Should I Be Concerned?

If I’m at home doing housework on a beautiful Saturday morning in February and I get overheated and take off my t-shirt and continue to work in my bra, should I be concerned? If, sometime later, I see the mail delivered and walk out to the mailbox, should I be concerned? If I sort through my mail and go back to my housecleaning, moving next to the bathroom, and if I look in the mirror and notice that I’m shirtless, in my bra, and suddenly realize that I walked out to the mailbox and back like that… I’m just wondering, if I should do something like that… should I be concerned?

I could blow it off the same way I did when I picked up a sheet cake I had ordered at Harris Teeter and walked out of the store without paying for it. Or the way I did when I went to a drive through, paid my money at the first window and drove off without stopping to pick up my food at the second window. (And I have done this, not once, but a half-dozen times, at least.) Or I could blow it off the way I did when I headed off to work in the morning and ended up in the parking lot of my former church two years after I stopped working there. I tell myself it’s nothing to be concerned about because I am an interior kind of person. Most of what’s going on in my life is happening within me, where I’m thinking deep thoughts. Okay, sometimes they’re not so deep. But they’re thoughts. And they seem to supersede whatever is going on in the world around me.

But then again, perhaps these interior-superseding moments are a part of the growing body of evidence that my children can collect and one day use to have me sent away somewhere so they can take my vast fortune from me. Should I be concerned?

Extravagant, Over-the-Top Love that Doesn't Hold Back

“Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect.” Say what? That’s what Jesus tells his followers in the Sermon on the Mount. It may help to know that this isn’t really a very good translation of the original Greek text. It sounds like Jesus is calling us to live perfect little lives and never make any mistakes, but that’s not his intent at all. The word perfect comes from the Greek word for goal, end or purpose. And that’s what the Sermon on the Mount is all about: accomplishing your God-given purpose in life. In The Message translation of the Bible, Eugene Peterson does a better job of translating the Greek. He renders it in English as, “You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity.”

Here’s that verse in its context in Peterson’s translation:
38-42"Here's another old saying that deserves a second look: 'Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.' Is that going to get us anywhere? Here's what I propose: 'Don't hit back at all.' If someone strikes you, stand there and take it. If someone drags you into court and sues for the shirt off your back, giftwrap your best coat and make a present of it. And if someone takes unfair advantage of you, use the occasion to practice the servant life. No more tit-for-tat stuff. Live generously.
43-47"You're familiar with the old written law, 'Love your friend,' and its unwritten companion, 'Hate your enemy.' I'm challenging that. I'm telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that.
48"In a word, what I'm saying is, Grow up. You're kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you."

Jesus isn’t telling us, “Don’t ever make any mistakes or do anything wrong.” In fact, if you live like that – trying to be perfect – you will end up doing exactly what Jesus is NOT asking of us here. Because what he wants of us is extravagant, over-the-top love that doesn’t hold back. You can’t love like that if you’re afraid of making a mistake.

Annie Dillard has written that “we catch grace like a man filling a coffee cup under a waterfall.” I refer to this image often because it’s the best one I can think of to describe what the Jesus Way of life looks like. Imagine holding a cup under a waterfall. The waterfall is the love of God and it keeps coming and coming and coming. It’s an extravagant, over-the-top love that you couldn’t hold back if you tried. And that love fills us to overflowing. It fills us and it spills out all over the place and then it fills us again and again. That’s the way it works when we open ourselves to receive the love God has for us. And when we live as the people God created us to be, as God’s beloved, God’s love pours into us and spills out of us onto others. We can’t help it. That’s who God is and that’s who we are.

But it seems that we have trouble living like an open cup under a waterfall. All too often we’re more like jars. We take in a little bit of God’s love and we seal it up and carry it around like it’s for us and us alone. That’s not who God has called us to be.

So, what is it in your life that keeps you from being the person God has called you to be? What keeps you from loving extravagantly, over the top, in a way that doesn’t hold back?

As a step toward living more as the person God has called you to be, I want to challenge you to step outside your comfort zone and love extravagantly. Think of a way that you would typically hold back, and bust loose. Just once.
• You might bake some cookies, take them to your neighbor’s house, ring the doorbell and say, “Hi, I’m Nancy. I’m embarrassed that I’ve lived next door to you for two years and we’ve never spoken. So, today I decided to do something about it. These cookies are for you…”
• How about sending a card to a friend you’ve been estranged from, just to let them know you’ve been thinking about them and hope they’re doing well?
• You might say the words, I love you to someone you love but have never told.
• Instead of flipping that guy the bird when he cuts you off in traffic, why not say a prayer for him? (God knows he needs it!)
• Or you might just say hello to a stranger on the street, if that’s not the sort of thing you would normally do.

Challenge yourself to step outside your comfort zone and live as the beloved child God created you to be. Stop carrying the love of God around in a jar and let it flow into your cup and over the top onto others. Don’t hold back. And then, after you’ve done it once, you might challenge yourself to find a new way to express over-the-top love every day.

Each time you do this, you’ll be one step closer toward living out your God-given identity by living graciously and generously toward others, the way God lives toward you.

Head or Heart?

I suspect that we all carry a bias about whether it's best to consult your head or your heart when making an important decision. If you tend to be a heart person and someone asks you for advice, you will probably tell them, "follow your heart." If you're more of a head person, your sage advice to them will be something like, "think it through carefully, weighing the pros and the cons." But the thing is, no one is all head and no heart or vice versa. When making decisions, both are a part of the mix. It's the way they tend to compete with each other that can throw us into a tizzy.

Most of us have difficulty making decisions from time to time. It’s especially tough when the head and the heart are in conflict. When that happens, we will usually struggle between following one or the other. But even if we do choose one over the other, the inner conflict doesn’t go away. If you decide to go with your head when your heart doesn’t agree, your heart won’t let go. You’ll continue to struggle, even though you may not realize it on a conscious level. Just because you have decided to go with your head or your heart, doesn’t mean that the inner conflict has ended. It goes underground and often resurfaces incognito.

With the polarities of our lives, we tend to think that we must choose either one way or the other, when the real solution is so often both/and. This is certainly true for head/heart conflicts. Either too much head or too much heart will get us into trouble. The solution to a head/heart dilemma is not to choose one over the other, but to use both to make good choices. Both the head and the heart are gifts God has given us for discernment.

Are you more of a head person or a heart person? It’s one of those things that it’s good to recognize in yourself if you want to avoid repeated heartaches or headaches in your life. If you tend to be a heart person, don’t neglect to use your brain. And if you’re head person, don’t forget your feelings. Oh, it sounds so simple, doesn't it? Of course it's not.

"Half our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think,
and thinking where we ought to feel."
- John Churton Collins

A Blessed Life? (It may not be what you think it is.)

“I’ve lived a blessed life.” We hear people say it all the time, but what do they mean by it? Quite often it’s said when things are going well. They get a job promotion and they’ve been blessed. They find out that lump they had biopsied isn’t cancer and they’ve been blessed. Someone finally makes an offer on the house and they’ve been blessed. But is that what it means to be blessed? Is it all about having things go our way? If that’s the case, I wonder why Jesus would ever have said anything so preposterous as, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” or “Blessed are those who mourn.” Being blessed must not have a whole lot to do with having everything go our way. It must mean something else.

I heard a story about a man named Michael Plant, who set off on a solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1992. He was an expert yachtsman and had made the trip several times before. His brand-new sailboat, The Coyote, was very high tech; there were few like it in the world.

Plant’s support team monitored his trip by satellite and radio. Everything was smooth sailing. Even when a storm disrupted the communications, no one worried about it. After all, this guy was one of the best sailors in the world. His boat was equipped with state-of-the-art navigational equipment. They figured Plant would resume radio contact when everything settled down.

When they didn’t hear from him, they tried repeatedly to reach him by radio. Still nothing. So they sent out Coast Guard helicopters to search for him. They spotted The Coyote floating upside down. It’s captain and sole passenger was never found.

How could this have happened? people wondered. Everyone knows that sailboats are very hard to turn over. Their deep keels and massive rudders right themselves. But as the boat was examined, the cause of the tragedy became clear. For all its beauty and technological advances, The Coyote didn’t have enough weight beneath the surface. There wasn’t enough ballast below to outweigh the fancy gadgetry above. And so, it flipped over as it lost its ability to balance in the water during a storm.

We seem to equate being blessed with what’s happening in the boat. The more fancy stuff we have in our lives and the better they look on the surface, the more we believe we’ve been blessed. But I don’t know if that has much to do with the way God blesses us his people. God’s blessing is found beneath the surface. It’s the keel that gives our lives direction and keeps us from capsizing in a storm.

The relationship we have with God is what blesses us. We would do well to work at developing that relationship so that more weight is given to our lives below the surface and less above the surface. For when we find ourselves in a time when we’re struggling to stay afloat, it will become apparent to us how blessed we are. We’ll understand that being blessed is not about having everything go our way, but being blessed is experiencing and knowing that no matter what happens in this life, God will see us through it.

Our blessings are measured by the weight and depth of the relationship we have with God. That’s the kind of blessing Jesus tells us to strive for. It’s why he can say: Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the hungry. Blessed are those who mourn. It’s also why he could say: don’t spend your life fretting over what you’re going to wear or what you’re going to eat. Above all else, seek the Kingdom of God.

There’s an old Celtic fisherman’s prayer that says: "Dear God, be good to me; the sea is so wide and my boat is so small." It’s so true. The sea is so wide and our boat is so small. And our boats are blessed, not because of what they carry inside them or how they look above the surface, compared to other people’s boats. They’re blessed because of what’s happening below the surface, the part no one can see. It’s the relationship we have with our God that blesses us.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Last week I got an email from Angela, one of the young parents at Holy Trinity, who wanted to tell me what 4 year olds are theologizing about these days. She shared with me the questions that her son Henry had asked over the course of the previous two days…

Does God die? How is God Jesus and God at the same time? If God doesn't die, why didn't God make it so we don't die? Does God like the cold weather? Does God like pirates? Do pirates do bad things to God, too? Where does God live? Was God ever a baby? Does God love sharks? Why did God make sharks? Does God talk to us when he isn't right here?

Henry alternates between calling God a he and a she. Angela wonders if maybe he is thinking of his pastor as God. He told his mother that he met God once and told her what he liked, and that God had brown hair. When his mom told him that she, too, asked God why we had to die, but that God didn't answer, he said, "Well, if you two are kind of close, maybe you could ask again and she will tell you."

Questions are such an important part of faith. We all have them, although we may not feel as free to voice them as a 4 year old does. But questions are nothing to be ashamed of. They’re not marks of ignorance or weakness, the way they so often are perceived in our world where we always seem to be competing to prove who is most competent. Questions are the product of a lively and curious mind.

I hope that your minds are full of questions about God. I’ve found in my own life that the questions never go away. Instead, I keep coming up with new ones. One of the things I have learned, though, as I’ve matured in my faith, is to be at peace with the questions. They don’t keep me awake at night the way they used to. I’m okay with the fact that for the best questions, there are no real answers. And I rest secure in the peace of God that passes all understanding. God's love for me is bigger than my questions, and that is enough for me. But despite that, I still have questions.

What are some of the questions about God that you carry around?

Beloved

Why can’t I love the way I long to be loved?
With mouth wide open, gasping for air,
I disappoint myself time and again
by expecting, and needing, and aching.
I had hoped to love freely, and selflessly, and joyfully.

Am I smothering my love
with past patterns of pathos rehearsed ad nauseum, now simply pathetic?
with blind spots carefully constructed to shield me from seeing the truth?
with razor-sharp fear I dare not approach without a bag of blood in the bank?
So many breath-defying barriers that keep me from loving the way I long to be loved.

And yet, my failed attempts at loving never prevent me
from being dearly loved by the One
who breathes a love into my lungs
that fills me to my fingers and my toes.
I am loved the way I long to be loved.

I am beloved.

Remembering Christmas

We go trudging in the cold searching for the perfect tree. We labor over decorations and straighten every bow a dozen times. We rack our brains trying to come up with the perfect present to give someone special. We spend days slaving in the kitchen hoping to put together the feast that nobody will ever forget. Why is it that we work so hard to get everything perfect for Christmas?

Back in 1954, E.B. White was feeling that Christmas perfection pressure when he sat down at his typewriter to write his annual Christmas column for The New Yorker magazine. He wanted to say something new and fresh that would inspire his readers at Christmastime. But nothing he wrote seemed to do it. And while he was struggling to find the perfect words to say, he thought about a conversation he had with his 92 Aunt Caroline, who lived with White and his wife. He described his Aunt Caroline as a woman from another century, who always seemed to know what to say.

The White family lived in New England, which was known for its beautiful fall color and Aunt Caroline loved to go for drives in the country and take in the changing colors. But this particular year they hadn’t had the opportunity to go, and when he realized this, E.B. White felt terrible about it. He went to his aunt and said, “I’m so sorry we didn’t get out for a ride to see the leaves. I know that’s your favorite thing.”

Aunt Caroline looked at him and she said, “Why my dear --- remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.” It was such an unexpected answer that he said it felt like a bird had just flown into the room. She didn’t need a new experience – she just needed to remember what she had already seen. That was enough for her. Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.

How do you remember Christmas? Re-membering is the opposite of dis-membering. To dis-member is to take something apart. It’s to divide it up into pieces. But to re-member is to bring all the pieces back together again into a whole picture. Another word for remember is recollect, and that gives us an even better visual. It’s re-collecting the parts of the story. That process of bringing the story together again is what we’re called to do at Christmastime.

That seems to be the way Mary celebrated the first Christmas. We read in Luke’s gospel that Mary “treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.” It’s a great description of what it means to remember. Mary treasured “all these things.” She gathered up all the different pieces of the story and put them together, not just in her mind, but also in her heart. She pondered in her heart. What an oxymoron that is. How do you ponder with your heart? Well, that’s what remembering is. You take the details you have filed away in your brain and filter them through your heart. Then your experience becomes more than just a collection of facts. It takes on significance and meaning. That’s what happens when you ponder with your heart.

I remember Christmas in a way that is unique to me. At this time of year I’m pondering with my heart all the many pieces to my Christmas story. Pieces like the last Christmas I had with my father and he gave me a Shirley Temple doll. When my shiny blue Schwinn bicycle was standing by the tree on Christmas morning. Christmas Eve parties at my aunt and uncle’s. Homemade shortbread from Grandma Johannsen. As a teenager, playing my flute for the Episcopal church and discovering that some people actually go to worship on Christmas Eve. Rocking my three week old baby to sleep singing “Silent Night” to the light of a Christmas tree. Going into my mom’s house after she died in November 29 years ago and finding the Christmas gifts she had already wrapped for us. Looking out into a sea of candles on Christmas Eve and seeing my children’s faces glowing back at me. Waking up on Christmas morning completely alone for the first time after my divorce. My first Christmas at Holy Trinity when we had over a 100 people at worship for the first time in recent history. When the usher went to the balcony to count the people she got so excited that on her way back down she fell down the stairs. Those are among the pieces of my Christmas story.

But then, there is another story that gets thrown into that mix. It’s a story that has also become a part of my life. So much so that it overshadows all the other pieces of Christmas that I ponder in my heart. This is a story that is not unique to me. I share it with all of you. It’s the story of how our God came to live as one of us. Beginning his life the way we all do, as an infant. Small, vulnerable, hungry for the milk and the love of his mama. And as his life unfolded, he showed us the very essence of God: grace, mercy and truth. Into the darkness of this world, he shone with the light of God.

Although none of us were actually there when it happened, we can still re-member that story as we ponder it in our hearts and connect it with our own personal Christmas stories.

We spend so much time, energy and money at Christmastime trying to create a perfect moment, when all we really need to do is remember. We don’t need a brand new experience; we need to remember what we already know. There’s such beauty and truth in the story of Christmas that it doesn’t require a lot of embellishment or special effects. All we have to do is remember it well. Because when we do, it speaks to that deepest part of us. When we do, it’s still as surprising as if a bird just flew into the room. Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.