Faith Venture

My wife will ask, “When should we leave to arrive on time?”

I may reply, “Oh, between 5:15 and 5:30.”

I am thinking it should be closer to 5:15 when the car doors close and we’re about to leave. She is thinking that 5:30 is an approximate target.

How often lies that territory between sloppy thinking and misunderstanding.

I made a career from precise communication—from engineering specifications through technical standards development to magazine articles. Yet, I can be as guilty as anyone of sloppy communication.

Failure to say what we mean in a clear way reveals lack of clear thinking. Perhaps even lack of empathy with those we wish to reach.

One thing I love about Jesus is his ability to drive home a point with just a few words. Although, to be fair, sometimes he left behind a puzzle to contemplate.

Today’s lesson is to first think clearly, say what you mean and mean what you say. With kindness.

German writer Hermann Hesse was perhaps the first modern storyteller. Take scenes from his novel, Steppenwolf. The protagonist always turns on the radio upon entering his apartment. He needs noise.

On a recent podcast Episcopal priest and therapist Ian Morgan Cron stated, “Noise is the most underestimated enemy of the spiritual life.”

Is the TV turned on in your house or apartment right now? Is it just background noise? How about streaming music?

Sometimes I like to work in a coffee house where I can derive energy from the conversations around me even though I have no knowledge of the conversation or the people.

But sometimes I like silence. Perhaps the silence of nature. Sometimes the silence in my office with no Miles Davis playing in the background. Just to sit with myself in silence.

Carl Jung wrote of a patient who was burdened with anxiety. He prescribed solitude and silence. The next appointment, Jung asked what the experience was like. The patient replied that he went to his study, closed the door, and sat. Then he grew bored. He stood, wandered around the room, picked up his violin to practice a little, looked out the window.

Jung chastised him. No, no, he said, you must sit with yourself in silence. “But I can’t stand myself,” was the reply. Therein lies the problem. We cannot just sit in silence with ourselves. Perhaps opening our hearts to potential murmurings from God.

How about you? Can you just sit with yourself for 10 minutes? 20 minutes? Half-an-hour?

Try it.

Writer Marilynn Robinson (quoted in Oliver Burkeman’s 4,000 Weeks, said, “The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency.”

How are we going about our days? Do we deeply embody the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control—as we accomplish tasks at our job or around the house?

Do we just try to get to the end of the day?

Burkeman’s book discussed time management and productivity. But, he said, productivity is a trap. At one company I worked at my colleagues and I used often the metaphor of a gerbil wheel—the wire Ferris Wheel where the gerbil runs and runs and goes nowhere.

Are we trapped in a productivity gerbil wheel? Joyless urgency? Feeding the need to go faster and faster yet going nowhere?

Get off the wheel. Pause. Breathe deeply. Exhale slowly. Remember whom you are serving. If you cannot bring back the joy of serving and doing, perhaps it is time to move on.

Yesterday’s thought concerned taking responsibility for what we say. Many (most? All?) of us think saying whatever comes to mind, whatever we want, whenever we want to say it is perfectly good.

We don’t like constraints.

I wasn’t the best of parents. But one thing I would tell the kids as they went through the rebellious stages was that it was their job to push against constraints. It was my job to set and enforce the constraints.

We grow up. Hopefully mature. Then we learn to set and abide by our own constraints. We either learn to assume responsibility for ourselves or we remain locked in the little kids rebellious world.

I neither want to be two again or to be 16 again.

But we need to learn to assume responsibility for ourselves in other ways.

People interviewed on two podcasts I’ve listened to this morning learned constraints and responsibility for nutrition for health. One recovered much function lost to multiple sclerosis (MS) partly or mostly through a nutrition regimen. Another was an actor who talked of the initial struggle to learn to maintain nutrition and exercise while filming on location.

Throughout the pandemic beginning with the lockdown, I doggedly maintained as much discipline as I could with fitness and exercise. I lost some due to trying to find a place and equipment for weight training and Yoga. But, I took responsibility for rising between 5:30 and 6:00, meditating (over a cup of direct trade coffee), and walking briskly, jogging, or sprinting.

Now that the fitness center is open, I head over there. In addition to aerobic machines (in bad weather), there’s weights, the Yoga room, and then the whirlpool to get 20 minutes of healthful heat.

The apostle Paul talked of our bodies as the Temple of the Spirit. We should treat that Temple well. Nutrition, hydration, exercise, quiet time, sleep. A daily spiritual practice.

Kids think that they can say and do anything they want without constraints—or punishment. Developmental psychologists may place bounds of age, say maybe from 2 to 17 or something. Although it is now well known that male humans’ prefrontal cortex development matures in the mid-20s.

When I scan social media and news, I think of the title of a TV show that I know nothing about, but the title resonates—Arrested Development. People in their 20s, 30s, 40s, or even older (Elon Musk?) act like those adolescents or pre-adolescents. Some are even elected into responsible positions.

Where were the parents who were supposed to set constraints? Guardrails? Teach responsibility?

A periodic rant regarding maturity and responsibility relating to free speech becomes necessary lest we forget. Words hurt. Words destroy.

Words also uplift. They encourage. They heal.

How do you wish to use your limited supply of words?

I am reading an advance copy of a new book by Andy Stanley (@andystanley) called Not In It to Win It discussing how the evangelical Christian church has driven away half of its potential new members by choosing political sides.

I’ll not review the book here. That’ll come later. It is just that while reviewing my notes on the book last night, I saw this sentence which hit me where it hurts:

Are we willing to prioritize our faith over our politics?

In other words, what is our priority?

• Is it passing laws to force others to our point of view?
• Is it putting Jesus’ teachings into action?
• Is it loving one another as he loved us?
• Is it going into all the world and making disciples?

What, then, does our daily life and actions tell the world about our priorities?

Today is Good Friday. Even as a child, I took words pretty literally. How, I wondered after learning what happened on this day, could this be called “good.” What good comes from killing a man? By the way, I still can’t answer that question.

But the third day, the day we call Easter Sunday, remembers and celebrates the day that a small group of women (almost never heroes in ancient literature) discovered the empty grave, asked questions, and were told the guy in the grave walked out. It took several weeks for this event to sink in for Jesus’ followers.

Ryan Holliday has made a career and a good living writing on the Stoics. Some of the most influential of the Stoics lived at the time of Jesus. Later Christians were convinced Seneca was really one of them. The founders of the American republic avidly read the Stoics. I appreciate the Stoics.

We could take Jesus to be a Jewish version of the Stoics. Some people have. But the Stoics didn’t change the world like the followers of Jesus did. Why? Because Jesus did more than teach. He did more than die. He returned to life. This was verified enough that it changed his followers and eventually changed the world.

We must study Jesus teachings more closely than we have as a culture and society. We need to be like the man Jesus cited at the end of the Sermon on the Mount who learned the words of Jesus and put them into practice. But the reason we should do that is celebrated at this time every year—death and resurrection.

On this evening some 1,990 years ago, a group of guys (and maybe others, we don’t know for sure) gathered in Jerusalem in a large room probably provided by a rich guy for the annual ritual Passover meal.

Things seemed mostly the same as usual except for the strange teaching and comments from the Teacher.

They had experienced four days of being close to the center of the action as crowds of people listened to teaching and as their leader physically expressed anger at merchants ripping off pilgrims seeking animals for sacrifice at the Temple. They were sure the time was near when they would all be the religious/political leaders of Israel.

They got it wrong. Despite three years of teaching and a week of intense explanations, they still got it wrong.

Events of the following 24 hours completely destroyed their hopes and ambitions turning them into cowards hiding in fear.

This was the story of the Thursday and Friday of Jesus’ last week.

Jesus had taught that the time had come to turn the Roman world upside down. Instead of worship of power and authority of humans, the new age would worship God celebrating love, not power.

It took another 40 days for all this to finally sink in to the guys and gals who had followed Jesus for up to 3 years. But once they finally got it, they really did turn the Roman world upside down.

We need a resurgence of that attitude of love instead of power again in this era. That’s something to pray for as we head into the celebration of Easter.

I’ve been thinking about discipling and educating. Yesterday I thought about the difference between a discipling relationship with a master and a traditional education relationship with a teacher.

An adult lifetime of observing parents at sporting events (thanks to 30+ years of soccer officiating plus some baseball umpiring) not to mention music and academics witnessed the growth of helicopter parents who hover over their kids to protect them from the evils of working things out to the more recent snowplow parents who try to make the way smooth for their kids once again to protect them from the evils of working their way through problems—or even just working.

An attitude of expectation and encouragement forge an environment to allow youth and adults to challenge themselves, grow, and develop skills and talent.

This works in families, organizations, schools..

Expect the best in the student / employee and you’ll often be rewarded. Provide encouragement to all. People so much respect those who encourage others to be their best. People who constantly denigrate others are themselves held in low esteem by others.