There are some things money can't buy . . .

I was thinking today about a friend who once upon a time enlisted some friends and I to help her move into a new apartment. Presumably, when you do these things via your friends the setup is lower-cost in comparison to hiring professional movers. However, what typically seems to happen is that the one who is helped takes their helpers out for a meal or something of the sort. It's by no means a requirement or an expectation but rather a courteous gesture of appreciation.

So in actuality, things end up being not as low-cost as one might think in comparison to hiring movers (of course there are other factors that go into this like the degree to which the person helped is able to show their appreciation to their helpers). And such was the case with my friend.

What then is to be gained in asking friends to help instead of pro movers? The pro movers would probably even do a quicker, better, and overall professional job of things.

It was at this point that I realized there is something that pro movers cannot touch, and something that money cannot buy. It is the bond of love. It is the interweaving and sharing of lives in working together, in sharing each other's burdens, and in meeting one another's needs without expectation of return.

Storage boxes: $20
Packing tape: $5
U-Haul truck: $30
Dinner for six friends: $60
Strengthening the bond of love: priceless

Without Shame, Without Walls

this entry has lost much of its original formatting when moving it to blogger. click here for the original post.

this entry is the partial result of thinking about one of loocie's recent entries. . . .

a friend and i asked each other once, "what will relationships with other people be like in heaven?" before eating the sweet and bitter fruit, Adam and Eve were naked and were without shame. after eating it they covered themselves and hid from God. (Genesis 2-3)

i am of the seed of Adam and his shame I inherit.
his shame i have also made my own in the life that i live.
i bear it secretly
for fear that if anyone were to discover
it i should be loved no longer.
so i build my walls of righteousness,
my fences of piety,
my vaults of wholeness,
and these strong defenses none shall penetrate
to discover the frightened child
that wants to be dearly loved
without condition.

yet I in following Jesus I am also the seed of the Second Adam,
the seed of Christ.

this Second Adam bore my shame
so that i no longer have to.
this Second Adam comes through my defenses
and speaks to this frightened child,

“Your shame I have seen.
Your shame I know.
Your shame I will bear.
Take your walls down.
You no longer need them.
For I who loves you unconditionally
am here.”

so now i do not have to be ashamed because Christ has taken it away.

i and all who are of the Second Adam no longer have to be ashamed.

we no longer have accusers,
for the one whom we have shamed
has taken our shame away.
men and demons can bring to memory our sin,
but they cannot accuse us
because in our Christ
we have been forgiven.

so in heaven,
in which God will restore all things
to the way they ought to be,
there will be no walls.
there will be no more shame.
there will be no more hiding.
we will see one another in our former ugliness
and then we will rejoice in that ugliness turned to glorious beauty
by the gracious mercy of our God,
the gracious mercy of Jesus.

i long for those days,
but here now where i scrape
in a broken,
festering world,
being transformed by God
from dust to glory,
i still struggle,
and i shall continue until Jesus returns to bring about the fullness of his redemption for His children. my walls remain, the child remains frightened,
but He who bore my shame remains also.
He holds the hand of this weak, ugly child
and continues to speak to me in His warm, gentle, affirming voice
that He loves me and that He will never leave me.
And together we tear these walls down piece by piece
that my ugliness and His glory can be displayed for all to see.
that He can tell all that this son of His who was once lost
is now found.
that I unashamed can love others

because He loves me.

Left Behind: The Video Game

An excerpt from a review of the game at www.gamespot.com : "Your units include gospel-singing musicians, missionaries, healers, and medics. Enemy units feature college-trained secularists, devils, and foul-mouthed rock stars with their electric twangers ...your goal is not to wipe out the enemy as in a typical RTS game but to convert as many neutrals and baddies as possible by raising their spirit level. You seek out these people and directly target the ones you want to save with the recruit ability. If all goes well, he or she will soon be turned into a friend in either a Ned Flanders-like sweater ensemble or a sensible skirt and pumps. These drones can then be sent to training centers for instruction in their new Christ-inspired careers."

As one who follows Jesus and as one who is a part of the body of Christ, I'm grieved and ashamed at multiple levels to see something like this come from us. And this both for the Church's sake and for those outside the Church. I know there was probably a lot of thought, time, effort from hard-working, well-intending people that went into its creation, but in the words of the rapper Antonious, "I don't knock your hustle, but at the same time don't justify." I can't help feel offended at what, while unintentional, seems like mockery of the gospel and what Jesus taught.

People are not stero-typed objects to be saved, but they are people like you and me who wrestle with many of the same issues. The gospel is more than salvation and trying to get people tickets to heaven. Salvation is definitely a central feature of the gospel, but in the bigger scheme it is about rejoining God through Christ in His grand redemptive movement throughout human history to establish His reign. In this sense the gospel is not finished once you are "saved." It continues on as we follow Jesus in bringing His good and glorious rule to earth.

From the another perspective, to the non-Jesus-Follower what does this game say about Jesus?

Read the full review here.
Visit the official website here.

The Mystery of God's Will, The Mystery of Faith

We All Want to Follow God
I want to do God's will. I want to glorify God through obedient and worshipful lives. I think many of us who follow Jesus desire the same. But truth be told, to me God's will is a mystery.

Divining and Destiny
Some say that He isn't hiding. That He is not withholding the revelation of His will to us. Yet it doesn't seem all that apparent or else Christians wouldn't struggle with this as much as they do. Sometimes it feels like Indiana Jones searching for the lost ark: our is task is only to discover it.

Some might say that we have a freedom to choose within given boundaries (while still holding that God has foreordained our days). Does that then mean our destiny is (apparently) ours as we choose? Dallas Willard once said that Christian maturity is when God will give us the power to do what we want. For God enables one to accomplish what He desires that person to do. Or as Psalm 37:4 says, "Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart."

The Mystery of God's Will
Whichever it may or may not be, the end result is still mystery to me. It comes down to neurotic set of questions and decisions whose answers are not always settling. What decision will love others? What decision will glorify God? With people at my stage in life (the quarter-century years) these decisions are heavy with weighty implications for the future. The decisions we are making now will affect us for years to come. What is our call from God? Who are we going to marry? If there is a will to discern, than we should make every effort to discern it well. If there is a destiny to be made, then it should be chosen well.

Probability or The Spirit?
So then my practical how-to in discerning God's will or choosing a destiny becomes a blended mixture of talking with God, talking with peers, talking with elders, checking out the options, testing the open doors, and tossing in a handful of emotion. With that healthy mixture, I should get a nice decision from the end of that, right?

Well, a certain unsettling thought has entered my mind recently. After all my attempts at spiritualizing the process, perhaps all I'm really doing is making God into a probability. Maybe discerning His will (I'm going to stick with "will" now instead of destiny) is nothing more than my perception of what is practical, what is probable, and what is least ridden with hardship.

Depending on which peers and elders I talk with, how I'm feeling on any given day, and how I thus interpret circumstances, I could get a different "probable will" every time I roll the dice of divining.

What does one do when given two opposing sets of advice from two well respected people? Maybe that "closed door" is a barrier that must be persevered through rather than avoided. Maybe, one's feelings betray at a particular moment. I fear that this paradigm of merely adding up the numbers may disallow a God whose coming and goings can be unpredictable and who moves where He pleases (John 3:8).

I'm do not mean to say that I cannot do these things, nor that I should not do them. In fact I think these are good things to do when making decisions, especially weighty ones. I just feel that I perhaps err on the side of practicality rather than following a living, moving, and pursuing God.

A Simple, Incomplete, and Perhaps Frustrating Answer
So what then am I to do? I've given up on the idolatrous neurotic paralysis of engineering a will. What is left?

Faith.

That's a nice Sunday school answer for you. And its not the answer that an engineer wants to hear. Where's the determinism?! I want assurance that if I add two and two that I will get four! Yet following in faith a God who is like the wind can be unpredictable and will sometime produce an unexpected 3, 5, or 5093. Often how I think things should work out differs from what is in His mind.

How does the process of faith and rationale work itself out practically? That is a mystery that escapes my consistent grasping right now. Its a blend of both. Neither can be separated from the other in discerning where to follow God. And I'm OK with that.

Ministry vs. Mate

The List
When it comes to looking for a spouse, I like lists. Not a list of who is naughty and who is nice, but in the language of Genesis 2:18, which some might consider stodgy, a list of things that describe the kind of spouse I feel God would deem suitable. Comprising the list there are, of course, the non-negotiables, the desireables, and things that I "say" are desirables but are really non-negotiables if i'm honest with myself.

Lets be honest with ourselves, though unspoken, we all have a list. Otherwise some of us would be married by now and those of us that are already married may not have married as late as we did. Perhaps it would sound better if I called it a "filter", like a computer network firewall that allows desirable traffic in and keeps undesirable traffic out. Or perhaps a "radar" that goes off when it detects the parameters one has set for it. Analogies are good things.

Wiser, Not Desperate (at least I hope so)
Well, as I collect years, I find that my list grows shorter, my filter lets more traffiic in, and, my radar has fewer parameters. This is by no means an isolated phenomenon. Older, and now married, brothers have recounted the same experience. I attribute this mostly to what I hope is wisdom in discerning what is truly important and less to the irrational yet heartfelt sense of aging beyond marriageable years (which is perhaps a more acute feeling among women). Another way of saying it would be to say that I am more open to God providing outside of my desired expectations.

A Wildcard
While some things have become more clear, one of them has not. It sometimes finds its way into the non-negotiables, but sometimes shows up in the desirables. How critical is it for a husband and wife to share the same vision for ministry? In my case, how critical is it for my spouse to share a love and compassion for the Chinese people? Wise people have counseled both ways.


Ministry
Certainly (not in a sarcastic way), in the pursuit of God's glory through the ministry He has planned, God is able to bring a wife with whom I can partner. Certainly, as seen in the marriage of William Carey, to share a ministry will cause far less division and strife from both our perspectives. Certainly, to have a like-minded-ministry wife will help rather than hinder the pursuit of both our ministries.

Mate
Yet we are to marry a person and not a ministry. The possibility exists that I or my spouse could be incapacitated to the point of inability to continue the ministry. There exists the possibility that the ministry of either of us change. In this case, would it not be wiser to marry the person for the person? For my spouse to be a passionate Jesus-follower, is this not the most important issue? As one woman had said concerning her husband who began as a pharmacist and ended up a pastor, "I didn't marry a pharmacist or a pastor. I married a man" and as another woman who was headed towards mission said of her husband, "The mission field will always be there, but the opportunity to marry will not." (And I don't think that is an exclusively female sentiment.)

The Middle
Must my spouse be headed in the same direction or is it possible for them to be "open" to every possibility? Can I go even further and say that I would postpone the pursuit of a ministry in order to gain the ministry of marriage and family? I tend to believe that she must at least be open and not diametrical to the ministry to which I'm called. But I don't know if that "at least open" should be elevated to "at least in the general same direction"

The Spirit
And that's okay. I'm learning that much of following Jesus involves tension in a good way. I like to have things settled in my mind, but try as I may, they cannot be. While tension formerly drove me to neurotic, obsessive compulsion, now I'm driven to neurotic, obsessive compulsion to a lesser degree. For the mysterious goodness of the Spirit is my hope, not the unending and many times fruitless iterations of my neurosis. So, trusting that I'll get where God wants me to through His leading, I live the tension, I walk by the Spirit.