Alcoholics Anonymous vs. the Church

http://stevieg.typepad.com/trudging_the_road_of_happ/addiction/
This is a series of posts in which Steve (a fella I met waaay back in college) goes through the 12 steps of AA (he's gotten through 8 so far) and first explains how they work within AA and then what the church might look like if it took the same rule/step to heart. I think his posts have been provocative so far and would recommend them as a means of thinking through the nature and purpose of the church.

The link takes you to the series of posts specifically on this topic and works just like viewing a tag here works -- which means the posts are going to show up in reverse chronological order when you click through. So scroll to the bottom of the page to start reading.

(For those of you viewing this post via Facebook, you might need to click through to Multiply in order to grab the link to Steve's page. To be honest, I don't remember how Multiply links render when they're cross-posted to FB.)

The fruit of the Spirit - with a place to practice

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law." -- Galatians 5:22-23

New Year's resolutions can probably all be boiled down to: "In the upcoming year, I want to be a better person."  That might mean eating differently, exercising more, spending more time with family, or not kicking the cat. But the end goal is to somehow improve your life in some way. Often times it's hard to stick to those goals. Without outside encouragement or accountability, it's easy to let things slide.

This is certainly true for Christians, and not just at the New Year.  Exhorted by the Bible to love our neighbor as ourselves, to be loving, patient, gentle, self-controlled, etc. we are constantly encouraged to better ourselves (not so that we might achieve our salvation since that was the whole point of Jesus' coming after all, but so that we might be people of integrity who mirror the characteristics of our messiah.) But just because I read that I should be loving doesn't make me loving.  And just because I'm told that I should be gentle doesn't make me gentle. It takes practice. And that's where church should come in.

Church should be a safe place where I can practice forgiving, or asking for forgiveness, or being loving when someone annoys or upsets me, or being patient. And I should be safer there because the people are of the same body. It's to their benefit for me to improve myself, just as it's to my benefit as they improve themselves. So when I "try" to be patient and end up screwing up royally, it's the church (meaning members of that same body) that should come alongside me, help me to calm down, encourage me to continue trying to be patient and perhaps even step in if my impatience is harming another. And this should all be done, not in judgment, but in brotherly love.

Of course, I keep saying the church "should" do this because it is, by definition, made up of a bunch of screwed up individuals who aren't always going to be patient and loving and kind with each other. But as our savior has forgiven us, he has enabled us to forgive others. Yes, we'll keep messing up, but we also need to keep forgiving, keep moving forward, keep encouraging, keep loving. Church should be like family -- a group of people who accept us even when we've messed up and who encourage us to do better next time.

So why don't you leave?

A few weeks back a friend of mine asked how our church was doing. She knew we had a new pastor (Well, he's been around for over a year now.) and so she thought she'd check in and see how that was going. I replied that though things were OK, I didn't feel like I was really being challenged and we were still struggling to grow in size.  (Not that I think numerical growth is a big issue in general, but our little congregation is so small, that we really do need to grow a bit just to get back to a respectable size.)  She looked at me in consternation and asked, "So why don't you just leave?"

To be honest, I was kinda floored by that. I know that other people wander from church to church looking for... I don't even know what. But I see church as a body (or a family). Romans 12:5 says, "we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others." Leaving would feel like chopping off my arm and casting it aside. (Only, in this analogy, I'm the arm, not the body. They'd be injured, but whole enough to carry on. I'd just be an arm lying on the ground unable to do a whole lot.) 

This (and a subsequent discussion on "church" with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law) got me to thinking more on the topic of leaving a church/what is church/how do we "do" church. It's something I've thought a lot about in the past, so this is nothing new. But I thought it would be worthwhile to articulate my thoughts this time around. 

1) Church is not about what you get out of it. It's about who we are. To leave is akin to dismemberment, or perhaps some form of elective surgery. (There are times when we have to move, such as for work or school. But if you were actually part of a body, then you'll feel the tear when you leave.)  

The chief exception to this, I think, is when there are "churches" that behave more like a social club than the living organism that they should be (according to my reading of the Bible, at least). I've attended a social-club-esque church where the chief goals seemed to be finding a mate or a business partner, playing church, and talking a whole lot about community but then blaming the not-actually-doing-it on living in a transient society. Churches like this are very easy to join as well as to leave, in my opinion. They don't function like a body, therefore there's no (or little) pain when someone walks away. 

2) I've been a member of our current church since we moved to the area 8 years ago and from the get-go, I had the impression that the people in this congregation understand what I just said back in #1, even if they've never studied a single book on it, heard a single sermon on it, or ever bothered to articulate it. After having attended several churches in a row that talked a whole lot about community, it was almost stunning to end up in one that never once talked about it, but that seemed to understand and live it at a foundational level. Not only that, but we arrived just after several members had left and though some churches would blithely carry on after something like that, this church bled. Social clubs don't bleed. Bodies do. 

So, yeah, I'm not totally excited about where our body is right now.  I had high hopes as the new pastor was coming in that we'd really start growing. I suppose it's like the excitement you have at the beginning of the new year when you've made a resolution to work out every day. You're excited about what the all-new-you is going to be like. But then mid-January rolls around and you start to realize that though you might have done a little extra exercise the first week, you rolled right back into business as usual by the second. But just because I'm disappointed doesn't mean I'm going to chuck it all. You don't start cutting yourself just because you didn't exercise.  Instead, I think it's time to step back and recheck goals, rethink strategies, find partners who can help you to keep that New Years resolution, and continue to aim in the right direction even though you now realize it's not going to be as easy as you had once hoped. I'm still wrestling with what that means in terms of our relationship to our church. But it's worth wrestling with.  When you have a good thing, it's worth taking time to think out how it could be better, rather than chucking it in the trash. 

Christmas Quiz

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/quiz?id=PQBQS
This is from the Christian History Magazine folks. I only got 6 out of 10 right. (And most of the ones I got right I had guessed on.)

Whew! Does this mean I should expect a lump of coal in my stocking? (Or is Santa handing out Carbon Offset Credits this year instead of coal?)

How December 25 Became Christmas - Biblical Archaeology Review

http://www.bib-arch.org/e-features/christmas.asp
Here's an interesting take on how December 25th was chosen as the date to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Rather than attributing the date selection to a holiday makeover of pagan holidays, the author argues that it might rather be based upon the time of Jesus' conception.

Still sounds kinda odd to me, but it might be worth giving a "hmmm" to.

Thanks to Don for the link.

Planting a tree when you're 70 years old...

Sojourners' email newsletter today included the following quote:

You must take living so seriously that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees -- and not for your children, either, but because although you fear death you don't believe it, because living, I mean, weighs heavier.- Nazim Hikmet, Turkish poet, persecuted during the Cold War for his communist views (1901-1963)

I have two questions:
1) What do you think of his reason for planting a tree.  Do you think that living weighs heavier than death? and
2) Would you plant a tree when you're 70?

This pretty much sums up why we don't have a Christmas tree

There's lots of possible excuses I could use on why we don't have a Christmas tree:
* It's a Germanic pagan tradition and I'm not a Germanic pagan.
* They drop needles and make a mess and I don't want to deal with it.
* Trees often represent fertility and the last thing I need in this house after having had twins before my firstborn was even 2 is more fertility.

But none of those are really the real reason why we don't have a tree. The real reason is that I just can't get past this idea that we're celebrating life by killing something and then enshrining its dying carcass, as wonderful as it might smell, in our house. It just feels all wrong to me.

I have nothing against people doing Christmas trees. But I just find that year after year, even when the kids beg, I can't make myself do it. The last time we had a tree was in 2001 when I bought a live one in a pot. It was only a few feet tall, cost an arm and a leg, and then we were stuck with finding a place to plant it afterwards. (It now lives somewhere out on the plains with my brother-in-law's parents and is apparently doing well.)

This year my mom took pity on the kids and gave them a little plastic tree that they've set out front next to the Christmas cactus that I told them they could put the presents under. They seem OK with that. Then I showed them this cartoon. With my girls, cartoons speak louder than words. I'll be curious to see if they beg for a tree next year or not. To be honest, their begging has always seemed a little half-hearted.

(Click on the picture to enlarge it.)

The beginning of wisdom

A friend of mine just retweeted this:

RT @JohnPiper The beginning of wisdom is that I have absolutely no say in how God should run the world, and I am peaceful with that.

It seemed to fit in with our previous discussion in which I used a gardener and ant analogy, so I thought I'd share it here.

10 strangest Jesus sightings of 2009

http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2009/12/top-10-places-jesus-revealed-himself-this-year.html
I can't see Jesus on Mars or on the toilet, can you?

He's plain as day on this candy bar, though, eh?

Majesty

"On Maui, one November, Hugh and I went swimming, and turned to find a gigantic sea turtle coming up between us. As gentle as a cow she was, and with a cow's dopey, almost lovesick expression on her face.  That, to me, was worth the entire trip, worth my entire life, practically.  For to witness majesty, to find yourself literally touched by it--isn't that what we've all been waiting for?" -- David Sedaris, in his article Loggerheads: Sea turtles and me which was included in the January 7th, 2009 edition of The New Yorker.

God's noblest work

I'm reading a book called Revelations: Diaries of Women which includes excerpts from a wide variety of women including the wife of Tolstoy, the wife of Dostoevsky, Anne Frank, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Many of the women that I have read so far appear to adore some man or other (often husbands, but Dorothy Wordsworth adored her brother, William.) It was getting to a point that I honestly started to wonder if men were different or better or some such back in the day. (Or perhaps the women led more pathetic lives?)

But then I got to a quote by Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women.  When she was 10 years old she wrote the following in her diary:

Father asked us what was God's noblest work.  Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad; babies never are.

I had to laugh at that.

So what would you say is God's noblest work?  (Atheists can play along by deferring to the God part for the moment and focusing on the noblest work bit.) I'm tempted to pick something mushy like "love" or "community." But I think the theme of the quote involves tangible objects. Chocolate jumps to mind, but that might be a bit of a silly answer.

I suppose a question like this calls to mind another question, "What does it mean to be noble?"

I guess I'm going to go with "People" as my answer for now. We're such complex creatures that I think that makes us pretty impressive. But noble?  See, I'm not sure if we fit that part. I'll have to keep thinking on this.

The Living Nativity « The Skit Guys

Link

Hmmm, I haven't used this share into Multiply feature before.  Even though the link under the video says "watch preview" I think you still end up seeing the whole thing.

The blurb under the vid. describes it as: "A hilarious and heartwarming mockumentary that tells the story of an actor performing in a living nativity who takes his role way too seriously."

Safe Ground

[A dorky poem by yours truly.]

As long as we continue to pedal
   through the same ideas and concepts
     every Sunday
As long as "they" are always wrong
   and "we" are always right
Then we are on safe ground.

Some days we seem to veer near the edge.
We come close to an interesting or new idea.
We consider that there might be more to consider.
And then we get back on task.

If we really believe what we believe
Then aren't we already on safe ground?
Shouldn't we feel safe then,
   pedaling outside our comfort zone?

*Sigh*

Another Sunday spent
   remaining on safe ground.

He has a knack for that

I got this in my email inbox today. The text at the bottom says, "Steve Fee has quite a knack for writing relevant worship songs with memorable melodies and lyrics that give voice to the songs that God has already put in the hearts of His people."

Does that even make sense to say that Steve has "quite a knack" for writing worship songs?Seems like that would be akin to saying that Elijah had "quite a knack" for working miracles or Moses had "quite a knack" for leading the Israelites out of Egypt. 

Jars of Clay covers Van Halen (accordion style)

We listen to Mornings with Brant on our way in to school. He's thoughtful, brings up interesting topics of discussion, and is just the right amount of irreverent.

He also plays accordion, but this time around it was one of the chaps from Jars of Clay that grabbed the instrument and rocked out. (Brant is the guy who throws his face in front of the camera about half way through.)

Ayn Rand vs. Kathleen Dean Moore

I'm currently reading Ayn Rand's We the Living. I've only read one Ayn Rand before; I can't remember which book it was.  All I remember was that the two characters that hated each other the most were also constantly having sex with each other.  It seemed a bit bizarre to me. But since then I've occasionally heard people rave over Ayn Rand's books. So I decided to dive in again in hopes of figuring out what exactly it was that people liked in them. I still don't think I get it.  (Feel free to enlighten me.) But I did find that some sections of the book stand at a delightful juxtaposition to an article I was reading in this week's High Country News.

I'm curious, which quote resonates with you more? And why?

"Don't you know," her voice trembled suddenly in a passionate plea she could not hide, "don't you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside hand should dare to touch? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: 'This is mine'? Don't you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Don't you know that there is something in us which must not be touched by any state, by any collective, by any number of millions?" -- Ayn Rand, in We the Living

This inclusiveness is by design. Kathy's friends and family members underscore Aldo Leopold's belief that, just as ecology is the science of connection, so "all ethics... rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts." It is also Moore's reply to centuries of Western philosophy.  She believes that our great thinkers have spent far too much energy parsing distinctions between ideas, between humans and other living things, between the mundane and the sacred, and not given nearly enough effort to pointing out commonalities. -- John Calderazzo, writing about Kathleen Dean Moore in an article entitled, "When reverence isn't enough" in HCN.

Re: Jesus loves you

This cracked me up. I'd love to see what folks said in the emails they sent in reply to him.

I think the answer to the disconnect has to do with justice. But the disconnect itself is interesting in its own right (as the video hilariously points out). I think many people who call themselves Christians live in this world of disconnect without ever realizing how confused they are. And when it dawns on them, I think that's when they jump ship.

Death is a Donne Deal

I think I'd be remiss in talking about death if I didn't mention what I believe Death's fate is in the end. John Donne (one of my favorite poets) summed it up far better than I ever could:

Death Be Not Proud

by John Donne
(1572-1631)

---

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

(copied over from About.com)

End of Life Discussions

OK, so perhaps we can't prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we're all gonna die, but I'd venture to say that it's pretty likely to occur. It's going to happen to me. It's going to happen to you. Whether we want to talk about it or not, it's one of those pieces of life that we get to undergo whether we ever talk about it or not.

But why don't we talk about it? Why does the inclusion of "end-of-life counseling" in the president's health care proposal stir so much acrimony? I can understand where people have concerns about a government run health care system or they might have issues with the increased cost to the nation or other similar issues.  But fighting the inclusion of counseling to help people know what their options are when making a living will? What is it that we're really fighting there? Is this a means for the nation to channel Dylan Thomas in raging against the dying of the light? It's not the counseling we're afraid of. It's that bit about death.

The older sister of one of Nathan's former classmates died last Thursday. She was 14. She was hit by an SUV as she biked across a crosswalk and her body was thrown 60 feet. I heard that her mother spent most of the day thrown across her body crying. I can't get that image out of my mind. I ache for her loss and I imagine myself similarly prostrate across one of my children's lifeless forms if the same were to befall us. And that leads me to appreciate and love and cherish my kids all the more. They're not dead, yet. I'm not dead, yet. But all of us will be one day. Recognizing and being aware of that fact enables me to be more thankful for the life we have today.

The New York Times had an article on end-of-life care and counseling yesterday entitled, "At the End, Offering Not a Cure but Comfort." The article touches upon different people's ability to cope with the fact that they are nearing the end of their life. It described a cancer patient whose response to the tragic news that her cancer was terminal was to state matter-of-factly that she's rather live, thank you very much. Her response echoed the statements made by a gal in our church who passed away several years ago from a brain tumor. She "just wanted to get on with life." ... Isn't that what many of us would say when faced with death? "No thank you. I'll pass on that. I've got better things to do." And yet it comes anyway.

Why is discussing death left to the goths and morbid teens who have more life in them than the death they love to ruminate on? Why are we not more aware of death in our day-today lives? Rob and I both remind our kids that we're not going to be around forever.  We don't know the day of our demise, but we recognize that it's coming. We know that each day we have in which we can be with our kids and love them and raise them is a gift. We try hard not to take that for granted. As much as I'd love to promise my kids that I'll always be here for them, I'd be a fool to say that. There are no guarantees.

I would have thought that Terry Schiavo's situation would have taught us all a lesson. Death is coming and it's not always as clean and definitive as one might hope. Talking about death with our family members might seem like a real downer, but if something like what happened to Terry happened to us, wouldn't that downer of a conversation take on a whole new light? Wouldn't our family members feel relieved that we'd written down our wishes? The pain of the death might not be diminished, but at least it wouldn't also be shackled with the doubt, guilt and other issues that can come with trying to decide about pulling that plug.

The beautiful thing when talking about death is that it proves to be such a perfect foil for life. It illuminates and highlights the precious nature of that which we often take for granted. As Natalie Babbitt said in Tuck Everlasting, "Don't be afraid of death, be afraid of the unlived life."

Spiritual Gifts - An Intro.

I'm a project person. I like to have a goal in mind so I know what I'm working toward.  Since I'm finished with the Bible study on the environment, I thought it was time to move on to a new topic. This time around I thought I'd take a gander at spiritual gifts.

I started out by doing an online search on spiritual gifts and I ended up with a bunch of tests. The consensus seemed to be that I have gifts in administration, teaching and writing.  ... I'm not making that up -- writing.  (Pssst, if you can find a verse in the Bible regarding the gift of writing, I'd love to see it.)

What struck me (as I pointed out in the post that I linked to above) is that I could have skipped the spiritual gifts tests and just looked at a description of an INTJ to tell you what my gifts were.  *scratches head*  The Holy Spirit seems to prefer giving gifts that match a person's Meyers Briggs type.  Isn't that convenient.

So my goals in this study are shaping up to be: 1) What the heck is a spiritual gift and why do we call it that? 2) What's the difference between a spiritual gift and a personality trait? 3) and my favorite topic (just ask the gals in my Bible study) how are we to be using these gifts for the benefit of one another?

So far all I've written is an intro.  But I thought I'd share it here in case anyone would like to get a head-start on picking my writing apart.  ... Don't be intimidated by the fact that writing is one of my spiritual gifts. ;-)


The phrase “spiritual gifts” is fairly common in Christian circles today. It’s not a common phrase in the Bible, however. In the NIV and KJV translations of the Bible, this combination of words only appears 4 times, and three of those times the word “gift” doesn’t actually appear in the original Greek.  Only Romans 1:11 puts the two words “spiritual” (pneumatikos) and “gift” (charisma) together.  On the other hand, the idea of gifts from God is quite frequent in the Bible and encompasses quite a bit more than we usually associate with the term “spiritual gifts.”

Labeling some gifts differently than others and having workbooks and online tests that help you to determine your spiritual gifts set these gifts apart as being quite different than the other gifts that God gives. The way we talk about them also tends to put the focus on us rather than on God.  “What are my spiritual gifts?” or “How should I be using my spiritual gift?” Contrast that with, “What gifts has God given to me?” or “How does God expect me to use these gifts within the church?”  In the first two examples we have ownership and authority to control our gifts as we please. In the second two we are entrusted with something from God, and we have a responsibility to use what has been given to us for a purpose other than our own.  I’d like to suggest that the second way of relating to gifts is more in keeping with what we find in Biblical texts.

(cartoon was snagged from this Grasping for the Wind page)

Beaver Dams Lead to Spiritual Maturity

High Country News published an article about beavers a few weeks ago. Beavers are considered by many to be nothing more than a pesky nuisance. Their dams have been known to cause flooding across popular hiking trails and even threaten some lake front mountain properties. But there's a new movement to bring back the beaver, and in the end, letting the beavers return may not only restore some mountain habitat, but it could also save taxpayers money. Beavers can help to restore soil that has been badly fire damaged along the Rocky Mountains. And their dams might do a better job of slowing water release from the mountains, which would provide water storage, at no cost, to the people and farms down slope.

The article points out that for millenia, beavers have been an integral part of the mountain ecosystem. It wasn't until trappers invaded en masse that beaver populations plummeted from what the trappers described as "60 to 80 beaver" per mile of stream to an estimated 100,000 total after a century or heavy trapping. Because of that, as European settlers moved into the areas where beavers used to live, they found streams that were wide, shallow and fast moving. Despite how beautiful such a scene might be, with the sun glinting off quickly flowing water, these water systems have actually been corrupted. They are out of sync with how they had been running for thousands of years prior. As a forest service hydrologist explained, we have "internalized a degraded stream as natural." 

That line particularly grabbed my attention. What this hydrologist was saying was that we had not only come to believe a lie, but that we had looked upon that lie as something natural -- beautiful even.

From a Christian perspective, these streams are no longer flowing the way God made them to flow because they no longer have the large beaver populations that God had put in place to manage the water. And yet, looking upon these streams, unless you knew how the stream was supposed to look, it would seem to be just fine. One might even go so far as to say that its beauty somehow reflected the glory of God. And yet in saying such a thing, we'd actually be giving high praise to a system that has been perverted from the way it was created to be!

I began to wonder how often we do that. How often have we not only come to believe the lie, but we even elevate it as something extraordinary, something wonderful?! How many things in our lives -- the way we interact with others, the way we do church, the way we set goals and make decisions -- are predicated upon an understanding that is warped by our constrained knowledge of how things are compared to how God meant them to be? How often do we let the culture we grew up in dictate to us what is right and what is wrong? And how often do we tag those "right" things as being God's right things (whether or not they actually are)? 

The mountain ecosystem can be a metaphor in which the beaver filled landscape represents our lives as they would be in God's perfect world, in Eden. The beavers are managers put in place to care for the water ways, and yet these God-chosen managers are seen by us in our fallen state as pesky vermin. I'm not sure what the exact parallel would be with the beavers. Perhaps they are the people in our lives who can speak the truth to us in love. Perhaps they're the people who slow us down long enough to help us reflect on our lives, our actions, our beliefs. How often do we shut the beavers our of our lives thinking that our speedy, sediment filled rush down the hill is how life is supposed to be? How often do we choose what is wrong in the misguided impression that we're doing what's right?

Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

http://barefootmeg.multiply.com/reviews/item/36
I've mentioned Rob Bell and his book, Velvet Elvis a few times here in this blog and I finally got a review of the book finished today. Click through on the link above to read the review.

What does forgiveness look like?

When a person feels that they have been wronged, they can carry that relational transaction forward in one of two directions -- either they head toward the goal of forgiveness (though they might not actually reach it) or they can head toward revenge (though again, they might stop along the way, at holding a grudge, perhaps, or maybe just clinging to the hurt within them). Though I’ve been practicing walking down the road of forgiveness for years, I still struggle with the last bit of the path that will get me to that ultimate goal.

Cognitively I recognize that there should be a restoration of relationship. Somehow you get past the hurt and you embrace the one who did the hurting. I can envision that part. I’ve even seen it in action as painful and broken relationships have been mended between myself and others and among my friends as well.  But those times  seem more like outliers in my life. There’s still the day to day little interactions that bite and sting and yet still need to be forgiven. And that seems more impossible to me, some days, than any of those larger cases of severe pain and miraculous restoration.

According to Psych Central, forgiveness “is letting go of the need for revenge and releasing negative thoughts of bitterness and resentment.” I agree with that definition. Sometimes we say that we forgive someone, but we still feel gleeful inside when we think of things going wrong for them in a way that will prove in the end that we were right. When that happens, that’s a sign that forgiveness might have been extended but it wasn’t heartfelt (and therefore is a rather iffy form of forgiveness). But I think there’s more to forgiveness than just getting rid of the negative.  There’s a positive component that replaces that need for revenge and those negative thoughts with the need for relationship and hopeful, even excited thoughts of restoration.

I think there are different types of forgiveness as well.  What we usually think of is a reactive forgiveness -- the hurt has been done, the forgiveness is brought to bear after the fact. There is also proactive forgiveness.  This is the kind of forgiveness that’s required in those day to day relationships. It’s an overall attitude of forebearance and care for people even when they’re grumpy and dour and are needling us in all the most tender places. But what has dawned on me recently is that in the very moment when someone is annoying me or needling me or doing that thing they do that makes me feel small and unloved an unappreciated, it is right in that exact moment that my forgiveness needs to be active. And it is that in-action-forgiveness that I’ve been mulling over lately.  What does that look like? And how do I do it?

This is where I can take a lesson from my dog.  Laika loves me. When I wake up in the morning, pet her and let her out, she loves me.  When I take her for a walk or feed her or rub her belly, she loves me.  But what always amazes me about dogs is that when you accidentally step on their tail or leave them home alone for a long time or forget to feed them one day, they don’t crawl off to a corner and sulk.  They don’t put tacks on your chair or poop in your shoes.  No, what they do is yelp at the pain in their tail, hop up and come to you for comfort -- wagging their tail and nuzzling you. When you’ve left them at home all day and they’ve been lonely and miserable, they don’t berate you for your absence, they run up to the door, jump up and down, spin in circles and wag their tail like crazy because they love you.  In other words, even when you do those little needling or hurtful day to day things to your dog, they respond with overwhelming love because they forgive you right then and there.  In the very moment you have injured them, you are forgiven. They don’t treat you as your actions deserve.  They treat you as if your actions had  been the exact opposite of what you actually did.  They seek immediate and complete restoration of the relationship. Dogs are the ultimate forgivers.

So I’m trying to learn to be more like my dog.  When my mom or my kids or my husband does one of those little needling or annoying or bothersome things that humans are prone to do, I’m trying to pretend in my mind that they’ve really done just the opposite.  This doesn’t mean that when my kids hurt me by leaving a mess in the living room that I don’t ask them to clean it up.  But attitudinally, I’m trying to still love them in that moment as if they’d already cleaned it up. ... ... ... This is hard.  This is really hard.

The thing that keeps me going, that keeps me trying to think this through and act upon it is the thought that this is how I wish people would treat me. When I do something stupid or hurtful or arrogant, I don’t want people to treat me like the turd I am.  I want them to embrace me and love me as the person I could be. It’s not when someone gets mad back at me that I want to change my behavior so much as when someone loves me back even when I’ve been hurtful.  That’s when I am overwhelmed with the desire to shed my selfish ways and embrace relationship.

Are Christians Bad for an Empire’s Economy? Should They Be? - Julie Clawson - God’s Politics Blog

http://blog.sojo.net/2009/05/06/are-committed-christians-bad-for-empire-economy/
This is an interesting take on whether we're living out what we believe and what affect doing so might have upon the economy (of all things).

Quote from the post:
"What if we all choose not to buy products made by slave labor? What if we choose not to invest in companies that provide brothel visits with trafficked children as incentives for businessmen? What if we only bought clothing or food for which workers were paid a living wage? Would we maybe then be known for being something other than the lapdogs of Empire?"

Doctrine as Nutrients

I recently finished reading Michael Pollan's book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.  I had already read his previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and agreed, in large part, with what he had to say: that our food is far more processed than we probably realize, that there are political, environmental, health and relational problems with the great eating experiment taking place in America, and that changing the way we grow and eat our food could very well improve our land, our health and even our relationships. In Defense of Food, rather than building upon the themes in the Omnivore's Dilemma, explores instead the ideological and market forces underlying the problems that he described in the previous book. Why are we so nonchalantly galloping further and further down this experimental food path? Pollan's answer? Nutrients. Well, more precisely, Nutritionism.

nutritionism: thinking about food strictly in terms of its chemical constituents

-- In Defense of Food, p. 102

Pollan walks the reader all the way back to the early 1800s when a man by the name of William Prout "identified the three principal constituents of food -- protein, fat, and carbohydrates--that would come to be known as macronutrients."  A German scientist, Justus von Liebig (the same guy that identified nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium as the macronutrients needed in the soil), grabbed Prout's insight into food nutrition and developed a meat extract, which we now call bouillon, and the first baby food formula, which he modeled upon his understanding of the three nutrients that he thought fully embodied the functionality of food. Unfortunately, many of the babies raised on Liebig's formula failed to thrive. By the early 1900s, biochemists started to realize that there was more to food than just the big 3 nutrients. There were vitamins... and minerals... and lipids....  And within each of those groups, scientists have been discovering a greater variety of nutrients and a greater importance within the human diet. In other words, Pollan points out that as much as we want to, and think we have, locked down all that is required for health and happiness, history shows us that we tend to keep missing stuff. 

It's an ironic situation in which the western world finds itself.  We are learning more and more about food and nutrients all the time.  We are more interested in the component bits and pieces that make up our food than at any other point in history. Much of what we eat is labeled so that we can be informed and eat more of what scientists have found to be good for us and less of what they've declared to be bad. And despite all of this acquired knowledge, nutrition training in school, labeling on packages, etc. we continue to have rising rates of obesity, hypertension, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers -- a panoply of health issues that are known to have a direct relationship with a Western diet. 

Pollan goes into the politics and market forces that keep nutritionism a reigning ideology in the American psyche. The book is well worth the read, and the last half of the book gives many specific ways to avoid the traps of nutritionism and instead eat healthier by maintaining a diet that is summed up in his opening statement:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

But what intrigues me about this book is not only its description of nutritionism and its ruinous affects upon our diet, but a parallel that jumped quickly to mind as I read Pollan's description. Nutritionism is a matter of taking something good--food--and reducing it to the sum of its parts--nutrients (which are also good). But, as Pollan points out (and he lists studies on this), simply consuming those parts separately, rather in the form of the whole food, is not equivalent and doesn't bear the same health affects. There is something about the relationship of those nutrients (and perhaps the inclusion of nutrients that we haven't discovered yet) that is beneficial when eating an apple that we don't get when we consume vitamins that have an equivalent nutritional value. Could it not be the same with Christian doctrine? (phew! Now there's a leap. But hear me out.)

Doctrine is essentially a reduction of Biblical teachings into succinct bits (just as a vitamin or an amino acid is a part of a piece of food). That doctrine might be incredibly important as a teaching within the church (just as protein is important for the regular functioning of our body). But when our spirituality becomes founded upon the sum of the parts (or at least the parts that we've identified and called out as a specific doctrine), are we still getting the "nutritional value" of the greater whole? As much as it might be important to identify vitamins, minerals and lipids, there is still greater value in eating those identified bits within the context of the whole food. As much as it might be important to identify God's sovereignty, his omniscience, his great justice and mercy, it's still interesting to note that God did not give us those identified bits in a list or a confessional format. He gave them to us in the greater context of the story of a people. He gave us a whole--the Bible.  The whole contains the bits and pieces that Christians have teased out in various confessions and creeds over the years.  And those confessions and creeds certainly have value.  But they are parts.  They are identified bits. They are pieces of a greater whole. 

As members of a church that is, in turn, a member of a larger nation-wide denomination, we (my husband and I) are continually struck by the way in which the denomination and many of its members turn first to a confession, catechism or book of church order before turning to the Bible to resolve an issue or to state a case. The bread and butter of the denomination seems not to be the Bible, the basic text upon which Christians base their faith, but a confession written over 1600 years after the time of Christ. Of course, if you were to say as much to those that do this, they'd deny it in a heartbeat. They'd point out that whichever text they're using to support their point was derived from the Bible and that, therefore, their argument also relies squarely upon Biblical statements. But in so doing, I venture to point out that they're making a common nutritionist mistake. They're depending upon a belief that vitamins out of context are just as valuable as vitamins in context. (I should add that certainly not everyone in the denomination does this. But it is quite prevalent.)

Nutrition is important.  Doctrine, in my opinion, is also important.  It's a succinct way of outlining what a particular group believes and holds to be dear.  But nutrition or doctrine alone is an insufficient foundation upon which to base your health or spirituality. God created vitamins, proteins, minerals, etc. in a context of whole food. And while God did give us some summary statements that guide who we are and how we should live as Christians -- 

He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
-- Micah 6:8

or

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these.
-- Mark 12:30-31

He gave those statements in the context of a greater whole -- a whole text, a whole story, a whole history of a people that spans time and place.

Doctrine is like nutrients.  They both have value.  But both are more valuable in the context of their greater whole. When we focus on the nutrients, it's sometimes easy to lose site of the context.  If we're only checking the nutrition label on the bread package for iron and folic acid, then we might miss the ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides or the azodicarbonamide listed in the ingredients section.  If all we're focused on is T.U.L.I.P. and the "proper" form of baptism, then we might not notice the other ingredients such as arrogance, anger and self-righteousness. Just because we want to consume vitamin C doesn't mean that we have to go about it by also consuming a bunch of processed carbs, highly refined sweeteners, and preservatives.  

When Christians focus on nutritional/doctrinal bits and pieces and ignore the larger context of the food/Bible story, I believe they open the way for non-food/non-doctrine to slip into their spiritual diet in much the same way that prepackaged, highly-processed, sugar-filled, preservative-laden "food" has been added to supermarket shelves with labels that make them look healthy, while the reality is that the overall processed nature of the food will cause disease in the end. 

God has provided a whole food for us.  Shame on us for reducing it to the sum of its parts (and missing out on bits and pieces while we're at it). Doctrine certainly isn't bad. But overly focusing on it can lead otherwise healthy Christians toward diseases of pride, arrogance, self-righteousness and anger.  When you find yourself tempted to jump on a doctrinal band-wagon, remind yourself that Jesus said, "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if your doctrine is spot on if you love one another."

Liturgy

An old college friend posted this on Facebook and I think it's right on.  Although I think N's (or is it T's?) can feel constricted or constrained by liturgy, when we understand it the way that Jonathan describes it, then it feels much more natural and comforting and important. 

We have little songs for our kids, too.  Nathan has a song and the girls share a song, and though we don't sing them much any more, I make a point of singing them on the kids' birthdays after telling their birthing story (a tradition as I put them to bed on their birthday night). 

Jonathan on Liturgy from Journey Training on Vimeo.

I know you mean well...

I'm reading through an old notebook that I kept in 1996.  I just hit some scribbles that I thought I'd share.  Have you ever felt this way?

the love you're giving to me
is the wrong blood type.
i know you mean well,
but it's killing me.