When Plans Fail

Eternal God, you call us to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown.  Give us faith to go out with courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us, and your love supporting us, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

For several years a dear friend, mentor, and ministry supporter had been encouraging me to have a plan.  Instrumental in helping me to find new sources of support for my ministry, he wanted me to be able to articulate where I was going to others in such a way that they would catch the vision, be inspired, and be convinced of how vital their partnership was.  Clueless as to how to do this, I would concoct lofty and ambitious tales of what my future would hold, based largely on whims and personal fancy.  How does one develop a plan when so much is in flux?  How can one know what the future holds?  How does one ensure they speak with integrity while still casting a vision of what lay ahead?  For years these questions plagued my ministry and I am so thankful that I feel the light beginning to dawn.

A recent lunch with the aforementioned friend gave much needed clarity to the circumstances I found myself in.  He told me of his early years in the company he now runs, how he understood and enjoyed the business, and how he concluded one day that he would own it.  At the time he had no idea how this would come about, nor how long it would be before it happened, but he had a goal toward which he would work.  In his recounting of this story I began to see why I was never convinced or convincing about my call and conviction to ministry, vocation, or anything else really.  I had it too figured out, or at least I tried to have it too figured out.  And I do this in all spectrums of life.  I can’t begin an exercise program unless I am confident I know how to do it perfectly and that it will thoroughly work my whole body.  When I wish to learn about a new topic I am skeptical of buying introductory texts, convinced instead that I should make one purchase of a complete compendium to the topic so that I never need anything else again.  When I suggested to a friend that we begin to brew beer I had an ambitious plan in mind where we each saved nearly $2000 to buy all the equipment we would ever need.  He countered my suggestion by advising we buy a $100 starter kit to see if we liked it, which proved to be a much wiser idea.  Simply stated, I want control, certainty, and assurance that what I am doing is being done perfectly and that through faithful application I will have measurable results.

But where in the Scripture is that promised?  If it is at all it is certainly not by God.  Rather it is the serpent that assures us that our eyes can be open and that we can be like God knowing good and evil (Gen 3:4).  And I think that is the heart of the matter.  For so long I have felt like I need to know, to master, to control, because I fall victim to the same trick that the first couple did, as John Eldridge says, that God was holding out on them.  I’m not convinced I can trust Him to lead me to the next place, and feel that the general inclinations I get (to pursue academics, to go into campus ministry, to become a pastor) are 1) of my own authorship and 2) need to be filled out with ambitious narratives of what my life will hold.  It’s a questing after significance, an attempt to address the futility and meaninglessness of a life lived outside of the anchoring of God.  And I do it day by day.  It’s a form of greed, to covet experience, to master my existence so that I can feel sustained and satisfied.  I am the rich fool, who is blessed with an abundance and rather than trusting this windfall will be sustained by the provider so long as I use it well, instead seeks to preserve it himself through devising plans that will ensure self-sufficiency and security.  Lord, make me a person who neither forsakes your gifts, nor selfishly seizes them to concoct my own schemes, but one who recognizes your leading and follows it faithfully, being willing to allow the step after next to be shrouded in mystery, and relying on your faithfulness to see me through.

Grief, Loss, Death, and Dying

This is the course that I look forward to, nay long for, after three hours of Presbyterian Polity.  Some might call this morbid or assume that it is a profoundly interesting class.  My retort would be to suggest that they first read the Book of Order and Robert’s Rules before they pass any further judgment.  All kidding aside, I’ve found this class to be at times insightful, in large part because through it I’ve had to think deeply of a reality that our society insulates us against, the very sobering truth that all of us will die.

I can’t say this makes me excited or comfortable at all.  Quite to the contrary, it terrifies me.  I don’t want to die, and much more importantly I don’t want to be left alone through the loss of loved ones be they family or friends.  I don’t want to go young, and the thought of leaving people I care about behind to ask “why” fills me with insurmountable guilt and frequently brings me to prayer, asking God for a long enough life so that no one looks at my parting as tragic.  In thinking about death I think about my diet, my exercise patterns, my consumption of fermented beverages, occasional cigars, transfats, high fructose corn syrup, and any number of other inducements to my personal eschaton.  Death makes me paranoid.  It makes me wonder why I live so far from my family and friends, why I am even further from Mikhal, why I wasted my college years by not applying myself, why I haven’t learned to surf, and why I still delay each day in offering my prayers and reading the Bible as faithfully as I would like (Psalm 90:11 – Who regards the power of your wrath?  Who rightfully fears your indignation?).  Death’s relentlessness makes me cautious to say “it could never happen to me,” and makes me ashamed of the moments when my persistent stubbornness, envy, gluttony, and meanness betray a life lived believing it really couldn’t.  Death is a puzzle I perpetually wrestle with, a rubix cube which I toy with out of curiosity and earnest (albeit limited) belief that I can overcome, yet cast aside in frustration when I realize I’ll never be able to move beyond it.

I, of course, could cite gratuitous biblical assurances about life in Christ, how in being bound to him in death we are raised in life, how belief in him assures us of eternal life, how all things are made new through him, and for the record I believe them all.  Yet, I think that the hope we as Christians have for a better and future life is often co-opted by us to remove the true tragedy that is the loss of death.  Such hope, like the culture we exist in, can be put to the malevolent use of denying death, of overlooking its immanence, its stealth, its treachery.  It anticipates a coming Kingdom without a cross and in the process it trivializes Christ.  What more, it makes me forget the preciousness of this world and the call I am given to care for it, even if that comes at the expense of myself.

I don’t know what the solution to this is.  I want to live life in a way where I recognize death’s immanence, but where such an unavoidable end prompts me not to wallow in creature comforts but to further extending of myself to others.  I want to trust in the Resurrection and set myself free from the fear that I only have one life to live, a fear that convinces myself it is best lived for me.  Yet, I don’t want to use the promise of new life as a salve for covering the awfulness of death, which is the silencing of the beauty that exists in this life.  For in doing so, I neglect that beauty, I deny the fact that what comes to an end here were things of merit, and I neglect God’s Work in Creation.  How do I walk such a balance?

Desiring Grace

I will run in the way of your commandments when you enlarge my heart - Psalm 125:32

Oh how often I struggle with stammering out prayers, remaining obedient in the midst of temptation, being aware of the Lord’s presence amidst the humdrum moments or frantic escapades of daily life.  Recently I accepted an invitation into the Company of New Pastors, a five year mentoring program offered by the PCUSA designed to assist new clergy through their first call in the church.  The Company is based around a commitment to continued spiritual and intellectual growth and all participants are to abide to a covenant of daily scripture reading and the practice of spiritual disciplines.  This terrifies me.  I am so incapable of developing any habits other than bad ones that I fear I am going to drop the ball.  So many days I wake up and don’t want to engage in dialog with God, be it because I am busy and feel like I would only be wasting my time to do something so foolish as slowing down, because I am angry and don’t want to be forced to give up my indignant posture just yet, or simply because I am feeling good, strong, and disturbingly independent.  I need God’s grace to teach me discipline.  I need His presence to break my heart over the world’s suffer and to shame myself for the egocentric life I lead.  I need Him to give me just enough grace to turn my moments of panic into those of respite, my malice into praise, and my cockiness into contrition.

I often hear times hear such wonderful tidbits of insight in my day to day life that I want to scratch down and post on my wall next to my bed in order that I might wake up to them and reflect on them daily.  But if I’m honest with myself I know I’d never do it.  I establish structures in my life which I inevitably find a way to subvert and then I go on in the old ways, except now I have one more thing I need to work around.  Structures, like the Law in Paul’s appraisal, often serve to further enslave me.  They bind me to a belief in my own ability to achieve, succeed, and conquer.  They bind me to a belief that I can be sanctified without involving God.

Yet insolence is not a suitable alternative.  God’s grace is not cheap, and the Scriptures testify to a mysterious cooperative relationship where God’s grace interacts with human effort.  So where do I stand in forming disciplines?  I don’t know.  I wish like so many other tidbits of wisdom that I collect throughout my life that the verse above would be my constant refrain.  That through praying it I would acknowledge day in and day out my desire to do good but my understanding that God alone can bring that good about in me.  For too often I acknowledge a desire to do good once or twice a week, and live as a tyrant for the other five days.  So too do I wish that the words of the man, whose son was possessed by an evil spirit that the disciples could not drive out, were constantly on my lips, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.” For I truly think that I asked more often he certainly would.

It never ceases to amaze me how far God has already brought me.  I am, in all things, a miscreant whose half-hearted efforts I can’t imagine fooling people for all that much longer.  And yet, it feels like I’m still fooling God, as though He buys my piety and love hook, line, and sinker.  Of course I know he doesn’t.  Of course He sees through even the most robust veneer of deception I can muster, but He doesn’t stop there.  He plants something good in a wicked frame and takes the malevolent and contorted desire I have to present myself as more than I am and somehow honors even that, by actually making me to be more than I previously was.  Oh I wish I had the strength to ask Him to do even more, each and every day.  I wish I could free myself from trying to be something I am not, and dedicate that time to Him in asking Him to show me what I am, and to shape me as He would.  Perhaps that fickle desire is enough, and so I’m waiting on Him.

A God of Mystery

I am shamefully remiss in my New Year’s Resolution to read the scripture each day, and now after nearly a month away I am finally stumbling through Leviticus in a lofty goal to get back on track.  Leviticus, with the latter part of Exodus and the whole of Numbers is, in my humble opinion, some of the most boring and tedious territory in the Bible, consisting of approximately 1000 instructions to the nation stated roughly 5000 times.  The repetition quickly seems like redundancy, and the nature of the regulations feel obscure, even irrelevant, making me wonder what I am to make of a large swath of the Pentateuch when considering Holy Scripture.

For me this strangeness was for a long time something to be ignored or glossed over in my personal devotions, but of late it’s become a more prominent public concern.  This is so because over spring break I received a call from a friend asking to talk to me about Christianity.  To say that this surprised me would be a profound understatement, as this friend now seeking a relationship with God had long been an avowed agnostic.

We met on a Saturday for what was far too brief a time in which to catch up, sample Lancaster’s stunning array of coffee shops, and talk theology.  After a few hours I needed to get on the road so we committed ourselves to an email dialog about his journey of exploration in the Christian faith.  Before departing I did my best to give him some tips about theological precepts to keep in mind and where to begin a study of the Bible, however I felt whatever I could say would prove frightfully inadequate to support him in his journey.  After my reading this morning in the Pentateuch my concerns are heightened all the more.

It just seems so odd to me that God would require so much from the nation, that to make sacrifices the people would have to be meticulous in their observance, that specific clothing needed to be worn, specific times kept after ritual purity had been compromised, and that when these standards were abandoned the results were often fatal.  Then to assume that God is inherently linked with Christ (is indeed Christ), and that there is all at once no distinction yet profound diversity among these two people of the Trinity, makes conceiving His person all the stranger.  It seems hard to believe the God who demanded ritual purity and extreme cultic offerings would later declare all foods clean, condemn the Temple system, and associate with the very parties the Jews feared would keep them from right worship of the Lord.  At very least it makes for an incredibly complex character with who Christians are forced to reconcile.  I also have trouble thinking of the same God dwelling in me through faith, both authoring, extending, and abiding in that faith, and transforming me into one bearing the likeness of the Son, who is the Image of the Father.  When I consider how malevolent I can be I don’t see that image developing.  When I think of the ways I have improved, I soon find myself given over to pride and once again I question whether I’ve changed at all.  However, when I see the people that God favors in the Bible… those who deceive their brothers, shrewdly capitalize on their enemies, and wipe out inhabitants of lands they will soon occupy I can see a parallel to myself, but it is not one I like and it leads me to question the type of God I follow, who would suffer people like me.

Of course I could address these questions through the narrative of scripture, could argue that God has a plan and that the point is that He chooses the worst and weakest through which He manifests His glory.  But I don’t think it’s a bad thing to let the tensions hang.  So often, as the liberal Protestants of the past several centuries have done, I want to eliminate the confusing, transcendent, and altogether “other” nature of God.  In essence, I want to conform Him to my understanding rather than letting Him shape it.  I would gladly do away with judgment, wrath, divine anger, and legalism if only I could… yet it exists as part of God’s person and therefore I need to reckon with it.  For many, I fear that causes them to turn away, to leave frustrated by the fact that God seems so callous and cultic at times, often in profound opposition to the graceful nature of Christ.  I consider myself blessed to be blissfully ignorant enough to allow contradictions and blatant offenses regarding the character of God to be subsumed within a more general creed that “God is love.”  What that means for legalism, judgment, and wrath I don’t always know, and perhaps my best contribution to the conversation is simply to admit that.  Hopefully, through testifying to that Love as it is experienced in my own life I can aid others in reconciling the illogically transcendent character of the Divine Other.

Letting Things Go

357 days… that’s how long its been since I last wrote on this page.  It’s astounding to think through the places I’ve been in that time both geographically as well as emotionally and spiritually.  Since I last wrote Mikhal came home, was offered another job in the Congo, and returned.  I spent the summer in Minneapolis.  A beach project came and went in which I had no involvement.  I’ve rethought my educational and vocational goals about a million times.  I’ve made friends, found a church, made decisions that will impact my life, had a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s, and also had a slew of occasions arise where I felt like I never did anything interesting.  To say that trying to recap the highlights of this past year in any detail would be foolhardy is a profound understatement, though even now the temptation arises.  When Mikhal and I drove across the country at the end of summer 2008 I remember a distinct conversation we had about what heaven will be like, a topic we have revisited on more than one occasion since.  I mentioned that for me some memories are so dear, the events which they encapsulate so seemingly perfect, that I must envision an eternity where they can be relived perpetually, in addition to a limitless number of new possibilities to be realized in a Creation now reclaimed by the rightful King.  Jim Skillen (whom I am indebted to for perspectives on a great number of things beyond the title of this blog) had mentioned earlier that summer at the Civitas program of which I was a part that heaven must be all we can conceive and more.  I like that, it’s what I’ve always believed.

I mention this now with my temptation to try and record the events of the last year in mind.  For this desire rises out of a strange mix of longing to relive that which was noteworthy, learn from that which was difficult, and alleviate fears that somethings will be forgotten altogether, never to be experienced again.  To me, my desire to record represents the height of a lack of faith in what lay beyond.  This is in no way to say that journaling, or blogging, or keeping photo albums are in any way bad habits to cultivate, but to recognize that even in these praiseworthy endeavors I recognize within me a need to possess, control, and dominate the life which I so often feel as though I am hurtling through.  For me, it is critical to understand that this life is one in which good things must come to an end, that good times, friendships, people, and even our memories of them must die, if there is to be any hope of a coming resurrection.  To not sit before my computer screen for hours meticulously mapping out the most important events of the past year is for me an act of faith, a confession to God that deep down I know that He has much higher regard for the good experiences He has blessed me with than I ever could, and that should it be His will He will reunite me with them in Paradise.

So I tentatively begin my blogging career again, knowing full well that though I enjoy to write the pressures of academics, the opportunities that arise in the moment, and the absence of muse may all result in another year of silence, and a painful goodbye to those things now forgotten.  This past year has been a tumultuous, exciting, heartbreaking, and uplifting experience where I’ve seen, experienced, and learned things I never thought I would, and I praise God for all that.  Moreover I praise God that He has given me the power to forget, for in my inability to recount the thing that caused such laughter on that day last summer, or the order of events I so meticulously planned so that to my time in Philadelphia during Christmas break would be memorable, I have found an ability to trust that those things are being stored up and preserved for me in my true home with Christ, in which all things find their meaning.

Systems Theory

There are days when I leave school excited to delve into my reading, but soon realize that in order to understand the cultural shift from modernism to postmodernity, I need to have a working knowledge of chaos theory and scientific systems that exhibit nonlinearity.  It is at this point that I wonder how, having deliberately chosen a path of study in which I would never have to relive the perplexity I experienced in math and science classes again, I have now stumbled onto articles in seminary that presuppose a working knowledge of molecular physics.  These are the times I need prayer.

A limited view on a big picture.

One waiting for the train at Market East in Philadelphia will find a wall lined with thousands of frightfully gaudy ceramic tiles, clearly installed in the 70′s when people thought that ugly things looked nice.  It’s hard to comprehend what the designer was thinking as you stand on the platform, but should you miss your train and make a run to Sbarro before the next one arrives, you can see from the escalator that there is indeed method to the madness.  From afar the obscure tiling is distinctly ordered to produce a colossal mosaic of trees in the early autumn before the leaves fall.  The splotches of reds, oranges and yellows begin to make sense in the landscape they encompass.  My point in all of this is to simply say: sometimes in the midst of things it’s hard to see the big picture.

I spent the last three years working for a campus ministry organization called the CCO.  While this time had its joys and successes, many were the days when I would come home from a poorly attended bible study and wonder if my efforts were doing any good at all.  Often times it seemed that the “mountain moments,” those times when I felt as though all things were lining up and moving in a generally positive direction, were interspersed with long sojourns through dark and lonely valleys.  Though I knew good had come of my efforts on campus, when I submitted my resignation, I wondered how much.

Since arriving at Fuller I’ve had my thinking on this matter challenged, having watched the ministry I left behind flourish.  At Ursinus two of the students I worked most closely with now serve on the executive team and have recruited over fifteen students to attend the CCO Jubilee conference (and this without a CCO staff member on campus!), have planned an international mission trip so as to have a real encounter with true poverty (they are going to Guatemala this March), and are regular attendees at the college chapel service (a good place for getting to know other Christians not generally involved with our ministry).  In addition to this, several friends and partners in ministry have come along side some of my former students.  All these things made it clear to me that my work was not in vain and that God would preserve that which was good.

And I don’t suppose I should have ever doubted that.  After all, it doesn’t really matter who is leading the ministry in any particular season, all of it is God’s, as are the long-term successes and major breakthroughs.  At Fuller where I have dozens of opportunities that present themselves every day, I am beginning to realize that not seeing a linear pattern to success, agendas, ministries or careers, isn’t such a bad thing.  I’ve learned that my job here and now is what it has always been… to focus on those few tiles (be they students, friends, responsibilities, opportunities or studies) that are in my immediate line of vision.  They may be ugly, they may be quite beautiful, they may need recaulking or just a good scrubbing.  And sometimes they really don’t need anything at all, but for the moment, I’ve been elected the privilege of stewarding them.  The part they play in the larger mosaic God is putting together is not my concern, nor is wondering if and when I will see new tiles or the whole picture.   Rather, all I should be concerned with is caring for them, so that they may faithfully execute their role in the bigger endeavor and give glory to the Artist in the grand exhibition He is unveiling.