it, we are not capable of knowing it with certainty.
Simplicity of wisdom later made it clear that if God existed, His divinity meant sovereignty; sovereignty meant power--power I couldn't conceive. Thus, He has ways of reaching everyone: The intellectuals. The feelers. The impoverished. The consumers. Those who've heard, those who haven't heard. Because at the end of the day it really does come down to trust, and the openness of the human heart.
Now I've found God. Now I know who I love, yet He is no different than the God I've always loved. It's just that all of those dark splotches I could not reconcile in His character, the ugliness that made me scream and run have been wiped clean so I can see Him. And yes, He's beautiful. Yes, He is a Father. And yes, He commands obedience. Yes he sometimes calls us to suffer, but that does not negate his love for us. The most poignant thing is that this person is not a flowery vision brought into existence by my wishful thinking. That was always the problem before. I wanted safe, I wanted comfortable, I wanted lovely, I wanted utopia.
But he gave me something better.
He taught me how to love reality. And to be honest, if the truth that is unchangeable turned out to, in fact, mirror the truth I was fabricating, it would be a sorry day for all of us. Because life is not utopia, and God knows that. I would have been seasonally happy, but ill-equipped to live a life of freedom. Down the road it would have gotten really difficult to reconcile real life stuff with the expectancy of static transcendent, permanent peace. My current joy is not rooted in the fiction I wanted so badly to call a reality. But all of me rejoices with all of Him--the good and the bad--bad in the sense that we, as people, are forever vexed by our fixed notions of good and evil, that are most likely, but sadly, inaccurate. We're so reluctant to let those opinions be re-informed. Or better, redefined.
If we would only trust enough to let go of our illusive stability and see our individual worldiews for what they are--completely dichotomous. We claim belief in something, yet we functionally live differently. Why accede to the dishonesty?
The admittance that perhaps I didn't really believe in Christianity because I lived like a functional existentialist (or agnostic) was uncomfortable. And by functional I'm talking in the realm of hopes, thoughts, desires, decisions, life planning, and daily activity. Whatever Christian was, mine weren't Christian. So maybe Jesus wasn't real, and praying people were just so far convinced of something that the experience of everyone believing it together gave them that rush and that glow. There was the possibility that I was completely alone, and that everything I had given my life to was a lie.
After honest recognition follows honest search. I started looking for somewhere legitimate to anchor my belief. Then, I knew that once I had found it, I had to surrender my ideas.
I know, surrender has scary implications. Especially to a religion. because most of them are a) fatalistic b) a product of human construction flaunting the facade of divine instruction. And this leaves a bad taste in everyones mouth. Hope in science is worse--it makes US the saviors. Clearly we're not.
No wonder the contemporary American spirit is to make it up yourself. My gosh, that's better than submitting blindly to something that will control or screw up your life. But what about option c? Submission to a way that is actually better than yours. I'm pretty sure that if those of us who have testified to have found this way were truly convinced, we would be happily surrendering our consistently failing, disappointing methods.
The Bible says that those who are pure in heart are blessed because they will see God. When you picture purity, you get this picture of something really simple and liquid, almost clear--like water. It has no added elements. The pure in heart are those who recognized a long time ago that their water was contaminated and filthy. But they saw what pure water looked like and wanted it. Then they gave God room to purge out the muck, until the water glistened true in itself. Holistic. Beautiful. Pure.
I think purity starts with a recognition that sometimes we don't know what we're looking for. We don't know what is best. In some deep corner of every heart we know what goodness is and want it, but our understanding of it might be a little off. And so the particular way of life we are clinging to really is, to quote C.S. Lewis, "a mud pie when God wants to give us a holiday at the sea". This is your life. You have one. Don't let someone screw with it. Don't let lies mess with it. Don't you desire freedom?
Truth?
In the post-modern age, tolerance has painted it as too narrow. Relativism has made it inconceivable. The religious have made excuses for it, and in these waves of thought that compete with the longing of our hearts we have written off the legitimacy of a search for it.
So I would say the "good news" is that it not only exists, but it's available. Now.
Let go and let God. He'll surprise you. Trust. He'll awaken you. If you're looking, He will find you.
A lot has transpired in short six months between that conversation and where I stand now. Essentially what I've come to realize is that God would not have left truth as hieroglyphics to be deciphered by a handful of academic elites who would eventually make claims to, in fact, have come to terms with understanding the nature of everything.
Last year I lived solely for one desire: to find truth. It being my first year at a prestigious, rigorously academic college, my genuine belief was that the means to discovering truth was through logical analysis of both religious texts and philosophical treatises, and the faculty of my mind to somehow synthesize it all. The process was really daunting. To be honest, that approach only led to a deeper, more complex confusion. I started to wonder how people were to find truth and whether it was even possible.
Believing in God was easy. Mere logic and inquiry will prove that. But which God? Is he knowable? How? After a long, hard year of questioning I came to the defeatist conclusion that truth had to exist in order for the world to operate, but while we are capable of hypothesizing about it, we are not capable of knowing it with certainty.
Simplicity of wisdom later made it clear that if God existed, His divinity meant sovereignty; sovereignty meant power--power I couldn't conceive. Thus, He has ways of reaching everyone: The intellectuals. The feelers. The impoverished. The consumers. Those who've heard, those who haven't heard. Because at the end of the day it really does come down to trust, and the openness of the human heart.
Now I've found God. Now I know who I love, yet He is no different than the God I've always loved. It's just that all of those dark splotches I could not reconcile in His character, the ugliness that made me scream and run have been wiped clean so I can see Him. And yes, He's beautiful. Yes, He is a Father. And yes, He commands obedience. Yes he sometimes calls us to suffer, but that does not negate his love for us. The most poignant thing is that this person is not a flowery vision brought into existence by my wishful thinking. That was always the problem before. I wanted safe, I wanted comfortable, I wanted lovely, I wanted utopia.
But he gave me something better.
He taught me how to love reality. And to be honest, if the truth that is unchangeable turned out to, in fact, mirror the truth I was fabricating, it would be a sorry day for all of us. Because life is not utopia, and God knows that. I would have been seasonally happy, but ill-equipped to live a life of freedom. Down the road it would have gotten really difficult to reconcile real life stuff with the expectancy of static transcendent, permanent peace. My current joy is not rooted in the fiction I wanted so badly to call a reality. But all of me rejoices with all of Him--the good and the bad--bad in the sense that we, as people, are forever vexed by our fixed notions of good and evil, that are most likely, but sadly, inaccurate. We're so reluctant to let those opinions be re-informed. Or better, redefined.
If we would only trust enough to let go of our illusive stability and see our individual worldiews for what they are--completely dichotomous. We claim belief in something, yet we functionally live differently. Why accede to the dishonesty?
The admittance that perhaps I didn't really believe in Christianity because I lived like a functional existentialist (or agnostic) was uncomfortable. And by functional I'm talking in the realm of hopes, thoughts, desires, decisions, life planning, and daily activity. Whatever Christian was, mine weren't Christian. So maybe Jesus wasn't real, and praying people were just so far convinced of something that the experience of everyone believing it together gave them that rush and that glow. There was the possibility that I was completely alone, and that everything I had given my life to was a lie.
After honest recognition follows honest search. I started looking for somewhere legitimate to anchor my belief. Then, I knew that once I had found it, I had to surrender my ideas.
I know, surrender has scary implications. Especially to a religion. because most of them are a) fatalistic b) a product of human construction flaunting the facade of divine instruction. And this leaves a bad taste in everyones mouth. Hope in science is worse--it makes US the saviors. Clearly we're not.
No wonder the contemporary American spirit is to make it up yourself. My gosh, that's better than submitting blindly to something that will control or screw up your life. But what about option c? Submission to a way that is actually better than yours. I'm pretty sure that if those of us who have testified to have found this way were truly convinced, we would be happily surrendering our consistently failing, disappointing methods.
The Bible says that those who are pure in heart are blessed because they will see God. When you picture purity, you get this picture of something really simple and liquid, almost clear--like water. It has no added elements. The pure in heart are those who recognized a long time ago that their water was contaminated and filthy. But they saw what pure water looked like and wanted it. Then they gave God room to purge out the muck, until the water glistened true in itself. Holistic. Beautiful. Pure.
I think purity starts with a recognition that sometimes we don't know what we're looking for. We don't know what is best. In some deep corner of every heart we know what goodness is and want it, but our understanding of it might be a little off. And so the particular way of life we are clinging to really is, to quote C.S. Lewis, "a mud pie when God wants to give us a holiday at the sea". This is your life. You have one. Don't let someone screw with it. Don't let lies mess with it. Don't you desire freedom?
Truth?
In the post-modern age, tolerance has painted it as too narrow. Relativism has made it inconceivable. The religious have made excuses for it, and in these waves of thought that compete with the longing of our hearts we have written off the legitimacy of a search for it.
So I would say the "good news" is that it not only exists, but it's available. Now.
Let go and let God. He'll surprise you. Trust. He'll awaken you. If you're looking, He will find you.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Worshipping Nothingness
If the worst evil i feel tonight
Is my aching, desperate longing
I will be okay for it will be
Forgotten in the morning.
I'll wake and start the motion,
While underneath the soil of my soul
Will suffer one more day of
Swift and soft erosion.
In motion I am free.
In forgetfulness, I'm beautiful.
In city lights I change hues
But in myself I am nothing.
I am in love with light,
But I am only shifting shadow
I am dishonest.
Because in stillness I'm a slave
In reality I'm ugly
Just a beautiful invention
Webbed in lies beneath my masking.
And in nights like these, the naked silence
Questions me like tiny mouses eating at my armor
What am I really desperate for?
What am I really longing for?
It's not okay if I am only desperate
It's not okay if I am only longing.
For nothing.
Is my aching, desperate longing
I will be okay for it will be
Forgotten in the morning.
I'll wake and start the motion,
While underneath the soil of my soul
Will suffer one more day of
Swift and soft erosion.
In motion I am free.
In forgetfulness, I'm beautiful.
In city lights I change hues
But in myself I am nothing.
I am in love with light,
But I am only shifting shadow
I am dishonest.
Because in stillness I'm a slave
In reality I'm ugly
Just a beautiful invention
Webbed in lies beneath my masking.
And in nights like these, the naked silence
Questions me like tiny mouses eating at my armor
What am I really desperate for?
What am I really longing for?
It's not okay if I am only desperate
It's not okay if I am only longing.
For nothing.
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