Ouch

I posted a video on my Facebook page a few days back. It was a piece of spoken word by Propaganda. It is a brilliant piece of art that challenges many assumptions the run unchecked in our hearts and on social media. Some people watched it and bristled and fomented. Some people watched it and cringed and acknowledged how much truth can hurt when that truth is exposing lies we have believed.

I want you to take the time to watch that video but only after first doing the following:

• Pray for a humble and contrite heart that rests in the Lord. Resting in the Lord helps us not feel undone when faced with something challenging.
• Lay aside political ideology. In case you haven't watched this election cycle it is not helpful and is primarily formulated and espoused by some real grade A idiots.
• Consider whether you can rest assured that the stories you heard in history class, on your favorite news channels, or that you read in your favorite blogs are unbiased, wholly accurate, and aligned with scripture. Hint: they are not and so you (and I) have some learning to do.
• Acknowledge that pain that you don't understand and haven't experienced can in fact be real, significant, and profoundly formative in the lives of others.
• Try to recognize that sins committed together can take on a life of their own outside of the lives of those individuals that committed them.
• Prepare your heart to watch for ways in which you become defensive. Defensiveness is most often a move to protect our hearts and the pride, selfishness, and idols found therein and NOT a move to stand for truth.

As a white, middle class American I was raised to believe that hard work, integrity, and honesty were just about all that was needed to get ahead in life. This video undoes many perceptions that I used to carry about race in this country. The sinfulness and arrogance of my old views are sadly all to common. Unknown and unchecked privilege kept my heart from feeling the pain and anguish handed down to us through history.

It is possible that both hard work and unearned privilege got me to where I am today. It is possible that sins that I maybe have never committed regarding racism are still at work in the world in a way that benefits me while trampling on the dignity of others.

If I give any credence to original sin passed down from Adam I am forced to acknowledge that it can't just be actively and openly committed sins today that are at work in the world. When it comes to issues of race and justice in America there are centuries of broad-based racial sins committed by huge portions of the country that are still rolling over lives. That sin is not going to wash away with a few strokes of a pen and some new legislation.

Disregarding the importance of the virtues that helped me get to where I am today would be stupid. Hard work and integrity are important and honor God. Just as stupid and far more hurtful would be ignoring the reality that people with equal or greater measure of those same virtues simply don't make it in this country because of the color of their skin.

I don't have answers for issues of race and I tend not to give much credence to anyone who says they do have some easy answers. People want to find a quick fix, as if it is something we just need to get over. I just don't think that apart from Christ's return that fix isn't out there.

However, there is a redemptive way forward. It is at the cross where we can look up and see love and forgiveness and grace and mercy and justice. Our hope and future has to be found in the fountains of grace and justice and mercy that never cease to flow from God.

At the foot of that same cross we can look around and see equal footing for all of God's children who through faith and repentance come to Him. That beautiful, made-in-the-image-of-God crowd of folks is precious and beloved and blood bought. I am so grateful to add my pale, Swedish/German hue to the spectrum of peach and brown and tan and ebony faces that will one day worship God together.

When we see the created-by-God beauty if the faces around us and realize how precious it is we will fight and even die to see that others also recognize that beauty. Doing so honors God and points to Him as Creator and Redeemer.

Whatever tries to hide or tarnish or disregard that beauty needs to be destroyed. The sin in our hearts needs to be confessed. The injustice of our systems needs to be revealed for the God-dishonoring temples of death they have become. With love and truth and a God given capacity for sacrifice, the people of God are uniquely equipped to lead the change.

The truth about racism in our country is a gift. It is a painful one, but a gift none the less. With words like Propaganda's we can being to unravel the lies that have a choke hold on our nation. Darkness comes kicking and screaming into the light but we know that it cannot continue once fully exposed. "And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

Wonderfully Average Children

The Olympics are always inspiring for me. Having played sports in high school and college, I know a bit of the time and effort and focus needed to perform at a high level. While I can't claim to have ever performed at a "high level" I know how much work it took for my mediocrity which makes Olympians all the more remarkable. Seriously, if they started giving medals for working hard but achieving little in athletics I would be world class.

Anyway, I watched the Olympics and then watched my kids try various athletic feats and realized that when it comes to athletics I am raising some very average children. It has forced me to give up on living vicariously through my children pretty early on in my parenting.

My oldest is all skin and bones and floppy limbs as she runs, swims, breathes, etc. Reminds me of my own awkwardness as a child in a not so heartwarming or nostalgic way. Like me, she will end up lettering in sports simply for faithfully showing up. Her hard work will likely produce a harvest of righteousness and zero gold medals.

My middle child, who thinks she is as graceful and elegant as a swan, showed me her "dives" which were really high speed belly flops. Like knock-the-wind-out-of-you flops. At age 6 she still runs into walls. She read three books before breakfast this morning so she has other contributions to make to the world but athletics doesn't seem to hold much promise right now.

I am holding out hope for my youngest because he is adopted and carries some different genes. At 3 he has better dance moves and hand-eye coordination than his sisters but the bar has been set so low I don't know if besting them moves him out of "average". I grew up in a tall family and played sports for big frames so with my son I am considering looking into some sports better suited for the vertically challenged.

Having my own life full of athletic mediocrity makes this early assessment of my children's future in sports a bit easier. While trips to the Olympics are probably out of the picture I do think that even in our average-ness there is much to be learned and celebrated about the effort and journey along the way.

As a parent I want be prepared to teach my kids the value of hard work especially when results don't come easily or praise doesn't come often. There is tremendous value to struggling, fighting and persevering. Please don't ever give my kids a participation award. That doesn't require anything special from them. Just getting to show up is a gift and doesn't deserve an award.

I also want my kids to learn to care for their bodies whether they are long and awkward or squishy and rounded or short and compact (my three kids in order). There is something precious to the gifts of life and breath and movement that should never be taken for granted. Our bodies are given by God and our use of them can bring Him glory.

In a small house my kids are already learning about the struggles of working together but there is something unique that happens in sports and athletics as you labor alongside others towards a common goal. Mediocre or not, everyone on a team has a contribution to make. Athletics were tremendously helpful for my own self discovery and self awareness as I processed how I fit in and what I could add to a team.

Hidden in average contributions are beautiful lessons on life, work, discipline, teamwork, and sacrifice. I want my wonderfully average children to learn those things whether they ever achieve "success" or not. I want my children to not be driven by idols of success or popularity or body type but by the desire for virtue and strength of character.

In the next few years my kids will probably begin playing sports if for no other reason than my wife and I will need some help tiring them out and getting them out of the house. My prayer is that I would push them hard to grow in character and virtue regardless of outcomes. I want to let them know that success, while wonderful, is a terrible thing to be stuck chasing if it doesn't produce something in you that can actually be kept for a lifetime.

Longing

"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing - to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from - my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back."

This quote from C.S. Lewis really has me thinking. I believe that many of our complex emotions stem from this longing that Lewis talks about. We are created for something more, something better, something clean and whole. When our head and heart slow down a bit, we find feelings arising in us that take us beyond the immediacy of check lists, burdens of the day, and the urgency of the "now".

Nostalgia rises unbidden in our hearts drawing us back to times and places where we had a glimmer of that something better, of that land of beauty.

Melancholy is the unsettled condition of a heart that laments often un-nameable wrongs in life. We sense that things are not as they ought to be.

Even submissiveness (which is both feeling and action) is an attempt to live out the restful surrender to a loving God and the order He established. I think we all long for this. Many heartaches in life arise because we have been submissive to things that are not God.

Curiosity and playfulness reveal that we carry a hidden and often tarnished sense of whimsy. Our longing for the place of beauty that Lewis mentions points to a carefully created world made to be explored by, or perhaps revealed to us.

Awe, in its biggest breath-stealing and jaw-dropping and silence-inducing sense, is the overwhelming sense of amazement that we feel when our creatureliness is confronted with the grandeur of a cosmos that points towards our Creator. Again, hidden within awe is the longing to be fully present in that land and with the One who made it.

Hope, that most important of feelings and one that is not simply wishful thinking, is actually grounded in that longed for land where all beauty comes from. Our hearts are wired for hope and sadly we try to anchor that sense of hope in something and someone lesser than God.

I have realized that these complex emotions take some effort to cultivate. Even melancholy takes a pensiveness that can't happen in the rush of life. This C.S. Lewis quote has helped me realize my need to let my heart and eyes wander far and wide so that they can glimpse those distant shores that will one day be home. These feelings help orient our hearts to what we were truly meant to be and what will one day ultimately become of us.

If you are interested in some ways to help cultivate at least a few of these feelings check out this blog post that has long been a favorite.

The Wrong Kind of Love

Loving someone a lot and loving someone rightly are two very different things.

To love someone a lot is easy but unpredictable. This is what the world calls love. It is to measure the rightness of love by intensity of feelings and strength of desire. It is supposed that greater feelings must necessarily equate to greater morality.

This kind of love leads to countless heartaches as feelings change over time. Or perhaps the feelings were just disoriented in the first place and come to their logical conclusions. This kind of love is fickle, unreliable, entirely subjective, and is the way that most people in the world view love. It is also one of the prevailing secular narratives for determining morality.

Love that is measured by magnitude and not morality is ultimately not truly love. This is what many people fail to understand in modern conversations on love. With the moral aspect of love discarded, the only measuring stick for secular love is our subjective, ever changing, and selfish feelings.

Christians ought to be very cautious in those conversations about love that focus on feelings and intensity. This isn't because feelings don't matter, but because left to themselves our feelings are subject to sinfulness. 

Our feelings, especially that most important feeling of love, must be submitted to God and His standards of righteousness. Most of what the world tells us of love is bereft of righteousness because it only recognizes the subjectively felt intensity of emotions. 

To love someone rightly is an entirely different thing. It is a move from quantity and magnitude to quality and morality. If we aim to love someone rightly we are forced to disregard the magnitude of our affections towards someone and instead examine the morality of our actions towards someone. For Christians, that morality is ultimately measured by God's righteousness.

This kind of love doesn't let us off the hook easy. It isn't just those who we feel like loving that we have to love. We have to love hard people in hard places.

This means we have to examine how we love the "others" that we don't hold much affection for. Whoever that unlovable "other" is for you, you had better search your heart and God's Word diligently to see whether you are loving them rightly.

I suggest two starting places for examining your love.

First, look at those people in your life who you regularly interact with. Who is unlovable or difficult to love? Is your marriage or  are your other relationships built on sentiment or on a commitment to righteousness? Have you allowed fading or wavering feelings to convince you that you no longer love someone?

Secondly, examine where you are on a socio-political spectrum. How do you respond to:

• Black Lives Matter? 
• Blue Lives Matter? 
• ISIS? 
• Either totally-unfit-for-office presidential candidate? 

Whoever it is that our culture and politics are telling you to distrust, dislike, or vilify they are probably deserving of better than what your heart has given them.

Love isn't agreement or endorsement. That is what the world's shallow, sentimental notion of morality and love calls for. Don't play by those rules.

Neither is love vilification, dismissal, or condemnation.

Someway, somehow Christians need to find a way to reclaim love as our hallmark. Let us love the world and "others" rightly, deeply, and sacrificially. It is what Christ did for us.