Disagreements Interest Me

Disagreements interest me.

This post is similar to a previous post of mine - which you should refer to for more depth if you are concerned with my logic.

I think disagreements tell me what you hold to be valuable.  Though – the person who refuses to disagree with anyone and the person who insists on disagreeing with everyone both believe nothing of interest to me.  I do not say that they believe nothing – but that whatever it is that they believe, simply disinterests me. 

So, ignoring what disinterests me, let us turn our attention to those who choose their disagreements – whether consciously or instinctually.

It seems that any argument can be made to have high stakes, whether or not it actually does.  Forgive me if this is your particular pet debate, but I’m going to use it as an example. 

• It can be said that if free will were the way that Christian salvation occurs, this negates God’s divine plan, and leaves him waiting in heaven, wringing His hands (metaphorically) hoping that mankind accepts the gift He has offered.

• The other side says that if predestination were the way that Christian salvation occurs, this leaves mankind as robots, controlled by the impersonal marionette strings of a deity unconcerned with our choices. 

What I think is that both sides have charged up the high stakes of their argument so that if you disagree with their side, the consequences are astronomical.  This can be done with virtually anything.  Unless you believe this one particular way, it means (x) which means (x) which means the nature of God has changed. 

All of these assume that unless these questions are answered sufficiently, the world has fallen apart.  Let me assure you – the world rests on Christ, and on nothing else.  As believers, we firmly stand united that salvation is provided by Christ.  Rather than argue about the mysterious method by which Christ has come to save us, let each of us apply ourselves to loving each other and obeying God. 

I have known of very few people who have ever been argued or debated into the kingdom of God.  But I have known many, countless masses, which have been loved into the kingdom of God – myself included.  If you are faced with the choice to either argue with someone over the minutia of the way by which God has come to save us or to love that person and meet them where they are – I urge you to choose the latter.    

Rest: Our Response to The Beautiful

If insomnia were a character quality, I would be venerated on the spot. 

I do feel fortunate, though, that my particular flavor of insomnia only strikes when I have some kind of idea which I am excited to flesh out.  This means that as far as long, lonely nights go, mine are fairly productive.  Insomnia is my response to the curious.

Sleep is an interesting idea, spiritually speaking.  We are no doubt familiar with the concept of rest and how that is something God wants us to do – no doubt, for our own good.  Those two must not be exclusively the same since one can have a restless sleep and a restful experience while fully awake.

This reminds me of an experience Caroline and I had in a museum in St Augustine.  We were wandering around the city, with nothing in particular to do, and we poked our heads into a small art museum.  I cannot tell you why, because art has so rarely affected me in any significant way, but Caroline and I were moved to silence by this art.  We stayed in this small shop for close to two hours, looking at each piece by an artist I cannot now recall.  Two hours we marveled in the face of the beautiful.  When we walked out of that small shop, and were reborn into the street of St. Augustine, I took a deep breath of the hot afternoon air, and felt like I had just woken up from a long and restful sleep. 

One of my favorite words is “insatiable,” because it has a driving sense of internal thirst for something.  I often feel this driving thirst, and I think it is this thirst that keeps me awake at nights.  It is my curiosity monkey that will not leave me alone.  But when we walked out of that museum, we were satiated – full and content.

To rest is to relax every muscle in your mind and come to rest in the eye of a storm, momentarily knowing that it is okay. 

I think rest is our response to the beautiful.  This may be why God gave us beautiful Sunday afternoons to take a picnic somewhere, or sit at the beach, or walk in the woods.  I think He likes it when we experience rest as a response to His beauty.  Our greatest rest, of course, comes gradually, as we see more and more of Him.   

Resolved

These are some resolutions I wrote in 2009 during a class that lasted longer than my attention span.  I find them useful to reread.

Resolved: To never err on the side of caution where God has called me to take a risk

Resolved: to not speak poorly of others behind their back, and to only do so to their face when I believe will bring some good to them.

Resolved: to not let the personality or appearance of someone cause me hesitation in sharing the gospel with them.

Resolved: to try, as best as I can, to love all people.

Resolved: to weigh the profit of any task against its importance in eternity.

Resolved: to live, as well as I can, with my own mortality in mind.

Resolved: to never open my mouth in prayer if my motive is a selfish one.

Resolved: if (or rather, when) I fail any one of these resolutions, I will not doubt the great forgiveness found in the grace of God.

Resolved: to never treat the greatness of God as common place.

Resolved: to never waste emotions on inanimate objects or unchangeable
circumstances.

Resolved: to go through my possessions often and see if there is anything which I would be ashamed to hold before the eyes of God.

Resolved: to pair actions with my beliefs.

Resolved: to consider I may be wrong before any disagreement damages a relationship.

Resolved: when I am confronted with my own error, I will not value my pride over the recognition of truth.

Resolved: to never, as well as I can, trade something which is best for something which is merely good. 

Resolved: to read this list often, act on what I've written, and add to it when I can.

Resolved: To not let nameless, vague, irrational fears cause me hesitation in following through in God's will.

To love everyone. Regardless:

of their response
of their personality
of their race
of their usefulness to me
of their offences against me or anyone else
of their possibility of change
of the possibility of repayment 
of their character
of how annoying they are
of how incompatible we are
of whether or not they ever know how much I've done for them
of how I feel
of who else loves them
of how long it takes
of how capable of love I feel
of how many times they've failed 
of who knows

Thoughts on Morality

It seems to me that Christians ought to be the ones on the front lines of many more causes than we currently are, and perhaps less vocal about some of the issues that we are most marked for.  This seems to not only be true in our current culture, but it seems to be historically true. 

I know it is very easy to judge those who came before us for their moral inadequacies, but morality does not exist in retrospect.  Morality does not exist in future intentions either.  Morality exists in that liminal space between our minds and our hands – what we know and what we do about it.  It may be that the concept of stewardship that is so prevalent in the New Testament also applies to the knowledge we receive.  If we have been given much, we are expected to allocate that knowledge in a way that “turns a profit,” so to speak.  So rather than saying of previous generations that they were the height of hypocrisy for not seeing what we so clearly see, we ought to wonder why we do not see what we ought to see.  Certainly, we would not want our future generations to call us hypocrites for the multitude of paradoxes we are guilty of.  What if in thirty years, the inhumane practice of factory farming animals and the inhumane treatment of animals in testing cosmetics were so looked down upon that our entire generation despised us for not doing more to stop it?  What if our future generations judged us for doing this to the ocean? 

Or that there are approximately 27 million people in slavery in the world, and that every year there are 1 million children exploited for the commercial sex trade.  And even with all this, the people who claim to be not only made in the image of God, but are meant to be ambassadors of Jesus are more known for intolerance and judgment than championing the causes of the oppressed. 

I promise you, if the world saw a culture that fought harder for the poor than our government does, and fought more for justice than our courts do, and fought harder for freedom than our constitution does, the world would fall in love with the same Jesus we did.  Medicare, the broken foster care system, failed governmental run ecological systems – all of these things exist to the shame of the Christian church.  Why is the world fighting harder to take care of the poor than we are?  If true morality exists between what you know and what you do about it, then I challenge you – what are you going to do about it?   

That Nameless Quality

It would seem that after all the study of what character is and how it should be cultivated, every possible character quality would have a definite name.  But I have one to add that I have yet to find a name for.

I have breakfast with a group of men every Tuesday morning at 6:00am.  Each of these men are significantly older than I am - almost any one of them could be my father.  One of the reasons I need this time for my own growth as a person, is that each of them has this nameless quality that sits on the tip of my tongue, but avoids being pinned down with a single word.  

Let me describe it.

There seems to be a kind of restedness that comes with living a long and full life - A kind of settled wisdom.  It is the kind of settled wisdom that comes from having spent many years walking with God and having been forgiven of many faults and having seen provision in many ways, having been very, very wrong and still loved in spite of it.  It's the kind of calmness that says "I've seen this before...yeah...it's gonna be okay."  It's the peace that comes with experience.  It's the assurance that comes with having seen a lot.  

It's like anxiety and worry have given way to faith and peace.  If there is a word for this, I do not know it.  But this realization tells me that language is running as fast as it can to keep up with the depths of our pursuit of God, and that it is not doing well.  

Maybe it's best that it doesn't have a name.  Maybe, like the character quality itself, it is best to be experienced, rather than discussed.  Maybe language will always fall short of the depths of the human soul.  If so, that gives me great hope for the human soul.

Thoughts on Jesus and my Heart

*This idea, and most of its development, is due to Quinten Miller, in a conversation we had over breakfast this morning. 

  

The Christian idea that Jesus lives in your heart has always troubled me.  I know that it is meant to be poetic, and representative, and spiritually speaking, but still, it has always sat funny in my mind.  Allow me to be a bit critical for a moment – it has always seemed that if Jesus could fit in my heart, he is a very small Jesus, because my heart seems like a small place.  When I imagine the scene of Jesus moving into my heart, I imagine it looks something like this.

Me: “Hi Jesus, come on in…oh, you didn’t need to wipe your feet, but thanks anyway.  Woah, it got pretty cramped in here, didn’t it?  Lemme just…no, well if you…yeah, I’ll stand here and put my arm liiiike this…so then you have room to sit down on that corner right there.  There.  Comfortable?  No?  Sorry about that.  Can I get you something to drink?  Oh, I can’t quite get to the sink…oh, you brought living water?  That was nice of you.  Well.  This is….cozy…..*long pause*…..so…..you’re here for eternity huh?  …know any games?

To really understand the poetics of what happens when the idea of Jesus living inside us, we need to broaden our understanding of what our internal selves are.  Imagine the space you are in right now.  Move out to the building you are in and imagine the whole aerial view.  Picture the city block.  Move out again to the side of town.  Move out again the whole city with its surrounding cities.  Move out again to the view of the state as a whole.  The country.  The hemisphere.  The world.  Move out again to the solar system.  The galaxy.  You can’t even make out the speck that is the world you live on at this point.  Move out again where our galaxy is a small part within the surrounding galaxies, and further and further out. 

This is not simply an exercise in the grandiose or the awe inspiring or the sublime.  Come back to the room you are occupying right now.  Zoom in on your chest cavity.  Zoom in again on your lungs and internal organs.  Zoom in to the fluid that surrounds and maintains the environment that keeps you breathing without any conscious thought on your part.  Zoom in again on the droplets of fluid that keep you alive.  Zoom in again on the molecules that comprise that drop, and the smaller elements that comprise those molecules.  Even closer at the atoms that make up those elements. 

There is an infinity in both directions – outward and inward.  Socially speaking, we could give our lives and energies to developing the external infinity, the impact we can have on others or the affect we can have on the world.  We can put up a front of caring or empathy or a façade of love, and neglect the infinity that is our internal selves.  How many pastors or ministers have given their lives to ministry, only to wreck their marriages and compromise their integrity?  What good is it to give your life for a cause, when you have neglected the infinite inward self that makes up your soul? 

I now have a new understanding of what it means for Jesus to be inside my heart.  Here is what it looks like:

Fog is rolling in from somewhere in front of me.  It is quiet and dark where I’m standing.  I take one step and the sound of my foot goes out into the darkness and seems to never stop.  There are no markers for me to get my bearings, and there is so little light I can hardly see past the fog that my breath makes.  It’s cold.  I shout.  Jesus is supposed to be here somewhere.  I wave my hands around in a circle trying to feel for anything.  Suddenly, Jesus is next to me.

Jesus: “Hi Stephen.”

Me: “Hello Jesus.”

Jesus: “Do you know what I want to do in here?”

Me: “Live, I guess?  There’s more room in here I think, you’re welcome to set up camp wherever you like…”

Jesus: “Live?  Yeah, sure, we’re going to live, but what I’m really looking forward to, is turning everything you see into something.”

Me: “What are you going to turn it into?”

Jesus: “A garden.” 

Intelligence vs Imagination

Victor Hugo once said that intelligence it's your wife, while imagination is your mistress. I disagree, though not simply on moral grounds. I disagree with the disassociation between how we ought to think and how we prefer to think. Hugo's metaphor has in it a dutiful mode of seeing the world, and a more enjoyable, exciting, pleasing mode. I have not found this distinction to be true in my life. I find they are, indeed, separate things, and certainly one is more exciting than the other, but I find I require them both.  One is not a pleasure any more than the other is a duty.  
So here is many edit of Hugo's sentiment: intelligence is the ground we stand on, imagination is the air we breathe. I would no more think that I could build a city on air, than think I could breathe dirt. But I find I need them both to live.  The ground allows me to build, the air allows me to fly.