Tag Archives: sabbath

rainbow after the storm

“Nothing to shout about”, or, my four-month break

It was July 4th. That was when I decided I needed a break. Four months. Important things have happened in that time. Much of it never made the news.

  • We found a new church home. My daughter was hugely relieved as she gets attached easily and “church dating” has been really hard on her.
  • I returned to Yosemite for the first time since my childhood best friend was killed there in a rock climbing accident in 2005. It was even more beautiful than I remembered.
  • In Monterey, my wife and I spent 10 hours battling seasickness in a tiny boat to see an actual, live albatross in flight overhead, something I had wanted to do since I read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner at age 12.
  • Within three days in late September, two of my favorite bloggers each posted that they are hanging it up, one for a break, and the other, for good.
  • My family witnessed, together, an outcome in the World Series unprecedented since before my daughter’s great-grandparents were born.
  • And yes, our country chose a new president, and I have sat with various friends through all their different reactions: some elated, some terrified.

I have posted before about sabbath: how important, and yet how little valued it is in our day. Especially for those who believe in their work, it is easy to justify the never-ending, bit-by-bit deplenishment of spirit that comes from doing just one more small thing.

Important things have been happening in our society. I know what I’m supposed to do if I want to be a successful writer: I need to write about what’s hot. I need to tap into the zeitgeist. I can only be relevant by connecting with an audience, and if this is a hard, cynical age, marked by division and mistrust, then I need to toss a coin, choose my side, and start shouting.

That is what I could not bring myself to do. As I stood on the sidelines these past four months, witness to all the sound and fury, I could not help remembering the words from Shakespeare’s King Lear: “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.”

I care passionately about what is happening in our society. I believe this is a historic moment. And I believe, at a time like this, that some things— like how we treat those who disagree— are more important than which side wins.

Some hear me calling for reconciliation and mutual respect, and they hear only the voice of white privilege, brimming with complaisance and naïveté. Some hear the voice of betrayal. Some hear nice words but with no real power. But I do not believe that Christ was complacent or naïve, or that bipartisanship equals betrayal, and as for those “nice words”: history has shown they are the only words with any real power to heal.

Stressed & broke at Christmas

Overwhelmed & broke: 3 survival tips for this season of joy

My family and I love this time of year: the lights, the elf,  the movies and music and cold days, the time with family… Surprisingly for a blog about Jesus, most of my enjoyment at this time of year comes, not from “churchy stuff”, but from regular old beauty and joy and kindness, mixed in with a healthy dose of beloved traditions and just a dash of Christmas magic. The “Jesusiness” is more like Galadriel’s power in Lothlorien: you can see and feel it everywhere, but it’s right down deep where you can’t lay your hands on it.

We all know, though, that there’s a dark side to this favorite time of year as well. A friend’s recent Facebook posting captured it nicely:

So it is 10 pm and I just stopped helping with homework! My sink is full of dishes, I have no clean panties, I need to pay bills, I need to do xmas shopping, I need to wash my face, I need to check on the elf and I have spin class at 5:30…my Dad was at my house…I worked from 8 to 5….my husband is traveling for work AGAIN……blessed, life is good but this type of schedule does not make for a happy me… so if I seem short with you and need some alone time, let me have it!!

Is there anyone who can’t relate to that? All the ordinary stresses and pressures of life seem magnified at Christmas. As I thought about it, it occurred to me: it’s the application of that “deep Jesusiness” that gives me the ability to suck all the marrow out of the season without going crazy or going broke. Here are three specific tips for doing just that.

Financial Peace

Used to be, every year, my Christmas excitement was flavored with just an undercurrent of dread. So many expenses are non-optional, right? They’re traditions! Travel for the family Christmas party (including gifts for everyone there), having a roast for Christmas dinner, ice skating,  Disneyland! “Christmas costs what it costs.” I used to get a mental image, running my American Express card through that reader slot, that it would be on fire when it came out.

That doesn’t happen any more. We finally figured out how to stop overspending when we took Dave Ramsey’s “Financial Peace University” in 2013. It turns out you can say no to some of that stuff at Christmas.

  • Offer to stop exchanging gifts with adult siblings. The first year, my sister and brother-in-law wrapped up an empty box and labeled it, “The gift of nothing… for the man who has everything.” It was one of my favorite presents ever.
  • Start new, affordable traditions. Now we visit local light displays instead of Disneyland, and a local Christmas street parade instead of ice skating.
  • To limit spending: fear the credit card. We take cash out of the bank, separate it into envelopes, and when they run out, that’s it. Cash may seem risky, but the fact is we could misplace it all the first day and still lose less that we used to overspend every year.

A lot of the obligations we had to live up to, it turns out, were only in our minds at best, or were just ostentatious showing off at worst.

Take Sabbath

Two sisters were having Jesus over for dinner. Can you imagine getting the house clean enough for him?? One sister (Martha) was frantically running around doing all the work; the other one (Mary) blew it all off and just came in the living room to hang out. When Martha angrily demanded Mary come help, Jesus told her no, Mary’s the one doing it right.

That’s us at Christmas. The desire to be Instagram-perfect drives us to deplete our emotional reserves and then some. Just don’t. At work, when it’s time to be home with my loving family, I am rarely at a good stopping place. Those are what I call “lift your hands” days: just stop typing, push back your chair from the desk, and walk away. Not everything is done. It’s OK.

Sabbath is for us. It happens in the midst of our work, not after every possible task is finished. There is no work so important it can’t pause for the good of our souls, even harvesting before the frost or healing the sick… certainly decorating for Christmas.

Give Grace

It’s a cliché, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” Doubly so at Christmas. As we celebrate, a lot of people are heartsick for how it should have been, and they don’t wear signs. At a minimum this time of year, be willing to believe the best of the people God puts into your path, and be willing to love them in his name.

When we think of charity at Christmas, everyone knows about food for the hungry & coats for the needy, but what about a sincere smile and a heartfelt “thank you” for that harried grocery clerk? Or an extra $5 in the tip for that server, never mind that the cook burned your toast? What about asking that coworker, “How are you today?” and investing the 90 seconds to actually listen to the answer?

This Christmas, you may not need to house that pregnant couple who couldn’t get a room at the inn, but there are many simple acts of mercy that are just as important. In the end, that may be the most Jesus-y way to honor the season of all.

Deeper prayer life

My so-called prayer life

I’ll say it right up front: this is a posting for people who like prayer. I know of lot of us scoff at prayer, you’re all very welcome here, I would love to talk about that sometime soon, but not today.

I like prayer but unfortunately (like many of us), I am not particularly good at it. There have been moments— those prayers of earnest seeking when God is suddenly so present for one tiny instant, and then the wave crests and it all ebbs away. Or those vindictive moments when I remember to turn to God, then am shocked to discover I have found my way to love for my enemies. Those are the times when the power of prayer is like an electric force coursing through my body.

Then there are the other times… When my mind keeps getting distracted by shiny things. When I know I promised to pray for someone but can’t remember who. When I feel like a petulant child with my bullet-stream of requests, when I want to pray better but can’t think how, when I wander from topic to topic or (being honest) fall asleep.

How can we pray better? How can we have more of the immediate, intimate prayer life we want? Partly the answers must be found individually. The Christian walk is a relationship, and as there is no single secret to a happy marriage, there is no single secret to an intimate prayer life. However, there are some common threads, and I would like to highlight two that have proven meaningful for me, which are: space and intention.

Space

We live in a busy time. Everything is crammed in; nothing receives the attention it deserves. As 2013 New York Times editorial rather poignantly put it, “Being a Working Mother Means Always Having to Say You’re Sorry.” Little wonder, then, that our prayer times are crammed in as well. 1 Thessalonians 5:17 does instruct us to “pray without ceasing,” but again, the analogy to marriage is a good one: simple small acts of love are wonderful, but they don’t replace the periodic date night. Any healthy relationship requires genuine investment.

This is not to say that neglected prayer time is one more thing to feel guilty about. Guilt may have its place, but it’s not a fruit of the Holy Spirit. A better way to think of it is that, when we crave deeper intimacy with God, a way is available to us. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” says Christ. When that thirst for God becomes greater than the other needs that press in upon us from every side, he is there to be found.

As a practical note, one way to carve out space in our lives is with a clear start and finish. Small prayer-time rituals can have enormous value: ring a bell, light a candle, roll out a prayer mat… any such practice can reduce the muddy splashing of the everyday onto our sacred space/time.

Intention

Prayer needs to have the right focus, which is surprisingly easy to forget. During my flickers of transcendent prayer, the clearest memory is what I felt. So, the attempt to recreate those feelings is one very natural, but very wrong, approach to prayer. Because it is such an easy mistake, many Christian authors have written about it.

Way back in 1875, Hannah Whitall Smith wrote, “The common thought is, life is to be lived in the emotions. As they are satisfactory or otherwise, the soul rests or is troubled.” More recently, Bill Bright described the Christian experience as a train. “The caboose we will call ‘feelings,'” he writes, “It would be ridiculous to pull the train by the caboose. In the same way you, as a Christian, should never depend on feelings or seek after an emotional experience.”

Much of the core gospel message is concerned with love, which we think of as an emotion, but in scripture, “love” tends to be more of an action verb: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,” “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” “Let us show love, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service.”

Christian love, by definition, is other-focused rather than self-focused. The richest prayer life becomes available to us when create real space and time in our lives for it, and when our focus is on God, his work in the world, and our place within that.

 

Leave a comment! What practices help you to have a deeper and more transformative prayer life? 

 

Sabbath or Smartphones?

How to be human in a world of smartphones-over-sabbath

It was 1995, and he warned us. There was no smartphone then, not for 12 more years. Netscape, the first mass-market Internet browser, was barely ten months old. Facebook, Twitter… even MySpace  were still a decade away. He frets over the now quaint-seeming fax and car phone. But he saw it coming. He knew. There is the dad, sitting and lamenting how improved technology just speeds things up, increases expectations, when the little boy bursts in crying, “Six minutes to microwave this?? Who’s got that kind of time?!” If only we’d listened more carefully to that Calvin and Hobbes cartoon back then.

The fact is, for better or for worse, we now live in a 24/7 society. What then to make of God’s old-fashioned notion of Sabbath: that our lives, instead, ought to include a weekly rhythm of work and rest? That we ought to be, at most, 24/6?

We know there’s a problem

I will never cease to be struck by the irony, first observed by Sideshow Bob that time when he seized control of a television broadcast in order to demand the cessation of television broadcasts. Then there are the viral videos spread by social media about becoming too absorbed in viral videos and social media. This week’s New York Times editorial on screen addiction, nearly all of us read on some kind of screen.

We know society is moving too fast. At some fundamental level, we know that something’s gotta give, that something has to change, that we are being depleted, that we are bled dry. When I was a kid, it was still common for businesses to be closed on Sundays. It was a collective, socially enforced day of non-productivity. It was inconvenient, because you couldn’t get things done, but it was nice, because you couldn’t get things done.

Some of us long for a return to those days. But then again, we still wanna hit Starbucks on our way home from church. Others are outright antagonistic to the idea of a slower paced society. I have a coworker who boycotts Chick-fil-A, not for the reason you mention, but because he is so offended by the audacity of their being closed one whole day a week. Every year, Black Thursday erodes ever further into Thanksgiving, and while I personally celebrate efforts by “the good guys” like Costco to hold the line, I can’t escape the feeling of a desperate rearguard action.

We know God’s solution

Cultural change is usually contentious and hard-fought. In the past few weeks, the warning that God will judge America has been a favorite topic among some commentators. As evidence of our decline, some have cited court-enforced changes to US marriage law; others, an Oklahoma court order to remove a monument bearing the Ten Commandments.

So it begs the question: why has there been no hue and cry as God’s fourth commandment, listed right there on equal footing with “have no other gods before me” and “do not murder”, has gone gently into that good night? I have written in the past about the error we make in drawing distinctions among different kinds of sin, about the still very real capacity of any sin to harm us. It seems to me that the frenetic pace of modern life is at least as corrosive and damaging as other transgressions that seem to enjoy the front row seats of our cultural awareness.

Our culture’s craving for peace and calm is as much spiritual as it is physical or emotional. It should be one uncontroversial place where we as Christians can spend our precious, limited airtime to reach out with wisdom and healing, doing genuine good in the world. In our failure to do so, Madison Avenue has long since filled the void, and as a result, people whose actual desire is for love, meaning, wholeness, belonging— whose actual need is to cry out to God— are crying out instead to the likes of Calgon.

The voices inside

Observing the Sabbath day is hard. It has always been hard. Scripture goes on and on and on and on about all the exceptions you might be tempted to make, all the loopholes you might be tempted to find. “OK, I can’t work. Can I make my kids work? Nope. Servants? Nope. Animals? Nope. OK, what about some foreigner I met on the street who doesn’t even follow our laws? I can put him to work for me, can’t I? Nope. But, at least I can still work when it’s super busy, right? Like certain SUPER busy times of year? Nope.” All of this is how we know there were workaholics back in agrarian times too.

Many excellent books have been written on the importance of Sabbath and how to practice it. My personal favorite is Wayne Muller’s Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found one that addresses the biggest obstacle that makes genuine Sabbath rest an ongoing challenge and a still-elusive commodity in my own life personally: dealing with the internal critic. It’s that little voice inside your head the moment you sit down to rest: what you should be doing. How much time you’re wasting. How your to-do list is so long you can’t possibly stop to breathe.

Lift your hands

I first discovered my internal critic during the Silicon Valley “dot com” heyday when I was working between 80-100 hours a week. It would be time for my Tuesday night bible study group, and I would think, “Well, I can’t go.” Then a part of my brain finally realized: if I stay here and keep working, my week’s work hours will go from 80 to 81: negligible increase. If I go to bible study, my hours of nurturing my soul and slaking my terrible thirst for human connection and fellowship will go from 0 to 1. How much of an increase is that? Well anything divided by zero is infinity.

It’s very common to believe that we can take a rest once “we’ve earned it”… once every single possible item is crossed off our to-do list. To see this attitude in its proper perspective, remember that the word priority just means “how soon you do it.” Your “high priority” items are the ones that precede other, lower-priority stuff you may or may not ever get around to. So now your Sabbath agenda looks like: “Let me do all this high-priority stuff like washing the car and depositing these checks and returning this spoiled cabbage, and then if there’s time left I’ll get to the ‘low priorities’, like investing time in my marriage and my children, and replenishing my depleted emotional reserves.”

Is that really how we want our priorities to be ordered? The fact is, work expands to fill the time you give it, and the universe will not suffer too much if that spoiled cabbage never does get returned. God’s intent is not that we get everything done and then rest. It is that, right there in the midst of our work, we lift our hands from the keyboard, push the chair back from the desk, and walk away.

The fields will still be there to plow in the morning.

Jesus work, fabulous luxury

Doing Jesus’ work through fabulous luxury

Have you heard the saying, “Preach the gospel at all times; use words when necessary”? My pastor recently spoke about that. It used to be one of his favorites, he said, but not anymore; instead, he urged us to talk about Jesus, “no matter how uncomfortable it is.”

I was thinking about that this week as I took vacation time with my wife and daughter and some dear family friends. Some see vacation time as a fabulous luxury, but despite what my pastor said, I think we were doing at least three things that express God’s design for us— building relationship, creating sabbath, using our treasure— quite apart from the need for words.

Building relationship

Recently I have realized that vacation is not “one thing”, and how people like to enjoy themselves varies widely. For example, when my 70-something parents vacation, they like to go someplace new and exotic, and suck all the marrow out of life; where they get their energy from, I have no idea. When my sister’s family vacations, they like to go to an event, like a puzzle competition or a bluegrass festival. Whereas for our family, vacation is all about the “who”, more so than the “where” or the “what”. We like to “stay-cation” at a beautiful spot about 40 minutes’ drive from home, and the whole time is spent entertaining friends and family who drive up to visit us there. We swim, we cook out, and we celebrate time together.

Is it holy? Are we doing ministry? As I reflect on it, the answer, I think, is very much of a yes, even though most of the time, nobody is talking about Jesus. In Matthew 25, Jesus says, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father… for I was a stranger and you invited me in.” I have written before about the deep craving for relationship that is ingrained into each of us. Meeting this need for others, Christ says, is on a par with life essentials like food and water.

Creating sabbath

Our society is stressed out. A 2013 study by the American Psychological Association says that we are “a picture of high stress and ineffective coping mechanisms that appear to be ingrained in our culture”. Stress, the study says, impacts both our physical and mental health:

  • resulting in high rates of anger, irritability and anxiety
  • contributing to ailments ranging from digestive upset to heart disease
  • compounding depression and obesity

We see the examples everywhere. The Onion just satirized it with an article entitled, “Father Teaches Son How To Fly Into Rage Over Completely Inconsequential B*******”. This week when a friend’s dog escaped and ran into the street, rather than help, a nearby stranger began screaming unprovoked invective at her, moving her to tears. She was able to offer grace to her tormentor, concluding “Be kind. Everyone is doing the best they can. I know that angry man has some battles of his own.” But none of this is what God intended for us. Part of the reason we have so little patience for each other is that we do not honor our God-given rhythms of work and rest. Ann Graham Lotz went on record this week blaming the decline of American society on all the usual suspects, but nowhere does she mention our wholesale abandonment of the sabbath. Yet the biblical commandment to honor the sabbath and keep it holy is no less strongly worded, and the consequences are far more obvious and direct.

Into the midst of this kind of world, I believe, nothing is more important than creating margin for downtime. We relax, we renew, we replenish. We invest in our marriages and our children. Again, I think it is work God would approve of.

Using our treasure

There has been a lot of talk in the U.S. in recent years about “the 1%”, by which we mean the super-wealthy ivory-tower elite. But in a global sense, I am actually part of that top 1%, and so, quite likely, are you. (Find out here.) We have a lot to share, and God commands that we do so; otherwise we are like Jesus’ parables about the rich man (“This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God”) or the unworthy servant (“So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground”).

We have nice things. We like to share them. We get to vacation in a beautiful place. Why should we keep that experience to ourselves? Once, a friend’s father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and his kids pulled together to raise money and send their parents on the honeymoon they’d never had. We helped. Sometimes we are hosts on Airbnb, and have the privilege of helping to make that “pause from the action” happen in the lives of people we didn’t even know before. I think all of this is work that is pleasing to God, absence of a come-to-Jesus talk notwithstanding. Speaking of which…

About Jesus: uncomfortable?

When my wife was involved in Young Life, one of their core principles was “earning the right to be heard,” meaning that your advice to others is fairly meaningless and hollow if you won’t take the trouble to invest and walk alongside. The class Perspectives on the World Christian Movement makes the same point in the context of global missions. The gospel message is good news of freedom and reunion and redemption, soaked in a tonic of self-sacrificing love. It is hard to see how we have worked ourselves up into a state where talking about that should be seen as an uncomfortable chore. Jesus’ conversations about himself and the kingdom of heaven were a lot of things— transformative, miraculous, polarizing— but they were never simply socially awkward.

When our focus is on building relationship and investing in others in love, conversations happen naturally about who we are, how we live, what we believe and why. And that, after all, is what Christian faith is fundamentally about.

Related links

Be loved. I double-dog dare you.

Surviving years alone with God and “Into The Woods”