Update from Rob Martin

An Interesting View for a Picnic

Yesterday I posted about an attempt from The Simple Way to speak to the injustice they see in Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s proposed ordinance basically abolishing feeding the homeless unless you have permits and do it at approved places. My friend Rob Martin decided to participate in this gathering, and wrote about the experience over at his blog (Abnormal Anabaptist). Here is a taste:

So, despite all my panic, it was a very subdued, low-key event of a bunch of folks just spending time together.  What did we accomplish?  Well, in the eyes of the world, worried about laws, regulations, and government agencies, not a whole lot.  We didn’t change the law.  We didn’t change any politicians minds.  To that extent, we failed.

To the man who stocked up on sandwiches for the week, it wasn’t a failure.

To the man who stood there while we loved on him with a sandwich, a cupcake, an apple, and a bottle of water, it wasn’t a failure.

To the young man who, strange though he was, found a bunch of folks that just accepted him no matter how outrageous he acted, it wasn’t a failure.

You see, we were with Jesus.  Two or more believers gathered, and Jesus was there.  We fellow-shipped with each other and with other people made in the image of God and Jesus was there.

This was the third way.  This was the way of Christ made flesh.  This proved that it was possible to act counter to justice in a way that did not sacrifice grace, mercy, compassion, and love, even for those with whom we disagree.  Instead of attacking the counsel, we fellow-shipped.  Instead of shouting angrily, we fed quietly.  Instead of chanting slogans, we laughed together.  We demonstrated to everyone who saw us that there was something different, something other going on.

This is what faith can do.  It can change the world.  It’s subversive.  It gets under the skin and transforms people without them even knowing it.

“We’re with Jesus”.

If we remember that, if we take that every where we go, imagine the possibilities.  Imagine what we can accomplish when we decide that, when we’re acting for Jesus, we are acting with him.

And it’s uncomfortable.  When we decide to spend time with Jesus, we’re going to be taken in some very strange places and directions, places that we would never decide on our own to do.  I hate meeting new people, I despise walking into a strange situation where I know no-one.  And yet, that is precisely what God required of me so I could spend time with Jesus.

You see, this is a radical faith we have.  Following Jesus is not safe, it’s not comfortable, it will take you out of your normal life and you will never be able to go back to it the same.  For me, I’m no longer satisfied with living a “normal” life.  I’ve encountered God and the experience has changed me forever.  For those Christians who only know a faith of “agreement” and don’t know that radical, gut-wrenching, whole-body, throw caution to the wind kind of faith, I feel sad.  I know many who don’t know that.  I know many who are satisfied with their life as it is.

“I don’t think I would change anything of my life, even if I wasn’t a Christian”.

Yes, I’ve heard that from some.  And it saddens me.  It tells me that, as much as they may “believe” something, they haven’t yet experienced that transformation that comes from diving in head-first into the terror of a faith lived on the edge.  And it is that experience that I find in Hebrews 11.

If you haven’t experienced that yet, I hope you will stop, think, and start to look around with a new set of radical eyes, seeking for where God is moving.  And if you have experienced it, well… you know EXACTLY what I’m feeling right now.

“We’re with Jesus”.

How Not to Do International Aid

Found this post a week ago or so, but wanted to share it with you. Matador Change highlighted what it calls the seven worst international aid ideas. Here are the intro, the seven ideas, and the conclusion:

Maybe their hearts were in the right place. Maybe not. Either way, these are solid contenders for the title of “worst attempts at helping others since colonialism.”

1. One million t-shirts for Africa
2. TOMS Buy-One-Give-One
3. Machine gun preacher
4. 50 Cent ransoming children in Somalia
5. Donor fund restrictions
6. Making food aid the same color as cluster munitions
7. Making USAID a foreign policy tool

Sometimes bad aid is just the consequence of someone caring too much, but knowing too little. Other times it’s people who should have known better not being diligent in considering the consequences of their actions. And sometimes politicians and unscrupulous businessmen are simply manipulating the suffering of others for their own ends. When it’s benign or thwarted, it’s easy enough to laugh it off. But when a bad idea is carried through, the results can be diabolical.

You can read their comments about what is wrong with each of these ideas here. If you want to connect with an organization making a positive difference while avoiding these pitfalls, check out Hope International.

Where Have You Gone, Allen Iverson?

Allen Iverson looks on from the bench during a Jan 2010 game in Milwaukee

I remember cheering for Allen Iverson for years as a Sixers fan, despite constant disappointment at the mercurial star who talked a big game, but seemed too small and fragile to consistently back it up. With all of the new stars emerging, Iverson seems to have simply faded away. Too proud to accept that his diminished skills and increased age meant he would have to be a role player if he was to continue cashing paychecks in the league. Over at SB Nation, Bomani Jones offers his take on the latest news regarding Iverson. Iverson’s money seems to be dwindling, if not gone. His life outside of basketball seems likely to be a sad and tragic tale. Here is Jones’ take on the present and future of the one-time superstar.

The older I got, the clearer it became that A.I. was going about things all wrong. The braids were a lot cooler in 2001 than ‘09, especially since they were worn by someone 26, not 34. The one-man offense was more defensible when that man, at the very least, was a capable NBA starter. He maxed out what he could do through force of personality and little else. His aging body needed a nuanced game that he hadn’t picked up. His ego needed to be commensurate with his diminishing skills to find a place. And he needed to see, clearly, that he was losing basketball, which was the linchpin that held together everything he had.

Now, it’s gone. So are his wife and family and, apparently, much of his money. He’s no longer a star, not even at the Atlanta watering holes he frequents. We only hear about him when the cops are impounding his Lamborghini or creditors are beating down his door. After being so much, good and bad, to so many, Allen Iverson is a 36-year-old retiree. He is a nobody.

Does he have any fight left in him? We will find out soon. He may be finished as a basketball player, but he can’t be finished as a man, if he ever was one. He’s done too much, been too far and proven himself to be too strong. Right?

He seems totally unprepared for his greatest challenge: life. Iverson was tossed out of high school. He dropped out of college. Not even the gods of irony are funny enough to make A.I. a coach. He’s demonstrated no interest in any activity meant to be performed 40 hours per week. In the most significant ways, he is alone. And there’s no reason to think any of this will get any better.

Four years ago, he averaged 26.4 points per game. Two years later, as a free agent, his irrelevance was impossible to ignore. He wasn’t even on the backburner. He was in the fridge, cold and past his expiration date. Only running backs and radioactive isotopes decay that fast.

The game hadn’t just passed him by. The Game, the macro-level stuff about basketball and branding that The Answer could never be bothered with, were way beyond him. The suits he didn’t want to wear, not his t-shirts and du-rags, were in style. The superstars of the day bore little resemblance to the anti-hero who directly preceded them in the limelight.

Now, it’s as if he was never here. His most lasting imprint is the NBA’s dress code, a measure taken to erase some of Iverson’s cultural influence. He has a lifetime contract with Reebok, but he’ll never be the Jordan-like icon whose brand power could sell shoes forever. Each of his employers was ready for him to go when he left. The Sixers will retire his jersey, and he’ll surely be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Sadly, it might be best-case scenario if we never hear from him beyond those nights.

He went from nothing to the world, and now Allen Iverson may be back to nothing again. Literally, figuratively and tragically.

Great, Another Thing to Want!

Yep. The folks at LEGO just keep at it. Below are two pictures of the latest awesomeness. I can only hope that this means a LEGO: The Lord of the Rings is coming out soon for the Wii.

The "Good Guys"

 

The "Bad Guys"

You can see a full Facebook album, including close-ups, here!

Herman Cain vs. John Wesley

Presidential Candidate Herman Cain

An interesting article on Tony Campolo’s Red Letter Christians blog. This piece was written by Morgan Guyton (who I’m not familiar with), but it is an interesting look at the tempting American perspective of personal responsibility. His piece is so good I’ll copy it here in its entirety. You can respond in the comments below or on the original post here.

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“If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” Thus says Herman Cain to the unemployed Wall Street protestors. I understand why he said it. He wants to live in a world where the American Dream works, where being optimistic and entrepreneurial and hard-working guarantees success. Cain wants for blame to be something that is distributed neatly and perfectly between individual people. This could be described as an ethic ofindividual responsibility.

In a different context, Cain credits God’s grace for his fortune: “As you get older, your faith gets stronger because of your own personal experiences where you know the only way you could have made it through some of those personal experiences was by the grace of God.” This way of understanding our dependence on God’s grace is often termed the doctrine ofdivine providence.

The question is whether these two belief systems are compatible. Can you say at the same time that people are individually responsible for their success or failure but then credit their success to the grace of God? I would argue that the humility of knowing your dependence on God’s grace ought to keep you from saying something like “If you’re not rich, blame yourself.” If you really believe that you stand on God’s grace, that means your work ethic, intelligence, and creativity are to God’s credit, not yours, which disqualifies using these qualities as a soapbox from which to judge other people. A lot of Christians want to get credit for the humility of believing in divine providence while retaining the right to judge others based on an ethic of individual responsibility.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, lived in a very different time than ours. He framed his entire theology around the concept of divine providence. His understanding of our dependence on God led him to believe that the rich were supposed to take care of the poor. Instead of saying, “If you’re not rich, blame yourself,” Wesley said, “If I die rich, blame me.” Here’s exactly how he put it in 18th century language: “If I leave behind me ten pounds [when I die]… you and all mankind bear witness against me, that I have lived and died a thief and a robber.” Wesley believed that there was nothing wrong with making money as long as you spent all of it helping the poor after “supplying thy own reasonable wants, together with those of thy family.”

In his sermon “The More Excellent Way,” Wesley explains that all wealth belongs to God and is given to those who have it for the purpose of taking care of others:

You may consider yourself as one in whose hands the Proprietor of heaven and earth and all things therein has lodged a part of his goods, to be disposed of according to his direction. And his direction is, that you should look upon yourself as one of a certain number of indigent persons who are to be provided for out of that portion of His goods wherewith you are entrusted.

Wesley assumed that being truly dependent on God’s grace meant seeing ourselves as “indigent persons” (poor). People who have money have the God-given responsibility to help those who don’t. If Christians lived according to Wesley’s vision, none of us would have financial security but it wouldn’t matter because everyone would trust God and lean on each other. When Wesley saw that members of his Methodist movement were adding small luxuries to their life as they increased their wealth, he ripped into them in his “Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity”:

But you say, you can ‘afford’ it! O be ashamed to take such miserable nonsense into your mouths…. Can any steward ‘afford’ to be an errant knave? To waste his Lord’s goods? Can any servant ‘afford’ to lay out his master’s money any other wise than his master appoints him?

Wesley was utterly scandalized that anyone could spend more money than necessary on themselves. He contradicts the views of people like Herman Cain most squarely when heblames the rich among his followers for the plight of their poor brethren:

Many of your brethren, beloved of God, have not food to eat; they have not raiment to put on; they have not a place where to lay their head. And why are they thus distressed? Because you impiously, unjustly, and cruelly detain from them what your Master lodges in your hands on purpose to supply their wants!

Whereas today wealth is supposedly the measure of hard work and diligence, in Wesley’s sermon “The Mystery of Iniquity,” he writes that poverty is the greatest virtue:

As long as the Christians in any place were poor they were devoted to God. While they had little of the world they did not love the world; but the more had of it the more they loved it. This constrained the Lover of their souls at various times to unchain their persecutors, who by reducing them to their former poverty reduced them to their former purity. But still remember: riches have in all ages been the bane of genuine Christianity.

I’m sure that somebody will say Wesley was just an oddball and he certainly was, but his views on wealth and poverty are far closer to the  norm of historical Christianity than our age’s view that wealth shows our virtue. For most of Christian history, poverty was idealized because it meant putting your full trust in God. Part of the difference between Wesley’s vantage point and ours is that he was writing in a time when the values of capitalism were only starting to replace the values of feudalism that had preceded them.

The glue that held the feudal order together was the doctrine of divine providence, the idea that everything in creation belonged to God and everyone had a place within this order. The king’s privilege and power were accompanied by an awesome responsibility for his subjects, each of whom had a certain acreage of land to tend for God and their king. If kings were not so easily corrupted by their power, then this order grounded in divine providence might have worked. Because divine providence was associated with the corruption of feudal Christendom, the presumptions that frame our secular society and free-market economy push in the entirely opposite direction.

The ethic of individual responsibility that people like Herman Cain are trying to make “Christian” is actually the core of the secular humanist response to feudal Christendom’s understanding of divine providence. It is secular to think of our wealth as something we’ve earned and can use how we please instead of seeing it as a gift from God to use for His purpose. It doesn’t mean anything to piously credit your fortune to “the grace of God” unless you really see it as an unmerited gift. So many Christians today want to talk one way when the topic is economics and another way when the topic is religion.

John Wesley really believed that God has given us everything we have to share with others. And while I don’t think we should return to feudalism, I do think that divine providence lays the foundation for a better world than the world of individual responsibility we have now. It’s also more honest. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 4:7, “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” Everything that we have ever accomplished is the result of skills and habits that were cultivated in us through the guidance of parents, teachers, and mentors over the course of our life. To falsely individualize our accomplishments is to mock all the people who have made us who we are and the God who has worked through all who helped us because He loves us. We are the product of a community investment in our success ordered by the “invisible hand” of divine providence.

In one sense, Herman Cain is right. As Christians, we shouldn’t blame anyone else if we’re not rich; we should instead thank God for sparing us the treacherous temptations of wealth. The richer we are, the more we should blame ourselves if people around us are suffering because we haven’t shared what God gave us to share with them. In truth though, “blame” shouldn’t be part of Christian vocabulary. Jesus took the blame on the cross so that we could simply be grateful as the foundation for everything we do with whatever God has given us to share.

Steve Jobs: Bad Advice

Steve Jobs delivers the commencement address at Stanford University in 2005

Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, has joined the list of folks reflecting on Steve Jobs’ passing. Mouw particularly considers the advice given at Standford’s 2005 graduation ceremony, which he juxtaposes with comments by a commencement address from David Brooks. (HT: John Fea) Here is a taste:

I don’t know anything much about his fundamental convictions, but there is one line that caught my attention when it first was publicized, and it is now being quoted as an enduring piece of wisdom from his lips. In his Stanford commencement address in 2005 he told the graduates: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

That’s a very different message from the one David Brooks delivered in a commencement address he gave last spring. His point was summarized in the title that the New York Times gave it when it ran it as an op-ed in May: “It’s Not About You.” Graduates leave our institutions of higher learning, Brooks said, with “the whole baby boomer theology ringing in their ears.” Commencement speakers tell them: “Followyour passion, chart your course, march to the beat of your drummer, follow yourdreams and find yourself.” All of that, Brooks argued, is “the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.”

Brooks may even have had Steve Jobs’s Stanford address in mind when he said all of that. And my own evangelical convictions square nicely with Brooks’s concerns. The Apostle Paul certainly seemed to be saying, “It’s not about me” when he wrote that “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). And for many of us in the Reformed world, the Heidelberg Catechism puts it profoundly in its first question and answer: “My only comfort in life and in death” is “that I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ . . . [who] makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for Him.”

So if I have to choose, I clearly go with Brooks rather than Jobs. But it would have been nice to be able to ask Jobs what he thought about the Brooks piece. My guess is that he would have agreed with the basic point Brooks was making, but that he also would have insisted that there is something about “not living someone else’s life” that is worth emphasizing. Both Jobs and Brooks were addressing a generation of students who make much of “authenticity”: whatever you choose, make sure that you choose it, and that you are not just going along with the crowd.

Interesting thoughts (you can find the rest here). As I reflect more on Jobs’ speech, I can understand Mouw’s critique. Jobs’ perspective is certainly consistent with his apparent conversion to Buddhism. He is focused on the self, and actualizing that self. Don’t let external pressures conform you into their pattern, but be true to yourself. As Andy Crouch reminds us (see my previous post), the first part of this sounds almost Christian. We are admonished to not let the world press us into its pattern. The problem is that we are not, as Christians, supposed to simply remold ourselves as we see fit, we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds by the Spirit of God.

This difference does present a chance for us as Christians to clarify the differences between our faith and the others competing for the allegiance of those around us. Christianity is unique in its focus (relationship with God, rather than adherence to a set of rules) and motivation (we do this not to please ourselves or provide ourselves with reward in the present world, but to gain fulfillment by doing what we were created for: loving God). Jobs apparently never understood this. Do those around me “get it”, or do they see pleasing themselves as the end goal? I need to find ways to show the Truth in my daily life. I think this is what Brooks is trying to say. I’m not an expert on all of what Brooks may have to say, but on this point I certainly agree with him. Our life is not our own, we only “succeed” to the degree that we fulfill our purpose of delighting in the One who created us for Himself.

Steve Jobs: Prophet?

Steve Jobs Portrait by Tim O'Brien

An interesting perspective on Steve Jobs from Andy Crouch via a piece in the Wall Street Journal. (HT: John Fea) Here is his introduction, followed by some interesting pieces.

For every magical thing Steve Jobs revealed in his Apple keynote addresses, there were many other things he concealed. Like the devices he created, his life was more and more opaque even while becoming more and more celebrated. So his death this week came as a shock for nearly all of us, even though we knew that only grave illness could be keeping him from the company he co-founded and loved. He told us almost nothing about his prognosis—right through his last public appearance he was as turtleneck-clad and upbeat as ever. But suddenly, this week, he was gone.

Steve Jobs was extraordinary in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (demanding and occasionally ruthless) leader. But his most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple’s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and turned it into a sign of promise and progress.

That bitten apple was just one of Steve Jobs’s many touches of genius, capturing the promise of technology in a single glance. The philosopher Albert Borgmann has observed that technology promises to relieve us of the burden of being merely human, of being finite creatures in a harsh and unyielding world. The biblical story of the Fall pronounced a curse upon human work—”cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.” All technology implicitly promises to reverse the curse, easing the burden of creaturely existence. And technology is most celebrated when it is most invisible—when the machinery is completely hidden, combining godlike effortlessness with blissful ignorance about the mechanisms that deliver our disburdened lives.

What lay behind Jobs’ perspective? What was his motivation?

Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment—but technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket.

Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress—and he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. He believed so sincerely in the “magical, revolutionary” promise of Apple precisely because he believed in no higher power. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It’s worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn’t, say:

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”

This is the gospel of a secular age. It has the great virtue of being based only on what we can all perceive—it requires neither revelation nor dogma. And it promises nothing it cannot deliver—since all that is promised is the opportunity to live your own unique life, a hope that is manifestly realizable since it is offered by one who has so spectacularly succeeded by following his own “inner voice, heart and intuition.”

Mr. Jobs was by no means the first person to articulate this vision of a meaningful life—Socrates, the Buddha and Emerson come to mind. To be sure, fully embracing this secular gospel requires an austerity of spirit that few have been able to muster, even if it sounds quite fine on the lawn of Stanford University.

How does this “gospel” work out in the real world? Not well, says Crouch:

Upon close inspection, this gospel offers no hope that you cannot generate yourself and only the comfort of having been true to yourself. In the face of tragedy and evil—the kind of tragedy that cuts off lives not just at 56 years old but at 5 or 6, the kind of evil bent on eradicating whole tribes and nations from the earth—it is strangely inert.

Perhaps every human system of meaning fails or at least falls silent in the face of these harsh realities, but the gospel of self-fulfillment does require an extra helping of stability and privilege to be plausible. Death is “life’s change agent”? For most human beings, that would sound like cold comfort indeed.

But the genius of Steve Jobs was to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of “the Apple faithful” and the “cult of the Mac” is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

Crouch then turns to another visionary with a message to preach: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. King, too, had had a close encounter with his own mortality when he was stabbed by a mentally ill woman at a book signing in 1958. He told that story a decade later to a rally on the night of April 3, 1968, and then turned, with unsettling foresight, to the possibility of his own early death. His words, at the beginning, could easily have been a part of Steve Jobs’s commencement address:

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now.”

But here Dr. King, the civic and religious leader, turned a corner that Mr. Jobs never did. “I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything, I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

Finally, Crouch offers this perspective for the rest of us:

But the rest of us, as grateful as we are for his legacy, still have to decide whether technology’s promise is enough to take us to the promised land. Is technology enough? Has the curse truly been repealed? Is the troublesome world simply awaiting another Steve Jobs, the evangelist of our power to unfold our own possibilities?

And, correspondingly, was the hope beyond themselves, and beyond this life, that animated Dr. King and his companions merely superfluous to the success of their cause, an accident of religious history rather than a civic necessity?

For people of a secular age, Steve Jobs’s gospel may seem like all the good news we need. But people of another age would have considered it a set of beautifully polished empty promises, notwithstanding all its magical results. Indeed, they would have been suspicious of it precisely because of its magical results.

And that may be true of a future age as well. Our grandchildren may discover that technological progress, for all its gifts, is the exception rather than the rule. It works wonders within its own walled garden, but it falters when confronted with the worst of the world and the worst in ourselves. Indeed, it may be that rather than concealing difficulty and relieving burdens, the only way forward in the most tenacious human troubles is to embrace difficulty and take up burdens—in Dr. King’s words, to embrace a “dangerous unselfishness.”

I find this to be an interesting challenge. As Christians, have we succumbed to the secular, self-focused, gospel of Jobs, or do we subscribe to the faith-based gospel of Christ that Dr. King advocated? You can read the whole piece here.

Less Stuff, More Happiness

After another good message yesterday at McBIC about the freedom of living with less debt, I was reminded of this TED video about being intentional about living with less “stuff”. We easily get caught up in the culture of accumulation. As Christians, we should be leading the fight against this, and leading by example. Graham Hill gives reasoning for this that is not based on Christ’s call on us as Christians, but simply based on practicality and the desire for greater happiness. Funny how the world can sometimes remind those of us from the Kingdom of things we should have figured out long ago.

Is Busyness Next to Godliness?

Most people would answer that question with some comment about how obviously wrong this title is. Still, we often live our lives as if it were true. Over at Relevant Magazine, Mason Slater offers some thoughts about the cult of busyness. After pointing out the cultural pressure, even within the Church, he offers:

Here’s the dirty little secret of the gospel of busyness: It promises us a full and satisfying life, but, in the end, it makes our lives emptier. It uses us for what we can contribute, and in the process we live less, feel less, even love less.

Instead of a life filled with the satisfaction of endless accomplishments, we’ve gotten ourselves a generation of chronic exhaustion, absent workaholic parents and kids who have been not-so-subtly taught that the only way to earn the attention and love of others is with grades, paychecks or championships.

But your value is not determined by what you produce. Your loveliness is not based on what you accomplish or how full your calendar is.

Work is good—it’s part of the way God designed His image-bearers—but it is not the only thing we were made for. He created us to have a balance in life, going so far as to incorporate a cycle of work and rest into the very fabric of the created order. There is a time for work in that cycle, but there is also a time for rest and community and quiet contemplation.

A life of constant overcommitment is not a sign of success, or something to be bragged about. It is a sign of imbalance, a sign we have put our faith in the gospel of busyness instead of in a God who dares us to trust Him and be willing to rest.

But Slater does not leave us to figure it out on our own. He offers the following advice:

There is hope for the overcommitted, though; we don’t have to live this way. We can balance good hard work with rest and play; in fact we were created to live in that balance. And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can all stop playing the game of bragging that we are so very busy.

So the next time you catch up with a friend, refrain from contributing to the cycle. Refuse to brag about busyness as if it were a virtue, refuse to act like making time to rest is a mark of shame. If the very God who designed us thought that balancing work with rest was worthwhile, perhaps we should give it a try.

You can read the rest here. This is a much needed reminder for many of us. I find myself defending myself for having the ability to take off a little early to accompany Joy to an ultrasound. Why do I feel this need? Because those around me seem to have an expectation that taking a half day is in some way shirking my responsibilities. Do I still get my work done? Yes. Then what is the big deal? We have set up a culture of busyness. We claim that we are busy so that we can have just one more thing we want, or so we can save for that family vacation. Yet, once we have that one thing, or that amazing vacation, we end up back where we started. Busy again. We are, in large part, fooling ourselves and living an illusion. If the point is to have time for our families, why not find a balance that allows us to be home with our family?

That is part of why I took this job over the (much) better paying offer from a pharma company. Here I knew that I would have more flexibility for what was really important to me. I don’t get to pick vacation days, since I need to be in my classes when Messiah College is open. The reward, though, is that I get to set my office hours around classes in such a way that I have flexibility to take off early if I want. Generally, I put in 10 hour days, but I have the freedom to take an early exit if I want. I set my own deadlines, for the most part. I have summers to take as many days out of the office as I want to spend time with Joy and the kids. We can take day trips, or overnight trips, without having to use up vacation days or ask permission. I chose a career based on my calling and skills, but also with the type of life I wanted to live firmly fixed in my mind.

This job also gives me a chance to reflect on articles like this and post my reflections. In many ways, this is actually part of my job. I need to be thinking through issues like this so that I can set a good example for my students of what a balanced, godly life looks like. I also need to be able to talk with them meaningfully about these issues when advising them, and provide them with resources as they process this and make their own choices in life.

Do you know of any other resources for students to encourage the Christ-like life of balance? I’ve blogged about one resource, Mark Buchanan’s The Rest of God. (Check out the posts starting with this, or pick and choose here.) I’m sure there are other resources out there. Please feel free to inform me in the comments section!

If we look at His life, we see the time away balanced with the miracles and preaching. It must have been a significant part of His life, since the Gospel authors all considered it worth noting. Therefore, I think this should be the goal of our lives!

The Joy of a Messy Life

The Author with His Three Kids at Wildwood Park

Great post about the messy-ness of the Christian life from my friend Cindy King last week over at The King Zoo and Funny Farm. She was contemplating life as an adoptive mother (in addition to five biological children) in light of the call of Christ to live a life of sacrifice. Here is a recent example from her life:

Recently, in a conversation about our adoptions, someone said to me, “Well, I hope that works out for you.” It took me quite some time before I figured out why that statement bothered me so much but I’ve come to realize that it’s the approach to life, seen behind this statement, that troubles me. The person who said this is a Christian. Like many American Christians, we’ve come to appreciate our comfortable lives and don’t want sacrifice, complications, or “messy” situations to get in the way of that comfortableness. It’s that sense of entitlement that I’m always fighting against in my children. If we look at our families, for example, from an American standpoint, “easy” or comfortable is good, “messy” is bad. In this view, raising children, adopted or biological, can be deemed successful by how well it “works out” or looks to our human eyes.

However, from a Biblical standpoint, “I hope that works out for you,” should have a totally different result. Did it “work out” for Joseph in prison? Paul and Silas ended up there, too. How about the many martyrs through the years? Or the missionaries at the end of the spear in a remote jungle. Here on earth it looks as if things didn’t work out. From Heaven’s eyes? Perfect.

A friend recently asked me to schedule some time with her as she and her husband are getting closer and closer to their anticipated adoption. As I’ve contemplated what to share with her, I really think this is where I’m going to start. If God has truly called you to adopt (or pack up and move, or minister in Ecuador, or start a new non-profit, or . . . ), then the good news is that it WILL work out because we DO know the end of the story. Will it look the way you expect? Probably not. Messy in the meantime? Maybe. Filled with blessings and help from above? Absolutely. And in the end? A reward ready and waiting.

Might I need a few trips to the Funny Farm before it’s all over? Yeah. In fact, I was there today. But that’s okay.

As many of my reader know, my wife and I have adopted two children from the foster system in PA. We also have a biological daughter and another child on the way. When the baby arrives, our oldest will be 7, and our adopted kids will be 6 and 4. (If you want history on our adoption process, check out my previous posts by looking for the adoption category in the right hand margin of this page, or check here for my “Adoption!” post.) Here is my response in the comments section of her post:

Very well said, Cindy. This says so well some of the things we’ve processed along the way. It isn’t about our comfort or convenience. We’re doing this because we know it is what He wants, and we trust Him to handle the details and the results. It isn’t easy, but it is so much more amazing and fulfilling than the comfortable life of complacency.

Thanks, Cindy, for the reminder of how wonderful life can be, even though it gets messy. I wouldn’t give up the craziness that is our home for anything. I praise God that we have a church (McBIC) that encourages our view of life, and one where we can be surrounded by so many who share our passion for adoption and care for the least of these.