So This Is Christmas

Christmas 2010 in Steamboat, Colorado

"So this is Christmas
And what have you done?
Another year over
And a new one just begun."

This is how the famous John and Yoko Lennon's 1971 anthem leads off and I must confess that nearly every time I hear this song it gives me pause.  Another year over and another new one about to begin.  Did I maximize the opportunities God gave me to advance His kingdom in 2011?  How does one ever really answer that question affirmatively?  My shortcomings haunt me.  So many missed opportunities.  And a few that were seized.  Was it really me that seized them or that God seized them in spite of me ... in most cases, it was probably the latter.  Such is life.

So much to lament ... another year over ... never to be relived.  Yet God in His graciousness continues to bless me and my family.  Somehow we have been given four amazing children who have never really caused us any heartache.  They all love Christ and are actively involved in serving Him and advancing His kingdom ... especially my three daughters.  Andrew is a light in a fairly dark place [secular high school] and so far has tread a far different path in his adolescence than I did.  For that I am grateful.  I still eagerly anticipate the day that an overwhelming spiritual hunger develops in his heart like it has for my girls.

Speaking of them ... we will all be together for yet another Christmas.  That is a rare thing that I best not take for granted.  How many more will I have?  It is so easy for the togetherness to get lost in all the bustle of the holiday season and the myriad tasks that need to be done and even the multitude of events that can/should be attended [not the least of which is church] that we must actively strive to not let it be so.  This I again resolve to do ... but will probably fail here too like I have so many times before.  The oft-repeated truism that "Jesus is the reason for the season" begins to ring hollow when it is heard so much.  I must actively seek that place where He can speak the eternal realities of Christmas into my too-often hardened heart if I don't want to miss the real glories of the season ... for me simply meditating on Christmas songs helps here greatly.  Not so much the carols of old for they can too easily be mindlessly repeated but rather newer songs from artists such as Point of Grace:

Let us celebrate
As the Christmases go by
Learn to live our days
With our hearts near to the child
Ever drawn, ever close
To the only love that lasts
And though 2000 years have passed

We're not that far from Bethlehem
Where all our hope and joy began
For when our hearts still cherish him
We're not that far
We're not that far from Bethlehem 

Or perhaps Michael Card:

On a day like any other
in our search to find the truth.
We turned so many musty pages
In our hope to find some clue.
Then the words leapt from the parchment
From Jacob shines a star.
That a wordless one who is the word
Will be worth the journey far.

We will find him
We will find him
We will follow his star.
We will search and we will follow
No matter how far.
In castles, through kingdoms
We know where to start
To find the king whose kingdom is the heart.

Or lastly the great Twila Paris:

And a loving thought sent a snow white lamb
To a little town known as Bethlehem.
And the little lamb thought of you and me
As He hung His gift on the Christmas tree.


It's the thought that counts when the thought is love.
It's the thought that counts when we're thinking of
All the blood that flowed in vast amounts
When thought is love, it's the thought that counts.


The key is to get away with God and reflect on His gifts to each of us.  There are so many.  Steady jobs in this economy; the ability to pay not only our bills but to have extra; the ability to give beyond our tithe ... to bless many missionaries, the less fortunate in our community and around the globe when tragedy strikes, to help both our church and our Christian school in ministry expansion projects; to have generally good health [despite my 'thorn in the knee'], to have legacies of faith both preceding and following us.  To have the opportunities to speak into the lives of so many hurting people and to have the skills to relieve much of their physical suffering through office orthopedics and to earn the right to speak into the souls of so many in pain.  For Janna to be able to both help mold the next generation into faithful disciples of Christ and to help reveal to them the marvels of His creation.

So this is Christmas ... remember to take the time this week to reflect on the amazing mystery that God was "pleased as man with men to dwell."  Really!?!  What incredible humility!  If I were God, it would have been thanks but no thanks.  Jesus was not like Caesar ... the man who would become a god, but a much greater wonder -- the one true God who became a man.  The real meaning of Christmas not only comes solely to the humble, but it also humbles us.  There was scarcely another baby born on the night of Jesus' birth who had lower prospects in life than He.  Born as Heaven's prince into a pauper's family.  Laid not in a royal crib but a feeding trough.  It is here that Christianity began and this is where is always begins ... with an overwhelming sense of need and human insufficiency.  Jesus is born only to those who are "poor in spirit."

Jesus' birth was not announced to the high and mighty but rather to poor, lowly shepherds who were "keeping watch over their flocks by night."  The only people lower on the social pecking order in that day were lepers ... and we know Jesus sought them out as well once He began His earthly ministry.  He does not come to the self sufficient and when He does, He requires that we lay that down and become as little children ... for such is His kingdom for.  And that is what I/we must do not only every Christmas but really every day ... become a child that He can use us ... and that is the only way I know of to make Christmas happen every day.

Below are some scenes of what Christmas looks like at the Currieo home.

The Paradox of Perfection

What exactly does it mean to be perfect?  When it comes to our physical existence, we actually need relatively little and the less that we need the more perfect we are.  However, in our relationship with God this is reversed.  The more we need God the more perfect we are.  Moreover, this is not something we should be ashamed of, but is, in fact, perfection itself.  I cannot think of anything sadder in this life than people living all their days without discovering their need for God.

For what is man anyway?  And what is his power?  What is the highest he is able to will?  Is not man most fully realized when he comes to understand that apart from God he is capable of nothing that will stand the test of eternity, nothing at all?  Was it not the Christ Himself who stated, "If a man remains in me, and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing" [John 15:5].  There are few more sobering verses in all of Scripture and it took me years to come to an understanding of Jesus' declaration.  It is truly rare wisdom -- not rare in that it is only offered to the most highly educated, but rare because it is offered to all.

To look outward it will appear that we can accomplish amazing feats and can draw the enthusiastic accolades of man and there may be some level of satisfaction associated with this.  And mankind is almost certainly God's most glorious creation, but its glory is primarily in the external and for the external.  Do not our eyes aim its arrows outward every time passion and desire tighten its bowstrings?  Do not our hands grasp outward?  Are not our arms outstretched?  Do we not consider our ingenuity to be all-encompassing?  To the levels we do we are deceived!

We must learn to realize that as people we are great and at our highest only when before God we realize that in and of ourselves we are nothing.  Even Moses, whom most consider the most powerful man to have ever walked the earth, realized that he was capable of nothing if the Lord did not will.  His power was in living a life submitted to the Lord.  One of the great struggles of life is to come to this realization, that in and of ourselves we are capable of nothing.

This also applies to our internal worlds.  Are any of us capable here either?  If capability is to actually be capability there must be some form of opposition.  In the internal world of the spirit, our opposition can only come from within.  And thus, our struggle is with ourselves.  To the extent that we fail to realize this, our understanding is faulty and consequently our lives are imperfect.

Such self-knowledge is not really complicated.  But then are we able to overcome ourselves by ourselves?  How can we be stronger than ourselves?  It takes something or someone else.  We need to understand that with will power alone we create in our innermost being temptations of glory, fear, despondency, pride, defiance, and sensuality greater than those we meet in the external world.  And for these reasons we struggle with ourselves and victory proves nothing but greater temptation.  We must know that deep within ourselves that we are capable of nothing at all.

In one sense, to need God and to know that this is our highest perfection, makes life more difficult.  However, in as much as we do not know ourselves, we do not actually become conscious in the deeper sense that God is.  When we become conscious that we are capable of nothing, we have every day and every moment to more fully understand that God lives.  If we do not experience this often enough it is because our understanding is faulty and we believe that we are, after all, capable of something.

This does not necessarily mean that our lives become easy simply because we learn to know God in this way.  On the contrary, it can become far more difficult.  But in this difficulty our lives acquire a deeper meaning.  Should it mean nothing to us that as we continually keep our eyes on God, knowing that we are capable of nothing, but with the help of God we are indeed more than capable?  Should it mean nothing to us that we are learning to die to the world, to esteem less and less the things that are temporal?  Lastly, should it not have meaning for us that we come to a broader and fuller understanding that God is love and that God's goodness passes all understanding?

So what does all this mean really?  Just as knowing ourselves in our own nothingness is the precondition for knowing God, so knowing God is the precondition for our sanctification, with both His assistance and according to His intention.  Wherever God is, there He is always creating.  He does not want us to remain spiritually soft and bathing in the contemplation of our own glory.  He wants to create a new person.  To need  God is to become new.  And to know God is the most crucial thing in this life.  Without this knowledge we become nothing.  Without this knowledge, we are scarcely able to grasp that we ourselves are nothing at all, and even less that to need God is our highest perfection.

Faith v. Virtue

Kierkegaard once stated that "the ethical dimension of existence has to do with the universal, of doing what is unconditionally right.  The ethical applies to everyone and at every moment.  It possesses its own validity.  That is, it has nothing outside itself as its end or purpose."  It has no further to go.

By contrast, each of us finds our purposes in the universal.  Our task is always to express ourselves within the confines of our duties and thus limit our personal interests so as to fulfill our universal duties.  As soon as we try to assert our individuality, in direct opposition to the universal, we sin.  And only by recognizing this can we again reconcile ourselves with the universal ... we can free ourselves only by surrendering to the universal in repentance.

But if this is the highest that can be said of our existence, then what is ethical and what provides us ultimate happiness are identical.  And the philosopher is proven right.  The ethical is the universal, and thus, is divine.  Thus the entirety of human existence is ultimately entirely self-enclosed, and the ethical [the virtuous] becomes the limit and completion of our lives.  Us doing our duties becomes sufficient and as a result God becomes an invisible, vanishing point ... an impotent thought unrelated to our lives.  His being becomes no more than the ethical itself, which fills all existence.

So where does the question of faith fit in here?  Is the ethical, the virtuous, the final reality?  I think we realize that it is not.  This is where the philosopher goes wrong ... he should protest much more loudly and clearly against the honor and glory given to Abraham as the father of faith.  If the ethical really is final ... if it is the ultimate determination of the meaning of life, then Abraham should be stripped of his honor and remanded for trial on charges of attempted murder and aggravated child abuse.

Now faith is just this paradox, that each of us as single individuals, though under the demands of the universal, are higher than the universal.  If that is not faith, then Abraham is done for and faith has never existed in the world.  If the ethical/virtuous life is the highest and nothing incommensurable is left over, except in the sense of what is evil, then we need no other categories than those of the philosophers.  Goodbye Abraham!  But faith is just this paradox, that the each individual, though bound by the universal, is higher than the universal.  As a single individual we stand in an absolute relation to the Absolute!  The ethical/virtue is suspended.  This is the paradox of faith!

Abraham's story is the greatest example of such a suspension.  That Abraham would even consider slaying his son is absurd.  But as a single individual before God he found himself to be above the universal.  This paradox cannot otherwise be mediated -- there is no middle ground to explain it.  In fact, if Abraham had tried to explain it, he would have been in a state of temptation, and in that case he would have never attempted to sacrifice Isaac.  Or if he had done so, he would have had to return as a murderer repentant before the universal.

Nevertheless, in his action Abraham completely overstepped the ethical altogether.  He had a higher goal outside of it.  What other explanation could ever justify Abraham's action?  Who of us would have counseled him to proceed with what he felt God had demanded of him?  Would we not say "God would never ask such a thing?"  Certainly it was most unethical.  It was not to save a nation that Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, nor to appease angry gods.  His whole action stands above and beyond the universal.  Ultimately it was a private act, an act purely of personal conscience.  Thus, to judge his action according to what was ethical or right -- in the sense of a moral life -- is totally out of the question.  So far as the universal was there at all, it was latent in Isaac and it would have cried out, "Don't do it, you are destroying everything, not the least of which is God's plan to create out of you a great nation."

So why does Abraham do it then?  For God's sake, and what is exactly the same, for his own.  He does it for the sake of God because God demands this proof of his faith.  And he does it for his own sake in order to produce the proof.

Abraham's situation is a kind of trial ... a temptation.  But what does that really mean?  What we typically call a temptation is something that keeps a person from carrying out his duty, but here the temptation is the ethical itself ["Thou shall not kill"] which would keep him from doing God's will.  But what then is duty?  In Abraham's case, duty is found in doing God's will, which is itself higher than the universal.  Abraham's duty transcended the ethical.

If this is the case, how then did Abraham exist?  He had faith.  He lived by and in faith.  That was the paradox that kept him at the summit and which he could not explain or justify to himself or anyone else.  His faith was grounded on the paradox that as an individual he was above the universal.  He had an absolute relation to the Absolute.  Was he justified?  Yes, but he was not justified by being virtuous, but by being an individual submitted to God in faith.

Note that this does not mean that the ethical is to be done away with.  But it can result in an entirely different expression than what is typically demanded by the ethical ... for example, love of God can cause us to treat our neighbors in a way that could be quite opposite from what ethics would permit.  And if this is not how it is, then faith has no place in our existence.  In fact, faith can become a temptation.

But faith's paradox is precisely this, that the individual is higher than the universal, that the individual determines his relationship to the universal through his relation to God, not his relationship to God through his relationship to the universal.  That is, to live by faith means that one has an absolute duty to God and to God alone. 

For this reason, the ethical, for the person of faith, is relegated to the realm of the relative.  In fear and trembling, this is faith's paradox -- the suspension of virtue and ethics.  Anyway we look at it, Abraham's story contains a suspension of the ethical.  He who walks the narrow path of faith no one can ultimately advise as no one can fully understand.  Faith is always a miracle ... yet none of us are excluded from it.

The Danger of the Crowd

We warn our young people not to enter "dens of iniquity," even out of curiosity, because no one knows what evil may ensnare them there.  Still more terrible, however, is the danger of going along with the crowd.  In truth, there may be no other place, not even one more disgustingly dedicated to lust and vice as a strip club, where a human heart may be more easily corrupted -- than in a crowd.

Kierkegaard asserts that "Even though every individual possess the truth, when he gets together in a crowd, untruth will be present at once, for the crowd is untruth."  It either produces hardheartedness and irresponsibility or weakens a person's sense of responsibility by placing it in a fractional category.  Can you imagine a solitary person walking up to Christ and spitting on him?  Who would have the courage or audacity to do such a thing?  But as a part of a crowd, well many had both the "courage" and audacity to do it -- dreadful untruth.

Christ was crucified in large part because He would have nothing to do with the crowd [even though He did address himself to all].  He did not care to form a party, an interest group, a mass movement, but instead, wanted to be what He was, the Truth, which is related to the single individual.  Therefore, everyone who will genuinely serve the truth is by that very fact a type of martyr.  To win a crowd is no art; for only untruth is needed.  Add in a little nonsense and some knowledge of human passions and you are good to go.  But no witness to the truth dare gets involved with the crowd.  Our work is to be involved with people surely, but if possible, always individually, speaking with each and everyone separately -- in order to split apart the crowd one by one.  This is how the kingdom of God is built and it has always been so.

Everyone Must Stand Alone

"Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone.

I hear you call my name..."

and so goes the popular song by Madonna.
Except that she was sadly mistaken when she finished the line with "and it feels like home."

Why is it that the vast majority of people prefer to be addressed as a part of a group rather than as a distinct individual?  Could it be that conscience is one our life's greatest inconveniences, a knife that cuts just a little too deeply?  Sadly being a part of a group seems to impart a goodnight to one's conscience.  We cannot be a party of two or three, a Currieo Company, around our conscience.  No.  In fact, it is just the opposite, the only thing a group secures is the abolition of conscience.

By forming a party, a melting into some group, we avoid not only conscience but also martyrdom.  This is why the fear of others [what Jesus called the fear of man] so dominates this world.  Very few dare to be a genuine self; and most are hiding in some kind of "togetherness."  Instead we rely on traditions and the voices of others.  Too many are content to become a copy, living a life shielded against responsibility before the Truth.

Kierkegaard described true individuality as being measured by this:  "how long or how far one can endure being alone without the understanding of others."  The person who can endure being alone is miles apart from the man-pleaser, the one who manages to get along with everyone -- the one who possesses no sharp edges.  God never uses such people.  The true individual, anyone who is going to be directly used by and involved with God, will not and cannot avoid the human bite.  He will be thoroughly misunderstood [and Jesus promised as much].  God is no friend of the cozy human gathering.

In the purely human world the rule seems to be:  Seek out the opinion and the help of others.  Yet Christ says:  Beware of men!  The majority of people are not only afraid of holding the wrong opinion, they are afraid of holding any opinion alone.  In the physical world water extinguishes fire.  So too in the spiritual world.  The "many," the masses of people extinguish the inner fire of the individual -- beware of men!

According to Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, Christians are told to be both salt and light.  And thus Christianity puts this question to each individual:  Are you willing to be salt?  Are you willing to be light?  Are you willing to be sacrificed, instead of melding into the crowd, which itself seeks to profit from the sacrifice of others?  Here again is the distinction:  to be salt or to melt into the masses; to let others be sacrificed for us on behalf of the Truth or to let ourselves be sacrificed ... and between these two lies an eternal qualitative distinction.

The deep fault of the human race is that there are very few individuals any more.  Wanting to hide in the crowd, to be a small fraction of the group rather than being an individual, is the most corrupt of all escapes.  No doubt, it does make life easier, but it does so by making it thoughtless.  Yet at the end of the day, it comes down to the responsibility of every single individual -- each of us is still an authentic, answerable self.  It is in effect a cop-out for us to make a racket along with a group of others for a so-called conviction.  We, instead, must make up our own minds about our convictions before God and then live them out regardless of the opinions of others.  Eternity will single each person out as individually responsible.

Every person must render an account to God.  No third person dares to intrude upon this accounting.  God in heaven does not speak to us as an assembly; He speaks to us individually.  This is why in particular that it is the most ruinous evasion of all to be hidden away in a herd in an attempt to escape God's personal address.  It was none other than Adam who attempted to do this [when there was only one other person on the face of the earth] who tried to hide himself among the trees when his guilty conscience convicted him of his sin.  Similarly, it may be easier and more convenient, and more cowardly too, to hide ourselves among the crowd in hope that God will not recognize us from the others.  But in eternity each shall individually render an account.  Eternity will examine each person for all that he has chosen and done as an individual before God.

It will be a great and terrible day when judgment comes and all souls come to life again, to stand utterly alone, alone and known by all, and yet candidly, exhaustively known by Him who knows all.  So we might as well get used to it now.  Let us forsake the cover of the crowd and become the salt and light that He has created us to be.

The Spell of Good Intentions

There is a parable given to us by Jesus that is seldom considered but that I find very instructive and inspiring.  "There was a man who had two sons.  The father went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.'  And he answered, 'I will not'; but afterward he changed his mind and went.  And the father went to the second son and said the same and he answered, 'I will, sir,' but did not go.  Which of the two did the will of his father?" [Matthew 21:28-31].

What is the point of this parable?  Is it not meant to show us the danger of saying "Yes" in too great a hurry, if even it is well meant?  Though the yes-brother was not a deceiver when when he said "Yes," he nevertheless became a deceiver when he failed to keep his promise.  In fact, it may have even been in his very eagerness in promising that he became a deceiver.  When we say "Yes" or promise something, we can very easily deceive ourselves and others also, as if we had already done what we promised.  It is all too easy to think that by making a promise we have already done at least part of what we have promised ... as if the promise itself was something of value.  Which, of course, it isn't!  In fact, when we do not do what we have promised, it is a long way back to the truth.

We should beware.  The "Yes" of promise keeping is sleep-inducing.  An honest "No" possesses much more promise.  It can stimulate and repentance may not be so far away.  He who says "No," can become almost afraid of himself; whereas he who says "Yes, I will," is all too pleased with himself.  The world seems quite inclined -- almost too eager -- to make promises, for a promise appears very fine in the moment -- it virtually inspires!  And it is for this very reason the eternal is suspicious of promises.

Now suppose that neither of the brothers did his father's will.  Then the one who said "No" was surely closer to realizing that he did not do his father's will.  There is nothing hidden in a "no," but a "yes" can very easily become a deception, a self-deception; which of all deceptions is the most difficult to conquer.  And thus this proves the old axiom, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" to be all too true.

It is a most dangerous thing for a person to go backwards with the help of good intentions, especially with the help of promises unkept.  When a person turns his back on someone and walks away, it is very easy to determine where he is going.  But when a person finds himself looking at who he is walking away from, and thus is walking backwards while appearing to greet that person, give him assurances that he is, in fact, coming though getting further away at the same time, then it is not so easy to become aware.  And so it is with the one who, rich in good intentions and quick to promise, retreats backwards further and further from the good.  With every renewed intention and promise it seems as if he is taking a new step forward when in reality he is walking backwards.

We do not praise the son who said "No," but we need to learn from the parable just how dangerous it is to say, "Lord, I will."  Far too many of us have been deceived in this manner ... almost as if we've been cast under the spell of the enemy.

The Eternal Either/Or

Choice ... the pearl of great price.  Yet it is not intended to be buried and hidden away.  A choice not made is worse than no choice at all ... it becomes a snare in which we trap ourselves and yet we can never be truly rid of  it.  It remains with us and becomes a curse if unused.

Each person must choose between God and the world ... God and mammon as the King James Version calls it.  This is the eternal, unchangeable condition of choice that can never be evaded.  Never in all eternity.  We are not given the luxury of saying, "God and the world."  This would be, in effect, to refrain from choosing and Scripture does not give us that luxury.  We do so to our own destruction [Hebrews 10:39].  No one can say, "One can choose a little mammon and also God as well."

It is also presumptuous to believe that only the person who desires great wealth is the one who chooses mammon.  The man who insists on having a single penny without God ... wanting that sole penny for himself ... thus chooses mammon.  A single penny is enough to make the choice.  To chose mammon, whether great or little, makes not the slightest difference.

Scriptures say that to love God is to hate the world and to love the world is to hate God.  This, of course, is the colossal point of contention, either love or hate.  And this is sadly the place where the most terrible of fights must be fought.  And where is this place?  In our inmost beings.  Whether we struggle over millions or over a single penny, it comes down to a matter of loving and preferring God.  This is a great and terrible fight for the highest place ... but what great and unmeasurable happiness is promised to the one who rightly chooses.

What is it that God really demands in this eternal either/or?  He demands obedience ... unconditional obedience.  He says that if we don't obey Him unconditionally, without qualification, we don't love Him.  And if we don't love Him ... then we hate Him.  If we are not obedient unconditionally then we are not bound to Him and if we are not bound to Him then we despise Him.

But if we can become absolutely obedient, then when we pray, "Lead us not into temptation" there will be no ambiguity in us ... we become undivided and single before God.  And that is the one thing that all of Satan's cunning and all of his snares cannot take by surprise ... an undivided will.  Where unclarity resides, there is temptation, and there it proves too easily the stronger.  Wherever there is ambiguity, wherever there is wavering, there will inevitably be disobedience at the bottom.

But where there is no ambiguity, Satan and his temptations are powerless.  But with even the slightest glimpse of wavering, Satan is strong and temptation is enticing, and keen-sighted is the evil one whose trap is called temptation and whose prey is called the human soul.  Ambiguity cannot hide itself from him and when he discovers it, temptation is always at hand.  But the person solely surrendered to God, without reservation, is absolutely safe. 

There is a tremendous danger in which we find ourselves by virtue of our humanity ... a danger that results from the fact that we are placed between two tremendous powers.  The choice is left to us.  We must either love or hate, and not to love is to hate.  So hostile are these two powers that the slightest inclination towards one side becomes absolute opposition to the other.  Let us not forget the tremendous choice we must make.  To be either duplicitous or to forget to choose is to have made our choice.

May God give each of us a truly undivided will ... one with a singular bent towards Him.

Followers v. Fans

It is well known that Christ consistently used the expression "follower."  He never sought out fans, admirers, adherents or even worshippers.  No, what He sought was disciples.  It was not adherents to a teaching, but followers of a life that Christ was looking for.

Christ understood that being a "disciple" was the only way to respond to the things He revealed about Himself.  He claimed to be the way, the truth and the life [John 14:6].  For this reason, He could never abide adherents who only accepted His teaching -- especially those who lived their lives without the application of the principles He taught.  He lived His entire life on earth, from beginning to end, in such a way as to make being an "admirer" impossible but, instead, to demand followership.

Christ came into the world with the purpose of saving it rather than instructing it.  At the same time -- as is implied by His saving work -- He came to be the pattern, to leave footprints for us to follow should we decide to join Him.  This is why Christ was born and died in lowliness.  It would be absolutely impossible for any of us to describe the life He lived as having inherent worldly advantages for those who are called and choose to follow it.  In that sense, to "admire Christ" has become the false invention of a later age, aided by its inherent presumption of "loftiness."  He never really gave us that choice and if He had there was absolutely nothing intrinsic to admire in Christ, unless we would want to admire poverty, misery and the contempt of His peers.

So what then, is the difference between a fan [admirer] and a follower [disciple]?  A follower is or strives to be what he admires.  An admirer [fan], however, keeps himself personally detached.  He fails to see that what is admired involves a claim on him, and thus he fails to be or strive to be what he admires.

To want to admire instead of follow Christ is not necessarily an invention by bad people.  No, it is more an invention by those who spinelessly keep themselves detached, who keep themselves at a safe distance.  Admirers are related to the admired only through the excitement of the imagination.  To them he is like an actor on the stage except that, this being real life, the effect he produces is somewhat stronger.  But for their part, admirers make the same demands that are made in the theater or the ballpark:  to sit safe, still and calm.  Admirers are only all too willing to serve Christ so long as proper caution is exercised, lest one personally come in contact with danger.  As such, they refuse to accept that Christ's life is a demand on theirs.  In actuality, they are offended by Him.  His radical, bizarre character so offends them that when  they honestly see Christ for who He is, they are no longer able to experience the comfort and tranquility they so desire.  They know all too well that to associate with Christ to closely holds their own lives up for examination.  And while He may say nothing directly against them, they know that His life tacitly judges theirs.

And it is indeed true that Christ's life makes it terrifyingly manifest just what a dreadful untruth it is to admire the truth instead of following it.  And when there is no danger or cost apparent to our Christianity, it is all to easy to confuse an admirer with a follower.  In fact, the admirer can suffer the delusion that the position he takes is the true one, when in reality all he is doing is playing it safe.  We must always give heed to the call of discipleship.

To those who know the story of Christ's life there is no doubt that Judas Iscariot was an admirer of Christ.  And we know that from the beginning of Christ's ministry that He had many admirers/fans.  So how did this admirer become a traitor in a mere three years time?  But really, isn't that the way of the admirer?  The fairweather fan?  Those who only admire the truth, will, when danger appears, often betray the one they admire.  The admirer is infatuated with the false security of greatness; but if/when there is any inconvenience or trouble, he will typically pull back.  Admiring the truth, instead of following it, is just as dubious as the fire of erotic love, which at the turn of the hand can be changed into exactly the opposite, to hate, jealously and revenge.

Consider the story of another admirer in the gospels -- Nicodemus [John 3].  Unwilling to risk his reputation, he came to Jesus under the cover of night.  So far as we know he never became a follower but he definitely was an admirer.  It was as if he had said to Christ, "If we are able to reach a compromise, you and me, then I will accept your teaching in eternity.  But here in this world, no, that I cannot bring myself to do.  Could you not make an exception for me?  Could it not be enough if once in a while, at great risk to myself, I come to you during the night; but during the day continue to act as if I do not know you.  You must realize how humiliating it is for me and how disgraceful, and even insulting this is toward you."  Certainly the webs woven by the admirer can be awkward and unseemly.

Nicodemus, I have not doubt, was likely well-meaning.  I am also sure that he was tantalized by the truths of Christ's teaching.  But is it not true that the more strongly someone identifies with the words of another while his life remains unchanged, the more he is only making a fool of himself?  Suppose Christ had permitted a less costly version of being a follower or disciple -- suppose He allowed an admirer who swore on all that is high and holy that he is convinced -- then Nicodemus might have very well have been accepted.  But he was not!

Nevertheless, the difference between the fan and follower still remains, no matter who or where we are.  The admirer never makes any true sacrifices.  He always plays it safe.  Though in words, speech or even singing he may be inexhaustible in how he prizes Christ, nevertheless, he renounces nothing, he gives up nothing, he will not reorient his life, he will not become what he admires [this is often true in sports as well, as the life of the fan takes far less dedication than the life of the athlete that he supposedly "idolizes"].  Not so for the follower/disciple.  No.  The follower aspires with all his strength, will all his will, with all his might to become what he admires.  And then remarkably enough, even if he is living among a "Christian people," the same danger lies for him as was once the case when it was dangerous to openly confess Christ.  And as a result of the follower's life, it becomes evident just who the admirers are as well, and as a result the admirers will rise up against him.  It will be as Christ promised us, "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.  If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own" [John 15:18, 19].

What is Truth?

Truth is not something we can appropriate easily or quickly.  We certainly cannot sleep or dream ourselves into the truth.  No, we must be tried, do battle and suffer if we are to acquire truth for ourselves.  It is just an illusion to think that there is an abridgment, a short cut that dispenses with the necessity of struggling for it.  With respect to acquiring truth to live by, every generation and every person must essentially start from the beginning.

What is truth, and in what sense what Christ the truth?  The first question, as most recall, was asked by Pilate [John 18:38], and it is doubtful that he ever really cared to even have his question answered.  Pilate asked Christ, "What is truth?"  That it did not even occur to Pilate that Christ WAS the truth demonstrated precisely that he had no eye for truth at all.  Christ's life was the truth [John 14:6].  It was to this very end that Christ was born, and for this purpose did He come into the world, that He should bear witness to the truth.  What, then, is the fundamentally fallacy in Pilate's question?  It is primarily that it even occurred to him to question Christ in this way; for in questioning Christ he is actually damning himself as he reveals that Christ's life has not illuminated him.  How could Christ possibly enlighten Pilate with mere words when Pilate could not seen through Christ's own life what truth is!?

Pilate's question is extremely foolish.  Not that he asks, "What is truth?" but that he questions Christ, whose very life is the truth and who at every moment demonstrates more powerfully by His life what truth is than all the most profound lectures by the world's wisest thinkers.  Though it may make perfect sense to ask any other person, thinker, philosopher, teacher, pastor, whoever, "What is truth?" to ask this of Christ is the greatest possible faux pas.  Obviously, Pilate is of the opinion that Christ was just a man, like everyone else.  Poor Pilate!  His question is the most foolish and misguided ever asked by any man.  It is almost as if I were to ask someone standing right beside me, "Do you exist?"  How can one possibly reply to this?  So it is with Christ in relation to Pilate.  Christ is the truth.  "If my life," He might say, "cannot open your eyes to the truth, then what can I possibly say?  For I am the truth."

As with Pilate, in our day Christ as the truth has also been abolished:  we may accept Christ's teaching -- but abolish the very concept of Christ.  We want truth the easy way.  This is to abolish truth, for Christ the teacher is more important than His teaching.  Just as Christ's life, the very fact that He lived here on the earth, is vastly more important than all the results of His life, so also is Christ infinitely more important than His teaching.

Christ is the truth in the sense that to be the truth is the only genuine explanation of it; the only bona fide way of acquiring it.  Truth is not the sum of statements, not a definition, not a system of concepts, but, instead, a life.  Truth is not a way of thinking ... no truth is as Kierkegaard would say "a reduplication of truth within ourselves and within Him.  Your life, my life, His life expresses the truth in its striving."  Just as the truth was a life in Christ, so too, for us the truth must be lived.

Therefore, truth is not so much a matter of knowing this or that, but of being in the truth.  Despite our modern philosophy, there is an infinite difference here, as is best seen in Christ's response to Pilate.  Christ did not so much know the truth but was the truth.  Not that He did not know what the truth was, but when one is the truth and when the requirement is to be in the truth, to merely "know" the truth is insufficient -- it is even an untruth in comparison.  For knowing the truth is something that follows as a matter of course from being in the truth, not the other way around.  No one knows more of the truth than what he is of the truth.  To properly know the truth is to be the truth; it is to have the truth for one's life.  This always requires a struggle.  Any other kind of knowledge is a falsification.  In short, the truth, if it is really there, is a being, a life.  The Gospel says that this is eternal life, to know the only true God and the One whom He sent, the truth [John 17:3].  At the end of the day this means that we only know the truth when it becomes life in us.

The Power of One

As I noted in my last posting:  the one matters to God.

Steven Spielberg has explored this theme of the one in several of his films.  From E.T. to A.I. to Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Schindler's List to Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg seems almost obsessesed with the journey of the solitary individual.  In Saving Private Ryan we find the true story of how a troop of men literally marched through a world war to find and secure the safe return of one soldier.  This movie raises such important questions as:  What is the value of one human being?  and To what extreme should we go to save a single person?

Until I met my current pastor, Erik Braun, eleven years ago, I used to think that I was desperately searching for God during my latter teenage years.  Looking back, I now realize that God was desperately searching for me.  I used to wonder why my soul ached and God wouldn't do anything about it.  Now I perceive that it was that very pain that drove me to God.  A life lived without God starves the soul.  I thought for a while that God could meet my needs and stop the cravings of my soul.  Now I know that isn't really the case.  My soul doesn't crave something FROM God; my soul CRAVES God.  And by the way, so does yours.

That is why everything else leaves us unsatisfied in the end.  But we should not let this frustrate us; we should, instead, let it fuel us.  All the evidence we need to prove God is waiting to be discovered within us.  As we have traveled together for now twenty-eight postings over the past three months, I just want to say that our journey does not end here.  We are not at the final destination, but instead, at a crossroad.  There are decisions that we must consider, choices that perhaps we must make, steps that we must take.  Maybe we should stop and take a moment to turn our heads and look back.  We have journeyed farther than we may know.

If you are still tracking along with me then you are very much the kind of person that Jesus spoke very highly of in the gospels.  He calls people like you seekers [or perhaps you may already be one of His believers] and He assures you that if you seek, you will find.  He also promises that if you knock, the door will be opened to you, and if you ask, it will be given to you.  Please know, however, that He isn't so much speaking about material possessions here as much as He is about meeting the deepest longings of your soul.  So continue to seek, knock, ask and don't stop until you find, enter in and come to know the answer your soul has been searching for all along.

Our souls crave, and it's God that we are longing for.  So we should listen carefully to the conversations going on inside our heads.  We shouldn't worry ... we aren't really going crazy.  We are not talking to ourselves.  God is trying to get our attention and to bring us into relationship with Him.  If we will pay attention to our souls, they will guide us to God.

If God is real and we are created by Him, our souls already know this.  We may be in denial or even genuinely unaware of it, but if we would take the time to explore nowhere else except deep within ourselves, undoubtedly we would come face-to-face with God.

In the movie Contact, Jodie Foster asks the question, "Do you think there's life out there?"  The theme of the movie, of course, was that if there wasn't, then it would be a terrible waste of space.  I say that there is more unexplored space within us than there is in this ever-expanding universe.  If we will take the time to journey to the depths of our souls, we will not leave there disappointed, and perhaps to our surprise and astonishment, we will find God there.

Then what do we do?  If we find ourselves face-to-face with the God of the universe and feel His presence touch our souls like gentle breezes against our face, how will we respond to Him?  To trust in God, we have to truly know that He loves us without condition.  This is the beauty of Jesus' death on the cross.  It is literally God's celebration of His love for us.  His love embraces us wherever we happen to be in our journeys, and He refuses to leave us there.  Instead, He launches us on a quest to pursue the lives we were created to live.  Our souls know that there is a greater purpose for our lives, a God-sized dream waiting to unfold and become our futures.

We are all on a quest for intimacy, for meaning, for our destinies.  Our souls crave love and faith and hope.  We are all searching for what it is that our souls long for, and we will be satisfied only in God.  My guess is that it will never be easy, but at least Jesus has made it possible.  We don't have to be afraid to commit our lives to someone who gives His life for us.

Maybe you are different than I am, but my guess is that we are probably a lot alike in this.  Your soul, too, craves to believe.  You may have been burned, you may have even been deceived, but deep in your gut, somewhere deep inside, there is a voice telling you that God can be trusted with your life, that you can trust someone like Jesus.  His love is pure and your soul thirsts for Him like water is needed by a crusted desert.  That there is more to life than you can know without God.  Jesus walked among us so that we could get close enough to hear Him, to see Him, to touch Him, to know Him.  To know Him, this is what our souls crave.

Hide and Seek

Solomon once wrote that God has set eternity in the hearts of men, but that in the end we cannot seem to make any sense of it.  He somehow knew that deep within us is both our greatest evidence for God and our greatest connection to God.  Jesus said that the kingdom of God was within, yet for the past two thousand years we have kept looking outward for this kingdom rather than inside us.  I am absolutely convinced of one thing:  God has placed cravings within our souls that will either drive us insane or drive us to Him.  Our souls long for God; we just may not know it yet.

I lose things all the time [and as it turns out, so does my wife ... perhaps even more than I do ... so at all times there is a fairly good chance that there is a hunt going on at the Currieo hacienda].  I have literally spent untold hours of my life looking for lost items.  This goes back to childhood, and when I was a kid, I used to think God was punishing me by hiding whatever object was missing.  A bit of magical thinking I must admit now:)  I was certain that I had committed some heinous crime against both God and humanity, and now God was punishing me by hiding my wallet, keys, ticket, fill in the blank.  My parents would be exasperated saying things like "a place for everything and everything in its place."  The past few years I must admit that I have done better in the keeping things in their place department ... but it is forty years too late.

Losing things drove me to prayer [and it really drives Janna to prayer even more than me].  I would spend virtually every minute of my search begging God to help me find whatever I had lost [or He had hidden].  I, of course, would also make untold promises to God about ways in which I could be more holy if He would just show me where the missing item was.  Not that I was so good about keeping those promises mind you.  I would wrack my mind for anything I could have possibly done wrong to cause said item to go missing and then do whatever I could to make it right ... frantically trying to find the one thing God was holding against me so that I could get Him to give back what was missing.

Most people, I am sure, might think this was a ridiculous thought process, but frankly it seemed to work pretty well [maybe that is why I kept doing it ... after all, a behavior reinforced is a behavior repeated as the psychologists tell us].  Most of the time I was able to get God off my back, repair whatever breach in the cosmos I had created, and find the missing watch, wallet, keys, radio or whatever happened to be lost at the time.  Looking back now, I realize that the one thing that seemed to be lost all the time was me.  I kept looking for me.  Or really for who I was.  Somewhere along the way from grade school to adolescence I had become lost.

We try to fill ourselves with everything we can grab [remember the Schlitz beer commercials in the 70s ... you only go around once in life so grab all the gusto you can?].  And yet there always seemed to remain an inescapable emptiness within.  Even when we have looked everywhere else, even when there is seemingly no where else to even look, we still somehow fail to consider the possibility that what our souls long for is God.  We cannot take enough [gusto, money, things, whatever] or make enough to fill the hollowness within us.  No matter what we try to do we cannot seem to avoid the void.

Perhaps this is exactly what Jesus meant when He said, "What is it worth to gain the whole world, but to lose your soul?"  Could He have been describing someone like me or you?  We can spend our entire lives as slaves to our desires, determined to somehow satisfy the deepest longings of our souls.  We can take everything that we get our hands on; we can keep everything that we grab a hold of; we can, in the end, become human versions of a black hole.

Yet there remains something deep inside us that pulls us toward God, something our souls long for that we cannot fully understand or comprehend.  Doesn't it make sense that if we were created for relationship with the God of the universe, that He would leverage everything within us so that we would search for Him, to reach out for Him, and perhaps just end up finding Him?

So at the end of the day, we are back to our cosmic game of hide-and-seek.  At this point, we might be asking ourselves, If God wants me to find Him and my soul craves to do so, then why doesn't He make it easier than this?  How many of us have gone searching for God?  I have.  And frankly, I didn't feel much like He was cooperating at all [while now looking back I can see that He was there all the time].  And then when my propensity for losing things was factored in, it is a miracle that I ever ended up finding Him again at all.

When we lose something, we have to backtrack.  Don't you just hate the question we always get asked whenever we lose something, "Where did you last have it?"  If we knew that, then it wouldn't be lost, now would it?  But like an investigator from Scotland Yard, we go retracing every step.  When that doesn't work, sadly I too quickly move to Plan B ... blaming others.  "Who lost my _____ [fill in the blank]?"  Oh, that's right, we're talking about God.  "Who moved my God?"  Or worse yet, "My God, where did God go?"

Now I'll say it right here and now.  It is a very bad thing to misplace the Creator of the universe.  He could be just about anywhere [think of the infinite possibilities as to where this search might take us].  Or maybe in this case, everywhere.  Sometimes hide-and-seek isn't a game.

So I asked around and I looked for God in the last place someone saw Him -- in religion.  After all, millions of people around the world go to see God every week unless, of course, you were to interview them and then you might realize that they didn't see Him either.  They were just there looking for Him, hoping that they could find Him.  There may be nothing more frustrating or confusing than having tried God and then walking away with the bad taste of "religion" in our mouths.

So many of us spend our lives worrying that God is going to punish us or hoping that God is going to help us, but neither of these things ever seems to happen.  For all the activity that there is in the world trying to get God's attention, it can leave us wondering whether it's all just a horrible waste of time.  I couldn't really blame God, though.  I never really got too mad at Him [except perhaps after my mother's suicide ... why couldn't I have a normal family like everyone else?].  I just figured that He was too busy with more important stuff or maybe more important people.  So much of my life felt invisible.  It seemed pretty arrogant and presumptuous of me to think God would actually notice me.  Probably God was more of a big picture kind of guy.  Maybe He just wasn't that into details.  Or maybe, just maybe, there was more going on than I knew.

Over and over again, Jesus taught the value of the one to God.  He described God as the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to find the one that is lost; the woman who searches for the one coin that is missing till she finds it; the father who waits patiently for his wayward son to return home to him.  The one matters to God.

... To be continued ...

Dreams ... the Art Form of Hope

Dreams [aspirations] are the art form of hope.  They paint a picture of the life we desire.  It is impossible to enjoy life to the fullest without dreams.  And I believe we were certainly created to enjoy life.  We don't have to teach children to laugh.  Joy, celebration, and even happiness are the natural environments for the human spirit.  Have you ever considered just how difficult it is to fake a real laugh?  The imitation is easy to spot.  We might have faith in the wrong things and we might later discover our true love to be only of the puppy variety, but we are never confused about whether something is funny. 

This can be downright depressing if we think about it long enough.  I would rather be right about what I believe or about who I love than have a discerning sense of comedy.  At the end of our lives what really is the evolutionary value of laughter?  Yet, as it has often been said, it is somehow strangely true that laughter is the best medicine.

When you study any life form, we can discover its proper environment by what brings it health and makes it thrive.  Some plants require shade; others direct sunlight; still others only partial sunlight.  Some species are designed to thrive in deserts while others can only exist in tropical rain forests.  Move a plant out of its natural habitat and it will quickly deteriorate in both health and vitality.

People are no different.  Put them in an environment filled with bitterness, despair or detachment and it doesn't take too long to see the resulting negative effect.  Despite perhaps seeming superficial, the human spirit thrives where there is laughter.  Perhaps we should take happiness more seriously.  Somehow we live in a world where those societies who have the highest concentration of human wealth also have the highest percentage of people medicated for depression.  I guess it just goes to show that we can't buy happiness.  But somehow that doesn't seem to keep us from trying.

I remember laughing when I was a young boy ... I also remember when the laughter stopped after my mother's suicide.  Nothing much seemed funny in my adolescent years [maybe that is just par for the course ... but then again maybe not].  My girls' teenage years, on the other hand, seemed to be a barrel of laughs.  For me, I was in pretty sad shape.  Trapped in a universe that I couldn't get out of or worse yet even understand, I was quickly losing hope.  I didn't realize at the time just how essential hope was to getting out of bed in the morning ... yet still somehow I got out of bed every day at 3:00 AM to deliver the morning newspaper [perhaps it was because I didn't really have the choice to stay in bed].

Our souls get into trouble when we stop believing in hope.  Still I had dreams of a different life ... one where I would graduate from college and move into the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and somehow find myself in the solitude.  It would seem that no matter how difficult our lives are, if we can imagine better ones, that can somehow pull us through.  My biggest confusion during my high school years involved figuring out just who God was and why, or better yet how, He could love me.  Add my intrigue with the French existentialist philosophers to the mix and hopelessness became almost a given.

Yet I learned that our souls crave truth, beauty, wonder and love.  Our souls yearn to dream, to imagine, and simply just to understand who we are and why we are here.  Our souls crave to connect, to commune, and to create.  And should we become convinced that all these things are merely illusions to be dispensed of [as part of my soul did during my high school years] then our souls become sick.

One ink blot I saw during my college psychology class clearly gave me a choice between a bat and a butterfly.  I saw them both, and I fully understood the implications.  Which would I choose?  Seriously, how does one choose what to do when our souls want butterflies but the world keeps sending us bats?  Perhaps we become Batman ... taking our worst fears and making them our strengths.  But really ... how do we do that?  I never really got answers to those questions but I became convinced at least that asking the questions was a good thing.

And during my college years I began to realize that all of us have a common struggle.  While there may be an endless number of philosophies and religions in the world and while we may all disagree on the answers, all of us have the same questions, the same longings, the same cravings.

When I was just a small child, I believed in God, in love and in laughter -- and then I didn't.  I think love went first, then laughter.  And then since God couldn't help me with the first two, I went ahead and threw Him out with everything else you need to get rid of when you are no longer a child [these were my high school years].  But before you get shocked and think too badly of me, please know that almost immediately I wanted them all back.  I just didn't realize how intimately they were all connected together.  Imagine my surprise when I began to discover that the things that came so naturally to me as a child were the very things my soul was craving.

I think I gave away my soul at a very young age.  By this I mean I gave up on myself.  My mom, dad and even step-mom never did and were always saying I "could do anything I set my mind on."  I just never believed them ... at least not until my fourth semester of college when it was put up or shut up time.  I had just dropped a Physics class that I had a D in and just barely passed my Thermodynamics class the previous semester.  I had serious doubts as to whether I should even be in college and really had no idea at all as to why I was there, except that it was what came next after high school.

When we give up on ourselves, we start throwing out things like our dreams, our optimism [we become pessimists who just call themselves "realists"], our hope, intimacy, love, trust, truth, meaning, and even our faith.  Looking back now, I realize that I was just paralyzed by fear.  I was terrified that I was nothing and would never amount to anything.  Deep inside this ever-expanding universe known as my soul, I was drowning in a quickly rising ocean of self-doubt and despair.  And I know from experience that is isn't enough just to survive.

... To be continued ...

So What About Love?

So then there is love.

Some people who do not believe in God are consistent and do not believe in love either.  Basically they lack primary evidence.  In fact, I would assert that there is a direct correlation between losing faith in love and losing faith in God.  Yet for many people it is at this point that they live with the inconsistency.  We cannot see God; we cannot prove God in the laboratory.  They find that to believe in God is a stretch, but they believe in love.  Yet we cannot see love.  We cannot prove love.  The only available evidence is secondary.  Again, like God, there is no primary evidence.  However, when we love someone, we are more certain of this than virtually anything else.

It is love that reminds us that there is a knowing beyond reason.

Moreover, I would assert that we are born to love.  Children love unconditionally.  We can beat the love out of a person, but it is impossible to beat it into someone.  Just like faith, love is intrinsic.  It is not taught or transferred ... it just is.  We cannot make a person love us.  God only knows how many of us have tried to.  There might be nothing more painful than loving someone who does not love us in return.

For love to exist it does not even require reciprocation.

We can, in fact, live in a loveless environment and still love.  Children typically still love their parents when tragically their parents do not love them.  If love was something that developed over time, it would not be so.  It is certainly not the result of becoming a mature adult.  In fact, frequently it seems to be the opposite, where adulthood becomes the enemy of love.  I am not saying that love does not deepen with maturity but what I am saying is that the impetus for love is within us from the start.  We are all born with both faith and love -- not to mention hope.

The Faith of a Child v. the Doubt of the Adult

We seem destined to be tormented by cravings that we cannot satisfy or to live dissatisfied lives dead to our deepest longings.

We tend to think of childhood as that period in our lives when we are preparing for life.  But the truth of the matter is that life for the most part comes right at us from the very beginning.  No warm-ups; no pre-game; no do-overs or mulligans.  It's the real thing from our first breaths.

Sadly, I don't really remember much from my birthday ... the best I can do is pick up the trail of memories beginning several years afterward.  It is humbling to realize that my earliest memories are not really independent thoughts but more what I've been told about the first few years of my life with memories filled in from pictures, stories in my baby book or home videos.  All of us are shaped by people and events that we may not even vaguely remember.  I have just a handful of memories of my biological mother who committed suicide just before my tenth birthday.  Yet whether I care to admit it or not, she still affects me decades later.  So I know that my earliest thoughts were not shaped in a vacuum, but I also know that they did not simply come from the outside.

When I was only a small child, I believed in God, in love, and in laughter.  To believe in these things is natural to the human spirit.  For a child, more is unknown than is known.  To believe in God, in mystery, in the unseen, is not difficult for a child.  Children are pretty much born to believe.  They are the perfect candidates for myths, fables and fairy tales.  Adults, on the other hand, see this as a weakness, as proof of the naivete of childhood.

As we grow older, we come to know better.  I find it odd how as adults, we struggle with faith.  We need evidence to justify our belief in the invisible.  We attempt to build faith systems constructed with our logic and reason.  As children, we just believed.  Faith was so natural.  Yes, our innocence left us vulnerable to believing things that were not true, but is it also possible that this same innocence exists so that we may find that which is most true?  We seem to be created with an inherent inclination to believe.  So perhaps the truth is that we don't grow into faith; we grow out of it.

We have within us both the ability and the disposition to look beyond the material world and to search for the eternal.  If God exists and we were created to know him and faith is the means by which that happens, doesn't it make sense that we would be born with such an inclination?  For others, to believe in God is far too great a stretch.  They even consider such to be an insult to their intelligence.  For them believing in something they cannot empirically see or test is absurd.  And if we were to speak of the effects of God on the lives of his people, they will insist that secondary evidence is not enough.  If it is not primary then it is unreal.

Then there  is love.

... To be continued ...

To Be or Not To Be ... a Model T

All of us begin our lives fueled by curiosity, yet far too many of us replace it with conformity.  We are born unique but often die standardized.  Henry Ford offered his Model T in any color his customers wanted ... so long as it was black.  He was the master of standardization.  This turned out not to be a sustainable idea for cars, much less for people.  We are not supposed to look like or act like and certainly not live like we are the products of an assembly line.

It is far too easy to live our lives by default.  And if we are not careful, we can easily become the sum total of all the expectations others impose on our lives.  Too often we allow ourselves to become generic, standardized, homogenized.  We too frequently just maintain the status quo ... conform to the expectation of others ... suppress our curiosity ... stop questioning ... refrain from stirring things up.  We line up and march in single file.  We just get in line all to often never even thinking to ask WHY WE ARE EVEN STANDING THERE AT ALL.

I think this begins way back in kindergarten.  Janna and I spent a week in my daughter's [Alli] kindergarten class in Caracas, VZ this past March.  One of the striking thing the kids learn and do in kindergarten is to line up for everything ... even to go to the bathroom.  They line up for recess, for lunch, for snack, to change classes, literally everything.  The highest honor a kid gets in kindergarten is the rotating task of being the "line leader" for the day.  Heck it is even a fun task to be the "line caboose" for the day.  And it is the line leader's and line caboose's job to keep all the other kids "in line."  Somehow this becomes a pattern for our lives even to the subconscious level.

I sometimes notice this phenomenon at the movie theater when there is an extraordinarily long line for the sole ticket window even in the rain and then there is another window open and no one there in line.  I will ask the worker manning the booth if he is open and he will say "yes" and then I will ask why no one is in his line and he will often answer with a sheepish look on his face that he "has no idea."  After I have safely secured my tickets I have tried to free those in the long line to come on over and come out of the rain and receive the most distrusting looks from so many reluctant to believe.  Why is it that we are more likely to get in line behind someone else than we are to start our own?  Can it really go back to our kindergarten days and then just be socially reinforced through the decades that follow?

Eventually we find ourselves a part of a human assembly line surrounded by standardization, routine and predictability.  We find ourselves miserable in the mundane.  One day we end up finding ourselves looking at our image in the mirror and wondering who we are and why we are.  Is life arbitrary?  Or is there meaning behind it?  Are we unique or are we incidental?  Screen writer and actor Zach Braff captures this struggle to find uniqueness while wallowing in the blandness of everyday existence masterfully in the movie, Garden State.

This film follows the lives of a group of people who seem to be going absolutely nowhere and then the death of Andrew Largeman's [Braff] mother and the intervention of one person [Sam, Natalie Portman] who refuses to give up on her own uniqueness awakens him out of his lithium-induced slumber.  The story reminds us that it is easy to become an echo instead of a voice.  Yet we discover even one meaningless act that stands alone as unique can give us hope that our lives can, in fact, be different.  It is ironic that we can be absolutely uncertain about what it is that we are looking for and yet be absolutely certain that we haven't found it.  Still we know that we are searching for something; we just don't know for what or even why.

From our first breaths we have been on a journey.  There are things our souls long for, and whether we have yet recognized it or not, our lives are shaped by our search for them.  We are on a quest to discover our own uniqueness ... who we are, why we are here, and where we are going.

If we find ourselves endlessly thwarted in our search for our uniqueness, we may choose to end our quests and settle for sterile lives of empty existence.  We must be careful not to mistake our surrender for rest.

... To be continued ...

Black Holes and Luminaries

Science tells us that the cosmos is ever expanding ... that it is a virtual infinite space waiting to be both discovered and explored.  I find that this pretty much sums up the human spirit as well.  There seems to be no end to how far we can travel within ourselves.  With every breath we take, with every day we live and with every new experience we have, our souls expand.  We are all on the journey of the human spirit.

There is as much mystery inside us as there is outside ... and maybe more.  We've spent almost a trillion dollars in search of what is out there and yet it seems that most of us won't even give the time of day to discover what is going on inside us.  If we were to carefully observe people from the inside out, we would find both black holes and luminaries.  And if we choose to walk with someone for a lifetime, we will find that no matter how well we may know him or her, there remains much that we have still yet to discover.

I have been married to Janna for almost 29 years now and I can attest that she is an ever-expanding universe.  The more I get to know her, the deeper I realize that she has become.  I will never know her completely because she's essentially a moving target and not a stagnant one.  We cannot completely know someone who is always growing, always changing, always expanding.  That is what I most love about Janna ... she is not the same woman I married almost 29 years ago.   She has become far more than that.

I wish I could say this was true for everyone, but sadly, I am not so sure that it is.  Some people seem to live in very small universes.  Their worlds have room only for themselves.  While their souls have the potential to be ever expanding, they instead seem to be at the center of a collapsing universe ... no room for dreams, for hope, for laughter, for love, for others ... room really only for themselves.  They find themselves very much alone, and they are very lonely.  Strangely enough, most of them do not even know why.  Their souls crave also.  And the way that they have "gained the whole world and lost their souls" is that they have made themselves into their whole world.  They have sold out.

Most of us do not actually sell our souls to the devil; we just give them away.  We can choose to play it safe, to hide behind indifference, to choose the path of mediocrity.  The truth is that we can swallow just about anything.  But the question is, can we keep it down?  We live in a world filled with indifference, apathy, detachment, conformity, compliance and acquiescing to the status quo.  We may swallow, but it doesn't settle well.  The human spirit has no appetite for the bland, the mundane, or even the passionless.  When we stop believing that we are each something unique, something begins to die within us.

What exactly is it within the human spirit that insists on its uniqueness???  It is not enough for us to simply exist.  That each of us has a unique fingerprint, a unique DNA sequence, means more to us than simply improvement in forensic science.  We are nothing less than driven to find our own paths, to make our own way, to be our own persons.  While we may love to have things in common with others, we desperately need to believe that we are in some way unique.  We want to be both the same as and different from those around us.  We want to have things in common, but we don't want to be common.

We are made up of nothing but ordinary material ... primarily carbon and water.  Yet something inside us cries out that there is more to us than meets the eye.  We are like a cloth made of both burlap and cashmere.  We are without question on our way to becoming dust.  Our souls cry out, "Is this all it means to be human, or is there more?"

Even as I write this and perhaps as you read this, there is a voice coming not from our heads but from our gut, screaming that we are more than just water, carbon and calcium.  So much of our life journeys can be explained by the cravings of our souls.  Our souls know their uniqueness.  And a voice from somewhere deep inside us longs for us to discover it.  It calls us out and beckons us to pursue it.

There is something out there to be found, and our souls are restless to find it ....

To be continued ...

When Our Souls Need a Plumber

Sometimes I feel like my soul is nothing more than a leaky faucet ... the kind that drips all night long.  It doesn't really make a loud sound but more of an incessant one.  Yet after hours of drip, drip, drip the sound not only echoes but progressively intensifies.  The more silent the room, the louder the drips become.  And before I know it, the sound consumes the room.  And I would give anything to be able to shut it off ... this is when it would be especially good to know something about plumbing.  I wonder if plumbers ever have faucets that drip ... you know like cobblers whose kids have shoes that always need mending.  But I digress.

After a while, if the water continues to drip for long enough, the sound moves from deafening to silence.  We just can't hear it anymore.  It becomes what scientists call "white noise" or background noise.  The noise is still there, it is still calling out to us, but we become almost numb to it.  It goes from thunder to silence and, then when we least expect it, back to thunder.

I have found soul cravings to be like that.  They scream in our heads until your "ears" almost hurt but then after a while they become almost like a silent scream.  We can't hear them any longer and we can almost deny that they remain at all except for the echo down deep in the hollowness of our souls.  We don't really know what it is that our souls want and we seem to have struck out looking for what it is that our souls need.  So as a result, we begin losing our souls ... and we try to ignore incessant dripping and just move on.

Perhaps our souls are bit like us as kids waiting tireless day after day for the ice cream truck to drive down our streets.  I remember back in the day wishing that I could own my very own ice cream truck and just eat dessert all day long.  That to me is a picture of what feeding my soul is like.  It keeps confusing what it wants with what it needs.  Or maybe my soul just isn't convinced until I am physically sick to my stomach that the former is not the latter.

Buddha may have been right when he spoke against desires:  they really can make us sick.  Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to us is to get what we want ... consider all those lottery winners whose lives are literally destroyed by their prizes.  Desires and passion can lead us down some very dark paths.  Buddha must have experienced some of the same frustrations as I have and decided the only way to solve this problem was to rid ourselves of all our desires.

Now millions of his followers pursue this goal to eliminate all their desires.  For him it was pretty simple:  if his desires keep making his soul sick, get rid of them -- all of them.  Personally, I have found this to be impossible, but I can understand the sentiment.  I am not even Buddha [though some may say I am beginning to look like him ... maybe I can at least keep a few hairs on my head] but I have figured out that what my head, heart and body desire is not necessarily what my soul needs.

We can get lost in our desires and never truly find out what it is that our souls long for.  Instead of facing the hard reality that what we are pursuing is not what our souls crave, we tend to just try to solve the problem by getting more -- more toys, more money, more power, more prestige, more sex, more stuff.  We literally spend our lives trying to satisfy our souls.  Yet some things are only a facade.  Some things satisfy but for just a moment.  Some things actually deaden our souls.  It's kind of weird when we think about it -- to gain the whole world and lose our souls.  Jesus, of course, warned us about this way back in the day.

If No One Knows the Answer, Does Anyone Know the Way?

As a corollary to my posting yesterday, the world will get better when we get better.  With all the progress we've made since the Enlightenment, we've got to be honest with ourselves and admit that we're not getting better, and if anything, we're only getting worse.  This is the primary reason we are quickly losing our confidence in science to save us.  There was a time when science held out the promise of a better world.  We thought we could outgrow our primal instincts.  This was in large part the hope of the Enlightenment, that we could educate and elevate ourselves out of the cycle of violence.

We thought we were the masters of progress and that one day we would no longer hate each other, abuse the powerless, instigate wars or be in any way inhumane.  Such was promise of science's progress.  We had essentially outgrown our need for God.  We no longer needed Him to make us good.  We could not only be good without God, but through the achievements of science, we could actually perpetually make ourselves better.

Then came the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Even if we in United States found ourselves on the winning side, something in our souls told us that we were all losers in this.  Science was not creating for us a better world, only a more dangerous one.  It seems as if we can improve on everything except ourselves.  So if science and God are enemies, then why do we tend to blame God for what science corrupts?  Hmmm.

Even Einstein acknowledged the problem was within us:  "The release of the atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking.  The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.  If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."  Probably no more damning words were ever spoken.  He said basically it is better for us to remain stupid if we cannot become good.  The less technology we have, the less damage we can do.

So now it has been 65 plus years since we learned that all the technology in the world would not create for us the paradise that has been lost.  Maybe it was right to conclude that we cannot trust religion or philosophy or history or government or institutions, but one thing we know for sure is that we cannot trust science [this coming from a vocational applied scientist], and for all the same reasons.  They are all connected to people, which ultimately brings us to the inseparable relationship between truth and trust.

I remember back to my senior year in high school, in Mrs. McDougal's Honors English class when I first learned of the French existentialists Jean-Paul Sarte and Albert Camus as well as the Dutch Christian existentialist Soren Kirkegaard and devoured each of their writings.  For the first time in my life I was found myself seriously questioning my beliefs for both accuracy as well as for why I believed them.  Suddenly everything I believed to be true in my life was scrupulously challenged.  I was struck by how each writer [and their peers] and each belief system had something within in that was strangely compelling.

But eventually it also became clear that each system of thought had gaping holes and shortcomings.  During these days I became quite the Socratic [and my posse had running jokes about both the Socratic way of life as well as the Aristotlean way ... the life of questioning v. the life of balance and which was superior] but even then I could see at the end it all comes down to faith.  I found myself moving from one belief system to another and then to another.  And I had all the passion of youth to back it up.  Yet after a while I began to see these different beliefs as fluid, interchangeable and thus disposable.  I couldn't help but wonder if John Locke or David Hume or Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Rene Descartes before them really knew any better than I did.  No doubt they were all smarter than me, but I wondered if behind closed doors they were just as uncertain.  Perhaps we were all wanderers in the same forest trying to find a fresh trail to truth.

Some believed God was just down the road.  Others were convinced that it was just a dead end.  Still others thought we had nothing in common except that we were all lost and trying to find our way.  It is hard to be a guide when we don't know where we're going.  So in the midst of all the uncertainty we made a shift from looking for the answers to looking at the questions ... which is the primary reason I liked Socrates so much [never mind that he was willing to die for his convictions].

Even when we don't know what is ultimately true, most of us would follow someone whom we absolutely trust.  There seems to be an inseparable relationship between truth and trust, and God, it seems, is lost in between the two.  Accuracy seems to be less important than authenticity.  So if no one knows the answer, does anyone know the way?

It was in those days that I started to look for truth in an entirely new way.  I stopped being so interested in finding the best idea but more the best life.  Whatever I would come to believe in, it had to change more than just my mind; it had to change my life.  Was any truth out there not simply worth believing in but worth becoming?  What does an idea look like when it is "fleshed out" so to speak?  And that is where Jesus came into the picture.  His words were straight to the point.  His was more than a claim to know the truth; He claimed that He WAS the truth!  There really is no way to overemphasize the potential implications of this point.  Could it be possible that truth is more than just an idea and that it is found only in God?  What Jesus was telling us is that truth exists in God and comes only from God.

When we search for truth, we search for God.  Our souls crave the One who is true.