“The Anti-Compete”

H, 

The other side of competition, or being competitive, is that if it goes far enough, if you want it bad enough, you will push others under the bus. This is not just in terms of ruining lives, which is also on the table, but also in making others a little weaker so we can be in a stronger position. It is such a subtle slide. It is foolhardy to think we can be this way just a little and not fall into the final flood. If we think people are a little expendable, if we have a little anger in us about how they may be standing in our way, we will go down that rabbit hole and soon we will be ruthless.

This is seen in the way a mob operates and the toxic masculinity in our different societies. M mentioned the other day about how a mob usually treats a woman they believe may be in a criminal gang. She saw a video of three alleged criminals experiencing mob justice. The man was still wearing his trousers and the two women were naked. The mob thought of his dignity more than that of the women. It is common and sadly so. The idea of violence against women, of labeling them by sexual acts and basing their value on what they do or do not do in their private and intimate lives is based on a certain spirit of competition. We are in a constant and one-sided battle of the sexes and since all the institutions have been male for millennia, we can easily seek to crush that other part of being human.

We have to free ourselves of this war over value by agreeing that we are all equal. The inherent value of every human being sets us up on the same pedestal. We are made of the same stuff and going to the same place. Our differences are superficial in the larger sense of eternity and based on things we do not choose or control, on this present fragile earth. Since we live for a different reality, let us have this mindset: we are free to see each other not as rivals, foes or competitors, but as part of a larger story and equal children of God.

“The Non-Compete”

H,

There is a sense, out there in this world we live in, that competition makes us all better. I cannot speak to all of that statement, it is much too general to agree with or dismiss, but I think there is something fundamentally wrong with that approach. It is the ultimate zero-sum game, the idea that one person winning means another losing out. It is sketching the full diagram of what it is to succeed, in terms of value, based on how much others have failed.

I do not think anyone who follows God should really think this way. Yet, Christianity has been guilty of this much more than most. I do not mean the idea of wars fought in the name of spreading it or defending it, thought that is horrible enough. I do not even mean in terms of the material gospel that thinks shining a light means doing well in earthly pursuits like making money or being good at stuff, though that is misguided enough. I mean the very idea that we draw some comparative pleasure from the idea that lost souls go to hell and we are heading sweetly to the other place. Is there anything more unspiritual than being proud of the idea that some will perish in eternity?

We seem to think that it is a reward for all the “sacrifices” we make for being a Christian. That we have suffered so it is time to “en-joy” while hapless sinners, who have had their lot in this life, and openly refused the gospel, can finally get their comeuppance. That this so far from the truth of God should be obvious. Afterall, They wish “that no one should perish.” The light came for all and wants all and could still have all, in the end.

It is very clear that most of the opposition to ideas of universal salvation do not come from a love of God’s law but a love of competition. We won, they lost and now no cheating.

We simply cannot be this way. The grace road is wide and high and for everyone. It tells us everything has value in creation and is going back to that wonderful place. There is no competition in God, only Love and love eternal.

“Re: Works”

H,

I remember all the dreams we had of conquering the world and laying the groundwork for truth and beauty. We had this grand idea that we could do this by sterling law practice. Well, it was rarely sterling, and it was barely a practice. I suspect we were not made for this “spirit of excellence” troupe and we cannot file the necessary fake paperwork to make it appear as if we are of that word.

We had to readjust our aims and our heart. There are no grand stories outside of Christ. We are receivers of grace and not purveyors of some unnecessary goal. Love is what makes it necessary to spread the idea of grace and the work we do is only part of a full life in Christ. Once we know this, it redefines how we work and how much worth we put in that.

And do we not work better now? Are we not less likely to force on ourselves the arrogance of knowing? Do we not embrace now, the humility of learning slowly, perhaps again, the thing we think we already know but actually do not know enough?

This redefinition of work and life removes the divide between the sacred and the mundane. It allows us to live in the now moments of God and not in past glories or failures or those things in between. We are getting better. That is the only charge. We want to get better. That is the only approach. Our work now has significance and scope and meaning and purpose, not only to us, but to the idea of eternity and living in the light of God. It does not matter what the job is. It matters the spirit we bring to it. It matters that our hearts are tuned into that reality that makes our whole body full of light. It matters that the work is in us as well as through us.

“The work in the dark”

H,

There are many times on this journey when we do not feel anything like ourselves. Or what we imagine ourselves to be. These are times of waiting, hoping, grappling with decisions and trying to make sense of immediate tragedy. We seem cut off from the divine and nothing makes sense. Psalms spring to mind. Memorable verses that speak of illness and broken bones and a soul on fire but little hope at the end.

In my younger years, I thought of these things called faith as magic. I thought if I felt off kilter, I simply needed to find the combination of words and smoke and illusion, and I would be back to the feeling of levity. Now, I know there is nothing wrong with this feeling. It is more about growth than about loss. There is a great work that happens in the dark, if we let it.

We do not always do this. It is hard to wait on physical things, so the wait for some spiritual reaction to how we feel is even more problematic. We find things to feel the void. It is as ridiculous as if, in that time before time began, the earth began to form itself before God called out. This is in essence what we do when we are in the dark. We begin to form our own consolation and it is not one thing. It would be easy if all we did was drink the pain away. That is easy to attack. We can form all sorts of things around our need to grow. We can even fake the growth itself. We can make it about our job, our material progress, our ‘purpose’, our church, our sense of love or our place in the world. We can make it about everything except the thing it is really about: growing and the feeling that we are in the dark. The problem with filling the void is that we are creating temporary reactions to permanent problems.

We need to trust the process in the dark. There is nothing wrong with waiting, feeling off or trying to grasp the unfathomable. There is just a better solution to our ennui on the other side of being. We are not being made into machines or templates or efforts to prove to a dying world that its version of success has a Godly upgrade. These things are meant to die. We are here for that other report. We are here to show the light. The light is not mega churches and endless riches. It is not beautiful looking people and interesting lives thrown up as holy spaces. The light is what makes everyone real. It is love. It is kindness. It is longsuffering. It is hope. It is faith. It is acceptance. It is peace. We have been told these things are boring. Yet, in this present world, to live in the light is pure rebellion.

“Outside Fear.”

H,

There is a fear in facing everyday life that has to be addressed. I do not mean that some are fearful, and some are not and that we are dealing with the former category. I mean everyone is afraid and the only real difference is how we address that fear. Some do seem to fold, and some do seem to thrive, but these resolutions may only be skin deep. You never know until you look closer at who we have become because of fear.

There are many things we do, many beliefs we hold and many things we say that are simply a poor response to fear. We might fight the fear of poverty by being overly interested in prosperity, the fear of being alone with effective promiscuity or the fear of being taken for granted with caustic arrogance. These are all still, in the truest sense, surface reactions. The deeper and more complex reactions to fear take us on a lifelong trajectory that may have all these surface reactions and much more. It is our tendency, in very general terms, to protect ourselves above loving others. It is how we can put church above person, doctrine above communication and quick judgement above understanding.

God lives, and invites us to, live outside of fear. Fear is the greatest tool of the dark. The eternal picture painted has already told us to fear nothing. There is nothing on earth that cannot be rectified by heaven. This does not only mean physical miracles but also the deeper, final effect of eternity. The body will die. The mind will be renewed. The things we think are forever only last till the end of this age.

Outside of fear is faith. We believe in the benevolence. We believe in the resolution of all things in the light. We believe in the picture being painted. We believe in the reality of the coming Kingdom of power, of faith, of hope and of love. We are not in a hurry to prove ourselves. We live in God. We live in the light. We live outside of fear.

“Work”

H,

In our brief history, and all the history we have is brief, of trying to find meaning in the things we do, we have had all sorts of approaches. There is something about working for money and meaning at the same time that never quite comes together at the same level of input or output. We were raised on the idea that it all should count. We have been told to death about purpose and calling and anointing and place and being a light or a candle or a seed or a branch or a tree or the sun. None of these things is invalid but the pressure it puts on temporary failure, at least to our own minds, can be unbearable. It may harm more than it helps.

As we face the approaching vestige of middle age, hahaha, we might be called again into that trap of wind that keeps telling us: “make it count. Stand for something. Where is thy glory.”

We should really stop listening to this voice. It has nothing to say and it leads us into spirals that also have nothing to say. This piling in on the human soul will make more villains than heroes and will not do anything to advance the cause of meaningful and glorious work that the heart seeks for. Pressure and competition may raise the bar in a corporate setting where profit and loss and, perhaps, that vague thing, “value to the consumer” rule, but they do not add value to the eternal things the heart craves for. And companies are not eternal. Nor is any duty based in these present sands.

All this is not to say inertia should rule. No on who seeks the face and hand and heart of God really thinks this. What is required is the connection between the sacred and the profane. The profane here just means the earthy, the thing here, the sand. Jesus said to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. Apart from establishing the Christian reason to pay out taxes, it also speaks to giving our work the effort it demands. If we do this without strife, in honesty, growing and learning and without trying to bury anyone else, then we have applied the sacred to the profane. Then our little moments are not dull things but parts of an eternal whole. There is no such thing as ordinary work. Everything is an opportunity to live more and more in the light.

And then there is the purpose bit. The idea that our life work should mean something. What if it already does? I think we will gain more by doing our ordinary work and the things we are drawn too than in fixating on the greater destinies and impact that always lead man or woman to quick or slow ruin. History is paved with good intentions going to hell. Like ordinary love, ordinary work is the small field that connects us all together in the true sense of the word “church”. We are at the end of the era of superstars and bastions and pillars other than Christ. They very mutation and mortification of the word “celebrity” speaks to us of the dying idea that elevating one life over another due to some notoriety or “talent” has no eternal value.

Work, finally, is what God will do in us. And sometimes, through us.

“Tired heart”

H,

We have this need to treat love and God as some kind of miracle drug. This is not the kind of drug that heals but the kind that intoxicates. We want escape from the world and not resolution. We do not want to confront anything. We just want to run. Perhaps, this is why we are always so tired.

I know I get up every morning looking for a reason to put one leg ahead of the other. I am looking for some sense of balance, of levity, and the feeling that I am making progress in spite of the things in my way. This just makes my heart tired. I am not allowing myself to feel anything. I am tired from the effort of running.

There is no escape in the life with God. We are supposed to feel things, know things, go through things, have faith, fall a lot and learn to pray in fetal position. We have to learn to love instead of judge, to forgive instead of retaliating and to face ourselves first instead of being this constant burden to others while we claim we are “just being honest”. Everything we are told not to do is not a set of rules but the crucial substitution of living in the light above running around in the dark.

And so, it happens that we hit a brick wall. We find that we have run out of options, out of time and we think that means God has run out of patience. No. He never does. Lying in the depths of all our failure is the call from God to stand up, once again.

We must allow ourselves feel things. We can be tired. We can feel off. We do not need the placebo of the soul. We have living water. It is not that we will not feel thirst again. It is that we need not go to the well again. The well is inside. There is no thirst only the feeling of being thirsty. It will pass. We must allow ourselves to feel tired and off. It is what we do with it that matters. We have to spend less time running from our solution and more time on the floor, saying “I am tired, I am tired.”

Honesty is still always where we will find the truth

“Stop. Start. Stop. Start.”

H,

We are always going on and on about the extreme arrogance of thinking we have it all together. The idea that there is a time to stop learning, to start being perfect and to let go of the all the various flaws we have inhibited all through our brief so-far stay on earth.

The truth is that time will never come. It is old the addict idea that is still true. You are always an addict. You will deal with this fatal flaw for the rest of your life. You may deal with it better or worse depending on the season and the triggers you embrace or walk away from. You are not of less value because you are dealing with original sin and you will be bathe in light over all darkness before this whole deal is over.

This does not create a constant sinner. That is not a reality for anyone who has felt the face of God. The longing for more will keep you unsatisfied with your trivial pursuits of pleasure and your fruitless stabs at other-meaning. You cannot be filled by ordinary water once you have drunk from the living one.

So, it is enough to know that you are on the road. There is nothing that can take you from the love of God. You are inside it. There will be false starts and necessary stops. It will all be counted as glory; everything leading us to a full of understanding of the heart and mind of God. Do not let the heavy weight of futility tell you to not stand up. I do not know the personal way in which the light is working out in you, but I know it will work out. Stay in it. There is simply nowhere else to be.

“and the darkness around”

H,

There is no question about the predominant culture in the world at the moment. It is a world of darkness around and a few light spots here and there. Most people in the world do not live in the best of conditions and most countries in the world are not in prosperity or absolute peace. The human adventure is reaching a crescendo of pain and suffering while we plaster over the cracks with inspirational stories of ‘hope’ and the idea that all this wrong will pass us by.

There is a higher agenda for all of us who live in the light. Or are trying to. It is not about creating a self-protective oasis in the desert but about the pilgrimage to the promised land of the soul. We battle with this present state because we know there is a place to come. We battle, we do not sit inert, we speak of the golden age of Christ. Not just in words. We make our very lives conduits of this value. We act in this way even to our own detriment. We spend our resources even without hope of return. We speak truth in the midst of power struggles, even though it will cost us dearly. And we dwell in the light, even in all the darkness around us.

The older we get, the more this becomes apparent. With our politics, now the new frontier, there is a temptation to not be open or true or present to our purpose. It is far easier to change the world by becoming the world and calling that change. It is far more profitable to spend our lives in pursuit of the virtues that make the human soul whole. To be kind, to be generous, to be long suffering, to love, to be sacrificial, these are all the things that are counter-intuitive to present culture and the culture of politics. Yet, this is who we are and who we are becoming; to say there is another way and to, at the very least, not be in the way of that ultimate perfection to come.

I know the next chorus will be: why are we so worthy? The truth is we are not. The foolish to show wisdom, the unworthy to show grace and the fallen to show resurrection. The accuser is not only a liar because he tells outright lies. He is also one because he generally falls short of telling the whole story. The whole story is God and love. As we approach this new epoch, our job is not elective office but effective service. We are here to show the miracle of that single life spread through millennia and into infinity. We do not need to show it in flyers, posters or repeated words. The light will show in how the darkness recedes.

“The many long walks home”

H,

It may seem like we are always walking home. This is the thrust of our faith: falling and rising and then rising to fall no more. It is not easy to stand in the light or even to crawl or lie down in it. There is something intrinsically heroic about this business of light and dark. All our stories and conversations and politics and ideology are wrapped around this idea of the wrong way and the right way. We are constantly in celebration of our rightness and there lies the great delusion.

There is not even a right and a wrong in the sense in which we see it. The light is not simply the opposite of the dark. That would suggest equality. The dark is the absence of the light. It is everything outside the light. We are not in a war between two well matched foes. We are on a journey from dark to light, from foolish to wise and from ignorance to the knowledge of all things. What might seem like a war is just a long walk home. In fact, due to our imperfections “being made perfect”, it is many long walks home.

In light of recent events, the idea of church has been thrown into further derision. The abuse of power, the criminal exploitation of innocents and the brazen show of darkness is not unknown but the volume is now up. It is not enough to say it has always been. There is a light to reveal that the darkness is empty. The truth, the honest one you know right now, is the thing that will set us free. That there is abuse in church is clear. That we have not acted in the best way towards the victims is tragic and true. That we must do better is the challenge ahead.

The pastor is not the church, though. And I suspect those old structures are crumbling and will crumble under the coming weight of glory. The church is the holy communion of saints who believe in the atonement of Christ and the Deity of the Trinity in human affairs. It is you and I. That we reach out in love, look at our own conduct and pray healing toward each other is the call of the moment. One misplaced pastor, who should face at the very least criminal inquiry for his conduct, does not end the calling of the light. It reminds us that the temple is not a place or a particular person. The temple of God is now only in men and women who welcome the trinity in.