If I Knew You

The main point of my post today is that wherever you live, you have to be the friendly person in every equation.  If you  take the initiative to show others you mean no malice to them, then they will be more receptive to you.  I think that many people in Boston fear the unknown and for that could be labeled as “shy”; however, I posit that Bostonians are not so shy as much as they aren’t always sure of a stranger’s intentions.  Although this Boston attitude can carry some good for the individual, the fact remains that life was made to explore what’s out there.  Life is an adventure and the more people you meet, the more exciting it can become.  Also, God wants us to connect with others.  He wants us to use the gift of gab that he gave us to communicate friendliness across all lands, and he wants us to use our smile to provide sunlight to someone’s day that looks grim.  So, I urge you to go out and be as friendly as possible.  Who knows where that friendliness will take you?  Go forward on life’s journey and prosper others and you will be prospered in return.

“God must ‘satisfy himself,’ responding to the realities of human rebellion in a way that is perfectly consonant with his character.  This internal necessity is our fixed starting point.  In consequence, it would be impossible for us sinners to remain eternally the sole objects of his holy love, since he cannot both punish and pardon us at the same time.  Hence the second necessity, namely substitution.  The only way for God’s holy love to be satisfied is for his holiness to be directed in judgment upon his appointed substitute, in order that his love may be directed toward us in forgiveness.  The substitute bears the penalty that we sinners may receive the pardon…

It is the Judge himself who in holy love assumed the role of the innocent victim, for in and through the person of his Son he himself bore the penalty that he himself inflicted…For in order to save us in such a way as to satisfy himself, God through Christ substituted himself for us.  Divine love triumphed over divine wrath by divine self-sacrifice.  The cross was an act simultaneously of punishment and amnesty, severity and grace, justice and mercy.  We strongly reject, therefore, every explanation of the death of Christ that does not have at its center the principle of ‘satisfaction through substitution,’ indeed divine self-satisfaction through divine self-substitution. 

The cross was not a commercial bargain with the devil, let alone one that tricked and trapped him; nor an exact equivalent, a quid pro quo to satisfy a code of honor or technical point of law; nor a compulsory submission by God to some moral authority above him from which he could not otherwise escape; nor a punishment of a meek Christ by a harsh and punitive Father; nor an action of the Father which bypassed Christ as Mediator.  Instead, the righteous, loving Father humbled himself to become in and through his only Son flesh, sin and a curse for us, in order to redeem us without compromising his own character.  The theological words satisfaction and substitution need to be carefully defined and safeguarded, but they cannot in any circumstances be given up.  The biblical gospel of atonement is of God satisfying himself by substituting himself for us. 

The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation.  For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.  Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be.  Man claims prerogatives that belong to God alone; God accepts penalties that belong to man alone.” (John Stott, The Cross of Christ, pp. 157-59)

On my way home from a local tae kwon do studio is a Starbucks. It’s sort of awkwardly located in the middle of nowhere, just planted next to a highway because someone felt the need to put something other than a gas station at that particular exit. However, it is perfectly located to cater to my family’s collective sugar tooth. So I swung by yesterday evening after class to pick up a couple frappuccinos from their drive-thru, and then head home.

The problem was that when I got to the window, my wallet was missing. I had no way to pay for drinks that had already been made.  After I pulled into the parking lot and tore my entire car apart looking for it, and contemplated the possibility that someone I likely see at least three or four times a week at tae kwon do had gone into my bag and taken it during class, I called my mom and asked her if I had left my wallet at home by accident.

The good part was that I had left my wallet at home, and was sitting exactly where I thought it would be: on the end of the counter, right next to where I usually leave my purse. The bad part was that I had to go explain to the Starbucks barista what had happened and suffer the shame of looking pretty darn daffy.

But when I explained it to Drew, the barista who served me, he just handed me the carrier with the two drinks in it and said, “Here, take them anyway. I’m just glad you found it.”

Note: Not Drew. But some other equally gracious-looking Starbucks barista.

Drew’s response was an incredibly unusual one. To tell you the truth, I was just floored by his reaction. Even after all the things I’ve said about how the church and modern Christians need to show more grace, my experience at Starbucks showed me what it really means to be gracious in an everyday sense, and that I haven’t really been following my own advice. I would not have reacted in the same way at all; had I been in Drew’s place, I’m sure I would’ve been worried about what my manager would say, whether it was really okay, or the fact that I was clearly losing out on tip by just giving someone the drinks.

But Drew trusted that I, a) was honest and had actually lost/forgotten my wallet and wasn’t just trying to get free drinks; and b), might come back and pay for the drinks later even though I had received them for free, no strings attached. It was unusual to see in an everyday context, but it really restored my faith in the good in people, even if it did make me realize a few not-quite-so-warm-and-fuzzy things about myself.

I did go back and pay for the drinks after I ran home and got my wallet, and I left a generous tip along with a note for Drew, thanking him for his kindness. I didn’t really quite expect to learn a spiritual lesson from a Starbucks drive-thru, but last night’s experience will always stick with me as one of the great examples of grace in my life and what it looks like in practice.

Who knew it could be as simple as a barista handing you coffee you don’t deserve with a smile on his or her face, saying, “I understand. I’ll take your word for it, and it’s okay. Just take it.”

Just take it.

Now, I didn’t learn about service from a Christian perspective. I learned that it was good more from watching the joy and peace that it brought my mom. It’s not exactly fun or rewarding for most seven-year-olds to go visit a place like the Home of the Innocents (a home for abused, neglected, and mentally and/or physically handicapped children). But I learned from my mom’s grace, love, and patience with these children, and experienced the glow that emanated from her once we left the building. Not one “Jesus/The Bible/God says we should…” lesson came out of these visits, but I learned the value of service from how my mom conducted herself during and after her time serving. More than anything, I learned that service was good because it is a way to build relationships with people you wouldn’t otherwise meet and a better way to make use of what God has given you than using it for personal entertainment or glory.

All that being said, I didn’t really enjoy volunteering until I got older. When I was little, it was frankly a little scary to be around severely disordered and neglected children. I didn’t relate to them, I didn’t fully understand why they behaved the way they did, and I definitely didn’t understand why my mom visited them every few weeks. I just kind of tagged along with my mom, handed out the shakers my family had made out of plastic Easter eggs to the residents, and sat beside my mom while she played guitar and led a sing-along. But now that I’m older and have gone out more to volunteer on my own, I’m beginning to see the benefits of doing service, and I’m enjoying it more than ever. As a harpist, I like going to nursing homes and hospitals far more than I like playing in solo recitals; when I perform at a tea at a nursing home, or bring the harp to a patient’s hospital room, I play better because I aim for the goal of bringing joy and peace to someone else, rather than perfectly executing a particular piece of music to please myself and gain the appreciation of a crowd. I get more satisfaction from interacting with other people and learning from their perspectives on the music and my playing.

You're the missing piece!

Even though I value service for not-completely-religious reasons, the Bible calls us as believers to do some kind of service, to make use of our God-given talents in order to carry His message of grace throughout the world. Paul articulates it best in Corinthians:

“Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one there is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, to another the message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he gives them to each one, just as he determines.” (1 Corinthians 12:7-11)

Service is one of our primary Christian obligations. It is also the best way to spread the message of grace, as we are truly putting our faith into action. All too often, however, it is something we forget about, something we say we’ll do but never really get around to actually planning and executing.

So, my challenge for you is to ask yourself what you’re really good at. God has given you a gift (or maybe many) that will further His plan for the world. Then ask yourself, what can you give of yourself to show God’s grace? Once you’ve figured this out, just go out and do it! Even if your service is simply participating in a church function once or twice a month, then you’ve already found a good place to start.

Most of all, don’t look at service as a burden! If you haven’t served before or made it a priority in the past, I think you will find that it brings you joy and a fresh perspective on your life and your faith. You’ll also begin to relate to God in a new way. I know that I can sometimes feel God working through me; it feels as though He takes my hands and guides them, brings more expression out of the instrument so that He can communicate what He wants through the music I’m playing. Though God may not necessarily make the job of serving easy, I think that He will give you the inspiration and the energy that you need to carry out His mission.

And fellow young’uns, I’m looking at you in my challenge to serve. To quote from 1 Timothy,

“Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity… devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching. Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through a prophetic message when the body of elders laid their hands on you. Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress” (1 Timothy 4:12-15).

The obligation of service lies most heavily on our shoulders because we are the future of our faith. We will be the ones who will continue to define, exemplify, and spread God’s grace. Service is your opportunity to define your own faith and your own relationship with God, and in doing so, to show someone else what it means to know God’s love and the peace that only He can give.

Oedipus’ tragic flaw was the most fundamental one of all: Hubris – that is, pride, the willingness to defy the gods.

image from Wikipedia

He displayed this when he claimed that the prophecy concerning his birth would be unfulfilled. He declared this at the height of his powers: the man had, running from exile from Corinth (where he had been adopted as a little baby and brought up as a prince) in order to not fulfill the prophecy concerning the Corinthian king and queen, met with a strange man who challenged him. He had a duel with him and killed the man. Then he met a Sphinx along the way, and being a wise man he solved the Sphinx’s riddle, freeing the people of Thebes from its tyranny. He was given a beautiful bride, the Queen of Thebes, as a prize, and made King of Thebes. As King of Thebes he ruled wisely, excising the sinners from the land, bringing peace and prosperity to the citizens of Thebes. It was at this point that he said, Apollo’s oracle will fall! And of course, (anyone who has read any myth at all will know) this is when the metaphorical shit hits the metaphorical fan.

At the time I thought this a pagan play, with a skewed morality which I could hold at a critical distance. I would appreciate it aesthetically, I thought, but not morally. After all, I’m a Christian (I thought to myself). My God is not like Apollo at all – He would never hold me accountable for something he predestined me to do anyway, and in any case, He wouldn’t make me go through this kind of horror. My God also knows that I only have the best of intentions – he won’t hold me accountable for sins I commit unknowingly! So I reasoned: I will not be swayed by some silly Greek play. I had already decided ahead of time that the gods were unjust, when I wrote the essay. Now to list the evidence, I thought. You can read my argument, which I still think very reasonable, here.

Yesterday I realized I was wrong. I had been guilty myself of hubris – for putting the gods (yes, even pagan gods) in the dock, as such, along with Oedipus. If gods and men were equal – on a level moral playing field, as such – I would take the part of Oedipus in a heartbeat. After all, who’s the better man: an unknowing father-killer and mother-ravisher who did everything he did out of compassion for strangers, or Mr Zeus himself, who’s pretty much raped every pretty girl and goddess this side of Creation, smote people he didn’t like for no good reason, fathered a pantheon of illegitimate bastards and then been an absent father to them all, and pretty much (pardon my French) dicked around for all his everlasting life? I thought Oedipus the better man! But you see, gods and men are different. This is the lesson of humility.

Well, first of all, the Zeus that the ancient Greeks worshipped and theorized about, and probably the Zeus that the playwright Sophocles had in mind when he wrote this, is quite different from the Zeus of popular legend. People did not think of Zeus as my Mr. Zeus, as described in the above paragraph. Apparently the Greek and Roman myths about the gods being capricious and annoying – all those delightful stories – were as controversial as say, Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, or, more to the point, Jesus Christ Superstar or even Madonna’s music or the Da Vinci Code are to Christians today. Perhaps the best analogy to how Sophocles’ play today would be Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ – reverent, controversial, with a moral god in the centre, not some capricious serial adulterer, written probably by a devout but flawed man. So I was wrong on that count – I brought a straw man of a god to the dock, when really I should have been considering Someone far more like my God.

If the God of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph were the One who put Oedipus through this particular play, I realized, just yesterday, I would agree with Him. Here are several things I have learned in the last ten years, sometimes at great personal expense, which compel me say this:

1)   Direction, not intention, determines our final destination.

I have done terrible things out of good intentions, and I can honestly, having searched my heart, say that I did not mean to do them. Nevertheless, I did them, and the consequences of my actions were real. My experience of reality is subtly different from my friends’ and acquaintances’ and enemies’. They each have an interior world, with a personal narrative. Until I am in touch with this narrative, I can never know if the words I say, or the things I do towards them, are helping or hurting them. The road to hell truly is paved with good intentions – I’ve realized this because I have both tossed carelessly my friends into the flames, as well as been abandoned to the Pit by the best of people, all thanks to good intentions.

2)   Sin is not just personal – it is generational and collective.

This is a hard lesson to hear, particularly in America, or anywhere in the West where individualism is the dominant ideology. America tells you that “you can make it on your own”. So Americans make up stories (let’s take Disney films for example) in which the hero is largely orphaned (usually he or she has only one parent, and that single parent is pretty ineffectual), and the orphan makes it in the world anyway, within one generation, accomplishing what he sets out to do. Of course, the true nature of American success is very rarely like this. Michael Sandel, building on the work of John Rawls, has already begun arguing against individualism with communitarianism. In Political Science, Robert Putnam brought to our attention the consequences of the breakdown of community in America. Going back further, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government was written upon seeing early America, and the most salient difference he had seen between the New World and the Old was the American genius for organization – that is, of building community, of grassroots groups and movements. Given these roots, communitarianism may really be as American as individualism.

But back to my point about collective Sin. This is not to say that (as people in Jesus’ day argued) something such as blindness was an indication of parental sin. Nor should it ever give credence to such horrible thoughts such as that the melanin of those of African extraction is a symbol of the sins of their fathers, and therefore we should blithely exploit them as slave labor. No, this is not what I mean by collective Sin. I think that collective Sin is actually more of an accumulation of tiny individual sins. Let’s get back to Oedipus for an illustration. When the King and Queen of Thebes hear of Apollo’s oracle concerning their son Oedipus, (that he would kill his father and rape his mother), they are horrified and decide the only way to save themselves and Thebes is to kill their newborn son. However, love stops them. The baby is instead abandoned on a hillside. A shepherd sees the baby and is moved to compassion, and takes him in and raises him as a shepherd boy. Later he is brought into the King of Corinth’s palace and raised as a prince. A drunkard Oedipus meets one day tells him about the prophecy concerning him. Oedipus is horrified, and flees Corinth to save his adoptive parents. This is when he meets his actual father on the road, and commits parricide.

Truly, the road to hell was paved with good intentions! I do not have the heart to blame the King and Queen of Thebes for not killing their child. Nor do I have it in me to say the shepherd should have left well enough alone (if you ever find yourself ensnared in a myth, taking in a changeling child is always a bad idea). But perhaps we can definitely say that that man should not have been drunk, and gone around blabbing about ancient oracles while drunk. Who knows, if Oedipus had never talked to that drunkard, he could have ended life as a very satisfactory King of Corinth. In any case, all of these people broke the law. The law against a person who would kill the King and rape the Queen was death. Even though Oedipus was a newborn infant, he deserved death if the prophecy was true. The shepherd did not know the law (that the baby was condemned), but he should have known the law of myth (never pick up a changeling baby). However, out of compassion he thwarted the law. Defying the law leads to Death – this is the burden of all knowledge and Wisdom. I think if each of us knew what we were capable of, and the evil that we will in fact unleash in our lives, we would probably all quite impartially sentence ourselves to death. It is God’s grace that allows us to move through time like blind little minnows, not knowing what we do, and who we kill daily on the road. It was the accumulation of these tiny little transgressions – against laws of reason (logos), against laws of myth (mythos) – that added up to tragedy.

3)   Sin has eternal consequences because God does not work inside Time.

Albert Einstein divined that Time is merely one of many dimensions, although we tend to experience the world in three dimensions, traveling down the line of Time. God doesn’t (for obvious reasons) do this. He is able to see all of human history (as well as pre- and post-human history) as happening all at once. This solves the conundrum of free will vs. predestination. We are responsible for every single sin we commit, and if we imagine Christ eternally on the cross, being nailed by each sin as we commit it, perhaps we would be a little more hesitant in our words and actions. We are even more culpable for particular sins if directed by a particular prophecy not to do something. (Fortunately most of us do not find ourselves in this situation – although it does call for a careful, thorough examination of the prophecies of the Bible).

At one and the same time, everything has already happened in the sight of God. This is why God is able to deliver prophecy via his prophets. This is also why prophecy is useful – because the prophetic message has always included “repent!” as its basic, fundamental cry. If people hear the prophecy, and repent, judgment will be held back. Well, at least until the stench of sin reaches a certain noisome pitch, and when the cry of the poor and the widows becomes quite unbearable again, at which point the whole thing starts all over again. This makes every sin a lot more terrible, even the small ones, because each one echoes down the long reaches of history, geography, Eternity itself. Furthermore, it joins the sins of our fathers, the sins of our friends, and the sins of total strangers to form a stream of narrative: these various tributaries converge to form the River of Death: the Styx, that runs through Hell itself. The sins of the fathers are handed down to the next generation (via genes, via inherited patterns of behavior, via kinks or omissions in the moral code). So it really isn’t Apollo’s fault that Oedipus is predestined and free to commit sin. That is simply the human consequence of only living in three and a half dimensions.

So what is the whole point of Grace, anyway? What’s the point of compassion if it merely leads to hell, the same way cruelty leads to hell? What difference does it make whether you do unto others as you would have them do to you?

If I were God, I would never have put Oedipus through all that. I also would never have inflicted that horrible prophecy on him. However, if none of this had happened, we would lack one of the first and greatest heroes of the Western Canon: blind Oedipus, who put out his own eyes and exiled himself from his Kingdom the moment he realized what he had done. Why did Oedipus blind himself? I think I finally see why.

Oedipus wanted his outward self to be a reflection of his inward condition. “I was blind,” he says, as he stabs one eyeball after the other. “Therefore let me be blind.” It is an affront to the gods for him to have sight, because it creates a chasm between heaven and earth – between the spiritual world and the physical world. Blindness is what Oedipus longs for, after all: if he had never known any of the prophecy, if he had continued having fulfilled it, without knowing he had, he may have been a great king, (he already was). Cloaked by blindness, protected by wool pulled over his eyes, he could conceivably have been a good king of Thebes. But he would never have gained the stature of a tragic hero, whose name is uttered by mortals even today.

I wrote a little poem about blind Oedipus wandering in exile. If Oedipus had been Christian, I would have said to him, one day your Savior will come and redeem those eyes. You have repented more than an ordinary man can bear – you have repented in dust and ashes, and your crying eyes show me your nobility, your sincerity. One day when you are caught up in heaven you will lift up your sad face, and see. And He will restore your sight.

passing by Oedipus

I was walking by

the walls of a kingdom

flushed in the fading sun

and passed hardly a glance

at the cloak in the gutter –

the one with the noble heart

(the eyes were closed,

I could not see

if they were truly blind)

When I rented District 9, I certainly wasn’t expecting to have my heart wrenched around. I was in the mood for fun summer science fiction—a gripping adventure lightly spiced with the mystery of the unknown and some cool special effects. The fact that Christianity Today put it on its “Top Ten Redemptive Films” seemed a convenient way to persuade my parents that it was all right to watch a movie that was rated R, and not much else. I settled down with my metaphorical bag of popcorn and prepared for a rousing good time.

That’s not what I got at all. The central conceit of District 9 is that aliens have landed just outside Johannesburg, South Africa—but not the kind of aliens who want to either conquer the world or bring lasting peace and prosperity. Instead, they are scaly, repulsive-looking humanoids, intelligent enough to talk, barter, and build but not intelligent enough to find a way past human fear. Disputes come up between the aliens and the humans; violence breaks out; finally, the aliens are contained in a temporary camp just outside the city, which quickly turns into a slum. They live in squalid huts, do most of their human business with violent gangs, and get by scavenging or selling their weapons—so far inoperable by any but themselves—on the black market. The government doesn’t step in, except to control their population by destroying their incubating eggs or to guard the boundaries of the barbed-wire-lined camp. And then, twenty years after the aliens landed, the protests of the citizens of Johannesburg grow too loud for the government to ignore, and it is decided that the aliens should be moved to another camp further away from the city. All that needs to be done to protect the dubious legality of this operation is to force every alien to sign that he will give up his home to move to this new land. And if they won’t sign? Well, who will miss a dead alien?

The chilling thing about this film is that, despite the hideous aliens, arcane weapons, and unbelievable pieces of technology, this story is not far-fetched at all. Watching it, I realized that all of the callous disregard for life, all of the casual violence, all of the flinty calculation of how much money outweighs a death actually happens. Humans treated other humans like this in apartheid South Africa, in Nazi Germany, in the United States in the reservations, without even the flimsy excuse of pincer hands and scaly skin to magnify the differences between intelligent being and intelligent being. I needed to see this movie, because it is so easy to wrap myself up in the warm, comfortable bubble of middle-class American life and forget that my willing blindness helps horrific actions like this survive throughout the world.

I must warn you, the violence was almost more than I could stomach. This film is not for the faint of heart. And yet, I think that the violence—and the graphicness of the violence—was profoundly necessary for the movie to work. I so often blithely watch a film with spectacular explosions, bad guys being dispatched in dozens of inventive ways, and noncombatants being picked off left and right—and am utterly unmoved. It simply isn’t in the best interest of the makers of fun action-adventure films to let violence shake us too deeply, because then we would be reminded of the reality of death and the destructive pyrotechnics wouldn’t seem so fun anymore. The makers of District 9 had no such qualms. Violence is there, in abundance, but none of it is the kind of fighting that makes you whisper “that’s so cool!” under your breath in the movie theater. It is gritty, and disgusting, and real—and after seeing it, instead of wanting to take martial arts lessons, you want to fund an organization to rescue child soldiers.

If District 9 had been all about human sin and human atrocities, it would still have been worthwhile to watch, I think, because we so desperately need to be reminded that the world is yearning for God, waiting for God to come rescue it with bated breath. Sin is real, and it has consequences that should turn our stomachs—far better to be nauseated than to accept violence with complacency. However, District 9 doesn’t stop with just exposing injustice and cruelty. There is unexpected heroism, as well—unexpected not because it comes from the inexperienced or the weak, as in so many stories, but because it comes from the cruel and the willfully ignorant. The hero does not emerge from the young hero-in-training, but from the antihero. And this, perhaps, is the best reason to watch District 9. Is it not true that we are often the antiheroes of our own stories? Our petty selfishness and our little cruelties tear up the world around us, and most of the time we don’t even notice the bleeding wounds we have created. But this isn’t the end. God works, not simply to contain our damage, but to turn us into heroes. He not only disarms us, he gives us his own sword of the Spirit, and makes us his champions to fight the good fight. He transforms us from mockers of his Word into his messengers. It is this that can give us hope in our darkest moments, when it seems that everything we touch turns to ash. Like the characters of District 9, we do not start with a clean slate—but like those characters, we can change.

I fear facing God. I know that my faith isn’t where it needs to be, but I don’t know how to get it there. I know that the only way to even start to resolve the problem is a long, deep, intense prayer. But I am afraid to confront my doubts. I fear that they will always plague my tormented soul – that I will always be “like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind,” torn between the knowledge that my faith can never be proved and the dread of a dissatisfying atheistic nihilism that is equally uncertain. So instead of seriously dealing with them, I muster up the will to believe and muddle through shallow waters in prayer. I am afraid of falling on my knees once more before God, and perhaps I wouldn’t mind so much if I weren’t so fearful that this will be just one of a thousand times. I am afraid to deal with it because I am terrified that there will never be a resolution. I am a coward.

I fear spreading the gospel. I am ashamed to look people in the eye and tell them what I believe because I don’t believe it firmly enough myself. And although I can intellectually grant that “the Son of Man will be ashamed of me when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels,” that doesn’t stop me from giving into my terror when bringing up the gospel to someone I don’t know. I am especially afraid of offending people who are older and wiser and near to me. It is much easier to go up to a person you’ve never met and will never see again and to do something that would otherwise make you feel a fool. College students do it all the time at parties, in drunken revelry. My spirituality is no different – during spiritual high points, I have all the strength to approach strangers and share the gospel. But I do not make evangelism my way of life; I do not seriously reach out to those closest to me. This weekend, my atheist mother invited my grandmother to church with me. I couldn’t muster up the courage, but my mom did the work for me. I was just too afraid of making my grandmother feel bad or weird or unloved. Even as we drove back home, I couldn’t bring myself to actually ask my grandmother deep religious questions. I am a coward.

I am afraid of confronting others to their face. I have seen scriptures misused by ministers, but I have not brought it up to them. I have seen Christians swear and had the refrain “if anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless” beating mercilessly in my ears, but not said a word to actually help the person. I am afraid that my challenging someone else will in turn lead them to challenge me, and I know that I have messed up enough to give them plenty of examples to bring up. I am a coward.

I fear facing myself. It is so easy for me to look at Scriptures and point out all of the mistakes that other Christians make without seriously dealing with the mistakes I make. Yet I am unwilling to face down the chasms that lie in my own soul – an unending series of crevices full of selfishness, laziness, ingratitude, and hypocrisy. I know that if I actually deal with it, I know that if I truly live as I am supposed to live as a Christian, I will have to kill off all these parts of myself. I am afraid of dying to myself. I am a coward.

That’s precisely why I needed to write this. I could have written a post about what other Christians need to work on. I could have lamented the failure of the church in some area or another. But as I racked my brain for something insightful to say about Christian culture, I realized that I know more about myself and my flaws than about the problems of those around me. Really, I don’t know what other Christians do when they are outside of church. I don’t know how many are cowards. I don’t know whether they ought to be rebuked or consoled.

I do know this: I desperately have a lot to work on and the only way that I can get the help that I need is to be real with those around me. I pray that my honesty in these matters can spur on others to be honest with themselves about their sin and their fears and their unresolved problems. Most importantly, I know that I must overcome these fears. I must rid myself of this cowardice and become the brave daughter that God has called me to be. I pray that the Lord can give me the strength and perseverance and courage that I lack. Praise be to God for His patience and inexhaustible grace. He knows that I – and the rest of his children – desperately need it.

There must have been learning in the Garden of Eden, not just stasis. How could we learn the character of you, if we did not transgress? How would we understand? So much mercy and justice, already in that strange and secret fable – how you clothed us in skin still smoky from that first death, and sent us on our way – out into the world, into the long, long path where you had to take thousands, thousands of years to present us with the perfect human, and then only through direct intervention because nothing we could do: not advancement, not education, not evolution, could produce him.

So this  is my wilderness, and my promised land. I lean on you, my rod and my staff, I lean on you, heavily and wearily. This is what we were meant to be, cripple and stick, in this version of things. You want to own all my love, and that is utterly fair enough, because my tiny heart is already too small and mean: how could it produce enough love? Only when I love you with my whole heart, my whole soul, my whole mind will I ever be able to radiate you. And then I would be purely love. You are, after all, extravagant. You are like the sheets of rain, pummeling on the zinc roof of my heart. You have guarded my childhood in the bright-curtained room. You have sung in the wind past my window, you have littered your leaves on my grass. My whole childhood has been sitting on a stool, trying to peek at what meal you are preparing in the pot, for me, with only the smells that fill the air for a clue. You were entirely gentle to me, lifting me in the arms of my father when I tripped home and he swung me round in an almost perfect circle. Oh yes, you were present in every corner of my heart, present but unsuspected, present but not consciously bidden, from the sweet toffee rolls I loved to sneak out to buy, to the dark green shade of the pong pong tree. You were the legs I hugged and the shelves I climbed, reaching for that slightly out of reach, slightly battered paperback. You were the quiet corner I cried in in the cold blast of the library, you were in the gurgle of the school fountain. You were the whitewashed wall I stood attention by, silently waiting for me to turn to you. You were the perfect circle I approximated with the twirl of a ribbon on a string in the courtyard in the sun; you were the perfect balance of the plastic dragonfly, bobbing up and down gracefully on my finger.

You were the drains I ran down, followed by a flood of paper boats.
You were the geometry of trees I walked past.
You were the overhead bridge I walked over every morning.
You were the sunshine spilled on the asphalt.
You were the the fresh bright air I breathed in the mornings, you were everything I have truly loved – and you alone know what those things are, because of that, even my own heart does not know.
You are my best heart, the only good I’ve ever done

was done in childish mimicry of you.

At times, I preferred perishing to receiving grace. I wrote:

Righteous and wickedness can have no common ground.
In Heaven, you and I, oh Lord, ought never to be bound.
So send me to the depths of immeasurable despair
That Thy perfection may forever reign in holiness most fair.

It seemed like I couldn’t fully acknowledge how horrible all of my sin was without being terrified and mystified by grace.

But our Father is “full of grace and truth” (cf. John 1:14). He does not give us grace because he was blinking and didn’t see our sin. He knows everything that we’ve done – He knows our sin better than we do – but he still redeems us. Why? How? Because He loves us. “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

This was another idea that I couldn’t wrap my head around for a long time. I only fully grasped it when a friend wept over my lap, repeating the words “I’m sorry” over and over again. Even my saying, “I forgive you,” could not stop my friend’s refrain. Yet I did not want tears or weeping; I just wanted to enjoy time together. Yet it hit me that I was doing precisely the same thing with God: sobbing during all of our time together and constantly apologizing in prayer. But God’s love is infinitely greater than my feelings for my friends. How much more, then, must He be tired of my resistance to His forgiveness? God’s plan for us is not guilt, but repentance and salvation and freedom.

We are in a terrible situation when we cannot accept God’s grace. It leaves us disheartened and demotivated. If we don’t appreciate how much we have been redeemed, we cannot fully feel God’s unending love. We do not feel moved to serve Him or to flee our life of sin. It becomes easier and easier to be ungrateful and unloving in all of the other areas of our life.

We must accept God’s grace if we ever hope to live out a Christian life of love, forgiveness, and peace. You can see the difference between the man who has accepted grace and the man who has not: one is calm and peaceful, feeling loved by God, while the other one frets and worries, trying to earn his salvation.

Yet receiving grace is dangerous: we may easily forget the seriousness of the sin we commit. It is just as bad, if not worse, to feel loved simply because we do not grasp the horror of sin’s disgusting fetters. That is not accepting grace, but ignoring the Truth.

It is pride to think we are good enough on our own – to ignore our need to be set free from slavery to sin. It is also pride to think that our sin is so horrific that God cannot break the chains. As St. Bernard puts it, “The rivers of Grace cannot flow uphill, up the steep cliff of the proud man’s heart.” But the humble man will both acknowledge his sin and accept God’s solution. “That is why Scripture says: ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble’” (James 4:6).

So we are engaged in a constant balancing act: realizing the truth about ourselves while fully accepting God’s grace. It may not be easy, but it is the only way to maintain the drive to finish the race. It is our only hope if we seek to keep ourselves on the narrow path. Sometimes we will err on one side or the other. After many months of being too guilt-ridden, I have perhaps begun to focus too heavily on grace. Yet I can’t help but think that if we seek the balance humbly, with a childlike faith, God will not punish us for falling sometimes. He knows – most of all – that we are imperfect. The question is not “will we fall?” but “will we get back on the beam?” We are lucky enough to know that God’s got a little safety net known as Grace under there when we do fall.

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.

Tim Challies’ article “Show All History” in Christianity Today, reminds us of AOL’s disastrous mishap in 2006. Dr. Abdur Chowdhury accidentally released to the public a compressed text file containing twenty million search keywords for over 650,000 users over a 3-month period. Though AOL immediately withdrew the data, it had already seeped through the Internet. These 650,000 were victims of their search histories; histories that were made available to complete strangers, giving them the opportunity to reconstruct a person’s life.

Challies provides the following searches of one of the AOL users:
body fat calliper 2006-03-01 18:54:10
curb morning sickness 2006-03-05 08:53:23
get fit while pregnant 2006-03-09 18:49:37
he doesn’t want the baby 2006-03-11 03:52:01
uou’re pregnant he doesn’t want the baby 2006-03-11 03:52:49
online degrees theology 2006-03-11 04:05:24
online christian colleges 2006-03-11 04:13:33
foods to eat when pregnant 2006-03-12 09:38:02
baby names 2006-03-14 19:11:10
baby names and meanings 2006-03-14 20:01:27
physician search 2006-03-23 10:20:04
best spa vacation deals 2006-03-27 20:04:09
maternity clothes 2006-03-28 09:28:25
pregnancy workout videos 2006-03-29 10:01:39
buns of steel video 2006-03-29 10:12:38
what is yoga 2006-03-29 12:17:31
what is theism 2006-03-29 12:18:30
hindu religion 2006-03-29 12:18:56
yoga and hindu 2006-03-29 12:32:05
is yoga alligned with christianity 2006-03-29 12:33:18
yoga and christianity 2006-03-29 12:33:42
abortion clinics charlotte nc 2006-04-17 11:00:02
greater carolinas womens center 2006-04-17 11:40:22
can christians be forgiven for abortion 2006-04-17 21:14:19
roe vs. wade 2006-04-17 22:22:07
effects of abortion on fibroids 2006-04-18 06:50:34
abortion clinic charlotte 2006-04-18 15:14:03
symptoms of miscarriage 2006-04-18 16:14:07
water aerobics charlotte nc 2006-04-18 19:41:27
abortion clinic chsrlotte nc 2006-04-18 21:45:39
total woman vitamins 2006-04-20 16:38:16
engagement gifts 2006-04-20 16:57:04
engagement rings 2006-04-20 16:58:37
mom’s turning 50 2006-04-20 17:51:13
high risk abortions 2006-04-20 17:53:49
abortion fibroid 2006-04-20 17:55:18
benefits of water aerobics 2006-04-20 23:25:50
wedding gown styles 2006-04-26 19:37:34
recover after miscarriage 2006-05-22 18:17:53
marry your live-in 2006-05-27 07:25:45

He points out that this woman goes from searches on pregnancy, to realization that the father does not want the baby, to turning to abortion clinics and whether or not abortion is compatible with her faith, to dealing with a miscarriage, to eventually moving on. Challies comments, “What is so amazing about these searches is the way people transition seamlessly from the normal and mundane to the outrageous and perverse. They are, thus, an apt reflection of real life.”

The search history made tangible this woman’s most troubling emotions. The sad truth is that we are willing to pour out the depths of our soul to a search engine, often willing to admit more to an unforgiving and permanent track record than we will to a God who offers comfort and grace. This is a distressing glimpse of the reality of the sad plight of the human condition. What twisted search histories inhabit our own hearts? I would hate to see a written transcript of my own sin, but perhaps this is to be taken as a reminder of the darkness we are capable of, a darkness that we often seem to forget. After all, the search history knows us better than we know ourselves—they remember even when we choose not to. Convicting, right? How willing are we to expose our search histories before God? Challies concludes, “While the search engines may never forget, I am grateful that God does forget.” Hebrews 8:12 contains God’s beautiful promise to those who have confessed their sins, “I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” Remember no more – what exactly does that mean?  Throughout the Old Testament, when God chooses to “remember” His covenant with His people, He is not actually remembering something that He once forgot; rather He is honoring and keeping in mind His promise to them.  In the same way, when God says He will “remember their sins no more,” God still knows our sin, but He does not hold us accountable to it. We are not bound to the condemnation that we deserve. God sees our search histories. He sees the depths of our heart, yet He loves us the same.

Grace: something no search engine can ever provide.

Where are you searching?