A Hill To Die On

Napoleon's Russia Campaign was over months before he left a limb-littered red trail in the Muscovite winter.  While the popular anecdote tells us that the Tsar's climate bested France, the truth is that imperial troops had overextended their supply lines the summer prior.  Alexander had adopted a brilliant strategy; the Russians adopted a scorched-earth tactical retreat.  They torched their own peasants' farms in their retreat.  The Battle of Borodino was the only major engagement of the invasion.  The French advanced with shocking speed through Russian territory.  Of course, that was the point.  When Napoleon came to quarter in the smoldering ruins of Moscow, his support lines were running through hundreds of miles of hostile territory.  His reach had exceeded his grasp.  There were too many hills to hold between Germany and western Russia.  Moscow would be remembered the high-water mark of the First French Empire.  To call the withdrawal of the Grande Armée back to Paris "inglorious" would be an understatement.  Henceforth Napoleon would not be expanding his empire but managing his decline, whether or not he knew it.  Between antagonizing the British, the Prussians, and the Russians, France had unfurled too many war flags on too much soil.  To this day the emperor's name is a byword for megalomania.

Dad always used to tell me that you have to choose your battles.  He always had a penchant for military metaphors and history, despite never serving himself.  He also saw that I was often stirred by mighty passions on the basis of my opinions.  When others--even adults--weren't swayed by my arguments or reached my conclusions, I resented them and anger would simmer in my heart.  He recognized that I was often carried away by half-truth and spiritedness more than by pure reason, so instead of addressing my poor logic at the height of my agitation he offered advice.  He would say, "Son, maybe you're right, but you have to choose your battles."

"But Dad...!" I would blurt indignantly.

"You have to decide if it's a hill worth dying on."

To an adolescent abrim with youthful fire, these sounded like the flaccid excuses of a feeble old man.  (Though he wasn't yet forty when he said this, I figured anyone who'd spout platitudes like that must be half-senile and more than half dead.)  But of course he was right.  I will spare you any trite reflections on the ignorance of youth or the wisdom of fathers.  It is enough to say that he was right.

In my time at the Baptist Geneva, I have found the culture to be at once warm and alienating.  Sometimes this warmth is genuine Christian charity beckoning the lost to repent, sometimes it is a subversive veneer for earning converts.  The nuances of this distinction can be hard to discern and I won't address them here except to say that loving the lost well that they may know Jesus is virtuous and obedient.  There is a darkness in conditional, agenda-driven love, however, if the goal is to win more adherents to your party or cause.

But the real alienation doesn't come from true and false civility; it comes from entrenched conviction.  The air of the place is thick with pathos, both on-campus and in the church bodies within the orbit of the school.  And should it not be so?  After all, we are talking about a concentration of aspiring preachers who have heeded a Divine call to proclaim (literally, "to cry forth" ) the Truth of judgment and salvation.  Such men ought not to waiver in their heed to the declaration of the Cosmic King.  Judgment shall come, salvation is available, but only for a time.  I don't object in the slightest; may the Word of the Lord fill every corner of the earth.  It becomes a problem when the sermon never ends.

Christians disagree charitably about things.  None dispute the authority of the Bible and the Apostle's Creed.  All dispute everything else (even the Catholics, as monolithic as they pretend to be).  There are instances in the Scriptures were people are clearly placed outside the faith and some where people are free to disagree.  Dr. Albert Mohler of Southern Serminary has argued for a  "theological triage" in which there are "three different levels of theological urgency, each corresponding to a set of issues and theological priorities found in current doctrinal debates."  First-order issues are those essential to Christianity, second-order issues involve organizing ourselves into denominational and church bodies, third-order issues as ones of personal preference that can arise between individuals.  First- and third-order issues are pretty obvious to most; Jesus's literal bodily resurrection is pretty clearly a first-order issue, the color of the carpet in the sanctuary a third.

On second-order issues, however, Mohler says that these "resist easy settlement by those who would prefer an either/or approach."  A hasty decision on these issues can rend the soul in knots as it can divide brother from brother.  Nevertheless, Mohler believes that heated discussions can exist on this level.

But should they?  Must they?

For example: Was Paul talking his pre- or post-conversion life in Romans 7?  Should communion be closed to un-immersed believers?  Is the penal substitutionary model of the atonement the only model?  The best?  Are those who deny it nonbelievers?  Are those who deny a forensic view of justification outside the faith, woefully misguided, or simply favoring another perspective?  Premil, postmil, amil, or premil dispensational?  How important is a "born again" experience?  Do some people become Christians by process rather than dramatic conversion?  Can Reformed epistemology or presuppositional apologists have any ground for conversing with the lost world?  How depraved is the intellect in Romans 1?  These are all important issues that get discussed at seminaries the world over and especially at my mine.  I don't deny their significance.  I must deny the obviousness of any one conclusion on these complex issues over others.  Maybe just because a debate is settled for you doesn't mean that the debate is settled for the catholic Church.

Taking a stand is one thing.  What I have grown to revile is how uncharitable many of my peers are on these second-tier issues.  They speak with the prejudice of scientists.  "The facts are plain for any who would see.  Those who don't either fail to understand or deny it to indulge their power and selfishness."  Is this not the great straw man Reformed theology builds?  (I speak here as the cranky insider or the gadfly.)  Is their no room in our doctrine of the perspicuity (for laymen: "clarity" or "obviousness") of Scripture to say that it's not all equally clear?

Perhaps the more serious failure is the Reformed anxiety toward mystery and paradox.  Holding two things in tension is easy for the poet, the artist, the child.  It is nigh-impossible for the empiricist, the activist, the adult.  Physicists have come to agree that light exists as a wave and as a particle.  Do you think experimental physicists will ever live comfortably in that tension?  Yet even they seem to know that light primarily as wave or primarily as particle is no basis for partisanship.

And ultimately isn't this the luxury of men whose world extends scarcely beyond the walls of a seminary library in seminary-churches in a seminary city?  Perhaps the arrows we fire marked "Natural Theology" or "Regulative Principle" fly so true because no enemy bashes at the gates with the troubles of real people in real trouble.  Warlike men may mistake a friend for a foe if their blood lust cannot be directed again a true Enemy.  Woe to the men who choose too many hills to die on.  They may find Moscow aflame and the walk home cold indeed.

A Decade of Digital Ink

On May 8, 2003 at 5:38 PM I published my first blog (originally titled "The Inner Machinations").  I had been writing for some time before that and a handful of earlier stories still exist as backups of backups.  However, as far as personal writing goes, that survives only in an obscure corner of the internet I rarely retread.  I was in high school when I started blogging.  This was in a period before most people used blogs for anything more substantive than journaling and mine was no different.  What was unique about my writing was how verbose I was.  Some might fairly criticize Artery Bloggage for squeezing a paragraph's worth of content into twelve or awkwardly hanging between popular and intellectual audiences.  Okay, I'm the only person to make that critique.  Rereading my early 2000s writing encouraged me; I have come a very long way.  I recently archived that ten-year-old online journal; it is 297 pages in Microsoft Word with standard formatting

But it wouldn't be fair to throw "The Machinations" into a single category.  It began as teenage angst with a vocabulary.  It was pretentious and self-important.  It was never insincere though; I was so vulnerable in many of those entries that I lived in dread that someone I knew would find it.  (In this regard it is quite unlike Artery Bloggage which is shamelessly self-promoted.)  It eventually moved into other genres though, like fiction, parable, poetry, and even polemic.  The center of gravity was always existential though; I needed to write.

I can remember on many occasions being impelled to write.  When I studied the classical Muses in college, I was sympathetic because I had lived it.  I wrote from the overflow of my soul, riding on hormone-induced waves of rage, angst, grief, and joy.  Even when the entries topped the ten-page mark (when word-processed, and single-spaced no less), I always finished feeling cathartic.  It was an experience I had a difficult time recapturing; I wish writing papers had felt that good in college.

I started another blog on Xanga later in high school which had no title.  It served three purposes.  The first was to throw people of the scent of "The Machinations" (I doubt it did that).  The second was to be a place where I could put pithy, shallow, even humorous writing.  That aspect was later integrated into Artery Bloggage with the "You Only Think I'm Kidding" series penned by "the Prophet" (a character who may or may not be an outlet for my real opinions).  The third was to be a part of the community of friend I'd made who used Xanga for their high school writing.  It was a bit more self-aggrandizing like Artery Bloggage is now. As time went on, the Xanga began to resemble "The Machinations" a little bit more in length and sobriety.  Both were updated less frequently as college went on, and I eventually dropped both sometime in 2008.  Ironically, the silence in my writing between 2008 and 2011 marked some of the toughest years of my life and greatest periods of personal growth.  Looking back, I wish I had written more then.  The only big project I have from that time is a chronicle of a road trip I took with two college buddies out West (to be concluded this summer for the fourth anniversary of the trip).

As much as I sometimes dislike modernity, it really is a treasure to have these writings preserved.  I wrote entries when my father died, when I dealt with my first broken heart, and when I was learning about God's work in my life.  I will always have those pieces on hand (even if hard copies are a little cost-prohibitive).  Even though my writing has a different focus now, the core of the endeavor is still the same.  We all must grapple with our lives as they are, with our triumphs and tragedies, with our souls' yearnings, with man and God, and with our heart disease collectively and individually.

I will conclude with an excerpt from a piece I wrote on February 3, 2005 (I always made sure things were date-stamped).  The entry was titled "Soap Box of the Whenever: In Defense of Writing."  It was meant to address writing as a sufficiently manly activity.  I wrote:

    It isn't my intention to sound like a self-proclaimed martyr here. I wish only to defend my passion. Writers and thinkers are valuable. We matter too. It isn't he who runs fastest or scores most or plays best that is remembered and studied for years to come. It's those who've stopped and have something to say about life, about love, about logic, and about spirit. [...]

    I want to understand life. A great way for me to do that is to stop and consider it. That's all that writing is, really. Defining life in words. And a good writer knows how to define life so well that he not only comprehends it himself, but makes others see it through his writing. He has life so well-described that the reader cannot help but be swept up in his musings as well. He takes us to places we've been before, but deeper and further than we journeyed on our own. That's the kind of writer I want to be. The one that captures his readers and entices them with an adventure they can't help but join in. A beautiful slavery.

I would no longer describe good writing as "defining life in words", but I do think it gets at something real.  Socrates has since taught me that we shouldn't be too confident in having God, life, and our hearts contained in pithy, inadequate words.  I maintain that there is something real and true to it even if there can be no real end to our words.  Should there be?  Writing was and remains "a beautiful slavery" to the muse.

Ghosts

When I walk down Bardstown Road in Louisville, I am simultaneously surrounded by the throbbing pulse of life and the hollow pallor of death.  It's a busy street, the top hipster destination of Louisville.  It is abuzz with the bustle so common to many cities: too many people crammed into too little space and confident that this efficiency minimizes the carbon footprint of humanity and eliminates the encroaching evil of urban sprawl.  As to whether or not this ecological righteousness outweighs the evil of furious thoughts directed at the throngs of bodies crowding the sidewalk or the incompetent drivers slowing the flow of traffic, only the Universe knows (if it has personality or will at all; evidence suggests it is coldly indifferent).  I myself am less enthralled with the environmental responsibility and feel more like a flatfooted kid forced to wear shoes three sizes too small.  I am pressed and not comforted by the chattering bodies pressing in upon me.

But the thousand-yard-stare of these walking dead is far more troubling than the enclosure and noise.  Each is clothed in thick layers of irony.  The Bardstown hipster goes out of his way to dress sloppily because he finds it ironic.  He listens to obscure neofolk music, intentionally building an identity which few others may share.  He drinks terrible beer--the worst he can find--just to get a rise from those who recognize the rotgut he swills.  He swears he loves that he may get even more disapproval from the average clean-cut observer.  He lives post-culture, post-liberal, post-postmodern, post-everything but pre-nothing.  He is pre-nothing in the sense that he is not a pioneer of anything but reacting to everything.  Far more ominously, he is also pre-nothing in the sense that he in fact runs before nihil.  An existential void howls just beneath the ironic scaffold which he has constructed, caulked over with Ray-Ban glasses, unflattering skinny ties, and an affinity for Wes Anderson films.  In truth, any critique of the hipster has been exhausted to triteness by better and worse writers than me.  I only wish to note that these hipsters drift through the world as perpetual ghosts, reveling in all they aren't (i.e. mainstream, conformist, familiar, hygienic) rather than in all they are.

I can't say I blame them.  They suffer from the same heart disease I sometimes feel spiritually clogging my own metaphysical arteries.  They struggle to know who they are or why they're here.  They may gloss over it with a veneer of New Age spirituality or twentysomething progressivism or unsightly beards and skinny jeans.  In reality, they seem no more tied to Louisville or even their favorite haunt Bardstown Road as a place than they are to their own roots which they no doubt found too conventional or unjust.  True, they may be ardently devoted to a particular coffee shop or a local neo-folk bluegrass band.  Yet they share with most people (besides the elderly and the Evangelical Christians) the fact that they are unlikely to see themselves as dutiful citizens who may be called upon to sacrifice billfold or style, life or limb for the sake of this particular city.  Who am I to critique?  I am not much of a Louisvillian either.

It's all so different from the Southern roots I left.  I grew up in two small-ish towns/suburbs.  I much prefer to identify with my small town in Georgia than with the metropolis of Atlanta; I hated going to the city and rarely did.  (A Braves game was the only real draw.)  I was too young to do much travel in Birmingham when we moved away from its suburb.  However, Birmingham in the 90s felt more like Alabama's biggest town and seemed not to aspire to be an oasis of hip culture in a sea of redneck ignorance (unlike Birmingham today, desperate as it is to emulate Nashville or Atlanta).  All my grandparents came from very distinct roots in their small Alabama towns.  All the neighbors knew who they were and they understood their civic obligation to the neighbors; they had roles in town to play at were happy to play them whether or not Camden or Millbrook ever achieved hip metropolitan status or not.  Even when I was young, I was mystified that everyone (even the black folks) hollered, "Howdy, Mister Charlie!" to my grandfather every time we walked past the Wilcox County Courthouse on the way to the barber shop.  People there still know who I am years after my previous visit, a foot of height and a healthy beard notwithstanding.

Now the grands are dead and I am haunted by their ghosts every time I go back to the family estate.  This is especially true in Millbrook where three generations of family are buried in the side yard.  This always used to unnerve me when I was a kid.  I was convinced the house was haunted when I would hear creaks in the night.  Grandmother certainly agreed the spirits were about, though they never seemed to bother her as much.  Walker Percy wrote in The Moviegoer how every Southerner knows he is haunted by ghosts, be those spirits Confederates or slaves or great uncles or Episcopal ministers or Sir Walter Scott himself.  I have always known the land was haunted, even if I rarely felt brave enough to mention it.

Yet as I have grown older, I have grown to love the ghosts.  I grew less afraid that some ghoulish spirit would appear to me at night as I awakened to their ethereal presence in the sunlight.  They haunt me all the time as the voices of Stoical talk of obligation and duty.  I go home to Mama all the time because when she calls, a man must answer (Bear Bryant said so).  They haunt me in instinctive chivalry and honor.  "Hold the door for a lady, get between the lady and traffic when you stroll the sidewalk, hats off when you pray."  They haunt me in the mournful sadness at the rebel graveyards.  The grand Greek tragedy of Dixie--a proud culture built upon the back of irredeemable subjugation--strikes a chord in my soul even though I never donned a gray kepi or loaded a musket against a Yankee or forced a man into servitude.  Maybe it's as simple as the fact that the ghosts have inevitably become familiar as the years have marched on.  The boy sleeping by the graveyard in Alabama scarcely knew the souls lurking in the shadows.  But the graduate student twenty years later knows a few of them now since they have only lately passed into death and wouldn't mind a visit from them.  Family is still family, fleshly or ghastly.

The matter may be concluded with a cruel, untrendy irony.  Caught between three or four potential roads, enabled to be anyone or anything by the anonymity of the cosmopolitan metropolis, formed by the "you-can-be-anything-you-want-to-be" self-esteem of Disney movies and 90s educational philosophy, I am rootless in a town whose soil is as alien as the red dust of Mars.  I can be anyone or anything, but who should I be?  The hipster hides his uncertainty with trendy cigarettes and ironic beer and empty talk of his individual liberty and the providence of an impersonal universe.  Some days I would gladly trade the grounded shackles and limitations and small minds of a small Alabama town for chic twentysomething freedom which yields only listlessness and cosmopolitan relativism.  When you needn't be anyone, you can be whatever you want.  But what should you want and who should you be?

Put plainly, I prefer the dead ghosts to the living ones.

The Good Portion

Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village.  And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house.  And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching.  But Martha was distracted with much serving.  And she went up to him and said, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?  Tell her then to help me."  But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary.  Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her." -Luke 10:38-42 (ESV)

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.  But let him ask in faith, without doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.  For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. -James 1:5-8 (ESV)

I bide my time far too much in worrying.

I admitted this fairly plainly a few weeks ago.  The gist there was that persistence in prayer is a discipline which demonstrates faith that God will act.  The source of it is a healthy knowledge of God's Providence.  This doctrine of Providence has two elements.  The first is sovereignty.  God must be able to provide or else imploring Him to do so is a waste of time.  Not only must He be able, He must be active to perform it.  Thus God cannot sit lackadaisically in Heaven, capable of ordaining and doing yet not.  The second is His benevolence.  We must believe that God is enthroned in Heaven contending on our behalf for our good.  If He is uninterested or malevolent, He oughtn't be sought out for help.  It wouldn't do any good.

So is that simple?  Is the cure to worry simply not to think?  That seems to be the opinion of our age.  The popular cures to anxiety involve distraction and mediation.  The modern democrat busies himself with material cares, earning money to survive.  When he makes enough money to survive, he turns his attention to entertainment and luxury.  Once he has no need of worry about life's immediate needs--once he has attained the bases of Maslow's hierarchy--he can go after the glitzy pleasures his wealth affords.  He can start saving for the next house, the next smart phone, the next car, the boat and the lake house.  And when he achieves these things, he can tarry away enjoying these luxuries.  Of course, once habituated to a productive work life he hasn't the inclination to truly enjoy these things.  But they do provide welcome relaxation from the bitter stress of his busy-ness.  And the noisier his life gets the more he drowns the gnawing moans of his soul.  He is too busy to confront the void inside, and when exhaustion threatens to amplify the dirge he has his pleasures to distract him.

The most severe cases necessitate the pills.  He who can't busy or distract himself enough may find the grip of anxiety paralyzing.  For him there are shrinks and meds aplenty to assuage the sore emptiness of his existence.  (Please note that I am not here making a commentary on legitimate chemical imbalances nor am I saying that anxiety and depression are not real psychosomatic issues.  I just don't think they are as prevalent as we seem to think them.)  There's always a Zoloft for fears and worries to return you to a healthy (read: productive), functioning life.  For what is life if not produce and function?

Yet the anxious and unproductive seem wrapped and rapt in their own musings, though typically to their detriment.  And while most modern democrats see the solution as filling the mind with sundry thoughts to drown it out (or the oddly inverse-yet-identical Buddhist/New Age solution of emptying the mind of all thought through meditation), Jesus and James seem to suggest another way: fill the mind with something else.

The vessel of the mind is easily filled with worry.  Meditation is the Christian answer, but does anyone really know what mediation is?  What is it to meditate on the Law of the Lord?  I had a mentor long ago give me the answer.

Meditation and worry are the same process.  They just have different foci.

Martha was much troubled by the work of hospitality.  Her motive wasn't bad, yet her distraction kept her from what Jesus calls "the good portion".  What is the one necessary thing?  In this story, that was to sit and listen to the Lord's teaching.  The cares and concerns of this life will be taken care of in due time, but in that moment she needed most of all to sit and listen to Jesus.  She needed to stop filling her mind with the troubles of today and start filling it with the words of Jesus.

James tells us that if we need wisdom or understanding, we need only to ask.  Yet we must not ask double-mindedly.  He who asks without faith in the Answerer is like a wave tossed to and fro; he cannot ground himself because he has no confidence that his prayer will do any good.  The confidence that our prayers will be answered is the confidence to persist, to move, even to produce without fear that things beyond our control--or even things within our control--will destroy us.  We rejoice because clarity will come if only we ask, expectant of an answer granted not from more obsession over the object of our concern but from more obsession with the Sovereign Lord who grants it.  Christian meditation and prayer are unlike Buddhist and New Age practice because the Christian must fill his mind, not empty it.

So here I sit in my twenty-first-century, quarter-life crisis doing all I can to fixate upon the Lord in between schooling, jobs, careers, vocations, relationships, longings, doubts, and troubles.  May I learn to pray as one single-minded on the confident assurance that my heart's cries are heard and my troubled mind shall one day fall silent.  The key is to fill the mind with the things of God, the comfort of His character, the truth of His omnipotence, the warmth of His benevolent love which contends for me, not against me.  May the unbelief of distraction find cessation in the overwhelming awe of His presence to save, to heal, and to shelter.  God be here and swiftly so with all wisdom, amen.

Bitter Much?

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. ²⁹ For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? -Romans 8:28-31

I guess I haven't done a post about life recently, so I figure it's about time I write something personal again. It probably isn't very professional-blogger-ish of me to write these little updates about my personal life. Oh well. I recently saw that successful blogs have a set tone and audience in mind in order to succeed. Since mine is a blend of educational and lifestyle with erratic smatterings of comedy, I suspect it is doomed to failure. I am a proud contrarian and believe that an author's writings should reflect who he or she is personally. And since I pretty well fit the aforementioned categories, I am probably doomed to failure as a person as well.

"If only he'd planned out his blog better, he'd still be with us!"

The past couple of months I've been acclimating to my new job. I can't say that I'm crazy about it, frankly. I find that it has a lot of rather esoteric policies which, while I completely understand why they are in place, kinda rub me the wrong way. I have always held the opinion that procedures laid out by administration are there to do your thinking for you. They're usually written by someone far above who may or may not remember what it is to do your job. Whether they're effective or not, the principle remains that they exist to remove your individual judgment from a situation. I think this does bad things for individual employees, since it simultaneously expects more and less from them than it should. They require more in that an employee must defer to a boss who may or may not be right and remember all the steps in a process which may or may not be helpful (lest they be reprimanded for an ultimately inconsequential mistake). They require less in that they assume the individual worker isn't better off figuring things out for himself. Thus the policy may be more efficient, but that may not be better for the excellence of the employee in a holistic sense. Yeah, I know, "Companies exist to make money, not good people!" Hence, I won't be in this job forever.

I long ago added to my list of prayer requests the question of graduate school. I am more and more excited about what I see in catalogs. I am person always excited by possibilities and now sometimes I fear I'll never settle down. Whereas before I feared I'd never find anyone, now it's more because I may just chase after awesome things hither and yon until I get old and rot. Mom was right though; this is what your twenties are for. It's weird to think that I kinda used to obsess about getting married and starting a career right at 22. Must be a Southern thing.

Not long ago I was reminiscing with a friend about our college days. He noted that a few years back my self-deprecating sense of humor betrayed an underlying bitterness. I was honestly a bit surprised to find three years later that anyone had noticed. Granted, my immediate family knew my insecurities and that sometimes (okay, often) I masked them with jokes. I knew that about myself and hoped nobody else figured it out. Imagine my surprise upon discovering that it was a topic of discussion among some of my friends--a topic concerning my emotional well-being.

It has really only been in the past few months that this bitterness has been uprooted. Over the past year or so I was convicted that my attitude didn't really match my theology. I believe and publicly espouse a very strong view of God's Providence and oversight in all things. I also believe that God is good and is out for my benefit as His child--even that he is working all these sundry things for my good--no matter what happens. So why did I harbor this nasty self-pity, lurking deep within? More aptly, why did I take all of these failures (mainly relational and ministerial) so personally? I can no more control the actions of another than I can the weather. Sometimes things don't work out, even when you've done everything in your power to fix them. I realized that I was taking as my failure things that only God could control. Only God and other people can control how they made their decisions. Those people I would counsel are accountable for their choices, not me. And if God has already promised that all these confusing, frustrating things work together for my good, how could I blame myself?

For each will have to bear his own load. -Galatians 6:5

It was pride, plain and simple, to take on as mine what God had ordained. I saw how decisions I didn't like were being handed down to me from leaders I was under or from friends who rejected my counsel. I grew to hate the former because they pretended such wisdom when the solution seemed obvious to me. Seeing how those leaders in my organization handled controversies at that time, even now I still think they were wrong. Nevertheless it was God who appointed those people over me and indirectly their decisions came from him. It was mine to honor without begrudging and I failed miserably, if only in my heart. Some of my friends made choices which grieved me to see from afar. It hurt doubly so because I had been sought out for help and counsel. When I saw them do things that I warned against, I felt a foretaste of pain I feared would befall them. Praise God these fears were sometimes unfounded, but often enough they were not. I am still hurt to think about how some bashed their hearts against the craggy shoals of ill-advised solutions. Still, the Scriptures tell us that each must carry his own load. I am not responsible for the spiritual and emotional well-being of every person I meet. To think so is a short road to burnout, pride, and ultimately bitterness. The healing from all this is ongoing and I pray that the lessons I've learned will stick. I have faith now where I didn't before--that all this has somehow built me in Christ's likeness--and I thank him for the joyful and the tough lessons.

None of this to say that I won't stop making self-deprecating jokes. And what's a bigger joke than the quality of my written corpus? Ba-zinga!

Lenten Reflections: Matthew 1 & 2

I was raised in the Baptist tradition, so low church I think I scrapped the bottom of the holiness barrel. I leaned downright Anabaptist for a long time, so the idea of a Christian calendar with seasons of fasting seemed alien to me. After all, fasting doesn't make you a better Christian. Aren't we free in Christ from the law and its appointed seasons of feasting and fasting? The whole Christian life is a feast, I thought. By the end of high school I was identifying as a Calvinist and in college I was exposed to the deep wells of tradition and theology that pushed me firmly into a broadly-Reformed camp. There I discovered the history of the saints gone by and realized that the Church Universal didn't end with the Apostle John only to restart with Billy Graham (and maybe a blip with Martin Luther). I learned how Lent is supposed to be a time to prepare us for Easter, that the fasting is supposed to deepen our feasting on God. Our hunger for food or caffeine or the internet is supposed to bodily turn our affections toward a deepened spiritual hunger for God. Still I participated in Lent only once and then halfheartedly, forgetting partway through I was even fasting or what the point was. I failed to orient my hunger toward the Lord and fell back into my thoughtless feasting. Praise God that grace abounds to the chief of sinners.

This year I actually attended a morning Ash Wednesday service at Sojourn, a Southern Baptist congregation which manages maintain low church form with high church sensibilities. They have a deep appreciation for liturgy, ritual, art, and holy expression while keeping the last, the lost, the least unalienated with esoteric holy trappings. So this morning I heard the real truth of Lent again for the first time: Man is mortal and we die to something to come alive again with a celebration of Christ's resurrection. Along with that came a charge to read the Gospels this season, so I endeavor to do so as I fast praying that my devotion to the Holy Writ will increase in my temporary death.

Today I read and meditate upon Matthew chapters 1-2. Here we read the genealogy of Jesus. It is filled with the names of men sometimes glorious, but more often inglorious. Particularly Matthew calls to mind the wicked kings of Israel we read about in Kings and Chronicles. These are men like Rehoboam and Manasseh who bow the knee to idols and demons, couching the plans of God with their own expedient safeguards and back-up plans. God can't be wholly trusted, they reasoned, so my Judahite army, Molech, and Asherah will save me if Yahweh fails. There are harlots like Rahab and liars like Abraham. Still God chose to use this pedigree to fulfill His purpose.

Other things could be noted (the Magi, Herod, the Bethlehem slaughter), but I was struck today by the example of Joseph. Here was a man I once heard described as "the manliest Christian outside of Jesus Himself." He first hears that his betrothed is pregnant though he has never had sex with her. Rather than expose her to a public humiliation, we are told that he plans to divorce her quietly. This is a drastic understatement. According to Levitical law, he could have had her stoned for infidelity! Yet even before he realizes what has transpired, he still intends to extend grace and break off the engagement. Now, we know as the reader that had he done these things he would have in fact done something quite unjust. Yet from his perspective and the vantage point of those around him, this would have been reasonable, just, and even gracious.

Then he has a vision of an angel telling him that this child is from the Holy Spirit. And he believes and marries her. In spite of the local gossip around Nazareth, he takes responsibility for a child not his own. Only an unfair modern critic would try to say that he is buying into some mythology to justify himself here. Ancient people may have had a more primitive science, but they certainly knew where babies came from! He knew this wasn't natural, that it defied all explanation. He knew that the community might (and probably did) speak against the character of his future wife. Nevertheless he persevered by faith that God was working something astounding. He doesn't even know that Messiah has come, he just believes!

It is by faith that he takes his family to Bethlehem. His wife is due any day and he still goes, knowing that through obedience to Caesar he is obeying God. He trusts God to iron out all the details. God provides a safe birth. It is by faith that he listens to the angel's warnings and flees to Egypt. Can you imagine? He didn't go back home to Nazareth at all. He brought no effects of home with his young family. Instead, he flees by night to a foreign land--a land of slavery in the Jewish mind--to escape the wrath of a jealous king. Here he shows the great virtue of provision. He thinks again of the safety of his family--a disgraced wife and a child not his own--and leaves everything behind all based on another vision from a divine messenger. He has no natural promise of safe conduct, no tangible guarantee of success. He has his faith and his God, and that his more than enough. He has nothing yet he has everything.

His journey is not so different from ours. We too sojourn by faith, not by sight. We Christians live as a people in-between in a kingdom here but not here yet. The promise of Christ has yet to be fully realized. We have the Word of God, the Spirit of God, and promises of suffering and deliverance. And so we sojourn. We travel through life prayer by prayer, trusting not in the might of our hands nor the strength of our earnings nor the knowledge of our minds. This is the life of a Christian, the life of Joseph. It is one which is folly to the world yet salvation for those who believe. May we endure well this mortal race with our full hope in God the Father, faith in Jesus Christ our Redeemer, by the power of the Holy Spirit indwelling us. May the ash on our foreheads be a reminder that to dust we shall return and from death we shall rise in the glory and majesty of our brother Jesus Christ and our Father God Almighty. May this season of death be a season of life.

Keepin' It Professional

So I have spent some good time adjusting to Louisville. I always forget how much I hate moving. True, I love to meet new people, but I am trying to be hospitable. The prerequisite for hospitality is that you must actually belong in order to welcome. That's not to say that anyone has been rude or cloistered at school or the churches I have visited. It's more that I just don't like feeling this way. The problem is on my end and I think the only remedy is time.

The more time I spend surrounded mostly by acquaintances, the more time I spend in my own head. That leads me to plan and plot my life and speculate upon it. This can be healthy, so long as it doesn't wander down too many dark avenues of worrying reflection. It's much more likely when thinking about the far future than about the present or near-future. In either time period, the theme lately has been career.

At present, I'm working for a cigar warehouse here in town. It's close to home and the seminary, but it also has downsides. The work is very flexible, but also very sporadic. Normally I like that fact, but the appeal of it wears off as I keep eating into my savings to pay bills. I just can't live off what I make there. I have an interview today with a local bank for a teller position. That will pay more and offer more regular hours. It also rounds out my résumé better and offers more opportunities for advancement.

But when I think about advancement, I think about how far I would actually want to advance. Do I want to slow down my seminary education to work full-time? Would that be a nice fallback plan if I decide vocational ministry isn't for me? Will that actually enable better education because I'm soaking in my biblical studies rather than rushing through it? It would certainly enable me to stay afloat better as I try to sever ties with my folks' household.

See how easily short-term thinking can become long-term?

On that note, I am also thinking about where I need to be in ten years. Do I need to go from M.Div to a local church? A para-church organization? Or do I need to stick around for a Th.M and go PhD? Do I belong behind the lectern at a college or a podium in a Christian school classroom? Do I want to go through the strain and trial of more schooling for a rough job market after postgraduate study? Will it be a career I'm happy with? Should I combine high school/college teaching with a bi-vocational pastorate? And will I settle down and get hitched in that time or hold off on it until I achieve the postgraduate degree?

I have been reading through 1 Samuel for Old Testament class. (Contrary to the opinion of some, assigning the Bible for class doesn't rob it of its convicting power.) I see the stark contrast between Saul and David. Saul is a king who rules for his own glory and what he can achieve. He glories in himself and does what seems best to him. He is a very Machiavellian king, keeping Yahweh close to his lips but far from his heart. He has confidence in himself. But humble David is unimpressive physically. He puts his full trust in God and not in his power. He doesn't rule for his own sake but for the Lord's. His accomplishments are for God's glory and not his own. His anger at Goliath mocking the Israelite army is not for the humiliation of Israel but for the humiliation the Lord God; he burns with anger for the Lord's sake, not his nation's. The few times he starts to think about Number One, there are dire effects. Yet through it all, David is repentant and has a heart after God's.

I am trying to be prayerful in this time like Samuel. I'm honestly pretty bad about prayer as a spiritual discipline. When I'm out of the habit of prayer, I question its usefulness. I get functionally Deistic. Won't God do what He wants with or without my petitioning? Doesn't the world keep spinning if I neglect prayer to make toast first thing in the morning? When I'm in it, the worrying stops. "Relying on God" goes from being a Christianese buzzword to a reality where I tell God how much I need His power. Suddenly He is near at hand and His power reassures my fears. His hand is against my enemies. He is my strength and my redeemer. He rejoices in our relationship and I rejoice in Him. Prayer doesn't change God, it changes me. The Lord could go on without me for I am a contingent being. I can't very well go on without Him empowering me.

That really is the key I guess. Bank-tellers and college professors and even "professional Christian" ministers can operate under their own power and understanding. But can they do it with fulfillment? Can they endure well the angst of self-reliance and alienation? The creeping question of if what they're doing really matters, if their sand castles will amount to anything. Wherever I end up, it's immaterial so long as Yahweh is with me. I won't go alone and I know I shall prevail in this life or the next with Him there. I don't have obsess about having every detail of life figured out or make sure I've fasted for fourteen weeks to receive a vision of the angel Gabriel. I just need to have faith that God holds the future in His hands and remember that I can't screw up what God has ordained. I praise Yahweh that the future comes in His time and not in mine.

Life in LOO'uh-vuhl (or Loo'uh-VIL if I'm feeling Southern)

I have avoided many personal testimonials on Artery Bloggage up to this point. The reason for that is because two of the unwritten goals of the project were 1) to keep my critical thinking sharp in my off year between teaching and seminary and 2) put all my thoughts into a format that would benefit others rather than growing stale in my head. I figured I would eventually get around to personal stuff, but most of it got wrapped up in some grander theological point. I think the most personal writing has been in the "Why I Am Reformed" series. I hope my readers have caught a glimpse through these entries how our theology and philosophy, our faith and reason, and our minds and hearts are all connected. Even the comedy pieces were very intentionally meant to fit into that larger theme. All that kind of writing must continue; I could not be myself if I couldn't devote myself equally to John Calvin and Burt Reynolds.

And let's be honest with ourselves. No one wants to read another emo Xanga.

Yet even with the memory of my black-and-red themed LiveJournal always looming, I know I need to spice things up a bit. A couple things brought this to mind. First, I hit a terrible writers block some months ago. I had nothing to do with a lack of topics. It had everything to do with being very busy with school, church, relationships, and preparing for seminary. I would have resorted to ghastly, agonizing scientific experimentation if I knew it would somehow type my thoughts for me. Second, I am not so naive as to think that most of my readership consists of facebook friends and friends' friends. Third, I moved to a new state and am still making friends. J.D. Salinger taught me that emptying out my social calendar can increase my desire for writing. Let's just hope that it doesn't end in the emotional neglect of my family and the madness of seclusion. Most importantly, God has used the move to teach me things and for His sake I'll set them to ink. Sort of.

I was supposed to move up to Louisville on August 9. That did not prove to be so. I drove back from my farewell Family Dinner at Katie Edwards' house in Rome Monday night and went straight to bed. I woke up at 2:30 AM with the most agonizing pain I have ever felt, localized on my right side. The pain intensified quickly. My entire family was awake within about fifteen minutes from the sound of my moaning. Mom had to talk me into going to the hospital, but the wisdom of her words soon prevailed as things stayed messy and excruciating. She suspected appendicitis while I suspected I was going to cost us a good deal of money on what would ultimately be nothing. Part of being a man, I guess. But as every pebble on the road en route exponentially magnified the suffering, I very quickly changed my mind. I'm as far from a practicing Pentecostal as you can get, but I certainly sounded the part as I pleaded in rambling chants for the Holy Spirit to remove this cup from me. Long story short: kidney stones. The vile concentrate passed two days later without ceremony. I was off for real, having missed a job interview in the interim.

I came into town with two pieces of furniture, two weeks of summer clothes, a computer, and some books from home. I knew I wouldn't have time to really read them once classes started, but I felt like many other mementos might distract me from my studies. Maybe I could use the books for a paper, I thought. Plus an impressive pile of books is academic swag even if you never use Marxist or Nietzschean literature at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

I was warned by a friend that there are two products of an MDiv program. The first are those who have been filled with knowledge about God, Scripture, Greek and Hebrew, and ecclesiology. The second are those who have been filled with knowledge of God, Scripture, Greek and Hebrew, and ecclesiology. The first are puffed up with their encyclopedic recall and vast workload. The second are humbled saints who learned a lot. The first made much of themselves by the experience. The second made much of God and learned how small they are in relation. I continue to pray that I would be the first.

So imagine my surprise when God showed up most powerfully to me in a coffee shop on a lonely, unemployed afternoon. I sat reading an Old Testament survey (to be reviewed later) and the Book of Leviticus. The verbosely-titled survey, God's Glory in Salvation in Through Judgment, is arguing that this statement is the main point of the Bible (or "the center of biblical theology", as the author prefers). I have come to see that this lens for reading the Bible brings the text alive in a new way. God is the main character and the whole point of the Bible; making much of "I AM" is the goal. By what means? Bringing to justice sin and unrepentant sinners, but saving His people through it. Do not suspect I have come close to doing it justice here. It is enough simply to say that I was trying to apply this principle to the text of Leviticus.

As I forged on, I came to see compassion and justice behind the innumerable regulations. Leviticus isn't just a book of obsolete rules; it is Yahweh's blueprint for a holy nation characterized by social justice, love, righteousness, and hatred of sin. I spontaneously praised God in prayer for the gift of His Word. He was showing Himself to me in a larger way than He ever had before. My passion for God and the Scripture (even the "boring parts") had never been greater. I took the opportunity to pray that He would keep me diligent in glorifying Himself through all my learning. This was sadly something I cannot say was the case at Berry, and I came home with more than a bit of lurking hubris.

All in all, life in Louisville is wonderful. God has grown me in wisdom. For those of y'all with maternal leanings, fret not. I'm making friends, studying hard, and got a job this week. I miss my FayCo friends, my students, my Berry brethren, and most of all my family. Please pray that I will keep the Lord in view while I memorize the twenty-four ways of saying "the" in Greek. Pray that I hate sin, love people, and preach the Gospel to myself and to all in sundry things great and small.