If a son asks his father for a scorpion, does his father give it to him? How about if he asks for ice cream? What if he asks for ice cream… and then again… and again… and again? There’s a time for ice cream, but there’s also a time for going to bed, no?

There are some things that even repeated asking will not produce, no matter how resolute or plaintive such asking may be. I wish I was so savvy as to apply this logic in my own prayer life.

I am convinced that for each of us, God has a massive long list of things which he is simply longing for us to ask him for. Seriously, I imagine him shaking his head, “Why don’t you ask for this, because this I can actually give you!” I picture his pained expression as I determinedly plow through my laundry list of wants, none of which are even close. I suspect that a great many of the things I spend my prayer time asking for are things of the wrong sort – things that I happen to want but which are, in reality, closer to Ice Cream Before Bed (or even scorpions!) than to the necessities I believe them to be.

Every once in a while, I get brave enough to ask the question – “What if I stopped asking for the things I wanted and decided to seriously discover and pray for the things that God would like me to ask for?”

I have a sneaking suspicion that God answers in power when I pray, but that his exercise of power remains curiously stunted so long as I am committed to praying for things that just ain’t. gonna. happen. Odd, isn’t it? I can pray a very long time for God to change every circumstance and person around me. I’m well practiced at praying from a perspective where I am the center of all things. (“Dear God: Please restructure everything. Scott.”)

Of course, I’m also well practiced at sitting around and wondering where the power in my life is, asking why I am constantly falling short of the Victorious Christian Life (TM).

The answer, of course, is ridiculously simple. What I ought to be doing is finding out the sorts of things that God wants me to pray for, and start praying for those. Bring down the POWER!!! There’s only one wrinkle. I don’t want to pray for those kinds of things. I mean, seriously… I don’t want to. These are the things which are right at the heart of God but which are really really far away from the things that shiny and are distracting me right now.

These kinds of prayer items have a nasty tendency to stray into some pretty touchy areas, like the ugliness of my own sin or the pain of my own hurts. Worse still, into the ugliness of other people’s sins, whom I need to forgive – or the pain of their hurts, for which I need to ask forgiveness. The Holy Spirit came to lead us into all truth – but if the truth is that I need to change, do I really want to hear it?

Let me tell you – I get to thinking about a list of things I could be praying for, and I get rebellious and fearful. It’s a completely different reaction than my reaction to ordinary prayer – of wistfulness, regret, and pettiness. It’s a short trip for me, from “Lord, why are you not bringing The Power?” to “Lord, please not that power!” I’m not afraid of these things because I think they’re bad, I’m afraid of them because of those parts of me that are bad don’t like them. It’s like John says: my darkness doesn’t want to come to the light because the light will reveal it. It’s a scary thought: maybe I ought to be praying for things which I don’t want.

So here’s a list of things that I don’t pray for. I believe that if I ever did start praying for these things, my life would shift – I would start stumbling over opportunities to follow God in testing, challenging ways that would reveal God’s goodness, power, and action in this world. This list will be skewed, because my understanding of God’s heart is skewed, but it is a starting point.

• Show me someone whom you love but whom I am ignoring.
• Is there someone really unappealing whom it would delight you for me to serve?
  • God seems to really care about people who I loathe. The awkward and the socially incompatible and the immigrants and the distant rich. I get scared thinking about how much he loves them and how little I do.
  • Can you imagine how much joy God would feel if I finally started asking him to empower me to help those who he dearly loves and is longing for me to help? You’ve got to believe that if I started praying for this that the Holy Spirit would start stirring in tangible ways.
  • The inescapable irony is that if I ask God for a name of someone I don’t want to help, and he actually gives me a name… I won’t want to help them!
• Who would you like me to confess my unconfessed sin to?
  • A real person? It’s not fair to demand that of me! I mean, that’s in direct conflict with my people-pleasing and my fears of rejection!
• Which of my hopes and dreams do I need to let go? Will you show me which idols I am clinging to, even if they are near and dear to me?
• Please give me an opportunity to witness to ____
• Is there a free-will offering that I can offer which will really delight you?
• Is there a habit that you want me to be free from?

Like I said, I don’t pray for these things. This bothers me. I suspect that this is closely tied to a lack of fear of the LORD – an unwillingness to give him due and proper consideration in prayer, which you gotta figure is pretty near all consideration.

The above list is a negative list, but probably just because I’m a problem oriented thinker and I react instinctively to things that are Wrong and Must Be Fixed. There are positive things that God wants, which I don’t pray for either, for a variety of reasons. Maybe I’m being deceived into an unhealthy focus on the negative list. Here are some more things that I never pray for:

• Is there a way that I’m not being fed but in which you are willing and waiting to feed me?
• Is there a gift or a blessing that I should be seeking after?
• What fruit do you love to see the most when you look at my life?
• Which of my friends has done something special for me that you want me to offer thanksgiving for?
• Will you show me a way that I can strengthen the church this week?
• What relationship would you like to build and strengthen? How can I pray for your consecration and blessing of it? Will you give us a special care and compassion for one another?
• Is there a psalm I can pray (or sing) that will be especially pleasing to you?
• What act of worship will you really delight in right now?

I suspect that, having listed these, I will now have to Man Up, be obedient, and actually pray some of these. After all, doing things I don’t want to is a necessary part of growing up (which I was never particularly good at, but which I’ve always suspected I ought to do). In the meantime…

What don’t you pray for?

Ray Anderson writes,

“When someone asks where they should begin reading in the Old Testament, I never tell them to begin with Genesis, but rather with Exodus. Exodus is the theological beginning point that serves as the exposition and explanation of all that precedes.” [1]

When I first read this snippet, I took it as a curiosity and moved on without much thought. But, sitting in church one Sunday, I felt a twinge in my brain; a significance to Ray’s words began to form, a message to my own lost self and to a lost culture.

I can best understand Ray’s comments by thinking about the name of God – YHWH. This is God’s own, personal name (meaning I AM WHO I AM) and it is rendered by most English translations as “The LORD”. YHWH appears throughout Genesis (“The LORD said to Abraham.”) to describe which god (the only one!) created heaven and earth, and which god brought Abraham out from his own country to become a new nation… by whom all peoples of the earth would be blessed.

But Abraham never knew God’s name.

Only Moses knew God’s name; it is at the beginning of Exodus that YHWH appears to him in a bush that is ablaze yet does not burn up.  It is Moses whom YHWH commands to take off his shoes – Moses who is standing in the presence of holy God – present on the earth and introducing himself by name.

Exodus begins with a bombshell – the starting point of the Bible. God comes down and introduces himself to humanity. The rest of the story begins here… even Genesis. Most of us have been taught to read books by starting at the beginning, but Genesis is very much a prequel to Exodus.[2] This is clear; someone, in writing down the Genesis stories, has very carefully told them using God’s own name – YHWH. Genesis is written in hindsight, and it is important to pay attention to this.

For example, if we are tempted to place the Jewish creation myth alongside another ancient Mesopotamian creation myths, we must be cautious, because the Genesis story is not just an ancient myth. It is a reinterpreted ancient myth. Someone (having been stunned by the very revelation and introduction of God, by personal name, to the world) has gone back to re-examine tradition. Having been awed by the incredible and miraculous election and rescue of the Jewish people, he has retold an old story – to explain what actually happened.

The Moon and Sun are not gods; YHWH is. They are only created things. Matter is not shaped from a giant serpent of chaos but is spoken into existence by the word of the God who parts the sea and walks on the earth in fire, and who has introduced himself to humanity in a burning bush. Pharaoh, who claimed to be God – who claimed to protect and uphold the land – who claimed to make the rains fall – was exposed as a helpless fraud by the hand of our YHWH. There is a God who controls all Creation and he is YHWH. We know who he is because he has told us, and we know he commands the world because we have seen him do it.[3]

YHWH is in Genesis, which means that so is the burning bush. The plagues – the parting of the Red Sea… the pillar of fire… the glory at Sinai… all are in Genesis. The beginning words of this story are “I will rescue you from Egypt” and not, “Get out of my garden.” But – having now been rescued… we need to understand how we ever got to Egypt in the first place.

One lesson this story teaches us in our own lost culture is that God doesn’t play fair. He’s liable to introduce himself first, and ask him to follow him… before we understand everything. It’s quite probable that, once we have believed him and followed him some distance, we will have to go back and revise what we once thought we knew.

Our own lost culture is fixated on telling our own story “right the first time”. (These days, in the West, we mostly we try to do this through science and observation.) We think we can build an accurate story of our existence (an anthropology) without factoring in the introduction of God. Well, no – we can’t. We will get lost in bad creation myths, because we, as people – as storytellers – have not yet been transformed to the point where we can tell a decent story.

Look at the Gospels. They weren’t recorded in realtime, as events happened – not even close! Thanks be to God; even a brief read through Mark shows that when events were going on, the disciples were in the dark about what was actually happening. The Gospels were written through the fires of Pentecost. Here we have transformed Apostles who, having lived a life in the Spirit and in the Church, became men who knew – men who had seen with their very eyes the kingdom that Jesus came to announce.

They didn’t know what he had been preaching about, they knew the thing he had preached.

We need to know God first and understand him later. If we wait for God to make sense to us before we believe in him, we will forever be drowning in a world of primordial soup that houses ancient dragons of chaos, trying to piece together some kind of sensical story without any of the critical pieces. We can’t understand our lives without beginning in introduction and transformation.

“Hi God.
I’m Scott.
My life is kind of a mess.
Please don’t hate me…”

[1] Ray Sherman Anderson, The Soul of Ministry?: Forming Leader’s for God’s People (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 4. Back

[2] Prequels are funny things. Often (e.g. The Silmarillion & Lord of the Rings) they should be read last. In some cases (*cough* Phantom Menace *cough*) they should just be ignored. Back

[3] Genesis is really about Israel. It is not a general “How God made people” manual but more of a “Wow – YHWH was there all this time and this is what he was actually doing” account. Back

When we abstract, we create a picture that is distant, removed and in some way unreal, before attempting to map it back to the Real world. Like some bizarre mathematical transform (I’m looking at you, Laplace) we take a spin into an imaginary world and do magical things there, ultimately returning to the Real world with something more than we started with.

There tends to be a lot of pride in our abstraction. It has noble roots in humanity’s divine mandate to name things – one of our primal urges. But it’s worth remembering that our call to name things was a call to name things which were real, lions and tigers and bears. (Oh my!)

Where does God ever call us to concern ourselves with those things that might be or which might exist – that is, which he might create? He doesn’t, because if he decides to create them, he will let us know (should he so choose). But at that point they will be real. (There is a delicate point here – for example, should God warn us to consider what future consequences of a sin might be, he is calling us to consider not a hypothetical thing, but the very real present danger which we are in – the proper concern for our real, present decisions.)

Like we’ve done with all aspects of our divine mandate, we manage to pervert this naming urge. It becomes an urge to define things and determine them, not in the sense of discovering what is but of declaring what can be.

Abstracting lets us tell the future. If we can get general rules for things, we can predict. And if we can predict, we can move beyond the constraints of our current intolerable reality and the God who we find equally small, irritating and intolerable.

We are desperate to see beyond the Real, desperate… because we dream of uncovering a new and better idol beyond the limits of what we are currently stuck with. Maybe if we can nail down the rules about how God works, we can get to a God beyond the one we actually know.

It’s a tricky business, trying to sort out when we have stopped trying to discover the God who Really Is  (the God who has revealed himself) and when we have begun imagining the God we wish to be.

Imagining, of course, leads us to a place where the only God we have to share is not a God we know but a God we posit.

Oddly enough, such a God is often evil, terrifying, distant and of little use to those we try to proselytize.

Jesus calls us, “Come and follow me.”

If Jesus asks us to do a good work, is this challenge a question of faith or a question of works? If we then go and do it (and are saved through it) are we then saved through faith or through works?

We are clearly saved through works, because if we had not done the work, we would not be saved. Simple, no?

But we are clearly saved through faith! Had we done the work outside the call of Jesus, it would have given us precisely nothing. It is the call of Jesus that makes the work special, and it is our response to the call of Jesus (faith) that God loves. Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness, after all.

Jesus tells the story of a father who asks two sons to go to the field and work. The first says “Yes,” and doesn’t, while the second says “No,” and does. The second pleases his father – not because of the work, but because his father asked him and he responded. The story doesn’t work without the asking, because Jesus isn’t making a point about hoe technique – he’s making a point about obedience. If the son goes off and does a good work on his own, that’s a nice thing, but it doesn’t have anything to do with obedience to his father – what we like to call, “faith”.

But the story doesn’t work without the work, either. The father asks his son to do something, and if he doesn’t do it, he hasn’t shown faith.  When we look at this dynamic in our lives (Jesus calls us to something ==> We respond ==> consequences ensue), the one thing we CANNOT do is to play a silly little abstract game, where we try and imagine a world where Jesus calls us to follow, but in a sense where we can believe in him and not follow him at the same time.

In this abstract, fantasy world, Jesus calls us in a general sense of salvation, and there’s no real calling to follow into anything. There’s just a general, non-specific call. We are called. We are saved.[2]

I memorized Ephesians 2:8-9 long before I memorized Eph 2:10.

“For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” — Eph 2:8-9

“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” — Eph 2:10

Verses eight and nine present half of a story. If we build a world around just these two verses, it is a fantasy world, where Jesus calls us, but not to anything.

I have never heard a real, living testimony where someone stood up and said, “I heard God call me, but not to anything.” A call to belief? Sure. A call to repentance? Sure. A call to give up pride/fear/anger/hatred? Absolutely! The call of Jesus to follow is not limited to physical actions – it can be a call to an exercise of the will or the heart – but it is always a call to something.

A call to nothing does. not. exist.

Jesus is not interested in abstract salvation; there is no such thing. He is interested in your salvation and my salvation and everybody else’s salvation, but he doesn’t care a whit for salvation in the general, because there is no such thing. There is no such thing as ‘faith’ outside of a specific, concrete call.

Of course, if this is true, there is no separation of faith and works. There is no faith outside God’s request toward us and our response to him. There is just the question – did we respond to him as he asked? We don’t have the option of abstract salvation through abstract faith (call without doing) or works (obedience without call).

The challenge of saying this is that it suddenly becomes really, really, really, important that we pay attention to what God might (truly, concretely, specifically…) be calling us to today.

[1]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 57-78
Back

[2] In mainstream Christianity, there seems to be only one instance where we really and faithfully apply the concrete way of looking at faith and works… our initial act of belief, that single  moment when we are called to believe in Jesus! The rest of our life then seems to slip into the abstract, fantasy world where we somehow manage to believe in a Lord who doesn’t actually call us to anything.

In this fantasy, Jesus is concerned with only one moment of our lives and only one work – that of initial belief – and our salvation rests on this moment alone. The only problem with this world is that it’s not the real one; it doesn’t exist outside our fertile, self-centred imaginations.

Back

Isn’t it odd how our first experience of love is not of loving but of being loved? We don’t learn of love as something that comes naturally from within but as something we *receive* from outside ourselves. I guess this makes my Mom and Dad like Jesus. We all start out as little caterwauling narcissists (cute ones, though) demanding to be changed, in all senses of the word.

[ Dear Reader - please accept this article as written in a Christian voice. It is clearly propaganda, but in the sense that telling a child to "Eat their broccoli" is propaganda. That is, it has an unashamed agenda of moving towards something believed to be good. Of course, you're not a child and I'm not your Mommy. You're a reader and this is a random blog on the internet. You're free to decide how the broccoli tastes. Of course, you don't have to be a distant reader, and this blog doesn't have to be random to you; you're free to.leave a comment ]

Recently I took a series of psychological assessments as part of a course; one of them assessed how I dealt with conflict.

It turns out I’m not all that into compromise. Competition and collaboration, yes, but compromise to a lesser degree. [Okay, okay... I scored a zero]. I looked at my results and said, “Well, doesn’t compromise just paper over the cracks of a very real problem? That we should be dealing with?”

Sometimes a little bit of self reflection helps me to understand why I think the way I do. A good example is why I am so bothered by the idea of the separation of Church and State. I get cranky about it.

Separation of Church and State is not an intellectual truth… it’s a compromise. It papers over the cracks of the very real problem that people nowadays tend to disagree with one another. This isn’t exactly a new thing, but in our exciting global times we demand to be able to move freely and live alongside people we disagree with, We see this freedom as a Good Thing. Unfortunately, it is difficult to live alongside people you disagree with.

[The Bible paints the history of much of the world as a constant state of compromise, since humans are in the uncomfortable position of being in disagreement with God. This is illustrated by God killing an animal to clothe Adam and Eve, who were previously not ashamed but became ashamed through disagreement with God and who, all of a sudden, needed clothes.

All of our human systems (government, finance, etc.) reflect this state of compromise and our need to do apparently Bad Things (e.g. confining someone who bears the dignity of God's own image in a jail) as an attempt to mitigate the effect of our bad nature and our disagreement with God. God does not categorically condemn this compromise (in fact, he seems to work in and through it... and even endorses it on occasion) but ultimately, he seeks to resolve the central problem. Christians believe he has resolved the underlying disagreement in the person of Jesus Christ.]

Canada is perhaps the perfect case study for compromise. We teach our children that we are a ‘mosaic’ and not a ‘melting pot’. Apparently, we don’t want an easy answer of everyone thinking the same thing. Fine and good… but if this is our bed, we have to lie in it. [Of course, when it comes to the question of being a mosaic, we all are required to think the same thing; anyone who wants a melting pot is not a welcome part of a mosaic, because they will destroy it. A mosaic cannot retain self destructive elements and remain a mosaic.]

Of course, this means facing thorny questions, like:

“Does it infringe on freedom of religion to force children to learn about other religions at school?

The Supreme Court apparently doesn’t think so.

It blatantly does infringe.

To expose the farce, just look at any religion which believes it evil to learn about other religions. Make no mistake – our government will trample their freedom in the interest of making the country run smoothly. Same for any religion which involves human sacrifice – or anything that contravenes State law. [Actually, any religion that involves a god who is involved in the real world shatters the separation of Church and State.] The ideal is a farce, but the decision is a compromise. Legislation is all about compromise.

But I’m deliberately being unfair to the Supreme Court, only for the sake of sensationalism. Supreme Court Justices are all smart people and they absolutely understand that they’re trampling over freedom of religion. They just also understand that, in this case, it appears the wisest thing to do. They don’t try and deny the infringement. They just try to justify it.

From the court ruling [CBC article]:

“The suggestion that exposing children to a variety of religious facts in itself infringes their religious freedom or that of their parents amounts to a rejection of the multicultural reality of Canadian society and ignores the Quebec government’s obligations with regard to public education.”

Basically, “We’re a mosaic and kids gotta go to school. In the battle between this and religious freedoms… this wins.” Sorry, religious freedoms. [You are all commanded to ignore this blatant contradiction. "We affirm the multicultural reality of Canadian society. At the same time, we affirm that our multiple cultures must all school their children in the same way. We nonetheless affirm that this imposed conformity to our ideal (whose ideal, really?) does not diminish their cultural identity or infringe upon our right to feel warm and fuzzy about being a mosaic." ] Sorry, cultural freedoms. Sorry, logic. Sorry, consistency. You all are less important than compromise.

Ok, I’m just being snide and snarky now. It’s not the court’s fault. I don’t actually believe in full freedom of cultural expression, because (as seen above) it’s contradictory and it’s a Bad Idea and it doesn’t work. Supreme Court Justices are really smart and they understand nuance and they know that compromise papers over flaws of consistency and logic because compromise really. is. that. important. Even if it makes everybody mad.

In a good compromise, everybody goes away mad. Of course they do! The real problem hasn’t been dealt with! That’s because the real problem is that people disagree, and how on earth are we going to deal with that? [The answer is to pick one belief set that everyone is required to fully believe with all heart, soul, mind and strength. Given that we cannot hope to agree on which one to pick, we must choose arbitrarily, and I humbly offer my own . The Biblical answer to this question of disagreement is, I believe, found in the book of Job. When God holds court everybody shuts up. All our beliefs and protests are washed away by the light of his glory - which, incidentally, he desires to reveal to us! Our God is a consuming fire.]

Just like a psychological assessment doesn’t change the reality of things, but instead lets me know what might need to be changed, a ruling like this clarifies the world we’re in, and it’s worth paying attention to. We need to know that when the rubber hits the road, our country will not support religious freedoms beyond what is convenient – because it can’t. It was never built that way. It was built to enshrine a particular Enlightenment value set. It just so happens that this value set has some advantages and some truth to it, in addition to its many failings.

Our court system actually works pretty well. It enshrined some values which were pretty good values [I wonder where they came from?] even if it’s a philosophical sham… er, compromise.

Like my conflict assessment, knowing leaves me in a position to change my ways of acting. It gives me some clues about what I might be able to do, having realized the state of affairs.

Probably a good idea is for Quebec parents to prep their kids for that class. After all, who wouldn’t want the chance to share the gospel… in school? Talk about a captive audience! Of course, if we talk we also have to listen. We need to let others share their stories, and let their views change ours, insofar as they are truthful. [This might sound awful and bigoted, but in fact it's just the plain truth of how anyone listens to anyone else. We all just keep the good stuff and throw away the bad stuff. The challenge is doing it honestly and reflectively. Which is hard.] Prepping also involves learning how to share the gospel in a real way, one that doesn’t come from a can.

Of course, we as Christians will never be able to be honest in sharing the gospel if we have a nagging doubt that it doesn’t stand up to what other religions have to say. Honesty and humility are virtues that never go out of style, and if we can develop that character, I think it will go a long way in our classrooms. We can’t sacrifice those.  This means we have to resolve our doubt by some method that doesn’t involve a broom and a carpet. I recommend good evidence, common sense, the Spirit of God, the Scriptures and the community of the Church. [I'm still trying to figure out the right order of these.]

The spoiler is that this solution means we don’t get to entertain our own sin or hold on to the fantasy that we control our own lives. I mean, we used to have control of our lives, but look where that got us. That’s why we gave control away, right? Right?

Have you ever worked really hard one day, without eating much? Went straight to bed (just crashed, totally zonked – too bagged for supper and utterly exhausted)? Then woke up in the morning with a ridiculously empty stomach? I do that! I’ll stagger around groggy for a little bit, and then I realize that what I really want is to eat something. As soon as my head clears, I start to hear the voice of my belly and I know it’s time for breakfast.

We all wake up with a voracious hunger, a special hunger, every single morning… but not for food. Often, we don’t consciously realize that we’re hungry, even though that day we’ll be trying our hardest to feed ourselves.

But every morning, we wake up… and we need to have a reason to get out of our beds. We have to have a meaning. How do we satisfy this hunger? We try to fill it by telling ourselves stories.

“I’m going to be a great computer programmer like Charles Nutter or Larry Wall.”
“I’m going to get a beautiful woman to marry me!”
“I’m going to be famous!”
“I’m going to be famous AND rich AND live in that beautiful house I saw yesterday with my beautiful wife and seventeen beautiful children!”

Sometimes I lie in bed after my alarm goes off and I tell myself all kinds of stories about who I can be and what kinds of things I can do. Depending on the kinds of stories I tell, I sometimes get out of bed happy… or sad. I don’t want to be trudging through a random series of meals and classes in school, through a boring set of projects at work! I want to be building a tall tower! I want to be fighting to the end for a noble cause! I want to be standing up and doing something IMPORTANT and having people say, “Look at him, he’s such a hero!”

(In MY stories, I’m always the hero. It makes me feel a little less hungry, because a good story fills my hunger to know who I am, where I’m going, and how I’m getting there.)

My stories have a dark side. I’m not always a nice person in them. (Is it considerate to wish seventeen children upon my wife?) When I win my Olympic gold medals, there’s no-one beside me on MY podium; Did I shove them out of the way to get there? Do I have compassion in the stories I tell? Humility? Not always. There’s usually some anger in my stories, very often some self-pity. ALWAYS pride. Actually, they’re almost always exclusively about me! Pretty narcissistic…

You know what’s scary? I’ll act differently, depending on which stories I’ve been telling myself. I’ll hold a door for a girl if I’m today I’m a knight, and I’ll bury my nose in a book and ignore that same pretty girl entirely if that day I’m busy being a great scholar. It’s frightening that I can act so differently on the basis of a story… but this is what I actually do! And because I live them out, I’m bothered by the dark edge to my own stories, where I am often vindictive, proud, selfish, greedy, lustful, lazy or frightened. When my daydreams bleed into my life, they cease to be harmless fun. And they bleed into my life every. single. day. I can’t stop them from doing so.

I can’t stop them because I’m telling them to myself exactly so that they will bleed over! I need to know who I am, where I’m going, and how I’m getting there. If I don’t know that, I might as well stay in bed, because… why not? Who knows, it might be better! But better or not, I have to tell myself a story if I don’t want to be comatose. Fortunately, the world is full of good things! I have a wonderful loving family and friends who are beautiful people; it’s not so hard to tell a story that gets me on my feet every day.

It’s a sobering thought that these stories are directing how I live. How do I know I that I am listening to and telling the right stories? ARE there “right” stories to tell? How much time should I spend listening to the stories that other people are telling? Are their stories better than mine?

You know what’s interesting? All people everywhere tell stories, and always have. Chinese and English and West African and East African and South and Central American – pygmies and peasants and aristocrats and beggars and sages and atheists and mystics, ancient, modern, and everyone inbetween…Talk to any anthropologist, anyone who studies people, and they will tell you that all peoples have lived and died by the stories they told themselves.[1]

When children are young, we feed them a neverending stream of stories. Just as with that other kind of food they eventually learn to feed themselves – and they will gorge on their own fare of movies, books, television, music (have you ever wondered why most of our songs have words?), playing pretend, and daydreaming. Sometimes they even write stories of their own.[2]

In many of the stories I tell, I’m a very small person in a very big world. This big world has millions (billions!) of people who are not me, and who are all telling themselves stories. But if I myself am bothered about the stories I tell, the dark edge I find on them, and the very little piece of the world that I help to shape, what is happening in the rest of the world?

Our human history is unfolding through the stories we tell: as individuals, as groups, as nations. Are Tutsi people my brothers, strangers, or enemies? Is one race better than another? Is my comfort more important than someone’s hunger? Does it matter that they’re far away from me and were born in another country? The shape of the stories we tell reveals our answers to these questions.[3]

It is terrifying how important these stories are, how essential it is to choose the right ones. This isn’t just about my lazy Saturday morning. This is about the world. We are a world of hungry people, people who have to eat. And we’re feeding ourselves, but are we feeding ourselves good stories?

This is crazy! I look at the news and see stories about the obesity crisis in North America, how we are dying early because we need to eat better… but I never see any story about the starvation for goodness in our cultural narrative. Sometimes I see stories about tragic suicides and school shootings. But do I ever see a story about how the chronic evil nature of our own storytelling is leading to oppression and death, not only of ourselves, but also of the poor around the world?[4]

The fact that we systematically ignore the problem – that we tell bad stories – is itself the very proof of the point. And why can’t we stop? Why can’t we tell a story so good that everyone says, “We should stop being greedy and selfish and show compassion to the hungry?”[5]

I have a sneaking suspicion that it has to do with who we are – with who I am – and is inextricably tied to why, when I’m scaling Mt. Everest one-handed at quarter to seven on Saturday morning, I’m thinking of no-one but myself.

But can I change that? How can I get good stories inside me? What are “good” stories?

I’ve got a fair few other blog posts cooking with my thinking on some of these questions, and I’m interested to know how people relate to my take on things. Opinions come free! Please leave yours via the comment link below,,,

It’s also worth noting that if you’re prone to mercilessly mock Facebook as puerile and inane, you should recognize that we are incessantly posting party photographs and statuses not because we’re stupid but because we all have an irrepressible urge to share stories with one another and to be a part of each others stories. Back
[2] From an teaching point of view, it’s interesting that some media are much better at teaching our children how to tell and write their own stories. I think it has to do with how much a medium helps us to do the hard work of imagining. Back
[3]Nicholas Thomas Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis Minn. : Fortress Press, 1992), 122-126 Back
[4] Yeah, those folks whose nations our nations systematically abuse and whose economies ours systematically exploit because they’re small and we’re big. The other 99%. We dump toxic waste on them when we think we can get away with it. Back
[5] It’s tempting to say that we shouldn’t blame bad storytelling for worldly problems – that physical reality has more to say about how we act than the fantasies we tell ourselves. Stories can’t be that powerful, right? A story can’t change anything, can it?

I don’t know about that; just ask Joseph Goebbels. (On second though, don’t. He’s dead and the stories he told are disgusting – sickening. They only really held sway for a few years, anyway.) Why don’t you ask a really good storyteller like Jesus of Nazareth? He changed the course of 2000 years of history, and, on the evidence, isn’t done yet. Back

Forgive the “we’s” and the ‘us’es – this is cross posted from a school blog and I’m too focused on my studies to re-write it.

Here’s a funny thing. I study Christianity, but I live and breath secularism. In fact, I’m constantly being surprised by the pieces of secularism, big and small, that I find inside myself: pieces I have deeply embraced. Let me share one example.

Right now I’m studying. For better or for worse this comes with a lot of thinking about grades. Good ones and bad ones.

But what are good grades?

Now, everyone knows that good grades are higher grades: grades closer to the beginning of the alphabet. We learn this early, probably from kindergarten! (As we grow up, we do learn that our language is flexible and that the word ‘good’ can be contextual. Good grades for a smart student with demanding parents have a different alphabetical position than grades for a less talented student.) But “What are good grades?” is still a relatively simple question, one we can all happily answer. Simple question, simple answer, no?

Heh. The problem with “Everyone Knows” answers is that they are, at the bottom of it, an opinion poll. While opinions can sometimes be right, this depends on who is being asked. (I’m particularly proud of this brilliant deduction!) So what happens when you ask educational questions of a culture that refuses to acknowledge God, that clings to a rigid separation of its education from all things divine… that exalts godless education as the. right. kind. of education? Which opinions come back?

I already know the answers which come back, because they live deep in my gut. I have lived and breathed them for a very long time. Good grades are grades closer to the start of the alphabet.

Now, for Christians, the word ‘good’ has always been defined in terms of God. God is good. In fact, who is good but God alone? Every good and perfect gift comes from God. God looked on his creation and it was good.

Ironically, most of the time the Christian definition of ‘good’ overlaps with the culture’s, even in the most godless of cultures. Doggone, we just can’t help being made in God’s image! We all (so very deeply!) appreciate his goodness. It is good to eat. It is good to live. It is good to love one another and to bear children. This gracious overlap allows us to live together and talk together, even though we are using words that mean different things.

There are edge cases (corner cases, small, uncommon, rare cases)  where our definitions clearly diverge… and these edge cases are absolutely, utterly crucial. Because it is good to live… but when is it good to stop living and die for the sake of something more? It is good to wear clothes… but when is it good to tear them in mourning? It is good to eat… but when is it good to stop eating and fast?

If we wait upon a nihilistic or hedonistic (a postmodern?) answer of “When I feel like it.” for these to happen, we may be waiting a long time.

These extreme cases – of Jesus in the desert (on the cross!), of men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of the man who sold everything he had for a treasure in the field – these extreme cases are absolutely necessary for teaching us how to live our mundane lives. Who knows? One day, if we stay the course and keep a loose enough grip on earthly sanity, we may ourselves be extreme…

But back to the mundane, which means school: historical and literary contexts, empiricism, and in Hebrew, more phology than I can handle.

Christians have a beautifully simple definition of “good grades”. They are the grades that God wants us to get. But… we can only know what they are in relationship with him. We have to talk to him, listen to him, trust him and obey him in order to get his grades – good grades.

To think of how we get them, let’s think about buying and selling. Let’s think of the man who found a treasure in a field and sold everything to get it. Of Bonhoeffer, who sold his life for his country, his civilization, and his faith. Of Jesus, who sold his life for us. Let’s think about what grades we’re buying and about what we’re selling to get them.

Are we buying grades close to the start of the alphabet at the cost of abandoning people God loves? (Good news, this includes us!) Are we selling shalom – our peace, our well-being, our wholeness – for the sake of getting one letter closer?

Maybe one letter closer to God is one letter closer to the end of the alphabet.

It’s specifically about academic study but I’m sure it’s easily transferable elsewhere with minimal imagination.

John Stackhouse is a professor at Regent College.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Years!
Many moons ago, my mother asked me what I wanted for Christmas. (She prepares for these things, I don’t. I just run out on the 23rd and buy everyone chocolates.) Anyway, I said some Henri Nouwen would be nice. Come Christmas Day and… O joy! A little book bears my name, tidily wrapped and enticingly titled, “Making all things new”… by Henri Nouwen. He writes,

“Boredom is a sentiment of disconnectedness. While we are busy with many things, we wonder if what we do makes any real difference. Life presents itself as a random and unconnected series of activities and events over which we have little or no control. To be bored, therefore, does not mean that we have nothing to do, but that we question the value of the things we are so busy doing. The great paradox of our time is that many of us are busy and bored at the same time.”[1]

Heh. I wish Nouwen would stop spying on me and mind his own business for just once. Fortunately, I don’t have to read him! I also have a NT textbook called “The New Testament and the People of God” by N.T. Wright. This is just bursting with terms like “phenomenalist” and “critical realism,” which are handy for when Nouwen is emotionally too close for comfort. These terms are surely anything but.
Shockingly, however, by ”critical realism,” Wright actually seems to mean something simple that I can understand! He seems to be saying that we understand all things by weaving them into stories about life. He writes,

“Stories are one of the most basic modes of human life. It is  not the case that we perform random acts and then try to make sense of them; when people do that we say that they are drunk, or mad.”[2]
…
“When we examine how stories work in relation to other stories, we find that human beings tell stories because this is how we perceive, and indeed relate to the world. What we see close up, in a multitude of little incidents whether isolated or (more likely) interrelated, we make sense of by drawing on story-forms already more or less known to us and placing the information within them.”[3]

Yikes! When they’re not spying on me, have Wright and Nouwen been holding secret midnight meetings together? I remember a long time ago my father commenting that our society had “lost it’s narrative,” which I didn’t really understand at the time. What he, and these two gents seem to be saying, is that if I do not understand the story of why I am studying – if my study is fragmented, random and disconnected from a spring or well of meaning – it will quickly dry up and become stale, boring and barren.

To put this another way, when I sit down to study and feel bleh and jaded, perhaps it is because I’m looking too closely at my study and not closely enough at Jesus. He is the one who tells the story that connects my study to something glorious. When I am cut off from him, I will feel depressed.
I wonder if this is why John Stackhouse urges focused, intentional study in his Study Skills Seminar. Knowing what I am doing and why I am doing it, it seems, is the secret to not wasting time and not being distracted. Perhaps this is also Paul’s idea:

Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. It is the hard-working farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops. Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything. Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel… –2 Timothy 2:3-8 (ESV)

Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead. If I’m looking for a story in which to weave my studies this semester, perhaps this isn’t a bad one. Maybe, before I attempt a piece of work, I can carve out just five minutes to let Jesus (and Paul) tell me the story of who I am and why I am doing what I am doing. This may, of course, have the awful consequence that I discover I should NOT do it – that perhaps I should be doing something else. But it’s food for thought as a practical, tangible study habit.
Of course, if we we are called to suffering, perhaps that means I should get back to Hebrew and my review of the Qal stem and its associated morphology (Comes FREE with every gutteral!).
Peace be with you.