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.

If we don’t understand the problem, we will be baffled by the solution. It will seem no solution at all, and we will be left feeling angry and disillusioned about God. We won’t be able to see him as good.

A striking example of this is the healing ministry of Jesus. It seems to be a simple encounter between badness and goodness. There is a bad (illness and disease) and there is a good (God incarnate) and the good overcomes the bad. Hooray for the Kingdom of Heaven at hand!

Except this simple, straightforward, intuitive understanding falls apart as soon as we examine it. The good doesn’t eradicate the bad! Jesus doesn’t heal everyone, he doesn’t even try! This understanding just needs one question thrown at it to fall completely apart.

“If God loves my mother/father/brother/sister/uncle, why doesn’t he heal them?”

This indictment is even more damning in the church today; if God incarnate couldn’t wipe out illness, what hope do we have?

Part of the tremendous challenge of the Christian faith is that it grounds all badness in a single badness: we are sinners; we are not faithful to God. Indeed, we need to understand all badness and tragedy in the light of sin. Why are illness and disease among us? Why poverty, war and famine? Why isolation and desolation?

In understanding badness we need to start at sin and faithlessness, at separation from God, and work our way down. Why?

Because God’s solution is to provide redemption, spiritual life and transformation. It is from these that goodness is manifested in our physical world.

Jesus’ healings came in the arrival of the Kingdom of God. This is the power flowing forth; this is the arrival of the Spirit of God. He has burst through the door; he is here. The door he comes through is confession and repentance.

When we see that the glorious Power of God came bursting through to earth and yet all were not healed, what do we say?

Well, we say that the power of badness itself is broken; that salvation is on offer to all; that a holy transforming power is at work which will make us comforters where we have been ostracizers, brothers and sisters where we have been strangers, caregivers where we have been oppressors. We ask him to wash away our meanness and disdain, our smallness and our fear.

Illness and disease are not the badness that oppress us.

This sounds such a monstrous thing to say. But it does not minimize suffering; rather it emphasizes good.

We look at the goodness of God at its source: righteousness and holiness. We see how these come to us through confession and repentance, we see how these flow out – from God, to us, to all. Christ’s healing was a sign of this, it was a wonder to make people look and see: Righteousness and Holiness are flowing out, through Christ, through God’s anointed one!

The depth of human pain we experience and the great landscape of human suffering on display in every newspaper remind us how important it is that we constantly meditate on God’s goodness, as he has revealed it.

If we don’t get goodness into our hearts, we will never get it into our hands.

Just as from our faithlessness and separation from God comes our worldly groaning, from his redemption and salvation comes our worldly transformation and our empowerment through his Spirit.

When we pray to God and ask him to “make us better”, he always does. But he means a little something different by it.

May you give into his hands
All that stands
Between your self and You
Let him take you and make You
Break you to shape You
And love you for You.

Amen

…

“There’s not much of Meredith in the media. There aren’t photos of her in the media. The focus has completely moved away from Meredith to Amanda and Raffaele.

I do feel sorry for Stephanie Kercher. Largely because her sister was murdered, but also because she seems to have been sold a false hope through her genuine desire that her sister be remembered.

It’s a sad truth that relationship is not built through media stories. Reading media stories is a past-time high on emotion… but very low on mutual sacrifice. By the time we are finished a well told story, we feel close to the people in it! In reality? We are a long way distant.

Meredith is not forgotten because Meredith was never known; Amanda Knox is not really known either, but we are distracted by the picture of a young, pretty murderess, especially when the murder was attached to a love triangle and to kinky sex.

While the desire for fame has always been around, the emergence of the internet has made it seem plausible that you might, in fact, get yours. Ordinary people are elevated to the status of global icons. But the game has changed only slightly; the convenience of human attention has grown enormously, but the overall market for it is just as limited and a thousand times more competitive. It’s a familiar false hope, but one armed with a new and alluring hook.

The reason I hate the diabolical nature of false hopes is that they offer no mercy. They have no concept of giving time and space to the grieving.

I wonder who knows Meredith most deeply of all and who has the greatest capacity to remember her?

I think what really fuels it is that I read techie blogs when I want to procrastinate something else.

One of the major issues that gnaws at me is that there is a great gulf between the mindsets and attitudes of a Christian and of your average tech guy. The size of the gap never gets discussed, I think because the tech worldview is pervasive in Christian circles. We’ve managed to avoid the gulf by leaving our own worldview and by jumping over to the far side

I made that little face a frownie instead of a smilie because it’s sad; the ultimate result of this is confusion. It’s a tough confusion to resolve and it is only by going back across the gulf to a Christian worldview that we can resolve it.

I’ll give just one tiny example of the gulf and how it appears in subtle ways. This is fairly common; I’ll be reading an innocuous article on a tech site and some small thing will stab me and I will writhe in pain. Something like (from linked article):

What’s an egregious troll? Any troll that personally attacks someone else in our community. If you’re not bright enough to criticize ideas without personally criticizing individuals, we’re not interested in having you around.

Now here we have a perfectly agreeable statement, no? ArsTechnica wants to get tough on trolls (probably not a bad thing). If you read tech forums for any length of time, you will probably run into many, many similar comments. But there is a troll hiding under this particular comment bridge, and it will eat us up if we don’t call it out.

The troll is the idea (the assumption) that what saves you from criticizing people (rather than ideas) is being bright. If we could all just be smarter or brighter that would solve our problem. If that doesn’t work, we just have to draw our technical circle tighter to exclude the less smart people so that we, the smart people, can get something done.

Christians have been chewing on the idea of “loving the sinner, hating the sin” for a long, long time. A Christian view of this is that it is not chiefly an issue of intelligence but one of compassion. “If you are not compassionate enough to criticize ideas without personally criticizing individuals…”

At times I think I’m just being pedantic and nitpicky and making mountains out of all available mole-hills, but then I consider the greater world of statements like this, and I reassure myself that I’m not crazy.

The computing corners of the Internet are a rampant meritocracy, where intelligence is an idol and self improvement is the path to salvation. You have to hack your life to save it; just visit lifehacker!

This morning I’m in Kamloops.

I only have a motel room here for a few hours, so I’m not long in Kamloops, but I’m here for now.

Every time I come here, sailing down through the bald dry hills of Barriere, I think, “What a marvelous place to hide.” To me, it feels distant. Wild, remote… yet comfortable. The kind of place where nothing big or turbulent happens; just an isolated little spot in the interior, buffered from the churn and bustle of Big Places.

I think, “I should work hard and make a lot of money and come here to live. I could marry a nice Barriere girl and work odd jobs and be at peace and comfort, tucked safely away behind the hills. Let life be lazy, let it be slow, and let me rest in it.”

Jesus tells a story about a rich man who did exactly that: he carved out a little niche of comfort for himself and made sure that he had enough to carry him through to the end of his life.

But the end of his life was that very night; God looked down and said, “You fool.”

God will go to necessary lengths to teach us necessary truth. It’s part of his compassion. It’s a necessary truth that we can’t trust in our own control and that we can’t build our own security. For we Canadians, who live comfortably in a wealthy country, the illusion is powerful. But the truth is that we need to find our security elsewhere, wherever we are.

The psalmist writes,
You are my hiding place and my shield; I wait for your word. — Psalm 119:114

I should leave Kamloops soon; the road is not growing shorter while I sit at a motel desk.

It’s from a famous passage – a passage that shines a light on human blindness and that starkly reveals the limits of human observation.

The message of Scripture is that we cannot know the truth of our present moment only by examining it. In order to make sense of our current state we have to look beyond it. To understand our ‘now’ we must gaze upon our ‘then’.

Science is blind in time because it can only answer questions based on what we can immediately observe, which is, in the grand scheme of things, a pittance of what is.

42 It is the same way with the resurrection of the dead. Our earthly bodies are planted in the ground when we die, but they will be raised to live forever. 43 Our bodies are buried in brokenness, but they will be raised in glory. They are buried in weakness, but they will be raised in strength. 44 They are buried as natural human bodies, but they will be raised as spiritual bodies. For just as there are natural bodies, there are also spiritual bodies.

45 The Scriptures tell us, “The first man, Adam, became a living person.”But the last Adam—that is, Christ—is a life-giving Spirit. 46 What comes first is the natural body, then the spiritual body comes later. 47 Adam, the first man, was made from the dust of the earth, while Christ, the second man, came from heaven. 48 Earthly people are like the earthly man, and heavenly people are like the heavenly man. 49Just as we are now like the earthly man, we will someday be likei the heavenly man.

50 What I am saying, dear brothers and sisters, is that our physical bodies cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. These dying bodies cannot inherit what will last forever.

51 But let me reveal to you a wonderful secret. We will not all die, but we will all be transformed! 52 It will happen in a moment, in the blink of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, those who have died will be raised to live forever. And we who are living will also be transformed. 53 For our dying bodies must be transformed into bodies that will never die; our mortal bodies must be transformed into immortal bodies.

1 Corinthians 15: 42-53 (NLT)

I guess I read the OT with strange lenses on.

Recently reading this and other psalms, I struggled to find a picture I could relate to about trusting in God, OT style. My envisioning always came out in a military, “victory over the enemy” sense – at a national level, at a societal level, at the level of a king. It always seemed to me to be, oh, I don’t know… symbolic.

Trust in the Lord and he will deliver you – in battle.

What about the common people? What about the people who weren’t kings, who weren’t prophets? Is there such a thing as boring, mundane trust? The problems I face aren’t exactly on the scale of a foreign invasion…

I was praying a little about it and the book of Samuel came to mind, particularly the story of Hannah.

Here is a woman who faces an inglorious problem. Her pain, deep as it is, isn’t the stuff of enemy nations or whole tribes. She only wants a child and to no longer be mocked by a jealous second wife.

So what is she doing at the temple and why does she think a distant God of mighty military deliverance should care?