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Confession: The Gift We’ve Abandoned

“Few things accelerate the peace process as much as humbly admitting our own wrongdoing and asking forgiveness.”
– Lee Strobel

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In a world where disagreeable ditches outnumber beneficent bridges, confession is our only hope.

Without confession, we are lost in a fog of angry bewilderment. Why am I so messed up? Why don’t people act the way I want them to? Why is God so distant?

But today we fight for our lives in a “no regrets” cultural arena, where only the weak admit error, only the cowardly apologize, and irrational certainty  has replaced gentle humility in the face of the frightening unknown.

Families, communities, nations crumble around us. But we, individually and collectively, would rather die (or pay exorbitant legal fees) than to squeeze out the words, “It’s all my fault, it’s my wrong decisions, my selfish, thoughtless bent that contributed to or caused this mess. Please forgive me and allow me to make it right.”

Confession is no picnic. By admitting our complicity with all the ugly and un-right, we voluntarily stand naked before a critical crowd. How do we find the courage to confess?

First, we stop pretending.

A still-wet oil painting rests on an easel in my kitchen. As I chop vegetables, or unload the dishes, the canvas “talks” to me, mentioning too-hard edges, confusing brush strokes, or muddied color.  My embarrassing mistakes transform into helpful reminders as I tackle the next fresh surface. The desire to create better, more beautiful art turns out to be more important than pretending I already have.

In the same way, the practice of confession increases my desire to lead a better, more beautiful life, instead of pretending I already am.

Confession: A Daily Inventory

So, I attempt to inventory each day before the God who made me, loves me and sees me as I am. The steps are simple: What am I grateful for? How was I unloving today in my attitudes and actions? Forgive me, help me make it right with those I’ve harmed, and grant me your grace and wisdom for the new day.

Imagine if confession were a collective practice, if heartfelt gratitude, contrition, and hope dominated our gatherings?

What if, like God, we handed each other a daily blank canvas, trusting God to paint something new?

From the Book of Common Prayer

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.

We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.

For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name.

Amen.

Why not make a habit of daily confession? You’ll find it to be good for the soul.

Have you experienced the restorative gift of confession?

 

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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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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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The Peril of Perfection

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor…

~Anne Lamott

I awake from a dream about color, vivid slathers of oily orange resting beside cerulean blue. In my sleep, my brush is masterful, my palette true, I paint with exquisite perfection the tropical  hues, the radiant mix only the Creator could compose.

Rubbing my eyes, I wander into the kitchen to the smell of fragrant coffee. I’m itching to begin, my dream a hopeful omen for this stunning, sultry day.

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I lay out my paint supplies on the lanai and respectfully fasten my 6×8 to the easel.  Deeply inspired by the sun-lit scene before me, I take a breath and begin.

I fail… in slow motion. As the distant waters purple and the sand-warmed shallows turn to green, as the sun-kissed patio below me dazzles with cadmium, ochre, and magenta, my brush-stokes pile with clumsy, muddied confusion.

The Peril Of Perfection

In moments like these I’m tempted to quit, to believe the goal of art, of life, of existence, is to be extraordinary, to surpass all previous attempts. I compare my worst with another’s fine-tuned best, I contrast my flawed attempts with photo-shopped perfection, and lose courage.

Perhaps you do too.

Has our battered self-image ever been so ruthlessly under review? Have we always been required to justify our existence, to prove our value before the stone-eyed gaze of a virtual crowd?  Public humiliation follows one viral posting, personal rejection from one withheld “like”. Social media provides an ongoing beauty pageant, a hall of fame or shame, depending on the whim of your followers.

Yet, the struggle with perfectionism grows from ancient roots. Our anguish and often anger at a world we cannot mend, the burden of our simultaneously high and humble calling, is not new. To be human is to bear astounding potential within a leaky vessel, to find ourselves able to soar near the sun the same moment our wings begin to melt.

We Participate In Another’s Perfection

The same God who designed Hawaii also created me. I sense him at my shoulder, pleased when I notice the light in the shadows, the way the waves tease the shore, but whispering, “well done,” when I mix on my palate his compassion and kindness for the people I’d rather ignore.

Do you know this? As a human being you are designed not for perfection, but for participation in a perfection you can’t achieve on your own.

His perfect love to redeem every hate-filled act.

His perfect truth to counter every person-demeaning lie.

His perfect beauty to remind you, no matter how badly your life has been muddied, the divine Artist has not finished his masterpiece yet.

 

Do you struggle with perfectionism? 

 

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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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The Introvert’s Dilemma

“Introverts treasure the close relationships they have stretched so much to make.”~ Adam S. McHugh

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It was my choice to come, but I’m not comfortable, here on the surface with you.

I’m uneasy with shifting currents, with bluster and gusting demands for attention, as voices dive and swirl overhead. If I try to speak, my words toss on the waves, or spray away with the wind–a salty rebuke, a briny betrayal of convictions too early exposed.

Why does it feel like conversation is a competition and I’ve left my weapons on the shore?

I don’t know why you glance away at my remark. I can’t detect the meaning behind your unfiltered words, your sudden distraction, your frustrated sigh. You probably don’t understand my frowning intensity, or my stammered, stymied replies. I can’t fathom your serial  selfies, you are amazed at my turtled retreat. You say a thing, and mean another, I say a thing and wish I hadn’t, because there was something so much better to be said.

But I won’t know it until you’re out of earshot. Until, in the quiet of dawn, my heart belatedly speaks.

The Introvert’s Invitation

The wild and windblown shallows are not my home–they are where I must come to find you.  But I wish you would know my Introvert world, how deep beneath the chit and the chat there is airy calm, the slow, weighted drift of ideas and wonder. There, where words can linger, one finds acceptance and patience for unfashionable questions, for half-shaped answers, for unspoken, subtle delight. In a quiet corner of this sub-marine cavern is a table set only for two.

Some have been willing to join me there. Will you?

A Postscript

I would laminate the words above and hang them around my neck if I thought it would make a difference. In the company of others I feel the need to explain myself, though no one has ever asked. Do you Introverts resonate? Can you Extroverts understand? I recently thumbed through a thesaurus and found this.

Extrovert: outgoing, unselfish, sociable, people-oriented, friendly, amicable, congenial.

Introvert: self-observer, self-absorbed, brooder, muser, shy, bashful, timid, wallflower.

I wonder which type wrote the book…

 

Photograph by Melanie Hunt
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Z Is For Zoe: Live The End Of The Story

“I don’t think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for. ~Norman Mailer

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No greater tragedy can befall us than our own refusal to live.

A dear friend, a wise counselor, used to ask, “How old were you when you died?” At what age, because of what distressing event, or mistaken conclusion, did you shutter your dreams and forget why God made you? When did you choose death?

The Bible uses three Greek words for life:

  • bios–what you have, your age, size, net worth, accomplishments, possessions.
  • psuche–what you are, your personality, choices, ambitions, dreams, what you do with what you have.
  • zoe–what you can be.  The eternal, abundant, joy-filled, ever-renewed life of God we lost when we were D is for Deceived.

“I have come that they may have zoe…” Jesus claimed, and nothing delights him more than one person trusting him enough to live freely, love boldly and follow him eagerly no matter the cost.

We’ve come to the close of our Alphabet Adagio. The last book of the Bible plays the stunning finale of the biblical story, a lingering glimpse of a future with its fingerprints  all over the present. Someday, every broken life will be mended, all injustice upended, evil forgotten, darkness dispelled, creation lovingly made new. No sorrow, no pain, no death, no lies, no loneliness will haunt us. Earth and heaven will embrace forever, as God makes his home among us.

Someday.

But, if we are in Christ, the future is laughing within us. We live the happily ever, even while battered by the now.

How?

This is the power of the resurrected Christ. Indwelled by the zoe of God, we are bridges from the now to the will be. As healers of the broken, as conduits of his joy, as light in dark places, as bearers of compassion, as truth-tellers in the face of lies, we plant hope where nothing else grows.

Unless we forget how to live.

Are you living the end of the story? Say “yes” to Jesus and you will.

 

Thank you for joining me in this long, winding Alphabet Adagio. When you need reminding of how to live what matters, just start all over at A.

Photograph by Melanie Hunt

 

 

 

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Y Is For: You Is A Plural Word

Some believe it is only GREAT POWER that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I have found. I have found that it is the small every day deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay, small acts of kindness and love. ~ Gandalf

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The world is a mess, and you are the answer, but you are not the answer alone. English translations obscure this truth: the “you” of the Bible is plural.

God knows, one person, pious and gentle, will not make the world gasp in wonder. But together we become a blazing light, where every glimmer matters.

“Christ has no body now, but yours.
No hands, no feet on earth, but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which
Christ looks compassion into the world.
Yours are the feet
with which Christ walks to do good.
Yours are the hands
with which Christ blesses the world,” Teresa of Avila claimed.

But “yours” means “ours” in a way many of us find uncomfortable.

You implies a new identity

I am an American, white female, introvert, scholar, wife, parent, grandparent. I have political preferences and inherited biases, but in Christ, I die to them all. My new identity trumps every other, and at the same time redeems each one.

God knows, our nation needs more citizens  who are Christ-followers first, who bow to no party but his. God knows, we need more open-armed mothers, able to hug all children close. God knows, this broken world will be mended when his church abandons its rights, and takes up the cross–the self-forgetting, other-embracing, joy-filled way of Christ.

Not only on our own, but together.

Matthew 5:13-15;  Philippians 2:15; Colossians 3:1-4; 1 Peter 2:9

Where have you been Christ’s hands and feet, together?

 

In our series, An Alphabet Adagio, we are savoring the story of the Bible, our story, alphabetically. Next week: Z Is For Zoe: Live The End Of The Story.

Photograph by Melanie Hunt
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X Is For Xenophobia

Xenophobia: an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange.

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Come see him, this stranger, in a  manger. Draw near to the infant, a king dressed in humble swaddle, our savior, yawning in the night.

Life is no lullaby.  In Jesus, God will receive first-hand the angry xenophobia of the crowd.

Hunted by Herod, a political refugee in Egypt, harassed by the religious powers that be–did we welcome our guest? Did we rejoice, with eyes overflowing, as the lame, the broken, the dreamers, and the desperate found their home in him?

Or did we wonder at the company he kept?

Who Is This Xmas Baby?

Whatever you think of Jesus, whatever you may have heard, however he is reinvented by the smug  voices around you, please hold on to this: Jesus, on the cross, his arms open wide, making a breathless plea, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.”

Isn’t this the true spirit of Christmas, to fling our arms open to those around us, including the troubled and troubling souls who can’t yet return our kindness, who don’t know how to be better?

The early Christ-followers must have been stunned by the unprecedented ethnic and sociological diversity of their gatherings. Fear and revulsion of the stranger was deeply inbred. The Apostle Paul urged, “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (Romans 15:7).

“For the glory of God”–so God will be shown for who he is. As humans, we jealously guard our homogeneity (“these are my people”), but God delights in diversity.

Think of it–we live on a planet where over 400,000 different species of flowering plants bloom at the Creator’s bidding, where 10,000 new animal species are discovered each year! As for  people–you will never find two who are truly identical. Nobody is like you, and they were never meant to be. The differences that divide and disgust us do not deter God. He calls us to unity without uniformity, an open-armed invitation to all.

Xenophobia Cure

The end to xenophobia winds through the heart of God. It is his love, his understanding we borrow, for no person is alien or repulsive to him.

It’s not too late to have a xenophobia-free Xmas. Chances are good you will encounter strangers today, if only in a news report, or beside you at a traffic light. Will you notice the frazzled look, the discouraged shuffle, the defensive gaze of the forgotten, the lonely with nowhere to be?

Christmas is the day to fling our arms wide, and join in the loveliest of cries, “You are welcome.”

Merry Christmas, my friends. You are so loved.

 

In our series, An Alphabet Adagio, we are savoring the story of the Bible, our story, alphabetically. We are almost to the end! Forgive me for the long pauses–my writing time has been taken up by academic papers. I have only two more classes and hope to graduate in June with my Masters in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. I hope you experience the open arms of Jesus this Christmas. 

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