If You Want To Live

I try to steer away from TV recommendations, but I have found one that is quickly becoming a great show: the Sarah Connor Chronicles.

This review from the International Herald Tribune claims the show is subversively trying to tell us that faith makes us human.

The Tribune (along with its parent company, the New York Times) has a strong bias against evangelical Christianity, and the article has a whiney tone about the whole thing.

This element of the show is definitely there. In the last episode there is an extended reading from 2 Corinthians, and in an earlier episode Cameron (the cyborg intent on protecting John Connor) asks Sarah if she believes in the resurrection.

While I do like the apocalyptic story-line and the edgy questions about faith, the style of the show is what really sells it for me. The characters and the acting are definitely part of that.

The premise of the show is an collection of vagrants trying to postpone the end of the world ("doomsday"). The grimness of the approaching crisis weighs heavily on the characters while the people around them are content with facades and distraction (true to the James Cameron films, particularly the first Terminator).

There are moments of happiness in the uncertainty for some of the characters. It is not like the Sunday school stories where someone discovers an equation and the sun shines down on them. It is more like a subtle joy while "standing over the abyss".

Jesus spent a lot of time teaching that death and judgment can come at any time, and so can the unmerited favor of God. This film plays heavily on the absurdities (harsh and joyous) of life and questions of identity that would have drawn in Luther, Shakespeare, and Kierkegaard.

I recommend giving it a watch, especially if you are male. The episodes are free to watch off the fox website.

Weighed Down

Saul said to David, "Go, and the Lord be with you."

Then Saul dressed David in his own tunic. He put a coat of armor on him and a bronze helmet on his head. David fastened on his sword over the tunic and tried walking around, because he was not used to them.

"I cannot go in these," he said to Saul, "because I am not used to them." So he took them off. Then he took his staff in his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of his shepherd's bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached the Philistine.

1 Samuel 17:37b-40

Saul, flawed though he was, presented David with his best protection. The royal greatness of the gift was not in the strength of his armor but in the way he gave David his own armor. In the moment of crisis Saul achieved the greatness of treating others the way he wanted to be treated.

In the same way the gift became great -for it was indeed the very armor of the king- it became a liability for David -for it was not his own and neither were David's movements his own while he wore the armor.

The years have gone by but the battles are still in many ways the same. We still argue and quarrel much as they did back them, and we do it with words we ourselves are not used to. They are the words of someone else. We hold opinions that others respect, although we ourselves do not respect them. And our lives have meaning, yes! Rich meaning! But not to us personally. Our lives mean something only to someone else.

David wore the armor, but he took it off because he discovered it was not his own. There was something about it that he was not used to.

Is there anything today that people have not become accustomed to? The heaviness of jealousy can seem light after a while. The calculation of deceit can seem overbearing at first until it becomes second nature. The displays of righteousness seem phony at first until one forgets what it means to know something genuinely.

The armor of the modern world is something we wear to protect ourselves. Other people can see it, but it remains always on the outside and the weight crushes so quietly that we sometimes are completely unaware of it.

The court of appearances -the judgment of which humans have never questioned- was not in David's favor. If there were gamblers in those days as there are now, the betting odds would not be in David's favor. Yet inside he was full of certainty.

The certainty of David was a blazing fire in a company of half-fires and half-certainties. People could see glimpses of it through the way David carried himself on the battlefield, but they only saw someone else's certainty while they remained in doubt.


In melee combat, a major difficulty of fighting with armor was finding the right balance or -as some historians say today- alignment. Like a growing young man who has very quickly become tall, David had difficulty walking in Saul's armor.

In a way of speaking, balance was the skill David was not used to. Perhaps it could be said that David's talent in regard to balance was that he had no talent. He knew only one thing: the power of God, and in David's mind there was nothing that could balance against such a weight.

The absolute-ness of God is commonly understood in our day, we just relate to it relatively. Another practice that is becoming common is to consider God as a relativity and then to hold that belief absolutely. David's understanding of his relation to God was -as the poet writes- an absolute relationship to the Absolute.

Again, human intentions have changed very little. The ones who preach against idolatry are the ones harboring idols. The ones who pray in the streets are not the ones who pray in their closets. The givers of our day are the ones who sell their houses and keep a little for themselves.

But David knew nothing of balancing one part of his life against an opposing and opposite weight. His life was simple, divinely simple. In his way of thinking, he wanted to do only one thing and he wanted to do it with all his heart all his soul all his mind and all his strength.

Prepare us Father so that we too may enter your kingdom like this little shepherd boy. Assist us in making your words our words. Deliver us from the evil of our duplicitous minds. Save us from worldly thinking so that we may present our lives to you as pleasing and acceptable offerings. Amen.

One Life, Many Selves

The self which people give more attention than any other self is the visible self. It is the self that people see the most -the one on magazine covers, in movies, and on television.

At the same time the visible self is the self that belongs to us the least -more a product of chance than of our choosing.

The fantasy self is the self that we often imagine we could be at some uncertain point -usually in the future. We have some control over how that self looks and appears, but our wishes about our fantasy selves do not run deep.

The fantasy self reflects not someone we would seriously wish to be, yet we do wish to be that self as strongly as we fantasize about that self.

The ethical self is the self beneath the appearances. It is the one we keep hidden from others out of shame, and -more than that- we keep it hidden from ourselves because we are personally ashamed of that self.

People tend to find their ethical self so disheartening that they distract themselves with the self they wear on the surface ... until the time comes when some choose to confront the darkness they carry inside.

The ideal self, the one we truly and seriously wish to be is hard to see, mostly because this self has little to do with who we are and the choices we have made. We wish to be like our ideal self, but people usually must reach far into their past to remember when this was the self they pursued completely.

And then there is also that absurd possibility that we may be somehow (religiously) united with it once more.

The inner self, that self of selves, is the self most people keep so locked away and hidden that they scarcely know they have it. It is the feintest to see with human eyes but the strongest and most powerful of all selves.

When a person examines the choices they have made -their hallow victories and their tragic mistakes- there remains that difficult-to-hear voice inside that says, 'And yet despite all this I can be made new again.'

The inner self is childlike and draws strength in the faith that although it may be and deserves to be annihilated, it may still find favor that all its wrongs may be overcome in the presence of a supremely loving authority.

This act of reconciliation is only possible through personally receiving the gift Christ gave on the cross to those who have faith in him.

And so life presents a simple question: who do you wish to be?

A Sobering Awareness

Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.
1 John 2:6

My days in junior high were the most unhappy in my whole life.

It was a time of great malaise for me, this I was certain of -and I was very right about that. I blamed my circumstances, my school, my family, and some of the things I am now the most thankful for. Occasionally I suspected my own attitude had something to do with it, but I sent the suspicion away -calling myself the victim.

We studied the Bible in school. I considered myself to be a Christian, but I questioned whether or not I was actually living in the way God had commanded me to live.

The Bible readings were required, and not a matter of personal choice. It would have been easy to let the passages go in one ear and out the other, but I was full of questions. I didn't really want to know what happened to Noah's ark, or who the Nephilum were (although these were the questions I asked out loud).

The real questions I had about the Bible were really questions I had about myself.

With every command I read from God, I wondered to myself, 'Is this something I am doing? If I stood before God, if my appearances were as nothing as they are before Him, would He say, 'Well done, good and faithful servant'?'

One day the teacher introduced three verses we would be memorizing from 1 John. I had never seen these verses before. I remember the exact way that he wrote them on the green chalk board thirteen years ago:

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world - the cravings of sinful, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does - comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.
1 John 2:15-17

I wondered how I could memorize a verse which seemed impossible to even read. Do not love anything in the world?

Really?

There were a LOT of things in the world I loved.

I loved cartoons. I loved the cheap pizza my mom would buy for my sister and I at Costco. I loved going to the movies. I loved pop culture. More than all of it, I loved video games.

And could it be that here in this very place, John was telling in the full authority of the Bible not to love these things? If I did love them, would the love of the Father not be in me?

It sounded like I would go to hell, except that it was worded in the present tense. 'The love of the Father is not in him.'

I didn't care that the Bible did not forbid these things. I could stop doing them. I could stop watching my favorite shows. I could stop eating cheap pizza. I could (maybe) stop playing video games. But how could I stop LOVING them?

The second verse in the passage -the one about the cravings and the lust of the flesh and boasting about what a person has and does- that sounded just like me, just like my style.

It was like I was singled out and laid bare.

After digesting this verse for some time, I gave this messy region of my heart over to God (at about the time I was baptized).

These days I don't struggle with loving video games. There are moments where I get to do fun things and sometimes I struggle with loving those moments.

Then I teeter-totter about it and say to myself, 'Well, I don't love those things that much.'

And then I think back and I remember the chalk board on that day. I remember the verse that God commissioned John to write to me ... to give me a warning.

I remember how serious that moment was. How terrified I was at the choice I had to make and how seriously God takes my actions.

Father, keep my heart from the idolatry of the world. Spare me from loving the things here. Guide me into the fullness of your ways. As you prepare a place for me, prepare also that place for you in me.

Amen.

Home

It has been many years since I have sensed any absense of God. I've been walking and talking with Him for a long time now and I have learned that if I never deny His presence, I am never unaware of Him. He is with me continually and there is nothing that we don't discuss. I ask Him lots of dumb questions and often reply to His answers with, "Why?". He is patient to answer all my questions but never forces the answer upon me. He always gives me time to grow into understanding. He is even with me when I do or say something really stupid. There is nothing I can hide from Him. He knows even when I'm thinking of sinning and if I immediately take that thought to Him, He prevents me from falling. If not, He lets me fall and then He dusts me off, bandages my knees, and tells me to tell anyone else I may have hurt that I'm sorry. Then He holds me close and lets me know that nothing I do can ever stop Him from loving me. I am getting old but I am still a small child when it comes to my relationship with my Father, God, my Daddy.

Because awareness of God floods me continually now, I sometimes forget what it was like to be new in the Lord and not so sure of things. Older believers would tell me about the void in all of us that only Jesus can fill and I would have pangs of doubt for often I wasn't really sure that void had been filled. Though I doubted, Jesus would never really leave me either. Jesus wasn't a fad or a faze that I could leave behind but I went for many years without full surety of faith. When I sinned, I doubted Him. When something bad happened to me at the hand of another, I doubted Him. When disaster would strike or war was threatened, I doubted Him. Every human failing, my own and those of others, did not cause me to doubt myself or humankind but instead to doubt God. The void in me still felt empty because when things were not as I desired them to be, I did not draw near to God. Instead, I pulled away from Him. The void in me had been filled completely by Jesus but I often denied His reality in my life.

Jesus came to live in me at the very instant that I first believed. He has never left me since that first moment. It was the very fact of His presence that slowly drew me away from doubt to the true reality of Him living in me and I in Him. Though my choices began to change, I was not changed by my choices. The presence of Jesus in me changed the choices I would naturally make on my own. My thinking began to change and when I sinned, I saw my own failing and the only remedy in God. When others hurt me, I began to see their need for Jesus also and was no longer upset with God for not making them more perfect. When disaster struck or war was threatened, I no longer shook my fist at God but began to see the helplessness of human beings and our futility in seeking to settle things our own way apart from Him. Slowly each area of my life in which I doubted God, was filled with faith by the presence of Jesus. As I grew into Him, denying that presence, the very presence of God, was no longer possible. I can no longer fully remember how it felt not to be continually aware of Him with me. He truly is my friend who sticks closer than a brother.

If you are young in the Lord and doubt because you don't seem to have what some others seem to have, relax. You don't have to figure it all out. God isn't waiting for you to work a jig saw puzzle of His grand design before He will come near to you. If you believe Jesus is Who He says He is in the Bible, He is near to you and all you have to do is draw near to Him. You may even believe you have wondered far from Him but if you are His, He has had His watchful eye on you the whole time and has heard even your innermost private thoughts. Turn away from the deception that is doubt to the reality that is God's Love. Feel His strong arms draw you safely to Him and enter His rest. In Him, no matter where you are, you are always home.