Faith Venture

I last talked about playing chess and how it teaches you to look ahead. Another thing about chess players who are at a high level is that they really don’t see individual moves with an “if-then-else” logic. They see patterns. They look at a chess board and see a pattern that they recognize and know how to make decisions on the next move in order to move the pattern toward a winning outcome.

Life is like that. Individual decisions seem harmless. These decisions add up to a pattern. You can easily find yourself in a pattern of doing the wrong things–or the right things.

What sort of pattern is your life weaving? Are you tending toward being someone who is welcomed? Or whose presence is dreaded? Do you find yourself in a pattern of losing relationships and life wasted? Or a pattern of service and love?

The first of the Spiritual fruit Paul lists is love. Many people still mistake love as an emotion. You know, that gushy, hormone-filled, lose-your-head emotional high. They are wrong. Infatuation is not love.

Love is action. Love is something you do. Following Jesus, you act out love in the way you treat people. The way you serve people. You actually develop emotions from actions. As you act, so you will begin to feel. But the feeling is more mature. It’s more akin to empathy than infatuation. It’s more real.

It’s something you do.

My wife and I were discussing maturity the other day (no, not my lack of it–at least this time) after a rash of incidents of inappropriate behaviour by adults toward kids or just young adults in general. I asked if we teach maturity.

Maturity, responsibility, discipline–three words that would have made my hair curl when I was in college. I can remember the rebellious years. But by my mid-20s I was pretty much mature, responsible and disciplined. And I just expected my children to grow up that way. You can do that without being a tyrant. But you cannot do that by being your children’s friend.

Do they have a course in college about expected behaviour of teachers? I remember some classmates who were in the College of Education. They expressly did not want to be role models of behaviour. They just wanted to instruct in theory–not be one more model in the kid’s lives that showed the path to maturity. Parents I’ve seen and read about often were looking for playmates, not little lives to mold into mature and responsible adults.

I can remember telling my daughter that it was my job to set the limits and her job to test them. Being a teenager at the time, she thought she was discovering that normal growth curve for herself for the first time in history. Then she learned.

My goal for almost my entire life has been to continue to grow and mature in Jesus. What’s yours?

Last week I was at a conference–actually two conferences in one city–where I was kept busy from 4:30 am to about 10:30 pm. Exciting, but tiring. Only took a day to recover, but it’s hard to write these posts in those conditions. So, I was down to a couple. This week is another, but much shorter, conference. On the plus side, the high school soccer season is over for me. As an assignor, I worked a couple of hours a day finding referees for matches, dealing with injuries, game changes and upset coaches. Coupled with 9-10 hour work days, I was busy. Now, I have more time to read for a while until the next round of soccer comes around.

I know this is a little late for the Eastern Time Zone readers, but it’s just after 6 in LA. Long day yesterday followed by a great dinner with 70 or so of my “closest friends”–other media representatives and managers and customers of Emerson Process Management. (Oh, and great to see one of my readers from Brazil this week.)

I was contemplating how to approach the first of the Spiritual fruit in Paul’s list–love. One discussion last night was on how sexually aggressive high school girls have become. And how so often high school boys are just not equipped for the expectations of those girls. And how it’s “just sex” primarily into oral sex, which is hardly benefits the girl any.

Christians have almost always liked to mock current culture (whenever that current might have been). But it is true that for maybe 40 years books, movies and TV shows have concentrated on sex and sexual images with few stories of intimacy along with it. In fact there was a long article about this topic in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

Sort of makes you wonder. What if so many in a generation don’t experience that falling in love feeling? And the feeling of loss when it’s over? And finding the feeling again at a deeper level as you mature.

In English, we only have one word. The Greeks in the New Testament time had at least three. We are stuck in Eros. How about Agape?

How can we teach our youth about love at a deeper, more committed level, than only sex. By example? Actually, often it’s not just youth. How many people as old as in their 50s still need that lesson?

Perhaps a life of pursuing  Spiritual Practices helps.

Is the word “sin” used so much that we become numb to feeling the power of the emotions and effects of sinful behavior? Or has the word become trivialized in the modern world–as in the sense that many people only hear or see the word on the dessert menu describing a “sinfully delicious” sweet?

Some sins may be private–just between us and God. Others impact large numbers of people. Sexual sin often is that latter category. It begins as a private act, but rapidly reverberates through the lives of many people.

Recently I’ve heard of the suicides of two men who apparently were caught up in sexual sin. A speaker I heard recently asked, “If sex is just a physical act, why is its misuse so emotionally devastating?” I don’t even know any of the people involved in just these two cases, yet I’m saddened by the results.

In the New Testament, the writers of the Gospels used the word “demons” to describe that type of sin. Jesus cured those dysfunctional and even evil emotions that had captured a person. It was described as driving out demons.

We have 100 years of scientific psychologists who have developed an entire vocabulary describing these demons. Then we have people who, like me, tend to think too much. Many use scientific definitions and explanations to say we have no control over those emotions. It’s all our mother’s fault as the popular use of Freud’s theories have it.

I suppose that some people are just born evil. For most of us, though, it starts with a simple decision to yield to an emotional impulse. Instead of practicing good intellectual and spiritual control over our emotions, we decide to follow the wrong way.

That’s why teaching Spiritual Practices is so important. We learn how to point our lives toward control by God rather than control by demons.

At times like these I sense a small part of what Jesus must have felt when he looked at the people around him and sighed. They could be living with-God, but they weren’t.