A Stumbling Christian

Moving: Please Follow Me

2009-08-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

Hi All. I've decided to try out some of my blogs over at wordpress.com. A Stumbling Christian has been moved over to http://astumblingchristian.wordpress.com . Please check it out there, along with a new post.

Notes on The Shack

2009-07-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

So, I should just fess straight up: I'm a big fan of The Shack.

If -- let's just suppose for a moment-- the entirety of human history can be described as our endeavor to know and understand the nature, the essence, the heart of God... then I'd say The Shack was equivalent to some of humanity's best theology. And superior, probably, to at least one of the books of the Bible.

So I'm biased.

But I found great insight in this blog post from www.windrumors.com, William P Young's web site. And great comments from readers.

Check it out if you get the chance.

Adventures in Missing the Point

2009-07-05T15:25:00.001-07:00

Great message today.

Actually, a great day in church all the way around: relatively few screw-ups in the worship set, great choice of tunes, a moment of quiet transcendence... it was good. Aaron's message was good, but...

I've been at this Christian thing for four or five years now. Sometimes it seems the closer I come to understanding Christ the further I move from fitting with his people. An impossible contradiction, but one I sense nevertheless.

A fair amount of today's discussion revolved around "eternity." It wasn't ABOUT eternity, but eternity played a key supporting role. The message was essentially about "why bad things happen to good people," even to Christians.

The problem is... I don't care much about eternity. I really don't. If the answer to the previous question is "Bad things happen in the here and now, but our reward is eternal," then I'm left a bit out of the loop.

Maybe if I could fully understand and appreciate what it means to be one with God, reconciled with God, a part of the divine Trinity in all its fullness and love... maybe then I would care more about eternity. But I'm not quite there.

Instead I see Jesus' message as being an emphatically HERE and NOW message. Matthew 11:4 was used today to extensively highlight the idea that what we expect God to do and act like is often not what he does and acts like.

Jesus responded to John's men in Matthew 11:4, "Go and tell John what you see and hear: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up and the poor have the good news preached to them..." In other words, there's no Messianic King here, but people are being healed and saved here and now, today, as we speak and with hearts expanding.

He never said in this exchange (as far as we know), "Brother John, the Kingdom is at hand because we'll all be together in eternity soon, and this BS we worry about -- you in prison and me on the run -- will just be a bad dream."

The people at church, though, seemed really moved by this message. Something about eternity to come rather than healing and kingdom-ness delivered here and now really warms and inspires them. But it makes me wonder what I'm missing.

Is it that I don't understand what eternity in the presence of the King would be like? Is it that I don't fully appreciate the concept of eternal peace, therefore I'm so willing to trade it for healing and forgiveness and peace in the here and now?

I don't know. But I know that I'm not very interested in my own eternal salvation. I leave that in the hands of God. And I really wish we'd all focus on ways we can make the kingdom happen here, TODAY, and not think too much about what it will be like in the "great by and by."

Feed homeless children. Care for widows in their distress. Make the crippled and ostracized feel valued and necessary. Let God dwell in our every gesture and word, from daily observances to grateful jubilees. These are the things Jesus showed John the Baptist.

Unless I am wrong, and poking helplessly around at the outside of a hard-boiled egg that's far too big for me to crack or understand.

My Double Life: A Twitter Dilemma

2009-06-22T13:09:00.001-07:00

So here's a dilemma that didn't exist before I became a Christian and before my good friend Twitter came into my life:

I'm on Twitter as @MJThelander. I joined to follow my friends from church, primarily, and to follow people I care about in Christian music and contemporary Christian thought. I follow Emergent Village. As a closet Christian songwriter I follow bands like Kutless, Mercy Me, David Crowder Band, Jon Lloyd Band and Fee, and artists like Kathryn Scott, Jeremy Camp, Vicky Beeching, Lincoln Brewster and Kristian Stanfill. I follow Christian thinkers and writers like William Paul Young, Rob Bell, Aaron Gardner, and my friend and Pastor Reed.

Twitter is one of the places I go to discover and express the things that really matter to me: I post links to my God-focused, faith-centric original songs; I post quotes and thoughts that resonate with my image (my memory?) of who and what God is and what he's after in our lives; I follow discussions of faith and redemption.

That's cool, huh? So... what's the big deal?

Well, my very nice employer is rapidly coming up to speed in all aspects of social media, with our own online user community, a commitment to blogging by senior staff members like me, and an authentic embrace of the transparency offered by social media.

You say, "Great Michael. I still don't see the problem."

Maybe there isn't one.

But I see it this way: I can post my current Twitter name on all my work-related thoughts and ideas, and fold these new Twitterers in amongst the emphatically passionate, vocal Christians I follow and speak to. That would reveal me in short order as the emphatically passionate, vocal, songwriting (of all things!) Christian I am, to anyone who cares to look. My last post was a sorrowful plea to God to heal the strife that lead to the death of the beautiful young Iranian girl named Neda on Sunday.

These are not the thoughts of a technology business marketing professional. It may even dilute my credibility. We have to be honest: we're faced daily by professional people who think Christianity is a weakness. Followers of Christ are not often the best choices for leadership roles in the rough-and-tumble world of technology marketing. If I were still in educational technology it would be severely career-limiting to align myself with overtly Christian thought leaders. It's a bit easier in mainstream technology... but I've noticed that the other Christians I work with play their faith very low key.

Or… I can create a new identity that neatly sidesteps all this mess. (I already have another ID called TheOtherMichael but no one's seen it yet.) It would be easy to use @MJThelander for the one side of my life, the part that matters the most and feels the most real to me, and use @TheOtherMichael for comments on cyber security, multi-platform technologies, and trends in infrastructure management for data centers. But what would that make me?

A liar, at worst. Another Christian caught between their faith and the real world at best.

So, what should I do? Have you experienced this particular Twitter dilemma? Have you solved it? I'm eager to hear your story.

On Salvation

2009-05-25T14:37:00.001-07:00

Joie and I had a semi-theological discussion yesterday. (Dangerous, I know, for husbands and wives!)

To understand how amazing this is, you have to know a little about our different ways of faith. Where Joie has in the past tended to be non-critical of scripture ("It says what it says, why try to read more into it?") I have been the one who insists—often wrongly—that there's some deeper meaning there if we just dig for it.

Yesterday in church Reed took us through the end of Galatians 5. His goal was to juxtapose the "works of the flesh" in verse 19 with the "fruit of the Spirit" in verse 22. So this passage, along with its two lists and this proclamation was on Joie's mind:

¹⁹The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; ²⁰idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions ²¹and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

At the same time I've been reading If Grace is True: Why God Will Save Every Person by Gullley and Mulholland. This book, even in its first chapters, speaks directly to my own innate sense of how God works. To support their bold thesis they quote a number of sources, but three stand out:

Philippians 2:9: ⁹Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, ¹⁰that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Jeremiah 31:34:
No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest," declares the LORD.

Genesis 12:3, in God's very first conversation with Abraham: ³ I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

I won't try to summarize all their points, but I'll say that I've been profoundly touched by the grandeur and simplicity of their view. A wrote an unpublished article a while ago that included my own simple-minded version of this idea: "Salvation, I began to see, could only be fully realized when we all experienced it together."

So as I described this book to Joie while we were driving around for errands and ice cream she asked a really good question. "What about what Paul says in Galatians? 'I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.'"

So I have to admit I'm stumped. The message behind If Grace is True is powerfully resonant with me, and the idea that no one is left behind matches the way I've come to see my God. But Paul is pretty clear here.

Now, it's possible Paul was growing and changing as we all are. The Galatians passage, according to some timeline, was very early in his ministry, and Philippians may have been the last thing he ever wrote. Maybe he started thinking Galatians-like exclusiveness, but came to see salvation as an all-inclusive, universe-absorbing thing by the time he wrote Philippians.

I don't know. But I'm glad Joie and I are talking about it. I think it means, among other things, that we're both still growing in Christ.

[Note: Why the hawk? I don't know. It was a picture Joie captured one morning outside our living room window and we were both amazed by it. He also looks very wise to me.]

On Faith vs. Religion

2009-05-08T16:01:00.001-07:00

I came across an interesting article today. It's from US News and World Report and the headline reads, Many Americans Are Saying Goodbye to Religion, but Not Faith.

This is an interesting discussion for me, as someone who always considered himself adverse to religion but trying to find faith. It wasn't until I turned to Christianity as a thirty-something father of three that I realized how foolish and potentially misleading this point of view might be.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The article says in one place:

That trend has emerged in other recent surveys showing that more-bureaucratic and hierarchical traditions, such as the Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, are hemorrhaging members in the United States while highly personalized evangelical and nondenominational congregations are growing. But the move from religion to spirituality has also fed a surge in Americans identifying themselves as "spiritual but not religious," with more than 5 percent of Americans now describing themselves that way.

I understand fully well how dogmatic, fire-breathing and judgmental church experiences can push people to solemnly claim, "I consider myself a very spiritual person, I'm just not very religious." And I appreciate that they usually accompany this with a humanistic, healing worldview. "If I believe in the sanctity of all life," one might wonder, "and if I always strive to do no harm and to live an embracing and loving life…then why do I also need to be religious?"

Good question. The answer I've found for myself on this question is here, from James 2:16-18:

¹⁶If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? ¹⁷In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

¹⁸But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds."
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.

I'll be the first to admit that this answer is not for everyone. It wasn't the right answer for Martin Luther, who famously argued that James' letter wasn't even suitable for inclusion in the cannon. Of course he was the founder of the reformation, and insisted that faith alone saves us – none of our works, none of our deeds, none of the things we run about trying to piously accomplish.

But if I could argue against Mr. Luther I'd say that proper religion is faith in action. We can have faith, and we can be spiritual persons. But I don't think we begin to pay back that faith until we start living a religious life, until faith goes out and about in the world, changing hearts and lives. And it's often religion – for better or worse -- that gives us the foundation to go out and act out our faith.

Read the article and let me know what you think.

(Image by Luc Feyman)

The World’s Worst City

2009-04-30T19:20:00.001-07:00

I haven't traveled all over the world, but I've travelled a little bit. I've been all over North America, I've been in South America, I've been in Africa, and I've been in Europe. This doesn't make me an expert, but it qualifies me to pick a clear winner in my "worst cities" list: Las Vegas.

Here are ten reasons why I think Las Vegas is the worst city in the world.

Lack of Faith: As many prayers as are offered daily in this city ("Please, God, give me a seven and I swear I'll follow you for all my days"), it's a city remarkably devoid of God. I'm leaving after a 4-day trip here, having never seen a single church.
It's a city that appeals to nothing so much as it appeals to our own greed. Though an appeal to lust is a close second.
Cigarette smoke: Everywhere, anywhere, all the time. It's the lung cancer poster child city.
No one is real. If they are they hide it.
Nothing is real: I discovered here a near-perfect plastic spoon that was designed to look like a silver one; the dome of the mall in the Venetian is painted to look like the sky, with blue and fluffy clouds; and you can see on the boats poled by the fake gondoliers, if you look closely under their stern, small electric propellers that push them along.
Everybody wants something. Nobody wants to give anything.
It's a city devoted completely to the pursuit of incredible excess wealth – "the bread of today" is not an option.
Everyone seems desperate and sad.
Even the happy people seem angry.
Millions of foreigners come here thinking it represents the quintessential America. (Maybe it does, but I prefer to think not.)

As long as I'm in technology I'm going to have to keep coming here for events because it's a great trade show city – distractions, easy money, noise and smoke and lights. But I expect it will always make me sad.

I want to go home, where it's not so hard to find a quiet place to pray, where the songs come freely and easily to my mind, and where my family waits in all their dysfunctional glory.

My plane leaves in 2 more hours. J

All From You

2008-10-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

I wrote a song.

It's not a great song. I'm not even sure I'd call it a good song... but it's a heartfelt song. It's a song of praise to God Our Father.

I listen to this and I hear where I'm flat, or where I sliiiiide up to meet a note, or where the words I wrote seem trite, and I shudder. But I think God doesn't want our perfect offerings. He simply wants what we can offer.

It amazes me that three years ago I wouldn't dream of expressing my thoughts of God and grace in this fashion. God works in mysterious and wonderful ways.
---------
11/16/2008

I presented this song at the Christian Musician Summit and got some good feedback. Here's the chord chart and lyrics with the changes they recommended... note that the chorus you hear in the recording would now be a bit different.

VERSE 1
--------A---------------------------------------------D
We’d swing so high our feet would scrape the sky

-------A----------------------------------------- D
Make angels in fresh snow as our breath rose

E2----------------------------------------- D5
Every heartbeat filled with awe and wonder

E2 -------------------------------------- ---D5
Childhood seemed a spell we’d fallen under

F# - G# - A – B E
Now we know that…

CHORUS (driving)
---------------A --------------------D
It’s all from you, it’s all from you

--------------A -------------------D
It’s all from you, it’s all from you

--------A ------------E------------------------ D
All the joy that we know, it comes from you

-------A -------------------D
Every seed of love we sow,

-----A ------------------D
Every mercy we are shown

----------A-------------------- E--------------------- D
All the hope that’s in our souls, it comes from you.

VERSE 2
A ------------------------------------------------D
The trembling teenage bliss of love’s first kiss

-----A----------------------------------------- D
A shy and lovely smile floats down the aisle

----- E-------------------------------------------- D5
The laughter of our children falls like warm rain

-------E ----------------------------------------D5
Your blessings greet us each and every new day

F# - G# - A – B E
And now we know that…

CHORUS

BRIDGE (soaring, light)
-----A----------------------------------------- D
We thank you for the gifts you’ve given us

-----A --------------------------------------D
And send our heartfelt praises rising up

(Repeat)

CHORUS

What Kind of God?

2008-10-12T16:22:00.001-07:00

It was a poor ending to an otherwise good little series. But before I get into that, let me ask a question: If you had to pick one of these examples to represent your understanding of God – your prevailing archetype for the holy, if you will -- which one would it be?

A) The Creator of All Things

B) The Savior

C) The Long-Lost Father

D) The Judge

Ponder that for a bit…

I was recently privileged to lead our life group through a three week mini-series on Atonement. What is it? How do we define it? Why is it important? How do we view it? How do we give such a powerful (if abstract) theological concept some meaning and value in our day-to-day lives?

We discussed Christus Victor theology and how it gave us the “recapitulation” and “ransom theories.” We discussed St Anselm’s Satisfaction model, and how it reflected the social mores and balances of medieval times. We discussed Abelard’s Moral Influence model from the 12^th century, and the granddaddy of modern atonement theology, Substitution and especially the focus on “Penal substitution”.

My goal wasn’t to pick one of these as definitive (I thought), but to see them all as a product of their particular time and place. Did we in fact need them all? How did each one paint the picture of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection? Or was there some other emerging theory of atonement that could encompass them all?

We talked a lot about the difficulty of language, and how the original English meanings of atonement, “to bring into unity, harmony, concord,” or “to become reconciled,” had become over time “making amends or reparation.” How did that change our understanding of Jesus’ acts? We talked about the fact that no one really knows what Paul’s Greek word in Romans 3.25, hilasterion, really means. Did he mean the “mercy seat” above the ark in the old temple, or did he mean the act of “making peace” between groups of people?

But by our last meeting this Friday, when we were really ready to tackle these deeper questions, I was emotionally and physically wiped out. I’d flown to Milwaukee for some meetings on Monday evening, and wound up flying 15 hours for 7 hours of meeting time. Then I had to work the rest of the week… and there’s an awful lot going on at work just now. So I came into our life group tired and scattered.

While I didn’t ask the questions above, the A through D questions on how one understands or “sees” God, I meant to. They would have been helpful. Most people would say “all of these, at one time or another,” but if we were forced to pick one dominant one, it might reveal which model of atonement meant the most to each of us individually.

If atonement was really all about reconciliation, I asked, and if reconciliation depended on two parties forgiving and finding common ground, could we ever imagine a situation where God sought our forgiveness? There was some silent thinking, but two immediate and very vocal answers: “No not ever” and “No way.” (If we weren't in a church-sponsored Life Group I'm sure I would have heard "HELL NO!")

One of our members, who I respect and admire a great deal, summed up penal substitution extraordinarily well when I asked why God would not seek our forgiveness: We were guilty of sin, there was nothing we could do to assuage our guilt, and God could not accept us into his holy presence with that guilt still on us. Jesus, though, took that guilt away. You don't seek forgiveness from those who have done wrong.

I was thinking more of the only context in which I can understand God and his relationship with us, that of loving Father and Children. In that context I could easily see myself (as a father) saying, "I need to punish you, even though I love you more than life itself. Please forgive me."

Back to my four questions. If someone said A, God is like more a Creator than anything else, I would expect them to see in the atonement a patching-up of beautiful, holy creation, like an artisan repairing a fatally cracked but priceless vase.

If someone said God was like B, a Savior, I would expect them to see in the atonement liberation, freedom from fear and freedom from darkness.

If someone said God is like C, the Long-Lost Father, I would expect them to see in the atonement the rejoining and healing of a broken family.

If someone is inclined to see God primarily as D, a Judge, then I might expect them to see in the atonement a legal process being overturned. As my wise friend said, it would be heavy in guilt, and perhaps even heavier in atonement as “overturning the sentence justly given to the guilty.”

But I didn’t use my archetypes. And I didn’t focus on our own sense of what atonement is and does. To be honest, I think I subconsciously wanted to sway people to my own view of atonement, a view that focused more on “reconciliation with a long-lost father” than “sentencing from a judge.” That’s where I went wrong. In the end I think we all left unsatisfied, feeling that we'd explored something big and vague but not very filling.

Maybe that’s why James said “Not many of you should presume to be teachers…” I know I’m not a teacher, but I see clearly the traps that can come to those who teach. Our beliefs and ideals can get in the way not only of what is true, but of each person finding their way to truth. And what is Jesus and his atoning act but the grandest, most beautiful truth of all?

Emmanuel = God With Us

2008-10-11T12:43:00.001-07:00

I’ve been hearing the phrase “God sent his only son” quite a bit in church lately. The more I hear it the more this phrase begins to enrage me.

Rage seems a pretty serious – maybe even unstable? – response to any sort of church talk. So as Ricky said to Lucy I have “lots of ‘splainin’ to do” if I’m going to win any hearts and minds with the argument that follows. So let me back up…

I’m at church services more than most people. Our small community church has services on both Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Because I’m privileged to help with the worship music I often find myself attending both services. I usually hear two messages, two sets of pre-message prayers, and two post-message reflections. I generally enjoy this.

Right now, however, it’s the fourth week of Advent. Christmas is fast approaching and a certain phrase of John’s comes to the surface more and more frequently. As frequently as it’s tossed out at church – and I hear it now almost as often as I hear claims of “bipartisan cooperation” aimed at the coming election year – it’s even more often misquoted. To misquote John in the way I usually hear him misquoted, the phrase would go: “For God so loved the world that he [sent] his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but shall have eternal life.”

Of course the actual word in this passage is “gave.” John tells us God gave his one and only son, not that he sent him to us.

Is it just this slip of the verb that increasingly grates on me? That does seem unstable. After 2000 years it’s a bit unrealistic to expect every person who quotes John 3:16 to land on precisely the right four-letter verb.

But it’s this particular verb I chafe at. "Sent." When used as the primary verb to accompany the subject of Jesus I can hardly imagine another choice that could so painfully distort the good news of the gospels.

Why should that be? The bible uses the word combination “God sent” many many times. In Genesis Joseph says to his brothers, “God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.”

In Judges, God “sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the citizens of Shechem…”

In the first Chronicles, God “sent an angle to destroy Jerusalem.”

In Luke, “God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee…”

In Galatians Paul writes, “God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’”

With so many biblical precedents it seems like “He sent” is a perfectly acceptable biblical word combination. God seems to send spirits and angels to mankind with something like regularity. Is there any reason for me to feel anything remotely like rage? And there doesn’t seem much to support my claim that this little change of phrase so hideously distorts the good news of the gospels.

And yet…

Nearly 700 years before Christ, the prophet Isaiah ascribed a special name for the One of God who would deliver his enslaved people. He called him Emmanuel — “God is with us.”

The first temple was destroyed. Its finery had been carted away to the treasuries of Babylon. The remnants of Israel had been taken to the land of the two rivers in bondage.

In this alarming context Isaiah was making a profound statement: God would no longer be in his temple, or in the incense or priestly raiments of his attendants, or in the treasures of the ages. They day was coming when God would be with his people wherever they were.

Three-quarters of a century later the gospel writer Matthew remembered this phrase, and he very deliberately assigned this title to his lord and savior: “…She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Yeshua [or “God saves”], because he will save his people from their sins…all this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel…’”

As an ever-struggling Christian these words come back to me again and again. They console me. They reassure me as they reaffirm my faith in Jesus. The words that echo again and again in my mind dangle from the end of this phrase like sweet grapes from a gnarled and ancient vine: “…and they will call him Emmanuel…God with us.”

God is with me, and he is with you.

With Jesus we would never again be separated from God. Not by too great a distance between ourselves and a far-off temple. Not by rules or strictures that make us feel unworthy of accepting his grace in our lives. Not by the distance between a pulpit and a pew. Not by anything, for the God who came to us as a baby still comes. At this time of year more than any other we need to remember that.

So here is the source of my rage in the comment “God sent his only son.” Here is why I want to cry out “Aren’t you listening?” when we so readily ape this phrase. God didn’t send another being to communicate his desires to us. He came.

Jesus was not an ambassador sent to us from a distant empire.

Jesus was not a courier, bringing us checks or winnings.

He was not an otherworldly being, sent to us from a distant unreachable realm.

He was Emmanuel.

Jeremiah, the prophet who was a contemporary of that first prophet Isaiah, told us how this would be: “No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest…”

We can put ourselves in God’s all-encompassing shoes and see how brutal is the replacement of the verb “to give” with the verb “to send” by creating a simple modern parable:

A man had left behind his family to make his fortune in a far-off land when his homeland was set upon by disease and drought and famine. Half the population died from a mysterious sickness. The rains failed to come year after year. The crops failed. The man sent money home again and again, but the news never got better. Still the disease took lives, still the earth was parched, still there was no food. One day the man said “I will go myself.” He risked the failure of his new business, he risked catching the dreaded disease himself, he risked starvation, but still he went. It was better, he decided, to give himself to his people and help them from within than it was to try and help them from without.

Would God do any less?

When we say “God sent Jesus” we thoughtlessly strip the majesty and beauty from God’s great act of mercy. When we say “God sent his only son” we ignore the true message of Jesus: He came to suffer and be with us, forever and always, never to fully return to what he was.

There are two stories that bring this strange idea home to me again and again. One is an anecdotal tale that has been told many times in many versions, and the other is from the Gospel of Mark.

The anecdote goes, “There was a Jewish prisoner who was assigned to fill in and re-dig latrine ditches at Dachau. As the rains came and turned his job into an unholy mire of excrement and muck his guards jeered at him. They made fun of his neck-deep struggle in the filth, and they shouted to him ‘Hey old man, where is your God now?’ He looked up at them from his smelly hole and told them what Isaiah had always told him: ‘He’s down here with me, of course.’”

The gospel passage from the end of Mark’s tale goes: “The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.”

Mark could not have made a more deliberate and profound statement to his audience: the curtain in the holy of holies that separated man from God had been shredded and would never separate them again. He believed that a vast unmeasurable part of God had flooded into our reality then, and that it has been with us ever since.

And that’s why I feel something so close to rage when I hear “God sent” again and again. He did not send some supernatural visitor from another realm.

He instead traded distant safety for intimate pain. He traded remote otherness for blood and tears and oneness. He has been with us since and he is with us still. To fail to see this, to swap the personal “give” for the impartial “send,” runs the risk of forgetting how desperate and final and salvific this act truly was.

He became Emmanuel.

God is with us.

We should not forget it. This time of year above all others.

[This post was originally published in December 2006. MT]

Matthew's Talents

2008-10-11T12:39:00.000-07:00

[MT: This was conceived as a kind of sermon, and it's the kind of sermon I'd probably give if I were ever asked to give a sermon. I doubt whether this would be a good thing, though.]

The parables of Jesus can be both blessings and barriers. At their best they give us a clear, unfiltered view of Jesus' teaching, of how he wanted us to live and move in this world. At their worst they leave us confused and unsure of ourselves.

When we read the story of the Prodigal Son we're left with an unshakable sense that this is how God loves us. The father ran to his wayward son. He defied convention and abandoned his dignity and hiked up his robes and ran to his son. There were no lectures or admonishments. There was only unfettered rejoicing at his boy's return. And then in the midst of this overflowing joy the father takes a moment to assure his other son that he loves him, too, and that he'll forever retain his share of all the father is and all he has.

There's no confusion in this parable. It rings unmistakably clear. It strikes the very heart of us and leaves us nodding, quietly affirming that Yes, this is the true essence of my God and my savior.

There are other parables that aren't quite so simple. We read them or we hear them and we hope that they'll illuminate themselves, in a flash of sudden clarity make some universal truth obvious and irrefutable. But they often don't. Instead they leave us feeling like the dense and beleaguered disciples, forever hearing but never understanding and in need of Jesus' patient tutoring to give them any sense at all. What then?

All we can do then is read and re-read them, speak the words over and over to ourselves and wait patiently for the meaning to make itself known. There are thousands of commentaries and aids to interpreting the parables. They are as valuable and helpful as we let them be, but in the end we need to find a meaning in each story that attaches to us at the level of our hearts rather than our heads. And for the most part we need to do this on our own.

There is real danger in this. Jesus must have foreseen the danger that might come from multiple diverse interpretations of his stories. But he would also have recognized the enormous grace that comes from a parable made real, a parable given transformative power through personal experience. Of the grace that might come to a man or woman wondering for all they're worth what meaning could possibly be there.

Perhaps that's why his parables seem to be a mix of brilliant gems and occluded, opaque stones. We're asked to interpret the difficult ones ourselves, on our own time. But we're warned that our interpretation can never run against the grain of the unmistakable truths that lie beside them. We're free, in other words, to interpret them as our circumstances allow, but in doing so we must never imagine God as having any other nature than the one expressed to us through the parable of the Prodigal Son. He runs to us.

In Matthew's Parable of the Talents a wealthy unidentified man prepares to go on a journey. He calls his slaves forward, and to the first he gives five talents, to the second he gives two, and to the third he gives one, each according to his ability. Then he departs. He gives no instructions, even though the wealth he's handed over is an awesome amount of money-worth as much as fifteen years' wages for the common laborer.

After a long time he returns, and he calls his slaves to come to him. The first slave has traded with the talents, and to the original five he now adds five more. The master is overjoyed and praises him lavishly. Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master!

Likewise, the second slave has doubled the sum the master gave him, and for this he receives precisely the same words of praise.

But then the third slave comes forward. He buried the single talent in a safe place on the master's departure, and he now returns it. Perhaps beginning to understand that he didn't do what was expected of him he rushes to explain himself: Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; 25 so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.

The master's response is immediate and sharply negative. He calls the slave wicked and lazy, and berates him for his mistake. In what seems to be a fit of rage he cries, Take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. 29 For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. 30 As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'"

The parable ends. We're left with a hollow feeling, as if we've just seen a child in a grocery store get her hand smacked for fiddling with a bright package of candy.

When this parable is discussed, if it's discussed at all, it's most often interpreted as a stern instruction to use our spiritual gifts. The returning Christ demands to know that we've invested in our individual gifts and used them for the betterment of the body. After this brief sketch the interpretations usually end.

A number of scholars and students have been stumped by the disproportionate response of the master. Even though the third servant didn't steal the talent, or use it for himself, or run away with this huge sum of cash to another land beyond reach of the master, he's dismissed to the outer darkness. He is excommunicated, and left alone beyond the reach of the body.

Like these scholars and students, the compassionate person feels worried and uncertain because of this response. This is not Jesus as we know him. This isn't the behavior of the father in the Prodigal Son. Noted gospel scholar Geza Vermes is so disenchanted with this parable that he's remarked, "the whole of Matthew 25 is a shambles…" Another writer in a recent work says this parable is so uncomfortable that some scholars have interpreted the master and his reaction as a model of the world's behavior, rather than as a disciple's behavior, essentially showing us the antithesis of the way Jesus would react.

But if we want to discover what Jesus means for us today we need to take the clear with the opaque. We need to absorb the obvious parables and grapple with the difficult ones. We need to try and interpret Matthew's Parable of the Talents on our own.

To accomplish this we need to do two things. We need to interpret it so as not to contradict the more obvious parables-to propose an explanation that would in no way alter the character of the prodigal's father, for instance, were he to be dropped abruptly into the story. And we need to determine what the talents represent. This metaphor is at the heart of our story. Jesus is using this parable to describe what the Kingdom of God is like. These talents are of such vital importance that our treatment of them--for we must assume that each of us can take the role of one of the slaves--will be the sole determination in whether or not we share in the master's joy.

We're held back in this second task by the vagaries of language. It's almost impossible to separate our understanding of an ancient talent, a large unit of Greco-Roman money, from a modern talent, a personal gift or skill. In fact, it's assuming that these are the same that makes us initially feel uncomfortable with this story.

Have any of us not known a gifted person who was unable to fully realize their talents? There are women with beautiful, bell-like voices who are terrified of performing in public and whose songs are never heard by anyone but their children. There are gifted gardeners who are unfortunate enough to live in Fairbanks. There are poetic writers who lack the time or energy to finish their work and make it accessible to all. There are healers who struggle with self doubt, and pastors whose inspiration is drowned by depression or the realities of the world. Would we assign any of them to the outer darkness?

But if we discard our modern understanding of talents, whether physical or spiritual, what do they represent? They are clearly of great value. What earthly thing was of greatest value to Jesus?

For a possible key to this parable we might look to another book of the gospel: In John 15:12 Jesus says, Love one another as I have loved you. Does Jesus value anything more than he values you and I? Is it possible that we are indeed the slaves, but that our personal relationships with others are the talents entrusted to us? What if the other members of our community are the talents we've been asked to care for, or if a talent represents the depth of spiritual maturity in the community's members?

What does this do to our story? Does it explain the master's joy at the doubling of the talents? The slave entrusted with five followers of Jesus goes into the marketplace with them, and each attracts another to the voice of truth. Where the master left his slave with five disciples under his care he returns to find ten.

Or seen another way, the slave with two talents teaches and nurtures them in the master's absence, so that on his return they are more fully formed, more spiritually mature. Perhaps each one has become twice as capable of embodying the character and nature of the master-through compassion and humility and wisdom-and can better help God's dream come to fruition.

And then what does this view tell us about the slave who was given one talent? Perhaps it says that he buried the soul entrusted to him. He didn't nurture this person, or teach them, or walk with them on the Way. He ignored this soul. Perhaps he buried them in legalism and rites and laws, and never allowed the one entrusted to him to seek the face of God.

An extreme example, seen in light of modern evangelism, leads us to imagine that this slave adhered to a strict end of days faith, where they were saved on their baptism but then buried in a field to await the return of the Lord or passage to heaven and the afterlife. If so, the great sin of the third slave seems to be that he didn't work with this talent to further God's dream in this world, did nothing with this talent to help create a current day kingdom in which all could share.

Whatever we imagine, it seems clear that the slave not only failed to nurture the thing that was in his care, but also strangled it and put out its flame. It's possible the master was not so much displeased by what the salve didn't do with his talent, but what he did do with it: he buried it in a cold and lonely field. Perhaps it's for this sin that the master casts him out.

What understanding can this view lead us to? Simply that the talents represent the people who share our experiences on this journey, whose lives we touch and are touched by.

There is power and maybe even grace in this view. It is as true for lay people as well as pastors, for those deeply involved in the church as for those peripherally involved. When you next sit down in church, turn to your left and look long and hard at the faces you see. Turn to the right and look at the people there. These are your talents. These are the precious relationships the master has entrusted you with. How can you enrich their lives and their walk of faith? How can you allow yourself to be enriched by them? Take a mental image of these faces, whether they're new to you or you've known them your whole life. Sear them into your memory. These are the talents entrusted to you.

When you go home, let your mind wander over the faces of your friends, your relatives, the people you care for and who care for you. These are your talents. Nurture them. Help them feel and find God's grace.

In the end, this view doesn't fundamentally alter the teachings and salvation of Jesus. This may just be another view of another parable. But there may also be here the thing we search for the most: a meaning to these stories we can take to heart, that we can experience through our everyday lives.

As a recent book on Jesus remarked, "The importance of these stories lies in their meanings. An empty tomb without meaning ascribed to it is simply an odd, if even exceptional event. Only when meaning is ascribed does it take on significance. This is the function of parable... Indeed, it may be that the most important truths can be expressed only in parable."

Amen.

[This post was originally published in February 2006. MT]

Pixar's Surprising Grace

2008-10-11T12:35:00.001-07:00

[Note from Michael: This content is pretty suspect. It was turned down for publication as an article about a hundred times, so I think I'm missing the point pretty badly. Still, it was an honest exercise in trying to understand my newfound faith, so I'm keeping it.]

For a forty-year-old, faith doesn’t happen on cue. There are no Sunday School classes or parents to hiss “stop fidgeting” in your ear, and the paths aren’t obvious or easy. Faith emerges slowly and in fits and starts, and its shifting presence defies any notion of lines on a chart you can tap with a fingertip and say, “Look: here’s where it happened.”

Despite this, a string of vivid memories punctuate my first year of faith. I knelt on the darkened steps of an old church and asked the God I felt but couldn’t understand to save the life of a young girl I knew only by name. I was baptized in an early-September river, with hungry salmon fry darting around my knees. My wife and I flew to the equator with our anxious 11-year-old son and our blithe 2-year-old daughter, to meet our new 12-year-old daughter and bring her home.

I’m surprised, though, by how this first year of faith is better defined by questions than moments. “Can faith find me through my doubts?” “What sort of Christian shall I be?” An even greater surprise is that the answers, when they finally came, appeared in a pair of family movies playing quietly in the background of my life.

...

2004 was a year of tumult. I closed my fourth decade, which I expected, and I entered my third year as co-founder of a struggling startup. My two kids each grew another year older, which I also expected. What I didn’t expect was that Joie would cautiously bring home the idea of adopting another child. What I never imagined was that this idea would attach itself to an insistent, growing longing for meaning I’d been experiencing but had so far been unable to give a name to.

I’d never been a Christian, or wanted to be. Maybe this was due to one grandfather’s sad insistence that I was going to Hell because I didn’t believe, or it may simply have been a product of the life I grew up in: we were honest and I think we were caring, we had principles and we had a social conscience, but we never went to church.

In school I studied biology and evolutionary theory, and saw the latter as an elegant explanation for the profundity and beauty of life. I read Stephen J Gould and argued with biblical literalists. I felt a great truth in Plato’s concept of The Good, and inherently sensed a presence I’d later identify with Paul Tillich’s great “ground of being,” but these concepts had no real names and I didn’t serve them.

Long before Joie became my wife we had an impromptu first date at the zoo, and at a display full of elephant bones I made a vague comment about their evolution. Joie sniffed at the word in what I thought was a typically dismissive Christian fashion, and I thought, “This will never work.” But by 2004 we’d been married for 15 years.

The thought of adopting pulled at me with a gravity I couldn’t understand. It seemed totally ludicrous, this idea of bringing another child into a mildly dysfunctional home with a toddler and an almost-adolescent-former-only child. Perhaps the reason I didn’t immediately set the idea adrift was that my career seemed a bit ludicrous, and our financial situation, with Joie staying home for Georgia’s first several years, seemed ludicrous as well. Ludicrous had become the norm.

Yet it was all suddenly bigger than me. Joie had a few Christian CDs that I generally skipped when the car’s player came to them. I stopped skipping these discs, and on one sun-shining Sunday I listened with something other than my ears. As we drove about on errands I took one song’s statement as a question, and heard myself asking, “Holy… Holy… Are you Lord God, Almighty?”

The rearranged words fell on me with unexpected weight. This was my voice, timidly asking God if He was real, if I could call Him by name.

Friends introduced us to a family who were adopting from China, to talk about agencies and processes. We edged closer to the reality of our new child and I grew to know the other expecting father, who was the pastor of local church. Three of us—the first friend, the pastor, and myself—met at a pub to talk about children, the nature of God, and faith.

I learned that there were few Christian doctrines I could accept comfortably. I still couldn’t accept the bible as a collection of facts. I struggled with the package of substitution and atonement, and wondered how to reconcile it with the God of forgiveness and self-giving love I saw reflected in Jesus of Nazareth. I began to think of God as Abba, but wrestled with many of the foundations of Christian theology: the divinity of Jesus; Jesus as God’s only begotten son; redemption through Christ alone.

We attended services in the pastor’s church but stayed on the edge, even as I prayed that God might help me dismantle the walls I erected between myself and the rest of the congregation. Joie filled out a million adoption forms, and I wondered how we would pay for it all on an already floundering budget. We settled on a country, Colombia, and on an age, between six and nine, to fit between our other two children.

By late summer life had become even more complicated. The adoption process had become real, and we learned of an orphan in the far south of Colombia named Kaelly. She was not between the ages of six and nine: she was a year older than our son Braden to the day. But we read a line in her bio that said, “She got off to a rough start in life and will need a family who can help her deal with some of those issues,” and saw it as a forceful reminder of why we were doing what we were doing. At the same time my new boss demanded that I move from Portland, where we’d founded the company, to his office in Seattle. Alternatively, I could consider a “dramatically reduced role” in the business.

The path to faith became no clearer. I read dozens of books, from Christian history and exegesis to theology, but I struggled with my doubts. I felt unable move forward in my faith until I knew the answers to my seemingly unanswerable questions.

While all this was happening, life moved on. Georgia turned two, and like every two-year-old became impossibly attached to her favorite movies, asking to see them over and over again. On a hot August day I walked through the family room to see her perched cross-legged on the couch, fixated on the TV. “What are you watching?”

Without looking up she tilted her little blond head and said, “Nemo.” We’d had Pixar’s Finding Nemo for a few months and she was hooked.

“Can I watch too?”

So I sat with my daughter and watched Finding Nemo for about the fiftieth time, and as Marlin and Dory searched for the lost little clownfish I tried to put aside other thoughts. The scene opened where Marlin and Dory find themselves inside the whale…

Dory frolics in the waves that roil and wash through the whale’s massive mouth, as Marlin bangs furiously against the sheets of baleen locking them in. Great, shuddering tremors rock the two, and the water falls away as the whale swallows. His tongue tilts them into the air, and they cling to each other over an endlessly dark gullet. The whale’s calls reverberate, and Dory listens intently. She assures Marlin that everything will be all right, but Marlin refuses to believe her. Another series of deep rumbles from the whale, and Dory obeys what seems to be his command: she loosens her grip and starts to fall. Marlin catches her in a panic, and they swing suspended over what can only be certain death.

Dory’s face is serene, unconcerned. The whale rumbles again, and she calls up to Marlin who desperately grips her fin in his. “He says, ‘It’s time to let go.’” She blinks up at him. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”

Marlin is incredulous. Fear and loss transform his face. “How do you know? How do you know something bad isn’t gonna happen?

Dory stops for a moment and looks up at Marlin. “I don’t.”

And she lets go. She tumbles down into the whale’s gullet, and Marlin is alone. We see a lifetime of emotions cross Marlin’s face, and his dawning realization that he’ll never find his son unless he surrenders and falls. Even as doubt grips him, he has to let go and fall.

I sat stunned. Georgia giggled, and I marveled at the suddenness and unexpectedness of grace.

In Dynamics of Faith Tillich wrote, “Serious doubt is a confirmation of faith.” But I hadn’t really understood until Marlin showed me. Faith was not the cessation of doubt. Doubt was simply an affirmation of the seriousness of faith’s demands. It was surrendering to the whale to discover the son. I sent an email to my pastor friend, and two weeks later I was baptized in that early-September river. Full of uncertainty, but moving forward in my faith.

Out of the blue an old acquaintance suggested a job change that might keep me from moving to
Seattle in the midst of our adoption, and I took it. We wrote to the children’s welfare office for Colombia and formally asked for permission to adopt Kaelly, and they said yes.

We took part in the church’s Small Group program, and they prayed with us as we prepared to add an older child with an unknown past to our small family. I still winced self-consciously when I prayed in public, but if I was going to ask God to break down the barriers I’d erected around my heart I thought perhaps I should meet him half way.

In January, Joie and I stood in bemused wonder under an equatorial sun and watched our three children play in a hotel swimming pool.

The year of tumult passed into another one. We had very little equilibrium. We were like passengers on a ship that had veered to avoid an iceberg, and then lost their course and balance in doing it. Braden struggled to understand the rewoven fabric of our family, even as he struggled with the pain and confusion of being twelve. Kaelly struggled to learn a new language and a new way of life. We wrestled with her mistrust and her loneliness. We began to understand that her scars ran deep, and felt pitifully unprepared to help her heal them. In the pub where I first pondered faith I confessed to my friends that adopting a soon-to-be thirteen-year-old seemed in retrospect either terribly naïve or terribly arrogant, and that I was lost.

I struggled to find my place, at my new work and in my new church. I read more than ever, gravitating to Micah and Amos and those Old Testament prophets who seemed closest to discerning the essence of God’s will. I read modern interpretations of their messages in the books of Marcus Borg, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and others, and became convinced that God’s will was far simpler than the doctrines we used to elaborate on it: Take care of one another.

In August we had a number of guest speakers at church, and one of them I knew well: Jim was the leader of our Small Group, a former pastor well-versed in the traditional Christian thoughts and patterns of speech that made me uneasy. I saw him as a model of the conservative far right, but a good man passionate about his faith. He’d prayed with us for guidance in our adoption process, and we’d shared some beers together on a Sunday afternoon.

To anyone with experience in Christian fundamentalism his message would offer no surprises. It was a sermon my grandfather could have given. Like all postmodern churches we had multimedia effects attending the message, and Jim presented us with slides that showed how the majority of Christians believed the bible to be the infallible word of God, Renaissance-era paintings of souls being tortured in hell, and side-by-side portraits of Charles Manson and Mother Theresa, with the suggestion that those who fell short of the latter in their quest for sinlessness were no different than the former in the eyes of God. He finished with the statement that an unmoved God would reject us all at the gates of Heaven unless Jesus claimed us as one of His.

It was just one sermon, but it struck me at a time of great vulnerability in my faith. I drove home feeling empty and sad. Jim’s image of a God of judgment and indifference was not the image of God that my heart was nurturing. It wasn’t Jesus’ Abba. It bothered me that no one else in the church seemed disturbed by this message, and I remember thinking, “This is not my God. This is not my church.”

The next weekend—a year after my baptism—we went away for a vacation. We took Georgia’s new Pixar favorite with us, The Incredibles, a story of former superheroes trying to find equilibrium in a world that doesn’t want superheroes anymore.

In one scene early in the movie Helen Parr waits up at night, to confront her husband’s rescue of civilians trapped in a burning building and his inability to let go of the past: “Look, I performed a public service. You act like that’s a bad thing.”

“It is a bad thing, Bob. Uprooting our family—again—so you can relive the glory days is a very bad thing!”

Bob grows tense: “Reliving the glory days is better than acting like they didn’t happen.”

“Yes, they happened. But this—our family—is what’s happening now, Bob. And you’re missing this. I can’t believe you don’t want to go to your own son’s graduation...”

“It’s not a graduation. He is moving from the fourth grade to the fifth grade.”

“It’s a ceremony!”

“It’s psychotic! They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity. But if someone is genuinely exceptional then they—“

“This is not about you, Bob. This is about Dash.”

“You want to do something for Dash? Then let him actually compete. Let him go out for sports!”

“I will not be made the enemy here. You know why we can’t do that!”

“BECAUSE HE’D BE GREAT!”

Helen’s torso rises up in tension and anger and she bends forward with every word: “This is
NOT…ABOUT… YOU!”

This scene struck me with such force I had to go outside and walk in the cool, high desert night. I knew Helen Parr wasn’t talking about my struggles or my life, but her words fell cleanly into the gap I’d been trying to bridge: It wasn’t about me.

It wasn’t about my salvation, or the salvation of any one individual. A quietly dawning conviction told me we were all to be “saved,” in the end, for salvation was not likely to be a one-way trip to heaven at all. Salvation may in fact be the reality of God’s presence flooding into our current existence, overtaking us, and even the Charles Mansons of the world would partake in that salvation.

Alone in the night, under the glow of countless stars, it seemed that salvation must be the longing and goal of all the cosmos, with no one left behind. I wasn’t sure how or why, but felt that salvation couldn’t be a finish line crossed only by the few.

Our part in the grand mystery, it seemed to me, was to help set the table for the feast. Helen Parr reminds us of this when she implores us to be present, here.

What matters is that we never stop trying to bring about the kingdom, here. The defining action of the Christian life is to take care of one another, here. The traditional interpretation of heaven could become a trap that allows us to overlook suffering, here. Concern over our own salvation could turn us all into Bob Parr, longing for what has been or what will be, but ignoring “now” as a trial to be endured. Salvation, I began to see, could only be fully realized when we all experienced it together.

Later that week I found a counter to Jim’s sermon in Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel when I read, “No greater sinners exist than those so-called Christians who disfigure the face of God, mutilate the gospel of grace, and intimidate others through fear. They corrupt the essential nature of Christianity.”

I wanted to tear out this page and shake it at Jim in a rage. But I didn’t.

I’ve since realized that it’s not my job to bring Jim to a gentler view of Christianity. It’s my job to worship with him and understand the fears and longing that fire his beliefs. It’s my job to love him unconditionally and find the common ground we share in Christ. It’s my job to determine what kind of Christian I will be, and to ground that faith in hope rather than fear.

I’ve read that psychologist Carl Jung had a sign in his office that said, “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.” This is a powerful notion for me, reminding me that He will be here whether we give ourselves to Him or not. I suspect grace works this same way, because I look back on a first year of faith challenged by doubt and confusion and see that grace appeared in the form of unexpected life preservers.

In Marlin’s concerned brows I learned that doubt was essential to my faith, and that surrendering in spite of it could be my most profound expression of hope. Amidst confusion over how to express this faith, Helen Parr reminded me that it would never be solely about me, but about what I can do for others and what we can do together.

I doubt that the writers and technicians behind Pixar’s films have any view of their work as vessels set out to buoy the faith of struggling Christians. But God works with what he has at hand. In as much as His spirit permeates and binds our existence, maybe these artists can’t help but let some of His desire find expression in their work.

And now I’m a sophomore Christian. Sophomores think they know everything, so I have to remind myself that there’s more to learn than I can imagine. I need to keep my eyes open for unbidden messages of grace.

[This post was originally published in September 2005. MT]

For Brooke

2008-10-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

I am struggling today.

I'm in a resort hotel in Dallas, crowded with doubts about why I’m here and what my purpose is, and thousands of miles away from my family on a Sunday afternoon. Somewhere in Oregon today a celebration is being held, a recounting of the life of a young girl who died last week of leukemia.

I never met Brooke, but I knew a little of her story. Her nurse Carla broadcast her story in an effort to bring postcards to Brooke last year, postcards of far-off places that Brooke, who always wanted to travel, would not be able to see due to her illness.

I sent postcards of Germany and of Hawaii, and of more mundane places like Sacramento and Chicago and Minneapolis. This was a year ago.

In Minneapolis I found a small church a block from the juvenile Mississippi, and late one night I kneeled on its steps and prayed with all my being. I asked God if it was within his power and his vision that he would lift Brooke up and heal her. I asked that if he couldn’t do this that he would ease the hearts of her family, and all those who came into Carla’s compassionate net and cared for the girl they didn’t know.

I don’t pray much, and have no history of being moved by prayer or by the presence of God. But I left the darkened church and its steep, inviting steps knowing that I had asked with a clear heart, if not an unwavering voice. This was 11 ½ months ago.

Brooke got better, and her leukemia went into remission. I wondered if God had indeed heard all the prayers directed her way, and if he had bent the fabric of time and space to mend her in some way. By September I became a Christian. The two are not dependent on one another, and I didn’t read Brooke’s turn as a “miracle” that brought me to Christ. I probably would have come to my baptism without ever knowing of Brooke. But once there I did think of her and her story, and took strength from it.

But Brooke became sick again, and a week ago she left us. It has been hard on my faith. It has been hard on my heart. Tears come to me when I don’t want them to. My faith is still here, wounded and tired as it is. I simply wish I understood better. Brooke left behind a younger sister named Carmen who adored her, and a mother and a father whose sense of sorrow I can only imagine. My prayers ask now for God to give them peace, and ease their troubles. My prayer is for hope to be rekindled in faint hearts.

I have a number of pictures of Brooke that were sent to me in the course of her story, but I can’t seem to bring myself to post them here. It wouldn’t be right without asking her parents, and it seems intrusive. Instead I have included a picture of the cathedral on the Mississippi where I talked to God about this little girl. He heard me that night, and he answered me—though I don’t yet know how to interpret his words.

I recently found a poem by James Freeman called "I am There." Today, when people are gathered in central Oregon to celebrate the life and gifts of this 6-year-old girl and to offer their thanks for her brief presence with us, I post it on this site to add my voice to theirs.

Goodbye, Brooke. Thank you.

I am There

By James Dillet Freeman

Do you need Me?

I am there.

You cannot see Me, yet I am the light you see by.

You cannot hear Me, yet I speak through your voice.

You cannot feel Me, yet I am the power at work in your hands.

I am at work, though you do not understand My ways.

I am at work, though you do not recognize My works.

I am not strange visions.

I am not mysteries.

Only in absolute stillness, beyond self, can you know Me as I am, and then but as a feeling and a faith.

Yet I am there.

Yet I hear.

Yet I answer.

When you need Me, I am there.

Even if you deny Me, I am there.

Even when you feel most alone, I am there.

Even in your fears, I am there.

Even in your pain, I am there.

I am there when you pray and when you do not pray.

I am in you, and you are in Me.

Only in your mind can you feel separate from Me, for only in your mind are the mists of “yours” and “mine.”

Yet only with your mind can you know Me and experience Me.

Empty your heart of empty fears.

When you get yourself out of the way, I am there.

You can of yourself do nothing, but I can do all.

And I am in all.

Though you may not see the good, good is there, for I am there.

I am there because I have to be, because I am.

Only in Me does the world have meaning; only out of Me does the world take form; only because of Me does the world go forward.

I am the law on which the movement of the stars and the growth of living cells are founded.

I am the love that is the law’s fulfilling.

I am assurance.

I am peace.

I am oneness.

I am the law that you can live by.

I am the love that you can cling to.

I am your assurance.

I am your peace. I am one with you.

I am.

Though you fail to find Me, I do not fail you.

Though your faith in Me is unsure, My faith in you never wavers, because I know you, because I love you.

Beloved, I am there.

[This post was originally published in February 2005. MT]