We don’t normally face our fears willingly. Usually, God has to woo us into the desert. We are either chasing love or some other desire, and we find ourselves in the midst of a situation in which we have very little control. And when we lose control, we go into a mild form of trauma. But the good news is the greatest stories are lived in the desert. The great lives are lived in the places we most fear. If we fear being rejected, the great story has us standing at the door with flowers in our hands, if we fear losing love, the great stories have us letting that person go rather than clinging to them. If we fear taking a chance on a dream, the great stories have us quitting our jobs. My friend Jeremy Cowart moved from Nashville to LA recently but decided to tell a better story with his move. Rather than packing up the family and making a long, boring drive, he called Jamie Tworkowski from To Write Love on her Arms and made a Fears Vs Dreams tour out of the move. They’d pull the moving van into a town, set up a table, [...]
If you live here in Portland, come on out and hear Coach Tony Dungy at Imago on Saturday, July 30th. If you meet regularly with a group of guys, bring them out, or make it a father/son day. Coach has been an inspiration of mine for years. He is, of course, a Super-bowl winning coach but more than that he’s a proponent of integrity, character, and excellence in life and work. You have to register for the event but the proceeds go to The Mentoring Project’s Thousand Stories Campaign which will provide one-thousand mentors to fatherless boys here in Portland. It’s an incredibly ambitious campaign and we can’t think of a better person to launch it than Coach Dungy. Register today and we will see you Saturday morning.
All great spirituality is subversive, including the spirituality of following Jesus. Jesus was poor because the truth is there is more to life than money, and money is only a tool. Jesus did not cower to the power of religious authority, because the religious authority was corrupt and misrepresented God. Jesus did not take a wife or even a girlfriend because there is more to life than romance and sex. Jesus did not associate his identity with a specific fashion because clothes themselves cover the truth. So when we follow Christ, everything about us becomes subversive. We have the audacity to stand in the middle of the world and weep over the false idols of culture, the power, the money, the sex, the fashion. And we do the same within the church. We say to the religious that their rules will not redeem them, to the performers of ritual that their actions have no power. We say to the angry theologian that Jesus is not an idea, and to the fundamentalist that he is too cowardly to accept or give grace. Jesus is even subversive about the harsh reality of death, standing in the face of it and proving it [...]
Earlier this year I read about a prank a psychology class played on their professor in which they began playing closer attention to the professor when he walked to the left, and started looking away or looking down when he walked to the right. After only half an hour or so, the professor was so trained by the class to teach on the left side of the room that he was teaching, no kidding, from the door of the classroom. If we’re honest with ourselves, we will admit that the opinion of other people has an incredible power over what we wear, what we believe and even what we think about. We are foolish to think our sense of fashion, our ideas and even our personal tastes aren’t greatly influenced by those around us. To some degree, and I think to a very large degree, we are drawn to the ideas, the clothes and even the artistic sensibilities that will gain us the most favor from our peers. Unless our peers are influencing us to live unhealthy lives, there’s not much harm in this….Except, except that what gets lost when we live like dogs trying to get a treat is [...]
I’m reading Richard Rohr’s book Everything Belongs right now and when I came to a passage about using humility to get ahead, I unfortunately identified. Rohr talks about using the language of descent to make an ascent. That is, using the language of humility or spirituality to fit in or be accepted in a given culture. The Bible contains a recurring phrase that goes something like this: they will get their reward in full…The context changes, of course, but the idea is the same. The idea is that we can really know God and walk with Him in peace, or we can use Him to fit in with a religious social group. The real reward is God, not the group. And besides, when we do things for real, we get both God and connection to the group, so why not be the real thing? But motives are tough to decipher, and we can go crazy wondering whether we are being authentic. So how do we know if we are really spiritual, if we really love God? The answer lies in our actions. If we are talking one way and living another, we are just using the language of God to [...]
