May we have hope in the days ahead.

Having grown up in conservative evangelical culture, I became well acquainted long ago with the forecasts of doom & gloom & judgment that accompanied every.single.Democratic.presidency.  Such forecasts have been cluttering my Facebook news feed for weeks on end leading up to this year's election despite the fact it hadn't even been decided yet.  For much of my life I bought into this despair-oriented groupthink, but I began to realize a few years ago it was nonsense.

My husband & I both have had the label "Democrat" dismissively slapped on us in recent weeks despite the fact we consider ourselves nonpartisan and will examine every candidate before making a decision about who we're supporting.  I've come to understand that every candidate from every party is complex.  Each one represents some things I believe in as a follower of Jesus, and each one represents other things that make me cringe as a follower of Jesus.  And in this election, like it or not, Hillary Clinton made the Christ-follower in me cringe way less than Donald Trump did.

As my journey of faith has progressed in recent years, I've become increasingly aware that my understanding of what it means to be a Christian and to follow Jesus is fundamentally different from the understanding held by many modern American evangelicals.  I recently read a statement from someone claiming that individuals being held accountable for their own actions, "reaping individual rewards when they make good individual choices and paying the costs when they make bad individual choices" is the reason for "American greatness," and that "the Christian way" is "individualism, individual responsibility and individual accountability."

I'm not sure if I could possibly disagree more.

This notion first of all defies the reality, both presented in Scripture (hello there, Job) and evident in the world around us, that our circumstances are not an indicator of our righteousness or lack thereof.  On the contrary, as verbally illustrated by Jesus Himself, the rain falls & the sun rises on the righteous & unrighteous alike.  "American greatness" as described here is nothing more than a depiction of karmic belief.

This supposedly "Christian" way also completely ignores the central Christian concepts of grace & mercy -- receiving good things we don't deserve and being spared bad things we do deserve.  "American greatness" can build itself on individual responsibility if it wants to, but there's no way to mistake it for anything remotely like the Christian way, not when the latter is modeled after Someone who demonstrated selfless sacrifice on behalf of those who neither earned nor deserved anything whatsoever.  

And yet this theme of personal responsibility is what many American evangelicals have come to understand as Christianity.  We are too busy relying on ourselves and pointing fingers at others to realize we're dismissing Jesus by not simply and humbly relying on Him.  And so it begins to make sense to ostracize Muslims for choosing a "violent" religion.  It begins to make sense to build a wall to keep out neighboring folks who might take jobs we have a right to since we were born in this country and they weren't.  It begins to make sense to cling to our guns because someone might threaten us and, well, then they deserve the bullet that's coming to them.  It begins to make sense to vote for Donald Trump and his platform of self-preservation.

Nothing in this reflects the Jesus I read about in Scripture.  But sometimes we forget that Jesus is the clearest picture of God we've ever been given, and we opt for other versions of God that justify our attempts at self-preservation.  We let fear, rather than love, drive our thinking and our actions.

And then people think you're out of your mind for seeing any merit in Democratic social policies that call for those of us who have more to share what we have with those who have less.

But alas, I do.

No candidate is ever going to be a savior figure for America, despite the fact that each candidate will be championed as such by some of his or her supporters.  I never thought Hillary Clinton was the answer to all of America's problems, and I sure as heck don't believe Donald Trump is.  I do have fears about what the future could hold under his leadership.  But I also refuse to do what I've watched conservative evangelicals do for years...I won't offer my own forecast of gloom & doom & judgment for America just because a candidate I believe to be ill-equipped for the presidency is the candidate that won.

What I will do instead is give credit to many of my friends who have supported Clinton, some with hesitation but others with great enthusiasm, because your responses to what I know has been an incredibly disappointing night for you have been overwhelmingly gracious and even hopeful.  You have expressed sadness, shock, and fear, but you have not been hateful or judgmental.  You have continued to express love toward your fellow man.  And it has moved me.  I hope & pray you will continue to love others in the face of such hardships & disappointments, because I truly believe that kind of stubborn love, far more than any elected president, is what will shape the future for the world around us and continue to bend that long moral arc toward justice.

May you, and may we all, see beyond ourselves in order to love others, and may we continue to have hope in the days ahead.

A Year of Lament, Part 3

image from eszter dobay

Monday, February 16, 2015

Dear one, if you are in a season of healing, then let God heal you.  He can be found anywhere.  He certainly isn't contained within a building, for the love.  If you need to rest, rest.  But maybe one day when you're ready, you can try again.  There is a safe faith community for you.  This I know.  It exists.  It may be some teeny, tiny little place.  It may be some big, fancy loud place.  It may be with the Episcopalians or with a home church.  Who knows? 

And you are an important part of it.  It's not just that you will receive.  You will give too.  We need you.  You bring something special and important to the body and don't forget it.  God heals all of us through each other.  It's this crazy weird miracle... 

You are so loved and precious.  God can bind up even the worst wounds.  And His people can be so beautiful, so loving, so healing.  I pray you find them, in whatever context, wherever you are, exactly as you are. 

-Jen Hatmaker

In today's headlines is a story of ISIS beheading 21 Christian Egyptian men.  And I wonder as I read about such things how the hell the church continues to fire shots at its own.  I've just watched as way too many people have become collateral damage, left broken along the side of the road, over the past year in a quest for "truth," for the sake of pet doctrines that betray our prideful self-righteousness, for the ability to move forward with organized institutions without the inconvenience of working through tough spots.

And I'm weary of the casualties.  I'm weary of those who are doing the wounding going uncontested.  I'm weary of our insistence upon neatness, upon homogeneity.  I'm weary of having a heart that constantly feels stuck in tension, torn between different directions.  I'm weary of organizations taking precedence over individual lives.  I'm weary of doctrines and structures being given priority over LOVE.

My heart is tired.  I'm tired.  I'm tired of feeling jaded and cynical.  I'm tired of every flame of hope that gets kindled in my heart being inevitably doused with another ousting, another proclamation of error in the lives of others.

Jesus came seeking those who lived life on the fringes.  He offered an easy yoke and a light burden.  He proclaimed freedom and life.  He spoke and dined with those with whom it was taboo to speak and dine.  Aching, broken outcasts were drawn to Him.

How did we, His people, become those doing the casting out, causing the ache, creating the brokenness?

I ran across an article recently chastising those who criticize the modern American evangelical church because, since the Church is Christ's bride, it ought to be loved.  It's not the first time I've heard such an argument, and it's not without some merit, yet I wonder how we can make such a blanket statement when a large portion of the Old Testament is devoted to the voices of prophets who spent their lives calling Israel -- God's chosen people -- out for how they had strayed from His design.  The prophets didn't call them out for not being religious enough -- on the contrary, it was noted repeatedly that they did well with all their religious rituals.  What was sorely lacking was love:  love for God in the form of an actual active relationship and heart connection, and love for fellow man in the form of justice and mercy.

In the present-day representation of God's people in the Church, we may think we've got the "loving God" part down, but throughout Scripture it is made clear that one cannot love God without loving his fellow man.  We're told that mercy is better than sacrifice.  If the nation of Israel was repeatedly rebuked for lacking love and mercy, how much more so ought we to be -- we who claim to follow Jesus, lover of the sinner and outcast, not only in word but in DEED as He took part in their lives?

If there's one thing I've come to believe as I continue to grieve the lack of sacrificial love I see in the Church, it's that the prophets' hearts were constantly wracked with grief for the very people to whom they preached.  It is joyless to watch the ship that was sent to rescue people sink because of its own passengers' volatile determination to shape the vessel into their own images.

Sometimes I feel like I can't stand one more day in the machine that's flattening people as fast as -- or faster than -- it's setting anyone free.  I don't want to be implicated any longer in the choices that are leaving people bloodied on the side of the road...

In contrast to my pain and frustration and grief, thank You, Jesus, for the fresh, springlike air that fills this unseasonably warm February afternoon.  Thank You for people who love me, for people who understand me, and for people who don't understand me but love me anyway.  Please help me to love well and to be a conduit of healing, not hurt; of life, not death; of freedom, not chains.

Read here the Introduction, Part 1, and Part 2.

A Year of Lament, Part 2

image from matteo canessa

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Well, perhaps I won't be writing as frequently as I'd hoped or imagined.  And maybe this is going to be a book of laments.  My spirit is definitely troubled again today.

Today I'm troubled after reading Tony Kriz's account of how he was asked to leave his ministry at Reed College.  Someone dared to challenge the accepted norms in American Christianity and was deemed "dangerous" and removed.  What troubles me most is the fact that the supposedly "dangerous" practices/teachings look way more like Jesus' life and ministry than the "safe,"
acceptable norms we insist upon.  The more I hear about things like this, the more I wonder how in the world we've reached such an extreme cognitive dissonance that we don't even recognize how opposed our American conservative evangelical ideologies and methodologies too often stand to the ways of Jesus.  I can't help but be grieved again and again to see how little we look like Him and how oblivious we are to that fact.

Lord, have mercy.

I think back to our conversation in class Wednesday night about how Israel's great failure was repeatedly forgetting her identity as the people of God, which led her to neglect what had been handed down and instead to adopt the ways of the surrounding nations that did not know or trust God, nor look out for their fellow man.  We today often make the same mistake, forgetting our identity as Christ-followers and neglecting what was handed down to us through Him and His church.  We've adopted the ways of our culture, treasuring our independence, capitalism, and consumerism and largely ignoring the voices around us crying out for hope and healing.

How have we strayed so far, Lord?  How can we be brought back?  Can You restore our humility?  Can You make us agents of hope and healing again?

Lord, have mercy.

Read here the Introduction, Part 1, and Part 3.

A Year of Lament, Part 1

image from Bobbi Dombrowski

Sunday, August 10, 2014

It's been such a tumultuous year, Lord.  My heart feels like it's been beat to a pulp with all that's happened.  I've felt many times as though I'm drowning in brokenness.

Why do people in the evangelical/conservative/American/whatever church dismiss people like N.T. Wright, or like Scot McKnight, or even like Donald Miller or Eugene Cho, without even truly weighing what they have to say?  Why are there brilliant lines of thought coming through the likes of these people that hold desperately needed wisdom, that Your people refuse to give a second thought?

Why do we, Your people, spend the bulk of our energy concerning ourselves with things other than what Jesus revealed as the primary concerns of Your heart?  Why are we increasingly defined by who we kick out of fellowship?  Why is Your Church no longer a refuge, a safe place for the most broken of sinners and proponents of the most scandalous grace?  Who do we think we're pleasing?  You?  Surely not.  What are we trying to prove?  That we've got it right and those who don't ought to be shunned?  How far from the life Jesus lived...

My heart has been so overwhelmed with grief this year, and the most grievous part is almost every single drop of this grief has been born of the words and/or actions of Your people.  God, I know we're all broken and imperfect, but is this seriously the best we can do??

We need more Lisa Smiths and Whitney Gorbetts and Cari Jenkinses.  We need people who actually believe in the power of love to transform.  We need more conduits of Your grace and agents of Your healing.

I think the hope that lives in me has been brutally assaulted over the past year.  I think the enemy has tried to kill my belief in Your Kingdom's ability to invade this broken, hurting world as I've watched its citizens fire cannons at each other and perpetuate a cycle of devastation that renders us completely incapable of being any good to the world around us.

God, I know You are bigger than our brokenness, our ignorance, our refusal to listen to Your voice.  But I am desperate to see Your Kingdom breaking through all this senselessness, to see Your people acting as Your hands and feet instead of assuming we can act as Your mind; to see Your Church serving, loving, helping, and healing rather than judging and condemning.

Lord, have mercy.

Thank You for being a good God I can believe in even as I watch things crumble around me.  I know You desire more for us than this.  Help me to be an instrument of that.  "Make me an instrument of Your peace.  Where there is hatred, let me sow love.  Where there is darkness, let me shine light."  Help, Lord.

Read here the Introduction, Part 2, and Part 3.

A Year of Lament: Introduction

When I went to my first Q Conference in April 2014, I purchased a journal through the organization To Write Love On Her Arms.  The cover reads, "Let us not be silent...your story is important."  Ironically, I had no idea just how silent I would become in the months that lay ahead of me.

A series of events was about to unfold that would leave me virtually incapable of expressing the movements of my heart.  As conflict erupted in my church, I found I couldn't turn in any direction without seeing someone I loved experiencing excruciating pain -- people on all sides of the conflict.  My INFJ heart knows not how to avoid absorbing the hurts of those around me, and there were more hurts swirling around me than I could begin to process, in my own mind or on paper.

The journal I brought home with me from Q Nashville lay dormant.  You'll only find two entries dated 2014.  A glance at my blog reveals that I only posted two entries here during the entire year as well.  Even as 2015 began, I wrote virtually nothing.  No blog posts and only one journal entry until May.  Words just wouldn't come.

Thankfully, I've sensed the darkness beginning to subside over the past couple of months.  I'm finding words again.

And hope.

I remember thinking last year that what I was experiencing needed to be shared at some point, but seeing as I could hardly even write in my private journal, I was certainly in no place to share publicly at that time.  Now that the fog is lifting, however, I think the time is right.  And so I share at last some excerpts from those few pained journal entries written during what I've come to refer to as A Year of Lament...

Read here Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.