Getting Over Grief (February 26, 2006)

"How long will you mourn for Saul?" (1 Samuel 16:1)

I was surprised how much those words took me aback when I read them in preparation for a Sunday School lesson on David. Before David's story begins, God has to tell a very depressed Samuel to "get over it." The first king that he had anointed, Saul, proved unworthy. Saul's line was supposed to continue forever, but now his kingship would not even make it to the second generation. What a blow! Samuel had selected, supported and pinned his hopes on Saul. When Saul turned away from the Lord, Samuel grieved. It would have been wrong not to.

Just as it would have been wrong for him to go on grieving forever. There comes a moment when you have to say "O.K., enough, time to move on."

Of course you can't say that right away. The Lord himself "grieved" over having made Saul king (1 Samuel 15:35). Jesus paused a while to weep over the death of his friend Lazarus (John 11:35). Job's friends grieved with him seven days (Job 2:12-13), and that turned out not to be long enough.

I don't know what is the right amount of time to grieve. It varies depending on the loss. We grieve little at the passing of an aged saint; much at the sudden departure of a young man. Then again, Israel "grieved for Moses...30 days, until the time of weeping and mourning was over" (Deuteronomy 34:8) - but even one day was too long to mourn the wicked young traitor Absalom (2 Samuel 19:1-8).

People differ on what they feel they have a "right" to grieve over. When I heard a young preacher talk about how much he and his wife suffered when she miscarried early in her pregnancy, I remembered my mother saying that a woman should not even announce that she is with child until she is pretty far along. All child-bearers miscarry, she said (she herself had lost several that way), and, relative to losing
a full-term baby, it is a minor sorrow that should be borne quietly.

It is hard for those who have not suffered a particular loss to intuit its severity. My sister lost both her son (he was murdered) and her husband (he cheated on her and abandoned her) the same year. Which is harder - to lose a son to death or a husband to wickedness? According to my sister, it is not even close: her husband's betrayal was worse than death.

But even deaths and worse-than-deaths must not be allowed to hold hostage forever our duties of work and our pursuits of joy. My mother sometimes quoted Joshua 1:2, where God says bluntly, "Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you...". That is, quit crying about Moses and get busy with the task at hand.

May God give us grace to know the opportune time when we must discard righteous sorrow in order to resume even more righteous activity. And may he supply all the strength for that too. We'll need it.

Prayer Meeting Paradox (February 12, 2006)

I would like to introduce you to an effect that I have found so odd, so striking - and yet so common - that I have decided to give it a name. I'm going to call it the "Prayer Meeting Paradox."

I first became aware of the Prayer Meeting Paradox in 1989, when my wife and I and our year-old son were living in Costa Rica learning Spanish. On occasion Linda and I would hire a baby sitter and go see a movie. First-run Hollywood movies only cost about 50 cents, and they were in English. (We ignored the subtitles.) We only got to see about four or five movies during our year in Costa Rica, so whenever we went I looked forward to it as a real treat.

But, I confess, I was never that eager to go to a prayer meeting. It is not just that I was struggling to learn the language. It was more of - well, let's face it - a prayer meeting is something you go to out of duty, not because you can't wait to have such a good time. Frankly, I would have been glad to have an excuse not to go ("It's raining buckets tonight - even with my umbrella I'll get soaked. Better stay
home."). But if something prevented my seeing a movie, I probably would have been peeved. My problem is that by nature I am just not that spiritual. As C. S. Lewis once confided to a friend, "Being religious really goes against my grain."

But after going to a few movies out of joy and a few prayer meetings out of duty, I noticed an effect that amazed me. After a movie I'd leave the theater feeling either vague dissatisfaction or nothing at all. But after a prayer meeting I would have such a rush of joy it was like walking on air. Every prayer meeting left me exultant. This is the Prayer Meeting Paradox: you don't want to go, but when you do, you wind up being unbearably glad that you went.

I have experienced the Prayer Meeting Paradox many times since. Thursday afternoons in seminary, for example, I would drag my reluctant self over to the nursing home for prayer and Bible study with the old ladies - and then by the time our fellowship would end an hour later, it was like somebody (the Holy Spirit, I guess) had slipped me an Ecstasy pill.

There may be explanations, sociological and biochemical, to account for the Prayer Meeting Paradox, but I don't think they exclude this spiritual explanation: The devil does not want you to pray with people, and he tempts you to avoid such gatherings. But once he has succeeded in tempting you away, he has no reason to reward you with pleasure. You're like the male praying mantis who, having rendered his service, is chewed up and digested by the mate who cares nothing for his well-being.

God, on the other hand, delights to reward our obedience with some "after-the-fact" joy. But since he desires obedience for its own sake, the joy that follows must be a little elusive, not precisely sought after, perhaps dimly remembered, and experienced only as a byproduct. Were it not so, then our good actions (like prayer meeting attendance) would be mercenary. We would be lab rats pressing the "prayer bar" just for the release of sweet endorphins. God does not want behaviorally-conditioned rats though: he wants sons and daughters. To that end, the connection he establishes between obedience and joy must be nuanced, even a little paradoxical.

There is a way to test my theory empirically. But you have to drag yourself to a prayer meeting to find out.

I Welcome Your Disagreements (February 5, 2006)

My heart gave a little leap for joy in our Sunday School class when someone raised her hand and said, "I disagree with you."

Great! Now the discussion can get interesting. Not that it was dull before (though, who knows, maybe it was), but a direct challenge to a statement of mine or of anybody else gives the whole conversation a keener edge. The sharp blade of disagreement is the tool a teacher needs to refine his own thoughts, retract his mistakes and clarify his obfuscations. Learners benefit when disagreement is expressed, since no other dialectical knife can better carve our thoughts into lean and worthy units.

The worst teacher I had in seminary was one who took disagreements personally, and who graded us on how precisely we regurgitated his opinions back to him. My how dull his classes were! It seemed we were learning not to engage and reason but to listen and repeat. The"listen and repeat" method is fine for multiplication tables, but
truths that are deep and satisfying are arrived at by weathering bombardments of "I think you're wrong," or, "I would put it differently."

Solomon liked a good argument. When he wrote "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another," he was indicating in part his dissatisfaction with the dullness of thoughts achieved in isolation. Even the wisest man in the world needed the stimulation of a few "No-Men" to fine tune his proverbs. St. Paul also liked it when people refused to take his word for it. Acts 17:11 says, "The Bereans were of
more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true." Paul wanted them to test his words against Scripture.

In C. S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the ship's crew come to an island inhabited by invisible simpletons, the Dufflepuds. The two parties sit down for dinner, and Lewis writes,

The meal would have been pleasanter...if the conversation had not consisted entirely of agreements. The invisible people agreed about everything. Indeed most of their remarks were the sort it would not be easy to disagree with: "What I always say is, when a chap's hungry, he likes some victuals," or "Getting dark now, always does at night," or even "Ah, you've come over the water. Powerful wet stuff, ain't it?"

Yes, yes, the ocean is wet, night is dark and hungry people like to eat. Snooze. Your life should be purpose-driven. Snore. (Sorry - that last one was a cheap shot.)

Don't be a Dufflepud. Once in a while say something people might actually object to. And if other people (even your pastor!) say something amiss, speak up with a hearty "You're wrong!" If your words are seasoned with grace, no reasonable person will be offended.

God, That Hurts! (January 22, 2006)

A friend of mine in college told me about the time an orthopedist manipulated his injured ankle while asking, "Does this hurt?" My friend said "YES! That hurts." Then the orthopedist kept right on working the ankle and my friend, thinking that the man was hard of hearing, said, "That hurts! I said that HURTS!" The doctor calmly responded, "Oh, I'm not trying to find out if it hurts any more."

My friend had assumed that the doctor was trying to minimize his pain - but apparently he had some other good reason for rotating my friend's foot like a corkscrew. My guess is that he was aiming at a more accurate diagnosis.

That incident came to mind when a devout friend wrote to me recently about some nastiness he was suffering. He understands that God teaches us things through our sorrows. Yet he wrote, "But sometimes I just want to say 'Enough already, I get it, I get it - there couldn't possibly be anything more I could learn from this pain.'"

I think he's right. Maybe there is still some lesson he needs to learn, but I doubt it. I suspect the reason lies elsewhere. In saying, "I get it, I get it!" he is probably like my broken-ankled friend saying "That hurts! That hurts!" - to which God might respond, "Oh, I know. At this point I'm not trying to teach you anything."

So what is God trying to do? I don't know, but it won't hurt to throw out a couple guesses - as long as it is understood that these are mere guesses.

Maybe your trial will benefit someone else in ways you could never imagine. I once wrote a whole Pastor's Page on this (“Do We Always Benefit From Suffering?” - August 14, 2005), so I won't belabor the point. But I know that I need to remind myself that even when my sufferings have been mined for all the possible benefit they can do
me, the divine drilling may continue strictly for the sake of someone else. Maybe if I could talk to God and say, "This isn't refining me any more!" he would respond, "Child, it isn't you I'm refining."

I wonder if the apostles of our Lord ever got sick of the beatings and imprisonments and death sentences and were driven to say, "Lord, is this really necessary? I think you know by now that I am loyal to you! These pains sure aren't making me any holier." But I don't think those sufferings were mainly for their sakes. They were for ours. To me one of the strongest evidences for the resurrection of Christ is the fact that the apostles were willing to suffer so much for it. That was unpleasant for them, but it is a constant support for my faith.

Another of God's goals when he keeps "twisting our broken ankles" may be to make heaven all the sweeter for us. I believe there are only two ways for a saved person to increase his reward in heaven: (1) Do good, or (2) Suffer a lot. The first factor is one we can control, the second is one that just kind of happens to us. I think that most of us know that we can make our heaven better by doing good, but maybe it is less widely appreciated that suffering (as long as we don't self-inflict it) has much the same effect. Jesus talked a lot about the last being first, the mourners being comforted, the hungry being fed, etc. Look at the story of poor Lazarus in Luke 16! A wretched earthly life yielded to a blissful eternity. Where grief has abounded, joy will abound all the more.

In the meantime, we just keep trusting God.

Helping Others When You Have Nothing Left (January 15, 2006)

Are you running on empty?

I suppose there comes a time in most people's lives when, in one way or another, they're running on empty - or at least on fumes. Maybe it is money they have run out of. They can't pay their bills. Maybe they have run out of patience for solving a domestic problem. Maybe their idealism has evaporated and left them cynical about doing any good in the world. Maybe their wells of creativity have gone dry (pastors know this!), and they fear they can't open their mouths without boring the bejeebers out of people.

I have a word for those who have nearly run out of money, energy, ideas, hope, or even goodwill: God may still require your fumes. He required the fumes of a desperate woman in 1 Kings 17. The prophet Elijah needed food, but God, rather than sending him to a wealthy patron with stockpiled provisions, sent him to a widow who had almost nothing. When Elijah asked her for bread, she explained that she had only a tiny bit of flour and oil with which she was going to make a meal for herself and her son before they starved. Elijah said, "Make some bread for me first."

That seems so wrong. Wouldn't it have been better to say, "Terribly sorry. I'll go beg elsewhere - enjoy your last meal"? But Elijah was just being obedient. In verse 9 God had told him that he had commanded this woman to feed him. It pleased God to supply Elijah's need from the near-empty cupboard of a miserable widow who was waiting to die. Then, of course, it pleased God to replenish her stock with just
enough food to feed Elijah, her boy and herself till relief came.

Sometimes our cup is filled to overflowing; sometimes there is just a bare runnel of fluid that will hardly collect to a single drop. But that drop is precious in the eyes of God when shaken out onto the tongue of a thirsting soul. Maybe it is the word of encouragement you give to a grieving spirit just before you retreat to your own room to cry your eyes out. Maybe it is the support check you write to a missionary that drops your own balance to zero. Maybe it is the favor you do for somebody that eats up the last minute of your available time.

What a humbling experience it has been for me to discover that some need of mine was supplied by an exhausted individual giving the last he or she had. And what a boon to faith it has been when my own hopeless fumes gave hopeful encouragement to some needy Elijah. Some varieties of God's grace seem only to abound when our resources most severely abate.

God still has good use for your near-empty tank.

Sinners Are Boring (January 8, 2006)

Evil gets dull after a while.

I mulled this over recently when I read Walter Scott's answer to a Parade reader who asked, "Is it my imagination or has "Desperate Housewives" become boring?" Scott answered, "If anyone's imagination is failing, it's not yours; it's that of the writers of 'Desperate Housewives', who've run out of ideas about how to keep five monotonously promiscuous suburban women fresh and entertaining."

I've never seen "Desperate Housewives", but I have no doubt that the reader's evaluation and Scott's analysis are correct. Evil, whether in the form of promiscuity or any other vice, just doesn't have staying power. After it entices and entraps, it bores.

One fine fall afternoon 20 years ago I sat in the Quad of the University of Illinois and overheard a conversation between two students about the upcoming parties that weekend. It was unbearably sad. These two had evidently partied themselves out, and their conversation turned into a grim analysis of how pathetic and disappointing the weekend's gatherings would be. But they would probably go to them all the same.

I once saw a snippet of an interview with a man - I think he was the manager of a Las Vegas show - whose job included the regular evaluation of bare-breasted young dancers. Certainly that's the dream job of any reprobate male, but he intoned lifelessly to the interviewer, "To me this is like mixing cement."

It probably wasn't like mixing cement the first few times. But my guess is that it got old quicker even than literal cement mixing, which, if done diligently for the sake of building roads and homes while providing work for a man's body and sustenance for his family, would eventually bring more satisfaction than constant breast-gazing.

Virtue is the winning tortoise to vice's spent and exhausted hare. Read a novel like Leif Enger's Peace Like a River (I'm trying to get everybody to read it) and notice how the holiest character (the father, a janitor) is also the most compelling. The same goes for The Chronicles of Narnia with its diamond stars Lucy, Reepicheep, Puddleglum and of course Aslan. Take any George MacDonald novel and the same pattern holds. Evil is a shallow puddle whose resources are soon sucked dry; goodness is an ocean whose bottom you cannot sound and whose farthest shore you cannot reach.

I am certain the writers of "Desperate Housewives" would take no counsel from me, but I think I can solve the riddle of "how to keep five monotonously promiscuous suburban women fresh and entertaining."

Easy. Get them to repent.

Can We Believe St. Paul Was Divinely Inspired? (December 25, 2005)

Last installment from my son’s letter from college:

"The professor challenged the assumption that Paul's words could be thought of as divine...Now obviously, Paul's word is not absolute, as women don't wear cloth over their heads, but with what seems to us such faulty morality [regarding Paul's words on slavery], why are we to believe that Paul was, in fact, divinely inspired?"

I replied:

There must be an explanation for what turned Paul from a murderer of Christians into a man who spent the last 30 years of his life as a ruthlessly persecuted Christian himself. Maybe he was just a nut - and a very unlucky one at that to have had religious hallucinations that worked so vigorously to his disadvantage. I think it is more reasonable to believe that he was telling the truth, that the risen Christ had appeared to him on the road to Damascus and turned his life around and commissioned him to speak God's word to the Gentiles.

Ultimately it is a matter of faith whether one accepts that Paul (or any other biblical writer) was inspired by God. Can you know it for sure in the same way that you know that two and two are four? Can you prove it like Pythagorean theorem? No. You can simply read Paul's words claiming divine authority ("If anybody thinks he is a prophet or spiritually gifted, let him acknowledge that what I am writing you is
the Lord's command" - 1 Corinthians 14:37), and then either accept it or reject it. Maybe Paul was a mouthpiece of God, or maybe he was an ego-drunk, power hungry, manipulative gas bag. Choose.

Do you remember the scene in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where the crew came to Ramandu's island and saw a magnificent feast laid out but were afraid to eat it? They thought the food and wine were the cause of a deep sleep that had settled (for years, apparently) over three figures seated at one end of the table. Ramandu's daughter appeared and told the hungry crew to eat. They explained their fears of enchantment, and she told them that the sleepers had never touched the food. When Edmund asked how they could know this for sure, she told them they could not. They could either eat the food or leave it alone. They could trust her and risk that she was deceiving them; they could distrust her and go hungry.

Noble Reepicheep broke the silence that followed by saying, "I will drink to the lady." He partook and suffered no ill effects and the rest joined in.

It is kind of like that with Scripture. The Bible itself says, "Taste and see that the Lord is good" (Psalm 34:8). To press the metaphor of feasting, I would likewise say that we must "eat" the Scriptures - but we must do so wisely. Though everything on the table is good, that does not mean we eat all of it the same way. (We eat teaspoonfuls of pudding, not teaspoonfuls of salt). Some examples might help explain
what I mean.

I take St. Paul's word as inspired and authoritative, but that does not mean that I have got a room ready for him in obedience to his command in Philemon 22: "And one thing more: Prepare a guest room for me..." We all know that that was a temporary, specific command for Philemon and it does not apply directly to us. (Though indirectly we might draw from it a lesson about hospitality.) Likewise, I don't kiss anyone at Faith Bible Church - despite Paul's insistence that Romans and Corinthians "greet one another with a holy kiss." A handshake and a "Good morning!" are what get the job done today.

You mentioned the head coverings for women that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 11. Here it gets interesting. In some Christian fellowships women still wear head coverings in submission to Paul's command. But I think I can safely argue that head coverings carry no more meaning for us than holy kisses do. A womanly hat meant something to the Corinthians but means nothing to us. So then should we simply ignore this admonition? I don't think so - we must re-interpret it in light of today's cultural practice. This is what we do with Jesus' command to wash one another's feet. I think it would be silly to obey that command literally (I'd rather wash my own feet, thank you), but hopefully we obey the principle of humble service that lies behind it.

I think it is reasonable and right to ask what principles lie behind the culturally specific mandates of Scripture. This does not deny the biblical writer's inspiration - rather it affirms that inspiration by seeking to submit to it in the most meaningful ways possible.