Testimony Tuesday at Cerulean Sanctum

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On a hill far away...The Godblogosphere’s Powers That Be elected today “Testimony Tuesday,” so I thought I better fall in line lest I be numbered among the transgressors. As someone of whom it was once said, “He’s got the worst testimony I’ve ever heard,” don’t expect a whole lot. For the curious, that notorious testimony can be found here.

I think knowing another’s testimony binds us together. One day, I hope to hear the testimony of every member of my church. I’d be blessed if you posted your own testimony in the comments here.†  We preach the Gospel to others by telling our own stories of coming to Christ. Those stories build our faith.

The best testimony I think any Christian can give is to go to the grave in such a way that others say, “That one finished the race sprinting.” Over the last few years, I’ve come to believe that how we act out the faith is the best testimony we can give. May it be that every person we encounter in our daily journey can point to us and say, “Because of the way they live, we can see Jesus.”

Talk is good. Actions are better.

Live out the Gospel today in a way that radiates Jesus to everyone you meet.

Have a blessed day!

†  If you don’t know how to write a testimony, someone’s actually gone to the great length to post an outline for doing so. By their standard, I guess mine once again doesn’t measure up!

Fumbling the Torch

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Our television died last weekend.

My parents had a 70’s-era Sony for 25 years. Our JVC lasted only 11. Bought it for my wife when we were engaged. (The vacuum my parents bought us for our wedding croaked this last summer. Thankfully, the marriage still holds up.)

Toward the end of our TV’s life, the favored fix for its tendency to scrunch the entire image down to a line a quarter-inch thick across the middle of the screen consisted of an authoritative whack to its cabinet. Kapow! and the picture would balloon to normal size. Over the last six months, it resembled a speed bag more than a television. Last Saturday, no amount of throttling on my part could bring it back.

Given that a new television compliant with the FCC-mandated digital requirements will set us back a minimum of $750, we may simply have to do without. It’s just the way things are right now.

Though I wish things were not that way, my television viewing’s fallen off to a limit approaching zero since The X-Files went off the air, anyway. Back during its network run, I taped nearly every episode, my devotion to the show evident in my inability to participate in any event that coincided with it, for fear some drunk would crash into a power line somewhere and erasing my carefully crafted programming of the VCR. That, of course, didn’t happen—except on the one night I had no choice but attend an event. The episode in question just so happened to be the infamous inbred family one, which FOX elected never to run again. Ever. Of course.

But that slavish devotion taught me never again to surrender time to TV. I haven’t followed anything since and probably never will.

(Readers: “So, Dan, where does this boring intro actually lead?”)

Imagine a campfire on the plains of Palestine circa 200 AD. A dozen people gather ’round its warmth, trading stories. At one point, the elder of the group stands up and tells of Jesus, His ways, and how those ways became the ways of their people. He talks for an hour, while the younger ones trade questions with him, learning, absorbing. Tomorrow night, the conversation will be similar, but varied enough to take others to a fractionally deeper place than the night before. The faces might be different this night, the main storyteller another of the wise ones, but what lingers in the cooling night air contains the same truth, the same life-giving wisdom.

On some nights, stories surrender to music. But the music doesn’t jar with the oral traditions. No, it reinforces truth, resembling what was taught and told, only in words set to rhythm and melody.

Night after night, this is how it unfolds for those people. This is their entertainment and their revelation.

My parents’ generation was the first to adopt television. I will argue that theirs was the first with a soundtrack from cradle to grave, too. They embodied the first completely media-savvy generation.

And for that reason, my generation got ripped off. My son’s generation will be, also. And his son’s.

Media stole the passed torch. It distracted those who came before us from their primary duty of ensuring the wisdom of the ages survived into the next generation. Whatever that wisdom may have been, that generation preferred the dull gray light of a cathode ray tube, or the voice of a box of transistors, to passing on the only things worth saving.

In time, their newly adopted habits combined with the islandization of the cities and the suburbs to destroy community as known by the denizens of Palestine 200AD. Work habits changed, and employment moved far from home. Every day. Connections withered. Who we were supposed to be in our souls got lost amid The Honeymooners and Little Richard.

My entire twenties consisted of the relentless drone of young Christians around me repeating the the same mantra over and over: “I wish I could find a mentor.” Sorry, but the mentor couldn’t pry himself away from Charlie’s Angels.

But who could blame him? He slaved in an office in some nondescript tower of glass and steel all day, had no one pouring life back into him, so what did he have to give at the end of the day? Better just to tune into Laugh In and tune out for an hour or two than to step out of the cultural programming and back into something older and more lasting.

I look around today and can’t help but think it’s infinitely worse. Cruise the Godblogosphere long enough and it seems like everyone’s glued to a 50″ plasma display OR an iPod OR a PS3 OR the two dozen flicks at the multiplex OR some pointless Internet distraction. Meanwhile, the next generation’s holding out their hands, dying for what little got passed on to us.

So the threads of tradition thin and weaken. Trivia replaces wisdom. Words lose to throwaway images.

Meanwhile, the thief breaks in to steal and destroy. And he plunders the entire house because the homeowner couldn’t pry his attention away from Lost or American Idol or 24 or some other pointless entertainment guaranteed to burn on Judgment Day.

Hey, I know that’s a tough word, folks, but we’re fiddling while America burns. It’s one thing for Christians to be culturally-savvy in cultural distinctives that last for generations, but quite another to be so enamored of pop-cultural artifacts that won’t stand up to a decade’s time.

If the best we can give our kids when they move away from home is the complete DVD collection of The Office or our Radiohead box-set, how is Jesus going to get a word in edge-wise?

But He’s Jesus, right? He’ll find a way to compete!

Can we hear ourselves? What life is going to flow into those kids? And into their kids?

My generation got mugged on the way to “maturity.” My parents did a decent job and were good people, but they still suffered from media distractions. They fell prey to disconnection and fractured community. My mother’s generational wisdom should’ve fed me, but by the time I realized I needed it, she was too far gone to help. And I didn’t know I needed it because I was too lost in my own media-driven stupor. Because the generation before me was, too. It was all I knew.

In the end, the torch I should be passing on to my child resembles a paper matchstick.

All that wisdom—gone. When my parent’s generation dies off entirely, so goes heritage, at least for many like me. We won’t remember all the second and third cousins. We won’t know how Christ changed that one great-uncle. Those salvation stories won’t be repeated around campfires any longer. The Bible passages that changed a generation will retreat into the book, to be remembered no more. And the hard-earned wisdom gained through decades of walking with Christ will blow away like dust along with the folks who learned it through bloody prayer, but took it to their graves.

What a grievous loss!

I wish we could grab our old people by the lapels and beg, “Don’t die before you instill in us what you learned about Christ. If you’ve been to the secret places, show us how to get there, too!” Don’t leave our generation to reflect on what might have been!

You know what I wish more of us did on Sunday? Rather than the same old, same old, why not begin a quarterly recollection Sunday (and center it around a full church meal and communion), where people tell stories of how Jesus changed their lives. How He came through and led out of the darkness. Have our kids hear those stories from people besides us for a change. Show them the relevancy of Christ from one generation to the next. And please God, send the fire on us so those stories burn with miracles and deliverance and the kind of supernatural power that proves to the next generation that “Awesome God” isn’t just a tired old song on the radio.

 

Because that’s the kind of thinking we must resurrect if the generation that follows us is going to have any sense of purpose and history to pass on to their children.

{Image: Rembrandt—Jacob Blessing the Children of Joseph, 1656}

The Power of Story

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Lost in a Good BookI thought I'd have my novel completed in January.

Sickness hit and January slid into February. February saw me finally completing the first draft. YEAH! It's been rough going ever since.

Even now, I'm ogling a foot-high-plus stack of drafts that I ran past my writers group, The Write Brothers. Smart them, they edited their own works as other Brothers commented. Me? I saved it all till I was ready to edit. Again, for a four-hundred-page novel, that becomes a stack of edits as tall as my size thirteen foot.

So I'm slowly making my way through it all. Emphasis on the slowly.

In the meantime, I'm reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my son. We'll finish it today. If I could capture a third the magic that Roald Dahl imbues in his fiction, I'd be happy.

But to an aspiring novelist, the joy of great fiction is not in the publishing, but in the power of story and its ability to make us better people.

My son will be six in August, but even he can see the sins of the four brats who met ignoble ends in Mr. Wonka's mind-bending factory. Not more than a couple hours ago, we read the song the Oompa-Loompas sang over Mike Teavee, the boy addicted to television.  Through their song, Dahl spares no expense criticizing the brain-numbing aspect of TV and the counterpoint fascination of storytelling found in a good book.

When I write the words that comprise my novel, Fade into Blue, I pray that every word carries in it the strength of a redeemed imagination. There exists in a book a wonder that can be found nowhere else. Television supplies all the answers, but a book asks something from those who read it. As C.S. Lewis writes in his Experiment in Criticism:

What then is the good of … occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which we should try to avoid having in our own person? … The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own. … In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.

Many times in this blog, I've noted a failing of some believers to step out of themselves for even one second and be another person, to see with different eyes, to better understand through another person's perspective the failures, joys, sins, and redemption each of us experiences uniquely. The power of story, as Lewis notes, allows us to be a thousand men, a thousand women, and yet still be ourselves. I would contend that story allows God's grace to flow in a way we sometimes stymie when faced with reality. A gifted writer fashions characters who allow us to understand another in the pages of fiction that we might otherwise avoid entirely in everyday life.

If we are told a man is a thief, our judgments flow. But what if the grace of God can transform a robber into something more? We may not have any experience with thieves, but we may know of Jean Valjean from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. Having just passed nineteen years in a French jail for stealing a loaf of bread, Valjean is released. Destitute, he is taken in by a kindly bishop and the man's sister. In return, Valjean steals the bishop's silverware and hightails it out of town. The story picks up below:

As the brother and sister were about to rise from the table, there came a knock at the door.

"Come in," said the Bishop.

The door opened. A singular and violent group made its appearance on the threshold. Three men were holding a fourth man by the collar. The three men were gendarmes; the other was Jean Valjean.

A brigadier of gendarmes, who seemed to be in command of the group, was standing near the door. He entered and advanced to the Bishop, making a military salute.

"Monseigneur—" said he.

At this word, Jean Valjean, who was dejected and seemed overwhelmed, raised his head with an air of stupefaction.

"Monseigneur!" he murmured. "So he is not the cure?"

"Silence!" said the gendarme. "He is Monseigneur the Bishop."

In the meantime, Monseigneur Bienvenu had advanced as quickly as his great age permitted.

"Ah! here you are!" he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. "I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?"

Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.

"Monseigneur," said the brigadier of gendarmes, "so what this man said is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this silver—"

"And he told you," interposed the Bishop with a smile, "that it had been given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had passed the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him back here? It is a mistake."

"In that case," replied the brigadier, "we can let him go?"

"Certainly," replied the Bishop.

The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.

"Is it true that I am to be released?" he said, in an almost inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.

"Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?" said one of the gendarmes.

"My friend," resumed the Bishop, "before you go, here are your candlesticks. Take them."

He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the Bishop.

Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks mechanically, and with a bewildered air.

"Now," said the Bishop, "go in peace. By the way, when you return, my friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with anything but a latch, either by day or by night."

Then, turning to the gendarmes:—

"You may retire, gentlemen."

The gendarmes retired.

Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.

The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:—

"Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man."

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything, remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered them. He resumed with solemnity:—

"Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God."

Jean Valjean, broken by this act of gracious forgiveness, indeed becomes a changed man who goes on to right great wrongs in the world because of his encounter with a man of God who showed him grace. 

The power of story allows us the grace to be both the forgiving bishop and the forgiven thief. Their story enlarges us as people, distilling Gospel truth into the ordinariness of our own lives. Story grants us the chance to live what we have heard, to be changed by what we read.

Many Christian novelists have noted that there is only one archetypal story and all works that we write are mere copies of it. As a Christian novelist myself, I believe this to be true. And with that belief comes the one hero, the Lord Jesus, who embodies in Himself all heroes, He being the true image to which we all aspire.

In the end, the power of story is His story. 

If the power of story has enlarged you as a person, leave a comment and let us know which fictional works have touched your own life.