Wherever I’m going, along the way I’m learning that if you have a blog but you do not post new things on your blog, people will not read your blog.

Does anyone read this blog?

You start out as a reprobate, a sinner bound for the gates of hell, or at least that’s what you later learn was your spiritual standing before you knew Christ.

And then you meet Christ and you love the church and you love going to church even if the music is slow and boring; you even start reading the Bible and find pieces of meaning in the the archaic narratives.

You continue in this state for a time, a long time, and then something bad happens.  You respond in the way you’re supposed to respond–crisis of faith averted.  The Bible helped you and Jesus walked with you and there you still were, sitting in church on Sundays with the church, singing old songs and learning about Calvary and hell and how wonderful it is that you’ve been covered in blood.

And then you meet people who say that they love Jesus but they don’t love Jesus in the same way you love Jesus and so they probably don’t really love Jesus.

But a seed was dropped and you don’t even need water for it to grow because it hasn’t yet broken the soil and so you can’t remove it.  Soon after this you meet some more people who say they love Jesus but they don’t love Jesus in the same way you love Jesus and yet they’re less of a jerk than you are and that presents a bit of a problem.  The seed grows even in the dark.

And then life happens.

And this time you sit with your emotions a bit longer before bee-lining for the default position you know is expected of you.  Everyone around you knows the answer and you know the answer, too, and yet its truth rings less loudly this time.  This is honesty breaking through.  This is your soul radar asking more loudly what you’re going to do when the answers and the truth have cut their ties.

it’s been a long few years journeying away from some things and toward others.  along the way i’ve de-emphasized some things while emphasizing others.  i don’t think it has to be like this, but i suppose it’s just natural.  perhaps i need to learn to better live in the tension, to think with two hands rather than one.

it’s good to remember, though, that the god can’t be an individual’s “all in all.”  we already tried that back in the garden.  it didn’t work.  even before brokenness entered the picture, the god could not satisfy the man’s deepest needs.  the god even had the audacity to utter, “it is not good for the man to be alone.”

alone?

the power and the infiniteness and the love and beauty and faithfulness given for the pleasure of the man…and it’s not enough?

how far we have come from those days!  it’s common now among some circles to insist that only the god can truly satisfy, but i bet most of the people saying this are married and having sex, so we can’t really trust them.  he said he will make a companion for him.  because companionship from his powerfulness

was still
not
enough.

and now we have songs saying that “all of you is more than enough for all of me”!

such damage this does.

of course there are times for that aspect of life, though.  remember: two hands.

for me, one of those times is now.  what sermons and books and conversations cannot do, music can.  music has a way of cutting through the cognitive aspects and beelining straight for the soul.  almost as if to say, “i don’t care what you think.  this is good.”

“Christians have nothing to say to the world until they throw better parties.”
–Rob Bell

That night was like a scene from a Billy Joel song.  A few scattered, leftover men were attempting to drown their sorrows while a rock band tried to generate some enthusiasm.  All were unsuccessful.

There are few more depressing places than the lounge of an interstate Holiday Inn on a Friday night.  On weeknights the businessmen are still around, and they come in and give some life to the place.  But on Friday, those that can have managed to get home.  And since the hotel is on the interstate and far from anywhere, there aren’t very many locals to take the businessmen’s place.

Mid-way through the evening there was a noise at the front entrance and about sixty people in their twenties came charging in.  The momentum began to pick up at once, and as the evening wore on, things got livelier.  A few couples began to dance and managed to get the businessmen to join them.  Soon there was improvised line dancing, which required us to move the tables.

The band caught the infectious humor and its performance level picked up several notches.  Later yet, a conga line started growing, extending around the room and even out into the lobby, drawing desk clerks and waiters into its rhythm.  As the line snaked back into the lounge and the music hushed for a moment, one of the band members yelled out, “This is great!  Who are you guys?”

The crowd shot back, “We’re evangelists!”

Sadly, the evening ended all too soon after.  We’d been in staff training down the road all week and had simply taken a break.  We had to get back so we could get up early the next morning for further training and Bible study.

Did anyone become a Christian that night?  Not that I know of.  But nobody there will ever again think about “evangelists” in quite the same way.  “Evangelists” will now mean people who are great to have around, no matter what you believe.  Those young Christians were people you’d want at your party, especially if things were looking bleak, just as Jesus, according to the Gospels, seemed to be the type of person who was invited to many parties.

“Maybe the true mark of a Christian is someone you would eat chicken wings with, and shoot pool with or throw darts with or go to the game with, not just if they could exegete the Greek text and beat you in Bible jeopardy like some Sunday School jerk.  Maybe the true mark of a mature Christian is someone that is actually kinda fun to hang out with.”
–Mark Driscoll

photo by Michael Belk

concept: third way thinking

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If Christ had not said that in heaven marriage would be unnecessary I should greatly delight in a shot at the heart of one Miss Helen Keller, but this is only because I adore beauty, and what a beautiful soul!  I would give Miss Sullivan a break and write into dear Helen’s hand all the glory that shines around us, and when my hand got tired she would read my lips with her fingers as I compared the lilies before us to her soft cheeks and our joy would rise into the atmosphere like sweet burning incense.

And she makes me want to explore the world of books and wonder what a wide view of creation might look like rather than a narrow one:

But Hugo and Goethe and Schiller and all great poets of all great nations are interpreters of eternal things, and my spirit reverently follows them into the regions where Beauty and Truth and Goodness are one.
–The Story of My Life pg. 84

It is true–I am too deep into my Christian faith to climb out of the rabbit hole and attempt to see authors and flowers and women and hurricanes from an Atheistic or Muslim or Buddhist or Hedonist view: a person can waffle only so long before he either commits or becomes eternally confused; it is not healthy to remain on the fence indefinitely.  I have chosen to believe that the world as we know it has been made through a person–crazy as that sounds–and that if a thing is beautiful then it is beautiful because of him; if it is true then it is true insofar as he deems it so; and if it is good then it is good to the maximum capacity of his goodness.

How about exploration, then?  Yes!  Yes!  We fear nothing and celebrate with the happy and drink to good health, laugh up an entire Tuesday evening and then wake up and laugh Wednesday morning before work because our abs are sore.

Sometimes it’s so good it hurts.

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some still shots from one of my video shoots around the area where i live:

I have an ear problem.  I’ve had this problem for 4 years.  I’ve been to several doctors.  The best they can guess is that I have Eustachian Tube Dysfunction, which has to do with blocking the air that normally passes between the ears and the throat when a person swallows.

Luckily it’s not painful, but it does give me this “trapped” feeling.  I’ve been trapped for 4 years.  In order to feel better I like to eat tasty food, my favorites being bread, dairy, and sugar.  For a normal person this would be a minor health issue.  So you eat ice cream and pizza and donuts every once in a while–big deal.

Unfortunately for me it is a big deal.  The three food groups that make my ear problem worse just so happen to be bread, dairy, and sugar.

So the more tasty food I eat the more trapped I feel, and the more trapped I feel the more I need something to make me feel good, like sugar and dairy and bread.  It’s a vicious cycle, really.

In times of suffering people tend to look to God, either to tell him that he actually doesn’t exist; or he does exist and he’s bad; or for meaning and guidance and comfort.  The tradition I come from emphasizes God’s sovereignty, therefore if somebody gets cancer that means that God placed the cancer inside him in order to bring himself glory in some way.  There are Bible verses we point to in order to prove our point, either to ourselves or to others who might doubt us.

We’re also told that Christ heals people.  He did it while he was on earth in a human body and he does it now while he “plays in 10,000 places.”

In his book Letters to Malcom C.S Lewis writes, “At best, our faith and reason will tell us that He is adorable, but we shall not have found him so, not have ‘tasted and seen.’”

I don’t doubt that the Christ heals people, but in my experience he has chosen not to.  I’ve been trapped for 4 years, I’ve knocked on his door thousands of times, bugging him like the woman in that Bible story who bugs the judge at his house so much that he finally gives in.  After four years of knocking, God has not given in.  He could be busy.

And so intellectually I believe that God heals people, but I have not found him to be a healer, I have not “tasted and seen.”  My knocks have gone unanswered.  Is he peeking out the window, watching me bang on his door with tears streaming down my face?  Has he run out of tricks?  Is he sleeping?  He could at least do me the courtesy of opening the door and saying, “You’ve heard it said, ‘Your faith has made you well,’ but please don’t universalize this.  I only wish for some people to be well.  Now leave me alone.”  At least that’s something.  At least he’s honest.

I read in a theology textbook (oddly for a class I took from a place that emphasizes God’s sovereignty) that sometimes we just have to realize that stuff happens.  God didn’t plan it.  God didn’t want it.  It just happens.

This, of course, flies in the face of a perfect theology that must needs have an answer for everything.  I understand the inclination to insist that God is completely in charge of everything and therefore whatever happens to us is God’s will.  It’s comforting.  It helps give us meaning.

What I’m more interested in is “So what?”

So I’ve been trapped for four years and pleaded with God, who is powerful, to do something about it.  And he hasn’t, at least not in a direct way like we find Jesus doing in his ministry.  Some will say that God heals through doctors and such, and to that I respond, Did people come to Jesus only to have him say, “It is true, I am the Christ, and because you have faith, I recommend Dr. Johnson to you.  He will examine you and then give you some pills; if you take them faithfully for approximately two weeks then you will be healed!”  Or, “Boy you ain’t been eating yo’ greens!  Git you some green beans and you gon’ be healed, brotha!  I am the Lord!”

Not so much.

So what?

It may sound like I’m trying to take God out of the equation, but that’s not true, and here’s why:  in some way that I cannot explain, I believe that the world was formed through and is being sustained by this Christ who often does not heal.  I believe humans were made to live responsibly, not recklessly, wise, not unwise.

Sickness happens.  I got sick 4 years ago and that sickness traveled to my ears and remained.  Stuff happens.  Who knows whether or not I would be healed today if I ate more healthily the past 4 years?  I don’t.  All I know is that the more sugar, bread and dairy I eat the worse my ears get.

I was flipping through a book in the Christian Inspiration section of a bookstore.  It was one of those baby-naming books for Christians.  Naturally I flipped to my name to see what Bible verse was attached to it, smirking all the while because I know my name is definitely not Hebrew or Greek so how are they going to stretch a verse to fit it?

When my eyes lay across the page I was undone.

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

So what?

So during a month of great weakness I bought a lot of sugar, dairy and bread because this makes me feel good and if I can just stay trapped inside myself with some Mint Mocha Frappuccinos and $5 Pepperoni pizzas and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream then I don’t have to reach outside myself and interact with the world in any meaningful way.  I can stuff my face with pizza and knock on Jesus’ door til my knuckles are bloody and cry myself to sleep because I will not be healed.

During this month of weakness I kept all of my receipts.  I kept them so I could have visual reminders of what a pathetic poop I am, and then turn around and live a healthy life and these receipts would be a part of my past.  Maybe I’d cut them up, who knows.

And then I thought of my name and the Bible verse attached to it by the baby-naming book, and I taped all my receipts to a wall in my room and then went to Meijer.

I bought broccoli.  Organic broccoli.  And I bought green peppers and mixed vegetables and lima beans and chicken.  I bought plums and watermelon, cantaloupe and oatmeal, even fish.  I also bought sticky notes.

Now every time I eat something that doesn’t involve bread or dairy or (refined) sugar, I write the date and the food item on the sticky note and cover up a portion of a receipt.  I even have colors for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks.

I don’t believe in new beginnings but I do believe in new chapters.  I have to own up to my previous chapters.  To know where I’m going I have to know where I’ve been, and I’ve been down the road of tasty, body-destroying food.  I can’t say that I won’t ever venture out that way again, but I can have visual reminders that the story I want to tell with my life involves making wise decisions.

My goal is for my wall to not be overcome by white receipts but to overcome them with colorful sticky notes.

Celebrate with me as this story of overcoming unfolds on my wall.

I’d rather hitch up the bootstraps of my soul and travel to the land of Got-It-All-Together and then start a blog called Here’s-How-I-Did-It.

As it stands, though, I started a blog called Along the Way…  I started this at a time when I was ready to say that Got-It-All-Together is similar to Neverland — it exists in the mind of a genius playwright but is not an actual place — and therefore I might as well let people in on my journey along the way to wherever it is I’m going, because if I wait to write from the land of Got-It-All-Together I’m going to be 75 years old with nothing to say except “I wasted my life,” and who wants to read that blog?

I’m still hesitant to share what’s going on in my kingdom (the realm of rule where my decree is the law of the land that is my body and heart and mind and soul) for a number of reasons, but I do think it would be beneficial to start writing again.

But then again, not everything that’s beneficial is advisable.

In the coming weeks summer will “move forward and stitch the fabric of Fall, wrapping life in the brilliance of death, to humble us all,” and I’m still trying to kill the things that need to die in me and raise to life either dormant virtues or foreign concepts that would surely be to me and everyone affected by my decrees the first rays of Spring’s sun that melt away the blanket that successfully covered over the frozen parts of me.

And that’s not all, but is enough for today.

A reading of Deuteronomy 8-9 over an instrumental rock track.

D’varim is the 2nd book in the Torah.  Translated directly into English from Hebrew it reads “Words.”

Words 8-9

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