Both now and before the pandemic, I have spent most of my Friday nights with the youth in my church, providing a sweet time of transition from the hustle and bustle of the week into the Sabbath. On the rare occasion where this gets canceled, however, I like to drop in on the group that is so faithful that no holiday or pandemic seems to keep them from doing the vitally important business of intercessory prayer.
This prayer team is mostly made up of older members, and they take this business seriously. They systematically pray through lists of the sick, of those in the armed forces, of those in church leadership, of educators, of first responders, of those suffering financial difficulties, and more. They maintain 12-16 lists that each have quite a few names. The lists are routinely updated and followed up on. This may sound frighteningly labor-intensive, and it is. Praying for other people is hard work that demands just as much intentionality and strategy as going to war. In fact, a popular Christian movie, War Room, discusses prayer much in this way. Unlike actual battles, prayer costs nothing financially, but can be quite costly in terms of time and emotional investment. I would consider it well worth it, though, perhaps because I owe my very life to the intercessory prayers of other people. My grandmother is in the habit of praying for me every night, and I am fairly certain that this prayer sent an angel to keep my friends and me from being run over by a tram when we were on holiday in Germany during our year abroad. We had just finished an evening at the opera (you can get tickets for less than the cost of a movie in America if you know how), and we were cheerfully looking up at the opera house, unaware that we were standing in the tracks. A man yelled, in American English, “Get out of the way!” and we stepped forward just in time for the train to whoosh past us. We turned to thank him, and there was no sign of anyone in the immediate area. Prayer works, even when, like my grandmother, you don’t even know the specifics of what it needs to do. Praying for others demands even more patience, though, than praying for ourselves. When we pray for our own needs, we can adjust our choices as we pray to come into greater alignment with God’s will. When we pray for others, He still respects human choice and there can be many, many delays until the matter is accomplished. George Mueller, who famously built an enormous orphanage on no other business plan than the power of prayer, died with one person whose salvation he had prayed for remaining unconverted. Years after Mueller’s death, they finally made that choice. What matters here is persistence. While lists may feel mechanical, they are valuable in that they allow us to focus, remember, and follow up on needs. If you are just starting out, you are probably not ready for the voluminous lists of my church’s prayer team, but a good place to start is to pray regularly for the people closest to you. Pray for your household, your family, your closest friends, your co-workers--if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like lists and writing things down, it could be a valuable exercise just to think through the people you interacted with during the day and pray for them before you go to bed. Some have even mastered the habit of praying for the people they see as they go about their day. I will never forget a weekend I once spent in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, which contains the poorest people in the city, including a sizable homeless population. After interacting with these people on the street and then seeing the contrast when interacting with the wealthiest in the financial district, I was overwhelmed by the diverse needs I had seen. I prayed for that city and its people, and was amazed by a sense of how much God cares for each soul that lives there. He seemed glad that I had chosen to care about these anonymous faces, and I felt His presence there in the most run-down, sketchy, mildly unsafe part of the city. When we pray for others, we learn to love them better. In learning to love them better, we get more in touch with the God who loves all. Prayer for others is not just a service we do for other people, but one of the most sacred acts of worship we can do towards God Himself. He who made us in His image longs for us to recognize that image in other people by taking a genuine interest in their well-being. Each time we pray for another person, we get just a little bit closer to God’s own heart and become a little bit more like Him.
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There is a grand variety of mental illnesses and straight-up bad moods caused by difficult situations. Because of that, there is a great variety of treatments and strategies for them. However, there are a few core things that help across the board, and one of those is exercise.
Exercise is one of the most potent weapons against mental illness. It is so powerful that some people (not everyone, but some) with clinical-grade levels of depression and anxiety are able to replace their medications with faithful exercise habits. In those who have not reached that point, exercise can prevent them from getting to the point where they need medication in the first place. For this chemical reason alone, it’s well worth the time and effort to develop good exercise habits. In addition to its chemical benefits, exercise has the emotional benefit of reminding you that you matter enough to take the time to do it. Depending on how you exercise, it is an oasis in your day that restores you for the rest of the day’s work. Exercising outdoors gives you the calming benefits of fresh air and freedom from the caginess of indoor life. Pairing indoor exercise with other pleasurable activities like watching TV or listening to music or audiobooks gives you something more to be happy about. To gain even more benefits along the way, exercise with a partner. If you live with others, take walks with them; it will build your relationship and protect you from isolation. If you live alone (or if the people you live with are busy), call loved ones on the phone and walk or pace while talking to them. I pace while I’m on the phone, and I frequently exercise far more on days where I have a lot of phone calls than when I don’t because the time goes by so fast from the pleasure I get from being in the company of others. If you have a lot of work calls, this is also a great way of doing healthy multitasking. Of course, exercise also benefits your physical health, which improves your mental health as well. Obesity is linked to several kinds of mental illness, though it’s not clear which causes which. Medications used to treat mental illness can make people gain weight, and mental illness has a way of demotivating people from caring for their physical health. Conversely, being in poor physical health can cause situation-based depression and anxiety. It’s a vicious cycle. Because it’s easier to work on physical health in many ways than on mental health, exercise is a good way to enter the virtuous cycle of recovering from problems with both. While diet also has an impact on mental health, exercise is a better place to begin because it doesn’t involve adjusting the powerful emotional connections we have to food. Those things do need to be addressed eventually, but it’s easier to do once there are small victories and wins in the area of exercise. Success builds on success in both mental and physical health, so obtaining easier victories earlier on can help motivate you to work on both in the long run. The amount and kind of exercise needed to help with mental health will vary according to the severity of the mental health issue and what they’re capable of doing physically. If exercise hasn’t been a very big part of your life in a while, it’s fine to start small. You may hear people talk about the benefits of walking 10,000 steps a day, but 7500 is the real minimum for good health. Starting there and gradually working up to longer goals will be better for you in the long run than starting out trying to meet the ambitious but slightly unrealistic 12,500 steps recommended to treat severe depression. This principle is especially important in the area of strength training. While scientists have understood the benefits of aerobic exercise (walking, running, jogging, etc.) for mental health for some time, they are just now beginning to see how strength training benefits mental health as well. For strength training to be beneficial, it doesn’t have to make you sore or look impressive to yourself or others. In fact, to prevent injury, try not to push yourself until you’ve gotten refamiliarized with your body’s capabilities. On a recent getaway, I went swimming every morning in the resort’s glorious pool. On the last day, I started a little sore but loved the water so much that I pushed myself even further than the previous day and really wore myself out. There was no lasting harm done, but that level of exertion is unnecessary to see progress. If you get sore from any type of exercise, stretching is your friend. When a stretch feels good, you know you’ve worked the muscle enough to make progress. When you stretch, you want to stretch to the point of tightness, not pain, or you run the risk of tearing the muscle. In terms of mental health, stretching is aided and enhanced by deep breathing, which is known to help relax those suffering from severe anxiety. A regular practice of stretching and deep breathing will help those experiencing anxiety from succumbing to it completely. The body and the mind are inseparable, and exercise is one of the best activities for both. Find a form of it you enjoy and get moving! Your body is built for it, and your mind is designed to benefit from it. Why not try it? DISCLAIMER: Never withdraw from psychiatric medications without the supervision of the prescribing physician. Although exercise can make it possible, it is never a good idea to quit cold turkey because of the complicated effects these medications have on body chemistry. Take time to build up an exercise habit and enjoy some of its benefits before talking to your doctor about reducing or stopping your medications. While there are many dimensions to prayer beyond asking God for things, asking God for His help is still a very crucial, foundational part of prayer. It’s both a simple and a complicated dynamic at once. It’s simple that God loves us, wants to help us, and that we can ask Him for our various needs and wants. What makes it complicated? Well, God doesn’t always say “yes” and it’s not always clear why.
There are many reasons why God might not grant a given request, and we often aren’t privy to His reasoning. Garth Brooks once wrote a song called “Unanswered Prayers” about how grateful he was that God didn’t answer a prayer for a relationship to work out because it allowed him to meet his wife instead. We all know some story like that, where God withholds something we ask for so He can give us something better. Such stories comfort us. Sometimes, though, it’s not so clear. God’s perspective on the world is far more complicated than ours, and sometimes things genuinely have to turn out worse for us in order for the big picture to work out. We may never know why, despite hours on our knees for a worthy cause, the thing we prayed for was not accomplished. This is where faith comes in. Asking is itself a form of faith. When we’ve been through a string of unanswered prayers with no clear reason why, it takes a good deal of faith to keep praying. It’s human nature to read God’s silence as a sign that He doesn’t care, even if in the long run we may find that His silence saved us. Whenever we ask God for anything, we are affirming that He not only has the power but the inclination to help. I’ve seen a lot of people get discouraged, or even leave the faith, over unanswered prayers. Their hurt and feelings of rejection are real, and I get where they’re coming from. They’ve been rejected (or so it feels) and don’t want their hearts broken again. In some cases, the unanswered prayer has led them to believe that God doesn’t exist. For those who struggle with this, I would like to suggest, very gently, that they keep up the exercise of asking and pay attention to what they’re asking for. As humans, we’re not always good at figuring out what we need, and sometimes not even what we want. We certainly don’t always think through the implications of what would actually happen if we got everything we asked for. Examining our requests to God is an interesting way of clarifying what we think we want and need. When one of my friends was dying, a group of women from his church was praying for him to live. He stayed alive, all right, but in miserable physical conditions. As soon as they started praying for God to do what was best for him instead, he died. The first prayer reflected the desires of those praying to keep him around, but what he really needed was rest after a long life well-lived. This distinction between “I want” and “I need” is so well-understood even in secular cultures, it forms the backbone of many stories, especially those told through music. If you pay close attention to most of these, you’ll always hear an “I Want” speech or song early on. Whether it’s Romeo sighing for the girl he likes who went into a convent instead of accepting his affections, the old man from Up grieving his wife’s unfulfilled dreams of adventure in South America, Simba singing about being king someday, or whatever, this moment expresses what the hero thinks they want. By the end of the story, they may get it (Simba becomes king)--or they may get something they need more (the old man from Up gets to South America, but the Boy Scout who accidentally joins him on the trip becomes more important to him than his original goal), or be tragically defeated (Romeo and his new love Juliet die after a mere three days of marriage). As you live your life, consider that what you think you want may not be what you need. There may be many reversals before you discover what blessings God actually has in store for you. The journey of prayer is what keeps you from falling into the “tragically defeated” category. As long as you persist in prayer, God will keep leading you closer and closer to what you really need. To get really meta about this, the musical Godspell is based on the gospel of Matthew, making Jesus the main character. What’s His “I Want” song? “God Save the People.” By the end of the musical, He accomplishes this want through His death and resurrection. The rest of our stories are subplots in this big one--all the requests of ours that God accepts and denies are ultimately done so based on the salvation of ourselves and of those around us. As long as we trust in that and do not give up hope, we will be victorious in the end. Meanwhile, life goes on, and we pray for our daily bread knowing that while salvation is the big need, God cares about our wants, too. He may not always be able to accommodate them, but He loves us enough to try. Every once in a while, God shows His tender affection by granting even our silly desires, just to say He loves us. He doesn’t do this all the time, but just enough to show His care for us. Submitting our wants to God’s divine wisdom purifies them, refines them, and brings them closer to what we really need. The more our wants and needs align, the more we will see God’s power working through our prayers. Recently, I’ve been hearing more demand than usual for tips and resources for dealing with mental health challenges. And why not? These issues were always with us, but the pandemic and other stresses of these times have exacerbated them.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term “mental health,” the World Health Organization defines it this way: “Mental health is a state of well-being in which an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.” (www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-strengthening-our-response) Naturally, there are many things that can threaten this. The two most common are undoubtedly depression and anxiety, both of which have the ability to keep a person from realizing their potential, cope with life, work productively, and contribute. In the past, the importance of these issues has been downplayed or swept under the rug. After all, if it’s “all in your head,” you’re not really sick, right? The fact that the disease is “in your head” makes it no less important or real than if it were in your organs, bones or blood. A depressed person battling thoughts of suicide is fighting for their life just as much as a person with terminal cancer. The anxious person who cannot eat or do their job is suffering just as much as someone with the flu. These ailments may be less visible than a broken arm or a high fever, but they still require care and attention. In fact, mental and physical health are tied together. Proverbs 17:22 recognized this by saying, “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” Too many studies to count have shown how depression and anxiety weaken the immune system over time, opening the body up to sickness. Some more interesting recent studies show that mental health even affects how we experience back pain. Two people with the exact same physical injury will experience different degrees of pain based on their mental state. Because the mind and body are tied so tightly together, it’s important to take both seriously. While different kinds of people have different kinds of struggles with prioritizing one over the other, the most important thing is to start somewhere. Where does it start? By approaching life as though you matter. Think about it. Care for mental and physical health both demand that you consider yourself worth the effort. Even an action as small as flossing every day relies on the belief that your teeth are worth it. Because the mind is less concrete and visible than the body, it can be easy to dismiss it as though it doesn’t matter. When you treat your mind as though it doesn’t matter, it gets sick just like your body does. As a pastor, I can give you plenty of reasons why you matter as well as why your mind matters. The WHO definition of mental health rightfully points out the importance of doing one’s job, realizing one’s potential, and contributing to society, but I’d like to go beyond that. You matter because your Father in heaven loves you. He cares for you, and sees you as priceless. Even in the church, it can be hard to sit with that before moving on to the idea of doing useful service and living a productive life. However, you can’t move on to service and productivity until you have first recognized your own value. You cannot give what you haven’t received. You are a human being, not a human doing. You matter to God, not for what you can do for Him, but because of who He is. He lovingly made us in His image, knowing full well that we would break His heart. He accepted that heartbreak willingly and gladly because He loves us more truly and purely than we can ever love one another or even ourselves. To Him, it is joy to have you in the world with all the things that make you unique, and He desires that you flourish. He truly desires your happiness and peace. If the times are wearing on your mental health, you may have to come back to this central truth many, many times a day. There are so many voices in the world dehumanizing each other and saying that some people matter more than others. Some internalize these voices from messages received in childhood. However, the Voice of truth cuts past them all to say, “You are my beloved.” That is the base from which all health flows. Yes, there are books full of techniques and practices for better mental and physical health, and they do help. Over the next few weeks, we will be discussing a number of these things, which in some cases can be life-saving. For them to work in a lasting way, though, the foundation must be there. You matter. Your mind matters. Not for what you can do or who you are, but because your Creator adores you. Last week, I mentioned the nonverbal sacredness of time spent working in the kitchen. Many kinds of prayer overlap with each other, so I don’t think it’s an accident that the delight of nonverbally experiencing kitchen time with God happens to overlap with the joy of praying through and about the ordinary stuff of life. The stories we tell children tend to highlight exciting, out-of-the-ordinary adventures. However, unless you live in a profession as melodramatic as mine (I once went straight from a deathbed to a party), the vast majority of your life will revolve around fairly routine, mundane tasks. Even with my melodramatic profession, I have quite a few ordinary tasks, too. Actually, the melodrama has caused me to treasure these less exciting activities. We’re not designed to live with intense melodrama 24/7. So how do we relate prayer to the ordinary? There are two ways: to do the ordinary as prayer and to bring the ordinary to God in prayer. God gave work to human beings in the garden of Eden, before sin. This implies that we are designed to have occupations and ordinary tasks. Work is how we participate in God’s creation. Think about it: every kind of human work involves rearranging, appreciating, or caring for what God made. While it’s easy to see how the creative, teaching, and healthcare professions pour their lives into acts of prayer incarnated, it’s also important to see this in manual, unskilled, or unpaid labor. If you work in a factory making boxes all week to feed your family, each box you assemble is an act of prayer you do for that family. The medieval craftsman who built the European cathedrals understood this well. They would put loving detail into parts of their work that the people visiting the church would never see. Why? Because they built it for the God they worshiped, not just for the people who would worship in the church they were building. One of my favorite rooms in every church is its kitchen. Church kitchens have a pleasant feeling baked into them that gives the impression of the women and men who have put hours of near-anonymous labor into feeding the people they care about. Even in an empty church kitchen, I can feel the echoes of the bustling before potlucks and half-hear the cheerful chatter from clean-up after large events. This may be no substitute for the formal worship that happens in the sanctuary, but it is an act of worship all the same. A church’s sanctuary is its head, but its kitchen is its heart. Its countertops, drying racks, knives and stoves are saturated with almost as much prayer as the pews and Bibles in the sanctuary. When it comes to praying about the ordinary, nothing is too ordinary to bring to God’s attention. If you think about it, the custom of praying briefly before our meals is designed to encourage that. We eat three times a day--the only thing more ordinary is breathing or drinking water. A meal warrants a prayer because it is so ordinary, and so often the most ordinary things are also the most essential. Until I got married, it was my habit to do my devotionals at the end of the day to put the day to rest. This is a good schedule for people who either do not have the luxury of quiet early morning hours or who sleep alone and want to enjoy God’s companionship before nodding off. I switched this order after I got married, and it led to the interesting dynamic where I find myself praying through my schedule and tasks for the day before they happen. Some of these prayers would look a little silly to someone outside looking in, but I’ve found them incredibly helpful. On days where I pray for patience to deal with a specific challenge, I can feel the difference. On days where I pray for God to help me focus and use my time well, I’m usually more productive. On days where I pray for God to make me wise about how to take care of my body, I make measurably better choices about it. No portion of your day is too small or too mundane to bring to God in prayer. No act of ordinary labor is too trivial to be used as an act of prayer. God may be capable of great and dramatic miracles, but He is also the God of the mundane, the quiet, and the everyday. May you meet Him as you go about your day. As you read this, people are voting for who gets the privilege and responsibility of the presidency of the United States. Months of tension, debates, and politicking have led up to this time, and I think it’s fair to say that every US citizen is anxiously waiting for the answer. We want it now, we want it yesterday so that we can absorb our new reality and move on with our lives.
In the past, we’ve been able to expect to know who our President would be by the end of election night. This year, we might not know for several weeks, especially if it’s a close election. I can almost guarantee that we will not know who our President will be by the morning after the election, as we have in the past. Take a deep breath. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, no good can come of rushing this. No matter who wins, the sun will continue to rise. Consider this to be like the time period between taking a test and getting the results back. There is nothing you can do at this point to affect the outcome. With votes already cast, this is a good time to take a walk and think about something else. I have two concerns during this waiting period. First of all, I am concerned about my fellow Americans on both sides of the political spectrum losing patience and taking to the streets. I am concerned that once the results are known, there will be violence. Christians everywhere, please join me in praying for the peace of our nation. Peaceful protests from either side are fine, but pray with me that there will not be violence. Human lives matter. Secondly, I am concerned about my brothers and sisters within Adventism. The Adventist world is politically diverse, a result of our heritage of valuing freedom of conscience over any man-made political ideology. This used to have the result of Adventists hanging out pretty close to the center of that political spectrum, but in recent decades, they have become nearly as polarized as the rest of North American society. Things have been pretty heated on social media in the lead-up to this election, and I can only imagine how it will be once the results are known--no matter who wins. In my own church, I know there are ardent supporters of both candidates. To all parties involved, I ask this: remember that our loyalty to Christ is far more important than our loyalty to any earthly political system. We are all children of God. In recent years, many have remarked how awkward it is that Thanksgiving happens just a few short weeks after the election. Most extended families are politically diverse, and things can get tense over the veggie-turkey in an election year. Personally, I’m glad for its timing, though, because it forces us to look each other in the eye and remember: you are my family, not my enemy. I love you, and am grateful to have you in this world. We disagree about the election, but we are still a family. My prayer for the Adventist (and Christian) world is this: that no matter who wins this election, we can still look each other in the eye and love one another as Christ loved us. Earthly rulers come and go, but the kingdom of God is forever. Political parties are changeable and easily bought, but our bonds in Christ are forever. Is there someone at church or in your family whose politics annoy you? I challenge you to reach out to them on purpose to connect with them over something other than politics. Politics are such a small fraction of what makes us who we are. Reach for those deeper bonds, and let your love increase by the power of the God who binds you. I lead an incredibly verbal life. Even while physically being unable to speak, I find myself writing thousands of words a day, both for work and for conversation. I listen to audiobooks while I exercise, and read while I eat. I rip through 400+ pages of reading a week, something I didn’t realize was unusual for an adult until a meeting in which people shared their New Year’s resolutions. Many centered on reading one book a month.
While I’m guessing the majority of you don’t live quite as wordy a life as I do, you still probably find it plenty full of words. There’s nothing wrong with this; words are vital to communication and to nailing down complex thoughts. Losing my voice (again) reminds me of the value of spoken words and how much connection we experience through them. As a gentle counterbalance to this verbosity, though, I would like to draw attention to the fact that the God we worship is too big for language to contain. Because God is too big for our language to contain, there are times when praying with words fails us. Ecclesiastes 5:2 (NIV) puts this neatly: “Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.” Notice here how the emphasis is not on total silence your entire life, but on hasty, poorly-considered prayers that stretch on for paragraphs. (Perhaps you’ve been held hostage by one of these in a church service before.) Just as too many words can betray a lack of clear thinking in writing, they frequently do the same in prayer. To go deeper on this, think of it this way: words themselves are just symbols for ideas to make it possible to communicate our thoughts and experiences. Sometimes, we use too many words in order to avoid the complexity of wholeheartedly engaging with the original experience. It’s the everyday equivalent of the tourist who only sees fabulous foreign lands through the lens of their camera. In an effort to capture the experience in their photographs they end up missing out on the actual experience. Words are cameras that capture experiences, and in the capture, the original experience can be lost. How to get around this? I fully understand the irony of using words right now to discuss this in the first place. Words cannot be entirely avoided, and even the most “woke” tourist will want at least two or three photos to help remember their experience later on. That said, it is important to cultivate the habit of enjoying things on a non-verbal level (non-photographic), including God. The two most nonverbally spiritual kinds of places I know are the wilderness and the kitchen. The wilderness allows me to catch glimpses of its Creator in a concrete way without mucking about with words as much. If you were to ask me what I specifically enjoyed about a given hike or why I felt closer to God while doing it, even my own verbosity might fail. It is enough just to be in the presence of God and not overthink it. The spirituality of the kitchen for me comes from how sensory but nonverbal it is. Cooking involves handling God’s Edenic gift of food and participating in furthering that act of creation. Thought dissolves into action and experience, and while there might be a passing thought about how beautiful this batch of kale is or how much more of a spice I need to add, these aren’t necessarily processed at the language level. Observing the transformation of different ingredients into something new and better may have lessons for the spiritual life, but I absorb these things quietly, without too many words interfering. Truthfully, in the kitchen I use more numbers than words (some things do need to be measured), and even those sparingly. Silence may not be a good or desirable place to live long term (I know this too well), but it’s an important retreat to visit regularly. Even without words, you can fulfill the most essential purpose of prayer--connection with your Creator. Afterward, feel free to “capture” the experience in words, but don’t miss the experience itself. Sometimes, God just wants to be with us and our words only get in the way. I am writing this on October 16, a good 11 days before it’s due to post. Why? Don’t I have better things to do, like reviewing for my sermon tomorrow or preparing for the Acts conversation next Thursday or getting my research together for my October 31 sermon?
Ordinarily, yes. However, this morning I woke up with a real wrench in all these plans--a voice that once again refuses to work without feeling painful. If you’ve never heard the origin story for this blog, it was to share insights from what I learned from this very same situation back in February. On that occasion, my voice refused to cooperate for six weeks. Six weeks of precious face-to-face social interaction were lost before the world shut down from COVID just two weeks after I recovered. I sincerely hope that it doesn’t take six weeks this time, for a grand variety of reasons. It’s possible this will only be a matter of days, but at the very least, I won’t be able to get treatment until after the weekend. The dilemma is not knowing whether to take the trouble to prepare for speaking appointments that my voice may or may not cooperate for me to be able to do. After all, I still have a sermon about Boaz that I wrote for last February which has not yet seen the light of day. The sermon I wrote for tomorrow (possibly to be delivered by Pastor Paquini from my notes) is all about God’s power as the solution to feelings of human powerlessness. It feels like a sick joke that I was rewarded for affirming God’s power with the one ailment that makes me feel more powerless than any other. Perhaps there’s a purpose to that. I’ve lost my voice several times throughout the years, and they all have lead to some interesting situations I otherwise would not have experienced. When I was in high school I lost it during an evangelistic series/vacation Bible school I was doing in Romania, and it made the locals listen all the more attentively when I got my voice back. The six-week voice loss earlier this year made me downright grateful when coronavirus shut the world down because at least I could communicate again. This blog would not be here without that experience. I don’t know what purpose it serves for me to lose it now, but I have to trust that there is one. The part of tomorrow’s sermon I was especially looking forward to preaching had to do with the book of Ruth. It starts with Naomi feeling so empty about everything she’s lost--her wealth, her husband, and her sons--that she asks to be called Mara, which means “bitter.” By the end of this lovely short book, she holds a baby in her lap who would not exist if all these misfortunes had not befallen her in the first place. That child, Obed, was King David’s grandfather and an ancestor to Jesus. The scary part of being a believer is the knowledge that faith is not always rewarded with pleasant, comfortable experiences. When you trust in God, you are also trusting that He may need to allow you to suffer for things to turn out right in the grand scheme of things. Just as Naomi died without knowing that her loss ultimately contributed to the birth of the Messiah, we may never know what purpose our suffering serves. Where does this leave us in the meantime? We do the best we can with what we have, using the tools we have (and not dwelling too long on the tools we have lost or never had. Then we hold on to hope. We hold on to hope that God will improve our situation, and that if He will not, He will use it for good in the end. Meanwhile, life goes on. I hope my voice returns within the week, but if it does not, I can still write. I can still plan. I can still research and learn. There is hope for the future as well as a task at hand to occupy me. For that, I thank God in His goodness. Update: I have now seen a doctor, and am on voice rest until at least November 4. Surprisingly, the pandemic has made it easier for me to keep working, as more of it is digital than it was back in February. I haven't even had to cancel any events--just speeches I was going to give at them. Special thanks to everyone who is substituting for me in those various speeches, especially Pastor Paquini and Jennifer Merklin, who are doing the bulk of it. A few months ago, this blog spent a month or two discussing how to enjoy the Bible. In this post, we’ll be revisiting some of those ideas, but with the emphasis on the prayer side of praying through scripture. Here’s the thing: there are many, many ways of reading the Bible and many ways of praying. There are even multiple ways of praying through the Bible. What I wish to focus on here is the slow, restful practice of taking time to sit with a single text long enough to absorb and pray over its full meaning for you right now.
Every year, the Biblical Spirituality class at Andrews University sets aside a day to visit a beautiful nearby place and practice this kind of prayer. The assignments for the day include things like, “For the next half hour, pray over John 15:5 in total silence.” When this was assigned to me, I found a comfy place to stare at a tree while trying to keep impatient thoughts like, “Really, a half hour on the same verse?” out of my head. John 15:5 reads, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” To help me absorb this verse, there was a tree in front of me with many branches. I started to draw it as I turned the verse over in my head. I noticed how all the leaves and twigs that made the tree so complicated and difficult to draw were attached, in some way or another, to the trunk. This tree’s whole vitality came from the trunk, much like the vine from this verse. I mulled it all over further. The branches didn’t actually do anything; they just sat there, deriving life from the trunk and passing it onto their leaves. That was a real revelation for me. For so much of my life, I have striven towards behavioral goals--towards performing better in school, towards living what I thought a Christian life should be, towards doing the various things I thought were so important. The verse rebuked me; it showed me the need to be with God, to draw life from Him instead of trying so very hard to do things on my own. I was trying to “bear fruit” without first receiving the life and energy to do so from the Source. Digging even deeper into this, I saw how the pursuit of performance as a primary goal had hurt myself and others, and how performance naturally follows when we begin by putting God first. When we were called back inside to share our insights, I was amused, as usual for the Seminary, at how many of these young preachers felt the need to “preach” their insights in fairly dramatic ways. But I understood it--who hasn’t felt the pressure to perform at some point or other? Who hasn’t been tempted to neglect their first love in the pursuit of greater performance? Performing is easy; relational authenticity is harder. All of this came from a half hour of just praying and resting in one verse. This can be done with almost any verse in the Bible, though some are easier to process this way than others. In the stories, great, healing insights can come from using your sanctified imagination to insert yourself in the story. The words of Scripture are not only records of how God has worked in the past, but also God’s wisdom for what is going on in your life now. To read the Bible from just one perspective or the other all the time leads to excesses, but prayerfully considering God’s action in the past alongside what He might be trying to say to you now can reap beautiful, abundant rewards. Naturally, my half-hour exercise with John 15:5 did not forever cure me of chasing after performance goals, or by measuring myself in that way. I wouldn’t even say that I’m 100% cured of it now, though it’s less of a nagging force than it was then. The exercise did bring the matter to my attention in a profound way, though, and gave me a memory to use as a springboard for dealing with it better in the future. Similarly, the insights you gain from this prayer/scripture hybrid will work on you over time, rather than instantly. A special note to anyone out there who, like me, frequently has to read or study the Bible on behalf of others: it is vital that you take time regularly to “feed yourself.” By this I mean that if you only ever pray for others and read the Bible to gain insights to pass on to other people, your personal spirituality will quietly start to wither. It’s the same as if you were a chef who created fabulous meals for other people but never ate anything beyond a tasting sip here or there to make sure the food turned out. A chef in this condition would eventually die of malnutrition and their art would die with them. As one who gathers spiritual food for others, do not starve yourself. People in this role need this specific practice more than most because they may not have a “chef” cooking for them. Slow prayer from the scriptures, just for you, is as nourishing, necessary, and healthfully indulgent as home-cooking a beautiful meal for yourself to eat at the end of a long day. Better yet, it brings the Divine Master Chef into the process, preparing with flair a customized delight no one else could have possibly made for you. This Thursday is an important day in Adventist history: the 176th anniversary of the Great Disappointment. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, the Great Disappointment refers to a day when thousands of people (called Millerites) thought Jesus was coming, and He didn’t. There’s more to the story--they had more Biblical research behind their hopes than today’s date-setters do, but the result was the same: no second coming, and life goes on. The more interesting part of the story, I think, is how people dealt with the Great Disappointment. Some lost their faith in God entirely, some became fanatics, and some turned to their Bibles to check their work. The modern-day Adventist church is descended from this third group, but I find this range of responses to bitter disappointment an interesting study in how people are dealing with the various disappointments of 2020. Certainly, the year 2020 has had its share of disappointments. To make it all the messier, these disappointments play out a little different for everyone, so it isn’t a unified experience like it was for the disappointed Millerites. Some lost weddings, some lost graduations, some lost face-to-face schooling, and some lost desperately desired peace, quiet, or privacy. In all cases, the year has played out very differently than it was originally planned to happen. One reaction to this has been depression. Like the Millerites who lost their faith in God, some people have reacted to this year with deep sadness and soul-searing questions. If this is you, you need to know that you are not alone. Even those who have dealt with the pandemic most productively have had seasons of feeling that loss. Unfortunately, in this pandemic, the depression rate has gone up and there has been a small rise in suicides, as well as a major increase in alcohol consumption. The important thing is to keep going and to keep life moving on. Please don’t resort to suicide--the story isn’t over. If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide and live in LA County, please call 1-877-727-4747 for a trained professional to help you talk through things. The dark corners of the mind love to seize on moments like these and drag you down. Rather than try to blot out the darkness through addiction or self-destructive behavior, it is vital to ground yourself in the things that make life worth living. Focus on and pursue those things vigilantly, and slowly the darkness will fade. Another reaction has been extremism. When people deal with intense events like the Great Disappointment or the year 2020, they sometimes adopt more extreme positions on things than they would otherwise. The fanatics of 1844 started claiming that Jesus had come in their hearts already and acted like babies. Some practiced “spiritual wifery,” which is just as creepy and suspect as it sounds. I’m not going to single out one kind of extremism here because the point is that this year has brought out the extremist in so many of us. No matter what religion or political party you belong to, you most likely can’t open your social media feed right now or turn on the news without hearing some fresh example of this extremism at work. As you encounter extremism in others, be mindful that you may have forms of it, too. Extremism appears to arise from a hasty desire to make sense of the world without taking the time to go about it in a careful, balanced way. After all, who has time for fact-checking when the world is literally on fire? (Well, California is, anyway.) We all jump to conclusions sometimes when there simply isn’t time to sift through the mountains of information hitting us from all sides. At one point, I accidentally spread misinformation about the pandemic to school children because I hadn’t done careful fact-checking. Now that I’ve had time to check it out from more reliable sources, I’ve corrected my previous statements to those same children. It’s relatively easy to do that when the issue is a matter of scientific fact, but when it touches on such sensitive and subjective topics as race, political ideology, or economics, it gets even harder for people to self-correct or to wade patiently through misunderstandings. The third reaction to disappointment is probably the healthiest, though the hardest to do. The group of Millerites that turned to their Bibles to check their work made many mistakes along the way, including a teaching that no one new could be saved--but because they kept going back to Scripture, the truth eventually won out. They patiently and prayerfully sifted through the Scriptures, rediscovering things that had been forgotten by Christians for many years. They clung to their faith and continued to sift through the facts. Life went on for them, but they did not give up hope. To get through this season of disappointments, it is vital to keep up hope, to be patient when processing what’s going on, and to cling to the realities of our faith. While it is easy to get discouraged about the seemingly unanswered prayers out there--prayer for the end of the pandemic, prayers for the wildfires to end, etc--prayer is about so much more than asking God for what we want. In times of disappointment, prayer is how we bring our feelings about the matter to God for Him to deal with. It is also how we seek His wisdom in sifting through everything that’s going on. Most importantly, it re-centers our minds on the source of all hope. 2020 and its issues will not last forever. It will either lighten up, or it will intensify until Jesus comes and deals with everything at once. Either way, we are not stuck with this. Meanwhile, life goes on. |
AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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