A Double Advent (repost)

(I wrote this post in December of 2009, our last Christmas without children).

Joy to the World!
The Lord is come, let earth receive her king!
Let every heart prepare him room…

Preparing room in our hearts for Jesus.  Isn’t that what the Advent season is about?


But how does one actually prepare for an event as monumental as the arrival of Christ into the world?  At the moment of our conversion, did we ever pause to consider the enormous significance of his entrance into our lives and what would happen when he arrived to take his rightful place in our hearts? And during this season of Advent, are we prepared to welcome him into our lives anew?

If we’re honest, I think the answer is "yes and no."

The dictionary defines the word "advent" as "the arrival of something momentous."  I have to wonder, though, when those momentous occasions occur, do we truly realize what is arriving?

This year, as my wife and I take time each week of Advent to pause and "prepare him room", this season of preparation is taking on a deeper meaning, for we are actually preparing for two advents.  We are preparing for both Christmas day, and for what is affectionately known in our adoption agency as "gotcha day."  We long for this day, a day that will finally arrive after eighteen months of paperwork, social worker visits, blood tests, two sets of fingerprints, waiting lists, court dates, and a marathon flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.   A day when we meet our little one/ones for the first time and become his or her (or their!) forever family.


Everything in our lives is about to change dramatically.  Nothing will be the same.

Are we prepared to welcome this infant into our lives?  Yes and no.

So much will have to change, starting with our names. The stockings hanging over our fireplace have the names "Brian" and "Tracy" stitched into the fabric.  Those will have to go.  Next Christmas, the new ones will read "Mom" and "Dad."

Our home currently feels like a haven of safety and comfort in the world.  Our new family member will quickly challenge that assesment and will reveal to us a world of dangers we either never saw or comfortably ignored–things like exposed electrical outlets, glass keepsakes, and unlocked medicine cabinets.

Our current media consumption, our time spent with friends, our waking and sleeping schedules, our leisure time…it’s all about to get tossed out the window and replaced with something new.

Gulp.

The arrlval of baby Jesus seems so innocent and unobtrusive, yet a moment’s reflection on the upheaval awaiting expectant parents like us ought to move all of us to stop for a moment to seriously consider the transformation and upheaval awaiting all who sincerely welcome Christ into their lives.  We are far too comfortable with the Christmas celebration.

But Advent is not a season of fear.  It’s a season of joyful anticipation.  For when Jesus arrives, his upheaval involves rescuing us from the kingdom of darkness and transfering us into the kingdom of light (Colossians 1:12-13), the true resting place for our restless hearts.

So let every heart prepare him room this Advent season because the glorious disruption that awaits us, the feast that we only begin to sample this side of eternity, promises to enfold us into something and someone beyond our wildest dreams.

Need an idea for your next Sunday morning small group promotion?

If you are a small group pastor and you need an idea for your next small group promotional piece, here's a video that my wife and I developed, with the help of filmmaker Beau Brotherton.  We stole borrowed the concept from a similar video that Buckhead Church in Atlanta.  My wife, who is an actress and photographer, took the majority of the photos and helped arrange the stories.

Small Group Promo from Beau Brotherton on Vimeo.

Expensive lessons in leadership

It remains one the most painful leadership lessons I have ever learned.  The campus ministry I served with invited me to take a position as a team leader in Romania.  My team was made up of four recent college grads and a thirty-something friend who took a year off from her work as an Assistant U.S. Attorney.  

This was my first leadership position in our organization and I relished the opportunity to lead.  To prepare for this, I threw myself into every leadership training opportunity I could find:  A week with the national team as they trained the newest campus directors and four weeks in Colorado at our ministry's Leadership Development Project, where I was exposed to leaders in business, psychology, academics, and the church world.  I submitted myself to tests, mentors, and opportunities.  I was prepared...or so I thought.

Two weeks into my arrival in Romania, full of enthusiasm and excitement.  Armed with training, ideas and a team of young men and women, I fell flat on my face.

One of my team members didn't like having a leader.  He didn't like authority and I became the lightening rod for all of his hostility towards authority figures.

He didn't like me,

I wanted to be liked.  

Desperately so.

My desire for approval, even from someone who didn't like me, was so strong that it undermined my ability to lead well.  I hesitated to make decisions.  I feared making hard decisions.  Confronting him didn't change the situation.  Appeasing him made no difference.. I tried simple friendliness.  Nothing worked.

I was determined to get him to like me...to a fault.  I wanted to be liked more than I wanted to lead.

My determination to win his approval was costly.  Team meetings were draining and hindered our effectiveness in ministry.  In the midst of the challenge of cross cultural ministry and the stress of living in a foreign country, our team meetings could have been a place of encouragement and support.  Instead, weekly staff meetings stole more life from each of us.

Why didn't I send him home?.  I wanted to believe that I was dealing with the equivalent of a minor paper cut that simply needed a band-aid of friendliness.  Instead, I was facing a cancerous growth that required radical surgery and removal.  I committed one of the classic errors of leadership:  I refused to face reality.

That year in Romania was costly.  I learned several expensive lessons, among them are the following:

• Leadership isn't about being liked.  It's about leading, even when its tough.  It is not about making everyone happy.
• Reality is your friend.  Good leaders face reality.  They confront it and respond to it, even when it's tough.

What are some of the expensive leadership lessons that you have learned?

A Pastor's most important task

What is the most important task for a pastor?  To craft compelling sermons?  To develop a rich personal prayer life?  To learn how to listen well?

What would you say if someone asked you that question?

Dallas Willard, philosophy professor at USC, former pastor, and prolific writer on the topic of spiritual formation, would say that the task is this:

To arrange to live with deep contentment, joy, and confidence in one's everyday experience of life with God.

What would it look like to arrange my everyday life so that it was characterized by these three things?

• Deep contentment.

• Joy.

• Confidence.

How do I do this in the midst of a hectic life of work, family issues, poopy diapers, date nights with my wife, bible study, piles of bills, soccer in the backyard with my boys,...all the stuff of ordinary life?

We often tend to separate our spirituality from everyday life when in reality, ALL of life is spiritual, not just the explicitly "religious" moments.  It is in the ordinary moments of life that we can find the richness to be enjoyed and the satisfaction we desire.

In another context, Willard encourages pastors "to have substantial times every week where they do nothing but enjoy God.  That may mean walking by a stream, looking at a flower, listening to music, or watching your children or grandchildren play without your constantly trying to control them.  Experience the fullness of God, think about the good things God has done for you, and realize he has done well by you.  If there is a problem doing that, then work through the problem, because we cannot really serve him if we do not love him."

Instead of adding some kind of spiritual activity to my life, I need to look for God in the midst of what is already happening in my life.  I must look for the ways he has blessed me and enjoy what is right in front of me.  I need to open to God in the midst of my very ordinary life.

What about you?  What can you do to live your everyday life with deep satisfaction in Christ?

God, evil, and suffering (The Reason for God part 15)

(I'm reading through Tim Keller's book "The Reason for God" and taking my small group through a DVD study based on the book. Over the next few weeks, I'll be blogging about the book, the study, and the discussions occurring in my group.).

How does a Christ follower reconcile his or her belief in a good and powerful God with the reality of suffering and evil?  Honestly, there is no easy answer.  This is, in my opinion, the achilles heel of Christianity.  This is the toughest issue to resolve because, at the end of the day, it is ultimately a irreducible problem.  It can never be removed by argument.  And really...who among us is going to "feel better" about horrific tragedy if we have a crisp and clear answer to this issue?  None of our philosophizing about this issue will get God "off the hook."  Yet ironically, philospher Peter Kreeft comments that, "the Christian God came to earth to deliberately put himself ON the hook of human suffering."

Keller points out that, while Christianity "does not provide the reason for each experience of pain, it provides deep resources for actually facing suffering with hope and courage rather than bitterness and despair."   Keller makes the following observations and claims:

• Jesus did not face his death with the fearlessness that one would expect of a "Braveheart"-type hero.  He was deeply disturbed and shook up by his impending death (Mark 14:33-34), tried to avoid his death (“If it be your will…take this cup from me”—Mark 14:36; Luke 22:42), and when he was on the Cross, cried out that God had forsaken him (Matthew 27:46).
• Why this reaction?  He was more overwhelmed by his death because it involved something he had never known:  As God incarnate, Jesus had never been separated from God the father until now.
• "We cannot fathom...what it would be like to lose not just spousal love or parental love that has lasted several years, but the infinite love of the Father that Jesus had from all eternity. Jesus’s sufferings would have been eternally unbearable. Christian theology has always recognized that Jesus bore, as the substitute in our place, the endless exclusion from God that the human race has merited.
• "The death of Jesus was qualitatively different from any other death. The physical pain was nothing compared to the spiritual experience of cosmic abandonment.  Christianity alone among the world religions claims that God became uniquely and fully human in Jesus Christ and therefore knows firsthand despair, rejection, loneliness, poverty, bereavement, torture, and imprisonment.
• "If we again ask the question: “Why does God allow evil and suffering to continue?” and we look at the cross of Jesus, we still do not know what the answer is. However, we now know what the answer isn’t. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us. It can’t be that he is indifferent or detached from our condition. God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself.

What does the idea of a suffering God have on your understanding of the problem of reconciling belief in God with the reality of evil and suffering? 

 

Strange evidence for God (The Reason for God part 14)

(I'm reading through Tim Keller's book "The Reason for God" and taking my small group through a DVD study based on the book. Over the next few weeks, I'll be blogging about the book, the study, and the discussions occurring in my group.).

Keller makes an astounding claim in his chapter dealing with the tension of God's existence in a world full of evil and suffering.

While readily admitting that this is an enormous problem for believers, he notes that it is potentially an even greater problem for unbelievers. He notes that C.S. Lewis initially rejected the idea of God because he couldn't reconcile God's existence with the cruelty of life. But as Lewis pondered it, he concluded that the problem of evil was even more difficult to reconcile with his atheism. In his mind, suffering actually “provided a better argument for God's existence than one against it.”

Lewis stated that:

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of 'just' and 'unjust'?...What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?...Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too-for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies...Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple."

Many of our modern objections against the existence of God have to do with our sense of fair play and justice. We believe that people ought not to suffer or inflict evil on one another. But evolution is based upon the principle of natural selection and it depends upon the death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak. On what basis can we judge the natural world to be wrong and unfair? We can only judge it by admitting that there is some sort of extra-natural or supernatural standard by which to make the judgment. Otherwise, we are just offering up our own subjective opinion.

“The atheist does not have a good basis for being outraged at injustice,” says Keller, “which, as Lewis points out, was the reason for objecting to God in the first place.”

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga put it this way:

Could there really be any such thing as horrifying wickedness [if there were no God and we just evolved]? I don’t see how. There can be such a thing only if there is a way that rational creatures are supposed to live, obliged to live…A [secular] way of looking at the world has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort…and thus no way to say there is such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness (…and not just an illusion of some sort), then you have a powerful…argument for the reality of God.”

The problem of tragedy and suffering is a problem for everyone. At first glance, it does seem as if taking God out of the equation would make it easier to grapple with, but it doesn’t. It is at least as big a problem for unbelievers as it is for believers. 

Since the problem of evil is a problem for all of us...how do you reconcile it?  If you are a theist of some sort how do you reconcile evil and suffering with belief in the existence of a good and powerful God?  If you are a skeptic of some sort, how do you reconcile your belief that there is such a thing as an objective standard of justice and fairness in a world that is simply the product of chemical reactions occuring over time?

We'll unpack a few of Keller's thoughts on how a Christ-follower might approach it in my next post.

Book Review: "Kisses from Katie"

A few weeks ago, I attended a conference in Atlanta and had the privilege of hearing from Katie Davis, a remarkable young woman with a story full of so much sacrifice that I found it almost impossible to believe.

This remarkable young woman from Brentwood, Tennessee had the kind of life that teenage girls envy: student body president, homecoming queen, a boyfriend, a sports car, and plans to head to college. She turned her back on all of it to launch a sponsorship program for needy children in Uganda. Today, at age 22, she is the mother of 14 girls (yes, you read that right) and leads a child sponsorship ministry that cares for over 400 children, providing them with an education, food, and medical care.

Her story blows me away. I don’t have a category for someone like her. Yes, she's young, but wow, her sacrifice and humble trust in God inspires me. For those of us living in the USA who claim to follow Christ, it is easy to learn a lot about Jesus without really doing what he said to do. In her book, Kisses from Katie she writes, "As I learned more and more of what Jesus said, I liked the lifestyle I saw around me less and less...Slowly but surely I began to realize the truth: I had loved and admired and worshipped Jesus without doing what he said.”

For her personally, this realization led to her serving the poor in Uganda. She writes, “I fell in love with a beautiful country of gracious, joyful people and immense poverty and squalor that begged me to do more. It was happening in so many ways, and I couldn’t deny it. I wanted to actually do what Jesus said to do.”

“So I quit my life.”

Not all of us who follow Christ will be led down a path that leads to a third world country, but her response to Jesus’ command to take care of the poor and sick sure makes me want to reexamine how I live my life and makes me want to live with more intentionality w

You can learn more about her ministry here, follow her blog here, and learn more of her story by watching the video below.