Fighting my fears ...

Maybe you feel it too. A looming sense of judgment. A foreboding sense of doom. Nothing generates this more than religion. Nothing could be farther from the heart of God towards us.

Fear mongers have been using the furor of God to control the thoughts and feelings of the faithful since the beginning of time. It produces conformity. It generates revenue. It creates an insatiable need for assurance, so people keep coming back for more. And keep leaving with less.

What if God actually loves us?

What if God’s love, not his anger, judgment, and condemnation are the bottom line?

What if, at the end of the day, after we strip away all the other attributes of God, all that's left is God’s love for us?

That changes everything for me.

I used to think the antidote for fear was courage, but I’ve realized that courage only fights against my fears. It doesn't take them away. Only love take fear out of the picture.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. (1 John 4.18)

When I start living in the fearless flow of God's love, I start to breathe. Instead of shutting things down for fear of pissing God off, I start to see the possibilities. I stop thinking about the impossibilities. The road ahead becomes clearer, wider, more open. Life moves forward. Momentum builds. Things start happening. Clarity. Change. Freedom.

The Lord disciplines those whom he loves, and chastises every child whom he accepts. (Hebrews 12.6)

I don't always get it right. I often get it wrong. Clearly there are times when I need to make changes in my life. The love of God should make it easier for me to accept these changes. If I know God loves me, the battle between maintaining my sense of self respect vs. appeasing an angry deity should be over.

But it's not that simple. When God begins stripping away the detritus in my life, it causes disorientation. It's unsettling. It's uncomfortable. People don't understand. It looks messy, wrong, ungodly, even unbiblical. And here's where the ultimate battle between fear and love is played out. When God takes away the things I no longer need, will I start thinking God no longer loves me? When things in my life begin to disappear, will I start wondering if God has turned against me? Will I go forward into the unknown, or go back to the old and familiar to avoid the inner turmoil?

Jesus said that God removes every branch that bears no fruit, and in the same breath said every branch that bears fruit God prunes to make it bear more fruit (John 15.2). What makes this tricky is that both the fruitless and fruitful branches experience a cutting away. When God cuts away what is no longer needed in our lives we may wonder at the moment he cuts if he is discarding us -- throwing us out because we're no longer useful. Has he condemned us? Has he held our sins against us?

Even in this act of divine love, the fear creeps in.

I overthink everything. Music helps me get out of my head and get into the groove. I'll always be grateful for a South Dakota college DJ who handed me a tape during my second year of grad studies and told me to check it out. It was one of the toughest years of my life, but that recording helped me see that year as a step forward instead of a step back. Everything I needed to know in seminary, I learned from Rick Elias and the Confessions. For what it's worth (and for everything it's worth) ...

• The Word Is Love
• Stripped
• Stones

The long way home ...

Got dropped off at my old "office" today – the Starbucks on Academy & Lanark. This winter, I moved to a new Starbucks in Tuxedo Village. Coming back to the Academy & Lanark store brought back waves of memories: writing sermons and essays; editing books; trading stocks; coding software; and, of course, drinking coffee (lots of it). One of my favorite memories is a meeting with Dave Balzer that led to a first appearance on the GodTalk radio show.

My afternoon at the Academy Starbucks was preceded by an unpleasant but not unnecessary reality check: a long conversation that was tremendously difficult, but incredibly powerful in its clarity. I don’t have these conversations often. I’m “too busy”. But I realized today that I’m too busy in large part because I lack the clarity and focus these conversations create. For the first time in a long time, the things that matter most appeared front and center in my mind ... and a lot of other things immediately fell off the wish list.

If I had the things that matter most, I wouldn’t want the other things.

“Good enough” is never good. And it's never enough. Ultimately “good enough” is not enough good ... and not enough God. “Good enough” can never get me to good. Trying harder won’t change "good enough" into good. Praying harder won’t do it. This is particularly true in relationships: if people in my life are happy with “good enough”, they’ll never want good (and I can’t make them want it).

I feel the church is guilty of something between gross negligence and grievous sin in its sanctification of "good enough". As a young follower of Jesus, I was presented with cavalier notions of life, love, and God. I was told that life was a mostly forgettable preparation for Eternity, that love was a superficial experience, and that conformity to a casual (careless) understanding of Scripture was a sign of God's will. I paid a huge price for these idiotic ideas: I threw away my 20's, I turned my back on true love, and I used the “will of God” as a sophisticated denial mechanism to cover up the loss.

In more recent years, I’ve discovered that life is a sacred trust (Matthew 25.14-30), that nothing is greater than love (1 Cor. 13.13), and that nothing less than "good and acceptable and perfect" can be called the will of God (Romans 12.2). When I embrace these notions of life, love, and God, I become aware of the incredible opportunities inherent in each moment. And I pray that I’ll never settle for good enough again.

Good things are happening in my life. New opportunities, new people, new possibilities. I can't enjoy them fully and completely if I make room for good enough.

When I walked home from Starbucks today, I came to an impasse: a low-lying footbridge submerged by the flooding of Omand’s Creek. I was forced to take the long way home, which brought to mind the 1979 Supertramp hit, Take the Long Way Home:

So when the day comes to settle down,
who’s to blame if you’re not around?
You took the long way home.


The song is a testament to a life of lost moments and missed opportunities. A life of trying to play the hero and winding up with zero. A life of giving oneself to causes, groups, and people that are happy with good enough. A life devoid of good. Autobiographical in more ways than I care to admit.

Today, I took the long way home from Starbucks and it cost me an extra 10 minutes. “Good enough” is long way home that will cost me a lifetime if I don't set my sights on good.

I'm grateful for all the good. I don't want to settle for "good enough".

He is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine (Ephesians 3.20).

Lame!

"That's lame".

I hear that expression a dozen times a day. Half the time the expression is coming from my lips!

Sometimes it's a reference to a bad song on the radio or a lousy advertisement on TV. Sometimes, it's a reference to the behaviour of others, particularly behaviour that disappoints me or lets me down in some way.

In these cases, I'm essentially using the word "lame" as a acronym; i.e., Lazy And Making Excuses. You don't want to be around me when someone is lazy and making excuses. Just ask my church -- they'll tell you what I'm like! (Ugh.)

I'm not saying laziness and excuse-making shouldn't be confronted. When people slip into L.A.M.E. behaviour, they're letting others down. They need to know that. They need to hear how their actions (or lack thereof) are impacting other people. The rest of us owe them an intervention.

Which is my point. There's something about the L.A.M.E. behaviour of others that can quickly trigger our own L.A.M.E. tendencies. There's something amiss when we use the L.A.M.E.-ness of others as a reason to write them off. It's especially a problem when we wanted to write them off all along and their L.A.M.E. behaviour just happened to give us a reason to do so.

Who's L.A.M.E. now?

Relationships take work. By work, I don't mean putting up with the inaction and indifference of others. What I do mean is something the Apostle Paul calls "speaking the truth in love" (Ephesians 4.15). In fact, the Apostle describes speaking the truth in love as essential to our spiritual connection to Jesus.

Easy to say. Hard to do. I've seen a lot of people speaking the "truth", which is usually some self-centered rant about how they're offended, shocked, and disappointed by someone else. On the other side of the equation, I've seen a lot of people perpetually put up with the neglect or abuse of others out of the mistaken notion that love is analogous to a limp noodle.

Truth and love belong together. Truth is an attempt to express what I really think and feel. Love is the recognition that the whole world does not revolve around what I think and feel. Speak the truth in love -- let these two elemental qualities interplay with each other in your relationships with others.

Are you game?

Or are you L.A.M.E.? Do you have what it takes to speak the truth in love with your family, friends, co-workers, the people in your church, etc.? Or are you going to let their L.A.M.E. behaviour turn you into just another person being lazy and making excuses?