Fall into the gap.

No, this isn't "The Lovely Bones" meets trendy Gap jingle.

This is what happens when I go on vacation.

Relaxation. Intoxication. Loneliness. 

Words. By themselves can mean one thing, but put together in a sentence with meaning and purpose, another.

This week I flew up to Seattle for the Catalyst One Day in Seattle. Loved it. I was already feeling intoxicated from the crisp Mountain air, pretty green trees and lovely coast. I think God knew I needed a relaxing vacation away from the typical, Eat. Pray. Respond. See: Dallas.

Last week our family went camping up in the mountains - our last hoorah of summer. The drive was gorgeous. A few hours into our trip, we passed a sign informing us we were 16 miles from our destination. Twenty minutes and we’d be there.

As I looked around at the mountains I noticed an odd plane flying low in the foothills. We’ve had a dry summer in Idaho with many grass and forest fires. I wondered if there was a small fire in the area they were trying to put out.

The road wrapped around a curve and we saw it. A huge cloud of smoke was pouring out the side of the mountain (actual photo from iPhone above). It looked like the beginnings of a forest fire. The crews were arriving, assessing the situation and awaiting their orders. It was an eery feeling as we drove closer and closer. My first instinct was to turn around and head back towards Boise.

If you are married and enjoying the rewards of a sexually fulfilling covenant marriage, then this post will merely be interesting. But if you’re a single adult who finds yourself caught between the convictions of your faith and the desire of your flesh, you will want to linger awhile longer. Abstinence is a major dilemma, but its message isn’t just for minors.

When one’s sexual identity is under construction—say, at age sixteen—abstinence is a much easier sell. We know, of course, that our culture encourages early sexuality, but most adults—Christian or not—agree with the abstinence message, a message that promotes maturity, self-respect, good health, and responsible decisions. The most mature teenagers will recognize these traits as persuasive selling points.

I was reading Luke this morning, and when I got to chapter 3, something occurred to me that I had not thought of before. John the Baptist's main purpose in life, it seems to me, was to set the stage for people to meet God. “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” Fill in the valleys, flatten the mountains, straighten crooked paths, and level the rough places so that people can see God.

It seems like such a great way to live, going about life doing whatever you can do to make it easier for people to see God. But as I thought about it, I was challenged. Is that what I try to do? Make it easy for people to see God? 

Have you ever sent an email, text, or some other message you wished you could take back right after pushing “send”? A few months after college graduation I was getting my hair cut in Breckenridge, Colorado. The lady cutting my hair noticed I was reading The Gospel in a Pluralist Society by Leslie Newbigin.

Figuring I might know a little about theology, she asked if I could explain why there was so much evil in the world. Since I had just taken a class on apologetics, I decided to tell her everything I knew about why God might allow evil. Every time she had a question, I had a quick retort.

From my perspective the conversation was going great. But all of a sudden she started crying and said, “This is a bunch of &$%! You have an answer for everything. It can’t be that easy.” I was completely taken aback. This made me a bit nervous, especially since she was holding scissors next to my head! 

Broken Shells 

Yesterday I was hunting for shells on the beach with my six year old daughter Maeve.  It is one of her favorite beach hobbies and in San Diego we often get really low tides that make the search all the more fun. 

While we were walking the beach together she would run ahead of me, dig out a shell, and run back to ask “Is this a good one?”  Most of the time I would put it in my pocket, but on one occasion, I said, “Nah, it’s broken, we only want the whole ones” and threw it back onto the sand.   

Maeve’s response caught me off guard.  She ran over, picked up the broken piece of clam shell, and said “But it’s still beautiful to me.” 

When we got back to our chairs she showed me a bucket of all of the shells she had found while I was out surfing – more than half of them were broken fragments of shells that at one time had been whole.  Most of us would walk by them on our search for shells that were perfectly complete, but to her, the broken pieces of those once unbroken shells were worth something. 

James Davison’s Hunter’s new book, To Change the World, has been stirring up buzz since it came out this spring, and for good reason. It’s an intellectually robust, complicated, nuanced treatment of a crucial, continually difficult subject matter: The relationship between Christianity and culture. How do Christians relate to culture? How do they transform it? Is this even the right question to ask? For those familiar with this blog and my prevailing concerns as a writer, you know that this is a subject near and dear to my heart. Thus, I read To Change the World voraciously, though critically, enjoying it as much as I’ve enjoyed reading any other book this year.

There is one more story I’d like to share as I end the series on life lessons learned while living overseas. It’s another one from Russia but it’s a special one engrained in my heart.

The Russian town I lived in was small by Russian standards, only about 100,000 people. There was one small and very old hospital. The previous year I had an emergency appendectomy there and soon realized there is not much to do during the day. No televisions, no food service, nothing – just some radios that didn’t work that well. Visitors were greatly treasured.

A teammate and I began weekly visits with the patients in the women’s ward. The women on this ward were in the hospital for 4 weeks. Needless to say they were eager to talk with anyone who walked through the door.

I’ve always had a fascination with Russia. As a child, I remember sitting and watching the hockey game in the 1980 Winter Olympic games, USA versus the USSR. The Soviet players appeared so serious and void of emotion. “Why do they look so mean?” I asked my father.

He explained the Cold War to me in age appropriate terms. An “us and them” mentality began to grow in my young mind until my dad said something that broke this chain of thought. “You have to realize it’s not the people we are against, it’s their government. It is a group of people forcing evil ways on their country. We must pray for the people in the USSR, for God to help them.”

Fourteen years later I found myself preparing to live in part of the former Soviet Union. I was headed to southern Russia as a missionary. The Iron Curtain had fallen a few years prior. The world had experienced crazy change practically overnight. I couldn’t believe it - had God heard the prayers of my father and thousands and millions of others?