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The Unconventional Weapon of Good

“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
Leo Tolstoy

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Let’s make America good again. Only then will we be called great.

Are you heart-sore from seeing hateful spittle splash daily across your screen? Self-serving pretensions elbow outraged hypertension–is it any wonder we divide?

How will you respond? How should I?

We will either heal, or harm. Our weapons will deepen the darkness or usher in dawn.   There is no neutral position. We will either play this sick game, or bring hope to its exhausted players. We will be overcome by evil, or overcome evil with good.

With every single response.

But, you rightly argue, the word “good” is subjective–applied so confidently to our particular point of view. We’re more comfortable comparing our best days with the other side’s failures than admitting we have little good of our own.

Jesus claimed that “only God is truly good” (Mark 10:18). Perhaps he was warning us, busily inventing our moral hierarchies, to take our eyes off each other and admit we’re together in the same boat. To cheerfully acknowledge that, in an unaided swim from LA to Lahaina, some of us might prove more buoyant or athletic than others, but we would, every single one of us, drown.

Left to our own devices, we all fizzle. Yet, admitting our helplessness opens us to the rush of Greatness through us. The small and the humble are handed the mightiest of tools.

Don’t believe me? Turn off the relentless punditry and study history with eyes wide open. It has been and always will be the cunning wielders of mercy and justice who truly change the world.

The Unconventional Weapon of Good

In Romans 12, Paul lays out the strategy:

  1. Abandon your faith in any human institution or political ideology and allow God to have his way with you. Become the loving nonconformist we are secretly longing to see.
  2. Thirst for justice, but resign from your position as the judge of others, letting God do his (far better) job.
  3. Determine to live your life as a “we” not a “me,” giving yourself away for the sake of the great goodness God has planned for this world.
  4. Seek no other acclaim except that you remind people of Jesus and the world is brighter because you are in it.

Don’t take my word for it. Read Romans 12 as the non-negotiable command for anyone who claims to follow Christ. Read it again and again, until your heart begins to hope.

Let’s tap into this felicitous but formidable firepower so we will be the good in America again and again.

Are you aiming to be great the good way?

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Unpopular Virtue

“Freedom is to be like thee, face and heart; to know it, Lord, I must be as thou art.” ~ George MacDonald

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Vice may be more widely celebrated than virtue. To be free, we’ve come to believe, is to abandon restraint and quiet character, to embrace what is brash and rude, selfish and crude.

“I don’t care what you say, you aren’t the boss of me,” is our new, yet painfully unoriginal, national motto.

And, what was once considered virtue is now held up as vice:

  • Patience  has become a sign of weakness–we demand swift retribution and instant results.
  • Chastity, the ability to restrain or deny sexual appetite, has become a condition to be snickered at, not admired.
  • Charity, the determined desire for the good of all humankind, falters in tribalistic preference–we love and are concerned only for our own.
  • Humility seems pathetic and cowardly, ill-suited to moral outrage and image management.

Thomas Merton wrote half a century ago of the political, religious and relational vices we embrace today. He describes one characteristic of “the devil’s moral theology” as…

“…the exaggeration of all distinctions between this and that, good and evil, right and wrong. These distinctions become irreducible divisions. No longer is there any sense that we might perhaps all be more or less at fault, and that we might be expected to take upon our own shoulders the wrongs of others by forgiveness, acceptance, patient understanding and love, and thus help one another find the truth. On the contrary…the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong.” *

Sound familiar? We have become whiny prisoners of our own shadow self that demands the world bow to our whims.

An unpopular virtue

Only one virtue, unpopular though it may be, will set you free. Only one virtue is a sure sign a person is right with God. What do we call it?

Surrender.

What feels like death, allows us to finally live, as we allow the owner of the blueprints roll up his sleeves, and remodel us into his image. What is that image?

“The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The LORD is good to all, and his compassion is over all he has made” (Psalm 145:8-9).

You will know you are truly free when you can honestly say, “Every day, in my thoughts, words and deeds,  I am becoming more gracious, more merciful, less prone to anger, and better known for my faithful, un-self-conscious acts of love for all who cross my path. A new desire grows, the longing to bestow goodness on everyone, without distinction, empowered by God’s deep compassion and concern for every living thing.” **

How are you doing, in becoming the real you? You won’t be transformed by your own wishful thinking. Instead, surrender everything–the good, bad, and the ugly of your willful yet wondrous self–and declare to Jesus, who is virtue personified, “I care only what you say, you are the boss of me.”

By this you will change the world.

Are you taking the time to listen to the only voice that matters?

*Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, (New York: New Directions Books, 1961), 96.

** See also Galatians 5:22-23.

Photograph by Melanie Hunt
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The Fearless Power Of For

“Let mine be a merry, all-receiving heart, but make it whole, with light in every part.” ~George MacDonald

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True power belongs to those who are for.

For love, for light, for life.

Beauty from ashes, the triumph of truth, goodness turning the tide–this is the plan set in motion from the dawn of human history. The Creator is for his creation.

Are you?

Don’t listen to the lie–that all is lost, that child-like trust in God is for cowards, that brute and crude power will prevail. Boastful hubris is as old as the Fall, the discordant rant of small-hearted fear. Those who choose to be against, choose blindness, choose to create hell right where they are.

Some of us have lingered in the dark doorway for too long, lulled by the bitter, beguiling wailing within. The drumbeat beckons, the dissonance croons, “be against, be angry, trust no one but your own kind. Blame them, hate them, bomb them, fear them, send them all away.”

Repent! The only voice worth heeding has already spoken. “Forgive, forget offenses, forbear the failure and limitations of others, and of yourselves. Forgo self-interest, embrace the forlorn. For I will never forsake you, I am with you.” *

The momentum of history is always forward. God brings us through the frightening present, and never circles back to placate our dim-eyed nostalgia. “Behold I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5) is not wishful thinking, but daily signposts to the future even now unfolding.

The Power of For or the Power of Fear?

The news is forbidding, the odds seem impossible. You are sickened and dismayed by the poison you’ve inhaled. Throw open the windows! Breath in the fresh air of the Real!  Be for what God is for.

Reject

  • rigid ideology
  • political polarity
  • religious pretension
  • and cynical despair,

before you lose the only thing that, in the end, will matter.

“Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell, ” Jesus warns us in Matthew 10:28.

Do you understand what he is saying? The only One with ultimate and complete power over you is the God who sent his Son to die for you.  The cross demonstrates God’s unfathomable, unfailing determination to rescue us from the only thing he has set himself against–the already-defeated, hell-bound usurper we mimic when we refuse God’s “compassion on all he has made” (Psalm 145:9).

The redemptive power of Jesus or that ancient anti-everything deceiver–in this fear-mongered, formidable hour, which will you choose to resemble?

Embrace the fearless power of for, before it is too late.

 

*See, for instance, Matthew 6:14, 16:24-25, 28:20; 1 Corinthians 13, Romans 12, Galatians 5: 19-26

Photograph by Melanie Hunt
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Unfollow The Lie

“Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake.”~ H.L. Mencken

lie

The lie has made us ugly.

But still we inhale, scrolling through the wireless marketplace where once ideas flourished. Now bullies hang about, kicking over common sense, sending kindness crashing, leaving decency in shards.

What is the lie? First, answer this:

Since when is the vulture our national bird? The predators cheered, the broken hearts jeered–what Kool-Aid has made this okay?

To identify the lie, I’ve peered in the darkness, a virtual entomologist lifting every rock. I’ve squinted through the screen at the trolls, the truth-less, the paranoid, resentful self-pitiers before me. And in me.

I think I know its name,  the flattering and infuriating falsehood in the room.

The Lie:

You are superior, you are worthless. You are a god, but you don’t matter. The others must defer to your offended opinion, while you grovel for crumbs of esteem.

What a sea-sickening pendulum of un-grace we swing on. May I offer a humbling cure?

You are little and you are loved. You are limited yet you are empowered. Your life was given to be given away. When you open your heart, you will find what you’re missing. When you humble yourself, your way will be clear.

But first, unfollow the lie.

“Self-love or pride is a sin when, instead of leading you to share with others the self you love, it leads you to keep your life in perpetual safe-deposit. You not only don’t accrue any interest that way but become less and less interesting every day.” ~Frederick Buechner

“And Jesus said: Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 18:3

Have you been sickened lately by the lie?

 

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Be Careful With Your Words, Be Careful With Your Anger

Humility must always be doing its work like a bee making its honey in the hive: without humility all will be lost.” Teresa of Avila

_Bee on flower

Be careful, my child. Gather with care from the wind-borne moment what sustenance you may find.

Keep searching for truth, the sweet amidst the bitter. Be diligent, be sincere, be curious and undaunted.

But be humble. You are only one small laborer in a very large garden. There is so much more than what you see. There is so much less of you than you pretend.

Be careful, my troubled one. Learn to wait, to hover, to rise above the gusty winds of rash and shallow discourse. Tune your ear to listen for reason beneath reaction, for hunger beneath a smug and self-satisfied sigh.

Look deeper. It is not your quick retort, your flush of confusion, your clenched fist, or  your fleeting joy that will sustain you. It is not your solitary or collective understanding that will carry you home.

There is something more substantial beneath your feet, the pulsing life you did not fashion, the steady hum of being not of your own doing. The black-sharpie underline, the emphatic, unfathomable but rock-rooted foundation beneath you–what is it?

Love. Love that never fails, that will not be shaken. God’s glad and unswerving intention that all creation be healed, redeemed, and wondrously restored.

Be careful, then, with your words, for words can’t be unsaid. Be cautious with anger, keep it aimed at its only true target.

Be wary of superior and disdainful certainty. Reject the viral snark, the emotional and simplistic answers of this age. Be humble, be little, refusing to make your viewpoint and half-formed assumptions the interpretive key for all time.

Above all, be stern with your own sin,  your hidden complicity with evil. With joy, receive God’s abundant mercy and forgiveness, and let it spill over and ever upon your neighbor.

Where have you learned to be careful?

Photograph by Melanie Hunt
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Are You A Paint By Number Or An Original Work Of Art?

No great radical idea can survive unless it is embodied in individuals whose lives are the message. ~Erich Fromm

painting in progress

“Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world.” Romans 12:2 may be the most universally ignored command in the Bible, yet the key to all the others. Are you a work of art in progress, or do you counterfeit the crowd?

10 signs you are stuck on a paint-by-number canvas:

  1. You assume God thinks like you do. If you are disgusted, he must be. If you are delighted with yourself, he must be. If you hate yourself, he must too.
  2. When you ask, “What would Jesus do?” you really mean, “What would I do if I were in a good mood?”
  3. You are more excited about the idea of meeting a celebrity than getting to know what Jesus really did.
  4. You are easily swayed to fear, anger or sentimental tears by what you read or watch.
  5. Your opinions reflect the crowd you hang with.
  6. You worry about how you look, or are perceived.
  7. You fret over what you don’t have.
  8. You are more self-protective than self-giving.
  9. You avoid thinking about the suffering of people you don’t know.
  10. You are easily offended and quick to judge.

If you admit to any of these, congratulations. Recognizing the mold you are being squeezed into is the first, important step to resistance. Why be a pre-planned paint-by- number, when you are meant to be a work of art?

10 Steps To Becoming A Work Of Art

  1. Grab onto this truth–God does not think like you do. Isaiah 55:8: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways my ways, says the LORD.” Left to your own devices, chances are very good that the way you perceive things, the ways you respond, are the opposite of God’s. But your mind can be changed.  You can learn to think like God.
  2. Read the Bible yourself. God hasn’t left us clueless, but has ultimately revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ. If you read the Gospels carefully, you will notice that almost every time Jesus  speaks, thinks, and acts, the people around him expect the opposite. If you aren’t astonished by Jesus you haven’t met him yet.
  3. Look in the mirror and repeat these words, “The world around me is bullying me to be something I was never meant to be.”
  4. Look for patterns. One popular paint-by-number perspective? God is indifferent, people are disposable, life is cruel, it’s every man for himself. There you have the subplot of postmodernity.
  5. What you think about God matters. If you believe God is perpetually angry, disgusted, indifferent–that’s the kind of person you will be. If you are perpetually angry, disgusted and indifferent to others, that’s who you suspect God is.
  6. Open yourself to the incomparable mercy and grace of God, and you will become like him.
  7. Die. Actually, die to your presuppositions, prejudices, pressures and patterns–lay down on the operating table and let God give you a self-transplant.
  8. Be renewed by listening to God and loving others the way he does.
  9. Let God fit you with lenses of trust and hope in him.
  10. Turn your attention all day long to what is “true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, or worthy of praise.” Philippians 4:8

 

How are you choosing to be a work of art?

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C Is For Companion, Not Compliance Or Complaint

Love will not be constrained by mastery.~ Geoffrey Chaucer

_Dog through fence

Companion: From the old French, One who breaks bread with another. 

Warmed by mugs of fresh-brewed coffee, they nibble home-made pumpkin bread and admire the first red leaf of autumn resting between them on the worn oak table. Their eyes are kind, their posture comfortable, reflecting other-centered hearts. How have you been? How can I help? What would you advise? I’m grateful to find someone who will listen.

Control: From the old French “to keep accounts.” To exercise dominating influence over.

Stiff arms crossed, they glare at each other across the room, one calculating the best answer to the wailing rant of the other. Crafty maneuvers, evasions and defensive lobs deaden them to the unspoken cries of their own hearts. The air is tense with accusation. What were you thinking? Why do you never? How dare you defy my rights and desires? When will you become the ideal I have in mind?

Companionship or Control, which word best describes the relationships in your life?

God welcomes the human to his new home–a lush garden more beautiful than words can capture. Adam, not yet a proper name, but Hebrew for “earth-made,” is given a task to name the animals. In the midst of the barking, baa-ing, twittering, growling crowd, he hopes to find a companion.

One by one, Milo and Otis, Simba and Barbar approach and lick his out-stretched fingers, adoring. Cute, cuddly, and uncomplicated, a pet just may be the answer.

For the first time, the Creator has noticed something not good. People were not made for solitary life. But an unequal, superior/inferior pairing will not teach us how to love. A helper, an ezer kenegdo, a “sustainer-beside-him” must be found.

A True Companion

The English word “helper” in Genesis 2:18 derails us–a helper implies less-than. Gender, class and race divisions reflect the wretched human tendency to form a pecking order, to dominate each other in any group of more than one. What was the relationship between Adam and Eve? How do they model God’s design for all relationships? Before you decide, consider these other Old Testament verses where the word ezer is found:

Exodus 18:4 Moses names one of his sons Eli-ezer, for “The God of my father was my help, and delivered me from the sword of Pharaoh.”

Deuteronomy 33:7 “O LORD give heed to Judah…strengthen his hands for him, and be a help against his adversaries.”

Psalm 27:7-9 “Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud….Do not turn your servant away in anger, you who have been my help.”

Of the 29 places outside of Genesis 2 the word ezer is used, all but one refer to God. The implication? The first human needed someone to be like God for him, God with skin on, as they say. In marriage, in friendship, in work and church relationships–yes, even in the halls of Congress, God’s intention is for companionship, not control.

Ever since Genesis 3, we’ve resisted the call to companion.

  • We know how to dominate,
  • we know how to cower,
  • we know how to detach.

But we have forgotten how to be the kind of companion/helper God has been to us.

So, later on in our story, God will become human to show us how its done.

How is God calling you to be a companion rather than control freak to others in your life?

 

Welcome to our series, An Alphabet Adagio. We are savoring the story of the Bible, our story, alphabetically. You can subscribe to e-mail above so you won’t miss a letter. Next: D is for Deceived.

Photograph by Melanie Hunt

 

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The Past Is History

Before the hills in order stood, or earth received her frame, from everlasting, thou art God, to endless years the same. ~Isaac Watts

The Abbey Ruins at Alet-les-bains
The Abbey Ruins at Alet-les-bains

I’m drawn to the Old World.  My newer world is still young and forgetful. We pull up history by its roots.

Our rhetoric can be naive, as if the answer lies in the next amazing new thing. As if a heavy foot on the accelerator will take us where we long to be.

Don’t look back! Don’t look inward! Heaven can be purchased at a pre-season sale. Constant innovation and restless self-reinvention will restore our joy.

No wonder we are so tired.

The Dust of History

The river Aude
The river Aude

I’ve come to Alet-les-Bains to paint beside the ancient river Aude. From the snow-melting Pyrenees, the river flows swiftly on its relentless, timeless journey to the Mediterranean Sea.

I breathe in the damp air where once the son of Julius Caesar came to bathe in thermal waters and drink from the natural springs.

I watch a woman fill a bucketful of that same water from a faucet in the town square. Shuttered windows silently watch, as they have through numberless years.

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History is alive in the stones of the hotel, once a Bishop’s palace standing in the shadow of a Benedictine Abbey and Cathedral, later humbly reformed into a henhouse by unforgiving Revolutionaries.

Now her ancient doorways welcome tourists with mushroom omelets and glasses of the region’s fine wine.

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I’m conscious of the dust of history underfoot as I paint the 17th century arched bridge, my progress noted by a curious French hen.

DSC01242 The river flows, the ancient stones crumble, a fellow pilgrim quietly sips a cafe au lait under

wizened trees and gazes at the roses in full scarlet bloom.

I feel the backward pull of the past, while life’s demands draw me forward.

For a moment, paint-brush in hand, I’m free of the future’s uncertainty and the weight of history. I am content to be present, because I remember: While time is slippery, and the ages of humankind converge and diverge like the ebb and flow of tides, I am held by history’s Author. I stand on dependable ground.

O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come; be thou our guide while life shall last, and our eternal home. ~Isaac Watts

 

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When Being Female Is Hazardous To Your Health

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. ~Genesis 1:27

female tears

Their faces haunt me. For their gender alone they’ve endured pain no one should bear, and every day there’s another story, another news update or atrocity uncovered.

When has it ever been so hazardous to be female?

Cleveland and Oxford, New Delhi and Saratoga make headlines, but all over the world infants are aborted for lack of a Y chromosome, elderly women and tiny girls raped for no reason.

Just one story should be enough. Just one child trafficked or passed around at parties should make us shake with rage, and disturb our sleep until every female is safe.

I’m tired of excuses, the ones kept handy to explain it away–she asked for it, she dressed that way, she drank too much, she ran away and into danger, and well, boys will be boys, and always have been. 

I’m angry at Victoria’s Secret, Maxim, and Abercrombie, at The Bachelor and 50 Shades of Grey. I’m tired of the fiction, Christian or otherwise, that a woman is defined by the man at her side. I’m tired of seeing shame in female glances due to dress size or dress downs or someone’s cold sneer.

I’m angry when women play the games we despise, when with gossip and mean-girl strategies we diminish each other. When we stay silent and dumb ourselves down, I’m sad for us all, for

  • doors firmly shut,
  • ministry divided,
  • mutual encouragement that never happens due to jealousy or fear.

God Sees His Reflection In Both Male And Female,

and too often we forget it. What kind of world do I long for? A world where every female knows herself first as a beloved child, as a human being made in the image of God. A world where we all remember: to hurt her, shame her, exploit her, or ignore her is to despise her Creator, to deny His worth.

And the worth of every human male as well.

Do you ever get angry for these vulnerable ones?

[Thank you Dave, Jeff, and Scott for valuing me as the human being I am.]

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Practice Seeing Every Day

Vous, au contraire, vous êtes heureux, vos yeux voient et vos oreilles entendent!

But you, on the other hand, are blessed. Your eyes see and your ears hear! ~ Jesus (Matthew 13:16)

French flag

In a month, I travel to France! Meanwhile, I’ve opened my own practice. I practice packing, I practice sketching, I practice with paints, I practice my French. Je pratique.

Practice French

We sit at a table in the shade, the bouteille d’eau I sip from sweats moisture as the day warms. Un cahier rests by my elbow, its lined pages covered in scribbled notes written with le stylo I grip in my hand.

Right now my brain is cooking. The discussion is en français and my tutor has a lot to say. His paint stained hands gesture with the eloquence of a Parisienne, his grammar is foreign, yet familiar to my heart. Earnest and intelligent, this twenty-something will change the world.

We speak of a time in the past, when culture was not macdonaldized and our souls weren’t numbed by  TV. He waves a finger to remind himself–we can’t just go backwards in time. Desperate times are listed on every decade’s page. I chime in, “Les Miserables,” and he nods, “Exactement.”

He tells me his generation cannot be the hope, l’espoir d’humanitie, alone, but his children will complete the task. I recognize his vision, it mirrors my own longing for the world to be made new.

Quand j’etais une jeune fille, when I was young, my generation dreamed of change. Long-haired and starry-eyed we sang of  peace and justice and a world filled with love. We would be different, we would not conform. Je suis triste, I tell my tutor. I am sad. My generation is just as greedy and indifferent as those who lived before.

I quote a french expression, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Though a native of France, he has never heard the saying. Bon. Good. It’s a proverb for cynics, for those who’ve given up.

Our time has ended and I look across at this young man, his eyes filled with hope and the pain of the world. With hesitant French I compliment him. Vos yeux viorent…your eyes see.

Practice Seeing Every Day

Later I turn to Romans 8, a chapter filled with groaning. Creation groans to be set free from decay, God’s people groan for redemption, and the Spirit groans along. Unhampered by any pain of his own, the Spirit enters ours. He prays for us, for the world, with sighs too deep for words.

Do I pray along with the Spirit or close my eyes and reach for the remote control? My hope is no longer found in human solutions, but I’m a human God can use. An instrument of change in the Spirit’s hand, I must practice every day.

Jesus, help me share your light and hope with the open-eyed I encounter today. Amen

Where are you called to be the eyes that see?

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