Into the Wild

In Christian ministry, one of the greatest struggles I hear from the faithful is in "connecting with God." Many times, honest people sit in my office or over the table at lunch and speak to me about how they don't feel God or feel like they're not connecting with Him in any significant way. This always makes my heart sink.

As an aside, many people have absurd expectations for communion with God and think that, as a pastor, I experience some high level of supernatural revelation constantly. If I have not been clear enough in my tone, this is simply not the case. But we were made to be in communion with God; knowing him and feeling his love, presence, and kindness. So how do I answer these people?

Obviously it's a pretty case by case thing, but there tends to be one common place where everyone has the opportunity to meet this everlasting, all-powerful, fully-loving God. And it's a place where not many want to go, where people are hesitant to travel to. In fact, this place tends to be a place we avoid at all costs.

That place is the Wild.

I'm not talking about the forest and I'm not talking about a place filled with the freshness of life and biological potential and I'm certainly not speaking literally. I'm talking about a Wild of Biblical proportions, perhaps better thought of as the desert.

The Wild is unknown. The Wild is bare. The Wild is life-taking. The Wild is unprotected.

It's the place you would least expect to meet a God and that's exactly why it is the place where you meet this God.

It's where Abraham met Him, it's where Jacob wrestled with Him, it's where Moses got a name for Him and it's where the entire nation of Israel finally found Him. The only way to know that God is all you need is when God is all that you've got.

This project of 20th/21st century first-world life called America fights against this with everything its got. We reject the Wild because the Wild is uncomfortable, the Wild is unknown, and most frightening: the Wild strips us down to our very core and dries up our resources. We spend our lives building houses, making money, and putting on a face that will let the world know that we are not ever going into the Wild because it will kill us. But in all actuality, it just might save us.

That's why it shouldn't be such a shock to know that the Good News begins not in a major metropolis and not with a King naming his prince to be an heir to the throne, but it starts with,

"The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight."

You want to connect with this God? Next time you're sent to the Wild, spend less time looking to find yourself and more time looking for Him. It'll still be frightening, perhaps more frightening than your last trip there, but you might just come back knowing someone who has mastered such a place as the Wild.

True Christians

While the world and history are filled with those who use the name of Christ or Christian to do unspeakable things, there are those who embrace the deepest piece of the ancient faith - that our centerpiece and cornerstone is not dogma, but a person - and that changes everything.

The exclusive "truth" of Christianity is not that there exists plural "truths" to tell the world in order to ostracize and demean others who do not obey them, but rather a singular Truth found in the person and work of Jesus Christ, which is open for all to know:

"Why would such an exclusive belief system lead to behavior that was so open to others? It was because Christians had within their belief system the strongest possible resource for practicing sacrificial service, generosity, and peace-making. At the very heart of their view of reality was a man who died for his enemies, praying for their forgiveness."
        -Tim Keller, The Reason for God, p. 20

Self-proclaimed "Christians" don't always get this right and I am certainly in the fight to understand it all, but when they have (often when under heavy persecution), the known world changes.

Four Weeks in Psalms

For the next four weeks, I have the privilege of preaching at Community of Faith Lutheran Church. I've been blessed with a great relationship with this congregation that allows me to preach whatever I decide when they ask me to come in. Over the next four Sundays, I'll be taking them through four different Psalms and asking the question, Where is Christ in these songs? It'll be the first time I preach through a good chunk of Psalms.

I begin each day with a Psalm and then some other readings. I have certainly read every Psalm more than twice and I find immense satisfaction in the words of the ancient songwriters. But for years I have always thought that the purpose of the Psalms was solely aesthetic. I believed that there was very little room for Biblical exegesis and exhortation.

And then this:

"The delightful study of the Psalms has yielded me boundless profit and ever-growing pleasure; common gratitude constrains me to communicate to others a portion of the benefit, with the prayer that it may induce them to search further for themselves." - from "Preface," Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Treasury of David: An Original Exposition of the Book of Psalms.

After reading that, I immediately thought of Lewis who, in his introduction to Reflections on the Psalms, wrote against the preaching and studying of a Psalm but directly after that breaks down Parallelism, Repetition, and Meter in Biblical songs. He could not help himself.

I've rested with the idea that we are actually to do both with the Psalms - we must enjoy them and study them, listen and unpack them. We do this because they are beautiful and after admiration comes examination. After we recognize something as beautiful it is often the task of the onlooker to say, "Why is that so beautiful? Why do I enjoy that? Why does that satisfy?"

My last couple of days have been looking into that question: What makes these Psalms so right? So beautiful? I'm excited to share them with the church.

Alan Hirsch On So Many Things

Too Free

"Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she held a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable...she pitied herself for being so free."

-FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen, p. 181

Regarding the Toilets in O'Hare

It's always alarming when you hear the F word yelled from the stall next to you in the Chicago airport. It was a moment for investigation.

I flushed my toilet and walked out to see if he had emerged. His stall door was open and he was looking in the toilet when he craned his head back toward me. Another alarming thing is realizing that you're staring at another man in a stall. He ended his confused/angry face by awkwardly smiling at me and saying this:

"I dropped my cell phone in the toilet."

My smile warranted him to go on as I watched him gingerly handle his dripping Blackberry.

"I thought these toilets were so freakin' weird; I had to take a picture of 'em to…" he sort of trailed off when I interrupted him with a generous laugh and an "Oh." He swore again to comfort himself.

The toilets at the O'Hare Airport in Chicago, IL are nothing entirely alien. They look like any other toilet, except for the fact that they have plastic wrapping around the seat which automatically changes out upon your entering of the stall. It's a somewhat uninspiring sanitation effort. I suppose the most fascinating thing about it all is that it does say "thank you" on the screen when you're done, but is that picture worthy?

"Sorry about that, man," I finally said.

"It's a business phone, I can get another. I just kind of need it for the road," he replied. We both let a silence hang in the air after he said that and then he broke it by saying, "Weird toilets though, right?"

"Yeah," I said.

I then had a strange urge to help him in some way, maybe give him my phone or something as I watched him take out the battery and rub it dry with his coat, a certainly sad sight. I want to give him some sort of assistance, but what can one do for a man who drops his cell phone in the toilet? I'm only one man...

I surrendered to the sinks and washed my hands. As I left, a tall man walked in to a stall next to the exit. I heard him chuckle to himself as the toilet made its rotation noise.

Not worth it, buddy.