For upwards of a month, I’ve been doing baptismal studies over Zoom with a small handful of kids. It’s so exciting to see the lights come on as things that are well-worn and familiar in my own mental architecture become real to them for the first time. The first lesson on salvation gave me the cool experience of seeing a child understand for the first time that you can’t earn it; it’s a gift from God. This week was about spirituality, and it was neat seeing a student express his love for Jesus and his interest in learning more about how to live a life committed to Him.
These youngsters are at the beginning of their journey with Jesus, and whenever I or some other pastor gets the privilege of baptizing them, that will be a formal ceremony of commitment which is every bit as life-changing and important as a wedding. Done right, the relationship between two people deepens as the wedding becomes an increasingly distant memory, and so it is with our relationship with Jesus. Done wrong, it decays. What makes the difference? Commitment. In both spirituality and marriage, the beginning ceremony includes specific commitments of loyalty and love. These commitments--frequently, but not always formalized as spoken vows--express the shape and direction the relationship is meant to take. For those vows and promises to come true, there needs to be an intentional, ongoing commitment to work towards those aims. When it comes to our relationship with Jesus, it’s important to remember that love precedes obedience. He knows that we are human, and cannot keep His entire law perfectly. This does not make us liars when we commit to keeping it--rather, it declares that we are willing for Him to change us into the kind of people who will keep it better year after year. If we try and go in the other direction and attempt to earn Jesus’s love through commitment, it simply won’t work. Jesus loved you before you were born, and there is nothing you can do to make Him love you any more or any less. You, on the other hand, can increase or decrease your own love for Jesus by how much attention and commitment you put into the relationship. Just as a marriage decays if no intentional effort is put into it, we need to set aside regular, committed “dates” with Jesus for that relationship to continue to grow. These “dates” with Jesus will look different from person to person. If getting up at the crack of dawn to fill out your Sabbath school lessons brings you closer to Jesus, wonderful! But if that’s not you, that’s OK. You may meet Jesus with a clearer mind at night, after the day’s appointments are all done. You may find that the Sabbath school quarterly isn’t speaking to you this time and desire to read a more timely part of Scripture. That’s great, too. If you’re an auditory learner, you may find listening to the Bible more meaningful than reading it on the page. In the area of prayer, there is the greatest potential for variety. I personally like to write my prayers. Why? When I was growing up, I traveled too much to have a consistent place to pray. Praying in a journal gave me a tangible, portable space for prayer that also signalled to others when I wanted to be left alone. This is important when you share a hotel room or a tent with many, many other people. I don’t actually need it for this reason anymore, but I’ve clung to the habit over the years because it forces me to articulate my thoughts more carefully and it holds me accountable for spending time with God. I also enjoy the tactile sensation of writing. I’ve known others who pray in an astonishing variety of ways. Some place a chair in front of them and address it as though Jesus is there. Some clear out a closet to be a “war room” where they keep their prayer lists and pray in a very systematic way. Some pray through the Scriptures, claiming promises. Some pray in the shower. Some sing their prayers. Some have an alarm set reminding them to pray at certain hours. Some even draw or paint their prayers. Still others meet God in nature by setting aside time to pray in the wilderness on a regular basis. There are almost as many ways to pray as there are people. If what you’re doing isn’t working for you, try something else. In a human relationship, you may have experienced boredom with a standard “dinner and a movie” date and found the need to mix it up every once in a while. It’s like that with God, too. Even if a certain style of prayer works for you most of the time (like journaling does for me), every once in a while it’s healthy to try something else. The overriding principle behind it is that you deliberately set aside time and space to be with your God. Done right, an ongoing commitment to a relationship with Jesus will cause your love for Him to deepen over the years. You will always remember the enthusiasm of first falling in love, but it will mature into a more companionable, intimately appreciative love over time. In every church I’ve pastored at, there has been a small handful of elderly believers who have had much to teach me in this area. Their decades of walking in a love relationship with Jesus have given them a deeper, stronger testimony than the most exciting conversion-and-baptism story. Life goes on for them, but it goes on with Jesus.
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At the end of August, I went on vacation. When I got back, everything was radically different from when I left. School started. My church began face-to-face services outdoors. Pathfinders gave me its schedule for the first half of the school year. Starbucks released its delightful fall drinks. My baptismal class moved to Sabbath afternoon. In the midst of all this system-shocking change, I also decided to attend a virtual convention for youth and young adult ministries.
Going straight from the cheerful idleness of vacation into all of this was, to say the least, jarring. The month of September brings changes for most people, albeit not usually quite as abruptly as it has for me this year. This is so normal that it was even mentioned in my weight loss group as something to watch out for. Some people thrive on change, and others dread it. One thing is for sure: it’s inevitable. The purpose of the vacation I took was to celebrate my great grandmother’s 100th birthday. When I consider all the change she has experienced in one lifetime, it blows me away. When she was my age, phones were still connected to the wall, everyone did their work on typewriters, World War II was a recent and vivid memory that still impacted daily life, computers were enormous room-filling machines, humans had not yet visited outer space, animation was literally hand drawn on actual paper, people still occasionally died from things we routinely treat with antibiotics now, and black-and-white TV was still cutting-edge communications technology. So who’s to blame her if she struggles to remember to wear a mask? One of the things I appreciate most about her is that even now, she’s not given to the kind of nostalgia that paints the past with a better brush than the present. Sure, she has happy memories of the past, but she’s still enjoying and making new ones. On multiple occasions when I’ve expressed curiosity about some of the historically significant hardships she faced, she’s mentioned how she likes remembering the good things as much as possible. “It’s been a good life,” she says. It is vitally important to keep making good memories as the seasons and years bring ridiculously impactful changes. The year 2020 has turned out to be more compressed than dog years so far, and we haven’t even gotten to the contentious election that will bring earth-shattering changes no matter who wins or how. It’s tempting to focus on the negative impact of these changes and mourn the ways in which the world will never be the same. A little bit of mourning during seasons of change is good emotional honesty, but let’s not stay there. A grieving person eventually needs to arrive at a point where remembering their loved one makes them smile fondly at the memory instead of cry at the loss. Similarly, for us to be resilient as a society we need to develop the skill of remembering with joy and fondness what we once had. Treasure those memories of singing shoulder-to-shoulder in large choirs. Smile at your potluck memories. Chuckle as you remember the agony and ecstasy of things like the Oshkosh Pathfinder camporee, international travel, and amusement parks. Enjoy your memories. Then, and this is key: Go make some new ones. Change may cause us to lose some things, but it also opens up opportunities to make new kinds of good memories. One thing I love about looking at great grandmother’s pictures is how she dresses differently from decade to decade, but she looks beautiful and happy in each one, in an entirely different way for entirely different reasons. Behind all of that, I speculate, is a concrete knowledge of just how much worse it could be and gratitude that things turned out as well as they did. Even if it does turn out that 2020’s changes lead to the apocalypse, ha ha, let the apocalypse find us making what good memories we can despite the troubled times. The Baroque masters discovered that if they gave the backgrounds of their paintings dark shadows, they could make the subjects of their paintings shine almost three dimensionally. Let’s live lives that stand out from the shadows and shine all the brighter for it. “Prayer changes things.” When we pray through lists of requests, we acknowledge this. (Otherwise, what’s the point?) The most important thing to change through prayer, though, is the self.
Before I go any farther on this discussion, though, I’d like to make something clear: when we pray for change, we are subject to God’s timing. Fairly frequently, I meet people who are tortured by the notion that complete sinlessness is possible in this lifetime. They experience a good deal of angst over the contrast between what they think should be possible and what they see happening in their own lives. Alas, we’re kind of stuck with some sin or other our entire lives. If we weren’t, Jesus’s sacrifice would have been unnecessary. Because of this, the goal of transformative prayer isn’t total perfection, but progress towards resembling our Savior. There are many different ways to approach transformative prayer. Some of the types of prayer we have previously discussed offer a great starting point for it. After looking inward and surrendering to God what is precious to us, we have a clearer picture of what needs changing. That whole process spontaneously uncovers areas that require growth, and they’re well worth praying about. Another great direction to take--and one that might be more productive for people who are naturally extremely self-critical--is to use Jesus as the model and inspiration for transformative prayer. In the 90’s, the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) trend got started in earnest, with people wearing WWJD bracelets, lanyards, and other trinkets. The basic sentiment is OK if you’re only interested in the end result. I think the more pertinent question is, “What would Jesus be?” Action and behavior flow from character. Jesus’s actions were only righteous because they flowed from who He was. When we, as sinful human beings, start praying about transformation, it’s so easy to get caught up on praying about behaviors when we would do so much better to pray about character transformation. When using Jesus as a model for transformation, we can’t draw straight lines from His behavior to ours because, for crying out loud, He was God incarnate. He may be able to walk on water and control the forces of nature, but we can’t. Greater progress is made when we dig into His life and aim to discover why He acted as He did, what motivated Him, what His heart and mind were like. Those are the things we need to pray to have. When Jesus forgives the woman caught in the act of adultery, it’s not because He’s soft on adultery. In fact, in the Sermon on the Mount He makes it the only good reason for divorce. This powerful story reveals a good deal about Jesus’s character--about His high value on human life, about His compassion for sinners, and about His sense of fairness. Going deep into these stories and praying to love as Jesus loves while holding sacred the law He authored can change your life. When Jesus said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” there was just one person in the conversation without sin--Himself. The implications of this are huge. If He, as the only sinless human being ever to exist, would not condemn this woman, who are we to condemn others or even ourselves? There is a kind of spiritual greed that gets frustrated when we do not change as fast as we would like. This story shows a gentler path towards transformation--the path of seeing the full impact of the sin, recognizing God’s incredible mercy, and passing it on to others. These are all attitudes of the heart that take time, and leave no room for boasting or pride. Dwelling too long on our own sinful acts holds us back and makes us nasty critics to deal with. Transformation comes from looking towards what can be, towards the beautiful things Jesus offers and models. Following this path, we can transform without succumbing to hypocrisy, for we will be fixated on Jesus, rather than on the nitty gritty of human behavior. He alone can change our hearts and make us new. In our always-on world, it’s important to “check out” every once in a while. The human body is built with cycles of being awake and sleeping; the week is built with cycles of work and relaxation, especially if you take a Biblical view of the matter. The main business of life--solving problems, being productive, processing new information with careful critical thinking skills--is all very important, but we can’t be doing that 24/7. Just like an axe that starts sharp but gets dull from overuse, we all need to sharpen the axe by taking the time every once in a while to rest and recalibrate.
Most people understand this on some level, and do something or other to relax on a regular basis. The problem is that not every relaxation method is good, and even good methods of checking out can be done so badly that they don’t help in the long run. For checking out to have a lasting benefit, it needs to be done responsibly. It has come to my attention that during this pandemic, alcohol and substance abuse is becoming more common. Given the state of the world, I see how it can be a temptation. Who wouldn’t want to forget their sorrows every once in a while? Unfortunately, using substances towards that end has lasting consequences. In addition to forgetting one’s sorrows, one can end up forgetting the important things that make life worth living. One of the most heartrending accounts of substance abuse I’ve ever read involved a mother who, in pursuit of her high, forgot about her elementary-aged daughter entirely. This is without even mentioning the physiological horrors drugs and alcohol can work on the body over time. During grim times like these, the desire to check out is so high that addictions tend to flourish even more than usual. Chemical dependency may be the most obvious one, but there are many other kinds of addictions at work right now. Gaming is one of the most common. A little bit of gaming in moderation can be a delightful diversion, but there is a deep level of obsession at which the game blots out all other concerns. Sleep is forgotten, responsibilities are neglected, and everything becomes about beating the next level. Even when the game is not in front of the gaming addict, the mind is still churning away at how to beat the next level. To break a gaming habit, a period of total abstinence is frequently necessary. It really hurts to do, but in many cases it’s the only way to get out. Many videogames are specifically designed to be addictive. When I learned how Candy Crush and its derivatives intentionally did it, I was enraged. At one point in grad school, I was so hooked on a Candy Crush derivative that I would shake when I ran out of lives and would occasionally lie to my husband about playing. If a particular type of game does that to you, you probably ought to cut it out of your life entirely; it is not a safe form of recreation for you. It has crossed the line from relatively harmless time-waster to downright destructive life-force-sucker. Lest an older generation feel too smug about how superior they are to these youngsters who get addicted to videogames so easily, let’s talk about TV for a moment. In moderation, it can be a great way to unwind, learn new things, and enjoy interesting stories that make us laugh or say something interesting about human nature. Unfortunately, for a lot of people it dominates their evenings and steals away precious hours of sleep. Old-school broadcast TV did everything in its power to keep its viewers tuned in, and modern streaming platforms have even more sophisticated measures to ensure the same thing. In fact, both YouTube and Netflix have features deliberately designed to eat up as much of your time as possible. To check out responsibly, be deliberate about making sure that your recreation doesn’t lead to destruction in other areas of your life. Seek out relaxation methods that restore your mind and body instead of draining them. Call a friend. Take a walk. Plan breaks during the workday, days off during the week, and vacations throughout the year ahead of time so that you can tie up your responsibilities properly first. For about the next two weeks, I’ll be checking out of this blog to celebrate a few birthdays (a beloved relative is turning 100) and rest up before several incredibly busy months. I look forward to getting some good open-air exercise, unplugging from work, and visiting with people I love using appropriate infection control practices. I always gain a little bit of fresh perspective when I do this, and I look forward to having that to offer here when I get back. Until then, life goes on. Tonight, my local church board will be discussing a complicated issue: the details of when and how to reopen. It’s not a new subject by any means; it has occupied the attention of the board at every meeting since the county started allowing it. In fact, there have even been additional meetings to the regularly-scheduled ones. A good deal of thought has gone into the issue. What makes tonight different is that a dedicated group of people came together to create a concrete plan for doing outdoor church within the county’s guidelines.
What makes this step so important is that the heart of the issue is the tension between the desire to worship together and the desire to keep our people safe from the virus. On the one hand, there are Biblical texts that discuss the value of meeting together; on the other hand, there are extensive Biblical passages dealing with the importance of infection control and the infinitely precious value of human life. These two goals usually don’t conflict with each other, but the pandemic has placed them in an interesting tension. The tension is oddly fitting, as it comes from a Bible full of tensions. Grace only matters because the law matters. Jesus had to die to give us life. Many of the texts about the value of gathering are written from a lonely Paul in prison or under house arrest. The Biblical worldview was fairly comfortable with tension--the whole either/or mindset dominating so many modern discussions is an import from Greek dualism. I admire the motivations behind both sides of the discussion over reopening. Truly. Both are valid. Even the reasoning behind both positions has a great internal logic. As a pastor with the responsibility of serving the entire congregation, then, I would urge this: listen. The gather vs. distance conversation unearthed an issue so fundamental that it gets little attention: What is a church? What is a community, and what holds it together? What are the ties that bind? On one extreme, a church is a building where people gather. On another extreme, a church is a group of people who all believe the same thing. The truth as I see it lies in the middle--we are called to relationship, interdependence, and mutuality. This can happen without a church building and, in this technologically advanced age, without face-to-face meetings--but there have to be spaces for interaction. There has to be room for relationships. These relationships, rightly done, are founded on the beliefs we share. They are rooted and grounded in gratitude to Christ who died for us, whose reappearing we eagerly await. With God the Father, Christ our Elder Brother, and the Holy Spirit our Comforter, we are a family whose ties cannot be severed by distance and circumstance. These familial ties draw us together in love, helping us deepen our relationship with God as we see more and more of His image in each other. Having this foundation and trusting in it can give us a useful framework for discussing these issues. Naturally, we will disagree about things, but if we trust in the gospel that unites us, we will be willing to listen to each other, reason, and choose to do what is best for the body at large. Personally, I sit uneasily on the fence about the issue of reopening outdoors--largely because I hear, loud and clear, the concerns of both sides. It’s a less certain place to sit than in the firm convictions of those who are firmly decided, but my conscience will have it no other way. If we can have a dialogue that leads to the careful, compassionate consideration of both sides, we have it made. If we can, as a faith community, respect our differences of opinion and strive for a win-win, even if it takes a bit longer (or shorter) than we’d like, we’ll have it made. If we can prayerfully seek God’s will first in this, we will flourish in the long run. Inevitably, whatever plan emerges will have at least one or two things you don’t like personally. This is the nature of the world we live in; it has set up an unwinnable situation. Even so, we can strive for the greatest good for the greatest number of people and seek God’s will. Pray for the board’s decision tonight. Pray for us collectively to listen well to both sets of concerns, but first and foremost, for the will of God. He is the tie that binds us together, and He alone can grant us the wisdom we need to choose well. Like many other things in the spiritual life, surrender is incredibly easy to describe but extremely difficult to practice. Simply put, it’s the art of turning everything in your life over to God, giving His will preference over your own. This doesn’t mean that your will doesn’t matter--God gave you free will on purpose. It simply means that you put God’s will first.
If I were reckless, I could stop there. If I did not understand human nature fairly well, I could stop there. The central difficulty with surrender in all its forms is our built-in self-centeredness. This self-centeredness is so ubiquitous that it’s often difficult to see, like a fish trying to understand what water is. It’s so pervasive that even people who appear very selfless may be doing so from a very self-centered perspective. I stand guilty of this. When I’m living on autopilot (because I’m tired or whatever), I’m a people-pleaser. It can come off as very selfless and sacrificial, but if you look more closely, it’s actually about my selfishly trying to maintain the pleasant relational climate I want. I dislike being at odds with people; it’s even been known to make me feel physically ill from time to time. If I don’t watch it, this becomes an idol to me, and no one’s the wiser--except God. Human relationships are important, but if they take His place, they both disrupt the more important relationship with God and ultimately deteriorate from a lack of divine wisdom. Surrender involves a very difficult willingness to trust that whatever God asks us to give up, He will replace with something better. Replace people-pleasing for authentic relationships. Replace a mind gummed up with video game addiction for a mind that can actually rest. Replace the mere performance of religion with an intentional, personal relationship with God. It all sounds so easy on paper, but when we are holding tightly to something, it can be so hard to see past the pain of giving it up. I heard a story once about a little girl who loved her string of fake pearls that she would use to play dress-up. One day, her daddy told her to give him her pearls. She didn’t want to do it, she was afraid to do it, and it took her several days of wrestling with herself until she finally gave him the fake pearls. As he took them, he gave her a box that contained a strand of genuine pearls. Like this little girl, it’s so easy for us to hang on to counterfeits and imitations of the good things God has in store for us. It’s even harder when the thing we must surrender doesn’t actually come back. When I surrendered my brother to God’s will, I learned of his death only about fifteen minutes later. I don’t regret doing it, though, because starting the grieving process from the foundation of having already surrendered him softened my suffering. There was loss, there was a touch of anger, and all the complicated emotions that surround grief--but had I not surrendered my brother to God from the start, I don’t think my grief would have been constructive. I may never have found peace with it. Truly, surrender is the work of a lifetime, and God asks different things of us in different seasons of our lives. When we pray to do God’s will, He frequently gives us a good deal of latitude to choose our own paths. Other times, though, we have to be willing to give something up--a cherished plan, wish, or desire--to make room for something better. It will take time and wrestling (the human will never gives up easily), but it’s worth the struggle and the pain for the great things God has for you. For some time, I’ve been meaning to write on this topic. My delay comes from a variety of sources. For one thing, as a Teacher’s Kid, I share a deep reticence to discuss all things school-related until the week or two before it starts and abhor the Back to School displays that crop up on 4th of July weekend these days. Secondly, I’m not a parent, and I’m always a bit hesitant about discussing parenting issues that I have not experienced firsthand.
But, we are down to the last two weeks before many schools start, and no one has experienced this particular parenting issue firsthand before. After attending a webinar about going back to school, I realized that it’s probably better to address it imperfectly than to ignore it. The reality is that this back-to-school season will be very, very different than any other in living memory. Perhaps the strangest thing about it is that it’s not actually back to school physically--at least not around here. This makes things both more and less intense than they are in a regular school year. I can only imagine the practical struggles over arranging proper supervision in households where all the adults work outside the home right now, yet for the kids, it’s simply exchanging their entertainment screens for educational ones. The latter issue intrigues me in particular. In the webinar I attended, one parent discovered that her child didn’t even realize it was summer because so little had changed. This child was quite upset over “missing the summer.” These losses need to be mourned properly--the cancelled or downsized vacations, camp stays, and other features of the summer that normally make it more of a break for the kids. Some of the kids in my youth group are actually looking forward to school to break up the tedium of a featureless summer. If possible, try to do something extra special as a family before school starts again--in my family, we would call this “The Last Hurrah of Summer.” It’s harder to do with all the restrictions in place, but anything that helps mark the transition will help. Whether it’s a special meal, a day trip to the beach, or a movie marathon at home, try to sneak in a little extra family time before everyone involved is busier. Speaking of the stress involved, keep an eye out for your child’s emotional state. Children and even teens aren’t always very forthcoming about their feelings. They may be absorbing all kinds of fear and anxiety from what they pick up on the news without showing any signs of what’s troubling them. Without being too heavy-handed about it, look for natural opportunities to ask open-ended questions about their experience. In the check-ins I do with the teenagers every week, I’ve learned that “How was your week?” is too vague because inevitably, the answer will be “Fine.” Questions that engage with the details will get you more of a window into their world. One of my favorites lately has been, “What was the most interesting thing that happened this week?” because it probes for detail while acknowledging that they may be experiencing incredibly boring weeks with only, say, a change in cereal standing out (a real answer I have received). Another great opener I may go back to during the school year is, “What was the high and the low of your day/week?” The lows can be especially instructive. If your child is experiencing a good deal of anxiety about the upcoming school year, either for 2020-specific or for ordinary reasons, it might be helpful to discuss what will be the same about the coming school year. They will learn new things. They will have teachers and classmates. There will be homework (they might not look forward to that, but it’s a fact) and there will be a consistent thing to do with their time every weekday. In a world full of constant change, it can be comforting to remember what’s going to be the same. One of the things that remains the same with all of the Adventist teachers I know is an extensive preparation period before school starts. They are working hard to make sure that they can give your child the best experience possible. In fact, this year that “pre-session” is two weeks instead of one to make sure that school runs as smoothly as possible. I don’t know if the public system is doing something similar, but I do know that the teachers in this equation understand how difficult this pandemic has been for everyone and that they still want your child to succeed. Meanwhile, keep tabs on your own anxieties. Young children in particular have a way of absorbing the emotions of the adults around them, so it’s very important that you take good care of your own emotional health. Just as you need to secure your own oxygen mask on the airplane before helping your child with one, taking care of your own emotions will better equip you to be helpful and present for theirs. You can do this. It’s difficult, strange, and stressful, but with the help and support of the village it takes to raise a child--family, friends, and God--you and your family will make it through another school year. You’ve got this! Recently, I’ve been posting a series of topics that call for kind of a high level of self-discipline. Yes, self-discipline is a key part of an adulting skill set in all its forms. Yes, you’ll get better outcomes in life if you approach it from a fairly disciplined perspective. Yes, habits of self-discipline shape us for the better over time.
BUT. . . We’re in the middle of a global pandemic. We’re experiencing an extended trauma as a species, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in living memory. In the US, we’re going through a time of deep wrestling with the unresolved issues from the very founding of our country. Race is the obvious one, but phew, have you read any articles about the economy lately? Meanwhile, you’re trying to deal with drastic disruptions to your daily life which both add to the number of things you’re personally responsible for and subtract from the number of activities you can do to blow off steam. . . . and you wonder why you haven’t learned a new skill or “found yourself” while staying at home. Yes, we need to be adults about the situation and keep our heads screwed on straight. We need to give ourselves structures that will help us get by when the external structures we’re more used to break down. However, if you’ve been finding that REALLY hard to do, well, go easy on yourself. When you eat something you’re not proud of, when you snap at your spouse or kids, when you spend money you don’t have on impulse purchases, when you get grumpy and tell social media how you REALLY feel about a contentious issue, you are simply being human. Don’t reward your bad behavior, but don’t dwell on it, either. If you catch yourself acting out a bit, acknowledge it, laugh, and move on. (And make appropriate apologies if others were injured during your bad moment.) Beating yourself up about your lapses in discipline will only put you in a weird situation where you become your own angry boss that you want to rebel against. Try to be an understanding, compassionate boss towards yourself: have a gentle but firm conversation about your wayward behavior and make a plan to do better. Frequently, lapses in self-discipline are really just ways of coping with the frustrations of life, and there are plenty of those to go around. So, hey, here’s an idea: instead of acting out your frustrations in slightly self-destructive ways, why not give yourself a few moments to vent about them directly? Not publicly, of course--that could lead to all kinds of unpleasantness. But grab a piece of paper or a compassionate person you trust, set a timer, and just let it all out. What are you so frustrated about? Go as big as the pandemic or as microscopic as your pet’s tendency to leave “gifts” on the carpet. Let yourself whine and complain about it all. If the timer runs out and you still have more to vent, set it again. Eventually, you’ll either wear yourself out and have no more energy to get worked up about it or you’ll hear how silly some of the things coming out of your own mouth are and have a much-needed belly laugh. I believe a timer would be helpful so that it’s clear that the time is set aside specifically for it. As in, it’s your time to rage against it all without judgments or trying to talk yourself out of it. Clear boundaries to the venting-fest are important so that you can get it out of your system in one go instead of trying to limp along trying to multitask it with something else. Trust me, if you try the limping along method. . . you’ll probably just act out again. You might end up taking out your frustration (say, over lost upcoming holiday celebrations) on an unsuspecting, innocent person (like your spouse) during an entirely unrelated activity (like washing dishes). Information can be right or wrong, but your emotions are always right. There are right and wrong ways to deal with them, but your feelings of anger, frustration, and loss are perfectly valid. Before you can move on with good habits that require a good deal of self-discipline, you may need to listen to your inner toddler and just let the tantrum roll through you. By honoring that inner toddler proactively, you can keep it from taking the reins when you don’t want it to. Have yourself a good vent-fest and move on. The whole concept of sorrow over sin--and to some extent, even of sin itself--has fallen out of fashion in many mainstream Christian circles lately. Even in the squarely Biblical Adventist denomination where I work and worship, I’ve noticed an increased hesitancy to talk about sin, to acknowledge sin as a fact of life, or to discuss how to deal with sin.
I consider this, more than anything else, to be the worst trend of modern Christianity. Why? Because the acknowledgement of sin is central to understanding the gospel. Without sin as the problem in the background, Jesus’s whole story--His incarnation, life, death, and resurrection--is rendered unintelligible. The whole point of Jesus’s life was to deal with the sin problem. His life and death provided both an example and a sacrifice that bridge the terrible, lonely separation from God created by sin. This has enormous implications for how we pray. Last week, we discussed the prayer of self-examination. Any honest look inward will uncover vast amounts of sin. Put that sin in context, and consider: this harms you, separates you from God, and harms other people. A full, emotionally authentic reflection on this is enough to make anyone weep. Weeping, in this case, is good. When Jesus was on this earth, He experienced the full range of emotions. Among them was sorrow. In fact, Isaiah referred to Him as “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” He had no sin of His own to weep for, but He was more aware than anyone else who ever lived of the full damage caused by all of humanity’s sin. We are talking about a Man whose emotional experience was enough to cause Him to sweat blood at one point. If you are uncomfortable with such strong displays of emotion, it’s probably not entirely your fault. When Christianity started taking its cues from marketing, it was only a matter of time before such sentiments as “I confess my fault, my grievous fault” or “Lord, have mercy!” dropped from their prominent place in Christian worship. Meanwhile, in secular culture few spaces are given for the expression of any strong emotion, and many people simply don’t know what to do with them. Going to the deep place where you let God cut you to the heart and actually feel the enormity of your own sin can be scary. It is, however, a necessary step to true repentance and a renewed heart. Repentance is the heart work of acknowledging your sin and bringing it to God with no excuses or defensiveness. Then--and this is a crucial part--the experience of His great love and forgiveness sets us free from that weight and empowers us to go out and live better lives. The deep well of sorrow is a necessary waystation on the path to full conversion. Conversion is not assent to a cluster of beliefs or changing the name of one’s formal religion, but actually seeing the depths of sin to which you have sunk and accepting God’s beautiful, redeeming love. It is the sort of thing that may happen at a very different point in life than when you choose to get baptized, but when it happens, you never forget either how terrible human nature is or how beautiful and wonderful the great mercy of God. The prayer of sorrow can also be on behalf of a group’s sin. In the book of Daniel, chapter 9 is a beautiful example of this kind of prayer of sorrow. Daniel prays, confessing the sins of his people from the bottom of his heart, and God comforts him. There is power in this kind of prayer when done from a humble spirit--not claiming to be apart from the tangle of societal woes, but acknowledging your own complicity in them as well. If I were to pray, “Lord, forgive the people of Los Angeles, because we have glorified evil in our entertainments,” it would do no good to pretend that I have never, ever participated in these things nor failed to take a stand against truly blasphemous material. Using “we” instead of “they” keeps me from considering myself superior to or better than “those” people who make entertainment content that glorifies evil. When confessing the sin of a community, there’s plenty to weep over; if the prayer makes you feel good about your own righteousness, you’re doing something wrong. After the tears, there is a feeling of deep refreshment. The knowledge of being forgiven, of being clean is so freeing. Done right, this is actually what the foot washing ceremony is meant to do. While there is no power intrinsic to the water in the basins or to the towels, these symbols are meant to help us turn our thoughts to God’s deep, beautiful forgiveness and leave with a heart as clean as freshly fallen snow. As the popular praise song goes, “Though sorrow may last for a night, joy comes in the morning.” The cleansing of tears makes space for the abundant joy of God. Only by passing through that sorrow can the fullness of joy be realized. Scary as it can be, it’s worth it. Because of the conditions the pandemic has handed to us, it’s been hard for people to remember what each other look like beyond the small square Zoom reveals. Therefore, when people who haven’t seen me in a while actually get a good look, there tends to be a bit of astonishment these days: I’ve dropped a little over 35 pounds since last September.
Generally, this astonishment is followed by the joke, “I think you sent it to me,” then, “But how did you do it?” The first 15-20 pounds or so were all about nutrition--eating more fruits and vegetables, counting calories, and being good about portion control. Alongside that, of course, I’ve been using a step counter to make sure there’s enough activity in the day. Since then, though, the thing that has been busting the weight-loss plateau and helping me lose it faster is strength training. Strength training is one of those things that I don’t think high school PE classes tend to explain very well. It was fairly easy to grasp why cardio was important--after all, the organ it benefits is right there in the name. Who doesn’t want a healthy heart? Strength, though? As a teenager, I was strong enough to do the things that mattered to me--hiking, caving, hauling heavy cases of handbells, and the odd bit of climbing. I took my naturally well-muscled build for granted. Alas, even natural gifts require maintenance. When strength training was no longer built into my day through classes or natural needs (like hauling one’s books up and down a mountain campus all day), I started to notice more aches and pains. Apparently, much back pain comes from the back muscles trying to make up for weak abs. Since I put crunches back into my exercise routine, I’ve been amazed by how much less back pain I experience. Losing weight and maintaining a healthy weight are also related to strength training. While it may make more sense on the surface to do cardio exercise that burns calories--a mile of walking or running burns about a hundred calories--weight training is more of an investment in the long run. Cardio is great because it keeps your circulation good and your heart in shape, but it’s the muscles that actually burn fat faster. Any move towards making your muscles work harder also burns more fat even later on when you’re no longer moving. The more muscle you have, the more fat you burn. Of course, with gyms closed and dumbbells sold out, how do you begin? You might be surprised how many exercises you can do using your own body weight. Pushups and crunches are the mainstay, of course, but if you’re on the heavier side you can build some muscle just by standing for a greater portion of the day. To work the large muscle groups in the legs, squats and lunges are great, but must be done carefully to avoid injury. The internet is a great resource for finding a wide variety of workout techniques for different ability levels, and there are even apps that help people plan, track, and record their workouts. If you want to do actual weight lifting but can’t find dumbbells, you can use water bottles or jugs as weights. This morning, I used a pair of cat-shaped bookends as dumbbells, since the lowest-weight set we have (10 pounds) is still a bit much for me as a relative beginner. I haven’t shopped for resistance bands lately, but if you can find them, they’re great for this whole endeavor. With a good set of resistance bands, you can fairly organically increase the intensity of your workout over time. As an added bonus, they don’t take up as much space to store as other kinds of fitness equipment. As you begin, you might be a bit discouraged--when I first restarted pushups, I could only do about five modified ones. Remember, though: every bit counts. Your first forays into the world of strength training aren’t about looking like Arnold Swarzenegger or gaining the strength of a forestry worker, but building from where you are. If all you can do at first is five crunches and one pushup, start there and celebrate the small gains along the way. There will be days when you’ll be sore from using muscles you forgot you had. When that happens, don’t be discouraged; stretch, ice it or take a cold bath/shower, and give it a rest for a day or two before starting over. One of the biggest enemies to both strength training and weight loss (not to mention a good many other things in life) is a perfectionistic, all-or-nothing attitude. Life isn’t perfect; we work with what we have making slow, patient progress. . When there are delays and setbacks, don’t give up. Do what you can and celebrate small wins. Over time, they add up. Keep at it, and you won’t have to worry as much about putting on stay-at-home weight. This pandemic is not going away anytime soon, so do not wait until your gym reopens to give your body a good workout. Whenever civilization re-emerges from its current semi-shuttered state, you’ll be so glad you did--not just because of how you’ll look, but because of how much better you’ll feel. As you get stronger and lighter, you’ll experience less back pain, have more energy, resist osteoporosis, and--as a bonus for the ladies--be able to wear higher heels with less pain. Meanwhile, you’ll feel proud of yourself for having stuck to a discipline that so concretely improves your quality of life. You’re worth it! |
AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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