June 24, 2008: "The Lord Has Been Good To Me"

In an email recently I praised an individual for her sunny appreciation of God's blessings. She has to have a sharp eye for those blessings, because in many ways she has a difficult life. In fact, her general situation is so hard that I mentally reference her example when I quote to myself the proverb, "I cried because I had no shoes till I met a man who had no feet." She's the one without feet, and I'm just temporarily shoeless.

But while praising her peace I recalled a time when I was 17 and a friend told me how impressed he was with my mother's spiritual calm when she lost her husband. "She has such a look of the peace of the Lord on her face," he said, and I was shocked. "Oh no - you haven't seen her tears," I told him. "I see her anguish at home all the time."

I also recalled a moment when I was 14 and my mother was deeply upset over the fact that a family member had fallen into sin. Foolishly I said to her, "Mom - look at Dad! He's calm about this. He's taking it well." She told me, "No, he is not taking it well." And she explained how outraged and grieved he was, along with examples of how he expressed that in private. I hadn't known. I simply had not seen his sorrow. He had thought it wise - and certainly he was right - to hide that from his son.

We are like icebergs sometimes. I read somewhere, and suppose it's true, that only about 10 percent of an iceberg floats above the surface of the water. The rest sits heavily below where less sunlight can reach.

But it is good if that 10 percent of us that can bask in and reflect light is also the public side that people can see. This is not hypocrisy but good manners. Joseph washed tears from his face before appearing to his brothers (Genesis 43:31). Nehemiah only once gambled sorrow in the presence of Artaxerxes - otherwise his policy was never to be sad before the king (Nehemiah 2:1). While we must sometimes speak of our burdens in order to give others the privilege of bearing them, we do well to remember that they have their burdens too, and may well find their sorrows eased more by our expressions of gratitude than our cries of complaint. May God give us grace so that, like my saintly friend, our public face manifests a resolve to count our blessings more than we bemoan our curses.

The Gracious Gift Of Obligation

Do you ever feel tied down to duties from which you wish you were free? Those duties might be God's grace to you. To be relieved of them – if no fresh duties took their place - might be more numbing than pleasant. What happiness you have may depend in no small part on things that, if taken away, would not leave you saying, "Thank God I'm free!" but rather, "What in the world do I do now?"

Lately I have been reading through the private letters of C. S. Lewis (and what great devotional reading that has been!). In 1956 Lewis married a dying woman, Joy Gresham, mostly as a favor to her so that she could remain in England rather than be forced to return to America when her visa expired. He was her caretaker. Then she had a miraculous recovery, and they had a blissful two years together before her disease returned and she passed away. Shortly after she died Lewis wrote the following to a pastor friend:

I'd like to meet. Perhaps I could come up to town some day when you are in town and take you to lunch...For I am - oh God that I were not- very free now. One doesn't realize in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy one must be tied.

To be happy one must be tied! Those words hit me so hard I had to put the book down. I know them to be true. A kite, if it could think, might say, "This string pulling at my chest is annoying. If only I could cut it I could fly free!" But if the string were cut the kite would fall. The same string that holds it down also holds it up.

About a year ago I had a dream that had a strong emotional impact on me. In the dream I found myself in a line where people were buying tickets for some kind of entertainment. I happened to spot a lady friend there, greeted her and suggested (or assumed) that we go to the event together. But it turned out she was waiting to meet some other people and would attend with them. Feeling awkward, I excused myself, left and drove away. In the car I thought, "Well, now I can do anything I want." It was early evening and there was nothing on the agenda, so I was free to drive anywhere, eat anywhere, see a movie or go for a walk or anything else. But in the same moment I realized there was nothing that I really wanted to do by myself, and the thought filled me with sadness.

Solomon's near-absolute freedom wound up depressing him, and he wisely concluded that it was good for a man "to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor" (Ecclesiastes 5:18). Not apart from his toilsome labor, but in it. If you have things you must do, people you must care for, duties you must discharge, toilsome labors you must complete: give thanks. To be happy you must be tied to things for which people depend on you. Those duties, disguised as burdens, are often a gift from God.

June 10, 2008: As For Me And My House

Do parents matter?

Seriously. I'm asking this for real.

I found out the other day that a devout Christian friend of mine never knew his father, because the man abandoned his family when my friend was young. A pastor friend of mine, an example to me of holy good cheer, had a father who was angry and bitter. My father's father was a nasty unpleasant grouch - but somehow my dad wound up with a personality as warm as the sun.

Leon Powe of the Celtics grew up fatherless, and his mother, who had trouble with the law, died when he was a junior in high school. But Powe turned into a saint. Jim Daly, current president of Focus On The Family, was raised in foster homes - some of them really bad – after his parents divorced and his mother died and his stepfather abandoned him. But Daly turned out good.

Jerry Falwell's father tried to make him an atheist, and Madeleine Murray O'Hare tried to do the same with her son William. They failed, and their sons became outspoken evangelists of the gospel their parents hated.

And then there are all those good, godly parents whose children are evil. A missionary couple I know had a daughter who tried to poison them. That is extreme, of course, but I know plenty of cases not too far removed from that. Ever since God created Adam good people have begotten villains.

I find especially instructive those cases of close-in-age siblings, raised in the same home under the same conditions by the same parents, where one sibling is good and the other bad. A friend of mine (a good man) has told me that if his brother ever shows up on his doorstep, he will call the police (and I'm sorry to say he would be right to do so). Another friend who leads a moral life agonizes over a brother who has turned into a criminal bum. This friend happened to mention to me that his parents went out of their way to raise him and his brother just the same.

So, seriously: do parents matter?

After observing life and families and studying the Bible a lot, my answer has become, "Not nearly as much as we think." In the last few decades, parenting and family matters have become an obsession of the evangelical Christian subculture. The topic dominates Christian radio, is featured in a thousand sermon series, has launched millions of books and dozens of institutions. This fosters the illusion that we can control much of the way our kids turn out. The question I have been wanting to ask for a while is, "Why do we say so much about parenting when the Bible says so little?" Read through the whole Bible yourself and you will see what I mean. It is not that the Bible says nothing about parenting, but relative to other topics it is actually pretty low on the priority scale. Consider this: can you name even one child of a disciple of Christ? Can you name any of their wives? The apostles managed to write a whole New Testament and never mention their family members once!

I believe the apostles knew in their bones something we are in danger of losing: every one makes his or her own decision for Christ. Good parenting does not sanctify, and bad parenting does not doom. Do not take credit for your little saints, and do not beat yourself up over your little demons. Do your best as a parent, and remember always that your children will have to answer to God for themselves just as you will.

June 3, 2008: Suffering And Faith

Have you ever known someone who lost faith in God because of suffering? I mean his or her own personal suffering - not somebody else's.

I raise the question because people I know or know of who don't believe in God often point to suffering as the reason for their disbelief. The odd thing is, it always seems to be somebody else's suffering. Former evangelist and Billy Graham colleague Charles Templeton indicated that his conversion from Christianity to atheism involved outrage over the plight of starving multitudes in Africa. Templeton himself, however, led a long prosperous life in the United States and Canada. Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn wrote a "How can anybody believe in God?" essay after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami - but wrote it, of course, from the comfort of a desk in Chicago a half a world away from the killer waves.

At that time I wrote, "It just isn't the case that those who have suffered the worst lack religious faith while those who live at ease embrace it." Last week I came across a couple news stories that illustrate the point. The Tribune said that Rabbi Bob Schreibman began to lose his faith in 1988 when he had to conduct the funeral of 8-year-old Nicholas Corwin, who had been murdered in a random act of violence by a psychotic individual who shot up a school classroom. Schreibman, now retired, describes himself as a skeptic. Within days of reading about Schreibman, I saw a report on Bill and Linda Correira, who lost their daughter Bethany to a murderer-rapist in May of 2003. Bill and Linda, deeply religious both before and after the tragedy, have forgiven their daughter's killer.

Schreibman did not lose his own son, but the fact that another couple lost their son was enough to erode his faith. The Correiras, however, actually did lose their daughter - and in just about the most horrible way imaginable. But they have kept on worshipping God.

Though the cases of Schreibman and the Correiras are anecdotal, I do not believe they are merely so. As I pile up lots of consistent anecdotes over the years I begin to suspect that they reflect real tendencies. It would be going too far, and it would be uncharitable, to conclude, "See! No one who ever really suffered lost faith in God because of it." But what I think I can confidently say is this: Though suffering is perhaps the most frequently invoked reason to reject God, there is, in general, no positive correlation between one's own suffering and one's disbelief.

While I don't know a single person who became an atheist because of personal suffering, I do know people who became Christians that way. Some 23 years ago when I was working in a grim warehouse where it seemed that most of my co-workers were neither nice nor law-abiding, I prayed, "Lord, if there are any Christians here, please help me to find them!" Then one day I was in the cafeteria when I spotted a Bible on a table and sat down next to it to see who was reading it on break. It turned out to be a soft-spoken, kind-hearted black gentleman who explained to me how he had become a Christian. It was after his 4-year-old son died of a brain tumor.

May 20, 2008: Imaginative Works Where Holiness Dwells

In a sermon I recommended finding exemplars of holiness in great works of fiction. For men there is Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird and Jeremiah Land in Peace Like A River. For women: Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and Desdemona in Othello. For children: Lucy Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia and Charlie Bucket in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. For the imaginative: Reepicheep the Mouse and Puddleglum the Marshwiggle in Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair respectively.

Recently I found to my delight what I think might be an example of virtuous life imitating virtuous art. Just before the great battle scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis has the Christ figure Aslan give the following order: "Those who are good with their noses must come in the front with us lions to smell out where the battle is." The other lion in the scene, the merely mortal one, is exultant. He "kept running about everywhere pretending to be very busy but really in order to say to everyone he met, 'Did you hear what he said? Us lions. That means him and me. Us lions. That's what I like about Aslan. No side, no stand-off-ishness. Us lions. That meant him and me.'"

Lewis wrote that in 1949. In May of 1955 he was writing one of his many letters to Mary Shelburne, a neurotic American who constantly complained to him about illnesses and money troubles and all the injustices that others had inflicted on her. She also wrote bad poetry. Out of the blue, Lewis dropped the following:

Between ourselves, as one rhymester to another, it is a great pity that the word "world", such a good important word and often so emphatically demanding to come at the end of a line, has so few rhymes in English.

One rhymester to another! Goodness. Lewis should have been poet laureate of England, whereas Shelburne (bless her heart) was an irritating fool. When she got this letter, did she go around to her friends and say to them, "Do you see what Lewis wrote? One rhymester to another. That means him and me. One rhymester to another."

I'm reminded of the hymn Oh What Matchless Condescension the Eternal God Displays, and the Bible verse that says that Jesus "is not ashamed to call them brothers" (Hebrews 2:11). This is that gracious, unpatronizing virtue found in noble kings who treat mere peasants like fellow royalty - or themselves like mere peasants. Could the grace of Lewis's Aslan have been in the back of his mind when he stooped to Shelburne's level, or raised her up to his?

Jesus liked to use fictional stories (The Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son) to inspire good behavior in real life. With holiness in the real world so rare, fiction is a great place to find it. Read Pride and Prejudice (or watch the A&E miniseries), and in some situation you may soon be asking yourself, "What would Jane Bennet do?"

May 13, 2008: The Privacy Of Darkness And The Innocent Plea For Light

Three cheers for Wheaton College firing Professor Kent Gramm for refusing to talk about his divorce.

He's not getting fired for divorcing his wife, or being divorced by her. He's being fired for refusing to divulge details to college administrators. Wheaton has a policy that professors sign saying that they will abide by certain standards of Christian conduct, including
marital conduct. You can divorce your spouse if you have biblical justification for it - but you have to explain yourself. Gramm refuses to explain himself. He believes he should not be held accountable to the conduct code that he signed, and that the college has no business asking him about it. Now he has taken his case to the media. "I think it's wrong to have to discuss your personal life with your employer," he told the Chicago Tribune. He even dares to frame his case as an example for his students: "I feel that it's important for [the students] to know that they're not somehow rejected by God for having more or less normal lives and for having lives that didn't work out the way they intended them to turn out," he said.

Hey Gramm, got news for you. Christians aren't supposed to lead "more or less normal lives." We're supposed to be holy (1 Peter 1:16). Divorce isn't holy. God says he hates it (Malachi 2:16).

As a divorced man myself, I am blessed with an inside perspective here. When my wife renounced her faith and left me and divorced me against my will, I was eager for the spotlight of investigation. I made plain to all (and still do): "Ask me anything. And don't take my word for anything - here's her phone number and email and address; ask her anything about me. Ask my children about me. I have nothing to hide. I despise this putrid monstrosity of divorce - even as I despise rape and torture and genocide and all manner of evils that provoke the wrath of the Almighty. I have no part in this sin."

When charged, the innocent welcome investigation to clear their name while the guilty hide in the darkness of privacy. Jesus said, "[M]en loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed." (John 3:19-20). Wickedness fears exposure even as innocence longs for vindication.

Suppose for example we find out that a man was present at a Nazi concentration camp, but it is unclear whether he was one of the guards who incinerated bodies or one of the Jews who struggled to survive. So we ask him about it. He responds, "I think that's a personal question. It is really none of your business. Look, Auschwitz was messy and unfortunate and sometimes life just does not turn out the way you expect. The important thing is that God loves us all no matter what." That is not what a victim says. The persecuted Jew rolls up his sleeve and shows you the number tattooed on his arm.

We should look at divorce the way we do a dead body hanging from a noose. It is ugly and awful and we hope we never see it. But if we do see a hanged corpse, and have no other information, we can only conclude that a terrible sin has been committed. We don't necessarily know what it is or who committed it. Maybe the dead man was guilty of evil and justly hanged by duly appointed authorities. Maybe he was innocent but set upon by murderous thugs. Maybe he was guilty but hanged by a lynch mob contemptuous of due process, so there was wrongdoing on both sides. Maybe he committed suicide. There are all kinds of possibilities, ranging from 0 to 100 percent guilt on the part of the hanged man. While we don't know where the guilt lies or to what degree, we do know that somewhere, somehow, a moral outrage has been committed.

The one thing that passersby may not say when observing that body twisting in the wind is, "Well, that's certainly none of my business. These things happen. We live in a fallen world. Let's all agree not to talk about it. (Hey, I might want to lynch somebody myself some day, and the last thing I want is nosy people asking me questions about it.)" And if a possibly suspicious character near the body tries to shoo us away saying, "Move along! There's nothing to see here. This has nothing to do with you," then we have a duty to stand right there unmoved and insist, "I'm not going anywhere. I've got some questions first."

May 6, 2008: Can You Gauge Your Spiritual Progress?

"How are you doing spiritually? Do you feel you are making spiritual progress?"

These were the questions that my pastor would ask during a yearly home visit when I was young, and they would always annoy my mother. She never knew how to answer. How do you gauge your spiritual progress, and is it appropriate to do so? Do you respond, "Well, last year I prayed about 15 minutes a day but now I pray 20; and there were some occasions when I resisted my husband's leadership, but recently I haven't done that, so I'd say that while I used to be a 7, spiritually speaking, now I'm about an 8"? Mom found the practice of grading yourself in the things of the Lord to be distasteful.

All saints do. Their focus is on Christ, not on themselves and how well they are following Christ.

I have learned to distrust self-evaluation, having seen good people bemoan their depravity and bad people pat themselves on their spiritual backs. Forty-one years ago my father saw the church that we were attending utterly fail to respond in a godly way to a crisis in its midst, and he said, "This church will die." He was right, it did. He could perceive the spiritual decay, but the decaying ones could not see it in themselves. They were like the ghosts in M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense: they did not know they were dead.

Those who are spiritually alive, on the other hand, may be only vaguely aware of that life. The less aware the better. It is like playing basketball. A point guard who thinks, "I'm playing well now! Seven assists and two steals and even a blocked shot!" is more likely to commit a turnover in the next minute than the one who is simply focused on his job running the offense and listening to his coach's instructions.

Having carried with me all these years my mother's suspicion about the value of grading one's walk with God, imagine my delight the other day on finding the same thought beautifully expressed in a letter by C. S. Lewis. He wrote to his young friend and protégé Walter Hooper:

We should, I believe, distrust states of mind which turn our attention upon ourselves. Even at our sins we should look no longer than is necessary to know and to repent them: and our virtues or progress (if any) are certainly a dangerous object of contemplation. When the sun is vertically above a man he casts no shadow: similarly when we have come to the Divine meridian our spiritual shadow (that is, our consciousness of self) will vanish. One will thus in a sense be almost nothing: a room to be filled by God and our blessed fellow creatures, who in their turn are rooms we help to fill. But how far one is from this at present!

Indeed, we are far from this at present. But maybe, by looking to Christ and not ourselves, we'll inch ever closer to it.