Month: December 2008

No Good Reason

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Not mine, but not too much different...Back a half a year ago or so, a small earthquake in southern Illinois radiated far enough east to successfully remove the overloaded “clothing management system” from the wall on my side of our master bedroom walk-in closet. As it took five months for me to locate the replacement wall connectors to reattach the system, and I have been too busy to deal with them once I bought them,  the system remains unattached.

This means the majority of my clothing is in plastic bins sitting on our bedroom floor.

Over time, the amount of clothing seemed to pile up, and I went from two bins to five. Annoyed that my clothing should occupy so many bins and so little drawer space, etc., I decided to consolidate.

In sorting through this clothing, the realization that I throw away just about nothing hit home. If anyone needs clothing for extras in the next Night of the Living Dead sequel, call me. I don’t know what it is about me that I have no qualms about wearing jeans that look like they were savaged by a pack of rabid wolves, but there you go. I guess when you do farmwork, any excuse for work clothes will suffice.

At least that’s what I tell myself. It’s the other clothing I can’t explain.

Truthfully, I’m not sure I can come up for a reason for the following:

2 suits

2 sportjackets

7 pairs of dress pants

8 long-sleeved dress shirts

8 long-sleeved casual shirts

11 pairs of casual pants or jeans

3 sweatpants/sweatshirt combos

3 cardigans

5 pullover sweaters

3 turtlenecks

20 T-shirts

12 pairs of short pants

9 short-sleeved Polo shirts

I could go on. I’m sure most of you could, too, if you did the same inventory.

And sure, some of my stuff has seen its better day, as in “not fit for Goodwill.” But still. I want to come up with an explanation, but I can’t except to say that even a cheapskate like me who hasn’t bought more clothing in the last two years than two pair of “Sunday go t’ meetin'” pants is still beholden to consuming.

As simply as I try to live, I still have too much stuff. And when I try to tell people I don’t really need them to buy me more stuff, they do anyway. My in-laws were concerned that our home was devoid of stuff that screams Christmas, so they asked if they could remedy the situation so that our son didn’t miss out on the atmosphere of the season. So they bought us outdoor lights and some garland. We put them up this weekend and they look nice. I very much appreciate my in-laws’ generosity.

Still, it’s more stuff.

I keep trying to find ways to give away stuff, but it never seems to work.

I lie awake at night because I realize that I may have to explain myself someday to my Creator and I’ll have no good reason for all my stuff. When I think of whose expense that stuff may have come by, I sleep even less.

Something about building even bigger barns troubles me.

Still Looking for a Gospel That Speaks to Failure

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Another friend lost his job last week. He spent the last nine years in the housing biz, and we all know where that has gone. These are tough times, aren’t they?

When I think of the difficult lessons I have learned in life, whether through my own experiences or those of people I know, many of them revolve around our work lives:

The business world never forgives mistakes—ever.

It’s always about the bottom line, and almost never about the employees. (The sign of a soulless company? Its leaders refer to employees as “human capital.”)

If a man makes a bad career decision at age 18, it will more than likely haunt him for the rest of his life.

In the same way, if a man feels a call to ministry in his young adulthood, he will be hard pressed later in life if he fails in that ministry and must find his way in the regular work world.

If a man is trying to transition out of one field into another, more than ever he will find it impossible because employers can’t seem to break out of the niche mindset. In other words, once a bricklayer, always a bricklayer, and never a computer technician.

Men who lose their jobs at the most vulnerable point in their peak earning years are more likely than ever before to find themselves unable to return to the same level of pay.

Reaching for the brass ring may instead find one falling off the carousel.

This is not to say that God can’t do miracles. But the simple fact is that you don’t go to bed a video store clerk and wake up the next day as the lead on the Large Hadron Collider. And the even simpler fact is sometimes all the hard work in the world will not get you there, either.

And that’s why, especially at this time, we need a Gospel that speaks to failure.

A couple years ago at this time, I wrote a post called “We Need a Gospel That Speaks to Failure.” Take a couple minutes to read it, if you can.

You would think that we would have such a Gospel, but somehow we’ve missed it. To me, one of the oddest thing about living in a world that has seen its Savior come is that the one thing the Savior came to deliver is in such radically short supply: grace.

Recently, I said that I thought the largest unreached people group in the United States right now are those who have lost their homes to foreclosure. Here in America, what greater failure can exist than to kiss the American Dream home goodbye? Yet where is the Church on this?

Worse, where are the former homeowners? Are they in our pews or not? My guess is on the “not” side. The new breed of failure?I’m thinking that nothing hurts worse than to go down in flames in your church while everyone around looks the other way or quotes you Romans 8:28 off the motivational plaque they bought from the local Christian bookstore. Why stick around listening to sermons on Christian leadership when you were desperate for a servant in your time of need and one never showed up.

It really galled me that one of the largest sources of the pile-on afflicting those first homeowners who lost their homes at the beginning of all this was Christians. In our self-righteous ire, we blamed people for being stupid. And perhaps they were. But when is grace only for the smart people of the world?

One of the things about this financial implosion are the bystanders. Now, even people who did everything right are being wiped out. That may even be some of us. Does that make us stupid? Is the same measure of gracelessness that we doled out coming back to haunt us?

God, we need a Gospel that speaks to failure preached in our churches more than ever. Please, someone, anyone, preach it!

Neck Meet Boot

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I just finished reading Phil Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew. I’ve been so busy that I think I read it in five-page snippets over lunch over the course of a month and a half, but I read it nonetheless. Highly recommended, even if it’s not anywhere close to being a new release. (It came out in 1993. Wow. Time DOES fly.)

As good as Yancey’s book is, it somehow got me thinking about the worst ostensibly “Christian” book I’ve read in the last five years, David Limbaugh’s Persecution. So you don’t ever waste your time on it, I can sum up Persecution nicely for you:

When the world comes against you as an American Christian, the time-honored response is simple: SUE!

Yes, you too can resolve all attempts at “persecution” by filing a lawsuit. File early, and file often. Then file some more. In fact, keep an attorney (Christian, of course) on retainer at all times so you can sue any and all monolithic organizations that want to impinge on your rights. The impinged rights don’t even fundamentally have to do anything with religious freedom. Just being a Christian means you have the right to defend yourself in a court of law should even one of your rights be remotely challenged, even if it’s those bad men attempting to take away your access to the closest parking spots to the shopping mall.

I don’t know why I read Persecution all the way through. I guess I kept looking for some alternative point that eventually became scriptural. You know, along the lines of

“But be on your guard. For they will deliver you over to councils, and you will be beaten in synagogues, and you will stand before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them. And the gospel must first be proclaimed to all nations. And when they bring you to trial and deliver you over, do not be anxious beforehand what you are to say, but say whatever is given you in that hour, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit. And brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death. And you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.”
—Mark 13:9-13

Somehow that seems markedly different from “The school district wants to change the name of Christmas Break to Winter Break ! AND they dropped all the Christian carols from the elementary school play! Oh, what are we going to do?”

I’ve never had my nose broken because I am a believer. Never taken a series of steel-toed shoe kicks to my ribs because I had the Holy Spirit-inflamed guts to speak the name of Jesus.

Don’t get me wrong. I can definitely be thankful that we haven’t experienced that level of attack here in the States. But those days may be ending. When I am an old man, the world may be very different. Thrown to the lions in Rome...and America?The persecuted church in China has been praying for years that the Church in the United States would taste some real persecution, not the faux Westernized version that consists of “The town council won’t let us put up a nativity scene in the square!” and the inevitable response of “We’ll sue!” I suspect the Chinese will get those prayers answered in the affrimative.

So much of Christianity in America is nothing more than a kneejerk, worldly reaction to the world’s own kneejerk, worldy reaction. But I can expect that from the world; I shouldn’t from the Church. We’ve built an entire social structure within our country and, subsequently, within our churches that says that one must wage war as the world does. Sword to sword. Hate to hate. Fear to fear. “You take away my priveleges and I will take away yours.” We want our eye for an eye, even if it means everyone in the world must go blind.

But one of the major themes that came out of Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew was that Jesus never acted on script. His response was “You have heard it said, but I say to you….” He consistently responded in a way that befuddled everyone. Every expectation lay shattered, no matter what side of society you came from. He ate with prostitutes and also said to them, “Go, and sin no more.” The Kingdom He came to establish not only opposed the worldly kingdoms, but the religious ones as well. He is the long-awaited King who said to His followers, “They will hate you on account of me.”

In short, His is the upside-down, inside-out angle that no one EVER seems to expect.

If I were a public school administrator, here’s what I could expect from the followers of Jesus in America should I decide to take one step toward returning a morning prayer to the school day:

“You’re not doing it right! We’re going to sue!”

“You didn’t call our group to lead it! We’re going to sue!”

“Why were we not consulted? We’re going to sue!”

“A moment of silence? That’s so wimpy. We’re going to sue!”

So because we have no idea what genuine persecution is, we’ve made everything persecution. And that partly explains the origins of the lowest common denominator sentimentality that epitomizes the quasi-religious spirit in this country.

I keep wondering what it would be like for the Church in America to know real persecution. Would it bring genuine revival? Or would it merely degrade into a series of lawsuits with Founding-Father-quoting attorneys on both sides of the issue pontificating for the nightly news, best soundbyte wins.

When the Son of Man returns, will He find faith on Earth? Or will he find a packed courtroom arguing the constitutionality of a plastic, electrically lit version of Him as a newborn shining in my neighbor’s front yard?

Maybe a boot to the neck isn’t such a bad thing.