Fear

You Love the Lord, But…

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…do you trust Him?

At first glance, such a question appears ludicrous. How can one love God and not trust Him?

Well, you love your kids, but would you trust them with a gun? Uh, probably not. I taught riflery at camp once. Emphasis on the once. Having a spacy teen girl carelessly point a loaded .22 at your head (despite fifteen minutes of admonition not to do so) tends to bleach your complexion, if you know what I mean. Didn’t make me love her any less, though.

Each of us may have good reason to love but not trust. How about a dad you love, but who’s in the habit of making life miserable for you and your family because he drinks—and he’s not a fun drunk. Or a single mom who brings home “Uncle” after “Uncle,” a relentless series of men who drift in and out of your life. Or your brooding teen nephew with the death metal and the Hustlers stashed under his mattress—your own son wants to man shotgun in the young nihilist’s new Lancer Evo.

You love your mom, but she’s not acting like an adult should. Dad, either. The nephew? Barely tolerable, but you love him ’cause he’s your beloved sister’s kid. Plus, you sat by the young punk’s bedside when he got pneumonia at eighteen months and you prayed your guts out that he’d live.

I think plenty of people who tear up in church during worship, the ones with their hands held highest, may very well love God with a fervor that outdoes everyone else in the pews, but all the while they’re scared to death to trust Him with their lives. They’re scared because they’ve been burned by a father who was an ugly drunk, or a mother who couldn’t keep a decent man in her life, or {fill in the trust issue here}.

No greater area of struggle affects me like this one. I love God very much and have served Him for many years, but I don’t always trust Him. Yes, I’m fine when I’m trusting the Lord for other people’s faith needs, but when it comes to my own I don’t do so well. I’m sure my Dad’s problems didn’t help me in trusting, but I don’t remember being leery of God’s direction and leading in my life until I started getting dropped.

Dropped?

Have you ever taken that leap of faith, the one so certain that it could not fail because “God was all over it”? Wile E. Coyote splatEnded up as a squish spot at the bottom of some canyon just like Wile E. Coyote, didn’t you? Hurt, right?

It wasn’t just the pain of meeting the ground at a terminal velocity as much as the fact that the angels didn’t bear you up. That God—the one who orchestrated that leap of faith—seemed to vanish in a puff of smoke just when you needed Him the most. Years later, you’re still nursing the wounds, still asking why.

And still not getting any answers.

For me, no verse in the Bible stares me in the face and dares me to blink more than this one:

Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him…
—Job 13:15a KJV

For some of us, though, dying would be fine. But what of living, yet bearing a brutal wound? Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him may actually be easy. It’s the Though I’m left paralyzed in the bottom of a crater, yet will I trust in Him that needs our attention. I know a pastor who, on his way to a church meeting, accidentally backed the car over his toddler son and killed him. I can’t imagine. I simply can’t. I get choked up even thinking about something like that.

…yet will I trust in Him…

I’m not sure we do trust Him, at least to the extent we say we do. Though we all want to trust God to be more coherent and reliable than a drunken father, irresponsible mother, or suspect punk nephew, I suspect we all have our limits where trust begins to corrode. For some, that level’s pretty low. I believe that more than a few of us in America would blanch in the face of finding our favorite TV show canceled, our usual breakfast cereal discontinued, or the NFL home team packing up to move to LA.

Even if most of us can get past those mundane “disasters,” other more serious ones loom. We don’t want to deal with diminishing physical prowess. We don’t want to see the new kid promoted over us because it means we’ve maxed out our career and it’s all downhill from here on. We don’t want to go on weeping over adult children who have abandoned the Faith. We don’t want to consider what happens when the dream dies.

Even Christian books dance around this issue. I’m two-thirds of the way through Dan Allender’s Leading with a Limp. As an illustration of the power of honesty, he tells the story of a high-powered lawyer who confronted her company with a mirror and showed them how ugly they’d become. The company realized their errors and turned things around. The lady lawyer came off as a hero for her boldness.

But what if she hadn’t? What if they gutted and filleted her, then tossed her still-warm professional corpse on the dust heap, taking extra special care to ensure she never worked in a law firm within the borders of the good ol’ U.S. of A. again?

Doesn’t that happen? Doesn’t the leap of faith sometimes result in a big splat? Also, don’t we all know people who never recover? I do.

Last December, I wrote a blog post called “We Need a Gospel That Speaks to Failure.”I think we also need a means to help people crawl up out of the crater left behind when all the faith in the world didn’t work—for whatever reason. That’s where Christianity should shine, in moments like those.

Because I think that life is not going to be easy for most of us. At some point we’re going that face the reality of the ground rushing up to meet us and no net coming out of the sky. We have to be able to make sense of the crater we leave behind if we’re to trust God in the future.

We talk about God never leaving us and make up little poems (“Footprints in the Sand,” anyone?), but then the Bible also says this:

But, in regard to the ambassadors of the rulers of Babylon who sent to [Hezekiah] to ask about the wonder that was done in the land, God left him in order to try him, to know all that was in his heart.
—2 Chronicles 32:31

What is God going to find in our hearts when we’re in the crater after the leap of faith? What is it going to take from His Church to help those in the crater summon up the trust He is looking for?

It’s Never Enough Until Your Heart Stops Beating

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If you don’t already know, I play drums. Four weeks ago, I got lost in the moment during worship at church and misunderstood a gesture by one of the other worship team members as the signal end a song. Not remembering how far along we were into that song, I complied and the whole thing ground to a quick halt. This left the lead guitarist unprepared for the next song, as he was lost in the moment, too.

Oops. As someone who attempts to be professional in his playing, I don’t make an enormous number of boneheaded mistakes like that.

Later, I was told by someone that my mistake resulted in the quenching of the Spirit. I know in my heart that this isn’t true because the Holy Spirit isn’t so timid that a missed cue sends Him flying away. This isn’t an incantation, folks.

Still, a nagging doubt of my skills remained.

The next Sunday—Easter—rolled around and a packed church greeted us as I sat down on my drummer’s throne. Our set had a number of songs we’d not practiced fully, so I was on pins and needles considering the previous week.

What happened next could best be described in my view as “a disaster.” Because we sometimes extend songs if the mood hits, endings get dictated by whomever leads the song. I play along until I get a cue to end. Easter Sunday, yours truly, my cue radar on hypersensitive, proceeded to take three slight gestures by song leaders as “let’s end this”—only to end the songs prematurely. This happened on each of the last three songs we played, each ending worse than the one before.

The people in the seats didn’t know any better. The vast majority didn’t catch the mistakes. But I could barely get off the stage. I didn’t hear the message. I don’t think I heard anything anyone said. The afternoon stunk. The evening followed in kind. The Monday after resembled the dark-hued one that New Order (or Fats Domino, for all you oldsters) sang about.

New Order also sang the following:

That’s the way – shellshock.
Hold on! It’s never enough,
It’s never enough until your heart stops beating.

I talk to people and it never ceases to amaze me how many live in perpetual shellshock. No matter what they do, it’s never enough. Never enough until their hearts stop beating.

I look at what we’re doing to ourselves and wonder if the cost to keep up with the Joneses, to never let our guard down for one moment lest we stumble and the herd of stampeding elephants behind us run us over, is worth it.

I dare any married couple with children to arrange a get-together with five other similar couples. How far does the calendar spool out before a mutually open date shows up—if at all? Then the pressure mounts.

When our culture only likes a winner, everyone fights to win. But what of the losers? And if there’s only one winner, aren’t most of us losers?natlamp.jpg

When our culture praises a life set awhirling, how do we turn off the spin cycle?

The iconic magazine cover at right summarizes our dilemma. Are we the dog? Or are we the consumer? Don’t we lose in either case?

I think too many of us feel like we have a gun pointed at our heads and that at any second someone or something may squeeze the trigger. We rationalize that if we only do this better or that more quickly, the gun will magically disappear.

Or we feel the pressure to conform to the voices yelling at us through our culture. Sadly, we may feel as if our churches scream the same message as the culture. They tell us what we should be doing, but give us no tools or assistance to make that command possible. In some ways, we’re left attempting what they say for fear of worse consequences, even if we can’t make what they say work.

It’s never enough. And the heart beats on, though more anxiously.

I used to think that frenzy and performance stood as distinct traits, but now I’m beginning to see they feed off each other. They combine like nitro and glycerine to explode in our lives, leaving us shellshocked.

Yesterday afternoon, my family attended a wildflower walk hosted by the Audubon Society. Jack in the Pulpit, Spring Beauty, Blue Phlox, Trillium, Yellow Ragwort. Flowers. In the woods. For hours.

Driving home, I wondered how many people would consider that time ill-spent because the dividends don’t leap out. Or how many have so scheduled their lives they can’t possible find the time to stop and consider a fragile flower not even a quarter inch across.

I’ve got to believe that a culture that hurtles here and there loses its soul. If we’re living our lives under the mantra that it’s never enough until our hearts stop beating, then perhaps we’re already dead.

Someone has to stand up and oppose this performance-oriented frenzy of activity. And more than just one of us. We can’t do this alone or else we simply won’t generate the inertia to change our culture.

Yes, it’s a matter of prayer. But more than that, it’s Christians playing the counterculture card and doing so with their very lives.

We want to see Christ lifted up, to win the world for Him, yet we’re either stuck in the spin cycle or sidelined by shellshock.

Something’s gotta give.

{Image: One of the most recognized magazine covers of all-time, National Lampoon, January 1973, ASME‘s #7 cover of the period 1965-2005.}

More Cowbell Award IV

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Yet More Cowbell!Sometimes it’s just silly, and sometimes it’s on a scale of utter mental vacuity that deserves its own prize. That’s why I must hand out another More Cowbell Award. Yes, “The Award That No One Wants to Win” is back with a vengeance. Perhaps it’s been holed up in a cubbyhole plotting its return in a blaze of black helicopter glory that will bring down democratic nations and establish a one world….

Hey, wait a second!

I hereby bestow the fourth More Cowbell Award on a group of folks who can’t disengage from the latest Jack Van Impe scarefest. Lately, their ilk has dominated so many discussions that even I’m growing paranoid listening to them.

Here’s a sampling of their wares:

    “Don’t ever buy anything from a Christian bookstore with a credit card. Those transactions are routed to a data vault in Antwerp and correlated. That’s how they know whom to round up for extermination.””The Roman Catholic Church has infiltrated the National Association of Evangelicals. Ted Haggard is nothing more than a papist stooge installed by Opus Dei.””Did you know that the U.S. Government has a warehouse in upstate New York filled with guillotines to use on Christians during the Great Tribulation?”

    “Zionist bankers in Switzerland are even now funding a phony vaccine that will actually be targeted for use on believers. We’ll be told its an avian flu vaccine, but its most devastating component won’t actually kick in until a year after UN workers administer the shot. Think Ebola here, except a thousand times more powerful. Ever seen an eyeball melt?”

    “Rick Warren’s PEACE initiative is an attempt by Illuminati groups to undermine the true Church and diminish its power so the antichrist can be more easily installed after the Temple is rebuilt in Jerusalem. This is all Bill Hybels’s fault.”

    “Whenever a church that uses electronic tithing methods receives your monthly tithe out of your bank account, one percent of your tithe is routed to the estate of Aleister Crowley in order to print more copies of The Necronomicon.”

    “Today, a red heifer was born in Bethlehem…”

Frank Black (guess the reference) couldn’t make this stuff up. Nor could he track it all down to a shadowy group portrayed in an eponymous TV show. Nothing about these crackpot ideas is shadowy.

Anyway, the fourth More Cowbell Award goes to

Christian Conspiracy Theorists

Honestly, I’ve had to unsubscribe from a number of formerly rational blogs of formerly respectable Christian organizations. They once legitimately pursued heretical thinking in the Church, but now resemble little more than conspiracy sites run by folks who find nefarious global plots against Christians under every rock. There’s healthy discernment and then there’s just fearmongering.

Part of the problem is a lack of love. If perfect love drives out all fear, then we have to ask if folks are being loving (and loved) when the conspiracies start flying. Bad eschatology comes into play, too. Hyperkinetic dispensationalism run amok is threatening to drive hardcore orthodox amil- and premillennialists to drink. Maybe now’s a good time to be a Preterist!

Christians everywhere are up in arms about the pending DaVinci Code movie, yet we’re totally unwilling to silence our own who simply cannot shut up about harebrained conspiracies against Christians. By comparison, some of the cranium-busting hysteria trotted out as normal Christian thought today makes The DaVinci Code read like The Pokey Little Puppy.

Honestly, if someone can track down the company making all those guillotines being supplied to the U.S. Government, I want to buy their stock because they’re going to make a killing.

😉