Simplicity

Hell’s Road and Good Intentions

The Struggle of Good and Evil Spirits (1875) by Ivan Tvorozhnikov
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“When an unclean spirit comes out of a person, it roams through waterless places looking for rest, and not finding rest, it then says, ‘I’ll go back to my house that I came from.’ Returning, it finds the house swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and settle down there. As a result, that person’s last condition is worse than the first.”

—Luke 11:24-26

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is likely not a favorite aphorism of many—mostly because it may be more true than any of us would care to admit.

Exorcising a demon out of a man may, on the surface, seem about the most positive thing that could happen to that man, but Jesus said that unless other events transpire, that demon may return and bring more noxious demons with it. And so, an act of good becomes something much worse.

Because we lack a crystal ball to scry the future, and because we often don’t know or can’t manufacture the necessary next ingredient to keep a good situation from souring, we need to be more sober about what happens to us and whether that positive happening is only good in the moment, with its gotcha component still to come.

I don’t know what it is about American Christians today that we can’t get over exclaiming, “It’s a God thing!” whenever some positive event or windfall occurs. Fact is, we don’t know that—at least in the most basic way. Maybe it’s just a thing and we need to reserve judgment, allowing time to reveal its future aspects.

Winning the lottery would sound like a “God thing,” but when you read the horror stories of lottery winners whose lives crash and burn post-windfall, you start to wonder. Did God bless them with money only to destroy them later because of it? That’s a theodicy I don’t want to wander into, and yet many people do carelessly. How they manage to reconcile such dichotomies leads me to believe they never attempt to, and they just move on as if nothing happened, living in perpetual denial.

In contrast to the “from blessing to doom” pathway, we have this in the life of the patriarch Joseph:

Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Please, come near me,” and they came near. “I am Joseph, your brother,” he said, “the one you sold into Egypt. And now don’t be grieved or angry with yourselves for selling me here, because God sent me ahead of you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there will be five more years without plowing or harvesting. God sent me ahead of you to establish you as a remnant within the land and to keep you alive by a great deliverance. Therefore it was not you who sent me here, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household, and ruler over all the land of Egypt.”

—Genesis 45:4-8

Joseph was beaten by his brothers and left in a hole to die. He was sold into slavery, had a brief respite, and was later thrown into prison to rot. Everyone forgot about him, even the ones he asked not to.

But eventually, God not only restored Joseph, He elevated him to the second-in-command of the Egyptian empire, where his insight and blessings of God upon him resulted in saving a majority of the world from years-long famine.

The hubris of many of us American Christians is acting as if we know everything God is doing. But we don’t. In fact, we have almost no idea what God intends out of this happening or that circumstance. One day you get a promotion to an executive leadership position at work, and a month later you are indicted along with the rest of the leadership team for securities fraud. Welcome to the federal pen. Must be a God thing.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring — what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes.

Instead, you should say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

—James 4:13-15

I write all of the above to leave with this: Consider being more circumspect of pronouncing such and such as a positive or negative. Consider being more wary of the surface appearance of good that comes your way, for underneath the tip of that cool, refreshing iceberg may lurk something catastrophic. Likewise, today’s doom may set you up to save your life and the lives of many. Not everything bad today is bad forever.

Most of all, pause to allow for time to reveal all things. There is no evil in saying you will reserve judgment until you know more. “We shall see” is not a pronouncement of faithlessness but one of a right mind governed by godly sober thinking.

Image: “The Struggle of Good and Evil Spirits” (1875) by Ivan Tvorozhnikov

Why Cerulean Sanctum Has Been Quiet

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Man aloneThis blog has been in operation since 2003. That’s a long time. And in that time, much has been weathered.

A select few readers know my wife has battled mental illness for going on nearly a decade now. I haven’t talked about it much here, since talking about mental illness in a public space can be something of a death sentence. People don’t understand mental illness, nor do they know what to do when someone is mentally ill, so talking about it brings raised eyebrows and that slow drift away. Stigma—it’s still out there. As is a feeling of helplessness. If it were cancer, people would know what to say and do, but with mental illness, no one shows up at the door with a casserole. The person with the illness may seem fine, but when the visitors go away or the event ends, there it is. The spouse and family see it and live with it, but few others must.

Traumatic events can destabilize someone with a mental illness. We had a series of such in late 2016, which led to much heartache and grief, and my wife’s illness flared up. We’ve been battling back ever since. Doctor changes, medicine changes, and on and on. When your spouse suffers, you suffer. This has meant scant time for side projects and pursuits. And between a son trying to get his driver’s license and thinking about college, my work, household needs, helping my wife battle back, and all the various vicissitudes of life, blogging had to take a back seat. Fact is, almost everything that was not core to daily existence had to.

It’s not that I don’t have pressing thoughts to share. It’s that sometimes, you have to choose your priorities.

Winter and spring were rough, but I hold out hope that summer will be better. Maybe that will free up time for Cerulean Sanctum. God knows I want to write, but God also knows that family matters.

Thanks for being a reader.

The Benedict Option, God’s Will, and Why Everyone Needs to Chillax

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The Benedict OptionIn Christian circles, many have been talking about Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. Fact is, people have been talking about it for about three years now, because that’s how long Dreher has been doling out bits of his major thesis about why Christians need to form their own remote, intentional communities. Given how much I’ve read of what Dreher has already written online, I will probably never read the book.

Nonetheless, here is my review of The Benedict Option. It’s one word:

Whatever.

Oddly enough, that’s my review of most Christian books advocating for widespread change or action from all Christians. At one point, I used to be keen to grasp and understand this idea of preserving Christian faith from the ravages of rapidly degrading culture. Like many Christians, I had concerns about this thing or that. I had worries. I’m sure you have or have had worries too.

But what I have come to realize in the last few years is that the reasons the Church in America is worried, or needs to worry, or doesn’t need to worry, are not really about what is happening outside the Church, but inside. You can say that’s always been the focus of Cerulean Sanctum: Church Heal Thyself.

But you read all these dystopian nonfiction books about the bad stuff arriving soon to hurt the Church, and what you finally realize is that all these books and warnings, and cautions, and handwringings are all brilliantly reasoned answers to the wrong questions.

We have this strange, self-absorbed idea in contemporary Western Christianity that the most pressing issue for the entirety of the world is that one thing that is most pressing to me. And we wonder how it is that people can be so blind so as not to see X bearing down on us like a runaway train. Why is it that you aren’t taking X seriously? Why aren’t you doing something about X? You must be in sin because X doesn’t matter to you as much as it does to me.

And after a while, it all gets silly, this one-size-fits-all approach to discipleship and God’s working in the lives of His people.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Draw near to God.

Hear what God asks of me for my situation alone.

In response to that hearing, do what I can to achieve it with the unique resources God has provided to me.

Be at peace.

It sounds to me that God may be asking Rod Dreher to write a book about intentional communities that create a place of retreat. Maybe God is asking Rod Dreher to even start one.

That’s great for Rod Dreher.

And while it’s great for Rod Dreher, what it does not mean is that I must necessarily heed Rod Dreher’s call and follow the Benedict Option.

What is God asking of me in the situation in which He has placed me? What is God asking of you?

It seems to me that where we have gone astray in the modern church isn’t so much that we lost the culture wars and now must retreat to intentional communities but that we have made it mandatory to follow what some Christian leader, prognosticator, or pundit says. Sure we can listen, but we can also reject if that person’s message conflicts with what we know God is asking of you or of me in the situation you or I find before us.

Possessing no one-size-fits-all approach to life can be frightening. It means there isn’t a uniform plan. I think this scares us because listening to God to find our next steps can be hard. You can’t listen if you don’t draw near, and drawing near takes time and quiet. And we run the risk of getting the listening wrong.

This causes anxiety. Here is where we make our second mistake.

The Bible says this:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
—Hebrews 12:1-2

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
—Ephesians 2:8-10

“Woe to him who strives with him who formed him,
a pot among earthen pots!
Does the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’
or ‘Your work has no handles’?
Woe to him who says to a father, ‘What are you begetting?’
or to a woman, ‘With what are you in labor?’”
—Isaiah 45:9-10

Who founded the faith you have? God alone.

Who is perfecting the faith you have? God alone.

Who can force God’s hand on any of this? Not you. Not me. No one.

You and I are not in control. You and I did not start this, and we will not finish it. All that is on God.

So relax.

In fact, all God really asks of us is to show up. That’s it. And some days, we may not even do that. I think He understands that happens sometimes. What God really wants from us more than anything else is to draw near to Him and to talk with Him and listen.

It may be that in any given day, all I can do is go to the grocery store, buy some Pepto, and help a sick family member get over an upset stomach. Is that what God is asking of me? Perhaps it is. Perhaps that is the extent of today’s focus.

Perhaps that is what I am hearing from God when I draw near to Him today. And if that’s all there is, that’s OK. My eternal security does not rest on what I get done today but in whom I rest, the Lord.

It may be that God is calling some Christians to live radical lives on the fringes of civilization.

Or He may be calling some to care for the sick in hospitals or to build airplanes.

Or He may be saying to some to cease from their labors for the moment and just rest in Him.

Or He may be asking some to write a poem or a letter of encouragement to someone else.

Most likely, whatever it it is He may be asking of you or me, it may be something small, something for this moment.

Our mistake is to criticize another Christian for what he or she may or may not be doing based upon what we think we should or should not be doing. Yes, the Bible does lay out a few clear boundaries, but within those boundaries reside entire worlds of conversation and opportunity. And the conversation you had with God and the opportunity it created is unique. I won’t criticize you about mine. Don’t criticize me about yours. When and if possible, let’s do what we can to help each other make each other’s possible.

So as a review of The Benedict Option, I say, whatever. Maybe it is God’s word to you about your next step. Or maybe it’s not. Whichever answer it becomes to you as you draw near to God and listen, God is thankfully in control.