A devotion I wrote for yesterday's staff meeting.

Consider, for a moment, all the good you've ever done. All the compliments you've ever received. All the good reviews you've ever gotten from a supervisor. All the money that FMSC was able to use to feed kids because of your work. All the times you drove a friend to the airport even though it was out of your way, or you got up on a Sunday to volunteer at church. All the cans and bottles you've recycled. Think of how much good you've done in your life. 

Now consider your sin. All the times you said something unkind about a person who was not in the room. All the times you lied to get out of an obligation. All the times you judged a colleague for not doing their job perfectly. All the times you spoke in anger to someone who needed your love. All the times you wasted resources that could have helped somebody in need. All the promises you've broken. Think of how much sin pervades your life. 

If you're like me, you spend a lot of your time stacking up your good works and your bad, along with all the praise and criticism you've ever received, and you measure the stacks against each other like Monopoly money to try and determine how much you are worth. You become your own personal stock market, fluctuating minute by minute as your circumstances shift and your mood changes. Did I figure out a way to save my coworkers some time on a project? My worth goes up. Did I forget to put a meeting on Andy's calendar? My worth goes down. 

We do the same thing as an organization. Did FMSC get another four-star rating from Charity Navigator? We're more valuable. Did our delivery efficiency rate drop? We're less valuable. Did at least one kid get to eat today because of FMSC? Did at least one kid die today because we didn't produce enough meals? 

I think we all know that measuring our worth by our perceived successes or failures is a fool's game, but it's one that is very difficult to stop playing. It's a very human thing to want to find our worth in ourselves—in our beauty, our intelligence, our humor, our skills, our wealth, our righteousness. We balance the good and the bad on opposite sides of a scale and hope that the truth of ourselves is somewhere in the middle—that our value can be controlled, measured, achieved, improved...or even lost.

The great miracle and mercy of our lives as Christians, of course, is that this is not the truth. Ephesians 2 says, "Because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages, he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast."

Our worth has been declared, not earned. We can neither create or destroy our own worth any more than we can create or destroy matter and energy. And I think most of us, if not all of us, know this with our minds. We've read the Bible, we've heard the sermons, we know what we SHOULD think about our worth. But it takes more than knowledge to bring faith to life. For that, we need to look outside ourselves.

I once attended a spiritual renewal weekend that was staffed by a huge crew of volunteers who were there to take care of the weekend attendees. Every time somebody served me a meal, or held a door for me, or cleaned the restroom, or led a song, if I said, "Thank you," they didn't say, "You're welcome." They didn't say, "No problem," or "My pleasure," or "You bet." They looked me in the eyes and said, "You're worth it." No matter how many times I heard that phrase, casually dropped into the middle of a conversation, it blew me away. The power of "You're worth it" is incredible. Think of how many times we say, "Thank you" to each other throughout our work days. Imagine if we began this practice here at FMSC, of saying to each other, "You're worth it." What could that do for us? Imagine how our attitudes could be shaped if we began declaring to each other that we have infinite and unchanging worth because we belong to the Lord. It might make a small difference; it might make all the difference. 

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, which is commonly a time for Christians to take on an extra spiritual discipline to help focus our thoughts on Jesus' journey to the cross. This will be one of mine, and I invite anyone who wants to, to join me. Because I want to tell YOU that you are worthy of my service and my care, that YOU deserve to have joy and comfort, that YOU do not have to fear judgment or rejection. It is by grace that you have been saved. You are worth it. Amen.

Lament

(I shared this in church today as part of a service meditating on the "Seven Last Words of Jesus." I was allowed to pick any of the seven last words I wanted, and I chose Matthew 27:46. Some people asked me to post the text, so here it is.)

Please indicate if you have experienced the following emotions or behaviors in the last several days.

I feel afraid for no reason at all.

I get upset easily or feel panicky.

I feel like I’m falling apart or going to pieces.

I feel like something bad is going to happen.

I am afraid of dying.

Although I have never experienced physical pain like Jesus did on the cross, when he says "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" I can begin to imagine how he might have been feeling because I live with anxiety. Anxiety is like having a radio playing in my head, and it’s trying to turn itself up all the time. It never is completely silent, but if the radio volume is at a 1, I call that a good day.

I wonder if this elevator I’m in will snap its cables. I wonder if my mom’s name coming up on my phone means that some member of my family has died. I wonder if there’s a centipede hiding in my bath towel. I wonder if that little twinge of pain means I have cancer. I wonder my friends think it’s gross to have to hang out with somebody so fat. I wonder.

When the radio is up at about 4 or 5, which is more often than not, I increase the noise of my life to drown it out. I use TV and internet, rehearsals and social gatherings, alcohol and junk food--whatever’s within reach to help keep out the rising sounds of panic inside. Chances are that if you see me more than once a month, if I’ve sung in front of you or talked to you, that I’ve only been half paying attention to what I’ve been doing because I’m spending so much of my energy trying not to listen to something you can’t even hear.

What if someone with a gun comes into this gas station? What if I get fired and I have no financial safety net? What if I’m being watched through my webcam? What if God is not real? What if I'm single forever and I get Alzheimer's and I have nobody to take care of me? What if?

Then there are the rare--but not rare enough--days and nights when the radio is all the way on, full blast. Yes, this thing can and will go to 11, and when it does, it is hell on earth. Forget the “radio”: my whole brain is screaming. I can’t think. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. Just screaming. Almost nobody has seen me like this, when I’m curled up in a ball with my hands over my ears, trying and failing to keep the bad thoughts out because mental illness impairs the ability to seek help or comfort. It doesn’t last forever, and after a few hours the radio will dial itself down, and I’ll be able to rejoin society and pretend that I’m not constantly fighting a battle against an inner terror I don’t understand or control. But for now, it’s just me and the fear and the panic and the screaming inside.

Something. Something bad is going to happen. Something bad is going to happen to me and it’s already set in motion and there’s not a thing I can do to stop it and everyone I love will die and leave me forever and nobody cares about me and it’s probably my fault anyway because I make such bad choices and anyway it’s only a matter of time before I’m in a car accident or a tornado or a terrorist attack and then I will find out that I was wrong about Jesus and grace and everything will be awful forever and ever and ever and ever

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Happy New Year

Probably you have noticed that, like it or not, people are getting ready for Christmas. However, unless you are a certain kind of Church nerd, as I am, you might not know that Advent only really started today. There's no reason why you should know that just by looking around. I mean, Walmart put out their Christmas trees in October. Even my Advent calendar started on December 1. But real, true Advent technically begins four Sundays before Christmas, and as we all know, technically correct is the best kind.

Advent kicks off a new liturgical year in some parts of the Church. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe it's related to the preparations for the birth of Jesus. Maybe it's somehow tied to the more pagan roots of Christmas traditions. If I were making the Church calendar, I would have put the new year on Easter, but nobody asked me. Whatever the reason, we are here at the beginning of something, and so it seemed like a good time to blog again.

 I think part of why it feels so strange to begin the liturgical year with Advent is that Advent is about waiting. Imagine if, on December 31, we got together with our friends and counted down along with (sigh) Ryan Seacrest, but then at midnight, we didn't cheer or toast or kiss anyone, but we just--waited? Maybe Ron Swanson would like that party, but I think most of us would prefer a celebration that's got a little more celebrating in it.

Then again, though it may seem counterintuitive to start with waiting, that's how life begins. I've got a lot of pregnant and newly-babied friends right now, and so I've been doing a lot of waiting alongside them for the past several months. This kind of waiting is (usually) fun. Painting the baby's room, buying all the onesies in Target, counting down until the due date. This is Advent waiting, in joyful expectation. But sometimes the waiting is painful. Sometimes you lose a pregnancy, or two, or three. Sometimes you realize you're another year older with no partner in your life and a rapidly fading chance of having the kind of family you want. You wonder if your whole life will be spent waiting for something that is never going to happen. This, too, is Advent waiting, walking in darkness, hoping against hope to see the great light.

Maybe the point of beginning with waiting is so that I don't try to shortcut it or skip over it. I am not a super patient person. I've fooled myself in my later years into thinking I'm good at waiting because I have a smartphone now that I can whip out at the first moment of non-activity. That's not real waiting, though; that's just distraction. I have yet to learn how to truly wait, to be still and know that God is God and to be filled by nothing else. Maybe by putting my impatience in the spotlight, on the first day of the year, I can learn to stop fighting it. I can learn how to wait as someone who has been given a promise that has already been fulfilled, as yet unseen but not unknown. Christ is coming soon. Wait for it.

Indeed

"Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope." -- Maya Angelou

What wondrous love

I had a whole big thing written here about what tonight means to me, but it was crap. So I'll let others say for me what I can't express myself. Here. Here. Amen.

Through the window on the other side

We're coming up on Palm Sunday, the most conflicted observance in the church calendar. At least, it is for me. Every year, our worship service opens with a grand parade of the kids of our congregation around the sanctuary, waving their palm fronds and singing "Hosaaaaanna, Hosaaaaanna, Hosanna in the hiiiighest." And we have more than a few hundred kids in our congregation, so it's quite a spectacle. The adults get palm fronds, too, although none of them seem as enthusiastic about waving them around. (What is it about the palm fronds that makes kids go crazy for them? I remember feeling the same way when I was young. Is it just that you only get them once a year? Is it because you can swordfight your little brother with them?) After the kids open the service, our band sings all the songs we know with the word "Hosanna" in them, including one that the music director requested several years ago.

Him: You should do that one that goes "All I wanna do when I something something something is dah dah daaah, Hosanna, Hosanna"
Us: ...You mean "Rosanna"?

Instant classic.

So that's all fine and fun. The church is full, we're welcoming our King with open arms, and the kids are cute. But I can never fully enjoy it. Doesn't anybody see what we're doing here? Does anybody remember what happened the last time a bunch of people waved palms and sang hosannas for Jesus? They, which is to say we, which is to say I, FUCKING STRAIGHT UP MURDERED him a few days later. How can we celebrate the day Jesus showed up to get not just killed but REALLY FUCKING KILLED, without any sense of irony or even recognition of the blood that has never left our hands?

The cynical part of me thinks that this is just typical American church triumphalism, mixed with a little cheap grace theology. It goes like this: Jesus has already won the victory over sin and death. It was so many generations ago that it hardly seems necessary to dwell on it more than once, and we'll do that on Friday. So why bother with it today? After all, we are post-baptism people living in a post-resurrection world. Our sins and their eternal consequences were swept away before we even considered them. Our happy ending is assured. All that seemed wrong is now right, and everyone who deserves to is sure to live a long and happy life. Ever after.

It's tempting to cycle quickly through the "downer" parts of Christianity and just focus on the fun stuff. We breeze through confession or eliminate it entirely from our worship, couching it in the language of "mistakes that we made" rather than "innocent guys in whose deaths we are totally fucking complicit." And when was the last time you saw a Christmas pageant where Herod's army was skewering a bunch of babies and toddlers? We are terrible people, and being forgiven doesn't mean we get to ignore our terribleness.

It feels icky to me that we celebrate Palm Sunday by marching confidently toward the altar instead of crawling in shame. Palm Sunday is a shameful day, or it ought to be. But maybe we need to do it this way. Maybe the violence we are about to commemorate is made even more awful by its contrast with the misplaced joy of Palm Sunday. I began this season and this blog believing that in order for Easter to be meaningful, I really had to live with the melancholy of Lent and the misery of Holy Week. Maybe in order for the horror of the coming days to be full, I need to remember that I am at best, little more than a hypocrite. Maybe the only way to get down in the depths is to fall off the highest cliff.

Do as I say

Christians don’t tell lies; they go to church and they sing them. – A. W. Tozer

A friend retweeted this Tozer quote a while ago, and I’ve been turning it over in my mind ever since. It’s a provocative quote, and I haven’t looked for its context yet because I wanted to think for a while about what I think it means before I found out what Tozer thinks it means. My first reaction was, “YES.” I’m a member of a contemporary worship team, and much of the music that our team does is fairly ecstatic. On the whole, contemporary worship music (if that can be said to be a single genre) is meant to help a worshiper express an intimate, personal and profound connection with God. Here are some lyrical excerpts from this coming Sunday:

My dead heart now is beating, my deepest stains now clean
Your breath fills up my lungs, now I’m free, now I’m free
Sin has lost its power, death has lost its sting
From the grave you’ve risen victoriously

Heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest
And I don’t have time to maintain these regrets
When I think about the way that he loves us
Oh, how he loves us!

Every day, it’s you I live for
Every day, I’ll follow after you
Every day, I’ll walk with you, my Lord

When you’re in agreement with these kinds of sentiments, these songs can be incredibly fun and fulfilling to sing. Even if the composition isn’t of the highest artistic caliber, there’s just something about singing words you agree with that makes you feel powerful, like you’re changing the fabric of the universe by proclaiming your truth into the air.

That’s if you’re in the mood for it. What about when you’re not? I can’t begin to count the number of Sundays when I have dragged myself to the front of the congregation, grumbling inside about how the half-hour drive to church cuts into my weekend sleeping, or the annoying habits of the other people on the worship team, or how fat I am, or how stupid this music is, or how terrible I am at playing the bass, or how angry I am that people in our community keep dying even as we’re praying for their healing, or how confused I get by contradictions in the Bible, or how I look out at the congregation and see people who look like they’d rather be at the dentist than in church, or any old thing that happens to cross my mind in the wrong way. In those times, having to sing something like, “Every day, I’ll walk with you, my Lord” is downright galling. I don’t want to walk with God. What has he done to deserve my devotion? What have I done to deserve his attention? Sometimes I can’t even tell if it’s me or God I’m frustrated with, but I’m pretty sure one of us sucks. Either way, singing about how we’re madly in love with each other feels like the most hypocritical thing in the world.

But the songs aren't lies because they aren't true; the songs are lies because *I* am not true. The lie is the chasm between my experience and my hope, between how I feel and how I want to feel, between my fickle nature and a faithful God. I sing lies because I hope that somehow, the truth within them is strong enough to overpower my circumstance and conform me to itself. That's part of what it means to die to yourself, I guess. I live this Christian life, and I sing these songs, because I believe there's something there that is bigger and more worthy than what I can see in my world or in myself, and the closer I get to it, the more it will change me, whether I can tell the difference or not.

Like Hwin the mare said when she met Aslan, "Please, you are so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I'd sooner be eaten by you than be fed by anyone else."