John 1 rocks my face off. Here's my loose paraphrase.

Before Western Society, before Semitic tribes, before all cultures and people, the Revealer lived with God and was in very essence God. They were together (the Revealer and God) before anything was made. When God decided to make stuff, he did it through the Revealer so that all the stuff He made would point back to Him. The Revealer carried within Himself the very essence of life. That life was the Guiding Light that that showed people who God was. This Revealer has always been pointing people to God from the very first day. That’s His job.

A long time ago, God sent a guy named John to teach people about the Light-that-shows-God so that people would recognize it when it arrived in their midst. John was special but he knew he wasn’t The Light. He was kind of like a Revealer-revealer because the Light was about to break into the world in a new way.

Ironically, even though God made everything through the Revealer, by the time he showed up in the flesh, none of His stuff recognized Him anymore. He came to His own creation, but everyone shut their doors in His face. But a few people recognized Him and welcomed Him for who He was. Those folks would find themselves adopted into a brand new family with God Himself as their Papa.

The Revealer who had been pointing people to God from the beginning did something incredible in those days: He put on a human body with all its frailties and limitations and pitched his tent in our camp. He set up shop in our neighborhood as an ordinary guy. He moved in with humanity and became a human in every possible way. Well that was unexpected!

We were there. We saw it and I’m telling you it was amazing! It was clear as day to us: This was the One and Only, the Light emanating from God. This was the One everybody had been talking about. We knew without a shad of a doubt that this God-man came straight from God the Father and was the very embodiment of mercy on truth.

When John first saw him, he just about blew a fuse! He kept shouting, “Here he is! The one I’ve been telling you about! I told you he would come and far outdo me. He was around long before I ever existed so of course he’s greater than me!”

Hindsight is 20/20 and we see it all so clearly now! The Revealer was overflowing with mercy for people who didn’t deserve it. And out of that overflow, we’ve received one good thing after another. At one time a great man named Moses gave rules and regulations that were supposed to help people experience God and the good life. But at the end of the day, they were just words on a page. But when the Word of God leapt from the page and put on human skin, what we had was so much more than words! We had Grace and Truth living as a person among us. The Revealer did through a human existence what He could never do through dead words: He revealed God the Father not as a concept to be grasped but as a relationship to be enjoyed.

Ubuntu: Humanization through understanding. You GOTTA read this one!!!

I’m nearly leaping with excitement. I’ve just returned from a meeting with Harvey, a Malawian friend and I can’t wait to talk about “Ubuntu”. Harvey told me that in Malawi, ubuntu is a high ideal people strive for. Ubuntu means “person” but it’s more complex than that. It is the humanization of individuals within a community through generous understanding. A person who listens to the experiences and ideas of another person dignifies them and is said to have ubuntu. A person with ubuntu is generous with his time and resources. And he is able to empower others to exhibit ubuntu within their community. 

Desmond Tutu says it this way:

“A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”

The concept of ubuntu is also tied of with the idea of the spirit. So when a person with ubuntu humanizes another person through listening, understanding, and affirming, then it is said that they have a “spirit.” I was thinking about the parallels to the incarnation and our pursuit of whole-life discipleship. I. Was. Blown. Away.  

Jesus was the paradigm of ubuntu for humanity: he “moved into the neighborhood” (that’s how The Message puts it), he identified with our human experience, he made himself available to people and became the servant of all, and in the ultimate act of generosity, was outcast, tortured, and killed on our behalf. In doing so, he bestowed the spirit of a new humanity on us in the ultimate humanizing act. In him, we are restored to community with God and with each other (another effect of ubuntu). Ultimately Jesus empowers us to humanize and validate other through the ubuntu-spirit he bestow on us.

As we seek to raise up mature leaders in the church worldwide, I’m beginning to believe that traditional pedagogical discipleship paradigms will fail. Read this book, memorize these verses, sit in this Sunday school class, listen to the sermon, let me give you advice. It only goes so far. In my experience the single most effective act of disciple-building in Amercica and worldwide comes through the humanizing force of ubuntu. It is in the act of truly seeing one another that we are truly able to “spur one another on” toward deep rootedness in Christ. That’s why WDA’s discipleship acronym (R-CAPS) places relationship at the top of the list. Relationships based on understanding, love, and trust are the foundation the most potent life transformation we can foster as human beings.

Check out this passage:

“Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” (Hebrews 10:24-25)

Is it not clear in this verse that in considering how to help one another grow, we MUST (1) continue to meet together in relationship and (2) encourage one another? It is primarily by building relationships and validating one another’s experiences that we build disciples. This is not to say that we agree with everything people say, but we recognize the difference between a person and their ideas and actions. We are able to validate the person and thus leave room for divergent views and experiences… not because we are wishy-washy, but because we are secure in ourselves and our beliefs because of our relationship with Christ.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if our mentors and teachers were more concerned about understanding and validating our experiences than they are about pushing content? Wouldn’t it be amazing if the way we thought of mentoring, pastoring, and disciple-building was primarily concerned with finding opportunities to be generous with our time and energy, to love, to serve, and to really, really listen to people? If you had someone like that in your life, wouldn’t you be BEGGING them for guidance?

Do you want to change the world? Be a person with ubuntu in your community. I promise it will not go unnoticed.

Shaking off the Monxiety Monkey

Anxiety is no longer an acceptable “residence” for me. I know there will be anxious moments in my life and I won’t ignore that fact. But I feel like I’ve seen enough of God’s faithfulness in His promises to carry me through MOST difficulties. I believe I understand that even if the worst happens in my life that God’s love for me is not nullified. Though I’ll admit I’ve lived a pretty cushy existence to date. So I guess we’ll see what happens when the rubber meets the road. But what I HAVE experienced has only shown God’s care and intentionality even in the dark seasons.

There have been a few moments of clarity in life in which I’ve decided to move past a certain emotional response like anxiety. A couple years ago, I decided not to yield to my fear of people. I have written in caps, “I will not be afraid,” across a page in my bible. Did it work? Well, sort of. I’m still a petrified people-pleaser. But I’ve put myself in an increasing number of situations in the last couple years where I’ve had to swallow my fear. That’s felt good.

So I’m hopeful that this resolution that came out of a meeting last month with pastor Dan will keep bearing fruit in my heart. I realized that God has always provided for me and there’s no logical reason for me to believe that He will stop providing. (To be fair, I’m also coming to term with the fact that “provision” doesn’t always mean, “cushion” and I’m okay with that because I trust His character.) That resolution has already saved me from dwelling in anxiety on several occasions since then. When I feel it cropping up, I’m newly empowered to shake my head and dismiss it as ridiculous. Even today, I’m shaking off money anxiety (“monxiety??”) as I try to go to church not asking, “who will support me?” But rather, “who can I love?”  It seems juvenile for me to spend whole days at this point doubting the Father over money when he’s always given us food and shelter (and fun-money to boot)!

So I’m hopeful: Hopeful that the experience of relief from financial anxiety will also bring relief in other areas of anxiety in my life. My marriage, my ministry, my sense of purpose and identity…. They could all use a little rest from the strain of anxiety.

Dear Russian: who are you?

Over the course of my blogging career, I’ve had at least one anonymous person in Russia following me faithfully. In fact, I have more hits from Russia than from any other country outside the United States. I find that interesting because about a month ago, God put the city of St. Petersburg on my heart. I’ve never cared for Russia as a destination or a place of ministry. There is very little there that has captured my attention (all of my attention being so fully consumed by the great continent of Africa). But similar God-nudges  have changed the course of my life before (my trip to Atlanta which introduced me to WDA being the prime example).

So I’m making it my ambition to visit the city of St. Petersburg somehow in the not-too-distant future. I may have my chance on one end of an upcoming teaching trip to the Congo in August. We’ll see. Whatever the case, I’d like to see if there is more to this nudgey feeling than a random magnetism toward the frozen North or a hankering for borsch.  

So my dear unknown Russian: if any of this strikes you as curious or beautiful or plain freaky, I think we should talk. Shoot me a message, eh? Мы должны говорить.

Unzenny thoughts from a wannabe monk

I suppose I’m kind of a mystic. Highly spiritual, inclined toward superstition. I’ve been that way since elementary school. As a kid, I remember some highly compulsive praying, bible reading, even tithing (I once gave my whole quarter jar to a random cause because the Mood struck). Around Jr. High, I became enamored of “deep thoughts” and fancied that I was the only one who had them. I see depth and significance even where there is none. I lack the natural talent for bringing life out of the stratosphere and into the day-to-day. I would suck at business. Of course some of my favorite people are the earthy, refreshingly-honest ones who can laugh at themselves. (Here’s lookin’ at you, Lisa Ernster.)

Recently I’ve been thinking about my spiritual goals in pursuing daily hang-out time with Jesus. I’m chewing on a statement from my last blog post: “my relationship with Jesus sometimes looked more like a meditative quest for self-betterment than an actual relationship.” Sure enough. I think part of what I’m looking for in these daily times is a feeling of tranquility…. Spiritual Zen to start my day…. Which, when I think of it that way, makes me laugh. Truth is, life isn’t all that "zenny" to begin with. It’s not meant to be. It’s full of complex feelings and situations for which emotional detachment is unhelpful at best.

I was reading Habakkuk 3: a prayer against the enemies of Israel. I was pretty struck (again) with the tumult and violence of his imagery. Then again… Habakkuk didn’t live in the suburbs. He didn’t wake up and drink coffee each morning in on a brown leather couch. And I imagine he wasn’t a just-think-happy-thoughts kind of guy. Why should he be? He lived in a time of political turmoil and daily physical insecurity.

I imagine gentile armies advancing against sinful Jerusalem much like imagine the Visigoths cresting the hill over Rome: vast barbarian hoards bringing the worst that war has to offer. And Habakkuk prays:

² LORD, I have heard of your fame;
   I stand in awe of your deeds, LORD.
Repeat them in our day,
   in our time make them known;
   in wrath remember mercy.

The enemy advances. In my mind (for some reason), they lurch like orcs… or zombies….

⁵ Plague went before [God];
   pestilence followed his steps.
⁶ He stood, and shook the earth;
   he looked, and made the nations tremble.

Terror spreads through the city as siege ramps are built outside.

¹⁰ the mountains saw you and writhed.
Torrents of water swept by;
   the deep roared
   and lifted its waves on high.

The gates are breached and the enemy of God’s chosen people rush in to conquer and plunder.

 ¹⁶ I heard and my heart pounded,
   my lips quivered at the sound;
decay crept into my bones,
   and my legs trembled.
Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity
   to come on the nation invading us.

Habakkuk watches as soldiers rush past his window creating panic and destruction throughout the city. He feels keenly the uncertainty of his life.

¹⁸ yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
   I will be joyful in God my Savior.

 ¹⁹ The Sovereign LORD is my strength;
   he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
   he enables me to tread on the heights.

My point is that Habakkuk (“can I call ya Hab?”) is no mountain-top guru. Sure he ends on a happy note here. But what I’m saying is that his faith coexists with his other emotions. It doesn’t cancel them out. In one prayer he feels distressed, decaying, anxious, quivery, vengeful, worshipful, and empowered. And he feels okay about that. Do I feel okay about it?

Uh. No. But I want to be okay with it. At home. At church. Every day. It’s a particularly un-zenny idea: that our daily ambition with Jesus shouldn’t be to eliminate unpleasant emotions but to allow them to exist alongside our big-picture beliefs. It’s less Tibetan and more Semitic. But I think in the end it suits us better. After all… we’re not called to be mystics (though I dare say it’s okay to be wired that way).... Just real people getting realer with Jesus as He reveals the really real.

Receiving Love

Do I sometimes wonder if Jesus will orphan me... if one day, I’ll just stop hearing from Him and be left wondering if I can ever win him back? Will I feel powerless as he drifts away, disinterested, or disappointed in me? Of course, He’s saying "no" today. This morning, Father is saying to me, “The thing I need you to believe is that I love you, you are my child, I fashioned you, and there’s no way in the world that I will abandon you.” John 14 (a faithful companion the last few months) says as much: “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you… If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him.”

I know all this stuff. But God keeps saying it to me every time I open my ears. I guess I don’t fully believe it yet. And something tells me he’ll still be asking me to believe His love when I’m old.

His love has been piercing the leathery layers of my defenses for years. And even though today it makes me cry like a baby, I know it still hasn’t totally taken over my heart. And I know it’s no good to me unless I receive it.

I imagine myself receiving some random act of kindness from a friend. At first, I sneer inwardly, and demand the chance to do it for myself. Over time, my response becomes an embarrassed refusal of his kindness. Eventually, I let him serve me but try to pay him back. After he refuses, I let him serve me but formulate a backup plan in case he withdraws his love. With Jesus, I hope someday I can move beyond those responses and feel the safety to lay my head on his shoulder, close my eyes, and just let him be nice to me. In fact I fancy that my primary “work” each morning in my devotional time is to simply allow him to love me—none of this pursuit of holiness, spiritual discipline, or self-improvement stuff. That’s all great stuff. But before all I think about any of that, I sit alone on this couch and try to be open to His love…. displayed both on the cross and in my daily life. That trust in His love is the primary task of every Christian. Out of that simple belief flows all the personal transformation I could ever ask for. Like Augustine said, “Love God and do as you please.”

Once, after I was newly married, I reflected that Jesus’ love empowered me to love my wife. An atheist friend of mine took offense at that, imagining that I believed he was unable to fully love his wife. In hindsight, I think I was right that Jesus’ love uniquely enables people to love others. But I couldn’t know at the time how little I understood of that love. My marriage was often crippled by fears and paranoia. I was often critical and judgmental towards Debra: a “love-miser”. In fact, MANY of my relationships have been guarded and loveless. Even my relationship with Jesus sometimes looked more like a meditative quest for self-betterment than an actual relationship.

But 2 years ago, God started busting through my defenses as he embarrassed me with an extravagant dose of love from his Daddy-heart. I cried a lot after that as he started to heal old hurts. There were time I would cry at the weirdest stuff. At the same time, I started to feel this Daddy-heart beating in ME for the first time. I developed this strange parental affection for some of my friends. I started asking better questions and listening more attentively. These days when I sit down with someone, I imagine I’m putting on x-ray goggles. I imagine that I can see past their moving lips, down their esophagus, into their hearts (metaphorically speaking…. Annabel once told me, “Jesus looks into our hearts to see how much blood is in there!”). I try to remember that somewhere inside, this person is a vulnerable child just like me, that they are loved just like me. It helps me move past my anxious posturing, judging, impressing, and sizing-up to a restful place where I can begin to love that person because Jesus loves them with embarrassing extravagance… just like He loves me.

If anything, I’m starting to grasp how far I am from resting my head on His shoulder, closing my eyes, and letting Him be nice to me. It’s not a matter of being insufficient as a disciple. Rather I think I’m over-sufficient… self-sufficient.

PS- Here are a couple things that God used to bust through my heart with His love:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwhYCB5jL9w&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=SP1CC8B46C100BED5B

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyfH3T8HXZg

Injustice Make Me Sleepy

I am a white middle class American and honestly, I don’t feel embarrassed by that. But it makes me keenly aware of my position in the world. I can honestly say, I have NEVER been the victim of systemic injustice simply because I run this joint!  My people make the rules. We’re used to everyone playing on our terms and deferring to us. When I was in Kenya, the police would smile ingratiatingly at us as we walked through downtown but would stop and interrogate other Kenyans. Reverse racism. All over the world, I can get away with a lot just because of my skin and my passport.

If you’re like me, you’ve become so used to being treated fairly and given the benefit of the doubt, that somewhere in your heart you begin to doubt whether systemic injustice really exists among us at all. Like my white college buddies, you look at minority groups (especially the ones who “fight for their rights”) with a level of disdain. “They’re always complaining about their misfortune!” “They’re loud and obnoxious.” “If they would just work hard, get an education, and pull themselves out of their situation they would earn respect in our society.” A few of them who DO play by our rules (go to college, adopt a perfect Midwestern accent, sing our songs, and show up on time to everything) gain our notoriety and make us feel good about our “tolerance” for other cultures. I always used to feel justified in saying, “It’s not their skin, but their culture that bothers me.” I’m questioning that statement now.

It was recently suggested that I spend some time as a learner among Africans. I hope to make an impact on that continent through my work but I feel I need to first intuit the heartbeat of African societies. So I took a friend to lunch. He is an African church planter here in the Twin Cities. For 2 hours, I listened, probed, and sought to understand his experience as an African living in America.

What I heard troubled me. After teaching at a bible school, ministering in 20 countries, and learning  fluent German, he came to America to do his PhD in Theology. During his studies he planted a church through a primarily white denomination. The denomination hoped he would plant an “immigrant” church under their label. But when it turned into a primarily white church pastored by an African, the denomination began to distance itself. They told other regional pastors that they no longer associated with him that they shouldn't trust him. They stopped returning his calls and emails. As a final blow, his sending church has refused to sponsor him to renew his visa.

My friend believes he is not trusted because he is African. Believe me, I struggled emotionally to admit that could be possible among enlightened Americans. Surely, this was a communication breakdown. He was misinterpreting, misunderstanding the motives of others. Or perhaps my friend had done something wrong that he wasn’t sharing with me. I felt a strong compulsion to excuse the behavior of my white counterparts and eventually I had to ask why I was doing that, why I struggled to give my friend the benefit of the doubt.

But slowly, slowly, I began to unearth some loop tapes lodged within my psyche: Africans are lazy, Africans are needy, they are manipulative, they are deceptive, they cannot be trusted like "our people". Then it hit me…. I, an educated, sensitive, relational, enlightened human being simply do not trust Africans. But here was a young, educated, well-spoken, clear-headed African man telling me story after story proving that he was the victim of systemic injustice.

All I could do was yawn. The more I believed his story, the sleepier I got. I couldn’t help it. The idea that my culture still treats other cultures unjustly… well it’s overwhelming. So I shut down, became lethargic. I just can't believe this kind of thing could happen. Everything in me rejects the notion, because to accept it would require action on my part. I would have to learn to trust people of other cultural expressions and accept those cultures as much as I accept my own. I would have to let other cultures to play by their own rules in my church, in my neighborhood, even in my home. I may have to compromise some of MY ideals (like efficiency) for other peoples’ ideals (like community) and learn to appreciate those values for what they give me as a person and how they point me to God. And I would have to stand in solidarity with marginalized people seeking better treatment.

It’s not enough to be urbane and enlightened. My friend’s denomination had those qualities in spades. If I want to address racial injustice in my society, I have to get messy. I have to learn to trust people outside my cultural circles and listen to what they say…. Even if what they say makes me feel really incredibly sleepy.