Guided to the Good God Wants

"Many Americans not only believe in God in some general way but experience God directly and report repeated contact with the supernatural." [T.M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (Knopf, 2012).]

 

1. One of many.

I claim to be among the "many" that Professor Luhrman talks about.

I don’t boast in this. It’s just a fact of my life. Communication with God is something that I’ve sought and obtained.

I share here what I believe to be a message from God personal to me. I share what was communicated, my grudging response to it, the after-effect of yielding to it. I cast about for the why of it. I discuss its importance to me.

This isn’t a Message to America. It isn’t an Oracle to the Human Race. The subject will seem ordinary.

Why God involves himself in the details of our lives, and in my life in particular, is a question that I won’t try to answer. I’ll just point to a question raised by a very flawed, very great man who loved God with his whole heart:

What is man that You take thought of him, And the son of man that You care for him? [Psalm 8:4 (A Psalm of David) (NASB).]

 2. Jesus.

Jesus is above me as high as the moon is over the Mojave Desert.

But to be like him is my goal and the goal of any Christian. I won’t reach that goal while I walk this planet. Still, I want to do my best to imitate him and, to that end, I contemplate the closeness between Jesus and God.

Jesus submitted to God in all that he did. This is from the gospel of John:

Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner." [John 5:19 (NASB)].

Not only did he do what he saw his Father doing, he said what he heard his Father say:

Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works. [John 14:10 (NASB).]

This relationship is evident, even if sometimes it’s not indicated in so many words. There’s a backstory to the account of the Greek woman who came to Jesus pleading for him to heal her daughter. Her daughter was possessed by an impure spirit. Jesus said to her, "Let the children be satisfied first, for it is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs." (Mark 7:27 (NASB).)

After Jesus spoke, the Greek woman said back, "Yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table feed on the children’s crumbs." (Id., 7:28 (NASB).) For that answer, Jesus told her that her daughter was healed. The woman went home and her daughter was well.

Jesus was not cruel. He knew something from God, or God knew something and told Jesus what to say. Jesus said what he said to bring the woman to some realization, some repentance, perhaps some needed humility – Mark does say. But the existence of that backstory seems clear.

Nobody has ever had Jesus’s closeness with God. I’ve heard that prioress Hildegaard von Bingen longed to be a "feather on the breath of God", but I haven’t heard that she achieved that.

And that’s the human condition. For the most part, we’re left to ordinary resources for choices in our life.

3. My own choices

But sometimes God makes his will known. In a perfect world our response to God would be automatic. God commands, we obey.

To my shame, I have defied that perfect, four-word formula.

a. Marriage.

Twenty-some years ago, I believed that God directed me to marry a specific woman. I was praying. I asked God who I should marry. Immediately, the image of the face of a woman I knew came strongly upon me. The image came, I think, three times.

But I wanted to marry someone else. This other woman who I wanted to marry was smart, charming, beautiful, and professionally accomplished. We had dated.

So I resented direction to marry somebody who wasn’t her.

So instead of pursuing the woman of the vision, I started to study about divine guidance. Frankly, I was hoping to alibi myself out of doing what I didn’t want to do; though, in my defense, I was not altogether insincere. I read, I consulted others. I could never bring myself to act on the apparent response to my question to God.

It’s good that I didn’t marry the woman that I wanted to marry. We often were not kind to each other – there was conflict. Also, she was smarter and emotionally stronger than I was. If I had married her, I would have become her satellite. She would have been unsatisfied with that, and I would have been unhappy because she was unhappy.

It’s a pity that I didn’t marry the woman of the vision. I can now see how it could have been a good marriage. But I didn’t think so at the time.

I didn’t marry the woman that I wanted, and I didn’t marry the woman that I thought God wanted me to marry. Decades of loneliness followed.

b. House.

Around the time that I was refusing to marry the woman that I thought God wanted me to marry, I bought a house in Pasadena. It was small but charming.

But before I signed the papers to buy the house, a very clear voice came to me at night. I saw the house in my mind’s eye, and I heard: "No!"

But bought it anyway, although with anxiety.

House prices soon plunged, and the house became a burden. I unloaded it at a substantial loss.

c. China.

Around that time, I happened to see an advertisement from a Christian service organization about short-term teaching assignments in China. I called to ask about those.

When they found out that I was a lawyer, they strongly urged me to go to China long-term. They wanted me to teach international business law. The idea was attractive. Work at the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office had become a great strain because of conflict with my supervisor.

But again there was a warning. I do not remember now the exact circumstances, but I remember a voice that said, "Stay home and take care of your father." Dad was old, and he was lonely after the death of my mother.

But I was fixated on doing the good that I wanted, not the good that God apparently wanted, so I went to China. I taught there for two years.

I have good memories of China. But my time there ended with dread, with a belief that I had been opportunistically blamed for injury to a pedestrian who had walked into the side of a moving bus. I was not responsible. But in my last months in China, I always believed that I was about to be arrested.

In the meantime, Dad came under the influence of a manipulative woman who labored to divide him from his sons.

Each choice that I made, about marriage, about buying a house, about going to China, came with consequences. In fact, I still suffer consequences of those choices. And I may be largely unaware of all of the consequences that flowed from those poor choices. I note in passing that within a few years after I came back from China, I was fleeing vast conspiracies and looking for places to sleep out of the wind in ditches, in orange groves, and under shrubbery next to freeways.

4. No swimming.

This history of disobedience and disaster informs my response to guidance that I think I have had recently.

I was swimming regularly. I had for years. The thought occurred to me that I should give up swimming. As I thought about this, I felt an inner weight, which I interpreted to be the Holy Spirit signaling that this was from God. This thought was persistent.

This thought was not welcome. Swimming is my exercise, my hobby, and my enjoyment. Swim meets are my avenue of physical competition. It makes me proud to swim well and to be strong and fit. It’s good for my appearance, and I’m so vain that I like to see my broad chest and shoulders as I shave in the morning. I have friends that I know through swimming. And, after all, doesn’t the Bible say "Physical training is of some value"? (1 Timothy 4:8 (NIV).)

I weighed what to do. I went through some of the classic stages of grief. There was denial – does God really want this? There was bargaining – God, what if I don’t swim or compete on Sundays; then is it OK?

5. Caution.

It’s right to be cautious about supernatural guidance. I have to approach supernatural guidance with special caution because I have been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic– or, more exactly, as having something like paranoid schizophrenia. I take medicine.

But that doesn’t make me automatically dismiss the idea that God might speak to me. My times dominated by that disease are marked, first, by paranoia. I suffer alarm about an apparent conspiracy to harm me. As the disease progresses, the conspiracy seems to grow, and my alarm deepens. Only then do the voices and visions come. I assume that if I were listening to disease and not to God, before that I would be in flight from a vast conspiracy.

And to acknowledge my disease is not to say that I can never be supernaturally guided. That would be like saying that because I have ringing in my ears, nobody ever presses my doorbell.

Yet I have had supernatural-seeming thoughts that turned out not to be from God. Once I was leaving my home, and I had a strong sense, not unlike the sense I had about swimming, that I would never return to it again. It’s from that home that I now write. I’ve also heard voices with more alarming messages that I now know were not from God.

So not every voice, not every supernatural-seeming thought, comes from disease; nor does it necessarily come from God. If a voice told me to harm someone, I would know that it came from something evil that had access to my mind.

6. Discernment.

So I had to decide whether this thought about swimming really came from God. I convinced myself that it did by driving into mountains, finding a quiet, shaded spot, and being alone to think.

For the most part in my hours in the mountains I did not address the immediate issue of swimming. I began by reading a few chapters of scripture. Then I worked on an essay about the fear of God. At the end of several hours, I felt peace and comfort about the idea of giving up swimming.

Maybe I’m wrong. That’s always possible, and it’s good to be humble about the possibility of making a mistake. But all you can ever do is what you think is right after giving the matter careful thought.

7. Why this has happened.

Naturally I have wondered why God apparently banned me from swimming.

"Why" questions with God are perilous. He often does not give us the "why" of what he wants. And compared to God each of us is like a pawn or a bishop or a knight on an infinitely large chess board. We see only what is immediately around us. God sees the whole board. So sometimes we just have to trust.

In the first chapter of Mark, Jesus heals a leper. He strictly tells the leper not to tell anyone about how he came to be healed. But in his enthusiasm, the one-time leper told everybody. It’s right, isn’t it, to give glory to God? But afterward, the throngs of people made it impossible for Jesus to minister in towns, according to Mark. After that Jesus’s ministry was for a time confined to the countryside. (Mark 1:40-45.)

So God has his reasons, which we might not know. But here are reasons that make sense to me.

It might have happened in answer to a prayer. Months ago, seeing how tottering was my walk with God, I asked him to "quicken" me. I meant "quicken" in the sense of changing me from passively religious to actively engaged with God and doing his will. And I often pray for wisdom.

And my exercise regimen has been spectacular, but my prayer-life and Bible-study have been comparatively grudging and meager. Maybe God wanted to shake things up.

And I think of Jesus and the rich young ruler. He came to Jesus and asked what he should do to gain eternal life. Jesus told him to obey the scriptural commandments. But he pressed Jesus. He said that he had done that from childhood. Then Jesus told him to sell all he had and give the proceeds to the poor; then he would have treasure in heaven. Then, Jesus said, the young man should follow him. (Luke 18:18-23.)

Maybe I am like the rich young ruler, without the wealth. I have no great wealth to give up. But I can surrender this thing, swimming, that is such an important part of my life. Maybe my swimming is the wealth that makes me stumble in my walk with God.

And, apart from all of that, maybe what I heard was just a sovereign choice by God.

8. Effect.

I notice things about myself now that I don’t swim. I’ve had a quickening of ideas. I’ve had flashes of love for strangers – wholly uncharacteristic of me. These might be breadcrumbs from God dropped in my way to lead me to know that I’ve done right.

And now that I’ve given up something costly, I’m less patient with my lax religious practices. When I waste time, It seems to me that I risk forfeiting any benefit that I might gain from my sacrifice.

It used to be that the first thing I would do on waking in the morning was go online. Lately, the first thing I do is read the Bible.

And before, at night, I typically put off reading the Bible until shortly before sleeping. But by then I was so tired that I retained almost nothing of what I read.

So giving up swimming has shifted my priorities and made me walk better with God.

9. Hard.

Giving up swimming has been hard in two ways. It’s hard to give up something that I love. Also, it’s hard to know that I’m rightly interpreting God’s will. I’m glad for these two difficulties.

The value of what I’ve given up increases the value of what I gave it up for. Think of Thomas Paine. Think of what he wrote in a time when the American revolution had suffered military setbacks in New York. Paine wrote these words in his booklet The Crisis:

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

Giving up swimming is, in fact, a low price for a closer walk with God. But it is costly in my mind.

It’s also hard to know that I am not being fooled. But the fact that I struggle with this is some comfort.

Bryan Garner is a writing guru. He’s written many books, including two books he co-wrote with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. I’ve heard Garner say that the difference between a good writer and a bad writer is that a good writer thinks writing’s hard; a bad writer thinks it's easy.

Maybe that’s true with spiritual things, too. So the fact that I wrestle with my apparent messages from heaven might be a good thing.

10. The limits of supernatural guidance.

I am mindful that by far most of what I do and think will continue to come from my own thoughts. I’m not Paul that I learn all of what I know of Jesus by direct revelation. I need to study my Bible. And when I work at my law practice, I have to look for the law, and I have to think hard, and I have to labor at my advocacy.

Yet even most of the time, I hope and believe that God, if he chooses, might be guiding me, even if that’s not apparent. It might be that God speaks to us through our own thoughts, but he speaks to us below the level of our awareness.

11. The limits of my sacrifice.

I chose to interpret this supernatural guidance narrowly: not to give up all exercise, but only swimming. I took up running. But I wrestle with whether I am called to give the guidance a broader interpretation and to sacrifice all exercise for the sake of gaining more focus on God.

12. The limits of my sanctity.

Communication with God doesn’t make me a saint. I don’t love as I should. I waste a lot of time that God has given me. I spend too much time arguing about politics. Even as I post a snarky comment about a politician, I know that it doesn’t make me grow closer to God.

I walk with God haltingly. I hope that God will make me his foot-soldier. My hope is not to be exalted but acceptable. For a man who spent a decade convinced that he was lost to God, this hope is spectacular.

Did Jesus Have Short Hair?

Two questions. What did Jesus look like? Why don’t we know?

1. Jesus described.

There is one physical description of Jesus in the Bible. It occurs in the Book of Revelation. Revelation is the record of the apostle John’s visions that he had on the island of Patmos. John was exiled there long after Jesus had died, rose, and ascended into heaven. This is that description:


His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters. And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength. [Revelation 1:14-16 (KJV).] This describes Jesus in his glorified state. It is the description of a holy vision, not the description of a man as his disciples passed time with him.

The Bible elsewhere contains the idea of Jesus transformed from his natural, earthly appearance. He prayed with three of his disciples, and as he prayed his appearance changed. This is what Luke 9:29 says about the change in his appearance:
And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering. [KJV.] These passages do not reveal the appearance of Jesus day-by-day in Galilee.

2. Jesus un-recognized.

After his resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples, but they did not always recognize him.

He appeared to Mary Magdalene when she came to his tomb, but she thought at first that he was a gardener. (John 20:15.)

Seven disciples were fishing but catching no fish. Jesus stood on the shore and spoke to them, but they did not recognize him. He told them to cast their net on the right side of the boat. They did, and suddenly they had a haul of many fish. Then they knew it was Jesus. (John 21:1-9.) The Book of John suggests that the disciples recognized him by his miracle, not by his appearance or voice. It says that they dared not ask him who he was, because they knew it was Jesus. (John 21:12.) This would make no sense if he were otherwise recognizable.

Jesus walked with two disciples on the road to Emmaus. But they did not know who he was until he broke bread. Then he disappeared from their view. (Luke 24:1-31.)

3. Did Jesus have short hair?

Jesus is not described as he appeared in the time of his ministry, but there is one hint about what he looked like. Against traditional depictions of him, Jesus probably had short hair. The apostle Paul did not meet Jesus in his earthly state, but he knew people who knew him, and he knew the traditions of the time. And based on that tradition, he said in 1^st Corinthians:
Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? [1 Corinthians 11:14.] How odd it would be if Paul indirectly criticized Jesus’s appearance or chided men for having hair like him.

I suppose that the long-haired Jesus tradition is handed down from Medieval and Renaissance paintings. These depicted Jesus in the custom of those times.

4. The Passion of the Christ.

I watched the beginning of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. It is interesting that director Gibson had his actors speak Jesus’s language Aramaic, but he had Jesus wear his hair long, even though that was not the tradition of Jesus’s time.

And Gibson’s Jesus was European-looking. This was even though Jesus was born in the Middle East to a Middle-Eastern mother. Of course, we don’t know that Jesus did not look European, but we have no reason to think that he did.

I don't mean to say that The Passion of the Christ was a bad movie. Many people found it deeply stirring. It's just that a movie director must make a choice about the appearance of his central character. And there is no way to know that this director's choice was right.

5. Disguise as parable.

What does this mean? I suspect it means many things, and I suspect that I’m missing most of them.

But I suspect that one clue to one meaning reposes in Hebrews 13:2: "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." (KJV.) Therefore it is true in a literal sense and in a metaphorical sense: if you cannot know the appearance with which Jesus might come, any needy stranger might be Jesus.

Fear and Fearlessness

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." [Proverbs 9:10 (KJV).]

"Ye shall walk after the Lord your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him." [Deuteronomy 13:4(KJV).]

A prayer: Lord, you call us to love you, and you call us to fear you, and you do so for our good. Help me to understand. Sin makes my mind hazy, so please make my mind clear. May my meditations be acceptable to you. May any truth that I find sit down in me.

1. Craziness and danger.

The era of the bluetooth creates uncomfortable encounters in the street. When I see somebody on the street who seems to be talking to himself, I don’t know whether he is having a hands-free cellphone communication or a partner-free conversation such that I should cross the street for safety.

Call that "side-stepping the crazy-hazard."

Which is a way of getting into the subject of the fear of God. Of all of the reasons to fear God, certainly one is his wildness. This essay discusses God as a fear-inducing wildman.

2. Yeah, well, I think it’s an important subject.

This might seem heretical in a time when all talk of god’s nature seems to be about God’s unconditional father-love or about his unbreakable friendship with those who believe in him. If fear of God is heresy, I’m fine with heresy.

The fact is that both love and fear of God are right and biblical. In most any given time in most any given person, both ideas should converge. But one idea alone has dominated modern American church-talk. Call this essay contrarian.

3. The Lord as the wildman of the Bible.

I think that when they are honest, persons who regularly read the Bible will admit that parts of it wrinkle their brow. To some, these troubling parts are reasons to deny that the entire Bible is a credible source of moral guidance. They are a challenge to Paul’s assertion that "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness . . .." (2 Timothy 3:16 (KJV).)

Others take these troubling parts as a summons to wrestle with scripture, just as Jacob wrestled with God alone in the desert on the way to find his fate. (Genesis 32.)

And maybe they are an invitation to holy fear. Maybe they show that God defies placement into comfortable categories. Maybe they show that whenever we think that we have God defined, he breaks out of our good-natured definition.

Here are examples.

4. "Suffer the little children" or "The little children shall suffer"?

"God breathed" Psalm 137 cries out against Babylon. Babylon had defeated Judah and taken its leading citizens into exile. Mind you, Judah was not innocent in its own demise. The sins of King Manassah, a descendant of David, made God furious and doomed his kingdom. Be that as it may, here is the end of Psalm 137:
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. [ll. 8-9 (KJV)]
Whatever were the merits or demerits of the Babylonians, their "little ones" were likely innocent.

God has spoken through prophets. Sometimes he has proclaimed judgment and suffering to come. Through the prophet Jeremiah he promised that the people of Judah and Jerusalem would eat the flesh of their children:
And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them. [Jeremiah 19:9 (KJV).] The prophet Ezekiel pronounced a like horror. (Ezekiel 5, esp. 9-10.)

This is a prophesy of Isaiah against Israel: "Each will feed on the flesh of their own offspring." (Isaiah 9:20 (NIV).)

          5. Sacrifice: descendants of Saul.

When Israel entered the land God had promised them, to conquer it, a shrewd tribe tricked them. This tribe, the Gibeonites, clothed ambassadors in worn and torn and patched clothing. And they provisioned the ambassadors with dry and moldy food. In this way, they convinced the leaders of the Israelites that the ambassadors had traveled far, even though they dwelt near.

The ambassadors offered a treaty of peace with the Israelites. The Israelites believed them to be a distant tribe and not among those named for annihilation. So they made a pact with them to guarantee peace.

But in the time of King Saul, Saul had a different idea. He slaughtered the Gibeonites. They cried out to God.

When King David replaced Saul, there was a famine for three years. God told David that the famine came because of Saul’s crimes against the Gibeonites.

So David parlayed with the Gibeonites. They demanded that David surrender to them seven descendants of Saul. David did so, and the Gibeonites hanged them. (This narrative is in 2 Samuel 21.)

6. Job and Job’s children.

For undeserved punishment, the book of Job stands out. He was a righteous and blameless man, and God took everything from him. God took away his wealth, his children, and his health. This was because of a bet between God and Satan.

In the end, Job is restored to health, wealth, and family. Still, you wonder if his love of his new children could make him forget his lost loved ones.

7. God gulls, then he punishes the gullible.

Many prophets in the Bible did not serve God. For example, Balaam knew God, but he did not always do God’s will. He joined the Moabites against the Israelites. The Israelites killed Balaam while he dwelled in the company of their enemies. (Numbers 22-24, 31.)

Such prophets were a plague on Israel. But does this, from the book of the prophet Ezekiel, challenge your notion of fairness?

And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel. [14:9 (KJV).]

8. Cursing the fig tree.

In Mark chapter 11, Jesus was hungry and saw a fig tree. But it had no figs, so he cursed it. He cursed it even though it was not the season for figs. Jesus’s disciples passed by the fig tree the next morning, and it was dried up from the roots.

9. The cruelest sacrifice.

The ultimate un-tameness of God is the fact that he would send his son to suffer and die on the cross. An Episcopal bishop has even criticized this as child-abuse. (Never mind that, as Marilynne Robinson pointed out, Jesus was 33 at the time.)

Although I join Marilynne Robinson in thinking ill of the bishop’s criticism of God, that criticism might be preferable to our own sometimes too-casual regard for this history- turning act.

I understood some things better as a child than I do as an adult. Crucifixion terrorized me. Crucifixion terrorized me much so that I was greatly relieved to go to Denmark as a child and to hear a teacher describe Jesus’s death, in the Danish way, as death by "hanging from a cross". After hearing that I (erroneously) pictured in my mind’s eye the instrument of Jesus’s death as a rope from the top of a cross.

Since this did not involve nails and slow death, I happily drew pictures of this death of Jesus. I was almost riotously relieved.

I do not now have that dread of the idea of crucifixion that I had as a child. Familiarity has plucked the needful terror of crucifixion from my adult mind. I am less for that loss.

The point is that there is a seeming wildness in a God who makes his own beloved son, the one blameless person in history, suffer death by torture and descent into hell.

10. The flip side of fear.

God inspires Psalms about children being dashed on stones. He dooms his chosen people to eat the flesh of their sons and daughters. He causes a king to give the descendants of another king over to a vengeance-seeking tribe to end a famine. He wipes out a righteous man’s family on a bet. He misleads prophets, then he punishes them for being misled. He punishes a fig tree for not bearing figs out of season. He inflicts a cruel death on the one man in history who doesn’t deserve it.

God is wild. God is unpredictable. God defies our ideas of rightness. We are right when we fear him. 

But there is a divine purpose lurking in the fear. The fact is that sometimes God is an assailant. (As when God wrestled with Jacob). Sometimes he is a frenetic whirlwind. (Job 38:1; 40:6.) But after God wrestled with Jacob, God blessed Jacob. After God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, God blessed Job.

Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers. In his years of slavery and imprisonment, he must have rued the injustice of that.

But one day, he understood that God had sent him into slavery and into prison to prepare a place of prosperity for himself and his brothers. Egypt became a refuge to them in a time of worldwide famine.

11. Fear and courage.

Fear should grow into courage. Fearing God, we should be brave to stand against the ways of this world. Fearing God, we should be brave to lose comfort and lose security to gain God. Fearing God, we should be brave in the face of death.

Because on the far side of fear lies salvation.

See how fear and fearlessness are put side-by-side in this passage from Luke:
And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.
Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows. [Luke 12:4-7 (KJV).]
"Those who fear the Lord will have a happy end; on the day of their death they will be blessed." (Ecclesiasticus 1:13 (NRSV)(Canonical in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian traditions.))

12. Paul.

The apostle Paul is a hero of the Book of Acts. But he is no hero at the beginning. He persecuted the new church. He approved the slaughter of Christians.

Saul was on his way to Damascus to continue to bind the followers of Jesus. Then God struck him down to the ground and blinded him. This, of course, must have been terrifying. He was blind for three days, and in that time he did not eat or drink. Then God sent a disciple to cure his blindness. (Acts 9)

From that moment, Saul (known now as Paul) preached Christ. He suffered greatly for Christ: beatings, shipwrecks, exposure to the elements, whippings, imprisonment. Tradition says that he was beheaded.

This is the apostle who said during his ministry, "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." (Philippians 1:21 (KJV).) I like to think that, having learned to fear God, Paul died calmly.

A prayer: Lord, you who know how to give good things to those who ask. Please bless me, and bless my family, and bless my friends with that fear from which courage grows. Amen.

What I Admire About Mitt Romney

Shallow thinking makes shallow minds. I think of this when I think of a lot of the criticism of Barack Obama. It is reflexedly negative. Obama literally can’t drink a Budweiser without being criticized because his beer is not American enough. (Budweiser is owned by a Belgian brewery).

I don’t want to be like that. I aim for thinking that is deep, subtle, fair, fearless.

That means I can’t look at Mitt Romney the way that others look at Barack Obama. I must see him as a complex human being, one with good and bad qualities. That doesn’t mean I have to admire him on balance. But I have to be willing to see him as he is, and not as some cartoonish Snidely Whiplash, twirling the ends of a mustache that he doesn’t have, plotting evil for the sake of evil.

So I prove to myself that I have some capacity by nuance by looking for good qualities in a man that I otherwise don’t like. Here are ten things about Mitt Romney that I admire.

• Romney is smart. He won a law degree and a business degree from Harvard.
• He is brave. With his money, he could spend the rest of his life in luxurious retirement. But he enters the public forum to run for public office. Certainly, he knows the risks of that. But he does it anyway.
• He is energetic. Constantly campaigning can take a toll. He perseveres.
• He is faithful to his wife. There has never been any whiff of sexual scandal.
• I have heard that as a bishop in his church, he gave compassionate advice to some of his church-members who came to him for help.
• I have heard that one of his co-workers had a daughter who went missing. He deployed a team to the city where the daughter was missing, and he set up a command center. They found the girl.
• Romneycare really was a good idea. And it was path-making.
• He was successful in business. He occupied himself in a business in which he could use his considerable abilities to thrive, and he carried through and became a financial star.
• He rescued the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. They were successful.
• In a party in which many are anti-gay, he is not anti-gay. Until the man was driven out by the right-wing media, one of Romney’s top foreign-affairs advisers was openly gay. That seemed not to trouble Mr. Romney.

I challenge my conservative friends to perform this exercise with Barack Obama. Are you fearless enough to put aside comfortable, cartoonish concepts of the president’s character and to see him from a different point of view?

Michael Phelps Had to Learn to Put His Face in the Water: Thoughts on Faith

A good friend called tonight. My friend is worried about life after death. I sense that my friend wants to believe in God, but it’s hard.

1. Making a choice.

I know. I wasn’t a believer all my life. I had to choose to believe.

I thought hard about believing with my young mind. I couldn’t argue myself into faith. I couldn’t argue myself out of faith. God was a question mark in my mind.

Finally, I said: look, it makes sense to believe. If you’re right, heaven is your reward. But if you’re wrong, at least you’ll live by a moral code (hopefully), namely Christianity. As for sacrifices, all you’ll give up are things you probably need to give up anyway.

2. It can be hard at first.

Faith can be like working out. It can be hardest when you start. But if you stick with it, it gets easier as time goes by. Just like you develop skill and strength and endurance in a sport, you develop habits of mind and habits of behavior in religion.

Another analogy. Politics for some people is boring. For me it’s exciting. But that’s after years of reading and studying it. I bring knowledge and opinions to each new thing that I learn. My mind grasps political news like a child grasps a new toy.

For me, most sports are as boring as politics are exciting. But other people are the opposite. They have spent years following a sport. They know the nuances. They watch a football game with knowledge and understanding and therefore with enjoyment.

When I take friends to bullfights, I am careful to explain as much as I can about what goes on in the ring. When I do that, my friends enjoy it. If I don’t, the bullfight is pointless to them and painful to watch. That is, I try to get them past the boring part when what happens before their eyes is meaningless.

Religion is like that. Until you reach a certain critical mass of knowledge, it’s over your head and therefore not stimulating. But as your knowledge grows, religion becomes to you like sports are to your friends who can carry on at length about the Rams or the Raiders.

3. You need help.

It’s August, and the pool where I work out is filled with the Summer Olympics crowd – people who get inspired by watching races and head to the pool. In a couple of weeks, things will be back to normal. Most of the people will lose interest after the Olympics end. Some will keep at it, and those swimmers will get better and better as time goes by.

I see some folks who seem to have no idea how to benefit from being in the water. I figure them for short-timers. But if they were to join a team, where they could get advice and coaching, they would benefit. That would increase the likelihood that they will stay with it until they get good at it.

Faith is like that. If you don’t have a background in faith, you need help. The best help is friends or family. They won’t tire of coaching you about your faith. Lacking that, it’s good to find a church that has serious opportunities for discipleship – adult classes, good teaching.

You could read, too. I like Richard Foster’s book, The Celebration of Discipline. It’s about Christian discipleship.

4. Don’t get discouraged.

I talk to friends who are getting into shape. Sometimes they feel self-conscious because their workouts aren’t all that great. I try to encourage them. I say that any workout is a good workout. The trick is staying with it – building. That happens to be true.

Religion is like that. Not all churches are great. But just going to church regularly creates a cadence, a rhythm of religion. And that’s a good thing. Some churches are toxic; but if your church isn’t, don’t be too judgmental. Just go.

5. Just try. But make it a good try.

My best advice about faith to the uninitiated? Just try it. It might take; you might like it. If not, you’ve lost little.

But give it a good try. Think about it like taking up a sport, or learning a hobby, or learning a career. Those take time. They take help. Faith is like that.

And, honestly, faith requires something more. Yes, it requires effort from you; but it also requires grace. And that's something that comes from outside of you, something beyond your control. But if you feel a thirst for faith, that's evidence of grace already.

If you are fortunate, you will run into people who encourage you. You will find a preacher who appeals to your mind. If you are fortunate, you will stick with faith long enough for it to become a habit. It will give new meaning to your life.

Hopefully, you will be like I was with swimming – I stayed with it. I hope you aren’t like I was with piano lessons – I gave them up before I was good at it.

God be with you. May God bring you to the land of uprightness.

To Live

This is to live: to "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind" and to "love your neighbor as yourself". (Luke 10:27-28 (NIV).)

And to love is to know God.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. [1 John 4:7-8. (NIV).]

But many of us don’t exactly overflow with love. I count myself among those. This is my meditation on how to learn to love.

1. Prisoners: a metaphor.

As a lawyer, I used to represent prisoners in "lifer hearings". In a lifer hearing, a prisoner with a life sentence tries to persuade a parole board to release him from prison.

Sometimes my clients had no chance. If a prisoner has a "115" within the last five years, he can’t win parole. 115s are "serious" violations of prison rules. 115s can be anything from a kitchen worker stealing food, to possession of a cellular phone, to membership in a prison gang, to rape. The parole board assumes that if a prisoner won’t follow the rules in prison, he won’t follow rules out of prison.

Sometimes, a prisoner-client had a habit of picking up 115s. I would counsel him that if he wanted to win release on parole, he couldn’t pick up any more 115s. I couldn’t tell him how to stay out of trouble. But I would tell him that he had to wake up in the morning thinking about how to stay out of trouble, and that staying out of trouble had the last thing he thought about before he went to sleep at night. I would tell him that he had to become a genius at staying out of trouble.

I use prisoners as a metaphor for Christians. That’s because we are all prisoners of sin. We hope for mercy, not from a parole board but from God. (Romans 11:32 – "God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all".)

If we are saved, love saves us – the love of God, and the love that God causes to arise in us. "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins." (1 Peter 4:8.)

We need to learn to love like some of my clients need to learn to keep away from trouble.

2. A simple plan.

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened." [Matthew 7:7-8 (NIV).]

The Lord commands that we love him, that we love our enemies, and that we love our neighbors. He does not command us and then leave us without the ability to obey. He guides us. He tells us to ask and to seek.

3. Asking.

"Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" [Luke 11:11-13 (NIV).]

My prisoner-clients would benefit from friends to help them stay out of trouble. If they started down a path toward a 115, their friends might warn them away from what they were doing. Their friends might help by exhortation to walk blamelessly. My clients and their friends might share strategies for walking blamelessly through the maze of prison rules and opportunities to do wrong.

Like prisoners who struggle to stay out of trouble, we need allies in our effort to increase in love. The most powerful ally we can have is the Holy Spirit. To get the help of the Holy Spirit, we can ask.

And if we have friends, we can ask them to pray for us, and we can pray for them. Any big task should start and be sustained with prayer.

Asking is the first step; it might also be the hardest. Going from childhood to adulthood is a process of going from helplessness to some form of self-sufficiency. That’s called carrying one’s own weight, and it's a quality that we value in ourselves. To ask for help is to admit that we are not self-sufficient. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that Jesus said that we had to become like little children.

"Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." [Matthew 8:3-4 (NIV).]

4. Seeking.

Having asked, we seek. With so many directions open to us, we look for the path that leads to the promised land.

5. Seeking from the Holy Spirit.

Having asked, hopefully the Holy Spirit will be our guide to say "Not that way, this way". This guidance might come from within, or it might come through some agency outside ourselves.

6. Seeking from the Bible.

The Bible is a good guide. You can interpret many things that Jesus says as trail signs to direct us toward love.

For example, Jesus said:

"You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. [Matthew 5:43-45 (NIV).]

Hate opposes love. If we follow Jesus’s direction to pray for those who persecute us, we step off the path of hate and follow the path of love. This direction benefits our enemies, but it benefits ourselves, too. It puts in our minds a habit of love.

And to hold a grudge is the opposite of love. So Jesus said:

"And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins." [Mark 11:25 (NIV).]

To forgive also makes mental paths of love.

Another example – Jesus told us not to fret:

"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." [Matthew 6:34 (NIV).]

The thing about worry is this: it foregrounds self-concern. Self-concern crowds out love, which is other-directed. By setting aside any habit of fretting, we give space for love to grow.

Easier said than done. Like increasing in love, decreasing in worry does not come automatically. In part it’s a choice: sometimes we can simply choose not to worry. In part, it’s a matter of strategy. Dale Carnegie wrote a book called, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. I recommend it. And in part, to cease to fret is a matter of prayer.

I'm far more likely to behold these radical words than to follow them; but there little distance between them and love:

Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. [Luke 12:33-35.]

These words fortify love two ways. If we obey them, then our heart will follow our treasure. But if this commandment is too big for us, then it gives us humility. And we love God more easily if we are not too big in our own minds. 

7. Seeking from any source we can find.

If we really want to find our way through undiscovered country, we don’t despise any good guide.

To increase in love, we might learn from any friend who’s habits of love we admire.

We might learn about love from a movie, like Babette’s Feast. (A tolerance for subtitles is needed to enjoy this movie.)

We might learn about love from books. Years ago, Chuck Coleson’s books always moved me. Lately, I’ve traveled in St. Augustine’s Confessions.

8. Just do it.

But maybe Nike owns the secret: Just do it. A habit of hateful acts, hateful words, gossip, slander, unkindness in general, and sin takes us away from God. But a habit of loving acts makes a loving mind.

I envy parents. I think that raising children can be a school of love.

I try to do acts of love. I tithe, splitting my tithe between my church and the Salvation Army. I also give to an organization that gives aid overseas. And I help a friend financially from time to time. This is not a boast, because I do far less than I could.

I once read the words of a man who was baffled by sexual frustration in modern society. He argued that the near-infinite number of persons created near-infinite opportunities for sexual release. Thankfully, this licentious chirp hasn’t been widely repeated (though it seems to be practiced in some conjoined circles). But in a sense, his idea applies to good works: opportunities to do acts of love are near-infinite to one who looks for them.

I’ve heard that everything we do leaves a mark on our soul. The grace of God means that marks left by our sins are not indelible. But efforts to do right can’t help but decorate our souls with marks of love.

9. Grace.

But effort to do right can puff us up. It can makes us feel spiritually self-sufficient. Then we’re no longer the like the little children we must be to gain entrance into the kingdom of heaven. We become like the Pharisee of Jesus’s parable, who stood before God and gave thanks that he was spiritually excellent. We become unlike the tax collector of the same parable, who cried out "Have mercy upon me, a sinner!" Jesus said that the tax collector left the temple justified before God, but not the Pharisee. (Luke 18:9-14.) As we strive, we need to remember that we always rely upon the grace of God.

If effort can make us feel spiritually self-sufficient, it can also make us feel spiritually inadequate. Spiritual disappointment with ourselves is like the wall that athletes sometimes hit, when their race-times stop getting better or get worse. That is discouraging.

Grace rescues us in that, too . When we hit a spiritual wall, we need to be gracious to ourselves. We need to be self-forgiving, we need to be patient, and we need to not give up.

10. Self-examination: doing a new thing

From time to time, we should assess our progress in love.

But this self-examination shouldn’t be hyperactive. That can discourage us. And it can lead to a Pharisee-like over-focus on the self.

Hopefully, our self-examination will lead us to do new things. As a competitive swimmer, I’m alert to how I swim, and I look for ways to swim faster. As a believer, I want to be as attentive to ways to increase in love as I am to ways to win races.

Everything that I have talked about in this essay once was a new thing to me. And I have no idea what new things I might learn in the future about love and how to grow in it.

And sometimes old things become new. I read the Bible more deeply now than I did twenty years ago. Things stand out that didn’t stand out before. Also, I’m not new to prayer, but I depend on prayer these days more than I did in times past.

11. Self-examination: doing away.

Self-examination might lead us to cut loose some guides and some principles that we once relied upon. I think that obedience to God is fundamental and crucial; but lately I have tilted somewhat more in my thoughts toward grace, more than in years past.

Self-examination might lead us to unburden ourselves of things that hold us back. That might be certain friends who draw us away from God.

My habit of getting into political arguments doesn’t help me grow in love. I’ve tried to cut back. But I backslide. It’s a work-in-progress.

We might need release from addictions – certainly from addictions in the literal sense of substances that we put into our bodies to our detriment. But addictions can take many forms – persons, pleasures, things, ideas.

Some addictions are things that aren’t necessarily bad in and of themselves. Apart from their merits or demerits, Fox News or The New York Times could be addictions if we cherish them too much.

I once read parts of choreographer Twyla Tharp’s book about creativity. She wrote that she loves movies, but she gives them up for the sake of focusing on her art. Like Twyla Tharp gives up movies for dance, we might give up things that seem like harmless pleasures for the sake of love.

One young man came to Jesus earnestly seeking guidance. He was morally scrupulous, but he believed that he lacked something. Jesus told him that to be perfect he should sell all that he had and give the money to the poor; then follow him. (Matthew 19:16-28.)

We might need to give up some things right away. Others we might give up as time goes by. Our self-examination will take place over months and years and decades. What we will find in ourselves in a month won’t be the same as what we find in a decade.

We’re taking a journey through our minds from selfishness to love. Like a cross-country traveler, as we go the terrain changes. As terrain changes, our strategy to move forward also must change.

12. Time well spent.

We tend to get good at what we work at. Over time, a person who conscientiously works at archery gets better at archery. The same is true for swimming, writing, carpentry, driving, dancing, leadership, and art.

And love.

The two greatest commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor. Archery and swimming and all of the things that I just mentioned will end. But love is forever. Time spent learning love is well spent.

To Know God Better

There are five parts to any good plan to replace the god of the imagination with the God That Is.

I mean this essay to elaborate on this promise:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. [Matthew 7:7-8 (NIV).]

1. Humility.

God is vast. The first step to know him better is to know that there is more that we don’t know than what we do know. If we know that we are largely ignorant, then hubris won’t stop the flow of knowledge of God into our hearts and minds.

If we don’t know how incomplete our knowledge is, then we need to just assume that our knowledge is incomplete and proceed. As we gather more knowledge, we become aware of our prior ignorance. That will help us know that we need to build upon our knowledge of God.

It’s like a wilderness hiker who sees a peak in the distance. Every time the hiker advances on a peak, the hiker discovers a new peak behind the one that appeared before. In time, the hiker comes to assume that the farther he or she hikes, the more he or she will discover.

2. Effort.

A lot can be learned without much effort. It takes little effort to use bare hands to stick naked wires into an electrical socket. But that exercise will cause learning.

And sometimes knowledge of God comes with little conscious effort. Sometimes it comes as inspiration while we are thinking about something else. Maybe your love for your children teaches you about the love of God. C.S. Lewis wrote of a military pilot who flew across the desert at night and encountered a sense of the mystery of God.

But many of our greatest skills come from deliberate learning. We learned to read in school, and it took many years to achieve our present skill at reading. The same is true of writing and math. And I think that there is no job that doesn’t have a learning curve. A seasoned worker is almost always superior to a novice.

Knowledge of God is like that. Knowledge of God is improved through effort. That effort can be reading the Bible with a curious mind. Or hearing sermons by mature Christians. Or listening to hymns. (I have a strong preference for the old hymns; I’m old-fashioned that way.)

Effort can be reading books by spiritual giants, or at least by persons further along in knowledge of God than we are. It can be taking time to meditate on the nature of God. It can be talking about God with our friends.

Michael Phelps is a champion swimmer. Some have called him the greatest swimmer who ever lived. He has vast natural talent. But that natural talent wouldn’t have made him the most winning athlete in Olympic history if he hadn’t driven himself to swim countless laps with great effort. That effort rewarded him.

We might never be the spiritual equivalent of Michael Phelps. But it’s probably also true that we will benefit from every effort that we make to better know God.

3. Persistence.

Michael Phelps probably had times when felt like not going to workout. If he had worked out for a few years but then quit or took it easier, he might have benefitted from that, but he wouldn’t have become the athletic phenomenon that he became. Persistence pays off in the pursuit of knowledge of God, too.

But there’s a difference between Michael Phelps’s pursuit of athletic victory and our pursuit of knowledge of God. Athletes have a relatively small window in which to be Olympic heroes. Dara Torres has lasted longer than most. But now that she’s in her forties, her Olympic time is over.

But as long as we have healthy minds, nothing holds us back from learning more about God. To study about him for a year is good. To study about him for a decade is better. To study about him for a lifetime is best.

4. Grace.

What I just said is almost true. Let me take a little of it back.

The Westboro Baptist Church puzzles me. That’s the church that pickets the funerals of American soldiers who have died in war.

I’ve looked at their website. I’ve listened to a sermon by their pastor. They lack neither knowledge of the Bible nor zeal. But their message is a message of hate, and that makes me doubt their knowledge of God.

So even with zeal and effort and persistence, we might make grave errors about the nature of God. Zeal and effort and persistence can make us proud, which is the opposite of humility, which is necessary for knowledge of God.

So we need to persist in prayers for ourselves and for our friends and loved ones that our zeal and our effort and our persistence won’t be wasted. And hopefully the grace of God will be with us.

5. Love.

Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. [1 John 4:7-8.]

Again to speak of Westboro Baptist Church, I hazard a guess that love is the quality that they lack that makes them bray instead of sing to the glory of God.

I love imperfectly. That limits my ability to speak about it. But I picture it as the roof on the four walls of knowledge of God: humility, effort, persistence, and grace.

I’m not a carpenter, so it’s probably dangerous for me to use a carpentry metaphor. But it seems to me that you can start with a roof and raise walls under it. Or you can build the walls and then install the roof over them. But, like I say, I’m not a carpenter.

I envy the person who is filled with love to build knowledge of God on. But if we don’t feel love, we can do acts of love, and the feeling will come by the grace of God.

And if we love, as John said, we will know God.