It seems as if most of my son’s sentences begin like this: “Pretend…” Take, for example, the following actual quote: “Pretend the girl accidentally fell in love with the dragon.” This from a 3 year old who has no idea what “falling in love” means. But he knows that falling is usually bad, sometimes fun, and if life has taught him anything it is that accidents do happen. (That is, accidents happen from a certain point of view.)  Something else you will hear in our home is the recitation of Scripture. This is when we learn to delight in, and to submit to, that deeper truth that God is sovereign over all of life. Just now we are in Psalm 119:33-40 –a song of love for God’s Word. So, at our best, we live our lives at home in a twilight of imagination and deep truth. Far from being an obstacle to seeing, it is in this twilight that we see most clearly. Imagination is an avenue for seeing deeply truthful things with eyes unbound by erroneous and dogmatic insistence. Clearly the prevalent, problematic dogma being insisted upon in our times is one of rebellion in general –ultimately focusing on a rejection of the authority of God (and where he has placed his stewardship on earth). I believe that imagination is a way out of this wilderness. It is in such stories as The Lord of the Rings that we find ourselves immersed in a universe of such moral clarity and truth that it hangs like mist on the Lonely Mountain. It seeps through our unguarded gates. Belief is not as simple as intellectual assent alone. So children can grow their capacity for deep belief and strong commitment to truth by imbibing great gulps of imaginative literature. I would describe the role of imaginative literature in my own spiritual development with one word: essential. Materialism is a joyless vice. It is a vice in two senses, being that it is both evil and it strangles out many good things. Imaginative literature is a tonic towards health, a talisman to guard the open arches of the city. So many well-knotted lies are untied in the mind of a child whose imagination is alive. Literature is by its nature moral. Because literature is about people and people are moral creatures. Good literature allows a child to develop a moral clarity and sensitivity which no amount of dogmatic instruction can create. Certainly dogmatic instruction in truth is exactly what must be done. The Bible has the words of life (and Peter says “Where else could I go?“). So there is a sense in which the Bible is all we need. But the Bible is a book, written with words. It is also largely a story from a flawless Author (and here is that word Authority again). Understanding the language of stories and the power of words is an aid to our biblical understanding. So, I believe, imaginative literature is like a key opening up doors to new paths in the mind –a vast cavern of delight and wonder. Here the soul becomes prepared for deeper truths –for facts to fill the gaps. Don’t be fooled into believing that the facts don’t matter. Here is a modern pot of stew we are all boiling in. But a mind awake to wonder is particularly suited for spiritual consideration of those facts. So teach your kids the Book. Also, buy your kids good books. They are an inheritance of inestimable worth. However, not just any books will do. Like Eustace Scrubb in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a child who has read the wrong books is wholly unprepared for a confrontation with a dragon. He is as likely to become one as not. The world, as we know, is full of the scaly sort. So keep an eye on your princesses. From the Proprietor: Tuesdays usually feature a Song of the Day, and when I read this post I thought of a song on my new album called “Windows in the World”, which deals at least marginally with what S.D. is talking about here. Stories are but one of many windows God has placed in the world through which we catch glimpses of his glory, hints of “what is too good to be real but is more real than the air [we] breathe” (to quote Rich Mullins). Hope you like the song.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/Windows.mp3

Here we are again in the season of Lent – what has become one of my favorite liturgical observances. Since I didn’t grow up in a Christian home, I was always mystified by my catholic friend’s religious practice of ordering fishwiches from McDonald’s on Fridays.  “I can’t eat meat on Fridays for Lent,” they would explain, whatever that meant. I didn’t get it. But as I grew older and learned more about this sacred season leading up to Easter, I fell in love with it.  If you happen to be uninitiated as I was, one of the basic ideas of Lent as I understand it is to give something up during the 40 days leading up to Easter in order to help you identify with the sacrifice and sufferings of Christ.  As goofy as it may have sounded to me at the time to give up cheeseburgers in favor of fishwiches on Fridays for Lent, if that kind of thing brings the sacrifice of Christ to the forefront of our conscience, then I suppose that it  served its purpose. However, for me personally as I discovered the beauty of the Lenten fast, I felt like I wanted to sacrifice something more personal than a cheeseburger, something that cost me more on a deeper level, and so I committed myself to praying about what my sacrifice could be.  I believe the Spirit led me down a slightly  less conventional path and my Lenten fasts have taken on a different shape than the traditional model that I’d seen growing up.  At the time I don’t believe I’d ever heard or read of anybody observing it the way we now do in the Gray household, and I don’t think I’m clever enough to have conjured it up on my own.  It felt like it came by grace, like some songs do, or a rainy afternoon, or good dreams. I’ve since learned that who our observance of Lent is not unique – there are many others who share our mode of observance – but the point is that I’d never heard of this before and so I have reason to believe that it was inspired, in the truest sense of what that word means, by the Holy Spirit. What we did that first Lent and have been doing since is pray that the Lord would reveal to us anything that has some kind of lordship or mastery over us, anything that is competing with the supremacy of Christ for our attention and affection.  As the Spirit convicts and reveals what that particular thing is, then that is what we give up for lent. It is usually some sin, addiction, or lesser appetite that I can’t seem to beat or that occupies too much space in my life.  The idea is that it’s difficult – for me at least – to quit a stubborn sin cold turkey once and for all and expect that I’ll never stumble in that area again.  Ever.  It’s quite daunting and in most cases unrealistic.  I think of Bill Murray in “What About Bob” and his mantra of “baby steps…”  I believe the season of Lent can provide baby steps to freedom, an attainable goal of 40 days to give up that sin or habit you can’t seem to beat, to see what freedom feels like, to “taste and see that the Lord is good.” Over the years I’ve given up things such as fear, anxiety, certain eating habits, or other more private sins that stick to the walls of my heart.  I’ve also done things like commit to rekindling my affection for God’s word.  My wife gave up speeding one year, and it changed her life.  In the process she realized how much of life she lives constantly on the run, driven.  I introduced a friend of mine to this idea and he found much needed hope as he gave up a pornography addiction for the Lenten season.  Again, giving it up forever seemed an unattainable feat, but 40 days seemed  manageable and it was like entering his heart into a detox program.  In that time he started to get hooked on something else: the glorious freedom of the children of God. With the traditional Lenten fast, at the end of the 40 days you would get to enjoy whatever it is you gave up on Easter morning as a way of entering into the celebration of the resurrection, meaning you could swing by McDonald’s for that cheeseburger on your way to church. Of course my proposed observance of Lent breaks down here, as it would be a bit of a buzzkill (to put it mildly) to go binge on porn or push the speed limit or give yourself over to anxiety, or (insert your sin here_______________) on Easter morning.  Some of my friends have repeatedly pointed this flawed aspect of our Lenten fast out to me, as well as their disapproval of the idea of giving up a sin for Lent to identify with the sufferings of Christ.  Some of them wonder if the Gray Lenten observance might even be mildly blasphemous. Who can say? I get what they’re saying, I really do, and yet I can’t help but feel that ours is a fast that pleases the Lord.  Especially when it is a favorite sin that we fast.  I am, in fact, giving up something precious to me – a desire of my flesh, and usually a potent one that is trying to usurp my heart’s affections.  In this way, it is not only a very real, focused, and significant sacrifice but also one that acknowledges what Christ suffered for in the first place: my sin.  In giving this up I identify not only with Christ’s sufferings, but the bondage of my own misery as well – a misery that Christ came to deliver me from. And when Easter rolls around, though I’m not at McDonald’s scarfing down cheeseburgers, whispering Hallelujah between bites, My celebration comes in a newfound sense of the reality of the freedom that the resurrected life of Christ offers. Not to mention that on Easter morning I‘ve never rushed back to my old bondage.  40 days of freedom is enough to whet your appetite for more of the same.

Eighteenth century philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke wrote about the need for a “moral imagination.”  Russell Kirk explained what he meant by that phrase: By this “moral imagination,” Burke signifies that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events “especially,” as the dictionary has it, “the higher form of this power exercised in poetry and art.” The moral imagination aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth. In other words, the true purpose of art is not a light escapism or mindless entertainment, but to reflect and to produce an understanding of what it means to be truly human, and for humans to live together rightly.  The “highest form” or this moral imagination, Kirk and Burke argue, is not found in propositional statements of truth (though those are necessary), but in “poetry and art.” Madeleine L’Engle expressed a similar sentiment.  Noting, in Walking on Water, that when she observes injustice, neither theology nor philosophy help her much, she writes the following: The painters and the writers who see the abuse and misuse of freedom and cry out for justice for the helpless poor, the defenseless old, give me more hope; as long as anybody cares, all is not lost. As long as anybody cares, it may be possible for something to be done about it; there are still choices open to us; all doors are not closed. As long as anybody cares it is an icon of God’s caring, and we know that the light is stronger than the dark (117). It’s not that the theology and the philosophy are not needed and helpful explanations. It’s that we need the “icons of God’s caring” as well, because the icons – the symbols – reach us at the level that rational explanation cannot.  Propositional theology is always attained at the surface, moral, and allegorical levels of meaning – which is not a bad thing in the least; it’s just not all there is. This is why imaginative fiction, and the Bible itself, have a transformative effect on us – they take us through journeys not just of words and explanations, but of actions, metaphors, and symbols which powerfully move us.  C.S. Lewis, for example, framed his entire Narnia series on the imagery of medieval cosmology – the seven heavens.  He framed his Ransom Trilogy on the symbolism literary alchemy – a practice as old as Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet) and as new as J.K. Rowling. This is why fairy tales are more than just kids’ stories. This is why fantasy fiction isn’t just a fringe genre for geeks. Any story that helps us escape not “from the real world,” but “to more permanent things,” as Tolkien said, is worth the journey through its pages. As Tolkien wrote: Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in a prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

Unbelief is really just faith going in the wrong direction; as in Eden, we make an unconscious or conscious choice to go with Satan’s word rather than God’s Facts. Unbelief leads to bondage. The cycle of unbelief has become apparent in my own life many times as God has replaced old thinking patterns with new. I’ve finally encapsulated it in this brief summary. 1. Unbelief is the swallowing of a lie. 2. The lie generates fear. 3. Fear births the desire to control. 4. The desire to control prompts self-effort. 5. Self-effort produces tension in the body and mind. 6. Tension puts a lid or a cap on our abilities. I’ve seen this truth lately regarding the music I play. Lies I swallowed 25 years ago generated fear (“maybe I won’t succeed”). The fear birthed a desire to control (“I must do something to insure I succeed”); this desire produced self-effort (practicing feverishly). The self-effort ended up producing certain amounts of tension in my mind and in my hands, arms, and shoulders. That tension kept me from achieving the speed I’d had in the early few years before I swallowed the lies, before “grown up” thinking infected the childlike wonder with which I was learning to play banjo and guitar. Think about this paradigm in your own life. Marriage relationships. Parenting. Jobs. And especially our relationship with God. The lighting of the bomb fuse that blows up this false self is to replace wrongly directed faith with true faith. The lies in me have been replaced with truth – faith in the God who has given me a certain set of abilities for certain good reasons. This leads to a whole new set of inner and outer actions. The new paradigm looks like this: 1. Faith is the swallowing of the truth. 2. This truth generates a sense of sufficiency. 3. A sense of sufficiency births a God-confident attitude about playing music. 4. The God-confident attitude causes me to play music with more of a sense of joy and purpose. 5. The sense of joy and purpose creates ease and spontaneity in playing as I look to reprogram the tension in my body with this new restful, confident sufficiency. 6. The clearing of tension takes the cap off my abilities. 7. I more fully enter into my God-given purpose in life. So we ask ourselves, “Where else is the unbelief paradigm affecting my life?” The answer is that wherever there is fear, strain, and tension in the life of a believer, there is an inner lie causing it. It all starts with our identity in Christ, which is the subject of the last installment of Two.

I love when Jason Gray and his family stop in at the Warren for a visit. My kids love it too, even when the Gray kids aren’t with them, partly because they love to hear Jason tell stories. Usually when someone’s telling me a story that I’ve already heard I stop them mid-sentence, but with Jason we lean in like we’re hearing it for the first time. Jason’s newest album is a collection of live performances and stories from the road called Acoustic Storytime, and you can get it on iTunes and at his website. I picked two tracks for your listening pleasure. The first is an excellent song he co-wrote with Andy Gullahorn called “The Reason That You Brought Me Here”, and the second is one of the stories we’ve heard in our living room about seven times. THE REASON WHY YOU BROUGHT ME HERE I know I’d get an answer That I can’t understand If I ask that Your intentions be made clear I know Your plans are greater And in that greater plan Lie the reasons why You brought me here This story would be different If it were only mine to write There are secrets I would never volunteer But secrets lose their power When they have no place to hide Maybe that is why You brought me here Ooooh, all I see are the ruins Yeah, as the smoke starts to clear Ooooh, I hope You know what You’re doin’ ‘Cause You brought me here It’s a mess of my own making This I won’t deny And though the consequences shake my heart with fear If I was happy with the way things were I’d give more of a fight I guess I’m grateful that you brought me here Ooooh, all I see are the ruins Yeah, as the smoke starts to clear Ooooh, I hope You know what You’re doin’ ‘Cause You brought me here And if it’s hard to raise the white flag it’s even harder to believe That surrendering is worth the sacrifice And the very thing I always feared would be the end of me Was a way to come alive Now it hurts to be this broken But it’s bearable somehow As the chance to prove I’m worthy disappears I always heard You loved me But I think I know it now Is that the reason why You brought me here I’m grateful that You brought me herehttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/TheReasonWhyYouBroughtMeHere.mp3

Justin Gerard is one of my all-time favorite illustrators. He’s responsible for the cover of my album The Far Country, as well as the cover and illustrations for On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. For the last few months he’s undertaken the task of preserving his imagination before it is usurped by Peter Jackson and his well-meaning cronies. While the film version of The Hobbit will no doubt be a huge success, and will probably be a delight to watch, it will inevitably imprint itself on the minds of every future reader of this great story. This is one of the sad results of books-turned-films. Illustrations are less less intrusive than film in all its sound and fury, and seem more likely to merely inform and augment an imagination than to supplant it. So Justin set out to illustrate The Hobbit the way he remembers it–not the way Guillermo Del Toro sees it, and thanks to Justin’s blog we get to see the illustrations take shape. It’s a fascinating look at the fruit of one strong imagination’s influence on another strong imagination. Whether you’re a Tolkien nerd, an art nerd, or not a nerd at all, I’m sure you’ll enjoy watching this process unfold on Justin’s website. Justin told me he didn’t mind if I posted a few images from his blog here. But seriously, subscribe to the feed as I have, and watch these excellent works as they unfold. I’ll let Justin tell you about it in his own words: I remember having very clear notions of Shelob as a trap-door spider, that Isengard was more geometric and turned into a diamond at its top, that Sauron was seen as smoke and eyes and the illusion of oil-slick armor, that the orcs were meatier and more ape-like, with much longer arms, and knuckles that dragged the ground. The Balrog was only ever seen by the cracks in his flesh and his eyes and jaws. His skin would never really be seen for the smoke coming off it. The cracks in his skin would be like those in a lava flows seen at night, where some of it has cooled at the surface, but underneath it is still burning. And a few hundred other odd, now-forgotten notions of Middle Earth. I had not seen, at this point, any of Alan Lee, Ted Nasmith’s or John Howe’s fantastic paintings, on which the film’s art direction was to be largely based. I had a lot of very crystallized ideas in my head about how everything looked. And when the films were released I was jarred my first time seeing them. Things didn’t look like they had in my head. At first it bothered me. They got it all wrong I thought. But as the Fellowship of the Ring began to make its way towards Rivendell I was surprised that I found that I really enjoyed it anyway. It was a different take than I had, but it was spectacular and I went back and watched them several times each in the theater. Then something terrible happened. I found that I had lost my ideas. At first, they were only tainted by the films, but after a while I found that I had lost them altogether. And no matter how much I tried to see things differently, I still saw it the way Peter Jackson showed it. The Boromir I had imaged was gone and Sean Bean’s character remained. The goblins were hunched and crooked green men without noses. This has bothered me ever since, and now that The Hobbit films are on the schedule to be released next year I find that my ideas on The Hobbit are to be put in jeopardy as well. Click here to visit Justin’s blog.

The Levitical laws are suffocating in their all-encompassing completeness. Sin, sin, sin. The requirement for sin was that you publicly confessed it, had to bring your own property to sacrifice, and your animals had their throats cut or necks wrung because of what you did. The New Testament has a commentary on this: Hebrews 10. “For the law, having a shadow of the good things to come.. can never with these same sacrifices…make those who approach perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? For the worshipers, once purified, would have had no more consciousness of sins. But in those sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins.” So when that bull’s throat was cut and the blood pumped out in its death-struggle, when the innocent she-goat lay there with her legs twitching in a crimson pool, all it did was remind the worshiper of his imperfection, his sinfulness, his sin, his wrong. It reminded him that he was a bad person. And it reminded him that someday a Redeemer would come, the Seed of the Woman, the Anointed One, the Messiah. This is God hammering home the consequences of the wrong Tree, a performance-based acceptance with God. Strive to not sin. Pay up when you do. It is a sin-consciousness whereby we “try to not sin” rather than loving God and loving others. It’s the old covenant, the Old Testament. What is offered us in the New Covenant, the New Testament? A one-time, once-for-all sacrifice of the only One whose blood can take away sins. But wait, there’s more. Hebrews 10 goes on to say, “But this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God…For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being made holy. But the Holy Spirit also witnesses to us; for after He had said before, ‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws into their hearts, and in their minds I will write them,’ then He adds, ‘Their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.'” Now, let’s get this straight. The New Covenant is not only where the Messiah offers one sacrifice for sins forever and sits down, finished. The New Covenant is also where Jesus gives us an inner perfection by that one sacrifice, and that salvation in our inner being is being outworked into our daily lives because He has put His laws into our hearts and written them in our minds. This “Christ-in-you” was not revealed in the Old Covenant. So – sins paid for, once for all time. An inner perfection, given to us in Christ, once for all time. That inner perfection, Christ Himself, is being worked out into our daily lives because He is the inner, living Law put into our hearts, as the unbroken tablets of the Law were put into the Ark of the Covenant. We’re not only dead to sin in fact; we are also dead to the Law – to that sin-conscious, sin-generating system of performance-based acceptance. We have a choice. We can live according to the old way, sin-consciously building up a system of fence laws, rules and regulations based on fear of sinning. Or this: “Not only did Christ die for me, and pay for all my sins, but He lives in me and is even now my inner, living Law – both the desire to fulfill the Law and the power to do so.” This God-awareness (in an Old Covenant frame) is what caused God to call David, “A man after My own heart.” That’s what God is looking for – a vast army of Aragorns, “…who through faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in battle, turned to flight the armies of the aliens. Women received their dead raised to life again. Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection…” The choice is to live the old covenant, or to labor by faith to enter His rest – the righteousness which is of God by faith, ceasing from its own works. It is a giant-subduing faith, leading the alcoholic to get drunk on the Spirit, the porn addict to turn to the real Man within him, the financially fearful to trust upon the God who “owns the cattle on a thousand hills.” This is the God who draws us deeper and deeper into His inexhaustible Well. That’s the Good News; anything less isn’t. In the mid-nineties I found “Jesus-died-to-pay-your-sin-debt” was only half of the Gospel. I prayed at that time, “Lord, if you don’t change my life, don’t bother forgiving me anymore.” After growing up with a legalistic concept of God, and then after years of “greasy grace” I was sick of who thought I was. When God started to shake what can be shaken, a real self began to emerge and is still emerging – a humanity that is more and more being owned and operated by the indwelling Savior that is “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” the living Law that is in my heart and written on my mind. I’ve found Biblically and experientially that reliance on God brings His life through me; reliance on “my self,” brings me under sin’s power, because that “self” is a false self generated by unbelief. That’s life under the written Law, and the subject of Romans 7. But as we learn to walk in the Spirit – a faith-choice in every situation whereby we rely on Christ-in-me to live through us – He lives. Temptation and even sin become God’s calling card telling us what the next area of Spirit appropriation and victory will be. So ask yourself: “Do I live in a sin-consciousness? Do I feel I have to ‘pay up’ when I sin? Am I aware daily that Christ paid a one-time eternal fee for me? Am I aware that He has put Himself in my heart and written His laws on my mind? Do I live from that awareness – or do I live from sin-awareness, fear, and my own fleshly striving to do good and avoid evil? Am I walking in my true identity?” The one consciousness brings about the seeming reappearance of “the old man” as we lock into a false struggle with ourselves to in an attempt to do good and avoid evil by our human will power. The other consciousness – faith in God’s Word –  causes Christ to live through us more and more as He progressively appropriates more and more of our psyche and body. Faith takes the things of the Unseen and brings them down into manifestation; through faith our inner and outer Land is taken for the Kingdom.

“Pontius Pilate sought to release Jesus.” —John 19:12 Think about that for a second.It has been years since I observed a proper Lenten Season.  But the activities in New Orleans on the news are telling me Lent has begun.  Lent, this year, converges with a sermon series I’m working on dealing with the final week of Jesus’ life.  So as parts of my study for those messages present themselves as well suited for blog posts, I’ll bring them to the Rabbit Room in this span of time leading up to Easter. Today I can’t seem to shake the implications of John’s little statement above about Pontius Pilate.  Doesn’t it sound loaded with implication?  It sure does to me. Though Pontius Pilate ultimately became the man who ordered Jesus’ crucifixion, there were several points along the way where his actions were intended to prevent Jesus’ death. Consider the following instances: —Pilate vocally objected to the credibility of the charges against Jesus many times over: “I find no basis for the charges against this man.” (Mk 15:14, Lk 23:4 14-16, 22, Jn 18:38, 19:4) —Pilate questioned Jesus privately, away from the Chief Priests, giving Jesus a chance to defend Himself against the charges. (Jn 18:33, 19:9-11) —Pilate sent Jesus to Herod after finding no basis for the charges against him.  Pilate wouldn’t have done this had he thought Herod would disagree.  That would have been politically embarrasing.  Also, it might have made him appear like a poor judge in the eyes of his superiors.  Pilate was certain Herod would agree with him, resulting in a concensus that Jesus didn’t deserve to die.  And he was right.  Herod agreed. (Lk 23:6-15)  This, Pilate hoped, would end the momentum of Jesus’ accusers. —Pilate invoked his tradition of releasing a Jewish prisoner during Passover—giving the people a choice between Jesus and Barabbas, a known murderer, thief and insurrectionist.  Pilate thought the contrast between these two would leave the decision to release Jesus ironically in the hands of the mob who brought him there.  Surely given this choice, the people would free the non-murderer.  He was wrong. (Mt 27:15-22, Jn 18:39-40) —Pilate had Jesus publicly flogged.  This may not sound like an attempt to release Jesus, but the thinking was that maybe Pilate could satisfy the mob by taking Jesus to a point close to death without having to actually kill him.  Then, Jesus could live out the remainder of His days bearing on His body the marks of the Roman flogging and in His mind, the memory of the crowd as they cheered for this.  Maybe that would suffice. (Lk 23:16, Jn  19:1)  Wrong again. You might say Pontius Pilate was Jesus’ most ardent defender during these few short hours they had together.But with friends like this, who needs enemies, right? I don’t mean to foster sympathy for Pilate here.  And I certainly don’t wish to defend his cowardly, wicked acts.  Ultimately it was Pilate who held the civil authority to order a death by crucifixion—and this is what he did. I do want to say this though.  Pontius Pilate was no hero, but neither was he the consummate bad guy with the thin mustache sneering through the wispy trails of smoke rising from the “Cruella De Vil” cigarette in his hand. (Sorry Buechner.) Pontius Pilate was a middle-management Governor—basically a mayor with soldiers. He hoped, as any mid-level politician would, that his stock was rising. Judea was a stop along the way to the power, stature and respect he hoped to one day possess. He was a godless man motivated by a desire for the outcome of this unrest to be one that played to his favor. And for all of us, when it comes to this part of the Easter story, we have not understood the Cross until we have understood that, left alone, we are vastly more like Pilate than we are like Jesus.Pontius Pilate didn’t want to release Jesus for Jesus’ sake, but for his own.  He’d rather not have to explain to his superiors why a religious dispute required him to have a man under his authority executed. He’d rather not have to feel like a puppet at the hands of powerful and influential religious leaders.  He’d prefer for this matter to end with everyone alive and happy. But not really for the sake of anyone’s life or happiness except his own. This intrigues me because it raises questions: How many of my actions which appear noble and for the good of others are really more for the sake of making my own life easier?  And what does that say about what really drives me to act nobly? Appropriate questions to consider leading up to Easter?  What about you?  What in your own motivations of the heart testify to your need for the Cross and the Empty Tomb.

What about the old man? What about sin? Does Christ indwelling us mean that now we can trust Him in us every morning and then just go about our day walking in the Spirit, never being tempted or sinning? It is just in this tight spot that we find the story of the Exodus useful. The Hebrews were saved from Egypt’s dominion over them. But then they had to make a journey. They were not only saved from something; they were saved to something. They were saved to the Promised Land – from bondage to freedom. But nearly the entire first generation didn’t make it there. Their un-faith in God’s promises produced fear, which brought  the desire to control their own lives. “Let’s go back to Egypt.” “Not Thy will, but mine be done.” After years of this, God had had His fill, and after the carcasses of that generation fell in the Wilderness, Joshua and Caleb went in and took possession of the Land by a process – a continual process of faith. Whenever they resorted to their own human effort rather than relying God’s power and their identity as His chosen people they lost that particular battle. But eventually through faith they subdued the Land – more or less. The Land was theirs already by divine decree, in the Unseen. All they had to do was seek God’s face, trust Him, and walk in that trust, and that Land would progressively become theirs in the Seen. God would go before them, sending hornets, being their strength, confusing the enemy. Likewise, in Christ we are saved from something – the bondage and power of Sin. Mr. Sin, in fact. We are cut off from his dark domain. But there is a Wilderness – the no-man’s land between bondage and freedom. This is the believer’s Wilderness. Christ has redeemed you from sin, from bondage. He has loved you, called you His chosen. He has put His Spirit in you, made you one Spirit with Him. The old you in Satan (Eph 2:2) died, and the new you in Christ is risen to walk in newness of life. You are called to enter the Land and subdue the giants, the fierce inhabitants. All this happens by faith, not by exertion of human power. We seek the Lord’s face, trust Him, and go forward in that trust. The problem is that most of us won’t enter the Land. We spend years in no-man’s land – the Wilderness. Mix one part salvation and one part longing to return to bondage. “I’m such a sinner. An awful sinner, and I can’t change. Thank God for grace.” Or, “I’m doing better than Joe down the street. At least I go to church and read my Bible.” Or worse, “I’m involved in this church program and I host a Bible study and I’m doing this and that and these other things for God (and what an excellent fellow I must be! I’m so much better than all those other people!).” We give up and refuse to trust God; we trust our own effort, our own programs, our own ways, our own thoughts. We believe in sin’s power over us. And we trust God to “get us to Heaven.” One foot in Canaan and one foot in Egypt. Doing the splits makes it a little hard to walk. The question for us is this: Do I really believe the Word? Am I dead to sin? Am I dead to the Law, to using my own effort to become good? Am I a new creation? Am I holy? That’s what God says is Fact. Immutable. Eternal. These things are true right now. And we must deal with Fact, face it – believe it, or choose to believe our eyes, because this subduing of Canaan starts and continues and ends by faith. We can look at the giants. We can look at the fierce inhabitants. We can cower in fear. I can look all day at things in my psyche and think, “Oh man. This is never going to change.” Or we can look at God’s Word. His promises. His reliability. His love. His power to accomplish what He says He will do. What He wants is those who will go forward – not those who look back. He wants us reaching for the prize – a Holy Spirit empowered, gigantic butt-kicking of all the junk we were saddled with in our psyches, junk that we have followed our whole lives. It’s all got to go. And it does – as we faithe. That new man in us wants to push through the accretions of years of wrong thinking, falsely independent attitudes, and self-reliance, to break through into the Land and take it over. This of course is a process, like the land of Canaan. We are “being made holy” in our thoughts, attitudes, and actions, because in Christ we are filled with the Godhead by the Spirit. We don’t have just an outer, transcendent God, but an inner, immanent one. That’s the real you, the real me. The new man – a union between the human vessel and Deity, just as the old man was a union between the human vessel and the false deity. God wants to turn this new union into a unity of thought and being, where His will is our will at all times and in all situations. But we’ve been fooled into thinking that the old man is still alive. We’re to put off his deeds because he is dead; although Satan still shoves his thoughts into our minds he has been circumcised right off of us and is no longer a part of our identity. God wants faith-warriors. When we hook into that Power by faith, we become unstoppable. One by one, the inhabitants fall. The question is do we want to subdue the Land “more or less,” or totally?

Probably most of you have heard of Malcolm Gladwell, the author behind such best-selling titles as Blink or The Tipping Point. If not, then just know that it’s stimulating, easy to read non-fiction that Wikipedia calls “pop sociology.” (Although I realize that someone could easily edit it if you wanted to fact-check me and change it to Andrew Peterson impersonator). Anyway, Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers, holds interesting truths within and specifically for the church. And it’s something I’m particularly drawn to since I believe the consequences could be huge. Pause. Let me back up a bit by saying that I’m in the middle of 1 Timothy in our teaching series at church. One verse within mentions doing everything without favoritism and remaining impartial in selecting leaders. All of our teaching weeks have focused on the development of a new community – that our world around defines us by our job, our status, our race, our class, our gender. But the radical reality of the Kingdom of God wrecks all those identities and erases all those lines. Unpause. Gladwell’s basic premise (Spoiler Alert!): we are all the same in our ability to succeed. To argue his point, Gladwell enters the realm of athletics, law, politics, corporate millionaires (et al.) to realize that from Bill Gates to Wayne Gretzky, they were simply a product of luck or chance and hard work. And anyone else in their same shoes could succeed on the same level if they were also willing to work hard. The idea might sound far-fetched because we’re taught from the beginning that some are “gifted and talented” – as my school called it – and the rest were, well, not. Thus those who are deemed as “special” are given the extra chances to be even more special, thus continuing to separate the lines between the haves and the have-nots. In the end, you’re left convinced that Gladwell is onto something and that our society has ruined countless opportunities to embrace the down and out because we’ve bought into this sociological lie. This is beautiful news to someone like me, trying to get a community of people to realize that all are equal, that all are called children of God, and that the body of Christ shouldn’t play favorites. What if we didn’t choose our favorites from class, but instead worked with all kids equally and made sure they all had that same chance? What if we created systems of learning or tutoring that believed that every child who entered that room could – given the chance – become something “special?” I’ve always been privileged. Sure, I have my downer stories (growing up in a trailer park, etc.) but my reality was that I had very active parents (mom mostly) who worked with me incessantly. I knew the alphabet forward at one and a half, backward at 2, books of the Bible memorized at 3 and reading small books at 4. Someone chose me early and made sure I would be something. Gladwell’s book goes beyond “cool cultural insight.” What it does is give us some proof, some solid reasoning, behind the Christian calling to make things level – that we would follow Jesus into his interactions with the poor and oppressed and marginalized. And that along with our feet and Good News, that we might bring some opportunity with us to help call someone “special” who has never heard those words before.

My evening reading for the last couple weeks has consisted of a book of essays by British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, alongside G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. In chapter six of Orthodoxy, The Paradoxes of Christianity, I found a passage where Chesterton helped me explain my interest in reading Russell’s book. Describing how he came to faith as a teenager, Chesterton writes, “I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now.” He said it was the reading of the prominent atheists and agnostics of the day that brought him back to Orthodox theology. “They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt.” With that in mind, there was one paragraph that stuck out to me while reading the essay Russell’s book takes its title from, written in 1927, where he gives his thoughts on the roots of religion. “Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.” The reason Russell’s list struck me was because, if asked, those are three of the reasons I would give for why I believe. Or rather, the antithesis of that list. I believe because I embrace mystery, because I am persuaded that there is more than I can see, because I hear echoes of eternity around me that I can not explain. I believe because, in a final and eternal sense, I do not fear defeat. I have hope that things will be made right, that every sad thing will become untrue. And I don’t fear death, trusting in the words of the One who sits on the throne that all things will be made new, that the end is not the end. My friends know that I love quotations. I probably bore everyone around me by repeating lines from sermons, books, and songs that I’ve heard or read whenever I can slip one in. The one I’ve been repeating the last couple of weeks, my favorite quote at the moment, is one I’ve heard N.T. Wright give in a couple different sermons I’ve listened to recently. Wright mentions a friend of his, Leslie Newbigin, who was asked if he was optimistic or pessimistic about some issue. Newbigin’s answer, for me, is the answer to Job’s question, the question of theodicy. It’s the answer to the genocide in Rwanda. It’s the answer–but not necessarily the explanation–to my questions about wealth and poverty, sickness and health, indescribable happiness and unbearable tragedy. It’s an acknowledgment that there is something that transcends my questions, that “His ways are higher than my ways.” Newbigin’s answer? “I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.” Andy Gullahorn’s song Resurrection, recorded by his wife Jill Phillips on her new CD The Good Things, wrestles with this paradox of believing in Resurrection in spite of sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It’s one I find myself listening to on repeat late at night when I need to know others find the strength to somehow believe.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/Resurrection.mp3

While we were in college, my then-girlfriend, now wife, Danielle, introduced me to the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye. Though I was not reared on poetry or the merits of prose, most of it soaring far above my head (sorry, Bill Shakespeare), I was readily drawn into the world and words of Mrs. Nye. I know next to nothing about iambic pentameter, free verse, or the various types of rhyme patterns, but hers was unlike any poetry I had ever experienced, tender, graceful, plain-spoken, humorous and utterly human. The first poem of hers I read – rather Danielle read to me from a class assignment – was titled “The Traveling Onion”. She then read “Famous”. I was hooked. Finding a copy recently of one of her newer collections, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, I have found great pleasure in reading a few excerpts at bedtime, sometimes aloud to Danielle, before nodding off for the night. Nye, a resident of San Antonio, TX and of Palestinian descent, so richly communicates the richness of her ancestry that it is hard to conceive of any world culture failing to make peace with one another all these millenia, explosions, and deaths later. Our planet would be a safer, more sane, more peaceful place were it not for the stubborn, thick-headed, childish governments of the world. Nye never sinks to pointing fingers, but with the humility of a painter, she instead uses language to draw pictures describing the everyday beauty of the individual. Governments and so-called leaders will not spare this world its peace; only the individual choosing to love and honor his neighbor offers that sort of hope. Nye shows that, though we are made to believe we are all so vastly different, in actuality the cultures of the world have more beauty in a common humanity than any newscast would ever bother to convey. An elderly Palestinian man in worn coat and tie reaches up to pluck a fig from his backyard tree with such joy that one must smile from half a world away at the very thought of the sky and the soil and Yahweh finding pleasant agreement in the scene. An onion lies peeling on the drainboard, limp, translucent and divided, providing an object lesson in the humility of the small, forgotten things of earth. These are the types of moments Nye is profoundly adept at depicting, and I am grateful to be reminded of my own simple place in the turning of the earth, my own richness in the world, my own silk in the woven tapestry. A few years ago Danielle went to visit her sister in Florida. I elected to stay home. She left me with a writing assignment for the week: to write a song based on Nye’s poem, “The Traveling Onion”. I wrote, then, what amounted to the comparison of a career in music to that of the translucence of an onion, tears, flavor, subtle texture and all. The song, of the same title, will be included on my newest and forthcoming album, due out this spring. “Answer if you hear the words under the words — otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.” (from “Words Under The Words”)

Fifth grade wasn’t kind to Susan O’Farrell. No longer an undifferentiated mass of squirming humanity, our class at Miller Elementary began to sift itself into the social haves and have-nots, the in-crowd and everybody else. Susan O’Farrell, a plain and unremarkable girl, suddenly found herself on the outside of friendships she had never had reason to doubt. And even I, oblivious as I was, became aware of the growing sadness that seemed to be the central fact of her life. The angles of her face got sharper, and the dark circles under her eyes got darker, giving the impression that she was sinking more deeply into herself. I was a nice boy, and I tried to be nice to Susan. I imagined myself one of the few rays of sunshine in this girl’s darkening existence. Why, then, did I wrong her so unaccountably? One day during recess I returned to the classroom to fetch my coat. Emptied of fifth graders, the room seemed a completely different place. It was a strange and exhilarating feeling to have the room to myself. I savored the experience, walking up one row and down the other, seeing my friends’ familiar desks and possessions as if for the first time. Looking at Susan O’Farrell’s notebook I was struck by something so obvious I couldn’t believe I had never noticed it before: that second ‘r’ in her last name could easily be made into a ‘t’ so as to read O’Fartell. Get it? Fart—right there in the middle of her name! I pulled the pen out of her spiral binding and scratched the ‘t’ in its place, a little larger than it needed to be, just to be sure my efforts wouldn’t go unnoticed. The spell of the quiet room was broken; I went back to the playground. When the bell rang for the end of recess, I hurried to my desk. I wanted to be watching when Susan saw what I had done to her notebook. I looked as nonchalant as I could as she came to her seat, catty-corner from mine. This was going to be good. I didn’t have to wait long. Susan’s eyes widened when they fell on her notebook. Then they filled with tears. Then she hunched over, covering her name with her forearm. She looked furtively to her left, then to her right to see who had noticed her humiliation. And also, I believe, to see if she could tell who hated her enough to humiliate her so. Up to this point in the story, I’m willing to chalk my actions up to youthful indiscretion. My motive was wordplay (albeit juvenile and coarse wordplay), not malice. Until the moment I saw Susan’s face collapse, it hadn’t occurred to me that she might not appreciate my wit. In other words, my failures to this point were the failures of the immature. But as Susan scanned the room, I made a very mature calculation. I realized that I was literally the last person in the room Susan would suspect of such a meanness. If I played it cool, she would never know I was the person who had hurt her. So there I sat, looking off into the middle distance, pretending I hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Susan scribble out her name. Think on that a minute: in her sadness and hurt, the poor girl scribbled out her own name. It would have been so easy to fix my mistake. Two or three sentences: “Susan, will you forgive me? I don’t know what made me write that on your notebook, but I promise it wasn’t because I dislike you or think there’s anything wrong with you.” Which would have been true. But saying that that would have cost me something. Susan would have thought less of me. She might tell our classmates what I had done. I told myself that Susan would be crushed if she knew that I, the nice boy, had done such a thing to her. If she couldn’t trust me to be kind to her, whom could she trust? Best to let her keep some shred of hope in—well, in me, I guess. Besides, it wasn’t like me to persecute the downtrodden or to deface other people’s property. I had never done that sort of thing in my life. Surely I could be allowed one mistake, as long as I promised myself not to do it again. And I never didn’t mean to hurt Susan. Wouldn’t the judge count that in my favor? So I never told Susan what I had done. I let that suffering girl believe that, on top of the rejection she felt every day, she had an unknown enemy actively seeking to hurt her. I felt the cowardice of it, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything about it. The next day Susan had a new notebook. As far as I know, nobody but she and I ever saw what I did to her old one. Every day until the end of the school year, I felt a pang of conscience when I saw Susan and her clean notebook. Any one of those days, I could have made things right. But I never did. I never paid the small price of confessing my wrong. Instead I let Susan pay a heavier price. Oh, but I paid a heavy price myself: it’s a hard thing when you realize you’re not as righteous as you thought you were. The next year, Susan was in the other sixth grade class, and she mostly faded from my consciousness. The year after that, we went off to different schools. If I ever saw her again, I don’t remember it. I don’t suppose I even heard her name mentioned until one day in high school an old classmate from Miller Elementary asked, “You heard about Susan O’Farrell, I guess? Dead. She had some disease. Had it for years.” I wish the story had a happier ending. But when fear and self-protection and self-righteousness carry the day, we can’t expect happy endings. Instead, we’re left longing for the day when love and truth and justice win out and sweep everything before them like a flood—the day when, to paraphrase Sam Gamgee, every sad thing will come untrue. Lord, haste the day.

Every believer deep down wants to hear Jesus Christ say “Well done, good and faithful servant” on the Day. All we have to do is ask ourselves and listen within; if we listen deep enough we’ll find the Holy Spirit way down there resounding with a great “Yes!” But the question many of us have is “How do I get there? How do I change? How do I become ‘Christ-like’?” The usual answer I’ve heard is to read more, pray more, go to church more, start a Bible study, work in the soup kitchen, and any of a number of “do this and don’t do that” kinds of thinking. While all those things can be good actions, they can spring from the wrong source – the wrong Tree. Pretty soon we are doing this and doing that to try to become more sanctified.But that isn’t God’s way. He says in Isaiah 55, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways…For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” More twos: His thoughts vs our thoughts. His ways vs our ways. God’s way is that fruit comes from His implanted Word, the rain of His Holy Spirit watering it. It will not return to Him void. Yet He bases the amount of fruit on a believer’s level of trust. Thus, “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him: Rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Col 2:6-8). Here we have another pair of things: the faith-in-Christ way, or being spoiled through “our ways”: deceptive thinking and traditions modeled after the satanic principles of the world and not after Christ. Once again, we see the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Growth in Christ – or “growth” according to satanic principles. We can be built up – or robbed of fruitfulness. This echoes 1Cor 3, where Paul says he laid the foundation of Christ in the Corinthians, and other teachers build upon that foundation. Paul warns that every man take heed how he builds on the foundation; teachers are to build Christ upon Christ, faith in Him upon faith in Him; that’s building with gold, silver, precious stones. The teachers are responsible for what they teach; we are responsible for accepting or rejecting true or false teaching. So here I ask a question, to which I think I have in part the answer: What does God’s optimal believer look like? Here’s at least a partial answer that goes a long way; bear in mind that this is not some sort of method, but a picture: God is looking for faith in His Son. I don’t mean merely trusting Jesus “up there” to save us from our sin-debt and take us to Heaven. I mean a present-tense, here-and-now faith in Jesus who lives by the Holy Spirit inside you, inside me. We have to renew our minds to the new-creation reality: I am not an independent self trying to be good and make life work by my own effort. I am a human container, a cup, a vessel, who has an indwelling Lord. I am a slave with a inner Master, a wife with an inner Husband, a subject with an inner King, a son with an inner Father – a need with an inner Supply. “Well, then,” some will say, “Why, if I am all those things, do I still sin? I’m trying to be this new inner man, trying to do what God wants me to do, trying to follow the Master, and I keep on failing. Where is this abundant life of faith and victory?” That’s the unrenewed mind, the wrong Tree; that’s the trap of Romans 7. The Christian does not have to become holy; he already is holy. He is a man set apart. The believer does not have to become a good person by his human effort; he is a good person because the only Source of goodness in the universe lives inside him. ”Well!” some will say, “We’ve still got to act like it! Faith without works is dead!” To this I wholeheartedly agree. What I disagree with is the common, satanic, legalistic method of “getting there.” Any Way which does not begin and end in a wholehearted reliance on the One who said, “I am the Way,” is doomed to failure. Whether legalism or license is of no consequence; they both fall off this narrow Way, the width of a single Man. Works that spring from anything but God’s life through the channel of faith will burn in the end. God is looking for faith-people. Faith-ers. A peculiar people, the uncommon folks who will rely on Him every step of the way. Like Aragorn, through faith and endurance they slash through demonic hordes, deception, and lies to find their real identity, their true kinship and kingship.This kind of faith, the faith that recognizes God’s truth as Reality even though circumstance says otherwise, is what brings us to the expression of our real identity; we say in faith that we are loved when we feel unloved; we say in faith that Christ in us is our strength when we feel weak. We don’t deny our feelings, but we put them in their proper place. Trinity says to Neo, “…the Matrix cannot tell you who you are.” God is the Teller of our identity. If we hearken to Him, and put that new-creation identity in our mind-mirror daily, it will begin to show in our thoughts, attitudes, and actions. God only. That’s the Tree of Life. Christ alone has redeemed us; Christ alone has cleansed us, justified us; Christ alone has perfected us forever by His one sacrifice, and now is transforming our daily expression of life into His image. All we do is rely on Him, believe what He has told us in His Word, and step out on that Word as if it were true (because of course, it is). That Word, when mixed with faith, washes away the grit and grime of the wrong Tree, and so we learn to stand. We’ll discuss “the old man” in Two, Part IV.

Please enjoy my favorite song from Andrew Osenga’s Letters to the Editor, Volume II, available here in the Rabbit Room.  I remember listening to this song on tour–headphones on, curled up in my bunk on the bus, missing my family, missing my God, pricked by that terrible feeling of incompleteness that only comes when everything is going really well, and everything is not.  I put my iPod on repeat and went to sleep with the phrase “YOU ARE WHO YOU ARE, AND YOU ARE, AND YOU WERE AND WILL BE” ringing in my ears. And there was rest. Let Us Know You My friends have sent me letters I’ve read them all and then I tried to make sense of the stories But I was overwhelmed So much anger, so much pain We’ve had to go numb to survive So I am closing my eyes And I’m praying for those in my life Let us feel, let us love, let us be alive Let us know You My friends have shared their secrets I have given mine The anarchy of what we think No one will ever find But in the daylight, to our surprise Our secrets are shades of the same So I am closing my eyes And I’m praying for those in my life Let us feel, let us love, let us be alive Let us know You In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with You You parted the seas, You hung up the flame in the night to guide us through You drew in the sand, dropped the stones from violent hands You heard the cry of the crow and set Your eyes on a faithless friend You are who You are, and You are, and You were and will be I am opening my eyes And I’m praying for those in my life Let us feel, let us love, let us be alive Let us know You ————— Now playing: Andrew Osenga – Let Us Know You via FoxyTunes

It was an unexpected interview. Not that fact that I was interviewing Roger O’Donnell, longtime keyboardist for The Cure and Thompson Twins, since I had it scheduled for a few weeks in advance already, but rather that I actually enjoyed it so much. I’ve interviewed nearly 1,000 musicians in my time as a writer so the process has become rather dull for the most part and rare is the interview where the conversation is as stimulating as it was with this one. Of course, as a music industry veteran for the last 30 years, O’Donnell’s perspectives are quite interesting to say the least. However, it was one thing he said in the middle that stays with me long after we both hung up our phones. When I asked him about the demise of the Cure into what he earlier called “the best Cure tribute band ever,” O’Donnell said the reason was that an artist only has so much to say and after that, they just repeat themselves. I’ve heard this mentioned before in a couple places from a few artists in my time and I wonder about its truth. I’m also a pastor nearly five years into a church plant and I can easily see from time to time how much a fresh voice would help in this place. As a sports fan, I’ve definitely seen how the firing of an old coach simply helped for the sake of bringing in a fresh perspective. And I wonder, does this holds true for the artist? Perhaps an even better question to ask is what does this mean for the Christian artist? Is it true that there’s only so much that we can say and then we need to move on? Of course, it’s impossible to create a formula that everyone should only make 10 albums or 20 years of playing shows or whatever. But rather than shrug and say “we can’t figure this out,” I think it’s worth asking a simple question of “is there a time to stop, at least for some people?” I don’t play an instrument (at least to the level that anyone at all, even my mother, would pay to hear me), so, as I said, my venue is the church. And I definitely see this in play there. Here in the Bible Belt, there are many more churches alive than there should be – several in each surrounding city seem to be holding on only because somebody left some money in a trust fund or will, died, and then the church lives on its holdings. A friend of mine runs an inner city church and non-profit and most people reside right next to an old Methodist church. They’ve asked to rent from them, partner with them, meet at all separate times, etc. but to no avail. The same 10 to 12 people continue to drive in from “safer” areas (read: white) and refuse to allow anyone else to use the building. And I suppose it’s their right to do so since they own the building and are able to pay their utilities. But is there life there? It’s a natural life cycle to die and live. We’re so scared of one that we can’t embrace the other. But it’s death that gives nourishment to life. In fact, it’s even the promise of death that brings life to some things. We almost closed as a church plant three years into it. I grew up in a Pentecostal, money-manipulating atmosphere, so I promised if I ever led my own church that I would never do the same thing. But I went in the extreme other direction – never, ever mentioning the fact that it takes money to run things, like it or not. And because of that, we were going to shut down. I stood in front of our church that Sunday morning and explained it out. I said that I wasn’t afraid for us to die, that we had a great three year run and that I wasn’t going to manipulate for money, but that the reality was that this was our last week if things didn’t change. Since then, we’ve never looked back. There was something in that moment – knowing that everything has a limited run and that we can be okay with that – which has propelled us in a way we’ve never experienced. I wonder about this within our lives, wherever we are. What does it mean for the artist to know there’s only so many records to make and to make them well? And what does it mean to know when the life is gone and we’re stuck in our routine and comfort zone?

It’s not so much that I’m afraid of heights. It’s the involuntary anticipation of falling that bothers me. The prospect of losing balance from a high perch brings on the heebie-jeebies, a physical manifestation of falling. My palms sweat. An army of goose bumps slide from the top of my head, poised to meet waves of prickly nerve endings rising from below. Like draftees inducted into a war they do not want to fight, these inner nerve soldiers meet somewhere in my core, swirling in time and prepared for battle. When I visited Chicago and the Sears Tower Skydeck observation deck on the 103rd floor, I was inflicted with a ghastly case of these infamous heebie-jeebies. When the wind blows, the tower sways, a tangible, terrible reminder, that falling is always possible. What goes up, must come down. Contrast my perspective with that of Frenchman Philippe Petit, the star of Man on Wire. Replace my fearful dread with Petit’s unabashed joy and we begin to understand something about why this man will achieve his goal. Notwithstanding the hurdles and setbacks, on the morning of August 7, 1974, Petit did it. With the focused concentration of an eagle stalking its prey, Petit walked, lay down, knelt, juggled, and ran confidently between the two towers of the World Trade Center. As a growing boy, Petit loved to climb. The higher, the better. Trees were his domain. In the waiting room of a dentist’s office, Petit browsed a magazine article about the construction of The World Trade Center in New York City. An artist’s finished rendition of the barely started project provided a flash of inspiration. Surreptitiously, Petit swiped the picture and carried it home. This would not be the first time that Petit broke rules to further his fanciful vision. Man on Wire is about a dream. It’s about a man so ardent about following his dream that nothing will sway him. His passion is so scaldingly fierce, that he easily recruits a group of disciples to assist him in preparing and implementing his vision. He so effectively communicates his dream, that they do not hesitate to follow, though all of the team will not stay to share in achievement of the goal. Despite its documentary format, director James Marsh uses considerable creativity in wiring this picture for tension, intrigue, and beauty. It plays like a thriller, though we don’t witness wild car crashes or shaky hand-held cameras filming bad guys on the run. The cinematic pressure rises out of skillful editing and masterful story telling. We witness painstakingly calculated plans which sometimes go awry. Just when we anticipate that we are close to witnessing the fulfillment of Petit’s dream, something happens to prevent the plan from going forward, at least in the way in which it was conceived. So close, and yet so far; what goes up, must come down. Petit fancies himself as a sort of low-grade criminal. He’s supremely confident, but not quite brash. When he and his team move to New York City, they spend their leisure time watching cop and robber TV shows. His girl friend—the encourager—explains that Petit was raised by strict parents, insisting on fastidious, no nonsense behavior from young Philippe. As we get to know this man, witnessing the joy with which he practices his craft and the naughty twinkle in his eye, we begin to sense that bending the rules—taking certain liberties—is part of his character and motivation. Interviews with the present day versions of those that participated are edited next to well constructed reenactments, striking stills, and snippets of video preserved from the 70s, resulting in a compellingly realistic collage of this wonderful story. Attempting to articulate why such a preposterously bizarre act—walking a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center—captures my heart is as fruitless as Petit trying to explain why he did it in the first place. If Petit were a wacko, that would be an easy explanation; but he’s not. He’s remarkably lucid; a man that spins a tale with the same level of skill that he employs in walking tightropes. No. The whys and wherefores slip away, like the residue of a once vivid dream. This artful event transcends words. Why described it as art? Well first, it was beautiful. Video doesn’t exist of the New York episode, but there is video of some earlier practice rounds, one of which was between the towers of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. And it’s strikingly stunning. The still photographs used in the film frame this man, dressed in black from shoulder to toe, as a silhouette contrasting with the slate blue sky. Further, it’s a representation of possibility. What could each one of us do—the world might say—if only we could lasso the focused intensity required, like Philippe Petit? Switchfoot sang, “We were meant to live for so much more, have we lost ourselves?” Counter intuitively, believers learn that to become new men (and women), we must lose ourselves. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.   Ephesians 4:22-24 Philippe Petit’s singular act is poetically beautiful because of what it tells us about ourselves and our lives: who we are, and for what we were created. We hear it, not with the spoken word, but with language of the heart. It’s like a microcosm of a life well lived. “If I die, what a beautiful death, to die in the exercise of your passion.” “The fact that wire walking is framed by death is great because you have to take it very seriously.” “To me, it’s really so simple, that life should be lived on the edge. You have to exercise rebellion. To refuse to tape yourself to the rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge. Then you will live your life on the tightrope.” The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. John 10:10 (New International Version)

I’m sure everyone has heard some reference to the eerie coupling of music and film evidenced by joining Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz.  If you haven’t, let me give you a brief introduction: get Dark Side of the Moon ready on your music player of choice and at the same time spin up The Wizard of Oz on the DVD player.  Start playing the album at the third MGM lion’s roar and then sit back and watch how strangely the music seems to line up with the film. I don’t think for a second that any of it is intentional, but you can’t deny that it is really very interesting.  Well, I’ve got another one for you. A while back I was at a church helping to install their new audio-visual system and something fascinating happened.  As we were working on the video system, Wall-E was our test video, projected large over the stage.  The sound was muted because the audio guys were busy testing their systems and they happened to have Coldplay’s Rush of Blood to the Head playing.  It wasn’t long before a friend stopped me and told me to look at what was happening.  The music and the film lined up in such a way that they seemed made for each other.  It was amazing. So that night I bought Wall-E for myself and tried it again…and it’s really pretty cool.  For instance, start the music just when the lights go down on the Pixar logo, the camera zooms from somewhere deep in space to focus on the earth and just as the earth comes into view the lyrics begin: “Look at the earth from outer space Everyone must find a place” Cool right? That song ends as Wall-E comes home and just as he opens the door to his house, the lyrics for In My Place come in: “In my place, in my place, Were lines that I couldn’t change, I was lost, oh yeah” And so that song about waiting for someone plays as we learn about Wall-E’s loneliness.  Anyone else feeling me here? Sadly, it does break down somewhat after that but it’s kind of creepy how well the song The Scientist fits the imagery just as Eve appears for the first time and its even cooler if you play that song over the final sequence of the film (try starting it at 1:24:30). Clearly no one planned any of this but it’s a lot of fun to watch and it reinforces my case that Wall-E is a brilliant piece of film art.  It’s visual storytelling at its best.  None of the meaning of the film is lost by replacing the soundtrack.  Try it for yourself.   If nothing else it’s an excuse to watch a great movie and listen to some fantastic music.

With Valentine’s Day upon us, I thought Andy Gullahorn’s song “Give it Time” would be a fitting “Song of the Day.”  This song is wise, and I think rare, because it touches on the wonder and beauty of love that is tended to over time.  Songs about love bowling you over and filling you up in a moment are not to be trusted any more than the man who tells you his box of juicy-juice is as satisfying as a well aged, vintage bottle of wine.  My own comments below are adapted from one of my recent wedding sermons—and I have taken a few cues from Andy. Most roads good friends walk eventually diverge.  It’s not that our friendships are lost.  Usually it’s just that they’re changed by geography or circumstance.  Something. And it’s meant to be. This is even true of the relationships between parents and children.  Eventually, if everything works right, the road a parent and their son or daughter walks will eventually lead them in different directions in life.  This, too, is meant to be. But there is only one human relationship we come know in life that is meant by God to defy this pattern—the marriage relationship.  This one is meant to be intimate in affection, proximity and purpose until death itself separates you.  Though the people in your lives change, in marriage you are given a gift from God of incredible worth—a sworn partner for life.  That’s what we promise at the altar, anyway. When the Puritans used to talk of marriage, they’d say you got married in order to fall in love.  Their thinking went a little like this: how could a man and woman possibly hope to really know the wonder, joy and depth of real love—the kind where you are truly loved and truly known at the same time— without sharing in the waking and the sleeping, in the ordinary and the extraordinary, in the comedy and the tragedy? Without marriage? The truth is the two people standing at the altar or before the justice of the peace don’t really know each other very well yet.  Of course they think they do—and probably know each other better than they know most anyone else.  But still, how well could they really know each other? I had a seminary professor say on the occasion of his 25th anniversary that the things he loved most about his wife were things he didn’t really even know were a part of her when they were first married.  Did you catch that? There was a time I would have rolled my eyes at a statement like this—like during those first years of my own marriage.  But now, almost 14 years in, all I can do is nod in delighted agreement and wonder what the years ahead are going to reveal about the girl I married. We stood at the altar and we recited vows that painted us into a corner.  And before God and witnesses, we declared our intention to live within the boundaries of selfless love.  We swore to things we had never really tested—like how we’d stay together in sickness and in health, in plenty and in want and in joy and in sorrow until one of us dies. Who makes such promises without the anticipation that such polarities will, in fact, come along?   These vows are based in reality. And it looks so different for each couple.  For me, I’m not called simply to be a good and faithful husband.  I’m called to be a good and faithful husband to the particular woman I married.  That looks different for us from the couple across the room. Along the way, we pray we’ll learn to argue well.  God willing, we’ll learn to be wrong and long for humility when we are. We learn to bear with one another and forgive where there is injury.  We discover there are buttons you can push that deliver predictable reactions.   Sometimes we push them.  Sometimes we hurt each other because we’re mad and we mean to.  Most of the time though, we hurt each other because we didn’t know how not to. Understand the reality of marriage; it is two sinners under one roof. We should expect conflict.  And since we can’t avoid it, we should pray for the grace to avoid resentment and to not use offenses against each other, forgiving as those aware of the forgiveness we’ve been shown by our God who loves us as His bride. How can we survive?  How can we heal?  Certainly not by rushing these things.  I pray for time.  And for grace.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/GiveItTime.mp3

When we come to know the forgiveness of God in Christ and accept His life into our humanity, there’s one thing that doesn’t seem to change right away – we still carry the wrong Tree in our minds, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We still carry the lie that we are autonomous beings determining our own destiny by our actions, choosing good or evil. The Devil loves the continual promotion of his worn out idea from pub to pulpit.. It doesn’t matter which path we follow in this false idea; like the unbeliever’s path, these two seemingly divergent roads of “good” and “evil” end up in the same place, though for the Christ-indwelt it is not Hell as in the case of the Christ-rejector. In the believer’s case, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is superimposed over our Christ-indwelt, Tree-of-Life life. Like this: James spoke of wavering in faith: “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways,” and “He that wavers is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.” Jesus, in speaking of the necessity of trusting God, said in Matt 6:22-24, “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness…No man can serve two masters….” There again is the either/or, the two, the choice between two options. The single eye or double-think. If our spiritual eye is singular, centered upon God and His Word, abiding in Christ, our whole body will be full of light. But if our eye is evil, bad, not centered upon God and His Word but upon the Devil’s way of doing things, our whole body will be full of darkness. We’ll have just enough of Christ and just enough of the world to make us miserable. Whether this means legalistic Churchianity or chicks, booze, and bongs doesn’t really matter too much. They both come to the same end – less effectiveness here, fewer lives changed, fewer of our loved ones saved, and less reward in eternity. Our one shot will be shot. Here’s the thing: Any self-directed activity which is not based on a renewed mind achieves no eternal impact and does not please or honor the Lord Jesus Christ. It sounds unfair to say that a licentious believer and a legalistic believer will meet the same bonfire of the vanities. Isn’t the legalistic one at least trying to be “like Christ”? But that’s how the wrong Tree in our mind deceives us. The double-minded man, having the Tree of Life now within himself but never accessing it, chooses to be his own source, and really, what does he do? He connects back to the satanic mind-stream of Genesis 3 and Isaiah 14 and operates from that false source. “I’m not a vessel or cup, indwelt by Christ and operating by trusting His life in me. Instead, I am an autonomous self, choosing good.” Trying to be “like Christ” in our own effort echoes Satan’s boast of Isaiah 14, “I will be like the Most High.” It attempts to elevate a human being to godlike status, rather than being a vessel designed to be in willing cooperation with an indwelling God. Faith-ing in a lie, he lives the lie. The Me4God@aol.com mindset is not Christ-directed but Satan-driven. The false-tree man does not abide in Christ, and therefore sins; whether by legalism or license matters not. The licentious one simply changes it to, “I am an autonomous self, choosing evil.” Choosing good in this satanic mind-stream results in pride, self-commendation, Satan curing our cold to give us cancer. Choosing evil results in self-condemnation. Jesus becomes mere fire insurance in both cases. We are to take heed to overcome and keep Christ’s works, His life working through us, until the end. Holy Spirit indwelling must be followed by Holy Spirit expression. This theme runs throughout the New Testament and is beyond debate. Those who bear fruit, who overcome and keep Christ’s works to the end, will be given many things: a crown of life; the second death will do them no harm; hidden manna; a dazzling white stone with a new name; authority over the nations; the Morning Star; acknowledgment before the Father and the angelic hosts; we will take our seat beside Christ on His throne. These huge promises are fulfilled to those who overcome. Jesus says to those hard-working people in Matt 7:23, “I never knew you; depart from Me, ye who work iniquity.” These are folks who were without relationship with Christ but with lots of “good” works. As believers we understand God will not recognize works coming from the false god of Ephesians 2:2. What we miss is that God will not recognize any human activity, even the activity of redeemed humanity, which springs from that false source, the wrong Tree, no matter how good it looks. Legalism is just as satanically-driven as license. The only activity the Father will recognize and reward is that which springs from the headship of His Son in our hearts, bursting forth into true expression of God’s abundant life and love. “There is only One who is good – that is God,” says Jesus. That means there’s only one source of goodness in the universe, and it isn’t the human cup. As Jesus said of His humanity, “I can do nothing of Myself.” If we don’t repent of this doublethink we are in for a rude awakening. The Christ-indwelt person is not an autonomous being, and neither is the unbeliever; human beings were never created for self-directed autonomy and are actually incapable of it. But how do we spend our lives in Spirit-expression and not in this false Tree? We’ll begin to take a good look at this in Two, Part III.

Remember the movie “Big Fish” from 2003?  I recall sitting in my living room as the credits rolled, being struck by a thought I had never considered: my mom and dad had lives before I was born that were rich, complex and virtually unknown to me except for some basic details like where they lived, went to school, what they drove, etc. The other day I was asked to be the speaker at a men’s breakfast at our church.  The format was “Ask the Pastor,” so I didn’t prepare anything, but just presented myself for interrogation.  It was fun.  My friend who hosts these events introduced me by way of asking the first question: “When you’re gone from this world, what do you hope people will say about your life?” Much of my professional life right now is devoted to a pretty detailed study of the last week of Jesus’ earthly ministry.  So as soon as he asked, the words of the apostle Paul welled up within me and I replied, “That I was a pastor who knew nothing but Christ and Him crucified.”  Then I thought about it a bit more and said something about my relationship with my wife (which I’ll keep out of cyber space) and added, “That my kids will be able to say, by the grace of God, that they never wondered where they stood with their dad.” Since then, the question has been nagging at me.  I’ve been thinking about “Big Fish” and the more existential questions of what makes a life and how we’re known. The film, if you haven’t seen it, is about a son coming to terms with his father’s final days and the fact that all he feels he ever got from his dad were tall tales, exaggerations and in many cases, out and out lies.  Tim Burton did a masterful job of keeping me in the dark about where all this was headed.  But by the time it ended, I wanted to call my parents and apologize for what–I didn’t really know.  Maybe for not paying closer attention.  Maybe for presuming it was my world and they were only living in it.  Maybe for failing to appreciate that their lives were dense, complex worlds of wonder, passion, faith, fear, hope, resolve and tenacity. When we’re young and thinking about what we want to be when we grow up, most of us think of things like a fireman, or a famous singer.  But then, for example, you go over to Jill Phillips’ blog (she’s a famous singer, right?) and there are pictures of her with her husband and kids, and they’re at the zoo so she can run a 5K (faster than Andy Osenga, though no one’s gloating.)  You’re probably at her blog as a fan.  But she’s more than a famous singer.  She’s also a mom, wife and friend.  She runs.  She writes.  She cooks.  She cleans.  She disciplines her kids.  She serves in her church. I ask you, is there a chance that the best parts of her life that people will remember are going to relate mainly to her music?  What about for her husband Andy?  For her kids?  For her closest friends? Then I see Andrew Peterson’s boys in Ecuador meeting the Compassion Kid they sponsor.  Or I hear Pete tell the story about trying to tow his motorcycle from Florida to Nashville while in the middle of relocating his entire world.  Or I hear stories about friends standing in the smoldering ruins of each other’s lives as they sift through the rubble to see what might be salvaged.  And I think about that question my friend asked and wonder, how will the true answers to that question materialize? I believe the answers won’t come down to just one or two things.  I am not living a life populated by only one or two things.  It’s a full plate.  There’s the work, the family, the marriage, the hobbies, the failures, the epiphanies, the transitions, the fears, the hurts, the quirks, the lies, the baggage, the resolutions, the faith, the prayers, the needing and the giving.  And the sanctification.  Thank God for the sanctification! And they’re all happening in real space and real time this very moment. I used to lead a college Bible Study, and I cannot tell you how many students (mostly guys–so if this is you, listen up and repent) who were spending their parents’ money for college courses, skipping class and homework only to withdraw before their GPA took a hit, though still forfeiting their parent’s money and a semester’s worth of progress. I’d get on these guys about this, not so much because of the money, but because of the fact that they had wasted a year of their lives that they couldn’t get back.  It was gone.  Poof.  And they had nothing to show for it.  And they were no closer to graduating.  I’d tell them if they were going to live to be 70, now it might as well be 69– and the year they lost was during their physical prime too. Tragic. I mean, come on!  If you’re not going to pay attention to your own life, why would anyone else? Our lives are happening now, and they only happen once.  This is it. These are the days when the stories people will tell about me after I’m gone are being lived out.  And they stack, one upon another, to tell a bigger story in relief–one that will take many voice to tell well and true.  Some will tell more about what I withheld, others about what I gave. I suspect we’re fools if we think there will be one moment that will define our lives.  Or one success.  Or even one failure.  I guess it is possible to have defining moments, but even still it will be the rest of our lives that will provide the context for understanding. After I’m gone, I don’t know what people will have to say about me.  Will they say, “He died too young?” or “Man, I thought he’d never get his ticket punched.”  God only knows.  And He does know.  And that is unspeakably comforting to me. Here’s what I know.  I’m working on the answer right now.  My kids will have a say.  So will my wife.  And my friends.  And the congregation I serve.  And countless others– maybe even grandkids one day.  If they’re paying attention, am I giving them more than just my stories?  Am I shooting straight? The final scenes of Big Fish tore a hole in my heart.  As a great cloud of witnesses emerges literally out of the woodwork, the truth is told.  Maybe the thing about my friends’ question that still nags at me is that regardless of what I hope people say of me after I’m gone, they will say something, regardless.  God be merciful.

In one of the early scenes of The Wrestler, Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) shows off his scars as Cassidy the stripper (Marisa Tomei) responds with sympathy by whispering, “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brings us peace is upon him and by his wounds we are healed.” “What’s that all about?” says Randy. “Huh.  Tough dude.” If it wasn’t clear before this scene, it’s in that moment made plain that this is a movie about much more than simply the comeback of an aging wrestler.  Like director Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, it’s a hard film to watch.  It’s about guilt and self-destruction and the often horrible emptiness of being human. Rourke’s character is a man that’s hard to look at but equally difficult to look away from.  He’s scarred and bruised and wrecked by a lifetime of pro wrestling.  Drink, drugs, and steroids have all taken their toll and now he’s a failure, living in a trailer, unable to pay the rent, unable to maintain relationships, and looking to salve his loneliness down at the strip club.  Yet he’s a legendary wrestler with his own video game and action figures, and he’s humble, likable, and so often noble and gracious that I found myself desperately wanting him to succeed. It’s this spark of genuine goodness in the character that makes it so difficult to watch when Aronofsky shows us his wounds.  He cuts himself in the ring, he lets another wrestler use a staple gun on him and tear him with barbed wire and through it all the “Ram” comes up smiling as if with each cut and each drop of blood he can somehow atone for his disastrous life outside the ring. In the ring he’s Randy the Ram but outside it he’s reduced to grocery store clerk, Robin Ramzinsky—his real name.  His life is a constant struggle to bring those two aspects of himself together or to keep them apart and his belief that wrestling defines him is the central lie of his life even though he can’t see it.  When he makes mistakes and things begin to fall apart, his answer is to retreat to the ring to hurt himself and those around him until in the end he believes that the only place he can find salvation is in his own pain and destruction. It’s heartbreaking to watch him fall, both in the ring and out, but it’s even more painful to see him get back up because he’s the saboteur of his own life and we know it.  As he climbs into the ring for the big match at the end of the film I wanted to plead with him to stop, to make him understand that he doesn’t have to do it anymore.  He doesn’t realize that no matter how much he bleeds it will never be enough.  He doesn’t know that someone else has already been cut and pierced and bled and suffered so that he can live in peace.  The Gospel of “The Lamb” is that Randy is an illusion and Robin Ramzinsky never needs to go back into the ring again. The ultimate tragedy of the film is that Randy the Ram wants his sacrificial rite to be seen as an act of courage when the reality is that he’s running from his life rather than owning it.  He’s giving in to the clamor of the crowd because he’s not strong enough to let himself or anyone else try to forgive him. Aronofsky has crafted a brilliant work in The Wrestler.  It’s a moving and authentic look at the things we do to ourselves and to those around us when we can’t reconcile who we are with who we want to be.   When the theater lights come up, we are, each one of us, like Jacob, and even Randy the Ram, wrestlers of conscience and identity. I recommend this film with the greatest praise but I also have to caution you that it is certainly not for everyone.  Not only is there a lot of disturbing bloodshed in the ring, but Marsia Tomei’s stripper is portrayed very frankly.  There is a lot of nudity and while it’s every bit as important to the film as Rourke’s exploitation in the ring, it is definitely going to be distracting to some viewers. If you can handle it, don’t miss it.  It’s a film for the ages.

The concept of two runs throughout Scripture. The storyline of Genesis 2 speaks of two trees in Eden: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Jesus speaks of two “ways”; the narrow way leading to life, and the broad way to destruction. Paul speaks of two vessels: mercy and wrath. There are two spirits – the Spirit of Truth and the spirit of error, and two “gods” – the one true God, and the false god: He that is in you (Christ) and he that is in the world (the god of this age). There are also the two soils of Matthew 13. “But wait,” you say, “Aren’t there four soils?” Well, yes, but they are really two sets of people – those in whom the seed takes root and those in whom it doesn’t. There are many more sets of two in Scripture but now of all things because of Russ I’ve got to think of brevity. God said to Adam in Gen 2:17 “…but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” ” I looked up the Hebrew phrase “you will surely die.” What it actually says is “dying, you shall die.” That’s one more “two.” Death, and then death. Two deaths – a first dying, and then a second dying. Revelation 20:12-15 speaks of this second death: “And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire” (Emphasis mine). According to their works. The second death comes from being judged according to our works, and then our name not being found written in the book of Life. “Sorry, Perfection is required. Are you in Christ?” Eden’s death-death tree can be charted like this: This is the unbeliever’s choice between good and evil on this temporary plane. Worldly success or sensual sin. His identity as a person comes from what he does or doesn’t do; it is based in his performance. Thus we have people who get their identity from being “good” (“I am successful” or “I do a lot of community service”) or “bad” (“I’m a Hell’s Angel” “I am an alcoholic”). The unbeliever has no other options until his mind is illuminated by God choosing to bring the man’s will to its knees. The lie of “human potential” on this chart is obvious. The potential only goes so far, which is not nearly far enough. This is “the spirit of error,” the mindset that drives the “vessels of wrath.” It is a performance-based, avoid-pain-and-find-pleasure mindset. Whether that means indulging forbidden sensual pleasures or the intellectual and spiritual pleasures of “being above the sensual rabble” is of little consequence in the end, though of course societally it makes a big difference. But Pharisees and philanderers alike will face the second death. Those on the left of the chart are actually in more danger, because worldly success and “goodness” of any kind can blind us to our need for redemption. Those on the right of the chart are often aware their lives are not working out; that’s why Jesus hung out with “such awful people.” The unbeliever can opt out of this system: Jesus said in John 3:3, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” If we have been doomed to die twice in Adam, we must be born again in Christ to die only once, to escape the second death. This satanic system, this kingdom of death-death, is shown in the first two soils of Matthew 13:18-21 – those from whom the Word is stolen, and those who don’ t go deep enough to have the Word really take root. These first two soils are unbelievers; the next two are believers. We’ll dig into how this satanic mindset infects the thought life of the believer and the third soil of Matthew 13 in Part II.

Browsing the shelves of wicked-cool used bookstore here in Nashville, McKay Books, I happened upon Kathleen Norris’s (The Cloister Walk, Dakota, Amazing Grace) latest, Acedia & Me. Though I had no idea she had a new book out, the cheap sticker price for a primo first edition (Note: you will recall from a previous post that I have a more than slight affinity for used bookstores and, especially, first editions) was an easy decision. The title itself was mildly intriguing since I was vaguely familiar with the word, “acedia”, but of which I knew very little. The subtitle, “A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer’s Life”, though hardly an enticing, round-em-up, gather-em-in slogan, is true to Ms. Norris’ midwestern style, neither flamboyant nor melodramatic. The tedium of daily routine, whether you are a writer, an athlete or a garbage collector, can grate on the westernized image of living life to the full, souring the tinseled concept in such a way that daily repetition of just about anything breeds in us contempt. After all, repetition is not very glamorous. We get bored and despair in the seemingly mundane task of being, wondering Why even bother?, seeking salvation from unromantic drudgery at those times when we see our lives as being anything but full and robust. Surely Jesus meant the “abundant” life to be more than this?, we think. As Norris points out through her experiences as a writer, Benedictine oblate, a wife and caretaker of her dying husband, it is that same daily repetition – the redundant, monotonous splendor – which holds the seeds of that very salvation. Learning the true name of the enemy gives us greater advantage, even granting a degree of freedom. I, admittedly, am an undisciplined writer, writing whenever I feel like it, when inspiration strikes, or when the trees and skies themselves take to writing me their own message. In other words, I enable the acedia in me, by failing to embrace repetition – that “monotonous splendor” – and the creative discipline. Languishing with nothing to say, I lay the guitar aside for months at a time wanting nothing to do with its steel and wood language, because more often than not that language is as foreign to me as a lust for life itself. I lay aside pen and paper for a writer’s millenium, choosing instead to blame it on those familiar culprits, writer’s block or depression. As Ms. Norris states, like marriage and faith, writing is a mystery. The “person” you’re committed to spending life with is known, yet unknown. It is strange when, after years of being together,  the one you thought you knew all too well seems a sudden and complete stranger. I am compelled “to either recommit to the relationship or get the hell out.” In my own torpor and despair, I seek to avoid both blunt writing instruments because, in a very real sense, it is my way of avoiding the physically manifest representations of spiritual mistrust, doubt and my failure to ultimately believe that the things God once declared about me as being good, actually and truly still are. Acedia, as the author observes, “always takes the path of least resistance and attempts to go around, rather than through, the demands that life makes of us.” Throughout the book Norris continually draws from the early monastics as well as a slew of modern writers, both religious and secular. She often quotes fourth century monk and writer, Evagrius Ponticus, who states that “endurance cures listlessness, and so does everything done with much care and fear of God.” I can only hope Acedia & Me will serve and inform you, fellow hopeful despairer, in your own wobbling journey as it has given identity to that which has hounded me, personally, for many years. A Name is more than just a name.

Tuesdays are for music, and this week, it’s David Wilcox. David has long been one of singer/songwriter-dom’s luminaries, one of those guys who generates anecdotes as often as songs.  There’s the one about how someone looked down an alleyway in Nashville and saw him playing a song for someone. Or the one about how he and Allen Levi played a show where each answered the other guy’s song with a song until a story had been told. Or the time he met James Taylor and James was the nervous one. David was a special guest at the Behold the Lamb of God Christmas concert at the Ryman Auditorium in 2007, and one of my proudest moments was sitting beside him on the stage and hearing him enjoy, one after another, the music of my dear friends. He said, “Ahh” and “Mmm” in all the right places. It was a delight. The other night he spoke in Franklin about songwriting for a few hours.  He fanned the flame of my love for stories and music and the way they come together in songs–not because of some clever line or hook, but because songs have the power to connect one heart to another. They even have the power to connect one heart to Another. He said that when he sings a song for an audience, it’s like there are these wheat fields before him that need water. Behind him is an enormous reservoir. Playing a song that is True is like opening the tap and allowing some of that water to spill out. A beautiful picture, and the reason playing concerts and writing books thrills me so. That picture is what my song “Let There Be Light” is all about: using our gifts to speak light into the darkness, love into the loneliness, music into the clamor. There are a lot of songs–a lot of songs–that I could choose, so I decided on the title track to the first Wilcox album I ever bought, with one of the best first lines I’ve ever heard.  It’s called “Underneath,” and features Alison Krauss and Union Station.  Here’s the iTunes link. Underneath I know that compassion is all out of fashion, and anger is all the rage… Grow up and give in to that cynical spin that you see on most every page We all know what’s wrong with the system how the people are puppets and fools. If they’re not strong, it will trick them, they’ll get used up like factory tools: The kids just give up in those schools… …yeah, but what is it, really, that’s keeping me from living a life that’s true? When the worries speak louder than wisdom, it drowns out all the answers I knew, so I’m tossed on the waves on the surface. Still, the mystery’s dark and deep, with a much more frightening stillness… underneath Hopelessness always comes easy. But “easy” does not make it right. Courage can look past that surface, but fear will still put up a fight. When I get scared and scattered, and I don’t know where to begin, why even care; it doesn’t matter. Why fight when you know you can’t win? It’s easier just to give in.