March 2018 – Unravelling Space

March 30, 2018March 30, 2018

Unravelling Power: An Easter Reflection

I’ve been wrestling a lot lately with the power games we human beings play, the ways in which power is abused even in the Church (#churchtoo), the ways in which power has distorted the way we live out our calling as Image Bearers, the way power and position seduce my own soul. So, it is no surprise to me that as I read through the accounts of Last Supper to resurrection in the gospels that the Holy Spirit is drawing my attention in new and fresh ways to how God loves to “chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful” (1 Cor. 1:27).

Take for instance the thief on the cross. I was mind-blown in the way that you can read something a million times and then one day POOM! Think of this, the disciples themselves still don’t really get it, they have scattered, they have denied, they are hanging in the periphery, they are disillusioned and confused, and this thief condemned to death confesses his guilt and proclaims, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom” (Luke 23:42). How in the world does this man get that Jesus’ Kingdom is not a political kingdom of this world?

Or the Roman officer, a gentile, an oppressor, despised. He worships God in the moment of Jesus’ death, exclaiming “This man truly was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39) and “Surely this man was innocent” (Luke 23:47). Isn’t that incredible?

And there are the women, who seem to stick closer during Jesus suffering, death and burial than the majority of The Twelve. It is to them that the news of Jesus’ resurrection is first revealed. Later it is Mary Magdalene who first sees the risen Jesus. Totally upside-down considering that Jesus is entrusting the very first evangelist with a testimony that would not have been considered valid or trustworthy as women were not considered competent witnesses in that time.

Finally and with exclamation point emphasis we have the very example of Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
    and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

Philippians 2:6-11

March 10, 2018

Unravelling My Story: That Time I Cried Watching Wonder Woman

In honor of International Women’s Day yesterday I’m gonna go there.

When I watched Wonder Woman I bawled. It came from a deep place and surprised me, but I did.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Diana, who has trained her entire life for war finally steps onto war-torn soil. She is surrounded by suffering and injustice and every cell in her body is feeling the need to respond. But those people are not the mission. There is nothing that can be done for them. Or so she is told repeatedly by her male colleagues. And finally after being told no and reminded of the mission many times, she has finally had enough. She can’t not do something and so she ignores the pleas of her colleagues, she sluffs off her cape like she sluffs off their expectations. She takes up her weapons and steps into No Man’s Land. As she pushes in on the enemy and the others rise to follow and do battle alongside her I am struck by the beauty of the thing and I am almost ugly crying in the theatre. I’m not even sure why. As Dan and I walk home I begin to process what it was that produced that response in me.

I believe men and women are different and that that is a gift. I don’t necessarily believe that there are personality traits that belong to only men or only women. For example I believe that there are gentle and nurturing men and that there are strong and ambitious women and that there is nothing wrong with that. However, I do believe that the way a gentle and nurturing man will express those traits will likely look different than the way and gentle and nurturing woman expresses those traits and so forth. I think this is the case because our brains and bodies work differently, we interact with our worlds differently and the social realities that form us are different (i.e. both nature and nurture make us different). So without going to much farther down the gender theory path, because that’s not where I’m going with all this, my personal view is that men and women are different and our diversity is a gift.

So, what did I see in Wonder Woman that lead me to cry for the beauty of it? I saw a group of warriors out to do battle against evil. I saw the strengths of Diana and the strengths of her male counterparts. They both had the same goal – end the war – but they approached that in different ways. The men were focused on the mission – this is the one thing we have to do to get the job done. And there was Diana, who absolutely could not put blinders on to the suffering she was seeing. She was moved by what she saw and she had to do something about it. When she made that decisive step into No Man’s Land in order to take back the town from the enemy, she was responding to a call that the men had not heard, but when they saw her leaning into her purpose they jumped up and they supported her and they decided to fight alongside her.

Dare I say that we have often characterized the “emotion” of women as a weakness, a liability, a distraction? What if we could view it as a strength?What if we released women to feel deeply, to perceive injustice with prophetic vision of how things ought to be, to be burdened and to mourn for their communities, or the communities of another, to dream of a better way and to be moved into action. What if we released women to pursue their calling with the gifts and strengths and abilities that God knit into them while they were in their mothers’ womb. And what if it wasn’t just some little side-show (how sweet!) but that we actually got behind them as they charged the darkness in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Of course we needed Steve too. We needed his focus and his drive toward the thing that he was called to. We needed his form of conviction and bravery. We needed him to fly that plane in the sky sacrificing himself for the sake of the village to which they had just brought liberty under Wonder Woman’s calling. We need him and his strengths just as much as we need her and her strengths. And while I’m advocating for women here, the broader point is this: we need one another.

Imagine if all of God’s sons and all of God’s daughters were included in the fight, armed to fight in the battle and freed to lead the charge on the hills to which He has called them. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12), and the battle is too big to leave any one of God’s soldiers untrained and unengaged and doubting that they are called to push back the darkness because someone else hasn’t already taken the first step. I am compelled by a vision of us, men and women both, leading together in our God-given strengths and gifts and abilities and differences.

March 2, 2018

Unravelling Abiding: Stop Using Me.

“Teach me to abide!”

So much frustration was wrapped up in those words. I had been confessing that I had been doing a lot of running and numbing instead of connecting and really feeling the inner Romans 7 struggle.

“Teach me to abide!”

The Spirit responded gently. “Stop using me.”

He showed me how I have treated abiding like a filling station: I connect in, fill up my tank with His resources, then I disconnect and run off to do my own thing, use up the resources as if they were mine until I feel empty again and need to go top up the tank again. I was using Him.

This in contrast to the metaphor of the vine and the branches in John 15. The branch doesn’t receive resources to then run off and produce its own fruit. The branch is a conduit of the resources of the vine. The vine pours its resources through the branch and then produces its fruit.

We often talk about how Jesus regularly retreated to be with the Father and I think this has falsely fed my “fill’er up” mentality when the truth of the matter is that every word Jesus spoke came from the Father and every thing He did was directed by the Father. Jesus didn’t go and plug in, download and then disconnect to get about his business. He remained connected. Could it be that when He got away with the Father it more about intimacy than business?

When my time spent with the Father is utilitarian I’m missing out on intimacy. When it is about scrounging for wisdom or answers or inspiration or power it can’t be about feasting at the Father’s table. Abiding as a conduit in the vine means that I can trust for all of God’s resources to flow through me as He sees fit so that my times of quiet in His presence could actually just simply be about being in His presence.

So what does it look like to view abiding more as a state of being by which God may pour His resources through us to produce HIS fruit? And how does this practically play out in the chaos of life?

I’m not entirely sure just yet, but I think it has implications for other things that have been on my mind lately: how to let God order my days, how to be a wise steward of finances in the midst of so much need, how to pray, how to not lose my temper when my sons pants “feel funny” and I am powerless to fix his whiny dilemma. I think it is a key to not burning out. I think it has the power to free me from of some of those graveclothes of striving and fear of man because if I am simply a conduit everything that comes out of me is not of me at all and the fruit belongs to the Vine.

And I think…well I think it must start with confession and surrender. God, forgive me for using You and abiding only long enough to fill myself up and move on with my plans.