Tag: grace

God in Disguise: a guest appearance on Fuel Radio

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Last week, I had the privilege of being interviewed as a guest on a friend’s podcast, Fuel Radio. It was fun to reflect with Rod Janz on the process of writing my book, God in Disguise, the lessons I carry with me from having been immersed in urban poor communities in India, and the way my spiritual journey has continued to unfold since my book was released last year. In particular, I enjoyed having the chance to intentionally remember the ways that failure and pain have unexpectedly become catalysts for the deepest healing in my life over the past few years. You can listen to the whole half-hour podcast here.

If you’ve read God in Disguise, I’d love to hear from you about how to book resonates (or doesn’t) with your own spiritual journey. Whether you’ve read the book or not, have you ever experienced an unraveling of your faith or your worldview? What happened next? Have there been times that you have found God in unexpected places, or found healing through what felt at the time like a dark and hopeless situation?

Strong Enough to Hold Me

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So, I’m writing about church two days in a row–that never happens.

This essay for SheLoves Magazine is a bit more raw; more up close and personal. It explores my journey with Church from a different angle, zooming in on what it looked like sort out my faith in burn-out mode after India. This is what it was like to show up in church, dragging my baggage and doubts behind me. In particular, this is what it was like to take communion on days when I wasn’t sure I was–or wanted to be–part of the Body of Christ. This was what it was like to experience grace on the other side of failure. Here’s an excerpt:

Seeing the delight that the entire congregation took in including small children in the service, gave me hope. So did the fact that there was an old woman who felt free to dance in the aisle while the rest of us sang worship songs with typical Baptist understatement, slightly swaying or clapping where we stood.

For the past two and a half years, I had lived in slum communities in India where children were always buzzing around the edges of adult conversation and activity, but were rarely the focus of constructive attention. I had seen kids locked inside of dark rooms while their parents were at work during the day; I had seen them slapped around, kicked, screamed at, threatened, and neglected…

Head over to SheLoves Magazine to read the rest of the piece.

Why I Still Bother With Church

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Today RELEVANT magazine online published a piece I wrote about my evolving relationship with church over the years. At different stages in my journey, following Jesus has led me in and out of organized Christendom. Sometimes church has been a place to find helpful answers; other times, church has brought my most troubling questions into being. Church has both shown me love and stoked my darkest fears and insecurities. Like a dysfunctional family in which you alternately (or simultaneously) treasure your sense of belonging and resent your unflattering resemblances, church has been for me an exasperating, unwieldy community that reflects the fractured beauty of the messy human beings who comprise it.

There are times when I want nothing to do with it–usually when I am confronted with the very real damage the church as done in the world by choosing violence, power, and tribal allegiances over the humble way of Jesus (who includes and serves everybody, loves even his enemies, and is never swayed by desires for control or self-preservation). Cynicism is such an easy release, but so far I have never managed to permanently make my home on that lonely promontory of self-righteousness. This piece maps the journey so far, and describes the new territory I’ve recently discovered. Head on over to RELEVANTmagazine.com to check it out!

The Neglected Center

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This week I read a very insightful article* about cultivating a “spirituality of contentment” through living a simple lifestyle that draws us into greater connection with God, our neighbors, the Creation, and ourselves. The author of this article, Dee Dee Risher, writes as a seasoned veteran of this approach to life, and as someone who is well-acquainted with its particular gifts and struggles. She is aware that “simple living” has the ironic tendency of becoming a very complicated existence which obsesses over material concerns: how many things do we own? How much money do we spend? How many square feet do we live in? According to Risher, all of these material concerns as a tell-tale sign that the external changes in our lives have outpaced the inner transformation of our heart, so that we are ascetically denying ourselves of things without moving toward some alternative. Simplicity, she says, is not about going without. Its about building something new: moving positively toward a fuller life that would have been impossible without the clutter in our lives being cleared away. If we try to throw off the yoke of mainstream culture without developing an alternative dream, then we will never be content because we will always be longing for the very things we have decided to set aside. For most of us middle- and upper-class North Americans, the narrative that has been programmed into us is upward mobility, accumulation of possessions, comforts, and status. It involves making a place for ourselves in the world and then sitting back to enjoy the fruits of our labors, letting others compete with us and fare poorly or well as they may. This is essentially the American Dream. If we want to walk a different path, then we need a different dream to guide us, because merely building our identity or our life in opposition to something will only turn us into a hollow inverse of what we wish to change. We won’t have created anything new.

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I resonated with this problem of externals outpacing internals. Perhaps that’s exactly what’s happened to me, living in the slum. Up til now, my spiritual growth has always been driven by external experiences. As I have chosen to act on what I felt was right, what I read in the gospels of Jesus’ life, my experiences of reaching out to others to serve them and to get to know them has always led me into deeper understanding and experience with God. External actions and circumstances have seemed to drive internal transformation, and perhaps that’s as it must be, in the beginning. Until we leave the realm of what we already know, how can we encounter anything new, or challenging, or larger than ourselves?

But I think this necessary and appropriate pattern may have led me, somewhere along the way, to mistake the means for the end. Serving the poor is the ultimate goal, I decided, living as simply as possible in the worst possible place and doing as much as possible to help. Alas, I am discovering that the opposite is true: compassion and service and simplicity should be the means of communing with God, of recognizing God in myself and the people around me (especially the suffering poor), and of joyfully living in Love’s embrace.

How did Jesus live? I asked myself. He hung out with outcasts, poor people, blind people, sick people, enemy soldiers, their yellow-bellied tax collector cronies, and heretical half-breeds like the Samaritans. So that’s what I’ll do, I thought. Find the poor and the outcasts, befriend them, tell them that God loves them, and invite them into the community of the Kingdom in which there is always a place for them at the table.

What I failed to realize until I was smack-dab in the middle of the needy crowds, trying to offer hope to the down-and-out people spit out by the system, was that Jesus didn’t just up and begin his mission with the sheer force of willpower. It takes more than principles or warm fuzzies to sustain any kind of long-term commitment to the messy occupation of loving other people, particularly in a demanding and depressing context like a slum. I neglected to pay attention to the forty days of fasting and prayer in the desert which immediately preceded Jesus’ public life, the lonely hours of prayer and solitude which sustained it, and the 30 years of spiritual preparation that preceded it. Jesus was only able to do what he did because of his strength constantly being renewed by God inside Him. He was only able to maintain hope among misery because of his intense awareness of God’s loving presence; to experience joy in the midst of exhaustion and suffering because he was already well-experienced in cultivating an awareness of God’s presence in all circumstances; to weather frequent rejection and confrontation, and eventually total betrayal, because by the time these things happened to him, he had such an unshakeable sense of his identity as the Beloved of God that he was entirely free from the opinions of others—free enough to serve others without any need of gratitude, to love even those who repaid his compassion with hatred.

This incredible love and courage was only possible for Jesus because he had already experienced this unconditional love in the depths of his own being. It had defined him, and it had become the root of everything he did.

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As for me, all the labor of love has been exhausting, and my feverish attempts to pour myself out has revealed an emptiness in myself that I was never aware of before. Now its impossible to ignore the aching expanse within myself that has yet to be filled with the unconditional love of God. I am yet to claim my identity as the Beloved, and am desperately trying to build an identity for myself out of all the good things I am doing. See how much I suffer! See how much I am willing to sacrifice! My soul yells. I will earn your love yet. And yet…

God is not waiting for a display of faithful obedience, for exploits of courage and self-denial in order to embrace me. He embraces me with my empty hands and tattered clothes, as the beggar that I am. As the child who could ever do anything to make her Parent love her more or less. As the Prodigal son, returned home after all his fruitless attempts at making a life worth living for himself apart from the love of his Father.

I am the poor, I am the sick, I am the rejected. I wait in grief and hope for the mercy of God to reveal my true identity to me, for God to rock me to sleep in strong arms like a newborn baby, safe and wanted and loved. My neighbors often bear their scars and their struggles openly on their faces and in the rough edges of their lives, but mine are hidden inside.

I am the poor and they are me. God is in us, and we are in Him. Perhaps the whole purpose of life is for us to realize, together, the depth of our poverty, and to help one another to accept the Love that will satisfy it.

*Cultivating A Spirituality of Contentment by Dee Dee Risher

Source: New feed

Between Points A and B

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Well, we’re still in America– not where we expected to be by this date. Many people have told us encouragingly that there must be something else we’re supposed to do here before we go back to India… otherwise we’d already be there, right? There are definitely meaningful and important things that have happened during our stay, but these days we’re mostly feeling bored and looking for useful ways to fill time.

I don’t think there is anything left that I’m supposed to do. What’s becoming clear to me is that the challenging invitation in front of me while I wait isn’t actually to do anything, but rather to learn how to stop doing. Perhaps the reason I’m still here (besides the incompetence of the people handling our visa applications) is that I’m being given an opportunity to learn how to truly wait for something.

I don’t wait well. I’ve rarely ever waited for anything in my life. Because waiting means embracing emptiness inside of oneself; living in the actual tension of not knowing what will happen next, and perhaps even reaching a point of spiritual indifference from which one can joyfully embrace whatever answer or circumstance arises.

I don’t usually embrace emptiness. I run from it– which is why most of the time my “waiting” is actually an active process of filling my mind with all sorts of plans and counter-plans and contingencies, thinking ahead in both directions to prepare myself for every possible outcome before it happens.

I spend time forecasting how long I think it will take for whatever I am awaiting to arrive.

I count down days.

I imagine how I’ll feel when it happens.

I imagine my response if something unexpected happens, and then explore what each and every one of those things might be, so that I will expect them if they happen.

Creating my own plans and answers is no substitute for patiently waiting and receiving the plans and answers that God has for me. But there’s a paradox here, because as human beings we are co-creators and co-conspiritors with God, which means that we work cooperatively with Him to create the future. We have an important role to play in shaping what kind of person we will become and what kind of world we will live in! Where we delude ourselves is in thinking that we can actually create ourselves or our future independently of God.

Rather than action plans and will-power, our growth ultimately depends on our decisions to receive grace or not. Will we accept God’s invitations in our life? Will we recognize God’s activity; push into that realm of weakness and vulnerability that brings us closer to God? Even a thwarted plan or an unexpected delay can be a grace to us if we allow it to be.

So we can resist and kick and scream and slow down the process of our own growth, but we cannot engineer that process to ensure our preferred timing and style. Waiting is not merely a formula of putting in a set amount of time and effort to get a predictable or desired result. It is always an opening of ourselves to the unknown; a giving of consent for our own expectations and plans to be subverted and changed, and for new possibilities to come into existence. Waiting is a patient, sustained yes to God which humbly lays aside our own desires—not disregarding them, but accepting the possibility of giving them up in exchange for something we would not have chosen for ourselves.

I am in that in-between space now, trying to wait with open hands. Amidst my boredom, confusion, frustration, and uncertainty about the future, I am trying to learn how to take hold of the grace that is offered and to allow it to change me. It isn’t easy and I don’t always take it, but as many times as I get wound up in anxiety or bids for control, I find that I am allowed to wander back and try again. I find that grace is offered to me again and again.

Pursuing the Kingdom of God: The battle without and the battle within

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          Andy and I are in Colorado Springs for a few days after a twelve-hour drive from northern Arkansas, where we spent three weeks with his family.  We haven’t been doing much, besides sitting around talking with people and trying to keep warm around wood-burning stoves, heating vents, and fireplaces.  But these weeks have left a lot of space for reflection, and He seems to be raising new questions and insights in our minds all the time.  At this point, we have far more questions than answers, but here is a bit of what’s been on our minds.
What a paradox it is that we as humans dread and crave God’s judgment at the same time.  We dread His judgment when we call to mind our own guilt and shame over wrongful actions, evil thoughts, and selfish desires.  We crave His judgment against those who have wronged us or who have wreaked havoc on our society by perpetrating horrible crimes like rape, murder, or other kinds of heartless oppression against innocent, vulnerable people like women, children, and the elderly.  I have been recognizing these two impulses within myself recently: burning indignation against injustice, and yet thankfulness for God’s mercy when I soberly realize the roots of those outward expressions of evil within myself– pride, anger, jealousy.  In Vancouver, it was easy to feel outrage towards a man picking up a desperate woman who was prostituting herself on a street corner, or towards busy shoppers who avoided eye contact with the panhandlers on the sidewalk.  But if I am honest, then I must admit how easily the impulse to pursue what I want ahead of the best interests of others rises within my own spirit, or the way that apathy often finds fertile soil in my mind.  In pursuing the Kingdom of God, we must be willing both to fight for justice in the world, and to courageously face the evil within ourselves and invite God’s purifying flame to test our hearts, separating out the wheat from the chaff.  After all, it is only the pure in heart who will see God.