Showing posts with label emotional barriers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label emotional barriers. Show all posts

Monday, December 17, 2012

the problem of evil

One of the biggest questions we come up against, when we're talking with friends about faith, is the problem of evil in our world.  This is fresh in my mind, of course, because of all the violence that we've seen in the last week.  Only today there was another murder-suicide right down the road from me.  How on earth can we even hope to answer people's questions about this?

The first thing I think we have to understand is that there are different kinds of questions.  The first type is a more rational or intellectual question - can a good God allow evil?  Does God create evil?  If evil exists, does that logically mean that God must have intended for it to be here?  And these questions could use a logical response.  I could give someone information, point him to an apologist, talk for hours about the philosophical options we have to understand evil.

But there are other questions.  There are questions that come more from our emotional response to the evil and pain in the world.  How could such horrible things happen?  How could God let them happen?  How can I trust a God would would allow them to happen?  How could I love a God who would allow them to happen?  And these require entirely different responses.  An intellectual or logical response is never going to be enough.  But this is often how we handle it.  In the wake of the most recent school shooting, I've seen lots of theological responses.  I've seen people giving a whole history of sin and calling this evil a natural consequence.  But those responses don't go to the heart of the matter.  They don't really reach the heart at all.

And at the heart of the emotional question are 2 really important questions.  The first is who is this God you're talking about, really?  What kind of God is he?  What is his character?  What are his values?  Is he worth knowing?  The second is related to my own ability to trust that God.  Can I personally choose to trust him?  Would I even want to?  And Christians definitely have a role to play in helping people find answers to these questions.

Once I have taken the time to listen to someone's heart and their questions, then I have opportunities going forward.  I can share with them my struggle with those same questions about God, and how I made my way through them.  I can challenge their perceptions of God by sharing who I know God to be, and share lots of examples of why I think God is actually not that way.  I can introduce them to Jesus, and invite them (and model for them) how to take those questions to God.  I always want to be encouraging or inviting people into relationship with God.  Even if that relationship is based on questions and frustrations, that's better than leaving the questions in the abstract.  A question of trust or of character can only really be addressed within a relationship.

Have you or your friends had these types of questions this week?  Were they primarily intellectual questions, or emotional questions?  How did you dialogue about them?  If someone were to ask you a question about evil in the world, how would you respond?

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

what my clients have taught me

Sometimes I have really difficult clients.  This probably isn't a surprise, given that I do mostly court-appointed criminal defense.  The most difficult ones are the ones who are ruled entirely by emotion.

I've developed some strategies over the years I've been practicing law.  I've noticed that in order to reason with someone rationally, I have to let them express their emotions.  Usually I have to validate their feelings and frustrations.  Only then, after both of those things, can I begin to advise them on what the courts and rules of law say that we can do and what I think we should do.  It takes a significant amount of  relational investment and patience to work through these emotional barriers to the situation.  Mostly what it takes is a willingness to listen and an empathy about the emotions expressed.

I've noticed the same thing about spiritual things over the years.  Our culture is becoming increasingly more based in the emotions.  In order to help someone to meet Jesus, we've got to help them move through their emotions about God and the church and everything in between.  It takes a significant amount of relational investment and patience to listen as someone expresses their emotions about these things.  It takes an empathy and compassion so that our friends feel listened to and validated.  And it takes sensitivity to the Spirit to know when to take the next step and share from our hearts what God has done in us and what he is inviting them to.

I know that I talk a lot about emotional barriers to faith, and that's because this conversation is not really happening anywhere else.  But there is a time when it's appropriate to share rationally about who God is. There is a time for testimony and for information.  We just need to be really careful not to miss the other stuff as well.  All the information in the world is not going to get my client from point A to point B, at least not until he feels like I care about him and have listened to him.  I have to earn the right to be heard--I have to earn his trust.  And I have to do the same thing in the lives of my friends when I am hoping to share Christ with them.

Can you identify in your own life or someone else's how emotions are primary and rationality is secondary?  Can you reason them out of their feelings?  How do these same emotions affect a person's spirituality and relationship with God?

Monday, November 12, 2012

What would you say?

Imagine if you were a part of the following conversation with someone you know is not following Jesus:

Al:    Yeah, my friend and I went on this church retreat one time.  She’s seriously the nicest person in the whole world.  And they told her she was going to hell because she’s an atheist, can you believe that?

Bryten:    Well, the Bible does say that if you don’t believe in Jesus, you won’t be going to heaven when you die.

Al:    Yeah, but that doesn’t even make sense.  I mean, I know lots of Christians who are mean.  They hurt animals, they hurt people.  They want us to go to war.  They’re rude and horrible.  It doesn’t make sense that they would go to heaven, and people like my best friend and my dad would go to hell.  They honestly are the best people in the whole world.

What do you say? 

Do you say, "Here, let me show you in the Bible - it says that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and the wages of sin is death.  But if you confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in your hearts that God raised him from the dead, you’ll be saved."

Do you say, "Wow, I'm so sorry to hear that was your experience.  What did you do?"

Do you say, "Wow.  I'm so sorry that you had that experience.  That must have been really hard.  You know... I think Jesus might have told a story about something like that.  This really rich guy who did everything right on the outside came up to Jesus and said, "Teacher, what must I do to make sure that I have eternal life."  And Jesus said, "You know the things God commanded--do not murder, do not steal, etc."  And the guy said, "I've done all of these since I was young... is there anything I'm supposed to do?"  And Jesus said, "sell everything you have and follow me."  What do you think about that?

Each of these responses will have a different effect on your friend's thinking and even their experience of your relationship.  The first engages Al's intellect and comes from a authority-down approach.  Basically, here's the Bible's answer to your question.  But if you're coming from this perspective, Al has to share your assumption that Scripture has authority in your life.  If Al doesn't, then you're not going to get anywhere with your argument. And even if Al does share your assumptions, you still haven't answered the questions of Al's heart.

The second response invites further relationship and further information from Al.  But it doesn't really engage his intellect or the emotions.

The third response gives some information through a story that invites further reflection.  It could engage Al's emotions, and it invites him to look deeper than someone's outward actions to the heart, because that's what Jesus was looking at.  It might even open opportunities to talk about how hearts are transformed by Jesus and what that looks and feels like.  It could be followed up with personal examples of how Jesus has changed your heart.

I certainly don't think there's one right way to interact with every person.  But if you look closely at the original conversation, you can see how much emotion is tied up in the discussion.  It's not just the Al's best friend he's concerned about, it's also his father.  And an emotionally based question needs a response that engages a person at the heart level, not just at the intellect.

So what would you say?  Do you have a personal story about God transforming your heart that you could share after the story of the rich young ruler?

Monday, October 29, 2012

a miraculous deliverance

This week I had a traumatic car non-accident when the wheel of my car flew off while I was driving 70mph on the highway.  I spun around a couple of times, but I didn't hit anyone and no one hit me.  When my passenger explained what she saw during this non-accident, she said it seemed like the cars around us were just melting away.  I know I was mere inches away from a cement wall and almost slammed into it head on, but somehow the car shifted directions at the last minute and I ended up sliding parallel to it instead.

When I began to talk about my incident, I was quick to share with everyone that I'd been miraculously delivered from harm.  I shared that God had supernaturally intervened and kept me safe.  But even as I made the choice to say those things, I thought about how careful we have to be about what we claim to know about God.

Because even as I was saying that I was miraculously delivered, I wondered why my roommate's dad was not delivered from his fatal car accident a few years ago.  I wondered why my younger brother suffered from cancer or my own dad passed away after a pulminary embolism.  The minute I make claims about God's supernatural intervention in my life, that same minute I invite the question about why God didn't intervene in another time and another tragic situation.

Formal theologians have several different answers to this question, and each of us who lives with faith in God has to wrestle through those same questions.  Some claim the ultimate sovereignty of God and rest in his goodness.  Others speak about the already-but not yet aspects of the kingdom of God where sometimes it is breaking through and other times it is held back.  Some say that we simply can't know but they are content to rest in the mystery of it all because they trust that God is good.

Whatever your belief about that issue, I think this brings up a really important point, which is that what we say about God has a real affect on how others perceive him and relate to him.  If I walked into a funeral home where the guy had died in a car accident and I told my miraculous story of deliverance, I might unintentionally create an emotional barrier in the mourners' hearts to believing and trusting in God.  If I claim that I know God and he has this character trait or that one, I might cause people to react emotionally before they ever get to know God at a relational level.  What I say about God can profoundly impact another person's life and his ability to relate to God in the future.

So as I was sitting on the highway, waiting for the police car to arrive, I thought and prayed about the story I would tell about the accident.  Was it fair to attribute my deliverance to God?  Who should I tell this story to?  Should I declare that it was a miracle and give thanksgiving to God?  Of course.  But maybe not in every context.  And if I do, and when I do, I think it's important for me to acknowledge that I might be wrong.  That my perception of God and my relationship with him is based in part on my experience, and I'm an inherently limited being.  Yes, I want to praise God and thank God for his salvation, but I also want to respect where people are at.  More than that, I need to be prayerful and sensitive to God's leading about what will be helpful in a situation and what may harm those around me.

What things have others said about God that created an emotionally negative reaction in you?  Did that emotional reaction affect your ability to relate to God?  What things to you tell or claim about the character of God?  Might those things be appropriate to share in some situations and not appropriate in others?

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Wanting God to exist

Here's an interesting article about how seeing people come to desire God's existence is going to be more important in the 21st Century than giving people a bunch of rational reasons to believe in God.

I have to say that I definitely agree with this argument.  I've seen a lot of people believe in God without regard to whether every single piece of their belief system matches up rationally.  For that matter, I've seen a lot of people believe a lot of other things without regard to rationality.  It seems that our culture is moving to an culture that is increasingly centered on emotion rather than rationality.  We can complain about this, we can argue that it's not a good move, but I don't think that there's much chance of changing a cultural shift like this.  The only way to change a whole culture is to change individuals who can then change the culture.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

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.

Monday, July 2, 2012

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.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Making Paths Straight

Ran across this article today, and I think Melissa Turner Jones is saying many of the things I've been trying to say.  I like her reference to making straight paths and the word picture of helping someone to move their fists so that they can see and encounter Jesus.

Monday, May 14, 2012

seeing what's not being said

Many times when the church teaches about evangelism, the church teaches that you present the gospel story, and people take it or leave it.  And when we're not teaching that, we teach people to answer rational questions about faith, and that any other issues that come up are just excuses not to surrender their lives to God.  At least, this is what I heard at church.

But this isn't all that effective in our culture.  Because we seem to be more about feelings than anything else these days.  We fall in love, we fall out of love.  We chase our dreams and follow our hearts.  We evaluate things based on how they make us feel, not so much based on right or wrong or even what we think.

So if we buy into the belief that the only barriers to faith are rational ones, we are stuck talking about faith only on a plane where very few in our culture are actually living.  We present the ideas, we "do our part," and then we're free to walk away.  It was God they rejected, after all.

But over the past few years, I've really become convinced that the only way to reach a majority of the people in our culture is to engage their emotions and face those emotional barriers head on.  And I firmly believe that we can have a huge impact on helping others to see a way through those emotional barriers to find a fulfilling and life-changing relationship with Jesus.

But the first step is to be able to recognize the emotional barriers.

One challenge is that emotional barriers are often disguised as rational questions.  A person who's struggling to understand God's goodness and trustworthiness will often want to talk about how God could allow so much evil in the world.  But no matter how many times we walk through the theology and reasons that deal with that question, a person isn't going to make it through that question until they start to see themselves in relationship to God and start to bring that issue to him in a relational way.  I want to talk more about this part of things next week.

For now, I think the important question is how to you figure out what the emotional barriers in a person's life are?  How can you identify them if the person is using all rational language to describe them?

The first thing I'd recommend is prayer--pray that God will supernaturally reveal a person's barriers to faith to you.  Pray expecting to be a part of walking through that barrier with the person.  Pray knowing that God longs to see all people reconciled to him through his son.

Second, you have to listen to another person's story.  Listen for the experiences and challenges that have a lot of emotions tied to them.  I remember having a conversation with a very good friend... we were just talking about life, and I brought up something spiritual as it related to my own life--I was just talking about my own experience.  And he went off, and told me this whole story of a difficult experience he'd had with his parents' church a long, long time ago.  I learned a lot that day about things that were holding him back from faith in God.  But the emotional outburst was the clue that I needed to be listening very closely.

Third, listen for a person's distorted ideas about who God actually is.  A person's emotional responses against God are often against a particular idea they have about who God is rather than against God himself.  Sometimes helping a person through an emotional barrier to faith consists of helping a person to let go of misconceptions and meet the real and living God.

So what about you?  What emotional barriers have you faced in your own relationship with God?  What are the emotional triggers that set your friends off?  What are the true emotional questions that stand behind those trigger points?


Tuesday, May 8, 2012

stepping out

What keeps us from being willing to take a step out of the boat, like Peter did, and ask Jesus to save us?

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that there were layers to our hesitation.

On one level, the most obvious level, is the issue of reasonableness.  How reasonable is faith, really?  For Peter, it was insane.  He sees some dude, who has, of course, been doing some pretty amazing things, walking out in the middle of a tempest on a lake, and he decides to get out too.  I can think of a hundred reasons that's a stupid thing to do... you can't walk on water, for one.  And yet he believed that Jesus was Lord of the wind and the waves and he put his faith in Jesus to save him, so he got out of the boat.

The next level is harder to see, but it's kind of in the background of everything.  That's the spiritual issue of pride.  Going way back to the beginning of the world, the reason that people's relationship with God is broken is that we have wanted to be like God in naming good and evil.  We have wanted to measure our own choices and even God's choices by the rod of our own value system.  We have kicked and screamed and rebelled against even the idea that someone should be telling us what to do and how to live.

And then there's the level that we all know is there, but we tend not to talk about: the emotional part.  I don't get out of the boat because I feel like I'm gonna look stupid.  I don't follow Jesus because I don't trust him. 

For those rational questions about faith, we've had hundreds of people over hundreds of years answering those questions.  We have books and resources and access to information that dialogues with and explains those issues.

For the spiritual question of faith, we are dependent on the Spirit of God to transform and change us--to breathe life into us like Jesus talked about when he spoke with Nicodemas that night so long ago.  We can fast and we can pray and we can beg God to intercede, but at the end of the day, this part of faith is a mystery.  The Spirit blows as a wind and we see the evidence but don't know where it came from, where it is going, or why.

But those emotional issues... we don't talk about those much.  Somehow we think that all it takes for a person to have faith is the right knowledge and the Spirit's work.  But as I've gotten to know a lot of people at a lot of different points in life and faith, I've noticed that the emotional questions seem to be gaining importance in whether people ever start to follow Jesus.  They also seem important in whether we're ever able to follow him with complete abandon.

Why doesn't the church talk about this?  Why don't we interact with these emotional barriers to faith?  We can pretend that they aren't there, but they don't just go away.

I want to talk a little more about how to interact with these barriers in our own lives and when we recognize them in others.  But for this week, I just want to ask you to identify the barriers in your own life.

What keeps you from following Jesus?  What keeps you from following him with all your heart and soul and mind and spirit?  Invite Jesus to meet you there and to start knocking those barriers down.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Christmas giving and the barrier of grace

I've noticed a strange phenomenon around Christmas time this year.  For the past couple of years, my roommates and I have tried to be "good neighbors" in the most old fashioned and traditional sense of the word by caroling and giving away baked Christmas goodies to those around us.  Sometimes it's hard to get people to answer the door (I live in kind of a rough neighborhood).  But the ones who live closest to us now gladly accept our cookies.

What I've noticed this year is that, without fail, those neighbors come to our door a couple of days later with Christmas goodies of their own.  And one of the neighbors even bought candy from a local shop because they don't really bake, but they didn't want our kindness to go unreturned.

What do you think makes people feel like they have to respond in kind when you do something nice for them?  I'm not sure that this is always true, but it seems like part of the desire to respond in kind is so that we don't owe anyone anything.  Because if you give me a gift and I don't respond, I am now in your debt until I can repay it.  It's the same with getting a Christmas gift that is worth way more than I spent on you.  It makes me uncomfortable because there's this money sign hanging over our heads, showing how uneven the relationship seems.

I would suggest that this discomfort is rooted in our desire to be self-sufficient.  It takes great humility to accept gifts from others, and we want to somehow believe that we earn those things or deserve them in some way.  And if we didn't do anything to deserve them, at the very least we want to repay someone.

Grace is hard to accept.  It's hard to accept that today, I might need you to love me because I'm in pain and I can't be nice to you.  It's hard to accept that I might need help shoveling my sidewalk because I have the flu, and maybe I'll never be able to respond in kind.  It's hard to accept that, when I look at my relationship with God, I'm really bringing nothing to the table.  He gives me grace, he chooses to love me.  I can respond in gratitude, but it can never really repay what he's given me.

If I was trying to identify emotional barriers to faith, this is a huge one.  I think it's a barrier that we all face, and we all have to work through.  But in times like the holidays, I think we can also be a part of bringing this barrier to the surface by seeking ways that we can pour out kindness and love on those around us--even when they have nothing to give back or have done nothing to deserve it.  You never know how your gratuitous gift might open the door to someone receiving the grace of God.

So this week, who in your life can you give to for the holidays that wouldn't expect it and can't return it?  How can you be a reflection of the love and grace of God by giving to those around you?

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Who is my neighbor?

So I've been going through the book of Luke with a friend of mine.  I send her a part of a passage each morning with a couple of words--sometimes an explanation of the historical background, sometimes questions about interpretation, sometimes thoughts about what it means to apply those stories to our own lives.  We've just hit Luke 10, and this morning I sent her the story of the Good Samaritan.

I'm sure you know the story, where Jesus was doing some teaching.  A guy came up and asked Jesus how to find eternal life.  Jesus asked the guy what he thought, and the guy answered "Love God and love my neighbor."  Jesus told him that he had it exactly right.  But that didn't satisfy the guy, so he asked who his neighbor was.  And in response, Jesus told a story.  He told a story about this man who was beaten and left for dead.  Religious person after religious person saw him, but did nothing.  Instead, they crossed to the other side of the road so they wouldn't have to deal with him.  And then a Samaritan, that most-hated race, walked by and took care of the guy--treated him just like family and gave everything he needed to get well.  And then Jesus asked the guy, "who did you think was a neighbor in this story?  The answer, of course, was the Samaritan.

When I read this story this morning, I thought of the conversation that's stirring in my community about this billboard that our local atheist group put up in our community, saying that you don't need God to hope, to care, to love, or to live.  This has caused a firestorm of controversy in my very religious community, and some people are saying and doing some hateful things.  Some people who claim to be followers of Jesus, in fact, have not been loving toward the people who put up this billboard.

Is it just me, or does this completely contradict the message of Jesus--the message of the cross--the message of redemption?  I get the fact that people might feel like their ideology is being attacked.  I get that they take this personally, because their belief in God is a part of their identity.  But how can anyone think that responding by publicly disparaging other people or by doing cruel things to people who don't believe in God somehow advances the kingdom or the message of Jesus?

What happened to the message of loving God and loving others--even those who would ordinarily fall into a category of people we might consider our enemies?  Because the Jews and the Samaritans--they hated each other.  They had major ideological and practical differences that made getting along with each other impossible.  But when Jesus wanted to talk about what it means to truly follow him, he used the example of going above and beyond for someone who is your enemy.

What if, instead of reacting to this ideological statement in the abstract, the church actually got together and tried to think about how to extravagantly love the atheists in our community (or the Muslims or the Bhuddists or the Hindus)?  What if we started mowing lawns, providing for physical needs, or having conversations with others who don't believe the same things we do?  What if (gasp!) we actually became friends with those who might never see the need to believe in God?  How would that change the world?  How would that change us?

So I'm heartbroken, personally, as I think about how my community has responded.  I long for the kind of world that we'd be living in if everyone acted like the good Samaritan all of the time.  I wish that everyone in my community who loves Jesus would actually take the time to figure out a practical, sincere, and extravagant way to show the love of Jesus to my atheist friend and all of his friends.

I wish...

Sunday, June 26, 2011

just a pile of bricks

So, I'm not an artist, not really.  No training and too lazy to figure out how to do things right.  But I do play with watercolors and acrylics.  A while back I started drawing out prayers.  And then I started taking my colored pencils and sketch pad to church with me. 
It somewhat helps me stay focused on listening.

So here's what I drew today in church:

I don't know how well that you can see it (or even if you could, if you'd be able to tell what's going on here...), but there's a guy standing on this path looking toward the cross, and there's this big pile of bricks in his way.

When I envisioned it before drawing, I started out envisioning a brick wall and it was going to be on the very right hand side of the page.  The bricks representing, of course, someone's barriers to faith in Christ.  But then I thought that, no, these barriers aren't unscaleable, insurmountable walls.  And I really wanted to draw a picture of barriers being broken down, because that's what I'm praying for in the lives of my friends.  So I set out to draw a picture of a barrier that had already been broken down and that was no longer going to be in the way of the person looking to the cross.

But when I got done drawing, I realized that the pile of bricks seemed just as insurmountable as a wall would have been.  It's almost as tall as the guy and the guy just can't seem to see a way around it or through it.  So I sat there for a couple of minutes, wondering what the guy should do.  What can the guy do?

This is how I see barriers to faith right now, I think.  What I should see, what I want to see, is a work crew out there carting out the bricks.  I want to see a whole church there, holding the guy's hand, walking beside him, telling him about the path and the obstacles and the joys along the way.  But all I see right now is the one guy, standing alone, looking for a way across.  Worse still, sometimes I see a guy with his back turned toward the cross, not seeing anything there worth walking toward.

I know that it's possible for barriers to faith to be overcome.  I know that it's possible for people to cross over whatever barriers stand in their way and to kneel at the cross.  I've seen it happen.  But normally people need help to make it past the barriers.  The church is supposed to be that help.  We're supposed to be there, on that path toward the cross, walking with people and loving them and praying for them.

So why is my guy standing all alone?

Thursday, June 16, 2011

The power of a chosen identity

I am one of those people who has actively chosen her identity.

In my identity formation years, those years that we typically sort of separate from our parents and decide who we're going to become, I was living in Asia.  More than that, I'd just moved to Asia.  It was my first time living outside my own culture, so I had all those thoughts and feelings and questions that you have when you move to a new culture.  But those questions and thoughts and feelings coincided with the time that I was going to be deciding who I wanted to be.

I remember realizing that I actually had a choice about that.  And that maybe those choices were broader than I'd grown up thinking.  I remember realizing that my home culture valued dark skin (tans), while all my Asian friends thought it was great that I was so fair.  They wanted my skin.  I realized that what we think is beautiful is so much informed by what our culture tells us is beautiful (or by what we don't have).  That made me think that I could choose.  If they wanted to be white, and we wanted to be dark, why couldn't I just be happy with my own skin, my own teeth, my own hair, my own body?  And that made me think about other things.  Like the political system.  I grew up believing that our form of democracy is the best in the world.  It gives the most freedom, etc.  But they don't have the same system where I lived.  And people were generally happy with it.  In fact, most Singaporeans really believe that Singapore is the best place in the world.  (I learned later in a Sociology class that this is called ethnocentrism, and every culture has it).

Anyway, moving overseas when I did really opened up my eyes to see how many things that I believed were based on my culture.  And it kind of gave me permission to question everything.  So I did.  My process of identity formation was to hold up everything I knew and question its value.  Of course, at this time I had to figure out how I was going to measure that.  How was I going to decide what was good and what was bad?  How was I going to decide which things from my original culture I was going to keep and which things I was going to adopt from my new culture?  And because I was a Christian--I already had a relationship with God that was real and personal and becoming ever more so because of how much time I was spending with him (a whole other story...)--I decided to measure things based on how they held up against what I believed the Bible showed about who God is.  God's character, I guess you could say.

So I went through that process.  When I was deciding what I was going to value or how I was going to approach things or what things were going to take my time and energy, I held them up to God's character and to the moral principles that Scripture taught.  And little by little I chose my identity.  I chose it.  I made a rational decision about who I was going to be, where I was going to go, and what was going to be meaningful to me.

If someone now introduced me to a new way of life, a new way of thinking, a new god... I don't think there's any way I would walk away from what I've already chosen.  In all my conversations with my atheist friend, I can appreciate every point that he makes.  I think a lot of them are valid--at least I can understand why and how believing there is no God leads him to make the decisions that he makes.  I can understand how another system, many other systems, can exist that give people a basis for morality and ethics and a philosophical approach to life.  But I have no reason to want to abandon my own.  I have no reason to walk away from my own.  Because I chose it.  I already ascribed value to it.  I have been living according to it now for a good 20 years.  To turn my back on it now would be to lose my identity.  A hard-fought-for, already proven identity.  Why would I do that?

If it's true that Jesus invites us into an identity--or even to our true identity--as created ones, the children of God, loved of God, ambassadors of Christ, then the fact that a person has already chosen a different identity must affect her openness and willingness to consider following Christ.  It's so much bigger for her than for people who don't have an identity yet (like children), whose identities are ascribed to them by others, who don't like the identity they have (like as a "poor" person or a "murderer"), or for those whose identity is not that much different from the identity that Jesus offers. 

What about the identity that Jesus offers is so compelling that it would motivate someone to lay down an identity he has chosen and receive the one that Jesus is offering?

. . . ?

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Identity as a barrier to faith

Once in a while I get to know someone whose main barrier to faith, besides the spiritual barrier of pride and self-direction that all of us face, is their identity.  For whatever reason and in whatever way, these people have adopted an identity that they view as incompatible with faith in God.  I wrote about one woman whose primary barrier seemed to be her identity here.

After a lot of years and a lot more conversations with people, it seems to me that all identity-barriers are not the same strength.  For example, identities that we are given by others but don't fully own might not be so hard to let go of.  If I have someone telling me that I'm not good enough for anything, and I believe it and I start to live in that reality, then that can present as an emotional barrier to faith in God.  I might believe that I'm not good enough to be loved by him and I might avoid receiving his love and pursuit of me.  But if I didn't choose that identity and I don't really like it, then maybe it's not going to be so difficult for me to lay it down and walk away from it toward Jesus.  Difficult, yes.  Scary and vulnerable?  Of course.  But not impossible.

But what about those identities we choose?  What about those identities that we go through the process of excavating from the dust of our lives?  What if we uncover or decide to be something after a lot of thought and struggle?  And what if that identity is contrary to everything that Jesus invites us into?  Can that barrier be overcome?  What does it do to the person to lose that identity?  What would it take to make that person want to lay down one identity to receive the identity that Jesus is offering?  Does the process of laying down one identity that's closely held and receiving another identity destroy a person?

These seem like such important questions to me.  At the emotional barrier level, I feel like I've kind of figured the dance of give and take and listening and challenge and prayer that helps people move through those barriers toward Jesus.

But the identity level seems like a whole different ballgame.  First, because the identity I've chosen or uncovered is important to me.  So important that I can't even imagine letting it go.  If I chose it, then I chose it for a reason.  And if I uncovered the identity then I probably don't feel like I have the ability to choose another one, even if that other one looks really good to me.  It seems that here, more than anywhere else, the Spirit has to move and Jesus's invitation to follow and assume a new identity has to come from him.

So these are just the beginnings of questions and thoughts for me, but I think I'd like to take these identity questions one at a time as I process them.  I'd like to think out loud here about the possible implications for conversations and invitations to faith.  I feel like this is my next step in learning to walk with people spiritually wherever they are in that process.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

another conversation about goodness

Here's an interesting blog post from a guy in New Zealand who was part of a Christian/Atheist debate/discussion.  I thought it was interesting in light of my recent post about the problem of goodness.  It's a little more abstract and theoretical than my own discussion, but there's some interesting stuff there.

I will reiterate again that I'm not so sure about how truly useful conversations like this are at an everyday level.  Either my life reflects goodness or it doesn't.  We can talk about it all we want, but what we say and what we talk about is never as important as how we're living in real life.

But I have to admit that he's right - the Christian story talks about a God who is good.  And And I wholeheartedly agree that the story (which he calls a script) demands that Christians do what we can to conform to that goodness (although we often fail).

Saturday, June 4, 2011

On pride and transformation

Jesus told a story about two men who entered a temple one day.  The first was a deeply religious man who swept into the temple, chin held high, looking and acting as if he owned the place.  He prayed aloud, "God, thank you that I am not like these other people--robbers, evildoers, adulterers--even this tax collector.  I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get."

The tax collector, on the other hand, went in and stood off to the side.  He couldn't even look up to heaven when he prayed.  Head bowed, he prayed, "God have mercy on me, a sinner."

Is one of these men better than the other?  Qualitatively better?  The tax collector likely had cheated many people out of money.  He probably sacrificed to pagan gods in order to get his job as a tax collector.  He would have had to swear an oath of fealty to the Roman government, swearing to serve Rome above all others, even God.  Meanwhile, the religious man probably did everything good that could be done.  Not only did he follow all of the religious rules, he gave away a lot of his money.

I've had a question from a very good friend/reader about what I mean when I talk about this internal transformation that occurs through knowing Jesus.  I am working on thinking about how to answer that question in light of my own story.

But I think that the story I just told was Jesus's answer to a very similar question.  The internal transformation and change begins with acknowledging God and my need for God.  God's story of ultimate reconciliation and redemption starts with broken relationships.  Broken relationship with the Creator-God, with self, with other people, and with creation.  Those relationships are broken because that first person looked at what God was offering and believed the lie that he could do better and get more by doing things his own way.  Each one of us follows in his footsteps.  Jesus called that a spiritual death.

Some people do things their own way by following a religion, even the Christian religion.  Some people make following God into a list of rules and regulations and follow those things to a T.  Some people do things their own way by developing a nonreligious standard by which to live and meeting that standard.  Some people don't care one way or another and live out of what makes them feel good in the moment.

But Jesus offers a life of restored and reconciled relationships.  It starts by recognizing that my relationship with God is broken because of my own pride, and there is nothing that I can do to bridge that brokenness.  It starts by acknowledging that the Creator-God has some claim on my life because he created me and formed me and loves me.

Once I acknowledge those things and invite God to work in my life and walk with me, he begins to transform me and to move to heal those broken relationships.  Once I understand my right relationship to God, one of humility and love and obedience, I can learn to walk in that way in all of my relationships.

There is still a battle--there is always a battle while we are still on earth.  A battle between seeking to meet my own needs in my own way rather than trusting in God.  A battle between doing what feels good and what brings me the most immediate sense of happiness rather than doing what illustrates the character of God and brings honor to his name.  And each of those battles is an opportunity for transformation--it's an opportunity to invite God in, to be honest and humble about the struggle, and to ask for the power and the spiritual recreation that would enable the choice to follow Jesus.  Over time, those tiny little decisions of surrender and invited transformation build character and a pattern of obedience that I believe changes and transforms the very essence of a person more and more into the image of Christ.

So it seems like, for Jesus, anyway, the single most important quality a person could have is humility in his posture toward God.  From there, God can do anything to transform and recreate and make new and make good things.  From there, the door to spiritual life is wide open.

You'll have to tell me what you think, but I can kind of see his point.  I don't care how many great things that spiritual guy had done... I'd rather hang out with the tax collector any day.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

The problem of goodness

One of the biggest emotional barriers to faith that some people have is the problem of goodness--goodness being found in people who are not Christians, the absence of goodness in some Christians, and a person's own goodness without Christ.

I'm sure there's a theological argument to be made here about original sin and how "there is no one good, no not one," and "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."  But on the ground, the problem of goodness is a real problem.  Many Christians are not living in a way that allows or invites Jesus to transform them.  None of us Christians does that perfectly.  There is much goodness in the world that comes from people who don't know Jesus. 

It's tempting to talk about goodness at that level--to leave it safely there as an abstract discussion about where goodness comes from.  In that context, I would argue that not-good Christians are not truly following Christ.  I would argue that there is inherent goodness in all creation, and especially in people because we are created in God's image.  There is never so powerful an illustration of this for me than when I am working in prisons with murderers--there is goodness and value even in them because they are made in God's image and still reflect a part of him, though in a way that is desperately marred.

But when I think about this issue in terms of conversations about faith, I think there's another place to consider going.  I think I could tell the story about the rich man who met Jesus and then went away sad.  Basically, this man comes up to Jesus and he has the guts to say to him, "Jesus, I'm good.  I've been doing good things all my life.  I've followed all the rules God gave, better than anyone else.  What else do I have to do to have eternal life?"

I wonder if he really thought there was something else he needed to do, or if he wanted to be patted on the back for his ability to live above reproach.  I'm wondering if he was asking Jesus what he was offering that was so different than what the man already had.

Then Jesus looked at the man and said, "There's just one thing that stands in your way.  Sell everything you have & give it to the poor and then come and follow me."

I think in the church we focus a lot of the time on the selling everything you have part because it makes us uncomfortable.  We want to explain and excuse our own materialism so we rarely look beyond that to the invitation that Jesus gave.  But I think the most important part of that story is the invitation to follow Jesus--to be in relationship with him.

Jesus always looked deeper than a person's externals.  He looked beyond whether someone followed the rules.  He looked past what a person said or did to their hearts.  He invited people into something more--a transformation of the very motivations and attitudes of the heart.  Jesus wanted--he still wants--something deeper than mere external goodness.  He wants to free us from the bondage of self-satisfaction and pride and the need to strive to live up to an image we project or a standard that we have set.

And oh, that kind of walking with Jesus is so much harder.  It's so easy to check things off a list.  It's so great to have the 10 commandments and a list of good things to do and be able to cross those things off every night.  It's so much harder to hold your desires, attitudes, and motivations up to the light and invite Jesus into them to transform them into something that will always be life-giving and sacrificial and good and just and pure.

For the rich young man, Jesus was asking too much.  That man went away sad, choosing not to follow.

I think a lot of us follow that man on his journey away from Jesus.  To the Christians who do, I would beg you to change your mind or to drop the name of Christian--you are damaging Jesus's reputation in the world.  Your striving for goodness is no different than the rest of the world's, and we humans are so complex with so many selfish motives and desires that we destroy the good we try to do.  And to those of you who have never claimed or even desired to follow Jesus, I would merely want to say that, although painful and difficult, the process of examination and transformation into the image of Christ is worth every drop of sweat and tears; it is worth every sacrifice.  To be able to let go of striving for goodness and perfection, to be able to rest in the grace and power of Jesus to transform, to be able to walk in relationship with One who loves extravagantly and completely... it is freedom.  It is peace and joy in the midst of trials.  It is contentment with life in all of its up and downs.  It is knowing that you are loved by the One you have given your life to.  It is life with the Eternal One, right now.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

A prayer for the church

If there's one thing we can't escape as Christians it's that how we live and what we say affects how people view God.  God kinda set it up that way with his people long ago, calling first Israel and then the church to be his image-bearers and ambassadors in the world.  I so often wonder why he did that as I think we often end up preventing people from having a fair chance of seeing God for who he is.

When this image-bearing goes right, it can be a really powerful thing.  You can have people who don't even believe in God questioning their beliefs or at least willing to talk with you about the possibility of God's existence.  When we live like Jesus and love and serve and protect and sacrifice and love and love and love, people can be drawn first to us and then to him.

But when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong.  It devastates a person's desire or ability to seek God or to follow him.  It creates animosity.  It creates barriers.  And over time, the wealth of injuries the institutional church has caused to humanity's ability to see God is overwhelming.  It seems like it's impossible to get over.

I had a conversation with my atheist friend yesterday--a really long conversation and I'll probably have post after post of things to say as I process the conversation.  But this is the first of many things that sticks out to me.  His objections to God are actually objections to the God that the church has preached through her actions and through her words.  It's not the God that I know or run after.  But I find it overwhelming and nearly impossible to think of how to overcome all that history of all of us Christians who have lived lives aimed at having as little pain as possible and protecting ourselves from what we perceive as the taint of the world.

God, we have failed you.  We have put our need for comfort and safety above all things.  We have so often been filled with a passion to preach or convert but not to love or to serve or to sacrifice.  We have not cared about justice.  We have not loved the outcast or outsider.  We have wanted our own place in society to be preserved at the cost of inviting and sharing and being hospitable.  We have been threatened by people who believe differently.  We have allowed race and social class to divide us.  We have been like the pharisees instead of like the fishermen.  God, transform us, the church.  Make us over in your image and in your likeness so that we can be the picture that we are supposed to be of who you are and what you care about.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Stories we ignore

Have you ever thought about the stories that we don't allow in church?

The story of the abused child who becomes an adult and now cannot figure out how to feel God's presence in his life.  The story of the homeless man who has no access to a shower and can't figure out how to get his life together enough to be presentable.  The story of the homosexual person who has been told by the church that she doesn't fit, that she isn't right, but she has accepted her sexuality as part of who she is--so now she has to choose between God and her whole identity.  Or what about the story about the person who is sick day after day after day... with no hope of healing in this lifetime?

We don't want to hear the stories that have no answers.  We don't want to hear the stories that don't have redemption in the here and now.  We don't want to be confronted with the stories that push up against our carefully constructed boundaries around truth and right and wrong.  We don't want to have to look at the humanity that is encompassed in these stories and admit that life may not be as simple as we want it to be.  We don't want to acknowledge that sometimes, while we're here, the stories that we live don't end with a fairy tale ending.

We insulate ourselves from pain.  Our middle-to-upper-class culture does this too.  We pay for the best medical care, we pay to put our kids in the best schools, we pay to live in nice neighborhoods with the goal of preventing any of the pain and hardship that is normal in the rest of the world.  We sanitize our lives.  And when we fail to do that, we are not welcome in church.  Well... we can show up if we're willing and able to present a sanitized version of our lives that presents our complete and utter faith in the goodness of God.

There is no space for lament--for the acknowledgement that life is not what it ought to be, that life is not what we want it to be.  There is no room to rail against God asking questions about where he is and what he is doing and why he has left us alone in this agony.  There is no room to cry out.  It makes people uncomfortable.  So they answer with pat answers and simplify and spiritualize the agony so that it once again reflects the sanitized and controllable boundaries that we're comfortable with.  If we can understand and contain it, then we can predict it.  And if we can predict it, then maybe we can prevent it in our own lives.

We do such a disservice to ourselves and our communities by ignoring the real stories of people's lives.  Sooner or later, every person is confronted with pain, agony, abandonment, frustration, disappointment, tragedy, or grief.  By and large, the church is not safe for these people.  So people are left with the option of presenting a facade or actually beginning to spiritualize and contain their own pain.  Either that, or they leave the church.

What if instead we accepted people right where they are?  What if the message was that we would sit with people in their pain?  What if we didn't allow agony to disgust, embarrass, or frighten us?  What if we were willing to just love and walk alongside and cry out in agony along with our brothers and sisters?  What if we could make church a safe place to share any story?  What if there was no judgment and no expectation for the person to have a perfect life?  What if we were all actually vulnerable about the things that were going wrong in our own lives, so that it would be safe for others to share too?

What if?