What Is Needed And What Is Not

It’s official. My career as an ice dancer is over.

My doctor and I mutually came to this conclusion after I shredded my quad tendons during a fall on some ice.  One surgery and dozens of Percocet later (I had a Jerry Garcia Pez dispenser made for the occasion), I am a little surprised about my own reaction to the situation.  In a word, it’s “eh.”

Alright, it goes deeper than that. I really do hate this, and it hurt. A lot. But after the upper and lower portions of my leg were reconnected, my own little diversion into pain and discomfort actually made me more aware than ever of issues that many around me are going through right now – irreplacable loss, serious disease, and tragedies of many different kinds.  Things my predicament doesn’t come close to touching.  And when people are going through these horrible, painful life-changing situations, questions are often asked about the supposed goodness of God and the reality of His love.

This gets into a question that greater minds have grappled with for centuries, and which I won’t even attempt to answer here.  It gets asked in a variety of ways but can be summed up like this:  if God is love, why did He allow this?  Most answers I have heard are completely unsatisfactory because they  tend to be overly simplistic.  They spring more out of a desire to defend God as we understand Him than from any genuine wrestling with the question.

But here is one take-away:  God doesn’t need your defense or mine. He hasn’t put us here to offer an apologia.  Because God understands deep, heartfelt suffering from personal experience in the death of His Son, and because He is in fact all-loving, He allows us our questions.  He is OK with being screamed-at when we need to vent our pain. He is not going to write anyone off because they cannot come to terms with suffering and an allegedly benevolent God.   He gets it.  And in His way and in His time, He will begin to reveal Himself in ways that can bring comfort, healing  and some sense of purpose, even when that does not erase our pain. We need to let people question and even rail against God as they work through the situation, and to trust Him by proxy for them.

The second thing is we can do is to be "intentionally incarnational" – to simply be there without having to provide magic words (which do not exist anyway). We can stare at the floor with them, sharing the silence, the confusion, the pain, the questions and just be present.  Show up. Hug. Commiserate. Ask what they need - and then fulfill it to whatever degree you can.  Promise to pray. Then, actually pray.

Our faith does not give us all the answers. We won’t have those on this side of eternity. But if you are willing to give someone who is hurting the gift of your presence (and it is a gift) and be prepared to offer your comfort and support,  that will go a lot farther and be remembered a lot longer than any words you might have had to say.

We can best be used by the Holy Spirit when we are not trying to be the Holy Spirit. Be who God made you to be.

Equipped But Not Burdened

Parents worry. It’s what we do.  Ask one of us, if you can break through that quietly-panicking glassy-eyed look we have  from time to time. We dream that our kids will be doctors and then worry they will end up on Dr. Phil.  We envision them with large happy families, and the next minute worry that the leaders of those families will have names like Great Exalted Poohbah and live in an abandoned ammo dump outside of Bismark.

OK, so I am projecting. But now and again we do worry about what sort of a world we are sending our teens into and how equipped they are to handle it. We want them to have a faith that is built to last, one that can go the distance. A vital faith they embrace and carry forward into adulthood, passing it on to the next generation.  And our churches hopefully are coming along side us and addressing the same concern.

Is the faith we have built into our children relevant to the world and culture they are about to live in full-time?   To answer that question, we need to open it up and look into the contents of that faith. What is it about?

The fact is (Dad, Mom, church leaders and fellow church-goers), to a large degree, that faith is what we have told them it is. They have been trusting us to teach the truth, after all.

While we could always improve, I think that evangelical churches do a pretty good job passing on the essential elements of the historic faith. You know  -  the biggies, the “creed-worthy” stuff:  the nature of God in the three persons of the Trinity, the sinful plight of mankind, the necessity of salvation through Christ alone, the resurrection, the Second Coming  etc.  However, in many churches, other ideas are assigned nearly the same weight – perhaps not formally in the statement of faith, but they are so much a part of the church’s culture that they might as well be.  Among these are:
- an approach to Christian living that is based more on rules than on the guidance of the indwelling Holy Spirit and the principles of the Word.
- an outmoded and questionable view of women and their roles in church and in society.
- a heavy emphasis on creationism as the only acceptable  view of our origins and a suspicion of science in general. 
-insistence on alliance with a particular political party as the only valid choice for believers.

You could probably add a few more. I am not here to open debates on any of these positions.  As Paul says, let everyone be fully persuaded in their own mind.  My point is this: we do ourselves and our teens in particular a huge disservice whenever we give these or any tangential issues the same or similar weight we give to creed-worthy beliefs.  In doing so, we weigh their faith down with elements that teens may increasingly view as out-of-step as they move into adulthood. If they bundle all of this as "Christianity", and if we have not taught them to distinguish a secondary issue from a core issue (say, one’s political allegiance  vs. one’s position on salvation through Christ), they will be at risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, putting their faith aside because they no longer see it as being applicable in their lives and their culture.

Think I am pushing the panic button here?  This is exactly what is happening.  David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Research Group, cites various reasons why young adults 18-29 leave the church or at best keep it at arm’s length once they are out of the house. Some reasons young adults cited are:  the church is anti-intellectual or anti-science; it over-simplifies complex things; Christians demonize any views that are outside of the church; church teachings do not connect with the real world in which I live; I am not encouraged to think for myself , etc. (for more, read Kinnaman’s excellent book You Lost Me).

At its core, the gospel of Jesus Christ is a challenging message but one that has survived the test of time. So why would we insist on attaching other elements to it that are at best non-essential, making it much harder for teens to connect their faith to their world? (I have some ideas, but that’s for another blog, another time.)

This is not to say that we as believers cannot have our opinions on these side-issues. We certainly can and we should. But let ‘s do a better job differentiating between the historic affirmations of our faith and issues where Christians have agreed to disagree. Let’s be more committed to training our teens in how to examine secondary matters for themselves and come to their own conclusions.  Let’s send them into adulthood armed with the faith, without asking them to carry our baggage as well.