catching his breath

It’s easy to grow anxious observing someone else’s walk with Jesus. Others we observe may seem to have knowledge about Jesus that we don’t. How does he do it? Why does she believe that? They seem to know him deeply, I don’t. What’s up?

Peter struggled with this when Jesus shared with him some of his future persecution (end of John 21). “Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them…When Peter saw him, he asked, “Lord, what about him?” So maybe Peter questioned what John had that he didn’t. Was John going to endure the same death? If not, why not?

Jesus’ comeback is clear. “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me.” In essence here is the message I think Peter needed (and maybe we need) to hear.

Peter, I’m talking to you. You follow me and we’ll work it out together. Don’t worry about John. He and I have things squared away. As long as you both follow me things will fall into place. We will learn together. Your unique experiences will collide with my presence and you’ll be able to appropriately live out my story in your context. Just like John does in his. And when the three of us meet together in this work we’ll discuss and adjust to fit that time. But for now follow me.

There isn’t some general formula that we can apply to our lives and expect Kingdom fruit to flourish. You’re the only person who is you. I am the only one who is me. The command is to follow Jesus and when we do the results of that journey will vary between us, but that’s not the point. We’re not asked to purchase, buy into, a pre-packaged Christian experience. We’re asked to follow him. And this apprenticeship will naturally workout differently for those of us in the West than it will for those who follow Jesus in Asia, and so on.

Following Jesus as our unique selves will ensure we learn some things others who follow him don’t and perhaps miss out on some things others enjoy. But we’ll always know who we’re with and that’s what matters.

When naked we clothe ourselves. At funerals we shroud our tears in Oakleys. We protect those parts of us, physical or emotional, that we deem vulnerable to those around us. It’s natural to think, or so we’ve been conditioned to believe, that exposing certain parts of who we are leaves us short of true humanity. But does it? (Note: please don’t read the previous lines of thought as a proposal and encouragement of public nudity).

Let’s be honest, our propensity is to cover up our perceived weaknesses, to keep closed those doors to our hidden life, to protect our status as healthy humans. And this thinking can squelch a reality that may slip away from us if we’re not careful. When we train certain aspects of our humanness to vanish like ninjas when threatened we miss out on participating in and sharing with others our full humanity. And what did the incarnation of Jesus express if it didn’t express that God wants to, and does, participate in the fullness of humanity–the good, bad and ugly? God, in Jesus, embraced the vulnerabilities often disassociated from a complete person. He didn’t shy from them or throw on his shades. On the cross, and recorded for all to read, God unleashed his doubts and divulged a deep emotional trauma: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

God stamped approval on humanity by his willingness to enter it. He didn’t sit coldly from his divine perch and demand that we seek the status of gods before we could enjoy intimacy with him. He moved into our space, our world, our pain, our suffering, our condition. And Jesus didn’t enter human existence devoid of such realities. Still, he removed the typical protective measures and fully opened himself to God. He pled for his life in the garden. He wept at the passing of a friend. He cried out to God in confusion. Had he clamped shut these aspects of himself he would have come short of a full expression of humanity.

I’m afraid that failing to accept the implications of the incarnation has deepened our resolve to resist all the vulnerability we believe endangers our humanity. The irony, though, is that in doing so we cut off opportunities to be fully human. Let’s not forget that those tears and fears we believe need denied and suppressed are also emotions God seeks to share with us.

Surface level stuff seems good in my life, but I have an aching that I am missing something deeper. Perhaps like Martha I’m distracted from spending time with Jesus, sitting at his feet, infusing the rhythms of his life with mine. When people sleep, events are over, activities at rest the emptiness consumes me.  

I wanted to pray today and couldn’t. Where are the deeper things? I’d like to think I drink of the deep well of God’s love, but I haven’t felt the refreshing of it.

The next few weeks I will seek to find the deep where I can anchor my anxiety. Hope compels me. I tried to pray today and couldn’t. So I wrote.

I like to occasionally direct you to blogs, books or articles worth reading. I found one this morning and I believe it has the chutzpah and punch to catalyze the type of shift in thinking and action churches need.

Mark Hamilton (PhD – Associate Dean, Associate Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology) has written an incredible piece dealing with the demographic crisis in church culture. Read and start a conversation in your context.

Here is a line from it to stir your interest: “No one who has been a Christian for more than twenty years gets to be the “weaker brother.”

Finish the sentence. Ministering means…

Ministering means helping others find thin places. I first read about thin places in a book by Marcus Borg. It stuck and I haven’t let go of the concept. Thin places exist when heaven and earth come wonderfully close to slamming together, where only a trace of humanity’s fall remains. They are moments when a person can sense the divine within the mundane. They are experiences where things of earth seem flooded by the energy of heaven. In the moment of a thin place, a person can feel the tug of God’s presence.

Imagine you were injected with liquid metal and studded with magnetic particles. Now envision that throughout the day you were required to pass between a sheet of metal and a life-sized magnet. Both warp and lunge your direction as you walk through. You feel the impending collision ahead of time as each piece forces millions of invisible, molecular particles into your path. That’s the force of thin place.

Prayer. A certain song. A smile. Birth. That old recliner. A lover’s embrace. A glass of wine shared among friends. Psalm 23. Worn spots in the shroud of humanity’s fall.

Ministry, then, ought to encompass an intentional effort to lead others into thin places. It is God alone that can heal and mend broken hearts, and in a fallen world that bars his full disclosure we must encounter him at the thin spots, at least for now. So I understand ministers as once-broken veterans of thin place exploration, discoverers of the renewing force of God’s presence, who go back and share their discoveries with those now-broken.

John Dobbs has launched a grass-roots effort to honor ministers by asking bloggers to blog about a minister(s) who has impacted them (you can read more about it at his blog). I love the idea. Here is my contribution.

I come from a family of preachers: a grandpa, an uncle, a cousin and a dad. Dad didn’t always preach full-time, but he served as a deacon, which if done right exemplifies the essence of a minister. Now (and for the last 10 or so years) he ministers in the pulpit for a small congregation in Texas. Not only that, he directed a week of camp at Green Valley Bible Camp for around 9-10 years, and a majority of those years were directed while he worked full-time as a network analyst. He took his vacation to minister to young people in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas instead of sipping margaritas on the beach (actually I can’t convince him to have a drink with me so he wouldn’t have done that anyway…but the line sounded good).

Even though I actually started preaching full-time before he did, he still produced an incredible impact on my journey as a minister. Honestly, my initial mode and style of preaching came from other places and not him. I endured an indoctrination at a school of preaching and struggled to find a message and ministry of grace. He deserves no credit for that part of my ministry.

Though he raised me around rigid conservatism, he actually showed me the path of questioning everything while still getting along with those with whom we disagree. While a deacon, dad rarely let the preacher off the hook. He wanted to know why the preacher said what he said. I remember frequently waiting for dad to finish talking to the preacher after all the lights had been turned out in the church building. He wouldn’t settle for a traditional answer, he wanted to know God’s direction. This momentum of questioning eventually caught up to me, moved through me and swept me into a new era of my own ministry. This is where dad gets the credit.

He taught me how to question. He passed on to me the gift of relentlessness when it comes to finding God. He showed me that going against the traditional flow is what we’re often called to do, even if it stirs up family Christmas and comfortable congregations. He never liked the taste of canned answers and I’ve inherited those taste buds.

So Tony Linton, dad: Thanks. I now enjoy a ministry flooded by grace and truth because you taught me to never settle and to never quit asking questions.

If you have a minister in mind then write up a tribute to him/her and explain the positive impact on your life. Thanks to John Dobbs as well for the great idea. Keep the flame of encouragement going… get to writing. There’s got to be some more good preachers out there, somewhere.

A good friend of mine died yesterday. I am unable to make it to give her eulogy, but was able to write up something that will be read tomorrow. Below is what I wrote.

Pray for the friends and family. Rene, this if for you.

Rene wanted me here with all of you to celebrate her life and it pains me that I can’t make it. Yet I believe she would understand. She was one of the most gracious and encouraging people I’ve met.

Nothing can be said to change these circumstances or make the pain of her loss better, so I will avoid trying with my words to do so. To the friends and family of Rene who hurt, all I can say is allow God to experience it with you. Invite him into your pain and he will enter.

Rene understood this more than most, I think. She lost her son Brandon several years ago, unexpectedly and tragically. Then she lost her beloved Jim a few years after that. She was no stranger to pain. But that didn’t mean she was a stranger to God. Pain and God often and tearfully intertwine, and Rene embodied this bittersweet marriage.

Because of this and from what I know of her she still embraced life, even through heartbreak and brokenness. She understood that when God and pain dance together life will always ask to cut in.

Death does not have the final say. Pain cannot dominate us. When God steps into the experiences of death and the valleys of our pain life emerges as the consuming presence and ultimate reality.

So today isn’t about Rene’s death as much as it is about her life. Not just her life before her death but her life now. Yes… her life now. Even living within range of death’s putrid breath, Rene’s calmed and assured life echoed the mocking tone of Paul’s question, “O death, where is your sting?”

And though she has left the stage of earth, I can imagine her now, along with Jim and Brandon, chanting the chorus of resurrection, with fists in the air, defying death to make a move. “O death, where is your sting? Where is your victory? Bring it on for we have life and his name is Jesus!”

And just as she did many times through her tears on earth, let that chant march you through the mourning of this life until morning breaks on the next.

My aim and intention is to try and write 2-3 good posts a week. It may end up like 2 because I’m lazy when it comes to writing.

Thanks for all the comments, etc.

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Working up a sermon on friendship to Jesus. Share what friendship means to you. How has it impacted your life?

Time to play, pretend, acting as if your soul has no grime,
smile, back-slap, swap them: the pleasantries, they’re a dime.
Entering church, game on, gotta do this. Smile and nod, friend;
get finished, shake, side-hug, move, almost there, almost. The end.
Did it. Nobody asked, nobody knew. I kept it up and feigned on through.
They didn’t care about it and neither did I…I, well kind of, but who
would even care if I told them? I accept the play, the game, the untrue.

The land of make believe, Holy-wood hills, I get it but hate it.
I slide through it, never noticed, never pressured. Reckless fidget,
wondering, do they know, will they ask, will they pervade and push
right in to me, my life, my thoughts, the real me, the one I wish
they’d care some more about? Can they handle the truth I can’t take?
Hard exterior, nothing inside, at least you won’t find out, it’s mine. Wait,
someone approaches, smile, wipe that brow. Take two…action! One last try,
and I do, again, not a clue. And the Oscar goes to         …about to die.

It’s hard to breathe when you’re plastic, I must break out, let loose, live.
Reality beckons me and it’s what I want, truth, ugly truth, for that I’d give
all of this up, everything. Shallow suffering and fantasy, please, stay in your place,
don’t invade life with the fake. But you persist, and how I wish for just a taste
of the real, the life, edgy and uncut, but what exists?…nothing, blank rounds of smiles.
It’s alright. It’s alright. I’ve done this…I can maneuver my way through the aisles.

No! It can’t be this way, I need to find the real, behind the façade, the phony
person. A life that doesn’t want to live. It’s as if we’re dancing to a symphony,
the score for “The Stepford Wives.” Everybody feel good, look good, sound good, for
that’s your goal and your life. Do this, step here, walk there. Yes, that’ it. No, more.
No, less; just right. Smile. Pause and look away. Now move on. Very nice
to meet you. You did it well. They never noticed, they couldn’t tell, your act sufficed.

When will it end, this life of lies, staying in character? The only thing real is that…
it’s not real. Should I satisfy my thirst with that drop of truth or break the act
over my knee and melt the plastic into nothing? The furry swells inside, the feeling
that I can’t escape the shroud of secrecy looming over the living. The living?

Is that right, because I couldn’t tell? Reality exists but not in real time, the charade must
go on. For this act contains the only piece of truth left. Inside I fight and thrust
outward, trying to explode on to the scene, to scream, “Here I am it’s me!”
Really me, yeah, I know you don’t know me, but it’s me, I want you to see,
for yourself, but not the you I know, the you inside of you, the one inside the shell,
the one that speaks, the one that hurts, the one that’s watching this from hell,
the prison inside a plastic world. I want to live, to understand the free,
those that cry but not on cue, those that laugh outside the script, those that see
behind the scenes, those that distinguish their dreams and forget their lines,
those that have mined their feelings and brought them to the surface of life.

Real people, real problems, real hurts, real concerns enveloped in a world
of plastic. People trapped, anxiety ridden, scared their thoughts may unfurl.
But let them. Open up and stop pretending. Open up and quit reliving
the same steps the established programmed into your existence. Go on and give in
to the urge to be you, uncensored. Reject the life piety sells. Step to that raw
honesty. Let rage for dishonesty melt the plastic away. Exist, scars and all.

She stands shaking. Pregnant. Hopeless, ridden with shame about what she’s done. Tears cannot wash away the stigma, she’s tried. Suburbia has its standards.

The baby’s daddy? He doesn’t even know. Wouldn’t care if he did.

What about family? Her mother works two jobs, one of the jobs her father would have worked had he not ran off before she was born. She hasn’t the time to support her. Standards, remember? Doesn’t even have the time to say good night. That’s how it is.

What will she do? Fifteen. A child and knocked up.

Scared.

Confused.

Options?

Dizzy. A merry-go-round of choices circles her. Nauseating confusion. “Abortion? Adoption? Raise the baby myself? If I abort… no, that’s murder. If I put it up for adopt…oh, I’m horrible. Who will raise my baby? I can’t care for this baby. Is abortion really better for the baby? No…but.” Confusion mocks her––jeering at the one on stage forgetting her lines.

A beneficiary of abandonment. Forsaken. No embrace. No “I’m here.”

She stands shaking. Outside the clinic. Stomach cramping from emptiness. Convulsed in a dry heave, her ears ring. Disgusted with her life. Pondering the razor blade in the kitchen drawer.

“Screw up! Will you ever amount to anything?” shouts the indoctrination of her guardians. The mental assaults of her mother’s boyfriend. Enacted by his molesting hands. But not a single hand to lift her.

She stands shaking. Disoriented indecision. She’s desperate, afraid, hating herself. Dry heaves reach down, trying to jerk her stomach through her mouth. Acid stinging her chapped lips. She can’t live this nightmare. God?

She feigns hope. The urge to vomit again. Throat pulsating in pain. She screams inside, “Why?! Do you care, God? Say something!”

“Vote Today! Stop Abortion! Save a child!” booms the voice from the bullhorn.

Interrupted by the thunderous cadence of picketers, her racing mind halts. She loses air.

With raging confidence they stand and raise their signs. Embracing their Bibles. Lifting their voices. They have something to say.

She stands shaking.

Wipes the vomit from her lips. Turns and goes inside.