It’s Christmastime … Yay?

I am not a Grinch – at least I try not to be – but I often can’t “get into” Christmas like many people around me seem to.

Instead, I tend to get stressed, and tired, and overwhelmed by it all. By what, exactly? Glad you asked.

We have carols to sing and music to listen to and cookies to make and TV specials and movies to watch and tacky lights tours to take and decorations to unpack and set up and parties to throw and attend and school events to help with and cards to send and gifts to buy and Advent readings to do and church services to prepare for and neighbors to bake for and magic elves to move around the house and trees to buy and trees to decorate and family gatherings to attend and gifts to wrap and stockings to stuff and … well, I’m sure I’m forgetting a few things. Add all of this on top of this your standard schedule (work, kids, etc.), and it’s a bit much.

I should stop here and emphasize that it’s a bit much for me. I have some personality traits and mental health issues that make the beginning of winter – combined with the hubbub of Christmas preparations – a tougher time than usual. It’s still up to me how I choose to react to things, though, so I really, really try my best to “be of good cheer” and to not be a complete Grinch.

I take some comfort in knowing that I am far from the only person who wrestles with what should be “fun” at Christmastime. For some people, it’s an unpleasant reminder of loved ones lost, an uncertain job situation, or something else that casts a pall over things. My cousin Jonathan’s church even held a “Blue Christmas” worship service this year that was designed “to offer a time of worship and hope for anyone that faces a struggle in their lives during this season. … [W]e’ll call out the struggles that the holiday season can bring.”

Putting holiday sadness and struggle aside for a moment (although here are some very good tips for dealing with it), the more typical rejoinder to all this extra Christmas “stuff” is one of those great “Jesus is the reason for the season!” articles we see … every … single … year. In the interest of helping you meet your quota, here’s one.

Why do these reminders appear year after year? Why do people feel compelled to write them? Answer: Because humans are great at taking something that is simple and joyful at its core and putting so many extra layers on it that we can’t see the core without looking really, really hard, so we tend to forget about it.

This has happened before. Many Christians tend to whitewash the fact that the Christmas celebration (1) isn’t actually tied to the date Jesus was born (because no one knows), and (2) was originally started by Christians who simply co-opted existing pagan winter celebrations. Christmas eventually came to involve a lot of drunkenness and bad behavior (e.g., home invasion, vandalism, etc.), and it got so bad that the Massachusetts government banned the observance of Christmas for about 20 years in the 1600s.

So, yeah, humans are great at screwing things up. (See, e.g., shopping stampedes on Black Friday.) Even today, I hear Christians saying things like, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with [insert Christmas activity here], but we have to remember why we’re doing it and not let ourselves get stressed out about it.”

Easier said than done. I fear that too many of us end up like Calvin’s mom in this comic strip on Christmas Eve: “For the first time this month, there’s nothing that has to be done.” [I know it’s easy to zip past links, but click on this one. The last frame is priceless. Actually, every link in this post is worth checking out, so please do.]

I also struggle with secularization of Christmas. There are obviously plenty of people who take part in Christmas celebrations who don’t believe a word of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John in the Bible. They’re just some good stories, they say. Jesus was a good teacher, they say, but come on – the son of God (if there is a God)?

A couple of weeks ago, someone emailed me this Paul Harvey broadcast about a non-believing man’s experience on Christmas Eve. It’s not even five minutes, so please give it a listen. Christmas is many things to many people, but it’s also a great time to consider what is keeping you – or someone you know – from accepting Christ. Linus has told millions of people over the years what Christmas is all about, but how many millions tune him out time after time? You may have spent this year, or many years, trying to fill that hole inside of you with any number of things, only to feel empty again. Holiday parties, gifts, and events are all great, but like every other earthly thing, they will fade and won’t match the lasting peace that we have in Christ.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my wife and I have a Christmas movie to watch.

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This Harper Lee piece from 1961 really didn’t fit anywhere in what I wrote, but it is a wonderful recollection about a beautiful, incredibly generous Christmas gift she received (without which her writing career may have never prospered). She uses the word “melancholy”, and I can definitely relate to that when I feel like I’m not feeling as joyful as I’m supposed to feel at this time of year. My hope is that we can all grab onto everlasting joy not just for this season, but for the future as well. Merry Christmas.

Well, that happened. So what now? We need to think about who we play for.

“Who do you play for?” That’s the question that U.S. ice hockey coach Herb Brooks barks at his players in the movie “Miracle”. He asks the question at a time when his players are too slow to put aside school and regional rivalries, and the tension is getting in the way of creating a true team.

Most of us don’t make our livelihood on sports teams, but for our day-to-day lives, we can ask the same question in other ways. Who do you trust? Who do you have faith in? Who do you believe? Who do you follow?

In the past few months, I really got sucked into the presidential election. I started believing that if my favorite candidate could somehow get into the White House, the world would be so much better. I would be so much happier. Fulfilled, even.

I was thinking about the election all the time. I kept kicking around ideas about how I could promote my candidate and put down the others, and after much delay, I finally wrote a 2,000-word screed with the intention of posting it on social media or emailing it to practically everyone in my address book.

A funny thing happened, though. By the time I finished writing, I was pretty happy with the final version … but I found myself looking at it and asking, “What’s the point?” It’s not that the election wasn’t important, but I realized that I was putting my faith in the wrong thing.

To answer Herb’s question: I “play” for Jesus. I’ve been forgetting that too much lately. I need to keep my focus on more eternal things while seeking God’s guidance for how I should deal with worldly things like politics.

After I finished my political ramblings, it felt like God tapped me on the shoulder and said, “There, do you feel better after getting that out? Now forget about it and come with me.” Not unlike a father soothing a child who just had a meltdown, I suppose. And a few days later, I came across this article that encourages silence instead of being a monologuer who “stands alone, barking lines to everyone”. Yes, I know a blog post is kind of a monologue, but I’m doing my best not to bark.

I still have my views on the election results, of course. But that’s not what’s important. The well-known words of Joshua 24:15 are appropriate here:

But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.

Not everyone chooses to serve God, but everyone serves something, whether it’s money, desire, politics, or any number of other earthly options. And those options provide the answer to Herb’s question. Do you play for money? Do you play for power? Do you play for the approval of others (a particularly seductive one in an age of “likes” and “followers”)? Do you play for pleasure, whether through food, drink, sex, or something else? As Thomas Aquinas wrote, “People in the world work in order to have crowns, but that crown is corruptible.”

In sports, political campaigns, and other things, we play for another purpose: to win. If we’re on the same team, we can quibble about how we’re going to win – who gets to play and how much, who gets the ball the most, what kind of plays to run, etc. – but everyone on the team has the same goal. The teams who can get past the arguing and find the overall approach that works the best are the ones who consistently win, who consistently fulfill their purpose.

With the U.S. presidential election results fresh in our minds, it’s a particularly good time to take stock of who we play for. We may have spent the past few months playing mostly for the Republicans, or the Democrats, or the Libertarians, or the Greens, or something else. But who are we going to play for now?

I’ve already made it clear that, as a Christian, I play for Jesus. But I want to make this particular blog post a little broader than that. Obviously, there are plenty of Americans who aren’t Christians – Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, those who call themselves Christian but aren’t, Pastafarians, etc. I want to speak to some of you right now (in addition to the Christians).

We need to play for the United States of America. This is a tall order given that our “team” just split the popular vote evenly between the two main presidential candidates, so half our team isn’t really on board with our soon-to-be leader. There is obviously a lot to quibble about.

But let’s think about the things we can agree on. I’ll start:

1. We should help poor people in the United States and around the world.
2. We should educate our children well.
3. We should keep our residents and our country safe from harm.
4. We should be nice, respectful, and considerate to each other.
5. [Add your own here.]

I’m not trying to be a Pollyanna. I know that the problem with concepts as deceptively simple as the first three items on my list is that there are lots of different ways to accomplish those goals, and there is a lot of disagreement on the pros and cons of each way.

Unfortunately, when there is so much disagreement, our focus tends to shift from “Let’s accomplish this goal together” to “How can I get my idea to be the ‘winning’ idea? I want to win.” We see this all the time in our American political system, where our elected officials have their eye on getting re-elected more than they do in coming together to solve problems.

This article from last week takes a swing at addressing this problem. Instead of looking at politics as a war or a contest, can we look it as a garden? That is, a communal plot that all of us are responsible for maintaining and improving?

The author highlights immigration policy as a prime example. He worked for a Christian advocacy organization that put together some proposals for not only macro-level ideas but also for micro-level things like how we can improve the treatment of people who are in the process of being deported (e.g., something as simple as giving them back their smartphone with a fully charged battery instead of a drained one). So what happened in this quest to “find common ground in promoting human dignity and justice in the midst of deep political disagreement”?

We believed that these changes could be made if a few members of congress [sic] from each side of the aisle put pressure on the Justice Department to do so. These changes would not be ideologically motivated, politically controversial policy changes, but changes in processes that would make a significant positive difference in the lives of vulnerable people. Surely this could be championed by both Republicans and Democrats.

However, in office after office, we were told that these policy changes might be construed as support for the immigration policies of their political opposition and therefore could not be supported. Even when the offices agreed with what we were proposing, the risk of surrendering any ground in the political battle around immigration policy was too much to risk. Winning was more important than caring for the immigrants in our midst.

When we view politics as a territory to be won, a grand battle in which our fellow citizens are our enemies, this is what happens. This shift is not merely about a rhetorical difference, but affects actual policy. The common good, the protection of the vulnerable, a concern for justice, all take a back seat to political battles that reinforce fractures rather than mending them. If the guiding vision of politics is such that it manages to create division where there is common ground, how will it serve us in cases of actual disagreement?

That’s painful to read. “I could help these people, and I think it’s a good idea, but it might hurt my political career, so I’m not going to help.” Over and over. From both main parties. Putting their interests above American interests. Putting winning and personal gain ahead of tending the garden. Gardening is hard work, though:

It requires patience, care, perseverance, and flexibility. The cultivation of a healthy and fruitful political community is no different. It is easier to fight an ideological war than it is to cultivate a flesh-and-blood community. But if we care about the long-term health of our political community, we have no other option. [emphasis added]

If we focus on cultivating a community (i.e., tending the garden), we start to move in the direction that Jesus wanted us to go:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.                    – Matthew 6:19-21

In other words, earthly treasures don’t count for much. They are the corruptible crowns that Aquinas described. Fighting to win a contest yields a temporary reward. Working to tend the garden helps our fellow man and can yield eternal rewards.

In this election cycle, I fear that too many of my fellow Christians went down the same path I started down – chasing the temporary reward of a victory for their preferred candidate. Russell Moore is a prominent Southern Baptist who spent election season swimming against that tide, as chronicled in this New Yorker piece. The final passage sums up Moore’s thinking:

[Moore] told the congregation about all the ways that Jesus calls us away from the life we think we want. … ‘The way of the Kingdom is not a way of strength and power,’ he said.

Putting too much faith in an elected leader – in their “strength and power” – leads us astray. It leads us to chasing crowns, victories, and earthly treasure, and we trample the garden in the process.

Like I said before, gardening is hard work, especially when the other gardeners may not be very nice to us. Again, we have to take the high road.

But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.                                      – Matthew 5:39

The inability to turn the other cheek has been something that has really surprised me in recent months, and it was capped off by reactions to the presidential election results. (And it reminded me of my earlier blog post on the problem of factions.) The bitterness and vitriol I saw on social media from people on both sides was discouraging, especially when it came from people from whom I expected better. On the plus side, I did see plenty of the “better” as well, with many people (again, on both sides) thoughtfully touching on some of the points I’ve tried to make here.

To go back to No. 4 on my list above, we can all try to be nice, respectful, and considerate with people of all stripes. We can teach our children to do the same. That’s a good start for our garden. Our government may have trouble helping people from the top down, but each of us can work from the bottom up. We can value the people we encounter every day and avoid the temptation to reduce them to a caricature of things we dislike; we can view them with the love that God has for them, even when they make it really hard for us to do so.

Above all, as a Christian, I always have to trust God and his plans for me, my country, and the world:

So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.                                                                  – Matthew 6:31-34

And if trusting in God isn’t your thing, then maybe Mickey Rivers, the former N.Y. Yankee All-Star, can convince you:

Ain’t no sense worryin’ about the things you got control over, ’cause if you got control over ’em, ain’t no sense worryin’. And ain’t no sense worryin’ about the things you don’t got control over, ’cause if you don’t got control over ’em, ain’t no sense worryin’.

Amen.

The problem of poverty: How should we serve the poor (and why does it matter)?

“Don’t ever apologize for helping somebody.” More on that statement later…

A couple of weeks ago, I took Friday off from work to spend time with my family, but I still went to my Friday morning Bible study near the University of Richmond. One guy in the group had just returned from a church mission trip to the Dominican Republic, and it was very interesting to hear about what he did for the community there and how his group functioned during the trip.

When I left, I didn’t take my normal route, since I was going home instead of to work. At an intersection that I rarely go through, I ended up sitting at a red light with someone who was holding a sign asking for money right next to my car.

I mean, right next to me. And it was a loooonnng red light — plenty of time to think about what I was supposed to do. I thought about giving her a couple of dollars but remembered I had just used all my cash at a coffee shop. I fiddled with my change tray but didn’t want to give her a bunch of nickels and dimes because I didn’t want to upset her with something measly. (Perhaps a stupid concern, I know, but not completely unfounded based on prior experience.) I sat and thought some more until I realized this thought that I should help her wasn’t going away.

I opened my change tray and fished out eight quarters. I put my window down and held out my hand and stammered something about being sorry for the coins but I was out of cash. She smiled, took the money, said “Thank you”, and then she looked me right in the eyes:

“Don’t ever apologize for helping somebody.”

Whoa. It felt like she was looking right into my soul at that moment; it really did. It was powerful, and it left me a little overwhelmed as I drove home.

I’ve written before about helping poor people on a church mission trip and also about all the times I haven’t given someone money when they asked for it (in the same post, in fact). During this presidential election season in the United States, I have heard a lot from the candidates about the best way for the federal government to help the poor, the jobless, the have-nots.

I freely admit to not having an elegant solution to an extremely complex problem that has many moving parts. To get us thinking, though, below I’ve shared a list of articles that I’ve read in the past year or so about different aspects of the poverty problem. There is a lot there, so pick a couple that look interesting and dig in.

Before I go, I should answer the questions in my title:

What do we do? Each of us needs to pray about how God wants us to help our brothers and sisters, listen for his response, and act on what we hear. Sometimes his guidance may come on the spur of the moment — like while you’re sitting at a traffic light — and other times it may be slow to arrive. We don’t need to analyze all of the policy issues described in the links below and produce a 90-page whitepaper to get buy-in from 15 different organizations — we just need to listen to God and obey him. He will take care of the rest.

Why is it important for us to do this? It really boils down to “Love your neighbor as yourself”, which is a reference by Jesus to a passage in Leviticus. I admit this is a little bit circular: We help the poor by asking God how we should help them and then obeying. It’s important to do so because it’s important to obey God’s commands, including the ones the Bible already gives us.

And if we’re really loving our neighbor the way God wants us to, we won’t need to apologize.

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Now for the links:

1. New York Times, June 2015: The Next Culture War – instead of fighting the “culture wars”, Christians should focus on serving people who lack money, jobs, etc. (“The more practical struggle is to repair a society rendered atomized, unforgiving and inhospitable.”)
2. New York Times, May 2015: The Power of Hope Is Real – describes a study that shows how people in poverty improve more when they have real hope, and how people who feel they have no hope make more bad decisions. (“People trapped in a cycle of destitution often don’t realize their lives can be changed for the better through their own activities. Once they understand that, it’s like a light gets turned on.”)
3. New York Times, June 2015: How Do We Get More People to Have Good Lives? – recommends intervention in early childhood, which leads to more education, more earning power, and improved cognitive abilities. (“If these three experimental programs are further validated over time and can be successfully replicated, there is reason to be cautiously optimistic about well-designed, adequately funded, carefully assessed intervention in early childhood.”)
4. Washington Post, May 2015: The rhetoric of economic mobility in the United States – the importance of avoiding a society where your birth situation determines your outcome, and how politicians can’t agree on how to get there. (“The public goal that liberals and conservatives might share is not the equalization of wealth; it is the equalization of opportunity. And that is difficult enough.”)
5. Institute for Faith, Work & Economics (IFWE), February 2016: Charity That Hurts vs. Empowerment That Helps – how the “give people stuff” model doesn’t help (and can even hurt), and what better alternatives are. (“Instead of perpetuating a system of dependency based on charitable donations, those seeking to help the poor need a framework of partnership.”)
6. Slate, July 2016: Punished for Being Poor – highlighting how Virginia criminalizes being poor when people can’t pay small fines. (“We fill our jails with people who can’t afford to pay for their freedom, attempting to wring scraps of cash from those who must choose between fines and food.”)
7. Christianity Today, November 2015: The Secret Ingredient of Our Poverty Relief – again, the importance of hope in helping the poor. (“Aspirational Hope has one crucial element: Those who have it believe they can make a difference. The shorthand for this is agency, something given by God to human beings in many spheres so that we might steward his creation.”)
8. IFWE, April 2016: The Cost of Proclaiming Liberty to the Captives – are we ready to liberate the world’s poor and exploited, no matter the cost? (“Our attempts to redeem the poor and give them economic opportunity must be attempts to protect their rights. Our efforts need to focus on the tough work of improving criminal justice systems and advocating for human rights.”)
9. IFWE, May 2016: Serving the Poor with Humility – how to avoid the sins of paternalism. (“We likely are qualified to help a poor village overcome their need for clean water in the short run. We are also called to humility and consideration of the talents and gifts of the members of that village.”)
10. Christianity Today, March 2015: What You Probably Don’t Know About the ‘Least of These’– a different reading of Matthew 25:40, saying the “least of these” probably refers to the disciples of Jesus rather than to the poor. (“Matthew 25 appears to be one of those passages where the commonly assumed meaning diverges significantly from the dominant scholarly and historical view.”)
11. IFWE, July 2016: Can Microfinance Really Help the Poor?– does this alternative to traditional aid accomplish its goal? (“While microcredit has improved the lives of some poor people, there are many for whom it has made no discernible difference. Worse, microcredit has often harmed those it was meant to help, so we must examine the ascribed causes of harm and determine how to respond to them.”)

You v. me v. everyone else

In law school, one of my first reading assignments in constitutional law was Federalist No. 10, in which James Madison tackled the problem of factions in a republic. [Among other things, Madison believed that a large republic was preferable to a small republic because that would increase the chances of electing competent representatives. To put it mildly, Americans are putting that belief to the test in 2016.]

But back to factions: Our society is full of them. We’re divided into factions based on race, religion, political party, views on hot-button issues of the day, nationality, ethnicity, or whether you should put salt on watermelon (no, you shouldn’t). You name it, and we can find a reason to divide over it. Or as Bob Wiley told Dr. Leo Marvin, “There are two types of people in this world: those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don’t. My ex-wife loves him.”

From what I can tell, a lot of factions arise from one group’s fear of those who are not like them – those who are “other”. The “others” then react negatively toward the first group, and things spiral from there. Fear is usually not a productive emotion, as any Jedi Master can tell you:

 Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

– Yoda, The Phantom Menace

Factions go way, way back in history. In Old Testament times, the Jewish worldview was largely “Us against everyone else” because God chose the Jews to be his people – no one else followed God. Even after Jesus Christ’s arrival and the subsequent spread of Christianity, Paul had to deal with factions that immediately sprang up in some of the new churches he was ministering to.

Back to the present: After yet another round of violence over the past few weeks seemed to divide many of us into pro- and anti-police camps, the New York Times ran this fascinating story on something called “intergroup threat theory”:

When members of one social group feel it is under threat from another group, researchers say, this can heighten cognitive biases that distort how that group is perceived. That risks deepening social divisions and even, in extreme cases, escalating isolated episodes into conflict between groups.

So when we hear about something bad happening to someone in “our” group, and it was done by someone in an “other” group, our biases – our blind spots, our prejudices – kick into overdrive. As if we weren’t flawed enough already as humans, our identification with a group can throw us completely off-kilter when fear creeps into the picture. Other groups respond in kind (usually), and things just get worse from there.

But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression … the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever it will dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

– Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back

How do we counter our instinct to embrace anger, fear, aggression? How do we avoid the dark side when there is so much darkness all around us?

This may come as a shock, but I don’t have much faith in our elected leaders to help us on this point (sorry, President Madison). As the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson pointed out in a column last week, Robert Kennedy is not walking through that door:

In fact, there are people on the left and right who benefit from encouraging just enough division, just enough fear, to motivate their supporters, without tipping them over into violence. They are playing with fire in a parched and withered land.

Our leaders play with fire, but unfortunately we’re the ones who get burned. It’s up to each of us to refuse to get sucked into the trap of viewing everything around us through a faction-based lens. We need to resist generalizations, knee-jerk reactions, and the “oh yeah?” responses. We need to remember that we’re Americans, “with a capital A” as John Winger said. David Brooks made the same point more eloquently in a column last week when he discussed other factions in our society, including the nationalists/particularists against the globalists/universalists. I found his concluding paragraphs very compelling:

The fact is that both mind-sets have their virtues. The particularists emphasize the intimate love and loyalty that is the stuff of real community. The universalists are moved by injustices anywhere, and morally repulsed by inaction and indifference in the face of that suffering.

The tragedy of this election is that America already solved this problem. Unlike France and China, we were founded as a universalist nation. You can be fiercely patriotic and relatively open because America was founded to take in people from around the globe and unite them around something new.

Unfortunately, the forces of multiculturalism destroyed that commitment to cultural union. That has led to Trump, who has upended universalistic American nationalism and replaced it with European blood and soil nationalism in a stars and stripes disguise.

The way out of this debate is not to go nationalist or globalist. It’s to return to American nationalism — espoused by people like Walt Whitman — which combines an inclusive definition of who is Our Own with a fervent commitment to assimilate and Take Care of them.

It’s up to us to do this. Jesus said, “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5:44) Pray for those who harm us and upset us. Pray for those we view as “other”. And yes, pray for our leaders to somehow help us through all of this.

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Postscript: This weekend, my wife and I took a drive through the central Virginia countryside, and I put on some music from my iPod. (Yes, I still have an iPod.) One of the songs was “We May Be The Ones” by Paul Westerberg. (Yes, I like Paul Westerberg. And the Replacements. So there.) The chorus goes, “We may well be the ones/to set this world on its ear/We may well be the ones/If nothing, why are we here?” Listening to that got me thinking – Jesus definitely set the world on its ear in his time here. Two thousand years later, if we love each other, and pray for each other, and pray to find ways to get past the factions that divide us, I think we could very well set the world on its ear one more time.

Seeking justice, finding forgiveness

“What are kingdoms without justice? They’re just gangs of bandits.” – St. Augustine, City of God

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” – Jesus on the cross, Luke 23:34 (NIV)

As I start this post, we are less than 48 hours removed from what is reportedly the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. There are so many things to say about so many aspects of what happened; I can’t possibly cover them adequately here. I will try to get to one cogent conclusion.

I hear and read a lot of outrage, full of points and counterpoints:

• The media is ignoring how this was an anti-gay hate crime.
• The media is ignoring how this was a terrorist attack.
• This wouldn’t have happened if we had stricter gun laws.
• Blaming guns for extremist acts makes no sense.
• The president didn’t mention Islamist violence.
• This has nothing to do with Islam.
• Why didn’t the FBI stop this from happening?
• We can’t arrest every gun owner who says alarming things.

I am upset. I am upset that in this episode and others, hate is winning.[1] The perpetrator hates something or someone and does something terrible to show it. Amidst our grieving, we start analyzing why this happened so that we can take reasonable actions to prevent it from happening again. We disagree on root causes, and we disagree on actions, and we may end up hating those who disagree with us.

I do my best to view it from all sides – to separate the valid concerns from the ridiculous. This is complicated, and it is no cop-out to acknowledge that.

It is a cop-out, however, to do nothing. But I am not a legislator. I am not a member of law enforcement. I am usually not an activist, either. My political worldview is largely colored by my desire to be left alone by the government and by other people, and that approach does not lend itself to agitating, no matter how worthy the cause.

So what am I supposed to do to make things better in the face of these hateful murders in Orlando? I read a Facebook post yesterday that touched on three things that anyone (including me) can do to improve things. It was targeted at hate/fear based on sexual orientation, but the underlying principles apply broadly:

1. Whenever you hear anti-_____ speech that you know is wrong, tell the person to cut it out.
2. Don’t tell someone that their view of an occurrence, or a person, or anything else is invalid just because you haven’t noticed what they’re describing to you.
3. Love people for who they are.

No. 2 is a toughie for me if I’m not intentional about it. I have led a relatively privileged and comfortable existence, and I am in the traditional majority when you look at sex, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. I’ve never been harassed for anything more serious than some hick-ish tendencies, some of which manage to persist today (like pushing my baseball cap way back on my head – yeah, my wife loves that one).

Pretty harmless stuff – a comfortable life, all things considered. So when I read on Facebook where one of my gay friends says he still gets called “faggot” on a regular basis at a particular street intersection in his city … it makes me think. How many times have I missed casual, or even blatant, acts of hatred because I wasn’t paying attention?

Anyway, back to those three things. All of us can do them, and we should do them. I have one other thing to add to the list: “4. Forgive people, no matter how heinous their actions.”

That one isn’t easy for me, either. Often it is not something I can do in my own strength, and it can be helpful to consider examples of extraordinary efforts at forgiveness.

• Last November, the Washington Post featured this article on how Christian ministers were able to fellowship with high-profile Nazis (and why it was the right thing for the ministers to do): The amazing story of U.S. Army chaplains who ministered to Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg trials 70 years ago today.
• For those who are familiar with the movie Hotel Rwanda, this December 2015 piece (Are they forgivable?) focuses on Rwanda’s quest to forgive 30,000 perpetrators of mass ethnic slaughter.

One last example, and it was a memorable one for me. At the first church service I attended after the September 11^th attacks in the U.S., the pastor prayed – and one of the people he prayed for was Osama bin Laden. I understand why now, but it stunned me then. If we can forgive Nazis, Hutus, and Osama bin Laden, maybe we can forgive Omar Mateen.

I wanted justice in 2001 – and I want justice now – but that hardly makes me special. All of us want justice (at least we think we do), but the problem is agreeing on what that means. How do we mete out justice to the Islamic State? Or the Taliban? Or the oppressive regime in North Korea?

Clearly, we have earthly means of achieving justice, such as the rule of law and military force, but those means are imperfect (e.g., the infamous Stanford rape verdict). The only thing that is perfect in this area is God’s forgiveness, and the only way for us to come close to perfection is to try to show that forgiveness to others.

Yesterday the editor of Christianity Today posted these thoughts on the Orlando massacre. The two main takeaways are (1) prayer, and (2) love for our enemies. To put those together, we need to pray to ask God to give us the ability to love our enemies.

And that’s what I’m getting at here. Forgiveness is hard. We want justice, revenge, punishment, retribution, etc. And there is often a time and place for some of those things, but we can’t allow them to swallow up the need to forgive. Therefore, I will pray to God for the ability to forgive others as he forgives me (and as I would want to be forgiven by others).

I feel like my thoughts have been very disjointed in this post because there has been so much more running through my head, but I hope the previous sentence meets my stated goal of one cogent conclusion – at least for me, and hopefully for you, too.

————————-

Postscript: Although he didn’t explicitly mention forgiveness, listen to what Muhammad Ali said about how he would like to be remembered. Or read it here:

I’d like for them to say he took a few cups of love. He took one tablespoon of patience, one tablespoon, teaspoon of generosity, one pint of kindness; he took one quart of laughter, one pinch of concern. And then, he mixed willingness with happiness, he added lots of faith and he stirred it up well. Then he spread it over a span of a life time and he served it to each and every deserving person he met.

[1] According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups in the United States increased 14% from 2014 to 2015.

An era of discontent

I am discontent.

About what? Everything, it feels like. My job, my finances, my country, my house, my car, my Facebook feed (time for another extended break, I think), my to-do list, my body … you name it, and I’ll tell you why I’m dissatisfied with it.

I have been feeling this way for weeks, although the intensity of the feeling has its ups and downs. Silly things can send me into a spiral of negativity that affects everything (and everyone) around me. This is a big reason for my lack of blogging, although to say “I just haven’t felt like it” is a cop-out. I need to dissect why I haven’t felt like it – and why I haven’t felt like doing lots of other things – in order to get past this.

I tried to fix it. Work harder, focus more, bear down, seize the day … yada yada yada. When that didn’t work, I settled for coping with it: watching TV, sleeping, internet surfing, or mindless “projects” to distract myself – anything to avoid dealing with the real problem because I felt like I’d already failed at dealing with it.

I know that I’m supposed to be content. In Philippians 4:12-13, Paul writes:

I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.

I found some commentary on what the Bible says about contentment, and for these two verses, it concludes (emphasis added):

When we focus on the Word, we can respond appropriately in all circumstances. Christ is our Savior; He won’t let us down. He will strengthen us to be content.

Soooooo … have I been focusing on the Word recently? No, not really. Have I sought strength through Christ? Nope.

Well then. As Nick Bakay used to say in his ESPN segments, “So there you have it. It’s all so simple when you break things down scientifically.”

I know exactly why I’ve been feeling this way, and I’ve known it for weeks! But why haven’t I changed? Why haven’t I re-committed myself to praying and to reading my Bible? For crying out loud, my Sunday school class is doing a study on strategic prayer, and here I am heading in the opposite direction.

For those of you who don’t believe in the spiritual realm, I may lose you in this next part. Spiritual warfare is a very real thing, and Satan is “prince of this world”, as Jesus says in John 12:31. With that kind of power, Satan is all too happy to tangle with me one-on-one. If I stubbornly refuse to ask my God for help, I’m going to lose. I’m going to wander without making any progress toward anything meaningful. I’m going to wonder why things are so bad and never come up with a way to make them better. I’m going to seek answers but find only lies.

I have to be content. I have to be. I pray for contentment in all things. It seems like an impossible request, but I also know that Jesus told us, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” (Luke 18:27)

So I pray for contentment, for this seemingly impossible ideal. Instead of reacting to the world with anger, confusion, and frustration, I need to seek God’s wisdom on how I should act. If I’m seeking God’s will, listening to God, and acting on what I hear, then I will find contentment, and maybe a few other things:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.     – Galatians 5:22-23

Who’s in front of us?

Our family had a guest this week — a guy in his 20s who had to fly to Virginia from out of state in order to  get some people to do their jobs. He had ended up in a bad spot through no fault of his own, and the people who were supposed to help him simply wouldn’t do so despite repeated efforts over the phone.

So he got on a plane (and a train, and also an automobile or two) and went to their offices. Amazingly, the same people who hadn’t been able to help him before suddenly had answers: They figured out what mistakes had been made, and they fixed the situation. Our guest flew back home after three days with his mission accomplished.

What was different? Simple: The people in charge had to deal with him this time, because he was right in front of them. He was in their space. He wasn’t going anywhere until they gave him an answer.

As frustrating as their behavior is — “Why didn’t they do this months ago when I first called?” — it makes some sense. At work, I tend to focus on what’s in front of me: the urgent email, the request from my boss, a question from the person down the hall, etc. Calls from outside my firm tend to get put at the end of the list or ignored altogether, especially if they’re selling something. Long-term projects get pushed to the side again and again because I decide that something in front of me is more important.

Our guest’s situation was a little different, since he was dealing with government employees who are supposed to serve the public, but the general thought is the same: He wasn’t in front of them, so he was easy to ignore. His efforts at communication and his requests for attention went unheeded in favor of whatever those people decided was more important at that moment.

Who else tries to communicate with us and tries to get our attention? It’s Sunday school answer No. 1: God! (In case you’re wondering, Sunday school answer No. 2 is “Jesus”, and No. 3 is “pray and read the Bible.”)

My Sunday school class is studying how to improve our prayer lives (see Sunday school answer No. 3), which simply means we’re trying to get better at talking to God. That sounds a bit silly since Christians take it on faith that we can talk to God at any time and he will hear us, but it’s a sign of our hapless humanness that we don’t do it like we should.

Why not? Well, unless we’re on the lookout, God is not in front of us. He’s not screaming at us in a conference room, or sending us 10 emails about the same project, or demanding that we play a board game or discuss the latest neighborhood gossip. If we don’t make a concerted effort to pray, we end up treating God the same way the government treated our guest’s repeated attempts at getting someone’s attention: We ignore.

Ignoring our Creator sounds harsh, but that’s what we do too often — simply because in our earthly view, he is not in front of us. In the movie Waking Ned Devine, a young boy talks to the village priest about his career choice and concludes that he couldn’t be a priest because he couldn’t work for someone he had never met. Unfortunately, in our day-to-day living, Christians too often treat God like someone we’ve never met.

God does try to get our attention in various ways, including putting certain people in our path or bringing us face-to-face with certain events, but it’s still our responsibility to accept that invitation to communicate. (And a failure to communicate isn’t good for anyone.)

So, what to do? We have to come up with ways to put God in front of our face; we have to commit to spending time with him, just like we commit to showing up at work, going to a movie, or anything else that’s on our schedule. That was the first challenge in this week’s study in my Sunday school class: Schedule your prayer time. And I did: Monday through Friday, I got up 30 minutes before everyone else and prayed. I’m not saying that to get my prayer medal or show how pious I am — I’m trying to make more of a “If I can do it, so can you” point. On Friday morning, I did NOT want to do it. (A certain basketball tournament that began in earnest the day before may have had something to do with that.) But I had committed to another person in our class that I was going to do it, and that was enough to get me out of bed.

“Just do it” makes the right point when it comes to prayer, but we still need help on how to do it. Come up with a way to hold yourself accountable, set reminders on your phone, put sticky-notes on the fridge — do whatever works for you. The key is not giving up on prayer until you find what works for you. Usually, the answer to “Why can’t I pray like that person, since they make it sound so easy?” is that we haven’t started praying like that person does. It’s like asking why you can’t bench-press 300 pounds when you’ve never lifted weights — you haven’t started.

To throw in one final movie reference, most people are familiar with the Yoda instruction, “No. Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.” I’m not sure that distinction applies when it comes to praying. I’m more inclined to believe the line, “Trying to pray is praying.” If we don’t try, we’ll never get started … and we’ll never see that God has been in front of us the whole time.

Craving the good stuff

I really like eating York Peppermint Patties. And Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. And tin roof sundae ice cream. And – well, you get the idea.

I take some comfort in the fact that I’m not alone. Almost all of us like doing things that we know aren’t exactly beneficial for us, but we seek them out anyway. We like how they make us feel (temporarily), or the sensations we experience, or perhaps simply the act of doing them.

We also like stuff. No matter the size of our apartment, townhouse, condo, house – we fill them up. Closets are full; drawers are full. Attics, basements, garages, sheds – all full of stuff. Often we buy even more stuff in hopes of organizing the stuff we already have.

I feel like I have enough stuff … but sometimes I still buy more. I try to focus on going through my belongings and grouping things into “Donate”, “Sell”, or “Throw Away”, but that can be a lot of work. And I never know when I might need that doohickey or that book I haven’t read in 20 years. Or my kids may need it – yeah, that’s it, I’m keeping it for them!

Anyway, I really do feel like I have enough stuff, so I’m impossible to buy gifts for. “What do you want?” “I don’t know – maybe a belt?” My poor family.

This really shows up at Christmas. For several years, I have had a hard time getting into the spirit of giving and receiving presents. I struggle to get past the thought that all we’re doing is accumulating even more things we don’t need.

I’m not the only one who feels this. This New York Times article from 2014 describes this disillusionment and how it reflects a hunger for “abundance without attachment”:

In other words, if we are lucky enough to achieve abundance, we should be thankful for it and work to share the means to create it with others around the world. The real trick is the second part of the formula: avoiding attachment.

…

In the realm of material things, attachment results in envy and avarice. Getting beyond these snares is critical to life satisfaction.

The author offers his thoughts on how to avoid the snares, and the final tip is to “get to the center of your wheel.” Worldly things (i.e., stuff) populate the rim of the wheel and are constantly changing, but the center of the wheel – the stable part that never moves – should be the “transcendental truth” that is our life’s focus. For Christians, Jesus is the center of our wheel.

Sounds easy enough for a Christian: Stay focused on Jesus. Live our lives with him at the center. It’s OK to have stuff, but don’t make that your focus.

But even if we get that taken care of, do you know what easily takes the place of stuff? Distraction. We crave distraction. These days, it’s as easy as turning on our smartphone. And boy, do we use our smartphones, our tablets, our laptops, and our desktop computers … and don’t forget TV. According to one study from last summer, we spend more than eight hours a day consuming media. We crave information, sure, but we’re also craving distraction: What interesting fact/game/update could be out there to distract me from the things I should be doing?

If we’re not careful, this becomes our focus – the center of our wheel. It’s addictive: New information creates a dopamine rush in our brains, and our brains start craving that rush. As this article points out, constantly seeking this rush makes it really hard to slow down and read a book without interruption (or to do anything else that requires an attention span). I know it’s easy to breeze past links, but take some time to read the article. The author makes a startling case for what this information craving is doing to us. For any Star Trek: The Next Generation watchers out there, it’s like our smartphones and other gadgets are controlling us like the game devices in “The Game” episode. Those harmless games turned out to be not so harmless.

It’s the same thing with our craving for information or distraction. Not only does it get in the way of our productivity, our relationships, and many other things, but it becomes the center of our wheel. Instead of praying, we’re checking Twitter. Instead of sitting down to study the Bible, we’re watching a basketball game featuring teams we don’t even care about.

We need to be craving our relationship with God. Time in prayer – both speaking and listening – is crucial to a Christian life. That’s how we feed our souls with “the good stuff”, and that’s how we equip ourselves to go out and love and serve others the way we’re supposed to. If we don’t, we’ll crave something else … and Satan is always happy to hand us a menu to order from.

Stop this man, please

I am not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat, either. I’m more libertarian than anything in my political views, but I have mostly given up on the official Libertarian Party because a lot of its stances are too inflexible and simply aren’t pragmatic or realistic.

Anyway, on Tuesday I’m going to vote in the Republican presidential primary here in Virginia (thank you, open primary system). Normally I don’t vote in primaries, but I’m going to vote on Tuesday for one reason, and for one reason only: to vote for someone other than Donald Trump.

I don’t have any particularly strong affinity for any of the other Republican candidates, but frankly, I’m voting against Trump because I feel like it’s my obligation as a Christian.

Wait a second, you may say. Didn’t the president of Liberty University – “the world’s largest Christian university” – endorse Trump a few weeks ago? Yes, that is an unfortunate fact. I don’t know what kind of internal compromise Jerry Falwell Jr. reached with his conscience to take such an action, but the cynic in me can’t help but think it has to do with power, money, or both.

It wouldn’t be the first time a high-profile Christian compromised himself. Last week, a college history professor on the Washington Post website offered this historical comparison about another time that Christians signed up with a bully: when Pope Leo III cut a deal with Charles the Great (aka Charlemagne) in A.D. 800:

It didn’t matter that Charles had multiple wives and mistresses. Nor did it trouble the pontiff that he had a reputation for ruthlessness, earned during his wars against the Saxons, a Germanic tribe of pagan worshipers. In 782, in the Massacre of Verden, Charles ordered the execution of 4,500 prisoners, apparently for their refusal to convert to Christianity.

Here was a political leader who knew how to get things done, who could get tough with the church’s enemies, who could protect the empire from barbarian invaders. With the church on his side, he would restore Rome to its ancient glory. Sound familiar?

So when Republican evangelicals in South Carolina overwhelmingly voted for Trump last week, exactly what were they doing?

Their own fears are causing them to abandon their principles. In America’s historic struggle to protect religious liberty, evangelicals fought hardest for a Bill of Rights that guaranteed equal justice — not only for themselves, but for unpopular religious minorities. They have been the loudest critics of discrimination based on religious identity.

Yet three-quarters of GOP primary voters in South Carolina — dominated by evangelicals — support Trump’s plan to block all Muslims from entering the United States.[1]

…

Many evangelical voters seem ready to support Trump’s militancy, whatever form it takes, with hands upraised to heaven. They say they’re willing to endure their candidate’s “idiosyncrasies” because of his “authenticity.”

Never mind that he is an authentic egotist, or that he is unabashedly crude, proudly manipulative and emotionally undisciplined. What has happened to the evangelical insistence that presidents be people of prayer, humility and integrity?

In case you need some background on exactly what makes Trump such an awful candidate for any government position of consequence, here is some background reading. Take your time and read each article carefully – I’ll wait.

1. Blogger Matt Walsh takes on Trump supporters by trying to speak to them Trump-style, and he does a comprehensive job of summarizing Trump’s inadequacies, to use a polite term. I can’t even pick out just one quote because there is so much good stuff in there.
2. Jeremy Nix at the Huffington Post writes an open letter to his friends who are Trump supporters. Again, just read it. If you favor Trump, please look within yourself and try to come to terms with exactly what it is inside you that is driving you to this position.
3. This Rolling Stone article takes a look at Trump’s success to this point and the reasons behind it. To be fair, it does offer this summary of the other Republican candidates: “They really are all stooges on the take, unable to stand up to Trump because they’re not even people, but are, like Jeb and Rubio, just robo-babbling representatives of unseen donors.”

(Welcome back.) As the Rolling Stone article points out, Trump makes some points that other candidates won’t (e.g., see his takes on insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies) simply because he isn’t in anyone’s pocket. OK, I’ll grant you that his wealth is something that distinguishes him from the “establishment” candidates, but is that really enough? I don’t think so.

The last straw for me came in the form of this post from Max Lucado, because it really boils down everything in the above articles to one simple point: Donald Trump is not a decent person. To pile on to all the anecdotes described in the articles, he’s the kind of person who would strong-arm the government into seizing an elderly widow’s home so he could build a limousine parking lot (true story). He claims to be a Christian but also claims that he has never asked God for forgiveness. That doesn’t add up. Lucado has almost always stayed out of politics during his long, successful career as a pastor, and he has shared his reasons for speaking out now. At the end of the interview, he admits we’re not electing a pastor-in-chief of the U.S. but emphasizes why decency matters:

I appreciate the idea that we don’t want to elect a pastor-in-chief. I’m a pastor and I understand that it’s my assignment to spiritually oversee the affairs of a circle of people. That’s not the job of a president. They are much more what I would see as a Daniel or Nehemiah. They are much more concerned about the affairs of our country.

But boy, we have to call upon them. We pay a high price as a people if we don’t hold our leaders to a high standard. [emphasis added]

I understand if you think that there are things about other candidates that aren’t too decent, either. I understand if you’re angry about something, or a lot of somethings, and you just want to vote for someone who will make “them” (whoever “they” may be in your mind) pay for whatever it is they’ve done. But Lucado is right – this is the President of the United States we’re picking, not the next head of an organized crime family whose mission is to “set things right”.

Honestly, picking on Donald Trump has long struck me as low-hanging fruit. In 2015, I dismissed him as a cartoonish sideshow and thought/hoped that he would fall by the wayside once the voting started. I was certainly wrong about that. I completely underestimated how he has tapped into feelings of frustration, anger, and fear and how he has given cover to those voters whose own prejudices are usually not fit for public consumption (and now we have Trump refusing to take a stance on the Ku Klux Klan).

It’s not too late, though. It’s not too late to pray for our country, and it’s not too late to cast a vote against this man who falls far short of our standards in so many ways.

I’m your humble blogger, and I approve this message.

[1] I guess those folks didn’t read this December 2015 piece by Russell Moore, a leader in the Southern Baptist community, on why Christians should condemn Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric. [footnote not in original]

Good enough for God?

My church runs an Upward basketball league for kids. I happen to play (sometimes well, sometimes not as well) on the church’s adult basketball team. In exchange for the church paying the entry fee for the adult team, said adults will referee some Upward games.

I was slated to ref the 4:30 and 5:30 games this past Saturday. Knowing this in advance, I had also signed up to do two halftime devotions for the crowd, which is a regular feature of the Upward ministry. I thought I was going to do them at halftime of the 3:30 game and the 4:30 game, so I was taking care of some yardwork until it was almost time to leave. Imagine my surprise to find a voicemail on my phone from around 3 o’clock, wondering where I was since I had actually signed up for devotions for the 2:30 game and the 3:30 game.

Off to a great start, I hopped in my car and showed up in time to apologize to those in charge and to do the devotion for the 3:30 game. I then refereed two games and ended up doing two more devotions. Turns out we normally don’t do them for the later games because the crowds are smaller, but I was already there (and I’d screwed up earlier), so why not?

“Why not?” ended up being the starting point for my devotion. I talked about the reasons I could come up with to not referee the games, and I came up with three: (1) I’m too busy; (2) I have time but just don’t want to do it; and (3) I’m not good enough to do it.

The last excuse became the theme of my devotion: I’m not good enough. I’ve never had any training on how to be a referee. I do it only once a year. Yeah, I play basketball and know most of the rules, but I’m not going to be anywhere close to perfect. So I’m not good enough, and I don’t want to fail. I don’t want to hear comments from fans, coaches, or players about the mistakes I’m making. Those comments will just remind me that I’m not good enough.

But despite all of that, I did it. I refereed two games, and while my performance was far from perfect, the two games (one of which went into triple overtime) went off without a hitch. No screaming coaches or fans, and even a few compliments on my devotions.

Why did I do it? Well, the obvious reason is that it was the price of admission for playing on the adult team. But there is more to it – I did it because Upward basketball is a ministry; it’s another way to reach people and share some of God’s love with them. The ministry can’t run without volunteers. I wasn’t doing anything special. I was just being obedient and answering when God asked me to do something.

And you know what? I was good enough. I was good enough to officiate two rec-league basketball games involving 10- and 11-year-olds. That’s not something to shout from my front porch (I’m not climbing up on any rooftops), but it leads to what I told people on Saturday:

Many people hesitate to accept Jesus Christ because they feel like they’re not good enough. “You just don’t know what I’ve done,” they’ll say in what might be one of many excuses. Yeah, I don’t know what you’ve done … but God does. And he loves you anyway. He’s just waiting for you to love him back.

Is he happy with everything you’ve done? Of course not – but join the club. None of us who are walking into church on Sunday morning have spotless records, either. If we’re doing it right, though, we’re slowly getting better … better at loving God and loving our neighbors. We’ll still make mistakes, and we’ll hear about them (just like a referee hears about his mistakes … or gets to watch well-made YouTube videos about them), but we keep going.

I don’t how smart you are, or whether people like you, but I can say without question that you’re good enough for God’s love.[1] That’s one less excuse you have for not returning the favor.

[1] Even if you happen to be part of the Duke men’s basketball program.