If you spent your childhood outside the evangelical bubble before Jesus Christ and his radical, irrational message knocked you flat as an adult, then you, like the apostle Paul, understand the mystery of spiritual conversion. You might have been missing some Christian street cred—an Awana certificate, a Precious Moments figurines collection, a working knowledge of Dove Award winners—but what is all that anyway? You didn’t know the secret handshake at the front gate, so Jesus sprung you an entrance through the back door of God’s Kingdom, and you crossed the divide between life and death.

I’m so stinking jealous of you.

I, on the other hand, spent my life knowing the secret handshake. I suspect I first experienced a cultural conversion, learning the lexicon of American Christianity as one learns his ABC’s.

Here's a repost from the past. 

Writing is like sex. When you get the impulse to do it, you’re seldom in the right place, and when the atmosphere is sublime, you might not be in the mood. I suspect this accounts for the vast number of unsatisfying blogs written every day across America. 

So goes my theory about the mysterious impulses of the mind and body. Blogging is a mystery to me, a modern curiosity that is trying to find its place in the history of mankind’s literary arts. The percentage of people who write a blog is growing every day, and it's changing the art of the word.

I’m coming to understand the art of blogging as a hybrid of inclination, narcissism, and curiosity. Do I come to my screen as the ancients did with a quill, looking to shape and frame an idea, a thesis, an ideology? Does the spontaneity of the medium favor only freshly baked insights, or is it all right to offer the timeless truths of an essayist? Am I truly a writer—or am I, as they say, merely a Cat Blogger, someone who enjoys telling you that my cat did such and such today with the profound assurance that someone cares? (Cat Bloggers, by the way, aren’t new; they’ve been around for centuries, but their daily rhapsodies were mercifully trapped in little diaries with cheap aluminum keys).

continue reading

I'm being assaulted.

Not by violence, you see, but news of it. All the stories of bloodshed and disaster and evil are getting to me. It's really messing up my happy new year here in the suburbs.

For those of us whose lives don’t seem to reflect the expanse of human suffering in the world, how can we label our good luck as a divine blessing without simultaneously implying that God decided to screw everybody else? It is then that God starts to feel like a nickel slot machine. Solomon used different language when he proclaimed in the book of Ecclesiastes, “There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve.”  Aw Shoot. Makes no sense to me either.

People living in perennial peace are often afraid to question God’s sovereignty. Maybe if we don’t say anything, God won’t check his records and notice we got two paychecks by mistake while someone else forgot to get paid at all. Or perhaps worst of all, the numbing softness of our lives prompts no philosophical questions whatsoever. When that happens, God becomes unnecessary. Suffering has no meaning. Violence is mere cinema.

Dictators dreaming of nuclear weapons, suffering children dying in rubble, desperate looters shooting the innocent at will—how can we not see the hand of evil at work in the world? Essayist Lance Morrow wisely observes that  “each era gets its suitable evils.” The play is the same; only the cast of characters changes from generation to generation.  

continue reading

In the Greek pantheon of emotions, Love has the power of Zeus, Compassion is the lovely Aphrodite, and Anger kicks butt like Ares—but Sadness? He’s just a hated Cyclops, weeping out of that one ugly eye, a monster that nobody likes at all.

Sadness is the emotion that Americans like to eliminate right away. If our children are sad, we try to fix them with candy and distractions. If our best friend has the blues, we invite him to Happy Hour. A spouse feeling down? Well, here’s some shopping money, a round of golf, maybe a massage. We are uncomfortable with sadness; it’s such a downer to everyone in its radius.

Poets seem to understand the beauty of sadness better than the rest of us, but some are really just happy pretending they are sad. Bands like Atreyu (who sing lines like It only hurts when I breathe) capitalize on youthful angst with an almost self-conscious joy, and when the Smiths sing  My gut is burning.  Won't you find me some water? / Hey,just forget it . . . Can you bring me gasoline?  their hyper-tragic lines betray a twisted kind of happiness

Yet John Donne, a profound 16^th century metaphysical poet whom I reckon never wore an emo haircut or painted his fingernails black, wrote “Affliction is a treasure and scarce any man hath enough of it.”  I believe he was closer to getting at the real paradox of sadness: that when we try to kill suffering too quickly, we short circuit the natural order of things.

And what is the natural order of things? It’s first moving in rhythm to Ecclesiastes chapter 3, where there is a time for everything under the sun. It’s experiencing both suffering and joy, the juxtaposition of which ultimately defines both. It’s found in the book of James which makes the audacious claim, “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.”

continue reading

What do pastors do when Sunday morning is barreling down on them and they realize they have absolutely nothing to say from the pulpit?  Women-in-the-pulpit theology aside, I’m awfully glad I will never be a pastor. The burden to create life-changing sermons week upon week must weigh on a man, especially if he is naturally a shepherd, a hand-on-the-shoulder guy, or just rhetorically average.

Inspiration is a tricky cat. If you believe in the Holy Spirit—and I do—you want to believe that God can zap our intellect, give us supernatural insight, and use his Holy Scriptures to shape our teaching. Yet I’m pretty sure God didn’t deem sacred the seven-day cycle of insights, where the Holy Spirit punches his time clock at certain intervals just in time for the church secretary to print the sermon title every Wednesday for the church bulletin.

I haven’t had yuletide goose bumps yet.  I might be too late, since my kids told me this morning that today is Christmas Eve. If I expect to get any warm soul fuzzies, I’d better get cracking.  

Sometimes the Christmas rush lasts for a month or more. The cold sky always looks bright. My kitchen is full of creativity. The children are giddy. Some years the trees are prettier and the lights along my front porch are perfectly straight. In truth, the celebratory mood often rises, not out of any profound belief in the significance of the nativity, but because happy things are swirling around me. In shorthand, good situations equal good feelings.

 Not this year. With a crisis to navigate and a dark emotional sky overhead, I have no reason to feel the joyous rush of Joyeux Noël. The ornamental displays feel like frauds, the lights swallowed up in darkness. I imagine half the world feels as I do, perhaps finding Christmas gloom and Christmas glee oddly juxtaposed.  

continue reading

The strange digital signals zipping from satellite to satellite are making me sleepy.  That is, I’m falling asleep in my own life, finding fewer things to touch and hold. My sight and hearing and intellect are working late hours, but my sense of touch? He’s been laid off.  It seems December is getting all virtual on me. I don’t much like it.

My hands and skin have less and less to do these days. My childhood Decembers used to scatter my nerve endings every which way, giving my palms icy hot snowballs to handle and warm melamine bowls of Cream of Wheat in late afternoons. In the eighties I scraped frost off of my college clunker before volunteering at the local church on weekends, and just two years ago, my kids and I were shaping dough into cookies at the Alzheimer’s unit several blocks away.

continue reading

I am no Darwinist, but as I see it, the Age of the Grown Man is nearly complete. After several thousand years of hunting, gathering, procreating, and rescuing, it’s quite possible that The Grown Man has only a few decades left before he morphs into another species. (Disclaimer: With only one semester of college biology under my belt and no Y chromosome in my DNA, I might be the wrong candidate for recording such a primitive history, but indulge me; writers get paid to exaggerate stuff in order to make a point--or in this case, give it away for free).

Eons ago, the Grown Man relied on physical strength. He had to; otherwise, he and his family might die. Without the luxury of believing he had eighty years in front of him, he got right to the business of surviving. That’s about it.

continue reading

Today millions of dining rooms are filling up with strange, emotionally stunted families doing their best to fake Thanksgiving. I’m asking you not to participate in such foolery, suggesting instead that you prepare your spirit ahead of time with the same level of commitment you bring to the giant, stuffed turkey. If you do, you may discover that the most difficult family celebrations are the ones God uses best.

Even the coziest families struggle with authenticity. Few of us get to choose our dinner party guests; planning the guest list is often fraught with obligation and hostility. The anger that hides in little fortresses all year long must come out from behind the stone wall and show itself.  We fret about the way so-and-so micromanages the dinner, the way that certain parent refuses to discipline his child, the way that certain teenager avoids eye contact—every weakness is exposed in a small dining room. And those are the small things. Thanksgiving will probably make you angry, not grateful. Why do you think Costco sells more bottles of wine this month than any other?

continue reading

Do you think teenagers are self-absorbed? Africans are poverty-stricken? Evangelicals are judgmental? If so, how did you come to believe such a thing?

The Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie, in a beautiful speech filmed for the annual TED ideas conference, speaks of the dangers of reading and believing the “single story” of a people. She tells of a childhood reading British books about characters and objects that were completely foreign to her—and consequently writing books about those same characters, even though they were merely ghosts from her dreams, because that’s what characters in literary books were supposed to be.

continue reading