I Could Be Doing So Much More

This past weekend I attended the Dare 2 Share conference in Chicago for the seventh year in a row. This was, however, the first time I attended not as a student, but a young youth leader. Of course, I got just as much out of it as I always have, but for some reason this year was also significantly different. You see, I realized with shame that I had been wasting a lot of time.

Let me back up. My favorite part of the weekend was undoubtedly the drama that was performed on Friday night. It portrayed a young girl trapped within the dark room of her mind, with all of her doubts, fears, and struggles. This young girl heard whispers from two distinct voices. The first voice is the voice of demons trying to drag her down into despair. They tell her that she is crazy, she isn't worth anything, everything that is wrong with her life is her fault, all in an attempt to try to drag her so low that she will commit suicide. The second voice is the voice of Jesus Christ. This voice seems to be haunting her like a ghost at first. It continually whispers "I am coming for you. You are mine." But eventually both the audience and the girl realize that this voice is not a ghost or a halllucination, but Jesus Christ himself. He tells the girl that she is loved, and the voice begins to grow less frightening, but its intensity does not waver.

Finally, the demons have driven her to a point where she is at her lowest. She is right on the verge of taking her own precious life. But she remembers...there is another way. She says the name of Jesus. The demons hiss and recoil. She falls to her knees and begins to beg God to save her, to rescue her, to forgive her for all of the horrible things she has done. The demons are pushed further and further away, and finally with a resounding call to her Savior, the lights and music that have been building throughout the scene reach their crescendo and blaze into glory.

I shiver.

Everything goes quiet. The door from which the voice has been calling to the girl opens, and out walks Jesus Christ. He runs to the girl, holds her, takes her arm and sees the scars of her self-harm. "I have scars too," He says. And then He embraces her.

End scene.

It was so much more vivid and intense than a simple write-up can do justice to, but it moved me in such a way that left me breathless and in awe of God's grace and in wonder of His majesty. Afterward, Greg Stier, the head of Dare 2 Share, asked the youth leaders of each group at the conference to pray over their students. I bowed my head and listened to the multitude of youth pastors praying for their beloved youth.

It was a moment I will never forget. I was reminded again of how much God loves us, and how much he cares for every single teenager, every single child, every single person in the entire world. And then I remembered that I was supposed to be caring for people too.

The prayers broke off as Greg closed with his own prayer, asking those who had not received Jesus Christ to do so in the silence of their hearts, and then I looked around to see the hundreds of students around the building--some crying, some still praying, some hugging each other or their youth pastor. I heard a noise that was somewhere between a shout and a sob, but tinged with such joy that I knew with certainty what it had meant. Someone had found out that their friend had just accepted Christ. I smiled at all of the amazing work I was seeing God do around me, and at the thought of all the work God would continue to do in the lives of the students and teachers in the room.

And then I thought deeper than that, looked into my own heart and saw what I had been missing. So often in the past I have said that I would be all in for God, and that enthusiasm wavered. It wasn't that I didn't still love God, or that I wasn't a true follower of Jesus Christ. I know that I am, and that I will be with Christ in heaven. But I was being distracted. I was wasting time.

I don't want to waste any more time.

I thought of all of the numerous opportunities I have every week to talk to people about Jesus, or even to just try to have deeper conversations with them than just a superficial surface level relationship would require. I thought of all of the times when I saw reading the Bible as a chore or a task rather than a privilege. And I was ashamed.

That's what matters, in the end. Doing whatever you can do to love God and love others. To serve God and serve others. To make deep relationships, to nurture those relationships, to be a part of people's lives in a positive way.

One of the things that has been crucial in my understanding of the necessity of being in the Word of God is this simple fact: Reading the Bible is being nourished spiritually. We are taking part of the Bread of Life. Do we skip our physical meals? Do we put them off? Do we tell ourselves that we can eat later? Of course not! We eat when we're hungry.

I'm always hungry, spiritually, and yet I find excuses to starve myself for a bit longer. How morbid is that?

Life is about love. I'm going to make time for the things that are important. If I see someone that I know God wants me to talk to, I will. When I go to the grocery store, I won't always put in headphones and try to ignore everyone. I'll go out of my way to be kind and courteous to everyone I come in contact with. Find a way to make people's days.

I'm going to make it a priority to be reading the Word, not the required "once per day", but whenever I'm "hungry". I need to learn to identify that need in myself and specifically memorize and seek after verses that will help with specific areas.

I'm going to take the time to pray for the people I meet, the people I interact with on a regular basis. I'm going to pray for the little things, the things that I might not think matter that much...but it's like, why not? It's not like God is saying "whoa, that's too much prayer, I'm getting a little bogged down here." I should be praying constantly throughout a day. I need to be in communication with God. That's the only way I'm going to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

So, I'd like to say: Thank you, Dare 2 Share, for yet another weekend of conviction. I needed that. Here's to you and your ministry. I pray that God would continue to bless you all as you continue to bless so many others.

The People Who Forgive Me

I'd like to acknowledge all of the people who put up with me. The people who have to deal with every stupid mistake I make, and yet continue to love me and cherish me despite my flaws. I love you all so much, and I can't begin to thank you enough for the grace you've shown me. I'm not a good person--I mess up daily, saying things I don't mean, saying things I do mean but that should never have come out of my mouth, doing things that hurt other people deeply--and yet these select few people have decided that I am worth it. They see a potential in me that I have trouble ever seeing in myself, and that, more than anything else, is what keeps me going day after day. I thank God for those people. I don't know what I'd do without them.

And of course, I thank God for His own amazing grace and forgiveness in my life. He, more than anyone else, has such a right to just hate me, to wipe me off the face of the Earth, to want to have nothing to do with me because of my continued disobedience and selfishness in the face of his unending mercy. And yet with every mistake, with every step in the wrong direction, His love is the same for me. He continues to cherish me as an adopted son in His kingdom, and I have no response worthy enough for that kind of great, unfailing love. The best I can do is try as hard as I can to put on my red shoes and walk in the way He has called me to walk, sing in the way He wants to me sing, and live in the way I will honor Him by living.

There is nothing I have ever done to deserve even the slightest bit of grace or mercy in my life, not when you compare it with my ever-present failings. And yet, I am forgiven by those that I love. And I am so grateful. Here's to the people that forgive me. The God that has forgiven me. I hope you know that I will always try to do the very best I can to make up for the love and grace you've shown me. And if any of the people in my life ever fall down, fail in their own way, just know that I will be there to pick you up. I owe you that much at least. I will love you right back, and I'll forgive you like you've forgiven me.

Like He has forgiven us.

The Three Rabbis

This is a fantastic section from the book I'm reading right now by Orson Scott Card, "Speaker For The Dead". It is an epigraph at the beginning of one of the later chapters, a writing by a Christian leader in the far-future science fiction setting Mr. Card has dreamed up. I thought it was rather poignant, so I decided to share it. 

“A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death.

There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.

The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. 'Is there any man here,' he says to them, 'who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?'
They murmur and say, 'We all know the desire, but Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.'

The Rabbi says, 'Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, 'Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant.'

So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, 'Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.'

The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. ‘Someday,’ they think, ‘I may be like this woman. And I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated.’

As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones. ‘Nor am I without sins,’ he says to the people, ‘but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead – and our city with it.’

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation.

So of course, we killed him."

God Is Love, But Love Is Not Always Nice

Over the past few months, I've really dug into an interesting concept: what it means to love people as a Christian. There are all sorts of views about this, and most of them can be categorized in one of two categories: "Love" and "Justice". People on one extreme say that we should never judge anyone and just "love" everyone, in which they mean give them grace in such a way that ignores their actions and the consequences for their actions. On the other extreme, you have people who are going around telling everyone how wrong they are, and that they're going to hell, and God is going to judge them for the horrible things they're doing. Neither extreme has it right, and as in most things I've found related to God, there is a balance between the two that we as Christians need to walk. But the more I thought and studied the topic, the more I've come to believe that "love" and "justice" are misleading terms, since the two are actually mutually inclusive. But let me back up.

God is love. One can know this simply by reading any part of the Bible with an open mind--the thread of God's love for humanity lies throughout the entire narrative, in every poem and song, in every historical account, in every prophecy, you can see the overwhelming desire of God's to be in an intimate relationship with His creation.

But we need to define the term love, as Christians. After some considerable thought, I believe that this simple definition might be the most accurate: loving someone is giving them what they need emotionally. Most of the time, that is acceptance, companionship, grace, servitude--being there for someone. Everyone has a deeply rooted desire to feel like they belong, and loving someone truly is to show them that they do belong, and that they are accepted. But if love can be defined as giving people what they need, then there comes a point when what someone needs is not going to be what they want.

My parents can tell you this, from hundreds of experiences throughout their illustrious careers as youth leaders, that loving people with the truth is hard, but necessary. They've told me time and time again that you have to be okay with people not liking you for a while, maybe even hating you. But hopefully, as God works on their heart, the person you spoke truth to will be able to look back and thank you for it.

Obviously, different situations call for different approaches. For the most part, if you're in a situation with a non-Christian, and they are involved in sin, calling them out on it will neither be productive or loving. But there also come times when the truth does need to be spoken, and at that point the most loving thing to do is often not what modern Christians would call "loving".

We, as Christians, need to keep each other accountable with our actions and our words, and dancing around subjects because you don't want to hurt people's feelings is a horrible way to do that. There needs to come a point when one follower of Jesus Christ looks at another follower of Jesus Christ and is able to say "what you're doing is wrong, and you need to stop", and the recipient of that criticism will be able to, with an open mind, evaluate their actions and line it up against what the Bible says. If they are in error, they should change. If they are not, well, God's Word takes prevalence over man's.

In that sort of a situation, one obviously needs to make sure that one's own actions and words are being held to the same standard, so as to not be hypocritical, but using your own faults as an excuse not to lovingly correct someone else's (in the context of brothers and sisters in Christ) is not only unloving, but it's really sort of a cop-out. We have a responsibility to people on this earth. We're all headed in a downward spiral further away from God, and only by keeping each other accountable to God's moral standards and guidelines for our lives will we be able to have credibility when speaking on His behalf.

This is not to say that we are not broken people. Of course we are. And we will undoubtedly make mistakes. But there is a difference between stumbling and falling, and that difference is what defines those that have surrendered to their sin and those that have surrendered to God. Iron sharpens iron, and sometimes that process will hurt, and it will create sparks. But in the end, we will be better for it.

So, really, the love versus justice argument is faulty. Love is justice, and it is grace, mercy, acceptance, truth, and a host of other things. God is love, and so every aspect of God's character is an aspect of the definition of love. The same God who died on the cross for the sins of every man also told the adulteress to go and sin no more. And that was exactly what that woman needed in that situation--Jesus did not condemn her, He did not throw stones, but he did not pull any punches. He spoke the truth in love, and that was probably the turning point in her life.

As a closing thought, the thing we need to be most careful with when trying to be more like Jesus is letting our pride get in the way. This can take many different forms--thinking that we are so good that our sole duty is to tell people how they are wrong without challenging our own brokenness, being so caught up in the theology of what love is or isn't that we lose sight of the people we're supposed to be loving...even using our own weaknesses as an excuse to not try to live up to God's standards for our lives, no matter the cost, can be a form of pride--focusing so much on how screwed up we are that we forget that God redeemed us, and that means we have a responsibility to everyone around us.

In the end, God is who the Bible reveals him to be, and trying to put him into the "mercy" camp or the "justice" camp is neither correct theology nor anything but an unproductive waste of time. God is love, and love is anything that God would do. Follow His example, and don't let your own feelings get mixed up in it, and you'll be fine.