Creating Capacity

Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, did a seminar at my school today. There may be successive posts on the various ideas discussed, but for now, this was the highlight:

"God does not dump relief on us without creating capacity in us."

While Crouch made this statement in a different context, I found it applicable to spiritual formation. Over the last few years, I have thought a lot about how people grow as they follow Christ and what I can do as a minister to facilitate growth and transformation in others.

We often pray for quick solutions: immediate victory over sin, resolution in a conflict, or provision for a need. But God often answers by taking us through a process. I work part-time in an elementary school and three times a week I am in a 4th grade class during math time. As the students work through problems, they ask me if they got the right answer. In response, I ask them how they got their answer. Because it's more important to me that they know why an answer is correct, than it is for them to have the right numbers written on their paper. Maybe there is more to be learned in seasons of unanswered prayer, when relief is denied so our thought processes or character will be developed in a new way.

I like the idea of God creating capacity in us because it speaks of having greater ability than we did before. This is the result of difficulty and struggle, what some call growing pains.

In every season of my life, more is demanded of me. Whether it's thinking on a deeper level, accomplishing a greater number of tasks, or taking on increased responsibility, each new season challenges me to stretch beyond the ability I think I have. In the beginning, I find the new season impossible. I cry and scream and protest because it's difficult and sometimes painful. But as I grow and adapt, somehow I find a way to meet the new expectations. At the end of that season, I see that my capacity has indeed increased and I can do more than I thought was possible.

History of Time from 30,000 Feet

I apologize for not posting in the past few months. I had writer's block for most of the summer. But now my seminary classes have begun, and I am trying desperately to take in more information than I can hope to process. This blog may become my outlet to bring coherence out of my time here.

One of my classes is a church history course and our 3-hour block this week was like nothing I have ever experienced academically. What I am going to share in this post is from Dr. Gwenfair Adams' material on the theology of church history. I'm not sure if she has published it yet, but I will post a link to it if I can find one. And for full academic integrity, I should also mentioned that the terms and structure discussed come from Robert McKee's Story Seminar.

As an introduction to studying history, Dr. Adams gave us an overview of time. The Bible gives us the entire story outline, from God's creation to Jesus' return. What Dr. Adams discovered in McKee's Story Seminar is that, like other great stories throughout history and across cultures, the Bible follows a very particular outline.

All stories have a protagonist. A catalytic event interrupts life as he knows it, sending him on a quest for a desired object (or a person, goal, etc.). There is opposition throughout the quest, leading to the climax at the end of the line, where there is no other option but to take the greatest risk possible. In this, the story reveals the character of the protagonist and the strength of his desire for the object he seeks.

As I listened to the lecture, I realized

God is the Protagonist.

We are the Desired Object.

The entire history of our world is about God pursuing us. This sounds prideful or self-centered unless one has realized how much greater God is than we are: his holiness next to our sin, his power compared with our weakness, his glory opposed to our shame. Within this revelation of who he is and who we are, it becomes humbling that he would initiate relationship with us, that he would desire that which is so often undesirable.

In all the Braveheart metaphors and sermons based on Lord of the Rings that I've heard, it's easy for me to think that I'm supposed to be the hero, that my life with Christ should be a dramatic, movie-worthy quest. But in zooming out to look at the full story, I see that the climax already happened on the Cross. Though my own role in the story is valuable, it is really just a small piece. The protagonist is the one who gets all the glory and the fame, and that is God himself.

Books I'm Reading: The Unlikely Disciple

As summer wrapped up, I realized that I did not do nearly as much reading as I intended. This is a yearly occurrence of guilt that is mostly caused by unrealistic expectations.

I finished Kevin Roose's The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University right before moving back east. Loved it. Absolutely loved it. Roose, a student at Brown University, spent a semester at Liberty University as a sophomore to discover the world of evangelicals. It wasn't "gotcha" journalism, or a scheme to prove a point of view that he already held. He just realized that there was a whole group inAmerican society that he had never interacted with and decided to try to learn more.

What I appreciated about the book was its fairness and willingness to handle complexity. Roose made friends with a number of Liberty students and grew in respect for them. Some of what would be considered crazy by his friends and family started to make more sense, or seem more rational when allowing for certain premises. At the same time, there were aspects of the Christian faith propagated at the school that made him angry. He was able to express both of those views, resisting the urge to tie the book up into too neat a package.

Personally, the topics covered in the book fascinate me: the intersection of faith and politics, the human side of oft-caricatured fundamentalists, and the perception by non-Christians of what's normal to many who grew up in the church. The book is also written incredibly well. Roose utilizes humor, suspense, and empathy in telling his story. It's one that's definitely worth reading.

If you heed the word of Mortimer Adler...

Though I tend to mock Mortimer Adler's classic work, I agree with him that reading a book multiple times is the way to go. The first time I read something, I want to know how it ends, or what the author's overall point is. I don't want to form an opinion with partial information or waste time on the unimportant. Once that suspense is over, I can read the book again, taking my time to enjoy the writing and picking up on more subtle details. This especially applies for me when I read fiction, but I think it can apply to the Bible too. The smaller pieces make more sense when you have a sense of the overall work. When you see how the story is moving, you can pick up on the symbolism and imagery forshadowing what's to come. You're also less likely to misinterpret individual verses. Just a thought.

Not Yet What You Will Be

The Life You've Always Wanted is one of those books that I continually go back to. And yet, I don't think I've ever read the entire thing. My problem is that I always start at the beginning, at the chapter entitled, "We Shall Morph Indeed." It's about transformation, an idea and a concept that I can never quite wrap my mind around.

It's the idea of change that I can't manufacture on my own, that I can't work hard enough to attain. It's the positive alteration of who I am, not just what I do. And I'm still not sure how it happens.

In the book, John Ortberg describes Moses' encounter with God at the burning bush in the wilderness. God calls Moses to lead Israel and he says he isn't capable enough. In Ortberg's paraphrase, this is God's response:

"It doesn't really matter much. For I will be with you. Your guilt and your inadequacies are no longer the ultimate truth about you. You are what you are--but that's not all that you are. You are what you are, but you are not yet what you will be. I will be with you."

Ortberg calls this the hope of transformation. The hope that our jealous thoughts, petty actions, and selfish desires will not always be with us.

Paul describes it in Romans 7:24-25, "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God--through Jesus Christ our Lord!" We have to come to this place first, recognizing our inability to be who we feel we could or should be.

While I've been praying about some deeper issues in my heart, the song I've had on repeat is Steph Modder's "Hope's Got Me" which you can actually download for free on her website.

Hope's got me
wrapped so tightly
this is not the end
I'm ready to begin again

I heard about a college student who was asked if he was a Christian. He said no, he was becoming a Christian. He believed that identifying with Christ was a big deal, something to pursue, but not check off a list. We position ourselves and wait to be transformed, to be changed by God himself, to be shaped into the image of his son. We wait and hope for what is beyond us.

The Weight of Necessity

"Remember your Creator during your youth: when all possibilities lie open before you and you can offer all your strength intact for his service. The time to remember is not after you become senile and paralyzed! Then it is not too late for your salvation, but too late for you to serve as the presence of God in the midst of the world and the creation. You must take sides earlier--when you can actually make choices, when you have many paths opening at your feet, before the weight of necessity overwhelms you." --Jacques Ellul on Ecclesiastes 12

One of my personal assignments recently was to create a life mission statement. To facilitate this, I planned to spend a full day with God, looking over old journal entries and things that have really sparked something in my heart. Despite my excitement about doing it, it was still hard to schedule the time.

What struck me this quote from Jacques Ellul was the sense of urgency in deciding where to put our strength. There are a million little things that I could do this week. Many of them are very important and need to get done. But are they taking me in the right direction? Have I stepped back and spent time listening to God, asking what His purpose is for me? Or are my actions always a response to the expectations and demands of others?

Holy Week

I love Easter. It's a really special time for me personally. That may seem like a given, considering that I'm a Christian, but for the first 21 years I spent going to church, Easter didn't really mean that much to me. In all honesty, it seemed like one of the more boring church services of the year because I thought the sermons covered material that I had moved beyond.

But my senior year of college, I screwed up more than I thought was possible and felt more conviction from the Holy Spirit than I ever had in my life. Through that God taught me about His grace and forgiveness, the message of the gospel that I had missed despite my attendance at thousands of church services. And as if the gift of experiencing the Cross wasn't enough, I learned these lessons leading up to the calendar celebration of when Jesus made His sacrifice for me. I like having that personal anniversary that I can celebrate within the community of faith.

The pastor I heard speak last night challenged us to give up something during Holy Week--something that's not necessarily wrong, but might dull our sensitivity to what God is saying. So I'm going to cut back on my television watching (sorry Gilmore Girls). I didn't do so well today because of a headache, but that's my goal for the week. Hopefully putting it on this blog will help me stick to it. I like the idea of intentionally pressing into God during Holy Week. That might not seem revolutionary to those who are used to following the church calendar, but it's something different for this low-church girl.