This is Church

The more ministry I do, the more I’m beginning to believe that most people’s deep hurts and struggles with faith center around a pretty simple question:

“Am I really worth something?”

And I don’t just think it’s just church people asking this. I’m a pretty strong believer in the idea that most human beings live their lives primarily out of a desire to know that they’re valuable; for someone to tell them they’re worth something.

People will go to some pretty extreme ends to achieve this. They’ll insult, humiliate, and oppress to prove themselves better than another. They’ll fish for compliments, get physically fit, buy fancy clothes, work long hours, and build empires. Whether it’s just for a fleeting second of affirmation or a fixed monument in praise of their excellence; the stay-at-home mom and the CEO both want the same thing, and they’re going to employ the best means they know of to feel it.

But I don’t intrinsically know what I’m worth. None of us do, actually. And I think it’s in our nature as humans. My reading of Genesis 1-3 indicates to me that Adam and Eve were in a state of internal paradise because God had declared them “very good” (Genesis 1:31), a description for creation he did not use until he made humans, but had reserved solely for his most prized creation made in his very own image. In fact, the Bible’s first poetic inset occurs when God creates man (Genesis 1:27). It’s as if the rest of creation is mere repetitive prose to the poetic beauty that God sees in each of us. That kind of affirmation leads a person to be unashamed, even when completely naked (Genesis 2:25). But I think one of the core reasons our ancestors ended up falling into sin was because they allowed the Serpent to determine their worth for a time instead.

I think the third chapter of Genesis would look quite different had Adam and Eve been fully capable of asserting their own value on intrinsic grounds, telling the serpent that they had no interest in the wisdom of the forbidden fruit because they were quite glorious just as they were. But we don’t see that kind of self-informed response to the serpent. In fact, Eve could only recite what God had already told her (Genesis 3:2-3). I think she was made that way. And I think you and I were too.

Until the Serpent entered the scene, God had been the only one speaking to her what her value actually was. And He was telling her that He loved her enough to give her every tree in the garden except the one with the power to destroy her. She needed this because she was incapable of telling herself that she was quite lovable, and even having heard this from God, she is still unable to resist the serpent’s temptation in the face of his accusation (God is holding out on you / you’re ignorant) because she hasn’t internalized God’s truth.

I believe we were hard-wired in our original form as human beings to actually need an outside source to determine our worth. This means that, try as we may to convince ourselves of our worth, we will ultimately fail; and our insecurities, defensiveness and manipulation of others for our own purposes will constantly bear witness to this failure. So then, if we absolutely need an outside source to determine our worth, it’s natural that we will seek the answer from whoever we believe holds the authority on the matter. There are ways of doing this that lead to death and others that lead to life. I’ve experienced both.

Since we all have this fundamental question of value at the source of our most damaging thoughts and actions, how do we go about answering it? Over this next week (in two more posts), I want to share with you some foundational teachings of the Christian faith in order to equip you to answer your question well. Because I think that just maybe everything you do is riding on this thing…

As most of you know, I’m getting married in May. I don’t really know what I’m doing except that I’ve read Ephesians 5, observed some incredibly godly marriages, and really love Jessie and want to put her needs before my own. Just like the theme of some of my more recent posts, my intentions are good, but I’m still really unwise and prone to messing stuff up. So I’ve sought out considerable counsel so I wouldn’t hurt her as much as I would if left to my own understanding.

Here are my notes from a marriage seminar put on by James MacDonald, pastor of Harvest Bible Chapel in Rolling Meadows, IL. Keep in mind that he’s talking to a room full of married Christians (mostly couples). I got some really good stuff from it, and James actually played a big role in my early spiritual development, so I wanted to share his thoughts with you.

Why I Have A Great Marriage by James MacDonald

1) We each have a Master, and it’s not us. (1 Corinthians 8:6)
- My spouse doesn’t always bring me back to my marriage, Jesus Christ as Lord always brings me back to my marriage.

2) Because we have our identity tied up in our marriage. (Hebrews 13:4)
- I do not have a successful life apart from her.
- Esteem a great marriage.
- I cannot be successful if my marriage is not successful (think Tiger Woods).
- Whatever your work, you lose credibility from a bad or failed marriage because you have failed at relationship.

3) Because we have a biblical view of love: you before me. (1 Corinthians 13:4-8)
- Biblical love is more than feelings, romance, or chemistry.
- The bedrock of my love in marriage is my will, not my feelings.
- Choose to do the things you don’t feel like doing, and the feelings you want will follow.

4) Because we have transparent communication. (Romans 12:9)
- Don’t expect your marriage to meet all of your relational needs.
- Have a place of safety, confidentiality, and reciprocation of openness both inside and outside of your marriage.
- Open up to your wife! (1 Peter 3:7).
- Tell her what you’re afraid of, what your hopes and dreams are, and what you struggle with.
- Speaking your thoughts exposes your wrong thinking to the light.
- Speaking your feelings expoeses slippage and distraction in the relationship.
- Watch out for the people in your life who are meeting an emotional or relational need that only your spouse can righteously fulfill.
- It is far better that your need goes completely unmet in your life than it is for you to get it met by someone other than your spouse.
- It is better to feel lonely, misunderstood and disappointed than to be divorced.

5) Because we have a commitment to healthy conflict. (Ephesians 4:26-27)
Five Rules of Engagement for Conflict:
       1) Work it out today, or commit to working it out the next day after hurt feelings have cooled down.
       2) Attack the problem, not the person.
      3) Men: No invasion of her personal space physically or vocally. Women: No emotional manipulation or blackmail.
       4) No universals. No  ”You always ______.”  or  ”You never ______.”  It’s rarely helpful or even true.
       5) Don’t bring up the past for the sake of leverage. Love does not call upon the past to predict the future. If I keep re-hashing the wound, I can keep it from healing.

6) Because we will not let the relationship lag or flounder. (Hebrews 12:12-13)
- Take a honeymoon after any season or crisis that temporarily shifts your priorities away from each other.

7) Because we pursue opportunities to evaluate and strengthen our marriage. (Proverbs 1:5)
- You should be so consumed with your spouse’s beauty and strengths that all other people are utterly dumbfounded by what you’re seeing in them.
- Take a date night.

8 ) Because we protect our marriage from intruders. (Proverbs 4:23)
- Don’t ask your marriage to absorb all your problems.
- Protect from intrusion by work, church, parents, friends, kids, and extended family.

9) Because we have a long-term view of the power of a strong marriage. (Galatians 6:7-9)
- “You reap what you sow” can be very good news.
- You will never regret or be put to shame for investing deeply in a godly marriage. It always has a big return.

10) Because we have a mutual commitment to a higher mission (1 Corinthians 10:31)
- There are  lot of things counting on my marriage.
- Be a team, be deeply invested in what the other is called to.

Additional nuggets from Q&A time:
- Be prepared to disclose areas of sin or unfaithfulness, but don’t rush to disclose. Don’t make your spouse bear the weight of you clearing your conscience. Seek counsel about which details to disclose and when.
- No matter where your spouse is personally, treat them like the person you want them to be. Treat them as if you had your dream marriage, and they will come into their fullness.

This is the last of my three-part (for now) series on the power of grace. I hope you’ve come even just a little bit closer to knowing deeply the richness of God’s grace. But before I write anything more, I want you to watch this video and do your best to emotionally engage. Feel it as deeply as you can, even if you’ve seen it before.

Are you a bit emotional right now? If so, I want you to take some time to figure out why.

I get emotional every time I watch this video. And apparently so do quite a few other people, because it’s been viewed over 55 million times as of the writing of this post. I think it’s possibly the best Gospel metaphor on all of YouTube (it includes Gospel elements such as: a free gift for all people, the outcasts of society coming to a healer, scoffers and doubters, the good leader empowering disciples to carry on the same message, restoration to the hurting and lonely, strong opposition from the powers that be, triumph and victory in the end, and heck…he even fits our Anglo image of Jesus).

But let me go ahead and list the reasons why I think I get especially emotional when I watch it:

1) People become real and come alive; they let their defenses down and make themselves vulnerable in the presence of a safe environment where they can simply receive. I long to exist in that place.

2) Something good is offered freely to everyone; regardless of who they are, what they look like, where they come from, what they’ve done, whether they’re a “good person” or not. For a brief second, everyone is equal in their eligibility to receive this gift.

And our world is longing for this.

Christians, non-Christians, everyone.

And I think it’s overly simplistic to say this video is so popular because ”we just want to be loved” and this video demonstrates acts of love. There are tens of thousands of YouTube videos with parents showing a rich, warm, unconditional kind of love to their children; a love that’s probably much stronger than what this guy has for the people he’s hugging. 

And though those videos may make us feel warm and fuzzy, we’re not crying, showing our friends, and spreading it to 55 million people, causing subsequent “Free Hugs” outbreaks among young people in public places across the nation. I think the thing that makes a person tear up and want to send this video to their friends is the grace of the act.

There’s something in us that expects the parent in the YouTube video to love their child immensely. The act may be beautiful, but it’s not startling, and the video almost certainly isn’t going to be watched by anyone beyond immediate family and random passers-by.

But something about free hugs is just different.

That someone would do something so wild and radical as offer love freely to complete strangers in full sight of the whole world makes us want to tell someone. And when we watch it, we want to take part. We desperately long to be able to give and receive this undiscriminating kind of love. I think it’s what makes grace the most powerful thing in the world to behold.

I ache for the Church to hone their ability to similarly tell stories of grace that makes the world want to tell their neighbor.

I want to make better videos. 

So I want you to ask yourself how you can personally proclaim and demonstrate this kind of grace in a way that touches something deep within the heart of every human being; something that might provoke someone to tell all their friends of the good news. How can you start a “free hugs”-type movement in the name of the greatest grace-giver the world has ever known? Because as God’s Church, we’re the ones who have actually experienced the divinely gripping realities of this video; the ones who have tasted the Kingdom. 55 million hits says the world longs for a taste. How will you offer it to them?

In my last post, I shared about how I’ve struggled to boldly speak truth to others because I fear messing it up, even if my intentions are good. This blog post is going to deal with how we can respond to difficult responses to our truth-telling when we acted in ignorance or foolishness, even if our intentions were not evil. In sharing this, I am making two assumptions about the circumstance:

1) Your actions were not perfect in every way.
2) You are receptive to God’s response.

My thoughts will not make sense of a situation that doesn’t satisfy those criteria.

That being said, I want to tell you a parable that has given me significant freedom from the prison of despair that once accompanied my well-intentioned but unwise truth-telling.

Suppose you are a parent who owns a house and you have a toddler who doesn’t really know much of anything yet. You desire to keep your house hospitable for guests and generally neat. One day, your toddler realizes how much he really loves you for being such a wonderful parent, so he paints you a lovely mural…all over your walls. It’s a picture of your beautiful, happy family, and he’s celebrating all of you through art. He delightfully screams, “Look, Daddy!!!”

You turn around…

…Only to see your previously spotless walls covered in all the colors of the rainbow.

You know that he doesn’t know any better; you’ve never actually explicitly told him not to fingerpaint on the walls before, and it’s clear that he did this as an act of love, thinking you would actually rather enjoy it. But, of course, his artwork runs quite contrary to your decorative scheme and broader goal of keeping tidy. How would you (a loving, understanding, gracious parent who wants to keep a tidy house) respond to your child’s newfound artistic expression?

I’m not sure about the answer to this because I’ve never had kids (and am only seldom “loving, understanding and gracious”), but I think a loving response might look something like:

“Oh my goodness, thank you so much for that beautiful picture! It’s clear you really love Daddy a lot, and I really appreciate you making a painting for me. I’m not mad at you, because I know that you didn’t know any better. But from now on, I’d like you to keep your painting to the canvas and paper because painting on the walls actually hurts the house, and I also really care about our guests having a pleasant experience here. Can you do that for me from now on?”

And then I would paint over it.

Leaving no trace of the original offense.

The God of the Universe is a far more loving, understanding and gracious father than any of us could ever hope to be (Luke 11:13). To think that our Heavenly Father holds our foolish acts against us when they were done out of a sincere love for him seems absolutely ridiculous to me. In fact, we see in the Scriptures that God quickly forgives even the most heinous of sins when they were committed in ignorance (Acts 3:13-19, Acts 17:29-30, 1 Timothy 1:13-14).

But notice that in every case, he quickly extends the opportunity for repentance, because it would be unloving of God to just forgive us and allow us to continue in our destructive folly without offering a richer way of life in exchange. God desires intimate relationship with us, so he tells us his desires, that we might experience the fullness of his life. Just like the loving father who tells his child that he would do well to stick with painting on paper from now on.

I want you to know that it’s ridiculous of you to think that your foolishness and brokenness (apparent in your inability to boldly speak truth without some stain of sin) could somehow ruin God’s sovereign plan for another person’s life. It’s every bit as ridiculous as it is to believe that a toddler could forever ruin a household via fingerpainting while his father is present. Our God is powerful enough to completely remove the stains of your foolishness forever, gracious enough to not hold it against you, and loving enough to discipline you and lead you into greater understanding of his heart and character (“How much more will your Father in Heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!”).

So rather than going through my 4-part godless grieving process I introduced in the last post when I hurt someone via my good intentions gone awry, I have actually begun to learn to:

1) Confess my foolishness to the other person and to God in the moment, apologizing for the hurt I’ve caused (regardless of my intention).

2) Repent of the wrongdoing.

3) Immediately walk in the exhilarating freedom that God is painting over all of the stains of my mistakes in both of our lives, in many cases covering over it with something even more beautiful than was there before.

Instead of despair over my inadequacy, I now know the delight of being broken but forgiven. For a perfect example of this kind of repentance, mercy and restoration, check out Job 42.

So I want to take this opportunity to speak some truth into your life. For your sake and the sake of the world, please(!)…

Go out and be bold.

Speak the word of God in the best way you know how, and do not fear the consequences. You are not so mighty as to be able to thwart God’s redemptive plan for this world. He loves the things that you do out of your desire to live for Him, and He is faithful to reveal and cover over all your foolishness with his grace, and to instruct you in the way you should go. If you are continually humble and attentive to his voice, you have no reason to fear his discipline. He does every bit of it because he’s crazy about you and longs for you to know Him deeply. Leave your life of fear and hiding behind, and begin to dance in the freedom of his rich mercy.

This post marks the kickoff to a three-part blog series on the power of grace. But I intend on blogging about grace for a long time to come, so don’t think that I’m going to stay at three parts forever. I hope the series would rock your world and free your soul.

To start, I would like to share with you a struggle of mine that, because of God’s relentless grace, I’ve experienced significant victory in. And I share it in hopes that you might know Him more deeply and walk in unprecedented freedom.

I would like you to raise your hand at your computer if you relate to my problem:

When I find myself in spiritually influential situations (say, sharing or demonstrating my faith to another person), I tend to feel great pressure to speak and act perfectly, and then take great responsibility afterward for things that I perceive as having gone poorly.

This soul-destroying phenomenon has gotten to the point where I’d consistently shrink back from taking bold steps of faith for fear that I might defame Jesus or cause someone to hate God forever. I’d take careful measures to hide my shortcomings; then, faced with an opportunity to speak truth, choose my words so carefully that I’d end up not saying much of anything for fear that the truth of God will make him out to be ridiculous and unbelievable. Because when someone calls me a hypocrite or tells me that the God of the Bible sounds like a big jerk because of how I live or what I’ve communicated, I assume that I’ve ruined God’s plan for that person’s life, and vow never to do anything risky in my witness ever again.

And it happens when I’m with other Christians too. I’ve had difficult conversations with close brothers and sisters where, in love, I ask a question or make an observation regarding a pattern in their life that concerns me. I’ve been met with accusation, yelling, fuming silence and crying, sometimes even resulting in running away and the slamming of doors. Once again, I begin to wonder if this scene is what God had in mind when he adopted me to be his chosen representative to the world. I figure I’m better off just keeping my mouth shut.

For those of you who like bullet points, I’ll carefully walk you through a faithless kind of grieving process I go through when my bold steps of faith seem to blow up in my face:

1) Rationalize away the other person’s reaction as absurd, citing many of this person’s personal issues that would cause them not to recognize my profound insight communicated with the utmost gentleness and care. (Dismiss)

2) When that doesn’t make me feel better, look to friends or other outside sources to justify my actions as perfectly righteous and loving. (Defend)

3) When that also fails to soothe my soul, take full responsibility for this catastrophic event, analyzing every single thing  that went “poorly” and try to figure out how to do it instead in such a way that would make everyone perfectly happy…but never find the solution. (Despair)

4) Vow never to say anything difficult to anyone ever again, because I clearly suck at it.

In this process, whether it’s a conversation over a sin issue with a brother or sister, or a conversation about Christianity with someone outside the faith, I become absolutely obsessed with the “catastrophe”: why it went wrong, how I could have changed it, how messed up the other person is, how messed up I am, how broken the whole world is, etc. In these moments, I feel a desperate need to understand the answers to all of these questions; some airtight explanation or solution that lets me flee the confusing gravity of sitting inside the realities of our fallen world and escape to the friendly confines of simple platitudes and a clear course for improvement.

And, of course, confession, repentance and grace are nowhere to be found in my escapism. At no point would I admit my powerlessness and lack of understanding, ask God to restore me, conform me to his image, conform my friends to his image, and call them into intimate relationship with him. I’d rather have a formula.

What’s really sad is that even our nation’s broken, flawed justice system understands more about the necessity of grace in this scenario than I do. We have an entire body of legislation known as Good Samaritan laws that release me from any legal condemnation for making my best effort to assist an injured, sick or dying person.

Even if I end up killing them.

One day some psychologist or lawmaker realized that when you penalize people for trying to help someone but messing it up, they stop wanting to help hurting people. I think that’s because we all realize we are prone to ignorance and mistakes, and the fear of penalty is just stronger than our flesh’s compulsion to good. In fact, I think just the sheer guilt and shame of being told by the legal system that a helpless person’s fate was your fault for being too incompetent to actually help in any way would be enough to keep people from helping someone in need; fines and jail terms completely aside. But regardless of the exact reasons why potential legal penalty would keep someone from helping a person in dire need, the truth remains that it does. At some point, our nation’s legislative bodies concluded the following:

The only way to make people feel free to do good to their needy neighbor was to offer a release from all the potential consequences of their imperfection.

In other words, the only thing strong enough to ever compel me to love my neighbor as myself is to know that even if I don’t love my neighbor right, I myself am still free from guilt and condemnation. This is the revolutionary power of grace. I think it’s what Paul was getting at when he wrote Romans 8:1-4. And I think it’s why the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only thing powerful enough to save the world.

The bolded statement above makes me wonder if this legislator/psychologist’s realization of the human condition resulted in their falling on their face in repentance, pleading for God to have grace on them, a sinner, knowing it’s the only hope they have to love others well. Probably not, but just think what would happen if all the people who support this kind of law would follow its basic insight to its natural conclusion for their own spiritual condition…

Regardless, it’s sad that our legal system grants me “Good Samaritan laws” to free me from this kind of fear for physical acts of good, but I’ve struggled immensely to believe that God does the same for me spiritually. In part 2, I’m going to let you in on something that really helps me believe that God is extending me far more grace than our legal system…

If you missed Part I, you should really read it first. Now onto the second installment of a thrilling inteview with New Life Church counselor-in-residence, Tim Courtois:

M: Why counseling, and why the college campus?

T: Why counseling?  I’ve already mentioned that life was lonely for me growing up, and that it was a total revelation when I realized it was possible to really open up about my internal world.  The thrill and the terror of being deeply known – it’s incredible.  I developed quite a hunger for it. 

Around that same time was when I first heard that Thoreau quote: “I wanted to live deep and suck the marrow out of life.”  It totally resonated with me.  I had spent years missing out on what seemed like the most important thing: real relationships.  So now I want to spend as much time as possible where “real life” is really happening.

People in counseling are in the thick of it: Fighting between the part of us that wants to be fully alive no matter what, and the part of us that wants to check out and be done with it.  It’s a terrifying and exhilarating place to be, and it’s an incredible honor to walk with people in those moments. 

In the Celtic Christian tradition, they say that there are certain places geographically where people seem to experience God more directly, where the veil between this world and heaven is “thin”.  So they will say, “such and such is a very thin place”.  In that sense, I would say that I love counseling because the counseling office is a very thin place.

Why the college campus?  The same reason.  In their mid to late 20’s, people seem to settle into their patterns of living and stop asking questions of life.  But college is a time when people are either sprinting away from God, or passionately crying out to him.  The college campus is a very thin place.

M: Finish the sentence: If ____________, then I would consider my ministry to be incredibly successful.”

T: I spent years of my life as a Christian wondering on some level if maybe I didn’t “fit” with the Church because I struggled emotionally.  I remember at church, during times of worship, everybody seemed to be able to just ‘turn on the joy’ so easily.  I thought, either there’s something wrong with me, or there’s something wrong with them.  But after many years of wrestling, I believe there is a place in the Church for the strugglers, those for whom life, contentment – and even Christianity – doesn’t come so easy.

I’ve noticed others who are like that, who sit in the back of the auditorium at church, wondering if maybe there’s just no place for them because they can’t seem to pull off the “Christian” thing as well as others seem to be able to. 

My dream is that those ones will find that they do belong, that there is a special place for “strugglers” in the Church of God.  I’ve found a lot of solace in the fact that “Israel” means, “he struggles with God”, and that’s what God named his people.

I would also love to see generational patterns changed.  My best friend got saved through New Life in college, and his wife learned to follow God through New Life as well.  Today I look at their kids and think, “You don’t know how lucky you are to be in this family, being raised in a godly home that almost never was.”  That blows me away. 

So I would say, my ministry will be incredibly successful when a generation of babies are raised in godly, loving homes, free of abuse, with moms and dads who stay married.  That will happen when people enter into relationship with God, and then walk closely with him through the complex process of redeeming their pain and breaking individual and generational sin patterns.

M: What is your hope for people’s involvement who are outside this ministry? (What does the ideal partnership look like?)

Two things. 

First is financial support.  I am focusing on a demographic that can’t afford to pay for counseling: college students.  These kids are more broken than ever: sexual addiction is rampant; most of them come from broken homes; many of them are struggling with the wounds of abuse.  Not to mention the crazy things they’ll encounter once they actually get on campus.  They need help to sort through these things, and they can’t pay for it.

I am passionate about meeting this need, and in order for me to be there to minister to them, I need people who will give financially to this ministry.  (You can find out how to do that by following the link on my website.)

Second (for those who want to go above and beyond the call of duty): Take some time to actually think about these things.  Read my blog.  Join in the ongoing conversation in the Church about matters of the heart: Have a conversation about these things with your friends, or with me.

I greatly enjoy college ministry, and think that I’d get along serving college students anywhere just fine. But one of the greatest joys of laboring at New Life Church is that I’m surrounded by a staff team full of people who stretch my faith in ways that very few people on this planet do (and trust me, I know quite a few). One of those people is Tim Courtois (pronounced Curtis, not Core-TWAH). He’s the only person I know who got a counseling degree just to be a more effective missionary to the campus. He’s a fascinating individual, and I have learned a great deal regarding matters of the heart by simply reading his blog.

So I thought I would bless you with his life an insights. This first part is mostly about who Tim is as a unique human being and child of God. Part II will be about the unique role in this world God is calling him to fulfill at New Life Church. Enjoy!

M: How do you think your story and character uniquely reveal the heart of God?

T: The first thing that comes to mind is the themes that have been prominent in my story.  My life has been a lot about loneliness and the struggle to find beauty and meaning – and even connection with others – in the midst of that.  I can remember from a very young age feeling alone and feeling a deep longing for something that would make it all make sense.  And then I remember listening to certain kinds of music and feeling such joy and a longing to exist within the beauty that I was hearing… So my life is, in a big way, about holding onto those two truths: that loneliness and pain are real, but so is beauty and meaning.

So I think my story shows that God doesn’t flinch at the difficult parts of life.  I kind of grew up learning that so-called “negative” emotions are just that – negative – and so it’s best to avoid them as much as possible.  But I couldn’t ignore that certain parts of my life were sad; it would have required me to cut off a huge part of myself.  I had to learn to find meaning in the midst of my feelings, even if they were “negative”.  And for me, out of that came a deeper sense of beauty and meaning – and intimacy – than I ever could have found by avoiding those things.

Through that, I’ve developed a passion to try and “incarnate” myself fully in my life.  I want to be as fully present as possible, celebrating wholeheartedly and grieving deeply as the circumstances of my life call for it. 

This is a passion that God has built in me over time, and it is a reflection of his character: He engages in life and relationships fully, with all of his emotions.  I can’t be only halfway incarnate in this world and expect my presence to have the redemptive value God intended.  I’m continually striving to learn about what it means to feel, to bring my whole self to bear on my life.

M: What are you all about?

 T: I’m all about life being full, abundant, and passionate.  One of my favorite verses is Ezekiel 16:6: “Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood, and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, ‘Live!’”  I love that exclamation point!

There are many parts of myself that I exiled a long time ago, thinking they weren’t “good enough” for some reason: my creativity, my love for art, my love for rest and quietness.  In college I began to see them as a waste of time, a hindrance to all the things I should be doing for the gospel.  Inviting those exiled parts back into my life as reflections of God’s glory has been a huge part of my own healing.  That’s how God said, “Live!” to me. 

I love finding parts – either of myself or of other people – that have been lost, rejected or exiled, and inviting them back into the conversation. 

It’s like the guy with the lizard on his shoulder in “The Great Divorce” by C.S. Lewis.  The lizard represents lust.  We think the lizard needs to be thrown out, because “surely something like that could never be allowed in heaven?”.  But what happens is that after the lizard is struck down, it becomes a stallion: it is reborn as something beautiful, powerful and passionate. 

I want to see Christians living full and passionate lives, seeing parts of their hearts that they’d given up for dead become something beautiful.

Second, I’m all about connection and intimacy.  Growing up, I felt very alone.  Until I was a teenager, I didn’t even know it was really possible to open up to another person about all the things that were going on inside of me.  And when I finally did, it was amazing and terrifying at the same time.

I long for intimacy and at the same time it terrifies me.  Every day there is a tug of war in me between the longing to be close to people, and the desire to avoid people.  The same is true with God: I long for his closeness, but at the same time, I avoid him.

I think this same tug of war goes on in all of us.  So I’m continually wrestling with this tension, wanting to discover how to really connect with others, and I long to see the Church grow in this, too.  And I think it’s really happening: To see men in the Church today being more and more able to look into one another’s eyes and show affection for one another …it’s a beautiful thing.

M: (much more to come in Part II…I know you’re all stoked)

There are a million and one bloggers weighing in on what has transpired in Haiti’s earthquake and its aftermath. I’m not here to talk about Pat Robertson, the U.N., the Haitian government, or the relief efforts, because there are way too many people who know much more than me about all of that. Instead, I want to share some personal experiences in the country, and what it has meant for the life of someone very close to me. I had the privilege of sharing a trip with her to Haiti in the spring of 2008 with an organization called Raincatchers. So without further ado, a guest post from Jessie Aja:

We left for the Detroit airport at 3:30 a.m. I had finished packing for the week-long, University of Michigan Spring Break trip to Haiti around 3:00 a.m. I was nineteen years old – my sophomore year at U-M. To be honest, my biggest motivation for going to Haiti that February was to see my best friend, who had moved there a few months before, on the last day of the trip. We’d be staying near his new residence.

One week passed.

Our group began to board the flight out of Port Au Prince. I lingered on the runway, looked out toward the mountains, and left a portion of my heart there. In the beauty. In that place. I returned one . . . two . . . three more times throughout the next couple years. I went to different cities and with different people and helped aide in water purification efforts and health needs. I did this, largely, because of the prompting of the Spirit of God and of Teresa Price (T).

On the last night of my first trip to Haiti, T, a twenty-something year-old P.A., said this: “When you return home from Haiti, don’t look around at your plenty, your excess, and your privilege and feel things like guilt or pity for the Haitians. Those are unproductive emotions. Those negative emotional responses ultimately allow you to – force you to – shelve your experiences here and move on. They move you toward nothing beneficial and nothing helpful – either for the nation of Haiti or for you. Instead, I want to urge you to feel a sense of responsibility. You are God’s children – you young people attending the University of Michigan – and these are God’s children – these struggling infants, malnourished kids, and ailing people in this broken nation of Haiti. God’s Church does not have state lines, national borders, or distinctions of any kind. There is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. I want you to return to your homes in Michigan and feel, not guilt for what you have or for where you were blessed to be born, but, rather, RESPONSIBILITY to care for and be a blessing to your brothers and sisters (and brothers-and-sisters-to-be) throughout the world. Feel empowered, feel a sense of urgency, and take responsibility.”

I have a heart for the nations – I dream that the nations would know the unfailing love of the Lord Jesus Christ and that all would be cared for, healed, and satiated in body and spirit. I am committed to living my life – whether I am stateside, in Haiti, or elsewhere – proclaiming the death and resurrection of the One who saves, defending the poor and oppressed, caring for the widows and orphans, and living to hasten the day when all tears are wiped away and when unending joy replaces all sorrow.

I am not sorry that part of my heart lives still in the mountains of Haiti.

I have a pastor friend (at H2O church at Ohio State) who is probably the world’s greatest expert in the study of mankind’s eternal longings expressed via ESPN. 

High praise, I know.

Most recently, he pointed me to this video as an illustration of the Church’s adoration of Christ:

I have to applaud Nike for this campaign…they have tapped into something very deep within the human soul. We all long for heroes. Someone to adore. Our heart cries out for a superman, someone who can conquer any foe effortlessly. We want to tell his story. We want to boast in Him. And LeBron James is the closest it gets to immortality for many.

Here’s something humbling:

LeBron James misses over half his shots.

And yet we can still get pumped by idealizing him, singing his praises. It inspires us to buy Nike products, hearing from all kinds of people from different walks of life who have caught unique glimpses of his greatness. The testimony of his witnesses makes us long to see his glory ourselves, and we believe for a moment that we might even share in it if we buy Nike.

And they’ve actually convinced me in the moment that LeBron James is something more than human. Until I watch a game, that is. Then I’m reminded that he still misses over half his shots. Like most every other professional. I wonder if that makes the people in the video feel at all silly for how great they made him sound. I wonder what it would look like if they could do the same for someone who could back up every praise, every time.

How about you? Do you dare sing the praises of someone who is actually worthy of them? Someone who will never put to shame his worshippers? I think that just maybe the testimony of his witnesses will be strong enough to make the world long to see, experience, and share in his glory.

For those of you who don’t memorize all of my blog posts, let me remind you that StrengthsFinder calls me a futurist. That means I’m always thinking about what’s next. I think God knew about my futurist tendencies when he decided to begin calling me toward relationship with him. Not many people know this, but my spiritual journey actually started when I heard a pastor preach on Mark 13 about the “signs of the end of the age”. I was fascinated by what the Bible said about the end of the world, and that led me to begin opening the Bible on my own, starting in Revelation (an interesting place to start, I know…but God totally used it). Then I went back to read the rest of Mark, and upon reading Mark 2:17, I understood for the first time that Jesus wanted a relationship with me and offered me a great journey, calling me to follow him. But my fascination with the end of the world continues today.

So let’s talk about the future then. As a Christian, my greatest hope for the future is that Christ would return to earth and establish his Kingdom, and the Bible says that is going to happen once the Church brings the Gospel of the Kingdom to all nations (Matthew 24:14, Mark 13:10). Combine this promise with my futurist tendencies, and you might soon realize that I live much of my life mentally pre-occupied with what’s next for the Church in her process of fulfilling this promise.

I wanted to let you in on my future-obsessed brain and tell you about what I think is a “sign of the times” in the Church today. You see, I’ve heard quite a few sermons on Jesus’ return and how we should be watching for signs and waiting in expectation, but there’s one sign of Jesus’ return that I think the Bible teaches that I’ve never heard mentioned in a sermon. Or by anyone, for that matter. Perhaps because you have to do some digging around and piecing together in the Bible first. Are you ready? Let me take you there.

I believe that the Bible teaches that the future situation surrounding Jesus’ return will be marked with an unprecedented movement of Church unity. And if we’re looking to be alert and keep watch for these signs (Mark 13:33-37), then I want to put this one on your radar, because I think it’s big.

Let me begin in Genesis (another obsession of mine is starting in the beginning and telling the whole story through). In Genesis 11, all human beings have the same language, and assemble to build a tower in honor of themselves. God sees that his little image-bearers have become quite powerful, and in honor of that power, have begun to worship themselves. Knowing that such self-worship runs contrary to what He designed them to do and will only serve to destroy them, God, in his relentless grace, decides to confuse their language and scatter them so that they might not so easily go down this path of self-worship leading to self-destruction.

And from that day of scattering, it seems that God has been working out a plan to re-unify human beings back into a place of communication and collaboration. God’s plan is to be patient in returning (2 Peter 3:8-10) until all nations have heard of his great work in bringing the Kingdom of heaven to earth in the form of Jesus, his Messiah and Son. But in order for all nations to hear, there would first have to be some way of getting this message to all nations. God had a plan to re-connect humanity, and it’s being executed to this day at ever-increasing rates.

But let me talk about the Church. You might think that Jesus’ last words regarding the Church that would come after Him might reveal his plan for the future. And I think you’d be right. In Jesus’ only recorded prayer for us believers today, Jesus prays that the Church might be brought to complete unity so that the whole world would know the Gospel of the Father’s love for them (John 17:20-23).

Think about that for a second.

Jesus is leaving the world and he’s praying for the future Church in order that they might reach the whole world with the Gospel. And what one thing does he spend his time praying for?

UNITY.

That is the prayer of our Savior for the Church. That we would “be brought to complete unity”. Because then we will reach the world. You can almost hear echoes of Genesis 11:6: “If they’re all on the same page, then nothing will be impossible for them.” It’s been the lesson from Day 1 after the Flood: A movement is effective only insofar as its people are unified.  No wonder Jesus said Church unity would be the one thing necessary to bring the gospel to the world.

So what are we to look for as a sign that the end is coming? The Gospel will go out to all nations. And how will it do that? The Church will need to be brought to unity. Take a look around at the Church today and tell me we aren’t more unified than we’ve ever been. Hillsong United writes a song, puts it on an album, and overnight, thousands of churches on every continent are singing it. The Willow Creek Association puts on a leadership conference that reaches 65,000 church leaders in North America and an additional 46,000 overseas in 114 cities in 50 countries, and those numbers are growing every year. All hearing the same message. Being brought to complete unity. This wasn’t even possible 20 years ago. And it’s only accelerating. Be watchful. Because as the Church unifies, the Gospel will go out in power. And we all know what comes next…