Tag: Jesus

May
09
2013

radioThis post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

‘The law of Jeho­vah is per­fect, restor­ing the soul.’ (Psa. 19:7). Most laws con­demn the soul and pro­nounce sen­tence. The result of the law of my God is per­fect. It con­demns but for­gives. It restores—more than abundantly—what it takes away. Jim Elliot

If you live in Chicago, you know that you nat­u­rally spend a lot of time in your car because of traf­fic and get­ting from Point A to Point B. On these stop-and-go dri­ves, I usu­ally lis­tened to Chicago sports radio. The Bulls were win­ning cham­pi­onships left and right and it was fun lis­ten­ing to the ban­ter about the pride and joy of our city.  If you know me, you know that I am not a reg­u­lar lis­tener to Chris­t­ian radio or tele­vi­sion. How­ever, that night for some rea­son I turned the dial to some Chris­t­ian radio sta­tion being piped in from one of the sub­urbs. That night dri­ving down Roo­sevelt Avenue lonely and sad, I inad­ver­tently came across Bob George’s Peo­ple to Peo­ple radio pro­gram. If you have ever lis­tened to Bob George or read his books you know that he talks about one thing over and over at great length—God’s grace. For the first time, as I was lis­ten­ing to his words, God began show­ing me a grace I had not seen before—one that I actu­ally began to expe­ri­ence. In that car ride, lis­ten­ing to his South­ern twang talk about accep­tance, it opened up my eyes like never before. It was as if Jesus mixed some mud together, rubbed it on my eyes and then com­manded me to open them. A cou­ple of days later I grabbed Bob George’s book Grow­ing in Grace off the book­shelf at a store and took it home. I read it in one sit­ting and in that time came across this pas­sage below:

Now real­ize that I am talk­ing about our­selves being accept­able to God, not nec­es­sar­ily our actions. In my iden­tity I am eter­nally accept­able to Him, but that doesn’t mean that every­thing I do is all right. He may put His arm around me, so to speak, and show me the truth about some­thing in my life that is out of line: an atti­tude, action, or habit. Why? So He can change my atti­tude that is out of line, result­ing in a change of action. But at no time is His accep­tance of me ever in question.

But at no time is His accep­tance of me ever in ques­tion. This was one of the miss­ing pieces for me. I knew some­thing like this in con­cept, but had yet to expe­ri­ence it. Now I began to do that or as the psy­chol­o­gists term, I began to inter­nal­ize this truth.

Dur­ing that period in my life, Jesus was also say­ing that some sig­nif­i­cant changes needed to occur in my life so that I could really begin to under­stand that free­dom he desired for me. At that point, I made a com­mit­ment to not date any­one, even casu­ally. Like­wise, I decided I needed to pur­sue friend­ships with men, which for the most part was a bit of a chal­lenge for me. Hang­ing out with women even from a young age was eas­ier for me and for the most part, I enjoyed their com­pany more than hang­ing out with the guys. How­ever, I began to see that this on some level was con­tribut­ing to my prob­lem with hav­ing healthy rela­tion­ships with women. With this deci­sion, not until years later did I real­ize that in this time of heal­ing for me, as I was purs­ing my rela­tion­ship with God, I was also pur­su­ing heal­ing in terms of what it meant to be a man. I also decided to remove myself from any min­istry con­text and began read­ing vora­ciously books on sex­ual heal­ing. Specif­i­cally, the works of Wal­ter Tro­bisch had a tremen­dous influ­ence on me; his books speak openly about sex­ual issues from a Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive and address cer­tain issues that most books writ­ten at that time wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole.  Jesus, no dif­fer­ent than with Peter, had flipped my world upside down and it was an amaz­ingly lonely, but heal­ing time in my life. In essence, with all that he was doing in my life, he was say­ing that I had all this focus on min­is­ter­ing to oth­ers, but that I had got­ten the cart before the horse, and that first, he needed to min­is­ter to me. Some­thing, for the most part, I had never allowed him to do.

Iron­i­cally, at the end of the day, the main way in which Jesus dealt with me in this heal­ing in terms of all these rela­tional and sex­ual issues was that he sim­ply for­gave me and just as impor­tantly, taught me how to for­give myself. Strangely, these were the two key com­po­nents that began to change my behav­ior. Yes, I was read­ing books, seek­ing coun­sel, and doing a myr­iad of other things to attempt to bring change to my life, but it was these two pieces that began to trans­form me—His for­give­ness and my own for­give­ness toward myself. I, for the first time in my life, had truly expe­ri­enced for­give­ness beyond just know­ing it in text-book fash­ion and in word only.

In par­tic­u­lar, I can remem­ber one day when I was read­ing the Bible, God through His words basi­cally said, Buddy, there are a lot of other areas of your life that you pay lit­tle atten­tion to that need even more change than just this area of lust. I remem­ber that moment because it struck me that I began to see that in some ways the sin of pride was just as dam­ag­ing to myself and to oth­ers as what my sex­ual sin could be. This was a free­ing moment for me. It made me real­ize how focused I was on this one area of my life, but was neglect­ing so many oth­ers. Again, God was teach­ing me in a way only that he could, that I was a sin­ner through and through to the very core. Through this relin­quish­ment, not only did I begin to heal, but I mirac­u­lously began to change. The beauty of this time, now that I look back at it now, was that even though I was in this com­pletely bro­ken state, Jesus was extremely patient with me and slowly, but surely was in the process of chang­ing me for the better.

In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , , ,
May
02
2013

helpThis post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

After loss of iden­tity, the most potent mod­ern ter­ror, is loss of sex­u­al­ity. Jeanette Winterson

 I had my own expe­ri­ence in which I had lived a ser­vant too long. Iron­i­cally, just as my move from believer to ser­vant began in a car ride, in a way, so did my trans­for­ma­tion to becom­ing a friend to Jesus. As I have said before, for about ten years I lived in Chicago. It is a city I deeply love with my Chicago Cubs (yes, I am a glut­ton for pun­ish­ment), the lakeshore, its unique archi­tec­ture, and deep-dish pizza. While liv­ing there a cou­ple of years after col­lege, I was now a cou­ple years in my first “offi­cial” job. I worked for a large cat­a­log com­pany as a print and paper buyer and loved my job with all of its perks. I often ate at some of the best restau­rants, got to see Michael Jor­dan play on many occa­sions, and because of my posi­tion, I was schmoozed on a reg­u­lar basis by the other com­pa­nies that I worked with on the dif­fer­ent projects I oversaw.

How­ever, a cou­ple of neg­a­tive things were also hap­pen­ing, espe­cially in my rela­tion­ship with God and in my per­sonal life. First, I was becom­ing cal­lous in my faith and jaded. I had been a Chris­t­ian for some years, had moved into var­i­ous places of lead­er­ship and was begin­ning to like that spot­light. In my early years as a Chris­t­ian I threw myself into many endeav­ors and slowly but surely was get­ting burned out and basi­cally, becom­ing tired of being a Chris­t­ian. I was lead­ing Bible stud­ies; men­tor­ing a cou­ple of ram­bunc­tious sev­enth graders through Big Broth­ers; try­ing to get off the ground a col­lege min­istry at the school I grad­u­ated from; attend­ing not one, but three dif­fer­ent churches. You name it, I was doing it. The prob­lem was…I also try­ing to keep up appear­ances, because what once seem­ingly was a thriv­ing faith had dete­ri­o­rated. And here was the big problem—the prob­lem was that if you knew me then you would have never known that by look­ing at all that I was doing. You would have thought I was this great guy who had it all together, serv­ing God and serv­ing oth­ers. How do I know this? Because at that time so many around me told me this in not so many words. I had become a very gifted actor and was fit to be the next Robert De Niro.

And under­neath all of this, issues from my past had sur­faced and secret sins began to pile up. On the sur­face every­thing looked like it was in work­ing order, but inside I was hol­low and there were so many prob­lems in my life that I wasn’t rec­og­niz­ing. First, I was begin­ning to grow an anger within myself that seem­ingly just showed up one day. I was hard to please. I was putting high expec­ta­tions on oth­ers, but rarely myself. While up to that point in my life, anger had never really been a strug­gle or prob­lem, how­ever, now inside I was seething. I often would walk around just a bun­dle of annoy­ance and cha­grin. I almost never showed this to oth­ers, but inside anger had taken a foothold in my life. Sec­ond, I had become very arro­gant and pride­ful. I would go to church and not lis­ten to the ser­mon for self-reflection, but to cri­tique what was being spo­ken. With oth­ers, when some­one would have an opin­ion on some given issue, I often had to dis­agree. Being a Chris­t­ian had turned into for me an intel­lec­tual exer­cise and not a spir­i­tual one. That’s not how you inter­pret that pas­sage! Boy, was that ser­mon bor­ing! That’s not what Jesus meant when he said “Love your ene­mies!” Because I had been a Chris­t­ian for some years, I was slowly becom­ing a know-it-all and if some­one dis­agreed with me, I could almost in every occa­sion con­vince them oth­er­wise. At that time, I learned this—sadly, rarely do peo­ple ask tough ques­tions of their leaders.

To top this off, while I had lots of friends, I was dis­tanc­ing myself from them—I care­fully hid who I was becom­ing and where I was strug­gling. In par­tic­u­lar, there was one part of my life which was unrav­el­ing and was reveal­ing my bro­ken­ness at its deep­est levels—its roots, which were nearly twenty years old. Through var­i­ous expe­ri­ences in my child­hood that had hap­pened to me, some which we would now name as sex­ual abuse, my sex­u­al­ity had become an intri­cate and acute wounded part of me. Like so many that I have met in my prac­tice and in my role as a pas­tor, my sex­u­al­ity had been opened up way before it should have been, and with this, the dam­age that was done was com­ing to bear. Over the years, in par­tic­u­lar start­ing in my late teenage years, but espe­cially in my early twen­ties, I was slowly devel­op­ing a depen­dency on unhealthy rela­tion­ships, specif­i­cally those that turned sexual.

This bro­ken­ness orig­i­nated at some of my first mem­o­ries. I became promis­cu­ous at an early age, in part because of these child­hood expe­ri­ences that I men­tioned ear­lier. Like­wise, while in mid­dle school, the door had been abruptly slammed open with some inci­dents with a high school girl who lived down the street and who was a cou­ple of years my senior. We would sneak away to secret places dur­ing the sum­mer nights of my eighth grade year and she opened up a world to me that was intox­i­cat­ing and dan­ger­ously mys­te­ri­ous. As I have told many, pornog­ra­phy for the most part has never been a strong urge for me, pri­mar­ily because of these early expe­ri­ences. I did not yearn for vir­tual expe­ri­ences; I wanted the ones that had flesh and warmth asso­ci­ated with them. These sex­ual crav­ings took hold of me at a very early age and would fol­low for me years to come.

Toward the end of my high school years, this solid­i­fied in an even more dam­ag­ing way—in my fresh­man year in col­lege, a woman in her twen­ties who was very “expe­ri­enced,” entirely opened up that part of my life intro­duc­ing me to a world which I had not quite imag­ined. Up to that point, for all intents and pur­poses, I had been dab­bling with sex and in this rela­tion­ship I gave in full blown to my desires. And of course, by no means was I an inno­cent bystander in all of this—I was enthralled with this lifestyle and at that same time, could not see its dangers.

As I men­tioned in an ear­lier post, in my early twen­ties, I was out of con­trol and did not have the capac­ity, knowl­edge or courage to stop what I was doing. I had recently become a Chris­t­ian, but this trans­for­ma­tion had yet to invade my rela­tion­ships with women. While I might have been hav­ing lots of sex, in truth, I was begin­ning to lose my sex­u­al­ity and in some way, was los­ing my capac­ity to love a woman. I wouldn’t of course under­stand this for years to come, but the ground work had been laid. In these years, I was in many rela­tion­ships with women, most were just based on hav­ing both of our sex­ual needs met. There were a hand­ful of Sat­ur­day morn­ings that I would awaken next to a woman at my side and I would lay there in a tremen­dous amount of guilt and shame because of this dual life I was liv­ing. The wounds from my sex­ual past had finally caught up with me, but I did not know what to do.

At about age twenty three, I real­ized I had to some­how try to get things in respectable order. The prob­lem was—I did all this on my own, try­ing to piece together some­thing that would bring some sem­blance of well-being. For the next cou­ple of years, I man­aged to keep things together, but only barely. It was at this point where I re-committed my life to God which I detailed in a pre­vi­ous post. I seri­ously dated a cou­ple of women and was try­ing to take my faith more seri­ously as well. With the cou­ple of com­mit­ted rela­tion­ships that I did have in those years, on the sur­face they seemed like they were healthy rela­tion­ships, but in real­ity, we were two peo­ple who had not wres­tled with the demons of our past and present. Often in these rela­tion­ships, I was the overly depen­dent one and in real­ity these rela­tion­ships were becom­ing a sub­sti­tute for my rela­tion­ship with God. I knew I had a seri­ous prob­lem when one Sun­day I was stand­ing next to my girl­friend at church and in see­ing her in wor­ship; I became jeal­ous of her love toward God. Can you imag­ine that? I was jeal­ous of God! I remem­ber feel­ing that emo­tion and think­ing he was going to strike me dead at that very instance. At that point, I knew things were really bad and that what I was try­ing to do was bring­ing very lit­tle heal­ing to my life.

It all cul­mi­nated one night at my girlfriend’s apart­ment, in which, in too many words, we had another great argu­ment about our rela­tion­ship. That evening, we both decided to mutu­ally break things off and that was the begin­ning for me in pur­su­ing my own heal­ing and relin­quish­ing my crav­ing for women to make me happy and whole. Relieved and dev­as­tated at the same time, that evening as I was dri­ving home in my car, I heard a whis­per of a voice, which to para­phrase, basi­cally said, Dude, you need to get some help. Jesus was cry­ing out for me to pur­sue heal­ing instead of rela­tion­ships, and soon I was about to finally relent. Remark­ably, Jesus was going to begin to heal me in a way that was about as strange as when he used mud and spit to make a blind man see.

Next time, I will tell you how he did that…

In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , , ,
Apr
27
2013

Doubt­ing Thomas (2001), Mixed media on paper

(Click to enlarge)

 

 

 

In: Painting
Tags: , , ,
Apr
18
2013

god likeThis post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chrono­log­i­cally. 

I do not want to be the inher­i­tor of so many mis­for­tunes. I do not want to con­tinue as a root and as a tomb. Pablo Neruda

 As I said ear­lier in the blog, how we view God is all-important. It is the under­pin­ning of our entire life. Most often, our view of God comes from two places in our lives: 1) from how we were raised, i.e., from our par­ents and our upbring­ings; and 2) what we are taught from oth­ers either directly or indi­rectly. Again, as we look at Peter’s life, on a few dif­fer­ent occa­sions, Jesus had to cor­rect him in terms of his view of God (Matthew 16:23, John 13:3–9, Acts 10). Jesus com­pletely under­stood that if Peter did not change some of these views, every­thing else would also get bent and dis­torted in his life. Jesus clearly saw this in the reli­gious lead­ers of his time and he didn’t want these same atti­tudes and behav­iors to con­tinue in Peter.

There is one com­mon denom­i­na­tor when it comes to those who are stuck in this phase of faith of being the servant—they inevitably see God as the stern father—Someone who has expec­ta­tions that can never be met. Now, none of this is out in the open; these views are emo­tion­ally held in the sub-conscious and in the deep part of the person’s soul. This truly is how they see God—he cares very lit­tle for them. If you were to ask them to name some of God’s char­ac­ter­is­tics they would be able to per­fectly and even elo­quently share with you these:

  • God is good.
  • God is gracious.
  • God is loving.
  • God is forgiving.

But in truth, to inter­nally expe­ri­ence these real­i­ties on a daily basis, they don’t even come close. Deep inside, deep within their soul, God is not good or lov­ing or for­giv­ing. And with this, here is a sim­ple test in how you can deter­mine how a per­son gen­uinely sees God—don’t ask them how they view God—ask them how they view them­selves. Don’t let them think about the ques­tion, just ask them for the first words that come to their mind. Inevitably, the per­son caught in this stage of faith will use the major­ity of their descrip­tion with words such as these: a sin­ner, bro­ken, wicked, evil, a fallen per­son. In how they view them­selves, we begin to see a pic­ture of how they might view God. They will not use true words such as these—righteous, saved, holy, redeemed, a child—such words would not be the ones that would first come to their mind.

Those who are caught in this ser­vant stage of faith need to assess truly how they view God. They need to get beyond the sim­ple men­tal con­cep­tions that they have learned and look at who God is gen­uinely to them right now. But here is the tough part with this self-reflection—you often need some­one else in your life who knows you extremely well to help you answer these ques­tions of who God is to you. With the per­son who is stuck in this phase, as men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous chap­ter, too often this is a no-no; you do not get close to oth­ers and you def­i­nitely don’t need the help of others.

Often these deep-seated ideas of who God is began a long time ago in a land far, far away. Some­times a per­son stuck here will need to deal with issues from the past and often these issues might be dif­fi­cult to acknowl­edge or deal with because of the pain or con­fu­sion asso­ci­ated with them. Some of these dif­fi­cult issues to address might be:

  • How you were raised – espe­cially grow­ing up in home in which per­fec­tion was always required or where a par­ent was emo­tion­ally distant
  • Being phys­i­cally, emo­tion­ally or sex­u­ally abused in the past
  • Fac­ing a trau­matic event that occurred in your life
  • Hav­ing a par­ent who was extremely dom­i­neer­ing or passive
  • Grow­ing up in a home that was overly reli­gious (overly empha­siz­ing the rules of the faith over grace and forgiveness)

FACING THE WOUND OF REJECTION

There is an impor­tant con­cept from psy­chol­ogy that might help you under­stand one dynamic of this in terms of one’s up-bringing. Gre­gory Bate­son, a lin­guist and anthro­pol­o­gist, wrote in the 1950’s about the con­cept of a dou­ble bind; it is a term that is used when chil­dren grow up with incon­sis­tent and neg­a­tive parental mes­sages. Dou­ble binds usu­ally are most dam­ag­ing within the rela­tion­ship of a par­ent to a child; how­ever,  they can also occur in dif­fer­ent types of rela­tion­ships such as with sib­lings, extended fam­ily rela­tion­ships, within dat­ing or mar­riage rela­tion­ships and friend­ships. Here is the basic process of how a dou­ble bind occurs within the rela­tion­ship of a par­ent and child:

  • Stage One: Con­fu­sion. First, the child who expe­ri­ences a dou­ble bind receives con­tra­dic­tory ver­bal and emo­tional mes­sages when they are spo­ken to by their par­ent. For exam­ple, love is expressed by words, and yet dis­gust or detach­ment is exhib­ited by behav­iors by the par­ent. Like­wise, a child is encour­aged to speak freely, but then crit­i­cized or silenced when­ever they actu­ally do share their view on a given issue.
  • Stage Two: Con­trol. Often, when such con­ver­sa­tions occur, the child is not allowed to dis­en­gage from the con­ver­sa­tion which has these con­flict­ing messages.
  • Stage Three: Pun­ish­ment. Finally, if within the con­ver­sa­tion, the child fails to ful­fill the con­tra­dic­tory requests of the par­ent, they are pun­ished in some way (e.g., with­drawal of love, phys­i­cal pun­ish­ment, ver­bal attacks, etc.).

The clas­sic exam­ple given of a neg­a­tive dou­ble bind is of a mother telling her child that she loves him, while at the same time turn­ing away in dis­gust for some rea­son. In this case, the words the mother speaks are nor­mal and good, but then the body lan­guage is in con­flict with the words the mother just spoke. The child doesn’t know how to respond to the con­flict between the words and the body lan­guage and the harm­ful behav­iors of the par­ent (this can be either phys­i­cal or psy­cho­log­i­cal). Over­time, the child in this case will become either very sus­pi­cious of those who attempt to show him love or will become very depen­dent on the par­ent or others.

Often those who grow up in reli­gious homes expe­ri­ence dou­ble binds on a reg­u­lar basis. It is the image of the par­ent who says “I love you,” but in real­ity never really shows it in a phys­i­cal man­ner or often shows their repul­sion more times than not. It’s the father who says to his daugh­ter with his mouth “You are impor­tant to me,” but never expresses it in a phys­i­cal and tan­gi­ble way.

I will share an exam­ple I heard recently. A client of mine shared an expe­ri­ence of a dou­ble bind which was very dam­ag­ing and con­fus­ing to him. This man had been in an acci­dent in which some­one on a motor­cy­cle had died because of their own reck­less dri­ving. It was not this young man’s fault in any way, and he stayed at the scene of the acci­dent. Obvi­ously, it was a a very trou­bling expe­ri­ence for him. In his fam­ily, he was never allowed to express emo­tion and on dif­fer­ent occa­sions was actu­ally told to “stop cry­ing” or to keep his feel­ings in check. One after­noon, he and his mom were in the same room and she point­edly asked, “I am really sur­prised how you haven’t expressed any emo­tion about the acci­dent last week. Hasn’t it both­ered you?” At that moment, a wave of emo­tion rushed over him and he began to cry. He reached for his mom to hug her and she pushed him away. This is a per­fect pic­ture of a dou­ble bind. Step by step, this is what happened:

  1. Through­out his life, ver­bally and non-verbally, he was told not to show emotion.
  2. In this inci­dent, he ini­tially did as he was told and did not show any emo­tion about the accident.
  3. His mom requested that he show emo­tion about the accident.
  4. He was rejected and pun­ished for show­ing emotion.

If you grew up in a home like that, how do you think you would view God? You’d be very con­fused and it would make sense that how you grew up would influ­ence who God was to you. This often can be the case with the per­son who is stuck in this legal­is­tic stage of faith. Even with­out really know­ing it, they have grown up in a highly dys­func­tional home, expe­ri­enced sub­tle abuse and then trans­ferred this expe­ri­ence to their rela­tion­ship with God. In the sit­u­a­tion, with the young man above, this is how I found him when he came into coun­sel­ing. He was highly dis­trust­ful of oth­ers and he was highly dis­trust­ful of God. Now granted, he went to church each Sun­day and served in a lot of mean­ing­ful ways there, but in real­ity, he was a very bro­ken young man who really needed to get at some root issues that had hap­pened a long time ago. Not until he began to see the harm in his past was he able to begin to look at him­self and oth­ers dif­fer­ently. This heal­ing ini­tially began in that he con­fronted the truth that he was begin­ning to mimic his mother’s emo­tional dis­tance with his own fam­ily. Sec­ond, he had to reach out for help—these two things were the begin­ning of his heal­ing from a very wound­ing child­hood and upbring­ing. Those caught in this ser­vant stage of faith have a hard time doing what this young man did. Only those who are will­ing to look deeply at their past and how they are respond­ing presently because of the past are able to grow in their rela­tion­ship with God. The God who heals des­per­ately wants us to deal with our wounds and often that means we must first acknowl­edge them.

In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Feb
28
2013

arms lengthThis post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

Every­one has three lives: a pub­lic life, a pri­vate life, and a secret life. Gabriel Gar­cia Marquez

In our soci­ety, most of us wear pro­tec­tive masks of var­i­ous kinds and for var­i­ous rea­sons. Very often the end result is that the masks grow to us, dis­plac­ing our orig­i­nal char­ac­ters with our assumed char­ac­ters. Clarence John Laughlin

As we take this topic one step fur­ther, remem­ber how ear­lier we dis­cussed the impor­tance of Jesus “know­ing” us (Matthew 7:23). As a par­al­lel, a good ques­tion to ask your­self is how many peo­ple know the real you? In one aspect for Jesus to know us means that we must also let oth­ers into our lives in vul­ner­a­ble ways. Jesus makes this remark, “I have spo­ken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heav­enly things?” (John 3:12) I think in the same way, one of the best ways that Jesus can know us is how well we let oth­ers know who we are. In tan­dem, just as we attempt to develop a rela­tion­ship with God (i.e., a heav­enly rela­tion­ship), we must also push into friend­ships with those around us (i.e., an earthly rela­tion­ship). Typ­i­cally, on this front, those caught in the ser­vant stage have a long way to go.

This is another way to find out if you might be caught in this ser­vant phase with regards to your rela­tion­ship with Jesus. If so, there’s a good chance that you limit your friend­ships to acquain­tances in your life. The ques­tion you have to ask your­self is—how deep do I go in my rela­tion­ships? How much do peo­ple know the real you? How many peo­ple know for exam­ple that you strug­gle with anx­i­ety at an extreme level, or you peri­od­i­cally slap your kids, or your mar­riage is maybe just one or two fights away from a sep­a­ra­tion? Those who keep oth­ers at bay, usu­ally keep God at bay in some man­ner as well.

And often these types of shal­low rela­tion­ships flour­ish in a church set­ting. As a metaphor, too often, going to church means we are going to the sym­phony, when in real­ity, going to church should be more like when you go to a hos­pi­tal in an emer­gency. If we were to go to the sym­phony, we would put on our best jacket or dress, blow dry our hair just per­fectly, and put our best smile on to impress. But church is not like going to an orches­tra con­cert; it should be more like going to a hospital.

Some years ago, one Decem­ber day, I was get­ting the mail and walk­ing down our dri­ve­way. I slipped on an icy patch and down I went. As I fell, I used my left arm to brace my fall and just then, I felt my elbow twist like it never had before. I laid on the ground for a sec­ond and was won­der­ing what had just hap­pened. That left arm was in excru­ci­at­ing pain. I lifted myself up and real­ized I had done some­thing very bad to my arm as I could not straighten it. It hurt like noth­ing I had ever expe­ri­enced. Julie was on her way home and I called her in painful cries. Once she got home, she imme­di­ately drove me to the hos­pi­tal. How­ever, before all this had hap­pened, I had yet to take a shower and I had yet to change from what I had slept in the night before. This is how I entered the emer­gency room that day. I was in pain. I needed help. My hair was unwashed. I did not have on my Sun­day best. The real Kelly Bonewell had entered that emer­gency room, because I needed help, and I needed it now. This was the real me for all to see. In a way, this is what going to church should be like. Not like going to the sym­phony, but more like enter­ing the emer­gency room to receive help where you are allowed to be the real you.

Too often, when we are at church we play a part, but we don’t let any­one know the real story behind our lives. Peo­ple ask us how we are doing, but we quickly reply, Oh, fine. But are we really doing fine? In fact, the truth maybe is that we’ve made a mess of our lives and only we know it. We maybe are moments from doing some­thing really stu­pid and nobody in our lives knows the truth of that.

Early in my jour­ney in being a Chris­t­ian, I had a star­tling expe­ri­ence with this aspect of going only so deep. After becom­ing a Chris­t­ian, I was des­per­ate to find a church, because I wanted to know oth­ers who also knew this Jesus per­son. I had been told you can find peo­ple like these in churches… One day, I was going to class on the train into Chicago and as I flipped open my green Gideon’s New Tes­ta­ment this red-headed guy sat next to me. He quickly asked me if I was a Chris­t­ian because he noted the book I was read­ing.  I told him I was and over the course of that twenty minute ride on the train we talked. Right before he was about to got off at his stop, he invited me to his church. I was grate­ful and excited.

Over the next year, I became highly involved in this tiny lit­tle church which met in this huge old church build­ing in Oak Park, Illi­nois. I came into my own as a Chris­t­ian and got to know the pas­tor of the church and his young fam­ily. Dur­ing this time, I had heard a mes­sage that Tony Cam­polo spoke which really impacted who I was to become as a Chris­t­ian. He main­tained in this mes­sage the vital impor­tance of account­abil­ity with oth­ers in your walk of being a Chris­t­ian. I remem­ber one line in par­tic­u­lar; as a para­phrase, he said, “Unless you become ulti­mately close with oth­ers and open up your life to them, you maybe will be sit­ting in a church pew in your old age, but you won’t be a Chris­t­ian.” I really took that to heart and asked my pas­tor and some oth­ers to join me in liv­ing this life of being account­able with one another.

I can remem­ber our first meet­ing and this is when my eyes were opened. We were a few guys at my pastor’s office, sit­ting on fur­ni­ture which had been bought at the local Sal­va­tion Army and with full cof­fee cups in hand. Because I ini­ti­ated this lit­tle group, I began first and shared what was going on—I didn’t hold back and shared the gen­uine strug­gles that were going on in my life. After that, two other guys did just as I had and shared with vul­ner­a­bil­ity the sin and strug­gles in their lives. When it came to my pas­tor, he looked us each one-by-one and said he appre­ci­ated what we shared, but at that point, he said, he really didn’t have any­thing to share. Taken aback, our time together ended.

I walked away puz­zled. He had noth­ing to share? As I spent the next cou­ple years at that church, I slowly began to real­ize that this was my pastor’s nat­ural way of operating—he never really shared what was going on in his life whether that was from the pul­pit or when we shared break­fast at our favorite diner. At the end of four years, I didn’t know him much bet­ter than the guy who lived next door, who worked third shift and who I would wave and say hello to when we would pass in the hall­way. After spend­ing those four years at the church, I moved and there­fore, had to find another church.

About six years later, we had a sort of reunion with a some who attended this church. Dur­ing our time together, I learned that my pas­tor had left his wife and four kids. He lit­er­ally packed up and moved to where no one knew where he had gone. He sim­ply van­ished. I was shocked. He lit­er­ally left his wife and fam­ily? My pas­tor? And then it dawned on me, it kind of made sense. A lot of other stuff must have been going on in his life which he was just not deal­ing with and he just never let any­one into all of the secrets in his life.

Let me make an impor­tant statement—you will never grow as a Chris­t­ian with­out the help of oth­ers. Those who think that they can live as fol­low­ers of Jesus, but not have any rela­tion­ships that mean any­thing are dead wrong. The way that God designed how we grow as a per­son is that we grow first because we have a devel­op­ing rela­tion­ship with him, but a close sec­ond, is because we enter into deep rela­tion­ships with oth­ers. This is a good ques­tion to ask yourself—how well do oth­ers know the real you? How many gen­uine friend­ships do you have and how deep do they go? And here is an impor­tant point, you might have three thou­sand friends on face­book, but how well are you known? Can you count on at least one hand how many of your friends know most of the nooks and cran­nies of your life? The inevitable truth is this, if you have very few friend­ships that are authen­tic in your life, most likely your life has a shal­low­ness to it. If you have very few deep friend­ships in your life, most likely you are not mov­ing in the right direc­tion. For some, if there are very few peo­ple in your life who can sup­port you, you prob­a­bly are a cat­a­stro­phe wait­ing to hap­pen.

In: Friend to Jesus
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Jan
25
2013

Just as a per­son can be healthy or unhealthy, so can churches. Are you involved with a legal­is­tic or spiritually-abusive church? Here might be some clues that you should mull over:

  • At the heart of it, the over­all mes­sage through­out the min­istry that is spo­ken on a weekly basis is that God is a book­keeper, keep­ing a check­list of do’s and don’ts. He is imper­sonal and maybe even vin­dic­tive. If you mess with him, he’s going to get you. The reli­gion and expe­ri­ence is based on fear and not on grace. The church overly empha­sizes and talks about sin (either about your sins or of oth­ers, but never of the church lead­er­ship). Over­all, you often leave church feel­ing like you are always miss­ing the mark, just aren’t good enough, and you need to do more.
  • Your church strongly empha­sizes doc­tri­nal or the­o­log­i­cal cor­rect­ness. They overem­pha­size minor the­o­log­i­cal issues which in real­ity seek to divide other churches or Chris­t­ian groups from theirs. These the­o­log­i­cal issues may include bap­tism, the spir­i­tual gifts, which Bible trans­la­tion you should read, etc. This may even lead to the mes­sage that they are the only “true” church and other churches or Chris­tians are mis­guided. This may be lit­er­ally spo­ken from the pul­pit or sub­tly sug­gested in other ways. Lead­ers or the church as a whole exhibit a spir­i­tual arrogance—other churches are not quite as good as theirs and are miss­ing the mark.
  • Scrip­ture is said to be of pri­mary impor­tance, but if you lis­ten care­fully, it is really the leader’s inter­pre­ta­tion of Scrip­ture that is essen­tial. The Bible isn’t the end-all, rather the leader’s ideas about what they think the Bible says is what is impor­tant. With this, the lead­er­ship tends to often teach that sub­mis­sion to author­ity is cru­cial to being a “good Christian.”
  • Reli­gious tra­di­tions of the church are of utmost impor­tance and bib­li­cal pas­sages are used to man­date these tra­di­tions. Scrip­ture is often mis­quoted or used out of con­text. Verses are sin­gled out-and used to sub­stan­ti­ate the church’s posi­tion on issues they hold dear. These verses are not weighed against what other verses say, which may sug­gest a dif­fer­ent view. The con­text or the over­all mes­sage of the Scrip­tures is not allowed.
  • The church staff and lead­er­ship may be dom­i­nated by fam­ily mem­bers or per­sonal friends. There is a lack of objec­tive account­abil­ity: lead­er­ship is account­able to itself only and if any crit­i­cism about this is offered, it is shut down imme­di­ately. Intel­lec­tual devel­op­ment is lim­ited to fit the doc­trines that are taught at the church; schools or classes offered by other churches or orga­ni­za­tions have lit­tle, if any worth and you should prob­a­bly steer clear of “these types of peo­ple.” There are two types of dys­func­tional churches in these cases. Some churches may overem­pha­size the intel­lect (doc­trine over expe­ri­ence); oth­ers may dis­trust any­thing “book­ish” or intel­lec­tual and rely only on the expe­ri­ences of the per­son (expe­ri­ence over doctrine).
  • Church mem­bers or atten­dees who do not con­form to all these doc­tri­nal issues or opin­ions are black­listed, labeled as rebel­lious or ignored for lead­er­ship posi­tions. If you don’t fully agree with the lead­er­ship, you have no voice and may even be asked to leave the church.
  • Per­sonal and emo­tional bound­aries are often over-stepped and rela­tion­ships can become too close. The lead­er­ship asks you to be vul­ner­a­ble emo­tion­ally, but they them­selves rarely, if ever, show or dis­cuss any weak­nesses. These lead­ers have the pro­to­typ­i­cal Savior-complex. If you ask them about their own strug­gles, they always seem to avoid the question.

These are just some of the pos­si­ble traits of a spir­i­tu­ally abu­sive church. If you believe this may be the case for you, you may want to read one or two of the fol­low­ing books to learn more about this impor­tant topic:

In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , ,
Nov
29
2012

This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

If you lose the joy and the fun, why bother? Jack Heffron

I remem­ber some­one once say­ing that joy is the hall­mark of the Chris­t­ian. Another char­ac­ter­is­tic of what it means to be caught in the phase of the ser­vant with regard to your faith is that this per­son has a lack of joy in their lives. This is one the main miss­ing ingre­di­ents when you get stuck in your faith—it’s often joy that is miss­ing. But what exactly is joy? First, from a bib­li­cal stand­point, there are fif­teen dif­fer­ent Hebrew words and eight Greek words to describe joy. From a gram­mat­i­cal stand­point, it is both a noun and a verb—I can have joy and I do joy.

As I have said, there are many words for joy in the Bible, but per­haps my favorite is the Hebrew ranan. For me, this word encap­su­lates the broad scope and the mean­ing of joy. It sim­ply means to over­come or to cry out in exal­ta­tion or dis­tress. The part I like is the aspect of being over­come by some­thing. Here I can think of what was hap­pen­ing to me inter­nally on my wed­ding day. I was over­come by the experience—something spe­cial was hap­pen­ing when I com­mit­ted my life to Julie. It was a beau­ti­ful day. It was an intense day. It was unlike any other day that I have expe­ri­enced. The pic­ture of that moment in time for me is what it means to be a fol­lower of Jesus in so many dif­fer­ent ways. I mean think about it this way—what exactly hap­pens to us when Jesus enters our lives full-blown? What might be an anal­ogy of what hap­pens to me when I give my life to him?  When joy hap­pens, this is what hap­pens to me—I am over­come by his joy. Did you know that a key char­ac­ter qual­ity of God is joy?

Joy then is sim­ply the pos­si­bil­i­ties of what it means to have a grow­ing rela­tion­ship with your Cre­ator. Often we might think of joy as plea­sure; but it’s not that. A word that I think of when I think of the word joy is aban­don. To under­stand this, let’s go back to my wed­ding day and use an anal­ogy of our sex­u­al­ity. Sex is good and fun and plea­sur­able, because it’s all about aban­doned inti­macy at its core. It’s about enter­ing this dra­mat­i­cally intense and inti­mate expe­ri­ence with your spouse. It’s becom­ing your­self. It’s about becom­ing the other per­son. Spir­i­tu­ally and phys­i­cally, the Scrip­tures describe it as the two becom­ing one (Mark 10:8). Beyond the phys­i­cal plea­sure, to expe­ri­ence sex in its purest form is a soul-pleasure at its core. The best sex is when you get lost in your spouse, and yet at the same time, you become your­self in that inti­macy. You touch a place in your­self like never before. Emo­tion­ally and spir­i­tu­ally, you go to another place like never before, and you under­stand another per­son like never before.

Joy is sim­i­lar. But it is way beyond the feel­ing of plea­sure. Joy is feel­ing good, but it’s also con­sis­tent and deeply expe­ri­enced. It is nat­ural. It’s inside you. You feel good about your­self. You know that God is con­fi­dent in you, and that you are con­fi­dent in him.  Jesus is our model with this, and there­fore, because he was a man of tremen­dous joy, we can do the things he did because of his over­whelm­ing con­fi­dence in his Father, but also because of the Father’s con­fi­dence in him. Jesus guides us when he says, “I tell you the truth, any­one who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these.” (John 14:12) You can walk on the water. You can tell the moun­tains to take a step to the left and move out of your way. You can move into someone’s life and bring life-changing restora­tion. So let’s summarize:

  • First, joy is about rejoic­ing. It’s celebration.
  • Sec­ond, joy is about enter­ing into an expe­ri­ence full-heartedly.
  • Third, joy has an inten­sity about it. Joy = passion.
  • And lastly and most impor­tantly, joy allows peo­ple to be them­selves, really themselves.
In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , ,
Nov
01
2012

This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

 

It is the great­est truth of our age: Infor­ma­tion is not knowledge. Caleb Carr

When you are too sure about God and faith, you are sure of some­thing other than God: of dogma, of the church, of a par­tic­u­lar inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible. But God can­not be pigeon­holed. We must press toward cer­tainty, but be sus­pi­cious when it comes too glibly. Stan Wiersma

 

And here is the main prob­lem with bas­ing your faith on obey­ing a bunch of rules. Once you get it down, once you become really adept at bas­ing your rela­tion­ship with God on mak­ing sure you you are doing every­thing just right—it’s real easy to become what I call a know-it-all. Have you ever met a know-it-all? This is a per­son who when you are in a room talk­ing and you ask a ques­tion, this per­son comes out of nowhere and gives you the answer unin­vited. This is the per­son who, in any kind of dis­cus­sion, they never let up and will make sure they have the last word. This is the know-it-all:

  • The best books to read—where do I start?
  • The rea­son for poverty—let me give you the real answer.
  • How to make a proper omelet—let me show you how.
  • The very best polit­i­cal can­di­date—let me tell you a thing or two.
  • How to live a right­eous life—I’ve got that one down.

Of course, there are degrees to this type of per­son; some peo­ple are worse than oth­ers. And of course, there are those who are gen­uinely knowl­edge­able, but there is dis­tinc­tion between that type of per­son and the know-it-all. Usu­ally that dis­tinc­tion is that for the know-it-all, there is an arro­gance or pride mixed into the bat­ter. There is a way in which they use their knowl­edge as a weapon or in a man­ner in which they get to shine and be the cen­ter of attention.

Very eas­ily, one can turn into this per­son once one has been a Chris­t­ian for some time. Remem­ber, believ­ing is sim­ply men­tal assent and it is easy to use knowl­edge as the device in which one grows their rela­tion­ship with God. Knowl­edge then becomes the end pur­suit. The end game then can become this: hav­ing a greater under­stand­ing of doc­trine, know­ing the bib­li­cal premise behind bap­tism, know­ing the prophetic lit­er­a­ture of the Old Tes­ta­ment inside and out, etc.—this is what makes you a Chris­t­ian. Now, noth­ing is wrong with any of these kinds of pur­suits, but it boils down to the moti­va­tion behind that learn­ing. Usu­ally, we pur­sue knowl­edge for two rea­sons: for under­stand­ing or for power. The stu­dent who enters med­ical school can learn about dis­ease and the inter­ac­tion with the human body to help oth­ers or they can study and log in all of those hours sim­ply for more money or to wield their influ­ence over oth­ers. Each aspect of knowl­edge is like this: I have met peo­ple who learn about world his­tory, lan­guages, com­put­ers, fash­ion, engi­neer­ing, lit­er­a­ture, mechan­ics, par­ent­ing, the tax code, and even the Bible, not for the joy of learn­ing and grow­ing, but sim­ply to be able to wield that knowl­edge over oth­ers. In the end though, this pur­suit for knowl­edge becomes a machine to impress or control.

This is exactly why this period in the Chris­t­ian life can be so dan­ger­ous. All that we know at this point about God in some sense is just knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion. This is the Peter that we read about in the gospels. Read one of them and see how much he knows and how often Jesus chal­lenges him on what he knows. Over and over, he is telling Peter, “No, it’s not quite that way…let me explain it this way to you.” Do you remem­ber the scene in which Jesus actu­ally calls Peter the devil? This is Jesus chal­leng­ing him as the know-it-all.  He basi­cally tells Peter to shut up. That’s how bad Peter was get­ting in his arro­gance. (Matthew 16:23)

This is what Jesus saw in Peter—he was becom­ing very much like the Phar­isees, the teach­ers of the law with whom Jesus always had the harsh­est words. The Phar­isees were the crème of the crop when it came to being know-it-alls. This impor­tance of knowl­edge over rela­tion­ship with God is the chief com­plaint Jesus has against them. The Phar­isees were care­ful stu­dents of the Jew­ish law, and in fact, in Jesus’ eyes—too care­ful. They had the Scrip­tures mem­o­rized back­ward and for­wards; they defin­i­tively knew what was right and what was wrong. In this pur­suit of infor­ma­tion, they even had come up with some of their own rules! But they missed the point entirely. In con­trast, St. Augus­tine was so auda­cious with this issue that he wrote that “God is best known in not know­ing him.” What Augus­tine was attempt­ing to say was that pur­su­ing just knowl­edge in the end could get in the way of gen­uinely under­stand­ing who God is.

And so with that, in the end the Phar­isees began to mis­use the dogma they stud­ied. This is the tremen­dous pit­fall of the one who bases their entire expe­ri­ence with God sim­ply on attain­ing knowl­edge about him—they will even­tu­ally miss the major points like grace, for­give­ness, and free­dom in Christ. These are things they have never expe­ri­enced per­son­ally, and there­fore, these points of impor­tance don’t con­nect with them inter­nally. Their knowl­edge is merely based on rote learn­ing which is flat and imper­sonal. This per­son might be able to talk at length about grace and other such the­o­log­i­cal fun­da­men­tals, but gen­uinely expe­ri­enc­ing them is dis­tant and missed. This is why Jesus called them “blind guides.” (Matthew 23:16) If a per­son has the essen­tials of faith wrong, they will obvi­ously begin teach­ing oth­ers these ungrounded pre­sump­tions, which will cause fur­ther harm. Look at all the unset­tling stuff that gets prop­a­gated in the church today.

  • Those who have can­cer or rela­tion­ships prob­lems (or any other prob­lem) just don’t have enough faith.
  • You shouldn’t go to “rock” concerts.
  • So and so is the best preacher and you should only lis­ten to him.
  • You have to read this ver­sion of the Bible.
  • That woman should not have her hair cut so short (or that guy so long)!
  • You have to be bap­tized in this exact and pre­cise way.
  • To be a real Chris­t­ian, you have to attend our church.

Obvi­ously some rules are actu­ally right and good, but some­times rules can turn into some­thing that becomes a pre­req­ui­site to hav­ing a rela­tion­ship with God. How­ever, the truth is that some of these stan­dards that we put on our­selves and oth­ers have lit­tle to do with hav­ing a rela­tion­ship with God at all.

And here might be the most impor­tant point—as Chris­tians we have the free­dom to NOT know every­thing. In no way shape or form do we have to know it all. All of life is com­plex and there are mys­ter­ies to which we may never know. Events will occur in our lives that will leave us haunted by these expe­ri­ences and not until we see God face-to-face will we under­stand. As the Bible says, “Now we see but a poor reflec­tion as in a mir­ror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (1 Corinthi­ans 13:12) The world and uni­verse is vast and to expect to have it all down and under­stood is impos­si­ble. There are prob­lems we may face which sim­ply do not have clear and cut answers. When we are pre­sented with a dif­fi­cult ques­tion or prob­lem, it can be reliev­ing to just say these sim­ple words, “I do not know.” There can be a bless­ing in not know­ing it all—it leaves us room to con­tinue to explore. The­olo­gian Clark Pin­nock (as an aside, with his writ­ings, he was very instru­men­tal in our under­stand­ing about the infal­li­bil­ity of the Bible) says words which we would be well-advised to think about in rela­tion­ship to our own lives when we have mis­giv­ings with our faith:

I know what it is to doubt and ques­tion. And I sus­pect that every Chris­t­ian who takes the time to think seri­ously about his faith does so too.

I think these are good words for us to remem­ber. We need to always remem­ber that we don’t have to always know it all.

In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , , ,
Oct
04
2012

This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

 

I believe in the King­dom Come/Then all the col­ors will bleed into one/Bleed into one/But yes I’m still running/But I still haven’t found what I’m look­ing for. U2

The deep­est proof for God’s exis­tence, apart from his­tory, is just life itself. God has cre­ated man in his image, and men can­not elude the impli­ca­tions of this fact. Every­where their iden­tity pur­sues them. Ulti­mately, there is no escape. Clark Pinnock

Life’s sloppy. You think you know how tomor­row is going to be, you’ve made your plans, every­thing is set in place, and then the unimag­in­able hap­pens. Life catches you by sur­prise. It always does. But there’s good mixed in with the bad. It’s there. You just have to rec­og­nize it. Susan Beth Pfeffer

 

I had my own expe­ri­ence in which I had lived as a believer too long. I was a junior in col­lege and I was def­i­nitely liv­ing two lives. I was going to church, and occa­sion­ally liv­ing out my beliefs; I even went on a mis­sion trip dur­ing that time (doesn’t that make me holy). I had such great motives. The prob­lem was—it was just so dif­fi­cult to get my actions to fol­low. You see, I was also another per­son. When one has an imper­sonal rela­tion­ship with God, they inevitably do not know them­selves or their impor­tance in life. They will go where the wind blows. Even with all of my con­fi­dence on the out­side, inter­nally I was a mess. I played a good game; I knew how to impress; I knew how to wear the mask. But I was also the per­son who had dark secrets hid­ing just under the surface.

At the core, at that time in my life, God was not my secu­rity; rela­tion­ships with women were. Dur­ing that school year, I was in a hand­ful of dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship. Most of them were shal­low. Most of them were based on what I could get out of them. Just like me, these women were just out for a good time. At this point in my life, there was one woman I had had my eye on for a long time. To this day, I remem­ber her name; it was Julia.

Julia was my kind of woman. She was artsy; she was Euro­pean (lit­er­ally) and bohemian; she had a way about her—elegant and angu­lar. The way she wore her hair; the way her clothes hung off her body; the way she spoke with her Ital­ian accent—it all mes­mer­ized me. Julia was in a class that we shared together, and over­time we became friends, and I kept my infat­u­a­tion for her hid­den. The col­lege where we attended had a two-week break dur­ing Jan­u­ary and most stu­dents got out of the city and ven­tured off to other areas of the coun­try. Over cof­fee at the Har­ri­son Diner one day, Julia men­tioned that she was going to Toronto over break and she won­dered if I would like to go with her. I was pleas­antly ecsta­tic. Of course, I would, and so we began mak­ing plans.

In all of my days, I will never for­get that drive to Toronto. I love dri­ving early in the morn­ing, get­ting up at 3 a.m., hav­ing a cup of cof­fee in hand, and dri­ving through the early dawn. It was some­thing I grew up with as a kid; as a fam­ily, we always started our vaca­tions just before sun­rise and it’s always stuck with me. Before day­break, I picked up Julia at her apart­ment and we headed out on I-94, head­ing east toward Canada. We were cruis­ing along, chit-chatting and had the music turned up. It was a very cold Jan­u­ary night and when we reached just across the Michi­gan bor­der, it began sleet­ing. I slowed the car down a bit, but drove on. Just past Kala­ma­zoo, I thought I heard some­thing pop, but I just kept on dri­ving. At that sec­tion of the high­way, it was three lanes and I was dri­ving in the mid­dle lane. There was a semi-truck behind me, one in front, one to my right, and one to my left. I was sur­rounded by all of these semi-trucks and we sped down the road at sev­enty miles per hour. Unbe­knownst to me, my tire had blown. Unbe­knownst to me, there was ice an inch thick on the road. Unbe­knownst to me, the car was about to slide out of control.

I was dri­ving ner­vous, both hands on the wheel, knuck­les white. Stu­pidly, I sped up to about eighty and moved into the right lane of the high­way. I wanted to get to that far right lane as quick as I could, because in my gut I knew some­thing wasn’t right. How­ever, as I made the lane change, my 1977 Chevy Caprice Clas­sic skid­ded aim­lessly toward a guardrail, just miss­ing an eighteen-wheeler. Julia screamed and I tried to keep the car under con­trol. Thank­fully, no cars (or semis) hit us, but we did hit the guardrail in dra­matic fash­ion. Julia was hys­ter­i­cal and I was rat­tled by the cir­cum­stance as well. I got out of the car and looked over the dam­age that actu­ally wasn’t that bad (they just don’t make cars like that any­more). As I ven­tured toward the back of the car I saw that my rear pas­sen­ger tire was in shreds. I got out the jack and began replac­ing the blown wheel. It was freez­ing out and like a lot of for­get­ful 20-year-olds, I hadn’t packed very well and I didn’t have a win­ter coat. It was January—Julia was sit­ting in the car cry­ing and traf­fic was whizzing by me as I attempted to change the tire.

After about forty-five min­utes later, we were dri­ving again, Julia was still upset, and so I asked her if she wanted to get in the back­seat and go to sleep. Not a half an hour later, right out­side of Jack­son, I was dri­ving along in the early morn­ing, and just out of nowhere the car did a 360° spin right in the mid­dle of the high­way. That’s how icy it was. Thank­fully, no cars were in front or in back of me. I was now shak­ing. I got out of the car and lit­er­ally slipped to the ground because now there was a thick layer of ice on the grass and road. I was trem­bling and was audi­bly thank­ing God for pro­tect­ing us. I climbed back into the front seat and Julia was shak­ing the sleep off, rub­bing her eyes, and asked if every­thing was okay. I lied. I said things were fine. I also added that I thought it would be best if we pulled over for a while until all of the ice melted.

At this moment in time, God was talk­ing to me. He was try­ing to get my atten­tion. I knew and he knew that it was not best for me to be on this trip with this attrac­tive Ital­ian woman. It was just another attempt of me run­ning away from what I really needed to face. Right there, I should’ve turned around and gone back home, but I didn’t. God was try­ing to get my atten­tion and I ignored him. Julia and I decided to stay in Jack­son that night at some crummy motel. Noth­ing hap­pened as we slept next to one another—but you know what, I wanted it to and that was all that mat­tered. I was run­ning as hard as I could away from God no dif­fer­ent than Jonah.

We finally got to Toronto and I met Julia’s friends and our time together was filled with a lot of drink­ing. The first day we were there, three of the guys brewed their own beer and we drank a lot of it. Julia was orig­i­nally from Lithua­nia and the next night we ended up going to a Lithuan­ian fes­ti­val. At first, I was hav­ing a great time; I was drink­ing a lit­tle; I was talk­ing to a lot of dif­fer­ent peo­ple. But deep down, I was ter­ri­bly sad. I looked around at the peo­ple and every­thing seemed so depress­ing to me. The whole sit­u­a­tion was depress­ing. Slowly, but surely, I was real­iz­ing how depress­ing my life was. I was run­ning away from God and it was finally catch­ing up with me. We sat down to eat and not shortly after we were seated, I heard God speak to me more clearly than maybe I ever have before. In my mind, I heard two sim­ple words: Go home. That was all that I heard, but it was enough. It was a voice that was firm; it was a voice that was seri­ous. God was try­ing to get my atten­tion and I knew those words were for me. I got up out of my chair went over to Julia and told her I was head­ing home. She com­mented that she would see me when she got home and asked me if I knew the way back to her friend’s apart­ment. I explained to her that I was actu­ally head­ing back home to Chicago and just like that, I was out the door.

Her­bert Agar has said, “The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men pre­fer not to hear.” This was exactly where I was at in my life. On that jour­ney home, it was as if Jesus was lit­er­ally sit­ting in the car seat next to me and we drove home silent, not a word being said between the two of us. On the way back to Chicago, I was almost involved in another car acci­dent, dri­ving through a snow­storm, and again, I got out of the car shak­ing at the knees. It was con­firmed, I knew God was try­ing to drive home a point. He was attempt­ing to tell me some­thing rather sim­ple: Kelly, you must give me all of your­self. Not just the crumbs. If you want to be with me, you must live all of your life for me. Now, it’s up to you.

Now, it’s up to you. Those words pierced me because that was the full truth. That night as I drove into the city, I parked my car out­side my apart­ment and just lis­tened to the silence in the cold. That night just sit­ting there, I did my very best at relin­quish­ing all of these unruly desires and the pur­suits of unhealthy rela­tion­ships. At that inter­val in my life, it was the most out of con­trol it had ever been. I was fran­tic for love, but for the wrong kind. Even though I could not put it into words at that time, that night I tried to put Jesus at the cen­ter. That Jan­u­ary night, sit­ting cold in my Chevy Caprice Clas­sic on Oak Park Avenue, for the first time I became a fol­lower of Jesus, his fol­lower, his dis­ci­ple, his ser­vant. At that moment, I tried to fall in love with him and with no other. I tried to really fol­low him for the first time.

Here’s what I want you to do: Buy your gold from me, gold that’s been through the refiner’s fire. Then you’ll be rich. Buy your clothes from me, clothes designed in Heaven. You’ve gone around half-naked long enough. And buy med­i­cine for your eyes from me so you can see, really see. The peo­ple I love, I call to account—prod and cor­rect and guide so that they’ll live at their best. Up on your feet, then! About face! Run after God! Look at me. I stand at the door. I knock. If you hear me call and open the door, I’ll come right in and sit down to sup­per with you.

Rev­e­la­tion 3:18–20 (The Message)

In: Friend to Jesus
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Sep
20
2012

 This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

 

Tell me what com­pany you keep, and I will tell you what you are. Cervantes

The hard­est thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn. David Russell 

A final sign that a per­son may be just a believer is when one looks at their friend­ships. As men­tioned ear­lier, God made us for oth­ers, and oth­ers are made for our good as well. It’s a rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship. This is the epit­ome of what it means to be the body of Christ—the pow­er­ful influ­ence of good friend­ships. Believ­ers, how­ever, often shun friend­ships with those who share in their faith. Often, because their life is so crazy and out of whack, it’s dif­fi­cult and uncom­fort­able for them to hang out and befriend those who have a rela­tion­ship with God. I knew this first­hand. Early on when I became a Chris­t­ian, I did not enjoy being around those who shared my new-found faith, because my con­science was always telling me things were not quite right in my life. To be with other Chris­tians in some sense seemed to reveal to me how I was really living—that there were sig­nif­i­cant parts of my life that were mis­aligned. There­fore, there was a time in my life when I had few friends who had a rela­tion­ship with God. Iron­i­cally, for me, my clos­est friends were actu­ally adverse to Chris­tian­ity, and when­ever we got in dis­cus­sions about faith or sim­i­lar top­ics, they would let me know in no uncer­tain terms how they felt about my faith. Even­tu­ally, I dropped the topic altogether.

At that time, I was a fol­lower, but not really a fol­lower of Jesus. My friends influ­enced my beliefs and actions more than I did theirs. Here are some ques­tions to ask your­self if you might be in this stage of faith—1) who are you impact­ing in your life, and 2) who influ­ences or men­tors you? Over­all, are your friend­ships gen­uinely healthy and mov­ing you for­ward emo­tion­ally and spir­i­tu­ally? And if some of those friend­ships are not healthy, are your friends influ­enc­ing you in neg­a­tive ways? Do you grav­i­tate toward their way of life in harm­ful ways? If most of your friend­ships are neg­a­tively influ­enc­ing your life, you prob­a­bly need some new friends.

This is always a dif­fi­cult topic to broach because some­times friend­ships such as these have been a part of our lives for a long time, per­haps even since child­hood. At this point in my own life, this was a very dif­fi­cult deci­sion that I had to make. I had had a friend of many years, but when we were together, it was really David who directed my life. I can clearly remem­ber one day in which God said to me, It is David or it is Me. God knew that I could never become the per­son I was sup­posed to be, if David had this much influ­ence in my life. But with this, David was no devil or some awful per­son; he was kind and gen­er­ous and had brought a lot of good things into my life. God loved David, but he also knew that there were aspects in which he was hold­ing me back with my rela­tion­ship with Him, and if I was going to move in the right direc­tion, I would have to give up that friend­ship, because in many ways it was very unhealthy. As one exam­ple, David was adamantly an athe­ist and if ever a topic about faith came up, he quickly and angrily squelched it. The real­ity of it was that when I was around him, I could never really be myself. And isn’t that the pre­req­ui­site of a good friendship—you can always be your­self? As St. Augus­tine wrote:

Bad com­pany is like a nail dri­ven into a post, which, after the first or sec­ond blow, may be drawn out with lit­tle dif­fi­culty; but being once dri­ven up to the head, the pin­cers can­not take hold to draw it out, but which can only be done by the destruc­tion of the wood.

Of course, we can’t always alien­ate our lives from those who don’t share our faith; Jesus never iso­lated him­self from those who were for­eign to his words and ways. But his model is our model—his most inti­mate of rela­tion­ships were with those who knew him. We do have to be care­ful with whom we share our lives. As the famous Proverb states, “Above all else, guard your heart for it is the well­spring of life.” (4:23) Our most inti­mate of rela­tion­ships most likely will be with those who share this unique and beau­ti­ful rela­tion­ship that we have with Jesus. When we want to open up and share what is going on in our lives with our rela­tion­ship with God, these will be peo­ple who know what we are talk­ing about. For oth­ers, who do not share in this, they will sim­ply think we are speak­ing a for­eign lan­guage, and there­fore, this is why we really need to assess our friend­ships to see how healthy or unhealthy they are.

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