Best of Cerulean Sanctum

In the Eye of the Beheld

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God couldn’t have filled a woman with more admirable traits than Cassie possessed. She cooked like Julia Child. Entertained others as well as Martha Stewart. She had a faith as big as Corrie Ten Boom’s. She lived every word from Elisabeth Elliot’s books on womanhood. In short, she would have made the perfect wife.

I suspect she’s still waiting for that gold ring, though.

You see, to call Cassie “pretty” would have confused Webster. No heads swiveled when she walked by. Young guys on Sunday never anxiously dropped the question, “Have you seen Cassie in church today?”

No, Cassie wasn’t blessed with the one thing so many men crave above all else: physical beauty.

Cassie loved me. I didn’t return “those feelings,” though. Sure, her dowry of other fabulous qualities overflowed, but I could never get past the fact that she wasn’t physically beautiful.

I lost track of her years ago.

Looking back, I probably had two or three other Cassies in my single days, girls whose hearts would have leapt if I asked them out.  Fact is, each was a better person than I could ever hope to be.

I turned 44 last week. In thinking over my life, I realized I’d done all those Cassies wrong. I love my wife immensely, don’t misunderstand me. I had my 25th high school reunion and I can say with confidence that despite all the gorgeous girls in my high school back in the early Eighties, at the reunion my wife eclipsed them all. I’m very fortunate to have married a physically beautiful woman.

But I still dealt poorly with Cassie. Only now do I realize that the one thing Cassie was missing in her life was a real flesh and blood Christian man to tell her she was beautiful.

Time has a way of giving us room to think. As I look around this country and witness the Girls Gone Wild culture that threatens to tear our social fabric apart, I can’t help but think that most of those girls are dying on the inside. Why? Because they simply don’t believe they’re beautiful because no man they respect has ever told them so.

I don’t know what dads are doing at home that they turn out these shattered girls. Either dad doesn’t tell his daughter she’s beautiful, or he doesn’t command enough respect for his word to mean anything. Melancholy girlAnd we all know the story: If a girl doesn’t get admiration from her closest male relatives, she’s going to search for it elsewhere. And elsewhere isn’t always a nice place.

Ultimately, in our churches, the fault lies with Christian men of all ages. I perpetually hear how men in the church are bored. Yet when our young people are getting mugged by the world, where are all those Christian men? If we’re supposed to be the image of Christ, what are we saying about Him by our silence?

I can’t imagine what it does for a young woman to hear from a Christian man she respects, “God made you beautiful.” I don’t think there’s enough of that candor in our churches today. I think a lot of young women are dying to hear that they’re beautiful, but for whatever reason they never hear it. Or they hear it from the wrong people.

It’s sad to me that we’ve fouled this up so badly. Whether we can ever redeem this lack in our churches without it seeming “weird” is a question I can’t answer. Perhaps the older men in the church could pull this off without it being judged inappropriate. I don’t know. All I do know is that young women today simply aren’t hearing it enough from the right people.

Cassie needed to hear she was beautiful. No, she’d never be confused for Miss America. But how did we ever get to a point that her other traits garnered her no accolades? If we looked in her eyes, could we not find the beauty of God?

No doubt Cassie stayed true to the Lord, even when the rest of us didn’t give her the time of day. Still, I’ve got to believe that plenty of young women not as devout as Cassie would have found a word or two said in their favor to be all they needed to keep from straying.

I’m not sure that we cherish our young Christian women as much as we should. Few of us men stand in the gap for them. We don’t pray for them and their families. We don’t keep a watch out for them. We don’t build them up as we should.

Is there a young woman in your church who gets overlooked? Someone needs to tell her she’s loved and appreciated. Someone needs to encourage her to use her gifts for the Lord.

Someone may even need to tell her she’s beautiful.

Politics, Economics, and the American Church

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Empty pocketHere at Cerulean Sanctum, we talk little about politics and much about economic justice issues. Today, we'll see how those two items intersected in the election last week and how we American Christians must wake up to a brutal reality.

Pundits galore propounded the reason that Republicans got tossed off Capitol Hill, but they missed the real voter zeitgeist. Given the glowing economic news trumpeted in the usual Republican-sympathetic media sources, the talking heads looked only to non-economic federal issues to explain stunning Republican losses.

But to update a famous phrase, "It's still the economy, stupid."

While voters may talk about the Iraq War, terrorism, and a number of other global issues Republicans bungled, they'll vote based on local issues. Only people satisfied with their local outlook will vote global and national issues. If the local outlook is grim, forget about anyone looking beyond his own backyard. Local economic health, in particular, drives voting.

Here in (formerly, as of 11/7/06) Republican-dominated Ohio, the state with the worst job prospects in the country, a poll showed that 83% of Ohioans viewed economic issues as "very important" or "extremely important" in determining their Senate pick (Source: The Wall Street Journal, 11/8/06). But Republicans, thinking the economy was superb for everyone, continued to campaign on any issue but improving the economy. They expected folks to suck down the hoopla over the "great economy" despite seeing bare cupboards. As a result, Ohio incumbent Republican senator Mike DeWine got slaughtered by his Democratic challenger, Sherrod Brown, who took a more aggressive stance regarding Ohio's economic health. We talk about Virginia tipping the balance of power in the Senate, but DeWine's loss was potentially a greater news story, since it highlighted voter unease with the supposedly terrific economy. Plenty of people took one look at their bank accounts and the collective sigh sounded a lot like "*&^%!"

Ohio can't be the sole state with hurting workers. As we'll see, national figures could scare the heck out of anyone, regardless of state. So I suspect that many of the Republican losses reflect middle-class voters facing economic pressures, voting with their empty pockets.

As we know, money talks.

Consider the following realities:

  • The American savings rate hovers in negative numbers. (Source)
  • While salaries in the United States rose substantially in the United in the period 2000-2004, that wealth was almost entirely concentrated in the top one percent of wage-earners (household incomes of $300,000+/yr). That one percent saw a 19.8 percent increase in their income over the period. The other 99 percent? A 3 percent increase—not even close to keeping pace with 3 percent year-over-year inflation. (Plus, recent analysis of 2005-2006 shows a continued widening of the salary discrepancy.) (Source)
  • Consumer debt continues to rise. As of August 2006, Americans have never carried greater debt. (Interestingly,  those numbers backtracked a bit in September. I suspect people smelled trouble on the horizon. Perhaps that further proves Election Day results, especially since Republicans polled better against their Democratic opponents before September.) (Source)
  • For the first time since records began, highly educated Americans saw their earnings potential decrease in 2005, demolishing the accepted wisdom that more education translates into higher salaries. (Source)

While some debate that the negative savings rate ignores overall wealth, the information becomes even more dire when factoring in leverage and who holds investment wealth.

Many Americans leverage their home equity. With housing prices falling in almost every state, that leverage only eats away wealth and consumes retirement savings, compounding the problem. In addition, overall wealth incorporates investments, and again, that top one percent controls 93 percent of all investment wealth. (Just wait until those rich Baby Boomers start retiring, too, and begin pulling their money out of stocks.)

Given the rich are getting richer, what does the economic news tell us of the average family? For starters, the typical worker watched upper management prosper, while his or her real world dollars lost buying power. I know many people in their peak earning years whose companies reported record income, yet watched helplessly as their employers eliminated bonuses, cut back on insurance compensation, and froze or reduced cost-of-living increases.

I can't speak for you, but in our area in the last year alone, the cost of consumer goods skyrocketed. The box of cereal I bought last year for $2.29 is $2.99 now—a 31 percent increase. Broccoli cost $1.59 last November, but $1.99 a year later—25 percent more. Our electric company raised area rates 30 percent. And don't get me going on gasoline. I paid $1.59/gal. in the summer of 2005 and almost a dollar more now.

One doesn't need a PhD in mathematics to note that no one out there's received a 35 percent cost of living increase in the last year! Increasingly, middle class folks like us watch helplessly as our incomes buy less and less.

Five years ago, I knew several families where dad worked and mom didn't. I can't think of a single one like that now. While the unemployment figures look strong, do they merely reflect more families forced to put both parents to work to keep pace? If more women enter the job market (primarily in low-wage retail or service industry jobs) just to make ends meet at home, that puts a damper on much of that ecstatic job info, doesn't it?

My mother-in-law told me a new Wendy's opened in her small town. To her shock, most of the employees are over forty. Is working at a fast food restaurant the goal of people in their peak earning years? If so, we're in deep trouble.

In March 2006, I asked readers about their financial stability. More than sixty replied, about half via personal e-mail, the others through comments. Almost universally, people under 35 were better off at the end of 2005 than in previous years. That's to be expected, since many of them are young marrieds with both spouses working and few (or no) children. But the real shocker—and almost all these replies came through personal e-mails—concerned the state of people over forty. Many were far worse off than just five years before, having lost jobs (often multiple times) or  relegated to underemployment, compromised financially in what many consider peak earning years. Those tales broke my heart. I understand that kind of pain and what happens when the Church has no response—and none on the horizon, either.

And in the end, that's what this post is all about. I just completed a series on community , and I believe that our churches must start working toward some kind of money pool to help fellow congregants who fall on hard times. With so many families' money highly leveraged, and the reality that the middle class is fighting a losing battle against rising costs, something needs to be done on a macro level to fix some of the financial injustices people face today.

But the pulpit is silent. Sure, you'll hear about Ron Blue or Crown Financial stuff from time to time, but they only address individual issues. Who in the Church in America speaks out against the real problem, our broken system? 

Sure, we Americans spend too much of our incomes. But if the middle class continues to erode, it won't be a matter of spending too much on a consumeristic lifestyle. The real problem will be how to cope when curtailing excess spending simply won't halt the slide. You can shave expenses down to the bone, but when the bone's gone missing…

All it takes is a minor recession, I think. Or Ford or GM collapsing. With so many precariously perched families with no savings, high credit card debt, loans taken against homes of decreasing value—it won't take much.

Church, are we ready? Truly?

Time to wake up and start preparing for that day. It's coming faster than we think. 

UPDATE: I only got to see this last Saturday's Wall Street Journal late Monday evening. A front page story shows that Democrats running on anti-free-trade, anti-offshoring, and anti-outsourcing platforms crushed their Republican opponents in North Carolina, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. This further proves my theory that middle class voters smarting from job losses and inequities in the economy voted with their wallets, not with an eye toward Iraq, terrorism, or any other topic.

UPDATE II: Some who have read this post knee-jerked and assumed I was a Democrat or some other kind of liberal. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, I consider myself a pure conservative in that I believe in conserving what God values. I hold to many of the ideas espoused in Rod Dreher's book, Crunchy Cons. Also, I have a dim view of most political parties, Republican or Democrat. Both have sold out to special interests and forgotten the average American. Lastly, I firmly believe that politics is not the answer; the Kingdom of God is. The sooner American Christians realize this and start living it, the sooner we'll see many things come to pass that we're now foolishly hoping politics will give us.

“Oh, Sorry You’re in Hell….”

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HellfireI don’t know when the modern Church in the West abandoned talking about hell, but I do know that nothing’s been right since.

If what we preach in the Protestant Church accurately reflects reality, people are damned from the second they draw their first breath. We talk about eternal life starting when a person comes to Christ, but eternal damnation starts a lot earlier.

Yet do any of us live with that truth in mind?

I remember a conversation I had with a Seventh Day Adventist about the reality of hell. Adventists ascribe to annihilationism, meaning the unsaved cease to exist at their deaths. In other words, hell isn’t real. One of my arguments against that viewpoint comes from the following:

“There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’ And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house– for I have five brothers–so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’ But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.'”
—Luke 16:19-31 ESV

The Adventist immediately shot back that this was a parable and could not be taken literally. However, Jesus never uses illustrations in His parables that have no basis in reality. Every element in His parables is true to life.

Hell is a real place. So is the lake of fire. (I can quote you all the Scriptures, but you can find a good sampling here, here, here, and here .)

But even as I write this (or you read it), little of the reality of the place sinks in, does it? We’ve made hell a kind of mystical plane of existence where only the truly abominable wind up. It’s not for anyone in our family, or for our neighbor, or for the guy who empties our trash, or for the call center woman in Bangalore. It’s always for someone else.

Though “Denial isn’t a river in Egypt” is a mantra in the skewed world of pop-psychotherapy, too many of us Christians in America are in that same denial over the eternal futures of people around us. We go about our days as if no one will ever roast in a lake of fire for all eternity.

Too graphic. Too disturbing. Too in your face.

Leonard Ravenhill wrote in Why Revival Tarries (p.32):

Charlie Peace was a criminal. Laws of God or man curbed him not. Finally the law caught up with him, and he was condemned to death. On the fatal morning in Armley Jail, Leeds, England, he was taken on the death-walk. Before him went the prison chaplain, routinely and sleepily reading some Bible verses. The criminal touched the preacher and asked what he was reading. “The Consolations of Religion,” was the replay. Charlie Peace was shocked at the way he professionally read about hell. Could a man be so unmoved under the very shadow of the scaffold as to lead a fellow-human there and yet, dry-eyed, read of a pit that has no bottom into which this fellow must fall? Could this preacher believe the words that there is an eternal fire that never consumes its victims, and yet slide over the phrase with a tremor? Is a man human at all who can say with no tears, “You will be eternally dying and yet never know the relief that death brings”? All this was too much for Charlie Peace. So he preached. Listen to his on-the-eve-of-hell sermon:

“Sir,” addressing the preacher, “if I believed what you and the church of God say that you believe, even if England were covered with broken glass from coast to coast, I would walk over it, if need be, on hands and knees and think it worthwhile living, just to save one soul from an eternal hell like that!

How can it be that a condemned criminal who probably did not know Christ can be more concerned about people going into eternal torment than you or I? How many of us would scramble across the length of this country, torn to shreds by the shards of glass beneath us, to save one soul?

John Knox beseeched God: “Great God, give me Scotland, or I die!” Yet my own heart reveals little of that same concern to prefer my own death over the damnation of even one soul. And I know my heart is not the only one bereft of that evangelistic fire.

I don’t think we have a lot of time left. I’m no prophet or eschatology guru, but I can’t escape the Holy Spirit saying that we’ve got to start living like we really believe the Lord. That belief means we’ll do whatever it takes to ensure that no one ends up in hell. Maybe we better stop wasting time comparing iPod prices online.

Where is our zeal for evangelizing the lost? Why are we so dead to the reality that people we know are cruising toward an eternity filled with weeping and gnashing of teeth?

Hell is a real place. Time for us to start living like we believe it.