Flicking Walnuts

“If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small. Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?”

—Proverbs 24:10-12 (ESV)

*****

It is comical—and wonderful, sometimes—what people will do when they are tired. I don’t mean the dreary, grumpy stage of “tired”; I mean the “tired” that has come from, perhaps, too much time spent doing a good thing, the “tired” in which joy expresses itself in a loopy blur of consciousness and laughter is far more contagious than it usually is. This is the “tired” in which comedy and wonder can unite.

I remember a night a few years ago, a night tucked into a season in which a friend of mine had probably led more worship services with his band than he could count—a good season, without a doubt, but an exhausting one. I had attended one of the services where he was leading with his wife and daughter, and afterwards the four of us (thankfully) found a restaurant that was, somehow, still open. We sat down to dinner, drained but filled with joy. Likely none of us remembered the next morning what in the world we found to talk about—and to this day, my friend himself can’t even recall the night—but one memory stuck out to me.

After dinner had ended, the waitress came with dessert. My friend was excited for the dessert itself, but there was a road block: walnuts. He’s mildly allergic, and, being more than mildly tired, he began to flick them, good-naturedly, off the dessert, sending them flying at the wall. Some of them fell on the table; some disappeared into the dark-colored cracks of the old booth at which we were seated; others needed to be quickly dodged before their trajectory turned them into a new hair accessory. But he continued to flick them, laughing, until he had cleared enough of a path to safely eat the dessert beneath.

On a normal day, mind you, my friend is meticulously neat and deeply respectful. When I reminded him about this story years later, he was laughing in disbelief. But when you’re tired, and there’s a road block, sometimes you just flick it. We all have those days.

Despite the silliness of this event, this is a memory I cherish. Why? I learned a really valuable lesson that night from his delirious walnut-flicking. That lesson has come up for me all over again in the present season of my life, and a reading in Proverbs this morning resurfaced it too. And so, here I am, sharing it with you.

That lesson, in simple terms, is this: Sometimes, when there are walnuts in your life, you need to flick them.

Let me explain.

Have you ever hit a patch of life in which you felt like things were “bad”? You know, those patches where it seems like you’re running in pointless circles, beating your head against a wall, walking the same doomed roads day in and day out and wondering if anything will ever change?

I think we’ve all been there. But something I learned far too recently was this: We don’t have to stay there. Sure, sometimes we can’t change our circumstances; there are real difficulties in life that may not be eliminated, no matter how much we wish (or pray) that they would be. But even in these, there is a small but mighty hope in a realization that sounds simple but is immensely packed with power: the realization that we can control one thing, and that’s our attitude. We have a choice, regardless of circumstance, to respond either with negativity, complaint, and hopelessness or with truth, thanksgiving, and hope.

In the proverb quoted above, something that stood out to me was the reality that I have been able, at various times in my life, to see myself “being taken away to death,” “stumbling to the slaughter.” I’ve sat down on my floor, fallen on my face, and moaned, “Is there any hope? Why does life feel like death? What am I doing? Why do I keep running in the same stupid circles?” But what I didn’t realize until later was that it was my own refusal to choose life that was keeping me stuck. What I didn’t realize until later was that I actually had a lot of opportunity to choose what I was allowing in my life: how I was spending my free time, how I was filling my thought life, who I was around—even what job I was working, what attitude I had while working it, what environments I was putting myself into each day. What I didn’t realize until later was that “No” is a powerful word and that I could have said it to an awful lot of the things that I was letting infuse misery into my life.

It all made me wonder, reading this proverb, whether there may be times when its warning doesn’t just apply to others. Jesus said as much: “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matt. 7:3-5, ESV). Maybe there are times in which we know we know that we’re the ones headed towards death. Maybe God wants us not just to do the work of drawing others back onto the path of life; maybe there’s room for us to take note of our own path too.

Another proverb: “Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil” (Prov. 4:26-27, ESV).

I think probably all of us have more room in our lives to recognize the work that God Himself has done and still does to save us and make us holy; surely, there are vast numbers of ways He saves us that we don’t even realize. And the fact that we’re still breathing is repetitive testimony that He is still sustaining us, giving us reason and ability to live.

But, at the same time, I think probably all of us also have more room to recognize that we ourselves have responsibilities in this regard too. We don’t just plop down on a couch and let God do all the work of sanctifying us, do we? Is there not every chance for us to grow, to learn, to decide, to fail, to try again, to partner with what God is doing, to strive for godliness with all the strength with which He has filled our veins?

So we must, with the Lord, ponder the paths of our feet. We must take an honest look at our lives and ask, “Are there any walnuts here?” Is there anything sitting around, influencing who we’re becoming, that’s actually toxic to our health? And are we just leaving it there, for the sake of social “grace” or laziness or whatever other excuse comes to our mind? Or are we ready to say, “Lord, I know this thing is leading me into death. I know this thing is sending me stumbling to slaughter. I know you know it too. I’m ready to flick it out”?

That, my friend, takes a lot of strength to say. How much more frequently are we prone to echo Augustine’s oft-quoted, ironic prayer: “Oh, Master, make me chaste and celibate—but not yet!”¹

It’s so much easier to pretend like we can eat walnuts and get away with it. Sure, our tongues get a bit itchy; maybe it’s slightly hard to breathe. But at least we avoided the social embarrassment of launching them across the table, right? 

I’m learning, slowly, that I’d rather breathe. Maybe it is socially embarrassing to admit I’ve been up to things that haven’t been good for me. Maybe it will take a great deal of effort to rewrite my thought patterns and change my ways. But maybe that’s all worth it. Maybe it’s worth it to be able to say, “Yeah, I may have looked like a fool trying to get out of this swamp intact, but I would have been more foolish to just keep drowning in it.” More eloquently, here’s proverb #3: “The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it” (Prov. 22:3, ESV).

So, then, the questions I know you knew were coming: Are there walnuts in your life? Are you ready to start doing some flicking?

I’m not saying you can boot out every little thing that causes you pain. I’m also not saying that the weight of your holiness, your becoming, rests entirely on your shoulders. Only God can change our hearts. But what I am saying is that we’d be pretty silly to blame God for allergic reactions to walnuts we had every bit of power to remove.

Maybe it’s time we flick off what we can flick off. Maybe it’s time we actually take the plank out of our own eye. Maybe it’s time we take responsibility for the state of our minds, choose a different response to our circumstances, and craft a life that genuinely reflects what we say we value. Maybe our ability to obey the direct message of that first proverb—to rescue others we see stumbling toward death—depends on our willingness to ponder our own path first. Food for thought.

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¹ Translation by James J. O’Donnell, as qtd. in “Fleshing Out St. Augustine” by Brian Morton, SundayHeraldReview (https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/sundayheraldreview.html).

A New Look at an Old Rose: You Loved Me Not

“If in tongues of men I speak—and of angels too—but I don’t have love, I’ve become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophecies, and I’ve understood all mysteries and all knowledge—and if I have all faith, resulting in a mountain moving—but I don’t have love, I’m nothing. And if I gave away all my possessions—even if I gave my very body as my boast—but I don’t have love, I’ve profited nothing.”

—I Corinthians 13:1-3 (my translation)

*****

I Corinthians 13 has to be one of the most well-known passages in all of Scripture, save, perhaps, John 3:16 or Psalm 23. I think we’ve all had some part of this chapter stitched on a pillow, inked onto a journal, or verbally proclaimed into our lives by some well-meaning older person who has a fine dream in mind for our wedding day. “Love is patient, love is kind…” 

I have to confess right off the bat that it’s been a hard thing for me, all my life, to know what love is. Sometimes it’s such a vague concept. It’s a word with way too many meanings. And examples of love are shot out of cultural cannons like confetti; I grew up with so many pictures and definitions that things still feel like mingled colors of paper strips cluttering my soul. From Disney princesses being carried off by silent, enigmatic princes to the happy welcome of Mr. Rogers as he invited me again to be his neighbor, from the field trip zookeeper’s repeated explanations that petting the animals with two fingers was the nice way to my former pastor’s cold stares as we sat in the “wrong” seats in the church auditorium, from seethingly angry outbursts from teachers to manipulative convincings from family members—it was all portrayed as “love.” 

We all grow up in this milieu—or, if not this one, surely one equally chaotic, with multi-colored definitions of an elusive, overused word. It’s unfortunate. If we ever really needed a word to be specific, it’s this one.

For the first time in my life, this last week, I found a place where it is specific. It seems kinda obvious now, but for 27 years, it wasn’t. So I thought I’d share it. It may be old news to you. But my guess is that, somewhere, you’re probably needing this word to be specific too. 

My realization happened as I was reading I Corinthians 13 in Greek a few weeks ago. Any of you who know me really well will know that Paul’s epistles are probably the least comfortable place for me in Scripture. Tell me to go read Leviticus for an hour, and I’ll be nearly jumping out of my seat in excitement. Force me to read some Paul, and I get pretty antsy. But I’ve been trying, recently, to read his letters, in no particular order, in Greek—and the reason for it is just that reading in Greek forces me out of what’s known as the lullaby effect, that habit of listening mindlessly to something you’ve heard so many times that you’ve lost the ability to actually hear what it’s saying.¹ I’m so used to Paul’s words that it’s hard to actually hear them. So, Greek…

Greek also allows the text to become a puzzle again. It forces me to pay attention, to read slowly, to ask questions, to notice patterns, and to really dig. Part of my digging this time turned up a treasure my heart desperately needed.

Read again those first three verses of chapter 13 (this is my translation, given not because I see anything wrong with the other translations out there but because I hope it’ll get behind your own lullaby effect, allowing you to hear the text in a way you’ve never heard it before): 

If in tongues of men I speak—and of angels too—but I don’t have love, I’ve become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophecies, and I’ve understood all mysteries and all knowledge—and if I have all faith, resulting in a mountain moving—but I don’t have love, I’m nothing. And if I gave away all my possessions—even if I gave my very body as my boast—but I don’t have love, I’ve profited nothing. 

The typical “takeaway” from these verses is the idea that we really ought to make sure we ourselves are doing all of our doings in love. That is a valid and exceedingly important truth. However, I think there’s something else to notice here as well.

What’s interesting to me in all those “if’s” (if I speak, if I prophecy, if I have faith, etc.) is that, in all of them, stuff is happening. (I know, real theological language right there. Bear with me.) Look at it: Tongues of men and of angels are being uttered. Prophecies are spoken. Mysteries are unraveled. Knowledge abounds. Mountains are moving. Generosity is undeniably demonstrated. The utmost testimony of faith is given.

And yet, even as all of these activities are happening, Paul implies that it is entirely possible for them to happen without love.

Let me put this another way. When I was in junior high, my softball coach once had us do a full practice without any softballs. And it wasn’t a conditioning practice either, where we were just running or doing pushups or whatnot. This was a softball practice. We did all of our normal drills, the catching, throwing, base-running—everything—without any balls. We were supposed to act it out; we were supposed to pretend that he was hitting a real ball to us, pretend that we were fielding a real grounder, pretend that we were making a perfect throw to first base, pretend that the first baseman caught it, and pretend like the play was splendidly made. We did this for two hours.

Silly? Maybe. But in the context of that sport for that team, it was helpful. It gave us a chance to practice in our minds the confidence we needed to handle the same drills with a real ball. It gave us a chance to focus on mechanics in a low-stakes setting; there was no pressure of seeing unfortunate results to dash our weak hopes of success.

But you know what we did the next day? We played with real balls. And you know what we did every other day? We played with real balls too.

Why? Because we were a softball team. If I told you that we never practiced with balls—ever—we’d be walking disasters out there. We’d have been a total joke. You have to know how to actually throw a softball if you want to play the game. It doesn’t matter how flawless your mechanics look without the ball. In the real game, what matters is whether you can actually get it to the first baseman’s glove to make the play.

So let’s take this back to I Corinthians. Paul says that, apparently, it’s possible for a person (or, taking his context into consideration, a group—specifically, a church) to have an exceedingly nice display of mechanics that totally look like the Kingdom of God. You can take lots of photos and think, “Oh, wow. They’ve really got it going on. Look at how they bent their knees and scooped their glove in the dirt there. See how they followed through with their arms after their throws? Man, that swing looks really good: head down, weight balanced. It’s all there.” And you might think, “Wow, what a great softball team.” In church words: “Wow, look at them go: speaking in tongues, prophesying, unraveling great mysteries, displaying great faith, abounding in generosity. It’s the Kingdom!”

But mechanics are nothing without the ball.

And, if you haven’t guessed in my cheesy analogy yet, the ball is love. 

Note that what Paul is talking about are basic mechanics. He doesn’t mention the well-funded children’s ministry, the prison outreach program, the women’s luncheon, or the theology seminars. He’s talking about the barebones basics here: faith, generosity, speaking words and wisdom through the Holy Spirit. These are the equivalents of learning how to open your glove before trying to catch the ball—baby-level basics.

But he’s also saying that these baby basics can be present without love.

I used to think that seeing these rock-bottom basics in a church community were evidence that the Kingdom was present. I have been completely duped (and incredibly hurt) in the past by this mistake.

I used to think that, when I saw these Kingdom basics, whatever relational surroundings I found around them must be “love,” because love is in the Kingdom, right? And if this is the Kingdom, then whatever they’re doing, however they’re treating each other, surely that must be love?

Paul says that logic is backwards. Love is externally defined. Love is not whatever sort of relating exists between people when Kingdom-looking activities are present. Love has its own specific, independent definition; and love itself defines whether those Kingdom-looking activities are indeed Kingdom activities or if they are mere obnoxious noises, empty identities, stark pictures of fruitlessness, naked nothings. To return to the analogy: If there’s no softball, the mechanics are worthless. You’re not even playing the game.

So we’ve gotten this far: The presence of Kingdom-looking activities does not mean the Kingdom is present any more than some softball-looking mechanics mean the game of softball is being played. It all depends on if the ball is actually there—on if love is present.

So, then, we’ve got another question to ask. What is love?

And, thankfully, Paul doesn’t leave us waiting long. We’ve all heard the next verses in I Corinthians 13: “Love is patient, love is kind…” But let’s break up the lullaby. What is love? It’s this, to paraphrase (and I encourage you to read it slowly):

• Love can wait a really long time for a breakthrough without ever ceasing in its committed stance of rooting for wholeness.
• Love reaches out in joyful generosity to thoughtfully add value to others’ lives.
• Love doesn’t look at others with hatred or anger when they are blessed in ways we’re not. It doesn’t see either destruction or consumption of others as options on the path to inheritance of blessing; it is, in a word, content.
• Love doesn’t brag. It doesn’t talk about how great it is in comparison with all those not-so-great “others.”
• Love isn’t haughty. It doesn’t inflate itself like a balloon, and it doesn’t need to be seen by everyone in the room.
• Love isn’t rude. It doesn’t shove itself into or out of others’ lives in a way that leaves them feeling missed and snubbed. Love has manners.
• Love doesn’t have a strategy map for self-benefit. Its end goal is not its own interest.
• Love isn’t irritable or touchy. Love doesn’t have short nerves or a quick temper; you can’t make it burst into consuming flames over a few prods and pokes.
• Love doesn’t bother stewing on evil. It doesn’t have a calculated list of others’ misdeeds.
• Love does not celebrate unrighteousness; it doesn’t rejoice at the type of character expressions that come out of lives unshaped by apprenticeship to Christ.
• Love exuberantly delights and dances, hand-in-hand, with the truth. No self-deception here: truth is its deepest joy.
• Love keeps on welcoming, embracing, and covering even when its arms are tired.
• Love remains convinced, steadfast, and serious in its persuasions, orientations, and mission.
• Love keeps hoping. Love doesn’t flinch or worry when skies are gray.
• Love persists. It always keeps on fighting.
• Love doesn’t bow to circumstance. It doesn’t fall down. Ever.

How’s that for some specificity? You learning some things? Me too.

Somebody somewhere started a strange tradition of climaxing romantic tension with that all-too-typical picture of a lovesick girl picking petals off a rose to determine the answer to her heart’s quest for clarity. You know it, don’t you? Petal after petal: “He loves me…He loves me not…”

But you know what is absolutely ludicrous to me about this picture? It perpetuates the confetti cannons I mentioned above; it proclaims that love is something we wonder about, something that’s elusive, something that’s hard to define, something we have to guess about and assume exists whenever we see the “stuff” that other people tell us should exist when love is present.

Paul says that love is different. Love is identifiable. He lists out its characteristics, saying, “This is love. You don’t have to go around looking for it, wondering about it. This is what it is, and anything that’s happening without love is not the important stuff it claims to be. Without love, mechanics, activities—the barebones basics of religious expression—are nothing.”

So why am I saying all this? Why is this a thing we need to know? Three reasons:

Reason #1: It’s worth a glance at your own life. If you say you’re loving someone, and the characteristics of your relatings with them don’t match the list above, I’ll put it frankly: You’re not. You’re not loving them. If you want to play softball, you need a real ball. You’ve got to lay down your mechanics and your opinions and actually ask, “Do I line up with what love really is? Does what I call ‘love’ actually look like Paul’s definitions?” And if it doesn’t? If you’re out of line? Well, then I suggest you take a look at Reason #2.

Reason #2: It’s worth a glance at how we conceive of God. We’ve all heard from I John: “God is love.” But that can be confusing when we don’t know what love is, when our vision is blurred by the confetti images shot at us by the cultural cannons. I John has another truth for us: “We love because he first loved us” (4:19, ESV). If we need some assistance aligning our actions and dispositions with Paul’s descriptions (which, honestly, we all do), the best place to start is to realize that this is how God has loved us. Maybe go back through that list and replace the generic “love” with the specific “God’s love” at the beginning of each sentence. I think you’ll find yourself changing as you let that sink in.

And, lastly…

Reason #3: It’s worth a glance at the contexts in which we’re steeping. I’ll be transparent: In the back of my mind, the context I’ve been thinking about this whole time has been a church (a past church, thankfully—not my present community). Maybe that’s what’s been in your mind, too, or maybe you’re thinking about a family situation, a romantic relationship, a work context, or your local grocery store. Whatever it is, please hear me when I tell you that there’s going to be a place in your story, at some point, where you’re going to bump up against Paul’s list, and you’re going to have to say, “Hey, wait a minute. That person (or that group or that “whatever” it is) has not been loving me. They said they were. But they haven’t been patient with me. They haven’t been kind. I’m afraid they’ll get angry. I’m afraid they’ll walk away. I’m afraid…”

My friend, I’m so sorry.

A realization like that is a brutal one. It shakes you to your core. What do you do when you realize you’ve given your time, your heart, your energy, your body, and your very self to something that was lying, something that was never love from the start?

I’m not about to pretend that I have all the answers for this. I’m still working through this myself. But one thing that has made a world of difference: the clarity to define. I can look at that church context I was thinking of, square in the face, and I can say, without anger or exaggeration, “You loved me not.” I can say, “You said it was love. All the manipulations, all the abuse, all the lies—you lied. You loved me not.”

Why is this important? I can’t forgive something that isn’t defined. I can’t heal from a wound I haven’t acknowledged. The first step in letting the Lord into my pain is acknowledging that there really is pain there.

Friend, however this hits you, I pray that you might realize, in it, that the Lord is near. I pray that He will give you strength to look clearly, through His lenses, at how you’re loving (or not), at how you’re perceiving His love (or not), and at how you’ve been loved (or haven’t). I pray that He will guide your asking and your defining, your processing and your forgiving. I pray that you’ll be able to hold up Paul’s mirror, look in it honestly, and take the steps to walk out of the cultural clutter and into the clarity of love defined.

May you, seriously, be able to look at yourself and others and rejoice with truth, this truth, which is what love sees every time:

“I see you dressed in white, every wrong made right. I see a rose in bloom at the sight of you—oh, so priceless. Irreplaceable, unmistakeable, incomparable—darling, it’s beautiful. I see it all in you—oh, so priceless.”²

That is love, my friends. Let’s pick up a new rose and let it bloom. 

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¹ For more on the lullaby effect, see Rabbi Dr. Samuel Landau’s article, “The Lullaby Effect that Stops Us Reading Torah” (April 2021). https://www.thejc.com/judaism/all/the-lullaby-effect-that-stops-us-reading-torah-1.514048.

² for KING & COUNTRY, “Priceless” (2014).

10 Lessons

Today marks 5 years since I graduated college. That’s a little hard to wrap my head around. Apparently, it’s hard for others around me to wrap their head around too, for various reasons. On one side, a cashier informed me recently that I could open a credit card with her store if I was over 18. On the other, when I turned 27, my grandma made one of those faces that leaves you wondering if, perhaps, humans can get hairballs. When she found her words, she explained that 27 is, according to the laws of mathematics, very close to 30. We had to change the subject after that.

In my own estimations, however, thinking about age and calculating the time since “whenever” is becoming easier to swallow as the years go by. Possibly, this is because people in their 30’s (with whom I am very grateful to be able to associate as peers at last) are generally immensely more relaxed about life than those in their early 20’s. But it also may be simply because the Lord has been teaching me so much about gratitude recently, and all the counting leaves me in a place of awe that I’m still alive—still going—rather than leaving me in some sort of fearful self-implosion at the realization of how near I am to some decade milestone or other. And so, in the spirit of the gratitude I’ve been learning, I thought I’d take some time to reflect and share some of the things I’ve learned over the last 5 years, in this strange time of life that is the transition from college into the “real world,” as they call it. I hope this short list will be a blessing to you no matter where in the counting of years you find yourself.

*****

Lesson #1: There is no road map to “adulting.” Not really. Life after college is so much less scripted than all the years of schooling we faced before this. Part of realizing this means also realizing that there are no “rockstars” out here either. The secret that the adults rarely tell you is that they don’t know what they’re doing either. Even the seemingly “successful” ones are still unsure, guessing human beings. We’re all in the same boat, fumbling through a long list of quiet confusions, trying to figure it out.

It didn’t take me long after graduating to realize this. In fact, I may be cheating, because I think I began to learn this a few months before college even officially ended. And when I did begin to see it, my first reaction was anger and discouragement. You’re telling me this was all a sham? All the promises that a B.A. was what I really needed, that life would make sense and my calling would be clear? It was a joke? Are you kidding me? You’re all still confused and just couldn’t bother to be humble enough to admit that you haven’t figured it out?

There are times when I am still irritated that I don’t find many in the generations preceding me who are willing to admit that they, too, are still guessing. But what I’m learning is that this absence of a road map—this reality that we’re all guessing—is actually a beautiful thing. It means we’re working on a very level playing field. We’re all working to create art on a canvas framed by the circumstances we’ve been given. Yes, some of those frames are stranger and more confusing than others. But realizing that we’re all here doing our best to work on our own piece of art can be freeing. We don’t need to compare. There is no exact script to follow, no “nailing it” or “getting there.” The question simply becomes, “How can I love the Lord with all my heart and soul and mind and strength and love my neighbor as myself, right now, right where I’m at?”

Lesson #2: The environment you’re in plays a big part in who you become. I would have thought, being an Anthropology major, that I would have learned this in school. And I did, theoretically. But now I know from experience. We are shaped by what’s around us. If we think of the environments we exist in like a soup, we’re the veggies floating around inside. We influence our environment to some degree; but mostly, the longer we’re in there, the more we taste like whatever we’re in.

One of my favorite authors, Brant Hansen, discusses this in a chapter in his newest book, The Men We Need. He closes the chapter with the following mind-blower:

You’ve probably heard about the classic experiment by Solomon Asch from the 1950s. He’d ask a small group of people a very simple question using flash cards. When he would ask them individually about the lengths of the lines on the cards, they’d have no problem at all with the little quiz.

But in the small groups, there was a setup: Everyone but one person was in on the experiment. They would deliberately give the wrong answer, out loud, first. When the only “real” subject had to answer the simple question…it was no longer simple. In fact, 37 percent would get the answer wrong.

Even more amazing is what happened when another researcher followed up this experiment with a similar one, using functional magnetic resonance imaging machines to study brain activity. He expected to find that the subjects would have to use the part of their brain that helped them in social situations or to resolve conflict. After all, there was an obvious answer, but the other people weren’t giving it.

But the subjects didn’t use that part of the brain. When the others all said the wrong answer, the subjects simply saw the lines differently. Their perception of reality changed because of the people around them. That fast. (pp. 184-5, ellipsis and italics in original)

In the last 5 years, I’ve learned this, the hard way, twice. It can be brutal to have to face up to the ways we become like those we spend time with. Realizing we’re not immune from influence is a painful blow to our pride. But the lesson is an important one. As Brant concludes, “Choose the people around you, the people closest to you, wisely. You’ll become like them. Their thinking will shape yours. They will help you order—or disorder—your values and desires. They will affect your attitude toward life itself. Do not underestimate this. They will change who you become” (185).

Lesson #3: One of the reasons people stay in toxic or abusive situations is because they fear that getting out might be even worse. This might sound illogical to you. But it is a real struggle. I’ve seen it a few times in the past few years in others, but mostly I’ve seen it in myself. It is astonishingly easy to stay put in something you know is killing you because you know that you’ve survived, at least, up to this point. You don’t know if you’ll survive getting out. So you stay.

I mention this for two reasons. First, if you know someone stuck in something because of this kind of thinking, maybe it can help you relate. Maybe it can help you realize how you can step in to meet them with hope. But second, if you find yourself thinking this, I mention it so that you can hear this truth from the other side of the struggle: Getting out is worth it. There is life available. You can thrive, not just survive. It might be hellish for a time to have to cut off whatever is sucking your life out, but then there will be peace. You’ll hear the voice of Jesus: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:29-30, NIV 1984). He isn’t joking. His rest is real.

Lesson #4: Movement and nutrition can make a world of difference in your life. I hardly thought of this in college. I was just trying to make it through all the homework. But, man, life is better on the other side. I am learning how to listen to and care for my body. I am learning that doing so allows me to actually feel well (what a concept). I am learning that practicing a physical skill yields a result of improvement over time, and this helps encourage me that the time I spend building into the less-visible areas of my life (areas like patience, openness to others, and prayer) will yield a result over time too. I am having a ton of fun in the kitchen, and I’m loving the spaces where both movement and food can be places to connect with God and with others.

Lesson #5: Sunshine and walks in nature are really beautiful things. Almost every morning for the last five years, I have woken up to the sight of gentle morning light gleaming through tree branches that are twisted into the shape of a heart. I’m not kidding. That’s really what’s outside my bedroom window. I’ve also walked along the same paths at my favorite nature reserve more times than I can count. My footsteps have been retraced with the whole spectrum of emotions; sometimes I nearly skip in boundless joy and laughter, and other times I tread in grinding anger or overwhelming grief. But the sun is always there, even if it is sometimes behind clouds. Jesus meets me there too. Sometimes I see birds. Sometimes I see myself. And I’m grateful for it all.

Lesson #6: Spiritual warfare is a real thing, and probably the most important aspect of all of it is staying centered in truth. I wrote about this to some extent in the “Part 2” of my testimony (The Silent Years). But even beyond that, the Lord has used these last five years as training ground for war in a battlefield far more important than the struggles we face in the visible realm. I’m learning how to pay attention to the spiritual world, how to take care to protect my mind and my apartment from spiritual garbage, how to recognize the enemy’s lies, and how to sweep them out with truth. I’m not an expert. I won’t pretend to be. But I am confident that the Lord’s been training me, and if I can leave you with any tip in all this, it’s exactly what I said above: Stay centered in truth. Dig into the Word of God, by which I mean both Scripture and Jesus. Believing lies is crippling, and it’s as risky in the spiritual world as leaving rotten food is in the natural world if you suspect there might be a posse of rats nearby. 

Lesson #7: Operating without hurry is wildly freeing. Turns out, life is a lot more peaceful when you’re not rushing around everywhere. John Mark Comer’s The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry and Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy have both been hugely instrumental in reorienting my life in this regard. When asked once by John Ortberg, “What do I need to do to become the me I want to be?”, Willard paused and, afterward, simply said, “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” John took a note and asked, “What else?” Willard replied, “There is nothing else. Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life” (The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, p. 19). 

I’ve started a new habit, trying to put what I’ve been learning into practice. Every time I feel the pressing temptation to hurry, my response is to ask, “What would happen if I did not do (or even just postponed) this thing that is causing hurry in my soul? What changes can I make in myself, my atmosphere, or my schedule to ruthlessly eliminate hurry from my life?” The result: My soul is thanking me, and I’m sure the people around me are too. I’m a different person when I’m not hurried and worried, pressed for time and distracted by a million things. Ruthlessly eliminating hurry is a practice I definitely intend to continue.

Lesson #8: Wisdom is knowing what is best, knowing what to prioritize in any given situation; and knowing what is best is life-changing and grounding. I can recall spending day after day sitting on my floor in my bedroom thinking, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what’s important in life. I don’t know how to make decisions on any of the matters pressing on my mind because I don’t know what’s valuable. I don’t know what matters most. And it doesn’t seem like anyone around me does either.” (Shall we go back to Lesson #2?) 

Living without the direction of wisdom is like living in free-fall. Even in my aimlessness, I knew that James said, pretty clearly, “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him” (1:5). I tried asking God. I asked for a long time. It took me forever to realize that He had already given it.

There were, I suppose, two truths here for me to learn: 1) Scripture contains the wisdom I need to know what my life direction should be, and it’s not vague; and 2) Sometimes if I feel like I’m not hearing the Lord, the best thing to do is to ask whether I listened the last time He spoke. That latter insight was given to me courtesy of my Hebrew teacher (yes, cheating again…that was during college). But the point: I hinder my own ability to hear the wisdom and truth of Scripture when I don’t live in obedience. But when I decide to read God’s Word with the intent to listen and obey it, things get a whole lot clearer. I may not have the answer to every question, but I have enough to know how to take the next obedient step. He provides my daily bread.

Lesson #9: The two qualities I find myself needing more and more in life are humility and play. This could, perhaps, be summed up by saying that I continually need a softer heart. I need a heart that is aware of my own tendency toward pride and willing to lay that down, repeatedly. I need a heart that is unwilling to throw stones at others because I know I’ve been in their shoes. I need a heart that is anchored in the unfading joy of Jesus. I need a heart that is childlike, a heart that doesn’t have anything to prove. I think life’s sweet spot is found in the moments when we realize we have absolutely nothing to offer and are loved right there. We are loved just as we are, and we get to smile and be creative from that space. How freeing a realization that is.

Lesson #10: The goodness of God is deeper, wider, wilder, and more magnificent than I ever realized; and I’ve barely had a taste. I said at the beginning of this post that counting years has grown less overwhelming as I’ve gotten older and that the reason for that was that the Lord has been teaching me the rhythms of gratitude. I am learning that sometimes blessing is more overwhelming than hardship. I need the Lord’s help to even touch His goodness because He is so good that a mere touch could incinerate me. Moses encountered God, and his face glowed. His physical body couldn’t handle the goodness that passed by him. There have been nights where I have been overwhelmed to the point of exhaustion at the Lord’s goodness to me, where I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t move as tears streamed down my face—and I have seen far less than Moses. I don’t understand it. I can’t summon enough intellect or heart to grasp it. But I look at the wild goodness of God in the small increments that He has let me see, and I am amazed.

I want to grow into a person that can handle tasting more of His goodness. I’m praying for that. And in the meantime, I’m so thankful for what I get to see. I see more now than I did five years ago—more than I ever thought possible. 

On May 2, 2017, three days before I graduated, I journaled the following: “Tick, tick. Every beat of the clock is another step closer to the moment where life gets flipped on its head. 3 days, and I become whatever I am without the wrappings of all that I’ve done. They say change hurts sometimes but life keeps rolling on, and as dizzy as I feel and as odd as the end is, I gotta keep keeping on.”

Five years later, I’m glad I did. It’s worth keeping on. So in the famous words of the unicorn in C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, let’s keep going, “further up and further in!”

Some Thoughts on Grace

“I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.”

— Jesus (John 21:18, NIV 1984)

*****

There are some days when you need more Band-Aids than others. I realize that that could be a metaphorical reflection, but I don’t mean it to be. Today, I needed four. Two of them were required for a cut I don’t even know where I got; the other two are impeding my typing but helping a finger I sliced on a raisin box. (No, I don’t know how. But thanks for asking.) On the bright side, all four of them were Blue’s Clues themed, so that helped. One can’t feel too bummed about a cut on one’s finger if said cut is covered by the good ol’ Mailbox smiling back with his flag up and everything. He even has music notes by him, which means a certain song pops into your head and keeps running in there all day. (You’re welcome.)

But as I stood and stared at the Mailbox after he so kindly covered my finger, more than just a catchy song popped into my head. 

Earlier today, I was working through some questions in an ebook called Love Yourself Healthy. The section was titled “Shift Your Desire” and was a discussion on identifying the deepest desires at the root of our actions with the intent of shifting these towards what really matters—i.e., what we really want and, ultimately, what God really wants—so that our actions and life direction begin to align with our (and, more crucially) God’s values. The questions I was working through were the following: “If you are really honest with yourself, what do you want more than anything else? Does that desire align with what God calls us to? Does it honor those around you, or is it only self-serving?”¹

I sat with this for awhile in prayer and ended up journaling the following:

I think what I want more than anything else is to look like Jesus. But this isn’t as great as it sounds because sometimes that gets warped into the desire to be perfect, to not mess up, to not do a bad job at representing Him. And that plays out in fear of authenticity, fear of failure, lying, stagnancy, and insecurity. None of that is what God has called me to, nor is it honoring to those around me because my attention is all on myself. How can I shift this?

The question baffled me for awhile. How might I shift a desire that sounds like a good thing but is really warped at its core? It revealed that my root desire here was to somehow not fail, to be the one disciple of Jesus that would be able to get it right.

But then I remembered something—or, actually, two things. The first: A disciple is a learner. In the words of Dallas Willard: “For to be a disciple in any area or relationship is not to be perfect. One can be a very raw and incompetent beginner and still be a disciple” (The Divine Conspiracy, 309). Comforting…but it didn’t help me switch the desire. Wouldn’t Jesus be excited if I could be a disciple that didn’t fall all the time?

But then came the second realization, a truth I’ve been chewing on for some time from Galatians. Paul writes, “I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” (2:21, NIV 1984). 

Some context: Paul had been heatedly rebuking the Galatian churches for listening in to a group of false teachers who were trying to get them to follow Jewish law in order to be real followers of Christ. As part of his critique, he flashes back to a memory of when he had had to stand up to the apostle Peter when the latter had gotten nervous around some visiting Jews and stepped back from table fellowship with the Gentile believers. Paul rages at him—and for good reason. Peter balked out of fear for his reputation, but Paul makes clear that there is no room for an attitude of self-preservation in the Kingdom Jesus established. In fact, he says, there is no room for any attitude save a humble recognition that every person seated at those tables in fellowship was brought there by the sheer grace of Christ.

A bit later in this epistle, Paul speaks of this grace as “the offense of the cross,” saying that offense is “abolished” any time we get in our heads the idea that anything we have through Christ is ours because of something we did to deserve it (Gal. 5:11). 

Bringing this home: My desire to be a perfect disciple of Jesus misses the point of His death entirely. It’s like saying His blood didn’t matter, like saying He “died for nothing” (2:21). It is, at its root, a wish that I could have accomplished my own salvation so as not to be an inconvenience to Him.

What an insult.

In another epistle, Paul wrote what has become all too cliché in Christian rhetoric but needs a hearing nonetheless: “…[F]or Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (II Cor. 12:10).

What I realized at the end of my journaling time—and realized all over again as I stared at the cut on my finger and then the happy Mailbox who covered it—was that the desire shift I desperately needed was to quit longing to be a perfect apprentice of Jesus and to aim instead to be an apprentice who can accept grace.

Paul could delight in His weaknesses and hardships because they reminded him who His Savior was. They kept him in a position where he needed grace. As Jesus put it, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (II Cor. 12:9).

Somewhere along the lines, I bought in to a worldview that said that weakness was, well, weak. I bought in to a life orientation structured around self-sufficiency and self-accomplishment, where the things on my résumé are the things that speak of financial success, spotlights, victories, and awesomeness. 

But the life of the Kingdom doesn’t work that way.

The life of the Kingdom has only one entrance, and that is the grace of Christ.

My hope, now, is to grow into the kind of person who can accept that. I want to boast in my weaknesses as opportunities to learn that rhythm, opportunities to realize I need Jesus.

And that, honestly, is the only way to grow up. Another quote from Dallas Willard (complete with British spelling): “Ageing, accordingly, will become a process not of losing, but of gaining. As our physical body fades out, our glory body approaches and our spiritual substance grows richer and deeper” (The Divine Conspiracy, 432-3). Most of us these days tend to fear aging, as Willard says, as a loss. We hear Jesus’ words to Peter about another dressing him and leading him about to places he’d rather not go, and we picture our fingers wrinkling and the strength evaporating from our legs. How could this be a good thing?

Yet, Willard says this is an opportunity for glory to be ushered in. Weakness always is. Maybe we can be disciples who learn that lesson now, who start practicing with our present weaknesses how to be apprentices who accept grace. Decades down the road, maybe we can say with Paul, “…when I am weak, then I am strong” (II Cor. 12:10).

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¹ Love Yourself Healthy is an ebook written by Denika Spadafora and produced by Stand Unshaken. As far as I know, access is available only through membership with the Stand Unshaken Collective: https://www.standunshaken.com/.