Multitool

The sufficiency of Christ does not mean…

• prayer and Bible is all you need to fight depression,
• the arts are worthless unless they explicitly point someone back to Jesus,
• sitting down in a chair with Kierkegaard or Neithchze is dangerous,
• Bible commentaries are unnecessary,
• art museums are a waste of time,
• arts should be divided into Christian and secular,
• you should do all your book buying at CBD.com
• your radio dial should be locked on CCM radio Continue Reading…

The Invisible Girls

Sarah Thebarge’s The Invisible Girls: A Memoir is a testament to endurance, hope, and selflessness. Sarah grew up a pastor’s child in a conservative Christian family. As a young adult, her future seemed bright. A bright student, she earned a pair of Ivy League degrees in journalism and medicine. Mr. Right seemed close to proposing. That is until cancer derailed the trajectory of her life and she found herself on the brink of death. After narrowly surviving, she fled her life and found herself in Portland, OR, as far away as she could get. It was there she chanced upon a family of Somali refugee girls on the commuter train. Sarah took a chance and befriended the family. As their improbably friendship developed, Sarah discovered their commonality. She too was a refugee from her own life. She too was oppressed the religious fundamentalism of her tribe, particularly regarding the suffocating roles assigned to women. God was a harsh patriarch who treated her in ways she could not treat her worst enemy. Through the process of losing her life to help this struggling family, she recovers her faith and a God worth worshipping. Continue Reading…

Bat signal

The tragedy this week’s Boston Marathon was senseless, tragic, and  reminder that our long conflict with radicalized religion is far from over. The nation also caught a glimpse of the heroism inherent in the Bostonians. We watched video footage of the first responders leaping into action, pulling the portable gates down and coming the aid of the injured and bewildered crowd. These highly trained professional responders spend countless hour drilling proper actions to take in a crisis and executed them with perfection.

We also witnessed a beautiful secondary response. Roughly20,000 runners found themselves stranded in the city, many who were unable to get to their cell phones and credit cards. Some neighbors opened their bathrooms to the runners. Others served orange juice and food. Restaurant, such as El Patron Taqueria tweeted ”Anyone wanting to get out of the Back Bay [neighborhood] come, over plenty of tables and calm here and don’t worry you don’t have to buy a thing, open wifi, place to charge cell, or just don’t want to be alone, food and drinks.”

A google document was created and over 1,200 Bostonians opened their homes to those in need. Continue Reading…

Sarah Thebarge’s memoir, The Invisible Girls, drops today. I became aware of Sarah a handful of years ago when she joined the Burnside Writers Collective. She wrote with a skill and earnestness made you know instantly this girl was going places. She’s also had to endure more than most. This means something to me as I’m one of those writers who don’t think and author’s work isn’t worth a darn unless they’ve been broken once or twice. Unfortunately, Sarah has. Continue Reading…

Mike Stavlund’s A Force of Will is an exquisitely well written memoir that chronicles his  first year of grief after the death of his four month old child. I read an ARC of the book several months ago and the experience was unlike any another. Some manuscripts can only be plodded through grudgingly with a sense of duty commanding me to keep turning pages. Other times I find myself immersed in the plot an the book ends all too soon. Reading A Force of Will was more taxing than either of those scenarios. Stavlund describes his experiences with so much vulnerability that empathy is the only possible response for the reader. I finished the book realizing that Mike generously lent his grief to the reader to try on for the briefest of moments. I found myself emotionally exhausted from crying and laughing. I realized I experienced Mike’s  grief and grief of my own I had buried deep. Continue Reading…

In recent years Christians publishing has seen the release of a spate of books on how to become a running with your hair on fire, radical Christian. And In recent years I’ve found myself repelled by these books without fully grasping why. A few weeks ago Matthew Lee Anderson wrote a piece for Christianity Today that began to give me words to describe my reservations. I resisted sharing my thoughts because the people who write these books seem like fine folk as to the people who read them. I also suspect that I’m treating the movement like a Rorshach and what I’m about to write probably reveals more about the deficits of my own discipleship than anything else. Either way, I’ll work it out on the blog and let the good reader’s diagnose me. Here’s what concerns me: Continue Reading…

We live in a conflict avoidant culture. One man goes to the bar to numb himself instead of facing his angry wife and having that necessary fight. A couple sits down with a financial planner to map out the early retirement and idle time. I can’t speak for you, when I allow myself to day dream about the good life, that better reality always includes an absense of whatever conflict currently burdening me. The daydream usually involves me selling that best selling novel and not having to stress over college tuition for my kids or my aging home.

Peter Rollin’s, in his book The Idolatry of God, reminds us that it’s conflict that keeps our lives from becoming a living hell. He points us to the movie Wall-E of all places. The movie is set in the future when Planet Earth finds itself confronted with an ecological crisis. The world leaders react by launching humanity in a massive spaceship, the Axiom, while robots stay behind to clean up the human made mess on earth. The Axiom is designed to be a paradise. There is no work and no struggle. No one is denied a single desire. No one even exerts him or herself enough to walk. No one has a job, a role, or an unmet aspiration.The original plan of being in orbit for five years sprawls on for seven centuries. Humanity evolved in a species of obese gelatinous blobs. Collins point out “this heavenly existence is actually a type of mundane, melancholic hell.” Continue Reading…

This morning I took my first crack at the fifth workout of the Crossfit Open. Up until this point in the workout I’d been doing reasonably well for having only done it “full time” for  three months. I was middle of pack in my division. Workout 13.5 let me know that my ranking was a mirage. I couldn’t get out of the first round. I’m bad a pull ups and worse at the CrossFit “kipping” version. Prior to CrossFitting I was dependent on the assisted machine to provide enough counterweight for me to string together reps.

This morning it was me and a bar and a judge and four minutes.

I left angry and frustrated and disgusted with myself. I went home and sat in a dark room for thirty minutes and fumed.

The good news, and it took me a few hours to find it, is that I have a clear picture of my reality. I suck at pull ups. I don’t know to kip. And I have twelve months to do something about that before the Open comes around again. The assisted machine was fine and necessary, but it didn’t tell provide me with an accurate picture of my fitness. A better way to say it is that I abused the machine and used it to lie to myself.

Sometimes when I’m in a therapy session I’ll tell my counselor that I’m frustrated that I’m a middle-age man working on the issues I’m working on. I feel like I’m wrestling through a part of my emotional repertoire that I should be more skilled at. Sometimes she challenges me and says that I’m doing advanced work, but just as often she’ll let that statement stand. She’ll reply with by telling me that I can’t grow from where I think I ought to be but from where I really am.

I suspect we all have difficulty with admitting where we really are. Years ago I read a study that revealed that something like 80% of all respondents think they have above average intelligence and looks. In other words the average human respond for a person to imagine they are better off than the are.

So this is a human problem and not one unique to religious people. Still, its good to know how this trait distorts our spirituality: Continue Reading…

Champagne

My religious tribe doesn’t major on the liturgical calendar. We don’t know when the Feast of Epiphany is and celebrating Lent is a once-in-a-decade event. Occasionally, I get jealous of my mainline friends and wonder what I’m missing. For example, last night I discovered there’s a six week  Easter Season that started on Sunday. Six weeks! My tribe enjoys an hour long service, a ham dinner, and an Easter basket hunt.

I’m not sure how I’d go about celebrating six weeks of Easter, but N.T. Wright adamant that it should be exuberant. Champagne  breakfasts for a week! Joy is the only needed apologetic that Jesus has indeed risen. Here’s an excerpt from Surprised by Hope:

“In particular, if Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up. Champagne for breakfast again— Continue Reading…

One of my pastoral duties is to convert the teaching pastor’s sermon manuscript into a discussion guide for those want to interact with the sermon later in the week. Last week’s sermon on the resurrection forced me to see the entire Gospel of Mark in a new light. Specifically, this editor’s note in my  Bible changed everything:

[SOME OF THE EARLIEST MANUSCRIPTS DO NOT INCLUDE 16:9-20.]

My commentaries were more definitive: The earliest and best manuscripts do not include 16:9-20. The writing style of those verses is decidedly different from Mark’s and scholars believe the coda was added in the 2nd Century. The details in these verses are all found in the other three Gospels. Trustworthy information… that draws the eye away from Mark’s intended story arc. Continue Reading…