Sacred Mundane: The Blog

I’m going to practice what I preach and write some trash…because this afternoon I am just so tired, and cold, so I don’t feel like doing much other than pulling the blanket a little closer up to my neck and sinking down a little lower in the couch while Dutch takes his nap.  So, I’m writing just to write. My brain feels like mud today. Not much creativity.  The gerbil in my mind has ceased running and is now lying down on his wheel with his little gerbil arms and legs hanging over the sides.

Maybe I’m tired because I’ve actually begun, yes, exercising again.  Sedentary Seminary has taken its toll and both Jeff and I are ready for some fitness.  I started running (ok, jogging) a couple weeks ago, just a couple miles a couple days a week, and Jeff has been doing awesome riding his new bike, the “second car.”  He’s ridden it in all week this week to church for work–that’s 16 miles a day!  Woohoo Jeff! Jeff has also accepted the online Hundred Pushup Challenge.  So this morning after my run (that sounds so much cooler than “jog” even though I’m certain no one watching would ever qualify it as running), I collapsed on the couch and read my Bible while Jeff did his push-ups.  Way to go, hon!  He is LOVING riding his bike–he’s always wanted a new bike, and it’s so fun to see him get so excited about more than an hour of grueling exercise each day.

Nothing much on other fronts.  We’re trying to eat healthier, which lasts until after dinner when the dessert demon calls my name and insists that ice cream and cookies are absolutely necessary.  Dutch is now in love with graham crackers and makes his pitiful little “please” sign rapidly with desperation in his eyes as he points up to the cupboard.  He’s now feeding himself, which is great.  We spend lots of time sitting down at the river, letting him throw rocks, hundreds and hundreds of rocks into the water.   I’m LOVING summer, and thankful that Jeff is only working 1/2 time, so it makes for sweet mornings and afternoons together.  Last night he and Dutch watched the NBA finals so I had some sweet time alone to…well, I actually cleaned the closet. But that’s fun for me!

Ok, this post receives the all-time award for most-boring, nothing-of-significance blog entry.  Things are really great, my brain is just tired.  God is good.  If any of you have inspiration for the LiveDifferent Challenge this week, I’d love to hear it.  Actually, I do have an idea rolling around (slowly) in my mind…Increasing Margins. Hmm.  Think about it…

Have you ever been the recipient of a pat answer?  Or, perhaps far more convicting is the question, Have you ever given a pat answer?  What exactly is one, anyway?  How do we know if we’re giving one?  This past week something got me thinking about pat answers and why we all hate them but why we all give them. 

A dear friend of mine has confided in me about the dumb things people do when others are grieving.  For example, hopefully by now we know that the proper response to someone who’s had a miscarriage is NOT, Well, you’ll have another baby!  When someone loses a loved one, please don’t pat them on the shoulder and say, They’re in a better place.  Duh!  Both of those things are obviously true (probably), but the problem is not the validity of the statement, it’s the lack of concern.  When we were little and would stub our toe or bump our head, my PE teacher dad would say, “It’ll feel better when the pain goes away.”  That’s fine with the stubbed toe, but some of us unfortunately find ourselves in essence seeing a hurting person and saying, “It’ll feel better when the pain goes away.” 

What’s always been tough for me is that so often Scripture can be used as a pat answer.  “All things work for good!” is the classic example.  “God’s ways are not our ways!”  we might offer with a smile.  So what do we do?  Scripture is the best counsel, the very best thing to share with someone who is hurting, but the key is how we share it.  Basically, Scripture becomes a pat answer when it is shared before the recipient has been heard, loved, empathized with, and prepared to receive the verse.  If we’ve not loved, listened, empathized, and been sensitive to where the hurting person is, we’ll likely find ourselves giving pat answers.

So, when someone is struggling with forgiveness, with bitterness, with a gnawing pain that’s been growing for years, we err if we say, You just need more of Jesus!  Yes, of course that is true, but our job is to listen, our job is to love, our job is to care.  The greatest way to communicate love and care is to listen.  Listen long, listen well. Listen without countering, without offering advice.  That’s how we become catalysts for God’s supernatural work of grace to take place in another’s life. But first we must care.  If we do not care, we would do well to step back and ask God to change our hearts.  A lack of love should be pretty serious warning sign to us that we need a dose of God’s grace! 

I wish I could go around to every person who I’ve ever given a pat answer to, and ask for forgiveness.  I know we’ve all done it, and will all do it again at some point, but I pray that God would make us people who love enough to listen, to care enough to waste time with someone’s pain, to let the blood splash over onto our own garments, to let the wounds begin to ache as our own.  I think maybe that’s the first step in the cure for the pat answer.

As most of you know, these LiveDifferent Challenges are simply one way, each week, that we can challenge our culture’s way of thinking, acting, or engaging with the world around us, in hopefully creative ways so that we might better reflect the glory of God. This week, God has me contemplating amusement.

So I wouldn’t say I love all the things I inherited from my parents (let’s just say Jeff has smaller ankles than me), but one thing I am so thankful to get from them is my love of learning. I praise God that my parents somehow rooted in me an insatiable desire to learn and to grow, to avoid stagnation, and to keep moving forward. Just the other day I was telling someone about my unsual childhood as a homeschool kid: “playing outside” was really an undercover way for my mom to teach us about plants, road trips were filled with analogy and spelling games and a hundred questions from the backseat. Science fairs, bugs kept in jars, playroom carpet that had a chess board on it, cooking experiments…my mom was an absolute miracle worker for teaching children the wonder and awe of learning. She turned walking to the mailbox into a field trip! Her secret? She refused to simply amuse us. Instead of taking the easy road of sticking us in front of Sesame Street (and there’s nothing wrong with that sometimes!), she bypassed amusement and entertainment and taught us to think. And I think because of that, I truly love to learn and move and grow more than be amused. Thank you, Mom and Dad!

One of the ways I see this play out in adulthood is that I absolutely never watch TV. It’s not that I discipline myself to not watch TV, I just don’t even like it. It strikes me as mindless amusement at its worse. Now don’t get me wrong…amusement has its place. I enjoy movies every so often, I love love love to read, and I could ride Space Mountain a dozen times if there was no line. Movies are not evil. Books are not evil. Disneyland is not evil (although some would argue with me on that which is fine–I’m happy to lose the argument). But I would suggest that amusement is very dangerous. I suggest that Entertainment and Amusement, in excess, deadens our thirst and hunger for God and retards our spiritual learning and growth.

Let me explain my reasoning: The word “amuse” has several nuanced meanings in history (this comes from the 1828 dictionary): 1) to divert the attention of so as to deceive. 2) to occupy the attention of. 3) To entertain the mind agreeably; to occupy or detain attention with agreeable objects.

Basically, to amuse means to divert away from something of greater importance. It is essentially a playfully light distraction which keeps our mind from being engaged in weightier thoughts or activities. In a time where we need every faculty sharply attuned to the spiritual world around, amusement diverts the attention so as to deceive and keep us what truly matters.

Here is AW Tozer’s thoughts on The Great God Entertainment:

A German philosopher many years ago said something to the effect that the more a man has in his own heart the less he will require from the outside; excessive need for support from without is proof of the bankruptcy of the inner man. If this is true then the present inordinate attachment to every form of entertainment is evidence that the inner life of modern man is in serious decline.

…He has become a parasite on the world, drawing his life from his environment, unable to live a day apart from the stimulation which society affords him …

[However] No one with common human feeling will object to the simple pleasures of life, nor to such harmless forms of entertainment as may help relax the nerves and refresh the mind exhausted by toil. Such things if used with discretion may be a blessing along the way. …

[But] The abuse of a harmless thing is the essence of sin. The growth of the amusement phase of human life to such fantastic proportions is a portent, a threat to the souls of modern men. …

For centuries the church stood solidly against every form of worldly entertainment, recognizing it for what it was — a device for wasting time, a refuge from the disturbing voice of conscience, a scheme to divert attetion from moral accountability. But of late….we have the astonishing spectable of millions of dollars being poured into the unholy job of providing earthly entertainment for the so-called sons of heaven. Religious entertainment is in many places rapidly crowding out the serious things of God. Many churchs these days have become little more than poor theaters where fifth-rate “producers” peddle their shoddy wares with the full approval of evangelical leaders who can even quote a holy text in defense of their delinquency. And hardly a man dares raise a voice against it.”

I know this is harsh! (That’s why I let Tozer say it instead of me…he’s dead so he can say harsh things.) But don’t you sense there is some truth to it? We desperately try to entertain our toddlers so they won’t get bored, then we try to entertain our kids with TV so we can have a break and not have to engage with them too much, then we entertain students in school so that they’ll stay and won’t drop out, then surprise–we’ve bred adults who are hopelessly addicted to the sedating effect of entertainment. I agree with Tozer that there is certainly some value in entertainment that harmlessly allows us to relax, ease tension, and rest. Holy Relaxation is what John Hwang used to call it, or Rest with Accountability. But I do wonder how much this gnawing emptiness in our souls is being artificially satisfied with amusement, dulling our aching hunger for the Real Thing–Christ Himself. It’s like responding to your hunger pangs by drinking a diet soda.

To connect back to how we began, it seems to me that this frenzied addiction to entertainment prevents us from ever really learning and growing. We numb our senses so that we no longer see the beauty and wonder of the simple and beautiful creation around us. We glut our desire for romance and sex with movies, TV and romance novels so that we no longer are satisfied with the simple and beautifully imperfect romance of husband and wife. We divert our attention from the pain and challenge of Truth, by amusing ourselves with light and playful trifles. And sadly, we do this in the church of all places.

So, to conclude, please understand that I am not saying all amusement is evil. God has spoken powerful things to me through movies and novels (see our last LiveDifferent Challenge). There is a time and a place. But just as alcohol can be used in moderation to cheer the heart but can be deadly when abused, so amusement and entertainment should be handled with caution. Our goal is satisfaction not sedation. The world offers entertainment to sedate us from the beautiful pain of life. Christ offers the satisfaction of living fully awake, fully engaged, learning and growing every moment, seeing Him in all of life,. actively involved in letting Him mold us and shape us. So the challenge this week is to sit down and evaluate where exactly your life is filled with entertainment and amusement, then just for this week, cut it out. Cut out the amusement just for a week, to let yourself full engage with the truth, beauty, and pain of life. Instead of entertainment, choose a hike, a nap, an hour picking flowers or taking a walk around the block. Read the Word. Ask God to touch those painful spots that you usually douse with entertainment. Ask God to give you a childlike wonder and love of learning, a desire to grow, to discover, to live full engaged with your senses heightened, not deadened. Ask God for satisfaction, not sedation. Then ask Him to wholly entertain and amuse your heart with the pleasure and joy of Himself.

Just a few thoughts here today because it’s sunny outside :-).  This week God has me on the contemplative kick of considering amusement (stay tuned for LiveDifferent Challenge 12 tomorrow).  As I thought about it and read, I remembered chapter from AW Tozer, my favorite dead author, who talked about the very subject. More on the tomorrow. But as I picked up his book, The Root of the Righteous, I ran a steaming hot bath, thinking I would savor the quiet evening alone with some practical kick-your-teeth-in theology from Mr. Tozer.  Well, as usual, I couldn’t get past the first page, because Tozer writes with such pithiness that each sentence is a quote–how can you read large quantities of it?! It’d be like eating a trough full of Lindt truffles.  They’re better eating only one and savoring it. So, I leave this thought with you (the gist of the book).  Tozer writes this:

“One marked difference between the faith of our fathers…and the same faith…lived by their children is that the fathers were concerned with the root of the matter, while their present-day descendents seem concerned only with the fruit.  This appears in our attitude toward certain great Christian souls whose names are honored amont the churches…Today we write biographies of such as these and celebrate their fruit, but the tendency is to ignore the root out of which the fruit sprang.  “The root of the righteous yieldeth fruit,”…Our fathers looked well to the root of the tree and were willing to wait with patience for the fruit to appear.  We demand the fruit immediately even though the root may be weak and knobby or missing altogether…There is no lasting life apart from the root.” 

And how true this is today!  We’ve become so obsessed with wanting the fruit (increase church attendance, victory over struggle areas, souls “accepting” Christ), we’ve neglected the root. As John Piper says, “God calls us not to be fruitful, but faithful.” We’re called to be faithful, God is the one who causes fruit.  We will be rewarded for our faithfulness (“Well done, good and faithful servant”), not our fruitfulness.  How well for our souls it would be if we focused primarily on the cultivation of the inner man and woman of the heart. On the inner death to self and embrace of Christ, on the emotional, fervant desire for God Himself, on the forsaking of all that is opposed to God, even if it seems for naught. 

Today as I tended my basil plant I thought of the reason this is so hard for us. No one sees our roots. No one knows if we even have roots.  We (and God) are the only one who knows whether we have roots or not.  Unfortunately we’ve become masters at stimulating growth, but often without the necessary care of our root system, which means we will inevitably dry up.  But for those with roots, this is the beautiful outcome:

 3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water,
       which yields its fruit in season
       and whose leaf does not wither.
       Whatever he does prospers.  (Psalm 1)

Let’s tend to our roots and leave the fruit to the Heavenly Father.