yep... still on vacation

Here's an interesting post from Jennifer Fulwiler, a woman who's a relatively recent convert to Catholicism.  Though she doesn't use the same language I do to describe and identify barriers to faith, she's definitely recognized that there's more to it than rational questions.  For her, indeed, there were major emotional barriers that made the process of choosing to follow Jesus harder.

But what I find so encouraging is that the emotional barriers didn't hold her back forever, any more than whatever intellectual questions she had.  She doesn't describe how she worked through them in this post, but she clearly came to the point where she was able to trust Jesus even if it would mess up the way she'd organized and understood her whole life up to that point.

I also have to say that I agree with her number 4 on her list of finding God in 5 steps... She calls this step "Do the Experiment," and she encourages you to live for a time as though you believed that God exists.  There's only so much a person can know about God intellectually.  As with any relationship, you can't really know someone until you start relating to God.  You can know about him based on things you've heard and read, but that's just like learning about the person across the room from the person standing by you.  There are so many limits to what you can know about him... and you can't really know him until you meet him.  So this is something I occasionally suggest to a friend who is seeking to discern if God is real and who he is.

What do you think of the "Sinner's prayer?"

Wow!  2 days in a row... I must be on vacation! :)  Actually, my "vacation" was cut short about 9:00 a.m. today when I had to make a run to court and then spent the rest of the day on a last-minute case.   But what can I say... I love my job...

So anyway, here's an interesting post by Scot McKnight about what to invite people to instead of the sinner's prayer.  Although he says and I agree that the good old sinner's prayer is effective and the right thing sometimes, I do remember so often when I was working at summer camp so long ago thinking that it felt just a bit empty when separated from all that is the Gospel.  I mean, Jesus invites us to relationship, to a long journey of walking with him and living in step with the Spirit.  He invites us to be a part of his desire and plan to transform the world through the power of Jesus Christ.  Confessing sins and "accepting Christ" is a step, but it's just one.  There is so much more to living life with the Eternal One.   

How do you describe the process of faith when you're talking about it with your friends?

Taste and See

"But this is my belief: that at the heart of Christianity is a power that continues to speak and transform us.  As I found to my surprise and alarm, it could speak even to me: not in the sappy, Jesus-and-cookies tone of mild-mannered liberal Christianity, or the blustering, blaming hellfire of the religious right.  What I heard, and continue to hear, is a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely; that upsets the established order and makes a joke of certainty.  It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, including my own failures, are being made new.  It offers food without exception to the worthy and unworthy, the screwed-up and pious, and then commands everyone to do the same.  It doesn't promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life.  . . . . Faith, for me, isn't an argument, a catechism, a philosophical "proof."  It is instead a lens, a way of experiencing life, and a willingness to act. . . . As the Bible says: Taste and see."

Sara Miles, Take this Bread: A radical conversion, pp xvii-xviii.

I started reading this book this week, and I'm looking forward to finishing the story of this woman who encountered God in a way that transformed her life.  Apparently (I haven't gotten to this part yet), she's been working hard on building food pantries for the poor in her world.  But this paragraph really resonated with me because it articulates some things for me about the way of faith, how complicated and unexpected it is sometimes.

What do you think?  Food for thought?

Questions of the Heart

I taught a workshop last weekend about how to talk about faith in everyday life.  During the workshop, we were talking about different barriers to faith, and I was encouraging people to think about sharing stories from their own lives and from the Bible rather than giving "answers" to peoples' questions.  This post explains a little about why I think that's such an important idea within today's culture.

As an example, we were talking about a person whose barrier to faith is whether God is good.  So I gave a little hypothetical about a person who attended some kind of church event with the nicest person in the whole wide world who was also an agnostic or atheist.  At this event, the person and her friend were told that they were going to hell if they didn't believe in Jesus.  And the person, for years, looked back with incredulity at that situation.  How could her friend, (and her mom too) who were nicer and better than any other people in the whole world, including lots of "Christians," be going to hell?

How would you respond if this story came out in a conversation with one of your friends?  Would you quote from Scripture that Jesus said "I am the way, the truth and the life, and no man comes to the Father but by me"?  Or how about the verses that say "there is none righteous, no not one" and "the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord"?

Those were the types of answers that I was getting from the participants at the workshop.  And while those "answers" are not "wrong," I'm not sure they actually reach the heart of the person who is struggling with this issue.  There may be an intellectual question about whether those verses are actually true, but even if the person believed Jesus's statement and Paul's explanation about salvation, there's still an emotional barrier to faith there.  There's still the haunting question about how a good God could send good people to hell.  So does believing that the good friend and the good mother are in hell mean that God is not good?  How could a person serve a God like that?  What is this God really like?  Angry, capricious, judgmental, egomaniac?  If so, no thanks...

So how does one go about answering a question of the heart?

In my experience, the best way to do that is to tell stories from your own life and from Scripture that might begin to challenge the way someone looks at that question, or one that show how you worked through that question in your own faith journey, or that invite the person to meet and experience Jesus.


So what stories from your own life might be relevant to this question?  What stories from Scripture?  How might you go about inviting this person with this question to meet Jesus?

Here's one way I might respond to the question.

summer of serving

We've been given the challenge at my church this summer to spend our time trying to find ways to be Jesus and to share the love of Jesus with the people in our lives.  I'm excited to see and hear how the Spirit leads the people in my community to do this.  But I want to offer one additional suggestion...

One of the best ways to build relationships with people is to engage in acts of service with them.  And there are so many people out there who don't follow Jesus but who still have values of service and giving back to the community.

There are some great things that happen when we love and extend grace and service to those around us.  But sometimes this doesn't actually help us to get to know them better.  In fact, it can put us in a position of power in these relationships and make it difficult to take the next step in sharing our faith when the time is appropriate.

But when we ask for help and we invite people to come alongside us in doing the great works of reconciliation and restoration, we are actually inviting them to experience God with us.  When we are chasing after the values of God and asking him to work through us, his Spirit is with us in powerful ways. Whenever the followers of Jesus are seeking the restoration and reconciliation of the broken places in the world, God is there.  And it is a powerful thing to invite people into the presence of God.

Inviting someone along in your acts of service has some other benefits.  First, it shows them that your faith actually affects your life, particularly if you have a natural opportunity to share with them why you're doing this at all.  Second, it demonstrates that for you, faith is causing positive habits and activities to grow in your life.  Many of the barriers people have to faith come from seeing religious people acting in ways that hurt others.  When you are serving alongside someone, they can experience the benefit that your faith has in your life, and can also see how it's bringing something positive to the world.  Finally, you'll have a lot more time for meaningful conversation.  When you're doing something meaningful with someone, it's easier to have deeper and more meaningful conversations with them than it is when you're meeting casually for coffee or something--at least that's the way it's been in my own life.

So my challenge for this week is really a challenge for the whole summer--during your summer of service, I'd challenge you to invite one person along to do at least one act of service with you.  And I'll be praying that you and your friends meet God powerfully through serving.

handcrafted with purpose

For the last couple of weeks, we've been talking about how mankind's rebellion caused brokenness in the world.  Essentially, it harmed all the relationships of mankind--between mankind and God, mankind and the earth, individual relationships, and our relationship with and understanding of ourselves.  But we've also been talking about how God has plans to redeem and restore all those relationships, and even now is working toward that and inviting all his people to help him in that.

But what would it really look like for us to get involved?  What would it mean for us to truly become ministers of the reconciliation and restoration that God wants to bring?

That's the question I've been asking myself since I first started to follow Jesus.  And what it looks like for me these past few years has been following Jesus into the prisons and into serving the poorest criminals so that they have exceptional legal representation.  It means that I ask God every day to give me his eyes to see my clients as the precious human beings they are, so that I can treat them with the dignity, kindness, and grace that God gives me.  It means that instead of working with money as a primary motive, I pray about the cases I'm to take and I'm able to give time and services away to those who can't pay.  And it means that I use my choices to live simply and with these strange values as an opportunity to share with other lawyers how the great story of God has motivated me to live in this way.  And I've gotten to watch as God has softened and then transformed many people who did not know him when I met them.

As one who is made in the image of God and who has chosen to follow Jesus, I get to prayerfully approach each day.  I get to invite God to come with me where I go and work through me to bring justice and peace to the world around me.  And I get to see glimpses of how God is doing that in the lives of my friends and those around me.

For example, when I pray for justice and I see that something is not right, and I go out there and fight for the right thing to be done, I have great satisfaction in knowing that justice prevailed and some small wrong was made right in that moment.  When I see someone soften to the point that she is finally able to follow Jesus, I find such joy and inspiration that I know I am right where I'm called to be, doing exactly what I'm called to do.  And it's been to my great delight to know that God equipped and prepared me to do and to be exactly what I am right now.

In Ephesians 2:10, Paul said that "we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."  The word workmanship here makes me think of a finely carved piece of furniture or a masterpiece that someone spent hours crafting until it was just right for what it was supposed to accomplish.

So what part has God invited you to play in his great plan to rescue and redeem the world?  What broken relationships do you see in the world, and how can you, out of exactly the person God has created you to be, contribute to bringing restoration and reconciliation?

Bubble Creek Canyon

So what do you think of this video?

What do you think motivates Christians to want to live on a compound?  Do you think that's good or bad?