Christian Living

Toward not despising the day of small things*

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I was on the mock trials team in college, but I was not very good at it. Well, I actually was pretty good when I was playing the role of a witness, but when I competed as a lawyer, I just couldn’t seem to get it right. This was a bit demoralizing for someone who, at the time, thought he wanted to go to law school. It was also odd, because I had done well in high school debate. I could not figure out why mock trials lawyering did not “click” for me, but in hindsight I think I know. Unlike debate, mock trials is a team event. There are three “lawyers” and three “witnesses” on each team, and you are judged as a group. It is literally impossible for one person to win it or lose it, and everyone has to do their part. When I was playing a witness it was easier to just focus on my piece and let the lawyers manage the big picture, but when I was a lawyer my debate instincts and competitiveness kicked in and I was always looking for the one killer argument or perfect point that would win the case for us all–and therefore I wasn’t a very good lawyer, because I was trying so hard to do our job that I wasn’t focused on my job.

Is there anything that the people who made Just Do It one of the most successful advertising slogans in history hate more than outcomes that are in someone else’s hands? It’s part of what makes marriage and parenting so hard; the fact that you are making something with someone else, like two pianists sharing one instrument. We cannot stand the feeling of responsibility without control.

I think a lot of Christians are feeling that way about our culture. We know all the Bible verses about evangelizing the nations, about being ambassadors for God in a lost world, and we realize they are talking to us. Meanwhile, we see our country falling away from any sort of Christian identity and enthusiastically and publicly embracing every flavor of sin, and we think, hey, the church needs to do something about that; I need to do something about that. But what can you do about a problem made up of hundreds of millions of people, most of whom have already heard the gospel and consciously rejected it?

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Serving God in a world full of needs

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Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary. So then, while we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, and especially to those who are of the household of the faith. –Galatians 6:9-10

We all know Christians are called to serve. In fact, loving service is so integral to the Christian walk that James said “Faith without works is dead,” and Jesus declared that the distinguishing characteristic of His people in the day of judgment would be that “I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.” If you are a Christian, if you have the Holy Spirit living within you, then you have felt the urge to “do good to all people, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.” But here’s the thing: all people is a lot. Anyone who takes the time to look will find needs and opportunities for service stretching far beyond our ability to help and give. It is quite simply overwhelming.

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Learning to wait in an efficient world

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Earlier today, I had a few minutes free so I decided to run out to make a deposit at my bank, which is located across town. Twenty minutes later, on the way home, I realized I might have made a mistake with the deposit slip. I was at a long traffic light so I whipped out my smartphone and checked to make sure it went through properly. Sigh of relief. Then I wondered if I’d gotten any new emails, so I checked, because why not?

It’s become a commonplace to observe that technology has practically removed time and space from our calculations. You can be there and have that, right now. You want to be in Virginia by lunchtime? Sure, hop in the car. You want to be in Tokyo by tomorrow? Sure, hop on the airplane; you can save time by buying the tickets with your phone on the way to the airport. We live in the age of instant gratification, when, if you feel a sudden hankering to watch SportsCenter and you don’t happen to be near the television in your living room or the television in your bedroom or the television in your kitchen, you can just whip out your iPhone to enjoy live streaming straight to the palm of your hand. Amazon Prime rakes in millions of dollars by getting Season 4 of Downton Abbey to you three days sooner. We have learned to expect everything to be here and ready with an urgency that rivals a nicotine addict reaching for his next cigarette.

Now, it’s true that all that speed and convenience aren’t necessarily bad. Time is limited, and tools that help us invest it well can be a good thing. But it’s worth considering how living with our own, personal technological genie in a bottle affects us. Among other things, it has made simply waiting feel strange and almost wrong. One of the great lessons of Scripture is to wait on the Lord; and waiting on Him is a lot harder when He’s just about the only thing left that expects us to.

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About modesty

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I read an article recently which explained that the Christian ideal of female modesty justified sexual assault by making a man’s self-control the responsibility of the woman. My interest today isn’t in offering a lengthy rebuttal to that argument. In fact, I’ll confine myself to noting the Lord’s scathing response to King David over his adultery with Bathsheba, regardless of how he might have been tempted beforehand by her decision to bathe in plain sight of the palace. Clearly, divine appreciation for “she made me do it” excuses hasn’t increased since Adam tried it. Strawmen aside, though, the article’s underlying perspective that encouraging modesty means putting on women a responsibility that rightly belongs to men is one that I’ve seen frequently echoed in recent discussions among Christians.

In some ways, it’s an appropriate correction. There have certainly been segments of evangelical Christianity which have, in practice if not usually in theory, placed very disproportionate responsibility on women for maintaining sexual purity. I still recall hearing a young lady matter-of-factly describe how, when her boyfriend groped her while they were kissing, she would always swat his hand to help him remember (apparently unsuccessfully) not to do it again. It didn’t seem to occur to either of them that the fellow himself might need to exercise some self-control, perhaps with accompanying reading from Matthew 5:30 for motivation. And it’s absolutely heartbreaking to hear some women describe growing up terrified of predatory males whose inevitable lustfulness it was the girl’s job to prevent by becoming a social nullity swathed in protective layers of cloth. So, yes, absolutely: if we forget that the biblical model for men is Joseph with Potiphar’s wife, not David with Bathsheba, then we have gotten things badly off-balance. However, it’s awfully hard to avoid overshooting the mark as the pendulum swings back, and I’m afraid we may be seeing that happen.

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When your child sins

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Teens do a lot of astonishingly foolish things. They also do a lot of sinful things, and one of the great challenges of parenthood is the question of how to react to the inevitable foolishness and sin that come with learning how to be a man or a woman.

It’s easy for our love for our children (more charitably) or our pride (less charitably) to make us expect a sinlessness from them that we know is beyond our own reach. Every one of us could list persistent sins with which we’ve struggled for years: pride or lust or gossip or lack of faith. We can think back to sins we’ve committed that nauseate us with their selfishness or perversion or rebellion. The Christian is never satisfied with anything short of holiness, but we also recognize that sanctification is a process and the presence of sin does not nullify the promise of salvation. “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick.” Your children are born sick, just like you. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t need a Savior.

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Feeling what God feels

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As anyone who’s ever been cut off in traffic knows, our emotions aren’t the best guide for our behavior. Whether we’re doubting God’s goodness or struggling to turn the other cheek or fighting the urge to check out the girl in the bikini, the gut-level pull is often in the wrong direction. However, even though feelings shouldn’t point the way when we make our decisions, they can’t be ignored either. Holiness is much easier if it goes with the grain of our emotions rather than against it.

When I’m browsing the web and stumble on a pornographic popup ad, I can choose to close it regardless of what I’m feeling. It’s certainly an easier choice, though, if Christian anger and pity over violated innocence are there to counter the baser emotions the ad is meant to arouse. When my church goes to minister at a local nursing home, I can and should make myself go along even if I struggle to feel anything but revulsion for the unfortunates wasting away, but I’ll do more good if the choice grows out of genuine affection and sympathy. 

Which raises an interesting dilemma, because there’s really nothing I can do to directly change my emotions. A good argument can change my mind and a teeth-gritting choice can shift my will, but, at any particular moment, the best that can be done with my emotions is to overrule them. That’s not to say our emotional composition cannot be changed–it’s just a longer process, more like shaping a bonsai than like turning a steering wheel. And since our emotions are so closely tied up with our moral decision-making, it’s worth thinking about how our feelings can be included in the process of “putting on the Lord Jesus Christ.” There are a few things that we can do. 

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Show, don’t tell

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Your children badly need to see your faith making your life unpleasant.

You see, real things make demands upon us. A puppy is not the same as a stuffed animal, and even a little child can feel the difference when a play date is cut short to go home and take Fido out for a walk. When my wife was a little girl she had a paper cutout “husband” with whom she played at times, and then at other times she would pack him away in a drawer. That’s not an option with her real husband–I may need to talk, or need dinner, or need a hug, even when she’s tired and out of sorts. Even something as basic as gravity tells us it’s there by restricting what we can do. Real things disrupt your life.

In some parts of the world, Christian children hear their parents telling them God is real by hand-writing copies of the one village Bible, or gathering in hidden rooms to worship, or being carted off to prison or death because they will not deny their Lord. In America, we tell our children God is real by having an Easter egg hunt.

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Doing the right thing for the (sort of) wrong reason

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I recently watched a video of a fellow talking to a group of young women about whether or not they should wear bikinis. You shouldn’t, he explained, because it makes men objectify you. He even cited several neurological studies showing that male brains literally process images of bikini-clad women as if they were things, rather than people. Thus, if you want to be valued for who you are, you ought to dress modestly, he concluded; men will be more likely to find you attractive if your own scantily-clad body isn’t running interference. In related news, recent studies have shown that water is wet.

Despite the obviousness of the advice, something about it didn’t feel quite right, for the same reason that I’m always a little troubled by warnings to young men that they shouldn’t look at porn because it will make them less suitable for godly young women. Well yes, obviously… but. If you tell a girl she shouldn’t wear a bikini because it will make young men objectify her, what happens when she wakes up one day and realizes she wouldn’t much mind being objectified if it means having someone to hold her? What happens when you tell a boy he shouldn’t look at porn because porn now will harm his relationship with his wife later, and he concludes he’s mostly just interested in porn now?

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Virtue, vice, and double negatives

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You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit.

Christian virtue offers just one example of the mysterious coexistence of divine sovereignty with human freedom and responsibility. Even for those who are saved, any attempt at self-reliant virtue promises to be about as successful as Peter’s stroll on the Sea of Galilee. We cannot foster our own holiness any more than a bee can conjure honey through sheer willpower. Yet on the other hand, the Christian walk is described as a fight, a race; we are exhorted to “run in such a way that you may win.” Like Peter, we’re entirely dependent on Christ for any hope of reaching our destination, but, also like Peter, it’s still our responsibility to fight our way over the waves.

Part of that fight is to resist sin. “A good tree cannot produce bad fruit”; being a Christian means learning to hate what our Father hates. In fact, one might easily imagine virtue as a sort of path threaded safely among various “thou shalt nots.” So we pray that our children will not fall into bad company and we exhort teenagers to avoid premarital sex and we counsel men on how to avoid being pushovers, and very often we completely miss the point.

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Searching, and searching, for the perfect match

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Every so often someone writes an article about the plight of singles in America. It seems everyone wants to be married; they just don’t want to be married to anyone they know. It’s interesting to hear the issue discussed in both Christian and secular circles. While the specific diagnoses and proposed solutions differ, there does seem to be general agreement that an unprecedented number of singles in their 20’s and 30’s would like to be getting married but, for one reason or another, aren’t.

Of course, there are many reasons for this phenomenon, but one root cause that’s often mentioned is the never-ending quest to find The One: the perfect match, the one who completes you like two strands of music that run together in a perfect harmony. I’m male, so I picture it in geometrical terms: two equations so perfectly matched that their graphs will run together, no matter how far the line extends. (What did guys do for pickup lines before Euclid?) On the most popular dating websites, eager members fill out batteries of questions that dwarf most psychological tests, all carefully analyzed by computer algorithms to find your perfect match! We’re so committed to finding the right person that we demand no less than Google as our Yenta.

My point here is not to argue that we ought to swing to the other extreme and immediately dive into marriage with the nearest breathing organism that loves Jesus and has human DNA and a complementary pair of X or Y chromosomes. Nor is it to suggest exactly what balance should be struck between being too picky on the one hand, and being discerning and careful in our choice of the person with whom we pledge to spend the rest of our lives, on the other. If we stipulate, however, at least that it seems American culture in general has swung too far in the direction of “overly picky,” I wonder to what extent such a tendency is generated or reinforced by a lack of confidence in our ability to make marriage work.

If I’m buying a vehicle to take with me to a desert island and I have none of the mechanical knowledge necessary to maintain or fix it, it suddenly becomes tremendously important that I buy one that will never break down. If I take marriage seriously, and really mean it when I say “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part,” but simultaneously realize that on a very basic level I truly don’t know how to maintain or fix the life-long relationship I’m embarking upon, I’d better find the girl who’s such a perfect fit that my marriage will never break down. If those two lines on the graph start to diverge; if the tune falls out of harmony, and I don’t know what to do, that’s it. It’s over.

And so we continue our dogged hunt for something that does not exist, unwilling to accept the truth that no human hands can draw two perfect graphs or play a ceaseless harmony without error. Cinematic romances end with the ride off into the sunset because even the most brilliant screenwriter would struggle to maintain the alchemic fiction that promises lifelong happiness to those who can just find the right ingredients.

In reality, of course, the most important moment for securing the health of any marriage is this one, not some past point when the lucky pair each found their soulmate in the other. We must learn to bend the graphs, to blend the parts into harmony; to become soulmates more and more. If that knowledge has slipped from our cultural store, though–if we are no longer confident in our ability to make marriage work–then it’s not hard to understand those young singles who are reluctant to accept what must appear to be a gamble with nearly impossible odds.

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