Making the Bible Politically Correct
26 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
Any time I hear someone say “Romans 8 is my favorite chapter of the bible” I immediately promote them to “future best friend and/or prospective spouse” status. (Okay, that’s only happened once.) Seriously though, it’s an awesome chapter because it reveals the awesome truth that we are adopted by God. But there’s a word in this chapter that makes people act funny- sonship. Verse 15 “the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship.” Nope, it doesn’t say sonship and daughtership, or even the all-inclusive childship. (Is that even a word?) And yet, no, the Bible does not hate women. We love to dismiss things like that and just add in “daughtership” because we know that’s what Paul meant anyway. Or better yet, there are those of us who have decided we should burn bras and stop shaving our legs in protest of such ignorance! And even still there are some of us who feel awkward and try to make excuses for Paul.
But all these things imply that this God-breathed scripture is inadequate on our standards, that our standards hold greater value. No, both Paul and God knew what they were saying. You see, when Paul was writing this, only sons could be heirs. I’m so glad as a woman that Paul did not try to avoid offending me by adding “daughtership’,” because that would have meant something different and separated me from my brothers. He actually chose the least offensive word possible. I wanna be a “co-heir with Christ” (verse 17) too!
(And by the way, adoption at this same point in history was pretty legit. Jesus was born under Caesar Augustus’s rule who was adopted by Julius Caesar and thus inherited the Roman throne. So when it says we are co-heirs with Jesus, this is no small potato.)
I’m with you, it’s a lot easier to dismiss things like that cause it makes me uncomfortable. But by doing that we say “God, you were silly for saying that here, let me try to cover it up for you” instead of really looking into what he meant. The latter is harder, and more time consuming, and requires discernment. That doesn’t sound comfortable.
And the thing is, it’s not, but comfort’s not the point. The point is if we’re going to say the bible is god-breathed and the ultimate authority for our lives, then we need to treat it as such and stop trying to make it “politically correct.” (Next thing you know we’ll be making the three wise men say ‘Happy Holidays!’)
Things I’d Rather Not Have Learned
19 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment
I’d rather not have learned the following:
1. I can change into or out of my work uniform while driving.
2. If you never have time to put on deoderant in the morning, eventually your body will just stop needing it.
3. Frebreeze works just as well as laundry and coffee works almost as well as sleep.
4. It’s a good idea to keep a tooth brush, tooth paste, and a water bottle in your car, because you can do that while driving too.
5. And a hair brush. Just go ahead and sleep in the clothes you want to wear the next day and all you have to do is pee before you leave the house.
6. I also keep Chinese flashcards in my purse, just in case I end up waiting somewhere, because ten minutes would be a terrible thing to waste with all I have to accomplish.
7. 8 hours of sleep, good grades, an income, or a social life… you can only get two.
Productivity defines success in our culture. The design is such that if you do more, you get more (well, theoretically, but this is not about Occupy). But it’s more specific than that; if you do more ____ you get more _____. If you work more hours, you get more money. If you study more, you get better grades. Those are the things we are taught to value, but consequently we forget that if you pray more, there is more rest for your soul. If you love more, you are motivated beyond money and grades. Value the things that seperate you from a machine.
A favorite saying of mine is “don’t fill your life with work, fill your work with life.” Passion-driven action produces more meaning than deadline-driven action. Disciplining yourself beyond what you enjoy is indeed crucial, yes. Trust me, I’m an artist and if I did only what passion drove me to do I would not have a single completed work. But there is freedom in saying “I can’t do this” and going to sleep because life goes on, because you really cannot do it on your own strength. You need moments of restoration if you value quality over quantity.
I have absolutely taken Colossians 3:23 too far. “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.” Working for the Lord doesn’t mean working without Him, because when all my time is spent studying and working and cleaning and sleeping and none is spent praying or acknowledging Him, how can I rely on Him? I would rather be motivated by joy that comes from the resting of the soul and the honoring of the Sabbath than be the best or most productive. That’s not to be Hedonistic or lazy whatsoever; it is simply refusing to find my pride or worth or identity in my work, but rather where my heart is. If your heart is actually in something, it will manifest with action.
This school year is the first time I’ve really said “I can’t do this” and gone to bed without doing homework. It’s also the first year I’ve worked every week day, and somehow the first year I’ve had straight A’s and have made my best art. Not saying at all that if you pray instead of doing homework you’ll get an A, but I choose to spend only quality time with my studies and when I’m in a place where I’m only capable of BS, that is when I know I need instead restoration, which I really believe has catapulted me to do more quality work instead of just more work.
I’ll let Mr. Piper do the closing.
“What matters is not that we do all we might have done or dreamed of doing, but that, while we live, we live by faith in future grace and walk in the path of love.”
“Radical” Living
14 Nov 2011 1 Comment
I pretty much always just want to trash cultural norms because too often we do things because they’re what we’ve always done with no element of critical thinking. I will pick my nose in public because we all do it at home, I will wear clothes even once I’ve stained them because it’s not worth the money to make someone think I never spill, I refuse to eat sprinkles because they are potentially the most frivolous use of time and money and energy which I refuse to endorse, and I will not shop at LifeWay because I don’t believe in Christian Capitalism. Hey, I live by ideals, and I spent this past weekend in an anonymous community that does the same. It’s a community of about 1,000 people who grow and raise and sustain most of their own food for environmental reasons. It’s a community where every single person works in that community and for the good of that community. It’s actual community… and here’s why it sucked.
There’s something so much more satisfying about living by ideals in a world that doesn’t, in a world that has decided individuals can live by their own personal paradigm and can even change said paradigm to whatever gives them the greatest short-term pleasure at any moment! There’s something wonderful about playing devil’s advocate, about challenging norms, and about struggling to make the world a little better. There’s something beautiful in the brokeness. (Yeah, I went there.) And there’s something about ideals being ideals, and not being real, because things can exist much more perfectly as ideals. Besides, “hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” (Romans 8:24-26) There’s something about hope.
In an article about living radically in this culture as grown-ups, Adam and Chrissy Jeske write “It’s easy to slip into conformity, but it’s also easy to universally trash everything that lightly hints at conformity. And neither glorify God.” Instead, we are to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). We should hope to live outside the influences that cultural norms try to thrust upon us and instead live by the Absolute God, while being a light to the world we live in instead of completely trashing it.
Briefly, here are a few things I think we Christians have trashed because they are things generations before us have abused.
1. Gender roles. Women demean their unique roles because culturally too many men have abused their headship. Neither are God’s design. (This is a hard topic to do justice briefly!)
2. Sin. Today, it’s all about grace, which is wonderful and beautiful and crucial, but only so because of how wretched our sin is, how great the gap is between us and God. Before, condemnation and legalism were abused. Harsh opposition does not glorify God.
3. Okay, there are more, but these are often emotionally charged things which I like to avoid, so I will. Now go live well, friends.
With Purpose
30 Oct 2011 Leave a Comment
I made this piece this summer. The text is important.
Two people who have really inspired me to challenge cultural norms and live like Jesus are James Barnett from www.cyny.org and Katie from http://kissesfromkatie.blogspot.com/. And while I would love to tell you their stories, I think they would both agree that what is most important is the truths they have taught me, the truths they live by, which I am about to share. (But absolutely click those links and support them!)
I’ve learned that I so often view things in terms of what God is against, but that the only reason to be against something is because it opposes something that I’m for. Specifically, I am not called to hate sin first, but to love God first, and hate sin because it separates me from Him. Thus, if loving God is my reason for not sinning, than what am I supposed to replace sin with? What are my actions to be if not sin? James’s words go something like “In an attempt to look like Christ, we’ve simply not looked like the world,” and “obedience is not defined by what you don’t do, but what you do for the Lord your God.” I think we’ve been replacing sin with complacency.
Living a neutral life is what’s safe, what’s easy, what’s normal. Living a passionate life would require anguish when something opposes that about which we are passionate, but if we don’t care a great deal about anything then we won’t get too hurt. If we really love God then we are really burdened for those who don’t, for those who are in need, in longing. I remember once praying and praying for empathy and when it was granted I had to drop everything I was doing on the day of an important audition to pray and grieve and act. It was a terrible negative emotion within me that granted me conviction to try and right some wrongs. And I hated it. I didn’t sleep that night. It’s so much easier to not care.
But this, my friends, is not how Jesus lived. Loving your neighbor as yourself is not granting them the 2 hours of free time you have each week and it is not donating the clothes you outgrew years ago. That is not how you love yourself. Let yourself be passionate about God and consequently burdened for His creation in a way that inspires you to action, whether that action manifests as service, or prayer, or anything. Apathy and boredom is a result of ignorance and blindness, of which I am so guilty. I shall pray for you, dear anonymous reader, as I also pray that I live out these words I believe. It is hard to manifest these ideals in a culture so individualistic. It is hard to manifest these ideals and go to school and go to work, and I am quickly overwhelmed at the thought. But I will make it my aim to be conclusive, to live with purpose.
Apathy
13 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
The worst part about apathy is that you want to hate it, but you just don’t care enough.
If we let ourselves care about something, we give it the power to let us down. But if, before we let things get too crazy, we tell ourselves “Let go,” or “God is sovereign,” and don’t actually let ourselves hope, it can’t do anything to us. Which is what we want, right?
Maybe. And it may even feel like “trust” or “peace” for a while. If you don’t let yourself get too excited about your dream job because you know everything will work out and if I shrug off all thoughts concerning the college I’d love to go to but can’t afford because Romans 8:28 tells us that He’s working all things for the good of those who love Him, well, we’ll be fine regardless of the outcome. That’s joy despite circumstance. Right?
No. It’s not even joy at all. It’s forfeiting hope. Habakkuk 3:18 says joy despite circumstance triumphs in the Lord. Triumph is a pretty powerful word, a bit stronger than “it’s no big deal” (which I definitely say all the time.) And maybe in the grand scheme of things it’s good to have perspective, to know that many of our burdens are relatively trivial. But sooner or later, everything seems trivial and there’s nothing left to live for.
Even The Cross becomes trivial because we’ve stopped letting ourselves strongly oppose anything, because that causes conflict and “eliminates opportunities” and can divide people and just generate bad emotion.
But the truth is… there is a truth, and goodness and beauty. And there is evil and badness and darkness and sin and falsehood. For one to exist, so must its reciprocal. We could refuse to address them, but then what would we live for?
God hates sin. (Duh.) My point is that in the Bible He doesn’t look at sin and say “it’s no big, I’ll just make it into something good like I always do.” He hates it every time. Vehemently. He is sovereign God and gracious God and sin-hating God. Woah. That’s a lot going on.
He doesn’t just float around and say “wheeee I love everyone and everything’s going to be okay!” Nor should we! We must stop floating and live actively, intentionally, conclusively, objectively, and with purpose.
The converse of this is anxiety. I came to this state of apathy in an attempt to destroy the smallest bit of worry. But in abandoning worry I have obliterated hope. There’s a difference between abandoning things of selfish nature and abandoning intentional living.
There is a balance. Somewhere. I am starting today with mercies anew and victory over apathy. And I am joyous.
08 Aug 2011 Leave a Comment
In all honesty, my love for adoption and orphans has lately manifested itself as anger towards pro-creators and general bitterness towards humanity. Unjustified, I know, because I am then questioning the morality of my own existence. My prayer is for patience. But none the less, I will further my case.
My dearest Christians and pro-lifers alike, I charge you with this. Is not your heart’s cry to bring justice to the babies in question? Good, good. But do you expect to change the morality of another? Do you expect someone who does not believe in your God to abide by the moral laws of your God? What reason have they, if not the love of Christ? In Romans 7, Paul writes that without the Spirit, the law that is intended to bring good brings death. We are not to charge with legalism, but rather with love.
How do we best love these babies as well as our neighbors who are hurting and cannot, due to circumstance, care for these babies themselves? I do not mean this response lightly, in fact it is my dying wish. Adoption. I do not mean some of you but all of you. You see, if we cultivated a culture of adoption, there would be no need for abortion. If that is what we want, we must make it possible. We must do something about it. We must fight against the thing we hate and outnumber the abortions with families waiting for a beautiful baby! We must for the sake of all involved! We can’t shove our morals down people’s throat or expect them to figure it out on their own, if this is what we want we have to do something! We have to give the mothers and the babies and the families chances, while simultaneously putting to death daily our selfish nature, obeying James 1:27, and maintaining a sustainable population. (Remember China!)
In reality, I have so little hope for this. So little that I am regularly upset with humanity. It’s not enough of a difference to adopt instead of pro-create to justify letting abortions continue and letting poor innocent children live lives unloved. I am regularly holding back my utter detest at the idea, and I wish to be kind but I have zero empathy for any counter argument.
There is no real counter argument, I must confess. We must create a culture of adoption instead of a culture of abortion. 41% of pregnancies in New York City end in abortion. And, if only 2% of the church adopted there would be no more orphans. And I am appalled. I beg of you to join me in both adopting and advocating.
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. Psalm 139:13
Green Orphans
29 Jul 2011 Leave a Comment
Today, while eating much-loved raspberries, my thoughts drifted back to an article I read recently about a Christian’s role in the agrarianist movement. For those who don’t know, this is a movement that essentially opposes the industrial methods, such as chemical use or corporation, and values sustainability over industrial gain. It’s a green food movement, generally centered around buying locally. The very next article I read was about sugarcane companies in Kenya that had created a way to create paper using sugar-cane… the first tree-less paper. Kenya’s economy is centered around sugarcane, and in this case buying locally could well increase its poverty. I think there is an unfathomable amount of factors that go into this problem, and though buying locally could fix some it seems they will create others. The bottom line is humans are no longer adapting to their environment, but adapting the environment to them. We would adapt to this climate change if we didn’t live our lives in air conditioning. Is this a good or bad thing? This is another topic entirely, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.
This is what I do know. We are overpopulated, and that is severely problematic. This is what else I know. The Bible is God-breathed and tells us in James 1:27 that “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Orphans make up about 132 million people in our population. Yet that’s about 2% of the church… so if 2% of the church adopted, there would be no more orphans. And if that 2% adopted instead of pro-creating- and we are clearly called by God to care for orphans- well that is 132 million less people we are bringing into our population. And mind you, this is not famine, war, genocide, or even abortion. This is beautiful. This is necessary. This is incredibly practical. This is no inconvenience.
The best way to save trees, save gas, save water, is to obey this command. For this to be impactful it requires a complete cultural change. So this means we need everyone. 132 million. Because ultimately, do you want to be a eugenic or a parent?
