Have Faith

Have Faith, Pursue truth!

In the coming days, week’s, months, as you encounter ideas and situations that seem a challenge to your faith or a challenge to Christianity itself, how do you think you’ll respond?  Will you continue in your faith?  If so…how will you do that?

There are two paths that I hope you don’t take…One is to give up…to easily be defeated.  (Sometimes people abandon their faith)

The other is to retreat.  Sometimes we run; we decide to just stick with what we know and with people who think the same as we do. We ignore the challenge, or dismiss it easily.  At least we keep our faith, but I think the result is a weak and less effective faith.

In the face of challenging ideas, to give up or to retreat, while both are very real temptations, to choose them is to choose NOT to do the hard work of faith.  And it’s hard work – it’s hard to honestly and seriously wrestle with an idea or challenge.

To do the hard work of faith, to be a genuine person of faith in this world, I think that amongst other things, this involves two key qualities:  humility and courage. (And perhaps in a different way than you might think) Humility, to realize we may need to change a belief that needs to change; and courage, to look our questions and doubts in the eye, and not to look away.

In thinking about how to encourage you in your faith, two people come to mind: Galileo and Thomas.

I think about Galileo a lot.  He lived at a time when most everyone around him believed something that he figured out was wrong, and he was persecuted for it.  You probably know that he, along with Copernicus, discovered that the sun is stationary and the earth moves around it.  The church leaders and most Christians at that time were convinced that the earth was the centre of things, and that the sun revolved around it.  People had believed this for centuries, and they firmly believed this in large part because of what the Bible said.

And Galileo, he had it right, but he was labelled a heretic, his works banned and confiscated, and he was ordered to abandon his ideas.  At his condemnation, the Holy tribunal stated that his ideas were “absurd and false”, because they were “expressly contrary to the Holy Scriptures”.

There are plenty of other examples of Christians sincerely getting it wrong.  The gravestone of a seventeenth century American Puritan reads, “Sacred to the memory of Lynn S. Love, who, during his lifetime, killed 98 Indians that had been delivered into his hands by the Lord.  He had hoped to make it 100 before the year ended when he fell asleep in the arms of Jesus in his home in New York state”.

It’s easy for us centuries later, to be smug, and from a distance think, “How incredible; how could they have gotten it so wrong?”  But living then, that’s what made sense to them; it was hard for them to see another way.

We are not at the end of history.  We, like they, are just at a point along the way, and if we are sincerely interested in truth, we need to remain open to where we may need to see things differently, and to the fact that where Christians see themselves today, at times, may in fact be wrong.

It’s a kind of integrity of the mind.  We are called to love God with all of our heart, soul, strength, and MIND.  When we are challenged, our first reaction needs to be an honest desire for the truth, whatever that might be.  And that can be hard, but sometimes it’s the heretics who have it right.

Continue in your faith; a faith that is strong because it loves the truth. You can rest in the knowledge that “All truth is God’s truth”.  That His truth will endure, and that a genuine pursuit of truth, ultimately brings us closer to a deeper knowledge of God. We hold onto God, not necessarily to all of our ideas about God.  Remember Galileo.

Living with that kind of openness means also being open to our own doubts and questions.  And that brings me to Thomas.

A Calvin College professor, in a recent article, describes Thomas’ so-called doubt as “a kind of brutally honest faith.”  He reminds us that Jesus didn’t actually die in his sleep.  Thomas’ questions were real and Jesus doesn’t reject him.  What does He say?  He says, “Peace be with you.”  Then He invites him to wrestle with his questions as Jesus invites Thomas to put his hand into His broken body – to enter the brokenness.

When I was in high school, even though I was a leader of a Christian rock band, I certainly had questions about my faith, and still do.  In particular…then it was the Holocaust and God’s apparent absence.  I heard all of the explanations about God and evil, but none of it made much of an impression.

Someone then pointed me to the writer Rilke.  In his “Letters to A Young Poet” he writes, “I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books, written in a very foreign language.”  He goes on to say not only to love the questions, but LIVE the questions.

It’s easier to live feeling like we have everything all figured out; it’s usually harder but more real to live with our questions.  Every question is not neatly linked to an answer, and when we doubt and struggle, we can do it in the spirit of the psalmist and the prophets, and our questions and shouts become a prayer.

Elie Wiesel was fifteen when he was taken from his home to the Auschwitz concentration camp and then to Buchenwald, where his parents and young sister died. He saw other children die there too.  He didn’t write of his experience until 10 years after his liberation, but when he did, one of the things he said was simply this: “I don’t have the answers but I have a lot of very good questions”.

Christianity and the Bible itself asks a lot of good questions, and the Christian life is not so much about having all the answers, but about living deeply within those questions that really matter.

Last year, the journals of Mother Teresa were made public, and they revealed serious questions she had about her faith and her work. This great woman of faith lived with serious doubts.  This, of course, should not surprise us.  She along with so many others, from Abraham to St. John of the Cross, lived a genuine life of faith.  It has been said that spiritual development is founded on two crucial things; the first is great faith; the second is great doubt.  We seek truth, but we see “through a glass darkly.”  At the heart of it all remains a mystery.

Remember Galileo – be unafraid of new ideas.  Remember Thomas – be unafraid of your own questions.  And with Galileo on one side, and Thomas on the other…trust God, have faith.  Choose to hold onto God, and trust that He holds onto you in the messy-ness of this life of faith.

We are going to need that style of faith.  It’s not exactly a cheery time to be on this planet.  The planet, the world is in crisis, and we have before us a tremendous challenge and opportunity – it’s a huge responsibility to be alive at this point in time…to shape the changes we so desperately need.

May our faith guide us.  May it be a healthy, vibrant, full, deep faith…a faith that can stand the light of day, and endure the dark of the night.  May it give you hope and vision…courage and strength.

DC

I'm A Champion!

I am telling you I am a world class champion at proving my own humanity.

It is so hard to be an awesome bubble of kindness and love when you have a mondo backache and you are super hungry times five. It’s hard to keep hope when the world's cup runneth over with hopelessness. How am I supposed to fit in a round hole when I am an incredibly deformed peg? 

I want to be the kind of person who loves on people when I feel like a drawer full of socks. I want to be joyful and hopeful in the midst of the most down trodden situations. I want to always say and do the right things and always keep my word. I want to always win the war with my flesh. I want to learn from my monumental mishaps and never let them haunt and taunt me, but the truth is I am made of flesh and blood. 

I have scars on my arms and forehead to prove the fact that my skin is easily penetrated. I cry when my heart hurts. I use my tongue like a weapon when I am angry, and I hate every bit of that. But the only hope I find in all of this mess that I create daily is that The Guy who made heaven and lady bugs and the heart that beats in my chest (most of the time!) loves me just as I am and has my back. He never promised me a life of perfection, but he did promise me a life of forgiveness and hope in the midst of my human state.

I'm afraid this is about FEAR!

Fear is one of life's most tragic emotions.  It cripples....it disables...it robs us of desire, and generally....it's irrational.

I've never used to like flying.  I mean...I have had some pretty awful flights.  During my hey-day of traveling, I sometimes did close to 200,000 air miles a year...more than most pilots!  I've thankfully worked through this irrational fear, and now really enjoy flight.  But during the years of fear, I would lament my "plight of flight".

I've watched fear strip the powerful of the very attributes that made them effective.  I've seen fear destroy.

The turning point for me was watching the movie, The Wizard of Oz as an adult.  The cinematic epiphany for me was the hidden (yet obvious, that time around) message entwined in the story of the Cowardly lion.

I have always been struck by the story of the Cowardly Lion.  In the Wizard of Oz, the Cowardly Lion always possessed the courage he longed for.  He ALWAYS had that courage.  But it took a charlatan medicine man, posing as a wizard, to realize that all the lion needed was some affirmation.  The Wizard knew that if he merely put a medal on the lion, it would release what was already in him. 

The lion was a kitty cat...afraid of his own tail. The Wizard (medicine man, for all intents and purposes) knew of a device to release the very thing that he KNEW the lion possessed.  For deep within the lion's DNA was a genetic predisposition of great courage.  Never mind that the lion didn't recognize this, the Wizard did.

As I age, I am becoming less and less fearful. In fact, I LOVE the adventure of the unknown.  So much more to experience…..so much more to achieve. Courage….like the story of the Cowardly Lion, has always been a part of my nature.  I now “roar” at life!

So...with great pomp, the Wizard placed a medal on the Lion.  In this one act, the Lion felt validated and empowered.  He was no longer fearful....all this from a charlatan. 

LIGHTS OUT

LIGHTS OUT

(For those of you who know me, you know my fascination with space flight)

It was my privilege to know the late astronaut, Colonel Jim Irwin.  Jim served as lunar module pilot for Apollo 15, July 26 to August 7, 1971. His companions on the flight were David R. Scott, spacecraft commander and Al Worden, command module pilot. Apollo 15 was the fourth manned lunar landing mission and the first to visit and explore the moon's Hadley Rille and Apennine Mountains which are located on the southeast edge of the Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains). The lunar module, "Falcon", remained on the lunar surface for 66 hours, 54 minutes-setting a new record for lunar surface stay time-and Scott and Irwin logged 18 hours and 35 minutes each in extravehicular activities conducted during three separate excursions onto the lunar surface.

The other day, I watched Apollo 13 again.  Jim Lovell, the commander of the mission, tells a story in the film, which is a true story.  It all about a mission he flew as an Air Force pilot during the Korean War.  He was launching and landing on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.  As he was returning to the carrier, he lost all power to his jet.  So…a bit of an emergency for sure.  He had his interior lights, so he could see his altitude and avionics.  There was a very low cloud cover that night (oh yeah, it was a night mission) so he had no appreciable way of seeing where the carrier was.  He descended below the clouds, and then things got WAY worse.  He lost ALL electronics…no interior lights…no nothing!  He said he assumed he would have to ditch in the Pacific…never a good choice, as any aircraft is not built for that sort of thing. 

As he continued to descend, and with little hope, he noticed something strange.  He saw a luminous, green glow in the water, in a straight line, going for about a kilometre or so.  Very strange.  He then remembered that there was a type of plankton that is found in marine environments, that, when disturbed, glow green.  He figured out that this was happening due to the propeller stirring up the water, and in the wake of the ship, this green algae was "lighting up the runway" for him.

Interesting that the most desperate, hopeless time for Lovell was the very thing that saved him.  Had he not lost all his lights, particularly the planes interior lights, he would have never seen the glow of the plankton in the water.

Sometimes, it is in our most desperate situation that we find our mercy…our rescue…our hope.

First blog....

The “need” vs. “want” quotient

One of the powerful dynamics in my character that was “sealed” by Dylan was the dynamic of “need” vs. “want”. It’s a concept that came to mind back during the post drama from the dissolution of my marriage. One of the things I noticed about character was found in both my ex-wife and myself. There was an abundance of co-dependency which caused me to consider the following...

One of the most dangerous dynamics in relationships and in the church community is need.  Why?  Well….”need” obligates…”want” validates.  That’s right……”need” obligates.

If I ask 100 men what they would rather hear from their wife/girlfriend, “I need you” or “I want you”, 98 of them would choose the second response.  That’s right…..the notion of “want” is far more provocative than “need”.  When your significant other says, “Oh…I need you”, straight away you either HAVE to fulfill that need or dash an expectation or worse of all, COMPLETE SOMEONE!

Look…the miracle of marriage as defined in the Scriptures is, “The two shall become one”.  This, reader, is indeed a miracle. But sadly, it’s also rare.  More often than not, we find two very incomplete people coming together, and it’s “The two halves become one”.  This isn’t a miracle, this is math. 

The question is, “Where is personal wholeness”? The church sure doesn’t promote it.  In fact, the church is famous for stifling it. The church, unwittingly has held personal wholeness hostage in favour of having people in a perpetual posture of need. 

Need of God is Holy and right.  We all NEED God.  But to NEED our pastor’s Saviour or the church for anything more than a corporate gathering of like-faithed people, coming together in community and WHOLENESS is a recipe for disaster.

People often say, “Less of me and more of You, Lord”.  That’s great, if there is a YOU that is whole.  Then the sacrifice is meaningful.

Dylan is chronic care, for the most part. Someone is obligated to attend to his every need.  But he can’t manage his own needs….mentally and physically.  But we can.  It’s a full time job…it’s a sacrificial job…and it’s care without a choice.  It’s NOT whole, but it’s due to disability.

What’s stopping you from being whole?  Do you think that when God breathed _______________ (insert name here) into being, His notion was for you to be incomplete? Or do you think that we have everything we NEED according to His riches through Christ Jesus?  Ya can’t have it both ways.

Back to personal relationships…What if you were self sufficient?  Whole. Do you see how powerful the term, “I want you” can be?  Now no longer must someone fulfill an expectation, but rather, can choose to respond out of a giving heart rather than an obligation. What would a relationship look like that wasn’t founded on need?

And….what would a church look like that wasn’t operated on need? Imagine a church where the parishioners were there because they choose to be there.  Imagine a church where the leadership led people to their provision, without thought of losing financial security.

The whole point of this post is that whether in relationship or in community, the more “whole” one can be; the more freedom you offer…the more choice you offer.  I don’t need you….I WANT you!